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.

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.

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.

Happy! Happy!! Boarders in Hokkaido Rusutsu Resort (PS2)

 The first thing that stands out about Happy! Happy!! Boarders upon starting it is the way it sounds and looks: it's going to be a feast for those "Y2K Aesthetic" appreciators out there. Then, with the snowboarding game I've played most of being another PS2 game, Alpine Racer 3, it's striking how much slower and more realistic this game is. You have quite a lot of control of your boarder in this game, where they go, and you've also got to make them keep their balance. A big contrast to AR3, which is a very videogamey racing game, in which you mainly just have to go as fast as possible down linear tracks while avoiding obstacles. (It might get its own review here someday.)

 

So, this more of a sim-type game. Not just in the relatively more realistic snowboarding action, but also it's a tie-in to a real skiing/snowboarding resort in Hokkaido, and it's kind of a bit of a sim of being there, too. Well, a little bit. You access the menu for saving, changing your board, and some other things by returning to the hotel, at least. Also, the loading screens have some very nice, scenic photos of the real slopes, and there's also a gallery full of unlockable photos of the hotel's interior, for some reason. 

 

You start off with access to only one course, and a point quota. You get points by snowboarding, by doing tricks, by boarding between flags on the course, doing little speed challenges and for some reason, by stopping to talk to certain people who are loitering around on the course. Once you reach the points quota, you can go to the second course, which is a lot more interesting, since it's got a few branching points that kind of make it four courses in one, and you get a new points quota. For some reason, though, I didn't unlock a third course upon reaching this quota. And one of the big problems with playing and writing about obscure games is that there are no guides online to help you, so a little ulterior motive in writing this review is to ask the internet: anyone know what i'm doing wrong?

 

It really is a shame, because I was getting into the game before getting stuck like this: once you get the hang of the controls, it's a lot of fun going down the slopes, and as mentioned, it looks great too. They really did a good job of making this resort feel like a cool, fun, luxurious place to be! Plus, it seems to be almost entirely inhabited by attractive young people. Which makes sense, since from what little English writing there is about this game online, there's supposedly a romantic aspect to it, too, which I never picked up on at all! 

 

If you can read Japanese, I recommend giving this game a try! It's fun to play, and it really seems like it's got a lot going on to make it stand out in the genre. If you can't speak Japanese, I still recommend giving it a try, I've really enjoyed what I've been able to play of it, and maybe you'll be able to figure out how to get past the second course and make me look like Booboo the Fool. Who knows, maybe I'll figure it out myself? I can only hope.  

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love Basketball (Saturn)

 I saw some gifs of this game on Bsky a few months ago, and it immediately made its way on my to-play list. You can see from the screenshots that it looks pretty good, but it looks even better in motion! Big, well-drawn sprites that were it not for the concessions made for the purposes of being in a game, could feasibly have been taken straight from animation cels, with animation to match. But, of course: there are many anime tie-ins that look great and don't have much else going for them, so is this game any good?

 

Before answering that question, there are some other things I really need to address. The main one being my lack of interest in basketball, and by extension, my ignorance regarding things like tactics and team positions and so on. Because even though this game is a tie-in to an anime about basketball rather than a real basketball league, it still takes a pretty in-depth approach to the game. Between selecting a team and starting a match, you'll be asked to assign team members to positions, and to select formations for your team to take when they're on the offence and when they're defending. So I can't really speak to how well the game handles these things, beyond saying that it's pretty funny that if you pick Shohoku High School's team, and just go with everyone in default positions, Sakuragi is left on the bench

 

Actually in-game, it all seems to work pretty well. There's a lot of sprite scaling going on as players run towards or away from the camera, which looks great. You use the d-pad for moving around like you'd expect, and the A, B, and C buttons do different things depending on whether or not you've got the ball. With the ball, A dribbles, B passes, and C shoots (I think, but I'm not sure, that shooting relies on some kind of probability equation involving your player's stats, their distance from the basket, and how long they've had the ball with them.). While if you don't have it, A gets in the way of the guy with the ball, B jumps to try and block their shots, and C tries to take the ball off of them. 

