Maze Action (PS2)

It wasn't long ago that I proclaimed Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita to be the worst game ever featured on this blog, but in Maze Action (Also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 8: Gekitou! Meiro King), I've found a fairly robust challenger to that title. It does fall short, though, in that while playing Maze Action is a completely miserable experience, and it's a pretty cheap-looking title, even for a Simple Series game, it does at least feel like it's just a bad game, and not a personal insult from the developers directed at the player. (Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita really was that bad).

The plot and the mechanics both seem to have been inspired by the popular comic Hunter X Hunter, specifically the hunter exam story arc. You are one of the four of this year's candidates to have reached the final exam at the hero academy, but there can only be one graduate, so you've got to face each other in a contest of skill and strength to determine who that'll be. So single player mode has four stages: you face off against each of the three characters you didn't pick, and then you fight a copy of your own character. It seems likely that there's probably a fifth stage with a final boss character, but you'd honestly need the patience of a saint to bother playing long enough to find out.

The mechanical influence from HxH is also from the hunter exam part, as the contests in which you're place see you running around a maze, trying to be first to find three matching keys and getting to your opponent's starting pad. The twist is that while you need three red keys and your opponent needs three blue, you start with a blue key and they start with a red. So, just like that part on the island where all the hunter candidates have to run around trying to steal each other's number badges, while protecting their own, you will be forced, at some point, to fight your opponent. There are various items littering the mazes, along with the keys. There's weapons, of both melee and projectile varieties, and there's traps. There's also some traps permanently planted around the place, too.

This could have all addedup into a fairly decent game, but the problem is all in the execution. Moving around feels awkward, combat is haphazard and unsatisfying, and it just generally doesn't feel very good to play. It's frustrating, because it also feels like the developers were really inspired and really wanted to make a simplified videogame version of the hunter exam, but they just didn't make it enjoyable to play.

So yeah, Maze Action is a terrible game and you definitely shouldn't play it. But I can see what they were trying to do, at least. That's something, right?

Project Minerva Professional (PS2)

It's odd that this game got a western release, since it's a weird kind of celebrity vehicle thing for Norika Fujiwara, an actress who isn't well-known in the west at all (the only thing that westerners might know on her IMDB page is the live action movie based on the comic Boys Over Flowers). Even more oddly, the game's opening credits list er as "Star and Planner", though I assume her role in planning was just agreeing to be in a game, and possibly having the enemies be robots because she didn't want to be seen as a bloodthirsty mercenary? Or maybe it really was a passion project for her, and she genuinely had a bunch of ideas for an action game in which she wanted to star?

If this game was made in the west, about a western model/actress/general celebrity, it'd probably be very different. Look at Kim Kardashian's game, for example: a phone game about fashion and fame and all that sort of thing. Project Minerva Professional, by contrast, is a military/sci-fi themed squad-based 3D shooter. Norika "plays" a woman named Alicia, who is the leader of a military task force charged with saving humanity from the evil robots manufactured by Minerva Corporation. This is done in a series of missions (I hear there's over a hundred, though I've only played through about six of them), with various typical squad shooter objectives: kill a number of enemies, plant bombs in certain locations, rescue the hostages, and so on.

Now, though I do think it's a bit of a shame that almost all modern 3D action games use a near-identical dual analogue control scheme, I think the fact that Project Minerva came out before that layout had been standardised is what really hurts it the most, more than the useless squad members running around like headless chickens, and more than the very simple (and Simple Series-esque) stage layouts and mission parameters. (Though it wasn't originally released as a Simple Series game, it really does feel like one, and actually got a rerelease a bit later as The Simple 2000 Ulitmate Series Vol. 23). Alicia is moved with the left stick, the right shoulder buttons are used for aiming your gun and looking through your binoculars, and the left shoulder buttons are used for centering the camera behind Alicia, which is the only direct control of the camera you get. Another typical (and hated) trait the game has in common with a lot of Simple Series games is the insane level of grinding. Weapons and armour are slowly made available in the shop, and once they're available, they still need to be bought, with insane prices that require several stages to be completed before they can be met.

