Soccer Brawl (Neo Geo CD)

I've recently developed an interest in the extra features added to the CD versions of Neo Geo games, and I've long had an interest in the less popular games on consoles that are themselves pretty niche. Soccer Brawl, though it's definitely one of the less popular Neo Geo CD games, unfortunatelly doesn't have much in the way of extras. All there is is some short animations about an unlucky inventor trying to create a soccer-playing robot, that play as half time entertainment.

 

But the games itself is still pretty good! It's one of only three games developed by short-lived SNK sub-studio Pallas, with their most famous release also being a futuristic sports game, 2020 Super Baseball, which is more famous on account of it being ported to SNES and Mega Drive. Despite the name, though, Soccer Brawl isn't as violent as most future sports games based on soccer. There's regular tackling, as well as two other ways to hurt opponents: you if you don't have the ball, you can hold the kick button for a second and release it to fire an energy blast that can stun a player, and if you do have the ball, the same command kicks the ball super-hard (because all of the players are enhanced cyborgs, of course). This super-hard kick is useful for scoring goals, and for knocking down opponents. 

 

There's a couple of interesting things to note about the above, too. The first is that the game does have friendly fire for all forms of attack, so when things are crowded, you might want to be careful. Or alternatively, if you want to score, you might want to kick the ball with no regard as to who might be in the way. The other thing is that among the eight teams, there are four different kinds of super-kicks, there being two teams able to use each one. I think these are activated if you kick the ball at full strangth more than half the field's length away from your opponent's goal. These might have the ball moving in a big circle while on fire before shooting towards the goal, or the ball might split into to balls that dance around each other as they head toward the goal, and so on. Like a regular super-hard kick, these are very useful in both scoring goals, and incapacitating enemy players.

 

Like I said, it's a lot less violent than most games of this type. In all the games I've played, there's been no times where a player had to leave the game from being too beaten up, let alone players getting killed like you might see in some other titles. There is a nice little detail, though: players that have taken damage a few times will start to have smoke or electric sparks coming off of them, suggesting some damage death, or strain being put upon their cybernetic components. I don't think it actually has any effect on their ability to play, but it is a cool detail. I kind of want to say it's a shame that all the teams are just re-coloured sets of the exact same players (albeit with different supers and presumably different stats), but to be fair: we can't really expect a developer to ome up with eight teams' worth of individual characters from nothing, for a game in a genre whos players almost definitely won't notice or care compared to fighting game fans.

 

Soccer Brawl is a pretty fun game! The only big problems I can really accuse it of are ones that are kind of inherent to being a sports game of this type. If one team gets more than a few points ahead and there isn't much time left in the match, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up, but there's no option to concede (or for the game to automatically end early if there's a score gap of a certain size). Furthermore, if you happen to be the player on the upside of such a score gap, you can pretty much stop trying. If the gap's a few points, it's very easy to get the ball and just run around doing nothing to run out the clock, and if the gap's more than that, you can just stop playing and do something else for a while. Still, I've had some fun with it, and it's a nice little, very nineties sci-fi sports game. 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (Playstation)

 There are a few ways I've seen train driving simulators displays things. Polygons are the most common, and there's also a few on less powerful hardware that do sprite scaling (or, on even less powerful hardware, there's imitation sprite scaling). There's also FMV, which I think is most famously used in the Japanese Rail Sim series on 3DS, which use as their graphics actual high quality video footage of real train journeys. 

 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (which is also listed on some sites as "Hassha Ourai! Gatan Goton") uses FMV, but in a move that possibly makes it the cutest of all train driving games, it places you in the cockpits of various model trains, travelling through actual footage of tiny little model towns with cardboard buildings and little plastic construction workers! Despite the use of models, though, I think it's still working under the conceit that you'r driving a real train, as the cockpits surrounding the window in which the FMV plays are unique to each train, and pretty detailed too. The levers and dials move when they're supposed to, there's a little light that comes one when you're meant to start moving, and so on.

