OOPARTS (Arcade)

 There are two very important things to know about this game. First, it was never actually released, though the ROM surfaced online lin 2020, and was added to MAME in 2021. Second (and most important), when the legendary arcade magazine Gamest previewed it, they misread the logo on the title screen and referred to it as FARTS. Anyway, it's a brick-smashing game with a few interesting quirks.

 

Mechanically, there's quite a lot going on. The game solves the age-old problem the genre has of spending long agonising minutes trying to hit that last black to clear a stage by simply having a different goal. Instead of clearing every block away, you instead have to do ...something (I haven't entirely figured out the conditions, but I think they have to do with lighting various pinball-style rollover spots around the screen) that makes a boss appear, then kill the boss by hitting it with the ball repeatedly.

 

There's a few other little things in there too, like how you have limited-use magic, that has various effects like summoning an extra ball that kind of roams around breaking stuff, a bird thing that flies around attacking enemies, or a wave of energy that slowly descends the screen, stopping the ball from falling past it for a few seconds. There's also the fact that you can ram the sides of the screen at full speed to perform a pinball-style nudge, changing the ball's trajectory. Do it enough times in a single stage, and you'll smash through the wall, allowing you to insantly loop from one side of the screen to the other!

 

There's a lot to love about OOPARTS aesthetically, too! All the screens outside of actual gameplay look amazing, for a start. That is, the title screen, stage select, intermissions between stages, that kind of thing. Then the stages themselves look pretty good, too! They aren't just a bunch of blocks on an abstract background, but seem like actual locations: bits of countryside littered with stone cairns, ancient temples with polished marble blocks, and so on. Everything about the way the game looks and sounds is totally dedicated to portraying this world of ancient ruins and lost magic technology.

 

There's not much more to say about OOPARTS, other than that it's a really high quality game, and it's a shame it never saw an official release. It's out there now unofficially, though, and I definitely recommend giving it a try!

Asuncia: Matsue no Jubaki (Playstation)

 In my opinion, the latter half of the nineties was a golden age for RPGs, with a lot of the best ever appearing on the Playstation. Asuncia is a Playstation RPG from 1997, and though it can't stand among the timeless classics of the era, it can stand on its own as a game that took different inspiration, and set out to fulfill a different vision of what RPGs are. That is, it seems to be inspired both mechanically and aesthetically by very early tabletop RPGs.

 

The aesthetic influence is obvious: pretty much all of the art in the game could have been taken from a 1980s TTRPG rulebook, and it's set in a downbeat, grimy fantasy world, with dirty buildings, unpleasantly violent monsters, and magic use something of a rarity. It's set in a world where isolated towns cower in fear, surrounded by vast, monster-infested hinterlands, waiting for a hero to come along and save them.

 

And that's what you do: each stage takes place over a massive area, and there are two important numbers displayed at all times: the time remaining, and the monsters remaining. Your goal is to reduce the monsters to zero before the time gets to zero. It's not real time, instead the timer counts down a little every time you move a space on the map, or take a turn in battle. Dotted around the map are towns, each of which will give you an item or some money on your first arrival, and they also have a few facilities: blacksmiths, inns, ite shops, and so on. The blacksmiths and magic guilds in the towns are actually the only way of strengthening your characters, which seems like a very old school TTRPG way of doing things. Also, conversations had in certain town locations can aid in recruiting new party members.

 

There are also a few dungeons in each stage too, which are smaller maze-like maps where you can find a bunch of treasure, and also fight a boss, who's a lot stranger than all the other enemies. Oddly, these seem to be the only bosses in the game, and they're totally optional. The enemies in the dungeons don't count towards the enemy count of the main stages, and the main stages end as soon as you kill all the enemies in them, there's no bosses to finish them off. (Apparently there's an ending you can only get if you kill every dungeon boss, but I only found out about that after I was a few stages in.)

 

Another weird little quirk is that you get a score for each stage, not only based on things you'd expect, like how many times you died, how many turns were left on the clock, and how many towns survived, but also on a weird system involving the order in which you kill enemies. There are three types of monster in each stage, each of which is assigned a colour: red, green, or blue. You can score bonus points by killing three or five of a single colour in a row, as well as killing sets of different enemies in certain patterns that are shown on a screen you can access before choosing your actions every turn in battle. If the game was more popular, I could imagine people figuring out exactly how to maximise their score on each stage.

 

Asuncia is a unique and interesting game, and it's definitely worth playing. Just don't go in expecting the deep plot and characters you might normally expect from an RPG of this era, and also, don't try to play more than one consecutive stage in a single sitting. Each one takes about thirty to forty minutes, and while that makes for an entertaining diversion, the repetition will start to wear on you if you don't take a break after that.

Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.

Other Stuff Monthly #23!

 With a front cover that looks more like an ad you'd see on the back cover of a videogame magazine, Vortex #0 is the only publication Electrobrain Comics ever put out. Well, kind of. There are two versions of it: the full thirty-two page version, which has a comic story and a strategy guide for the game that shares its title (a Super FX-powered 3D shooting game for SNES), as well as a nine page version that only includes the comic.

 

The comic tells a prologue story for the videogame, and it's surprisingly complex, fitting a lot of stuff in its low page count. The eight planets of the Deoberon system (ruled by Emperor Deoberon) live in peace, with only one of them having any kind of military installations, just in case. Barkahn, one of the local lords, hates this arrangement, and believes the system needs more defence, which he sets out to prove by attacking one of the planets and killing a bunch of people, then trying to take over the whole system.

 

Emperor Deoberon sets his scientists to the task of coming up with a way to stop Barkahn's villainy, and they create a magic computer that sends Barkahn, his armies, nd the four planets they conquered into another dimension. When everything dies down, Deoberon and Barkahn both die, and Barkahn's best friend, Vercingetorix, vows revenge, and his scientists find a way out of the prison dimension, and they steal the magic computer that sent them there. So the game casts you as the ace pilot sent into the prison dimension to defeat Vercingetorix and retrieve the computer. Phew.

 

Then there's the walkthrough, taking the form of lots of captioned screenshots, telling you what's in each stage, and what you need to do to get through it. The way some parts are written makes Vortex seem like a game that would be a confusing bore to get through unguided: "Cany you find all of these hidden keys, bonuses, and tunnels? You can't defeat Darius without them all!", "Don not allow Xerxes to close in on you! He will fire a weapon that will destroy you immediately!", and "You must have four electro bombs to defeat Vercingetorix!", that kind of stuff, you know? Sorry to bring this concept up two posts in a row, but it sounds like the kind of advice sitcom characters give each other when they're all temporarily obsessed with some unseen videogame that's never ben mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

 

Other than all that stuff, the other items worthy of note are two ads in the inside pages of the front and back covers. In the front, there's an ad for a game I've never heard of before: Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme Skiing and Snowboarding, while more intriguing is the ad in the back cover. It shows neither a title nor any screenshots, only a motorcross biker, and the promse od a hot newe Super FX title from Electrobrain, to be announced in the fourth quarter of 1994. I can't find any evidence of this game being released or announced, nor can I find mention of any Motorcross games from Electrobrain on lists of unreleased SNES games.

Danger Express (Arcade)

 This is an unreleased and unfinished game that came to light relatively recently. Though it's clearly unfinished, this mostly manifests as what we can generously call "presentational eccentricities" that would have presumably have been ironed out before release. Things like the very default-looking font used for a lot of the text, and things like getting a "bonus for breaking stuff" at the end of each stage. It is totally playable, though, and it's a shame that it never got officially released, because it's a lot better than most western-developed arcade games ofthe nineties.

 

The main thing that stands out in Danger Express is its aesthetic, which I've seen other people describe as looking like a fake videogame you'd see characters playing on a TV show. That's a fair enough description, but while I played, what came to mind for me is that it was like some long-forgotten vanity project of a straight-to-VHS no-budget action movie had somehow got a licensed tie-in videogame. All it really needs is the addition of a cutscene starring Cameron Mitchell and it'd be perfect.

 

What is that aesthetic? It's an amazing combination of sprite scaling and digitisation, with real life actors dressed as generic goons walking in and out of the screen. There's even some kind of psuedo-live action cutscenes! They're not really proper videos, but more like short gif-like animations using frames from a live action video. To maximize the amount of scaling that gets done, Danger Express also eschews the usual horizontal scrolling seen in most beat em ups in favour of having all the stages go into the screen like a melee-based Space Harrier. It seems unlikely, but I wonder if the developers had played the PC Engine game Jinmu Densho, which is a similar concept, mechanically at least (though to be honest, Danger Express is a much better implementation of the concept).

 

Naturally, then, a train is the perfect setting for such a game: lots of narrow corridors, giving a good reason as to why you're walking in a straight line through waves of enemies. So that's how it goes (except for a few outdoor excursions to backalleys, docks, or at the casino): you walk from the back of the train carraige to the front, killing everyone who tries to stop you, including soldiers, ninja, strippers, wrestlers, bikers and so on. Interestingly, some stages give you a rifle, while others are purely melee, except for the occasional inclusion of a temporary pair of nunchaku that shoot balls of lightning.

