Coaster Race (MSX)

It's always impressive to see games on old computers do things that those computers just weren't designed for, like parallax scrolling, or, in this case, a pretty good bit of faux-sprite scaling, in an Outrun-esque racing game. It's even got hills and, true to its roller coaster theming, loops! Plus it plays pretty well, too.

So, on the title screen, you're presented with three modes: 1P SKILL 1 and 2, and 2P GAME. The 1P options are the single player game, but SKILL 2 starts you on the third track instead of the first. The 2P GAME option is even stranger, as rather than being a head to head race, or even a takey-turny time trail affair, it's a strange arrangement in which one player drives on a track using the joystick, while the other makes corners and loops appear by pressing keys on the keyboard. I couldn't figure out what the point of this mode was, as it didn't seem to have any obvious win conditions for either player.

The game itself is pretty standard for an arcade-style racing game of the mid-80s: you're racing against the clock to drive four laps each around five tracks. Hitting other cars results in your car exploding and a few seconds being wasted as you reappear on the track, and you get ten points for each car passed and a hundred for every second left on the clock at the end of each lap. The first thing that struck me when I started playing was how cute this game is: your car is a slightly futuristic, toyetic vehicle, with a big turbine on the back that spins faster as your speed increases. The tracks are cute too since they're all meant to be roller coasters, the backgrounds all look like theme parks. There's a lot of reused elements in the background, so I assume that all the tracks are part of the same park, and you can see differrent bits of it from each one.

The loops and steep hills on the tracks work really well too, which is impressive: you lose speed and accellerate more slowly when going uphill, and then go vastly faster going down the other side. Loops work pretty much the same, but with the added spectacle of the background scrolling vertically, coming back upside down, then coming back again the right way up. I haven't described it very well, but it is a really effective effect for an 8-bit game from 1986. Another nice little touch is that there's also differen times of day! Track one takes place during the day, two and three at sunset, and the final two tracks take place in the dead of night.

Coaster Race is a fun little game with a ton of charm, and I recommend you go and play it. There's even a little surprise waiting at the end of track five to look forward to too!

Heavy Smash (Arcade)

Other than a few remaining outliers like the Everybody's Golf series, sports games that aren't staid, po-faced "simulations" starring real life players are a pretty rare thing nowadays, and sci-fi/fantasy-themed games about fictional sports even moreso. And that's a shame, because those games are usually pretty great, Heavy Smash included.

What it is is a lot like a simplified, horizontally-scrolling version of the Speedball, where armoured players carry the ball and try to throw it into the goals at either ends of the pitch. This being an arcade game rather than a computer game, Heavy Smash does everything in a much louder, more colourful and generally more flamboyant manner than the Speedball games, though. There's also the addition of a power bar, whose main function is to determine how powerful you shots at the enemy's goal are, with the most powerful being like special attacks from a shonen anime, and being able to blast the opponent's goalie into the goal along with the ball at close nough range. The controls are pretty simple, and perfectly suited to a Mega Drive port that never happened: you have three buttons, the middle one is jump, and the other two each have two different functions, depending on which team has the ball. One of them is for taking shots at the opponent's goal, or attempting to tackle a ball-holding member of the opponent's team, while the other either passes the ball to one of your teammates, or, when your power bar is full, shoots a projectile at your nearest opponent.

Interestingly, the game has two scores. There's the number of goals you've scored in the current match, of course, but there's also a regular old arcade game score, too. This latter score goes up when you score goals, tackle enemy players and pick up the ball, and there's also end of match bonuses for things like scoring hat tricks and so on. Another little quirk is that though the standard length of a match is ninety seconds, if you get six points ahead of your opponents, the match is called off and you're declared the winner outright, so it is theoretically possible to attempt a speedrun of this game. Less cool is the fact that if the scores are tied when time runs out, the game goes into sudden death, and if no-one scores before that time runs out, the CPU player wins.

All the teams except one are nationally themed, and true to form for a Japanese arcade game, there's plenty of stereotypes. The Japan team are samurai, the Italy team are gladiators, and so on. But there's also some non-stereotypical teams in there too: Spain are also represented by a team of samurai, and Brazil are represented by a team of guys with electric superpowers? Also, at first glance, Australia's team are the only women in the game, but when the usually-masked Japan team score a goal, the bare-faced portrait that comes up appears to be a short-haired woman, which is interesting, I guess?

In summary, Heavy Smash is a game that's a lot of fun to play, and it looks awesome, too. Plus, it's yet another game you can look at and ask "why did this never get a home port?" So go and do both those things!