Dossun! Ganseki Battle (SNES)

Dossun! Ganseki Battle is a fantasy RPG-themed versus puzzle game. I wonder if the developers of Yuusha Puzzle, which was featured on the GG Series Collection cartridge for DS that I wrote about long ago had been inspired by it, because the two games have a lot in common, and not just the theming.

Like Yuusha Puzzle, your aim is to defeat various enemies by arranging the various items that fall into your pit into rows of three. Also like Yuusha Puzzle, different items have different effects: swords for physical damage, scrolls for magic damage, potions to heal, and orbs to summons monsters to fight on your behalf. Where the two games differ, though is in mechanical complexity and sophistication.

In Yuusha Puzzle, your foe was just a sprite and a health bar, while in Dossun! Ganseki Battle, they're a full-blown opponent, playing the same puzzle game as you, albeit with various advantages, like more special attacks, a longer health bar and so on. As well as this, there's a more robust chain system, whereby your attacks do more damage the later in a chain they are, and sufficently large chains (though I'm not totally sure whether this is decided by the number of stages in the chain, or the total number of items erased) will trigger a special animated attack for big damage.

It seems kind of unfair to keep comparing these two games, since Yuusha Puzzle was released well over a decade after this game, and it was a budget title/part of a compilation, while this was a full-priced standalone release. Come to think of it though, the passage of time should tilt things in YP's favour, while the circumstances of the two games releases should favour D!GB, so maybe it all evens out? Either way, this is the better game. It's better presented, it plays better, and it's just generally a higher quality game all-round.

That being said, though, is it recommended? Yeah, why not? It's decent enough. There's better puzzle games on SNES, of course, like Magical Drop 3, and Tetris Battle Gaiden, but I think this one's still good enough to be worthwhile.

The Lost Golem (Dreamcast)

Remember Pushover on the Amiga? It was a puzzle game about an ant pushing over dominos. The Lost Golem reminds me of that game, only it's top-down, rather than side-on. You play as a golem, who iis charged with looking after a king. The king, like most royals, is some kind of blinkered lemming-esque idiot who constantly walks foward until he hits an obstacle, at which point he turns ninety degrees and carries on. Unless the obstalcle is a bottomless pit, then he walks into it and falls to his doom.

So, what you have to do is go ahead of the king, pushing walls around using you immense golemic strength, to make sure that the king's walk takes him to the next door. There are, of course, some further complications. The first is that the king has to walk directly towards the door, as if he approaches it from the side, he'll go straight past it (he's a blinkered idiot, remember?). The second, for which I have no explanation, is that a certain number of the walls in the stage have to be connected by pillars when the kind goes through the door. Pillars will crumble away when there's no walls touching them, and there are two kinds of pillar (in the stages I could reach, anyway): ones that cause attached walls to rotate ninety degrees when pushed, and ones that just let their attached walls go forward one space when pushed.

So, like most puzzle games of this type, those are the elements that make up the stages, and the rules that make up the puzzles, and the game itself is just a long series of those puzzles. Also like most puzzle games of this type, I'm terrible at it. Unfortunately, the stages in the main mode have to tackled in a linear fashion, and I managed to get to the thirteenth of them, which I made many attempts at before giving up. But, as far as I can tell, this is a decent enough example of these kinds of games. There's some stages where you try every convoluted solution you can think of before it hits you that you literally only need to make one move to solve it. That seems like a good thing to me.

There's a couple of other diversions besides the main story, too! There's a simple stage editor that lets you set up a stage in a 3x3 grid, and I guess if you've got the patience for this kind of game, you probably also have the patience to make stages for it, too. I know for a short time back in the ancient past, I was playing a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, and enjoyed that game's stage editor, and it's the same principle, isn't it? Finally, there's a two player versus mode, with a king, two golems, and two doors. You move walls around to annoy your opponent and also guide the king to your door. There's no AI opponent, though, and even if you had someone around, I can't imagine wanting to play this over any of the Dreamcast's many excellent fighting games.

The Lost Golem is of a genre that's a little outside of my wheelhouse, but I think I enjoyed it enough to say that if you like puzzle games where you move stuff around and there's a specific solution to every stage, then this is a decent one of those.

