Jurassic Park Institute Tour: Dinosaur Rescue (GBA)

 This is a notable game for a few reasons. Firstly, it was developed by KaZe, a company known for their excellent Saturn pinball games Last Gladiators and Necronomicon, and their more experimental pinball games  Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Battle Pinball on Playstation, and Akira Psycho Ball on PS2. Secondly, it's a Japan-only release based on a western property, which is mildly interesting itself, but on top of that, it seems to have only been available to buy in one place: the gift shop at Jurassic Park Institute Tour, an edicational interactive museum exhibit thing.

 

That's where the interest stops, though, as the game itself is about what you'd expect from some cheap knocked-out crap sold in a tourist attraction gift shop. It's a collection of mini-games, which aren't even original, just Jurassic Park-themed knock offs of existing games. There's Cross Dinosaur, which is just Frogger, except you're a little safari man running across a valley while trying not to get trampled by triceratops. Next is Danger Zone, which has you playing as a parasaurolophus who has to repeatedly get from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen while avoiding volcanic rocks falling from the 'bove.

 

Egg Guard is the old Game and Watch game Egg, except there's six channels instead of four, and it's a lot slower. It's themed as you being a pteranodon sat in your nest at the centre of the screen protecting your eggs from poachers who come slowly walking down the six channels. I actually had to lose all my lives on purpose in this game, since even when they get to your nest, the poachers will just stand there for several seconds before taking an egg. Rexcercise is another Game and Watch game, this time being Flagman, one of the worst G&W games, which isn't made any better by the presence of a T-Rex.

 

The final game is Take Meat, which is a slightly more complex and interesting version of Danger Zone (relatively speaking). You now go back and forth across the screen instead of repeatedly going from left to right, and when you're at the right edge of the screen, you can pick up multiple pieces of meat before returning, which gets you more points while slowing down your movement. Also, you're know avoiding mortars being fire by a little man atop a nearby cliff instead of volcanic rocks. There's also a gallery mode, where high scores are rewarded by tiny, very low resolution screenshots from the first three Jurassic Park movies.

 

The curiosity is all this game has going for it, really. It's not worth your time, and the unusualy circumstances of its release mean that it's definitely not worth the ridiculous prices a real copy fetches online, either. The Game Boy Color and Advance are two systems reknowned for low quality licensed games, and Jurassic Park Institute Tour: Dinosaur Rescue lives up to that stereotype every step of the way.

Battle K-Road (Arcade)

 It's odd that of the two fighting games that Psikyo developed, it's Daraku Tenshi, the one that never got released, that seems to be the most well-known. Battle K-Road is still definitely worth a look, though, as despite its psuedo realistic setting (the only fantasy elements being that two of the playable characters are cyborgs, and the final boss is a bear, plus some silly joke endings. But the mood is still realistic, and there's no fantastical or super-powered fighting techniques), it's still a game that does some interesting stuff in terms of both mechanics and storytelling.

 

There are seven fighting styles represented among the playable characters, with two characters for each of them. The two characters for each style are just headswaps that play identically to each other, but the only reason this setup exists is for storytelling purposes. A single player game starts with you facing against the other representative of your fighting style in a match that's implied to be the final of a tournament, with each style's first fight taking place on a unique stage. Every subsequent fight takes place on the same stage, with the time of day changing as the fights go on. The implication here is that you're playing as the proven champion of your  chosen martial art, representing that art against all the others in the Battle K-Road tournament. It's a cool little touch that adds a lot to the game's atmosphere.

 

Mechanically speaking, there's some interesting stuff going on there, too. Special moves are performed by holding an attack button, then pressing a direction while you release. It's an input method not often seen (the only other examples I know of are Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), and though I've hated it in those other games, it really works well with the grounded playstyle of this game. A more unique quirk, and a nod towards the game's combat sport theme, is that whenever a fighter gets knocked down, the fight stops and oth fighters return to their starting positions. It really marks out that the fights in this game are part of a sports competition, as opposed to the unsanctioned fights in most fighting games, and it also means that there's very little scope for trapping an opponent in the corner or in some other disadvantageous position.

 

Battle K-Road is a game I've been playing a lot recently, and it's really a shame it still hasn't ever had a home console release to this day, as it's a really fun and interesting game that I think must have gotten lost amongst all the other fighting games that got released during the original post-Street Fighter II fighting boom. Unfortunately, its uniqueness didn't help it stand out from the crowd,  maybe because that uniqueness manifests in the form of deliberately being less flashy and extravagant than all its competitiors. Still, you should definitely give it a try if you get the chance, it's an excellent game, that's aged a lot more gracefully than a lot of its contemporaries.