 

The most surprising thing about Danger Express is how good it is, though. Most games that use digitised sprites tend to be awkward, stiff and no fun to play, while western arcade developers in the nineties had a penchant for putting out cynical, hateful coin eaters. Danger Express bucks both trends! While the action isn't exactly super-smooth, it's fast and enjoyable enough to cover up the cracks, and the difficulty is actually prety reasonable: on my first attempt, I got about four stages into it (out of nine), and I think it's probable that with some practice, it could actually be 1CCed by a skilled player.

Hang On GP (Saturn)

 There's a couple of things I need to say to start this review off. The first is that you'll probably notice from the screenshots that the emulation for it is far from perfect, and there's a fair bit of graphical glitching. However, it does seem to run at full speed, and plays totally fine, as far as I can tell. The other thing is that it's also known as Hang On GP 95 and Hang On GP 96. Yes, they are all the same game.

 

When I remembered recently that there was a 3D Hang On game for the Saturn that I'd never played, I was excited. I'm a big fan of Hang On, Super Hang On, and even the minor oddity Hang On Jr., a port of the original to lower-powered hardware, presumably for arcade operators on a tight budget, and Was interested to see a version with some nice mid-90s low poly graphics. I was pretty disappointed, then, when I loaded up Hang On GP and rather than the old formula of racing against the clock to reach checkpoints on long, linear road tracks, you are instead in a more standard racing scenario, racing laps around looped tracks against other riders.

 

It's not a bad game, though. It's fast and it plays fine (though considering that it's a Saturn original rather than an arcade port, you'd think they would have made it control a little better with a D-pad), and it looks great, especially considering how early a release it is. There's a lot of pop-up, especially on the city stage, but that's forgivable. The aesthetics are really nice: it takes the stereotypse of "SEGA blue skies" and really runs with it. The stages take place on a tropical island (complete with a row of moai heads!), the Great Wall of China, and a generic modern city, and they all look great, and like places you'd really want to go to.

 

Hang On GP isn't a great game, and I'd even go as far as to say it was a disappointment. But it's not a bad game, either. I do vaguely remember it being universally panned in magazines at the time, but that's definitely understandable: the early days of the Saturn had a lot of similar racing games, a lot of which were first party like this one, and almost all of them were not only better than Hang On GP, but they also had the allure of being arcade ports in their favour.

TAMA: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth (Playstation)

 I had originally planned to review the Saturn version of this game, since on that console it was a launch title, and I thought it'd be interesting to see a Saturn launch title that wasn't a port of one of SEGA's arcade hits. But that version doesn't really emulate very well, so I settled for the Playstation version instead. As far as I know, they're pretty much the same game though, and it was a launch game for both systems, so it's not too big a compromise.

 

In the early days of the 32-bit consoles, there were a lot of games that saw developers trying to figure out how classic genres would work in 3D: what changes would need to be made for practical reasons, and what innovations would be birthed from the newly discovered Z-axis. 3D Lemmings and the Bug games being two high profile (at the time) failed experiments. TAMA is another experiment, essentially taking the old Taito ball-in-a-rotating-maze arcade game Cameltry and putting it in 3D. There aren't really any compromises that need to be made to make the concept work, and there are two main innovations brought in.

 

Before I describe them, I should explain the game, for those who aren't familiar with Cameltry. ach stage is a maze with a ball in it. You've got to get the ball to the goal before time runs out. In Cameltry, you could only rotate the maze left and right, while being in 3D allows TAMA to also offer the ability to tilt the maze in any direction, giving the player a lot more potential precision in controlling the ball's speed and direction. The other big hange is simpler and more obvious: the stages are multi-layered and see you going up and down ramps, riding moving platforms across gaps, and so on.

 

As for how the game itself is: it's pretty good. I love the way it looks, the very low-poly models and simple textures really work for the toy-like setting, and the physics never feel weird, which is crucial in a game like this. It's not going to blow your mind, but it's a mildly amusing distraction, executed as well as it could have been. The only real negative point I have to make is that Stage 2-2, very early into the game, has a point near the end that's completely unforgiving and needs perfect execution. It took me something like half an hour and many attempts to get past this stage, and then it was plain sailing for the next twenty or so stages, so it's a weird little difficulty spike.

 

TAMA is a nice little game, and the fact that it was a launch title for two competing consoles released only a few weeks apart makes it an interesting historical footnote, too. It even managed to get reviewed in a few US and UK magazines as a result of this, though they weren't particularly impressed (though to be fair, I definitely wouldn't be recommending anyone play it if mid90s import prices were the barrier to doing so).

