Erementar Gerad: Matoe, Suifuu no Tsurugi (PS2)

 So this game is based on an anime that I've never seen (and which seems to be officially known in English as Elemental Gelade, and I did have to look up both spellings to get the exact right arrangement of Ls, Rs, and vowels), but it's a fighting game by Taito, which in my mind, makes it worthy of some attention already. Then I looked it up on GameFAQS, and they say that it was only published by Taito, and was developed by Tamsoft. Even more exciting! 

 

From what I can gather, the anime (and by extension, the game) is about a world where there are people who can transform into bladed weapons for use by other people, and one particularly powerful such person is found in the cargo hold of an airship. So it's a weapons-based fighter, with most of the characters actually being duos, though there's also one girl who fights using a BB Hood-like assortment of artillery hidden about her person. The cel shaded graphics are pretty impressive, being almost as convincing in their attempt at passing polygonal models off as cel animation as the latter Guilty Gear games, despite coming out several years earlier, on much less powerful hardware. (Though unfortunately, the effect doesn't seem to have worked as well in screenshots.)

 

How it plays is an odd mix of simple and complex. Like, none of the specials have more complex motions than quarter-circles, and supers are performed by pressing two buttons together. But then, they've managed to come up with something for all four face buttons and all fout shoulder buttons to do. There's three attack buttons: slash, hard slash, and kick. There's also a kind of Dead or Alive-esque grab button, that just takes ahold of your opponent, and switches your positions around. There's both directions of sidestepping, the aforementioned button that activates supers, and a block button. This feels like too many buttons! Especially with the simplified specials and supers, which feel like they're that way because it's a licensed game, and fans of the anime might not be familiar with fighting games (as I also assumed was the case with the InuYasha fighting game on PS1).

 

Another weird idiosyncracy is that each character has two supers. One will just happen normally, while the other will start a weird little rhythm minigame in which you have to press buttons at the right time while your character(s) say a little prayer, to power up the attack. But the problem is that there's no indication as to when you're meant to press the button, exactly. I'm sure it's not, but it feels like it's random as to whether your presses will increase or decrease the power meter. I think the worse thing about it, though, is the way it gives players a way to immediately interrupt the fight for a cutscene at any time, as long as they've got at least one full meter.

 

I can't really recommend this game. It's not offensively bad or anything, but it's also not good or interesting enough to be worth your time. If you like the anime, and want to play as the characters from it, I can see that being a big factor in changing your opinion of it, and like I said, it does look really great, so if that is your motivation, you probably will have a good time with it. But I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anyone talk about this show, ever. I feel like I've been a little too harsh on a game that's mostly fine, but I guess I was just a bit let down after the initial excitement of seeing where it came from. Oh wait, there is one little interesting thing I want to mention: there's actually 2D sprites of the characters in their fighting stances! They're really tiny and appear on the loading screens, but they're cute.

Skate Attack (PS2)

 As a publisher, Midas were famous mainly for two things: localising occasionally interesting Japanese budget games, and also publishing mostly-terrible original budget games. Skate Attack isn't one of the former, so my hopes for it weren't high. But I tried it anyway, being the fair-minded person that I am, and for a little while, I was pleasantly surprised! On initial inspection, this seems like not just a competent game, but one that's actually fun to play!

 

It's a skateboarding game that mostly plays and feels a lot like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games at the most basic level. You skate around, there's quarter pipes to launch you up into the air, doing flip tricks with the square button, and grab tricks with the circle. There's also lots of rails and ledges to grind on, though Skate Attack uses R1 for this, rather than triangle. You can even do a manual upon landing, to lengthen your combos! Aesthetically, it clearly takes a lot of influence from Jet Set Radio, being set in a brightly-coloured near-future sci-fi city.

 

So, it seems like, with some pretty decent influences, and well-constructed fundamentals, that this is a game whose development was backed by real passion, and not just a cheap cash-in. But you might be wondering why, back in the first paragraph, did I specify that I was pleasantly surprised "for a little while"? Well, the answer to that (as well as the answer as to why all of the screenshots are from the same area) lies in the game's structure. The game's plot sees an evil robot demon thing named Virus forcing you to do a bunch of tasks. A big bunch of tasks. The first area, for example, has twenty-one of them, in three sets of seven. 

