OOPARTS (Arcade)

 There are two very important things to know about this game. First, it was never actually released, though the ROM surfaced online lin 2020, and was added to MAME in 2021. Second (and most important), when the legendary arcade magazine Gamest previewed it, they misread the logo on the title screen and referred to it as FARTS. Anyway, it's a brick-smashing game with a few interesting quirks.

 

Mechanically, there's quite a lot going on. The game solves the age-old problem the genre has of spending long agonising minutes trying to hit that last black to clear a stage by simply having a different goal. Instead of clearing every block away, you instead have to do ...something (I haven't entirely figured out the conditions, but I think they have to do with lighting various pinball-style rollover spots around the screen) that makes a boss appear, then kill the boss by hitting it with the ball repeatedly.

 

There's a few other little things in there too, like how you have limited-use magic, that has various effects like summoning an extra ball that kind of roams around breaking stuff, a bird thing that flies around attacking enemies, or a wave of energy that slowly descends the screen, stopping the ball from falling past it for a few seconds. There's also the fact that you can ram the sides of the screen at full speed to perform a pinball-style nudge, changing the ball's trajectory. Do it enough times in a single stage, and you'll smash through the wall, allowing you to insantly loop from one side of the screen to the other!

 

There's a lot to love about OOPARTS aesthetically, too! All the screens outside of actual gameplay look amazing, for a start. That is, the title screen, stage select, intermissions between stages, that kind of thing. Then the stages themselves look pretty good, too! They aren't just a bunch of blocks on an abstract background, but seem like actual locations: bits of countryside littered with stone cairns, ancient temples with polished marble blocks, and so on. Everything about the way the game looks and sounds is totally dedicated to portraying this world of ancient ruins and lost magic technology.

 

There's not much more to say about OOPARTS, other than that it's a really high quality game, and it's a shame it never saw an official release. It's out there now unofficially, though, and I definitely recommend giving it a try!

Crazy Construction (3DS)

 This was one of the first games I got on my original 3DS, and I'd actually completely forgotten about it until pretty recently (I replaced my original with a New 3DS a few years ago, lured in by the system's potential as an emulation device). You might think that any 3DS game would be too recent to feel nostalgia towards, but once I loaded up Crazy Construction (also known as Choukousou Kenzou Keikaku Buildinger) really made me feel something for those halcyon days of seven years ago.

 

It's a falling stuff puzzle game with the reverse goal compared to most: you have to pile items up until they go past a certain height, and maintain that height for three seconds. The challenge comes from the fact that the items are a wide range of objects with many irregular shapes: furniture, junk, vehicles, moai heads, and so on. You can also rotate them a full 360 degrees, rather than just through ninety degree increments. So you have to pile these items up high, balancing them on top of each other, trying to avoid them falling off of the platform on which they're being stacked.

 

Of course, there's also a score to chase, and this comes in the form of item weight. Every item has a weight, mostly around two-to-four, and you have to have a pile weighing at least forty to clear a stage, with better grades being awarded for going beyond that. As well as that, each set of stages has obstacles, like wind, thunderclouds, birds, as well as an enemy character, who will periodically appear to use their power and hinder your progress. The problem with all of these things is that basically do the same thing in slightly different ways: they take away your ability to control the falling items as well as you like. It's a boring way to add challenge, and I would have vastly preferred something like changing the goals for each set of stages, adding objects that are harder to balance, and so on. Just taking away the player's ability to control the game is just no fun at all.

 

Crazy Construction isn't a bad game, just a flawed one. Just kind of mindlessly stacking items on a handheld while you watch TV is pretty nice, it's just a shame the challenges they added tend towards the mean-spirited and player-unfriendly, rather than actually being challenging. Also, the plot is about a bynch of construction androids rebelling against the evil corporation who made them, and the corporation sending other androids to bring them back under the heel, which I'm pretty sure is a Kamen Rider parody. Which is nice.

Ma Cheon Ru (Arcade)

 You're all familiar with Shanghai, right? The game about picking up pairs of Mahjong tiles out of a big pile in the right order? Ma Cheon Ru is based on a kind of variant of that. I can't find a name for this variant, though I think the most well-known games to feature it are the Dragon World series by IGS. 

