Guru Guru (DS)

Also known in Japan as "Guru Guru Nagetto", Guru Guru is a game I found while looking up the developers of a game I covered a few months ago, Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws on Game Boy Advance. Not only are the two games by the same developer, but the main character of that game, the trainee witch Straw, is also playable in this one! It's not a sequel, though, as while that was a puzzle game, this is a golf game.

Or rather, golf is the nearest thing to which Guru Guru can be compared. Instead of hitting a tiny hard ball with a stick to try and get it into a distant whole on a massive lawn in the fewest strikes, you are instead throwing bouncy limbless rabbit-like creatures called familars to try and land them at the end of a linear path in the fewest throws. Obviously, there's complications, as the paths are full of hills, walls, ceilings, bottomless pits, and so on, to hinder your progress. You do get to pick between three routes, though, and you can switch between them when you like, as long as you're on a flat surface that's even with the route to which you want to move.

Along with being golf-like in concept, there's also some similarities with more traditional golf games. For example, on each turn, you pick one of three different kinds of throwing technique (determined by which character you picked), then decide how hard you're going to throw the ball with the use of a power meter. Of course, this being a DS game, the power meter utilises the touch screen, having you quickly draw circles to build it up, before flicking across to throw. It works okay, but it's hard to get much precision for those rare occasions when you don't want to throw the familiar as hard as you can.

I was a little sceptical when I first started playing this game, and it did take me a few goes to even figure out how to play it, but it's actually a ton of fun to play once you've got the hang of it. My advice is to ignore the various training modes and just go straight in for the tournament. The training modes make the game seem a lot more difficult than it actually is, and there's a lot of satisfaction not just in beating your tournament opponents, but in seeing their familars bouncing backwards off of walls and falling down pits, leaving them in a worse position at the end of their turn than at the start. One last thing I have yet to mention is the graphics, so before this review ends: they're great. They're cute and colourful (in a kind of pastelly way on my actual DS, though the  screenshots from the capture device look a lot brighter), and have a clean isometric pixelly look that's very appealling. In summary, this game is definitely recommended to anyone still exploring the massive original DS library.

Simple 2000 Series Ultimate Vol. 17 Taisen! Bakudan Poi Poi (PS2)

Some of you might remember the two Poy Poy/Poitter's Poit games on the original Playstation, which had a (very) small cult following in the west at the time. If not, then they were a pair of multiplayer action games, where a bunch of characters in a small field tried to be the last one standing in a game of chucking objects at each other. They had a very distinct visual style, with brightly coloured, very low poly graphics even by the standards of the time. Taisen! Bakuden Poi Poi is at the very least, a spiritual successor to those games. It might be an actual sequel, though because the titles are only similar, not the same, and the fact that I can't find any companies involved in those games and this one.

As well as the Poy Poy games, it's also a kind of modern reimagining of the 1987 arcade game Butasan. While Poy Poy had players throwing rocks and logs and so on to damage each other, Bakudan Poi Poi is all about running around throwing time bombs at each other, just like Butasan. Though Butasan was about cartoonish anthropomorphised pigs in muddy fields, while this game is about realistic humans in a modern day (or at least, early 2000s) Japanese setting. The reaslistic setting actually makes the game feel a lot sillier, as you have schoolgirls, policemen, soldiers, and so on, running around parking lots and suburban wastelands holding big round bombs above their heads and chucking them at each other.

There aren't just normal bombs, either: there's also a rugby ball-shaped bomb that bounces around wildly after being thrown, a landmine, and a UFO-looking bomb that creates a slow movement field when it explodes. There's also a few power-ups. Normal ones, like health refills and invincibility, and stranger ones, like a potion that makes you fall asleep, and an orb that turns you into a bomb, allowing you to lie in wait until another player picks you up before exploding.

Single player mode has you going through a short series of missions as each character. The missions are mostly just to kill a certain quota of opponents before time runs out or you get killed yourself. So it could be "kill 10 policemen", or "kill 30 of any opponent", for example. The final stage for each character is a boss fight against an opponent who has three hit points like you, and can even pick up the healing items like you can.

It's a pretty fun game, all told. It gets repetitive pretty quickly, but the all-round zaniness and the chaos of the constant explosions alleviates that a fair bit. Pretty much perfect for a Simple 2000 game, and it doesn't have any of the pointless grinding that drags down so many of its stablemates, either. If you stumble across a copy at any time, and assuming it still carries an appropriately low price tag, it's definitely worth a try.