Kamen Rider SD - Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine (SNES)

I was attracted to this game when I saw some screenshots of it, and it appeared to be a side-scrolling racing game, which is pretty unusual. When I played it, though, it actually turned out to be a beat em up in which the player and all the enemies are riding in or on vehicles. That's pretty unusual too, I guess? Unfortunately, it doesn't have much effect on the game itself.

I assume that the idea of having all the characters on vehicles is to give the impression of an exciting, high speed battle, but that feeling never comes across. You can increase or decrease your speed at any time by pressing the shoulder buttons, but it doesn't really change anything besides the speed at which the background is scrolling, and fighting at 149 kilometres per hour feels exactly the same as fighting at 605 kilometres per hour. It's with those scrolling backgrounds themselves, though, that I place the blame for the this game's lack of excitement.

The thing is that the game never really feels fast or exciting because you're never going anywhere: each area has a background image that's maybe two screens long, and you go past it over and over again until you've beaten all the enemies in that area. Then your character just speeds offscreen to the next area. It feels like you're fighting on a treadmill, and it's not helped by the fact that each stage has a few areas in it, and each background gets used at least twice.

As for the characters, though this game does apparently star every Showa era Kamen Rider, you don't get to pick them, each one gets their own stage, that can only be played in order. A strange approach, when compared to Masked Rider Club Battle Race, which not only lets you pick whichever Rider you like, but is generally a much better game all-round. It's a shame it never got ported to any home systems, really.

There's really no reason to bother with Kamen Rider SD: Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine, unless you really need to have every Kamen Rider game ever released. Even if you want a SNES beat em up with Kamen Riders in it, this isn't the one to go for.

Nishijin Pachinko Monogatari 2 (SNES)

So this game was recently fan-translated into English, so I thought I thought it might make for an easy foot-in-the-door to get into the once-big genre of pachinko videogames. Unfortunately, I found pretty much as incomprehensible as I ever have, but I'll share my experience with you anyway.

As you might have gathered, this is a pachinko game with a story, and that story is one of gross irresponsibility: the protagonist, having lost their job due to the waning post-bubble economy, has decided to make a career out of playing pachinko instead. Like most forms of gambling, this might be a somewhat viable, if risky option. Unfortunately, this shmuck was under my control, and I have no idea how pachinko works, so he ended up just pouring all his life savings into some noisy ball-bearing dispensers.

There is a kind of practice mode that lets you play any of the four machines in the game as much as you like, and even gives very lengthy instructions for them, but even these instructions rely on you knowing the basics of the game. Instead, my eyes just glazed over as screens full of text about the relationship between red and green digits, and probability variation mode scrolled by. I did play for a little over an hour, but every time I thought I'd figured out how something worked, attempts to replicate it proved that I hadn't.

As it is, I don't really feel qualified to recommend or not-recommend this game. If you're completely unfamiliar with pachinko, it won't do much to teach you, but it does look nice, and for while I did get to watch a cute little story about a baby chick saving a mermaid play out on one of the machines. So, it exists, and it's now in English. Try it if you want, I guess? See if you can get more out of it than I did.

Battle Tycoon - Flash Hiders SFX (SNES)

I complain a lot about how many action games, especially those released in recent years, are ruined by the addition of experience points, skill progression, and the negative difficulty curve that those features create. But of course, there are exceptions to every rules, and Battle Tycoon is one of them. It's the sequel to a PC Engine game I've not yet played called Flash Hiders, and both games seem to be pioneering forays into the kind of long, robust single player modes that later fighting games like the home ports of Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution would have.

Obviously, there's the traditional modes where you just pick characters and fight against other human players or computer-controlled opponents, but the meat of the game is in the "Advance" mode, which has you selecting a character that you'll stick with for the duration, while you fight opponents, gain experience and raise your stats. This mode is split into days, and at different times of day, you can go to different places: the official arena to take part in fights against random opponents at random power levels, the street fight arena, where you can choose your opponent from a whoever's present on that day, the gambling den where you can bet on fights in which you don't personally participate (though, if you want, you can actually sit out of fighting altogether and have the computer do it. though the strategy/raising part of the game isn't really deep enough that this would be worthwhile for anyone), an item shop, a place to save your progress, and your apartment where you can look at your stats.

