City Panic! (PC)

 It's unusual to see any games inspired by the first two Grand Theft Auto games, especially Japanese-developed games. In fact, I can't think of any other Japanese games that took their inspiration from them, and that's a shame, since the first two are a lot more interesting and fun than the 3D sequels. 

 

City Panic kind of distills and simplifies the main essence of those games, being a series of car chases through cities. There's no changing vehicles, no shooting, just driving around collecting all the stolen floppy disks in each stage, then escaping from the city. All while the corrupt cops chase you around trying to smash you to death.

 

There are a bunch of options, though! Before starting a stage, you can change the camera and control settings, as well as picking from a whole bunch of different cars, that actually do all feel different from each other. Though the Mini, which is the default option, also seems to be the best, with better handling and more resilience than all the others. Also, I recommend using the "Fixed Camera + Normal Handling" mode.

 

Unfortunately, I don't really have much more to say about City Panic. It's a pretty simple game, but also one that's a lot of fun, and definitely worth buying. (Which you can do at DLsite)

Curiosities #22 - mikeyeldey95 (Mega Drive)

 Unfortunately, a short-lived illness immediately followed by a few days of aggressively unpleasant weather have made researching a new post this week very difficult. Luckily, I was recently made aware of another fake operating system for an old console! Interestingly, this wasn't made as a pack in for a bootleg console packaged with a keyboard (as I suspect was the case with Famicom Windows 98), but as a kind of digital album/art project by the eponymous Mikey.

 

Despite what expectations that might foster for you, it's actually both packed with features, and pretty authentic-feeling (at least, it looks and feels authentic to me, speaking as a poor kid who only got to use Windows computers at school in the nineties). There's a few minigames, you can change the desktop wallpaper and theme, there's a bunch of fake "websites", some of which even scroll and have animation and music, and there's various other little things to discover in here, too.

 

The games aren't particularly exciting. There's a maze game obviously inspired by the famous maze screensaver, and a bunch of very very simple things, like a traffic-avoiding game with text graphics, a Flappy Bird clone, a Simon Says-type game, and so on. They're not really the draw here though, and it is nice that they exist, at least. The "The Internet" option lets you choose one of a bunch of websites, all shown in super low-resolution 1995-vision. There's 1995 versions of sites like Twitter and Reddit, the game's own Itch.io and Bandcamp pages, and a few classic memes, like the Space Jam homepage, Hampster Dance, and so on. There's also a "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which picks a website at random, including a few secret ones that don't have their own buttons.

 

Your inbox just contains a single mail from the creator, thanking you for looking at their work, and Music lets you select a bunch of his tracks to listen to from a menu. Visualisers lets you pick from a bunch of different small animations, each with their own music. There's lots more references in here, too, to things like the Windows Media Player Headspace skin, the After Dark screensaver, Solitaire, and so on.

 

This isn't really a game I can recommend or steer you away from, but if it sounds interesting, you can find the rom by searching for its title and going to its Itch.io page. It's pay what you want too, including nothing, if you like. There's apparently already been two sell-out print runs for actual physical cartridges, too. I think this is an interesting enough curiosity that I might try and get one if there's ever a third run.

Soukaigi (Playstation)

 So, for years, I've just ignored this game for a number of reasons. It's a Japan-only Square-published game that takes up three discs. So I always just drew the logical conclusion that it must be a language-dependant RPG that would be totally impenetrable. But I saw it a couple of weeks ago in a compilation video of JP-only Playstation games, and it turns out to be a 3D beat em up! The reason it's on three discs is because there are a lot of very long, fully voice-acted cutscenes! (Luckily, they are all skippable, though).

 

Another interesting point is that it was developed by Yuke's, who are mainly famous for their many, many wrestling games, even more surprising when this game appears to have a plot inspired by the likes of X/1999, with a mystical apocalypse occuring in modern (well, nineties) Japan. (Though they did also make Eretzvaju/Evil Zone around this time, too, a fighting game that parodied/homaged various anime genres that were contemporaneously popular, so it's not toally unheard of for them.)

 

It's a very ambitious game in general, with huge stages that you can mostly roam around at your leisure. You can't just run past the enemies straight to the exit, though, as there's a meter to be filled before you can. It's on the righthand side of the screen and it fills up a tiny bit every time you kill an enemy or smash one of the red crystals that are floating about the stages. Once it's full, you can head to the exit for the next cutscene and a boss fight. It seems like a strange limitation at first, but I think it is an interesting attempt at making you actually fight enemies in a 3D beat em up, without forcing you to stay in one place with invisible walls or whatever, which would look a lot stranger in 3D than it does in 2D entries in the genre.

 

It's very difficult, though. The controls take a little getting used to, at first, and some things continue to feel strange, like how useless the jumps are, and how dashing straight forward is done with the square button, while quickstepping in any other direction is done by double-tapping that direction. And, of course, Resident Evil-style swivel controls in a fast-paced action game are not particularly welcome. 

