Other Stuff Monthly #11!

Because the last post was a few days late due to technical problems, it's already that time of the month where I look at a non-videogame item of interest. Not only that, but the next post will be the annual April fools non-obscure videogame! But anyway, what's this month's item? It is at least slightly videogame related, since it's a miniature replication of a classic electromechanical arcade game from Namco!

Namely, it's a replica of Wani Wani Panic, which is also known as Gator Panic or Wacky Gator. I'm sure most of you who are old enough to remember the 1990s would have probably seen it in arcades back then. It's a whack-a-mole style game, where crocodiles come back and forth, in and out of some tunnels, and you bop as many as you can with a hammer within the time limit. The replica is a fancy papercraft kit with some plastic battery-powered innards, and unfortunately, it's not a product you can just easily buy: it was a free gift with an issue of youchien (or, kindergarten), a magazine for young children. As such, it actually came with two skins: the classic one which I used, and another one themed around the latest Doraemon movie, Eiga Doraemon: Nobita no Shin Kyouryuu (Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's New Dinosaur).

It might be a little hard to tell from my grainy PS Vita photography, but the built kit looks great. It's bright and colourful, and does a surprisingly good job of looking like the original machine, despite being made of card instead of metal and plastic. I'm very pleased with it, and I hope that it's sturdy enough to last for many years. It's not perfect, though. A big flaw is one that I won't have to deal with again: it was really hard to put together. It's not a problem I had with the very simple Panelki kit I posted about previously, but this was a much more complex kit, and there were a lot of times when I had difficulty getting tabs through slots. The problem is that you need to be quite firm, but it's scary being too firm, in case you just smash your thumb right through a panel and ruin the whole thing. I should mention that I had no trouble following the instructions, though. You put the numbered tab into its matching slot, and that's pretty much it.

The other big problem I have with the kit is that there's no randomness in how the crocodiles come out. There's a very short pattern that repeats over and over until time is up, and it makes this more of a fancy novelty ornament than a real home version of the arcade game. I know I'm being a little nitpicky with a kids magazine gift, and like I said, it is a really great-looking toy, but it's still a disappointment. Overall, though, I have to say I'm pleased with this, simply because it does look great, and someday I hope I'll be in a situation where I have lots of shelf space for it to look nice on, and I'll just keep hoping that someday I'll encounter a real one of the machines somewhere to play it again.

Finally, I have two last things to say. The first is that in the magazine itself, they're advertising that the next issue will come with another kit, for a papercraft payphone with sound-making keypad. I wonder if they do a kit every month, and if I should try to keep an eye on this magazine in case there's ever another interesting one? The other thing I have to say is that special thanks for this post goes to selectbutton forums user Dylan, for buying the magazine on my behalf and sending it to me.

Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu - Otoko Ippiki Yume Kaidoi (Playstation)

I've been aware of this series for a long time, but the large amount of menus, all in Japanese had put me off. But recently, I just decided to dive in, and it turns out that the menus are pretty simple to navigate once you're playing the game. Anyway, in case you're won dering, this is the first in a series of nconventional racing games, themed around the subculture of Japanese truck drivers who adorn their vehicles with murals and flashing lights and various other garish accoutrements. Dekotora means "Decorated Truck", you see.

It's not just the theming that's unconventional, as Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu plays unlike any other racing game I've ever played. For a start, you never have to worry about taking corners, as your truck will just automatically follow the line of the road as you hold the accelerator down. Instead the races (which are all one-on-one) are more of a strategic battle of wits between you and your opponent. Basically, your opponent will always start with a pretty big lead, and it'll take a while to catch up with them, and when you do, you'll be going at about the same speed, making overtaking difficult. The twist is that you get a speed boost from being directly and closely behind your opponent, and you've got to use this to build up speed and nip in front of them when you have the chance.

Now, you might be wondering about the "no taking corners" thing. Instead of worrying about slowing down when the road bends, you're instead expected to use left and right on the D-pad to change lanes when the need arises, either in trying to out-maneuver your opponent or navigate around the normal car-driving road users (who, on later stages, always seem to be in the way as soon as you would otherwise be able to take the lead. infuriating!). You even have to double-tap them, as the first press just turns on your indicator! As well as acceleration and steering, you also have buttons for honking your horn and shouting abuse.