Ryu Kyu (Game Gear)

So, this is a port of an arcade game that was also ported to the PC Engine. I'm reviewing this version, though, because it's slightly different to the others, and because it's been a long time since the Game Gear was featured here. Also, this port of Ryu Kyu was released in the west under the title Solitaire Poker, but I didn't find that out until after I'd already played the Japanese version for a few hours, and also that title is so boring I almost fell asleep typing it in this sentence.

Anyway, Ryu Kyu is a poker-themed puzzle game. Each stage gives you a score quota and a pit containing a five-by-five grid. A deck of cards is shuffled into four piles, you can only see the top card of each pile. Your task is to pick one of the four visible cards, and drop it into the pit, then do that twenty-four more times until every space is full. While doing this, you're trying to make poker hands in rows, columns and diagonals. Every hand is worth a different amount of points, and you've got to meet the stage's quota before all the spaces are full. This is the basic premise of the game, which is the same in both the Arcade and Game Gear versions.

The Game Gear version differs in a few ways, though. Firstly, before you start playing, you pick a difficulty level. Easy is a lot easier than the arcade version, and hard is slightly harder, though the only difference between the two is that the score quotae are higher in hard mode. The second, much bigger, difference is that in the arcade version, every couple of stages, you got to open a random box, which would reduce the next stage's quota by a few hundred or a few thousand points. The Game Gear has its own system for reducing quotae, which is both better and worse than the arcade version's.

Now, when you clear a stage, any points you scored over the current stage's quota are subtracted from the next stage's quota. This means that you're rewarded for playing well, which I do prefer to the arcade's randomly assigned bonuses, but at the same time, it does make the game a lot easier. I've had playthroughs where my quota was zero points for two or three stages in a row! Though, obviously, it's still a game where you're heavily reliant on what cards you draw. I'd say it's about half-and-half with regards to skill versus luck, though. And though I'd normally admonish a game for having such a strong element of luck, I think in this case it's not so big a problem.

Ryu Kyu is just a simple little puzzle game on a handheld, something to pass a short amount of time, while still being addictive enough to have you coming back to it. It succeeds at that goal pretty well, and I actually like this version better than the arcade. My only big complaint is that you don't get an overall score, your points only correspond to the quota system. But otherwise, I recommend giving this game a try!

Logic Pro 2 (Arcade)

So, I've already reviewed the first and last parts of this trilogy in the past, and I've finally decided to write about the awkward middle child, which also happens to be the black sheep of the family. While Logic Pro and Logic Pro Adventure are the best nonogram games I've ever played, Logic Pro 2 rivals Oekaki Pizzle for the title of worst.

Where Oekaki Puzzle was boring and joyless in its execution, Logic Pro 2 is actively hateful. The big problem it has is that in attempting liven up their sequel, the developers thought it would be a good idea to add enemies into the mix. Now, this isn't some kind of versus mode where you race to finich a puzzle before an AI opponent, it's little creatures crawling around the grid doing stuff while you try to solve the puzzle. That "stuff" being erasing the crosses you use to mark squares that definitely don't need filling in, or adding crosses of their own, or just sitting and getting in the way.

You can kill all of the aforementioned enemies, though they respawn a short time later. Another type of enemy is unkillable, though, as it appears outside of the grid: the caterpillars that wiggle onto the screen now and then to cover up the numbers. You already have a time limit, and now you'll be wasting valuable seconds waiting for these jerks to wiggle away again so you can actually see the puzzle you're meant to be solving!

The real shame is that other than the enemies, it's mostly the same as Logic Pro Adventure: great graphics, decent puzzles, and that weird gimmick where you collect fifty little dots for a big bonus. It's just ruined by the enemies. I guess Adventure does prove that they learned from their mistakes though, which is nice. Still, don't play this game, no matter how much you're left wanting more after finishing its stablemates.

Chitty Chitty Train (PC98)

You can probably guess from the screenshots, but what attracted me to this game was the graphics: they're really really nice, aren't they? So tiny and clean and perfectly-formed. I was also thinking it'd been a long time since I'd covered anything on the PC98, and wanted to get back on that, and a great-looking puzzle game seemed like a nice way to do it. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that this game is not nice at all, in fact, you could even go as far as to call it cruel!

