Lamborghini American Challenge (SNES)

 It seems like ports from the Amiga to the SNES were a lot less common than they were to the Mega Drive, though there were a few, and this is one of them (originally named Crazy Cars 3). It is, obviously, a racing game about Lamborghini owners challenging each other to races in various places across the US. Though the character portraits look more like they kind of racers you'd see in something like Road Rash than the kind of millionaires who swan about racing expensive sports cars for fun.

 

Interestingly, it doesn't use the SNES' Mode 7 to render its tracks, using a more traditional line-by-line method, like you'd see in a lot of older arcade racing games. In my opinion, this method is actually better than Mode 7, though, since it looks a lot nicer than the massive stretched-out sprites used in Mode 7 race tracks, and it allows the tracks to have hills, which adds a little extra variety. As a result, this might be the best-looking racing game I've seen on the SNES. Furthermore, there's tracks with different weather conditions and different times of day, and the dusk and night races look particularly good.

 

The game's structure is a little unusual, and themed entirely around money. You start with a certain amount of it, and every race has an entry fee and a prize. Of course, this means that if you don't consistently win races, you'll eventually be unable to compete, and that gets you a game over. Complicating matters is the presence of an upgrade shop, and as you progress through the game, it pretty much becomes compulsory to buy the upgrades, since winning later races is impossible without them. I haven't yet encountered a situation whereby you accidentally give yourself a game over by spending too much on an upgrade, but it could theoretically happen.

 

As for the actual racing, it's fine. It feels incredibly smooth, and you never feel like you're fighting against the controls, or anything like that. Maybe because of this, it feels like the challenge in the harder races comes from the speed at which the opponents can go, as well as the amount of non-racer cars that get in your way, rather than from the design of the tracks themselves. There's also apparently no middle ground in difficulty: either you'll easily make your way to the front of the pack and win a race by a long long way, or you'll finish tenth in a miserable failure.

 

It's not a patch on SEGA's sprite scaling racers, but that's an unfairly high standard to hold any game to, especially one which probably had a pretty small production budget, originating on the Amiga. So, Lamborghini American Challenge is still a pretty good racing game, and like I said, it looks excellent. Also, a quick look online shows that real copies seem to be really cheap, so if you like racing games, it's probably one that's worth picking up. And of course, if you're just emulating, it's definitely worth a bit of your time, too.

Sorcerland (PC)

 This is a game that stood out to me as soon as I saw it, since the graphics are amazing. So, like a year later, I bought it (it's less than one American dollar!), and then a year after that, I actually got around to playing it! What it is is an action-heavy platform game with three playable characters, each of whom has their own distinct look and playstyle. Also, it has no bearing on actually playing it, but the description on the game's DLSite page happens to mention that all three of the playable characters are crossdressers.

 

So, there's a catboy, a bunnyboy, and a transforming mechanical pegasusboy. I played as all three, but the pegasus is by far the most fun, with a versatile and effective moveset. Also, the bunnyboy's moveset that seems to focus on using special attacks as if they were normal attacks, leaving you defenceless for seconds at a time while they recharge. The catboy is fine, I guess, but not as good as the pegasus, and definitely not good enough to trump the novelty of playing as a quadraped in a 2D platform game.

 

You go through the stages, fighting enemies, like you'd expect. The emphasis is very much in the direction of enemy placement, rather than stage design, with some early stages not being much more than flat plains with enemies waiting to be fought. Later stages do get a bit more complex, but the focus is always on combat. That approach extends to the controls, too: you only have one button for your regular attacks, but as well as pressing it repeatedly for a short beat em up-style combo, you can also press it with different directions for more specialised attacks, as well as more attacks when you're running or jumping.

 

It's hard to say more, really: it's just a really fun, well designed action platformer. It also looks amazing, with really cure sprites, pretty nice backgrounds, and some incredible pixel art in the cutscenes. There's a good couple of hours' worth of game in there, too, and while it claims to be "early access", it's probably best to consider what exists now to be the final game, as it was last updated in 2014, and the developer seems to have vanished off of the face of the Earth around the same time.

 

So yeah, Sorcerland is a great game that excels in pretty much every respect, and it's worth way more than the tiny asking price it carries. I definitely recommend picking it up.