Mostly though, you just take part in fights and watch numbers gradually go up. There's an interesting thing to note about the character stats in this game, though. There are four stats: Attack, Guard, Speed and Point. The first three are obvious, but Point is a pool of extra stat points that can be assigned as you see fit at the start of every bout. All the fights are so easy that the stats don't really seem to matter very much at all, but it's a nice touch. It's an enjoyable mode, and when it came out, there probably wasn't really anything like it. It's kind of surprising that a game like this, that is, a longform action game that's totally accessible to the JP-illiterate doesn't seem to have any kind of fandom in the west already. You would have thought it would have been a hit as far back as the imports market in the 90s, especially when you get onto how it looks and sounds.

How does it look and sound? Well, it's obvious that the developers not only had a target audience in mind, but they knew exactly hoe to hook them. Everything about this game is aggressively designed to appeal to 1990s anime fans (or as they were known at the time it came out, just regular anime fans). The character designs, the stages, even the menus, all look like they could have been licensed from a hundred different OAVs of the time, with music that comes as close to the ideal as the SNES can muster, too. The sprites are a little smaller than most fighting games of the time, but the quality of the artwork is still generally of a very high standard and the whole game looks great.

I totally recommend trying out Battle Tycoon. It looks incredible, and though it's not a particularly sophisticated fighting game, it's still fun enough and the single player mode is, as mentioned, years ahead of its time. It really makes me want to splash out on a 6-button PC Engine controller and a copy of the first game, too, since that has things like full-screen pixel art cutscenes and CD quality music.

Gangan Gan-chan (SNES)

It's odd how the SNES and Mega Drive have their own strong identities, both aesthetically and in terms of game mechanics and design. For example, I don't think I would be alone in saying that the SNES action game Hagane looks and feels like a Mega Drive game that somehow got released on the wrong console. GanGan Gan-chan, however, only goes half way: it looks very much like a typical Japanese SNES game, but in terms of how it plays, it feels a lot more like a Mega Drive game. This all makes sense, right?

Anyway, the most basic way of descibing the way it plays is that it's Flicky, but in a maze. You play as a thing that looks like Carbuncle from the Puyo Puyo games (or, through the use of a secret password, a giant bald man's head) and run around mazes collecting little coloured blob creatures, that follow behind you in a line. You take the creatures back to your home base, and the more you had following you, the more points you get. Obviously, though, there are a few complications. Firstly, the colours of the creatures actually matter: there are four keys sealed at certain points of the maze, and to complete a stage, you must collect four of each colour's creature to unseal the respective keys, then collect the keys and go home. Plus there's some kind of byzantine power-up system that revolves around the (surprisingly difficult) idea of picking up the creatures in the right order before bringing them home. I've only ever triggered this through luck, though, as there's always lots of the little guys running around haphazardly.

Of course there are also enemies roaming the mazes, who can kill you on contact, as well as break the chain of creatures following you, should they cross paths. You don't get any kind of attack to fight back against them, not even through power ups, though you do have a couple of defensive/evasive powers. You can hold down B to increase your movement speed, or Y to turn into a stationary pillar, that stuns enemies that crash into it. You also have a power meter that limits the use of both these powers, and when it runs down, not only are they taken away, but your default movement speed is reduced too, putting you at a massive disadvantage. All in all, the game is actually really difficult, though it never feels like it, and almost always you know that you died because of your own poor playing, rather than unfair design.

