Korokoro Post Nin (Playstation)

It's a trite, lazy and annoying thing, when someone describes a work by calling it a mix of other works, but I'm going to do it now anyway: Korokoro Post Nin is like a combination of elements from Cameltry, Paperboy and Sonic the Hedgehog. This really is a description of it at its basest level, though: it's a game where you rotate a maze to move a character inside, and that character is not only tasked with delivering small packages to mailboxes, but her movement speed is also heavily dependent on the slope of the surface on which she's stepping, and the momentum she's built up.

So yeah, it's some kind of (possibly post-apocalyptic?) future, and you're a delivery girl working for some kind of robot guy. You're tasked with delivering to every postbox in the area, then getting to the door within the time limit. Although, referring to the game's protagonist as "you" isn't exactly accurate, as like I mentioned earlier, you actually control the maze in which the delivery girl, postboxes and door exist. It's a mystery why this game was released for the Playstation in 2002, as it's exactly the sort of thing that would have become a beloved cult hit, had it been released on the GBA in the same period.

Playing the game is incredibly simple: R1 and L1 turn the maze left and right. If the ground upon which the delivery girl is standing is a slope, she'll walk down it. If it's a steep slope, she'll run down it (which is not only faster, but also essentially for smashing through certain obstacles). If there's no ground directly beneath her, she'll fall. The thing is, though, this game is actually a masterclass in old-school game design, by which I mean that it is entirely based around these (and a couple of other) simple rules, and the stages are all tests of both your knowledge of these rules and the precision of your dexterity in pulling them off.

On a larger scale, it also introduces new elements every few stages: first there are obstacles, both moving and stationary, which will knock three seconds off your remaining time you you hit them while you're not running. Next, there are spikes, which you are to avoid altogether, with a brutal penalty of five seconds for each violation. Further than that, I can't tell you about, as I'm just not good enough to get through more than the first couple of stages with spikes. However, that's fine, it doesn't feel like an unfair game, or an artificially difficult one. In fact, I'd love to see this game make the rounds in the speedrunning community, as each stage is obviously designed with an optimum or perfect path in mind, and I know there are people out there who would love the challenge of learning the layout of each stage by heart, and mastering the controls so that they can get through perfectly, and it's clear to me that this game was designed with that in mind.

In summary, Korokoro Postnin is a game that was slightly too hard for me, but it's also a game I can't help but respect, and I hope it somehow, someday gets the attention of the audience for whom it's truly intended. (Even if it is well over a decade too late for it to matter to the developers or publisher).

Legend of Galahad (Mega Drive)

The Legend of Galahad is a port of an Amiga game called Leander, and I'm reviewing the port rather than the original for two reasons: firstly, it's the version I remember seeing in magazines as a kid, and secondly, I'm going to assume that the original has some terrible control scheme where jump is mapped to up on the joystick, and I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense. Anyway, it's clearly a British attempt at making a Monster World-esque action platformer, andin some ways, it's a pretty good attempt. In other ways, not so much. Unfortunately, it's the important parts it messes up on.

I'll start on the positives, and specifically on the biggest positives: this is an incredible-looking game. It's got that Roger Dean-inspired airbrushed look that a lot of the higer-profile Amiga games had, and it's very effective. The world in which its set is a kind of mix of northern Europe, with a few mildly stereotypical asian influences thrown in, as well as the aforementioned prog rock album cover style. It feels like the entire game is set among the mountaintops, and the graphics do an amazing job of evoking that, to the extent that you can almost feel the fresh, cold air in your lungs, even in the stuffy humid heat of a British summer (the conditions under which I was playing this game). Another positive is that Galahad himself controls really well. Walking, jumping and attacking all feel good, and he swings his sword as fast as you push the button.

