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.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Volume 4!

Sam the Boulderman (James Hobden, 1998)
Like Rocks n Gems, Sam the Boulderman is a Boulderdash clone, though it has a slightly different take on the concept. Rather than RnG's big, sprawling stages full of enemies, Sam's stages are all single screen, and as far as I can tell, enemy-free. This means it's entirely puzzle-based, with none of the nerve-wracking chases of the more well known game. It plays alright, though movement does feel a little jerky, and the presentation is pretty shoddy. The graphics are grubby-looking, and the music and sound effects are the same as those used in Clone (though whether this is stealing or just the use of some common Yaroze sound library is beyond my knowledge). Still worth a look, though.

Blitter Boy in Monster Mall (Chris Chadwick, 1998)
This game was critically acclaimed when it came out, winning competitions and awards and the like, and comments I've seen online often name it as one of peoples' favourite Yaroze games, but I really don't like it at all. It's a semi-Robotron-esque game, without the twin-stick shooting in which the player must go about stages shooting ghosts and UFOs while rescuing babies and taking them to the centre of the screen to be beamed away. It can't be denied that it's competently put together and the graphics are incredibly slick, looking like it could be a commercially released Amiga game from only a few years earlier. The biggest problem Blitter Boy has, though, is the sound effects: there's always something making some kind of loud, shrill noise, and worst of all are the babies you're tasked with rescuing. Getting hit by one of the player's stray bullets or coming into contact with any of the enemies makes the babies stop what they're doing and cry, loudly. The constant, awful noise made this game unplayable for me for more than a few minutes.

The Incredible Coneman (Lars Barstad, Per Ivar Pedersen, Rune Solberg, Jostein Trondal, Frode Kristensen, Bjorn Ullevoldaeter, 1998)
The Incredible Coneman is a 3D Pac-Man clone. The player controls Coneman, a kind of robot/tank thing round various mazes, collecting pyramids and stars and avoiding ghosts. The face buttons can be used to move the camera, a function which seemingly has no restraints, allowing the player to zoom out until the entire map is just a tiny dot on the screen. The most distinguishing feature of the game is its sound: the music is a short, mellow, almost hypnotic beat, and the game plays a nice little saxophone doot-doot-doo when the player loses a life. TIC isn't essential playing, but it's not terrible either, and it does have some charm.

Arena (Tom Madams, ????)
A pretty impressive 3D shooting game, starring a mech that looks similar in design to the one from the Amiga game Walker. The player controls the mech, goes about a maze shooting enemies and turrets. It's really hard, so much so that I couldn't even get past the first stage, but I like Arena. The mech's fun to control, the enemíes are satisfying to shoot and destroy, and the graphics are easily some of the best I've seen in a Yaroze game. It's full, texture-mapped 3D, and it looks like it wouldn't be too out of place on the 3D0 or one of those other forgotten consoles of the early 32-bit era (something I say here totally as a compliment).

Mamono Hunter Yohko: Dai-7 no Keishou (Mega Drive)

You're probably already aware that this game is based on the anime known in english as Devi Hunter Yohko, but I can't say how faithful an adaptation it is, since I've never seen the show. Many years ago I had a poster of it that came with an issue of Animerica, though.

Anyway, the game is, as you'd expect from a 16-bit anime licence, is a platform game. At first glance, it seems pretty generic, but it does have some slightly more subtle qualities in its favour. The biggest is that the stages aren't laid out like a simple left-to-right path with a few enemy shelves, but right from the first stage will have the player being led in every direction (although the downside to this is that the game does also feature a few leaps of faith). Yohko's weapon is pretty interesting too. Though her normal attacks are just sword swings, holding the button down summons an energy ring, which be thrown by releasing the button, after which it comes back, and can be kept around by continuing to hold the attack button.

There is a big problem with the game though: that it's just far too hard to actually enjoy. The first stage goes pretty well, though there is a moment towards the end during which the player has to climb a huge wiggly beanstalk, while being pushed around by strong winds that randomly change direction, but the second stage is where the trouble really starts. The second stage is set in and around a volcano, and for some reason, whether it was a deliberate design decision or just an accident of programming, fire does insane damage to Yohko. Rather than just damaging her once, it constantly causes damage for as long as Yohko is in contact with it. This makes the stage itself pretty hard, but the boss is an insane chore, since not only does he breath fire across the ground, but also leaps around willy-nilly, and touching him drains half of Yohko's health. I did manage to struggle through and eventually get all the way to the start of stage 4, but no further.

