X-Treme Express (PS2)

 Unlike most games about driving trains, even the ones aimed at kids, or the ones in which the trains are just models, X-Treme Express (also known as Tetsu 1: Densha de Battle! World Grand Prix, though as far as I can tell, there's no connection to the Densha de Go! series, and it definitely wasn't developed or published by Taito) has no interest in providing a verisimilitudinal simulation of passenger train driving. Instead, it's not just a game about racing trains, but about aggressively racing them. What's interesting is that the developers made the wise decision that this premise alone was silly enough, and didn't feel the need to add to it. So you've got somewhat realistic-looking trains from around the world, racing each other in various locations that all look like they're in Japan, but no power up items or any other overtly videogamey stuff like that.

 

Being trains, you don't have complete control over where your vehicles go at any time. Instead, you mostly control the speed of your train, slowing down at corners to avoid derailment (or you can play on easy mode, where you can't derail youself), and changing tracks at switching points when they occur. That's where the aggression comes into things: time things just right, and you can ram into the side of one of your fellow competitiors, forcing them off of the track. Alternatively, if you've got a lead and there's another train close behind you, you can stubborn stay in front of them, never giving a chance to overtake in a much more mean-spirited way than if you were driving regular road vehicles.

 

An important thing for racing games is a sense of speed, and really, that's one of the first things that'll hit you regarding X-Treme Express: when you're going full speed down a straight bit of track (or any bit of track in easy mode), you're really hurtling along in a way that real life trains never seem to, and the fact that you are driving a train at such breakneck speeds really adds to the manic feel of it all. With the lack of steering in mind, other than managing your speed to stay on the track, and shunting rivals to knock them off of it, I think a big part of the strategy is to try and place yourself on lines that have more downhill parts than uphill, though its possible that this only provides a minor boost to your speed, if any at all.

 

As well as the main grand prix mode, there's also a free mode, where you can just ride a track at any time of day, and can even turn off opponents for a more relaxing time, there's also event races with special rules like "no shunting" or "shunt every opponent to win", both of which I think show how important aggression is to the game. You start the game with a choice of thirty trains and six tracks, but looking at the "game data" screen in options shows that there's apparently a total of eighty trains in the game, and ten tracks! Furthermore, when I went online to seek more information, I could only find a conversation that brough back memories of the Dragonball GT Final Bout myths that were going around circa the turn of the century: apparently if you complete grand prix with all eighty trains, placing first in every race with no retries, you can unlock a gun that lets you derail trains infront of you by pressing L2. That sounds like nonsense, and I'm definitely not the person who's going to go and find out either way.

 

X-treme Express is a unique little game, with a lot of idiosyncracies that make take a couple of goes to get used to, but once you do, you'll find that it's a fast, fun, weird game, and definitely worth your time. Maybe not hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time, but a few of them, at least. I'm surprised it doesn't come up in conversations about weird and interesting PS2 games more often, alongside the likes of Demolition Girl and Seigi no Mikata and so on. Maybe that'll change from now on, though? 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (Playstation)

 There are a few ways I've seen train driving simulators displays things. Polygons are the most common, and there's also a few on less powerful hardware that do sprite scaling (or, on even less powerful hardware, there's imitation sprite scaling). There's also FMV, which I think is most famously used in the Japanese Rail Sim series on 3DS, which use as their graphics actual high quality video footage of real train journeys. 

 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (which is also listed on some sites as "Hassha Ourai! Gatan Goton") uses FMV, but in a move that possibly makes it the cutest of all train driving games, it places you in the cockpits of various model trains, travelling through actual footage of tiny little model towns with cardboard buildings and little plastic construction workers! Despite the use of models, though, I think it's still working under the conceit that you'r driving a real train, as the cockpits surrounding the window in which the FMV plays are unique to each train, and pretty detailed too. The levers and dials move when they're supposed to, there's a little light that comes one when you're meant to start moving, and so on.

 

It's all very cute and charming! The game itself is kind of constrained by being what it is. I guess the train enthusiasts who are the target audience for the genre want exactly one thing from these games and one thing alone: to drive a train in as close a manner to driving an actual game as possible. So, just like Densha De Go and SL De Ikou and all the others, you can control acceleration and brakes, and you've got to get to a series of stations along your route, making sure to keep to the speed limits, arrive as close to exactly on time as you can, and to stop at the exact line on the platform at which you're expected. It does have one difference that makes it stand out from the others in the genre, though: it's a lot easier!

