Soleil (Mega Drive)

A lot of the reviews of Soleil (also known as Ragnacenty or Crusader of Centy) compared it to A Link to the Past. At first glance, this seems pretty apt: they're both top-down action RPGs, they both star young boys with swords, they both have you cutting grass to find coins. The thing is, it's only at first glance that comparision holds up. If you really need to compare Soleil to a SNES game, the one to go for would be Earthbound (or Mother 2). (It should be noted, however, that Earthbound wasn't yet out when Soliel was released. But that doesn't make the Zelda comparision any less lazy.)

Though they don't have a lot in common mechanically, or even aesthetically, with Earthbound being a Dragon Quest-style turn-based RPG set in a strange version of mid-twentieth century America, and Soleil being an action RPG set in a pastel-hued fantasy realm, they're both games that have narrative ambitions well beyond what was expected of console games at the time of their release, and conversely, well beyond their peers.

There's plenty of people who have written about Earthbound's setting and writing and so on, and I'm not a particularly big fan of it, so I'm not going to reitierate much about it, but basically, the people who do love tend to take from it not only a strong sense of nostalgia, but a real emotional resonance, and it's often said that the game does a good job of replicated the world in which a child lives. Clearly, its ambitions were loftier than most RPGs that existed at that point, which were almost all sci-fi or fantasy stories (that's not to say that there weren't good stories among them, just that they weren't literarily ambitious).

Soleil, though starts with a typical fantasy setting in which boys from the village long to become heroic monster killers when they grow up ,and so on, it quickly subverts it in a number of ways. The first subversion is seen when the village boys go to see off an older boy, Amon, as he leaves the village to go and kill monsters and be a hero. You encounter Amon once or twice later in the game, too, and there's the implication that in a more traditional RPG story, he would be the player character with the lofty destiny.

Instead of the normal heroic quest, Soleil's protagonist is embroiled in a number of bizarre events, during which they gain the power to speak to animals, temporarily get turned into a monster, and ever go to heaven while still alive. Possibly the most important of these, and definitely the most interesting is the section of the game where you're turned into a monster. At the risk of spoiling an important part of the game's story, you basically find out that monsters largely live in mortal terror of human heroes, and just want to be left alone, and that the monsters you kill do have families that mourn their passing. It's something that could have been just a throwaway joke in the vein of the henchman's family scene in one of the Austin Powers movies, but it's played totally straight, and though you do go back to kiling monsters when you retain your human form, you are given a new purpose in life: to find out why humans and monsters fight, and to strive towards ending that conflict.

So, that's Soleil. I can't say if the writers of 1994 were genuinely lazy or stupid in their easy comparisions, or if the climate of the time simply made the idea of thematic criticism of a videogame totally unthinkable to them, but either way, they were wrong. Soleil is a game that's worth playing on its own merits, and should hold a place in history alongside the Mother games as an early attempt to subvert and experiment with what's possible in a videogame's narrative.

Yakuza Fury (PS2)

I know what you're thinking, and for a long time, I thought the same: this game must be a mockbuster for SEGA's Yakuza series, right? But, in researching for this post, I found evidence to the contrary! The Japanese version of this game (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 72: The Ninkyou) was released ten whole months before the Japanese release of the first Yakuza game. Even more surprising is that if GameFAQs is to be believed, even the European release of Yakuza Fury preceded the Japanese release of Yakuza! So it's just a coincidence that there's a low budget game with a similar genre and similar themes to a massively popular high budget game.

Having played a lot of Simple Series games at this point, I can confidently say this one follows the formula to the letter. It's a simple action game (in this case, a beat em up), with stuff to grind for, and long boring cutscenes that have all the voice acting removed from the European version. It even has a low poly rendition of a contemporary Japanese suburb, like so many other low budget PS2 games have! Anyway, the game's split into two parts, essentially: the story missions, where you go to a place, and keep beating people up until you get to the boss fight, and the free-roaming bit. The free roaming bit is actually the least interesting: you can wander around a few streets of the aforementioned suburb, where enemies will constantly run in from the sides of the screen to attack you. There's also a few people standing around that you can talk to, though the enemies don't stop attacking you while you do.

The point of fighting the endless hordes of enemies is to collect the coins they drop so you can buy items of clothing at the shop (an interesting little detail is that the girl in the shop is wearing a t-shirt featuring the main character of another Simple game, The Splatter Action/Splatter Master). They offer minor benefits, but the most important ones to buy are the hakama trousers, which give you an incredibly useful (to the point of almost breaking the game) healing ability, and the eyepatch (listed here as "bandage"), which looks really cool. When you get bored of this, or you've bought every item in the shop, you go and find where the next stage starts, watch a boring cutscene, then beat everyone up in the stage.