It's really a shame that the game is so insanely hard, as mechanically, it's not too bad. Yohko is fun to control, killing enemies and cancelling their shots with the sword and ring is nice and satisfying, and there is some cool ideas in the stage designs, too. But the difficulty kills it, the game doesn't feel challenging as much as it just feels unfair. Don't bother playing it.

Harem (Arcade)

If you're cool and smart enough to be reading this blog, you'll aware that modern videogames, especially the big-budget AAA titles are full of casual misogyny and racism, though it's the subtle kind of misogyny and racism that hollywood movies use all the time, so it mostly goes unnoticed. There are, however certain relics from the distant past that act like videogame equivalents of The Black and White Minstrel Show or Love Thy Neighbour, examples of the bad old days when overt hatred was the norm. The most widely aknowledged example obviously being the rapacious and imperialistic Atari 2600 title Custer's Revenge.

Harem, the only known videogame output of the Italian company IGR is another such example. In it, the player controls a slightly portly beturbaned man who roams the desert kidnapping women and carrying them back to his harem. Attempting to stop him are knife weilding guys who live in tents, who will run around trying to catch the villain (which is you, obviously).

There are three stages in the game, the first two are pretty much the same: your victims are travelling, either by camel or car and you use you throwing knives to destroy their transport and carry them away to the harem at the bottom of the screen, while avoiding the guys. The third stage has the women sleeping in tents at the top half of the screen, with the player going into the tents to snatch women and carry them away. The player can complete a stage either by filling all six beds in the harem, or by killing all of the women's protectors.

There's a couple of other mechanics too, like a constantly decreasing bonus timer that counts down from 500 to determine how many points your next kidnapping will score you. It resets with each successful kidnap and a life is lost if it reaches zero. A nice little detail is that there's an oil well in the background that will start to run dry as the bonus timer decreases. I guess the player character is not the owner of the harems he's filling, but merely a mercenary in the employ of some corrupt oil baron? There's also another enemy, in the form of a large pink snake that only seems to appear on the last stage, and is bigger and faster than your human assailants.

Harem is only worthwhile as a historical curiosity. The game isn't exciting or interesting enough to be worth your time, even before you get to the offensive theming of the game.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Volume 3!

Samsaric Asymtotes (Phillipe-andre Lorin, 2003)
I've written in an earlier volume about one of Phillipe-andre Lorin's other game, Invs, which I thought was a pretty good game. Unfortunately, Samsaric Asymtotes doesn't live up to its predecessor. Although it does have an attractive and unique visual syle, with a combination of monochromatic sprites and backgrounds with the player's attack being a wide, brightly coloured laser, it's also boring to play. There's no scoring at all, barely any mechanics besides shooting enemies and avoiding their shots. It's just not fun to play.

Adventure Game (Robert Swan, 1998)
I loved this game as a kid, when it appeared on one of the Official Playstation Magazine's coverdiscs. It's not what you would traditionally consider a good game, but it is mildly amusing (admittedly, it was more so when I was 12, but it still has its moments). You play as some guy with a sword, who goes on a quest to save the stupid people of a small medieval town from some vaguely menacing birds. The script is full of silly conversations, with a lot of the humour coming from the low intelligence of the NPCs, though there are also a few jokes about the shoddiness of the game as well as references to other Yaroze games. I'm sure I was able to finish this game at some point in the ancient past, but now the terrible camera in the action parts caused me to quickly give up after going round in circles a few times.

Time Slip (David Johnston, Mike Goatly, 1999)
It might sound a little hyperbolic to say so, but this game has probably the best use of time travel ever seen in a videogame. It's a platform game, in which the player controls a snail who, for some reason, is trapped in an endlessly repeating minute of time. They have to collect a certain amount of coins and reach the exit, while every minute they are sent back in time one minute. As a result, there will eventually be numerous snails going about the stage, holding door switches for each other and so on. The real challenge comes from the fact that if you touch any of you past selves, you create a time paradox and destroy the universe. It's a good game, though it's very very hard, and it's also been ported to the Xbox 360 via the Xbox Live Indie Games store.

