X-Treme Express (PS2)

 Unlike most games about driving trains, even the ones aimed at kids, or the ones in which the trains are just models, X-Treme Express (also known as Tetsu 1: Densha de Battle! World Grand Prix, though as far as I can tell, there's no connection to the Densha de Go! series, and it definitely wasn't developed or published by Taito) has no interest in providing a verisimilitudinal simulation of passenger train driving. Instead, it's not just a game about racing trains, but about aggressively racing them. What's interesting is that the developers made the wise decision that this premise alone was silly enough, and didn't feel the need to add to it. So you've got somewhat realistic-looking trains from around the world, racing each other in various locations that all look like they're in Japan, but no power up items or any other overtly videogamey stuff like that.

 

Being trains, you don't have complete control over where your vehicles go at any time. Instead, you mostly control the speed of your train, slowing down at corners to avoid derailment (or you can play on easy mode, where you can't derail youself), and changing tracks at switching points when they occur. That's where the aggression comes into things: time things just right, and you can ram into the side of one of your fellow competitiors, forcing them off of the track. Alternatively, if you've got a lead and there's another train close behind you, you can stubborn stay in front of them, never giving a chance to overtake in a much more mean-spirited way than if you were driving regular road vehicles.

 

An important thing for racing games is a sense of speed, and really, that's one of the first things that'll hit you regarding X-Treme Express: when you're going full speed down a straight bit of track (or any bit of track in easy mode), you're really hurtling along in a way that real life trains never seem to, and the fact that you are driving a train at such breakneck speeds really adds to the manic feel of it all. With the lack of steering in mind, other than managing your speed to stay on the track, and shunting rivals to knock them off of it, I think a big part of the strategy is to try and place yourself on lines that have more downhill parts than uphill, though its possible that this only provides a minor boost to your speed, if any at all.

 

As well as the main grand prix mode, there's also a free mode, where you can just ride a track at any time of day, and can even turn off opponents for a more relaxing time, there's also event races with special rules like "no shunting" or "shunt every opponent to win", both of which I think show how important aggression is to the game. You start the game with a choice of thirty trains and six tracks, but looking at the "game data" screen in options shows that there's apparently a total of eighty trains in the game, and ten tracks! Furthermore, when I went online to seek more information, I could only find a conversation that brough back memories of the Dragonball GT Final Bout myths that were going around circa the turn of the century: apparently if you complete grand prix with all eighty trains, placing first in every race with no retries, you can unlock a gun that lets you derail trains infront of you by pressing L2. That sounds like nonsense, and I'm definitely not the person who's going to go and find out either way.

 

X-treme Express is a unique little game, with a lot of idiosyncracies that make take a couple of goes to get used to, but once you do, you'll find that it's a fast, fun, weird game, and definitely worth your time. Maybe not hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time, but a few of them, at least. I'm surprised it doesn't come up in conversations about weird and interesting PS2 games more often, alongside the likes of Demolition Girl and Seigi no Mikata and so on. Maybe that'll change from now on, though? 

Cellophanes (Playstation)

 Something that's pretty interesting, but doesn't come along very often are compilations of fake old games. I think everyone can probably agree that the pinnacle of this concept is represented by the two Game Center CX tie-in games for DS, both of which being collections of faux-Famicom (Fauxmicom?), faux-Super famicom (Super Fauxmicom?), and faux-Mega Drive (I don't have a satisfying portmanteau for this one, sorry) games, most of which are good, or even great, and would have been worth buying on their own. Cellophanes (erroneously listed on some websites as "Serofans") goes back much further than the Famicom for its inspiration, though, being a collection of homages to the primitive, maybe even rudimentary beginnings of Japanese consumer videogames.

 

There are twelve games in Cellophanes, with their inspirations ranging from the mid-seventies to the early eighties. Five of them are very simple breakout-like games, with the first being specifically a clone of Nintendo's 1979 plug-and-play game Block Kuzushi (it's also from this and a couple of the other games whence the compilation draws its title: these games had black and white graphics, with colour provided by cellophane overlays to attach to your TV screen. Cellophanes obviously just has colour pretending to be overlays, such is the mighty power of the Playstation.). There isn't much to differentiate these five from each other. One of them has dancing penguins, another has vector graphics, that's about it.

