Stellar Assault (32X)

 

 One of the (very) few games that stands out of one of the shining stars of the 32X's library is the port of Star Wars Arcade. So to make another 32X game in the same genre must either be a cynical attempt to cash in on that game's success, or a misguided attempt to try and compete with a game that has the advantages of being a tiw-in to a big mainstream movie series (though as has been forgotten by popular culture, Star Wars' cultural cache was probably at its all-time lowest in the first half of the nineties, it was still a hefty name to throw around), as well as being a port of an acclaimed arcade game and having some of the best graphics on the system.

 

But while Stellar Assault (also known as Shadow Squadron) might not seem like it has anything to offer in Star Wars' wake, it's still a pretty good game with plenty of its own charm. The graphics, for example, are a lot simpler and significantly less impressive than those of Star Wars, despite coming out a year later, but there's just something about these big spaceships silently floating in mostly empty space that creates a lot of atmosphere (ironically, since they're in space). Furthermore, there's some really cool stylisitc thigs in there too, like the start of the first stage, that sees your ship getting launched from a gigantic curved space elevator thing. I also like the constant presence of the sun, that you seem to get slightly closer to in each stage, and again: though it's just a flashing bright circle in the distance, it somehow feels a little more real in its understatedness.

 

The stages themselves are pretty simple, all of them being just "destroy all of the enemy ships", with some interesting enemies appearing on certain stages like the massive Accel Gate on the second stage, that sucks your ship in, to shoot it out of the other side like a projectile if you get too close to its opening. This doesn't actually damage you, but the first time it happens it's a pretty exciting and disorienting surprise. Mostly, though, there's a bunch of enemy fighters flying around, and a few larger ships just lurking about. The bigger ships are interesting in that you shoot parts off of them before they're fully destroyed, so you can tactically shoot off a bunch of ther guns as you go, if they're hassling you while you try to take down their fighter escorts.

 

Along with the games itself, there's a few interesting features that really give the game away as an early polygon-based game, and that that was something about which the developers were excited. There's a model viewer, which lets you spoil some surprises by looking at every 3D model in the game at your leisure (the aforementioned Accel Gate filling the whole screen in this mode!), as well as a mode that lets you change the colour schemes of not only the player ship, but also the enemy fleet. Make them the same, and pretend you're a pilot who's gone rogue and turned on your masters!

 

Stellar Assault is a pretty good game! Despite its simplicity I've enjoyed what it has to offer, and I think the visuals work really well in a fin example of "less is more". While researching this post, I also found out that there's a Saturn port/remake/sequel (I'm not sure which), so I guess I'll look into that at some point in the future, too.

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball (Game Boy Color)

 The first thing that needs to be addressed in this review is the game's title: yes, it will make your dad laugh if he asks what you're playing and you answer "Pocket Billiards". Don't worry about it. The other thing is that GameFAQs lists this as being published by Tamsoft, which struck me as odd, since they're more of a developer, and the only games I know of that they published were also developed by them. My suspicions were correct, and this game was published by a completely unrelated company called TAM, Inc., and the people maintaining GameFAQs are incompetent buffoons.

 

Anyway, this is a billiards/snooker game, but not only should you cast out of your mind the image of boring men wearing tuxedos and chainsmoking, but it's been specifically designed with the intention of casting those men out of your mind! Instead of a traditional look, Funk the 9 Ball instead takes its aesthetic cues from vaguely contemporaneous rhythm games, like Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, and so on. The devs must have had their fingers on the pulse, too, as the first game I was going to mention in that list was SNK's Cool Cool Toon, which didn't come out until six months later! But anyway, there's lots of cute/weird characters, the place in which you play isn't a smoky bar but some kind of brightly-coloured night club with a DJ, and not only can you collect cans of paint to recolour the club and the table, but you can collect Minidiscs to give the DJ more BGM selections to pick from!

 

The game itself, as far as I can tell (as someone who has never played snooker), is mostly a fairly normal game of nine ball, and controls in a fairly traditional manner, in which you aim the cue ball, and then use a timed power meter to shoot. I say "mostly", because while it uses the rules of that game, it's also in the now pretty much dead genre of silly sports games. While playing, various creatures will use their magic powers to effect the course of the game in various way. Some of the creatures live in the pockets, and their powers activate when a ball goes into the pocket they call home. Other creatures are put inside the balls somehow by the players pre-match, and their powers activate when you hit their ball after holding the button down for a few seconds.

 

The creatures in the pockets will have powers that equally help or hinder both players, like destroying one of the lower-numbered balls, or making all the balls invisible. The ones in the balls, obviously, use their powers to specifically help the player to whom they belong (because there is also a vague aspect of monster collection in here too!), and they do stuff like give you the ability to re-take a foul shot, make a ball jump into the nearest pocket, and that kind of thing. They also all cause a little animation to play when they're activated, and not only are these animations all weird, but the way they come into play is amusingly over-dramatic: just before the cueball hits its target, time will stop, and the screen will cut to a strange cutscene of like, a chorus of angels in heaven, or a little guy drinking tea, or something. I think it's meant to evoke a kind of sports anime-esque drama? It's silly and time-consuming, but I do like it.

 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball is a decent enough game. I don't think I would ever want to play it on a TV screen, but on a handheld, it's a fine way to keep your hands busy while watching TV. It also has an English translation patch, which you wouldn't really expect. If it appeals to you at all, you should give it a try! Definitely don't pay £400 for a real copy though. Four hundred entire pounds! Madness.

Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai (Game Boy Advance)

 I was first drawn to this game because it was an RPG with an east Asian fantasy setting and also a lot of really nice pixel art. There's also some nice full screen cutscene pixel art, though it only shows up fairly rarely, because of the way the game's structured. Which brings up the big surprise I got from playing Oriental Blue: it's an open world game! On the Game Boy Advance! Like is so often the case, western publishers were very short-sighted and didn't bother translating it. The post-Pokemon/Tokyopop English anime and manga boom was still ongoing, as was the post-Final Fantasy VII RPG boom, and here's a really high quality RPG owned by lots of kids, with a sertting they'd love and an amazing selling point, and apparently none of them were interested. 

 

Luckily, it did get a fan translation a few year later, so you (and I) can play it without having to read Japanese. There's a lot of plot threads, but it all starts in a large city, where a big ritual is about to take place, and there's apparently also conspiracies afoot. The ritual fails, and there's also monsters roaming the streets, and bad stuff happening across the land, too. One particularly interesting thread I picked up involved the Oni. They're depicted as a stand-in for indigenous people (which is also done in the TTRPG Tenra Bansho Zero, which was orginally published a few years before this game. Is this a common trope, or is there a specific bit of direct inspiration going on here?)

 

The Oni are suffering some severe oppression at the hands of humanity: forced to live in a barren mountain village, subject to raids by slavers, and treated like dirt if they go to human settlements of their own volition. One of the first quests I got myself involved in was trying to re-claim a stolen Oni artifact from a human lord's palace, but it turns out to have been stolen again from him by a mysterious theif/murderer. I as worried that the Oni stuff would have been some passive background thing, just "that's how it is, I guess", but during that quest, one of them joins your party, with a view to improving the lot of his people and faning and getting their treasure back.

 

Unfortunately, I eventually ran into a big problem: I was finding the starts of plot threads and questlines, but I wasn't able to actually advance any of them. Ships were stuck in docks, valleys were blocked by boulders, and other barriers stood in my way in various places, all making it so I couldn't go to new towns, in each of which I was sure at least one "next thing" I needed must be waiting. I'm sure eventually I'd be able to figure some way of making progress, but having so many brick walls being put up all at once, in seemingly every direction really killed my desire to continue playing.

 

If you've got more patience for this kind of RPG stuff, you'll probbly get a lot more out of this game than I have, and if it sounds like it would appeal to you, you should definitely give it a try. It's clearly a very high quality game, with tons to do, places to go, systems to figure out and so on. It also definitely feels like one of the strongest examples of a vague concept I've been chasing for years: the "portable world", a handheld game that feels like it contains a full world inside it. If it had goten an official English release, there'd probably have been a print strategy guide for it, and the problems I encountered wouldn't have been so insurmounted. Oh well, never mind.

Death Wing (Playstation)

 Death Wing (also listed on some sites as The Operation: Death Wing) is clearly a game that was made with a strong artistic vision in mind. Right from the start, the game presents a very strong aesthetic. The first thing you see is a very stylish FMV intro with black and white footage of real people in 1996 intercut with footage of the game. I don't know exactly what this is all supposed to mean, though, since the game is a 3D spaceship shooting game that appears to be set in a very distant future. But it looks cool, and that seems to have been a high priority for the developers.

 

Before each mission, there are more FMVs. No real people in these, though, just very cool-looking wireframe animations showing your mission objective, along with boxes of text that are obviously too low resolution to actually read (though in the unlikely event that this game ever gets a HD remaster, that might prove interesting, assuming enough of the original assets even still exist for that to happen), and the missions themselves have a few seconds before you're given control where the camera swoops around, showing all the stuff that's in the stage.

 

Most impressive of all of this, though, is that while it's a little constrained by its host hardware, with things like draw distance and such, it's still a very nice-looking game. Certain stages are especially spectacular, like the one where you're assaulting some kind of giant tower built on the surface of a still-active star, or fighting a big snake-like robot in the midst of a giant outer space thunderstorm. But we're three paragraphs into this review, and I haven't even started describing how the game plays yet, so let's get into that.

 

Like I said, it's a 3D spaceship shooter, like a more complex version of SEGA's Star Wars Arcade, or alternatively, an Ace Combat game in space. The missions with which you're tasked usually involve one or more really big things (space ships, stations, buildings, etc.) that are your targets, and a bunch of annoying smaller fighter ships that will fly around trying to kill you. After a few stages, the little fighters will sometimes be replaced with armadas of giant battleships! It all works as well as these games usually do, though being set in speace, it is sometimes a little too easy to lose your bearings. The enemy fighters are also a lot more aggressive than the enemies in similar games I've played, too, and you really have to manage them or you'll get torn apart quickly, even in the first stage.

 

One nice feature, that's made it a little easier to take varied screenshots for this review, despite my inabilty to get past the third stage is that it uses an Outrun-style branching path structure! So there's two second missions and four third missions! All the third missions represent a massive ramp up in difficulty, though, so I don't know how many more there are after that.

 

I'd recommend giving Death Wing a try! If you like this kind of 3D shooting game, it seems to be a perfectly competent example of the genre (though I admit I'm not an expert, so maybe it sucks actually), and otherwise, it's a game that looks great and has a strong aesthetic and atmosphere to it that's worth experiencing, even if only for a short time.