You might wonder what the right analogue stick is doing, and it does nothing besides being a duplicate of the controls mapped to the d-pad, which are used for selecting and giving orders to your underlings. There's lots of other weird quirks in this game too, like how enemies don't appear on the radar unless you look at them through your binoculars and "mark" them, which has to be done for each enemy individually. You also have very little offence or defence at short ranges. There are some short range weapons, but they aren't great, and  you can't move and shoot at the same time: to shoot, you hold down R2 to look through your weapon's scope, aim with the left stick (so you can't move at the same time), and shoot with the square button. To make things worse, the direction you'll be looking in when you hold R2 isn't necessarily going to be the direction the camera is pointing in beforehand, making it very difficult to quickly aim and shoot at enemies. Unlike the clunkiness of Deep Water, this awkwardness doesn't add anything to the game, it is just annoying awkwardness.

Having said all that, there is some fun to be had in Project Minerva Professional. Since the late 90s, it's been a widely held opinion that there's a certain satisfying thrill to be had in shooting far away enemies through a scope, and that does still apply in this game, even through all the clunkiness of the controls and the weirdness of the camera. There's still dozens, and probably even hundreds of better games that offer the same thrill, though, so unless you really love the aesthetic of early PS2 games, you should just go for one of those over this one.

Deep Water (PS2)

I bought this game over three years ago, and at the time, I had a little play of it, quickly got lost and confused, and put it on the shelf to rot. Recently, I decided to give it another chance, and was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting game with lots of cool ideas. The joy didn't last long, but I'll get to that later.

Also known as The Simple 2000 Series Vol. 54: The Taikai Kemono, Deep Water is an open-world sailing/monster-hunting game in which you sail around a flooded world, going from port to port, taking on missions and buying weaponry and fuel. The world's pretty odd, as it seems to be a post-apocalyptic flooded world, with the tops of ruined buildings peeking up out of the water in some places, but there's actually lots of land, all of it surrounded by steep, very high cliffs. I wonder if there's people living up there, who shun the ocean-faring peasants below. Anyway, as you're sailing around, you get attacked by sharks and pirates (on silly little one-person cannon-boat things) and other angry sealife, and occasionally, you'll take on the task of fighting a giant monster, the giant monster fights being the game's main draw.

The mechanics of playing the game are actually pretty interesting themselves. You never really set foot off your boat, but you are a one-person crew and the game tries to replicate this experience by having you walk up and down your boat to do different things. For example, to actually sail around, you have to go to the steering wheel and controls in the middle of the boat, while to look at the map, change weapons or cool the engines, you have to go to the storage bins at the back of the boat. During combat, you'll be running around the deck aiming your rifle at your assailants, and during bossfights you'll occasionally have to man the harpoon gun at the front.

What I've been avoiding talking about is the huge, absurd, totally deliberate flaw in the game's design: the obscene amount of back-tracking, which would be bad enough itself, but it's vaguely directed back-tracking too. You'll quickly learn that when you see a harbour mentioned by anyone at another harbour, even in passing, it means you have to go there to make the story progress, even if that means twenty minutes of sailing across the map to somewhere you went near the start of the game. Add to this the fact that fuel is absurdly expensive, so the game also expects you to spend hours grinding random enemies to be able to afford refills (though I've found that it's far more efficient in cases where you're low on both fuel and money to just let enemies sink your ship. you'll reappear at the last harbour you visited with full HP and fuel, and half your money gone, which is almost definitely less than the cost of the fuel).

This time-wasting and vagueness mean that I've only been able to fight one of the game's much-vaunted giant monsters. I've received the missions to fight two more, but in one case, the area where they're said to appear are still blocked by barriers, and in the other, I've found the area, but apparently there's someone, somewhere I need to speak to to make it appear, and after a solid hour of tedious nautical errand-running, I just totally lost patience.

I think I can semi-recommend Deep Water. The way it handles the solo sailing is pretty cool, and the fact that it'll probably be dirt cheap means that you're not losing much by giving up on it when it starts trying your patience.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting (Playstation)

I said it in my review of another Simple Series game with a very to-the-point title, Vol. 24: The Gun Shooting, but this game isn't as generic as you'd expect. Not only does it have a plot told in (thankfully skippable) FMV cutscenes between stages, but there's also little bits of voice-acted dialogue between your pilot and their comrades as you play through the stages themselves. As well as there being more plot and more effort put into the presentation than you'd expect, it's also a pretty full-featured (if not particularly original) horizontal shooter that gives the player lots of attack options.

