Tiny Bullets (Playstation)

 

 Judging by the title, I really expected Tiny Bullets to be another one of those excellent 3D shooting games secretly hiding in the Playstation library, like Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero. Instead, it's more of a combination of Tomb Raider's meticulous 3D platforming and Resident Evil's simple "put the item in the hole" puzzle-solving. Also, the player character looks like a babyfaced Sonic gijinka.

 

So, you play as this blue spiky kid, and you're exploring ruins and caves and such (though apparently, you're meant to be running an errand for your grandmother). There's some kind of plot involving an evil wizard and his henchmen who have cool bird-face helmets, as well as a friendly dragon and some other guy that you meet on your travels. So, you jump and climb and shimmy around, trying to get to the village where the shop selling Grandma's medicine is, and also not getting killed by monsters or evil goons or your own clumsiness.

 

The platforming itself is slow and clunky, but in a way that makes it feel deliberate and satisfying. You jump with X, and hang onto ledges by holding O. You can jump up to a ledge and hold O to grab it instead of falling back down, or you can hold O while walking off of a ledge to grab it while you drop down. You can also grab ahold of vertical poles/pipes/etc., and shimmy from side to side along them, and while hanging like this, you can swing bak and forth to do a long jump forward. I'm describing this stuff in such exhaustive detail because it's a big part of what the game entails, and it's all fun and satisfying. In fact, I do kind of wish Tiny Bullets more platforming and less puzzle-solving. And no combat.

 

The puzzle solving, as mentioned already, is Resident Evil-like in nature. Find a key to open a door. Find a fuse to turn on a machine. Put the coloured tiles in the right slots in the right order to activate the ancient secret thingy. That kind of thing. It's fine, but in a game like this where it clearly wasn't a high priority for the designers (as opposed to Resident Evil, where the puzzles clearly were a higher design priority, and are much more interesting as a result), these puzzles feel more like they're just a way of making the game consume more time, rather than entertaining challenges.

 

The combat, as has been vriefly alluded to already, is bad and even more of a chore than the puzzles. The controls for it are interesting, at least. Your weapon is a slingshot, and you hold R2 to point it, then O to shoot it. The game lets you hold L2 to look around in first person, and you can hold L2 and R2 together to aim and shoot like that, which at least is nice. You can shoot at things like gongs to activate stuff in the stages, too. The problem is that the enemies just kind of potter about, they'll probably get a hit or two in on you while you're aiming, and after a couple of shots they die. Also for some reason, despite the detailed aiming mechanics, most of the enemies don't take damage if you snipe them from a distance. Like the puzzles, the combat feels like padding, and while it's happening, you'd much rather be jumping and clambering and generally navigating the environment, and it's a shame the developers didn't concentrate more on that instead. 

 

Tiny Bullets is a game that I think, had it gotten a worldwide release, would be fondly-remembered part of a lot of childhoods. Without nostalgia, though, it can only really stand on its own, and unfortunately, the good parts (the controls and the generally great way it feels to move around in this game) are heavily overshadowed by the bad parts (the pointless puzzles and boring combat). Having said that, I do wonder how beloved it is among Japanese players. I've never seen or heard any references to it anywhere, though. 

Wonder Trek (Playstation)

 Among the many prominent and exciting translation patches that have been released in recent times, it feels like Wonder Trek kind of fell by the wayside, and didn't really get the attention it deserved. Which is strange, since I'm sure a basic description of what kind of game it is has at least one element that appeals to a wide range of different tastes and interests: it's an isometric open world metrovania with Prince of Persia-esque platforming, 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, and Dizzy-style "use the item in the right place" puzzles.

 

You play as an explorer, accompanied by an elderly professor, exploring a jungle island. There's lots of animals, many of whom will attack you, and you fight back by hitting them with a piko hammer until they get annoyed and run away. Sometimes there's plants that'll attack you, too! Sometimes, an animal will talk and ask for help, like the giant catfish with an upset stomach who asks you to go inside and fix it. It turns out that he's inadvertantly swallowed an ancient golden harp. Plus he's also full of aggressive parasitic worms.

