Simple 2000 Series Vol. 60: The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero

Like the last PS2 game I covered, Seigi no Mikata, The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero is a game that's heavily themed around the genre of Japanese superhero TV shows (though you could probably guess that from the title). Being a Simple 2000 game, however, it eschews the strange meta "living in a tv show world" approach of Seigi no Mikata, and takes the more obvious path of being a beat em up in which you fight a bunch of goons before a monstruous boss.

The tokusatsu flavour is still pretty strong, though. Even though the plot is all in Japanese, it's still easy enough to follow and all the classic cliches of the genre are there: the scientist who gave you your powers watches over you, there's generic footsoldier enemies, along with cheesy-looking monsters, and above the monsters, there's occasional fights against higher-ranking, re-occuring enemies, too. In fact, one of those re-ooccuring enemies, named Yabaider is a direct homage to the character Hakaider, who first appeared as a villain in the 1972 TV series Android Kikaider, and even had his own spinoff movie in 1995 entitled Mechanical Violator Hakaider. Interestingly, as it is a budget game, it takes something of a tokusatsu-style approach to cutting costs, too: the same few locations are reused over and over, there's a lot of padding out by having you fight off increasingly large groups of identical footsoldiers, and none of the battles are particularly grand or spectacular.

These cost-cutting measures unfortunately result in a game that is incredibly repetitive, though. Every stage plays the same, and the first half in which you fight the generic enemies gets longer and more labourious each time as they come in bigger numbers and with more HP each time. The bosses also have far too much HP, as once you've learned their patterns, you're left avoiding them and very gradually chipping away at their life bars for several minutes. Of course, maybe if I could read the unlock conditions for more weapons and moves, maybe it would all have been a lot more fast paced, so the Japanese-literate among you might have a better time (though obviously, I can't promise anything. maybe all the unlockables are rubbish).

You can pick a male or female base, and can choose various costume parts, with more being unlocked as you play, along with more attacks and weapons. At first, I thought there was an Earth Defence Force type situation going on, whereby items are unlocked at random when you finish a stage, but on closer inspection, it appears that each item has a specific unlock condition to be met. This is actually the one place where the language barrier was a problem, as the unlocks started to dry up a few stages in, and I couldn't figure out how to force more of them. It's only a small problem though, as early on, I unlocked a laser pistol and a kind of jumping splits kick, which are both incredibly effective at taking down both footsoldiers and bosses alike.

On the subject of the language barrier, it should also be noted that there are rumours of a European release of this game, from 505 Gamestreet, under the title "Power Fighters". However, though it's appeared on various release lists and so on, I've never seen a copy for sale online or off, nor have I seen any screenshots or footage, and no disc image has ever been ripped and uploaded to the internet as far as I'm aware, either. So I suspect that Power Fighters either doesn't exist at all, or if it does, only on some long-forgotten hard drive in Italy somewhere. Of course, if I'm wrong and it did actually get released, and you can prove it, please let me know.

In summary, The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero is almost an archetypal Simple Series game: it's cheap and repetitive, but also very charming and obviously made with love. It's best played in short bursts of one or two stages at a time, it would definitely be agonising to endure for longer sessions.

Seigi no Mikata (PS2)

Most tokusatsu-themed games, whether they're based on actual shows, or just inspired by the genre's aesthetic and concepts, are fighting games or beat em ups. That's what I was expecting from Seigi no Mikata, but it turned out to be something completely different: an adventure game that attempts to simulate the entire role of a main character in a tokusatsu show, not just the parts where they're transformed and fighting enemies. In fact, the game emulates the structure of a tokusatsu TV show in general: there are episodes rather than stages, and each episode had opening and closing sequences and an ad break in the middle! Furthermore, your goal isn't necessarily to win every instance of combat, but to achieve a minimum percentage of the TV ratings each week.

Before you get to doing any of that, though, you do get to choose the look of your hero's transformed state. It's not a super in-depth character creator, since you can just mix and match parts for arms, legs, torso and head, but it interesting in another way. All the parts you can pick are blatant homages to classic tokusatsu and anime shows like Gatchaman, Kikaider, and even going all the way back to the likes of Gekkou Kamen, the first Japanese TV superhero from all the way back in 1958.

