Initial D Gaiden (Game Boy)

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Initial D, but for the few that aren't, it's a comic/TV/movie/videogame franchise that started in the 90s, and it's all about people with badly-drawn faces taking part in street races down twisty mountain paths, mainly at night. If you were reading English-translated manga around the turn of the century, you might remember it being advertised in the back of seemingly everything Tokyopop published for about two years. Anyway, Initial D Gaiden is a Game Boy incarnation of it. Oddly, I think it might also be the first ever videogame adaptation of the series, beating the Saturn game Initial D: Koudou Saisoku Densetsu by three months.

It's a pretty simple game, but I consider that to be one of its strengths. You just pick a car, then participate in a series of one-on-one races until you get to the end of the game. Obviously, drifting around corners is a big part of the proceedings, and luckily the devs made that fun and easy to do: you just have to let go of the accelerator, tap the brake, then go back to holding the accelerator down. Just like Outrun 2, which came out about 5 years later! There's no car tuning or parts replacement or any other complications, you just go from one race to the next, with a little skippable dialogue scene between each one.

Mention has to be made of the game's presentation too, which is generally excellent. It must have taken a miracle, but the developers somehow managed to give a racing game that plays out on a tiny four-colour screen atmosphere! Even though the road seems to be  floating in a black void, it and the cars still look great, and the backgrounds really do give the feeling of driving down a mountain road at night, with the city lights shining in the distance. The only real problem the game has presentation wise is the lack of music, having instead a constant low buzz representing engine sounds punctuated with high pitched beeps when you're drifting.

There's not much more to be said here: Initial D Gaiden is just a really good racing game, on a system that isn't really known for them. It's a shame that the license precluded it from getting a worldwide release so more people might know about it. But without the license, would anyone have taken any notice of it today, including me?

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.