Nekoba Rock n Roll (PC)

 Nekoba, in case you're wondering, is short for "Neko Bazooka", and in this game you play as a badly-drawn cat with a bazooka, shooting various weird things in at least three kinds of stages (I haven't completed the game yet, maybe more appear later?). There's platform stages, driving stages, and helicopter stages.

 

The platform stages are the most numerous, and they take place in closed-off areas where you have to kill all the bosses that appear within the time limit (and obviously, without getting killed yourself). The driving stages see you stand on the back of a pickup truck shooting a cop cars and busses until a boss appears for you to kill, and the helicopter stages are short, but somewhat traditional horizontally-scrolling shooting stages.

 

This is a game that really feels like what I think of regarding the term "indie": it seems to have been made by one person, who clearly had ideas about the game they wanted to make, and let nothing stand in their way. The art is wildly inconsistent, with high detailed artwork of anime girls talking to crudely-drawn blobs in the cutscenes, and all the enemies in the stages are a seemingly random assortment of more crudely-drawn animals, parodies of existing characters (including the very brave inclusion of what appears to just be a distorted low resolution piece of official mickey mouse art), and just strange monster things. All this, and a lot of the music is actually vocal songs!

 

Is it actually fun to play, though? Yes! It's definitely not a tightly-crafted experience, but each stage is only a couple of minutes long, and they're some incredibly frantic minutes with enemies and bullets all over the place. The difficulty is just right, too, as it never feels like a tedious cakewalk, or a punishing slog. Likewise, the enemies all take just enough punishment to make them satisfying kills without feeling like damage sponges. Come to think of it, maybe this is a tightly-crafted experience, merely disguised as a demented piece of outsider art?

 

Anyway, Nekoba Rock n Roll is interesting, fun, unique and also very very cheap. So you should probably go and buy it!

Shin Senki Van-Gale - The War of Neo-Century (Playstation)

 I was attracted to this game not only because it was a Playstation fighting game I haven't seen anyone talk about before, and also because it seemed to be an aerial, projectile-focussed fighting game, like the Psychic Force games. It's not really much like Psychic Force, though. I'd say it's more like a cross between Bastard! Ankoku no Hakaishin and Senko no Ronde.

 

This is an assumption based entirely on the game's low budget-looking intro FMV and the fact that both the developer and the publisher seem to have only released a few games each, all in a window of a few years in the late nineties, but it does feel like it's a bit of an enthusiast's project. It's undeniable what the aim of the game was: to recreate one-on-one mecha battles, specifically in the style of those seen in the Gundam franchise. There's lots of zooming around, shooting and dodging laser fire, ruching in close to attack with beam sabers, and defending with beam shields.

 

It's also heavily influenced by Gundam aesthetically: as well as the robots looking like Gundam designs (one of them looks almost exactly lke The O, for example), the stages are straight out of that franchise, too. There's space, with the Earth in the background, a stage where the two combatants are burning up on entry into the atmosphere, a big cylindrical space colony, and so on. One bizarre detail is that you can set a time limit in the options screen, but it only seems to apply on the re-entry stage.

 

Unfortunately, though the game looks and sounds great, it doesn't play so great. It's not painful to play or anthing, but it's just not particularly enjoyable, either. I think a big problem stems from something that Psychic Force has that Van-Gale doesn't. In Psychic Force, there's an invisible line connecting the two characters; their positions and how the directions work for them are always in relation to their opponent, and more importantly, projectiles always fire directly at the opponent, and melee attacks always connect when the fighters are within range and the defender hasn't blocked or dodged.

 

What this results in is really long fights where two robots shoot at each other, only occasionally doing damage. Even rushing in to melee attack isn't great, because melee attacks only seem to actually trigger sometimes, and when it does happen, it usually just awkwardly whiffs. Sometimes a little "LOCK ON" crosshair thing appears over your opponent, though it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Attacks that you're supposed to aim just fire straight ahead whether the crosshair is there or not, and homing attacks kind of vaguely home in on the opponent whether it's there or not. I don't know if it's just an aesthetic touch or it does something that I haven't figured out, or even if it's supposed to do something, but some kind of programming error prevents that.

 

Like I said earlier, Van-Gale isn't a terrible game, but it's also not a good one. If you're curious about it, you might as well take a look, just don't spend a lot of money on it.

Other Stuff Monthly #24!

 A dark day that I never thought would come to pass finally has: I own a product of the Funko company. It's not one of their garbage cube-headed figures, though, it's Godzilla Tokyo Clash a board game about monsters throwing trains at each other. It even has some excellent-looking miniatures, proving that some talented sculptors do apparently work there!

 

The game sees two-to-four players each picking a kaiju from a selection of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and unexpectedly, the one movie wonder Megalon, and having them wage turn-based combat against each other and humanity. You take turns playing cards from your hand to perform attacks against the other monsters, or discarding them to move around the city and attack buildings and vehicles. Attacking buildings and vehicles gives you the energy you need to attack the other kaiju, so you've got to perform a balancing act between the two.

 

Because kaiju are generally near-indestructible (and because being eliminated from a board game is boring and dumb), you can't actually kill each other. Instead, every special move card has a points value in the bottom-right corner, and dealing damage means you take a number of cards from the top of your victim's deck and taking the most valuable one as a trophy. There's a round tracker with the oxygen destroyer moving in one direction, and the smaller buildings going the other way as they're destroyed by the players, with the game ending when the two cross over each other. I guess the in-universe explanation is that the more bildings get destroyed, the greater urgency humanity feels with regard to deploying the ocygen destroyer? (Let's be kind and ignore the fact that Ghidorah can travel through space and doesn't need to breathe oxygen, okay?)

 

The board is made up of a bunch of tiles representing the city (a different amount based on the amount of players), and even comes with a bunch of little plastic buildings of various types to populate it. Along with the excellent kaiju minis, it comes together to be a really great-looking game. I've seen some photos online from other people who own the game and have replaced the slightly generic-looking buildings with more detailed ones from other games, and the cardboard tokens representing the human vehicles with minis, and they looked amazing, too! That's something I may have to look into myself at some point.

 

Luckily, it's also a fun game to actually play, and the four kaiju all play differently, each emphasising different tactics. Though it's not the kind of game I can see myself playing every week, I do see it being a game that gets brought out semi-frequently for a long time. Especially if the rumours about planned expansions adding more kaiju turn out to be true.

Pretty Chaser (PC)

 There aren't many arcade-style racing games I've definitely mentioned before that there aren't many arcade-style racing games any more. The big companies tend to go towards the two extremes that arcade racers fall between: realistic "simulation" style racing games where no fun is allowed, and totally wacky kart-style racing games where randomly assigned power-ups can sometimes play too large a part in results. There are a few arcade racers coming out here and there, though, mainly from indie/doujin developers. Like this one, from solo developer YY Games.

 

It's a very bare bones affair: there are three tracks, one type of care (though you can choose between grip and drift handling), and no gear changing of any kind. You can change the number of laps and opponent cars, and the skil level of the opponent cars, though. And the colour of your own car! So you set all the options, then you race around the track. That's literally it, though: there's no high score table for best lap times, no championship mode, nothing. But that's fine!

 

If you like racing games, give Pretty Chaser a try! It's cute, it's free, and you'll probably get at least twety to thirty minutes of enjoyment out of it. The developer has another racing game that not only looks to be a little more complex, but also significantly cuter. So I'll probably try that out and cover it here eventually, too. I know this is a shorter post than usual, but a lot of Playstation games, fan translations, and leaked unreleased games have been drawing my attention recently, and I do try to space similarly-themed posts out a little, and that's what this one is doing.