Wolfchild (Mega CD)

Wolfchild is that precious, rare kind of Mega CD game: it came from a western developer, but it isn't a terrible FMV game or boring edutainment title. Though to be fair, it is from Core Design, who had a reputation in UK magazines, at least, for making great Mega CD titles, after seemingly every publication in the UK lost their minds over their sprite scaling shooter Thunderhawk. It does one bit of FMV though: a charmingly ugly animated intro.

Oher than the intro though, Wolfchild is a pretty typical early 90s platformer, albeit one with something of a psuedo-gritty "dark superhero" setting, that you might see in some of the comics and tabletop RPGs of the time. You play as some guy who's used science to turn himself into a psuedo-werewolf, to go and defeat the evil Chimera group and rescue his scientist dad. Oddly, Wolfchild apparently takes its cues for werewolf abilities from Altered Beast of all places, as the main advantage of wolf form is that you shoot fireballs from your fists.

How transformation works is linked to your health bar: above a certain level, you're a wolfman, below that level, you're just a manman. There's some kind of subtle levelling up ystem in place whereby your maximum health increases as you make your way through the game. I'm not sure whether this is related to scoring points or collecting items, though, as the game does nothing to draw your attention to it happening (I didn't notice it until I'd already played the game a few times). Other than that, this is a pretty standard decent-quality platform game.

There's a few little problems the game has, like how even in wolf form, and after collecting some power-ups, you still don't feel particularly powerful, and the power-ups themselves have a problem that you see in a fair few western platformers of the time, whereby they all just look kind of like tiny indistinct polished orbs (everything else looks great, though. Especially thr backgrounds). There's also one stage of the game that has a few instances of what some call "Rick Dangerous nonsense", where hazards just suddenly pop out of the scenery without warning, meaning the first time you go through an area, you have no way of knowing they're there, and you just have to remember them next time. There's not enough of it to ruin the game, but it is still annoying.

Wolfchild isn't some great classic, but it's not bad, either. I receommend at least giving it a look, definitely.

Magical Tree (MSX)

The great thing about writing about obscure stuff is that sometimes, you find something great, and can then go on to show it off to everyone, so they can enjoy it, too. This is one of those times. Magical Tree is an MSX platform game about climbing a tree. I first tried it out, because I saw the boxart, and thought it might be a clone of Noboranka, the arcade shooting game about climbing a tree. I was wrong, but luckily, it turned out to be better than that anyway.

I'm sure I've mentioned before the concept of "pure" game design. Don't confuse purity with quality, it's just a stylistic assessment. What I mean by it is a concept that was more common in the eighties and early nineties than it is now: videogames in which each element, be it an enemy, an item, a part of the stage ,or something else, serves a specific in-game purpose and is easily identifiable from the other elements around it. Obviously, this kind of thing is much easier to do in simple, old-fashioned, arcade-style games like this one, but it's something you can also see in Minecraft, which is probably one of the most complex videogames of all time. I'm bringing it up here, because Magical Tree is a game that has this purity, and it does it well.

It is a very simple game: you go up the tree, avoiding enemies and collecting points items. At certain score thresholds, you get extra lives, so there's an incentive for playing for score, if that's not enough of a motivating factor for on its own. But like I describe above, you can easily learn how each enemy type acts, how certain objects interact with certain stage elements, and so on, to figure out every way possible of maximising your score, and of surviving to climb a little higher up the tree. Luckily, along with all of that, it is actually fun to play the game and do all this stuff.

One little stylistic thing that I think adds a lot to the game, and how addictive it is, is the constant on-screen tracker of how far up the tree you currently are. It's a constant reminder of your progress, and an easily-remembered benchmark to compare against earlier runs. It's probably copied from the "how high can you get?" screens, but they only appeared between stages, in twenty-five metre increments, while this counter is constant, and counts every metre you climb. It's just satisfying, you know?

Obviously, I recommend that you play Magical Tree. It's fun and cute and addictive. It seems that I keep finding more and more MSX games to love as time goes on, and while other Japanese microcomputers might have excellent graphics or music, it's the MSX's games that keep me coming back most often.

