#joycast

‘Manic Game Girl’

[PS1] [SOUTH KOREA] [MAGAZINE] [2002]

via PlayStation DataCenter

Manic Game Girl is a half adventure, half beat-em-up hybrid game, where you assume a role of Amber, a college freshman who doesn’t know a thing about video games, but becomes quite good at them once she brings the brand new console, Game Stealth, to her room. Soon enough, the city is overrun by terrorists also obsessed with video games, and Amber is selected as a resistance fighter against evil corporation responsible for this turmoil, which plans to take over the world by their equally evil video games. It’s a noble concept, but there’s a certain problem with their writing. Games with such meta premise has tried catering to their target audience in some way – Segagaga, a similar game with official Sega’s backup, had gone over their duty to include tons of minigames or others that references their products, and some like Neptunia, without that kind of support behind, utilized a load of tongue-in-cheek memes.

Manic Game Girl

Manic Game Girl is a mildly interesting piece of history that holds some unusual records behind it. First and foremost, it’s the only game ever developed and published in South Korea for the original PlayStation. The game was a pet project of Joycast, an infant company founded to exclusively deal with console affairs, tying to Sony’s grand launch of PlayStation 2 on Asia at that time. It was a budget release, but nonetheless Joycast brought a good number of talents into the crew to kickstart this project. One of the key people was the main programmer Lee Hanjong, who used to work for Square USA where he contributed some programming works (his name appears in the credits of Parasite Eve). His expertise on the architecture might also has to do with its odd choice of the platform, which was by then in the twilight years.