Mabougirl Miracle Kurun (PC)

If you're smart enough to spot bi-ingual puns, you may have already guessed this game's main hook, which is one I'm suprised to have never encountered before: it's a combination of the old Irritating Stick/Kuru Kuru Kururin thing where you have to navigate a rotating stick through a maze without touching the sides and a danmaku-style shooting game. The pun of course being that the "cle" from "miracle" becomes "kuru" when transliterated into Japanese, and "kuru kuru" is a Japanese onomatopoeia for rotation.

Anyway, you play as a stick that you can move around, and also rotate either way at will, and you have to get through the stages without touching anything (obviously, unlike most modern shooting games, your hitbox is the same size as your ship, since that's the entire point of the game). All the while, bullets will be streaming from the wide sides of your stick, so you've got to juggle the rotation you do to avoid collisions and the rotation you do to try and kill enemies. Killing enemies also fills a meter, and at the press of a button, you can switch from your regular bullets to a powerful laser, that shoots out from the ends of your stick, and is not only more powerful than your normal shots, but also has a score multiplier attached to it that decreases as the meter depletes.

As you play through the stages, you collect gems to buy upgrades, like  increases to max HP, greater ranges of speed settings for both movement and rotation, and even alternative ships. Disappointingly, though, the alternate ships only have different weaponry to the default ship. I would have thought the game could present a whole new set of challenes if there were ships that were different shapes: shorter but fatter for example, or maybe even curved. For those worried about the purity of the arcade-style experience being affected by the upgrades, you can turn them off once unlocked. Furthermore, the game doesn't really have arcade-style progression. Instead, each stage is played individually with a new set of lives and a score that doesn't carry over into other stages. As an extra challenge, though, some upgrades can only be bought by spending a certain kind of gem that can only be obtained one at a time, and only by completing a stage without taking any damage at all.

Mabougirl Miracle Kurun is far from being my favourite game from the current Japanese indie scene, but it's even further from being the worst I've played, too. It's alright, I guess. It'd probably worth a buy if it ever gets released in some convenient form, but it's not worth using a proxy site to order a physical copy from Japan. Like I did. Doh.

_____ (PC)

Okay, so obviously, this game's title isn't five underscores, it's the string of characters you see in the title screen above. But all the text in this game, including the numbers, is in an untranslated (possibly untranslatable) alien language. The name entry on the high score screen will let you know that there's twenty-eight letters, and I haven't gone out of my way to count them, but I think there might actually be more than ten numerical digits, too. The game's .exe is called "_____.exe", though, and I think some people online refer to it as "Platine Dispositif's Comiket 87 STG", too. (It does have the typical PD graphical style too, with cute female characters and soft-looking colourful bullets).

Anyway, other than that bizarre presentational choice (I wonder if it was done as a kind of accessibility thing? Like, instead of having multiple language options to make the game accessible to everyone, use an alien language to make it equally inaccessible to everyone?), it's a fairly traditional vertically-scrolling shooter, with the Star Soldier games being a clear design influence: there's a time-limited caravan mode, and the stages are full of passive collections of destructible blocks to get points. There's also stages, bosses and enemies that feel like they might be homages to other classic shooting games, like Xevious, Sylvalion, and so on.

There's a few interesting mechanics and systems in play in the game, though. The first one you'll notice is the weapons system: as you collect power ups, you get an increasing amount of options attached to your ship. You have a button on the controller for changing the formation of these options, with multiple possibilities available, depending on which direction you press on the d-pad when pressing the change button. There's also secret items hidden around the stages (revealed by shooting them, another clear Star Soldier influence) that give you more formations to choose from. The problem is, 90% of the game will only have you ever using "all the options pointed stright forward" and "all the options pointed straight back", making the rest of them a bit useless. Though I guess the alternative would have been to have the player constantly switching between different formations, making the game a fiddly annoying mess to play.

