Bad Boy Brother (Switch)

 This game has another title, and once you know it, you'll also know why I was so excited to pre-order it as soon as I knew it existed: Simple Series for Switch vol. 5: Yankii Bros! The Simple series is back (and has been for four previous entries)! With a beat em up about juvenile delinquents! It's almost like they made this game specifically because they knew I was finally going to get a Switch this year or something.

 

It's not just in name only, either, as this is a game that really does keep the Simple spirit alive, for all the good and bad that implies. It's a game with several (too many?) ideas that all tie together well thematically that was also clearly a passion project for its creators. Also, it's got a whole bunch of randomness and grinding, and a ton of stuff to unlock, including both stat upgrades and new special moves. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad. And also: videogames are a creative medium, and most of the things we consider good practice are "rules" rather than "laws". (Of course there are some exceptions: real money shops and gambling are always indefensible and to a game's detriment, as are the dark patterns present in almost every modern phone game. I can't imagine there ever being exceptions there.)

 

What the game is is a beat em up, that uses a vague roguelike structure to facilitate some traditional Simple asset reuse and playtime extension. Each stage has five segments, the first four of which will see you fighting many enemies. They'll either give you a quota of enemies to beat, or an amount of time you have to survive/beat as many enemies as you can. The fifth segment will always be a boss fight, though the bosses are randomly chosen from a small pool for each stage. Before each stage, you'll be dealt a hand of twelve mahjongg tiles, which correspond to various stat and ability uprades. The upgrades increase exponentially when you get matching tiles, and even more if you're able to form scoring hands with them. After each segment, you're given a chance to swap out tiles from your hand with a random selection of four. After you complete a whole stage, you keep all the tile and hand-based upgrades you had at the end of it, then get dealt a whole new hand to get further upgrades.

 

Furthermore, there are aliases. Theses are made at random when you score triple sevens on the roulette at the top of the screen, which turns when you fill up a meter by hitting enemies a lot. They're made at random from words that enemies "drop" (also at random) as you're fighting them. They're always made up of an adjective half that determines their effect, and a noun half that applies a multiplier to the effect. Also they're always nonsense like "Jobless Chihuahua" or "House-Moving Sinbad", because of the multiple layers of randomness involved in their formation. There's also a shop to access between runs, where you use coins earned by defeating lots of enemies to buy more advantageous tiles to add to the pool, special moves performed by bosses you've beaten, and more.

 

Like I said, there are exceptions to many "rules" of what makes a good game, and while I usually hate randomness and upgrades in action games, Bad Boy Brother feels good enough that I can easily overlook them here. It's also admirably committed to its setting. You might expect a budget game that happens to include an English translation to be dry and functional, but all the text, even stuff like the game telling you it's loading or saving your savefile is written "in character", with a little cartoony tough guy edge to it. The most insane (and probably most expensive) bit of flavour is that there's a constant expository rap going on as you play, too. It's always in Japanese, and you'll be too busy playing the game to read the subtitles, but they are there, and it's just another sign of the commitment and passion the developers had for this game.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but I really like this game, and I enthusiastically recommend it. It's just a ton of fun to play! It's got a worldwide release as a download, but even if you import a cartridge copy from Japan, it includes English and Chinese language options. Not only is it a good game, but it also gives me hope that the Simple series is truly back, and in the hands of people who are willing to keep up its silly, fun, experimental tradition.

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love Basketball (Saturn)

 I saw some gifs of this game on Bsky a few months ago, and it immediately made its way on my to-play list. You can see from the screenshots that it looks pretty good, but it looks even better in motion! Big, well-drawn sprites that were it not for the concessions made for the purposes of being in a game, could feasibly have been taken straight from animation cels, with animation to match. But, of course: there are many anime tie-ins that look great and don't have much else going for them, so is this game any good?

