Robo Pit 2 (Playstation)

The original Robo Pit was a game that I rented multiple times back during the Playstation's heyday. Not alone, of course: Royal Video, the local video shop let you rent one game for two pounds, or two games for three pounds, so Robo Pit was usually the undercard to whatever game was the main event: Soul Blade or Klonoa or whatever it might have been. It was a very basic game in which you built a robot and had it fight against other robots (all built from the same pool of parts to which you had access) in arena battles to gradually make your way up the ranks.

 

It was the robot building that kept me coming back: the idea of character creation was so exciting to me back then that something even vaguely close to that got my interest (I was, of course, very disappointed when the creation feature that had been made so much of in magazine previews of Rival Schools wasn't included in the European version of that game. Furthermore, WWF Warzone's inclusion of a creation mode was so effective that it made a lifelong wrestling fan out of me!). Robo Pit 2 keeps that customisation, but has an all-new structure, and an actual plot!

 

The plot is that the arena from the first game has been taken over by evil robots, and you have to liberate it by fighting them all. But you do so by selecting a path through a semi-linear map instead of a list of ranked opponents, so it's a little different. There's also occasional cutscenes set in a moody prerendered techno-dystopia world slightly reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII or Galerians. Slightly. These maps are made up of concentric circles, with the opponents getting more difficult towards the centre, where lies a boss. At least, I know the first one does, and I assume later ones are the same.

 

The problem is that the first boss represents a massive step up in difficulty compared to everything that came before: its standard weapons are more powerful than any you've faced up to that point, plus it can perform wrestling moves on you, which is something of which the game has made no prior mention. These wrerstling moves are, of course, devastating (wrestling is the strongest fighting style, as we all know). He even tells you in his victory quote to train and come back to fight him again. The audacity of an action game explicitly telling you to grind! Anyway, I spent almost an hour after reaching him grinding (which means fighting the exact same few opponrnts over and over) and gaining two levels. He still annihilated my robot without breaking a robo-sweat.

 

If the actual game itself was fun enough, or if the way it looked was a little more charming (while the low-poly robot models look really cool and toyetic when the camera focusses on them for their win poses, in battle they just kind of look like indistinct brightly-coloured blobs), I might have given Robo Pit 2 a bit more of a chance, maybe ground another level or two to see if I could get any further. But it doesn't. It's a somewhat silly-looking game that's very repetitive to play, and the designers, in an effort to squeeze more runtime out of it, have given it a structure that only serves to exacerbate that repetition. There's still something about this game and its forebear that make me want to root for them, but unfortunately, I do have to be honest and say that Robo Pit 2 isn't worth your time, and worse than that, it won't respect your time.

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi (Switch)

 Though like any normal person, I prefer my shooting games to strictly follow arcade-style rules: no meta-progression, continues optional (and preferably punished), and scoring being based as much on skill (and as little on either luck or grinding) as possible. I will concede, however, that there is room for games to be experimental, and try different things within the framework of shooting games as a genre. Any such game, even if it's a good game, couldn't be considered a good shooting game. That makes sense, right? You're all on board with what I'm saying, right?

 

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi is such a game as I've just described. It's got a whole bunch of unlocking of weapons, unlocking of stages, various things like that, that mean that even in the "arcade" mode, scoring isn't completely skill-based, since the weapons you unlock in quest mode also get unlocked in arcade, and they tend to be a lot better than the ones available when you first start playing the game. There's also a heavy luck element, with each stage containing a pachinko minigame. You collect balls as you make your way through the stage, then use them in the minigame to secure materials used for unlocking weapons in quest mode, or points in arcade mode.

 

So, it's not a good shooting game. But is it a good game? Yes. There's two big factors that sway my opinion in its favour. The first is that that it's a game that's overflowing with charm. The graphics are all really cute pixel art, drawn with very bright colours and a very endearing, slightly messy style. There's lots of little references to other shooting games like Twinbee and Fantasy Zone. Nozomi makes little comments in the top corner of the screen based on what's currently happening in-game. When you're in the shop, you can see a bunch of little easter egg items from elswhere inthe game on the shelves in the background, and these even change from stage to stage! 

