Charge'N Blast (Dreamcast)

 There was a big problem in the world of UK-based Dreamcast magazines. Though the console was mostly a home arcade machine, made by an arcade company, and with many arcade ports in its library, both first and third party, most of these magazines seemed to be staffed by writers with a bizarre pathological hatred for arcade games. Charge N Blast was a game they really, really hated, of course.

 

The big point of contention with a lot of the critics at the time was its length. And yes, if you don't care about actually playing the game, and you just want to credit feed your way to seeing the end credits, it is a very short game. Probably less than half an hour. But I don't know why you would do that. It's not an enjoyable way of playing any kind of game. I find it boring to use continues, as I'm sure I've mentioned numerous times before, and after a couple of hours of playing Charge N Blast, I can semi-reliably get about half way through the game on a single credit.

 

Addressing the follies of generations past aside, how does the game actually play? Pretty well, and, more interestingly: pretty idiosyncratically! It looks like a standard Cabal-alike, which was a long-dead genre in 2000, but it's actually something a little more unique. The best way to describe it would be to describe the control system, which does take a little getting used to at first. You use the d-pad or analogue stick to move your crosshairs around and aim at enemies, and the shoulder buttons to move left and right to dodge enemy attacks. 

 

That's odd enough, but it's shooting where things get even more unusual. Each character (there are three to choose from) has three weapons, and each is assigned to the X, Y, and B buttons. These aren't fire buttons, though, but they start charging the weapon up; the longer you leave it before firing, the more powerful the shot will be. Furthermore, some weapons let you lock onto multiple enemies by moving the crosshair over them while the weapon charges. Then, you press A to actually shoot. So, rather than switching between your three weapons, you instead choose which one you want to charge a few seconds before you actually make each shot.

 

It's a fun and interesting take on the old crosshair shooter, and though it could have been done a few years earlier with sprite scaling, the turn-of-the-century polygons look is fine, too. Like I said, it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it's a fun and unique game, and I recommend giving it a try. Unfortunately, it seems that the Dreamcast has gone the way of the PC Engine in terms of ludicrous game prices, though, so emulate it, unless you're rich uncle moneybags.

@Simple DL Series Vol. 13: The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utensha (3DS)

 I recently made an exciting discovery: there's a 3DS branch of the Simple 2000 Series! Well, I already knew it existed, but for ages, I thought it was limited to a small selection of escape room games. Turns out, there's a whole bunch of the Simple Series' trademark weirdness to be found on the most-modded handheld. This game is even developed by Z-game studio extraordinaires Tamsoft! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was to find this.

 

The most succinct way of describing the game is "Sane Taxi". At a basic conceptual level, it's a lot like SEGA's arcade classic Crazy Taxi, in that oyu drive around a small city, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, being paid a bonus based on how quickly you get your charges to their destination. The difference being that there's very little in the way of craziness present this time around. 

 

You drive at a normal speed, there's no expectation that you perform stunts, or even any opportunity to do so, and the whole city seems to be built on completely flat ground. It's also structured in a more joblike manner, with each stage representing a day's shift, starting at 8AM and ending at 1PM, with a quota of fares to bring in by the day's end. I played eight days, and though the quota increases every day, it's still possible at the point I reached to fill it in about half your alloted time. I'd hoped that maybe after a week, the game might give you a new map to drive around, but nope: it's the same map, with a slight increase in quota every day. Maybe there are more cities later on, but the game's worn my patience out by asking me to drive around the same map eight times in a row.

 

It is a Simple game, and there's plenty of Simple tropes on display, to please those cultured connoisseurs among you. As I already mentioned, it's developed by Tamsoft, and it also takes place in a comfy, mild-weathered low-poly representation of modern-day urban Japan. Furthermore, despite being about a car instead of a person, there's a whole bunch of costume parts to unlock, including normal things like paint colours and custom licenseplates (including one that has a picture of old-school Japanese internet meme Monar!), and less normal things like a giant viking helmet, a bumper shaped like a piano keyboard, and so on.