Snail World (PC)

 Snail World is a cute little shooting game, and the developer's page for it on itchio states "This game is in Japanese, but if you know the Fantasy Zone, you should be able to play it without any problems", which is true, as this is very much a Fantasy Zone fangame, mechanically speaking, at least. Furthermore, even that polite warning is more that is really necessary, since the intro and ending scenes, as well as the item shop are all bilingual. 

 

It's interesting, after Near Fantasy Space, to see another Fantasy Zone fangame that takes a completely different approach to the source material. While Near Fantasy Space paid homage to various other shooting games from the history of the genre, re-imagining each of them as Fantasy Zone stages, Snail World is totally its own thing, aesthetically speaking. It uses only four colours throughout the entire game, and as a result, has a very clean, stylish look to it. 

 

Snail World is an excellent and lovingly-crafted game in every respect, and the only real criticism that can be levelled at it is that it's incredibly easy: I'm not even particuarly good at shooting games (as much as I love them), and I managed to get the one credit clear on my first time playing. However, I don't think this really is a criticism in this case, because I feel like Snail World was created as a kind of playable art piece, to showcase the creator's pixel art and music. 

 

A deliberate prioritisation of aesthetics, then. And judging the gme on its aesthetics can only honestly be done positively: it's clear the developer had a vision, and realised it perfectly, and it all looks and sounds great. There isn't really much more to say on this game, other than that it's free, so if it sounds interesting to you, go and get it. It's definitely made me curious about the developer's other works, so I'll be looking into those at some point, too!

Other Stuff Monthly #22!

 Though it was unfortunately short-lived, in my opinion, Raijin Comics was the second-best of all the English-language manga magazines (the best was Pulp, obviously). It was a magazine of extremes: some of the series it printed were super-popular, some were obscure works by new creators; some of the series were incredibly violent and masculine, some were very soft slice of life or romance stories. Even shorter-lived though, was its companion magazine, Raijin Games and Anime: a slender bimonthly publication that covered the current otaku culture in Japan at the time.

 

Before either of them came out, though, there was this preview issue with a front cover at both ends. From one side, you saw a preview of the first few manga series that would be running in Raijin Comics, and from the other side, a preview of the kinds of articles that would be running in the aforementioned companion magazine, which was at this point called Fujin Magazine, which is a better name than Raijin Games and Anime, in my opinion. Raijin and Fujin, they always go together, right?

 

So, what kind of stuff's in here? As the cover suggests, there's quite a bit of Sakura Wars coverage, as well as an article about the 2002 Tokyo Toy Show, and a few pages of very expensive-looking action figures. And it wouldn't be an early 00s publication aimed at anime nerds if there wasn't a mention of those overpriced lego minifig knock-offs, Kubricks (and their even worse spin-off Be@rbricks). There's also a look at upcoming games, and anime TV shows and movies. Most of these even got released in the west, eventually!

 

The most interesting article is the one covering the Radio Kaikan building in Akihabara, detailing what kinds of items are sold on each floor. The building has since been demolished and rebuilt, but I'm told it's still full of shops selling nerd stuff. I wonder if it still keeps the same layout described here? Also on these pages are two cosplayers: eighteen-year-old Wakatsuki Sena, who is attending a voice actor school (a quick internet search for her name turns up an AV star, though I don't know if they're the same person), and nineteen-year-old Kikouden Misa, who is "a player of a New Japan catfight league", the meaning of which is a mystery, though again, searching her name brings up a JAV star whose date of birth would put her as being nineteen at the time of this publication.

 

I don't want to go into too much detail on the manga previewed in the other side of the magazine, except to point out that for a few of the lesser-known titles, the few chapters printed in Raijin Comics remain the only English translations they've ever received, without even any fan translations stepping in to finish the job. These include Bow Wow Wata, a charming slice of life/veteranarian story about a teenage boy who can talk to animals, Revenge of Mouflon, a gritty story about an anti-terrorist agent, and Encounter, a series about World Health Organisation agents investigating paranormal phenomena. Encounter was created by a duo working under the pseudonym Sakuya Konohana, one half of which was Nishino Tsugumi, creator of Hanamaru Angels!

 

I still don't have a scanner, so once again, I'll apologise for the low quality photos used in this article. But I hope it was interesting and informative for you. I don't recommend picking up this preview issue specifically, but I do definitely recommend picking up any issues of Raijin Comics that cross your path, and if you're interested in turn-of-the-century otaku culture, then you probably won't regret seeking out Rajin Games and Anime, either.