Dragon Egg! (PC Engine)

Dragon Egg! is one of that strange category of games from around the late eighties and early nineties that totally would have fit in among the arcade games of the time, but it was only ever a console game. Well, maybe 1991 was a little too late to be releasing a very eighties-feeling platformer, but only a little. But two or three years earlier, it would have fit into the arcade scene perfectly, anyway.

It borrows heavily from two popular arcade games of that era, after all: Wonderboy in Monsterland, and Altered Beast. From Wonderboy, it takes the item shops as well as the generally overall feel of things, and from Altered Beast it takes the concept of collecting orbs to gradually take on new forms. You play as a little girl who starts the game carrying a dragon egg around in her backpack, which she uses to bludgeon enemies (which seems very irresponsible). Upon death, enemies will drop either a coin or an orb. Obviously, the coins are for spending in the shops littered about the stages, on power ups and health potions.

The orbs, though, like in Altered Beast, gradually cause the dragon to hatch, and then grow. Growing the dragon doesn't just give extra range to your weapon, but it also affects your movement and the size of your sprite (and presumably, your hit box, though I'm not 100% on that one). By the time your dragon's at full size, you'll be doing massive jumps that cover a lot of height and distance. It makes it a little more difficult to accurately land on small moving platforms, but overall it's a net benefit as it allows you to reach places you smaller forms couldn't and sometimes even skip parts of stages. Oddly, you have to icrease the power of your attacks by buying power-ups from the shop, which seems odd. Also, if you lose a life, it's all the way back down to egg form, which can lead to some Gradius-style slippery slopes, especially if it happens while fighting a boss.

It's the difficulty in general that's the game's main flaw, in fact. It's not as simple as just being too hard, though: the first half of the game is incredibly easy, in fact, and you should breeze through it on your first attempt with very few issues. After there, though, the game takes a sudden and dramatic turn towards being difficult to the point that it feels unfair at times. There are enemies with attacks that come out without warning, or that are impossible to kill without also taking a hit. You could ignore them, but if you've just lost a life, you'll be desperately hoping to get some orbs. Maybe the real strategy is to learn how to get through the game using basic short range egg attack. But even if that were effective, it definitely wouldn't be any fun.

Dragon Egg! is a cute game, and it does start out fun. I won't say it's not a good game, I'll just warn anyone that fancies trying it that the latter half is brutal, and they shouldn't go into it expecting an easy time.

Curiosities Vol. 17 - Blaze

So, back in the ancient mists of time, there was a preview in issue #115 (June 1991) of CVG of an Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog that never came into being. The reasons why such a game might have been cancelled are obvious: as soon as it was released in the UK, the first Sonic game, and Sonic in general launched a kind of SEGA-mania that would last for almost half a decade, and the Amiga was, in mid-1991, the only major 16-bit competition to the Mega Drive in the UK that didn't have to be imported. Sonic appearing on the Amiga might have hampered sales of the Mega Drive, which was in the UK, almost monolithic in a way that the NES/Famicom was in the US and Japan in the 1980s.

Some might have said that the Amiga just couldn't do everything that the Mega Drive did, and a substandard port might also damage the brand. Blaze, a fanmade demo for an Amiga Sonic-alike could be used as evidence for and against this theory. On the surface, it does do a lot of the fancy tricks seen in Mega Drive Sonic: high-speed scrolling, loop-the-loops, water-surface reflections, and so on. However, it came out in 1993, not 1991. And, to the best of my knowledge, no commercially released Amiga platformers attempted any of this stuff, despite how poentially lucrative it might have been.

It does as decent a job as you might expect of emulating the feel of a genuine Sonic game, too. Not only does it have loops, but one particular highlight is a massive series of five linked loops in quick succession. There's also robot crabs and hornets, and gems to collect in lieu of rings. Blaze even curls into a ball to attck when he jumps! Interestingly, though, if you press down while running, he doesn't curl into a ball, but goes into a Splatterhouse-esque sliding kick.

The physics do occasionally feel a little off, particularly with regards to running up and jumping off of quarter pipes. This can be forgiven, though, by that fact that this was made in an age before widespread internet access, and long before there was the meticulous observation and analysis of Sonic phyisics that there is today. In fact, it's obviously impossible to be totally one hundred percent certain about this, but I think Blaze might be the first ever Sonic fangame!

