Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.