 

The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utenshu is far from being a great game, or even a good one. But it's not really fair to call it a bad one, either. It is a nice, comfy thing to keep you occupied while watching tv for an hour or so, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play it for any longer than that.

Fox Junction (Playstation)

 This game has been a fascination for me for probably about a decade at this point! There's just something about the way it looks and sounds that's really caught my eye, and as the years have gone on, I think I've figured out most of the mechanics despite the language barrier. There's still a big wall impeding my progress though, that I don't think I'll be able to surpass until it gets a translation patch, but I'll tell you all what I (and people in a few forum threads over the years) have been able to ascertain.

 

First, it's a real time 3D semi-roguelike, where you go to various maps. In the maps, there are, as you'd expect, enemies, items, and traps. There's also a teleporter in each map. This is because all those maps are just squares on a bigger map, that looks like a multicoloured patchwork quilt, each coloured square representing a map and its theme (desert, cave, night town, plains, and so on). There's a tower visible in the distance, and its location is constant: if you see it in the north in one map, then take the teleporter north from there, it'll be closer in the next map, for example. And that's where I've hit the wall! I have no idea what you're meant to do once you get to the tower.

 

However, there's still lots of information I have to give you. So, some of the items are stuff you'd expect, for healing your HP and replenishing your ammo. Some of them are "Drums", which are like files in the game's world. And some of those drums, the ones with P in their name, tell you how to build robot companions called Palmata (I assume a portmanteau of Pal and Automata). The enemies sometimes drop robot parts bearing their names, and these P drums tell you which of these parts you can combine to make your palmata. Give them a weapon too, and that's a new friend you've made!

 

Now, to attack, you hold R1 and press square, but if you have a palmata equipped, holding R1 brings them into the fray to fight in your place. This is essential, not only because it means they take all the hits instead of you, but also because, as far as I can tell, your weapon never gets more powerful. So to fight tougher enemies, you've got to find the parts to create stronger palmata and the compatible weapons to give them!

 

Regarding the language barrier, like I said: I've hit a wall in my progress through the game. But, I've still managed to enjoy hours of it, just through exploring the worlds, trying to get a little further, and so on. It was incredibly satisfying building a palmata for the first time, once I figured out the game actually tells you what parts to combine, and you don't need to use trial and error like I had been doing! I think it's probably going to be a lot more difficult if you can't at least read katakana, though. Enemy names (which correspond to the palmata parts they drop), along with a lot of other items are named in katakana, and being able to identify them at a glance is obviously a lot easier than memorising symbols that have no meaing to you.

 

There's apparently a fan translation in progress, by the people who recently translated Iblard Laputa no Kaeru Machi. I'm very much looking forward to it, but in case anyone wants to give the game a try before it comes out, I hope the information here is at least a little useful. (Also, I wish I'd bought a real copy of this game back when I first found out about it, as the price has shot up to ludicrous levels in the years since!)

SEGA Ages 2500 Series Vol. 5: Golden Axe (PS2)

 I remember first seeing the boxart for this game on Lik-Sang or some other import site not long after it came out, and being amazed that there was a new Gold Axe game, and frustrated that not only was no-one talking about it, but there were no signs of it ever getting released in Europe. It did get that Europe release a few years later though, as part of the SEGA Classics Collection that compiled a bunch of the SEGA Ages 2500 Series games onto a single disc. Everybody hated it!

 

I tolerated it at the time, partly from nostalgia, and partly from the  beat em up drought that had been ongoing for about a decade at that point. Playing it again now, a decade and a half later (meaning it's now older than the original Golden Axe was when it was first released!), my opinion's a little more reasonable, and though it's not the irredeemible garbage people made it out to be when the Classics Collection came out, it's not particularly great, either.

 

It looks okay for a nineteen year old budget game, though there are some massive weak points, like how most of the magic attacks other than Tyris' dragon summon look pathetic, and how Gilius looks like a bendy rubber action figure that's been played with too much, giving him weird bow legs and arms constantly stretched outwards. The few cutscenes look pretty nice, though, thanks to the developers went the route of using low polygon count models and covering that up with higher resolution textures. So the characters actually look better in close up than they do while you're actully playing the game.

