Fluid (Playstation)

I don't know how well-known they are outside the UK, but there were a couple of music sequencing programs on the original Playstation entitled Music and Music 2000. They weren't the first on the system, though: that title (as far as I can tell) goes to this weird dolphin-themed thing. I've seen other sites write about this game, tying it into that whole cringewrothy "Playstations in nightclubs" thing Sony were doing in the mid-90s, that laid the ground for the awful trying-to-be-cool writing seen in games magaines of the era, parodied by Digitiser's "Cyber X" character. But Fluid came out a couple of years after that whole thing had mostly wound down, and I'd place it more alongside the Japanese experimental art-game movement of the time, along with the likes of Kaze no Notam.

Anyway, what is Fluid? It's an attmept to tie a simple, accessible music sequencer to a videogame. I don't know much (or anything) about making music, but I'd say the sequencer part is probably too simple, since it limits the player to creating a very short (about 4 seconds) loop of irritating beeps and buzzes.

The videogame part sees you guiding a dolphin around the sea, until you touch one of the slowly-rotating rock sculptures, each of which sends you into a different streaming FMV world wherein you can tap or hold the triangle, X and circle buttons to have the dolphin emit weird noises. While you're doing this, you can also move the dolphin round with the dpad, simultaneously changing the way the noises sound so you're playing the dolphin like a weird underwater theremin. Once you've spent enough time in a world, you can move on to the next one, and at any time, presing start takes you back to the ocean, where you can also find a spinning DNA thing that takes you to the sequencer, where you can mess with the BGM that plays in the FMV worlds.

I should really talk about Fluid's most appealing aspect: its aesthetic. It's like a perfect slice of vaporwave aesthetic cliche: you play as a low-poly dolphin, swimming through an ocean of abstract stone sculptures, which transport you to shiny, dreamlike worlds full of crystals and marble pillars and the like. If you decide to make all the music as slow as possible, that adds to the effect even more, of course If that sounds like enough to make Fluid worth your while, then go for it , I guess. I didn't really get much enjoyment out of it, and I can't see myself ever loading it up again after posting this review.

Retro Force (Playstation)

"Cultural appropriation" might be a bit strong for what Retro Force is, but it can't be denied that there is something at least a little annoying about the circumstances under which it was released. In the late 90s, unless you were able to import, you pretty much didn't get to play any home ports of arcade shooting games, and if you did, they were often insulting, mangled messes like the infamous Mobile Light Force, stripped of its character to make it "less Japanese", for some reason. It's in this climate that Retro Force, a vertically scrolleing shooter with a Wipeout/Jet Force Gemini-esque faux-Japanese aesthetic was released.

All this aside, is it actually a good game, though? No. The first and biggest problem you'll encounter is the controls: your ship doesn't stop moving until about a second after you stop pressing the d-pad. This alone is pretty unforgivable in a game and a genre that demands precision at all times. I guess that's why you have a pretty long health bar for each of your lives, and almost nofeedback on getting hit, making you into a kind of bullet-sponging ice hockey puck.

Another problem is that your weapons all feel incredibly weak, and power-ups are unbelievably rare: you don't see one until midway through the second stage. Speaking of stages, there's some odd choices in the game's visual design, like how the first stage is set in a pretty cool-looking futuristic city, while the next three stages are spent flying above boring, white ice fields.

I could keep going on and on about all the flaws this game has, and how it's just no fun to play at all, but that kind of negativity isn't very interesting, despite what thousands of squealing youtube critics would have you believe. I'll just say that it's a bad game, and there are many other, better shooters on the Playstation alone.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Vol. 9!

Unread (Sin, 1996)
A weird shooting game with some unusual ideas. Your ship is accompanied onscreen by a smal purple drone. Pressing square at any time instantly switches the positions of ship and drone,the skillful use of which is the only way to avoid certain hazards and enemy attacks. Unfortunately, Unread doesn't make enough use of its gimmick, and is mainly a pretty bland shooter without even a scoring system to liven things up.

