Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi (X Box 360)

The X Box Live Indie Games marketplace has a pretty bad reputation, thanks to the millions of games about chatting up girls, and trillions of games with titles containing some combination of the words "zombie", "craft", "epic" and "pixel". But among all of those, there are a few gems to be sought out. I've probably made a bad decision by choosing this one to write about first, since it's definitely my favourite game on the entire XBLIG

marketplace.
In it, you play as a young girl who was enjoying a nice day at the hot springs with her dad, when suddenly, the bottom of the spring gives way, and dad's sucked down into a pit full of malicious ducks and monkeys. Obviously, Chieri is compelled to jump into the pit and save her dad, armed only with a squirt bottle and a rabbit. The least likely of these two weapons, the rabbit, is the gimmick on which the game hangs. All over the screen, there are flashing "hooks", similar to those seen in ChainDive, onto which the rabbit can grab (an action performed by the player pressing and holding A), with Chieri hanging on by a chain. While attatched to a hook (or even an enemy!), pushing the analogue stick will make Chieri lean in the direction pushed, shooting bullets from her squirt bottle in the opposite direction.
There's a few types of enemies in the game: Ducks, who paddle along the bottom of the screen in groups, monkeys, who float down from above in wooden buckets, and revolving turret-things that stay in one place. There's also bosses who appear every now and then, in the form of giant floating meatbuns with an increasing number of smaller meatbuns orbiting it. The bullets the enemies fight are turned into harmless fruit when they pass through the chain, and the fruit all instantly fly towards Chieri when the chain is released. Collecting a

certain amount of fruit earns an extra life, with the amount increasing everytime it's reached. But, as the game goes along, the enemies gradually get more enthusiastic in shooting larger amounts of bullets that be cancelled into fruit. So it all works out in the end, which is nice.
Anyway, I've already said that I love this game, so obviously I recommend it, especially since it's only about 70p. Searching for Japanese games on the XBLIG marketplace is a pain, tough, so just buy it on the xbox site here and have it appear on your console's download queue. The developers also have a website here, and it appears they mostly make fangames using characters from existing series, like Cardcaptor Sakura, Lilith from the Darkstalkers series.

The Castle (SG-1000)

This game's a port of an MSX game, but I'm writing about this version because it's the one I discovered first and because I really like the SG-1000's colour palette.
It's a very old-fashioned platform adventure game of the sort that were popular on various computers in Europe in the 1980s, (l'Abbaye des Morts by Locomalito is a pretty great modern-day tribute to the genre) so much so, that I actually tried to find an "original" C64 or Spectrum version from which the SG-1000 and

MSX versions might have been ported, until I saw the MSX version's title screen, which credits the game's original authors, Isao Yoshida and Keisuke Iwakura.
Anyway, the plot of the game is a generic "save the princess from the castle"-type affair, and to do so, you have to find your way around the 100 room castle. Unlike most modern metrovania games (which could be seen as the spiritual descendents of this genre), combat is far from the player's main concern in this game. Keys are the most important thing, available in various different colours, to open doors of matching colours. There's also potions to increase your number of lives, and various kinds of treasure to increase your score. The meat of the game is working out how to reach each item and each exit in every room without getting killed by any of the enemies or traps in the room. There's items that can be pushed around, like bricks and vases and such, though they all act the same. they can be jumped on top of or pushed from the sides, and they fall off of platforms. They're also your only weapon against the enemies in the castle, as pushing one of these items into an enemy kills the enemy. Dead enemies stay dead, even after leaving a room and re-entering, while items return to their original positions, meaning that a single item can be used in more than

one part of a room, as long as you exit and re-enter.
The controls are obviously simple: the d-pad moves your character, one button jumps and the other, unusually, changes the speed of the game, allowing the player to switch at will between full and half-speed, depending on whether they're waiting for an elevator to come down to them, or timing a risky jump over an enemy's head.
There's not much more to be said abou this game, other than that it meets my approval. It's a lot of fun to play, and it's neither brutally hard nor insultingly easy, and solving each room feels like a satisfying little victory.