Express Raider (Arcade)

Hello! Remember me? It's been a while since I last posted, sorry! I've been busy with things like re-learning how to 3D model and other miscellany.

Anyway, Express Raider is an arcade game released by Data East in 1986, and it's a pretty early example of a game in which the player is the bad guy. I won't say first, because even if there's no earlier villain arcade games (which there might be, I haven't checked), there's probably something from the 80s british computer scene that features a playable bad guy.

The specific knave over whom your control will be exerted in this game is a nameless train robber/mass murderer in the old west. There's two types of robberies this no-good scoundrel commits: ones where he

boards the train, and ones where he rides horseback alongside it. Yes, it's not "one big score" he's after, he's a career criminal.

The two types of robbery are represented by two types of play. The on-foot robberies see the player walking across the tops of the train carraiges, each of which is protected by a different guardian. This might sound like a beat em up setup, but as the enemies are fought one at a time, in fixed spaces, it's more along the lines of something like Karateka, a strictly Player-Vs-AI fighting game with a single playable character, but multiple opponents, a genre that was pretty much killed by Street Fighter II, and then buried by Rise of the Robots.

Other than the generic tough guy you'll encounter a few times on each fighting stage, there's also riflemen, big guys who try to shove you off the train with a wall of boxes, and the coal-shovelling guy who, on your arrival, diverts his attention from fuelling the train to ending your life. An interesting part of these sections is your health bar, which obviously get depleted via enemy attacks, but also gets restored through your successful attacks, making it something more of a momentum meter than a traditional health bar.

The other bits, the ones that take place on horseback, aren't nearly as interesting as the fighting bits, though they're not the chore I'd originally assumed them to be when I saw them in the game's attract demo. The

easiest way to describe it would be as a kind of horseback cabal-esque shooting gallery. The bottom part of the screen is your moving area, in which you must dodge the enemy bullets, and the top has the train carraiges. Enemies pop up to take shots at the player through windows or from behind walls or whatever, and sometimes a woman will appear with a bag of points for you too (you lose a life if you shoot her, which is really easy to do, considering how frantic these sections are). After you kill a certain amount of enemies at a carraige, you move on to the next until you finally reach the engine, which plays host to a mildly bizarre bonus stage, in which you have the remaining time from the rest of the stage to shoot as manically as possible to find invisible targets while a guy on board the train randomly gives you big sacks of points.

Express Raider is a fun, fairly unique game that definitely meets my recommendation. You should totally play it!

Aa Harimanada (Game Gear)

Aa Harimanada is a sumo game, based on Kei Sadayasu's comiic of the same name. You've probably seen the Mega Drive game based on the comic, which, as was the fashion at the time, was more like a sumo-themed fighting game, with large, detailed sprites and special moves and the like. (As an aside, the UK's Sega Power magazine printed a review of the Mega Drive game, but were apparently too lazy or too cheap to get someone to translate the title for them, so they just referred to it as "SUMO".)

The Game Gear version is, as far as I can tell with my very limited understanding of sumo, a lot more realistic. Though there are special moves in the game, the only reason I know this is because I once

performed one by accident (ashoryuken-looking maneuver that I was unfortunately never able to recreate). The CPU opponents never performed any specials, no matter how far into the game I got. There is one particularly unrealistic-seeming touch left in however: the ability to jump stright up in the air about three or four metres. You can't attack or anything from up there, though, so it's as pointless as it is inappropriate. Winning is possible via the regular sumo methods of knocking your opponent down, or throwing them out of the ring, though there is also a health bar, presumably to avoid stalemates, and attacking an opponent with a fully depleted health bar will automatically knock them down or send them rolling out of the ring.

As you can see from the screenshots, the game's graphics are fairly nice looking, though they're far from the best the Game Gear has to offer, and as you play the game, you'll notice they commit a far graver sin: repetition to an almost absurd degree. There's only one arena in the game as far as I can tell, having played well over twenty stages in, and even worse, there's only on character sprite. It's true, although the many opponents you face in the game all have different names and portraits displayed before each bout, every one of them, including the player character, is one sprite used over and over with the only variations being in skin and mawashi colour. Making this even worse is the fact that the varying skin colours rarely match the colour of the character seen in the pre-match portraits.

