Polestar (PC98)

Released in 1995, it's clear that Polestar is an attempt to bring some approximation of contemporary arcade racing games like Daytona USA and Ridge Racer to the humble, and by then over a decade old PC98 hardware. (Though the fact that you're driving a red convertible with a passenger is an obvious homage to Outrun, it's those more modern games that Polestar plays more like) In doing so, it also brings to mind the legendary MZ-700 port of Space Harrier, which made incredible use of ASCII graphics to produce the illusion of high-speed sprite scaling on vastly underpowered hardware. Though the PC98 is more powerful than the MZ-700, and Polestar uses low resolution sprites rather than ASCII, the principle's still the same.

The structure is a simple as can be: you drive around a bunch of tracks, racing only against the clock, no other drivers. The biggest problem this game has is that the time limits are incredibly strict: crash or even just go off the road even once and you're not going to finish the race in time. Luckily, you can just go into time attack mode and choose which track you want to drive on if you can't make it through the two linear courses. And it's worth doing too, as it's the tracks themselves that are the real draw in Polestar.

There's eight of them, and they're all ful of cool things to see (albeit some tracks have more stuff than others). The 3D effect offered by the lo-res sprites works excellently, though it's a lot better in motion than it is in still screenshots, unfortunately. And it's used to great effect, too, as you drive past aeroplanes taking off, people on theme park rides, flocks of ravens flying out of the windows of a ruined castle, and lots more interesting things. The devs have been very successful in making a racing game set in a world that's full of life, not just barren tracks with decorative billboards next to them. Though the arcade games mentioned above have all this stuff too, they do it on powerful hardware with polygonal graphics. Personally, I'd love to see a sprite scaling arcade racer with the same kind of background features as Polestar, but with more detailed sprites. I guess the closest thing would be 1992's Outrunners, but even that falls a little towards the "decorative billboard" style of the 1980s.

Polestar is a decent enough game, and incredibly impressive consdiering the host hardware. The only real problems it has are that the time limits are way too strict, and the actual act of driving the car doesn't feel that great, either, so once you've seen all the cool stuff in every track, you aren't likely to go back to it. Contrast with games like Outrun or Super Hang On, which feel great to play, and as such, are endlessly replayable.

Case of Dungeons (PC98)

It's time for that rarest of treats: a Japanese microcomputer game that has an English translation! Well, a partial one, at least. The character names are romanised and the names of the items and some of the enemies are translated, and not much else. But that does make it a lot easier compared to playing the raw Japanese version, and there doesn't really seem to be much of a plot to be missing out on, either. Anyway, Case of Dungeon is a simple isometric dungeon crawling RPG.

To start of with, you pick one of many pre-made characters from a little book at the start of the game. There's knights, mages, elves, thiefs, and so on, and one little odd thing I noticed is a few sneaky little Addams Family references, with some of the characters' names containing "Fesuta", "Gomezu", "Wenzudi", and "Motesha", though there's no "Paguzuri". The characters aren't at all balanced, with some having stats that just totally put the others to shame, even when you take into account the differing amount of points you can add to stats yourself when you select one. Once that's done with, you enter the dungeon, on your quest to (I think) kill the Black Dragon.

As mentioned, everything's seen from an isometric viewpoint, and the game is controlled with either the mouse or the arrow and Z/X keys. You don't directly move your character, you move an arrow around the screen, where it'll be pointing in one of four directions, then press Z to make them take one step in that direction. It's pretty slow, as the dungeon is procedurally generated and revealed one space at a time. Every now and then, you'll also enter a random battle. The commands for the battles aren't translated, so I'll tell you what they are here: from left to right, you've got escape, magic, and attack. Your item window is also open during battle, and oddly, using items and changing equipment doesn't use up a turn, so if you're about to die, you can just eat a load of bread until you get back to full health.

Something that was clearly done to extend the length of the game is that the stairs down to the next floor of the dungeon won't appear until you've explored every last tile on the current floor, except for those covered by locked doors. (On the subject of locked doors, you do start with a load of keys, and they're pretty commonly found in chests, too, but it's not worth the effort of going into your inventory and using them, as doors are almost always generated in frong of walls, or in the middle of rooms. So you can just either walk round them or they don't lead anywhere anyway. Weird.)