 

The second, more important factor is that this is a game with an overwhelming surplus of ideas, to the extent that I feel like that's worthy of respect on its own. As well as the aforementioned pachinko minigame and weapon shop/development system, I still haven't mentioned the game's eponymous gimmick! You shoot your normal weapon by just holding down the fire button, but when you press it, you shoot out a giant harpoon! There's various things the harpoon can hook onto, the main use being pulling apart larger enemies and bosses: pull the heads off of birds, the shells from snails, the rooves from buildings, and so on. There's some bosses where you have to pull away the boss' armour with your harpoon, then let go, and before it snaps back, shoot the harpoon to pull out the vulnerable cockpit! On top of that, there's a system of Dynamite Headdy-style secret bonuses, including hidden items, as well as secret little tasks, like pulling part of an enemy away from it, then while it's hooked, flying round it in a circle.

 

This is a fun and charming little game, and definitely worth your time, as long as you can disconnect the part of your brain that expects a certain kind of purity from shooting games. I recommend it, with that caveat. I'd also like to know if anyone has any information on the developer, Wandering Wonder. I haven't been able to find anything myself, and I'd like to know what else they've done!

Gegege no Kitaro: Youkai Daigekisen (DS)

 Gegege no Kitaro is one of those series I think everyone's aware of through its influence, but it's not widely seen or read by English-speaking audiences. This game was apparently released to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Gegege TV anime, though to be honest, there's been a pretty steady stream of Gegege games (Gegegames?) coming out since at least the Famicom. Those games have manifest in a few genres, and in this case, it's a platformer.

 

I think the big draw for the game is the graphics: on the surface level, they're made up of beautifully-drawn pixel art, but what I really loved is what that art depicts. The game is set in a modern Japan that's just a little grimier, a little darker, and a little spookier than real life. It's not the kind of over-the-top grime and dirt seen in a lot of 2010s American horror movies, it's just presenting slightly murkier spaces than the average suburbanite might be comfortable inhabiting, and even within that specific setting, there's still a lot of variety in the backgrounds. I think it looks beautiful! All the characters and monsters are full of character and charm, too, and all fit perfectly into the world depicted.

 

The game itself is surprisingly simple for a platformer of this vintage. You can jump and double jump, you can shoot your hair straight forward, and you can kick your sandals at your foes for a slightly more powerful attack. You can also have Kitaro use his stripey waistcoat thing as a shield or a parachute, the latter use being a big part of navigating later stages. And it is an actual platformer with actual platofrming, too! A lot of the challenge actually comes from testing the player's skill in navigating big stages, with combat actually being pretty simple. Having said that, though, another highlight of the game, both mechanically and aesthetically, are the gigantic bosses that appear at the ends of the stages, including one of the coolest and most impressive gashadokuro I've ever seen in a videogame!

 

For all of the praise I've given it, I do have a pretty big problem with this game: the difficulty. The first few stages are moderate: they don't feel like a cakewalk, but they're not particularly challenging. Then stage five is a massive step up in difficulty. Throughout the game, there are glowing orb things to collect, and once you've got a hundred of them, you get a short period of invincibility. They re-appear if you leave an area and re-enter it. There was a point in stage five where it seemed like the only way to progress was to keep going in and out of the area until you can use invincibility to get through. Then on stage six, there was another area that felt the same way, but that's where my patience with the game ran out and I stopped playing.

 

There is a possibility that this dramatic uptick in difficulty is a deliberate decision, though, as after stage five, there's and ending and the credits roll. So maybe the final four stages are intended to be a kind of optional "for super players" type thing? That makes it a little more forgivable, but it also means the actual game is only about forty minutes long. I dunno. That doesn't really matter nowadays, though, since you're likely to be playing via emulation of a flash cart anyway. (I did look up the game on Suruga-ya, and it's listed for about the same price as it would have been brand new, which is a lot more reasonable than most older Gegege games (gegegames).)

