Cellophanes (Playstation)

 Something that's pretty interesting, but doesn't come along very often are compilations of fake old games. I think everyone can probably agree that the pinnacle of this concept is represented by the two Game Center CX tie-in games for DS, both of which being collections of faux-Famicom (Fauxmicom?), faux-Super famicom (Super Fauxmicom?), and faux-Mega Drive (I don't have a satisfying portmanteau for this one, sorry) games, most of which are good, or even great, and would have been worth buying on their own. Cellophanes (erroneously listed on some websites as "Serofans") goes back much further than the Famicom for its inspiration, though, being a collection of homages to the primitive, maybe even rudimentary beginnings of Japanese consumer videogames.

 

There are twelve games in Cellophanes, with their inspirations ranging from the mid-seventies to the early eighties. Five of them are very simple breakout-like games, with the first being specifically a clone of Nintendo's 1979 plug-and-play game Block Kuzushi (it's also from this and a couple of the other games whence the compilation draws its title: these games had black and white graphics, with colour provided by cellophane overlays to attach to your TV screen. Cellophanes obviously just has colour pretending to be overlays, such is the mighty power of the Playstation.). There isn't much to differentiate these five from each other. One of them has dancing penguins, another has vector graphics, that's about it.

 

Then there's a few games that are all somewhat unique (from each other, at least). Mystery Planet is a spaceship game with very heavy Asteriods-like intertia, where each stage has you avoiding walls, shooting enemies, and collecting numbered panels in order. Sea Fighter has you controlling a submarine at the bottom of the screen, shooting at a battleship at the top. Between you is a different set of sea creatures for each stage, each behaving differently: some just get in the way of your shots, some shoot at you, some move erratically so you constantly have to avoid them, etc. Carnival Hunt is just a clone of SEGA's 1980 arcade game Carnival. Dragon Walker is something a little like Zoom/Amidar/Painter, where you make squares by walking across lines and avoiding enemies. You can breath fire, but the meter that allows you to do so charges very slowly, and it doesn't score you any points. 

 

Finally, there are three recreations of old-style electro-mechanical light gun games, themed around cowboys, jungle animals, and tanks, respectively. These look a lot prettier than all the other games, since they're pretending to be old painted toys rather than old videogames, with the jungle game having some particularly nicely-realised animals (for you to repeatedly shoot and kill). There's a lot of talk online saying that these games are actually compatible with the GCon-45, which is cool, but which I'm not able to try out myself.

 

As well as the games themselves, there's an "Akiba Parts Shop" menu, which allows you to unlock extra options for all of the games, presumably the thematic conceit here being that for these early games, modifications would actually need to be done to the physical hardware for this kind of thing (like that one episode of That 70s Show where they mod a Pong plug-and-play). Iy is actually a shop, though, with the currency being total minutes played in the games. I didn't unlock much here, though, partially for technical reasons (my emulator would often crash when exiting games, so my playtime wasn't recorded), but also because there really isn't much to these games, and they largely just aren't very fun or compelling. A lot of the time, I'm bored long before a single credit has ended.

 

And that's really the problem with Cellophanes: the games aren't fun. They're chore-like, even. And they don't even invoke any nostalgic sentiment in me because I wasn't a child in 1970s Japan. Like, it's an admirable exercise in authenticity, and it's nice that it exists, but I just don't want to spend any time playing it, and if you're reading this, you probably won't gt much out of it, either.

Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).