Kick Challenger - Air Foot - Yasai no Kuni no Ashi Senshi (Famicom Disk System)

 Kick Challenger is a strange game. Not just mechanically or thematically, but in both respects. For a start, the boxart depicts the main character as a face-having tomato with a pair of two long legs stretching from its underside. This is inaccurate, though, as ingame, the protagonist, while being a tomato with a face, doesn't have legs, instead moving by way of a pair of Rayman-esque detached feet moving presumably though some kind of psychokinesis. I'm not just saying that to exagerrate the difference between representative artwork and what oyu see ingame, either: your two etached feet can move and cross over each other in ways that they wouldn't be able to, were they on the ends of legs attached at the other end to a body.

 

I might have been exaggerating slightly regarding the strangeness of the game's mechanics, on further reflection, "unusual" might be more appropriate. The aim of the game is mainly just to make your way up the screen, kicking the many bugs that try to stop you, and trying to keep out of bottomless pits, rivers, and other hazards. The twist is that this is a game that makes the act of walking itself an actual part of the game. Rather than just holding the direction you want to go in, and then your character walking semi-autmatically, you instead use the D-pad to move one foot at a time, with the A button switching between them, and the B bubtton being used to kick with your currently active foot. 

 

There are some quirks besides the controls, too! Like the weird little holes that sometimes appear when you kick the scenery, in lieu of a power up (and I'll get to those shortly). Put your foot down on it, and you're transported to another location; one that's similar enough in theme to where you were to let you know that it's part of the same stage, but with a different tileset and layout. It kind of reminds me of the front and back sides every stage has in Fantasy Zone II. Power ups are also collected by putting your foot down n them, and most of them come in the form of different kinds of shoes, which do actually get worn by your character while they're in effect, which is a nice little touch. The different kinds of shoes offer abilities like faster walking, better grip on slippy and sloped surfaces, and even the ability to walk on areas that would normally kill you. Other than the shoes, there's a power up that turns your head (which is a tomato under normal circumstances) into a can of bug spray, allowing you to shoot projectiles at your enemies from a distance.

 

Kick Challenger is a decent game. It's fun, it's unique, and it's neither too difficult nor too easy. It won't set your world on fire, but it's definitely worth playing, and you'll get at least get an hour or two of amusement out of it.

United States Presidential Race - America Daitoryo Senkyo (NES)

 Here's a rare bit of topicality from this blog, even though it is a couple of weeks late: a game about getting elected to the presidency of the USA, which coincidentally had a translation patch released just as an actual election was taking place in that country in real life. Unfortunately, it's one of those super-abstract stat-manipulation strategy games, and like I said in my review of Graduation, I just don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing or how, so I haven't been able to get particularly far in this one.

 

I've made a couple of attempts at playing this game, but every time, I get knocked out of the race by scoring fewer than fifteen percent of votes in two consecutive primaries. The way the game works is that you pick a candidate and an assistant, then you go and campaign in primaries, one state at a time. Campaigning means picking three out of several screen's worth of issues, and deciding how far left or right you want to lean on those issues. Then you can decide how many speeches you want to give during the campaign, as well as spending money on opinion polls and TV ad campaigns. I guess the secret to success is figuring out exactly which issues are important to each state, and which direction the people there want you to go in on each issue.

 

I was actually surprised when I started playing at how specific the politics in the game are. There's three candidates each for Republicans and Democrats, and the Republicans have traits like "Televangelist" and "Anti-Communist", while Democrats have traits like "Liked by unions" and "Black". And the little left/right slider you use when setting policies is actually labelled Democrat and Republican at the left and right ends, respectively. Going in, I'd expected a much more abstract kind of politics, where you just had to manage your campaign budget, maybe avoid randomly-occuring scandals, and so on.

 

I guess I'll have to say what I always say regarding these games: if you have the patience to figure out how the whole thing works, and get far into it, then it seems like it has a lot to offer. But I can't, so it's just a bunch of boring numbers and a few well-drawn character portraits to me.