Supanda (Koh/Ray-Net, 2001)
A very odd single plane beat em up in which you play as a kangaroo travelling across some kind of pastel-hued theme park beating up clowns, penguins and various assorted inanimate objects. It's a pretty amusing diversion, though it's a shame there's only one stage, that just suddenly and abruptly ends.
A little extra note: the "Net Yaroze 2012" compilation claims that Supanda is a port of a SNES game, though I haven't been able to find any evidence of such a game existing. Does anyone reading this know anything about this one way or the other?

The Appointed Station (Syuntarou Yoshikawa, 1996)
Another shooting game, this time a variant on the old time limit/score attack Caravan formula. The twist is that rather than starting the game with a fixed time limit, you instead get a series of very short time limits, each with a minimum score threshold that has to be met if you want to continue playing when the timer reaches zero. Special note should be made of this game's grainy-textured low polygon count aesthetic, which looks great in motion, if not in static screenshots.

Roller (Matt Verran, 2002)
This game's very well presented, with clean and sharp textures and models, professional-looking menus and HUD, and the voice of a woman with a thick southern accent saying "Ready? ...Go!" at the start of each stage. Unfortunately, despite all that, it's not very fun to play. You tilt floating 3D platforms so that a ball rolls around collecting gems and getting to the exit, without dropping the ball or running out of time.

Curiosities Vol. 8 - Secret Shooting Games

Something I've always liked since I was a kid was secrets in games, and especially secrets that added extra fun to games, like stages or characters. Like most early-90s kids, I was obsessed with Sonic, and got really excited when I heard there was a secret stage hidden in the cartridge, the Hidden Palace Zone. Of course, all that excitement turned to disappointment when I used my cousin's Action REplay to access the HPZ and it was just unplayable garbage with a title card. Even more exciting than hidden bits of games, though, are entire hidden games, which is what this post is about.

Before I really start, I want to clarify the difference between "secret" and "unlockable": unlockable games will be easily accessible from an in-game menu, and the game might even acknowledge the games before they're available. Secret games require cheats or passwords to get to, and the game doesn't let you know they're there if you don't know about them already. There'll probably be posts about some unlockable games on this blog in the future, but today I'm talking about three secret games, that also happen to all be shooting games hidden away in the bowels of non-shooting games. 

First up is Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf for the Mega Drive. It's a golf game, that would be totally forgotten by history, were it not for its secret. And that secret is a simple little game based on SEGA's beloved Fantasy Zone games. It's a single-screen shooter in which you have one life and a constantly increasing score, and all you have to do is stay alive for as long as possible. It's very simple and you're unlikely to last very long, but it is fun. The only problem is that it's a pain to get to: you have to get a game over in the main game, then input the famous Konami code on the game over screen. Getting a game over requires using one hundred shots on a single hole, which will take you about ten minutes. Best to do this in an emulator, and make a save state on the game over screen.

Next is another, much better Mega Drive game: Mega-lo Mania (known as "Tyrants: Fight Through Time" in America), which is a surprisingly deep real-time strategy game about giant immortal floating heads using humans to wage war against each other. Inputting the password "JOOLS" into the game's save/load option also unlocks a weird, vaguely asteroidsy shooting game where you fly around space and impotently shoot at seemingly-intangible enemies, until one of the main game's floating heads says "do you want to be on my side", then flies in and smashes you to death. Yeah, it's not very good. But luckily, Mega-lo Mania is really good, so once you've got over the novelty of having a secret game in there, you can just play that instead.

I've saved the most impressive secret shooter till last, and it's hidden in the early Playstation 3D fighting game Zero Divide. Though it's a game that's been forgotten by history, Zero Divide's got a lot of charm, and that mainly comes from the fact that the developers were obviously very excited about the inherent possibilities of all the storage space on a CD (compared to cartridges and floppy disks) and even the memory card. There's tons of unlockable stuff, some of which comes only after the game's been played for 200 hours, and there's a lot of weird experimental stuff too, like an annoying DJ who comments on how well or badly you play.

