Wicked (Amiga)

It's nice to play a unique game, that doesn't have anything else like it. Wicked is a unique game, as far as I know. Even now, 22 years after its release, there doesn't seem to be any copycats or clones.
I should probably talk about it now, then.
The intro tells the tale of some guy (that's you) who has undergone a painful ritual to become a firey star thing to battle evil. The battle against evil is mainly about the cultivation of celestial mould.
The game's a single screen shooter, and each stage has various things in it. There's you, an enemy (just one), the sun/moon and lots of gold and grey mould. The gold mould is good, the grey mould is evil, and your job is to make each stage only have good, gold stuff in it. Among the mould are big pimple-looking pod things, which are what creates the mould. These things also create seeds at random, the good seeds you have to pick up and strategically drop on the good mould to encourage it's growth, and the evil seeds will sound an alarm, and you have to go over and kill them before they make another evil pod.
Shooting the evil mould turns it red for a few seconds, which kind of "fertilises" it, making it possible for the good mould to grow over it (though of course, evil can grow over good whenever it likes). You win the stage once all the evil pods are covered by good mould.
It's not completely simple, though! There are complications! The biggest being the previously mentioned enemy that's on each stage. These enemies take the form of various "evil" things: dragons, demons, spiders, etc. and the hover about shooting stuff at you and trying to kill you.
There's also the sun/moon thing in the centre of the screen. When it's showing the moon, you can't hurt the enemy (but you can still shoot the mould, or the game would be insanely hard). They can still hurt you when the sun's out though. Killing the enemy is only temporary, but it does make things a lot easier not having them around for a while.
Sometimes the face in the centre will open up, revealing a tarot card and releasing an orb. Collecting the orb has a different effect depending on the card shown. Some are helpful, others not. I won't list all of them, but make sure you never ever collect the moon or tower orbs, or they'll make things a lot more difficult for you.
The game is pretty well presented, having a generic occult/pagan/new agey theme, and the title screen music is very atmospheric, though it's a shame there isn't any music in-game. The stage selection screens are especially nice to look at.
I used to have this game when I was a kid and owner of an actual amiga. I liked it back then, and I still do now. It's unique, atmospheric and fun. Go and play it.

Action Puzzle Prism Land (Playstation)

I know i review a lot of playstation games on here, but that's mostly because there are tons and tons of interesting playstation games that are also really obscure! There are quite a few DS games I want to write about too, but I can't take screenshots of those. I might do it without screenshots eventually anyway, because there are a lot of really cool games for DS that hardly anyone knows about. Anyway, here is another playstation game!
It's an arkanoid-like, which you could probably have guessed from the screenshots. To be honest, when I loaded this game up for the first time, and i saw the catboy and the fairy, i wasn't expecting it to be that great. Luckily, i was wrong. It's one of the best arkanoid-likes I've ever played!
What makes it so great? Well, it takes cool elements from other games of the same genre, like power-ups, points bonuses for combos, boss fights, etc., and puts them alongside some really good level design, and it's own gimmick (and biggest draw): the fact that most power-ups don't cancel each other out!
Most of these games have power-ups, but you can usually have one power-up at a time, for example: you get a power-up that makes your bat wider, but if you collect the multiball power-up, it'll go back to it's normal size. In Prism land, most power-ups can be collected together. You can have the elongated bat and the multiple balls and other effects all happening at once!
Not only that, but the power-ups themselves work in cool ways too! For example, the multiball power-up: Instead of just splitting your ball once into three or four, it splits the ball in two every time it hits the bat. And it does this with every ball that hits the bat, leading to balls everywhere. The elongated bat power-up too works slightly differently to most games in that you can collect it more than once, leading to a comically huge bat. And there's more: remote control balls, giant balls, one-use exploding balls and so on. And most (if not all) of them can be used together!
There was also a European release of this, called "Prism Land Story" that can still be bought for very very cheap online. Be warned, though: for reasons beyond my ability to discern, the morons who localised it removed the ability to save high scores or progress. Great work, idiots.