Also known as Scary Dreams1, Buster’s Bad Dream has slipped under the radar thanks to its incredibly delayed release stateside, its outdated cartoon license, and its overall limited presentation. If anything, the game has had more discussion as a prototype of sorts for Astro Boy: Omega Factor, both of which were programmed by Yaiman (Mitsuru Yaida, best known for leading Gunstar Heroes and the Bangai-O games). However, where Omega Factor and many of Treasure’s other titles focus heavily on setpieces, Buster’s Bad Dream’s restraint helps it stand out for those more interested in pure combat. The single-plane beat ’em up engine compares less to Treasure’s 16-bit days and more to Fill-in-Cafe games like Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit, with deep toolkits that draw from contemporary fighting games more than belt scroller classics.
One distinguishing factor of vehicle games that tends to get lost in genres tied to humanoid avatars is that turning around can be rather difficult. When you’re driving a car, you have the option of either doing a 180° turn, subject to all of the dynamics that a tight turn involves at speed, or stopping to shift into reverse. Banishing Racer applies a rudimentary version of this on the 2D plane, where the main car refuses to ignore inertia and going backwards requires overcoming the forward force. It’s not realistic by any means – the other main movement mechanic is a forward dash that can also be done after jumping – but it helps differentiate the game from peers that had moved away from this handling model by the early ’90s.
In the era of Metroidvanias before Super Metroid, a dense world would still take the form of traditional single-directional platformer levels, just interconnected with ability-driven progression. Metroid II looks much the same as you descend down into SR388, wading through pitch-black caverns on your mission to eradicate every remaining Metroid on the planet. At most you’ll walk over a bridge or slide through a gap in the floor, but nothing lets you know the game’s true scope until you obtain the Spider Ball. With Samus now able to roll up walls, the player can start crawling up the outside of the ruins where they obtained the upgrade, revealing a far more vast, coherent structure than the truncated view from the entrance allowed. Probing in the ceiling and the high walls reveals new entrances, with new rooms segregated from the main halls and tunnels through rooms you’ve been through before. The NES forerunners of the Metroidvania pushed up against that system’s rigid scrolling system and tight screen buffer, whereas R&D1 squeezes a much more formidable world out of the Game Boy’s more sophisticated renderer.
Sega’s mission statement for the ’90s in a three-track package. Where Ridge Racer points to energetic hard dance and concrete urban environments1, Sega zagged and descended into full kitsch. Daytona splatters mismatched grotesque fonts all over the interface, drills three-reel slots into a rock overpass on the one course even vaguely related to the NASCAR tracks that inspired the game, and lets cars go lazily flying after head-on collisions only to bounce gently back onto all four wheels. Mitsuyoshi’s soundtrack anchors itself against auxiliary percussion-heavy rhythms relying on dense syncopation reminiscent of batucada, flavoring them with squelchy bass and urgent ninths on retro keys. To build out the sound, Mitsuyoshi liberally samples himself, with the limited clip length giving his voice a robotic tremolo on sustains. And above it all: the blue sky, the brilliant lighting, all against cleanly textured cars deforming like cardboard models. It’s the same look and feel that Sega would carry all the way through the Dreamcast era; no matter how tacky or garish, it’s the essence of their gonzo arcade philosophy.
A Metroidvania based on an arcade game should instantly ring structural bells, but Strider thankfully opts for an on-rails approach. Strider Hiryu leaps into the Meio Tower to expel its emperor with almost as little fuss as its forebear, and the narrative rarely amounts to more than occasional shady figures giving Hiryu tidbits on how to crush the empire from within. In-game markers drag the player around from area to area with frequent shortcuts cutting down extraneous travel time, and when the player actually has to backtrack, the game spins up new enemy encounters to keep the pace moving. This approach may have been just as much out of necessity as preference, as the game lacks non-combat-related abilities or puzzle potential, and what little exists for hidden items rarely scale past opening an out-of-the-way door with a late-game key.
While Coloris sits on a match-three foundation, it distinguishes itself from similar titles through a Mizuguchi-esque approach to player-guided sound evolution. With the help of jittery art-pop musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius), the team at Skip layers inputs and playfield updates with scratchy samples, sidechained against an LFO or glazed with brittle reverb. Each square on the playfield decays into garbage when left untouched, and as they get closer to their transformation they pulse quicker and quicker. Lines scroll, dots shimmer, each block’s skin turns itself inside out, bugs crawl across, and leaves fall, each shimmering at an increasing clip until burning out with the gasp of a synth pad sting. At the game’s end, each sound effect comes together into an arrangement of blocks snapping on and off in rhythm as Oyamada presents his overarching composition. Even as the game seems to sputter on its own premise, dialing back the visual flair on the last few stages, the way it coalesces in this finale makes it clear that the campaign serves as a vehicle for sonic ideas. The player has space to contextualize the stems in their own way, pushing through until their final form is revealed.
While the overall 2D platformer scene died down in the advent of polygonal rendering in the late ’90s, Klonoa quietly inherited the mantle of Yoshi’s Island and brought its slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs into the fifth generation. Much like how Yoshi can ingest enemies to create throwable eggs, Klonoa can capture and inflate enemies, although he can only hold one at a time. This restriction directly feeds into Klonoa’s puzzle design: every obstacle in the environment requires Klonoa to immediately interface with surrounding enemies to get past, unlike Yoshi’s Island, where a persistent “inventory” of eggs trailing Yoshi and a plethora of egg generators let players decouple storage from puzzle solving.
I tend to play a lot of games at once, and recently I’ve been sampling the start of many different games just to keep myself fresh and avoid getting bored with any particular game I’m playing. It also helps that I recently got ethernet streaming set up for my PS2 and have a much wider set of games available for myself. Although I have a list of titles that I’m closer to finishing and will be focusing on those for the time being, here’s some early impressions of a few under-the-radar titles that I know I’ll be returning to in the future.
A group of simulation game experts naively wandering into the arcade domain results in the rich fabric of mechanics combining the best of each genre coming out patchy. The box pitch (yell commands to your troops while you play pinball on the controller) presents the two concepts as separate, but in reality the troop manipulation rarely progresses past keeping up a tempo of pressing your troops forward and rallying them around occasional interactables. Instead, the uneasy alliance between the mighty Odama and your comparatively diminutive troops takes the forefront.
Although the painful gotcha moments and frequent shifts between setpieces may hide it on a blind playthrough, Strider’s main appeal is its movement and handling, which bridge the gap between commitment and fluidity. Main character Hiryu’s moving jump arc is a graceful parabola befitting the fixed movement of something like Castlevania, yet it interfaces with the rest of Hiryu’s kit elegantly thanks to its lack of endlag and gentle buffering. Hiryu can leap backwards to cancel his ground slide, instantly flip off of poles and ledges that he grabs, and rotate mid-jump to slash foes behind him with minimal effort. Learning the ins and outs of how all of these moves interact with each other takes effort thanks to both natural and unnatural restrictions set in place: the inability to jump out of a crouch given that the input makes Hiryu slide makes sense, while some curved ceilings being traversable forward while not backwards is less intuitive. However, learning these interactions gives the players the tools to improvise in navigating level layouts compared to the stricter routing of its ilk, all without the dynamic enemy spawns of contemporaries like Ghouls ’n Ghosts.
