Otostaz (PS2)

I can't find any evidence of this besides on mention in a 17-year-old issue of Edge, and I don't know if any other games came out of it, but Otostaz was possibly the result of an initiative at Sony in the early days of the PS2 to put out some games with lower production budgets and shorter development times. Presumably, the aim of such an initiative is to create more interesting, unique games, that didn't necessarily need to sell lots of copies, since they had less to lose. That's the kind of thing I like to see in videogames, movies, and so on. Lower budgets, more imagination!

Anyway, it's a kind of solitaire Othello game, themed around making buildings grow. There's three kinds of tiles in the game: ground, tree, and water. If there's one piece of ground touching both a tree and a bit of water, then a level one house will grow there. If there's a bit of ground touching two level one houses, a level two house will grow there, and so on up to level six. Your job is to make as many high-level houses grow as you can before each stage ends, to score points. There's also a game over condition that I think happens when you don't have any houses in the leftmost column of spaces when the screen scroll past it. But you'll be playing a few hours before you get to the point where that happens.

There's a few more advanced techniques to learn too, but you'll pick them up along the way, plus not only is there a very through tutorial, but there's also an option to turn all the text into English, despite this being a Japan-only release, which is nice. It's generally a fun and satisfying game to play, too, once you've figured out how it all works: lots of squares constantly flipping over, and numberse going up, and all those little kind of kinaesthetic touches that let you know you're doing well.

The presentation's pretty nice, too, with the game seemingly being set in a world made of thick coloured paper, though the stock sound effects do make it feel slightly cheap. The only real problem with Otostaz is that there's not much to write about regarding it. It's a decent game, pretty unique, and if you see a copy going cheap, it definitely wouldn't hurt to pick it up. You'll definitely get a few hours of enjoyment out of it, even if the first hour is just learning how to play.

Off-World Interceptor Extreme (Saturn)

This is a game that got a lot of coverage around the time of the Saturn's European launch, though I don't remember ever hearing of anyone actually owning or even playing it. There's a few reviews on GameFAQs, that are all well over a decade old and incredibly poorly written, even by GameFAQs standards, and they all absolutely hate the game and everything about it. Which strikes me as odd, since the game isn't terrible by any degree, nor is it even well-known enough for any supposed low quality to be received opinion, either. But one review even went as far as to say that Off-World Interceptor Extreme was so bad that Superman 64 looked good next to it.

It's not like this is some great forgotten classic, either, of course. But it is pretty good. You play as a "trash man", which is a kind of futuristic bounty hunter, employed by some military-looking people to chase down and kill space-criminals, and if you happen to also kill tons of space-cops along the way, that's fine too. Yeah, I'm not sure what kind of organisation is employing you, except maybe some kind of incredibly well-funded space-anarchist vigilante group? But anyway, you go to various planets in your futuristic gun-car and kill lots of space-cops and occasionally a space criminal, then spending your bounty on new cars and upgrades.

"Pretty good" is a perfect assessment of this game, in fact: driving isn't perfect but it's fun enough and goes at a decent speed. Shooting enemies and seeing them explode is kind of satisfying, et cetera. It wouldn't have been a wise purchase at full price even in 1995, but if you pick up a copy cheap in 2019, you'll get an hour or two's worth of fun out of it. (I did check ebay, and the prices for this game vary wildly: from £2 up to £50!)

Of course, it's a western-developed game from the early days of CD consoles, so there's the obligatory live action cutscenes between each stage, during which you're given your missions and the higher-ranked officers gradually warm up to you and so on. It all looks like a very low budget TV show, like most live action FMV did, bet there is one small difference that makes OWIE's cutscenes stand out: self-awareness. I don't know if it was the intention to do this from the start, or if the developers saw the footage and took and instant dislike to it, but all the cutscenes has imposed onto them the silhouettes of two guys in armchairs, watching the proceedings and making jokes at the game's expense, in a manner obviously inspired by Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Occasionally, they do even get some actual funny lines, too!

Off-World Interceptor Extreme is really the kind of game that natually gravitates towards being forgotten: it's nothing special, but it's not really a bad game, either. It feels a lot older than it is, too, despite the stages being made of texture-mapped polygons, too (though all the things in the stages are sprites): replace them with a good-old stripey road like you'd see in a typical sprite scaling game and take out the cutscenes, and this is a game that could totally have appeared on consoles five years prior, or in arcades ten years prior. That's not to say it's bad, but at the launch of a shiny new console generation, it probably got buried under all the games that were offering something genuiniely new.