New Horizons (SNES)

 This is a sequel to the game Uncharted Waters, though I haven't played the original, so I won't be able to say how it compares to it. Furthermore, while I know this game is pretty much completely unheard of in the UK, I don't know how well known it is in North America or other areas. It feels like its English release would have been pretty niche at the time, though, so I think we're safe. Before I gave it a try a few months ago, I had no idea what it was about or what kind of game it was, other than it being one of those 16-bit Koei games that are about real historical things and have many screens full of numbers to look at.

 

What I got, though, was a pleasant surprise! It is, amazingly, a pretty big open world RPG, with the world in question being the actual Earth, as it was in the sixteenth century. Obviously, it's not 100% accurate, but if you have at least a little bit of geographical knowledge, you'll be able to put some of it to use while playing this game. It really is incredibly open, too: you can be an explorer, a trader, a conquerer, a pirate, probably some other jobs, too. While I've played it, I've always been going the explorer route, with a little bit of trading on the side. (My tip is to go to Lisbon and get the local rich guy to be your patron. He'll pay you handsomely for every discovery you make!)

 

So as an explorer, I've spent a lot of my playtime sail near coastlines, waiting to find new ports (where I can resupply food and water, stock up of stuff that might be sold for profit elsewhere, and when necessary, recruit some sailors), or villages. Villages don't have the facilities of ports, but they are where you make discoveries. Every village has a discovery to make, though at some of them, you'll have to give food to the locals a few times before you find them. And the discoveries will be all kinds of stuff: monuments, treasures, plants and animals, foods, and so on. Taking the explorer route is slow and repetitive, but there's still something really compelling about sailing around, finding new things, and really hoping you'll find a new port as your supplies run low in the middle of nowhere.

 

Unfortunately, due to the way I've been playing the game, I can't really talk about how combat works, since I've managed to avoid it entirely. In my defence, engaging in combat in other Koei games of this era has always been unbearably tedious and also incredibly difficult. Trading works as you might expect: you buy some local specialty in one port, then sail to a port far, far away, and sell it all for a big profit. The problem is that you only have a limited amount of cargo space, and goods take up space that could be used by food and water, allowing you to safely sail further without stopping. THat same goes  for cannons, too. Supply management has its own balance to maintain, too: the more sailors on board your ship, the faster you sail, and the easier a time you'll have in general. But also, more sailors mean that you'll burn through your supplies, too. Plus, you have to pay them a monthly wage, which will be hard to afford in the ealry part of the game, before you've established a decent income source.

 

New Horizons is a game that I've really enjoyed, a lot more than I expected to, even. It's really impressive that such a big and open game existed on consoles in the early nineties, too! The real world setting is something upon which I'm a little conflicted, though: as I said above, it makes things a little easier if you have some geographical knowledge, but also, I think it might have been a little more interesting to have the game set in a fictional world, so that the things you discover could also be fictional, and by extension, more of a surprise. But anyway, I definitely recommend giving this game a try. Especially if you're able to emulate it on a handheld!

Hellhound (X68000)

 There's a little sub-sub-genre of doujin shooting games, especially ones that came about before the Touhou series, that is "I'm gonna make my own Gradius game!", and Hellhound is one such game! It's got a few mechanical ideas of its own, but they're all built upon a scaffold made of the bones of Gradius, like the third Mechagodzilla being built around the bones of the original monster from 1954. And, like you can see just by looking at the screenshots, it's definitely very heavily inspired by the aesthetics of Konami's series: space moai, organic tunnels and all.

 

The first big difference makes itself known before you even start playing the game: you're presented with a menu from which you pick two normal weapons and two sub-weapons. Then when you're in-game, you'll collect orange power-ups to upgrade your weapons, like in Gradius. Unlike Gradius, though, you don't get to choose when the power-ups activate. Instead, each upgrade has a bunch of little boxes, one of which filled up when you get a power-up. When all of an upgrade's boxes are filled in, you get the upgrade. There's definitely an order to how they fill up, though, it's not random.

 

So how do those choices from the start come into play? Very rarely, a blue or green power-up will appear. The blue one pertains to your main weapon, the green to your sub-weapon. If you haven't yet collected enough orange power-ups to get the related upgrade, you'll be given it straight away, but if you do have the upgrade, it'll switch to the other one of the two choices you made for that weapon at the start. Annoyingly, it does feel like there's one choice for your main weapon that's significantly better than all the others, but there's no way to only have one weapon choice.

 

One thing Hellhound's developers have improved upon compared to their inspiration is the difficulty level. It's still difficult, of course, but it doesn't feel brutal or unfair in the way that the Gradius games can. It especially does a good job of alleviating the infamous "Gradius Syndrome", the slippery slope whereby losing one life, and with it all of one's accumulated upgrades means that you'll quickly lose the rest. It does so through two small changes. The first is that your weapons are all rapid fire by default, so you're never left frantically hammering the fire button with all your might trying to desperately kill anything higher in rank than a basic popcorn enemy. The second curative, which is one I think actually turned up in later entries of the original series, is that sometimes you get to keep your options after you die. (I'm not sure exactly how this one works, but I think that if you had more than one option on death, you only lose half of them.)