 

It's the open world element that really impresses in Wonder Trek. When you start playing, you'll find a set of giant bird footprints going down a particular path away from your camp, encouraging you to go that way. But you really don't have to! Once I'd figured this out, I started going down the other paths and found all kind of interesting things: a spider-infested fungus forest, a dungeon with traps and seemingly man-made traps in a volcano, a very aggressive pitcher plant (which was also a boss I've not yet been able to beat), and more! Most importantly, every path I took either resulted in my reeiving an item that could be used to go further down a different path, or a dead end where a specific item is obviously necessary to go further. So it's a game that's actively designed around encouraging exploring the world its built for you.

 

The movement and platforming were both a little surprising, too, and they take a little getting used to. I call this an isometric game rather than a 3D one despite the world being made of polygons because the camera is always in that same position diagonally above you, plus you can only move in the four cardinal directions, but shifted forty-five degrees. So every time you load it up and start playing, there'll probably be a few seconds where you re-orient yourself with which cardinal on the D-pad correlates to which diagonal for your character's movement. When you're paniccing in some of the more complex platforming/climbing situations, you're also likely to wiggle the pad a little, attempting to make precise movements in directions that don't exist in the game. Or at least I did.

 

As for the platforming, like I said: it's kind of like Prince of Persia in 3D. You can jump a certain distance and height, and the distance is a little further if you're running when you do so. You can also grab onto the edges of platforms and vlimb up onto them after jumping, as well as climbing down to grab onto the edge of the platform on which you're standing, to drop down a little more safely. Sometimes, there'll be something high up that the professor wants to see, and you have to escort him there. He's not as agile or strong as you when it comes to jumping and climbing, so how this works is that whenever you're hanging from the edge of something, he can jump far/high enough to cling to your back and you can then climb up with him on you. It mainly just makes things a little more time-consuming, and it's a slightly unusual take on the concept of the escort mission. But it is still an escort mission, and those are always worse than just letting the player get on with things.

 

Though it's got a few little shortcomings, like escorting the old man every now and then, Wonder Trek is a game that's definitely worthy of your time and attention. It's fun, interesting, and full of charm. I don't really have much more to say about it: seek it out, and play it!

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure (Mega Drive)

 

 Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures. For a couple of short years, I loved the TV show, the comic, and when it came to pass that a Mega Drive game was coming, I became obsessed with wanting to play it, even using the screenshot maps in the second issue of Sega XS as a substitute until I was able to. As was the fashion at the time, the game would obviously be a platformer where you defeat enemies by jumping on their heads.

 

There would be a second Tiny Toons Mega Drive game a few years later, a comedy sports title. But by the time it came out in 1994, I'd long since lost interest in the show. Buster's Hidden Treasure though, I did get to play, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a pretty good, and very well presented iteration of the generic Sonic-wannabe game. Buster can run really fast, even to the point where his legs start revolving in a circle like Sonic's do, and the first few stages take place in grassy plains, and the final ones in industrial factories.

 

There's some weirdness in here, though. Tiny Toon Adventures was a silly comedy show, so while they managed to use a villain from the show, Dr. Gene Splicer, there's no enemy army to populate the stages. There's a recurring eney who's supposed to be a character from the show named Rhubella Rat, though they look like her (and also there's lots of them). Big muscular dog character Arnold also turns up a bunch of times as an enemy. There's also some cute little bats and birds and other normal animals. Then there's a ton of weird things. Like little blue goblin creatures, werewolves, egg-shaped guys who defy gravity and release circles from their mouths to attack, and so on. I was all ready to talk about how these things were clearly made up last minute, and how they didn't fit with the aesthetic of the series' world, but on doing a bit more reasearch, every one of them actually is from the show, even if they only had a single appearance each.

 

The plot's also kind of over-written, too. Buster Bunny finds a treasure map in the attic at Acme Looniversity, so he and Montana Max race to get the treasure (which could have been the plot for a somewhat more unique game, with Spy VS Spy/Trap Gunner/Dashin Desperados=style sabotage-action gameplay), and also the evil scientist Dr. Gene Splicer has been kidnapping Buster's friends to put brainwashing hats on them. I guess that doesn't really matter, though.

