Other Stuff Monthly #14!

So, a while ago, I discovered the Japanese youtuber Crafty Transformer, who makes cool mechanical weapons and machinery (mostly recreated from videogames and anime) out of cardboard. Coupled with my ever-increasing love of tokusatsu, it's made me think "I want to make cool things too". At some point, I also became aware of the subject of today's post, a Japanese children's book entitled Saikyo Kosaku Craft Wars.

The book contains instructions on how to make various toys out of household objects, a long-standing tradition of kids' media the world over, of course. The gimmick here though is that all the items are tied into various stories that are told alongside the instructions. Of course, I can't read the stories, but they're accompanied by some really awesome artwork, and the instructions on how to make the things are mostly diagram-based anyway.

There's two basic types of thing to be made from the instructions in the book: weapons and armour for kids to use themselves, and smaller-scale spaceships and monsters and things. I'm really just interested in the weapons and armour, to be honest, to learn the bare basics, then figure out ways of making them bigger, better, and more mechanically complex. There's swords, shields, guns, claw-gauntlets, and so on. Regarding the guns, there's non-firing guns that just look cool, a bazooka that fires a missile made from paper cups, and a magic blaster that shoots a puff of air. I haven't even started to attempt making anything from the book yet, and I've already been thinking of ways to make the last two more powerful than the book's blueprints.

As, like I said, I haven't made anything from the book yet, there's not much more to say. It's a cool little book with some really amazing artwork in it (which was actually the main initial thing that caught my attention). And, you know, it's been pretty hard to get stuff for these monthly posts what with the ongoing boring apocalypse.

Maniac Racers Advance (Game Boy Advance)

Also known as Motorcross Manaics Advance, this is the second sequel to that orginial Game Boy pirate cart classic, Motorcross Maniacs. (The first sequel was on Game Boy Color, and I might also feature it here someday. Shame they didn't carry the sries onto Nintendo's later handhelds, isn't it?) In case you never played that game, it was a slightly platformy racing game, where you were a little motorbike guy doing laps around crazy tracks full of ramps and loops and such,  all with a strict time limit, and an opponent racer who was so inept that they might as well have not shown up. Maniac Racers Advance is very much a sequel to that game, buidling on its ideas while still having a similar feel.

The main thing you had to worry about in the original was nitro management, and that's the same here. Using them at the right time means getting round the track faster, being able to collect more of them, and being able to take optimal routes, as each course has a few different routes to take, kind of like the stages in the 2D Sonic games, only here the only method of jumping you have is nitro boosting off of ramps. You can also hold left or right to rotate in the air, the main pruose of which is making sure your wheels meet the ground at the correct angle when you land, but you can also show off by doing lots of flips during particularly long jumps, if you are so inclined.

Obviously, the biggest change compared to the original is the graphics: Motorcross Manics was released very early in the Game Boy's life, and like most games of that time, it had very minimalist, functional graphics. By contrast, Maniac Racers Advance looks amazing! The stages take place in a variety of locations, there's a bunch of character to pick from, who all have appealling cartoony designs, and everything's big and colourful. The characters are of course another big change, though they all feel identical to play despite having different stats. You now race against three opponents instead of just one, and once you get past the novice courses, you really do have to do your best to come in first!

Even with that in mind though, it probably won't take more than about an hour to finish the game and unlock everything. That's fine, to be honest, I'm a big proponent of shorter games, but in this case it does feel like something's missing. Maybe it's the fact that most of the tracks are repeated a fair few times over the course of the championship mode? I can't quite put my finger on it, but once I finished the game, I was left asking "is that it?". There are a couple of bonus modes, like one that has you running over zombies, and another where you're wheelying over frozen penguins in a lab to collect stars, but they don't have a lot to offer, either.

I think I can recommend this to anyone with fond memories of the original, though. It might only be an hour long, but it is a good hour, and the feel of the boosts and the midair rotation is  as good as it ever was. It just looks a lot nicer here than it did before.

Small Games Vol. 7!

