Import friendly
By werewolf2000ad

Right, I've been asked for another of these things, so this time you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Car Racing Challenge

Take one Japanese programmer. Chain him to a PS2 development kit in a darkened room, give him a budget of fourteen and a half Yen and tell him you want a racing game by next Thursday. After an hour or so, push a battered copy of GTA3 under the door, shouting ‘And make it look a bit like that!’ – What do you get? If you’re unlucky, you get Car Racing Challenge, a game I believe you should experience, but cannot in good conscience allow you to actually pay any amount of money for. It places you in the role of a private detective racing against time to prove his client’s innocence, a process that necessitates stealing dozens of cars, causing incalculable damage and multiple pile-ups along busy roadways, and running away from the police. Your aim is to race from one end of the Nagoya-Tokyo freeway to the other in under four hours; If your car gets too battered to continue, you just hop out and steal another one - And if you think I’m joking about the GTA3 thing, wait until you see the oddly familiar-looking ‘pulling people out of their cars’ animations. Just to add to the originality, they put in a dash of Chase HQ; along the way you must destroy marked cars to gather the evidence that you need. Since all the evidence must be collected, this means you can ruin your chances of winning in the first five minutes, yet the game will still let you play on for the full four hours. That doesn’t make any sense, but then very little in this game does: Why don’t the villain’s henchmen just destroy the evidence, rather than driving it around, or in some cases leaving it lying around unguarded in service areas? Why are you sometimes told that the car you’ve just stolen has no brakes or no steering? How the hell did it get out in the middle of the freeway? How on earth can your character cause this much destruction yet get away scot free at the end of it? What does that box cover photo have to do with the game?

Pinball Fun

Not like this it bloody well isn’t.

Fitness Fun

More bouncy virtual totty! D3’s virtual idol mascot Riho Futaba gets her own rhythm action dance game, and as a budget example of the form, you could certainly do a lot worse. The mechanics are simple but effective; you navigate a constantly moving cursor between four guide lines, hitting beats as appropriate – Hitting enough keeps Riho’s oxygen gauge up and produces more elaborate dance moves. Reach the end of the song and you unlock a new music track; score high enough and you get a new set of clothes to wear, ranging from bunny girl to ballerina. The modelling and motion capture are genuinely impressive, with the range of moves and the way they flow into each other comparing favourably with plenty of full-price games of this type. It might not have the same degree of longevity - There are only a dozen songs and outfits to unlock all together. But this is still worthy of the asking price.

Splatter Master

A horror-themed scrolling beat-em up with an incongruent combination of clean, colourful cartoon visuals with occasional, unpredictable injections of gore, slasher film iconography and at times almost Silent-Hillesque body horror, a bizarre style clash best represented by the way the main character, a cutesy pumpkin-headed scarecrow, can pull out a large pair of chainsaws and slice his enemies in half, splattering the screen with blood as he does so. The gameplay is appealingly old school, not least in the difficulty level, which is tough in that distinct ‘I’m just bastard unfair and you’re going to have to learn to live with it’ way of the 8- and 16-bit days. Deserves a punt if only for the variety in the boss fights – I certainly can’t think of another horror game where you fight a train from hell, an evil robotic hamburger restaurant and the Moon.

Space War Attack

A combination of Afterburner and Monster Attack, with some fairly explicit nods in the direction of Independence Day, this jet fighters vs. bio-mechanical aliens game is fairly easy, paper-thin stuff which will evaporate from your mind as soon as you reset the console, but is nonetheless fun when you’re actually playing. One can’t help feeling that it could have been so much better with little more variety to the objectives – The best of the game’s twenty-odd levels are not those where you must simply destroy the enemies, but those where you must fulfil tasks such as defending a city from meteor strikes, or – in the best level – chasing around an alien-controlled missile base trying to shoot down the warheads as they launch. A special mention must go to the action replay you receive on completing a level, which does a passably decent job of recreating the familiar shaky-cam’ed style of 80’s fighter pilot flicks.

EXTRA - Special JapTat bonus downloads: The Maid Uniform and Machine Gun wallpapers, courtesy of D3; and, from the previously reviewed Party Girls - Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Arisu Kagura...

August 2006

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