Robot Ron (Matt Verran, 2001)
Obviously, it's a robotron clone with an amusing pun for a title. You control a small mushroom thing and shoot swarms of enemies who look kind of like multi-coloured alien glyphs. If you've played any robotron clone, you pretty much know what to expect with this one. There is one nice little touch, that a point is scored for each bullet the player fires, as well as the obvious points scored for killing enemies. This seems like an odd choice at first, but since all power-ups are lost with the loss of a life, and the power-ups make the player shoot bullets faster, it does kind of make sense, since players that stay alive longer will end up shooting vastly more bullets.

Street Fighter 2 Interactive Movie (Saturn)

Everyone knows that there was a terrible Mortal Kombat-esque game based on the live action Street Fighter movie, and that the general visual style and some of the plot elements of the Street Fighter Alpha games were inspired by the popularity of the animated movie (and maybe to a lesser extent the Street Fighter 2 V animated tv show), but the fact that there was an interactive FMV game directly based on the animated movie has been somewhat forgotten by history. Just like FMV games in general, ahhhh!

You'll remember that throughout the animated move, there were cyborgs sent out by Dictator to scan the world's strongest fighters and analyse their strengths, and it is one of those cyborgs the player controls in this game. The way this works is that you watch the movie, and during fight scenes, you hold down the A button to bring up a crosshair, use the d-pad to move it around and press B to "scan" moves. Successful scans are met with a "ching!" noise, and supposedly, doing this will make the Cyborg stronger, in preperation for the game's big setpiece: a fight between the Cyborg and Ryu at the end of the game. I guess I didn't do a good job of scanning, since I was only doing tiny, puny amounts of damage against Ryu and got quickly and thouroughly pummeled. Oddly, pretty much the entire movie is included, despite the non-fight scenes serving no purpose in the game, making the Cyborg seem like a bit of a creepy voyeur. You can also press C during most scenes to bring up information, including character stats, what model of car is being driven and so on. There are even incomplete stats for non-playable characters, like Eliza and the guy Ryu one hit KOs in Hong Kong. The game even acknowledges Akuma/Gouki's background cameo with this feature!

The most interesting thing about the game is the exclusive stuff it has, mainly in the form of new graphics and animation. There's an FMV intro in the style of the movie, with all-new animation and there's some very small extra bits of animation in the game just before the big fight. The fight itself is pretty cool, too. It's done in the graphical style of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, with an all-new sprite and portrait for the Cyborg (though its moves are the same as Ken's), and what I think is also a whole new background for the fight, too.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this game. It really is just watching the Street Fighter 2 animated movie, with added button pressing. You'd be better off just watching the movie and then playing a proper Street Fighter game, or if you have the GBA port of Alpha 3 or the 3DS port of Street Fighter IV, both at the same time! Not even the aforementioned exclusive animation or things like the gallery of character design artwork are enough to save it really.

Spark Man (Arcade)

Spark Man is a Rolling Thunder-esque walking shooter from South Korea, with a few of its own eccentricities, both mechanically and aesthetically.

It begins before a coin is even inserted, with the title screen depicting the hand of god bestowing electric life unto an androgynous cyborg. Androgynous apparently being a very apt word in this case, as between coin insertion and the start of the first stage, the player is treated to a profile of the game's protagonist, including their country of origin (Republic of Korea), date of birth (1994, which along with the given age of 16 sets the game in 2010/11), parents (Electroman and Fire Lady) and then sex, for which both male and female symbols are listed. Does Spark Man identify him/herself as being somewhere on a gender spectrum, rather than a binary male or female? Amazingly progressive for a game from 1989!

Most of the game doesn't do anything particularly exciting or innovative, having the player saunter from left to right shooting awkward-looking guys dressed in red (with the odd guy in green and every now and then, a panther or two), occasionally picking up a temporary weapon power up (which last for far too short a time).
There are a few interesting ideas in there, though. Roughly once a stage, a (somewhat stupid-looking) flying platform, allowing the player to fly around the screen dropping bombs on enemies. The bosses have another nice little quirk: they're all (as far as I've seen) giant robots (including what I assume is an unlicenced cameo from a Star Wars AT-ST), and rather than having health bars, they have visible crew members on board, a certain number of whom must be shot before the robot dies.

