Haunted Boynight (MSX)

 This game's also known as Youkai Yashiki and Haunted House. I have no idea where the "Haunted Boynight" name comes from, but that's what it's called in many romsets, and it's a lot more eyecatching than the other, probably more legitimate titles, so that's the one I'll use. It's a surprisingly complicated and ambitious platform game that's not quite a search action game, but a little more complex than a traditional platformer.

 

You play as a boy, going into a haunted house to save your sister, who is apparently a renowned paranormal investigator who went missing there. (At least, that's what a comment on a Youtube playthrough says the plot is, anyway. That video and its comments being pretty much the only source of useful information on this game that I've been able to find). Your only weapon is a flashlight, which damages ghosts when its light hits them, and that's where the first really weird thing comes in. When you start the game, your flashlight is a melee weapon, but if you use it to dispell the wisps in the garden leading up to the house, it'll start shooting a projectile, until you get hit. This also does something to make you stay alive longer, but the way your health and lives work in this game is enough of a mystery that I never fully worked it out.

 

The basic goal of each area is pretty simple: find five paper talismans, whih will then turn into a key that'll allow you into the room where the boss is. You have to find the boss room yourself, of course, and as the game goes on, the stages get bigger and more byzantine in their layout. Therer does tend to be more than five talismans in each stage, though, and your surplus get carried over. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the game is actually a big open world, with more areas getting made accessible with every boss defeat. I'm not totally sure, though, as the only time I went back to a previous stage was by accident. Because there are what look like stone firepits dotted around all the stages, and when the fire's not shooting out of the top of them, you can stand there and press down to get taken away to somewhere else that might be hell or might just be a network of caves under the house? And there are also firepits down ther that'll take you back to the house, not necesserily in the same place you left it, though.

 

Another thing that won't be immediately obvious are the little monk statues standing around in certain places. If you touch them while carrying a rice ball and a depowered flashlight, they'll take the riceball and repower your flashlight. But they also have a second function! Stand in front of them and press down, and a small part of the wall or floor nearby will disappear, opening a new path. This is actually necessary to get into one of the boss rooms! The bosses themselves are the most mysterious of all. They all have one very specific weak point that's not at all obvious, and I only figured out most of them for the four bosses I fought by watching the aforementioned playthrough video. Sometimes the weak point is easy to rerach, and needs to be hit a bunch of times, sometimes it's hard to reach and only needs to be hit once. But again, in almost all cases, it's not something you're likely to figure out on your own. I wonder if all these "secret" things were listed in the manual, or if this is a game that just wanted to extend its playtime through obtusity?

 

To be honest, this isn't a great game. Like I've described, it's mostly about figuring stuff out either through luck or through looking it up online. The first stage does do a good job of creating a ver Japanese haunted house atmosphere, but it's unfortunately a case of severe frontloading, and the following stages just feel like some generic 8-bit microcomputer platformer world. This isn't one you should seek out and play yourself. Maybe just play through the first stage, for the atmosphere, but don't bother going any further.

Silk (PS4)

 Sometimes when you watch a particularly low budget horror movie or tokusatsu production, it's inspirational: these works stand as proof that it's possible to create interesting, entertaining works on modest budgets. Silk is kind of like that! Common wisdom would tell you that it's impossible to make a large scale RPG/trading sim/resource management game without a large team and the financial backing of a publisher. But here Silk is: claiming to boast the largest explorable world in videogame history, and it all appears to have been made by a solo developer (or at least, a very small team) on a shoestring budget.

 

Silk is an absurdly huge sandbox of a game. You start out by picking out a quest, though you really don't have to follow it if you don't want to, and you set off on your big adventure. THe name comes from the fact that you play as a trading caravan on the silk road, and as such, the aforementioned gigantic open world encompasses huge swathes of Europe, Asia, and Africa! The most basic mission is to get from the Roman empire, over to the Han empire in what is now China, and then back again. I've attempted this a couple of times now, and though I can just about manage the "getting there" part of the journey, my party always ends up starving to death in either the mountains or the desert on the way back. Or murdered by nomads, who for some reason are incredibly hostile to your little band of travellers. Even though technically, you're also nomads. 