 

Densha De Go, the most famous example of the genre is known for being completely merciless when players don't play completely perfectly. N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton is a lot more forgiving, though: you can be up to ten seconds late when arriving, and you can go a few metres over the line without getting a game over. Also, on some stages, there's something strange that happens where another train will attach itself to your train and just drive you to the next station, with no input from you necessary. I don't know why this happens, or why you'd put in a part of your game where it essentially just plays itself for part of a stage. 

 

If you've enjoyed literally any other game in this genre, or if you've tried but found them too difficult, then you can probably already figure out if you want to play this one. If not, and you're interested, it's probably a good first game to try out. I've been really enjoying it, and the use of miniatures gives a unique and very appealling look. It's definitely worth your time, I think.

Plarail Yume Ga Ippai! (PS2)

 Like I'm sure you all remember from the time I reviewed the arcade game Attack Plarail in 2018, that Plarail is Tomy's line of Plastic Railway toys, which, from an outsider's perspective, seem geared more towards easy, fun creativity and play value, as opposed to the more realistic trains of western companies like Hornby, which are made for hobbyists to gradually create and permanently install miniature villages and counties in their houses. That was all one sentence! Sorry about that. Anyway, here's a home console game based on the same toyline, and apparently made by just Tomy, without the assistance of a more established videogame name like how Namco worked on Attack Plarail.

 

Being a home game, it also has a much wider scope and more ambition than its arcade predecessor. Attack Plarail had you just driving a train along a few premade courses. Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is essentially a whole plarail ownership simulator, and while it does have some pre-made courses, the real meat of this game is that you get to build your own! The way in which this is implemented has some positive and negative aspects, though. And to be fair, some of the negative aspects might be under exacerbation from my Japanese illiteracy.

 

There's two modes to choose from when you load up the game: on the left is train driving. It's actually a lot simpler than most arcade train driving games like Attack Plarail or Densha de Go, as you only really have to control the speed of the train and there's no fail condition as far as I can tell. There's lots of buttons to do things, like sound your horn or flick switches on the train dashboard, but it's not clear what, if anything, any of these things do. on the right is construction mode, where you'll be spending most of your time with this game.

 

First, you'll pick a map. I don't really see much reason not to pick the biggest one, as you start with the same amount of stuff no matter which you pick, and more space to play in is better, right? Once you're on the map, the first thing you should do is pick up all the stuff that's placed there by default. It'll go into your inventory, so again you'll have more to play with, and for some reason, I just could never get the prebuilt stuff to link up with the stuff that I'd built, which was frustrating. Anyway, you've got various things to place around the map as you see fit: tracks, stations, trains, etc. There's straight and curved tracks, as well as bits of track that are higher at one end than the other, to reach higher or lower altitudes (there's nine levels of elevation in the game). You've also got buildings and trees to place around to make the world look less abandoned, and you can even build a whole road network to go alongside your rail network, and put cars on it too!

 

One thing you'll quickly notice in this mode is that you don't start with a lot of the scenery stuff to put about, and it also feels like you don't have as many of certain kinds of track as you might like. But luckily, there's a bit of extra customisation available, as there's an ingame catalogue full of stuff in every category to persue and order from. More tracks, more varieties of track, new trains and cars, lots more different types of buildings and trees, and so on. This is where I found one of the points where the language barrier might be getting in my way, though: you start with a hundred coins, and to be fair, this can actually get you a lot of stuff from the catalogue. 

 

But I have not yet found any way to get more coins, so the stuff you buy on a particular save file is, as far as I can tell, all you get, and if you want to build something different or use a different train or whatever once it's gone, you'll have to start a new file from scratch. Once you've built and saved your track, you can, most excitingly, go back to the main menu, select the driving mode, select the map on which you've been building, and drive around the little world you've created! I assume this must have been the game's big selling point when it was released.

 

If, as I suspect, I am just being a wrong idiot, and someone reading this knows better, please let me know. Or alternatively, if you know better and I actually am right and this game has an oddly stringent limit on the amount of stuff you can have in a single save file, also let me know. Either way, as it appears to be in my eyes right now, Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is okay. It's a decently distracting way to spend a couple of hours, even with those limitations. A quick look at prices seems to suggest that they fluctuate wildly, but it emulates perfectly well, even on my aged preowned laptop (and you never know with PS2 games: I can play some pretty busy 3D games at full speed, but the 2D Street Fighter Alpha collection is a slideshow. Which is very annoying, I hear you can play Alpha 3 with SF3-style parrying, which sounds great).

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.