Brave Pinball (PC)

 

 Okay, I'll start this review with an apology: there's no screenshots other than the title screen because every time I took a screenshot in-game, the game would pause, and the screenshot would just show the pause menu. Every time, no matter what I did. After over an hour of trying different solutions, I gave up. So unfortunately, you'll have to deal with an unillustrated review, just this once.

I bought Brave Pinball a few weeks ago, as I was browsing the summer sale on DLSite, and the concept of an RPG-themed pinball game seemed pretty cute and fun. I especially like the little synergy between the main character and the concept of pinball: his swords are kind of shaped like pinball flippers, and the flippers in the game are kind of shaped like swords. Also, there isn't actually a ball in the game, as you're instead chucking a tiny version of the main character around the table to hit things with his swords.

The over-arching goal of the game, alongside the traditional pinball goal of scoring points, is to collect sixteen "pieces" of something. What the something is is a surprise. Pieces are collected in various ways: random drops from enemies in each area, reaching score thresholds, beating bosses, and so on. So, to get them all, you have to be able to explore the massive table and all its sub-tables, as well as just scoring points. Luckily, you don't have to get every piece in a single game, it's more of a long-term goal.

There's one massive flaw to the game, though, that really hampered my enjoyment of it: there's no way of nudging the ball/knight a little in the right direction. In a normal pinball game, this would be frustrating enough, as it'd cause you to lose balls down the middle with no hope of saving them far too often, but, as previously mentioned, Brave Pinball has an exploration element to it. So what this means is that you can struggle your way up the table a few areas, and in a second or two, find yourself all the way back down to the starting area. There's also little technical problems that a nudge action would have solved, like how the knight often gets stuck on objects for long, boring seconds at a time, or stuck in a loop bouncing between certain objects and the side of the table.

That's not the only flaw the game has, though. If you think back to my review of Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball, you'll remember that (in my opinion, at least) an important part of pinball is that you should have constant stimulation: ideally, every time you hit the ball up the table, and every time it hits something, there should be a noise, a flashing light, some points scored, or all of the above. In Brave Pinball, not only do the enemies only score points when they're killed, rater than every time they take damage, but there are also these wooden windmill/waterwheel things littered around the board that just get in the way, scoring no points and often proving another hurdle in the way of the game's exploration gimmick.

I admit I do feel a litle guilty giving such a damning review to a modern indie game, the developers of which obviously put a lot of love into, but I just can't recommend Brave Pinball. It's addictive, as most pinball games are, especially on PC when you can load them up and play a quick game to pass a few minutes, but unfortunately, the flaws are just insumountible. I do hope, though, that the devs go back to the drawing board and give it another try sometime, as the basic idea of an RPG-themed pinball game is really cool.

Elemental Battle Academy (PC)

Elemental Battle Academy is a kind of combination of a multi-person fighting game (with up to eight combatants in a match), and a third person shooter. But the combat's largely base around melee. You know what I mean though, right? Anyway, it's about a bunch of magical girls fighting each other in big arenas, with a camera just behind the one you're controlling, that's the main thing I'm trying to get across here.

I have to say this about the game: it's incredibly well-made. It's only a doujin title, but it could easily pass for a mid-budget console game. Not only that, but it all works like it should, too: no glitches, graphical or otherwise, and it all feels very stable the whole time you're playing. If these compliments seem a bit suspicious that's because the above qualities make it difficult to be too hard on the game, and unfortunately I am going to have to do that. The big problem is: it's just not very fun to play.

For a start, all the characters have way too much health, so taking them down (or being taken down yourself) takes far too long, especially when the default settings have matches going until someone's scored five knockouts. Similarly, the arenas are enormous, and even with the maximum quotient of eight characters in them, they feel vast and empty, and this is made even worse when you play story mode, which largely consists of one-on-one battles in these vast,cavernous stages.

Worst of all though, are the controls, which seem to have been designed for people with an unusual abundance of digits. For example, your character is equipped with a melee weapon and a projectile weapon. You move her with the left stick, and turn around/aim with the right stick. Whichever weapon you want to use, attack is mapped to the square button (or the X button if you're using an XBox controller, but the problem here is that it's a face button). This is fairly manageable for melee attacks, where you just need to be pointed in the general direction of your target, then you press the button to attack. To shoot at them, however, requires you to hold down R2 to ready your weapon, aim it with the right analogue stick, then fire with the attack button. If you're really ambitious, you might also be using the left analogue stik to avoid incoming attacks.

