Queen Fighter 2000 (Game Boy Color)

Also known as Nv Wang Ge Dou 2000, this is an unlicensed fighting game that bucks the usual trend by having an all-original cast of characters, rather than being a knock-off of an existing fighting game, or a bizarre mish-mash of random characters and real life people, like Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII. Well, it goes half way to bucking the usual trend, at least. The characters themselves, in design and name are all original, but if you look closely, you'll see what lies beneath.

 

What the developers of this game have done is trace over a load of characters from various Neo Geo Pocket Colour fighting games with their own original character designs, with the results being interesting, at the very least. Some of the characters' previous lives are instantly recognisable from just their pre-fight animations, like the ones based on Ryu and Athena, while others, like the one based on Felicia have been re-interpreted so wildly that they're pretty hard to clock. I really like this aspect of the game, to be honest: Ryu re-imagined as a big, strong woman, Iori Yagami in the form of a moody tough girl, and Nakoruru as a knife-wielding maid are all pretty cool. Also, the character that has Athena's animations for some reason looks just like Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura, and has different costumes for each of her special moves.

 

As for how it plays, it's not a disappointment there, either! The Game Boy is a system with more good fighting games than you might expect, thanks to all the great Takara-published ports of arcade fighters in the mid-nineties, but Queen Fighter 2000 stands tall among them. It's a little choppy, maybe thanks to the big sprites that were originally intended for the more powerful NGPC hardware, but other than that, it's still pretty fast, the special moves work like you'd expect, and it's just generally a fun little game. The lack of any proper story is a little disappointing considering the all-original cast, but I guess it'd be in Chinese if it were there anyway. But there's single player and vs modes, and you can play as single characters or teams of three.

 

This game wasn't really playable without a (now very rare) original cartridge, since like a lot of unlicensed Game Boy games (for example School Fighter, which I covered a few years ago), but thanks to the efforts of the tireless pirate preserver Taizou Hori over on Handheld Underground, now everyone can play it! And I recommend you do, it's good. It won't change your world or anything, but it looks cool and it's a lot of fun, and isn't that really all you need?

Safari Race (SG1000)

 Back in 2018, I reviewed the SG-1000 racing game GP World, and recognised it as a predecessor to SEGA's more well-known racing games Hang On and Outrun. In trying out Safari Race, I've found an even earlier part of the family tree. As well as being a very early into-the-screen time-attack racing game, you can see the DNA in a few of the specific features shared between it, GP World and Outrun.

 

The most obvious is the gears: Outrun has two gears, that work just like you'd expect in a racing game, as does GP World. Safari Race kind of has two gears, but implemented in a way emblematic of most of the changes made between it and its antecendents: it's slightly more complucated and strange than it needs to be. In Safari Race, you press up to accelerate when your speed is less than eighty kilometers per hour, and somewhat counter-intuitively, down to accelerate when your speed goes above that level. So rather than switching fears in the way you might expect, low gear and high gear have different acceleration controls. (The two buttons on the SG-1000 controller are mapped to braking and making a weird noise for no obvious reason, respectively).

 

Like GP World, Safari Race also has the quirk of your time limit being measured by a clock that counts upwards towards the limit, rather than starting at the limit and counting down to zero. Safari Race is actually more complicated than its antecendants, too, as the time limit is only one of three possible lose coniditons in the game! You can also get a game over by crashing four times (represented by four spare tyres, as that is the only repair you need, whether you've crashed into a rock, a car, or an elephant), or by running out of fuel. Fuel is used up at a drastically increased rate the faster you go, though of course you can't possibly get to the end of each stage within the time limit if you don't go as fast as possible as often as possible, so there are fuel pumps dotted around the stages.

 

There's a couple of weird quirks regarding the fuel pumps. For a start, just like the various obstacles, their appearance seems to be procedurally generated, and since you use them by stopping in front of them (a painfully slow process), sometimes a pump will be unusable because a rock spawned in the place where you're supposed to stop. Also, whatever bit of code decides how often they should appear seems to space them out based on how much time has passed, rather than how much distance you've travelled. I guess this makes sense from a game balance perspective, if you try to think of the game taking place in an actual world, it paints a very strange picture of that world.

 

Safari Race is one of those games that's not particularly fun to play, but it is interesting to have a look at, and compare to where the ideas presented in it would later go. It's an especially interesting example of the phenomena, because of how later iterations of the concept simplified the formula, rather than complicating it, a decision that was entirely to the later games' benefit. So, it's a historical curiosity and not much more, then.