Landmaker (Playstation)

Landmaker's a Taito arcade puzzle game from the mid-90s, when Taito were putting out a load of them, presumably due to the success of the Puzzle Bobble series. In it, you play as one of eight gods, each representing a different kind of biome (forest, mountains, desert, icefield, and so on) that wants control over a continent. Control is gained by beating all the other gods in a kind of civilisation-building contest. (All these story details are pretty much entirely conjecture on my part based on what appears to happen in the game. There's not a lot of documentation on the matter, you know?)

These contests involved shooting coloured diamond-shaped blocks up a diagonal grid, and when blocks of the same colour touch each other, they become houses, and if they form squares, they form larger, and more extravagant buildings the bigger the square is. Forming big, fancy buildings garners a lot of points, and erasing them (by shooting another same-coloured block at one of the formation's downward-pointing corners) garners more points, and lowers the upper limit of the opponent's grid. Obviously, if a block falls off of the bottom of your grid, it's game over.

I really like this game, like all the best versus-style puzzle games, it's fast and satisfying, with a good match involving things constantly moving and changing state all over the screen, and there are opportunities for clever players in a bind to turn things around. The presentation seems a little lower-budget than Taito's other games of the period, with the characters lacking individual voices, and other little omissions, though there is one small touch that I really like: each character has a different architectural style applied to the buildings that they grow.

The home port also adds a single=player puzzle mode, which doesn't feature the arcade game's setting or any of its characters, and replaces the detailed building sprites for slightly plain polygon structures. The premise for this mode is that you're tasked with founding cities in various locations around the world, and the better the job you do, the higher the city's population grows, and the more it develops. More cities get unlocked as the world's total population grows.

Though it uses the same basic mechanics as the arcade game, puzzle mode is set out pretty differently: each stage starts with a specific amount of remaining space and atarting layout of blocks, and you're tasked with creating a building of a minimum size before getting a game over. You get points for every building you make along the way, and massive bonuses are available for making buildings bigger than your quota.  It's a pleasant enough way to pass some time and watch a big number gradually get bigger, but it's not a patch of the fast-paced action of the arcade game.

As will be obvious by now, I really like the Landmaker arcade game, and this port is arcade-perfect (except for the loading times), plus it comes with a mildly amusing extra game on the side. It's available dirt cheap, and I recommend you get ahold of a copy.

Legend of Galahad (Mega Drive)

The Legend of Galahad is a port of an Amiga game called Leander, and I'm reviewing the port rather than the original for two reasons: firstly, it's the version I remember seeing in magazines as a kid, and secondly, I'm going to assume that the original has some terrible control scheme where jump is mapped to up on the joystick, and I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense. Anyway, it's clearly a British attempt at making a Monster World-esque action platformer, andin some ways, it's a pretty good attempt. In other ways, not so much. Unfortunately, it's the important parts it messes up on.

I'll start on the positives, and specifically on the biggest positives: this is an incredible-looking game. It's got that Roger Dean-inspired airbrushed look that a lot of the higer-profile Amiga games had, and it's very effective. The world in which its set is a kind of mix of northern Europe, with a few mildly stereotypical asian influences thrown in, as well as the aforementioned prog rock album cover style. It feels like the entire game is set among the mountaintops, and the graphics do an amazing job of evoking that, to the extent that you can almost feel the fresh, cold air in your lungs, even in the stuffy humid heat of a British summer (the conditions under which I was playing this game). Another positive is that Galahad himself controls really well. Walking, jumping and attacking all feel good, and he swings his sword as fast as you push the button.

Okay, so then there's the negatives, first of which being that the combat doesn't feel very good at all. Almost every enemy takes multiple hits to kill, and most of them won't make any acknowledgement that you're hitting them: they'll just keep walking back and forth while you impotntly slash at them with your sword. Furthermore, there's other enemies with certain weak spots, that are often in positions that makes them impossible to hurt without taking damage yourself, and example being the giant bugs that appear in some of the cave segments. An even bigger crime is that the rules of combat are applied inconsistently: every few stages, there'll be a dragon. The dragons aren't bosses in the traditional sense, they aren't at the end of stages or anything, though they are unique and they do appear in places that mean they have to be defeated before you can get past them. The problem is that a single hit from a dragon will take a life from you, no matter how much health you have remaining. A dragon can just poke you with the end of its nose and you lose a life straight away. It feels unfair, and it's just a terrible design decision.

The other big negative is the stage design. I've already mentioned that some enemies are placed in positions that make taking damage inevitable, but there's other things too. Like the massive amount of leaps of faith there are: you're often asked to blindly jump into the ether, without any way of knowing what traps await, or where they are. There's also a certain kind of trap that drops a heavy object on the player, killing them instantly. The problem is that its effective hitbox is its entire sprite, so if it's already fallen and you walk into the side of it, you lose a life. Again, lots of terrible, unfair design decisions.

It's easy to see why Galahad (or rather, Leander) would have been a big deal on the Amiga, where there weren't a lot of Japanese-inspired action game, especially ones with such great production values. But on the Mega Drive, the early 90s home of arcade ports? It's got a lot of stiff competition, against which it never had a hope of standing up.