Bazaaru de Gozaaru no Game de Gozaaru

~ BAZAARU DE GOZAARU ~

NEC Home Electronics / GAME FREAK

Super CD-ROM

1996

I wanted to acquire Bazaaru de Gozaaru in part because I thought it'd be a nice collection piece, as it seems pretty darn rare, and in part because I'd long been curious about it, often wondering to myself, "What the hell is that monkey game all about?" I went in thinking that any enjoyment I'd get out of it would be gravy. Much to my surprise, I found myself addicted to it almost at once and blazed right through its eighty levels, having a great time the whole way through.

It looks like a platformer from afar, but it's really a trial-and-error-style puzzle game. In each stage, you've got to guide Bazaaru from the starting point to the goal while dealing with springs, pitfalls, and FIERCE ENEMIES... like little white puppy dogs.

Every level has a number of "action points"; your job is to select moves for Bazaaru to carry out at said points. He can jump or roll or spin... or dance or doze or do the moonwalk.

Once you've settled on your moves, you can sit back and watch the zaniness unfold, as the crazy monkey tiptoes past sleeping mutts, gobbles up bananas to extend the time he's allotted to finish his mission, and snags moneybags that are scattered about the various environs (which include a desert, an amusement park, and the moon).

There are one hundred moneybags to grab, and the fact that some of them are in out-of-the-way, tough-to-reach places adds a "sidequest" element to the proceedings. You may use the cash you collect to buy furniture for Bazaaru's house, which starts off as little more than an empty box. You can eventually have it decked out with curtains, a bed, a computer, and other such luxuriances, much to the monkey's delight.

The game isn't very challenging, which is fine with me. I enjoy tough puzzle games like Tricky Kick once in a while, but there are times when I prefer an easier ride, and Bazaaru fits the bill for those instances. Its music is decent, and its graphics are simple but nice looking. Yellowish-orange hues dominate the drawings; so, uh, be prepared for that.

This is the sort of game that definitely won't appeal to everyone, but the folks to whom it does appeal will have an awful lot of fun with it. There are those who'll have a blast solving the puzzles and those who'll get a kick out of the monkey's goofy antics. And then there's my well-off cousin Zigfriedoslov, who sure does love collecting those moneybags.

Gomola Speed

~ GOMOLA SPEED ~

UPL

HuCard

1990

You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen people passing along the good word on this game, how many times I myself was told of its "must own" and "unknown gem" status. And I'm talking about people who know their stuff, reliable guys who had given me solid recommendations in the past and whose game evaluations I won't hesitate to trust in the future; these are not some know-nothing knaves on a backwater web site. Yet, I did not end up merely disliking Gomola Speed--I downright hated it.

It starts off innocuously enough. You begin each round as a, uh, worm head, and you have to zip around Gauntlet-esque mini-maze-type boards to capture your roving body segments.

Your main objective once you start to resemble a full-length creepy crawler rather than a vagabond insect head is to collect the "food" that's just sort of rolling around. You accomplish this by wrapping your creature's newly formed body around the treat--and this is where things go straight to hell for me. And maybe it really is just me, but I find this wrap-around "technique" to be one of the most cumbersome and aggravating play mechanisms I've ever come across. Causing further aggravation are the swift enemies who hound your miserable worm and slice off body segments you retrieved just seconds earlier. Sure, you can destroy these fiends, but first you need to "stun" them with well-placed (read: luckily placed) bombs a la Bomberman (another play mechanism I could live without), and then you have to pull off the constriction business to do them in once and for--well, actually, they won't really be gone for good. They'll just reappear in faster, angrier forms. And, incidentally, some of them can devour your bombs before the explosives detonate. Excellent.

So it really doesn't matter that the Gauntlet similarities made me feel right at home in the Gomola Speed world, or that many of the game's stages contain secret warps and breakable walls that should make them a lot of fun to explore, or that the placement of enemies in relation to board construction is truly ingenious at times. These things don't matter to me because I absolutely hate the principal gameplay elements. At least there are boss fights that are somewhat entertaining (being that for a number of them you gain the ability to shoot fireballs and thus finally employ a comfortable method of waging combat).

