Ling Rise (Playstation)

 When you look at the screenshots of Ling Rise, I'm sure you'll probably think the same thing as I did: it looks like some kind of Japanese Crash Bandicoot clone. Once you actually play, though, that similarity only extends to the fact that the whole game takes place in long, narrow corridor-like areas full of enemies and pits. The actual platforming is done at a much slower pace than the Crash games, and there's a bunch of other stuff in the game besides that, too.

 

So, you play as this very androgynous character (in-game they look like a girl, but the boxart makes them look like a boy?), who's acoompanied by some small floating creatures that are called Lings. You only start off with one of them, but you quickly accumulate a Ling posse. These guys are the way you attack, since your character can't do it themselves for some reason. They shoot forward and ram enemies with their bodies! There's a little bit of a virtual pet element going on with the Lings, too, as you not onlt have to feed them to ensure they have energy to attack with, but you have to feed them the right foods, or their energy will refill, but they'll be in a bad mood and not want to attack. Sometimes you'll meet other characters accompanied by Lings, but I've played for a few hours and done a couple of bossfights, and none of them have used Lings to attack, preferring more traditional methods like magic swords.

 

I have no idea what the plot is about, but in the time I've played so far, I've done a lot of stuff that's very reminiscent of the legendary RPG Grandia: climbed mountains, explored ruins, walked along train tracks, escaped military prison, and so on. On the subject of RPGs, a lot of database-type sites online have this listed as one, but it's really not. There's some very mild RPG elements, like raising the stats of the Lings and being able/required to revisit earlier areas, but most of your playtime and the bulk of the game's challenge is in 3D platforming. 

 

The platforming itself takes some getting used to: judging jump distances took me a while to get used to, and I was constantly falling into pits like an idiot for the first couple of areas. It did gradually get easier, though, and there was a stage a bit later on which sees you navigating a lot of moving platforms, while also counter-intuitively moving towards the camera instead of away from it,  but by that point, I'd gotten the jumping down to an instinct. For some reason, collecting the items that enemies and smashed boxes drop never stops being a weird experience of perspective nightmares.

 

Ling Rise is a really cool and fun game, and other than one small hiccup near the start of the game, there hasn't been much of a language barrier in the way of me playing it. I'd still definitely play a fan translation if one ever comes out, though, since it'd be nice to know what's going on in the game. It's a shame it never got an official English release at the time, actually, I think it's thematically and aesthetically something a lot of people would have gone for during the turn-of-the-century anime boom, and the game itself is unique enough to stand out while also being familiar enough to draw people in. For those reasons, it's also surprising that it doesn't seem to already have any kind of western fanbase. Hopefully that'll change sometime soon, because it's a game that deserves a wider audience.

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.

The Violinist of Hamelin (SNES)

 
Also known as Hamelin no Violin Hiki, this is a tie-in platformer based on the anime of the same name. The anime is about a bard named Hamel who goes around a European-style fantasy world fighting evil with his adventurer friends, which is pretty much the premise of the game too, though the only friend accompanying him here is his suffering sidekick Flute. It's a little smarter than most licensed 16-bit platformers, though, and it actually uses the presence of a sidekick character as a major mechanical gimmick.

 

The way it works is that you traverse the stages mostly in a traditional platformy manner, and Flute follows you around. At the start of the game, you can also stand on top of Flute, or you can pick er up and throw her at breakable walls. You quickly start to build up a collection of costumes for her, though, and you can change her costume in the pause menu. This is where the real meat of the game's puzzles and challenges lie.

 

Each costume gives Flute different abilities, that Hamel can exploit to get around the stages (mainly by standing on her head): the frog suit lets her jump really high, the robot suit lets her walk on spikes and punch through walls, the duck suit lets her swim, and the fish suit... lets her float around in a semi-uncontrollable manner? If you remember my Kid Chameleon post from a few years ago when I said that that game was like an edgy teenage re-imagining of Super Mario Bros. 3, I guess you could consider The Violinist of Hamelin to be a combination of Super Mario Bros. 3 with the AI-controlled sidekick aspect of Sonic 2, with both concepts expanded in a significantly more cerebral direction. It's a bit unweildy, but you know what I mean, right?

