VW's Top 1000 Games

[spanky]

Was Exploding Fist + just an alternative name for International Karate + or are they completely separate games that look identical? I loved IK+ far more than was healthy.

[Gulftastic]

Midtown Madness was terrific- I might do the MM3 write-up a bit later if someone hasn't beaten me to it.

Please do. I adored MM3. One of the first games in ages I played until I had unlocked virtually everything (some of the paint jobs escaped me). I still feel I could confidently manouvre around real-life Paris due to my extensive playing of the game.

[HappyTree]

I got all the paint jobs on MM3, finally! The hardest one is in Washington DC, way high in the air above the motorway just after a bend to the right. You must have the Koenigsegg to reach it as it's the only way to get enough speed up for the jump. Very tricky indeed! I still love playing this game, it got the cruise mode absolutely perfect. And that mammoth last race all over the entire Paris map is fantastic.

[Garfield And Friends]

#866: GALAXIAN

Genre: 2D single-screen shoot 'em up
Format: Coin-op Arcade
Publisher: Namco
Year: 1979
Developer: Namco



As a lone starfighter defending a region of outer space, you are challenged to defeat wave after wave of alien intruders. These aliens are pretty aggressive enemies, and will often break from their formation to divebomb you, sometimes three, four, or five of them at a time going in different swoops across your front.

The blighters can even angle their missiles to force you into a corner, where only a bit of quick maneuvering between their bombs can save your ship. To make matters even worse, you can only fire one cannon shot at a time, so any misses can be very costly indeed.

Should you almost defeat a wave of attacking aliens, the few remaining aggressors will proceed to go kamikaze crazy on you with divebomb after divebomb until you are either destroyed or they are eliminated.

Your reward for surviving a wave... is a whole new convoy of intergalactic creeps to obliterate! Good work rewarded with more work, sounds like my last job.

Galaxian easily trumps Space Invaders in my book. Multicoloured sprites that actually come to get you in packs, a nice flickering starfield effect in the background, real tension in the pulsing sound effects that get quicker and quicker as you reach the end of a wave with the aliens swooping at you like angry bees, and lots of nice touches like the bonus points for eliminating a gliding yellow squadron leader after kablamming his two lieutenants in quick succession (sometimes right before they might crash into your ship!).

A great arcade game that needs no story other than 'shoot or be shot'!

Galaxian - 80's flashback!

[Garfield And Friends]

#865: CHOCKS AWAY

Genre: 3D flying shooter
Format: Acorn Archimedes
Publisher: The Fourth Dimension
Year: 1990
Developer: Andrew Hutchings



Those magnificent men in their flying machines. They go up diddley up-up, they go RAT- AT-AT-AT- AT!!! Chocks Away is an entertaining polygonal arcade-style cockpit shooter set during World War 1.

There's no complicated flight simulator-like controls, it's basically just forward, backward, left, right, and fire. Despite this easy simplicity, the gameplay is ace whether dogfighting against another person, or against the CPU planes in mission mode.

This is another game that is top merriment just faffing about with your orange biplane. Sometimes I used to not take off the runaway, instead just 'driving' my plane around the maps, onto football fields, then doing turns to see how sharp I could change direction without smashing a wing into the ground and spectacularly exploding! Other times I'd just do all manner of loop the loops close to the ground and see how dangerously I could land (on low fuel/no engine power) without crashing. Capital tomfoolery!

If you had two Acorn Archimedes you could link them up via a serial cable and dogfight against your pal, both with full-screen views of course.

Machine gunning CPU plane after plane out of the sky is highly addictive, though it was easy to get too greedy (ha ha!) in adding to your hitlist and thereby miss mission targets, or indeed risk flying too close headlong into an oncoming opponent only for you both to crash terribly in midair. All you could do then was sadly watch your crippled aircraft silently tumble towards the ground, killing your unseen virtual pilot in the process, though sometimes you'd see the enemy hit the dirt first, which was some minor consolation in your last few seconds!

Once familiar enough, you could send almost the exact amount of bullets cascading into a soaring zeppelin before casually turning away from the target, only listening for the satisfying "pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-KERSMMMASSHH!" impact sounds to confirm you'd blown that sucker out of the sky. Niiiiice.

Chocks Away AcornGamez Video Archive

[falafel]

Shit Garfield, you should divert your verbosity a bit and write a novel. You'd be the next William T Vollmann.

