Dragon Unit (Arcade)

Dragon Unit was released in 1989 by the little-known Athena co., and it's an odd kind of hybrid platformer/beat em up. Odd because rather than being a platformer with beat em up elements, there are instead two kinds of stages: straight platformer stages and other stages that are mainly a long, flat corridor of enemies, but have two Guardian Heroes-esque planes to switch between by pushing the joystick up or down.

Other than that, and the fact that the shield the protagonist is carrying actually does block small projectiles, it's pretty unremarkable, mechanically speaking. There's lots of enemies, a whole range of power-ups and different weapons to collect and all the typical stuff you'd expect from a 1989 arcade platformer. Its charm lies in its presentation. At the most basic level, you can plainly see that the sprites are big, the colours are bright and lurid, and it looks pretty nice, though the black outlines on everything are a little ugly. Looking further than that, there's nice little touches, like how your knight's armour gradually falls apart as your health decreases until he's in his underwear, like a more gradual version of Arthur from Ghouls and Ghosts.

There's also a lot of visual variety in Dragon Unit. Even though there are only six fairly short stages, they all look completely different to each other, and mostly have their own sets of enemies, who are mostly big and always ugly and evil-looking, which is nice too. It's a game that mostly gets by on its atmosphere, the ugliness of the enemies, the overly saturated colours, and so on really make it stand out. At the same time, it's all very rough around the edges, I don't know whether it's down to a lack of experience on the part of the developers, or maybe budget or time contraints, but the whole thing looks, sounds and feels very unpolished.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, and I'd say it actually adds to the game's appeal. It could have given the impression of a game lazily knocked out to fill a quota, but instead it feels more like a labour of love, made by a team whose passion and creativity slightly outweighed their technical abilities. I'd say it's definitely worth a look and a credit feed through at the very least. There's apparently also a NES port, called Castle of Dragon. I haven't played it, but I can't imagine it being a game that makes the transition to such an underpowered console gracefully.

King Colossus (Mega Drive)

It's often an annoying cliche to compare 16-bit action RPGs to A Link to the Past, especially when lazy critics accuse the likes of Story of Thor and Soliel of being "Zelda-clones", when the only similarities are at the most superficial level. But in this case, there's a good point to be made, though it's done by contrasting this one with Nintendo's classic. The thing is, they're good  examples of the differences in the design philosophies typical to their host consoles.

First off, there's the tone and aesthetic of each game: if ALttP can be likened to a fun, colourful adventure anime that gets dubbed on the cheap and aired at 6am, then King Colossus is more like a grim late 80s fantasy OAV that gets dubbed with extra swear words and released on tape by Manga Video. That is, while Zelda does have some dark elements, it's mainly bright and colourful, with the tone being skewed towards fun and adventure. In contrast, King Colossus has your orphaned hero being sold into slavery by the old man that raised him, being forced to fight to the death in an arena as part of a ritual honouring an evil god. (And that's just the start of your hardships).

The contrasts carry over into each game's structure, too: unlike ALttP, KC has no currency to accumulate, nor does it have a large open world to explore. It's a lot more linear and arcadey in its execution. Pretty much the entire game is spent in dungeons fighting monsters (or in the colosseum fighting your fellow captives), with only short expository interludes between them. There's still a little exploration to be done within the dungeons, but the meat of the game is combat. It's fortunat, then, that the combat is pretty good. There's an array of different weapons to find, and not only do the get stronger as you go through the game, but they also attack in different ways. There's swords, axes and spears that attack in front of the player at different lengths, as well as crossbows that shoot over long distances, flails that attack in a circle around the player and others.

The only criticism that can really be levelled towards King Colossus is that it is a little bit too easy. I'm most of the way through the game at the time of writing (and I do intend to eventually see it through to the end), and I've only died at two or three points in the game. Other than that, though, it's a fun action RPG that's a little darker in tone than the usual and it's worth a try if you're curious.

