Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.

Battle K-Road (Arcade)

 It's odd that of the two fighting games that Psikyo developed, it's Daraku Tenshi, the one that never got released, that seems to be the most well-known. Battle K-Road is still definitely worth a look, though, as despite its psuedo realistic setting (the only fantasy elements being that two of the playable characters are cyborgs, and the final boss is a bear, plus some silly joke endings. But the mood is still realistic, and there's no fantastical or super-powered fighting techniques), it's still a game that does some interesting stuff in terms of both mechanics and storytelling.

 

There are seven fighting styles represented among the playable characters, with two characters for each of them. The two characters for each style are just headswaps that play identically to each other, but the only reason this setup exists is for storytelling purposes. A single player game starts with you facing against the other representative of your fighting style in a match that's implied to be the final of a tournament, with each style's first fight taking place on a unique stage. Every subsequent fight takes place on the same stage, with the time of day changing as the fights go on. The implication here is that you're playing as the proven champion of your  chosen martial art, representing that art against all the others in the Battle K-Road tournament. It's a cool little touch that adds a lot to the game's atmosphere.

 

Mechanically speaking, there's some interesting stuff going on there, too. Special moves are performed by holding an attack button, then pressing a direction while you release. It's an input method not often seen (the only other examples I know of are Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), and though I've hated it in those other games, it really works well with the grounded playstyle of this game. A more unique quirk, and a nod towards the game's combat sport theme, is that whenever a fighter gets knocked down, the fight stops and oth fighters return to their starting positions. It really marks out that the fights in this game are part of a sports competition, as opposed to the unsanctioned fights in most fighting games, and it also means that there's very little scope for trapping an opponent in the corner or in some other disadvantageous position.

 

Battle K-Road is a game I've been playing a lot recently, and it's really a shame it still hasn't ever had a home console release to this day, as it's a really fun and interesting game that I think must have gotten lost amongst all the other fighting games that got released during the original post-Street Fighter II fighting boom. Unfortunately, its uniqueness didn't help it stand out from the crowd,  maybe because that uniqueness manifests in the form of deliberately being less flashy and extravagant than all its competitiors. Still, you should definitely give it a try if you get the chance, it's an excellent game, that's aged a lot more gracefully than a lot of its contemporaries.

Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.

Dunk Kid's (Game Gear)

The strangeness with Dunk Kid's doesn't actually start with the superfluous apostrophe on the title screen: before you even get to there, there's a splash screen featuring the logo of ASBA, the All-Japan Street Basketball Association. What's strange about ASBA? Well, not only do they seem to not exist anymore, but the only reference I can find to them online is in relation to this game, which makes me wonder if they ever existed at all. None of the teams in the game have names besides their home city/country/state/continent, either, which makes ASBA's existence all the more questionable.

But let's not allow possibly-fictional governing bodies skew our opinions of this game, that simply wouldn't be fair, would it? Especially since it's a pretty good game, after all. Like Jammit, it's a basketball game in which both sides are trying to score in the same basket. Unlike Jammit, it doesn't make many embarassing pretensions towards being "tough", nor does it have a buffet of weird variant rules.

In Dunk Kid's, there's a time limit, and whichever team has the most points at the end of it is the winner, and that's that. Baskets score one point when they're put in close to the basket, and two points from far away. If you get one in from directly beneath the basket, this sometimes triggers one of a few special dunk animations, which look cool, but still only score one point.

It's a pretty fun, simple sports game that doesn't make a quixotic attempt at squeezing a psuedo-realistic "simulation" out of an 8-bit console. But what it does squeeze out is some surprisingly great presentation! Each team has their own slightly stereotypical stage, for example, and while you might expect an 8-bit sports game to have one player sprite that's cloned and recoloured many times for every player on every team, there's actually four player sprites that are copied over the game's eight teams! Not only that, but the devs have even got a nice little bit of diversity out of those four sprites: there's a bunch of different skin colours spread across the teams, and one of the sprites (or, if you like, two of the teams) is a girl! Even in 2020, there's not many games where you can play as a black girl, but this little-known Japan-only handheld sports title is one of them!