Despite this, the presentation in general is pretty good. The one sprite the game has is of a decent size and also fairly well animated, and there's quite a bit of sampled speech, considering it's an early 90s handheld game. Each match also ends with a big, full-screen animation of the winniing move, which looks pretty cool and is only slightly hampered by the fact that again, all the animations feature generic characters, irrelevant of which characters are involved.

Unforunately, though there are a few good points speaking in this game's favour, they are vastly outweighed by the negatives. The aformentioned health bar is the game's real killer, even in light of the recoloured sprites problem, as it removes the need for any kind of skill in the game. It's entirely possible to coast through the game by simply pummeling opponents with palm thrusts and headbutts until they're knocked out, and it seems they never develop any kind of skill to counter such tactics. I've only seen the game over screen because I lost a fight on purpose, and I've never seen the game's ending simply because the boredom of fighting identical, inept opponents always becomes totaly unbearable after about twenty-ish matches.

Exelinya Burst (Xbox 360)

It's time for another Japanese Xbox Live Indie Game, and in it, the player controls a tiny sukumizu-clad girl who flies aroun d with a big grabby-arm device. Using said device, they must grab and throw enemies, who come in the form of crudely drawn vegetables. Though the game bears some superficial similarities to Bangai-O, as well as a shared obsession with explosions, the way it plays makes it a pretty unique game.

You character is unkillable, with the only real foe being the time limit. Before time runs out, the player has to score as many points as possible, by grab the enemies and throwing them into each other. Thrown enemies explode, and enemies caught in explosions will also explode, and so on. There's also bosses, who come in

the form of flans and milk cartons, who shoot streams of carrot and radish-shaped missiles (the carrots go in a straight line, the radishes are homing).

There's also a power bar at the bottom of the screen, which goes up and down depending on how many explosions are currently happening. The more full it gets, the larger the explosions get. When it's completely full, large red explosions will occur, that also slightly increase the amoumnt of remaining time. So obviously, the game revolves entirely around creating more, bigger explosions, to score points, to regain time, and to cause more explosions.

Obviously, the time lmit and constant explosions give the game a manic pace, and this is also aided by the

music. There's a few different tracks, and the game seems to switch between in a semi-dynamic way. I'm not sure exactly how it chooses which track to play at a given time, whether it's based on the current amount of enemies or explosions on-screen, or maybe the remaining time or some other myserious algorhythm, but it always fits.

Though it's not a must-buy like Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemori Burari Tabi, I still totally recommend Exelinya Burst. It's only 69p, and the nature of the game means you can probably easily fit a whole credit into the 8 minute default demo time that XBLIG games offer to see if it grabs you.

Sanrio Carnival (Game Boy)

So, it's a puzzle game featuring Sanrio characters on the menu screens, and their faces on the blocks. Match three of the same and they'll disappear, the ones above will fall down, leading to the possibility of a chain. That's it, as far as the core mechanics of the game go. It's a slow rip-off of Columns, with music so awful it can only be that way on purpose.

But! That's not all there is to the game! There are three modes of play available, High Score, Endless and what the fan-translated version of the game refers to as just "Complete Stages". The first two are, as far as I

can tell, identical to each other, and they're the typical puzzle game single player mode in which the player just has to last as long as they can, scoring as many points as they can until they fill the screen up and the game ends.

The third mode is much more interesting, and probably the only interesting thing about this game. In it, there are five stages, each charging the player with a different task, the first and third are trivially easy: clear thirty sets of three or more, and clear five sets of four or more. Stages four and five are a little more challenging: clear ten "doubles" (a double being more than one set of three or more at the same time) and make ten chains. The second stage is the hardest, however, requiring 50,000 points to be scored. It would sound like a lot in most games, but the points in this game go up very slowly, and it's made even harder by

the fact that the well into which your blocks are falling is really small, possibly the smallest I've ever seen in a puzzle game at only six blocks wide by eight blocks high.

Of course, you could, with a bit of practice, complete all the tasks easily. But why would you bother? The game just isn't any fun. The stages gimmick is interesting, but the game itself is so slow and plain, there's just no excitement in it. Considering that it's for the Game Boy, facing stiff competition from many, many better puzzle games, therre's just no reason to ever play Sanrio Carnival. Apparently, the Sanrio name and characters were enough to get it to sell on release, though, as it did receive a sequel two years later.