But anyway, among its many other features, Zero Divide also includes Tiny Phalanx, a cut-down port of the X68000/SNES shooter Phalanx, a game that's infamous in the west for the bizarre boxart the SNES version got in North America. It's unlocked by holding start and select on the second controller as the game loads up, and it's really good. It looks and sounds great, it's got proper power-up and scoring systems and it's just really impressive for a secret freebie. Since Zero Divide came out in 1995, there were probably full games being released at the same time that were lower quality.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Vol.8!

Earth Saves Our Love (Taro Kamon, 1998)
A fairly minimalist shooting game that has you controlling a swivelling cannon at the bottom of the screen. Satellites fall from above, and if three hit the bottom of the screen, it's game over. The challenge mainly comes from the fact that your cannon is very slow-firing, so you have to time your shots well to hit the falling  satellites. Furthermore, holding the fire button charges your shots, and if hit with enough force, satellites can smash into each other, saving you a bit of work.

Jagot (Unknown Creator, 1998)
Jagot has two modes: classic and fishy. Classic mode is a fairly generic, no-frills Tetris clone, albeit one with an absurdly wide playing field and awkward controls (everything is done with the d-pad, with up rotating pieces, and down instantly setting them into place at the bottom of the pit). Fishy mode is more original, though unfortunately, significantly less fun to play.
It's the same "wide Tetris" as classic mode, except that you no longer have direct control over the falling pieces. Instead, you move a fish around, and try to nudge the pieces into place. It's novel, but not fun. Also, there's a glitch whereby the pieces sometimes sink through the bottom of the pit and reappear at the top, causing an instant game over when the next piece spawns.

Magical Millie (KBO, 1997)
A cute little single-screen platformer in which you play as the eponymous Millie, a witch dressed in red. It's pretty basic stuff, really: collect the key and get to the door while killing enemies and avoiding their attacks. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it is fun to play. I assume the game's unfinished, as there's no music or sound effects, and the presentation is somewhat rough around the edges, but Magical Millie is still a game that's worth a bit of your time.

 

NanaTan (KRD/Yousuke Kuroda, 1997)This is a cute tank-based shooting game with really nice shaded polygon graphics. It's also very simple to play: just drive up the screen shooting enemies and avoiding their fire. Unfortunately, all of NanaTan's positive qualities are outweighed by the fact that it's brutally difficult, and on top of that, only gives you one life. A real shame.

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.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting (Playstation)

I said it in my review of another Simple Series game with a very to-the-point title, Vol. 24: The Gun Shooting, but this game isn't as generic as you'd expect. Not only does it have a plot told in (thankfully skippable) FMV cutscenes between stages, but there's also little bits of voice-acted dialogue between your pilot and their comrades as you play through the stages themselves. As well as there being more plot and more effort put into the presentation than you'd expect, it's also a pretty full-featured (if not particularly original) horizontal shooter that gives the player lots of attack options.

But before I get onto how it plays, i'll talk a little bit more about how it looks. Now, the difficulty spikes massively in the third stage, and as a result, I haven't been able to get past that stage's boss. But, those three stages display either a love of the game's contemporaries, or a lack of shame in ripping them off, depending on how cynical you are. For example, the first stage takes place in a futuristic cityscape reminiscent of Einhander, the second over and under an idyllic ocean that calls to mind G-Darius, and the third a desert with a brief foray into an underground technological tunnel that vaguely reminded me of Thunderforce V, but only a little. All of this in that "low-poly models with low-resolution textures" aesthetic with which I'm sure all my discerning readers are enamoured.

