Hangzo (Arcade)

Hangzo is yet another unreleased arcade game that only came to light thanks to MAME, though this time it's not by Taito. It might be by Hot-B or Data East, though no-one seems to be 100% sure. One thing that is for sure is that though Hangzo was inteded to be an arcade game, spiritually, it's a Mega Drive game to the core. Can you really say that game is spiritually something for sure? Yes, I just did.

The game's about three ninjas, who clearly went to the Joe Musashi school of ninjitsu, as they don't spend any time sneaking around assassinating people. Instead they go through cyberpunk cities noisily destroying loads of exploding robots, and also through biopunk laboratories destroying loads of exploding blobby monsters. They even have a limited-use screen-clearing magic bomb jutsu! It really is like a lost Shinobi game, specifically a lost entry into the Mega Drive's Super/Revenge of Shinobi series.

There are a couple of original elements, though, like the inclusion of seperate buttons for melee and projectile attacks, bearing in mind that Hangzo does predate Shinobi III/Super Shinobi 2, and even in that game, the six-button mode was hidden behind a cheat code. There's also a magic fire breathing lion that turns up in most of the stages for you to ride around on. But generally in terms of both theming and mechanics, this is essentially a professionally-made Shinobi fangame.

It's fairly easy too, and shouldn't take more than a few attempts to one-credit-clear. Though a big part of this is thanks to one stage, about midway through the game, inexplicably having a section where a whole bunch of extra lives and health powerups coming floating in from the side of the screen. But it's not too easy, though, not easy enough to be boring, at least.

I feel like the last few posts on this blog have been really negative, and though I want to turn that around with this post, I can't be 100% positive about Hangzo. Probably as a conseqeunce of being an unfinished, unreleased game, it is a little rough around the edges: the presentation is not exactly super-polished, and the hitboxes feel a little strange at times, for example. However, it's still a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend going and giving it a try. It's a shame it never actually got released, and I hope someday, whoever owns the rights to it gives it a little extra sheen and releases it officially somehow.

Oekaki Puzzle (Neo Geo Pocket Colour)

Long time readers might remember that I've always said that Logic Pro (and its sequel, Logic Pro Adventure) are by far the best nonogram videogames around, with all others being mediocre by comparision. Well, it's time for some exciting news: I may have found the all-time worst example of a nonogram game in Oekaki Puzzle!

To start with, it has the same big flaw as so many others: non-existant stakes caused by a lack of any real lose condition, with the added caveat that you get zero feedback at all on whether you're marking the right or wrong squares. It's also missing some common quality of life features, like highlighting the row and column your cursor is currently on so you tell where you are at a glance, for example.

Then there's the puzzles themselves, which are completely joyless things to solve. I think there's three main reasons for this. One: a lot of the puzzles turn out to be things like letters or numbers or just simple shapes when you complete them. Two: a huge amount of the puzzles are symmetrical, so when you've solved half the puzzle, you just go and do the same thing reversed on the other half of the grid. There's a soul-crushingly long series of near-identical animal faces that are all particularly egregious offenders in this department. Three: a lot of puzzles also feature a lot of rows where the numbers have a lot of ones and twos. This is a hard one to explain, but it makes the puzzles really tedious to solve, and also removes the mild satisfaction of filling in a long line of squares with reckless abandon.

I've actually gone back to the original Logic Pro recently, attempting to finish it in a single credit like I did with Logic Pro Adventure when I reviewed it last year, and the differences between that game and Oekaki Puzzle really show how such a simple concept can be executed by two games with such a vast chasm of quality between the two. Don't bother playing this game.

Kamen Rider SD - Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine (SNES)

I was attracted to this game when I saw some screenshots of it, and it appeared to be a side-scrolling racing game, which is pretty unusual. When I played it, though, it actually turned out to be a beat em up in which the player and all the enemies are riding in or on vehicles. That's pretty unusual too, I guess? Unfortunately, it doesn't have much effect on the game itself.

I assume that the idea of having all the characters on vehicles is to give the impression of an exciting, high speed battle, but that feeling never comes across. You can increase or decrease your speed at any time by pressing the shoulder buttons, but it doesn't really change anything besides the speed at which the background is scrolling, and fighting at 149 kilometres per hour feels exactly the same as fighting at 605 kilometres per hour. It's with those scrolling backgrounds themselves, though, that I place the blame for the this game's lack of excitement.

