Knights of Valour: The Seven Spirits (Arcade)

 I don't know what exactly made me try this game, as I've long thought that IGS' beat em ups are mostly very similar: expanding wildly upon the concepts of inventories and levelling up put forth in Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons and King of Dragons games. The main thing that interested me in Knights of Valour 3 was the fact that it used memory cards to save progress in a way that's more common in rhythm or racing arcade games. Still, whatever instinct drew me to Seven Spirits turned out to be a good one.

 

First, I want to talk about the presentation: it uses a combination of 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, which is something you see more in home games than arcades (the only other arcade examples I can think of off the top of my head are Strider 2 and Dolphin Blue). It's a style that almost always looks great, though, and this is no exception. The characters are all well-drawn and well-animated, and the bosses playable characters all have really cool designs, too. There's something about the character designs and the colour palettes that really feels reminiscent of Chinese martial arts comics, which is something else in this game's favour, since that's an aesthetic well that's not drawn from enough by videogames in my opinion.

 

The game's structure is also worthy of praise. Each character has their own starting stage, and after that, you're usually given a choice of which stage you want to enter next. And it's not a case of choosing the order in which you want to tackle the stages, but rather there are three possible stage twos, three possible stage threes, and so on. So it adds up to this game having a ton of stages, and it's only possible to see them all over the course of several playthroughs.

 

As for how it plays, it doesn't have the RPG-inspired stylings of its stablemates (which might be why it's got a subtitle instead of a sequel number? I dunno), being more of a straightforward beat em up. You've got three buttons: weak and strong combo attacks, and jump. Pressing two adjacent buttons at once activates one of your two super attacks, which are limited by your stock of pearls. You've also got a meter that gradually fills up as you take damage, and once it's full, you can press weak attack and jump together to go into a powered-up mode that lets you use as many supers as you like for a short time.

 

I've really enjoyed the few hours I've spent playing this game, and I look forward to a fair few more of them, as I want to see all the different locales it has, and fight more of the cool bosses. It really is a shame it's never had a release on a home console, especially since it could easily have been hosted on the Dreamcast, a system with a massive hole in its library where beat em ups should have been. Still, you can play it now via emulation, and I recommend that you do so.

Battle of Kingdom (Game Boy)

 There's a bit of received wisdom regarding handheld games that I've never really agreed with: that they should be designed around being short experiences, never to be played more than a few minutes at a time, like early arcade games. In my opinion, I actually want my arcade-style games on full size consoles, whereas I much prefer playing things like RPGs and such on handhelds. Basically, I prefer handheld games to be something that can occupy a lot of time while I mindlessly half-watch something unimportant on Youtube or whatever.

 

Battle of Kingdom is a game that kind of comes in between those two philosophies. It's a slow, methodical game, but you can't save your progress, and once you're dead, youre dead. And you'll probably be playing for thirty to sixty minutes for one go. Anyway, in it, you play the part of a beseiged kingdom's military commander, who has decided that offence is the best defence, and is waging a campaign across the land. Unfortunately, the kingdom has suffered a bunch of attacks already and its forces are severely diminished.

 

There's an all-enompassing currency in the games called Points, which acts as money for recruiting troops, and as MP for using their skills in battle. Recruitment happens at the start of each stage (and sometimes at certain points within stages, too), and you can spend points on various generic fantasy characters: knights, elves, ghosts, etc. The enemies you'll be fighting are also drawn from the same pool. All the characters have three stats: HP, which is obvious, AP, which is attack power (there's no defense stat, so a character's attacks will always deal one fifth of their AP score in damage), and SP, which denotes the SPeed at ehich they cross the battlefield. They each all have a special power, which I'll get onto shortly.

 

The stages are made up of simple, board game-style maps with squares on them, and you go from square to square one at a time until you reach the end and go to the next stage. Some of the squares have shops or little games of chance, but most of them are battles. The battles all take place on a long stretch of land, with a force starting at each end. You pick one of your troops to go out, and the enemy does the same, then the two walk fowards until they meet. You control your troop by moving your cursor along the five icons at the bottom of the screen. The feet will make your troop walk forwards and the fist will make them stand still and repeatedly attack. The potion spends some points to restore ten of their HP, and the guy shooting lightning will knock your enemy back a tenth of the stage's length. The middle "?" icon utilises your character's special power. Most of these are ranged attacks, some do other things like sending the enemy back to their end of the field, reducing one of their stats, swapping one of their stats for your's, and so on.

 

Going back to the concepts in the first paragraph, this is a pretty good example of what I was describing as a good fit for handheld consoles: it's simple and low intensity, but it can keep you occupied for a decent length of time and though it's far from being mindless or easy, you don't need to be paying it your full attention most of the time. I enjoyed it a lot, and I recommend it! Also, though I played it with a translation hack, it's pretty text-independent, so if you wanted to track down a real cartridge, you could probably play it fine without being Japanese-literate. Finally, I looked up the developer of this game, Lenar, and it seems they had a bit of an experimental streak in them, as along with this, their output included the cute, almost artsy Bird Week on Famicom, and the turn-based PC Engine wrestling game Monster Puroresu, which I've covered here before, many years ago.

