Disc Station 15 (PC)

So, most of the games on this volume were very text heavy, and as such, completely impenetrable to me. The one remaining game wasn't very good, either. But! It does has some pretty interesting extras, so I'll upload those for your viewing pleasure, starting with these two pieces of art from the disc's OMAKE folder.

There's also a whole bunch of interesting videos!

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 114: The Jo'okappichi Torimonochou ~Oharuchan GOGOGO!~ (PS2)

This is another beat em up, and I know almost all the Ps2 games about which I write posts are beat em ups, but this time I did actually intend to write about a Japan-only train racing game entitled Tetsu-1: Densha de Battle!, but that game was way too frustrating for me to play long enough to write about. It seems like it

might be enjoyable if you can muster up the patience for it, though.
So, in this game, you play as a female ninja-for-hire, taking on missions for money. The missions all involve finding a villain in their hideout and capturing them. All the missions take place in the same map, a largish town that mixes elements from modern-day and old-timey Japan. The enemies are all ninjas, geishas and so-on, and this coupled with the darumas appearing everywhere and the power-ups including pieces of sushi and maneki-neko statues makes the game's setting seem like an over the top western stereotype of Japan.
Playing the game is pretty simple. You have regular attacks, a useless projectile attack and a lasso, that can be used to throw sunned enemies. The lasso is also required for beating the bosses at the end of each stage, as they need to be stunned and caught, rather than just beaten up.
There are three different types of mission, though in all of them the final objective is finding and capturing the boss. But in some missions, you just have to wander the town until you see a yellow E on the map, showing where the boss is hiding, in others, you have to collect a certain number of round bottle-type objects that are just lying around the stage before the boss's location is revealed and in others, a few keys will have to be found that will be dropped by defeated enemies at random. The key stages are actually really quick and easy, since the enemies keep respawning, so you can stay where you are and keep beating them until you've got all the keys. Later in the
game, there's also a stage where all the enemies are sword-weilding darumas that kill you in two hits.
This is a pretty good entry into the Simple Series. It doesn't have the terrible grinding that some of them are ruined by, and it's not hard or too easy (except for that damn daruma stage, which I think might be optional).

GunMaster (Arcade)

As promised in my Dharma Doujou post, I'm doing another post on an arcade game by the little-known company Metro. This time it's a platform shooting game, heavily influenced by Gunstar Heroes.

I use the more generous "influenced by" rather than "ripped off" because while GunMaster does have a lot in common with Treasure's masterpiece, it also adds a lot of it's own ingredients, the most notewothy of which being the fighting game-esque special moves the player can execute. Most of these moves are listed in the game's attract mode sequence, except one move, referred to as "BLOODY DANCE". I haven't managed to figure out this move myself (having done so with all the others, as being the impatient person I am, I didn't bother watching the attract mode until I'd already played the game a few times), but according to internet hearsay, the commands for it are revealed during the end credits.
The game itself sees the player going from stage to stage with each stage being a few screens wide and being taken up almost entirely with a boss fight, a la Alien Soldier (yes, another Treasure game, though in this case
GunMaster predates it by about a year).
I did actually intend to throw away my principles and credit feed to the end to take a screenshot of that elusive move for my precious readers, but unfortunately, the game's emulation in MAME has one small, but fatal flaw: while playing, it might at some random point, for no obvious reason, freeze.
But anyway, you can still play it to see what it's like, and it doesn't freeze every time, nor does any specific

in-game situation seem to trigger the bug, so you might make it all the way through if you're lucky! Plus, even if you're not, you can choose the order in which to tackle the stages (except for the final stage and an easy introductory stage), so you can still see a lot of the game. You'll definitely have to credit feed, though. That's the biggest flaw of the game itself: the unfair difficulty. A lot of the bosses have attacks that are impossible (or at least very close to impossible) to avoid. This wouldn't be so bad is the player had some kind of defensive maneouver, like Alien Soldier's Counter Force, or even just something as simple as a block button would have made fiinishing the game a significantly more realisitc prospect.
As for Metro, while trying to find more information on this game, I actually stumbled across their official website, which is still active, as is the company itself. They mostly seem to make licenced shovelware, as well as a few MMOs and even a couple of entries in the Simple series.