So, if it's not all combat, what does this game actually entail? Mostly, wandering around a small Japanese town (as a side note, if you like low-poly renditions of small Japanese towns, and I know some of you do, this is a pretty good one), talking to people and sometimes helping them with small problems, like herding their cats, finding their dropped contact lenses, and so on. Talking to people and solving their problems gives very tiny ratings boosts, while standing still doing nothing causes them to plummet. Every few minutes, though, there'll be an event, which means you have to go to the right location before it starts. (Amazingly, for the entire first episode, I managed to do this every time, entirely by chance. After that though, I went and found a guide, just in case). An event might be just a conversation with the other characters on the show, a battle with some mooks or a villain, or sometimes both. During the conversations, there are usually multiple choices, that can affect the ratings, though they'll slowly rise all the time an event is happening no matter what you do.

As for the combat, it's a disappointment. It starts with a little button-mashing minigame to do decide who goes first, then whoever does go first gets to pick their ten attacks (they can be punches, kicks or throws). After that, the other side tries to guess which ten attacks the attacker chose so they can defend. The whole thing then plays out, and if both sides are still standing, it starts again, but with the roles of attacker and defender reversed, until one side falls. It's not exciting at all, but since this isn't an action game generally, I guess they didn't want any difficulty walls for the adventure game fans that were probably going to buy it. But even Shenmue's branching path-style QTBs were better than this.

Seigi no Mikata is a game that I really wanted to like, as it's clear a lot of love went into its creation, and it is of a very high quality and full of ideas. The problem is that it's just so boring to play! A lot of your time is spent wandering around waiting for the next event to happen, and the events themselves aren't particularly exciting, either. You might level the same criticisms at Shenmue, but I'd say the difference is that in Shenmue, you have to actually investigate to make the events happen, plus its depictions of 1980s Japan and Hong Kong are so richly textured and full of life that it can get by pretty well on its atmosphere alone. In summary, play Shenmue instead of this, sorry.

Shinseiki Evangelion: Battle Orchestra (PS2)

Considering what a huge merchandising juggernaut Neon Genesis Evangelion is, it's surprising that not a single one of the videogames based on it (as far as I'm aware) has ever been released outside Japan. The might have something to do with the fact that despite being a super robot show, most Evangelion games are text-heavy things like adventure games and child-rearing simulators, which don't have big fanbases in the west . But there are a few action games, like this one, and the one on N64, which have also been passed over for westward release.

A certain kind of fan might be a little upset with the above paragraph, thinking I'm not showing Evangelion the proper amount of respect and reverence by referring to it as a super robot show, but that's what it is, and furthermore, this game is similarly irreverent. For a start, it's a Smash Bros.-esque party fighting game, with platforms and weapons and so on (though all the weapons are realistic things like missiles and axes, no squeaky hammers or anything), and it uses characters and locations from not only the series itself, but also from the movie End of Evangelion. So you can have fights atop a bunch of navy ships in the ocean, in the flooded remains of Tokyo, and even in places like the Seele room where all those talking slabs hang out at say ominous things to each other. The best stage of all, however, is Terminal Dogma, the place where the angel Lilith is crucified, bleeding LCL. This stage also serves as the game's "Final Destination", being just a flat plain with no special features or gimmicks.

The game's story mode lets you play as  any of the five kids who pilot evas over the course of the series, and it goes pretty much as you expect: you just take part in battles from the show, one after another. More interesting are the versus and survival modes, though, as they allow you to play as the angels, as well as some other oddities, like the mass-produced Evas from EoE, and there's even a guest character in the form of the Gunbuster! (Though it must be a shrunken-down version, since the actual Gunbuster was on a significantly larger scale than the Evas and angels.) The best part of this is that the selection isn't limited to those angels that are vaguely anthropomorphic: the d8-shaped Ramiel, spherical Leilel, and just plain strange Sahaquiel are all present. I'm sure I've said in previous that I'm not a big fan of Smash-likes, but I think Battle Orchestra has enough weird stuff in it to be worth a look, and the inclusion of such strange playable characters adds a lot of appeal.

