Blue Angelo: Angels from the Shrine (GP32)

 The GP32 was, as far as I know, the first emulator handheld, and having owned one during its heyday, it was very exciting. Streets of Rage 2 looked incredible on its 320x240 LCD screen, even without a backlight! It also had a bunch of games commercially released for it, on pre-written Smart Media cards. However, I couldn't afford any of them, and as far as I could tell, no-one was dumping the ROMs back then, either, so for decades, I was completely
unable to play them, because though the games were eventually dumped, the only GP32 emulator was pretty useless, only offering gameplay in the form of a silent, slow slideshow. But on a whim, I recently did a youtube search for "GP32", to see if the modern fashion for emulator handhelds had revived interest in their Korean forebear. Some of the videos showed full speed gameplay, with sound, which was pretty exciting, and a little more research led to an actual, functioning GP32 emulator! It's on android and you have to pay for it, but it's better than nothing.

 

So, I then spent a few hours dipping toes into various GP32 games, and some of them will be reviewed here in time. But the one that really hooked me is the console's final commercial release, Blue Angelo: Angels from the Shrine. It's a very GBA-looking metrovania, in which you control a mouthless, telepathic blue angel exploring a post-human, demon-infested planet in the distant future. There was actually an attempted kickstarter for PC and GBA ports in 2016, but it unfortunately failed. Anyway, Blue Angelo isn't as fully-featured as the GBA Castlevaniae that were its contemporaries, but it's clear that this was a result of being made by a much smaller team on a much smaller budget, rather than an indictment of the abilities of the dev team or the host hardware.

 

Your blue guy is arms with a staff, and as well as your normal beat em up-style combo, and your jumping and crouching attacks, there's also a few special moves performed with fighting game-style inputs. The only one I've consistently figured out is a very useful throwing of the stick, performed with a half-circle motion. I know there's at least one other move that I performed by accident once, where your guy spins in place attacking, but I haven't figured out how to replicate it. There aren't any other weapons to find, though there are pieces of jewellery hidden in specific places that can be equipped for stat upgrades, and you also level up by defeating enemies.

 

Exploration is fine. The pause menu teases a bunch of new abilities: super jump, double jump, and so on, but after a couple of hours of play, all the accessing of new areas has been done via coloured keystones that open doors that match their colours. There's also some multi-coloured doors, that presumably open when you have all of the stones. One thing worth mentioning is that save points are the only way to restore your HP, and they're pretty far apart, so venturing into uncharted territory always feels like a dangerous feat of endurance. It can sometimes be a little frustrating
, but I think more importantly, it negates the feeling that a lot of games in this genre can evoke after a couple of hours, where the player is listlessly swanning back and forth through rooms full of enemies who can barely scracth them. It really feels like you're in dangerous territory, and makes every discovery of a new save point a lot more exciting.

 

I think the real draw for Blue Angelo, though, is how it looks. Not only is it full of great pixel art, for the sprites and for the backgrounds. More importantly, what that pixel art depicts is really great, too. The backgrounds often look like the surreal vistas seen on the covers of sci-fi books from the 1970s, while a lot of the enemies are demons and giants reminiscent of renaissance art. It's an interesting combination that works well, and the incongruity really helps the impression of the game taking place in a world without humans, distant in both space and time. It adds to the aforementioned satisfaction, too, as each new area means a new beautiful backdrop at which to gawk.

 

Blue Angelo is a great game, and it's a shame it's trapped on ancient, somewhat rare hardware. Of course, you can now play it via emulation, but it'd be nice if it someday did get an official rerelease of some kind so the devs can get the payday they deserve. Until then, though, metrovania fans should seek it out, and enjoy a previously inaccessible genre entry that has a lot to offer. The one caveat I would place on the recommendation is that it's definitely not safe for people with photo-sensitive epilepsy, as levelling up provokes one of the most violent full-screen flashing effects I've ever seen.

Gachapin Challenge DS (DS)

 Gachapin is a character from Japanese children's TV. Portrayed by someone in a green monster costume, I guess he goes around participating in various sports and activities? That's what I gather from the premise of this game, as well as the gallery contained therein of actual photos of him doing these things. Wikipedia also tells me that he's able to do all this stuff because of seven energy balls on his wrists, that provide him with carbohydrates. Oh. 

 

This game has you playing as Gachapin, as he takes part in various sporting activities. I think the plot has something to do with TV ratings and trying to take a regional show national, but of course, I can't read any of the dialogue, and can only go by what I see happening. There's a lot of these activities, and most of them play completely differently from each other, while all of the racing ones play slightly differently from each other. Even better, all of them are played in that beautiful style of 3D particular to the DS.

 

There's minibike, go-kart, and quad racing, as well as motorcross and hovercraft time trials. Two fooball games see you triyng to score goals past a bunch of slowly-moving targets or playing keepy-uppy on your own, a trampolining game combines timing button presses to bounce higher with quickly tapping dirrectional inputs to do tricks, and a kung fu game has you quickly reacting to button prompts to fight off attackers. None of them are particularly mind-blowing, but nor are any of them terrible. 

 

In the game's main mode, the racing games will have an opponent for you to defeat, while all of the others have a score or time limit for you to beat. The difficulty of all of these is pretty perfectly set, too: some of them might take a few attempts to beat, but none of them are going to be frustrating to get through, nor will they force you to replay a particularly difficult game to the point of fostering resentment. Having said that, a couple are way too easy, the goal-scoring game in particular feels like it's near-impossible to fail at.

 

I did eventually get to a point where even though I'd met the clear conditions for every game that was available to me, the story wouldn't proceed, and as a result, there's three games that I haven't been able to play, and don't even know what they are! But I do have more to talk about, as this game was devloped by Hudson Soft, and for some reason, they included a Bomberman mode. And by "mode", I mean that it's more fully featured than some entire Bomberman games that sold for full price on home consoles (yes, I am talking about Bomberman Act Zero, here).

 

This mode, called Gachabon, features all-new sprites of Gachapin wearing different-coloured Bomberman costumes as the player characters. It's got five different stages to choose from, and can be played against CPU opponents, or with up to four human players (so it doesn't make the DS Bomberman games obsolete, at least, since they went up to eight players). You play until one player has won a certain amount of matches, all the power-ups are in there, and it is just a fairly complete battle mode from a Bomberman game, included as an extra in this licensed game, completely unrelated to Bomberman beyond sharing a developer. Bizarre, but welcome, I guess? If there's just one group of mid-00s Japanese kids out there who spent hours playing this mode together, having never heard of Bomberman otherwise, then it was all worth it.

 

Gachapin Challenge DS probably doesn't have a lot to offer to anyone who isn't a small Japanese child in the 00s. But it does look really good, it's got a lot of charm, and it's inexplicably also got a Bomberman game in it. And some photos of a weird green thing doing a bunch of sports in real life.