Dinosaur Hunting ~The Lost Continent~ (X Box)

 Something that's interesting about Japan-only X Box exclusives is that the console sold incredibly poorly in Japan, meaning that these games must have been played by very few people before the advent of emulation. Werider still is that there are at least two Japan only games for which exist fully translated English versions that never got released: this game (also known as Dinosaur Hunting: Ushinawareta Daichi), and Rent A Hero. The case of Dinosaur Hunting is even stranger, since it really feels like a precursor to all of those games from the PS3/360 era, wherein Japanese developers tried to make games specifically to appeal to stereotypical western "ball and gun" players.

 

As you might have guess from the title, it's a third person shooter in which you hunt dinosaurs. But it's more interesting than that! Firstly, it can join Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero in the ranks of third person shooters that don't use the generic twin stick controls. Though you do move your character with the left stick and the camera with the right, moving the camera and aiming aren't the same thing. You have three weapons: a pistol, a rifle (with scope, of course), and a shotgun, and all three work differently. The pistol will autoaim at any dinosaur in range, the rifle can only be shot through the scope, putting you into a first person view where you can aim, but not move, and the shotgun will just blast straight in front of your character when fired.

 

Adding to the idiosyncracies of the game is the fact that though you're hunting dinosaurs, you're only knocking them out, not killing them. At first glance, this seems like a mere aesthetic change, but it does tie into one of the game's more unique mechanics. Because you are actually hunting, and not just going to war with the dinosaurs, and each stage has some specific dinosaurs for you to find, which you do by following footprints and other clues. Furthermore, the standard ammo for your three guns is expensive, so in your investigations, if you find things like corpses, eggs, or poo, you and have a look at them to determine the perfect formula (mixed from unnamed red, green, and blue chemicals in different ratios) to create darts specifically to knock out a certain species. Not only do these special dart one-shot their targets, but they also don't use up any of your expensive regular ammo. 

 

In some cases, though, it does mean that if you haven't found the clues you need, then some of the tougher, more aggressive dinosaurs can be incredibly difficult to take down. Especially once you're a few stages in, and you encounter dinosaurs that gang up on you to trample you to death, or that inexplicably have the ability to turn invisible. But in general, I think the devs did a great job of elevating this above what could so easily have been an incredibly generic shooting game, but with dinosaurs. Even the setting has had more thought put into it than was really necessary: in the year 1910, an area in South America is found where dinosaurs still live, but an impending volcanic eruption threatens them. A group of elite hunters from around the world is sent in to capture and rescue as many of them as possible.

 

This is a really enjoyable, unique game, which makes even morre of a shame that so few people have ever played it. Adding to the tragedy of the cancellation of its western release is that it appears to have been the final game put out by developer Scarab. Obviously, this is just speculation, but it seems like this was a mid-budget game, and only being released on one console, and only in a country where that console had a tiny userbase seems like it can't have made much money back, and maybe the lack of a global release killed the company? Anyway, should you have the means to emulate X Box games, you should definitely seek out the leaked English version and give it a try. All the extra complications of tracking and making special ammo make hunting down big dinosaurs very satisfying.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 113: The Tairyou Jigoku (PS2)

 This is yet another game that's been on my radar a long, long time, and that I'm finally able to play thanks to fan translators. (The translation actually came out quite some time ago, but I'm also very bad at keeping on top of things like this). It's a weird and original horror game, it's in the Simple 2000 series, and it's from Tamsoft, so of course I was interested in it. The title, I believe, translates to "The Overwhelming Hell", which is pretty appropriate, as it stars a teenage girl with poor posture, who's having an incredibly unpleasant time.

 

One night, she's leaving school a little later than usual, so it's dark and no-one else is around, when she remembers she left her phone in the classroom! She goes back, only to catch the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland stealing her phone and running away through a portal. The portal leads to a forest, and that's where all the unpleasantness starts. The forest, like all the places the rabbit takes you (I've gotten as far as just after the third boss, and can tell you that the second and third stages take place in a sewer and a castle, respectively), is infested with swarnms of bugs and frogs and other unpleasant creatures. Each stage then has her running around finding notes left by the rabbit, and eventually grabbing the rabbit himself, to make him drop a key for the room where that stage's boss lies in wait.

 

Unusually for a horror game, you don't have a health meter. Instead, if the gross things get close enough to you, they'll start crawling all over you, and a visual representation of the noises the protgonist is making as they do so. If you don't shake them off quick enough (by frantically wiggling the analogue sticks), she'll get so grossed out that she dies. You can pre-emptively stop them from getting on you, too: you can jump on them to squash them, or you can hit them with one of the various weapons you find lying around each of which is swung in a different way, and also eventually breaks.

 

 The bosses are a little more interesting. The first one is killed just by running up to it and hitting it a bunch of times, but the second and third bosses are a lot sillier. The second has you hitting bugs that crawl along the ground towards you at it with a golf club, and the third has you hitting flying bugs at it with a baseball bat! As for more traditional survival horror-type stuff, you mgiht be disappointed to learn that the game really only pays lip service towards it: there really no puzzles beyond wandering around hoping you happen to find a key or the rabbit, who will also be holding a key. The fact that there's no health also simplifies things beyond what some people might like: the character calms down shortly after all the things have stopped crawling on her, so there's no long-term management of your health or recovery items. And though the weapons are breakable, tthat takes a pretty long time to happen, and there's plenty of them lying around.

 

The Tairyou Jigoku is a pretty good game. It's a lot more atmospheric than you might expect from a twenty-year-old budget game, and the kind of fear it invokes is pretty different to that of most horror games: rather than the fear of a violent death, it's the fear of being lost and alone in a cold, damp place at night, while a ton of horrible, unsanitary creatures want to touch and crawl all over you. It's definitely worth playing, and I'm very glad it got translated so more of us can do so.