So yeah, I'm surprised this game isn't already better known, since it's one of the few Evangelion videogames that's totally playable without knowledge of Japanese, plus it's actually pretty good for what it is. I should also mention that on top of everything else, it looks amazing, a ton of effort has obviously gone into the presentation, both in battle and in the menus. It's a bit of a copout, but I'll just end by saying that if you're a fan of Evangelion, and not averse to having a bit of illy fun with it, you should totally track this game down. If not, you probably shouldn't bother.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 112: The Tousou Highway 2 ~Road Warrior 2050~

You have to admit, just looking at the title, that this game has a lot of potential right from the start. Of course, it's a Simple Series title and it's yet another game on this blog by Tamsoft, so I still approached with some caution, knowing that the higher I raised my hopes for a cool Mad Max knockoff game, the more likely they'd be dashed, and the game would turn out to be some awful fiddly rubbish.

Luckily, my fears were unfounded, and though the game's low budget did result in some minor problems, like all the stages looking the same, The Tousou Highway 2 is easily one of the best the Simple 2000 Series has to offer. The premise, as far as I can tell, is that in the post-apocalyptic future, your wife/sister/friend/some random woman is dying in Nagoya, and you have to drive your precious cargo of medicine to her from Tokyo in under four hours. Obviously, between the two cities there are an endless amount of goons riding motorbikes and armoured cars who want to stop you, though I have no idea way.So you drive across a number of stages, shooting enemies as you go, and that four hour time limit is in real time, though it doesn't count time you spend in the pause menu or the shop/pitstop screen.

 A few months ago, I played through the 2015 Mad Max game on PS4, and while most of the game was a fairly standard (though very pretty) map-tidying open world dealy, the vehicular combat was probably the best I've ever seen, especially during the convoy chases. Tousou Highway 2, being a low-budget game from nearly a decade before Mad Max came out, obviously can't match up to the newer game in terms of sophistication, but the thing is, after I'd finished Mad Max, I said "I wish there was a game that was just the convoy battles from this", and Tousou Highway 2 is pretty close to that!

It's a very very simple version of that, but still: you get to hurtle down the highway in a cool-looking post-apocalyptic car, constantly killing bandits, either by gunfire or just by smashing through them with your car, and it all takes place in the crumbling ruins of the twenty-first century. It feels fast, killing bad guys is fun and satisfying and it's just great all-round. Well, that part of the game is,at least. Once every stage or so, you'll have to stop your car and get out, because the bad guys have built a barricade. You go in the barricade and fight a whole bunch of goons on foot, sometimes accompanied by a heavily-armed boss. Once they're all dead, the barricade explodes and you can get back in you car and be on your merry way. It's not exactly terrible, but it does break the flow a little bit.

The only other problem I have with the game is that it's incredibly easy. You hardly take any damage (which is represented by an image of the vial of medicine gradually cracking), and when you do, there are more healing items around for you to stockpile than you'll ever need. Furthermore, the time limit is no challenge, either, as on my first attempt I finished the game with over an hour and a half left over. But even taking those few small qualms into account, I definitely recommend seeking this game out and giving it a go. It's excellent.

Space War Attack (PS2)

When I first started playing Space War Attack (also known as Simple 2000 Series Vol. 78: The Uchuu Taisensou), I had planned to liken it to a videogame version of an Asylum movie. But as I played it more, I realised how unfair that was: as much as I love The Asylum, the name conjures, in most people's minds, an image of incompetence and lack of imagination. Now I'd say that's unfair as a start, since The Asylum have made plenty of legitimately enjoyable movies and TV shows and it'd take a tedious snob to deny that. Actually, Space War Attack IS like an Asylum film in videogame form: it takes a simple concept and a low budget, and combines them with a shameless kind of creative enthusiasm to create something that's a ton of fun.

Anyway, it's a 3D action-oriented combat flight sim-type thing, in which you fly around, firing locked-on missiles at enemies and so on. The hook, though, is the enemies themselves: while most stages will have a squadron of enemy fighters getting in the way, which look a lot like organic fighter jets (kind of like the ones in Space Harrier II), your main target enemies are a bit more exciting. There's bigger fighter/bomber aliens, which look kind of like the Toho kaiju Battra, there's giant scorpions and snakes, meteors, enormous flying mechanical starfish, and so on. A lazier person would sum it up as being "Earth Defence Force in a fighter jet!", but though there's a lot of undeniable similarities, the atmosphere and feel is totally different, in some vague, hard to describe way.

