Melpool Land (PC98)

Melpool Land (sometimes romanised as "Merupu Rurando") is a bit of a slight oddity, being a kind of top-down fighting game. Almost a mixture of sumo and boxing, with some extra videogamey bits thrown in, even. You pick your character from a selection of four (one of them is the furry swordsman from "Gensei", so I assume the rest of them are characters from other Compile games with whom I'm not familiar) and you fight the others in sequence, plus a weird little plant-man that you fight twice: once on his own stage and again on the stage of the character you picked.

The fights are a little unusual. They take place in squarish arenas, filled with pitfalls, landmines, walls and pinball bumpers. Each character has two floating objects (for example, magic pillars, small robots, floating tomatoes, etc.), tht are used kind of like a boxer's fist. Tapping the space bar uses them to punch, holding uses them to block. You win by either wearing down your opponent's health or knocking them off the stage. Your "fists" also have their own health, which is diminished by blocking. If both your fists are destroyed, your only offence is to walk into your opponent and try to push them off the stage, which is pretty difficult, so try not to let it come to that.

Melpool Land has the same flaws as another Compile PC98 game I've featured here in the past, Runner's High: It's beautifully presented, but there's just not enough of it. Single player mode will take only about 15-20 minutes to play through with every character, and there's no higher difficulty levels or anything like that. There is also a 2 player versus mode, which I haven't been able to play, but the fact that the characters aren't very well balanced (the swordsman is a lot better than all the others, the robot a lot worse than all the others) mean that it's not likely to come out as a lost competitive classic.

It does look very nice, though, being yet another display of the kind of lovingly-crafted pixel art Compile were putting out on PC98 and Windows in the 90s. But unfortunately, that's not enough to save it.

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.