Black Viper (Amiga)

I don't cover a lot of Amiga games on this blog, because though pretty much every Amiga game is obscure outside of Europe, in Europe, it had a pretty big following, so there's still quite a few games that are well known by a lot of people.

But by about 1995-ish, the system had been pretty much abandoned by big publishers and, to be honest, most people buying new games too, leaving only dedicated enthusiasts making and laying new Amiga games. Black Viper comes from well into that era, being released in 1996.

It's an into-the-screen sprite scaling motorbike riding game, like Super Hang-On, but with guns. The player is Efrin Kadan, a lone fighter for freedom on a post-apocalyptic earth ravaged by a war with aliens. Though for some reason, the aliens all seem to ride around in mad max-esque cars and motorbikes, covered in rust and spikes. The fight for freedom taking the form of riding a motorbike (the titular Black Viper) long distances, shooting the alien vehicles, and not shooting the "innocent" articulated lorries.

The graphics are a mixed bag, with the backgrounds being beautiful vistas of blasted wastelands and deserts, and the sprites being indistinct grey-brown lumps. Also, someone on the development team must have been a Cradle of Filth fan, since two of the selectable BGM tracks are named "Summer Dying Fast" and "The Black Goddess Rises", though unfortunately, they ear no resemblence to their namesakes.

Black Viper should be a fast, exciting game with tons of action, but because of various stupid little problems, it's more of a chore to play. Since it adds a bit of shooting action to the usual racing shenanigans, it stands to reason that it has a mechanic whereby the player takes damage, and can eventually be killed, resulting in a game over. This is fine, but not only does Black Viper only allow the player to partially restore their health between stages, but because of some slight clunkiness in the way the game handles collisions, situations in which the player gets caught between the side of the road and another vehicle are not only common, but also devastating, often taking almost half the player's health in a few seconds. There are power-ups on the road, that can instantly restore some health, or offer a temporary shield, but thanks to their random placement and the fact that they whizz by almost instantly, collecting them is a matter of luck more than anything else.

Also available between stages are weapon power-ups, though buying them is a very bad idea, since every time I have, halfway through the following stage the message stating "weapon damaged" has been displayed, leaving me weaponless, and not long after, dead.

The most ridiculous problem this game has, though, is the fact that though it was released in the year 1996, long after anyone with an Amiga had already started using a Mega Drive controller with it's many buttons, it inexplicably only recognises a single fire button. There is a control setting in the options screen that claims to include an option for two-button controllers, but setting it seems to make no difference at all. It is effectively a painted-on fire alarm.

In summary, Black Viper is a bad game with some nice backgrounds (though since it's so broken, you'll probably only see two of them). Oh, another small point in its favour is that it puts the intro on a seperate disk, so you never have to waste time watching/skipping it, plus it includes an option to turn in-game cutscenes off too. If only modern developers were so kind.

Over Rev (Arcade)

You might already know that I love arcade racing games, especially ones from the mid-90s, with their bright colours and relatively low (compared to modern console games) polygon counts. Over Rev is the second racing game Jaleco released for SEGA's Model 2 hardware, and it hits most of the right spots that a 90s arcade racer should. I should also mention here the same disclaimer I put at the start of my post about Motor Raid, that I emulated this game and played it with a normal analogue controller, so my experience will be slightly different to that of someone playing on a real arcade cabinet with steering wheels and fancy moulded seats and the like.

It's got bright blue skies, it's fast, it has cool backdrops, all it lacks is a cool soundtrack. Once you start the game, there are two modes to choose from: Challenge Cup and Time Attack. Challenge cup is the harder of the two modes, but also the one that has a chance of giving a longer game for your credit (if you're a good player). In it, the player drives each track in order, having to not only reach checkpoints to prolong the time

limit, but also finish the race in a minimum position, which starts at 5th and gets higher with each race. (Because I'm terrible, I only got to the second stage in this mode D:). Time Attack mode allows the player to choose any of the four tracks to play on, though you only get one race per credit. All that needs to be done in this mode is get to the checkpoints and finish as quickly as possible, your position in the race isn't important.

The four tracks (there might be a secret track, or maybe a fifth track in Challenge Cup mode, but I haven't found any mention of one online anywhere) take place in Shibuya, Ariake (which includes driving under the Tokyo Big Sight!), Tsukuba (the most boring track, taking place in a racing arena. Are they called arenas? I don't know.), and Hakone (a very nice-looking track taking place in a forest, with waterfalls and trees and such). There's lots of nice little touches, like planes flying past, trains

going over overhead bridges, and so on, that make the stages feel a little more alive, though there doesn't seem to be a crowd of any kind watching on the Tsukuba track, which seems odd.