Okay, so then there's the negatives, first of which being that the combat doesn't feel very good at all. Almost every enemy takes multiple hits to kill, and most of them won't make any acknowledgement that you're hitting them: they'll just keep walking back and forth while you impotntly slash at them with your sword. Furthermore, there's other enemies with certain weak spots, that are often in positions that makes them impossible to hurt without taking damage yourself, and example being the giant bugs that appear in some of the cave segments. An even bigger crime is that the rules of combat are applied inconsistently: every few stages, there'll be a dragon. The dragons aren't bosses in the traditional sense, they aren't at the end of stages or anything, though they are unique and they do appear in places that mean they have to be defeated before you can get past them. The problem is that a single hit from a dragon will take a life from you, no matter how much health you have remaining. A dragon can just poke you with the end of its nose and you lose a life straight away. It feels unfair, and it's just a terrible design decision.

The other big negative is the stage design. I've already mentioned that some enemies are placed in positions that make taking damage inevitable, but there's other things too. Like the massive amount of leaps of faith there are: you're often asked to blindly jump into the ether, without any way of knowing what traps await, or where they are. There's also a certain kind of trap that drops a heavy object on the player, killing them instantly. The problem is that its effective hitbox is its entire sprite, so if it's already fallen and you walk into the side of it, you lose a life. Again, lots of terrible, unfair design decisions.

It's easy to see why Galahad (or rather, Leander) would have been a big deal on the Amiga, where there weren't a lot of Japanese-inspired action game, especially ones with such great production values. But on the Mega Drive, the early 90s home of arcade ports? It's got a lot of stiff competition, against which it never had a hope of standing up.

Devastator (Mega CD)

It might just be my imagination, but it seems like there's a disproportionally large amount of action games about giant robots on the Mega CD. Devastator is one of them, and it's also part of another sizable category of Mega CD games: anime licenses. It's based on a two episode OAV entitled D-1 Devastator, of which only one episode has ever been subbed into english, by the group ARR, who had an infuriating habit of subbing the first episodes of rare and interesting series, and then never going back to them. Of course, since this is a game on an early CD console, grainy clips from the anime play between stages, though the quality is far from being the worst on the system.

But anyway, Devastator is a combination platform game/horizontally-scrolling shooter, with each stage playing out as either one or the other. There's no half-measures, either, as the platform stages are intricate, and full of traps, while the shooting stages are fast, hectic and full of enemies and their bullets. I admit I wasn't expecting much from a Mega CD game licensed from a long-forgotten OAV and developed by Wolfteam, but Devastator was a really pleasant surprise.

I have no idea what the anime is about, but the developers haven't let it hamper them thematically in any way, as there's stages in cities, deserts, jungles, some kind of incredibly enormous space/hell mansion and so on. The monsters mostly seem to be the same for all the platform stages, though each has unique traps and other elements, while the enemies in the shooting stages seem to be different every time. The bosses in both types of stages are great, too, being massive, detailed sprites, with attack patterns that are fun to learn.

Not only does it play really well, with the difficulty level balanced just right, hard enough to be satisfying and easy enough to avoid frustration, but it also looks and sounds great. It's not just a case of a Mega Drive game being dumped onto CD so they could shoehorn in some FMVs, the Mega CD's strengths are really put on display here, with lots of colours, amazing CD quality music, and even the occasional bit of sprite scaling! (Sprite scaling is always very welcome on this blog.)

The Mega CD is a system with more hidden gems than most people think, and Devastator is definitely one of them. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

Willy Wombat (Saturn)

The early years of the 32-bit era were a time of great experimentation. The advent of decent texture-mapped 3D on home consoles meant developers were trying to find new genres that wouldn't have been previously possible, and finding ways to take old genres into the third dimension. Willy Wombat falls into the latter category, being an attempt at making a 3D mascot platformer. Unfortunately, I think it came out a year or two too late to be a big success: by 1997, the animal mascot fad had pretty much completely died down, the Saturn was already mostly abandoned in the west, and, to be brutally honest, compared to its contemporaries, WW would have looked pretty ugly and old hat, with its pre-rendered sprites on drably-coloured 3D stages look.

Like you've probably figured out, it's a 3D platformer, about the eponymous wombat. What you might not expect is that he's an ex-cop on the run from the totalitarian regime he once served, and is also searching ancient ruins for six magic gems. The camera is always high above the stage, and can be rotated with the shoulder buttons. You have melee attacks and the ability to throw boomerangs, which can be used to collect items as well as defeat foes.