Also unlike most racing games, the money you win from races can't be spent on more powerful engines, or more grippy tires. Instead, you start the game with a bland, grey truck, and your winnings are spent on your choice of a vast array of bright, gaudy junk to put on it. There's strips of flashing lights, massive murals of demons or monsters or princesses, and more. The only bad thing I really have to say about this stuff is that right from the first races, your opponents all already have fully-decorated trucks, and the miserly amount of points you get for each win means that you'll be playing for eons before your ride is looking as ostentatious as you want it to. It would be remiss, too, to talk about this game without mentioning its atmosphere: there's tons of it. It's definitely in that genre of fiction regarding working class people in showa era Japan, and if you've seen movies or TV shows from those days, you'll definitely get the same feel from this as you did from those.

Anyway, the first Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu game is one I've enjoyed playing so far, and I look forward to looking into some of its spin-offs and sequels at some point, too. it even has entries on the Game Boy and Wonderswan! I recommend giving it a try yourself, and I even have a small menu-navigation tip for the Japanese-illiterate: to load your save, you have to pick the box on the right on the main menu. Also, there's a couple of modes I haven't bothered with, like the drawing mode (because only those with the patience of the saint and some proper pixel art talent are going to get anything decent out of it), and time attack mode (because it's just the racing, without the game's main gimmick).

Dragon Egg! (PC Engine)

Dragon Egg! is one of that strange category of games from around the late eighties and early nineties that totally would have fit in among the arcade games of the time, but it was only ever a console game. Well, maybe 1991 was a little too late to be releasing a very eighties-feeling platformer, but only a little. But two or three years earlier, it would have fit into the arcade scene perfectly, anyway.

It borrows heavily from two popular arcade games of that era, after all: Wonderboy in Monsterland, and Altered Beast. From Wonderboy, it takes the item shops as well as the generally overall feel of things, and from Altered Beast it takes the concept of collecting orbs to gradually take on new forms. You play as a little girl who starts the game carrying a dragon egg around in her backpack, which she uses to bludgeon enemies (which seems very irresponsible). Upon death, enemies will drop either a coin or an orb. Obviously, the coins are for spending in the shops littered about the stages, on power ups and health potions.

The orbs, though, like in Altered Beast, gradually cause the dragon to hatch, and then grow. Growing the dragon doesn't just give extra range to your weapon, but it also affects your movement and the size of your sprite (and presumably, your hit box, though I'm not 100% on that one). By the time your dragon's at full size, you'll be doing massive jumps that cover a lot of height and distance. It makes it a little more difficult to accurately land on small moving platforms, but overall it's a net benefit as it allows you to reach places you smaller forms couldn't and sometimes even skip parts of stages. Oddly, you have to icrease the power of your attacks by buying power-ups from the shop, which seems odd. Also, if you lose a life, it's all the way back down to egg form, which can lead to some Gradius-style slippery slopes, especially if it happens while fighting a boss.

It's the difficulty in general that's the game's main flaw, in fact. It's not as simple as just being too hard, though: the first half of the game is incredibly easy, in fact, and you should breeze through it on your first attempt with very few issues. After there, though, the game takes a sudden and dramatic turn towards being difficult to the point that it feels unfair at times. There are enemies with attacks that come out without warning, or that are impossible to kill without also taking a hit. You could ignore them, but if you've just lost a life, you'll be desperately hoping to get some orbs. Maybe the real strategy is to learn how to get through the game using basic short range egg attack. But even if that were effective, it definitely wouldn't be any fun.

Dragon Egg! is a cute game, and it does start out fun. I won't say it's not a good game, I'll just warn anyone that fancies trying it that the latter half is brutal, and they shouldn't go into it expecting an easy time.