 

Before answering that question, there are some other things I really need to address. The main one being my lack of interest in basketball, and by extension, my ignorance regarding things like tactics and team positions and so on. Because even though this game is a tie-in to an anime about basketball rather than a real basketball league, it still takes a pretty in-depth approach to the game. Between selecting a team and starting a match, you'll be asked to assign team members to positions, and to select formations for your team to take when they're on the offence and when they're defending. So I can't really speak to how well the game handles these things, beyond saying that it's pretty funny that if you pick Shohoku High School's team, and just go with everyone in default positions, Sakuragi is left on the bench

 

Actually in-game, it all seems to work pretty well. There's a lot of sprite scaling going on as players run towards or away from the camera, which looks great. You use the d-pad for moving around like you'd expect, and the A, B, and C buttons do different things depending on whether or not you've got the ball. With the ball, A dribbles, B passes, and C shoots (I think, but I'm not sure, that shooting relies on some kind of probability equation involving your player's stats, their distance from the basket, and how long they've had the ball with them.). While if you don't have it, A gets in the way of the guy with the ball, B jumps to try and block their shots, and C tries to take the ball off of them. 

 

The camera always looks in one direction, with the court stretching off into the distance, one basket all the way at the back, one right at the front. It keeps things simple, and it always being at the same angle allows for the aforementioned detailed, well-animated sprites. I think there might have been an arcade basketball game that used a similar set up, but I'm not sure about that. It works, and like I keep mentioning: it looks great! The menus look a little less great, but in a very charming, very nineties kind of way: lots of multi-coloured WordArt on display, for example.

 

From TV Animation Slam Dunk: I Love BasketBall is a pretty decent little game. I can't play it well at all, and haven't won a single match yet, but I've come close a few times! One thing I should also mention is that not only does it allow you to play matches with twenty minute long halves, but if you want to play story mode, you don't get a choice, and you'll have to play these insanely long matches, presumably racking up massive scores over time, too. For as much as I've praised the game, I haven't been able to get through even half of one of these real time matches. But there is a versus CPU mode (and a two player versus mode, of course) that lets you play with more reasonable settings. I think it's at least worth giving a try if you're curious, or if like any other normal person with good taste, you love sprite scaling.

Building Crush! (Playstation)

 This is a hard post to write, and one I really hoped I wouldn't have to. The reason it's a hard post to write is because Building Crush! is an awful game, and everytime I loaded it up, I dreaded actually playing it. The reason I hoped that I wouldn't have to write it is because I'd originally planned to write about a differrent Playstation game, Buckle Up. Buckle Up is a pretty interesting semi-open world driving game that I think is kind of inspired by Dukes of Hazzard? But unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get past the first mission, so here's Building Crush! instead.

 

Building Crush! is a colour-matching puzzle game themed around the idea of competitive building demolition (or crushing, if you will). You and your opponent each stand on a window-washer's platform in front of a tall building. The buildings are made of cubes in various colours, most with windows on them. The windows are constantly opening and closing, and you have to throw bombs into them when they're open, then detonate them. When you destroy a cube in this way, any cubes touching it that are the same colour will also explode. Furthermore, the cubes above will fall down, and if they do so in a manner that creates a formation of four or more touching cubes of the same colour, those formations will then explode, creating the traditional competitive puzzle game chain reactions. 

 

So far it doesn't sound too bad, right? The main problem is that the game is incredibly slow. Moving around is slow and throwing the bombs is slow (and made worse when a window closes and your bomb just falls down uselessly). The only way to win a round is to destroy every last cube of which your building is composed, so rounds take several long minutes to finish, and each stage is a best-of-three match. Making things worse is that some cubes don't have windows, and can only be destroy either by linking them to same-coloured ones that do, or by repeatedly (and slowly) hitting them with many bombs until they eventually crack and disappear. And no matter how well you plan things, you'll always end up with at least one of these at the end of a round.

 

Another complication comes in the form of random objects that sometimes fall down from the 'bove. If they hit you, they actually slow things down in two ways! First, you're momentarily stunned. Then, a witch will fly onscreen and change one of the windowed cubes onscreen into an unwindowed cube. It's all a shame, as I'm sure the basic concept of the game could have been fun. It needed to be a lot faster, louder and more manic, and maybe have a lot bigger explosions and maybe some numbers flying around the place when you score big chains. As it is, it really feels like the developers were anxious about possibly over-stimulating players or something, like they might have had a good idea once, but stripped away all the fun and excitement, chasing some theoretical puzzle game player that won't play anything that isn't sedate. That's all conjecture on my part, of course. I doubt there's ever been or will ever be a developer interview related to a low budget Japan-only console-exclusive puzzle game from 1996.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend Building Crush! That exclamation mark at the end of its name is the most exciting thing about it. I guess it's also worth mentioning that your character has a little animated facepic thing that appears (and blocks your view) when you're doing well, and you actually make the face using a little photofit-type thing before you play. That's mildly impressive. Also one of the stage backgrounds is a photo of some people (presumably the developers) having a nice time in a nightclub, which is the kind of thing you don't really see in commercial videogames anymore.

