Asian Dynamite (Arcade)

 This is the third (or fourth if you count the greatly expanded PS2 port of the original) game in the Dynamite Deka series. Like so many SEGA arcade games from the 00s, it still doesn't have a home port, but it does run on the easily-emulated Naomi board. Though I do remember the early days of Naomi emulation, that this was one of the games I most wanted to play on that system, and it was so glitchy as to be unplayable. But that was a long time ago, and things have changed.

 

So, in keeping with the series' main gimmick, it's a 3D beat em up where almost every item is a weapon or a healing item. Some are even both, as you can pick up plates of food, pressing punch to throw some food or kick to take a bite. The plot and structure seem to be a strange mish=mash of elements from the previous games: like the first game, you're storming a building that's occupied by terrorists who've kidnapped an important person's daughter. Like the second game, you choose one of three routes of increasing difficulty at the start of the game, plus there are setpieces in this game that are clearly reskins of setpieces from the second game. For example, the small kitchen where you fought a big fat chef in that game is a small room where you fight a big fat panda in this one (well, a guy in a very realistic panda costume, at least).

 

It also keeps and expands upon the costume mechanic from the first game's PS2 remake. There are three plyable characters, and while playing the game, there are three diffrent coloured briefcases that cane appear as items dropped by enemies. The costumes aren't just cosmetic, but they're entire transformations with their own movesets, and most of them also have their own unique ways of interacting with the many weapons littered around the stages. Surprisingly, none of the costumes are references to classic SEGA games. Also, a useful piece of information is that all of Jennifer's costumes are both useless for fighting with and boring to control. But, you should give her a try at least once just because they're also the strangest, being a levitating yoga practitioner, a creepy jester, and (letting the weird trio down a little) a blatant clone of Marvel Comics' character Elektra.

 

Another returning element that's been expanded upon is the scene transition QTEs. They're annoying like all QTEs are, but unlike a lot of worse implementations of the concept, they serve to create a branching path system (like they did in the previous games), rather than being a "press the right button or die" situation. They're expanded on here by sometimes taking the form of little multiple choice questions that you only have seconds to answer, and some of them are even trick questions, like the old "What colour is the word RED in this sentence?", with the word RED actually being blue. I guess it's a way of preventing players from just memorising every QTE and forcing a reaction even from well-versed players. I don't like it, but I do approve of the ingenuity in concept, at least.

 

Asian Dynamite is a pretty good game. If you like the arlier games in the series, this is mostly just more of those. In some cases, it's just bits of those with a new coat of paint (and a hilariously garish gold suit on the main villain). But the new coat of paint, being a big shiny multipurpose Hong Kong skyscraper is nice, and it's a fun and weird game to play. I recommend giving it a try, while we all continue to wait and hope that SEGA starts porting Naomi and Atomiswave games to consoles someday.

Firebugs (Playstation)

 I'm sure a lot of you reading will remember Rollcage, the Playstation racing game featuring cars that were very obviously inspired by the radio control car Ricochet, released by Tonka a few years earlier. For some reason, it's a game I very heavily associate with magazine demo discs, even though I've long since played the full game, for a lot more time than I ever played the demo. Anyway, it had a sequel not long after release, called Rollcage Stage II (or apparently, Death Track Racing for its PC release in the US). Then, a few years later, Firebugs came out.

 

Mechanically, it's a sequel to the Rollcage games, though thematically, it's had some changes. The original games were similar in theme and setting to the Wipeout games, being set in a stylised luxury future with entire cities seemingly designed around the idea of having racetracks built in them. Firebugs, being a PAL exclusive released in 2002, seems to be following an idea I've seen in some late release Japanese exclusive Playstation games: the only people still buying games for the older console are probably kids. So there's a bunch of cartoony characters, and the world itself is a lot more brightly coloured, too (though the music is still the same kind of awful garbage that seemingly every European-developed Playstation game had to have since the console's beginning).

