Formula 1 Sensation (NES)

 Only a few weeks after Royal Stone really showed off the potential of the Game Gear, I'm writing about another game that makes its aged eight bit host hardware look amazing. Though I was initially turned off by its psuedo-realisms, F-1 Sensation's amazing graphics kept me playing, and I'm glad they did, as it turns out that the game's a lot more fun than my initial reaction made out. I'd go as far as to say that it looks as good as Final Lap Twin on the PC Engine (probably my favourite racing game on that console, and also impressive on its hardware for its speed and use of split screen multiplayer).

 

But yeah, there were a few things that almost turned me away, reminding me of games I've really disliked in the past, like the Mega Drive's Super Monaco GP, for example. There's no option to drive with an automatic transmission, you have to do a qualifying lap before each race to determine your starting position, and you have to keep track of the condition of some of your car's parts (specifically the engine, tire, and wing. Though it seems to mainly be the tires that are the problem), and go into the pits to have them changed when the condition meters get low.

 

However, these things that I'd originally perceived as negatives all turned out to be incredibly minor! THe qualifying laps aren't as boring as I'd expected, and they actually give a nice chance to figure out the hardest corners and easiest straights on the course. The gear shifting, oddly, doesn't really seem to matter at all: you have four gears, though unlike in most games, you can pretty much shift into the third gear straight away and then into fourth a couple of seconds later. The acceleration pentaly for skipping gears is almost non-existent! And finally, entering the pit comes with a cute little animation of your crew changing your car's parts, only takes a few seconds, and oddly, doesn't seem to affect your race position too much, if at all. In fact, there were a couple of times where I entered the pit while in first place, and it seemed like my lead had increased when I left the pit.

 

So it turned out that this is the fast, fun, and simple kind of racing game I like the most, despite its realist trappings. There are some negatives, though! Firstly, while it is an incredible looking game for the NES/Famicom, in terms of moving at high speed and making a decent-looking attempt at a scaling effect, it's also constrained by being a Formula 1 game. That is to say: every track looks almost exactly the same, with only a slightly different colour scheme, and different sponsor names on the buildings in the background to differentiate them. Secondly, I feel like every race being five laps long might be a little too much. It means that they're all at least five minutes long, some going over seven minutes. It's just too long to be driving around such sparsely decorated tracks!

 

Those negatives are both pretty minor, though. This is still an excellent game, and though I've only played a few Famicom racing games, I'm yet to have encountered one that comes close to rivalling F-1 Sensation (though if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, the Famicom's not a system in which I have a lot of expertise). I also want to mention that it's part of a small, exclusive club: Famicom/NES games that got released in Europe, but not North America. It wasn't a super popular system here in its heyday, so it's extra strange that a game would get released for it as late as 1993! I guess they were really hoping the popularity of Formula 1 and the NES' status as a budget console by that time would get it some sales from people who were sports fans more than they were videogame fans? Of course, its high quality, lack of language barrier, and late release make it a very rare and sought after title, and there are copies out there listed for close to an entire thousand pounds! Madness.

Jack Bros. (Virtual Boy)

 This is one of the better-known Virtual Boy games, but I'm still considering it obscure, because it's still a Virtual Boy game, and like most of them, it's an exclusive to a console that almost no-one owned and has only fairly recently seemed to have attracted the attention of emulator writers. It also has something of a positive reputation, which I think must be entirely based on the fact that it's a little-known, lesser-played action game starring characters and monsters from the Shn Megami Tensei series.

 

There's been games featured on this blog in recent times that I didn't particularly enjoy for various reasons, games I didn't feel like I could recommend, but I think it's been a long time since I've featured a game here that I've actively disliked as much as I do Jack Bros. It's a maze game in which you have to collect a bunch of keys in each stage to open up the exit (or exits) and go to the next stage. One thing I do like about it is that it utilises the VB's 3D in a nice little way: you get to the next stage by jumping off of the side of the current one, and you can always see the next stage floating in space far below the current one. I also like the use of a combined time limit/health bar. That's something you see in a lot of the old top-down racing games I love, and it's rare to see such a system in a game of another genre (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars).

 

That's about all I like about it, though. The problems start before you even get to do anything: at the start of every stage, a fairy will appear to deliver a few textboxes of information, that you've either already worked out or could have worked out within a few seconds of play. Things like several variations on "there are enemies on this stage that will attack you", or the revelation, at the start of the eleventh stage, that you can attack by using the right d-pad. I've managed to get over twenty stages into the game, and that fairy was still showing up at the start of each one to deliver some worthless advice.

 

Then you start playing, and the game is just so slow and boring and easy. You waddle around the small mazes, find a few keys, and jump off the side to the next stage. Like you've probably already worked out, it uses twinstick controls, though you can only move and shoot in the four cardinal directions. Even with this in mind, the normal enemies are no threat to you at all, and the bosses only slightly moreso. There are three characters, though only one of them is really viable. Jack Frost has ranged attacks, but they're so slow and weak that he's useless. Jack Skelton does decent damage, but only at melee range. Jack Lantern has fast-firing projectiles that do decent damage, so is better than the other characters in such a way that makes them totally pointless.

 

Like I said back in the first paragraph, I think that all of the goodwill people have towards this game comes from its association to a beloved series. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, this is a game that was hard to review simply because playing it was such a tedious chore that I would put off going back to it, and wished I was playing anything else the whole time I was playing it. I'm not writing off the Virtual Boy as a console, though: I've played a few other games that have been better and/or more interesting, and I'll almost definitely cover at least some of them here in the future.