 

Most importantly, the game itself is pretty good. As mentioned before, the strong pointi s definitely the presentation. Buster himself has a ton of animations that all look great. There's even animations that aren't even really necessary, like in areas with low ceilings, he'll walk around with his ears hanging low instead of pointing upwards. But there's also a tons of great-looking animations for crawling across the ground, zip-cording down ropes on his ears, and hanging from horizontal ropes by his hands. The backgrounds all look really nice, too, though unfortunately, it feels like a bizarrely long segment of the game takes place in a series of caves.

 

It also plays pretty well. As already mentioned, it's definitely a Sonic imitator, with fast-paced platforming, and lots of ramps and slopes and momentum-based shenanigens. There's a couple of things that kind of let it down, though. Sonic can easily and quickly smash through enemies by rolling, initiated by the player pressing down on the D-pad. Buster, to make things slightly different, slides along the ground, an action initiated by pressing the B button. It only works when he's at top speed, and assigning it to a button rather than down makes it a little less intuitive, just enough that you forget to do it, and just run into the enemies and get hurt. It's not helped by the fact that unlike Sonic's roll, it's only a short move, and it slows you down, you can just keep going with it. Also, those cave stages that take up such a long segment of the game's middle parts are also very cramped, slowing affairs down to a crawl (much more than, for example, Marble Zone does), and they're also a lot longer and more difficult than the stages preceding and following them.

 

Buster's Hidden Treasure is a decent enough Mega Drive platformer. It's worth playing for the excellent graphics and animation, but if it stops being fun in the caves, there's no real reason to feel bad about quitting there. It's unfortunate that as well-made as it is, I'm not sure it would even get into the top twenty Mega Drive platformers, and definitely not the top ten. It's fine, though.

The Terminator (Mega CD)

 It might seem a little odd for me to be writing about a game that's a tie-in to an incredibly popular mainstream movie. But there's a few mitigating factors at play here. Firstly, it's a Mega CD game, and almost every Mega CD game can be considered at least a little obscure. Not only that, but it's also a platformer on the Mega CD, and it was released in 1993, and to the magazines of the time, that was an unforgivable crime. Around about 1993-94, even games now considered universally-beloved classics like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier were getting bad reviews for being "just platformers", and to exacerbate this, critics at the time had somehow gotten the idea that the Mega CD was some kind of wonder consoles that would change the very meaning of videogames, giving us hyper-realistic graphics and games that were indistinguishable from playable movies, and anything that fell short of this was lambasted. Except Thunderhawk, for what I'm sure are totally legitimate reasons.

 

The Terminator, then, is "just a platformer", and it's definitely not as good as those Treasure games I mentioned above. But what it does do is utilise the strengths of the Mega CD to create a big, exciting audiovisual experience. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think it's using a deeper colour palette than the stock Mega Drive would normally support, and there's a few subtle bits here and there in the way certain sections scroll and such that probably wouldn't be impossible on a cartridge, but would at least been a bit of a hefty test of skill for the programmers. There's also clips from the movie played between stages, and the very dark lighting and muted colours of the movie really make for a good fit into the very limited FMV capabilities of the Mega CD. I haven't gotten through the entire game (though I have played more than half way), but it seems like none of the clips used contain any spoken dialogue, which is interesting. Even moreso when you reach the Tech-Noir nightclub, where the BGM is a track made up of little samples of the movie's dialogue. "It's just me.. and him. Cyborg. Cyborg. Cy-cy-cybernetic Organism." and so on.

 

The music is a high point in general, with the aforementioned track being a very of-the-time kind of electronic dancy type thing, and a lot of the other stages being backed by some also very early nineties American-style hair metal instrumentals, mixd with a little movie soundtrack epic bombasticity (you can really tell I'm not used to writing a lot about music here, can't you?). The music was clearly an intentional selling point, too, as three of the five big bullet points on the back of the US case mention it. (It's also credited to Tommy Tallarico in the intro, but in the year 2026, what does that even mean anymore?) The back of the Pal box doesn't mention it at all, with a much more standard, flavourless paragraph just describing the game. I do want to mention that the front of the boxes are very different, somehow, though: the PAL cover is simple, but effective. The Terminator logo and the classic portrait of the T-800 on a black background. The US cover is deranged, however: that same portrait, but copied and pasted around a few times, with a different filter on each one in a very silly and cheap-looking manner.