I think special note should also be made of the settings for the stages. Though it does partake in the traditional Simple Series cost-saving trick of reusing maps at different times of the day, those few maps are really great-looking. In the stages I've played so far, I've seen, among others, a city in the middle of the desert, a series of super-futuristic solar/hydro power plant facilities in the ocean, and a bigger city that's built on a concentric series of artificial islands surrounding a huge volcano emerging from the sea. It's all very futuristic, and more importantly, with its gleaming cities, blue skies and apparent commitment to renewable energy, it is as the Overwatch slogan goes, a future worth saving.

In my review of Savage Skies, I compained that a common problem I've had playing this genre is that you often end up chasing a little arrow pointing to the nearest enemy off the edge of the screen. I don't know how the developers did it, but that's not something I've had much of a problem with in Space War Attack, and it's even better when you unlock long-range lock-on missiles a few stages in. It seems that the developers Bit-Town are responsible for a few other PS2 flight sims, and I may well seek them out at some point in the future, so high is this game's quality.

Space War Attack is a great game: a cool setting, and a ton of fun to play. The downside is that it's a good game from the Simple 2000 series that got a PAL release, which means that copies are hard to get hold of, and as such, there's currently none of them on Amazon, and the cheapest on Ebay is about £50. You might have better luck looking for the Japanese version, though.

Ichigeku Sachuu!! Hoihoi-san (PS2)

In the year 20XX, the face of pest control is small robots with live weapons, just like in the 2000AD series Banzai Battalion, though unlike Banzai Battalion, this is a Japanese videogame from 2003, so the robot in question is a tiny maid. Anyway, I think the plot is that you're some guy who's bought one of these robots and set up a small business for himself hiring it out to kill the insects in his neighbours' houses, since Japan is a warm, humid country and therefore, full of huge insects with no respect for human privacy.

It's nota very good business model, though, since the fees he collects for this task barely cover the cost of ammunition for Hoihoi's guns. You will be able to afford the best melee weapon after only a few stages, and that coupled with a mastery of sneaking up on the bugs that like to run away, will save you a lot of bullets, and therefore money.

I haven't really explained the game at all yet, have I? It's a 3D third person shooter, that's very much from a bygone age. We've all complained about how a lot of modern 3D games feel very similar, due to them all using near-identical control schemes where the left analogue stick moves your character, and the right moves the camera around them. Hoihoi-san is from the days when a lot of developers hadn't really figured this out yet, so while the left analogue stick does move Hoihoi around, the right stick does nothing at all, the player's only control of the camera being the L1 button putting it directly behind Hoihoi. If you're wondering about aiming your guns, well that's all automatic: if you're near an enemy, a red crosshair will appear on it, and you can shoot them.

The incredibly dated controls aside, this is a pretty good game! It's nothing special, but it looks alright, it's cute, and smashing bugs is very satisfying. Another thing to note about the bugs is that having them be normal-sized and shrinking the player down to their level is far creepier than the typical videogame approach of having normal-sized protagonists and giant bugs. And though all the characters and the stages are cartoony, the bugs are fairly realistic-looking, making them even creepier. The stages are obviously all rooms in people's houses: living rooms, basements, kitchens, etc. You can tell that you're in a different person's house on different stages, though, as different people have different sets of belongings and tastes in decor, which is another nice little touch.

Though it isn't a bad game, I can't really recommend playing Ichigeku Sachii!! Hoihoi-san. Like I've said, it's incredibly dated, and it's also pretty frustrating at first, until you get used to all its little idiosyncracies, and there just isn't anything about it that's interesting or exciting enough to get past its faults.

Dark Native Apostle (PS2)

When Bomberman: Act Zero came out for the 360 in 2006, it was universally loathed, and rightfully so. But an annoying point about the coverage it got is that so much of the negativity was focussed on the concept of a gritty sci-fi Bomberman game, that it was barely mentioned that the game itself was absolute garbage, with only one arena, no local multiplayer, and a single player mode that consisted of playing the same stage 100 times in a row. The thing is, it wasn't the first attempt at a gritty Bomberman for the 21st century. Though it doesn't bear the name of the esteemed multiplayer franchise, Dark Native Apostle was published in Japan by Hudson Soft, and features a protagonist with the ability to drop small timed explosives wherever he goes. (Coincidentally, it was developed by recurring Lunatic Obscurity favourites Tamsoft!)