But before I get onto how it plays, i'll talk a little bit more about how it looks. Now, the difficulty spikes massively in the third stage, and as a result, I haven't been able to get past that stage's boss. But, those three stages display either a love of the game's contemporaries, or a lack of shame in ripping them off, depending on how cynical you are. For example, the first stage takes place in a futuristic cityscape reminiscent of Einhander, the second over and under an idyllic ocean that calls to mind G-Darius, and the third a desert with a brief foray into an underground technological tunnel that vaguely reminded me of Thunderforce V, but only a little. All of this in that "low-poly models with low-resolution textures" aesthetic with which I'm sure all my discerning readers are enamoured.

Though the game doesn't have any power-ups, the player does start with an array of different weapons that really really remind me of Thunderforce V (as an aside, The Shooting was apparently developed by two companies called CyberDreams and C.I.I, and I haven't been able to find anything else they worked on. I guess there's a chance that those are psuedonyms for ex-Tecnosoft employees, but this is pure conjecture on my part). You have a machine gun, fired from the front of your ship, and from two options. By moving left or right while not shooting, the two options can be moved around the ship, allowing the player to shoot i wide angles, as well as above, below and behind. You've also got a lock-on weapon, which can shoot up to sixteen guided missiles in a nice Itano Circus-esque fashion. Unfortunately, it takes so long to fire that you'll usually have killed all the enemies with your machine gun by the time the missiles reach them (it's useful in boss fights, though). Finally, you have a forward-firing giant, powerful laser that's limited by a power meter at the top of the screen. The power meter recharges in a matter of seconds, but the catch is that it's shared with another, non-offensive feature of your ship: a quick dodging move that can pass harmlessly through enemy bullets.

What ties all these weapons and features together is a control system that's simple and elegant. Square fires your machine gun, holding X locks on your missiles and releasing fires them, and the dodge and laser are assigned to the two right shoulder buttons. It's obviously designed around the idea that the player will spend much of the game holding down the square button, but will also need regular, comfortable and instant access to the others (which wouldn't have been the case had all four functions been assigned to the Playstation controller's four face buttons). It's a little thing, but it's done so well that I feel it's worth mentioning.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting is a pretty good game. It's nothing particularly spectacular or original, and the sudden upturn in difficulty presented by stage 3 is a pain, but it's much better than a budget title with a generic title really needs or deserves to be. Apparently, it also got a western release as "Shooter: Space Shot", which somehow feels like an even worse title. I don't know how intact the US version is, though, as we all know that western budget publishers loved to meddle in games, especially shooting games.

Simple DS Series vol. 39: The Shouboutai (DS)

Time for another Tamsoft game, and I don't think I've mentioned this before, but despite most of their DS output being in the Simple Series, Tamsoft seemed to have an uncanny nack for making polygon graphics on the system. The Shouboutai is no exception to this, bringing some non-violent third person shooting action to the table.

I remember one of the advertising taglines for Sonic Team's Burning Rangers stating that it had "Thrills without the kills", as it was a 3D action game about rescuing people and fighting fires, and The Shouboutai treads similar ground, though in present day Japan, rather than the futuristic labs and space stations of Burning Rangers.

As well as having great graphics, The Shouboutai also manages to simulate the dual analogue-based controls of console third person shooters, with the d-pad or face buttons being used to move around, and the touchscreen being used to turn you character, as well as to aim and shoot. Obviously, since this is a game about firefighting, different kinds of water hoses take the place of guns, and fire takes the place of enemies. Though the first few stages feature normal fire, that mostly just stays still and slowly grows if you don't put it out, you'll soon be up against fires that move around and even shoot smaller fires at the player. There's even boss fights, against such foes as giant angry chemical fires, and burning out cars that are somehow driving up and down the street.

There's some downsides to this game, though they're not big ones. The main one is an issue that crops up in a lot of Japanese budget games, even the big names like Oneechanbara and Earth Defence Force: There are a lot of stages, but not so many maps. So you have stages that just take place in different areas of the same map, with the rest blocked off. There only seems to be three maps in The Shouboutai: a suburban street, the corridors of a hotel, and a factory/warehouse type place. There's also the fact that the game can get a little repetitive, even though there are a few different mission objectives that crop up, from simply putting out every fire, to rescuing civilians. These are the only real faults, and neither of them are significant problems.

I definitely recommend giving The Shouboutai a look, even though there are plenty of 3D shooters on more modern handhelds, it's always nice to see something like this squeezed on to low-powered hardware. And if you want more violence in your TPS, there are a couple of alternative options that I'll cover at some point in the future (and if i remember rightly, they're also developed by Tamsoft).

