Gungage (Playstation)

 Something that I've been thinking of with regards to current videogames is the way in which certain control schemes have become ubiquitous, and the way in which this makes it difficult for games to have their own identity beyond feeling like reskins of the same basic concept. "Current" isn't really accurate of this phenomenon, come to think of it: I remember playing Gears of War and Army of Two on the same day at a friend's house fifteen years ago, and they felt like exactly the same game, except one had you shooting aliens, and one had you shooting people of colour.

 

Those are both third person shooters, and obviously, both are hurt by the way in which that genre had become "solved" and homogenised in the years leading up to their release, causing the situation which I described in the first paragraph, whereby it becomes more difficult for games in a "solved" genre to carve an identity for themselves. Gungae is also a third person shooter, from a much earlier point in the genre's existence, and as such, it doesn't use the now standardised controls of "left stick to move, right stick to aim, right shoulder to shoot". It's got controls that, on paper, sound like they'd be awkward and difficult to play with: the d-pad is used for turning and moving forwards and backwards, with strafing mapped to L1 and R1. (Note: Gungage did come out after the Dual Shock controller, so could theoretically hve used the standard control scheme. In fact, Love and Destroy, which released on Playstation six months after Gungage actually does use that control scheme!) 

 

Anyway, despite the entirety of the past two paragraphs, I'm not saying that the modern standard 3D action game control layout is bad, but rather it's the monolithic ubiquity of it that's bad: You can make games that control differently! It's okay! (Furthermore, the same thing can be seen in other genres to a lesser extent. I think if you were to release a Mercs/Commando/etc. style top down shooter now, you'd get people asking why you didn't use twinstick controls.) So Gungage, then. The reason I'm using this game to talk about this subject is that it has a bunch of playable characters. Four in total, though I've only been able to unlock three so far: Wakle Skade the typical late 90s protagonist, Kard Berdysh the big rectangular military officer, and Steyr Harquebus the rebel terrorist girl.

 

What's significant is that though they go through the same areas (albeit in different orders, and sometimes with different enemies and slightly different layouts), and despite the fact that they're all obviously in the same game, all the characters feel completely different to each other as you play as them. It's not as simple as Kard being tougher and slower, or Wakle being the all-rounder, but they also have completely different main weapons, their super-weapons work in completely different ways, and the way they move all feel differently to each other. Wakle's got an automatic pistol, Kard has a big cannon with four different firing modes for different situations, and Steyr has a gatling gun that's as tall as her, yet she can run around firing like nobody's business. 

 

More important than them all feeling different to each other, they also all feel great to play as. Wakle introduces you to the way movement and aiming work in the game at their most basic levels, Kard has you trying your hardest not to get hit while firing your slow, devastating arsenal (as well as picking the best of his weapons for each situation), and Steyr has you running and flipping around, shooting enemies and dodging their attacks with agility and grace, almost like a character from a more modern character action game like Bayonetta or the later entries in the Oneechanbara series. Furthermore, the stages themselves are designed in such a way that they're interesting to traverse and explore. You never feel lost, but you always feel like you can run around and seek out secrets. AND! The fact that the different characters do reach them at different times, with different enemies, and so on, really makes them feel like actual locations, where different things are happening in them at different times. 

 

Gungage is an excellent game, and one that's worth the time of anyone with even a passing interest in 3D action games. It's a mystery and a shame that it's not more well known. It actually did get a western release, and I don't remember anyone talking about it at that time. I didn't even see it in magazines! A new 3D action game from Konami, a year after their massive hit Metal Gear Solid, and it somehow just slipped under the radar? Madness. Fix the mistakes of the past, and play Gungage now. (But as always, don't pay the ludicrous online prices it fetches.)

Nosferatu (SNES)

 It's incredibly easy to explain the idea behind Nosferatu: it simply asks "what if Prince of Persia was a beat em up and also Castlevania?". Though, it seems that the beat em up element gradually withers away as the game goes on. But anyway, that's the main thing: your main character (an average American teenage jock) runs and jumps and slides like the aforementioned Prince, but he's got punch combos and ducks and weaves like a boxer.

 

The plot's barely worth mentioning, so this is all it's going to get: your girlfriend's been taken by a vampire, and you've got to go and save her. This vampire is even more wealthy than most, owning several mansions, castles, and other large domiciles that you've got to get through to get him, and of course, they're all full of various minions to fight. Including, as the second boss, a pair of evil orangutans, which was fun to see.

