Keriotosse! (Saturn)

I'm tagging Keriotosse as a fighting game, like I have with a few other similar 32-bit oddities in the past, but it's a very tenuous tag, as this game lacks most of the trappings of what you'd consider to be a real fighting game. There's no healthbars, no knockouts, almost no special moves, and no punching. What it actually is is a somewhat silly contest in which four characters on a small circular stage all try to kick each other off the edge. The last one on the platform wins the round, and the first to win three rounds wins the match.

Thinking about it a little more, the stages themselves actually suggest a little inspiration from the Bomberman games, as each one is slightly different, whether it has interactive playground equipment, running water, strong winds or other such features, that all have some kind of effect on the proceedings. An annoying feature that every stage has is that no matter what kind of surface they take place upon, all the characters slid around as if it were a traditional platform slippy slidy ice stage. Obviously the devs were thinking this would aid in characters kicking each other around, but it's mostly just a nuisance.

The characters are a weird, incoherent selection, seemingly made up of anything that came into the designer's heads. Your starting selection includings a harpy boy, a deep-voiced alien woman, a beer-loving bunnygirl, and an aging buddhist priest. A few stages into single-player mode, you'll also start encountering other weirdos, including robots of both faux-Gundam and faux-R2D2 flavours, a weird masked princess, and others. They all mostly play identically to each other, with the exception being the special attacks. I assume these characters can be unlocked, though unfortunately, I haven't yet found out how.

Special attacks are limited-use (typically once per round, though if the round goes on long enough, they do eventualy recharge), and each character's is totally different. For example, the harpy boy can fly around for a short time, taking him out of reach of attacks and allowing him to swoop down and claw at his foes. The monk surrounds himself with a ring of hearts, that knockback foes much further than the normal kicks. The bunnygirls can offer a pint to an opponent, that leaves them drunk for a short time, and the R2D2-like robot can trigger a large explosion. It's nice that the special attacks aren't just slight variations on the same few effects, but it does mean that some characters have massive advantages over the others. In my experience, the priest and the harpy boy are by far the best equipped of the initial few selectable characters.

Keriotosse isn't a bad game, but it's not a very good one, either. It's incredibly average. The only reason you should really play it is to see the very nice low-poly stages, and the slightly less nice low-poly characters. I mean, I can't think of any better kicking-people-off-platforms games, but it's not a very exciting concept to begin with, either. After this and JSWAT and that awful game with the pig, I should really try to seek out a forgotten Saturn game that I can be a bit more positive about, shouldn't I?

Maze Action (PS2)

It wasn't long ago that I proclaimed Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita to be the worst game ever featured on this blog, but in Maze Action (Also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 8: Gekitou! Meiro King), I've found a fairly robust challenger to that title. It does fall short, though, in that while playing Maze Action is a completely miserable experience, and it's a pretty cheap-looking title, even for a Simple Series game, it does at least feel like it's just a bad game, and not a personal insult from the developers directed at the player. (Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita really was that bad).

The plot and the mechanics both seem to have been inspired by the popular comic Hunter X Hunter, specifically the hunter exam story arc. You are one of the four of this year's candidates to have reached the final exam at the hero academy, but there can only be one graduate, so you've got to face each other in a contest of skill and strength to determine who that'll be. So single player mode has four stages: you face off against each of the three characters you didn't pick, and then you fight a copy of your own character. It seems likely that there's probably a fifth stage with a final boss character, but you'd honestly need the patience of a saint to bother playing long enough to find out.

The mechanical influence from HxH is also from the hunter exam part, as the contests in which you're place see you running around a maze, trying to be first to find three matching keys and getting to your opponent's starting pad. The twist is that while you need three red keys and your opponent needs three blue, you start with a blue key and they start with a red. So, just like that part on the island where all the hunter candidates have to run around trying to steal each other's number badges, while protecting their own, you will be forced, at some point, to fight your opponent. There are various items littering the mazes, along with the keys. There's weapons, of both melee and projectile varieties, and there's traps. There's also some traps permanently planted around the place, too.

This could have all addedup into a fairly decent game, but the problem is all in the execution. Moving around feels awkward, combat is haphazard and unsatisfying, and it just generally doesn't feel very good to play. It's frustrating, because it also feels like the developers were really inspired and really wanted to make a simplified videogame version of the hunter exam, but they just didn't make it enjoyable to play.

