Chiteisenki (X68000)

Chiteisenki is a bit of a mixed bag. There's a lot to like about it, but there's also a few annoying little flaws that can easily attract your most fevered hatred. It's a giant robot shooting game by Sprite, wo are mostly known for fangames featuring anime characters, like Ayu Ayu Panic and Akazukin Cha Cha Cha.

You guide your robot through the stages, which look like platform stages, though you can freely fly around them, and your task is to find and destroy the various enemy towers that sit around the stages motionless, firing their weapons and spawning enemies. Each destroyed tower also yields a futuristic treasure chest, that will contain one of the various items, and sometimes also an enemy. Destroy them all and the exit to the next stage opens.

There are a few unique points to make Chiteisenki stand out. The first you'll encounter is the game's use of gravity and recoil: you're constantly being pulled down by gravity, and the recoil from firing your gun knocks you backwards a little. It's just a little touch, but it's contantly affecting how you control your movement. The other main unique point is the extra life system. At the end of each stage, you'll play a roulette game. By default, the prizes on offer are four empty boxes, two items worth 1000 points and two items that will reduce your health by one point. However, one of the items that can be found in the treasure chests is a small bouncy creature, a lot like the Haro robots from the Gundam franchise. Each one of these you collect replaces one of the empty boxes in the roulette, and should you get one from the roulette, it's worth an extra life. Unfortunately, these items can be shot and killed when they appear, and if you do kill one, not only do you lose that one, you lose all of them you have in stock. Also, collecting more than four of them doesn't really have any extra benefit.

The one big problem with the game is how frustrating it can be. Using the Haro items as an example, sometimes a chest will contain one of them and an enemy, and it's way too easy to accidentally shoot the item while trying to kill the enemy. There's also the fact that you start each stage and each life with only three out of your five shields in place (or two if you were unlucky in the previous stage's roulette). And there's also the fact that side from the enemies that are already in the stages, and the enemies that spawn from the towers, a lot of the stages also feature enemies constantly spawning at random from thin air.

All in all, Chiteisenki is a fairly average game. If you think you got the patience for it, it's definitely interesting enough to be worth a look. Oddly, it also has a port to the GBA, though I haven't played that yet. One last note: I did actually get further than the second set of stages, but for no obvious reason, Fraps decided to stop taking screenshots at that point, and I didn't have it in me to start again.

Rayer Shoot (X68000)

Something the X68000 has a lot of (compared to most systems) is fan-made games based on anime, with a fair few of them being based on magical girl shows. There's a bunch of Sailor Moon fangames on there, as well as a relatively well-known one based on Akazukin Chacha. Rayer Shoot is another one of those, based (as you can probably tell from the very obivously fanart title screen) on CLAMP's series Magic Knight Rayearth. I'm not very familiar with the series, but I do know that it's about three schoolgirls who get whisked away to a magical fantasy land while on a school trip to the Tokyo Tower.

Anyway, despite the amateurish title screen, the game itself is really well presented. Almost commercial quality, even, with nice sprites, lots of colour, decent music, and even voice samples. I assume the samples must be recorded from the anime itself? I should really talk about how the game plays too, right? Well, it's no classic, but it's a pretty good effort.

It's a vertically-scrolling shooter, and the player has control of all three of the schoolgirl protagonists, though only one at a time. Each girl has a different weapon, and they each have a health bar, which slowly replenishes while tagged out. There's also an experience/levelling up system in lieu of power ups, though it seems to take a very very long time to get anywhere with it, and it'd definitely take a lot of skill to even try to keep your three girls' levels balanced.

In fact, playing the game takes a lot of skill in general: those health bars go down very quickly, and the enemies and their bullets are both high-speed and high-quantity. To get anywhere, players really do need to keep an eye on their helath bars and make tactical use of tagging in and out to recover as much health as possible, trying to keep the girl with the highest amount of health in play as much as possible. You also get a bomb attack which is different for each girl and recharges a short time after use.

Rayer Shoot is a fun, well presented game, as well as a nice little artifact of 90s anime fandom in Japan. I definitely recommend it, with the caveat that you go in expecting a merciless challenge.

FZ Senki Axis (X68000)

This game does what I've seen a few games on old floppy-based systems do, in that it has a fancy animated intro, which it puts on a completely seperate disk that's not needed to play the game. So theoretically, you don't even need to skip the cutscene, you can just throw it away never to be seen again. It's not a terrible one, though, it's fairly atmospheric and sets the scene I guess.

Anyway, FZ Senki Axis, then. It's an isometric shooting game by Wolfteam, specialists in making games that seem like they're licenced from late 80s OAVs, but actually aren't. In the case of FZ Senki Axis, it feels a lot like the Votoms spin-off Armour Hunter Mellowlink, except you're in a mecha, and poor old Mellowlink was always on foot with his trusty rifle. Each stage sees the player hunting down a certain number of specific target enemies, which tend to be bigger or faster than the regular drones (or both).