There's seven cars to choose from, though three of them are very slightly hidden, being revealed when the accelerator is pushed on the car select screen (oddly, the brake is used to select things in this game). Unfortunately, the three hidden cars aren't anything too outlandish or interesting like the hidden horse in Daytona USA, just two more sports cars and a pick-up truck.

In conclusion, Over Rev is a pretty fun game, definitely worth playing if you're sick of seeing Daytona's

tracks over and over again and want something new to scratch your Model 2 racing itch. It's just a shame that it never got a home port, unlike Jaleco's earlier Model 2 racer, Super GT 24hr (which maybe I'll write about sometime in the distant future? I'll think about it.).

Police Chase Down (PS2)

The english title for this one's a bit of a misnomer: though you do play as police officers, you aren't chasing anyone down, but are in fact on security detail. You pick one of four motorbike-riding police officers (amusingly, three of them get descriptions like "member of an elite unit" or "the force's most decorated officer", while one guy is just "a respected highway patrol officer"),and go on missions to protect limosines

from gangs of thugs on motorbikes and in vans, who would cause harm to the passengers within. So it's like Chase HQ, minus the chase, but plus escort missions.
Having to protect a fairly slow-moving vehicle while riding a quite fast one is really fiddly, and you'll often be either turning round to go back and fight enemies who've appeared from the rear, or just plodding along as slow as you can (which means pressing the accelerator every few seconds, since the game doesn't support the Dual Shock 2's analogue buttons) to keep pace with the limo.
If the limo's health is reduced to zero, or the time runs out, you fail the mission, if the limo reaches its destination, you succeed. But while you're playing, the game doesn't actually tell you how far you are from the goal, which is annoying, and leaves the player in a kind of limbo, not knowing whether or not the limo has

enough health left to make it. Which it might not anyway, as it might drive into some obstacle you didn't see and instantly lose all its health, which happened to me once.
I could go as far as to say that Police Chase Down is the second-worst of the PS2 Simple Series games I've played, with only Eternal Quest/The Dungeon RPG being worse on account of the fact that it's incredibly boring and the PAL version isn't even fully translated!
So in summary, I don't recommend this or Eternal Quest.
This game is also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 7: Saikyou! Shirobi King ~Security Police~

Super Mad Champ (SNES)

According to legend, this game was originally planned to have been a racing spin-off from the Kunio-kun series, though the tie-in was ditched, the game lived on independently. Like Motor Raid and the Road Rash series, it's a motorbike racing game in which the competitors can attack each other as they pass by.

It definitely seems to be influence by the Road rash games, as it features a simple career system, in which the player must spend money to buy and repair bikes and to enter races, while winnig money by placing highly in races.
Although you'll win a prize no matter what place you finish the race in, only the top three prizes are actually more than the cost of entering. Furthermore, only by placing in the top three can the player advance to the next race, rather than repeating it (and paying the entry fee again). Winning isn't the only way to gain money: there are also small bonuses available for every time you hit an opponent, as well as for finishing a lap in a high position. As well as he five race participants, there are also a bunch of guys riding around the tracks in red jumpsuits. Passing or being passed by them doesn't effect your position, but they can be attacked for bonuses, and if they happen to ride by while you're walking around after falling off your bike, they'll dismount and attack you. When this happens, you can beat them up for a hefty bonus (though due to the time taken to

do this, you'll definitely win the race), or you can get on their bike and ride off on it (which is useful if your bike has been destroyed).
The weird thing about this game is something you won't notice until a few races in, once you start buying faster bikes: it's really hard to steer at high speeds! Rather than just taking a nice simple approach to steering, where going faster just means slowing down a little to stay on the road at corners, steering a fast bike in Super Mad Champ is a delicate affair, requiring pressing the accellerate button and the d-pad at just the right times, and holding them just long enough so that you don't skid and fall off your bike in the middle of the road.

Unfortunately, this ruins the game for me. That kind of finicky steering makes the game feel more like the controls are your opponent, rather than the other racers, and it's just not very fun. The first few races are nice, but once you get into the GP1 class races, it's best to just write the game off and start playing something else.

