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!

Sega Game Pack 4 in 1 (Game Gear)

It might seem strange to review a compilation, but this isn't a compilation of previously released games, the games on here were made specifically for a compilation. Not this compilation, though. Three of the games were originally part of two Japan-only releases called Kuni-chan no Game Tengoku Volume 1 & 2. The other game, Penalty Shootout was made especially for this cartridge, which appears to have been released only in Europe, mainly as a pack-in with the console, but apparently there's also a very rare boxed release of it too.
You might say that a console pack-in might not be obscure enough to fit this blog's remit, but it's not like you see people posting about this game everywhere, is it? It seems to have been mostly forgotten, which is good enough for me.
So, on to the games!
First up is Flash Columns, which, as you might guess from the title, is a cut-down version of columns, featuring only the "Flash mode" from the full version. If you don't know, flash mode gives you a stage partially filled with jewels, some of which are flashing. Get rid of the flashing jewels and go on to the next stage. There are a couple of differences between this version and the version you might be used to, though. Firstly, although the jewels still fall in vertical columns of three, to make them disappear, they have to be arranged so that at least four of the same colour are touching, non diagonally, as opposed to the normal columns rule of putting three in a row, in any direction. The other difference is the scoring system, or rather, the lack of one. In this game, you get one point for every jewel you make vanish. No extra points for chains or disappearing large amounts at once, and also no time limit to get the falshing jewels in. This is the flaw that ruins the game, with no rewards for speed or skill, it feels like a tedious trudge.
The second game is the one made especially for europe, Penalty Shootout! Essentially, it's a guessing game. You choose which direction to make the guy kick the ball, and how high. Then you hope the goalie doesn't jump in the same direction. After five shots, you switch places. There's no way of knowing what the computer player is going to do, making the whole thing a pointless waste of time. Don't bother with it.
The third game, which is referred to by most of the internet as just "Rally", though I'm sure I remember it being called something like "Pan-American Grand Prix" in the manual, though I no longer have the manual, and of course there are no scans of it online (as far as I can tell), so wo knows? Anyway, this is definitely the best game of the four. It's an Outrun-clone, but with no branching paths. So I guess you could also call it a Hang-On clone, but in a car, if you wanted to. Whatever you want to call it, it's fast and fun and has nice graphics. The only downside is that it's really really short and easy. But that's not a massive downside, is it?
The last game, which is also the second best game on the cart is Tennis. It plays exactly like Nintendo's Tennis game on the Game Boy. Obviously this version is infinitely better though, for three reasons: it's made by SEGA, it's in glorious colour, and instead of Mario being the referee, Sonic is the referee. Other than those differences, I assume it's only the game's relative obscurity that stopped there being any kind of lawsuit, as it really does play exactly like Nintendo's game.

Lock n Chase (Game Boy)