It's  a shame for a couple of reasons. The first is that the character designs were done by Susumu Matsushita, of Famitsu magazine fame, and all look pretty cool in their cutscene portaits and other art, even if their actual sprites are kind of blobby. Secondly, it was clearly made with a view to a worldwide release,  with all the cutscenes having full english voice acting, and the main character looking like a mix of Sonic, Indiana Jones and Batman. On the other hand, had it got a worldwide release, there's a good chance it wouldn't have gotten the best reception.

Willy Wombat is a game with problems that go beyond the slightly ugly graphics. Mainly, it's incredibly frustrating to play. The stages are huge, full of enemies, puzzles, traps and pitfalls, so obviously, some of the difficulty is down to deliberate design, which is fine. Unfortunately, everything you do (or try to do) ingame is made all the harder because of how the game works. It's sometimes hard to be sure you're facing in the exact right direction to hit an enemy or dodge a trap or jump over a pit. In fact, fighting crowds of enemies is usually best done by standing still and repeatedly firing while rotating the camera with the shoulder buttons to aim.

Willy Wombat is a game I really tried my hardest to like, but eventually, I just couldn't suck up the frustration any more, and it began to sprout into boredom as I fruitlessly wandered round a stage, looking for the next place to go to. It's just not fun enough to stick with, unfortunately.

Tomba! (Playstation)

It's April Fools day again (Or the 30th of March if you're a patreon subscriber)! I liked doing the Soul Calibur V post last year, so I'm making a tradition of these annual non-obscure game posts!
 

If it was released today, Tomba (or Tombi in Europe) would be called a metrovania (or metroidvania for people who like words with awkward stops in the middle of them). It's a platform game with RPG elements and a big explorable world in place of seperate linear stages. Obviously, the genre existed before either Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night existed, but those were the two that made it popular, blah blah et cetera.  

 

Though it wasn't anywhere near as popular as either of those two games, Tomba was fairly popular in its day, and it's remembered fondly by everyone who played it. If it was more popular, or if design traits were more of a factor in coming up with these names, Tomba would have part of its name in that awkward portmanteau alongside the works of Nintendo and Konami. The reason I say this is because the three games represent three different styles of RPG being turned sideways and played all platform-like.  

Metroid represents a simple, Zelda-esque style of RPG, with the player character getting stronger and opening new areas being based on the finding of certain items, and in which each item has a specific intended use. Symphony of the Night represents a more typical Japanese RPG, with lots of stats and experience points and all kinds of different weapons and armour and other equipment. So what does Tomba represent? Western-style RPGs, series like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. 

 

This might sound ridiculous, but it's true! The crux of this lies in Tomba's mission system. Like in a large, open-world western RPG, Tomba picks up missions and side-missions and so on as he wanders the world looking for the Koma Pigs and hid Grandfather's bracelet. Also like those games, new missions can be triggered in a variety of different ways: talking to characters, finding items, entering new areas, and so on. 

 

Also like those games, some missions will be over almost as soon as they begin (or, in some cases, a particularly thorough player can finish a mission before they've triggered the start of it), and some missions can be started near the start of the game and not come fully into fruition much later in the game. 

 

So yeah, that's an aspect of this game that I've never seen anyone else acknowledge, and I think it's a shame that it's one that hasn't really found a place in the greater DNA of the metrovania species.

Dragon Unit (Arcade)

Dragon Unit was released in 1989 by the little-known Athena co., and it's an odd kind of hybrid platformer/beat em up. Odd because rather than being a platformer with beat em up elements, there are instead two kinds of stages: straight platformer stages and other stages that are mainly a long, flat corridor of enemies, but have two Guardian Heroes-esque planes to switch between by pushing the joystick up or down.

