Fushigi no Dungeon Furai no Shiren Gaiden - Onna Kenshi Asuka Kenzan! (Dreamcast)

 Or if you'd prefer, Mystery Dungeon Shiren the Wanderer Sidestory - The Swordswoman Asuka Appears! So obviously, it's a spinoff from the Shiren the Wanderer series, which in my opinion are the absolute height of the roguelike genre, with very little else even coming close (in fact, the only rival the series has in my mind is One Way Heroics, and that must be a friendly rivalry, since Shiren characters have appeared in that series too).

 

This one just recently got fantranslated, and only partially: so far, the first "area" is translated apparently. I don't know exactly what that entails, but I've finished the first dungeon, and made a decent way into the second and everything's still in English. The story concerns Asuka, the eponymous swordswoman and a friends of the series' protagonist Shiren. She finds herself in a valley where the local ninja clan, who once protected the people from monsters, have begun robbing people and poisoning the river, and Asuka steps in to investigate. Of course, the ninjas aren't acting of their own volition, but I won't spoil anymore of the plot for you.

 

This mostly plays pretty much exactly like one of the regular Shiren games, with a few elements I haven't seen in the others. But even that's standard for the series, since they all seem to have a few unique elements to them. This time around, there's the Monboxes, which are items that can be used to summon monsters to act as sidekicks if you don't have any actual sidekicks. I haven't found much use for them, to be honest. There's also a new scroll/wand effect: being able to set fires that burn over a large area for quite some time, doing damage every turn to anything that's caught in them.

 

I wasn't keen on the graphics at first, as they eschew the series' usual high-quality pixel art in favour of pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds. The game's look quickly grew on me, though, as everything's detailed and sharp enough that it doesn't have the usual ugly blobby look associated with pre-rendered graphics. Coupled with the background music, there's a lot of atmosphere to be felt and enjoyed in this game's dungeons, too.

 

I don't really have a lot more to say about this game. If you like the Shiren games, this is essentially another one of them, and if you're not familiar with the series, I recommend going and playing the first game, either in its original SNES form, or its later DS port, which even got an official English release! (I'm not sure if this game even counts as being obscure, but it's been the majority of my game-playing this past week, alongside Shenmue 3. So sorry if it doesn't meet your obscurity standards!)

Phenomenon User Metropolitan Highway Invincible Legend Second Stage - Clash! Metropolitan Expressway Grand Prix- (PC)

 I'm not totally sure on the accuracy of that title, but this game doesn't seem to have an official English (or even romanised) title, so  I put the Japanese title into Google translate, and the result is what you see above. Anyay, it's a beat em up that appears to be about illegal street racers who all have superpowers for some reason. All the racing happens in the story mode cutscenes, the game itself is all about fighting enemies and bosses. So right from the start, this is a pretty unusual game.

 

Adding more to that weird genre situation is that it's made in a shooting game engine. Shooting Game Builder, to be precise. I've never used this engine, but I have a theory about how this game was made. This game has no jump button, and with one exception where there's an auto-scrolling background, all the stages take place on a single screen. So, I theorise that it was made in that engine using settings for a Galaga-style game, and the developer has chosen to push that engine to the edges of what can be reasonably done with it, instead of using an engine that's actually intended for beat em ups.

 

The game's a lot of fun, though. You can move left and right, and you have three buttons. The first is for your normal attacks, which are wildly different for every character. There are characters with melee combos, characters that shoot streams of projectiles, and even a character who summons giant swords out of nowhere to attack enemies. The second button is either for guarding if you hold it, or special attacks if you press it at the same time as a direction. Each character's got three specials, and again, they're all very different to each other. The third button is your super attack, which uses up fifty points of your power meter (which fills up as you fight, to a maximum of one hundred).

 

Most stages are structured in the same way: you fight lots of enemies until the boss turns up. One stage is different in that the boss turns up early and fights the enemies alongside you for a while before you face off against each other. Which leads me into the game's big selling point: how shamelessly chuunibyou everything is. The character designs, their attack animations, the fact that so much of the game is spent fighting in front of cityscapes at night, it's all the perfect encapsulation of that particular youthful aesthetic. There's even a Psychic Force reference, as a boss with wind powers has attacks that references various wind characters, including that game's Wendy Ryan, as well as Megaman's Airman, and King of Fighters' Leopold Goenitz.

 

As well as the main game, there's also a nice little PS1-style extra in the form of G-coins that you'll find a couple of every time you play one of the main modes. These are used to buy in-game trading games, of which there are twenty-four. It's only a little thing, but it really makes the game feel like a full, well-rounded thing that could have been on a console in days goneby. That's especially cool when you take into account that the game's free! Of course, I recommend that you go and give it a try, I enjoyed it a lot, and I look forward to the sequel that's teased in the story mode's ending, too.

