Super Chinese Fighter (SNES)

 If that title seems a little odd, don't worry: this is a fighitng game spin off from the Super Chinese series, which i think normally alternates between action games and RPGs. Or maybe action RPGs. I haven't actually played any of them. An extra bit of trivia is that characters from this series also appear as guest characters in the last couple of Hiryuu no Ken games (a series I once said I'd go back to someday, and maybe someday I will).

 

Anyway, like another game I recently covered, Ninku 2, Super Chinese Fighter places more of an emphasis on its single-player story mode than on its two player versus mode that most of its post-Street Fighter II peers focussed on. Of course, the big difference between this game and Ninku 2 is that Ninku 2 was on a low-powered handheld upon which multiplayer was expensive and inconveient, while Super Chinese Fighter was on a system where access to multiplayer was practically the default, with even some turn-based RPGs having some kind of multiplayer mode. (I am rememebering that right, right? A couple of the SNES Final Fantasies had a weird mode where you could let extra players take control of a character each during battles, didn't they?)

 

But anyway, what that means is that the developers specifically wanted to make this kind of single player fighting story game, and amazingly, the publishers allowed them to do so, even though it was a bit of an anachronism in the post-SF2 world. Rather than taking inspiration from other videogames, Super Chinese Fighter seems to take its inspiration more from TV anime, especially the original pre-Z Dragonball, and the imitators that followed in its wake. It takes place in a whimsical sci-fi martial arts world, with planets named after various Asian foodstuffs. Sounds familiar, right?

 

The plot is also pretty standard fare, that sees you travelling to those foodstuff-named planets in search of a bunch of missing martial arts scrolls, before going off to the final boss' base to fight his henchmen and then the boss himself. It's all pretty light-hearted, and the characters are all somewhat jovial goofs,  so again, if you've seen a lot of late 80s/early 90s kiddy adventure anime, it'll all feel very familiar. The only problem with all this is that the plot is told in the form of many, slow-scrolling,non-skippable dialogue boxes. A playthrough of single-player mode will take you about two hours at most, and it feels like at least half of this time is taken up by the dialogue scenes.

 

So anyway, the fighting. It's okay, but not great. Of the four face buttons on the SNES controller, you have strong and weak attacks, a button to hold so you can increase your power level, and a button for using the one-use item you equipped pre-battle, which could be a trap you place in the arena, health restoration, a bomb that explodes in a few seconds, and so on. There's special moves that are done in the manner you might expect, using d-pad commands and the attack button, though one thing I don't like is that in the single-player mode, you unlock more moves as you win fights and find the aforementioned scrolls. But that's something I hate in action games generally, as I'm sure long-time readers have probably noticed. It does kind of make up for this by giving you a cheat to input on the title screen that unlocks every character with their full movesets in the other modes, but that still feels like a solution to a problem that didn't really need to be there.

 

It's hard to summarise Super Chinese Fighter. It's a game that's not particularly good or bad, and it doesn't really have any great mechanical hook to make it an interesting curiosity, either. I guess the one thing I can say is that if you have a bit of nostalgia for the era and genre of anime to which it pays so much homage, then it's a game you might want to seek out. After this game, the series mostly seems to have petered out: there were no more entries into the main series, but there were two more fighting spin-offs, on the Game Boy an Game Boy Color, which sound interesting, just by being pre-2000 handheld fighting games.

Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula VS (PSP)

 You might not have heard of Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula, but it's a series that's interested me for a while. Originally an anime that aired on Japanese TV in 1991, obviously trying to cash in on the popularity of Formula 1 racing in Japan at that time. It's not a massive franchise, but it does seem to have been a bit of a cult hit, spawning several straight-to-video sequels over the course of the 1990s, and a seemingly endless stretch of videogame adapatations, with the most recent being released in 2018. Despite all this, and even despite the existence of an English dub that aired in parts of Southeast Asia, almost nothing of it has ever reached North America or the UK, with the one exception being the SNES game, released in the US as "Cyber Spin".

 

This entry was released in Japan only in 2008, and it's pretty good! When it comes to racing games, I'm usually more interested in the glamourous likes of the Ridge Racer series than the grey world of Gran Turismo or F1, but having seen a few episodes of the source material, I decided to give it a chance. It mostly plays like an arcade-style racer, rather than a psuedo-realistic simulation, which is definitely fine by me. There's plenty of different things to hold your attention, too.

 

There's three main modes of play, ofr a start: Survival, which has a very arcade-like structure, and sees you competing in races until you fail to finish one in first place. Unfortunately, I've only managed to get a few races deep into this, so I can't tell you if it's endless or if it has an ending. The fact that the tracks are always presented in the same order suggests to me that there's an end to it, though. Conquest is the one of the three I've played the least, and seems to be made up of shorter, harder, one-on-one races. The real meat of the game seems to be in the GPX mode, in which you pick a set of stages, and race through them in sequence, with the usual system of points awarded for higher finishing places, and so on.

 

What's interesting about GPX mode, is that the higher difficulty courses add more laps to each race. This is interesting because the cars in the game have a boost function, limited by the amount of fuel it uses up. It's essential to winning races, and as the races get longer, it'll run out a lot sooner before the ends of the races. So, as you progress through th ranks, you'll have to get better at both rationing the use of your boost, and in timing your visits to the pit lane to refuel. This probably doesn't sound like much to people who are more used to simulation-style racers, but in most racing games, I pretty much never enter the pit, so it's interesting to see a game that necessitates doing so, without slowing down or over-complicating the action.

 

There's a couple of other side modes in there, too: a solo drag race time trial mode (called ZERO 4000), and a mode called "Max Speed Attack", which sees you racing round part of a track, attempting to reach as high a speed as possible when you go past two specific points. I've made a few attempts at beating both these modes, all unsuccessful.

 

Anyway, I'm not even sure if most of my readership is even interested in racing games (which is why I try and keep a bigger gap between each one than I do with other genres), but if you are, this is one that's definitely worth a look. It looks great, it's fun to play, and it's fast. All you want from a racing game really, right?