This, more than anything else, is what killed this game for me. I was actually fine with the incredibly slow walking speed and the slightly glitchy battle menu, but after I'd gotten a few floors in, I was traipsing around the place looking for the one last unexplored tile somewhere that would make the stairs appear for over 20 minutes. I saved my game and gave up. I might never go back to that file, but you never know. It's a shame, as despite having everything going against it, Case of Dungeon was, like The Hunter, it's a game that really held my attention despite really being quite boring.

I can't really say that I recommend this game after saying that, can I? But if you're more patient than I am, maybe you could give it a shot? Everyone like isometric graphics at least, don't they? Oh, and for some reason, the translated version doesn't seem to be listed on romhacking.net or on the "beginner's guide to PC98"-type articles going around, so here's the link.

Totsugeki! Mix (PC98)

The problem with looking into games that are on systems that never got released in English-speaking territories is that you're usually limited to action games and nothing else. Amd when those systems are computers that were aimed at businessmen, like the PC98, it's even worse, since there's a higher proportion than usual of games in very text-heavy genres. Luckily, Totsugeki Mix happens to be a pretty straight-up platfor game, of the kind kids across the world were playing, no matter what systems they had access to. Less luckily, though, is that there's almost nothing interesting about it at all. (Except the nice pixel art, but that's the minimum you'd expect from a PC98 game, really).

You jump over things, attack enemies, collect stuff, and so on, just like you've don't a million times before. The only ways in which the game stands out are either bad, or just slightly odd. A bad thing, for example, is how there are three playable characters, only one of whom is viable. Because only one of them can double jump, a skill whose absence makes some stages uncompletable. An odd thing is how every platform you can stand on is completely solid. Like, you can't walk in front of it, or jump through it from below or anything like that. I'm not sure if this one is a deliberate design choice, or just a problem deemed too minor to be worth fixing by the devs, but it does make some areas really awkward to get through.

Like I've already mentioned, the one good thing that can be said in this game's defense is that it's got really nice backgrounds: detailed, high resolution, and very colourful. I guess you could also make the case that it is merely a boring, mediocre game, and not one that's actively unpleasant to play. But I can't recommend it on the strength of that alone, and I won't. There's plenty of much better platformers with great pixel art in the world, like the Amiga's Lionheart, or the X68000's Castlevania, for example. Play those instead of Totsugeki Mix.

Chitty Chitty Train (PC98)

You can probably guess from the screenshots, but what attracted me to this game was the graphics: they're really really nice, aren't they? So tiny and clean and perfectly-formed. I was also thinking it'd been a long time since I'd covered anything on the PC98, and wanted to get back on that, and a great-looking puzzle game seemed like a nice way to do it. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that this game is not nice at all, in fact, you could even go as far as to call it cruel!

But before we get onto that, I should explain it, if you haven't already figured out the premise just by looking at the screens. It's a mouse-controlled puzzle game in which you have to get a train to all the stations, then to the exit. You do this by clicking on the switches to change their positions, and by right-clicking at any point on the track to place a red light that stops any train that encounters it for a few seconds. The cruelty comes from the fact that all the trains (there are other trains on the track that you also need to direct to avoid collisions) all move really fast, and never stop, except in the case of the aforementioned red lights.

Now, there are two basic types of stages in Chitty Chitty Train. There's the complex ones, where you really need to take a look at every switch, the positions of all the trains and stations, and plan your routes carefully. Then there are stages with simpler layouts, where the challenge comes more from having the timing and manual dexterity to click the right switches at the exact right times to avert disaster. Either way, though, you'll be working at high speed, and a successful run of any stage will probably only take a few seconds, though they'll be very intense, high-stress seconds. And of course, it's very unlikely that you'll finish any stage on the first attempt, so don't think you'll be tearing through the game in no time.

There's also an edit mode, which is interesting in theory, though I didn't really have the patience to do anything with it myself. It uses a similar interface to making maps in RPG maker, with you selecting pieces of track and scenery from a window, then placing them where you like on the screen. One interesting bit of information I did glean from this mode is that there are a bunch of different tilesets in the game. All but the first are locked at the start and I could only get far enough to unlock the second, but there's apparently Plain, Snow, Desert, Europe, Future, and Toybox. Hopefully some super player will come along and take screenshots of some later stages someday.

Anyway, Chitty Chitty Train is a fun and charming game, that's also sadistically difficult and stressful. I definitely recommend giving it a shot. And in case you're wondering, all the text I saw in the game was in English, so there's no language barrier to worry about, either.

Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na (PC98)

So, we've all seen the many many mahjong games that were the most hated thing in MAME until they decided to start including fruit machines (which aren't even playable, as they have no graphics), but until recently, I'd never actually played any of them. Using the helpful site Mahjong in MAME, I picked up some of the basics of how the game works, and since Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na is a simplified version of the game, and it has a cool fantasy theme with amazing pixel art, just like you expect from PC98 games, I decided this would be my first foray into tile-matching. (Also as you'd expect from PC98 games, there's sex and nudity tacked on that adds nothing of value to the game. So tacked on, in fact, that I can take plenty of screenshots and you'd think it was a totally clean game with some fanservicey character designs).

So, rather than explain mahjong to you, I'll just suggest you visit the aforementioned site to learn how it's played, and then forget most of that, since like I said, this is a simplified version. There's a much smaller variety of tiles, and the only thing you're aiming to do is make up three sets of three identical tiles. Each turn you gain a tile, either by drawing at random, or by taking the last tile your opponent discarded (though you can only do this if it's the last one you need to make a "tri", which is what this game calls Pon/Koutsu). Another difference is that the tiles aren't the traditional mahjong tiles, but instead have pictures of typical RPG monsters and items on them: dragons, slimes, swords, potions and so on.

Keeping with that RPG theme, all your opponents are sexy female versions of RPG monsters, with HP and MP. (Which you also have) MP is used to stack the deck in your favour before a round, or to take a look at your opponent's hand during the round. Victory in a game is attained by reducing your opponent's HP to zero, and vice versa. How much damage you do to your opponent when you've got three tris depends on what the tiles making up those tris are. Different monsters deal different amounts of damage (or sometimes heal your HP and MP), and if you're lucky enough to get two tris of the same tile, that'll result in a massive bonus to its effects. Another thing to take note of is that all the monster tiles have yellow or blue triangles in their bottom corners, and making a hand of all yellow monsters results in a powerful "El Dorado" attack, while all blue results in an "Evil Attack".

If you win, you go back to the simple "board" and move on to the next opponent (or, if you beat a boss, you see a dirty cutscene before moving on to the next board), if you lose it's game over, and of course, a dirty cutscene featuring your character. If you haven't played a mahjong game before, Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na is a great introduction, as long as you don't mind the occasionaly bit of dirty pixel art. It's even addictive enough to have had me staying up hours later than I should have a few nights ago! I'll probably even look into some "proper" mahjong games in the near future, I enjoyed this one so much.

Melpool Land (PC98)

Melpool Land (sometimes romanised as "Merupu Rurando") is a bit of a slight oddity, being a kind of top-down fighting game. Almost a mixture of sumo and boxing, with some extra videogamey bits thrown in, even. You pick your character from a selection of four (one of them is the furry swordsman from "Gensei", so I assume the rest of them are characters from other Compile games with whom I'm not familiar) and you fight the others in sequence, plus a weird little plant-man that you fight twice: once on his own stage and again on the stage of the character you picked.

The fights are a little unusual. They take place in squarish arenas, filled with pitfalls, landmines, walls and pinball bumpers. Each character has two floating objects (for example, magic pillars, small robots, floating tomatoes, etc.), tht are used kind of like a boxer's fist. Tapping the space bar uses them to punch, holding uses them to block. You win by either wearing down your opponent's health or knocking them off the stage. Your "fists" also have their own health, which is diminished by blocking. If both your fists are destroyed, your only offence is to walk into your opponent and try to push them off the stage, which is pretty difficult, so try not to let it come to that.

Melpool Land has the same flaws as another Compile PC98 game I've featured here in the past, Runner's High: It's beautifully presented, but there's just not enough of it. Single player mode will take only about 15-20 minutes to play through with every character, and there's no higher difficulty levels or anything like that. There is also a 2 player versus mode, which I haven't been able to play, but the fact that the characters aren't very well balanced (the swordsman is a lot better than all the others, the robot a lot worse than all the others) mean that it's not likely to come out as a lost competitive classic.

It does look very nice, though, being yet another display of the kind of lovingly-crafted pixel art Compile were putting out on PC98 and Windows in the 90s. But unfortunately, that's not enough to save it.