As I mentioned earlier, many trustworthy critics have praised this game. The mechanics don't sit well with me at all, but it really might just be me. It probably is. But if it's you too, you're gonna end up with a game you despise here. I'd rather play QBasic Nibbles than slog through this damn thing again.

Fighting Run

~ FIGHTING RUN ~

Nichibutsu

HuCard

1991

There have been times when a developer's best efforts didn't work out but warranted commendation nonetheless, when brave designers came up with a fresh idea and gave their concept a shot. And there have been times when it seemed obvious from the get-go that a developer had impending disaster on their hands and should've discarded their clearly flawed blueprint at once. Fighting Run never could've worked, as its premise (two robots barrel down a corridor while thrashing one another) is too fucking stupid; it really makes you wonder what the hell Nichibutsu were thinking when they came up with it (though with Nichibutsu nothing should really come as a surprise...). Why in the world must the warriors participating in a given match charge through a speed tunnel while battling? When my brother Duomitri and I have a dispute to settle, we square off like men; we don't go frolicking down the street side by side.

Well, in the Fighting Run universe, there are quite a few goofballs who enjoy this ridiculous brand of "competition," enough to fill the ranks of numerous circuits that you can advance through. As you proceed, you earn power points to improve your robot's speed, strength, and defense as well as a few weapons that, for the most part, aren't all that useful (though there's a cool chain-thing that enables you to harpoon an opponent stationed behind you and hurl him into perfect position for a beating).

How well does it play? Well... how well do you think it plays? Is there any strategy involved? Oh, sure. I like the strategy of sitting in a corner while my dumb computer-controlled foe stumbles suicidally into crap that's littered about the track.

Oh, there's "variety" too, as the corridor designs go from one type of ugly to another. There are some "funny" intermission scenes as well.

Zoom through the entire goofy gauntlet and you'll be treated to jovial end-game celebration screens. I was certainly happy when I reached said screens--happy to have gotten it all over with. But, funnily enough, I didn't mind experiencing Fighting Run. It is indeed a unique form of, uh, "robo-gladiation." And it does feel good to deal the final blow to an opponent and watch the ensuing explosion. However, the game certainly isn't novel enough (or nearly enjoyable enough) to make its many flaws forgivable. Anyone who does go ahead and purchase it will be making a "What the hell are you thinking?" sort of move, just like Nichibutsu were when they went ahead and designed the damn thing.

Stratego

~ STRATEGO ~

Victor Musical Industries / Accolade / JPI

HuCard

1992

A lot of people, me included, look back on the Stratego board game quite fondly. For many of us, it served as a cool introduction to "strategic" gaming. But an introductory role and nothing more seemed, in my mind at least, to be what it's best suited for. After all, it's fairly rudimentary as far as thinking man's material goes, bearing greater resemblance to Memory than to Risk. Way back when, it was cool to command an army consisting of several different types of soldiers, but nostalgia and the neatness of premise I perceived in my younger days were not going to make the PCE game work for me now. And when I powered it up and got a glimpse of its simplistic graphics, I was about ready to write the title off.

But this version of Stratego managed to rekindle my interest in the concept. There's nothing impressive about its visuals, but what's cool in regards to them is that you can choose from a variety of very different boards and characters. Take fairy-tale beasts and send them up into outer space, or position modern armed forces atop a medieval battlefield. Or just stick with the tried-and-true dual-lake Stratego board with the customary game pieces you grew up with.

You get a handful of tunes to select from as well, and most of them are actually very good. And while there's no two-player mode (it simply could not work here considering the importance of secrecy in placing units), you can get a multi-round campaign going where the rules are changed up as you advance.

Surprisingly, I found that Stratego in its essence actually still stands tall as an extremely enjoyable game. You'd think that as a fan of classic 16-bit titles I would've remembered that "simplistic" oldies often contain more depth than they're given credit for, and the ones that were truly done right in the first place can offer tons of fun no matter how many years go by.