"Somewhat stupid-looking" is a phrase that can be used to describe a lot of things about Spark Man. The enemies and protagonist have an awkward, uncomfortable way of standing and walking, the flying platform, and the way Sparky sits on it look bizarre, and the stages, apparently set in America and the USSR both look like they were drawn by someone who had only the flimsiest knowledge of the countries. I'm not saying any of the art in the game is bad or poorly-drawn, there's just some kind of vague offness about how it all looks.

For all it's faults, Spark Man isn't a terrible game, if you're curious, there's no reason not to check it out, but if you don't you're definately not missing out on a classic or anything.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Volume 2!

Decaying Orbit (Scott Cartier, David Dewitt, 1999)
This was a game I loved back when Yaroze games were being given away with magazine demo discs. In it,

the player controls a tiny spaceship, flying from planet to planet, shooting enemy turrets and activating beacons. The interesting part, however, is the psuedo-realistic physics engine. Every planet has gravity, and not only will larger planets try to pull your ship into orbit, but you can also "slingshot" around planets to travel at super-high speeds. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really want to put up with these kinds of shenanigans, and travelling at extreme velocities will usually result in either flying off the map or smashing violently into a planet. There is, however, an edit mode, allowing players to create their own maps, and play with the engine to their heart's content.

Hover Racing (Tomukazu Sato, 1997)
People talk a lot about Terra Incognita being a yaroze game of particularly high production values, and though it's not very well known, Hover Racing is another one that with a bit of polish could at least pass for a Simple 1500 Series game. In essence, it's a blatant F-Zero knock-off, with low-poly hovering vehicles
speeding around floating racetracks. It's of a high quality, and there's lots of tracks, but it is brutally hard, both by design and by virtue of its bizarre controls. Left and right on the d-pad are used to go left and right on the track, to avoid walls and the like, but to actually turn corners requires an unusual combination of shoulder buttons: to turn left, the player must hold L2 and R1 together (and vice versa). If you have the patience to learn it, it'd probably be very satisfying to play.

Bouncer 2 (Scott Evans, 1998)
It's an Arkanoid clone with a gimmick! A pretty interesting gimmick at that: instead of a ball and a bat, the player controls a small see-saw, with two men bouncing on it taking the place the place of the ball. Although
the gimmick is interesting, unfortunately, it doesn't save the game. The problem the game has is that the stages are enormous, and it feels like it takes forever to get through them. It's a shame really, as I do enjoy a good Arkanoid clone.

Clone (Stuart Ashley, 1997)
A first person shooter that places the player in dark, gloomy mazes inhabited by strange zombie-like monsters with transparent skin and targets on their chests. It's definitely atmospheric, and there's a simple charm to the way it plays. There's nothing particularly wrong with the game, it's just that all the stages look
the same and there's only one kind of enemy, so it struggles to hold my attention for long. But still, it is a little bit charming too, and despite the primitive visuals, it does manage to maintain a sliver of tension and atmosphere.

Psychon (Ben James, 1998)
A top-down shooter that's obviously heavily inspired by the Alien Breed series on the Amiga. The player controls a space marine-looking guy around a dirty, cramped spaceship/futuristic slum/place, shooting everyone one they meet and collecting bullets, keys and healing items. There's also four glowing things that need to be found and switched off on each stage before the exit will open. The game looks great, in a grimy, British sci-fi kind of way, and it plays pretty well too, though it's a lot harder than I remember it being.
Psychon's another one that was a favourite back in the days of yore, especially thanks to it having a 2-player co-op mode.

Kakutou Bijin Wulong (PS2)

I'll apologise in advance for the quality of the screenshots accompanying this post. PS2 screenshots tend to look pretty bad at the best of times, but for some reason this game was particularly unphotogenic.

Kakutou Bijin Wulong is a beat em up developed by Dream Factory, though unfortunately there isn't much trace of their trademark roguelike elements in there, other than a stamina bar that can be used to partially restore the player's health by resting. It does use their typical control method, though, with a face button each for low, medium and high attacks, and shoulder buttons for jumping, guarding and grappling.