 

How it works is that like in Shanghai, there is a specially-arranged pile of Mahjong tiles and you have to pick up all the tiles, with restrictions on which tiles can be picked up. Also like in Shanghai, the main restiction is that you can only pick up tiles that aren't covered by other tiles, and which have at least one of their horizontal sides untouched by other tiles, too. You aren't trying to match pairs to remove them from the game, though.

 

It's a pretty simple concept, but it's one that's kind of hard to explain in words. You have to match trios of identical tiles, but you don't have to pick them up together. Instead, you can hold up to six tiles in your hand (picking up a seventh that isn't the third tile of a set results in a game over), and tiles vanish from your hand when you've made a set of three. Get rid of all the tiles in the time limit and you finish the stage and go onto the next one. It's a genre I've only seen in arcade games, and pretty much all of them ramp up the difficulty very very quickly.

 

What makes Ma Cheon Ru stand out though, is the bonus stages (if you play it after reading this, I recommend going into the settings in MAME and setting it so they appear after every stage instead of after every third stage). There's nine different bonus stages that take the form of Tanto R-style minigames, with a wide variety of subject matter, like shooting parachutists, repeatedly punching a guy in the face, throwing objects at ugly people, and so on. They break things up pretty well, and you can get power ups for the main game if you score enough points in them. 

 

In fact, it seems like a lot more care and attention went into the bonus stages than the main game itself, and I wonder if the devs actually wanted to make a minigame compilation, but their publishers said that they needed to make a tile-matching puzzle game instead? We'll probably never know. Either way, I don't think this little subgenre is actually as fun as regular old vanilla Shanghai, but if you're going to play one of these games, Ma Cheon Ru at least has some mildly amusing bonus stages in its favour.

Gal Pani X (PC)

You can probably tell from the title that this is a fangame of the infamously seedy series of dirty arcade Qix-likes Gals Panic, but it's actually a double fangame, since the art you're revealing in the stages features characters from To Heart. If you're unfamiliar with To Heart, it's a multimedia franchise with manga, anime, visual novels and other stuff, and around the turn of the century, it was enjoying a similr kind of popularity among doujin circles as the Touhou series has in modern times. I don't think it was ever a big mainstream hit, but it definitely had a lot of fanworks based on it!

 

I actually like Gal Pani X a lot more than I like any of the actual Gals Panic games, though! Part of that might just be nostalgia, since when I got my first PC in 2005, I loaded it up with a whole bunch of freeware doujin games, and Gal Pani X was among them, but there's other reasons too. Firstly, none of the art in this game is actually dirty, it's just cute, so there's none of the unseemly grime associated with Gals Panic. Secondly, despite Gal Pani X mixing in elements of bullet hell shooting games, it feels a lot more fair to play, and it should only take a couple of attempts before you can get to the end of the game in a single credit. Thirdly, and most difficult to explain, it just feels really smooth to play. Moving your ship around, and expanding your area of control just feels really satisfying, like using a knife to cut through something with just a little bit of resistance.

 

So, in case you're totally unfamiliar with Qix-likes in general, or Gals Panic in particular, Qix-likes are games where you have a field inhabited by a large threat (and sometimes some smaller sub-threats), and your job is to eat away at that area, by leaving your safe zone and drawing shapes. Successfully come back to your safe zone without either your or the line you've drawn getting hit, and the area you drew around is added to your safe zone. Any enemies caught in that area are destroyed, too. The Gals Panic series added the twist that you can see the silhouette of a woman in the field, and rather than having to claim a percentage of the field as a whole, you have to claim a percentage of the silhouetted area only.

 

Gal Pani X builds further on this with its elements taken from shooting games. Not only do the enemies fire dense bullet patterns at you, but these patterns can come into your safe zone and kill you there (though I don't think there are any enemy attacks that can destroy parts of your safe zone like some stages in the later Gals Panic sequels have). So you're really only safe from touching the enemies while you're in there. Another element taken from shooting games is grazing, whereby you score extra points for getting really close to enemy bullets without actually letting them hit you. Though in Gal Pani X, it's not limited to enemy bullets, and you get points for grazing on pretty much everything: power ups, points items, bullets, the enemies themselves.

