Occultist Girl Magatsuhi (PC)

 To describe this game is to invoke that one image macro format with images of Vince McMahon getting progressively more excited with every new piece of information. It's a sprite scaling shooting game, in which you play as a flying onmyouji, and it's developed by Platine Dispositif. You see what I mean? As a list of bullet points, it's incredible! But what about as an actual game?

 

Well, before we get into that, I should mention that I decided to abide by the rule of threes in the opening paragraph, as there's another bullet point I could have added: it takes inspiration from and makes references to Space Harrier, Night Striker, and Afterburner! All those games are undisputed classics of the genre, this just keeps getting better, right? And of course, it's got some ideas of its own, too. 

 

From Space Harrier, it takes the general feel of being a high-speed flying person weaving between the parts of the scenery that you can't destroy, the checkerboard pattern on a lot of the stage's floors, and there's even a tribute to that game's multi-sprite dragon boss. From Night Striker, there's the branching paths, the interstitial tunel segments, and a lot of the stage concepts seem to be taken directly from there, too. And from Afterburner, there's a heavy emphasis on locking onto multiple enemies at once with a homing shot, with escalating score rewards to match.

 

The game's own big idea is actually a little bit of an attempt at building upon the Afterburner lock-on system. Like in Afterburner, you lock onto enemies by aiming at them without firing, but from that point on, it gets a little more complicated. Each enemy type will be locked onto with either a red, green, or blue reticule, and each of those has its own fire button. You'll generally only have one type of enemy in each little squadron, and you only need to hold the correct button for a second to shoot all of them, but it's still a bit more concentration than you had to exert in Afterburner. (I've been playing with a Saturn controller, and mapped the three lock-on fire buttons to X, Y, and Z, which was a fine setup).

 

So yes, Occultist Girl Magatsuhi is a good game. I don't think it's quite as good as Space Harrier or Night Striker, and it's maybe a little better than Afterburner. The only real bad points I can come up with are presentational and definitely not deal breakers. Firstly, I don't think the enemies are particularly interesting. There's a lot of things like eyes, orbs, spinning tops, and so on that feels a bit bland and sterile. Secondly, there's the soundtrack. It's hard for me to be specific in criticising the game's music simply because I can't remember any of it. It just immediately leaves my brain as soon as I stop playing. I wouldn't normally bring this up, but all those games I listed as this game's influences all had incredible soundtracks, as did other big-name games in the genre, like Galaxy Force 2 and Super Thunderblade.

 

To reiterate: this is a great game, though it's not a super-original one, and I have some minor criticisms regarding its presentation. Still definitely worth your time, though, especially if you're starved for some new (to you, at least) sprite scaling action.

Zig Zag Cat Dachou Club mo Oosawagi da (SNES)

 It seems doubtful that I'll find another brick breaking game that comes close to being as good as either of the two titans that stand atop the genre, Puchi Charat and Prism Land Story, but I keep on looking. Zig Zag Cat, though it does have a few interesting ideas, definitely isn't the one to do it. And remember: interesting and good aren't always the same thing.

 

The biggest idea Zig Zag Cat has is structural: it's got some vague, very slight RPG bits mixed in with the Arkanoid-like action. Very slight meaning that there's little "towns" (contained entirely within one building each) between the stages, with save points, inns (that don't seem to actually do anything), and shops. The shops sell power ups, but they're as temporary as the ones that appear in the stages themselves, and coupled with the rarity of the coins, a bit pointless. There's no permanent equipment or levelling up or anything, though. Which on the one hand is a plus for the game's balance and difficulty curve, but it would at least have offered something a bit more exciting to talk about. I wonder how levelling up and permanent upgrades would even work in a game like this, for example.

 

The stages themselves are vertically scrolling, and for the most part, sparsely populated with bricks to hit with your ball. And while the screen's scrolling, you can just hit them with your paddle as you get to them anyway. A few times in each stage, though, the scrolling stops, and you have to get through a more traditional Arkanoid-style stage, though even here you don't have to break all the bricks, just one particular one. It's a grey blob thing that opens an eye the first two times you hit it and disappears on the third. The stages are all completely linear, of course, and it all feels like a significantly more boring version of Devilish on the Mega Drive.

 

Something else that makes this game noteworthy, other than its unusual combination of structure and genre is that it's a tie-in game to a Japanese comedy trio called Dachou Club. I don't really know anything about them, other than that the first related search result I found was a news story about one member's untimely death in 2022. They appear a few times to say stuff to your character, but I can't read Japanese, so I can't tell you anything about what they say. Since the protagonist is some kid, and the ball is his cat, I wonder if the tie-in was something added late in development? It seems more like pretty generic early nineties "it'll do" nonsense than something a group of famous comedians would come up with.

