Small Games Round Up Vol. 1!

I've long laboured over the fact that there are lots of games I'd like to tell you all about, mainly early arcade games, or ones on very old computers, but weren't complex enough to carry a post on their own. I could just write shorter posts, but then you'd be eagerly waiting five days for a new post, just to get a few lines an a couple of screenshots about some anncient relic. Then I realised I could just bundle them together, and for this inaugural round up, I've put together three little PC88 games, starting with Skyscraper. Another note before we start: the PC88 is known in some circles for being home to a lot of great music. None of the three games featured in this post live up to that, though, they just have bleepy sound effects.

Skyscraper is a single-screen shooter, in which you avoid or shoot various seemingly-random shapes and objects, while also catching tiny little people who are falling to the deaths (well, some are falling to their deaths, some have parachutes). Once you've met your rescue quota, the stage ends. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for letting the fallers die, other than wasting time (and losing a bit of your time bonus at the end of the stage), which is nice, since they die if they hit the bottom of the screen, any of the enemies, or even your own shots. Between stages, there's a very strange bonus "game" that simply asks you to press a letter on the keyboard. All in all, a fun enough game, with some really nice pixel art backgrounds.

Next up is Karakuri Ninpou, a very arcade-looking game, and, I suspect, possibly an influence on the Haggleman games on the first Game Center CX game for the DS. In it, you play as a green ninja out to rescue their red ninja friend, who gets kidnapped by god in the pening cutscene. To do so, you have to navigate a house full of enemies, stairs, and doors. Not every room is reachable by stairs alone, so you have to use the doors, which are all linked to each other in pairs, though it's up to you to figure out and remember which doors are connected to which. I have to admit that though I made many attempts, I never actually got past the first stage of this one, as there's an enemy that sometimes appears, a black ninja, who throws shuriken at you, and there doesn't seem to be any way of avoiding or deflecting that. Still, someone with the patience to build up superhuman skill (and probably a lot of luck, too) at playing this game might get more joy out of it than I did. It definitely feels like it's a game that might better than it first seems, at least.

Last, and also least, is Donkey Gorilla, a very simple, almost Game and Watch-esque game. It uses text mode graphics, so everything's very charming and simple in a geometric kind of way, and you play as what I think is a chameleon hanging onto a washing line while things that are probably gorillas dance around below you. You kill the gorillas by dropping hearts on them, and sometimes one of them will try to climb a tree, killing you if they reach the top. Also a bird-like thing occaisionally flies overhead to try and kill you with hearts, too. There's not much to say about Donkey Gorilla, really. You might get a minute or two's amusement out of it, at most, but not much more.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 30: The 1 on 1 Basketball (Playstation)

When you look at a list of arcade games, there's one name near the top that always sticks out, to me at least: 1 on 1 Government. I always notice it, because it's close to the top of an alphabetically ordered list, and it's such a strange title that gives nothing away about what kind of game it is. What it is, though, is a port to arcades of this, more sensibly titled Playstation game.

It's surprising that it was a Playstation game before it was an arcade game, as it's structured very much like an arcade game, and, like Lethal Crash Race tried to apply the Street Fighter II formula to racing games, The 1 on 1 Basketball tries to do that for Basketball. You pick a character from a pretty big selection (that includes, aong a few regular people, a monkey, an angel, and some kind of childish cartoon drawing of a person), and you go on to face the other characters in a series of basketball games. By default, the games last ninety seconds, or until someone scores eleven points. Also, I don't know if this is an actual basketball rule, but if the time ends on a draw, the game carries on for another twenty seconds. This didn't strike me as odd, but it'll keep doing that until there's a winner, one way or another.

It should be mentioned that as well a the 1 on 1 mode, there's also a 2 on 2 mode, though as far as I can tell, there's no "canon" teams, so you just throw any two characters together, and your CPU opponents will do the same, and it otherwise plays out the same as the main mode, except the stages are a little too small for it, so there's a lot of bumping into each other. Anyway, this game plays pretty well! The controls are simple enough to pick up: you move left or right across the court, with up and down moving you left or right in relation to your oppnent's position. There's also a button each for shooting, getting in your opponent's way, and trying to steal the ball. Like the fighting games it's trying to emulate structurally, it's fast paced, and easy to start playing straight away.

Anyway, yeah, I recommend playing this (or the arcade version, since as far as I can tell, there aren't really any differences between them). For various reasons, I keep getting more curious about arcade sports games these days, and it seems like a lot of them are pretty good (this one being no exception).