[Rev]

#864: DEUS EX MACHINA

Genre: Suggestions welcome
Format: Spectrum (and C64?)
Publisher/Developer: Automata
Year: 1984



The couple of other games I've nominated for this list so far aren't necessaily my favourites of all time, or anything like that.  They're great, but more importantly, they're games that don't immediately suggest something similar that you might also enjoy.  That said, it's the small things that made them unique.  God help you if you liked this one and wanted more of the same.

Sixth-form sociology hats on for the plot:  there exists a machine, inside which a mouse has taken a shit.  The dropping causes a 'mistake' to occur, that mistake being your life.  You're a deviant, a potential non-conformist, and the game itself consists of playing from your formation at the DNA stage to your eventual death of old age.

You know what this means.  Minigames, and plenty of 'em.  To be frank, the games aren't all that interesting, particularly in the early stages.  You also can't really win or lose the game in the traditional sense; you have a percentage score, but you'll reach the end no matter what.

If we were talking about gameplay alone here, this wouldn't have a place on the list.  From the moment the screeching of your Spectrum loading turns into the voice of Jon Pertwee asking you to pause the tape so that it can be synced with the screen, however, this becomes a different proposition.

Yer Pertwee!  Yer Frankie Howerd!  Yer Ian Dury!  And a load of slightly dodgy music!  Y'see, Deus Ex Machina was an absolutely crackers multimedia experiment, and way ahead of its time in pretty much every department.  Essentially a concept album welded to a game, I'd struggle to call it a great game, but as an experience there's little to compare it to.

And it's bleak.  So very bleak.

[vrailaine]

Bah, sure Galaxian is no more entertaining than a load screen off the first Ridge Racer on the PlayStation.

Which reminds me, why did I buy Gradius V? I hate shoot-em-ups.

[Geraint]

have recently rediscovered some favourites from the N64 era via the wonders of emulation:

#863 F-Zero X

My favourite racing game on the system by far, F-Zero X is one of the most hectic games you'll ever play. Two things stand out immediately. First, the speed - the cars can easily reach 800km/h+ without hitting turbos (and more importantly, it feels fast). Secondly, there are THIRTY craft on the circuit - so you're always having to weave about, thinking on your feet even when you know the tracks like clockwork.
The tracks themselves are pretty well-designed, track width varies a lot, loops, steep drops, precarious jumps and weird gravity tubes that let you drive right around their circumference. As you unlock later tournaments, not only do you get some bastard hard tracks but the final cup is randomly generated - sometimes throwing up circuits so devious that you get past the first lap and realise half the field have all retired on the same corner.
Unlike it's SNES counterpart, all 30 craft are fully fleshed out and playable (vs 4 real cars and a load of 'drones' that existed purely as backmarkers), and while it fixes its predecessors biggest flaw: no multiplayer - its single player that really makes this game. 4-player split screen is rarely a bad idea in any game but the tradeoff here is all the AI cars, and its not quite the same without the frantic battles in traffic. The craft are also distinct enough to keep things varied, with the lighter craft being fragile and with a dodgy centre of gravity, but generally better turbo to balance this out.

Add in a 'death race' mode where you've got a simple looped track and aim to set a 'high score' by ramming 29 contenders off the edge in the quickest time, plus brief unique endings for all 30 cars and its easy to see how I sank dozens of hours into the fucking thing iin my teens. classic game







(Japan also got an expansion pack via the ill-fated 64DD thingy, I believe it had a trackbuilder which sounds amazing)

[Gulftastic]

Galaxians sound effexts were smapled and used in a track called 'Do The Gimme Taht' on the second 'Fame' (TV) album, the imaginatively title 'Kids From Fame Again'.

Sadly, no ones put this minort classic on youtube, so you'll have to take my word fo it. I've only got it on vinyl too, so I can't post it.

[Wilbur]

Broken sword.

I just got around to having a go with this yesterday. Yes brilliant fun and great dialogue.

Thanks for the tip £5 well spent for 1 and 2.

Ta

[Garfield And Friends]

#862: THE COLONEL'S BEQUEST

Genre: 2D graphics adventure
Format: MS-DOS
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Year: 1989
Developer: Sierra On-Line



Set in the mid 1920s, university student Laura Bow travels to her flapper friend's family reunion at their Louisiana Bayou estate. The reunion has been convened by millionaire patriarch uncle Henri Dijon who announces that he will be sharing his wealth with his gathered relatives.

Soon, murder is afoot and it's up to you (as Laura) to figure out the mystery midst the greedy family's deadly scheming in the decaying mansion (and not fall foul of any fatal mishap while doing so too).