 

The camera always looks in one direction, with the court stretching off into the distance, one basket all the way at the back, one right at the front. It keeps things simple, and it always being at the same angle allows for the aforementioned detailed, well-animated sprites. I think there might have been an arcade basketball game that used a similar set up, but I'm not sure about that. It works, and like I keep mentioning: it looks great! The menus look a little less great, but in a very charming, very nineties kind of way: lots of multi-coloured WordArt on display, for example.

 

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love BasketBall is a pretty decent little game. I can't play it well at all, and haven't won a single match yet, but I've come close a few times! One thing I should also mention is that not only does it allow you to play matches with twenty minute long halves, but if you want to play story mode, you don't get a choice, and you'll have to play these insanely long matches, presumably racking up massive scores over time, too. For as much as I've praised the game, I haven't been able to get through even half of one of these real time matches. But there is a versus CPU mode (and a two player versus mode, of course) that lets you play with more reasonable settings. I think it's at least worth giving a try if you're curious, or if like any other normal person with good taste, you love sprite scaling.

Sword of the Samurai (PS2)

 I only played the original Kengo once, long long ago, when me and some friends were just trying out a big stack of PS2 games we'd never played before. My memory of it is as a weird idiosyncratic swordfighting game that had a dedicated buttong for yelling at your opponent. The reason I bring Kengo up is that this is actually Kengo 2, mysteriously renamed by its western publisher. I recently tried it out on a whim, and got totally engrossed in what is not just a swordfighting game, but a game about being a swordfighter.

 

What does that mean? Well, the main mode in this game has you "making" (that is, picking a face and a body from a very small selection. In fact, there's only one female body!) a character and then making a debut on the local swordsmanship scene in a little village named Chiaraijima. You can take part in casual fights down at the riverbank, or you can go to one of the local dojos to learn the basics. The game's very idiosyncratic in how it plays, and if you go in trying to playing like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade, you'll get nowhere, so going and learning the basics is recommended. It's a much better way of getting in the tutorial than a lot of games, too, since you don't have to go straight there, and the lessons address one subject at a time, so inbetween you can go and test what you've learned at the riverbank.

 

Eventually, you'll get the opportunity to spar against other students at the dojo, and even challenging the students and masters of other dojos! All of the above are, of course, competitive bouts using wooden and bamboo swords. But there's a couple of other things to occupy your time in Chiaraijima. There are the secret nighttime fights that take place in an abndoned courtyard, and they use real swords. Also using real swords are the jobs you can go on, brokered by a local merchant. Real sword fights change the mechanics slightly. For a start, if you get cut, you start bleeding and losing health (I've even had a fight end with both participants bleeding to death at the same time!), and yes: lose a real swordfight and you die, and get sent back to the title screen. You can reload your save from there, but still. It's a lot more dramatic than taking a couple days' rest after losing a normal fight.

 

The jobs are slightly different still. There's a little bit of Bushido Blade here, as you have to fend of groups of enemies who attack a few at a time, but can be taken out themselves with one or two hits. The game also makes mention that if you guard too much in a real sword fight, the metal can get chipped and the sword can even break, leaving you defenceless, but I haven't seen that happen. I'm not sure what the point of taking these risks is, since there's no money in this game, but presumably, there are story events that can happen if you consistently do well enough in them. (For example, the merchant who gives you your jobs doesn't appear himself until you make a few consecutive wins at the riverbank).

 

To clarify some of the above: everything other than the fights and jobs is menu-based. Every day, you can choose to rest or do one of the above activities. Whatever you pick, it'll take up the whole day. Anything other than resting will usually increase all of your stats by some amount, and also decrease your stamina. Resting replenishes your stamina, and no matter how low it is, it'll usually be back to full after two days, and if you're impatient, you can still go out if it isn't full, you'll just have less health. I don't know if resting too many days in a row makes your skills atrophy and your stats decline, but that seems like it'd be logical. Finally, you learn new moves by getting hit by them!

 

Like I said, I've been engrossed in this game. Some people might find the structure repetitive, others might find the fighting clunky and weird, but I think if you're willing to give it a chance, this is a game that you can really get a lot out of. As simple as it is, there's lots of interesting little details to notice, too. For example, the guys you fight down at the riverbank are all just named "Swordsman", but as you keep going back, you'll come to recognise them on sight, and they use consistent fighting styles, so they're definitely the same guys who keep coming back, and not just random nobodies represented by the same models. If you're able to, I recommend at least giving this a try.

