Giral (PC)

 This RPG Maker game (or, it at least uses tilesets from RPG, I don't know if it was actually made in the engine) drew me in with two promises on its DLSite page: combat in the style of the first two Ys games, where the dedicated attack buton is eschewed, and you strategically walk into enemies to defeat them, and a protagonist whose sprite and artwork changed when you changed their equipment.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on the first, and while it does deliver on the second, there isn't really a lot of equipment to see in the game (though, to be fair, it is a game that was clearly made on a tight budget, and the character art there is is really great). The problem is that it's not really an Ys-like action RPG at all, instead being a kind of endurance testing game.

 

Enemies attack you once when you touch them, then they die. And each kind of enemy will always deal the same amount of damage to you. So you've got to look at what enemies you can see ahead of you, and judge whether you've got enough HP to make it through them or not. It's really just a question of counting rather than strategy or skill. If you don't have enough HP, go back home and spend the money you got from killing enemies to increase your max HP (one hundred points for every thousand gold).

 

And that's it, really! The entire game is about an hour and a half long, and the final fifteen minutes will be made up of you grinding for enough money to get your max HP to 30100, since the final boss deals 30000 damage, and you need at least 100 left over to win the fight. There's not much more to say about it. The character artwork is nice, I got the game in a sale for next-to-nothing, and I guess it's a potentially interesting idea, that just needs some work to make it into more of an actual game. I hope the dev sticks with it, at least.

Ultraman Powered (3DO)

 Sometimes, you encounter a game that's centred around a concept so obvious, you can't believe you've never encountered it elsewhere. Ultraman Powered (based on the Japan-US co-produced TV show that's also known as Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero) is a game that has two such concepts! And it's hidden away on a console nobody cares about!

 

The two concepts are kind of related, though, being both related to the fact that this is a fighting game that makes use of digitised sprites. Firstly, it's the first game I've seen that mixes them with live action FMV cutscenes, but the real shocker is that this is the only game I can think of that's based on a tokusatsu TV show or movie that uses digitised sprites! It's such a natural combination! Not to mention the glory days of the Mortal Kombat series coincided with the heyday of Power Rangers, VR Troopers, and all the other American "localised" versions of toku series.

 

So, is it any good? Eh, not particularly. To be more fair, it is fun to play, and there are positive aspects to it, like how the digitised look really does fit perfectly with the theme, but there's some real problems, too. In single player mode, you play as Ultraman, and you fight against various kaiju one after another, like you'd expect. You've got a couple of special moves that aren't particularly impressive or useful, and the controls are laid out very strangely: you've got light and heavy punches and kicks. The punches are assigned to the A and B buttons, while the kicks are assigned to C and the right shoulder button. This isn't an arcade port or anything, it's a 3DO exclusive! Why didn't they design the controls more logically based on the controller that they knew players would be using?

 

There's actually two modes for single players: visual and battle. The only differences between them are that visual mode has fairly long FMV cutscenes before each fight, while battle mode has "VTOL Shooting" sections before each fight. The sections play out like a very simplified version of Cobra Command/Thunder Storm FX. They're viewed through the windshield of a VTOL craft flying towards the next kaiju you're going to fight, and you move a crosshair around the screen to shoot at little targets that appear on them, slightly reducing their starting health during the fighting section. It's nothing spectacular, but it's fun little gimmick, and I can't imagine anyone ever picking visual mode over it more than once.

 

Ultraman Powered isn't a very good game, but it's not painful to play or anything, either. You'll probably get some mild amusement out of it for maybe thirty to sixty minutes? It is at least better than the 1991 Ultraman fighting game that appeared on the Mega Drive and SNES (and somehow also got a SNES-only sequel), though.

Blast Wind (Saturn)

 I went into this game with high expectations, coming as it does from Technosoft, makers of Thunder Force IV, a strong candidate for the title of best shooting game on the Mega Drive, a system with an absurd amount of high quality shooting games. While it doesn't live up to its legendary forebear, it's still an excellent game.

 

It's a vertically scrolling shooter that's surprisingly simple for the time it came out: there's no elaborate scoring system like you'd see in Cave's contemporary output, nore are there the many different playable craft with multiple attack options like you'd see in Psikyo's games. You just get one ship, with two kinds of normal shot (a powerful straight-ahead weapon, and a weaker, more spread out one), and the customary screen-clearing bombs. I wonder if this simplicity in an age when shooting games were going through a lot of sudden evolution is why the location tests for the unreleased arcade version failed? (Of course, I was emulating this game, and its arcade origins are so obvious that on more than one occasion I instinctively pressed the 5 key on my laptop, as if I was playing in MAME and needed to insert another virtual coin!)