 

As for how the game plays, it's a mixed bag that's mostly bad. There's some stuff I do like, such as the magic potion system being replaced by a meter that fills up as you attack enemies, so you get to use your magic more often. The little elves (who now look like little kobold creatures) are still present, with the potions giving a large amount of meter in one go. A nice little touch is that if you make them drop a potion, then leave it on the ground for a while, they'll pick it back up!

 

As for the bad, there's quite a few things. Gilius is so slow as to be pretty much useless to play as. The same can also be said of the back attack that every character has, though the normal attacks have such weird hitboxes that you'll usually hit enemes that are behind you if they're stood closely enough anyway. There's very few enemy types, and a lot of stages don't even have bosses at the end of them! An upside of the scant variety in enemies is that you can learn their behaviours pretty easily, I guess? The main thing to remember is that every enemy, if they're at the other end of the screen from you, will do a running attack. So try not to be stuck mid-combo when that happens.

 

There's really no reason to play this version of Golden Axe in this day and age. The arcade original is better, and the Mega Drive port of that is pretty good too, making up for its slightly worse graphics with a couple of extra stages. Hopefully SEGA will let someone give Golden Axe the Streets of Rage 4 treatment, and we'll get an all-new, excellent game that also looks amazing. Or at the very least, I hope Revenge of Death Adder gets a home port someday. One final thing I'll say about SEGA Ages Golden Axe, though: it's a lot better than the absolute garbage that was Golden Axe: Beast Rider.

Holosseum (Arcade)

 A disclaimer for this game: I played it on a PC monitor via emulation, but the original cabinet's display had the graphics projected onto a curved mirror, to create the illusion that there was a 3D hologram in the middle of the cabinet. It doesn't affect how the game plays at all, but it's obvious that it's a game that was relying heavily on this for its appeal, so I thought I should mention it.

 

The game itself is a fighting game, though it's one that very short on features, even being released as early as 1992. There are four characters: Professor Chen (kung fu guy), Somchay Dompayagen (muay thai guy), Jack Garrison (big guy), and Dave (karate guy). There are no backgrounds, though the real cabinet had a few coloured blocks in it, to add to the futuristic semi-abstract hologram look. The four fighters also don't really have any personalities or backstories, nor is there any plot at all, or even any special moves. Just four guys punching and kicking each other in the void. Dave doesn't even get a last name!

 

So you pick a guy, you fight the other three guys, then you fight the world champion, who is you, but recoloured. If you beat the world champion, you get to fight in a little survival mode. There's no reward for any of this, though: like I said, there are no endings, and there's also no scores or time records. The controls are simple as you might expect: just the joystick and two buttons, for strong and weak attacks. It is pretty surprising that they went that way instead of a punch button and a kick button. Surprisingly forward thinking, considering how basic the rest of the game is.

 

Holosseum was apparently released as a conversion kit for Time Traveller, a laserdisc-based game that also used the curved mirror fake hologram display, after the laserdisc player in the cabinets starteed failing. With that in mind, it could be that the game's barebones nature was a result of having to get it out of the door as quickly as possible. But honestly, what I think is closer to the truth is that it wasn't made for fighting games fans, or even arcade game fans in general to be a game that they'd come back to regularly. I think the target audience would be families and other casual players who might be impressed by the visual gimmick, play one credit, and move on.

 

I think the game could even have been ported to the Mega Drive at the time, without losing anything except the hologram gimmick. But obviously they couldn't actually do that, because without the gimmick, the game doesn't really have anything else to offer, and if it could be played on your TV at home, the fancy expensive arcade cabinet would have lost all its prestige.

Code Name: Viper (NES)

 I'm not actually sure how obscure this game will be to my North American readers, but it was so unheard of to me that I'd never heard of it before seeing the vaguely unpleasant Japanese title Dead Fox in a list of ROMs, and I had to find out what such a game could be. But the NES/Famicom is still foreign territory to me, so forgive me if this was a widely-loved clasic outside of the UK.

