Bad Boy Brother (Switch)

 This game has another title, and once you know it, you'll also know why I was so excited to pre-order it as soon as I knew it existed: Simple Series for Switch vol. 5: Yankii Bros! The Simple series is back (and has been for four previous entries)! With a beat em up about juvenile delinquents! It's almost like they made this game specifically because they knew I was finally going to get a Switch this year or something.

 

It's not just in name only, either, as this is a game that really does keep the Simple spirit alive, for all the good and bad that implies. It's a game with several (too many?) ideas that all tie together well thematically that was also clearly a passion project for its creators. Also, it's got a whole bunch of randomness and grinding, and a ton of stuff to unlock, including both stat upgrades and new special moves. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad. And also: videogames are a creative medium, and most of the things we consider good practice are "rules" rather than "laws". (Of course there are some exceptions: real money shops and gambling are always indefensible and to a game's detriment, as are the dark patterns present in almost every modern phone game. I can't imagine there ever being exceptions there.)

 

What the game is is a beat em up, that uses a vague roguelike structure to facilitate some traditional Simple asset reuse and playtime extension. Each stage has five segments, the first four of which will see you fighting many enemies. They'll either give you a quota of enemies to beat, or an amount of time you have to survive/beat as many enemies as you can. The fifth segment will always be a boss fight, though the bosses are randomly chosen from a small pool for each stage. Before each stage, you'll be dealt a hand of twelve mahjongg tiles, which correspond to various stat and ability uprades. The upgrades increase exponentially when you get matching tiles, and even more if you're able to form scoring hands with them. After each segment, you're given a chance to swap out tiles from your hand with a random selection of four. After you complete a whole stage, you keep all the tile and hand-based upgrades you had at the end of it, then get dealt a whole new hand to get further upgrades.

 

Furthermore, there are aliases. Theses are made at random when you score triple sevens on the roulette at the top of the screen, which turns when you fill up a meter by hitting enemies a lot. They're made at random from words that enemies "drop" (also at random) as you're fighting them. They're always made up of an adjective half that determines their effect, and a noun half that applies a multiplier to the effect. Also they're always nonsense like "Jobless Chihuahua" or "House-Moving Sinbad", because of the multiple layers of randomness involved in their formation. There's also a shop to access between runs, where you use coins earned by defeating lots of enemies to buy more advantageous tiles to add to the pool, special moves performed by bosses you've beaten, and more.

 

Like I said, there are exceptions to many "rules" of what makes a good game, and while I usually hate randomness and upgrades in action games, Bad Boy Brother feels good enough that I can easily overlook them here. It's also admirably committed to its setting. You might expect a budget game that happens to include an English translation to be dry and functional, but all the text, even stuff like the game telling you it's loading or saving your savefile is written "in character", with a little cartoony tough guy edge to it. The most insane (and probably most expensive) bit of flavour is that there's a constant expository rap going on as you play, too. It's always in Japanese, and you'll be too busy playing the game to read the subtitles, but they are there, and it's just another sign of the commitment and passion the developers had for this game.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but I really like this game, and I enthusiastically recommend it. It's just a ton of fun to play! It's got a worldwide release as a download, but even if you import a cartridge copy from Japan, it includes English and Chinese language options. Not only is it a good game, but it also gives me hope that the Simple series is truly back, and in the hands of people who are willing to keep up its silly, fun, experimental tradition.

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love Basketball (Saturn)

 I saw some gifs of this game on Bsky a few months ago, and it immediately made its way on my to-play list. You can see from the screenshots that it looks pretty good, but it looks even better in motion! Big, well-drawn sprites that were it not for the concessions made for the purposes of being in a game, could feasibly have been taken straight from animation cels, with animation to match. But, of course: there are many anime tie-ins that look great and don't have much else going for them, so is this game any good?

 

Before answering that question, there are some other things I really need to address. The main one being my lack of interest in basketball, and by extension, my ignorance regarding things like tactics and team positions and so on. Because even though this game is a tie-in to an anime about basketball rather than a real basketball league, it still takes a pretty in-depth approach to the game. Between selecting a team and starting a match, you'll be asked to assign team members to positions, and to select formations for your team to take when they're on the offence and when they're defending. So I can't really speak to how well the game handles these things, beyond saying that it's pretty funny that if you pick Shohoku High School's team, and just go with everyone in default positions, Sakuragi is left on the bench

 

Actually in-game, it all seems to work pretty well. There's a lot of sprite scaling going on as players run towards or away from the camera, which looks great. You use the d-pad for moving around like you'd expect, and the A, B, and C buttons do different things depending on whether or not you've got the ball. With the ball, A dribbles, B passes, and C shoots (I think, but I'm not sure, that shooting relies on some kind of probability equation involving your player's stats, their distance from the basket, and how long they've had the ball with them.). While if you don't have it, A gets in the way of the guy with the ball, B jumps to try and block their shots, and C tries to take the ball off of them. 

 

The camera always looks in one direction, with the court stretching off into the distance, one basket all the way at the back, one right at the front. It keeps things simple, and it always being at the same angle allows for the aforementioned detailed, well-animated sprites. I think there might have been an arcade basketball game that used a similar set up, but I'm not sure about that. It works, and like I keep mentioning: it looks great! The menus look a little less great, but in a very charming, very nineties kind of way: lots of multi-coloured WordArt on display, for example.

 

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love BasketBall is a pretty decent little game. I can't play it well at all, and haven't won a single match yet, but I've come close a few times! One thing I should also mention is that not only does it allow you to play matches with twenty minute long halves, but if you want to play story mode, you don't get a choice, and you'll have to play these insanely long matches, presumably racking up massive scores over time, too. For as much as I've praised the game, I haven't been able to get through even half of one of these real time matches. But there is a versus CPU mode (and a two player versus mode, of course) that lets you play with more reasonable settings. I think it's at least worth giving a try if you're curious, or if like any other normal person with good taste, you love sprite scaling.