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.

Nyan Nyan Tower (PC)

Collecting physical copies of doujin PC games is becoming something of a mini-hobby for me recently, and 2001's Nyan Nyan Tower is my latest acquisition. It's a cure maze game that plays a lot like a top-down version of the old SEGA arcade game Flicky: your aim is to go around each single-screen stage, pick up all the fairies, and bring them to the exit. Just like in Flicky, and Blitter Boy, and other games of this type, there's more points to be had by bring multiple fairies home at once. However, unlike every other game, it's not that simple: each fairy is colour-coded and they have to be picked up in rainbow order from red to violet, in order to score the big points.

When you start the game, you can choose between story and challenge mode, though the only difference I can see between them is that Story mode has a dialogue scene at the start. More meaningful is the choice between two characters, Nora and Ziam. Nora's normal attack is very close range, and only stuns enemies, though it can destroy destructible walls and reveal hidden coins (of which there is one on each stage, and every five stages you get to use them to play a bonus game), and to kill enemies, she has to use a charge attack. Ziam, on the other hand has a ranged normal attack, which kills enemies in one hit, but needs a charge attack to destroy walls and reveal coins.

Nyan Nyan Tower would be a pretty great game if it weren't for two problems. The first is that it's really, really slow. I'm sure it's not a frame rate issue, since all the sounds seem to be playing at the right speed, plus I'm sure my computer, which can emulate the Dreamcast and PS2, should have no trouble keeping up with a 2D indie game from eighteen years ago. But even though Nora moves slightly faster than Ziam, they both still feel like they're wading through treacle the whole time. The other problem is kind of related, and it's that the game is just too easy. Even if you play for score and go around collecting the fairies on each stage in order, you'll get more than ten stages in before you lose a single life. In fact, it's so easy that I've yet to have the patience to play an entire credit of it yet: I get bored and give up long before I'm in any danger of running out of lives.

It's a shame, but not every game can be a lost classic, I guess. Still, in NNT's favour, I will say that it's very well presented, and it's got some good ideas, even if the execution isn't great. The developers, Shisui House seem to have been pretty prolific around the early 00s, and they've got a few games I'd like to look at in the future too, and this one wasn't bad enough to put me off them, at least. But I still don't recommend tracking it down.

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.

Bomb Boat (Playstation)

This game's title, in isolation, might lead you, like me, to assume that it might be some kind of military simulation game, or maybe a nautically-themed shooting game. It's actually some thing completely different, and, some would say, slightly unoriginal: Bomb Boat is a maze game about a hungry yellow blob eating stuff while avoiding ghosts.

That is a little harsh, actually, as Bomb Boat does have a couple of its own little gimmicks, and they're right there in the title, even: bombs and boats! The mazes of which each stage is composed are weird little docks, with solid stone parts connected by flimsy wooden bridges. Your means of defence against the ghosts is to drop bombs, bomberman-style, on the ground. On solid ground, the bomb's blast will just stun any nearby ghosts for a couple of seconds, which is useless. However, a bomb that explodes on a bridge destroys the bridge, as well as any ghosts standing on it, scoring you points and getting a ghost or two out of the way for a short time. Furthermore, the bridge will reappear a few seconds later with an item upon it! These are usually just points-granting fish, but there's a few power-ups in there too, like speed-ups, temporary invincibility, and so on. I'm not sure if there's any relationship between simultaneous ghost sinking and the quality of items that appears.

The boats are a lot simpler, though. Each stage has a bunch of them dotted around in pre-determined places. You step onto one and it'll take you in a straight line until it hits another bit of path. Assuming the levels have been designed with enough care, theoretically, someone with a lot of patience might be able to figure out the best route around each stage, to maximise ghost killing and boat-riding for the quickest, most efficient way of getting through the game. I highly doubt anyone has ever been so dedicated to a mediocre Japan-only budget-price Playstation game released at the end of the console's life though.

