Wander Vehicles - Doggybone Daisakusen (Playstation)

 So, this is a game that I instantly knew I had to play as soon as I saw screenshots of it, though, seeing it was a strategy game, I was worried about potential language barrier problems (which I'll address later). It's about small-scale tank battles between the armed forces of two countries: The Doggy Bone Republic (your guys, who are all anthropomorphic dogs) and the Banana Slip Kingdom (the enemy, who are all anthropomorphic monkeys). A third country, the Cat's Eye Confederation (anthropomorphic cats, of course), seem content to play profiteers, selling supplies to both sides. At least, that's how it looks to me, without being able to actually understand any of the dialogue.

 

Luckily, the game at its most basic isn't hard to figure out without being able to read Japanese! You have a few squads made up of three tanks each, and so does the enemy. You pick a squad and tell them where on the batle field you want them to go, by stretching a line out from their current location. When they encounter an enemy squadron, they'll ask if you want them to attack or carry on moving. Every squad is also marked with a rock, paper, or scissors hand sign, which obviously tells you who'll come out on top in a straight 3v3 fight.

 

So, your task in most of the stages is to figure out which of your squads to move to which locations, and at which times, to ensure they don't end up in battles they can't win. Some stages just want you to wipeout the opposition, others want you to get all your tanks to a certain location on the map, and it's one of these stages, the fourth in the game, where I came up against a (literal) barrier. In this stage, you make your way across a jungle swamp, with a few enemy squads lurking about. The battle part is pretty complicated, as attacking one squad will summon a nearby squad of a different element to back it up, so you've got to try and occupy different enemy squads at the same time. On my third attempt at this, I managed to wipe them all out and cross the swamp.

 

Unfortunately, this was a "reach the location" stage, and the location was behind some electric forcefields, and I couldn't figure out how to pass them at all. I'd been really enjoying the game up until this point, so I sought a solution online, only to encounter the big disadvantage inherent to writing about obscure games: if no-one's played it, no-one can help you. There's one attempted let's play on Youtube, which ends when the player dies near the start of this very stage. I found a series of videos on niconicodouga that appeared to be a complete playthrough, and got excited. Then I clicked the link to the video for stage four, and found that the videos only contained the cutscenes, and no actual gameplay footage.

 

Hopefully, someday, I'll be able to pass this stage, either because someone with better Japanese literacy than me will play the game and make a guide, or maybe someone will even make a translation patch, someday, since the Playstation seems to be growing in popularity among that scene. But until then, I can unfortunately only recommend Wander Vehicles (sometimes mistransliterated as "Wonder B-Cruise") to those who can read Japanese, or who have the perseverence to figure out this kind of thing through trial and error. However, I was thoroughly enjoying it until I got stuck, so if the language barrier isn't a problem for you, or if someone does reveal the solution for all to see at some point in the future, it's definitely worth playing.

GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.