News: Night Creatures, Snatcher PSG, Lords of Awesome

June 17, 2006, 12:49 PM

by brandon, via superpcenginegrafx -
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I looked a little further into that superpcenginegrafx site that I linked in the previous post, and he's got some interesting stuff on there. The site's still under construction, but there's certainly enough content to browse. There are the usual scans and things, but what caught my eye was his direct playthrough of Night Creatures, a late-era, america-developed Turbo Grafx hucard. It's split into two parts, and I'll leave it to you to find it, as I don't want to kill his bandwidth with direct links, but suffice to say this is an awful game. I played my copy a bit, and can tell you it's not as easy as he makes it look, not least because it's horribly designed, and controls like an 80s Buick. It's not very easy to like, either.

You can apparently play through the game in under 20 minutes, after which the game tells you to go to bed, because you probably need some rest. If you ever want to have any kind of interaction with the game, this is the way to do it. Night Creatures was developed by Manley and Associates, which was acquired by EA in the 1990s, and apparently did work for The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in the earlier years. It was designed by this strapping young lad (Dave Albert), who went on to become the vice president of external development for Hasbro Interactive (now defunct, of course), and has a long line of special thanks, and little more. A lengthy career without lustre. Night Creatures had a nice concept - shape shifting, Megaman-like gaining of powers, but...well, you'll see.

Next, there's a nice mix of the PSG from Snatcher (PSG stands for Programmable Sound Generator, and refers to the proprietary PC Engine soundchip). It's not something you'll hear very often, as Snatcher was CD-based, yet used PSG for the music, meaning it was not redbook audio.

Assuming his bandwidth isn't dead by the time you've downloaded those things, there's also a really bizarre Lords of Thunder promo video. "I already have Sega, but I'd trade it in for this." *ahem* I suppose this was before the game got ported to the Sega CD. Gone are the days when a company could rely on a shooter to sell a system, eh? But that's what TTi did, bless their cold, dead hearts. They even talk to some sort of fisherman in this video, I think, and then film a car going over a dip in the road really fast. It's...very strange.