Robbit Mon Dieu (Playstation)

 Everyone loves the Jumping Flash games, right? The early Playstation releases that brought a splash of colour to the normally dour world of the first person shooter, their only big downside being the draw distance that had barely improved from their genetic forbear Geograph Seal, and restricted the player's field of vision to barely a few metres in front of their noses. Luckily, there was another sequel, released only in Japan in 1999 that corrects that problem! Unluckily, it's also a very, very boring game to play.

 

As I just mentioned, the Jumping Flash games stood out amongst other first person shooters by being bright, colourful games, set in fanciful wonderlands. They also stood out by not only have a jump button, but by letting players use it to triple jump to incredible heights. Robbit Mon Dieu, unfortunately does away with almost all of the shooting of the previous games, and in fact pretty much all of the action and even the challenge of those games along with it. A first person game focussed on platforming is still a fairly novel concept, especially in 1999, but not like this.

 

I feel like the problem might lie in a shift in the demographics the publishers were targeting: as a game aimed at the under-fives, Robbit Mon Dieu would actually be one of the all-time greats. It sees you fulfilling simple tasks like delivering a package to someone who lives up on a floating island, tackling obstacle courses, diving off a high platform and falling through hoops, and so on. There's a few stages that technically have you shooting things, but since those things don't shoot back or offer any other kind of resistance, it's hard to really consider them shooting stages.

 

 Though it's odd that they'd aim a game at such a young audience and use characters from a pre-existing game that was a few years old itself at that point. Furthermore, there is a lot of text in this game, including menus, mission briefings (though obviously, most of the missions are simple enough that you can easily work them out without being able to read them), and story text. So I'm going to assume that the game was aimed at pre-existing Jumping Flash fans.

 

And with that in mind, it's a total failure. Unless the aesthetics were literally the only thing that drew you to the Jumping Flash games, and you don't care about how they play, Robbit Mon Dieu is not worth bothering with. It does look amazing, but that's pretty much all it does. Not recommended.

Monster Bass (Playstation)

Do you remember those Hot Wheels sets that were clearly designed as a lame attempt to get nerdier kids to buy toy cars? Like, they'd have aliens or dinosaurs or post-apocalyptic landscapes besides the track? Well, Monster Bass (also known as Killer Bass) is a fishing game that puts in a lame attempt at appealing to the under-75s by having genetically-engineered zombie fish and bait that includes lives spiders and mice and so on.

Unfortunately, though, the fish just look like regular fish in-game, the horror theme doesn't actually affect gameplay at all, and after a couple of hours of play, the game had long since started repeating stage locations, but still hadn't let me use any bait besides the spider. That doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad, though, it could still be a fun and accessible fishing game, even if th horror theme's a bust! Unfortunately, while it is accessible, it's not fun. And it's really only accessible in the sense that playing it is so incredibly simple that pretty much anyone could do it, and most of the actual challenge appears to be down to luck rather than skill.

Anyway, the game is structured kind of like a racing game, in more ways than one. Each stage, you're given a quota, like "catch 3 fish", "catch a total of 25lbs of fish", or "catch a fish weighing at least 3lb", and you have to fill that quota as quickly as possible. Like a racing game, whoever finishes first gets the most points, and everyone who finishes below a certain ranking is elminated. This is fine, I've got no problem with this really, except for the weight quota stages, it seems totally random as to how big the fish you catch are, so you can finish them in under a minute, or you can be stuck catching fish after fish, hoping the next one is big enough.

The real problem with Monster Bass is the fishing itself. You cast your bait, and it always travels about 41.7 feet away, no matter what, then you slowly rell it back in towards you, maybe jiggling it about a little, hoping a fish bites. When the fish bites, you just hold the X button down until it's eventually reeled in. You can jiggle the d-pad a bit to increase the line tension, which might make it reel in faster, but I'm not actually certain on that. Then once the fish is brought in, you've either met the stage quota, ending the stage, or you haven't and you go back to toiling at the old fish mines. The fishing mini-game in Breath of Fire III is more complex, more exciting, and more rewarding than this entire retail release that came out almost half a decade later!