The Fighting Wolf AT (MSX)

For such an early entry into the belt scrolling beat em up genre, and from a relatively small company like Technopolis Soft, it's impressive how versatile the controls in The Fighting Wolf AT are. With only a D-pad and two buttons, you can walk in eight directions, punch, kick, and even duck and jump! Unfortunately, you only ever have to walk left, walk right, and punch, and in fact, doing anything else will diminish your chances of survival.

So, each stage consists of a few screen's worth of a repeating background, though it doesn't matter if you walk to the end or not, only that you defeat every enemy. Although it would be more accurate to say that rather than "beating every enemy", you're beating enemies until they eventually stop spawning. Each stage has exactly two kinds of enemy: one that spawns on the right of the screen, and one that spawns on the left of the screen. Beat one, and an identical one will take its place. Keep doing this and after a couple of minutes, you've beaten the stage.

I don't know how long the game is, but the technique that got me to stage five (the enemies do gradually become more enthusastic about trying to fight back, and you only get one life) is just to repeatedly punch one enemy until it's dead, then turn around and punch the enemy on the other side until they're dead. By then, the enemy on the first side will have respawned and walked up to you, so repeat the process. And that's pretty much the entire game. The background changes each stage, as do the sprites for the enemies, but they all play the same.

There's not much more to say about this game. It looks okay, except when the screen scrolls, and the music isn't terrible I guess. The best thing I can say about it is that the enemies in th second stage are a woman and a baby, which is kind of odd. Don't play The Fighting Wolf AT, it's rubbish.

Other Stuff Monthly #10!

Possibly the furthest these posts have gotten away from videogames and general nerd culture this month, as today's subject is a book about prefabricated housing blocks in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in eastern Europe. It's not as boring as it sounds, though, as this book is Panelki, and the back half of it is made up of a press-out-and-put-together kit to build your own little replica of one of those very blocks.

The book itself is short, but fairly interesting, with text about the history of these building systems, how they came about, and why, and how "a home for every family" was a high priority in the postwar USSR. These prefab blocks were the way to fulfill that goal, in that time of diminished resources across all of Europe. (Interesting to note that in 2020, "a home for every family" isn't anywhere in sight in capitalist America or Britain. More like "a hundred homes for every landlord"). There's also a lot of big pictures, since this is essentiall a coffee table book, comprised of both photos of the blocks and the people who lived in them, and reproductions of promotional posters and magazine covers from the time.

The kit itself is surprisingly big, and obviously, it's a simple build, since you are essentially very slowly putting a big box together. While building it, though, it's kind of educational with the repetitive routine of putting the square panels demonstrating how a gigantic concrete version of the same would be a quick and cost-effective way of building a lot of housing in a short time, compared to manufacturing millions of bricks and having them be put together into one house at a time. Most of this won't be of any interest to most people, and to be honest, it's not a subject I expect I'll be looking into any further. But sometimes, you have to look into areas of knowledge that go alightly further away from your main interests (even if it's just going down a wikipedia rabbithole), or you'll end up being a boring, ignorant person.

Polestar (PC98)

Released in 1995, it's clear that Polestar is an attempt to bring some approximation of contemporary arcade racing games like Daytona USA and Ridge Racer to the humble, and by then over a decade old PC98 hardware. (Though the fact that you're driving a red convertible with a passenger is an obvious homage to Outrun, it's those more modern games that Polestar plays more like) In doing so, it also brings to mind the legendary MZ-700 port of Space Harrier, which made incredible use of ASCII graphics to produce the illusion of high-speed sprite scaling on vastly underpowered hardware. Though the PC98 is more powerful than the MZ-700, and Polestar uses low resolution sprites rather than ASCII, the principle's still the same.

The structure is a simple as can be: you drive around a bunch of tracks, racing only against the clock, no other drivers. The biggest problem this game has is that the time limits are incredibly strict: crash or even just go off the road even once and you're not going to finish the race in time. Luckily, you can just go into time attack mode and choose which track you want to drive on if you can't make it through the two linear courses. And it's worth doing too, as it's the tracks themselves that are the real draw in Polestar.

