Tetris Giant (Arcade)

 I'm not totally sure if this game counts as obscure, but at the same time I'm thinking that it's going to mostly be arcade nerds that know about it, and even then, a lot of people will quickly write it off as a silly novelty game, and I think it deserves more than that. I'll also have to do something I haven't done on this blog in a long time: a disclaimer regarding this game's controls. The actual arcade version of Tetris Giant (also known as Tetris Dekaris) uses a projector dor its display, and is controlled by two gigantic joysticks at least the height of a human child. I, of course, have been emulating it on my laptop, and using a normal-sized USB Saturn controller. So the experiences I describe here are probably not exactly analogous to those of someone playing a real arcade machine.

 

I've also only ben playing single player, so I can't tell you about either the co-op or versus two player modes. Luckily, though, there are two single player modes, and both of them are a lot of fun. In both modes, there are some things that have been simplified to accomodate the unusual nature of the arcade version's controls: rather than the standard 10x20 block well, you instead have a 6x7 well, with the pieces being big and very brightly coloured. Furthermore, only when an entire piece crosses the line at the top does it count as a game over, partial pieces crossing the line are fine.

 

The first mode is line challenge mode, which is supposed to be the easier of the two modes, mainly because crossing the line doesn't end the game, it just erases the bottom few rows of blocks, so you're guaranteed at least two minutes of play. There's no scoring in this mode, and instead you're given two minutes to get as many lines as you can, with extra seconds added for clearing multiple lines at once. It's fun, but the lack of scores, and with it the lack of a high score table damages its long term appeal.

 

Luckily, the other mode, which tries to scare off timid players with a warning that it's for experts only, is score challenge. It's entirely about scoring as many points as you can before you get a game over or you reach two hundred lines. This mode does have a high score table, which features prominently as you play. It records the top one thousand scores, and it appears onscreen beside the well as a giant tower that you ascend as your score increases. The background fits the ascension theme too, starting at the bottom of the ocean, gradually rising up past skyscrapers, the sky itself, and up past the moon and into deep space. This mode is the meat of the game, and it's very addictive. A credit will only last me about five minutes, and I've still managed to play hours and hours of it. 

 

Even (or maybe especially?) without the giant gimmick of the arcade cabinet, Tetris Giant has still easily come to be one of my favourite versions of Tetris, and I definitely recommend giving it a try yourself. It's unlikely, but I hope it someday gets a ported to  handheld at some point, or at least a handheld Tetris game comes out that includes a mode that plays like it. One last thing to mention is that one essential thing you should do before you play (assuming you're playing via emulation) is to go into the service menu and change the music option from "instrumental" to "japanese songs". Trust me, this massively enhances an already great game.

Ushio & Tora (SNES)

 It's yet another game based on an anime, but this time it's one that I have seen: the nineties classic Ushio & Tora, which tells the story of Ushio, a teenage boy who one day accidentally frees Tora, a tiger-like demon from his dad's basement. The two then team up to fight other, worse demons, Ushio fighting using the magic spear that had previously held Tora pinned to a wall, and Tora using his claws and ability to shoot lightning from his face.

 

This game is something of an anachronism, being of a subgenre that was mostly dead by 1993: the single player boss fighter. You know, like Yie Ar Kung Fu or Metamoquester. There's some very short scrolling parts where you fight a few weak enemies, but the bulk of the game is made up of one-on-one fights against bosses who are mostly a lot bigger than you. It's a little disappointing that with only two playable characters, the movelists aren't bigger. Each character only has a few slight variations on their standard attack. 

 

The graphics also seem like a disappointment at first too, as they look a bit drab and dull. This all changed for me once I got to the second stage, a fight against a centipede-infested suit of antique samurai armour that takes place in a dusty, abandoned school building. The colour pallete, which makes heavy use of browns and greys, works really well here, and the game continues to have a grim, gloomy atmosphere appropriate for its demon-killing action for the rest of the game from this point on.

 

It's not a particularly sophisticated game, but I really enjoyed Ushio and Tora, and I think it must have made a fine accompaniment to the show at the time. And since there wasn't a videogame for the 2015 remake (it seems like only the absolute biggest anime series get videogame adaptations these days. It's a shame, in my opinion, and the blame probably lies at the feet of the vastly swollen scale and budgets of modern videogame production), it's probably worth looking into for fans of that version, too. One weird little detail is that another Ushio and Tora game came out six months later for the Famicom. Releasing a Famicom game as late as 1993 seems odd on its own, but six months after a Super Famicom version of the same series is double strange. I won't be reviewing that one though, since it's an RPG with no English translation.

Kaleido Festival (PC)

 This is a fangame based on an anime I've never seen called Kaleido Star. From what I've read online, Kaleido Star is about a girl named Sora who dreams of being a circus performer. In this game, you play as Sora, navigating short platforms stages, with the main gimmick being that there's lots of trapezes and trampolines strewn about each stage for you to use. Also, there aren't any enemies (though some stages do have traps that can hurt you, and pretty much all of them have parts with no floor where you can fall to your death (or at least wet failure) in the sea).

 

I was actually pretty disappointed by the circus aspect of the game. Looking at screenshots before I played it, I was expecting a game that focussed mostly on trapezing and doing tricks in the air, getting landings right, and so on. Instead, it's just a time attack platformer, and though you can get chains by quickly jumping from trapeze to trapeze in quick succession without touching the ground, it's ultimately a minor component of your final scoring for each stage.

