Metropolismania 2 (PS2)

Metropolismania 2, also known as Machi-ing Maker 2: Zoku Boku no Machi Zukuri, is a city-building game, though it takes a much more down-to-earth approach to the subject matter than the likes of Sim City. It's also a lot simpler, as you don't have to manage finances,  utilities, traffic, or any of the other things you might expect from such a game. Instead, itcan be considered to have elements from Sim City, The Sims, and Animal Crossing, along with its own unique take on municipal management, planning and engineering.

The most obvious difference compared to those other games is the total lack of budgeting required: buildings, roads, and most other things cost nothing. The only money in the game belongs to your character, and is for buying items either for your own use, or to give as gifts. Instead, buildings can only be built when there's someone who wants to move into them, and finding such people is the game's core hook. If you're doing an especially good job of running your town, you'll be receiving e-mails from families and businesses (oddly, all the employees of any businesses in your town all live together in the business' premises as if they were a family) telling you that they want to move in, and what kind of building they want to move into, that you're then able to build.

For most of the game, however, this won't be happening. Instead, you have to gradually befriend the people already living in your town and ask them to introduce you to their out-of-town friends who might want to move in. After a short time, you'll start getting requests for specific buildings and facilities, too, like hospitals, schools, parks, and so on, and you've got to go around talking to everyone, gathering clues on who might have the right connections for what you need.

It's a novel concept, at least, but unforunately, it's not a particularly fun one. The problem is that you've got to do this stuff a lot of times to a lot of people to get anywhere, and once you've finished one stage, you start a new stage and do it all over again (this seems to be a problem in Japan-developed building games, actually, as having to start all over again is what made me stop playing Dragon Quest Builders after I finished the first stage and found out that that meant losing all the stuff I'd built). And even just the first stage took me something like two and a half hours to get through. The only way I can see anyone getting a long way into this game is if they either have a very high tolerance for repetition, or if they play one stage over the course of a day or two, then take a long break before starting the next one.

There are some positive things I have to say about Metropolismania 2, though. For a start, it does have a lot of charm, and even though the townspeople will repeat the same few topics of conversation over and over, it does somehow give the illusion of them all having personalities. Another thing I really liked is that you can go into a first-person view and walk aroud the streets of your town, and the game even keeps the people going about their business while you do so, so you can talk to them just as if you were passing in the street for real. Or you can do it at night, while the streets are empty, all the shops are shut and the only light is from the lampposts. It's got a very comfy feel about it.

Inexplicably, this game and the one before it both got worldwide releases, so you can get them pretty easily, and pretty cheaply. If you're curious, I wouldn't totally dissuade you from giving it a try, though I wouldn't recommend paying more than five or six pounds if you do.

Totsugeki! Mix (PC98)

The problem with looking into games that are on systems that never got released in English-speaking territories is that you're usually limited to action games and nothing else. Amd when those systems are computers that were aimed at businessmen, like the PC98, it's even worse, since there's a higher proportion than usual of games in very text-heavy genres. Luckily, Totsugeki Mix happens to be a pretty straight-up platfor game, of the kind kids across the world were playing, no matter what systems they had access to. Less luckily, though, is that there's almost nothing interesting about it at all. (Except the nice pixel art, but that's the minimum you'd expect from a PC98 game, really).

You jump over things, attack enemies, collect stuff, and so on, just like you've don't a million times before. The only ways in which the game stands out are either bad, or just slightly odd. A bad thing, for example, is how there are three playable characters, only one of whom is viable. Because only one of them can double jump, a skill whose absence makes some stages uncompletable. An odd thing is how every platform you can stand on is completely solid. Like, you can't walk in front of it, or jump through it from below or anything like that. I'm not sure if this one is a deliberate design choice, or just a problem deemed too minor to be worth fixing by the devs, but it does make some areas really awkward to get through.

Like I've already mentioned, the one good thing that can be said in this game's defense is that it's got really nice backgrounds: detailed, high resolution, and very colourful. I guess you could also make the case that it is merely a boring, mediocre game, and not one that's actively unpleasant to play. But I can't recommend it on the strength of that alone, and I won't. There's plenty of much better platformers with great pixel art in the world, like the Amiga's Lionheart, or the X68000's Castlevania, for example. Play those instead of Totsugeki Mix.