 

As for how the game plays, it's pretty good. You play as Kyle Reese, and the first few stages have you running around post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and Skynet's base, killing lots of evil robots, until you get to the time machine. Then you're in 1980s Los Angeles, killing lots of punks and hair metal fans. It's kind of similar to the movie tie-ins that Acclaim were putting out on SNES and Mega Drive at around the same time: well-animated sprites, enemies that can take a few hits before dying, lots of ladders to go up and down, and a dark colour palette. It's simpler than those games tended to be in good ways, though: you armed only with your standard machine gun and grenades, rather than having a bunch of gimmicky weapons with limited ammo to swtich between, and while the enemies do take a bit of a beating, so do you. Best of all, you pretty much only ever have to make your way in a generally rightwards direction, with exploration beyond that being optional and rewarded with power-ups. No getting lost in vast labyrinthine stages.

 

There's a few very distinct enemy types in each era, with maybe one or two new ones introduced per stage at most, and they all have very learnable behaviour, another thing I consider a big positive. It's satisfying to see a bunch of enemies you're about to fight, you know how to fight them, and then you execute that. Another cool thing is that you get a whole new look after you time travel! In the future, Kyle's in his military-like resistance outfit, with a futuristic machine gun, then after the jump (since nothing can be brought through the portal orb thing), he gets a trenchcoat and rifle, and his grenades are replaced with molotov cocktails. These 1980s weapons still handle exactly like the 2020s ones, but it's still a cool visual touch.

 

I recommend trying out The Terminator, and make sure you do so with the volume up high. It seems almost as if someone at Virgin (presumably Dave Perry) had the idea of using the Mega CD to adapt the movie into a kind of playable concept album, and in my opinion at least, it's an idea that really paid off. I'll assume it wasn't much of a commercial success, though, not only because it's on the Mega CD, but also because it's apparently one of the rarer games on the system nowadays. What a shame. It'll probably never get ny kind of modern pot or rerelease either, for many reasons. So you know what to do.

Yoyo's Puzzle Park (Playstation)

 There's some slightly odd circumstances surrounding the release of this game. Firstly, it's one of those games with a massive gap between its Japanese release (1996) and its western release (1999). Also, in Japan, it's called Gussun Paradise, which is a better name for it than Yoyo's Puzzle Park for two reasons. The first is that it lets you know that it's a spinoff from the Gussun Oyoyo series of puzzle games, and the second is that the reason it's a spinoff and not one of the main entries is that it's not a puzzle game. Instead, it's a Bubble Bobble-like: a single screen platformer in which you have to kill every enemy to progress, and also you score more points by killing multiple enemies in one go.

 

Unfortunately, every game in this genre is expected to have its own novel way of killing its enemies, that allows for that multi-kill high score play, and by 1996 the well seems to have been running dry. How it works here is that there are enemies going around, and they kill you if you touch them. You can stun them by shooting at them with one of those cone-shaped party poppers, which also knocks them back a little bit, so you can (labouriously) get them where you want them to be. There are also living bombs with faces that just kind of passively sit around. You can't shoot them with your popper, but you can go right up to them and kick them, or you can jump on them from above or headbutt them from below. Any of these nudges them a bit, and lights their fuse. Naturally, their explosions are pretty big, and they kill anyone caught in them, friend or foe.

 

It's awkward, slow, and just generally not fun at all. The worst part of it all is that the bombs regenerate where they exploded, and while you can kick them off of the edge of platforms, but there's no way to get them back to higher parts of the screen. Meanwhile, the enemies, when not stunned, can jump up to higher levels at will, meaning that you'll spend a lot of time stunning enemies and kicking them down the stage to get them to the bombs that are stuck down there. There's some interesting power-ups, at least, in the form of vehicle/animal/rubber ring things that go around your waist and give you new abilities, like flight or long-range shots. I don't think there's any that just let you directly kill enemies, though, like there are in most games of this type.

 

Though I found playing the game itself fiddly and tedious, there are some things I liked about the presentation. The map screen, from whence you pick which set of stages you're going to tackle is a very nice bit of pixel art. In fact, the game's premise is a stamp rally around the various different areas of a theme park, and it really commits to this concept in things like the save and load screens and such. Stages will do gimmicky things based on where in the park they're meant to be, too: in the aquarium, there's rising and falling water levels, with some enemies floating at the top of it, on a flight simulator, the entire screen tilts, and so on. Something else nice is the unusually human way the options are phrased: instead of "new game" and "load game", there's "play from the beginning" and "continue", while "play on my own", and "two of us play" take the place of "one player" and "two player". It's immediately noticable and adds a lot of charm.