Erementar Gerad: Matoe, Suifuu no Tsurugi (PS2)

 So this game is based on an anime that I've never seen (and which seems to be officially known in English as Elemental Gelade, and I did have to look up both spellings to get the exact right arrangement of Ls, Rs, and vowels), but it's a fighting game by Taito, which in my mind, makes it worthy of some attention already. Then I looked it up on GameFAQS, and they say that it was only published by Taito, and was developed by Tamsoft. Even more exciting! 

 

From what I can gather, the anime (and by extension, the game) is about a world where there are people who can transform into bladed weapons for use by other people, and one particularly powerful such person is found in the cargo hold of an airship. So it's a weapons-based fighter, with most of the characters actually being duos, though there's also one girl who fights using a BB Hood-like assortment of artillery hidden about her person. The cel shaded graphics are pretty impressive, being almost as convincing in their attempt at passing polygonal models off as cel animation as the latter Guilty Gear games, despite coming out several years earlier, on much less powerful hardware. (Though unfortunately, the effect doesn't seem to have worked as well in screenshots.)

 

How it plays is an odd mix of simple and complex. Like, none of the specials have more complex motions than quarter-circles, and supers are performed by pressing two buttons together. But then, they've managed to come up with something for all four face buttons and all fout shoulder buttons to do. There's three attack buttons: slash, hard slash, and kick. There's also a kind of Dead or Alive-esque grab button, that just takes ahold of your opponent, and switches your positions around. There's both directions of sidestepping, the aforementioned button that activates supers, and a block button. This feels like too many buttons! Especially with the simplified specials and supers, which feel like they're that way because it's a licensed game, and fans of the anime might not be familiar with fighting games (as I also assumed was the case with the InuYasha fighting game on PS1).

 

Another weird idiosyncracy is that each character has two supers. One will just happen normally, while the other will start a weird little rhythm minigame in which you have to press buttons at the right time while your character(s) say a little prayer, to power up the attack. But the problem is that there's no indication as to when you're meant to press the button, exactly. I'm sure it's not, but it feels like it's random as to whether your presses will increase or decrease the power meter. I think the worse thing about it, though, is the way it gives players a way to immediately interrupt the fight for a cutscene at any time, as long as they've got at least one full meter.

 

I can't really recommend this game. It's not offensively bad or anything, but it's also not good or interesting enough to be worth your time. If you like the anime, and want to play as the characters from it, I can see that being a big factor in changing your opinion of it, and like I said, it does look really great, so if that is your motivation, you probably will have a good time with it. But I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anyone talk about this show, ever. I feel like I've been a little too harsh on a game that's mostly fine, but I guess I was just a bit let down after the initial excitement of seeing where it came from. Oh wait, there is one little interesting thing I want to mention: there's actually 2D sprites of the characters in their fighting stances! They're really tiny and appear on the loading screens, but they're cute.

Spirit of Speed 1937 (Dreamcast)

 If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists. However, it doesn't look too bad in screenshots, and it's a Dreamcast racing game, so I assumed it couldn't be as bad as people say. Plus, the old timey setting was a pretty appealling gimmick, so I gave it a try. And at first, it seemed like everyone was being too harsh on Spirit of Speed: it's a little clunky, but initial impressions are of a mediocre racing game that might provide a little bit of fun, if you're into the setting.

 

Then, you notice how long the races are. Either the track you're on is incredibly long, with lap times of multiple minutes, or you're expected to drive around the track ten or twenty times. Either way, most races are projected to take over ten minutes, sometimes significantly longer than that. On top of that, despite the game's title, you never fel like you're going fast, even at top speed in the game's fastest car. So every race has you slowly trundling around a track for a long, long time. At least the cars and tracks themselves do look pretty nice. 

