Logic Pro Adventure (Arcade)

The original Logic Pro was one of the first games ever featured on this blog, all the way back in 2009. Back then, I said it was the only nonograms game to make an actual interesting videogame out of the concept, by adding a strict time limit, with penalties for trying to fill in the wrong squares. In the nine years since, I've played a few other games, old and new, and it's still true that Logic Pro (and its sequels) are the only ones really worth your time.

Logic Pro Adventure is the second sequel to the original, and it mostly works the same as the first: you solve nonograms, there's a time limit, you lose a big chunk of time if you try to fill in an incorrect square. Also like the first, you get limited-use items to help you when you can't get a handle on a puzzle. The "cross clear" item from the first game, that reveals all the squares in horizontal and vertical straight lines emanating from the cursor's current location is back, and accompanied by a bomb that reveals a five-by-five square surrounding the cursor. There's also little coloured spheres that randomly appear as you play, that seem, at first, to just be points items, though they're a little more strange than that.

The stages are split into sets of three, identified by colour, and if, in the course of completing a set of stages, you collect fifty of those orbs, you'll instantly be taken to the next trio of stages. It's a really strange mechanic, and it seems odd to me that an arcade game would add a mechanic that just makes completion quicker and easier like this, with no real downside. As it is, this might be the easiest one credit completion of an arcade game I've ever had! There is actually some replay value, though: as you might expect, the stages are randomly chosen from an unseen pool, so every game is slightly different. However, there are three characters to choose from at the start of the game, and I'm pretty sure that each character has a totally different pool from which puzzles are drawn. Other than that, there's no difference in how they play, other than having different sound effects and endings.

There's not much more to be said about Logic Pro Adventure. If you like nonograms, then it's probably the best videogame about solving them that's out there. If you don't, then you're not going to have any interest in it at all anyway. So let that be your guide as to whether or not you go and play it, I guess.

Lupin III: Pyramid no Kenja (Saturn)

It's suprising how few Lupin III games there have been over the years, considering not only the character's international popularity, but also how his 1979 movie The Castle of Cagliostro was a clear influence on the designs of various games, most obviously the Castlevania series. And of the games that there are, a bunch of them are adventure games or console ports of pachi-slot machines, not the crazy madcap action games you'd expect from Lupin III.

This Saturn entry is one of the action games, though, and for some reason, it seems to be less well known than the Lupin III database disc thing that's also on Saturn. The plot, as far as I can discern (since it's told in a series of great-looking, but obviously untranslated FMVs), concerns Lupin, Goemon, and Jigen looking to relieve a pyramid of all its treasures. Of course, this being a videogame based on an anime character, the pyramid is not only full of normal traps, but also masked cultist guards, futuristic super-technology, and the pyramid itself is only the tip of a giant diamond-shaped structure that's mostly underground.

Most of the stages focus around getting a treasure, then getting to the exit. Along the way you'll also fight enemies, avoid traps and sometimes solve a simple puzzle or two. It's okay, but it's let down by a few things. The camera is the worst, it's terrible. It never changes angle on its own, instead relying on you to do it with the shoulder buttons, and even then, it seems almost impossible to get it into a good position for jumping over pits and things like that. I feel like a lot of the time when people complain about the camera in old 3D games, they're just nitpicking, but this is a case where it's legitimately terrible.

The other main problem is one I almost feel bad for picking at, because it really shows that the developers tried to capture the spirit of Lupin III. Lupin's got a big, gangly-limned run animation that looks great, but unfortunately, it also means that he's constantly moving really fast, making navigating certain hazards more difficult than it needs to be, especially when stuff like moving platforms and the like are brought into the equation.

On the whole, Pyramid no Kenja isn't a great game. It does, however, look really great, and it's yet another nail in the coffin of the "Saturn can't do 3D" myth. I don't really recommend playing it though, unless you've got saintlike reserves of patience at your disposal.

