Lethal Crash Race (Arcade)

Lethal Crash Race is a game that can pay testament to the incredible popularity and influence of Street Fighter II on the arcade scene of the early nineties, as though it's not a fighting game, it clearly takes a lot of influence from Capcom's epoch-defining game. That's not to say that it's one of those racing games that's heavy on the fantasy and violence: though a lot of effort has clearly gone into ensuring that ramming your opponent's car is fun and satisfying, it's not an essential part of winning, nor are there projectile weapons or other power ups to be collected on the track.

Instead the influence is more structural and stylistic. There are eight characters to choose from, each with their own cars (all of which are mis-spelled knock-offs of real cars), and their own stages. Their own stages because rather than being a game in which you race a whole load of cars round stadiums for several laps, Lethal Crash Race instead has short one-on-one races of about a minute in length, along various linear tracks all across the world. Not only that, but each character also has different quotes for the beginning and end of each race, my favourite being the rich old man who cheerily declares "this might be my last race."

It's got a really nice feel to it, it's fast and smooth, and as mentioned, bashing into your opponent is satisfying. You're not going to destroy them, but you can knock them off the road, and into rivers or other obstacles. It looks great, too: though the style of the time was all sprite scaling, moving into low poly models, Lethal Crash Race puts up a good fight with its top-down view, having great-looking cars and nicely detailed stages. It looks kind of like if Grand Theft Auto was fully 2D and a bit more detailed and zoomed in, and since it's set up so that your car is always driving up the screen, there's a really cool rotating camera effect on tracks with big round turns.

Lethal Crash Race is a fun game with a cool and interesting concept and lots of charm, and I recommend that you go and play it. It's also yet another game that could easily have been ported to consoles, but inexplicably never was, and probably never will be.

Paneltia Story: Kerun no Daibouken (Saturn)

The "rebuild the world" RPG is a grand old tradition, dating back to at least the early nineties with games like Terranigma (if there are any such games pre-16 bit, I don't know about them), and still lingers today with the likes of Dragon Quest Builders and maybe even Fallout 4 could be considered an entry, with its focus on taking an active hand in rebuilding civilisation. Paneltia Story is one of the rare examples of a 32-bit example (again, I can't think of any others, so if you can, please tell me!), though I'm not sure if you're rebuilding a world, or building a new one in your dreams, since I can't read any of the plot.

Anyway, it doesn't look particularly impressive, and doesn't really contain anything that couldn't have been done on the Mega Drive or SNES, as the RPG part of the game is very very old-fashioned, not only aesthetically, but also mechanically. You've got a top-down view, Dragon-Quest-style first person battles with static monster sprites and so on, and lots and lots of reused graphics. The battles are really unexciting affairs, too: in the oldest-school style, you and they monsters simply take turns hitting each other until one side runs out of HP. It's unfair to completely judge Paneltia Story as a pure RPG though, as a lot of the game revolves around the whole building gimmick.

Building works like this: each stage starts as a big empty void with a town floating in it, though as you start, the town is just an inn and a small shop. You start off with a few panels that you can place in the void, and they can have mountains, forests, rocks or water on them, or they can just be an empty plain. After you've placed a few, you can go and explore them, fighting monsters to gain experience and more panels. When you place a panel on certain (invisible) spaces, a fairy will appear and give you a town panel, which can only be placed on top of your starting town, to which they add more people and buildings. In the map-building menu, you can also look at instructions for making dungeons appear on the map, like say, place a forest panel and surround it with mountain panels, for example. Then the entrance to a dungeon will appear in the forest panels. Go to the dungeon, beat the boss, and then go to the next stage to start all over again, but with new monsters that have higher stats.

Well, I say that, but the second stage has a slightly different structure (though graphically, it and its starting town use the exact same tilesets as the first stage, which is a disappointment). For a start, the dungeon is already on the map, and you don't have any special instructions in the map menu. So you go to the boss, and there's a bit of dialogue beefore you're kicked out of the dungeon. You do now have some instructions though, and using them makes a little cave with a treasure chest in it appear. This is unfortunately, as far as I managed to get, though. I went back to the boss, and the same thing happened as before, but without any new instructions this time, and I have no idea how to proceed further.

Paneltia Story is still a somewhat interesting game, though. Playing it might be overly simple to the point of tedium, but it does have some interesting ideas, and I did have the hope of seeing if there were more of them as the game goes on. I also hope that there's more tilesets and different kinds of panel later in the game, too. I did try and find a walkthrough or a longplay video, and try and figure out what I was doing wrong, but there's nothing as far as I can see, on GameFAQs, Youtube or even Niconico. If you're Japanese-literate, and have the patience for not-particularly-exciting RPG mechanics, then you might find something interesting in Paneltia, and if you do, please satisfy my curiosity and tell me all about it!