So yeah, Maze Action is a terrible game and you definitely shouldn't play it. But I can see what they were trying to do, at least. That's something, right?

Diet Family (Arcade)

When I first saw this title, and the fact that it was made by the Korean company Semicom, I was instantly interested. This was mainly because, as I've covered before, Korean arcade games aren't always completely original, and I thought that it might at least be a fun knock-off of the excellent Data East game Diet Go Go (which I covered on this blog many years ago). It's actually a totally original (as far as I can tell) Galaga-style shooting game, with a bit of an unhealthy approach to weight loss as its main theme.

So, you play as one of five characters (and if they're a family, as the title suggests, then it looks like it's two daughters, mum, dad and their weird blue cat thing), and set out to destroy/avoid food, and eat only the tasty diet pills. Yeah, that's a bit weird and unpleasant, isn't it? I mean at least Diet Go Go had the protagonists dressed like they were going to do execise too, and the food that evil scientist was giving out was all massive cakes and legs of meat.Most of the food in Diet Family is pretty healthy stuff like fruits, vegetables and sushi!

But all that aside, the game is at least full of interesting ideas mechanically. For example, scoring and obtaining power-ups relies heavily on the game's comboing system. Unusually, that system focuses entirely on accuracy, rather than the more typical speed, as your combo counter goes up for every one of your bullets that hits an enemy in a row, and resets if one of your bullets flies offscreen. As the combo gets longer, more and more items and power-ups will make their way down the screen to you. It works fairly well, though the requirements to get a power-up for your weapon are incredibly steep, needing twenty sucessful shots in a row. On the other hand, as you get further into the game, there are more enemies coming at you in thicker patterns, so it does get easier to rack up big combos as you go along.

The way your lives work is different, too. You have three lives and an energy meter. If you take a hit, the energy meter decreases, depending on the strength of the enemy that hit you (you're told the strengths of the different enemies at the start of each stage). It goes up a tiny amount for each diet pills you collect. If it decreases past the bottom of the bar, you'll lose a life, your sprite will get fatter (though this is only cosmetic, you aren't slowed down or anything), and the energy meter will be back near the top again. If you collect enough pills to make the meter go over the top, and you've lost at least one life, you'll get another life back, though the meter will be back at the bottom. So it's easier to claw lives back than in most shooting games, though you are limited to a maximum of three (plus a full energy meter).

Saying whether or not I actually recommend Diet Family is a difficult one: though I didn't personally find it to be a very enjoyable game to play, I can also see that it's definitely competently made and designed, and someone with more patience for its accuracy-based mechanics could very well get a lot of fun out of it. What a terrible, fence-sitting conclusion!

Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita (Saturn)

What we have here might be the worst game ever featured on this blog. It's definitely the most shameful licensed commercial release, with production values that would look bad if they were in some Chinese Pirate Mega Drive game, let alone a game licensed, officially released and sold for money on the Saturn in 1996. Even having an animated FMV intro doesn't make the game look any better, since even that manages to be grotesque and cheap-looking.

You take control of a whip-wielding pig, on a journey to retrieve a load of lost piglets (as far as I can tell, at least). This journey takes you across various different landscapes, which are fairly typical platform game locales: snowy place, clockwork place, jungle place, beach place, and so on. The stages themselves can be tackled in any order, and also have two types of sections. When you first enter an area, you'll play through a psuedo-platformy stage (though there's no actual platforming to be done), where you walk from left to right, using your whip to defeat enemies and free piglets from bubbles. Once you get to the end of one of these areas, you'll then enter a puzzle stage.

The puzzles are all varied, to the point at which I've seen quite a few of them, and they were all unique with none of them being just a variation on one of the others. The main problem is that not only do you have to solve the puzzles, but you also have to figure out what slving the puzzles requires. Like I said they're all unique, but on top of that, none of them come with instructions in any language. You're just dumped in there and expected to work out what you're meant to do, and how to do it in three attempts. If you solve the puzzle, you'll go on to another action stage/puzzle stage cycle. If you use up your three chances, you'll get a game over, and if you voluntarily quit, you'll go back to the area select screen.

