Midnight Run: Road Fighter 2 (Playstation)

 Yes, this is a sequel to the 1984 arcade game Road Fighter, released over a decade later, long after everyone had forgotten about it, and a couple of years after that whole genre of top-down racing games was pretty much dead and buried. So, Midnight Run is a more modern, post-Daytona and Ridge Racer 3D racing game! It's not just a generic also-ran (an also- midnight ran?), though, as it's got some interesting ideas to make it stand out.

 

Unfortunately, it's a very straight port of the arcade version, and as such, it only has three tracks, which is a little bit stingy in 1997. They do, however, all form a cohesive little fictional world, being set around differernt parts of a single city, at different times of what is presumably a single night. The easy track takes place at sunset, the intermediate track at "starlight", which is just late at night when the stars are out, and the hard track takes place at what the game calls midnight, but looks to me more like the time just before dawn. It's only a little, completely aesthetic thing, but I really like how this touch adds to the fiction of the game.

 

Moving on to the interesting stuff, this being a racing game that takes place on the streets of a city, there's regular traffic on the roads. On its own, that's nothing worthy of note, but as well as your position relative to your fellow racers, the game keeps track of how many vehicles you've passed overall, whether they're in the rce or not. Which ties into the other interesting thing that Midnight Run does: instead of keeping a high score table of lap and course times, it keeps an actual high score table of actual scores that are totted up at the end of the race, with points awarded for the time you took to finish the race, the number of vehicles passed, and the position at which you finished the race. I'm sure it's the kind of thing that racing purists would absolutely hate, but I really enjoyed the novelty and gameyness of it.

 

There's something that needs to be mentioned that is undeniably a good thing or a racing game, too: Midnight Run is very fast. Maybe the fastest racing game on Playstation that involves regular non-scifi 1990s cars in a reasonably realistic world? Even with the dearth of tracks, and the risky choice of scores over times, I don't think anyone can deny that generally, it's better for racing games to be really fast. And the controls are good enough that the speed doesn't make it difficult or annoying to play, either: it all just flows nicely and feels great to play.

 

Konami's trick of making this a sequel to a much older game that just also happened to also be about driving cars really fast worked for me, since I just had to know why there was a decade-late sequel to Road Fighter. I'm glad it did, too, since it turned out to be a great game in its own right, and I definitely recommend it to fans of late nineties racing games (and I know there's a fair few among my readership). Apparently, they actually pulled this trick again, with another Road Fighter game being released in 2010. I'd like to play it, but unfortunately, it never got a home port, and of all the long-standing Japanese arcade companies, Konami seem the least interested in making their library available on consoles if they can't get someone else like Hamster or M2 to do it for them.

Vertical Force (Virtual Boy)

 Vertical Force is one of those rare games for a console with a big gimmick that not only exists to shoehorn in the use of that gimmick, but is also just a decent game that happens to do so. In this case, it's a vertically-scrolling shooting game, that utilises the Virtual Boy's 3D gimmick to give the stages two layers. But it otherwise does just play like a pretty decent shooting game.

 

Specifically, since it came from Hudson Soft, it plays very much like a title from the Star Soldier series, other than the layers thing. And even that could be considered to beuilding upon the weird thing in the original Star Soldier where you would sometimes fly underneath bits of scenery if you approached them from certain angles. But now you've got a button to shoot and a button to move in and out of the screen (or since the game is top-down, to increase or decrease your altitude).

 

They really did a good job of working the gimmick into the game and using it in interesting ways, too. The second and third stages are especally full of fun little moments that use it. In the second stage, there's these whirlpool things that can suck you down to the lower level if you fly over them at the top level, and the third stage has lots of big rock formations that you need to fly over and under. Unfortunately, it does also feel like the rest of the game was left a little neglected.

 

It's very barebones and featureless for a 1995 console game, and especially if you consider it a part of the Star Soldier series, as even the PC Engine entries from years earlier had things like high score tables that saved (Vertical Force doesn't have high scores at all), Caravan modes, and so on. Vertical Force just has the main game, and that's not a particularly difficult one: on my second play I managed to get to the penultimate boss, and I think I'd be able to clear the game on a single credit without much more practice. (Though Ihaven't been able to replicate that success since, so maybe it was a fluke?). It's only four relatively short stages and a final boss that gets its own stage.

 

So, Vertical Force is a decent enough shooting game, that's also a little short and definitely too easy to be a long term interest, especially with the lack of high score tables. But if you want to play every Star Soldier game, this is definitely one of those in all but name (the default weapon even powers up in the same patterns), and also I'm going to assume that anyone playing Virtual Boy games in 2024 is doing so via emulation, so you're not going to feel like you've got much to lose.

Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Mega Drive)

 Games on SEGA consoles that star Disney's main mascot characters have a great reputation, and they deserve it. Quackshot, World and Castle of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper, and others are all widely-beloved classics that radiate quality from the moment you turn them on. There are some lesser titles, though, that aren't so fondly remembered: Fantasia, for example was hated when it came out, and only comes up in discussions of terrible Mega Drive games nowadays. Goofy's Hysterical History Tour has it even worse: it was released without anyone even noticing, and Idoubt that any of those few that remember it do so fondly.

 

It starts out pretty much as soon as you turn the game on: for some reason, it has its own slightly different, slightly cheaper-looking versions of the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Enterprises Ltd." and SEGA logo screens. And the title screen has that strange, intangible look of cheapness that a lot of (but defintiely not all) US-developed Mega Drive games have to them, especially ones aimed at kids. Things briefly start to look up once you actually start playing, though, as Goofy himself has a pretty decently animted walk cycle, and the extending arm device with which he's armed is pretty interesting too, and actually brought to mind better games, like Bionic Commando or  The Magical Quest starring Micky Mouse. 

 

That's about the sum of the positive things I have to say about this game, though. The longer you play, the less fun you'll have. There are enemies every where, and they're all insane damage sponges. You're constantly having to make leaps of faith, being expected to just jump off of cliffs into the void, and hoping there'll be something to land on when you get there. Or you've got to jump down onto a tiny little platform that can only just be seen when you crouch (and of course, you can't jump straight from crouching). There are apparently several epochs on Goofy's eponymous tour, but after about an hour of playing (and I would have given up long before that without save states), and after finishing at least seven or eight surprisingly long stages, there was no end in sight for the prehistoric age, with its one background image and one tileset.

 

The thing that finally made me give up on the game, though, was a sequence of jumps that made heavy use of the extending arm I praised only a couple of paragraphs ago. The thing is that by default, pressing B makes Goofy extend the arm diagonally upwards in the direction he's facing. If you press left or right while presing B, it'll stretch out horizontally instead. All sounds normal so far, right? Unfortunately, the sequence in question wants you to jump and grab platforms above and  to the right. So, you have to press C and right to make the jump, holding them long enough to get close to the platform, then let go of both and press B on its own to stretch the arm towards it. But instinctively, you'll still be pressing right when you press B, and the arm will stretch out horizontally, causing you to fall onto the spikes below. There's a few of these jumps in a row, all identical, and if you fail one, you either start again, or you lose your last bit of health on the spikes below and got back to the start of the stage.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but Goofy's Hysterical History Tour isn't worth your time. It's boring, frustrating, and ugly. One final example of how it's a shoddy producation as well as a terrible game, though: like most platform games, you can hold up to pan the camera upwards and see what's above you. But Goofy has no accompanying animation for this! He doesn't even turn his eyes upwards, he just stands there as the camera pans. So to re-iterate: game's awful, don't bother.

U.P.P. (Playstation)

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on what UPP stands for. But I did find out that apparently, when it was released, the big selling points for UPP were the attack animations and the voice cast. Though I've never been into sriyuu fandom, so I can't really comment on that, I can say that the attack animations do look really great. The characters appear onscreen casting their spells in big, screen-filling animations. Well animated and high resolution, you could be tricked into thinking this was a PC-FX game or something.

 

But I should really get onto describing the game in which these attacks are taking place, shouldn't I? It's a typical match three coloured blocks falling stuff puzzle game. Except that the blocks are floating upwards towards the top of your well instead of falling to the bottom. For the sake of convenience, just remember that if I describe falling or gravity for the rest of this review, imagine I did so upside-down. Anyway, the mechanics of the actual colour matching are as generic as can be: you put three or more of the same colour in a row, and they disappear. The combat aspect, though, is similar to the Hanagumi Taisen Columns games, in that rather than sending junk blocks over to your opponent's well by making chains, you instead fill up a meter, and can use the meter at your leisure to perform a character-specific attack.

 

These attacks are pretty varied, too! From simple things like filling up the bottom of your opponent's well, sticking all the blocks in your opponent's well together so they don't fall when those below them are erased, and so on. The final boss in single player mode has an especially harsh one: a few random blocks in your well will temporarily be turned into skulls. Erase three skulls over the course of the match, and you immediately lose! Unfortunately, as interesting as these attacks are, and as impressive as the animations that accompany them are, they also provide the game with its biggest negative.