Simple DS Series Vol. 18: The Soukou Kihei Gunground

I've covered a fair few Simple Series games in the past, on the Playstation, PS2 and PSP, but the Simple DS Series warrants a bit of an extra introduction. Like all the other versions of the series, it's a long string of budget games that tend to have fairly generic titles with a few diamonds hidden in the rough. What's special about the Simple DS Series though, is that there seems to be a higher level of technical quality than you might expect from a budget series of games on the original DS. You might expect a lot of cheap-looking touchscreen minigame compilations, but there's a lot of polygon-heavy action games with pretty high production values.

The Soukou Kihei Gunground is an entry into what I feel is a pretty under-subscribed subgenre: military giant robot-themed action platformers whose progenitor is (as far as I know) Assault Suits Leynos. It has most of the common features: parts upgrading, a setting that seems heavily inspired by Soukou Kihei Votoms (obviously), even the missions have the same kinds of objectives and locations that other games have.

There's stages where the player just has to make their way from left to right, stages where every enemy has to be destroyed, stages where certain items have to be defended or destroyed or collected. And they take place in jungles, deserts, mountains, cities and secret bases. Upgrading is pretty simple, with a shop selling new weapons and parts, as well as healing items that can be used during play via the touch screen. (The touchscreen's only use in this game is for changing weapons and using items.) Menus are all in Japanese, but there's plenty of numbers and other visual representation, so navigation won't be too big a problem after you get used to things (and I'm assuming that most people who regularly read this blog can at least recognise the katakana for "save" and "load").

There's also ther option to change the colours of every indiviual part of your mecha, but unfortunately the developers have gone with a "realistic" look for the game, so no matter what colours the player picks, their mecha will still look like an ugly greyish pile of boxes. Most of the enemy mecha, at least, look like boldly coloured green or orange piles of boxes. I assume the developers of this particular title just had problems getting good 3D from the DS though, as all the backgrounds are pretty nice looking pixel art, all colourful and detailed.

The single player game is pretty good, and as I said, it's not a genre with a lot of options, especially on handhelds, but the game also has a pretty great multiplayer option. It actually has two multiplayer options, but the other one's a bit disappointing. They both allow download play with a single cartridge though, which is always nice.

Starting with the disappointment, there's the co-op mode. I was really looking forward to this mode before playing it, teaming up with some friends to smash enemy mecha sounded great, but unfortunately, the missions are so trivially easy with multiple players, there's no fun to be found here. The versus mode is a lot better though. It's pretty much as you'd imagine: each player enters into a small stage and wages battle until only one remains. Since all the available mecha are bipedal, it doesn't have the variety that the similar versus mode found in the SNES game Metal Warriors, but it does have the advantage of being on handhelds, so each player has their own screen.

Yeah, The Soukou Kihei Gunground is a pretty good game. I wouldn't pay a lot for it, but it's definitely worth a look if you happen across a copy going cheap.

Simple 2500 Series Portable!! Vol. 13: The Akuma Hunters - Exorsister

The first thing you should know about this game is that it bears no relation to the early 90s series of comedy/horror/porn films starring famed comic creator Ippongi Bang. I hope you can get over your obviously grave disappointment.
It's actually got more in common with the Oneechanbara series being, as it is, developed by Tamsoft, and featuring a group of attractive women engaging in combat with horror-themed monsters. Also like the Oneechanbara series, the game has only a few maps,

each having several missions taking place in parts of it. The game has a big flaw that its more famous sister lacks though, which is that most hated bugbear of modern action games, endless grinding. While the Oneechanbara series does have experience points and levelling up, the player's progress isn't particularly impeded by their low level, Exorsister requires re-playing stages over and over to grind for the materials to sell so you can play a stronger weapon that will reduce the awful slog of the next one.
When you do manage to save up for an adequate weapon, the game is a fairly entertaining (though repetetive) beat em up. You go about the stage,

beat up monsters (who do look pretty cool, and there are a fair few varieties of them, too), and while they're unconcious on the ground, you exorcise them. Each weapon has two stats: AP (attack power) and RP (I assume this means rosary power?), their functions are fairly obvious: attack power indicates how much damage the weapon does when attacking, and RP indicates how quickly monsters can be exorcised with the weapon equipped.
Fighting tough monsters, who will have three main advantages over the player, such as lots of health, lots of.. spiritual health(?) and an entourage of goons to protect them,

is simpler than it seems at first. You just need to stay locked on to the target, and wail on them, dodging out of the way when they look like they're going to attack. When they're down, the best way to exorcise them is to charge the spell up close (which makes it charge much quicker), then run away from the crony monsters before casting it, so they don't interrupt it with their attacks. And don't bother killing the cronies until you kill the target, as they'll quickly respawn.
Anyway, although I've enjoyed this game, and spent a good few hours playing it, I can't call it a good game or really recommend it. The fact is that the grind of having to repeat stages to get equipped for the next ones is just so boring, and there are much better things to do with your time than waste it on that kind of rubbish.

