Puzzle de Bowling (Arcade)

 I think it's a fair thing to say that iteration and expansion on existing ideas, even if they're someone else's, is a legitimate form of game design. It's a fine line though, especially when you go with an aesthetic that leers very close to that of your ludological muse. Puzzle de Bowling iterates upon the Puzzle Bobble series with a couple of its own ideas, but as inferred, I think making it look so much like Taito's games was a big mistake that gives it the air of a shameless mockbuster.

 

Like you've probably inferred, Puzzle de Bowling is a lot like Puzzle Bobble, but with a bowling theme. Also, the characters are cute anthropomorphised signs of the zodiac. There's a bunch of different-coloured bowling pins at the top of the field, and you roll different-coloured bowling balls at them. When the balls stop moving, they become pins, and if this results in three or more pins of the same colour touching, they'll vanish, and any other-coloured pins hanging off of them wil fall off, too. If you manage to get lots of pins in one go, you can get strike and split bonuses. 

 

The mechanical quirks come from the bowling theme. There's gutters at either side of the field, and you can get a gutterball, though I'm not sure of what the penalty is for doing this. It can get balls of unwanted colours out of the way, at least. The big one, though, is the way you can put a little curve on the ball. As well as moving your character left and right along the bottom of the field with the joystick, there are three buttons related to controlling the ball. Before you roll it, you can press the left and right buttons to determine a point at which the ball will veer in the respective direction. So you can get the ball into awkward little nooks that would require a difficult trick shot in Puzzle Bobble.

 

It sounds like it's an ability that would make the game far too easy, but it doesn't work out like that in practice. The puzzles in the solo puzzle mode are designed in such a way that though the curving system is very helpful, it won't get you out of every jam, and the weakness it has in versus mode is that it does take a couple of seconds longer to line up a perfect curved shot than an okay straight one. I'm sure with practice, high level players could theoretically be able to play accurately at high speed. But, obviously, this game is so forgotten, it's very unlikely that there are any high-level players anywhere in the world. Especially since its only home port was cancelled before release.

 

Anyway, and I feel like this is something I've said about other puzzle games in the past, Puzzle de Bowling is a decent enough game. It's fun to play, and like I said, its lack of originality isn't too much of a black mark, as it's obvious that the developers had an idea they wanted to try out that was an iteration on an existing one, and that's fine. The aesthetics, though, feel a bit cheap. The character designs are incredibly generic, and if you put the characters in Puzzle de Bowling up against those in its contemporaries like Magical Drop 3 or Puchi Charat, they're just lacking a certain intangible something to make them appealing. But here's the part I'm sure I've said before: the later nineties were an amazing time for puzzle games, and lots of really excellent titles were coming out. So why would you ever play this one over any of the others? It just isn't as good or as interesting or as exciting as any of them. Give it a shot in MAME if you're curious, but don't expect it to stick with you.

Kaze Kiri Ninja Action (PC Engine)

 I wasn't sure of whether or not this game counted as obscure, but I think, in 2023, it does. It's a game that's been through a few phases, as far as its perception goes:I remember in the early 00s, when I was first dipping my toes into emulation and playing PC Engine games for the first time, Kaze Kiri was a game people were always quick to recommend. A few years later, the tide had turned a little bit, and people started saying it was a bit boring, repetitive, and overrated. Than a few more years and it was barely ever mentioned at all.

 

Until recently, I hadn't played it since that first era, when everyone loved it. I'd thought it was pretty good, too, but like I said, those were the days when I was first dipping my toes into emulation. I was playing lots of games for the first time, and for some reason, it wasn't one of the ones that really stuck with me. From my recent playtime with it, I can only assume I wasn't ready for it yet. It's a single plane beat em up, a genre that a lot of people misunderstand as being the over-simple vestigial ancestor to the belt scrolling beat em up. But it's also a genre for which I've grown a huge amount of appreciation in recent years. There's a lot that can be done in the genre, and even today, there's games pushing it forward, like Ninja Saviors (which is a remake, but with enough new stuff that it still be considered an advancement).

 

Kaze Kiri came out in 1994. The PC Engine was already an elderly console, an 8-bit that was still somehow trundling on as the age of the 32-bits was just starting to dawn. But as well as impressive ports from other systems, like Asuka 120% Burning Festival, it was still getting original games with enough new ideas and enough raw talent in their production that it sometimes didn't look like the old grandpa that it was. Kaze Kiri is one such game. The first thing that hits you about it is of course the presentation, in particular, the intro that's made up of incredible-looking full screen pixel animation. The game itself looks amazing, too with animated backgrounds and detailed sprites. Sometimes, you get something that combines the two, like an especially great-looking bossfight against a big clockwork robot in a candlelit room, the flickering light reflecting off its metal armour.

