News

A whole bunch of new videos

A whole bunch of new, and old, videos have been made available today, spanning 4 generations of games consoles!

Might as well go through them in alphabetical order. Which means I get to explain Daina Airan first (not the easiest of tasks). This game is an interactive comic by Game Arts, released in 1997 (the same year as the more important Grandia). Having acquired it recently I just had to do something with it! The music throughout the game is extremely cute and catchy and I just love the whole thing to bits! To describe the game further, well, the story follows the lives of two girls, Emiri and Anji, as they prepare for a class concert. However, just about everything they do involves big, huggable dinosaurs because the island they live on is covered in them! The antics they get up to include bungie jumping, hunting for eggs, playing with fireworks, exploring ancient relics, and sending the whole island into total chaos by singing in the style of old Japanese mecha show theme songs... This is a sequel of sorts to Yumimimix, and boasts much better animation quality, without using any video compression at all. The video is from the intro, and incorporates the title screen with 'Press Start Button' message. It uses the same animation engine as the rest of the game. I've already placed an order for the music CD... Visit this movies page for Daina Airan.

Next up is Grandia. Here we have the return of two videos. The Grandia commercial however, is bigger and better than it was before. Much thanks to my friend Saturnman for providing this higher resolution version. Also, the 'walking around Ruku village' one is back, because I happen to like it, being such a beautiful place within the game. The Japanese PlayStation video is gone instead, due to being of pretty low quality, and not showing much more of interest than the Ubi Soft Grandia vid. I think that'll be the end of the Grandia video updates and shuffling for a bit, at least as far as that incarnation of the game is concerned!

Enough with the Saturn for the time being, now we have a 2nd PlayStation 2 video. This is from Kessen the strategy war game from Koei. The video features part of a very nice pre-rendered FMV sequence, which I would expect would play back at DVD quality in the final game. The soundtrack to this vid is also from Kessen, but was taken from a different source (a Tokyo Game Show Video CD), and isn't intended to match the video footage. It was just put on because I don't like silent videos. The vid was capatured from TV and had a presenter talking over the top of it. This is a good video though, really! Visit this movies page for Grandia and Kessen.

Jumping to Dreamcast now, we have Martian Successor Nadesico The Mission, by Kadokawa/ESP. This game was released in Japan earlier this year, and plays much like Sakura Wars. For the most part, it's a strategy war game where you control the Nadesico ship (or rather, the Nadesico B, or...) and the Aestavalis mechs, in fights against new enemies, specifically the mysterious Crimson Group. Between fights you get to explore the Nadesico and talk to many of the characters from the Japanese anime series, and improve their battle statistics (but not in the context of dating, that was done in previous Nadesico games!) Each Aestavalis is customisable with various weapons and frame types. But this video doesn't show any of that. This is the intro from the attract sequence, presented at 30 frames per second and in stereo. However, for those of you starting to watch the series via AD Vision's video releases, bear in mind that this game takes place after the movie, which in turn is 3 years after the 26 part series. So, it contains very minor spoilers with regards to the new roles of some of the characters. The song, 'Rose Bud', is from the Nadesico The Movie/The Prince of Darkness soundtrack and is sung by Yumi Matzuzawa. Visit this movies page for Nadesico.

Finally, we have, thanks to Feena (sincere apologies about taking ages and ages to do this Feena!), better versions of the Phantasy Star Japanese commercials, all split up from each other instead of in one file. This is where the 4 generations of consoles I mentioned at the top of this update comes in, being adverts of Master System (Mark III, grrr, better sound quality than the Master Systems North America and Europe got, and this video rubs it in...) and Megadrive games. These vids are from the Phantasy Star Collection on Saturn. Visit this movies page for Phantasy Star.

Date Updated:
December 21st, 1999

Time Updated:
5:18 PM


Zone Pharaoh


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