Royal Stone - Hirakareshi Toki no Tobira (Game Gear)

 Back when I was a teenager, one of my friends' bedrooms had no windows, and a bunch of us used to hang out in there, watching anime and playing videogames. The lack of windows is relevant because he had a Game Gear lying around, and we'd sometimes take turns playing through stages of a little turn-based strategy game named Crystal Warriors (which was called Ariel: Crystal Densetsu in Japan), and the Game Gear's screen was bright enough that if someone was playing it, it was possible for someone sat next to them to read comics by its light.

 

Anyway, Royal Stone is the sequel to Crystal Warriors, though it only ever got released in Japan, unfortunately. I can't remember anything about the plot of the first game, so I can't comment on that, but Royal Stone is a true sequel in every other aspect, replicating the original's concepts but in bigger, better, and more sophisticated ways. Crystal Warriors had crudely drawn characters wiggling weapons at each other, Royal Stone has detailed characters full of personality attacking each other in cool little psuedo-3D scenes. Crystal Warrior's towns were crude and all identical, being more like slightly glorified menus than actual places, while Royle Stone's towns are like those you'd see in most 8-bit RPGs. The element system carries over too: Water, Fire, and Wind all have a Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship, while Earth (usually reserved for important characters) is neither strong nor weak against any of the elements.

 

I assume that Ariel was a big hit in Japan, as its clear that this game was a lavish production. It looks better than some contemperanous 16-bit console RPGs, and I feel confident in saying it's the best-looking game of the Game Gear's original lifespan (and the Game Gear is a system with no shortage of great-looking pixel art), not being bettered until 2020's GG Aleste 3. It even has a seperate copyright credit for the character designer (Kugatsuhime, of Monster Maker fame) before the title screen appears, which was pretty rare in general back then, and even moreso for a handheld game. The plot has also had a lot of effort put into it, not just in the writing, but also the presentation. There's various twists that occur, a bunch of different factions warring against each other, a protagonist with a tragic backstory and more. Like I keep saying, it's all so much more than you'd expect from a handheld game in 1995.

 

And as for the presentation of the story, it's mostly pretty standard for this kind of game, with you going around towns and talking to people, and also your enemies taunting you or declaring their intentions at the start of battles. But there's other things too: there's flashbacks that are shown in the game's graphics but with a sepia toned pallete. One particularly impressive example uses the game's battle engine to tell the story of the protagonist's dad getting betrayed and falling in battle. Furthermore, when your party members fall in battle, they're just dead and gone, and they all have a unique line of dialogue to act as their last words. One character uses this to declare his love for the protagonist, something that he never mentions at any other point!

 

Royal Stone is an excellent game, and has impressed me in so many ways the whole time I've been playing it. There was an instance somewhat early on, the first time I lost a couple of characters in battle, where I was ready to give up on the game, thinking my diminshed force might make the game unplayable. But I persevered, and with some slightly better strategy to compensate, I still got through the next few battles and gradually recruited a few new friends. I think that's probably one of the best compliments you can pay a strategy game, isn't it? That you can make up for having a weaker force by just thinking about what you're doing a bit better? Unfortunately, SEGA exhibited some of their trademark wisdom, and decided no-one outside of Japan would be interested in playing what was probably the best handheld strategy/RPG at that time, and so the only way to play it in English is via a fantranslated ROM. But we are lucky enough, at least, to have that available to play, and you definitely should.

Oraga Land Shusai - Best Farmer Shuukakusai (SNES)

 Looking at the character designs in this, I first assumed that it must be a tie-in to one of those family friendly anime that has thousands of episodes, and is of no interest to anyone outside Japan, but if it is, I've been able to find no evidence of it. There's a copyright for a company whose name I didn't recognise called Nitto on the title screen, so I looked them up, thinking it might be a food company, and the characters in the game might be its advertising mascots or something. But Nitto make things like LCD screens and surgical tape. 

 

Anyway, the game itself is listed in various places around the internet as a puzzle game. And at first glance, with the split screen and the grids full of brightly coloured fruits and vegetables it would appear to be a puzzle game. But in my opinion, the way it plays is closer to a sports game. The sport in question being high-speed competitive farming, in which the various characters are trying to harvest crops faster than their opponents.

 

How it works is that there are four kinds of vegetables, and you and your opponent are given identical quotas to grow and harvest a certain amount of each one in your field. Your field's got sixteen spaces in it, each able to grow one vegetable at a time (and after the first couple of stages, you'll be required to grow many more than sixteen vegetables to clear a stage). You walk along the edges of the field with left and right on the d-pad, and press up and down to aim at spaces on the field. You press one button to cycle through the four vegetables, another to throw seeds, and a third to run across the field with your hoe to harvest any fully-grown crops.

 

To make things more manic, various creatures (crows, caterpillars, monkeys, human children, and so on) will invade your field, and you've got ot shoo them away, either by running at them with your hoe, or by throwing stones at them with the same button you use to throw seeds. That button can also be used to throw what I assume must be fertiliser or something at already-planted seeds to make them grow faster. So the game boils down to planting seeds, encouraging them to grow, and also frantically fighting off the pests trying to eat your stuff, all while hoping you do it faster than your opponent. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any way at all to affect your opponent's field, so it is completely a pure race to fulfil your quota in time, with no funny business at all. You could theoretically play this game competitively and fairly, if the desire hit you (and if you could find someone willing to be your opponent).

 

Oraga Land Shusai is an interesting game, and definitely a unique one. It's also something you can comfortably and idly play on a handheld while watching TV. It's nothing spectacular, though. If you're curious, give it a try, and if you're not, you won't be missing out on some great unsung classic. It's fine.