Xevious: Fardraut Densetsu

~ XEVIOUS ~

Namco / Compile

HuCard

1990

Xevious and I didn't happen to cross paths during the game's heyday; in fact, it wasn't until I picked up this PC Engine rendition that I got to experience the "classic shooter" for myself. I really wish I had kept my distance, as this is as bad as vertical blasting gets on the PCE. Five seconds into my first session, I was actually grimacing, such was my displeasure. That the visuals are terribly antiquated wasn't the primary problem; I mean, I expected them to be hideous coming in. Splotchy forests, motionless waters, and silly dirt sketches didn't do nearly as much to repel me as did the "music," which consists of an incredibly brief string of high-pitched notes played over and over again. The sound effects are just as irritating, particularly the obnoxious blare that accompanies bomb drops. You'll make those drops and fire away with a boring two-stream pea shooter in an effort to annihilate small, dull "circle-with-a-dot-inside" adversaries. I've waged war against cooler enemies in Atari 2600 games, so let's establish this right now regarding where Xevious' designers went wrong: technological limitations were not the issue; lack of creativity was. And primitive certainly needn't mean repulsive or annoying.

It would've taken some great action to offset all those shortcomings, but Xevious doesn't toss a lot of bullets at you for quite some time, and only in brief bursts even then. There really isn't any reason to endure the monotony for long, as the game eventually enters a stretch of eternal looping. If you decide to continue on for the sake of achieving a high score... well, chances are you won't do that, as you're unlikely to find anything here that'll hold your interest.

But hey, I've been focusing thus far on the "Arcade" mode, the faithful-down-to-every-last-dull-moment replication of the original. There's also a "Fardraut" mode, a purportedly advanced rendition of the should've-stayed-retired oldie. With Fardraut came hope; after all, other over-the-hillers like Galaga and Space Invaders emerged from the upgrade operating room in acceptable-for-16-bit forms. And this Fardraut not only has a set number of stages rather than looping interminably but also tells a story as you play through it--a story conveyed via text and, well, some lame cinematic stills.

I couldn't help but smirk upon first witnessing those plot-detailing wastes. The smirk was wiped right off my face by the stages themselves, which pissed me off outright...

...as what they serve up is pretty much the same crap that's delivered by the horrible original version of the game. The music resembles normal game music a little more, but it's still repetitive racket. You can grab icons that do not-so-thrilling things like granting you additional bullet streams and vaporizing enemy-fired projectiles. And there are what I suppose we can consider bosses and mini-bosses that appear at certain points during the dragged-out four-board journey.

So, what's there to say for Xevious? Fans anxious to paint it as a pioneer quickly point to its "innovative" dual-weapon scheme: you use cannons to take out aerial threats and bombs to eliminate terrain-based foes. Well, that's wonderful. Bravo, Xevious. Thanks to your groundbreaking efforts, other games have been able to employ such systems in contexts that actually don't repel players at once. I think I'll go play Cyber Core now.

Lady Sword

~ LADY SWORD ~

Games Express

HuCard

1992

Tits are Lady Sword's hook. Tits are your incentive to plod haplessly through dungeons that are overly large yet strangely devoid of interesting puzzles and obstacles, to endure too-frequent random battles and unspectacular musical tracks, and to fumble around with a cumbersome setup that requires players to press the Run button in order to access essential maze maps (a pointless requirement considering all the main-screen space that's wasted on nothingness, and an annoying one when step-by-step map consulting becomes necessary in dark or trap-littered areas). Were Lady Sword tits-less and bold enough to stand solely on its merits as a first-person dungeon crawler, there's no doubt it would be deemed a title that stumbles in more ways than it excels.

All that stumbling doesn't mean that Games Express got nothing right in their endeavor, however. In fact, whoever was responsible for Lady Sword's monster designs did a hell of a job. The variety in the cast is laudable; I met what seemed to be over a dozen different breeds of beast just during my inaugural reckless dash to first-floor slaughter. The designs are a bit too cartoony for my liking, but I do get a kick out of how certain enormous bosses and mini-bosses are sketched as stooped to account for being crammed into lairs too restrictive for their hulking frames.

Even beings who don't immediately assail you have their own, er, "unique charms."

Confrontations can be handled in quick, painless fashion. Also convenient are the options to save and rest whenever you so desire (though dream invaders will occasionally interrupt your convalescence) and set warp points so that important locations can be revisited in a flash. Actually, it's all a little too simple; expect nothing in the way of commerce, spell books, strategic battling, or puzzle solving. Items you need are almost always laid out for you along the correct route to a floor's exit, so there is seldom any reason to poke around in side-corridors and fill out your map, seldom any worthwhile extra exploration to partake in. You'll have to be content with lots of monsters, fast fights, and tits.

