Super Bikkuriman (SNES)

 A few years ago, I reviewed a platform game for the Game Boy based on this same property, and it wasn't great. But because the character designs are interesting enough to capture my interest, and because old licensed fighting games are also interesting to me, I decided to look at this SNES adaptation. Unfortunately, it's even worse. A lot worse.

 

In single player, it takes the old pre-Street Fighter II approach of having only two playable characters facing off against a bunch of CPU opponents in a set order, though all the characters can be played in versus mode. It's also like a pre-Street Fighter II game in that you don't get any special moves. All you get is punch and kick, a slightly stronger punch and kick executed by pressing forward at the same time as the button, and a flying kick that only works sometimes. I have no problem with simple fighting, I've recently been getting obsessed with Psikyo's arcade-only martial arts fighting game Battle K-Road, which doesn't have much in the way of moves, and half its roster are headswaps of the other half, but this is an incredibly barren effort.

 

It doesn't even look good! In still screenshots, it looks like it might have fit in among fanmade X68000 games from a couple of years earlier, while in motion, it looks even worse! The characters have barely animation, and when you look at other games coming out on the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993, it stands out even more. It's a shame, since, like the Game Boy Super Bikkuriman game, the box and label art are pretty nice, and probably suckered in some unfortunate victims back when these games were first released.

 

As I played this game more, and as I was thinking about writing this review, it gradually dawned upon me the best possible way of describing it succinctly: it's anime Rise of the Robots. The terrible animation, the lack of playable characters, and the complete absence of any fun or excitement, but this time you've got knights with very long hair fighting various monsters, instead of a blue ugly robot fighting different coloured ugly robots. Just like Rise of the Robots, though, Super Bikkuriman is a game that's not worth playing at all. It's not even bad in a funny way, it's just boring.

The Shutokou Racing (Game Boy Color)

 I think I've mentioned this before, but I really like the simple top down racing games that have SEGA's Monaco GP as their patient zero. Zippy Race, Rally Bike, Mad Gear, that kind of thing. It was very much a genre of the eighties, though, and 1998 seems like a very late time to be releasing one, even on the Game Boy Color. This is only conjecture, but I feel like The Shutokou Racing was probably a passion project by someone who was themselves a fan of the genre, and wondered to themselves how it might be modified, and made into a longer, more "console-like" experience.

 

I'm sure that last sentence has struck dread into the hearts of some readers, and I have to say your suspicions are correct: this game is a grinding festival. Basically, there are four races, and the place in which you finish one race is your starting position in the next race. You've got a number of lives that deplete every time you crash (the starting number determined by your equipment), and running out of lives is the only way to get a game over. Instead, finishing a race, no matter where you place in the ranking, gets you some prize money. If you aren't in first place by the end of race four, the season restarts, but your money and equipment carry over. So you're expected to just keep failing until you're eventually rich enough to get the upgrades needed to go fast enough and win the season. 

 

Then you can play the second season, which is harder, faster, and more exciting, though it still relies on the cyclical grinding structure. There's also a "Classic Mode", which is a much simpler game, harkening back to the original Monaco GP, with enemy cars just mindlessly bouncing left and right off the sides of the track. Unfortunately, it's a lot slower than the original, even on hard difficulty. Another thing to note is that the game's main mode even has the "ambulance of death" that occasionally zooms up from the bottom of the screen, wrecking all in its path, which is also very specifically a Monaco GP reference.

 

Though I hate grinding in action games as much as any other sane person, in this case, I don't think it's a gamekiller, at least. The fact that the game's on a handheld makes it a nice little thing to occupy the mind while semi-watching some mediocre TV or something. I'd have preferred something closer to the arcade games mentioned up at the start of this post, but The Shutokou Racing isn't a total write off.

Other Stuff Monthly #18!

 Wow, what a long month it's been! Feels more like eight of them, doesn't it? Anyway, I'm finally able to start getting though the backlog of board games that's built up from Kickstarters and cheap online sales over the past year or so, and as such, I've regained the motivation to make these posts (though having said that, there isn't going to be a sudden string of monthly board game posts. I've got other stuff to cover, too). First up is a game that sat on my shelf for months, the communist-themed worker placement game Red Outpost!