Disc Station #11 (PC98)

This volume is the final Disc Station to be released for the PC98. But, Compile did at least let the system go out with a bang, as this disc is packed full of stuff!
Firstly, there's Jump Hero Gaiden, which is a turn-based strategy game starring characters from Compile's Jump Hero series of platform games. I didn't play much of this, since as regular readers will be aware, I often have very little patience for stumbling through text heavy games that are all in Japanese.I'm sure it's probably fine, though. Similarly, there's also a demo (or is it a full game?) for some RPG, called Melpool Land Stories, that I also didn't play.
There's another Apple Sauce Room-style clicking game thing, too. It's called Tanken, and it takes place in a jungle. It seems a bit more complex than previous games of this type, as there are parts of the image that, when clicked on, open up another, smaller area with stuff to click on! Plus, there seems to be an actual objective: to find three objects that will open the pyramid on the horizon.
Next up is Tanukids, which is basically a top-down version of the old SEGA arcade game Flicky. You play as a dad tanuki (who wears a tie!) who goes around the various stages gathering his many kids to fetch back home, and avoiding the various other animals of the forest who want to stop this from happening for some reason. While there's nothing terribly wrong with Tanukids, it is a little bit boring. You'll probably only play it once or twice.
The fifth game on here is Karakuri, and it's a lot better. It's another top-down action game, but this time you play as a teenage girl with a rocket launcher charged with the task of riddeing a large Japanese mansion of clockwork robots. The rockets you shoot create fairly big explosions, as do shot enemies.So, you can create chain reactions and kill multiple enemies with a single shot, and in grand old arcade traditions, your score increases exponentially the more enemies you kill in one go. The only complaint I have about this game is that it is really, really short and a little too generous with the extra lives.
The sixth (!) game is Firelive, a card game that's worth playing for the awesome character art alone! In it, you play as a guy who wants to form a band, and decides to recruit band members by beating them at a simple card game. The cards are numbered one to five, plus there are joker cards. There's three cards to choose from at a time, and two dice are rolled each turn to decide who picks first. The object is to get a hand of five cards worth more points than your opponent. Obviously, the cards are each worth the number they have on them, but you can also make poker-style hands like two pairs, full house, et cetera to score massive bonus points. The player with the lowest scoring hand has the difference deducted from their life poins, and the game ends when one player runs out of life points.
I really enjoyed playing this game, and like I said, the character art is really excellent too. Definitely my highlight for this volume of Disc Station. THe only downside is that sometimes the game randomly decides to add fifty points to one player's card, which seems pointless and unfair.
Like the previous volume, there were various promotional videos on the disc, the highlights this time being a really cool advert for the Mega CD game Shadowrun, and coverage of what appears to be a pro-Puyo Puyo tournament event.

Disc Station #10 (PC98)

Another Disc Station post, this time being the first DS to come with videos on the disc! Videos that came in a convenient .avi format so they can easily be uploaded to Youtube! How exciting!
But before all that, the important part: the games.
First up is Rude Breaker, a decent shooter that's highly reminiscent of the later games in Hudson's Star Soldier series. I think given the popularity of that series in Japan, it's safe to say that this game was probably a homage to them, rather than a rip off. Unfortunately, I'm not really a big fan of that series, and some of the things I dislike about them are present here: the stages feel like they're really, really long, and though you might die a lot, it also seems to take a really long time to get game over. I guess if you do like the SS games, you'll probably like this too, though. It has really nice high resolution graphics like you'd expect from a PC98 shooter, too.
The second game on the disc is Runner's High, about which I have already written. I guess the last part of that old post looks kind of silly now, as it seems that it actually was published on a Disc Station. Hmm.
Third up is Matsuri, which isn't really a game, but an interactive thing like the Apple Sauce Room things that were on the early DS98 discs. But! instead of a room, you have a whole festival of things that do weird stuff when you click them! Literally minutes of fun to be had!
Also on the disc are Kirifuda, a very very Japanese card game that seems to be based on hanafuda, and which is completely incomprehensible to me, and another set of Nazo Puyo puzzles, if you like that sort of thing. What a long sentence.
The videos include ads for the Mega Drive port of Madou Monogatari and the SNES Port of Puyo Puyo 2, a video of what appears to be some kind of compile promotional event, and, most interesting of all: a Compile recruitment ad! I've uploaded the Puyo ad and the Recruitment ad for your enjoyment:

Manpuku (PC98)