Run Saber (SNES)

 There's a few interesting things to point out about Run Saber before you even get to the game itself. For a start, it's a Japanese game that was only released in North America and Europe (which means there' no chance of ever being able to afford a copy). Furthermore, it was developed by Hori, the famous and popular makers of high quality controllers. It's the first of six games they put out, according to Moby Games, spread out over the course of the nineties. Finally, and this is a lot more subjective than the other points: it kind of looks and feels more like a Mega Drive game than a SNES one. The gritty OAV-like sci-fi setting full of weird monsters, when from SNES games, you expect more of a kid-friendly TV anime look and feel, don't you? Like I said, it is more subjective than the other points I raised.

 

What is the game, though? It's a platformer, in which you select either a male or female character (if there are any differences between the two, they're very minor. I think their attacks have slightly different hitboxes, but that's all), and you traverse a few linear stages killing monsters with energy swords, and there's several boss fights per stage, too, which is nice. You could, if you wanted, call Run Saber a Strider-like, with its superhumanly acrobatic protagonists and their quick-swinging energy blade attacks. But that would be a little simplistic and lazy.

 

Instead, you should call Run Saber a Strider-like because of the way its paced! You're constantly being usher forward into the next big weird setpiece, whether it's a bunch of spiky traps to maneuver around, a wall to climb while fighting off enemies, or one of the game's many boss fights. Just like Strider! I'm joking about the first comparision being lazy, of course: the characters do move and feel a lot like Strider Hiryu, and if someone from the development team came out and said it was originally intended to be a Strider sequel but a deal with Capcom fell through at the last minute, it wouldn't be a massive shock. You do have a couple of new moves, though: a jumping spin attack, a dive kick, and a non-offensive slide across the ground.

 

So with all that in mind, is it actually a good game, or is it just a Japanese Strider Returns? Luckily, it's good. On your first play, it'll feel slightly stiff and odd, and a little too difficult, but somehow that literally only applies to your first attempt at playing it. At least, that's how it went for me. My first attempt, I lost most of my lives over the course of the first stage and got a game over shortly into the second. But every attempt after that, I've easily been able to get well into the third, and sometimes fourth stage! (According to what I've read online, there are five of them).

 

The bosses are cool enough that they aren't a slog or a nuisance, either, instead being fun and quick enough to get through that you do feel like you're a powerful, heroic character charging through all these evil monsters. And they're pretty interesting too. There's a green mutant-man who bursts out of a metal canister, a demonic fighter jet that grows heads to attack you while you're standing on it mid-flight, a big red meditating demon in the background who detached his head to get you, a giant zombie woman (who was apparently designed as a giant living woman, but Nintendo of America thought that was the same as a positive depiction of domestic violence, presumably because there are worms in their brains). A varied bunch of monsters and freaks to fight, and like I said, the fights go by pretty quickly, which feels like a fairly unique trait in this kind of game.

 

Run Saber is a pretty good game, in a style that really stands out on the SNES. It's definitely worth playing. Even though it won't keep your attention for a long time, you probably will enjoy it while it does.

Sword of the Samurai (PS2)

 I only played the original Kengo once, long long ago, when me and some friends were just trying out a big stack of PS2 games we'd never played before. My memory of it is as a weird idiosyncratic swordfighting game that had a dedicated buttong for yelling at your opponent. The reason I bring Kengo up is that this is actually Kengo 2, mysteriously renamed by its western publisher. I recently tried it out on a whim, and got totally engrossed in what is not just a swordfighting game, but a game about being a swordfighter.

 

What does that mean? Well, the main mode in this game has you "making" (that is, picking a face and a body from a very small selection. In fact, there's only one female body!) a character and then making a debut on the local swordsmanship scene in a little village named Chiaraijima. You can take part in casual fights down at the riverbank, or you can go to one of the local dojos to learn the basics. The game's very idiosyncratic in how it plays, and if you go in trying to playing like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade, you'll get nowhere, so going and learning the basics is recommended. It's a much better way of getting in the tutorial than a lot of games, too, since you don't have to go straight there, and the lessons address one subject at a time, so inbetween you can go and test what you've learned at the riverbank.

