Hit Back (Playstation)

 Hit Back (which seems to be listed on some piracy sites as "3D Bouncing Ball", "3D Bouncing Ball Puzzle" and maybe also "Ball Mayhem") is a great example of a game with a simple and obvious concept, that asks the question "why hadn't anyone done this earlier?", and then through playing it, you quickly find out why. The concept is "Arkanoid in 3D", as the game sees you standing at one end of a corridor hitting a ball in the hopes of hitting all the blocks (in trial mode) or enemies (in story mode), without letting the ball go past you.

 

To be fair though, the game has a few problems, and only one of them is conceptual. If you think about it for a while, you'll probably figure it out, but: the worst part of an Arkanoid-like is the part at the end of each stage where you're stuck watch the ball tediously bounce up and down the screen until you can get it to hit the final block so you can move on. That problem becomes so much worse when there's not only a third dimension for the ball to rattle around in, but also when the "blocks" are moving enemies, who can also move around in three dimensions! You're left feeling the cells in your body die one by one as you see the ball and your last target pass each other by like ships in the night for the fiftieth time in a row. So, at a conceptual level, the game doesn't really work very well. It gets worse, though!

 

The above is also exacerbated by various technical problems the game has, each of which contributes to making it even less fun to play! I'll start with the collision detection. It's just bad. Part of it lies in the hitboxes just making no sense at all, as the ball will hit enemies that it wasn't even close to actually touching, while passing harmlessly through others. Part of it must be the result of something strange going on under the hood, though, especially with regards to the player characters' interactions with the ball. Sometimes, if your character is close enough to the ball, they'll reach out an arm to hit it, and that's fine. Sometimes, they won't do that. Sometimes, the ball hitting your character's torso counts as hitting it back into the field, and sometimes it doesn't. Most frustrating of all is the vertical element. Sometimes the ball goes over your head, and you have to jump to hit it. But sometimes you don't have to jump to hit it. Furthermore, sometimes, jumping will specifically miss the ball. There's no consistent rule as to how high the ball has to be for any of these conditions, they all just seem to happen at random.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend seeking this game out at all. If it worked properly, it'd be mind-numbingly boring, and as it is, it's a pointless, playable exercise in hoping the code likes you each time the ball comes back. The character designs are weird and cute, though, and some of the music is okay.

World Rally Fever: Born on the Road (PC)

 It's very clear that the developers of World Rally Fever loved arcade racing games, especially those of the sprite scaling variety made by SEGA's AM2. They've really gone all the way into capturing the aesthetic of a Japanese arcade game of the late eighties or early nineties, even down to a nice Neogeo-esque intro before the title screen. The game was itself developed in Belgium, so it can go alongside the various works of Gaelco as being a European love letter to Japanese arcades. There's even a character who looks just like Joe from Tsukai GANGAN Koshinkyoku, and another who looks like Cheng Sinzan from the Fatal Fury series!

 

As well as their tributary nature, the graphics are just genuinely amazing. I'm not sure if they're actually using sprite scaling, or actual 3D polygons with pixel art textures designed to look like sprite scaling, but they look incredible either way. In a time when so many developers were making primitive attempts at photorealism using technology that couldn't hope to offer it, this game decided to push the aesthetic concepts of previous years to new heights. Such a shame that they did it in a game stuck on the PC, in a time when people playing PC games seemed to be even more "proud" of how their games were so much more sophisticated and boring than silly lowbrow arcade games. I wonder why it never got released on Playstation or Saturn, actually: Team17 were releasing games on those systems.

 

It's all slightly academic in the end, though, since as nice as the game looks, it's unfortunately not very enjoyable to play. Though the characters do handle differently, it feels like all of them take ages to accelerate to a decent speed. Which is something you'll definitely notice, as there are a lot of obstacles that will just bring you to a dead stop if you so much as scrape against them. Furthermore, something that's happened to me multiple times is crashing into the roadside barrier, clipping through it, getting stuck on the other side, then having to repeatedly crash into it to gradually clip back onto the road. There's a jump button (and on some stages, obstacles that go across the entire width of the road, necessitating its use), but you need to build up speed to actually put it to use, and in the off-road hinterlands, that's impossible.

 

These couple of flaws, along with the fact that the game never really feels like you're going particularly fast, even at full speed, are unfortunately gamekillers. It really is a shame, too, as this is a beautiful game, aestheticlly speaking. It just doesn't live up to that mechanically.

Legend of Sayuki (PS2)

 I've recently been playing Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, which as you'd expect from the high quality of Tengo Project's other games, represents excellence at a level to which most game developers can only hope to aspire. But it reminded me of Legend of Sayuki (also known as Heavenly Guardian or Yukinko Daisenpuu ~Sayuki to Koyuki no Hie-Hie Daisoudou~), a "Pocky and Rocky in all but name" that was released on PS2 to little fanfare in 2008. It really is in all but name, too, as it was originally intended to be part of that much-loved series, until negotiations with Square-Enix fell through and they had to (slightly) re-theme it.

