Mabougirl Miracle Kurun (PC)

If you're smart enough to spot bi-ingual puns, you may have already guessed this game's main hook, which is one I'm suprised to have never encountered before: it's a combination of the old Irritating Stick/Kuru Kuru Kururin thing where you have to navigate a rotating stick through a maze without touching the sides and a danmaku-style shooting game. The pun of course being that the "cle" from "miracle" becomes "kuru" when transliterated into Japanese, and "kuru kuru" is a Japanese onomatopoeia for rotation.

Anyway, you play as a stick that you can move around, and also rotate either way at will, and you have to get through the stages without touching anything (obviously, unlike most modern shooting games, your hitbox is the same size as your ship, since that's the entire point of the game). All the while, bullets will be streaming from the wide sides of your stick, so you've got to juggle the rotation you do to avoid collisions and the rotation you do to try and kill enemies. Killing enemies also fills a meter, and at the press of a button, you can switch from your regular bullets to a powerful laser, that shoots out from the ends of your stick, and is not only more powerful than your normal shots, but also has a score multiplier attached to it that decreases as the meter depletes.

As you play through the stages, you collect gems to buy upgrades, like  increases to max HP, greater ranges of speed settings for both movement and rotation, and even alternative ships. Disappointingly, though, the alternate ships only have different weaponry to the default ship. I would have thought the game could present a whole new set of challenes if there were ships that were different shapes: shorter but fatter for example, or maybe even curved. For those worried about the purity of the arcade-style experience being affected by the upgrades, you can turn them off once unlocked. Furthermore, the game doesn't really have arcade-style progression. Instead, each stage is played individually with a new set of lives and a score that doesn't carry over into other stages. As an extra challenge, though, some upgrades can only be bought by spending a certain kind of gem that can only be obtained one at a time, and only by completing a stage without taking any damage at all.

Mabougirl Miracle Kurun is far from being my favourite game from the current Japanese indie scene, but it's even further from being the worst I've played, too. It's alright, I guess. It'd probably worth a buy if it ever gets released in some convenient form, but it's not worth using a proxy site to order a physical copy from Japan. Like I did. Doh.

Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na (PC98)

So, we've all seen the many many mahjong games that were the most hated thing in MAME until they decided to start including fruit machines (which aren't even playable, as they have no graphics), but until recently, I'd never actually played any of them. Using the helpful site Mahjong in MAME, I picked up some of the basics of how the game works, and since Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na is a simplified version of the game, and it has a cool fantasy theme with amazing pixel art, just like you expect from PC98 games, I decided this would be my first foray into tile-matching. (Also as you'd expect from PC98 games, there's sex and nudity tacked on that adds nothing of value to the game. So tacked on, in fact, that I can take plenty of screenshots and you'd think it was a totally clean game with some fanservicey character designs).

So, rather than explain mahjong to you, I'll just suggest you visit the aforementioned site to learn how it's played, and then forget most of that, since like I said, this is a simplified version. There's a much smaller variety of tiles, and the only thing you're aiming to do is make up three sets of three identical tiles. Each turn you gain a tile, either by drawing at random, or by taking the last tile your opponent discarded (though you can only do this if it's the last one you need to make a "tri", which is what this game calls Pon/Koutsu). Another difference is that the tiles aren't the traditional mahjong tiles, but instead have pictures of typical RPG monsters and items on them: dragons, slimes, swords, potions and so on.

Keeping with that RPG theme, all your opponents are sexy female versions of RPG monsters, with HP and MP. (Which you also have) MP is used to stack the deck in your favour before a round, or to take a look at your opponent's hand during the round. Victory in a game is attained by reducing your opponent's HP to zero, and vice versa. How much damage you do to your opponent when you've got three tris depends on what the tiles making up those tris are. Different monsters deal different amounts of damage (or sometimes heal your HP and MP), and if you're lucky enough to get two tris of the same tile, that'll result in a massive bonus to its effects. Another thing to take note of is that all the monster tiles have yellow or blue triangles in their bottom corners, and making a hand of all yellow monsters results in a powerful "El Dorado" attack, while all blue results in an "Evil Attack".

If you win, you go back to the simple "board" and move on to the next opponent (or, if you beat a boss, you see a dirty cutscene before moving on to the next board), if you lose it's game over, and of course, a dirty cutscene featuring your character. If you haven't played a mahjong game before, Legend of Pong Lonng Fighter Sunny'na is a great introduction, as long as you don't mind the occasionaly bit of dirty pixel art. It's even addictive enough to have had me staying up hours later than I should have a few nights ago! I'll probably even look into some "proper" mahjong games in the near future, I enjoyed this one so much.