 

You get across the world via dungeon crawler-style "blob" movement, being able to face eight directions, and move one big footstep at a time. Which is kind of how the game acieves its huge world claims: there's quite a bit of simplification and abstraction at play here. Distances are approximate, and there's a day/night cycle that goes round every few turns, and when you "enter" towns and other locations where trading is possible, it's all done via a menu. But somehow, this doesn't do anything diminish the sense of scale in the game! So much is done through clever game design that you might not even notice unless you're specifically thinking about it. For example, you start out in the Roman empire, in Europe. There's lots of water for fishing, forests for hunting, and friendly cities for trading, so you're never going to be short on food.

 

Your first big challenge coms when you get to the mountains: they're somewhat maze-like, there are no towns, and there's nowhere to hunt or fish. But unless you get really lost, this isn't a huge area, and once you get out, the Parthian towns on the other side are a little hostile, but they'll quickly warm up to you once you get in there and trade with them a few times. Later, though, you'll get to what the game calls the Sea of Death, which I think is supposed to be the real-life Taklamakan Desert. This place is huge, something like half as wide as all the ground you've covered before reaching it, and there's no woods, no water, and very few settlements. And a lot of the settlements that are there are surrounded and inhabited by the aforementioned very hostile nomads. So, to stand a chance of getting across here, you need to hire a bunch of guards, and also stock up on enough food to feed them for the several weeks it'll take you to get across. While you're in the desert, a little bit of flavour is also added by the unusually large amount of abandonded and ruined caravans you find, which will yield a small amount of silver, wool, and spices when you pass them. It really gets across how treacherous this terrain is, while also giving you something to trade for more food once you get to the other side and have to journey back again.

 

While the game successfully gets across what a grand undertaking a silk road journey is, it still has the low budget charm and appeal that I mentioned back at the start of the review. All the sprites representing locations and obstacles like mountains, sand dunes, and so on all look like they were drawn using felt tip pens, and they haven't been filtered or sharpened up in any way. It creates a look for the game that really makes it very clear that it's a passion project and a work of pure creativity, and not a capitalist product that's been through focus tests and an overly powerful marketing department. 

 

It might sound to some that I'm damning this game with faint praise, but honestly: I'd prefer it if all games were passion projects, and we never had to hear about crunch time or developers being traumatised by having to repeatedly watch real gore videos for reference or playing games that would obviously have been a thousand times better if some bean counter hadn't demanded more potential revenue streams or if some soulless animated corpse in a suit demanded less marketable elements be watered down or removed altogether. I'll be honest and say that Silk isn't really in one of my preferred genres, and it's definitely got its flaws, but it is an incredible achievement, the sense of scale is really awe-inspiring, and it represents a better way for videogames to be in the future. Furthermore, it often goes on sale for an absolute pittance, so if you want to give it a try yourself, it's not like it'll take a big investment to do so. And I definitely recommend that you do.

Crisis City (Playstation)

 This is a game I've only got around to trying out fairly recently, and it coincidentally seems to have started to appear on a few other people's radars too (including in the comments of this very blog!). So I thought I'd better cover it before it stops being considered obscure! It's a game that attempts to answer a question I've thought about many times before, and I'm sure a lot of you have too: what if you used polygon characters on pre-rendered backgrounds like in Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, but for an action game? Two whole years before Capcom tried their hand at it with Dino Crisis 2, too!

 

It seems like the developers of Crisis City had a bunch of ideas for how to implement that concept into a game! There's a regular single player mode, in which you select a character and run through stages killing enemies; there's a versus mode where you select a character and fight one of the other characters in a duel (either against the CPU or another player, though unfortunately there's no arcade-style mode for fighting a series of CPU opponents, only individual battles); and a secret extra mode, which seems identical to the first mode, but there must presumably be some difference! (If anyone can figure out what the point of extra mode is, please tell me.)

 

I really wanted to like Crisis City, the concept is really cool, and aesthetically, it really lives up to the potential offered by the concept of "action game with prerendered backgrounds". I love the near-future shiny big city nighttime look and feel of it! There's also some really cool illustrations to look at while the game gives you exposition (unfortunatley in the form of scrolling Japanese text) before you start a story mode game. But beyond the excellent aesthetics is a game that's unfortunately not very fun to play, with a few small problems that all work together to the game's detriment.