Though the game doesn't have any power-ups, the player does start with an array of different weapons that really really remind me of Thunderforce V (as an aside, The Shooting was apparently developed by two companies called CyberDreams and C.I.I, and I haven't been able to find anything else they worked on. I guess there's a chance that those are psuedonyms for ex-Tecnosoft employees, but this is pure conjecture on my part). You have a machine gun, fired from the front of your ship, and from two options. By moving left or right while not shooting, the two options can be moved around the ship, allowing the player to shoot i wide angles, as well as above, below and behind. You've also got a lock-on weapon, which can shoot up to sixteen guided missiles in a nice Itano Circus-esque fashion. Unfortunately, it takes so long to fire that you'll usually have killed all the enemies with your machine gun by the time the missiles reach them (it's useful in boss fights, though). Finally, you have a forward-firing giant, powerful laser that's limited by a power meter at the top of the screen. The power meter recharges in a matter of seconds, but the catch is that it's shared with another, non-offensive feature of your ship: a quick dodging move that can pass harmlessly through enemy bullets.

What ties all these weapons and features together is a control system that's simple and elegant. Square fires your machine gun, holding X locks on your missiles and releasing fires them, and the dodge and laser are assigned to the two right shoulder buttons. It's obviously designed around the idea that the player will spend much of the game holding down the square button, but will also need regular, comfortable and instant access to the others (which wouldn't have been the case had all four functions been assigned to the Playstation controller's four face buttons). It's a little thing, but it's done so well that I feel it's worth mentioning.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting is a pretty good game. It's nothing particularly spectacular or original, and the sudden upturn in difficulty presented by stage 3 is a pain, but it's much better than a budget title with a generic title really needs or deserves to be. Apparently, it also got a western release as "Shooter: Space Shot", which somehow feels like an even worse title. I don't know how intact the US version is, though, as we all know that western budget publishers loved to meddle in games, especially shooting games.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Vol. 7!

Grave Pobbery (Masahiro, 1997)
This game is very unpolished, but mechanically it seems to be mostly finished. It's a pretty simple game in which your little polygon man enters stages that each contain a few stone blocks. Using your pickaxe, you smash every block in the stage, and fight off the ghosts and snakes hiding within, either by repeatedly hitting them with your pickaxe, or by using items, also found inside the blocks. There's crosses to get rid of ghosts, and bombs to kill the snakes (and handily, destroy any blocks caught in their blast, too).  It's a mildly amusing game, and its simple nature and tiny amount of assets used make it feel like the kind of thing someone might make for a quick game jam today.

Alien Looter (Ben James, 1998)
Alien Looter is a pretty simple concept: take Space Invaders, add power-ups and remove the dan kire so that the player can shoot as quickly as they can press the fire button. The result is a game where stages last only a few loud and cacophonus seconds, and you can blast through fifty or more stages in only a couple of minutes.  It's nothing especially fancy, but it is a lot of fun while it lasts.

Oyaji (T. Munemasa, 1998)
This is a weird one: you play as an old, balding man wearing only a pair of underpants, and you're trapped in a brick maze with some hovering satellite dish robot things. As far as I can tell, your task is to smash all the robots, but awful collision detection coupled with your long, slow attack animation make this very difficult. Oyaji is graphically impressive with its texture maps and such, but not very fun to play at all.

Diver (Nahoisa Kamei, 1997)
Diver looks and feels like a game from a 1980s 8-bit computer, specifically the kind popular with Japanese hobbyists, like the PC88 and such. It's a very simple game: you play as a diver, diving into the sea to get piles of gold, though you can only stay under for a few seconds at a time. Every time you get a pile of gold, another one appears, as well as a few more rocks to get in the way. The main problem with Diver is that there's not really any challenge, unless you play chicken and try to get multiple piles in a single dive, but there's no real reason to do this, since they'll only be worth one point each whatever you do. Adding a score multiplier or something to incentivise this kind of risky play would be a massive improvement.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Vol. 6!

The Comedian Adventure (Taro Kamon, 1998)
A minimalist one-button platform game that seems to have "borrowed" its heroes from the scatological PC Engine game Kato-chan and Ken-chan (AKA JJ & Jeff). Pressing any button makes your guy jump forwards at an angle, releasing the button or hitting the top of the screen makes him fall forwards at a slightly steeper angle. You have sixty seconds to get as far as you can without falling into any holes. If you fall into a hole, you get a speech bubble with some sage advice like "Finish your homework!" or "Brush your teeth!". It's mildly amusing for a few minutes, until you manage to survive the full minute.