一>◇ (XBox 360)

So, I don't know how to pronounce this game's title, and I had to copy and paste the characters from the XBox website. Thanks, Hitmark Brothers. Anyway, it's a weird little puzzle/strategy/art game thing in which you play as a giant green hand that holds dominion over a small island inhabited by green bean-like creatures.

The game's presentation is almost aggressively committed to standing out and being strange: obviously there's the bizarre title, and then once you start the game, you see that a lot of the graphics are digitised photos. The presentation is the main part of the game's appeal, though I'm sure that that was intentional. It definitely feels more like an "interactive creative work" than an actual game, even though it has various gamey elements, like a score and a game over screen.

Anyway, you play as this giant green hand, and you have various actions in your repertoire. You can move left and right across the landscape as well as up or down (though vertically, there are only two possible positions). You can also grab objects, push the bean-people into the ground, flick objects, and pick up and drop bean-people and water. The object of the game is to plant trees, flick their leaves so that more bean-people fall out, and then grab the leaves and then vigorously rub the tree until it becomes a wooden spaceship. You then grab a few of the bean-people and drop them into the spaceship, which will take off a short time later. The game ends when you have no more bean-people left on the island, and you won't last more than a few launches, as the island very gradually shirnks over time (unless there's a way to reverse this process that I haven't figured out).

一>◇ is an amusing enough distraction for a short time, but you'll definitely be able to see everything it has to offer in the standard XBLIG 8 minute free preview. So unless you want to show the developers your appreciation, there's no need to pay the 69p for the full version.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Vol. 7!

Grave Pobbery (Masahiro, 1997)
This game is very unpolished, but mechanically it seems to be mostly finished. It's a pretty simple game in which your little polygon man enters stages that each contain a few stone blocks. Using your pickaxe, you smash every block in the stage, and fight off the ghosts and snakes hiding within, either by repeatedly hitting them with your pickaxe, or by using items, also found inside the blocks. There's crosses to get rid of ghosts, and bombs to kill the snakes (and handily, destroy any blocks caught in their blast, too).  It's a mildly amusing game, and its simple nature and tiny amount of assets used make it feel like the kind of thing someone might make for a quick game jam today.

Alien Looter (Ben James, 1998)
Alien Looter is a pretty simple concept: take Space Invaders, add power-ups and remove the dan kire so that the player can shoot as quickly as they can press the fire button. The result is a game where stages last only a few loud and cacophonus seconds, and you can blast through fifty or more stages in only a couple of minutes.  It's nothing especially fancy, but it is a lot of fun while it lasts.

Oyaji (T. Munemasa, 1998)
This is a weird one: you play as an old, balding man wearing only a pair of underpants, and you're trapped in a brick maze with some hovering satellite dish robot things. As far as I can tell, your task is to smash all the robots, but awful collision detection coupled with your long, slow attack animation make this very difficult. Oyaji is graphically impressive with its texture maps and such, but not very fun to play at all.

Diver (Nahoisa Kamei, 1997)
Diver looks and feels like a game from a 1980s 8-bit computer, specifically the kind popular with Japanese hobbyists, like the PC88 and such. It's a very simple game: you play as a diver, diving into the sea to get piles of gold, though you can only stay under for a few seconds at a time. Every time you get a pile of gold, another one appears, as well as a few more rocks to get in the way. The main problem with Diver is that there's not really any challenge, unless you play chicken and try to get multiple piles in a single dive, but there's no real reason to do this, since they'll only be worth one point each whatever you do. Adding a score multiplier or something to incentivise this kind of risky play would be a massive improvement.

Pang: Magical Michael (DS)

So, Pang (also known as Buster Bros. and Pomping World) is a series that was once fairly well-known, but seemingly got completely forgotten once the 32-bit consoles came long in the mid-90s.  For those of you who don't already know, it is, at its most basic, a kind of mix between Space Invaders and Asteroids, where the player (or players) run around the bottom of the screen firing upwards at malevolent balloons, that split into smaller balloons when shot, until they're at their smallest size, at which they just pop. The aim of each stage is to get rid of every balloon without any of them hitting you.

