[Mac Sirloin]

I'm playing SILPHEED THE LOST PLANET which is another in the Working Designs Ultra series, like Gungriffon Blaze mentioned above. Silpheed is a shmup, a damn good one, but is unfortunately single player only. Fun as it is, I find the company that made it pretty interesting.

Working Designs was an American game publisher that saw a schism between the Western and Asian (but mostly Japan) game markets and sought to bridge the gap. Up until then pretty much any AAA Japanese game was either not released over here or given an awful, awful, awful translation job and spat upon the market to a collective 'What the fuck is this?'. This meant a lot of decent (at least at the time) english voiceover work and small tweaks to the game engine to adjust it for Western expectations. Typically they'd release a game in two formats; one just standard case and disc and another more expensive 'Ultra' version with holographic boxart, full colour manuals (at a time when greyscale was the norm) and lots of other little goodies. Unfortunately this system of dual, financially trying releases and a series of 'Two games for the price of One' games more or less bankrupted them. This is a shame, because they did a really good job of making games clearly intended for the alien world of Japan into something approachable and fun for stupid gaijin Americunts.

So if you see shiny games with boxart that says WORKING DESIGNS ULTRA SERIES pick it up, it's kind of rare and probably a good game.