Other than that, and the fact that the shield the protagonist is carrying actually does block small projectiles, it's pretty unremarkable, mechanically speaking. There's lots of enemies, a whole range of power-ups and different weapons to collect and all the typical stuff you'd expect from a 1989 arcade platformer. Its charm lies in its presentation. At the most basic level, you can plainly see that the sprites are big, the colours are bright and lurid, and it looks pretty nice, though the black outlines on everything are a little ugly. Looking further than that, there's nice little touches, like how your knight's armour gradually falls apart as your health decreases until he's in his underwear, like a more gradual version of Arthur from Ghouls and Ghosts.

There's also a lot of visual variety in Dragon Unit. Even though there are only six fairly short stages, they all look completely different to each other, and mostly have their own sets of enemies, who are mostly big and always ugly and evil-looking, which is nice too. It's a game that mostly gets by on its atmosphere, the ugliness of the enemies, the overly saturated colours, and so on really make it stand out. At the same time, it's all very rough around the edges, I don't know whether it's down to a lack of experience on the part of the developers, or maybe budget or time contraints, but the whole thing looks, sounds and feels very unpolished.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, and I'd say it actually adds to the game's appeal. It could have given the impression of a game lazily knocked out to fill a quota, but instead it feels more like a labour of love, made by a team whose passion and creativity slightly outweighed their technical abilities. I'd say it's definitely worth a look and a credit feed through at the very least. There's apparently also a NES port, called Castle of Dragon. I haven't played it, but I can't imagine it being a game that makes the transition to such an underpowered console gracefully.

Baluba-Louk no Densetsu (Arcade)

So, Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a 1986 platformer that combines ideas from an earlier age of arcade games, along with ideas shared by its contempories. From the earlier age, it has a lot of mechanics that you'll recognise from Pac-Man and its imitators: your goal in each stage is to collect all the points items and avoid the enemies chasing you (in this case, they appear to be brightly coloured octopodes). Also, there's an item in each stage that turns the enemies into points items for a short time, which double in value for each one you manage to collect.

Its more contempory influences are more widespread but mainly, they appear to be Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble. From Mario, the game takes the idea of hitting blocks from below: hitting a treasure chest from below causes it to open, and opened treasure chests are worth more points when collected. Furthermore, an opened treasure chest might sprout a flower, and hitting it again will cause the flower to bloom. Obviously, bloomed flower chests are worth even more points. Opened chests will also leave a bomb in their place, and if the player jumps from a block with a bomb on top, the bomb will be lit, and any enemies caught in the explosion will be paralysed for a few seconds. Bloomed flowers, when collected, leave a different item, and when this item is jumped from, it fires shots to the left and right, which turn enemies into one of eight different power-ups, each with different effects, like adding portals or an extra "power pill" item to the stage, or just giving the player a few extra points.

It's this whole business with the flowers and opening chests and so on that I'm considering the influence of Bubble Bobble (and other arcade games of the time), that is, that though the game seems simple on the surface, there are various hidden and semi-hidden ways of scoring extra points, doing away with enemies, and so on. I often find myself saying on this blog the phrase "it's a shame this game wasn't more popular", and it applies to this game, too, as though it did get a Famicom-only sequel, had it been more popular, there might be more documentation around of the various secrets that might be hidden within (or maybe I'm just assuming too much of the game, and the reason it never took off in a big way, despite being a fun, well made game,  is because there aren't any secrets and it didn't hold players' attention for long).

Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a decent enough little game, and I recommend you give it a shot. As an aside, the text on the title screen "Baluba-Louk was discovered in 1985" made me wonder if it was inspired by some real ruins or something that might have been discovered that year, but no, that's just regular old flavour text.

Snezhaja Koroleva (Arcade)

So, here's a game that was made in the Soviet Union (specifically Ukraine, I believe), for a Soviet audience. Though it was released in 1988, it's apparently based on a 1957 animated film, itself based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Snow Queen. I haven't seen that movie, but I'm sure it can't be the worst animated adaptation that story's received.

Though some might hold lazy stereotypes about technology in the USSR being primitive in comparision to that of the rest of the world, graphically, Snezhaja Koroleva appears to be on a par with what a lot of videogames looked like in 1988. I definitely wouldn't look too out of place on the Master System or maybe even as a budget-priced Amiga release of that period.

