Of Mice and Sand (3DS)

 I first became aware of this game when it was originally released in Japanese as Sabaku no Nezumi Dan, and though it looked interesting, I just assumed it would never get an English release of any kind and forgot about it. More recently, though, I was browsing 3DS releases, and found that it not only has an English release since I last saw it, but also a bunch of ports to different formats! Despite that though, I haven't seen anyone talking about any version of it, so I guess I'll do it.

 

The game's set in a post-apocalyptic desert world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (mainly mice, though you do encounter cats and just regular old humans, so there are presumably others out there, too), and you take charge of a small group of mice journeying in search of the mythical paradise of El Dorado. it's a big journey, too: I've been playing for several hours at the time of writing, and I'm not even half way across the world map. They do this in a big armoured vehicle that starts out looking a lot like a Mad Max tour bus, and gradually gets bigger and more formidable. You control any of them directly, though, you just move a cursor round, giving them orders. Build this room, craft this item, drive to the next town, and so on. 

 

At the basic level, Of Mice and Sand follows a classically compelling formula: get the ingredients to craft the items to build the rooms to get more ingredients to craft more items and build new rooms. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. The problem coms in the way that new locations are added to your vehicle's navigational computer. When you get to a town for the first time, you can pay to hear rumours, which includes rumours of nearby undiscovered locations. The problem is that the prices of these rumours increases pretty quickly, and your main source of income is fulfilling requests for crafted items. So you spend a lot of time driving back and forth between towns gathering resources or parked up next to towns waiting for your mice to craft the items you need.

 

I'm not too disappointed with Of Mice and Sand. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to continue playing all the way to the end, but like I said, I have had hours of play over the past week or so since I got it, so it's not like it's totally worthless. Maybe a kind of Cookie Clicker-esque version that let you just set things up and have travelling and crafting happen while you're away would be more palatable? Maybe if it ever gets a sequel, that's how it'll go? As it is, it's no classic, but it's worth a look, at least.

Metamorphic Force (Arcade)

 Two unfair criticisms that are often aimed a beat em ups as a genre are that they're unfair quarter munchers, and that they're repetitive to the point of mindlessness. This might sound a little too harsh to some of you, but I think the blame for both of these can be laid at the feet of Konami's licensed beat em ups of the late eighties and early nineties: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, X-Men, etc. I know a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and I do too, but they definitely live up to those stereotypes more than the average beat em up (especially the western versions, which were made more difficult to squeeze those few extra coins out of players), and the popularity and ubiquitousness in the past means they're the games that a lot of people think of first when it comes to the genre. It's really a shame that the best entries Konami made in the genre came out just as it was waning in popularity: Violent Storm was one of them, and Metamorphic Force was the other.

 

I think most people already know about Violent Storm, with it's bizarre soundtrack and wide array of bone-crunching throws, but Metamorphic Force seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar for some reason. The simplest way to describe it would be as a combination of SEGA's Altered Beast and Konami's X-Men beat em up. You pick one of four guys, each of whom has been granted the ability to transform into a different werebeast by the Earth goddess, and you walk across various fantasy landscapes beating up monsters until they explode into glowing goo. Each playable character has their own beast form, as opposed to each stage having a beast form ala Altered Beast, and they mostly just make you bigger, stranger, faster, and a slightly expanded movelist. Interestingly, a lot of the enemies you face are also werebeasts: lizardmen, elephantmen, hedgehogmen, and so on.

 

The X-Men similarities are a little more vague and difficult to describe than the obvious conceptual similarities to Altered Beast. Basically, it just really feels like the X-Men game, but with a bit more polish, and a bit more balance. It's especially evident in the boss fights: I'm sure a lot of you remember the fight against The Blob in X-Men, where the player characters can basically just pummel his to death in a few seconds? The bossfights in this, in the early part of the game, at least, are a lot like that. Still manages to be satisfying, though, the way you can beat your foes, throw them around, and even continue beating them while they're lying on the ground (especially when you play as Ban, the martial artist Minotaur, who literally dances on his enemies' prone bodies with his hooves!), Transformation occurs through collecting a goddess statue, and there's no time limit to it: you stay transformed until it's beaten out of you. Collect another goddess statue while already transformed, and you'll do a fullscreen dashing attack, a lot like Nightcrawler's super in X-Men.

