The Great Waldo Search (Mega Drive)

 Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games. One of my most-loved games is the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast, and with a bit of practice, you can reliably get through it in under ten minutes. Something a little different, however, is The Great Waldo Search: the first time I loaded it up, I'd seen the ending in a similarly short time. I didn't measure it, but I was sure it was under twenty minutes. Then a few days later, I did it again to take screenshots, and the time stamps in the file names of those screenshots revealed my completion time: eight minutes from title screen to ending!

 

Thanks to the American obsession with pointlessly changing the names of things, it might not be immediately obvious from the title that this is a game based on the Where's Wally books (or possibly, the TV cartoon that was also based on them, since there's a beepy-boop over of that show's theme song. Rather than just put Wally into a generic platform game, I can say that they at least tried something a bit more interesting in attempting to turn the "finding stuff in a busy picture" gimmick of the books into a videogame. Unfortunately, I think the developers were a little ahead of their time on this.

 

The problem is that the technology isn't really up to the task. It's not just the Mega Drive's fault, but I think this kind of game is one of very few that really needs to have a HD display to work. Remember all those hidden object games that old women were playing about ten to fifteen years ago? They wouldn't have worked on an old standard definition TV, either. So, there's a few stages, in which you're tasked to find Wally himself and a scroll belonging to his friend Wizard Whitebeard. There's also points items and clocks, to give you extra time (as the time limit is your only foe). Wally's dog Woof is also there, taking you to a magic carpet flying, bone-collecting bonus stage (bone-us stage) when you find him. Come to think of it, you could eschew Woof and finish the game even more quickly if you don't care about points.

 

All except the final stage are fantasy-themed, and somewhat oddly, most are also battle-themed. There's a war between two factions of wizards/monks/cultists, people fighting against dragons in a cave system, an arabian nights-type stage, and a village defending themselves against giants. The final stage is a "trick" one, similar to one seen in the books, where there's many Wallies, and you have to find the real one, identified by his striped socks. There's little bits of looping animation in the stages, but nothing actually moves around, which might have made things more interesting/frustrating. I assume it would have been difficult to have that many sprites moving around the screen at once, though, and presumably everything that isn't a findable item is part of the background.

 

The Great Waldo Search isn't a game I can recommend. It's absurdly easy, it's not interesting or exciting in any way, and the best thing that can really be said about it is that at least it won't bore you for a long time. I'm curious as to how many copies it sold, I can't imagine there were many happy customers paying probably £40 for this. The closest I can find to a release date is December 1992, which adds even more absurdity: Sonic 2 had been released just the previous month! 

Wonder Trek (Playstation)

 Among the many prominent and exciting translation patches that have been released in recent times, it feels like Wonder Trek kind of fell by the wayside, and didn't really get the attention it deserved. Which is strange, since I'm sure a basic description of what kind of game it is has at least one element that appeals to a wide range of different tastes and interests: it's an isometric open world metrovania with Prince of Persia-esque platforming, 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, and Dizzy-style "use the item in the right place" puzzles.

 

You play as an explorer, accompanied by an elderly professor, exploring a jungle island. There's lots of animals, many of whom will attack you, and you fight back by hitting them with a piko hammer until they get annoyed and run away. Sometimes there's plants that'll attack you, too! Sometimes, an animal will talk and ask for help, like the giant catfish with an upset stomach who asks you to go inside and fix it. It turns out that he's inadvertantly swallowed an ancient golden harp. Plus he's also full of aggressive parasitic worms.

 

It's the open world element that really impresses in Wonder Trek. When you start playing, you'll find a set of giant bird footprints going down a particular path away from your camp, encouraging you to go that way. But you really don't have to! Once I'd figured this out, I started going down the other paths and found all kind of interesting things: a spider-infested fungus forest, a dungeon with traps and seemingly man-made traps in a volcano, a very aggressive pitcher plant (which was also a boss I've not yet been able to beat), and more! Most importantly, every path I took either resulted in my reeiving an item that could be used to go further down a different path, or a dead end where a specific item is obviously necessary to go further. So it's a game that's actively designed around encouraging exploring the world its built for you.

 

The movement and platforming were both a little surprising, too, and they take a little getting used to. I call this an isometric game rather than a 3D one despite the world being made of polygons because the camera is always in that same position diagonally above you, plus you can only move in the four cardinal directions, but shifted forty-five degrees. So every time you load it up and start playing, there'll probably be a few seconds where you re-orient yourself with which cardinal on the D-pad correlates to which diagonal for your character's movement. When you're paniccing in some of the more complex platforming/climbing situations, you're also likely to wiggle the pad a little, attempting to make precise movements in directions that don't exist in the game. Or at least I did.

