Giral (PC)

 This RPG Maker game (or, it at least uses tilesets from RPG, I don't know if it was actually made in the engine) drew me in with two promises on its DLSite page: combat in the style of the first two Ys games, where the dedicated attack buton is eschewed, and you strategically walk into enemies to defeat them, and a protagonist whose sprite and artwork changed when you changed their equipment.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on the first, and while it does deliver on the second, there isn't really a lot of equipment to see in the game (though, to be fair, it is a game that was clearly made on a tight budget, and the character art there is is really great). The problem is that it's not really an Ys-like action RPG at all, instead being a kind of endurance testing game.

 

Enemies attack you once when you touch them, then they die. And each kind of enemy will always deal the same amount of damage to you. So you've got to look at what enemies you can see ahead of you, and judge whether you've got enough HP to make it through them or not. It's really just a question of counting rather than strategy or skill. If you don't have enough HP, go back home and spend the money you got from killing enemies to increase your max HP (one hundred points for every thousand gold).

 

And that's it, really! The entire game is about an hour and a half long, and the final fifteen minutes will be made up of you grinding for enough money to get your max HP to 30100, since the final boss deals 30000 damage, and you need at least 100 left over to win the fight. There's not much more to say about it. The character artwork is nice, I got the game in a sale for next-to-nothing, and I guess it's a potentially interesting idea, that just needs some work to make it into more of an actual game. I hope the dev sticks with it, at least.

Nekoba Rock n Roll (PC)

 Nekoba, in case you're wondering, is short for "Neko Bazooka", and in this game you play as a badly-drawn cat with a bazooka, shooting various weird things in at least three kinds of stages (I haven't completed the game yet, maybe more appear later?). There's platform stages, driving stages, and helicopter stages.

 

The platform stages are the most numerous, and they take place in closed-off areas where you have to kill all the bosses that appear within the time limit (and obviously, without getting killed yourself). The driving stages see you stand on the back of a pickup truck shooting a cop cars and busses until a boss appears for you to kill, and the helicopter stages are short, but somewhat traditional horizontally-scrolling shooting stages.

 

This is a game that really feels like what I think of regarding the term "indie": it seems to have been made by one person, who clearly had ideas about the game they wanted to make, and let nothing stand in their way. The art is wildly inconsistent, with high detailed artwork of anime girls talking to crudely-drawn blobs in the cutscenes, and all the enemies in the stages are a seemingly random assortment of more crudely-drawn animals, parodies of existing characters (including the very brave inclusion of what appears to just be a distorted low resolution piece of official mickey mouse art), and just strange monster things. All this, and a lot of the music is actually vocal songs!

 

Is it actually fun to play, though? Yes! It's definitely not a tightly-crafted experience, but each stage is only a couple of minutes long, and they're some incredibly frantic minutes with enemies and bullets all over the place. The difficulty is just right, too, as it never feels like a tedious cakewalk, or a punishing slog. Likewise, the enemies all take just enough punishment to make them satisfying kills without feeling like damage sponges. Come to think of it, maybe this is a tightly-crafted experience, merely disguised as a demented piece of outsider art?

 

Anyway, Nekoba Rock n Roll is interesting, fun, unique and also very very cheap. So you should probably go and buy it!

Pretty Chaser (PC)

 There aren't many arcade-style racing games I've definitely mentioned before that there aren't many arcade-style racing games any more. The big companies tend to go towards the two extremes that arcade racers fall between: realistic "simulation" style racing games where no fun is allowed, and totally wacky kart-style racing games where randomly assigned power-ups can sometimes play too large a part in results. There are a few arcade racers coming out here and there, though, mainly from indie/doujin developers. Like this one, from solo developer YY Games.

 

It's a very bare bones affair: there are three tracks, one type of care (though you can choose between grip and drift handling), and no gear changing of any kind. You can change the number of laps and opponent cars, and the skil level of the opponent cars, though. And the colour of your own car! So you set all the options, then you race around the track. That's literally it, though: there's no high score table for best lap times, no championship mode, nothing. But that's fine!

 

If you like racing games, give Pretty Chaser a try! It's cute, it's free, and you'll probably get at least twety to thirty minutes of enjoyment out of it. The developer has another racing game that not only looks to be a little more complex, but also significantly cuter. So I'll probably try that out and cover it here eventually, too. I know this is a shorter post than usual, but a lot of Playstation games, fan translations, and leaked unreleased games have been drawing my attention recently, and I do try to space similarly-themed posts out a little, and that's what this one is doing.