 

Gal Pani X is a game I recommend playing. It's freeware, but the developers' site went down many years ago now, so it might be a little harder to find now. But, surprisingly for such an old game, it runs in 64-bit Windows 10 without issue! Finally, on the subject of tracking down games, the developers of Gal Pani X, D5, also had a game that they didn't release as freeware, named Sispri Gauntlet. It was a bullet hell take on Gauntlet, starring characters from a novel series called Sister Princess. I've never been able to find more than the playable demo of it, and even that was a long long time ago. Please get in touch if you know where I might find the full game.

Tetris Giant (Arcade)

 I'm not totally sure if this game counts as obscure, but at the same time I'm thinking that it's going to mostly be arcade nerds that know about it, and even then, a lot of people will quickly write it off as a silly novelty game, and I think it deserves more than that. I'll also have to do something I haven't done on this blog in a long time: a disclaimer regarding this game's controls. The actual arcade version of Tetris Giant (also known as Tetris Dekaris) uses a projector dor its display, and is controlled by two gigantic joysticks at least the height of a human child. I, of course, have been emulating it on my laptop, and using a normal-sized USB Saturn controller. So the experiences I describe here are probably not exactly analogous to those of someone playing a real arcade machine.

 

I've also only ben playing single player, so I can't tell you about either the co-op or versus two player modes. Luckily, though, there are two single player modes, and both of them are a lot of fun. In both modes, there are some things that have been simplified to accomodate the unusual nature of the arcade version's controls: rather than the standard 10x20 block well, you instead have a 6x7 well, with the pieces being big and very brightly coloured. Furthermore, only when an entire piece crosses the line at the top does it count as a game over, partial pieces crossing the line are fine.

 

The first mode is line challenge mode, which is supposed to be the easier of the two modes, mainly because crossing the line doesn't end the game, it just erases the bottom few rows of blocks, so you're guaranteed at least two minutes of play. There's no scoring in this mode, and instead you're given two minutes to get as many lines as you can, with extra seconds added for clearing multiple lines at once. It's fun, but the lack of scores, and with it the lack of a high score table damages its long term appeal.

 

Luckily, the other mode, which tries to scare off timid players with a warning that it's for experts only, is score challenge. It's entirely about scoring as many points as you can before you get a game over or you reach two hundred lines. This mode does have a high score table, which features prominently as you play. It records the top one thousand scores, and it appears onscreen beside the well as a giant tower that you ascend as your score increases. The background fits the ascension theme too, starting at the bottom of the ocean, gradually rising up past skyscrapers, the sky itself, and up past the moon and into deep space. This mode is the meat of the game, and it's very addictive. A credit will only last me about five minutes, and I've still managed to play hours and hours of it. 

 

Even (or maybe especially?) without the giant gimmick of the arcade cabinet, Tetris Giant has still easily come to be one of my favourite versions of Tetris, and I definitely recommend giving it a try yourself. It's unlikely, but I hope it someday gets a ported to  handheld at some point, or at least a handheld Tetris game comes out that includes a mode that plays like it. One last thing to mention is that one essential thing you should do before you play (assuming you're playing via emulation) is to go into the service menu and change the music option from "instrumental" to "japanese songs". Trust me, this massively enhances an already great game.

Suho Jeonsa (Master System)

 Pretty much every block-breaking game that's less than thirty-five years old has some kind of special gimmick. Looking at the two games I consider to be the best of the genre, Prism Land Story has its crazy stacking power-ups, and Puchi Charat has the competitive element and the general application of (a modified version of) the Puzzle Bobble 2 rules, for example. Suho Jeonsa (also known as Suho Cheonsa and Power Brick)'s got a few ideas up its sleeve, and it somehow manages to have a similar structure to a more well-known game from a few years later.

