Rainbow Cotton (Dreamcast)

 This is a game I somehow only recently got around to, despite having been meaning to play it for almost twenty years! Back in the Dreamcast's original heyday, it was one of the Japan-only titles I really wanted to try out. Then when Dreamcast emulation first came about years later, this game was just a little too much for my computer at the time to handle. A few more years (and a couple of dead laptops) later still, and an English translation patch, that even subtitles the FMV cutscenes gets released, and I finally got around to playing it.

 

The game is, of course, part of the long-running Cotton series of shooting games, and more specifically it's a sequel to the Mega Drive game Panorama Cotton, both games being Space Harrier clones, rather than the horizontally scrolling 2D shooting games more typical of the series. The first thing that'll hit you about the game once you start playing is how nice it looks. It's definitely among the best-looking games in the whole Dreamcast library! There's an incredible use of colour, and everything looks like an amazing fairytale dreamworld, almost as if they'd made a shooting spin-off from NiGHTs into Dreams. If I had played the game around the time of its release in early 2000, I don't think I would have ever seen anything like it before!

 

Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't live up to the visuals. It's just got lots of tiny little faults that all add up. Cotton herself gets in the way of where you're aiming and blocks your view of incoming enemy shots, too. You have a health bar instead of lives, and I don't think there's enough feedback when you get it, either. So if you don't pay attention to your health bar, you'll suddenly die without even realising you'd taken a lot of hits. None of these things is game-breaking on its own, and even added up, they don't make the game a bad one, but they are annoying, and it feels so close to being an actual good game, rather than one that's merely okay.

 

I think I can recommend this game conditionally. If, like me, you've been curious about it for a long time, then now is a good time to seek it out. Though the plot, as revealed by the subtitled cutscenes isn't really anything particualrly special, the whole experience of the excellent graphics and those turn-of-the-century animated FMVs does feel like something I would have loved back then, so there's a kind of retroactive enjoyment there. You should probably just emulate it, though, since the prices legitimate copies fetch these days are, just like its Mega Drive forebear, ludicrous.

Other Stuff Monthly #20!

 Another game from the big boardgame backlog I mentioned in my review of Red Outpost, this time it's Ars Alchimia. It's a translation of a Japanese board game, which is kind of interesting, since it seems like  this doesn't happen as often as I'd like. The same goes for Japanese TTRPGs, too, but that situation is slowly changing (though there are still many many TTRPGs from the 90s and 00s with cool-looking art, and cool-sounding concepts that I don't think we'll ever see in English).

 

Anyway, Ars Alchimia is a worker placement game that follows the players through their four years at alchemy school. Each year, you need to gather ingredients and recipes, employ assistants, and finally use forges to make magical items using alchemy. The big gimmick is that each player has a lot of workers (the exact amount varies based on turn order, the number of players, and some other choices that happen in-game). You see, when you send workers to a location, if there are already workers there, you have to send a larger group of workers there to take it over. Furthermore, you can also send more workers than you need, with the twin benefits of making it more difficult for following players to use the location, and adding to your own dice roll (for getting extra ingredients when gathering, etc.).

 

So, once the players get a hang of it, there is a lot of opportunities for some pretty spiteful play:  for example, if you know that a player that comes after you needs a specific ingredient, you can force them to make a choice between getting that ingredient and having enough workers left over to do other things elsewhere on the board). I think offering these cruel choices is a little more interesting than the dynamic in a lot of worker placement games, where you can just straight up block your opponents from using certain facilities.

 

I don't really have anything negative to say about this game. It's a lot of fun, the inter-player interaction is cool, it moves really fast, even with four players, and there's a lot of very cute and cool artwork on the board and cards. I think it's out of print now (and maybe even the English publisher might have gone out of business), but if you can find a copy of Ars Alchimia, I definitely recommend picking it up. I've only played it a few times at the time of writing, but I think with time, it might come to stand among the likes of Dominion and Istanbul and other all-time favourites!