 

So instead of a shrine maiden running around banishing youkai and other monsters, you're a snow goddess doing that. Your raison d'etre is to gather the ingredients necessary to lift a curse from a local boy. You'll go through various environments, like a snowy forest (that seems to gradually become a springtime forest as you progress through it), a massive gambling den inhabited by monsters (the game calls it a casino, but it's more like an old-fashioned Japanese gambling den than the glitzy western-style casino the name implies), and a haunted cave full of fungus and crystals. And the boss of that third stage is as far as I've been able to get so far, as it's a horrible fight where a big evil doll throws books at you, along with magic hearts that mess with your controls.

 

It's a pretty good game! There's a bunch of differently-coloured weapon powers you can gets, of varying degrees of usefulness (note:don't get the green power up that appears just before the first bossfight! It's too short range for that battle!), as well as the expected health restore items, and health meter extension items. An interesting mechanic comes in the form of the little snow bunny that constantly follows you around. As you shoot, it also shoots a little snowflake at a slower rate. This snowflake temporarily freezes enemies it hits, and frozen enemies drop spirit flames. Spirit flames are collected to increase your MP, and you can spend twenty-five MP to activate the snow bunny's special attack, causing it to run around freezing nearby enemies and their shots en masse.

 

I think this might be the key to higher scoring, though I have been mostly focussed on survival to the extent that I haven't paid a lot of attention to that aspect of the game. But something you really should know about this attack is that if you use it wisely, it can be self-sustaining. Enemies frozen in larger groups drop more spirit flames, so if you use it at the right times, you can easily collect more MP than the attack costs to activate. This is especially useful to know when you're about to fight a boss that becomes a lot easier with well-timed special attacks. Which isn't every boss, as the first boss at least doesn't use a lot of projectiles, so the best thing to do there is find the best place to stand and shoot, and the easy ways to avoid its few different attacks. But now I'm just telling you basic shooting game technique.

 

Legend of Sayuki is a pretty decent game all-round. It's not as good as any of the actual Pocky and Rocky/Kiki Kaikai games, and definitely not even close to reshrined, but it's still definitely worth your time. And though I feel like I'm becoming a stuck record on this subject recently, I also feel the need to point out that this is once again one to emulate, as like most PS2 budget titles, it's currently being sold for hundreds of pounds by people who definitely don't deserve any of your money.

Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos (PC Engine)

 It's my opinion that the PC Engine port of Asuka 120% Maxima Burning Festival is the best fighting game on any 8-bit console, so I was curious about Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos, which was released by the same developers a year earlier. Surprisingly, considering how both Asuka 120% and Fill-in-Cafe's beat em ups Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit all share a few common mechanics like the semi-automatic attack speed, and the clashing attack/parry system, Algunos plays more like a more traditional post-Street Fighter II fighting game.

 

It does have a few points that would have made it a little more unique at the time of its release, though. For example, it was made and designed specifically for the PC Engine, rather than being an arcade port, so rather than making compromises in terms of graphics and controls, it's all designed to be the best it can be on the host hardware. Like Asuka 120%, it can be played to its fullest with a standard two-button controller and the Super CD ROM system card. No need to hunt down rare and expensive six-button pads and Arcade Cards!

 

So, the controls feature a strong attack button and a weak attack button. You can also perform throws by pressing them both together (or by pressing the third button on a six-button pad). Other than that, move inputs are pretty standard for the time, with quarter circles and dragon punch inputs doing something for most characters. There's none of the kind of big innovations we'd later see in Asuka 120%, though, like dashes, backsteps, and so on. (Actually, one character does have the ability to dash, and unexpectedly, it's the big green giant guy). It still manages to stand above a lot of the lesser-known also-rans from the early 90s, though, in that it feels good to play, specials are easy to consistently execute, and the AI opponents aren't unstoppable monsters that make solo play a frustrating misery festival.

 

Where it does stand out, though, is in the setting and aesthetic. The characters, and the world they inhabit all look like they were ripped straight from some gritty bubble-era OAV. The kind of stuff that licensed on the cheap, and dubbed with a load of extra swearing in the UK. It almost feels like some kind of long-forgotten Guilty Gear ancestor, at least in aesthetic terms. I think it might have been one of the first post-SFII fighting games not to have a "martial artists in the modern real world" setting, even. (Not the first, though, as I pretty sure that title would go to Irem's Dino Rex, which supposedly changed genre mid-development when it became clear how big and important the just-released SFII was turning out to be). I was disappointed that the story mode endings didn't have nice animated cutscenes like the intro, though. Oh, and another thing to mention for solo players: the final boss is absolutely not safe for people with photosensitive epilepsy or similar conditions. It constantly emits some of the most violent flashing I've ever seen in a videogame, so be warned.

 

So, though it doesn't live up to the greatness of its direct descendant, Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos is still a solid, very enjoyable game, especially when you take into account the host hardware and how early into the genre's life its release date was. If you want to play it, do it via emulation, though. It's suffering the fate that seemingly all PC Engine games suffer these days: absolutely ludicrous prices online. Hopefully there'll come a time when the hoarding speculator scum get bored of old videogames and move onto ruining some other hobby, but until then, emulation is fine. Just an example, and sorry for mentioning Asuka 120% yet again in this review, but I got a copy of that game a few years ago for £15. Looking up Algunos, a less popular, less iconic game, and the cheapest copy I can find is £90. Madness.