Meikyuu Jiin Dababa (Famicom Disk System)

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Bionic Battler (Game Boy)

 It seems like the release of the Game Boy, an incredibly popular system that was also significantly lower-powered than most of its contemporaries, was seen as something of a challenge to some developers. Games like X and Faceball 2000 sought to do things that conventional wisdom would tell you were impossible on there. And they were pretty successful, technically at least. Whether these achievements resulted in something that was actually practical or enjoyable to play is a little less clear.

 

Bionic Battler (also known as Vs. Battler) isn't quite as ambitious as the games listed above, but it is still a game that's attempting to do more than you might expect a Game Boy game to do. It's a first person deathmatch game, though it can't quite stretch as far as the incremental movement of Faceball 2000. Instead, it's got dungeon crawler-style blob movement: the map is a grid, every character always occupies exactly one square on the grid, you can only face the four cardinal directions, and you always move one space at a time.

 

So you're in the maze (the layouts of which are either selected or generated at random when the stage starts), and you and a couple of CPU partners have to hunt down your opponents, who are trying to do the same to you. You've got two weapons at your disposal: a punch that obviously only works at point blank range, and a missile that can be fired in a straight line ahead of you, but takes a few seconds to charge. Annoyingly, though, to win, you have defeat every member of your opponent's team, while they only have to defeat you. If it was too difficult to have you take control of a teammate upon defeat, they could have alternatively had a similar "captain" on the other team who needed to be defeated for an immediate win.

 

There are five difficulty levels to pick from, though there's no progression of any kind, and as far as I can tell, no way to complete the game. You just pick a level, and then either win or lose at it. I assume this means the game was actually designed with versus play in mind, which, considering that I've never seen anyone play an original Game Boy game via link cable that wasn't Pokemon, seems like an Ozymandian display of hubris. The one thing you do get when you win a match is a little cutscene where your pilot disembarks from his robot, goes into the next room, and shakes hands with a general, who gives him a laughably small amount of prize money (though there's no item shop or anything in which to spend this money).

 

Bionic Battler, unless you cajole someone into playing it against you, isn't much more than a temporarily amusing display of technical achivement. I guess that if it was one of only a few cartridges you owned as a kid in the actual early nineties, you'd probably get a lot of play out of it, and you wouldn't have a bad time doing so, either. But in the year 2024, you're going to play it for a few minutes, and then probably never think about it ever again.

Jack Bros. (Virtual Boy)

 This is one of the better-known Virtual Boy games, but I'm still considering it obscure, because it's still a Virtual Boy game, and like most of them, it's an exclusive to a console that almost no-one owned and has only fairly recently seemed to have attracted the attention of emulator writers. It also has something of a positive reputation, which I think must be entirely based on the fact that it's a little-known, lesser-played action game starring characters and monsters from the Shn Megami Tensei series.

 

There's been games featured on this blog in recent times that I didn't particularly enjoy for various reasons, games I didn't feel like I could recommend, but I think it's been a long time since I've featured a game here that I've actively disliked as much as I do Jack Bros. It's a maze game in which you have to collect a bunch of keys in each stage to open up the exit (or exits) and go to the next stage. One thing I do like about it is that it utilises the VB's 3D in a nice little way: you get to the next stage by jumping off of the side of the current one, and you can always see the next stage floating in space far below the current one. I also like the use of a combined time limit/health bar. That's something you see in a lot of the old top-down racing games I love, and it's rare to see such a system in a game of another genre (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars).

 

That's about all I like about it, though. The problems start before you even get to do anything: at the start of every stage, a fairy will appear to deliver a few textboxes of information, that you've either already worked out or could have worked out within a few seconds of play. Things like several variations on "there are enemies on this stage that will attack you", or the revelation, at the start of the eleventh stage, that you can attack by using the right d-pad. I've managed to get over twenty stages into the game, and that fairy was still showing up at the start of each one to deliver some worthless advice.

 

Then you start playing, and the game is just so slow and boring and easy. You waddle around the small mazes, find a few keys, and jump off the side to the next stage. Like you've probably already worked out, it uses twinstick controls, though you can only move and shoot in the four cardinal directions. Even with this in mind, the normal enemies are no threat to you at all, and the bosses only slightly moreso. There are three characters, though only one of them is really viable. Jack Frost has ranged attacks, but they're so slow and weak that he's useless. Jack Skelton does decent damage, but only at melee range. Jack Lantern has fast-firing projectiles that do decent damage, so is better than the other characters in such a way that makes them totally pointless.

