Tsumera (PC)

I'll start out by saying that getting this game running was an ordeal. Unlike the last couple of old PC games, Graduation and Nyan Nyan Tower, which ran natively in Windows 10 with no problems, for a couple of days, I couldn't even manage to get Tsumera running in DOSBOX. Luckily, someone pointed me towards a version uploaded as part of something called the eXoDOS collection, which runs in DOSBOX no problem. So if you end up wanting to play this game, seek that out, I guess?

Anyway, it's a pinball game developed in Taiwan, which is itself pretty interesting. Is is the first Taiwanese game I've covered here? I can't actually remember. It's also very heavily influenced by the Crush games, which is no bad thing at all. Thematically, it can be considered a combination of Devil Crush and Jaki Crush, with lots European and Asian occult influences on display, though in terms of actual design, it's definitely skewed towards Devil Crush. Soome elements are shamelessly lifted from there, like the dragon whos maouth leads to a boss stage, or the hexagram surrounded by a troop of marching goons. And yes, like the Crush games, Tsumera is made up of one main table that's three screens high, with hidden portals to single-screen bossfight/bonus stages littered around the place.

Despite being pretty unoriginal, there's a lot to love about this game: it looks amazing, it's fun to play, there's a ton of mysterious things to uncover (I've played for a few hours now, and in my last credit before writing this, I was still discovering new stuff!), and it's generally a high-quality game all round. I do, however have a couple of minor issues. The first is that there's no score display while you're playing, nor is it ever made clear what exactly contributes to your end-of-ball bonuses. Obviously, this doesn't really affect play too much, but it does make learning to play the game better and make higher scores more difficult. The second, much bigger problem is also a little harder to explain: basically, there's lots of things to activate around the table. Portals to open, different monsters to summon, and so on. The problem is that whenever you leave the main table, whether it's to go to a boss screen, or even just to prematurely cash in your bonus, everything on the table resets. Because somethings are a lot less labourious to activate than others, seeing what some of the slower-activated gimmicks actually do when completed is pretty difficult!

All in all, though, these faults don't get in the way of the fact that Tsumera is an excellent little game, and it really is a shame that it's not only obscure, but also kind of inaccessible. We can only hope that whatever company owns the rights to it someday decides to cash in and put out a rerelease for modern systems. But if the idea of getting it working isn't too daunting, I definitely recommend doing so.

Curiosites Vol. 15 - Ohenro-san (Gamecube)

"Walking Simulator" is a disparaging name often given to non-violent, narrative-driven games, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. Though the term didn't really exist in 2003 when Ohenro-san Hosshin no Dojo was released, it's a mantle that fits the game perfectly. Ohenro-san is literally a game about walking across Japan and visiting temples and that's it. It's meant to come with a special controller with buttons for left and right steps, as well as a pedometer so the walking you do in your day-to-day life can be transferred into the game, but I had neither of those things, so I was just pushing forward on the analogue stick to progress.

Because this was meant as a substitute for a real pilgrimage, aimed at the old and infirm who couldn't make the journey themselves, everything is represented as a slide show of photos of the real locations, rather than being a polygonal rendering for you to walk through and explore in real time. Of course I understand why it was done in this way, but it's not very impressive, and it really doesn't give the impression of walking from place to place: when I say it's a slideshow, that's all it feels like, there's no sensation of movement at all.

Once you're at a temple, you can do various things like light a candle, get a talisman, do some reading, and so on, but really, that's all there is to this. It's not a game, and it's not intended to be played like one, and so it wouldn't be fair to judge it as one, either. I'm just posting about it because it's weird and obscure and there's probably not many people who know about it.

The nature of this thing is that recommending it or not recommending it is kind of meaningless, though I will say this: unless you can read Japanese and you really, really love seeing photos of Japanese temples, I can't imagine how you'd get anything out of this at all.