 

In pretty much every respect, it's a cut above most licensed platformers in terms of quality, and I'd even go so far as to say it was the equal of the Disney games being put out by SEGA and Capcom in the early nineties. And as much as I usually dislike puzzle platformers, this game does a good enough job of balancing puzzles and action that it didn't come close to being a deal breaker for me. I recommend giving this game a try, though obviously, don't pay the £100+ that legit copies are currently selling for.

Other Stuff Monthly #21!

 So, think back a couple of months to the post I wrote about Chibi-Pop Manga magazine, when I said I'd eventually get around to posting about the bilingual self-published manga Hanamaru Angels? That time is here! And, a quick search online earlier today makes me think that I might be the first person to write about this manga in English, which is nice. It's happened plenty of times for games, but it's not so easy with other stuff.

 

Anyway, Hanamaru Angels isn't anything especially original, especially in the nineties: it's a light hearted fantasy story about a trio of massively powerful (but still quite incompetent) students at a magic academy in a fantasy world. Very similar in feel to things like Ozanari Dungeon, Dragon Half, Slayers, and so on. That's not a bad thing, though, that kind of silly TTRPG-flavoured fantasy comedy isn't really around much anymore, replaced by much less appealling isekai power fantasies. The book starts with them breaking into the headteacher's office to change their grades, and quickly escalates into them having to go and save the kingdom from an unsealed demon (and the two adventures are causally linked, surprisingly enough).

 

Though the story as a whole isn't particularly original, there are little bits of originality here and there, and they really make the book and its world shine. Little details like how all the computers are shaped like little desktop dinosaurs with monitors in their bodies, psychic cannons powered by armies of meditating monks, and evil sand, each grain of which is a tiny black hole that sends anything that touches it straight to hell. They really add a lot of charm to the whole story, and it's that cretivity that makes me wish that there was more of Tsugumi Nishino's work available, since they definitely have a lot of imagination and talent. It also makes me wish that the bilingual nature of the main story extended to the two pages of design sketches and notes at the back of the book, too.

 

Anyway, despite the obscure nature of its existence, it's surprisingly easy and inexpensive to get a copy of Hanamaru Angels, and if you're a fan of those many two-to-four episode fantasy OAVs that were so numerous in the nineties, I think it's definitely the kind of thing you'll enjoy. The back cover promises "Action! Suspense! And fun!", and the comic inside delivers on that. Definitely worth seeking out.

Sispri Gauntlet (PC)

 Remember my review of Gal Pani X a few months ago, when I mentioned that I'd been unable to find a copy of this game? Well, thanks to the help of a good friend, I managed to get ahold of it, and it was worth the effort! It's a fangame based on a series of novels and a dating simulator called Sister Princess, with a premise so creepy that I'll let you go and look it up yourselves if you want to know, but luckily that doesn't really affect this game.

 

The title spells out the basic premise, really: it's Sister Princess characters, in a Gauntlet=style game. That's Gauntlet the old maze shooting game, not just the general concept of gauntlets. Of course, just like how D5 gave the Gals Panic games a boost of adrenaline with Gal Pani X, Sispri Gauntlet does the same to Gauntlet. The easy way of describing it would be to say that it's an enemy hell game. THere are constantly thick hordes of enemies assailing you from all directions, spawning out of (thankfully destructible) generators. So your task is to manage the flow of these enemies and get to the end of the stage, as well as finding keycards to open doors along the way.

 

There's various other complications too, like giant robots that walk around placing more generators, barricades that act like walls that block movement and you shots, but allow enemy shots to pass through, and the most panic-inducing of all: the time limit. Considering the amount of enemies you have to fight, the time limit is incredibly tight, and once it runs out, you're quickly murdered by an endless swarm of tiny red enemies that spawn everywhere in increasing numbers until you're dead.

 

One thing I didn't like is the way you use your super weapon: rather than being assigned a button of its own, you're supposed to tap a direction and the shoot button together to use it, though it's very unreliable and only registers about a third of the time. Also, it's only limited in that it takes a couple of seconds to regarge after use, announcing that it's ready with the "OK" sound effect from Giga Wing, oddly. This is a relatively small complaint, though, and overall, I think this is an excellent game. It might seem overwhelmingly difficult at first (and even after a couple of hours' play, I've only managed to get as far as the third stage), but with some perseverance and a little bit of strategic thinking, you'll get into the swing of it, and realise that stemming the flow of enemies and avoiding their bullets isn't as impossible as it first seems. If you can find a copy, I definitely recommend playing Sispri Gauntlet.

