Charge'N Blast (Dreamcast)

 There was a big problem in the world of UK-based Dreamcast magazines. Though the console was mostly a home arcade machine, made by an arcade company, and with many arcade ports in its library, both first and third party, most of these magazines seemed to be staffed by writers with a bizarre pathological hatred for arcade games. Charge N Blast was a game they really, really hated, of course.

 

The big point of contention with a lot of the critics at the time was its length. And yes, if you don't care about actually playing the game, and you just want to credit feed your way to seeing the end credits, it is a very short game. Probably less than half an hour. But I don't know why you would do that. It's not an enjoyable way of playing any kind of game. I find it boring to use continues, as I'm sure I've mentioned numerous times before, and after a couple of hours of playing Charge N Blast, I can semi-reliably get about half way through the game on a single credit.

 

Addressing the follies of generations past aside, how does the game actually play? Pretty well, and, more interestingly: pretty idiosyncratically! It looks like a standard Cabal-alike, which was a long-dead genre in 2000, but it's actually something a little more unique. The best way to describe it would be to describe the control system, which does take a little getting used to at first. You use the d-pad or analogue stick to move your crosshairs around and aim at enemies, and the shoulder buttons to move left and right to dodge enemy attacks. 

 

That's odd enough, but it's shooting where things get even more unusual. Each character (there are three to choose from) has three weapons, and each is assigned to the X, Y, and B buttons. These aren't fire buttons, though, but they start charging the weapon up; the longer you leave it before firing, the more powerful the shot will be. Furthermore, some weapons let you lock onto multiple enemies by moving the crosshair over them while the weapon charges. Then, you press A to actually shoot. So, rather than switching between your three weapons, you instead choose which one you want to charge a few seconds before you actually make each shot.

 

It's a fun and interesting take on the old crosshair shooter, and though it could have been done a few years earlier with sprite scaling, the turn-of-the-century polygons look is fine, too. Like I said, it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it's a fun and unique game, and I recommend giving it a try. Unfortunately, it seems that the Dreamcast has gone the way of the PC Engine in terms of ludicrous game prices, though, so emulate it, unless you're rich uncle moneybags.

@Simple DL Series Vol. 13: The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utensha (3DS)

 I recently made an exciting discovery: there's a 3DS branch of the Simple 2000 Series! Well, I already knew it existed, but for ages, I thought it was limited to a small selection of escape room games. Turns out, there's a whole bunch of the Simple Series' trademark weirdness to be found on the most-modded handheld. This game is even developed by Z-game studio extraordinaires Tamsoft! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was to find this.

 

The most succinct way of describing the game is "Sane Taxi". At a basic conceptual level, it's a lot like SEGA's arcade classic Crazy Taxi, in that oyu drive around a small city, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, being paid a bonus based on how quickly you get your charges to their destination. The difference being that there's very little in the way of craziness present this time around. 

 

You drive at a normal speed, there's no expectation that you perform stunts, or even any opportunity to do so, and the whole city seems to be built on completely flat ground. It's also structured in a more joblike manner, with each stage representing a day's shift, starting at 8AM and ending at 1PM, with a quota of fares to bring in by the day's end. I played eight days, and though the quota increases every day, it's still possible at the point I reached to fill it in about half your alloted time. I'd hoped that maybe after a week, the game might give you a new map to drive around, but nope: it's the same map, with a slight increase in quota every day. Maybe there are more cities later on, but the game's worn my patience out by asking me to drive around the same map eight times in a row.

 

It is a Simple game, and there's plenty of Simple tropes on display, to please those cultured connoisseurs among you. As I already mentioned, it's developed by Tamsoft, and it also takes place in a comfy, mild-weathered low-poly representation of modern-day urban Japan. Furthermore, despite being about a car instead of a person, there's a whole bunch of costume parts to unlock, including normal things like paint colours and custom licenseplates (including one that has a picture of old-school Japanese internet meme Monar!), and less normal things like a giant viking helmet, a bumper shaped like a piano keyboard, and so on.

 

The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utenshu is far from being a great game, or even a good one. But it's not really fair to call it a bad one, either. It is a nice, comfy thing to keep you occupied while watching tv for an hour or so, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play it for any longer than that.