 

Eventually, you'll get the opportunity to spar against other students at the dojo, and even challenging the students and masters of other dojos! All of the above are, of course, competitive bouts using wooden and bamboo swords. But there's a couple of other things to occupy your time in Chiaraijima. There are the secret nighttime fights that take place in an abndoned courtyard, and they use real swords. Also using real swords are the jobs you can go on, brokered by a local merchant. Real sword fights change the mechanics slightly. For a start, if you get cut, you start bleeding and losing health (I've even had a fight end with both participants bleeding to death at the same time!), and yes: lose a real swordfight and you die, and get sent back to the title screen. You can reload your save from there, but still. It's a lot more dramatic than taking a couple days' rest after losing a normal fight.

 

The jobs are slightly different still. There's a little bit of Bushido Blade here, as you have to fend of groups of enemies who attack a few at a time, but can be taken out themselves with one or two hits. The game also makes mention that if you guard too much in a real sword fight, the metal can get chipped and the sword can even break, leaving you defenceless, but I haven't seen that happen. I'm not sure what the point of taking these risks is, since there's no money in this game, but presumably, there are story events that can happen if you consistently do well enough in them. (For example, the merchant who gives you your jobs doesn't appear himself until you make a few consecutive wins at the riverbank).

 

To clarify some of the above: everything other than the fights and jobs is menu-based. Every day, you can choose to rest or do one of the above activities. Whatever you pick, it'll take up the whole day. Anything other than resting will usually increase all of your stats by some amount, and also decrease your stamina. Resting replenishes your stamina, and no matter how low it is, it'll usually be back to full after two days, and if you're impatient, you can still go out if it isn't full, you'll just have less health. I don't know if resting too many days in a row makes your skills atrophy and your stats decline, but that seems like it'd be logical. Finally, you learn new moves by getting hit by them!

 

Like I said, I've been engrossed in this game. Some people might find the structure repetitive, others might find the fighting clunky and weird, but I think if you're willing to give it a chance, this is a game that you can really get a lot out of. As simple as it is, there's lots of interesting little details to notice, too. For example, the guys you fight down at the riverbank are all just named "Swordsman", but as you keep going back, you'll come to recognise them on sight, and they use consistent fighting styles, so they're definitely the same guys who keep coming back, and not just random nobodies represented by the same models. If you're able to, I recommend at least giving this a try.

The King of Fighters - Battle de Paradise (Neo Geo Pocket Color)

 Something that not very many people remember is that there was a cross-system link cable between the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the Dreamcast. This is one of the few games that uses that function! Obviously, I haven't got any way to try it myself, but a little bit of research online suggests that strikers levelled up in this game can be uploaded to the Dreamcast port of King of Fighters 99, where they'll have stronger attacks. The game itself is, in keeping with the Dreamcast theme, a King of Fighters-themed Sonic Shuffle-like (or I guess you could call it a Mario Party-like if you're boring).

 

You pick a character, and you play a board game, and some spaces on the board trigger minigames. Oddly, the characters you play as aren't King of Fighters characters, but a small collection of original teenagers. You do pick an actual KOF character as a striker to represent you in the minigames, though. Very strange setup. The aim of the game is to get stars, and there's one space on the entire board where you can buy them for twenty coins each. There are spaces on the board that increase or decrease your stock of coins when you land on them, and you can also win or lose them in minigames. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, now.

 

To go back a little: after picking your character, striker, stage, and game length, you'll appear on the board. You take turns rolling the die, and occasionally choosing a direction to go in. Prety standard Sugoroku-type stuff. But there's a few special space types! Exclamation marks will trigger a weird little event where your striker will interact with some other KOF characters, and you might lose a turn, gain some coins, or some other thing along those lines might happen. The VS. spaces are the game's main draw, and they'll trigger as soon as you get to them, you don't need to actually land on them. Of course, they'll pull you and your opponent into a minigame.