 

Then there's a few games that are all somewhat unique (from each other, at least). Mystery Planet is a spaceship game with very heavy Asteriods-like intertia, where each stage has you avoiding walls, shooting enemies, and collecting numbered panels in order. Sea Fighter has you controlling a submarine at the bottom of the screen, shooting at a battleship at the top. Between you is a different set of sea creatures for each stage, each behaving differently: some just get in the way of your shots, some shoot at you, some move erratically so you constantly have to avoid them, etc. Carnival Hunt is just a clone of SEGA's 1980 arcade game Carnival. Dragon Walker is something a little like Zoom/Amidar/Painter, where you make squares by walking across lines and avoiding enemies. You can breath fire, but the meter that allows you to do so charges very slowly, and it doesn't score you any points. 

 

Finally, there are three recreations of old-style electro-mechanical light gun games, themed around cowboys, jungle animals, and tanks, respectively. These look a lot prettier than all the other games, since they're pretending to be old painted toys rather than old videogames, with the jungle game having some particularly nicely-realised animals (for you to repeatedly shoot and kill). There's a lot of talk online saying that these games are actually compatible with the GCon-45, which is cool, but which I'm not able to try out myself.

 

As well as the games themselves, there's an "Akiba Parts Shop" menu, which allows you to unlock extra options for all of the games, presumably the thematic conceit here being that for these early games, modifications would actually need to be done to the physical hardware for this kind of thing (like that one episode of That 70s Show where they mod a Pong plug-and-play). Iy is actually a shop, though, with the currency being total minutes played in the games. I didn't unlock much here, though, partially for technical reasons (my emulator would often crash when exiting games, so my playtime wasn't recorded), but also because there really isn't much to these games, and they largely just aren't very fun or compelling. A lot of the time, I'm bored long before a single credit has ended.

 

And that's really the problem with Cellophanes: the games aren't fun. They're chore-like, even. And they don't even invoke any nostalgic sentiment in me because I wasn't a child in 1970s Japan. Like, it's an admirable exercise in authenticity, and it's nice that it exists, but I just don't want to spend any time playing it, and if you're reading this, you probably won't gt much out of it, either.

Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).

Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters (Mega Drive)

 I've really been enjoying the current rennaissance that the Mega Drive is going through. The past few years have seen new games getting released for the thirty-seven-year-old console, with even industry veterans like Yuzo Koshiro being involved in new games, the officially-sanctioned port of the original Darius released on the Mega Drive Mini, and even indie games like Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon Fist Master getting full cartridge releases with boxes and manuals (meaning that this indie game on an ancient console comes as a more complete package than almost all games on modern systems).

 

It's unfortunate, then, that Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters is a fangame, made purely out of love for fighting games and for the Kunio-kun series in particular (and the love for both those things is very evident). Unfortunate because it's one of the best fighting games on the Mega Drive, and almost definitely the most fully-featured. It's got all kinds of stuff, that was uncommon, if not unheard of in the time when fighting games were being commercially released on Mega Drive: there's alpha counters, forwards and backwards dashing, dodge rolls, super moves, taunting, and so on. 
It looks great, too, with all the characters being really well animated, stages that show the passage of time between stages, and lots of cool little stylistic flairs like little manga sound effects appearing when attacks land, and so on. There's even unique pre-fight interactions for certain pairs of characters! All of this would be pointless if it weren't fun to play, which luckily isn't a problem. The fights are fast, the controls work perfectly, the characters all feel different to play, it never feels unbalanced or unfair. Really, the only negative I can think of to say about how it plays is that while everything it does is incredibly well executed, none of it is particularly original. It might have had more of its own identity if it had introduced at least one new or unusual mechanic.

 

Even that criticism is taking into account the fact that the game came out in 2025, and that we can all play hundreds of fighting games across many different host systems. Specifically as a Mega Drive fighting game, it definitely stands out from the crowd by having all of those aforementioned features coupled with the flawless execution, and if it had been released thirty years earlier, it would have absolutely blown minds. Obviously, it couldn't have come out thirty years ago, though, for many reasons related to both technological proliferation and socio-economic factors. I'm not certain on this, but I don't think there would have been many avenues for an independent developer in Brazil to make a commercial-quality fighting game for the Mega Drive in 1995, let alone for that game to be released to the world.

 

Which is why it's such a shame that this is a fangame! I'd love to be able to buy a real copy to play on my real (well, Chinese clone) Mega Drive, and which would make some money for the devs. Hopefully, they'll make more Mega Drive games in the future, and those ones belong solely to them, to sell as they will. Obviously, I very much recommend this game, especially since it's free/pay-what-you-want. I've enjoyed it a great deal, and I look forward to whatever the devs bring out in the future.