There's eight of them, and they're all ful of cool things to see (albeit some tracks have more stuff than others). The 3D effect offered by the lo-res sprites works excellently, though it's a lot better in motion than it is in still screenshots, unfortunately. And it's used to great effect, too, as you drive past aeroplanes taking off, people on theme park rides, flocks of ravens flying out of the windows of a ruined castle, and lots more interesting things. The devs have been very successful in making a racing game set in a world that's full of life, not just barren tracks with decorative billboards next to them. Though the arcade games mentioned above have all this stuff too, they do it on powerful hardware with polygonal graphics. Personally, I'd love to see a sprite scaling arcade racer with the same kind of background features as Polestar, but with more detailed sprites. I guess the closest thing would be 1992's Outrunners, but even that falls a little towards the "decorative billboard" style of the 1980s.

Polestar is a decent enough game, and incredibly impressive consdiering the host hardware. The only real problems it has are that the time limits are way too strict, and the actual act of driving the car doesn't feel that great, either, so once you've seen all the cool stuff in every track, you aren't likely to go back to it. Contrast with games like Outrun or Super Hang On, which feel great to play, and as such, are endlessly replayable.

Lin Zexu No Smoking (NES)

The odd title Lin Zexu No Smoking (also known as Lin Ze Xu Jin Yan) can be explained away by the fact that in this game, you play as Longyin Yan, an agent of the nineteenth century Chinese official Lin Zexu, and you spend the game trying to stop the opium trade in China, by fighting against the evil British and their treacherous allies. This all takes place in a beat em up, with some very light adventure game trimmings.

Those light trimmings seem to be an attempt at telling a TV serial-style story through an eight bit videogame, which is very ambitious, though unfortunately, the game doesn't really live up to that ambition. Basically, at the start of each stage, you're given an order, like, go and investigate the British Museum. But you can't go straight there, you have to ask around to find out who might know the way, then find them and ask them for directions. This wouldn't be too bad, were it not for the invisible walls that actually stop you going anywhere until someone's told you the way to get there. And this happens for pretty much every location you need to get to on foot. A particularly egregious case is when you're looking for a secret passage in a garden. The secret passage is hidden in a well, but you can't go down it until you've spoken to the woman nearby who lies and tells you that there's no secret passages nearby.

As for the beat em up sections, they're not totally horrible. Even though there's rarely more than two enemies on screen at a time, they still manage to be challenging, and you do have a few moves at your disposal, though honestly, the only really useful one is your flying kick. Once you get to the jungle and enemies start shooting projectiles at you, the difficulty drastically shoots upwards, too. In fact, there's apparently a part later in the game where you take to the high seas and fire cannons at British ships, but after over half an hour trying to get past one particular gun-toting enemy on the beach, I had give up for the sake of my sanity.

Despite its various huge flaws, I can't bring myself to be too harsh on Lin Zexu No Smoking, as like I said, it is a very ambitious game, both for the hardware, and for the time it was released (in 1996, even on the Playstation and Saturn this kind of story-heavy action game wasn't that common). It's not a good game, but it is at least worthy of note. And one last thing: if you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend doing so on an emulator with the NES's sprite limit turned off. Otherwise the game is a flickery mess. Not to the point of unplability, but it is very ugly and dampens the experience.

The Lost Golem (Dreamcast)

Remember Pushover on the Amiga? It was a puzzle game about an ant pushing over dominos. The Lost Golem reminds me of that game, only it's top-down, rather than side-on. You play as a golem, who iis charged with looking after a king. The king, like most royals, is some kind of blinkered lemming-esque idiot who constantly walks foward until he hits an obstacle, at which point he turns ninety degrees and carries on. Unless the obstalcle is a bottomless pit, then he walks into it and falls to his doom.

So, what you have to do is go ahead of the king, pushing walls around using you immense golemic strength, to make sure that the king's walk takes him to the next door. There are, of course, some further complications. The first is that the king has to walk directly towards the door, as if he approaches it from the side, he'll go straight past it (he's a blinkered idiot, remember?). The second, for which I have no explanation, is that a certain number of the walls in the stage have to be connected by pillars when the kind goes through the door. Pillars will crumble away when there's no walls touching them, and there are two kinds of pillar (in the stages I could reach, anyway): ones that cause attached walls to rotate ninety degrees when pushed, and ones that just let their attached walls go forward one space when pushed.

