Sol Negro (Amiga)

I decided to play this game based entirely on the boxart, which featured the hero and heroine looking like they were from some cool european sci-fi action comic. Though the cover wasn't a total bait-and-switch, as those two characters are actually the protagonists, the world they inhabit is more like an uglier, more luridly coloured version of a nineties platformer world. More interesting is the story, which is a rip-off of the story from the 1985 fantasy movie Ladyhawke. Ladyhawke, if you don't know, is about a warrior and a lady who love each other, but are kept apart by a curse that means when he's a human, she's a hawk, and when she's a human he's a wolf. The main characters in Sol Negro have a similar dilemma, except that the guy in this case turns into a fish. Also they'e both rifle-toting post-apocalyptic soldiers.

So, at the start of the game, you pick one of the characters, who you play as in human form, while rescuing/protecting the other, who obviously appears in their animal form. The most interesting thing about this is that it means each character has different stages: the male character starts the game in a surreal place with mountains and giant mushrooms and flowers, while the female character starts under the sea. Beyond that, however, I can't tell you any more, since this is yet another Amiga game, that's absurdly difficult, and after many attempts, I never made it past either character's first stages.

The game's mechanics are as much of a rip-off as its story, as it sees you walking and flying along narrow horizontally-scrolling stages shooting groups of small enemies, a lot like the arcade game Atomic Robo-Kid (in the interests of fairness, it should be mentioned that Atomic Robo-Kid and Sol Negro were released in the same year, and the Amiga version of ARK didn't even come out until two years later, so the similarities might just be a coincidence). Though obviously, Atomic Robo-Kid is a lot better than this in pretty much every way. Sol Negro has terrible collision detection, pointless non-enemy characters that do nothing but float around making you wonder what you're supposed to shoot, and various other problems. The most hateful of all, I think, is the dolphin that appears in the female character's underwater stage: it can't hurt you, but unlike all the other peaceful characters, if you accidentally shoot it, a bunch of tridents fly in from off screen and kill you as punishment.

In summary, Sol Negro is a bad game, despite having unique presentation and an endearingly shameless/bizarre plot. Just play Atomic Robo-Kid instead, to be honest.

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?