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!

Airship Q (PS Vita)

The first I heard of this game was that it was an import-only PS Vita game that had received an official translation, and instantly went and bought a copy, just because we really should reward the publishers who do good things like this, just as much as we should shun those who engage in unethical business practices like encouraging real money gambling and so on. (How topical! I feel lucky that none of the games embroiled in all this loot box controversy are even slightly appealing to me in the first place, though). Luckily, this all paid off, and Airship Q turned out to be a pretty good game!

As you look at the screenshots, I'm sure you'll be reminded heavily of Terraria, and there's no denying that that game must have been a big influence on this one. It's by no means a clone, though, as while Terraria might have an end goal, it's also a non-linear game that takes place in a large, procedurally generated open world, with a heavy emphasis on building bases and so on, Airship Q is a much more linear action RPG ala Zelda, that happens to take place in a world of mostly-destructible blocks, and in which you gather resources to make your tools and weapons.

In it, you play as a girl living in a world of floating islands who built a flying ship with her brother, only for her brother to be kidnapped by a witch, who also turned the two siblings into cats. Your aim (at the start of your adventure, at least) is to rescue your brother, beat up the witch and regain your human forms. In the course of this, you'll seek out statues that let you build more and more pieces of equipment, from stronger mining equipment to pieces of machinery that improve your airship. You'll also eventually find out some secrets behind the world when your true quest is revealed (though since this is a pretty recent game that's still available to buy brand new, I won't spoil things any further). There's even the possiblity of a cheeky bit of sequence-breaking, if you're smart!

It's a lot of fun to play. Dungeons largely involve digging around and building staircases to climb, while simultaneously fighting off hoards of monsters and seeking out the statues hidden within. Exploration has a totally different feel, as you fly around on your ship seeking out islands and dungeons, as well as occasionally fending off attacks from flying monsters,and even huge dragons and enemy ships (dragons are usually guarding some important treasure nearby, while enemy ships are usually great sources for resources like big cannons to steal and attach to your ship, and coal to power your machines). There's also cool little touches like how structures need to be built in certain ways, since unlike Minecraft, everything will collapse in short time if it's not built in a sufficiently sturdy manner (though that's fine if you're just building a temporary bridge or whatever).

Again, I don't want to spoil all the cool little moments and touches that this game holds, so I'll end this review here with a strong recommendation. Airship Q is a great game, and you can pick up a brand new physical copy for really cheap, too!

The Ottifants (Master System)

The Ottifants are apparently from a cartoon created by German comedian Otto Waalkes, and if the games magazines in the UK at the time of this game's release are to believed, they were intended to be as popular a merchandising juggernaut as The Simpsons. Obviously, that never happened, the cartoon never left germany, with this game's release across europe the only reason anyone else has ever heard of them (and even this is pretty much completely forgotten). I've never seen The Ottifants cartoon, but having played the game, I assume the reason they never went anywhere is because they're an unendearing bunch of disgusting-looking shrivelled elephants. But is their game any good?

No. In fact, it's terrible in several different ways. There's a common complaint with European-developed shooting games, that even the weakest enemies are bullet sponges, making the player feel weak, and the game unsatisfying. Though it's not a shooting game, the enemies in it are dispatched by shooting multi-coloured dots from the end of your nose, and the regular enemies will stand there and take several shots before disappearing. The bosses take this to a ludicrous degree, with the first boss alone taking eighty hits before it'll fall, all while you're avoiding its homing death spanners.

Other than that, the game is just aggressively mediocre. You go around boring stages collecting teddy bears and pieces of paper with bar charts on them, until you find the exit. Then you go to the next stage. The one thing I can say in its favour is that the sprites are all big, colourful, and detailed to an extent that's pretty impressive for an 8-bit consoles. But even taking that into account, The Ottifants is an awful, joyless game, and I don't recommend wasting any time on it.

Parasol Henbee (Game Boy)

So, this game is based on an anime I've never seen, and had never heard of before playing the game. And I wouldn't have even heard of the game itself had it not happened to be one of the 66 games built into some models of the excellent Game Boy Color clone, the KongFeng GB Boy Colour. So what kind of game is Parasol Henbee? It's a platform game with an incredibly sedate pace and feel, akin to going out for a leisurely stroll.