 

Despite the ludicrous length of the races, I did want to finish at least one of them, in the interests of fairness. I'm not sure if it's actually possible to place first in the races, because while you're always limitd by the tchnical limitations of these old timey cars: slow accelleration, inability to take corners at any kind of speed, and so on, it seems like there's always one opponent who faces no such limitations, able to just shoot off at the start of the race, never to be seen again. The rest of them are just like you, though, so once you've left them behind, you'll likely spend a lot of time in second place, all alone with most of your opponents getting left further and further behind you, and one opponent getting further and further ahead of you.

 

However, I was never able to finish a race, as every time, without fail, something would happen to prevent me from doing so. Sometimes, the game would suddenly crash. Sometimes, the car would inexplicably stop accellerating for no obvious reason, meaning the race had to be quit via the pause menu (because this wasn't some kind of deliberate game condition that makes you instantly retre from the race). One time, I paused the game, and it just wouldn't unpause no matter what. So as well as being poorly designed, it seems that Spirit of Speed 1937 is also incompetent on a technical level.

 

I approached this game with an open mind. I think I've been clear in the past on the subject of how little patience I have for received opinion, especially when it comes to games that are supposedly universally reviled like Spirit of Speed is. However, in this instance, I have to admit that the mob is right: this is a game that fails at everything it tries to do, on almost every level. The only positive thing I can say about it is to repeat that it does look pretty nice in screenshots. It's just unfortunate that to take those screenshots, someone has to actually (attempt to) play it.

Meikyuu Jiin Dababa (Famicom Disk System)

 I feel like whenever I look into the library of the Famicom Disk System, I find a lot of games that are kind of interesting as curiosities, as well as the seedy underbelly of the 1980s Famicom boom. But in Meikyuu Jiin Dababa, I've managed to find an FDS game that is actually a lot of fun to play! It being one of those rare games to be set in mythic India is a nice little bonus, too.

 

You play as a guy, in this case a monk, and like so many eighties videogame guys, you're out to rescue a girl from a demon. As generic as this premise is, it's not just the Indian flavour that gives this game life, as it plays like a kind of combination of Frogger and The Tower of Druaga. The world is made up of grids, upon which, you can only move from square to square (as well as being able to jump a distance of one square). In this world, you shoot monsters and evil wizards, and try to find power ups and the exits to the next stage.

 

That's where the Druaga stuff comes in! Power-ups will only appear when you do very specific things: shoot a certain statue eight times, jump on a specific tile three times, and so on. While the tiles will visibly crack after being jumped upon, special statues give no indication at all that they're hiding anything until it's revealed. It's not far into the game where finding secrets like these is also the only way to proceed. Each set of stages starts with an outside stage, then several stages inside a temple. To progress through the temples, you've got to find hidden mandalas under floor tiles, which will then reveal a special tablet (or maybe it's a book?), that will open the exit upon collection. 

 

Mostly, though I've compared this mechanic to the infamously obtuse Druaga, it's not too difficult to find your way through. Up to a point, though. Frustratingly, I've been unable to get past the fourth stage in the third set of stages. I can make the exist appear, I figured out that two of the exits are fake, but for some reason I can't detemine, going into the real exit just transports me back several stages. There's a longplay on Youtube, and following that exactly doesn't seem to help! To make things more frustrating, there's only four sets of stages, so I've managed to get three quarters of the way through the game before getting stuck. Tragic!

 

I should also make mention of the boss fights. Though the rest of the game is top-down, the boss fights take place in a side-on view, though you can still only move by jumping space-by-space. The fights themselves are pretty easy, though, and I don't think I ever lost a single life to either of the ones I fought. Overall, even with the mishap I suffered above, this might be the best Famicom Disk System-original game I've played so far, so obviously, I definitely recommend that you give it a try, too. And if anyone does give it a try and figures out what I'm doing wrong on stage 3-4, please let me know.

