Curiosities Vol. 4 - Gambling!

Gambling games, especially ones that are played for real money are inherently bad. Not just from a moral standpoint, but also because they're entirely designed to drain money away from the player, rather than to be fun, well balanced games (the same applies to modern-day mobile phone games with real money currencies too, in my opinion.) But terrible games are still games, so lt's look at a few!

First up is Koro Koro Quest, by Takumi (who are better known for making various shooting games, including Gigawing, one of my all-time favourites). It's by far the simplest of the three games I'll be covering in this post, and it also feels like it's the least fair. On the plus side, it does look really nice, with big, colourful RPG/fantasy-themed graphics. After putting in your coins, you take part in a simple dice battle against a randomly selected monster, rolling two six-sided dice each, with the highest roller winning. You can tap your button to tamper with the dice in some way (it's not totally clear what it does, but you do seem to have a higher chance of winning doing this). If you win, you can either cash out or go on to the next, more chellenging battle. It looks nice, but like I said, there's not much to it and it's entirely based on luck.

Next is Crusher Mako-chan, also by Takumi, and also looking pretty nice. The premise here is a bit more silly: you play as Mako-chan, a superhumanly strong little girl, who has to punch various large objects to solve various problems (destroy a toppling skyscraper before it hits the ground, destroy a dam so the water can put out a fire, etc.). You do this by hammering on the button as quickly as possible, in a Track and Field sort of way. Even if you fail, sometimes you'll get a second chance to turn Mako-chan into a huge muscle-bound monster and win anyway. After stages, you get the same choice to cash out or carry on. It feels a lot fairer than Koro Koro Quest, and as a result, it's more fun to play too.

Finally, we have Witch, also known as Pinball Champ 95, by Vic Tokai. It;s totally different ot the other two games in this post, being an odd combination of pinball and bingo. After you put in your coins, you can then bet on lines on a bingo-style grid of numbers. Then, you play pinball! You have a time limit and only a single ball, and the aim is to hit the bumpers, which are randomly flashing numbers. Hit a bumper, and you cross off the number it was on on your bingo card. There's also Devil Crush-esque bonus screens hidden about the place, too. Although the strong gameplay element makes Witch feel like it's a pretty fair game, on all the times I've played it, I've never managed to fill a single line.

So that's gambling games, then! I might cover some more of these in the future, if I find out about any more that are interesting.

Ijlimae-jeon: Manpa Skijeok-pyeon (PC)

I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I love sprite scaling as an aesthetic, and that's definitely helped by the fact that a lot of sprite scaling games are all-time classics like Space Harrier, Outrun, Night Striker, and so on. I should have known there'd be some terrible ones out there somewhere, though, and Iljimae-jeon is one of them.

You'll have guessed from the title (and the presence of Korean text on the title screen above) that it's a Korean game, and from what I've read online, the plot is about a character from ancient China finding themselves sent through time to futuristic Japan. Obviously, I don't know how accurate that is, as while there's a long text intro (thankfully skippable), I can't read Korean.

So, you pick one of three characters, and set out into a game that's kind of like a mix between Space Harrier and Cabal: your character is confined to moving left and right across the bottom of the screen, while aiming a crosshair all around it, but they're also constantly running forward while the enemies come running from the distance in the opposite direction. starting with the superficial complaints, it's probably the ugliest game of this type I've ever played, with the ground looking like the worst example of SNES Mode 7 graphics you can think of, and the enemy sprites looking small and undetailed even when they get up close.

The enemies definitely will get up close, too, as your feeble heroes takes several shots to defeat even the most common jobbers among the enemy force. Even the delivery boys carrying the power-ups take a fair few shots to take down. The bosses, as you can imagine, are even worse. There's no health ar given for them, and their attacks don't change as you fight them, so you just spend long, agonising minutes shooting them and avoiding their attacks (except for the ones that are unavoidable, like when the second boss swooces all the way across the bottom of the screen) until suddenly, they explode and the stage ends.

One final note, I've never been given as much trouble getting a PC game to run as I have with this one, not even other Korean DOS games, like Still Hunt. Part of that is down to the fact that I never owned a PC as a kid so I don't have any experience running DOS in general, though. I wouldn't normally bring this kind of thing up, but this game is so terrible, and it took such effort to be able to play it that it was just adding insult to injury.

Obviously, I don't recommend this game at all.