I'm not just saying that the cutscenes are boring because I hate cutscenes (though I do, as you know), but because they are the most lifeless, generic gangster nonsense you can imagine. None of the characters have any personality and nothting in the story is remotely interesting. Or maybe I've just been spoiled by the incredible story and characters in the Yakuza games (I know it's not fair to keep comparing them like this, but it's also very hard to avoid). The combat is also unexciting. You get a simple punch combo, which you can end with a kick, and you also get throws, which are so short range and slow that you'll probably never get one to actually connect.

I hate being so negative when reviewing a game, but Yakuza Fury is just an incredibly bland nothing of a game, that's not even bad in an interesting or unique way. It's just plain old mediocre tedium. Don't play it.

Punch the Monkey - Game Edition (Playstation)

This game's got a pretty strange title, but it's there for a reason, as it's a pretty strange idea. Punch The Monkey was an album released in 1998 which featured a bunch of remixes of songs from the various animated adaptations of Monkey Punch's universally-beloved character Lupin III, and this is a videogame adaptation of that album, released in 2000.

Of course, it's a rhythm game, and it's an incredibly simple one at that: the song plays, an animated FMV is shown in the middle of the screen, and Playstation face buttons travel across the bottom of the screen. In the middle of the screen at the bottom, there's a little crosshair, and when a button reaches it, you press the button. There's also a set of colours at the top of the screen, showing how well you're doing, ranging from red (the worst) to blue (the best). At certain points in the song, if you're not in green or blue, you fail and have to start again. It's so simple, it's the kind of thing that you'd see as a minigame in an RPG or something, rather than its own whole game.

Simple doesn't mean easy, though, and it took me about six attempts to get past the first stage. It seems that this is a question of balance, rather than overall difficulty, though, as I breezed through the next few stages without problems. There are some other odd decisions besides the stage order, too, like how you don't actually get to hear most of the songs you're meant to be playing along with, as your button presses all make very loud noises that drown everythig else out, from bullet ricochets on some stages, to doorbells and animal sounds on others. Interesingly, the general presentation of the game is very much a part of a certain aesthetic things in the late 1990s/early2000s had when they were cashing in on 1970s nostalgia. Some of the fonts and swirly background patterns seen at certain points in this game are very reminiscent of the UK VHS and DVD releases of the 1970s Japanese TV show  Monkey/Saiyuuki that came out at around the same time.

Unfortunately, there isn't much more to be said about the game itself, though. There are apparently a series of minigames, unlocked by completing the main game on all difficulties but the easiest, and through those minigames, FMV clips can be unlocked to watch at your leisure, but it's just not worth playing through such a simple and unengaging main game. So all I have left is this little bit of trivia: it was developed by the company Kaze, who I associate more with their two excellent pinball games on Saturn, Last Gladiators and Necronomicon. Two years later, they also released Akira Psycho Ball, a very experimental and strange pinball game on PS2, which, like this game, was licensed from a popular classic anime, and also featured heavy use of FMV clips in little windows. How interesting!

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban (Game Boy)

You might already be aware of Bikkuriman as a franchise, but if you're not, it's a line of snacks that were popular in Japan from the late 1970s onwards, that also had stickers in the packets. The characters from the stickers were popular enough to have been featured in various anime and videogame tie-ins over the years, the most well-known in the west probably being the PC Engine game Bikkuriman World, which was an altered port of the arcade game Wonderboy in Monster Land. As far as I can tell, though, this game is completely new.

Like most licensed games from the early 1990s, though it is a platform game, and coming from 1992, it's actually an early example of a problem I associate with the later years of the Game Boy's life: developers being way too ambitious with the size of their sprites. Like you can see in the screenshots, the sprite in this game are huge, which doesn't give them a lot of space to move around the screen, and limits the distance you can see. And that does cause a lot of problems with leaps of faith and so on. Luckily, though, it is ambitious in other ways, and they at least make it an interesting game, if not a good one.

Firstly, your character's lifebar is split in half, with the second half being a power meter that goes up as you attack enemies, and down as you take damage. However, the less life you have left, the higher the maximum amount of power you can store gets, like in Psychic Force 2012. Once the meter reaches a certain level for the first time, you can press start to take on a more powerful form, who looks cooler and can fly and shoot projectiles. In this form, once the power meter reaches a certain level, you can press start to use a super attack, summoning a phoenix or a dragon (depending on which character you're playing as, and they seem to alternate stage-by-stage) to smite your enemies. So brave players might want to try sacrificing their health so they can easily perform this attack twice in a row as soon as they reach the boss (though this is both brave and foolish, as the game's massive sprites make it pretty hard to dodge attacks a lot of the time).