Of course, I don't recommend you get hooked on the lame bait that Monster Bass is dangling in front of you. For fishing fans, it's presumably too simple and the theme is probably too silly, and for non-fishing fans, it does nothing to dissuade the notion of fishing being a boring, stupid waste of time.

Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu - Otoko Ippiki Yume Kaidoi (Playstation)

I've been aware of this series for a long time, but the large amount of menus, all in Japanese had put me off. But recently, I just decided to dive in, and it turns out that the menus are pretty simple to navigate once you're playing the game. Anyway, in case you're won dering, this is the first in a series of nconventional racing games, themed around the subculture of Japanese truck drivers who adorn their vehicles with murals and flashing lights and various other garish accoutrements. Dekotora means "Decorated Truck", you see.

It's not just the theming that's unconventional, as Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu plays unlike any other racing game I've ever played. For a start, you never have to worry about taking corners, as your truck will just automatically follow the line of the road as you hold the accelerator down. Instead the races (which are all one-on-one) are more of a strategic battle of wits between you and your opponent. Basically, your opponent will always start with a pretty big lead, and it'll take a while to catch up with them, and when you do, you'll be going at about the same speed, making overtaking difficult. The twist is that you get a speed boost from being directly and closely behind your opponent, and you've got to use this to build up speed and nip in front of them when you have the chance.

Now, you might be wondering about the "no taking corners" thing. Instead of worrying about slowing down when the road bends, you're instead expected to use left and right on the D-pad to change lanes when the need arises, either in trying to out-maneuver your opponent or navigate around the normal car-driving road users (who, on later stages, always seem to be in the way as soon as you would otherwise be able to take the lead. infuriating!). You even have to double-tap them, as the first press just turns on your indicator! As well as acceleration and steering, you also have buttons for honking your horn and shouting abuse.

Also unlike most racing games, the money you win from races can't be spent on more powerful engines, or more grippy tires. Instead, you start the game with a bland, grey truck, and your winnings are spent on your choice of a vast array of bright, gaudy junk to put on it. There's strips of flashing lights, massive murals of demons or monsters or princesses, and more. The only bad thing I really have to say about this stuff is that right from the first races, your opponents all already have fully-decorated trucks, and the miserly amount of points you get for each win means that you'll be playing for eons before your ride is looking as ostentatious as you want it to. It would be remiss, too, to talk about this game without mentioning its atmosphere: there's tons of it. It's definitely in that genre of fiction regarding working class people in showa era Japan, and if you've seen movies or TV shows from those days, you'll definitely get the same feel from this as you did from those.

Anyway, the first Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu game is one I've enjoyed playing so far, and I look forward to looking into some of its spin-offs and sequels at some point, too. it even has entries on the Game Boy and Wonderswan! I recommend giving it a try yourself, and I even have a small menu-navigation tip for the Japanese-illiterate: to load your save, you have to pick the box on the right on the main menu. Also, there's a couple of modes I haven't bothered with, like the drawing mode (because only those with the patience of the saint and some proper pixel art talent are going to get anything decent out of it), and time attack mode (because it's just the racing, without the game's main gimmick).

S.C.A.R.S (Playstation)

That title there's an acronym, for Super Computer Animal Racing Simulation. The plot involes a super computer in the distant future simulating races between animal/car hybrids (reminiscent of the 90s toyline Car-Nivores) for some reason. The plot doesn't really affect the game in any way other than each track having a little sequence where the topology "grows" out of a flat blue grid, before the textures spread over it. That's pretty cool, though. Better than a normal loading screen, at least. The cars being animals doesn't really come into it at all, though, other than looking cool and putting an A in the title's acronym.

