Korokoro Post Nin (Playstation)

It's a trite, lazy and annoying thing, when someone describes a work by calling it a mix of other works, but I'm going to do it now anyway: Korokoro Post Nin is like a combination of elements from Cameltry, Paperboy and Sonic the Hedgehog. This really is a description of it at its basest level, though: it's a game where you rotate a maze to move a character inside, and that character is not only tasked with delivering small packages to mailboxes, but her movement speed is also heavily dependent on the slope of the surface on which she's stepping, and the momentum she's built up.

So yeah, it's some kind of (possibly post-apocalyptic?) future, and you're a delivery girl working for some kind of robot guy. You're tasked with delivering to every postbox in the area, then getting to the door within the time limit. Although, referring to the game's protagonist as "you" isn't exactly accurate, as like I mentioned earlier, you actually control the maze in which the delivery girl, postboxes and door exist. It's a mystery why this game was released for the Playstation in 2002, as it's exactly the sort of thing that would have become a beloved cult hit, had it been released on the GBA in the same period.

Playing the game is incredibly simple: R1 and L1 turn the maze left and right. If the ground upon which the delivery girl is standing is a slope, she'll walk down it. If it's a steep slope, she'll run down it (which is not only faster, but also essentially for smashing through certain obstacles). If there's no ground directly beneath her, she'll fall. The thing is, though, this game is actually a masterclass in old-school game design, by which I mean that it is entirely based around these (and a couple of other) simple rules, and the stages are all tests of both your knowledge of these rules and the precision of your dexterity in pulling them off.

On a larger scale, it also introduces new elements every few stages: first there are obstacles, both moving and stationary, which will knock three seconds off your remaining time you you hit them while you're not running. Next, there are spikes, which you are to avoid altogether, with a brutal penalty of five seconds for each violation. Further than that, I can't tell you about, as I'm just not good enough to get through more than the first couple of stages with spikes. However, that's fine, it doesn't feel like an unfair game, or an artificially difficult one. In fact, I'd love to see this game make the rounds in the speedrunning community, as each stage is obviously designed with an optimum or perfect path in mind, and I know there are people out there who would love the challenge of learning the layout of each stage by heart, and mastering the controls so that they can get through perfectly, and it's clear to me that this game was designed with that in mind.

In summary, Korokoro Postnin is a game that was slightly too hard for me, but it's also a game I can't help but respect, and I hope it somehow, someday gets the attention of the audience for whom it's truly intended. (Even if it is well over a decade too late for it to matter to the developers or publisher).

Assassins PD Games Disk 1 (Amiga)

Covering Amiga games is often a tricky one for me, as though almost anything on the Amiga can be considered obscure outside of Europe, assuming it never got ported to consoles, some Amiga games are very fondly remembered locally, while going completely unheard of elsewhere. So, I decided to start looking into an area pretty much untouched by the internet: PD games (which is what homebrew was called back then, though it actually stands for Public Domain). And the easiest way to get a decent cross-section of that wide, forgotten world is to go through old compilation disks, so this is the first of what will be an occasional series (and I will get back to doing posts about Disc Station someday, honest!)

So, there's five games on this disk, though I don't have much to say about Tanx, the first game. It's a fairly primitive 2-player only Scorched Earth/pre-Worms type thing in which two distant tanks have to aim shots at each other from across the battlefield until one of them hits the other. There's lots of different options like wind speed, gravity strength, hills and mountains, and so on, but it's still not very interesting, to be honest.

Next up is Rollerpede, which is exactly what it looks like: a Centipede clone. There's a few power-ups and some nice music on the title screen, but other than that, it's just a moderately competent version of the ancient arcade game. Surprisingly, it uses the joystick for controls, rather than trying to emulate trackball controls using the mouse, but if I'm honest, I hate using a mouse to control action games, so I'm happy the developers took that decision.

The third game is by far the best, and it's called Amigoids. Again, it's not really an original game, since it's just a high-quality Asteriods clone, though it does have a couple of interesting options. Firstly, you have a selection of three "specials" to choose from, those being the traditional hyperspace, a temporary shield, and a simple instant 180 degree turn. There's no option to use a controller with a second fire button, but they special is mapped to "down", which actually works pretty well, so it's not that big a problem.

The other interesting thing Amigoids adds to the formula is the ability to load new graphics, replacing the score font, player's ship, UFO and the asteroids themselves. There's a few styles included on the disk alongside the detailed default sprites, like Atari 2600-style coloured blobs, faux-vector white lines, childishdrawings of faces, houses and shapes, and one that turns the asteroids into various computer parts and paraphrenalia. The fact that these are loaded from a generic Amiga file window, rather than an in-game menu suggests that the game allows players to add their own spritesheets, should they want to. It's a nice package all-round, really.

Fourth is Cave Runner, a barebones Boulder Dash clone. It's fine, I guess? It's not flashy and it doesn't add anything to the formula, but it is brutally difficult, if that's your kind of thing, and you've somehow already played all the other brutally difficult Boulder Dash clones that exist in the world.

Finally, Avatris, which is obviously a Tetris clone, though it is also a bit of an oddity. Firstly, the game's clearly designed for three players: two on joysticks, the third on keyboard. There'll always be three players, though if you're on your own, you can set all three to be controlled by the same device, so you have one game played in triplicate (since the pieces come out in the same order for all three players). Secondly, it goes back to the stages-with-lines-quotas system of the old arcade version of Tetris, but rather than getting faster, each stage after the first has an arrangement of pre-set blocks already on the field to get in the way. These stages start off so difficult, I've not been able to clear stage 2, after quite a few attempts. Thirdly, and this is the most annoying thing, once all three players are out, the game just stops. There's no game over screen, it doesn't go back to the title, you just have to reset the Amiga. Avatris is an okay game, though I assume it gets exponentially better with actual opponents.

So, that's the first of the Assassins PD compilation disks. It was alright, though when I decided to cover PD stuff, I was hoping for less clones of old arcade games, and more weird experimental stuff that could never possibly be a commercial release. Fingers crossed for the next disk I do then, eh?