Crazy Construction (3DS)

 This was one of the first games I got on my original 3DS, and I'd actually completely forgotten about it until pretty recently (I replaced my original with a New 3DS a few years ago, lured in by the system's potential as an emulation device). You might think that any 3DS game would be too recent to feel nostalgia towards, but once I loaded up Crazy Construction (also known as Choukousou Kenzou Keikaku Buildinger) really made me feel something for those halcyon days of seven years ago.

 

It's a falling stuff puzzle game with the reverse goal compared to most: you have to pile items up until they go past a certain height, and maintain that height for three seconds. The challenge comes from the fact that the items are a wide range of objects with many irregular shapes: furniture, junk, vehicles, moai heads, and so on. You can also rotate them a full 360 degrees, rather than just through ninety degree increments. So you have to pile these items up high, balancing them on top of each other, trying to avoid them falling off of the platform on which they're being stacked.

 

Of course, there's also a score to chase, and this comes in the form of item weight. Every item has a weight, mostly around two-to-four, and you have to have a pile weighing at least forty to clear a stage, with better grades being awarded for going beyond that. As well as that, each set of stages has obstacles, like wind, thunderclouds, birds, as well as an enemy character, who will periodically appear to use their power and hinder your progress. The problem with all of these things is that basically do the same thing in slightly different ways: they take away your ability to control the falling items as well as you like. It's a boring way to add challenge, and I would have vastly preferred something like changing the goals for each set of stages, adding objects that are harder to balance, and so on. Just taking away the player's ability to control the game is just no fun at all.

 

Crazy Construction isn't a bad game, just a flawed one. Just kind of mindlessly stacking items on a handheld while you watch TV is pretty nice, it's just a shame the challenges they added tend towards the mean-spirited and player-unfriendly, rather than actually being challenging. Also, the plot is about a bynch of construction androids rebelling against the evil corporation who made them, and the corporation sending other androids to bring them back under the heel, which I'm pretty sure is a Kamen Rider parody. Which is nice.

Ling Rise (Playstation)

 When you look at the screenshots of Ling Rise, I'm sure you'll probably think the same thing as I did: it looks like some kind of Japanese Crash Bandicoot clone. Once you actually play, though, that similarity only extends to the fact that the whole game takes place in long, narrow corridor-like areas full of enemies and pits. The actual platforming is done at a much slower pace than the Crash games, and there's a bunch of other stuff in the game besides that, too.

 

So, you play as this very androgynous character (in-game they look like a girl, but the boxart makes them look like a boy?), who's acoompanied by some small floating creatures that are called Lings. You only start off with one of them, but you quickly accumulate a Ling posse. These guys are the way you attack, since your character can't do it themselves for some reason. They shoot forward and ram enemies with their bodies! There's a little bit of a virtual pet element going on with the Lings, too, as you not onlt have to feed them to ensure they have energy to attack with, but you have to feed them the right foods, or their energy will refill, but they'll be in a bad mood and not want to attack. Sometimes you'll meet other characters accompanied by Lings, but I've played for a few hours and done a couple of bossfights, and none of them have used Lings to attack, preferring more traditional methods like magic swords.

 

I have no idea what the plot is about, but in the time I've played so far, I've done a lot of stuff that's very reminiscent of the legendary RPG Grandia: climbed mountains, explored ruins, walked along train tracks, escaped military prison, and so on. On the subject of RPGs, a lot of database-type sites online have this listed as one, but it's really not. There's some very mild RPG elements, like raising the stats of the Lings and being able/required to revisit earlier areas, but most of your playtime and the bulk of the game's challenge is in 3D platforming. 

 

The platforming itself takes some getting used to: judging jump distances took me a while to get used to, and I was constantly falling into pits like an idiot for the first couple of areas. It did gradually get easier, though, and there was a stage a bit later on which sees you navigating a lot of moving platforms, while also counter-intuitively moving towards the camera instead of away from it,  but by that point, I'd gotten the jumping down to an instinct. For some reason, collecting the items that enemies and smashed boxes drop never stops being a weird experience of perspective nightmares.

 

Ling Rise is a really cool and fun game, and other than one small hiccup near the start of the game, there hasn't been much of a language barrier in the way of me playing it. I'd still definitely play a fan translation if one ever comes out, though, since it'd be nice to know what's going on in the game. It's a shame it never got an official English release at the time, actually, I think it's thematically and aesthetically something a lot of people would have gone for during the turn-of-the-century anime boom, and the game itself is unique enough to stand out while also being familiar enough to draw people in. For those reasons, it's also surprising that it doesn't seem to already have any kind of western fanbase. Hopefully that'll change sometime soon, because it's a game that deserves a wider audience.