 

A lot of effort has clearly been put into your guy's combat prowess, with his main stock in trade being punch combos, but he also counts shoulder tackles, roundhouse kicks, and more in his repetoire. There's even a vague kind of levelling system: collecting red crystals gradually unlocks more moves, but it's not permanent, as falling over (whether through monster attacks, traps, or general clumsiness) makes you drop your crystals. With all that in mind, it's a surprise that as the game goes on, it seems to de-emphasise combat in favour of platforming challenges.

 

There are still plenty of enemies as the game goes on, but fighting them becomes so inconvenient and time-consuming that they're more like aggressive, mobile obstacles that you're better off going around than through. Instead, the game starts to focus more and more heavily on platforming challenges, which really shows a lot of confidence on the part of the stage designers: everything hinges upon how well they're put together and they can't just rely on taking up more of the player's time by increasing numbers here and there, especially since the game also imposes pretty strict time limits. It's a testament to that skill on the part of the designers that I was just barely able to scrape through to the third stage.

 

Getting that far already required near-perfect timing and dexterity, and having to maneuver safely through multiple traps and stage elements at a time. I think anyone looking for proper spatial platforming challenges is definitely going to be satisfied by Nosferatu. Most people will probably hit a brick wall in their progress pretty early on like I did, but at least while they're getting to that wall, the game looks and feels luxurious. It could just as much be an early Playstation or Saturn game as it is a mid-life SNES game, and no-one would bat an eye. There's even some psuedo-FMV CG cutscenes! Either way, Nosferatu is at least worth some of your time.

Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness (Game Gear)

 Long before this game had an English translation patch, I was curious about it. The boxart looks interesting, and there's something about the title that made it sound like it might be a little more interesting than most 8-bit RPGs. Like, "Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness" sounds like it has a more specific vision in mind for its story than more vague titles like Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, and Dragon Quest, right? Unfortunately, in most aspects, it's as generic as can be, and as soon as I stop typing this review, I'll probably immediately forget everything I know about it.

 

The game starts with a bit of ludonarrative dissonance, as everyone seems eager to tell you what a useless milksop you are, and how you'd be long dead if your childhood friend wasn't always looking out for you. But then you and said friend go out into the nearby forest on some minor fetch quest, and she's significantly weaker than you in every respect. Then, when it comes to entering the deeper forest where the first boss is, she gets scared and waits outside. This turns out to be a bad idea, since it's durig this time that she gets kidnapped by a flying monster. And so, your actual quest starts: to save the weak and defenceless damsel who's also you big sister figure who always has to protect you.

 

I think I've played about six to eight hours, and the story doesn't get any more interesting or original in that time. There's a part where you have to take a secret exit tunnel out of a palace that's gone into lockdown, part where you have to get a rare fruit to make special medicine, and so on. The one interesting plot element that turned up is that a werepanther rescues your party at one point, before running away again. I suspect that this werepanther might be your dad, who went missing after going to rescue your friend slightly before you did. But this dangling thread isn't enough to keep me playing the game, so I guess I'll never know.

 

There's something in the game's mechanics that's kind of unique, but unfortunately, it's not in a positive way. Instead of picking your commands from menus in battles, you instead press a combination of a direction and a button to do each possible thing you might want to: right and button one to attack, up and button two for you're mage's fire spell, and so on. The problem is that you've got to memorise all of these things (though in the time I've played, I've only just got a character who can use magic, and she's basically just a healer, since her attack magic is so much weaker than the other party members' normal attacks, which don't use MP), and you only get about a second to remember and input the command you want, or the game just skips your turn and goes onto the next character (which is probably an enemy). I can see what they tried to do here, and it's just a shame that they didn't dump it after realising it was no fun.

 

This isn't a game that's completely without merit: it looks okay, and I think, in 1994, an RPG that's somewhat on par with the console RPGs of five or so years earlier with a running time to match definitely had a worthwhile place in a handheld's library, even if it is a bit generic. Unfortunately, it's not 1994 now, and I think every Game Gear RPG is available (officially or otherwise) in English, and I'm pretty sure that the only that isn't better than Molodorian is Defenders of Oasis. And even that game has the advantage of having a more interesting setting than this one.

Hashiriya - Ookami-Tachi no Densetsu (Playstation)

 There's a certain look that I really like in racing games, and unfortunately it's very much a product of its time. Grainy textures, low poly models, driving around empty roads in the dead of night, all that stuff. It's mostly seen in drift racing games inspired by the manga Initial D and the 90s Option VHS magazine that people used to post lots of gifs from on Tumblr many years ago. Hashiriya is not only one of the best-looking of these games I've ever seen, but it's also definitely taking a lot of inspiration from those two sources.