I can't really tell you any more about it. The action stages are terrible and pointless, with tiny sprites jerking around in front of backgrounds that aren't even in the same scale. The puzzle stages are boring and if you solve them, there's no satisfaction, while if you fail, you don't feel any incentive to go back and try again. I played this game for about an hour, and the only positive thing I can say about the experience is that I can at least tell you not to bother.

I hate to say it, but Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita is a game that deserves to languish in obscurity, forgotten forever. After you finish reading this review, try to forget you ever even heard this game's title.

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.

Hyakumanton no Barabara (PSP)

So, it's only after playing the Japanese version of this game for a few hours that I learn that it actually had a western release, under the name "Patchwork Heroes". But I think the fact that I've never seen or heard anyone speak about either version makes it fine material for an obscure videogames blog. Anyway, if, like me, seeing screenshots of it makes you assume that it's some kind of quirky tower defence-type thing where you build flying battleships with cannons and turrets and things. It's actually kind of the opposite! What Hyakumanton no Barabara is is an imaginative twist on the old Qix formula, that sees you cutting apart huge flying battleships while working under the pressure of a strict time limit (since you want to destroy the battleships before they reach your hometown), and while under attack from the ships' various defence systems, mobile and otherwise.

So the way it works is that you climb around on the side of the ship, and you can cut swathes across it. If you cut in such a manner that the ship is split in two, the smallest part is destroyed and falls away. Your mission on each stage is to keep destroying bits of the ship until it falls out of the sky. Some stages also add little extra objectives that need to be fulfilled alongside your main goal, like ensuring one certain part of the ship remains intact, or collecting all of a certain item that's strewn around the ship.

There's many different kinds of enemies crawling around the ship triyng to stop you, and they each have a skill, like being able to repair the ship, or being able to fly, so they can't be killed when you cut away the part of the ship they're standing on, and so on. You can take two hits from enemies before dying, represented by the fact that you have two other people climbing alongside you at the start of each stage. There's also prisoners to rescue from cages dotted around the place, and if you have less than two remaining, they'll step in to replace them. Otherwise, they'll fly away with a balloon. There's also a few power-ups, which are the same as usual for Qix-alikes: faster movement, stop time for all the enemies, and so on.

The game looks and sounds really nice, too! Like you could guess from the game's western title, everything looks like it's made from big, colourful patchwork quilts. What you can't tell from the title is that the music is really bouncy and fun, sounding like a kind of eastern european marching band? It's pretty unique, as far as videogame soundtracks go, at least.

I really enjoyed this game. I'd even go as far as to say  that playing it is the most fun I've ever had playing a Qix-alike game! That might be damning with faint praise, since most of them have more of a "addiction through frustration" thing going on, rather than genuine enjoyment. But yeah, Hyakumanton no Barabara/Patchwork Heroes is a great little unsung hero of the PSP library. I think it might also be the first PSP game I've featured on this blog that I recommend without reservation? That's nice.

Metal Freezer (Arcade)

I know what some of you might be thinking, and this game doesn't have anything to do with Dragonball Z. In fact, it's a futuristic maze game, that's almost as good as the game that I (and I'm sure many other people) place at the top of the genre, Raimais (and yes, I realise that this marks two arcade games in a row that I've compared to better-known games by Taito. The thing is, if you like arcade games, you like Taito games. They just put out a ton of varied, high quality games in the 80s and 90s!)

Anyway, Metal Freezer has you placing floor tiles over what appears to be exposed electronics, though functionally, this is exactly the same as collecting stuff in almost every other maze game that exists. It might actually be a spiritual sequel to another game from the same publisher named "Mustache Boy", albeit with a significant aesthetic improvement (but I'll get back to that later). Anyway, in four out of every five stages, you simply have to move over all the exposed electronics squares to place floor tiles over them, while avoiding/destroying the enemies roaming around. Every fifth stage has you getting through a tight obstacle course-like stage and reaching the exit as quickly as possible.

There are several distinct types of enemies, and they all do different things. For example, one type of enemies drags you towards it with magnetism, while one drills holes in walls to create more work for you, and another shoots goo at you that prevents you from jumping for a few seconds. Touching any of them loses you a life, though you aren't nearly as defenceless as you would be in most maze games, as you can shoot them with your freeze ray as much as you like (well, it has an overheat meter, but unless you go crazy with it, that won't even matter), turning them into ice cubes that can be pushed off the stage, into walls, or even used to crush other enemies.

