Mr. Prospector Horiate-kun (Playstation)

 A few weeks ago, I reviewed Addie no Okurimono, a Playstation game that I didn't enjoy, though it was obviously a high-quality game that I could recommend to people who have different tastes in videogames to me. Now I'm reviewing Mr. Prospector Horiate-kun, a game that looks and feels cheap in many ways, but which has been able to somehow grab my attention and have me play it compulsively for several multi-hour sessions.

 

In it, you play as a little puppy, who I assume is Horiate-kun himself, and you go into the mines to look for treasure, in the form of both money and items. Items of course, can be equipped or sold for more money. There's seven mines, and each has an entry fee, starting at one coin, and adding a zero each time until the final mine costs a million coins to go and have a snoop around in. Naturally, the more expensive the mine, the better the items there are in there, and the higher denominations of currency you'll find. I'm not sure of the actual goal of the game, but there's an item book with a couple of hundred blank entries in it, so my best guess is that you've got to go into the mine and find at least one of all of them.

 

The money cost of entry isn't the only barrier holding back your progress, though: you have a bunch of stats, that all affect how well you're likely to do in the mines. The most important is your lung stat, which determines the length of time for which you can stay underground. (Of course, your oxygen count acts as both your time limit and your health meter.) Your other stats are Speed, Strength, and Intelligence. I'm pretty sure speed affects how fast you walk, and Strength affects both the number of hits with your pickaxe it takes to break blocks, as well as what happens when enemies touch you (depending on your strength and that of the enemy, they can either hurt you, disappear harmlessly, or turn into money), and my best guess for intelligence is that it either affects the frequency and quality of item drops, or it affect how often the little sparkles appear that tell you where the item drops are.

 

So, back on the subject of mine entry barriers. They're both to do with your strength. The more expensive the mine, the tougher the enemies are, and the more resilient the blocks are. So if you save up all your money to go to a mine that you're not ready for, it'll be a waste. You'll use up all of your air slowly digging through a few blocks, and if anything touches you, you'll likely pass out immediately. Passing out isn't a disaster: you keep all your money, but you lose half of the item chests you found during that dig.

 

As well as digging in the mines, there's a few places in town to visit! The scientist has to be rescued from the first mine before you can utlise his services, but he has a bunch of machines that change items. You can fuse items together like in Power Stone 2, you can upgrade items, and there's another option that he's never actually let me pick. Then there's a pet shop! I'm not sure exactly what goes on here. You can sometimes find pets as items in the mines, and you have to go here to equip them. Then you'll have a little animal following you around as you dig. Finally, the item shop. They never seem to actually sell anything good, but you can offload all your unwanted items to them.

 

The game's presentation is a mixed bag, mostly filled with bad stuff. All the ingame graphics look bad. I honestly wonder if some of it is temporary "programmer art" that accidentally never got replaced? The screens where you pick which mine to enter are particularly bad, as are the characters that appear in the locations in town. There is only onw thing that really looks good in the game, and you barely get to see it: the cutscenes! You know a game's got problems when I'm praising the cutscenes as one of the best parts, but they tell the story of the game through the use of digitised photos of the game's characters in plushy form, with text laid over the top! Who can hate that level of cuteness?

 

Though the game's entirely in Japanese, it's also simple enough that you'll be able to figure out pretty much everything just by playing. And though, like I said earlier, I've played the game for several hours, I can't really recommend it. It's incredibly repetitive, your every interaction with the world, especially with enemies, is based almost entirely on your stats, with no skill factor involved at all, and it feels like a precursor to modern "incremental" games ala Cookie Clicker, Immortal Taoists, Masters of Madness, et al., a genre I've recently cut out of my life altogether, as they're just pointless, boring chores and barely games at all.

Peace Breaker (PC)

 I didn't realise until after I'd bought it, but Peace Breaker is from the same developer as another game I've reviewed here, Near Fantasy Space. But what drew me into it was the premise: it claims to be a "fair" shooting game, where, unlike most shooting games, where you're alone against a massive enemy army, you're now just one pilot among many in a massive battle against an enemy force. Worded like it is on the game's page on DLSite, it sounds like this is a game designed to be easier than most shooting games, but it seems the developers saw the "unfairness" of the typical shooting game arrangement as being skewed in favour of the player.

 

It's a mecha game, in the style of Assault Suits Valken or Metal Warriors, though all the stages (that I've seen, at least) take place in spce, with no platforms on which to land. Missions generally see a clash between a small fleet of your side's ships and a small fleet of the enemy side's ships, and each ship releases a bunch of mecha, including you. Though there's some small variance from mission to mission, they generally play out in the same way: a massive, messy battle between many mecha happening in the middle of the field, with bullets flying everywhere and lots of pilots on both sides dying. Then, as the two fleets of ships gradually get closer, it becomes a race to take out your enemy's ships before your own ships (or yourself) gets destroyed. Furthermore, if you're low on health or ammo, you can go back to your launch ship to reload and repair, though it takes time, and the battle carries on as it happens. If your launch ship gets destroyed, that's also an instant game over.

