Railroad Baron (NES)

 Also known as Tetsudou-Oh, Railroad Baron is a board game, that's definitely in the same genre as Monopoly, with a little bit of Ticket to Ride thrown in, too. The aim the the game is to move your train around Europe by rolling the dice, making money as you go. Each player get randomly assigned a destination at the start of the game, then again whenever they reach a destination. When one player has finished a certain number of journeys (the default is seven), or when one of the players runs out of money, the game ends and scores are totted up.

 

The scores are based on how much money you have at the end of the game, how many stations you control (you control a station if you were the last player to pass through it) and how many railways you own (if you control two adjacent stations, then you can choose to buy the railway between them). If the game ends because of a player going bankrupt, that player automatically scores zero.

 

Each railway is made up of three empty spaces of track between stations, and it costs money to move over them. But if you own the track that another player is moving over, that money comes to you. So, be strategic with the railways you buy, and you'll probably win. There is another element of chaos, though: after each move where you don't reach your destination, a random event occurs. You might win the lottery, get to bet on a horse race, or have some railways blocked off for a ew turns by an earthquake. You might even be given a free railway! Most annoying of all, you might get teleported to another part of the map, or have your destination changed at random.

 

Anyway, that's an explantion of how Railroad Baron plays, but is it actually any good? Eh, it depends. The split between luck and strategy is about 75/25 in luck's favour, which isn't great. I don't expect you to be able to subject any other human players, but the CPU players are decent enough: they aren't the telepathic superplayers that you might find in a lot of tabletop-themed videogames, but they do act like they're trying to win rather than acting totally randomly, too. Basically, if you have some way of playing this on a handheld, whether through emulation or a handheld Famiclone, it's not a terrible way to keep your hands busy through thirty-to-fourty minutes of TV watching.

Chitty Chitty Train (PC98)

You can probably guess from the screenshots, but what attracted me to this game was the graphics: they're really really nice, aren't they? So tiny and clean and perfectly-formed. I was also thinking it'd been a long time since I'd covered anything on the PC98, and wanted to get back on that, and a great-looking puzzle game seemed like a nice way to do it. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that this game is not nice at all, in fact, you could even go as far as to call it cruel!

But before we get onto that, I should explain it, if you haven't already figured out the premise just by looking at the screens. It's a mouse-controlled puzzle game in which you have to get a train to all the stations, then to the exit. You do this by clicking on the switches to change their positions, and by right-clicking at any point on the track to place a red light that stops any train that encounters it for a few seconds. The cruelty comes from the fact that all the trains (there are other trains on the track that you also need to direct to avoid collisions) all move really fast, and never stop, except in the case of the aforementioned red lights.

Now, there are two basic types of stages in Chitty Chitty Train. There's the complex ones, where you really need to take a look at every switch, the positions of all the trains and stations, and plan your routes carefully. Then there are stages with simpler layouts, where the challenge comes more from having the timing and manual dexterity to click the right switches at the exact right times to avert disaster. Either way, though, you'll be working at high speed, and a successful run of any stage will probably only take a few seconds, though they'll be very intense, high-stress seconds. And of course, it's very unlikely that you'll finish any stage on the first attempt, so don't think you'll be tearing through the game in no time.

There's also an edit mode, which is interesting in theory, though I didn't really have the patience to do anything with it myself. It uses a similar interface to making maps in RPG maker, with you selecting pieces of track and scenery from a window, then placing them where you like on the screen. One interesting bit of information I did glean from this mode is that there are a bunch of different tilesets in the game. All but the first are locked at the start and I could only get far enough to unlock the second, but there's apparently Plain, Snow, Desert, Europe, Future, and Toybox. Hopefully some super player will come along and take screenshots of some later stages someday.

Anyway, Chitty Chitty Train is a fun and charming game, that's also sadistically difficult and stressful. I definitely recommend giving it a shot. And in case you're wondering, all the text I saw in the game was in English, so there's no language barrier to worry about, either.

Attack Pla-Rail (Arcade)

I'm sure most of you have probably heard of Taito's Densha De Go series of train-driving games, based on real Japanese train routes and with an array of specialist controllers associated with the home ports. Attack Pla-Rail, made by Namco and based on a toyline by Tomy seems to be either an attempt at making a rival for that series, or a version of it that aims for a younger audience. The controls, as far as I can tell without having yet played any of the Densha De Go games, are pretty much the same: a lever for controlling your speed, and a few buttons for making decisions and parping your horn.

The most obvious difference between Attack Pla-Rail and its better-known rival is the aesthetic: while Densha De Go aims towards realism, this game gives every object a plastic sheen, and people, vehicles and other objects are very simple. Because they're all toys, obviously. Also playing into the toy aspect is that your time limit is given in the form of remaining battery life, with different trains having different rates of usage, along with differing top speeds and corner handling abilities. You get more batteries by doing different tasks, though they're very simple things: speeding up to go through a loop, beeping your horn at cows, stopping while a bridge gets into place, and so on.

Obviously, with the mention of loops and such, you can already guess that the routes in this game aren't based on any from real life, and that's true. Instead, there's an Outrun-esque system of stages with branching paths between them, though unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any information regarding the total number of stages, or a diagram of where every branching path takes the player. You do go through five stages before the game ends, though that doesn't mean there are fifteen in total like in Outrun, as late in one run, I encountered a stage that had appeared early in another run on a different route. A nice touch is that once you've finished your five stages, you get to use your remaining battery power on a cool-looking night time stage with no obstacles to navigate.

It's a lot more relaxing than the usual excitement you'd want from an arcade game, but despite that (or maybe because of it), Attack Pla-Rail is still a fun game, though since it has no sequels or home ports, I have to say that if it was intended to take custom away from the Densha De Go series, it's had the opposite effect, as it's got me looking up the games and their controllers on ebay, wanting more in a similar vein.

TRL: The Rail Loaders (Playstation)

Hello! I'm back again! I apparently get the same amount of monthly views whether I post or not! Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Anyway, on to today's game. I think it might actually be a port of a Korean PC game, but I'm not sure.
It's hard to categorise, but I'm listing it as a shooting game and a puzzle game. Mostly a shooting game though. But unlike most shooting games, you play as a train on a track, and as such, your movement is mostly restricted to moving back and forth along that track, as well as jumping over obstacles. You also have an AI-controlled parttner, who's performance mostly varies between useless and annoying.
You do get some small choices as to where you go in the stages, as there are switches here and there along the way that change the route you're taking. The problem with this is that you don't know which routes are the best unless you've playted through the stage before.
Along the way, there'll be other trains on your track going the opposite direction that you'll have to shoot, and brown... things that you'll have to jump over. Your gun isn't a typical destructive weapon, instead shooting a large bubble that your enemies safely float away inside.
At the end of each stage, there's a boss fight, during which your train will inexplicably take flight. The first boss is a pushover: you can just sit in front of its weakspot and shoot until it dies, but the second boss is a lot harder, constantly attaking, and hiding its weakspot away most of the time.
I haven't beaten the second boss yet, and to be honest, I probably never will. The game, despite being original, just isn't very good. I don't recommend wasting any time playing it.
 END.