Despite every stage having the same overall mission, they still manage to be varied. Not only are the stages set in a variety of different environments, with war-torn cities, countryside battlefields, desert ruins, and so on, but there's gimmicks to them, too. Like one stage has the player in a dark cave, seeking out gun turrets hidden in murky pools of water, and another takes a break from the wide open spaces that are the norm, and has the player storming an enemy base, fighting security systems in corridors. The bossfights are even more varied, with heavily armed war-trains, a pair of fast elite mecha who seem to be inspired by Gundam's Black Tri-Stars and so on.

It's not all good, though. For starters, the difficulty is totally unforgiving, and it'd be hard to blame players for giving up after being quickly destroyed on their first go. The other side of that coin, however, is that the difficulty can really ramp up the tension, leading situations like a player on their last point of health trying to hunt down the stage's last target before getting taken out by a drone. Another problem is a smaller one, and I almost feel as if I'm nitpicking when I bring it up: the fact that there's no kind of acknowledgement when walking over different types of terrain. It's most noticable in the countryside stage, where the player's mech just walks over fields, bridges and water alike, as if the world was one of those carpets with roads and stuff printed on it. All it would have taken would have been a tiny splashing effect around the feet to enhance the experience so much more. But like I said, it's a tiny thing, and I feel silly bringing it up.

FZ Senki Axis is still a good game, and you should definitely give it a try if you think you can handle it. Even if you don't, you could try the Mega Drive port, which is mostly the same, but a lot easier.

The Last Tempest (X68000)

This is a game that was almost, thanks to the short-sightedness of its developer, lost to the ages. It's only down to a helpful poster at the Tokugawa Corp forums, who found a way round the game's copy protection that it can now be emulated, played and written about.
On to the game itself, it's an action game taking place on floating isometric islands, and on each stage, the player must find and kill all the enemies therein. The hook is that the player is some kind of evil skull-

worm-thing, and the enemies are angels, saints, apostles and other biblical figures. Enemies are killed simply by repeatedly ramming them with your face. The game delights in being disrespectful and irreverant, too: cherub enemies are labelled "angelic scum", the good samaritan is pointed out with a big red arrow instructing "KILL HIM!", and the homing shots fired by the Archangel Gabriel are "angelic sperm".
The game is a lot of fun, and though the stages all have the same basic goal (kill every enemy), there's still a lot of variety in them, and another nice touch is that though each stage has a boss (usually an archangel, though I've also encountered a bronze serpent summoned by Moses and Aaron, who also float around on their own little island summoning explosions and rains of holy water to further annoy you), they don't have to be killed last, and will often roam about the stages attacking at will.
Another interesting point is that the player character is technically invulnerable to direct attacks, with death only coming from falling off the islands, which actually serves to make it more annoying, especially when, as is often the case, death comes from the player's own clumsiness, without even needing any enemy

intervention.
Despite this frustration, this is a game I'm going to be sticking with for a few reasons. Firstly, the charm of its adolescent blasphemous trappings (as an aside: though it came out in the same year as Neon Genesis Evangelion, since that series debuted in October, it's probably just a coincidence), contrasted with the high quality of the graphics and music and how well put together the game is in general is nice, and secondly, as I said, every stage is unique and full of nice little ideas, and I want to see more of what the game has to offer.
Special thanks to Japanese PC Compendium for helping me get the disc images and the save state needed to run them.

Buster (X68000)

Buster is a platform game, that's clearly been heavily influenced by Arcade platformers of the late 1980s, like Wardner and Legend of Hero Tonma. In it, the player travels, in the traditional manner, from left to right, killing enemies as you go. The only part of the game that's particularly original is the sword meter, which decreases every time you make a normal attack, and replenishes gradually when you're not attacking. You do also have an alternate attack, in the form of a splatterhouse-esque sliding kick, performed by pressing the

attack button at the same time as hitting the ground after a jump or fall. The sliding kick doesn't deplete the sword meter, and in fact quickly replenishes a large portion of it.
Don't mistake unoriginality for low quality, though: Buster is an excellent game that also has great graphics and music. The controls are tight and the stages are designed with deliberate precision. Nothing in the game feels arbitrary or accidental.
There is an aspect of the game that will put many off, however: its difficulty. The stages are designed with precision, and they expect to be played with precision in return. The first stage allows the player to get acquainted with the controls and mechanics, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, the game no longer has any mercy. There are jumps which require pixel-perfect accuracy, and a little later, situations that require that accuracy in jumping, but also perfect timing in attacking, and all in tiny timeframes with no space for error.
Because the game is so well made, this can get frustrating, but it's the right kind of frustration that a difficult game should invoke, where the player knows that they are at fault, and not the game. If you want a hard,

very old fashioned platform game, Buster is definitely one of them. The maker, E. Hashimoto, later went on to make a bunch of fairly well-known PC games, such as Akuji the Demon, and Guardian of Paradise. He's also made a psuedo-remake of Buster, 11 years after the original. I say psuedo-remake, as though I haven't played it, footage I've seen shows that the graphics are completely different (in a good way), and the game looks like it plays very differently, with the character moving around and fighting enemies at very high speeds.