 

That's not to say that Blast Wing doesn't have any new ideas, though. There's two big ones, the most noticable of which is the way every stage splits into two paths, chosen by pressing a button by nudging it with your ship. Though you go through the same stages no matter which way you go, there are two different boss fights for each stage, and the paths do vary in difficulty enough that beginner players would do well to learn what effect pressing the button or not has on their chances of survival. (And of course, advanced players will want to try their hand at playing through both versions of each stage no matter what).

 

The other big idea is one that seems inconsequential when you first encounter it, but turns out to be both interesting and important as you play the game more. When you collect a power up, as well as the usual effect, you also get a couple of seconds of invincibility, as well as a big powerful lightning attack that extends from your ship horizontally and cancels enemy bullets, as well as one-shotting most regular foes and dealing massive damage to bosses. It not only encourages players to chase power ups further up the screen to where the enemies are (as opposed to timidly waiting near the bottom for the power ups to come to them), but it also introduces a strategic element regarding when to collect them: if a couple of power ups appear on an empty screen, do you collect them there and then while the coast is clear, or wait until enemies appear so you can quickly wipe them out with the lightning?

 

It would be remiss to talk about a Technosoft game without mentioning how it looks and sounds, and luckily, their reputation is untarnished in Blast Wind. The backgrounds are really nice, full of cool little details. I really love stage two in particular, which takes place high above a huge city, which is far below in the background, with a much closer layer showing various industrial-looking platforms and walkways of some kind, and there's tiny little pixel people walking around them! There's lots of little details like that that make it feel more like you're flying over an actual world and add a lot to the atmosphere. The soundtrack is also really cool. Not as good as the one in TFIV, but again, that's one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time, and an absurdly high bar to clear. But yeah, the music's good. (I'm not good at talking about music though!)

 

Obviously, this is yet another Saturn game that had a low print run and fetches ludicrously high prices online. Hopefully someday, SEGA will start rereleasing Saturn games on modern consoles, but until they do, Blast Wind is definitely one that deserves a permanent place in you SSF/YabaSanshiro disc images folder.

Arc Style: San Goku Shi Pinball (3DS)

 In 2006, Nintendo released a strange samurai-themed voice-controlled pinball/strategy game called Odama. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to play Odama, but it was in my mind the whole time I was playing San Goku Shi Pinball. It doesn't have any voice controls, and it's setting is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than feudal Japan, but still: olden times battlefield pinball. I doubt it was made as a deliberate mockbuster anyway, coming out six year later than Odama, and Odama not being the kind of massive hit you'd bother mockbusting anyway.

 

That doesn't mean it's just a generic pinball game with a Three Kingdoms coat of paint, though. Instead, you go through various differnt stages, each followed by a boss. The stages are all different, though they all consist of a small battlefield area, littered with soldiers, battlements, and so on. The goal in the stages is to defeat all of the enemy officers who are commanding the endlessly respawning troops, while also lighting torches and finding hidden treasures and bonus stages to score more points. 

 

The boss fights are slightly different, and all take place in a little castle courtyard area. in that courtyard, there'll be a prominent figure from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you have to defeat them by repeadly hitting them with the ball (the one exception to this that I've ecountered was Zhang Jiao, who is defeated by extinguishing his magic purple bonfires dotted around the place. Bosses can fight back by attacking your flippers and disabling them for a couple of seconds, which is something I always hate. Taking away the player's input just seems like a cheap copout form of difficulty.

 

San Goku Shi Pinball isn't one of the greatest pinball games you'll ever seen, and it has some stiff competition on the 3DS in the form of Pinball Hall of Fame, which contains recreations of Taxi, Pinbot, and a bunch of other real-life tables. But those are recreations of real tables, and San Goku Shi is a whole new pinball videogame with all the advantages and possibilities that brings. So it's fine. If you already have Pinball Hall of Fame, and want more, less realistic pinball on your 3DS, then you wouldn't be too disappointed if you went with this one.

Other Stuff Monthly #25!

 So, Tekno Comix were a short-lived publisher in the nineties comics publisher boom that happened after Image started. Tekno had their own unique selling point, though: their comics would be created (but not actually written) by famous creators. Leonard Nimoy's Primortals was the series I used to always see copies of in back issue bargain boxes back in the day, but they also had titles created the likes of Isaac Asimov, Gene Rodenberry, and, most relevant to this post, Neil Gaiman. 

