Sabnack (X68000)

 There's something about the title of this game that's just so ugly, isn't there? Look at it: Sabnack. Ugh. The game itself doesn't look very nice, either, considering it's a commercial release on the X68000, a computer known for having amazing looking ports of arcade games years before consoles could really manage it. But let's not hold those things against it, as a game it's actually alright. In fact, it manages to make a Sokoban-style game actually interesting!

 

I usually find the block-pushing action of Sokoban games as embodying a combination of negative traits. Right from the start, they're usually too difficult to even get ahold on them, and you couple this with the fact that they're often literally about pushing boxes in a warehouse and it's all so off-putting and unrewarding that I just don't want to figure out how to get further into them.

 

Sabnack solves both issues! It opens with stages that are deceptively easy, teaching you how all the game's elements work and interact with each other, before gradually turning up the difficulty as you go on. I managed to get through eight whole stages before it got too hard for me! 

 

You play as a little man in a cape, and you can go up to statues and bring them to life, so they follow you, until getting stuck behind a wall or something makes them go more than one space away from you, at which time they urn back into statues. The goal of each stage is to take the fairy to the exit, and turn her back into a statue. But there are also enemies in each stage, and if any of them touch you or an un-statued fairy, you fail (though you get infinite lives, so it's not too bad). There are other statues around, too, like knights, who destroy enemies with whom they come into contact, and guys that look like wizards, whose purpose I haven't been able to figure out. So each stage uses these elements, along with various different kinds of enemies that each have their own movement rules, to create all kindss of different challenges for the player. It's that "purity" thing I've talked about before.

 

However, just like with puzzle platformers, I have to put my hands up and admit that this is a genre of game I just don't get along with. If you do, it definitely seems like a high-quality, well-designed iteration of the concept that's worth giving a shot. A cop out of a conclusion, but there it is.

Geograph Seal (X68000)

To be honest, I should really have written about this game years and years ago, and it barely even counts as obscure anymore: along with Cho Ren Sha 68k, this is easily one of the best-known X68000 games, and since Cho Ren Sha has a Windows port, it's definitely the best-known X68000 exclusive. Of course, for a lot of people, just being an X68000 exclusive alone is enough to be considered obscure, so let's just get on with it, eh?

Now, the most obvious thing to say about this game is that it's by the developers of the much-loved Playstation series Jumping Flash, and it acts very much as a genetic forebear to those games, too. It's got similar weapons, the same super-high triple jump, even some of the same fonts are used in its GUI. While those more famous games focussed heavily on the dizzying heights available to the new world of 3D platforming, Geograph Seal is more of a straight first person shooter, where you also happen to have the ability to jump really high. This makes sense, though, as the short draw distance (yes, even shorter than Jumping Flash!) means that any platforming would have been unfair and confusing.

Draw distance aside, it's an incredible-looking game. Seeing it in motion, it's hard to believe it's running on a 16-bit machine from the eighties. Pretty much everything is a 3D model, when they could just as easily have used sprites for the enemies and items, it all moves a lot more smoothly than its console contemporaries like Starwing or Virtua Racing, and even though none of the models are textured, the background is, and even that small thing adds a lot to how the game looks. I remember when I first played this, back on my first PC, on a much earlier version of the emulator xm6, and the backgound images were plain black, and the models weren't even filled in, so it was wireframe on a black background, with no GUI. Even then, it looked pretty good, but now that we can see the game in its full glory, it's on the level of some of the 3D arcade games Namco were putting out in the early nineties, like Cyber Sled and Starblade.

Geograph Seal isn't just a game that was ahead of its time technologically: it's clear that the devs at Exact had a clear view of the direction in which action games were going to go over the following few years, and they were right. I don't know what the reaction to it was on release, but I can only assume that people must have been blown away by a fast, exciting, full 3D game of this quality. It's definitely a game you could have looked at in 1994, and said "this is the future".

I don't really think there's much more for me to say about this game. Yes, you should definitely play it if you haven't already. It's excellent.

Small Games Vol. 6!

It seems like it's been a while since there's been a small games post, and I just happened upon three candidates while exploring the X68000's roster, so here we are! First up is Hard Battle, a nice little shooting game. In it, you control an X68000, flying over scenery made of circuit boards and chips, and shooting disks at various other flying microcomputers, who return fire in kind. All while a demented little chiptune plays. It's pretty good! Play it, set a high score, try to beat the high score, there's not much else to it, really. There's no bombs or power-ups, and there's no scoring system besides "get points for shooting enemies", so it's pretty much as simple as a shooting game cane be. Not bad, though.

