Saturday 23 April 2011

Action Puzzle Prism Land (Playstation)


I know i review a lot of playstation games on here, but that's mostly because there are tons and tons of interesting playstation games that are also really obscure! There are quite a few DS games I want to write about too, but I can't take screenshots of those. I might do it without screenshots eventually anyway, because there are a lot of really cool games for DS that hardly anyone knows about. Anyway, here is another playstation game!
It's an arkanoid-like, which you could probably have guessed from the screenshots. To be honest, when I loaded this game up for the first time, and i saw the catboy and the fairy, i wasn't expecting it to be that great. Luckily, i was wrong. It's one of the best arkanoid-likes I've ever played!
What makes it so great? Well, it takes cool elements from other games of the same genre, like power-ups, points bonuses for combos, boss fights, etc., and puts them alongside some really good level design, and it's own gimmick (and biggest draw): the fact that most power-ups don't cancel each other out!
Most of these games have power-ups, but you can usually have one power-up at a time, for example: you get a power-up that makes your bat wider, but if you collect the multiball power-up, it'll go back to it's normal size. In Prism land, most power-ups can be collected together. You can have the elongated bat and the multiple balls and other effects all happening at once!
Not only that, but the power-ups themselves work in cool ways too! For example, the multiball power-up: Instead of just splitting your ball once into three or four, it splits the ball in two every time it hits the bat. And it does this with every ball that hits the bat, leading to balls everywhere. The elongated bat power-up too works slightly differently to most games in that you can collect it more than once, leading to a comically huge bat. And there's more: remote control balls, giant balls, one-use exploding balls and so on. And most (if not all) of them can be used together!
There was also a European release of this, called "Prism Land Story" that can still be bought for very very cheap online. Be warned, though: for reasons beyond my ability to discern, the morons who localised it removed the ability to save high scores or progress. Great work, idiots.

4 comments:

  1. heh, i forgot this was a hect game.

    this is a rerelease of a 1998 game also called "prism land story". i don't know if the european version (i think that one's just called "prism land" too) is based on that, but it's possible that the original release didn't have saving.

    if i remember correctly, the "split balls that hit bat" mechanic is from an actual arkanoid... i want to say that it's the "neo diffusion" powerup from revenge of doh, i could be wrong. there are also various games that let you grab the bat extender again and again... i think that started with yet another arkanoid, doh it again.

    i don't know anything about all those '00s casual games though, other than blasterball (wild) being something i REALLY need to find and blasterball 2 and 3 being giant ripoffs of arkanoid returns and arkanoid ds respectively.

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  3. Where can you buy a copy that works in the US? I have a bootleg copy that removes a lot of stuff (It's called "The Sorcerers Maze"), and I want to get the real thing.

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    1. It might be on JP PSN? Otherwise, just check ebay or other sites that sell old import games?

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