 

What is is, though, is a Rolling Thunder-alike, albeit one with enough of its own ideas (and twists on Rolling Thunder's ideas) to be worthwhile in its own right. You play as some guy named Mr. Smith, sent to South America to destroy the seven hideouts of a drug cartel. For some reason, you aren't sent in with any explosives or demolition equipment, and have to find a guy on-site who'll give this to you. I guess it's more interesting that finding a key to finish each stage?

 

There's lots of revolving doors around the stages, and like in Rolling thunder, some of them contain ammo and weapon upgrades, and all of them can be used as hiding places from enemies. Unlike Rolling Thunder, some of them also contain hostages, little boys and grown women. They make a satisfying BEEP-BOOP noise that kind of sounds like the words "thank you" when you find them, but they don't give you any power ups or points. The game keeps a running total of how many hostages you find as you finish each stage, so I assume it affects the ending in some way?

 

The meat of the game, though, is obviously going about killing lots of guys. I really liked this! The guys are all wearing different coloured outfits, which signify their exact behaviours and abilities. You know I love that kind of clean, pure game design by now, don't you? There's something about shooting them that feels really satisfying, too. I can't explain it, it's like how shooting guys at point blank range in Elevator Action EX on Game Boy Color feels like it's much more violent and gory than it actually is for some reason. The only big flaw relates to the fact that, like Rolling Thunder, you can take a melee attack before dying, while a bullet takes you down instantly. However, while Rolling Thunder has unarmed enemies that stop to punch you whe you let them get up close, the unarmed enemies in Code Name: Viper hurt you by just walking into you. It really is a tiny little nitpick, but in a game with a pseudo-realistic setting like this, it's a little disappointing.

 

So yeah, Code Name: Viper/Dead Fox is a pretty good game. As for how it compares to its inspiration, I'd say that it's a lot better than the NES port of Rolling Thunder, but it falls a long way short of matching up to the arcade original. I definitely recommend it!

Gale Racer (Saturn)

 Though it wasn't exactly a launch title for the Saturn, coming about a week later, Gale Racer still feels like a title that was made purely to experiment with the hardware, then released just to boost the fledgling system's early library. It's a port of the 1991 arcade game Rad Mobile, whose main claim to fame is being technically the first game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog, as a decoration dangling from the rear view mirror.

 

It's not an exact port of Rad Mobile, having some changes and additions made, not all of which are positive, like how there are now loading screens between stages. Most of the changes are small and not worth noting, but a big one is that while the stages themselves are still made using sprite scaling as in the arcade, all the cars are now polygonal models. This mostly looks fine, though there are occasional moments where it looks like the cars and the road exist in completely different worlds to each other. 

 

In fact, sprite scaling is, more than most forms of videogame graphics, an optical illusion. Two dimensional sprites are shown changing size very quickly so that they look like they're moving in a three dimensional space. The illusion frequntly breaks down in Gale Racer, though. It looks fine when there's a lot of stuf at the side of the road, but when there isn't, it starts to look a lot like you're driving down a rollercoaster track suspended in a strange empty void.

 

As for how it plays, it's kind of a mixed bag. Mostly a bag filled with bad stuff, but there's some good in there. For a start, the car feels very strange to steer. I think it was a mistake giving a sprite scaling racing game a first person viewpoint, as it really feels like the car doesn't steer as much as it does swivel on a central point underneath it. It's something that takes a lot of getting used to. Collisions are another problem, in that they're incredibly inconsistent. If you hit another vehicle, you might pass through it, you might lose a bit of speed, or you might come to a complete stop for several seconds. There doesn't seem to be any solid determining factor as to which of the three things might happen.

 

There's a couple of weird things, too. Like how you have buttons for activating your headlights and windscreen wipers. They can only be used on certain stages, and you have to use them for those entire stages or you won't be able to see anything. Since you have no choice in the matter, why aren't these functions automatic? Very strange. Also, though you're overtaking cars the whole time, this seems to mainly be an aesthetic thing, as you're really racing against the time limit, and it doesn't seem possible to finish the game within that limit without also passing every car. Furthermore, there's times where the logic of the race takes some time off. 