Next up is a game that doesn't fair so well, to the extent that I think it was probably just a bit of practice for the developer, and not meant to be enjoyed as a full, finished game at all. Its name is Death Fighter, and in it, you play as a martial artist who looks a lot like Ryu from Street Fighter, but whos repetoire is limited to punches and judo throws, locked in combat against a heavily armoured gladiator/knight-type guy. Your enemy doesn't really have any AI beyond charging forward and constantly attacking, and you've got to try and get your offence in when you can. You can block by pressing down, but since the enemy never stops attacking, there isn't really any point. A curiosity, and nothing more.

Finally, the best game of this trio, Ikari Blade. It looks like a pretty typical old-fashioned single-screen shooting game, but it gradually escalates to the point where the screens is full of enemies and their bullets, with very little room to maneuver. The main problem is that the escalation is a little too gradual, and your first five minutes or so of play will have you wondering why the game starts you out with ten shields, and why it's so generous in giving you more of them. It's also a shame that the game's not so generous with weapon power-ups, as even after three or four of them, your gun still feels incredibly feeble. Like I said, though, Ikari Blade is the best game out of these three, and despite its flaws, there's just something about it that's compelling and even slightly addictive.

Reinforcer (X68000)

The first thing I though when I loaded up Reinforcer is that it looked a lot like SEGA's arcade game Crack Down, and the first two stages even have you locating and defusing bombs, which is kind of the opposite of what you do in Crack Down, even though in top-down videogame form, the two activities are identical. It only takes a little more inspection to see that Reinforcer is definitely its own game with a lot to offer, though.

Possibly because of the resemblence to Crack Down, I first approached the game with an approach that was both methodical and thorough: killing every enemy, searching every room and path for items, and so on. Then I got to the first boss and had sixteen seconds to try and fight it. It seems that the actual way to play the game is a lot more exciting! I found a lot more success in running through each room, killing only the enemies that were directly in my path or otherwise especially threatening. You can absorb plenty of damage too, which also encourages this kind of madcap, rampaging playstyle.

But let's take a break from talking about how the game plays to highlight the presentation. Though it's a top-down shooter, everything looks as detailed as it can, with some of the sprites looking better than those in the first two Grand Theft Auto games. The menus, cutscenes, dialogue boxes also look great: detailed and stylish. There's a lengthy intro that you thankfully don't have to watch, but it's worth a look at least once, for some excellent pixel art, and top-quality music (though the game has great music generally, to be honest). On top of all this, there's some nice little touches here and there, like the text on the title screen that states emphatically that "THIS GAME IS CYBER PUNK ACTION". It all looks and feels so cool!

Getting into specifics, each character has a selection of four weapons, though you'll mostly be using the machine gun (because it has infinite ammo), and the hand grenades (because you can throw them over walls to kill enemies a room over). Though you don't get to pick which character you use to play each mission, unfortunately. Also of interest is your characters' damage system. You have damage counters for armour and health that start at zero and go up when you get hit. You don't lose any health until your armour is at 100% damage, and in the few stages I've played, there are no items for refilling your health, only your armour (though you can still collect these when your armour is 100% damaged, and it'll still go back down).

Reinforcer is definitely a game I recommend you try out. Among the X68000 action games that aren't arcade ports, it's definitely one of the most high quality, in terms of both presentation, and just as a fun, exciting game! Finally, if you try it out in xm6g, it might not be immediately obvious how to get it running so here's some help: put the System Disk in the first drive, then wait for it to start loading. Then, into the second drive, insert Disk A to watch the intro, or Disk B to go straight to the game. For some reason, the game won't load if you don't wait for the system disk to start loading before inserting one of the others.

Advanced Spanner-X -Endless Fire- (X68000)

The title might be bizarre, but unfortunately, the setting of this game is fairly standard, old-fashioned space shooter stuff. You're a spaceship, you shoot other spaceships. Luckily, however, it is a bit more interesting from a mechanical standpoint, and though it's a Japanese game on a system that was only ever released in Japan, it does make me wonder if the developers were fans of European-developed shooting games, like Xenon 2 et al.

There's a couple of reasons I say this. The first is that the game does suffer from that most stereotypical EuroSTG bugbear, lots and lots of bulletsponge enemies. The second, and most interesting, is that rather than your ship having one weapon that gradually powers up, or the ability to change weapons by collecting different items, you instead select your weapon before each stage. A lot of European shooting games have weapon shops for changing and upgrading one's weapon, though Spanner-X's system is a little different from that, too: you're given a selection of weapons from which to choose at the start of each stage, and the twist is that each can only be chosen once.

