Odyssey (Amiga)

Apparently, people want to see more posts about european computer games on here. Stuff for the Amiga, C64, Spectrum, and so on. i don't write about these things a lot, as although their games are super-obscure in America, over here, a lot of the game are fairly well-remembered. So it feels like I'm writing about games that everyone knows. Plus, there are people who are obsessed with the games on these systems, and my knowledge of them isn't so great, so I don't want to make myself look stupid, either.
Odyssey, then. It's a platform game with huge stages. Really huge stages. It's also got nice graphics. The best part of those graphics being the fact that the player character actually has different sprites for when he's facing left and right, so his sword stays in the same hand! Amazing!
Anyway, there are seven stages in Odyssey, and as I said, they are huge. They're also split into three segments: The first three stages are the outer islands, and each of these contains a crystal and a sphere of influence. The crystals allow you to turn into animals (one is a grasshopper, another is a sparrow, and the third I haven't managed to get yet.). The spheres allow you to do so on the second set of stages, the inner islands. Each of the inner islands holds a key, and when all the keys are found, you can go to the final stage: the king's castle, where the wizard is being held captive.
You can visit the stages in any order, but you won't be able to do anything in the inner islands until you have the spheres and crystals, and you can't get inside the castle without the keys. Unfortunately, I have managed to find only two of the crystals and none of the spheres, so I can't tell you about the later parts of the game.
But the stages I have played were a lot of fun. You go around caves solving simple puzzles (switches, keys, that sort of thing), and also climb trees, cliffs, ledges and towers high up into the sky. You fight enemies like rock-men that roll around in an annoying manner, and black and red poisonous spiders. You murder harmless innocent little clay-men.
I don't really have much more to say about this game. It's fun, very nice to look at, but also hard. Not hard in the "constantly dying" sense, but rather the "lost and frustrated" sense, though.

Disk Station MSX #00

This is the first in what will hopefully be a continuing series of posts about Compile's Disk Station series of disk magazines. It'll run until either I run out of disk stations or I get bored of it. If the latter doesn't happen, it should run a pretty long time!
I'll mostly be covering the games, because my inability to read Japanese renders the magazine features and other such things useless to me. I might also, on occasion, talk about the pixel art galleries and graphics demos the disks contain, should any of them catch my eye. I'll also be alternating between the MSX and PC98 releases, to add a bit of variety.
So, this is the very first Disk Station release ever! It contains a playable demo of the shooting game Aleste, the start of what would become a famous and revered series. The demo lets you play for a couple of minutes before fading to black and returning to the title screen. I'm sure there are many many places you can read about the Aleste games online, so I won't go into any more detail here.
There's also a non-playable demo of Brain Grey's RPG, Last Armageddon. I'm not especialy fond of RPGs at the best of times, but the fact that this game is Japanese-only, coupled with 80s computer game difficulty (at least, I assume this is the case) makes me not too bothered about playing this. It does have some really awesome artwork in the intro, though!
The only full game on the disk is the classic Hustle Chumy. This game, in case you haven't played it, concerns a sewer rat who heads to the surface to find food to bring home, while avoiding the attention of the various surface dwelling creatures. These creatures include rabbits, people, turtles, bats and an invincible robot. Unfortunately, the really cool-looking cat enemy from the SG-1000 version is absent. The game is pretty good. You wander the stages, collecting the food and shooting/avoiding the enemies. The stage is over when you collect all the food and return home. Your movement slows for every piece of food you pick up, but you can go back home to empty at any time. The disadvantage being that the stages have both a time limit and a time bonus upon completion. You'll have to choose between risking death at the hands of your various enemies due to slower movement, or sacrificing your bonus for the sake of safety.
So! There's only one disk for this DS, but they still managed to pack quite a lot in there! Just think how great the later releases with 3-5 disks will be!