So, that's Blaze. An interesting thing in many ways. It's a shame it never got fleshed out into a full game. It would obviously have been too late to have saved the Amiga from its inevitable doom, but it would at least have freed Amiga fans from decades of pretending Zool was as good as any platform game that originated on consoles.

Bay Route (Arcade)

Yes, that title does sound a lot like "Beirut", though the game is set in a generic post-apocalyptic sci-fi land, so I have no idea why they did that. But anyway, it's a game developed by Sunsoft and published by SEGA, that's a lot like Contra. As is so often the case with SEGA arcade games from this period, I have to wonder why it never got a Mega Drive release. The resemblance to Contra makes it even stranger, since that series was so popular back then, and it could have been a bit of a coup to say "our console has a game like contra, that's more colourful and better looking than anything on Nintendo's console!"

Like Contra, you play as some guy going from left to right, shooting lots of generic enemy soldiers, a fair few pieces of big enemy military hardware, and occasionally a big enemy weird monster here and there, too. The first boss is even a big barricade wall thing with guns on it, like in Contra. There's some differences, though: for example, you start with four weapons and can switch between them at any time, instead of waiting for the right powerup to come along. Also, the flamethrower is definitely the good kind of flamethrower, as opposed to Contra's rubbish fireball gun thing.

On its own merits, without comparisions to Contra, Bay Route is pretty good overall. It's nothing particularly special, just a well-designed run-and-gun game, with easily-learnable enemy behaviours, some cool set-pieces, and a nice smooth difficulty curve. It looks and sounds pretty good, though nothing mindblowing for an arcade game of its era. Obviously, it's not even slightly original, but I don't want to be too harsh on it for that, especially since it's of a pretty similar quality to the series it's ripping off, rather than being significantly worse. Unfortunately, that averageness makes it kind of hard to write about.

I guess I can recommend playing Bay Route? You won't be missing out on a great deal if you don't, but you'll have a decent enough time if you do. It's hard not to be on the fence about this game; there's a lot of reasons why a game might fade into obscurity, and this one clearly did just because it's so completely unremarkable.

Totsugeki! Mix (PC98)

The problem with looking into games that are on systems that never got released in English-speaking territories is that you're usually limited to action games and nothing else. Amd when those systems are computers that were aimed at businessmen, like the PC98, it's even worse, since there's a higher proportion than usual of games in very text-heavy genres. Luckily, Totsugeki Mix happens to be a pretty straight-up platfor game, of the kind kids across the world were playing, no matter what systems they had access to. Less luckily, though, is that there's almost nothing interesting about it at all. (Except the nice pixel art, but that's the minimum you'd expect from a PC98 game, really).

You jump over things, attack enemies, collect stuff, and so on, just like you've don't a million times before. The only ways in which the game stands out are either bad, or just slightly odd. A bad thing, for example, is how there are three playable characters, only one of whom is viable. Because only one of them can double jump, a skill whose absence makes some stages uncompletable. An odd thing is how every platform you can stand on is completely solid. Like, you can't walk in front of it, or jump through it from below or anything like that. I'm not sure if this one is a deliberate design choice, or just a problem deemed too minor to be worth fixing by the devs, but it does make some areas really awkward to get through.

Like I've already mentioned, the one good thing that can be said in this game's defense is that it's got really nice backgrounds: detailed, high resolution, and very colourful. I guess you could also make the case that it is merely a boring, mediocre game, and not one that's actively unpleasant to play. But I can't recommend it on the strength of that alone, and I won't. There's plenty of much better platformers with great pixel art in the world, like the Amiga's Lionheart, or the X68000's Castlevania, for example. Play those instead of Totsugeki Mix.

Hangzo (Arcade)

Hangzo is yet another unreleased arcade game that only came to light thanks to MAME, though this time it's not by Taito. It might be by Hot-B or Data East, though no-one seems to be 100% sure. One thing that is for sure is that though Hangzo was inteded to be an arcade game, spiritually, it's a Mega Drive game to the core. Can you really say that game is spiritually something for sure? Yes, I just did.