 

It's all very cute and charming! The game itself is kind of constrained by being what it is. I guess the train enthusiasts who are the target audience for the genre want exactly one thing from these games and one thing alone: to drive a train in as close a manner to driving an actual game as possible. So, just like Densha De Go and SL De Ikou and all the others, you can control acceleration and brakes, and you've got to get to a series of stations along your route, making sure to keep to the speed limits, arrive as close to exactly on time as you can, and to stop at the exact line on the platform at which you're expected. It does have one difference that makes it stand out from the others in the genre, though: it's a lot easier!

 

Densha De Go, the most famous example of the genre is known for being completely merciless when players don't play completely perfectly. N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton is a lot more forgiving, though: you can be up to ten seconds late when arriving, and you can go a few metres over the line without getting a game over. Also, on some stages, there's something strange that happens where another train will attach itself to your train and just drive you to the next station, with no input from you necessary. I don't know why this happens, or why you'd put in a part of your game where it essentially just plays itself for part of a stage. 

 

If you've enjoyed literally any other game in this genre, or if you've tried but found them too difficult, then you can probably already figure out if you want to play this one. If not, and you're interested, it's probably a good first game to try out. I've been really enjoying it, and the use of miniatures gives a unique and very appealling look. It's definitely worth your time, I think.

Air Diver (Mega Drive)

 I've started to unkindly describe Ace Combat-style 3D aerial combat games as "slowly following a little dot on your radar waiting until you can actually see and fire a homing missile at the enemy", and while that's pretty bad in actual 3D games with polygon graphics where you and the enemies actually occupy positions in a properly defined space. Air Diver bravely attempts to make a game in that genre using only 2D sprites, which aren't even actually scaling, since it's a Mega Drive game!

 

I can see why the developers wanted to try doing this: Afterburner II is a pretty good game, and it fared surprisingly well in its port to Mega Drive, so why not try putting together a game with the homing missile-based gameplay of Afterburner II, but instead of being a completely linear rail shooter, try and simulate a more realistic scenario, where the same enemy planes can fly all around you? The problem is that becuse this is a faux-sprite scaling game, you can only fly straight ahead, with the ability to kind of do a barrel roll or a loop being the extent of your maneuverability.

 

This means that when enemy planes fly behind you, all you can really do is a loop, to try and fly over and behind them. Or at least, that's what I thought, but this only puts the enemy in front of you some of the time. Similarly, enemies will often fly off to the side, and there's just no effective way to chase them there either. So even worse than chasing the little radar dots, you spend the majority of your time in this game waiting for the dots to place themselves within your field of vision.

 

Making this even worse is the way the stages are structured. There's three parts to each: first, you fight lots of regualr enemy planes, who all die in one hit. Then, a single super-plane, that's a different colour, and takes a bunch of hits to kill. Finally, each stage has some kind of gigantic futuristic sky fortress thing, that's so big it has to be portrayed as a background, rather than a sprite. The super-plane is the hardest of the three on all of the stages I've tried, as the fortresses just need you to constonatly shoot and move until they're dead. No chasing or aiming necessary!

 

Mentioning the fortresses makes me think that I should bring up the game's threadbare, but also absurd plot. A previously unknown terrorist organisation from the middle east has suddenly taken over the entire world. Despite being an unknown, unnamed organisation, they have hundreds (possibly thousands) of fighter planes, as well as the aforementioned giant sky fortresses. The only part of the world left unconquered is an airbase in the south Pacific, from whence a flying transporter containing your plane is deployed to save the world.

 

This does actually bring up a structural point to the game that doesn't make it more fun, but which is slightly interesting. You can tackle the stages in any order, and each one also tells you an estimated chance of success on the world map screen. However, your transport has a limited amount of fuel, and there is, according to the manual, a specific route that you have to figure out to be able to tackle every stage without running out of transporter fuel (which means an instant game over).

 

In case you haven't already figured it out, I didn't really enjoy Air Diver. It's a shame, because it looks kind of cool, and the soundtrack is pretty good, too. But unfortunately, it's a boring, frustrating chore, and not worth your time. I am kind of curious about the two sequels that apparently came out on SNES, though. Which that system's focus on scaling and rotation, maybe it's able to do a better job of realising the developers' ambitions?