Anyway, those aesthetics, eh? At first, the game'll look no better or worse than any other mid-budget late-80s arcade game. But there's a lot of great little details in there that you'll gradually start to notice! Like the way every type of floor and wall block has a different animation for when the stage fades to black on completion. And there's the cool cyberpunk wireframe progress map that displays at the start and finish of every game. All these little things add up to lift Metal Freezer a little higher than its contempories, and make it feel a little bit more professional.

Anyway, Metal Freezer is an excellent game, and I strongly recommend giving it a try!

Powerplay - The Game of the Gods (Amiga)

If Powerplay's claim is true, and it is actually the game of the gods, then it tells us three things about them. The first and second things it tells us are that the gods have both incredible patience and a lot of time on their hands, as a single glaically-paced game of Powerplay took the better part of two hours. The other thing it teaches us about the gods is that above all, they value knowledge of trivia.

Powerplay takes the form of a board game, each player (either a human versus the CPU, or up to four human players, though I struggle to imagine a situation where that has ever happened) picks a greek god and four champions to represent them on the board. Each turn you pick one of your champions to move, and then you answer a general knowledge question. If you get it right, you score a few points and you can move your chosen champion one space in any direction. If not, your turn ends. That's what happens most turns, anyway: sometimes, your champions will just wander around the board at random, and you do nothing. When a character reaches 25 points, they'll "mutate" into another character.

Should one of your champions meet one of your opponent's, a challenge will start. There's two types of challenge: either a tug-of-war held over a lava pit, or some kind of bizarre trial, over which the gorgon Medusa presides. It doesn't matter which you get though, as they're both exactly the same, mechanically: you answer more trivia questions. Get three in a row right and you win, get three in a row wrong and you lose. You also lose if your champion runs out of strength, which depletes for both sides at a rate of one per question. The losing champion will either go down one level of mutation, or if they're in their default state, be taken off the board entirely.

Once only one god is left represented on the board, they win. You get an animation of Zeus congratulating you, and then the game asks if you want to play again. Which is pretty presumptuous, considering you've just spent two hours answering stupid questions, and they already started repeating half way through.

Powerplay is a terrible game. I had it in the box of pirated disks that came with my Amiga when I was a kid, and even then, I knew better than try to get someone else involved in trying to play through a multiplayer game. As an adult, I wouldn't recommend bothering with single player, either.

G-Type (PC)

G-Type was actually one of the first doujin shooters i ever played, back in the mid-00s. Unlike other games from that period, like Warning Forever or Dan! Da Dan!, it's not one I ever went back to in the years between then and now. That's not to say it's a worse game than those two (well, not significantly worse, anyway), it's just that comparatively, it's a lot more old-fashioned and slower paced than those games, and obviously I'm one of those impatient millenials that needs everything to be fast and flashy all the time. Well, my shooting games, anyway.

There's a good reason why this 2002 game is so slow and archaic, though: it's a loving homage and fusion of those two elder statesman of the shooting genre, R-type and Gradius. Later on, you even get to fight weird fusions of bosses from those two games and the Darius series, too! How it works is that the stages are mostly Gradius-like in design, and your ship is clearly a variant of the classic R-9 Arrowhead. The power-up system is the most coherent fusion of the two games, though. You collect generic power ups that each advance a counter at the bottom of the screen by one, and you press the second controller button to activate the currently highlighted power-up. So far, that's Gradius, right? The twist is that when you start the game, the fourth option is "Force", and the fifth and sixth are blank. When you choose force, the force floats onscreen and the last three power up options become "M-Way", "Laser" and "Burst". Laser refers to the blue power-up from R-Type, the three-way lasers, M-Way is a weak and boring multi-way shot, made pretty much redundant by the laser serving the same purpose, and Burst is the burst missiles seen in some of the Gradius games.

As well as the two big stars, there's also some homages to the Darius series in there! Firstly, the third stage, taking the form of the traditional R-Type battleship boss/stage takes place over a fire planet that periodically spits out firballs, like the first stage of Darius II. The fourth stage also takes the form of a boss rush, during which your opponents take the form of fusions of classic Darius, Gradius and R-type bosses.

