_____ (PC)

Okay, so obviously, this game's title isn't five underscores, it's the string of characters you see in the title screen above. But all the text in this game, including the numbers, is in an untranslated (possibly untranslatable) alien language. The name entry on the high score screen will let you know that there's twenty-eight letters, and I haven't gone out of my way to count them, but I think there might actually be more than ten numerical digits, too. The game's .exe is called "_____.exe", though, and I think some people online refer to it as "Platine Dispositif's Comiket 87 STG", too. (It does have the typical PD graphical style too, with cute female characters and soft-looking colourful bullets).

Anyway, other than that bizarre presentational choice (I wonder if it was done as a kind of accessibility thing? Like, instead of having multiple language options to make the game accessible to everyone, use an alien language to make it equally inaccessible to everyone?), it's a fairly traditional vertically-scrolling shooter, with the Star Soldier games being a clear design influence: there's a time-limited caravan mode, and the stages are full of passive collections of destructible blocks to get points. There's also stages, bosses and enemies that feel like they might be homages to other classic shooting games, like Xevious, Sylvalion, and so on.

There's a few interesting mechanics and systems in play in the game, though. The first one you'll notice is the weapons system: as you collect power ups, you get an increasing amount of options attached to your ship. You have a button on the controller for changing the formation of these options, with multiple possibilities available, depending on which direction you press on the d-pad when pressing the change button. There's also secret items hidden around the stages (revealed by shooting them, another clear Star Soldier influence) that give you more formations to choose from. The problem is, 90% of the game will only have you ever using "all the options pointed stright forward" and "all the options pointed straight back", making the rest of them a bit useless. Though I guess the alternative would have been to have the player constantly switching between different formations, making the game a fiddly annoying mess to play.

The other big mechanic is also the main way to score big points, and it's a lot more fun than I can probably make it sound. When power ups are on screen, and you fly near them, they'll get magnetised and home into your ship, and if you let go of the fire button, the distance from which this happens is greatly increased. This is a pretty common idea, really. The difference here is that your ship can move slightly faster than the power ups, and they often appear more than one at a time. Furthermore, every frame you have a power up following your ship, you get points, and obviously, the more power ups following, the more points you rack up. So with a bit of skill, you can have sizable clusters of power ups hovering around your ship, generating tons of points for you.

There is a tactical advantage to doing this too, however: when your weapon's at max power, collecting another power up gives you a few seconds of even more powerful shots. So, if you're maxed out, and there's a boss coming up, you "save" any power ups floating around so you can unleash your full might on the boss, instead of wasting it on the empty few seconds before it appears. I've said "power ups" far too many times in this review so far, but there's still a few more mentions to go, as there's also a upgrade shop in the main menu, that uses the power ups you've collected during play as currency. You'll be glad to know, though, that you can't make entries into the high score table if you're using upgrades, they can be turned off once bought, and they never affect the caravan mode.

In summary, this is a really great game, with an incredibly unique presentation, and it's highly recommended. Don't worry about navigating menus in an alien language, either, as there's nice friendly pictograms showing what things do too. Also, this is the first physical release of a doujin PC game I've ever bought, and it came in a really nice custom package made of think, sturdy card, with the art on the disc fitting perfectly with the art on the surrounding parts of the packaging. In an age where billion-dollar publishers only do the bare minimum in presenting their £60 physical releases, seeing a tiny company making such a high-quality item for their 1500JPY game is really nice.

Annet Futatabi (Mega CD)

For some reason, Wolf Team were very prolific on the Mega CD, whether they were porting other companies games, like Road Avenger and Thunderstorm FX, or making their own stuff, like this game. Annet Futatabi is the third part of a trilogy that also includes the Mega Drive games Earnest Evans and El Viento. Unlike those games, though, it's not a platformer, but a belt-scrolling beat em up, one of very few Mega CD beat em ups that aren't arcade ports.

As a Japanese Mega CD title, it's pretty much par for the course: it's an action game of the sort that the base Mega Drive could have played host to, but with the addition of CD audio, full screen animated cutscenes (in the "animated pixel art" non-FMV style I've spoken of in  a few other reviews, most notably the Saturn game Dinosaur Island) and voice acting. And all of those things are great! The cutscenes are very reminiscent of 80s/early 90s period-adventure anime, like The Secret of Blue Water, and so on. There's even a nice anime-style intro, complete with vocal theme song!

Of course, great presentation is something of a common theme throughout Wolf Team's games, especially when they're working on CD-based systems. Unfortunately, another running theme is "almost greatness", and Annet Futatabi is no exception. It has all the ingredients for being an unsung classic of the system (and, to be honest, most of the system's classics can be considered unsung, thanks to the received opinion that "the Mega CD was worthless"): it's a fairly nice-looking beat em up, with a cool setting, a female lead and great presentation, plus it's a system exclusive. You can probably guess from the tone of this paragraph so far that it doesn't quite work out like that, though.

And you'd be right to guess that! Though there are some nice little things about how the game plays: the fact that you can run in eight directions, and that you do have a moderately sizable moelist, it all falls apart due to how unfair the difficulty is. Firstly, when enemies attack, their hitbox seems to be bigger than their entire sprite, not just the part of them that's attacking, and it seems to still be in effect for a few frames after the attack animation's finished. So for anyone used to more competently-constructed beat em ups, who might instinctively go in for a throw or combo as soon as an enemy's attack finishes will have to counterintuitively learn to wait a little, slowing the game down and ruining the flow. There's also the fact that you have a big bomb attack that recharges over time, so it can be used multiple times over the course of a single stage. The problem is that when the stage's boss appears, your bomb attack disappears and you can't use it. This just makes no sense at all! I can't imagine what they were thinking when they made that decision, especially due to the fact that bosses suffer (or rather, they benefit?) from the "giant attack hitbox problem just as much as the regular enemies, and they're a lot bigger than normal enemies already.

I really wanted to like this game, and I tried to get some kind of joy from it, but it's just an awkward, frustrating slog. When I got to the third stage, an underground ancient temple full of robots with ranged attacks and the ability to turn invincible without warning, I gave up on it. It's a shame.