 

It's clear, too, that the developers quickly ran out of ideas for skateboarding-related tasks for you to do, too, since you'll soon be fighting evil robots, flying around atop stolen and fiddly-to-control drones, and other tedious nonsense. It's such a shame, because like I said, the actual skateboarding is really great, way above what you'd expect from a Midas original, and it even has a potentially interesting unique element in the grappling laser thing that lets you zoom onto the rooves of vehicles from a distance. But all these other psuedo-action game tasks are incredibly fiddly and annoying, and no fun at all.

 

Though Skate Attack turned out to be a disappointment after initially seeming to have so many things in its favour, it does appear that the developers made another skateboarding game: Skate Park City on PSP. The game's description on GameFAQs even also mentions THPS and JSR as influences, so I'll definitely be looking into that, to see if it realises the potential seen in this game. Unfortunately, whether it does or not, this is a review of Skate Attack, which is itself a game I don't recommend.

Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.

Happy! Happy!! Boarders in Hokkaido Rusutsu Resort (PS2)

 The first thing that stands out about Happy! Happy!! Boarders upon starting it is the way it sounds and looks: it's going to be a feast for those "Y2K Aesthetic" appreciators out there. Then, with the snowboarding game I've played most of being another PS2 game, Alpine Racer 3, it's striking how much slower and more realistic this game is. You have quite a lot of control of your boarder in this game, where they go, and you've also got to make them keep their balance. A big contrast to AR3, which is a very videogamey racing game, in which you mainly just have to go as fast as possible down linear tracks while avoiding obstacles. (It might get its own review here someday.)

 

So, this more of a sim-type game. Not just in the relatively more realistic snowboarding action, but also it's a tie-in to a real skiing/snowboarding resort in Hokkaido, and it's kind of a bit of a sim of being there, too. Well, a little bit. You access the menu for saving, changing your board, and some other things by returning to the hotel, at least. Also, the loading screens have some very nice, scenic photos of the real slopes, and there's also a gallery full of unlockable photos of the hotel's interior, for some reason. 

 

You start off with access to only one course, and a point quota. You get points by snowboarding, by doing tricks, by boarding between flags on the course, doing little speed challenges and for some reason, by stopping to talk to certain people who are loitering around on the course. Once you reach the points quota, you can go to the second course, which is a lot more interesting, since it's got a few branching points that kind of make it four courses in one, and you get a new points quota. For some reason, though, I didn't unlock a third course upon reaching this quota. And one of the big problems with playing and writing about obscure games is that there are no guides online to help you, so a little ulterior motive in writing this review is to ask the internet: anyone know what i'm doing wrong?

 

It really is a shame, because I was getting into the game before getting stuck like this: once you get the hang of the controls, it's a lot of fun going down the slopes, and as mentioned, it looks great too. They really did a good job of making this resort feel like a cool, fun, luxurious place to be! Plus, it seems to be almost entirely inhabited by attractive young people. Which makes sense, since from what little English writing there is about this game online, there's supposedly a romantic aspect to it, too, which I never picked up on at all! 

 

If you can read Japanese, I recommend giving this game a try! It's fun to play, and it really seems like it's got a lot going on to make it stand out in the genre. If you can't speak Japanese, I still recommend giving it a try, I've really enjoyed what I've been able to play of it, and maybe you'll be able to figure out how to get past the second course and make me look like Booboo the Fool. Who knows, maybe I'll figure it out myself? I can only hope.  

Yokushin: Gigawing Generations (PS2)

 Alongside Gunbird 2, the Dreamcast port of the original Gigawing was one of the shooting games that really got me interested in the genre. At the time, I'd seen nothing like it before: not only was it my first danmaku STG, with enemy agression like I'd never seen before, but it also had some other elements that added their own spice. The story scenes between stages, where characters melodramatically despaired about the cruelties man inflicts upon man, as well as the specific horrors of the war unfolding before their eyes. There's also the soundtrack, while not exactly to my tastes, does a great job of setting the mood, not just while you're playing, but also with specific situations, like how the game over music is so calm and relaxing compared to the noise and chaos of the game, and cuts in so abruptly as soon as you die, giving the feeling of a soldier dying on the battlefield and immediately finding themselves in paradise. The most important, and most famous ingredient of both the original Gigawing and the series in general, though is its scoring and self-defence system, that are intertwined as one.

 

By holding the fire button for a few seconds, you emit a forcefield that reflects enemy bullets back at them, doing big damage, and turning them into medals. Each medal you collect increases the value of every subsequent medal, and also the multiplier constantly applied to your score. By the end of the first stage of the first game, you can easily get your multiplier into the millions, with your score already reaching the tens of trillions. The second game leant really hard into a bombastic look and sound, with a WWII-like fantasy setting. It also added an optional "reflect laser" weapon, which converted enemy bullets into auto-aimed laserbeams instead of directly reflecting them. It also added cascades, whereby having a large amount of medals onscreen at ones would magically cause big golden waterfalls of hundreds more medals appear out of nowhere.