 

The problem is that the pace is so slow! My favourite puzzle game series is Magical Drop, in which matches are often over in a couple of seconds, making UPP's matches feel glacial in comparison. The meter-building gameplay is slow enough (even though it never feels as such in the aforementioned Columns games. maybe the meters just fill faster in those games?), but the much-lauded animations cause everything to stop for ten to twenty seconds while they play. That's longer than an entire Magical Drop match, for a purely cosmetic element!

 

UPP isn't a bad game, and I think it's worth playing at least once, just for how good it looks. But I don't think it's a puzzle game anyone will be going back to for years and years, and I especially don't think it's one that you'll get a lot of fun out of through playing against human opponents, either. Most of all, though, and I think I've said this about puzzle games a few times before: I can't imagine anyone ever choosing this over Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo or Money Idol Exchanger or Landmaker or any of the other greats of the genre.

Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits - Bushido Retsuden (Neo Geo CD)

 Back when I was about eleven or twelve, I'd started to become a bit obsessed with fighting game lore, specifically the Street Fighter and Rival Schools games. I was also still in my post-Final Fantasy VII RPG phase, so naturally, I wished "if only there were RPGs to flesh out the stories of my favourite fighting games". Of course, back then, I had no idea about things like Gamest Mooks full of insane amounts of lore for arcade games in general, not just fighting games (and I still think that if some publisher had translated those tomes back then, western arcades would have stayed healthy just a little longer). And though I wouldn't play any SNK fighting games until the advent of the Dreamcast a few years later, I did somehow become aware of this game, whose title has since been translated as "Samurai Shodown - Tales of the Bushido" (though among many English-speaking fans, it had colloquially been known as simply "Samurai Shodown RPG" for a long time).

 

Despite having no knowledge of the Samurai Shodown series, its plot, or its characters, just the existence of an RPG based on a fighting game series was enticing to me. Unfortunately, there was no English version at all back then, nor would there be until only a few months ago at the time of my writing this review! So when this fantranslation came out, it was something of a holy grail being found after decades of waiting. I don't play RPGs as much as I used to, so it didn't excite me as much now as it would have then, but it's still pretty exciting. And having now played a few hours of it, it's not a disappointment!

 

You start the game by picking one of six characters, and one of two storylines. I went with Cham Cham, and the second storyline, which is about a bunch of demons trying to resurrect their leader by collecting negative human emotions in seven ancient bells around the world. Shortly after you start playing, you also get to pick a second character to join your poarty, though unfortunately, it turns out that you're only picking them for their mechanical use, and they don't actually get to join in any dialogue scenes. I guess the number of possible combinations there would have made for an insane amount of extra writing for the devs, though. I went with Nakoruru, which turned out to make for a somewhat complimentary team: Cham Cham focuses on attacking groups of enemies, and Nakoruru does powerful attacks against single enemies, plus she has a healing spell.

 

You're given the unusualy option of having to use special move inputs from the actual fighting games to use specials in battle, but I opted not to, because I'm not super-familiar with the SS series, plus the battles are turn-based anyway, so it's just a bit of a gimmick more than anything. If they'd used a Final Fantasy-style active time battle system or something similar, I can see how skipping menus would have been useful. What's slightly unusual is that your normal attacks do very little damage, and you're expected to use specials more often than not. All of your specials consume SP, which complicates matters further. For example, Cham Cham has a useful attack that damages every enemy, but it also uses a lot of SP, and her pool isn't that big, so until she's levelled up a few times, she can only use that attack maybe four or five times before needing to replenish. In contrast, Nakoruru's specials are all single-target, but they use very little SP, and she has tons of it to spare anyway. Not being able to just mindlessly select the attack option like in most older RPGs is something you'll get used to quickly, and it does make things a lot more interesting.

 

This being an SNK game from the nineties, the graphics are also worthy of note. As you might expect, the game contains an absurd bounty of beautiful, detailed pixel art. The characters all look great, and full of life, the backgrounds are similarly lived-in and packed with detail, and there's even lots of weird and cool monster sprites to fight in battle. I'm pretty sure it's all been made bespoke for this game, too, with no recycling from its parent series. Even the battle sprites for your characters are specially drawn to a smaller scale than the fighting games, but still as detailed and interesting as everything else. The music and sound effects are exactly as you'd expect from a Samurai Shodown game, too: traditional, quiet, and subdued.

 

If you're at all interested in the Samurai Shodown series and its lore, or in games from the nineties golden age of RPGs, I definitely recommend giving this a try. Like I said, I've been playing it for a few hours now, and it's yet to wear out its welcome, even despite its relatively slow pace. I'll definitely be continuing to play it for a few weeks, at least, if not all the way to the end of the story.