The thing is that the game never really feels fast or exciting because you're never going anywhere: each area has a background image that's maybe two screens long, and you go past it over and over again until you've beaten all the enemies in that area. Then your character just speeds offscreen to the next area. It feels like you're fighting on a treadmill, and it's not helped by the fact that each stage has a few areas in it, and each background gets used at least twice.

As for the characters, though this game does apparently star every Showa era Kamen Rider, you don't get to pick them, each one gets their own stage, that can only be played in order. A strange approach, when compared to Masked Rider Club Battle Race, which not only lets you pick whichever Rider you like, but is generally a much better game all-round. It's a shame it never got ported to any home systems, really.

There's really no reason to bother with Kamen Rider SD: Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine, unless you really need to have every Kamen Rider game ever released. Even if you want a SNES beat em up with Kamen Riders in it, this isn't the one to go for.

Command War Super Special Battle & War Game (Arcade)

I've reviewed an unreleased Taito arcade game before, Recalhorn, which was pretty much a completed , fully polished game that just wasn't released. Command War Super Special Battle & War Game is not like that: it's very unfinished, and very rough around the edges. I think it's mainly the presentation and balance that hasn't been worked out, though, and the game is still very playable.

Unusually for an (intended) arcade game, it's a strategy game, that sees you moving troops around a simple board. When one of your troops meets one of the enemy's troops, they enter a little battle, a lot like the ones seen in the Game Gear game, Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki. Also like that game, the troops themselves are a combination of normal sci-fi military stuff like tanks, jets and giant robots, along with slightly weirder monsters, like cyborg dragons and giant harpies. You might not expect it, but it seems that the tanks are the most important units, just because they're so short that a lot of the larger troops' attacks just go right over their heads.

So, that's the basic premise of the game, but before you play, you're asked to select one of four difficulty levels, which have more of an effect on how the game works then you might expect. On beginner mode, you're automatically given a pre-selected group of troops for each battle, making it the least interersting of all the modes. In amateur, there's always a tank on your team, and you get to buy two more. In Professional and Expert, you get to pick all your troops for yourself, plus the objective of the battles is different: in the lower two difficulties, you win simply by defeating all the enemy troops. In the higher two difficulties, each side also has a special extra unit in the form of a giant robot/tank thing, the defeat of which instantly ends the battle.

You've probably noticed that the screenshots of this game are pretty hard to read, and that's true: clearly, the developers hadn't fully figured out how this game was to be presented, and in its current form it's very messy-looking. You do get used to it after a couple of plays, though it's still a shame that it's hard to get a decent look at the troops attacking each other in the action sections without the big stupid maps in the way. There's also a problem with the money, in that you don't get more money for winning battles, and you need to buy units to replace those destroyed. You can get money in battle to be the first one to reach the flags on the map, but otherwise, you can quickly end up in an unwinnable situation after a couple of stages.

All in all, Command War is a mildly interesting distraction, and a curiosity for Taito fans to look into. In its current form, though, it's not a very good game. It might have become one if they'd continued working on it, but it's easy to see why they didn't: someone obviously had the thought "can we make a strategy game for arcades?", and it gradually became clearer that the answer was "not really".

Windy x Windam (DS)

I remember when this game was originally released in 2008, I was pretty excited for it! I've always been interested attempts at fitting arcade genres like fighting games, beat em ups and shooting games onto handhelds, and this wasn't just a handheld fighting game, but it was made specifically for the ds, so it wasn't a downgraded version of a "proper" fighting game, like the massively disappointing Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers. Nor was it a licensed game, which I considered a plus, as though Treasure's Bleach DS fighting games were a lot of fun, the world and characters didn't appeal to me at all. (One extra little note: why weren't there any Capcom or SNK fighting games on DS? The GBC and GBA played host to some miraculously great versions of the Street Fighter ALpha and King of Fighters games. A missed opportunity.)