Purified (PS Vita)

 

 This game apparently came out a while ago, though I only learned of it last week (and, to be fair, it does still call itself Ver 0.9, so I guess it's still not totally complete). Most PS Vita homebrew so far has been either ports of PC and Android games, or various utilities, with a few fairly small-scale games here and there, too. I don't want to diminish any of those things, they all contribute to making the Vita a fun console to own. But Purified has really blown me away. This could easily have been a full commercial release!

 

It's a third person shooter, with a very turn-of-the-century edgy mallgoth look to it, in which you play as a beefy space-catholic cyborg tasked with killing the endless hordes of demonic cyborgs and their possessed victims that are beseiging the last human city. This war takes the form of three survival skirmish stages, which can be played in any order. You pick one, and you fight against increasingly difficult waves of enemies and sometimes bosses. They aren't endless, as one of the stats tracked is how many times you've won each stage (though my total for all three is still currently zero), and I suspect there might be a secret fourth stage, based on some of the in-game text?

 

Which brings me onto the subject of what an amazingly complete package this game is! As well as the game's three main stages, there's also an optional tutorial stage, which is its own complete map with unique models and textures and stuff. There's a sound test, which lets you listen to the game's soundtrack (obviously), while looking at a rotating 3D model of a soundtrack CD case. There's even an ingame encyclopedia, with pictures and lore for every character, location, weapon, item, and concept in the game! And like you can tell from the screenshots, this looks like an actual game put out by a big company (maybe a game that was put out twenty-five years ago, but a big company game nonetheless). 

 

Is the game actually good, though? Yes! It didn't click with me at first, and a few aspects felt a little clunky, like how you can't just shoot, you have to hole L to aim, then press R to shoot, and you have to press a seperate reload button to reload, rather than the fire button doing it when you're empty. But after a few plays, the game's vision really became clear: you're this big heavy man-monster, you have to consider every action because the actions are weighty. This weight, of course, makes the actions all the more satisfying, and there's some great smaller design decisions that have been made that play into that. For example, the first few enemies in a stage will typically be these skinless people who are much shorter than you and not much threat at all, and those few seconds you get to spend casually walking around, thoughtlessly slicing them up with your melee attack are a very fun warm for what's to come.

 

I definitely recommend this game, I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I think it'll remain a mainstay on my Vita for a long time to come. An interesting thing about its distribution is that while you can get it for free from VitaDB, you can also pay what you want on itch, which I think makes it the only PS Vita game you can digitally buy in 2025! The only really negative thing I have to say about it is that one time I had to exit a stage via the pause menu because something went wrong, and no enemies were spawning!

Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M (3DS)

 It seems slightly incongruous for there to be a first party Nintendo game here, but it's one that doesn't even seem like it's been forgotten in the decade since its release, but rather no-one took any notice of it at all. They did try to build hype for it, and I definitely remember downloading the demo at the time, too. But no-one cared. If people were buying and playing it in 2015, then they weren't talking about it, and with it being a decade old now and with the 3DS having a minor renaissance in 2025 (thanks to the combination of broke nostalgic young people and the high price of new consoles - exactly how "retro gaming" should be!), I still don't see anyone talking about it.

 

Code Name S.T.E.A.M is a turn-based strategy game, with some mild action elements. You control a squad of very toyetic soldiers, with steam-powered armour and weapons. Moving a space uses up one unit of steam, different weapons use different amounts to fire, usually between two and four. Each of your soldiers generates eight steam per turn, and can store up to ten (though these numbers will change slightly as you unlock more equipment). So if you leave a couple of steam units at the end of a turn, they'll carry over into the next turn. Furthermore, when you fire weapons, you don't just select your target and pick "fire" from a menu: you've got to aim and fire yourself, either using a joystick on the touchscreen, or the right analogue stick if you're playing on a New 3DS.

 

I've played about ten stages so far, and all of them have had the goal of getting at least one of your soldiers (or in one case, an escorted non-combatant) to a goal area on the other side of the battlefield. After a few turns, more enemies will start generating on the map, so if you have infinite patience, you could theoretically keep killing them forever. But the battles also tend to be pretty tight, with my guys often just barely crawling over the finish line to end a lot of the battles. I think this whole semi-turn-based approach might be taken from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles series, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I can't completely confirm this. 