Soccer Brawl (Neo Geo CD)

I've recently developed an interest in the extra features added to the CD versions of Neo Geo games, and I've long had an interest in the less popular games on consoles that are themselves pretty niche. Soccer Brawl, though it's definitely one of the less popular Neo Geo CD games, unfortunatelly doesn't have much in the way of extras. All there is is some short animations about an unlucky inventor trying to create a soccer-playing robot, that play as half time entertainment.

 

But the games itself is still pretty good! It's one of only three games developed by short-lived SNK sub-studio Pallas, with their most famous release also being a futuristic sports game, 2020 Super Baseball, which is more famous on account of it being ported to SNES and Mega Drive. Despite the name, though, Soccer Brawl isn't as violent as most future sports games based on soccer. There's regular tackling, as well as two other ways to hurt opponents: you if you don't have the ball, you can hold the kick button for a second and release it to fire an energy blast that can stun a player, and if you do have the ball, the same command kicks the ball super-hard (because all of the players are enhanced cyborgs, of course). This super-hard kick is useful for scoring goals, and for knocking down opponents. 

 

There's a couple of interesting things to note about the above, too. The first is that the game does have friendly fire for all forms of attack, so when things are crowded, you might want to be careful. Or alternatively, if you want to score, you might want to kick the ball with no regard as to who might be in the way. The other thing is that among the eight teams, there are four different kinds of super-kicks, there being two teams able to use each one. I think these are activated if you kick the ball at full strangth more than half the field's length away from your opponent's goal. These might have the ball moving in a big circle while on fire before shooting towards the goal, or the ball might split into to balls that dance around each other as they head toward the goal, and so on. Like a regular super-hard kick, these are very useful in both scoring goals, and incapacitating enemy players.

 

Like I said, it's a lot less violent than most games of this type. In all the games I've played, there's been no times where a player had to leave the game from being too beaten up, let alone players getting killed like you might see in some other titles. There is a nice little detail, though: players that have taken damage a few times will start to have smoke or electric sparks coming off of them, suggesting some damage death, or strain being put upon their cybernetic components. I don't think it actually has any effect on their ability to play, but it is a cool detail. I kind of want to say it's a shame that all the teams are just re-coloured sets of the exact same players (albeit with different supers and presumably different stats), but to be fair: we can't really expect a developer to ome up with eight teams' worth of individual characters from nothing, for a game in a genre whos players almost definitely won't notice or care compared to fighting game fans.

 

Soccer Brawl is a pretty fun game! The only big problems I can really accuse it of are ones that are kind of inherent to being a sports game of this type. If one team gets more than a few points ahead and there isn't much time left in the match, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up, but there's no option to concede (or for the game to automatically end early if there's a score gap of a certain size). Furthermore, if you happen to be the player on the upside of such a score gap, you can pretty much stop trying. If the gap's a few points, it's very easy to get the ball and just run around doing nothing to run out the clock, and if the gap's more than that, you can just stop playing and do something else for a while. Still, I've had some fun with it, and it's a nice little, very nineties sci-fi sports game. 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball (Game Boy Color)

 The first thing that needs to be addressed in this review is the game's title: yes, it will make your dad laugh if he asks what you're playing and you answer "Pocket Billiards". Don't worry about it. The other thing is that GameFAQs lists this as being published by Tamsoft, which struck me as odd, since they're more of a developer, and the only games I know of that they published were also developed by them. My suspicions were correct, and this game was published by a completely unrelated company called TAM, Inc., and the people maintaining GameFAQs are incompetent buffoons.

