Simple DS Series Vol. 18: The Soukou Kihei Gunground

I've covered a fair few Simple Series games in the past, on the Playstation, PS2 and PSP, but the Simple DS Series warrants a bit of an extra introduction. Like all the other versions of the series, it's a long string of budget games that tend to have fairly generic titles with a few diamonds hidden in the rough. What's special about the Simple DS Series though, is that there seems to be a higher level of technical quality than you might expect from a budget series of games on the original DS. You might expect a lot of cheap-looking touchscreen minigame compilations, but there's a lot of polygon-heavy action games with pretty high production values.

The Soukou Kihei Gunground is an entry into what I feel is a pretty under-subscribed subgenre: military giant robot-themed action platformers whose progenitor is (as far as I know) Assault Suits Leynos. It has most of the common features: parts upgrading, a setting that seems heavily inspired by Soukou Kihei Votoms (obviously), even the missions have the same kinds of objectives and locations that other games have.

There's stages where the player just has to make their way from left to right, stages where every enemy has to be destroyed, stages where certain items have to be defended or destroyed or collected. And they take place in jungles, deserts, mountains, cities and secret bases. Upgrading is pretty simple, with a shop selling new weapons and parts, as well as healing items that can be used during play via the touch screen. (The touchscreen's only use in this game is for changing weapons and using items.) Menus are all in Japanese, but there's plenty of numbers and other visual representation, so navigation won't be too big a problem after you get used to things (and I'm assuming that most people who regularly read this blog can at least recognise the katakana for "save" and "load").

There's also ther option to change the colours of every indiviual part of your mecha, but unfortunately the developers have gone with a "realistic" look for the game, so no matter what colours the player picks, their mecha will still look like an ugly greyish pile of boxes. Most of the enemy mecha, at least, look like boldly coloured green or orange piles of boxes. I assume the developers of this particular title just had problems getting good 3D from the DS though, as all the backgrounds are pretty nice looking pixel art, all colourful and detailed.

The single player game is pretty good, and as I said, it's not a genre with a lot of options, especially on handhelds, but the game also has a pretty great multiplayer option. It actually has two multiplayer options, but the other one's a bit disappointing. They both allow download play with a single cartridge though, which is always nice.

Starting with the disappointment, there's the co-op mode. I was really looking forward to this mode before playing it, teaming up with some friends to smash enemy mecha sounded great, but unfortunately, the missions are so trivially easy with multiple players, there's no fun to be found here. The versus mode is a lot better though. It's pretty much as you'd imagine: each player enters into a small stage and wages battle until only one remains. Since all the available mecha are bipedal, it doesn't have the variety that the similar versus mode found in the SNES game Metal Warriors, but it does have the advantage of being on handhelds, so each player has their own screen.

Yeah, The Soukou Kihei Gunground is a pretty good game. I wouldn't pay a lot for it, but it's definitely worth a look if you happen across a copy going cheap.

Andorogynous (MSX)

Obviously, the title is a mistransliteration of the word "androgynous" from English in Japanese and then back again. But since there's no obvious gender-related themes in the game, I'll just assume that the developers were just going for a word that sounded sciencey and biological and this is the one they went with.

Anyway, the game's a vertically scrolling shooter with two twists: the scrolling goes down instead of up, and the player can only shoot to the left and right. The incongruity between the shooting and scrolling axes serves two purposes: the first, and most obvious is the mechanical purpose. When your enemies mainly come from above or below, having to maneuver youself to shoot them from the sides puts you at an automatic disadvantage. The second purpose is one of atmosphere: the player character's shooting range is ill-suited for their environment. Coupled with the fact that they are some kind of humanoid slowly floating down a hostile, biological pit, this helps create a feeling that the player is a fish-out-of-water, a soldier behind enemy lines in every sense.

Atmosphere is one of Adorogynous' strongest points, and the developers ( and more specifically, the artists) have really played to the MSX's strengths and weaknesses. The graphics are just detailed enough that you can see that everything around you is a living organism, including the walls and the shots your enemies fire at you, while at the same time are just vague enough to allow the player's imagination to fill in the blanks. What this does is give the impression of descending and being surrounded by a pulsating and oozing organic hell, even though a more detailed and more animated depiction of such would be beyond the host hardware.