True to the SNES aesthetic, the game looks great: huge, very brightly coloured sprites, and backgrounds that manage to be both detailed and chunky-looking. The first set of stages looks best, by far, looking not unlike a zoomed-in version of the SNES Sim City port. It's actually a disappointment that after this and the lively beach stages, the China and Egypt stages that follow are so bland and lifeless. The production as a whole is pretty nice, though, which is a surprise, since as far as I can tell, it's one of only two games develoepd by the oddly-named Team Mental Care, and one of only a handful put out by publisher Magifact. Anyway, it's a fairly innofensive little game with a lot of character and charm, and I definitely wouldn't discourage the curious from giving it a go themselves.

Asameshimae Nyanko (SNES)

Othello is a classic strategy board game that's been around since at least the late 19th century, and has been adapted into videogame form many times over the years, dating back all the way to the Odyssey2's Dynasty. Rock Paper Scissors is an even older game, though it's a lot less strategic, and really more of a way of randomly deciding things than an enjoyable pastime. Asameshimae Nyanko is a game from 1994 that bravely seeks to answer the question "what if we combined the strategy of Othello with the randomness of Rock Paper Scissors, and there were also lots of kittens?"

Yeah, so this is a game of othello in which the piece are not small black and white discs, but blue and pink kittens. For some reason, you also get to pick which breed of kitten is used before you start a game. There's also a few locations to play in, too, like a roof in the city, a grid of rocks in the wilderness and a luxurious carpet in a remote palace. The different locations do offer slightly differently shaped boards, but are otherwise just cosmetic changes like the kitten breeds. The big difference between this game and a normal game of Othello is that after each turn, the current player can choose one of their opponent's kittens to take, and this dispute is decided in a seperate little one-on-one battle.

As you might have guessed, these one-on-ones are where the Rock-Paper-Scissors element comes into play. You press A, Y or B on your controller, your opponent does the same, and a winner is decided. I've only played single player, so I can't tell you which button beats which, but I'm not sure it really matters that much. It's not just the one solitary kitten that's at stake, either: if the kitten changes hands and this causes two kittens of that colour to surround a line of the opponent's kittens, that line is taken, as if the changed kitten was placed as part of a normal move. (I know that sentence is confusing for people who don't know how Othello is played, but I'm assuming those people are in the minority.)

Asameshimae Nyanko is a very well-presented game. The kitten sprites look cute, and though there would be a risk of them looking lifeless when placed on the board in large numbers, the game cleverly animates each kitten individually, so they're all doing dfferent things at any one time, which really adds a lot to the character of the game. It looks really great in general, actually, with nice, soft colours and well-drawn sprites and backgrounds.

Unfortunately, there's really nothing more to this game than playing one-off games. There's no kind of story mode or arcade-style mode with opponents of gradually increasing difficulty, so playing single player is an experience you'll get bored of in less than half an hour. On the other hand, if you can somehow convince someone to play a partially-randomised videogame adaptation of Othello with you, then Asameshimae Nyanko is that game!

Edono Kiba (SNES)

If you're of a certain age, you might remember the days when the only Japanese cartoons being released in the UK were what were sometimes called "beer and curry videos," which were mainly 80s and early 90s OAV with lots of sex and violence, and lots of gratuitous swearing added in the English dub, and a lot of these OAVs were set in cyberpunk dystopias, with lots of evil robots killing people and slightly less evil robots also killing people, but sometimes killing the evil robots as well. Anyway, Edono Kiba, aesthetically, owes a lot to those old OAVs (though I guess they'd be fairly contemporous when it came out), but with the sex and violence.

It's a beat em up in which you play as a constantly-running (or walking, or riding a flying surfboard, depending on the stage) robot, who travels through a futuristic city killing lots of evil robots. the constant movement does make one common beat em up bugbear irrelevant: the old "stay in one place until you beat up enough enemies" gimmick, as it keeps the stage constantly scrolling and enemies either come zooming in from ahead or behind you, or they jump in from the background. The downside is that though the stage is constantly scrolling, it still looks a bit silly when your character is staying on the same spot of the screen, apparently walking or running in place. Almost all of the enemies are one hit kills, too, which also helps give the game a fast pace.

