Dark Hunter: Shou Kotojigen Gakuen (Saturn)

I am cheating a little bit here, as this isn't actually a game. It claims to be an interactive learning tool to help Japanese teenagers learn english. It comes in the forms of what is essentially an OAV about various

supernatural goings-on occuring at and around a boarding school at the top of a steep hill. It was made by Koei, who released five such things on the Saturn, two in the Dark Hunter series (of which this is the first), and three in the EMIT series.
THe educational element comes in the form of the language options. You can choose to have the story play out with English or Japanese voice acting, as well as English or Japanese subtitles, in any combination. You can also choose to immediately repeat scenes with different language options, and certain words and phrases in the subtitles will be highlighted, and these phrases can be selected, which will show the selected phrase in the opposite language.
Also, at certain points in the story, the player/viewer can choose which character the story should focus on or choose the next line a character might say, making it slightly ahead of Dinosaur Island in terms of interactivity, and the fact that there's an English language option makes it a lot easier and more enjoyable. There are also short "quizzes", in which the player will, for example be asked to identify ten things in the room, by clicking on

them and choosing from three options the correct english name for that item. Dinosaur Island definitely has the edge over Dark Hunter in terms of animation, though. Despite using a similar system of giant sprites over FMV, Dark Hunter's animation is very limited, with a lot of shots of people standing or sitting around, people talking with their faces out of shot and so on. I think it's safe to assume that this is down to the fact that this release comes on a single CD, and still has room for two full voice tracks. And the bilingual nature of the disc could also explain a lack of fluidity in the lip sync, making it sort-of match both languages could have been a preferable solution to concentrating on one and having the other look much worse.
As for the story itself, it's not great. It really could be a low-budget mid-90s OAV, with a slightly awkward sounding English dub also typical of the era. There's a lot of "mystery" which really feels like an excuse to have not a lot happen. Come to think of it, the "language tutor" aspect of the software is also a pretty

reasonable explanation as to why a lot of the story is made up of conversations. THe fact that you can save which scene you've watched up to and come back to it later is nice, too.
IN conclusion, this isn't really a game, but it is kind of interesting, and it could be thought of as a weird pre-DVD example of a bilingual anime release. I wonder if this series (and the EMIT sister series) ever had a small western fandom for that reason? If there was such a fandom, it must have been tiny, since I've never heard people talking about either of them.

Waku Waku Monster (Saturn)

It's been suggested that I do more posts on Saturn games, and I'll try to, but the Saturn and Dreamcast both share a problem when it comes to this blog: the two systems are so beloved by all that most of the games worth talking about already have been at great length all across the internet.
I will try to find more interesting things hidden away in their catalogues, though. Like this!
Waku Waku Monster is a versus-type puzzle game that also includes a minor monster-raising element. Although the game was released well after Pokemon Red and Green, the monster raising in this seems to take its cues more from the earlier  Tamagotchi. Having said that, one of the monsters in the game is a flagrant and shameless knock-off of Pikachu.
You start the game with an egg that hatches into a young monster after the first stage, which then changes form after each subsequent stage. I don't know what, if any effect the form of the monster has on the game itself, though the opposite is fairly clear. After each stage a stats screen is shown, the results of which do seem to affect the forms your monster takes, though I don't know exactly how, nor what each stat is, as it's all in Japanese. I've included a screenshot of said screen in case any of my kind readers wants to lend some assistance.

As for the game itself, it's fairly simple. Your character stands at the top of the screen holding a blob, which will be in one of six colours. You move them left and right to decide where to drop the blob. If three or more of he same colour ar touching, they disappear, and game over occurs when the well is totally full, as opposed to ending when the blobs cross the top. As it's a versus-type puzzle game, there are also attacks. Rathyer than happening whenever a chain occurs, as in the Puyo Puyo series, the players each have a power meter that fills up as blobs are removed. When a player's meter is full, they attack automatically, sending junk blobs over to their opponent's field and the meter's maximum is raised. Players can also attack manually by pressing B, and of course, the attacks are more powerful the more full the meter is. This is measured by the amount in the meter, not as a percentage, so filling the meter at least once to raise the maximum is a good idea. If a player have some power when their opponent attacks, they can also press B to

guard, reducing or even completely stopping the attack from happening.
Waku Waku Monster is a pretty good game, though it can't really hold a candle to the giants of the genre, such as Puyo Puyo, Tetris Battle Gaiden or my favourite, the Magical Drop series.

Kyuutenkai Fantastic Pinball (Saturn)

So, Technosoft (sometimes known as Tecnosoft, for some reason) have made a lot of excellent games, usually with excellent music. One of their better-known titles is the Mega Drive port of Devil Crush, also known as Dragon's Fury. Like Kyuutenkai, it's a pinball game, and a lot of elements from Devil Crush made their way into this game: a main table being three screens high, bonus stage/boss fight sub-tables that offer huge amounts of points upon completion, even some smaller details, like the bonus counter with its two stacking multipliers.

Being on the Saturn, Kyuutenkai has some stiff competition from Kaze's Digital Pinball games, Last Gladiators and Necronomicon, and by "stiff competition", I mean "the best pinball videogames ever". Obviously, it's not as great as those two titans of the genre, but it does at least serve as a worthy follow-up to Devil Crush.
The main (and only) table is, as I said, three screens high. Each screen has a set of flippers at the bottom of it, and the whole table has a nice theme to it, with heaven at the top, earth in the middle, and hell at the bottom. There's lots of things to hit, and gimmicks to activate on the main table, like the angel watching over the middle portion of the table who can be made to shoot laser eyes all over the place, and the little band of skeletal day of the dead mariachis who can be knocked down in hell.
Obviously, the cute fantasy visual style of this game is massively different to the heavy metal album cover-inspired look of Devil Crush, and the bonus stages follow suit: instead of smashing open coffins or fighting multi-headed dragons, the bonus stages are cuter and more imaginitive to boot. My two favourites of the few I've seen are one that takes place on a football pitch where the player has to score 4 goals past the devil goalkeepers and his mummy defenders, and another where you have to use the ball to smash up the contents of a girl's bedroom in a strict time limit.
Although Kyuutenkai isn't as good as the mighty Digital Pinball series nor does it have the excellent music you would expect from Technosoft
, it is still a lot of fun to play, as well as very fast paced and even more addictive. There's also a Playstation version which I haven't played, but I assume it's' pretty much the same as this one.

Dinosaur Island (Saturn)

It's been a while since the last post, and unjfortunately, this one's just a short filler post. Sorry!
Anyway, Dinosaur Island isn't really a game, it's more of an interactive cartoon. Everything's in Japanese, but it's not like it's some super-complex story or anything. It's just stuff happening to some kids who live on an island that's also inhabited by monsters.
It's definitely worth a look if you can get it cheap, though (and you probably can: my copy cost about £3 including shipping from Japan!), just for how amazing it all looks. The first generation of CD consoles (the PC Engine and Mega CD) had some severe limitations that really showed when they tried to play video. The worst example of this was the Mega CD Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers game, featuring ugly FMVs playing in a tiny box. One solution used to great effect was making animations using big sprites and such, meaning the graphics could be coloured to fit the consoles' limited palletes and they could be full screen too.
Dinosaur Island takes this idea and applies it to the much more powerful Saturn, allowing for super-clear, high quality animation that also has amazing bright colours. Don't pay a lot of money for it though, unless you speak Japanese, I guess.