 

As for the platforming, like I said: it's kind of like Prince of Persia in 3D. You can jump a certain distance and height, and the distance is a little further if you're running when you do so. You can also grab onto the edges of platforms and vlimb up onto them after jumping, as well as climbing down to grab onto the edge of the platform on which you're standing, to drop down a little more safely. Sometimes, there'll be something high up that the professor wants to see, and you have to escort him there. He's not as agile or strong as you when it comes to jumping and climbing, so how this works is that whenever you're hanging from the edge of something, he can jump far/high enough to cling to your back and you can then climb up with him on you. It mainly just makes things a little more time-consuming, and it's a slightly unusual take on the concept of the escort mission. But it is still an escort mission, and those are always worse than just letting the player get on with things.

 

Though it's got a few little shortcomings, like escorting the old man every now and then, Wonder Trek is a game that's definitely worthy of your time and attention. It's fun, interesting, and full of charm. I don't really have much more to say about it: seek it out, and play it!

Angelian Trigger (Switch)

 Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, there hasn't been a lot of iteration on its principles over the years, not by SEGA nor by anyone else. But Pixel, who made a name for themselves with Flame Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei, a game in another genre considered dead and obsolete by the ill-informed, the single plane beat em up, took on the task a couple of years ago with Angelian Trigger.

 

Just looking at screenshots, you can see one thing that this game has going for it: it looks amazing. Most of the graphics are made up of high resolution sprites, with those used for the player characters also being lavishly animated. There's some enemies (mainly robotic ones) that are represented by polgyonal models, but most of the enemies, as well as the stages themseves are super-sharp sprites. That aside, most of the other things the game does to build upon the basic concept put forth by Space Harrier are apparently attempt to "modernise" the genre, for better and worse.

 

There are two playable characters to choose from whenever you play, and they are actually different to each other: one can fly around the screen like the Harrier of lore and legend, while the other runs along the ground, but can double jump to evade ground hazards and shoot at airbound enemies, and does all these things a lot more quickly. There are also two modes in which to play: arcade and story. The game's clearly been designed with story mode in mind, though, with arcade put in as a concession to those who prefer purely skill-based play in their shooting games.

 

Arcade mode is what you'd expect: you pick a character and then you play through all of the stages in order, until you complete the game or get killed. However, there are twenty-four stages spread across six planets, and each stage is about five minutes long. So playing through arcade mode means concentrating on shooting and avoiding stuff for two solid hours! By contrast, story mode lets you start from any planet you've previously reached (even if you reached it in arcade mode!), and it also has unlockable permanent upgrades. It also has lots of cutscenes between stages, though they are mercifully skippable.

 

The big gameplay gimmick the game has to offer is the HDCPC meter, and its various uses. It slowly charges over time, and when it's full, you can press a button to spend it in one of three ways: projecting a shield over yourself to pretect you from a single hit, summoning a robot buddy to fly around and shoot enemies until you take damage, or shooting a load of homing beams at every enemy currently onscreen. The shield is he most important one, and it feels like success in the game hinges upon keeping it up as much as possible. There's also times when the homing beams are very useful, too, of course. The kindest thing to do regarding the robot buddy is to move on without mentioning its relative usefulness.

 

Angelian Trigger isn't a perfect successor to Space Harrier and the neglected genre it represents, but it is a game that's decently fun enough to play, and the more I've played it, the more I've grown to like it. It's definitely worth your time, I think. What's weird about it, though, is that in a bizarre circumstance from days gone by, it's a Japan-only release, on Switch at least (I think there's an international release on PC). Did you even know that that kind of nonsense still happened, outside of tie-ins to gameshows and the like? There's obviously no language barrier though, unless you really want to know what's being said in the cutscenes.

Undercover Cops Gaiden - Hakaishin Garumaa (Game Boy)

 It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel unfortunately, but it did get this: a Game Boy exclusive spin-off that's a kind of board game/RPG thing.

 

So, you pick one of the characters from the original game (but let's be honest: everyone's going to pick Rosa. Can you even remember the names of the other two guys without looking them up?), and you traverse a board game world with branching paths and differently-coloured squares and a few special squares here and there. Movement takes place in the same manner that would be used in Sonic Shuffle years later: you have a hand of cards bearing different numbers. You pick a card, and then there's a roulette that can land on a number up to that of the card you picked, telling you how many spaces you'll move. White squares do nothing, grey squares give you a little money, and black squares result in a battle (or occasionally a whack-a-mole minigame).