Bomb Boat isn't a bad game, but I still can't recommend it. There's just no excitement, no hook, nothing to it at all. It would have been a forgotten also-ran if it had been released in 1982, let alone 2002.

Aaargh! (Amiga)

Oddly, I'd played this game long before I'd ever even heard of Rampage. It was among the boxes of pirated games that came with the second hand Amiga 500 I got one year as a kid, and for a couple of years, it was the only reference I had for games about being a big monster that wrecks stuff. Interestingly, it's also one of a few Amiga games that was also released on the Amiga-based Arcadia arcade hardware, making it an oddity in two ways: a European-developed arcade game, and one that was ported from a computer to the arcades (or possibly the other way round? Though since they're pretty much the same machine I don't think it really matters).

Is it good though? We'll get to that in a while. First, it might be more useful to compare it to its more famous American forebear. In terms of originality, at least, Aaargh! fares pretty well. It's got a slightly beat em up-like perspective so you can walk up and down as well as left and right, meaning the cities can have more interesting layouts than just a bunch of buildings all in a row. There's also a secondary goal alongside smashing everything, which is to find the roc's egg hidden in each stage, which takes you to a bossfight/bonus stage against the one of the two selectable monsters you didn't choose.

So anyway, the game sees you as one of two giant monsters (a giant lizard or a cyclops) destroying various human-built locations throughout history. The locations are pretty varied, and other than the first stage always being the jungle village, they seem to appear in random order, too, so even if you can't get far, you'll at least be able to see a lot of them with some perseverance. There's sterotypical east asian temples, desert cities carved into the sides of cliff faces, colonial American towns, and so on, and they all look pretty nice (though naturally, some are more colourful and detailed than others). No matter what location in time or space you end up, though, you always seem to be under attack from a human-directed trebuchet and giant prehistoric mosquitos.

To finish a stage, you either destroy every building, or you find and pick up the roc's egg. The first method will just take you to another stage full of stuff to smash, while the second will take you to the aforementioned bonus bossfight. The bonus bossfights aren't very good. There's no health bar or other indication of who's winning, and you and your opponent just flail at each other for a few seconds until inevitably, you fall over and your opponent wins. It doesn't really matter though, since losing these fights doesn't result in a game over anyway. The game's other big problem is the controls: since it's an Amiga game, that means the designers had to shoehorn multiple actions onto one fire button (I mean, the Amiga could totally use two button controllers, but for some reason most developers for it never bothered with a second button). So, if you tap the button, you breath fire. If you hold it and press left and right, you punch, up and you do an uppercut (for killing mosquitons) and down is for picking up items or humans off the ground.

These controls would be fine, were it not for two problems: firstly, you have four-way movement in this game, but because of how the controls work, you can't punch buildings while you're facing up or down, meaning you can only destroy them with fire. Fire that's limited, but you don't have any kind of onscreen meter or anything telling you how much you have left. (As an aside, one pretty cool thing you can do with your fire breath is set buildings ablaze, and they'll gradually fall apart and collapse while you go and do other stuff). The other problem is that sometimes, the controls just don't respond. I'm sure there's some kind of special knack to getting your monster to punch or whatever whenever you want them to, but as it is, sometimes you'll be holding the button and pressing the directions and your monster will just walk around, or breath fire instead of doing what you ask. It's this problem especially that's the game-killer.

So, Aaargh! is a game with some good ideas, and some bad ideas (why not have both monsters in the field looking for the egg simultaneously? That would make a lot more sense.), and some very bad execution. And it's the execution that prevents me from being able to recommend playing it, unresponsive controls of this degree are just unforgivable.

Gangan Gan-chan (SNES)

It's odd how the SNES and Mega Drive have their own strong identities, both aesthetically and in terms of game mechanics and design. For example, I don't think I would be alone in saying that the SNES action game Hagane looks and feels like a Mega Drive game that somehow got released on the wrong console. GanGan Gan-chan, however, only goes half way: it looks very much like a typical Japanese SNES game, but in terms of how it plays, it feels a lot more like a Mega Drive game. This all makes sense, right?

