Welcome to Still Playing. Take a trip back in time and pretend the PlayStation stopped at PS1 with me.
I’m a PS1 gamer, and sort of, but not really, a collector. I do sell PS1 games elsewhere, but I won’t be using this blog for promotion in any way. This is merely a space where you can read my thoughts on the joys and frustrations of the old grey box, and hopefully join in the conversation, recommend games, and give me ideas for the kind of future content you’d like to see.
Everyone has their own taste in games, and I’m no different. My own touchstones on the PS1 include, to name a random selection off the top of my head: Grandia, Final Fantasy VII, The original Pro Evo games, Command and Conquer, MediEvil, Rayman, WWF Smackdown, Gran Turismo, and Crash Bandicoot. As I keyed in the full stop at the end of that sentence, another ten sprang to mind, but for now I’ll leave you with that little bunch as an indication of the kind of game I like to play. There’s every chance I’ll be writing about some of these games in future posts, but I also want to branch out and discover new titles. Since taking up PS1 gaming again as an adult, I’ve discovered games I only had demos of, or had completely forgotten about, like Kula World – playing these properly for the first time has been just as fun as replaying my own personal catalogue of classics.
But the game I want to end this inaugural post with is a lesser known RPG called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest. For those who don’t remember it, it was an average to poor RPG released by T&E Soft in 1998, but for some reason I found it completely compelling at the time. You could play each character in a party of stock RPG types, levelling them up across screens of poorly rendered environments by hacking and slashing at various enemies. There may have been some kind of puzzle element. I remember it received 5/10 in OPSM, and I picked it up second-hand on the cheap somewhere. I dedicated a sizeable chunk of what must have been about 1999 to playing Blaze & Blade, throwing in the the towel only when I found it impossible to find the exit to one particular level. To this day, I can taste the frustration of running around the screen for hours on end searching for that elusive way out. I think the background was yellow on that level.
Anyway, I just ordered it: it’s in the post. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Still Playing 