Saturday, 14 January 2012

Choro Q Jet: Rainbow Wings (Playstation)

I've been meaning to review this for well over a year now, but for some reason, I'm only just now getting round to it. Now that I've built it up like that, I'm sure you'll all be disappointed at how this isn't a classic masterpiece of games writing. Waah.
Obviously, it's a spin-off of the well known Choro Q series of racing games/ talking car RPGs (CaRPGs?), and it's about military aircraft in general, not just jets. Breaking from the usual Choro Q style, the aircraft actually have human pilots, too! There's a bunch of characters/aircraft to choose from, including a bunny-girl in an attack helicopter, a punk in a stealth bomber and a Sakura Wars knock-off in a cherry blossom painted plane. Other miscelleny includes the usual stuff you get in the Playstation games about which I write, like an animated intro, blue skies, and so on.
The game plays like a combination of the All-Range Mode stages from Lylat Wars, and the lock-on missiles from the Afterburner games. You fly around the smallish stages, shooting down enemies with either your lock-on missiles or your non-lock-on machine gun (which can also be used to shoot down enemy missiles, again like in Afterburner!) until you fulfill the target, at which point "WARNING!" will appear on the screen, and the boss fight will start. The boss doesn't just arrive in the stage, though, rather the game does a slightly awkward feeling thing of having the stage reset, but with the enemies all gone and the boss present.
The stage targets vary from destroying a particular building or all of a certain kind of enemy, to destroying all the enemies within a time limit, among other things.
The early boss fights are often very easy, since for a lot of them, as long as you can keep them in your sights, you can fire all your missiles as fast as you can push the button, making short work of their health bars. Of course, this changes as the game goes on, and later bosses are almost chellenging.
The game never seems to actually get hard, though. And though it's fun to play, eventually, the fact that the missions aren't very hard and, despite the variety of objectives, also play very similarly to each other, you'll probably get bored of the game before you complete it. It is fun for a while, though.

Friday, 6 January 2012

Bubble Hero 2 (PC)

Okay, so this review is going to be terrible filler for a few reasons.
Reason one: It had been a while since the last post, and unfortunately, I haven't really been playing anything obscure enough to be worth posting here.
Reason two: There's no screenshots because all the screenshots I took of this game came out all corrupt and strange. This is especially a shame because the graphics were pretty much the only good thing about the game.
Reason three: I could only actually stand to play a few credits of this awful, awful game.

So, it's a Bubble Bobble rip-off for PC. When you first load it up, you might be impressed with its graphics. There's no shame in that, it's got nice big colourful sprites and... nice big colourful sprites. As I mentioned before, that's everything good about the game.
There is no background music, even though there's an option to turn music on and off. There are two buttons like you'd expect from a Bubble Bobble clone: jump and blow. But the jump button only works about three-quarters of the time.
And all these things are leading up to the main event of this games problems, and one that's ruined a previous chinese game I reviewed: the first boss is huge, it's faster than you, it will camp right next to your respawn point to kill you again and it takes a ton of hits to kill. How many hits? I'll never know, as I gave up after four or five attempts. It's even worse than the bosses in Adventurous Boy.
So there's Bubble Hero 2. A legitimately awful game.