Railroad Baron (NES)

 Also known as Tetsudou-Oh, Railroad Baron is a board game, that's definitely in the same genre as Monopoly, with a little bit of Ticket to Ride thrown in, too. The aim the the game is to move your train around Europe by rolling the dice, making money as you go. Each player get randomly assigned a destination at the start of the game, then again whenever they reach a destination. When one player has finished a certain number of journeys (the default is seven), or when one of the players runs out of money, the game ends and scores are totted up.

 

The scores are based on how much money you have at the end of the game, how many stations you control (you control a station if you were the last player to pass through it) and how many railways you own (if you control two adjacent stations, then you can choose to buy the railway between them). If the game ends because of a player going bankrupt, that player automatically scores zero.

 

Each railway is made up of three empty spaces of track between stations, and it costs money to move over them. But if you own the track that another player is moving over, that money comes to you. So, be strategic with the railways you buy, and you'll probably win. There is another element of chaos, though: after each move where you don't reach your destination, a random event occurs. You might win the lottery, get to bet on a horse race, or have some railways blocked off for a ew turns by an earthquake. You might even be given a free railway! Most annoying of all, you might get teleported to another part of the map, or have your destination changed at random.

 

Anyway, that's an explantion of how Railroad Baron plays, but is it actually any good? Eh, it depends. The split between luck and strategy is about 75/25 in luck's favour, which isn't great. I don't expect you to be able to subject any other human players, but the CPU players are decent enough: they aren't the telepathic superplayers that you might find in a lot of tabletop-themed videogames, but they do act like they're trying to win rather than acting totally randomly, too. Basically, if you have some way of playing this on a handheld, whether through emulation or a handheld Famiclone, it's not a terrible way to keep your hands busy through thirty-to-fourty minutes of TV watching.

Dragonball Z Gekitou Tenkaichi Budokai (NES)

 Most of the Famicom Dragonball Z games are RPG, which never really seemed like a good fit, in my opinion, so when I found out that the final Famicom DBZ game was a fighting game released as late as 1992, that really caught my attention. Then when I learned that it was also part of some gimmicky barcode trading card nonsense, I wanted to play it even more! Of course, actually playing such a thing on real hardware would cost a ton, not only for the peripheral itself, but also for the cards required to use it. Luckily, there's a romhack out there that just lets you pick which character you want to be ingame, as opposed to having to swipe the barcode on the character's trading card.

 

It's a pretty impressive roster, too, with thirty slots. That is, nineteen characters, seven of whom have multiple forms, since this is Dragonball Z, after all. That's still thirty different character sprites, though, which is impressive for a Famicom game! They're taken from the fight against Raditz, all the way up to the fight against Perfect Cell, too, if you're wondering. Now, since this is a game built entirely around a gimmick, and really the whole point of it is to have kids in early 90s Japan going to each others' houses to make their card collections fight each other, there's not much in the way of single player stuff, and definitely no story mode.

 

You can play a tournament mode, though, by picking the eight-man tournament option, and, after selecting your own character, pressing B on the controller, which will have the CPU pick seven random fighters to fill the rest of the spaces. The problem is that the CPU-generated fighters are all incredibly weak, and you'll be able to beat any of them within a few hits. Sometimes just a single hit is enough! After you've beaten three opponents and won the tournament, you get to see your character's face in the middle of a fancy winners' certificate screen! Then, Freeza turns up and demands a fight. As big as the gap was between you and your previous CPU opponents, there's a similar gap between this bossfight Freeza and you. I've fought him a bunch of times, and never beaten him, and in fact, most of those fights were over in less than ten seconds.

 

That's really all there is to Gekitou Tenkaichi Budokai. Unless through some strange cosmic happenstance you suddenly find yourself in the body of a Japanese child in 1992, and that child doesn't yet have a sixteen-bit console, but does have the expensive peripheral for playing this game, then I'm sure you'll hve a lot of fun with your new friends. If that incredibly unlikely thing doesn't happen, though, this really is just a gimmick of a game, and there are many much better Dragonball Z fighitng games. In fact, I'm pretty sure there were probably already better ones on the Super Famicom and Mega Drive in 1992, even.

