Hangzo (Arcade)

Hangzo is yet another unreleased arcade game that only came to light thanks to MAME, though this time it's not by Taito. It might be by Hot-B or Data East, though no-one seems to be 100% sure. One thing that is for sure is that though Hangzo was inteded to be an arcade game, spiritually, it's a Mega Drive game to the core. Can you really say that game is spiritually something for sure? Yes, I just did.

The game's about three ninjas, who clearly went to the Joe Musashi school of ninjitsu, as they don't spend any time sneaking around assassinating people. Instead they go through cyberpunk cities noisily destroying loads of exploding robots, and also through biopunk laboratories destroying loads of exploding blobby monsters. They even have a limited-use screen-clearing magic bomb jutsu! It really is like a lost Shinobi game, specifically a lost entry into the Mega Drive's Super/Revenge of Shinobi series.

There are a couple of original elements, though, like the inclusion of seperate buttons for melee and projectile attacks, bearing in mind that Hangzo does predate Shinobi III/Super Shinobi 2, and even in that game, the six-button mode was hidden behind a cheat code. There's also a magic fire breathing lion that turns up in most of the stages for you to ride around on. But generally in terms of both theming and mechanics, this is essentially a professionally-made Shinobi fangame.

It's fairly easy too, and shouldn't take more than a few attempts to one-credit-clear. Though a big part of this is thanks to one stage, about midway through the game, inexplicably having a section where a whole bunch of extra lives and health powerups coming floating in from the side of the screen. But it's not too easy, though, not easy enough to be boring, at least.

I feel like the last few posts on this blog have been really negative, and though I want to turn that around with this post, I can't be 100% positive about Hangzo. Probably as a conseqeunce of being an unfinished, unreleased game, it is a little rough around the edges: the presentation is not exactly super-polished, and the hitboxes feel a little strange at times, for example. However, it's still a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend going and giving it a try. It's a shame it never actually got released, and I hope someday, whoever owns the rights to it gives it a little extra sheen and releases it officially somehow.

Command War Super Special Battle & War Game (Arcade)

I've reviewed an unreleased Taito arcade game before, Recalhorn, which was pretty much a completed , fully polished game that just wasn't released. Command War Super Special Battle & War Game is not like that: it's very unfinished, and very rough around the edges. I think it's mainly the presentation and balance that hasn't been worked out, though, and the game is still very playable.

Unusually for an (intended) arcade game, it's a strategy game, that sees you moving troops around a simple board. When one of your troops meets one of the enemy's troops, they enter a little battle, a lot like the ones seen in the Game Gear game, Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki. Also like that game, the troops themselves are a combination of normal sci-fi military stuff like tanks, jets and giant robots, along with slightly weirder monsters, like cyborg dragons and giant harpies. You might not expect it, but it seems that the tanks are the most important units, just because they're so short that a lot of the larger troops' attacks just go right over their heads.

So, that's the basic premise of the game, but before you play, you're asked to select one of four difficulty levels, which have more of an effect on how the game works then you might expect. On beginner mode, you're automatically given a pre-selected group of troops for each battle, making it the least interersting of all the modes. In amateur, there's always a tank on your team, and you get to buy two more. In Professional and Expert, you get to pick all your troops for yourself, plus the objective of the battles is different: in the lower two difficulties, you win simply by defeating all the enemy troops. In the higher two difficulties, each side also has a special extra unit in the form of a giant robot/tank thing, the defeat of which instantly ends the battle.

You've probably noticed that the screenshots of this game are pretty hard to read, and that's true: clearly, the developers hadn't fully figured out how this game was to be presented, and in its current form it's very messy-looking. You do get used to it after a couple of plays, though it's still a shame that it's hard to get a decent look at the troops attacking each other in the action sections without the big stupid maps in the way. There's also a problem with the money, in that you don't get more money for winning battles, and you need to buy units to replace those destroyed. You can get money in battle to be the first one to reach the flags on the map, but otherwise, you can quickly end up in an unwinnable situation after a couple of stages.

All in all, Command War is a mildly interesting distraction, and a curiosity for Taito fans to look into. In its current form, though, it's not a very good game. It might have become one if they'd continued working on it, but it's easy to see why they didn't: someone obviously had the thought "can we make a strategy game for arcades?", and it gradually became clearer that the answer was "not really".

