Rainbow Cotton (Dreamcast)

 This is a game I somehow only recently got around to, despite having been meaning to play it for almost twenty years! Back in the Dreamcast's original heyday, it was one of the Japan-only titles I really wanted to try out. Then when Dreamcast emulation first came about years later, this game was just a little too much for my computer at the time to handle. A few more years (and a couple of dead laptops) later still, and an English translation patch, that even subtitles the FMV cutscenes gets released, and I finally got around to playing it.

 

The game is, of course, part of the long-running Cotton series of shooting games, and more specifically it's a sequel to the Mega Drive game Panorama Cotton, both games being Space Harrier clones, rather than the horizontally scrolling 2D shooting games more typical of the series. The first thing that'll hit you about the game once you start playing is how nice it looks. It's definitely among the best-looking games in the whole Dreamcast library! There's an incredible use of colour, and everything looks like an amazing fairytale dreamworld, almost as if they'd made a shooting spin-off from NiGHTs into Dreams. If I had played the game around the time of its release in early 2000, I don't think I would have ever seen anything like it before!

 

Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't live up to the visuals. It's just got lots of tiny little faults that all add up. Cotton herself gets in the way of where you're aiming and blocks your view of incoming enemy shots, too. You have a health bar instead of lives, and I don't think there's enough feedback when you get it, either. So if you don't pay attention to your health bar, you'll suddenly die without even realising you'd taken a lot of hits. None of these things is game-breaking on its own, and even added up, they don't make the game a bad one, but they are annoying, and it feels so close to being an actual good game, rather than one that's merely okay.

 

I think I can recommend this game conditionally. If, like me, you've been curious about it for a long time, then now is a good time to seek it out. Though the plot, as revealed by the subtitled cutscenes isn't really anything particualrly special, the whole experience of the excellent graphics and those turn-of-the-century animated FMVs does feel like something I would have loved back then, so there's a kind of retroactive enjoyment there. You should probably just emulate it, though, since the prices legitimate copies fetch these days are, just like its Mega Drive forebear, ludicrous.

Other Stuff Monthly #20!

 Another game from the big boardgame backlog I mentioned in my review of Red Outpost, this time it's Ars Alchimia. It's a translation of a Japanese board game, which is kind of interesting, since it seems like  this doesn't happen as often as I'd like. The same goes for Japanese TTRPGs, too, but that situation is slowly changing (though there are still many many TTRPGs from the 90s and 00s with cool-looking art, and cool-sounding concepts that I don't think we'll ever see in English).

 

Anyway, Ars Alchimia is a worker placement game that follows the players through their four years at alchemy school. Each year, you need to gather ingredients and recipes, employ assistants, and finally use forges to make magical items using alchemy. The big gimmick is that each player has a lot of workers (the exact amount varies based on turn order, the number of players, and some other choices that happen in-game). You see, when you send workers to a location, if there are already workers there, you have to send a larger group of workers there to take it over. Furthermore, you can also send more workers than you need, with the twin benefits of making it more difficult for following players to use the location, and adding to your own dice roll (for getting extra ingredients when gathering, etc.).

 

So, once the players get a hang of it, there is a lot of opportunities for some pretty spiteful play:  for example, if you know that a player that comes after you needs a specific ingredient, you can force them to make a choice between getting that ingredient and having enough workers left over to do other things elsewhere on the board). I think offering these cruel choices is a little more interesting than the dynamic in a lot of worker placement games, where you can just straight up block your opponents from using certain facilities.

 

I don't really have anything negative to say about this game. It's a lot of fun, the inter-player interaction is cool, it moves really fast, even with four players, and there's a lot of very cute and cool artwork on the board and cards. I think it's out of print now (and maybe even the English publisher might have gone out of business), but if you can find a copy of Ars Alchimia, I definitely recommend picking it up. I've only played it a few times at the time of writing, but I think with time, it might come to stand among the likes of Dominion and Istanbul and other all-time favourites!

Wander Vehicles - Doggybone Daisakusen (Playstation)

 So, this is a game that I instantly knew I had to play as soon as I saw screenshots of it, though, seeing it was a strategy game, I was worried about potential language barrier problems (which I'll address later). It's about small-scale tank battles between the armed forces of two countries: The Doggy Bone Republic (your guys, who are all anthropomorphic dogs) and the Banana Slip Kingdom (the enemy, who are all anthropomorphic monkeys). A third country, the Cat's Eye Confederation (anthropomorphic cats, of course), seem content to play profiteers, selling supplies to both sides. At least, that's how it looks to me, without being able to actually understand any of the dialogue.

 

Luckily, the game at its most basic isn't hard to figure out without being able to read Japanese! You have a few squads made up of three tanks each, and so does the enemy. You pick a squad and tell them where on the batle field you want them to go, by stretching a line out from their current location. When they encounter an enemy squadron, they'll ask if you want them to attack or carry on moving. Every squad is also marked with a rock, paper, or scissors hand sign, which obviously tells you who'll come out on top in a straight 3v3 fight.

 

So, your task in most of the stages is to figure out which of your squads to move to which locations, and at which times, to ensure they don't end up in battles they can't win. Some stages just want you to wipeout the opposition, others want you to get all your tanks to a certain location on the map, and it's one of these stages, the fourth in the game, where I came up against a (literal) barrier. In this stage, you make your way across a jungle swamp, with a few enemy squads lurking about. The battle part is pretty complicated, as attacking one squad will summon a nearby squad of a different element to back it up, so you've got to try and occupy different enemy squads at the same time. On my third attempt at this, I managed to wipe them all out and cross the swamp.

 

Unfortunately, this was a "reach the location" stage, and the location was behind some electric forcefields, and I couldn't figure out how to pass them at all. I'd been really enjoying the game up until this point, so I sought a solution online, only to encounter the big disadvantage inherent to writing about obscure games: if no-one's played it, no-one can help you. There's one attempted let's play on Youtube, which ends when the player dies near the start of this very stage. I found a series of videos on niconicodouga that appeared to be a complete playthrough, and got excited. Then I clicked the link to the video for stage four, and found that the videos only contained the cutscenes, and no actual gameplay footage.

 

Hopefully, someday, I'll be able to pass this stage, either because someone with better Japanese literacy than me will play the game and make a guide, or maybe someone will even make a translation patch, someday, since the Playstation seems to be growing in popularity among that scene. But until then, I can unfortunately only recommend Wander Vehicles (sometimes mistransliterated as "Wonder B-Cruise") to those who can read Japanese, or who have the perseverence to figure out this kind of thing through trial and error. However, I was thoroughly enjoying it until I got stuck, so if the language barrier isn't a problem for you, or if someone does reveal the solution for all to see at some point in the future, it's definitely worth playing.

GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.