Over Rev (Arcade)

You might already know that I love arcade racing games, especially ones from the mid-90s, with their bright colours and relatively low (compared to modern console games) polygon counts. Over Rev is the second racing game Jaleco released for SEGA's Model 2 hardware, and it hits most of the right spots that a 90s arcade racer should. I should also mention here the same disclaimer I put at the start of my post about Motor Raid, that I emulated this game and played it with a normal analogue controller, so my experience will be slightly different to that of someone playing on a real arcade cabinet with steering wheels and fancy moulded seats and the like.

It's got bright blue skies, it's fast, it has cool backdrops, all it lacks is a cool soundtrack. Once you start the game, there are two modes to choose from: Challenge Cup and Time Attack. Challenge cup is the harder of the two modes, but also the one that has a chance of giving a longer game for your credit (if you're a good player). In it, the player drives each track in order, having to not only reach checkpoints to prolong the time

limit, but also finish the race in a minimum position, which starts at 5th and gets higher with each race. (Because I'm terrible, I only got to the second stage in this mode D:). Time Attack mode allows the player to choose any of the four tracks to play on, though you only get one race per credit. All that needs to be done in this mode is get to the checkpoints and finish as quickly as possible, your position in the race isn't important.

The four tracks (there might be a secret track, or maybe a fifth track in Challenge Cup mode, but I haven't found any mention of one online anywhere) take place in Shibuya, Ariake (which includes driving under the Tokyo Big Sight!), Tsukuba (the most boring track, taking place in a racing arena. Are they called arenas? I don't know.), and Hakone (a very nice-looking track taking place in a forest, with waterfalls and trees and such). There's lots of nice little touches, like planes flying past, trains

going over overhead bridges, and so on, that make the stages feel a little more alive, though there doesn't seem to be a crowd of any kind watching on the Tsukuba track, which seems odd.

There's seven cars to choose from, though three of them are very slightly hidden, being revealed when the accelerator is pushed on the car select screen (oddly, the brake is used to select things in this game). Unfortunately, the three hidden cars aren't anything too outlandish or interesting like the hidden horse in Daytona USA, just two more sports cars and a pick-up truck.

In conclusion, Over Rev is a pretty fun game, definitely worth playing if you're sick of seeing Daytona's

tracks over and over again and want something new to scratch your Model 2 racing itch. It's just a shame that it never got a home port, unlike Jaleco's earlier Model 2 racer, Super GT 24hr (which maybe I'll write about sometime in the distant future? I'll think about it.).

The Last Tempest (X68000)

This is a game that was almost, thanks to the short-sightedness of its developer, lost to the ages. It's only down to a helpful poster at the Tokugawa Corp forums, who found a way round the game's copy protection that it can now be emulated, played and written about.
On to the game itself, it's an action game taking place on floating isometric islands, and on each stage, the player must find and kill all the enemies therein. The hook is that the player is some kind of evil skull-

worm-thing, and the enemies are angels, saints, apostles and other biblical figures. Enemies are killed simply by repeatedly ramming them with your face. The game delights in being disrespectful and irreverant, too: cherub enemies are labelled "angelic scum", the good samaritan is pointed out with a big red arrow instructing "KILL HIM!", and the homing shots fired by the Archangel Gabriel are "angelic sperm".
The game is a lot of fun, and though the stages all have the same basic goal (kill every enemy), there's still a lot of variety in them, and another nice touch is that though each stage has a boss (usually an archangel, though I've also encountered a bronze serpent summoned by Moses and Aaron, who also float around on their own little island summoning explosions and rains of holy water to further annoy you), they don't have to be killed last, and will often roam about the stages attacking at will.
Another interesting point is that the player character is technically invulnerable to direct attacks, with death only coming from falling off the islands, which actually serves to make it more annoying, especially when, as is often the case, death comes from the player's own clumsiness, without even needing any enemy

intervention.
Despite this frustration, this is a game I'm going to be sticking with for a few reasons. Firstly, the charm of its adolescent blasphemous trappings (as an aside: though it came out in the same year as Neon Genesis Evangelion, since that series debuted in October, it's probably just a coincidence), contrasted with the high quality of the graphics and music and how well put together the game is in general is nice, and secondly, as I said, every stage is unique and full of nice little ideas, and I want to see more of what the game has to offer.
Special thanks to Japanese PC Compendium for helping me get the disc images and the save state needed to run them.