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.

Lin Zexu No Smoking (NES)

The odd title Lin Zexu No Smoking (also known as Lin Ze Xu Jin Yan) can be explained away by the fact that in this game, you play as Longyin Yan, an agent of the nineteenth century Chinese official Lin Zexu, and you spend the game trying to stop the opium trade in China, by fighting against the evil British and their treacherous allies. This all takes place in a beat em up, with some very light adventure game trimmings.

Those light trimmings seem to be an attempt at telling a TV serial-style story through an eight bit videogame, which is very ambitious, though unfortunately, the game doesn't really live up to that ambition. Basically, at the start of each stage, you're given an order, like, go and investigate the British Museum. But you can't go straight there, you have to ask around to find out who might know the way, then find them and ask them for directions. This wouldn't be too bad, were it not for the invisible walls that actually stop you going anywhere until someone's told you the way to get there. And this happens for pretty much every location you need to get to on foot. A particularly egregious case is when you're looking for a secret passage in a garden. The secret passage is hidden in a well, but you can't go down it until you've spoken to the woman nearby who lies and tells you that there's no secret passages nearby.

As for the beat em up sections, they're not totally horrible. Even though there's rarely more than two enemies on screen at a time, they still manage to be challenging, and you do have a few moves at your disposal, though honestly, the only really useful one is your flying kick. Once you get to the jungle and enemies start shooting projectiles at you, the difficulty drastically shoots upwards, too. In fact, there's apparently a part later in the game where you take to the high seas and fire cannons at British ships, but after over half an hour trying to get past one particular gun-toting enemy on the beach, I had give up for the sake of my sanity.

Despite its various huge flaws, I can't bring myself to be too harsh on Lin Zexu No Smoking, as like I said, it is a very ambitious game, both for the hardware, and for the time it was released (in 1996, even on the Playstation and Saturn this kind of story-heavy action game wasn't that common). It's not a good game, but it is at least worthy of note. And one last thing: if you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend doing so on an emulator with the NES's sprite limit turned off. Otherwise the game is a flickery mess. Not to the point of unplability, but it is very ugly and dampens the experience.

Grand Master (NES)

Despite the martial artsy-sounding name, this is an action RPG with a western fantasy setting, in which you play as a young knight named Rody out to rescue a princess from a devil named Dante. It is the most generic plot possible, but it is at at least presented well, with nice-looking pixelart cutscenes, and there's little side elements too, like the failed hero of a land that's already fallen to Dante, and your sister who went missing after going off to become a demon tamer thre years ago. It's also a little different to most RPGs, since it has no save or password functions, so you're meant to be able to get through it in one sitting (I've managed about half, so far, though the way the game's set out means that I've been able to see much more of it than that).

From the start, you can choose which order you want to play the first five dungeons (and this game only has dungeons, no towns), though I strongly recommend going to the icy mountains first, since there you get the throwing axes, which make all the bossfights significantly easier. Every stage has some kind of item to make progress easier, too: a morning star, a magic wand, armour, and so on, and those items are avtually the only way to improve you attack power, since levelling up only improves your max HP and MP. As I mentioned, there's no saving or even passwords available, but if you do die, you can continue from the title screen as many times as you like, keeping your experience level, as well as any items you got from dungeons you've completed.

The nice thing about Grand Master is it's a proper, purely designed videogame, by which i mean that you can easily recognise each kind of enemy and each stage element and quickly learn what they do and how they behave, then you figure out how you best counteract that behaviour. It's not flashy or impressive, but it is simple and satisfying. Though that's not to say that this is a game with bad presentation, the aforementioned cutscenes look great for something in a NES game, and there's some cool little touches in the game itself, too, like when you go to the mountains, Rody's wearing a big thick coat, and in the desert dungeon, he's wearing lighter, short-sleeved armour.

I don't think there's really much more for me to say about Grand Master: it's just a simple, well-designed, fun-to-play game. So obviously, I recommend that you give it a try!

Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Daimakyou (NES)

I'm sure most of the people reading a blog like this will be cultured enough to have some familiarity with Gegege no Kitaro, but for the few that don't it's an incredibly popular and influential folk horror comic for kids from the mid-20th century that essentially re-introduced the concept of youkai back into Japanese popular culture. Of course, such a cultural megalith has had a ton of adaptations into other media, including lots of videogames, of which this is one.

It's a platform game, but unlike a lot of 1980s licensed platformers, it's actually got some cool and original ideas! You start out on a map screen, pretty reminiscent of the ones in Namco's Dragon Buster II, and it's litterd with various spooky-looking buildings that obviously contain the stages you'll be traversing. What interesting is the form those stages take. They're only about two or three screens across and the loop infinitely, but each one has one of three possible goals to complete.

Some stages want you to kill a quota of enemies, which is fairly standard, others want you to collect a quota of the ghosts floating around the stage, and the third kind are both the most conceptually interesting and the fiddliest to play. They have you accompanied by a little flamey ghost friend that follows you around like Tails in Sonic 2, and the goal is to move around the stage in such a way that the ghost touches (and lights) the wicks of all the candles strewn about the place. This mostly comes down to standing next to a candle and either crouching or jumping to get the spirit to float to the right height, but still, I appreciate the effort put into making something a little bit different. With some refinement of the basic formula and some skillful stage design, this could have been fleshed out into its own game, maybe.

Whatever the stage type you're in, after you've performed your task, two doors appear. Going in the one on the left takes you to a boss battle, the one on the right just takes you straight back to the map with the stage cleared. I don't know if there's any long-term consequences for skipping the bosses, other than missing out on the big points payday you get for defeating them. The bosses inhabit their own mini-stages, which are tall rather than wide, with you starting at the bottom and climbing up to the boss at the top. Though they're pretty formulaic, I have to say that the bosses are very charming. They all appear in the form of massive looming faces made up of a mixture of sprites and background tiles and there's just something about them that I love.

Gegege no Kitaro isn't a game that will change your life, but it is one that's got a lot of charm and it's decent enough fun to play, too. It's also a game that really strongly looks and feels like a Famicom game. Like, if you imagine in your head a game that kids might be playing at home in 1980s Japan, it'd probably look something like this one. It did get a US release, renamed to "Ninja Kid", despite the complete lack of ninjas. I reviewed the JP version, though, just because this is yet another game I "discovered" through my habit of buying dirt-cheap Famicom cartridges with cool-looking label art.

Family Pinball (NES)

Family Pinball, released in 1989, seems like it might have felt a little bit dated. Not only is the main table, a 2 screen high Pac-Man-themed affair, a bit simplistic when compared to real pinball tables of the late 1980s, but also compared to video pinball games on other systems. For example, Alien Crush had been released on PC Engine just a few months earlier, and while it might be a little unfair to compare games on systems with such different power levels, but while the Famicom had no chance of putting out anything that could rival Alien Crush graphically, it could definitely have played host to a pinball table that was just as complex and interesting.

I guess Namco saw the same problem in their own game, as while the Pac-Man table is the only traditional pinball table in the game, there are a bunch of other tables, that are more like pinball-inspired minigames, rather than actual tables. The first is 9-Ball. It's an odd combination of pinball and pachinko, where the aim is, like pachinko, to launch the ball at just the right speed so that it goes into one of the holes on the table. Before starting, you bet points, and winning the bet relies on getting balls in holes so that they form squares or lines. The pinball element enters proceddings in two ways: firstly, you can nudge the table to try and influence how the ball falls, and secondly, instead of a ball just falling off the bottom of the screen helplessly, there's a pair of flippers down there, so you can send it back up if you're quick enough.