There's a much bigger downside to the constant movement thing, though: as the stage keeps moving in one direction, and your character has no animations for running backwards, you can only face right. This is bad for two reasons: the first, and most obvious, is that you can also only attack in one direction, making combat with enemies coming from behind awkward and annoying, as you wait for them to pass you before you can strike. The other problem is that it makes the game feel very cheaply made, like it wasn't totally finished. I mean obviously, it's done as part of the game's whole fast paced, always moving forward thing, but even with that in mind, it still feels off.

Edono Kiba isn't a bad game, it looks great and it's a decent enough way to pass half an hour or so. But it's no classic, and the SNES has many other, better beat em ups you should play before you get to this one. And if you really want a grim cyberpunk SNES action game, you'd be better off going for Hagane.

Kat's Run - Zen-Nihon K-Car Senshuken (SNES)

There's a few slightly odd little idiosyncracies that seperate Kat's Run from the usual generic 16-bit racing games. For a start, the selection of cars on offer is a little odd, being a mix of fast convertibles and the kind of 4x4s and people carriers you'd normally associate with middle class soccer moms. There's also the fact that before selecting your car, you select your character from a pack of very 90s anime-looking young folks.

Character selection is a purely aesthetic choice, as far as I can tell: they appear in a window at the bottom of the screen, with animations for steering and reacting to moving up and down in the race standing. Despite that, it does add to the game, in that it forms part of an all-round well-presented little package. The game looks great in general, with an array of beautiful mode 7 tracks and cute little sprites for the cars and so on.

Another odd thing is how the game handles tracks. Before you start, you can pick one of two game types, though the only difference I can tell between the two is that one gives you the tracks in a fixed order, the other random. But either way, you drive all the tracks as a single race: after a lap (or possibly two? I'm not totally certain on that), a red orb appears on the ground, and when you drive past it, you suddenly find yourself a dark tunnel, emerging a few seconds later in a totally different location. The locations are pretty varied too: there's city and country tracks in Japan, a track in the egyptian desert, one in the shadow of a gigantic statue statue, and so on.

The odd vehicular selection can be somewhat explained away by the fact that these races are apparently illegal: there's some kind of plot about a wanted racer with a billion-yen bounty on her head, and should a player find themselves hanging too far behind the pack, they'll start to hear sirens getting louder and louder. Eventually, a cop car will appear to your rear, and if it manages to overtake, it's instantly game over and prison food for your chosen character.

Overall, Kat's Run is a fun and great-looking racing game with a lot of charm and some interesting little quirks. You could definitely do a lot worse on the SNES.

Jaki Crush (SNES)

Everyone remembers the PC Engine and Mega Drive entries into Naxat Soft's Crush series of pinall games, right? Well, there was a Japan-only SNES entry too, that never enjoyed the same success as its forbears, and as a result, isn't remembered anywhere near as fondly. The reason it stayed in Japan is easy to figure out: while Alien Crush had a theme that was heavily inspired by the Alien movies, and Devil Crash was themed around European-style occultism and fantasy, Jaki Crush draws its look from traditional Japanese depictions of hell, and as we all know, western companies in the 1980s and 90s were inexplicably obsessed with pretending that Japan didn't exist. There was sort of another entry into the Crush series which was a western exclusive, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, if you've played any of the previous games in the series, you'll basically know what to expect from Jaki Crush: a pinball table, stretching upwards across three screens, with a pair of flippers on each screen, and various demons and monsters marching around or standing in formation or even forming part of the the table itself. There's also bonus bossfight-style mini-tables that can be accessed by opening certain holes (often the mouths of demons) and getting the ball in there.