 

Like you might have figured out, I didn't enjoy playing Yoyo's Puzzle Park, and I don't recommend it. At least, I don't recommend playing it and expecting a fun game. Give it a quick go to see how nicely presented it is, though. Then you can properly lament what a chore the actual game is. I'm surprised to learn, from a quick look at ebay, that copies are less than a hundred pounds, but still a lot more than I'd recommend paying. 

Run Saber (SNES)

 There's a few interesting things to point out about Run Saber before you even get to the game itself. For a start, it's a Japanese game that was only released in North America and Europe (which means there' no chance of ever being able to afford a copy). Furthermore, it was developed by Hori, the famous and popular makers of high quality controllers. It's the first of six games they put out, according to Moby Games, spread out over the course of the nineties. Finally, and this is a lot more subjective than the other points: it kind of looks and feels more like a Mega Drive game than a SNES one. The gritty OAV-like sci-fi setting full of weird monsters, when from SNES games, you expect more of a kid-friendly TV anime look and feel, don't you? Like I said, it is more subjective than the other points I raised.

 

What is the game, though? It's a platformer, in which you select either a male or female character (if there are any differences between the two, they're very minor. I think their attacks have slightly different hitboxes, but that's all), and you traverse a few linear stages killing monsters with energy swords, and there's several boss fights per stage, too, which is nice. You could, if you wanted, call Run Saber a Strider-like, with its superhumanly acrobatic protagonists and their quick-swinging energy blade attacks. But that would be a little simplistic and lazy.

 

Instead, you should call Run Saber a Strider-like because of the way its paced! You're constantly being usher forward into the next big weird setpiece, whether it's a bunch of spiky traps to maneuver around, a wall to climb while fighting off enemies, or one of the game's many boss fights. Just like Strider! I'm joking about the first comparision being lazy, of course: the characters do move and feel a lot like Strider Hiryu, and if someone from the development team came out and said it was originally intended to be a Strider sequel but a deal with Capcom fell through at the last minute, it wouldn't be a massive shock. You do have a couple of new moves, though: a jumping spin attack, a dive kick, and a non-offensive slide across the ground.

 

So with all that in mind, is it actually a good game, or is it just a Japanese Strider Returns? Luckily, it's good. On your first play, it'll feel slightly stiff and odd, and a little too difficult, but somehow that literally only applies to your first attempt at playing it. At least, that's how it went for me. My first attempt, I lost most of my lives over the course of the first stage and got a game over shortly into the second. But every attempt after that, I've easily been able to get well into the third, and sometimes fourth stage! (According to what I've read online, there are five of them).

 

The bosses are cool enough that they aren't a slog or a nuisance, either, instead being fun and quick enough to get through that you do feel like you're a powerful, heroic character charging through all these evil monsters. And they're pretty interesting too. There's a green mutant-man who bursts out of a metal canister, a demonic fighter jet that grows heads to attack you while you're standing on it mid-flight, a big red meditating demon in the background who detached his head to get you, a giant zombie woman (who was apparently designed as a giant living woman, but Nintendo of America thought that was the same as a positive depiction of domestic violence, presumably because there are worms in their brains). A varied bunch of monsters and freaks to fight, and like I said, the fights go by pretty quickly, which feels like a fairly unique trait in this kind of game.

 

Run Saber is a pretty good game, in a style that really stands out on the SNES. It's definitely worth playing. Even though it won't keep your attention for a long time, you probably will enjoy it while it does.

Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).

Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Ganso Jajamaru-kun (Wonderswan)

 

 The original Ninja Jajamaru-kun was a fairly early Famicom release, and is typical of such, being made up of very similar stages that gradually increase in difficulty, and through which the player progresses by killing all of the enemies, rather than by reaching a goal. Also typical of many games of the time, there's various little semi-secret methods for scoring extra points (and by extension, gaining more lives). Wikipedia says that Ganso Jajamaru-kun is a remake of that original game, but I'd say it's really a sequel that happens to skew closer to the original than the earlier sequels did (as they tended to follow the trends in the platform genre in the late 80s and early 90s).