There's also outfits and accessories and joke weapons to unlock for all the characters, but if the game itself is no fun, then that's no t much consolation, is it? All in all, Elemental Battle Academy is a finely-constructed exercise in tedium. I guess it really does offer the AAA experience on a doujin budget then, eh?

Mahou City (PC)

So, like a previous game I've covered here, Panic in Nakayoshi Land, Mahou City is a magical girl-themed Battle City clone. Though as far as I can tell, the magical girls in this case aren't from any existing property (though there's homages to a few existing magical girls in the very silly 2001 A Space Odyssey-homaging intro). You play as a girl with a cannon-lance weapon, and you go around mazes shooting other, similarly armed girls. Also, you've got a base to protect, and the game instantly ends if it gets shot. Instead of the militaristic eagle emblem of Battle City, it's a big fat yellow bird sitting on a nest.

All the Battle City hallmarks are present: destructible walls, enemies without AI that move and act completely randomly, power-ups that also appear at random, and most importantly: fun, simple action that manages to be compelling despite the heavy reliance on randomness. It even adds a few elements, like power-ups that give you a four-way shot, or shrink you down so you're harder to hit.

There's also some presentational changes, though they range from pointless to being of an actual detriment to the game. The pointless includes the addition of two extra camera angles: on low down, close to your character, and a first person view, which also changes the controls to a swivel-and-move arrangement. Unfortunately, they're both much worse for playing than the default bird's eye view camera, though they can make for some nice screenshots. The cosmetic change that's of active detriment to the game is that the Bomb Attack power up, that kills all enemies present in a stage when you pick it up, is now preceded by an unskippable animation of an airship flying in to carpet bomb the area. Actually, there is one bit of flair I feel ads to the game: the big explosions every shot creates are very satisfying.

There's also a few technical problems this game has, like the aforementioned intro being unskippable every time you load the game, or the fact that it doesn't save high scores after you close the program. All in all, though, if you like Battle City and clones thereof, this is one of those, and it's as addictive as any other. Even if it's also the hardest Battle City clone I've ever played, and I can only get 5 stages into it. Anyway, it's available from the dev's website for free, so you might as well give it a try, right?

Tsumera (PC)

I'll start out by saying that getting this game running was an ordeal. Unlike the last couple of old PC games, Graduation and Nyan Nyan Tower, which ran natively in Windows 10 with no problems, for a couple of days, I couldn't even manage to get Tsumera running in DOSBOX. Luckily, someone pointed me towards a version uploaded as part of something called the eXoDOS collection, which runs in DOSBOX no problem. So if you end up wanting to play this game, seek that out, I guess?

Anyway, it's a pinball game developed in Taiwan, which is itself pretty interesting. Is is the first Taiwanese game I've covered here? I can't actually remember. It's also very heavily influenced by the Crush games, which is no bad thing at all. Thematically, it can be considered a combination of Devil Crush and Jaki Crush, with lots European and Asian occult influences on display, though in terms of actual design, it's definitely skewed towards Devil Crush. Soome elements are shamelessly lifted from there, like the dragon whos maouth leads to a boss stage, or the hexagram surrounded by a troop of marching goons. And yes, like the Crush games, Tsumera is made up of one main table that's three screens high, with hidden portals to single-screen bossfight/bonus stages littered around the place.

Despite being pretty unoriginal, there's a lot to love about this game: it looks amazing, it's fun to play, there's a ton of mysterious things to uncover (I've played for a few hours now, and in my last credit before writing this, I was still discovering new stuff!), and it's generally a high-quality game all round. I do, however have a couple of minor issues. The first is that there's no score display while you're playing, nor is it ever made clear what exactly contributes to your end-of-ball bonuses. Obviously, this doesn't really affect play too much, but it does make learning to play the game better and make higher scores more difficult. The second, much bigger problem is also a little harder to explain: basically, there's lots of things to activate around the table. Portals to open, different monsters to summon, and so on. The problem is that whenever you leave the main table, whether it's to go to a boss screen, or even just to prematurely cash in your bonus, everything on the table resets. Because somethings are a lot less labourious to activate than others, seeing what some of the slower-activated gimmicks actually do when completed is pretty difficult!

