Simple DS Series vol. 39: The Shouboutai (DS)

Time for another Tamsoft game, and I don't think I've mentioned this before, but despite most of their DS output being in the Simple Series, Tamsoft seemed to have an uncanny nack for making polygon graphics on the system. The Shouboutai is no exception to this, bringing some non-violent third person shooting action to the table.

I remember one of the advertising taglines for Sonic Team's Burning Rangers stating that it had "Thrills without the kills", as it was a 3D action game about rescuing people and fighting fires, and The Shouboutai treads similar ground, though in present day Japan, rather than the futuristic labs and space stations of Burning Rangers.

As well as having great graphics, The Shouboutai also manages to simulate the dual analogue-based controls of console third person shooters, with the d-pad or face buttons being used to move around, and the touchscreen being used to turn you character, as well as to aim and shoot. Obviously, since this is a game about firefighting, different kinds of water hoses take the place of guns, and fire takes the place of enemies. Though the first few stages feature normal fire, that mostly just stays still and slowly grows if you don't put it out, you'll soon be up against fires that move around and even shoot smaller fires at the player. There's even boss fights, against such foes as giant angry chemical fires, and burning out cars that are somehow driving up and down the street.

There's some downsides to this game, though they're not big ones. The main one is an issue that crops up in a lot of Japanese budget games, even the big names like Oneechanbara and Earth Defence Force: There are a lot of stages, but not so many maps. So you have stages that just take place in different areas of the same map, with the rest blocked off. There only seems to be three maps in The Shouboutai: a suburban street, the corridors of a hotel, and a factory/warehouse type place. There's also the fact that the game can get a little repetitive, even though there are a few different mission objectives that crop up, from simply putting out every fire, to rescuing civilians. These are the only real faults, and neither of them are significant problems.

I definitely recommend giving The Shouboutai a look, even though there are plenty of 3D shooters on more modern handhelds, it's always nice to see something like this squeezed on to low-powered hardware. And if you want more violence in your TPS, there are a couple of alternative options that I'll cover at some point in the future (and if i remember rightly, they're also developed by Tamsoft).

Robbeary (Amiga)

I recently had a minor revelation regarding this game: for years, I'd assumed the title was pronounced like "Robb-ear-y", which is meaningless and makes no sense, but the player's character is a teddy bar, so obviously, it's meant to be "Rob-bear-y", which is still pretty stupid, but at least makes a little sense. Anyway, it's a single screen platformer about collecting stuff and scoring points.

Yeah, your bear goes around these pretty simply laid out stages and collects every giants fruit they contain before going on to the next stage. Obviously, there's also a bunch of enemies running around trying to stop you, and one touch from them kills you. Unusually, and more typical of "collect everything" maze games than platformers, you have no reliable means of defence against the enemies. Other than randomly appearing power ups that turn them into points items, all you can do is try your best to avoid them. To make this even harder, there's a timer, and when it runs out, all the enemies go into cocoons and hatch out twice as fast as they were before. If you take too long finishing a stage, this can even happen more than once!

Not only are the items that appear random, but so are the movements of the enemies: they just randomly walk back and forth, sometimes stopping for a second or walking off the edge of platforms. These things make the game not only hard, but dependent almost entirely on luck. You can't form  a strategy to make sure you get a power up in the nick of time, because you don't know when or where the power ups will appear, and you can't learn the enemy patterns to work out the best way around them because the enemies don't have any patterns. It's only when one of the random items (a green key, not to be confused with the gold key that appears at the end of the stage or the silver key which apparently does nothing at all) opened a door to a bonus stage that I realised that there's a chance that the developer had misinterpreted Bubble Bobble's elaborate system of secret items, room and stages as being random and tried to copy it.

Now I know that there have been a few games covered on this very blog where I've said that randomness has ruined them, but I should clarify that randomness isn't an inherently bad thing. Some of my favourite games use a lot of it: Shiren the Wanderer, One-Way Heroics and Minecraft being but three. But you'll notice that none of those games are arcade (or arcade-style) score-based action http://games.In games like this, scoring and progress should always be as close as possible to 100% about skill, knowledge and understanding of the game mechanics on the part of the player, and random elements totally ruin that.

Though it holds a little bit of nostalgia value for me (it was in a huge box of pirated games that came with the pre-owned Amiga I got for Christmas as a kid one year), I definitey can't recommend that you bother playing Robbeary.