New Sinbad 7 (Arcade)

I like to think that I'm too intelligent to be taken in by advertising, but in the case of New Sinbad 7, it was not just the game's promotional flyer, with its striking sci-fi/fantasy hybrid art, but also the bizarre slogan on that flyer, loudly proclaiming "SEVEN TIMES SEVEN SORCERERS OF OLD SOUGHT SINBAD 7", that totally caught my imagination and led me to playing the game. It's a great little turn of phrase though, isn't it? It's so mythic and dramatic.

The game itself is a little less so, however. It's a maze game, that's pretty primitive-looking, even compared to other games from 1983, and you play as sinbad, represented by what appears to be some kind of tiny green bird, who flies around mazes shooting butterflies. In the centre of each maze, there's a temple with a treasure or a key in the middle of it, and for each monster you kill, a small block of the temple disappears, until a path has been cleared to the bounty within. If there's a treasure there, you collect it and simply go on to the next stage. On collection of a key, a door will open somewhere on the stage, which leads to another screen, on which there's a formation of blocks for you to shoot, and while you're doing that, some of the blocks will occasionally break off and start haphazardly flying around the screen. Shoot all the blocks, animate or otherwise, and you go on to the next screen.

It's a very simple game, and I do like the path-clearing mechanic, and the fact that you can shoot the enemies' shots. In conjunction with the fact that you're limited to two shots at a time means that realistically, you'll win a gunfight with one enemy in a couple of seconds, but with two or more enemies coming at you from the same direction, you'll quickly end up dead. I like that small-scale bit of mechanical certainty: you know exactly what you can do, and so you can instantly assess which situations can be worked to your benefit. Unfortunately, the "block" stages don't really allow for any of that kind of strategising, with your enemies randomly bouncing around the screen faster than both your movement and your bullets, making clearing them mainly down to luck.

I can see that they wanted to break up the main stages in fears of the game becoming repetitive, but those block stages are boring, unfair and generally terrible. New Sinbad 7 wouldn't have been some great classic without them, but they definitely make it a worse game than it would otherwise have been. I don't recommend playing this game, but I do really recommend you go and look up its flyer.

Ninja Emaki (Arcade)

Ninja Emaki (also known as Youma Ninpou Chou) is a 1986 entry into a now mostly dead shooting sub-genre: the Commando-style top-down walking shooters. Nowadays, it seems that vertically scrolling shooters have to either be more standard ship-style games with player's shots only going in one direction, or twin-stick shooters where the player's movement and firing directions are totally independent.

You play as a ninja in fuedal Japan who, in a mildly cliched story, goes off to rescue a princess who we see being carried off by a giant flying snake at the start of the game. You're armed with a crossbow as standard, and there's also magic scrolls that periodically appear, giving access upon collection to your choice of eight different offensive spells. The way this works is very versatile: once you collect and activate a scroll, the magic will work for twenty seconds, and during those twenty seconds, you can cycle through the different weapons as much as you like. They're all pretty different, too, having effects from a crashing wave that course up the screen destroying enemies, to a series of small whirlwinds that surround you, killing enemies that come near, to a simple power boost for your crossbow bolts.

What makes Ninja Emaki stand out from the pack (and believe it or not, there is something of a pack of ninja-themed scrolling shooters) is its slightly manic pace and structure. Though you start the game in the skies riding a cloud, each area you enter is different: you're riding a cloud, then you're running through a field, then you're on a boat, then fighting giant spiders in a graveyard, and so on. And I say "areas" rather than "stages" because there's never really a solid "end of the stage" like you'd expect in most games. Instead, you just travel up the screen, going from one situation to the next, the action never stopping for more than a second or two.

Though its qualities don't instantly jump out on first playing, Ninja Emaki is a fun, exciting game, and definitely worth your time. And if you find it too easy (which is definitely a possibility, as it's pretty generous with the extra lives), apparently the Japanese version is a lot harder, though I've not yet played it myself.