 

In terms of anime, you should be thinking more along the lines of Armoured Trooper VOTOMS than Mobile Suit Gundam: your mecha is fragile, lots of your comrades will die, and it's very likely you will too. It feels especially cruel when you're taken out by the shot of a distant ship's cannon, which can take over half your health in a single hit. But conversely, it also feels very satifying when an enemy ship goes down after several second of concentrated fire from you and your allies. The difficulty level really did have me close to giving up on the game at first, though It took me nearly an hour to get past the first stage! Once you've got past that first stage, and you're used to how the game is meant to be played, it becomes a little easier, and a lot more enjoyable.

 

You've really just got to constantly keep in mind that you are just a fragile, expendable grunt. Stick with the crowd as much as you can, don't try to be the big solo hero, and go back to the ship to get repaired when you need to. Conceptually, it's pretty interesting, but I still have some reservations when recommending it. The problem is that pretty much every stage is the same, and once you've played through a few of them, it's very easy to lose interest in seeing any more. I tihnk it would have been really interesting to have some stages on-planet where all your guys are traversing terrain, maybe avoiding landmines, and so on? It'd have a lot of potential in terms of both game design and narrative. Imagine something like Front Mission: Gunhazard with this kind of setup! Anyway, it's a decent game with an interesting concept, but a short shelf life and a lot of unfulfilled potential. If it sounds interesting to you, get it next time it's on sale?

Uchuu Daisakusen - Chocovader Contactee (Arcade)

 So, Chocovader was an early 00s toyline in Japan, made up of little plastic figures disseminated via Kinder Surprise-style hollow chocolate orbs. Most, though apparently not all, of the figures were based on descriptions of aliens given by people who'd encountered them in real life (plus a few inspired by pop culture aliens, like the xenomorph and Dan Dare's enemy the Mekon). So they are Chocolate Invaders. There's a Game Boy Adance game based on the toys that I think is some kind of Pokemon-like monster catching RPG, but this arcade game is a fast-paced minigame compilation more along the lines of Bishi Bashi Special or Tanto-R.

 

Building on the toyline's concept of taking inspiration from real alien encounter reports, a lot of the minigames are actually based on the events described in those reports. For example, there's a report that in 1979, a group of tiny angel-like aliens broke into an old lady's house and caused mischief, messing up her christmas decorations and such. So one of the games has you playing as one of those aliens, repeatedly jumping on the old lady's furniture, trying to bounce as high as you can before the time limit runs out. You play as the alien in all the games, and there's a kind of silly-but dark feel to a lot of them.

 

You'll play as a classic nineties Grey, choosing the right shaped metal implants to put in people's brains, the Flatwoods monster building up energy to mass-abduct people from an urban area, and a whole bunch more, based on stories of which I'm only vaguely aware. After each game, you're given a score, a success percentage, and a letter grade, and the same will happen at the end of your credit, which gets you a go at four minigames. 

 

There are, of course, high score tables for every individual game, as well as for an entire credit, but what's really interesting is a feature that's now long since abandoned: an internet ranking! The cabinet itself wouldn't be linked to the internet, but instead, you'd be given a password along with your score, and you'd be able to input that password at the website abduction.jp (which now contains information on a "Class Action to end Parental Child Abduction In Japan", though you can see the high score table on the Wayback Machine). There, you'd be able to see your place among the best players in the land until about 2003, which appears to be when the site was taken down.

 

Chocovader Contactee doesn't have the insane manic excitement of the Bishi Bashi Special games, but I do like it a lot more than the Tanto-R games, and the theming is really cool and pretty unique among arcade games. It's a shame (though obviously not a surprise) that the high score website is no longer online, but I think it's still worth a bit of your time as a silly curio if you're interested in aliens or paranormal stuff in general.

Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie (Playstation)

 It feels bad to have to give a negative review to what is obviously a good game, but that's what I'm going to have to do here. There's so much about Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie that's really high quality, a lot of cool and interesting ideas executed well, but the problem is that I just really don't enjoy playing it at all. It starts off at a disadvantage, being an adventure game, a genre I rarely get along with well.