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~

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 104: The Robot Tsukuruuze ~Gekitou! Robot Fight~

Before playing this game, all i knew about it was the title, an from that, I assumed it would be a game about giant robots, or maybe some kind of Angelic Layer/Plawres Sanshiro-esque affair with toy robots fighting. The second guess was the closer of the two, though unlike the fighting toy robots seen in those shows, the robots in this game are much more realistic. Rather than being tiny mechanical superheroes, these robots are

blocky machines, awkwardly stumbling about just like bipedal robots do in real life. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen robots pretty similar to the ones in this game in real life, but searches for "bipedal robot sumo/fighting/etc." proved fruitless.
Anyway, the fighting portion of the game has your robot facing another in a sumo-style arena, victory coming from either depriving your opponent of their balance points and knocking them over, or by pushing them out of the ring. The first robot to win three rounds wins the fight.
Of course, the robot in-game belongs to and is controlled by the teenage members of an after-school club, and between the matches, you can instruct the four members of the club to either perform one of four actions (making new robot parts, programming new special moves into the robot,

repairing the robot's parts or changing the robot's parts), or they can spend the week studying to increase their proficiency in one of the four actions.
The makers of the game really got into the high school anime presentation style of the game, even going so far as having the game's intro be in the style of an anime intro, complete with vocal theme song and a fake time stamp in the corner of the screen. The developers' (HuneX) back catalogue (at least as far as their Simple Series entries go) is largely made up of visual novels and romance games, which shows in this game in the form of the unbelievably lengthy dialogue scenes that occur almost constantly between fights, delivered in the format of static pictures with text boxes beneath them. I don't feel like I'm missing much

through my inability to read them, and to be honest, my enjoyment of the game shot up immensely after discovering that you can skip entire scenes of dialogue in one go by pressing select.
In summary, this is a fun game with a nice, friendly atmosphere, even if you skip all the dialogue scenes. It' also very well made, with great production values that really hide the fact that it's a Simple 2000 game. I definitely recommend it.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 114: The Jo'okappichi Torimonochou ~Oharuchan GOGOGO!~ (PS2)

This is another beat em up, and I know almost all the Ps2 games about which I write posts are beat em ups, but this time I did actually intend to write about a Japan-only train racing game entitled Tetsu-1: Densha de Battle!, but that game was way too frustrating for me to play long enough to write about. It seems like it

might be enjoyable if you can muster up the patience for it, though.
So, in this game, you play as a female ninja-for-hire, taking on missions for money. The missions all involve finding a villain in their hideout and capturing them. All the missions take place in the same map, a largish town that mixes elements from modern-day and old-timey Japan. The enemies are all ninjas, geishas and so-on, and this coupled with the darumas appearing everywhere and the power-ups including pieces of sushi and maneki-neko statues makes the game's setting seem like an over the top western stereotype of Japan.
Playing the game is pretty simple. You have regular attacks, a useless projectile attack and a lasso, that can be used to throw sunned enemies. The lasso is also required for beating the bosses at the end of each stage, as they need to be stunned and caught, rather than just beaten up.
There are three different types of mission, though in all of them the final objective is finding and capturing the boss. But in some missions, you just have to wander the town until you see a yellow E on the map, showing where the boss is hiding, in others, you have to collect a certain number of round bottle-type objects that are just lying around the stage before the boss's location is revealed and in others, a few keys will have to be found that will be dropped by defeated enemies at random. The key stages are actually really quick and easy, since the enemies keep respawning, so you can stay where you are and keep beating them until you've got all the keys. Later in the
game, there's also a stage where all the enemies are sword-weilding darumas that kill you in two hits.
This is a pretty good entry into the Simple Series. It doesn't have the terrible grinding that some of them are ruined by, and it's not hard or too easy (except for that damn daruma stage, which I think might be optional).