Snail World (PC)

 Snail World is a cute little shooting game, and the developer's page for it on itchio states "This game is in Japanese, but if you know the Fantasy Zone, you should be able to play it without any problems", which is true, as this is very much a Fantasy Zone fangame, mechanically speaking, at least. Furthermore, even that polite warning is more that is really necessary, since the intro and ending scenes, as well as the item shop are all bilingual. 

 

It's interesting, after Near Fantasy Space, to see another Fantasy Zone fangame that takes a completely different approach to the source material. While Near Fantasy Space paid homage to various other shooting games from the history of the genre, re-imagining each of them as Fantasy Zone stages, Snail World is totally its own thing, aesthetically speaking. It uses only four colours throughout the entire game, and as a result, has a very clean, stylish look to it. 

 

Snail World is an excellent and lovingly-crafted game in every respect, and the only real criticism that can be levelled at it is that it's incredibly easy: I'm not even particuarly good at shooting games (as much as I love them), and I managed to get the one credit clear on my first time playing. However, I don't think this really is a criticism in this case, because I feel like Snail World was created as a kind of playable art piece, to showcase the creator's pixel art and music. 

 

A deliberate prioritisation of aesthetics, then. And judging the gme on its aesthetics can only honestly be done positively: it's clear the developer had a vision, and realised it perfectly, and it all looks and sounds great. There isn't really much more to say on this game, other than that it's free, so if it sounds interesting to you, go and get it. It's definitely made me curious about the developer's other works, so I'll be looking into those at some point, too!

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.

Gal Pani X (PC)

You can probably tell from the title that this is a fangame of the infamously seedy series of dirty arcade Qix-likes Gals Panic, but it's actually a double fangame, since the art you're revealing in the stages features characters from To Heart. If you're unfamiliar with To Heart, it's a multimedia franchise with manga, anime, visual novels and other stuff, and around the turn of the century, it was enjoying a similr kind of popularity among doujin circles as the Touhou series has in modern times. I don't think it was ever a big mainstream hit, but it definitely had a lot of fanworks based on it!

 

I actually like Gal Pani X a lot more than I like any of the actual Gals Panic games, though! Part of that might just be nostalgia, since when I got my first PC in 2005, I loaded it up with a whole bunch of freeware doujin games, and Gal Pani X was among them, but there's other reasons too. Firstly, none of the art in this game is actually dirty, it's just cute, so there's none of the unseemly grime associated with Gals Panic. Secondly, despite Gal Pani X mixing in elements of bullet hell shooting games, it feels a lot more fair to play, and it should only take a couple of attempts before you can get to the end of the game in a single credit. Thirdly, and most difficult to explain, it just feels really smooth to play. Moving your ship around, and expanding your area of control just feels really satisfying, like using a knife to cut through something with just a little bit of resistance.

 

So, in case you're totally unfamiliar with Qix-likes in general, or Gals Panic in particular, Qix-likes are games where you have a field inhabited by a large threat (and sometimes some smaller sub-threats), and your job is to eat away at that area, by leaving your safe zone and drawing shapes. Successfully come back to your safe zone without either your or the line you've drawn getting hit, and the area you drew around is added to your safe zone. Any enemies caught in that area are destroyed, too. The Gals Panic series added the twist that you can see the silhouette of a woman in the field, and rather than having to claim a percentage of the field as a whole, you have to claim a percentage of the silhouetted area only.

 

Gal Pani X builds further on this with its elements taken from shooting games. Not only do the enemies fire dense bullet patterns at you, but these patterns can come into your safe zone and kill you there (though I don't think there are any enemy attacks that can destroy parts of your safe zone like some stages in the later Gals Panic sequels have). So you're really only safe from touching the enemies while you're in there. Another element taken from shooting games is grazing, whereby you score extra points for getting really close to enemy bullets without actually letting them hit you. Though in Gal Pani X, it's not limited to enemy bullets, and you get points for grazing on pretty much everything: power ups, points items, bullets, the enemies themselves.

 

Gal Pani X is a game I recommend playing. It's freeware, but the developers' site went down many years ago now, so it might be a little harder to find now. But, surprisingly for such an old game, it runs in 64-bit Windows 10 without issue! Finally, on the subject of tracking down games, the developers of Gal Pani X, D5, also had a game that they didn't release as freeware, named Sispri Gauntlet. It was a bullet hell take on Gauntlet, starring characters from a novel series called Sister Princess. I've never been able to find more than the playable demo of it, and even that was a long long time ago. Please get in touch if you know where I might find the full game.