The game's about three ninjas, who clearly went to the Joe Musashi school of ninjitsu, as they don't spend any time sneaking around assassinating people. Instead they go through cyberpunk cities noisily destroying loads of exploding robots, and also through biopunk laboratories destroying loads of exploding blobby monsters. They even have a limited-use screen-clearing magic bomb jutsu! It really is like a lost Shinobi game, specifically a lost entry into the Mega Drive's Super/Revenge of Shinobi series.

There are a couple of original elements, though, like the inclusion of seperate buttons for melee and projectile attacks, bearing in mind that Hangzo does predate Shinobi III/Super Shinobi 2, and even in that game, the six-button mode was hidden behind a cheat code. There's also a magic fire breathing lion that turns up in most of the stages for you to ride around on. But generally in terms of both theming and mechanics, this is essentially a professionally-made Shinobi fangame.

It's fairly easy too, and shouldn't take more than a few attempts to one-credit-clear. Though a big part of this is thanks to one stage, about midway through the game, inexplicably having a section where a whole bunch of extra lives and health powerups coming floating in from the side of the screen. But it's not too easy, though, not easy enough to be boring, at least.

I feel like the last few posts on this blog have been really negative, and though I want to turn that around with this post, I can't be 100% positive about Hangzo. Probably as a conseqeunce of being an unfinished, unreleased game, it is a little rough around the edges: the presentation is not exactly super-polished, and the hitboxes feel a little strange at times, for example. However, it's still a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend going and giving it a try. It's a shame it never actually got released, and I hope someday, whoever owns the rights to it gives it a little extra sheen and releases it officially somehow.

Satan (Amiga)

Black Tiger is something of an unsung hero in Capcom's late 80s arcade oeuvre. Though it's a great game, it never achieved the level of fame enjoyed by the likes of Ghosts and Goblins or 1942. In fact, though it got ported to various microcomputers in Europe, the first official console port didn't come until 2010, 23 years after its debut! Despite being mostly forgotten, though, it does have its advocates. For example, the first time I encountered it was a fan-made port on the Korean handheld the GP32 in the early-mid 00s, and it had a rethemed spiritual sequel in the form of Sonson 2 on the PC Engine in 1989. Why is all of this relevant? Because the first half of Satan is clearly very influenced by Black Tiger, further cementing its place as a minor cult hit, despite having fallen from the collective conciousness.

Satan's plot is about a warrior who wants to kill the eponymous demon, but realises he needs to become a wizard to do so. To become a wizard, he journeys through some kind of subterranean world killing monsters and collecting money and power ups, until he faces off against what looks like a white dragon from Castlevania. Then his wizardly diploma falls from the 'bove, he grows a beard, and sets out on the second part of the quest. This bit is okay, like a poor man's Black Tiger, pretty much. But Black Tiger is really good, so that's not too harsh a criticism.

The game's second half has you playing as the newly-qualified wizard, using money to buy spells with which you fight Satan himself, who, upon defeat, splits into two and then four flying demons. There's also something about rescuing captured wizards before Satan can kill them, but this is where the game reveals itself to be broken: those wizards are all on platforms that are too high to reach. It seems like there's a whole exploratory part of this half of the game that's just totally inaccessible because your jump isn't high enough. You can still fight and kill Satan in his various forms, though if you go back to the shop once he starts flying, there's a good chance that when you come back outside, he'll be offscreen somewhere, killing wizards with impunity.

It really is a shame, as like I've mentioned on this blog before, it often feels as if the Amiga is a system that coasts by on nostalgia, and doesn't really have many actual good games, and Satan is so close to being a good game. It just lets itself down with one stupid mistake in the latter half. Tragic!

Simple DS Series Vol. 31: The Chou Dangan!! Custom Sensha

As you look at the screenshots of this game, with the knowledge that it's a platform shooter about driving tanks, it would be easy to just write it off as a cheap Metal Slug knock off. It is a cheap Metal Slug knock off, but importantly, that's not all it is: it does have enough of its own qualities to justify its own existence. It's another nice little sample from the Simple DS Series, after all.

Being a Simple Series game, it does adhere to their usual design philosophy: upgradable characters, selecting the next stage you want to pay from a menu, lots of difficulty levels, and so on. It does take a few detours from the usual route, though: grinding for experience points only increases the max HP of your tank, as weapon and mobility upgrades are hidden throughout the stages as items. Furthermore, while most Simple Series games will pad themselves out with grinding and recycled stages and enemies, The Chou Dangan Custom Sensha is short and sweet, being only about an hour long from start to finish, with the aforementioned grinding never really being necessary. Completing story mode unlocks a score attack mode, which is mostly the same, to the point where I can't actually figue out what the difference is meant to be.

