Relax after a holiday feast by joining us for a nostalgic tour of old Japanese game mags that blurred the lines between analogue and digital

    Pasokon Retro is our look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

    (Image credit: Compile)

    The exhausting whirl of festive treats, family visits, and the lie I keep telling myself about having just one more chocolate tends to put me in a slothful fog over the holiday season, the thought of sitting down for some serious gaming all but impossible. Thankfully decades-old Japanese computer games have a solution for this self-inflicted fugue: Compile's DiscStation series.

    DiscStation was a successful series of quarterly magazine/CD hybrids (or magazine/floppy hybrids in its earliest form) created by the Puyo Puyo developer, focussed entirely on its own impressive and ever-expanding body of work. Much more than a typical combination of written features with a demo disc slapped on the cover, the paper portions burst with exclusive comics, lavish multi-page instructions, masses of world building material, reader-submitted fan art in all shapes and sizes, and the occasional poster. Even the adverts are delightful, pitching all sorts of rarely-seen Compile merchandise—edible snacks, pocket mirrors, tea cups, and towels.

    And the discs? They're a treasure trove of playable gems and digital goodies, a buffet designed to be casually picked at as I please. I only need a small handful of discs to be able to access:

    • Action spinoffs of serious strategy games where heroines jump-kick their way around an arena instead of participating in turn-based combat
    • Puyo puzzle editors
    • Fresh slices of Jump Hero (a platformer starring a boy who is really good at exactly what you'd expect him to be good at)
    • And even serialised action RPGs

    (Image credit: Compile)

    Every spare byte gets put to good use, spare space filled with unique wallpapers, screensavers, and minigames.

    Thanks to this anything-goes approach there's little consistency between images placed in the same folder, never mind the wider disc (or magazine)—and I love it. No matter where I click I honestly have no idea what's coming next. Maybe I'll land on some weird little puzzle. Maybe I'll spend the next half hour reading through a sound novel, mucking around with a browser-based game of rock-paper-scissors, or just enjoy the digital artwork on show.

    Here are a few favourites I stumbled upon recently as I was digging through my discs and nostalgically flipping through magazines:

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