Cross The Ridge R (PC)

 Despite the word "Ridge" in the title, this game has a lot more in common with the Initial D series than Ridge Racer. It really does have a lot in common with Initial D, too: it's an arcade-style drift racing game where you take part in one-on-one races that all take place on incredibly bendy Japanese country roads. Also there's lots of eurobeat music.

 

There's some stuff in the game I don't quite get, too. Like how there's a huge selection of cars to pick from, but you only get to pick once, the first time you load up the game. Also, if you're using an XInput controller (or a Dual Shock 4 masquerading as one), the controls are mapped automatically, but accelerate and brake are mapped to two of the face buttons, rather than the analogue triggers. But seeing that the menus are almost totally horizontally arranged, it looks like the developers were assuming that most people playing this game would be doing so with a steering wheel.

 

The main mode is arcade mode, which has various courses, each one consisting of four races, each against a different opponent. Complete one course to unlock the next, though I don't know how many there are in total yet, I've only played the game for a couple of hours at this point. It's been a fun few hours, though! Of course, right from the start, your success relies upon your ability to drift well, so it's important that it feels good to drift. The devs have done a decent enough job of this, I'm glad to report. I think I've been spoiled by the likes of OutRun 2 and Ridge Racer 3D with their incredibly easy works-every-time drifting, but Cross the Ridge R complicates things just enough to make a good successful drift feel incredibly satisfying. You've got to know just exactly when and for how long you need to switch back and forth between accelerating and braking when taking each corner.

 

I have mixed feeling on the graphics, though I do admit that they're not totally rational. There's something in the combination of low poly 3D models with blurry low resolution textures and the high resolution of the game itself that really reminds me of the days of X Box Live Indie Games. It looks fine I guess, if a little sterile. The big problem I have with it though, is that when I think of drift racing games, my mind always instantly goes to the ones on Playstation and Saturn, with their super-grainy textures and short draw distances (especially on the night time stages) that really added to their atmosphere. I know this kind of nostalgic thinking isn't really fair, though, so I won't consider it too thick a black mark against Cross the Ridge R's  name.

 

In summary, Cross the Ridge R is a game I can easily recommend. There don't seem to be many racing games of this kind released in the past decade, it'll probably run at full speed on almost any modern PC, and it only costs a few hundred yen! If you like arcade racers, it seems like it'd be rude not to pick this one up.

Kaleido Festival (PC)

 This is a fangame based on an anime I've never seen called Kaleido Star. From what I've read online, Kaleido Star is about a girl named Sora who dreams of being a circus performer. In this game, you play as Sora, navigating short platforms stages, with the main gimmick being that there's lots of trapezes and trampolines strewn about each stage for you to use. Also, there aren't any enemies (though some stages do have traps that can hurt you, and pretty much all of them have parts with no floor where you can fall to your death (or at least wet failure) in the sea).

 

I was actually pretty disappointed by the circus aspect of the game. Looking at screenshots before I played it, I was expecting a game that focussed mostly on trapezing and doing tricks in the air, getting landings right, and so on. Instead, it's just a time attack platformer, and though you can get chains by quickly jumping from trapeze to trapeze in quick succession without touching the ground, it's ultimately a minor component of your final scoring for each stage.

 

The stages themselves are okay, they gradually introduce new elements as you go along, a lot of them have slightly out-of-the-way areas with more coins to collect, all the standard stuff you'd expect from a game like this. That is, until you get to stage 3-4. This stage starts out strong, with a staircase of trampolines leading up to a trapeze on a much longer pair of chains than any seen in the game so far, but then immediately crumbles. At the end of your swing arc on that giant trapeze are a bunch of traps that you'll hit midair if you try to jump straight up to the next giant trapeze. There's also a row of traps for you to smash into if you try going for a horizontal route lower down. I've had something like thirty attempts at this stage, and I don't know if there's some secret trick I have'nt discovered, or if the developer accidentally left some traps where they weren't supposed to be in their stage editor, but as far as I can tell, this stage is impossible.

 

It's a real disappointment, as that giant trapeze hints at more exciting things to come in later stages, but it seems like I'll nver get to see what those exciting things might turn out to be. As a result of this, and as much as I wish it weren't the case, I really can't recommend this game at all. Sorry.