So, like most puzzle games of this type, those are the elements that make up the stages, and the rules that make up the puzzles, and the game itself is just a long series of those puzzles. Also like most puzzle games of this type, I'm terrible at it. Unfortunately, the stages in the main mode have to tackled in a linear fashion, and I managed to get to the thirteenth of them, which I made many attempts at before giving up. But, as far as I can tell, this is a decent enough example of these kinds of games. There's some stages where you try every convoluted solution you can think of before it hits you that you literally only need to make one move to solve it. That seems like a good thing to me.

There's a couple of other diversions besides the main story, too! There's a simple stage editor that lets you set up a stage in a 3x3 grid, and I guess if you've got the patience for this kind of game, you probably also have the patience to make stages for it, too. I know for a short time back in the ancient past, I was playing a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, and enjoyed that game's stage editor, and it's the same principle, isn't it? Finally, there's a two player versus mode, with a king, two golems, and two doors. You move walls around to annoy your opponent and also guide the king to your door. There's no AI opponent, though, and even if you had someone around, I can't imagine wanting to play this over any of the Dreamcast's many excellent fighting games.

The Lost Golem is of a genre that's a little outside of my wheelhouse, but I think I enjoyed it enough to say that if you like puzzle games where you move stuff around and there's a specific solution to every stage, then this is a decent one of those.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match (PS4)

I thought this a few years ago, and it still seems to be true: there's surprisingly few videogames about tanks. But here's another one, based on the anime, Girls und Panzer. In case you aren't already aware, the anime is set in a world where Panzerfahren is seen as a respectable and feminine sport for young women to participate in. Panzerfahren is the waging of tank battles, in actual World War II tanks. The insides of the cockpits have been treated with a special carbon coating, so no-one actually gets hurt, despite them shooting live ammunition at each other. Totally believable, I don't know why we don't do that in real life.

The game is surprisingly structured like a home port of a fighting game: there's a story mode, where you play through the events of the movie, "domination mode", which is essentially arcade mode, having you pick one of the available school teams (each one very loosely themed around a country involved in WWII and driving that country's tanks) and play through five randomly assigned battles, and "extra mode", which has a bunch of special challenge missions. In all but extra mode, there's also ludicrous amounts of dialogue before and after each battle, which can luckily be skipped, since each conversation takes two or three times more time than the battles themselves. I started the game intending to watch them and find out about the characters, but they really are too long.

So, the important question: are the battles actually fun to play? Luckily, yes! There's various kinds of battles on offer, like straight up team battles, kill-the-captain "flag battles", one-on-one battles, and a weird kind of gauntlet thing. The gauntlet, referred to in-game by the unwieldy title "arrive at the destination", is almost the most interesting type of battle.  You play it alone, and the aim is to drive your tank to the end of a treacherous mountain path, along which are the five members of the opposing team, who'll take pot shots at you as you go. The one thing holding it back is the fact that there's only one map that you play every time this match type comes up. What a shame!

That's not to say the other battles are bad, though. The tanks are satifying to control, feeling big and slow and heavy as they trundle around the maps (I felt a similar way about the way the monsters feel in the excellent PS4 Godzilla game. Maybe there should be more games where you control big heavy things?). As well as moving, there's also satisfaction to be found in shooting. You can only do it once every few seconds, since you're driving a tank, and every shot needs to be loaded individually. There's an auto-aim option, but you really shouldn't use it, as a big part of the combat in the game is not just hitting your enemy's tank, but hitting the right part of the tank, as different parts take different amounts of damage, and you can temporarily immobilise foes by shooting their treads. Like movement, the combat is slow, heavy, and satisfying.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match is a game I definitely recommend. It's fun to play, and there's a lot of it (other than the lack of maps for the gauntlet missions), and through the use of the anime license, it manages to be a game about vintage military hardware that doesn't have a boring, ugly macho aesthetic. The license also gives it an excuse for its fighting game-style structure, as opposed to being about larger scale, more realistic battles, which might have ended up been longer and a little more tedious. It never got released in the west, but an English version did get released in South East Asia, so track that one down if you're interested.

