Other Stuff Monthly #12!

Wow, it's the twelfth installment of Lunatic Obscurity's least-popular feature, Other Stuff Monthly! So why not talk about the item that inspired it, a 1980s Dragonball tabletop game, which I think is called Goku's West City Uproar? See, I bought this game on a whim after seeing it listed for one solitary Yen on Yahho Auctions Japan, and it being a piece of merch of the world's most popular cartoon that I'd never seen before, thought it mght make an interesting subject to review or at least post about somewhere at some point.

Having not yet had the idea for Other Stuff Monthly, I put it away and forgot about it, until recently! When my landlord found it as he was clearing out the spare room. Now, there's a reason this rare old toy was so cheap, and that's because it is in very poor condition. There's several parts missing, most of which are just cosmetic, but two are very much essential to play: the balls.

If you've ever seen the game that's known in the UK as Screwball Scramble, in which the player races against the clock, using switches to operate various gizmos on a board to get a ball bearing through an assault course as quickly as possible, Goku's West City Uproar is a game like that, except instead of a single player racing against the clock, it's two players racing against each other. I did try to rectify this omission though, by ordering a couple of ball bearings online, but unfortunately, they're just slightly too big to fit through the tunnels on the board, and just slightly too heavy to jump off of the little lifting pokey sticks high enough.

In testing the game with the replacement balls, I also found out another thing wrong with my copy of the game: some of the parts which are supposed to move up and down when a player pushes a lever don't do anything at all. So even if I got some more appropriately-sized orbs, it still wouldn't matter. I've taken some pictures (with the griny PS Vita camera, as always), but that's all I can really say on this post. Please look forward to  many more installments of this feature, whether you want them or not!

Small Games Vol. 6!

It seems like it's been a while since there's been a small games post, and I just happened upon three candidates while exploring the X68000's roster, so here we are! First up is Hard Battle, a nice little shooting game. In it, you control an X68000, flying over scenery made of circuit boards and chips, and shooting disks at various other flying microcomputers, who return fire in kind. All while a demented little chiptune plays. It's pretty good! Play it, set a high score, try to beat the high score, there's not much else to it, really. There's no bombs or power-ups, and there's no scoring system besides "get points for shooting enemies", so it's pretty much as simple as a shooting game cane be. Not bad, though.

Next up is a game that doesn't fair so well, to the extent that I think it was probably just a bit of practice for the developer, and not meant to be enjoyed as a full, finished game at all. Its name is Death Fighter, and in it, you play as a martial artist who looks a lot like Ryu from Street Fighter, but whos repetoire is limited to punches and judo throws, locked in combat against a heavily armoured gladiator/knight-type guy. Your enemy doesn't really have any AI beyond charging forward and constantly attacking, and you've got to try and get your offence in when you can. You can block by pressing down, but since the enemy never stops attacking, there isn't really any point. A curiosity, and nothing more.

Finally, the best game of this trio, Ikari Blade. It looks like a pretty typical old-fashioned single-screen shooting game, but it gradually escalates to the point where the screens is full of enemies and their bullets, with very little room to maneuver. The main problem is that the escalation is a little too gradual, and your first five minutes or so of play will have you wondering why the game starts you out with ten shields, and why it's so generous in giving you more of them. It's also a shame that the game's not so generous with weapon power-ups, as even after three or four of them, your gun still feels incredibly feeble. Like I said, though, Ikari Blade is the best game out of these three, and despite its flaws, there's just something about it that's compelling and even slightly addictive.