Outlander (Mega Drive)

This is a game I first encountered years ago, in my earliest days of emulation, but back then, I never figured out how to actually play it. Or at least, I never figured out how to play it for a decent amount of time. But before I get onto that, I should describe what the game actually is: it's a would-be sequel to a Mad Max game on the NES (that I haven't played), though the publisher apparently no longer had the license, so they just changed the name.

You play as some guy driving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, constantly assailed by bikers, and later on, people in cars and helicopter pilots. You can fight them off with machineguns mounted to the front of your car, and when an enemy's coming close up next to you, a little side window appears and, if your timing's good enough, you can blast them with your shotgun. Eventually, the little left-pointing arrow on your dashboard will start blinking, telling you that you're near a town and you should pull over (which is done by stopping your car to the left side of the road, then turning the steering wheel left as far as it'll go).

That's the part I never figured out back then, and it's pretty important! The town segments take the form of single-plane beat em up stages, where you walk to the left, taking out any enemies you encounter (all the people you encounter are enemies, by the way), as well as destroying any barrels or crates you find, in the hopes of obtaining more fuel, food or water (to replenish you health), or ammo for your guns. If you don't visit the towns, you won't get any points, as they're totted up based on how many enemies you killed, your remaining fuel and health, and so on as you enter. But more importantly, you'll quickly run out of fuel! (Actually points are pretty important too, since you don't start with any extra lives and you can only get them through points).

If you run out of fuel, you'll come to a stop, and you'll have to do a beat em up stage on the road, which are much harder than the town ones, since there's now bikers trying to take your head off with chains, and you can only kill them with your shotgun, which has limited ammo. In the old days, I'd just keep driving until I reached one of these stages, then quickly get killed. I'm glad I gave it another shot as an adult, and finally figured it out, because Outlander is a pretty fun game!

It's no classic, and it has some big problems, like how the scenery during the driving sections never changes (I know you're driving through an endless wasteland, but with a bit of imagination you can easily come up with a few variants: toxic swamp, ruined city, dead forest, etc.), and how later on there's some unfair stuff like poisoned water that reduces your health, but it's definitely a game worth playing, and it's a shame it's not better known. I strongly recommend you also give it a try!

Advanced Spanner-X -Endless Fire- (X68000)

The title might be bizarre, but unfortunately, the setting of this game is fairly standard, old-fashioned space shooter stuff. You're a spaceship, you shoot other spaceships. Luckily, however, it is a bit more interesting from a mechanical standpoint, and though it's a Japanese game on a system that was only ever released in Japan, it does make me wonder if the developers were fans of European-developed shooting games, like Xenon 2 et al.

There's a couple of reasons I say this. The first is that the game does suffer from that most stereotypical EuroSTG bugbear, lots and lots of bulletsponge enemies. The second, and most interesting, is that rather than your ship having one weapon that gradually powers up, or the ability to change weapons by collecting different items, you instead select your weapon before each stage. A lot of European shooting games have weapon shops for changing and upgrading one's weapon, though Spanner-X's system is a little different from that, too: you're given a selection of weapons from which to choose at the start of each stage, and the twist is that each can only be chosen once.

I guess the point of this is that there's a weapon that best matches each stage, and the player discovers the best order to use them through trial and error. I'm putting a lot of faith in the design skills of the developers with this theory, but I think it works out. There's definitely weapons that seem perfect for the first few stages, at least. It's not a system I like, but at least they're trying something different, I guess? And really, the biggest problem with this game is that first point: the enemies can all take a fair few shots, and they're mostly really small sprites too, so you constantly feel underpowered, which isn't a lot of fun, to be honest.

There is another, more interesting mechanical idiosyncracy in there too, though! Rather than giving you a health bar or a set number of lives, you're given a number of energy units, which not only act as hitpoints, but also temporary power-ups. You lose a unit of energy if you get hit, and you can also press the second button on your controller to expend a unit to power up your weapon for five seconds. Either way, when there's no energy left, it's game over. It's an interesting and unusual system, but even your powered up weapons still feel weak, so making the sacrifice never really feels worthwhile.