2010's Magical Michael was the first new Pang game in ten years, and in the years since, there haven't been any more of them. It's a shame, because it's easily the best in the series. The two main modes in the game are tour mode, which is the traditional stage-based affair, themed around visiting famous landmarks from around the world and freeing them of their inflated spherical oppressors, and panic mode, introduced in 2000's Mighty Pang, which is an endless survival mode with no platforms, items or ladders, in which balloons endlessly fall from the sky, with the player just popping them, scoring points and staying alive as long as possible.

The reason that this is the best version of Pang is mainly down to its host hardware. The two screens of the DS allow for a wider array of stage designs in tour mode: single-screen stages, stages in which the balloons have the height of both screens to bounce in, and split-level stages, where the player has to judge when and how to climb the ladder from one screen to the other.

To be honest, though, I don't particularly care for tour mode. Panic mode is a lot more enjoyable, being a pure score-based game of skill. There are two main scoring mechanics: one based on which order you pop balloons (more points for consecutively popping same-sized balloons) and a bonus that gradually increases as long as you don't fire off a shot that hits nothing. Panic mode doesn't really gain anything massive from being done on two screens, though, other than the fact that it takes place in a series of extravagant high-ceilinged halls that look amazing, despite being heavily stylised static artwork. It does, however, benefit greatly from being on a handheld. It's just a great game to have on hand to play for a few minutes while waiting for something else to happe, and a handheld console is a lot more convenient and logical towards that end than an arcade cabinet.

Pang: Magical Michael is a good game and a worthwhile (though simple) update to an old series. It's also available for practically nothing, so I definitely recommend seeking it out.

School Fighter (Game Boy Color)

So, for years this unlicenced Chinese game has been sitting in the Game Boy Color romsets, mocking us all with the promise of educational pugilism. Booting the rom would let the inquisitive player see the intro and title screen, but nothing more. Until, that is, earlier this week, when long-time friend and ally of this blog Takashi partially cracked School Fighter's copy protection. Only the first two stages are playable, but that lets us see the game in action, and get a good grip on its mechanics and design.

So what's it like? It's a single-plane beat em up, with some occasional platform elements, and it's clearly heavily influenced, both aesthetically and mechanically by SNK's King of Fighters games and by Technos' Kunio-kun games. The plot, as far as I can tell (there's no text in the intro, and if there was, it'd be in Chinese, and I wouldn't be able to read it anyway), is that all the school's sports teams have been taken over and corrupted by appropriately-themed monsters. So in the first stage, you fight baseball monsters, the second has volleyball monsters, and the title card for the third stage promises judo monsters. Judging by the number of monsters that appear in the intro, it looks like there's six stages in total, with boxing, kendo and a final stage lying in wait.

You get three characters to choose from, though as far as I can tell, the only differences are aesthetic: a girl, a boy, and Gowin's dinosaur mascot, who for this game is cosplaying as Kyo Kusanagi. The game manages to get a lot of different actions from the GBC's d-pad and two buttons, too. A and B are punch and kick (though oddly, the girl's standing kick is a crouching punch, albeit a different-looking one than her actual crouching punch), and pressing the two together jumps. The d-pad works mostly as you'd expect: you walk left and right, and press down to crouch, but this is where the mechanical influence of The King of Fighters comes in: pressing up performs a very KOF-esque dodge move, and double-tapping left or right performs a short dash. Furthermore, you can jump while dashing to go further and higher.

The three characters, while they play identically, as I already mentioned, they do each have their own personalities, the male character especially. They really went all out to make him look like a tough Bancho (yeah, though it's a Chinese game, it does seem to be heavily influenced by Japanese high school culture). He walks with his hands in his pockets, his standing kicks are the kind of casual forward thrusts you see in the likes of Rival Schools or Kenka Bancho, and his dodge move is a nonchalant shrug out of the way. The enemies, on the other hand, are mostly just really cute: there's little green bean guys, flying guys who look like Tails, but with his spinning tails replaced with dragonfly wings, little tiger cub people, and so on.