 

The battles are turn-based, and a little more complex than you might expect from a 1993 Game Boy game. First, you and your opponent will pick a card, with the highest number determining who is the attacker for the current turn. If that's you, you pick a body part, then pick another card from your hand, and you might do some damage, or maybe nothing will happen. If you're the defender, you only have to pick the top or bottom half of your body to defend, and again, you pick another card. Then you might take damage or you might not. This carries on until someone runs out of hit points, which can take ages, since it seems to be completely randomly determined whether or not damage is dealt each turn. It doesn't take much strategy to ensure that you're almost always the attacker, at least. Especially as you level up, which puts higher-numbered cards in your deck.

 

There is a kind of mindless compulsion that can keep you playing this game. Like it's mostly luck-based, but there's also a lot of really nice pixel art in here, and there is even a plot running through the game. But that's all there is, and if you're going to play on real hardware, you won't have access to save states or a fast forward button, which will also really dampen the game's appeal. What really killed my enthusiasm for it, though is the fact that the branching paths don't lead to different routes or even alternate storylines. What they lead to is dead ends. You can't scroll ahead, so if you do end up going down the wrong path, you have no choice but to go back and then go down the right path. 

 

The problem here is that the process of moving is incredibly slow. As described above, you pick a card and then you spin the roulette and then you move. And then if you land on a grey square, you've got long seconds of reading the line of text telling you about the tiny amount of money you've picked up. And the black squares don't go away after you've landed on them, so the incredibly slow and random number generator-based battles are something you'll be enduring again and again. 

 

The pixel art in the battles and cutscenes is really nice, and near-miraculous when you consider this is only a couple of years into the lifespan of the original Game Boy. But unfortuantely, that's really all this game has going for it, and the mountains of tedious timewasting through which it puts the player is unforgivable. I'm glad it got a translation patch, because it was a game that had caught my attention and my cuiosity a long time ago. But I don't recommend actually playing it.

Hokuto no Ken 6 Gekitou Denshouken - Haou heno Michi (SNES)

 Though I think nowadays, when people think of Hokuto no Ken games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, they're more likely to think of the ones on Master System and Mega Drive, there was a series of them on Nintendo's consoles, too. And while the Nintendo games carried a sequel number across seven games (so yes, this is apparently a part of the same series of games as the Famicom beat em up Hokuto no Ken 2 that I reviewed long ago), they don't seem to have much else in common. Of course they started with beat em ups, then there were a few RPGs, and the final two, six and seven, were fighting games. 

 

Hokuto no Ken 6 represents an interesting and very narrow point in time in the genre's evolution, too. It's clear just by looking at it that the developers were familiar with Street Fighter II and its massive success (as I think everyone involved in videogames would have been at the time), and they were able to copy the general screen layout, and the large character sprites. But the mechanics and the feel of Street Fighter II were far beyond their capabilities at that time. The regular punches and kicks feel very stiff and clunky, and it's near-impossible to string multiple attacks together into anything feeling like a combo. Furthermore, instead of having motion-based special moves, the players have two meters beneath their health meter, and all specials are performed via the shoulder buttons, in conjunction with these meters.

 

The first meter, AP, works almost like the momentum meter in Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu: it goes up when you land hits, and it goes down when you take hits. When it's full, you can press the left shoulder button to perform a move so special, it's name will also appear onscreen if it lands. You'll recognise these as each character's signiature move from the comic/TV show. The other meter, TP, is less interesting: you hold the right shoulder button to fill it, and when it fills up, you can release to shoot a projectile attack. And that's pretty much the entirety of the game's special moves. (There are apparently even more powerful signatures if you manage to fill up the AP meter twice before using it, but I haven't been able to do that.)

 

The character line up is a little strange, too. There's Kenshiro and Rei, like you might expect, along with a bunch of villains from late in the series like Raoh, Souther, and so on. But what makes it weird is that there's a stage clearly meant to be Shin's throne room in Southern Cross, but instead of being occupied by Shin, it's the home stage for Heart! I guess he's kind of an iconic character, but he's also a comedy jobber who dies very early in the series! It's a shame I can't read the dialogue text that appears at the start of each story mode fight, as I'd love to know what happens in Heart's conversations with those god-like man-tyrants who make up most of the cast.