There's some other little notes to say about this game, like how the music is excellent (though this being both a shooting game and on the X68000, you could probably have predicted that), and the weird practice of how by default, the score's only displayed between stages, and you have to go into the options screen to turn on score display during play. Though it's an interesting and fairly original game, I can't really recommend Advanced Spanner X Endless Fire, as playing it just isn't fun or exciting. A disappointment.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 73 = The Saiyuutou Saruden (PS2)

This game has a lot in common with the early Oneechanbara games: it's by Tamsoft, it's a low budget musou game, and it has a lot of wandering around big, multi-map stages like a lost idiot. But! There isn't just the "Journey to the West" theme to differentiate it, as it does actually bring a few ideas to the table, even if they're more interesting in theory than they are fun to engage with in practice.

The premise is one that just seems so obvious for a 3D game based on Journey to the West: you play as Monkey (and later Pigsy and Sandy too), and your job is to escort Tripitaka (note: I'm using the names from the UK dub of the 1970s Japanese live action Saiyuki TV show, just for convenience) across big stages filled with various kinds of demons. There's a few complications that took me a while to figure out at first, though.

Firstly, you've got to find the place to which you're escorting Tripitaka. You go out, find the thing, then go back and tell her, and she'll start moving. There's a huge statue you've got to find and take her to to pray to, and a smaller statue, the finding of which will encourage Tripitaka to take you to the sealed gate to the stage's boss, that you have to fight. The first two bosses are Pigsy and Sandy, and Sandy is the point at which I gave up on the game, after spending over 30 minutes repeatedly being killed by him. Sorry, but he takes off a third of your health right at the start with an unavoidable combo, and then interrupts all your attempts to fight him with the same. It's no fun, and it totally killed my interest in the game.

But other than that, the whole reconnaisance/escort aspect of the game does a lot to differentiate it from other musou games, though I feel it might have been better if they'd have waited a few years and put it on more powerful hardware. The problem is that the stages have to be pretty big by the nature of the game, which means they have to be split up into a few smaller maps, with loading times between each of them. Since you're definitely going to be back and forth, that means you're subjected to numerous loading screens no matter what. There's also the problem that when you leave an area and come back, all the enemies will have respawned, though you can lighten that burden by just running past them all the first time through.

Obviously, though I spent a few hours playing The Saiyuutou Saruden and it does have some potential, I can't really recommend it. It's a shame its ideas never got re-explored on hardware more capable of fulfilling them. Also, it's totally ruined by the unfair, unfun bosses (even though I did beat the first one, it was still an awful experience, and mainly down to luck).

Ankoku Shinwa: Yamato Takeru Densetsu (NES)

Also known as Dark Myth, this is an adventure game based on the 1976 comic, all focussed around Japanese and Buddhist mythology, with a particular focus on the creation myths of Japan. The comic only lasted a single volume, so I assume it wasn't massively popular when it came out, with both this game and an OAV being released in 1989 and 1990 respectively, over a decade later. I can't say for certain, but I'm going to lay the credit for both adaptations at the feet of the Teito Monogatari franchise of novels, comics, movies and anime, that really re-popularised Japanese mythology and mysticism in the 1980s.

The game itself has typical 80s menu-based Famicom adventure game sections where you look at, walk, talk to, get, and use things, places and people, each one puntucated by a boss fight done in the style of a 2D platform game (but with no platforms). The adventure sections are actually pretty easy, there never seems to be more than three options for each action you can take, and even working through trial and error, you shouldn't face too many problems, except for one. Paradoxically, the game, at times, assumes you're an idiot, which makes the puzzles harder.