Agress - Missile Daisenryaku (Arcade)

The circumstances of Agress' release, and that of its unofficial English translations are somewhat interesting. It's a Versus puzzle game released in 1991 and themed around the Gulf War, even having grainy digitised photos of Saddam Hussein and George Bush in the attract mode. Then, an unofficial English version seems to have surfaced in 2003, presumably to exploit the US and UK's invasion of Iraq that was happening at that time (though they didn't update the attract mode to feature George W Bush).

The title might lead you to believe that this game is related to the long-running Daisenryaku series of very serious military turn-based strategy games, but other than the theme and name, I can't find any relation between the two. In it, you're presented with a map covering the top half of the screen that has missile launchers at either side, representing the two sides of the conflict. The actual game takes place in the bottom half of the screen, where there's two grids (one for each player, just like the missile launchers). The grids each have a bunch of grey tiles, a few coloured tiles, and one empty space. There's also a picture that shows the coloured tiles arranged into a certain pattern or shape. Your task is to keep moving the tiles round to mimic the pictured shape, which causes you to launch missiles and very gradually tunr sections of the map your colour.

So, just like how, a few years later, Puchi Carat would figure out a way of making Arkanoid-style games into endless puzzles, Agress has figured out how to make those annoying little plastic slide puzzles endless, and competitive to boot! I think it's also the only videogame version of a slide puzzle I've seen that wasn't pornographic, too. Is it any good though? Well, unfortunately, I've only been able to play it single player, and even on the easiest settings, it's a struggle to get more than a couple of stages in, and it's very stressful figuring out how to move the tiles round to get that one tile where you need it to be. Just like real slide puzzles, really! Once the game starts increasing the number of coloured tiles, and even adding multiple colours, it gets more and more difficult to keep treading water.

I suspect, though, that it's the two-player mode in which this game would shine. Having two human players facing off against each other would make for a tense, though probably brief exchange, with the fun not being hampered by one competitor having a perfect computer brain designed solely to win at this game. (I'm sure I've read before that in making videogame AI, programmers make it as good as it can possibly be, then pare it back to make them into reasonably beatable opponents for human players. It seems like the developers of this game skimped on the second part slightly.) So, I guess if you can get someone to play an old, ugly, tastelessly-themed puzzle game with you, you'll probably have a decent time with Agress. If you're going to be playing alone, though, I wouldn't bother.

Spikers Battle (Arcade)

The Dreamcast, despite being, in most respects, an incredible machine for people who wanted to bring the arcade home, had only two beat em ups released for it (as far as I can remember, at least). And one of them was Soul Fighter. The strange thing about this is that SEGA had a series of beat em ups in arcades at around that time, the Spikeout series, and two of them even ran on Naomi hardware: the fantasy-themed Slashout, and this one, Spikers Battle. They would have made great additions to the DC library, but I guess it's all just more evidence of SEGA being the Paul Heyman of the videogames world: unmatched in terms of creativity and talent, completely terrible when it comes to making money.

Anyway, Spikers Battle is a strange case, in that it's a beat em up that thinks its a fighting game. It controls like a beat em up, has weapons strewn about the place like a beat em up, and most of the stages see you fighting a boss and some goons, like a beat em up. If you were to compare it to any other game, the most apt would probably be the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun/Renegade, with its small stages and gang warfare setting. But on top of all of this, it has a strange fighting-game rounds system in place of lives, whereby to advance past a stage, you have to finish it twice, and to get a game over, you have to fail the same stage twice.

I haven't been able to find any information on how multiplayer modes work, but I'll assume it's like the other Spikeout games, and has multiple cabinets linked together, so maybe the rounds thing makes more sense in that context? Anyway, it's pretty much the only problem I have with this game, and it's not a big one. It's fun to play, looks really cool, everything's fine except for that one thing.

Obviously, if you're brave enough to tangle with Naomi emulation, or rich enough to tangle with Naomi ownership, Spikers Battle is one of the games I recommend you look into. It's a lot less brutal in terms of difficulty than some of its stablemates, too (I'm mainly talking about Slashout here, which is a very difficult game).

Street Fighter Alpha (Arcade)

It's the first of April, and as tradition dictates, I'm doing my one post a year (on this blog at least) about a mainstream videogame. My history with Street Fighter Alpha is a little odd: though the second and third games in the series were huge obsessions for me in me pre- and early teens, I never actually played the first SFA game until 2018, when it was included on the Street Fighter 30th anniversary compilation.

