Agress - Missile Daisenryaku (Arcade)

The circumstances of Agress' release, and that of its unofficial English translations are somewhat interesting. It's a Versus puzzle game released in 1991 and themed around the Gulf War, even having grainy digitised photos of Saddam Hussein and George Bush in the attract mode. Then, an unofficial English version seems to have surfaced in 2003, presumably to exploit the US and UK's invasion of Iraq that was happening at that time (though they didn't update the attract mode to feature George W Bush).

The title might lead you to believe that this game is related to the long-running Daisenryaku series of very serious military turn-based strategy games, but other than the theme and name, I can't find any relation between the two. In it, you're presented with a map covering the top half of the screen that has missile launchers at either side, representing the two sides of the conflict. The actual game takes place in the bottom half of the screen, where there's two grids (one for each player, just like the missile launchers). The grids each have a bunch of grey tiles, a few coloured tiles, and one empty space. There's also a picture that shows the coloured tiles arranged into a certain pattern or shape. Your task is to keep moving the tiles round to mimic the pictured shape, which causes you to launch missiles and very gradually tunr sections of the map your colour.

So, just like how, a few years later, Puchi Carat would figure out a way of making Arkanoid-style games into endless puzzles, Agress has figured out how to make those annoying little plastic slide puzzles endless, and competitive to boot! I think it's also the only videogame version of a slide puzzle I've seen that wasn't pornographic, too. Is it any good though? Well, unfortunately, I've only been able to play it single player, and even on the easiest settings, it's a struggle to get more than a couple of stages in, and it's very stressful figuring out how to move the tiles round to get that one tile where you need it to be. Just like real slide puzzles, really! Once the game starts increasing the number of coloured tiles, and even adding multiple colours, it gets more and more difficult to keep treading water.

I suspect, though, that it's the two-player mode in which this game would shine. Having two human players facing off against each other would make for a tense, though probably brief exchange, with the fun not being hampered by one competitor having a perfect computer brain designed solely to win at this game. (I'm sure I've read before that in making videogame AI, programmers make it as good as it can possibly be, then pare it back to make them into reasonably beatable opponents for human players. It seems like the developers of this game skimped on the second part slightly.) So, I guess if you can get someone to play an old, ugly, tastelessly-themed puzzle game with you, you'll probably have a decent time with Agress. If you're going to be playing alone, though, I wouldn't bother.

The Hunter (Playstation)

The Hunter, also known as Battle Hunter and Battle Sugoroku: Hunter, is a strange one. It's yet another one of those late-life, low-budget Playstation titles, though it's also one of the few that actually got a worldwide release. As a result, there's actually a bunch of reviews for it on GameFAQs from around that time, and what's interesting about those reviews is that they all either loved or hated the game, with nothing in the middle. In fact, I first played it a few years ago and didn't think much of it, but picking it back up again recently, I've had a fair bit of fun with it.

You start the game by making a character, picking your sprite and colour scheme from a total of 64 combinations, and assigning your initial stats to HP, speed, attack and defense. Then you get a job from the broker and go into the dungeon. The dungeons are randomly generated, and the jobs are usually just finding a specific item and getting to the exit. There'll also be three CPU-controlled players trying to do the same. The biggest problem with this game is that pretty much everything is random, and your success relies a lot on luck. Movement speed and combat are determined by a combination of dice rolls and playing cards from your hand (you start with five cards, and you draw one every turn, and all players draw cards from a common deck. The cards do things like add to specific rolls for movement, attack, and defence, or lay traps on the space you're moving off of). The placement of item boxes is also random, and you don't know what's in a box until you go and get it.

For most missions, though, it doesn't matter if you win or lose: all it affects is how much money you get as a reward, and all money seems to do is let you level up, or restore your max HP (which is halved if you ever get reduced to zero in battle). Still, this is a game that should be both boring and frustrating in equal measure, but I think it manages to get pretty far on charm alone. Even though there's only eight character sprites with eight possible colour palettes, there's still a lot of personality in their animations, and they really add a lot, considering the dungeon itself is represented by nothing more than an isometric grid of grey squares.

There's actually a lot of personality in this simple little game generally. It's all in the little things. Like how there's a hundred items in the game, and most of them don't do anything besides letting you sell them, but the fact that they all have names just adds a little flavour to the world. Like all the books you find seem to be university-level textbooks on specific subjects, and so on. It's also pretty addictive, as games with a lot of random generation often are. I think a big problem is that it was released on a home console. On a handheld, where you could more quickly dip in and out of it, or idly play while watching TV, I think it'd have a lot more value.

Luckily, we don't live in 2001, it's 2019, and there's a bunch of mobile phones and chinese handhelds that can emulate the Playstation, plus the game has a release on PSN, so you can even legally download it to your Vita. I haven't tried any of these solutions yet, but the next time I get some US PSN credit, I will be. Because of the love-or-hate reactions this game gets, though, I can only really recommend paying money for it if you've tried it a couple of times via emulation first, just to see if it clicks with you. But for the record, I do think it's a fun and charming game.