Whipplu Special (X68000)

Just a small post to fill in a gap in my silly self-imposed "there has to be a gap of two posts between posts with the same tag" rule.
Whipplu Special (the name that's in the loading screen, if that's not what it says on the title screen) is a block-sorting puzzle game which, on first glance looks a lot like the SNES game Panel de Pon. It plays quite differently, though rather than having to form groups of touching blocks, the aim is to have three or more similar blocks on the same row, a which point they will disappear. Game over comes when you try to put a block into a column that's already touching the top of the field.  Also unlike Panel de Pon (an most other post-Puyo Puyo puzzle games, there's no kind of vs mode, nor does the game gradually get faster as you play.
The pace is actually a big departure from the genre at large, as the game is much more sedentary than it's peers. You can take as long as you want to eye up the situation before placing your blocks without penalty. Another unusual, but not unheard of feature is the way stages work in this game, being a system similar to some older versions of Tetris: each stage has a quota of blocks to be cleared, at which point it will end. Between the stages, you'll be shown a picture of some food, which is nice. There's also a Ranking Mode, the aim of which is to achieve as high a score as possible while removing 100 blocks.

Unfortunately, though the background art is a nice scene, it doesn't seem to ever change. Or at least, not as far as I've seen (having managed to get about 7 or 8 stages in). The music does change every few stages though, and it's pretty nice too.

STDS00751 R+R (X68000)

Sorry about the long wait between the last post and this one, but I was busy preparing for, going to, and recovering from Bloodstock 2012 (which was thoroughly excellent, in case you were wondering). Also, I was playing a lot of Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 instead of anything that fits this blog's remit. Oops.
Anyway, this game is a shooting game for the X68000. It's a pretty good one, too! It's neither too easy or too hard, it moves at a decent pace and it looks and sounds pretty good, too. The only problem it has is that it's a little bit generic. It doesn't have any really strong gimmicks: no intricate scoring system, no fancy bullet-countering weapons or cool-looking bomb attacks, not much at all really. The nearest thing it has to a good gimmick is the power up system: you start with the weakest weapons (oh yeah, there are two weapons that can be switched between at any time: a powerful straight laser, and a weaker spread shot. Again, generic) and once you get 10000 points, they get more powerful, then again after another 20000 points. If you die, you're back to the weakest weapon and have to build it up again.
This would be a pretty cool system, if it had more than 3 levels of power. It would have been interesting if the game rewarded continued survival with gradually more and more powerful weaponry.
You also get an unlimited-use super shot that is activated, oddly, by jiggling your ship left and right.
As said before, the game looks pretty good, with the sprites being a lot better looking than the backgrounds (though they themselves aren't ugly or anything). I could be my imagination, but some of the enemies seem to be possibly inspired by Thunderforce IV.
The music is as good as you would expect from a shooting game for the X68000, though obviously it doesn't reach the heady heights of ChoRenSha.
All in all, this is a pretty fun game, but on a system with as many great shooters as the X68000, it doesn't really stand out much. And it has a really terrible name.

Silk Road 2 (X68000)

It's an action RPG! I actually meant to write about this game ages and ages ago, but never got round to it, then I got stuck and didn't play it again for about a year. But I recently decided to pick it back up, started a new file, and now I'm further than I was before. I'll probably have completed it in the near future!
Anyway, you play as a young elf-girl-thing with a tail, and you explore some nice SNES-looking countryside. There's a map screen, that shows the world split into a grid of squares, each representing one screen. Four of the squares have numbers in them, which represent bosses. When you defeat a boss, you get an item which gives you a new ability: winged bots that allow you to jump, flippers that let you swim, etc. I don't yet know what happens when you beat all four bosses, unfortunately.
The game plays pretty well, and the controlsare well designed, using only the directions and two buttons. The first button uses your weapon, some kind of blowgun that shoots bubbles, and when held down, allows you to select an item, via a Secrret of Mana-Esque ring menu. The second button uses the currently selected item.
After a boss, you'll usually end up meeting a crazy-eyed witch who sells you stuff. Here is my advice: always buy the red and blue ribbons, they're 200 gold each, and they increase your attack (red) and defence (blue).
The game is all in Japanese, though you might be able to get through without understanding. There were a couple of points where I had to ask for help from JP-literate friends, but after they'd told me what the text said, I felt a little stupid, as the solution was always something obvious. So, if you're maybe not as dumb as me, you might be able to get through the game without being able to read the text. There's not much of it, anyway.
Silk Road 2 is a really fun game, and it's definitely worth playing. There's also a PC port of the game, with nicer graphics, and even a babelfish-esque translation patch. I haven't played that version, because reports suggest it's somewhat bug-ridden, and I found this version first and was too stubborn to change.