Then it actually came out and I played it a little, but it just couldn't hold my interest, and I quickly forgot about it in favour of playing Last Blade 2 and Mark of the Wolves via the surprisingly good homebrew Neo Geo emulator the DS had. Playing it again a decade later, it's got a lot of charm, but I can definitely see why it didn't have staying power, and why pretty much everyone almost instantly forgot about it: that charm has to do a lot of heavy lifting to get you to look past the big flaws in how the game actually plays, and it's just not up to the task.

I'll talk about the positives before I get onto the negatives, though. Like the world and characters are pretty nice. I guess it's set in the same world as the DS roguelite Izuna the Unemployed Ninja, since two characters from that game are unlockable in it, along with a stage set in their village, plus the chharacters are part of the story like everyone else, and the village is on the map just like the other locations. The fact that the attacks have little-to-no recovery time is pretty nice, too. It means you can make weak combos just by attacking really quickly, and almost feels like a poor man's Asuka 120%, albeit with none of the impact that that game's attacks have, and also lacking the cool clash/parry mechanic from that series.

That's pretty much it for the positives, unfortunately. And some of these negatives are pretty hefty, too. Like how sometimes, jumping just doesn't work. That's pretty much unforgivable, right? Any game with unreliable controls has to do a lot of work to make up for that, but for a fighting game? It's an insurmountable barrier. It's clear that this was a problem the developers had noticed too, as they add a seperate jump button, along with the traditional pressing up on the d-pad. Unfortunately, while I'm sure with some dedication, a player might eventually get used to it, with heavy attacks on the X button and jump on the B button, it feels very awkward. Another, lesser flaw is that all the characters seem to have a ton of health, making fights seem slow and undramatic. Though that one's more an issue of preference than a game-breaking catastrophe like the controls.

Obviously, I can't recommend Windy x Windam, especially now that a used copy seems to cost more than a brand new copy did back when it was released. Pretty much every major handheld since the original Game Boy has a bunch of way better fighting games than this, including the DS itself. So get one of those instead.

Other Stuff Monthly #4

Other than Judge Dredd, British comics don't seem to have much of a place in mainstream "nerd culture" (or "Funko Pop-culture", as it's sometimes derisively called), not even in the UK itself. There's probably a lot of complicated reasons for this, but speaking from the position of a fan with no real knowledge of the inner workings of the comic industry, I'd lay the blame at the feet of publishers who thought they were just churning out penny dreadfuls for children, ignorant of the wealth of talent in their employ, and at the quality of the work they were printing. Sonic the Comic, probably the most fondly remembered UK comic of my generation's childhood is only so highly-regarded in spite of its publishers wishes, as the creative team had to sneak even the simple concept of serialised narrative under the radar.

There's some effort being made to redress that nowadays though, as comics that have never been reprinted in the decades since their original serialisation are finally being collected and made available. This is most notable with regards to the girls' comics of the 1970s, as the entire genre has pretty much disappeared over the past thirty years or so. It really is a crime, when you see how comics like Ace wo Nerae and Onii-sama E Oniisama are internationally renowned, while their UK equivalents have spent decades locked away unread in dusty archives somewhere. So today's subject is a recently printed volume of two stories originally printed in a magazine called Jinty, which was a sci-fi comics anthology aimed at girls, a concept that, if announced today, would enrage all kinds of foul-smelling fedora-wearers.

The first of the two stories is Land of No Tears is the story of a girl named Cassy, born with one leg shorter than the other, a trait that she uses constantly to garner sympathy and weasel out of stuff. After being anaesthetised to undergo the operation to lengthen her shortened leg, she wakes up in a future world, a tory's paradise where the hospital is reduced to rubble and no-one has sympathy for those less fortunate. In fact, any girl who dares to be imperfect in anyway is a slave to those who are. Of course, this is a comic aimed at young girls, so the secret to winning freedom is swimming and gymnastics, as there's a big sports competition for preteen girls that seems to be universally watched, and if the imperfect "gammas" can snatch victory from the perfect "alphas" in front of the world, then everything will change! Luckily, Cassy did a lot of swimming in the past as part of her physical therapy, and one of the other girls, who had her hair partially burned off as a baby, is a talented gymnast.