Really, though, Lady Sword makes for decent dungeon romping, and it could've been a good game had it offered some confounding conundrums to solve and tucked-away items to locate. As it is, it's too damn boring for stretches, as it doesn't give players much to do aside from wandering around, fighting, and trying to make heads or tails of the gargantuan floor layouts. It's worth playing... if you've already experienced other, much-better PCE dungeon crawlers (like Dragon Knight II and Madou Monogatari) and you're scouring the market for more.

Volfied

~ VOLFIED ~

Taito

HuCard

1989

Well, the first part of this review is going to be difficult for me. I feel like I should explain how this strange little game works, but that's no simple task, so bear with me. You control a tiny spacecraft that leaves red lines in its wake as it flies about the playfield. Create a box with said lines to mark off territory as your own; the enclosed area takes on a new appearance as you continue with your veritable conquest-by-doodling. Claim 75% of the round's land and you'll get to move on to a new rectangular realm. Three kinds of enemies take issue with your "three-fourths of this country are mine" declarations: yard bosses who possess missile-attack capabilities, smaller creatures who can be obliterated if you obtain and make good use of a laser cannon, and odd electrically charged orbs that blaze mindlessly along until they ram into your ship. While the electrocution corps settle for nothing but head-on assaults, their prancing cohorts merely need to come in contact with a box-in-progress to deplete your life stock by one.

I'm sure that made very little sense. But the second part of this review is going to be even more difficult for me, as this is where I try to explain why all of that nonsense actually constitutes a pretty enjoyable experience. Most of the fun to be had in Volfied comes from taking chances, from extending a line as far as you can, from attempting to create as large a box as possible when you know a collision can take place at any moment. Stumbling upon time-stop or speed-up icons adds to the fun, as you suddenly gain a significant advantage over the adversaries who'd been making such meddling nuisances of themselves. And extra incentive to push yourself comes in the form of bonus points for going beyond the 75% requirement.

Now it's time for the last part of the review, which will be enjoyable for me, as here's where I get to bash the poor little game for a bit. It consists of forty levels but features far too few enemy types to remain interesting for such a long stretch. Later board layouts seem all too familiar (with the less-enjoyable, icon-devoid ones making for annoying speed bumps), and the gameplay itself feels overly repetitive before even half the quest has been completed. And with droning sound effects proving poor substitutes for quality musical tracks, late-round Volfied only agitates when it isn't wallowing in dullness. Still, the game is enjoyable and intriguing off the bat and comes cheaply enough for its few-rounds-of-fun degree of success to be deemed acceptable.

Yuu Yuu Jinsei (Victory Life)

~ YUU YUU JINSEI ~

Hudson Soft / Takara

HuCard

1988

The Life board game seemed pretty neat to me back when I was really young. I couldn't have cared less how the game is played or what it's all about, but I did know that it involves moving neat little cars down a road, and that was cool enough for me. I was an easily amused little goofball.

Now I'm a much bigger goofball, and as the whole "little cars" thing doesn't carry quite as much weight as it once did, I had to acquaint myself with the "technicalities" of the Life experience to get into this PC Engine take on it. The automobile element is still present, of course, and you get to choose a driver from a set of ten rather doofy-looking folks.

Then you have to set off and make a (mostly randomly determined) living for yourself. As you make your way around the board, you'll experience myriad normal-life events, the particulars of which are determined by the paths you take and the spots you land on. Find work, get married, have a kid, crash your car, watch your house burn down, meet an alien... you know, all the usual stuff.

Of course, the whole point is to make as much money as you can...

...so that you end up living a more luxurious life than your opponents.

I dug the core game a lot more when all I knew about it was the car element. There's very little thought or effort involved; so much of it boils down to pure luck. And the animated bits just aren't amusing enough to inject the goings-on with the charisma they need to remain entertaining.