Of course, in terms of aesthetics and game mechanics, it was probably developed in a state of relative isolation from its Japanese, American and Western European peers, and as a result, it has a fairly different structure and feel to it. It's essentially a collection of single-screen mini-games.

You play as Gerda, out to find her missing friend Kay, and on each screen, the goal is to reach the top-right corner, with each screen providing its own obstacles. Oddly, though most of the screens are platformers, the first is a maze, that has you avoiding monsters while picking up roses before heading to the corner to exit. There's some thing of a "Game and Watch" quality to the rest of the screens, as they focus on avoiding or navigating various obstacles, sometimes requiring frame-perfect timing. I was going to say that the game's easy to get through, after I managed it on my second attempt, but then on every subsequent attempt, I totally failed, so who knows? I also had a theory that the game was "allowed" to be easy and just tell a story because it was developed outside of capitalism and the profit motive demanding a challenging coin-muncher. But I guess my own ineptitude has put paid to that idea.

As it is, and as it often is with old games developed outside the "usual" game-developing regions, Snezhaja Koroleva (or Снежная королева, if you like) is more of an endearing curiosity than an unearthed lost classic. Still, it's nice that games like these are preserved for everyone to play, isn't it?

Miracle! Panzou - 7-Tsu no Hoshi no Uchuu Kaizoku

I think that means "Space Pirates of the Seven Stars", but I could be wrong. Anyway, it's a combination shooting game and platformer, and though it looks and feels like it might be based on some anime aimed at little kids, I haven't found any actual evidence that it might be.

Anyway, each world has three parts. The first is flying to the world by spaceship, represented by a short and very easy vertical shooting section. Then, you land on the world, and walk around a top-down map with a vacuum cleaner sucking up little creatures and finding the entrances to the actual stages. The actual stages come in platform form. On the map, there are doors with orbs on them, with stages behind them. At the end of each stage there's an orb, and the doors open when you have as many orbs as they're displaying. So progression between stages is totally linear (not that that's a problem or anything, but the map sections add nothing else to the game). The last door on the map leads to the boss.

Miracle! Panzou is a nice looking game, and it's fairly fun to play at first, but it does have some pretty big problems. Firstly, there's one of the worst problems with a lot of post-2000 videogames: pointless tutorials for everything. It mainly only effects the first stage (with exceptions when you gain a new ability, though there's no real reason why those abilities couldn't have been available from the start anyway, another modern game design nuisance), but there, your play will be interrupted so you can be told how to shoot, jump and pretty much every other action, no matter how basic. There's also the problem that I feel bad about bringing up, since it feels so subective: the games is just way too easy. Like I'm sure you have, I've read that criticism being given out by all sorts of idiots, from those who don't understand the point of Kirby games, to those who think credit feeding through an arcade port on the easiest settings means they've seen all it has to offer.

Miracle! Panzou just doesn't feel like even the slightest challenge at any point. I played through the first two worlds, which took about 20-30 minutes, and there were no hard parts, no progression in difficulty from one world to the next, nothing. The new abilities that were obtained weren't really any use except as "keys" (the double jump appears just before the first time you reach a platform that's just out of reach for a single jump, the charge punch appears just before you reach a statue that has to be smashed to progress, and other than similar specific situations, there's no uses for them). It just felt like the game was wasting my time and I might as well have been watching a tv show while mindlessly pressing buttons. Looking at the game's aesthetics, it was probably made with a younger audience in mind, but to me, that's not a valid excuse. There's plenty of games suitable for children, while still being challenging and interesting. A game like Miracle! Panzou, however, just feels insulting.

Socket (Mega Drive)

So, if you only know one thing about this game, you'll know that it's a blatant Sonic clone, to an extent that no other game before it had been. Every other review I've read of this game, whether it was in a magazine at the time of its release, or on the internet many years later, has focussed entirely on that fact, and then descended into tedious hyperbole about how terrible and unplayable the game is. The fact is, Socket is a very flawed game, and a very unoriginal game, but it does have a few ideas of its own, and it is a fun game to play.

