Small Games Round Up Vol. 3!

It's another round up of three games that aren't big enough to support posts of their own, and this time I'm looking at a trio of SG-1000 games, starting with Golgo 13. Obviously the middle-aged fantasy world of Golgo 13, the stoic sniper who assassinates people and beds women is an ill fit for the pastel-palleted world of the SG-1000, so in this game he's using his skills for a non-violent purpose: rescuing people from a runaway train by shooting out the windows so they can escape. Between Goglo and the train, though, there's an infinitely long cargo train and a road. If your bullets hit one of the boxcars on the cargo train, or a truck passing by on the road, it'll bounce back at you, and you have to avoid it. After a few stages, some misanthropic helicopter pilots will also start tryng to bomb you, plus there's a time limit. Unfortunately, if the time limit runs out, the train just goes offscreen, there's no sequence of it hitting a wall or going off a cliff or anything.

Golgo 13 is an okay game, but it's really let down by the fact that once the helicopters start appearing, that's as hard as the game gets. It doesn't speed up or add any more elements, it's essentially just that stage over and over until you run out of lives. Even something as simple as the train going up and down hills occaisionally would be a big change, forcing the player to aim vertically as well astiming their shots and aiming horizontally. Never mind. Hustle Chumy is a more standard game for the time, being a single-screen platformer about a sewer-dwelling rat that just wants to bring home some food. To do so, you leave the sewer and brave the world above, filled with cats, bats, crocodiles, astronauts and an invincible fishman. All the enemies except the fishman can be killed by throwing dots (stones, maybe), with the fishman acting as a slow, but unrelenting terminator-type figure.

The big twist in Hustle Chumy is that the more bits of food you pick up (it's impressive for a game on such an old system that they vary from stage to stage, including fruits, sweets, pudding, and so on), the heavier and slower you get. You can still jump at the same speed, though this carries its own risk, thanks not only to the bats flying overhead, but also the fact that your jump is a set arc, over which you have no control. Hustle Chumy is a pretty good game, well worth a look. Plus it has some very cute sprites, with the cat enemy in particular looking great.

Finally, there's GP World, a racing game that feels like a genetic forebear to SEGA's more well-known sprite scaling racers like Outrun and Hang On. It makes a decent attempt at looking like a sprite scaling game on hardware where that couldn't possibly support it, and it features simpler versions of mechanics that would appear in those games, like Outrun's two-gear system, and the fact that there's no actual placement in the races, you're just racing against time, and the other vehicles are present just to ct as obstacles and to provide points bonuses for passing them. One odd little touch that really speaks to GP World's prototypical nature is that rather than having a timer that counts down to zero, the timer counts upwards, and each stage has a different time limit that gives a game over when the timer gets that high. It's only a little thing, but looking at this game, and the games that came after it, you can see how they streamlined things and improved them bit-by-bit over time.

As for GP World itself, it's a good game. It's fun enough on its own merits, and it's a nice little curiosity: a look at the DNA of some later, more polished games that we all know and love.

Rock N' Bolt (SG-1000)

Rock N' Bolt is part of a thematic tradition that was strong in the 1980s, especially on the 8-bit microcomputers, but seemed to have completely disappeared by the start of the 1990s: working class videogames. That is, games with protagonists that weren't adventurers or assassins or any other kind of power fantasy, but just men and women doing (cartoonishly exaggerated versions of) their regular day-to-day jobs, like binmen, miners, nurses and in this case, construction workers*.

So, as a part of that long-forgotten tradition, Rock N' Bolt stars a construction worker charged with the task of bolting girders in place, with his only enemy being the time limit. The girders, when not bolted down are inexplicably moving back and forth, and your worker can't jump across any gaps that might appear. Each floor is done twice: first, you only have to bolt down every girder. The second time around, you're given a diagram at the bottom of the screen, and the girders have to be bolted down so that they match the diagram. Once he's done on a floor, he goes back to the elevator to be taken upwards to the next, and this is where the real puzzle element comes in.

Just going out and bolting the girders down is simple enough, and even in the diagram versions of the stages it's not too much of a task to get things matched up, but getting back to the elevator means leaving some girders left unbolted, sometimes even unbolting them so you can get across the map. It gets hard pretty quickly, too, as a few stages in, the stages get bigger, being spread across several screens. So the player has to navigate their way away from the elevator, put the girders in the positions detailed on the diagram, and find their way back. All while keeping in mind what's happening across several screens and staying within the time limit.

It's a fun game, I can't deny that. And like most SG-1000 games, it automatically looks nice, thanks to the system's attractive and idiosyncratic colour palette. There's also the neat little touch of the score being displayed as dollars and cents working in it's favour. But for me, it's just a little too stressful. All the doing and un-doing and backtracking and so on is just a bit overwhelming. I know a lot of people would be fine with all that, and would love Rock N' Bolt, and to those people, I definitely recommend it, personally, it's not something I can see myself continuing to play long term.

