So this game is based on an anime that I've never seen (and which seems to be officially known in English as Elemental Gelade, and I did have to look up both spellings to get the exact right arrangement of Ls, Rs, and vowels), but it's a fighting game by Taito, which in my mind, makes it worthy of some attention already. Then I looked it up on GameFAQS, and they say that it was only published by…
If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists. However, it doesn't look too bad in screenshots, and it's a Dreamcast racing game, so I assumed it couldn't be as bad as people say. Plus, the old timey setting was a pretty appealling gimmick, so I gave it a try. And at first, it seemed like everyone was being too harsh on Spirit of…
I feel like whenever I look into the library of the Famicom Disk System, I find a lot of games that are kind of interesting as curiosities, as well as the seedy underbelly of the 1980s Famicom boom. But in Meikyuu Jiin Dababa, I've managed to find an FDS game that is actually a lot of fun to play! It being one of those rare games to be set in mythic India is a nice little bonus, too. You play as a…
1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, but this one (which does seem to be official) is the only one I've played. It's something of a mixed bag, being a true sequel in the sense that it…
Judging by the title, I really expected Tiny Bullets to be another one of those excellent 3D shooting games secretly hiding in the Playstation library, like Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero . Instead, it's more of a combination of Tomb Raider's meticulous 3D platforming and Resident Evil's simple "put the item in the hole" puzzle-solving. Also, the player character looks like a babyfaced Sonic…
A quick disclaimer first: after I'd already bought a physical copy of this game, and then played it for a week and a half, I found out that it actually has a western release (though I don't think it has a physical version), under the title Cats Away. But the Japanese version (technically) has an English translation included, that's the version I've been playing, and that's the version I'm…
This is a demake of World of Horror, a game I haven't yet played (though I'm sure I will eventually), but which drew me in simply for the novelty of being a horror game made for Game Boy Color. Because I haven't played its inspiration, I can only judge it as a game in its own right, and am unable to compare the two. It uses a few elements that it seems like a lot of the new wave of Game Boy Color…
While looking up which came first out of the Battle Athletess anime and videogames, I found something surprising: it was neither! It originated as a radio drama! Then, the Saturn game was released before there was an anime. That Saturn game, is, I believe, a kind of girl-raising sim in the vein of Princess Maker or Graduation, and has never been translated into English. I guess they wanted to go a…
As a publisher, Midas were famous mainly for two things: localising occasionally interesting Japanese budget games , and also publishing mostly-terrible original budget games. Skate Attack isn't one of the former, so my hopes for it weren't high. But I tried it anyway, being the fair-minded person that I am, and for a little while, I was pleasantly surprised! On initial inspection, this seems like…
This is a game I've been meaning to write about for a long time, and finally, I'm getting around to it (the roadblock being that I misplaced my original DS and have now finally got ahold of a gizmo that can satisfactorily emulate the DS and take screenshots while doing so. Unfortunately, the 3DS can only do one of those things at the same time.) It's a licensed fighting game (based, unusually, on…
In real life, coin pushers are a hated scourge, the disease that has overrun and essentially killed off everything fun and interesting in the UK's seaside arcades. But when I noticed there was a series of videogame adaptations of the concept, my curiosity was piqued: how would you turn such a simple concept, that's so reliant on physicality and prizes into a videogame that is inherently unable to…
Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games. One of my most-loved games is the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast, and with a bit of practice, you can reliably get through it in under ten minutes. Something a little different, however, is The Great Waldo Search: the first time I loaded it up, I'd seen the ending in a similarly short time. I didn't measure it, but I was sure it was…
Among the many prominent and exciting translation patches that have been released in recent times, it feels like Wonder Trek kind of fell by the wayside, and didn't really get the attention it deserved. Which is strange, since I'm sure a basic description of what kind of game it is has at least one element that appeals to a wide range of different tastes and interests: it's an isometric open world…
Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, there hasn't been a lot of iteration on its principles over the years, not by SEGA nor by anyone else. But Pixel, who made a name for themselves…
It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel…
Though I think nowadays, when people think of Hokuto no Ken games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, they're more likely to think of the ones on Master System and Mega Drive, there was a series of them on Nintendo's consoles, too. And while the Nintendo games carried a sequel number across seven games (so yes, this is apparently a part of the same series of games as the Famicom beat em up Hokuto no Ken 2…
Something interesting about budget hames in particular is the way in whih the best of them manage to get a maximum amount of game with a minimum amount of resources, especially when they manage to do it without resorting to boring grinding or other timesink tactics. And The Kendo is a good example of that! Most of the characters in the game are represented by the same model with different coloured…
Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port…
Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures. For a couple of short years, I loved the TV show, the comic, and when it came to pass that a Mega Drive game was coming, I became obsessed with wanting to play it, even using the screenshot maps in…
Everyone loves to read about Japan-exclusive Playstation games, but Blood Lines is part of a much rarer breed: PAL-exclusive Playstation games! Despite that, someone at Sony Europe must have had some faith in it, as I remember playing it on a magazine demo disc back at the time. I especially remember the line "LOSING BECOMES YOU!" that one of the characters shouts after winning a round, in an…
It might seem a little odd for me to be writing about a game that's a tie-in to an incredibly popular mainstream movie. But there's a few mitigating factors at play here. Firstly, it's a Mega CD game, and almost every Mega CD game can be considered at least a little obscure. Not only that, but it's also a platformer on the Mega CD, and it was released in 1993, and to the magazines of the time,…
The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar. I do remember, probably more than twenty years ago, spending an afternoon playing one of the GBA Monster rancher games via emulation, keeping the fast forward button held down almost constantly. Even further back, I remember people complaining online that there weren't enough female characters in the anime about whom to write…
I know this game isn't particularly obscure, but this is a special case. This is specifically the Japanese version of the game also known as Project Justice, and a big difference between the two versions is that Moero! Justice Gakuen had a whole mode that was removed from Project Justice. That mode is Nekketsu Nikki (Hot-Blooded Diary), a character creation mode, combined with a board game with a…
There's some slightly odd circumstances surrounding the release of this game. Firstly, it's one of those games with a massive gap between its Japanese release (1996) and its western release (1999). Also, in Japan, it's called Gussun Paradise, which is a better name for it than Yoyo's Puzzle Park for two reasons. The first is that it lets you know that it's a spinoff from the Gussun Oyoyo series of…
The first thing that stands out about Happy! Happy!! Boarders upon starting it is the way it sounds and looks: it's going to be a feast for those "Y2K Aesthetic" appreciators out there. Then, with the snowboarding game I've played most of being another PS2 game, Alpine Racer 3, it's striking how much slower and more realistic this game is. You have quite a lot of control of your boarder in this…