Oh my god the bittersweet memories. One of my favorite Genesis games ever. The graphics were fairly simplistic but also had this dark otherworldly vibe, as did the excellent music and sounds. The sense of occult strangeness and wandering through alien dimensions fighting demonic entities was just perfect for me at that time in my gaming life…I loved it, recall sitting up late at night in a darkened room struggling with its considerable challenges. The game was HARD, at least for me…thanks for the memories. And yes, this would be incredible source material for a current-gen game IF anyone could pull it off properly. I wouldn’t want to see it done unless it was either Arkham Asylum-level good OR a hi-res 2D remake of the original game.

What I would have said AL HOGAR did for me.

I had this game as a kid, my brother used to read the comics. This game was REALLY REALLY REALLY hard. As a child I remember only getting past one of the first bosses. I attempted replaying this game a year back- it was just as hard as I remembered. Least to say, I never beat it. If I remember correctly, the first half of the game is timed. If you don’t finish the levels in time the game ends and you start over.

But I could be wrong.

I rented this when I was in elementary school. Was very disappointed, as it was too difficult, looked great though.

i remember playing it but i don’t remember anything about the game.

All I remember about that game was that I was excited there was an Iron Maiden video game…

Chakan! I don’t think I ever played it, but I can still remember it vividly. That cover art kinda freaked me out.

Wait, that’s Eddie from Iron Maiden, right?

Chakan was a pretty solid game for the Genesis. The graphics were pretty dark and grainy, but they grew on you after a while. This wasn’t a very good game at the start, but it steadily builds, and by the halfway point, it was really, really solid.

Best thing about this game was the twist ending, which felt like a setup for sequels. But those sequels never came, for unknown reasons.

Chakan was a tough game, classic hardcore stuff (back when “hardcore” didn’t refer solely to HD movie games). I’m a bit surprised that Sega let it lapse, but perhaps they no longer hold the licensing rights. These sort of games tend to fall through the cracks.

Thank God for Emulators! Heh heh heh. Why are you even reading this? You should be playing Chakan on your Gens32 emulator right now!

Its got a great creep Metal vibe to it, but its also (like others have said) really really hard. The game has no issues with thumping you up and down. It does not control that great, which adds to the difficulty. Its a game I always intend to play via emulation and do save states all the way through just so I can see everything without beating my brain in. I never do though, I end up trying to play it legit and fail and get mad and give up.

I remember buying this game based solely on the cover art, then trying to play it and failing miserably ar everything.
It was sort of fun, but years of playing Mega Man, Mario, Sonic, Castlevania and everything you can imagine didn’t help with the difficulty, it was just impossible to beat.

I remember that they were making a Dreamcast version of Chakan but it was canned, it sounded really good and was based on stealth, according to the producers every enemy in the game could kill you so you had to find strange ways to kill every single one of them.

Here I found an IGN article about the unreleased DC version (dated October 8, 1999)
http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/132/132726p1.html
And a tech demo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXPeKCiIGFs
I would love to get my hand on a working version…

I have this game, but I never played it for more than fifteen minutes. I just couldn’t get into it.

:D