Gegege no Kitaro: Youkai Daigekisen (DS)

 Gegege no Kitaro is one of those series I think everyone's aware of through its influence, but it's not widely seen or read by English-speaking audiences. This game was apparently released to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Gegege TV anime, though to be honest, there's been a pretty steady stream of Gegege games (Gegegames?) coming out since at least the Famicom. Those games have manifest in a few genres, and in this case, it's a platformer.

 

I think the big draw for the game is the graphics: on the surface level, they're made up of beautifully-drawn pixel art, but what I really loved is what that art depicts. The game is set in a modern Japan that's just a little grimier, a little darker, and a little spookier than real life. It's not the kind of over-the-top grime and dirt seen in a lot of 2010s American horror movies, it's just presenting slightly murkier spaces than the average suburbanite might be comfortable inhabiting, and even within that specific setting, there's still a lot of variety in the backgrounds. I think it looks beautiful! All the characters and monsters are full of character and charm, too, and all fit perfectly into the world depicted.

 

The game itself is surprisingly simple for a platformer of this vintage. You can jump and double jump, you can shoot your hair straight forward, and you can kick your sandals at your foes for a slightly more powerful attack. You can also have Kitaro use his stripey waistcoat thing as a shield or a parachute, the latter use being a big part of navigating later stages. And it is an actual platformer with actual platofrming, too! A lot of the challenge actually comes from testing the player's skill in navigating big stages, with combat actually being pretty simple. Having said that, though, another highlight of the game, both mechanically and aesthetically, are the gigantic bosses that appear at the ends of the stages, including one of the coolest and most impressive gashadokuro I've ever seen in a videogame!

 

For all of the praise I've given it, I do have a pretty big problem with this game: the difficulty. The first few stages are moderate: they don't feel like a cakewalk, but they're not particularly challenging. Then stage five is a massive step up in difficulty. Throughout the game, there are glowing orb things to collect, and once you've got a hundred of them, you get a short period of invincibility. They re-appear if you leave an area and re-enter it. There was a point in stage five where it seemed like the only way to progress was to keep going in and out of the area until you can use invincibility to get through. Then on stage six, there was another area that felt the same way, but that's where my patience with the game ran out and I stopped playing.

 

There is a possibility that this dramatic uptick in difficulty is a deliberate decision, though, as after stage five, there's and ending and the credits roll. So maybe the final four stages are intended to be a kind of optional "for super players" type thing? That makes it a little more forgivable, but it also means the actual game is only about forty minutes long. I dunno. That doesn't really matter nowadays, though, since you're likely to be playing via emulation of a flash cart anyway. (I did look up the game on Suruga-ya, and it's listed for about the same price as it would have been brand new, which is a lot more reasonable than most older Gegege games (gegegames).)

Erementar Gerad: Matoe, Suifuu no Tsurugi (PS2)

 So this game is based on an anime that I've never seen (and which seems to be officially known in English as Elemental Gelade, and I did have to look up both spellings to get the exact right arrangement of Ls, Rs, and vowels), but it's a fighting game by Taito, which in my mind, makes it worthy of some attention already. Then I looked it up on GameFAQS, and they say that it was only published by Taito, and was developed by Tamsoft. Even more exciting! 

 

From what I can gather, the anime (and by extension, the game) is about a world where there are people who can transform into bladed weapons for use by other people, and one particularly powerful such person is found in the cargo hold of an airship. So it's a weapons-based fighter, with most of the characters actually being duos, though there's also one girl who fights using a BB Hood-like assortment of artillery hidden about her person. The cel shaded graphics are pretty impressive, being almost as convincing in their attempt at passing polygonal models off as cel animation as the latter Guilty Gear games, despite coming out several years earlier, on much less powerful hardware. (Though unfortunately, the effect doesn't seem to have worked as well in screenshots.)

 

How it plays is an odd mix of simple and complex. Like, none of the specials have more complex motions than quarter-circles, and supers are performed by pressing two buttons together. But then, they've managed to come up with something for all four face buttons and all fout shoulder buttons to do. There's three attack buttons: slash, hard slash, and kick. There's also a kind of Dead or Alive-esque grab button, that just takes ahold of your opponent, and switches your positions around. There's both directions of sidestepping, the aforementioned button that activates supers, and a block button. This feels like too many buttons! Especially with the simplified specials and supers, which feel like they're that way because it's a licensed game, and fans of the anime might not be familiar with fighting games (as I also assumed was the case with the InuYasha fighting game on PS1).

 

Another weird idiosyncracy is that each character has two supers. One will just happen normally, while the other will start a weird little rhythm minigame in which you have to press buttons at the right time while your character(s) say a little prayer, to power up the attack. But the problem is that there's no indication as to when you're meant to press the button, exactly. I'm sure it's not, but it feels like it's random as to whether your presses will increase or decrease the power meter. I think the worse thing about it, though, is the way it gives players a way to immediately interrupt the fight for a cutscene at any time, as long as they've got at least one full meter.