 

As well as the toyetic protagonists, the game as a whole has a distinct aesthetic to it, too. The tech is all steam=powered, and your homebase is a blimp, but a lot of the fashion and such looks more inspired by 1930s and 40s military uniforms, and the world in general is a mixture of lots of brss and polished wood, with American and British flags draped everywhere. It kind of brings to mind a theoretical Fallout cartoon, made for an audience of kids in 1994. (I'll take this opportunity to make clear that I don't consider a work to be "steampunk" unless it's explicitly anti-imperialist, and since the aforementioned non-combatant you have to escort is Queen Victoria, this game definitely isn't that.)

 

This is a decent enough game, I guess. Playing through a stage is a decent enough way to pass twenty minutes or so, and there is some satisfaction to be derived from the active aiming, plus some of the sillier weapons are a lot of fun too, like the Lion Launcher (wielded by a lion-man named Lion, it makes him bounce on top of enemies for big damage), and the healing gun. Plus, if you play it, you can put it on your list of "3DS hidden gems" for internet clout, since I haven't seen anyone do that so far. Also uncharacteristically for a first party Nintendo game, you can pick up an actual copy for a pittance, if you are a cartridge-accumulating little freak.

Saikyou! Takada Nobuhiko (SNES)

 The early-mid nineties were a time of great experimentation in the world of professional wrestling, both in terms of presentational style and in terms of the actual way wrestling was done. I think to most western fans, the most famous part of this experimentation is from the hardcore style as seen in ECW, FMW and Big Japan, that would eventually go on to be copied (in a watered-down form) by WWE for their massively popular attitude era. But there were other innovations taking place at that time, including in a Japanese promotion called UWFi, where an almost opposite approach was being taken.

 

UWFi took note of the rising popularity of kickboxing, mixed martial arts, and other legitimate combat sports, and sought to create a wrestling style that emulated them, and it's this style upon which Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko is based. (It also takes the very early nineties approach of only featuring one real wrestler, fighting renamed unlicensed versions of other wrestlers.) Thie results in a game that plays very differently to any other, not least because the UWFi used a completely different ruleset than that seen in mainstream wrestling promotions. Furthermore, the action takes place on a single plane, like a contemporaneous fighting game (but in keeping with the shoot style, there's no jumping and not really any special moves).

 

There are a few rulesets in the game, but the main (and most interesting) one is the main ruleset used by UWFi. Matches have a thirty minute time limit, and wrestlers also start each match with fifteen points each. One point is lost when a wrestler is suplexed, or when they escape a submission hold by grabbing the ropes. Three points are lost if a wrestler is down on the floor long enough for the referee to start the ten count. If a wrestler submits to a hold, fails to answer a ten count, or if they're reduced to zero points, they lose the match. In game terms, the wrestlers have two health bars in addition to the fifteen points. 

 

One of the bars regenerates quickly, and when it's depleted, the wrestler goes down and loses three points, while the player has to hammer their controller buttons to try and get back up before the referee counts to ten. The other bar regenerates very slowly, but it only goes down while a wrestler is in a submission hold. When it runs out, they tap and immediately lose the match. Also, while in a submission hold, both wrestlers' players can use the shoulder buttons to edge closer to the ropes or to the centre of the ring.

 

I wouldn't say this is a fun game exactly, and I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to it after this review. But I am always interested in videogames that have people fighting or engaging in combat sports with rules and win conditions that aren't just the typical fighting game knockouts or standard pro-wrestling rules. So I do recommend playing it at least a couple of times to experience that, and maybe it'll click better for you than it did for me. But that's my opinion on it really: not a game I loved, but a game that's interesting and worthy of attention. Also, I hope I wasn't embarassingly incorrect on all the wrestling history back at the start of the review, this kind of shoot style-stuff is a little outside my normal circle of interest. (A little extra note: though I don't often reply to comments on this blog, I do read and appreciate them all.)