 

Relevant because the subject of the post is Wheel of Worlds, a diptych of issues released a year apart, and only slightly related to each other. The first, numbered issue zero, is like an introduction to all the Gaiman-created Tekno characters. The most interesting is the Teknophage, an immortal super-inteligent humanoid dinosaur who travels the multiverse cultivating oppressive civilisations so that they produce superpowered individuals whose souls he can consume to extend his lifespan. There's also Mr. Hero, a heroic and honourable steampunk robot made of brass who speaks with a cockney accent, and Lady Justice, who in this issue is a former slave/protoge of Teknophage who has the power to plant suggestions in people's heads, which she'd also used in the past to make a lucrative living as a findom to a bunch of rich guys on her horrible dystopian homeworld.

 

I really enjoyed this issue! Most of the page count is dedicated to a storytelling contest between Teknophage and Lady Justice, in which they both choose to tell their origin stories, along with a subplot about Mr. Hero looking for his missing hand. As evil and powerful as Teknophage is, in this story, he still feels like a fleshed out and believable character, and the rest of the cast come out of it pretty well, too. If you can get ahold of a reasonably-priced copy of Wheel of Worlds #0, I recommend you do so. Wheel of Worlds #1, however, is not a comic to which I can extend the same recommendation.

 

The main star of the show here is Lady Justice, though her origin from the previous issue seems to have been discarded, and she's now some kind of cosmic force of justice, empowering women to fight against evil. Well, in this issue, she empowers two women and a little girl. Problematically, the little girl gets temporarily aged up into an adult woman, and maybe even more problematically, one of the other women who is ugly and short, is temporarily made tall and beautiful. (It makes sense that you wouldn't send a child on a deadly mission, but what's stopping you sending a non-conventionally attractive adult?)

 

The three empowered women all get sent on seemingly unrelated quests that all converge later in the story. One women goes after her ex-husband who has a penchant for putting beautiful women in his sex/torture/molecular annihilation machine. Another goes after the scientist who apparently destroyed the man of the genius she loves, and the aged-up little girl goes after a gang of bad guys who stole her babysitter's soul so she'd take dirty photos of kidnapped underage runaways for them. 

 

The three stories converge as it turns out the evil ex-husband was sending the beautiful women's bodies to another dimension, where they'd be implanted with genius intellects stolen by the scientist, and perfect souls stolen by shock twist surprise vllain: the little girl's mother! These "perfect" women would then be sold to the highest bidder in the slave markets on a world ruled over by the Teknophage. Long story short, he eats the villains in a fit of rage, and the three heroines go back to their previous lives. The vengeful ex-wife goes back to enjoy a normal life, but Lady Justice shows her visions of the future showing her that the other two are both haunted by their experiences and end up living miserable, tragic lives.

 

So that's Neil Gaiman's Wheel of Worlds! Like I said earlier, issue zero is an entertaining, engaging story with interesting characters, and issue one is boring "dark age" nineties trash that's unpleasant seemingly just for the sake of it.

Kaikan Phrase - Datenshi Kourin (Playstation)

I've covered a lot of anime license games on here before, but this might be the game licensed from the most obscure anime so far. Released during the late nineties bishonen boom alongside the likes of Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no Matsuei, Kaikan Phrase is a show about a Visual Kei band made up of handsome young men. It's never had an official English release, and the only fansubs around as far as I can tell are rips of ancient VHS tapes!

 

Fitting with the theme of the show, the game is a rhythm game, in which you play the songs of the fictional band  Λucifer (which also became a real band, so singles and such could be released). There's only four stages in single player story mode, but each stage you pick one of two options. Though it's not a branching path, there are only two options for each stage no matter what, and the options only change the cutscenes that play before and after the stage. There's also only six songs in the game, and worst of all: they pad out the play time by making you grind to unlock them!

 

When you start a stage, you choose a song and a band member to play as. Since each member plays a different instrument, they each have different charts for each song, and naturally, different difficulty levels. To unlock more songs, you have to gain New Release points, which I think are scored 1:1 on the number of successful notes you play in a song. So picking a harder chart means more potential for points, but if you fail a stage, you get nothing. No matter what, though, when you start playing, you'll be hearing the first song at least three times before you unlock the second, and the gaps between unlocks only get longer and longer.

 

As for the game itself, it's incredibly simple: there's a bar on the lefthand side of the screen. Note markers appear on the bar, and a line travels down it. Although the markers appear in a number of different colours, you only ever have to press the X button when the line reaches them, and that's it! There's a meter next to the bar that fills up gradually as you hit notes, and if it's full at the end of the song, you pass the stage! As you progress through the four stages of a single player playthrough, that meter gets longer, but there's no other complications added.

