Review #466: Gouketuji Ichizoku 2 / Power Instinct 2

 The game about the little old ladies duking it out with projectile prosthetic dentures.

It's not a horror game, but that old lady is out to get you.

 Welcome to the weirdest and best fighting game you've never heard about. Gouketuji Ichizoku features a weird sense of humor, including little old ladies that can turn young by kissing their opponent, a little boy that turns into a dog-man thing, a ridiculous and fantastic soundtrack featuring tracks with vocals and a fantastic combat system, all hidden beneath a layer of Street Fighter II-clone paint.

 The game is a bit lacking in modes, an Arcade Ladder, VS Player and VS Team player. That's it, no survival, no time attack, no vs CPU, no nothing, there aren't even unlockables and the arcade Mode endings are disappointingly short. The cast of characters is made up of 13 unique characters, but playing in Team VS you have a few more characters. Characters that transform(except Kanji and the Goketuji sisters) have been divided, so Kurara and Super Kurara are two very different characters, Kintaro and Pochy the same, and you also get Kuroko and Oume Gouketuji(A clone of the playable Otane Gouketuji) for a total of 17 characters.

That's the time when they go Super Saiyan.

 The game looks like Street Fighter II, with chubby, simple 2-D sprites, but foes with the 4-button set-up other fighters go, so you get two punches and two kicks. It's also much faster, the speed being somewhere between SFII and Darkstalkers, characters dash-step, back-step and double jump, on top of the game being pretty fast. Characters have the same amount of special attacks as well as a single super move that can be used when your super gauge fills. This gauge is filled by receiving damage, and once it feels your character will produce a blue aura that knocks the opponent back, if close enough, dealing a bit of damage, and making you invincible for the few seconds its active. The combat is fast and furious, the combo system is pretty tight and characters offer a lot of tools to get creative with.

 There is one fatal flaw however... The game comes in a disc, and we know how the PS1 tends to treat fighting games and loading times.... Well, anytime a character transforms the game will freeze for 5-6 seconds in order to load the temporary transformation... and once the time runs out, well, get ready for another loading pause. There're many characters with this ability, Kurara and Super Kurara, Kintaro and Pochy, Oume & Otane with their young transformations, Kanji with his weak transformation and lest we forget that Kurara's Super will transform anything it hits into a pig or a duck. Yeah, matches featuring Kurara can be insufferable. It's kinda depressing, since the game runs very smoothly and fighting feels fantastic, until someone decides to play a character such as Kurara...

Totally not Ryu, he's got legs like Chun-Li and Shoryukens like Ken.

 I might be a bit generous, but... but despite how little content it has, despite how horrible the mid-fight loading times are... the core game is top-notch. I think I might even like it more than Street Fighter II thanks to it marrying fantastic gameplay with a ton of quirky creativity that makes it stand out from other games. That said, I think emulating this game is a better alternative than the PS1 disc, since you don't get the horrible loading times.
 8.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Gouketuji Ichizoku 2/Power Instinct 2

  The best fighting game you've never heard about.

Games don't tend to have a character roster this diverse and original.

 Let's go back in time, about... 10 years back or so, there I was, at the flea market on a Sunday morning. While scavenging through bootleg PS1 and PS2 games I came upon this Japanese thingie. And it wasn't just another disc, it was a honest-to-goodness original Japanese PS1 game. On a Latin American flea market! A quick inspection of the back-cover revealed it to be a 2-D fighting game, so of course I had to have it. And I did.

 Fast forward a few hours time and there I was, placing the disc on my fat PS2 and lo and behold, I knew this game! I had played Power Instinct 1 on the PS1, and boy oh boy was I having a blast. I've been a fan of the Power Instinct series ever seen, sadly, most games are Japan only. But I'm gonna import PS2's Matrimelee any time soon!

