(If you want to take a look at the earlier parts of this series of articles, you can do so here, here, here and here for Part I, II, III and IV respectively)

After many promises and delays, the day has finally come. First off, I want to apologize for taking this long to compile the results for the poll and write this article. Last weekend was chaotic for me, since I was involved in a three-day long gamejam where I made a small horror visual novel (you can check that out here, sorry for the shameless plug) which totally sc*** up my sleep schedule and even made me miss a few important news releases.

Now I’ve got good news and bad news: starting off with the bad news, you guys voted on so many different things that it was really hard to get a good list of winners! There were a lot of entries with only one vote and I had to pick twice from the pool of “one vote only” to complete the list. However I did compile a list of honorary mentions that didn’t make the list that I think are still worth looking into even if I won’t go into detail for them. The good news is that you guys voted for quite a few applications, which will actually allow me to make a new list only with application entries suggested by everyone here. Now since there is got a lot to go through, let’s start with the list – followed at the end by the honorary mentions.

Warcraft I:

The Warcraft series has to be one of the reasons I learned to love story-driven RTS games when I began gaming seriously on the PC. While I started with the much better looking Warcraft III (and the Frozen Throne!) I did go back and play the others to get a feel for the entire lore of the Warcraft universe. Blizzard lost me as a customer with World of Warcraft – the game is good, don’t get me wrong. I just was never big into MMOs – but I would love to be able to play the original on the go. I am as of yet unsure as to how the mouse controls would translate to the touch interface of the Vita. They work fine for a game like Civilization V using Moonlight though, so I’m willing to give it at least one chance.

FreeSynd:

 

I had a feeling that including this game off the bat would make a lot of people vote on it… and I was right. The original Syndicate (not the sub-par FPS remake) was one of the greatest creations by legendary game designer Peter Molyneux (along with Black & White and Populous) while the working as the head of the defunct Bullfrog Productions studio. The original game is available on GOG although that is the “Plus” version. Being a tactical game, the gameplay would translate pretty well on the PS Vita and the console’s specs can assuredly handle the game, being that it was released on the DOS platform in 1993. This is one I would very much enjoy playing on my Vita.

Clannad:

Out of all the visual novels on the market or ever released, the last one I expected to see on the list (with more than 1 vote no less!) was Clannad. I will admit, even with all my years of playing hundreds of Japan-developed games, Clannad never caught my eye. Might be because I’m not into straight-forward romantic comedies? It’s one of the most popular visual novels I’ve heard of and has spawned anime adaptation and spinoffs so it can’t be that bad. Thankfully, I found an open-source engine that plays Clannad along with a few others like Planetarian so if any developer wants to port this for you guys, he can. If it eventually does happen, I’ll say I helped, ok?

Jedi Knight – Dark Forces 2:

Even before I made the poll, I knew this was going to be on here. I had gotten so many requests about it in the past that I purposely held back on talking about it because I knew it would make it into the community-voted list. However, that was another reason: I have no idea if the Vita will run something like this and since this list doesn’t have this sort of restriction unlike the ones I made myself, I decided it was worth a shot. The game was made in 1997, so it’s still from a time where games didn’t need as much juice as they did a few years after that and I even found a open-source recreation of the game’s engine – though I don’t know how well it runs. It’s here, just don’t get your hopes up too much, already?

Hurrican:

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Again, I have to be really honest. When I searched for this engine which is a modern port of the classic Turrican game, I expected to find a straight port of the classic game not a remake. Color me surprised. Even the website for this remake looks so slick I thought it was a scam at first. However, scams usually don’t link to GitHub repositories so that’s where my doubts dissipated. To be quite honest I’d love to see this game on the Vita. I am unsure as to how well it would run, but it sure as well would be cool to play. If anyone wants to give it a try, the source is there. I’ll keep hoping for this one.

The Maze of Galious:

In the end I was torn between two games: Me and my Shadow and this one.However, my love of cool looking art won and I ended including The Maze of Galious over the other one. Again, I had never heard of this game before, so thanks to whoever suggested this game! I was also surprised to find this game actually has various art styles that you can choose from in case you don’t like the base one specifically. Quite the nifty feature there. Aside from that, it looks like a fun platformer and reminded me of one of my favorite games of all time: Wonderboy: The Dragon’s Trap. I would totally play this if it was ported!

Honorable Mentions:

• Abuse: This one I actually covered about a year ago, when I made the Rejuvenate wishlist. At the time, while I admitted never having heard of the game, I said it did look like it would fit the Vita like a glove and that you could find the source for it here!
• UAE: Some of you really must want to play Amiga on the Vita because even though I mentioned it in Part IV, there was still two or three votes for it. Developers, you know what to do next!
• OpenRA: OpenRA is an open-source remake of the original Command & Conquer game for the PC and it even supports mods! Anyone who knows me knows I love any game with a halfway decent modding community, so I had to include the game in these mentions.
• Goonies 20th Anniversary Edition: As a kid, this movie scared the wits out of me. Sadly, I never knew there even was a videogame based off of it. Now I know there is, the source is linked. If any developer out there wants to do, go for it!

That’s it for the community-voted list for GekiHEN! I really liked that you guys picked games from various genres and ages (and that no one picked PCSX2!) and it’s a shame that not all of them made it onto the list. As I said at the beginning however, you guys have made it possible for me to write a list only made up of applications, so you can probably still expect that this month! Hopefully, we will soon see some of these ported on our Vitas. The scene right now is totally on the ice with the announcement and development of taiHENkaku so when that is out I hope we will see more ports coming out again.

As usual thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the next one!