Pipe Mania (DS)

 1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, but this one (which does seem to be official) is the only one I've played. It's something of a mixed bag, being a true sequel in the sense that it builds upon the game's concept with a lot of new ideas that really add to the formula, but it also implements some more modern structural ideas of which I'm less fond. And somewhere in the middle is an idea that makes the game worse (though it's mostly optional). In case you're not familiar with the concept, you have to lay down pieces of pipe in different shapes (randomly given to you like the pieces in Tetris), to direct the flow of a liquid from one place to another, usually with a quota of spaces it has to pass through first.

 

To get the good stuff out of the way first, there's generous helpings of it. In the game's main mode, the stages are split into different areas, each with its own aesthetic and its own substance whose flow you have to direct: whether it's chemicals through pipes, trains on tracks, electricity through coils, toys on factory conveyor belts, or data through cables, they all look great, each having their own unique and appeallingly-drawn pixel art tilesets. Each area has their own set of mechanical gimmicks, too: teleporters, switches to redirect the flow, gates to split or re-combine the flow, and so on, and they all work to add variety and legitimate challenge to the stages. There were definitely a few points where I got a little frustrated, but I never felt like the game was unfairly designed, just that I was failing to solve the puzzles, and as a result: when I did get through those moments, it was as satisfying as it should be. I can't really fault this aspect of the game. Except, there's a boss fight for each area, where as well as the regular puzzle, you have a character sending various attacks to destroy or change the pipes you've laid. These parts are no fun, but luckily, you can progress through the game without bothering with them.

 

There's a couple of other modes to play, too. Arcade is one that plays with the format a little. Instead of static single-screen stages, this mode has autoscrolling stages, in which you have to keep the flow onscreen as well as in the pipes. It's an interesting idea, but I found it too stressful to really enjoy. There's also the slightly misnamed classic mode, which just has a whole bunch of traditional single screen A-to-B stages without the heavy gimmickry of the main mode. This is a perfectly decent mode to play, though it takes a more modern structure where each stage is played in isolation and also scored as such. It might sound like nitpicking to some, but the name "classic" had me hoping for a mode similar to the original game, where you play stage-to-stage until you get a game over or reach the ending, building up a singular score as you go.

 

That's a small issue, and the biggest downside of the game are the optional bossfights, but there's one more negative I have to bring up. While the game looks great while you're playing it, with the aforementioned beautiful pixels, all the menus and character designs are a world away from that. They're all this kind of incredibly cheap-looking simple vector art, that I assume were created with easy scalability in mind, since as well as the DS, there are versions of this game on PS2, PC, PSP, and Wii. Despite the few flaws I've pointed out, though, I still really enjoyed pipe Mania. I prefer the structure of the original Pipe Dream, so I'd recommend that one before Pipe Mania, but Pipe Mania is still a great time, and still worth playng.

Tiny Bullets (Playstation)

 

 Judging by the title, I really expected Tiny Bullets to be another one of those excellent 3D shooting games secretly hiding in the Playstation library, like Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero. Instead, it's more of a combination of Tomb Raider's meticulous 3D platforming and Resident Evil's simple "put the item in the hole" puzzle-solving. Also, the player character looks like a babyfaced Sonic gijinka.

 

So, you play as this blue spiky kid, and you're exploring ruins and caves and such (though apparently, you're meant to be running an errand for your grandmother). There's some kind of plot involving an evil wizard and his henchmen who have cool bird-face helmets, as well as a friendly dragon and some other guy that you meet on your travels. So, you jump and climb and shimmy around, trying to get to the village where the shop selling Grandma's medicine is, and also not getting killed by monsters or evil goons or your own clumsiness.

 

The platforming itself is slow and clunky, but in a way that makes it feel deliberate and satisfying. You jump with X, and hang onto ledges by holding O. You can jump up to a ledge and hold O to grab it instead of falling back down, or you can hold O while walking off of a ledge to grab it while you drop down. You can also grab ahold of vertical poles/pipes/etc., and shimmy from side to side along them, and while hanging like this, you can swing bak and forth to do a long jump forward. I'm describing this stuff in such exhaustive detail because it's a big part of what the game entails, and it's all fun and satisfying. In fact, I do kind of wish Tiny Bullets more platforming and less puzzle-solving. And no combat.