 

There's a fair few minigames, and they all include references to the King of Fighters series, as well as other SNK games. Some of these references will just be cards with characters' faces on them, but others are more deep. My favourite is the one where you're given a clue, and have to pick the right character from a lineup of three. It actually requires some knowledge of these characters, their personalities and lore! That's so rare in a fighting game spinoff! Other standouts include a little dancing game starring Mai Shiranui, which seems impossible to win (there's even a FAQ written in 2001 that agrees!), a game that's like SEGA's ancient arcade game Head On, but it's about Sie Kensou eating meat buns, and a game where Chang and Choi have to choose the right doors on their escape bid from prison. 

 

After each game, whether you win or lose, you get a bunch of points, that gradually unlock stuff: new boards to play on, the ability to play the minigames from a menu, and most interestingly, a gallery of twenty pieces of pixel art with text attached. These can be ads for upcoming SNK games from around the same time, like King of Fighters 2000 or Cool Cool Toon, little design notes about this game or even classic SNK games, and more. It all really adds up to this game being a great little love letter and time capsule for SNK fans, especially now that there's a fan translation. 

 

And that really affects whether or not you'll want to play it. Like I said, my favourite of the minigames really relies on the player having knowledge of SNK lore, and a lot of the appeal elsewhere is in the references to other SNK games and their lore. So if you're a big SNK fan, you should definitely give it a try. One thing I can say in its favou is that it's a lot quicker and less painful to play as against a CPU opponent than other games in this genre. I'd love to play it against a human opponent someday, but I don't know how I'd ever be able to make that happen for a number of reasons (does anyone know anything about setting up multiplayer stuff on modern emulator handhelds? Is that possible?). I'll bookend the review by bringing up another feature I wasn't able to access via emulation: apparently, if you put the cartridge into a non-colour Neo Geo Pocket, there's a remake of SNK's 1979 arcade game Yosaku! Unfortunately, though, I couldn't force the emulator I was using to load the ROM in monochrome mode.

Arcana Strikes (Saturn)

 Because of how terribly managed the Saturn was outside Japan, very few of its RPGs ever got official English translations, and some of the ones that did were just used for some talentless hack's stupid comedy routines. But thanks to the brave and noble efforts of fan translators in the modern age, we're finally able to see some of the interesting exclusives the Saturn got in Japan, and Arcana Strikes is definitely one that's unique and worthy of note!

 

There's a few things that make Arcana Strikes unique, and at the core of a lot of them are the things the game doesn't have. Most important are the things it deliberately doesn't have: there's no items, equipment, no spells in the way that you might usually think of them, and strangest of all, there's no attack option in battle! All of these things are replaced with cards. You have a deck of up to twenty-four cards (and if you have fewer than twelve, the difference will be made up with useless spam cards), and they come in various categories. There's cards that just inflict an elemental attack on an enemy, cards that can buff an ally or debuff an enemy, and most important of all: cards that summon monsters to fight alongside you!

 

Every fight in the game will be against a main enemy who stands opposite your character. You both have a space at either side of you, into each of which you can summon a monster. Monsters will always attack straight in front of them: the monster on your left will attack the monster on your opponent's right (which is the left side of the screen, since you're facing each other), and vice versa. If a monster doesn't have a monster in front of it, they'll attack the main opponent directly. You have more freedom, and can attack anyone on your opponent's side, or use other cards for other effects. A battle goes on until the main fighter on one side is killed. Monster cards can be bought from shops, and there are also capture cards that let you steal them from opponents! 

 

Monsters also have elements assigned to them (though there are some neutral monsters), and of course, each element is strong against one other and weak against one other. Your attack cards are mostly also elemental, and if you have more than one of the same card in your hand, you can play them at the same time for more powerful attacks. To explain further, you have your deck of cards, and in battle, you'll have a hand of four of them. You have the option to play a card from you hand (or more than one if you've got multiples), recall a monster from battle, discard one or more card from your hand (you'll draw back up to four on your next turn), or play an arcana card. There are twenty-two arcana cards in the game, any you only get them on special occasions, like completing dungeons. You can play each one once per battle, and they have big effects like healing your whole team, damaging everyone one the playing field, and so on. Finally, each battle happens pretty much in isolation, as your HP and that of your monsters is restored after each one, and all cards (except the single-use disposables) are returned to your deck.

