Sideswiped (DS)

Sideswiped, also known as Clash King V201 is a great little racing game for the DS, that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed and forgotten. You'd think a fast, fully 3D handheld racing game, that didn't force the use of a terrible touchscreen steering wheel would have got people's attention, but as far as I could tell at the time, the only people who paid any attention to this one were people paying attention to Japanese DS releases on its original release, and then when it came westwards, the few members of that previous group who were interested in racing games. (Having said that, though, I do seem to be suffering a bit of a Mandela effect moment, as various websites have both versions of this game coming out within a month of each other, while I remember playing Clash King V201 for several months before Sideswiped came out. Weird.)

It's not just a racing game, either! It's a little handheld version of the Playstation classic Destruction Derby, with you competing in three kinds of "races", only one of which is focussed on being the first to pass a finish line. There's "Destruction", in which you drive into traffic, trying to ram innocent people's cars hard enough that they fly into the distance and explode, scoring big points for causing chain reactions and "Crash Race", where you drive around a track with seven other cars, scoring points by crashing into them, with less spectacular results than in Destruction. In both of the above modes, you're given a time limit and a points quota to meet in that time. In the final mode, "Normal Race", you take part in a normal race! There's seven other cars, like in Crash Race, but this time you're all just trying to make it over the finish line first.

Most of the stages take place in places like Las Vegas, New York, and generic Seaside and Mountain locales, but there's also an Arena area, which adds a couple of its own, weird race types: "Bowling", where you drive into a bunch of giant pins, and the even stranger "Trampoline", which has you driving off of a raised platform, to bounce on a series of giant trampolines, and popping as many floating balloons as you can along the way. All in all, there's a lot of variety in Sideswiped! Though to be honest, it's only Destruction and Normal Race that you'll ever want to go back to, as the others are either stupid and gimmicky, or just plain boring. But  good stages are really good, don't get me wrong.

Sideswiped is a game that doesn't have any real problems, other than it being surprisingly hard to get ahold of (it doesn't seem to even be listed on Amazon UK!). But if you can find it, it's definitely worth getting.

Bay Route (Arcade)

Yes, that title does sound a lot like "Beirut", though the game is set in a generic post-apocalyptic sci-fi land, so I have no idea why they did that. But anyway, it's a game developed by Sunsoft and published by SEGA, that's a lot like Contra. As is so often the case with SEGA arcade games from this period, I have to wonder why it never got a Mega Drive release. The resemblance to Contra makes it even stranger, since that series was so popular back then, and it could have been a bit of a coup to say "our console has a game like contra, that's more colourful and better looking than anything on Nintendo's console!"

Like Contra, you play as some guy going from left to right, shooting lots of generic enemy soldiers, a fair few pieces of big enemy military hardware, and occasionally a big enemy weird monster here and there, too. The first boss is even a big barricade wall thing with guns on it, like in Contra. There's some differences, though: for example, you start with four weapons and can switch between them at any time, instead of waiting for the right powerup to come along. Also, the flamethrower is definitely the good kind of flamethrower, as opposed to Contra's rubbish fireball gun thing.

On its own merits, without comparisions to Contra, Bay Route is pretty good overall. It's nothing particularly special, just a well-designed run-and-gun game, with easily-learnable enemy behaviours, some cool set-pieces, and a nice smooth difficulty curve. It looks and sounds pretty good, though nothing mindblowing for an arcade game of its era. Obviously, it's not even slightly original, but I don't want to be too harsh on it for that, especially since it's of a pretty similar quality to the series it's ripping off, rather than being significantly worse. Unfortunately, that averageness makes it kind of hard to write about.

I guess I can recommend playing Bay Route? You won't be missing out on a great deal if you don't, but you'll have a decent enough time if you do. It's hard not to be on the fence about this game; there's a lot of reasons why a game might fade into obscurity, and this one clearly did just because it's so completely unremarkable.