With BT broadband and TV, you can say goodbye to boredom and hello to...

Huh?

This week in RetroNuts, Merry Christmas 1997.

This is the square soft of old.

The company still produces good games, but it rarely gives us anything as daring as 1997's

quote-unquote cinematic RPG.

Square and navigated to transition from 16 to 32-bit game design, perhaps more adeptly

than any other publisher in the world.

Nearly everything they developed or published for PlayStation was at the very least good and

frequently passed over into truly great.

These days people mostly remember Final Fantasy VII and its sequels, but the square soft

PS1 lineup offered a remarkable variety of games and concepts to complement its mega-hits.

From the viciously authentic samurai battles of Bushido Blade to the trippy 2D shooting

of Einhander, Square embraced the industry's move to Polygons, CD-ROMs, and 3D with remarkable

enthusiasm and skill.

Parasite E tends to fall in with those semi-forgotten creations, and given how dicey the game's

most recent sequel turned out, the third birthday for PSP, I could certainly be forgiven.

But even taken on its own intrinsic merits, the game feels very dated, like a product

of a very specific time and place.

It's a very mid-90s creation, even without the Merry Christmas 1997 ornament in the opening

cutscene to dated.

Square's driving concept behind Parasite E was to create the aforementioned cinematic

...