For example, there's a point where you encounter two statues, one with an empty eye socket, another with a removable eye-shaped gem. Obviusly, the solution is to take the eye-shaped gem from one statue and put it into the other. The thing that got me stuck, though, is that the option to put the gem into the eyehole doesn't appear until you check your late dad's journal, which will helpfully tell you "put the gem in the eyehole!" Figuring out that I had to look in the journal led to me having to look up a guide, and it makes no sense to me that the game forces you to do that as part of the puzzle, rather than using it as an optional hint.

The action sequences are very brief and very easy, and would barely be worth mentioning if they weren't unusual by their simple presence in the game. They're not terrible or a chore, but neither do they add a lot to the game. The game's difficulty is a mystery in general, though: the story's subject matter is pretty dark, with lots of deaths and a fair bit of violence, and the way the story's told in the comic and the OAV is also very dense, to the extent that it almost seems like it was made with the intent of being an edutainment piece on Japanese myth and ancient history. Contradictory to the tone and style of the source material is the game's difficulty. It all feels like it was made for a much younger audience than the other versions, and maybe it was?

Though the subject matter is interesting, and surprisingly rare in videogames, I still feel like everything about this game just makes it a weak substitute for either of the other versions of the story, and you'd probably be better off reading or watching one of those.

Delisoba Deluxe (Saturn)

So, it's another one of those candidates for the title of "rarest Saturn game of all", and like Heim Waltz, it's one that was never released on sale in shops. Delisoba Deluxe was only given out as a prize to contestants on a TV game show, and playing the game was apparently also part of being on the game show, though I haven't been able to find out whether that's actually true or not, or even the name of the show itself. As you might guess, then, unlike Heim Waltz, Delisoba Deluxe is an actual playable game! And not only that, but it's also developed by Cave, which can only push its price up even further.

What it is is a fairly basic against-the-clock racing game, in which you play as two people atop a moped, hoping to deliver something to the TV studio before time runs out. I guess there must be some rule I'm missing out on from not having seen the TV show, because it seems like even if you don't crash at all, it'd be impossible to complete the "TV Original" mode without running out of time at least once. Luckily, though, there's two other modes to play. The second mode is Time Attack, which isn't much diffrent from TV Original, except you don't run out of time, and you're just trying to set records for finishing the course.

The third mode is the most exciting, and the one in which you can really see that this is a Cave game: Coin Links. In this mode, you've got a much more generous time limit, and the aim is to drive through the course collecting coins for points. This being a cave game, there is of course a scoring system, whereby coins are worth more points as you collect them in quick succession, with a little time meter in the corner of the screen showing you exactly how long you've got to get the next coin before dropping your combo. It's not like the complex and byzantine systems seen in their more recent games, but this was relatively early in their life as a company, and it is almost exactly like the combo system for killing enemies in the Dodonpachi games. It's interesting to see something like that in a game that was probably mostly in the hands of normal, non-arcade obsessed people for a long time.

Other than that, there's a map edit mode that seems a little glitchy, and I unfortunately couldn't figure out how to actually ride on the edited course, which is a shame. There's not much more to say about this game, really! It's a pretty fun diversion for about 15 minutes, and I can see people possibly getting into the Coin Link mode, trying to beat their scores, but it's also one I definitely recommend emulating. You're unlikely to ever see a real copy for sale, and if you do, it'll be hundreds, maybe even thousands of pounds to buy.

Panic Road (Arcade)

Video pinball games make sense on home systems, as there are factors of cost and space that make keeping a pinball collection at home incredibly unrealistic for anyone but the most crooked robber barons. In arcades, though, they're a much odder prospect, since most places that have arcade machines are also places you're likely to find pinball tables, so who would bother playing an untactile facsimile when they can play the real thing? Which is probably why, off the top of my head, I can only think of two pinball arcade games: the pornographic Gals Pinball, and this one, Panic Road.

