Railroad Baron (NES)

 Also known as Tetsudou-Oh, Railroad Baron is a board game, that's definitely in the same genre as Monopoly, with a little bit of Ticket to Ride thrown in, too. The aim the the game is to move your train around Europe by rolling the dice, making money as you go. Each player get randomly assigned a destination at the start of the game, then again whenever they reach a destination. When one player has finished a certain number of journeys (the default is seven), or when one of the players runs out of money, the game ends and scores are totted up.

 

The scores are based on how much money you have at the end of the game, how many stations you control (you control a station if you were the last player to pass through it) and how many railways you own (if you control two adjacent stations, then you can choose to buy the railway between them). If the game ends because of a player going bankrupt, that player automatically scores zero.

 

Each railway is made up of three empty spaces of track between stations, and it costs money to move over them. But if you own the track that another player is moving over, that money comes to you. So, be strategic with the railways you buy, and you'll probably win. There is another element of chaos, though: after each move where you don't reach your destination, a random event occurs. You might win the lottery, get to bet on a horse race, or have some railways blocked off for a ew turns by an earthquake. You might even be given a free railway! Most annoying of all, you might get teleported to another part of the map, or have your destination changed at random.

 

Anyway, that's an explantion of how Railroad Baron plays, but is it actually any good? Eh, it depends. The split between luck and strategy is about 75/25 in luck's favour, which isn't great. I don't expect you to be able to subject any other human players, but the CPU players are decent enough: they aren't the telepathic superplayers that you might find in a lot of tabletop-themed videogames, but they do act like they're trying to win rather than acting totally randomly, too. Basically, if you have some way of playing this on a handheld, whether through emulation or a handheld Famiclone, it's not a terrible way to keep your hands busy through thirty-to-fourty minutes of TV watching.

Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei (PC)

 Sometimes, you can just happen to see screenshots or a short video of a game, and instantly need to play it, and that was the case when the trailer for Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei appared in my Youtube recommendations. It looks to be a high-quality single-plane beat em up that's true to its genre, and which is obviously playing on nostalgia while updating the aesthetic just a little bit, and still adding a couple of its own ideas.

 

I have good news: it's exactly what it looks to be! Beat em ups are a genre that have been unfortunately conspicuous by their absence in both western and Japanese indie scenes (with very few exceptions, like Streets of Rage Remake, and Tifa Tan X, a game you should not go and look up if you're in polite company), but FDFM Xiaomei is definitely seeking to make up for lost time. It's obviously very inspired by the progenitor of the genre, Spartan X (or Kung Fu, if you prefer), even having the same little row of boxes showing how many stages you've beaten and have yet to beat.

 

Like Spartan X, this game sees you walk from left to right in various old-timey chinese locales, punching and kicking various enemies, the most populous of whom being the big bald guys with their arms up in the air. But there's also creepy little doll things, birds, snakes, butterflies, sword-throwing guys, kyonshi, and more out to get you, too. And this being an old-fashioned game with old-fashioned values, every enemy type has its own specific behaviour and tactics. 

 

There's bosses too, who are all unique, like the guy who throws his giant head at you, the sad ghost who thanks you for killing her, and at the end of stage four, a cool multi-sprite dragon than summons lightning, and along who's back you can walk, if you like. Best of all, you fight every boss with the same moveset and the same stats as you start the game with. In 2020, Streets of Rage 4 brought back real belt-scroller beat em ups, but right under our noses, Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei had brought back real single plane beat em ups in 2019, and none of us even noticed!

 

It's definitely a revival that I'm very happy to see, and I hope it continues for a long time. If you agree, the best way to ensure that, as far as I can see is to go and buy this game, as well as SoR4 (if, for some insane reason you don't have that one already). There's even a physical release, for those willing to go to all the effort of importing from Japan (and who still have an optical drive on their PC). I highly recommend this game, it's honestly like an arcade perfect home port of a game that never existed. There's plenty of PC shooting games you could give that accolade to, now there's finally a beat em up to join them!