Minesweeper (PC Engine)

Traditionally, the main strength of Minesweeper has been the fact that it's insantly accessible on your computer's desktop at a second's notice. Logically, therefore, a version of the game that requires a console, a TV and a physical copy of the game might seem superfluous to the point of absurdity. And it is! But still, the PC Engine version of Minesweeper does have something in its favour, which is, like what the arcade game Logic Pro did for nonograms (that is, making an actual videogame out of them), as does this with the concept of Minesweeper.

There's four modes to choose from once you start the game, though we can disregard two of them right off the bat: one's just regular old Minesweeper, and the other lets you choose the size of the grid and the number of mines. The meat of the game is in the other two modes: The Voyage and Cook's Quest. The Voyage is the least interesting of the two, being set in the high seas of the sixteenth century, it's just a long series of pre-set Minesweeper grids for you to gradually progress through in order. What really kills the draw of this mode is that despite being on the PC Engine CD, a system that has space for game saves built into itself, Minesweeper expects you to write passwords down like some kind of stone-age oaf, which wouldn't be so bad in a normal game, but remember: this is just another layer of obfuscation put on top of what is already a comedically inconvenient way to play Minesweeper.

The other mode, Cook's Quest suffers from the same problems of pre-set rids and lack of saves, but I'm willing to give it much more leeway simply because it's generally a much more interesting concept and a lot more fun to play. In this mode, each grid is part of a large underground cave complex, and there are doors dotted around the edges. You aren't expected to clear every mine on every grid, just carve out a safe path to the doors and to the various treasures and items strewn about the place too. This is actually a pretty addictive mode, and not only is it a lot more fun and interesting than regular Minesweeper, but it actually makes sense to be using a D-pad rather than a mouse in this mode, since you can't go more than a space away from the safe spaces you've already revealed.

Though it's obvious that the grids are pre-set to make this a fairly-designed game, it is a buzz killer to be digging around for half an hour, only to misclick and go all the way back to the start to solve the exact same puzzles again to get back to where you were. Maybe it could have had both pre-set and randomised modes, like Toejam and Earl on the Mega Drive? What would be really cool is if you were digging for artifacts, and each one had an in-game encyclopedia entry, like in La Mulana or something. But I'm just fantasy game designing now, aren't I?

Anyway, Minesweeper is a ridiculous game that shouldn't really exist. But it does, and you can get a copy dirt cheap. I recommend you do so, just so you can play Cook's Quest and fantasise about how much better it would have been with just a few changes. Aah.

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.