The third of the minigames is battle pinball, and is also probably the most filled-out conceptually speaking, as well as the most fun to play. It's a versus pinball game, in which the aim is to get the ball past your opponent's flippers. First to three points wins. The way gravity works in this mode is a little odd, though I can't think of any better way they might have handled it: the ball will "fall" towards the nearest set of flippers, with "down" changing direction halfway up the table. (Or down it. You know what I mean.) There's three different tables in this mode, too, which would add a bit of variety if it was being played a lot (which I can actually imagine happening back in the game's heyday).

Finally, there's sports pinball, coming in soccer and ice hockey varieties (though there isn't much difference between the two as far as I can tell). This is mostly like battle pinball, with the same physics, and the same aim, but with no pinball bumpers or targets strewn about the tables, and with a much odder control scheme. Instead of activating two flippeers in front of your goal, you have a goalkeeper there, who you can move left and right, and who automatically deflects the ball, Pong-style. In the opponent's side of the table, you have one flipper, which you can also move left and right, and you can also press the buttons that activate the two flippers in other mdes to spin it clockwise or counter-clockwise. This mode feels a little half-baked, and is more fiddly than fun, especially compared to the much better battle pinball mode.

All in all, I found Family Pinball a bit of a disappointment, mainly thanks to how basic the main table is. If you have someone to regularly play against, you'll probably get decent milage out of battle mode, but otherwise, it's not a title worth bothering with.

Ankoku Shinwa: Yamato Takeru Densetsu (NES)

Also known as Dark Myth, this is an adventure game based on the 1976 comic, all focussed around Japanese and Buddhist mythology, with a particular focus on the creation myths of Japan. The comic only lasted a single volume, so I assume it wasn't massively popular when it came out, with both this game and an OAV being released in 1989 and 1990 respectively, over a decade later. I can't say for certain, but I'm going to lay the credit for both adaptations at the feet of the Teito Monogatari franchise of novels, comics, movies and anime, that really re-popularised Japanese mythology and mysticism in the 1980s.

The game itself has typical 80s menu-based Famicom adventure game sections where you look at, walk, talk to, get, and use things, places and people, each one puntucated by a boss fight done in the style of a 2D platform game (but with no platforms). The adventure sections are actually pretty easy, there never seems to be more than three options for each action you can take, and even working through trial and error, you shouldn't face too many problems, except for one. Paradoxically, the game, at times, assumes you're an idiot, which makes the puzzles harder.

For example, there's a point where you encounter two statues, one with an empty eye socket, another with a removable eye-shaped gem. Obviusly, the solution is to take the eye-shaped gem from one statue and put it into the other. The thing that got me stuck, though, is that the option to put the gem into the eyehole doesn't appear until you check your late dad's journal, which will helpfully tell you "put the gem in the eyehole!" Figuring out that I had to look in the journal led to me having to look up a guide, and it makes no sense to me that the game forces you to do that as part of the puzzle, rather than using it as an optional hint.

The action sequences are very brief and very easy, and would barely be worth mentioning if they weren't unusual by their simple presence in the game. They're not terrible or a chore, but neither do they add a lot to the game. The game's difficulty is a mystery in general, though: the story's subject matter is pretty dark, with lots of deaths and a fair bit of violence, and the way the story's told in the comic and the OAV is also very dense, to the extent that it almost seems like it was made with the intent of being an edutainment piece on Japanese myth and ancient history. Contradictory to the tone and style of the source material is the game's difficulty. It all feels like it was made for a much younger audience than the other versions, and maybe it was?

Though the subject matter is interesting, and surprisingly rare in videogames, I still feel like everything about this game just makes it a weak substitute for either of the other versions of the story, and you'd probably be better off reading or watching one of those.

Cosmic Epsilon (NES)

When it was released in 1985, Space Harrier was one of, possibly the most graphically impressive videogame that had ever been released up until that point. It would obviously, then, be absurd to try and match it on an 8-bit home console originally released in 1983, even with a few more years of advancement in programming know how. And Cosmic Epsilon is no exception to that: it looks nowhere near as good as arcade Space Harrier. It is still one of the most graphically impressive Famicom games I've ever seen, though, and it does have one cool little trick that Space Harrier doesn't. But I'll get back to that later.