 

Despite the grind problem, I still had a pretty good time playing this game. The songs are decent, and actually playing it is mindless and stress-free to the extent that it's a nice relaxing game to zone out to and play for 15 minutes or so. Obviously, it gets better as you unlock more songs, too.

Kinnikuman Nisei - Shinsedai Choujin vs. Densetsu Choujin (Gamecube)

 So, this game did get a western release, under the title Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs. New Generation. I played the Japanese version instead, though, since I read somewhere that the western publishers removed the character creation mode. Now I'm not so sure whether that's true or not, but really it doesn't matter much either way, since the character creation mode isn't very good.

 

I had high hopes for it, since a character creation mode in such a cartoony-looking game seemed like it could be really interesting. Unfortunately, you just select a head, torso, arms, and legs from a pretty small selection, and they're all obviously meant to be matched together in sets, and mixing them up really does look like you just mixed up parts from different characters. Also, you can't use them in the game's main single player mode, only in one-off fights.

 

It's a simple wrestling game based on the anime Kinnikuman Nisei/Ultimate Muscle, obviously, and it really is very simple: there are no pinfalls or submissions, you're just trying to get your opponent's health to zero in every match. Furthermore, the game is mostly controlled using just the analogue stick for movement, and three buttons: strike, grapple, and jump. Each character has a short string of strike attacks, a couple of wrestling moves done with the grapple button, as well as a mid-air strike and grapple each. There's also a super meter, and by holding the left trigger, you can expend one segment of meter to perform a more powerful strike, two segments for a more powerful grapple, or all three to perform a big super move, which is like its own little cutscene where you do some big crazy impossible wrestling move on your opponent.

 

There's a ton of characters and stuff to unlock (including a gallery of photos of over four hundred keshigomu figures!), but the preblem is that all the characters feel the same when you play as them, and they only have very few moves, and it's pretty boring seeing the same couple of moves over and over during each match. Take into account that a single-player playthrough comprises five consecutive matches, and it's even worse. 

 

As it is, the game attempts to occupy a space between fighting games and wrestling games, but while each genre has its own complexities, this game kind of eschews both, leaving you with a great-looking, but repetitive and over-simple game. I can't even really recommend it for multiplayer, since the main skill you need is the ability to press the attack button before your opponent does. It's a shame, since it mostly feels okay to play and it has a lot of charm, but it's just so completely unexciting that it's not worth bothering with.

Nekoba Rock n Roll (PC)

 Nekoba, in case you're wondering, is short for "Neko Bazooka", and in this game you play as a badly-drawn cat with a bazooka, shooting various weird things in at least three kinds of stages (I haven't completed the game yet, maybe more appear later?). There's platform stages, driving stages, and helicopter stages.

 

The platform stages are the most numerous, and they take place in closed-off areas where you have to kill all the bosses that appear within the time limit (and obviously, without getting killed yourself). The driving stages see you stand on the back of a pickup truck shooting a cop cars and busses until a boss appears for you to kill, and the helicopter stages are short, but somewhat traditional horizontally-scrolling shooting stages.

 

This is a game that really feels like what I think of regarding the term "indie": it seems to have been made by one person, who clearly had ideas about the game they wanted to make, and let nothing stand in their way. The art is wildly inconsistent, with high detailed artwork of anime girls talking to crudely-drawn blobs in the cutscenes, and all the enemies in the stages are a seemingly random assortment of more crudely-drawn animals, parodies of existing characters (including the very brave inclusion of what appears to just be a distorted low resolution piece of official mickey mouse art), and just strange monster things. All this, and a lot of the music is actually vocal songs!

 

Is it actually fun to play, though? Yes! It's definitely not a tightly-crafted experience, but each stage is only a couple of minutes long, and they're some incredibly frantic minutes with enemies and bullets all over the place. The difficulty is just right, too, as it never feels like a tedious cakewalk, or a punishing slog. Likewise, the enemies all take just enough punishment to make them satisfying kills without feeling like damage sponges. Come to think of it, maybe this is a tightly-crafted experience, merely disguised as a demented piece of outsider art?

 

Anyway, Nekoba Rock n Roll is interesting, fun, unique and also very very cheap. So you should probably go and buy it!

