Rayer Shoot (X68000)

Something the X68000 has a lot of (compared to most systems) is fan-made games based on anime, with a fair few of them being based on magical girl shows. There's a bunch of Sailor Moon fangames on there, as well as a relatively well-known one based on Akazukin Chacha. Rayer Shoot is another one of those, based (as you can probably tell from the very obivously fanart title screen) on CLAMP's series Magic Knight Rayearth. I'm not very familiar with the series, but I do know that it's about three schoolgirls who get whisked away to a magical fantasy land while on a school trip to the Tokyo Tower.

Anyway, despite the amateurish title screen, the game itself is really well presented. Almost commercial quality, even, with nice sprites, lots of colour, decent music, and even voice samples. I assume the samples must be recorded from the anime itself? I should really talk about how the game plays too, right? Well, it's no classic, but it's a pretty good effort.

It's a vertically-scrolling shooter, and the player has control of all three of the schoolgirl protagonists, though only one at a time. Each girl has a different weapon, and they each have a health bar, which slowly replenishes while tagged out. There's also an experience/levelling up system in lieu of power ups, though it seems to take a very very long time to get anywhere with it, and it'd definitely take a lot of skill to even try to keep your three girls' levels balanced.

In fact, playing the game takes a lot of skill in general: those health bars go down very quickly, and the enemies and their bullets are both high-speed and high-quantity. To get anywhere, players really do need to keep an eye on their helath bars and make tactical use of tagging in and out to recover as much health as possible, trying to keep the girl with the highest amount of health in play as much as possible. You also get a bomb attack which is different for each girl and recharges a short time after use.

Rayer Shoot is a fun, well presented game, as well as a nice little artifact of 90s anime fandom in Japan. I definitely recommend it, with the caveat that you go in expecting a merciless challenge.

Dragon Wang (SG-1000)

Pre-Final Fight beat em ups are interesting, in the same way that pre-Street Fighter II fighting games are, in that Final Fight kind of standardised the genre (I know Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun was also very influential, but FF was definitely a watershed moment). There were a few standard tropes before the afore-mentioned games, though: enemies that appeared at random rather than at planned intervals, standard enemies being one hit kills and generic chinese-style martial arts settings were more popular than the crime-ridden urban hells popularised by FF and NKK. Dragon Wang mostly follows this formula to a tee: each stage is some kind of multistory palace, with one-hit enemies running in from the sides of the screen at random.

The player has two attacks: kicks and flying kicks. Though the flying kicks never ever connect so they might as well not be there. Also though the SG-1000 controller has two buttons, they're both assigned to kick, forcing the player to press up to jump. Such a stupid, annoying little problem that's there for no reason at all. There's two kinds of regular enemies: guys who come right up to the player to kick, and guys who stand back and throw knives. Because of the random generation, though, the knife guys can sometimes show up at the worst times, surrounding the player from both sides, protected by walls of kicking guys.

The one unique gimmick the game has, though, is that rather than just go from left to right until reaching a boss at the end, they explore the floors of the palace seeking out bosses to fight to get keys and rescue the girl. The bosses all have their own health bars, and each has a gimmick, whether it's a weapon or the ability to teleport or being a robot. There's three bosses on the first stage, and each subsequent stage adds one. What's horrible about fighting the bosses is that there's no pattern or strategy to learn: they move and attack at random, so you just have to hope you're lucky enough to get enough attacks in to kill them before they do it to you. You health does get replenished after you beat them, though.

I wanted to like this game, it does have some charm and it looks really nice, as most SG-1000 games do, thanks to the system's idiosyncratic colour palette. Unfortunately, the more time spent playing it, the more obvious its flaws become,  and the more painful it gets to play.