Mad Paradox
hentaiRPG, 1994, DOS/VGA.
The only review of this game I found is on Home of the Underdogs, and it is far from good. Indeed there are lots of things you could criticize, especially the over-simplistic combat mechanics: at a given level, with given equipment, the damage dealt to a given enemy will vary only by a few percent. You'll always know in advance how many rounds it will take to kill that monster.
Another source of annoyance are the scanlines. Obviously, the graphics were designed for a 640×200 resolution, not uncommon for Asian games, possibly for compatibility with the NEC PC-8801, where 640×200 was the highest color resolution (8 colors). The sane way to handle this would have been to either run the game itself in Eh, and switch to 12h for the pics, or to double every line. Instead, these ugly scan lines were added. Out of curiosity, I edited the screenshot above to see what it would have looked like without scanlines:
Quite an improvement, don't you think so? This is probably what the game looked like on its original platform, or so I thought.—Guess what? I was right. Later I found this PC-98 screenshot, which really is 640×200 and does not have scanlines:
Nevertheless I had fun playing it through to the end (even including the end boss fight, which I rarely do), and maybe I'll play it again some day.