The game itself is fun to play, though it is also brutally, unforgivingly difficult. I've completed Mushihimesama Futari on a single credit, but even after hours of play and dozens of attempts, I've yet to even see the second boss of Andorogynous. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that it's a testament to the game's quality that I even bothered to try so long and so hard before giving up. There's a couple of specific flaws that make the game even harder than its level design intends, too. Firstly, the power-ups tend to appear in the same places, but whih power-ups appear is totally random. In one particularly absurd case, the game started the second stage by giving me two extra lives. Secondly, there's an old bugbear typical of a shooting game this old, the "slippery slope" of losing all one's power-ups on death as well as being sent back to a checkpoint, meaning the loss of one life makes progress incredibly difficult. Finally, there's a weird bug I found. The best weapon power-up is the 2-way/3-way shot offered by a white letter L. Collecting once gives you 2-way shots, collecting twice gives 3-way.Collecting a third, however, demotes the player back to a single stream of shots.

In conclusion, I can only really recommend Andorogynous if you're looking for a true challenge. It is a good game, that' high in quality in most respects, but like I said, it's brutally, insanely hard.

Gyakuten!! Puzzle Bancho (Arcade)

The title of this game actually tells you a lot about it. It's a puzzle game, and the characters are banchos (that is, a certain kind of tough teenage delinquent that had its heyday in the 70s and 80s, and have a bunch of attatched stereotypes). Also, I'm pretty sure that "gyakuten" means something along the lines of "comeback" or "reversal", and there's a pretty good mechanic relating to that in this game.

But before I get on to the mechanics, I want to talk about how great it looks. It's made by Fuuki, and like their most well-known games, Asura Blade and its sequel Asura Buster, it's full of large character sprites and very bold and vibrant colours. I don't know how they do it, but something about the colour in Fuuki's games really bursts forth from the screen, and Puzzle Bancho is no exception to that. The designs of the characters and the world they inhabit is well-done, too, being extremely exagerrated caricatures of bancho stereotypes. There's also a sukeban (female bancho) character, and I'm sure I've mentioned before how mysteriously absent they tend to be from videogames, so that's nice too.

As for the mechanics, it's a versus-style puzzle game of the sort that sprung up in droves in the wake of Puyo Puyo. Coloured blocks fall from above, and react when placed together in groups of three. The blocks come in large and small variants, and upon "reaction", the large blocks disappear, and the small blocks grow into large ones. Obviously, this opens up a new way to make chains (and as is usual for these games, chaining is the most important thing): if three small blocks react and grow into large ones, those large blocks will instantly react again and disappear.

By now, you might wonder where the "comeback" concept comes into things. Like most games of this type, there's garbage blocks that fall upon the opponents of skilled players. When a large block disappears while touching a garbage block, the garbage block becomes a small block of the same colour. With proper planning, a good (or very lucky) player can use the garbage blocks to form monstruous chains that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Although it's a good game with no real downsides, I can't really recommend Gyakuten!! Puzzle Bancho. Unless you really love versus puzzlers and want to play every one, or if you really love the aesthetic, it's just not different enough or any better than the likes of Puyo Puyo or Magical Drop.

Chou Shoujuu Mecha MG (DS)

If any development studios could be considered auteurs, Sandlot would definitely be among them. There are a few things their games tend to feature: giant things (especially robots), destructible environments, unorthodox control schemes, huge amounts of missions and similarly huge amount of options with regards to how players tackle those missions.

Chou Shoujuu Mecha MG has all of these things. You might have gathered this from the title, but it's a game about giant robots. Specifically, it's a game about controlling giant robots. This might seem an odd distinction to make, since most games are about controlling things, but CSMMG takes it to a new level. There are many selectable mecha in the game, and they each have unique control schemes.

In what must be one of the best uses of a touch screen gimmick, though all the mecha use the d-pad or face buttons to move around, they each have a unique control panel on the DS's bottom screen. The control panels all have various switches, buttons, dials and other stuff for controlling weapons and other functions the mecha have.

They aren't just lazy reskins, either: each one is different to all the others, there's a robot samurai that turns into a racecar, a giant toy robot that has powerful weapons, but needs to be regularly wound up, a bow-wielding robot that has you pulling back and releasing arrows on the touchscreen.

The variety also stretches to the missions. There's the obvious combat missions, against gangs of generic enemies, as well as solo mecha with similar diversity in design as your own, there's moving huge objects around, destroying stuff, races, contests to destroy more stuff than your rival and so on.