 

I actually did enjoy Hokuto no Ken 6. I can't recommend it, because it just doesn't really feel good to play. But somehow, I did get some joy from having these character awkwardly flail at each other. It's definitely helped by having such nicely drawn, detailed sprites, as well as other little details like Raoh being unable to crouch (because of course, the king of fists would never bend a knee). But it's very simplistic, very stiff, and it's on a console that has a ton of better fighting games (including several others that are based on anime and manga. Though Hokuto no Ken 7 isn't very good either, unfortunately). The best I can say is that it's a game that can be found very cheaply, and if you've got friends who can appreciate a good bad game, and who also love Hokuto no Ken, you might get a decent hour or so out of it.

Simple 1500 Series vol. 99 - The Kendo ~Ken no Hanamichi~ (Playstation)

 Something interesting about budget hames in particular is the way in whih the best of them manage to get a maximum amount of game with a minimum amount of resources, especially when they manage to do it without resorting to boring grinding or other timesink tactics. And The Kendo is a good example of that! Most of the characters in the game are represented by the same model with different coloured versions of the same textures. And yet, there are three single player stories, a survival mode, and a versus mode for one or two players.

 

The story mode is the most interesting part of the game, in my opinion. Everything's in Japanese, but it's easy enough to understand what's going on anyway. As mentioned, there are three stories, and they're all told with kendo matches interspersed between visual noval-style dialogue scenes using static character portraits and textboxes. The first story is about a teenage boy entering a kendo tournament, and along with winning the tournament, he also hopes to beat his bishounen rival to impress his girlfriend. 

 

Finishing that story lets you play the second, which stars a young policewoman, apparently investigating a kendo crime ring. So she corners suspects in a shady boiler room-style place and uses kendo skills to make them confess, eventually leading her to the mob's headquarters, and its leaders: a curly-moustached European knight and a sinister figure in a suit and hooded mask. The boiler room fights are done in a single hit, rather than the two-hit fights in the previous tournament story, so it's clear that the developers were doing what they could to add a little variety to what could have easily become a very repetitive game.

 

The final story mode has as its protagonist a man in his late forties, who seems to be working in some kind of industry that's a combination of pro-wrestling and kendo, complete with a sleazy McMahon-esque promoter and the involvement of organised crime. Unfortunately, this is where my Japanese illiteracy causes problems: it seems like in this story, you have to ensure that specific things happen in the match to progress, and I'm not sure exactly what those things are. I manage to eventually luck my way to the third stage, but it eventually became clear that I wasn't going to get any further.

 

The actual kendo action is pretty good. You can move forward and back, as well as into and out of the screen, and each of the four face buttons represents a different offensive or defensive move. You can even feint by pressing two buttons in quick succession, letting you stop one move midway and immediately perform a different one. The obvious comparison to make is to the SG-1000 game Champion Kendo, since it's both a game I love and as far as I know, the only other kendo game. The Kendo focusses on one-on-one matches that are decided by first-to-two-points, as opposed to Champion Kendo's five-on-five elimination matches. It's also a lot more fair than Champion Kendo, which, as much as I love it, does seem to rely a lot of randomness. There's definitely a lot more skill involved in this game. 

 

Whether you speak Japanese or not, this is a game I think is worth playing. Despite being tehnically a better game, it won't replace Champion Kendo in my regular rotation, but that's because I like that game's more arcadey score-chasing structure. But this game is a smartly-conceived and well-executed exercise in game design, and in getting the most out of limited resources. So I do recommend it, especially if you are interested in videogames as a creative medium.

Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure (Mega Drive)

 

 Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures. For a couple of short years, I loved the TV show, the comic, and when it came to pass that a Mega Drive game was coming, I became obsessed with wanting to play it, even using the screenshot maps in the second issue of Sega XS as a substitute until I was able to. As was the fashion at the time, the game would obviously be a platformer where you defeat enemies by jumping on their heads.

 

There would be a second Tiny Toons Mega Drive game a few years later, a comedy sports title. But by the time it came out in 1994, I'd long since lost interest in the show. Buster's Hidden Treasure though, I did get to play, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a pretty good, and very well presented iteration of the generic Sonic-wannabe game. Buster can run really fast, even to the point where his legs start revolving in a circle like Sonic's do, and the first few stages take place in grassy plains, and the final ones in industrial factories.

 

There's some weirdness in here, though. Tiny Toon Adventures was a silly comedy show, so while they managed to use a villain from the show, Dr. Gene Splicer, there's no enemy army to populate the stages. There's a recurring eney who's supposed to be a character from the show named Rhubella Rat, though they look like her (and also there's lots of them). Big muscular dog character Arnold also turns up a bunch of times as an enemy. There's also some cute little bats and birds and other normal animals. Then there's a ton of weird things. Like little blue goblin creatures, werewolves, egg-shaped guys who defy gravity and release circles from their mouths to attack, and so on. I was all ready to talk about how these things were clearly made up last minute, and how they didn't fit with the aesthetic of the series' world, but on doing a bit more reasearch, every one of them actually is from the show, even if they only had a single appearance each.