All in all, though, these faults don't get in the way of the fact that Tsumera is an excellent little game, and it really is a shame that it's not only obscure, but also kind of inaccessible. We can only hope that whatever company owns the rights to it someday decides to cash in and put out a rerelease for modern systems. But if the idea of getting it working isn't too daunting, I definitely recommend doing so.

Nyan Nyan Tower (PC)

Collecting physical copies of doujin PC games is becoming something of a mini-hobby for me recently, and 2001's Nyan Nyan Tower is my latest acquisition. It's a cure maze game that plays a lot like a top-down version of the old SEGA arcade game Flicky: your aim is to go around each single-screen stage, pick up all the fairies, and bring them to the exit. Just like in Flicky, and Blitter Boy, and other games of this type, there's more points to be had by bring multiple fairies home at once. However, unlike every other game, it's not that simple: each fairy is colour-coded and they have to be picked up in rainbow order from red to violet, in order to score the big points.

When you start the game, you can choose between story and challenge mode, though the only difference I can see between them is that Story mode has a dialogue scene at the start. More meaningful is the choice between two characters, Nora and Ziam. Nora's normal attack is very close range, and only stuns enemies, though it can destroy destructible walls and reveal hidden coins (of which there is one on each stage, and every five stages you get to use them to play a bonus game), and to kill enemies, she has to use a charge attack. Ziam, on the other hand has a ranged normal attack, which kills enemies in one hit, but needs a charge attack to destroy walls and reveal coins.

Nyan Nyan Tower would be a pretty great game if it weren't for two problems. The first is that it's really, really slow. I'm sure it's not a frame rate issue, since all the sounds seem to be playing at the right speed, plus I'm sure my computer, which can emulate the Dreamcast and PS2, should have no trouble keeping up with a 2D indie game from eighteen years ago. But even though Nora moves slightly faster than Ziam, they both still feel like they're wading through treacle the whole time. The other problem is kind of related, and it's that the game is just too easy. Even if you play for score and go around collecting the fairies on each stage in order, you'll get more than ten stages in before you lose a single life. In fact, it's so easy that I've yet to have the patience to play an entire credit of it yet: I get bored and give up long before I'm in any danger of running out of lives.

It's a shame, but not every game can be a lost classic, I guess. Still, in NNT's favour, I will say that it's very well presented, and it's got some good ideas, even if the execution isn't great. The developers, Shisui House seem to have been pretty prolific around the early 00s, and they've got a few games I'd like to look at in the future too, and this one wasn't bad enough to put me off them, at least. But I still don't recommend tracking it down.

PatchMon (PC)

So, this is a game made in the fighting game engine MUGEN, more commonly known for those big giant mashups of every fighting game character ever, and of course, for SaltyBet. Contrary to stereotypes though, PatchMon is game using sem-original materials! I say semioriginal, as while it doesn't use prites from other games, it is a fangame based on a 1970s series of trading cards called Pachimon which featured a bunch of original kaiju going about their monsterly business.

The big gimmick of this game, as you can see from the screenshots, is that the graphics for the characters and most of the backgrounds are taken directly from the cards themselves. It makes for a unique and authentic look, but it also massively limits what the characters do: most of them don't have jumps or blocks, and one character in particular, a giant coelacanth/whale/shark thing, can't even move, and attacks by summoning waves and ships to travel across the screen on its behalf.

The rest of the cast doesn't have much more articulation, either, and the controls amount to moving left and right, performing two normal attacks and one (or sometimes two!) super attacks. One thing that has to be said though, is that the incredibly limited animation does have a lot of charm, and looks kind of like what you'd get if Monty Python's Terry Gilliam had put his animation methods towards making a cartoon about giant monsters.

The arcade mode takes a Street Fighter II approach, with you fighting all the playable characters, followed by four unplayable (as far as I'm aware) boss characters, and as well as that, there's survival and a crazy simultaneous two-versus-two mode. It would be a lie to say that PatchMon is a good game: it looks ridiculous, it's totally unbalanced, and it's stiff and weird to play. But it would also be a lie to say that it isn't a fun one, and you can definitely get an hour or two's enjoyment out of it before it outstays its welcome.