Panic Road features some early examples (maybe even the first, but I'm not sure on that) of a video pinball game having features not possible on real tables, too: there's roaming, destructible enemies in place of stationary bumpers, there's multiple tables, and were those multiscreen tables real, they'd definitely be abnormally long compared to their peers. You don't get to choose which table you play, though, as the game takes a videogamey approach to progression. Each table has a goal, which reveals a key when fulfilled. Hit the key with the ball andgo to the next table!

The problem is that the game doesn't tell you what these goals are, and they're not particularly intuitive, either. The first table's goal is to collect the numbers 1-2-3 that are in a row about midway up the table, the ocean-themed table two has you hitting every clam on the table so they open up, and though I made the key appear on table three, I still have no idea what triggered that. It just seemed to happen. At least the table's themes are varied, though: table one is in a little garden with mushrooms, strawberries and wooden fenceposts, table two is as mentioned before, in the ocean, while the third table is just an arrangement of random objects, like moles, pencils, disembodied hands and a pink mountain.

Panic Road is an okay game. The opacity of each stage's goals is a problem, as are the slightly odd ball physics (which can be forgiven considering the game's age), and it obviously doesn't hold a candle to many of the console pinball games that would come later, but it's a fun enough distraction. I imagine it wasn't very popular with arcade operators, though: my first credit with no prior practice lasted over 20 minutes, and none of those that followed were any shorter.

Shadow Blasters (Mega Drive)

Shadow Blasters, also known as Shiten Myooh, is an interesting case. When I first played it, I wrote it off as an unfair, too-hard kusoge. For some resaon, though, I kept being drawn back to it, and the more I played it, the more I saw the good in it. For a start, it's not unfair, or too hard, it's just a very old fashioned (even for 1990) game that expects you to learn it, and offers little mercy or concession while you do so.

You get four characters (two ninja, a swordsman and a monk), who also act as your lives, and you can switch between them at any time from the pause menu. One concession the game does make is that it allows you to play the stages in whatever order you wish. The four characters each have their own very slightly different attacks, not in my opinion, they're not really different enough to warrant switching often. One thing that really feels missing from this game is the ability to heal characters while they're "tagged out", either automatically over time, or through power ups with that purpose. As it is though, you might as well play with one character until they die, then go onto the next, until you run out or finish the game. Maybe it would make the game too easy though?

On the other hand, something I did really find interesting about Shadow Blasters is the attack/power up system. Next to your health meter, there's a power meter, indicating how powerful your attacks are. You can charge it by holding the attack button for a more powerful attack. That's all fairly traditional, right? The twist that I really like, though, is that one of the power ups you collect makes it so a segment of your current character's power meter is always filled in, making charge shots take less time to power up, and gradually increasing the power of all your shots, until eventually, if you ever manage to collect nine of the items with one character, every one of your attacks is at full power. It's only something small, but I don't recall ever seeing it done in any other game, and I thought it was really cool.

Everything else about the game is fairly standard for an early Mega Drive action title: the stages are in forests, mountains, spaceships, and gritty inner cities, the enemies are a mix of humanoid troops who blindly march forward and weird small monsters that fly around, and the bosses are a decent enough array of big, weird monsters. It's not ground-breaking, but it is at least well executed. Shadow Blasters was apparently released in Japan and the US in the same week, but despite that, there's still some localisation silliness in there. In the JP version, the characters have the thematically appropriate names Kotarou, Ayame, Senshirou and Kidenbou, while the US version has the incredibly ill-fitting Horatio, Tiffany, Leo and Marco. That's more amusing than anything, tough the same can't be said for the disparity in quality between the two versions' boxarts: the Japanese copy has an incredible high quality painting, reminiscent of the best of the Heisei era Godzilla movie posters, while the US box has a laughable piece that looks like the cover of a self-published tabletop RPG supplement.

Whichever version you play, though, the game itself is surprisingly good if you have the patience to stick with it. You'll probably want to emulate, though, since it's apparently now rare and expensive. Though it was one of the built in ROMs on my chinese handheld Mega Drive clone, so that's also a nice way to get it!