What's most interesting about this game, though, is that depite the fact that (as far as I know) tanks can't jump in real life, this is a platform game about driving a tank where the limitations and abilities of a tank are taken into account. For example, you have two guns: one that can be swivelled around in almost a full circle, and you main turret, that can't be aimed, raised, or lowered. So you  really have to take into account your height relative to the enemies when you're shooting them. Another thing relates to the tank treads: if you jump up to a higher platform, and only just about get onto the edge of it, you can keep pushing forward to kind of climb onto it using the movement of the tank treads. It's only a little thing, but it's very satisfying.

If you can find a copy for cheap, then The Chou Dangan Custom Sensha is definitely worth picking up. The only real downside it has is that it's very short, very easy, and not really exciting or interesting enough to play through more than once. But that one playthrough you have will be a fun time, at least.

Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Daimakyou (NES)

I'm sure most of the people reading a blog like this will be cultured enough to have some familiarity with Gegege no Kitaro, but for the few that don't it's an incredibly popular and influential folk horror comic for kids from the mid-20th century that essentially re-introduced the concept of youkai back into Japanese popular culture. Of course, such a cultural megalith has had a ton of adaptations into other media, including lots of videogames, of which this is one.

It's a platform game, but unlike a lot of 1980s licensed platformers, it's actually got some cool and original ideas! You start out on a map screen, pretty reminiscent of the ones in Namco's Dragon Buster II, and it's litterd with various spooky-looking buildings that obviously contain the stages you'll be traversing. What interesting is the form those stages take. They're only about two or three screens across and the loop infinitely, but each one has one of three possible goals to complete.

Some stages want you to kill a quota of enemies, which is fairly standard, others want you to collect a quota of the ghosts floating around the stage, and the third kind are both the most conceptually interesting and the fiddliest to play. They have you accompanied by a little flamey ghost friend that follows you around like Tails in Sonic 2, and the goal is to move around the stage in such a way that the ghost touches (and lights) the wicks of all the candles strewn about the place. This mostly comes down to standing next to a candle and either crouching or jumping to get the spirit to float to the right height, but still, I appreciate the effort put into making something a little bit different. With some refinement of the basic formula and some skillful stage design, this could have been fleshed out into its own game, maybe.

Whatever the stage type you're in, after you've performed your task, two doors appear. Going in the one on the left takes you to a boss battle, the one on the right just takes you straight back to the map with the stage cleared. I don't know if there's any long-term consequences for skipping the bosses, other than missing out on the big points payday you get for defeating them. The bosses inhabit their own mini-stages, which are tall rather than wide, with you starting at the bottom and climbing up to the boss at the top. Though they're pretty formulaic, I have to say that the bosses are very charming. They all appear in the form of massive looming faces made up of a mixture of sprites and background tiles and there's just something about them that I love.

Gegege no Kitaro isn't a game that will change your life, but it is one that's got a lot of charm and it's decent enough fun to play, too. It's also a game that really strongly looks and feels like a Famicom game. Like, if you imagine in your head a game that kids might be playing at home in 1980s Japan, it'd probably look something like this one. It did get a US release, renamed to "Ninja Kid", despite the complete lack of ninjas. I reviewed the JP version, though, just because this is yet another game I "discovered" through my habit of buying dirt-cheap Famicom cartridges with cool-looking label art.

Steamgear Mash (Saturn)

I didn't know anything about this game going into it, other than it being developed by Tamsoft, who are always welcome on this blog, and published by Takara, who are mainly known (to me, at least) for their surprisingly good ports of SNK games to the Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and Game Gear. Despite the involvement of those two companies, it's neither a fighting game nor does it feature almost-naked ladies fighting monsters. Instead, it's a cute isometric action game, with some interesting ideas.