 

Anyway, this is a billiards/snooker game, but not only should you cast out of your mind the image of boring men wearing tuxedos and chainsmoking, but it's been specifically designed with the intention of casting those men out of your mind! Instead of a traditional look, Funk the 9 Ball instead takes its aesthetic cues from vaguely contemporaneous rhythm games, like Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, and so on. The devs must have had their fingers on the pulse, too, as the first game I was going to mention in that list was SNK's Cool Cool Toon, which didn't come out until six months later! But anyway, there's lots of cute/weird characters, the place in which you play isn't a smoky bar but some kind of brightly-coloured night club with a DJ, and not only can you collect cans of paint to recolour the club and the table, but you can collect Minidiscs to give the DJ more BGM selections to pick from!

 

The game itself, as far as I can tell (as someone who has never played snooker), is mostly a fairly normal game of nine ball, and controls in a fairly traditional manner, in which you aim the cue ball, and then use a timed power meter to shoot. I say "mostly", because while it uses the rules of that game, it's also in the now pretty much dead genre of silly sports games. While playing, various creatures will use their magic powers to effect the course of the game in various way. Some of the creatures live in the pockets, and their powers activate when a ball goes into the pocket they call home. Other creatures are put inside the balls somehow by the players pre-match, and their powers activate when you hit their ball after holding the button down for a few seconds.

 

The creatures in the pockets will have powers that equally help or hinder both players, like destroying one of the lower-numbered balls, or making all the balls invisible. The ones in the balls, obviously, use their powers to specifically help the player to whom they belong (because there is also a vague aspect of monster collection in here too!), and they do stuff like give you the ability to re-take a foul shot, make a ball jump into the nearest pocket, and that kind of thing. They also all cause a little animation to play when they're activated, and not only are these animations all weird, but the way they come into play is amusingly over-dramatic: just before the cueball hits its target, time will stop, and the screen will cut to a strange cutscene of like, a chorus of angels in heaven, or a little guy drinking tea, or something. I think it's meant to evoke a kind of sports anime-esque drama? It's silly and time-consuming, but I do like it.

 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball is a decent enough game. I don't think I would ever want to play it on a TV screen, but on a handheld, it's a fine way to keep your hands busy while watching TV. It also has an English translation patch, which you wouldn't really expect. If it appeals to you at all, you should give it a try! Definitely don't pay £400 for a real copy though. Four hundred entire pounds! Madness.

Dojo Masters (PC)

 Okay, so this isn't an obscure game, but it is a recently-release indie game that I think deserves highlighting. It's been over a decade since I reviewed Champion Kendou on SG-1000, and I still regularly play that game! It really gave me a taste for that kind of very old-fashioned martial-arts-as-a-sport style of play, and though other games like it do exist, none of them have really scratched the itch for me in the same way. As such, I've been fantasising for years now about a game that did, and also which offered some more modern amenities, like properly responsive controls and maybe multiple different styles to pick from.

 

When I first saw Dojo Masters last year, it was a pretty disturbing day, as it looks almost exactly like the game I've been imagining all this time! Obviously, I wishlisted it immediately, and a couple of weeks ago, it finally got released and I bought it immediately, too. I'm glad to say: it doesn't disappoint! It uses only the d-pad and two buttons, which are ostensibly designated punch and kick, but it's a little more complex than that. There's also six styles to play as: Karate, Taekwondo, Kendo, Boxing, Muay Thai, and Krav Maga. There's no actual named characters in the game, either: instead there's generic, androgynous fighters, and when you pick a style, you get to change the colour of their skin and clothes, and pick one of two hairstyles for them. Any other traits they have like personality or gender only exist in your own mental projections. Which is a pretty cool and unique way of doing things.

 

Regarding the punch and kick buttons, obviously some styles don't have both (or either!) of those things in them, in which cases, they obviously do different things instead. For example, Taekwondo has an elaborate system of stances taken by pressing the punch button with directions, and there are different attacks depending on which stand you're currently in when you press kick. Kendo can perform a quick three-hit combo with the punch button, while pressing kick raises their shinai above their head for more powerful attacks. Furthermore, press back and punch puts a kendo fighter into a defensive stance for a split second, resulting in a cool samurai movie cutdown, should the opponent attack.

