Commando Steel Disaster (DS)

 Okay, so you might notice that all of the screenshots for this reciew are of the game's first stage, and usually, I wouldn't review a game if that's all I could see of it, but this is a special case. Most of my time playing this game was the DSiWare version which I have on my n3DS. I don't have any way of taking screenshots of DSiWare games, though, but I knew the game was released as a regular DS cartridge, so I played that too, for screenshotting purposes. It turns out, the two versions aren't the same!

 

The basic core of the game is the same, of course: it's a pretty decent Metal Slug clone. You go through stages, shooting lots of guys, and occasionally robots and tanks and helicopters. There's a whole bunch of temporary power-up weapons, destructible parts of the stages with hidden items, and most other Metal Slug things. Except that vehicles only appear in special seperate substages, not as thing you can just climb aboard in the regular stages. It's pretty good. Obviously nowhere near as good as the first few Metal Slugs, but maybe in the same league as the later entries.

 

The differences between the two versions are all related to difficulty. The stages in the cartridge version are a lot longer, to the extent that entire sections are removed from the digital version. Of course, I've only seen the first stage of the cartridge version, but the first stage is made up of three sections: one on a jetbike in a forest, one outside in the snow, and another inside an underground military base. The digital version of the first stage, meanwhile, and the indoors section is slightly truncated, as well as the larger gatekeeper enemies having significantly less HP. The enemies in the digital version generally have less HP, and they inflict less damage on the player, too.

 

Which one is better? To be honest, there's no perfect version. The cartridge version is a bit of a chore: I could definitely overlook the difficulty if the stages were shorter, and the bigger enemies didn't feel like such bullet sponges, and while I definitely prefer the digital version's faster pace, it also feels like there's no challenge at all, and most of the times I've played it, I've actually gotten bored and stopped playing the game long before I came close to dying. 

 

So I guess the only conclusion is that Commando: Steel Disaster is a game with two different versions on the same platform, both of which are terribly flawed, in almost completely opposite ways. Just play Metal Slug X instead, is the best advice I can give here.

Pocket Pro Wrestling - Perfect Wrestler (Game Boy Color)

 Its strange that though handheld consoles in the nineties were often treated as lesser systems aimed at kids, and filled with licensed games of wildly varying quality, wrestling games were relatively rare compared to home consoles. In fact, GameFAQs only lists six wrestling games for the Game Boy Color, and one of them is WWF Betrayal, which isn't even a wrestling game, it's a beat em up starring wrestlers. 

 

Pocket Pro Wrestling is the only one of the six that isn't a licensed tie in to a promotion that now belongs to WWE, so there's no tie-ins to Japanese promotions, nor are there any Fire Pro games. But that's okay, since the wrestlers in this game are all thinly-disguised stand-ins for wrestlers popular in Japan in the nineties, and it plays kind of like a Fire Pro game. Like in Fire Pro, you perform moves by pressing a button at the exact right frame in the lockup animation that occurs when the wrestlers walk into each other.

 

There's a few differences to Fire Pro, but they don't do much to make Pocket Pro stand apart. The most obvious is that the ring is shown as a regular square instead of a diagonal one, and that doesn't really affect game at all. The next most obvious change is one that actually kind of harms the game: there's only one button for moves, as opposed to at least two, sometimes three, in the Fire Pro games. I guess this is linked to the fect that there aren't actually many moves in the game overall, with each wrestler having six main standing throws from a pool of maybe ten or so? 

 

Another thing there's a conspicuous lack of is match types, as there's actually only one: singles match. There are a few modes: there's a championship mode where you fight every other wrestler, and can continue or use passwords to pick up where you left off if you lose, a survival mode, which is the same but without continues or passwords, and a King of Fighters-style team battle mode, where two teams of three wrestlers fight one at a time. I think I'm being a little too harsh on a low budget Game Boy Color game, but when a game is so similar to an already-existing series of games, it's hard not to compare them, and to point out the ways in which the imitator falls short.

 

But, in its historical context, Pocket Pro Wrestling actually comes off a lot better. While the modern player in search of handheld wrestling fun would just put the Playstation's Fire Pro Wrestling G on their emulation device of choice, that wasn't an option in 2000, when this game was released, and there wouldn't be an actual handheld Fire Pro until the following year, on the GBA. So, at the time of its release, Pocket Pro Wrestling was actually the best handheld wrestling game money could buy (as far as I can tell, at least). So while there's not much reason to play it now, besides historical curiosity, at the time, it would've been a great game to get your hands on. Shame it was never released outside Japan, really.

Other Stuff Monthly #19!

 Around the turn of the century, there was a sudden boom in English translated manga. Fuelled partially by the popularity of various dubbed anime series that were being shown on TV in the UK and US, and partially by a company called Tokyopop pumping out tons and tons of low-priced volumes of series in every genre, it was a time that saw translated manga go from being a niche part of the English comics to the biggest part of it by a long way. Alongside the cheap volumes, there was also a mini-boom of Japan-style manga anthology magazines.

