Maze of Flott (Arcade)

Maze of Flott is a bizarre game. Not in any of the usual senses: mechanically, it's plays like an attempt at making a slightly more involved and complex version of the traditional arcade maze game, and there's nothing overtly surreal about the aesthetic either. What bizarre is the combination of the two. You play as a little red car that drives around cities looking for keys, and avoiding/destroying other cars along the way. You also have a fuel gauge, and there are petrol stations dotted around where you can refuel, which costs money. Also, unlike the cars in Pacar (another, much older, car-themed maze game), in Maze of Flott, your car just moves like any other maze game character, being able to instantly turn 180 degrees and go in the other direction.

Money and keys are both obtained inside buildings. Now, although these buildings appear to be things you'd find in normal cities, like banks, supermarkets, casinos, and so on from the outside, on the inside they actually contain dungeon-like mazes (or maze-like dungeons), full of traps, treasures, and secret passageways. Exactly which maze is in which building is different every time you play, though there are only a few possible layouts to encounter. The keys are also in different buildings each time, and every possible layout has the potential to contain a key.

This means the player has to go into each building and thoroughly explore the mazes within until they find the number of keys needed to proceed to the next stage. This kind of balances out with the fact that every mazes contains lots of treasure, whether the key's there or not, and treasure gives both points and money, and money can be spent to buy back the fuel wasted on going round all these mazes.

The big problem with this game comes in the form of some unfair inconsistency. When you're in the mazes, colliding with most of the traps will take a chunk off your fuel gauge, with the exception being that falling down an open trap door means losing a life. While outside, driving around the cities, colliding with other vehicles is instant death. Furthermore, the vehicles are faster, more numerous and less predictable than the maze traps.

I can't really recommend this game, nothing about it is really interesting enough to be able to overlook its numerous flaws.

Hokuto no Ken: Hokuto Shinken Denshousha no Michi (DS)

I'm sure anyone reading a blog like this will be familiar with Hokuto no Ken (also known as Fist of the North Star) from one place or another, and even if you aren't, you'll probably have played or watched or read something that was influenced by (or just straight up stole from) it. Even today, decades after the original comic finished, it still gets licenced videogames, cartoons and other stuff. This isn't even the only Hokuto no Ken game on the DS, though the other one is a Pachinko simulator, so it barely counts.

This one, however, is what could most simply be described as an interactive comic. If that brings up unpleasant images of tedious visual novels and the like, don't worry, it's nothing like that. Instead, you're shown panels from the original comic, and when a fight breaks out, you have to perform various touchscreen things to get through it. Since this is a Hokuto no Ken game, the most common thing the game wants you to do is hit the badguys' pressure points in quick succession, but there's also various other things, like carefully tracing lines or circles, to simulate blocking and countering attacks, as well as variations on pressure point-hitting, like hitting them in a certain order, or hitting a single point many times as quickly as possible.

In fact, as you progress through the game, there'll be chapters in which you plays as characters besides Kenshiro; namely, Rei and Raoh. Raoh, being a fellow Hokuto Shinken practioner, plays in much the same way as Kenshiro: hitting pressure points and making guys explode. Rei's Nanto Suichoken attacks are executed differently, though, with the player having to precisely slash across thin lines to cut enemies apart. I don't know if making Rei's stages significantly harder was the developers' intention, but it definitely came out that way.

Though it's a fun game, there are some negative points: the production values are very low, as not only is there no actual animation in-game, but there's also some stupid little errors, like how easy it is to accidentally start a new game on the title screen, which immediately deletes any progress you'd previously made. Also, when replaying stages, the game simply saves the most recent score you got on a stage, rather than always keeping the highest. There's also the fact that all the extras, like the character profiles and quiz mini-game are useless to the Japanese-illiterate, though it'd be unfair to blame the game for that, really.

If you're a big HnK fan, and you can pick this up cheaply (which you probably can), I definitely recommend giving it a try. It's a fun little game, and the colourised comic panels do look really great, too.