Disc Station MSX #11

I kind of got sick of doing DS posts last year, so I took a break from them. But now they're back again, until the next time I get bored of them! Also, I skipped MSX volume 10 because there wasn't anything really interesting on it.
So, the first disc of this volume has two main points of interest. The first is a playable demo of Valis II. You all know the Valis series, right? Those cutscene-heavy platform games full of transforming schoolgirl drama? It's a demo of one of those. The MSX version doesn't look as nice as the ones on Mega Drive or PC Engine, but it does have a lot of its own low-fi charm. It does, however, commit the cardinal sin of using up to jump. One of the two face buttons is used to access the pause menu, but that's not really a valid excuse for a system that has an entire keyboard to use for that kind of thing. It is just a demo, though. Maybe the full game has better controls.
The other point of interest on disc one is a little pixel animation featuring various Compile characters and employees relaxing under a cherry blossom tree as the petals fall (this volume was released in april 1990, so it's seasonal!).
Another item on disc one lets you see a few still screens from one of those graphic adventures that were so popular on the Japanese computers.
Disc two is mainly concerned with all those text-heavy magazine features that are of no use to me, being unable to read Japanese and all. But there are two full games on offer, too!
The first is Randar Burn, which is the "april fool's" edition of Disc Station's serial grinding shooter series Blaster Burn. Of course, instead of being a spaceship shooting badguys, you're Compile's spherical mascot Randar and you're shooting bits of food. Not even cartoony food with faces, just regular fruits and neopolitan ice creams and the like. Even though I'm normally an opponent of grinding, especially when it intrudes on holy genres like shooting or fighting games, I must admit that I played this for so long that I'd totally forgot all the contents of the first disc and had to go back and go through them again.
The second is what appears to be a first person dungeon crawling RPG by the name of Mystery Tower. Obviously, I couldn't really play this due to the language barrier, but what's interesting about it is that it loads up in BASIC, and is credited to someone calling themselves "miichan", rather than to a company. I wonder if it was a winner of some competition Compile ran or something?

Option Monster (PC)

This was going to be a post about all the stuff on volume thirteen of the PC Disc Station series, but for some reason, after searching all my hard drives and storage devices, I could only find an incomplete set of files for it, from whence this game was the only one i could get working. Nor could I go and re-download the disc image, since some malodourous vermin has seen fit to conspire against Underground Gamer, probably the most important resource there has ever been in preserving obscure games and their related ephemera. Luckily, I do seem to have most of the later volumes in their entirety.
Anyway, on to the game itself. There are three main qualities the PC Disc Station games tend to have in common: they're often very short, feature a score system centred around defeating multiple enemies at once and they also tend to have beautifully crafted pixel graphics.
The game takes place over three worlds, each of which contains five or six stages. The stages are all top-down mazes full of enemies, who must be dispatched by throwing your titular option monster at them.

The monster bounces off the walls (but not enemies), and after a few seconds will return to you. Obviously, the way to play is to ensure that the monster bounces around as much of the screen and hits as many enemies as possible with each throw, ensuring the maximum score.
There are power-ups on each stage, revealed when the option monster travels over them. The two main types of power-up are "non-stop", which temporarily exends the amount of time your monster can spend bouncing around the screen, and "+1", which gives you an extra monster to throw around.
As I've said before about Disc Station games, Option Monster is a lot of fun to play, the only problem being its extreme shortness, leaving interesting mechanics and ideas never to be expanded on.

