When people mention Taito’s Puzzle Bobble/Bust a Move series of games nowadays, it usually isn’t in a particularly positive light. Read any recent review of any game in the series if you don’t believe me. They say that the games lack depth. They say that they aren’t real puzzle games, since all you really need to succeed at them is good aim as opposed to any sort of critical thinking skill. Most of all, in spite of the fact that twenty incarnations of the game now exist with the release of Space Puzzle Bobble (if Wikipedia does not lie), they maintain that every game in the series since its conception in 1994 is exactly the same. To all of this I say the following: “Right you are on all counts, sir or madam!” (more…)

This is part of my continuing series of playing and reviewing random SNES games I’ve never heard of. Next up: Stealth.

In Stealth, you control a 6-man commando unit in the Vietnam war. You move along a grid like in a tactics game, but it is SNES directional pad-controlled, so it’s really slow and crappy. If the mouse worked with this, it would be a big improvement.

You get to customize the weapons your team uses beforehand (rifles, SMGs, grenades, grenade launchers, etc), and some weigh more which, in turn, make the dude’s movement rate lower. As an aside, the music during the weapon select screen is pretty nifty.

This is what the gameplay looks like. And yes, you can shoot the villagers. You can also talk to them. I tried to use them as cover a couple times, thinking maybe they wouldn’t throw grenades at me, but they didn’t attack that far from the bush.

The enemies (guerrilla fighters) hide in the bushes around the path. Sometimes you can see them if they’re in your line of sight after you move, but not always. This leads to them usually getting the drop on you and whacking a couple of your guys with grenades.

Your first mission is, apparently, to destroy these missiles. You have to use explosive weapons, which means conserving ammo (since explosives hit a wider range and cause more damage) and not getting killed. Did I mention that if a dude gets killed the screen turns black and white and says it like it’s a fact of history? “In 1968, (name) died in Vietnam” or something like that.

See that fourth guy? His name was Tuxedo. Good guy, good guy. From Arkansas. So, uh, anyway, we were out there, walking through the jungle, tryin’ to get to the target, and I hear a bang. So I grab Tuxedo’s shoulder, like “hey buddy, get down!”, and I put my hand–where I put my hand, it goes IN. I mean it goes IN. and it was his FACE. Tuxedo…Tuxedo was a good guy, you know? And Charlie got him, man.

On the start of the second mission, the black dude joined my team. I don’t know if he was a replacement for Tuxedo or if he would’ve joined anyway.

And, uh, despite what the only screenshot with text on it implies, this game was not translated into English.

Note: I made that name up. The only names I bothered to look at were the commander (Nile) and the indian (Falcon).

Dementium: The Ward is a classic case of a solid concept and great controls mixed with unsatisfying gameplay. Dementium is the first game released by developer Renegade Kid, who recently released their second game, Moon. Dementium is first person survival horror game that takes place in mental hospital. The controls closely resemble Metroid Prime Hunters, which is a very good thing. It is just unfortunate that the entire package didn’t come together here, but it still makes for a decent game if you can look past some issues. (more…)