Abalaburn (Playstation)

Abalaburn has two main modes: story mode and arcade mode.I haven't played much of arcade mode, because it's pretty awful. Story mode I have played a lot of, though.
It comprises a 3D roaming beat em up with some huge stages, lots of varied enemies and the occaisional bit of insanely painful platforming.
Each stage basically involves you wandering around beating up monsters until you beat the one that drops a key (pointed out by a small spark floating above its head), which will open a door that leads to that stage's mid-boss, which will be a huge monster of some kind. Then you find another key, and beat the stage's actual boss, which will be more humanoid in proportions (and for most of the game, they will be the other selectable characters. the aforementioned arcade mode is made entirely of these fights). As an aside, the playable characters are very varied in design, with some cool characters (eg. a spiky-haired and chunky-limbed shonen protagonist and a light-footed catboy) and some that are awful (a grotesquely racist caricature and a shape shifting midget thing).
For a few hours, this is all a lot of fun. Eventually the cracks will start to appear. You'll notice that every normal fight consists of doing a short combo, holding block while the enemy does the same, and then repeating until the enemy is dead. And then there are the terrible parts where you have to use the slightly awkward controls to navigate moving platforms, which will take a long time, and will be no fun at all. At least you don't die or take damage for falling off of them, though.
All these minor flaws do add up, but it wasn't until the final stage that the game really killed my desire to play. The final stage, in true Japanese videogame cliche fashion, is a futuristic technology stage, following all the other, fantasy themed stages. It's also got several huge mid-bosses, which are a series of heavily armed (and heavily armoured) tanks. They kill you very quickly, die very slowly and are just no fun at all to fight. It was a shame to have to give up on a game that was, up until that point, so charming and fun, especially so close to the end, but those bosses really were terrible.
It's really a shame this game never got a western release, though. I'm sure I would have loved this as a teenager, if I'd had the chance to play it back then.

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.