S.C.A.R.S (Playstation)

That title there's an acronym, for Super Computer Animal Racing Simulation. The plot involes a super computer in the distant future simulating races between animal/car hybrids (reminiscent of the 90s toyline Car-Nivores) for some reason. The plot doesn't really affect the game in any way other than each track having a little sequence where the topology "grows" out of a flat blue grid, before the textures spread over it. That's pretty cool, though. Better than a normal loading screen, at least. The cars being animals doesn't really come into it at all, though, other than looking cool and putting an A in the title's acronym.

The races themselves play out in a Mario Kart style, which you might not expect from the non-cuteness of the overall aesthetic. There's power-ups to collect and a jump button, though, so that's pretty Mario Kart, I'm sure you agree. There's enough differences in the formula to set it apart, though, and they mostly involve the power-ups themselves. Firstly, they aren't assigned randomly, you can see which power-up you're going to get before you get it. This means there's none of the MK-style balancing where racers at the front only get the worst power-ups, and racers at the back only get the best. This is kind of balanced out by the fact that most of the power-ups are more useful when you're behind the pack, so a racer in first will be driving around holding onto their power-ups just in case they fall behind at some point.

Then there's the power-ups themselves. There are some of the usual suspects: missiles, speed boosts, shields, and so on, but there's also several kinds of trap power-ups. When used, these typically send forwards an energy field of some kind: a wall, a spinning triangle, a floating magnetic tetrahedron. The wall and the triangle simple stop any car that hits them, and they take a split-second to disappear afterwards, so if a few cars are bunched together, they might all get stopped, fot you to drive past with impunity. The magnetic tetrahedron is more deadly, but only to one car: it piicks them up and spins them for a few seconds. The trapped car can shoot a missile to get free, but they'll be dropped at whatever angle the magnet currently has them at, while if they wait the few seconds to be dropped naturally, they'll be pointed in the right direction. What's annoying about all of the above, is that they can trap the racer who sent them out, which seems like a stupid oversight.

Another weird quirk is that you have a score while racing, with points awarded for hitting your opponents with weapons. But these points don't affect your standing in the race ranking in any way, and it's hard to see what the point of them is. There's a bonus ranking point awarded after each race for the racer that had the fastest single lap, so why couldn't they have had another one for the highest score? As it is, the score doesn't take anything away from the game, but at the same time, it doesn't add anything either.

As a single-player experience, SCARS is very much okay. It's not great, but it's not bad, either. In terms of Playstation kart racers that I've played in recent times, it's better than Tank Racer, but not as good as Megaman Battle & Chase. It's probably better with human opponents, but that's obviously going to be the case for the other games, too.

Case of Dungeons (PC98)

It's time for that rarest of treats: a Japanese microcomputer game that has an English translation! Well, a partial one, at least. The character names are romanised and the names of the items and some of the enemies are translated, and not much else. But that does make it a lot easier compared to playing the raw Japanese version, and there doesn't really seem to be much of a plot to be missing out on, either. Anyway, Case of Dungeon is a simple isometric dungeon crawling RPG.

To start of with, you pick one of many pre-made characters from a little book at the start of the game. There's knights, mages, elves, thiefs, and so on, and one little odd thing I noticed is a few sneaky little Addams Family references, with some of the characters' names containing "Fesuta", "Gomezu", "Wenzudi", and "Motesha", though there's no "Paguzuri". The characters aren't at all balanced, with some having stats that just totally put the others to shame, even when you take into account the differing amount of points you can add to stats yourself when you select one. Once that's done with, you enter the dungeon, on your quest to (I think) kill the Black Dragon.

As mentioned, everything's seen from an isometric viewpoint, and the game is controlled with either the mouse or the arrow and Z/X keys. You don't directly move your character, you move an arrow around the screen, where it'll be pointing in one of four directions, then press Z to make them take one step in that direction. It's pretty slow, as the dungeon is procedurally generated and revealed one space at a time. Every now and then, you'll also enter a random battle. The commands for the battles aren't translated, so I'll tell you what they are here: from left to right, you've got escape, magic, and attack. Your item window is also open during battle, and oddly, using items and changing equipment doesn't use up a turn, so if you're about to die, you can just eat a load of bread until you get back to full health.

Something that was clearly done to extend the length of the game is that the stairs down to the next floor of the dungeon won't appear until you've explored every last tile on the current floor, except for those covered by locked doors. (On the subject of locked doors, you do start with a load of keys, and they're pretty commonly found in chests, too, but it's not worth the effort of going into your inventory and using them, as doors are almost always generated in frong of walls, or in the middle of rooms. So you can just either walk round them or they don't lead anywhere anyway. Weird.)

This, more than anything else, is what killed this game for me. I was actually fine with the incredibly slow walking speed and the slightly glitchy battle menu, but after I'd gotten a few floors in, I was traipsing around the place looking for the one last unexplored tile somewhere that would make the stairs appear for over 20 minutes. I saved my game and gave up. I might never go back to that file, but you never know. It's a shame, as despite having everything going against it, Case of Dungeon was, like The Hunter, it's a game that really held my attention despite really being quite boring.

I can't really say that I recommend this game after saying that, can I? But if you're more patient than I am, maybe you could give it a shot? Everyone like isometric graphics at least, don't they? Oh, and for some reason, the translated version doesn't seem to be listed on romhacking.net or on the "beginner's guide to PC98"-type articles going around, so here's the link.