Kuru Kuru Panic (Playstation)

It's yet another colour-matching competitive puzzle game! This time, it's on the Playstation, rather than arcades, and it seems to have been made by a very small team, who proudly put all their names on a screen preceding the title screen, which sounds like it would be annoying, but it actually gives the game a feel of being the product of a ragtag bunch of enthusiasts. According to GameFAQs, they only did two other games, one of which was part of the Atelier series, and the other is the Dreamcast version of that visual novel thing starring Samurai Shodown's Nakoruru. Which is a bit sad really, isn't it?

Anyway, the main gimmick this game uses to stand out from the crowd is that rather than rectangular pits, you have coloured blobs falling towards the centre of large wheels? Though it might not be obvious at first, the effect this has isn't just aesthetic, but also has a few effects on gameplay. The first is that the wheels mean that unlike most games, your playing area is much wider than it is tall, so while piling on the blobs in one place will kill you quicker, you have more places in which to drop them. There's also the fact that you move the wheel itself round, rather than moving the blobs round it, which takes some getting used to at first, and allows the game to do another thing: set up blobs to fall in at different locations at the same time (or at least, in very quick succession).

The fact that you're almost constantly bombarded with blobs to place, and that you have such a wide area in which to place them makes Kuru Kuru Panic a fair bit more stressful than other puzzle games, even before it starts speeding up. It gets a little better once you realise this fact, and concentrating on just setting up little chains here and there when you can, and not getting too caught up in trying to build up one big chain. The fact is, you don't always have total control over where every blob, so you just have to do what you can to manage. Writing it like this makes the game sound like it's mostly luck-based, and not very good at all. And to be honest, I don't feel too bad saying that.

Every time I review a puzzle game, I always seem to end up talking about how it's good enough, but it has nothing to allow it to stand up to the giants of the genre. But in this case, I think it's more a case of that I desperately wanted this game to be better than it is, but it's just not. It's not a terrible game either, though: it's well-made and well-presented, but more important than all that is the fact that it's just not a very fun or interesting game to play.

Savage Skies (PS2)

Some concepts are so obvious that you can't believe that hadn't been done earlier, and Savage Skies is one of those very concepts: a fantasy combat flight sim, with mythical creatures instead of fighter jets. It was apparently going to feature Ozzy Osbourne early in development, too, which probably would have got it a bit more attention. (More than none, I mean. I'd never heard of this game at all before picking up a copy for next-to -nothing on a whim  few weeks ago.)

We might never know what the Ozzied-up version of the game might have been like, but the version we got has a pretty boring, generic fantasy plot, about a good kingdom and an evil horde and another horde that's neither good nor evil but they are weird-looking, and they're all at war with each other. You can pick any one of the three to play as, and they each have a series of missions to fly, as well as their own unique set of monsters. You don't get to pick your monster, though, each mission has one set to it. On the plus side, this means that there are a lot of them and they're all different, both visually and in the weapons with which they're equipped.

The good guys are the least interesting, having a fleet mainly made up of the obvious fantasy suspects: dragons, rocs, pegasi, and so on. The weird faction have weird steeds: flying eyeball monsters, flying manta rays, and other non-mammalian-looking monsters. The bad guys, of course, have typically evil-looking rides: giant bats, a giant locust made of bones, and my favourite of all the monsters I've seen so far, a giant flying rat armed with "vomit spray" and "plague breath". I love how childishly disgusting that guy is! I should also make mention of the stages themselves, which look amazing: mountains and deserts and huge majestic castles, the developers really made the most of the setting, giving you lots of picturesque locales to fly around and over that obviously would never appear in a traditional flight sim.

Anyway, it's not all fun: none of the monsters I've ridden so far have homing weapons, and the enemy flyers take a ton of hits before going down, so unfortunately, this means you spend a lot of time flying round and round in circles chasing an arrow at the edge of the screen pointing towards your nearest foe. Not every stage is like that, though, and some of the monsters do have weapons that make the process a lot less painful, like high-powered close-range breath weapons, or weapons that slow the enemy's movement. There is a level skip cheat, though, and I've found the best way to get the most enjoyment out of Savage Skies is to just skip a stage as soon as it gets boring or frustrating. When the game told me the next mission was a race, I skipped right away. There's something incredibly frustrating and joyless about race missions in non-racing games.

So yeah, Savage Skies is a game that mainly stands on the twin pillars of looking really nice and having a great concept. If I'd paid full price for it, I probably wouldn't be happy, but for the prices it goes for nowadays, you can totally have a lot of fun with it in conjunction with the level skip cheat.