Chaos Heat (Arcade)

If you think way back, you might remember when I wrote about a terrible Playstation survival horror game named Chaos Break, and how I mentioned that it was a vastly inferior "adaptation" of an arcade game called Chaos Heat. This is that very game. Obviously. Before I start, I should also mention that the emulation of this game isn't totally perfect yet, but it's definitely good enough to play.

Anyway, it's a 3D action game, that's structured like a beat em up, but you mostly shoot stuff, rather than punch it. I guess kind of like the later Capcom game Cannon Spike? It's got the same plot as a million other 90s videogames: you're a member of an elite military team, and you've been sent to some remote lab full of genetically-engineered monsters. There's three characters to pick from, and they're different not just in movement speed and attack power, but in the weapons they carry.

To elaborate, the weapons can be shot normally, by tapping the fire button, or they can be charged by holding it down. So different are the characters' weapons, that even the way charging works is different for each of them. For example, one character's charge attack is a powerful laser that fires continuously for however long you held the button before releasing, while another character's charge attack only works if it's charged all the way, and it increases the power of their normal shots for a short time. The third character doesn't have a charge weapon, instead firing a powerful flamethrower that uses up ammo at a much higher rate than their normal gun when the button is held.

As you play the game more, you'll encounter various other interesting things about it, like how there are branching paths through levels, that diverge based on your ability to perform timed tasks, like protect an NPC teammate for 30 seconds while they hack an electronic lock, and so on. Different paths through stages can even lead to entirely different boss fights, too, which is more impressive than the "same boss fight, different background" offered by the likes of House of the Dead 2!

The most interesting thing from a historical standpoint, though, is a mechanic that's way ahead of its time for a game released in 1998: the player has an invincible dodge roll move. I know Chaos Heat probably isn't the first game to have such a thing, but it's still something I associate with more modern action games, like Dark Souls or Bayonetta (actually, is the DS roll even invincible? It's been years since I played it). Once you know that this move is there, it totally changes the flow of the game, as it does in most games where it exists. The only downside to it is that it's performed with a double direction tap, rather than a single button press, which does feel slightly unwieldy.

Chaos Heat isn't a great all-time classic, but it is a bit of a hidden gem, and it's a crying shame that Taito decided to make that horrible survival horror game rather than give this one the home port it deserved. As it is, though, if you can tolerate playing a game in less-than-perfect emulation (or if you somehow gain access to a real cabinet), Chaos Heat is definitely worth a look.

Palamedes (Arcade)

This is a game I originally encountered in the form of its Game Boy port, which was on the 32-in-1 pirate cart I had as a kid, and have mentioned several times on this blog previously. Unfortunately, the Game Boy version is a pretty bad port, for reasons I'll get into later, so I'm reviewing the original arcade release instead.

Anyway, Palamedes is a "matching stuff as it descends from the 'bove"-type puzzle game. This time you're not matching colours, but sides of a die. In a similar manner to Magical Drop (though predating that series by a few years), you control a little character at the bottom of the screen, who holds a six-sided die above their head. Pressing one button cycles through the sides of the die, and the other throws it upwards, where rows of dice are steadily advancing downwards. You throw the die at other die showing the same face to make them disappear. When the advancing rows reach the bottom of the screen, it's game over. There's a solitary score attack mode, as well as versus modes where you can compete against another human player, or a series of AI opponents.

And, were I reviewing the Game Boy port, that's where the description would end, as that port omits the most interesting aspect of the game: the fact that by clearing dice in the right order, you create simple mahjong-esque "hands", that can be used to clear several lines of descending dice at once. There's a whole bunch of different hands to get, from simply getting the same number three or more times in a row, to getting all the numbers one to six in order, and a bunch of others in between.

Clearing lines in this way is by far the best way of scoring points, and in all modes, clearing a certain number of lines is the way to advance the level. In the competitive modes, clearing lines via your hands is also the way you attack your opponent: lines you clear are added to their field at the same time. Without this whole thing, the Game Boy port is not only a lot less interesting, it's also so difficult as to be almost unplayable.

