Charge'N Blast (Dreamcast)

 There was a big problem in the world of UK-based Dreamcast magazines. Though the console was mostly a home arcade machine, made by an arcade company, and with many arcade ports in its library, both first and third party, most of these magazines seemed to be staffed by writers with a bizarre pathological hatred for arcade games. Charge N Blast was a game they really, really hated, of course.

 

The big point of contention with a lot of the critics at the time was its length. And yes, if you don't care about actually playing the game, and you just want to credit feed your way to seeing the end credits, it is a very short game. Probably less than half an hour. But I don't know why you would do that. It's not an enjoyable way of playing any kind of game. I find it boring to use continues, as I'm sure I've mentioned numerous times before, and after a couple of hours of playing Charge N Blast, I can semi-reliably get about half way through the game on a single credit.

 

Addressing the follies of generations past aside, how does the game actually play? Pretty well, and, more interestingly: pretty idiosyncratically! It looks like a standard Cabal-alike, which was a long-dead genre in 2000, but it's actually something a little more unique. The best way to describe it would be to describe the control system, which does take a little getting used to at first. You use the d-pad or analogue stick to move your crosshairs around and aim at enemies, and the shoulder buttons to move left and right to dodge enemy attacks. 

 

That's odd enough, but it's shooting where things get even more unusual. Each character (there are three to choose from) has three weapons, and each is assigned to the X, Y, and B buttons. These aren't fire buttons, though, but they start charging the weapon up; the longer you leave it before firing, the more powerful the shot will be. Furthermore, some weapons let you lock onto multiple enemies by moving the crosshair over them while the weapon charges. Then, you press A to actually shoot. So, rather than switching between your three weapons, you instead choose which one you want to charge a few seconds before you actually make each shot.

 

It's a fun and interesting take on the old crosshair shooter, and though it could have been done a few years earlier with sprite scaling, the turn-of-the-century polygons look is fine, too. Like I said, it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it's a fun and unique game, and I recommend giving it a try. Unfortunately, it seems that the Dreamcast has gone the way of the PC Engine in terms of ludicrous game prices, though, so emulate it, unless you're rich uncle moneybags.

@Simple DL Series Vol. 13: The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utensha (3DS)

 I recently made an exciting discovery: there's a 3DS branch of the Simple 2000 Series! Well, I already knew it existed, but for ages, I thought it was limited to a small selection of escape room games. Turns out, there's a whole bunch of the Simple Series' trademark weirdness to be found on the most-modded handheld. This game is even developed by Z-game studio extraordinaires Tamsoft! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was to find this.

 

The most succinct way of describing the game is "Sane Taxi". At a basic conceptual level, it's a lot like SEGA's arcade classic Crazy Taxi, in that oyu drive around a small city, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, being paid a bonus based on how quickly you get your charges to their destination. The difference being that there's very little in the way of craziness present this time around. 

 

You drive at a normal speed, there's no expectation that you perform stunts, or even any opportunity to do so, and the whole city seems to be built on completely flat ground. It's also structured in a more joblike manner, with each stage representing a day's shift, starting at 8AM and ending at 1PM, with a quota of fares to bring in by the day's end. I played eight days, and though the quota increases every day, it's still possible at the point I reached to fill it in about half your alloted time. I'd hoped that maybe after a week, the game might give you a new map to drive around, but nope: it's the same map, with a slight increase in quota every day. Maybe there are more cities later on, but the game's worn my patience out by asking me to drive around the same map eight times in a row.

 

It is a Simple game, and there's plenty of Simple tropes on display, to please those cultured connoisseurs among you. As I already mentioned, it's developed by Tamsoft, and it also takes place in a comfy, mild-weathered low-poly representation of modern-day urban Japan. Furthermore, despite being about a car instead of a person, there's a whole bunch of costume parts to unlock, including normal things like paint colours and custom licenseplates (including one that has a picture of old-school Japanese internet meme Monar!), and less normal things like a giant viking helmet, a bumper shaped like a piano keyboard, and so on.

 

The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utenshu is far from being a great game, or even a good one. But it's not really fair to call it a bad one, either. It is a nice, comfy thing to keep you occupied while watching tv for an hour or so, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play it for any longer than that.

Fox Junction (Playstation)

 This game has been a fascination for me for probably about a decade at this point! There's just something about the way it looks and sounds that's really caught my eye, and as the years have gone on, I think I've figured out most of the mechanics despite the language barrier. There's still a big wall impeding my progress though, that I don't think I'll be able to surpass until it gets a translation patch, but I'll tell you all what I (and people in a few forum threads over the years) have been able to ascertain.

