BORDER DOWN

Dreamcast Jap | 2003

Another shooter that is dubbed to be the last commercial release ever for the Dreamcast and is a port of the Naomi arcade game.

This game is a horizontal shooter. You blast your way through waves of ships across detailed landscapes, in orbit or planets with some huge bosses.

The game an interesting difficulty system being that you are actually playing 1 of 3 attacking ships. When you die you assume to path of the next ship and a 3rd ship all with the goal of neutralizing a boss at the end of the stage.

SHADOW WARRIOR

PC DOS + 3DFX

From 3DRealms this is a game from the same team that brought us the landmark Duke Nukem.

This time you are a Ninja assassin by the name of Lo Wang on a mission to crush Zilla Enterprises demonic operations. You battle through the suburban warehouses, jungle hideouts and mountainous regions. Hacking at enemies with your sword along with an assortment of deadly weapons including the grenade launcher and the amusing sticky bombs. In this game you can drive some vehicles such as a tanks.

The game uses a slight enhanced version of the Build Engine as used by Duke Nukem. The character also has several humorous traits to entertain you.

You can get yourself a copy of the shareware version from go grab yourself a classic. You no mess with the Lo Wang!

DESCENT 3

PC

The latest installment in the popular Descent Series developed this time by several members of the original Descent team who go by the name Outrage.

The game takes place immediately at the end of Descent 2. You are rescued after destroying the warp core as your craft hurtles towards a star. Your saviors inform you of further ongoing with PTMC and so the mission continues.

The graphics engine is completely new and modern and as such requires a good 3D accelerator.

Apart form the improved graphics the game adds plenty of improvements to the series; more ships, more weapons, more environments and more in-depth gameplay. Instead of destroying drones and find the keys you have other missions such as operate weird machinery or protect energy cores from attack.

So far the game has only been released on PC. A Descent 4 was planned but development was canned after Descent 3 was not as successful as anticipated.

PANZER DRAGOON ORTA

X Box Pal | 2003

Playing the game on Hard mode to unlock all of those extra goodies including the original Panzer Dragoon which may run on some rudimentary Saturn emulator by the way the game performs.

Just can’t get enough of this game. There are internet rumors that a sequel is being planned but there is no official news from any of Sega’s studios yet. Here’s hoping....

See March of this year for more information.

GLQuake

PC and Dreamcast

Continuing with the revival of classic FPS comes Quake but with some upgraded graphics.

For a spot of history, Quake is a first person shooter to used a polygon engine instead of sprites.

GLQuake is the actual game yet with a brilliant little add-on from a few years back will take the graphics of yesteryear and upgrade them. Weird to see this classic running at such hi resolutions thanks to the power of even the slowest modern video cards.

Quake has also been ported to Dreamcast which can be downloaded for free at Dreamcast Emulation. This game comes as the shareware version but just replace the .pak file with that from the pc version and you have the full game on your Dreamcast. May take a while to get used to using a control pad though...