Battle Athletess Daiundokai GTO (Playstation)

 While looking up which came first out of the Battle Athletess anime and videogames, I found something surprising: it was neither! It originated as a radio drama! Then, the Saturn game was released before there was an anime. That Saturn game, is, I believe, a kind of girl-raising sim in the vein of Princess Maker or Graduation, and has never been translated into English. I guess they wanted to go a little more mainstream for this Playstation release, though, since it's a much more accessible (and less language dependent) racing game!

 

Being about athletes(s), they aren't utilising any kind of vehicles, instead running on foot! Unlike a lot of leg-based racing games, there's no athleticism required from the player in the form of high speed button-tapping. Instead, your selected runner goes at a consistent speed, and instead your focus as the player is on a couple of other matters. The first is avoiding the various obstacles strewn about the stages by going round them, jumping over them, or sliding under them. The second is management of your runner's stamina. You can hold up on the d-pad to run faster (or in the case of one character, ride a bike that appears from nowhere), which depletes your stamina meter. When it's all gone, your runner will stop for a few seconds to catch their breath.

 

All of this is presented in very colourful and charming 3D, and it's the presentation that's clearly the selling point here. There's definitely a lot of affection for the characters in the game: they're all voice acted, of course, and there's nice little touches like how when you lose in single player mode, the "continue?" countdown will be said out loud by the character who defeated you. They all each have their own stages, too. The cast is an international one, and the stages are all from the Street Fighter II school of harmless national stereotypes: the Russia stage is snowy and has nice architecture, the China stage takes place atop the great wall, the Japan stage is slightly futuristic and surrounded by neon signs, and so on. The protagonist is exempt from this, being Japanese, but having a stage that's in a place that looks like a mural painted on a nursery wall. (Japan is the only country represented by two characters). Finally, each character also has a semi-secret (and usually a little strange) pose that they adopt if you pause the game, no matter what they're doing at the time.

 

It's a pretty fun game! It'd probably be even moreso if played with other people (and, had I known about it back then, I can easily see it being in the rotation of versus games in my teenage bedroom around the turn of the century). The only real problem is that it's also very slight, and there's not really a lot of variation. The various playable characters don't really feel any different from each other, and though all the stages look different, and the obstacles on them have unique models and textures, mechanically, the only real difference between them is the way the obstacles are laid out. Even just having one unique element for each stage would have added a lot to the game. Maybe a special ability for each character, too. Still, as it is, it's still okay. You'll get a little bit of fun out of it on your own, and probably a lot more with opponents. It's also a very lovingly made game with a lot of charm, and I think that's worth something, too. I think it's worth a look for the curious at the very least.

Skate Attack (PS2)

 As a publisher, Midas were famous mainly for two things: localising occasionally interesting Japanese budget games, and also publishing mostly-terrible original budget games. Skate Attack isn't one of the former, so my hopes for it weren't high. But I tried it anyway, being the fair-minded person that I am, and for a little while, I was pleasantly surprised! On initial inspection, this seems like not just a competent game, but one that's actually fun to play!

 

It's a skateboarding game that mostly plays and feels a lot like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games at the most basic level. You skate around, there's quarter pipes to launch you up into the air, doing flip tricks with the square button, and grab tricks with the circle. There's also lots of rails and ledges to grind on, though Skate Attack uses R1 for this, rather than triangle. You can even do a manual upon landing, to lengthen your combos! Aesthetically, it clearly takes a lot of influence from Jet Set Radio, being set in a brightly-coloured near-future sci-fi city.

 

So, it seems like, with some pretty decent influences, and well-constructed fundamentals, that this is a game whose development was backed by real passion, and not just a cheap cash-in. But you might be wondering why, back in the first paragraph, did I specify that I was pleasantly surprised "for a little while"? Well, the answer to that (as well as the answer as to why all of the screenshots are from the same area) lies in the game's structure. The game's plot sees an evil robot demon thing named Virus forcing you to do a bunch of tasks. A big bunch of tasks. The first area, for example, has twenty-one of them, in three sets of seven. 

 

It's clear, too, that the developers quickly ran out of ideas for skateboarding-related tasks for you to do, too, since you'll soon be fighting evil robots, flying around atop stolen and fiddly-to-control drones, and other tedious nonsense. It's such a shame, because like I said, the actual skateboarding is really great, way above what you'd expect from a Midas original, and it even has a potentially interesting unique element in the grappling laser thing that lets you zoom onto the rooves of vehicles from a distance. But all these other psuedo-action game tasks are incredibly fiddly and annoying, and no fun at all.

 

Though Skate Attack turned out to be a disappointment after initially seeming to have so many things in its favour, it does appear that the developers made another skateboarding game: Skate Park City on PSP. The game's description on GameFAQs even also mentions THPS and JSR as influences, so I'll definitely be looking into that, to see if it realises the potential seen in this game. Unfortunately, whether it does or not, this is a review of Skate Attack, which is itself a game I don't recommend.

Gekifu Bakegyamon Ayakashi Fighting (DS)

 This is a game I've been meaning to write about for a long time, and finally, I'm getting around to it (the roadblock being that I misplaced my original DS and have now finally got ahold of a gizmo that can satisfactorily emulate the DS and take screenshots while doing so. Unfortunately, the 3DS can only do one of those things at the same time.) It's a licensed fighting game (based, unusually, on a manga that didn't get an anime adaptation), though while the fashion of the time was to make such things in the style of Smash Bros., this at least appears to be more of a traditional 3D fighting game, though it quickly becomes clear that it's quite a bit more experimental than that.

 

If you start playing with story mode, then the controls will probably be the first weird thing you encounter. There's only one attack button, that can be repeatedly pressed for a short beat em up-like combo. There's also a jump button, a special move button, and a button to crouch and pick up cards off the ground. And you block with the right shoulder button. Those cards, then: you start a match with four of them, and can hold up to eight. They're kept on the touchscreen, and you touch them to activate them, each one representing a different spell. Some are big powerful elemental attacks, others temporarily increase your stats, or decrease those of your opponent.

 

That's not all, as as soon as you win or lose a round, you'll encounter the next weird thing: every fight is a King of Fighters-style elimination battle between teams of three. Furthermore, the manga upon which the game is based is apparently a kind of horror-themed pokemon-type deal, so all the characters are monsters, mainly youkai-type guys. (Maybe they're all youkai? It's a little outside my realm of expertise. But there's tengu and kappa, at least). And of course, each team is acting as the proxy for some kid. Oddly, in free battle mode, you pick a kid, and then you can form a team out of all the monsters you've so far unlocked, while in story mode, each kid has a predetermined trio of monsters. Which makes me wonder what the point of picking a kid in free battle is. Just flavour, or does each kid have specialities of their own?

 

So, it's different, but is it actually good? Kind of. It won't be your new favourite handheld fighting game or anything, and I actually did get a little bored of it after a few attempts at getting through story mode on a single credit, as well as a bunch of trying out different monsters in free battle. (Since story mode only lets you play as the protagonist, and his set team, until you unlock more characters). But it's definitely unique, and the novelty of playing as monsters and casting spells during the fights does have its appeal. Apparently the manga did get an official English translation, so fans of that might want to pick up a copy, and if you've never read it (like me), you might still want to give it a look, just for how weird and interesting it is. It is definitely more weird and interesting than it is actually good, though.