Prop Cycle (Arcade)

 There have been times in the past where I've put disclaimers at the start of arcade game reviews, because I was emulating, and the original game had some kind of specialised control scheme or gimmicky cabinet that I couldn't possibly replicate at home. Prop Cycle represents a particularly big case of this, as the original cabinet had a whole exercise bike on it, plus fans blowing wind into the player's face. But that elaborate cabinet full of moving parts is almost thirty years old now, and there are very few arcades around in the west that aren't just full of worthless garbage like coinpushers and fruit machines, so it's very unlikely most of us are ever going to encounter a functional Prop Cycle and be able to play it. So, I'm here to ask (and answer) the pertinent question: is it worth emulating, and could it have worked as a Playstation game back in the day?

 

For those who don't know what this game is, it's a game in which you pilot a pedal-powered aircraft around various stages, popping balloons for points or extra time. In easy mode, you pick one of three stages, and you're just playing for a high score in that stage. In advanced mode, you play each of the three stages, with a tighter time limit, balloons in more difficult positions, and to progress from one stage to the next, you have to hit a score quota. Advanced mode has an exclusive fourth stage, the floating continent of Solitar, but unfortunately, even through practice, turning down the difficulty, and using continues, I haven't managed to get there.

 

It might sound like scant material for a home release, but a lot of Namco's Playstation games in those early years were pretty brief. I think it wasn't until Soul Edge and Tekken 3 that they really started to pile on the extras for the home audience. Plus, it's the quality of what's in there that really matters, and that quality is very high. The game takes place in an idyllic world, obviously inspired by Laputa (as so many great videogames are), and it's all realised in some of the most beautiiful low-poly graphics you'll ever see. It's prefectly directed, too: for example, the second stage has you fly into a tunnel inhabited by (peaceful) giant worms during daylight, and as you emerge from the other side, the music changes and you're flying around a little mining village beneath a beautiful starry sky.

 

The one problem with playing through emulation is that I haven't been able to figure out a way to perfectly map the controls of the cabinet to a controller. The best I'e been able to manage (using a Dual Shock 4) is to map steering to the left analogue stick (like you'd expect), and using L2 and R2 to decrease and increase the speed of the pedals turning. It's far from perfect, but it is good enough to make playing the game an enjoyable, if slightly fiddly, experience. Of course, the theoretical Playstation port that doesn't exist would have been able to come up with something more bespoke for the game, maybe even coming up with a scheme that involed Namco's NeGcon controller. But that's just me making educated guesses on other stuff Namco did around the same time.

 

Prop Cycle is a great game, definitely worth your time to emulate, and in my opinion at least, it would also have been a worthwhile Playstation port at the time, and I think it's a shame it wasn't one. I've never been able to play it on an actual cabinet, but hopefully that'll change someday. I do know that in recent years, there's been at least one Prop Cycle-like game, complete with bike controller and fans, released by a Chinese company, but the only cabient I've encountered of that was way too small for my giant long legs to comfortably be able to pedal.

Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen (PS Vita)

 I actually wasn't going to review this, as I didn't think it was really obscure enough, so it's been mentioned in the monthly Patreon posts where I talk about other games I've been playing that I didn't review. But then I realised that despite its big budget look and feel, it's the sequel to a late-era PS2 game that wasn't massively popular, plus it's a game I've never seen anyone talk about, and finally, fourteen years after its release, it's still an exclusive to PS Vita, a console that never got the attention it deserved from most people.

 

It's a ninja-themed stealth game, and it's by Acquire, so the obvious comparison to make is to the timeless classic Tenchu Stealth Assassins on Playstation. It does feel quite a lot like that game, and you do do a lot of running along rooftops, then jumping down to silently kill some hapless guard who never even knew you existed. The big way in which it feels different, however, is that it feels a lot more like it's designed around speed. You have a run button, you can perform stealth kills while in midair, and the way you use special items and your grappling hook is different.

 

In Tenchu, all of your items were displayed on a bar at the bottom. You switched between them with the shoulder buttons, and you pressed triangle to use them. For items that needed to be aimed, like the grappling hook, you held triangle, aimed with the d-pad, and released triangle to use. In Shinobido 2, You only have four items equipped at a time (though you can swap three of them out at any time). They're each assigned to a direction on the d-pad, with the grappling hook always assigned to down. To use the grappling hook, you just tap down on the d-pad, and you'll throw it at the nearest appropriate surface in the direction you're facing. Again, you can even do this in midair! For thrown weapons, you can lock on to an enemy that's in your field of vision and throw directly at them. 

 

It all adds up to a game in which you're speeding around, killing your enmeies and it all feels so good and satisfying. The only real downside is that there's very few different stages to play in, and they're reused for different missions, with different enemy layouts and different objectives for you to complete. Outside the stages, there's a few things to get your attention too. There are three factions vying for power in the region where the game's set, and you can pick missions to complete for any of them. If you stick with one faction, they'll gradually grow more and more of an appreciation for you, resulting in higher payouts and other benefits. Similarly, if you've got it in for a certain faction for some reason, you can keep accepting missions where they're the target, and if you eventually dwindle their resources down, you'll be hired to assassinate their leader, after which that faction will just no longer be a part of the game!