Granew-Tou! Daibouken (Playstation)

 This game's title has a few different transliterations floating around the internet, including some which say "shima" instead of "tou". But I think a decent enough translation of the title would be something like "The Big Granew Island Adventure"? It also really looks like it could be based on an anime aimed at little kids, though I'm fairly certain it isn't.

 

What it is, though, is an interesting and unusual racing game. It combines the button-tapping of a Track and Field-type game with the attack items of a Mario Kart-type game, and puts them together on linear 3D platformer stages. The plot, as far as I can tell, concerns the eponymous island, and starts when a UFO crashes on top of its highest mountain. All the locals want to go and look at the UFO, and so a mad race to the mountaintop ensues.

 

It plays pretty much like how I described it above: you tap the circle button as fast as you can to keep up your running speed, while also using the D-pad to steer and the X button to jump. There's also various hazards to avoid on each stage, and a lot of the stages have short vehicle sections too, where you're riding hand-powered railcarts, rubber dinghies, snowboards, and so on. And of course, there are little glowing orbs that give you a random item to use against your opponents. There's items that let you shoot fireballs and tornados, stop time, form an ice puddle on the floor and more.

 

The races are all very short and very hectic, and I can see how this game would be a ton of fun with a multitap and three human opponents. It's still pretty good as just a single-player game, too. Because the races are as short as they are, the few seconds advantage a well-aimed item can get you really do make a lot of difference. The only big flaw I can point out in how the game plays is that the platforming in the later stages does start to get more annoying than challenging, especially since it feels like the camera's working against you. Other than that though, this is a good little bit of silly fun.

 

I think this is a pretty easy game to recommend. It's a fairly unique combination of ideas, and there's no language barrier, either. Possibly due to the aforementioned transliteration trouble, I haven't been able to find any copies for sale online, so I can't tell you how affordable it is. But buying legitimate copies of decades-out-of-print games is really just a novelty, anyway, right?

Wing War (Arcade)

 For some reason, Model 1 games have been listed as "Not Working" in MAME for years, even though they're all, as far as I can tell, totally playable. Maybe it's an oversight, or maybe there's some special technological reason that's beyond my grasp, but you can definitely play them. And this is one of them! I think it might have been the last of them, too, coming out in 1994. Model 2 games Daytona USA and Virtua Cop had already been released the previous year!

 

But being the last Model 1 game, it is also the most graphically sophisticated by a long way. It's a game about one-on-one aircraft combat, with aged propellor planes, modern fighter jets, and a few attack helicopters on offer. Also on offer are two modes of play, selectable right at the start of your credit: dogfight and expert. Dogfight is the best, but I should at least explain the differences between them.

 

Dogfight is by far the most videogamey, and specifically the most like a SEGA arcade game of the two. In this mode, you and your opponent fly on a fixed path over each of the stages, and every ten seconds or so you switch positions between being the attacker at the rear or the evader in front. As the attacker, you can fire your useless machine gun, and your slightly less useless missiles, while as the evader, you've got to fly around to evade your opponent's weapons and at a pinch, you can release a smokescreen to confuse their missiles.

 

Expert is a lot more complex, and it's all the weaker for it. In this mode, the stages are just differently-decorated large square plains over which you and your opponent are free to fly around and try to shoot each other down. Now, dogfight mode ends much more often than not in a time out finish with the victory going to whoever scorded the most lucky hits, but expert mode adds in the struggle of having to seek out your opponent before you can even try to hit them. Many of my Expert mode matches were decided with only one hit having been landed by the time time was up.

 

The game does have a problem with how unreliable the weapons are at hitting their marks. It is a problem that plagues both the player and their AI opponents, though, so the luck-based gameplay is at least equal in its tedium. I'm not sure how it could be fixed, unfortunately. lock-on weapons ala Afterburner or Panzer Dragoon would grossly unbalance dogfight mode, though they would greatly improve expert mode. But would they also ruin the psuedo-realistic verisimilitude to which expert mode aspires?

 

Though the game has some serious problems mechanically, it is at least aesthetically beautiful. Like I said, it's the most visually complex Model 1 game, and the stages look great, especially in dogfight mode, which sees you flying through them on a fixed path like you would in a sprite scrolling game. They're varied, too: there's a New York-like city, a wild west desert, and a high-altitude fantasy plateau with waterfalls, rainbows, and dinosaurs. Something else worth noting is that there was a version of this game housing in an R-360 cabinet, which might explain its existence: maybe SEGA wanted to put a polygon-based game in one of those, but there was some reason that it wouldn't have been practical to put a Model 2 game in there.

 

Wing War isn't a particularly great game, but it is one that looks really cool. And I suspect that that's the whole point of it existing: in an age where polygonal 3D games were new, this was one that had a lot of cool-looking stuff happening at a high speed, and sometimes it was even in a gimmicky cabient that span the player round a bunch. If you like looking a pretty low polygon vistas, give it a look. If you don't, it doesn't really have anything else to offer.