Alien Front Online (Dreamcast)

 This is a game from the latter days of the Dreamcast's official support that I always wanted a copy of after seeing it in magazines,  but it was slightly before the time when I was able to import games and it only got released in North America. It's probably for the best, though, since many of my Dreamcast play at that time was multiplayer, with four people crowded into my room, and as the name suggests, this one was online only.

 

Anyway, it's a game about groups of tanks waging battle against each other, one side humans, the other aliens. The single player arcade mode is actually a lot like a game I wrote about not long ago, Polygonet Commanders: you fight against the opposing force, and there's a strict time limit. Killing three enemies gets you ten extra seconds (and it really does mean you have to do it, any enemies killed by your AI comrades don't count towards this), and winning a battle (by killing fifteen of their tanks before they do the same to you. AI contributions do count towards this, at least) gets you a whole bunch of extra time depending on your performance. Usually about forty seconds in my experience. I haven't actually lost a battle in arcade mode yet, though I always get a game over via timeout three or four stages in, which is a little frustrating.

 

There's also a "tactics" mode which is an attempt at a longer single player campaign. It's not very fun to play, though, with missions like "drive over all the stationary targets within the time limit" and "shoot all the stationary targets within the time limit". It does eventually go on to give you proper battles, but there's no reason to pick this over arcade mode, to be honest.

 

Actually playing the game feels pretty good. Each side has three vehicles, filling the roles of light, heavy, and medium, of course. The human vehicles are all tanks, and all basically feel the same to control, other than their movement and firing speed. The alien vehicles are much more interesting, being made up of a hover tank and two- and four- legged walkers that all feel very different from each other. The controls are pretty old fashioned, using the analogue stick to both steer and move forward and backwards (there's no vertical aiming), and you can use the shoulder buttons to strafe, too.

 

Though I obviously haven't been able to play this online, thanks to the existence of ancient textfiles online, I have been able to find out somethings that are mildly interesting about the experience. Firstly, though the game doesn't support the Dreamcast Broadband adaptor, it apparently does support voice chat over its dial-up connection, and was even packaged with a mic! This might have been a contributing factor in a common complaint across the accounts I've read though: difficulty connecting to matches, and even worse, difficulty staying connected to matches. Most amusingly of all, though, is that there were a couple of secret match types that were accessed by inputting cheat codes as the name of your online lobby. However, lobbies couldn't share the same name, so only one group of players could use these cheats at a time!

 

Though obviously it can no longer be played as originally intended (as far as I know?), I think Alien Front Online is still worth a look. Even single player, it'll provide you with an hour or two of decent tank fun before you get bored of it. That assuming you're emulating, of course. The prices legitimate copies fetch online are not a good investment.

Hyper Crash (Arcade)

 Longtime readers know I love those old top-down arcade racing games where your fuel bar acts as both a time limit and a health bar, and Hyper Crash is one of those, but it's not top down! It's a sprite scaling affair! And everyone with taste loves sprite scaling, so it surely can't lose, right?

 

Before I get onto whether or not the game lives up to its promise, though, I'll describe it in a bit more detail. It takes place on a long, linear track divided into stages, ala SEGA's Hang On, and also like Hang On, it's not really a traditional race with positions and rankings and such. Instead, it's more akin to something like the destructive road trip action of The Tousou Highway 2, as all the other cars exist solely to be smashed into and destroyed by you. And it's mandatory, too, since doing so replenishes your fuel, and even if you manage to drive perfectly, there's no way you're getting from one checkpoint to the next without running out.

 

The enemy cars on each stage each have their own gimmick, too, though I've only been able to see the first three in my time playing so far. On the first stage, the enemies have a jumping attack (which you also have, but since using it depletes a big chuck of your fuel meter, it seems counter-productive), the second stage enemies drop oil slicks behind them, and the third stage has enemies with super-durability. Which doesn't seem like a weapon, but the formations in which they drive, and the layout of the explosive barrels on that stage turn it into one.

 

There's a scoring system, too, and it's simple but elegant: you get 500 points for destroying a car, and that amount increases by 500 each time until it gets to every car being worth 5000 points, or until you yourself crash, in which case it resets. Such an emphasis is placed on score that the game has two high score tables! One for the hoi-polloi, and another for those skilled enough to finish the entire game. The finisher's high score table even goes as far as to add "Sir" to the front of every player's name!

 

So yeah, this is a good game, in case you haven't figured that out by now. I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago myself, but I've really been enjoying it, and it's going to be one of my MAME regulars for quite some time to come.