I definitely recommend Chou Shoujuu Mecha MG: it's fun, there's tons of stuff to do, and it looks great. The only problem with it is that i can't really talk more about it without just listing the cool things that are in it.

Kaze no Notam (Playstation)

You might have already seen the boxart and title screen for this game posted on tumblr before. For some reason, though, no-one seems to have actually taken any in-game screenshots, and with the exception of a miserable, point-missing review on GameFAQs, no-one seems to have written on the game, either.

So what you probably aleady know is that it's a game about riding around in a hot air balloon. It's a product of Artdink, who seemed to be having something of an experimental period in the mid-90s, with this along with other non-traditional games like Aquanaut's Holiday and Tail of the Sun. So, what you might be wondering is how they made a game out of Hot Air Ballooning, and the answer is: they barely did. 

The biggest unique point of Kaze no Notam is its controls. The player can't just steer their balloon about as they like, and are instead subject to the whims of the winds. A column on the right side of the screen shows the direction of the wind at different altitudes, and the only direct control the player has over their balloon is to ascend and descend to try and keep themselves in their desired air current. 

There are a few different game modes: finding a target on the ground and shooting it, shooting at three widespread points to make a huge triangle, and shooting down other balloons. None of them are particularly engaging though, but that's okay, since they only seem to be included as a token concession towards traditional videogamery, and the aforementioned controls mean that trying to beat times or play efficiently is a fool's errand. 

The real point of Kaze no Notam is to just leisurely fly around the maps, sightseeing and relaxing. The maps are huge, and full of cool stuff to see: futuristic cities, mountain-topping mansions, ruins of lost civilisations, and so on. The game lets players pick any of the maps right from the start, and also gives a choice from a few different times of day and weather conditions. As if to really hammer home the point that the game is more about aesthetics and mood than it is about mechanics and challenge, neither the time nor weather options actually affect the gameplay at all.

I definitely recommend that you seek out and play Kaze no Notam, for two reasons. The first is that it's a perfect example of how a videogame can be more than just its mechanics, and the second that it's a great little time capsule of a time when the advent of textured polygons was widening the scope of the kinds of games that could exist, and before the risk-minimising homogeneity of large-budget game development had sanitised and narrowed the scope back down.

   This game is also known as "Notam of Wind"

SEGA Master System Brawl (Mega Drive)

So, this is a homebrew, by a guy named Bonaf on the SMSPower forums. It's pretty good, too. The concept is that it takes characters from a bunch of the Master System's most iconic games, and puts them in a one-on-one fighting game, using only the abilities they have in their original games. (If I remember rightly, there was a similar fangame made for PC by a Japanese developer years ago, but with Famicom characters).

The roster is surprisingly big, and contains most of the characters you'd think of first when you think of the Master System, from SEGA's big names like Alex Kidd, Opa Opa, Joe Musashi and Sonic down to lesser-known heroes like Psycho Fox and Master of Darkness' Dr. Social. The only quibbles I have with the roster are that the absence of any characters from Masters of Combat or Virtua Fighter The Animation seems a bit odd, and that Bonaf has used Riki from Black Belt, rather than Kenshiro from Hokuto no Ken. (Though there are some little nods to HnK in Riki's pre-fight quote and winpose).

The presentation is pretty good. Obviously, the music and most of the graphics are taken from various Master System games, so though they won't meet the usual high MD standards, they're still colourful and charming. There are some original graphics, though: each character has a winpose, and though I'm not 100% certain on this, in think they're all-new.

Now for the most important part: how the game actually plays. The controls are simple: there's a jump button, an attack button and a "special" button. The special button only seems to be used by one character though: Psycho Fox uses it to change between forms. Obviously, every character's movements and attacks are different, since they've all been taken from different games and even different genres, and as a result, the balance isn't really that great. Certain characters (Sonic, Opa Opa, and Steve (of My Hero fame) in particular) totally dominate against almost any opponents, while others (Bean, Dr. Social, Wang) can struggle to land a single hit on their opponents.

What I don't want you to take from this is that SMS Brawl is a bad game, because it's not. Despite the balance issues, it's a ton of fun to play, and a great love letter to a system that doesn't get the love it deserves, especially on the NES-worshipping internet, and I totally recommend that you go get it and play it.

Lei Nu Ji Shen (Game Boy Color)

It seems like it's been a long time since I featured a Game Boy game, and even longer since I featured a Chinese pirate original. Lei Nu Ji Shen (possibly also known as "Future Robot") stands out from the usual Chinese crowd by eschewing most of their common flaws.

