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.

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.

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.