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.