It's nothing ground breaking, but it's more complexity than you might expect from a licensed Game Boy platformer in 1992. And there's more too! As well as the main game, the developers have also included a little beyblade-esque spinning tops minigame accessible from the main menu, presumably as a way to shoehorn in a multiplayer mode. Before you start, you choose whether to emphasise power or speed, and whoever runs out of speed frst loses. So go with speed every time and you'll win. I can't imagine this sold many more copies of the game, and I honestly wonder if two Game Boys and two copies of this were ever connected together, even once. But it was probably a request from the licensor or the publisher that they had to include some kind of multiplayer thing.

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban isn't anything revolutionary, and I definitely don't recommend going out of your way to track down a copy. But if you ever happen upon a loose cartridge on sale for practically no money at all (like I did), it wouldn't hurt to pick it up.

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.

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.

Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen (3DS)

The developer/publisher of this game is a company named Compile-O, who are apparently made up of former members of Compile. Considering that this is a colour-matching versus puzzle game, that must be a good thing, right? At first glance, the little multicoloured blobs look a lot like Puyos, too. Luckily, though Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen manages to be both a good game, and an original enough concept to avoid being trapped in Puyo Puyo's shadow.

Like in Puyo Puyo, you put the same-coloured blobs next to each other and they merge, but unlike Puyo Puyo, you can keep doing this with as many of them as you like, and they won't disappear on their own, they'll just keep merging into bigger and bigger hattifattener-like blobby towers until you're ready to make them pop. The process of making them pop is a little like Super Puzzle Fighter, or Baku Baku Animal, in that you accumulated tower of blobs has to be touched by an activation blob of the same colour to vanish. The difference being that in this game, rather than waiting around for the activator to be given to you, at the touch of a button, you can change the piece you're currently controlling into an activator, and you can do this whenever you like, and how often you like.

Obviously, getting rid of lots of blobs at once means giving your opponent lots of junk blobs to get in their way, but even this is subject to the same kind of player choice as the activator blobs. All the junk pieces you create by destroying the coloured blobs on your side are stored until you want to use them. Once they're there, you can drop them at any time you like, though a maximum of 40 can be dropped in one go, after which there's a few seconds of cooldown time. These two mechanics, the player-summoned activator blobs and the player-launched junk blobs work together to create a unique kind of tension not usually seen in these kinds of games: you might be tempted to build up huge piles of blobs before you get rid of them, or huge amounts of junk to pummel your opponent with, but you have to be careful and keep an eye on what they're doing too, as if you're not, just a few well-timed junk blobs dropped into your field could ruin all your plans.

So yeah, Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen is a decent game, that proves that there's still new things to be done with the competitive colour matching puzzle genre. And by the people who started it, no less! Of course, it's a Japan-only 3DS game, so actually getting to play it might be difficult for some people, but I'm sure you can figure something out if you want it.

Super Bubble 2003 (Arcade)

There's an unusual story behind this post: a total stranger on Youtube sent me a message saying that the only information they could find on it anywhere were short video clips, and asked if I could write a post about it. I'd never heard of it before, and looked up those short video clips, and it looked okay, so here this post is.

For a long long time, I've lamented that I would often see screenshots of freemium MMORPGs and mobile phone games from Korea with really, incredibly good pixelart and sprites, always sad that there was this pool of talent there was was a perfect fit for cool, fun, arcade-style games, seemingly doomed to an eternity of their art being wasted in a world of nickel-and-diming micro-transactions and grind-based games. Meanwhile, Korean arcade games had a reputation for not only being incredibly low in quality, but also for stealing art assets from western and Japanese games. Super Bubble 2003 bucks both trends by not only being okay to play, but by having all-original (as far as I can tell) artwork!

And that artwork is truly excellent. All the characters are super-cute and well-animated, the points items are all lovingly rendered sprites depicted various foods, everything's bright and colorful without being garish; it's all just really high quality. I think the only negative thing I can say about this game, visually speaking, is that there's no visible life counter! The music and sound effects are pretty unremarkable, if you're wondering.

As for how it plays: it's a Bubble Bobble clone. Like most BB clones, it doesn't, as far as I can tell, copy the original's Druaga-esque system of byzantine secrets-within-secrets, only the core mechanics of trpping enemies in bubbles and popping them for points items. It does a pretty good job of it, though, and it does add a couple of other things to the formula, too: there's a tug-o-war minigame that appears when you collect a magic wand, and a giant/invincible mode that happens when you collect a bootleg Superman icon. The minigame is pretty much impossible to win, as far as I can tell though, so I have no idea what the prize is. The giant/invinciblity power up is nice, having its own super-cute sprites rather than just blowing up the regular-sized ones.

