Lilithrottle (PC)

 Here's a game that will immediately appeal to some of my readers: a fangame dedicated to Lilith from Capcom's Darkstalkers/Vampire games! More exciting, though, is the developer: Mount Punch, who also developed the best game on the XBox Live Indie Games store, Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi! Does it live up to that game's greatness? No. But it is still pretty good!

 

It's a platform game in which you play as Lilith, and you've got to traverse the various stages killing enemies and avoiding traps while also collecting enough bats to open the stage's exit. Later on, things get added like switches for opening doors and so on. The gimmick, though, is in how you get around the stages. Obviously, you can walk and jump, but the majority of your time playing the game will be spent flying in straight lines.

 

While in midair, you hold a direction and press jump to make Lilith fly in that direction, and while flying, you can also hold the melee attack button to turn her into a drill, smashing through enemies and certain kinds of blocks. To be honest, I don't know why you have to press a second button to do this, since there's no benefit to be found in flying without drilling, nor is there any disadvantage to doing it every time. 

 

The game's clearly designed entirely around this mechanic, and it's in a certain category of game (my goto example always being the Playstation game Speed Power Gunbike) that offer little mercy to new players, but get significantly more enjoyable to players that persevere and master the idiosyncratic way the game plays. That is, when you first start playing, it'll seem unfair, clunky, and generally no fun at all to play. But once you master flying and drilling and you  learn the stage layouts a little, there's a lot of fun and satisfaction to be had zooming from place to place, cleaning up bats, monsters, and destructible blocks as you go.

 

Lilithrottle is, like I said, definitely an acquired taste, but if you think you have the patience to properly get ahold of it (or if you're enough of a Darkstalkers fan for that to motivate you), you should definitely give it a try! If you just want to get through games while encountering very little friction, though, it's definitely not for you.

Doki Doki Idol Star Seeker Remix (Dreamcast)

 This is a bold statement to make, but Doki Doki Idol Starseeker Remix does for Minesweeper what Logic Pro did for Nonograms: takes the basic concept and turns it into an actual exciting videogame, rather than a leisurely time-passing puzzle. It's really a shame that the Dreamcast is the only home port it ever got, as it's simple enough and has enough appeal that it could really have had decent ports to pretty much every mainstream system of the twenty-first century, from the Game Boy Advance to the PS5.

 

How it works is that it's a lot like minesweeper played on a grid of hexagons instead of squares, and your cursor highlights seven (the one it's on, plus the six touching it) of them. You'll be given a number, which shows how many stars (this game's mines) are in those seven hexes. If there's zero, you can instantly clear out the seven by pressing A. By moving around, you figure out where the stars are and press B to put a flag on them. Then, if you put the centre of your cursor over a flag and press A, assuming all the flags actually are correctly placed over stars, the stars will be cleared, you'll get a bunch of points and some extra time, and if there's no stars left to find, you'll clear the stage and go onto the next one.

 

The more stars you clear in one go, the more points and extra time you'll get for them. So you'll get the most points if you clear all the stars on a stage in one big sweep. But, as the stages go on, the timer can get really short, and you might have to clear the stars you've got before then just to claw back the few seconds you need to find the rest. It's a cool mechanic that build tension and really encourages the "score vs survival" feeling that's present in a lot of great shooting games.

 

This is an arcade port, and it has a few extra features. Star Seeker mode is closely based on the arcade game, and just has you going through sets of stages of gradually increasing difficulty, trying to score points. Doki Doki Idol mode is a console-exclusive story mode, with a few chapters, which tell the story of a manager bringing together some girls to form an idol group, and then the blossoming friendships between these characters. That's what it looks like it's about based on the pictures at least. There are also art gallery and sound test modes, but they have to be unlocked, and though I've been playing quite a bit of this game over the past week, I'm not yet good enough at it to have done that yet.

 

This is an excellent game, and I strongly recommend that you find a way to play it. Despite what I said in my Charge'N Blast review, and this being a late Dreamcast release with presumably a smaller-than-usual print run, the prices for it vary wildly from reasonable to absurd. But even if you can't find a reasonably priced copy, I'm sure you can find some way to play it. And again: you definitely should, it's great.

Janken Game Acchi Muite Hoi! (Arcade)

 Two posts in a row, I'm having to start with a controls disclaimer! Truly, we live in unprecedented times. Again, I'm playing this game via an emulator with a regular controller, but this time it was originally an arcade cabinet with a specialised joystick! As you can probably surmise from the title, it's a rock-paper-scissors game, and the controller was designed to be as immersive as possible: it used a slightly bigger-than-usual joystick with two buttons along the length of its shaft. Rather than rock, paper, and scissors each having a button mapped to them, the player instead makes the actual handsigns by pressing or releasing the buttons. So holding both buttons is rock, holding only the bottom button is scissors, and releasing both is paper! It's a pretty cool system, right?

