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.

Moon Crystal (NES)

 

 Moon Crystal was released in 1992, which is very late in the Famicom's original commercial lifespan, and it definitely benefits from advancements made in that time, both in terms of what could be extracted from the hardware and in terms of game design. It's a platform game with a setting that feels like it could have been taken from a classic kids' adventure anime. Future Boy Conan, Secret of Blue Water, that kind of show. An evil count wants to exploit a magic pendant (the eponymous Moon Crystal) to raise the dead, and to aid in this endeavour, he kidnaps a scientist, Dr. Slater, and kills the scientist's family. Only Dr. Slater's son Ricky escapes, and sets out on a quest to save his dad and the world.

 

Though it doesn't come across to well in still screenshots, this game is very impressive looking, considering the host hardware. It's all in the character animation, which is incredibly smooth, and Ricky especially has a ton of frames for every action he does. The colour palettes are also worthy of note, really giving a sense of atmosphere and the time of day. 

 

The game itself is pretty good too! It's not super-complex or anything: it's basically just platforming and killing enemies with your one melee attack. Though a lot of the time, it's best to just avoid the enemies, with the emphasis being heavily on platforming challenges. This is reflected in the way Ricky controls, with him being able to grab ahold and dangle from the edges of platforms (something I always like in platform games), and in the fact that one of the power ups is a double jump that lasts until the end of your current stage or until you lose a life.

 

With such a heavy emphasis on platforming, it is slightly disappointing that each stage ends in a fairly basic (though usually still difficult) boss fight, rather than something more imaginative and fitting to the way the game's designed, like some kind of special platforming challenge. The game's designers could definitely have managed it, too: the difficulty curve is steep, but fair, and the stages really do ramp up in terms of being platforming challenges themselves, with new gimmicks being brought into every stage to liven things up, too.

 

Moon Crystal is a great game, that I definitely recommend, especially if you're interested in older systems being pushed beyond what most games get out of them. It's also highly rercommended for platform fans that really want themselves to be pushed beyond what most games expect of them in terms of precision jumping and climbing and the like.

Battle Blues (3DO)

 There's a lot of disappointment for me regarding this game, unfortunately. A few years ago, when I first started looking into the 3DO library, Battle Blues really stood out with its gritty cyberpunk isometric pixel art stylings. I wanted to play it, but the prospect of trying to play a turn-based strategy game in Korean was a bit daunting, and being a 3DO game and being in Korean were both factors that made a fan translation ever coming out seem unlikely.

 

But in 2021, a fan translation did actually get released! Then, later, in 2022, I noticed this had happened and finally got to play the cool-looking cyberpunk strategy game. And for the first mission, I was having a great time! If anything, certain elements in the first mission actually made me think the game might turn out to be a little too easy. For example, the missions are split into a few smaller stages, in which you have to kill every enemy before moving onto the next. Some of the characters aren't enemies, but characters who join your team under certain conditions. The thing that really surprised me was that not only are deaths not permanent, they don't even carry over from map to map within the same mission! 

 

But it turns out I was an over confident fool. Because since getting through that misleadingly easy first mission, I've spent a few hours and many unsuccessful attempts trying to get through the first map of the second mission. The problem is that in this map, there's one particular enemy that spends loitering at the back, letting you bash your guys against his cronies. When he does come into the fray, you'll learn that he takes very little damage from your attacks, while his attacks take off at least seventy percent off of the health bars of any of your guys. I did manage to kill him one time, but unfortunately, he still had some henchmen on the map, and they gladly took advantage of the rule that says that your leader getting killed results in an instant game over.

 

So I'll apologise for the lack of variety in the screenshots, but I was only able to see one-and-a-bit missions. I think this is a pretty common problem among people who've tried to play the game, as the only longplay video on Youtube is from someone who hacked the game to make all their characters invincible. And other than that, and various posts announcing/celebrating the release of the translation patch, there's not much anyone online has had to say about the game.