School Fighter is definitely a pleasant surprise: it's a strong contendor for the title of "best Game Boy beat em up", as well as one of the best pirate games I've played on any system. I only hope that someday the copy protection  might get fully cracked. Or I somehow manage to track down an actual copy of it myself. Apparently, it's also the third game in a series that started on the original Game Boy called "Binary Monsters", so I guess I should take a look at those games sometime too.
This game is also known as Binary Monsters III and 熱門高校 數碼怪獸III

Curiosities Vol. 6 - Heim Waltz (Saturn)

So firstly, I should point out that I've renamed the "Arcade Curiosities" series of posts, and included stuff like those X68000 Space Harrier hacks and stuff, just to allow a bit more variety in future posts.  Mainly things that are on games consoles but aren't really games, like Heim Waltz, for example.

What is Heim Waltz then, if not a game? Well, it's an interactive video tour of two model homes, a house and a flat, in mid-1990s Japanese suburbia. Since it was only given out to prospective customers of one particular housing company, it's also one of the rarest Saturn discs around. The odd thing about this situation is that you'd think that it'd make more sense for them to make this a PC disc, and if they did, no-one would have cared about preserving it and it would have just vanished into true, irretrievable obscurity never to be seen again.

But they didn't, and here we all are. It actually bears some superficial similarities to the Mega CD and Saturn game Yumemi Mystery Mansion, in that your navigation of the properties is very limited, basically giving you a choice of different paths from one FMV to the next. There's no puzzles or butterfly ghosts though, just a voiceover (you get to choose between a male and female voice) describing the details, and some kind of floor plan menu thing that's all in Japanese, as well as a feature to move a cursor round and see additional details on certain parts of each room.

Unless you're in the market for middle-class suburban housing in 1990s Japan, Heim Waltz will have no interest or use to you, so obviously, there's no reason to "play" it. There's especially no reason to pay £300 to get a legit copy of it either.

Final Justice (PC)

You might remember a week or two ago in the Olteus II post, when I bemoaned the state of the beat em up in the twenty-first century, lumbered as it is with boring, time-wasting nonsense like experience levels and skill shops. It seems that the Japanese indie scene, at least, is one last vanguard of proper beat em ups. It doesn't mean they're all automatically good, but they can at least be said to be "pure" arcade-style games, undiluted by weak RPG nonsense.

Final Justice is one of those Japanese indie beat em ups, though it doesn't have anything to do with Captain America's super move from Capcom's fighting games. Instead, it's about a Kamen Rider-style heroine (complete with rider kick) fighting off crowds of little girls and disembodied bunnygirl heads, with a boss appearing every few stages. You get a normal combo, which can be ended in one of two ways, a rising uppercut, a couple of air attacks (including the rider kick), and two super moves that cost meter. I guess I'd say the sophistication of the combat is fairly average.

The presentation is a mixed bag: the menus and GUI and such look great, and the backgrounds and sprites are technically well-drawn. The problem lies in the super deformed style of the sprites leaves me a little cold, and the fact that though they are detailed and well-drawn, they're also very small and the top half of the screen is always empty seems like a waste. I guess it mainly depends on how tolerant you are of SD characters.

Another problem with Final Justice is that it's far too easy, with no difficulty options available. The game gives out more extra lives than you'll ever need, and I completed the whole thing on my first attempt with plenty of them left over. This is despite the fact that enemies in later stages come in pretty thick crowds, and they're constantly throwing projectiles around and doing a decent amount of damage.

I guess Final Justice isn't a bad game, but it's not a particularly good one, either. It's just a painless way to spend a forgettable half an hour.