Shin Senki Van-Gale - The War of Neo-Century (Playstation)

 I was attracted to this game not only because it was a Playstation fighting game I haven't seen anyone talk about before, and also because it seemed to be an aerial, projectile-focussed fighting game, like the Psychic Force games. It's not really much like Psychic Force, though. I'd say it's more like a cross between Bastard! Ankoku no Hakaishin and Senko no Ronde.

 

This is an assumption based entirely on the game's low budget-looking intro FMV and the fact that both the developer and the publisher seem to have only released a few games each, all in a window of a few years in the late nineties, but it does feel like it's a bit of an enthusiast's project. It's undeniable what the aim of the game was: to recreate one-on-one mecha battles, specifically in the style of those seen in the Gundam franchise. There's lots of zooming around, shooting and dodging laser fire, ruching in close to attack with beam sabers, and defending with beam shields.

 

It's also heavily influenced by Gundam aesthetically: as well as the robots looking like Gundam designs (one of them looks almost exactly lke The O, for example), the stages are straight out of that franchise, too. There's space, with the Earth in the background, a stage where the two combatants are burning up on entry into the atmosphere, a big cylindrical space colony, and so on. One bizarre detail is that you can set a time limit in the options screen, but it only seems to apply on the re-entry stage.

 

Unfortunately, though the game looks and sounds great, it doesn't play so great. It's not painful to play or anthing, but it's just not particularly enjoyable, either. I think a big problem stems from something that Psychic Force has that Van-Gale doesn't. In Psychic Force, there's an invisible line connecting the two characters; their positions and how the directions work for them are always in relation to their opponent, and more importantly, projectiles always fire directly at the opponent, and melee attacks always connect when the fighters are within range and the defender hasn't blocked or dodged.

 

What this results in is really long fights where two robots shoot at each other, only occasionally doing damage. Even rushing in to melee attack isn't great, because melee attacks only seem to actually trigger sometimes, and when it does happen, it usually just awkwardly whiffs. Sometimes a little "LOCK ON" crosshair thing appears over your opponent, though it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Attacks that you're supposed to aim just fire straight ahead whether the crosshair is there or not, and homing attacks kind of vaguely home in on the opponent whether it's there or not. I don't know if it's just an aesthetic touch or it does something that I haven't figured out, or even if it's supposed to do something, but some kind of programming error prevents that.

 

Like I said earlier, Van-Gale isn't a terrible game, but it's also not a good one. If you're curious about it, you might as well take a look, just don't spend a lot of money on it.

Other Stuff Monthly #24!

 A dark day that I never thought would come to pass finally has: I own a product of the Funko company. It's not one of their garbage cube-headed figures, though, it's Godzilla Tokyo Clash a board game about monsters throwing trains at each other. It even has some excellent-looking miniatures, proving that some talented sculptors do apparently work there!

 

The game sees two-to-four players each picking a kaiju from a selection of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and unexpectedly, the one movie wonder Megalon, and having them wage turn-based combat against each other and humanity. You take turns playing cards from your hand to perform attacks against the other monsters, or discarding them to move around the city and attack buildings and vehicles. Attacking buildings and vehicles gives you the energy you need to attack the other kaiju, so you've got to perform a balancing act between the two.

 

Because kaiju are generally near-indestructible (and because being eliminated from a board game is boring and dumb), you can't actually kill each other. Instead, every special move card has a points value in the bottom-right corner, and dealing damage means you take a number of cards from the top of your victim's deck and taking the most valuable one as a trophy. There's a round tracker with the oxygen destroyer moving in one direction, and the smaller buildings going the other way as they're destroyed by the players, with the game ending when the two cross over each other. I guess the in-universe explanation is that the more bildings get destroyed, the greater urgency humanity feels with regard to deploying the ocygen destroyer? (Let's be kind and ignore the fact that Ghidorah can travel through space and doesn't need to breathe oxygen, okay?)

 

The board is made up of a bunch of tiles representing the city (a different amount based on the amount of players), and even comes with a bunch of little plastic buildings of various types to populate it. Along with the excellent kaiju minis, it comes together to be a really great-looking game. I've seen some photos online from other people who own the game and have replaced the slightly generic-looking buildings with more detailed ones from other games, and the cardboard tokens representing the human vehicles with minis, and they looked amazing, too! That's something I may have to look into myself at some point.

 

Luckily, it's also a fun game to actually play, and the four kaiju all play differently, each emphasising different tactics. Though it's not the kind of game I can see myself playing every week, I do see it being a game that gets brought out semi-frequently for a long time. Especially if the rumours about planned expansions adding more kaiju turn out to be true.