Chiteisenki (X68000)

Chiteisenki is a bit of a mixed bag. There's a lot to like about it, but there's also a few annoying little flaws that can easily attract your most fevered hatred. It's a giant robot shooting game by Sprite, wo are mostly known for fangames featuring anime characters, like Ayu Ayu Panic and Akazukin Cha Cha Cha.

You guide your robot through the stages, which look like platform stages, though you can freely fly around them, and your task is to find and destroy the various enemy towers that sit around the stages motionless, firing their weapons and spawning enemies. Each destroyed tower also yields a futuristic treasure chest, that will contain one of the various items, and sometimes also an enemy. Destroy them all and the exit to the next stage opens.

There are a few unique points to make Chiteisenki stand out. The first you'll encounter is the game's use of gravity and recoil: you're constantly being pulled down by gravity, and the recoil from firing your gun knocks you backwards a little. It's just a little touch, but it's contantly affecting how you control your movement. The other main unique point is the extra life system. At the end of each stage, you'll play a roulette game. By default, the prizes on offer are four empty boxes, two items worth 1000 points and two items that will reduce your health by one point. However, one of the items that can be found in the treasure chests is a small bouncy creature, a lot like the Haro robots from the Gundam franchise. Each one of these you collect replaces one of the empty boxes in the roulette, and should you get one from the roulette, it's worth an extra life. Unfortunately, these items can be shot and killed when they appear, and if you do kill one, not only do you lose that one, you lose all of them you have in stock. Also, collecting more than four of them doesn't really have any extra benefit.

The one big problem with the game is how frustrating it can be. Using the Haro items as an example, sometimes a chest will contain one of them and an enemy, and it's way too easy to accidentally shoot the item while trying to kill the enemy. There's also the fact that you start each stage and each life with only three out of your five shields in place (or two if you were unlucky in the previous stage's roulette). And there's also the fact that side from the enemies that are already in the stages, and the enemies that spawn from the towers, a lot of the stages also feature enemies constantly spawning at random from thin air.

All in all, Chiteisenki is a fairly average game. If you think you got the patience for it, it's definitely interesting enough to be worth a look. Oddly, it also has a port to the GBA, though I haven't played that yet. One last note: I did actually get further than the second set of stages, but for no obvious reason, Fraps decided to stop taking screenshots at that point, and I didn't have it in me to start again.

Croket! Kindan no Kinka Box (Playstation)

So, Croket is based on an anime series from 2003, about the eponymous boy going on a quest to seek out some kind of special wish-granting coins called Kinka. Or so the summary on anidb says, at least. Only a single episode has been subbed, apparently, and I haven't seen it.

In this game (the only one on a home console, though there are a bunch on the GBA and DS), youtake control of Croket, and take part in some kind of fighting-themed gameshow/tournament arrangement. Each stage sees you in a top-down location with other characters, and for the first couple of stages, there's a certain amount of Kinka you need to get to finish the stage. Eventually, I reached a stage with some kind of scavenger hunt arrangement going on, and I couldn't work out the win condition. On the map screen, you see how many Kinka the top 6 fighters have, and you go about looking for them. Walking into another character on the map takes things into a side-view platform/fighting arrangement feeling a lot like the Digimon Battle Spirit games.

In the fighting segments, there are treasure chests that fling Kinka about when opened, and you can also knock the Kinka out of your opponent either with certain moves, or just with sustained beatings. Of course, the winner of the bout also takes a portion of their opponent's Kinka as a prize. Unfortunately, you'll end up having to fight the same opponents multiple times in a stage to get the required amount, and to make things worse, the smart player will quickly work out which characters they can most easily beat, and follow them around the map "bullying" them until they have enough Kinka to end the stage.

The fighting controls are simple, though they do have one odd little quirk: there's buttons for weak and strong attacks, as well as a third button that's only used in conjunction with direction inputs for specials and supers. Specials use up a third of your super meter, while supers use up the whole thing, but if you connect with your super, your opponent will drop a lot of coins, and coins fill up your meter.

It's hard to believe that this is not only a Playstation game, but one that came so late in the console's life in 2003, as it would easily fit in among the many anime licenced games on the Super Famicom. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, of course, it just strikes me as very unusual that not only was a licenced game being released on the original Playstation years after the PS2's release, but it's also such a dated-looking title. I can only assume the developers weren't given much of a budget.

Croket! Kindan no Kinka Box is a fairly playable game, if you're curious about it, it won't hurt to give it a try, but you're not missing out on anything special if you don't. One last note, though: like I said, I've never sen the anime on which this game is based, so maybe it's pretty different, but the game's premise heavily reminds me of the hunter exam arc near the start of Hunter X Hunter, particularly the part where all the candidates have to hunt each other down to steal enough badges to pass. I don't know if the anime was just a cheap, cynical cash-in, but the game kind of makes it seem that way.