 

The arcana are what the plot revolves around, too: you're some random guy who was brought into the dream world to find and reclaim these twenty-two arcana who are meant to keep things balanced in the world, but have been stolen by monsters and other evil-doers. It's a pretty bare-bones, generic plot, and it's clear that the developer's focus was on the mechanics. While you do navigate the dungeons in a fairly traditional top-down manner, you don't get to do so in either the overworld or towns. The over world is a series of static map screens with dots on them representing towns and dungeons, and the towns are each just a single screen with a few characters stood in a row waiting to be addressed. 

 

The game's presentation is something worth talking about, too. First, it's clear that the artists were having a lot of fun with their computers: there's lots of very charming 90s 3DCG renders for things like the map screens, and the establishing shots you see before entering a location. Furthermore, the dungeons and the background for the towns are just full of every effect they could think of: garish translucent cloud effects, big shiny lens flares, and more! It's ugly, but in a very charming way. What's not ugly, though, is the spritework use in the battle screens! All of the monsters are detailed and all have their own attack animations, and on top of that, because of how the battles work, they all also have front and back versions of all of their sprites! Another really nice detail is that even when it does the traditional RPG thing of recolouring enemies, there'll be some slight other edits done to each variant. For example, there's a series of enemies that are like little elemental spirits. There's a bunch of them in different colour palettes representing each element, but they also have the element they represent growing from the top of their heads, so they're not completely identical palette swaps.

 

Unfortunately, for all its charm and originality, there was a very specific point where Arcana Strikes wrecked all the goodwill it had built up. That point is the start of the fifth dungeon. It's off to a bad start already, as the first four were a dungeon for each of the four elements, and this fifth is just another water dungeon like the first one was. Then, to make things worse, the jester character, who appears every now and then to introduce new concepts to you, turns up and tells you that from now on, you'll have to maintain two seperate decks, and to make sure you actually do it, you'll now have to fight every boss twice, once with each of your decks. I tried to persevere, but this knowledge weighed heavy on my mind, and I just had no more interest in playing the game, realising that it was going to continue gradually becoming more and more labourious as it went on. If you've got the patience for this kind of thing, maybe you'll find Arcana Strikes to be a rewarding game in its ever-increasing complexity. But for me, it was just too much hassle.

X-Treme Express (PS2)

 Unlike most games about driving trains, even the ones aimed at kids, or the ones in which the trains are just models, X-Treme Express (also known as Tetsu 1: Densha de Battle! World Grand Prix, though as far as I can tell, there's no connection to the Densha de Go! series, and it definitely wasn't developed or published by Taito) has no interest in providing a verisimilitudinal simulation of passenger train driving. Instead, it's not just a game about racing trains, but about aggressively racing them. What's interesting is that the developers made the wise decision that this premise alone was silly enough, and didn't feel the need to add to it. So you've got somewhat realistic-looking trains from around the world, racing each other in various locations that all look like they're in Japan, but no power up items or any other overtly videogamey stuff like that.

 

Being trains, you don't have complete control over where your vehicles go at any time. Instead, you mostly control the speed of your train, slowing down at corners to avoid derailment (or you can play on easy mode, where you can't derail youself), and changing tracks at switching points when they occur. That's where the aggression comes into things: time things just right, and you can ram into the side of one of your fellow competitiors, forcing them off of the track. Alternatively, if you've got a lead and there's another train close behind you, you can stubborn stay in front of them, never giving a chance to overtake in a much more mean-spirited way than if you were driving regular road vehicles.

 

An important thing for racing games is a sense of speed, and really, that's one of the first things that'll hit you regarding X-Treme Express: when you're going full speed down a straight bit of track (or any bit of track in easy mode), you're really hurtling along in a way that real life trains never seem to, and the fact that you are driving a train at such breakneck speeds really adds to the manic feel of it all. With the lack of steering in mind, other than managing your speed to stay on the track, and shunting rivals to knock them off of it, I think a big part of the strategy is to try and place yourself on lines that have more downhill parts than uphill, though its possible that this only provides a minor boost to your speed, if any at all.

