Disc Station 98 #00

Considering how great the first MSX Disk Station was, surely, the first volume for the much more powerful PC98 must be way better, right?
Unfortunately not. It's kind of rubbish. Well, the original content part is, at least. People who bought it at the time weren't getting ripped off: it comes on three disks, and the first two are full commercial games! Prince of Persia and Powermonger, to be specific! I won't bother writing about those though, since they're very well known, and there are probably a million other places to read about them.
Onto the third disk, then. It has a paltry four items on it.
The first is a non-playable demo/advert for a game whose title I can't read. But it does say that it's a "SPACE WAR SIMULATION", and theres a "II" in the title, so presumably it's also a sequel.
The second option is something a bit odd. It's an interactive... thing. There's a black and white drawing on the room, and clicking on items in the room makes stuff happen. The painting on the wall changes to a different picture, the cat turns into a weird alien, etc. Also, the pillow, TV and teddy bear come to life and start asking questions in Japanese. I wonder if anything happens when you answer their questions correctly. I guess we'll never know.
The third item is a long, boring and very text heavy animation about a UFO travelling the universe. In its defence, it does look very nice, though.
The fourth option is some kind of text content thing, as you usually get on these disks. I wish I could read the text content that's on the disk stations, it would be a window into a pre-internet nerd subculture in a far-off foreign land. Doesn't that kind of thing interest you? It interests me. BYE!

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.