 

Bascially, the stages in Suho Jeonsa are split into to halves: the first half has you breaking bricks in the time-worn manner (though for some reason, instead of being at the bottom of the screen, you're on the left side f it?), though the aim isn't to break every block, but to break one specific double-sized block in the centre of the screen. Every block, centre or otherwise, takes two hits to break, which is annoying, but they did at least put a little bit of charm into this element. Every stage has a theme, like animals, or cakes, or whatever. There's even an emoji stage, which is surprising in a game from 1994! But anyway, the first time you hit a block, it changes somehow, in keeping with the theme, like the animal blocks fall over, with their feet pointing at the camera, tubes of paint get squeezed out, and so on.

 

The second half of each stage has you fighting a boss, which will appear in the form of a big weird thing (still sticking to the theme of the stage, though), that randomly hovers around the screen, occasionally shooting an instant death shot. You kill the bosses just by hitting them with the ball a bunch of times, and they don't really ever get any harder. Their presence does make Suho Jeonsa kind of feel like a weird primitive version of Psikyo's 2001 arcade game Gunbarich. While the bosses never get harder, the actual stages do, though in an annoying, unfair-feeling way: they gradually start with rows of blocks closer and closer to the left edge of the screen, giving you a smaller and smaller amount of space to work with.

 

There's not much else to say about Suho Jeonsa, except maybe that the aforementioned "Power Brick" version was released only in Australia as part of a four-in-one cartridge, that contained three other Korean-developed games. But Suho Jeonsa was the first version of the game I found, and there's no text in there anyoway, other than the intro, so I stuck with it. As for whether the game is worth playing, eh, it's okay. I wouldn't pay big money for it (being a decades-old unlicensed cartridge, I'm assuming it's probably at least fairly rare, in any of its forms), but it's a decent enough block-breaking game, on a system that doesn't have many, so it's worth a look via emulation if you're curious.

Noon - New Type Action Game (Playstation)

 Disregard the title: it's a puzzle game, not an action game, and it can be played by anyone, not just newtypes. It is, though, a game with a lot to hold your interest, and there's even a bit of mystery outside of the game itself to enjoy, too! But I'll get back to that later. First: the game itself.

 

It's a versus puzzle game, but not of the "stuff falling into a well" variety. Instead, you and your opponent are doing battle in a square arena. Near the top and bottom of the arena, there are two rectangular grids of coloured squares: one blue and one green. Also, coloured orbs randomly appear throughout the arena. Each player also has a timer, that starts at ten seconds, and depletes whenever every square of their coloured grid is full of orbs. If your counter reaches zero, you lose.

 

Now, you can push the orbs around, and there are two methods of clearing them from the arena. For the sake of convenience, I'll called them "squashing" and "smashing". First, squashing: if you push an orb against a wall or another orb, after a couple of seconds, it'll break and your power meter will fill up a little. When the power meter is full, you can use a super attack, which is different for each character: making a bunch of same-colloured orbs appear, making a few rainbow-coloured wild orbs appear, making a tond of junk orbs appear, and so on.

 

Smashing is a little more conventional: get three or more orbs of the same colour in a straight line and hit them with your melee attack, and they'll all disappear, and some junk orbs will appear in your opponent's grid. THere's also boss fights where your opponent has a health bar instead of a grid, and you damage them by smashing orbs. It all took me a couple of games to get ahold of, but once I did, I was having a pretty good time.

 

The presentation is also really high quality! There's a ton of excellent pixel art in here, for the characters, the stage backgrounds, and the story cutscenes. Even the main menu is pretty cool, being made of a big cog-power machine thing. This might not make sense, but it siimultaneously feels like both a medium-budget title, and a small creator-driven passion project.  Which leads nicely into that mystery I mentioned earlier!

 

Before the titles screen, along with all the usual company logos you'd expect to see at the start of a videogame, there's also a plain black screen with the white text ""Kouji Oono Original Version 1993", and every mention of copyright includes a 1996 copyright for Microcabin, and a 1993 copyright for Kouji Oono. Now, the obvious part of all this is that the Playstation version of Noon is a remake of a game made in 1993, by Kouji Oono. THe mystery is the fact that all my searching hasn't been able to turn up any information on either the pre-Playstation version of the game, or its creator.