At first glance, it is very very similar to the original game: each stage has eight enemies roaming around a stage with four floors. Parts of the floors can be destroyed from underneath, and some of these destroyed floor panels will reveal power ups. There's also the secret power up that will only appear after you've already had three different power ups, that summons a giant frog for you to ride around. But there's some new stuff. Like the sakura petals the princess drops aren't just optional items to get more points and access to the bonus stage. In this game, if you don't collect a petal on a stage, you'll have to go back and do the stage again before you're allowed to fight that area's boss. (Boss fights being another new element that wasn't present in the original).

 

There's some other eccentricities I've noticed regarding this petal business. When you finish a stage, if you didn't lose a life, you'll get a time bonus. It's pretty easy to zoom through the stages quickly and get a big time bonus, but the clock starts at 120 seconds, and the princess won't drop the petal until it reaches ninety seconds (I word it like this because if you collect the watch item that adds seconds to the clock, she still waits for it to say ninety, rather than when you've been in the stage for thirty seconds). So you might want to repeat stages for more points. Except! That after every boss you beat, the amount of points-per-second awarded for time bonuses increases by ten. So while you'll get more points in the short term by repeating stages, this means your score won't be increasing as quickly as it would if you just progressed through the game normally (plus the repetition is a hassle).

 

There's some improvements over the original that really stem from the fourteen years between the two games' releases. Like, the controls and Jajamaru's movement just feel smoother, more responsive, and generally a lot better in this game. Furthermore, it looks great. It's obviously all rendered in eight shades of grey, but the backgrounds are beautifully drawn, and there's even the occasional full screen piel art cutscene. Though it's a game that was old-fashioned on its original release a quarter of a entury ago, Ganso Jajamaru-kun is still a game that I think is a lot of fun, and definitely worth your time (though like almost all Wonderswan action games, it fetches a completely obscene price on the secondhand market in 2025, so definitely just emulate it).

Mon Mon Monster (MSX)

There's two particular types of nonsense that have long since been exorcised from the language of modern games design. Rick Dangerous nonsense is when a game's made up of nothing but memorising the locations of invisible threats, and then demonstrating that knowledge to avoid them in succession (because they're invisible, and it's impossible to avoid them without foreknowledge of their locations). The other is Tower of Druaga nonsense, whereby progression through a game is blocked by obstacles that need to be tackled in a certain way, with no in-game clues as to what those means are, or often even that the obstacles themselves even exist. Mon Mon Monster (also known as Mon Mon Kaibutsu) is an example of the latter kind.

 

The first stage is pretty normal, to lull the player into a false sense of security. It's split into a few segments, but each one just has you going from left to right fighting enemies and punching blocks, until you find the door to the next one. Eventually, you'll reach the boss, and can punch him to death. The second stage is a lot less clear. It seems to take place on one massive map, there are doors that lead nowhere, doors that send you to an earlier part of the stage, and the boss awaits in a hidden room, behind two destructible walls that don't stand out in any way, and have no clues pointing towards them. The third stage seems to take a moderate place between the previous two, being semi-linear with dead end passages if you take a wrong turn. Though I haven't yet been able to reach the end of stage three, so maybe there is more nonsense to look forward to there.

 

I should probably also describe the game itself, right? Well, other than the implementation of Druaga Nonsense, it's a pretty typical eight bit platform game. You play as a little Frankenstein's monster guy, and you can punch and jump. When you punch, you also shoot out a projectile attack. Enemeis can be hurt by punchs and projectiles, but bosses and blocks have to be punched up close. Sometimes blocks have items in, that might power up your projectiles, restore your health, or give an extra life. In terms of quality, it's not up there with the big names of the era, but it's still a little above average. It mostly feels good enough to move around, jump, and so on. There's a weird technical quirk that means your projectiles are sometimes invisible, but they still hurt the enemies, so it's not a big problem.

 

That's all I really have to say about Mon Mon Monster, to be honest. It's a robust enough platformer, especially considering its age, but I just don't have the patiences to keep searching for invisible routes to progress. Other than that stuff, though, it's not that difficult a game! If only the developers had designed their stages without the assumption of clairvoyance on the part of the player, this would have been a much better game.