But before we get onto that, I should explain it, if you haven't already figured out the premise just by looking at the screens. It's a mouse-controlled puzzle game in which you have to get a train to all the stations, then to the exit. You do this by clicking on the switches to change their positions, and by right-clicking at any point on the track to place a red light that stops any train that encounters it for a few seconds. The cruelty comes from the fact that all the trains (there are other trains on the track that you also need to direct to avoid collisions) all move really fast, and never stop, except in the case of the aforementioned red lights.

Now, there are two basic types of stages in Chitty Chitty Train. There's the complex ones, where you really need to take a look at every switch, the positions of all the trains and stations, and plan your routes carefully. Then there are stages with simpler layouts, where the challenge comes more from having the timing and manual dexterity to click the right switches at the exact right times to avert disaster. Either way, though, you'll be working at high speed, and a successful run of any stage will probably only take a few seconds, though they'll be very intense, high-stress seconds. And of course, it's very unlikely that you'll finish any stage on the first attempt, so don't think you'll be tearing through the game in no time.

There's also an edit mode, which is interesting in theory, though I didn't really have the patience to do anything with it myself. It uses a similar interface to making maps in RPG maker, with you selecting pieces of track and scenery from a window, then placing them where you like on the screen. One interesting bit of information I did glean from this mode is that there are a bunch of different tilesets in the game. All but the first are locked at the start and I could only get far enough to unlock the second, but there's apparently Plain, Snow, Desert, Europe, Future, and Toybox. Hopefully some super player will come along and take screenshots of some later stages someday.

Anyway, Chitty Chitty Train is a fun and charming game, that's also sadistically difficult and stressful. I definitely recommend giving it a shot. And in case you're wondering, all the text I saw in the game was in English, so there's no language barrier to worry about, either.

Oekaki Puzzle (Neo Geo Pocket Colour)

Long time readers might remember that I've always said that Logic Pro (and its sequel, Logic Pro Adventure) are by far the best nonogram videogames around, with all others being mediocre by comparision. Well, it's time for some exciting news: I may have found the all-time worst example of a nonogram game in Oekaki Puzzle!

To start with, it has the same big flaw as so many others: non-existant stakes caused by a lack of any real lose condition, with the added caveat that you get zero feedback at all on whether you're marking the right or wrong squares. It's also missing some common quality of life features, like highlighting the row and column your cursor is currently on so you tell where you are at a glance, for example.

Then there's the puzzles themselves, which are completely joyless things to solve. I think there's three main reasons for this. One: a lot of the puzzles turn out to be things like letters or numbers or just simple shapes when you complete them. Two: a huge amount of the puzzles are symmetrical, so when you've solved half the puzzle, you just go and do the same thing reversed on the other half of the grid. There's a soul-crushingly long series of near-identical animal faces that are all particularly egregious offenders in this department. Three: a lot of puzzles also feature a lot of rows where the numbers have a lot of ones and twos. This is a hard one to explain, but it makes the puzzles really tedious to solve, and also removes the mild satisfaction of filling in a long line of squares with reckless abandon.

I've actually gone back to the original Logic Pro recently, attempting to finish it in a single credit like I did with Logic Pro Adventure when I reviewed it last year, and the differences between that game and Oekaki Puzzle really show how such a simple concept can be executed by two games with such a vast chasm of quality between the two. Don't bother playing this game.

Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws (Game Boy Advance)

I'd previously written off the Simple 2960 Tomodachi series, assuming that it was just a bunch of untranslated visual novels like the Dreamcast's Simple 2000 DC series. I happened across some screenshots of this one recently, though, and it turns out I've been wrong all this time, and the GBA Simple games have at least one cute puzzler among them! In fact, looking at the list of titles, I have no idea where I got my previous assumption from, as it's clear that none of them are visual novels at all. But anyway, this is The Itsudemo Puzzle ~Massugu Soroete Straws~, or The Anytime Puzzle ~Line Up the Straws~, and it's pretty good!

The game presents you with groups of stars connected by lines, and you move your cursor thing around, pushing stars up and down the screen so that the connecting lines become one straight line, either horizontal or diagonal. Do it multiple times in quick succession for more points, of course. There's a totally unimportant story about an apprentice witch who I think is trying to hold back the dawn for as long as possible by arranging the stars in the night sky into straight lines? That's what seems to be happening in the main mode, anyway, as the moon scrolls across the screen and the sky gets lighter as time starts to run out, while going in reverse when you get more time while clearing lines.

