#Riverhillsoft

[mvfm-25]

" You want to get your hands dirty? " Saturn Fan Magazine n25 - November, 1996.

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Top 47K - Jak II (and Doctor Hauzer!)

Join the HG101 gang as they discuss and rank Naughty Dog’s slightly darker, slightly better (?) Jak and Daxter sequel. Then stick around for Doctor Hauzer, the Japan-only survival horror game for the 3DO!

[viciogame]

🎮 Klaymen Klaymen: The Mystery of the Neverhood (PlayStation)

Complete Gameplay: https://youtu.be/v-NSOusJVBI

#Klaymen #TheNeverhood #PlayStation #RiverhillSoft #dreamworks #Claymation #adventure #pointandclick #rpg #sierra #lucasarts #myst #policequest #PSX #PsOne #PS #PS1 #PS2 #PS3 #PS4 #PS5 #Play1 #プレイステーション #ソニー #クレイマンクレイマン #Sony #stopmotion #Viciogame #Gameplay #Walkthrough #Playthrough #Longplay #LetsPlay #Game #Videogames #Games

[vgprintads]

‘Burai: Hachigyoku no Yuushi Densetsu’ [ブライ八玉の勇士伝説]  

[MEGA-CD] [JAPAN] [MAGAZINE] [1992]

Beep! MegaDrive, October 1992

Scanned by Akane, via RetroCDN

[retrogameconnect]

Watch here!

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[megamoses]

Backblog #17 - J.B. Harold Murder Club (TCD)

After Princess Tomato, I decided to play J.B. Harold Murder Club, a game that I knew pretty much nothing about and kind of added on a whim.  It was developed by Riverhillsoft, former members of which went on to form Level-5 and Cing (who ended up making their own series of mystery games: the Kyle Hyde series).  It was originally self-published by them in August of 1986 for the NEC PC-88 and various other Japanese PCs.  This was then followed by a number of other ports published by various parties, including SETA Corporation for the Famicom, Broderbund for MS-DOS, Hudson Soft for the TurboGrafx-CD, and eventually FonFun for the Nintendo DS and Mebius for the Nintendo Switch as full remakes.  It is a mystery visual novel, similar in a lot of ways to Portopia.  It is also known for its localization.  Even many of the Japanese releases (starting with the DX release for the Sharp X68000) have dual-language options which can be switched on the fly, but only the MS-DOS and TurboGrafx-CD versions were actually released in English-speaking territories.  The TurboGrafx-CD version is the version I played.

The setup of the game is a simple murder mystery: Bill Robbins, a wealthy businessman in the town of Liberty, was found dead of multiple stab wounds to the back and it’s up to J.B. Harold to bring the perpetrator of this brutal crime to justice.  The manual provides a bit more context, adding that it was Jad Gregory, a retired detective who acted as J.B.’s mentor, who asked him to take the case.  The game itself cold opens into a protracted noir-soaked opening set to some sexy sax music then plays some narration providing the details of the murder and pretty much throws you into the deep end.  There’s not even a title screen really, which is pretty strange.  Every time you boot up the game, you need to skip the opening cutscene, after which you’ll be in a new game.  And from there you go into the options screen and load your save file.  You also need to turn on the voice acting from here every time, since it’s off by default and the option does not save.

The majority of the game is spent traveling the city and interviewing the many, many people that are connected to the murder, many of which are Bill’s extended family and friends.  You can ask them about their personal details (name, occupation, blood type, alibi, etc.), their relationship with any of the other characters you know of, and about any other miscellaneous topics you’ve learned about, such as other crimes that have taken place.  Eventually, you’ll learn something through these interviews, such as that a character was sighted near the murder site near the time of the murder, that will justify a search warrant, which you need to request from the prosecutor’s office.  This will allow you to actually find evidence in the various locations which may allow you to request an arrest warrant.  And once you start making arrests and further pressing people in the interrogation room, you gain even more information and are able to start the cycle all over again until you are able to finally piece together who the true culprit behind the murder is.

It’s an extremely open-ended game, almost to the point of seeming structure-less.  Unlike in Portopia, where you can go pretty much anywhere from the start but are kept steered in the right direction by events that occur at the police station, everything in Murder Club comes down to the player’s own intuition.  At no point after learning a piece of information during an interview does J.B. narrate to himself that this makes such-and-such seem suspicious enough to justify a search or anything like that, you the player have to reach that conclusion on your own.  This is both good and bad.  It makes the game very difficult without brute forcing it (ask everyone about everything then request search/arrest warrants for everything, rinse, repeat).  The analysis and investigation screens (accessed from the options menu in the police station) provide some automated notes: a character relationship chart and metrics on how much evidence, information, etc. you have (as well as a vague hint from Jad Gregory) respectively, but they’re not really helpful.