Presentation-wise, Jaki Crush is excellent: the table is full of little details and gimmicks and various things that change over the course of a game, like a demon face on the bottom screen, that eventually turns into a set of traditional pinball bumpers, which themselves change formation a few times (in a bit of a callback to some similarly-acting bumpers that appear in Alien Crush) before eventually disappearing to be replaced with a different demon face. The colour choices are really great too, with lots of purples, greys, pinks and reds giving the game a very visceral, fleshy feel. And as is series tradition, the game has a great, energetic soundtrack to mindlessly hum along with as you play.

The game itself is good, though you'll be playing a lot of practice games if you want to get any enjoyment out of it. It's easily the most difficult pinball videogame I've ever played. The ball seems incredibly eager to go right down the middle of the flippers on the bottom screen, and the fact that the flippers on the middle screen are in some bizarre asymmetrical arrangement makes it really hard to get away from the bottom and stay there. Add this to the fact that it takes a pretty long time to get exciting things happening and portals to bonus stages open and it means it'll take quite a bit of play before you get a lot of enjoyment out of Jaki Crush. If you have the patience for it, though, it is worth it, as seeing the table changing over time is pretty satisfying, and the stuff that happens on the top screen is especially extravagant and cool-looking. There's also even multiball, which I don't think is a feature in any of the other games in the series (though it's been years since I played either of them, so I could be wrong).

So yeah, in conclusion, Jaki Crush is a worthy entry into the series, and it'll reward players who have the patience to get through it's horrific skill barrier.

Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow - Pop'n Smash (SNES)

You probably wouldn't pick it up from the title (it might not even be
immediately clear from the screenshots), but Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow -
Pop'n Smash is a tennis game, based on a comic of which I hadn't
previously heard. Well, it's kind of a mixture of tennis with various
other things, like there's elements of Arkanoid, a tiny pinch of pinball
and even a minor bit of RPG levelling up. Also, you (in single player,
at least) play as a dog, with a choice of rackets including an actual
tennis racket, a baseball bat, a mallet and a tree branch.

There's a lot to explain with this game, so I'll start with the most basic
difference it has compared to real tennis: the scoring. The scoring in
tennis has always, in my mind, been a problem in tennis videogames,
because the way it works means that a single game can potentially go on
for hours and hours before a victor is declared. HIMB-PnS simplifies it
by having the winner be the first player to score three points. There
are other, more drastic changes, too: there's a bunch of different
courts (I've played about twelve or thirteen matches into single player
mode, and every one had a different court), and they're all different
sizes and shapes, and they all also have different obstacles and
power-ups. The controls are pretty interesting too: you have seperate
buttons for hitting the ball to the left or right, another button to
slide along the ground and hit the ball in desperate circumstances, and
another to use your power shot (which is different for every character,
and is charged by holding down one of your regular hitting buttons).

Single player mode works like this: You face each opponent four times, each
time in a different court. After you've won all four matches, you play a
bonus game. The bonus games all use the same controls as the matches,
but they all also have you doing different things, whether it's catching
butterflies with nets or hitting baseballs or knocking baked goods into
air hockey goals. For every twenty points scored in these bonus games,
your power shot gets levelled up and improves a little bit.

Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow - Pop'n Smash is an okay game. It's not horribly
flawed in anyway, and it's an unusual spin on tennis, even among the
subgenre of deliberately unrealistic/videogamey sports games. It's
easily also available really cheap, if you want to take a risk on a real
copy.

Kenyuu Densetsu Yaiba (SNES)

While the Mega Drive catered to arcade nerds with its many ports and original shooting games, the SNES/Super Famicom sought to draw in the anime nerds, with masses of licenced games and RPGs (I have a theory that the decline in RPG popularity is linked with the rise of very cheaply available anime, especially in the west. Back in the 90s, it was a lot more expensive, space-consuming and generally difficult to watch an entire anime series, but RPGs offered a full-length animesque storyline contained in a single cartridge or later on, a few CDs.).