 

The puzzle solving, as mentioned already, is Resident Evil-like in nature. Find a key to open a door. Find a fuse to turn on a machine. Put the coloured tiles in the right slots in the right order to activate the ancient secret thingy. That kind of thing. It's fine, but in a game like this where it clearly wasn't a high priority for the designers (as opposed to Resident Evil, where the puzzles clearly were a higher design priority, and are much more interesting as a result), these puzzles feel more like they're just a way of making the game consume more time, rather than entertaining challenges.

 

The combat, as has been vriefly alluded to already, is bad and even more of a chore than the puzzles. The controls for it are interesting, at least. Your weapon is a slingshot, and you hold R2 to point it, then O to shoot it. The game lets you hold L2 to look around in first person, and you can hold L2 and R2 together to aim and shoot like that, which at least is nice. You can shoot at things like gongs to activate stuff in the stages, too. The problem is that the enemies just kind of potter about, they'll probably get a hit or two in on you while you're aiming, and after a couple of shots they die. Also for some reason, despite the detailed aiming mechanics, most of the enemies don't take damage if you snipe them from a distance. Like the puzzles, the combat feels like padding, and while it's happening, you'd much rather be jumping and clambering and generally navigating the environment, and it's a shame the developers didn't concentrate more on that instead. 

 

Tiny Bullets is a game that I think, had it gotten a worldwide release, would be fondly-remembered part of a lot of childhoods. Without nostalgia, though, it can only really stand on its own, and unfortunately, the good parts (the controls and the generally great way it feels to move around in this game) are heavily overshadowed by the bad parts (the pointless puzzles and boring combat). Having said that, I do wonder how beloved it is among Japanese players. I've never seen or heard any references to it anywhere, though. 

Buccanyar! (Switch)

 A quick disclaimer first: after I'd already bought a physical copy of this game, and then played it for a week and a half, I found out that it actually has a western release (though I don't think it has a physical version), under the title Cats Away. But the Japanese version (technically) has an English translation included, that's the version I've been playing, and that's the version I'm reviewing. I assume at most, the only differences will be the name and (hopefully) the translation, but bear that in mind nonetheless.

 

Anyway, I haven't seen anyone talking about this game under either title, and when I saw it on both a list of Japanese games with included English translations and on sale for a low price on a certain Japanese second hand shop's website, I picked it up. Which turns out to have been a good idea, as this is an excellent game. It's clearly been made with a lot of passion, it's unique and fun to play, and it even has an interesting, entertaining story and even more surprising: actually funny comedy scenes that manage to shine despite a pretty bad translation (kind of reminds you of what I said about Sword and Fairy 6, doesn't it?). 

 

So what the game's actually about is nautical combat! Three sisters in a flooded world have inherited a special magic ship and a map from their dad, and as they travel around to the locations marked on the map in search of dad, they get involved in a surprisingly layered plot involving a cult trying to ressurect ancient monsters, they make a lot of friends (some of whom start out as enemies), as well as a lot of discoveries about the world, their ship, and themselves. Your part in all of this is mostly split into two parts, that can be succinctly put as the combat itself, and the background management that prepares you to survive and win that combat.

 

During the management part of the game, you sail around and visit ports. In the ports, you can take on missions (pretty much always being "go here and kill these enemies") to earn money, then spend that money on ship parts. Equipping ship parts has its whole own menu full of submenus, as it's surprisingly deep. There's a lot of different weapon types, as well as a lot of different ship designs, which eah have a different amount of spaces for putting weapons of different sizes, with some also having their own powerful bewpoke weapons built in. You also get to equip smaller boats, aircraft, and subs that can be deployed from your ship mid-battle. These are interesting too, as while most of them are just there to attack enemies, some of them will go around picking up items dropped by sunk foes, others might be fishing boats that catch fish you can sell for a little extra money, and so on. And of course, you also have to hire sailors (who are all cats, for some reason) to actually man all these guns and pilot all these little vehicles.