There's really only one big problem Dunk Kid's has, and to be honest, it's not even that big a problem. I'm sure you remember how in Cyber Dodge, the teams' stats were based on the order in which you face them in the single player campaign. Well, the same is done here, so if you play a single match (or if you somehow get two Game Gears, a link cable and two copies of the game to play versus mode), the only viable teams to pick are Russia, China, and Hawaii. In campaign mode, only the teams representing Japanese cities are playable, making this a Japanese game where all the Japanese player options are the weakest. How odd!

Anyway, yes, Dunk Kid's is a very fun game that I definitely recommend to people who aren't the types to turn their noses up at ancient sports games. It's just a shame it's on a system that requires such faff to set up a two-player game.

Aa Harimanada (Mega Drive)

You might remember all the way back in 2014, I reviewed the Game Ger version of this, or rather, the Game Gear game that's based on the same source material as this one. Because the two are very different: while the Game Gear game took a somewhat spartan , sports game-like approach, the Mega Drive version has a much flashier fighting game-inspired take on the concept of Sumo. There's even special moves and a health bar!

The most obvious difference though, is that while the Game Gear game's characters all used the same sprite with different colour palletes, this version has all the characters looking different. They're not totally unique, though: every character has a unique head, but it's put onto one of a few different body types, with a variety of skin tones. It's also nice that there are different body types, when you'd think most sumotori would have pretty much the same physique.

Well, they are all pretty mastodonic compared to regular people, but if we take the player character (single player mode has you playing through the story of the manga's protagonist Isao Harimanada) as being an "average" sized sumotori, with most opponents being the same size, then there's also some opponents who are noticably a lot smaller than him, as well as a few who are a lot bigger, standing like mountains of muscle. Body size doesn't seem to be any indicator of how difficult an opponent's going to be, though, which is mainly thanks to the ring out mechanic.

Though you can win by repeatedly slapping and headbutting your opponent into unconsciousness (and also picking them up onto your shoulders and putting them into a Torture Rack hold, in a feat of incredible strength!), most fights will be decided by ring out, sometimes only a couple of seconds after they start. The fighters lock upwhen thy get close enough to each other, and from there, there's a power struggle to get your opponent's back to the edge of the ring, or to throw him overhead to do some damage. Once you get to the edge, depending (I think) on how much health each sumotori has left, either one of them will be thrown out right away, or a new power struggle begins, this time based entirely on who can hit buttons the fastest. So an easy way to win fights is to walk straight into your opponent, keep pressing forward and B to get them over to the edge, then rub all three buttons with the knuckles of your fingers as fast as you can. Of course, I take no responsibility for any damage you might do to your controller or fingers in trying this technique.

I reservedly recommend Aa Harimanada. It's a fun game, and I'm sure it'd be a great laugh to play with friends in between bouts on "proper" fighting games, but even by the standards of a 1993 fighting game, there's not much to entertain a single player, due to there only being one playable character and all. Furthermore, I definitely don't recommend trying to buy a legitimate copy in this day and age, as the prices it fetches online are ludicrous.

Monster Bass (Playstation)

Do you remember those Hot Wheels sets that were clearly designed as a lame attempt to get nerdier kids to buy toy cars? Like, they'd have aliens or dinosaurs or post-apocalyptic landscapes besides the track? Well, Monster Bass (also known as Killer Bass) is a fishing game that puts in a lame attempt at appealing to the under-75s by having genetically-engineered zombie fish and bait that includes lives spiders and mice and so on.

Unfortunately, though, the fish just look like regular fish in-game, the horror theme doesn't actually affect gameplay at all, and after a couple of hours of play, the game had long since started repeating stage locations, but still hadn't let me use any bait besides the spider. That doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad, though, it could still be a fun and accessible fishing game, even if th horror theme's a bust! Unfortunately, while it is accessible, it's not fun. And it's really only accessible in the sense that playing it is so incredibly simple that pretty much anyone could do it, and most of the actual challenge appears to be down to luck rather than skill.

