Magical Speed (Arcade)

Magical Speed is an adaptation of the tradition card game (traditional as in it uses a deck of normal playing cards) Speed, with a really nice-looking fantasy RPG lick of paint, and there's a few interesting (or at least unusual) things about it. Speed, if you don't know (and I didn't before playing this) has two cards in the centre of the table, and the players have 4 cards at a time each, as well as a pile to draw from when one of them is gone. You get rid of your cards by putting them on top of one of the two cards in the middle, though it has to be one higher or lower than it (suits don't matter). The winner is the first player to be rid of all their cards, or whoever has the least remaining cards when time runs out.

The first interesting thing about this game is that it's intended to be played two-player, on a cocktail cabinet, with the players facing each other. So each player sees their cards at the bottom of the screen facing them, and their opponent's cars at the top, upside down. Luckily, there's also a single player mode, as even if I could get someone to play, figuring out how this arrangement would work while emulating on a PC would be a bit of a hassle. The single player mode is surprisingly thorough, too! Though it's just a typical fighting game-style deal where you play against a bunch of opponents in succession, each more skilled than the last, there are three difficulty levels to pick from, and each of the three levels has its own seperate cast of opponents, all with unique sprites and animations, plus their own cute little introductory cutscenes. And there is actually a fair difficulty curve too! Well done, Allumer.

The other interesting thing is the controls. Since this is a game all about having the fastest reactions, using the joystick to move a cursor to select your card, then choose which pile to put it on would be far too slow. Instead, there are six buttons: two on the top row, representing the two piles and four beneath, representing your four face-up cards. Hit the button for the card you want, then the pile you want it to go to, and that's how you play. I may have mentioned before, but I typically use a USB replica SEGA Saturn pad for playing stuff on PC that doesn't require any analogue sticks, but in this case, I was having trouble figuring out a setup that let me press all the buttons quickly, while also avoiding my getting confused about which button was which. Eventually, I managed to come up with something that worked pretty well: holding the controller in my right hand, I had the two top buttons mapped to the Y and Z buttons on there, and with my left hand on the PC keyboard, and the four bottom buttons mapped to Q, W, E, and R on there. I could only play for 10-15 minutes at a time before the fingers of my left hand started getting stiff, but it was good enough.

In summary, Magical Speed is a very cute game, and it's fun enough, but I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to play it more than a few times in single player. I guess if you're lucky enough to ever encounter a real cocktail cabinet of it, it seems like it'd be a ton of fun to play against a real opponent that way, though.

Hellraider (Amiga)

The most interesting thing about this game is that it turned out to be a totally different kind of game than I thought it was when I started playing. When I started playing, I thought it was an incredibly difficult Bosconian knockoff with some weird quirks, where you were supposed to fly around an eight-way scrolling world and destroy every enemy base. Turns out I was totally wrong: it's an incredibly difficult (but kind of original) shooting/escort type thing!

As the HMS Hellraider, you're tasked with collecting gems from the surface of the planet Hell (nothing to do with the Ngihtwish song though, as far as I can tell), where the intense heat and pressure cause the local volcanos to just spit them out like nobody's business. Though for most of the game, you don't actually control the Hellraider itself, but its four little scouting/escort ships, called Orbitals. The Hellraider will float around slowly, seemingly at random, picking up gems as it flies over them. When its hold is full of gems, the stage is over and you go onto the next one. The problem of course being that not only is Hell a hazardous planet to begin with, being peppered with volcanos, lava lakes, and  big rocks to crash into, but there are also apparantly rival mining interests already here, who are far more organised than you and not willing to share. So the main point of your mission is to pilot an Orbital escorting the Hellraider, and protect it from any enemy ships, turrets or mines that want to destroy it. If the Hellraider gets destroyed, you do get to fly around shooting enemies until your Orbital goes down, but you can't actually finish the stage. If all four Orbitals get destroyed, you can then control the Hellraider directly. It moves very slowly, but it can take a lot of hits (assuming it hasn't already been shot to near destruction, anyway), and can shoot in seven directions.

You might notice that all the screenshots I've taken are of the first stage. This is because, despite playing for over two hours, I never managed to complete it (though I did come close once or twice). I only know there even are more stages because I looked it up on youtube! I think there are two main problems that make this game such a chore. The first is that there's no radar, so you never know when enemies are going to suddenly fly in and start shooting your mothership to bits, or when you're about to stumble upon a nest of enemy turrets. Also, if you do chase an enemy ship and end up away from the Hellraider, there's no way of knowing how to get back to it.  The second is that the Hellraider itself just seems to move around at random, often just flying straight past convenient clumps of gems all stuck together. The stage would be over much quicker, and you wouldn't have to protect it for as long (the stages can go on for over five minutes!) if it had some kind of gem-seeking AI (apparently, you can play a kind of co-op game, with player one controlling the Orbitals and player two controlling the Hellraider, but I haven't been able to try it. If so, that sounds like a much less stressful game).

Hellraider is interesting: it's a game that I initially thought was a low-quality knockoff of an arcade classic, but it turned out to be an interesting and original game, ruined by a couple of huge flaws. I've said in the past that people's nostalgia for the Amiga keeps them from admitting that most of its games looked amazing, but played like garbage, but I have to admit that the low barrier for entry does result in a lot of experimentation in design that can result in games that, even if they aren't actually fun to play, are at least different and cool conceptually.