It didn't really have many surprises for me: like the first game in the other big CPS2 trilogy, Darkstalkers, it feels a lot like a proof-of-concept for its sequels. The roster's pretty slim, there's the seeds of certain ideas that would become more fleshed out later on, and so on. In fact, this is partially why I never played it before: its status as a "practice attempt" is so ingrained that even its story is completely overwritten by that of Street Fighter Alpha 2, and since the characters and lore have always been a big part of fighting games' appeal to me, I just never bothered after learning about that from the gigantic, now-legendary "Street Fighter Story FAQ" textfile that used to be floating around the internet.

It is a game with its own charms, though. There's some unnamable quality to the way it looks and sounds that fills me with nostalgia, and though the fact that there's even fewer stages than there are characters, the attempt to flesh out the selection by giving each one of them a couple of "time of day" colour palettes is a nice little bit of ingenuity. It also started the Alpha series' tradition of having ports to hardware that shouldn't be able to handle it. The second game had its SNES port, the third had the Game Boy Advance, but Street Fighter Alpha has two such ports: one to the Game Boy Color (which actually came out a fair while later than the SFA2 SNES port), and another to the CPS Changer. If you don't already know, the CPS Changer was Capcom's short-lived attempt at making a competitor to SNK's  Neo Geo AES, being a home console version of their CPS1 arcade hardware.

As already mentioned, the arcade version of Alpha was on CPS2 hardware, and the Changer port was the last game released on that system, done as a kind of swansong. It's almost arcade perfect, though. There's apparently fewer frames of animation in the Changer version, and I think there might be fewer colours and a bit more dithering if you look really closely, but mostly, it's not noticable at all. Anyway, those are my thoughts on Street Fighter Alpha. I'm sure most of you have already played it, but if not, it wouldn't hurt, would it?

Masked Rider Club Battle Race (Arcade)

I've actually been avoiding writing about this game for a long time now, not for any reason actually to do with the game itself, but for some reason I thought I'd already covered it years ago. But I finallt went back and cheacked and found no such post. So anyway, Masked Rider Club Battle Race is a game I actually got to play as a kid, in an arcade at a holiday camp in Cleethorpes. This was long before I'd ever head of Kamen Rider, and possibly before I'd even seen Saban's Masked Rider or the Power Rangers episodes that introduced him.

Anyway, it's one of those games that only I seem to love: a top-down, vertically-scrolling psuedo-racing game where the aim is to get to the end of each stage as quickly as possible while avoiding obstacles, and in which you have a fuel meter that acts as a combination time limit and health bar. There's got to be a snappier name for these things! There's also an actual time limit this time round, too, though it's so generous that you're never likely to run it down, and it's really only there for providing a time bonus at the end of each stage. The controls are interesting, though the game's controlled with two buttons and a digital joystick, you still have a fair amount of control over your speed. Obviously, once of the buttons is the accelerator, which you'll be holding the whole time, and you can let go of it to slow down and stop. But also, holding up on the joystick lets you go faster, and holding down lets you reduce your speed.

It's tempting to storm through the stages at top speed, holding up the entire time, but unless you both memorise the location of every obstacle and have the dexterity to avoid them at high speed, it's a bad move. In terms of survival and scoring, it's better to just go through the stages at normal speed: you're more likely to survive, and the end-of-stage fuel bonus is likely to be higher if you aren't constantly crashing into stuff. On top of that, you're more likely to pick up more of the points items littered about the stages if you aren't zooming past them, too. On the other hand, top speed is really fast, so it's a lot more thrilling to play tht way.

All the TV Kamen Riders who had appeared up to that point are playable characters, with the main difference between them being the direction and range of their attacks (in my opinion, Kamen Rider ZX is probably the best pick, with his straightfoward straight-ahead attack), and everything's in a colourful super deformed style, which I guess was the fashion at the time, considering there was also a Kamen Rider SD anime released in the same year, along with another SD Kamen Rider appearing in Banpresto's Great Battle series of Super Famicom games. Even if you're, for some reason, not a fan of Kamen Rider or tokusatsu in general, I'd still say Kamen Rider Club Battle Race is worth playing. It's a great example of the genre, with more sophistication than earlier entries. (In fact, it might even be the last game of its kind to ever appear in arcades, as the world had mostly moved on by 1993).

