Boogie Woogie Bowling (Mega Drive)

 I think, if I cast my mind back to the ancient past, this game might have received a review in an issue of SEGA Power, probably an issue numbered in the 40s. But I had no interest in sports games at all as a kid, and that review wasn't of Boogie Woogie Bowling, as the game underwent a rigorous blandification process while being brought westwards. The name was changed to "Championship Bowling", and while Boogie Woogie has a cast made up of two boys, a girl, and a xenomorph, Championship has a cast made up of two men and two women, drawn in a totally different style to the ones in Boogie Woogie. 

 

The reason I even bothered to look into this game as an adult is thanks to a bit of weird happenstance. A couple of years ago, I got a chinese clone console that has a slot for Famicom cartridges, and a slot for Mega Drive cartridges. It's a nie little machine, it's USB powered and has HDMI output, so it's very convenient to get running in the 2020s, plus it even has region and language switches for the Mega Drive games.  One little quirk it has is the power switch: in the middle, the console is switched off, push it upwards to turn the Famicom part on, and downwards to activate the Mega Drive part. Anyway, a friend's son was playing on it, and with no cartridge in the Famicom slot, tried to turn it on by pushing the switch upwards. This revealed a menu of over a hundred built-in Famicom ROMs that had been there the whole time without my knowledge! A short experiment later revealed that there was an equivalent menu of Mega Drive games, too! And Boogie Woogie Bowling was among them.

 

I have no idea, though, how I managed to recognise that it had been reskinned for a different version that I'd only ever seen in a magazine more than thirty years ago, though. The human brain really is mysterious, I guess. Anyway, it's a bowling game. It plays pretty much like any other bowling game: it's mainly based around stopping a marker that quickly moves back and forth on various power/spin/etc. meters. Isn't it strange how bowling games and golf games are so similar in how they're played? There's also a little gimmick that lets you press the face buttons while your opponent's trying to determine their ball's spin, which I think affects the speed of their marker, though I'm not totally sure on that.

 

The main mode is structured as you might expect: you bowl against various CPU opponents, gradually increasing in difficulty. A lot of these opponents will throw gutter ball after gutter ball, while some will oddly alternate between gutter balls and strikes. either way, it's a lot more merciful than the other bowling game with which I'm familiar, the Game Boy pirate cart classic World Bowling, which is absolutely merciless and demands perfect play from the outset. There's a couple of other modes, too, though these can only be played as a solo practice, or against other human players. There's split mode, which gives you sets of random pins, never a full set, and you have to clear them. In this mode, you only score points if you clear every pin. There's also bonus mode, which is more interesting: each individual pin is assigned a different points value, seemingly at random. I guess there's no CPU opponents for these modes because it would have been too complicated to program them to actually try and score properly? That's just a theory, though.

 

Boogie Woogie Bowling is an incredibly okay game. I definitely wouldn't have paid money for it on release, and I probably wouldn't today, unless it was apart of some kind of compilation or something. But if you emulate it, or find the ROM hidden away in a piece of hardware you own, it might amuse you for an hour or so. One extra thing I found interesting is that it was published in Japan by Visco, a company I definitely associate more with arcade games and the Neo Geo than with regular consoles.

Wolf Simulator (PS4)

 Or to give it its full title, Wolf Simulator: RPG Survival Animal Battle. As you might have guessed from that "please put me in someone's search results" title, this is asset flip shovelware. But I thought there was a chance, however small, that there might be something worthwhile in that realm, maybe. Plus, action games where you play as four-legged characters are usually a nice enough novelty. I'll spoil the end of the review right here: I was wrong, and this game sucks.

 

But at least it does so in enough ways that I can fill out a review of decent length talking about them. So, the premise is that you're a wolf in the United States. Though there are a couple of buildings around, and some abandonded train tracks, there are no roads, people, vehicles, or power lines. So I guess it's set some significantly distant time in the post-human future? That would explain why there's tigers and leopards and hyenas among all the normal North American animals. Like Tokyo Jungle! Anyway, you're a wolf and you've got to kill and eat other animals, while trying not to have the same happen to you. Like Tokyo Jungle! 

 

You also get missions, though they're not as interesting or varied as the ones in Tokyo Jungle. Instead, every mission is a randomly generated quota of certain animals you hve to find and kill. I suspect that the game was originally a free-to-play mobile game, as there's experience points plus two different currencies, one of which lets you skip long cooldown times involved in one of the more pointless parts of the game. That one's the coins, a tiny amount of which will be given to you for completing missions, and there's also fangs, which are given for killing other animals. Fangs are used for increasing your stats. So what do experience points do? They eventually level you up, and every other level up, you're allowed to take part in an incredibly easy boss fight against another wolf to unlock a new area in which to run around and hunt.

 

That's pretty much the entirety of the "game" part of the game. If you really want to play as a realistic animal and hunt other animals, then Tokyo Jungle is orders of magnitude better than this in every way possible, so play that instead. But there's other stuff to talk about too! Like those coins, for example! You can use them to unlock different wolves to play as. Some of these wolves actually look really cool (though I'm 99% certain every model, texture, animation, and sound in the game was probably just bought off-the-shelf), but the coins needed to unlock them would take eons of completing missions.

 

There's also another thing in the menu that lets you use coins to buy wolf puppies, smaller versions of all the different kinds of wolf you can unlock to play as. Supposedly, these puppies can follow you round and hunt with you. However, having played through something like 70-80% of the game, it never gets any mroe difficult, and I've never felt like I've needed any assistance. But they can't join you unless you keep feeding them fangs to level them up ten times. Every time you do this, the amount of fangs for the next level increases like you might expect, but so does the amount of time you have to wait before you can do that. Unless you cancel the timer by paying a huge amount of coins. So I never got a puppy past like level three or four.

 

Wolf Simulator is awful garbage. It's insidious awful garbage, though. It's blandly engaging enough that if you were in a sufficiently deep bout of depression, I can see a person idly playing it for hours, never enjoying it, but having their brain and hands occupied enough that they don't stop, either. But you deserve to waste your time on better games than this tedious, unimaginative swill. Wolf Simulator costs about £10 normally, but I got it in a sale a while back because it was 90% off. Neither price is worth it, nor, in fact, would it be worth getting for free. Like I already said: I know the idea of being a realistic animal on the hunt in an open world will be a draw for a lot of people, and if it is, then you need to play Tokyo Jungle. No-one needs to play Wolf Simulator.