As a matter of obsessive habit I check Steam every Friday when I get home. Sometimes it’s like getting a present that I can share with other people. Games have been known to go so cheap they’re impossible to pass up. There’ve been a few games that I bought once for a console then re-bought on Steam for basically nothing. Five minutes ago that game was Lost Planet.

Lost Planet was one of the early release titles of this generation of consoles that gave me faith in the “new direction” at the time. Many people condemned the game for the very reasons that it apealed to me. Boiling down the game to a skeletal shell of itself leaves a player with the impression of both very-very pretty graphics, and “archaic” 16-bit design ethos.

Rather than being upset over this contrast of the very-new and the just-old-enough, I thought of it as a breath of fresh air from the stale smell that most new games around that same time gave off. Many were overly complicated first person action games. To me it felt like Capcom sat down and figured out what they could do best (that “archaic” design ethos) and then combine it with what they thought the public was looking for (bloom-infused high resolution graphics).

This seems to have confused most people who were looking for “something more.” I’ve never figured out what that exactly means. To me Lost Planet is one of the gems from this generation of console games, and for $5 I feel it’s worth giving a look if you haven’t yet.