Pastel Island (Arcade)

Pastel Island is an unreleased arcade prototype, though as far as I can tell, the only noticable bug it has is that the "INSERT COINS" text keeps flashing while you're playing, so it doesn't seem totally unfair to treat it as if its a finished game. And it's not like it's on sale anywhere or anything, so I'm hardly going to be tricking anyone into buying a stinker or anything. Anyway, it's a maze game from 1993 where, by the time-honoured tradition, you are tasked with collecting all the points items (this time they're hearts) in a stage, before going to the next stage and doing it there, and so on.

It's a pretty full-featured game, too. There's a couple of scoring systems in play, the main one revolving around collecting stars. Stars are one of a few random power-ups that can appear when you destroy one of the destructible items littered around each stage, and when you kill an enemy. As a side note, while the power-ups are random, you can shoot them to turn them into other power ups, so scoring isn't totally reliant on the kindness of the random number generator, which is nice. The stars, when collected, multiply the value of the hearts for a limited time. If you collect a star while one's already active, the multiplier increases by one. So, collecting stars, and doing it in quick succession, is obviously an important part of the scoring system.

The other main scoring element is the selection of end-of-stage bonuses available. There's a bonus for how many stars you collected, as well as no-jump, no-dash, and no-miss bonuses. It's possible there might be a no-shoot bonus, too, but I haven't been able to finish a stage without shooting, so I don't know. The power ups other than the stars are S and P icons, whose purpose I haven't quite figured out, but I think that one of them will allow you to take one extra hit before dying, and a bubble, which turns your shots into lethal bubbles, rather than the stunning popcorn-like bullets you usually put out.

I should also mention the graphics, since this is a pretty good-looking game. The enemy and player sprites are an exception, all being quite ugly, but in their favour, every enemy has different behaviour and different abilities, and they're all easy to tell apart, which is nice. The stages are what really looks good, though: I'm not sure if they're made of a very low number of texture-mapped polygons, or if each stage is a huge Mode 7-style rotated sprite, but whatever it is, it's an effective and appealing effect. The stages also change name and visual theme every other one, and I was amused by stages 3 and 4 being called the "Confort [sic] Zone".

Pastel Island is a great-looking game that's fun to play, and while it's no Raimais, it would have been a worthy addition to the genre had it been officially released. Having said that, it's fairly obvious why it wasn't: in 1993, the first 2D fighting game boom was in full swing, and 3D fighting and racing games were just starting to loom over the horizon too. A maze game, no matter how well-designed, would have looked embarassingly old hat in that environment. Still, I recommend giving Pastel Island a chance if you're a fan of score-chasing.

Mo Jie Qibing (GBA)

I'm not the biggest fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in fact, my main exposure to it was watching the first movie at a friend's house on DVD many years ago, and being left with no desire to ever watch the other two. What I do like, though, is the KiKi KaiKai games, also known as Pocky and Rocky. They a great bunch of Commando-style shooting games, but they're about a shrine maiden shooting ghosts instead of an army guy shooting other army guys. Mo Jie Qibang is an unofficial, unlicensed Lord of the Rings game that's also an unofficial, unlicenced KiKi KaiKai game.

You play as Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Gandalf, or Frodo, and you set out on an adventure that's a very, very loose interpretation of the original story. Like how the first stage is a north american-style desert full of cacti and bleach-white cow skeletons, culminating in a boss battle against a giant scorpion. Like the KiKi KaiKai games, you can shoot enemies from a distance, or you can bat them away with a risky, very short range melee attack. You've also got a limited-use bomb (represented by a gold ring) that instantly clears the screen of enemies. There's not need to save your bomb for the bosses, either, as both it and your melee attack are disabled during boss fights. I wonder if this is because the developers couldn't come up with a way of making those weapons do normal damage, rather than having them insantly kill enemies? We'll probably never know.

Anyway, though it's a terrible LotR adaptation, it is a pretty decent KKKK knock-off, so it's a lot of fun to play. There's only two real problems I've encountered. The first is that power-up distribution is totally random: every enemy seems to have an equal chance of dropping any power-up, or nothing at all. So on some runs you'll get lots of health items, extra lives, and so on, and on other runs you'll get nothing. The other big problem is the first boss: it's so much harder than the stages and bosses that follow it, and again, there's a bit of luck involved in beating it. Basically, there's a safe spot just in front of its face and to the side a little, and if you stand there, it'll stay still, fruitlessly trying to attack you while you safely shoot it in the face. Sometimes, though, it'll just move straight away and go back to attacking you.

Other than those faults, Mo Jie Qibang is still a pretty good game, though: it looks great, and it's a lot of fun when things go your way. It's easily one of the best pirate originals I've ever played, and I like it more than any official Lord of the Rings-based media I've encountered, too. Totally worth playing, though not as much as the actual KiKi KaiKai games are. Play those first, obviously.