 

That absurdly long preamble, despite not mentioning Yokushin Gigawing Generations, says so much about it. The unfortunate fact is that, as much as I love the first two games in this series, I just don't care for this third entry. Now, I don't particularly dislike it. It plays fine, and it can get its hooks in your for an hour or so here and there like any half-decent STG can, but it makes me feel nothing. It's just there, existing. It doesn't have the melodrama or the aesthetics of the previous games. Though the numbers have gone up in regard to the multiplier and the score, the cascades and reflect laser are both gone, too, and that really feels like a step backwards.

 

Everything about this game looks, sounds, and feels cheap in a way that its forebears didn't. To use a cinematic allegory, think of the ninties live action Addams Family movies. The first two were theatrical releases, with lavish production design, great scripts, and perfectly-cast actors. Then a few years later, there was a third, straight-to-video movie entitled Addams Family Reunion. Barely anyone's heard of it and even fewer have seen it, there are no returning cast members, and it looks like an episode of a kids TV show (because it's actually a pilot for one, the somehow even cheaper The NEw Addams Family). Yokushin Gigawing Generations is the videogame equivalent of Addams Family Reunion: it's not painful to watch or anything, and while it's a massive step down from what came before it in every way, if you really want some more Gigawing, that's what you technically get here.

Sword of the Samurai (PS2)

 I only played the original Kengo once, long long ago, when me and some friends were just trying out a big stack of PS2 games we'd never played before. My memory of it is as a weird idiosyncratic swordfighting game that had a dedicated buttong for yelling at your opponent. The reason I bring Kengo up is that this is actually Kengo 2, mysteriously renamed by its western publisher. I recently tried it out on a whim, and got totally engrossed in what is not just a swordfighting game, but a game about being a swordfighter.

 

What does that mean? Well, the main mode in this game has you "making" (that is, picking a face and a body from a very small selection. In fact, there's only one female body!) a character and then making a debut on the local swordsmanship scene in a little village named Chiaraijima. You can take part in casual fights down at the riverbank, or you can go to one of the local dojos to learn the basics. The game's very idiosyncratic in how it plays, and if you go in trying to playing like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade, you'll get nowhere, so going and learning the basics is recommended. It's a much better way of getting in the tutorial than a lot of games, too, since you don't have to go straight there, and the lessons address one subject at a time, so inbetween you can go and test what you've learned at the riverbank.

 

Eventually, you'll get the opportunity to spar against other students at the dojo, and even challenging the students and masters of other dojos! All of the above are, of course, competitive bouts using wooden and bamboo swords. But there's a couple of other things to occupy your time in Chiaraijima. There are the secret nighttime fights that take place in an abndoned courtyard, and they use real swords. Also using real swords are the jobs you can go on, brokered by a local merchant. Real sword fights change the mechanics slightly. For a start, if you get cut, you start bleeding and losing health (I've even had a fight end with both participants bleeding to death at the same time!), and yes: lose a real swordfight and you die, and get sent back to the title screen. You can reload your save from there, but still. It's a lot more dramatic than taking a couple days' rest after losing a normal fight.

 

The jobs are slightly different still. There's a little bit of Bushido Blade here, as you have to fend of groups of enemies who attack a few at a time, but can be taken out themselves with one or two hits. The game also makes mention that if you guard too much in a real sword fight, the metal can get chipped and the sword can even break, leaving you defenceless, but I haven't seen that happen. I'm not sure what the point of taking these risks is, since there's no money in this game, but presumably, there are story events that can happen if you consistently do well enough in them. (For example, the merchant who gives you your jobs doesn't appear himself until you make a few consecutive wins at the riverbank).

 

To clarify some of the above: everything other than the fights and jobs is menu-based. Every day, you can choose to rest or do one of the above activities. Whatever you pick, it'll take up the whole day. Anything other than resting will usually increase all of your stats by some amount, and also decrease your stamina. Resting replenishes your stamina, and no matter how low it is, it'll usually be back to full after two days, and if you're impatient, you can still go out if it isn't full, you'll just have less health. I don't know if resting too many days in a row makes your skills atrophy and your stats decline, but that seems like it'd be logical. Finally, you learn new moves by getting hit by them!