The story of me and Lock n Chase is a short, pointless and boring one. This summer, while I was subjected to only a mobile broadband dongle with very limited bandwidth, I noticed somewhere that the entire ROMset for the Atari 2600 took up only 5MB. Seeing this as good value for bandwidth, I downloaded it, and put it onto my GP2X to play while watching repeats of Everybody Hates Chris and 60s Batman.
Overwhelmed by the huge list of games, I started playing the familiar games I played on a real 2600 in times long past (Carnival, Stampede, Othello), then games with interesting titles (Aquaventure, Cosmic Ark) and also, games that I remember seeing advertised in the old (as in pre-dating my birth) Marvel and DC comics I used to buy from the book stall on the market in my teenage years. Lock n Chase was one of those games.
But I'm not writing about the Atari 2600 version, or the arcade game of which it was a port. Today I'm writing about the much later Game Boy port.
It's pretty fun. It's a Pacman clone, as was the fashion at the time, themed around a bank robber being chased by cops. The characters all look like the chicken nugget people that McDonalds had among their many mascots a long time ago (I specifically remember during the 1992 Olympics, Happy Meals came with little plastic nugget-men, each one engaged in a different sport, not letting their lack of limbs stand in the way of their ambitions), and are all wearing hats. The cops are wearing the kind of hats you see cops wearing in old gangster movies, and the player is wearing the kind of hat you see gangsters wearing in old gangster movies.
You waddle around the mazes avoiding cops and collecting round things (which I think we can assume are coins). As usual, collect all the coins and you go the the next stage. There's also moneybags and diamonds, that will periodically appear for a short time every now and then. The moneybags freeze the cops in place for a few seconds, and the diamonds let you chase them for a short time, like the power pills in Pacman.
I should probably go into what makes Lock n Chase its own game, and not just a reskinned Pacman clone. The original gimmick in the arcade version was that there were doors place all over the stages that the player can shut behind them, cutting off any persuing cops (but also possibly creating a dead end for the careless player to be chased down). This feature survives into the Game Boy port, which also gradually adds more gimmicks as the game goes on. The first to appear is kind of the opposite of the original: doors that are closed by default and can be opened for a few seconds by the player walking into them.
I won't spoil any of the other features for you (plus i can't get very far into the game, and have only seen a couple more anyway, but shhh.).
The GB Lock n Chase is a pretty fun game, and even better than the original version. It is also, by extension, better than the PSP version, which is a download over 100MB large from the PSN store, despite just being a ROM of the arcade version packaged with an emulator. THat doesn't even automatically save high scores. Tsk.

Choro Q Jet: Rainbow Wings (Playstation)

I've been meaning to review this for well over a year now, but for some reason, I'm only just now getting round to it. Now that I've built it up like that, I'm sure you'll all be disappointed at how this isn't a classic masterpiece of games writing. Waah.
Obviously, it's a spin-off of the well known Choro Q series of racing games/ talking car RPGs (CaRPGs?), and it's about military aircraft in general, not just jets. Breaking from the usual Choro Q style, the aircraft actually have human pilots, too! There's a bunch of characters/aircraft to choose from, including a bunny-girl in an attack helicopter, a punk in a stealth bomber and a Sakura Wars knock-off in a cherry blossom painted plane. Other miscelleny includes the usual stuff you get in the Playstation games about which I write, like an animated intro, blue skies, and so on.
The game plays like a combination of the All-Range Mode stages from Lylat Wars, and the lock-on missiles from the Afterburner games. You fly around the smallish stages, shooting down enemies with either your lock-on missiles or your non-lock-on machine gun (which can also be used to shoot down enemy missiles, again like in Afterburner!) until you fulfill the target, at which point "WARNING!" will appear on the screen, and the boss fight will start. The boss doesn't just arrive in the stage, though, rather the game does a slightly awkward feeling thing of having the stage reset, but with the enemies all gone and the boss present.
The stage targets vary from destroying a particular building or all of a certain kind of enemy, to destroying all the enemies within a time limit, among other things.
The early boss fights are often very easy, since for a lot of them, as long as you can keep them in your sights, you can fire all your missiles as fast as you can push the button, making short work of their health bars. Of course, this changes as the game goes on, and later bosses are almost chellenging.
The game never seems to actually get hard, though. And though it's fun to play, eventually, the fact that the missions aren't very hard and, despite the variety of objectives, also play very similarly to each other, you'll probably get bored of the game before you complete it. It is fun for a while, though.

Bubble Hero 2 (PC)

Okay, so this review is going to be terrible filler for a few reasons.
Reason one: It had been a while since the last post, and unfortunately, I haven't really been playing anything obscure enough to be worth posting here.
Reason two: There's no screenshots because all the screenshots I took of this game came out all corrupt and strange. This is especially a shame because the graphics were pretty much the only good thing about the game.
Reason three: I could only actually stand to play a few credits of this awful, awful game.

So, it's a Bubble Bobble rip-off for PC. When you first load it up, you might be impressed with its graphics. There's no shame in that, it's got nice big colourful sprites and... nice big colourful sprites. As I mentioned before, that's everything good about the game.
There is no background music, even though there's an option to turn music on and off. There are two buttons like you'd expect from a Bubble Bobble clone: jump and blow. But the jump button only works about three-quarters of the time.
And all these things are leading up to the main event of this games problems, and one that's ruined a previous chinese game I reviewed: the first boss is huge, it's faster than you, it will camp right next to your respawn point to kill you again and it takes a ton of hits to kill. How many hits? I'll never know, as I gave up after four or five attempts. It's even worse than the bosses in Adventurous Boy.
So there's Bubble Hero 2. A legitimately awful game.