Space Invaders: Fukkatsu no Hi

~ SPACE INVADERS: FUKKATSU NO HI ~

Taito

HuCard

1990

I didn't like Space Invaders even back when it was "all the rage." There just wasn't enough speed, strategy, or spontaneity to the SI experience. I guess I never quite got the alleged "quaint" appeal of the slow, dull manner in which the stick-with-their-partners aliens proceed with their "invasion"; and I reaped nothing but boredom from the required repetitive utilization of basic tactics. Also, it wasn't long before I discovered "shoot-from-the-bottom" shooters that have so much more to offer. Demon Attack is much more dynamic and colorful and features a wider variety of aliens to blast, and most of its creatures are tougher to annihilate and far less predictable than the average antennae-topped Space Invaders punk. Action-packed Spider Fighter gives players something to look forward to in that it grants them super-fast gunfire once they make sufficient progress, while SI changes things up merely by allowing its aliens offsides starts in later rounds. Even the not-exactly-thrilling-itself Centipede comes off as veritably manic in style when compared with SI thanks to its more-crowded playfield.

The bottom line is that Space Invaders bored me. I would lose patience with it so early during any given session that I'd often go right ahead and blast up my own damn defense barriers so I could get at the dopey aliens that much more quickly.

Needless to say, I really didn't ponder the possibilities of what HuCard Space Invaders would have in store for me. Hell, sitting through just a few seconds of this horrid antiquity...

...made me want to ditch the chip entirely. But I decided to stick with it for a bit and started firing away (at my own shields, of course). After a couple of rounds, I'd had enough.

I couldn't wash my hands of the whole abysmal affair yet, though, as there was still the special "Plus" mode to experience. So with the goal in mind of getting the obligatory give-it-a-try session out of the way as quickly as possible, I started up a game of Plus and watched a pointless "polygonal" spacecraft-tossing exhibition.

I just wanted the game to stop embarrassing itself at that point. It was one of those "You're not cool, so stop acting like you are" moments. But Plus ran through its "3D" shenanigans quickly enough, and once I began playing the game proper, I discovered that it actually is kinda cool in some ways.

First things first: it's fast. Everything happens so much more quickly here than in the terribly methodical original. There are many more alien types to deal with, and the creatures here have three-way shots at their disposal in addition to the usual straight-line bomb attacks. They occasionally align themselves in formations more complex than the facile rectangle-of-rows that their ancestors assembled in. You're provided with numerous neat auxiliary items with which you can fend off your wily new adversaries. Decent-looking backdrops spell the old black nothings that classic battles played out atop. And accompanying the upgraded action is actual music (as opposed to the "tense" lines of blops that had previously passed for a "score").

SI Plus is an enormous improvement over the original Space Invaders, though it isn't quite the renaissance success story that Galaga '90 is; its gameplay just isn't at a high-enough level. It's too random for you to ever get in a zone with it like you can with '90, as luck comes into play a little too often: sometimes, you just have to hope that you're granted a useful secondary weapon or that the aliens don't unleash an untimely spread attack. And ultimately, the action is still monotonous. Nonetheless, even an old SI belittler like me can appreciate the fast-paced play of Plus, and those who actually adore the "classic" will likely consider this modernized take a must-own.

Maison Ikkoku

~ MAISON IKKOKU ~

Micro Cabin

HuCard

1989

You'd expect a HuCard digital comic to seem a bit lacking presentation-wise when compared with its CD-ROM peers, and indeed, Maison Ikkoku is as primitive a member of the genre as you'll find on the PCE, at least where audio and visuals are concerned. There's nothing rudimentary about what it requires players to do, though; this is no "click away 'til the end" sort of affair. While the item-finding and puzzle-solving requisites shouldn't prove too taxing for most, interaction with other characters is where matters get dicey and demand delicacy, and prudent management of the protagonist's limited finances is essential.

Ironically, while Maison certainly gives you enough things to worry about at any given moment, and its seemingly wide-open "take a look around and see what you can make of things" realm presents little in the way of guidance, there really isn't all that much that you can do in it. You spend most of your time loitering in the hallways of a simply structured house, where ill-tempered, odd-looking hooligans hound you like Furies until you shoo them away via ramen- or liquor-based bribery. The peace you attain is always only momentary, and though you can periodically escape from the madhouse and set off on brief excursions, shopping at the mini-mart or tutoring a dimwit doesn't make for exciting times.

Consequences for poor decisions can be severe; there are plenty of ways for your efforts to go disastrously awry and land you in unenviable predicaments.

There's no way you'll avoid an unfortunate fate if you can't read Japanese; there's just too much to the menu and gameplay systems to cheese your way to achieving the end goal (which is merely to glimpse at a hidden photo that, believe me, you can do without seeing anyway). An English patch for the game is available, but regardless of how much you'll be able to understand of what's going on, it's unlikely that you'll find Maison Ikkoku particularly interesting or entertaining. If, for some reason, you don't have access to the CD library but yearn to try a digital comic, I recommend the very-cool Chikudenya Toubee over this.