Pastel Island (Arcade)

Pastel Island is an unreleased arcade prototype, though as far as I can tell, the only noticable bug it has is that the "INSERT COINS" text keeps flashing while you're playing, so it doesn't seem totally unfair to treat it as if its a finished game. And it's not like it's on sale anywhere or anything, so I'm hardly going to be tricking anyone into buying a stinker or anything. Anyway, it's a maze game from 1993 where, by the time-honoured tradition, you are tasked with collecting all the points items (this time they're hearts) in a stage, before going to the next stage and doing it there, and so on.

It's a pretty full-featured game, too. There's a couple of scoring systems in play, the main one revolving around collecting stars. Stars are one of a few random power-ups that can appear when you destroy one of the destructible items littered around each stage, and when you kill an enemy. As a side note, while the power-ups are random, you can shoot them to turn them into other power ups, so scoring isn't totally reliant on the kindness of the random number generator, which is nice. The stars, when collected, multiply the value of the hearts for a limited time. If you collect a star while one's already active, the multiplier increases by one. So, collecting stars, and doing it in quick succession, is obviously an important part of the scoring system.

The other main scoring element is the selection of end-of-stage bonuses available. There's a bonus for how many stars you collected, as well as no-jump, no-dash, and no-miss bonuses. It's possible there might be a no-shoot bonus, too, but I haven't been able to finish a stage without shooting, so I don't know. The power ups other than the stars are S and P icons, whose purpose I haven't quite figured out, but I think that one of them will allow you to take one extra hit before dying, and a bubble, which turns your shots into lethal bubbles, rather than the stunning popcorn-like bullets you usually put out.

I should also mention the graphics, since this is a pretty good-looking game. The enemy and player sprites are an exception, all being quite ugly, but in their favour, every enemy has different behaviour and different abilities, and they're all easy to tell apart, which is nice. The stages are what really looks good, though: I'm not sure if they're made of a very low number of texture-mapped polygons, or if each stage is a huge Mode 7-style rotated sprite, but whatever it is, it's an effective and appealing effect. The stages also change name and visual theme every other one, and I was amused by stages 3 and 4 being called the "Confort [sic] Zone".

Pastel Island is a great-looking game that's fun to play, and while it's no Raimais, it would have been a worthy addition to the genre had it been officially released. Having said that, it's fairly obvious why it wasn't: in 1993, the first 2D fighting game boom was in full swing, and 3D fighting and racing games were just starting to loom over the horizon too. A maze game, no matter how well-designed, would have looked embarassingly old hat in that environment. Still, I recommend giving Pastel Island a chance if you're a fan of score-chasing.

Shanghai Kid (Arcade)

Also known as Hokuha Syourin Hiryu no Ken, Shanghai Kid is the first in the long-running Hiryu no Ken series of fighting games and beat em ups. The last entries in the series were on the Playstation and N64, so I guess it just wasn't able to survive the move to 3D, though I'll save that talk for another time, as I do intend to cover a few other games in this series at some point in the future, but for now: back to Shanghai Kid. It looks like an early fighting game, though it's really more of an attempt at a more complex (for the time) martial arts simulator-type game.

The structure is the same as most fighting games even to this day: you fight a series of gradually more difficult opponents. The difference is in how the fighting takes place, and how you control your character, as the developers came up with a system that allows for quite a bit of sophistication using only two buttons and an eight-way joystick, long before special move motions or combos had been invented. The two buttons are predictably assigned to punch and kick, but the interesting stuff comes in the form of the joystick. Though you can walk left and right, jump, and crouch, those aren't the things you'll mainly be using the joystick for. Instead, the game uses a system of high, middle, and low attacks, as well as corresponding blocks.

The way this works is almost turn-based in its execution. There are red circles that will appear on you or your opponent, at the head, feet, or torso level. When a circle appears on you, you just press the joystick up, down, or sideways to block the incoming attack. When it appears on the opponent, you do the same, but you press punch or kick at the same time, to attack your opponent's temporary blind spot. Obviously, as the game goes on, and the difficulty of opponents increases, so does the speed at which circles appear, disappear, or change places. Another complication is that a few fights in, you start facing special opponents (including one that happens to look exactly like Tiger Mask! There are probably otther unofficial appearances from old manga characters too, that I haven't recognised) who have unique attacks, for which you'll need to figure out the most effective evasive maneuvers.