 

The game's presentation is excellent all round. You can see in the screnshots how colourful it is, how big the sprites are, and how interesting the world and the monsters in it are, but the soundtrack is also high quality. Feeling in some parts like the music you'd hear in the background of a really great fantasy cartoon, and in others the  same kind of bombastic chiptune metal heard in the likes of Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive. There was, according to legend, a soundtrack CD was released under the title Konami Amusement Sounds '93: Autumn Edition, but I can't find a single picture of it, a copy of it for sale, or any reference to it existing other than ones apparently copied from Wikipedia (which I think was itself copied from the old MAME history.dat). I'm sure it does exist, somewhere, but it must have been printed in very small quantities.

 

Metamorphic Force is a game I definitely recommend playing. If you do, though, the old rule of Konami beat em ups does still apply: play the Japanese version of the ROM and you'll have a much better time. It's never had any kind of home port, but I'm hoping that Hamster Corp. put it out as part of the Arcade Archive series at some point. They've released other nineties Konami games, so it could happen, maybe! If it ever does, it'll be a day one purchase for me.

Hissatsu! (Saturn)

 Based on an incredibly long-running perod drama, Hissatsu! sees you taking control of a group of four assassins (or rather, picking two of them out of the group) and traversing platform stages that have their targets at the end. Each of the four fights with a different weapon: sword, fists, poisoned acupuncture needles, and a specially-treated shamisen string. Interestingly, I found that the last two, despite having the least conventional weapons, were also the easiest to use. The needles guy throws them for his special attack, and it uses so little of his special meter that he's basically a long range one hit kill character most of the time, and the string guy's normal atack is weaker than all the others, but it's also slightly longer range. And since a lot of the enemies are "activated" by you coming close to them, range is pretty important.

 

The game istelf seems a little anachronistic: other than the CD audio, the large colour pallete, and the big pieces of pixel art used for cutscenes, there's not really anything on display here that couldn't have been done on the Mega Drive, and even those three things could have been done when you bring the Mega CD into the picture. I remember this being said as a criticism for various Saturn and Playstation games in some of the lower quality magazines of the nineties, but it was always in reference to games that would have been impossible on the Mega Drive, like Guardian Heroes or Street Fighter ALpha 3. But Hissatsu! really does look and feel like a game that's a few years older than it is. I'm not saying this as a negative, though, that's just how it is. It even uses the same control layout as a lot of first party Mega Drive games: A for special attacks, B for normal attacks, and C for jump!

 

It's a pretty traditional 2D platformer all round, you go from left to right killing enemies, avoiding traps, and so on, until you get to the boss, then you kill them. An interesting little stylistic twist is that because the player characters are assassins, the people they're out to kill might be politically powerful, but that doesn't mean that they're formidable combatants. As a result, the first stage ends with you killing a defenceless old rich guy with no problems at all, and subsquent stages end with a fight against each target's personal bodyguard, before you do the final deed yourself to end the stage.

 

At the most basic level, it's a fun game that also looks and sounds pretty nice, but it's also got a lot of flaws. There's little annoying things like how it really feels like you should be able to drop down to lower levels from thin platforms, like in Revenge of Shinobi, but you can't. That's only a little one, but it's annoying every time I forget and try to do it. And there's worse things, like how the game quickly ramps up the difficulty, and does so in ways that feel unfair.

 

 For example, there are enemies that split into three enemies of equal power if you don't kill them before they get close to you, and even worse, in a Rick Dangerous-style display of hatefulness, a few stages in, certain kinds of enemy gain the ability to just suddenly appear right next to you out of nowhere. So you either meticulously memorise the exact pixels that summon them when you step past them, or you spend tedious extra time slowly shuffling along step-by-step so that you don't accidently just run into an attack out of nowhere. There's even an element of randomness to contend with, as there's a chance that enemies will drop a caltrop when you kill them. Most of the time, this is fine: just pay attention and jump over them when they appear. But sometimes it happens in a tight corridor with no room overhead, and you have no choice but to walk into the caltrop and take damage.