 

I'm sure there are other ways to get endings (Acquire are also the developers of the Way of the Samurai series, after all), but once there's only one faction left, you'll get the ending that shows them taking power in the region, and also expressing their thanks for your help. The other big extra-curricular activity in which you can engage is alchemy! You don't often find ready-made items in the field, but instead there are lots of weeds and mushrooms with various effects lying around. You can put a bunch of these into a jar (generally they all have to have the same effect, which is enhanced by putting more and more in the jar at once), and then you can extract the ingredients as either elixir (which you drink to gain the effects), sushi (which you leave around for enemies to eat and gain the effects), and bombs (which you throw to cause the effect). The effects are stuff like HP recovery, speed increase, confusion, fainting, explosion, and so on. All the effects can be put into any of the three forms, so you can make a healing grenade or a potion of makes you explode. There's also mechanical dolls for distracting enemies, but I think that these are mostly found, bought, or received as gifts.

 

I've played through this game once, and though I've deleted it now (I'm too lazy to get an SD2VITA card so I'm stuck with a mere 16GB on there), I'm sure I'll go back to it in the future to seek out other paths and endings. It's an excellent game, and even though it's fourteen years old, and I've owned a Vita myself for almost a decade now, it's still amazing to me that a handheld game can look so good! I highly recommend giving Shinobido 2 a try, should you have access to a PS Vita, especially since it's one of the system's few exclusives.

Super Zangyura (PS4)

 Also known as Maid-san wo Migi ni: Shooting Star, this is a game by doujin veterans Platine Dispositif! Which makes it all the more amazing that I played this via a standard edition physical release for a console in the PAL region!  What a time to be alive. Contrary to what you might expect from them, it's a platformer rather than a shooting game, though it does have a lot of their typical hallmarks: cute character designs, nice pixel art with beautiful colour palettes, brutally sadistic difficulty, and so on.

 

You play as a maid armed with a morning star, in a parody of/homage to classic-style linear Castlevania series, with the plot even having you storming the castle home of an evil immortal vampire. It's a little more puzzle-centric than Castlevania, though, with a lot of the game focussing on the acquisition of coloured keys for opening doors. As things proceed, just getting the keys won't be enough, since the game starts introducing elements like red herring doors that waste your keys, and while destructible walls appear early in the game, they actually become essential for progress later on. There's usually some contextual clues to look out for with regards to hidden stuff: invisible platforms will have torches on them, spikes that suddenly fall on unwitting players will have bloodstained floors beneath them, and the presence of destructible walls might be signified by a number of less clear clues, like oddly-placed enemies, suspiciously-shaped rooms, and so on. 

 

So while it's a difficult game, an observant player isn't subject to trial-and-error Rick Dangerous nonsense. And all of the above is just my describing the default game mode, the end of which reveals that you've actually been wasting you time storming the castle of the vampire lord's next door neighbour. But you've now unlocked overture mode, which is the actual vampire lord's castle, and it goes by the Super Mario Bros. 2jp principle of "they've completed the main game, so the first stage here has to be harder than the final stage there", and shamefully, I haven't been able to get to the first boss in this mode, let alone the final. You also unlock Knightmare mode, which is a completely merciless masocore version of the game. Also, after you complete the game for the first time, everyone's voice actor is swapped to be the voice of the pumpkin guy who runs the in-game shop. I don't know why, or if there's a way to get the normal voices back.

 

The difficulty all comes from the stage design, too: the controls are perfect for what they are, and it would be interesting to see a version of this game that focussed more on action and combat, rather than puzzles and investigation. We do get a little hint of this (and of the developers' STG heritage) during the boss battles, which are a lot of fun, but unfortunately very brief and the long stages space them out to be very far apart. It's a good game, but I wouldn't say it's one of Platine Dispositif's most exciting. It's definitely worth your time, but I would recommend waiting for a PSN sale, rather than getting excited and buying a physical copy like I did. Especially since there seems to be some kind of fault with the physical copies: when you first put it into your console, it'll register as an unrecognised disc. To get it to work, you've got to reset the PS4 with the disc in the drive, a solution I only found by chance and laziness. It'll work every time after you;ve done this once, though. And I assume it's a fault with the whole print run, since when I discovered the trick, I'd already returned one copy under the assumption that it was totally unplayable.

Nostradamus (Arcade)

 Though the game bears the name, and the title screen bears the image of the famous french fortuneteller, it's not about him. It's about a war (or possibly alien invasion?) that occurs at the end of the century, which was probably one of his predictions. You know how vague they are. But anyway, this is a shooting game that, as far as I know, has no home ports, and I suspect the reason for that is that in more ways than one, it comes between two eras.

