Disc Station 98 #00

Considering how great the first MSX Disk Station was, surely, the first volume for the much more powerful PC98 must be way better, right?
Unfortunately not. It's kind of rubbish. Well, the original content part is, at least. People who bought it at the time weren't getting ripped off: it comes on three disks, and the first two are full commercial games! Prince of Persia and Powermonger, to be specific! I won't bother writing about those though, since they're very well known, and there are probably a million other places to read about them.
Onto the third disk, then. It has a paltry four items on it.
The first is a non-playable demo/advert for a game whose title I can't read. But it does say that it's a "SPACE WAR SIMULATION", and theres a "II" in the title, so presumably it's also a sequel.
The second option is something a bit odd. It's an interactive... thing. There's a black and white drawing on the room, and clicking on items in the room makes stuff happen. The painting on the wall changes to a different picture, the cat turns into a weird alien, etc. Also, the pillow, TV and teddy bear come to life and start asking questions in Japanese. I wonder if anything happens when you answer their questions correctly. I guess we'll never know.
The third item is a long, boring and very text heavy animation about a UFO travelling the universe. In its defence, it does look very nice, though.
The fourth option is some kind of text content thing, as you usually get on these disks. I wish I could read the text content that's on the disk stations, it would be a window into a pre-internet nerd subculture in a far-off foreign land. Doesn't that kind of thing interest you? It interests me. BYE!

Flame Zapper Kotsujin (PC-98)

Flame Zapper Kotsujin is an excellent game. I'm starting the review off with that statement, just because it's hard to know exactly where to start in singing this game's praises.
The most obvious things when you start playing are the graphics and sound, both of which are of a very high quality. The graphics are excellently drawn, making good use of the PC98's high resolution, as well as using some nice pallettes.
The music is excellent. That's all there is to say about it. It's just really good, catchy shooting game music.
Great presentation can't really standup on its own without a good game behind it, though. But like the opening sentence of this review says, Flame Zapper Kotsujin is an excellent game. I'd go as far as to say it's the best of all the PC98 games I've played (though admittedly, this isn't many. At a guess, I'd say about 20-ish) (And yes, I've played the Touhou games. They're just a bit better than mediocre, to be honest.).
You've probably already worked out that it's a shooting game, and it was made by a team called CO2-PRO, who made a few other PC98 shooters, including the Gradius fangame GARUDIUS 95 and the okay-but-nothing-special Last Breaker. Their body of work, as well as the quality of it suggests that CO2-PRO were big fans of the genre. And this love especially shows in FZK.
It plays fast, with lots of enemies and bullets constantly onscereen. There are three weapons to choose from, a red spread gun that's kind of weak and useless, blue bendy homing lasers, and a very powerful yellow gun that fires straight ahead. You also have the usual bullet-cancelling bombs, but in a nice touch, the bombs look different depending on which weapon you have at the time: red bombs release a bunch of toaplan-esque skull-shaped explosions up the screen, blue bombs summon four extra ships to shoot a giant screen-filling array of lasers, and the most spectacular bombs are the yellows, which summon a giant celestial hand to fill the screen with bolts of lightning.
The game also has a number of different scoring methods, ranging from the obvious (finish a stage without dying or using any bombs to add multipliers to your end of stage bonuses) to the obscure (at least three different techniques of getting big points from the Eighting/Raizing reminiscent medals that enemies often drop).
The only negative criticism I can give this game is that it is a little bit too easy. I'm not even very good at shooting games, and I can get pretty far into the final stage on a single credit. That's on the default settings, though, and you can always turn the difficulty up.
If you're at all interested in shooting games, I very much recommend you seek out and play Flame Zapper Kotsujin.

Runner's High (PC-98)

Just a small review, since it's been a while since I last posted, and I did say I'd try to post more often.
It's surprising that it's taken this long for me to post about a game for one of the old Japanese computers, and there's actually a few games on the PC-98 and X68000 I intend to write about eventually.
Anyway, this game is Runner's High. It's a racing game by Compile. You play as a girl wearing a jetpack, and you choose one of three tracks, then attempt to fly three laps though it before the time runs out.
The problem is, that's it. Doing the four laps of any one of the three courses is going to take less than two minutes, and even the hardest course you'll be able to finish in a couple of goes. There's no mode where you race against other opponents, be they CPU or human, no career mode or anything like that. There are rankings boards for fastest times around each of the tracks, but the game isn't really fun enough that you'll want to play it after completeing them all once (if you even bother to get that far). It seems strange that Compile would release this as a stand-alone game, as I've played longer games on their Disc Station diskmags.
It's not all bad, though: as you'd expect from Compile, the graphics and all-round presentation are excellent, and there's some really nice still art in the intro, too.