Fearless Pinocchio (Arcade)

 It had been a while since I last updated MAME, but a couple of months ago, Fearless Pinocchio caught my eye, and got me to finally undertake that minor chore. A previously unknown 2D fighting game by IGS with cute, stylised graphics suddenly appearing on the landscape would naturally get my attention. It's kind of a bittersweet game to learn of, though, as it's not actually a fighting game, but a machine for dispensing the tickets that are so important to all the depressing seaside arcades that have replaced fun games with low-quality prizes.

 

Still, it's at least pretending to be a fighting game, and there are some things worthy of mention. It's single player-only, and there's only one playable character, the eponymous Pinocchio. He's on a quest to rescue Geppeto, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook, for some reason. Hook's the last boss, and to get to him, you've first got to fight two of his henchbeings, randomly selected from a pool of five. There's a genie, a witch, a grim reaper, the Queen of Hearts' card army, and the Big Bad Wolf. All the characters are well-drawn and animated, and full of personality.

 

The stages are also full of cool little details, even if there's only four of them shard amongst the six opponents. The woods have a little mushroom/candy house where Little Red Riding Hood and the three little pigs apparently live together, the graveyard has the witch's hut (I guess she and Death are neighbours?), plus a beanstalk with a depressed-looking giant watching the fight. Wonderland's the weakest stage, looking a lot like it's cobbled together from clipart, and Hook's ship has his pirate underlings, and far in the back, a Peter Pan who looks dangerously close to Disney's version standing around and doing nothing to help.

 

You fight using a joystick and one attack button, and while you do have specials and supers, they just seem to be activated by holding a direction and pressing the button a lot. I do really like the super where Pinocchio does the samurai movie thing where he dashes past his opponent while drawing a weapon, with the opponent taking damage after a second or two's delay, but his weapon is a big wooden mallet rather than a sword. The fights have only one round, and no matter what the situation is, if time runes out, you lose. I guess, true to its nature as "not a proper game", it just exists to have the shortest possible time between coin inputs.

 

It's really a shame there's no "legitimate" version of this game. A lot of work clearly went into designing and animated the characters, and six playable characters plus a boss wouldn't be too bad for a first entry in a series, especially if they added a background for each one, and especially if the characters looked as good as they do in the game that exists. I guess the best we can hope for is that someone rips all the sprites and puts something together in MUGEN or something. As always with this kind of shady gambling game, I think it's worth playing a few credits in MAME just to see it, though I don't think it's worth putting any money in if you encounter it in the wild. Or maybe it is? I don't know if this is some kind of emulation error or something, but every time I played, no matter how well or how poorly I did, I always got a screen telling me I'd won ten tickets. If a real machine is the same, it might be a cheap/quick way to grind for that cheap plastic tat upon which you've got your eye.

Magicus (PC)

 I bought this game a few years ago, because the PC version also comes with a download of the Android version, and at the time, my phone was still just about capable of playing games, and I was interrested to see what stuff of interest might exist in the world of pre-paid phone games (a subject I'll get back to later). It's an RPG in which the battles take the form of match-three puzzles, but there's surprisingly a lot more to it than that.

 

When you enter a battle, the enemies will be at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half wil be filled with gems. Clicking any gem makes it disappear and also deals a little damage to the enemies. Getting three or more in a row makes all of the lined up gems disappear and deals more damage. After playing a while, you'll also get spells, which have various effects like damaging the enemy, healing you, or changing what's happening in your little gempit. Each spell has an associated colour, and to charge a use of the spell, you have to click or line up a certain number of gems in that colour. Around the same time as you get spells, you'll also get special gems. These are different-looking gems, each only appearing as a certain colour, and they all have special spell-like effects when cleared as part of a line.

 

Aside from battling, the main gimmick of the game is its one-dimensional dungeon design. You traverse the overworldby just clicking the name of a location you want to go to, but in dungeings, you can go backwards and forwards. Every step you take has a chance of causing a random encounter. This could be a battle, a trap, a travelling merchant, a fishing hole, or one of a bunch of other things. So, the main point of difficulty is resource and stat management. And there are a lot of both of these things. You've got items, experience points, coins, leaves, fish, lottery tickets and more. This might sound overwhelming, but they're all introduced very gradually so you aren't overwhelmed.

 

Some of you might also be thinking that this sounds a lot like a free-to-play game with dark patterns and so on, and I do agree: while playing it, I was heavily reminded of the time I've spent in the past playing Immortal Taoists. There is, however, one important difference that I've already mentioned: this is a game that you buy, and which contains no microtransactions. The problem with free-to-play games that are structured like that isn't just the cost of the microtransactions themselves, but the fact that the developers are financially incentivised to design the games in such a way as to make the microtransactions more attractive: make it possible, but tedious to make progress, give players daily login bonuses so they're hooked on comig back to the game, and so on. It's known as "Dark Patterns" in game design.

 

Using Immortal Taoists as the example, because it's the game of this type with which I'm the most familiar, the setting draws new players in, and the carrot of endless character progression is what keeps them coming back and either watching ads or paying money. It is endless, too. The "Live Service" nature of the games means they can always raise the grapes every time player get close to grabbing them (the player is Tantalus in this analogy, and the game developer is Tartarus). Magicus offers all the positive stuff those free-to-play games, but without the negatives: dying in a dungeon is a very minor setback, you're only shown new equipment when you're at least a significant part of the way to being able to obtain it, and above all: you're given a singular long-term goal at the start of the game (obtain seven magic orbs to save the land from monsters), that has a clear and definite endpoint. I kind of wish there were more games like this! There are interesting elements in free-to-play games, but they're poisoned by the psychologically harmful structure of those games.

 

There's other positive things I can mention about the game, too: its cute low polygon count graphics, your lovable companions and the slowburn bond that grows between them, the fact that though it's a first person game where your character is never shown, it's still canonical that your character is a woman, reflected in the equipment you can obtain and more interestingly (though only occasionally), in the attitudes various characters have in addressing you. Anyway, I definitely recommend Magicus, it's a unique, interesting, charming, and fun little game, and you can get it from DLSite for an absolute pittance.