Anda (Makoto Okuzumi, 1997)
A very old-fashioned shooting game that's obviously very inspired by the likes of Xevious and Star Soldier. There's no sound, and it's generally not very exciting at all. The worst part, though, is that the enemy bullets are incredibly tiny and often blend into the background. It seems competently made, but not very well-designed.

Minic The Hedgehog (Kiyoshi Sakai, 1997)
This is apparently a port of an X68000 doujin game, though I haven't been able to find that version. It's more of a tech demo than an actual game, too, being as it is an attempt at making a semi-clone of the first Sonic The Hedgehog game. It's mostly impressive, too, as there's a decent attempt at replicating Sonic physics, though it just falls a tiny bit short . That tiny bit makes a lot of difference, though, and the result is that it's almost impossible to build up the momentum needed to run up even the shallowest of inclines. Another problem is that the screen is flanked on all sides by massive black borders (which I've cropped ouit of the screenshots for this post, to make things look a bit nicer).

Dance Of Death (Shigeaki Matsumoto, 1998)
This polygonal top-dpwn beat em up does performs a trick that many of the best games of the 32-bit era do: uses its low-poly models, short draw distance and small memory space for textures to create an atmosphere. You play as a lone samurai, beseiged on all sides by your enemies, who has to fight his way out. There's a timer and a number counting down the amount of remaining enemies, but the game's hard enough that I've not yet managed to survive long enough for either one to make it to zero. Like I said, it's an atmospheric game, and tense too, as you and your enemies can be taken out in only a couple of sword strokes, and there are far more of them than there are of you. Definitely worth a look.

My Flower (Makoto Okuzumi, 1997)
A brightly-dressed young girl on a series of floating islands inhabited by angry crabs and friendly chickens must make flowers grow, flags fly and eggs hatch by dancing around them. The colours and simple graphics remind me of early Namco games, like Toypop and Pac-Land. The main problem this game has is that it's not immediately obvious what the player is supposed to do or avoid. Though I managed to get a couple of stages in, I did so without ever figuring out the exact win conditions for each stage. Avoid this one, I say. (I feel like I'm being a little hard on ol' Makoto's games in this post. If you search your own name and find it, I'm really sorry!)

Hard Brain (Playstation)

This was just going to be part of another Net Yaroze round up (and I do still intend to do one of those in the near future), but I totally fell in love with this game and thought it deserved more than a single paragraph. It's a cyberpunk-themed turn-based strategy game, and though it's entirely in Japanese, it seems to be about a small gang of three guys either raiding some high-tech offices or escaping from some high-tech offices that are under siege.

Mechaically, it's pretty simple: to win, you pretty much just have to try and avoid letting any of your guys get surrounded by the enemy, and keep an eye on their HP so that you know when to heal (every one of your characters has one spell, which is for healing, and plenty of MP to use it whenever it's needed). It's also only a few stages long, which is a shame, as it has enough charm in its aesthetics alone, and it'd be nice to see more of the great sprites and character portraits.

It feels, however, that the creator had to cut a lot back in creating the game, since as I'm sure you're all aware, Net Yaroze games had to fit entirely into the Playstation's tiny RAM. There's a bunch of options that are never used, as well as spells for each character that are, as far as I can tell, permanently greyed-out and unusable. I managed to find the creator's website on the internet archive, in the hopes that they might have made a lengthier, more fleshed out version for PC or something, but all I found was the download for this version.

Hard Brain is a game that's definitely worth playing, especially since it'll only take up about 15 minutes of your time for a full playthrough (of which i've had a few at this point). People hold up Team Fatal's Terra Incognita as the Yaroze game that's closest to "commercial quality", but look at the screenshots for Hard Brain and you can't deny that at least in terms of presentation it could stand alongside the likes of Breath of Fire III or Persona and no-one could tell it was the work of a solitary hobbyist.