The races themselves play out in a Mario Kart style, which you might not expect from the non-cuteness of the overall aesthetic. There's power-ups to collect and a jump button, though, so that's pretty Mario Kart, I'm sure you agree. There's enough differences in the formula to set it apart, though, and they mostly involve the power-ups themselves. Firstly, they aren't assigned randomly, you can see which power-up you're going to get before you get it. This means there's none of the MK-style balancing where racers at the front only get the worst power-ups, and racers at the back only get the best. This is kind of balanced out by the fact that most of the power-ups are more useful when you're behind the pack, so a racer in first will be driving around holding onto their power-ups just in case they fall behind at some point.

Then there's the power-ups themselves. There are some of the usual suspects: missiles, speed boosts, shields, and so on, but there's also several kinds of trap power-ups. When used, these typically send forwards an energy field of some kind: a wall, a spinning triangle, a floating magnetic tetrahedron. The wall and the triangle simple stop any car that hits them, and they take a split-second to disappear afterwards, so if a few cars are bunched together, they might all get stopped, fot you to drive past with impunity. The magnetic tetrahedron is more deadly, but only to one car: it piicks them up and spins them for a few seconds. The trapped car can shoot a missile to get free, but they'll be dropped at whatever angle the magnet currently has them at, while if they wait the few seconds to be dropped naturally, they'll be pointed in the right direction. What's annoying about all of the above, is that they can trap the racer who sent them out, which seems like a stupid oversight.

Another weird quirk is that you have a score while racing, with points awarded for hitting your opponents with weapons. But these points don't affect your standing in the race ranking in any way, and it's hard to see what the point of them is. There's a bonus ranking point awarded after each race for the racer that had the fastest single lap, so why couldn't they have had another one for the highest score? As it is, the score doesn't take anything away from the game, but at the same time, it doesn't add anything either.

As a single-player experience, SCARS is very much okay. It's not great, but it's not bad, either. In terms of Playstation kart racers that I've played in recent times, it's better than Tank Racer, but not as good as Megaman Battle & Chase. It's probably better with human opponents, but that's obviously going to be the case for the other games, too.

Tank Racer (Playstation)

This game's title tells you pretty much everything about its premise: it's a racing game, but with tanks. You can even shoot at each other as much as you want! That's really it, I don't have anything more to put into this opening paragraph, sorry.

So, it's a British-developed game, which is obvious from the first two tracks: a pretty authentic-feeling little country village with a church and a duck pond and so on, followed by a very silly, inauthentic-feeling depiction of the USA-Mexico border. You can also tell that it's a western-developed game from the late 90s, since there are UFOs on some of the menu backgrounds, and there's a UFO power up ingame, too (though it's pretty rare, and I missed my shot every time I got it, so unfortunately, I can't tell you what it does).

How does it actually play though? Eh, it's alright. I was disappointed that the tanks just control like the cars do in any other racing game, where you hold the accellerator and steer left and right. I would have been much more interesting if you had left and right accelerators, one for each tank tread, and you steered by letting go of one of them (like how Steambot Chronicles/Bumpy Trot would have you controlling its walking vehicles a few years later. I really like that control method, actually, and I'd love to see it in a high speed racing game someday).

Also, though you can shoot your tank's cannon as much as you like, it's the weakest-feeling tank cannon I think I'v ever used in a game, as whether you're hitting an enemy or taking a hit yourself, it barely seems to have any effect at all. I guess the developers had to make a choice between making a fast and fair racing game, or a manic one with powerful weapons that could get incredibly frustrating. I'm not sure which would have been the best choice, actually, so I can't really be too hard on the game for that.

There's a few other small, nitpicky problems, too, like how some parts of stages are destructible and some aren't, but I think that's just the fault of the Playstation's hardware limitations (on the other hand, though, other games like Rollcage did a better job of hiding those limitations when it came to what you could and couldn't smash on their tracks). The biggest problem this game has is just the fact that it's on Playstation, and it can't hold a candle to the monolithic might of Ridge Racer Type 4, nor is its unusual theming strong enough to make it an interesting novelty. So, like I said a few paragraphs up: eh, it's alright.