I guess the point of this is that there's a weapon that best matches each stage, and the player discovers the best order to use them through trial and error. I'm putting a lot of faith in the design skills of the developers with this theory, but I think it works out. There's definitely weapons that seem perfect for the first few stages, at least. It's not a system I like, but at least they're trying something different, I guess? And really, the biggest problem with this game is that first point: the enemies can all take a fair few shots, and they're mostly really small sprites too, so you constantly feel underpowered, which isn't a lot of fun, to be honest.

There is another, more interesting mechanical idiosyncracy in there too, though! Rather than giving you a health bar or a set number of lives, you're given a number of energy units, which not only act as hitpoints, but also temporary power-ups. You lose a unit of energy if you get hit, and you can also press the second button on your controller to expend a unit to power up your weapon for five seconds. Either way, when there's no energy left, it's game over. It's an interesting and unusual system, but even your powered up weapons still feel weak, so making the sacrifice never really feels worthwhile.

There's some other little notes to say about this game, like how the music is excellent (though this being both a shooting game and on the X68000, you could probably have predicted that), and the weird practice of how by default, the score's only displayed between stages, and you have to go into the options screen to turn on score display during play. Though it's an interesting and fairly original game, I can't really recommend Advanced Spanner X Endless Fire, as playing it just isn't fun or exciting. A disappointment.

Sion II (X68000)

It seems like the last couple of posts have been a bit negative, but luckily, this one has come along to buck that trend! Sion II is a game for the X68000 which was given away for free with a magazine in 1992, which is pretty amazing to be honest, for a couple of reasons, which I'll get around to shortly. Before I do, I'm going to make a point of mentioning that along with all its other fine traits, it's got an incredibly good soundtrack, right up there with Cho Ren Sha 68k as one of the best on the system.

Now, the reasons it's amazing that this is a coverdisk game I mentioned. Firstly, there's the fact that it's a fully-featured game, that could easily stand alongside any commercial games of the time, on pretty much any contemporaeous system. I mean, it's a fairly simple arcadey shooting game, but you know, it came out in 1992, and it has a proper attract mode and other little bits of presentation polish. It plays well too, but you know, there's been plenty of good games given away free on various formats over the years, but ones with these kind of production values are pretty rare.

The other reason you can figure out by simply looking at the screenshots alongside this review: it's a polygonal 3D action game on a 16-bit system in 1992. That's a year before Starfox hit the SNES, and two years before Virtua Racing on the Mega Drive. It's also two years before the better-known 3D X68000 shooter, the Jumping Flash antecendent Geograph Seal. The framerate might drop a little when things get busy, but honestly, even with that taken into account, it still feels like a technical marvel.

Anyway, yeah, as I mentioned, it plays pretty well. It's obviously heavily influenced by the Star Wars vector-based arcade games from the 80s, as you fly forwards, shooting enemies and avoiding their shots, with a first-person cockpit view. There's even a stage taking place in a trench! The trench is as far as I've been able to get, actually, as it features sections of girder-dodging, between shooting sections, and eventually the girders start moving. I've tried a few times, but I have not yet been able to proceed any further than that. But yeah, it's a simple 3D on-rails shooter, so it's very linear, but only an idiot would complain about that (like the guy who wrote the Panzer Dragoon review in Sega Power a million years ago). I definitely recommend playing it, or at the very least looking up the music on youtube.

Scorpius (X68000)

As you look through the screenshots for this post, you'll notice that they're mainly from the first two stages. That's because this game is brutally, incredibly difficult, and though some of the difficulty comes from stupid, unfair design decisions, such as obstacles that are impossible to avoid without foreknowledge of their location, a lot of it does simply come down to the fact that Scorpius is just a game that just seems to be designed entirely around the player's tears.

It's a horizontally-scrolling shooting game, and the gimmick that gives the game its title is that each of the three ships has a retractible scorpion-like tail that extends from their rear. The tail fires shots from the end, though aiming it takes a fair bit of getting used, as the tail moves in a manner vaguely similar to (though much harder to get the hang of) your dragon's tail in Irem's 1989 arcade game Dragon Breed. You can also put the tail away, and shoot normally, which is the best thing to do in most circumstances. Don't, however, neglect to learn how to control the tail, since it becomes absolutely vital to survival as soon as the middle of stage 2.