 

Though I've dipped my toe into online play a little (which went surprisingly well! I think I had a win ration of around 50%), I've mainly been playing single player. There's an arcade mode, where you try and fight through ten randomly-generated opponents of increasing difficulty, and a survival mode, which takes its cues from the survival mode in home versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3, pitting you against multiple opponents at once. Most interestingly, though you'll probably only play it once per style, is the tutorial mode. In only a few short lessons, it teaches you every little detail of how each style controls, and also how each style's tools are meant to work against the opponents. Because they all play so dramatically differently, you will want to utilise the tutorials, especially for the styles whose strengths aren't immediately obvious, like Taekwondo and Krav Maga.

 

It's hard to be objective about Dojo Masters, since as I mentioned above, it's eerily close to being a game that somehow manifested from my thoughts. On the other hand, I guess there's also a lot of potential for disappointment when such a game appears. But of course, I love it. It's a great game, it feels good to play, it was made with a specific goal in mind, and it reached that goal. I definitely recommend etting ahold of it, and I hope that someday it gets ported to consoles. I really wish there were still mainstream handhelds for it to be ported to, too. I'd love to play it on 3DS or PS Vita, though if that were possible, it might end up being the only thing I ever did from that point on.

Boogie Woogie Bowling (Mega Drive)

 I think, if I cast my mind back to the ancient past, this game might have received a review in an issue of SEGA Power, probably an issue numbered in the 40s. But I had no interest in sports games at all as a kid, and that review wasn't of Boogie Woogie Bowling, as the game underwent a rigorous blandification process while being brought westwards. The name was changed to "Championship Bowling", and while Boogie Woogie has a cast made up of two boys, a girl, and a xenomorph, Championship has a cast made up of two men and two women, drawn in a totally different style to the ones in Boogie Woogie. 

 

The reason I even bothered to look into this game as an adult is thanks to a bit of weird happenstance. A couple of years ago, I got a chinese clone console that has a slot for Famicom cartridges, and a slot for Mega Drive cartridges. It's a nie little machine, it's USB powered and has HDMI output, so it's very convenient to get running in the 2020s, plus it even has region and language switches for the Mega Drive games.  One little quirk it has is the power switch: in the middle, the console is switched off, push it upwards to turn the Famicom part on, and downwards to activate the Mega Drive part. Anyway, a friend's son was playing on it, and with no cartridge in the Famicom slot, tried to turn it on by pushing the switch upwards. This revealed a menu of over a hundred built-in Famicom ROMs that had been there the whole time without my knowledge! A short experiment later revealed that there was an equivalent menu of Mega Drive games, too! And Boogie Woogie Bowling was among them.

 

I have no idea, though, how I managed to recognise that it had been reskinned for a different version that I'd only ever seen in a magazine more than thirty years ago, though. The human brain really is mysterious, I guess. Anyway, it's a bowling game. It plays pretty much like any other bowling game: it's mainly based around stopping a marker that quickly moves back and forth on various power/spin/etc. meters. Isn't it strange how bowling games and golf games are so similar in how they're played? There's also a little gimmick that lets you press the face buttons while your opponent's trying to determine their ball's spin, which I think affects the speed of their marker, though I'm not totally sure on that.

 

The main mode is structured as you might expect: you bowl against various CPU opponents, gradually increasing in difficulty. A lot of these opponents will throw gutter ball after gutter ball, while some will oddly alternate between gutter balls and strikes. either way, it's a lot more merciful than the other bowling game with which I'm familiar, the Game Boy pirate cart classic World Bowling, which is absolutely merciless and demands perfect play from the outset. There's a couple of other modes, too, though these can only be played as a solo practice, or against other human players. There's split mode, which gives you sets of random pins, never a full set, and you have to clear them. In this mode, you only score points if you clear every pin. There's also bonus mode, which is more interesting: each individual pin is assigned a different points value, seemingly at random. I guess there's no CPU opponents for these modes because it would have been too complicated to program them to actually try and score properly? That's just a theory, though.

 

Boogie Woogie Bowling is an incredibly okay game. I definitely wouldn't have paid money for it on release, and I probably wouldn't today, unless it was apart of some kind of compilation or something. But if you emulate it, or find the ROM hidden away in a piece of hardware you own, it might amuse you for an hour or so. One extra thing I found interesting is that it was published in Japan by Visco, a company I definitely associate more with arcade games and the Neo Geo than with regular consoles.