Curiosities vol. 1 - X68000 Space Harrier Hacks

This post is a little different than the usual reviews, since all these games ar just hacks of Space Harrier, and everyone loves Space Harrier anyway, it'd be pointless reviewing them. I'm just posting about them because I think they're interesting and I want to share them with the world. I don't know when these hacks were made, but judging by the contents, I would guess they didn't come out too long after the X68000 version of the game itself, in the late 1980s. This also isn't a comprehensive guide: there are three other known hacks, two of them themed around Sailor Moon and Gundam, and another one, called "Pretty Harrier", about which I know very little. Unfortunately, I couldn't get them to run in XM6g. If anyone has got those to run in an emulator, please tell me how and which emulator! Also, special thanks for this post go to Dark Age Iron Savior, who managed to find the disc images for me. I apologise in advance for the layout of this post. There's a lot of images, and I'll try my best to arrange them nicely, but I make no promises it won't be an ugly mess at the end of it.

Harrier Desse

As far as I can tell, this hack doesn't really have any unifying theme to it. It's just strange. The sound effects have all been replaced with strange voice samples, and the enemies include slimes from Dragon Quest, hattifatteners from Moomin and Gamera, among other unconnected things.

Rumic Harrier

This one is a bit more palatable, you play as Lum from Urusei Yatsura, and fly around shooting characters from the various works of Rumiko Takahashi, including UY as well as Maison Ikkoku and Ranma 1/2

Street HarrierThis one is the coolest of the three I'm posting about. You play as Ryu from Street Fighter, flying and shooting hadokens, and the enemies are characters from a ton of different arcade games! The bonus stage has Ryu doing a handstand on top of the plane from Afterburner! The last boss is the guy from Space Harrier, come to reclaim his game! The only problem is that there's something wrong with the game (or possibly the emulation of it) that means the lives counter never goes down. On the other hand though, that means I got to play it all the way to the end and take lots of screenshots!

Vagrant Fighter FX (X68000)

Vagrant fighter FX is a homebrew fighting game from 1995. With that in mind, it's surprising how well it turned out.
It seems to be pretty well balanced, and it has everything you'd expect from a fighter at the time: special and super moves, combos, etc. Even the ability to cancel normal attacks into specials is in there! It's obvious that the maker (or possibly makers) of this game really loved fighting games, and had a bunch of ideas they wanted to put into one.
There are 8 playable characters (there are four more shown on the character select screen, who I assume are bosses. I don't know if there's any way to play as them though, as I'm so rubbish I couldn't even get far enough to fight against them, let alone defeat them) including a figure skater, an american football player, an armoured claw-weilding guy and a guy who's a blatant rip-off of Joseph Joestar from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (but what's interesting is that this game seems to have been made before Capcom's JJBA arcade games, making this possibly the first videogame appearance of the series). They definitely aren't what you'd call professionally drawn or animated, but for the most part, they're not especially ugly (the main exception being Arucard, who looks terrible. Also, he's a fighting stage magician, and not a vampire. Strange.), and similar can be said for the stages: for the most part they look okay, but not great. Although the night-time cityscape and european town stages look a lot nicer than the rest, while the russion submarine looks completely awful. The music, like the graphics varies, from moderately catchy tunes to terrible alarm-like cacophonies.
The game itself is a lot more fun to play than I was expecting (I'm slightly ashamed to say that I did initially judge the game on first sight and assume it to be another awful old X68000 homebrew), though it is a little too hard, I had to turn the difficulty all the way down before i could win any fights (of course, it's very possible I'm just rubbish). As mentioned at the start of the review, it's got everything you'd expect from an early 90s fighting game, and despite the slightly choppy animation, it feels pretty smooth, too. As far as I can discern, none of the characters seems to be horribly broken, and incredibly, there doesn't seem to be a resident shotoclone!
VFFX isn't an all time classic game, and won't be replacing any of your favourite big-name fighting games, but it is fun to play, and you can be certain that it'll also be new to whoever you play it with, which is nice.
One final note: despite the name, there doesn't appear to be any homeless people in this game.