Gotzendiener (PC Engine)

This is an action-RPG, made by Gainax. Or at least, they were involved in it's development in some way. It's odd that Gainax's most famous series tend to be about mecha (Gunbuster, Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, etc.), but their games usually have fantasy settings with no mecha at all (Alisia Dragoon, the Princess Maker series, etc.). This game is no exception to that rule.
The scneario is pretty cool: You play as a maiden who's been captured by an evil demon, and as usual, a brave hero came to rescue you, and though he did successfully kill the demon, he was mortally wounded during the fight and quickly followed the monster into death. So you take the hero's sword and set off to find your own way out of the castle.
You go around the isometric stages, solving puzzles and occasionally fighting monsters (I guess the hero must have killed most of them on his way up?). You don't have to worry about understanding Japanese for this game, as other than a couple of animated cutscenes, there's no text or dialogue, and there's nothing in the cutscenes that you need to know to progress. There were a couple of points where I got stuck in the game, though luckily there's a really excellent FAQ on GameFAQs, that not only contains a full walkthrough for the game, it also translates the plot and provides details of the tie-in merchandise that was released for it!
The game looks good, with nice animation and sprites that are detailed despite also being tiny and low-res. The music is good too, having a slightly arabian flavour to it (some people online have compared the game as a whole to Prince of Persia, and there is definitely a similar feel to it in looks, sound and atmosphere, I'm not really familiar enough with PoP to say whether the similarities extend to the game itself. (I'm mostly unfamiliar with it because I tend to die as soon as the first enemy appears.))
The only real problem with the game is that it is incredibly short and, other than the parts where I got stuck also very very easy. I completed it in less than two hours, and as I've mentioned plenty of times before, I'm terrible at games. It's definitely worth playing if you can find it cheap/free, but copies online seem to go for about £30, which does seem a bit much.

One Piece Mansion (Playstation)

The thing this game is most famous for is having nothing to do with stretchy pirates. It also has nothing to do with mansions either, so it all works out for the best in the end.
You play as the manager of an apartment block who looks kind of like Gaz from Invader Zim, and you've got to keep all your tenants happy so they don't explode. You do this by strategically arranging their apartments. How do you know how happy they'll be? Each kind of tenant has a bunch of arrows coming out of them when you highlight them. Blue arrows mean anyone in that direction of the tenant will be made happier by their presence, red arrows mean that their neighbours will be made less happy. Further complicating matters are criminals who will randomly move in, spreading bad vibes around them, and occaisionally wandering the building causing havoc. To get rid of them, you have to make good use of your more annoying tenants to drive them out, as well as running around blowing a whistle and/or spraying a fire extinguisher at them when they go on their mischeivious jaunts.
In story mode, you go through a finite amount of stages, each with an objective, such as "Build 30 rooms!" or "Make $20000!". If you run out of money, the game ends. There's also an endless mode, with no objectives, you just keep building upwards until you run out of money.
Story mode is excellent, the stages are fast-paced and don't take too long to do, the only problem being it's quite easy and very short (I completed story mode without failing a single stage.). Endless mode is also very easy, and obviously lasts a long time, but has a different problem: the lack of objectives makes the game very boring. You just build tenants as soon as they come along, then wait for either more tenants to appear, or for that month's rent to be paid, with only the occaisional criminal to break up the monotony.
One Piece Mansion is good, and definitely worth playing, I just wish it had some kind of mode with infinite, randomly generated mission objectives.