 

I have a few assumptions and educated guesses, at least: if the game was commercially released, it wasn't on any consoles, since  there would be some documentation of it online somewhere, since pretty much every official console game release is documented, and almost all are ripped and uploaded too. My guess is that it could have been released on a microcomputer, since the gaps in generally available knowledge in that field are significantly bigger than the gaps in knowledge of console games. My guess is the X68000, based on nothing, really, except that the game itself jst has a kind of intangible X68000 feel to it. As for Kouji Oono, I could only find a short list of games he had development credits in. So short, in fact, that neither version of Noon was among them. The only other solution I can think of is that the 1993 game had a different title, in which case the only chance we have of finding it is to play every Microcabin game released in 1993, and hoping it's one of them.

 

Mystery aside, Noon is a fun, exciting game, as well as being pretty unique and vety aesthetically pleasing. It's definitely worth your time, and I recommend giving it a try.

Sabnack (X68000)

 There's something about the title of this game that's just so ugly, isn't there? Look at it: Sabnack. Ugh. The game itself doesn't look very nice, either, considering it's a commercial release on the X68000, a computer known for having amazing looking ports of arcade games years before consoles could really manage it. But let's not hold those things against it, as a game it's actually alright. In fact, it manages to make a Sokoban-style game actually interesting!

 

I usually find the block-pushing action of Sokoban games as embodying a combination of negative traits. Right from the start, they're usually too difficult to even get ahold on them, and you couple this with the fact that they're often literally about pushing boxes in a warehouse and it's all so off-putting and unrewarding that I just don't want to figure out how to get further into them.

 

Sabnack solves both issues! It opens with stages that are deceptively easy, teaching you how all the game's elements work and interact with each other, before gradually turning up the difficulty as you go on. I managed to get through eight whole stages before it got too hard for me! 

 

You play as a little man in a cape, and you can go up to statues and bring them to life, so they follow you, until getting stuck behind a wall or something makes them go more than one space away from you, at which time they urn back into statues. The goal of each stage is to take the fairy to the exit, and turn her back into a statue. But there are also enemies in each stage, and if any of them touch you or an un-statued fairy, you fail (though you get infinite lives, so it's not too bad). There are other statues around, too, like knights, who destroy enemies with whom they come into contact, and guys that look like wizards, whose purpose I haven't been able to figure out. So each stage uses these elements, along with various different kinds of enemies that each have their own movement rules, to create all kindss of different challenges for the player. It's that "purity" thing I've talked about before.

 

However, just like with puzzle platformers, I have to put my hands up and admit that this is a genre of game I just don't get along with. If you do, it definitely seems like a high-quality, well-designed iteration of the concept that's worth giving a shot. A cop out of a conclusion, but there it is.

Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai Taisen Puzzle-dama (SNES)

When looking out for more obscure material for this blog, it sometimes pops up in some strange places. In this case, for example, there's a file on textfiles.com from 1992 which lists the anime airing at that time on Japanese TV, including the times and channels, along with a short description of most of the shows. Most amusingly, Dragonball Z is described as "arcade-style beat em up", but another one that stood out to me was the description to a show I've never seen and had never previously heard of: Tsuyoshi  Shikkari Shinasai, described as "family anime with The Slap". A little bit of searching revealed that the show itself didn't look interesting at all, but that it did have a SNES game.

 

The game itself is so generic that you could almost consider it the platonic ideal of competitive puzzle games. Coloured orbs fall from the 'bove in pairs, and if three of the same colour touch, they disappear. The main tactic is to set up chains so that lots of junk blocks fill up your opponent's pit. The one unique mechanical touch is that the junk blocks take the form of the regular orbs trapped in transparent cubes. The cubes disappear when orbs are cleared next to them. As a result, any character that dumps junk blocks all in the same colour is at a massive disadvantage, since if three of the same coloured orbs get freed from junk blocks together, they'll also match up, and they'll free the ones next to them, and so on. This kind of thing can instantly change the tide of a match and destroy an opponent in one go.

 

The presentation of the game is unique in its blandness, though, which is a direct result of the license: all the characters are friendly, middle class suburbanites in jumpers. Plus a dog. It's kind of funny that some people in the west have this stereotype of all Japanese cartoons being crazy, loud action shows, when here we have an anime license that looks like it could be based on some kind of animated adaptation of a cosy BBC sitcom. 