 

As well as the main grand prix mode, there's also a free mode, where you can just ride a track at any time of day, and can even turn off opponents for a more relaxing time, there's also event races with special rules like "no shunting" or "shunt every opponent to win", both of which I think show how important aggression is to the game. You start the game with a choice of thirty trains and six tracks, but looking at the "game data" screen in options shows that there's apparently a total of eighty trains in the game, and ten tracks! Furthermore, when I went online to seek more information, I could only find a conversation that brough back memories of the Dragonball GT Final Bout myths that were going around circa the turn of the century: apparently if you complete grand prix with all eighty trains, placing first in every race with no retries, you can unlock a gun that lets you derail trains infront of you by pressing L2. That sounds like nonsense, and I'm definitely not the person who's going to go and find out either way.

 

X-treme Express is a unique little game, with a lot of idiosyncracies that make take a couple of goes to get used to, but once you do, you'll find that it's a fast, fun, weird game, and definitely worth your time. Maybe not hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time, but a few of them, at least. I'm surprised it doesn't come up in conversations about weird and interesting PS2 games more often, alongside the likes of Demolition Girl and Seigi no Mikata and so on. Maybe that'll change from now on, though? 

Cellophanes (Playstation)

 Something that's pretty interesting, but doesn't come along very often are compilations of fake old games. I think everyone can probably agree that the pinnacle of this concept is represented by the two Game Center CX tie-in games for DS, both of which being collections of faux-Famicom (Fauxmicom?), faux-Super famicom (Super Fauxmicom?), and faux-Mega Drive (I don't have a satisfying portmanteau for this one, sorry) games, most of which are good, or even great, and would have been worth buying on their own. Cellophanes (erroneously listed on some websites as "Serofans") goes back much further than the Famicom for its inspiration, though, being a collection of homages to the primitive, maybe even rudimentary beginnings of Japanese consumer videogames.

 

There are twelve games in Cellophanes, with their inspirations ranging from the mid-seventies to the early eighties. Five of them are very simple breakout-like games, with the first being specifically a clone of Nintendo's 1979 plug-and-play game Block Kuzushi (it's also from this and a couple of the other games whence the compilation draws its title: these games had black and white graphics, with colour provided by cellophane overlays to attach to your TV screen. Cellophanes obviously just has colour pretending to be overlays, such is the mighty power of the Playstation.). There isn't much to differentiate these five from each other. One of them has dancing penguins, another has vector graphics, that's about it.

 

Then there's a few games that are all somewhat unique (from each other, at least). Mystery Planet is a spaceship game with very heavy Asteriods-like intertia, where each stage has you avoiding walls, shooting enemies, and collecting numbered panels in order. Sea Fighter has you controlling a submarine at the bottom of the screen, shooting at a battleship at the top. Between you is a different set of sea creatures for each stage, each behaving differently: some just get in the way of your shots, some shoot at you, some move erratically so you constantly have to avoid them, etc. Carnival Hunt is just a clone of SEGA's 1980 arcade game Carnival. Dragon Walker is something a little like Zoom/Amidar/Painter, where you make squares by walking across lines and avoiding enemies. You can breath fire, but the meter that allows you to do so charges very slowly, and it doesn't score you any points. 

 

Finally, there are three recreations of old-style electro-mechanical light gun games, themed around cowboys, jungle animals, and tanks, respectively. These look a lot prettier than all the other games, since they're pretending to be old painted toys rather than old videogames, with the jungle game having some particularly nicely-realised animals (for you to repeatedly shoot and kill). There's a lot of talk online saying that these games are actually compatible with the GCon-45, which is cool, but which I'm not able to try out myself.

 

As well as the games themselves, there's an "Akiba Parts Shop" menu, which allows you to unlock extra options for all of the games, presumably the thematic conceit here being that for these early games, modifications would actually need to be done to the physical hardware for this kind of thing (like that one episode of That 70s Show where they mod a Pong plug-and-play). Iy is actually a shop, though, with the currency being total minutes played in the games. I didn't unlock much here, though, partially for technical reasons (my emulator would often crash when exiting games, so my playtime wasn't recorded), but also because there really isn't much to these games, and they largely just aren't very fun or compelling. A lot of the time, I'm bored long before a single credit has ended.

 

And that's really the problem with Cellophanes: the games aren't fun. They're chore-like, even. And they don't even invoke any nostalgic sentiment in me because I wasn't a child in 1970s Japan. Like, it's an admirable exercise in authenticity, and it's nice that it exists, but I just don't want to spend any time playing it, and if you're reading this, you probably won't gt much out of it, either.