Black Touch 96 (Arcade)

The title Black Touch 96 might sound like some creepy Qix-clone with lewd pictures in the background, but it's actually something totally different and equally as bad: an unfinished Korean beat em up (with lewd pictures between stages)! Though it's unfinished and therefore a bit rough around the edges, it still has all the typical hallmarks of terrible Korean arcade games we've come to know and hate over the years: low quality sampled music, power up items that don't seem to do anything, sound effects stolen from other games (in this case, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) and generally unbalanced difficulty are all present and correct. However, it also has some quirks of its own, mainly aesthetic, to stand out from the awful pack.

For example, the enemies. There's only a few of them you'll fight throughout the game, but they are at least unique. There's a mutant man-baby thing that hits you with a wrench, a bald woman who takes off her wig to hit you with, and a fat guy on a skateboard wearing shorts, a vest and a horned helmet, among less interesting ones like the biker-without-a-bike, and recoloured versions of bosses you've already beaten. Of course, all of the above reappear again and again with different colour palettes, though their difficulty and how much health they have seems to be completely unrelated, as one enemy will go down in two hits, while the next one of the exact same type will take twenty seconds of solid pummelling. Solid pummelling is also the strategy for beating every boss: get them to the edge of the screen and hammer the punch button until they die or your arm drops off.

There's no choice of characters, you're stuck with a generic muscular guy, and your attack options are limited. You've got buttons for punches and kicks, a jump button that's completely pointless (you do a tiny little jump in place, and if you press kick while doing it, you do an unimpressivle spin-kick that removes a third of your own health bar), and you also have a once-per-life bomb attack. The bomb attack is at least hilarious, though, as rather than killing all the enemies onscreen, it just makes them run away. On that note, I should, in the interest of fairness, commend the game on its sprite-pushing ability: the character sprites are all pretty big, and the screen does get crowded at times, with up to six enemies at a time. There's no weapons to pick up, though, and very few power ups (lots of point items, very rare health packs that restore a miserly amount of HP, and even rarer invincibility potions and extra bombs), and really no variety at all in the stages other than the backgrounds (though they're not bad-looking, unlike the blotchy characters): just walking left to right fighting crowds of the same few enemies over and over.

There's not much to recommend about Black Touch 96. To be fair, that might be why the developers didn't finish it, they just saw that it was a dead end. Some arcade prototypes are glimpses at concepts that were just too out there to be marketable, or at cool games that just came about at the wrong time. This isn't one of those ones, though, and it's not really worth your time.

Cardcaptor Sakura - Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundokai (Game Boy Color)

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Cardcaptor Sakura was a very popular show in Japan and around the world. Being a popular kids anime meant that obviously, it got a bunch of videogame adaptations, too, though since it's a cartoon with a female lead, and western companies inexplicably hate cartoons with female leads, none of them got released outside of Japan (in fact, there was barely any western merchandise in general). Testament to exactly how popular the show was is the fact that though it only ran for a little under a hundred episodes, it got ten games across six formats in that shot time. And while most of them were as you'd expect: games about magic and action and so on, this one more than any of the others, I think, shows just how popular the series was: it's a game about Sakura and her classmates participating in a school sports day.

A fantasy-action show getting a videogame that totally eschews both of those in favour of the characters having some light-hearted fun seems like a big risk to me, especially releasing it on a cartridge-based console in 2000, rather than as a simple download in 2018. But anyway, it exists, and it's a Track and Field-style button-annihilation game in which you pick either the pink or blue team and take part in various events. There's normal sports, like the 100m dash and the relay race, there's sports you only see in school sports days, like the three-legged race and the "assault course" that ends in sack racing, there's sports you only see in Japanese school sports days, like the one where teams of three kids carry around a fourth kid, and the kids on top have to steal each other's hats, and there's some slightly weird stuff, like a colour matching puzzle game and a thing where you race over bumpy ground, running behind a giant ball.

As for how it plays, it's alright. A lot of the events are about pressing A and B as fast as you can, with a few extra little twists for each one too, like handing the baton in the relay, or crawling under obstacles in the assault course. The hat-stealing game is the most fun, as it sees you trying to knock your opponents off their balance to so you can easily grab their hat, while also trying to avoid your own hat getting taken as you lean in to do the pushing. Of course, like all TaF-style games, I'm completely terrible at every event, and in a couple of hours' play, haven't managed to win a single one. But that's where the game's secret weapon kicks in: the license.

Of course, Cardcaptor Sakura is an all-time classic show, that doesn't get quite as much recognition in the west as it should, for aforementioned reasons, and this game captures (ho-ho!) a lot of its charm. The actual in-game character sprites are pretty nice, and between events, there's lots of big, luxurious pixel art of the characters, and it all looks excellent, brightly coloured, and super-cute. Though it's clearly a case of just applying a license to a generic game, it's still very effective and adds a ton of charm.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd definitely recommend tracking this game down, as it's pretty fun, really captures the show's feel against all odds, and would generally be a cute addition to your collection. If you're a fan of the genre, I'm not really sure what might make a good or a bad Track and Field game, and there's probably plenty of others that are a lot more easily available for you to get your hands on, and provide just as much of that arm-tiring action you crave.