The eponymous character is a weird kind of time-travelling electric duck from the future, who has to stop an evil time-travelling winged fox called Time Dominator from doing evil stuff throughout history. Socket can run, jump and kick, and has an energy meter that serves as a combined time limit and health bar, something usually only seen in games where the player controls a vehicle of some kind.

But the stage themes tread the familiar platform game ground of grassy place, lava caves, factory, futuristic city, and so on.  Stages come in sets of three, though each stage of the three fills an explicit role: The first stage will be a "High Speed Zone", which always takes place in an amazing-looking future city, and is what it sounds like: go really really fast util you get to the end. It's not challenging, but there is a good sensation of speed as you whizz around. The second will be Athletic, a pretty traditional action-platform stage, with a focus on running and jumping and so on. The third part of each set of stages is the "Labyrinth", a huge, sprawling stage with puzzles and traps and so on, with the emphasis being on actually finding your way to the end of the stage.

As for how Socket plays, it's mostly pretty good. Definitely leagues ahead of the other "poor man's Sonic", Bubsy, at least. There's a few moments where the cracks begin to show: for example, there are lots of very Sonic-esque places in stages that use ramps and momentum and even running up walls, but they're just a little bit too stiff and unco-operative, and jumping from non-flat surfaces can sometimes feel strange an unpredictable. Another problem is that it's incredibly easy, even compared to the Sonic games, which themselves aren't incredibly challenging. Socket's massive heath bar, means there's very little consequence to getting hit, so you can just speed your way through stages, ignoring enemies, spikes, lava pits, and so on. You're likely to complete it on your first or second attempt.

If I were to compare Socket to any game, I would actually choose the Playstation 3D action game Speed Power Gunbike. Though SPGB hides it better, there's a shared thread between the two games of being Sonic-inspired attempts at high-speed action games that are just almost great, being held back by a few small, but damning flaws. Also like SPGB, I'd recommend Socket to anyone who has an interest in a kind of alternate interpretation of the Sonic games' ideas.
This game is also known as Time Dominator 1st

Pop'n Magic (PC Engine)

There are a lot of cute Japanse games with Pop and/or Magic in the title, usually platformers or colour-matching puzzle games. In this case, it's a platformer with a very mild element of colour matching thrown in as a gimmick. More specifically, it's a Bubble Bobble-esque single screen platformer with a heavy emphasis on finding the best ways to make points items appear  from killing enemies.

As usual with this subgenre, your main weapon doesn't directly kill the enemies, just puts them into a harmless, immoble state, in this case being a magic orb in one of three colours (depending on the enemy): orange, blue or yellow. These orbs can be picked up and thrown around by the player by holding down the fire button, and the idea is to throw them at other orbs. Then, if the two orbs are the same colour, they turn back into enemies, which yields no benefits to the player as far as I can tell. But if they're different colours, one of the orbs will bounce around dropping power ups and points items as it goes, before disappearing.

Which orb disappears depends on the colours involved, in a rock-paper-scissors arrangement: blue destroys orange, orange destroys yellow, and yellow destroys blue. If you're unable to make an orb (or orbs) disappear in this method, you can do it by shooting them a few times, but you only get one item out of it this way. So, the key to scoring high is defeating enemies and destroying their orbs in an order that only leaves you with one leftover at the end of the stage. The fact that you'll always be left with at least one leftover is a bit of a weakness to the system, as it makes the ends of stages a little bit awkward and unsatisfying, even when you've technically done as well as possible on the stage.

Putting mechanics to the side, the game's excellently presented, with full-screen animated cutscenes, lots of voice acting, and bright, colourful graphics throughout. Also, as you might expect, the stages are split into themed sets, with a bossfight at the end. What you might not expect, though, is that each stage has its own background, and each theme sort of has two sub-themes. For example, in the woods stages, the first half will be the woods during daylight, with the second half being the woods at sunset. The spooky stages start outside a haunted mansion, gradually getting closer and going inside. It's a nice little touch.

Pop'n Magic isn't a bad game, but it doesn't particularly stand out, either. If you really like Bubble Bobb-likes, there's no harm in giving it a try, but there are plenty of better ones too.