Disk Station MSX #00

This is the first in what will hopefully be a continuing series of posts about Compile's Disk Station series of disk magazines. It'll run until either I run out of disk stations or I get bored of it. If the latter doesn't happen, it should run a pretty long time!
I'll mostly be covering the games, because my inability to read Japanese renders the magazine features and other such things useless to me. I might also, on occasion, talk about the pixel art galleries and graphics demos the disks contain, should any of them catch my eye. I'll also be alternating between the MSX and PC98 releases, to add a bit of variety.
So, this is the very first Disk Station release ever! It contains a playable demo of the shooting game Aleste, the start of what would become a famous and revered series. The demo lets you play for a couple of minutes before fading to black and returning to the title screen. I'm sure there are many many places you can read about the Aleste games online, so I won't go into any more detail here.
There's also a non-playable demo of Brain Grey's RPG, Last Armageddon. I'm not especialy fond of RPGs at the best of times, but the fact that this game is Japanese-only, coupled with 80s computer game difficulty (at least, I assume this is the case) makes me not too bothered about playing this. It does have some really awesome artwork in the intro, though!
The only full game on the disk is the classic Hustle Chumy. This game, in case you haven't played it, concerns a sewer rat who heads to the surface to find food to bring home, while avoiding the attention of the various surface dwelling creatures. These creatures include rabbits, people, turtles, bats and an invincible robot. Unfortunately, the really cool-looking cat enemy from the SG-1000 version is absent. The game is pretty good. You wander the stages, collecting the food and shooting/avoiding the enemies. The stage is over when you collect all the food and return home. Your movement slows for every piece of food you pick up, but you can go back home to empty at any time. The disadvantage being that the stages have both a time limit and a time bonus upon completion. You'll have to choose between risking death at the hands of your various enemies due to slower movement, or sacrificing your bonus for the sake of safety.
So! There's only one disk for this DS, but they still managed to pack quite a lot in there! Just think how great the later releases with 3-5 disks will be!

Two Tenkaku (Playstation)

I read somewhere that this game was the winner of the highest award in the Second Digital Entertainment Program (DEP '94) Pro Course. The problem is, the only reference I can find to this program is the same quote regarding this game winning at it, copied and pasted into various pointless game database sites. So for all I know, DEP '94 might not even be a real thing.
Other internet results for this game are mainly made up of scattered forum posts, in which people express their opinion of it. Most of thoe opinions are negative. That's entirely reasonable, too! The game is far from being a must-play classic! It doesn't have an interesting scoring system, the graphics are kind of drab (although the first stage has some nice pixel cityscapes, if you like that sort of thing), and it's hard without
feeling like a fun challenge. To top it all off, it has an incredibly ugly CG intro FMV. Despite all these criticisms, I actually kind of like this game! Or at least, I got mildly addicted to it. If I put it on, I know i'll be playing at least few credits before I get bored and do something else. And the presentation isn't all bad! The title cards for each stage have an unusual "ominous Buddhist chanting" thing going on. The Buddhist theme also finds its way into the graphics in a small way: one of the two bomb types summons a giant Buddha made of fire that shoots fireballs about the screen. (Note: I am not a religious scholar. If I'm wrong and the chanting and the fire guy are from another religion, feel free to correct me.)
I should probably describe how the game actually plays in a little more detail, right? Well, there isn't really a great deal of detail to go into. It's a pretty generic shooter. There are three ships to choose from (I prefer the blue one, as it shoots a cool Dodonpachi-esque laser when you've collected a couple of power-ups), power-ups, bombs, no special scoring system, blah blah blah. In summary, I liked this game, but don't feel like you're missing anything if you never get to play it.