War Games: Defcon 1 (Playstation)

 Two of the first things you'll be confronted with regarding this game are anachronisms. Firstly, it's a tie-in to a movie released fifteen years earlier, and secondly, despite being released in 1998, this game has no save option, and if you want to keep your progress, you have to do so via a password system! But what is the game? It's one that has very little in common with the movie whose name it bears, being a 3D shooting game that plays kind of like an inferior spin-off from the Strike series of games. No hacking or global tension here at all!

 

So, you can play as either NORAD (humans in tanks and jeeps and such) or WOPR (various different robot things), and you're  given a series of worldwide missions, which mainly involve going to part of a map, killing all the enemies there, then going to a different part of the map and killing everyone there. It's all kind of arbitrary, especially if you accidentally wander to the wrong part of the map and kill the enemies there, at which point you'll fail the mission, literally being told you did things in the wrong order and ruined everything. Compare to the aforementioned Strike games, in which you could mostly take on a stage's objectives in any order, and sometimes there might be a tactical advantage to be gained from taking things in a certain order.

 

There's other problems, too. The biggest being the controls. Though there's lots of vehicles to control in the game, they all control the same, and they all use the "swivel and accelerate" system (or "tank controls," if you prefer), with no capacity for strafing. Furthermore, you can only shoot directly in front of you in all of them. So combat against other units means you and one enemy staying still and shooting at each other until one of you explodes. If the enemy explodes , you move on and do the same thing to the next one. If you explode, either you start back at your base with the next vehicle in your allocation for the current stage, or if you were already on the final one, you fail the mission. 

 

Aesthetically, it's fine I guess. It's got a similar look to other western-developed Playstation games that take place on battlefields, the one that keeps coming to mind in particular being Populous: The Beginning, despite the wildly different themes and settings between the two games. But there's nice terrain, cute little buildings decorating the place, and so on. I even really like the models for some of the NORAD vehicles! Something I have to address, though, is that the game does suffer from "the western mecha problem": all of the mecha are just ugly grey boxes plopped on top of a pair of chicken legs like a mechanical version of Baba Yaga's hut. The more powerful the mecha, the bigger the grey box, and not a single arm or hint of aesthetic flair among them.

 

Despite all the bad things I've had to say about War Games Defcon 1, I actually don't hate this game. It's okay. I think if you were to pick it up, you'd probably play a couple of stages, think to yourself "that was alright, I'll have to get back to it some time", and then you'll never play or think about it ever again. But you probably won't hate it!

Solitary Fighter (Arcade)

 Solitary Fighter is the sequel to a much better-known game, Violence Fight. Though its more of an expanded rerelease, since it has exactly the same plot, and it mostly plays in the same way, with the main (but not only) difference being the addition of a few more playable characters. This is probably a contributing factor into why it's so forgotten, but the biggest factor is definitely the circumstances of its release: it has the misfortune of being a pre-Street Fighter II-style fighting game released in 1991, the same year as Street Fighter II. So no matter what, it would have looked like a weird, awkward throwback.

 

But here in 2025, it's that weird awkwardness that makes it interesting: it's a fighting game, but not following the formula that SFI codified. So, it's set in 1950s America, and all of the characters are fighting for cash prizes in warehouses and other such places. Most of the stages are in a beat em up-style forced perspective arrangement, whereby you can walk in eight directions, as well as jumping. Though some stages only let you walk on a single plane (I wonder if this was an attempt at making the game look at least partially like SFII, since apparently, major changes were made to a 1992 Taito game, Dino Rex, for the same reason).

 

You have three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. Pressing punch and kick together makes your character crouch, and pressing either of the attack buttons together with jump does a special  move of wildly varying usefulness. One of the characters, a balding fat idiot dressed in stars and stripes has headbutts instead of kicks. While you're fighting in the beat em up-style stages, sometimes armed audience members will invade the fight, but the thing is, they're just interested in violence, they don't seem to care where it goes. They'll start out attacking one fighter, then change their mind and attack the other, until they take enough hits themselves that they decide it's no longer worth the effort and give up.

 

Maybe the weirdest element of the game is the health bar. It goes down in inconsistent, seemingly random amounts in response to characters taking attacks, and also it'll often start going back up again immediately afterwards. And getting a character's health bar to zero isn't enough to knock them out, you've got to hit them again after that (and if it goes back up, you'll have to deplete it again). Plus, it seems like you can't win with a throw? It makes for a game that feels very imprecise and unpredictable in a way that removes any satisfaction from victory.

 

Solitary Fighter isn't a completely terrible game. I do really like the setting and how the game looks in general, and I am always on the lookout for games that offer takes on fighting that feel different to typical fighting games. But none of this is enough to make it good. I think the absolute best you might hope for is having one or (at most) two fights with a friend, as a little comic relief between better games.

Burger Kitchen (Game Gear)

 

 This is the first game I've played from Habit Soft, who've physically released a bunch of newly developed games for a variety of old consoles! With the exceptiong of a URL on the title screen, it really looks, sounds and feels like it could have come from the Game Gear's actual heyday (in contrast to something like M2's GG Aleste 3 from 2020, that pushes the hardware to its absolute limit, making a game that would have seemed impossible on the home consoles of the early nineties, let alone the humble Game Gear). Even the cutified burger restaurant theming calls to mind the fascination Japanese pop culture had with McDonalds (and similar chains) for a couple of years, as seen in things like Project A-ko 3 and Space Fantasy Zone.

 

How it works is that you've got a playfield that's four spaces high and eight spaces tall. Into the field will fall horizontal pairs of burger layers, being the burgers themselves, the top or bottom halves of the breadcake, or slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bacon (that looks more like salami), and that weird egg slab that only exists in burger restaurants. You lose when all the pieces pile up to cover the top space of either of the two middle columns. If two identical pieces are placed atop each other, they disappear, but you score no points.

 

To actually score points, you've got to construct burgers according to various recipes. There's got to be bottom bread on the bottom, a certain collection of ingredients in the middle, and a top bread on top. Then the whole thing will disappear, and you'll score the "price" of that particular recipe, or half the price if the ingredients were right, but in the wrong order. You'll have a quota of certain specific recipes to make a few times to clear each stage, but you still get points for non-quota burgers you make.

 

There's two game modes, the first of which being mission, where, upon completing a stage's quota, you go onto the next stage with a shiny new empty playing field, and which ends after five stages. The other is endless, where filling a quota will immediately start the next one, but since you can make any burgers for points, you really just need to have remembered all of the recipes and make what you can, when you can. Endless mode never clears out your playing field, and once you get to its equivalent of stage five, the quota has an infinity symbol, and the game just continues until you get a game over.

 

The game's cute and it's decently fun, and I do keep going back to it. But there is a frustrating little problem. Every recipe has to have a bottom bread on the bottom to be valid, and it's pretty often the case that there'll be no bottom bread pieces in the first few pairs that drop. Now, you can hold one for later, like in most modern Tetris games, but it's still frustrating that you can't even start putting things together for the first few drops. I'm ot sure exactly how I'd fix this, except for maybe eliminating the bottom bread piece and having a permanent layer of them beneath the playing field? It's not a massive problem, but it does bother me a little, especially since it's there every time you play,pretty much.

 

Burger Kitchen is a game that's cute, but very flawed, but also one to which I keep returning despite those flaws. It's really difficult to decide whether or not it gets my recomendation! I guess I'll say: it's fine? Play it if you want?