This was originally going to just be a post about one PC88 game, a Buddhism-themed action RPG called Gandhara. It's definitely not a small game, as it takes place over a bunch of massive stages, and I only gave up on it, as after a few hours going around stage one, and even finding the entrance to stage two, it was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere. Also, playing it got the ending theme from the old 1970s tokusatsu show Saiyuki/Monkey stuck in my head, and I hope reading the title earlier in this paragraph does the same to a few of you, too. If you want to try it, here's a little help with the controls: Space attacks with your sword, Shift uses your magic (once you get that ability), and 5 on the numberpad lets you pray to certain trees to regain your HP, at the cost of one hundred beads.

So, what do we have instead? First, an interesting little maze game entitled Daidassou, which is all about freeing your comrades from prison! First thing on each stage you have to kill a guard to get his key, then you run around opening cells and leading the inmates to the exit. If you're not careful, inmates can be taken to a special maximum security cell if they're caught by guards, or even killed in the crossfire. It's a cute little game, and it's fun to play, even if it's also very, very hard (it took several attempts just to get past the first stage!). I especially like the isometric look of the game, which results in some mazes looking kind of Escher-esque, and maybe impossible? Like the heights of different floors don't totally make sense all the time.

Finally, The Demon Crystal, which, despire its grandiose title and plot about a demon invasion, seems to take place in a series of suburban houses. You run around these houses, picking up keys to open locked doors, looking for the big key that opens the door to the next stage. It's a nice touch that the rooms behind the locked doors are shrouded in darkness until you enter them, and generally, this is a fun game, mechanically speaking, at least. Unfortunately, it's let down by the fact that the behaviour of most types of enemy is randomised, which can in some cases make the very possibility of being able to complete a stage entirely down to luck. If each enemy type had a learnable pattern, or a specific way they reacted to your presence, then this would have been a great lost classic I could have shown to you all, like an archaologist showing off an amazing artefact. Unfortunately, though, it's not only frustrating to play, but also frustrating to think about what could have been.

Dossun! Ganseki Battle (SNES)

Dossun! Ganseki Battle is a fantasy RPG-themed versus puzzle game. I wonder if the developers of Yuusha Puzzle, which was featured on the GG Series Collection cartridge for DS that I wrote about long ago had been inspired by it, because the two games have a lot in common, and not just the theming.

Like Yuusha Puzzle, your aim is to defeat various enemies by arranging the various items that fall into your pit into rows of three. Also like Yuusha Puzzle, different items have different effects: swords for physical damage, scrolls for magic damage, potions to heal, and orbs to summons monsters to fight on your behalf. Where the two games differ, though is in mechanical complexity and sophistication.

In Yuusha Puzzle, your foe was just a sprite and a health bar, while in Dossun! Ganseki Battle, they're a full-blown opponent, playing the same puzzle game as you, albeit with various advantages, like more special attacks, a longer health bar and so on. As well as this, there's a more robust chain system, whereby your attacks do more damage the later in a chain they are, and sufficently large chains (though I'm not totally sure whether this is decided by the number of stages in the chain, or the total number of items erased) will trigger a special animated attack for big damage.

It seems kind of unfair to keep comparing these two games, since Yuusha Puzzle was released well over a decade after this game, and it was a budget title/part of a compilation, while this was a full-priced standalone release. Come to think of it though, the passage of time should tilt things in YP's favour, while the circumstances of the two games releases should favour D!GB, so maybe it all evens out? Either way, this is the better game. It's better presented, it plays better, and it's just generally a higher quality game all-round.

That being said, though, is it recommended? Yeah, why not? It's decent enough. There's better puzzle games on SNES, of course, like Magical Drop 3, and Tetris Battle Gaiden, but I think this one's still good enough to be worthwhile.

Aa Harimanada (Mega Drive)

You might remember all the way back in 2014, I reviewed the Game Ger version of this, or rather, the Game Gear game that's based on the same source material as this one. Because the two are very different: while the Game Gear game took a somewhat spartan , sports game-like approach, the Mega Drive version has a much flashier fighting game-inspired take on the concept of Sumo. There's even special moves and a health bar!

