3D rail shooter from around the PS1 launch window, at least in North America. Looks pretty impressive for so early on, although the music is kind of poor. Reminds me a lot of Star Fox, with a better framerate but more finicky controls. Could have definitely used more weapons and some health pickups, or even bombs. Nothing of the sort is here, just a laser and a sub-weapon that locks onto targets. It unfortunately gets quite dull towards the end due to being quite basic and not really fun enough to carry that energy throughout. It showed promise for sure, though.

Somewhat of a "choose your own adventure" kind of thing. It claims to have fifty endings but most of those just end with Not Treasure Hunter getting unceremoniously killed. This game isn't translated to my knowledge, so I suppose I can't really comment on the dialogue, but I had a general idea of what was going on in each real ending I got. Despite the title suggesting otherwise, Not Treasure Hunter is in fact a treasure hunter of some sort and he finds things and meets people and gets double crossed and so on and so forth. Nothing you haven't heard before, really. Very reminiscent of Indiana Jones or James Bond or something, which will both undoubtedly provide a lot more entertainment.

It's pretty awful as a whole, honestly. It looks more like a 3DO game than even the standard set in early PS1 era. The background music is too loud and often doesn't fit the mood in any capacity. Moving around is a hassle too, somehow. It's similar to Resident Evil with the tank controls and fixed camera angles, but a lot more poorly thought out and uncomfortable. On the other hand, combat is so simple that it's pretty much completely pointless. Both are pointless, actually. For what is described as a visual novel I think I'd rather just watch my character do these things than lug him around with bad controls.

Finding actual branching paths is rather obtuse as well, like at the beginning for example you have to wait around for a lizard man to spawn and whether or not you kill or run past it will determine where you end up next. There are hardly any helpful videos online that I could find, so I spent a lot of time with trial and error of this sort. After finding about three or four endings I figured I was wasting my time.

Gets an extra half star because the running animation and overall poor quality is funny as fuck. This is Acti-Art Corporation's only game. Wonder why.

Not bad, really. Nothing much to return to, but nice and simple. The length is quite reasonable and even the sudden boss at the end was executed nicely and had good music. Some smaller enemy types were annoying though, particularly the bullets.

This game has an emulation issue, which I can't really count against it in terms of quality, but it's worth noting. You can't really do this on a Genesis controller, but holding left and right simultaneously makes the game freak out and warp you in different places instantaneously. It can be used to your advantage sometimes but is for the most part a major inconvenience, particularly if you wind up doing this a lot on accident while attempting to do diagonals. I initially assumed it was a problem with PicoDrive but it persisted on BlastEm. Once again, due to being a non-issue on original hardware, I can't really knock it for this, so take this as more of an aside. If you decide to emulate it, use a controller.

Clearly one of Wolf Team's more realized efforts, but still thoroughly mediocre. Another game where I'm not sure why anyone would really play it today unless they're digging through the bowels of the Genesis library for shits and giggles like me.

I don't know if this was originally programmed for the Genesis or for the X68000, but on the former there is ungodly slowdown. Recurringly. Whenever there's a bunch of projectiles on screen, really. Maybe it's just hardware limitations or whatever, but you'll want to be shooting as frequently as you can due to a bunch of offscreen enemies, so you have to deal with this a lot and it's seriously frustrating.

The core gameplay is actually very simple, but is frequently rendered cumbersome both by the aforementioned slowdown as well as how labyrinthine the levels can be at times. Several levels have you going back and forth to get keys and swords and such (or items for your own convenience, of which you can carry merely six at a time), and more importantly, there are no maps. None. There is so much time spent just stumbling around in spots you've already been in because there's hardly ever any indicators on what to do and where to go.

The end result is pretty lame as per usual from these guys. I'll take it over Earnest Evans or Final Zone literally any day, but you know what else I would prefer? Something fun. Something simple and enjoyable. This certainly seems at least close to fun from a glance, but isn't quite there.

This one's bullshit and I got bored and sadde and ditched it for now. 10-12 all have this really annoying shit with the continues where it's like, while they're infinite now, they always put you back at the start of the level instead of dropping you off where you were like in earlier games. There are frequently times where you'll be stuck in the same spot for a long ass time due to this and it's just not really as enjoyable. You also can't adjust your number of lives in the options anymore for some reason. 10 is still quite manageable despite this but 11 is a hassle and this is just outright not very fun.

During some point in stage 5 I clicked on "redo from beginning" from the pause menu, thinking it'd put me back at the start of the level, and it put me at stage 1. I'll probably be coming back to it later but for now ehh h no thanks