OOPARTS (Arcade)

 There are two very important things to know about this game. First, it was never actually released, though the ROM surfaced online lin 2020, and was added to MAME in 2021. Second (and most important), when the legendary arcade magazine Gamest previewed it, they misread the logo on the title screen and referred to it as FARTS. Anyway, it's a brick-smashing game with a few interesting quirks.

 

Mechanically, there's quite a lot going on. The game solves the age-old problem the genre has of spending long agonising minutes trying to hit that last black to clear a stage by simply having a different goal. Instead of clearing every block away, you instead have to do ...something (I haven't entirely figured out the conditions, but I think they have to do with lighting various pinball-style rollover spots around the screen) that makes a boss appear, then kill the boss by hitting it with the ball repeatedly.

 

There's a few other little things in there too, like how you have limited-use magic, that has various effects like summoning an extra ball that kind of roams around breaking stuff, a bird thing that flies around attacking enemies, or a wave of energy that slowly descends the screen, stopping the ball from falling past it for a few seconds. There's also the fact that you can ram the sides of the screen at full speed to perform a pinball-style nudge, changing the ball's trajectory. Do it enough times in a single stage, and you'll smash through the wall, allowing you to insantly loop from one side of the screen to the other!

 

There's a lot to love about OOPARTS aesthetically, too! All the screens outside of actual gameplay look amazing, for a start. That is, the title screen, stage select, intermissions between stages, that kind of thing. Then the stages themselves look pretty good, too! They aren't just a bunch of blocks on an abstract background, but seem like actual locations: bits of countryside littered with stone cairns, ancient temples with polished marble blocks, and so on. Everything about the way the game looks and sounds is totally dedicated to portraying this world of ancient ruins and lost magic technology.

 

There's not much more to say about OOPARTS, other than that it's a really high quality game, and it's a shame it never saw an official release. It's out there now unofficially, though, and I definitely recommend giving it a try!

Asuncia: Matsue no Jubaki (Playstation)

 In my opinion, the latter half of the nineties was a golden age for RPGs, with a lot of the best ever appearing on the Playstation. Asuncia is a Playstation RPG from 1997, and though it can't stand among the timeless classics of the era, it can stand on its own as a game that took different inspiration, and set out to fulfill a different vision of what RPGs are. That is, it seems to be inspired both mechanically and aesthetically by very early tabletop RPGs.

 

The aesthetic influence is obvious: pretty much all of the art in the game could have been taken from a 1980s TTRPG rulebook, and it's set in a downbeat, grimy fantasy world, with dirty buildings, unpleasantly violent monsters, and magic use something of a rarity. It's set in a world where isolated towns cower in fear, surrounded by vast, monster-infested hinterlands, waiting for a hero to come along and save them.

 

And that's what you do: each stage takes place over a massive area, and there are two important numbers displayed at all times: the time remaining, and the monsters remaining. Your goal is to reduce the monsters to zero before the time gets to zero. It's not real time, instead the timer counts down a little every time you move a space on the map, or take a turn in battle. Dotted around the map are towns, each of which will give you an item or some money on your first arrival, and they also have a few facilities: blacksmiths, inns, ite shops, and so on. The blacksmiths and magic guilds in the towns are actually the only way of strengthening your characters, which seems like a very old school TTRPG way of doing things. Also, conversations had in certain town locations can aid in recruiting new party members.

 

There are also a few dungeons in each stage too, which are smaller maze-like maps where you can find a bunch of treasure, and also fight a boss, who's a lot stranger than all the other enemies. Oddly, these seem to be the only bosses in the game, and they're totally optional. The enemies in the dungeons don't count towards the enemy count of the main stages, and the main stages end as soon as you kill all the enemies in them, there's no bosses to finish them off. (Apparently there's an ending you can only get if you kill every dungeon boss, but I only found out about that after I was a few stages in.)

 

Another weird little quirk is that you get a score for each stage, not only based on things you'd expect, like how many times you died, how many turns were left on the clock, and how many towns survived, but also on a weird system involving the order in which you kill enemies. There are three types of monster in each stage, each of which is assigned a colour: red, green, or blue. You can score bonus points by killing three or five of a single colour in a row, as well as killing sets of different enemies in certain patterns that are shown on a screen you can access before choosing your actions every turn in battle. If the game was more popular, I could imagine people figuring out exactly how to maximise their score on each stage.

 

Asuncia is a unique and interesting game, and it's definitely worth playing. Just don't go in expecting the deep plot and characters you might normally expect from an RPG of this era, and also, don't try to play more than one consecutive stage in a single sitting. Each one takes about thirty to forty minutes, and while that makes for an entertaining diversion, the repetition will start to wear on you if you don't take a break after that.

Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.

Other Stuff Monthly #23!