 

In its favour, though, it's not an adventure game of the "completely illogical object puzzle" type. Instead, all the puzzles centre around a device called the LogLock, which is made up of a bunch of wheels that have the alphabet printed on them. The wheels can be manipulated in various ways: thhat can be swapped around, the letters can be flipped and rotated, and so on. Each puzzle tasks you with changing one word into another, utilising a certain number of moves or fewer. For some reason, the tutorial puzzles the game starts you off with are much stricter regarding move limits than the puzzles you'll tackle in the story, to the point that I came pretty close to just quitting at that point.
 

When you actually get into the story itself (which I think takes place in your dream?), then not only do the puzzles get easier, but they lose a bit of their abstraction, too. For when you solve a puzzle in the story, you're not just changing one word to another, but doing the same to actual objects! For eample, the first two puzzles you encounter have you turning a cage into a bell, so that the boy trapped inside can escape from it, and then a cow into a cat, so that it's no longer blocking your path. So that element does at least make things a lot more satisfying and entertaining than just solving abstract wor puzzles in isolation.

 

Most of the game, though, has you controlling a little girl as she runs around what appears to be a mediterranean island, getting into mischief, magically transforming objects, and so on. Though the game doesn't appear to have any horror elements, the easiest comparision to make is to Resident Evil, since you're moving a polygon character around various pre-rendered backgrounds with different camera angles, and it's often obvious what you can interact with, since it too will be a polygon object. 

 

I can only make vague guesses as to what the plot's actually about, because it is of course, all in Japanese. But there is a really cool presentational quirk to it: there's no voice acting! Instead, characters will gesticulate as if they're talking, while musical sounds will play, conveying the mood of what they're saying, with subtitles in Japanese appearing onscreen at the same time. This is a cool and imaginitive touch, and really adds a lot to the whole "high quality animated movie" feel of the game.

 

Unfortunately, though, like I said at the start of the review, I didn't like this game at all. I got bored wandering around the island looking for the next puzzle to solve, and actually solving the puzzles wasn't satisfying enough for me to make up for how boring and/or frustrating they could get. But also like I said up at the top, this is clearly a very high quality game, and if you are a fan of adventure games and fixed puzzles, I feel confident in saying it's definitely worth your time and attention.

Adventures in the Desert Country ~Al and the Underground Labyrinth~ (PC)

 It's nice to see a game that's a clear labour of love from its developer, and Adventures in the Desert Country ~Al and the Underground Labyrinth~ (which is the title according to Google Translate, but it reads decently enough to me) is definitely such a game. As far as I can tell, it's an original setting and characters, with all original graphics and sound, and made and designed completely from scratch. It is, in terms of production values, easily up to the standards of the average indie/doujin 2D platformer, and it's free! Amazing.

 

Is it actually any good, though? Yes! But with a caveat or two. Before I get into that, I should probably descibe how it plays, though. It's a very old-fashioned, nineties-style platformer, in which you play as the eponymous Al (Albert Lal Custard, to give him his full name) as he traverses the also eponymous underground labyrinth. In the labyrinth, there's lots of enemies who want him dead, and who can be fought off either with swordplay, or by shooting fireballs at them. An even bigger threat than the enemies, though, are the many, many bottomless pits littered throughout each stage. And of course, the two are capable of working together, too, with enemies often being strategically placed so that they've got a decent chance of knocking you to your doom.

 

One nice little touch is that that goes both ways, though: you can also knock enemies off of platforms to their doom, too. And not just in the bottomless pits, either: enemies are affected by all the traps in the stages. Spike pits, lava pits, falling blocks, and so on can all be used to your advantage if you're smart. And that's where the aforementioned caveat comes in: this game is really difficult. Not in the way of the masocore platformers that were popular about fifteen years ago, but in a normal, old-fashioned "make no mistakes" way. If the stage select in the options screen is to be believed, there are eight stages in the game, and I've gotten as far as the sixth. To get past the third you really need to start playing carefully, getting the lay of the land, and so on.

 

It's not a Rick Dangerous-type situation, where you need to memorise the entire stage layout, because the hazards are impossible to react to without foreknowledge, you just have to play smart, assess the situation, and form a plan. The enemies and the stage are both against you, so to progress, you'll usually have to figure out how you're going to kill the enemies with the tools you have, and how you're going to traverse the stage (which obviously becomes somewhat easier when the enemies aren't in it). So though the game's short, and the stages themselves aren't very long in terms of how much actual distance you cover in each of them, this is still a game that'll take a while to get through, because of the methodical way it needs to be played. I'm sure a skilled speedrun of it would be an exciting watch!

 

As I already said, this game is a clear labour of love, and if you're interested in playing a platform game that demands a lot of strategy and skill, you should definitely give it a try. It's the exact level of difficulty where every bit of progress is a satisfying accomplishment, and you'll keep playing past the point of frustration so as to not let the game beat you. I've had it a while now, so I have absolutely no memory of how I originally discovered it, but you can get it here.