 

Like I said, I've been engrossed in this game. Some people might find the structure repetitive, others might find the fighting clunky and weird, but I think if you're willing to give it a chance, this is a game that you can really get a lot out of. As simple as it is, there's lots of interesting little details to notice, too. For example, the guys you fight down at the riverbank are all just named "Swordsman", but as you keep going back, you'll come to recognise them on sight, and they use consistent fighting styles, so they're definitely the same guys who keep coming back, and not just random nobodies represented by the same models. If you're able to, I recommend at least giving this a try.

X-Treme Express (PS2)

 Unlike most games about driving trains, even the ones aimed at kids, or the ones in which the trains are just models, X-Treme Express (also known as Tetsu 1: Densha de Battle! World Grand Prix, though as far as I can tell, there's no connection to the Densha de Go! series, and it definitely wasn't developed or published by Taito) has no interest in providing a verisimilitudinal simulation of passenger train driving. Instead, it's not just a game about racing trains, but about aggressively racing them. What's interesting is that the developers made the wise decision that this premise alone was silly enough, and didn't feel the need to add to it. So you've got somewhat realistic-looking trains from around the world, racing each other in various locations that all look like they're in Japan, but no power up items or any other overtly videogamey stuff like that.

 

Being trains, you don't have complete control over where your vehicles go at any time. Instead, you mostly control the speed of your train, slowing down at corners to avoid derailment (or you can play on easy mode, where you can't derail youself), and changing tracks at switching points when they occur. That's where the aggression comes into things: time things just right, and you can ram into the side of one of your fellow competitiors, forcing them off of the track. Alternatively, if you've got a lead and there's another train close behind you, you can stubborn stay in front of them, never giving a chance to overtake in a much more mean-spirited way than if you were driving regular road vehicles.

 

An important thing for racing games is a sense of speed, and really, that's one of the first things that'll hit you regarding X-Treme Express: when you're going full speed down a straight bit of track (or any bit of track in easy mode), you're really hurtling along in a way that real life trains never seem to, and the fact that you are driving a train at such breakneck speeds really adds to the manic feel of it all. With the lack of steering in mind, other than managing your speed to stay on the track, and shunting rivals to knock them off of it, I think a big part of the strategy is to try and place yourself on lines that have more downhill parts than uphill, though its possible that this only provides a minor boost to your speed, if any at all.

 

As well as the main grand prix mode, there's also a free mode, where you can just ride a track at any time of day, and can even turn off opponents for a more relaxing time, there's also event races with special rules like "no shunting" or "shunt every opponent to win", both of which I think show how important aggression is to the game. You start the game with a choice of thirty trains and six tracks, but looking at the "game data" screen in options shows that there's apparently a total of eighty trains in the game, and ten tracks! Furthermore, when I went online to seek more information, I could only find a conversation that brough back memories of the Dragonball GT Final Bout myths that were going around circa the turn of the century: apparently if you complete grand prix with all eighty trains, placing first in every race with no retries, you can unlock a gun that lets you derail trains infront of you by pressing L2. That sounds like nonsense, and I'm definitely not the person who's going to go and find out either way.

 

X-treme Express is a unique little game, with a lot of idiosyncracies that make take a couple of goes to get used to, but once you do, you'll find that it's a fast, fun, weird game, and definitely worth your time. Maybe not hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time, but a few of them, at least. I'm surprised it doesn't come up in conversations about weird and interesting PS2 games more often, alongside the likes of Demolition Girl and Seigi no Mikata and so on. Maybe that'll change from now on, though? 

Plarail Yume Ga Ippai! (PS2)

 Like I'm sure you all remember from the time I reviewed the arcade game Attack Plarail in 2018, that Plarail is Tomy's line of Plastic Railway toys, which, from an outsider's perspective, seem geared more towards easy, fun creativity and play value, as opposed to the more realistic trains of western companies like Hornby, which are made for hobbyists to gradually create and permanently install miniature villages and counties in their houses. That was all one sentence! Sorry about that. Anyway, here's a home console game based on the same toyline, and apparently made by just Tomy, without the assistance of a more established videogame name like how Namco worked on Attack Plarail.

 

Being a home game, it also has a much wider scope and more ambition than its arcade predecessor. Attack Plarail had you just driving a train along a few premade courses. Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is essentially a whole plarail ownership simulator, and while it does have some pre-made courses, the real meat of this game is that you get to build your own! The way in which this is implemented has some positive and negative aspects, though. And to be fair, some of the negative aspects might be under exacerbation from my Japanese illiteracy.