The Hunter (Playstation)

The Hunter, also known as Battle Hunter and Battle Sugoroku: Hunter, is a strange one. It's yet another one of those late-life, low-budget Playstation titles, though it's also one of the few that actually got a worldwide release. As a result, there's actually a bunch of reviews for it on GameFAQs from around that time, and what's interesting about those reviews is that they all either loved or hated the game, with nothing in the middle. In fact, I first played it a few years ago and didn't think much of it, but picking it back up again recently, I've had a fair bit of fun with it.

You start the game by making a character, picking your sprite and colour scheme from a total of 64 combinations, and assigning your initial stats to HP, speed, attack and defense. Then you get a job from the broker and go into the dungeon. The dungeons are randomly generated, and the jobs are usually just finding a specific item and getting to the exit. There'll also be three CPU-controlled players trying to do the same. The biggest problem with this game is that pretty much everything is random, and your success relies a lot on luck. Movement speed and combat are determined by a combination of dice rolls and playing cards from your hand (you start with five cards, and you draw one every turn, and all players draw cards from a common deck. The cards do things like add to specific rolls for movement, attack, and defence, or lay traps on the space you're moving off of). The placement of item boxes is also random, and you don't know what's in a box until you go and get it.

For most missions, though, it doesn't matter if you win or lose: all it affects is how much money you get as a reward, and all money seems to do is let you level up, or restore your max HP (which is halved if you ever get reduced to zero in battle). Still, this is a game that should be both boring and frustrating in equal measure, but I think it manages to get pretty far on charm alone. Even though there's only eight character sprites with eight possible colour palettes, there's still a lot of personality in their animations, and they really add a lot, considering the dungeon itself is represented by nothing more than an isometric grid of grey squares.

There's actually a lot of personality in this simple little game generally. It's all in the little things. Like how there's a hundred items in the game, and most of them don't do anything besides letting you sell them, but the fact that they all have names just adds a little flavour to the world. Like all the books you find seem to be university-level textbooks on specific subjects, and so on. It's also pretty addictive, as games with a lot of random generation often are. I think a big problem is that it was released on a home console. On a handheld, where you could more quickly dip in and out of it, or idly play while watching TV, I think it'd have a lot more value.

Luckily, we don't live in 2001, it's 2019, and there's a bunch of mobile phones and chinese handhelds that can emulate the Playstation, plus the game has a release on PSN, so you can even legally download it to your Vita. I haven't tried any of these solutions yet, but the next time I get some US PSN credit, I will be. Because of the love-or-hate reactions this game gets, though, I can only really recommend paying money for it if you've tried it a couple of times via emulation first, just to see if it clicks with you. But for the record, I do think it's a fun and charming game.

Breed Master (Playstation)

Though the title might sound like one of those Japan-only racehorse management games, Breed Master is actually a colour-matching puzzle game, with some monster raising/battling flavour added. It's also part of that strange class of games: those very low budget Playstation games that came out well after everyone had moved onto the PS2.

It has a few quirks besides that, too, like how not only do you have (almost) complete control over when pieces drop into your pit, but the game doesn't end when they reach the top! Instead, you can summon another row's worth of pieces by pressing the R1 button at any time, and the game ends when your monster's HP reaches zero. You can probably work out from there that filling your pit to the brim damages your monster, and that's right, but it only causes a small amount of damage. Instead, damage is caused to your opponent's monster (and vice versa) mainly by getting rid of coloured pieces by matching them, and doing so in combos, as tradition dictates.

Now, it's the combo-forming that's my favourite part of this game, as it takes an approach similar to the Magical Drop series, in that being fast and dextrous in your movement of the pieces is more important than the approach preferred in games like Puyo Puyo, for example, where setting up a large chain in advance and waiting for the right piece you need to trigger it to come along is the main tactic. Getting bigger combos does more damage to your opponent, of course.