Curiosities Vol. 17 - Blaze

So, back in the ancient mists of time, there was a preview in issue #115 (June 1991) of CVG of an Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog that never came into being. The reasons why such a game might have been cancelled are obvious: as soon as it was released in the UK, the first Sonic game, and Sonic in general launched a kind of SEGA-mania that would last for almost half a decade, and the Amiga was, in mid-1991, the only major 16-bit competition to the Mega Drive in the UK that didn't have to be imported. Sonic appearing on the Amiga might have hampered sales of the Mega Drive, which was in the UK, almost monolithic in a way that the NES/Famicom was in the US and Japan in the 1980s.

Some might have said that the Amiga just couldn't do everything that the Mega Drive did, and a substandard port might also damage the brand. Blaze, a fanmade demo for an Amiga Sonic-alike could be used as evidence for and against this theory. On the surface, it does do a lot of the fancy tricks seen in Mega Drive Sonic: high-speed scrolling, loop-the-loops, water-surface reflections, and so on. However, it came out in 1993, not 1991. And, to the best of my knowledge, no commercially released Amiga platformers attempted any of this stuff, despite how poentially lucrative it might have been.

It does as decent a job as you might expect of emulating the feel of a genuine Sonic game, too. Not only does it have loops, but one particular highlight is a massive series of five linked loops in quick succession. There's also robot crabs and hornets, and gems to collect in lieu of rings. Blaze even curls into a ball to attck when he jumps! Interestingly, though, if you press down while running, he doesn't curl into a ball, but goes into a Splatterhouse-esque sliding kick.

The physics do occasionally feel a little off, particularly with regards to running up and jumping off of quarter pipes. This can be forgiven, though, by that fact that this was made in an age before widespread internet access, and long before there was the meticulous observation and analysis of Sonic phyisics that there is today. In fact, it's obviously impossible to be totally one hundred percent certain about this, but I think Blaze might be the first ever Sonic fangame!

So, that's Blaze. An interesting thing in many ways. It's a shame it never got fleshed out into a full game. It would obviously have been too late to have saved the Amiga from its inevitable doom, but it would at least have freed Amiga fans from decades of pretending Zool was as good as any platform game that originated on consoles.

Other Stuff Monthly #9!

So, a few years ago, I was reading my way through the 1980s, as depicted in Uncanny X-Men, and an ad that kept cropping up was one for a board game entitled Web of Gold. It caught my eye, so I went to ebay to see if I could get a copy for myself. Amazingly, depsite the game being decades old, I managed to get a complete copy in immaculate condition for less than five pounds! Even better, it actually turned out to be a pretty good game, which is against the odds for a kids game from the 1980s.

The game concerns a group of explorers venturing into a large cave in search of gold. The cave is unfortunately inhabited by giant spiders. Players each control one explorer and one spider. As explorers, they journey around the board, hoping to find gold nuggets and other items (that aid in finding gold nuggets). As spiders, they try to entrap and kill the other players' explorers in webs. Winning comes through either being the first explorer to fetch six nuggets back to their homebase, or the last explorer still alive. It's a fun game, full of backstabbing, and just enough of a luck element to make snatching victory from the jaws of defeat an exciting event.

Where Web of Gold really shines though, is in its board and components. Everything is meticulously and precisely designed to fit together. The rock pillars on the board have little notches to fit the web tokens between, the explorers have slots on their underside to put them on the webs whn they get caught, and there are little places around the edges of the board to store cards, the die, and so on. Furthermore, each player has a little card to keep track of the fuel in their lantern and the number of spider bites they've suffered. These cards have little sliding counters attached to them and again, they're excellenty designed. Finally, the item cards, depicting things like torches, mushrooms, ropes, and so on, have really great, colourful art printed on them. It's just a great-looking game, with parts that are satisfying to use that add to the overall quality of the game as a whole.

Web of Gold is a great game, and, assuming prices are still as low as they were a few years ago, and also assuming you have at least two other people with whom to play it, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of your own.

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.