Tian Wang Xiang Mo Zhuan (NES)

As you may have gathered from the title, this is yet another unlicenced Chinese game. I don't like reviewing similar games after each other, but that whole world of unlicenced, mostly undocumented games interests me a lot.
It's a beat em up, set, if my interpretations of the images in the intro are correct, in a post-apocalyptic world that has suffered the ravages of both nuclear war and the opening of some kind of evil demon treasure chest.
So, you pick one of four warriors (and if you're smart, you'll pick the orange, umbrella wielding guy in the bottom right of the selection screen) and go about various locations beating up monsters.
The enemies are pretty varied, ranging from aggressive bats and frogs, to humanoid snake and eagle monsters.
Combat itself is okay. There's arent any Streets of Rage-style combos for you normal attacks, though each character does have two special moves, though these two moves are essentially the same for all characters: double-tapping a direction and pressing attack will make your character zoom across the screen, damaging all the enemies they touch (very useful for dealing with the bats, who are awkward to kill with your regular attack), and a projectile move done in the tradional quarter circle forward manner.
As for power-ups, there are the usual health recovery and 1-up items, plus a few other items, that all turn you into some kind of creature (including, but possibly not limited to a dragon, a flying unicorn and a will-o-the-wisp), that give you the ability to fly around, be invincible and kill every enemy you touch for a short time.
This isn't a bad game, it's hard, but not unfair, it doesn't look or sound any worse than your typical NES games, and as far as I know, it isn't just an officially released game with the sprites changed.

Adventurous Boy (Mega Drive)

I really wanted this game to be good. I like pirate games, I like the Mega Drive, and I like shooting games.
You can probably tell from the screenshots that it's a blatant rip-off of Super Fantasy Zone, with similar stages, a similar visual style and music that sounds like weird cover versions of the music from SFZ. Unlike Super Fantasy Zone, though, Adventurous Boy is terrible.
It might lure you into thinking it might be a fun game, with its okay graphics, and its nice, easy-going first stage, but this game is evil!
The first hint of danger is your character's default flying speed: really really slow. Luckily, a shop will appear once you've collected some money (see? Super Fantasy Zone!), and you can buy some bigger wings to go faster. And by "can", I mean "must": the game is no fun at all to play with the default speed, and you'll probably die very quickly too. You should also buy the Track Missiles, since they also make things a lot easier.
Like in that other, more famous game, there are ten enemy generators in each stage, and when they've all been destroyed, the boss will appear.
This is where the game shows its true colours. If you manage to kill the boss without losing a life, then everything will be fine, you'll go onto the next stage and a good time will be had by all (except the boss, obviously). If you get killed during the boss fight, you'll then experience the harshest and most frustrating case of "Gradius Syndrome" I've ever seen. You'll be back to your default speed, which is a lot slower than the speed at which the bosses move. So slow is your default speed, that even though this game gives you a few hit-points per life, if you get touched by the boss, you won't be able to move fast enough to get away before losing a life. And when you respawn, the boss will likely still be near where you died, if not still right on top of that spot, and you'll die again.
By setting the difficulty level to easy and putting the amount of starting lives to the maximum, I've managed to get as far as the third boss. I won't be trying again to get any further.
I love hard shooting games, but this game isn't hard as much as it is broken and unfair. And the way in which this difficulty arises makes me think it wasn't even intentional, which seems like a real shame. Those chinese guys thought they were putting out a nice, fun (though unoriginal) shooter, but because of a couple of little flaws, it's completely ruined.

Pop'n Tanks (Playstation)