It's not a multiplayer Vs. arena game, though, but takes the attack mechanic from the Bomberman series and applies to, of all things, a blend of survival horror with the occasional bit of light 3D platforming. Well, "survival horror" in the respect that the plot involves genetic engineering and bio-weapons, and that a lot of time is spent running back and forth finding keys, putting disks into computer terminals and flicking power switches. There isn't anything actually scary in the game, your main method of attack has infinte ammo and there's an ample supply of healing items.

So yeah, you're some genetic engineered bio-weapon guy with amnesia, and you go into the labs where you were made to try and find out your past. It's pretty much the exact same plot as a billion other games that came out between 1996 and 2005. The combat aspect of the game is incredibly easy: most enemies will stand still while firing at you or changing direction, so you can just drop a bomb at their feet to dispatch them. You can hold the square button down and walk away when you drop a bomb to give it a longer fuse, but I've gotten a fair few areas into the game, and beaten a few bosses and this ability has not yet been useful once.

The puzzle-solving aspect of the game is a lot more difficult, though. Well, I think it is, it might just be my being a bit thick. Though you are expected to comb every room you can go into to find every item and clue that might lead to you opening more rooms and progressing. There is one interesting feature the game has involving the upgrades to your powers: you can equip up to four "chips", each of which improves an aspect of your abilities, like the power of your bombs or you max HP or whatever. But, by equipping them in the right order, you can also gain special abilities! Some of these are almost universally useful, like the dash ability. Some are useful in a few certain places, like the ability to see invisible objects. Some are useful in literally one part of the game and then never again, like the ability to drop blinding flash bombs, that only seem to affect the big purple lizard boss you fight in the sewers early in the game. The fact that you often don't get the chips needed to acquire a special ability until around the time you get the note telling you about it is a disappointment, too: playing a second time around with prior knowledge of all the "recipes" could have possibly led to a sneaky bit of sequence breaking, maybe?

Dark Native Apostle isn't a great game, but it's not a particularly bad one either. I guess the core concept alone is interesting enough to be worth a look, though. An obvious comparision to make is to the Playstation game Silent Bomber, which I like a lot more than DNA, though it is a pure all-out action game, so it's not an entirely fair comparision to make.

Savage Skies (PS2)

Some concepts are so obvious that you can't believe that hadn't been done earlier, and Savage Skies is one of those very concepts: a fantasy combat flight sim, with mythical creatures instead of fighter jets. It was apparently going to feature Ozzy Osbourne early in development, too, which probably would have got it a bit more attention. (More than none, I mean. I'd never heard of this game at all before picking up a copy for next-to -nothing on a whim  few weeks ago.)

We might never know what the Ozzied-up version of the game might have been like, but the version we got has a pretty boring, generic fantasy plot, about a good kingdom and an evil horde and another horde that's neither good nor evil but they are weird-looking, and they're all at war with each other. You can pick any one of the three to play as, and they each have a series of missions to fly, as well as their own unique set of monsters. You don't get to pick your monster, though, each mission has one set to it. On the plus side, this means that there are a lot of them and they're all different, both visually and in the weapons with which they're equipped.

The good guys are the least interesting, having a fleet mainly made up of the obvious fantasy suspects: dragons, rocs, pegasi, and so on. The weird faction have weird steeds: flying eyeball monsters, flying manta rays, and other non-mammalian-looking monsters. The bad guys, of course, have typically evil-looking rides: giant bats, a giant locust made of bones, and my favourite of all the monsters I've seen so far, a giant flying rat armed with "vomit spray" and "plague breath". I love how childishly disgusting that guy is! I should also make mention of the stages themselves, which look amazing: mountains and deserts and huge majestic castles, the developers really made the most of the setting, giving you lots of picturesque locales to fly around and over that obviously would never appear in a traditional flight sim.

Anyway, it's not all fun: none of the monsters I've ridden so far have homing weapons, and the enemy flyers take a ton of hits before going down, so unfortunately, this means you spend a lot of time flying round and round in circles chasing an arrow at the edge of the screen pointing towards your nearest foe. Not every stage is like that, though, and some of the monsters do have weapons that make the process a lot less painful, like high-powered close-range breath weapons, or weapons that slow the enemy's movement. There is a level skip cheat, though, and I've found the best way to get the most enjoyment out of Savage Skies is to just skip a stage as soon as it gets boring or frustrating. When the game told me the next mission was a race, I skipped right away. There's something incredibly frustrating and joyless about race missions in non-racing games.

