also in the related videos it gave me 'X' which looks excellent http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCyTGdCyg3w&feature=related
X was a game Nintendo made with Dylan Cuthbert and they collaborated on
Star Fox right after that. I have no idea why it never left Japan, especially since Nintendo could have sat on it 'till '93, when their only really big GB release was
Link's Awakening.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZouboBEULS8 Faceball's preincarnation as MIDI Maze, which suffers from a lack of Smiloid voice clips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZq31JUYf8M Faceball for Game Boy with awesome comment:
I was the producer on this game. The comments on the framerate are a sore point for me...When we originally designed this game, it could handle up to 16 players using a custom-made token ring cable. The frame rate with up to about 8 players was pretty good, but sucked at 16...? We were going to package the cables with the game, but Nintendo insisted we support their Satellite 4 player hub even though it was a piece of poo. Framerate dropped big time. Ah well, such is life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UtCznXNKfE Last Survivor for FM TOWNS MARTY
pops up on youtube when you search for Faceball and I can see why. Looks pretty rad. Bet you'd find a lot of weird shit you'd never heard of if you went digging through the FM TOWNS library.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28bYW71xksI best video I found for
Tobal No. 1's Quest Mode, which is the most abstract/alienating thing I can ever remember Square doing. 1995: look at the lush sprite art we can produce after more than a decade of developing 2D games. 1996: please navigate a Gouraud-shaded maze suspended in an infinite black void.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjOtbmN0l8A Tecmo's Deception, one of the best games on the PSX even though it's kind of terrible to play--I think the save consumes an entire memory card, the load times are some of the worst on the console, and the everything has that slow, floaty, "underwater" feeling. This was followed by Kagero: Deception II, which refined the basic mechanics but dropped the more ambitious systems (in Deception 1, you can spend resources to create custom rooms and change the floorplan of your castle, collect corpses to make monsters, etc.) That wall of darkness hiding the limited draw distance gives everything a creepy, claustrophobic feel. I love how sparse everything is--you have big, ornate castle rooms that only contain a couch, a fireplace, a chandelier. The sound design works, too. Everything echoes, sounds like it's happening in an empty stone chamber.
The sequels dropped all the Satanic references this game had. You're working for Satan, pentagrams keep showing up. If I recall correctly, there's a speed powerup that's depicted as a pair of shoes with pentagrams on them. Satanic Converse. Fucking great.