Bionic Battler (Game Boy)

 It seems like the release of the Game Boy, an incredibly popular system that was also significantly lower-powered than most of its contemporaries, was seen as something of a challenge to some developers. Games like X and Faceball 2000 sought to do things that conventional wisdom would tell you were impossible on there. And they were pretty successful, technically at least. Whether these achievements resulted in something that was actually practical or enjoyable to play is a little less clear.

 

Bionic Battler (also known as Vs. Battler) isn't quite as ambitious as the games listed above, but it is still a game that's attempting to do more than you might expect a Game Boy game to do. It's a first person deathmatch game, though it can't quite stretch as far as the incremental movement of Faceball 2000. Instead, it's got dungeon crawler-style blob movement: the map is a grid, every character always occupies exactly one square on the grid, you can only face the four cardinal directions, and you always move one space at a time.

 

So you're in the maze (the layouts of which are either selected or generated at random when the stage starts), and you and a couple of CPU partners have to hunt down your opponents, who are trying to do the same to you. You've got two weapons at your disposal: a punch that obviously only works at point blank range, and a missile that can be fired in a straight line ahead of you, but takes a few seconds to charge. Annoyingly, though, to win, you have defeat every member of your opponent's team, while they only have to defeat you. If it was too difficult to have you take control of a teammate upon defeat, they could have alternatively had a similar "captain" on the other team who needed to be defeated for an immediate win.

 

There are five difficulty levels to pick from, though there's no progression of any kind, and as far as I can tell, no way to complete the game. You just pick a level, and then either win or lose at it. I assume this means the game was actually designed with versus play in mind, which, considering that I've never seen anyone play an original Game Boy game via link cable that wasn't Pokemon, seems like an Ozymandian display of hubris. The one thing you do get when you win a match is a little cutscene where your pilot disembarks from his robot, goes into the next room, and shakes hands with a general, who gives him a laughably small amount of prize money (though there's no item shop or anything in which to spend this money).

 

Bionic Battler, unless you cajole someone into playing it against you, isn't much more than a temporarily amusing display of technical achivement. I guess that if it was one of only a few cartridges you owned as a kid in the actual early nineties, you'd probably get a lot of play out of it, and you wouldn't have a bad time doing so, either. But in the year 2024, you're going to play it for a few minutes, and then probably never think about it ever again.

Card Captor Sakura: Sakura Card de Mini Game (Game Boy Advance)

 This isn't the first Card Captor Sakura game I've covered, and it definitely won't be the last. One interesting quality it has, though, is the amount of unique graphics it uses for each stage. I think it's worth mentioning up here in the first paragraph because the show itself is well known for Sakura wearing a different costume in every episode, preventing the producers from saving money by reusing animatons and requiring new reference sheets for every episode. Kind of like how here, it requires a whole new set of sprites for every stage, which is pretty inefficient, especially on a cartridge-based system like the GBA.

 

The game's set during the second season, when Sakura's already tamed all of the Clow cards, and is then using her own power to turn them into her own Sakura cards. That's not really important, though. The game's format follows that of the show, where rather than engaging every card's spirit in battle, Sakura has to best them in some kind of challenge. As such, every stage is, like the title suggests, a different mini-game. They're generally about  a minute long each, and they're pretty varied.

 

There's a rhythm game stage, a Bubble Bobble-like single screen platformer, a racing game where you have to rhythmically tap the A button to build up speed on your rollerblades, a stage where you use the sword card to cut chains that are trying to capture Xiaolang, and a bunch more. Some of them are moderately fun, some of them are tedious, none of them particularly stand out as being especially bad
or good, though. That's a problem in itself, but it's not the biggest problem the game has.

 

The biggest problem is for almost all of the mini-games, there's no score, they play the same every time, and a lot of them will even last the exact same amount of time every time you play them. So once you've played a mini-game once and performed well enough to get past it in the story mode, there isn't really anything driving you to go back and play it ever again (and none of them are exciting enough to lure you back intrinsically, either). Since they're about a minute long each, that means that even including the cutscenes (told using text boxes and very tiny screenshots of the TV show), the game's about an hour long, and you're unlikely to ever go back and replay it, unless you happen to be in the target audience of a very young child with very indiscriminating tastes and a small library of games to play. There is also a pretty pointless paint program included too, I guess in an attempt to address that problem.

 

Though none of them ever got released outside of Japan (despite the show being pretty popular in the UK and North America), there were quite a few Card Captor Sakura games released during the time the show was on the air, and out of the ones I've played so far, this is definitely the worst. You really aren't missing out if you pass this one by. The best things I can say about it are that it looks okay and the language barrier isn't going to be a problem.

