Kat's Run - Zen-Nihon K-Car Senshuken (SNES)

There's a few slightly odd little idiosyncracies that seperate Kat's Run from the usual generic 16-bit racing games. For a start, the selection of cars on offer is a little odd, being a mix of fast convertibles and the kind of 4x4s and people carriers you'd normally associate with middle class soccer moms. There's also the fact that before selecting your car, you select your character from a pack of very 90s anime-looking young folks.

Character selection is a purely aesthetic choice, as far as I can tell: they appear in a window at the bottom of the screen, with animations for steering and reacting to moving up and down in the race standing. Despite that, it does add to the game, in that it forms part of an all-round well-presented little package. The game looks great in general, with an array of beautiful mode 7 tracks and cute little sprites for the cars and so on.

Another odd thing is how the game handles tracks. Before you start, you can pick one of two game types, though the only difference I can tell between the two is that one gives you the tracks in a fixed order, the other random. But either way, you drive all the tracks as a single race: after a lap (or possibly two? I'm not totally certain on that), a red orb appears on the ground, and when you drive past it, you suddenly find yourself a dark tunnel, emerging a few seconds later in a totally different location. The locations are pretty varied too: there's city and country tracks in Japan, a track in the egyptian desert, one in the shadow of a gigantic statue statue, and so on.

The odd vehicular selection can be somewhat explained away by the fact that these races are apparently illegal: there's some kind of plot about a wanted racer with a billion-yen bounty on her head, and should a player find themselves hanging too far behind the pack, they'll start to hear sirens getting louder and louder. Eventually, a cop car will appear to your rear, and if it manages to overtake, it's instantly game over and prison food for your chosen character.

Overall, Kat's Run is a fun and great-looking racing game with a lot of charm and some interesting little quirks. You could definitely do a lot worse on the SNES.

100 Yen Disk No. 1 (PC88)

100 Yen offered a fair bit of choice to the mid-80s PC88 owner, as there were at least three series of disks on the market with that price in the title: 100 Yen Disk, 100 Yen Music Disk, and 100 Yen Soft. I've picked this one in particular to cover for a reason, though: it features early work by the legendary videogame composer Yuzo Koshiro!

Anyway, if you've read any of the Disc Station posts on this very blog before, you'll know what to expect from this: there's a few games, a text feature and a little bit of advertising. The first game on the menu is the generically-entitled Shooting Master 86, which happens to be the best game on the disk by a long way, so I'll come back to it after getting the others out of the way. A nice little touch is that the cursor on the menu is Samus Aran, and when you select an item, she turns into Takahashi Meijin for some reason.

So, the next game on the list is Graman Bee, the work of Mr. Koshiro himself! Unfortunately, it's either unfinished or for some it's not emulated well, as the graphics are glitchy, there's no music and the first boss' attacks seem completely impossible to avoid. I hope it is just unfinished and there's a full version out there somewhere, I'll keep an eye out, at least.

Following Graman Bee is Electric Novel, which isn't a game, it's a cool-looking title screen followed by a few screens full of text. Then there's The Rotten Wall, which is a spectacularly awful Breakout clone that's terrible in every aspect. There's also an option labelled "The Information of NAO Graphic Lab", which is an advert for an upcoming game called Triangle Panic, which I haven't found a disk image of, unfortunately.

Next is another game, Jumper, which must be one of the earliest examples of an endless runner. You play as a white blob thing that has to jump over a series of walls without crashing into the low, spike-covered ceiling. That's it pretty much. I wonder if it actually was the first?

Finally, we come back to Shooting Master 86, which is actually better quality and more fully-featured than a lot of standalone PC88 releases. It's a kind of hybrid shooting game/RPG thing. There's some things I haven't yet figured out, like how to buy better ships, but basically, you play a short shooting game stage, then you're dumped onto a map screen. You move a cursor (represtented literally by the word "CURSOR") around, until you meet one of the programmers, who will ask you something. Press Y on the keyboard and you'll enter another short shooting stage.

It's a pretty accomplished game that's so far beyond the others on the disk in terms of sophistication, plus, though he didn't do the programming, Yuzo Koshiro did do the soundtrack, so it sounds great too. Unquestionably the highlight of the disk, I really don't know why they chose not to package Shooting Master 86 on its own and sell it for a higher price. Maybe there's some 80s Japanese reason why they couldn't?