J Arcane
01-29-2007, 01:17 AM
I was wandering about the museum at System16 (http://www.system16.com), ogling all the Japanese arcade games, when I came across some screen shots of an intriguing looking series from Konami, called Monster Gate.
The Monster Gate games are a sort of lite Rogue-like, with the added touch of some collectible card game bits, and a bit of gambling to boot. It also proves to be very quickly addictive, and I fear for what would become of my wallet if I ever found one of the machines in Japan.
Sadly however, the series has never had an English incarnation. However, after some amount of digging, I discovered a playable demo (http://www.konami.jp/am/mg_online/online2/html/trial2.html) on Konami's Japanese website, for Windows PCs! Just click the big like that says "DOWNLOAD". You'll need an archiver that handles LZH files to open it, like WinRAR or WinZip.
The game is in Japanese, but surprisingly self explanatory, especially if you're familiar with the Japanese flavor of Rogue-lite type games, and the game runs you through a sort of visual tutorial on the first level that helps break through the language barrier a bit.
I recommend checking it out. It's a simple game, but it hooks you quick, and after one session it's earned a permanent place on my hard drive, so I figured I'd share this with the folks of Evil Avatar!
The Monster Gate games are a sort of lite Rogue-like, with the added touch of some collectible card game bits, and a bit of gambling to boot. It also proves to be very quickly addictive, and I fear for what would become of my wallet if I ever found one of the machines in Japan.
Sadly however, the series has never had an English incarnation. However, after some amount of digging, I discovered a playable demo (http://www.konami.jp/am/mg_online/online2/html/trial2.html) on Konami's Japanese website, for Windows PCs! Just click the big like that says "DOWNLOAD". You'll need an archiver that handles LZH files to open it, like WinRAR or WinZip.
The game is in Japanese, but surprisingly self explanatory, especially if you're familiar with the Japanese flavor of Rogue-lite type games, and the game runs you through a sort of visual tutorial on the first level that helps break through the language barrier a bit.
I recommend checking it out. It's a simple game, but it hooks you quick, and after one session it's earned a permanent place on my hard drive, so I figured I'd share this with the folks of Evil Avatar!