Block Wars (Playstation)

It's kind of interesting, that every time I find another Versus Arkanoid clone, it manifests its competitive element in a totally different way. There's the most famous example, Puchi Carat, that essentially transplants Puzzle Bobble's ruleset into a block-breaking environment, there's Blocken, with its combination of a block-breaking race, and Tetris Battle Gaiden-esque attacks, and now Block Wars, which has yet another interpretation of the concept.

How it works is that the field is horizontally aligned, with a player at each end, barrier in the middle, and a solid wall behind each player. Each player starts with an identical set of blocks, and they go about their business smashing them with the ball. There's a bunch of characters to choose from, and as far as I can tell, they differ in how fast the ball goes, and how quickly it accelerates. There are two possible win conditions, the least interesting being smashing all your blocks before your opponent does.

Much more interesting is the way the walls and centre barrier come into play. The other way you can win is to ensure that one of the blocks on your opponent's side touches the wall behind them. Of course, this is done by moving the barrier in the middle of the field. There's two things that make the barrier move: hitting it with your ball pushes it away from you and towards your opponent. Allowing your ball to hit the wall behind you does the opposite. I think hitting the barrier also makes extra blocks appear on your opponent's side of the field, but the game moves really fast, so I'm not totally sure about that.

Well, the balls move really fast, but the game doesn't always. As is often a problem in single player Arkanoid-likes, you do often end up with situations where both players have one brick remaining in a hard-to-reach place, and there's a long, tense battle to be the first to reach it. And of course, with no blocks in the way, both players are knocking the barrier back and forth, too. The tension would probably be a lot more exciting with human opponents than AI ones, I assume.

Block Wars is a playable game, but if you plan on playing it single player, I wouldn't bother. There's a perfectly fine Playstation port of Puchi Carat, and that game's a lot more fun, and it has a couple of solo modes, too. Maybe Block Wars would have worked better as an arcade game, maybe on a tabletop cabinet with a vertically-aligned screen between the players?

Strahl (3DO)

There's a lot of FMV games on the 3DO, but as far as I can tell, most of them are of the later, more complex variety that have you switching between multiple cameras and setting traps, and so on. In fact, I think Strahl might be the only old school Dragon's Lair-style game on the system (if I'm wrong on this, please let me know, of course). If anyone reading this somehow doesn't know how these games work, you watch a nice-looking cartoon, and "control" the action through a series of what would later become known as QTEs.

There's not much out of the ordinary in Strahl, mechanically speaking: It uses the four directions of the D-pad, as well as the A button when some crossed swords on the screen, and unusually, when a line of dots appears onscreen, you're expected to quickly tap the B button until they're all gone. The other big difference between Strahl and other games in the genre is that you get to choose the order in which you play the stages, so even hopelessly inept players can see a decent amount of different animation. (At the start of the game, you get 3 stages to pick from. After completing one of them, this opens up to six stages, and after them, there's a final seventh stage.)

There is actually a third difference between Strahl and its genremates: it's by far the easiest of these games I've ever played. The button prompts are actually pretty sparesly placed, and there's sometimes long stretches of onscreen action where you're not asked for any input at all. Furthermore, they're very forgiving, too: not only do you get a generous amount of time to press the button, but you're also not penalised for mispressing, as long as you do make the correct input before the prompt disappears. As a result of this, I finished the game on my first attempt, without continuing.

Strahl is only about twenty minutes long, but it's a nice twenty minutes. It looks and feels like the kind of 1980s OAV that would have been dubbed and released in the west as a kids' video on the cheap, no matter how inappropriate that decision would have been, like Birth, or that bizarre Marvel Dracula anime. I say it's worth a play if the sound of that appeals to you. One last note: I've read up a little bit on this game's history, and it was apparently originally made for arcades in 1985, but went unreleased until the 1990s, when it got ported to the Laseractive, the Saturn, and the 3DO, and apparently, all three versions play slightly differently (though I have no idea how).