Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball (Game Boy Color)

 The first thing that needs to be addressed in this review is the game's title: yes, it will make your dad laugh if he asks what you're playing and you answer "Pocket Billiards". Don't worry about it. The other thing is that GameFAQs lists this as being published by Tamsoft, which struck me as odd, since they're more of a developer, and the only games I know of that they published were also developed by them. My suspicions were correct, and this game was published by a completely unrelated company called TAM, Inc., and the people maintaining GameFAQs are incompetent buffoons.

 

Anyway, this is a billiards/snooker game, but not only should you cast out of your mind the image of boring men wearing tuxedos and chainsmoking, but it's been specifically designed with the intention of casting those men out of your mind! Instead of a traditional look, Funk the 9 Ball instead takes its aesthetic cues from vaguely contemporaneous rhythm games, like Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, and so on. The devs must have had their fingers on the pulse, too, as the first game I was going to mention in that list was SNK's Cool Cool Toon, which didn't come out until six months later! But anyway, there's lots of cute/weird characters, the place in which you play isn't a smoky bar but some kind of brightly-coloured night club with a DJ, and not only can you collect cans of paint to recolour the club and the table, but you can collect Minidiscs to give the DJ more BGM selections to pick from!

 

The game itself, as far as I can tell (as someone who has never played snooker), is mostly a fairly normal game of nine ball, and controls in a fairly traditional manner, in which you aim the cue ball, and then use a timed power meter to shoot. I say "mostly", because while it uses the rules of that game, it's also in the now pretty much dead genre of silly sports games. While playing, various creatures will use their magic powers to effect the course of the game in various way. Some of the creatures live in the pockets, and their powers activate when a ball goes into the pocket they call home. Other creatures are put inside the balls somehow by the players pre-match, and their powers activate when you hit their ball after holding the button down for a few seconds.

 

The creatures in the pockets will have powers that equally help or hinder both players, like destroying one of the lower-numbered balls, or making all the balls invisible. The ones in the balls, obviously, use their powers to specifically help the player to whom they belong (because there is also a vague aspect of monster collection in here too!), and they do stuff like give you the ability to re-take a foul shot, make a ball jump into the nearest pocket, and that kind of thing. They also all cause a little animation to play when they're activated, and not only are these animations all weird, but the way they come into play is amusingly over-dramatic: just before the cueball hits its target, time will stop, and the screen will cut to a strange cutscene of like, a chorus of angels in heaven, or a little guy drinking tea, or something. I think it's meant to evoke a kind of sports anime-esque drama? It's silly and time-consuming, but I do like it.

 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball is a decent enough game. I don't think I would ever want to play it on a TV screen, but on a handheld, it's a fine way to keep your hands busy while watching TV. It also has an English translation patch, which you wouldn't really expect. If it appeals to you at all, you should give it a try! Definitely don't pay £400 for a real copy though. Four hundred entire pounds! Madness.

Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai (Game Boy Advance)

 I was first drawn to this game because it was an RPG with an east Asian fantasy setting and also a lot of really nice pixel art. There's also some nice full screen cutscene pixel art, though it only shows up fairly rarely, because of the way the game's structured. Which brings up the big surprise I got from playing Oriental Blue: it's an open world game! On the Game Boy Advance! Like is so often the case, western publishers were very short-sighted and didn't bother translating it. The post-Pokemon/Tokyopop English anime and manga boom was still ongoing, as was the post-Final Fantasy VII RPG boom, and here's a really high quality RPG owned by lots of kids, with a sertting they'd love and an amazing selling point, and apparently none of them were interested. 

 

Luckily, it did get a fan translation a few year later, so you (and I) can play it without having to read Japanese. There's a lot of plot threads, but it all starts in a large city, where a big ritual is about to take place, and there's apparently also conspiracies afoot. The ritual fails, and there's also monsters roaming the streets, and bad stuff happening across the land, too. One particularly interesting thread I picked up involved the Oni. They're depicted as a stand-in for indigenous people (which is also done in the TTRPG Tenra Bansho Zero, which was orginally published a few years before this game. Is this a common trope, or is there a specific bit of direct inspiration going on here?)