This is the arcade version, though, and it's a game i definitely recommend giving a try. There's also a sequel on the Famicom that I haven't played, and there are a few ideas I feel would add to the game, so that's something I'll be looking into and probably covering here at some point in the future too.

Dragon Unit (Arcade)

Dragon Unit was released in 1989 by the little-known Athena co., and it's an odd kind of hybrid platformer/beat em up. Odd because rather than being a platformer with beat em up elements, there are instead two kinds of stages: straight platformer stages and other stages that are mainly a long, flat corridor of enemies, but have two Guardian Heroes-esque planes to switch between by pushing the joystick up or down.

Other than that, and the fact that the shield the protagonist is carrying actually does block small projectiles, it's pretty unremarkable, mechanically speaking. There's lots of enemies, a whole range of power-ups and different weapons to collect and all the typical stuff you'd expect from a 1989 arcade platformer. Its charm lies in its presentation. At the most basic level, you can plainly see that the sprites are big, the colours are bright and lurid, and it looks pretty nice, though the black outlines on everything are a little ugly. Looking further than that, there's nice little touches, like how your knight's armour gradually falls apart as your health decreases until he's in his underwear, like a more gradual version of Arthur from Ghouls and Ghosts.

There's also a lot of visual variety in Dragon Unit. Even though there are only six fairly short stages, they all look completely different to each other, and mostly have their own sets of enemies, who are mostly big and always ugly and evil-looking, which is nice too. It's a game that mostly gets by on its atmosphere, the ugliness of the enemies, the overly saturated colours, and so on really make it stand out. At the same time, it's all very rough around the edges, I don't know whether it's down to a lack of experience on the part of the developers, or maybe budget or time contraints, but the whole thing looks, sounds and feels very unpolished.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, and I'd say it actually adds to the game's appeal. It could have given the impression of a game lazily knocked out to fill a quota, but instead it feels more like a labour of love, made by a team whose passion and creativity slightly outweighed their technical abilities. I'd say it's definitely worth a look and a credit feed through at the very least. There's apparently also a NES port, called Castle of Dragon. I haven't played it, but I can't imagine it being a game that makes the transition to such an underpowered console gracefully.

Baluba-Louk no Densetsu (Arcade)

So, Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a 1986 platformer that combines ideas from an earlier age of arcade games, along with ideas shared by its contempories. From the earlier age, it has a lot of mechanics that you'll recognise from Pac-Man and its imitators: your goal in each stage is to collect all the points items and avoid the enemies chasing you (in this case, they appear to be brightly coloured octopodes). Also, there's an item in each stage that turns the enemies into points items for a short time, which double in value for each one you manage to collect.

Its more contempory influences are more widespread but mainly, they appear to be Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble. From Mario, the game takes the idea of hitting blocks from below: hitting a treasure chest from below causes it to open, and opened treasure chests are worth more points when collected. Furthermore, an opened treasure chest might sprout a flower, and hitting it again will cause the flower to bloom. Obviously, bloomed flower chests are worth even more points. Opened chests will also leave a bomb in their place, and if the player jumps from a block with a bomb on top, the bomb will be lit, and any enemies caught in the explosion will be paralysed for a few seconds. Bloomed flowers, when collected, leave a different item, and when this item is jumped from, it fires shots to the left and right, which turn enemies into one of eight different power-ups, each with different effects, like adding portals or an extra "power pill" item to the stage, or just giving the player a few extra points.

It's this whole business with the flowers and opening chests and so on that I'm considering the influence of Bubble Bobble (and other arcade games of the time), that is, that though the game seems simple on the surface, there are various hidden and semi-hidden ways of scoring extra points, doing away with enemies, and so on. I often find myself saying on this blog the phrase "it's a shame this game wasn't more popular", and it applies to this game, too, as though it did get a Famicom-only sequel, had it been more popular, there might be more documentation around of the various secrets that might be hidden within (or maybe I'm just assuming too much of the game, and the reason it never took off in a big way, despite being a fun, well made game,  is because there aren't any secrets and it didn't hold players' attention for long).

Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a decent enough little game, and I recommend you give it a shot. As an aside, the text on the title screen "Baluba-Louk was discovered in 1985" made me wonder if it was inspired by some real ruins or something that might have been discovered that year, but no, that's just regular old flavour text.

Snezhaja Koroleva (Arcade)

So, here's a game that was made in the Soviet Union (specifically Ukraine, I believe), for a Soviet audience. Though it was released in 1988, it's apparently based on a 1957 animated film, itself based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Snow Queen. I haven't seen that movie, but I'm sure it can't be the worst animated adaptation that story's received.

Though some might hold lazy stereotypes about technology in the USSR being primitive in comparision to that of the rest of the world, graphically, Snezhaja Koroleva appears to be on a par with what a lot of videogames looked like in 1988. I definitely wouldn't look too out of place on the Master System or maybe even as a budget-priced Amiga release of that period.

Of course, in terms of aesthetics and game mechanics, it was probably developed in a state of relative isolation from its Japanese, American and Western European peers, and as a result, it has a fairly different structure and feel to it. It's essentially a collection of single-screen mini-games.

You play as Gerda, out to find her missing friend Kay, and on each screen, the goal is to reach the top-right corner, with each screen providing its own obstacles. Oddly, though most of the screens are platformers, the first is a maze, that has you avoiding monsters while picking up roses before heading to the corner to exit. There's some thing of a "Game and Watch" quality to the rest of the screens, as they focus on avoiding or navigating various obstacles, sometimes requiring frame-perfect timing. I was going to say that the game's easy to get through, after I managed it on my second attempt, but then on every subsequent attempt, I totally failed, so who knows? I also had a theory that the game was "allowed" to be easy and just tell a story because it was developed outside of capitalism and the profit motive demanding a challenging coin-muncher. But I guess my own ineptitude has put paid to that idea.

As it is, and as it often is with old games developed outside the "usual" game-developing regions, Snezhaja Koroleva (or Снежная королева, if you like) is more of an endearing curiosity than an unearthed lost classic. Still, it's nice that games like these are preserved for everyone to play, isn't it?

Pilot Kids (Arcade)

Pilot Kids is a third party game for SEGA's famous and beloved Model 2 arcade hardware, from Psikyo. Though it's a shooting game, as you'd expect of Psikyo, it's pretty different to most of Psikyo's shooters, in terms of both looks and mechanics. On both fronts, I'd say the Psikyo game it's closest to is their weird Space Invaders parody Space Bomber, with it's quirky looks and multi-kill based scoring system.

It's a horizontal shooter, about two kids who get shrunk down, and fly toy planes to fight off all the other toys, insects and other assorted household objects that have come to life in a hostile manner. The players have two weapons at their disposal: a normal machine gun and lock-on homing missiles. The machine gun is almost useless as an offensive weapon, though it does have the useful property of being able to destroy the orange bullets the enemies fire (which, for the first few stages, is all they fire. Towards the end of stage 4, indestructable blue bullets will also find their way into the enemy's patterns). The missiles, then, are your main method of attack, and they're slightly more complicated than most hoing weapons.

Pressing the second button fires a marker, and the player can mark three to six enemies at once (depending on how many power-ups you have). Pressing the main fire button when at least one enemy is marked fires a missile that'll pass through any marked enemies, as well as any others in its way. The missiles are also the key to the scoring system. The first enemy killed by a missile will award double points, the next quadruple, and so on, up to a multiplier of sixty-four.

Though it's not up there with the likes of Cave's games, or even Psikyo's best, Pilot Kids is pretty fun, and has a nice selection of gimmicks. If it had ever got a sequel that refined things a bit and had slightly more exciting stages, such a game would probably be a classic.