 

Like I said back in the first paragraph, I think that all of the goodwill people have towards this game comes from its association to a beloved series. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, this is a game that was hard to review simply because playing it was such a tedious chore that I would put off going back to it, and wished I was playing anything else the whole time I was playing it. I'm not writing off the Virtual Boy as a console, though: I've played a few other games that have been better and/or more interesting, and I'll almost definitely cover at least some of them here in the future.

Dangerous Road (3DS)

 I had big hopes for this one. The title made me think it might be some Destruction Derby-style racing game, or maybe something topdown like Action Fighter or Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, Raising my hopes higher was how I discovered it: on a list of works by SIMS, those tireless stalwarts of the Master System and Game Gear in the early nineties, and I was excited to learn that they were still around and active as recent as 2016. They even worked on the most recent Ape Escape game in 2023!

 

Unfortunately, actually playing the game dashed all of those hopes. As Tak Fujii once said long ago, while toiling in the Konami shovelware mines: "It's a Frogger". I think the last time I saw a Frogger knockoff was on the Atari 2600, but here's one that came out in 2016 on the 3DS. It has a couple of new ideas, though! There are four playable characters, each with their own special ability, like being able to slow time for a few seconds or having slightly faster movement than the others.

 

The aim of the game is very slightly different to traditional frogger, too. Instead of just crossing the road to get home a few times per stage, you've instead got to go back and forth seeking out numbered flags (in order), before getting the stage clear flag. That's in the main Goal Run mode, at least. There's also that insanely irresponsible Survival Run mode. This one sees you trapped on a busy multi-lane highway (with a few train tracks to mix things up too), and your only aim is to survive for sixty seconds. It didn't really hit me how crazy it was for a game that seems to be aimed at kids to literally have a "play in traffic" mode until after I'd stopped playing. 

 

I think what really hurts this game is the lack of scores. Especially in Survival Run: there's a star item that appears occasionally that gives you five seconds of invincibilty, destroying any vehicles that hit you in this time. It's a mildly amusing effect the first few times, but they might as well have just made it an item that reduced the remaining time by five seconds. If there was a score, and you got points for destroying the vehicles in this way, there'd be some point to this. I guess you'd score points when not invincible by playing chicken, and moving out of the way of vehicles as close to being hit as possible. But then I guess that would also exacerbate the irresponsibility of the mode.

 

This is a game that exists. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. There's nothing about it that I can recommend, as it's just completely unremarkable. I played it because of the title, and to see what SIMS had been up to in recent times. Through reading this review, you've now got that information, and don't need to bother.

City Panic! (PC)

 It's unusual to see any games inspired by the first two Grand Theft Auto games, especially Japanese-developed games. In fact, I can't think of any other Japanese games that took their inspiration from them, and that's a shame, since the first two are a lot more interesting and fun than the 3D sequels. 

 

City Panic kind of distills and simplifies the main essence of those games, being a series of car chases through cities. There's no changing vehicles, no shooting, just driving around collecting all the stolen floppy disks in each stage, then escaping from the city. All while the corrupt cops chase you around trying to smash you to death.

 

There are a bunch of options, though! Before starting a stage, you can change the camera and control settings, as well as picking from a whole bunch of different cars, that actually do all feel different from each other. Though the Mini, which is the default option, also seems to be the best, with better handling and more resilience than all the others. Also, I recommend using the "Fixed Camera + Normal Handling" mode.

 

Unfortunately, I don't really have much more to say about City Panic. It's a pretty simple game, but also one that's a lot of fun, and definitely worth buying. (Which you can do at DLsite)

TAMA: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth (Playstation)

 I had originally planned to review the Saturn version of this game, since on that console it was a launch title, and I thought it'd be interesting to see a Saturn launch title that wasn't a port of one of SEGA's arcade hits. But that version doesn't really emulate very well, so I settled for the Playstation version instead. As far as I know, they're pretty much the same game though, and it was a launch game for both systems, so it's not too big a compromise.