 

That's Battle Blues, then. It looks pretty cool, and it wouldd be a good game. If only it didn't have that massive and sudden difficulty spike! I think if I keep plugging at it, I must be able to eke out a victory against the accursed Fm Com (the name of the particular enemy that's the sticking point), but to be honest, my frustration has really started to outweigh my curiosity.

Other Stuff Monthly #27!

 With the exception of the deliberately rebellious 2000AD, you wouldn't expect a boys' comic from the seventies to be in any way progressive, especially not one with a concept like The Crunch, which launched in 1979 and lasted almost exactly a year. The premise of The Crunch was that all the stories featured in its pages starred tough men of action in dangerous and stressful situations (to which the publication's name is referring). However, there's a few surprises to be found in its pages that you might not expect from a time when bigotry and toxic masculinity were the mainstream.

 

I've only read the first four issues as I write this, but I'm definitely interested enough to keep going. The stories in these issues are surprisingly varied, considering they all follow the basic premise outlined above. Notably, though, they're all very serious action stories, with no room for levity. The lead feature in each issue is Arena, about a journalist stripped of his citizenship by a fascist UK government and made to fight for his live in an underground gladiatorial arena. It's the other stories that really showcase what's interesting about the comic, though. Hitler Lives! stars a disillusioned Nazi soldier in 1945. He was conscripted, and fought to defend his country, though he hated the insanity of the Nazi regime, and he's long sick of war. Lying about having an urgent message for the fuhrer, he aims to infiltrate Hitler's bunker and assassinate him, only to learn that he's already dead. Almost immediately after this, he's subject to another revelation: that the Hitler who died in that bunker was actually just a body double left to trick the allies! He runs away, hoping to inform the allies of what he's seen, but of course, he's arrested as a Nazi, and when he tries to tell his story, everyone thinks he's gone insane from the stresses of wartime. The Kyser Experiment is the comic's weak link, being a boring story about a soccer team, whos on-staff physician is actually an evil scientist gradually replacing them with mindless clones. The Mantracker tells of the violent adventures of Bearpaw Jay, a Native American ex-soldier who returns home just in time to see he grandad murdered by bank robbers. He spends his life savings on weaponry and becomes a bounty hunter, taking down a new set of crooks each issue. This series is pretty much pure action, and Jay has no mercy or pity for his quarries.

 

Clancy and the Man is a very seventies TV-style story of two police detectives in the fictional American city of Las Minola. It's another series with a man of colour in one of the lead roles, and the two cops are constantly going undercover to combat gangs, some of whom also happen to be racist. (Something I should mention is a character and series named Ebony, who was printed in later issues of The Crunch. She was not only the first action heroine to have her own strip in a UK boys' comic, but also the first black woman to do the same. And yet she seems to have been totally forgotten. Hopefully the people at Treasury of British Comics will put out a reprint at some point). There's also The Walking Bombs, which sees two British agents investigating a series of mysterious terrorist attacks, and Who Killed Cassidy?, about an American traffic cop who finds himself embroiled in the mysteries and conspiracies surrounding the assassination of a fictional US president (though the whole story is obviously a thinly-veiled reference to JFK). A non-comic feature that's also worthy of note is the unusual letters page. While most comics of the time would have a page where readers could send in letters about the comic itself, usually answered by a fictional "editor" character (most famously, 2000AD's Tharg, who's still at it today!), The Crunch did something a little different. Instead of normal letters, it had a problem page, into which boys could write in asking for advice on school, friendship, romance, and other things they were dealing with, and they'd be answered by some guy named Andy. Andy's advice was almost always something along the lines of "adults know best, so follow the rules and do what they say", but as a concept, it's still something way outside of the norm for a comic aimed at boys, especially one from an era when boys and men were encouraged to keep their problems to themselves.

 

All in all, The Crunch is an intersting comic. I have no idea how well it sold, but its quick demise seems to have been down to the comic publisher trend of "merging" titles at the drop of a hat to save costs and try to consolidate readerships. Maybe if that hadn't have happened, it would have remained a rival title to 2000AD, the last survivor of that era of British comics? Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by these first few issues, and I'll definitely be continuing onwards with it.