Dragon Wang (SG-1000)

Pre-Final Fight beat em ups are interesting, in the same way that pre-Street Fighter II fighting games are, in that Final Fight kind of standardised the genre (I know Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun was also very influential, but FF was definitely a watershed moment). There were a few standard tropes before the afore-mentioned games, though: enemies that appeared at random rather than at planned intervals, standard enemies being one hit kills and generic chinese-style martial arts settings were more popular than the crime-ridden urban hells popularised by FF and NKK. Dragon Wang mostly follows this formula to a tee: each stage is some kind of multistory palace, with one-hit enemies running in from the sides of the screen at random.

The player has two attacks: kicks and flying kicks. Though the flying kicks never ever connect so they might as well not be there. Also though the SG-1000 controller has two buttons, they're both assigned to kick, forcing the player to press up to jump. Such a stupid, annoying little problem that's there for no reason at all. There's two kinds of regular enemies: guys who come right up to the player to kick, and guys who stand back and throw knives. Because of the random generation, though, the knife guys can sometimes show up at the worst times, surrounding the player from both sides, protected by walls of kicking guys.

The one unique gimmick the game has, though, is that rather than just go from left to right until reaching a boss at the end, they explore the floors of the palace seeking out bosses to fight to get keys and rescue the girl. The bosses all have their own health bars, and each has a gimmick, whether it's a weapon or the ability to teleport or being a robot. There's three bosses on the first stage, and each subsequent stage adds one. What's horrible about fighting the bosses is that there's no pattern or strategy to learn: they move and attack at random, so you just have to hope you're lucky enough to get enough attacks in to kill them before they do it to you. You health does get replenished after you beat them, though.

I wanted to like this game, it does have some charm and it looks really nice, as most SG-1000 games do, thanks to the system's idiosyncratic colour palette. Unfortunately, the more time spent playing it, the more obvious its flaws become,  and the more painful it gets to play.

Zippy Race (SG-1000)

Zippy Race is port of an arcade game, though I'm reviewing the SG-1000 version for three reasons: I didn't know this until I'd already played the SG-1000 version quite a bit, it's been a while since an SG-1000 game was featured on this blog and I just like the way SG-1000 games look. Obviously, it's a racing game, and though it's a pretty simple one, it's also pretty clever. The race in question is a ninety participant contest taking place across the USA, from Los Angeles to New York with a few other cities visited along the way. One odd point, though, is that though the player is riding a motorbike, all the other racers are in cars.

The game is fit into five stages, with your position in the race carrying over from stage to stage. Your bike's fuel tank serves as both a time limit and a health bar, and there are fuel tanks dotted around the stages to slightly replenish it. This being an old arcade game, there's also points to score, and I do like the various ways Zippy Race allows players to score points. The main two methods revolve around your position in the race: whenever you overtake a car, if overtaking that car puts you in a higher position than you've had at any prior point in the race, you get 500 points. Also, at the end of each stage, a big long chart of possible positions comes up, and bonus points are awarded based on your position on that chart. This also fulfills an even more important function than points: for every hundred points you get here, a small amount of fuel is replenished.

That leads into an example of the mechanical simplicity I love in this game, and how it all ties together so well: when you crash, you lose a chunk of your fuel bar and two cars will always pass you. When cars pass you, obviously your position in the race goes down, potentially affecting you end-of-stage bonus and the extra fuel that comes with it, but also stops you from getting points for passing cars until you've regained and surpassed your pre-crash position. This kind of simple, intertwined mechanic that effectively seperates good players from bad is something I really like, and I think works great in this game.

The game has five stages of two types: three of them take place in rural-looking environments and two in the desert. These two types of stage have their own set of obstacles and features, though they are all differently laid out from each other. The rural stages tend to have lots of bends and forks in the road, with not much else, while the desert stages have boulders and cacti strewn about the place, along with narrow bridges across rivers, and a much more generous supple or fuel cans and points items than the rural stages.

There is one thing I don't like at all in Zippy Race, however. At the end of each stage, there's a short psuedo-3D section, with a simple representation of a city in the background. These sections are just straight, featureless road on which the player avoids cars, but the sticking point is that they act like a kind of anti-bonus stage. You don't get any points or increase in rank for passing these cars, but you fuel is still depleting and you still get the penalty for crashing.

I liked this game a lot. As I've already said, the simple mechanics and they way they all weave together into a fun game really hooked me. I definitely recommend giving it a shot!
(This game is also known as MotoRace USA, Traverse USA and Mototour)

The Castle (SG-1000)

This game's a port of an MSX game, but I'm writing about this version because it's the one I discovered first and because I really like the SG-1000's colour palette.
It's a very old-fashioned platform adventure game of the sort that were popular on various computers in Europe in the 1980s, (l'Abbaye des Morts by Locomalito is a pretty great modern-day tribute to the genre) so much so, that I actually tried to find an "original" C64 or Spectrum version from which the SG-1000 and