 

The game itself is more advanced than you might expect, too. A year prior, Shinobi III, another hardware-pushing ninja action game had appeared on a more powerful console, the Mega Drive. Shinobi III had a complex-but-intuitive control scheme that allowed a whole bunch of different commands to be mapped to only the d-pad and three buttons. I can only wonder if that was an influence on Kaze Kiri, which performs a similar feat with a d-pad and only two buttons. You can walk, run, and jump, as you'd expect. You can also throw kunai and swing your sword. Plus, you can run, perform a dive kick, a slide kick across the ground, and do quick flips backwards and forwards. None of this is complicated, and you'll figure it all out within a few seconds of starting the game. Then you get on with what the game is: fighting lots of enemies until you've killed enough to fight the stage's boss. It's a simple formula, executed with mountains of style and panache.

 

There's a couple more steps towards modernity, too! Your ability to throw kunai is limited not by a specific supply of the throwing blades, but instead by the fact that doing so depletes your health a tiny amount. On its own, that would be annoying. Maybe even unfair. But couple with the very twenty-first century design decision of having your health constantly (but very slowly) regenerating, it makes total sense as yet another way of streamlining all the game's many systems, making a faster and simpler game while still putting a relatively huge amount of tools and possibilities into the player's hands. Just like the control scheme!

 

After reading all that, it won't surprise you to hear that I recommend Kaze Kiri. To everyone! Go and play it! It's the kind of incredible, high-quality game that can really make you excited about videogames and their design. Don't give a penny to the scamming bastards on ebay, but play this game at your earliest convenience. It's an essential play for anyone who appreciates action games, and it should re-rise to its formerly-held position of prominence in the PC Engine library.

Keitai Denjuu Telefang Power Version (Game Boy Color)

 The "Power Version" part of the title is in contrast to there also being a "Speed Version", though I don't know exactly what differences exist between the two. But that piece of information, as well as a quick look at the screenshots accompanying this review, should tell you that this is a shameless Pokemon mockbuster. So much so, in fact, that for a long time it was mostly known to English speakers by the titles Pokemon Diamond/Jade Version, as that was the name of a poorly translated bootleg that was being sold for years. There's also a fanmade translation patch, which is the version I've been playing. It's not just a Pokemon mockbuster though: the plot also takes a lot of elements from Digimon! And, to be fair, though it does lift a lot from more popular series, it does have a lot of its own ideas, too.

 

So, the plot is extremely Digimon-like, until it starts adding in some slightly more unhinged elements: in the near future, another dimension is discovered that can be accessed via portals in trees that are accessed by using flip phones, somehow. In this other world, there are friendly monsters named Denjuu. Also, this other world was "discovered" by a pharmaceutical company who claim ownership over it. That company allows kids access for free, but adults have to pay money. Your character is a kid who's also apparently a baseball prodigy, and as a result of the aforementioned policy, most of the other human characters you meet are also kids. The exceptions being members of the Kazuka Party, a shady political party who want to win an election and give everyone curry? But they seem to be the only political party in the Denjuu world? 

 

Anyway, upon arrival in the Denjuu world, you're assigned a friend Denjuu, and you can also recruit more Denjuu by beating them up. This is explained thusly: "some Denjuu won't make friends with anyone weaker than them, so you have to beat them in battle to get their phone numbers". Which gets into the first interesting system: you don't have a party like in Pokemon. Instead, you have your main Denjuu following you around ala Pokemon Yellow (though you can change this to any Denjuu you've befriended), and the others are saved in your phone as contacts. At the start of a battle, you can call one or two of your contacts (I think this is based on how strong your phone signal currently is?), and they'll arrive within a certain number of turns. Again, I'm not sure what exactly determines this number, but my guess is the type of the monster and the type of area you're in (unlike the elements used for monster types in most games like this, Telefang's monsters are categorised by their home habitats). If your main monsters is defeated before any allies turn up, that's a game over, but the same also applies to enemy trainers who have multiple Denjuu allies, too. 

 

The way the game and its story are structured are interesting enough to be of note, too, I think. The story's kind of episodic, in that you turn up in a Denjuu village, solve whatever problem they're currently enduring, then move onto the next village. The villages are dotted around the world map, and connected by more big trees with portals in them. What's interesting is the world map itself: it's like the map in Link's Awakening! There's no scrolling, and one screen of the game world equals one square on the map. Dungeons, of course, have their own maps, and work in the same way. Unfortunately, I've only played through the first two towns and their stories, as the enemies surrounding the third town are significantly stronger than those that came immediately prior, in an obvious attempt to pad out the game's length via enforced grinding. I was mildly enjoying the game up to this point, but not enough to put up with that kind of nonsense.