 

The Oni are suffering some severe oppression at the hands of humanity: forced to live in a barren mountain village, subject to raids by slavers, and treated like dirt if they go to human settlements of their own volition. One of the first quests I got myself involved in was trying to re-claim a stolen Oni artifact from a human lord's palace, but it turns out to have been stolen again from him by a mysterious theif/murderer. I as worried that the Oni stuff would have been some passive background thing, just "that's how it is, I guess", but during that quest, one of them joins your party, with a view to improving the lot of his people and faning and getting their treasure back.

 

Unfortunately, I eventually ran into a big problem: I was finding the starts of plot threads and questlines, but I wasn't able to actually advance any of them. Ships were stuck in docks, valleys were blocked by boulders, and other barriers stood in my way in various places, all making it so I couldn't go to new towns, in each of which I was sure at least one "next thing" I needed must be waiting. I'm sure eventually I'd be able to figure some way of making progress, but having so many brick walls being put up all at once, in seemingly every direction really killed my desire to continue playing.

 

If you've got more patience for this kind of RPG stuff, you'll probbly get a lot more out of this game than I have, and if it sounds like it would appeal to you, you should definitely give it a try. It's clearly a very high quality game, with tons to do, places to go, systems to figure out and so on. It also definitely feels like one of the strongest examples of a vague concept I've been chasing for years: the "portable world", a handheld game that feels like it contains a full world inside it. If it had goten an official English release, there'd probably have been a print strategy guide for it, and the problems I encountered wouldn't have been so insurmounted. Oh well, never mind.

Death Wing (Playstation)

 Death Wing (also listed on some sites as The Operation: Death Wing) is clearly a game that was made with a strong artistic vision in mind. Right from the start, the game presents a very strong aesthetic. The first thing you see is a very stylish FMV intro with black and white footage of real people in 1996 intercut with footage of the game. I don't know exactly what this is all supposed to mean, though, since the game is a 3D spaceship shooting game that appears to be set in a very distant future. But it looks cool, and that seems to have been a high priority for the developers.

 

Before each mission, there are more FMVs. No real people in these, though, just very cool-looking wireframe animations showing your mission objective, along with boxes of text that are obviously too low resolution to actually read (though in the unlikely event that this game ever gets a HD remaster, that might prove interesting, assuming enough of the original assets even still exist for that to happen), and the missions themselves have a few seconds before you're given control where the camera swoops around, showing all the stuff that's in the stage.

 

Most impressive of all of this, though, is that while it's a little constrained by its host hardware, with things like draw distance and such, it's still a very nice-looking game. Certain stages are especially spectacular, like the one where you're assaulting some kind of giant tower built on the surface of a still-active star, or fighting a big snake-like robot in the midst of a giant outer space thunderstorm. But we're three paragraphs into this review, and I haven't even started describing how the game plays yet, so let's get into that.

 

Like I said, it's a 3D spaceship shooter, like a more complex version of SEGA's Star Wars Arcade, or alternatively, an Ace Combat game in space. The missions with which you're tasked usually involve one or more really big things (space ships, stations, buildings, etc.) that are your targets, and a bunch of annoying smaller fighter ships that will fly around trying to kill you. After a few stages, the little fighters will sometimes be replaced with armadas of giant battleships! It all works as well as these games usually do, though being set in speace, it is sometimes a little too easy to lose your bearings. The enemy fighters are also a lot more aggressive than the enemies in similar games I've played, too, and you really have to manage them or you'll get torn apart quickly, even in the first stage.

 

One nice feature, that's made it a little easier to take varied screenshots for this review, despite my inabilty to get past the third stage is that it uses an Outrun-style branching path structure! So there's two second missions and four third missions! All the third missions represent a massive ramp up in difficulty, though, so I don't know how many more there are after that.

 

I'd recommend giving Death Wing a try! If you like this kind of 3D shooting game, it seems to be a perfectly competent example of the genre (though I admit I'm not an expert, so maybe it sucks actually), and otherwise, it's a game that looks great and has a strong aesthetic and atmosphere to it that's worth experiencing, even if only for a short time.