 

Hellhound is a pretty good game! If you like Gradius (and I'm sure pretty much everyone likes Gradius at least a little bit), it's definitely worth a look. One final thing I have to add is that I think I discovered not only a glitch, but the game's built-in defence against it! In the first stage, there's some asteroids, that do what asteroids do in videogames and split into smaller pieces when shot. At their smallest size, they usually just fly offscreen before you can destroy them, leading me to assume that these smallest chunks were indestructible. However! There was one occasion where one such chunk just stayed in the same point on the screen. After several seconds of shooting it (a significantly longer time than they're usually onscreen, remember), it was eventually destroyed! Isn't that interesting?

Lil' Monster (Game Boy Color)

 

 Also known as Gem Gem Monster, this is a kind of monster-raising RPG, but without the RPG part. The world map is more of a fancy menu, and most of it's non-functional. According to a guide I read online, you can give items to your monster and that'll open up new map areas, and even a whole side quest about collecting five special items. But whenever I gave the requisite items to my monster, nothing happened.

 

So what does happen? The game starts with you being told that you can make a monster by putting a gem in a can and shaking it. Surprisingly, this is actually the case! From there, the main thing you do is go to the arena to enter four tournaments of increasing difficulty, and also grinding to get strong enough to win the tournaments. There really is an insane amount of grinding in this game, and I strongly recommend you have a fast forward button mapped to a convenient button (since I assume you'll be emulating it).

 

It's not a completely mindless grind, though, and this is thanks to the relationship between monsters, gems, and moves. Gems are turned into monsters, that's already been established. But gems are also moves, and there's a bit of proto-deckbuilding in here, since you've got to maintain a deck of twenty moves for your monster to use in battle. Every turn in battle, you can pick from your current hand of four, and the one you choose will be replaced by another random one from your deck.

 

When you're not at the arena, you can also go to the fields, and turn a gem into a monster for your current monster to fight. Most of the early gems will just drop a copy of themselves after you beat them. This is useful if you want to build up a bunch of useless gems to sell, but it gets more interesting a bit later, when gem-summoned monsters start dropping slightly more powerful gems after you beat them. So, this improves the range of moves you can put in your deck, and it also gives you access to better monsters. 

 

I think that your monster is actually just an incorporeal spirit, as when it's defeated in battle, it dies, and you pick a gem from your inventory to turn into your new monster. But your "new" monster has the same name, experience, and maximum HP as the old one, so it's more like reincarnation? Their attack and defence stats will be determined by their new form, though. Frustratingly, you don't ever get to see what the attack and defence stats are, though, so you just have to assume that a gem that represents a stronger move also represents a stronger monster.

 

Lil' Monster is a game that's all about boring grinding with a little bit of strategy, and a clear path of progression to string you along. Being on a handheld definitely helps its tolerability, but honestly, there are many more interesting handheld games about grinding if that's what you want, and plenty of even more interesting handheld games that aren't about grinding, too. It's better than Wolf Simulator, at least, but that's not saying much. The main reason I stopped playing after several hours, though, is getting eternally softlocked in a battle where my opponent healed every turn, and my own monster wasn't taking any damage at all for an unknown reason. So if you do decide to look into this game, save often.

Boogie Woogie Bowling (Mega Drive)

 I think, if I cast my mind back to the ancient past, this game might have received a review in an issue of SEGA Power, probably an issue numbered in the 40s. But I had no interest in sports games at all as a kid, and that review wasn't of Boogie Woogie Bowling, as the game underwent a rigorous blandification process while being brought westwards. The name was changed to "Championship Bowling", and while Boogie Woogie has a cast made up of two boys, a girl, and a xenomorph, Championship has a cast made up of two men and two women, drawn in a totally different style to the ones in Boogie Woogie. 

 

The reason I even bothered to look into this game as an adult is thanks to a bit of weird happenstance. A couple of years ago, I got a chinese clone console that has a slot for Famicom cartridges, and a slot for Mega Drive cartridges. It's a nie little machine, it's USB powered and has HDMI output, so it's very convenient to get running in the 2020s, plus it even has region and language switches for the Mega Drive games.  One little quirk it has is the power switch: in the middle, the console is switched off, push it upwards to turn the Famicom part on, and downwards to activate the Mega Drive part. Anyway, a friend's son was playing on it, and with no cartridge in the Famicom slot, tried to turn it on by pushing the switch upwards. This revealed a menu of over a hundred built-in Famicom ROMs that had been there the whole time without my knowledge! A short experiment later revealed that there was an equivalent menu of Mega Drive games, too! And Boogie Woogie Bowling was among them.