Baluba-Louk no Densetsu (Arcade)

So, Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a 1986 platformer that combines ideas from an earlier age of arcade games, along with ideas shared by its contempories. From the earlier age, it has a lot of mechanics that you'll recognise from Pac-Man and its imitators: your goal in each stage is to collect all the points items and avoid the enemies chasing you (in this case, they appear to be brightly coloured octopodes). Also, there's an item in each stage that turns the enemies into points items for a short time, which double in value for each one you manage to collect.

Its more contempory influences are more widespread but mainly, they appear to be Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble. From Mario, the game takes the idea of hitting blocks from below: hitting a treasure chest from below causes it to open, and opened treasure chests are worth more points when collected. Furthermore, an opened treasure chest might sprout a flower, and hitting it again will cause the flower to bloom. Obviously, bloomed flower chests are worth even more points. Opened chests will also leave a bomb in their place, and if the player jumps from a block with a bomb on top, the bomb will be lit, and any enemies caught in the explosion will be paralysed for a few seconds. Bloomed flowers, when collected, leave a different item, and when this item is jumped from, it fires shots to the left and right, which turn enemies into one of eight different power-ups, each with different effects, like adding portals or an extra "power pill" item to the stage, or just giving the player a few extra points.

It's this whole business with the flowers and opening chests and so on that I'm considering the influence of Bubble Bobble (and other arcade games of the time), that is, that though the game seems simple on the surface, there are various hidden and semi-hidden ways of scoring extra points, doing away with enemies, and so on. I often find myself saying on this blog the phrase "it's a shame this game wasn't more popular", and it applies to this game, too, as though it did get a Famicom-only sequel, had it been more popular, there might be more documentation around of the various secrets that might be hidden within (or maybe I'm just assuming too much of the game, and the reason it never took off in a big way, despite being a fun, well made game,  is because there aren't any secrets and it didn't hold players' attention for long).

Balouba-Louk no Densetsu is a decent enough little game, and I recommend you give it a shot. As an aside, the text on the title screen "Baluba-Louk was discovered in 1985" made me wonder if it was inspired by some real ruins or something that might have been discovered that year, but no, that's just regular old flavour text.

Olteus II (X68000)

One thing I usually hate is levelling up and buying equipment in action games. The worst cases are almost always beat em ups, a genre that has been completely killed in recent years by developers choosing to replace interesting mechanics and design with endless grinding and enemies that can only be defeated using moves that are only useful for defeating those specific enemies. But I'm going on a bit of an unrelated rant here, as though Olteus II has both experience levels and a weapon shop, they actually make the game more compelling. Plus it's a shooting game, not a beat em up.

In fact, the way the game seems to encourage, rather than punish continuing in contradiction to the genre's norm, it can possibly be considered a kind of dialogue-free action RPG that takes a shooting game-like form. For shooting enemies, you gain experience points and gold. Levelling up via experience increases the amount of hits you can take before dying, and increases the power of your default gun and your charge weapon. You also start the game with two options which do nothing alone. This is where the gold comes into play: there's a shop with a variety of different weapons, and different power levels for each of those weapons, and you can equip a different weapon to each one of the options.

The game's split (as far as I can tell, as I haven't completed it yet) into two planets, of four stages each, and a final techno-organic spaceship with a single stage. The stages on each planet can be done in any order, though you have to complete one planet to go to the next. There's also a system of "days" in effect. You start with 999 days to complete your mission, and every time you play a stage, whether successful or not, takes up one day. I really don't know what happens if you run out of days, as getting to the final stage, maxing out my level and getting enough gold to buy every weapon took about 20-something days and an hour and a half. It'd take superhuman levels of both incompetence and persistence to get through 999 days.

The game's presentation is definitely a strong point. The menus all look great, with little diagrams for the weapons in the shop, and thumbnail illustrations of each stage on the stage select screen. Ingame, it looks really great and very colourful, and though it's a minor shame there isn't any parallax, it does look amazing for an independently-produced videogame from 1991. The music was a surprise, as it sounds like it was influenced more by western computer game music, rather than the arcade and console influences you see in most X68000 games (and especially shooting games).