I promised a post about this game, and here it is! Manpuku could pretty easily be played as a card game with real people, and it'd be pretty fun. As it is, a single player videogame, it's fun too. Well done, Manpuku.
Anyway, the idea of the game is that you're one of four chefs who take turns feeding the king. Each kind of food is worth an amount of points, and the king's stomach can hold exactly 1000 points worth of food. If he eats over 1000 points, he gets very upset and fires the chef who made him cross the line. So, if you survive 3 rounds, you are the winner. Food isn't the only kind of card you get, though: there are pills that reduce the king's fullness by 100 points, glasses of water that are worth 0 points, cocktails that reverse the turn order, and explosion-things that force the next player to play two cards.
The explosion-things can be especially evil, since if a player plays one of them, then the next player does, too, then the curse moves on to the next player after that, who has to play 4 cards! The special cards appear randomly, but you can guarantee getting one by ensuring the king's fullness reaches a certain number (displayed in a box next to the king) exactly on your turn.
After a couple of games, you'll be working out little strategies and tactics to enable you to win, but this being a cardgame, sometimes you're just unlucky and have to take a loss.
Manpuku is a really, really fun game, though being a free giveaway game on a disc with a bunch of others, it is very short, with only 2 sets of opponents to fight before the credits roll. Even worse is that as far as I can tell, there's no versus mode. Unless this is just a demo, though I haven't been able to find any evidence of a full standalone version.
Sorry about the short post, the next one'll be better, promise. Plus, it'll be a playstation game. Those are always crowdpleasers, right?

Disc Station #09 (PC98)

So, after skipping the Disc Station 98 series, as well as the floppy volumes of the relaunched Disc Station series, we arrive at the first Disc Station to come on a CD! And Compile definitely weren't shy about making good use of the massively increased storage space, since this volume contains SEVEN full games! First, I'll tell you that the positions of the screenshots in this post don't necessarily coincide with which game is being talked about. Sorry!
The first of which is Madou 456. Not, as you mgiht assume part of the Madou Monogatari series of dungeon crawlers, but an RPG/board game hybrid thing, similar to the Rune Master series of games that Compile released on the MSX, but with Puyo Puyo characters as the players. I didn't get far into this, because of all the Japanese text. It has a nice looking intro, though!
Next on the list is Devil Force II, which sounds like a shooting game, but is actually a Shining Force-esque turn-based strategy game. Although there is a lot of Japanese text in this game, a lot of the commands are represented by little icons with obvious meanings, so I actually managed to get a few battles into this before I got bored and moved on to the next game. I might even go back to it at some point!
The third game, Imahori 2 is a card game that appears to be some kind of Uno variant. Not very interesting, although the cards have some nice little pixel arts of the Puyo Puyo characters on them.
Next up is Ceramic Ball, a really fun action/puzzle game. You control a very fast-moving, incredibly bouncy ball, and you have to get it to the small blue blocks to finish the stage. The game is very, very fast paced, to the point where each stage has a time limit of less than ten seconds! Not a classic for the ages, but worth a look.
Game Number 5 is a top-down action game entitled GaGaGa Sprint. In it, you run around the stages drawing lines on the ground. When the enemies touch your lines, they get stuck for a few seconds. Touch an already drawn line to create a loop, and all the enemies stuck on the looped bit of line get killed. Of course, you get more points for killing more enemies in one go. Again, not a great game, but not a particularly bad one, either. Unfortunately, the PC98 emulator I use (Anex86) has an ugly graphic glitch when running this game, though it doesn't get in the way of playing.
The sixth game on the disc is Manpuku, a strategy/card game about feeding a king that I liked so much, I'm going to give it a post of its own (eventually)!
Finally, there is Nazo Puyo Vol. 9. If you don't know, Nazo Puyo is a spin-off of Puyo Puyo, though rather being a Vs. puzzle game or an endless survial-type puzzle game, it uses the rules of Puyo Puyo in a different way.
Each stage already has some Puyos set up, and you have to arrange pre-determined falling Puyos to get rid of them all within a certain number of moves. It's okay if you like that sort of thing, I guess. I don't see why it gets to be its own series of games, rather than an extra mode in the Puyo Puyo games, though.

Disc Station 98 Title Screens

Okay, so the DS98 series was almost impossible to write about. Most of the volumes were just full of playable demos of RPGs and adventure games, neither of which are of much use or interest to JP-illiterate old me. So, I'll be skipping ahead to Disc Station (no suffix) #9, which is the first CD-based DS. 9-11 are still on PC98, and the volumes after that are for Windows. The one awesome thing the DS98 series did have, though, is really really nice art on the titles screens. It would be a shame not to show you all the amazing art, so here it is, in one post. I'll try to make the images be in the right order, but I can't promise that blogger won't mess it up.