Wired Soul (PC)

 I've been saying that the past few years have seen something of a renaissance for the beat em up genre, with the likes of Streets of Rage 4, Ninja Saviors, and Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei all being excellent games that both revived the genre after years and years of diluted efforts, as well as bringing their own new ideas to the table. But Wired Soul predates them all, having come out in 2015 (according to its DLSite page, there might have been a physical release before that). 

 

I've got some bad news and some good news regarding Wired Soul, though. The bad news is that it's not as good as any of the games listed above. The good news is that those games all set an incredibly high bar, and it's still a good game that's definitely worth playing. On first sight, it'll all seem very generic and basic, with the "girl getting kidnapped" plot and the strange lack of grappling or throws, but the more you play, the more you realise that there's a little more under the surface.

 

I guess the devs disregarded grappling to focus on combos, since as you'll eventually discover, you can chain a bunch of attacks together, and it's very satisfying to do so. It also manages this with only one attack button! You get your regular string of attacks by going up to an enemy and repeatedly pressing attack, and obviously, there are running and jumping attacks, too. But you can also perform more powerful autocombos by holding the attack button to fill a charge meter, then releasing when an enemy's in range. Not only that, but you can actually attack twice while in the air, plus you can hit an enemy once while they're on the ground.

 

With a bit of skill, timing, and aim, you can, for example, perform your charged autocombo before jumping up and kicking the enemy another two times before landing beside them and getting a sly ground punch in before they get up. It'll take a fair bit of practice before you can do that kind of thing reliably, but it's very satisfying every time you do pull it off. The only real problem the game has is the difficulty, that feels slightly unfair. For example, it seems like enemy attacks, regardless of whether you're doing a special or who attacked first or anything else like that, always have priority over your attacks. Furthermore, a bar of health doesn't seem to go very far, either: it'll only take a few hits for you to lose a life, especially against bosses. They aren't game-killing problems, but they're a bit annoying, and they stop the game reaching the upper echelons like the ones listed above.

 

Wired Soul is a game where the positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I do still recommend it. It was clearly a passion project for the developers, and not every game has to be a senses-shattering instant classic. If you like beat em ups, go and buy it. it's good.

Small Games Vol. 8!

 This post represents the last vestiges of my fifth laptop, the worst laptop I ever owned, which could barely run anything, and which is the reason why there haven't been any arcade, PS2, Saturn, etc. games featured on here in a long time. Because the two games I'm writing about today were among the few it could actually run without any problems! They're also linked to each other by being deliberate throwbacks to games of the 1980s.

 

Anyway, the first of the two is Cinnabar Kamen, a tokusatsu-themed single plane beat em up that has you in the role of the eponymous masked hero, walking from right to left, punching and kicking monsters, until you get to a boss, who you proceed to fight. There's not much more to it than that, really. It doesn't bring much to the genre, feeling like a romhack of the oldest of the old, Spartan X/Kung Fu, that doesn't even feel as good to play. It's definitely worlds away from the quality of the excellent Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei. Cinnabar Kamen was a huge disappointment, and the one positive thing I can think to say about it is that the sunset in the background is nice and colourful. Not worth the hundred yen asking price.

 

Next up is a game that oozes authenticity, with the only crack in its eighties facade being the option for online co-op on the title screen. Were it not for this one giveaway, you could easily think that Virus Crashers was a ROM from the early days of the Famicom running in an emulator, rather than a brand new PC game released in the twenty-first century (I'm not sure exactly when, though, since the title screen has two copyright dates: 2006 and 2013)! As for the game itself, it can simply (and accurately) be described as "Bubble Bobble, but you can fly", as it sees you tackle single-screen stages full of enemies by trapping them in bubbles, then popping them to get point-scoring fruit. You even get higher-scoring fruit and power-ups for popping multiple enemies at once! Also, you can fly by holding the jump button. Though that is slightly more difficult than it sounds, as theres a lot of momentum/inertia at play, so it's not as simple as just going where you like on the screen and popping enemies at your leisure. The only thing missing (at least as far as I can tell) is Bubble Bobble's plethora of esoteric Druaga-esque secrets. Unless they are in there and I just haven't found any of them, in which case: good job to the devs for hiding them so well, I guess!

 

So, that's two games, both will run on practically any PC, though only one of the two is really worth bothering with. I know this post is short, but the next one's going to be longer, and maybe even a little bit seedier, so please look forward to that!