 

It's here where I have to make an admission, too: though I played the game for a good few hours, I just couldn't get past the third boss fight. I'm sure there's some secret tactic I must be missing there, because it feels impossible. Having said that, though, the first two bosses were pretty difficult too, and in a very old fashioned way: they're all about learning the boss' attack pattern, how to properly react to it, and then doing that and getting your hits in until the boss is dead. It just feels like the bosses have a lot more HP than they really needed to, making the fights cross the line from tight challenge into arduous slog.

 

The game's big draw is its aesthetic, of course, with stages taking place in empty towns at sunset, beaches at night, and so on, all enhanced with a little extra mystical onmyouji-esque seasoning. The first stage's background music even has chanting! I'd say it's worth giving a play just for how great it looks and sounds alone, and if you've got the skill and/or patience to get further into it than I did, I hope you post lots of screenshots of the later stages somewhere!

Taito Grand Prix (NES)

 This is a racing game that's impressively advanced both graphically and in terms of design. The graphics are the obvious and most immediate thing, and they are pretty impressive for a Famicom game. It's a faux-sprite scaling racer, which is impressive to begin with, but there's little touches like arches and bridges that go by overhead, that'd be impressive in a similar game on some more powerful hardware. Like, if Road Spirits or Final Lap Twin on PC Engine had an effect like that, it'd stil be impressive.

 

More impressive, though, is the game's structure. It's so much more complex than you'd expect from a racing game released in 1987! The game takes place in a region with a bunch of cities that you can travel to as you like. Each city has a parts shop selling different upgrades, and a place to register for races, with every city having its own set of three races available. Participating in races usually costs an entry fee (there is a free race in the first city that you can repeat, so you don't end up in a bankruptcy situation like in Lamborghini American Challenge), and you can win money and points. Points let you rank up, as each race also has a rank, and you can only enter races your own rank or lower.

 

The weird thing is that all the races (at least as far as I've played) aren't actually races where you beat opponents. They're more like miniature Outrun courses, where you just have to get from start to finish before time runs out. I've only been able to play races from the lowest two ranks, though, as the second rank represents a bit of a wall that I just don't have the energy or time to climb. The courses get longer, and the only way you can possibly get to the end of them within the time limit is by upgrading all the parts of your car. However, some of the parts that you need are so expensive that the only way to afford them is to play and re-play the courses you actually can finish over and over. I was enjoying the game up until this point, but I guess it's the kind of padding-out tactic that was common in longform games of the time (as opposed to the different, more subtle boring padding-out tactics that modern longform games ruin themselves with).

 

That being said, though, I know a lot of people have more patience than me for that kind of thing, so they'll probably get a lot further into Taito Grand Prix. I can't say that playing it was a totally negative experience for me, though: until I hit that wall, I actually kind of lost myself in the game for a fair few hours, and before I knew it, it was almost 4AM! So yeah, if you have the patience for it, I think you'll probably get a lot out of this game.

Kamen Rider (SNES)

 

 It's a common criticism of SNES beat em ups that compared to their Mega Drive and arcade contemporaries, they can be a little slow, and they rarely have more than a couple of enemies onscreen at a time. There are exceptions, though, and oddly enough, one such exception is this licensed game based on a TV show that was more than twenty years old when it came out.

 

Anyway, player one plays as Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider 1, and player two is Hayato Ichimonji/Kamen Rider 2, and they go through various typical 1970s tokusatsu locations (quarries, docks, theme parks, etc.) beating up uniformed goons from the fascist terror group Shocker, as well as various monstrous members of that organisation. Some of the monster enemies are recurring villains, appearing in multiple stages, but the boss of each stage is unique each time. A lot of the bosses even have unique death cutscenes, which see them being kicked off of rooves, out of windows, and so on. Some of them just have a fairly generic death where they're shown exploding in front of a different background each time.

 

The transformation gimmick works in a different way to the likes of Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji. In that game, you always want to be transformed, but it's limited by power up appearances and your character's health. In Kamen Rider, you can transform at any time at the press of a button, but there's a small strategic advantage to waiting until you really need to. Transforming makes you stronger, faster, and more resilient, and it also completely refills your health. So it makes the most sense to keep fighting off enemies for as long as you can in your untransformed form, waiting until you've almost lost a life before doing it. But obviously, this creates a little game of chicken you the player: do you transform now, or take a couple more hits, and risk losing a life and wasting a whole transformed health bar?

 

There's a few things in this game I couldn't really engage with. One was the selection of little training mini-stages between the actual stages. Because of the language barrier, I wasn't sure what to do in them, or what the point of them was. The other was the SSI system, which seems to be a way of building your own attack strings. This one, I just didn't have the patience for, and I seemed to be getting through the game just fine without it.

 

It's not a perfect game, but Kamen Rider is definitely worth your time. It's fun to play, looks great, and is a treat for fans of either beat em ups or tokusatsu. It's not the best SNES beat em up, but it's definitely pretty high up in the ranks!