There is also an additional mystery connected to this game, though: after a game ends, and you've inputted your initials, there's a counter that starts at a billion points, and depletes by however many points you scored. It keeps track of this every time you play, and I've managed to hack away a little over twenty million points so far. I have no idea what happens when the counter reaches zero, and apparently, no-one else on the internet has tried to find out, either.

Curiosities Vol. 4 - Gambling!

Gambling games, especially ones that are played for real money are inherently bad. Not just from a moral standpoint, but also because they're entirely designed to drain money away from the player, rather than to be fun, well balanced games (the same applies to modern-day mobile phone games with real money currencies too, in my opinion.) But terrible games are still games, so lt's look at a few!

First up is Koro Koro Quest, by Takumi (who are better known for making various shooting games, including Gigawing, one of my all-time favourites). It's by far the simplest of the three games I'll be covering in this post, and it also feels like it's the least fair. On the plus side, it does look really nice, with big, colourful RPG/fantasy-themed graphics. After putting in your coins, you take part in a simple dice battle against a randomly selected monster, rolling two six-sided dice each, with the highest roller winning. You can tap your button to tamper with the dice in some way (it's not totally clear what it does, but you do seem to have a higher chance of winning doing this). If you win, you can either cash out or go on to the next, more chellenging battle. It looks nice, but like I said, there's not much to it and it's entirely based on luck.

Next is Crusher Mako-chan, also by Takumi, and also looking pretty nice. The premise here is a bit more silly: you play as Mako-chan, a superhumanly strong little girl, who has to punch various large objects to solve various problems (destroy a toppling skyscraper before it hits the ground, destroy a dam so the water can put out a fire, etc.). You do this by hammering on the button as quickly as possible, in a Track and Field sort of way. Even if you fail, sometimes you'll get a second chance to turn Mako-chan into a huge muscle-bound monster and win anyway. After stages, you get the same choice to cash out or carry on. It feels a lot fairer than Koro Koro Quest, and as a result, it's more fun to play too.

Finally, we have Witch, also known as Pinball Champ 95, by Vic Tokai. It;s totally different ot the other two games in this post, being an odd combination of pinball and bingo. After you put in your coins, you can then bet on lines on a bingo-style grid of numbers. Then, you play pinball! You have a time limit and only a single ball, and the aim is to hit the bumpers, which are randomly flashing numbers. Hit a bumper, and you cross off the number it was on on your bingo card. There's also Devil Crush-esque bonus screens hidden about the place, too. Although the strong gameplay element makes Witch feel like it's a pretty fair game, on all the times I've played it, I've never managed to fill a single line.

So that's gambling games, then! I might cover some more of these in the future, if I find out about any more that are interesting.

Thunder Hoop (Arcade)

Thunder Hoop's an arcade platform game by a Spanish company called Gaelco, who have a few games I hope to cover in the future, mainly because unlike a lot of European arcade manufacturers, they did/do seem to actually care about making good games, rather than just makng money (even if they aren't always 100% successful in their endeavours). In fact, they're probably best known for releasing the ROMs for their game World Rally for free and even assisting in it being added to MAME.

But anyway, Thunder Hoop. It feels quite Amiga-esque, in two ways: mechanically, it's obviously inspired by Japanese arcade games, as a lot of the better Amiga games were, and aesthetically it has a kind of particularly European psuedo-anime look to it. The main character even looks kind of like a bootleg Son Goku. Otherwise, it's a fairly typical action-heavy platform game, and a fairly well made one, from a purely mechanical and technical standpoint. There's no wrestling with bad controls, or poor collision detection or anything like that, it all works fine.

The problem is the stage designs. Firstly, though they are at least interesting to navigate (ie. you're always climbing ladders and jumping platforms and so on, rather than just walking across vast flat plains), the stages are also far too long. I haven't timed any of my plays, but they feel like they're around 5 minutes long each, which seems a bit of a slog. Secondly, there are lots of places where enemies just suddenly appear right next to the player literally out of nowhere, giving them almost no time to react. Obviously, these enemies will only get you the first time you reach their spawning point, but it feels cheap and Rick Dangerous-esque, which is bad enough for home games but even worse in an Arcade game.