Graduation (PC)

The Graduation/Sostsugyou series was pretty big in Japan in the 1990s, and spawned a bunch of sequels, anime adaptations and other spin-offs. You probably already know that that success never travelled abroad, though, but there was one attempt at making it. Oddly, that one attempt was made by Mixx Entertainment, the company that would later become Tokyopop, a big part in the turn-of-the-century english-translated manga boom. I'm no industry analyst, but I suspect that a big part of the reason why they failed so hard that most people aren't even aware that any of the Graduation games got a western release is because they chose one of the PC versions to bring over, rather than one of the many console ports. (As an aside, despite the name, this game is actually a translation of one of the sequels, Graduation II: Neo Generation.)

I'm sure the reason they made that decision was to cut costs, though at the same time, they also redubbed all the dialogue instead of just subtitling it (and of course, this being a 90s dub of a Japanese property, all of the girls are from the UK and various parts of America now). The problem is that, before the likes of Cave Story started the big indie boom in the early 00s, PC games had a bit of a problem with aesthetic and thematic homogeneity. That is, it seemed (at least to a casual observer) that PC games were all about manly men doing violent things in grim worlds, compared to consoles, which hosted games of almost every genre, with settings and styles for every taste. Combined with the fact that PCs weren't as ubiquitous then as they are now, and you get the situation that most of the people who would have been interested in playing this game had no way of doing so, or even of finding out it existed. (And there are even more factors you could take into account, like how PCs were usually kept in shared family rooms back then, and toxic masculinity being what it is, a lot of male potential players probably wouldn't have wanted to play something that looked so "girly" in front of their parents, while consoles would more likely be kept in the privacy of one's bedroom).

So, the English release of Graduation sank without a trace. The only reason I know it existed is because I happened to pick up an issue of Mixx-zine from around the time of its release on one of my first ever trips to a comic shop, in which it was heavily promoted (along with another Mixx CD-Rom, a weird multimedia Sailor Moon thing that I'm yet to track down). Nearly twenty years later, I finally get ahold of it, and I have to say: it's not for me, to be honest. The premise is that you're a teacher with a class of five girls, with different personalities (nerd, airhead, delinquent, annoying child, and generic pretty girl), and you've got to guide them through their final year of high school, with the aim not only to keep their grades up, but also to make sure they turn out to be happy, well-rounded individuals. You do this by choosing once a week which subjects to focus on, which girl needs more attention, how strict your teaching style is, and so on. You even have control over what the girls do at the weekends!

The problem is, I'm just not very good at this kind of semi-abstract strategy game. To me, it mostly feels like I'm clicking on boxes and watching numbers go up and down, and I just don't see the logic to any of it. I'm sure someone with the patience and desire to see it through could play the game over and over, eventually learning all its systems and how every thing works, eventually getting a perfect ening where all five girls go on to have amazing lives, but I just don't have the patience for that. I'm not saying it's a bad game, it's just one that doesn't work for me at all (I mean, it might be a bad game too, I guess?). Still, hopefully someone who would be interested in this game, but didn't know it existed might read this, track it down, and write a better, more qualified review of it. But until then, this is probably going to be the only review on the whole internet. Sorry. One final note: since this is an old PC game, you might be wondering about compatibility. Well, as long as you go into the .exe's properties and run it in Windows 95 compatibility mode, it works perfectly in 64-bit Windows 10.

Monster Hearts R (PC)

Once again, I've been able to get ahold of a game released at a recent Comiket, and once again, it's a shooting game. This time, it's a shooting game about three monster maids: a vampire maid who is just that, a werewolf maid who is also a ninja, and a Frankenstein's monster maid who can summon a giant robot. Though there are obviously a few common systems no matter who you pick, their weapons and playstyles are all so different, they could almost have come from different games. But first, we'll get to those elements that are the same whoever you play.