 

I don't recommend playing Zig Zag Cat. I played it for about an hour or two and at best I was bored, and at worst I was frustrated (and not in a fun way). But it's weird and unusual in various ways, and now you know about it. You're welcome, I guess?

Tokyo Jungle Mobile (PS Vita)

 The original Tokyo Jungle on PS3 is one of the unsung heroes of videogames in the 2010s, being a cool and original concept realised into a fun and compelling game that I still regularly play a decade later. It's also a poster child for a problem that's been plagueing the world of videogames in recent years: console manufacturers and their fervent antipathy towards backwards compatibility and enthusiasm for abandoning and closing shopfronts. Tokyo Jungle is, like so many other great games of that time, trapped on its host hardware. If you want to play it, you need a PS3. There have been no sequels, rereleases, or ports to anything else. Its handheld spin-off Tokyo Jungle Mobile is in an even worse situation!

 

It was part of the Playstation Mobile shopfront, which delivered smaller games to the PS Vita and a small range of specially certified mobile phones. This shopfront closed in 2016, when the PS Vita had a good few years of commercial life left in it, and, in a frustrating case of personal bad luck, a week before I was able to get one. So, like some of the 3DS games I've covered in the past (and will cover in the future), there is no legal way to get ahold of this game at all. 

 

But is it actually any good? Yes! When I first saw screenshots of it before release, it looked to me like some kind of turn-based strategy variation on the original game's concept. (In case you don't know, the original was a semi-roguelike (before that concept had become so over-exposed and diluted) action game where you played as a selection of wild animals, surviving as long as you could in post-apocalyptic Tokyo) It wasn't the handheld port I would have liked, but I was willing to give it a try. Now that I've actually been able to play it, I can say that it's not turn-based at all, but instead it's a streamlined and simplified version of the original game. The movement is grid-based, but real time, as is the combat. The graphics are also massively simplified: there's no longer any walk animations, and the animals all kind of bounce around like they're plastic toys being moved around by a little kid.

 

Most of the simplifications are positive! You're now only given one mission at a time, and when one mission ends (whether through success or failure), the next starts a few seconds later. There's no waiting around for the start of the next decade with nothing to do like in the original. Hiding in the grass works in a much clearer way, whereby if you're in the grass, other animals won't know you're there unless they saw you go in. And for carnivores, killing and eating animals are now the same action. You kill an animal, you immediately get the hunger points and calories. Finally, it's now a lot more obvious that you've got to regularly refresh the map's supply of food by using the nests.

 

There are a couple of changes that aren't so great, though they're definitely not game-ruiners. The first is a change to the way you get new playable animals. In the original, there was a kind of chain, where each animal would receive a special mission that unlocked the next animal. In mobile, all you have to do to unlock an animal is see it in-game. I'm usually against having characters and similar things locked at all, but there's exceptions to almost every rule in game design, and I think it really worked in Tokyo Jungle's favour. In Mobile, though, I'd unlocked late-game species like Dilophosaurus and Homo Erectus on my second or third game. One positive, though, is that there's no species for which you're expected to pay real money like there was in the original game.

 

The second negative change is a much less important one: the lack of rooftop exploration. It's only a little thing, but I really liked running around the rooftops in the original. It also points towards the main reason why I can't say that one game is better than the other. I think Tokyo Jungle Mobile is a lot more pure in its game design, and if we look at it purely mechanically, I think the changes it makes are positive enough that it's easily the better game of the two. Being playable on a handheld just adds a cherry on top of that, too. However, the original game just feels better. It's more atmospheric, immersive, and exciting.

 

Honestly, I would unreservedly recommend both games. They're both excellent games in very slightly different ways. I think you can still buy the original if you have a PS3 (and you can track down a disc copy from Japan for not too much an investment), but for Tokyo Jungle Mobile, piracy is the only way to get it. But since the Vita is an abandoned console, and PS Mobile games doubly so, where's the moral quandary here?

Monster Farm Jump (Playstation)

 This game also has a western release renamed Monster Rancher Hop-A-Bout, but that name is terrible, plus the Japanese version is the one I picked up dirt cheap a few years ago, and it's the one I've played most of, so that's the title I'm going to use. It's from that brief time that Pokemon was so popular that even the also-rans in its wake had enough residual popularity to get their own weird spino-offs, and in this case it is, of course, a weird spin-off from Monster Farm/Rancher.