Though it does have some good points, and it is an admirable effort, I don't really recommend playin Thunder Hoop. Apparently it has two sequels that aren't yet emulated in MAME. I'd definitely be interested in playing them, as TH does show potential, and it'd be nice to see if it was ever realised.

Bullfight (Arcade)

The first thing I should mention here is that the title of this game isn't any kind of metaphor, it's literally about bulfighting, and it's pretty grisly, so if you that might upset you, you should probably skip this post. It's a top-down single screen game, it's pretty fun, atmospheric enough, but also quite flawed.

You play as a torero in the bullring, and the controls comprise a joystick and two buttons. Obviously, the joystick moves you around, while the buttons are for cape moving and stabbing, respectively. You score points for leading the bull with your cape, stabbing the bull, leading it into a wall, opening a wound on its back and killing it. Upon killing the bull, you go onto the next stage, with progressively fiercer bulls, and eventually, a second bull gets added to the mix.

The bull can trample you, which temporarily immobilises you, he can knock your sword out of your hand and even sometimes break it (if this happens a guy at ringside will throw another one into the ring after a couple of seconds) and he can gore you with his horns, resulting in a lost life. Since your torero wears a different-coloured outfit for each life, does that mean that they're literally being killed in the ring and it's a different guy each time? Who knows?

As for the flaws, there are two main ones. The first is that cape movement is kind of awkward and stiff. I think the direction in which the cape rotates is determined by the relative positions and movements of you and the bull, but I'm not entirely sure about that. The second is that the bull's movement can sometimes feels erratic and random, even when you're leading it with your cape. I guess this adds a little realism, since a bull is a huge, angry wild animal and should be a little unpredictable, but it can also make the game feel unfair.

If you can stomach it, though, I do think bullfight is a fun game, despite its flaws and the fact that it's pretty shallow in the long run. Interesting that other than this, the only other videogames based on real-life bloodsports that I can think of are those Cabela rifle animal hunting arcade games. I guess that's because of the unpleasant subject matter and the inherent unfairness in favour of the human participants that most of these sports hold. I'd also like to point out before I finish that I am totally against bloodsports of all kinds in real life.

Maze of Flott (Arcade)

Maze of Flott is a bizarre game. Not in any of the usual senses: mechanically, it's plays like an attempt at making a slightly more involved and complex version of the traditional arcade maze game, and there's nothing overtly surreal about the aesthetic either. What bizarre is the combination of the two. You play as a little red car that drives around cities looking for keys, and avoiding/destroying other cars along the way. You also have a fuel gauge, and there are petrol stations dotted around where you can refuel, which costs money. Also, unlike the cars in Pacar (another, much older, car-themed maze game), in Maze of Flott, your car just moves like any other maze game character, being able to instantly turn 180 degrees and go in the other direction.

Money and keys are both obtained inside buildings. Now, although these buildings appear to be things you'd find in normal cities, like banks, supermarkets, casinos, and so on from the outside, on the inside they actually contain dungeon-like mazes (or maze-like dungeons), full of traps, treasures, and secret passageways. Exactly which maze is in which building is different every time you play, though there are only a few possible layouts to encounter. The keys are also in different buildings each time, and every possible layout has the potential to contain a key.

This means the player has to go into each building and thoroughly explore the mazes within until they find the number of keys needed to proceed to the next stage. This kind of balances out with the fact that every mazes contains lots of treasure, whether the key's there or not, and treasure gives both points and money, and money can be spent to buy back the fuel wasted on going round all these mazes.

The big problem with this game comes in the form of some unfair inconsistency. When you're in the mazes, colliding with most of the traps will take a chunk off your fuel gauge, with the exception being that falling down an open trap door means losing a life. While outside, driving around the cities, colliding with other vehicles is instant death. Furthermore, the vehicles are faster, more numerous and less predictable than the maze traps.

I can't really recommend this game, nothing about it is really interesting enough to be able to overlook its numerous flaws.