Hit Back (Playstation)

 Hit Back (which seems to be listed on some piracy sites as "3D Bouncing Ball", "3D Bouncing Ball Puzzle" and maybe also "Ball Mayhem") is a great example of a game with a simple and obvious concept, that asks the question "why hadn't anyone done this earlier?", and then through playing it, you quickly find out why. The concept is "Arkanoid in 3D", as the game sees you standing at one end of a corridor hitting a ball in the hopes of hitting all the blocks (in trial mode) or enemies (in story mode), without letting the ball go past you.

 

To be fair though, the game has a few problems, and only one of them is conceptual. If you think about it for a while, you'll probably figure it out, but: the worst part of an Arkanoid-like is the part at the end of each stage where you're stuck watch the ball tediously bounce up and down the screen until you can get it to hit the final block so you can move on. That problem becomes so much worse when there's not only a third dimension for the ball to rattle around in, but also when the "blocks" are moving enemies, who can also move around in three dimensions! You're left feeling the cells in your body die one by one as you see the ball and your last target pass each other by like ships in the night for the fiftieth time in a row. So, at a conceptual level, the game doesn't really work very well. It gets worse, though!

 

The above is also exacerbated by various technical problems the game has, each of which contributes to making it even less fun to play! I'll start with the collision detection. It's just bad. Part of it lies in the hitboxes just making no sense at all, as the ball will hit enemies that it wasn't even close to actually touching, while passing harmlessly through others. Part of it must be the result of something strange going on under the hood, though, especially with regards to the player characters' interactions with the ball. Sometimes, if your character is close enough to the ball, they'll reach out an arm to hit it, and that's fine. Sometimes, they won't do that. Sometimes, the ball hitting your character's torso counts as hitting it back into the field, and sometimes it doesn't. Most frustrating of all is the vertical element. Sometimes the ball goes over your head, and you have to jump to hit it. But sometimes you don't have to jump to hit it. Furthermore, sometimes, jumping will specifically miss the ball. There's no consistent rule as to how high the ball has to be for any of these conditions, they all just seem to happen at random.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend seeking this game out at all. If it worked properly, it'd be mind-numbingly boring, and as it is, it's a pointless, playable exercise in hoping the code likes you each time the ball comes back. The character designs are weird and cute, though, and some of the music is okay.

World Rally Fever: Born on the Road (PC)

 It's very clear that the developers of World Rally Fever loved arcade racing games, especially those of the sprite scaling variety made by SEGA's AM2. They've really gone all the way into capturing the aesthetic of a Japanese arcade game of the late eighties or early nineties, even down to a nice Neogeo-esque intro before the title screen. The game was itself developed in Belgium, so it can go alongside the various works of Gaelco as being a European love letter to Japanese arcades. There's even a character who looks just like Joe from Tsukai GANGAN Koshinkyoku, and another who looks like Cheng Sinzan from the Fatal Fury series!

 

As well as their tributary nature, the graphics are just genuinely amazing. I'm not sure if they're actually using sprite scaling, or actual 3D polygons with pixel art textures designed to look like sprite scaling, but they look incredible either way. In a time when so many developers were making primitive attempts at photorealism using technology that couldn't hope to offer it, this game decided to push the aesthetic concepts of previous years to new heights. Such a shame that they did it in a game stuck on the PC, in a time when people playing PC games seemed to be even more "proud" of how their games were so much more sophisticated and boring than silly lowbrow arcade games. I wonder why it never got released on Playstation or Saturn, actually: Team17 were releasing games on those systems.

 

It's all slightly academic in the end, though, since as nice as the game looks, it's unfortunately not very enjoyable to play. Though the characters do handle differently, it feels like all of them take ages to accelerate to a decent speed. Which is something you'll definitely notice, as there are a lot of obstacles that will just bring you to a dead stop if you so much as scrape against them. Furthermore, something that's happened to me multiple times is crashing into the roadside barrier, clipping through it, getting stuck on the other side, then having to repeatedly crash into it to gradually clip back onto the road. There's a jump button (and on some stages, obstacles that go across the entire width of the road, necessitating its use), but you need to build up speed to actually put it to use, and in the off-road hinterlands, that's impossible.

 

These couple of flaws, along with the fact that the game never really feels like you're going particularly fast, even at full speed, are unfortunately gamekillers. It really is a shame, too, as this is a beautiful game, aestheticlly speaking. It just doesn't live up to that mechanically.