I won't spoil any more, but there's various powers conspiring against them and so on, and there's an incredibly cruel fate in store for one of the main characters at the end. In my opinion, this was the better of the two stories in this volume, though the other one isn't bad at all, it just isn't as good.That other story is The Human Zoo, the story of a girl named Shona, who, along with her sister Jenny, and a bunch of other unrelated people, are abducted by  big-headed telepathic aliens. They're taken to a world where humans are treated like any other animals: used as food, slaves, pets, and kept in zoos as entertainment.

Before going further into the plot, I want to mention how the aliens  communicate with each other in hilarious unemotional sci-fi speak, woth parents and children referring to each other as "guardian and progeny", and this meets its apex when the aliens dress Shona as one of their own for a circus show, and one of them thinks "This should part lips greatly!" But anyway, Shona's time on the other planet starts in the eponymous zoo, though it doesn't stay there long, as she serves time as a child's pet, a circus animal, and eventually gets freed into the wilderness, where she meets some human-like aliens living in caves, apparently indigenous to the planet. I don't want to say any more, as there are a lot of genuinely surpsing twists, and some pretty grim moments of horror, too.

One thing I will says is that though this story was written and originally published in the 1970s, some of the messages are incredibly relevant today. One of the aliens justifies their torture of rebellious humans with some throwaway excuse about "property damage", just like the apologists for police violence in 2010s America, and there's another scene where humans are enslaved on a farm with the explanation "Machines break down and need repairing. When our men collapse, they just round up more" given as to why the technologically advanced aliens haven't automated all their labour. As our own world quickly approaches the level of technology at which humans can be liberated from drudgery, expect to find similar excuses between the lines whenever corporate bosses and their right-wing political lapdogs make excuses as to why people are still being worked to death for a pittance.

With all of the above being kept in mind, it only makes the story's somewhat milquetoast ending more frustrating. Again, I dont want to go into specifics too much, but essentially, the day is saved when Shona, Jenny, and the native humans discover that all they needed to do to win their freedom was be nice to their oppressors. I mean, obviously this story was published in a children's comic, and obviously, the path of non-violence is probably the better one to be teaching to kids, but it still feels like a bit of an anti-cathartic wet noodle after all the indignities and violence the telepathic aliens had visited upon the humans. I still recommend the story, though, and of course, the book as a whole. If you''re at all interested in comics at all, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by ignoring it. Even though I said Land of no Tears was the better story, I wrote significantly more about The Human Zoo. Hmm.

Mahou City (PC)

So, like a previous game I've covered here, Panic in Nakayoshi Land, Mahou City is a magical girl-themed Battle City clone. Though as far as I can tell, the magical girls in this case aren't from any existing property (though there's homages to a few existing magical girls in the very silly 2001 A Space Odyssey-homaging intro). You play as a girl with a cannon-lance weapon, and you go around mazes shooting other, similarly armed girls. Also, you've got a base to protect, and the game instantly ends if it gets shot. Instead of the militaristic eagle emblem of Battle City, it's a big fat yellow bird sitting on a nest.

All the Battle City hallmarks are present: destructible walls, enemies without AI that move and act completely randomly, power-ups that also appear at random, and most importantly: fun, simple action that manages to be compelling despite the heavy reliance on randomness. It even adds a few elements, like power-ups that give you a four-way shot, or shrink you down so you're harder to hit.

There's also some presentational changes, though they range from pointless to being of an actual detriment to the game. The pointless includes the addition of two extra camera angles: on low down, close to your character, and a first person view, which also changes the controls to a swivel-and-move arrangement. Unfortunately, they're both much worse for playing than the default bird's eye view camera, though they can make for some nice screenshots. The cosmetic change that's of active detriment to the game is that the Bomb Attack power up, that kills all enemies present in a stage when you pick it up, is now preceded by an unskippable animation of an airship flying in to carpet bomb the area. Actually, there is one bit of flair I feel ads to the game: the big explosions every shot creates are very satisfying.

There's also a few technical problems this game has, like the aforementioned intro being unskippable every time you load the game, or the fact that it doesn't save high scores after you close the program. All in all, though, if you like Battle City and clones thereof, this is one of those, and it's as addictive as any other. Even if it's also the hardest Battle City clone I've ever played, and I can only get 5 stages into it. Anyway, it's available from the dev's website for free, so you might as well give it a try, right?

Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws (Game Boy Advance)

I'd previously written off the Simple 2960 Tomodachi series, assuming that it was just a bunch of untranslated visual novels like the Dreamcast's Simple 2000 DC series. I happened across some screenshots of this one recently, though, and it turns out I've been wrong all this time, and the GBA Simple games have at least one cute puzzler among them! In fact, looking at the list of titles, I have no idea where I got my previous assumption from, as it's clear that none of them are visual novels at all. But anyway, this is The Itsudemo Puzzle ~Massugu Soroete Straws~, or The Anytime Puzzle ~Line Up the Straws~, and it's pretty good!

The game presents you with groups of stars connected by lines, and you move your cursor thing around, pushing stars up and down the screen so that the connecting lines become one straight line, either horizontal or diagonal. Do it multiple times in quick succession for more points, of course. There's a totally unimportant story about an apprentice witch who I think is trying to hold back the dawn for as long as possible by arranging the stars in the night sky into straight lines? That's what seems to be happening in the main mode, anyway, as the moon scrolls across the screen and the sky gets lighter as time starts to run out, while going in reverse when you get more time while clearing lines.

Other than the main game, there's also a time attack mode, in which you attempt to score as many points as possible in three minutes, and a free mode, which just goes on forever until you quit via the pause menu. Oddly, even the free mode has a high score table, though the nature of the mode means it really just measures the player's tolerance for boredom (though playing free mode did help me figure out little techniques here and there to improve my game, like any good practice mode should).

There's not much more to be said about this game! It's cute, it's fun, and unlike a lot of Simple Series games, a real copy of it can be found for next to nothing online if you're lucky. It's recommended!

Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen (Game Boy)

Videogames based on Kaiju and Tokusatsu properties can be a mixed bag, though I'm probably not alone in thinking that the 2014 Godzilla game on PS4 is probably the best. And while its true that a lot of these games have got a worse rap than they deserve due to critics not really understanding their appeal (the common opinion of the Dreamcast's Godzilla Generations, for example), I might have found the worst of them all, by some considerable margin.

How Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen works is kind of like a turn-based fighting game, with no menus. Every turn, you're asked to input a command, then both monsters' maneuvers play out, and that carries on until one of them runs out of health. The closest thing to which I can compare it is probably the weird FMV fighting game Battle Heat on PC-FX. Except it's on the Game Boy, so you don't even have the visual spectacle of lavish full-screen animation to liven things up. Though if you're playing on a Super Game Boy, there are some nice borders to look at, I guess.

There are really two problems with this game, and they're both massive ones. The first is the inconsistency: it seems like pressing the same button combination on different turns doesn't always result in the same action, and furthermore, performing the same action won't always produce the same results, even if the enemy does the same thing, too. So the game boils down to you watching little animations of Gamera and his current opponent doing seemingly random things at each other until one of them suddenly gets hurt. This repeats over and over until one of them runs out of health, and to make things worse, you have to win two rounds against each monster.

And that leads nicely into the second problem: this game is unbelievably slow! Honestly, it took me a few attempts to get past the first fight, simply because it was sapping me of the will to live, and when I did finally get past it, it took over twenty minutes! And that's without losing any rounds! Then you get to the next stage and are faced with the prospect of this carrying on. Apparently this game has a total of five stages, but I can't imagine anyone having the patience to play through them all. I definitely don't recommend trying to.

Small Games Vol. 4!

All the games in this post are for the Epoch Game Pocket Computer, from 1984. Also, I'm going to at least mention all the games for the Epoch Game Pocket Computer, as there's only seven of them. And only two (maybe three) that are actually worth playing. Now, I'm not 100% on this, but while it definitely wasn't the first handheld games console, I think this might have been the first to have all the true hallmarks of what we think of as a handheld console: interchangable ROM cartridges, processing power in the console itself (as opposed to being inside the cartridges), and a pixel-based display (as opposed to a bespoke Game and Watch-style display for each game). If I'm wrong, please correct me, but I can't see any earlier handhelds that have all three properties.