 

There isn't really anything else to say about Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai. Mechanically, it's so generic that the only reason you'd ever want to choose it over literally any other competitive puzzle game is if you're a big fan of the source material, and I can't imagine there's many readers of this blog that fit that description.

Pyramid Magic (Mega Drive)

 

 It's yet another puzzle platformer, even though every time I need to mention I'm not a fan of the genre. On the plus side, I have at least realsied that there are things to like bout them. For example, they definitely adhere to the idea of "purity" I've talked about in past reviews, as they're pretty much all made up of a small number of easily-identifiable parts that have a very specific purpose. 

 

This especially applies to Pyramid Magic, as it was a download title, and as you might imagine, a download title in 1991 really did have to be economical with the filesizes. So, every stage is made up of seven different kinds of thing (well, every stage I saw, at least): the blocks that make up the walls, floor, and ceiling, the blocks that you can pick up and move around, three kinds of boxes that have to be opened in order (the wooden box has the key for the red box, whih has the key for the green box,  which contains the magic... thing that banishes the ghost blocking the exit), and of course, the player character himself and the aforementioned exit-blocking ghost.

 

So obviously, the game centres around moving the stone blocks around so that you can get to the exit, making sure you open wach of the three boxes in order along the way. Your character is two blocks high, and can jump two blocks high. He can carry one block at a time, and can move and drop blocks in increments half a block wide. You can only crawl throgh one-block-high gaps if you walk into them while carrying a block, and if you fall off an edge while carrying a block, it'll crush you to death. There's your basic elements, nd of course, they're arranged in increasingly complex ways, and there's usually one specific solution to each stage you have to figure out.

 

Like I always say with these games, it's really not for me, but if you like them, maybe you'll like this one. However, due to the circumstances of this game's release, the presentation is significantly more spartan than you mighht be used to, but maybe the curiosity of those circumstances is compensation enough for you? And if you do play and enjoy Pyramid Magic, you'll also like Pyramid Magic II, which is essentially just more stages of the same game. Pyramid Magic III is a little different, adding a breakable urn to the mix, and I couldn't even figure out what the goal of the first stage in that one was.

Sutte Hakkun (SNES)

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not very good at platform puzzle games, nor do I really enjoy playing them very much. Still, I occasionally give one a try, to see if it'll click with me. The only one I can think of that I really liked was Samurai Kid on Game Boy Color, and even that cleverly disguised itself as an action game. Sutte Hakkun is one such attempt, being a puzzle platformer released on the SNES in 1997, either through Satellaview, or through the Nintendo Power download stations, different sources seem to claim different things.

In it, you play as a flightless hummingbird/mosquito thing made of glass that has to collect multicoloured gems that are stashed away in hard-to-reach places on each stage. To get to them, you have to utilise your innate drinking/regurgitating ability. There are transparent blocks lying around, that you can drink in one location, then spit out in another. Furthermore, there's pots of coloured ink that you can drink, and then inject into the transparent blocks. Doing this makes the blocks move on their own: vertically with red ink, horizontally with blue ink, and diagonally with yellow ink.

Eventually, the game also introduces other elements, like stone statues, that make you incredibly heavy while you have them drank, or weird transparent creatures that take on various different properties when injected with coloured ink. Like all games of this type, it familiarises the player with the essential building blocks of its world, then arranges puzzles that require the expert use of those blocks, quickly requiring outside-the-box techniiques like placing a block inside a wall, so you can suck it up again from the other side, or rapidly extracting, then re-injecting the colour from a block in midair to re-set its range of movement.

It's pretty generous to the idiot player, too, allowing access to thirty stages across three areas right from the start, and unlocking more after twenty-five of them have been solved. Unfortunately, as I've already mentioned, this really isn't my kind of game, and I had to throw in the towel at twenty-three. I know it's a terrible cop-out, but as far as I can tell, if you like these kind of environment-traversing puzzle games, then this seems like it's a high-quality example of the genre, and it does have plenty of interesting and original ideas. I can't really recommend it fully myself though, as, like so many other games of this type, most of my time with it was frustrating and boring.