Dharma Doujou (Arcade)

Dharma Doujou (or should it be "dojo"?) is a puzzle game based on a traditional Japanese children's game called Daruma Otoshi, in which a Daruma doll is placed atop a stack of coloured wooden blocks, which the player must attempt to knock away using a small hammer without letting the tower fall over.
Dharma Doujou combines this with the usual matching colours puzzle game mechanic. Each stage starts with numerous towers of blocks, Daruma dolls and other items, and the player, in the guise of a huge-eyebrowed

hammer-wielding monk, must knock away all the blocks to clear the stage.
When swinging at a row of blocks, the leftmost block of that row is knocked into a chamber beneath the playing field. When this chamber is full, if all the blocks in it are the same, they disappear, if not, they rise up to make a new bottom row in the playfield. At the start of the game, the chamber holds three blocks, though this increases by one every couple of stages.
There are two ways to lose the game: either run out of time, or allow one of the block towers to reach the top of the screen. The time limit, rather than being represented by a traditional clock, is shown by a creature

(the creature, along with the difficulty, changes every two stages and so far I've seen a crab, an oni and a pair of koinobori.) climbing towards a finish line in the top-left corner of the screen.
I highly recommend this game. Though it gets very difficult very quickly, it's also satisfying and fun to play as well as addictive. The developer/manufacturer Metro has made a few interesting arcade games, so expect me to be writing about those too in the future.

Everblue (PS2)

Although i'd never heard of this game before a few days ago, it was apparently popular enough to get a sequel, as well as two spiritual sequels in the Endless Ocean series for Wii (which I also haven't heard of, though I admit the Wii is one of my blind spots).
Anyway, the game's abut diving and looking for treasure on the ocean floor. There's also some plot regarding an ancient civilisation or something, but it doesn't come into things until much later in the game. Other than that, the game's setting is mostly pretty realistic, with only very minor fantasy elements.
For most of the early game, you'll be walking the ocean floor, tapping your sonar button until you get a hit on some treasure, then closing in and taking that treasure. Then you take it back to the surface to evaluate and sell it or give it away to someone who needs/wants it. you should also be careful, as you can sell items needed to complete optional side quests, and even progress in the story. So only sell items that you have more than one of. Eventually you'll start finding shipwrecks, which you explore with full 3D movement, and you'll look for treasure inside those too.
The second shipwreck, the Juno is harder to fin than the first, since you won't be given directions until you beat a guy in an underwater swimming race. This race is the worst part of the game. It's too hard, boring, doesn't fit in with the feel of the rest of the game, and comes accompanied with some awful background music. Luckily, the ship is actually there whether you get the directions or not, and you might even be able to find a handy map on some cool internet blog if you look hard enough.
Although the game itself is actually quite repetitive, it never becomes boring. Finding a bunch of mysterious items and finding out what they all are is pretty cool, and the game has a great atmosphere too. Inbetween dives all your quests, shopping and item appraisals take place in the two small towns on the island. These bits add a lot to the feel of the game: they're always sunny, the people are all friendly, and the whole experience just feels really warm and happy. Interestingly, references to things like romance, alcohol, death and so on, that often get removed in English translations of videogames are left intact here. (And by death, I mean in the sense of an old woman missing her late husband, and so on, rather than the usual kind of videogame deaths that only serve as catalysts for more conflict.)
Another noteworthy aspect of the game is the complete lack of conflict. Even the guy who challenes you to a race does so only out of friendly, time-killing rivalry. There's no enemies or hostile creatures underwater, no evil regime to overthrow on land. It's actually quite refreshing to play a game that's so completely positive!
I thouroughly recommend you play this game if you have the chance.

Kyuutenkai Fantastic Pinball (Saturn)

So, Technosoft (sometimes known as Tecnosoft, for some reason) have made a lot of excellent games, usually with excellent music. One of their better-known titles is the Mega Drive port of Devil Crush, also known as Dragon's Fury. Like Kyuutenkai, it's a pinball game, and a lot of elements from Devil Crush made their way into this game: a main table being three screens high, bonus stage/boss fight sub-tables that offer huge amounts of points upon completion, even some smaller details, like the bonus counter with its two stacking multipliers.

