Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.

Other Stuff Monthly #23!

 With a front cover that looks more like an ad you'd see on the back cover of a videogame magazine, Vortex #0 is the only publication Electrobrain Comics ever put out. Well, kind of. There are two versions of it: the full thirty-two page version, which has a comic story and a strategy guide for the game that shares its title (a Super FX-powered 3D shooting game for SNES), as well as a nine page version that only includes the comic.

 

The comic tells a prologue story for the videogame, and it's surprisingly complex, fitting a lot of stuff in its low page count. The eight planets of the Deoberon system (ruled by Emperor Deoberon) live in peace, with only one of them having any kind of military installations, just in case. Barkahn, one of the local lords, hates this arrangement, and believes the system needs more defence, which he sets out to prove by attacking one of the planets and killing a bunch of people, then trying to take over the whole system.

 

Emperor Deoberon sets his scientists to the task of coming up with a way to stop Barkahn's villainy, and they create a magic computer that sends Barkahn, his armies, nd the four planets they conquered into another dimension. When everything dies down, Deoberon and Barkahn both die, and Barkahn's best friend, Vercingetorix, vows revenge, and his scientists find a way out of the prison dimension, and they steal the magic computer that sent them there. So the game casts you as the ace pilot sent into the prison dimension to defeat Vercingetorix and retrieve the computer. Phew.

 

Then there's the walkthrough, taking the form of lots of captioned screenshots, telling you what's in each stage, and what you need to do to get through it. The way some parts are written makes Vortex seem like a game that would be a confusing bore to get through unguided: "Cany you find all of these hidden keys, bonuses, and tunnels? You can't defeat Darius without them all!", "Don not allow Xerxes to close in on you! He will fire a weapon that will destroy you immediately!", and "You must have four electro bombs to defeat Vercingetorix!", that kind of stuff, you know? Sorry to bring this concept up two posts in a row, but it sounds like the kind of advice sitcom characters give each other when they're all temporarily obsessed with some unseen videogame that's never ben mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

 

Other than all that stuff, the other items worthy of note are two ads in the inside pages of the front and back covers. In the front, there's an ad for a game I've never heard of before: Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme Skiing and Snowboarding, while more intriguing is the ad in the back cover. It shows neither a title nor any screenshots, only a motorcross biker, and the promse od a hot newe Super FX title from Electrobrain, to be announced in the fourth quarter of 1994. I can't find any evidence of this game being released or announced, nor can I find mention of any Motorcross games from Electrobrain on lists of unreleased SNES games.