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?