You play as a round little heavily-armed robot, followed around by a tiny, constantly-meowing cat, and you walk around various isometric stages shooting enemies and looking for each area's boss. There's a little dash of the Metrovania in there, too as the the path to the next stage is always blocked by a coloured block that can only be destroyed by the weapon acquired by beaten the stage's boss. There's  sometimes other blocks that get in the way of even reaching the boss, though the weapons to destroy them can be found hidden about the stage somewhere. It's all fairly standard semi=linear action game stuff so far, right?

The most interesting thing this game has though, in my opinion, is the controls. Because the Saturn controller doesn't have two sets of directional controls, some other solution had to have been made with regards to being ables to move and shoot in different directions simultaneously. They could have used the A, B, X and Y buttons as a second d-pad, I guess, though that wouldn't have left many buttons for things like jumping and changing weapons, or alternatively they could have used the shoulder buttons to swivel the top half of your robot like a tank's turret. But they did neither of these, going for a much more unorthodox solution. There's various different aiming options that can be cycled through with the left shoulder button, and they're utilised with the right shoulder button, though some of them have to be found as upgrade items as you play the game.

These options are things like Lock, which keeps you firing in the same direction when you change your walking direction, Back, which shoots in the opposite direction of your movement, Stop, which keeps you in one place and lets you shoot all around, or Roll, which lets you walk around in straight lines, while the top half of your body spins around, shooting in a circle. It's an odd solution, and some would say and over-complicated one, but the important thing is that it's an interesting one.

Other than that, Steamgear Mash is a pretty good game. It's not going to blow any minds or anything, but it's still pretty fun, and it's also really cute. They didn't have to put in a tiny meowing cat following you around, it doesn't serve any actuual in-game purpose, but there it is. That kind of superfluous detail really speaks in this game's favour, I think. If you get the opportunity to play Steamgear Mash, you should probably give it a try.

Tenma de Jack - Odoroki Mamenoki Daitoubou!! (Playstation)

The early days of 3D platforming were a little odd, as developers came up with their own ideas as to how what was probably the most popular genre on home systems at the time would work in 3D. Games like Pandemonium and Klonoa just played like 2D platformers, but with amazing-looking polygon graphics. Crash Bandicoot turned things sideways and had players going in a fairly linear path into the screen, instead of across it. Mario 64, Croc, and Spyro, between them, took what would become the most popular approach: huge 3d worlds to run and jump around in. But there was another approach that's been mostly forgotten by history: Bug on the saturn had players navigating netowrks of thin paths suspended in space, and had almost no imitators. In fact, this game: Tenma de Jack - Odoroki Mamenoki Daitoubou is the only one that I know of, coming out on Playstation in the year 2000.

Tenma de Jack's paths aren't floating in total isolation though: despite the protagonist being a weird blue goblin with a detachable head, he's actually the folkloric Jack, and the whole game is about climbing his famous and popular beanstalk, which runs up through the centre of each stage, and in most cases, can be jumped onto and climbed up, too. There's a few things stopping you from just jumping on and climbing to the top (and end) of the stage. First, there's an extra objective: each stage has a native flower, of which there are three specimens to find (though you only need to get one of them to be allowed to go to the next stage). Second, there's areas on the beanstalk that you can't grab ahold of, meaning that getting to the top requires strategic use of both platforms and stalk to get to the top. There's also a meter on screen showing Jack's remaining arm strength, which depletes as you're clung to the stalk, and Jack's movement speed goes down with it.

There's also, on each stage, a special enemy to go along with the usual birds and worms and such. This enemy is a human (or at least vaguely human-like), who will chase you around, trying to steal your head, for some reason. They're incredibly annoying, and you can only knock them out for a few seconds at a time. In fact, when you first start playing, the whole game is pretty annoying: every where you go, you'll find a new irritating trap or enemy or mechanic stopping your progress. But as you learn to recognise these things, and also to figure out the game's logic so you can more easily figure out new obstacles as they appear, it becomes a much more enjoyable game! Stages that were painful slogs, you begin to soar through at high speed, and it all becomes quite rewarding. Thugh it's not in the same league of quality as Speed Power Gunbike, I do think it belongs to that same school of games that get better in proportion to your ability to learn their systems and play them.

Tenma de Jack isn't a great game, but platform fans might want to track it down to try something a little out of the norm for the genre. You will need a bit of patience to get you through the initial frustration, though.