Gal Pani X (PC)

You can probably tell from the title that this is a fangame of the infamously seedy series of dirty arcade Qix-likes Gals Panic, but it's actually a double fangame, since the art you're revealing in the stages features characters from To Heart. If you're unfamiliar with To Heart, it's a multimedia franchise with manga, anime, visual novels and other stuff, and around the turn of the century, it was enjoying a similr kind of popularity among doujin circles as the Touhou series has in modern times. I don't think it was ever a big mainstream hit, but it definitely had a lot of fanworks based on it!

 

I actually like Gal Pani X a lot more than I like any of the actual Gals Panic games, though! Part of that might just be nostalgia, since when I got my first PC in 2005, I loaded it up with a whole bunch of freeware doujin games, and Gal Pani X was among them, but there's other reasons too. Firstly, none of the art in this game is actually dirty, it's just cute, so there's none of the unseemly grime associated with Gals Panic. Secondly, despite Gal Pani X mixing in elements of bullet hell shooting games, it feels a lot more fair to play, and it should only take a couple of attempts before you can get to the end of the game in a single credit. Thirdly, and most difficult to explain, it just feels really smooth to play. Moving your ship around, and expanding your area of control just feels really satisfying, like using a knife to cut through something with just a little bit of resistance.

 

So, in case you're totally unfamiliar with Qix-likes in general, or Gals Panic in particular, Qix-likes are games where you have a field inhabited by a large threat (and sometimes some smaller sub-threats), and your job is to eat away at that area, by leaving your safe zone and drawing shapes. Successfully come back to your safe zone without either your or the line you've drawn getting hit, and the area you drew around is added to your safe zone. Any enemies caught in that area are destroyed, too. The Gals Panic series added the twist that you can see the silhouette of a woman in the field, and rather than having to claim a percentage of the field as a whole, you have to claim a percentage of the silhouetted area only.

 

Gal Pani X builds further on this with its elements taken from shooting games. Not only do the enemies fire dense bullet patterns at you, but these patterns can come into your safe zone and kill you there (though I don't think there are any enemy attacks that can destroy parts of your safe zone like some stages in the later Gals Panic sequels have). So you're really only safe from touching the enemies while you're in there. Another element taken from shooting games is grazing, whereby you score extra points for getting really close to enemy bullets without actually letting them hit you. Though in Gal Pani X, it's not limited to enemy bullets, and you get points for grazing on pretty much everything: power ups, points items, bullets, the enemies themselves.

 

Gal Pani X is a game I recommend playing. It's freeware, but the developers' site went down many years ago now, so it might be a little harder to find now. But, surprisingly for such an old game, it runs in 64-bit Windows 10 without issue! Finally, on the subject of tracking down games, the developers of Gal Pani X, D5, also had a game that they didn't release as freeware, named Sispri Gauntlet. It was a bullet hell take on Gauntlet, starring characters from a novel series called Sister Princess. I've never been able to find more than the playable demo of it, and even that was a long long time ago. Please get in touch if you know where I might find the full game.

Of Mice and Sand (3DS)

 I first became aware of this game when it was originally released in Japanese as Sabaku no Nezumi Dan, and though it looked interesting, I just assumed it would never get an English release of any kind and forgot about it. More recently, though, I was browsing 3DS releases, and found that it not only has an English release since I last saw it, but also a bunch of ports to different formats! Despite that though, I haven't seen anyone talking about any version of it, so I guess I'll do it.

 

The game's set in a post-apocalyptic desert world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (mainly mice, though you do encounter cats and just regular old humans, so there are presumably others out there, too), and you take charge of a small group of mice journeying in search of the mythical paradise of El Dorado. it's a big journey, too: I've been playing for several hours at the time of writing, and I'm not even half way across the world map. They do this in a big armoured vehicle that starts out looking a lot like a Mad Max tour bus, and gradually gets bigger and more formidable. You control any of them directly, though, you just move a cursor round, giving them orders. Build this room, craft this item, drive to the next town, and so on. 

 

At the basic level, Of Mice and Sand follows a classically compelling formula: get the ingredients to craft the items to build the rooms to get more ingredients to craft more items and build new rooms. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. The problem coms in the way that new locations are added to your vehicle's navigational computer. When you get to a town for the first time, you can pay to hear rumours, which includes rumours of nearby undiscovered locations. The problem is that the prices of these rumours increases pretty quickly, and your main source of income is fulfilling requests for crafted items. So you spend a lot of time driving back and forth between towns gathering resources or parked up next to towns waiting for your mice to craft the items you need.

 

I'm not too disappointed with Of Mice and Sand. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to continue playing all the way to the end, but like I said, I have had hours of play over the past week or so since I got it, so it's not like it's totally worthless. Maybe a kind of Cookie Clicker-esque version that let you just set things up and have travelling and crafting happen while you're away would be more palatable? Maybe if it ever gets a sequel, that's how it'll go? As it is, it's no classic, but it's worth a look, at least.