Near Fantasy Space (PC)

 Now, I'm sure you'll all take one look at these screenshots and you'll instantly know one thing: this is a Fantasy Zone fangame. And while that's an accurate assesment, it's also an incomplete one! Because Near Fantasy Space might take most of its aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from SEGA's pschedelic shooting game series, it uses them as a skeleton to pay homage to a whole bunch of other shooting games too! How efficient!

 

Now, I'm going to have to be honest with you all here: on this blog, I've always insisted on only using my own screenshots to illustrate my reviews. Unfortunately, Near Fantasy Space is one of those cases where that stubborn adherence to principles has somewhat limited my capacity to show all the cool stuff a game has to offer. So while I can show you the first three stages, which pay homage to Ikaruga, Battle Garegga, and R-Type respectively, you'll have to go elsewhere to see the later stages homaging the likes of Darius, Gradius, Fantasy Zone itself, and more. Sorry.

 

Other than the stages themselves, more little treats are on offer in the super-cute weapon shop screen, which is made to look like a modern shopping website, compllete with star ratings on each item and some recommendations right at the bottom. Furthermore, the rapid fire item looks just like the Rapid Fire Unit peripheral that was released for the Master System!

 

The most frustrating thing about the game's difficulty is how uneven it is. The stages themselves are actually pretty easy, and if you're not totally useless at shooting games, they shouldn't really offer you any trouble. The bossfights, by contrast, are harrowing ordeals. The bosses take an incredible amount of punishment before going down, and they definitely aren't shy about dishing it out, either. I almost wrote this game off, as I was having such a hard time getting past the second stage's boss, and I didn't want to post a review that only had sreenshots of two stages, but after about an hour of repeated failure, I eventually got past it. I will say this though: seeing how each new stage pays homeage to its inspiration is a pretty nice reward for getting through each bossfight.

 

Near Fantasy Space is a game that was clearly made with a lot of love, and like the X68000 game Scorpius that I reviewed a few years ago, is living proof of the fact that old-style shooting games are significantly more difficult than modern danmaku-style games. You can get it pretty cheaply online if you don't want to seek out a physical copy, and if you have the fortitude for a game with such a small amount of mercy, then I recommend you do so.

Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei (PC)

 Sometimes, you can just happen to see screenshots or a short video of a game, and instantly need to play it, and that was the case when the trailer for Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei appared in my Youtube recommendations. It looks to be a high-quality single-plane beat em up that's true to its genre, and which is obviously playing on nostalgia while updating the aesthetic just a little bit, and still adding a couple of its own ideas.

 

I have good news: it's exactly what it looks to be! Beat em ups are a genre that have been unfortunately conspicuous by their absence in both western and Japanese indie scenes (with very few exceptions, like Streets of Rage Remake, and Tifa Tan X, a game you should not go and look up if you're in polite company), but FDFM Xiaomei is definitely seeking to make up for lost time. It's obviously very inspired by the progenitor of the genre, Spartan X (or Kung Fu, if you prefer), even having the same little row of boxes showing how many stages you've beaten and have yet to beat.

 

Like Spartan X, this game sees you walk from left to right in various old-timey chinese locales, punching and kicking various enemies, the most populous of whom being the big bald guys with their arms up in the air. But there's also creepy little doll things, birds, snakes, butterflies, sword-throwing guys, kyonshi, and more out to get you, too. And this being an old-fashioned game with old-fashioned values, every enemy type has its own specific behaviour and tactics. 

 

There's bosses too, who are all unique, like the guy who throws his giant head at you, the sad ghost who thanks you for killing her, and at the end of stage four, a cool multi-sprite dragon than summons lightning, and along who's back you can walk, if you like. Best of all, you fight every boss with the same moveset and the same stats as you start the game with. In 2020, Streets of Rage 4 brought back real belt-scroller beat em ups, but right under our noses, Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei had brought back real single plane beat em ups in 2019, and none of us even noticed!

 

It's definitely a revival that I'm very happy to see, and I hope it continues for a long time. If you agree, the best way to ensure that, as far as I can see is to go and buy this game, as well as SoR4 (if, for some insane reason you don't have that one already). There's even a physical release, for those willing to go to all the effort of importing from Japan (and who still have an optical drive on their PC). I highly recommend this game, it's honestly like an arcade perfect home port of a game that never existed. There's plenty of PC shooting games you could give that accolade to, now there's finally a beat em up to join them!