The first game I'll talk about is Astro Bomber, which is mostly a clone of Konami's arcade game Scramble, though it does have a few of its own original elements, such as fuel-eating clouds, and a final bossfight against a ship that shoots giant snakes at you. It's fun enough, but it's both incredibly easy and far too generous with the lives: you start with six of them, and on my second play, it took until midway through the second loop to lose one of them. I guess that'd make it great for a long train journey, though? Oh, also when you beat the boss, it plays a little bit of Star Wars music, which gave me a laugh the first time.

Next up is Block Maze, which is an original idea, as far as I can tell: you play as a thing in a maze, and you have to kick four blocks from the middle of the maze to the four corners. There's also enemies to avoid, and balls to kick at the enemies and kill them. Plus, after the first stage, the blocks and corners get marked with letters, and you have to get each block to its matching corner. Unforutnately, it suffers the same problem as Astro Bomber: six lives that are way too easy to keep ahold of. Also, the scoring system relies heavily on a little roulette minigame that plays whenever you get a block to its corner, and you know I hate luck-based scoring systems.

The third game isn't even a game, it's the console's built-in art program! That's pretty impressive for a mid-eighties handheld, right? Of course, there's not much you can do with a 75x64 screen and 1-bit colour, but it's interesting nonetheless. I couldn't get much out of it, but I bet pixel artists who love limitations would have a lot of fun with it! The two biggest shames are that there's no way to save your work (on the original hardware, at least. Obviously in an emulator, you just take screenshots), and that every  time the cursor moves a pixel, it's accompanied by a hellish beeping.

As for the rest of the line-up, there's a puzzle game that's also built in, but it's unfortunately a sliding tile puzzle, which doesn't even make a picture, you're just putting letters in order. There's also Sokoban and Mahjong games (I absolutely hate sokoban, and I'm useless at mahjong), and there's an Othello/Reversi game, which might be okay, but there's not really anything to say about it. And that's the Epoch Game Pocket Computer! We hardly knew ye.

Junker's High (Mega Drive)

Just for clarification, Junker's High is the beta title for Outrun 2019, and the only differences, as far as I can tell, are that Junker's High was intended to have the ability to save times and even replays, though it seems like these options don't actually work, even though they're there in the game. But still, Outrun 2019 isn't particularly well known as it is, is it? Until the Asian version of the Mega Drive Mini comes out, at least.

Despite the different working title, it's pretty clear that this was always meant to be an Outrun sequel: it looks and feels like Outrun, and even uses a similar branching paths system. Similar, but not exactly the same. Before you start playing, you pick one of four stages, each of which is made up of a collection of branching paths, like the one in Outrun. Though they don't follow the same big triangle formation as in the original game, instead being a selection of diamond and chain shapes. This means that each time you play a stage, the first and last areas will be the same as the other times you picked that stage, but there's a bunch of different routes to take in the middle. So while a single play will be shorter than a game of the original Outrun, there's a greater number of routes to go back and see.

The structure isn't the only change to the formula, though: your Batmobile-looking vehicle also has a boost function, that works in a pretty unique way. If you reach and maintain top speed for a few uninterrupted seconds, the boost will activate, significantly incresing your speed until you slow down for any reason. It's a little more strategic than the usual limited-use boost items you'd see in other racing games, and what makes it better is that it really does seem like the tracks are designed around it. It pays to learn where the straight parts are in a track that let you really cut loose with the speed, and where you should tap the brake to stop the boost activating so that it doesn't send you careening off of a bridge.

Another interesting thing is that though it looks like it's going to be set in a grim cyberpunk dystopia, there's actually a bit of optimism in the game's backdrops. Most of the city stages seem clean, shiny and genuinely advanced, and there's a few stages set in  lush green paradises, too. From what I've seen, there's only one stage that takes a "glass half empty" approach, and that's a stage with you driving on bridges over clean-looking water, with a backdrops of ruined, crumbling skyscrapers in the distance.

If you like Outrun and want some more of it, then Junker's High/Outrun 2019 will give you exactly that, with a couple of new and interesting twists bundled in, too. The Asian version of the Mega Drive Mini probably has the best line up generally, and Outrun 2019 is a part of that, which is nice, since actual cartridge copies seem to be selling for the same price as they did when the game got released in 1992. (On another note, who would have ever have guessed it'd be Konami of all companies, that did the proper thing with their mini console by putting the same lineup on every version of it?)