 

The combat itself is somewhat unique. All of your weapons just repeatedly fire and automatically aim once you've given the order to open fire, so your part in the battle is to actually control the ship itself: positioning yourself to hit the enemy better, and to avoid incoming attacks, especially the powerful special attacks that come from big boss enemies. You also decide when to deploy the aforementioned little vehicles (which then act autonomously), as well as giving commands to repair the ship, and switch between your three loadouts of weapons, depending on the circumstances. As the game goes on, you'll also get access to magic attacks, so you decide when to use those and which ones to use, too.

 

It took me a while to get into Buccanyar!, but once I did, it really got its claws into me. I've been having a ton of fun with it, and despite the poor translation, getting engrossed in its world, story, and characters. As well as being a great game on its own, it's also a nice thing to see in the wider landscape: a new(-ish) commercial game that's been made with a lot of love, that's both original and fun to play, and which doesn't have a single piece of nickel-and-diming or dark design patterns in it. It's just a great, old-fashioned, well-designed game that stands on its own. I can easily and unreservedly recommend it, and I don't think I'll get much disagreement if I say that it's exactly the kind of thing I want to see from longform-style videogames in the future: honest creativity and no scams or desperate trend-chasing.

Pocket of Horror: Lighthouse (Game Boy Color)

 This is a demake of World of Horror, a game I haven't yet played (though I'm sure I will eventually), but which drew me in simply for the novelty of being a horror game made for Game Boy Color. Because I haven't played its inspiration, I can only judge it as a game in its own right, and am unable to compare the two. 

 

It uses a few elements that it seems like a lot of the new wave of Game Boy Color games use, no matter the genre: full-screen pixel art, abstract menu-based gameplay, and tastefully restrained colour palettes. I don't know if that's because the tools being used to make these games favour them, or if it's some kind of leftover resentment from western GBC-owning kids from the olden days of never getting to play the likes of Sakura Taisen GB or Hana Yori Dango: Another Love Story in English, now driving them to make their own GBC adventures with their own fancy pixel art.

 

So, how Pocket of Horror works is that you choose one of four mysteries to investigate. Then you'll be told a little story, through full screen art, little "investigating" animations, and text. Sometimes, you'll get to choose on of two options, and sometimes you'll find yourself fighting enemies. These battles feature yet more full screen art of your foe, and you have a bunch of options to pick, such as attacking, defending, trying to restore your stamina or reason, and so on. Whenever you pick an action, a bar at the bottom of the screen fills up a little bit, and when it fills all the way, he enemy attacks. You can usually just attack wildly and kill the enemies before they do the same to you, though since I died partway through the fourth mystery, that might be a poor plan in the long term.

 

After each mystery's solved, you get a key, and all four are needed to open the way to the lighthouse, where the final mystery lies. I can't spoilt the details of that final mystery for you, because I haven't been able to survive all four mysteries. You've got three numbers to keep track of as you play: stamina, reason, and doom. Stamina and reason obviously represent your physical and mental health respectively, and if either reaches zero, it's game over. Doom, however, is more mysterious. It's a percentage that goes up or down a little bit every time you do something. It was in the mid-forties when my playthrough ended, and I'm left curious about what might happen if it gets to a full hundred.

 

This is a decent enough little game, and definitely worth a bit of your time. I'm really interested in the rennaisance that the Game Boy and Mega Drive in particular have been going through in recent years, so there'll probably be more coverage of both consoles here in the future. It's not a 100% correlation, but it's interesting that a lot of new Mega Drive games are action titles, and a lot of new Game Boy games are like this: adventures that focus on making decisions and really pushing quality of presentation above all.