 As far as this game is concerned, it definitely has stood the test of time. The fighting feels good and fast, controls are responsive(I think, not having a modded PS2 means I'm emulating this, and playing with a X360 controller!), graphics are pretty and the music is ridiculous and amazing at the same time. The only blemish I came upon so far would be the loading times. Any time a character transforms, or gets transformed into a pig by Kurara, the game will pause for about 5-6 seconds in order to load, and then again when they revert. It's a bit of a mood killer.

 Other than that, Gouketuji Ichizoku 2 is fantastic.

Review #465: Psychic Force 2

 As 90s anime as you can get.

Look at those 90s animu character designs!

 The Psychic Force franchise was a two game oddity that was born in the Arcades but made its way to the PS1, Dreamcast and PS2. It's a fighting game unlike any other, well, at the time anyways, that pits two different Psychiccers against each other inside a floating cube of energy. It translates into a 2-D Fighter with a twist: Characters are flying at all times, and you get to move in 8 different directions.

 The game offers Arcade Mode, an 8 opponent ladder, Story, another 8 opponent ladder but with dialogue and a few stills, Rraining, VS CPU, VS Player, Group versus, Survival and Psy Expand, a mode in which you can customize a character with moves from the rest of the cast. It's a decent selection of modes complimented by 16 different characters who are very different from each other. Some lay out traps, some have special grabs, some can stop time, some can teleport, etc. That said, the game certainly makes it a grind to unlock every character, you must finish both Story and Arcade mode with every character to unlock everything, which will take a while and feels like a grind.

There's a lot of flying, projectiles and anime hair in this game.

 Characters have both weak and strong attacks, depending on the distance between you and your opponent, this will either be projectiles or punches and kicks. There're plenty of super moves performed a la Street Fighter, with directional inputs, but these consume energy that must be recharged by holding L1. As for defense, you've got barriers or high-speed dodges. As you get hit your maximum total energy increases for the round, or you can charge energy and mash the analog stick/digital pad to sacrifice your health to increase your maximum energy. It works pretty well, but I felt like sometimes I wouldn't get the special moves I wanted to do, probably a side-effect of the 360 degrees of movement and positioning allowed.

 Fast-paced, easy to learn but with enough depth to keep casuals entertained, Psychic Force 2 is a rather fun offering. The combo system is a bit limited, but it's fun to try out new and different things. You have to keep in mind that combos aren't the bread and butter of this game, but rather positioning, energy management and learning when to dodge and how to respond to projectiles. It's a very different kind of fighting game, but a fun one if you give it the chance.
 8.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Psychic Force 2

 No, it's not another X-Men game.

 Psychic Force is the inspiration behind the fantastic Dragon Ball Z SuperSonic Warriors game....s(the sequel wasn't too good). I've finished a few Arcade Routes and it's pretty fun, although not quite as fun as I remembered it to be.The full 360 degrees of movement also means that, sometimes, pulling of moves can be a bit tricky.

 Basically, I liked:
 - The 90s anime aesthetics.
 - The simple, but fun, combat mechanics
 - The amount of unlockables
 - Production values

 What I didn't:
 - The 90s anime aesthetics(Double edged sword!)
 - Pulling off special moves can be tricky
 - Unlocking some characters is a bit tedious.

 It's pretty alright. Sadly, since I own an american PS2, I'm running this game on a emulator. Makes me sad.

Review #464: TMNT(PS2)

 I was too kind. Too kind.

At least the cover isn't as focused on Raphael as the movie and the game were.

 I just finished my reassessment of the game, and read what I said about it in 2015 and I stand by everything I said but the final score.

 I think I cut the presentation/story some slack back then, because I found the dialogue insufferable and the way the story is told laughably bad. It sorta has the Turtles narrating what happened in past tense, voicing remarks or what they felt at the time, which is pretty dumb. I also failed to mention just how choppy the FMVs extracted from the movie are, I was probably guessing that my disc was scratched. It wasn't.

Bosses are the only element that brings a stop to the monotony of the combat sections.