Motor Raid (Arcade)

Before I start, I should mention something: the actual arcade version of this game comes in a full-sized motorbike cabinet that the player sits on while playing, tilting left and right to steer. I didn't play like that, though. I played Motor Raid via the excellent Model 2 Emulator, using an Xbox 360 controller.
With that out of the way, I'll get on to actually talking about the game. It's a lot like the Road Rash games, but in space and with luxurious and beautiful Model 2 3D graphics. You take part in motorbike races across various planets, and you have the option of attacking your opponents, punching them, kicking them, or clobbering them about the head with your weapon.
There's also a boost meter that gradually fills up as you race. Once it's more than half full, you can double-tap (or on the real arcade machine, I guess you would double twist?) the accelerator to use it. Obviously, the more you let it fill, the longer your boost will last. Less obviously, if you wait for the meter to fill completely before using it, you'll become enshrouded in an energy field and spin your weapon around your head.
There are four main planets upon which the races take place, though you'll only actually race on three of them in a regular game. Your performance in the races decides which planets you visit. I've read online that there's also a fifth planet which appears as an extra fourth race if you manage to place first in all three regular races. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough to make this happen, so I don't know what that extra stage is like.
There's a few characters to pick from, but since I'm not good enough at racing games to really tell the difference, I just pick the default character everytime, a young woman named Robin. After each race, Robin recites the cryptic quote "I won! But I still can't find what I'm looking for...". This is never explained.
In conclusion, Motor Raid is a really great game that you should definitely play, if you have a computer good enough for Model 2 emulation (pretty likely), or you live near a place that has an actual machine (not so likely). It's a shame it never got a home port, but I assume that's because the Saturn had no chance of replicating this game's graphics, and by the time the Dreamcast came along, Model 2 games were starting to be considered "old hat".

Drome Racers (GBA)

This game is a Lego licenced game! This is worth mentioning, because other than a lego logo at the start, you'd never know otherwise. There's no nice friendly lego men like you see in most lego games, just vaguely futuristic-looking cars going really fast.
The coolest and most obviou gimmick this game has is that it uses polygons for the track, rather than the usual mode 7-looking style that most GBA racing games go for. It makes the game look a lot like Virtua Racing, which is kind of funny, since people in the olden days would often joke about how SEGA Model 1 games looked like everything in them was made of Lego! The cars, unfortunately, aren't made of polygons, using the "ugly blobby pre-rendered sprite" style that was inexplicably popular on the GBA, especially for licenced games. The music is worth mentioning too, having a nice Amiga/C64-esque sound to it.
You might think I'm going on about the graphics for so long to put off talking about the game, but that's not true! I just really like this game's graphics. Luckily, the game is actually fun to play, too! There are four championships of escalating difficulty, though you only start with the easiest, and unlock the rest one at a time. Most people would probably play them in that order, but why force them to like that? Some people might want to go straight for the normal difficulty, and a few might even want to go straight to hard! Tsk.
The difficulty curve is almost perfect, except for one problem. The problem being that the AI cars will seemingly have different abilities in each race, meaning that as long as you come in first at least once in a championship, you'll probably win it, since the AI players have so few points because they finish in a completely different place each time. If the AI teams had different distinct skill levels, so there was always one or two of them that were near equal to you from race to race, I think that would have been a great improvement.
The actual racing is pretty fun, and the game moves nice and smoothly, too. There are power-ups, in this game, of two kinds: weapons and boosts. They're assigned to different buttons, so you can carry one of each, which is nice. The weapons are the usual racing game weapons: missile, mine, homing missile, etc. They don't really affect the outcome of the race compared to weapons in most racing games that have them. The game probably would have been slightly better had they been left out, even.
The boosts, however are very important. There are two kinds: the kind that you can store (only one at a time, though) and use whenever you like, and the kind that are used as soon as you drive over them. Collecting and using the boosts strategically isn't 100% vital to winning, but you'll have a hard time doing so otherwise. It's a good idea to get the instant boosts as much as possible, and to use your stored boosts on every straight. Two other boost-related points: they seem to last a little longer if you can avoid bumping into things, so do that, and if you're boosting when you go over a hill, you'll soar through the air, which looks and feels really cool.
Overall, this game is great, despite the complete lack of tension in the championships.
Oh, and there are also drag races to decide which place you'll start in before each race, but they're pointless, since it's pretty easy to just charge straight into first once the race begins, anyway. And I forgot to mention the completely hateful slippy-slidy ice tracks that appear a lot later in the game. Boo.

Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile (SNES)

This is a strange game. It has the exact same plot as the awesome laserdisc arcade game Road Avenger/Road Blaster FX (Your wife was killed on your wedding day by a gang of Mad Max knock-offs, and you seek revenge in a modified, armoured sports car). It looks like (and is structured like) a shooting game, but you do very little shooting in it. The only shooting you do is firing surface-to-air missiles at helicopters. most of your enemies are motorbikes, cars and other land vehicles, and these guys you dispatch by ramming, either hitting them enough times to make them explode, or more satisfyingly, making them crash into scenery.
You can't just drive into them normally and expect to do damage, though. By pressing the B button and a direction, you charge in that direction with speed and force, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Ecco the Dolphin's method of attack.
Your health bar constantly (but slowly) depletes, but luckily, health power-ups float down the screen fairly often and you have a limited-use force field (which is also very useful for fighting bosses), so unless you take a lot of hits, you shouldn't need to worry about it.
The stages range from post-apocalyptic-looking desert roads to motorways suspended high above futuristic cities and even a nice drive on a beach. They all look great, and the music is also excellent. In fact, the music and graphics are so good, you'd think this game was on the Mega Drive, rather than the SNES*!
The game is pretty great all-round, in fact. It's neither too hard nor too easy, it's a lot of fun to play and there's not really much else like it.
This is where I normally might say "the only problem is..", but in this case, there isn't any real problems with the game! It's great! Play it!


*Just kidding, SNES fans! Or am I...?

Sega Game Pack 4 in 1 (Game Gear)

It might seem strange to review a compilation, but this isn't a compilation of previously released games, the games on here were made specifically for a compilation. Not this compilation, though. Three of the games were originally part of two Japan-only releases called Kuni-chan no Game Tengoku Volume 1 & 2. The other game, Penalty Shootout was made especially for this cartridge, which appears to have been released only in Europe, mainly as a pack-in with the console, but apparently there's also a very rare boxed release of it too.
You might say that a console pack-in might not be obscure enough to fit this blog's remit, but it's not like you see people posting about this game everywhere, is it? It seems to have been mostly forgotten, which is good enough for me.
So, on to the games!
First up is Flash Columns, which, as you might guess from the title, is a cut-down version of columns, featuring only the "Flash mode" from the full version. If you don't know, flash mode gives you a stage partially filled with jewels, some of which are flashing. Get rid of the flashing jewels and go on to the next stage. There are a couple of differences between this version and the version you might be used to, though. Firstly, although the jewels still fall in vertical columns of three, to make them disappear, they have to be arranged so that at least four of the same colour are touching, non diagonally, as opposed to the normal columns rule of putting three in a row, in any direction. The other difference is the scoring system, or rather, the lack of one. In this game, you get one point for every jewel you make vanish. No extra points for chains or disappearing large amounts at once, and also no time limit to get the falshing jewels in. This is the flaw that ruins the game, with no rewards for speed or skill, it feels like a tedious trudge.
The second game is the one made especially for europe, Penalty Shootout! Essentially, it's a guessing game. You choose which direction to make the guy kick the ball, and how high. Then you hope the goalie doesn't jump in the same direction. After five shots, you switch places. There's no way of knowing what the computer player is going to do, making the whole thing a pointless waste of time. Don't bother with it.
The third game, which is referred to by most of the internet as just "Rally", though I'm sure I remember it being called something like "Pan-American Grand Prix" in the manual, though I no longer have the manual, and of course there are no scans of it online (as far as I can tell), so wo knows? Anyway, this is definitely the best game of the four. It's an Outrun-clone, but with no branching paths. So I guess you could also call it a Hang-On clone, but in a car, if you wanted to. Whatever you want to call it, it's fast and fun and has nice graphics. The only downside is that it's really really short and easy. But that's not a massive downside, is it?
The last game, which is also the second best game on the cart is Tennis. It plays exactly like Nintendo's Tennis game on the Game Boy. Obviously this version is infinitely better though, for three reasons: it's made by SEGA, it's in glorious colour, and instead of Mario being the referee, Sonic is the referee. Other than those differences, I assume it's only the game's relative obscurity that stopped there being any kind of lawsuit, as it really does play exactly like Nintendo's game.

Runner's High (PC-98)

Just a small review, since it's been a while since I last posted, and I did say I'd try to post more often.
It's surprising that it's taken this long for me to post about a game for one of the old Japanese computers, and there's actually a few games on the PC-98 and X68000 I intend to write about eventually.
Anyway, this game is Runner's High. It's a racing game by Compile. You play as a girl wearing a jetpack, and you choose one of three tracks, then attempt to fly three laps though it before the time runs out.
The problem is, that's it. Doing the four laps of any one of the three courses is going to take less than two minutes, and even the hardest course you'll be able to finish in a couple of goes. There's no mode where you race against other opponents, be they CPU or human, no career mode or anything like that. There are rankings boards for fastest times around each of the tracks, but the game isn't really fun enough that you'll want to play it after completeing them all once (if you even bother to get that far). It seems strange that Compile would release this as a stand-alone game, as I've played longer games on their Disc Station diskmags.
It's not all bad, though: as you'd expect from Compile, the graphics and all-round presentation are excellent, and there's some really nice still art in the intro, too.