 

Set in an alternate (better?) world where the USSR never ended and ventually made its way to the stars, the players take the role of the people in charge of a newly founded Soviet space colony, telling which workers to go where and at what time. It creates an interesting dynamic, as while you are competing for victory points, resources that might be in seperate player pools in other games, like workers, and the resources they produce, are instead communal. During the game, you get points for instructing workers to produce efficiently, but the big scoring happens after each day (there are two days in a game, and each day is broken down into five phases), when the mood of each worker is assessed, and each player who moved that worker during the day scores points based on both the worker's mood and how many times they moved them.

 

You can improve a worker's mood by sending them to do a job at which they're skilled (send the fisherman to fish, the shepherd to the pasture, and so on), or by giving them time off. Conversely, if you think one player stands to rake in a lot of points from a certain worker, there are also ways to decrease their mood, like sending them to do an ill-fitting job, framing them for stealing from the warehouse, or even having them spend some time in the gulag. So you can try and risk putting all your eggs in one basket for a big payoff at the end, or try and keep a few workers at slightly above-average levels of happiness, or you can concentrate on sabotaging the other players and making their favoured workers unhappy.

 

It took a few turns to really get into the swing of Red Outpost, but once we did, it was a really fun game. I think the Soviet theme really comes through in the game mechanics, and it's also a game with a lot of player interaction and opportunities for aggressive or sneaky play. I'm not sure if they're in the retail version, or if they're Kickstarter only, but the components are also really high quality: differently-shaped wooden meeples and tokens for the workers and resources, player counters with little hammer-and-sickles printed on them, and beautiful painted artwork on the board, too. Altogether, Red Outpost is a really fun game with great theming, and I definitely recommend at least giving it a try if you get the chance.

Gal Pani X (PC)

You can probably tell from the title that this is a fangame of the infamously seedy series of dirty arcade Qix-likes Gals Panic, but it's actually a double fangame, since the art you're revealing in the stages features characters from To Heart. If you're unfamiliar with To Heart, it's a multimedia franchise with manga, anime, visual novels and other stuff, and around the turn of the century, it was enjoying a similr kind of popularity among doujin circles as the Touhou series has in modern times. I don't think it was ever a big mainstream hit, but it definitely had a lot of fanworks based on it!

 

I actually like Gal Pani X a lot more than I like any of the actual Gals Panic games, though! Part of that might just be nostalgia, since when I got my first PC in 2005, I loaded it up with a whole bunch of freeware doujin games, and Gal Pani X was among them, but there's other reasons too. Firstly, none of the art in this game is actually dirty, it's just cute, so there's none of the unseemly grime associated with Gals Panic. Secondly, despite Gal Pani X mixing in elements of bullet hell shooting games, it feels a lot more fair to play, and it should only take a couple of attempts before you can get to the end of the game in a single credit. Thirdly, and most difficult to explain, it just feels really smooth to play. Moving your ship around, and expanding your area of control just feels really satisfying, like using a knife to cut through something with just a little bit of resistance.

 

So, in case you're totally unfamiliar with Qix-likes in general, or Gals Panic in particular, Qix-likes are games where you have a field inhabited by a large threat (and sometimes some smaller sub-threats), and your job is to eat away at that area, by leaving your safe zone and drawing shapes. Successfully come back to your safe zone without either your or the line you've drawn getting hit, and the area you drew around is added to your safe zone. Any enemies caught in that area are destroyed, too. The Gals Panic series added the twist that you can see the silhouette of a woman in the field, and rather than having to claim a percentage of the field as a whole, you have to claim a percentage of the silhouetted area only.

 

Gal Pani X builds further on this with its elements taken from shooting games. Not only do the enemies fire dense bullet patterns at you, but these patterns can come into your safe zone and kill you there (though I don't think there are any enemy attacks that can destroy parts of your safe zone like some stages in the later Gals Panic sequels have). So you're really only safe from touching the enemies while you're in there. Another element taken from shooting games is grazing, whereby you score extra points for getting really close to enemy bullets without actually letting them hit you. Though in Gal Pani X, it's not limited to enemy bullets, and you get points for grazing on pretty much everything: power ups, points items, bullets, the enemies themselves.

 

Gal Pani X is a game I recommend playing. It's freeware, but the developers' site went down many years ago now, so it might be a little harder to find now. But, surprisingly for such an old game, it runs in 64-bit Windows 10 without issue! Finally, on the subject of tracking down games, the developers of Gal Pani X, D5, also had a game that they didn't release as freeware, named Sispri Gauntlet. It was a bullet hell take on Gauntlet, starring characters from a novel series called Sister Princess. I've never been able to find more than the playable demo of it, and even that was a long long time ago. Please get in touch if you know where I might find the full game.