Cross Wiber - Cyber Combat Police (PC Engine)

Last year, I reviewed Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji, which is one of the most-played PC Engine games among those of which I actually own real copies. Cross Wiber is the sequel to that game, and it too is a tokusatsu-themed single-plane beat em up. This time, though, the aesthetic is one more contemporaneous to the tokusatsu shows at the time, as opposed to the 1970s retro look of the first game. Think Blue Swat or Mobile Cop Jiban, as opposed to Kamen Rider or Battle Fever J. The best part of this is that one of the bosses from the first game (the fire-breathing giant frog-man) reappears in the new style, looking totally different, but also instantly recognisable.

The new look is generally pretty great all round, though: everything's very detailed and well-drawn, and it has a little bit of a gritty edge to it, and there's lots of shiny technology and gooey monsters. The game itself has had a few changes made to it, too. For example, where transformation in the first game was dependant on collecting an item, this time round, you just have to press the select button when your health is high enough to have some blue segments. There's really no reason why you wouldn't transform as soon as possible, but requiring you to manually do it does make it feel a little cooler.

Just like last time, there's red, green, and blue forms to transorm into (the default is red, and the other two have to be collected as items), and the weapons for each form are the same, too: red has a sword, green has boomerangs, and blue has a gun. It seems the devs realised that the gun was the best weapon by a long distance, so its use is reliant on battery power, and the blue form is reduced to using punches and kicks when that runs out. Other than these small differences, and a shooting stage where you're riding on a hoverbike, it's very similar to the first game, but with a new coat of paint.

The main difference, which is a big factor as to why I don't like this as much as I did Cyber Cross is the difficulty. The first few stages are very, very easy. A lot easier than the first game ever was. Then along comes the sixth stage, which takes place atop a bunch of metal pillars, with instant death pits below and gangs of floating monsters going about the place, waiting to slightly knock you to your doom. It just feels like such a letdown that instead of designing stages and enemies that challenge you in combat, the devs inserted this kind of test of memory and luck. It's not a total game-ruiner, but it did deflate my enthusiasm for it quite a bit.

As it is, Cross Wiber is a game that's decent, but far from essential. The most damning thing about it, though, is that it's both less good and more expensive than its predecessor. I won't tell you not to play it, but I'd definitely direct you towards Cyber Cross instead of it.

Dark Awake -The King Has No Name- (PS3)

So, this is a fighting game that was originally released on Taito's Type X arcade hardware as "Chaos Breaker" in 2004, with this, the only home port, coming six years later. It's a fantasy-themed 2D fighting game base around team battles, kind of like a combination of Golden Axe: The Duel with the King of Fighters series, but with a few interesting little gimmicks to call its own. As far as I can tell, the home version is pretty much a straight port of the original, with the only addition being online play (which I'm fairly certain is no longer available).

There's eighteen characters, divided into six teams, all of except one of which is racially homogenous. So there's a team each of humans, elves, dwarves, sea demons, and undead, as well as a team that's made up of a goblin, an orc, and a troll. Though the designs do lean heavily on typical fantasy tropes, there's still some cool ideas in the designs. One of the dwarves, for example, comes with an entire artillery cannon, and there's members of the monster and undead teams riding mounts of their own. And even the more cliched characters are cool enough to be appealling, too. Though it's a straight KOF-style team battle arrangement with no tagging, you can call the still-concious members of your team in for assist attacks, and this plays into the game's main unique gimmick.

When you pick your team, you see, you get four slots to fill. The first three are for your characters, and the fourth is for an item. There's a ton of items to choose from, and they do various things like healing your health or super meters, increasing attack or defence for a few seconds, summoning a monster to attack your opponent, and so on. This ties into the assist system in a couple of ways:assists are called by pressing a combination of two attack buttons, and your item is listed among your team memebers and used in the same way. Where things get more interesting (in a single player game, at least) is when, after defeating a team, you get a few more items to pick from, and you can choose to use them to either replace the item you picked at the start, or if you're feeling brave, to replace up to two of your characters, giving you a disadvantage in terms of the number rounds you can lose, but also giving you a bigger choice of usable items.

So, is the game any good? Yes! It feels good to play, all the attacks look and sound good, it's just all-round a pretty good game. It was never going to have an easy time, being a post-2000 2D fighting game with no ties to existing series, and it definitely can't have been helped by the fact that it looks a lot better in motion than it does in still screenshots, either. In motion, it looks great, with big sprites and expressive animation, but in stills, the sprites tend to look a lot more blocky and ugly. If you have the means to play a Japan-only download-only PS3 game (or, for that matter, a Taito Type X game), it's definitely worth your time.