You play as the eponymous Henbee (or possibly Henbei, depending on the romanisation), and you literally just got from left to right on each stage, avoiding enemies and hazards until you reach the end. You do have an attack, but it's awkward to use, and it depletes your health almost as much as getting hit by an enemy does. You start out with pretty low health, though there is a reason for that: your walking speed and the height/length of your jumps has a correlation with the state of your health bar, and there's lots of little items floating around that increase your health a tiny amount. Of course, this means that in later stages, when the platforms start getting smaller, and the gaps between them bigger, if you take a few hits, finishing the stage becomes basically impossible. And there are points in those later stages that require military precision to avoid touching the enemies.

There's not much else to say about the game, mechanically speaking. There's no bosses, very little variety, and you can get through most of the game without feeling any sense of progress or achievement. There are some interesting things to say about it aesthetically and thematically, though! Firstly, Henbee looks like a Mr. Saturn from Earthbound, though this game and the series on which it's based is older than that game. Also, the first couple of stages, which are set in what's clearly supposed to be a friendly Japanese suburb look more like a feral city, left to rot by uncaring corrupt politicians, as the streets are lined with piles of uncollected rubbish and populated by packs of wild dogs and cats. Maybe I'm wrong, and the creator of Doraemon did make a series that was a biting social commentary that somehow got a licensed Gamy Boy game made out of it, but I'd be very surprised if that were the case.

I don't recommend Parasol Henbee. It's not interesting enough to bother hunting down, and even if you do have a GB Boy Colour and no actual cartridges to put in it, there's plenty of much, much better games on the built in list you can enjoy while waiting for your ebay-purchased carts to arrive.

Wiz n Liz (Mega Drive)

Videogames magazines of the early to mid 1990s had something of a strange vendetta against platform games. Even unquestioned classics like Gunstar Heroes, Contra Hard Corps and Alien Soldier would get average-at-best reviews from a lot of magazines, simply for looking like platform games. Obviously, this meant that there were great games that fell by the wayside, and since they never had the series or developer associations that those games had, they never gained the renown they deserved. Wiz n Liz is one such game.

Though it's a UK-developed game that was only ever released on home systems, it could honestly stand up alongside the best single player arcade games, as it is purely about going fast and scoring points. I'd even go as far as to say that with a different aesthetic, the game's design could totally be used to make a perfect Sonic arcade game! The main meat of the game is running arond the stages, which are only a few screens across, rollercoaster-like in design and looping (kind of like the multiplayer stages in Sonic 3), where you collect rabbits, which turn into letters. The first task of each stage is to collect the letters to spell a word at the top of the screen, once that's done, you just have to collect the rest of the rabbits (who now turn into clocks, fruit, and stars, all of which I'll explain shortly) and go to the exit as fast as possible, you have to do two or three rounds of this per stage, depending on the difficulty level. There's no enemies, other than very easy bossfights that occur every eight stages, and your only threat is the time limit.

You start the game with two minutes, and your remaining time carries over from stage to stage. When it runs out, you lose a life, but there are various ways to claw back the seconds. The main two are the clocks that the rabbits drop during the stages, as each one will give you three seconds back at the end of the round, and a glowing time orb worth thirty seconds that appears in a random place on the stage whenever you get down to lesst than ten seconds left on the clock. Now that the clocks have been explained, I should do the other two items, right?

The stars don't really do anything on their own, other than give you points, but with the aid of certain fruits and vegetables, they can do a lot more! The fruits and veg, you see, are spell components, and between stages, you put two of the food items in your posession into a cauldron to get various different effects. This is where the game hides and almost Bubble Bobblian level of secret stuff: as well as item shops where you can spend you hard-won stars on more fruit, extra lives and a few more precious seconds, there's at least three mini-games that can be played for more points, level skips, a fake game over screen and various other weird things. Though obviously, a player who wanted to maximise their score would go online to look up a list of all the recipes for the most useful spells, I would honeslty advise against doing this, as there's a lot of fun to be had in getting a different surprise between every stage, and of course, the world seems a lot bigger when you don't know exactly how much there is in it, right?

Obviously, Wiz n Liz is a game I completely recommend you go and play as soon as possible. It really is a double shame that it never got an arcade release back when it came out, and that it doesn't have the cultural cache to ever get any kind of remake or rerelease on modern consoles. It's a game that excels in pretty much every department and deserves to be much more famous than it is.

Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS (DS)

Like Binary Land, I also received a physical copy of this game as a kind gift from a patreon subcriber, this time Justin, of the excellent (though sadly seldom updated) site, Tinpot Gamer! This time, it's a cute puzzle-platformer that was ported to DS from the Playstation. Unfortunately, I haven't played the Playstation version, so I can't tell you how they compare. I can only tell you about this version on its own terms.

Anyway, the biggest thing that will hit you about this game is the presentation: there's lots of art in the cutscenes and on the title screen and in the backgrounds of the stages by prolific artist Izumi Takemoto (who has appeared on this blog before, back when I reviewed the Saturn adventure game Dinosaur Island). I don't think any of his work in any field has ever been released in English, though if I'm wrong, please tell me. As well as that, each set of stages has a theme, like cake, medicine, sleeping, and so on, and the player character has a different sprite for each theme! And that's not all, either: each set of stages has its own background music, with not only vocals, but also karaoke lyrics on the bottom screen!

It's already the third paragraph, and I haven't even mentioned how the game plays yet! Each stage has various differently coloured cubes that you can push around. They disappear when three or more are touching, and the aim of each stage is to get rid of them all. Like you'd expect from a game like this (that doesn't hide it like certain other games that have recently been on this blog, rassum frassum), your movement and jumping is all very precise: jumps always reach the same height and cover the same distance, and you always move one block's width at a time.

The problem with a lot of these games is that they're either so easy as to be a boring timewaster, or so hard that I get a few stages in and give up. Loopop Cube is a rare case that falls somewhere in the middle! I've gotten slightly stuck a few times, but I've managed to get over thirty stages in so far (out of 120) without totally giving up yet, so that's pretty great.

In summary, Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS is a very cute, well presented game, that's also alright to play. Obviously, it doesn't have the kind of superfast action I usually crave, but as the ancient philosophers said: a man cannot live on bullet patterns alone.

Hiho Densetsu: Chris no Bouken (PC Engine)

Sometimes, certain games get a reputation of being incredibly, unplayably difficult, accessible to only the most resilient of players. A few of these games deserve such a reputation, but in a lot of cases all the games really require is a slightly higher level of dexterity than most games, and maybe a little pattern recognition when it comes to facing off against enemies and bosses. Though there isn't a lot of english-language writing about Hiho Densetsu: Chris no Bouken floating around out there, what there is does tend to mention the game's difficulty.

It's apparently even considered a Kusoge in some circles, so, just like I inadvertently did with my Renny Blaster review, I'm going to have to buck the trend. I actually thought this game was pretty good! It's nothing special, but it is good enough. The difficulty is mostly just a result of tight design. Every enemy has a very specific set pattern it follows in its movements and attacks, and that includes the bosses. So once you figure those out for an enemy type, you can beat every other enemy of that type with ease. And you get five hit points per life, so it's not like the game's totally unforgiving in that respect.

Another unforgiving aspect is the time limit. Each stage has a certain number of "days" for it's time limit. These "days" are acually only about 20-30 seconds, and you tend to get between three and nine of them to get through the stage, leaving you with no time to meander, you really have to figure things out as quickly as possible, beat enemies with a minimum of fuss and just generally storm your way through. Furthermore, if you die, even if it's during a boss fight, you go back to the start of the stage. Again, other than the "no checkpoints, ever" aspect, this is unforgiving, but still fair. The stages are clearly designed with this kind of play in mind: with one exception, they're totally linear, and it's pretty obvious what you have to do to get past the various obstacles in your way, requiring dextruous skill, rather than puzzle-solving insight.

There's a few interesting original ideas in here, too. For example, you start the game with a near-useless weapon with almost no range. To power it up, you collect two differently coloured orbs: red, blue or yellow. Each combination of two colours gives a different weapon. This itself is cool, but not something that hadn't been done before, even in 1991. What's cooler in relation to this idea is that a few stages into the game a kind of enemy startes to appear who doesn't do any damage to you, but instead steals one of your orbs and runs away, leaving you with the default weapon until you find another orb to go with the one you're left with.

So, Hiho Densetsu is a pretty good game, though it did take a few goes to grow on me. At first the slightly ugly look of it, and the harsh difficulty are off-putting, but stick with it, and it's a fun, satisfying little game.

