Monster Bass (Playstation)

Do you remember those Hot Wheels sets that were clearly designed as a lame attempt to get nerdier kids to buy toy cars? Like, they'd have aliens or dinosaurs or post-apocalyptic landscapes besides the track? Well, Monster Bass (also known as Killer Bass) is a fishing game that puts in a lame attempt at appealing to the under-75s by having genetically-engineered zombie fish and bait that includes lives spiders and mice and so on.

Unfortunately, though, the fish just look like regular fish in-game, the horror theme doesn't actually affect gameplay at all, and after a couple of hours of play, the game had long since started repeating stage locations, but still hadn't let me use any bait besides the spider. That doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad, though, it could still be a fun and accessible fishing game, even if th horror theme's a bust! Unfortunately, while it is accessible, it's not fun. And it's really only accessible in the sense that playing it is so incredibly simple that pretty much anyone could do it, and most of the actual challenge appears to be down to luck rather than skill.

Anyway, the game is structured kind of like a racing game, in more ways than one. Each stage, you're given a quota, like "catch 3 fish", "catch a total of 25lbs of fish", or "catch a fish weighing at least 3lb", and you have to fill that quota as quickly as possible. Like a racing game, whoever finishes first gets the most points, and everyone who finishes below a certain ranking is elminated. This is fine, I've got no problem with this really, except for the weight quota stages, it seems totally random as to how big the fish you catch are, so you can finish them in under a minute, or you can be stuck catching fish after fish, hoping the next one is big enough.

The real problem with Monster Bass is the fishing itself. You cast your bait, and it always travels about 41.7 feet away, no matter what, then you slowly rell it back in towards you, maybe jiggling it about a little, hoping a fish bites. When the fish bites, you just hold the X button down until it's eventually reeled in. You can jiggle the d-pad a bit to increase the line tension, which might make it reel in faster, but I'm not actually certain on that. Then once the fish is brought in, you've either met the stage quota, ending the stage, or you haven't and you go back to toiling at the old fish mines. The fishing mini-game in Breath of Fire III is more complex, more exciting, and more rewarding than this entire retail release that came out almost half a decade later!

Of course, I don't recommend you get hooked on the lame bait that Monster Bass is dangling in front of you. For fishing fans, it's presumably too simple and the theme is probably too silly, and for non-fishing fans, it does nothing to dissuade the notion of fishing being a boring, stupid waste of time.

Magical Tree (MSX)

The great thing about writing about obscure stuff is that sometimes, you find something great, and can then go on to show it off to everyone, so they can enjoy it, too. This is one of those times. Magical Tree is an MSX platform game about climbing a tree. I first tried it out, because I saw the boxart, and thought it might be a clone of Noboranka, the arcade shooting game about climbing a tree. I was wrong, but luckily, it turned out to be better than that anyway.

I'm sure I've mentioned before the concept of "pure" game design. Don't confuse purity with quality, it's just a stylistic assessment. What I mean by it is a concept that was more common in the eighties and early nineties than it is now: videogames in which each element, be it an enemy, an item, a part of the stage ,or something else, serves a specific in-game purpose and is easily identifiable from the other elements around it. Obviously, this kind of thing is much easier to do in simple, old-fashioned, arcade-style games like this one, but it's something you can also see in Minecraft, which is probably one of the most complex videogames of all time. I'm bringing it up here, because Magical Tree is a game that has this purity, and it does it well.

It is a very simple game: you go up the tree, avoiding enemies and collecting points items. At certain score thresholds, you get extra lives, so there's an incentive for playing for score, if that's not enough of a motivating factor for on its own. But like I describe above, you can easily learn how each enemy type acts, how certain objects interact with certain stage elements, and so on, to figure out every way possible of maximising your score, and of surviving to climb a little higher up the tree. Luckily, along with all of that, it is actually fun to play the game and do all this stuff.

One little stylistic thing that I think adds a lot to the game, and how addictive it is, is the constant on-screen tracker of how far up the tree you currently are. It's a constant reminder of your progress, and an easily-remembered benchmark to compare against earlier runs. It's probably copied from the "how high can you get?" screens, but they only appeared between stages, in twenty-five metre increments, while this counter is constant, and counts every metre you climb. It's just satisfying, you know?

Obviously, I recommend that you play Magical Tree. It's fun and cute and addictive. It seems that I keep finding more and more MSX games to love as time goes on, and while other Japanese microcomputers might have excellent graphics or music, it's the MSX's games that keep me coming back most often.