SimEarth

~ SIMEARTH ~

Hudson Soft / Maxis / TTI

Super CD-ROM

1993

This snoozer has never appealed to me at all. Reading the hefty manual is like studying for a geology test, a task I'm glad I needn't undertake anymore. And this isn't a game that you can learn on the fly, as options are aplenty, and it plays out excruciatingly slowly. The basic theme of world construction isn't particularly alluring to me anyway, so I see little reason to acquaint myself with the ins and outs of the title. Bringing disaster to my planet in the form of a good meteor shower constituted the only "fun" I had during the few minutes I spent with the disc, so I take great comfort in the fact that it cost me but two dollars shipped. The poor sap who sold it to me paid more than that just to mail it and included the original $60 Toys "R" Us receipt as if to lay a guilt trip on me. It didn't work!

The opening sequence features this whiny globular guy who goes on about how unhappy he is and how the planet can't possibly flourish while he's unhappy.

This seems like a no-win situation for me at this point. The "game" has too many options and moves too slowly for me to bother learning it on the fly, and whenever I try to read through the manual, I end up dozing off.

Maybe someday I'll find the patience necessary to sit down and partake in a little world building. All I know for now is that I wasn't happy while I was playing SimEarth, and my planet couldn't possibly flourish while I was unhappy.

So I bombed the planet with meteors and then turned the game off.

Nice plague sound, though!

Hany on the Road

~ HANY ON THE ROAD ~
Face
HuCard
1990

Face was an assemblage of "mad scientists"; the craziness and creativity they poured into their work served to ensure that their customers would be in for interesting experiences (if not always positive ones). Unlike the cut-from-the-same-kooky-cloth oddballs at Wolf Team, they never did manage to crank out a masterpiece; their catalog boasts no El Vientos, though a few of their releases went beyond "experimental" and actually wound up being enjoyable. Hany on the Road is one of the fairly fun ones, a redemptive effort for its cucumber-like protagonist, who'd previously starred in a rather horrible overhead-view shooter. Clearly more at home in a sidescrolling context, Hany runs, jumps, and utilizes a backflip-based kick-attack to clear his path of foes. Actually--and here's the "big twist"--he typically has four paths to travel down and switch between as he makes his way through a level.

With four planes scrolling along at different speeds, Hany on the Road has a distinct, not at all unappealing look about it. Excellent color choices solidify its status as a graphically strong title.

You'll have some decisions to make as you journey through the nice-looking lands: the intermediary map screen occasionally allows you to "choose your path" a la Darius. The stages seldom feel redundant, and almost all of them are worth checking out, making multiple trips through the game worthwhile.

The miscreants inhabiting all those realms are interesting both in appearance and in how they attempt to take you down, especially in stages where environmental hazards exist. One challenging late-game strip pits Hany against a band of small yellow fools who try to latch on to him and hold him back as the road crumbles beneath his feet. To combat such wily foes, you can occasionally grab hold of weapons or, in very rare instances, undergo unexpected transformations.

No such drastic measures will need to be taken against the bosses, who are a little less crafty than their minions. Though they're interestingly bizarre design-wise, most of them can be destroyed simply by booting their own junk-shots right back at them. The last battle features a really neat twist, though.

Simpleton bosses are not the only problem here. Hany is a speedy, slip-sliding sort who's sure to crash into enemies or stumble off platforms despite your best efforts to avoid collisions and remain on solid ground, and his backflip technique has very limited range. Some of the stage designs seem, at least initially, to demand tighter, Super Mario-style controls and a more reliable primary attack. Practice and memorization will help decent, dedicated players overcome most of the gameplay issues. A tough desert stretch with quick-tugging quicksand and lots of dangerous cacti seemed rather irritating to me until I developed a feel for the board--and it ultimately became my favorite level in the game.

Similar salvation cannot be found in every unpleasant incident, though. Some stretches just feel sloppy, and some deaths just seem unavoidable. But if you find a path through the levels that you feel comfortable with and that contains but a few potentially irritating moments, you'll have a unique adventure that boasts some very nice graphics on your hands. And even if all else disappoints, the cool cover art alone makes the whole package worth acquiring.