It's also based on a comic of the same name (or sometimes known as "Fighting Beauty Wulong"), and though I haven't read that comic and the game is entirely in Japanese, from what I can work out, the game's about a teenage girl (who might be an immigrant to Japan from China?) being taught to fight by an old man (her grandad?), who uses a very on-the-job approach to martial arts tutelage, forcing the girl to repeatedly prove herself by fighting in various situations. And these situations are the stages of this game. Oddly, though the game has its origins in a comic, there's something about the aesthetic and the way the game feels that reminds me more of those slightly seedy low budget tokusatsu heroine movies and series that companies like Zen Pictures put out.

Because the game is really, brutally hard, I've only been able to get a few stages in, and so far I've been on the seedy backstreets fighting criminal goons, in a dojo fighting trainee wrestlers, out in the woods fighting wild bears and then in a wrestling ring in a flashy stadium, fighting pro wrestlers.

The stages are laid out in a typical beat em up fashion: you start in an area and beat up everyone there before moving on to the next area. After a few areas, you'll fight a boss, and then go onto the next stage. An interesting and unique element the game has is that for each area, the player is randomly given five items, which are selected by pressing left and right on the d-pad, and used with up on the d-pad (movement is done using the left analogue stick, of course). These items will be a mix (different every time) of any of five things: health-restoring melons, stamina-restoring cheese wedges, and red, blue or green cards. The cards are the most interesting ones, as each one represents a different special move: blue is a powerful strike straight ahead on one target, green is a hurricane kick-type maneuver that will hit anyone near the player, and best of all, red picks up the nearest enemy for a giant swing, which then damages any enemies that get in the way of it.

This is an interesting alternative to more common systems, like specials limited by a power bar or performed via input commands. Interesting and original, but not necessarily good. Like always with random elements, the "five items" mean the player sometimes has to rely on luck more than skill to proceed, and unlike in some games, such as roguelikes and even Dream Factory's trademark roguelike/beat em up hybrids, rather than feeling like an extra little challenge that forces players to be resourceful and cunning, it just feels cheap, and like the player would be better off resetting and trying again on receipt of a bad hand.

That said though, Kakutou Bijin Wulong isn't a bad game, it's not a chore to play or anything, and though it's on a console with more than a generous helping of beat em ups, it could still be worth a look if you've played a fair few of them already and still want more.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Volume 1!

I've been wanting to feature Yaroze games on here for a while now. Originally, I was going to have a themed month, but I didn't like the idea of having consecutive posts on a single subject. Then, I considered a "Top 20" of my favourite Yaroze games, but list posts are a bit sterile and "clickbaity", and I have my integrity to think of! Plus, a Top 20 would mean leaving out games that are interesting, but not particularly fun to play. In the end, I've decided to make this an occaisional series of posts, kind of like the Disc Station ones (which will return someday, I promise!). Oh, and in case any of you aren't familiar with Net Yaroze, it was a scheme by Sony in the late 90s, where they would sell Playstation dev kits to homebrew developers. Some of the games were distributed to the public via magazine coverdiscs, others were only available online between other Yaroze users. Luckily, a lot of the games and demos have been compiled and made available online by kindly hackers and pirates and archivists.

A Bob (K. Okada, H. Endo, J. Suehiro, M. Taniguti, 1998)
A Bob (also known as Airbob) is a cute little bobsledding game. You pick a team, tap square to make them run to the ramp, use the dpad to steer their sled down the ramp, and then press buttons according to the onscreen prompts to make them do stunts and open their parachutes on the way down after jumping from the end of the ramp. There's really only about 2 minutes of game in here, but the graphics are really cute, with the sledders looking like cuddly little space robots. It's worth at least one play just for that, right?

Rocks n Gems (Gerhard Rittenhofer, 1998)
It's a Boulderdash clone! A really well presented Boulderdash clone, too. It looks great, and it mostly feels pretty professional, with only one crack in its veneer: the player character moves way too fast. The game's hard enough as it is, but it also requires precise movement in almost all situations, but the protagonist's speed makes this a pain. The difficulty didn't go unnoticed either, as I definitely remember the UK Official Playstation Magazine printing a password to unlock every stage, which is pretty special for a Yaroze game.