 

The main single player mode has you picking from a bunch of characters, each with their own cars, and each a member of a different faction. They all also each have their own storylines, told in lengthy dialogue scenes between races. It'd be nice if someone translated these someday. There's no decision making or anything in these scenes, and you can definitely 100% play the game without being able to read them, but these scenes are unskippable, so it'd at least be nice to be able to understand what's happening in them. But yeah, you pick a character, and you have to win a bunch of races as them to get through the story. It doesn't seem like you unlock anything for doing so, though. Which is fine, I guess.

 

There's also a time trial mode, and a mode where you can set up single races how you like. Especially nice in this mode is that you can choose the time of day, so tracks that are always night time in story mode can be played in the daylight, and vice versa. It'd be even better if there were weather options, too. All of these features and nice graphics and such would be worthless, though, if the game didn't feel good to play. Luckily, it does! It's not quite Ridge Racer or Daytona USA, but it's still nice, it doesn't feel like you're constantly crashing the car, nor do you feel like you have to crawl around the tracks to be able to take corners adequately.

 

It was a big relief for me, as when the translation patch for Racing Lagoon came out a while ago, I was kind of disappointed to find that I didn't enjoy how the racing felt in that game at all. Of course, that game looks amazing and it's by Squaresoft, so naturally my expectations were high. So a story-heavy racing game with really great-looking graphics that also plays well was a great find for me, especially since, like I said, being unable to read the story doesn't block you from being able to play through the game.

 

This is definitely a game worth playing. It's fun, looks great, and has a really nice atmosphere. It only has a few tracks, which is a little disappointing, but it's also actually pretty standard for racing games of the time. The massive array of tracks in Ridge Racer Type 4 is definitely the exception rather than the rule. But if you like this kind of racing game, then this is a very good example of it. It's a little surprising it isn't more well-known outside of Japan, to be honest. I would've thought the graphics alone would have gotten it some attention.

Galaxy Deka Gayvan (PC Engine)

 Deka means Detective, so I guess the title is an attempted parody of the 1982 TV series Space Sherriff Gavan, though that parody only goes as far as the title and the fact that the player characters transform into Metal Heroes-style armoured forms. Which makes this the third Metal Heroes-inspired PC Engine single plane beat em up I've covered on this blog. What a weirdly specific subgenre! As single plane beat em ups go, it's pretty basic. The stages are just completely flat planes, and you go from left to right beating up enemies until you get to the end of them. You've got a little three-hit combo, plus jumping attacks and a couple of throws. Beneath your health bar, you've also got a power bar, though! It's for managing your transformation! You can transform at any time, and the meter slowly increases while you're not transformed, and slowly depletes while you are.

 

The game's biggest problem is that the transformation is so limp. You don't get any new attacks or abilities, even the animations for your attacks while transformed are traced over the sprites for your untransformed attacks. It's so unimaginative! I guess you have higher attack and defence while transformed, but the difference is so incremental that you'll barely even notice. It might even be a placebo and there's no difference at all! Considering that it's around this gimmick that the game is built, it really sucks the joy out of the whole thing.

 

There's a few other things I want to talk about, though: in its favour, it is one of very few PC Engine games with a two player co-op mode, and  it's an early example of a beat em up with a versus mode that lets you play as a few of the enemies, too. And on the subject of enemies (as well as returning to the subject of parodies), some of them are from other games. Games from other companies, so they're unofficial references and/or parodies, not guest stars. There's a pair of enemies who are literally just Ninja and Kunoichi from The Ninja Warriors, and a little later there's an overweight version of Guile from Street Fighter II. As well as being fat, there is an actual joke in the Guile parody: he has an attack where he attempts a FLash Kick, but falls over onto his back afterwards. It's not a funny joke, but it is something, at least. (Also, the NW parodies first appear in stage 2. They don't appear in stage 3, though, so when they returned in stage 4, I thought to myself "The Ninja Warriors, Again?")(Now that's what I call attempted comedy!)

 

I can't really recommend Gayvan, unless you're really really desperate to play a co-op beat em up on PC Engine. If you really want a Metal Heroes-inspired game and you don't need a second player to be involved,  then just go for Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji. That game is excellent, and if you're buying real copies, it's like a tenth of the price of Galaxy Deka Gayvan. This is an inoffensive game, but it's also an unexciting one with so much wasted potential. To make it worse, it's from Fill-In-Cafe, who'd later go on to make a bunch of really great fighting games and beat em ups.