 

The plot's also kind of over-written, too. Buster Bunny finds a treasure map in the attic at Acme Looniversity, so he and Montana Max race to get the treasure (which could have been the plot for a somewhat more unique game, with Spy VS Spy/Trap Gunner/Dashin Desperados=style sabotage-action gameplay), and also the evil scientist Dr. Gene Splicer has been kidnapping Buster's friends to put brainwashing hats on them. I guess that doesn't really matter, though.

 

Most importantly, the game itself is pretty good. As mentioned before, the strong pointi s definitely the presentation. Buster himself has a ton of animations that all look great. There's even animations that aren't even really necessary, like in areas with low ceilings, he'll walk around with his ears hanging low instead of pointing upwards. But there's also a tons of great-looking animations for crawling across the ground, zip-cording down ropes on his ears, and hanging from horizontal ropes by his hands. The backgrounds all look really nice, too, though unfortunately, it feels like a bizarrely long segment of the game takes place in a series of caves.

 

It also plays pretty well. As already mentioned, it's definitely a Sonic imitator, with fast-paced platforming, and lots of ramps and slopes and momentum-based shenanigens. There's a couple of things that kind of let it down, though. Sonic can easily and quickly smash through enemies by rolling, initiated by the player pressing down on the D-pad. Buster, to make things slightly different, slides along the ground, an action initiated by pressing the B button. It only works when he's at top speed, and assigning it to a button rather than down makes it a little less intuitive, just enough that you forget to do it, and just run into the enemies and get hurt. It's not helped by the fact that unlike Sonic's roll, it's only a short move, and it slows you down, you can just keep going with it. Also, those cave stages that take up such a long segment of the game's middle parts are also very cramped, slowing affairs down to a crawl (much more than, for example, Marble Zone does), and they're also a lot longer and more difficult than the stages preceding and following them.

 

Buster's Hidden Treasure is a decent enough Mega Drive platformer. It's worth playing for the excellent graphics and animation, but if it stops being fun in the caves, there's no real reason to feel bad about quitting there. It's unfortunate that as well-made as it is, I'm not sure it would even get into the top twenty Mega Drive platformers, and definitely not the top ten. It's fine, though.

Blood Lines (Playstation)

 Everyone loves to read about Japan-exclusive Playstation games, but Blood Lines is part of a much rarer breed: PAL-exclusive Playstation games! Despite that, someone at Sony Europe must have had some faith in it, as I remember playing it on a magazine demo disc back at the time. I especially remember the line "LOSING BECOMES YOU!" that one of the characters shouts after winning a round, in an exagerrated posh accent.

 

But after winning a round of what? A combination of tig, and a four corners strap wrestling match. Also, it's set in some kind of dystopian future. How it works is that you and your opponent start in the middle of a small 3D platform stage, at strategic points of which are a bunch of energy field things. These fields start off green (neutral), until the first player touches one. Then, that field changes to be their colour, and they become the active player, so they can touch the others to make them their colour. Turn all except one of the things to your colour to win the match.

 

If you're not the active player, you've got to chase them, and when you catch them, you'll do a wrestling move to them and become the active player yourself. All the while, both players can keep tapping square to shoot little homing projectiles at each other, the effect of which isn't exactly clear, but I think the active player getting hit brings them a tiny amount closer to their opponent, and the passive player getting hit sends them a tiny amount further away.

 

It's an interesting idea to make a gritty sci-fi version of a game most people left behind in primary school, and it kind of pays off? Like, this is a pretty fun game! I imagine, if you could somehow convince someone to play it with you, you'd both have a good time. And, in an even more far-fetched scenario, you might even set up a multi-tap and get three other people to play with you, in the four player party mode. In this mode, there are obviously four characters in play at the same time, and two can be active at any times. THe aim is still to turn all but one of the fields your colour, though. It really seems like this could be a nice bit of chaotic fun if you could get it running with the right group of people. I do wonder if it's ever actually been played with a full cohort outside of the developer's offices, though. 

 

Blood Lines is a fun game! It's decent enough as a solo player and though I can only speak on multiplayer from a theoretical standpoint, like I said: if you've got a group that's willing to try out something a little strange and different, I think you'll get a lot out of it.