 

In the early days of the 32-bit consoles, there were a lot of games that saw developers trying to figure out how classic genres would work in 3D: what changes would need to be made for practical reasons, and what innovations would be birthed from the newly discovered Z-axis. 3D Lemmings and the Bug games being two high profile (at the time) failed experiments. TAMA is another experiment, essentially taking the old Taito ball-in-a-rotating-maze arcade game Cameltry and putting it in 3D. There aren't really any compromises that need to be made to make the concept work, and there are two main innovations brought in.

 

Before I describe them, I should explain the game, for those who aren't familiar with Cameltry. ach stage is a maze with a ball in it. You've got to get the ball to the goal before time runs out. In Cameltry, you could only rotate the maze left and right, while being in 3D allows TAMA to also offer the ability to tilt the maze in any direction, giving the player a lot more potential precision in controlling the ball's speed and direction. The other big hange is simpler and more obvious: the stages are multi-layered and see you going up and down ramps, riding moving platforms across gaps, and so on.

 

As for how the game itself is: it's pretty good. I love the way it looks, the very low-poly models and simple textures really work for the toy-like setting, and the physics never feel weird, which is crucial in a game like this. It's not going to blow your mind, but it's a mildly amusing distraction, executed as well as it could have been. The only real negative point I have to make is that Stage 2-2, very early into the game, has a point near the end that's completely unforgiving and needs perfect execution. It took me something like half an hour and many attempts to get past this stage, and then it was plain sailing for the next twenty or so stages, so it's a weird little difficulty spike.

 

TAMA is a nice little game, and the fact that it was a launch title for two competing consoles released only a few weeks apart makes it an interesting historical footnote, too. It even managed to get reviewed in a few US and UK magazines as a result of this, though they weren't particularly impressed (though to be fair, I definitely wouldn't be recommending anyone play it if mid90s import prices were the barrier to doing so).

Sispri Gauntlet (PC)

 Remember my review of Gal Pani X a few months ago, when I mentioned that I'd been unable to find a copy of this game? Well, thanks to the help of a good friend, I managed to get ahold of it, and it was worth the effort! It's a fangame based on a series of novels and a dating simulator called Sister Princess, with a premise so creepy that I'll let you go and look it up yourselves if you want to know, but luckily that doesn't really affect this game.

 

The title spells out the basic premise, really: it's Sister Princess characters, in a Gauntlet=style game. That's Gauntlet the old maze shooting game, not just the general concept of gauntlets. Of course, just like how D5 gave the Gals Panic games a boost of adrenaline with Gal Pani X, Sispri Gauntlet does the same to Gauntlet. The easy way of describing it would be to say that it's an enemy hell game. THere are constantly thick hordes of enemies assailing you from all directions, spawning out of (thankfully destructible) generators. So your task is to manage the flow of these enemies and get to the end of the stage, as well as finding keycards to open doors along the way.

 

There's various other complications too, like giant robots that walk around placing more generators, barricades that act like walls that block movement and you shots, but allow enemy shots to pass through, and the most panic-inducing of all: the time limit. Considering the amount of enemies you have to fight, the time limit is incredibly tight, and once it runs out, you're quickly murdered by an endless swarm of tiny red enemies that spawn everywhere in increasing numbers until you're dead.

 

One thing I didn't like is the way you use your super weapon: rather than being assigned a button of its own, you're supposed to tap a direction and the shoot button together to use it, though it's very unreliable and only registers about a third of the time. Also, it's only limited in that it takes a couple of seconds to regarge after use, announcing that it's ready with the "OK" sound effect from Giga Wing, oddly. This is a relatively small complaint, though, and overall, I think this is an excellent game. It might seem overwhelmingly difficult at first (and even after a couple of hours' play, I've only managed to get as far as the third stage), but with some perseverance and a little bit of strategic thinking, you'll get into the swing of it, and realise that stemming the flow of enemies and avoiding their bullets isn't as impossible as it first seems. If you can find a copy, I definitely recommend playing Sispri Gauntlet.

