Other Stuff Monthly #13!

As soon as I saw the sun-baked Carlos Ezquerra cover art for El Mestizo, and its yellowed brick-effect logo, I was drawn into it. When I heard the premise, of a mixed-race mercenary fighting in the American Civil War, my interest was peaked even more. Of course, I wasn't let down when I did eventually get ahold of it, as it's a great action story, with no slow moments or filler.

I did have some questions, though, and they're probably the same questions you're thinking about after reading the premise. Mainly: why would a mixed-race former slave act as a mercenary in the Civil War, instead of just fighting against the Confederacy? Well, the story does offer a few answers to this, and I guess they're good enough to allow the reader to get into the action. Basically, it was a pretty anarchic war, and there were some companies in the Union army who were essentially uniformed raiders, pillaging small towns and killing everyone in sight, including the slaves they were meant to be freeing. So El Mestizo is portrayed as a man who'll fight on the side of whoever pays him, but also against anyone who he sees to be harming the innocent, no matter which side's uniform either of the above is wearing. I think another thing that should be taken into account is that most young boys in 1970s Britain probably didn't know or care much about the American Civil War, and it was, to them, just a change of scenery from all the World War II war comics that were popular at the time.

The book's only about sixty-four pages long, but in the old British comics tradition, chapters were only a few pages long each anyway, so not only is the storytelling very dense and full of action, but there manages to be a few complete story arcs in that small space! Mestizo avenges murdered slaves, saves North America from the bubonic plague, and manages to see the end of the Civil War, all in the page space of two or three US-style comic issues! The book even ends on a hook for a sequel that (as far as I know) never came about, set in Mexico.

Obviously, I recommend that anyone interested in comics that cover subject matter outside of the usual stuff gives El Mestizo a read. Like I've already said, it's tightly written, full of action, and the art is esecially excellent, exactly the kind of stuff Carlos Ezquerra seems to have been born to draw.

Coron Land (SNES)

For a brief period in the early nineties, there was a craze of Bomberman wannabes, obviously fuelled by that series' massive popularity, that even managed to sell big expensive multitaps to people in decent numbers, too. I hesitate to call them clones, as while they were all top-down single screen action games with idiosyncratic attack methods and four player versus modes, they mostly each had their own unique gimmicks. (Though there were one or two that were literally just Bomberman knockoffs, like the ninja-themed SNES game Otoboke Ninja Colosseum).

Coron Land's gimmick is kind of snowball-themed. In story mode, you defeat enemies by shooting them a few times, turning them into pink orbs. You can then pick up these orbs and throw them at other enemies, or before doing that, you can make them bigger and more powerful by rolling them along the ground like snowballs. In the multiplayer mode, shooting just stuns your opponents, and the orbs randomly fall from the sky, but they can still be rolled and thrown and so on. It's a fun little thing, and even rolling an orb a short distance is worth doing, just for the little bit of extra damage it does, so rolling doesn't really slow the game down too much.

It probably goes without saying for a game of this type, but the multiplayer mode, even when played alone against CPU opponents, is a lot better than the singleplayer story mode. In this case it's especially so, though, since the story mode has a ludicrously steep difficulty curve, with some very hard enemy types showing up after only a few stages: enemies that can send orbs back at you, enemies that can stun, then pick up and throw you like you do to the orbs, and so on. Multiplayer is fine, I guess. A nice touch is that every player gets to be a differrent character, not just palette swaps of the same one, a feature I don't think the Bomberman series offered until about three or four games in, if I remember rightly. There's also a selection of stages, each offering a slight variation: trains that speed across the stage, running players over, a stage with bouncy walls, a stage with no walls at all, with instant death for players who fall off, and so on.

Coron Land is a decent enough game, I guess. It's not really worth playing unless you have thee friends willing to play it with you, though, and even then, it'd probably be easier to get ahold of a copy of one of the Super Bomberman series. Though having said that, this is a much faster game than Bomberman, so it does have that in its favour.

Wolfchild (Mega CD)

Wolfchild is that precious, rare kind of Mega CD game: it came from a western developer, but it isn't a terrible FMV game or boring edutainment title. Though to be fair, it is from Core Design, who had a reputation in UK magazines, at least, for making great Mega CD titles, after seemingly every publication in the UK lost their minds over their sprite scaling shooter Thunderhawk. It does one bit of FMV though: a charmingly ugly animated intro.

Oher than the intro though, Wolfchild is a pretty typical early 90s platformer, albeit one with something of a psuedo-gritty "dark superhero" setting, that you might see in some of the comics and tabletop RPGs of the time. You play as some guy who's used science to turn himself into a psuedo-werewolf, to go and defeat the evil Chimera group and rescue his scientist dad. Oddly, Wolfchild apparently takes its cues for werewolf abilities from Altered Beast of all places, as the main advantage of wolf form is that you shoot fireballs from your fists.

How transformation works is linked to your health bar: above a certain level, you're a wolfman, below that level, you're just a manman. There's some kind of subtle levelling up ystem in place whereby your maximum health increases as you make your way through the game. I'm not sure whether this is related to scoring points or collecting items, though, as the game does nothing to draw your attention to it happening (I didn't notice it until I'd already played the game a few times). Other than that, this is a pretty standard decent-quality platform game.

There's a few little problems the game has, like how even in wolf form, and after collecting some power-ups, you still don't feel particularly powerful, and the power-ups themselves have a problem that you see in a fair few western platformers of the time, whereby they all just look kind of like tiny indistinct polished orbs (everything else looks great, though. Especially thr backgrounds). There's also one stage of the game that has a few instances of what some call "Rick Dangerous nonsense", where hazards just suddenly pop out of the scenery without warning, meaning the first time you go through an area, you have no way of knowing they're there, and you just have to remember them next time. There's not enough of it to ruin the game, but it is still annoying.

Wolfchild isn't some great classic, but it's not bad, either. I receommend at least giving it a look, definitely.

Gekitotsu Yonku Battle (NES)

For years, I ignored this title, because the title made me think it was just some generic racing game, unworthy of note. Then, one day, I remembered that I actually quite like racing games, especially old ones that aren't burdened with the tedious albatross of realism. The most ridiculous part of all this is that while Gekitotsu Yonku Battle is a game about cars, it turns out that it's not about racing them at all, and the word "battle" is to be taken more literally than I'd expected.

What this game actually is is a kind of high-speed survival dodgems game. The goal of each stage is to survive until the Teki counter drops from fifty to zero. It goes down by one every time you destroy an enemy car, by ramming them into the walls (or just ramming them enough that they explode on contact). There are also numbered flags that appear around the arena. The flags start out with a number one on them, and over time this gradually increases up to four, until finally the flag turns into an crown, with a value of five. Of course, the Teki counter goes down by the value of the flag/crown on collection. Enemy cars can pick up the flags too, though (and the start aggressively pursuing it in later stages), so you have a little bit of a gambler's choice there: get the less valuable flag now, or wait for it to grow, running the risk of getting nothing at all. (It's worth noting also that flags are worth double their points value in cars, and the crown double that again.)

There's also other items in the stages, which are there from the start and don't respawn, like invincibility stars, and fuel tanks to refill your health. That's really all there is to Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, and that's really all there needs to be! It's a very simple, very fun game, and the only real criticism I can give it is that there's not enough of it: Each stage will take you less than two minutes to get through, and there's only eight of them.

Still, I highly recommend giving this game a shot,whether through emulation, of if you ever encounter a cheap physical copy on your travels.

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.

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.

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!

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.