 

The biggest example of this is one stage that's conceptally very cool, though it's also very frustrating to get through. Basically, there's an entire stage where the only other racer is the homicidally agressive driver of an articulated lorry, who you race against along a long winding mountain road with a sheer drop off of one side. There's no chance of seeing this guy on any earlier or later stages, and he always appears in this one, no matter what position you hold in the the race.

 

I actually own a copy of Gale Racer, or at least I did at some point. Maybe I still do? Either way, the only reason I bought it is because it was dirt cheap, and I wanted more import Saturn games with no language barrier. This was also in those ancient times before Saturn emulation was as reliable as it is now, of course. In this day and age, though, you probably are going to be playing your Saturn games through emulation, and there's many much, much better racing games on there. Some with fan translations, even! So don't bother playing this one.

Dark Eden (Game Boy Advance)

 You could make a strong case for the lifespans of the Game Boy Advance and DS being the golden age for the search action genre. Six excellent Castlevaniae, two great Metroids, and a bunch of other, lesser known games or varying quality like Monster Tale and Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru were released in this time, and though they were prolific, they didn't yet feel over saturated. Strange, then, that Dark Eden is a proposed search action game that couldn't find a publisher.

 

The ROM that was recently leaked isn't really a full game, but nor is it an unfinished one. Instead, it's kind of a playable pitch, an example in microcosm of what the full game would entail. You play as a guy with a sword, and you're in a very Castlevania-esque castle with a few gardens full of ruins (or possibly follies?). You jump around, kill enemies with your sword, and find upgrades that let you access more areas. There's only four upgrades, and they all give you new abilities that can be done without accessing a menu (which is lucky, as there isn't one). 

 

The upgrades are, in the order that you get them: running (and with it, a running jump that covers more horizontal distance), sliding down/jumping off of walls, a fire elemental upgrade for your sword that increases your damage output and lets you destroy ice walls, and finally, an anti-gravity jump. I was surprised that there was no double jump, that's pretty unusual for a search action game. From start to finish, the game takes less than fifteen minutes to complete, which makes sense, since, as stated earlier, it's just a playable pitch for a possible full game.

 

The pacing, though, is great. It really does feel like a very short longform game, not an excerpt from a full game or one that's been truncated. I was a little disappointed when there was no boss or anything at the end of it, but even so, while the collection of four area-opening upgrades in a full-sized search action game might take place over two or three hours, getting them all in less than a tenth of that doesn't feel like you're being rushed. It just feels kind of natural?

 

It really makes me wonder about the design of search action games. Could someone create one that's longer than this, but which still distills and refines the experience, maybe down to about an hour for a typical playthrough while still retaining the feel of a full experience? And could this idea be extended to other longform genres? It's interesting to think about. Dark Eden is interesting and pretty fun, and it's also short and (kind of) free. So why not play it?

Nose: The Great Keana Edition (PC)

 Nose is almost the platonic ideal of the soulslike. It has pretty much everything you'd expect from such a game: enemies that are significantly tougher than you, gates that are locked from the other side, a universal resource that's gained from killing enemies that serves as both currency and experience points, elevators with big buttons you have to step on to activte, a big poisonous swamp, and so on.

 

So closely does it adhere to the formula that it's almost difficult to describe without just describing soulslikes as a concept. I guess the best I can do is to note the ways in which it differs from the formula. Mechanically, there's not much new on offer here. It's a fir bit easier than the actual Dark Souls games and even Bloodborne, but it's not as easy as the likes of Code Vein. I think the biggest difference between Nose and its genremates mechancally is that when you're killed, instead of dropping all of your Keana (the aforementioned resource), and having to go and reclaim it, you just respawn having lost half of what you had. It doesn't seem like a big difference at first, but if you had a lot of Keana before dying, you might respawn with enough to level up a couple of times, making your next attempt very slightly easier than the last one.