It's got a very steep difficulty curve that almost instantly shoots right up after you finish the first set of fifteen stages. I shamefully have to admit that I credit-fed up to the mid-30s to take screenshots, but I find credit-feeding incredibly boring so stopped there. It's proper difficulty, though: it doesn't change the rules on you or any other underhand tactic like that. With a lot of practice and skill, you could totally 1cc this game eventually. Whether or not it's a recommended play hinges, I guess, on your tolerance for that sort of thing, possibly tempered by your desire to see super-cute sprites. Give it a try, I guess?

All Star Pro Wrestling (PS2)

I'm sure you're aware that there are plenty of older games that look a lot better, and ever have certain graphical effects that only work properly on an older CRT TV. Some, like old rhythm games are actually borderline unplayable on flatscreen TVs, for various reason to do with refresh rates and the like. However, All Star Pro Wrestling is the first videogame that feels like it was made to not only be played on a CRT TV, but more specifically a black and white one from the 1970s.

This is despite the fact that most of the wrestlers featured in it were current at the time of its release in 2000 (though, since i know nothing about Japanese wrestling of that period, I can't tell you anything about them). It's just so incredibly austere in its presentation that it looks and feels like a tv broadcast from three decades earlier than its release date. If Jim Cornette were ever to play a wrestling videogame (despite his hatred for "videogame marks"), this would be the one he'd play. There's no gimmick matches(not even tag matches! There's nothing but singles matches on offer), barely any music, no finishing moves, no flashy entrances, absolutely no concessions towards the idea that wrestling is a form of entertainment and not a legitimate sport.

The game itself makes no concessions towards being entertainment, either, being an absolute chore to actually play. There's the controls, first of all, which are entirely mapped to the analogue sticks. You move with the left stick, and attack (or sometimes run to the ropes, if that's what your wrestler feels like doing) with the right stick. To grapple, you press L3 and R3 together, while standing so close to your opponent you're already touching them. When while grappling, you use the right stick to do a move, which will almost always be a snapmare, an Irish whip, or a backdrop, no matter what you do or which wrestler you're controlling. (Note: there is apparently an alternate control scheme that uses the buttons, but it also uses the universally terrible touch sensitivity feature the PS2's face buttons had that was so bad that Sony asked developers not to use it after a couple of years).To make matters worse, all this happens so slowly that you'd think the wrestlers were submerged in a vat of treacle.

This game was part of the second half of Squaresoft's "experimental period", which started on the Playstation with the likes of Einhander, Racing Lagoon and Tobal No. 1, and ended in the early days of the Playstation 2 with the likes of this, Driving Emotion Type-S and The Bouncer. You've probably figured out by now that I do not recommend it, and it might even be the worst 3D wrestling game I've ever played. There must have been an audience for slow, boring wrestling games in turn-of-the-century Japan, however, as it somehow sold enough copies to get two sequels.

Jerry Glanville's Pigskin Footbrawl (Mega Drive)

Before I actually start talking about this game, I want to talk about its title. Say it out loud: "Jerry Glanville's Pigskin Footbrawl", and there's something somewhat satisfying in the way it flows. So much so, that for years, I'd assumed that Jerry Glanville was a fictional character, invented purely for the sound of his name, but apparently, he's some kind of sporting multiclasser, having been an American football player as well as a driver in two kinds of car racing. Anyway, it's a port of an arcade game that didn't feature any license, but getting sportsmen's names in titles was a big strategy for early Mega Drive games in the US, so I guess Jerry was the only player they could get who would put his name on this incredibly tenuous adaptataion of the sport.

It's played in a vaguely belt scrolly kind of way, on pitches littered with various objects and hazards. An odd quirk compared to most team sport games is that you control the same player for the entire match, which, since the camera follows the balls, means that you spend a lot of the time offscreen trying to catch up. You do have one little sliver of control over your teammates, however: when you press the punch button, everyone on your team throws a punch at once. Obviously, the main aim is to get the ball to your opponent's end of the pitch, scoring seven points when you do. There's also a "possession" meter that slowly fills while a member of your team has the ball, and if it's full when you score, you get an extra point.

Mostly, this is a pretty fun game to play, with only two major problems: there is both too much and too little of it. Too much because the shortest a single match can be is ten minutes, plus all the intermissions and so on whenever anyone scores and at the end of each quarter. Too little because it's incredibly bare bones: there are only two teams, "Red" and "Blue", and single player mode consists of playing one game as the blue team against the red team. There's no season or career or anything to be found here. There are two pitches, though: the first half of the game takes place in a field, and the second half in a dungeon.

Pigskin Footbrawl is an okay game, but it's really only worth your time if you have at least one friend who's very enthusiastic about playing lots of long matches in a sports game where every match features the exact same teams playing in the exact same venue, forever.