 The game's main two components: Platforming and Combat are pretty bland too. Combat is as deep as mashing the circle button until you enter your 'super mode' and then mash circle some more. You'll have to do the occasional dodge or block every now and then, but it's a rare occurrence and if you are good at mashing you probably won't have to bother with either. It's hard to put into words just how lame and boring it is, fights never evolve and they never get exciting. The bosses offer more of a challenge, and even then they are pretty lame. Three out of the four bosses will escape after you deal some damage to them, which makes for pathetic fights, an then you have to fight them back to back on the final level, this time until their health bar finally drops to 0. It's so mindnumbingly boring!

 Platforming fares much better, but even then it fails to offer any challenge besides the fixed camera angles that will sometimes make you perform a jump instead of a wallrun or vice-versa. And sometimes it's hard to tell if they want you to make an assisted-jump or a wallrun, and don't try to go faster than the level itself or invisible walls or other shenanigans will stop you on your way. Donatello's exclusive jump is also a bit annoying to pull off, since you have to be at just the right distance unless you want to botch it. That said, when it's at its best it flows pretty nicely and looks pretty cool too. At its best.

The levels are so generic and  uninteresting.

 I don't know how else to put it, but TMNT is a boring, bland and dull game. Nothing's broken here, everything works as it should, but it's such a lifeless endeavor. Quite literally, any other TMNT game on the PS2 is a better choice than this, even Smash-up.
 4.0 out of 10

Now Playing: TMNT(PS2)

 As underwhelming as ever...

Deja vu.

 A few years ago, during a Ninja Turtle Month, I played TMNT on the Gamecube. I didn't like it. Earlier this year I came across this game, brand new, dirt cheap on the PS2, so I said... why not? So here I am, giving it another chance. And since this year saw no new TMNT game released, there'll be no Ninja Turtle month, plus, after the Spider-manathon, I'm not ready for a thematic month again... not until October anyways.

 So, first... I mean, second-first impressions? The combat is underwhelmingly bland, but, BUT the platforming is rather fun, I expected no less from Prince of Persia's developer. The stages, at least the first one, looks quite nice too. I'm not sure if my memory deceives me, but I think the game looks crisper than it did on the Gamecube. I might be remembering it wrongly though. I might check out the Gamecube version again after I'm done. Might.

 Lastly, I won't be reading my thoughts on the GC version until I'm done, since I don't want to temper with my current playthrough. At the end I will either validate everything I said or change my stance on it.

Review #463: The Simpsons - Hit & Run

 Now, if I could turn this opening line into a couch gag...

Yet another instance of Blue-Shirt Bart, even if he is nowhere to be found in the game.

 Now, join me on my trip back to the early 2000s, you with me? Grand Theft Auto 3 had released and now everything had to be a sandbox game. There was another franchise that just couldn't get enough of copying other games, first they aped Tony Hawk with their skateboarding game(It was really bad) and then they ripped off Crazy Taxi, they were so bold with they copying that Sega actually sued. Yes, it was the Simpsons, and not content with Sega's lawsuit, now they were gonna get their very own GTA game.

 Everything starts out with Springfield being invaded by a swarm of mechanical bees, and soon, a host of black vans start patrolling the city... and then Homer gets involved in it. The story claims to have been penned by The Simpsons writers, and maybe it was, but it wasn't particularly funny, but then again, this game came after their heyday. There're 7 stages with 7 main missions, 3 races and one bonus mission each, and on each stage you'll play as a different character: Homer(twice), Bart(twice), Lisa, Marge and.... Apu? It's a strange selection, a bit unfair too, that Homer and Bart get two stages while Lisa and Marge only get one, and why is Apu a playable character? In that case I'd rather get Krusty or someone else instead of another Bart stage, and Bart's pretty much my favorite character(Hey! I'm a 90s kid). Sadly, while there're 7 stages, there are only 3 maps. They are medium sized, certainly not as open as GTA, and while every time they are reused they receive little changes, it's still not enough, since most collectibles will be exactly where they were before, only the Cards and a few bees changing places.

Green arrows will point you in the right direction, years before GTA would adopt the mechanic.