 

There's two modes to choose from when you load up the game: on the left is train driving. It's actually a lot simpler than most arcade train driving games like Attack Plarail or Densha de Go, as you only really have to control the speed of the train and there's no fail condition as far as I can tell. There's lots of buttons to do things, like sound your horn or flick switches on the train dashboard, but it's not clear what, if anything, any of these things do. on the right is construction mode, where you'll be spending most of your time with this game.

 

First, you'll pick a map. I don't really see much reason not to pick the biggest one, as you start with the same amount of stuff no matter which you pick, and more space to play in is better, right? Once you're on the map, the first thing you should do is pick up all the stuff that's placed there by default. It'll go into your inventory, so again you'll have more to play with, and for some reason, I just could never get the prebuilt stuff to link up with the stuff that I'd built, which was frustrating. Anyway, you've got various things to place around the map as you see fit: tracks, stations, trains, etc. There's straight and curved tracks, as well as bits of track that are higher at one end than the other, to reach higher or lower altitudes (there's nine levels of elevation in the game). You've also got buildings and trees to place around to make the world look less abandoned, and you can even build a whole road network to go alongside your rail network, and put cars on it too!

 

One thing you'll quickly notice in this mode is that you don't start with a lot of the scenery stuff to put about, and it also feels like you don't have as many of certain kinds of track as you might like. But luckily, there's a bit of extra customisation available, as there's an ingame catalogue full of stuff in every category to persue and order from. More tracks, more varieties of track, new trains and cars, lots more different types of buildings and trees, and so on. This is where I found one of the points where the language barrier might be getting in my way, though: you start with a hundred coins, and to be fair, this can actually get you a lot of stuff from the catalogue. 

 

But I have not yet found any way to get more coins, so the stuff you buy on a particular save file is, as far as I can tell, all you get, and if you want to build something different or use a different train or whatever once it's gone, you'll have to start a new file from scratch. Once you've built and saved your track, you can, most excitingly, go back to the main menu, select the driving mode, select the map on which you've been building, and drive around the little world you've created! I assume this must have been the game's big selling point when it was released.

 

If, as I suspect, I am just being a wrong idiot, and someone reading this knows better, please let me know. Or alternatively, if you know better and I actually am right and this game has an oddly stringent limit on the amount of stuff you can have in a single save file, also let me know. Either way, as it appears to be in my eyes right now, Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is okay. It's a decently distracting way to spend a couple of hours, even with those limitations. A quick look at prices seems to suggest that they fluctuate wildly, but it emulates perfectly well, even on my aged preowned laptop (and you never know with PS2 games: I can play some pretty busy 3D games at full speed, but the 2D Street Fighter Alpha collection is a slideshow. Which is very annoying, I hear you can play Alpha 3 with SF3-style parrying, which sounds great).

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance (PS2)

 Back at the time of its release in 2005, Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance had the misfortune to find itself lumped alongside a load of other games in a trend hated by many people (including my friends and I). That trend being the embarassing array of gang-themed games released in the wake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, each expending so much effort telling you how tough and cool they were that it made you wonder who they were trying to convince. But many years later, when I was picking up PS2 games for cheap, I noticed that this one was developed by Cavia, a B-game studio only a few rungs higher on the ladder than the likes of Tamsoft.

 

So I gave it a go, and in the isolation from its peers afforded it by the distance of time, I've been able to see Beat Down in a new light. Thematically, it's still a lot more silly than it seems like it wants to be, but it's in a charming way. It's very much a bunch of Japanese game developers making their idea of what the tough streets of inner city America are like. Mafia members wear identical matching suits, assassins look like vampires with their own trademark weapons, and the tone generally feels kind of like an inner city immersive theme park. In fact, some of the stuff is so strange that I do wonder if it was originally meant to be a Vampire: The Masquerade-style setting that got changed into a gangland theme at some point during development.

 

Themeing aside, there's also a lot of interesting mechanical systems in here, too. Fighting, for example. There's two types of fights you'll take part in. There's one-on-one fights, used for bosses and some other situations, and gang fights, where you beat up a bunch of weaker goons. They both play the same in terms of controlling your character, but the one-on-one fights have the camera somewhat fixed into a fighting game-style position and the characters are locked into facing each other, while you can move the camera and yourself more freely in the gang fights. 