Critical Blow (Playstation)

 I originally played this game just because of the graphics, which are amazing. It's got a lot of charm in its low-poly anime style. But not only did it actually turn out to be a fun game, but also an all-round aesthetic masterpiece that really captured the feel of a certain culture at a specific time. Maybe even more than Evil Zone/Eretzvaju, Critical Blow is like a time capsule of anime fandom in the late nineties!

 

The way all the characters look the world they inhabit, the high-quality animated FMV intro, and even the music will take you right back to that time. It even infiltrates the way the game plays to a certain extent! One of the modes on the main menu is "Theatre Mode", which I assumed would be just a menu where you can view unlocked cutscenes (as well as the intro, there's also an animatd ending for each character in Arcade Mode). What it actually is is a story mode in which you play as the game's main protagonist Ricky, and have the game's plot told to you via a mixture of still images with text captions, and yet more fully voiced, fully animated high quality FMV cutscenes! Of course, whenever a fight breaks out. that's when the actual game part kicks in. 

 

As well as Theatre and Arcade, there's also another single player mode, called Trading Mode. This is an instance of something that was very fashionable in console fighting games at the time: a mode where you take a character, fight lots of opponents, and gradually increase their stats and unlock new abilities. It was probably popularised by Street Fighter Alpha 3's famous World Tour mode, but I think it might have started in the Flash Hiders games on SNES and PC Engine. It's fine I guess, but I think it speaks to the quality of Arcade and Thatre modes that it's easily the least interesting part of this game, and that's coming from someone who can't even understand any of the text or dialogue in Theatre Mode. The art and FMV are really that charming!

 

There are some bad sides to the game, especially if you're hoping for a well-balanced, competitive fighter. Like how the super meter is filled by any blocked or connecting attacks, including super attacks. So one character in particular, who has a long range, multi-hit super, once they have one meter, they essentially have infinite supers as long as they either hit or get blocked (and the super in question does a not insignificant amount of damage even when blocked, too). There's also a possible issue with the camera: as the fighters get closer to one end of the stage or the other, the camera will tilt slightly to make a dramatic angle, which does look really cool, but might raise some questions regarding fairness, especially among the kind of players who insist on always fighting in plain training stages, or banning custom costumes in modern fighting games.

 

Mostly, though, Critical Blow is a game I strongly recommend, especially if you're nostalgic for the era in which it was originally released. I think the music especially is going to make a certain section of my audience lose their minds when they hear it! I learned only after already having played it for several hours that it's also the sequel to game from 1996 called Genei Tougi, so that might also be worth checking out too (though I haven't played it yet, so I can't say for sure).

Ace Driver Victory Lap (Arcade)

 Everyone knows about Namco's arcade racing series Ridge Racer, right? But long before that, there were the Pole Position games, and from them eventually came the Final Lap games, and from them came the first Ace Driver, and this, its sequel. I was going to review both Ace Driver games, but since the first one only has one track, a graphically enhanced version of which is included in this game, I decided not to bother with it.

 

Ace Driver Victory Lap was released in 1995, the same year as Rave Racer, so although Ace Driver seems to have been mostly forgotten by history, it was running alongside its more popular sibling at one time. I guess the difference is that interest in Formula 1-style racing games had waned by the mid-nineties in favour of the street and mountain racing seen in Ridge Racer? Maybe that's also why Ridge Racer got home ports, but Ace Driver never did?

 

Anyway, you know how racing games go: you race around tracks, both against other racers and against a time limit that gets extended every time you go trough a checkpoint. There aren't any special gimmicks on display here, it's just a great-looking, competent racing game that's fun to play. I guess the slightly futuristic setting could be considered a gimmick, but it doesn't affect gameplay at all. There's no boosts or power ups or anything like that. Just a great use of colours (with an emphasis on purple, brown, and silver/grey that works surprisingly well) and a kind of eco-technological world with giant skyscrapers and machinery alongside perfectly clear skies and seemingly untarnished nature.

 

Unfortunately, I don't hve a lot more to say about Ace Driver Victory Lap. It's good, you should play it if you see a cabinet somewhere, or if you have a good enough computer to run it in MAME (and if I do, you almost definitely will, too, to be honest).

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!

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.