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Game Gear)

 When it comes to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers videogames, I think most people's first thoughts will either be the single plane beat em ups on Mega Drive, or the awkwardly entitled Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Fighting Edition on SNES, which is mainly remembered for the legacy it spawned in the form of Gundam Wing: Endless Duel and the Gundam Battle Assault series. But, as I found Dangerous Road while looking up a list of every game developed by SIMS, I noticed this on the list. I looked it up, saw some of that beautiful pixel art that the Game Gear has as its trademark, and needed to know more. So this isn't a super-obscure game, but it's one I think a lot of people will have automatically written off as shovelware and never tried out.

 

Interestingly, it's actually pretty similar in structure to the Gaoranger and Hurricanger games on Playstation: each stage has you picking a ranger, then playing through the action scenes of an episode. You fight some putties, the human-sized version of the weekly monster, and sometimes goldar will show up, too, and once you're done with that, everything gets bigger, and you control the Megazord against the giant version of the weekly monster (and again, Goldar sometimes shows up here). 

 

The game keeps things focused entirely on the first season of the TV show, and actually makes great use of the license. There are seven stages, the third and fourth of which are dedicated to that season's most iconic storyline: Green With Evil. Stage three has you fighting the brainwashed green ranger Tommy in human- and giant-sized forms, while the second has you fighting the Dragonzord, followed by a final battle to free Tommy's mind. Of course, the best thing about this is that for the final three stages, you can play as Tommy in the human-sized parts, and for the giant-sized parts, you get to pick between the Megazord, the vanilla Dragonzord, and best of all, Dragonzord battle mode. I think this might be the only game where that particular robot is playable, even!

 

The rangers all have their own movesets, and Tommy happens to have the most effective and cool-looking moves, and while the three mecha are pretty equal in power, they do still all play pretty differently to each other, and it's cool to have the choice of three really great-looking designs. The Game Gear, like the Game Boy, has more decent fighting games than you might think, especially the ports of Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury Special. But those are ports, and even though SNK are renowned for the great storylines and characters in their games, they are still designed around the idea that they'll be played against human opponents. 

 

Power Rangers has the advantage of being made specifically for the Game Gear, and so it's also designed around being a single player story experience. So you have five (six later on) characters all with their own movesets, but no matter who you pick, you'll be playing through the same storyline with the same opponents. The game doesn't need to come up with reasons for allied characters to be fighting each other, plus considering this is a cartridge-based game for a handheld in 1994, being able to save space by re-using Goldar and evil Tommy as opponents was surely a big help to the developers.

 

This is a pretty great game! It's definitely better than the Mega Drive Power Rangers games, and I'd say it's an equal-but-different altenative to Fighting Edition, too. All of the MMPR seemed to get univerally slated on release, but if you ever feel the need to play an of-the-time Power Rangers game, you'll have a better time with this one than you'd have with most of the others. And if you finish it, the Game Gear's Power Rangers The Movie game is pretty much exactly the same as this one, but with monsters from both the movie and the second season of the TV show.

Dangerous Road (3DS)

 I had big hopes for this one. The title made me think it might be some Destruction Derby-style racing game, or maybe something topdown like Action Fighter or Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, Raising my hopes higher was how I discovered it: on a list of works by SIMS, those tireless stalwarts of the Master System and Game Gear in the early nineties, and I was excited to learn that they were still around and active as recent as 2016. They even worked on the most recent Ape Escape game in 2023!

 

Unfortunately, actually playing the game dashed all of those hopes. As Tak Fujii once said long ago, while toiling in the Konami shovelware mines: "It's a Frogger". I think the last time I saw a Frogger knockoff was on the Atari 2600, but here's one that came out in 2016 on the 3DS. It has a couple of new ideas, though! There are four playable characters, each with their own special ability, like being able to slow time for a few seconds or having slightly faster movement than the others.

 

The aim of the game is very slightly different to traditional frogger, too. Instead of just crossing the road to get home a few times per stage, you've instead got to go back and forth seeking out numbered flags (in order), before getting the stage clear flag. That's in the main Goal Run mode, at least. There's also that insanely irresponsible Survival Run mode. This one sees you trapped on a busy multi-lane highway (with a few train tracks to mix things up too), and your only aim is to survive for sixty seconds. It didn't really hit me how crazy it was for a game that seems to be aimed at kids to literally have a "play in traffic" mode until after I'd stopped playing. 

