Musashi no Ken - Tadaima Shugyou Chuu (NES)

Based on an 80s anime of which I'd never heard prior to playing the game, Musashi no Ken has one of the most wholesome and innocent premises for a platform game I've ever seen. The protagonist has a big kendo tournament coming up, so he takes to the wilderness to go and train, by hitting inanimate objects with his shinai. Obviously, we can't expect too much deviation or innovation from an 80s licensed platformer, so there are still enemies to kill in the stages, though they're mostly either indistinct blobs, or random objects like maid dolls or walking bowls.

Your journey through the platform stage actually does act as a kind of training, as when you hit platforms, wooden posts, tires and other stuff strewn about the stages, little tiny shinai items pop out of them. These items come in three flavours: high, middle and low, and they're also floating around in the stages in the traditional platform game item fashion. These items don't actually do anything during the platform stages, but after three such stages, it's time for the big tournament!

But before I get onto that, I have more things to say about the platform stages. Firstly, there's an added complication in that as well as avoiding all the hazards, traps and enemies, you're also racing your dog to the end of the stage. This isn't really a big deal though, as he's so slow that he's usually only halfway through the stage by the time you reach the end. Secondly, the game uses a kind of rudimentary HP system: you start with fifty HP, and getting hit causes you to lose twenty-five of them, and should you happen across any riceballs along the way, they'll restore 10 each. At the end of the stage, you'll get 100 points for each HP you have left. What I find interesting about this system is that if you've been hit once, finding a riceball will allow you to survive one more hit before losing a life, but after that hit, you'll need to find two of them to get another hit. Obviously, this also means that the best scoring strategy is to avoid hits and find riceballs, so you have the maximum number of HP to turn into points at the end.

The platform stages are so absurdly difficult that, though I'm ashamed to admit it, I actually had to abuse save states to reach the tournament, because I really wanted to see it and screenshot it for my beloved readers. It was totally worth the effort, though, as it's good enough to have been a game on its own. What happenis is that you fight five sequential opponents in traditional first-to-two-points kendo matches. The items you collected during your training come into play here, as each 10 you have in each category allow you to use a powerful strike once. These strikes are almost guaranteed to win you a point when you use them, but you still need to be careful with tham, as the amount of items you have going into the tournament is what you're stuck with: they don't replenish between rounds, or when you lose a life (by losing a round).

Musashi no Ken is a pretty good game, with a lot of cool ideas. If they could flesh it out about, and come up wwith a replacement for the item-limited power strikes, the kendo tournament is good enough to be its own standalone game. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: kendo is a sport that should work well in videogame form, and it's totally bizarre that over almost forty years, there's less than ten kendo games in existence.

Mimizu Panzer (PC)

This is a game I first read about on Insert Credit over a decade ago, back when it used to be a news site, though I only actually got round to playing it fairly recently. It's a single-screen shooting game in which you control a long, segmented millipede-like tank, destroying gun turrets in the desert. That ancient IC news post made mention of the plot placing the player in the boots of a moe version of a Nazi tank commander in World War II, though I guess either it's an incredibly loose interpretation, or they based that post on an early version, and all that stuff was replaced with more generic moe girls for the final release.

On first play, Mimizu Panzer seems slow, boring and hard, and the scores seen on the high score table seem unreachable compared to the scores you'll be getting. Most of these things will change once you work out all the little tricks to how the game works. Firstly, there's the length of your tank, which affects things in various different ways. You start with four segments behind your head tank, and gain one for every enemy you kill. Furthermore, only your head can be hurt, and all the other segments stop enemy bullets. If you lose a life, you also lose half of your segments (not including the first four). Some of the segments have holes in, and those holes glow when hit by enemy bullets. If you shoot one of the glowing hole segments with your own bullets, it'll start shooting flames from one side, which is the key mechanic you have to master to get anywhere in this game.

The most obvious thing about the flames is that they're significantly more powerful than your normal shots, which is important, as all but the weakest of the enemy turrets can take a lot of punishment before going down. At the same time, though, they're also significantly harder to aim, unless you pre-calculate the path you want your tank and its fiery emissions to take before letting them off. The other thing the flames do is vastly increase your scoring potential: enemies killed by shot have pretty small points values, while enemies killed by flame have their points value multiplied by the number of extra segments (again, discounting the first four). It's really got everything a good score system should have, in that it rewards both skillful use of the game's main mechanical gimmick, plus it rewards staying alive, and even more than that, it makes staying alive a more difficult task the longer you keep it up (since you have to avoid crashing into yourself and the sides of the screen on top of everything else).

The only real problem with Mimizu Panzer is really more a problem with myself rather than the game, and it's the fact that it's really difficult. To get a decent variety of screenshots for this review, I had to resort to continues and even the game's pre-recorded replays to get a look further in the game. I will say this in its favour, though: even as hard and frustrating as it gets, it doesn't stop being addictive. I've whiled away hours trying to get just one screen further while playing it for this review. It's for that reason that I totally recommend Mimizu Panzer, and I say that it's a shame it languishes in the obscurity inherent in being a years-old Japanese PC game, and will probably never get an official western release, and is even less likely to get the audience it deserves on consoles.