 

It really does look great, too. The stages are stylistically rendered, with the textures all bearing very bright and bold colours, along with thick, stark black outlines. It's a clever way of getting some cartoony graphics out of the aging hardware that manage to avoid the game looking like a consolation prize for the kids who just got their older sibling's console as a hand-me-down. There's been some minor changes to how the game plays, too. No big changes to the concept or anything: you can still drive upside-down and on the walls and ceilings, but the handling is generally a bit less chaotic and frenzied, and while suddenly spinning around in the air and landing faced the wrong way was a near-constant problem in the Rollcage games before you got the hang of things, it's a lot rarer here.

 

Something I'd like to highlight is the power-up system. You have two power-up slots, which I'll refer to as left and right. The first time you get a power-up, it'll fill your left slot, which is a power that's unique to the character you're playing. Then, if you pick up another before using your left power up, it'll fill your right slot, with a randomly selected power-up from the game's standard pool. Most of the power-ups are standard stuff like missiles, shields, and speed boosts, but I do also like the one that slowly opens a portal in front of your vehicle, which then instantly sends you slightly further ahead on the track. In Firebugs, the portal is just a glowing white ring, but I wonder if this game had gotten a sequel on more powerful hardware, if you'd be able to see your destination through the portal in real time?

 

There's another weird quirk in the way that the single player mode is structured. There are five planets, and each planet has two main races, the first with three laps, and the final with five. If you come first in the first race, you get thirty points and go straight to the final. If you don't, you get significantly fewer points (second place only gets you ten!), and have to race in two very short one-on-one races before going to the final. You'll get some extra points for winning these races, but they really feel like a punishment, since they're so short that they're barely longer than the loading screens that precede them!

 

Firebugs is a decent enough game, but there's just something lacking in it that I can't quite pin down. It's obviously a fast, exciting racing game, but it never really feels like it is. It doesn't really make sense, but against all logic, while playing the game, I quickly felt like I was just tediously going through the motions, waiting for the races to be over, rather than feeling like an engaged, active participant. I guess the best I can do is recommend that you give it a try yourself? It's clearly a competent game, but it just didn't click with me like I feel like it should have.

Return of the Ninja (Game Boy Color)

 So, all I knew about this game going into it was that it was supposedly a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Ninja, which is a great game from the late eighties/early nineties ninja platformer craze, and also that it got a licensed reprint in 2020. But the licensed reprint completely went under my radar, and since I don't think it's a game I've ever heard anyone talk about, I assume it went under everyone else's radar, too. But my assumptions based on the above were that it'd be more of that old-style action, maybe with some more modern "quality of life" additions.

 

What I got was a mix of old and new, and while I was right on the "old" part being the aforementioned ninja-themed platformers, the "new" part was actually something more akin to a 2D interpretation of Tenchu Stealth Assassins. Human enemies will patrol back and forth on their little bit of territory, and only attack if they spot you, and you can actually sneak in and stab them from behind (though there's no cool little pixel animation Tenchu-style executions, unfortunately). So there is actually some stealth in this ninja platformer, something missing from the older games from whence it claims lineage.

 

The Tenchu influence doesn't stop at the stealth kills, either! After the first stage, you're told about various pieces of ninja equipment, that can be found littered around the next few stages. There's stuff for jumping higher, digging underground, clinging to ceilings, gliding, and more. Stages two to five can be tackled in any order and revisited after completion. Furthermore, if you find equipment and finish a stage, you keep it. But if you die, you lose all the equipment you've got (but completed stages stay that way). So I'm sure with a lot of experimentation, you could figure out the optimal order to complete the stages. Assuming you don't die, which is unlikely, as you can only take four hits, and health items are rare drops from enemies.