The other big mechanic is also the main way to score big points, and it's a lot more fun than I can probably make it sound. When power ups are on screen, and you fly near them, they'll get magnetised and home into your ship, and if you let go of the fire button, the distance from which this happens is greatly increased. This is a pretty common idea, really. The difference here is that your ship can move slightly faster than the power ups, and they often appear more than one at a time. Furthermore, every frame you have a power up following your ship, you get points, and obviously, the more power ups following, the more points you rack up. So with a bit of skill, you can have sizable clusters of power ups hovering around your ship, generating tons of points for you.

There is a tactical advantage to doing this too, however: when your weapon's at max power, collecting another power up gives you a few seconds of even more powerful shots. So, if you're maxed out, and there's a boss coming up, you "save" any power ups floating around so you can unleash your full might on the boss, instead of wasting it on the empty few seconds before it appears. I've said "power ups" far too many times in this review so far, but there's still a few more mentions to go, as there's also a upgrade shop in the main menu, that uses the power ups you've collected during play as currency. You'll be glad to know, though, that you can't make entries into the high score table if you're using upgrades, they can be turned off once bought, and they never affect the caravan mode.

In summary, this is a really great game, with an incredibly unique presentation, and it's highly recommended. Don't worry about navigating menus in an alien language, either, as there's nice friendly pictograms showing what things do too. Also, this is the first physical release of a doujin PC game I've ever bought, and it came in a really nice custom package made of think, sturdy card, with the art on the disc fitting perfectly with the art on the surrounding parts of the packaging. In an age where billion-dollar publishers only do the bare minimum in presenting their £60 physical releases, seeing a tiny company making such a high-quality item for their 1500JPY game is really nice.

Mimizu Panzer (PC)

This is a game I first read about on Insert Credit over a decade ago, back when it used to be a news site, though I only actually got round to playing it fairly recently. It's a single-screen shooting game in which you control a long, segmented millipede-like tank, destroying gun turrets in the desert. That ancient IC news post made mention of the plot placing the player in the boots of a moe version of a Nazi tank commander in World War II, though I guess either it's an incredibly loose interpretation, or they based that post on an early version, and all that stuff was replaced with more generic moe girls for the final release.

On first play, Mimizu Panzer seems slow, boring and hard, and the scores seen on the high score table seem unreachable compared to the scores you'll be getting. Most of these things will change once you work out all the little tricks to how the game works. Firstly, there's the length of your tank, which affects things in various different ways. You start with four segments behind your head tank, and gain one for every enemy you kill. Furthermore, only your head can be hurt, and all the other segments stop enemy bullets. If you lose a life, you also lose half of your segments (not including the first four). Some of the segments have holes in, and those holes glow when hit by enemy bullets. If you shoot one of the glowing hole segments with your own bullets, it'll start shooting flames from one side, which is the key mechanic you have to master to get anywhere in this game.

The most obvious thing about the flames is that they're significantly more powerful than your normal shots, which is important, as all but the weakest of the enemy turrets can take a lot of punishment before going down. At the same time, though, they're also significantly harder to aim, unless you pre-calculate the path you want your tank and its fiery emissions to take before letting them off. The other thing the flames do is vastly increase your scoring potential: enemies killed by shot have pretty small points values, while enemies killed by flame have their points value multiplied by the number of extra segments (again, discounting the first four). It's really got everything a good score system should have, in that it rewards both skillful use of the game's main mechanical gimmick, plus it rewards staying alive, and even more than that, it makes staying alive a more difficult task the longer you keep it up (since you have to avoid crashing into yourself and the sides of the screen on top of everything else).

The only real problem with Mimizu Panzer is really more a problem with myself rather than the game, and it's the fact that it's really difficult. To get a decent variety of screenshots for this review, I had to resort to continues and even the game's pre-recorded replays to get a look further in the game. I will say this in its favour, though: even as hard and frustrating as it gets, it doesn't stop being addictive. I've whiled away hours trying to get just one screen further while playing it for this review. It's for that reason that I totally recommend Mimizu Panzer, and I say that it's a shame it languishes in the obscurity inherent in being a years-old Japanese PC game, and will probably never get an official western release, and is even less likely to get the audience it deserves on consoles.