As far as I can tell, though the look of the main character (and the game in general) is definitely heavily influenced by 90s mecha anime, the setting is original. The visual presentation in general is of a particularly high standard, with nice backgroundsand detailed sprites. There are also some amazing looking full screen graphics for an intro and ending and also for static post-boss screens. The music doesn't live up to the looks though, being a shrill, beeping cacophony.

The game itself is a cut above the norm too, as the controls are tight, if not original, and the game is actually at a playable level of difficulty. The way your robot plays is just like Megaman: he can jump, he can shoot three normal shots or one charge shot, and he can dash/slide by pressing down and jump together. The only addition is that the robot in this game can also double jump. There's even an idle animation, which is just another way Lei Nu Ji Shen shows the extra bit of polish it has above its peers.

The stage design is unfortunately the game's weakest point after the music, as every stage consists of walking from left to right, while constantly shooting and occasionally jumping over a bottomless pit. Even the combat is boring, since there's rarely ever more than one enemy onscreen at a time. The boss fights add a bit of variety, though the stages between them seem to be incredibly long.

Although Lei Nu Ji Shen is, as I've said, a lot better than the usual pirate original, especially the ones that appear on 8-bit consoles, I can't recommend it. Even though it does look really great, it's just not very exciting to play at all.

Sukeban Deka II: Shoujo Tekkamen Densetsu (Master System)

Or if you'd prefer, "Delinquent Girl Cop II: Legend of the Girl in the Iron Mask". I should also let the uninitiated among you know that this game isn't a sequel to an earlier Sukeban Deka title, but is based on the second Sukeban Deka TV series, which sees a girl named Yoko Godai, who spent her childhood with her head trapped in an iron mask, taking up the Saki Asamiya codename and becoming the second Sukeban Deka, in the hopes of finding the reasons and culprits behind her stolen childhood. It's an excellent show, and is currently being fansubbed by The Skaro Hunting Society, should any of you be curious.

The game presents a heavily abridged version of the TV show's plot, split into adventure segments and beat em up segments. Unfortunately, the adventure segments make up the bulk of the game, and though I admit that it's a genre that doesn't especially appeal to me at the best of times, Sukeban Deka II's adventure segments are of an especially old-school flavour. There are very few clues as to what is supposed to be done, and though there is an english fan-translation, you'll still probably want a guide to save the tedious effort of going to every room and clicking on everything to find clues and items.

The beat em up sections are much shorter, and similarly old-fashioned, but they're pretty fun. Typically, you'll fight off a small gang of high school boys, before fighting a boss, and though the gang fights are pretty much all the same, the boss fights are really varied, though oddly, they seem to actually get easier as the game goes on.

There's also a couple of 3D maze sections, though they are really just that: empty mazes for the player to navigate that just pad the game out and fill a little bit of extra time.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this game unless you really love the TV series, or if you want a nice little slice of 80s Japanese pop-culture (for some reason, I associate SEGA's 8-bit consoles with the period far more than I do the Famicom, despite the Famicom's near-monolithic popularity in Japan at the time, and it's can't be denied that Sukeban Deka is an important artifact of the era.). But if you just want a Master System beat em up, there are far better examples, like Hokuto no Ken or Kung-fu Kid.

Curiosities Vol. 3 - Korean Compile Pirates

I hate to make stereotypes like this, but we're all aware that sometimes game developers and publishers in mainland Asian countries have somewhat lackadaisical stances towards other people's copyrights. It seems that Compile's Disc Station, specifically volume 12 of the PC series had, at one point, caught the eyes of a few arcade developers in South Korea.

This phenomenon was first brought to my attention by tumblr user Fergzilla, who told me about the first of the three games I'll be covering in this post: Yun Sung's Shocking. Shocking is a total, wholesale rip-off of the action RPG Gensei Kai Shingeki, with a new plot about a wolfman trying to regain his humanity tacked on. There's not really that much more to it: Shocking is a really close clone to its "inspiration", the biggest difference being that the graphics are lower resolution, since the original was a PC game, and Compile's PC games were (and are) reknowned for their great hi-res pixel art.

After some investigation into MAME ROMsets and history.dat, I found two Korean arcade games that are both knock-offs of the other big draw on Disc Station #12, Bomber Through Gogo! ~Jump Hero Gaiden 2~, but, unlike Shocking, neither is a direct clone, with different levels of variation from the original.

