Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.

Mon Mon Monster (MSX)

There's two particular types of nonsense that have long since been exorcised from the language of modern games design. Rick Dangerous nonsense is when a game's made up of nothing but memorising the locations of invisible threats, and then demonstrating that knowledge to avoid them in succession (because they're invisible, and it's impossible to avoid them without foreknowledge of their locations). The other is Tower of Druaga nonsense, whereby progression through a game is blocked by obstacles that need to be tackled in a certain way, with no in-game clues as to what those means are, or often even that the obstacles themselves even exist. Mon Mon Monster (also known as Mon Mon Kaibutsu) is an example of the latter kind.

 

The first stage is pretty normal, to lull the player into a false sense of security. It's split into a few segments, but each one just has you going from left to right fighting enemies and punching blocks, until you find the door to the next one. Eventually, you'll reach the boss, and can punch him to death. The second stage is a lot less clear. It seems to take place on one massive map, there are doors that lead nowhere, doors that send you to an earlier part of the stage, and the boss awaits in a hidden room, behind two destructible walls that don't stand out in any way, and have no clues pointing towards them. The third stage seems to take a moderate place between the previous two, being semi-linear with dead end passages if you take a wrong turn. Though I haven't yet been able to reach the end of stage three, so maybe there is more nonsense to look forward to there.

 

I should probably also describe the game itself, right? Well, other than the implementation of Druaga Nonsense, it's a pretty typical eight bit platform game. You play as a little Frankenstein's monster guy, and you can punch and jump. When you punch, you also shoot out a projectile attack. Enemeis can be hurt by punchs and projectiles, but bosses and blocks have to be punched up close. Sometimes blocks have items in, that might power up your projectiles, restore your health, or give an extra life. In terms of quality, it's not up there with the big names of the era, but it's still a little above average. It mostly feels good enough to move around, jump, and so on. There's a weird technical quirk that means your projectiles are sometimes invisible, but they still hurt the enemies, so it's not a big problem.

 

That's all I really have to say about Mon Mon Monster, to be honest. It's a robust enough platformer, especially considering its age, but I just don't have the patiences to keep searching for invisible routes to progress. Other than that stuff, though, it's not that difficult a game! If only the developers had designed their stages without the assumption of clairvoyance on the part of the player, this would have been a much better game.

Olivia's Mystery (SNES)

 

 Ages ago, I tried to review a Saturn game entitled Cube Battler, but for some reason, I just couldn't get into it at all, and couldn't force myself to play it enough to write a review of it. I was a puzzle game, that saw you moving and rotating cubes around to make a jigsaw puzzle, which was an animated FMV constantly looping in little bits on the faces of the cubes. Olivia's Mystery predates Cube Battler, and the pieces are 2D rectangular tiles rather than 3D cubes, but it is also a game about solving jigsaw puzzles in which the pieces all have a little bit of animation looping on them.

 

From what I remember, Cube Battler also had some kind of competitive element to it, too, which Olivia's Mystery doesn't have. Instead, Olivia's Mystery tells a story. The game's structure is incredibly simple: you read a passage of text telling a part of the story, then you solve a jigsaw puzzle depicting a little animated scene from that chapter. And that's the whole game! You can pick up the pieces, move them around, and flip them horiontally and vertically. There's also doubles of some of the pieces in each stage, and when you place a fake one in the correct position on the board, it explodes and vanishes.

 

Of course, this only wastes a few seconds, as you can just pick up and place the identical remaining piece and put it in the same place. It's actually pretty helpful, as when a piece explodes, you know you're going in the right direction, since they only explode in the right position and orientation. The start of each stage can feel a little overwhelming, with all the pieces scattered around at random, all playing their little loops discordantly. 

 

The story is pretty whimsical and episodic, feeling a little like it's being made up on the fly by a particularly imaginative child. It concerns a kindgom facing a water shortage, but you find water on the moon, along with an abandoned civilisation, but the moon water contains parasites that make the princess ill, and so on. There's apparently three endings, with the amount of time you take to get through the game determining which one you get.

 

This is an okay, mildly interesting game. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a massive jigsaw enthusiast buying at full price on release, and I'm sure there's no-one on earth who could muster up the enthusiasm to pay the prices for which it sells online these days. But emulating also means you can play the fan-translated version, and read the story, which is nice. You'll probably get an hour or two of distraction out of it before you get bored.

Bugs vs Tanks! (3DS)

 One of the less popular titles in Level-5's Guild series, far behind the likes of Crimson Shroud or Attack of the Friday Monsters, Bugs vs Tanks puts the player in the jackboots of a Nazi panzer battalion's leader. However, the battalion isn't (in this battle, at least) fighting against the allied forces, as the title suggests, bugs. Because they've been shrunken down really tiny by some unknown force. "Bugs" in this case covers a lot of zoological ground, too, as apparently all the minibeasts of the forest in which your roman-saluting protagonists find themselves instinctively know that fascists are the enemies of all life, and team up against you. You'll even fight a spider boss backed up by fly bodyguards at one point!

 

So, the actual game has you driving a tank around, fulfilling various missions: secure resources, rescue lost comrades, destroy ant hills to make things a little safer for yourselves, and so on. Every now and then, there'll be a defence mission, during which you just have to kill all of the bugs beseiging your base until they're all dead. Proressing through the game, new kinds of bugs get gradually introduced alongside new mission types, and if you go looking for them, you'll also find more shrunken tanks lying around waiting for you to comandeer them. The obvious comparision to make for this game thematically is to the Earth Defence Force series, and it turns out that structurally, Bugs vs Tanks has a lot in common with Simple Series games in general, too.

 

An interesting mechanical point is that by default, you don't have a fire button. Instead, as long as there's a shell loaded, you'll fire as soon as an enemy is in your line of fire. It works well enough that there's no reason to change to the manual firing control scheme, either. Instead, your focus is to be more on strategically placing yourself in such a way that you avoid damage in those few seconds between shells being fired, and as you progress through the game, also making  decisions as to whether it's worth fighting an enemy (or a swarm of enemies), as opposed to just trying to speed past it towards your goal as the clock ticks down.

 

It's a pretty fun game! The way it handles shooting is a little annoying at first, but once you get your head around what it's trying to do, Ithink you'll come to appreciate the game for what it is, rather than being chagrined about what it isn't. It's not really relevant in 2025, but Bugs vs Tanks actually also has streetpass features, and back in the olden days when that was a relevant thing, I actually did get a hit on it once, making it maybe the most obscure game I ever got one on.

 

This is the last time I'll mention this (unless I forget), but Nintendo themselves have ensured that if you want to play a download-only 3DS game that you don't already own, you have to pirate it. Taking that into account, Bugs vs Tanks is definitely interesting enough to be worth a look for free. But, as implied above, I did actually buy this on my original 3DS many years ago, and I definitely never felt ripped off through having done so. It's not as good as those more popular Guild games I listed at the start of the review, but those games are great, there's still plenty of room beneath them for Bugs vs Tanks to be considered a good game.