Being on the Saturn, Kyuutenkai has some stiff competition from Kaze's Digital Pinball games, Last Gladiators and Necronomicon, and by "stiff competition", I mean "the best pinball videogames ever". Obviously, it's not as great as those two titans of the genre, but it does at least serve as a worthy follow-up to Devil Crush.
The main (and only) table is, as I said, three screens high. Each screen has a set of flippers at the bottom of it, and the whole table has a nice theme to it, with heaven at the top, earth in the middle, and hell at the bottom. There's lots of things to hit, and gimmicks to activate on the main table, like the angel watching over the middle portion of the table who can be made to shoot laser eyes all over the place, and the little band of skeletal day of the dead mariachis who can be knocked down in hell.
Obviously, the cute fantasy visual style of this game is massively different to the heavy metal album cover-inspired look of Devil Crush, and the bonus stages follow suit: instead of smashing open coffins or fighting multi-headed dragons, the bonus stages are cuter and more imaginitive to boot. My two favourites of the few I've seen are one that takes place on a football pitch where the player has to score 4 goals past the devil goalkeepers and his mummy defenders, and another where you have to use the ball to smash up the contents of a girl's bedroom in a strict time limit.
Although Kyuutenkai isn't as good as the mighty Digital Pinball series nor does it have the excellent music you would expect from Technosoft
, it is still a lot of fun to play, as well as very fast paced and even more addictive. There's also a Playstation version which I haven't played, but I assume it's' pretty much the same as this one.

Motor Raid (Arcade)

Before I start, I should mention something: the actual arcade version of this game comes in a full-sized motorbike cabinet that the player sits on while playing, tilting left and right to steer. I didn't play like that, though. I played Motor Raid via the excellent Model 2 Emulator, using an Xbox 360 controller.
With that out of the way, I'll get on to actually talking about the game. It's a lot like the Road Rash games, but in space and with luxurious and beautiful Model 2 3D graphics. You take part in motorbike races across various planets, and you have the option of attacking your opponents, punching them, kicking them, or clobbering them about the head with your weapon.
There's also a boost meter that gradually fills up as you race. Once it's more than half full, you can double-tap (or on the real arcade machine, I guess you would double twist?) the accelerator to use it. Obviously, the more you let it fill, the longer your boost will last. Less obviously, if you wait for the meter to fill completely before using it, you'll become enshrouded in an energy field and spin your weapon around your head.
There are four main planets upon which the races take place, though you'll only actually race on three of them in a regular game. Your performance in the races decides which planets you visit. I've read online that there's also a fifth planet which appears as an extra fourth race if you manage to place first in all three regular races. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough to make this happen, so I don't know what that extra stage is like.
There's a few characters to pick from, but since I'm not good enough at racing games to really tell the difference, I just pick the default character everytime, a young woman named Robin. After each race, Robin recites the cryptic quote "I won! But I still can't find what I'm looking for...". This is never explained.
In conclusion, Motor Raid is a really great game that you should definitely play, if you have a computer good enough for Model 2 emulation (pretty likely), or you live near a place that has an actual machine (not so likely). It's a shame it never got a home port, but I assume that's because the Saturn had no chance of replicating this game's graphics, and by the time the Dreamcast came along, Model 2 games were starting to be considered "old hat".

Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butoden (Playstation)

A fighting game where all the characters are Japanese folk monsters is a pretty nice idea, in theory. Unfortunately, the act of putting that theory into practice has, in this case, been done with more enthusiasm than talent.
Some of the monsters in this game I'm familiar with from comics and cartoons like Urusei Yatsura, Ushio and Tora and Usagi Yojimbo. These include oni, karasutengu, sickle weasel, snow princess. There's also a few I'm not familiar with, like the weird lumpy-headed dwarf thing and the old woman who is very aggressive with her kisses. There's also two boss characters who are (as far as I can tell) unplayable. They're both also western-style monsters: a female demon who might be some kind of succubus, and a cloaked grim reaper type.
As for how it plays, it's kind of terrible. The controls are stiff and unresponsive, and everything feels very awkward. The clunky controls even make something as fundamental as special move inputs unreliable, and possibly in reaction to this, the shoulder buttons serve as macros, each one having a special move assigned to it. This in turn leads to the game's one interesting mechanic (which I strongly suspect wan't even intentional): these macros cancel the animations of normal attacks, meaning you can do some super-fast (and ridiculous looking) 1-2 combos. Against an AI opponent who isn't expecting these kind of tactics, this completely breaks the game, since it gives them very little hope of fighting back. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to play against a human opponent, but I'd be really interested in seeing some high-skilled fighitng game players totally break the game.
Oh, and I didn't know until I looked it up for this review, but Mizuki Shigeru is the creator of the popular GeGeGe no Kitaro comic/cartoon/movie franchise.
(Sorry about the weird layout of this post, but blogger is being stupid and uncooperative again)