 

I think what really hurts this game is the lack of scores. Especially in Survival Run: there's a star item that appears occasionally that gives you five seconds of invincibilty, destroying any vehicles that hit you in this time. It's a mildly amusing effect the first few times, but they might as well have just made it an item that reduced the remaining time by five seconds. If there was a score, and you got points for destroying the vehicles in this way, there'd be some point to this. I guess you'd score points when not invincible by playing chicken, and moving out of the way of vehicles as close to being hit as possible. But then I guess that would also exacerbate the irresponsibility of the mode.

 

This is a game that exists. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. There's nothing about it that I can recommend, as it's just completely unremarkable. I played it because of the title, and to see what SIMS had been up to in recent times. Through reading this review, you've now got that information, and don't need to bother.

Sigmatica (PC)

 So, I've recently been worried that the level of obscurity of the games I cover hasn't been as deep as it could have been. In an attempt to assuage that feeling, I got ahold of a compilation disc of games made by the Chiba University Computer ResearchingSociety in 2013. Most of the games were very simple, very short minigames that I'd struggle to write a full post about (so I'll do a big patreon exclusive compilation post about all of them in the near future). But this one, Sigmatica (or Σtica The uncorporeal domain, as the title screen calls it), stood out head and shoulders above all of the others.

 

Like you can tell from the screenshots, it's a shooting game! And though it uses an abstract visual style, with the player ship and all of the enemies being represented by simple wireframe polygonal shapes, the Touhou series was definitely a big influence on it. The most obvious manifestation of this is the way the screen is laid out, with the big info column on the righthand side of the screen showing your score, lives, bombs, and the number of bullets you've grazed. There's also the fact that the bosses take a long time to kill, with multiple healthbars, and distinct bullet/attack patterns to go with each healthbar.

 

It's a very simple game, as far as modern shooting games go. You can shoot and bomb, and you also have a focus shot that slows your movement. I'm not 100% on how the scoring system works, but I think you score more points the more grazes you do, and when you bomb, all the onscreen bullets turn into points items, too. So it's in your interest to graze and to use bombs at the most dangerous moments. Which is all pretty logical for survival play, too, with a little bit of risk thrown in by the graze counter. Even moreso is the end-of-game bonus you get: big bonuses for each stage you finish and how many grazes you got in total, plus if you finish the game, more bonuses for how many lives you had left over.

 

Which kind of brings up the only real problem I have with the game: it's really short! Only two stages! I know it's only a student project and all, but I was really getting into it, and then it suddenly ended! I guess that's a pretty good problem for a game to have, though. There isn't really much more I can say about Sigmatica. It's pretty good, and I hope its developer went on to make more shooting games in the decade since its release.

Asian Dynamite (Arcade)

 This is the third (or fourth if you count the greatly expanded PS2 port of the original) game in the Dynamite Deka series. Like so many SEGA arcade games from the 00s, it still doesn't have a home port, but it does run on the easily-emulated Naomi board. Though I do remember the early days of Naomi emulation, that this was one of the games I most wanted to play on that system, and it was so glitchy as to be unplayable. But that was a long time ago, and things have changed.

 

So, in keeping with the series' main gimmick, it's a 3D beat em up where almost every item is a weapon or a healing item. Some are even both, as you can pick up plates of food, pressing punch to throw some food or kick to take a bite. The plot and structure seem to be a strange mish=mash of elements from the previous games: like the first game, you're storming a building that's occupied by terrorists who've kidnapped an important person's daughter. Like the second game, you choose one of three routes of increasing difficulty at the start of the game, plus there are setpieces in this game that are clearly reskins of setpieces from the second game. For example, the small kitchen where you fought a big fat chef in that game is a small room where you fight a big fat panda in this one (well, a guy in a very realistic panda costume, at least).

 

It also keeps and expands upon the costume mechanic from the first game's PS2 remake. There are three plyable characters, and while playing the game, there are three diffrent coloured briefcases that cane appear as items dropped by enemies. The costumes aren't just cosmetic, but they're entire transformations with their own movesets, and most of them also have their own unique ways of interacting with the many weapons littered around the stages. Surprisingly, none of the costumes are references to classic SEGA games. Also, a useful piece of information is that all of Jennifer's costumes are both useless for fighting with and boring to control. But, you should give her a try at least once just because they're also the strangest, being a levitating yoga practitioner, a creepy jester, and (letting the weird trio down a little) a blatant clone of Marvel Comics' character Elektra.