Elevator Action Old & New (Game Boy Advance)

So obviously, everyone knows of the Elevator Action series, probably through the amazing arcade game Elevator Action Returns, but I think this entry into the series has gone mostly unplayed, released as it was, only in Japan, and apparently not in great quantities.
The cartridge contains both the original Elevator Action and a whole new game. The original is what it is. I won't waste too much time talking about it, but it's definitely a game that lives in the shadow of its sequels: it's

brutally hard, fiddly to control and moves like it's set at the bottom of a treacle ocean.
The new game lets you pick from three playable characters, with different stats. There is a fourth character unlocked after completing the game with all three characters, but I didn't go that far. I got most of the way through with one character before giving up on the game. The game's stages are split into 8 sets of four, which all have to be played through individually, which presents one of the biggest problems the game has. Because you get a whole new set of lives every four stages, this makes getting through the first three quarters of the game incredibly easy. You might argue that this is to make the game more palatable for a handheld console, but compare to another GBA game, the excellent Ninja Cop (which itself has a few similarities to the Elevator Action series), which allows the player to start at any set of stages, but also goes straight into the next once one is finished, with the continuing score adding an extra incentive to play the game from start to finish in a single run. Elevator Action New doesn't even have scoring, so the player is literally just trying to get from start to finish.
With that complaint out of the way, you might wonder why I didn't complete the game, even once. The thing is, once you get to the penultimate set of stages, the game does two things that totally throw the difficulty from "pointlessly easy" to "unfairly difficult". The first thing is a new enemy, big robots that stomp around the floors shooting lasers, and who take ten shots to kill. For context, consider that your ammo is limited in this game, even for the default gun, and the player starts each stage with only 30 bullets. The second is the fact that the stage layouts are no longer simple vertical buildings with the exit at the top or bottom. I gave up on

the game, when, after finding all the secret files in one stage, dying to a time out when I couldn't seem to find the stage exit anywhere.
The game isn't a total write-off, though. There is one new element that I really liked in this game: the disguise power up. It turns the player into an enemy for 10 or so seconds, allowing them to walk about the stages freely, without any enemy interference. It's only a simple little thing, but it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save this game. I never expected EAN to be able to stand up to Elevator Action Returns, but the fact is, it doesn't even stand up to its Game Boy Color antescendant Elevator Action EX, which is a great game, and one which I definitely recommend, should you have a need for some portable elevator-themed espionage.

Kouryuu Densetsu: Elan Doree (Saturn)

So, it's a fighting game, and as was the fashion at the time, it attempts to stand out from the crowd by having a gimmick: the fights take place mid-air, with the characters riding on flying beasts (most of whom are dragons).
Aesthetically, the game is excellent, going for the always-welcome "mid-90s fantasy OAV" style. The characters are all fairly appealing, in their own ways, and though most of the characters are riding dragons, those dragons aren't just lazy re-colours, all looking slightly different, with Rubone's poison dragon standing out in particular with its smooth black skin and whale-like face. And as I said, most of the characters are

riding dragons. Marielle the magician rides a kind of flying dolphin creature, Tina the magical girl rides a furry orange beast, and Eriorna, the coolest character in the game, is a Takarazuka-inspired swordswoman who fights with the power of "estheticism" rides a large bird. The stages in which the fights take place are also worrth a mention, being as they are, huge in scale and definitely appropriate for providing the kind of gravitas you'd expect from fights between dragon-straddling warriors and the like.
As for how the game plays, it's pretty good. There's three main buttons: weak attack, strong attack and jump (obviously in this case, the human character jumps off their steed, rather than the flying beast jumping in midair). It's jumping that stops the dragon-riding gimmick from being purely aesthetic, as taking an attack midair will knock a character to the ground, leaving them prone to attack until their steed swoops down and retrieves them. Another unique point is in the way special and super moves are handled. While you might see in the screenshots beneath the health bars something that looks like a traditional super meter, it's actually two