 

It's aesthetically and thematically where Nose really makes its mark, though. It might just be because I'm playing it on the lowest settings (and my laptop still feels like it's going to burn a hole in my leg!), but it's got a very cute low polygon count look to it that makes it feel like what would have happened if a soulslike had been released on the Dreamcast (and if Dreamcast games had significantly longer draw distances). Thematically, it's kind of weird. There's people sitting around being sad, like in a normal soulslike, but there's also the whole "nose" aspect to the world.

 

It seems like the main god of the world is named Nose, and as you go around, you'll sometimes see giant noses carved from stone or sculpted in metal. The bonfire equivalents are well-like structures decorated with noses. There's a building called The Temple of Nose housing living statues and an angry drunk giant, and an early boss you fight is a giant black nose that scutters around on tentacles called Nose Hair Demon. I haven't completed the game yet, but I really hope there's some kind of explanation for all this at the end of it. or maybe I don't? Maybe it's better for a weird game to just be weird?

 

I definitely recommend playing Nose. It's a very fun game, with a perfectly pitched level of difficulty (in my opinion, at least), and it's also free! And don't worry about the computer thing, my laptop is old and preowned, so people who prioritise being able to play high-spec PC games should have no trouble at all on running it on its highest settings.

Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons (Arcade)

 It's a shooting game about, like the title suggests, cybernetic wyverns. But it borrows more from its contemporaries like Battle Garegga and Gunbird than it does its thematic forebears like Dragon Spirit and Saint Dragon. In the game's options you can change the title screen to say Kiryu in kanji instead of Cyvern, but as far as I know, this isn't the default option in any region. Which is odd.

 

So, there are three cyverns you can play as, and in shooting game tradition, they're red, blue, and green. They all have different normal shots, but the big difference between them is their breath weapons, referred to ingame as Banish. Red has a useless short-range flame thrower, blue is the best with a wide-spreading, semi-homing lightning attack, and green is okay with its powerful and cool-looking laser, that's just slightly impractical for scoring. 

 

Scoring and your Banish attack are closely related in a couple of ways. Firstly, there's a Garegga-esque medal system, though it's a lot easier to manage. Medals appear when you destroy ground-based enemies with your Banish, they start at fifty points, and gradually get up to ten thousand points, as long as you don't let any drop off the bottom of the screen. Though, since you completely control when medals appear, and because they're always on the ground rather than falling from the sky, that's not liely to happen. Furthermore, at least five medals of one level have to have appeared before medals of the next level will appear. With a bit of skill, you can get ten thousand point medals to start appearing about halfway through the first stage! 

 

There's some other scoring techniques, too. Power-ups are dropped by yellow ships, and if you destroy these ships with normal shows, they drop two half-power ups, while iff you destroy them with Banish, they destroy one full power-up. The full power-up is not only more convenient, but also, when you're already at full power, it's worth five thousand points, while the half power-ups are only worth five hundred each. Also, I'm not completely sure on the requisite conditions, but it seems like there are harder versions of the bosses that are worth signifiantly more points. I think the first stage requires you to have scored at least 175000 points and to not have lost any lives before the boss appears.

 

Unfortunately, while the game's mechanics are very interesting and fun to engage with, there's a massive problem in the game's design: the second stage. It's long, it's boring, it mostly takes place in a cloudy sky, with no ground enemies to kill for medals, and it ends with a boss fight that is also long and boring. The weird thing is, on occasions when I've made it through the other side of this ordeal, the third stage is a lot more entertaining, and a lot shorter. For some reason, the developers saw fit to scare people away from their game with this stage that suggests that everything you saw in the first stage was all the good ideas they had, and you might as well stop playing.

 

That being said, I think the mechanics present in Cyvern are interesting and fun enough that the terrible second stage isn't enough to make me stop playing, and if it ever gets an Arcade Archives release, I'll probably pick it up there. But unless you already really like shooting games, this really isn't a gateway game that'll make you change your ways.