Splendor Blast II (Arcade)

So, you remember the early 90s, when the first big 3D arcade games were coming out? Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, and so on? It's shameful to say it now, but at the time, I wasn't impressed. Since I was a poor kid who couldn't afford a Saturn or 32X, and lived in some podunk village with no arcade, I only ever saw still screenshots of these games, that looked like a bunch of ugly boxes. Obviously, yers later, I saw these games in motion and was made to be ashamed of my thoughts and actions. I clearly didn't learn anything, though, as upon seeing stills of Splendor Blast II, I thought it looked like just another 80s shooting game with ugly low resolution graphics. Then I actually played it, and it turns out I was wrong on many fronts: it's actually an innovate futuristic racing game that looks amazing in motion, and the backgrounds look that way because it uses a kind of pre-mode 7 rotation effect to fake 3D!

This game was actually never released, though it is finished, and we can only play it thanks to Shoutime getting ahold of a copy and dumping the ROM, and we should all be thankful for that, as it really is a great game. It's pretty much as you'd expect from a futuristic racing game: spaceships instead of cars, racers risking life and limb, interfering space monsters and a little bit of shooting, as well as that old chestnut, the "fuel gauge that serves as a combined health bar and time limit." You race through the stages at high-speed, dodging obstacles and overtaking your opponents. The latter half of each stage will also let you shoot to destroy obstacles and aliens, though not your opponents, who will manage to avoid getting hit every time (though you can use this to your advantage by getting them out of the way). At the end of each stage, you get a bonus based on which position you finished in, how quick you were (as long as you finished in under a minute) and just a bonus for finishing. You also get some of your fuel back, at a rate which seems to be directly tied to how large your bonuses were.

It really is a game ahead of its time in a few ways. Obviously, there's the graphics, which look great in motion. Not only are they super-fast, but the psuedo-3D effect looks really cool as well, with some parts being especially good, like the lava stage with has columns of flame shooting out of firepits, like something from the hellish planet Apokolips in Jack Kirby's Fourth World. There's also the fact that you are actually racing against opponents. Though the game won't end if you place low at the end of a stage, the bearing that your placement has on the energy you get back would severely hamper your chances of surviving the next stage. But the fact that it keeps track at all is something to talk about, as most racing games in 1985 pitted you purely against the clock, with other racers only there to give you a points bonus when you pass them (though SBII does that too, of course).

The fact that this game was never released is bizarre to me. It's obviously a complete game, and not only is it a great one, but it's also an innovative one that's years ahead of its time. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that maybe Alpha Denshi saw SEGA's Super Scaler games and thought that their vertically-scrolling effort looked old hat in comparision? Anyway, now that it's available for everyone to play, I strongly recommend that you do so as soon as possible.

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.