Leucistic Wyvern (X Box 360)

Looking at this game's logo, and the dragon the player controls in the game, you'll probably think the same that I did: that it's some kind of flagrant no-budget Panzer Dragoon "homage". That's an innaccurate thought, though: while the creator was obviously a SEGA fan (the fonts used in-game are also really similar to the fonts seen in AM2 arcade games in the mid-90s, particularly bring the Virtua Cop games to mind), it actually plays more like Space Harrier.

There's none of the locking-on seen in Panzer Dragoon, it's all about flying around (while travelling in a straight line, obviously.) while shooting enemies and trying your hardest not to collide with them, their bullets or any of the bits of scenery jutting out of the ground. The scenery is the only real bad point of the game. It's hard to describe, but for some reason, it's really difficult to judge the positions of the obstacles and the player in relation to each other. It's worst of all in the bonus stages, which have points bonuses floating in the middle of large rings, and despite them being bonuses stages, the player can still lose health during them.

I'd also like to talk about the presentation: the graphics are a strange mix of low poly models, with the sharpness that comes with modern HD console games. There's a minor problem that's actually similar to the SNES game I recently covered, Bishin Densetsu Zoku, in that there's a kind of sparseness in the environments, compared to its SEGA-produced inspiration, and being in 3D makes the stages look like completely empty, incredibly vast wasteland stretching out for hundreds of miles. The music and sound effects are a bit of a weak point, though. The music, though inoffensive, just seems to be there, while the sounds effects seem to have been recorded at different levels of volume.

Though Leucistic Wyvern has a few problems (and it's definitely no contender for Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi's XBLIG crown), it's a fun game to play, and it's definitely worth the 60-something pence it costs.

Bishin Densetsu Zoku (SNES)

Bishin Densetsu Zoku is a game set in Japan,'s distant future of 2010. As far as I can tell (without being able to actually read any of the plot), it's about a boyfriend and girlfriend (either of whom can be selected for play, though the boy is a better fighter) on a fun futuristic roadtrip, who have their date ruined by a bunch of mean goons. Unlike most games with futuristic roadtrips as the main centrepiece of their plots, Bishin doesn't focus on vehicular combat: though the bulk of the game is driving, and there are enemy drivers who can be defeated through aggressive, repeated ramming, the main business of fighting foes takes place in short beat em up sections.

Along with the game's hybrid structure, the other cool idea it has is the passage of time. Every stage has a time limit, but rather than just be a generic number of seconds counting down to zero, each stage starts at a time of day, and the destination must be reached before a certain time. These times also provide contiunity: stage one starts at 9am, and the end must be reached before midday. Stage two goes from midday to 4pm, and the third stage from 4 till 8, with the sun gradually setting as time passes. Time passes at a rate of roughly one game minute for every two real-world seconds. When the player crashes their car, a short beat em up section starts, in which the player must defeat a small group of enemies (who, oddly seem to be almost exclusively female) as the clock still runs.

Unfortunately, despite having all these cool and interesting ideas crammed into it, their execution lets Bshin Densetsu Zoku down. The driving sections are not linear, having the player find their own way from point A to point B on the map. The problem lies in the fact that not only do all the roads look exactly the same, without even Outrun-esque roadside objects to break the monotony, but the on-screen minimap doesn't display the layout of the roads. The result of this is long, frustrating minutes driving round in circles, often finding yourself back at the start of the stage with scarce time remaining.

The beat em up sections aren't much better, either. Though they don't have any massive flaws like the driving sections, they're just kind of bland: the player doesn't have many attacks, there's only one small background per stage (though the boss fights get their own backgrounds, too), and the enemies all look the same, even between different stages.

It's really a shame that this game's not very fun to play, as the concept is cool, and it does have a lot of good ideas, they're just executed poorly. As it stands, I have to say that playing Bishin Densetsu Zoku quickly starts to feel like a frustrating chore, and it's not really worth bothering with.