 

Furthermore, the one-on-one fights have a second meter below each character's health. This is the pride meter, and it's got a couple of purposes. If you lose the fight while your pride meter is empty, you can't re-try it, and are forced to either beg for your life and end up in hospital, or get a game over and have to reload your save. More interestingly, if you deplete your opponent's pride meter before you beat them, you can grab them, and upon doing so you're given a few options. You can rob them, interrogate them (some story missions requitre you to find a bunch of specific enemies and interrogate them), and even recruit them as cronies who follow you around to fight alongside you in gang fights and act as team memebers (like a fighting game's team battle mode) in one-on-one fights.

 

The other big interesting system the game has is the stealth/dressing up system. Because the game starts with you turning your back on your mafia life, and because you're still a criminal, there's two gangs who want to get you: the mafia and the cops. Luckily, they both have member bases with memory problems, who can only vaguely remember what you look like. So, while you're going around the city, there's two recognition meters at the top of the screen. They go up a little every time a member of the corresponding gang sees you, and when a group's recognition meter is at 100%, members of that gang attack you on sight! To get the meters to go down, you've got to change your clothes, hair, and accessories! Best of all, once you buy an item of clothing, you keep it for the rest of the game, so eventually, you'll build up a decently-sized wardrobe of stuff out of which you can construct different outfits whenever the need arises. I can't think of another game that isn't specifically about dressing up, but which incorporates doing so into the gameplay in such a way. Which is a shame, really. There's so much potential for this kind of thing, especially with how popular open-world games and action RPGs are nowadays.

 

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance is a game that I unjustly derided and shunned when it came out, but now, eighteen years later, I can admit how wrong that was. It's a game with a lot of interesting ideas, that's decently fun to play. Of course, I recommend doing so, assuming you have the means to play PS2 games in the year 2023. (And I'm sure that most of the people reading this probably do.)

Legend of Sayuki (PS2)

 I've recently been playing Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, which as you'd expect from the high quality of Tengo Project's other games, represents excellence at a level to which most game developers can only hope to aspire. But it reminded me of Legend of Sayuki (also known as Heavenly Guardian or Yukinko Daisenpuu ~Sayuki to Koyuki no Hie-Hie Daisoudou~), a "Pocky and Rocky in all but name" that was released on PS2 to little fanfare in 2008. It really is in all but name, too, as it was originally intended to be part of that much-loved series, until negotiations with Square-Enix fell through and they had to (slightly) re-theme it.

 

So instead of a shrine maiden running around banishing youkai and other monsters, you're a snow goddess doing that. Your raison d'etre is to gather the ingredients necessary to lift a curse from a local boy. You'll go through various environments, like a snowy forest (that seems to gradually become a springtime forest as you progress through it), a massive gambling den inhabited by monsters (the game calls it a casino, but it's more like an old-fashioned Japanese gambling den than the glitzy western-style casino the name implies), and a haunted cave full of fungus and crystals. And the boss of that third stage is as far as I've been able to get so far, as it's a horrible fight where a big evil doll throws books at you, along with magic hearts that mess with your controls.

 

It's a pretty good game! There's a bunch of differently-coloured weapon powers you can gets, of varying degrees of usefulness (note:don't get the green power up that appears just before the first bossfight! It's too short range for that battle!), as well as the expected health restore items, and health meter extension items. An interesting mechanic comes in the form of the little snow bunny that constantly follows you around. As you shoot, it also shoots a little snowflake at a slower rate. This snowflake temporarily freezes enemies it hits, and frozen enemies drop spirit flames. Spirit flames are collected to increase your MP, and you can spend twenty-five MP to activate the snow bunny's special attack, causing it to run around freezing nearby enemies and their shots en masse.

 

I think this might be the key to higher scoring, though I have been mostly focussed on survival to the extent that I haven't paid a lot of attention to that aspect of the game. But something you really should know about this attack is that if you use it wisely, it can be self-sustaining. Enemies frozen in larger groups drop more spirit flames, so if you use it at the right times, you can easily collect more MP than the attack costs to activate. This is especially useful to know when you're about to fight a boss that becomes a lot easier with well-timed special attacks. Which isn't every boss, as the first boss at least doesn't use a lot of projectiles, so the best thing to do there is find the best place to stand and shoot, and the easy ways to avoid its few different attacks. But now I'm just telling you basic shooting game technique.

 

Legend of Sayuki is a pretty decent game all-round. It's not as good as any of the actual Pocky and Rocky/Kiki Kaikai games, and definitely not even close to reshrined, but it's still definitely worth your time. And though I feel like I'm becoming a stuck record on this subject recently, I also feel the need to point out that this is once again one to emulate, as like most PS2 budget titles, it's currently being sold for hundreds of pounds by people who definitely don't deserve any of your money.