seperate items. The number in a box does show how many super move uses a player has remaining, though this is a set amount each round, that, as far as I can tell, isn't replenished until the next round (the amount is sometimes two and sometimes three, though I haven't figured out why). The meter next to it measures a player's "dragon power", which is depleted whenever the player guards or uses a projectile attack, and fills back up when they take damage or land a melee attack. Obviously, the developers were attempting to curb projectile spamming and players that constantly guard. Speaking of the developers, this game was apparently made by a company named Sai-Mate, who, as far as I'm aware never made another game before or since, which is a shame.
Elan Doree is definitely worth playing, if only for how nice it looks (though it's not exactly a chor to play, either).

Simple 2500 Series Portable!! Vol. 13: The Akuma Hunters - Exorsister

The first thing you should know about this game is that it bears no relation to the early 90s series of comedy/horror/porn films starring famed comic creator Ippongi Bang. I hope you can get over your obviously grave disappointment.
It's actually got more in common with the Oneechanbara series being, as it is, developed by Tamsoft, and featuring a group of attractive women engaging in combat with horror-themed monsters. Also like the Oneechanbara series, the game has only a few maps,

each having several missions taking place in parts of it. The game has a big flaw that its more famous sister lacks though, which is that most hated bugbear of modern action games, endless grinding. While the Oneechanbara series does have experience points and levelling up, the player's progress isn't particularly impeded by their low level, Exorsister requires re-playing stages over and over to grind for the materials to sell so you can play a stronger weapon that will reduce the awful slog of the next one.
When you do manage to save up for an adequate weapon, the game is a fairly entertaining (though repetetive) beat em up. You go about the stage,

beat up monsters (who do look pretty cool, and there are a fair few varieties of them, too), and while they're unconcious on the ground, you exorcise them. Each weapon has two stats: AP (attack power) and RP (I assume this means rosary power?), their functions are fairly obvious: attack power indicates how much damage the weapon does when attacking, and RP indicates how quickly monsters can be exorcised with the weapon equipped.
Fighting tough monsters, who will have three main advantages over the player, such as lots of health, lots of.. spiritual health(?) and an entourage of goons to protect them,

is simpler than it seems at first. You just need to stay locked on to the target, and wail on them, dodging out of the way when they look like they're going to attack. When they're down, the best way to exorcise them is to charge the spell up close (which makes it charge much quicker), then run away from the crony monsters before casting it, so they don't interrupt it with their attacks. And don't bother killing the cronies until you kill the target, as they'll quickly respawn.
Anyway, although I've enjoyed this game, and spent a good few hours playing it, I can't call it a good game or really recommend it. The fact is that the grind of having to repeat stages to get equipped for the next ones is just so boring, and there are much better things to do with your time than waste it on that kind of rubbish.

Buster (X68000)

Buster is a platform game, that's clearly been heavily influenced by Arcade platformers of the late 1980s, like Wardner and Legend of Hero Tonma. In it, the player travels, in the traditional manner, from left to right, killing enemies as you go. The only part of the game that's particularly original is the sword meter, which decreases every time you make a normal attack, and replenishes gradually when you're not attacking. You do also have an alternate attack, in the form of a splatterhouse-esque sliding kick, performed by pressing the

attack button at the same time as hitting the ground after a jump or fall. The sliding kick doesn't deplete the sword meter, and in fact quickly replenishes a large portion of it.
Don't mistake unoriginality for low quality, though: Buster is an excellent game that also has great graphics and music. The controls are tight and the stages are designed with deliberate precision. Nothing in the game feels arbitrary or accidental.
There is an aspect of the game that will put many off, however: its difficulty. The stages are designed with precision, and they expect to be played with precision in return. The first stage allows the player to get acquainted with the controls and mechanics, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, the game no longer has any mercy. There are jumps which require pixel-perfect accuracy, and a little later, situations that require that accuracy in jumping, but also perfect timing in attacking, and all in tiny timeframes with no space for error.
Because the game is so well made, this can get frustrating, but it's the right kind of frustration that a difficult game should invoke, where the player knows that they are at fault, and not the game. If you want a hard,

very old fashioned platform game, Buster is definitely one of them. The maker, E. Hashimoto, later went on to make a bunch of fairly well-known PC games, such as Akuji the Demon, and Guardian of Paradise. He's also made a psuedo-remake of Buster, 11 years after the original. I say psuedo-remake, as though I haven't played it, footage I've seen shows that the graphics are completely different (in a good way), and the game looks like it plays very differently, with the character moving around and fighting enemies at very high speeds.

Qix Adventure (Game Boy Colour)

I'm sure most people reading this blog have played Qix, or some clone of it. If not, the idea is that you claim territory in a big box by drawing smaller boxes inside it, while avoiding the things that already live in there. Most clones build on the original Qix's framework by having pictures be revealed in your claimed territory, and by adding power ups. Qix Adventure has these things, as well as a Pokemon bandwagon-jumping

collectathon element (the late 90s kids anime style the game's visuals have are further evidence of this), as

well as some faux-RPG trappings.
Playing as some kid named Speedy, you arrive on an island full of strange creatures that will, before each stage, engage Speedy in poorly-translated conversation. These creatures also appear in the stages themselves, though not as enemies that need to be avoided. The enemies are the traditional Qix and Sparks. There's also a treasure chest in each stage, though it's locked at the start of the stage, which is where the strange creatures come into things: capture them into your territory and the treasure chest opens. Obviously, capture the chest into your territory to claim the goods it contains. Said goods are the aforementioned collectathon element of the game, as the menu between stages will let you look at the treasures you've collected, along with a short description, also poorly translated. None of the treasures I've found seem to have any in-game use, though there is a screen in the menu for equipping items, and you are given money as well as points at the end of each stage, so presumably, there is equipment to buy later in the game? I've played through a few

areas, and hadn't encountered a shop yet, though. The way the game gives the player money is fairly interesting, too: the amount of money received at the end of a stage is a percentage of the points scored in the stage (starting at 2% and increasing gradually as the player progresses through the game).
Qix Adventure also has on the cartridge a port of the original Qix, selectable from the main menu, which is nice, I guess. If you like Qix and Qix-like games, Adventure is definitely one of the better ones I've played, so it's worth having a look at, though I'm not sure I'd want to pay the £10-ish it tends to go for on ebay.
Shamefully, I forgot to take a screenshot of the title screen while playing, and was too lazy to go back to my other computer to take one, so please make do with this google image searched replacement. I took all the other screenshots, though.

Raging Blades (PS2)

Raging Blades is a beat em up that, though it never saw an arcade release really feels like it should have had one (there is the possibility that is was made from the remains of a cancelled arcade game, but this is purely speculation).
In it, you pick one of four generic fantasy characters (Gray the Knight, Bud the Warrior, Raybrandt the Wizard, and Tina the Monk), go to various generic fantasy locations, including the much loved RPG staple, the "ancient lost civilisation with guard robots and big glowing crystals" and fight lots of generic fantasy

monsters. There's also two secret characters, Iria the Valkyrie and Alicia the Fallen Angel, who have to be unloacked with a cheat, though it you save after doing the cheat, they stay unlocked permanently. They're both a lot stronger than all the other characters. Alicia can't be selected in Story Mode, though Iria can.
Doing said cheat also unlocks an extra mode, called "Full Attack", which allows players to change characters when they continue, and more importantly, removes the boring story narration between stages.
As for how the game actually plays, it's pretty good. Like the setting, the mechanics won't win any prizes for originality, but it's fun enough, and the stages, though cliched, do have a lot of atmosphere to them. You don't get any lives in the game, just  single health bar, though continues are limited, so if you wanted, you could treat them as a stock of lives, without letting it weigh too heavily upon

your conscience.
You progress through stages in the traditional beat em up manner: walk along, stop to fight a group of enemies, carry on walking until you get to the next area. The stages themsleves are easy (other than the last stage), but the miserly distribution of healing items means you often won't have a lot of health left by the time you reach the bosses, and the bosses are significantly harder than the stages.
There's also a Duel Mode, which unfortunately isn't a reprise of the Duel Mode found in the first two Mega Drive Goolden Axe games, but rather a versus mode, in which up to four players (which means it's not really a duel then, surely?) pick either one of the main cast or one of the enemies and fight each other. I think it has all the enemies in the game, I didn't actually check. Sorry!
Like I've said throughout the review, there's definitely nothing original about Raging Blades, but it's fun and

it's atmospheric and it looks nice, so it wouldn't be a totally terrible idea to get it. Especially since it doesn't fetch particularly high prices online: my copy (like a lot of the non-import PS2 games I write about here) only cost me a penny plus postage from amazon. There are definitely better PS2 beat em ups you should get first, though. Like God Hand. You should definitely have God Hand.
This game is also known as Raging Bless

Flash Motor Karen (PSP)

I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows of Sokoban or Boxxle or one of the other names of the ancient shoving boxes onto certain spots-type of puzzle game. Flash Motor Karen plays kind of like a more complicated, but simultaneously more forgiving version of those games.
Each stage is a small area with a switch and a door. The object is to press the switch, then get to the door. You can take as many steps as you like getting to the switch, but each stage has a limit on how many steps can be taken between pressing the switch and getting to the door. So, in puzzle mode at least, there are two main kinds of stages: ones which introduce the player to a new concept, in which the puzzle to solve is usually getting to the switch, allowing the player more leeway in learning how to interact with the new element, and the main kind, in which the player is given

elements they have seen before, and the main challenge of the stage is to set up a path to get from the switch to the door in as few moves as possible.
There's also a story mode, chapters of which are gradually unlocked as you make your way through puzzle mode, which, as well as telling a story (entirely in Japanese, of course, and thankfully skippable), also adds another type of stage. The third type of stage has enemy robots walking around the map, who act in a roguelike-style manner, only moving when the player moves. In these stages, the aim is to "trick" the robots into moving into a square adjacent to your own, so they can be dispatched with a press of the O button. Conversley, moving into a square adjacent to one of the robots will result in the player's death.

Flash Motor Karen is a pretty good game, and unlike many puzzle games of this type, never feels impossibly hard (though there are hard puzzles, I've yet to be stuck on one for more than 10-15 minutes, nor did I ever feel that the solution was totally beyond my reach). Though this might mean that the game is offensively easy for hardened sokoban fans. (Sokofans?)

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.

Net de Tennis! (Dreamcast)

In Europe, the Dreamcast was advertised with the slogan "up to six billion players", obviously referring to the console's in-built online capabilities. Obviously, SEGA Europe then went on to live up to this by releasing a massive amount of games with online play. And by massive number, I mean "about five or six". Yeah, they

messed it up, just like they did when they refused to play to the Saturn's strengths and arcade-loving userbase. Another Saturn analogue is that in Japan, Capcom in particular were releasing a whole bunch of games that could be played online, most famously their "For Matching Service" series of arcade ports. This is another one of Capcom's online Dreamcast releases.
What's obvious as soon the game starts is that it's a budget release and that it was definitely released with online play in ind, with single player being just an afterthought, only offering single exhibition matches with no kind of career or arcade-style progression mode available. There's also a couple of extra features included to enhance the online aspect. The first is a simple character edit mode, in which you can choose the hairstyle, skin and clothing colours of a player, as well as choosing whether their racket is star-shaped or a more traditional oval, plus you can give your player a little dog that follows her around the court (and you can

choose the colour of the dog too). The other is a mode allowing players to select a still avatar, and four short phrases, which, it seems would be displayed during play when the analogue stick was pushed (the game itself being controlled with the d-pad, obviously).
As for how the game actually plays, it's okay. Nothing special. No fancy moves or powers or anything, like in something like SEGA Superstars Tennis as far as I could tell, though the players do have stats labelled "Guts" and "Miracle" (plus one of the players is apparently from a country called "Love"), so it's possible I just haven't figured out how to activate these things (but the CPU players haven't used them, either). One weird little touch is that when you're serving, you can tap down on the d-pad to make your player bounce the ball on the ground. It doesn't

affect gameplay in anyway, but it's a nice little thing.
I'd probably compare the game to the early Game Boy game Tennis: just a simple, fun tennis videogame. This doesn't really work in its favour though, since there are a lot of simple fun tennis games on pretty much every system, and most of them are easier to get ahold of than this one, there's not really any reason to bother going to the effort of tracking this one down, unless you specifically like to seek out and play lesser known titles like this like some kind of weirdo nerd or something.