I really like Shanghai Kid, it's an interesting game, and the Hiryu no Ken series is interesting to me in general, so like I said earlier, expect to see some of the sequels covered here at some point in the future. Until then, obviously I recommend giving this game a try!

Magical Speed (Arcade)

Magical Speed is an adaptation of the tradition card game (traditional as in it uses a deck of normal playing cards) Speed, with a really nice-looking fantasy RPG lick of paint, and there's a few interesting (or at least unusual) things about it. Speed, if you don't know (and I didn't before playing this) has two cards in the centre of the table, and the players have 4 cards at a time each, as well as a pile to draw from when one of them is gone. You get rid of your cards by putting them on top of one of the two cards in the middle, though it has to be one higher or lower than it (suits don't matter). The winner is the first player to be rid of all their cards, or whoever has the least remaining cards when time runs out.

The first interesting thing about this game is that it's intended to be played two-player, on a cocktail cabinet, with the players facing each other. So each player sees their cards at the bottom of the screen facing them, and their opponent's cars at the top, upside down. Luckily, there's also a single player mode, as even if I could get someone to play, figuring out how this arrangement would work while emulating on a PC would be a bit of a hassle. The single player mode is surprisingly thorough, too! Though it's just a typical fighting game-style deal where you play against a bunch of opponents in succession, each more skilled than the last, there are three difficulty levels to pick from, and each of the three levels has its own seperate cast of opponents, all with unique sprites and animations, plus their own cute little introductory cutscenes. And there is actually a fair difficulty curve too! Well done, Allumer.

The other interesting thing is the controls. Since this is a game all about having the fastest reactions, using the joystick to move a cursor to select your card, then choose which pile to put it on would be far too slow. Instead, there are six buttons: two on the top row, representing the two piles and four beneath, representing your four face-up cards. Hit the button for the card you want, then the pile you want it to go to, and that's how you play. I may have mentioned before, but I typically use a USB replica SEGA Saturn pad for playing stuff on PC that doesn't require any analogue sticks, but in this case, I was having trouble figuring out a setup that let me press all the buttons quickly, while also avoiding my getting confused about which button was which. Eventually, I managed to come up with something that worked pretty well: holding the controller in my right hand, I had the two top buttons mapped to the Y and Z buttons on there, and with my left hand on the PC keyboard, and the four bottom buttons mapped to Q, W, E, and R on there. I could only play for 10-15 minutes at a time before the fingers of my left hand started getting stiff, but it was good enough.

In summary, Magical Speed is a very cute game, and it's fun enough, but I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to play it more than a few times in single player. I guess if you're lucky enough to ever encounter a real cocktail cabinet of it, it seems like it'd be a ton of fun to play against a real opponent that way, though.

Attack Pla-Rail (Arcade)

I'm sure most of you have probably heard of Taito's Densha De Go series of train-driving games, based on real Japanese train routes and with an array of specialist controllers associated with the home ports. Attack Pla-Rail, made by Namco and based on a toyline by Tomy seems to be either an attempt at making a rival for that series, or a version of it that aims for a younger audience. The controls, as far as I can tell without having yet played any of the Densha De Go games, are pretty much the same: a lever for controlling your speed, and a few buttons for making decisions and parping your horn.

The most obvious difference between Attack Pla-Rail and its better-known rival is the aesthetic: while Densha De Go aims towards realism, this game gives every object a plastic sheen, and people, vehicles and other objects are very simple. Because they're all toys, obviously. Also playing into the toy aspect is that your time limit is given in the form of remaining battery life, with different trains having different rates of usage, along with differing top speeds and corner handling abilities. You get more batteries by doing different tasks, though they're very simple things: speeding up to go through a loop, beeping your horn at cows, stopping while a bridge gets into place, and so on.

Obviously, with the mention of loops and such, you can already guess that the routes in this game aren't based on any from real life, and that's true. Instead, there's an Outrun-esque system of stages with branching paths between them, though unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any information regarding the total number of stages, or a diagram of where every branching path takes the player. You do go through five stages before the game ends, though that doesn't mean there are fifteen in total like in Outrun, as late in one run, I encountered a stage that had appeared early in another run on a different route. A nice touch is that once you've finished your five stages, you get to use your remaining battery power on a cool-looking night time stage with no obstacles to navigate.

