Tank Force (Arcade)

Tank Force is the sequel to Tank Battalion, which got ported to NES and Game Boy as Battle City (why was that such a popular thing in the old days, changing the names of arcade ports? Was it a licencing thing?). The GB version of Battle City is easily one of my favourite games on that system, so you should definitely play it sometime. It gains a lot from the simplified graphics and the fact that you can't see the entire map onscreen at once.
But this post isn't about Battle City, it's about Tank Force! And I'll say right now, it's definitely a worthy sequel. In fact, it does everything a sequel should do!
If you don't know, the idea of the game is simple, the stages are simple, slightly mazey single screen maps with destructible walls, onto which enemy tanks will roll. You, also in a tank, keep killing all the enemies until they stop coming, then it's on to the next map.
Tank Force builds well upon this simple formula. The most immediatly obvious change is the improvements in graphics. TF is very colourful, and while the first game had simple, functional brick walls making up the stages, the sequel has various different buildings which, though viewed from above, still give the stages obvious themes: warehouse district, military base in a desert, etc.
There's also a lot of new actual game stuff, too. New power-ups, such as a range of temporary weapons, including a kind of sonic wave weapon that passes through walls without breaking them, allowing you to kill enemies from acros the map. There's new enemies too, including small, fast tanks that drop timed mines, and the biggest addition of all: bosses! The original game had no bosses at all, but every few stages in TF, you'll face really big super-tanks.
I think I'm beginning to sound a bit too much like a press release or something, with all this feature-listing and positivity. The problem is, I do just really like this game! I strongly recommend you play it, as well as the Game Boy port of the original.

Toryumon (Arcade)

When you're looking through a big long list of ROMs you've never heard of, how do you pick out the ones you want to play? I picked this one because it had the same name as the wrestling gym/promotion founded by Ultimo Dragon, that eventually changed it's name into Dragon Gate. But obviously, this game has nothing to do with wrestling at all. It's a kung-fu themed puzzle game.
It's pretty simple to play: yellow blocks fall into your pit in pairs, and some (or all) of the blocks' corners will have blue quarter-circles on them. Put four of those blue quarters together to make a full circle, and the four blocks disappear, the surrounding blocks get more blue quarters on them, and some junk blocks fall into your opponent's pit.
The junk blocks are actually an essential part of playing, though, as when you get rid of some regular blocks, any junk blocks touching them will gain a blue quarter on all four corners, which is (as far as I'm aware) the only way to get combos in this game. This means when half your pit is full of junk, it's very possible to make a dramatic and cool comeback! In a way, this is similar to the timed junk blocks in Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo, though in that case using them to your advantage is as much about waiting as skill (not that I'm saying that Toryumon is better than SPFT, though. Although Toryumon is pretty good, that would be crazy talk.).
The AI is pretty good at the game, too. If you let your guard down for even a few seconds, they can quickly mess up all of your plans and beat you in no time at all!
Toryumon is good. Strange that it never got a home or even handheld release, really. It just seems to have sank without a trace, never to be heard from again. What a shame.

Diet Go Go (Arcade)

Diet Go Go was released by Data East in 1992. It's a spiritual successor to Tumblepop. The plot apparently involves an evil scientist giving everyone free meat and cake. That bastard. Instead of vacuuming up enemies then shooting them like in Tumblepop, you inflate them with balls, then kick them around at other enemies. This works a lot better than Tumblepop's vacuuming which could sometimes feel a bit awkward and inaccurate.
Instead of always dying with a single hit, if you get hit by an enemies attack (which is usually in the form of food being thrown at you), you become fat and slow, and die if you get hit again. If you get hit by the enemies themselves you die straight away.
Like in Tumblepop, you get extra lives from bonus stages, this time accessed by getting 777 on the fruit machine at the top of the screen, which spins whenever you collect one of the big gold coins that enemies drop. Matching triples of other symbols gets you one of each power-up or causes a whole bunch of points items to appear onscreen. This random element meants this happens a lot more often than collecting the whole word "tumblepop", so you end up getting extra lives pretty frequently.
Like you can see in the video, it's a lot faster than Tumblepop, and i think it's a lot better too. It's actually one of my most played roms in MAME, and one of the few i can come close to completing.

(Originally posted on selectbutton.net on 13/03/2009)

Logic Pro (Arcade)

There are lots and lots and lots of picross/nonogram/oekaki logic games in the world, and this one is the best of them. The reason for this bold claim? Because this is the only one to actually make a game using the puzzles. This was the first game of this type I ever played, which was a bad move, because every other one has seemed poorly thought out in comparision. The reason being that every other picross game I've played has just been a collection of puzzles on a disc/cartridge. At most, they might save your best times so you can go back and beat them. Of particular note is the GaoGaiGar Oekaki Logic game on DS, which doesn't even do that, and lacks the ability to cross off squares on the grid which you know to be clear. There are two main commands you need in a game of this type, and it forgets one of them. Not to mention the fact that the puzzles never actually get harder. You do get 20x20, 30x30 and 40x40 puzzles in that game, but you only ever tackle them as huge sets of multiple, very easy 10x10 puzzles, and the whole thing becomes a test of your patience.
But anyway, back to Logic Pro. Look at the screenshots. You can clearly see two things that are very important to this game's appeal: the score and the timer. I said earlier that most games of this type have a timer. The difference here is that the timer in logic pro goes down, not up, and if it runs out, it's game over. If you make a mistake, you lose a big chunk of time, and conversely, for every correct mark, you regain a small amount of time. You also get a small amount of points for each correct mark, and a bonus for clearing a stage without any errors. The simple addition of a score and a time limit are what turn a picross game from a laborious slog into a tense speed puzzle, and it works.
You might have noticed the little caveboy in all the screenshots. He isn't just there for decoration, this game has a plot! In a harrowing and emotional attract sequence, we see a large pink ape crying to our caveboy hero and his red-haired female friend (player 2's character in the completely pointless co-op mode), loudly stating "I WANT TO BE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN!", to which the brave kid yells "I CAN HELP YOU", and then goes off to solve puzzles, I guess. He mostly just stands there at the side of the screen, occaisionally jogging on the spot or shouting "GREEN LETTUCE" for no obvious reason. One last thing worth mentioning about this game, if you look below, you'll see that one of the later puzzles bear an eerie resemblance to famous child-killer Myra Hindley. I can't say whether or not this was intentional, though.