G-Type (PC)

G-Type was actually one of the first doujin shooters i ever played, back in the mid-00s. Unlike other games from that period, like Warning Forever or Dan! Da Dan!, it's not one I ever went back to in the years between then and now. That's not to say it's a worse game than those two (well, not significantly worse, anyway), it's just that comparatively, it's a lot more old-fashioned and slower paced than those games, and obviously I'm one of those impatient millenials that needs everything to be fast and flashy all the time. Well, my shooting games, anyway.

There's a good reason why this 2002 game is so slow and archaic, though: it's a loving homage and fusion of those two elder statesman of the shooting genre, R-type and Gradius. Later on, you even get to fight weird fusions of bosses from those two games and the Darius series, too! How it works is that the stages are mostly Gradius-like in design, and your ship is clearly a variant of the classic R-9 Arrowhead. The power-up system is the most coherent fusion of the two games, though. You collect generic power ups that each advance a counter at the bottom of the screen by one, and you press the second controller button to activate the currently highlighted power-up. So far, that's Gradius, right? The twist is that when you start the game, the fourth option is "Force", and the fifth and sixth are blank. When you choose force, the force floats onscreen and the last three power up options become "M-Way", "Laser" and "Burst". Laser refers to the blue power-up from R-Type, the three-way lasers, M-Way is a weak and boring multi-way shot, made pretty much redundant by the laser serving the same purpose, and Burst is the burst missiles seen in some of the Gradius games.

As well as the two big stars, there's also some homages to the Darius series in there! Firstly, the third stage, taking the form of the traditional R-Type battleship boss/stage takes place over a fire planet that periodically spits out firballs, like the first stage of Darius II. The fourth stage also takes the form of a boss rush, during which your opponents take the form of fusions of classic Darius, Gradius and R-type bosses.

You're probably wondering by now if there's actually a good game under all the homages and nostalgia, and there is. Like I said earlier, it's pretty slow-paced by modern standards, but it's still a lot of fun. It also looks great, with nice, chunky sprites, and a kind of high-contrast colour style reminiscent of R-Type Leo. The difficulty's also perfecty pitched: not too hard, and not too easy, and if you want to see a little further in the game (like if you want to take more screenshots to put in your review for example, ahem), you can start a new game from any stage you've previously reached. A good tip is to obtain and power up your force as early as possible, since when you lose a life, it stays behind with all its power-ups intact. This might be a little inauthentic, but it's also a pretty good way of alleviating the slippery slope that was prevalent in both R-Type and Gradius, whereby you lost all your power-ups on death, leading to rapid loss of the rest of your lives. If I remember right, didn't Gradius V do a similar thing with Options a couple of years later?

G-Type is a pretty good game, and a nice homage to its spiritual progenitors. If you're a fan of either of them, I'd recommend giving it a shot. Some advice though: you'll need to use JoyToKey or a similar program to use a controller, no matter what the options screen might suggest, and the only display options are a tiny 320x240 window and the same resolution stretched to fullscreen. That sort of thing doesn't bother me, but I know that some people are gigantic tedious snobs when it comes to that stuff.

Final Justice (PC)

You might remember a week or two ago in the Olteus II post, when I bemoaned the state of the beat em up in the twenty-first century, lumbered as it is with boring, time-wasting nonsense like experience levels and skill shops. It seems that the Japanese indie scene, at least, is one last vanguard of proper beat em ups. It doesn't mean they're all automatically good, but they can at least be said to be "pure" arcade-style games, undiluted by weak RPG nonsense.

Final Justice is one of those Japanese indie beat em ups, though it doesn't have anything to do with Captain America's super move from Capcom's fighting games. Instead, it's about a Kamen Rider-style heroine (complete with rider kick) fighting off crowds of little girls and disembodied bunnygirl heads, with a boss appearing every few stages. You get a normal combo, which can be ended in one of two ways, a rising uppercut, a couple of air attacks (including the rider kick), and two super moves that cost meter. I guess I'd say the sophistication of the combat is fairly average.

