Slow down Mr Driver, you’ll kill us both!

Chase HQ

PC Engine

Taito 1990

Ah Chase HQ: an intoxicating slammer of Outrun speed married to a Glenn A. Larson-style car chase. You are a couple of badass, rule bending, 80s cops called Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady, card-carrying members of the Care Bear Club, oh and also the Chase Special Investigation Department. They drive a high powered Porsche 928, chasin’ and shuttin’ down bad guys in high speed pursuits.

It was a massive favourite of mine in the arcades back in the 90s, I spent a fortune on it. A game that big and loud was always going to be a challenge to blend down to a home machine pulp and unsurprisingly it had mixed results. The Amstrad conversion is astounding and the Spectrum version is nothing short of a miracle of optimizing. Every aspect of the game is there: it’s more tightly packed than Sophie Howard’s swimsuit.

Make the switch to the beige machines and it all starts to go terribly, terribly wrong. The Amiga version could sort of, maybe, be picked out of a line-up whilst squinting, but it drives like a tortoise with a grand piano on its back, walking through custard. And the C64 has a face not even its mother could love: blocky, ugly and sluggish.

So we come to the PC Engine version, doesn’t it look great from the screen shot? It is pure racing glamour.

Alas that is where the feel good mood dissolves, as when it moves, it falls over. Your car, an example of precision German automotive engineering, skids and flops around like an old 70s Cadillac on its last legs driving on an ice skating rink.

As a consequence, you will crash on all corners and thump into every single car. I have no idea why but all of the other road users seem to have got up that morning and decided to get in your way deliberately. Due to shocking collision detection and despite the road clearly being a three-lane highway, it just never seems wide enough. You crash into absolutely everything despite being comfortably in your own, empty lane. Forget ramming the criminal's car, it'll take you several continues to even catch sight of the bugger.

I had high hopes for this one, as NEC’s pocket rocket certainly has the potential to do this justice, but it failed. If a Spectrum with its steam-powered architecture can pull it off with such class then this has no excuse. It is simply a very poor, disappointing conversion.

I don't understand how the last card is played, but somehow the vital connection is made

City Connection

Famicom

Jaleco, 1985.

It looks like a driving game from the cart but nope, it's a platform game. You control a little Honda City Car that appears to have no brakes: it is always moving. No doubt, after taking it the garage and had the mechanic exhale and quote you silly prices for fixing it “Ooof you can’t get the parts easily for these Japanese micro cars, mate”, you decided to keep driving it anyway. It’ll sort itself out right?

The old jalopy always tootles along at the same speed; the controls you have over it are left and right turns, a Dukes of Hazzard style handbrake turn and a normal or high jump. I wish every car manufacturer had followed Honda’s lead on that feature.

The idea of the game is paint every bit of the road. You do this simply by driving over it. Like one of those line-painting machines you see old blokes using on football fields presumably. These City Cars truly are amazing, like Swiss army knives.

Of course, nothing is ever simple and The Daily Mail would be very happy as the police have a zero-tolerance for such free thinking expression and will attempt to stop you mid brush stroke. Crash into them and you explode into fluttery hearts like a Michael Bay blockbuster meets the Care Bears. However, you can fight back against John Q Law by bounding over them or firing cans of oil at them. You can collect more of this fossil fuel on your travels.

The other enemy is a cat, well of course it is. This mangy moggy also causes the loss of a life on colliding with it. Occasionally, a balloon may float by. If you touch it you collect it. God knows where, your car is clearly the TARDIS. Grab three of them and you get sent to a warp that sends you a couple of stages ahead, and gives you some good old bonus points to boot.

I was really looking forward to playing this one as many years ago when I owned a Commodore Amiga I had a game by Core Design called CarVuP, which I loved to death and it was based on the arcade original of this.

As is the case with many old Famicom carts, it took me five minutes of cleaning, swearing and pleading until it decided to work. However, first impressions seemed positive, the graphics are nice, with a nice New York Skyline with Lady Liberty and the poor old Twin Towers on the first stage. There is a nice little tinkly tune too, all good stuff.

It wasn’t to last though. Your Honda is a bit of a handful to control, the jumping is fiddly at the best of times and it’s not helped by occasionally poor responses from the controls. Plus in the Amiga’s CarVuP, when you reached the edge of a platform the car would automatically flip round, which was a real help in painting the last segment of the platform and setting off again. Here your car just keeps on going, which means you very often fall into the unknown and out of control.