MSX versions might have been ported, until I saw the MSX version's title screen, which credits the game's original authors, Isao Yoshida and Keisuke Iwakura.
Anyway, the plot of the game is a generic "save the princess from the castle"-type affair, and to do so, you have to find your way around the 100 room castle. Unlike most modern metrovania games (which could be seen as the spiritual descendents of this genre), combat is far from the player's main concern in this game. Keys are the most important thing, available in various different colours, to open doors of matching colours. There's also potions to increase your number of lives, and various kinds of treasure to increase your score. The meat of the game is working out how to reach each item and each exit in every room without getting killed by any of the enemies or traps in the room. There's items that can be pushed around, like bricks and vases and such, though they all act the same. they can be jumped on top of or pushed from the sides, and they fall off of platforms. They're also your only weapon against the enemies in the castle, as pushing one of these items into an enemy kills the enemy. Dead enemies stay dead, even after leaving a room and re-entering, while items return to their original positions, meaning that a single item can be used in more than

one part of a room, as long as you exit and re-enter.
The controls are obviously simple: the d-pad moves your character, one button jumps and the other, unusually, changes the speed of the game, allowing the player to switch at will between full and half-speed, depending on whether they're waiting for an elevator to come down to them, or timing a risky jump over an enemy's head.
There's not much more to be said abou this game, other than that it meets my approval. It's a lot of fun to play, and it's neither brutally hard nor insultingly easy, and solving each room feels like a satisfying little victory.

Champion Kendou (SG-1000)

I don't know much about kendo, though it seems to be a sport that's mysteriously under-represented in videogames. Other than this game, there's a Simple 1500 release on the Playstation, and oddly, a few games on 80s British computers and very little else. I guess other types of fighting are seen to make for more exciting videogames?
Anyway, the game has two main modes of play. The first, and most realistic is a tournament mode featuring teams of five fighting one by one. A pint is scored by getting a clean hit on your opponent, and the first to score twice wins. Their opponent is eliminated, and the first team to lose all five memebers loses the match. I don't know how many rounds are played in this mode all together, but I've been able to get to the fifth team of opponents so far. Though the box art depicts the competitors as men, the in-game sprites are simple and plain enough that you can, should you be so inclined, project any kind of personality onto them. Like if you're some kind of weirdo, you might decide that you're controlling a team of misfit teenage girls, led by a seemingly aloof sempai who seems stuck up but secretly she's really kind and protects younger kids from bullies. If you were some kind of weirdo, of course.
The other mode isn't so good. It's a one-on-one mode in which the two fighters each have health bars, which for some reason are reduced not only by taking attacks, but also by attacking. You can actuallly knock

yourself out by attacking too much.
For some reason, I instantly took a liking to this game. It's simple, but very satisfying to play, and the primitive graphics somehow manage to radiate a lot of atmosphere. One amusing minor detail is that the crowd of spectators seem to be very one-sided in their tastes: They'll cheer when the player's team wins a match, but only offer a stony silence for AI victories.
I definitely recommend this game! If you're one of those collector types, it might be helpful to know that it was released on Sega's My Card format, meaning it's compatible with the Sega Mark III, the first model of the Master System, a few other, more obscure 80s consoles and the Mega Drive Powerbase Convertor.

Pacar (SG1000)

At first glance, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that Pacar is just a crap, lazy rip-off of Pac-Man, but with cars (the name is probably as close to "Pac-Car" as Sega could get without being sued). In reality, it's a pretty great rip-off of Pac-Man!
The fact that the ghosts and... yellow thing have been replaced by cars isn't just an aesthetic change, it leads to the first, and probably most important difference between Pacar and Pac-Man: cars go much slower in reverse. This means that if you want to change direction quickly, you have to turn 90 degrees. You can drive backwards, but it's a lot slower than going forwards, which is pretty dangerous when there are enemies around.
There are other differences, too. For example, there are two mazes instead of one. The game alternates between the two, and each time you clear both mazes, the end of level bonus increases, as does the number of blue cars in the maze.
Blue cars are the most common enemy type in the game, and they just passively drive around the mazes, not making any special effort to try and kill you. Each maze also has one orange car, that appears after you've been in the stage for a certain amount of time. The orange car is much more agressive than the blue ones, actively chasing you around and trying to kill you.
Like Pac-Man, Pacar has special larger dots that temporarily give you the ability to kill the enemies. Like everything else that Pacar takes from it's predecessor however, there's a little more strategy to the power dots.
Firstly, they aren't waiting ready on the map for you to collect them from the start, one appears for every 30 normal dots that you collect. Secondly, the blue cars can collect them, although doing so gives them no special advantage, it does rob you of the chance to get some extra points, both by killing the enemies (the points awarded for which double in the exact same manner as, that's right, Pac-Man), as well as the quite hefty 300 points that each power dot is worth.
There is quite a bit more strategy to the game that i won't go into here, since this is meant to be a review, not a guide.
In summary, though it's not quite as good as later maze games such as Raimais or Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Pacar is still a very good game, definately better than it's inspiration, as well as being a lot more playable today than a lot of it's contempories.