Fatal Run (Atari 7800)

 

 The Atari 7800 is a console with an identity problem. The only place it ever really had a hance to be popular is the US, where obviously, the NES was almost uncontested as far as eight bit consoles go. I guess the heavily western-skewed design philosophy and aesthetic of its games might have fit in alongside the microcomputer culture of the UK and Europe of the time, but of course, the higher price of console games mean people would have expected higher quality to go along with it. And from a nostalgia standpoint, it doesn't have the sun-baked 20th century California feel to it that the 2600 has. In my mind, the Atari 2600 fits alongside pinball tables and the sixties Batman TV show than it does other videogames.

 

But anyway, the 7800 does inexplicably have a few exclusives, one of which being Fatal Run. It's a sprite scaling (if the effect's being fakes, they're doing a good job of it) racing game with some mild combat elements. You're acing across post-apocalyptic America, delivering a vaccine to all the towns you pss along your way, and for some reason, everyone else on the road wants to stop you doing that.  (As an aside, was the 1978 Judge Dredd story The Cursed Earth the first post-apocalypse story to use this premise? This is at least the second game I've covered here with this plot, after The Tousou Highway 2)

 

So you drive from town to town, as fast as you can, and that's the most impressive thing about Fatal Run: it really does go fast! Not only that, but the roads are winding and hilly, and you see them stretch off into the distance, far enough away that it's just a single pixel line wiggling off towards the horizon. It's a simple-looking, but very effective effect. As mentioned, you'll be attacked by other cars trying to ram you off the road, and you can fight back with various guns and gasgets, though ammunition is very limited. You get points for killing enemies, but not money, so it's not really a necessity. What you do get money for is speed: the quicker you get to each town, the fewer people will die from lack of vaccine, and the more people survive, the more you get paid. This is shown via a weird little sequence that took me by surprise the first time I saw it: you drive past the ruins of the town, looking out of your side window, as various innocent-looking people either stand still or explode and turn into gravestones. It reminds me of the kind of crude illustrations on certain kinds of American punk and metal album covers from the late eighties and early nineties.

 

Also at every town, you'll go to the car shop/bar, and these are another nice little arsthetic time capsule. They so powerfully evoke the working class America of the time (or at least a stereotype of it), and there's a few different screens used for the shops, too. I especially like the one with a TV behind the bar, switching between news and sports broadcasts. It feels like something you'd see in an early Simpsons episode, that kind of wood-panelled, slightly run down, slightly seedy place. It's actually a surprise to see a game from this time, on this console, with such a distinct, unglamourous, and non-videogamey aesthetic to it. I think if Fatal Run had looked more like a typical driving game (with the sunshine and luxury of Outrun, for example), or took place in a more standard post-apocalyptic wasteland, it might have had a harder time keeping my attention in the way that it did.

 

Fatal Run is an okay game. You won't regret never having played it, but if you do play it, you'll have a pretty good time. But as I've described, it's the way it looks and feels that really make it interersting. If you want to play a game that feels like it might have been played by Bart Simpson or Beavis and Butthead in their respective heydays, it's definitely one to look into.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire (32X)

 

 This was the final official 32X release, and coming out in 1996, I think there are two assumptions that can be safely made about it. The first is that it coming out was something of an adherence to the lost cause fallacy: possibly the publisher specifically had a license to make Marvel games only for the 32X, and they were going to do it whether it made sense or not. The second assumption is that it probably sold incredibly poorly, which is backed up by its modern day rarity and insane resale value.

 

Is it good, though? Not really. It's not terrible, either, though. Like most Spider-Man games of the time, it's a 2D platformer, you climb and swing acorss the stages, and the boss fights are against existing Marvel villains. Unlike some similar Spidey games, it does have a few stages that are designed in such a way as to allow you to freely web-swing over large swathes of the stage at your leisure. In fact, these stages are so long, that it'd probably take an absurdly long time to get across them on foot. Unfortunately, there's also a few stages that fall into the usual Spidey-traps, like being a long corridor with a surprisingly low ceiling, or being a bunch of enclosed boxes with small entrances and exits.

