Tai Fu - Wrath of the Tiger for me it was extremely fun and enjoying action platformer. A bit short, but on the other hand filled with asian mythology, great story and charismatic main character. To this day im waiting for sequel...
When I was a kid, probably about 98, I went to my mates birthday party/sleepover/whatever where we basically drank coke and played Playstation all night. He rented a couple of games from his local video shop - Fighting Force 2 and Rival Schools. I've seen a bit about the Fighting Force games online but after that night I never saw another copy of Rival Schools ever again. I live in Australia so I'm not sure it was even officially released here but I'm sure the version we played was in English. Pretty fun fighting game though, I loved the cartoonist graphics and the team-up mechanic.
Rival Schools was released in Australia (I was lucky to get a copy myself) but I believe they distributed only a small number of copies. Aussies got shafted in terms of fighting game distribution back in the day. Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter had to be imported from the UK, and even Street Fighter Alpha 3 got a small release in Aus.
Spider: The Video Game. 2.5D Action Platformer where you play as a cybernetic spider who can use weapons attached to its legs. Always thought this was awesome as a kid, but not played it since the early 2000s! 😅
Footage of Fighting Force as a Streets of Rage game exists out the somewhere, one of the VHS preview tapes they used to run in Game/EB in the nineties has it on.
Great list! LSD was made by a madman surely. It gets scary when you start having bad dreams too. My honorable mentions: Bushido Blade, Ghost in the Shell, and Omega Boost.
A truly superb and underrated PS1 gem was Blast Radius by Psygnosis. Wikipedia calls it a "space combat simulator" lolol, but it is actually a 3rd-person arcade-style shooter in a sci-fi setting, with some RPG elements (upgradable ship) and some shamelessly awesome arcade tropes (when you destroy an enemy ship, it drops a collectible item to replenish your shield/fuel/ammo, lol). The analog aiming controls are smooth and the hard difficulty is a good challenge.
My gem I overlooked for years without a doubt is Tomba 1 and Tomba 2. I've 100% both of them twice. Looking back on fighting force 1 I laughed my ass off, too bad fighting force 2 was so forgetful. I remember even back around 2001 it was quite difficult to get it. However, Tobal no. 1 my brother adored. I wanted a final fantasy 7 demo that it was included in the disc, he ended up loving tobal no 1. He was able to go to the bottom of Udan's dungeon with Mufu spamming the 4 kick combo over and over again. You get a useless robot version of Akira Toriyama for doing so.
Bushido Blade 1 and 2. Some of the best fighting games ever made. I prefer Bushido Blade 2's faster arcade, less technical but still deep fighting system. Bushido Blade 1 built to reword not killing opponents and disabling them. From what I remember, you only get the best ending in the game if you only kill the final boss. I could never learn the techniques to disable the opponents and ended up playing 2 more. I wish 2 had the high-medium-low fighting system like 1, but still having the bounce back mechanics to counter after a block.
SPACE GRIFFON was an AMAZING GAME!!! I have a Japanese version they did for Dreamcast that they did up the graphics a lil better! Sucks cause I dint speak Japanese soooo I get lost and cant read anything
Saturn didn’t use cartridges my guy. I think there was like 3 games in Japan that require a cartridge exclusive to the game (packaged with it) and a handful of fighting games that utilized the ram expansion carts but zero cart based games.
@@CulturedVultures I'm not too sure I've moved a lot since we did keep a lot of gaming stuff safe but I have no idea where it all could be 🤷🏼♂️ I know I still got the consoles somewhere might need to dig around for it 😂
I have just went to look through some stuff I have Tron bonne disc only in one of those folders that you can store games in along with 40 winks that LAPD game I was on about... crazy
OMG you did mention Legend of Legaia, (my all time favorite RPG game) I've been saying for years that this game is super underrated, I had watched a lot of lists and none of it included this gem, thank you for that🙏
My buddy had Tobal no. 1. I think because we were all caught up in the Final Fantasy 7 hype. And where Tobal came with the FF7 demo, one of us needed to pick this game up. Turned out, I preferred Tobal over FF7
Fighting Force was so popular among my friends that I wouldn't ever think it can be considered as hidden gem :D Also was super disappointed when Fighting Force 2 came out and was a single player game.
