Tsuushin Taisen Logic Battle Daisessen (Dreamcast)

I feel like I'm playing a lot of games recently that can be described as a kind of combination of elements from other games, and this is one of them. The constituent parts in this case being Battleship and Minesweeper, both grid-based games about naval combat, though this game is themed around the inhabitants of a floating island where it's always springtime, but is currently suffering a terrible winter. That's really all I know about the plot, so let's just move on to the game itself, the explanation of which is going to be fairly lengthy.

The first thing you do before you even try to enter battle is decide your formations. You start with twenty soldiers, called "Bingos", and you can place them on your 10x10 grid in small formations called boards (kind of like your different ships in Battleship, but more varied in shape). As you win battles, you'll gradually be given more Bingos (Bingoes?) to play with, and you'll earn currency that can be spent on buying more boards, in bigger sizes and a wider variety of shapes. The importance of the boards you pick and wherre you place them will become apparent when you actually get into battle, which is where things get a bit more complex and nerdy-sounding, so be warned as you enter the next paragraph.

In battle, you start off with ten power points, and your choice from the boards you have on the grid. Whichever board you choose costs as many points as the number of bingos of which it is composed, and you use it to attack, in a Battleship-esque manner, placing its shape on the opponent's grid. If you found any of your opponent's bingos, they'll be revealed, and once you reveal one of your opponent's boards entirely, it'll be destroyed and they can no longer attack with it. Missed attacks aren't completely useless, as on your subsequent turns, places where you've attacked but there wasn't a bingo will be marked in one of two ways: if there are no bingos vertically or horizontally adjacent to the empty square, it'll show as a white cross, and if there are, there'll be a green exclamation mark there. At the start of a new turn, you'll get back one power point, plus any bonus power points you got for destroying boards. Obviously, once you're done, your opponent will do the same until one of you is left without bingos and declared the loser.

It's a pretty amusing game, but nothing special. I have to say that there are multiplayer modes that I wasn't able to play: one online, and one offline. The offline multiplayer mode apparently has the players' grids shown on the VMU screen in their respective controllers for the sake of privacy, like your hand of cards in Sonic Shuffle. It's a shame it's fallen into the Mariana Trench of forgotten games, as a nice convenient PC version to play for 10 minutes while wating for something else would be really nice.

If you like the sound of it, I recommend Tsuushin Taisen Logic Battle Daisessen. The thing to remember though, is that it's one of those Windows CE Dreamcast games, and as far as I know, the only emulator that runs them is Demul, which can be a bit weird and temperamental.

Penguin-kun Wars 2 (MSX)

There's a chance you might have played the first Penguin-kun Wars game, which was ported to the NES and Game Boy and released in the west as King of the Zoo, but in case you haven't, it was about a fictional sport played by cute animals.

The sport itself (which doesn't have a name, as far as I can tell) is a kind of combination of bowling and dodgeball: the participants stand at either end of a flat plain, each starting with five balls. The aim is to roll the balls over to your opponent's side, with the winner being either the first to get all ten balls on their opponent's side, or the one with the least balls on their side when time runs out. Furthermore, if you hit your opponent with a ball, they're stunned for a few seconds (or vice versa, obviously).

In the first game, this was all there was to it. It had a sports tournament setting, and you simple faced off against increasingly skilled opponents as you advanced. The second game, however, has a (very simple) plot: you go to  the house of your friend to play, only to see them getting kidnapped! So you go off to rescue them. An additional cute touch is that you can pick a male or female penguin to play as, and the one you don't pick is who gets kidnapped. As you're not participating in a sports tournament this time, your opponents don't play fair. There are multiple areas (Mammal World, Insect World, Reptile World, etc.), each with a few opponents to beat. Most of your opponents have some kind of special ability that they have no qualms about abusing, such as the shark, who can't be stunned, instead turning red and ramping up the aggression if you hit him, or the ants, who's special ability is that there are two of them, so if you stun one, the other can still move. The exception is Mammal World, where the locals just seem to be mediocre players that you won't have too much trouble beating.

After you've beaten three opponents in an area, you fight that area's boss, who has even more unfair abilities. For example, the boss of Insect World is a centipede, who takes up his entire side of the field, can throw every ball he has at once and takes multiple hits before getting stunned. There's no versus mode, and I think that's probably for the best: though it's a kind of sports game at its core, Penguin-kun Wars 2 is structured more like a single player action game, with stages and boss fights and so on, and as such is balanced heavily against the player.

Before the review ends, it would be remiss to allow the presentation to go unmentioned, as it's pretty nice for a 1988 MSX game. Each stage has its own background, with an audience of whatever animals live there. One stage, Antarctic World, has a few humans in the crowd, which is odd. Another cool touch is that each stage has unique game over and stage complete screens. It really feels like the developers were enthusiastic about making this game, but unfortunately, that enthusiasm has mainly gone into including as many ideas and variations on the core mechanics as possible, with little regard as to how balanced it all is.

If you're a particularly big fan of the original, and you're desperately clamouring for more, then that's exactly what you'll get from this sequel. I can't help but feel that that's an incredibly tiny niche, though, even by the standards of this blog.