Coron Land (SNES)

For a brief period in the early nineties, there was a craze of Bomberman wannabes, obviously fuelled by that series' massive popularity, that even managed to sell big expensive multitaps to people in decent numbers, too. I hesitate to call them clones, as while they were all top-down single screen action games with idiosyncratic attack methods and four player versus modes, they mostly each had their own unique gimmicks. (Though there were one or two that were literally just Bomberman knockoffs, like the ninja-themed SNES game Otoboke Ninja Colosseum).

Coron Land's gimmick is kind of snowball-themed. In story mode, you defeat enemies by shooting them a few times, turning them into pink orbs. You can then pick up these orbs and throw them at other enemies, or before doing that, you can make them bigger and more powerful by rolling them along the ground like snowballs. In the multiplayer mode, shooting just stuns your opponents, and the orbs randomly fall from the sky, but they can still be rolled and thrown and so on. It's a fun little thing, and even rolling an orb a short distance is worth doing, just for the little bit of extra damage it does, so rolling doesn't really slow the game down too much.

It probably goes without saying for a game of this type, but the multiplayer mode, even when played alone against CPU opponents, is a lot better than the singleplayer story mode. In this case it's especially so, though, since the story mode has a ludicrously steep difficulty curve, with some very hard enemy types showing up after only a few stages: enemies that can send orbs back at you, enemies that can stun, then pick up and throw you like you do to the orbs, and so on. Multiplayer is fine, I guess. A nice touch is that every player gets to be a differrent character, not just palette swaps of the same one, a feature I don't think the Bomberman series offered until about three or four games in, if I remember rightly. There's also a selection of stages, each offering a slight variation: trains that speed across the stage, running players over, a stage with bouncy walls, a stage with no walls at all, with instant death for players who fall off, and so on.

Coron Land is a decent enough game, I guess. It's not really worth playing unless you have thee friends willing to play it with you, though, and even then, it'd probably be easier to get ahold of a copy of one of the Super Bomberman series. Though having said that, this is a much faster game than Bomberman, so it does have that in its favour.

Gekitotsu Yonku Battle (NES)

For years, I ignored this title, because the title made me think it was just some generic racing game, unworthy of note. Then, one day, I remembered that I actually quite like racing games, especially old ones that aren't burdened with the tedious albatross of realism. The most ridiculous part of all this is that while Gekitotsu Yonku Battle is a game about cars, it turns out that it's not about racing them at all, and the word "battle" is to be taken more literally than I'd expected.

What this game actually is is a kind of high-speed survival dodgems game. The goal of each stage is to survive until the Teki counter drops from fifty to zero. It goes down by one every time you destroy an enemy car, by ramming them into the walls (or just ramming them enough that they explode on contact). There are also numbered flags that appear around the arena. The flags start out with a number one on them, and over time this gradually increases up to four, until finally the flag turns into an crown, with a value of five. Of course, the Teki counter goes down by the value of the flag/crown on collection. Enemy cars can pick up the flags too, though (and the start aggressively pursuing it in later stages), so you have a little bit of a gambler's choice there: get the less valuable flag now, or wait for it to grow, running the risk of getting nothing at all. (It's worth noting also that flags are worth double their points value in cars, and the crown double that again.)

There's also other items in the stages, which are there from the start and don't respawn, like invincibility stars, and fuel tanks to refill your health. That's really all there is to Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, and that's really all there needs to be! It's a very simple, very fun game, and the only real criticism I can give it is that there's not enough of it: Each stage will take you less than two minutes to get through, and there's only eight of them.

Still, I highly recommend giving this game a shot,whether through emulation, of if you ever encounter a cheap physical copy on your travels.

Reinforcer (X68000)

The first thing I though when I loaded up Reinforcer is that it looked a lot like SEGA's arcade game Crack Down, and the first two stages even have you locating and defusing bombs, which is kind of the opposite of what you do in Crack Down, even though in top-down videogame form, the two activities are identical. It only takes a little more inspection to see that Reinforcer is definitely its own game with a lot to offer, though.

Possibly because of the resemblence to Crack Down, I first approached the game with an approach that was both methodical and thorough: killing every enemy, searching every room and path for items, and so on. Then I got to the first boss and had sixteen seconds to try and fight it. It seems that the actual way to play the game is a lot more exciting! I found a lot more success in running through each room, killing only the enemies that were directly in my path or otherwise especially threatening. You can absorb plenty of damage too, which also encourages this kind of madcap, rampaging playstyle.