 

The plot concerns a plot by Hydra, who have set up a big laser net over New York (the eponymous Web of Fire), and are holding the city to ransom, plus they've kidnapped Daredevil and put him in a birdcage for some reason. After you rescue Daredevil, you can summon him to throw sticks at your enemies! So each stage ends with you fighting a villain in Hydra's employ, and destroying a laser generator, until you get to the Hydra airship/submarine/base stages. The bosses are probably the most interesting part of the game, to be honest, as the roster's made up of some absurdly little-known jobbers. People like The Eel, Thermite, Tangle, and others. 

 

Web of Fire is a game you mgiht want to look into out of curiosity: its rarity, status as the final 32X game, and weird villain roster are all points of interest (and what drew me into playing it). But if none of those things interest you, there's nothing else in the game that will, either. I played it way past the point of enjoyment to get screenshots, but there's no reason for anyone else to do that. And definitely no reason for anyone to pay £500+ for a real copy!

Fearless Pinocchio (Arcade)

 It had been a while since I last updated MAME, but a couple of months ago, Fearless Pinocchio caught my eye, and got me to finally undertake that minor chore. A previously unknown 2D fighting game by IGS with cute, stylised graphics suddenly appearing on the landscape would naturally get my attention. It's kind of a bittersweet game to learn of, though, as it's not actually a fighting game, but a machine for dispensing the tickets that are so important to all the depressing seaside arcades that have replaced fun games with low-quality prizes.

 

Still, it's at least pretending to be a fighting game, and there are some things worthy of mention. It's single player-only, and there's only one playable character, the eponymous Pinocchio. He's on a quest to rescue Geppeto, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook, for some reason. Hook's the last boss, and to get to him, you've first got to fight two of his henchbeings, randomly selected from a pool of five. There's a genie, a witch, a grim reaper, the Queen of Hearts' card army, and the Big Bad Wolf. All the characters are well-drawn and animated, and full of personality.

 

The stages are also full of cool little details, even if there's only four of them shard amongst the six opponents. The woods have a little mushroom/candy house where Little Red Riding Hood and the three little pigs apparently live together, the graveyard has the witch's hut (I guess she and Death are neighbours?), plus a beanstalk with a depressed-looking giant watching the fight. Wonderland's the weakest stage, looking a lot like it's cobbled together from clipart, and Hook's ship has his pirate underlings, and far in the back, a Peter Pan who looks dangerously close to Disney's version standing around and doing nothing to help.

 

You fight using a joystick and one attack button, and while you do have specials and supers, they just seem to be activated by holding a direction and pressing the button a lot. I do really like the super where Pinocchio does the samurai movie thing where he dashes past his opponent while drawing a weapon, with the opponent taking damage after a second or two's delay, but his weapon is a big wooden mallet rather than a sword. The fights have only one round, and no matter what the situation is, if time runes out, you lose. I guess, true to its nature as "not a proper game", it just exists to have the shortest possible time between coin inputs.

 

It's really a shame there's no "legitimate" version of this game. A lot of work clearly went into designing and animated the characters, and six playable characters plus a boss wouldn't be too bad for a first entry in a series, especially if they added a background for each one, and especially if the characters looked as good as they do in the game that exists. I guess the best we can hope for is that someone rips all the sprites and puts something together in MUGEN or something. As always with this kind of shady gambling game, I think it's worth playing a few credits in MAME just to see it, though I don't think it's worth putting any money in if you encounter it in the wild. Or maybe it is? I don't know if this is some kind of emulation error or something, but every time I played, no matter how well or how poorly I did, I always got a screen telling me I'd won ten tickets. If a real machine is the same, it might be a cheap/quick way to grind for that cheap plastic tat upon which you've got your eye.

Magicus (PC)

 I bought this game a few years ago, because the PC version also comes with a download of the Android version, and at the time, my phone was still just about capable of playing games, and I was interrested to see what stuff of interest might exist in the world of pre-paid phone games (a subject I'll get back to later). It's an RPG in which the battles take the form of match-three puzzles, but there's surprisingly a lot more to it than that.