Firstly, there's the power-up system. There's various differently coloured kanji that might appear while you play, but the two most important ones are the orange ones, that power you up, and the purple ones, which power you down. The orange ones gradually fill up an experience meter, until your weapon reaches level 5. You can keep collecting them once you're at level 5, but now every time the meter fills, it makes three big bonus coins appear on screen. These coins are worth so many points, that, should you be playing for score, this is the main thing on wich you should concentrate. The purple ones are fired in patterns by certain enemies like bullets, and obviously should be avoided like they are bullets.

As for the differences in characters, obviously, there's the differences you'd expect between their normal shots: the vampire has a regular spreading vulcan shot, the werewolf has a shot that just goes straight ahead, but is a lot weaker than you'd expect from a weapon of this type (due to this, she requires a slightly non-traditional, counter-intuitive playstyle that I'll get into shortly), and the Frankenstein's monster slowly fires powerful drill-shaped rockets, with faster lasers accompanying them as she powers up. The real differences between the three come from their super attacks, which all work differently, and require very different tactics.

We'll start again with the vampire, whose super weapon surrounds her with a bullet-absorbing forcefield for a few seconds, after which a bunch of familiars will storm across the screen, their number and the power of their attacks being determined in correlation with the amount of bullets absorbed. After about 10-20 seconds, it will have recharged, and can be used again. The werewolf's super has two different forms: tapping the button will simply make her release shurikens in a circle outwards, using up a third of the power meter. Holding the button while the meter's full, though, will make a bunch of shadow copies appear all over the screen, before they start shooting shurikens in every direction for a couple of seconds. This is the quickest super to recharge, taking only a few seconds to come back, which, along with her almost useless normal shots, so playing as the werewolf means relying on your super as your main form of attack.

The Frankenstein's monster's super is the coolest, but also the hardest to really use effectively: it summons a giant robot, vastly increasing your firepower, and also letting you absorb a bunch of hits, until it's had enough and goes away. How long you get to use it depends on how much it gets hit, though obviously, it's hitbox is huge, and it's pretty hard to avoid bullets in this form. What makes it hard to use, though, is that it takes several minutes to recharge after you summon it, so you're left betting on your own skills: can you survive until the boss without the robot, or alternatively, do you want to uuse it to storm through the stage, and hope it doesn't take too many hits and can get you through at least some of the boss fight too?

With all this in mind, is the game actually any good though? Well, it has a lot of problems, like how every time you get a game over, the time it takes and the amount of stuff you have to skip through to start a new game is way too long. Also, as a result of the three characters being so completely different in playstyle, the initial learning curve is pretty brutal, even for an STG. On the other hand, though, despite the minor problems it has, and how frustrating it can be in general, it's a game that once you start playing, it can be hard to stop. You can easily while away the hours without even realising. Maybe it's wasted on PC with this strong a hook, it could probably rake in the coins in an arcade setting! Anyway, if you're ordering a copy from Japan, there are probably way better games you could buy before it, but if it ever gets a nice convenient download release, then I definitely recommend picking it up.

GHost94 (PC)

I have to start this review with an admission: I have no idea what the goal of this game is, plus I'm really bad at it, so I didn't get very far in the few hours of it that I played. However, I think it's an interesting enough game to write about and at least tell you what I figured out about it. It's part of a long-running series o;f Japanese indie PC games, that you've probably seen a few of if you pay attention to the trailer compilations that come out before each Comiket.

It's a 3D stealth game that takes place in a massive (well, it feels massive, anyway) post-apocalyptic/dystopian Japanese city, patrolled by ninja-like soldiers and heavily-armed robots. Being stealthy is incredibly important, as if you're spotted, all the enemies in the area will chase you around trying to kill you and you're far from durable. You can find somewhere to hide until the heat dies down, but the best thing to do is to find an exit and leae the area as fast as possible. I can't tell you about any of the plot or anything, so I basically just went exploring as best I could. Occasionally I'd trigger a story event, and one time I found a save/healing room (which was very important, as if you haven't saved and you die, you have to start the game again, with a very long unskippable cutscene you have to sit through every time). There's areas that I think are radioactive, where a geiger counter-esque clicking sound starts, and an increasing counter appears above your head. Different areas have the counter going up at different speeds, and if it reaches 999, you die instantly. Seems like videogame radioactivity to me!