The lush backgrounds, whilst nice, actually hinder the game. The fine detail makes the baddies hard to spot and the parallax scrolling makes the whole experience a bit confusing, especially on the second level where it’s hard in tense moments to quickly work out where the platforms are.

After several plays you get used to all of this somewhat and there is an enjoyable game to be had with perseverance. But it still feels unnecessarily fiddly and unfair. It’s entertaining but sadly flawed.

New Acquisitions 11th March 2010

The postie brought me four Famicom carts today. Athena, Rolling Thunder, Elevator Action and Challenger.

I had Athena on the good old Sinclair Spectrum and quite enjoyed it, mainly for the slightly racy Bob Wakelin artwork I think! I seem to remember the music was pretty good too.

Rolling Thunder is a game I loved in the arcades and one I still play on Mame to this day. It is one of the rare games I am actually quite good at! The Fami conversion generally got good reviews, though is apparently rock hard!

I love the Saturn sequel to Elevator Action and have to confess I've never really played the original. Thought it was time that was fixed.

Challenger is a Hudsonsoft game, which as a PC Engine groupie got my attention straight away. All I know about it is that the first level is taken lock, stock and barrel from Hudson's Speccy classic 'Stop the Express'.

Goodbye 'New World'

I've finally decided to part ways with my SNK Neo Geo AES after a stormy twelve-month marriage.

As I'm sure you will know, The AES is the Citizen Kane of 1990s games machines. The TV show Top Gear reckons that to be a true car fan you must have owned an Alfa Romeo at some time in your life and I think similarly, that to be a true gamer you must have had in your possession at some point a machine with the SNK badge. Well, I’ve served my time.

The machine was ludicrously expensive to buy back when it was released ($649.99 in 1990), and horrifically pricy to keep upholstered with games ($200 a throw). Despite the high cost, they aren't rare at all and are still very much in demand with collectors to this day. Diehard fans on the Neo Geo forum would fight you to the death in a knife fight defending their pride and joy. Seriously.

It is, to be honest, a little underwhelming at the first meeting. For a machine with such a reputation of prestige and exclusivity, you would expect it to be carved from the finest mahogany by Gisele Bündchen and weigh the same as a Fiat Cinquecento. Alas it is, well... plain, light, a bit flimsy and doesn't even have an external LED to show when its on. It does have a truly fantastic controller though.

The NG is infamous for being the de facto machine for beat 'em up fans and well... I don't like fighting games much at all. OK I admit it; l bought it just to show off and say I had one, happy now? I kept telling myself that there were plenty of other games for it that didn't involve kicking people's heads in with combos and not all of them cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. In short, I thought I could own one without having to sell a kidney.

Well yes you can, but it's all rather disappointing and disheartening. The early releases such as Magician Lord, NAM-1975, Ghost Pilots and The Super Spy can be picked up for about US$30 each off eBay - not too bad. They are packed to the brim with the sort of bright colours, fancy graphical effects and beefy sound that had the Megadrive crying into its beer, but to be honest, they aren't exactly the greatest games made by mankind and while they don’t play especially bad, its just that you can get a lot, lot better.

Fine thought I, I'll get some newer titles. The ‘Metal Slug’ games are rightly trumpeted as classics and would make the whole AES ownership an absolute joy. I knew that the first one is as rare as hen’s teeth and goes for a couple of thousand dollars, and I’m sorry but even if I could afford it, no game is THAT good. However, there have been numerous sequels and surely those would be more reasonably priced? Well yes they are cheaper, but their reputation precedes them and the admission fees start at $250 for the later, not as well respected games and climb up to a grand or so, for the early fan favourites. Ye gods… Far too rich for my blood.

I conceded and picked up a few cheap beat 'em ups, but I just never played them very much. I began to see how many PC Engine or Super Famicom games I could get for my SNK banknotes and how Neo Geo ownership, especially when avoiding fighting games, was just not practical for me.

I see forum posts and YouTube videos all the time with people stating that they intend to buy an AES and I always want to shake them furiously by the lapels screaming ‘Please! For the love of God, don’t do it’.

So farewell Miss Neo, I will miss you and the slightly erotic smell of solder in your hardback book sized cartridges, but it was not meant to be. You were too high maintenance.

Games without Frontiers... Well, maybe a couple.

Ooooh look, a blog. I think this must be the third time I've attempted one of these things. I just keep forgetting that it exists.

I'm going to use this page as a log of all the games that I pick up. I collect Japanese versions for the PC Engine, Nintendo 64, Famicom and Super Famicom.

Come on in, the water's lovely.