But on the flip-side, the lack of feedback from J.B. as a character or from the game at all makes it feel somewhat empty.  The majority of the game is spent interviewing suspects, but because J.B. lacks any dialogue of his own and you’re just hearing a one-sided conversation, it feels a bit dull, like you might as well just be reading their LinkedIn profiles or something.  It really feels like it would benefit from some dialogue to characterize J.B. or at least an intermediary character who is with you throughout the game, adding a bit of flavor, like Yasu or Percy from Portopia and Princess Tomato respectively.  The fact that they give him a name and establish that this is his first case (as if setting up that this is the prologue to the career of a legendary detective) rather than just having him be a nameless detective for the player to project onto (like Boss in Portopia) and then having him act like a blank slate anyway seems weird.

It’s a shame, because despite the somewhat flawed execution, the twists and turns and ultimate conclusion of the case are very good.  It’s a classic example of a murder mystery going deep enough to become tangled in another unsolved mystery which must also be solved to bring both cases to a close (think the DL-6 Incident in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney).  Of course, this conspiracy involves the titular Murder Club.  While the game is difficult, its title provides a bit of meta-knowledge that gives the player sort of an artificial lead early on.  Anytime a character mentioned that they were a part of some strange club I had never heard of, I immediately became suspicious of that.  But I’m sure the writers accounted for this, since there are multiple suspicious sounding clubs like this in the game, only one of which is the Murder Club.

Unfortunately, the graphics and sound of the game (at least this version) also leave a bit to be desired.  The majority of the graphics in the game resemble digitized photographs of the various locations and characters you meet, with the only outlier being the map of the city which resembles a map in a strategy game more than anything.  The photorealistic look is an obvious choice to make, since the game is going for a more serious noir feel, but the TurboGrafx doesn’t really have the color depth to do this justice, so the character portraits often end up looking somewhat washed out and bland.

The game has three CD audio music tracks: "Quivive” which plays during the opening, “Gimlet” which plays on the options menu, and “The Long Good-Bye” which plays during the end credits.  All three of these songs are pretty good and wholly appropriate for the genre, with “Quivive” sounding exactly as moody as a noir game needs to and “Gimlet” resembling lounge music.  However, the majority of the time you’ll be hearing the various PSG tracks played elsewhere in the game, which get pretty repetitive.  The voice acting, on the other hand, isn’t half bad, especially for the time.  In 1991, the game was light years ahead of some of its peers in this regard.

Ultimately, while I did enjoy the narrative that this game laid out and the challenge it presented, I felt myself wanting to know more about this J.B. Harold guy, since the game is named after him after all.  But really, it’s pointless to wonder about how the game would be if it were written in a completely different manner.  I just wish some of the later versions, like the ones for the DS and Switch, were released here, since the audiovisual presentation of those looks much better from what I’ve seen.  Unfortunately, because the English release of this game was on the TurboGrafx-CD and the English release of its sequel, Manhattan Requiem, was on the Pioneer LaserActive, the series was doomed to obscurity in the West.  So, this will probably be the last I see of old J.B. Harold.  Next time, I’ll be covering Squaresoft’s Crystal Dragon.  Until then, take it easy~

[nono-ne-e]

My sis made me a Klaymen figure for Christmas! He's so cute! I miss this game so much T_T ty @_them20eyes_ ! #klaymen #theneverhood #clay #sculpture #handmade • • • • • • • • • • #crafts #crafty #pcgaming #pcgamer #oldschoolgames #skullmonkeys #pointandclick #pointandclickadventure #1996 #dreamworksinteractive #dreamworks #riverhillsoft #dougtennapel #marklorenzen #microsoft #playstation #singleplayer #christmasgift #fimobasic #fimoclay #clayart

[vgjunk]

Densetsu no Ogre Battle Gaiden: Zenobia no Ouji, Neo Geo Pocket Color.

[bowloflentils]

OverBlood 2 (オーバーブラッド2) - Riverhillsoft - PlayStation - 1998

Don’t Touch

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Doctor Hauzer

If you’ve heard the name Riverhillsoft, it’s most likely in the context of Overblood, one of the most ridiculous and widely mocked horror games of the classical era. That’s understandable, as Overblood is a bonkers experience that sticks in your brain like few things do (PIPOOOOOOOOOOO!!!). That isn’t all they’ve done, though. Before Overblood, there was Doctor Hauzer, a much worse game that’s more forgivable for its sins because it came out in 1994 and tried a lot of things nobody else was doing at the time – arguably for good reason. It is a fascinating piece of history all the same, if just due to what system it released on and for what region. 

Read more...

[corrupted-sorrow]

Overblood and Hino Akihiro

Maybe many of Inazuma and Layton fans don´t know, but in 1996, Riverhillsoft released the PSX survival horror game Overblood. The designer Hino Akihiro worked in this game as lead programmer.

Riverhillsoft closed in 2000, then Hino decided to open his own game studio, Level-5. Since then, his studio have been working only in anime-style RPGs. Including participation in Dragon Quest series.

[vgjunk]

Overblood, PS1.

[vgjunk]

Klaymen Gun-Hockey, PS1.