There's a lot that's failry unique about the game, with the most obvious being its look. It looks incredible, with a late-90s inspired combination of 2d sprites walking around low-poly 3D worlds with low resolution pixel art textures. But it's used in a way that wouldn't have been possible on the Playstation or Saturn, creating some gigantic areas, and creating a real sense of scale, as rotting skyscrapers tower above your tiny SD sprite in the outdoors areas, while the indoor areas range from labyrinhtine mazes of corridors and small rooms to huge high-ceilinged hallways and swimming pools. The other big idiosyncracy is the controls: rather than going with the now-standard twin stick controls for 3d action games, GHost94 has its own controls that take a little bit of getting used to. Essentially, your actual movement is restriced to moving left and right on a 2D plane, and jumping. You can still move all over the place though, as you use the shoulder buttons (assumeing you've set up your controls in the layout recommended by the config screen's diagram) to move the camera, and with it the plane on which you move, by ninety degrees. Like I said, it does take some gettig used to, and you are in danger of fumbling under pressure when you've been spotted, but on the other hand, it is nice to play a modern 3D action game that doesn't just use the exact same control scheme as every other game. Plus, there's a first-person view button that's useful not just for spotting eemies you might not have otherwise, but also for just taking in the spectacle of your surroundings.

Now, as I mentioned, I haven't managed to get very far in this game yet, so there's some things I can only half-understand. You can pick up various small objects from the ground, but most of them seem to be useless bits of garbage. There's also money, dropped by enemies, should you be brave enough to try and fight them, and lucky/skilled enough to kill one. I never found a use for the garbage items (that do literally just seem to be bits of litter), nor did I ever reach a shop where money could be spent. Though I assume that weapons are sold there, as you start with a weak knife that can be equipped and unequipped.

I think that's all I can really say about GHost94, to be honest. I find it fascinating and aesthetically beautiful enough to try and stumble my way through. If you've got the patience (or the Japanese literacy) for it, you should give it a try, too. If you do, I'd be glad to hear your findings!

Micom Slayer (PC)

So, this is a free Japanese game, and if I forget to add the link here when I upload this post, please comment and remind me to (since I write posts as plain text documents well in advance of them actually being uploaded). Anyway, it's also a total love letter to the 8-bit microcomputers (or "micoms", if you will) of 1980s Japan, like the MSX, the Sharp MZ-700, the NEC PC88, and so on, as it's a semi-linear platform game about a girl on a quest to collect them all (plus a few slightly later 16-bit computers too).

There's twelve stages, two each for each area, and each area is based on a particular old computer, with graphics and sound to match (though your characters' sprites are always modern and hi-res. I don't have much experience with some of these computers, but to my eye, all these homages seemed spot on. I especially love the MZ-700 stages with their blocky text mode enemies and such, they're just really cute. I was even able to identify some game-specific homages, too, with a stage that looks just like Lode Runner, and bosses that harken back to the likes of Donkey Kong, and, oddly, Capcom's awesome arcade platformer Black Tiger.

Anyway, these stages are all huge and filled with treasure chests, which contain keys, food (for replenishing health, of course) and coins (if you have at least one hundred coins when a character dies, you can bring them back) or, very rarely, a computer. The computers don't do anything, other than their collection being your ultimate goal. Every stage has two of them somewhere, either hidden in a chest or hoarded away by the stage's boss, who can't be fought until you find the chest with that stage's boss key. Some bosses don't have computers, meaning that their stages must have both of them hidden in chests. What these bosses do give you is new characters.

There's six characters in total, and as well as acting as extra lives, they all have different abilities. The girl who's a clear homage to the Valis games is just generally better at jumping around and attacking than the default character, while the lizardman/troll guy and the stickman can break the large square rocks that block off certain parts of each stage and jump really high respectively. So yeah, there's a kind of backtracking exploratory element in there game, too. Fitting to the game's theme, it's more of a Maze of Galious situation rather than a Metroid or Symphony of the Night one.

There's not much more I can really say about Micom Slayer. It's a great little game that's both fun to play and super-charming, and it's free so I recommend you go and get it right now. The only problem I have is that for some reason, it didn't save my game. Though this is only a minor problem, and I'm sure I've probably set something up wrong while installing the game. If anyone figures out the solution to this problem, please let me know!

