Castle Warrior (Amiga)

Castle Warrior represents a concept I've rarely seen before: the into-the-screen sprite scaling beat em up (the only other example I can think of is Jinmu Densho on PC Engine). Well, it starts out as that, anyway, with your warrior walking down a corridor (in a castle, of course), being assailed by bats and wall-mounted monster arms, and the occasional enemy big enough to force him to stop and fight it for a bit. While the bats and the arms are dispatched with a direct swing of the sword, these larger opponents are battled in a silly little game of violent tennis, whereby they shoot perfectly spherical fireballs at you, and you try to bat them back with your sword. At the end of the corridor waits a big dragon, so big in fact that it doesn't even fit on the screen. This battle, and a later boss fight against a similarly massive snake monster, is fought by moving left and right to avoid attacks, and chucking spears when you get the chance.

The second stage has a similar into-the-screen premise, but this time you're kayaking down an underground river and avoiding stalacmites, angry fish, and other such things. All the stages and boss fights so far have a feel to them that's a kind of combination of a simple LCD game and one of those games they had on saturday morning TV shows in the 1990s, where kids could call in and control a character by shouting directions down the phone. It's all very simplistic, very slow, and very stiff.

After the boat ride, you fight the aforementioned snake monster, and after that, the game suddenly changes perspective, as the final battle is viewed from the side. This seems like a strange decision, having the final boss fight be less graphically impressive than the rest of the game. This fight is against a wizened old wizrd in a red cloak, sitting in a flying throne made from the lower jaw of a giant demon statue. It's also incredibly hard, as the wizard's attacks are both difficult to dodge and massively damaging. I've made a few attempts at beating him, but even with an infinite lives cheat, I could never land more than one or two hits.

There's one last thing to be said about Castle Warrior that I haven't already: it's incredibly short. Like, less than ten minutes. I assume that the huge difficulty spike represented by the final boss is just there so that people can't say they completed it on their first try with no problems at all. Though it's a pretty unique game, and even Jinmu Densho is pretty different to it, so there's not really any alternatives, I can't really recommend Castle Warrior. It's an incredibly short game, and still somehow feels like a bit of a slog.

Accel Knights 2: Full Throttle (3DS)

First, I'll point out that though this is a 3DS game, I haven't bothered to stitch the top and bottom screenshots together, since the bottom screen is mostly unused and doesn't have anything interesting on it. But anyway, Accel Knights 2 is a game with an amazing premise: it's about knights on motorbikes jousting in a fantastical future world. Also, the motorbikes can transform into power armour. Obviously, this game never got released in the west, presumably due to some market research by the publisher that told them that people outside Japan weren't interested in buying games where awesome stuff happens. It's also the sequel to a Japan-only DSiWare game, but getting hold of such a thing in this day and age  is currently beyond me.

Anyway, these jousts don't take the form of real time action, instead being a kind of strategic rock-paper-scissors arrangement, albeit one where you can see what your opponent is picking. The battles take place in rounds, and each round has two parts. The first part is the RPS bit, where each knight decides to charge a low, middle, or high attack by holding X, A, or B to fill a meter. High beats middle, middle beats low, and low beats high, and you can see what your opponent is charging. However, you can change which one you want to charge at any point in this very short sequence, and I think the last one you press is the one that you use. It's really best to just pick one and charge it all the way, which gives you a two-out-of-three chance of winning.

The second part of the round is a much simpler rhythm-based affair: there's a bar with some lines along it, another line moves along the bar, and you press A whenever the moving line meets one of the stationary ones. Being successful in either part of the combat builds up your MP, which you then allocate between rounds. The aim of the battle is to be the first one to fill up your final charge meter, which transforms your motorbike into power armour so you can dleiver your final attack and win the fight. You can (and should) also use MP to charge up your two engines (one for each part of the combat round), though, as doing so significantly increases the amount of MP you build up in future rounds, and charging the final meter takes a lot of the stuff.

Accel Knights 2 is definitely a case of style over substance, as the battles are very repetitive, and once you've won a few and figured out how it all works, it's also incredibly easy. But, the game's style is cool enough to make up for the lack of substance, and it's definitely an enjoyable experience (for maybe two or three battles at a time, at least). If you are able to attain access to this game, I'd recommend you do so.