 

When you enter a battle, the enemies will be at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half wil be filled with gems. Clicking any gem makes it disappear and also deals a little damage to the enemies. Getting three or more in a row makes all of the lined up gems disappear and deals more damage. After playing a while, you'll also get spells, which have various effects like damaging the enemy, healing you, or changing what's happening in your little gempit. Each spell has an associated colour, and to charge a use of the spell, you have to click or line up a certain number of gems in that colour. Around the same time as you get spells, you'll also get special gems. These are different-looking gems, each only appearing as a certain colour, and they all have special spell-like effects when cleared as part of a line.

 

Aside from battling, the main gimmick of the game is its one-dimensional dungeon design. You traverse the overworldby just clicking the name of a location you want to go to, but in dungeings, you can go backwards and forwards. Every step you take has a chance of causing a random encounter. This could be a battle, a trap, a travelling merchant, a fishing hole, or one of a bunch of other things. So, the main point of difficulty is resource and stat management. And there are a lot of both of these things. You've got items, experience points, coins, leaves, fish, lottery tickets and more. This might sound overwhelming, but they're all introduced very gradually so you aren't overwhelmed.

 

Some of you might also be thinking that this sounds a lot like a free-to-play game with dark patterns and so on, and I do agree: while playing it, I was heavily reminded of the time I've spent in the past playing Immortal Taoists. There is, however, one important difference that I've already mentioned: this is a game that you buy, and which contains no microtransactions. The problem with free-to-play games that are structured like that isn't just the cost of the microtransactions themselves, but the fact that the developers are financially incentivised to design the games in such a way as to make the microtransactions more attractive: make it possible, but tedious to make progress, give players daily login bonuses so they're hooked on comig back to the game, and so on. It's known as "Dark Patterns" in game design.

 

Using Immortal Taoists as the example, because it's the game of this type with which I'm the most familiar, the setting draws new players in, and the carrot of endless character progression is what keeps them coming back and either watching ads or paying money. It is endless, too. The "Live Service" nature of the games means they can always raise the grapes every time player get close to grabbing them (the player is Tantalus in this analogy, and the game developer is Tartarus). Magicus offers all the positive stuff those free-to-play games, but without the negatives: dying in a dungeon is a very minor setback, you're only shown new equipment when you're at least a significant part of the way to being able to obtain it, and above all: you're given a singular long-term goal at the start of the game (obtain seven magic orbs to save the land from monsters), that has a clear and definite endpoint. I kind of wish there were more games like this! There are interesting elements in free-to-play games, but they're poisoned by the psychologically harmful structure of those games.

 

There's other positive things I can mention about the game, too: its cute low polygon count graphics, your lovable companions and the slowburn bond that grows between them, the fact that though it's a first person game where your character is never shown, it's still canonical that your character is a woman, reflected in the equipment you can obtain and more interestingly (though only occasionally), in the attitudes various characters have in addressing you. Anyway, I definitely recommend Magicus, it's a unique, interesting, charming, and fun little game, and you can get it from DLSite for an absolute pittance.

Banshee (Amiga)

 It's a shooting game, and it's on the Amiga, so I'm sure many of you can predict that this won't be a positive review. I do have some nice things to say about Banshee, though, so look forward to that, at least. I'll start the slating here by stating that this game was only released on the 32-bit Amiga models, the 1200 and CD32. Why, though? There doesn't seem to be anything technologically strenuous going on here, and the 16-bit Mega Drive and SNES, and even the 8-bit PC Engine all have shooting games that are faster and more frantic.

 

That's not to say that Banshee is a bad-looking game, though. In fact, all of its positive qualities are in the visual department. But they're also all the result of some really great pixel artistry, not any special effects or graphical trickery. The game takes place in an exagerrated early twentieth century kind of setting, and all of the backgrounds and sprites are full of detail and life. One thing worthy of highlighting is the way that soldiers die. You're mostly fighting vehicles of varius kinds, but there are tiny little infantrymen running aorund and shooting at you, too. Sometimes when you shoot them, they'll fall over into a pool of their own blood, sometimes they'll crumble into a pile of bones. Sometimes, if you're quick enough on the draw to blow up the transport bringing them to the battle field, they'll flee from the wreckage, with their clothes ablaze.