 There's not much your Simpson character can do while on foot: X jumps and double jumps, Square kicks(You can't kill NPCs, only topple them, but you can break boxes or defeat the mechanical bees), circle dashes and triangle let's you get on any vehicle, this being a T for Teen game NPCs will gladly give you a ride on their car, you don't steal them! There're no weapons of any sort, nor is there a combat system, so as you could guess, 98% of the missions take place on wheels. There're only a handful of mission types: Get to X place on time, gather every item on time, race a vehicle, chase a vehicle, chase and smash onto a vehicle and gather what they drop or chase and destroy a vehicle(By smashing into it) before the time runs out. While it gets a bit predictable, it doesn't get too repetitive. The difficulty is all over the place, however, since some missions will be tougher than other subsequent ones for no reason at all. That said, most of the game is rather easy, and if you lose too much you'll be allowed to skip a mission.... save for the final one, which is hard as nails.

 Each stage has a decent amount of stuff to do in it. First and foremost, you'll want to smash everything you come into contact with to collect coins, which can be spent on costumes or extra vehicles. There're also 'gags' to find, which unlock nothing, 20 mechanical bees per stage to destroy(30 coins each, so you'll want to) and 7 trading cards per stage which unlock tracks for a silly isometrical racing mini-game(Up to four players!), as well as three optional races to partake in and a bonus mission that rewards you with a bonus car. One BIG problem comes with coins... money is pretty hard to come by unless you exploit the game, either by hitting without breaking every box and then reloading or turning on 'Invincible Car' and 'Cars explode on contact' to earn money by destroying vehicles. And you need money, every single stage requires you to buy at least one of the bonus cars, and sometimes you'll even need costumes. Unless you are gonna use cheats or exploits, ignore optional content unless you want to be stuck grinding for money.

If the car has a name, it's been on the show sometime before.

 As with any GTA clone, cause too much havoc and the police will come after you. You can't die(or kill), so you'll be fined 50 coins, which hurts a lot more than it sounds. Eventually this becomes the main source of the game's difficulty, since the missions themselves would be pretty easy had it not been because smashing into any object(except walls) will make the police siren gauge increase, so you'll be triggering the police pretty often during missions. It doesn't help that the game's physics are very floaty, and at times wonky, it's easy to lose control of your vehicle if you turn to hard, and drifting doesn't work too well. These are but some of the reasons that the last mission is so hard, but you also have to couple them with the fact that hitting a wall or a car hard enough will make the object you are carrying fall. And it's also a mission with two main parts, and losing on the second part means having to redo the entire first part(a race) again. There're quite a few of these 'two-part' missions without checkpoints, but the final mission is the only one in which it gets tedious.

 That said, as spotty as controls can be, as horrid as the framerate can get... Hit & Run is a fun game for the most part. Save the final mission, the game's difficulty, even on the harder missions, isn't so that the controls will make you lose a mission, heck, there's a lot of rubberbanding, if the enemy falls too far behind, they will catch up to you, but I also noticed that quite a few enemies would wait for me to catch up to them. And exploring the stages is very fun, even on my second visits, even when I realized that most stuff would be exactly where it was before, I was still having fun going from end to end. The dialogue, recorded by series' regulars, makes the game feel very legit, and a lot of care went into designing the game's three main worlds. The more you know about the Simpsons the more you'll like the game, since there're references to the lore everywhere, heck, every named car in the game appeared in some episode before, every single unlockable costume comes straight out of the series' itself.

Lisa tried to fit in with the cool crowd before. Hit & Run successfully managed to fit in with the GTA clones!

 The Simpsons - Hit & Run is easy to recommend to both fans of the show and people that don't care about it. Fans will get tons of references and allusions to the show, a game that makes the most of the license and stays true to it. Non-fans will get a watered-down, but mostly competent GTA clone that, unlike other gritty, realistic clones('Just Cause', 'True Crime', 'The Getaway'... I could go on), has a very cartoony take on it and doesn't take seriously, making it feel very fresh and different in comparison.
 7.0 out of 10