 

First, it's just really fiddly. The very first thing to do when you start playing is press X to turn on lock on, as the game's unplayable without it, and even with it on, you have to be stood still and facing an enemy for it to aim at them (as despite what "lock on" sounds like, it's really more of an aiming assist). Of course, the enemies have no problems running around while shooting directly in your direction flawlessly. The second problem, and one that feels bizarrely specific, is that the game really loves putting you in situations where you might get run over by a car. It takes off half of your HP, and it's a car so it's faster than you, too. And it happens so much! Finally, there's a problem that kind of arises from the game's concept (though it could have been fixed with a little more care from the designers): it's sometimes not clear where you're supposed to go or what you're meant to do. 

 

For example, there was one part in the stage that's the first stage for most characters (I guess each character has their own story, so they do things in different orders) where it seems like there's nothing to do after you've killed all of the local enemies. I even died of a time out on one attempt! It turns out that what you've got to do is completely destroy a nearby truck, which takes a lot more ammo than you might expect for something that's both essential and non-hostile, and that clears the path to the next screen. Also you take damage (and lots of it!) if you're stood too close when it explodes, which you probably will be, as since it's not an enemy, you can't lock on to it, and it's not always obvious whether or not your shots are hitting it.

 

So yeah, Crisis City is a game that looks great, and it deserves some respect for trying to pioneer a potentially cool concept (unless there's another game that did it first that I don't know about), but it just doesn't manage to get the execution right. I think you should definitely at least give it a try, just don't go in with high expectations for anything beyond the aesthetics.

Sutobasu Yarou Show (SNES)

 Just like the last SNES game I covered, this is a licensed manga tie-in. But I think it might be notable as being the SNES game based on the  least popular manga. As far as I can tell (because there's very little information out there), Sutobasu Yarou Show was a manga by Kouji Kousaka in Monthly Shonen Jump, and lasted long enough to be collected into two volumes. It has no anime adaptation, and Kouji Kousaka doesn't have any other published works, as far as I can tell. How did this get a videogame tie-in?! The answer probably lies in its subject matter: Basketball. Takehiko Inoue's Slam Dunk, which ran in Weekly Shoenen Jump in the first half of the nineties, was a huge success, to the extent that it's credited for inspiring an upsurge in the sport's popularity throughout east Asia in that time. Presumably, both the manga nad the game of Sutobasu Yarou Show were intended to ride its coattails to a quick buck.

 

But anyway, this is a street basketball game, taking place on a court with only one basket, like previous subjects of this blog Jammit and Dunk Kids. Another trait it has in common with Jammit is that it's an incredibly annoying stickler for the rules. My first few attempts at playing it were severely hampered by my constantly getting fouls, for travelling, accidentally pushing an opponent,and more travelling. I don't know why sports games include the ability to accidentally trigger fouls like this, especially when it's in a way that wouldn't get you any advantage anyway. There's a jump button that seems to serve no purpose besides giving you a foul if you press it! Besides the fouls, there's some other rules in effect that are slightly annoying. For example, if your team is meant to be on the defence, but you get ahold of the ball after your opponents fumble it, you've got to pass to another player before you can try and score.

 

Other than those little annoyances, though, this is a fairly enjoyable game. Good enough for me to persevere through at least an hour of constant losses before getting my first victory, at least. I think a big part of the game's appeal is in its presentation. Being based on a manga gives it the advantage that every player on every team (and there are three to a team) is a named character with their own unique look. So there's various different body types, and every player has a unique face, and when you pass the ball between the different members of your team, they all feel noticably different as they move around. Furthermore, there's a bunch of different stages that add some visual variety, though they don't affect how the game actually plays.

 

It's also a nice surprise how diverse the characters are, too. Like, they aren't super diverse by modern standards, but while there's the usual one all-girl team, there's also a mixed gender team. And more than one team is made up of players of more than one ethnicity, too. It's not much, but it still seems like it's worthy of note to see in an early nineties sports game. Another surprise with regards to the presentation is the music: I'm no expert on the subject, but they've clearly put some effort into creating a soundtrack that comes as close as they can get to contemporaneous early nineties hip hop on the SNES. 

 

Sutobasu Yarou Show is a game that's slightly better than just okay, and it gets extra points for being unusually well-made, and for the curiosity of being based on a manga almost completely forgotten by history. Unlike a lot of games I've covered here in recent times, you should also be able to pick up a physical copy at a reasonable price too, which is nice. Finally, one of the teams in the game is named DRUGS, while the protagonist team in story mode is named JUMPS, and "JUMPS VERSUS DRUGS" sounds like it could be the name of some basketball-themed anti-drugs VHS tape to be shown in mid-nineties schools.