The game's big claim to fame is that it was put out by Shinseisha, the publishers of the legendary arcade magazine Gamest. It's clearly was a labour of love, too: the graphics and sound are both of a very high quality, especially when you take into account that this was a 1991 release, it could easily have come out two or three years later and still fit in fine among its contemporaries. Of course, the other side of the coin is that it's definitely made solely for an audience of super hardcore arcade fans. There are no concessions or allowances made for players who don't have either the skill to play well, or the fortitude to learn. I have to admit that I eventually fell short on both counts. Scorpius is just too hard for me! I had to give up after a straight hour's play, I managed to get to the third stage, then losing all my remaining lives within seconds. I'm ashamed to say it, but I was almost in tears.

It's easily much more difficult than even more modern danmaku-style shooting games, but with that level of extreme difficulty comes the physical sensation that comes along with all the best shooters. While reaching and fighting the second boss, I was on edge the whole time,feeling immense pressure and tension, followed by incredible, though brief, relief when the stage was done. All I can say is that if you want that kind of feeling, and you think you have the fortitude to stick with the game, and push through the trauma it inflicts, Scorpius is one you should seek out. No-one will think any less of you if you don't, though.

Curiosities Vol. 9 - Street Fighter II Fangames

So, you might already be aware of this fact, but Street Fighter II was pretty popular when it came out, and it managed to maintain that popularity for quite some time, too. And I'm sure you're also aware that when Japanese nerds like a thing, they tend to make tons and tons of fanworks for it, so why not look at a few SFII fangames, contemporary to the game's original popularity? I've already covered one, the Space Harrier hack Street Harrier, back when I posted all about the wide array of Space Harrier hacks there are on the X68000, which is also the host hardware of the three games I'll talk about today.

First up is the worst of the crop: American Heroes BF 92 Extra Version. It's a fighting game in which you play as a super deformed Guile, and travel the world fighting super deformed guile recolours. Unfortunately, special moves hardly ever work, the collision detection is awful, and in my opinion at least, Guile is the least interesting or cool Street Fighter II character to base a game around. AHBF92EV isn't really worth your time.

Next up, there's the strangest of this motley trio, Blanka in Shura No Kuni. This is an odd single screen beat em up affair, in which you play as Blanka, and beat up as many copies of Vega (claw) as you can before either the time or your health run out. It uses beat em up-style controls, where you have a jump button, a single button for comboed attacks and can walk up and down the screen, and the sprites for Blanka and Vega are both ripped directly from Street Fighter II. The title screen also has three "START" options, for no obvious reason. A decent enough distraction for a couple of minutes, and a headscratching mystery as to why it exists.

 Finally, I saved the best til last! Little Chinese Final Edition is another fighting game, starring a cute, slightly super deformed version of Chun-li. Well, to tell the truth, it stars several cute, slightly super deformed versions of Chun-li, all with other characters' specials added to their moveset. Every version has the lightning kick, and most have the spinning bird kick, too, but only one of them has only these moves. There's also a Chun-li with Ryu/Ken's moves, one with M. Bison (dictator)'s moves, and one with Balrog (boxer)'s moves. Plus, waiting at the end of single-player mode, there's a Chun-li with the moves of all these characters! LCFE is a nice game, it looks really cute, it's fun to play, and most importantly, unlike American Heroes, the moves actually work, and hits connect properly! If you're a big Chun-li fan, or you just like weird old curios, it's definitely worth seeking it out.

Dancing Sword (X68000)

Firstly, I'll apologise for the kind of lacklustre screenshots attatched to this review. Dancing Sword is a very fast-paced game, and that fact, combined with the very small sprites it uses, makes for poor-quality stills. Anyway, in this game, you choose between a knife, a sword, and a meat cleaver, and your chosen weapon will spin and fly around the screen at your behest, slicing up monsters. The three weapons take the usual positions of fast and weak, average on both counts, and slow but powerful. With that in mind, you should go for the cleaver everytime: the slow speed makes it a lot easier to control than the others, and its extra power means less hassle taking care of enemies that need multiple hits.

Of course, the game would have almost no challenge at all if you could just fly around the screen chopping things up willy-nilly, especially since your weapon is indestructible. The challenge comes in the form of elements. Pressing one button on the controller sets your blade alight, while the other makes it really cold. The game gradually introduces types of enemies that can only be killed by freezing or burning them, as well as enemies that change colour and weakness every few seconds. Hitting an enemy in the wrong form makes you bounce harmlessly off it, immobilising you for a second, which is a big disadvantage, since each stage has a time limit (though you can just re-try as many times as you have patience for).