So yeah, Savage Skies is a game that mainly stands on the twin pillars of looking really nice and having a great concept. If I'd paid full price for it, I probably wouldn't be happy, but for the prices it goes for nowadays, you can totally have a lot of fun with it in conjunction with the level skip cheat.

Maze Action (PS2)

It wasn't long ago that I proclaimed Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita to be the worst game ever featured on this blog, but in Maze Action (Also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 8: Gekitou! Meiro King), I've found a fairly robust challenger to that title. It does fall short, though, in that while playing Maze Action is a completely miserable experience, and it's a pretty cheap-looking title, even for a Simple Series game, it does at least feel like it's just a bad game, and not a personal insult from the developers directed at the player. (Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita really was that bad).

The plot and the mechanics both seem to have been inspired by the popular comic Hunter X Hunter, specifically the hunter exam story arc. You are one of the four of this year's candidates to have reached the final exam at the hero academy, but there can only be one graduate, so you've got to face each other in a contest of skill and strength to determine who that'll be. So single player mode has four stages: you face off against each of the three characters you didn't pick, and then you fight a copy of your own character. It seems likely that there's probably a fifth stage with a final boss character, but you'd honestly need the patience of a saint to bother playing long enough to find out.

The mechanical influence from HxH is also from the hunter exam part, as the contests in which you're place see you running around a maze, trying to be first to find three matching keys and getting to your opponent's starting pad. The twist is that while you need three red keys and your opponent needs three blue, you start with a blue key and they start with a red. So, just like that part on the island where all the hunter candidates have to run around trying to steal each other's number badges, while protecting their own, you will be forced, at some point, to fight your opponent. There are various items littering the mazes, along with the keys. There's weapons, of both melee and projectile varieties, and there's traps. There's also some traps permanently planted around the place, too.

This could have all addedup into a fairly decent game, but the problem is all in the execution. Moving around feels awkward, combat is haphazard and unsatisfying, and it just generally doesn't feel very good to play. It's frustrating, because it also feels like the developers were really inspired and really wanted to make a simplified videogame version of the hunter exam, but they just didn't make it enjoyable to play.

So yeah, Maze Action is a terrible game and you definitely shouldn't play it. But I can see what they were trying to do, at least. That's something, right?

Project Minerva Professional (PS2)

It's odd that this game got a western release, since it's a weird kind of celebrity vehicle thing for Norika Fujiwara, an actress who isn't well-known in the west at all (the only thing that westerners might know on her IMDB page is the live action movie based on the comic Boys Over Flowers). Even more oddly, the game's opening credits list er as "Star and Planner", though I assume her role in planning was just agreeing to be in a game, and possibly having the enemies be robots because she didn't want to be seen as a bloodthirsty mercenary? Or maybe it really was a passion project for her, and she genuinely had a bunch of ideas for an action game in which she wanted to star?

If this game was made in the west, about a western model/actress/general celebrity, it'd probably be very different. Look at Kim Kardashian's game, for example: a phone game about fashion and fame and all that sort of thing. Project Minerva Professional, by contrast, is a military/sci-fi themed squad-based 3D shooter. Norika "plays" a woman named Alicia, who is the leader of a military task force charged with saving humanity from the evil robots manufactured by Minerva Corporation. This is done in a series of missions (I hear there's over a hundred, though I've only played through about six of them), with various typical squad shooter objectives: kill a number of enemies, plant bombs in certain locations, rescue the hostages, and so on.

Now, though I do think it's a bit of a shame that almost all modern 3D action games use a near-identical dual analogue control scheme, I think the fact that Project Minerva came out before that layout had been standardised is what really hurts it the most, more than the useless squad members running around like headless chickens, and more than the very simple (and Simple Series-esque) stage layouts and mission parameters. (Though it wasn't originally released as a Simple Series game, it really does feel like one, and actually got a rerelease a bit later as The Simple 2000 Ulitmate Series Vol. 23). Alicia is moved with the left stick, the right shoulder buttons are used for aiming your gun and looking through your binoculars, and the left shoulder buttons are used for centering the camera behind Alicia, which is the only direct control of the camera you get. Another typical (and hated) trait the game has in common with a lot of Simple Series games is the insane level of grinding. Weapons and armour are slowly made available in the shop, and once they're available, they still need to be bought, with insane prices that require several stages to be completed before they can be met.