 

Another returning element that's been expanded upon is the scene transition QTEs. They're annoying like all QTEs are, but unlike a lot of worse implementations of the concept, they serve to create a branching path system (like they did in the previous games), rather than being a "press the right button or die" situation. They're expanded on here by sometimes taking the form of little multiple choice questions that you only have seconds to answer, and some of them are even trick questions, like the old "What colour is the word RED in this sentence?", with the word RED actually being blue. I guess it's a way of preventing players from just memorising every QTE and forcing a reaction even from well-versed players. I don't like it, but I do approve of the ingenuity in concept, at least.

 

Asian Dynamite is a pretty good game. If you like the arlier games in the series, this is mostly just more of those. In some cases, it's just bits of those with a new coat of paint (and a hilariously garish gold suit on the main villain). But the new coat of paint, being a big shiny multipurpose Hong Kong skyscraper is nice, and it's a fun and weird game to play. I recommend giving it a try, while we all continue to wait and hope that SEGA starts porting Naomi and Atomiswave games to consoles someday.

Firebugs (Playstation)

 I'm sure a lot of you reading will remember Rollcage, the Playstation racing game featuring cars that were very obviously inspired by the radio control car Ricochet, released by Tonka a few years earlier. For some reason, it's a game I very heavily associate with magazine demo discs, even though I've long since played the full game, for a lot more time than I ever played the demo. Anyway, it had a sequel not long after release, called Rollcage Stage II (or apparently, Death Track Racing for its PC release in the US). Then, a few years later, Firebugs came out.

 

Mechanically, it's a sequel to the Rollcage games, though thematically, it's had some changes. The original games were similar in theme and setting to the Wipeout games, being set in a stylised luxury future with entire cities seemingly designed around the idea of having racetracks built in them. Firebugs, being a PAL exclusive released in 2002, seems to be following an idea I've seen in some late release Japanese exclusive Playstation games: the only people still buying games for the older console are probably kids. So there's a bunch of cartoony characters, and the world itself is a lot more brightly coloured, too (though the music is still the same kind of awful garbage that seemingly every European-developed Playstation game had to have since the console's beginning).

 

It really does look great, too. The stages are stylistically rendered, with the textures all bearing very bright and bold colours, along with thick, stark black outlines. It's a clever way of getting some cartoony graphics out of the aging hardware that manage to avoid the game looking like a consolation prize for the kids who just got their older sibling's console as a hand-me-down. There's been some minor changes to how the game plays, too. No big changes to the concept or anything: you can still drive upside-down and on the walls and ceilings, but the handling is generally a bit less chaotic and frenzied, and while suddenly spinning around in the air and landing faced the wrong way was a near-constant problem in the Rollcage games before you got the hang of things, it's a lot rarer here.

 

Something I'd like to highlight is the power-up system. You have two power-up slots, which I'll refer to as left and right. The first time you get a power-up, it'll fill your left slot, which is a power that's unique to the character you're playing. Then, if you pick up another before using your left power up, it'll fill your right slot, with a randomly selected power-up from the game's standard pool. Most of the power-ups are standard stuff like missiles, shields, and speed boosts, but I do also like the one that slowly opens a portal in front of your vehicle, which then instantly sends you slightly further ahead on the track. In Firebugs, the portal is just a glowing white ring, but I wonder if this game had gotten a sequel on more powerful hardware, if you'd be able to see your destination through the portal in real time?

 

There's another weird quirk in the way that the single player mode is structured. There are five planets, and each planet has two main races, the first with three laps, and the final with five. If you come first in the first race, you get thirty points and go straight to the final. If you don't, you get significantly fewer points (second place only gets you ten!), and have to race in two very short one-on-one races before going to the final. You'll get some extra points for winning these races, but they really feel like a punishment, since they're so short that they're barely longer than the loading screens that precede them!

 

Firebugs is a decent enough game, but there's just something lacking in it that I can't quite pin down. It's obviously a fast, exciting racing game, but it never really feels like it is. It doesn't really make sense, but against all logic, while playing the game, I quickly felt like I was just tediously going through the motions, waiting for the races to be over, rather than feeling like an engaged, active participant. I guess the best I can do is recommend that you give it a try yourself? It's clearly a competent game, but it just didn't click with me like I feel like it should have.