Small Games #9!

 It's been three years since the last small games post, but I was recently playing random MSX games and discovered two platform games that were cute, fun, and interesting, but not really complex enough to carry posts of their own. The first is the oddly-titled Rise Out From Dungeon, and it's a little bit of a Lode Runner knock off, with gold bars, pursuing guards, and the ability to temporarily destroy the blocks that make up the platforms.

 

The way the guards move in particular is very similar to Lode Runner: they'll try to match your position horizontally before trying to match it vertically. They'll follow this pattern even if it means getting themselves trapped or falling to their deaths! It's the differences that really make it worthwhile, though. Firstly, your digging tool is very different to the one in Lode Runner. Rather than diffing a hole in one of the blocks next to the one on which you're standing, you instead have a gun that lets you shoot away blocks on the same height as you, even from across the screen. 

 

The other big difference is that you don't have to collect every gold bar before exiting the stage. Some stages have locked doors, and one of the bars will contain a key that you have to find before you can open the door, but otherwise, you can just rush to the exit if you aren't bothered about score. I really like the way this game looks, with your character represented by a little white stickman, and the enemies are red stickmen. It's all very tiny and cute, almost the bare minimum amount of pixels used to represent each object in the game.

 

The other game I'll talk about today is Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, in which you play as a lagomorph dockworker, trying to get crate to a ship while being chased and harassed by villainous white blobs. It's a platform game with stages that are only one screen wide, but they scroll vertically. You start at the top of each stage, and there's crates littered about (but not randomly!). When you walk past a crate, it drops down to the platform below. 

 

At the bottom of the stage, there's a cargo ship sailing back and forth, and you've got to get all of the crates onto it. Or at least, as many of them as you can. There's no penalty for just dropping crates into the ocean, but getting them on the ship is essential for getting a good score. There are also blocks that can be hit from below to reveal power ups, like in Mario, though it's slightly awkward in that they don't move, so you've got to descend, hit the block, then climb back up to get the item. It's usually worth it, though, as there's a common carrot item that temporarily makes you invincible, and a rarer yellow smiley face that just immediately ends the stage (good for progress, but very bad for scoring). Both these games are great, and I definitely recommend you give them a try, and it feels like a great bit of luck that I found them both consecutively.

Fuuun Shaolin Ken (Famicom Disk System)

 I think this game's title translates to something like "Elements of the Shaolin Fist", which sounds like the English title of a Shaw Bros. movie. Which is appropriate, since there is quite a bit of a Shaw Bros. feel to the game. It's an early fighting gam,e of the single-player style that was the norm before Street Fighter II, and you play as a generic kung fu guy who fights a series of opponents, each with different gimmicks, a lot like Konami's much more famous arcade game Yie Ar Kung Fu. But I think Fuuun Shaolin Ken has enough of its own quirks to be interesting as more than an also-ran knock-off.

 

There's a lot of personality in it right from the start. Your first two opponents are two palette swapped kung fu fighters with ponytails (who I've chosen to interpret as identical twin siblings - you fight the sister first, then the brother), nect there's two giant opponents who are disappointingly boring and very easy once you figure out the trick to beating them. Then there's two rotund opponents, each with a strange and unique special power, and after them, a fight that's interesting from a technical, as well as a design standpoint.

 

The seventh stage sees you fight another kung fu duo, but this time you fight both at the same time. Obviously, this is a lot more difficult than before, even though they share the same amount of health as each other individual opponent, but more interestingly is how this fight is done. I assume all the characters must be made up of multiple sprites, since to have three fighters in the game at once, your twin opponents only exist on alternating frames. This is a cool bit of ingenuity, but it also has the slightly annoying side effect that it's impossible to take a screenshot of the two of them together! Still, I love these little tricks developers did to squeeze a little more out of eight bit systems, and I don't think I've seen this particular one before.

 

The stages are represented as temples on a hill, and judging by the hill, there's still several more stages I haven't seen, but this is a difficult game as it is, and at the time of writing, having to fight off two opponents at once is the wall I've hit. I've managed to get them down to their very last bit of health a few times, so I think I'll break through eventually, but I do also have to stop playing and write this review at some point, right? 

 

I've been enjoying this game a lot, and as I inferred in the previous paragraph, I'm probably going to keep playing it onwards. So obviously, I recommend giving it a try yourself. It's a little user-unfriendly in the way that original home games from the eighties often are, but get through that, and there's a fun and surprisingly atmospheric little game to be found.