 

Despite its flaws, Hissatsu! isn't a bad game, and I think a patient player who can get into the right mood to appreciate the game's atmosphere will have a pretty good time with it. The only problem is that they'd have to be very patient, a lot more patient than I am, unfortunately.

Curiosities #20 - Wakusei Aton Gaiden (Famicom Disk System)

 The circumstances of this game's creation are somewhat similr to the MSX game The Komainu Quest, which I reviewed back in Small Games Vol. 5, in that it was created by a government agency. This time though, it's the National Tax Agency of Japan, and the aim here isn't promotional, it's educational, aiming to teach Japanese citizens of the 1980s correct tax-paying procedures.

 

It takes the form of a simple vertically-scrolling shooting game with occasional quiz segments. The quiz segments are all in Japanese, and presumably, all the questions are about Japanese tax laws in the 1980s, so I'm going to assume nobody is ever going to bother translating this game, and even if they did, most playrs wouldn't get the answers right without emplying a lot of trial and error anyway. That is, unless a passionate and very competitive high score scene suddenly springs up around the game, since correct answers score points (I managed to get a few through sheer luck).

 

The shooting parts are very simple, you just fly upwards, and every few seconds, a couple of enemies fly down from the top of the screen for you to shoot. Now and then a friendly ship will fly up from the bottom of the screen, and these act like power ups if you touch them, either killing all present enemies, increasing your speed and the power of your guns, or latching onto the front of your ship and acting as a temporary shield. That last one seems the most pointless, thank's to the game's biggest flaw: there's no real lose condition. Getting hit just reduces your speed and firepower, and you can otherwise get hit as much as you like without consequence. 

 

As a result, the only real "game" here is to try and get the highest score before it ends, by shooting every enemy and answering every question correctly. With that in mind, I can't really recommend Wakusei Aton Gaiden to anyone except those curious to see a government-commissioned shooting game about taxes.

Cross The Ridge R (PC)

 Despite the word "Ridge" in the title, this game has a lot more in common with the Initial D series than Ridge Racer. It really does have a lot in common with Initial D, too: it's an arcade-style drift racing game where you take part in one-on-one races that all take place on incredibly bendy Japanese country roads. Also there's lots of eurobeat music.

 

There's some stuff in the game I don't quite get, too. Like how there's a huge selection of cars to pick from, but you only get to pick once, the first time you load up the game. Also, if you're using an XInput controller (or a Dual Shock 4 masquerading as one), the controls are mapped automatically, but accelerate and brake are mapped to two of the face buttons, rather than the analogue triggers. But seeing that the menus are almost totally horizontally arranged, it looks like the developers were assuming that most people playing this game would be doing so with a steering wheel.

 

The main mode is arcade mode, which has various courses, each one consisting of four races, each against a different opponent. Complete one course to unlock the next, though I don't know how many there are in total yet, I've only played the game for a couple of hours at this point. It's been a fun few hours, though! Of course, right from the start, your success relies upon your ability to drift well, so it's important that it feels good to drift. The devs have done a decent enough job of this, I'm glad to report. I think I've been spoiled by the likes of OutRun 2 and Ridge Racer 3D with their incredibly easy works-every-time drifting, but Cross the Ridge R complicates things just enough to make a good successful drift feel incredibly satisfying. You've got to know just exactly when and for how long you need to switch back and forth between accelerating and braking when taking each corner.

 

I have mixed feeling on the graphics, though I do admit that they're not totally rational. There's something in the combination of low poly 3D models with blurry low resolution textures and the high resolution of the game itself that really reminds me of the days of X Box Live Indie Games. It looks fine I guess, if a little sterile. The big problem I have with it though, is that when I think of drift racing games, my mind always instantly goes to the ones on Playstation and Saturn, with their super-grainy textures and short draw distances (especially on the night time stages) that really added to their atmosphere. I know this kind of nostalgic thinking isn't really fair, though, so I won't consider it too thick a black mark against Cross the Ridge R's  name.

 

In summary, Cross the Ridge R is a game I can easily recommend. There don't seem to be many racing games of this kind released in the past decade, it'll probably run at full speed on almost any modern PC, and it only costs a few hundred yen! If you like arcade racers, it seems like it'd be rude not to pick this one up.