Outrun (Game Gear)

 It's once again the time of year where I post about a game that's not obscure, and most years, It seems to be a SEGA or SNK game. This time, it's SEGA's turn, with an ambitious handheld port of their classic racing game. Something that the best Game Gear games do is that rather than desperately trying to squeeze a game down from more powerful hardware, they make a version of the game that plays to the Game Gear's strengths.

 

Those strengths being the bright colours, and the fact that it's a system that somehow seems to have really brought the best out of pixel artists who worked on it. So again: rather than just scaling down all the graphics, everything's completely redrawn from scratch, and as a result, it's an amazing-looking game. The backgrounds especially look great, though it feels like there are more stages featuring ancient ruins than in more standard versions of the game.

 

As for the game itself, it plays like Outrun! At its most basic level, at least. You drive against a time limit, there's branching paths, low and high gear, all the standard stuff. There are a few changes compared to earlier versions, though. There's one negative change, so I'll get that out of the way first: you only drive through four stages in the main mode, meaning that there are only ten stages in total, compared to the standard fifteen. There's two additions to kind of make up for it, though. First, you can choose between automatic and manual transmission, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original, and second, there's a whole new racing mode!

 

You can play against a CPU opponent, or a human opponent (has anyone reading this ever played a Game Gear game over link cable, by the way? Pretty much every one at least linked up for Pokemon on Game Boy, but I've never known of anyone linking two Game Gears together). The races are always duels against a couple driving a blue Ferrari, and they take place on your choice of the the game's ten stages. It's a shame that you can only do single races, and there's no option for a single player series or anything, but it's a nice little extra, and it's a surprise it took so long for it to exist, since there'd already been ports to Master System, PC Engin,e and a bunch of microcomputers, plus a Mega Drive port that came out the same day as this one, though that one definitely makes more of an attempt at being like the arcade original, with nothing much extra besides a new BGM track.

 

I think, in the modern day where Hamster Corp. are releasing a new perfect arcade port every week, and everyone has constant access to at least three devices that can emulate arcade games at all times, it's easy for people to write off old home/handheld ports of arcade games as being necessarily inferior, and unworthy of attention. But Game Gear Outrun stands as one of many examples that many of them are interesting and unique creations in their own right.

Samurai Deeper Kyo (Playstation)

 

 Like TV Animation X and Inu-Yasha, this is yet another fighting game released late in the Playstation's life, and based on a then-current anime. Unlike those other two, I've never seen the anime Samurai Deeper Kyo, and I know pretty much nothing about it, except that there's videogame tie-ins on Playstation and Game Boy Advance. If you wanted to be glib and more than a little unfair, you could call this one "a poor man's Last Blade 2". Unfair both because most games pale in comparison to Last Blade 2, and because Samurai Deeper Kyo's not a bad game at all.

 

Another thing it has in common with the Inu-Yasha game is that the controls and special move inputs are a lot simpler than those seen in "proper" fighting games. In fact, there are two control methods, one with single button specials and a truncated movelist in general, plus one that's a little more complex ( but not by much). There's also an assist system, which under default settings, triggers automatically every time your assist meter fills up, which makes things mildly chaotic in a fun way. Also, I don't know the plot explanation for this, but in story mode, a lot of the time, each opponent you beat will be your assist character for the next fight. Is this just the old shonen "defeat equals friendship" trope manifest in videogame form?

 

Other than the basics of the game itself, there's some other points of interest I'd like to address. First, one of the playable characters is a blonde girl with a handgun, who, through her end poses and other flavour animations, seems like she's meant to at least partially be a joke character. But, she's also the only one who brought a gun to a swordfight, and as you'd expect, she's a very effective fighter, with a moveset almost totally made up of projectile attacks. Another character has a spider theme, and can send spiders to attack her opponents, as well as summoning webs. She can even use webs to entangle her opponent's assist meter, though I only did this once and never figured out how to replicate it.

 

Something else that really stands out is the backgrounds. All of them really well-drawn pixel art backdrops, with cherry blossom trees, moonlit nights, soft rain, sunsets, and more. Unfortunately, this is an area that really does draw comparisons to the Last Blade games, since they're so thematically similar. Of course, in such a comparison, Samurai Deeper Kyo falls short: its backgrounds are very sparsely animated, when they're animated at all, and oddly, there's no people or animals in any of them. It gives that a strange, empty feeling. It's only a very minor complaint, but it is something that really stood out to me as I played.

 

Samurai Deeper Kyo isn't anything particularly life-changing or roundbreaking, but it's a decent enough game, and in my experience, you can never have too many decent enough fighting games. It's also one of those games that I feel like would've been a hit among my friends, if we'd have known about and had access to it at the time of its release, even if we didn't ever get to see the anime itself. It's definitely worth your time.