 

It's a shame that there aren't any of these magazines left today, because they were a really nice format, and each magazine had its own identity formed from the kinds of series they'd print, along with the general aesthetic and house style. My favourites were Pulp, which printed a lot of gritty and slightly artsy comics aimed at adults, and Raijin Comics, which stuck most closely to the visual style of Japanese magazines, and had a strange mix of series from well-known creators and stuff by people who'd never been printed in English before. But today, I'm going to talk about a short-lived magazine that I only discovered a few years ago, and seemed to last only a year or two circa 1999-2000: Chibi-Pop Manga.

 

As far as I can tell, this magazine was published by an American comic shop owner, and he took on a business model that I've actually wondered about many times: licensing works from up-and-coming, lesser-known creators, and translating it as cheaply as possible. The most amazing bit of cost-cutting is the way in which one of the series is printed: four shrunken manga pages on each magazine page, fitting a fifteen-page story into five! As well as the manga, the issue I have (vol. 2 #3) also has an error-laden article on the 1999 Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, and a few pages of cosplay photos, presumably from the same event. Unfortunately, the cosplay photos are printed in black and white and the contrast is terrible, so you can barely see anything in them.

 

So, you're probably wondering by now what series were printed in here, right? Here's the list:
The Twilight Files (Fujiwara & Atsu) - A Twilight Zone-esque weird tales anthology type series, hosted by a nameless person who's been interergrated into an information-gathering computer who tells us in this chapter, two stories of scientists experimenting on humans to try and cheat death.
Nagi: Coastguard 2 (Denjiro) - Appears to be a post-apocalyptic action series? There's a girl with metal manipulation powers fighting a giant robot in a ruined city, at least. There's only a few pages of this, and i'd like to see more.
Artifacts Breaker (Ataru Cagiva) - A shonen action series about marital artists with unique special powers, which I think are the result of human experimentation? Like Nagi, the small taste I have here makes me curious to read more.
Fubuki The Female Ninja (Tsugumi) - A very nineties action comedy about a ninja going to a modern day high school.
Adventures of Tokyo Kid (Tetsu Suzuki) - I have no idea what this is about. Most of the chapter is taken up by a young man and a young woman speaking in his apartment, where he reveals himself to be an inventor.
Trout Burger (Syuntaro Masuki) - This is the series printed in the weird shrunken format, and it's a silly comedy where a fast food restaurant employee foils a pair of bank robbers using a can of disgusting vegetable juice and a giant anti-tank cannon.

 

I admire the amateur enthusiast charm that Chibi-Pop Manga exudes, both in the production of the magazine itself, and in the series printed within, and as mentioned, I am genuinely curious about several of them, and I'd like to see more. Unfortunately, I can find almost no information on the series or the creators. Ataru Cagiva is an exception, and seems to have done a few manga adaptations of videogame RPGs. Tsugumi is the other exception, their full name being Nishino Tsugumi, and their most notable work being a single volume story called Hanamaru Angels, which I think was self-published, and even more interestingly, was a bilingual release! I actually managed to track a copy of Hanamaru Angels down, so I'll review it here at some point in the future.

 

So yeah, that's Chibi-Pop Manga: a clear labour of love for all concerned that unfortunately seems to have been totally forgotten. I enjoyed it, though, and if anyone can offer more information on any of the series listed in this post, please contact me! Also, I apologise for the phone photos, but my ancient scanner has no drivers for Windows 10. Forced Absolecence!

Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.

Ma Cheon Ru (Arcade)

 You're all familiar with Shanghai, right? The game about picking up pairs of Mahjong tiles out of a big pile in the right order? Ma Cheon Ru is based on a kind of variant of that. I can't find a name for this variant, though I think the most well-known games to feature it are the Dragon World series by IGS. 

 

How it works is that like in Shanghai, there is a specially-arranged pile of Mahjong tiles and you have to pick up all the tiles, with restrictions on which tiles can be picked up. Also like in Shanghai, the main restiction is that you can only pick up tiles that aren't covered by other tiles, and which have at least one of their horizontal sides untouched by other tiles, too. You aren't trying to match pairs to remove them from the game, though.

 

It's a pretty simple concept, but it's one that's kind of hard to explain in words. You have to match trios of identical tiles, but you don't have to pick them up together. Instead, you can hold up to six tiles in your hand (picking up a seventh that isn't the third tile of a set results in a game over), and tiles vanish from your hand when you've made a set of three. Get rid of all the tiles in the time limit and you finish the stage and go onto the next one. It's a genre I've only seen in arcade games, and pretty much all of them ramp up the difficulty very very quickly.

 

What makes Ma Cheon Ru stand out though, is the bonus stages (if you play it after reading this, I recommend going into the settings in MAME and setting it so they appear after every stage instead of after every third stage). There's nine different bonus stages that take the form of Tanto R-style minigames, with a wide variety of subject matter, like shooting parachutists, repeatedly punching a guy in the face, throwing objects at ugly people, and so on. They break things up pretty well, and you can get power ups for the main game if you score enough points in them. 

 

In fact, it seems like a lot more care and attention went into the bonus stages than the main game itself, and I wonder if the devs actually wanted to make a minigame compilation, but their publishers said that they needed to make a tile-matching puzzle game instead? We'll probably never know. Either way, I don't think this little subgenre is actually as fun as regular old vanilla Shanghai, but if you're going to play one of these games, Ma Cheon Ru at least has some mildly amusing bonus stages in its favour.