Puzzle de Bowling (Arcade)

 I think it's a fair thing to say that iteration and expansion on existing ideas, even if they're someone else's, is a legitimate form of game design. It's a fine line though, especially when you go with an aesthetic that leers very close to that of your ludological muse. Puzzle de Bowling iterates upon the Puzzle Bobble series with a couple of its own ideas, but as inferred, I think making it look so much like Taito's games was a big mistake that gives it the air of a shameless mockbuster.

 

Like you've probably inferred, Puzzle de Bowling is a lot like Puzzle Bobble, but with a bowling theme. Also, the characters are cute anthropomorphised signs of the zodiac. There's a bunch of different-coloured bowling pins at the top of the field, and you roll different-coloured bowling balls at them. When the balls stop moving, they become pins, and if this results in three or more pins of the same colour touching, they'll vanish, and any other-coloured pins hanging off of them wil fall off, too. If you manage to get lots of pins in one go, you can get strike and split bonuses. 

 

The mechanical quirks come from the bowling theme. There's gutters at either side of the field, and you can get a gutterball, though I'm not sure of what the penalty is for doing this. It can get balls of unwanted colours out of the way, at least. The big one, though, is the way you can put a little curve on the ball. As well as moving your character left and right along the bottom of the field with the joystick, there are three buttons related to controlling the ball. Before you roll it, you can press the left and right buttons to determine a point at which the ball will veer in the respective direction. So you can get the ball into awkward little nooks that would require a difficult trick shot in Puzzle Bobble.

 

It sounds like it's an ability that would make the game far too easy, but it doesn't work out like that in practice. The puzzles in the solo puzzle mode are designed in such a way that though the curving system is very helpful, it won't get you out of every jam, and the weakness it has in versus mode is that it does take a couple of seconds longer to line up a perfect curved shot than an okay straight one. I'm sure with practice, high level players could theoretically be able to play accurately at high speed. But, obviously, this game is so forgotten, it's very unlikely that there are any high-level players anywhere in the world. Especially since its only home port was cancelled before release.

 

Anyway, and I feel like this is something I've said about other puzzle games in the past, Puzzle de Bowling is a decent enough game. It's fun to play, and like I said, its lack of originality isn't too much of a black mark, as it's obvious that the developers had an idea they wanted to try out that was an iteration on an existing one, and that's fine. The aesthetics, though, feel a bit cheap. The character designs are incredibly generic, and if you put the characters in Puzzle de Bowling up against those in its contemporaries like Magical Drop 3 or Puchi Charat, they're just lacking a certain intangible something to make them appealing. But here's the part I'm sure I've said before: the later nineties were an amazing time for puzzle games, and lots of really excellent titles were coming out. So why would you ever play this one over any of the others? It just isn't as good or as interesting or as exciting as any of them. Give it a shot in MAME if you're curious, but don't expect it to stick with you.

Kaze Kiri Ninja Action (PC Engine)

 I wasn't sure of whether or not this game counted as obscure, but I think, in 2023, it does. It's a game that's been through a few phases, as far as its perception goes:I remember in the early 00s, when I was first dipping my toes into emulation and playing PC Engine games for the first time, Kaze Kiri was a game people were always quick to recommend. A few years later, the tide had turned a little bit, and people started saying it was a bit boring, repetitive, and overrated. Than a few more years and it was barely ever mentioned at all.

 

Until recently, I hadn't played it since that first era, when everyone loved it. I'd thought it was pretty good, too, but like I said, those were the days when I was first dipping my toes into emulation. I was playing lots of games for the first time, and for some reason, it wasn't one of the ones that really stuck with me. From my recent playtime with it, I can only assume I wasn't ready for it yet. It's a single plane beat em up, a genre that a lot of people misunderstand as being the over-simple vestigial ancestor to the belt scrolling beat em up. But it's also a genre for which I've grown a huge amount of appreciation in recent years. There's a lot that can be done in the genre, and even today, there's games pushing it forward, like Ninja Saviors (which is a remake, but with enough new stuff that it still be considered an advancement).

 

Kaze Kiri came out in 1994. The PC Engine was already an elderly console, an 8-bit that was still somehow trundling on as the age of the 32-bits was just starting to dawn. But as well as impressive ports from other systems, like Asuka 120% Burning Festival, it was still getting original games with enough new ideas and enough raw talent in their production that it sometimes didn't look like the old grandpa that it was. Kaze Kiri is one such game. The first thing that hits you about it is of course the presentation, in particular, the intro that's made up of incredible-looking full screen pixel animation. The game itself looks amazing, too with animated backgrounds and detailed sprites. Sometimes, you get something that combines the two, like an especially great-looking bossfight against a big clockwork robot in a candlelit room, the flickering light reflecting off its metal armour.

 

The game itself is more advanced than you might expect, too. A year prior, Shinobi III, another hardware-pushing ninja action game had appeared on a more powerful console, the Mega Drive. Shinobi III had a complex-but-intuitive control scheme that allowed a whole bunch of different commands to be mapped to only the d-pad and three buttons. I can only wonder if that was an influence on Kaze Kiri, which performs a similar feat with a d-pad and only two buttons. You can walk, run, and jump, as you'd expect. You can also throw kunai and swing your sword. Plus, you can run, perform a dive kick, a slide kick across the ground, and do quick flips backwards and forwards. None of this is complicated, and you'll figure it all out within a few seconds of starting the game. Then you get on with what the game is: fighting lots of enemies until you've killed enough to fight the stage's boss. It's a simple formula, executed with mountains of style and panache.

 

There's a couple more steps towards modernity, too! Your ability to throw kunai is limited not by a specific supply of the throwing blades, but instead by the fact that doing so depletes your health a tiny amount. On its own, that would be annoying. Maybe even unfair. But couple with the very twenty-first century design decision of having your health constantly (but very slowly) regenerating, it makes total sense as yet another way of streamlining all the game's many systems, making a faster and simpler game while still putting a relatively huge amount of tools and possibilities into the player's hands. Just like the control scheme!

 

After reading all that, it won't surprise you to hear that I recommend Kaze Kiri. To everyone! Go and play it! It's the kind of incredible, high-quality game that can really make you excited about videogames and their design. Don't give a penny to the scamming bastards on ebay, but play this game at your earliest convenience. It's an essential play for anyone who appreciates action games, and it should re-rise to its formerly-held position of prominence in the PC Engine library.