 

I have no idea, though, how I managed to recognise that it had been reskinned for a different version that I'd only ever seen in a magazine more than thirty years ago, though. The human brain really is mysterious, I guess. Anyway, it's a bowling game. It plays pretty much like any other bowling game: it's mainly based around stopping a marker that quickly moves back and forth on various power/spin/etc. meters. Isn't it strange how bowling games and golf games are so similar in how they're played? There's also a little gimmick that lets you press the face buttons while your opponent's trying to determine their ball's spin, which I think affects the speed of their marker, though I'm not totally sure on that.

 

The main mode is structured as you might expect: you bowl against various CPU opponents, gradually increasing in difficulty. A lot of these opponents will throw gutter ball after gutter ball, while some will oddly alternate between gutter balls and strikes. either way, it's a lot more merciful than the other bowling game with which I'm familiar, the Game Boy pirate cart classic World Bowling, which is absolutely merciless and demands perfect play from the outset. There's a couple of other modes, too, though these can only be played as a solo practice, or against other human players. There's split mode, which gives you sets of random pins, never a full set, and you have to clear them. In this mode, you only score points if you clear every pin. There's also bonus mode, which is more interesting: each individual pin is assigned a different points value, seemingly at random. I guess there's no CPU opponents for these modes because it would have been too complicated to program them to actually try and score properly? That's just a theory, though.

 

Boogie Woogie Bowling is an incredibly okay game. I definitely wouldn't have paid money for it on release, and I probably wouldn't today, unless it was apart of some kind of compilation or something. But if you emulate it, or find the ROM hidden away in a piece of hardware you own, it might amuse you for an hour or so. One extra thing I found interesting is that it was published in Japan by Visco, a company I definitely associate more with arcade games and the Neo Geo than with regular consoles.

Wolf Simulator (PS4)

 Or to give it its full title, Wolf Simulator: RPG Survival Animal Battle. As you might have guessed from that "please put me in someone's search results" title, this is asset flip shovelware. But I thought there was a chance, however small, that there might be something worthwhile in that realm, maybe. Plus, action games where you play as four-legged characters are usually a nice enough novelty. I'll spoil the end of the review right here: I was wrong, and this game sucks.

 

But at least it does so in enough ways that I can fill out a review of decent length talking about them. So, the premise is that you're a wolf in the United States. Though there are a couple of buildings around, and some abandonded train tracks, there are no roads, people, vehicles, or power lines. So I guess it's set some significantly distant time in the post-human future? That would explain why there's tigers and leopards and hyenas among all the normal North American animals. Like Tokyo Jungle! Anyway, you're a wolf and you've got to kill and eat other animals, while trying not to have the same happen to you. Like Tokyo Jungle! 

 

You also get missions, though they're not as interesting or varied as the ones in Tokyo Jungle. Instead, every mission is a randomly generated quota of certain animals you hve to find and kill. I suspect that the game was originally a free-to-play mobile game, as there's experience points plus two different currencies, one of which lets you skip long cooldown times involved in one of the more pointless parts of the game. That one's the coins, a tiny amount of which will be given to you for completing missions, and there's also fangs, which are given for killing other animals. Fangs are used for increasing your stats. So what do experience points do? They eventually level you up, and every other level up, you're allowed to take part in an incredibly easy boss fight against another wolf to unlock a new area in which to run around and hunt.

 

That's pretty much the entirety of the "game" part of the game. If you really want to play as a realistic animal and hunt other animals, then Tokyo Jungle is orders of magnitude better than this in every way possible, so play that instead. But there's other stuff to talk about too! Like those coins, for example! You can use them to unlock different wolves to play as. Some of these wolves actually look really cool (though I'm 99% certain every model, texture, animation, and sound in the game was probably just bought off-the-shelf), but the coins needed to unlock them would take eons of completing missions.

 

There's also another thing in the menu that lets you use coins to buy wolf puppies, smaller versions of all the different kinds of wolf you can unlock to play as. Supposedly, these puppies can follow you round and hunt with you. However, having played through something like 70-80% of the game, it never gets any mroe difficult, and I've never felt like I've needed any assistance. But they can't join you unless you keep feeding them fangs to level them up ten times. Every time you do this, the amount of fangs for the next level increases like you might expect, but so does the amount of time you have to wait before you can do that. Unless you cancel the timer by paying a huge amount of coins. So I never got a puppy past like level three or four.

 

Wolf Simulator is awful garbage. It's insidious awful garbage, though. It's blandly engaging enough that if you were in a sufficiently deep bout of depression, I can see a person idly playing it for hours, never enjoying it, but having their brain and hands occupied enough that they don't stop, either. But you deserve to waste your time on better games than this tedious, unimaginative swill. Wolf Simulator costs about £10 normally, but I got it in a sale a while back because it was 90% off. Neither price is worth it, nor, in fact, would it be worth getting for free. Like I already said: I know the idea of being a realistic animal on the hunt in an open world will be a draw for a lot of people, and if it is, then you need to play Tokyo Jungle. No-one needs to play Wolf Simulator.