Then there's the monster-raising aspect of the game. The pieces come in four colours, and there are four corresponding meters for your monster below its HP meter. As they fill up, your monster will level up, and very occasionally (like, no more than three times in an entire single-player run), four yellow blocks with hexagrams on them will fall into your pit. Put those together and your monster evloves into a new form, with more HP and a different magic attack. Magic attacks are performed in a similar manner to evolution, except these hexagram blocks are green, and they appear a lot more frequently. Magic attacks range from healing your monster everytime it damages the opponent, to turning the bottom few rows of their pit into junk blocks, or making unbreakable stone pillars appear in their pit for a short time.

The problem with Breed Master is that it feels half-made. You'll get good enough to 1CC the single player mode after no more than two or three attempts, there's no checklist to see entice you into trying to hatch that one monster you're missing, and the game's core mechanics aren't exciting enough for versus play to be much of a draw. It's an okay game, and if you see it going cheap, it might be worth gettin for a couple of hours' entertainment, but it's not one to bother actively seeking out.

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.

Ridegear Guybrave (Playstation)

It's a beat em up, and it's not an arcade game, or on a console released before 1994! So, I'm sure you all know what's going to happen, and yes, there are both experience points and equipment shops. But it's not all bad, as the weapons you buy actually all have not only their own models that actually appear on your robot, but their own animations too! So you are actually getting a bit of fun out of them besides the numbers going up.

And yes, it's also a game about robots. Giant ones, though they're also super-deformed. Which is probably actually more realistic than big tall, slender mecha. The setting is an island in what I assume is some kind of newly colonised frontier world, as everything manmade seems kind of ramshackle, though there isn't any of the environmental devestation you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic world, with stages taking place in deserts, plains, caves, forests, meadows and so on.

The RPG elements don't just stop at the stat-raising stuff, either: there's towns where you talk to people, buy stuff, and so on. In fact, the towns conspire with the game's navigation system to create some offensively aggregious padding, which actually detracts from the game's quality a lot more than the stats stuff. There's a point early on in the game, where you have to talk to a guy in the second town, then go back to the first town to talk to another guy, then return to the original guy in the second town. The problem with this is that there are two stages between those two towns.

Now, the game's world map doesn't let you just pass over cleared areas, but instead, each area, whether it's a stage or a town, has two exits, one at the left and one at the right. When you leave via one exit, you can only go to the opposite exit on the next stage in that direction. So, how the above quest goes is that you initially leave the first town, and go through the two stages to get to the second. Then you leave the second and go through those two stages again, but backwards, to get back to the first town. Then you have to go through those same two stages for a third time to get back to the second town. I can't remember the last time I played a game with such little respect for the player's time. The combat was actually pretty fun at first: crunchy and satisfying, and with the novelty of trying out new weapons now and then, but after this nonsense, I'd lost all goodwill I once had towards this game.

I think if me and my friends had gotten copies of this from our local totally legitimate import games dealer around the time of its release, it might have been one of our favourites that we'd occasionally talk about to this day. As a more discerning adult with access to emulation and so on, I can't recommend it. If you want action games with nice low poly robots and cool anime character portraits, you can easily find many others that are a lot better than this.

Block Wars (Playstation)

It's kind of interesting, that every time I find another Versus Arkanoid clone, it manifests its competitive element in a totally different way. There's the most famous example, Puchi Carat, that essentially transplants Puzzle Bobble's ruleset into a block-breaking environment, there's Blocken, with its combination of a block-breaking race, and Tetris Battle Gaiden-esque attacks, and now Block Wars, which has yet another interpretation of the concept.

How it works is that the field is horizontally aligned, with a player at each end, barrier in the middle, and a solid wall behind each player. Each player starts with an identical set of blocks, and they go about their business smashing them with the ball. There's a bunch of characters to choose from, and as far as I can tell, they differ in how fast the ball goes, and how quickly it accelerates. There are two possible win conditions, the least interesting being smashing all your blocks before your opponent does.

