N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (Playstation)

 There are a few ways I've seen train driving simulators displays things. Polygons are the most common, and there's also a few on less powerful hardware that do sprite scaling (or, on even less powerful hardware, there's imitation sprite scaling). There's also FMV, which I think is most famously used in the Japanese Rail Sim series on 3DS, which use as their graphics actual high quality video footage of real train journeys. 

 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (which is also listed on some sites as "Hassha Ourai! Gatan Goton") uses FMV, but in a move that possibly makes it the cutest of all train driving games, it places you in the cockpits of various model trains, travelling through actual footage of tiny little model towns with cardboard buildings and little plastic construction workers! Despite the use of models, though, I think it's still working under the conceit that you'r driving a real train, as the cockpits surrounding the window in which the FMV plays are unique to each train, and pretty detailed too. The levers and dials move when they're supposed to, there's a little light that comes one when you're meant to start moving, and so on.

 

It's all very cute and charming! The game itself is kind of constrained by being what it is. I guess the train enthusiasts who are the target audience for the genre want exactly one thing from these games and one thing alone: to drive a train in as close a manner to driving an actual game as possible. So, just like Densha De Go and SL De Ikou and all the others, you can control acceleration and brakes, and you've got to get to a series of stations along your route, making sure to keep to the speed limits, arrive as close to exactly on time as you can, and to stop at the exact line on the platform at which you're expected. It does have one difference that makes it stand out from the others in the genre, though: it's a lot easier!

 

Densha De Go, the most famous example of the genre is known for being completely merciless when players don't play completely perfectly. N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton is a lot more forgiving, though: you can be up to ten seconds late when arriving, and you can go a few metres over the line without getting a game over. Also, on some stages, there's something strange that happens where another train will attach itself to your train and just drive you to the next station, with no input from you necessary. I don't know why this happens, or why you'd put in a part of your game where it essentially just plays itself for part of a stage. 

 

If you've enjoyed literally any other game in this genre, or if you've tried but found them too difficult, then you can probably already figure out if you want to play this one. If not, and you're interested, it's probably a good first game to try out. I've been really enjoying it, and the use of miniatures gives a unique and very appealling look. It's definitely worth your time, I think.

Air Diver (Mega Drive)

 I've started to unkindly describe Ace Combat-style 3D aerial combat games as "slowly following a little dot on your radar waiting until you can actually see and fire a homing missile at the enemy", and while that's pretty bad in actual 3D games with polygon graphics where you and the enemies actually occupy positions in a properly defined space. Air Diver bravely attempts to make a game in that genre using only 2D sprites, which aren't even actually scaling, since it's a Mega Drive game!

 

I can see why the developers wanted to try doing this: Afterburner II is a pretty good game, and it fared surprisingly well in its port to Mega Drive, so why not try putting together a game with the homing missile-based gameplay of Afterburner II, but instead of being a completely linear rail shooter, try and simulate a more realistic scenario, where the same enemy planes can fly all around you? The problem is that becuse this is a faux-sprite scaling game, you can only fly straight ahead, with the ability to kind of do a barrel roll or a loop being the extent of your maneuverability.

 

This means that when enemy planes fly behind you, all you can really do is a loop, to try and fly over and behind them. Or at least, that's what I thought, but this only puts the enemy in front of you some of the time. Similarly, enemies will often fly off to the side, and there's just no effective way to chase them there either. So even worse than chasing the little radar dots, you spend the majority of your time in this game waiting for the dots to place themselves within your field of vision.

 

Making this even worse is the way the stages are structured. There's three parts to each: first, you fight lots of regualr enemy planes, who all die in one hit. Then, a single super-plane, that's a different colour, and takes a bunch of hits to kill. Finally, each stage has some kind of gigantic futuristic sky fortress thing, that's so big it has to be portrayed as a background, rather than a sprite. The super-plane is the hardest of the three on all of the stages I've tried, as the fortresses just need you to constonatly shoot and move until they're dead. No chasing or aiming necessary!

 

Mentioning the fortresses makes me think that I should bring up the game's threadbare, but also absurd plot. A previously unknown terrorist organisation from the middle east has suddenly taken over the entire world. Despite being an unknown, unnamed organisation, they have hundreds (possibly thousands) of fighter planes, as well as the aforementioned giant sky fortresses. The only part of the world left unconquered is an airbase in the south Pacific, from whence a flying transporter containing your plane is deployed to save the world.

 

This does actually bring up a structural point to the game that doesn't make it more fun, but which is slightly interesting. You can tackle the stages in any order, and each one also tells you an estimated chance of success on the world map screen. However, your transport has a limited amount of fuel, and there is, according to the manual, a specific route that you have to figure out to be able to tackle every stage without running out of transporter fuel (which means an instant game over).

 

In case you haven't already figured it out, I didn't really enjoy Air Diver. It's a shame, because it looks kind of cool, and the soundtrack is pretty good, too. But unfortunately, it's a boring, frustrating chore, and not worth your time. I am kind of curious about the two sequels that apparently came out on SNES, though. Which that system's focus on scaling and rotation, maybe it's able to do a better job of realising the developers' ambitions?