 

As you can see from the screenshots, the battles are similar to those seen in the Pokemon games to an almost ridiculous degree, even using a near-identical screen layout. Mechanically, there's a couple of differences, though. There's the calling for help party system I already described, and there's also the friendship stat each monster has. This is increased by giving them gifts, talking to them on the phone, using them in battle, and setting them as your main partner. What it does is affects how the denjuu acts in battle: with a low friendship, they might do nothing at all, slightly higher, and they'll sometimes follow orders or sometimes do an atack of their own choice, and eventually they'll have enough friendship to obey commands every time. Other than that, there's attacks, buff/debuff moves, and status effects, and even the attack animations are very similar to those seen in Pokemon.

 

There's not much else to say about Keitai Denjuu Telefang. It's got a real time clock and day/night cycle, like Pokemon Gold and Silver had the year prior. I was mostly playing this in the dead of night, but I did force myself to have an afternoon session so that I could at least take some screenshots in the daytime. But that's about it. In the year 2000, when it came out, you could reasonably recommend Telefang to people who'd played all the actual Pokemon games to death and were desperate for something similar. But in 2023, there are significantly more Pokemon games to play though before you get to that point, and once you do, there are many more interesting options to go for, like the Nexomon games, or Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, for example. So this is just a historical curiosity, thanks to the unique circumstance of it having such an infamous bootleg.

Plarail Yume Ga Ippai! (PS2)

 Like I'm sure you all remember from the time I reviewed the arcade game Attack Plarail in 2018, that Plarail is Tomy's line of Plastic Railway toys, which, from an outsider's perspective, seem geared more towards easy, fun creativity and play value, as opposed to the more realistic trains of western companies like Hornby, which are made for hobbyists to gradually create and permanently install miniature villages and counties in their houses. That was all one sentence! Sorry about that. Anyway, here's a home console game based on the same toyline, and apparently made by just Tomy, without the assistance of a more established videogame name like how Namco worked on Attack Plarail.

 

Being a home game, it also has a much wider scope and more ambition than its arcade predecessor. Attack Plarail had you just driving a train along a few premade courses. Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is essentially a whole plarail ownership simulator, and while it does have some pre-made courses, the real meat of this game is that you get to build your own! The way in which this is implemented has some positive and negative aspects, though. And to be fair, some of the negative aspects might be under exacerbation from my Japanese illiteracy.

 

There's two modes to choose from when you load up the game: on the left is train driving. It's actually a lot simpler than most arcade train driving games like Attack Plarail or Densha de Go, as you only really have to control the speed of the train and there's no fail condition as far as I can tell. There's lots of buttons to do things, like sound your horn or flick switches on the train dashboard, but it's not clear what, if anything, any of these things do. on the right is construction mode, where you'll be spending most of your time with this game.

 

First, you'll pick a map. I don't really see much reason not to pick the biggest one, as you start with the same amount of stuff no matter which you pick, and more space to play in is better, right? Once you're on the map, the first thing you should do is pick up all the stuff that's placed there by default. It'll go into your inventory, so again you'll have more to play with, and for some reason, I just could never get the prebuilt stuff to link up with the stuff that I'd built, which was frustrating. Anyway, you've got various things to place around the map as you see fit: tracks, stations, trains, etc. There's straight and curved tracks, as well as bits of track that are higher at one end than the other, to reach higher or lower altitudes (there's nine levels of elevation in the game). You've also got buildings and trees to place around to make the world look less abandoned, and you can even build a whole road network to go alongside your rail network, and put cars on it too!

 

One thing you'll quickly notice in this mode is that you don't start with a lot of the scenery stuff to put about, and it also feels like you don't have as many of certain kinds of track as you might like. But luckily, there's a bit of extra customisation available, as there's an ingame catalogue full of stuff in every category to persue and order from. More tracks, more varieties of track, new trains and cars, lots more different types of buildings and trees, and so on. This is where I found one of the points where the language barrier might be getting in my way, though: you start with a hundred coins, and to be fair, this can actually get you a lot of stuff from the catalogue. 

 

But I have not yet found any way to get more coins, so the stuff you buy on a particular save file is, as far as I can tell, all you get, and if you want to build something different or use a different train or whatever once it's gone, you'll have to start a new file from scratch. Once you've built and saved your track, you can, most excitingly, go back to the main menu, select the driving mode, select the map on which you've been building, and drive around the little world you've created! I assume this must have been the game's big selling point when it was released.

 

If, as I suspect, I am just being a wrong idiot, and someone reading this knows better, please let me know. Or alternatively, if you know better and I actually am right and this game has an oddly stringent limit on the amount of stuff you can have in a single save file, also let me know. Either way, as it appears to be in my eyes right now, Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is okay. It's a decently distracting way to spend a couple of hours, even with those limitations. A quick look at prices seems to suggest that they fluctuate wildly, but it emulates perfectly well, even on my aged preowned laptop (and you never know with PS2 games: I can play some pretty busy 3D games at full speed, but the 2D Street Fighter Alpha collection is a slideshow. Which is very annoying, I hear you can play Alpha 3 with SF3-style parrying, which sounds great).