Curosities Vol. 18! - Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen (Master System)

Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen is an educational game that was commisionned by a Japanese insurance company, and was never actually on sale. They made a couple of hundred copies, and would lend the game, along with a Master System, to primary schools that requested it. It's also something that was pretty much completely forgotten and considered lost to the ages until very recently, when the great people at SMS Power got ahold of a copy, and not only dumped the ROM, but also simultaneously released a translation patch so more people could enjoy it! There's lots more information over there regarding the game's origins, so you should definitely go and have a look.

But I'm here to talk about the game itself! It's actually a collection of three games on one cartridge: Driving Sense Test, You're the Best Driver, and Pyonkichi's Adventure. Driving Sense Test is itself a collection of four minigames, designed to test the player's reactions and observational skills. You'll have to identify objects that fly past a window at high speed, catch animals of varying speeds by lowering your net at just the right time, follow a motorbike while weaving through traffic, and finally, walk behind a parrot, who'll warn you when to duck, jump, or speed up, o avoid obstacles. It's ok, I guess. The last of the minigames is the best, and the most videogamey in feel. At the end of all four, you get given scores in the areas each one was meant to be measuring: Driving Eye, Speed Sense, Driving Technique, and Risk Control.

Next up is the most substantial of the three games, You're the Best Driver. In this one, you drive either a car or a motorbike (though I couldn't tell any non-cosmetic difference between the two), and drive around the streets, very carefully obeying the rules of the road. Sticking to the speed limit, stopping at lights, and so on. Though I kept getting minor violations every time I turned a corner, and couldn't figure out why. Does Japan have a seperate speed limit for cornering maybe? You start the game with a hundred points, and lose some for every violation. Speeding loses seven points, hitting another car twenty-nine, and so on. Hitting a pedestrian loses all hundred points in one go! This is a decent enough educational game, I can definitely see a bunch of primary school kids in the eighties all clamouring to be the first to get to play it, like Granny's Garden in the UK during the same era, or the generic maths and French games that were on the computers at my school in the nineties.

Last, and also least, is Pyonkitchi's Adventure. By far the weakest of the three games here, it sees Pyonkitchi the Rabbit off on a walk to visit Pyonko the Rabbit. Along the way, he makes various decisions, like whether or not to look oth ways before crossing, or wait until the man turns green, and so on. Afterward, you decide whether he made the right decision or not, and the game tells you whether you were right or wrong. It's probably more educationally relvant to little kids than the other two games, but it's also by far the most boring. Very little interactivity, and it feels more than a little bit preachy and finger-wagging.

In summary, this is an interesting piece of history that's finally available for all to see, and it's actually not a bad set of games either, considering their origin. I do wonder why the insurance company chose the Master System for its host console rather than the ubiquitous-in-Japan Famicom, though. Maybe they liked the SMS' colour palette? Maybe it was cheaper? Maybe an exec was friends with one of SEGA's execs? We'll probably never know.

Streets of Rage II (Game Gear)

So, for this year's April fools non-obscure game, I've gone with a game that's really only a port of a well-known game. Obviously, everyone knows the original Mega Drive version of Streets of Rage 2, it's one of the most beloved classics of the entire 16-bit era. But I saw some screenshots of the Game Gear port, and the cute little sprites made me want to give it a go. I did, and it turns out that though it is missing a few elements of the MD version, it's got enough of its own stuff to be considered its own game, rather than a poor man's cut down port.

For a start, it controls differently to the original, which is to be expected, as the Game Gear has one fewer button than a standard Mega Drive controller, but you'll be surprised to learn that they actually added a few things in this department! The attacks that were mapped to the A button are now performed by pressing up-down-one, and they don't reduce your health when they hit. The A+forward attacks are now 1+2+forward, and you now have a limited-use super attack, performed by holding down button 1 for a few seconds and releasing. This is functonally the same as summoning the police artillery in the first game, but now it's a screen-filling special move your character performs, which is a bit less awkward, thematically.

The stages are different, too. There's no baseball field or bridge stages, for example, and the theme park is split into two stages: the pirate ship full of ninjas comes first, and then there's a partially-new stage that combines elements of the alien hive area and the missing bridge stage. This stage even has an all-new exclusive boss! Even better, that boss takes on the SEGA tradition of ripping off characters from pop-culture, as it's blatantly just a Predator, complete with stealth camoflage and triangular aiming reticle.

Now, for the omissions. A minor one is that you now only have one kind of jumping attack for each character instead of three. There's also only three playble characters instead of four, and while Axel and Blaze were obviously not going to be cut, for some reason they got rid of Max instead of Skates. Skates is the worst! There's only two weapon types, though cleverly, one of them is depicted as just a straight line of white pixels, which you can easily interpret as a baseball bat, lead pipe or katana, depending on the situation. There's fewer enemy types, of course, and as already mentioned, some stages have been omitted or merged together. I've also already mentioned how much I love the graphics, but I'll also say that they've done a great job of bringing over the original's legendary soundtrack, too, and this version sounds as good as any 8-bit non-CD console game probably ever could.

Game Gear Streets of Rage 2, then. It's definitely worth playing, even if (or especially if) you've played the Mega Drive version to death. On last thing that might entice you into giving it a go: one of the biggest criticism of the Mga Drive version is that it's too easy. Even with the addition of the supermoves, and the Game Gear's inability to handle crowds of enemies as large as the Mega Drive can, this version is a lot harder, without feeling like it's unfair or unbalanced.