Anyway, the most basic way of descibing the way it plays is that it's Flicky, but in a maze. You play as a thing that looks like Carbuncle from the Puyo Puyo games (or, through the use of a secret password, a giant bald man's head) and run around mazes collecting little coloured blob creatures, that follow behind you in a line. You take the creatures back to your home base, and the more you had following you, the more points you get. Obviously, though, there are a few complications. Firstly, the colours of the creatures actually matter: there are four keys sealed at certain points of the maze, and to complete a stage, you must collect four of each colour's creature to unseal the respective keys, then collect the keys and go home. Plus there's some kind of byzantine power-up system that revolves around the (surprisingly difficult) idea of picking up the creatures in the right order before bringing them home. I've only ever triggered this through luck, though, as there's always lots of the little guys running around haphazardly.

Of course there are also enemies roaming the mazes, who can kill you on contact, as well as break the chain of creatures following you, should they cross paths. You don't get any kind of attack to fight back against them, not even through power ups, though you do have a couple of defensive/evasive powers. You can hold down B to increase your movement speed, or Y to turn into a stationary pillar, that stuns enemies that crash into it. You also have a power meter that limits the use of both these powers, and when it runs down, not only are they taken away, but your default movement speed is reduced too, putting you at a massive disadvantage. All in all, the game is actually really difficult, though it never feels like it, and almost always you know that you died because of your own poor playing, rather than unfair design.

True to the SNES aesthetic, the game looks great: huge, very brightly coloured sprites, and backgrounds that manage to be both detailed and chunky-looking. The first set of stages looks best, by far, looking not unlike a zoomed-in version of the SNES Sim City port. It's actually a disappointment that after this and the lively beach stages, the China and Egypt stages that follow are so bland and lifeless. The production as a whole is pretty nice, though, which is a surprise, since as far as I can tell, it's one of only two games develoepd by the oddly-named Team Mental Care, and one of only a handful put out by publisher Magifact. Anyway, it's a fairly innofensive little game with a lot of character and charm, and I definitely wouldn't discourage the curious from giving it a go themselves.

Penky (Arcade)

It's a tragic thing, when a game has an interesting concept, but poor execution, and Penky represents one such tragedy. The base concept is actually pretty cool, and so simple and obvious that I'm surprised I haven't seen it done before: You walk around painting the floor, like in the old ame Crush Roller, but rather than just avoiding enemies and trying to paint the whole floor of the stage, you are instead competing with another floor painter to have most of the floor yur colour when the time runs out. I guess it's also a little like Splatoon too?

Unfortunately, Penky is a product of Yunsung, a Korean developer whos games have been featured on this blog before, pretty much exclusively in reference to their habit of making poor-quality knock-offs of Compile games. So it might not be an original concept at all, but just stolen from another game of which I'm not aware. All the typical hallmarks of poor games from mainland Asia are in full effect, though: stuff happening onscreen for no reason, low quality sampled music stolen from other sources (including at least one track from the excellent Mega Drive shooting game Thunderforce IV), ugly characters that look like depressing poundshop toys, and a general air of cheapness.

The negativity isn't just confined to the game's presentation, either: it also plays really badly. Now, the aim, as I've already stated, is to make most of the floor your colour before time runs out. So fast movement should be key, right? And there is a power-up that makes you move very fast for a couple of seconds. The problem is that there's also a bunch more power-ups that don't seem to do anything at all, and a lot of the time your character will be slowed to a crawl, or even just randomly stopping to do a stupid pose, both with no obvious reason or explanation. Also, during the matches, other characters will sometimes appear and wander around, clearing both player's colour wherever they tread. All this adds up to a game that's competitive in concept, but completely down to random chance in practice, making it a useless waste of time.

There's other problems too, like how, if you're playing single player, you'll just fight the same opponent over and over on different stages, no matter how many times you beat them. But really, talking about Penky any longer would just be flogging a dead horse. All you need to know is that it's awful and you shouldn't bother playing it.