Demon Island Massacre (PC)

 Just by looking at the screenshots, you'll be able to figure out what drew me to this game: it looks amazing. Everyone loves it when sprite characters are put in a polygonal world, but it's a concept that's mostly absent from modern indie games, even now that games with a Playstation-inspired look are becoming ever more popular. The game itself is a nice little platformer, too, which is also a positive.

 

Though, "nice" isn't the best word to describe it for a few reasons. As the title suggests, it's about a massacre (perpetrated by you) on an island inhabited by demons. The demons themselves are all weird, mangled mockeries of humanity at best, plus they burst into big pixelly bloodsplatters on death, too. To add to the horror, there's at least one enemy that's a direct reference to Splatterhouse 2, one of the all-time most shamelessly gory games there's ever been. (The enemy in question is the partially-rotted zombie, who in both games crawls around as a legless torso after you hit him for the first time). 

 

As well as Splatterhouse, Castlevania is also a clear influence on the game, with some of the tracks sounding like (very good) cover versions with more of an asian horror flavour thn Castlevania's European gothic stylings. Plus, you get ammo for your special attacks by attacking lanterns that are floating in place in the stages. It does also have its own style, too, with a few different attack options. You have you standard attack combo, you can press up and attack for a shoryuken-style attack, press down and attack for a sliding kick, and press down and kick while in the air for a downwards attack that bounces you off of enemies really high.

 

So, the meat of the game is navigating the platform stages, figuring out the best way to get through each enemy encounter while taking as little damage as possible and also not falling to your death. Like you'd expect from a combat-focussed action platformer, I guess. You really do have to think about every encounter, and approach them cautiously, too, as the game is completely merciless. Death means getting sent back to the last checkpoint, which are few and far between, and you really can only take a few hits before that happens. On the plus side, there isn't really a time limit, and most enemy types don't become a threat until you get close to them, so you can stand still and appraise the situation at your leisure.

 

Demon Island Massacre is definitely not a game for the casual player, or for the crybaby. But it is aesthetically beautiful, and it's fun and rewarding if you're able to engage with it on the level it demands. If you're attracted by the way the game looks, and you think you can at least attempt to play it without writing it off as "too hard", then you should definitely give it a try. There's a free play-in-browser version on the game's itch.io page, as well as a pay-what-you-want download version, and it's defintely worth your time, at the very least.

Ninku (Playstation)

 Many, many years ago when I was a kid, I read a review of an import game, possibly in an issue of Manga Mania. The game was described as being "like a fighting game, but you pick your moves from a menu", and for some reason, that interested me. Unfortunately, by the time the age of emulation had its advent and opened up the entire libraries of every pre-2000 console, I'd forgotten all information on the game except that written above, and I'd somehow misplaced the magazine, too. It wasn't until earlier this year that I re-discovered the game, which is this one. (Obviously.)

 

And the description given above by me, and in print by some long-forgotten writer (though there's a good chance it mgiht have been Wil Overton?) is prety accurate, though a little incomplete. How the game works is that your character and your opponent face off against each other, in a manner that looks a lot like a fighting game of the time, albeit with a slightly more dynamic camera and a lot of sprite scaling and rotation. There's a cross onscreen representing the d-pad, and you hold a direction to change it into a slightly differrent cross, this time representing the Playstation controller's four face buttons. Of course, all these things are labelled (in Japanese), and do different things. But basically, to input a command, you hold a direction, then press a button. Then sometimes, press a button again.

 

So, holding up lets you select what I think is an evasive maneuver, then you press a button choose the direction in which you dodge. Down lets you choose what I'll refer to as a vocalisation: either a taunt or a martial arts yell. Finally, and most importantly: right lets you attack, with a choice of punches, kicks, or specials. And if you pick specials, there's a further choice of three regualr specials that are always available or one of two super-specials. I don't know what makes the super-specials available, there doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern for it.

 

The weird thing is that despite what you might have assumed so far, thte game isn't turn-based. Every command causes a series of animations to happen, as the two characters attack, block, and evade each other, but as long as the animations aren't happening, you can input commands. So you can attack several times in a row before your opponent can do anything, and if you're slow, the reverse can also happen. So it's kind of like Final Fantasy VII's Active Time Battle system, I guess, but everyone's speed stat is already at maximum? That's as close a comparision to anything else I can come up with, at least.

 

Well, there is another comparision I can make, though it's a much less well-known one. It also feels like the PCFX FMV-based fighting game Battle Heat, but a lot better. Like, the reason Battle Heat's never been featured on here is because it just seems like a completely unplayable mess to me. It's never clear what is happening or why, and you might win a fight eventually, but probably won't. Ninku, by contrast, is a lot more clear, even with a language barrier, and though there are some elements that seem a little randomised and frustrating (blocking and evading attacks, for example, just seems to happen sometimes for either side, no matter what anyone's doing), you can kind of work out a strategy to win each fight.