 

First, it's a real time 3D semi-roguelike, where you go to various maps. In the maps, there are, as you'd expect, enemies, items, and traps. There's also a teleporter in each map. This is because all those maps are just squares on a bigger map, that looks like a multicoloured patchwork quilt, each coloured square representing a map and its theme (desert, cave, night town, plains, and so on). There's a tower visible in the distance, and its location is constant: if you see it in the north in one map, then take the teleporter north from there, it'll be closer in the next map, for example. And that's where I've hit the wall! I have no idea what you're meant to do once you get to the tower.

 

However, there's still lots of information I have to give you. So, some of the items are stuff you'd expect, for healing your HP and replenishing your ammo. Some of them are "Drums", which are like files in the game's world. And some of those drums, the ones with P in their name, tell you how to build robot companions called Palmata (I assume a portmanteau of Pal and Automata). The enemies sometimes drop robot parts bearing their names, and these P drums tell you which of these parts you can combine to make your palmata. Give them a weapon too, and that's a new friend you've made!

 

Now, to attack, you hold R1 and press square, but if you have a palmata equipped, holding R1 brings them into the fray to fight in your place. This is essential, not only because it means they take all the hits instead of you, but also because, as far as I can tell, your weapon never gets more powerful. So to fight tougher enemies, you've got to find the parts to create stronger palmata and the compatible weapons to give them!

 

Regarding the language barrier, like I said: I've hit a wall in my progress through the game. But, I've still managed to enjoy hours of it, just through exploring the worlds, trying to get a little further, and so on. It was incredibly satisfying building a palmata for the first time, once I figured out the game actually tells you what parts to combine, and you don't need to use trial and error like I had been doing! I think it's probably going to be a lot more difficult if you can't at least read katakana, though. Enemy names (which correspond to the palmata parts they drop), along with a lot of other items are named in katakana, and being able to identify them at a glance is obviously a lot easier than memorising symbols that have no meaing to you.

 

There's apparently a fan translation in progress, by the people who recently translated Iblard Laputa no Kaeru Machi. I'm very much looking forward to it, but in case anyone wants to give the game a try before it comes out, I hope the information here is at least a little useful. (Also, I wish I'd bought a real copy of this game back when I first found out about it, as the price has shot up to ludicrous levels in the years since!)

SEGA Ages 2500 Series Vol. 5: Golden Axe (PS2)

 I remember first seeing the boxart for this game on Lik-Sang or some other import site not long after it came out, and being amazed that there was a new Gold Axe game, and frustrated that not only was no-one talking about it, but there were no signs of it ever getting released in Europe. It did get that Europe release a few years later though, as part of the SEGA Classics Collection that compiled a bunch of the SEGA Ages 2500 Series games onto a single disc. Everybody hated it!

 

I tolerated it at the time, partly from nostalgia, and partly from the  beat em up drought that had been ongoing for about a decade at that point. Playing it again now, a decade and a half later (meaning it's now older than the original Golden Axe was when it was first released!), my opinion's a little more reasonable, and though it's not the irredeemible garbage people made it out to be when the Classics Collection came out, it's not particularly great, either.

 

It looks okay for a nineteen year old budget game, though there are some massive weak points, like how most of the magic attacks other than Tyris' dragon summon look pathetic, and how Gilius looks like a bendy rubber action figure that's been played with too much, giving him weird bow legs and arms constantly stretched outwards. The few cutscenes look pretty nice, though, thanks to the developers went the route of using low polygon count models and covering that up with higher resolution textures. So the characters actually look better in close up than they do while you're actully playing the game.

 

As for how the game plays, it's a mixed bag that's mostly bad. There's some stuff I do like, such as the magic potion system being replaced by a meter that fills up as you attack enemies, so you get to use your magic more often. The little elves (who now look like little kobold creatures) are still present, with the potions giving a large amount of meter in one go. A nice little touch is that if you make them drop a potion, then leave it on the ground for a while, they'll pick it back up!

 

As for the bad, there's quite a few things. Gilius is so slow as to be pretty much useless to play as. The same can also be said of the back attack that every character has, though the normal attacks have such weird hitboxes that you'll usually hit enemes that are behind you if they're stood closely enough anyway. There's very few enemy types, and a lot of stages don't even have bosses at the end of them! An upside of the scant variety in enemies is that you can learn their behaviours pretty easily, I guess? The main thing to remember is that every enemy, if they're at the other end of the screen from you, will do a running attack. So try not to be stuck mid-combo when that happens.

 

There's really no reason to play this version of Golden Axe in this day and age. The arcade original is better, and the Mega Drive port of that is pretty good too, making up for its slightly worse graphics with a couple of extra stages. Hopefully SEGA will let someone give Golden Axe the Streets of Rage 4 treatment, and we'll get an all-new, excellent game that also looks amazing. Or at the very least, I hope Revenge of Death Adder gets a home port someday. One final thing I'll say about SEGA Ages Golden Axe, though: it's a lot better than the absolute garbage that was Golden Axe: Beast Rider.