The presentation is a mixed bag: the menus and GUI and such look great, and the backgrounds and sprites are technically well-drawn. The problem lies in the super deformed style of the sprites leaves me a little cold, and the fact that though they are detailed and well-drawn, they're also very small and the top half of the screen is always empty seems like a waste. I guess it mainly depends on how tolerant you are of SD characters.

Another problem with Final Justice is that it's far too easy, with no difficulty options available. The game gives out more extra lives than you'll ever need, and I completed the whole thing on my first attempt with plenty of them left over. This is despite the fact that enemies in later stages come in pretty thick crowds, and they're constantly throwing projectiles around and doing a decent amount of damage.

I guess Final Justice isn't a bad game, but it's not a particularly good one, either. It's just a painless way to spend a forgettable half an hour.

Burning Angels (PC)

Firstly, this game has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the theme song from Sonic Team's firefighting classic Burning Rangers. Instead, it's an all-female fighting game themed around pro-wrestling. It's obviously a very low budget indie game, and it's very barebones, with nothing more than a single-player story mode and a versus mode on offer. There's also only one background in the game, though each character does have their own theme tune.

It's got some nice mechanics of its own, though, so it isn't just some throwaway vanilla fighter with a wrestling-themed lick of paint. The player has five buttons: a taunt, and hard and light variants of strikes and throws. Unfortunately, the throw buttons aren't very interesting on their own, just performing an irish whip to the side of the screen. But with typical special move direction inputs, they allow each character to have a few special throws, and even super throws. In keeping with the wresting theme, normal strikes do very little damage, and strike specials generally not much more, placing a stronger emphasis on throws than combos. The throw buttons are also used for parrying throws, while strikes are blocked in the usual manner of holding back

The game's strongest point is probably the way it looks: big sprites, bold colours and an oddly smooth style of animation that brings to mind the french tv cartoon Wakfu. The character designs are pretty varied, too: rather than the usual tactic seen in the likes of Stardust Suplex of using real-life wrestlers with the names changed, Burning Angels uses exaggerated cartoonish characters, and though some of them seem a little fetishistic (a leather-clad sadistic heel, a skinny, flat-chested catgirl, etc.), they're mostly okay, and pretty varied too. There's a typical heroic wrestler (very reminiscent of Rumble Roses' protagonist Reiko), a long-legged woman with a heavily kick-based offence, and a female Ultraman parody, among others.

It'll probably never happen, but Burning Angels is a game I'd really like to see some high-level versus play of. I think the emphasis on throws, and the Irish whip move that doesn't really have an analogue in other games would make for interesting viewing. It's worth a look if you want to play a fighting game that's a little different from the norm, though probably only if you have other humans to fight against.

Ijlimae-jeon: Manpa Skijeok-pyeon (PC)

I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I love sprite scaling as an aesthetic, and that's definitely helped by the fact that a lot of sprite scaling games are all-time classics like Space Harrier, Outrun, Night Striker, and so on. I should have known there'd be some terrible ones out there somewhere, though, and Iljimae-jeon is one of them.

You'll have guessed from the title (and the presence of Korean text on the title screen above) that it's a Korean game, and from what I've read online, the plot is about a character from ancient China finding themselves sent through time to futuristic Japan. Obviously, I don't know how accurate that is, as while there's a long text intro (thankfully skippable), I can't read Korean.

So, you pick one of three characters, and set out into a game that's kind of like a mix between Space Harrier and Cabal: your character is confined to moving left and right across the bottom of the screen, while aiming a crosshair all around it, but they're also constantly running forward while the enemies come running from the distance in the opposite direction. starting with the superficial complaints, it's probably the ugliest game of this type I've ever played, with the ground looking like the worst example of SNES Mode 7 graphics you can think of, and the enemy sprites looking small and undetailed even when they get up close.