In summary, Olteus II's idiosyncracies mean it won't be something you'll play for years to come like the more orthodox high-quality shooting games on the X68000, like Cho Ren Sha 68k and the like, but it is an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours.

Burning Angels (PC)

Firstly, this game has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the theme song from Sonic Team's firefighting classic Burning Rangers. Instead, it's an all-female fighting game themed around pro-wrestling. It's obviously a very low budget indie game, and it's very barebones, with nothing more than a single-player story mode and a versus mode on offer. There's also only one background in the game, though each character does have their own theme tune.

It's got some nice mechanics of its own, though, so it isn't just some throwaway vanilla fighter with a wrestling-themed lick of paint. The player has five buttons: a taunt, and hard and light variants of strikes and throws. Unfortunately, the throw buttons aren't very interesting on their own, just performing an irish whip to the side of the screen. But with typical special move direction inputs, they allow each character to have a few special throws, and even super throws. In keeping with the wresting theme, normal strikes do very little damage, and strike specials generally not much more, placing a stronger emphasis on throws than combos. The throw buttons are also used for parrying throws, while strikes are blocked in the usual manner of holding back

The game's strongest point is probably the way it looks: big sprites, bold colours and an oddly smooth style of animation that brings to mind the french tv cartoon Wakfu. The character designs are pretty varied, too: rather than the usual tactic seen in the likes of Stardust Suplex of using real-life wrestlers with the names changed, Burning Angels uses exaggerated cartoonish characters, and though some of them seem a little fetishistic (a leather-clad sadistic heel, a skinny, flat-chested catgirl, etc.), they're mostly okay, and pretty varied too. There's a typical heroic wrestler (very reminiscent of Rumble Roses' protagonist Reiko), a long-legged woman with a heavily kick-based offence, and a female Ultraman parody, among others.

It'll probably never happen, but Burning Angels is a game I'd really like to see some high-level versus play of. I think the emphasis on throws, and the Irish whip move that doesn't really have an analogue in other games would make for interesting viewing. It's worth a look if you want to play a fighting game that's a little different from the norm, though probably only if you have other humans to fight against.

Snezhaja Koroleva (Arcade)

So, here's a game that was made in the Soviet Union (specifically Ukraine, I believe), for a Soviet audience. Though it was released in 1988, it's apparently based on a 1957 animated film, itself based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Snow Queen. I haven't seen that movie, but I'm sure it can't be the worst animated adaptation that story's received.

Though some might hold lazy stereotypes about technology in the USSR being primitive in comparision to that of the rest of the world, graphically, Snezhaja Koroleva appears to be on a par with what a lot of videogames looked like in 1988. I definitely wouldn't look too out of place on the Master System or maybe even as a budget-priced Amiga release of that period.

Of course, in terms of aesthetics and game mechanics, it was probably developed in a state of relative isolation from its Japanese, American and Western European peers, and as a result, it has a fairly different structure and feel to it. It's essentially a collection of single-screen mini-games.

You play as Gerda, out to find her missing friend Kay, and on each screen, the goal is to reach the top-right corner, with each screen providing its own obstacles. Oddly, though most of the screens are platformers, the first is a maze, that has you avoiding monsters while picking up roses before heading to the corner to exit. There's some thing of a "Game and Watch" quality to the rest of the screens, as they focus on avoiding or navigating various obstacles, sometimes requiring frame-perfect timing. I was going to say that the game's easy to get through, after I managed it on my second attempt, but then on every subsequent attempt, I totally failed, so who knows? I also had a theory that the game was "allowed" to be easy and just tell a story because it was developed outside of capitalism and the profit motive demanding a challenging coin-muncher. But I guess my own ineptitude has put paid to that idea.

As it is, and as it often is with old games developed outside the "usual" game-developing regions, Snezhaja Koroleva (or Снежная королева, if you like) is more of an endearing curiosity than an unearthed lost classic. Still, it's nice that games like these are preserved for everyone to play, isn't it?