Tag: timeextension

Time Extension Talks Starflight

Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction.

PC Starflight (image from the article)

It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games, was a major mover on all three. Johnson went on to be one of the people behind ToeJam & Earl and a number of other projects, including some terrific music, and is currently working on the eagerly-awaited Dancing With Ghosts.

Time Extension translated an interview with four of the people who made the original Starflight, including Greg Johnson, from a German podcast. The story of the game’s creation is a bit rocky, with some of the principals having to put in their own money or take out loans to live on during its creation. It’s also a tale of the final moments of the good days of Electronic Arts, right before they discovered there was a lot more money running series into the ground and tying up the rights to multiple big-league sports than their original mandate of nurturing independent creators and making possible unique software visions.

But don’t weep for what could have been; instead, rejoice that it happened at all. Remember that Tarn Adams, half of the duo who make the literally incredible Dwarf Fortress, credits Starflight as a major inspiration. The path to the future, and the long-delayed realization of video games as a transcendent art form, runs through many different people, but the thread holds firm. The coming decades will see great things, and Starflight is but one brick in their foundation.

Time Extension: Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Use European-Style Fantasy Worlds?

Time Extension has come up here a lot lately, hasn’t it? It’s because they so often do interesting articles! This one’s about the propensity of Japanese games to use medieval European game worlds, the kinds with a generally agrarian society, royalty, knights, and their folklore counterparts elves, dwarves, fairies, gnomes and associated concepts.

They often fudge the exact age they’re trying to depict, with genuine medieval institutions sitting beside Renaissance improvements like taverns and shops. Nearly of them also put in magic in a general D&D kind of way, sometimes institutionalizing it into a Harry Potter-style educational system.

Notably, they usually choose the positive aspects of that setting. The king is usually a benevolent ruler. It’s rare that serfdom and plagues come up. The general populace is usually okay with being bound to the land. The Church, when it exists, is sometimes allowed to be evil, in order to give the player a plot road to fighting God at the end.

Hyrule of the Zelda games is likely the most universally-known of these realms, which I once called Generic Fantasylands. The various kingdoms of the Dragon Quest games also nicely fit the bill. Final Fantasy games were among the first to question those tropes, presenting evil empire kingdoms as early at the second game.

Dragon Quest
(All images here from Mobygames)

John Szczepaniak’s article at Time Extension dives into the question by interviewing a number of relevant Japanese and US figures and developers, including former Squaresoft translator Ted Woolsey. I think the most insightful comments are from Hiromasa Iwasaki, programmer of Ys I and II, who notes that this Japanese conception of a fantasy world mostly comes from movies and the early computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima, that the literature that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons (which in turned inspired Wizardry and Ultima), especially Lord of the Rings and Weird Tales, were generally unknown to Japanese popular culture. Developer Rica Matsumura notices, also, that there is a cool factor in Japan to European folklore that doesn’t apply, over there, to Japanese folklore.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

It’s a great read, that says a number of things well that have been bubbling up in the back of my head for a long time, especially that JRPGs recreated both RPG mechanics and fantasy tropes at a remove, that they got their ideas second hand and, in a way similar to how a bunch of gaming tables recreated Dungeons & Dragons in their own image to fill in gaps left in Gary Gygax’s early rulebooks, so too did they make their versions of RPGs to elaborate upon the ideas of Wizardry and Ultima without having seen their bases.

Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Take Place In European Fantasy Settings? (timeextension.com)

Time Extension talks to the programmer of Crusader of Centy

Been looking through the RSS feeds and found another item from Time Extension, a fairly lengthy piece where they talked with lead programmer of overlooked Mega Drive/Genesis classic Crusader of Centy, Yikihiko Tani, a.k.a. Bugtarou.

There’s something about this style of promo art that really appeals to me. Images from the article at timeextension.com.

Crusader of Centy’s generic name caused me to pass on it back then, but it has a lot of interesting elements, including a surprisingly dark story, a system where you can collect up to 16 animal companions and use them two at a time, an animation style for its main character where it was composed of several individual pieces that were animated separately (while avoiding the problems that system had in Ernest Evans) and generally Zelda-like gameplay.

Of particular interest in the article is that the game was at one point pitched to be an entry in the Shining series, with the working title Shining Rogue. That turns out to also have been a WIP title for Landstalker.

Soleil/Crusader of Centy, Sega’s Answer To Zelda (timeextension.com)

Info on Unproduced Landstalker Sequel

Time Extension links to a Landstalker artbook found by VGDensetsu that has information on a planned sequel that never got made, laying out the futurer adventures of Link-ish adventurer Nigel and his devil-fairy (sorry, wood nymph) friend Friday.

Despite its visual similarities to Zelda (or rather they both were inspired by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan) Landstalker had lots of differences, and despite its sometimes infuriating 3D isometric perspective is commonly regarded as one of the leading lights of the Sega Genesis. Despite its popularity though, the game never got a direct sequel, despite several references, cross-overs and inspired-bys ranging from the infortunately-named Ladystalker to Time Stalkers, and a couple other games without “stalker” in the title.

Friday was a waifu long before there was a term for it. Sorry about the frugly watermark, eesh.

Landstalker managed to become a hit rather despite its isometric perspective, in which characters didn’t cast shadows when jumping or floating in the air, making it very difficult to figure out where things were spatially. Since it was an isometric jumping game with lots of tiny moving platforms, that made it quite difficult. There was even an entire area, the infamous Greenmaze, that leaned into the perspective puzzles and pseudo-optical illusions to give the player a hard time. Yet the fun and light anime-styled story and winning characters won many players hearts.

VGDensetsu’s tweet links to a Google Drive folder with complete scans, although with a hideous translucent watermark plastered over every page.

Here’s A Glimpse Of The Landstalker Sequel We Never Got To Play (timeextension.com)