 

For reasons I'll get into later, I only managed to get as far as the second stage, but it's set in the capital city of the enemy nation, and it's even more full of details. You see women pushing prams, soldiers on roofs who fall to their doom when you shoot them, or riding round the streets on motorbikes, with a gunner in a sidecar shooting at you. I could keep going on about all the cool little things I saw in the relatively small portion of the game I played, but I guess I have to get onto the reasons why all of these things represent a tragic waste of effort and talent.

 

The first problem you'll encounter is that your weapons feel incredibly weedy. Power-ups are rare, and seemingly ganded out at random, meaning a lot of the time, you'll only get useless junk (you can shoot the items to change them into other items, but each one only has between one and three possibilities, and a lot of the time, none of them will make you any more powerful. Another thing that seems to be random is how much of your power you get to keep upon death. Sometimes you'll stay at the same power level, sometimes it'll be slightly diminished, and sometimes it's straight back to the default peashooter. The second problem is one that dawns on you after you kill your first boss: the stages are insanely long. That first boss you kill, if it ended the first stage, would have represented the end of a stage with a perfectly fine and normal length. It actually represents you having gotten a third of the way through the stage, with two more boss fights to (eventually) reach and survive.

 

Another weird thing is that there's no music in the game! Not even in the CD version! I feel like shooting games as a genre are known for having great soundtracks, so one that doesn't have one at all seems very strange, and it feels a little cheap, too, to be honest. It really feels like the pixel artists for this game were let down by everyone else working on it. Looking at Lemon Amiga, this was very well received by magazines at the time, with no review scores lower than 80%. Now, the Amiga specialist magazines I can kind of see, they were clinging to a zombie system and some of the writers might not have played any console or arcade shooting games. But even Gamesmaster, a multi-format magazine, gave it a glowing review and a score of 83%! Doing their readers a disservice, all of them. I won't, though: don't play this game, it's not fun.

Mobile Fighter G Gundam (SNES)

 Round about the turn of the century, when access to SNES emulation became more widely available, there were a few previously Japan-only games to which a lot of people (especially young teenagers) flocked, due to their being tie-ins with anime that were becoming popular in English-speaking countries at about the same time, thanks to the multi-year delay that that process had back then. Sailor Moon: Another Story, Dragonball Z: Hyper Dimension, and most relevant to this review, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Duel were three such games.

 

Sailor Moon was an okay RPG, and Hyper Dimension had the distinction of being better than the only other Dragonball game me and my friends had played at that point, the awful Dragonball GT: Final Bout on Playstation, but Endless Duel was a legitimately excellent game. Like, probably the best fighting game on the SNES, and definitely the best-looking SNES fighter. G Gundam had not yet had any kind of release in the UK yet, and I think wasn't very well-known in the US either, so no-one really paid its game any mind. It's also a fighting game, though, and in retrospect, it should have been excellent: the show was, after all, essentially Street Fighter II but with giant robots.

 

It won't be much of a surprise to careful readers of the preceding paragraph, but G Gundam just doesn't match up to the following year's game in any way. The easiest way to put it is that it feels like Endless Duel was developed to be as good a game as possible, and it also happens to be a licensed game, while G Gundam fits right alongside a lot of the other bog standard SNES anime tie-ins. It even has the presentational quirks a lot of similar SNES games have, like loud, low quality voice clips taken from the show, background screens where the show's logo scrolls by diagonally, and so on.

 

I will say, though, that it is a perfectly okay fighting game. Every character plays differently, they all have special moves with proper input commands, and there's also a desperation move for each of them. There's even a few features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 1994 fighting game: seperate story and arcade modes, and a team battle mode, for example. Plus: the stages have different colour palettes showing the progression of time from round to round! SNK had introduced that feature a few years prior in Fatal Fury, but it was still very rare at the time.