Much more interesting is the way the walls and centre barrier come into play. The other way you can win is to ensure that one of the blocks on your opponent's side touches the wall behind them. Of course, this is done by moving the barrier in the middle of the field. There's two things that make the barrier move: hitting it with your ball pushes it away from you and towards your opponent. Allowing your ball to hit the wall behind you does the opposite. I think hitting the barrier also makes extra blocks appear on your opponent's side of the field, but the game moves really fast, so I'm not totally sure about that.

Well, the balls move really fast, but the game doesn't always. As is often a problem in single player Arkanoid-likes, you do often end up with situations where both players have one brick remaining in a hard-to-reach place, and there's a long, tense battle to be the first to reach it. And of course, with no blocks in the way, both players are knocking the barrier back and forth, too. The tension would probably be a lot more exciting with human opponents than AI ones, I assume.

Block Wars is a playable game, but if you plan on playing it single player, I wouldn't bother. There's a perfectly fine Playstation port of Puchi Carat, and that game's a lot more fun, and it has a couple of solo modes, too. Maybe Block Wars would have worked better as an arcade game, maybe on a tabletop cabinet with a vertically-aligned screen between the players?

Kamen Rider Kuuga (Playstation)

2000's Kamen Rider Kuuga, in case anyone doesn't know, was the first Kamen Rider TV series since 1988's Kamen Rider Black RX. And I guess it must have been a success, since Different Kamen Rider shows have been running alongside the Super Sentai shows ever since. Since the show's aimed at little kids, it makes sense to have the licensed videogame on the Playstation instead of the newly-released PS2, too, since it means they can make a quick, cheap little game for the kids to buy with their pocket money. (The 2001 and 2002 Kamen Rider shows, Agito and Ryuki also had their games on PS1, presumably for the same reasons.)

Anyway, as befitting a series that's mainly about one-on-one combat between a hero and a series of episodic monsters, it's a fighting game. There's a single player story mode, that's about fifteen minutes long, and sees you playing as Kamen Rider Ryuki in various different forms fighting monsters. There's different kinds of fights in this mode too, like ones where you only have to get the monster down to 50% health, or ones where you have to survive the attacks of an invincible monster for thirty seconds. The game will also encourage you (in the form of a text prompt) to finish some fights with certain attacks. It's okay, but like I said, there's only fifteen minutes of it and it's done. Finishing it once does unlock survival mode, which is a lot more interesting, though.

Survival mode lets you play as the various Kuuga forms seen in story mode, but also, as all of the monsters you fight in that mode! (After you've unlocked them, but I'll get onto that later.) Other than that, it's just a typical survival mode: you fight an unending stream of randomly-selected foes until you get beat. The game's controls are very simple, which I assume is another concession towards a younger target audience: there's no special move inputs, instead the four face buttons are mapped to punch, kick, throw, and special. Some characters have more than one special, which are excuted by just pressing different directions along with the special button.

Now, onto unocking stuff. Every time you finish playing story or survival mode, you get points, depending on how many fights you won. Each point can be spent to buy one random card in the digital card collection. There's 81 cards to get, and once you get a card, it isn't removed from the pool of possible cards you draw, so the more you have, the harder it is to fill the gaps in your collection. Anyway, among the cards, there are smaller subsets of three cards, which unlock playable characters when you get them all. I think I managed to get all of these cards after finishing story mode once and playing maybe two or three games of survival mode. The rest of the cards are just for completionists and people who like looking at low resolution photos of turn-of-the-century tokusatsu actors and monster suits (and who doesn't?).

So Kamen Rider Kuuga is a decent enough game, I guess. Nothingg spectacular, but it's entertaining enough, and if you know people who you can get to play old licensed games with you, it's probably pretty fun in versus mode, too. On that note, I wonder why it was never seen on the import/piracy scene at the time, considering how import-friendly it is. But on the other hand, English-speaking tokusatsu fandom was still so tiny as to be practically non-existent at the time, and the game isn't really good enough to be worth playing over any arcade-ported figting games without the allure of the license. (Still a lot better than some of the awful fighting games we played back then just because of the license, like Dragonball Final Bout and so on). Yeah, it's alright. Give it a try.