You're probably wondering by now if there's actually a good game under all the homages and nostalgia, and there is. Like I said earlier, it's pretty slow-paced by modern standards, but it's still a lot of fun. It also looks great, with nice, chunky sprites, and a kind of high-contrast colour style reminiscent of R-Type Leo. The difficulty's also perfecty pitched: not too hard, and not too easy, and if you want to see a little further in the game (like if you want to take more screenshots to put in your review for example, ahem), you can start a new game from any stage you've previously reached. A good tip is to obtain and power up your force as early as possible, since when you lose a life, it stays behind with all its power-ups intact. This might be a little inauthentic, but it's also a pretty good way of alleviating the slippery slope that was prevalent in both R-Type and Gradius, whereby you lost all your power-ups on death, leading to rapid loss of the rest of your lives. If I remember right, didn't Gradius V do a similar thing with Options a couple of years later?

G-Type is a pretty good game, and a nice homage to its spiritual progenitors. If you're a fan of either of them, I'd recommend giving it a shot. Some advice though: you'll need to use JoyToKey or a similar program to use a controller, no matter what the options screen might suggest, and the only display options are a tiny 320x240 window and the same resolution stretched to fullscreen. That sort of thing doesn't bother me, but I know that some people are gigantic tedious snobs when it comes to that stuff.

Tokusou Kidoutai JSWAT (Saturn)

In the early days of the 32-bit era, there was a lot of experimentation going on, thanks to the fact that everyone now had access to things like texture mapped 3D and the ability to save games without increasing the price of the game itself (because of the cost of the battery needed to save in cartridge games) all in their very own home consoles. New genres were born, and other genres that had previously been confined to PCs in a time when very few people had them at home were made available to the masses. One of the latter genres being the first person shooter.

Now, for some reason, there aren't many Japanese-developed first person shooters, and the ones that do exist tend not to be very popular. Some of them, like JSWAT, don't really deserve to have been popular. I'll admit that there are some things I do like about the game, like the fact that it uses live action FMVs between stages to tell its story, and that those sequences do manage to be pretty seedy and grimy thanks to the harsh lighting and general dirtyness of how everything looks, in a case of a low budget working in a production's favour. There's also the fact that all the game's bullets are actual visible projectiles, rather than the invisible hitscan situation as seen with things like Doom's chainguns, for example. Of course, this also means that all the shots move pretty slowly, giving you and the criminals ample time to dodge bullets like some kind of superhuman. Another thing I like (or at least find mildly interesting) about the game is that the graphics mix full 3D (though very blocky and simple) environments with Mortal Kombat-style digitised sprites, which I guess helps maintain some small amount of aesthetic coherency between the people in the cutscenes and the people in-game. Though the in-game sprites are so low resolution, until you get up close they mainly resemble vaguely humanoid greyish blobs, which ruins the effect somewhat.

There's a few attempted concessions to realism, too. For example, you start each stage with a certain loudout of weapons with limited ammunition (you can choose these, but it's simpler to just pick the "auto" option), and you can only reload a weapon when its current magazine is empty. The game also tries to bring things into full 3D, making you actually aim your weapons vertically, as opposed to the "infinite height" enemies of games like Doom. Unfortunately, the way it does this is incredibly clunky and awkward: to aim, you hold the Z button, and move your crosshair around the screen with the D-pad. It'll stay in whatever position you put it in as you walk around until you tap Z again.

JSWAT also tries to complicate the first person shooter beyond just killing all the enemies and getting out of the stage. Since you're a member of the eponymous Japanese police squad, you're given missions, like rescuing hostages and finding illegally smuggled weapons and so on. This would be something I could count totally in JSWAT's favour, were it not for the fact that no matter what I do, I can't get the second mission (the aforementioned gun smuggling one) to end. I don't know if this is just a poorly designed stage with some obtusely hidden gimmick somewhere, or if, yet again, my Japanese illiteracy has caused me to miss some vital part of the mission's briefing.

All in all, Tokusou Kidoutai JSWAT is a game that's very ambitious, but not very fun to play. Even if i was able to get past the second mission, I think the clunky controls and general slow pace of the game would have stopped me from getting much further into it before boredom and frustration set in. I know the Saturn port of Doom is supposed to be pretty bad, but the console's also home to Quake, Exhumed and Duke Nukem 3D, all three of which it does an excellent job of hosting, and all three of which you should definitely play before you resort to this.