 

It's a shame they went with this kind of scavenger hunt structure, as I think the game would have been a lot better if you had access to your complete moveset at all times, and the stages themselves were designed around that. Generally, I just don't like this kind of progression in action games that restricts the player's control options. (I'm not a big fan of ability progression in action games generally, but especially when it's like this.)(Of course, I have to point out that there are always exceptions, or I'll get a bunch of "what about" comments in certain places.) A third and final piece of influence from Tenchu is that you're graded at the end of each stage on how stealthy you were, and rather than being given new weapons and stuff as rewards like in Tenchu, you're given cute little pixel art ninja trading cards! They don't actually do anything except have cool pictures and facts on them, which only serves to make them more charming!

 

But getting past the stuff I don't like about the game, I'll move onto what is easily its best aspect: the way it looks. I'm not sure how well this will come across in still screenshots, but this game looks amazing, and is definitely one of the best-looking games on the Game Boy Color. The colour palettes are all excellently chosen, the sprites are all full of character, and there's an amazing sense of place and atmosphere in every stage. The haunted woods are spooky, the caves are dank and cold, the big ship is full of life, and so on. The haunted woods especially make me think there's a lot of untapped potential for horror games on the Game Boy Color, with skilled enough developers.

 

Return of the Ninja is a game that's definitely worth giving a try. The only explanations I can come up with as to why it flew under the radar on release are that 2D platformers were seen as old hat at the time, and also maybe 2001 was a little late for getting anyone interested in a Game Boy Color game. But still, it's a game that really shows off the potential of the system, and it's full of both ideas and charm. But as always: don't give a penny to the ebay scalpers.

K-1 Pocket Grand Prix 2 (Game Boy Advance)

 I don't know much about K-1, except that it's some kind of kickboxing-adjacent sport that takes place in a ring similar to a wrestling ring. And I only know that much because of the S-1 mode in the Fire Pro Wrestling games. But I saw the boxart for this game, upon which are shown photos of two men who don't look like each other, but they do both look kind of like Randy Orton, and I thought that was kind of funny, so I gave the game itself a try.

 

Surprisingly, considering how serious and po-faced real life combat sports, their enthusiasts, and associated media tend to be, this game takes a weird kind of cartoony approach. A bunch of real life fighters (all of whom are short haired or bald muscular men in shorts) are depicted in an almost super deformed style, and all the stages are Street Figher II=style collections of national stereotypes. An Australia stage with Uluru and kangaroos in the background, a Japan stage with Fuji and geisha, and so on. Furthermore, the fighters all have super moves and a Fighting Vipers-style hyper mode, which can be activated a limited number of times per fight.

 

So what concessions to realism does Pocket Grand Prix 2 make, to keep itself in the realm of "combat sports game" and out of "fighting game"? Well, there's a knockdown system, like in Battle K-Road. Get knocked down three times in a fight, and you lose, even if you've got health remaining. There's also theoretically a timed rounds system, though the knockdowns rarely come into things, and I've never had a fight go past the first round, simply because fights are decided by knockout very quickly. 

 

Furthermore, there's also no jumping, and no throws. No jumping makes sense generally, because jumping just doesn't happen as much in real life as it does in videogames, no matter what the situation. And I know that K-1 doesn't permit throws in real life, as it's the same in the aforementioned Fire Pro S-1 mode, meaning you basically have to create specific characters with strike-based movesets to play it. This game also has a character creation mode, though it's very limited (your only appearance option is to change the colour palette of the one pre-made generic character), and, as far as I can tell, it seems to be impossible to make a character capable of standing a chance against the real guys.

 

K-1 Pocket Grand Prix is a strange one. On the one hand, the boring-looking characters and completely pointless creation mode are going to put off people who aren't particularly interested in the real sport. But at the same time, the cartoony aesthetic and animal spirit-manifesting special moves are probably going to be off-putting to people looking for a serious sports game. I'm going to be predictable here, and say that the best solution for both groups is to get ahold of a Fire Pro Wrestling game, and spend some time setting up a roster of characters to use in S-1 mode. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the GBA Fire Pro games have S-1 mode, though the second one does have the UFC-like Gruesome Fighters mode.