For a resolution of 320 pixels by 200 stretched rows in 16 colours the graphics are lovely with many screens of detailed accomplished hand-drawn pixel art. Sprites are equally pretty as they move past the dithered walls and floors of the mansion's interiors. The audio isn't a major aspect of the game (there are some jingles here and there) but still the unobtrusive midi chiming and occasional sound effect are a plus, if only a minor one.

Unlike other text-parser graphical adventures, a certain amount of 'real time' elapsing occurs which plays a fairly big part in The Colonel's Bequest, and if you dilly-dally you can easily miss out on encounters and opportunities to eavesdrop on meetings between the various family members. Thankfully there's a save and load facility, so you can recommence play should you die horribly (though entertainingly).

Getting to the finish of this mind-flexing whodunnit game is relatively easy, though to get a good detective ranking at the end requires some keen observation, specific questioning of characters, and a constantly inquisitive mind as you wander from screen to screen. Captivating!

Laura Bow: Colonel's Bequest

[samadriel]

I'd say HERO was the best thing on the ole Atari 2600.  Good call, Garfield.

[HappyTree]

#861 Citadel
Publisher: Superior Software
Designer: Michael Jakobsen
Platforms: BBC Micro, Acorn Electron
Release date: 1985
Genre: Platform game, Puzzle game



Citadel was a platform game for the BBC and Acorn Electron. I had the Electron version and it was a kind of Zelda game of finding keys and crystals. I got really into this game and laboriously drew up a map of all the screens on a large piece of hardboard I kept beside the monitor. It seems very basic now but at the time it seemed very expansive. The faceless monks were also quite scary.

Citadel Longplay Part 6 of 6

[HappyTree]

I can't remember if this game's been done already. Apologies if so.

#860 Shenmue II
Developer: Sega AM2 (DC), Rutubo Games (XBX)
Publisher: Sega (DC), Microsoft Game Studios (XBX)
Designer:    Yu Suzuki
Platform:Dreamcast, Xbox
Release date: DC November 23 2001, XBX March 21, 2003
Genre: Adventure game



This is the sequel to the Dreamcast original Shenmue. With the Xbox game you got a DVD of the first Shenmue story. I must admit I never watched it. I like the style of Japanese comic book art but am not interested enough to bother watching a film of it.

In this game you are Ryo in Hong Kong, continuing the quest to find Master Lishao Tao. The game features a good amount of QTE but I don't object to this mechanism. It worked well for fights and exciting set pieces like balancing on rickety planks high up in a dilapidated building.

There was some good combat and lots of hidden features that no mortal man could ever hope to unlock without reading a walkthrough. I mean, the convoluted sequence of things to do in a set time to get the birthday sequence for Fangmei is ridiculous!



But follow it I did. I also used a walkthrough to get into the special fights in the amusement arcade. Those were tough, but when I beat them I was able to go to the shop and enter a really excellent duck race. Getting the gold medal for that was very satisfying. I do wonder how anyone is supposed to find these things by themselves without cheating slightly.

There were some cool games of chance too, as one can't help but be reminded of by the hawkers continually asking you if you "want a game of lucky hit". I enjoyed believing that my psychic powers could influence these games in my favour.

As if all that adventuring and exploring of this richly atmospheric culture wasn't enough, there were loads of original retro games in the amusement arcade to play.

One of the most annoying sequences was dusting the books outside the library. You had to walk with trembling piles of books in your hands and get them all out in a set time. If you do it well enough you progress, and the game's calendar also cranked up the pressure to get it done in a certain number of days.

My favourite sequence was standing by the red-leafed tree and catching the leaves as they fell to practise my kung-fu focus. You needed to do this to get the duck for the duck race.

This is another game for which I made a cool map on hardboard to keep beside the monitor. I got easily lost in the sprawling maps of so many different locations and timing was everything in this game. I found that exciting but also at times an additional and unwelcome pressure. I do like to wander around and take my time.

So now the world awaits Shenmue III with bated breath. If it ever gets made it will be in time for the next gen of consoles. Let us all pray for salvation!

Shenmue 2 - Fangmei's Birthday

[Borboski]

Has anyone done Repton or Joust yet?

[Garfield And Friends]

#859: FANTASTIC NIGHT DREAMS COTTON

Genre: 2D horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up
Format: Coin-op Arcade / Sharp X68000 / NEC PC Engine CD
Publisher: Sega
Year: 1991
Developer: Success



I hate anime. I hate bug-eyed squeaky-voiced kawaii manga characters that feature in them. The Japanese have hell to play for!

