Asian Dynamite (Arcade)

 This is the third (or fourth if you count the greatly expanded PS2 port of the original) game in the Dynamite Deka series. Like so many SEGA arcade games from the 00s, it still doesn't have a home port, but it does run on the easily-emulated Naomi board. Though I do remember the early days of Naomi emulation, that this was one of the games I most wanted to play on that system, and it was so glitchy as to be unplayable. But that was a long time ago, and things have changed.

 

So, in keeping with the series' main gimmick, it's a 3D beat em up where almost every item is a weapon or a healing item. Some are even both, as you can pick up plates of food, pressing punch to throw some food or kick to take a bite. The plot and structure seem to be a strange mish=mash of elements from the previous games: like the first game, you're storming a building that's occupied by terrorists who've kidnapped an important person's daughter. Like the second game, you choose one of three routes of increasing difficulty at the start of the game, plus there are setpieces in this game that are clearly reskins of setpieces from the second game. For example, the small kitchen where you fought a big fat chef in that game is a small room where you fight a big fat panda in this one (well, a guy in a very realistic panda costume, at least).

 

It also keeps and expands upon the costume mechanic from the first game's PS2 remake. There are three plyable characters, and while playing the game, there are three diffrent coloured briefcases that cane appear as items dropped by enemies. The costumes aren't just cosmetic, but they're entire transformations with their own movesets, and most of them also have their own unique ways of interacting with the many weapons littered around the stages. Surprisingly, none of the costumes are references to classic SEGA games. Also, a useful piece of information is that all of Jennifer's costumes are both useless for fighting with and boring to control. But, you should give her a try at least once just because they're also the strangest, being a levitating yoga practitioner, a creepy jester, and (letting the weird trio down a little) a blatant clone of Marvel Comics' character Elektra.

 

Another returning element that's been expanded upon is the scene transition QTEs. They're annoying like all QTEs are, but unlike a lot of worse implementations of the concept, they serve to create a branching path system (like they did in the previous games), rather than being a "press the right button or die" situation. They're expanded on here by sometimes taking the form of little multiple choice questions that you only have seconds to answer, and some of them are even trick questions, like the old "What colour is the word RED in this sentence?", with the word RED actually being blue. I guess it's a way of preventing players from just memorising every QTE and forcing a reaction even from well-versed players. I don't like it, but I do approve of the ingenuity in concept, at least.

 

Asian Dynamite is a pretty good game. If you like the arlier games in the series, this is mostly just more of those. In some cases, it's just bits of those with a new coat of paint (and a hilariously garish gold suit on the main villain). But the new coat of paint, being a big shiny multipurpose Hong Kong skyscraper is nice, and it's a fun and weird game to play. I recommend giving it a try, while we all continue to wait and hope that SEGA starts porting Naomi and Atomiswave games to consoles someday.

Firebugs (Playstation)

 I'm sure a lot of you reading will remember Rollcage, the Playstation racing game featuring cars that were very obviously inspired by the radio control car Ricochet, released by Tonka a few years earlier. For some reason, it's a game I very heavily associate with magazine demo discs, even though I've long since played the full game, for a lot more time than I ever played the demo. Anyway, it had a sequel not long after release, called Rollcage Stage II (or apparently, Death Track Racing for its PC release in the US). Then, a few years later, Firebugs came out.

 

Mechanically, it's a sequel to the Rollcage games, though thematically, it's had some changes. The original games were similar in theme and setting to the Wipeout games, being set in a stylised luxury future with entire cities seemingly designed around the idea of having racetracks built in them. Firebugs, being a PAL exclusive released in 2002, seems to be following an idea I've seen in some late release Japanese exclusive Playstation games: the only people still buying games for the older console are probably kids. So there's a bunch of cartoony characters, and the world itself is a lot more brightly coloured, too (though the music is still the same kind of awful garbage that seemingly every European-developed Playstation game had to have since the console's beginning).

 

It really does look great, too. The stages are stylistically rendered, with the textures all bearing very bright and bold colours, along with thick, stark black outlines. It's a clever way of getting some cartoony graphics out of the aging hardware that manage to avoid the game looking like a consolation prize for the kids who just got their older sibling's console as a hand-me-down. There's been some minor changes to how the game plays, too. No big changes to the concept or anything: you can still drive upside-down and on the walls and ceilings, but the handling is generally a bit less chaotic and frenzied, and while suddenly spinning around in the air and landing faced the wrong way was a near-constant problem in the Rollcage games before you got the hang of things, it's a lot rarer here.

 

Something I'd like to highlight is the power-up system. You have two power-up slots, which I'll refer to as left and right. The first time you get a power-up, it'll fill your left slot, which is a power that's unique to the character you're playing. Then, if you pick up another before using your left power up, it'll fill your right slot, with a randomly selected power-up from the game's standard pool. Most of the power-ups are standard stuff like missiles, shields, and speed boosts, but I do also like the one that slowly opens a portal in front of your vehicle, which then instantly sends you slightly further ahead on the track. In Firebugs, the portal is just a glowing white ring, but I wonder if this game had gotten a sequel on more powerful hardware, if you'd be able to see your destination through the portal in real time?

 

There's another weird quirk in the way that the single player mode is structured. There are five planets, and each planet has two main races, the first with three laps, and the final with five. If you come first in the first race, you get thirty points and go straight to the final. If you don't, you get significantly fewer points (second place only gets you ten!), and have to race in two very short one-on-one races before going to the final. You'll get some extra points for winning these races, but they really feel like a punishment, since they're so short that they're barely longer than the loading screens that precede them!

 

Firebugs is a decent enough game, but there's just something lacking in it that I can't quite pin down. It's obviously a fast, exciting racing game, but it never really feels like it is. It doesn't really make sense, but against all logic, while playing the game, I quickly felt like I was just tediously going through the motions, waiting for the races to be over, rather than feeling like an engaged, active participant. I guess the best I can do is recommend that you give it a try yourself? It's clearly a competent game, but it just didn't click with me like I feel like it should have.