Lamborghini American Challenge (SNES)

 It seems like ports from the Amiga to the SNES were a lot less common than they were to the Mega Drive, though there were a few, and this is one of them (originally named Crazy Cars 3). It is, obviously, a racing game about Lamborghini owners challenging each other to races in various places across the US. Though the character portraits look more like they kind of racers you'd see in something like Road Rash than the kind of millionaires who swan about racing expensive sports cars for fun.

 

Interestingly, it doesn't use the SNES' Mode 7 to render its tracks, using a more traditional line-by-line method, like you'd see in a lot of older arcade racing games. In my opinion, this method is actually better than Mode 7, though, since it looks a lot nicer than the massive stretched-out sprites used in Mode 7 race tracks, and it allows the tracks to have hills, which adds a little extra variety. As a result, this might be the best-looking racing game I've seen on the SNES. Furthermore, there's tracks with different weather conditions and different times of day, and the dusk and night races look particularly good.

 

The game's structure is a little unusual, and themed entirely around money. You start with a certain amount of it, and every race has an entry fee and a prize. Of course, this means that if you don't consistently win races, you'll eventually be unable to compete, and that gets you a game over. Complicating matters is the presence of an upgrade shop, and as you progress through the game, it pretty much becomes compulsory to buy the upgrades, since winning later races is impossible without them. I haven't yet encountered a situation whereby you accidentally give yourself a game over by spending too much on an upgrade, but it could theoretically happen.

 

As for the actual racing, it's fine. It feels incredibly smooth, and you never feel like you're fighting against the controls, or anything like that. Maybe because of this, it feels like the challenge in the harder races comes from the speed at which the opponents can go, as well as the amount of non-racer cars that get in your way, rather than from the design of the tracks themselves. There's also apparently no middle ground in difficulty: either you'll easily make your way to the front of the pack and win a race by a long long way, or you'll finish tenth in a miserable failure.

 

It's not a patch on SEGA's sprite scaling racers, but that's an unfairly high standard to hold any game to, especially one which probably had a pretty small production budget, originating on the Amiga. So, Lamborghini American Challenge is still a pretty good racing game, and like I said, it looks excellent. Also, a quick look online shows that real copies seem to be really cheap, so if you like racing games, it's probably one that's worth picking up. And of course, if you're just emulating, it's definitely worth a bit of your time, too.

Sorcerland (PC)

 This is a game that stood out to me as soon as I saw it, since the graphics are amazing. So, like a year later, I bought it (it's less than one American dollar!), and then a year after that, I actually got around to playing it! What it is is an action-heavy platform game with three playable characters, each of whom has their own distinct look and playstyle. Also, it has no bearing on actually playing it, but the description on the game's DLSite page happens to mention that all three of the playable characters are crossdressers.

 

So, there's a catboy, a bunnyboy, and a transforming mechanical pegasusboy. I played as all three, but the pegasus is by far the most fun, with a versatile and effective moveset. Also, the bunnyboy's moveset that seems to focus on using special attacks as if they were normal attacks, leaving you defenceless for seconds at a time while they recharge. The catboy is fine, I guess, but not as good as the pegasus, and definitely not good enough to trump the novelty of playing as a quadraped in a 2D platform game.

 

You go through the stages, fighting enemies, like you'd expect. The emphasis is very much in the direction of enemy placement, rather than stage design, with some early stages not being much more than flat plains with enemies waiting to be fought. Later stages do get a bit more complex, but the focus is always on combat. That approach extends to the controls, too: you only have one button for your regular attacks, but as well as pressing it repeatedly for a short beat em up-style combo, you can also press it with different directions for more specialised attacks, as well as more attacks when you're running or jumping.

 

It's hard to say more, really: it's just a really fun, well designed action platformer. It also looks amazing, with really cure sprites, pretty nice backgrounds, and some incredible pixel art in the cutscenes. There's a good couple of hours' worth of game in there, too, and while it claims to be "early access", it's probably best to consider what exists now to be the final game, as it was last updated in 2014, and the developer seems to have vanished off of the face of the Earth around the same time.

 

So yeah, Sorcerland is a great game that excels in pretty much every respect, and it's worth way more than the tiny asking price it carries. I definitely recommend picking it up.