Haunted Maze (Edward Federmeyer, 1998)
Essentially a kind of minimalist Pac-Man clone, Haunted Maze has the player running around a fairly open-plan maze, avoiding skinless zombies and collecting "goodies", which look a lot like giant Lucky Charms marshmallows. Despite the incredibly simple premise, I really enjoy this game. The speed of the game, coupled with the classical soundtrack and the somewhat basic visuals give the game a kind of silent movie slapstick feel.

INVS (Philippe-Andre Lorin, 2001)
I really like this one, it's a psuedo-old-school single-screen shooting game. It kind of anticipates the experimental direction Taito took with some of the more recent Space Invaders games, like Infinity Gene and Extreme. There's some cool enemy concepts, like ones that intercept the player's shots with lasers, and dive-bombing enemies that create pretty large explosions if they're allowed to hit the ground. There's also a nice little mechanic whereby enemies will sometimes release small snowflake-like particles, that are collected to activate the player's shield and temporarily power up their shots.

Gas Girl (Koji Yoshikawa, 1998)
This is one of those games I mentioned in the intro, one of the ones that is more interesting than it is good. It's a platform game about a woman who gets abducted by aliens, and must fart her way to freedom. The one positive thing that can be said about this game is that the farting gimmick is using in a number of ways: it's a weapon to defeat enemies, a propulsion system to boost the distance of the player's jumps, and it can be used to affect the movement of certain obstacles. But otherwise, the game is awful in pretty much every way, and I suspect it mainly exists because of some kind of special interest on the part of the creator.

Cyborg 009 (Mega CD)

So, it's a licenced game based on Shotaro Ishinomori's comic of the same name. But unlike most comic licenced games of the early 90s, rather than being aimed at kids, Cyborg 009's presentation seems to suggest that it's more at nostalgic adults. There's opening credits before the title screen, that, though they don't appear to be a direct recreation of the openings of either Cyborg 009 tv series that had been made at that point, do definitely invoke the feel of 1970s/late 60s Japanese sci-fi/action, and the options screen is styled like an old 1970s TV, with a knob that turns as you go up and down.

The game itself, however is pretty standard for a 90s licence game: it's a platform game where you shoot enemies and collect stuff. It's a pretty high quality one, though. It looks nice, the difficulty is pretty reasonably balanced and it has a nice little gimmick in 009's temporary super-speed ability. Pressing C makes 009 quickly dash forward at high speed, and starting from a few stages in, a fair bit of the level design is based around successfully using this ability in conjunction with jumping to get to higher or further away platforms than can be reached with normal jumps.

Your weapon for most of the game is a beam gun that can only be fired straight ahead, and can be powered up three times (though the only effect of the power ups is that the beam does more damage. Unfortunately, this leads to a (fairly mild) case of the Gradius slippery slope, especially when fighting bosses. Though all the bosses have fairly easy to learn attack patterns, you're still likely to take hits unless you have expertly-honed, lightning fast reflexes, and if you lose a life, you lose your powerups too, meaning that now you have to start the boss fight again, only this time you have to dodge for longer, giving you more chances to mess up. It's far from being the worse case of the problem I've ever seen, but it is a mild irritation. The worst part of it is that it renders the game's progress save option a little less useful, since that starts you at the beginning of the stage in which you saved with the default number of lives and no power-ups.

The game looks and sounds very nice, as previously mentioned, it's very much presented in a retro-Japanese style, but even ignoring that, the graphics are nicely drawn and colourful, and the music fits perfectly. One of the bosses even has a mildly impressive faux-3D effect going on in the background, though it doesn't really come across well in a still screenshot. There's also cutscenes between each stage, and though I'm not a fan of cutscenes as a concept, these are also nicely done. Unlike a lot of Mega CD cutscenes, they're almost full screen (with black borders at the top and bottom for a wide screen effect), as brightly coloured as the in-game graphics and not at all grainy. It seems that rather than using low quality FMV, the developers decided to go with a more extravagant version of the cutscenes seen in various cartridge-based games, like the Valis series or Ninja Gaiden. One little technical oddity though, is that if you're playing the game via an emulator, the voices will be out of sync, presumably due to the lack of loading times.

Cyborg 009 is a pretty fun game, I've never read or watched any version of the original story, so I can't vouch for how faithful an adaptation it is, but if you just want to play a decent Mega CD platformer, it's worth a look.