The enemies definitely will get up close, too, as your feeble heroes takes several shots to defeat even the most common jobbers among the enemy force. Even the delivery boys carrying the power-ups take a fair few shots to take down. The bosses, as you can imagine, are even worse. There's no health ar given for them, and their attacks don't change as you fight them, so you just spend long, agonising minutes shooting them and avoiding their attacks (except for the ones that are unavoidable, like when the second boss swooces all the way across the bottom of the screen) until suddenly, they explode and the stage ends.

One final note, I've never been given as much trouble getting a PC game to run as I have with this one, not even other Korean DOS games, like Still Hunt. Part of that is down to the fact that I never owned a PC as a kid so I don't have any experience running DOS in general, though. I wouldn't normally bring this kind of thing up, but this game is so terrible, and it took such effort to be able to play it that it was just adding insult to injury.

Obviously, I don't recommend this game at all.

Blank Blood (PC)

The first thing you should probably know about Blank Blood is that it was made by and for people with an interest in a certain specialist genre of entertainment called "ryona", whose main focus is pretty girls coming to severe physical harm. It's not an interest I share, but luckily, the developers of this game weren't so consumed by their interests that they forgot to make an actual game to put them in.

It's an exploratory platform game (you could call it a Metrovania, though as far as I can tell, there's no kind of levelling up or acquisition of skills or abilities), in which a knife-weilding young woman and a gun-toting schoolgirl explore a large dungeon in search of treasure. I actually like the treasure hunting aspect: each treasure chest you find has a unique item, which are all worth a different amount of points, and they all also have little descriptions (though the descriptions are in Japanese, it's the thought that counts). The controls feel a little weak at first, but once you get used to the slightly odd collision detection and the fact that almost every gap requires a double jump, you'll be fine.

The dungeon is, of course, filled with many kinds of monsters and traps, and though the monsters start out as pretty standard fare (snakes, carnivorous plants, slimes, etc.), as you start to get a bit further in, there are some very strange, alien-looking creature lurking about. Though, the same strategy is applied to beating most of them: just repeatedly attack, and they'll probably die long before your health is low. Some of the enemies have more dangerous grapple-style attacks, that requires quick hammering of the attack button to escape, and some of these have their own unique death animations too. For example, falling into a carnivorous plant's mouth and failing to get free results in your character being shown getting digested inside the plant.

Actually, had the game's website not pointed out that it was made with the intention of attracting ryona enthusiasts as an audience, it could easily get away with being considered a 2D platform game with a lot of different animations for the main characters and more gore than usual. Different types of damage each have their own sprites, and there's also a lot of quite gory death animations, the one that most sticks in my mind is the one seen when the player dies from being impaled by a spear shooting up from the ground, leaving them twitching with the spear sticking right through their torso. Both characters also have different idle stances depending on how much remaining health they have.

There is a big downside to Blank Blood though (aside from the obvious, of course): the difficulty is not at all balanced. Certain traps seem completely impossible to get by unscathed, though there is a kind of fix, in the form of an invincibility "Debug Mode", that can be turned on and off at any time by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard, it still feels a bit weak. It's hard to say whether or not I recommend Blank Blood. It's not some nice spritework, and it's not terrible to play, but it's also a bit sleazy and there are many, many other exploration-based platformers that are much better than it. I guess it all depends on how much grim curiosity you have?
 (Thanks to tumblr user acid-eater for bringing this game to my attention)

Zangeki Warp Trial (PC)

So, I thought I'd try out something different with this post: rather than talking about a game that's already been overlooked, I'm going to talk about the demo for a game that isn't out yet, and of which my readers might not be aware.

So, some of you might be aware of the Japanese PC developers Astro Port, with their catalogue of shooting games, as well as the awesome Assault Suits-alike Gigantic Army. And I'm sure that most of you will know of the recent Comiket 87. Astro Port didn't release a new game at C87, but they did release this demo of their upcoming game.