 

Not just weird because it's a platform spin-off from a monster raising/training game that's mostly about crunching numbers and such, but also weird in its own right. Tecmo really came up with a somewhat unique idea for a platform game and had such little confidence in it that they attached it to an existing series. Which is fair, to be honest. The game takes place in short stages made up of floating islands high in the sky, and you control one of four monsters picked from the Farm/Rancher besitary on a pogo stick. You're constantly bouncing and you've got to get from one end of the stage to the other.

 

The islands in the stages are themselves constructed from square tiles, and after a couple of stages, not only do you hav to avoid falling down the gaps, but you also have to take into account many kinds of special tiles. Some increase or decrease the time remaining, some give or take lives, some send you bouncing in a specific direction, and some even turn into a little flying platform that you can control for a few seconds. You start each stage with three lives and ninety seconds. If either run out, it's game over.

 

But! The game doesn't have an arcade-like structure (there is an arcade version of the game, though, but surprisingly, it seems like it came after this version, not before), and the only penalty for getting a game over is that you have to start the stage again, and you can't progress to the next stage until you've finished your current one. As far as I can tell, it's not actually possible to try an arcade-style "survival" run through the game, unless you just start a new save every time you get a game over.

 

After about fifteen stages, the dificulty really starts to ramp up, and the game really starts to get interesting. You'll probably die a lot from this point on, but really, that's what's fun about the game. Because your character is constantly bouncing, you never have completely precise control over them, with momentum playing a big part in how far they go with each bounce and how easy it'll be for you to change their direction. So as the stages get more complex in their layouts and more treacherous in the placement of negative tiles, you've really got to master the touch you need to "suggest" your character lands as close to where you want them as possible. It's frustrating, but in a way that'll make you laugh, rather than make you angry. Or at least, that's my experience of it, anyway.

 

Monster Farm Jump is an interesting and unique game, and it's a lot of fun to play. It's not some great forgotten classic or anything, but it is a game that I load up every few months to try and get through a few more stages each time. It's definitely worth your time.

Brian Jacks' Uchi Mata (C64)

 First, I'm going to credit Epsilon Eagle on Twitter for posting about this game and making me aware of it. It is another combat sports game, a genre I'm becoming more interested in as I discover more of them (on that subject, have you seen the trailer for the upcoming PC game Dojo Masters? It looks so cool!), and though it's a game that's been forgotten in the decades since, it also happens to be historically significant.

 

Before I get onto that, I'll give you some basic description. The sport in question is specifically judo, which means that there's no punching or kicking in this game, only throws, which is already pretty unusual. There is a move whereby you rudely shove your opponent to the floor, but performing it means you immediately lose the match via disqualification. Which makes you wonder why the developers even bothered to include it, it's obviously not something you'd ever do in a real tournament, is it? It's not like wrestling, where the referee might look away or be temporarily incapacitated to give you the opportunity for illegal moves. Also, Brian Jacks was a British olympic judo practitioner, and this game carries his endorsement. Which is nice.

 

Anyway, the thing that makes Uchi Mata noteworthy, interesting, and historically significant is its main mechanical gimmick: it was seemingly the first game to use command inputs for special moves, beating Street Fighter by a year! You approach your opponent, press the fire button to lock up, and when the time's right, hold the fire button, input a special motion (a quarter or half circle, for example), andthen release the button to do your move! The timing system also brings to mind the Fire Pro Wrestling games, though it's quite different, and a lot more mysterious and inscrutible.

 

When the two fighters are locked up, there will sometimes flash up a rectangle in one of the fighters' colours (red or white) at the top of the screen, near the clock. When your colour's up there, that's when you have the opportunity to land a move. The problem is that it's not really clear what causes the rectangles to appear or disappear. It seems vaguely related to who initiates the lock up, but if it continues past that point, its whims seem to be kind of random. It really puts a damper on how enjoyable the game can be, since it feels like your wins and losses are subject to the whims of this mysterious rectangle entity, and not so much on your own skills. Furthermore, going back to that disqualification thing, every match I've played has ended that way, either through my performing the move by accident, or through what I assume was a fit of rage on behalf of the CPU player.

 

All in all, Uchi Mata is a game that was clearly ahead of its time, and the developers really put some thought into how they could replicate a complicated fighting style on such primitive hardware with such limited control options. Unfortunately, they also saw fit to add in what is either a random element, or an element so mysterious that it might as well be random, and that really does ruin the game, to be honest. Give it a try out of historical curiosity, but don't expect it to be a game you'll come back to once that's been satisfied.