 

I can't really recommend this game. It's not offensively bad or anything, but it's also not good or interesting enough to be worth your time. If you like the anime, and want to play as the characters from it, I can see that being a big factor in changing your opinion of it, and like I said, it does look really great, so if that is your motivation, you probably will have a good time with it. But I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anyone talk about this show, ever. I feel like I've been a little too harsh on a game that's mostly fine, but I guess I was just a bit let down after the initial excitement of seeing where it came from. Oh wait, there is one little interesting thing I want to mention: there's actually 2D sprites of the characters in their fighting stances! They're really tiny and appear on the loading screens, but they're cute.

Spirit of Speed 1937 (Dreamcast)

 If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists. However, it doesn't look too bad in screenshots, and it's a Dreamcast racing game, so I assumed it couldn't be as bad as people say. Plus, the old timey setting was a pretty appealling gimmick, so I gave it a try. And at first, it seemed like everyone was being too harsh on Spirit of Speed: it's a little clunky, but initial impressions are of a mediocre racing game that might provide a little bit of fun, if you're into the setting.

 

Then, you notice how long the races are. Either the track you're on is incredibly long, with lap times of multiple minutes, or you're expected to drive around the track ten or twenty times. Either way, most races are projected to take over ten minutes, sometimes significantly longer than that. On top of that, despite the game's title, you never fel like you're going fast, even at top speed in the game's fastest car. So every race has you slowly trundling around a track for a long, long time. At least the cars and tracks themselves do look pretty nice. 

 

Despite the ludicrous length of the races, I did want to finish at least one of them, in the interests of fairness. I'm not sure if it's actually possible to place first in the races, because while you're always limitd by the tchnical limitations of these old timey cars: slow accelleration, inability to take corners at any kind of speed, and so on, it seems like there's always one opponent who faces no such limitations, able to just shoot off at the start of the race, never to be seen again. The rest of them are just like you, though, so once you've left them behind, you'll likely spend a lot of time in second place, all alone with most of your opponents getting left further and further behind you, and one opponent getting further and further ahead of you.

 

However, I was never able to finish a race, as every time, without fail, something would happen to prevent me from doing so. Sometimes, the game would suddenly crash. Sometimes, the car would inexplicably stop accellerating for no obvious reason, meaning the race had to be quit via the pause menu (because this wasn't some kind of deliberate game condition that makes you instantly retre from the race). One time, I paused the game, and it just wouldn't unpause no matter what. So as well as being poorly designed, it seems that Spirit of Speed 1937 is also incompetent on a technical level.

 

I approached this game with an open mind. I think I've been clear in the past on the subject of how little patience I have for received opinion, especially when it comes to games that are supposedly universally reviled like Spirit of Speed is. However, in this instance, I have to admit that the mob is right: this is a game that fails at everything it tries to do, on almost every level. The only positive thing I can say about it is to repeat that it does look pretty nice in screenshots. It's just unfortunate that to take those screenshots, someone has to actually (attempt to) play it.

Meikyuu Jiin Dababa (Famicom Disk System)

 I feel like whenever I look into the library of the Famicom Disk System, I find a lot of games that are kind of interesting as curiosities, as well as the seedy underbelly of the 1980s Famicom boom. But in Meikyuu Jiin Dababa, I've managed to find an FDS game that is actually a lot of fun to play! It being one of those rare games to be set in mythic India is a nice little bonus, too.

 

You play as a guy, in this case a monk, and like so many eighties videogame guys, you're out to rescue a girl from a demon. As generic as this premise is, it's not just the Indian flavour that gives this game life, as it plays like a kind of combination of Frogger and The Tower of Druaga. The world is made up of grids, upon which, you can only move from square to square (as well as being able to jump a distance of one square). In this world, you shoot monsters and evil wizards, and try to find power ups and the exits to the next stage.

 

That's where the Druaga stuff comes in! Power-ups will only appear when you do very specific things: shoot a certain statue eight times, jump on a specific tile three times, and so on. While the tiles will visibly crack after being jumped upon, special statues give no indication at all that they're hiding anything until it's revealed. It's not far into the game where finding secrets like these is also the only way to proceed. Each set of stages starts with an outside stage, then several stages inside a temple. To progress through the temples, you've got to find hidden mandalas under floor tiles, which will then reveal a special tablet (or maybe it's a book?), that will open the exit upon collection. 

 

Mostly, though I've compared this mechanic to the infamously obtuse Druaga, it's not too difficult to find your way through. Up to a point, though. Frustratingly, I've been unable to get past the fourth stage in the third set of stages. I can make the exist appear, I figured out that two of the exits are fake, but for some reason I can't detemine, going into the real exit just transports me back several stages. There's a longplay on Youtube, and following that exactly doesn't seem to help! To make things more frustrating, there's only four sets of stages, so I've managed to get three quarters of the way through the game before getting stuck. Tragic!

 

I should also make mention of the boss fights. Though the rest of the game is top-down, the boss fights take place in a side-on view, though you can still only move by jumping space-by-space. The fights themselves are pretty easy, though, and I don't think I ever lost a single life to either of the ones I fought. Overall, even with the mishap I suffered above, this might be the best Famicom Disk System-original game I've played so far, so obviously, I definitely recommend that you give it a try, too. And if anyone does give it a try and figures out what I'm doing wrong on stage 3-4, please let me know.