Dreammix TV World Fighters (Gamecube)

So, when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Gamecune and proved to be a massive hit, way bigger than its N64 forebear, there were a few me-too platform fighting games that tried to ride its coattails, mostly licensed from popular anime of the time like Digimon, Groove Adventure Rave or Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Dreammix TV World Fighters is even more of a Smash Bros wannabe than those games, as like Smash Bros, it's a big crossover, and it actually pre-empts the more famous series in two ways: it's a multi-company crossover, and it features Solid Snake as a playable character!

Yes, it's a crossover featuring characters from the videogame publisher Hudson Soft (providing characters from Bomberman, Bloody Roar and others), the toymakers Takara (represented by Transformers, Beyblade and some dolls) and the pachinko machine manufacturers* Konami (who probably have the most recoginsable line-up, having characters from Gradius, Twinbee, Castlevania, and some baseball series alongside the famous Mr. Dave Snake). Like most of these games, it doesn't use a traditional health bar system, instead having fights decided by a convoluted system involving coins with hearts on them.

How it works is this: at the start of a fight, coins with hearts on them will rain from the 'bove, and all the character present will scramble to collect as many as they can in the few seconds before they disappear. During the fights, taking damage means dropping coins, until, when you have no coins left, you'll shrink down to a tiny size and a big glowing heart will come out of you and float around. If you can catch that heart before anyone else, you're back in the game, but if not, you're no longer able to win, but you can still move around in your shrunken form, like a small useless ghost (Iguess this is so players aren't left with nothing to doing after getting eliminated). The last player left at their full size is the winner, of course.

The actual act of playing is very similar to Smash Bros: you have buttons for jumping, normal and special attacks, throws and blocking. You do different attacks by pushing the analogue stick in the right direction while pressing one of the attack buttons. The most flagrant thing is that the shoulder buttons are used for blockng, and while blocking, you character crouches and gets surrounded by an impenetrable bubble. Shameless!

I'd feel unnecessarily harsh referring to this as a poor man's Smash Bros, as I enjoyed as much as the "real thing" (although to be fair, I do consider Smash Bros to be a bit of a poor man's Power Stone 2 to begin with), plus it has a bit of a more exciting roster than its consolemate Melee, especially if you don't particularly have a great interest in many of Nintendo's first party titles or their style of character design. I guess all I can say is that if you like Smash Bros, but you'd like to see Optimus Prime and Tyson from Beyblade fight Bomberman and a Moai head, then you should definitely play this game. If not, then probably not. What a boring copout!


*SATIRE~!

Fire Trap (Arcade)

The wikipedia page for 1982's crazy climber says that that game might be the only arcade game that's not a twin-stick shooter two use two joysticks and no buttons. That's definitely wrong, though, as Fire Trap is another game with that control system. Although, to be fair to whoever wrote the Crazy Climber wiki page, Fire Trap is essentially an update of that game with really nice graphics.

And those graphics are really nice. You scale lovingly-rendered isometric highrises, rescuing people and putting out fires, and when you have a second or two spare, you can take in some gorgeous views of the surrounding cityscape. And while it was typical for city-set arcade games of the 1980s to take their visual cues from the likes of The Warriors or Terrifying Girls High School, Fire Trap emulates a more optimistic, luxurious view of the decade of decadence: rather than climbing graffiti-covered tenement estates, you're climbing luxurious condos in the sun. The second stage is a particularly proud example of eighties excess, being set on a building constructed of pink concrete, with occasional swimming pools and sun decks. On a sidenote of probably-unintentional satire, you could say that the most eighties element of the game is that you get more points for finding a sack of money than you do for rescuing a trapped human.

Anyway, I have some bad news: although the game is really really nice to look at, it's not so nice to play. It's not only incredibly hard, but frequently feels unfair, and even mean-spirited. It has that same "evil fire" that almost every other fire-fighting game seems to have (in fact, it might even be the first appearance of the phenomenon), and the flames will shooting homing orbs of fire at you as you're climbing around. Not only that, but once you near the top of the building, a huge hovering, invincible fireball will start floating around, faster than you can possibly avoid it, meaning you just have to hope that it doesn't crash into you as you climb the last few windows to the top. In case you're wondering about the controls, up and down on each stick move the respective hands of your character in the pushed direction, pushing left or right on either stick moes you sideways, and pushing the sticks in towards each other shoots upwards. Obviously, I was emulating, and while you might think the most logical setup for these controls would be the two analogue sticks of an XBox 360 controller, but I actually found this to be slightly less responsive and immediate as I'd like, so I figured out a scheme utilising the d-pad and ABXY buttons of a USB Saturn pad, as well as mapping the shot command to the right shoulder button. This allowed for much quicker movement, and just felt a lot nicer, especially when building up the right rhythm for speedy ascension. (Were the last few sentences a bit pointless and self-indulgent? Maybe.)

Anyway, yeah; Fire Trap is a beautiful game, but you'll save yourself a lot of stress by just going and looking up a longplay video of it on youtube.