As you've probably worked out, 1989's Cosmic Epsilon is an into-the-screen sprite scaling-style shooting game (though since it's on the Famicom, it has to fake the sprite scaling, though that's no point of shame: remember that Space Harrier II on the Mega Drive had to do the same). You fly forwards, shooting enemies and avoiding their shots, of course. There's a couple of extra gameplay gimmicks in there too, compared to Space Harrier, like the ability to charge up your weapon, making your shots more powerful for a few seconds, as well as a limited use missile weapon that's presumably more powerful, but never seems to hit anything, so we'll never know for sure.

I've read a few other reviews of this game dotted around the internet, and one thing always seems to come up: the difficulty level. Well, two things, but they're related, as the other is the player's massive hitbox, which is a major contributing factor to the game's high difficulty. At first, I was a little sceptical, since I easily managed to get past the first stage on my first attempt. It was only after several failed attempts to get past the second that I realised the veracity of all the complaints of those who came before me. I even looked up the level select cheat so I could take a few more varied screenshots for this review! (As an interesting bit of trivia, the level select cheat is performed by inputting the famous Konami code backwards on the titles screen. Inputting it the right way round just flashes up the message "I AM NOT KONANI", which is slightly amusing).

Other than the difficulty, though, this game is a joy to play: it's smooth, it's fast, everything works how it should, and it generally just feels good. Getting back to the graphics, it also looks amazing! A lot better in motion than in still screenshots,though. And the graphical gimmick I mentioned back in the first paragraph? It's the ground: unlike Space Harrier's abstract grids, the floor in Cosmic Epsilon shows actual places! There's roads, shorelines, cracked earth and lava flows, even a high-altitude stage where you're flying above a lightly cloudy sky. All of this is conveyed to you in the form of patterns of big, differently coloured squares, but nonetheless, it's an effect that works, and really gives the game a sense of place.

So I definitely recommend Cosmic Epsilon. It's one of the most impressive games on its host system, and it's actually fun to play in its own right too. 

Palamedes II - Star Twinkles (NES)

You might remember that a while back, I reviewed the arcade game Palamedes, which was all about matching dice and forming hands and so on. Palamedes II is the sequel to that game, obviously. It's still about matching dice and forming hands, but it's been completely re-jigged to make a much faster, more competitive game.

The most obvious difference compared to the first game (and the only one that Wikipedia mentions) is that the dice now rise up from the bottom of the screen, rather than descending from the top, but there are many more changes. For example, while before, your character held a die, and you would cycle through the sides, throwing it up to hit a matching die above. Now, you press a button to shuffle the column of dice directly beneatht you, and another to take the top of the column. Complicating this is the fact that you can only take a die that is the same, or one higher or lower than the last die that was taken. This is simple enough to keep track of in the single player endurance mode, but when you've got an opponent, the same "last die taken" applies to both players, which offers an extra little strategic element as you try and ruin your opponent's hands while building your own.

The hands themselves have also changed, as they're now made up of only four dice instead of six, which means versus games are a lot faster, with both sides forming hannds and cashing them in every couple of seconds, and as a result, both characters moving up and down the screen quickly. It's pretty exciting, and a good change all round, even if it does take away the satisfaction of forming a nice clean 1-2-3-4-5-6 hand like in the first game. I should probably mention that as the dice are ascending up the screen, the characters stand on a platform on top of them, and you lose when your character is crushed between their platform and the ceiling. Oh, and forming hands erases rows of dice from beneath you, and forces the same number to quickly rise up beneath your opponent. Those are pretty important details, but I just couldn't find a place to fit them in until now.

I've said this before about competitive puzzle games, but though Palamedes II is a great game, it's in a genre with some pretty much perfect entries in the form of the Puyo Puyo series, the Magical Drop series, and in more recent times, Puyo Puyo x Tetris, too. But if you've got a Famicom (or a NES with an adaptor, or some other Famicom-compatible console) and you see a copy of this game going cheap somewhere, it's definitely worth picking up.