The first thing that I'm going to tell you about this game is that it has a nice 2D animated intro before the title screen, as well as nice 2D animated intros for each character in story mode. So I'm slightly biased towards it, as like all good-hearted people, I really like it when 32-bit era games have 2D animated videos in them.
Anyway. The game's about one-on-one tank battles, in small brightly coloured cartoony tanks. All the tanks are different, both in looks and in weaponry. But you should be aware that the tank with a cake for a turret is the best one, since its special weapon sends out some flying exploding giant bananas that are really hard to avoid and do tons of damage.
There's two main modes to play in: Tank World and Story Mode. Tank world is the more in-depth of the two modes; you pick a tank, choose a name for yourself and the tank you chose, then try to fight your way up the rankings. When you win a fight, you go up in the rankings and also gain a tank part. The main problem with this mode is that you don't get to choose your opponents, just the stage on which you fight them. And the fact that I'm so rubbish I can never get more than one or two ranks places above the bottom rank. Waah.
Story mode is basically what would be called "Arcade Mode" in any other fighting game. You pick a character (these characters don't appear in the Tank World mode, and the tanks they have are all the default tanks you can choose from in that mode) and figght the other characters, and the characters will have a conversation before each fight. I don't know what the plot's about because it's all in Japanese. But like i've probably said a million times before, if the plot's so important that your inability to understand it will keep you from playing a game, you're a massive idiot.
As for how the game actually plays, it's mostly pretty good! The tanks are really fun to drive around, to the point where I wish there were some kind of Choro Q-esque adventure mode so I could drive them round without being shot at. The battles are nice and fast-paced, too, and although I'm terrible at the game and almost constantly lose, it rarely feels unfair. Tying in with the animated cutscenes, the battles do a good job of looking like what battle scenes from a late-90s Japanese cartoon about brightly coloured tanks would look like, were such a show to exist (and if it does exist and I just don't know about it, please inform me!).
Pop'n Tanks, then. It's alright. Plus, I'm tagging it as a fighting game, and you can't stop me!

Kirby no Omochabako - Hoshi Kuzushi (SNES)

Remember at the end of the Dyna Brothers review, where I said I was worried that I was doing to many positive reviews? Well, this should help buck the trend a little!
This game is terrible. It's an Arkanoid-like, starring Kirby as the ball, and has the player controlling two hamsters carrying a sheet to bounce him upwards with. The fact that this setup is kind of cute is probably the most positive thing that can be said about this game.
It mostly plays like any other generic Arkanoid-like, with the gimmick that you have a constantly depleting "stars" counter, and if kirby hits the ground while it's above zero, he'll bounce once, giving you a chance to catch him rather than losing a life straight away, and you'll also lose 10 stars. The blocks are star shaped, and for every one that's destroyed, a little star falls down which boosts your star counter slightly.
The problem is that it's just incredibly slow and boring.
The first problem is that there are no power-ups at all, unless you count the stars. The second problem is that Kirby's movement speed never increases. The third and fourth problems are that the blocks are really tiny and there are tons of them in each stage.
All of these add up into a game in which you spend long, tedious minutes staring at Kirby slowly bouncing around the screen, waiting for him to hit the two tiny stars at either side of it.
I should also mention that this was an early downloaded title, distributed via the Satellaview system, using some kind of arcane sorcery. This fact might lead you to think that I'm being unnessecarily hard on the game, but I'm not. Kaizo Chojin Shubibinman Zero and The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets were also Satellaview titles, but they were both awesome, fully fleshed out games.

Dragon Fighter (NES)

Sorry it's been so long since the last post, I've been spending lots of time playing fare far too mainstream for this blog, like Dodonpachi Ressurection and Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and so on. Both of those are really good, by the way.
Anyway, when you first start playing Dragon Fighter, it seems pretty much like any other generic NES platform game: you're a sword guy in a frosty wasteland, it's really hard, you're fighting absurd enemies like killer snowflakes and ninja bears. But then you die and get game over (since there are no lives), and if you're me, you think "That can't be it! There has to be more to this game!", and you find out that there is more to this game, that this game has a gimmick. A really cool gimmick.
There are two meters at the top of the screen while you play. The shorter one is obviously your health bar (don't worry, it gets slightly longer every time you complete a stage), the longer one is your dragon bar. Your dragon bar fills up a tiny amount every time you kill an enemy, and when it's at least half full, hold up and jump together to turn into a dragon. Then proceed to fly around and shoot stuff until it runs out or you change back voluntarily.
Obviously, the cool gimmick alone makes the game a pretty amusing diversion, and apart from that it's not really bad, just a generic NES platform game. It does have one pretty big flaw, though: the only health recovery items are dropped by enemies randomly, so depending on whether the gods are on your side that day, you could get plenty of them or you could get none. In a game as hard as this, that can make a really big difference as to how far you get on a playthrough.