How do I square that with the game Fantastic Night Dreams Cotton? Well, I try my best to ignore the forgettable story, glaze over when the cut scenes roll, and just look at the early 90s arcade graphics which are zoomed out and low resolution enough not to make the main character's anime features too prominent! Doing all that and I find this shoot 'em up to be a, well, blast with top shooting goodness.

It's mostly a standard horizontal scroller with the occasional vertical section. I like the idea of having a witch on a broom as the protagonist in a shoot 'em up, and the contrast between the well-drawn low-res cutesy graphics in a spooky environment works well.

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, for TurboGrafx-CD TurboDuo, 1993

[Garfield And Friends]

#858: THE FIREMEN

Genre: 2D three-quarters overhead shooter
Format: SNES
Publisher: Human Entertainment
Year: 1994
Developer: Human Entertainment



A high rise building is on fire and it's up to you (as Pete) to tackle the flames. A risky job indeed, but your lucky is in for your axe-swinging colleague Danny is fireproof (he definitely chose the right career) and you carry a magic hose that generates infinite amounts of spray out of thin air. That kind of equipment should be standard issue, don't you think?

Anyway, this is basically a quirky twist on the top-down shooter genre that has you quenching all manner of infernos inside the building, and occasionally rescuing stranded survivors you come across. Another real life horrible experience turned into fun cartoony entertainment!

SNES The Firemen

[Garfield And Friends]

#857: NEMESIS THE WARLOCK

Genre: 2D single-screen hack n' shoot platformer
Format: C64 / Amstrad CPC
Publisher: Martech
Year: 1987
Developer: Michael Archer / Creative Reality



I don't recall if the ABC Warriors ever got their own game, but Nemesis the Warlock did, and this is it. As Nemesis, you're out to kill Tommy de Torquemada, but he's gone and set his laser rifle henchmen after you! Defeat each wave of bad guys and find the exit to the next level. Your methods of execution include slashing enemies up close with your sword, and firing bullets at distance enemies on the same ground height as you.

Each level is a single screen arranged into different platforms, so you've got to be on your toes to avoid the henchmen's bullets. Simple but great dark 8-bit art style to the chunky sprites. A cool (and rare for its time) thing is that dead bodies don't disappear, and in fact this gets used on occasion where you have to use piled corpses as stepping stones to reach level exits. Hah! Further nice touches include the Rob Hubbard tune, the gory animation of your heart (health meter icon) being squeezed when you take damage, and the random resurrection (with accompanying unsettling sound effect) of killed foes into slashhook-swishing zombies!

c64 longplay - Nemesis the Warlock part 1 of 8 (1-5)

[Garfield And Friends]

#856: SYLPHIA

Genre: 2D vertical scrolling shoot 'em up
Format: NEC PC Engine CD
Publisher: Tonkin House
Year: 1993
Developer: Compile



The NEC PC Engine (Turbografx to some) has a paucity of titles in certain videogame genres but thankfully shoot 'em ups is not one of them. In fact, there's a shit load of decent blasters on the underinvestigated console, and Sylphia is a vertical instance of such.

The story seems to be set in a time long ago (influenced by ancient Greece, amongst other periods) where a group of villagers are attacked by demonic forces, and a warrioress attempts to thwart the attackers only to be slain. Rather than die, an elemental force descends from the heavens and transforms the heroine into a fairy-like being with the ability to fire multiple types of destructive energy projectiles. Obviously it's time for revenge!

The variety of enemies is very good, and the levels are challenging from the get-go, never mind talk of the mythical bosses. I like shoot 'em ups where the main character is obviously humanoid. I guess it's easier to relate to something like that rather than a space ship! The audio tracks are stonking and that's not a surprise given that the game is for the PC Engine's CD-ROM add-on.

Sylphia (PC Engine)

[Garfield And Friends]

#855: TERRAFORMING

Genre: 2D horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up
Format: NEC PC Engine CD
Publisher: Right Stuff
Year: 1992
Developer: Right Stuff



Rocking soundtrack and amazing parallax scrolling backgrounds in this one. Humans have destroyed their world and need to colonise another planet, so it's your job as a fighter spaceship pilot to lead the way and destroy the aliens that stand in the humans' way of terraforming a homeland. Straightforward shmup in terms of gameplay, but excellent bizarre enemy designs and wonderfully weird locales really seal the deal on this shooter. Nice use of the PC Engine's visual trickery in the backgrounds, including stuff like horizontal offset heatwaving and a wobbly 'hall of mirrors' vertical technique in the watery sections.