It's a lot more relaxing than the usual excitement you'd want from an arcade game, but despite that (or maybe because of it), Attack Pla-Rail is still a fun game, though since it has no sequels or home ports, I have to say that if it was intended to take custom away from the Densha De Go series, it's had the opposite effect, as it's got me looking up the games and their controllers on ebay, wanting more in a similar vein.

Knights of Valour 3 (Arcade)

It's strange that even to this day, none of IGS' arcade games have been ported to home consoles, the only reason I can think of being that no console publisher wants to bother with a Taiwanese company? But still, their beat em ups were always pretty ambitious, taking the inventory system from Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons beat em ups, and gradually expanding on the idea, eventually culminating in this: Knights of Valour 3, which brings various console game concepts and brings them to the arcade.

The biggest and most obvious thing is the use of memory cards. Though this is actuall pretty common in a lot of post-2000 arcade games, this is, as far as I know, the only beat em up that uses them. What does it use them for? For saving your progress in the game, and the stats, equipment and inventory of your character. Yes, it is another beat em up with those dreaded "RPG elements". But in this case, I'm willing to be a lot more forgiving than usual.

There's a couple of reasons for this, the least important being that the "progression" is very slow and very gradual, so it's not like grinding over and over to make the game easier is going to be a big thing, especially since there's a couple of barriers to this: firstly, it's an arcade game, so every time you play and die, that's the price of a credit thrown away, so you'd be better off getting better at the game, than waiting for it to get easier. Secondly, the item/equipment shop is only accessible after completing a stage, so there is a minimum barrier of entry before you can unlock new moves and better weapons and such.

The big reason I'm more forgiving, though, is simply that it's an arcade game, and it's not meant to be played the way I've been playing it (alone, on a computer at home). It's meant to be played in a public, social setting, with other players. And I can really see how that would enhance the game greatly: a group of friends, each with their own memory card containing their character, playing every day on their lunch break or whatever, gradually making progress through the game over the course of months. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any other arcade games that offer that kind of long term experience (like I said earlier, there are other arcade games that use memory cards, but as far as I know, they're all competitive, rather than co-operative), and it sounds like something that'd be really enjoyable. And after you've all finished for good, the memory cards themselves look really cool, so they'd be nice keepsakes to hold onto.

If you're curious about this game, it's still worth playing in MAME: it's decent enough fun, and it also looks incredible, but I have to say that, though it's very unlikely, I really hope I one day get to play it as it was originally intended, since the developers really did make an arcade game that offers and experience you can't perfectly replicate as a home game, even though the game itself could easily be ported to any of its contemporary home systems (Knights of Valour 3 was originally released in 2011).

Logic Pro Adventure (Arcade)

The original Logic Pro was one of the first games ever featured on this blog, all the way back in 2009. Back then, I said it was the only nonograms game to make an actual interesting videogame out of the concept, by adding a strict time limit, with penalties for trying to fill in the wrong squares. In the nine years since, I've played a few other games, old and new, and it's still true that Logic Pro (and its sequels) are the only ones really worth your time.

Logic Pro Adventure is the second sequel to the original, and it mostly works the same as the first: you solve nonograms, there's a time limit, you lose a big chunk of time if you try to fill in an incorrect square. Also like the first, you get limited-use items to help you when you can't get a handle on a puzzle. The "cross clear" item from the first game, that reveals all the squares in horizontal and vertical straight lines emanating from the cursor's current location is back, and accompanied by a bomb that reveals a five-by-five square surrounding the cursor. There's also little coloured spheres that randomly appear as you play, that seem, at first, to just be points items, though they're a little more strange than that.

The stages are split into sets of three, identified by colour, and if, in the course of completing a set of stages, you collect fifty of those orbs, you'll instantly be taken to the next trio of stages. It's a really strange mechanic, and it seems odd to me that an arcade game would add a mechanic that just makes completion quicker and easier like this, with no real downside. As it is, this might be the easiest one credit completion of an arcade game I've ever had! There is actually some replay value, though: as you might expect, the stages are randomly chosen from an unseen pool, so every game is slightly different. However, there are three characters to choose from at the start of the game, and I'm pretty sure that each character has a totally different pool from which puzzles are drawn. Other than that, there's no difference in how they play, other than having different sound effects and endings.

There's not much more to be said about Logic Pro Adventure. If you like nonograms, then it's probably the best videogame about solving them that's out there. If you don't, then you're not going to have any interest in it at all anyway. So let that be your guide as to whether or not you go and play it, I guess.