Small Games Vol. 5!

It's time for another batch of lower-key games, and once again, it's an MSX edition, simply because everyone loves the MSX, right? Unfortunately though, it, like all systems, played host to some pretty terrible games over the course of its life, and today's post is a bit of a good game sandwich, with bad games as the bread. The first slice being American Truck. It's one of those top-down see-how-far-you-can-go crash-avoiding psuedo-racing games that longtime readers will know I love. It's a pretty bad example of the genre, though.

It's just got a lot of little things wrong with it that all add up to a game that's no fun to play. The scoring system is bad: you only get points for destroying other vehicles, so there's no points gained for distance travelled or leftover fuel or time (though this does make me wonder if the developers were inspired by Goliath, the evil truck from Knight Rider). Instead of the usual fuel meter that acts as a combination time limit and health bar, you have three lives, one of which is lost if you touch the edge of the road, or if you so much as graze one of the black circles (presumably open manholes?) dotted around the place here and there. Also, at least once, I died from crashing into a vehicle, even though this is the only way to score points. I wish this game was better, but it just isn't. Don't bother with it.

Next up is a much better game, A.E., a simple single-screen shooter that was recommended to me years and years ago, though I've unfortunately forgotten by whom. If it was you, sorry! Though this game might like incredibly simple and primitive in screenshots, in motion, it's a different story. The backgrounds are completely static, but the enemies fly around them, and a kind of primitive psuedo-sprite-scaling effect has the swooping in and out of hollow meteors and slaloming through stalagmites and stalactites, and so on. It's a really cool effect that really shows how creative the devs must have been. The game itself is okay, too. Mechanically, it manages to stand out by giving you a fairly unusual weapon: your shots travel upwards for as long as you hold the fire button, detonating into an explosion that lasts a couple of seconds when you release. The enemies come in waves of six that fly away after a few passes. You clear a stage when you manage to successfully wipe out three waves. A.E is a decent game, and I pass on the recommendation I received onto you.

Finally, the second slice of bad game bread is The Komainu Quest, a game that I almost feel bad for badmouthing, since it was originally made as a promotional game for the town of Seto in Japan. I still will though, because it's awful. In contrast to A.E, which seemed to be made by developers who knew both the hardware they were using, and the extent of their abilities in using it, The Komainu Quest is rendered pretty much unplayable, apparently thanks to developers biting off more than they could chew in attempting a scrolling shooter on the MSX hardware (though that has been done by others, before anyone points out, and with spectacular results, too. But that's a story for another day). I say "attempting", because this game doesn't actually have scrolling. Instead, the screen slowly updates as you play, in columns a few pixels wide. The result of this is that sometimes you have enemies already firing at you several seconds before they actually appear, and even stationary obstacles pushing your ship out of the way when all you can see is empty sky. I feel bad for saying it, but The Komainu Quest is only worth playing out of historical curiosity.

Chitty Chitty Train (PC98)

You can probably guess from the screenshots, but what attracted me to this game was the graphics: they're really really nice, aren't they? So tiny and clean and perfectly-formed. I was also thinking it'd been a long time since I'd covered anything on the PC98, and wanted to get back on that, and a great-looking puzzle game seemed like a nice way to do it. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that this game is not nice at all, in fact, you could even go as far as to call it cruel!

But before we get onto that, I should explain it, if you haven't already figured out the premise just by looking at the screens. It's a mouse-controlled puzzle game in which you have to get a train to all the stations, then to the exit. You do this by clicking on the switches to change their positions, and by right-clicking at any point on the track to place a red light that stops any train that encounters it for a few seconds. The cruelty comes from the fact that all the trains (there are other trains on the track that you also need to direct to avoid collisions) all move really fast, and never stop, except in the case of the aforementioned red lights.

Now, there are two basic types of stages in Chitty Chitty Train. There's the complex ones, where you really need to take a look at every switch, the positions of all the trains and stations, and plan your routes carefully. Then there are stages with simpler layouts, where the challenge comes more from having the timing and manual dexterity to click the right switches at the exact right times to avert disaster. Either way, though, you'll be working at high speed, and a successful run of any stage will probably only take a few seconds, though they'll be very intense, high-stress seconds. And of course, it's very unlikely that you'll finish any stage on the first attempt, so don't think you'll be tearing through the game in no time.

There's also an edit mode, which is interesting in theory, though I didn't really have the patience to do anything with it myself. It uses a similar interface to making maps in RPG maker, with you selecting pieces of track and scenery from a window, then placing them where you like on the screen. One interesting bit of information I did glean from this mode is that there are a bunch of different tilesets in the game. All but the first are locked at the start and I could only get far enough to unlock the second, but there's apparently Plain, Snow, Desert, Europe, Future, and Toybox. Hopefully some super player will come along and take screenshots of some later stages someday.

Anyway, Chitty Chitty Train is a fun and charming game, that's also sadistically difficult and stressful. I definitely recommend giving it a shot. And in case you're wondering, all the text I saw in the game was in English, so there's no language barrier to worry about, either.