Super Nintendo

My boyfriend knows exactly the kind of stuff I love, but you’d expect that. Read on for why all this stuff is SO FREAKIN’ COOL.

This Othello game for the Super Famicom is funny and surprisingly challenging.

As I promised Terra in my last post, I would be playing Drakkhen for the Super Nintendo. It’s 3D! It has dragons! You get to create your own party! And dragons! Well, there may be a couple bad eggs in the bushel. I really knew nothing about this game. Although I was a huge Atari ST fan at the time and played a lot of RPGs on it, I missed it on its original platform (and I hear it was better there, too, though graphically it looks pretty similar). Still, it’s better late than never. I started hearing bits and pieces about it on retro RPG YouTube channels, and when I saw it at the Hartford RetroWorld Expo, at a reasonable price, I took the plunge and bought it. ...

Retro World Expo in Hartford came up light on Sega Saturn games, but I got a couple new games to try. Terra isn’t a fan and is warning me away from Drakkhen for the SNES.

I haven’t really been blogging, streaming or even talking about my progress in Ogre Battle lately. I’ve been mostly just working my way through the story. The last time I wrote, my character was headed for the very worst of endings. Her alignment was the absolute worst. Her charisma was headed to the same point. Cities hated me. I couldn’t get the good character promotions. I found a solution. It was obvious, really: I had to stop playing the main character, and I had to stop liberating cities and temples if there were any possibility that the enemy could retake them. ...

Before I decided to consolidate my groups a bit, my lord’s alignment and charisma were sky-high. I’m even proudly wielding the holy sword Brunhild. They just don’t toss those out to just anyone. But now, I am in dire straits. My charisma is a nice, round zero – and it’s the same for the rest of the group. My alignment has plummeted – wasn’t too long ago it was at 100, shining like a star. Now, my moral compass is pointed to a dark place. ...

The first time I tried to play Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, I didn’t know how there could be any sort of strategy or planning when every map was just continually battling enemies that are continually attacking you. How anyone could take the time to be concerned about making sure each unit only fought higher level enemies with lower alignment (if the unit contained good characters, like Knights), or ignored those rules (if the unit contained evil characters (like Wizards), while also juggling reputation, the time of day (good characters stronger in day, evil ones at night) along with fifteen thousand other fiddly bits… every time, I put the game aside and promised to get back to it later. ...

I took Wednesday night off to watch the VP debates, which were way more fun than any dumb game. Thursday, with the drop of Fall Guys Season 2, was already pretty full, but after embarrassing myself for awhile dodging swinging axes and spiky rollers, I thought it was about time to check in on the battling ogres. Deneb is the Ogre Battle series’ answer to Final Fantasy’s Cid. She’s always going to show up somewhere. Rumor has it that she’s not even human – in reality she is an evil spirit that possesses young women, though she denies this. ...

In a little bit of serendipity, fan site RPG Site posted up on Twitter yesterday that the successor to : turned 25 yesterday. ...

I just don’t know about this game. Other tactics games, you take your best guys, you win a fight, you’re done, grats, everyone cheers. Sometimes you save someone, sometimes you condemn someone, sometimes you take the left path and other times the right. Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen weaponizes fighting itself. You could win the battle and lose everything. That’s what happened to me in the Pogrom Forest. ...