Werdragon (PC88)

So, I have to start this review with a confession: I've only been able to play the first stage of this game. Not because it was too hard for me to get past (though it did actually take me a few attempts), but because as soon as the second stage started, the graphics were suddenly all glitched out, to the point of being unplayable. It's a shame, as Werdragon was turning out to be an okay game. Not a great one, or even a good one, but an okay one, at least.

Set in a world familiar from a thousand 1980s OAVs, that of a post-apocayptic cyberpunk city, where there's also demons and stuff along with the gangs and cyborgs, Werdragon is an auto-scrolling single-plane beat em up where you play as the eponymous, mis-spelled weredragon. Who is also a cyborg or something put together by a ghost professor? I'm just guessing by what I saw in the cutscenes. Anyway, you go from left to right, killing lots of enemies along the way with your sword, until you eventually get to the boss. You know how these things go.

There's a few twists in there, though! Like the flying drone enemies with the flat tops, who aren't just enemies: sometimes killing them refills a few points of your hit points, and you can stand on top of their flat heads, which is actually essential to avoid getting crushed to death between the left side of the screen and a wall at certain points. You move, jump, and crouch using the d-pad, and you have a button each for attacking left and right. Pressing down and both buttons together also fetches up your weapon select menu, from whence you can pick swords, guns, and magic. The magic is limited-use, and the gun you start off with is too slow and weak for most uses (it does come in handy during the first boss fight though, just because you'll eventually run out of magic, and your sword is almost impossible to harm him with).

Though the game moves very quickly, it also scrolls very jerkily, in chunks of a few pixels at a time. That's pretty common for action games on old Japanese microcomputers, though, so it'd be unfair to judge the game on that, and to be honest, it doesn't work to the game's detriment too much anyway. But, since I could only play the first stage of Werdragon there's not much else I have to say about it. Unless there was a big change later in the game, I can't say that we're all missing out on some big lost classic here, but like I said: it's not bad, either. It's just okay.

Racing Aces (Mega CD)

There were a few games on the Mega CD that used a combination of a few very low poly models and FMV backgrounds to try and trick players into thinking they were 3D, the most well-known probably being Silpheed. Racing Aces bucks that trend by actually being a  game with full 3D stages! As you might have figured out from the title, it's a racing game about flying old timey aeroplanes around racetracks.

Unfortunately, it's a concept that doesn't really work very well, at least it doesn't here. It's just so fiddly, and it also feels so slow, even when you collect the turbo boost power ups. I'm sure it's not a frame rate issue, as though the frame rate does chug a bit, the Mega Drive version of Virtua Racing manages to be a fast and fun racing game under similar conditions. Maybe it's the fact that it's a game about racing planes? There's no accelerator, of course, and you have to keep dipping down to maintain speed, then pulling back up to avoid the ground.

The unfortunate fact is that the whole time I was playing this game, I was thinking of all the ways it could have been better. It would have been better if they'd made it a ground-based racing game, or a Pilotwings-style flying stunt game, or maybe even pushed the boat out and pre-empted the PS2's Sky Odyssey by about a decade and made it a relaxing biplane exploration game. It's a shame, because it really is impressive what they've managed to achieve with this game, and it's just no fun to play at all. It's barely even worth mentioning the incredibly dated stereotypical Japanese characters, because it's not like they're spoiling an otherwise decent game through their presence.

Anyway, more about how the game actually plays. You pick a character from the massive roster (though as far as I can tell, they don't actually play differently to each other), then you'll compete in a series of races against eight of the other characters, with the usual rules that you get championship points for finishing races in high positions. There's an extra caveat in that you can also shoot down your fellow racers, and each kill is worth one championship point too (downed pilots respawn after a couple of seconds). That's actually a good design decision, that I wish was more common in racing games that also have a combat element. I'm sure you remember when I criticised S.C.A.R.S for having a completely pointless scoring system tied to destroying your opponents. There's lots of tracks, and as you go along, you can buy better planes and upgrade them, and so on, but otherwise, that's pretty much it.

Racing Aces is a game that's ambitious and impressive, and unfortunately absolutely no fun to play at all. I don't recommend it as anything other than a technological curiosity. And on the subject of curiosity, I decided to look up the developers, Hammond & Leyland. Not only was this their only game (as far as I could tell), but most of the results weren't even for this company, but for news stories concerning a pair of cricket players active in the 1930s!