Sutte Hakkun (SNES)

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not very good at platform puzzle games, nor do I really enjoy playing them very much. Still, I occasionally give one a try, to see if it'll click with me. The only one I can think of that I really liked was Samurai Kid on Game Boy Color, and even that cleverly disguised itself as an action game. Sutte Hakkun is one such attempt, being a puzzle platformer released on the SNES in 1997, either through Satellaview, or through the Nintendo Power download stations, different sources seem to claim different things.

In it, you play as a flightless hummingbird/mosquito thing made of glass that has to collect multicoloured gems that are stashed away in hard-to-reach places on each stage. To get to them, you have to utilise your innate drinking/regurgitating ability. There are transparent blocks lying around, that you can drink in one location, then spit out in another. Furthermore, there's pots of coloured ink that you can drink, and then inject into the transparent blocks. Doing this makes the blocks move on their own: vertically with red ink, horizontally with blue ink, and diagonally with yellow ink.

Eventually, the game also introduces other elements, like stone statues, that make you incredibly heavy while you have them drank, or weird transparent creatures that take on various different properties when injected with coloured ink. Like all games of this type, it familiarises the player with the essential building blocks of its world, then arranges puzzles that require the expert use of those blocks, quickly requiring outside-the-box techniiques like placing a block inside a wall, so you can suck it up again from the other side, or rapidly extracting, then re-injecting the colour from a block in midair to re-set its range of movement.

It's pretty generous to the idiot player, too, allowing access to thirty stages across three areas right from the start, and unlocking more after twenty-five of them have been solved. Unfortunately, as I've already mentioned, this really isn't my kind of game, and I had to throw in the towel at twenty-three. I know it's a terrible cop-out, but as far as I can tell, if you like these kind of environment-traversing puzzle games, then this seems like it's a high-quality example of the genre, and it does have plenty of interesting and original ideas. I can't really recommend it fully myself though, as, like so many other games of this type, most of my time with it was frustrating and boring.

Pleasure Hearts (MSX)

Pleasure Hearts is one of the early works of M-Kai, a developer who would go onto later fame through his Wonderswan game Judgement Silversword, and even later than that, the XBox 360's Eschatos. Though it's an early work, you can already see that he's a developer with plenty of ability in both programming and game design. In fact, this might be the best-looking game on the MSX (discounting laserdisc games, of course), with all kinds of animation and scrolling tricks in effect.

Luckily, it also plays really well. Though it might look like an old-fashioned horizontal STG, it actually occupies a space in between old-fashioned games like Gradius and the like, and faster danmaku-style games, which had already been populatr in arcades for a few years by the time of Pleasure Hearts' release in 1999. Bullet patterns are mostly confined to boss fights, though, with the stages having large crowds of small enemies each firing individual bullets directly at you, often at different speeds. This is a really strange paragraph to read, isn't it? Sorry about that.

Basically, it's a fast and fun and very high quality game. Interestingly, for a game on an 8-bit system, the scores go really high, really quickly, and score growth seems to be exponential: I tend to hit the one billion mark around the start of stage four, and only a stage later, I'm already at three billion! I'm not totally certain on this, but there is a bullet graze counter among the various other stats and meters at the top of the screen, and I think this acts as a multiplier on the points diamonds that are dropped by some enemies, and which your bombs turn bullets into. Like I said, I'm not 100% certain of that theory, though.

There's even some kind of plot in the game, as evidenced in the optional prologue stage, which sees a fully-powered up ship with a massive score at the end of some grand adventure getting betrayed by its allies and ultimately destroyed by a giant dragon. Presumably, then, the game's plot is about seeking revenge on the traitors and their dragon? I'm only guessing, of course. There's no text or anything as far as I can tell, and it would presumably be in Japanese anyway, even if there was.

I could keep writing about how great this game is, but if I did, it really would be just that: a stream of compliments directed at every aspect of the game. Obviously, I strongly recommend that you go and play this game as soon as possible. It's very easily available online, since M-Kai himself released it and his other MSX games as freeware back in 2009, so go and find it, load it up in your MSX emulator of choice, and have a great time!