 

I actually do really like the way the game looks, too. It's a shame that it's doomed to be compared to the vastly superior Endless Duel, because just as it plays perfectly fine, G Gundam also looks fairly decent, too. The sprites aren't very big, but they are nice to look at, and detailed in a way that reminds of a particularly great-looking Game Gear game. Which does sound like damning with faint praise, I admit. The aforementioned backgrounds are also very well-drawn, all depicted places in which fights took place in the actual show, too.

 

I've spent most of this review comparing G Gundam to other games, which might not seem fair, but I'll be honest here: it is a very standard, okay, average fighting game. If it weren't for the license, it would have been even more forgotten than it actually is, and if it weren't for the massive shadow cast by the other Gundam SNES fighting game, there'd be very little to say about it. Play it if you're a fan of the show and/or you're curious about it, but don't expect to unearth a lost classic or anything.

Shadow Brain (NES)

 I think it's a pretty prevalent stereotype of 8-bit console RPGs that they're ugly, difficult, and just generally hostile to the player. It's not a completely unfounded stereotype, and I know there are people reading this who play those games specifically looking for those qualities. I'm not one of those players, but I do occasionally dip my toes into the genre, to seek out diamonds in the rough, and because I think the developers of games like these often came from the world of indie development on microcomputers, and there's a similar kind of creator-led energy to a lot of them to that seen in OAVs of the same era.

 

I found Shadow Brain in one such toe-dipping session, and I instantly took a liking to the way it bucks the trends in the genre at that time, both thematically and mechanically.  Thematically, it immediately stands out: it takes place in some kind of futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. There are only towns, no dungeons, but the streets of the towns are all plagued by roving criminals, rogue cyborgs, and mutated animals. The grimy look of both enemy and NPC characters juxtaposed with the incredibly sterile look of the faux-3D blobber maps really gives off the impression that this is a world that's still being maintained in terms of things being kept working, but also a world in which the actual inhabitants have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The closest thing I encountered to any kind of law enforcement are the gates between towns that require security ID to get through.

 

Mechanically, the first thing that proved promising is that while you're a solo adventurer who never gets any party members, you aren't punished harshly for dying. You're simply whisked away to the nearest ressurectionist, who provides the service you'd expect him to, and takes half of your current money as payment. Other than that, there's a lot of interesting little quirks. In battle, you have three attack options: punch, sword, and gun, and you can equip weapons to all three. There's no reason not to only buy and use the weapon that has the highest attack, but it's still a sign that the devs had a lot of ideas they wanted to include. Front Mission 3 fans might also be interested to learn that Shadow Brain also includes an in-game internet!

 

In the same way that Front Mission 3's internet reflected the real internet of 1999, featuring simple, charmingly gaudy webpages, Shadow Brain's internet reflects how things were in 1991. You can only access it via terminals that are dotted here and there around the towns, and when you do, there's a "live chat", where your character can converse with a few recurring characters, a BBS, where people post questions and information about what's going on, and an online shop where you can buy and sell things. It's very rudimentary, but it's still a fun little addition, and it really adds to the feels that this is a sci-fi game, and not just a fantasy game with a shiny metal skin. 

 

Another thing that you might be surprised to hear about is that you can go to the arcade and play minigames! In a 1991 Famicom game! There's futuristic Pong and futuristic clay pigeon shooting, and you can play them as much as you like to win money, plus there's a couple of points in the plot where you have to play special "if you die in the game, you die for real" versions to advance the plot. 

 

Anyway, though Shadow Brain is a lot more player-friendly than a lot of RPGs from that time, I'd say it's probably still a bit of an acquired taste, and while dying isn't a problem, there are still moments when it's not really clear what you have to do to progress. Still, I enjoyed the few hours I played of it (I got as far as the fourth town). I also really loved the way the game looks: the enemy and NPC sprites all look amazing, the world itself is really atmospheric, and even the UI elements feels as if they've been designed as a part of the game's world. This is a high quality work, and was clearly made with a lot of love. There's an English translation patch out there, and if this review has at all piqued your interest, you should definitely give it a try.