Kid Chameleon (Mega Drive)

It's been said many times that Sonic the Hedgehog was SEGA's answer to Mario. This isn't just true on the basic level of being a company mascot, but from the way Sonic's first game was designed, to his brash, rebellious personality made him different to Mario, and by extension, made SEGA different to Nintendo. Kid Chameleon can also be said to be SEGA's answer to Mario, especially Super Mario Bros. 3, a game which saw Mario take on various different forms as the game went on.

While Sonic's games were almost totally different to Mario's, other than being platform games, Kid Chameleon is very similar to SMB3 in a number of ways: a main character who transforms, blocks containing power-ups that are broken from below and so on. But philosophically, Kid Chameleon shows a different set of ideas to Nintendo's game. Super Mario Bros. 3 is designed like a game adults think children should enjoy, while Kid Chameleon feels as if a ten-to-thirteen year old had played SMB3, and designed their own heavily-inspired game in an exercise book stolen from school, and then somehow their drawings had become an actual game. (I'd like to note that I don't mean to disparage either game here. They're both classics, of course.)

As you play Kid Chameleon, you can hear that kid's voice saying "Mario changing into a raccoon or a frog is okay, but what if you were a badass dude in shades, and you could turn into a knight or a samurai?", and then of course, the more you play, the further the ideas get from the family-friendly Nintendo fare: "What if you were a nazi tank in hell that shot skulls? And then you turned into Jason Voorhies and got chased around by giant skulls that scream 'DIE!' at you?". The structure of the game feels faily adolescent, too. The stages are huge, and full of secrets. Secret areas, invisible power-ups, and of course, secret exits that lead to extra secret stages.

I don't really know how to end this piece, since Kid Chameleon is already a pretty well-known game, and most people reading this will have probably played it at some point and already formed an opinion on it. I guess there's this anecdote: when I was a very young child, someone told me they were playing this game, and that it was so long and hard, they might not live long enough to ever finish it. Obviously, I suggested that they have it put into their coffin so that they could continue playing it in the afterlife. I was a very practically-minded child, I'm sure you'll agree.

Dogimegi Inroyku-chan (3DS)

The first time I played this game, I was impressed that there were still people able to come up with new mechanics for a Bubble Bobble-style platform game focussing on defeating multiple enemies in a single attack. As I played it more and more, I also got frustrated with the awkward controls, and I also came to relaise that the game's real focus is figuring out the exact right way of defeating all the enemies in a stage without dying: a test of smarts, rather than skill. I should really have realised sooner, since the game doesn't have any kind of scoring system, which is one of the two main keystones of a Bobble-like (the other being secrets revealed only through Druaga-esque byzantine methods).

So, you're a rogue cupid who has been causing havoc on Earth by setting up ridiculous couples that don't fit together at all, and God has seen an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by sending you to hell to bring peace there by making all the demons fall in love with each other. How this actually works is that you shoot an arrow at an enemy, then shoot another arrow at something else, be it another enemy, or the wall, ceiling or floor, and the two will smash together. If two enemies smash together, they'll both disappear, as will any enemies they hit on the way to each other (does this mean they all became a polyamorous unit together?). If you hit an enemy and an inanimate object, the enemy will fly towards the object, and receive damage based on how far they had to go. Hit two inanimate objects and a temporary trampoline will appear, which is necessary for getting to places slightly out of reach of your normal jumps.

It's an okay game, the biggest flaw is its controls. Everything feels very awkward, especially jumping, over which you have no control after leaving the ground, with all jumps being an exact distance. Of course, I eventually figured out that it is the way it is because it's a puzzle game, and if you can't make a jump, you're meant to figure out a different way to get to where you want to be. The problem is that I just can't get past the fact that it looks like an action-platform game, and it's so frustrating that it doesn't work that way. I guess that's more my fault than the game's, though.

Even with that in mind, I find it hard to recommend Dogimegi Inryoku-Chan. It's not very exciting to play, it's even less exciting to look at and solving the stages isn't at all satisfying.