Guardians (Arcade)

Also known as Denjin Makai II, this is a game that I'm not totally sure about including. It's very well known among arcade fans, but conversely, it's almost totally unknown to everyone else. There's some reasons for this, like it being a beat em up that came out just a year or two after that genre's original heyday was on the wane. Plus it's in at that level of technology where it was way too advanced for a port to the Mega Drive or SNES (in fact, the game to which it's a sequel got a SNES port for which a lot of compromises had to made, so this one had no chance), but a lot of people would have ignorantly stuck their noses up in the air at a port to Saturn or Playstation.

 

It's a massive shame too, as it might well be the best beat em up from before the recent genre renaissance. You constantly have a whole bunch of attack options, and it offers superior solutions to some long-standing problems the genre had back then. There's a whole bunch of characters to choose from, all of whom are wildly different in design: there's a ninja and a kung fu guy, a big triceratops-man, a very Shiar Empire-looking bird-girl, a muscle-bound soldier, and more. Though the controls are the same for all of them, they all feel very different to play as. Not only do they have different attacks, and different speed/damage/etc. stats, but there's little things, too, like how they utilise weapons, or how much meter their different specials consume.

 

Because this is a game that has both special moves and meter. There's three action buttons in the game: melee, jump, and projectile. Like pretty much any other beat em up, you can repeatedly press melee for combos, and you can also press it with a direction while you're jumping for a few different air attacks. None of that uses up meter, of course, but you have several different options that do. There's the traditional all-around emergency attack, and it did feel pretty liberating once I realised it uses meter rather than health, and there's the projectile attack, which is very useful and uses the most meter for most characters. Finally, each character has a couple of special moves, performed by holding the melee button and either moving the stick side-to-side or up-and-down. That might be a slightly awkward-sounding input method, and in a fighting game, I think it would be (it brings to mind Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), but in a beat em up it works really well. You can quickly learn to hold the button at the end of a combo and immediately go into a special.

 

As well as mechanically, there's lots to love in the game's theme and aesthetics, too. The setting is some kind of futuristic dystopia, though not one that's suffered environmental collapse, as locations include various kinds of big cities, a theme park, a moving train, a forest, a military base in the desert, and more. They all look amazing, with lots of super-detailed pixel art. The enemies are very varied, too, with futuristic soldiers (including what appears to be some kind of penal regiment with their wrists in pillories), a few different superhero-like characters, and weirder things like big-eyed humanoid crocodile monsters. The one weak point I can think of in this area is the boss music, which sounds more like it should be on the options screen of a sports game.

 

Obviously I recommend playing Guardians, it's excellent. It works fine in both MAME and Final Burn Neo, and since Hamster have put out a few Banpresto games already, it'll hopefully turn up in the Arcade Archives series someday. How nice it'll be to finally play a legal version of this game on a home console, a mere thirty years late!

Hataraku Chocobo (Wonderswan Color)

 So, this has been unplayed in my Wonderswan folder for quite a while. The main thing I knew about it was that it's a board game, and most board game videogames follow a very time consuming roll-and-move money accumulation format, presumably due to the populatiry of Game of Life in Japan. So I was putting off playing it. But it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool this whole time, because against my expectations, it's a pretty fast-paced Euro-style worker placement game! Which is doubly surprising, as it came out in 2000, and that wasn't a particularly common or well-known genre in actual board games back then, let alone in videogame board games!

 

The premise is a little unsavoury: humans have "discovered" a continent inhabited by chocobo, who, while they can't talk, they are capable of using tools and following instructions, so can be considered sapient. Of course, the humans (including you) set about enslaving the indigenous population and stripping the land of resources. So, you start each map with three chocobo in your employ, and you assign them a job (there are four jobs, each of them gathering a different resource), and take them to the part of the map (there are eight such locations to a map, with your homebase in the centre square) where you want them to do that job. Each space has a different yield of each resource, and each turn there's a weather effect that will also affect these yields, usually increasing one of them. You can also find wild chocobo roaming the map, that you can capture to increase your stock of workers.

 

The four resources are greens, logs, water, and ore. The more chocobos you have, the more greens you need at the end of each turn: if you don't have enough, there's a chance that one of your chocobos will run away. Water determines how many things you can do in a turn. Walking around is free, but most actual actions (capturing a chocobo, distracting chocobo belonging to one of your rivals, assigning a chocobo to a task or location) will use some of your water. Logs and ore are also consumed when assigning tasks to chocobo. So you have to use these resources to actually get anything done, but you're also given coins for how many you have left over at the end of each turn. The player with the most coins at the end of the game wins!