Queen Fighter 2000 (Game Boy Color)

Also known as Nv Wang Ge Dou 2000, this is an unlicensed fighting game that bucks the usual trend by having an all-original cast of characters, rather than being a knock-off of an existing fighting game, or a bizarre mish-mash of random characters and real life people, like Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII. Well, it goes half way to bucking the usual trend, at least. The characters themselves, in design and name are all original, but if you look closely, you'll see what lies beneath.

 

What the developers of this game have done is trace over a load of characters from various Neo Geo Pocket Colour fighting games with their own original character designs, with the results being interesting, at the very least. Some of the characters' previous lives are instantly recognisable from just their pre-fight animations, like the ones based on Ryu and Athena, while others, like the one based on Felicia have been re-interpreted so wildly that they're pretty hard to clock. I really like this aspect of the game, to be honest: Ryu re-imagined as a big, strong woman, Iori Yagami in the form of a moody tough girl, and Nakoruru as a knife-wielding maid are all pretty cool. Also, the character that has Athena's animations for some reason looks just like Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura, and has different costumes for each of her special moves.

 

As for how it plays, it's not a disappointment there, either! The Game Boy is a system with more good fighting games than you might expect, thanks to all the great Takara-published ports of arcade fighters in the mid-nineties, but Queen Fighter 2000 stands tall among them. It's a little choppy, maybe thanks to the big sprites that were originally intended for the more powerful NGPC hardware, but other than that, it's still pretty fast, the special moves work like you'd expect, and it's just generally a fun little game. The lack of any proper story is a little disappointing considering the all-original cast, but I guess it'd be in Chinese if it were there anyway. But there's single player and vs modes, and you can play as single characters or teams of three.

 

This game wasn't really playable without a (now very rare) original cartridge, since like a lot of unlicensed Game Boy games (for example School Fighter, which I covered a few years ago), but thanks to the efforts of the tireless pirate preserver Taizou Hori over on Handheld Underground, now everyone can play it! And I recommend you do, it's good. It won't change your world or anything, but it looks cool and it's a lot of fun, and isn't that really all you need?

Safari Race (SG1000)

 Back in 2018, I reviewed the SG-1000 racing game GP World, and recognised it as a predecessor to SEGA's more well-known racing games Hang On and Outrun. In trying out Safari Race, I've found an even earlier part of the family tree. As well as being a very early into-the-screen time-attack racing game, you can see the DNA in a few of the specific features shared between it, GP World and Outrun.

 

The most obvious is the gears: Outrun has two gears, that work just like you'd expect in a racing game, as does GP World. Safari Race kind of has two gears, but implemented in a way emblematic of most of the changes made between it and its antecendents: it's slightly more complucated and strange than it needs to be. In Safari Race, you press up to accelerate when your speed is less than eighty kilometers per hour, and somewhat counter-intuitively, down to accelerate when your speed goes above that level. So rather than switching fears in the way you might expect, low gear and high gear have different acceleration controls. (The two buttons on the SG-1000 controller are mapped to braking and making a weird noise for no obvious reason, respectively).

 

Like GP World, Safari Race also has the quirk of your time limit being measured by a clock that counts upwards towards the limit, rather than starting at the limit and counting down to zero. Safari Race is actually more complicated than its antecendants, too, as the time limit is only one of three possible lose coniditons in the game! You can also get a game over by crashing four times (represented by four spare tyres, as that is the only repair you need, whether you've crashed into a rock, a car, or an elephant), or by running out of fuel. Fuel is used up at a drastically increased rate the faster you go, though of course you can't possibly get to the end of each stage within the time limit if you don't go as fast as possible as often as possible, so there are fuel pumps dotted around the stages.

 

There's a couple of weird quirks regarding the fuel pumps. For a start, just like the various obstacles, their appearance seems to be procedurally generated, and since you use them by stopping in front of them (a painfully slow process), sometimes a pump will be unusable because a rock spawned in the place where you're supposed to stop. Also, whatever bit of code decides how often they should appear seems to space them out based on how much time has passed, rather than how much distance you've travelled. I guess this makes sense from a game balance perspective, if you try to think of the game taking place in an actual world, it paints a very strange picture of that world.

 

Safari Race is one of those games that's not particularly fun to play, but it is interesting to have a look at, and compare to where the ideas presented in it would later go. It's an especially interesting example of the phenomena, because of how later iterations of the concept simplified the formula, rather than complicating it, a decision that was entirely to the later games' benefit. So, it's a historical curiosity and not much more, then.