 

The stages themselves are okay, they gradually introduce new elements as you go along, a lot of them have slightly out-of-the-way areas with more coins to collect, all the standard stuff you'd expect from a game like this. That is, until you get to stage 3-4. This stage starts out strong, with a staircase of trampolines leading up to a trapeze on a much longer pair of chains than any seen in the game so far, but then immediately crumbles. At the end of your swing arc on that giant trapeze are a bunch of traps that you'll hit midair if you try to jump straight up to the next giant trapeze. There's also a row of traps for you to smash into if you try going for a horizontal route lower down. I've had something like thirty attempts at this stage, and I don't know if there's some secret trick I have'nt discovered, or if the developer accidentally left some traps where they weren't supposed to be in their stage editor, but as far as I can tell, this stage is impossible.

 

It's a real disappointment, as that giant trapeze hints at more exciting things to come in later stages, but it seems like I'll nver get to see what those exciting things might turn out to be. As a result of this, and as much as I wish it weren't the case, I really can't recommend this game at all. Sorry.

Tekkouki Mikazuki Trial Version (PS2)

 Obviously, "Trial Edition" means that this is only a demo. But it's a demo of a game that never got released! And that game would have been based on Tekkouki Mikazuki, Keita Amemiya's excellent big-budget giant robot miniseries that aired in 2000! You play as Kazeo, the young boy protagonist of the series, and in tuen, he controls the giant robot Mikazuki to fight off the melon kaiju from the first episode, Suika Idom.

 

To clarify on that explanation, you play as Kazeo, running around on the ground. At the start of the stage, Suika Idom shows up and starts stomping around and destroying buildings. For about a minute, you've got to run around trying not to get stepped on, until some gold text appears on the screen, heralding Mikazuki's arrival. When it shows up, you can press select to alternate between controlling Kazeo and controlling Mikazuki. However, whichever of the two you're controlling, Kazeo is still "you" in the game's world, and you see what Mikazuki is doing from his perspective, wherever you left him on the ground.

 

It's a pretty interesting way of getting across the fact that this is a fight between giantsized combatants, and really, you shouldn't have expected anything less, since this game is by Sandlot, the masters of making games about really big things, as seen in their most famous games, the Earth Defence Force series, and a previous Lunatic Obscurity subject, Chou Shoujuu Mecha MG. It's a shame this game never fully came into fruition, as the monster design in the show is incredible (but again, Keita Amemiya is one of the greatest tokusatsu monster designers of all time), and it might have been cool to have stages where you played as Akane piloting the Gekkouki series of robots. 

 

Though this specific game came out, Sandlot went on to make a bunch of other games, and two of their other PS2 titles in particular build on the concepts put forth in this demo: Gigantic Drive and Tetsujin 28 Go. So I guess I should really seek them both out and give them a try, right? It's very difficult to get ahold of this demo through legitimate means nowadays, but I'm sure that if it appeals to you, you'll figure something out. And if you do, you'll have a fun five or so minutes before it's over, so why not?

Shenmue I & II (PS4)

 It is the first of April again, and as tradition dictates, it's time to write about a game that's a bit more well known than the usual fare. And this year, it's the turn of SEGA's divisive, absurdly ambitious adventure (and its sequel). In case you're wondering, I'm firmly in the pro-Shenmue camp. 

 

For those who don't know, the Shenmue games tell the story of a young Japanese man in the mid-1980s named Ryo Hazuki, and his quest to get revenge on Lan Di, the mysterious martial artist who killed his father. Well, they tell part of that story anyway. Unfortunately, though the games are absurdly ambitious, those ambitions never even came close to fruition. This story's been told many times before, but the original intention was for Shenmue to be twelve games, all as long as the first. Shenmue I is the first chapter in its full intended length, but then chapter two was skipped entirely, and the second game comprises chapters three-to-five. I haven't played the third game yet, but I do at least know that the story still isn't finished after twenty years.

 

But anyway, despite the reduction in scope from the original plans, these games are still incredible. They're open world adventures where you gather information, occasionally get into fights, and if you feel like it, you can waste time playing various side games, including a bunch of actual SEGA arcade games contemporary to the setting. Though they weren't the first open world games, you could make the argument that they were the first modern-style ones, with all kinds of distractions and things to do alongside the main quest. 

 

I could also talk about the way every character in the game has a name, backstory, and daily schedule, no matter how minor they are, or all the other bizarre and incredible things that are in these games, but to do so would be to do them a disservice. They're games that are much more than the sum of their parts. There's just a certain magic to them that's hard to describe, and judging by the way some people have reacted to them over the years, it's something that you either get or you don't.

 

Though I finished the first game a few times back on its original release, I never got all the way through the second until its HD rerelease. Furthermore, though I was always a fan of the games, it wasn't until I'd played all the way through both that I really realised how special and beautiful they were. Beyond the specifics of the plot and mechanics of the games, they're also a celebration of life, with themes of personal growth, the way people, places and events come and go with ever-shifting levels of importance, and all that kind of stuff.

 

There's a lot of stuff to see and do and find and collect in the games, but they aren't really made for completionists. Instead, it makes everyone's experience of the game slightly different: most of the main points will be seen by everyone in mostly the same way, but there's plenty of stuff you'll see that your friends might not, and vice versa. I mentioned earlier that I played through the first game a few times back on the Dreamcast, but on my recent playthrough of the PS4 port, I saw for the first time a pretty lengthy dialogue seen that is not only fully voice-acted (like all the game's dialogue), but even has a unique flashback cutscene. And unless you do a specific set of actions, you might never see any of that stuff! And there's a whole bunch of things like this in both games!

 

The atmosphere of the games is also noteworthy, in how immersive it is. There's some kind of magic captured in these (by 2021 standards) low polygon models and grainy textures, such that you can practically smell the environments you're exploring. Even playing back then, as a fourteen year old in the north of England, I recognised that these games were instilling in me a nostalgia for places I've never been to, at a time (slightly) before I was even born. I know lot of people don't think highly of these games, but to me, they're two of the best and most important ever, and I think everyone should play them both at least once.