Other than the main game, there's also a time attack mode, in which you attempt to score as many points as possible in three minutes, and a free mode, which just goes on forever until you quit via the pause menu. Oddly, even the free mode has a high score table, though the nature of the mode means it really just measures the player's tolerance for boredom (though playing free mode did help me figure out little techniques here and there to improve my game, like any good practice mode should).

There's not much more to be said about this game! It's cute, it's fun, and unlike a lot of Simple Series games, a real copy of it can be found for next to nothing online if you're lucky. It's recommended!

Otostaz (PS2)

I can't find any evidence of this besides on mention in a 17-year-old issue of Edge, and I don't know if any other games came out of it, but Otostaz was possibly the result of an initiative at Sony in the early days of the PS2 to put out some games with lower production budgets and shorter development times. Presumably, the aim of such an initiative is to create more interesting, unique games, that didn't necessarily need to sell lots of copies, since they had less to lose. That's the kind of thing I like to see in videogames, movies, and so on. Lower budgets, more imagination!

Anyway, it's a kind of solitaire Othello game, themed around making buildings grow. There's three kinds of tiles in the game: ground, tree, and water. If there's one piece of ground touching both a tree and a bit of water, then a level one house will grow there. If there's a bit of ground touching two level one houses, a level two house will grow there, and so on up to level six. Your job is to make as many high-level houses grow as you can before each stage ends, to score points. There's also a game over condition that I think happens when you don't have any houses in the leftmost column of spaces when the screen scroll past it. But you'll be playing a few hours before you get to the point where that happens.

There's a few more advanced techniques to learn too, but you'll pick them up along the way, plus not only is there a very through tutorial, but there's also an option to turn all the text into English, despite this being a Japan-only release, which is nice. It's generally a fun and satisfying game to play, too, once you've figured out how it all works: lots of squares constantly flipping over, and numberse going up, and all those little kind of kinaesthetic touches that let you know you're doing well.

The presentation's pretty nice, too, with the game seemingly being set in a world made of thick coloured paper, though the stock sound effects do make it feel slightly cheap. The only real problem with Otostaz is that there's not much to write about regarding it. It's a decent game, pretty unique, and if you see a copy going cheap, it definitely wouldn't hurt to pick it up. You'll definitely get a few hours of enjoyment out of it, even if the first hour is just learning how to play.

Plus Plum (Dreamcast)

Also sometimes spelt as "Plus Plumb", this is a pretty low budget-looking, Japan-only competitive puzzle game. Of course, it's about matching coloured blobs, but it does at least bring some new ideas to the table, even if they're not good ones.

Like you might expect, Plus Plum has you arranging coloured blobs into matching sets of three, which then disappear. What's different is what happens when they disappear: not only do the blobs above them fall down, but all the blobs touching them also change colour. So to make combos, you not only have to take into account where the blobs will fall, but what colour they'll be when they do. Luckily, the colour changing isn't random, and the six colours are in three pairs: red and blue, white and purple, and yellow and green. The blobs also only fall one at a time, and rather than changing shape or formation like you would in most puzzle games, you can move that one blob around, and change it to its opposite colour.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's pretty simple once you've got the hang of it. I think with a bit more work, it might have led to a decent puzzler, but this game has one massive problem: it's incredibly slow. I haven't had a single game, win or lose, that's taken less than four minutes. The blame for this falls at the feet of PP's other oddball mechanic: the playing fields of you and your opponent are on some kind of counter-balanced platforms, and the game is lost when either one player's platform has been lifted high enough that their blobs touch the top of the screen, or their platform is so weighed down that it hits the bottom. Compare these four minute matches with the likes of Magical Drop (my personal favourite competitive puzzle series), where matches can be won or lost within seconds of them starting, and Plus Plum feels like a meandering, tension-free bore.

I can't recommend tracking down Plus Plum at all. There might not be as many competitive puzzle games on the Dreamcast compared to the Playstation, but there's still plenty that are better than this one. Strangely, though, it was apparently popular enough to get a sequel, Plus Plum 2. However, that was released on the original XBox, in Japan only, so it presumably sold about seven copies.

