Maniac Racers Advance (Game Boy Advance)

Also known as Motorcross Manaics Advance, this is the second sequel to that orginial Game Boy pirate cart classic, Motorcross Maniacs. (The first sequel was on Game Boy Color, and I might also feature it here someday. Shame they didn't carry the sries onto Nintendo's later handhelds, isn't it?) In case you never played that game, it was a slightly platformy racing game, where you were a little motorbike guy doing laps around crazy tracks full of ramps and loops and such,  all with a strict time limit, and an opponent racer who was so inept that they might as well have not shown up. Maniac Racers Advance is very much a sequel to that game, buidling on its ideas while still having a similar feel.

The main thing you had to worry about in the original was nitro management, and that's the same here. Using them at the right time means getting round the track faster, being able to collect more of them, and being able to take optimal routes, as each course has a few different routes to take, kind of like the stages in the 2D Sonic games, only here the only method of jumping you have is nitro boosting off of ramps. You can also hold left or right to rotate in the air, the main pruose of which is making sure your wheels meet the ground at the correct angle when you land, but you can also show off by doing lots of flips during particularly long jumps, if you are so inclined.

Obviously, the biggest change compared to the original is the graphics: Motorcross Manics was released very early in the Game Boy's life, and like most games of that time, it had very minimalist, functional graphics. By contrast, Maniac Racers Advance looks amazing! The stages take place in a variety of locations, there's a bunch of character to pick from, who all have appealling cartoony designs, and everything's big and colourful. The characters are of course another big change, though they all feel identical to play despite having different stats. You now race against three opponents instead of just one, and once you get past the novice courses, you really do have to do your best to come in first!

Even with that in mind though, it probably won't take more than about an hour to finish the game and unlock everything. That's fine, to be honest, I'm a big proponent of shorter games, but in this case it does feel like something's missing. Maybe it's the fact that most of the tracks are repeated a fair few times over the course of the championship mode? I can't quite put my finger on it, but once I finished the game, I was left asking "is that it?". There are a couple of bonus modes, like one that has you running over zombies, and another where you're wheelying over frozen penguins in a lab to collect stars, but they don't have a lot to offer, either.

I think I can recommend this to anyone with fond memories of the original, though. It might only be an hour long, but it is a good hour, and the feel of the boosts and the midair rotation is  as good as it ever was. It just looks a lot nicer here than it did before.

Small Games Vol. 7!

This was originally going to just be a post about one PC88 game, a Buddhism-themed action RPG called Gandhara. It's definitely not a small game, as it takes place over a bunch of massive stages, and I only gave up on it, as after a few hours going around stage one, and even finding the entrance to stage two, it was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere. Also, playing it got the ending theme from the old 1970s tokusatsu show Saiyuki/Monkey stuck in my head, and I hope reading the title earlier in this paragraph does the same to a few of you, too. If you want to try it, here's a little help with the controls: Space attacks with your sword, Shift uses your magic (once you get that ability), and 5 on the numberpad lets you pray to certain trees to regain your HP, at the cost of one hundred beads.

So, what do we have instead? First, an interesting little maze game entitled Daidassou, which is all about freeing your comrades from prison! First thing on each stage you have to kill a guard to get his key, then you run around opening cells and leading the inmates to the exit. If you're not careful, inmates can be taken to a special maximum security cell if they're caught by guards, or even killed in the crossfire. It's a cute little game, and it's fun to play, even if it's also very, very hard (it took several attempts just to get past the first stage!). I especially like the isometric look of the game, which results in some mazes looking kind of Escher-esque, and maybe impossible? Like the heights of different floors don't totally make sense all the time.

Finally, The Demon Crystal, which, despire its grandiose title and plot about a demon invasion, seems to take place in a series of suburban houses. You run around these houses, picking up keys to open locked doors, looking for the big key that opens the door to the next stage. It's a nice touch that the rooms behind the locked doors are shrouded in darkness until you enter them, and generally, this is a fun game, mechanically speaking, at least. Unfortunately, it's let down by the fact that the behaviour of most types of enemy is randomised, which can in some cases make the very possibility of being able to complete a stage entirely down to luck. If each enemy type had a learnable pattern, or a specific way they reacted to your presence, then this would have been a great lost classic I could have shown to you all, like an archaologist showing off an amazing artefact. Unfortunately, though, it's not only frustrating to play, but also frustrating to think about what could have been.