 

The first, and most relevant way it does this is in the same as lots of arcade games that didn't get home ports. It came out in 1993, and graphically, it's beyond what could satisfactorily have been done on the Mega Drive or SNES, but by the time the Saturn and Playstation came about, it would have been old hat, and it's definitely not a popular or famous enough game to have made up for that. It does look really good, though. There's not much in the way of special effects, but there's a lot of amazing-looking super-detailed pixel art in the backgrounds and sprites alike. 

 

The other way in which it stands astride two eras is less relevant to its unported status, since it's an aspect it shares with games that did get ported to home systems, like Grind Stormer and Batsugun: it's one of those games that bridges the gap between classic-style shooting games and later danmaku-style shooting games. There's never super-elaborate or particularly dense bullet patterns, but there is still a fair few enemy bullets coming your way from very early in the game. Furthermore, while you don't have a screen-clearing, bullet-cancelling bomb, you do have a charge shot that, when being charged, manifests as a small energy field following your ship around. This energy field does cancel enemy bullets, so with a bit of skill, you can maneuver around in such a way that it keeps you safe. Of course, that means you aren't shooting, so you aren't killing enemies or revealing the score items that remain invisible until you shoot their hiding places. (I almost called this a danmaku shooter thing because of the hidden bees in the Dodonpachi games, but then I remembered that it's something that goes as far back as 1986's Star Soldier).

 

Something else that's of interest is that the bosses have a unifying theme of modularity. That is to say, each boss is made up of various smaller parts that come together to form the whole boss. What's interesting about this is the way that sometimes you'll destroy one of a boss' constituent parts, and  a different one will fly in, and attach itself to the core and give it a new set of attack patterns. Sometimes, you'll fights some of the segments during the stage as larger enemies that escape before you destroy them, then they come together at the end of the stage to form a boss.

 

Another aesthetic quirk I'd like to mention is that, as well as the in-game graphics looking so good, there's a fair bit of thought that's clearly gone into the game's overall presentation, with the aspect I'd particularly like to highlight being the player characters. There are two characters, though you unfortunately can't pick which one you get: player one is always Dalas (sic), and player two is always Joanna. I don't recognise them, but their faces on the screen that appears after you insert a coin really look like they must have been traced over photos of real people. There'sa possibility that the developers actually hired models themselves, since there's different pictures of the pair on the high score screen, this time in profile. Dalas has a lit cigarette in his mouth in both situations, of course! I wonder if there were plans for more to be done with these characters?

 

Nostradamus is a pretty good shooting game. It won't blow your mind or change your life, but it's still fun enough, and worth pushing through the high level of difficulty to see more of the beautiful pixel art it contains. Luckily, even the animation for your ship exploding looks great!

Outrun (Game Gear)

 It's once again the time of year where I post about a game that's not obscure, and most years, It seems to be a SEGA or SNK game. This time, it's SEGA's turn, with an ambitious handheld port of their classic racing game. Something that the best Game Gear games do is that rather than desperately trying to squeeze a game down from more powerful hardware, they make a version of the game that plays to the Game Gear's strengths.

 

Those strengths being the bright colours, and the fact that it's a system that somehow seems to have really brought the best out of pixel artists who worked on it. So again: rather than just scaling down all the graphics, everything's completely redrawn from scratch, and as a result, it's an amazing-looking game. The backgrounds especially look great, though it feels like there are more stages featuring ancient ruins than in more standard versions of the game.

 

As for the game itself, it plays like Outrun! At its most basic level, at least. You drive against a time limit, there's branching paths, low and high gear, all the standard stuff. There are a few changes compared to earlier versions, though. There's one negative change, so I'll get that out of the way first: you only drive through four stages in the main mode, meaning that there are only ten stages in total, compared to the standard fifteen. There's two additions to kind of make up for it, though. First, you can choose between automatic and manual transmission, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original, and second, there's a whole new racing mode!

 

You can play against a CPU opponent, or a human opponent (has anyone reading this ever played a Game Gear game over link cable, by the way? Pretty much every one at least linked up for Pokemon on Game Boy, but I've never known of anyone linking two Game Gears together). The races are always duels against a couple driving a blue Ferrari, and they take place on your choice of the the game's ten stages. It's a shame that you can only do single races, and there's no option for a single player series or anything, but it's a nice little extra, and it's a surprise it took so long for it to exist, since there'd already been ports to Master System, PC Engin,e and a bunch of microcomputers, plus a Mega Drive port that came out the same day as this one, though that one definitely makes more of an attempt at being like the arcade original, with nothing much extra besides a new BGM track.

 

I think, in the modern day where Hamster Corp. are releasing a new perfect arcade port every week, and everyone has constant access to at least three devices that can emulate arcade games at all times, it's easy for people to write off old home/handheld ports of arcade games as being necessarily inferior, and unworthy of attention. But Game Gear Outrun stands as one of many examples that many of them are interesting and unique creations in their own right.