Anyway, the game is structured kind of like a racing game, in more ways than one. Each stage, you're given a quota, like "catch 3 fish", "catch a total of 25lbs of fish", or "catch a fish weighing at least 3lb", and you have to fill that quota as quickly as possible. Like a racing game, whoever finishes first gets the most points, and everyone who finishes below a certain ranking is elminated. This is fine, I've got no problem with this really, except for the weight quota stages, it seems totally random as to how big the fish you catch are, so you can finish them in under a minute, or you can be stuck catching fish after fish, hoping the next one is big enough.

The real problem with Monster Bass is the fishing itself. You cast your bait, and it always travels about 41.7 feet away, no matter what, then you slowly rell it back in towards you, maybe jiggling it about a little, hoping a fish bites. When the fish bites, you just hold the X button down until it's eventually reeled in. You can jiggle the d-pad a bit to increase the line tension, which might make it reel in faster, but I'm not actually certain on that. Then once the fish is brought in, you've either met the stage quota, ending the stage, or you haven't and you go back to toiling at the old fish mines. The fishing mini-game in Breath of Fire III is more complex, more exciting, and more rewarding than this entire retail release that came out almost half a decade later!

Of course, I don't recommend you get hooked on the lame bait that Monster Bass is dangling in front of you. For fishing fans, it's presumably too simple and the theme is probably too silly, and for non-fishing fans, it does nothing to dissuade the notion of fishing being a boring, stupid waste of time.

Guru Guru (DS)

Also known in Japan as "Guru Guru Nagetto", Guru Guru is a game I found while looking up the developers of a game I covered a few months ago, Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws on Game Boy Advance. Not only are the two games by the same developer, but the main character of that game, the trainee witch Straw, is also playable in this one! It's not a sequel, though, as while that was a puzzle game, this is a golf game.

Or rather, golf is the nearest thing to which Guru Guru can be compared. Instead of hitting a tiny hard ball with a stick to try and get it into a distant whole on a massive lawn in the fewest strikes, you are instead throwing bouncy limbless rabbit-like creatures called familars to try and land them at the end of a linear path in the fewest throws. Obviously, there's complications, as the paths are full of hills, walls, ceilings, bottomless pits, and so on, to hinder your progress. You do get to pick between three routes, though, and you can switch between them when you like, as long as you're on a flat surface that's even with the route to which you want to move.

Along with being golf-like in concept, there's also some similarities with more traditional golf games. For example, on each turn, you pick one of three different kinds of throwing technique (determined by which character you picked), then decide how hard you're going to throw the ball with the use of a power meter. Of course, this being a DS game, the power meter utilises the touch screen, having you quickly draw circles to build it up, before flicking across to throw. It works okay, but it's hard to get much precision for those rare occasions when you don't want to throw the familiar as hard as you can.

I was a little sceptical when I first started playing this game, and it did take me a few goes to even figure out how to play it, but it's actually a ton of fun to play once you've got the hang of it. My advice is to ignore the various training modes and just go straight in for the tournament. The training modes make the game seem a lot more difficult than it actually is, and there's a lot of satisfaction not just in beating your tournament opponents, but in seeing their familars bouncing backwards off of walls and falling down pits, leaving them in a worse position at the end of their turn than at the start. One last thing I have yet to mention is the graphics, so before this review ends: they're great. They're cute and colourful (in a kind of pastelly way on my actual DS, though the  screenshots from the capture device look a lot brighter), and have a clean isometric pixelly look that's very appealling. In summary, this game is definitely recommended to anyone still exploring the massive original DS library.

Dragonball Z (Plug and Play)

So, back in the mid-00s, there were a lot of these licensed plug and play joystick things, usually shaped like a character from a show they were based on, and more interestingly, containing one or more completely new 2D games! Though there's recently been talk of a lot of plug and plays actually being famiclones, with brand new, officially licensed Famicom games still being written because of them, as far as I can tell, these Jakks Pacific ones aren't famiclones. The games are too colourful, the sprites are too big, and so on.