 With a front cover that looks more like an ad you'd see on the back cover of a videogame magazine, Vortex #0 is the only publication Electrobrain Comics ever put out. Well, kind of. There are two versions of it: the full thirty-two page version, which has a comic story and a strategy guide for the game that shares its title (a Super FX-powered 3D shooting game for SNES), as well as a nine page version that only includes the comic.

 

The comic tells a prologue story for the videogame, and it's surprisingly complex, fitting a lot of stuff in its low page count. The eight planets of the Deoberon system (ruled by Emperor Deoberon) live in peace, with only one of them having any kind of military installations, just in case. Barkahn, one of the local lords, hates this arrangement, and believes the system needs more defence, which he sets out to prove by attacking one of the planets and killing a bunch of people, then trying to take over the whole system.

 

Emperor Deoberon sets his scientists to the task of coming up with a way to stop Barkahn's villainy, and they create a magic computer that sends Barkahn, his armies, nd the four planets they conquered into another dimension. When everything dies down, Deoberon and Barkahn both die, and Barkahn's best friend, Vercingetorix, vows revenge, and his scientists find a way out of the prison dimension, and they steal the magic computer that sent them there. So the game casts you as the ace pilot sent into the prison dimension to defeat Vercingetorix and retrieve the computer. Phew.

 

Then there's the walkthrough, taking the form of lots of captioned screenshots, telling you what's in each stage, and what you need to do to get through it. The way some parts are written makes Vortex seem like a game that would be a confusing bore to get through unguided: "Cany you find all of these hidden keys, bonuses, and tunnels? You can't defeat Darius without them all!", "Don not allow Xerxes to close in on you! He will fire a weapon that will destroy you immediately!", and "You must have four electro bombs to defeat Vercingetorix!", that kind of stuff, you know? Sorry to bring this concept up two posts in a row, but it sounds like the kind of advice sitcom characters give each other when they're all temporarily obsessed with some unseen videogame that's never ben mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

 

Other than all that stuff, the other items worthy of note are two ads in the inside pages of the front and back covers. In the front, there's an ad for a game I've never heard of before: Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme Skiing and Snowboarding, while more intriguing is the ad in the back cover. It shows neither a title nor any screenshots, only a motorcross biker, and the promse od a hot newe Super FX title from Electrobrain, to be announced in the fourth quarter of 1994. I can't find any evidence of this game being released or announced, nor can I find mention of any Motorcross games from Electrobrain on lists of unreleased SNES games.

Danger Express (Arcade)

 This is an unreleased and unfinished game that came to light relatively recently. Though it's clearly unfinished, this mostly manifests as what we can generously call "presentational eccentricities" that would have presumably have been ironed out before release. Things like the very default-looking font used for a lot of the text, and things like getting a "bonus for breaking stuff" at the end of each stage. It is totally playable, though, and it's a shame that it never got officially released, because it's a lot better than most western-developed arcade games ofthe nineties.

 

The main thing that stands out in Danger Express is its aesthetic, which I've seen other people describe as looking like a fake videogame you'd see characters playing on a TV show. That's a fair enough description, but while I played, what came to mind for me is that it was like some long-forgotten vanity project of a straight-to-VHS no-budget action movie had somehow got a licensed tie-in videogame. All it really needs is the addition of a cutscene starring Cameron Mitchell and it'd be perfect.

 

What is that aesthetic? It's an amazing combination of sprite scaling and digitisation, with real life actors dressed as generic goons walking in and out of the screen. There's even some kind of psuedo-live action cutscenes! They're not really proper videos, but more like short gif-like animations using frames from a live action video. To maximize the amount of scaling that gets done, Danger Express also eschews the usual horizontal scrolling seen in most beat em ups in favour of having all the stages go into the screen like a melee-based Space Harrier. It seems unlikely, but I wonder if the developers had played the PC Engine game Jinmu Densho, which is a similar concept, mechanically at least (though to be honest, Danger Express is a much better implementation of the concept).

 

Naturally, then, a train is the perfect setting for such a game: lots of narrow corridors, giving a good reason as to why you're walking in a straight line through waves of enemies. So that's how it goes (except for a few outdoor excursions to backalleys, docks, or at the casino): you walk from the back of the train carraige to the front, killing everyone who tries to stop you, including soldiers, ninja, strippers, wrestlers, bikers and so on. Interestingly, some stages give you a rifle, while others are purely melee, except for the occasional inclusion of a temporary pair of nunchaku that shoot balls of lightning.

 

The most surprising thing about Danger Express is how good it is, though. Most games that use digitised sprites tend to be awkward, stiff and no fun to play, while western arcade developers in the nineties had a penchant for putting out cynical, hateful coin eaters. Danger Express bucks both trends! While the action isn't exactly super-smooth, it's fast and enjoyable enough to cover up the cracks, and the difficulty is actually prety reasonable: on my first attempt, I got about four stages into it (out of nine), and I think it's probable that with some practice, it could actually be 1CCed by a skilled player.