Crazy Construction (3DS)

 This was one of the first games I got on my original 3DS, and I'd actually completely forgotten about it until pretty recently (I replaced my original with a New 3DS a few years ago, lured in by the system's potential as an emulation device). You might think that any 3DS game would be too recent to feel nostalgia towards, but once I loaded up Crazy Construction (also known as Choukousou Kenzou Keikaku Buildinger) really made me feel something for those halcyon days of seven years ago.

 

It's a falling stuff puzzle game with the reverse goal compared to most: you have to pile items up until they go past a certain height, and maintain that height for three seconds. The challenge comes from the fact that the items are a wide range of objects with many irregular shapes: furniture, junk, vehicles, moai heads, and so on. You can also rotate them a full 360 degrees, rather than just through ninety degree increments. So you have to pile these items up high, balancing them on top of each other, trying to avoid them falling off of the platform on which they're being stacked.

 

Of course, there's also a score to chase, and this comes in the form of item weight. Every item has a weight, mostly around two-to-four, and you have to have a pile weighing at least forty to clear a stage, with better grades being awarded for going beyond that. As well as that, each set of stages has obstacles, like wind, thunderclouds, birds, as well as an enemy character, who will periodically appear to use their power and hinder your progress. The problem with all of these things is that basically do the same thing in slightly different ways: they take away your ability to control the falling items as well as you like. It's a boring way to add challenge, and I would have vastly preferred something like changing the goals for each set of stages, adding objects that are harder to balance, and so on. Just taking away the player's ability to control the game is just no fun at all.

 

Crazy Construction isn't a bad game, just a flawed one. Just kind of mindlessly stacking items on a handheld while you watch TV is pretty nice, it's just a shame the challenges they added tend towards the mean-spirited and player-unfriendly, rather than actually being challenging. Also, the plot is about a bynch of construction androids rebelling against the evil corporation who made them, and the corporation sending other androids to bring them back under the heel, which I'm pretty sure is a Kamen Rider parody. Which is nice.

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.