Agress - Missile Daisenryaku (Arcade)

The circumstances of Agress' release, and that of its unofficial English translations are somewhat interesting. It's a Versus puzzle game released in 1991 and themed around the Gulf War, even having grainy digitised photos of Saddam Hussein and George Bush in the attract mode. Then, an unofficial English version seems to have surfaced in 2003, presumably to exploit the US and UK's invasion of Iraq that was happening at that time (though they didn't update the attract mode to feature George W Bush).

The title might lead you to believe that this game is related to the long-running Daisenryaku series of very serious military turn-based strategy games, but other than the theme and name, I can't find any relation between the two. In it, you're presented with a map covering the top half of the screen that has missile launchers at either side, representing the two sides of the conflict. The actual game takes place in the bottom half of the screen, where there's two grids (one for each player, just like the missile launchers). The grids each have a bunch of grey tiles, a few coloured tiles, and one empty space. There's also a picture that shows the coloured tiles arranged into a certain pattern or shape. Your task is to keep moving the tiles round to mimic the pictured shape, which causes you to launch missiles and very gradually tunr sections of the map your colour.

So, just like how, a few years later, Puchi Carat would figure out a way of making Arkanoid-style games into endless puzzles, Agress has figured out how to make those annoying little plastic slide puzzles endless, and competitive to boot! I think it's also the only videogame version of a slide puzzle I've seen that wasn't pornographic, too. Is it any good though? Well, unfortunately, I've only been able to play it single player, and even on the easiest settings, it's a struggle to get more than a couple of stages in, and it's very stressful figuring out how to move the tiles round to get that one tile where you need it to be. Just like real slide puzzles, really! Once the game starts increasing the number of coloured tiles, and even adding multiple colours, it gets more and more difficult to keep treading water.

I suspect, though, that it's the two-player mode in which this game would shine. Having two human players facing off against each other would make for a tense, though probably brief exchange, with the fun not being hampered by one competitor having a perfect computer brain designed solely to win at this game. (I'm sure I've read before that in making videogame AI, programmers make it as good as it can possibly be, then pare it back to make them into reasonably beatable opponents for human players. It seems like the developers of this game skimped on the second part slightly.) So, I guess if you can get someone to play an old, ugly, tastelessly-themed puzzle game with you, you'll probably have a decent time with Agress. If you're going to be playing alone, though, I wouldn't bother.

Breed Master (Playstation)

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

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

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

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

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

Logic Pro Adventure (Arcade)

The original Logic Pro was one of the first games ever featured on this blog, all the way back in 2009. Back then, I said it was the only nonograms game to make an actual interesting videogame out of the concept, by adding a strict time limit, with penalties for trying to fill in the wrong squares. In the nine years since, I've played a few other games, old and new, and it's still true that Logic Pro (and its sequels) are the only ones really worth your time.

Logic Pro Adventure is the second sequel to the original, and it mostly works the same as the first: you solve nonograms, there's a time limit, you lose a big chunk of time if you try to fill in an incorrect square. Also like the first, you get limited-use items to help you when you can't get a handle on a puzzle. The "cross clear" item from the first game, that reveals all the squares in horizontal and vertical straight lines emanating from the cursor's current location is back, and accompanied by a bomb that reveals a five-by-five square surrounding the cursor. There's also little coloured spheres that randomly appear as you play, that seem, at first, to just be points items, though they're a little more strange than that.

The stages are split into sets of three, identified by colour, and if, in the course of completing a set of stages, you collect fifty of those orbs, you'll instantly be taken to the next trio of stages. It's a really strange mechanic, and it seems odd to me that an arcade game would add a mechanic that just makes completion quicker and easier like this, with no real downside. As it is, this might be the easiest one credit completion of an arcade game I've ever had! There is actually some replay value, though: as you might expect, the stages are randomly chosen from an unseen pool, so every game is slightly different. However, there are three characters to choose from at the start of the game, and I'm pretty sure that each character has a totally different pool from which puzzles are drawn. Other than that, there's no difference in how they play, other than having different sound effects and endings.

There's not much more to be said about Logic Pro Adventure. If you like nonograms, then it's probably the best videogame about solving them that's out there. If you don't, then you're not going to have any interest in it at all anyway. So let that be your guide as to whether or not you go and play it, I guess.