There's also boss fights every five stages. The first boss is pretty much just an enemy that takes a ton of hits to take down, but as the game goes on, the game's bosses really start to test your reactions more and more. The third boss, for example, is a group of five flying swords, that fly across the screen in a random direction every couple of seconds, with a randomly-coloured jetstream behind them, that's also different for each sword, each time. To damage the swords, you have to hit it with the element that matches their stream (with yellow representing a neutral blade). Even with the extra attack power of the cleaver, this boss is incredibly difficult to beat in the time limit, and it's all thanks to that infamous ugbear that crops up time and time again on this blog: randomness. It's frustrating, and feels like the only way to beat the swords is through a combination of superhuman reflexes and incredibly good luck.

But even ignoring the luck aspect, this boss fight also brings up another problem: sometimes blue enemies are killed with fire and vice versa, killing them with the opposite element. Sometimes enemies have to be killed with the element that matches their colour.  It's inconsistent and annoying. The game is pretty frustrating in general, just thanks to its very nature: tiny sprites flying around the screen at high speeds, and strict time limits and all that stuff. But like I said, selecting the cleaver does temper that a little.

Dancing Sword is a pretty original game, and could probably be really good in the hands of a slightly more skilled designer. As it is, it's a better idea than it is a game, unfortunately. Maybe there's a sequel out there somewhere that addresses its issues, waiting to be discovered?

Olteus II (X68000)

One thing I usually hate is levelling up and buying equipment in action games. The worst cases are almost always beat em ups, a genre that has been completely killed in recent years by developers choosing to replace interesting mechanics and design with endless grinding and enemies that can only be defeated using moves that are only useful for defeating those specific enemies. But I'm going on a bit of an unrelated rant here, as though Olteus II has both experience levels and a weapon shop, they actually make the game more compelling. Plus it's a shooting game, not a beat em up.

In fact, the way the game seems to encourage, rather than punish continuing in contradiction to the genre's norm, it can possibly be considered a kind of dialogue-free action RPG that takes a shooting game-like form. For shooting enemies, you gain experience points and gold. Levelling up via experience increases the amount of hits you can take before dying, and increases the power of your default gun and your charge weapon. You also start the game with two options which do nothing alone. This is where the gold comes into play: there's a shop with a variety of different weapons, and different power levels for each of those weapons, and you can equip a different weapon to each one of the options.

The game's split (as far as I can tell, as I haven't completed it yet) into two planets, of four stages each, and a final techno-organic spaceship with a single stage. The stages on each planet can be done in any order, though you have to complete one planet to go to the next. There's also a system of "days" in effect. You start with 999 days to complete your mission, and every time you play a stage, whether successful or not, takes up one day. I really don't know what happens if you run out of days, as getting to the final stage, maxing out my level and getting enough gold to buy every weapon took about 20-something days and an hour and a half. It'd take superhuman levels of both incompetence and persistence to get through 999 days.

The game's presentation is definitely a strong point. The menus all look great, with little diagrams for the weapons in the shop, and thumbnail illustrations of each stage on the stage select screen. Ingame, it looks really great and very colourful, and though it's a minor shame there isn't any parallax, it does look amazing for an independently-produced videogame from 1991. The music was a surprise, as it sounds like it was influenced more by western computer game music, rather than the arcade and console influences you see in most X68000 games (and especially shooting games).

In summary, Olteus II's idiosyncracies mean it won't be something you'll play for years to come like the more orthodox high-quality shooting games on the X68000, like Cho Ren Sha 68k and the like, but it is an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours.

Koma (X68000)

Koma, or Beigoma, are a kind of traditional Japanese wooden spinning top. In this game, you play as one in the odd situation of having to collect exclamation marks while trying to stay to moving platforms above an endless black void. Each stage has a different set of platforms, and though they move in the same patterns every time, the exclamation marks appear in random positions.

The biggest strength of Koma is that the aesthetics and mechanics are inseperably intertwined: because anything that's not black is safe ground, the more complex and psychedelic a stage looks, generally the more difficult it'll be. The stages were each obviously designed with this in mind, each having both its own look and an individual set of challenges and tests of dexterity in navigating to different areas of the screen.

The thing you have to try and do is to stop seeing the different coloured platforms as seperate entities and instead to see the gaps between them as shifting and warping things to avoid. But then again, after a few stages, you'll start to be presented with very small platforms, and single pixel-width bridges, so that advice doesn't really hole up in those situations.

The old cliche "easy to play, difficult to master" definitely applies to Koma, and it's definitely worth playing, at least until the difficulty starts to try your patience.