This one was shaped like Shenron, and contained three games, all of which vary in both quality and thematic appropriateness. We'll get the worst and least fitting out of the way first, with "Kamehameha Assault". This is Dragonball Z-themed Pong. You pick one of five characters (Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Cell, and Buu), then you hit a green energy orb back and forth while also shooting energy blasts at each other. Each of the two characters has some of the Dragonballs behind them, and every time one of them gets hit by the green orb, it goes over to the other character's side. When one character has all seven, they win. It really is just fancy pong where you can also shoot each other a bit. It's definitely not fast or exciting enough to be considered a Windjammers-alike.

Next up is the most thematically appropriate of the three games, and while it is better than Kamehameha Assault, it's not by a great amount. Its name is Buto-Retsuden (fighting fighting legend? Am I reading that right?), and it's a fighting game. The roster is the same five characters as before, and it looks and feels like a poor imitation of the Super Butoden games. Except there's no special move inputs, beyond, say, forward+attack. Also, all the attacks, even the supers, do a pathetically tiny amount of damage and the fights feel like they last for hours. As a result, I never even managed to finish a credit of this, win or lose. By the halfway point of the second fight's first round, I was losing the will to live every time, and just quit.

Finally, we've got the best game of the three, and while it doesn't fit the theme particularly well, it's pinball, and basing pinball tables on things no matter what they are is a grand old tradition dating back to colonial times, at least. Also, the ball launch mechanism is Goku charging and firing a Kamehameha, which is a nice little touch. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Devil Crush, with the basic structure being a three-screen-tall main table, with entrances to seven bossfight bonus tables hidden around the place, and enemies marching up and down the place waiting to be smashed by the ball. Of course, every time you beat one of the bosses, the ball turns into a dragonball for you to take to goku up at the top of the table. Get them all to summon Porunga (since this table is set on Namek, during the Freeza arc) for lives and points and such.

Pinball isn't a spectacular game, but it's not awful, either, and it's a lot better than the other two games on here. Whether or not it's worth the price of admission depends on how much that price is. The going rate on ebay at the time of writing seems to be £10-20, which is far, far too much. If you see one of these for a pittance in a charity shop, though, the pinball game will give you half an hour's fun before you put the stick on a shelf, where it will at least make a fairly nice ornament forevermore.

Jammit (3DO)

Jammit is a one-on-one basketball game, played on half-courts with a basket at only one end. The back of the box calls this "streetball", but that sounds way too much like it was invented by a marketing executive to be real, in my opinion. That feel carries over to the whole game, as everything about it attempts to be gritty and edgy and street and all that stuff, albeit in an incredibly ineffectual, even quaint early 1990s way.

The back of the box says a lot of things, in fact. It tries to paint a picture of a merciless and violent world of street basketball, where players are "left gasping for air in intensive care", even though fouls are totally still in effect, and can be called for a bit of mildly aggressive shoving. It also says that there's "enough trash talk to dis the whole neighbourhood", when you mainly just hear the phrases "you be foulin'!" and "you're not so tough!" over and over, no matter which characters (of which there are only three) are in the game. Also there's meant to be five different courts, but in a couple of hours of play, I only saw two. But that's probably my fault for not being very good.

As I'm sure you've noticed from the screenshots, the character sprites in Jammit are digitised photos, ala Mortal Kombat, which is partially why I decided to play the 3DO version over the Mega Drive or SNES versions: I was going in blind, and had assumed that the sheer 90s power of the CD and a mighty 32-bit onsole would let this game look its best, maybe rivalling the arcade versions of the first few Mortal Kombat games. Unfortunately, as you can see, it's still got small, blurry sprites, and what you can't see is that the music is also a disappointment. Being on CD, I had my heart set on hearing some terrible, conspicuously clean-languaged original raps in this game, but the music just has that weird farty sound that so many America-developed Mega Drive games have.

I've been incredibly harsh on this game so far, but honestly, I had a lot of fun playing it, even though I'm terrible and won only about  two or three of the games I played. The games aren't all just the same, either: in single-player mode, each game you play has different rules: first to twenty-one points, points only count when you're shooting from an X that moves around the floor, points only count when you make the camera go into close-up mode, and so on. And the cheesiness of the game's aesthetic is incredibly charming and nostalgic, too. Jammit's far from a classic, and I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play it, but if you ever stumble across the chance to do so, you'll probably have a pretty good time playing this pretty bad game.