 

I played through the story mode of Ninku on easy and normal difficulty, and I expect I'll attempt to play through hard mode too, at some point. It's simple and repetitive, but it looks great, and I had a lot of fun playing it, too. Furthermore, unless you really want to know what's happening in the FMV cutscenes between each fight, there isn't really a language barrier, either. I definitely recommend giving it a try if you're at all interested. And a final bit of trivia: this game was released on the same day as the other Ninku tie-in I've reviewed, Ninku 2 on the Game Gear!

SubaraCity (3DS)

 I discovered this game while trying to find a city building game for 3DS. I didn't find one, so if anyone can recommend any, please let me know. Well, it is about building cities in a literal sense, but it's not a city building game like Sim City or something. It's a puzzle game, like Zookeeper or Sega Swirl, that is themed around buidling a city. 

 

How it works is that there are buildings/people/trees/etc. in a few colours on a grid. If they're the same colour and touching, they can be fused together into a higher-quality building. You pick which of the multiple squares the buildings being matched together go into, leaving empty spaces where the rest of them are.Then more buildings fall down to fill the empty spaces. Or, since the game is played looking down from above, the new buildings fall southwardly. It doesn't really make sense either way, so don't worry about it. Once a building reaches level ten, its colour changes to white, and it can only be fused with other level ten buildings. When you do this, the level of the new building is determined by how many level tens are being fused: two of them become level eleven, three become level twelve, and so on. 

 

As you're doing this, two numbers are going up. The first is population, which is your score. It goes up depending on the levels of the buildings you create, and gets a massive boost every time you make a ten plus building. The other number is the year. It starts at the year 2000, and goes up a year for every action you take. You've also got an expendible resource called mayor marks, which let you destroy one building. You start with two mayor marks, and get another every time you pass another century, and every time you make a building that's level fifteen or higher. The game ends when you've got no buildings of the same colour touching each other and you have no mayor marks with which to make space.

 

The presentation is kind of interesting, too. Visually, it's pretty much exactly how you'd expect: cute little buildings and people, all very clean and toy-like in appearance. But the music is completely bizarre. It's good, I'm not denying that, but it's also incredibly ill-fitting. You're playing this cute little puzzle game, all while the 3DS is playing this dramatic, doom-laden apocalyptic score that almost sounds like it could be made up of castoffs from the Akira soundtrack! 

 

This is a fun game, and incredibly addictive. After installing, I immediately played through an entire charge of my 3DS' battery in one sitting. Apparently, it's also available on pretty much every other modern platform, so if you want to give the developers some money (that they definitely deserve, and which I'll be doing as soon as possible), get one of those versions rather than (or in addition to) the 3DS one.

Maharaja (NES)

 Pre-1990 RPGs, with a scant few exceptions, are largely considered by modern players to be unfair, hostile, boring, and borderline unplayable. And to be honest: there are a lot of games that fit that bill, plopped out onto the market in the wake of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's massive success, hoping to ride their coattails. But still, in the same way that I occasionlly play a AAA game in the interests of fairness, I do the same with old RPGs. This time, it actually paid off! A bit.

 

The setting was a big draw for me: I really like India-inspired fantasy (I might as well take the opportunity to recommend a novel I recently read in this genre: Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri). Also, once I started playing, I was hooked by the graphics. They're mostly confined to a box that takes up a quarter of the screen, and there's very little actual animation, but there's a lot of detail and charm in them. There's a lot of of points of charm in the game, too. For example, instead of just getting new magic spells automatically as you level up, the spells are called mantras, and you have to get to Shiva's palace so he can teach them to you after you've levelled up. (Luckily, the first mantra you learn lets you teleport to locations you've already been to, so it's not too much of a chore.)

 

How the game plays is a combination of the menu-based adventure games that were so common on Japanese microcomputers in the eighties, with turn-based RPG battles thrown in, too. Though both aspects are somewhat simplified from their pure forms. There's only ever a few exits, one character, and maybe one or two items to interact with in each location, and furthermore, you only ever fight one enemy at a time, and you never recruit any party members. As simplified as the game's two halves are, they both also have a foot each in oldschool eighties obtusity. 

 

The adventure part of the game includes at least one maze of identical patches of jungle, as well as characters who need to be given items to let you pass, with no clues in that direction at all. Furthermore, there's no in-game information on what items do, what stats different pieces of equipment bestow, or what effects mantras do. It's possible all this stuff was listed in the game's manual, in which case, disregard all this as an unfair criticism and blame me for playing a fan-translation via emulation. One thing that can't be so easily excused is the predicable bugbear of grinding. The game's story is actually pretty short, so the runtime is greatly padded by requiring you to grind for levels and money for new equipment to be able to survive the gauntlet of newly powerful enemies.

 

I can't really say that Maharaja is a great game, nor can I say it's a bad one. For its age and in its genre, you could even say it's an unsung classic! But unless you've got the patience for RPGs and adventures of this vintage, there's a good chance you'll hate it. Personally, I enjoyed it, and the simplicity of it all really made the game feel like a digital Fighting Fantasy book. So I guess I do recommend it, with those caveats.