You might wonder what the right analogue stick is doing, and it does nothing besides being a duplicate of the controls mapped to the d-pad, which are used for selecting and giving orders to your underlings. There's lots of other weird quirks in this game too, like how enemies don't appear on the radar unless you look at them through your binoculars and "mark" them, which has to be done for each enemy individually. You also have very little offence or defence at short ranges. There are some short range weapons, but they aren't great, and  you can't move and shoot at the same time: to shoot, you hold down R2 to look through your weapon's scope, aim with the left stick (so you can't move at the same time), and shoot with the square button. To make things worse, the direction you'll be looking in when you hold R2 isn't necessarily going to be the direction the camera is pointing in beforehand, making it very difficult to quickly aim and shoot at enemies. Unlike the clunkiness of Deep Water, this awkwardness doesn't add anything to the game, it is just annoying awkwardness.

Having said all that, there is some fun to be had in Project Minerva Professional. Since the late 90s, it's been a widely held opinion that there's a certain satisfying thrill to be had in shooting far away enemies through a scope, and that does still apply in this game, even through all the clunkiness of the controls and the weirdness of the camera. There's still dozens, and probably even hundreds of better games that offer the same thrill, though, so unless you really love the aesthetic of early PS2 games, you should just go for one of those over this one.

Deep Water (PS2)

I bought this game over three years ago, and at the time, I had a little play of it, quickly got lost and confused, and put it on the shelf to rot. Recently, I decided to give it another chance, and was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting game with lots of cool ideas. The joy didn't last long, but I'll get to that later.

Also known as The Simple 2000 Series Vol. 54: The Taikai Kemono, Deep Water is an open-world sailing/monster-hunting game in which you sail around a flooded world, going from port to port, taking on missions and buying weaponry and fuel. The world's pretty odd, as it seems to be a post-apocalyptic flooded world, with the tops of ruined buildings peeking up out of the water in some places, but there's actually lots of land, all of it surrounded by steep, very high cliffs. I wonder if there's people living up there, who shun the ocean-faring peasants below. Anyway, as you're sailing around, you get attacked by sharks and pirates (on silly little one-person cannon-boat things) and other angry sealife, and occasionally, you'll take on the task of fighting a giant monster, the giant monster fights being the game's main draw.

The mechanics of playing the game are actually pretty interesting themselves. You never really set foot off your boat, but you are a one-person crew and the game tries to replicate this experience by having you walk up and down your boat to do different things. For example, to actually sail around, you have to go to the steering wheel and controls in the middle of the boat, while to look at the map, change weapons or cool the engines, you have to go to the storage bins at the back of the boat. During combat, you'll be running around the deck aiming your rifle at your assailants, and during bossfights you'll occasionally have to man the harpoon gun at the front.

What I've been avoiding talking about is the huge, absurd, totally deliberate flaw in the game's design: the obscene amount of back-tracking, which would be bad enough itself, but it's vaguely directed back-tracking too. You'll quickly learn that when you see a harbour mentioned by anyone at another harbour, even in passing, it means you have to go there to make the story progress, even if that means twenty minutes of sailing across the map to somewhere you went near the start of the game. Add to this the fact that fuel is absurdly expensive, so the game also expects you to spend hours grinding random enemies to be able to afford refills (though I've found that it's far more efficient in cases where you're low on both fuel and money to just let enemies sink your ship. you'll reappear at the last harbour you visited with full HP and fuel, and half your money gone, which is almost definitely less than the cost of the fuel).

This time-wasting and vagueness mean that I've only been able to fight one of the game's much-vaunted giant monsters. I've received the missions to fight two more, but in one case, the area where they're said to appear are still blocked by barriers, and in the other, I've found the area, but apparently there's someone, somewhere I need to speak to to make it appear, and after a solid hour of tedious nautical errand-running, I just totally lost patience.

I think I can semi-recommend Deep Water. The way it handles the solo sailing is pretty cool, and the fact that it'll probably be dirt cheap means that you're not losing much by giving up on it when it starts trying your patience.