If you can’t read Japanese, or just don’t want to play the games yourself, the embedded video would be your best bet for seeing them in action.
![game pc 88 game pc 88](http://gamestudies.org/articleimages/120_Figure_8bx.png)
Much of this information was laid out on a dedicated stream for both these games by Macaw45, who has dedicated years to researching, cataloguing, and exposing people to lesser-known videogames.
#GAME PC 88 FULL#
The Rune Worth series was, by all appearances, T&E Soft’s successor to Hydlide, and while it is formally organized as a trilogy, the three-months-gap between the second and third installment’s release, their discounted price, and the way in which 3 picks up right where 2 leaves off (to the extent of being able to transfer your character data from one to the other), means that, really, there are two full entries. As usual, if your only resources on the English-speaking Internet for videogames are Wikipedia and MobyGames, you would probably never know about either of these (Wikipedia cites the first Rune Worth (1989) for the MSX, but says nothing of the sequels MobyGames does not even cite the former). With that preamble out of the way, I’d like to bring to unaware readers’ attention Rune Worth 2 and 3, released for the PC-98 in 1991.
![game pc 88 game pc 88](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/5b/5b/42/5b5b420f8217122410f12d400119d511.jpg)
But if this were the worst thing you could knock a game for, the medium would be specially positioned among all others for a minimum of faults (hint: it isn’t). I get why this would put people off from playing it, especially since it’s always conflicted with the design’s speedrun-like emphases. Its most significant downside is a miserable framerate. Virtual Hydlide is noteworthy too as a strange and perhaps unique attempt at crafting a lightly randomized, score- and time-based 3D arcade game for a home console using the overworld + dungeon crawler format.
![game pc 88 game pc 88](https://i.imgur.com/Gc2wYtk.png)
Understood as such - compare the PC releases of Hydlide to, e.g., the original Dragon Slayer, also released for the PC-88 in 1984 -, we can also begin to understand its popularity as a consequence of something more than millions of Japanese citizens being deprived and deluded. It’s better to see Hydlide in its PC-6001/PC-88 context as an innovator of the action-adventure-RPG genre, and the influence for the first two Ys games’ format (also little-known: Ys III: Wanderers from Ys was modeled on the design of Tritorn 2, a game by developer Sein/Xain/Zain Soft it even copied some of the settings!). Both of these have acquired a pretty undue notoriety, mostly encouraged by the exaggerations of e-personalities intent on making everything out to be either AWESOME or LMAO TERRIBLE, since that’s what gets the most attention. Most English-speaking people today who are aware of videogame developer T&E Soft only know of them through two titles: the first Hydlide (specifically the, by 1987, dated/inferior NES re-release) and Virtual Hydlide.