PC Engine Gaming: Terraforming

[Garfield And Friends]

#854: POCAHONTAS

Genre: 2D scrolling platformer
Format: Mega Drive
Publisher: Sega
Year: 1996
Developer: Funcom



You control the Disneyfied native american princess Pocahontas, who must stop her tribe from clashing with the newly arrived English settlers, and save the neck of her illicit lover John Smith. Ostensibly a game directed at young children, it doesn't seem to give many concessions to that notion, save maybe for the relatively short length of the game (four 'episodes').

Released towards the end of the Mega Drive's run, the forest-themed visuals are stellar. Leaves tumble here and there, woodland critters scurry to and fro. All the characters move so well it's like they were rotoscoped. It's all so relaxing if only you didn't have a mission at hand. The audio isn't the best on the Mega Drive, but it's no deal breaker.

There's a fair amount of platform puzzling about, often stemming from your ability to switch control between Pocahontas and her friendly raccoon pal Meeko. As you progress, Pocahontas earns nine new abilities by performing good deeds for the fluffy friendly variety of beasts amongst the trees, such as better night vision and becoming a better swimmer. Each of them needed if you are going to beat the game and prevent all out war!

Pocahontas (HD), auto demonstration, for Sega Genesis, 1996

[Garfield And Friends]

#853: CORYOON

Genre: 2D horizontal scrolling shooter
Format: NEC PC Engine
Publisher: Naxat Soft
Year: 1991
Developer: Naxat Soft



Forget the save-the-princess (with her anime bug eyes) wafer-thin story... this shooter is jolly and jolly good! Full of vibrant colours and black outlines around almost every sprite, Coryoon was surely designed with little kids in mind. Guide the little dragon through various colourful stages and use his firey breath to off cutesy enemies who leave all manner of fruit bonuses in their wake. Shoot the storks that wander on-screen to collect power-ups, essential to beat all manner of tricky cartoon-animals-gone-bad bosses. The music easily matches the video, with bouncing ditty after bouncing ditty keeping the frivolous tone of the game skipping along.

Coryoon (PC Engine)

[Garfield And Friends]

#852: TOMCAT THE F-14 FIGHTER SIMULATOR

Genre: 2D arcade first-person flight shooter
Format: Atari 2600 / Atari 7800
Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
Year: 1988
Developer: Dan Kitchen



Holy smokes! This is a comprehensive arcade cockpit flight shooter programmed very very late into the life of the Atari 2600 games console. I played the hell out of this back in the day, and it's still one of the hidden gems on the system. The four aspects of the game are launching from aircraft carrier, controlling your flight, engaging in combat with enemy 'bogeys', and returning to land on the flight deck. Your first mission sees you take off in day time by engaging your afterburners to reach 216% engine power and once you've cleared the ship it's vital to observe altitude above the water, reduce thrust level, and bank in the appropriate directions in order to safely arrive at the combat airspace.

Once in range of enemy fighter jets, they appear on your radar and can approach you from any angle. The machine gun is best used for close range dogfighting (but don't let them overheat!), and the missiles (three kinds) are better used for distance engagement. Your crosshairs turn red when you've managed to track an enemy plane and you've a split second to launch a rocket. Do so correctly and that jet explodes moments later in a pleasing sky-brightening shower of shrapnel!

Soon enough dawn sets in and if you've survived the dogfights (including shaking off homing missiles from enemy aircraft - turn on your Electronic Counter Measures first!) you'll either have expended your ammunition or will be low on fuel. Landing is the final challenge of each mission, and requires careful positioning and velocity adjustments in order to return successfully. It's easy for a novice player to crash at the final hurdle, but a bit of practice (and a keen eye on your cockpit's information monitor) sees you land, where the game will rate your performance and offer up a new mission (refuelled and rearmed). Are you a mere civilian (rating 0) or a top gun graduate (rating 9)? And the next mission you face... is at night!

Tomcat really pushes the old VCS console, even going so far as to use the 'select' and 'reset' buttons as in-game controls with multiple functions (though every control is quite logically laid out once you've read the manual), and the two 'difficulty' switches for the landing sequences. Extreme, man!

