Tenkomori Shooting (Arcade)

So, an evil witch has kidnapped all your monkey brothers and locked them in her towers. Also her towers are full of shooting minigames. You, as one of the two remaining free monkeys must go to the towers to shoot stuffand save your brethren. It's a lot like what Tanto-R or Warioware would be like if they were made by

shooting obsessives.
Depending on which difficulty you choose, you play through either four, six or nine shooting games, each about a minute long. There is a surprising amount of variety among the games, there are a few obvious ones like "shoot this many tanks/planes", "collect this many medals", "shoot the boss this many times". but there are also a lot of games based on premises you wouldn't associate with shooting.
There's a stage in which you must shoot love hearts at a performing idol, making sure to avoid hitting the waiters, elvis impersonators and dogs who will all assault you in various ways should they feel your love. There's also a stage where a man will ask for certain sushi dishes that are scrolling by on a conveyor belt, to be delivered via the medium of thrown plate.
Then there are stages where you're shooting stuff again, but with an interesting twist, such as a stage that gives you three shots to destroy at least 20 planes, making you aim at clusters of planes close together, to set of a chain of explosions. (If you're really good, you can get all twenty in a single shot). Or a stage where the enemy is a single cell organism that splits in two when shot, and your mission is to split it into a certain

number of copies.
Obviously, since it's a Namco game, there are also stages paying homage to Galaga, Digdug and Xevious (Another possible homage to another Namco game is that the monkeys look a lot like the monkeys from Dancing Eyes).
That's enough boring listing of the minigames, I think. I like this game a lot, it appeals to my short attention span, it rarely feels unfair, even when it's brutally hard and it is very addictive. Having seperate high scores for each minigame along with a highscore table for the highest combined scores is a simple but excellent idea, adding an extra little challenge, pushing the player to get better each time they play. I always say this when I write about an arcade game, but it really is a shame there was no home version of this, it has a lot of potential for

extra modes that would only work on a home port, like being able to play each game individually, and infinite survival mode, and so on. Oh well.

Seventh Cross Evolution (Dreamcast)

Seventh Cross was one of the first games released for the Dreamcast, and it definitely shows. When i first played it, the simple landscapes and repeating textures reminded me of creations made in the Dreamcast's Japan-only adventure game creator "DreamStudio". The creatures in the game look a little nicer. You see animations repeated for similar-shaped enemies in different areas, but they do all have a nice low-poly charm

to them.
The game is an action RPG, in which you play as a lifeform who kills and eats other creatures to gain nutrients and experience points which allow it to become stronger and grow new body parts. Mechanically, it has a lot of similarites with the SNES and PC98 game EVO: The Search for Eden/46 Okunen Monogatari, though the atmosphere is totally different. While EVO had a fairly cute, cartoony atmosphere, Seventh Cross is much more sombre, with quiet music, and more realistic-looking enemies. Also like EVO, each stage is an era in time, millions of years after the last, and to complete an era, you must find, kill and eat the alpha predator of the time.
The problem is, it's not very good. The combat, which is the main meat of the game, is almost entirely about how high your stats are rather than skill. As a result, there is a lot of grinding, for the nutrients needed to grow stronger body parts, as well as the Evolution Points needed to use the evolution grid.
The evolution grid is a pretty original concept: it's a 10x10 grid, upon which you draw in six colours. Each colour corresponds to one of your stats (you choose which colour goes to which stat at the start of the game), and drawing in a colour raises its associated stat. Drawing also makes available more body parts for

you to grow. Once you discover the secret (that minimalist designs tend to yield higher stat boosts and better parts), you'll get stronger faster, but towards the start of the game developing weaker parts is necessary, since the higher level parts need a lot of nutrients to grow, and some kinds of nutrients don't even appear until later stages.
On the other hand, developing high-level parts early in the game is fun, since it means you see strange creature names in there such as "Laser Horse" and "Electric Mollusk", which you won't get to see until much later on.
Despite my saying earlier that the game isn't very good, you might have guessed from how much detail I'm going into that I've played it a lot. And I have! I guess this is all down to the atmosphere: Seventh Cross is definitely what some circles would describe as a lonely game, with it's sparsely populated environments, complete lack of dialogue and minimalist plot. In fact, that there even is a plot isn't even made obvious until

you start the second era, and see a giant golden angel killing the local fauna with lasers. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the game so far and not a single word of dialogue has been spoken, nor has there been a single clue as to the identity or purpose of the time-travelling genocidal being.
In conclusion, Seventh Cross Evolution is a boring, ugly, repetitive game that I totally love and can play for hours at a time.