Street Boyz (PS2)

I was going to make the 100th post something special, but I couldn't actually think of anything special to do. I'll try harder for the 137th post, okay?
This is the first review done with the aid of my new capture device, though! That's kind of special, even if the device is a cheap piece of crap. (Don't buy super-cheap capture devices from ebay.they'll fall apart and need to be re-installed everytime you want to use them and you'll have to trick them into giving you sound.)
Anyway, on to the game itself! It's by Tamsoft, who are one of my favourite developers. They're most well known these days for the archetypal modern B-games, the Oneechanbara/Zombie Hunters series, though in ages past they did also make the Battle Arena Toshinden games, and they're responsible for a lot of other entries into the legendary Simple 2000 series (including this one!). Especially interesting are their entries into the Simple DS series, since they tend to have some of the best 3D graphics on the original DS, despite being budget games.
Street Boyz is a beat em up about banchos, those baggy trousered high school thugs of 70s and 80s Japan, and though the name and boxart of the PAL release might lead you to believe that they'd have been replaced with burberry-clad council estate thugs, the game's original plot, character names and everything else has been left intact! Not that any of it is particularly interesting or original, mind you.

How does it play? It's alright. Not terrible, not spectacular. It carries over one of the worst flaws of the Oneechanbara games (or the other way round, as i think this game might have been made before those), in that you're often only given the vaguest clues as to what to do in an area. For example, being told you need a key, but having no clue where the key might be, or who might be carrying it, and like in the Oneechanbara series, this situation is made worse by the fact that the stages are made up of rooms and corridors that all look exactly alike.

The combat is okay, typical 3D beat em up stuff: a button each for strong and weak attacks, weapons to pick up, a super bar to fill, and so on. There is a major flaw here, though. The camera is probably the worst I've experienced in a 3D game, it often seems to go where it likes, and that always seems to be a place where it's hardest to see what you're doing. There is a button to place the camera behind your character, and another button to lock on to the nearest enemy, but these aren't perfect solutions, and in some areas they're disabled. There are a few parts of each stage where all camera control is taken away, because the game wants to show off a nice "cinematic" viewpoint. Unfortunately, while these views do look nice, they're also very impractical.
Although I've said a lot of bad things about this game (and it does deserve the criticism), I've still managed to get a good few hours of enjoyment out of it, and for the prices it tends to go for these days, I'd say it's definitely worth risking a pound or two on.
This game is also known as Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 21: First-Class Brawl! Yankee Leader ~Legendary Shouwa 99 Year~

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 24 - The Gun Shooting (Playstation)

Judging by the title of this game, and the fact that it's a Simple 1500 budget release, you'd probably expect a bland, bare-bones target shooter, maybe like a less colourful version of Point Blank. Surprisingly, it's not like that at all: it has a plot, characters, and even an animated intro showing those characters getting aboard some kind of futuristic buggy thing! It also has some pretty cool artwork on the loading screens between stages. Of course, I can't tell you what the plot is about, or what the names of the characters are because all that stuff is in Japanese. Who cares anyway, though?
Anyway, the game is a typical lightgun shooter: you move slowly through the stages shooting at tanks, robots and other mechanical stuff that wants to kill you. The stages are fairly varied in their looks, though they all take place in some kind of exotic outdoors wilderness, there's forests and valleys and deserts and so on, so they aren't all the same. You do fight a lot of the same enemies on every stage, though, but that's one of the corners you expect to be cut in a budget game.
The only problem with the game is the difficulty: it is incredibly easy for most of the game. You can take at least thirty hits before getting a game over, and not only are the enemies not particularly enthusiastic about trying to kill you, but at least half of the time you get hit, you won't lose any health. Plus you're likely to get at least one extra life on each stage. I did say it was only incredibly easy for most of the game though, as once you get to the mid-boss of the last stage, and what I assume is the game's final boss, the difficulty takes a sudden and dramatic spike upwards. These two guys will hit you fast, and take off lots of health when they do. It's really cheap, and i would have preferred a harder game in general to a very easy game with really hard bosses at the end. Until you reach that point, it's a fairly fun, leisurely game and the surprisingly high production values make me wonder why it's a simple series game with a generic title, rather than being sold on it's own right with an actual name and such. I'm also slightly surprised that it wasn't one of the simple series games brought to the west under a different title by budget publishers late in the Playstation's lifespan.