 

Now that I've explained the controls, let's get onto the game itself. You start by picking one of four opponents: a cat, a geisha, a schoolgirl, or a fisherman, then you'll repeatedly play rock-paper-scissors with them. Whoever wins each round then gets to guess the direction the loser's going to look in. (Kind of like the early 00s Dandy Sakano GETS! trend, if anyone remembers that?) Whenever you beat the opponent, and when you guess the direction correctly, a meter at the top of the screen fills up, and things keep getting faster with it. 

 

When the meter's totally full, one of the other opponents will suddenly barge in and knock your current opponent offscreen. Then you'll keep playing against them, and proceedings will continue to speed up, until you run out of time. I'm not sure if there's a way to get more time, or if it's possible to be lucky/speedy enough to move onto a third (or fourth) opponent on a single credit, though. 

 

Playing it for free via emulator, it's pretty addictive, though if I was paying for each credit, the fact that it's a 100% luck-based game with no skill or strategy involved would be offputting enough that not even the interesting controller gimmick would get me to part with my money. I think there's also some kind of prize/redemption aspect when it's played on a real cab, but there's almost no information about the game online, so I haven't been able to confirm or disprove that.

 

I think it's also worth noting that this is a game released in 1997 by Data East. I didn't even think they were still around that late in the nineties! Furthermore, when I think of Data East's games, I associate them with a kind of grimy, otaku-focused sci-fi aesthetic. Two Crude Dudes, Karnov, Atomic Runner, and so on. But this game's got a really clean, contemporary (for late nineties Japan) look to it, so I guess as a last grasp at solvency, they were making an attempt to get the kind of mainstream audience enjoyed by SEGA's Print Club series of machines? Anyway, if you're curious, play this in MAME. In the unlikely event that any of you find a working cabinet out in the world somewhere, I hope you'll at least spend one credit to find out if it does give out some kind of prize, and then come here and tell me about it.

Champiyon Pinball (Plug and Play)

 Controls disclaimer: this is a plug and play with specilised controls, but I played it using a regular old saturn controller via emulation. The only photo I can find of an actual unit looks like a small rectangular controller with a couple of novelty flipper-shaped buttons, but it's not a particularly great photo, so I thought I should mention this just in case it is more than it looks like.

 

Also known as the more correctly-spelled Champion Pinball, this is a dedicated plug and play video pinball game from Tomy, released in 2003. Obviously made for a younger audience, it's still an interesting piece, and also surprisingly fully featured! There's a story mode, which tells, through the medium of cute little cutscenes (which are unfortunately unskippable), the story of two kids, sent by the pinball king to crush his enemies in various places and times. At least, that's what it looks like, there's no English language version.

 

It sees you going through a linear set of stages, each with their own simple little missions. Finish the mission, go to the next stage. For example, the first stage is in a forest, with a big tree at the back. Hit it a few times to reveal the enetrance to the boss' lair, go in and smack the boss around a bit, and you're done. Stage two is in the ocean, and takes place across three screens, and on the first two, you keep scoring points until someone (a big fish on the first screen, a mermaid on the second) appears to carry you up to the next. Then on the last screen, a whale will appear to shoot you out of their blowhole and into the next stage.The most interesting stage I've seen so far is the fifth, set in an evil robot factory, in which you've got to hit various buttons and mechanisms with the ball to make your way through.

 

As well as story mode, there's challenge mode, in which you can individually play any of the tables from story mode (though only the first three are available at the start, more are unlocked as you reach them in story mode), classic mode, which features a unique, though very bland "old school"-style pinball table. Which is actually a lot simpler and less exciting than most actual 1970s tables, unfortunately. 

 

There's also battle mode, which actually seems a little bit like a very simplified version of one of the modes in KaZe's PS2 game Akira Psychoball. There's a single table, though the bottom half is divided in two by a wall, and each of those two halves has a pit and a set of flippers. Each set of flippers is controlled by a different player, and you're just trying to keep the ball out of your pit. Hitting things on the table causes effects like making your opponent's flippers invisible and the like. It probably won't provide hoyrs of fun, but I'm sure it led to young siblings in Japan somewhere coming to blows at least once, so there's that.Finally, there's a kind of incredibly simple pachinko mode, which is barely a game at all, even by pachinko standards. Launch balls to try and get them in holes, and if you're lucky, even filling in a full line of holes. Ooh.

 

Champiyon Pinball is fine, I guess. It's not some great unsung classic of the genre, but it's a decent bit of fun. I've had a couple of hours of enjoyment out of it, anyway, and I feel like it's one I'll go back to every now and then, too. I have no idea if buying an actual unit would be expensive or not, as I can't find one for sale anywhere online. Which I guess answers the question in a different way? But you can play it in MAME, anyway.