Welcome to the 58th issue of the GBAtemp Recommends Revival Project! This project is a weekly feature where we share our favourite games and applications with you. The things we recommend may be "old school" titles, a Homebrew, a ROM hack, sleeper hits, an application, etc, but one thing's for certain, we think they are fantastic and deserve your attention!
GBAtemp Recommends!
Ah Ristar, the forgotten platforming classic. In Ristar, you played a a strange star with stretchable arms and legs and you travelled across colourful lands of the Valdi System to defeat the evil space pirate, Kaiser Greedy to stop him from using his mind control which have made the planets leaders obey him.
The game was a very well thought out platformer that incorporated a lot of new ideas into a genre that was starting to get a bit tired. Unlike some platformers at the time, rather than try to out run Sonic, the game focused more on Ristar's stratchy arms and legs for him to defeat the enemies that got in his way by either grabbing them and headbutting them or by grabbing objects to throw at them, he also uses these to navigate his way across the seven planets.
This guy never got to star in a sequel, maybe because the game may have not done as well seeing it was released in 1995 (which was the year the PlayStation debuted) and Sega's 16-bit console was overshadowed by the on coming and hype of other consoles but that doesn't mean this should have been forgotten. However with graphics that showed what the 16 bit Sega console could do, extremely memorable tunes, good sound effects and gameplay mechanics that worked so well and very inspiring level design made this game something of a cult classic.
I must note that while this is credited to Sonic Team, most of the core team have not actually worked on a single Sonic game and only a few of the members working on Sonic CD before. Most went on to make more Sonic Team games, most notably Nights into Dreams on the Sega Saturn.
There was also a Game Gear port at the time which plays the same, however this misses some levels.
Genre: PlatformerRelease Year: 1995
Developed: Sonic Team
Published by: SEGA
Designed by: Takumi Miyake/Akira Nishino/Takeshi Niimura
Released For: Mega Drive/Genesis (also on XBLA, Steam & WiiWare)
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