It's a shooting game, and in keeping with Astro Port's other shooters, it's of an old-fashioned, pre-bullet hell design, ala Gradius, R-Type, Darius, and so on. It also has a really cool, fairly unique gimmick, though: as well as the fire button, there's also a warp button. When held, the warp button freezes time and gives the player a cursor to move around the screen. When the button's released, the player's ship warps to wherever the cursor was, hitting any enemies between the two locations with a slashing attack, and ignoring any walls or other obstacles in the way. There's also no power-ups in-game, but instead a more RPG-esque system of putting points into different stats, with more points being rewarded between stages.

I've played to a little over halfway through stage two, and not only do I love the gimmick itself, but the stage design perfectly compliments it. The first stage is an introduction to the use of the warp, while still managing to be a pretty robust challenge, while the second stage is totally merciless, expecting the player to have mastered warping around and all the little nuances of the game's controls.

I definitely recommend getting this demo (from here), and I look forward to the full game being released. The only issue I have is a very minor issue: It would be cool if there were some kind of points incentive for destroying or damaging enemies with the slash attack, rather than shooting them.

Winged Gear (PC)

So, Winged Gear is a freeware shooting game, made by a guy named ZAP back in 2006. Unlike most doujin shooting games, it isn't a bullet hell-style game, nor does it feature any little girls. It's actually a very old-fashions single-screen shooter with elements of various games such as Smash TV and Raimais (though, the similarities with Raimais are pretty much entirely aesthetic), as well as a few modern twists, mainly in the fact that it has a scoring system, life system and weapon system tied to the same high concept.

That high concept is that bullets, whether they came from the player or an enemy, shrink as they get further from the source, becoming less powerful. The bullets have three sizes, and the player has three hitpoints for each life. Bullets at their largest are instant death, medium bullets take two HP away, and small bullets one. This ties into the scoring system, through use of a multiplier applied to destoryed enemies based on what kind of bullet was the last to hit them: x4 for a large bullet, x2 for medium and x1 for enemies killed by small bullets or bombs. It's nice how all these things tie together into a single system, isn't it? There's also yellow triangles dropped by destroyed enemies which are worth points, but aren't specifically tied into the bullet-shrinking system. They do, however, lose value the longer they're on-screen, though, so you're more likely to get more points from them if you were near the enemy when it died.

Aesthetically, the game is okay. It's very functional in its looks, with very little flair, though everything about those looks, from the sprites to the backgrounds to the colour palettes used would allow it to fit in perfectly among similar games from the late 1980s, with a lot more authenticity than most modern games claiming to have a "retro" aesthetic. There's also something about it, possibly the designs of the enemies, that makes it really feel like an Amiga game, in fact, when I said earlier that it had a similar look to Raimais, it looks like an Amiga port of Raimais might have looked (though obiously, this is also if Raimais was a shooting game rather than a maze game).

Winged Gear isn't anything amazing or special, but it is a fun game that's fairly addictive, and the aesthetic authenticity it displays is pretty admirable, too. Also, it's free so it's not like you have anything to lose by trying it.

HIGH-MACS Simulator (PC)

So, HIGH-MACS Simulator is a freeware game made by a fan of the Gun Griffon series, which unfortuantely, I've never played. But they're a series of military-themed 3D mecha shooters very much in the "real robot" style. I don't know anything about the plot of the games, but HIGH-MACS Simulator's missions take place in real countries and cities, in what looks like the late 20th/early 21st century, but with giant robots.

So obviously, you take on the role of a mecha pilot, usually as part of a small squadron, and you go out on various missions shooting down the enemy's tanks, mecha, and other vehicles. You get four weapons which, as far as I know, are always the same: an anti-tank gun, a machine gun, some kind of mortar-type weapon, and lock-on homing missiles. All except the machine gun come with limited ammunition, and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting more during a stage, though it's unlikely you'll run out of ammo for your anti-tank gun, at least.

The controls are a little awkward to set up, sine the game doesn't seem to acknowledge the right stick of an X-Box 360 controller, mapping "Analog R" controls to the triggers instead, but using a combination of the in-game options and JoytoKey, I managed to put together a comfortable little arrangement. Also, this game should run on pretty much any modern computer: it runs perfectly on my laptop, which can't even manage a decent framerate in Minecraft. Although, it mysteriously wouldn't even open up on my other computer, despite that computer fulfilling all the requirements (actually being more powerful than the laptop too). The only reason I can think of for this is that the other computer is running on Windows XP, though it's listed as compatible on the game's website.