Eojjeonji Joheun Il-i Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok (PC)

So, that long title apparently translates to "A Night Where Good Things Are Bound To Happen", which is also the name of the comic on which it's based, which was the first professional work (as far as I can tell) of Lee myung-Jin, who later went on to create the fantasy comic Ragnarok, which he'd then abandon after that comic's spin-off MMORPG turned out to be wildly more profitable. Boo. This comic apparently got an english translation under the name "Lights Out", which is interesting, I guess.

The comic's apparently about juvenile delinquents and gangsters, and the game is a belt-scrolling beat em up! It's also a bit of an anachronism: despite coming out in 1997, it's a DOS game, rather than Windows 95 or something. At the opposite end of the scale, it also suffers from that beat em up disease I'm sure you're all sick of me complaining about: experience points! You get points for beating up enemies, and at the end of each stage segment, you get a chance to spend those points on things like increasing your max HP, improving your moveset, and so on. You really need to choose wisely, since you'll probably only be able to afford something every couple of visits, and your health doesn't recover between stages unless you pay for it (there's an option to increase and refill your health bar and a cheaper one to just refill it). Also because this game is merciless in its difficulty.

Well, it appears to be on your first play, as your health bar goes down in huge chunks, and after only a few hits from enemies it'll be gone. Obviously, you'll want to upgrade it pretty soon, but there's something else at work that you won't notice at first, that I'll refer to as the "stubbornness" system for the sake of convenience. How stubbornness works is that once your health bar is completely depleted, you start flashing red. While you're in this state, you can keep taking damage indefinitely, as long as you never get knocked off your feet. So it's a cool little last chance type of dealy. It'd be a lot cooler if there were health items every now and then or free healing at the end of the stage, as it'd motivate you to try your very hardest to struggle to the next item, but it's still nice. Some enemies also have the stubbornness trait too, but it's not just a way to make the game even harder, as you get a small amount of experience for every hit you land on a flashing enemy, so, depending on your skill, courage and tolerance to boredom, you can milk these guys for experience indefinitely.

It would be remiss to let this review end without mentioning how great this game looks. The character sprites aren't anything special, but they're nice enough, and more than made up for by the backgrounds, which all look excellent. The game's got a gritty urban setting, and that coupled with the high-quality pixel art almost lets you envision a world where there was a Saturn entry into the Streets of Rage series. A nice little touch is that there's billboard ads for the Ragnarok comic series in some of the backgrounds, too. Anyway, I'm not going to say that this game is an absolute essential that you need to track down, but if you do, and you give it a chance, you won't regret it.

Real Fighter (PC)

If you go back and play the original Virtua Fighter, you'll find a pretty fun game, and I'm you'll also agree that though the character models and textures are simple, there's a lot of life in them, and the animation in particular is more lifelike and realistic than any fighting game that had come before it. Back in the early-mid 1990s, however, I didn't live near any arcades, nor was I rich enough to have a 32X or a Saturn. So I'd see still screenshots of SEGA's fighting game, and wonder why all the writers were losing their minds over what looked like two piles of boxes engaging in combat.

I bring all this up to make something clear to you: you might look at the screenshots of Real Fighter in this review and assume that it's a similar scenario, that it looks bad in still pictures, but in motion it takes on a whole new life. You would be very wrong to assume this. In fact, Real Fighter actually looks worse in motion than it does in still screenshots. The characters look only very vaguely human at the best of times, their fighting stances look ridiculous and when they move, it's something akin to someone picking up an action figure and seeing how far in each direction every point of articulation goes, attempting to make the most impossible poses they can.

Actually playing the game isn't any better. Like Virtua Fighter, you have buttons for punch, kick and guard. Guard works exactly as you'd expect, punch will make a punch happen maybe one of every ten times you press it, and kick will usually produce something that's kind of like a kick or series of kicks. The two characters will sort of randomly flail at each other for a while, until one of them either runs out of health or falls off the stage. None of this is helped by the camera, that changes angles completely at random, presumably in an ill-fated attempt at being cinematic.

I might be being a little too harsh on Real Fighter, since it is, after all, Korea's first ever 3D fighting game (as far as I can tell, it might also be the only Korean 3D fighting game, as all the others I've seen, before and since, have been 2D), but it's just an ugly, boring waste of time. Don't bother playing it, except for reasons of historical curiosity.