Yaiba is both an anime licenced game and an RPG. I don't know anything about the source material, but it looks to be a pretty generic early 90s shonen series, though the creator went on to create the absurdly long-running Detective Conan juggernaut. As for the game itself, it's an action RPG, with the emphasis placed heavily on the action. Interacting with other characters is mostly confined to linear dialogues before and after bossfights, as well as token conversations related to mechanical things like saving and buying items.

The vast majority of the player's time is spent roaming topdown stages killing constantly spawning enemies, until they find the spot where the next story event or bossfight is triggered. It's better than I'm making it sound, but it's also very simple. In fact, the simplicity is actually part of the game's appeal. There's some nice streamlining in the mechanics that I really like. For example, rather than receiving experience points in set amounts upon defeating enemies, whenever the player hits an enemy, they receive experience equal to the amount of damage they inflicted. Level ups are simple, too: every level up you recieve adds 10 to your maximum HP, 1 to the amount of damage you inflict with a normal attack and reduces the amount of damage you take from enemy attacks by one.

The fact that the game is so simple means that Japanese literacy is not at all required to enjoy it, I managed to get a fair few stages in so far with no troubles, at the most you'll probably just need to look up the controls and the basics of how the game works: saving, travelling between stages, that kind of thing.

Kenyuu Densetsu Yaiba isn't anything particularly special, but it's a fun game, it feels rewarding to play, and it doesn't require knowledge of Japanese language. I don't think you'd regret giving it a try.

Taekwon-Do (SNES)

Like the previously-covered Champion Kendou, Taekwon-Do is part of the mostly dead (apart from MMA and Boxing games, usually featuring real-world athletes) genre of combat sports videogames. Obviously, it focuses on the Korean martial art Taekwon-Do, and, unusally, even offers an option to play the game in Korean rather than Japanese (though, wasn't the import of Japanese videogames to Korea illegal when this game came out? I don't know).

Though there are other modes, such as a King of Fighters-esque team battle mode, and some kind of character edit/training mode that I couldn't really work out, as its pretty text-heavy, and I can't read Japanese or Korean, the main single player mode sees the player selecting a character and taking part in tournaments around the world. There are three possible ways to win a match: either knock your opponent out, knock them to the ground five times, or have scored the most points when the time runs out.

Successful attacks score one to three points each, while knockdowns and ringouts are worth five each. The score totals aren't visible until the end of each match, presumably to stop players building up a safe score and then blocking or avoiding attacks until the counter runs down. There's no visible health bar, but knockouts usually seem to be achieved by completely overwhelming your opponent with constant attacks. The game controls pretty simply: the face buttons combined with directions on the d-pad execute various attacks (mostly kicks, of course), and the shoulder buttons are held to take on different stances, and also to move up and down the mat. The sounds for attacks connecting and being blocked sound like wood blocks being knocked together, which is more effective than my description implies, and gives a very different feel to the more visceral sounds heard in regular fighting games.

Since this is an attempt at a fairly realistic martial arts sports game, the characters are all just guys in Taekwon-Do outfits, and, in fact are all head and palette swaps of the same sprite. Don't take this as a negative, though: the developers have used this fact to their advantage, as that one sprite has a ton of expressive animation. Not only are there special reaction animations to getting hit by ceratin attacks, or in certain situations (for example, a character taking a strong hit to the gut will hunch over and hold themselves for a few frames, while a character being hit mid-jump will stumble on their feet when they land), but the fighters also show various levels of fatigue, which seem to be effected by various factors, such as the character's own stamina stat, the severity of the beating they've taken and the amount of jumping and other energetic moves they've performed. By the end of a particularly fierce bout, both characters will be breathing heavily, shoulders slumped and knees starting to buckle. This depth of animation really adds a lot to the game, and I'm slightly worried I'm not doing a good enough job of getting that across.

Soyeah, Taekwon-Do is definitely a game worth looking into for those wanting something slightly different from a typical fighting game, as well as those interested in how a videogame can take its weaknesses and turn them into strengths.