Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile (SNES)

This is a strange game. It has the exact same plot as the awesome laserdisc arcade game Road Avenger/Road Blaster FX (Your wife was killed on your wedding day by a gang of Mad Max knock-offs, and you seek revenge in a modified, armoured sports car). It looks like (and is structured like) a shooting game, but you do very little shooting in it. The only shooting you do is firing surface-to-air missiles at helicopters. most of your enemies are motorbikes, cars and other land vehicles, and these guys you dispatch by ramming, either hitting them enough times to make them explode, or more satisfyingly, making them crash into scenery.
You can't just drive into them normally and expect to do damage, though. By pressing the B button and a direction, you charge in that direction with speed and force, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Ecco the Dolphin's method of attack.
Your health bar constantly (but slowly) depletes, but luckily, health power-ups float down the screen fairly often and you have a limited-use force field (which is also very useful for fighting bosses), so unless you take a lot of hits, you shouldn't need to worry about it.
The stages range from post-apocalyptic-looking desert roads to motorways suspended high above futuristic cities and even a nice drive on a beach. They all look great, and the music is also excellent. In fact, the music and graphics are so good, you'd think this game was on the Mega Drive, rather than the SNES*!
The game is pretty great all-round, in fact. It's neither too hard nor too easy, it's a lot of fun to play and there's not really much else like it.
This is where I normally might say "the only problem is..", but in this case, there isn't any real problems with the game! It's great! Play it!


*Just kidding, SNES fans! Or am I...?

Reverthion (Playstation)

Reverthion is made by Tecnosoft, who are most famous for the excellent Thunderforce series of shooting games. It isn't a shooting game, though, it's a fighting game. It plays like a simplified version of Virtual On, and also all the robots are shaped (vaguely) like animals.
The animal robots on offer are crab, dove, wasp, spider, butterfly, walrus/turtle thing, shark and dragon-looking thing. There's also a boss robot, who is some kind of centaur/spider/multiwinged angel monster. I don't know if the boss is unlockable in this version, though there is also a Saturn version, in which it is unlockable, according to gameFAQS. And judging by videos of it on youtube, the saturn version has slightly nicer graphics than the Playstation version, too. Not that there's anything wrong with the graphics in this version, they're pretty good considering how early in the Playstation's life it came out. And of course, this being a Tecnosoft game, the music is pretty great too!
Moving on to how the game plays, it plays alright. You move the robots using the old-fashioned swivel and go forward tank controls, and you can also jump, boost and do a barrel roll to either side, and you have an attack button. The are apparently special moves in the game, since the CPU opponents all use them against you, but I have yet to discover how to actually do any of them.
It's a pretty fun game to play, and having animal-shaped robots is a nice gimmick, even though it doesn't really affect how the game plays. That's a wasted opportunity in my opinion, all the robots control pretty much the same, with only their speed and the power of their weapons to differentiate them (and their special moves too, I guess). It would have been cool is the dove, wasp and butterfly could all fly, or if the spider could crawl over obstacles, that kind of thing. But I guess that would have ruined the balance of the game. Speaking of which, choose the crab: his attack is only short range, but it's quick and very powerful. Get in close to your opponent and just destroy their health bar. Until you get to the last boss, who has a force field attack thing that makes the crab useless. Bah.