Elevation II (Amiga)

I've given up, at least temporarily, on finding anything interesting in the Assassins PD compilation disks, as after looking at a few, it seems they were almost exclusively interested in making compilations of uninteresting clones of old arcade games. So instead, here's a solitary PD Amiga game that, rather than copying verbatim an old arcade game, offers up an original game that wouldn't have looked out of place in arcades a decade before its actual release.

So, you're a little man, and you have to run across the floors of a building until you reach your lady love at the top. Obstructing you are elevators, with various levels of speed and erraticnes. It's incredibly simple: the only controls are left and right, and touching an elevator results in a lost life. There's also various kinds of items that fall from above at random intervals, including extra lives, invincibility, points bonuses and items that instantly move you up or down a floor.

Scoring is pretty simple, too: other than the 1000 points item that might fall down, at the end of each stage, you get a bonus based on how quick you were, as well as fifty points for each stage you've cleared and a hundred for each remaining life you have. Obviously, the items appearing at random can mean that your score isn't totally a reflection of your skill, and there's always something of a luck element. Unlike in other games where I've slated such an aproach, though, I think Elevation II is just about simple enough to get away with it.

It would be remiss to let this review end without mention of the game's presentation. Since the game is a one-man job from 1993, it's obviously very simple, but at the same time, there's a lot of nostalgic charm to it. I'd describe it as a kind of mix of the black backgrounds and simple sprites of classic arcade games and the cheap and cheerful brightly-colored working class charm of 1980s ITV Saturday night light entertainment.

Elevation II is an incredibly simple game, and even at the time of its release, it couldn't possibly have been considered meaty enough to be a commercial release on either home systems or in arcades, but it remains one of my favourite Amiga games. It just has a timeless quality, it's a ton of fun to play, and surprisingly addictive.

Musashi no Ken - Tadaima Shugyou Chuu (NES)

Based on an 80s anime of which I'd never heard prior to playing the game, Musashi no Ken has one of the most wholesome and innocent premises for a platform game I've ever seen. The protagonist has a big kendo tournament coming up, so he takes to the wilderness to go and train, by hitting inanimate objects with his shinai. Obviously, we can't expect too much deviation or innovation from an 80s licensed platformer, so there are still enemies to kill in the stages, though they're mostly either indistinct blobs, or random objects like maid dolls or walking bowls.

Your journey through the platform stage actually does act as a kind of training, as when you hit platforms, wooden posts, tires and other stuff strewn about the stages, little tiny shinai items pop out of them. These items come in three flavours: high, middle and low, and they're also floating around in the stages in the traditional platform game item fashion. These items don't actually do anything during the platform stages, but after three such stages, it's time for the big tournament!

But before I get onto that, I have more things to say about the platform stages. Firstly, there's an added complication in that as well as avoiding all the hazards, traps and enemies, you're also racing your dog to the end of the stage. This isn't really a big deal though, as he's so slow that he's usually only halfway through the stage by the time you reach the end. Secondly, the game uses a kind of rudimentary HP system: you start with fifty HP, and getting hit causes you to lose twenty-five of them, and should you happen across any riceballs along the way, they'll restore 10 each. At the end of the stage, you'll get 100 points for each HP you have left. What I find interesting about this system is that if you've been hit once, finding a riceball will allow you to survive one more hit before losing a life, but after that hit, you'll need to find two of them to get another hit. Obviously, this also means that the best scoring strategy is to avoid hits and find riceballs, so you have the maximum number of HP to turn into points at the end.

The platform stages are so absurdly difficult that, though I'm ashamed to admit it, I actually had to abuse save states to reach the tournament, because I really wanted to see it and screenshot it for my beloved readers. It was totally worth the effort, though, as it's good enough to have been a game on its own. What happenis is that you fight five sequential opponents in traditional first-to-two-points kendo matches. The items you collected during your training come into play here, as each 10 you have in each category allow you to use a powerful strike once. These strikes are almost guaranteed to win you a point when you use them, but you still need to be careful with tham, as the amount of items you have going into the tournament is what you're stuck with: they don't replenish between rounds, or when you lose a life (by losing a round).

Musashi no Ken is a pretty good game, with a lot of cool ideas. If they could flesh it out about, and come up wwith a replacement for the item-limited power strikes, the kendo tournament is good enough to be its own standalone game. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: kendo is a sport that should work well in videogame form, and it's totally bizarre that over almost forty years, there's less than ten kendo games in existence.