Espalion (PC)

Espalion is a shooting game made in 2004 by a Japanese indie developer named Team DRYUAS, and as far as I'm aware, it's their only work.
It feels really different to most shooting games, and though at first I couldn't put my finger on how, I eventually realised that playing Espalion feels less like flying a fighter ship in a future war and more like taking part in some kind of choreographed performance. The enemies are all arranged into exact positions, and have exact lines of fire to create intricate grids and weaving patterns, in contrast to the chaotic spirals and shapes of typical shooters.
The way it plays is fairly unique, too.Your main (and only) weapon is a pair of two shields that shoot streams of bullets, either in front of and behind your ship, or to either side of your ship. You switch between the two positions at the touch of a button. The shields also absorb bullets, which is also the game's main scoring gimmick. As I said earlier, the game feels like a choreographed performance, in which you're expected to find the right place to be to survive, as well as the right alignment for your shields to both absorb enemy shots and kill those enemies.
The choreographed feeling doesn't hurt the game like you mgiht be thinking, though. It is still a shooting game and quick enough reflexes will get you through, so it's not like a shooting version of Rick Dangerous, with unfair deathtraps that are impossible to avoid on a first attempt.

Whipplu Special (X68000)

Just a small post to fill in a gap in my silly self-imposed "there has to be a gap of two posts between posts with the same tag" rule.
Whipplu Special (the name that's in the loading screen, if that's not what it says on the title screen) is a block-sorting puzzle game which, on first glance looks a lot like the SNES game Panel de Pon. It plays quite differently, though rather than having to form groups of touching blocks, the aim is to have three or more similar blocks on the same row, a which point they will disappear. Game over comes when you try to put a block into a column that's already touching the top of the field.  Also unlike Panel de Pon (an most other post-Puyo Puyo puzzle games, there's no kind of vs mode, nor does the game gradually get faster as you play.
The pace is actually a big departure from the genre at large, as the game is much more sedentary than it's peers. You can take as long as you want to eye up the situation before placing your blocks without penalty. Another unusual, but not unheard of feature is the way stages work in this game, being a system similar to some older versions of Tetris: each stage has a quota of blocks to be cleared, at which point it will end. Between the stages, you'll be shown a picture of some food, which is nice. There's also a Ranking Mode, the aim of which is to achieve as high a score as possible while removing 100 blocks.

Unfortunately, though the background art is a nice scene, it doesn't seem to ever change. Or at least, not as far as I've seen (having managed to get about 7 or 8 stages in). The music does change every few stages though, and it's pretty nice too.

The Karate Tournament (Arcade)

In the period following the release of Street Fighter II, tons of fighting games were released into arcades. Most of them were terrible also-rans like Mortal Kombat, some were the start of timeless, beloved franchises like Fatal Fury and King of Fighters 98. What they mostly had in common is the basic formula codified by SFII that even to this day most fighting games adhere to, with health bars and combos and special move inputs and so on.
The Karate Tournament is one of the few that doesn't follow that trend. The most obvious difference between it and other fighting games is the lack of health bars. Instead, it takes a more realistic martial arts tournament approach, with each fighter having six points, losing one when they take a hit, and two when they're knocked down. Losing all six points means losing the fight.
Three is a pretty important number in this game: you can choose from three difficulties before you start playing, you get three lives, and each location has three opponents to fight. Obviously, when you lose a match, you lose a life, but you have to start the match from the beginning again. A nice little touch is how there's a kabuki referee guy like in the early Samurai Shodown games, announcing and waving flags when a fighter gains a point or wins a match.
The points system makes the fights a lot quicker than in regular fighting games, usually only going for a few seconds and sometimes ending in only 2 or 3 hits. The other big difference is in the controls. Since there isn't any health system, there aren't different strengths of attack. Instead, there's an attack button an a jump button. There's a ifferent attack for pressing the attack button at the same time as each direction, as well as mid-air attacks, and quick mini-combos activated by pressing both buttons plus a direction. As far as I can tell, the CPU opponents all have the same moveset as the player, differing only in their preferred tactics and their skill in using them.
Despite all the unique innovation and originality in the game, my favourite thing about it is the graphics. As you might expect from Mitchell, the makers of the psychedelic Strider-clone Osman, the colour pallettes in this game are all incredibly bright and vibrant, and the animation is also excellently fluid (probably as a positive side effect of there essentially being only one character).



The Karate Tournament doesn't have the lasting appeal of regular fighters, with their varied casts and masses of tactical options, but it's still a game I reccomend playing, as there really isn't much else like it and it does look amazing.

TRL: The Rail Loaders (Playstation)

Hello! I'm back again! I apparently get the same amount of monthly views whether I post or not! Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Anyway, on to today's game. I think it might actually be a port of a Korean PC game, but I'm not sure.
It's hard to categorise, but I'm listing it as a shooting game and a puzzle game. Mostly a shooting game though. But unlike most shooting games, you play as a train on a track, and as such, your movement is mostly restricted to moving back and forth along that track, as well as jumping over obstacles. You also have an AI-controlled parttner, who's performance mostly varies between useless and annoying.
You do get some small choices as to where you go in the stages, as there are switches here and there along the way that change the route you're taking. The problem with this is that you don't know which routes are the best unless you've playted through the stage before.
Along the way, there'll be other trains on your track going the opposite direction that you'll have to shoot, and brown... things that you'll have to jump over. Your gun isn't a typical destructive weapon, instead shooting a large bubble that your enemies safely float away inside.
At the end of each stage, there's a boss fight, during which your train will inexplicably take flight. The first boss is a pushover: you can just sit in front of its weakspot and shoot until it dies, but the second boss is a lot harder, constantly attaking, and hiding its weakspot away most of the time.
I haven't beaten the second boss yet, and to be honest, I probably never will. The game, despite being original, just isn't very good. I don't recommend wasting any time playing it.
 END.

Yainsidae - Age of Wanderer (PC)

This game is based on a Korean TV show, set during the Japanese occupancy of Korea in the early 20th century. Other than that, I don't know anything about the plot, but you pick from one of two guys and walk around town beating up Japanese soldiers, as well as thugs, gangsters and martial artists.
The presentation is excellent, the sprites and backgrounds are all super shard and well-drawn, and the music is really great too. There are some tiny cracks in the presentation here and there, like when the music abruptly changes between stages, but these are very minor. After playing a few times, I also noticed hat background graphics are re-used alot, which is also a negative, but they do look nice enough for it not to matter a lot. Plus, the locations usually have different lighting and bystanders when you re-visit them.
As for how it plays, it's not bad. There's no throw or grab moves, nor are there any weapons, which is a shame. You do get a couple of special moves performed via fighting game-style direction commands, though. The best part of the combat is that your normal combos can be interrupts with specials. This is somehing that really needs to be mastered to stand a chance of beating the bosses, who are incredibly hard. They'll relentlessly pummel you into a corner and keep pummeling if you let you guard down at all, but if you fight back hard enough with your specials and sliding kicks to knock them down, you should be able to get through. There's a cool extra touch during the boss fights, too: you can hear the crowd of watching bystanders cheer or boo when you or the boss gains an upper hand, though unfortunately they aren't animated.



Since this is a PC game, another thing to take into account is how much of a pain it is to get running. Mostly, Yainsidae is fine in this respect, just install it and play. There's one strange issue, though: although the game saves your high scores, it doesn't save your options settings, and by default it uses keyboard controls. So every time you play, you have to go into the options by keyboard and change the controls to joypad. It is a minor thing, but it is also a pain to do every time.