Firstly there's Bomb Kick, again by Yun Sung. Surprisingly, this game deviates the furthest from the original. Again, the graphics are much lower res than the original, but at least this time they're not direct rips of the original (except that some of the enemies definitely are). In fact, as far as I can tell, a good portion of the game's graphics are new. But also, there are a few enemy sprites that are clearly ripped from either the Mega Drive or SNES version of Disney's Aladdin, as well as a few background images that contain elements from the same, some disguised, some not so much.

The biggest difference between Bomb Kick and the original, though, is in the weapon deployment. In the original, pressing the fire button would drop a bomb on the ground, with a seperate kick button to send it enemy-bound. Bomb Kick has bombs being kicked by default, though they can still be dropped by pressing down and fire. Because of this, this is probably my favourite iteration of the formula, despite its combination of ugly new graphics and shameless stolen ones.

Finally, there's Dynamite Bomber from a company named Limenko. Mechanically, it's more faithful to Compile's original game, with bombing and kicking kept to seperate buttons, and I think that most, or possibly all of the graphics are either new, or at least somewhat disguised rips of graphics from the original game (the playable characters do look like rip-offs of Compile's Jump Hero characters, but I'm not sure if they're just similar designs or edited rips).

The problem is that this, combined with stage design that often places enemies on small, high-up platforms makes the game a bit of an awkward, labourious chore to play. It's a shame, as it does at least look a lot better than Bomb Kick.

So that's that, then. Two Korean companies both decided to plagiarise games from a relatively little-known series of discmags, and both chose games from the same volume of said discmags. What a world!

TV Animation X: Unmei no Tatakai (Playstation)

Although the advent of online play has made it pretty clear that I'm actually not very good at them at all, I've always loved fighting games, and the Psychic Force series found its way into my heart during my teenage years, as it put the actual licenced anime fighting games to which I had access at the time to shame: while Dragonball GT Final Bout offered vague approximations of well-known characters having slow, awkward battles in boring, lifeless arenas, Psychic force offered cool-looking original characters in flight, dashing around firing energy blasts at each other in a variety of cool-looking stages. The reason I'm talking about Psychic Force is because Unmei no Tatakai is essentially Psychic Force 3 in all but name and characters.

Not only does this game have the same concept and mechanics as the Psychic Force series, it even reuses a few graphical effects and fonts. But it's not just a simple re-skinning of Psychic Force 2/2012, it is a true sequel, with numerous tweaks and new elements. The biggest all-round tweak relates to the dash system. The Psychic Force games have two main kinds of dashing that can be done: a dash that goes in a straight line in any direction that's used for travelling around the arenas, and a semi-circular dash that's intended for dodging attacks at high speed and quickly ducking behind opponents. In the earlier games, dashing was executed by pressing both attack buttons at once, with the type of dash determined by the direction pressed, but Unmei no Tatakai has dashing mapped to the right shoulder buttons, R1 for the straight dash and R2 for the curved dodge.

Obviously, the entire cast is new, being taking from CLAMP's pre-apocalyptic saga X, but two of the characters in particular bring interesting new ideas to the table. Sword-weilding Arashi Kishu stands out from the rest of the cast by being a melee specialist, with vastly fewer projectile attacks, but with better range and power on her melee attacks than any of the other characters. Yuzuhira Nekoi's gimmick is hard to describe in text, but she comes accompanied by a large dog, and most of her projectile attacks are delivered in the form of that canine companion launching itself at her opponent like a missile. The difference this makes mechanically is that Nekoi and her dog are not always in the same direction in relation to the opponent, who can find themselves coming under attack from all directions.

The game's presentation is also worth writing about, as not only is it easily the best-looking 3D fighting game on the Playstation, with some really breath-taking stages which manage to be varied despite all being set in Tokyo, from a skyscraper encoiled by a huge electric dragon, to a peaceful shrine at night, to the misty, moonlit ruins of post-apocalyptic Tokyo in general. The character models all look pretty great, too, with plenty of detail, even close up. It doesn't stop with the graphics, either, as the soundtrack is also excellent, with some amazing music providing perfect accompaniment to the exciting, fast-paced super-powered battles taking place.

You've probably already worked this out, but TV Animation X: Unmei no Tatakai is an incredible game, that I strongly recommend without reservation.