 

Between turns, there's also two additional things to deal with: auctions and trading. Auctions are the part where you can really make some big profits if you're lucky, as you can often trade one resources for multiples of another. Since they're all worth one coin (I'm pretty sure), you can really bolster your takings here. Trading is more of an act of desperation. If you really need a particular resource, you can trade two of another resource for one of the one you want. Interestingly, the bank with which you trade also has a limited supply of each resource, so you might sometimes have to hope that someone else trades in the one you want or else you'll just have to go without.

 

Interestingly, winning isn't particularly important. Obviously, it's more satisfying to win, and it unlocks new stages quicker, but really, all you have to do is ensure that the total score of all the players is above a certain amount fo the game to be considered a success. This kind of "communal competition" kind of brings to mind the 2019 board game Red Outpost, though I doubt that the designers of that game ever played this one to be influenced by it. Turn order in both the game itself and the between-turn economic sections is affected by your current ranking, too (the highest-ranked player goes last, and so on), so you might want to hold back early in the game, so you're able to go first and place your chocobo in the best locations before they fill up.

 

Hataraku Chocobo is a really fun game! It's pretty unique as far as videogames go, too, so it's a shame that it's never been ported to anything else besides the Wonderswan, and that it only exists in English thanks to a fan translation. Hopefully someday Square will remember they made it and put a new version on Switch, maybe with multiplayer and maybe also a new, less uncomfortable storyline! Until then, it's definitely worth your time to emulate!

War Games: Defcon 1 (Playstation)

 Two of the first things you'll be confronted with regarding this game are anachronisms. Firstly, it's a tie-in to a movie released fifteen years earlier, and secondly, despite being released in 1998, this game has no save option, and if you want to keep your progress, you have to do so via a password system! But what is the game? It's one that has very little in common with the movie whose name it bears, being a 3D shooting game that plays kind of like an inferior spin-off from the Strike series of games. No hacking or global tension here at all!

 

So, you can play as either NORAD (humans in tanks and jeeps and such) or WOPR (various different robot things), and you're  given a series of worldwide missions, which mainly involve going to part of a map, killing all the enemies there, then going to a different part of the map and killing everyone there. It's all kind of arbitrary, especially if you accidentally wander to the wrong part of the map and kill the enemies there, at which point you'll fail the mission, literally being told you did things in the wrong order and ruined everything. Compare to the aforementioned Strike games, in which you could mostly take on a stage's objectives in any order, and sometimes there might be a tactical advantage to be gained from taking things in a certain order.

 

There's other problems, too. The biggest being the controls. Though there's lots of vehicles to control in the game, they all control the same, and they all use the "swivel and accelerate" system (or "tank controls," if you prefer), with no capacity for strafing. Furthermore, you can only shoot directly in front of you in all of them. So combat against other units means you and one enemy staying still and shooting at each other until one of you explodes. If the enemy explodes , you move on and do the same thing to the next one. If you explode, either you start back at your base with the next vehicle in your allocation for the current stage, or if you were already on the final one, you fail the mission. 

 

Aesthetically, it's fine I guess. It's got a similar look to other western-developed Playstation games that take place on battlefields, the one that keeps coming to mind in particular being Populous: The Beginning, despite the wildly different themes and settings between the two games. But there's nice terrain, cute little buildings decorating the place, and so on. I even really like the models for some of the NORAD vehicles! Something I have to address, though, is that the game does suffer from "the western mecha problem": all of the mecha are just ugly grey boxes plopped on top of a pair of chicken legs like a mechanical version of Baba Yaga's hut. The more powerful the mecha, the bigger the grey box, and not a single arm or hint of aesthetic flair among them.

 

Despite all the bad things I've had to say about War Games Defcon 1, I actually don't hate this game. It's okay. I think if you were to pick it up, you'd probably play a couple of stages, think to yourself "that was alright, I'll have to get back to it some time", and then you'll never play or think about it ever again. But you probably won't hate it!