Tomcat: The F-14 Fighter Simulator for the Atari 2600

[Garfield And Friends]

#851: WORLD CLASS RUGBY

Genre: 2D three-quarters overhead sports
Format: C64 / Amiga / Amstrad CPC / Atari ST / Spectrum / MS-DOS
Publisher: Audiogenic
Year: 1991
Developer: Denton Designs



I only know the main rules of real life rugby union, but that seems to be enough to enjoy watching the Six Nations tournament every year. Given that, what I look for in a rugby videogame is something pick-up-and-play-able. World Class Rugby is such a release, and indeed has more than enough options for more committed rugger aficionados beyond what I would necessarily seek.

If all you knew was 'not passing forward', scrums, kicking into touch, and lineouts, then this game has that down pat. However it also goes beyond that if you so wish, with a limited selection of special set-piece plays that can be initiated when the scrum-half has the ball, the offside rule can be turned on or off, team prowess can be levelled or handicapped, and more. Uncommon for its time, you can even capture a move replay to floppy/tape and relive your glorious try again and again!

Speaking of trys (tries?), this game was programmed in '91 before the 1992 value change in them from 4 points to 5 points. It does mean that two drop goals from open play is all it takes to equal a converted try here. Not a big deal, and anyway trys are much more fun to see successfully pulled off (both here and in the real thing).

World Class Rugby @ xtcabandonware.com

[Borboski]

Was that really a decent game?  Jonah Lomu Rugby was a great game.

[Phil_A]

#850: OIDS

Genre: 2D Shooter
Format: Atari ST
Publisher: FTL Games
Year: 1987
Developer: Software Heaven, Inc



Oids was a fun but challenging take on the classic "Thrust"(with bits of "Defender" thrown in), and one of the few ST titles not to be overshadowed by a superior Amiga port.

In Oids you must use your tiny V-Wing craft to navigate a series of barren but increasingly treacherous planetoids, with the aim of rescuing legions of tiny imprisoned andr(oids) that are holed up in little cells all over the place. Once you've freed your comrades you must find a flat surface to land on, load up with passengers and transport them safely back to the mothership hovering in orbit. Three main obstacles lie in the way of your quest: enemy ships that frequently pop up to harass you, depleting fuel supplies and of course, gravity itself. If that weren't bad enough you also have to deal with stationery force generators that will send you hurtling into the nearest rock face if you get too close.

As well as the usual weapons, your craft is equipped with a shield that can be operated in times of dire emergency, but it will only protect you for a few fleeting seconds before needing to recharge. A well-timed activation can often be the difference between life and death!

And that's not all - Oids also came with a level editor for creating your own sprawling masterpieces of gravitational chaos.

Graphics are extremely simple(the terrain you navigate around basically consists of outlines), but the sprites are well animated, and everything runs very smoothly by ST standards. I have to admit I could never get very far in it, but as the kind of game you can just load up to kill a few minutes, Oids is hard to beat. Wonder why there isn't a DS port of this already?

Oids: Atari ST
Hours of Newtonian mayhem for one and all!

[waste of chops]

Was that really a decent game?

It was certainly better than International Rugby Challenge:

http://amr.abime.net/review_932

[mikeyg27]

It was certainly better than International Rugby Challenge:

http://amr.abime.net/review_932

The Maga Drive version of that game is weirdly compelling. It's also impossible to play it successfully without punting the ball down the field and hoping that your opponent fucks up, since the passing is too inaccurate so trying to run in tries is no longer worth the effort.

In other words, it's too accurate a simulation of Rugby Union.

[Garfield And Friends]

#849: GOMOLA SPEED

Genre: 2D action puzzler
Format: NEC PC Engine
Publisher: UPL
Year: 1990
Developer: UPL



Mobile phones often feature little games, and the 'snake' game has cropped up quite a bit on various handsets.

Gomola Speed is superficially a bit like the 'snake' game, insofar as your character grows longer as you progress around a rectangular enclosure, but your goal on each level is to eat all the food which reveals an exit (or exits) which you can leave through. Food is digested by fully encircling it with your segmented body. Furthermore, you may only leave the environment when you have collected all your body segments scattered around the arena.

Naturally, there's enemies too, and you lose a life if they make contact with your head. Your body segments get detached if enemies touch them, though it's just a matter of moving over your parts to reattach and lengthen yourself once more. Enemies can be dispatched by stunning them for a moment with timebombs, then fully encircling them much like consuming food. Every few levels there's a boss that has to be defeated before progressing.

The circling mechanic is centrally what makes the game an enjoyable unique action-puzzle experience.

PC Engine Gaming: Gomola Speed