Battle Outrun (Master System)

 Contrary to what you might think, unoriginality can actually be a powerful tool in creating a great game, using the core concept of an existing game and adding your own twists and ideas to make something new and exciting. Kid Chameleon did it to Super Mario Brothers 3, and Mortal Kombat did it to Street Fighter II, for just two examples. Battle Outrun is unfortunately an unsuccessful attempt to do it to Chase HQ.

 

In case any of you aren't familiar with Chase HW, it was an arcade game released by Taito in 1988 (a year before Battle Outrun), and subsequentally ported to pretty much every active home system at the time. In it, you play as a cop engaged in ar chases with criminals, who you have to catch by ramming their car with yours until they stop. Battle Outrun has you playing as a bounty hunter engaged in ar chases with criminals, who you have to catch by ramming their car with yours until they stop,

 

The only idea that Battle Outrun really adds to the Chase HQ concept is an item shop that appears once a stage, offering upgrades for your car, which are absolutely necessary if you want to make it past even the first stage. Tire and engine are pretty obvious, while upgrading your body reduces the amount of speed you lose when you collide with cars and other objects, and the totally useless chassis upgrades affect how far you fly when you drive over the ramps that appear a couple of times per stage.

 

The other thing Battle Outrun adds is frustration. Like in pretty much any racing game that takes place on city streets, there are many civilian cars acting as obstacles in your path. More than any other such game, the civilian cars in this gme feel like they were programmed with a sense of deliberate malice. They'll often deliberately drive right in front of you, or between you and the criminal you're trying to ram, or they'll get in front of you and stay in front of you, so you hit them repeatedly and lose five-to-ten precious seconds. Even when you've upgraded your body and engine a couple of times, this is still incredibly annoying, and feels totally unfair, too.

 

Despite what I said in the opening paragraph of this review, though, the biggest problem Battle Outrun has is its similarity to Chase HQ. Taito's game even got a port to the Master System in 1990, with better graphics, more speed, and obviously, a more streamlined and fun design. So play that instead, and just don't bother with Battle Outrun.

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.