Flea Market Gaming #1

I love the flea market, it’s like the American third world. When I’m not eating an ear of roasted corn or checking out a Pakistani KKK knife, I tend to mosey over to the vendors specializing in video games. Nowadays, their shelves or tables are lines with cheap PS2 and XBox games, but every once in a while you can find yourself a true diamond in all the shit. No matter what, though, even if I come away with something lackluster, I’ve usually paid less than ten dollars for whatever amount of entertainment I get.

And so, it begins…

This, friends, is Project Horned Owl, developed by SCE in 1996. It’s a light gun game that received mediocre reviews upon it’s initial release, but, I’ve got to say that I had a lot of fun with it. Let it be said that this game does absolutely nothing new, in fact, it probably does less than comparable light gun games at the time, nonetheless, it probably holds up better than most.

I was afraid at first that this was going to be a polygonal blurry mess, but, since it’s an anime-styled game, or, most likely, a budget constrained game, 2d sprites were used on a 3d background. The benefit of this choice is that you can actually tell what the hell you’re shooting at, and it also gives a bit of character to the game that misshapen pixely polygons probably would have ruined.

The gameplay is standard light gun fare as I said earlier: you get grenades that are hugely overpowered, and you can also charge your shot to release a burst-fire spread-shot. I didn’t play the game with a light gun, because it’s really hard to find a Konami Justifier these days, but I managed to beat it without it. The main strategy I found was just to save the grenades until the bosses.

The sound was nothing special, but it was neat to hear lots of chatter as you progressed through the stages.

Probably the best part of this game was the story. Totally nonsensical Japanese wonderfulness involving a dictator named Blair and his army called “Metalica.” Harharhar. There are short anime cutscenes between stages that last about 30 seconds a piece, but they make me nostalgic for the old VHS US Manga Corps. releases.

All in all, I enjoyed myself, and I’m pretty happy to own this game. you really can’t go wrong with a 5 dollar Japanese PSone game.

The Trailer: