Toyrobo Force (Game Boy Advance)

For some reason, shooting games seem to be something of an underrepresented genre on handheld consoles, especially on post-2000 handhelds (though having said that, the PSP has a pretty strong line-up, even if it is mostly ports). So obviously, when I found out there was a GBA shooter that I hadn't played, I had to give it a try.

I'll be kind, and talk about the positive parts of the game first. Most of the game's positives stem from its presentation: in-game it looks great, with a very friendly, colourful pallette that's somewhat reminiscent of cartoons aimed at the very young. Everything's well-drawn and very detailed considering they low resolution of th GBA screen, and there's cute little touces, like cows in fields that run away when the player shoots at them. The TV cartoon presentation continues between stages, with eyecatches appearing before and after each stage. The character designs are all okay, though a little bland, and unfortunately, most of the enemies are pretty generic.

As for the game itself, it's a vertically scrolling shooting game, with the inclusion of a Xevious-style bomb weapon, which is actually a pretty rare thing in modern shooters. The player controls a police robot on a flying motorbike, and they fly upwards, shooting the generic enemies, and bombing turrets and tanks on the ground. Sometimes during the stage, a criminal will appear, in the form of a mini-bossfight, after which the defeated perp will be left lying on the ground dazed for the player to pick up. The coolest example of this is actually in the first stage, which takes place in a town centre, and has the criminal running around on the ground, avoiding and hiding from the player's bombs and so on.

This all sounds pretty good, right? It's okay, but there are some massive flaws in this game. Firstly, the player only gets limited ammunition for each stage, which can leave no onther choice than just commiting suicide since obviously, having no weapons in a shooter makes things pretty much unwinnable. Secondly, the stages don't just flow into each other, but between them, there are sections in which characters talk to each other, and the player has to go to different buildings to talk to characters in the right order to be able to go to the next stage.

Although the fact that I can't read Japanese makes this more of an exercise in trial and error than it would be for someone who could, even if the game has Englishtext, I'd hate this. I've spoken before, ironically at great length, about how much I hate games that interrupt the player's fun for lengthy sections of usually terrible storytelling. If a game is exceptionally good, or in very rare cases, if the story is actually interesting or entertaining, it can make sitting through these parts worthwhile, but Toyrobo Force definitely doesn't fulfill the first condition, and though I can't read the text, I feel confident that the story is no great saga for our times, either.

If you really want to play a shooting game on your GBA, you'd be much better off going with Gradius Advance/Galaxies, a game that is better than Toyrobo Force in pretty much every possible way.

Disc Station Vol. 17 (PC)

Ahh, it's been a long time since I did a Disc Station post, hasn't it? Well, here's one now, right after a Yaroze Round-Up post. Maybe I could come up with some other semi-regular post series someday and do three in a row? Maybe...

Anyway, it's a PC Disc Station, so you know there's going to be at least some of the following things: interesting videos, amazing pixel art and a whole bunch of games. And Puyo Puyo characters, obviously. And DS17 doesn't disappoint on any of those fronts!

First up is a game entitled "Blitz Runner", which is a kind of time trial racing platform game. You know the Vs. mode in Sonic 3, in which the players pick a character and race laps around a small, specially designed stage? Blitz Runner is like that, but it's single player only, unfortunately, so you only have time to race against. There is an internet option on the title screen, which I assume was used for uploading and downloading times, but of course, that was in late 1997 and the option is now useless. There's three stages, and two characters (though they seem to play exactly alike), and not much else to this game. It looks great, though. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, Blitz Runner refused to be screenshotted.

Next is an even smaller game, whose title I cannot read. But it's a simple badminton game, starring Carbuncle the orange star-shaped thing from the Puyo games. The side-on perspective reminds me a little of Tennis for Two, but it doesn't really play like it, obviously. The main problem with this game is the difficulty: even on the lowers setting, I never saw the CPU opponent miss a single shot, and I played a few games before giving up completely.

Third is a nice little RPG, in which a Compile employee becomes a tokusatsu-style transforming superhero. This has pretty good production values, with really nice graphics, and not-so-nice CGI cutscenes, and though exploration and such is done top-down, the battles take the form of little side-on beat-em-up segments. Unfortunately, though this game has a lot of charm, and the battles were cool, the language barrier was too high for me to really get anywhere in it. If some kind souls somewhere, someday made a translation patch for it, I'd probably make another attempt and give it its own blog post.

The last game from this volume (I'm omitting the Nazo Puyo installment on the disc, as I'm sure you all know what that's like) is Puyolympics, a collection of mini-games starring a bunch of Puyo characters, with Arle and Witch in the lead roles. The mini-games are a mix of real sports, like running and swimming, and silly videogame nonsense, like catching falling Puyos in a basket, and another one that seems to be based on the same traditional toys as Dharma Doujou. You can play through all the events in a story mode, or you can play each one indiviually. It's pretty full featured, and like all the other games, it looks pretty great, with some cool artwork of Puyo characters in sports clothes, if that's the kind of thing that would interest any of you.

Finally, as always, there's a folder of video files on the disc, too. They were the usual mix of silly animated shorts starring characters from various Compile games, TV ads for Compile games, and other Compile ephemera. I've uploaded one of the videos from the last category, a kind of highlight reel featuring footage from all the various live events Compile held over the course of 1997. It's a great little video, featuring lots of cool stuff like people playing in tournaments, 90s cosplayers, and some guy singing.