Karous (Dreamcast)

 You might notice that the screenshots on this review are a combination of arcade and Dreamcast shots. This is due to my own technological ineptitude, and it doesn't really matter, since I mostly played the Dreamcast version and that's what I'm writing about, and also they're identical anyway, the only difference being that the Dreamcast version has a fanmade English translation. 

 

Karous is from Milestone, a developer mostly known for shooting games, especially their late-release Dreamcast duology, Radirgy and this one. It came out a year after Radirgy, and the first two things you'll notice about it are how much it doesn't look like its forebear (Radirgy had a very colourful Akihabara-inspired look, while Karous goes for a moodier tone, with muted colours and lots of grey), and how much it appears to play like its forebear. 

 

Like Radirgy, Karous arms you with a gun, a sword, and a shield. The gun and sword are each assigned to a button, and the shield appears in front of you when you aren't using either of the other two. You also, like in Radirgy, have a forcefield that projects outtwards to protect you and continually damage any enemies it touches, and it can be used whenever a meter that incrementally fill every time you damage an enemy or cancel an enemy bullet completely fills up. You can even hit power ups and points items with your sword to change them into different things!

 

What's different, though, is the scoring system, which offers a stark contrast to that seen in the earlier game, which had you constantly trying to fill meters as quickly as possible and collect items and so on, and never taking a break. In Karous, the scoring system and the power-up system are linked. Whenever you use one of your three main weapons, they gain experience, and gradually level up (don't worry, it's still a completely linear STG, so there's no grinding and the levelling is more like Radiant Silvergun than an RPG), increasing their power very slightly every time. You also have a constant multiplyer that's made up of all three weapon levels combined. So again, like Radiant Silvergun: playing for survival and playing for score are one and the same. You want you weapons to be more powerful, and making them so is also how you score more points.

 

Though I was initially put off by the miserable look of the game, and the fact that the 3DS sequel/spin-off Karous: The Beast of Re:Eden was awful, but Karous is a game I just keep going back to! The basic Milestone mechanics are enjoyable as they are, and the ways in which it's less stressful than Radirgy have their own appeal, too. You should definitely give it a try!

Soccer Brawl (Neo Geo CD)

I've recently developed an interest in the extra features added to the CD versions of Neo Geo games, and I've long had an interest in the less popular games on consoles that are themselves pretty niche. Soccer Brawl, though it's definitely one of the less popular Neo Geo CD games, unfortunatelly doesn't have much in the way of extras. All there is is some short animations about an unlucky inventor trying to create a soccer-playing robot, that play as half time entertainment.

 

But the games itself is still pretty good! It's one of only three games developed by short-lived SNK sub-studio Pallas, with their most famous release also being a futuristic sports game, 2020 Super Baseball, which is more famous on account of it being ported to SNES and Mega Drive. Despite the name, though, Soccer Brawl isn't as violent as most future sports games based on soccer. There's regular tackling, as well as two other ways to hurt opponents: you if you don't have the ball, you can hold the kick button for a second and release it to fire an energy blast that can stun a player, and if you do have the ball, the same command kicks the ball super-hard (because all of the players are enhanced cyborgs, of course). This super-hard kick is useful for scoring goals, and for knocking down opponents. 

 

There's a couple of interesting things to note about the above, too. The first is that the game does have friendly fire for all forms of attack, so when things are crowded, you might want to be careful. Or alternatively, if you want to score, you might want to kick the ball with no regard as to who might be in the way. The other thing is that among the eight teams, there are four different kinds of super-kicks, there being two teams able to use each one. I think these are activated if you kick the ball at full strangth more than half the field's length away from your opponent's goal. These might have the ball moving in a big circle while on fire before shooting towards the goal, or the ball might split into to balls that dance around each other as they head toward the goal, and so on. Like a regular super-hard kick, these are very useful in both scoring goals, and incapacitating enemy players.

 

Like I said, it's a lot less violent than most games of this type. In all the games I've played, there's been no times where a player had to leave the game from being too beaten up, let alone players getting killed like you might see in some other titles. There is a nice little detail, though: players that have taken damage a few times will start to have smoke or electric sparks coming off of them, suggesting some damage death, or strain being put upon their cybernetic components. I don't think it actually has any effect on their ability to play, but it is a cool detail. I kind of want to say it's a shame that all the teams are just re-coloured sets of the exact same players (albeit with different supers and presumably different stats), but to be fair: we can't really expect a developer to ome up with eight teams' worth of individual characters from nothing, for a game in a genre whos players almost definitely won't notice or care compared to fighting game fans.

 

Soccer Brawl is a pretty fun game! The only big problems I can really accuse it of are ones that are kind of inherent to being a sports game of this type. If one team gets more than a few points ahead and there isn't much time left in the match, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up, but there's no option to concede (or for the game to automatically end early if there's a score gap of a certain size). Furthermore, if you happen to be the player on the upside of such a score gap, you can pretty much stop trying. If the gap's a few points, it's very easy to get the ball and just run around doing nothing to run out the clock, and if the gap's more than that, you can just stop playing and do something else for a while. Still, I've had some fun with it, and it's a nice little, very nineties sci-fi sports game.