Remember these titles? Check them on eBay and see what they may be goind for nowadays.
Hi diddley ho, Gamearinos! Everybody out there remembers that one rented game that they loved to absolute death, almost to the point of thievery just to ensure that they could always play it whenever they wanted. Though none of my exploits ever went that far, the sad thing is that I never did purchase any of those titles. Why is that sad? Because now, I realize that I still love them and that they are nigh impossible to unearth. Well, since misery loves company, I’ve decided to club you all and forcefully cart you down my own personal Memory Lane. These are five games for the PlayStation that will, hopefully, have you hitting various Wikis and eBay pages to sate your own curiosities.
Future Cop L.A.P.D.
I remember renting this one with a friend and beating it several times over a weekend. This was one of those PlayStation games that seemed like it would have been found in those oversized, elongated boxes. Sadly, it was not. As the pilot of the LAPD’s new X1-Alpha morphing prototype assault vehicle, you were to fight through eight stages of crime busting.
Needless to say, the best time out of this game came with the two-player mode. The game was quite simple with a vast array of weapons and a semi-sandbox style of play that promoted total annihilation of anything destructible in the level.
Azure Dreams
Once again, another trip to the local Blockbuster unearthed my love for this game, and I wish I could find a workable copy of it somewhere. You play as Koh, son of the greatest monster hunter in Monsbaiya, a city that lies at the foot of the giant Monster Tower.
At the age of 15, Koh is allowed to enter the Tower and “make a living” by not only following his dad’s footsteps, but in an attempt to find what happened to him. Basically, it’s a giant dungeon crawl based around raising support monsters and building your town. The dungeon was random, equipment was hard to improve, and the fun level was through the roof.
Incredible Crisis
I showed up at Cortney Knox’s apartment one day when he pulled this title out of some forgotten corner. Well before Wario Ware was even a thought, this was a mini-game driven title that was laced with cinematic cut scenes pretty much detailing the story of a family trying to survive a Tokyo gone wrong.
The reason I never picked up the game before was due to the cover, which bore some striking resemblance to an otherwise forgettable racing game for the PSX. If it weren’t for games like this, we wouldn’t be basking into the likes of the Wario Ware and Mario Party franchises, that’s for sure.
Tomba!
This one may not fall into the “never played’ category, but I never played it much beyond the demo. That I am truly sorry for because this game kicked so much pig it was unreal! Back in the days when the PlayStation was the king of platformers such as Blasto and Crash Bandicoot, this delightful little romp about a pink-haired native with an achin’ for stompin’ some demonic bacon was ridiculously addictive. I must have played that demo a hundred times, wondering when I was going to get an actual copy of the game.
Sadly, I never did, feeling lost in the mist of games such as Final Fantasy VII (pre-fan boy nonsense) and Parasite Eve. If I ever find another copy of Tomba!, I will play the mess out of it, then proceed to make several copies to play those in order to preserve the original.
Mega Man Legends
Since when did Mega Man get a last name, a proportionately boyish voice and a monkey who was considered the Lord of the Invisible Drum? Talk about an EXTREME departure from what everyone knows and loves of the Mega Man series, and worthy enough to warrant both a sequel AND a spinoff game in The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. Mega Man Legends was, yet again, another rental that dared me to buy it.
The rental copy had some defective scratch, forcing me to return the game and go out in search of my own disc. Love the game to death and still have yet to finish the sequel. It was Mega Man with more of an RPG aspect and probably paved the way for Mega Man X: Command Mission. A challenge of control and camera mastery and a perfectly good excuse to waste a weekend. Now THAT’S a game!