The most obvious difference though, is that while the Game Gear game's characters all used the same sprite with different colour palletes, this version has all the characters looking different. They're not totally unique, though: every character has a unique head, but it's put onto one of a few different body types, with a variety of skin tones. It's also nice that there are different body types, when you'd think most sumotori would have pretty much the same physique.

Well, they are all pretty mastodonic compared to regular people, but if we take the player character (single player mode has you playing through the story of the manga's protagonist Isao Harimanada) as being an "average" sized sumotori, with most opponents being the same size, then there's also some opponents who are noticably a lot smaller than him, as well as a few who are a lot bigger, standing like mountains of muscle. Body size doesn't seem to be any indicator of how difficult an opponent's going to be, though, which is mainly thanks to the ring out mechanic.

Though you can win by repeatedly slapping and headbutting your opponent into unconsciousness (and also picking them up onto your shoulders and putting them into a Torture Rack hold, in a feat of incredible strength!), most fights will be decided by ring out, sometimes only a couple of seconds after they start. The fighters lock upwhen thy get close enough to each other, and from there, there's a power struggle to get your opponent's back to the edge of the ring, or to throw him overhead to do some damage. Once you get to the edge, depending (I think) on how much health each sumotori has left, either one of them will be thrown out right away, or a new power struggle begins, this time based entirely on who can hit buttons the fastest. So an easy way to win fights is to walk straight into your opponent, keep pressing forward and B to get them over to the edge, then rub all three buttons with the knuckles of your fingers as fast as you can. Of course, I take no responsibility for any damage you might do to your controller or fingers in trying this technique.

I reservedly recommend Aa Harimanada. It's a fun game, and I'm sure it'd be a great laugh to play with friends in between bouts on "proper" fighting games, but even by the standards of a 1993 fighting game, there's not much to entertain a single player, due to there only being one playable character and all. Furthermore, I definitely don't recommend trying to buy a legitimate copy in this day and age, as the prices it fetches online are ludicrous.

Geograph Seal (X68000)

To be honest, I should really have written about this game years and years ago, and it barely even counts as obscure anymore: along with Cho Ren Sha 68k, this is easily one of the best-known X68000 games, and since Cho Ren Sha has a Windows port, it's definitely the best-known X68000 exclusive. Of course, for a lot of people, just being an X68000 exclusive alone is enough to be considered obscure, so let's just get on with it, eh?

Now, the most obvious thing to say about this game is that it's by the developers of the much-loved Playstation series Jumping Flash, and it acts very much as a genetic forebear to those games, too. It's got similar weapons, the same super-high triple jump, even some of the same fonts are used in its GUI. While those more famous games focussed heavily on the dizzying heights available to the new world of 3D platforming, Geograph Seal is more of a straight first person shooter, where you also happen to have the ability to jump really high. This makes sense, though, as the short draw distance (yes, even shorter than Jumping Flash!) means that any platforming would have been unfair and confusing.

Draw distance aside, it's an incredible-looking game. Seeing it in motion, it's hard to believe it's running on a 16-bit machine from the eighties. Pretty much everything is a 3D model, when they could just as easily have used sprites for the enemies and items, it all moves a lot more smoothly than its console contemporaries like Starwing or Virtua Racing, and even though none of the models are textured, the background is, and even that small thing adds a lot to how the game looks. I remember when I first played this, back on my first PC, on a much earlier version of the emulator xm6, and the backgound images were plain black, and the models weren't even filled in, so it was wireframe on a black background, with no GUI. Even then, it looked pretty good, but now that we can see the game in its full glory, it's on the level of some of the 3D arcade games Namco were putting out in the early nineties, like Cyber Sled and Starblade.

Geograph Seal isn't just a game that was ahead of its time technologically: it's clear that the devs at Exact had a clear view of the direction in which action games were going to go over the following few years, and they were right. I don't know what the reaction to it was on release, but I can only assume that people must have been blown away by a fast, exciting, full 3D game of this quality. It's definitely a game you could have looked at in 1994, and said "this is the future".

I don't really think there's much more for me to say about this game. Yes, you should definitely play it if you haven't already. It's excellent.