There are two kinds of stages, missions and survival stages. Survival stages are self-explanatory: in them, the player kills enemies and tries to survive as long as possible. Missions have various objectives, like securing a series of points on a map, or killing every enemy on the map. Unfortunately, I've so far been unable to pregress further than the third mission, in which enemy units must be hunted down and wiped out in Kiev under the cover of night, with a pretty strict time limit.

Despite the game's difficulty, I still definitely recommend it: controlling the mech is nice, and even little things, like the satisfying animations for enemies getting hit by your shots make the game a little better. Plus, it's free (from here), so it's not like you have anything to lose. 

Sorry this post's kind of short and unprepared, I had intended to write about PC Disc Station Vol. 18, but I could barely get any of the contents to co-operate with modern computers. Hopefully that won't turn out to be an ongoing problem.

Disc Station Vol. 17 (PC)

Ahh, it's been a long time since I did a Disc Station post, hasn't it? Well, here's one now, right after a Yaroze Round-Up post. Maybe I could come up with some other semi-regular post series someday and do three in a row? Maybe...

Anyway, it's a PC Disc Station, so you know there's going to be at least some of the following things: interesting videos, amazing pixel art and a whole bunch of games. And Puyo Puyo characters, obviously. And DS17 doesn't disappoint on any of those fronts!

First up is a game entitled "Blitz Runner", which is a kind of time trial racing platform game. You know the Vs. mode in Sonic 3, in which the players pick a character and race laps around a small, specially designed stage? Blitz Runner is like that, but it's single player only, unfortunately, so you only have time to race against. There is an internet option on the title screen, which I assume was used for uploading and downloading times, but of course, that was in late 1997 and the option is now useless. There's three stages, and two characters (though they seem to play exactly alike), and not much else to this game. It looks great, though. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, Blitz Runner refused to be screenshotted.

Next is an even smaller game, whose title I cannot read. But it's a simple badminton game, starring Carbuncle the orange star-shaped thing from the Puyo games. The side-on perspective reminds me a little of Tennis for Two, but it doesn't really play like it, obviously. The main problem with this game is the difficulty: even on the lowers setting, I never saw the CPU opponent miss a single shot, and I played a few games before giving up completely.

Third is a nice little RPG, in which a Compile employee becomes a tokusatsu-style transforming superhero. This has pretty good production values, with really nice graphics, and not-so-nice CGI cutscenes, and though exploration and such is done top-down, the battles take the form of little side-on beat-em-up segments. Unfortunately, though this game has a lot of charm, and the battles were cool, the language barrier was too high for me to really get anywhere in it. If some kind souls somewhere, someday made a translation patch for it, I'd probably make another attempt and give it its own blog post.

The last game from this volume (I'm omitting the Nazo Puyo installment on the disc, as I'm sure you all know what that's like) is Puyolympics, a collection of mini-games starring a bunch of Puyo characters, with Arle and Witch in the lead roles. The mini-games are a mix of real sports, like running and swimming, and silly videogame nonsense, like catching falling Puyos in a basket, and another one that seems to be based on the same traditional toys as Dharma Doujou. You can play through all the events in a story mode, or you can play each one indiviually. It's pretty full featured, and like all the other games, it looks pretty great, with some cool artwork of Puyo characters in sports clothes, if that's the kind of thing that would interest any of you.

Finally, as always, there's a folder of video files on the disc, too. They were the usual mix of silly animated shorts starring characters from various Compile games, TV ads for Compile games, and other Compile ephemera. I've uploaded one of the videos from the last category, a kind of highlight reel featuring footage from all the various live events Compile held over the course of 1997. It's a great little video, featuring lots of cool stuff like people playing in tournaments, 90s cosplayers, and some guy singing.