Shanghai Kid (Arcade)

Also known as Hokuha Syourin Hiryu no Ken, Shanghai Kid is the first in the long-running Hiryu no Ken series of fighting games and beat em ups. The last entries in the series were on the Playstation and N64, so I guess it just wasn't able to survive the move to 3D, though I'll save that talk for another time, as I do intend to cover a few other games in this series at some point in the future, but for now: back to Shanghai Kid. It looks like an early fighting game, though it's really more of an attempt at a more complex (for the time) martial arts simulator-type game.

The structure is the same as most fighting games even to this day: you fight a series of gradually more difficult opponents. The difference is in how the fighting takes place, and how you control your character, as the developers came up with a system that allows for quite a bit of sophistication using only two buttons and an eight-way joystick, long before special move motions or combos had been invented. The two buttons are predictably assigned to punch and kick, but the interesting stuff comes in the form of the joystick. Though you can walk left and right, jump, and crouch, those aren't the things you'll mainly be using the joystick for. Instead, the game uses a system of high, middle, and low attacks, as well as corresponding blocks.

The way this works is almost turn-based in its execution. There are red circles that will appear on you or your opponent, at the head, feet, or torso level. When a circle appears on you, you just press the joystick up, down, or sideways to block the incoming attack. When it appears on the opponent, you do the same, but you press punch or kick at the same time, to attack your opponent's temporary blind spot. Obviously, as the game goes on, and the difficulty of opponents increases, so does the speed at which circles appear, disappear, or change places. Another complication is that a few fights in, you start facing special opponents (including one that happens to look exactly like Tiger Mask! There are probably otther unofficial appearances from old manga characters too, that I haven't recognised) who have unique attacks, for which you'll need to figure out the most effective evasive maneuvers.

I really like Shanghai Kid, it's an interesting game, and the Hiryu no Ken series is interesting to me in general, so like I said earlier, expect to see some of the sequels covered here at some point in the future. Until then, obviously I recommend giving this game a try!

The Anime Super Remix: Kyojin no Hoshi (PS2)

In case you don't know, Kyojin no Hoshi is a baseball anime that aired all the way back in 1968, and it's one of those old anime that was massively influential on all that came after it. Unfortunately, I don't know much of the exact details, because only the first episode has ever been translated into English. I do know that it was to first appearance of that BDSM-looking "training suit" that you see in a bunch of anime, including an early episode of Pokemon, where some guy puts one on his Sandshrew.

Anyway, this game came out in 2002, alongside another "Anime Super Remix" game, based on the 1980 boxing anime Ashita no Joe 2, and it, as far as I can tell, tells the story of the anime through a mixture of video clips (which are amazingly high quality, considering the age of the source material), still images with captions, and minigames re-enacting certain iconic scenes.

The minigames are all very difficult, and completely unforgiving, even on the easiest difficulty. Well, the three of them I was able to play were, anyway. You only start with two minigames unlocked, and by playing them, you can earn points, which allow you to unlock more minigames, as well as more story scenes. However, to actually get the minigames, you'll have to grind no matter how well you play. Each minigame costs nine hundred points to unlock, and successfully completing a minigame on its hardest difficulty will get you between 150 and 200 points each time. So you'll have to complete 4 successful runs on hard to get the next game at the very least.

And I'm not exageratting when I describe the difficulty of these games. They basically boil down to different configurations of press a button once or twice with perfect timing, and pressing a button as many times as possible in a very short amount of time. The timing-based tasks aren't so bad once you get into a bit of a rhythm with them, which is possible even through emulation. The button-tapping tasks, however seem to vary, seemingly at random, between "pretty difficult" and "literally impossible, even Meijin Takahashi can't press a button this fast". I know these olden days sports anime were all about tragedy and despair, but to complete these absurdly hard tasks, with the only reward being a fraction of the way towards getting the next one is a bit dispiriting.

Though retelling the story of an old, reknowned TV series through a series of minigames recreating specific scenes is an interesting one, the actual execution here is so bad, and so antithetical to having a good time, I can't recommend this game at all.