GG Series Collection Plus (DS),Part 1

GG Series Collection Plus is a collection of 30 games, some of which are available individually on the DSiWare store, though a lot of them are exclusive to this cartridge. None of the games use the DS's touchscreen, and the collection can be compared to finding a huge box full of loose cartridges for a 16-bit console. Since the cartridge contains 30 games that are all fairly unique to each other, I'll be splitting the coverage of them into four posts, one for each of the collection's categories. First up is the Puzzle section, containing four games.

Conveyor Konpou
This game is set in a pastel-coloured penguin factory, and the player has to pack penguins into boxes that match their colours. This is done by moving a 2x1 cursor around, and switching the positions of boxes and penguins, in a manner similar to Tetris Attack/Panel de Pon. There's a combo mechanic, but rather than focussing entirely on pre-setting up multipart chains, it places its weight on just quickly packing massive amounts of penguins in quick succession, so it's better to place your efforts into gathering large groups of the same coloured penguins into one place before bringing a box in to clear them all in one go. It's a pretty good game, and it seems to build up points for unlocking games quicker than most of the others, which is helpful, as unlocking more games is a massive chore.

Energy Chain
Set in some kind of cube-based electrical circuit map, the aim of Energy Chain is to connect up the four pre-placed, immovable generators with lines of coloured blocks. Obviously, power can only travel along lines of uniform hue, and once a connection is made, the coloured blocks disappear, making room for more to be placed. It's not an exciting game, but it does have a certain kind of charm that only boring games have. It's not the worst game in this section, not at all.

Vertex
Very similar to the Konami classic Quarth, Vertex presents the player with simple shapes like squares and regular pentagons with missing vertices, which must be filled in as quickly as possible. Y shoots one vertex, X shoots two and A three. Over-verting results in the shapes quickly jutting downwards and in time-honoured tradition, once a shape crosses the line at the bottom, the player loses. Though the game generously gives three lives instead of an instant game over.

Black x Block
A game in which the player controls a little stick-person, who has to reach the exit on each stage by picking up, turning and placing large black blocks. I'll be totally honest, I'm terrible at this game and I don't enjoy playing it and the minimalist presentation leaves me a bit cold.

Vector
This one reminds me of Gunpey both mechanically and aesthetically, and like Gunpey, it doesn't really excite me. Blocks fall from above with little arrows on them, and the aim is to turn them so that the arrows point into lines, with 90 degree turns acceptable, and when a line is at least four blocks long, all the blocks will disappear. It's not a bad game, and it's pretty easy to set up mildly satisfying chains, but mild satisfaction is all it really offers. I don't dislike it as much as Black x Block, but it's not one I return to often.

Yuusha Puzzle
Yuusha Puzzle is an RPG-themed colour-matching game (except that instead of colours, you're matching RPG equipment). You're presented with a stream of typical fantasy RPG monsters, who attack by dropping garbage blocks into your well, as well as by doing Tetris Battle Gaiden-style status effects like blocking your view, restricting movement and so on. To fight back, you match items. Weapons like wands, swords and spears just straight up damage the monsters, with more damage dealt by matching up more at once. Sheilds and helmets and other bits of armour erase any garbage blocks touching them when they go, dealing a bit of counterattack damage to the enemy for each garbage block deleted this way. It takes way too long to get difficult, and it repeats monsters far too much, but for some reason, when I play it, I'll often end up becoming enthralled with it for long periods of time.

Running Battle (Master System)

You probably already know this, but the Master System in the 90s was in an unusual position. It was long dead in Japan, and never really took off at all in North America, but in Europe, South America and Australia, it still had enough of an established userbase that it was still getting games released in those territories. While many of those games were made in those territories, there were still games in the strange position of being made in Japan but never sold there, mainly by one of SEGA's subsidiaries SIMS. Running Battle is one of these, as was Masters of Combat, which I've previously covered.

Anyway, Running Battle is a single-plane beat em up about a guy named Gray  seeking out the killers of his partner (and possibly brother?) Brody. It's pretty standard and generic: walk from left to right, kill lots of the same enemy, then do it again. It sometimes throws in an extra element, like wall-mounted guns (that seem to hold an oddly generous amount of extra lives if you destroy them). There's also some power-ups like guns and super strength and a very rare power up that allows Gray to run forward at high speed, ignoring obstacles and pits and killing enemies on contact for five seconds. The most interesting thing about Running Battle, however, is that it feels like an unfinished mish-mash of assets the devs just had lying around.

The game starts in a typical beat em up ghetto stage, though all the stages after it take place inside sci-fi enemy bases. The first few bosses ignore this sci-fi theme, being a dwarf pirate, a cowboy, and a Samurai, each with their own individually themed room. The last two bosses fit better, though: a psychic super-villain and some kind of giant tank thing that's so big, the health bars have to become numbers at the bottom of the screen to make room for it.

So, that thematic jumble explains the "mish mash", but as for the game feeling unfinished? It's not massively glitchy, but rather there's a few little things that imply that the game wasn't tested or balanced as much as it could have been. For example, throughout most of the game, there are doors at the end of the stages. To go through them, the player stands in front and presses up on the d-pad, like a million other games. At the end of the first stage, there's a door, but to finish the stage, the player just walks past it and off the edge of the screen.

There's also the issue of balance. Like I said earlier, the game is really generous with the extra lives once the wall-mounted guns show up, and this seems to be because the last two bosses take very little damage from the player's attacks, but also deal massive amounts of damage with hard to avoid attacks. So the extra lives seem to be a sort of half-solution to this problem, turning te final boss battles into battles of attrition, in which the player has to hope they've saved up enough lives to survive and gradually wear down the bosses.

In conclusion, I don't recommend Running Battle at all. It's not painful to play, there just isn't really anything interesting about it, and it generally feels like it was quickly knocked out on the cheap.