But let's take a break from talking about how the game plays to highlight the presentation. Though it's a top-down shooter, everything looks as detailed as it can, with some of the sprites looking better than those in the first two Grand Theft Auto games. The menus, cutscenes, dialogue boxes also look great: detailed and stylish. There's a lengthy intro that you thankfully don't have to watch, but it's worth a look at least once, for some excellent pixel art, and top-quality music (though the game has great music generally, to be honest). On top of all this, there's some nice little touches here and there, like the text on the title screen that states emphatically that "THIS GAME IS CYBER PUNK ACTION". It all looks and feels so cool!

Getting into specifics, each character has a selection of four weapons, though you'll mostly be using the machine gun (because it has infinite ammo), and the hand grenades (because you can throw them over walls to kill enemies a room over). Though you don't get to pick which character you use to play each mission, unfortunately. Also of interest is your characters' damage system. You have damage counters for armour and health that start at zero and go up when you get hit. You don't lose any health until your armour is at 100% damage, and in the few stages I've played, there are no items for refilling your health, only your armour (though you can still collect these when your armour is 100% damaged, and it'll still go back down).

Reinforcer is definitely a game I recommend you try out. Among the X68000 action games that aren't arcade ports, it's definitely one of the most high quality, in terms of both presentation, and just as a fun, exciting game! Finally, if you try it out in xm6g, it might not be immediately obvious how to get it running so here's some help: put the System Disk in the first drive, then wait for it to start loading. Then, into the second drive, insert Disk A to watch the intro, or Disk B to go straight to the game. For some reason, the game won't load if you don't wait for the system disk to start loading before inserting one of the others.

3-D Bomberman (MSX)

Though it seems like an obvious thing to have tried at some point in the mid-00s, maybe around the time of the awful Bomberman Act Zero, as far as I can tell, this game from all the way back in 1984 is the only attempt at a first-person Bomberman game. To put that in perspective, I don't even think anyone involved had even realised the multiplayer potential for the series at this point! Obviously, this doesn't use polygons, or even sprite scaling for its 3D effect, instead using Phantasy Star-style dungeons to stage an action game.

By that, I mean they're mazes with identical walls, where your movement is in pre-determined steps, and you can only turn in increments of ninety degrees. This wasn't the only action game from this era to use such a setting, with the most famous example in the UK being 3D Monster Maze, released in 1981 on the Sinclair ZX81, a computer with significantly less power than the MSX. An important difference between that game and 3-D Bomber Man though, is that while 3D Monster Maze had the player as a passive participant, running and hiding from the T-Rex in the maze, the player in this game is tasked with killing the enemies (malevolent green balloons, the eponymous floaters from the UK's localised version of the first Bomber man game, Eric and the Floaters), by dropping time bombs in the grand Bomberman tradition. You can also escape from the maze by finding a ladder, but you don't get any points for this, and I'm not sure if the game has an ending to reach.

The game's execution is about as good as can be expected with the technology of the time, with two small exceptions. Firstly, each of your steps covers the distance of half a block in the maze, which, couple with the stiff 90 degree turning, means you can sometimes get stuck on corners for a few seconds, which can be annoying when you're being chased. The other problem is that there are two types of wall: the indestructible outer wall of the maze, and the destructible walls within, and they both look identical. You do have a small radar that only shows you, the enemies, and the outer walls, but it's a weak compromise. There are other problems, but they're not so much problems with this game, but ways in which someone playing it in 2019 can see that it could have been improved upon with more advanced technology: things like atmospheric stereo sound, the ability to peek round corners, and move in directions other than backwards and forwards would all have added a lot, but obviously wouldn't really have been possible in 1984. Which makes it stranger that it's not an idea Hudson ever revisited, as far as I know.

3-D Bomber Man isn't a bad game, but at the same time, it's more interesting than it is good. It's worth playing out of curiosity, but not much more than that. Also, since I mentioned it at the start, I want to point something out about Bomberman Act Zero: while everyone laughed at that game's attempt at applying a dystopian sci-fi aesthetic to Bomberman, the real problem it had was that it was barely a game at all: the single player mode consisted of 100 identical boring stages, and the multiplayer mode was only playable online. And even then, you could only play in that one stage that's in the single player.