Hana no Star Kaidou (Famicom, 1987, Victor Musical Industries)

This game is the dictionary definition of cheap. Any other game that you may have labeled as such in the past at least didn't have random projectiles fired at you from the ceiling every twenty seconds to steal a level-critical item away while nearby enemies' bullets have the exact same result, inside of a lengthy maze that, if you fail to present said item at the last screen, will boot your ass right back out.

What is it with games calling me gay recently ?
First Vanslug, now this.

And you have to not get hit in either of your sprites.

Here's where we get to the meat of the whole thing. Hana no Star Kaidou is a game where you control two characters at once. With a single d-pad. Now this might not seem so bad, after all Binary Land had the same premise. However where that was a simple puzzle game, this is a side scrolling platform game with "exploration" maze elements. And trying to get two characters to land on two different platforms simultaneously is just as annoying as you would think it is.

The controls are basicly as follows: press up, your characters stay glued together, press down and they go apart. Now while this might have worked in a less action oriented game, here you're expected to jump over gaps, onto platforms, avoid enemies and enemy bullets as well as the random projectiles coming usualy in a group of three, that the game uses to take away your items, and that in adition to that staple of all fine platforming, the moving platform that does not move you with it. Alone this might be difficult, but with two characters it's nearly impossible.

And were these problems not enough, the game itself also tacks on a maddening level design, mixed with cryptic level objectives, usualy delivered in horrible pidgeon english before a level. And yes, these never actualy tell you anything that you can interpret in any usefull manner. For example, if one simply walks along on the first level, they get stuck at a seemingly impassible wall. Most gamers online seem to get exactly this far before quiting. As in those that even survived this long. The trick is, there are staircases and subways on screens of levels you use to go to different spots. Sounds logical right ?

Well what would you say if I told you there is a spot in Level 5 that recquires you to go back into the subway you came out of four consecutive times, each time landing in a completely different location. In the begining you might not even know that you can access these locations, because the staircases and subways and the one building you can go into look no different from all the places you can't go into that are just there for decoration.

The intro. With additude.

In addition, the game designers went the Adventure Island route and made so that even if you somehow manage to not get killed, standing still doing nothing will drain your health anyway and eventualy kill you. In a game where every level's layout is a maze, and who'se exit building even more so.

All this with controls that are simply counter intuitive.

In order to go upstairs , inside of a buiding or down into a subway, you have to press up, right/left and the fire button. The goal itself is seemingly random and can be anything from shooting at a block somewhere in the level to make a suit come out to stunning and then "collecting" one random enemy to get an item from them. And here is another thing a casual player would not figure out. You stun certain enemies and if you shoot them again they go away. But if you instead walk towards them, with both your sprites, and press up, the enemy will be gone and replaced by an item. Sometimes. Sometimes, when it's an ugly female fan or a black person, trying to "collect" them will kill you.

And you have to pretty much guess at random to try and collect everyone, because not only does the game recquire you to have item X when you reach the goal, but also a randomly increasing number of record-like things (that  are yellow and look sort of like bagguetes), otherwhise, like if you don't have the correct item, it will simply kick your ass out of the building, and collecting the records from people (and not the ones that randomly appear sometimes from enemy spawners) is also the only way to increase your time.

Yeah.....uhm.....let's just move on.

Speaking of the end-of-the-level-mazes, these buildings are humongous, with many screens and dead ends leading into all sorts of directions each time. Trying to get through these while essentialy timed is rather difficult, but made exponentialy worse by several factors. First, the screen will only scroll up or down if both of your characters are on the same elevation and this can lead to many deaths trying to navigate both of your seperately falling characters onto a ledge. Second,as noted in the very first paragraph, while there is generaly a room with the level item inside the maze, each second screen or so the game throws various projectiles from the top of the screen, and these touching either one of the two characters not only takes away your item immediately, but will also subsequently take records away. And the same things can be said for most enemies, some of which can't even be stunned and take a ridiculous amount of hits in a closed off area with holes just barely big enough for two people to jump through simultanouesly to beat. The only good thing is you can leave the room and come back and the enemy-door will spawn something else.

As you can probably tell the game is not fun as a result. It's a slow moving, cumbersome experience that controls badly, and where ten minutes of fighting your way through a maze can be undone while you're staning on the ledge right next to the goal. It's cryptic, badly designed and rather repetitive.

New York. Can't you tell ?

Which is a shame. Using two characters to attack in two different directions at the same time, especialy with maxed out weapons, seems like it could be realy fun, in a completely different game. Similarily, the enemies, while being rather gross stereotypes at times, are realy wacky and unique and so it's a shame fighting these is made into such a chore. The game is pretty much unplayable without a walkthrough or playthrough video and it's so unfun that it frankly doesn't deserve that much attention.

Paris-Dakar Rally Special (Famicom, 1988, ISCO/CBS Sony Group)

Let's be honest people. Dakar Rally race car drivers don't get paid nearly enough.

I mean, the aprox. 30 000 Dollars for first place just doesn't cut it. I mean if it was only an endurance race through hundreds of miles of difficult terrain with a huge chunk taking place in the desert then that would probably make sense.

The rather pointless and clunky RPG segment. All of it.

However, that isn't even the begining of the hardships participants must face every year. Why, beyond the necessity of not only finding a sponsor all on their own, taking care of all the preparations and chasing down random bank employees with their PIN details, they have to acquire the services of a top level navigator. And how else would they employ such a person then have then randomly assigned to them as a result of a button pressing minigame of course !

Remember, chose only the best care
of the one type availible !

And then there's the usual hardships, like having to make sure other drivers don't intentionaly drive into them from behind and somehow dammage their care while being unscathed, and then having to find a way through a maze and use their gas tank to create oil slips to bounce off oncoming opponents into nearby walls, prefferabely until their car explodes and leaves behind some extra fuel ! Otherwise fuel can only be obtained by using a trampoline to catch it as it's levitating in mid-air in the garage.

Who needs pit stops when you can get
all the spare parts you'll ever need by simply
screwing a trampoline to the hood of your car.
GENIUS

Let's not forget the exorbitant costs of modifying their standard issue race car to include an unlimited supply of missiles so they can shoot down all the giant mice blocking their path, or all the cost that goes into making the car completely air tight and manouverable under water so the drivers can waste some time shooting sharks while they dodge missiles and torpedoes dropped on them from above.

You have to also admire the remarkable physical state these drivers have to keep themselves in. Not only to be able to jump gaps to activate switches to turn off flamehtrowers, but also to be able to walk on clouds so they'll have enough room to build up some running speed ! I mean obviously the organisers could structure the competition so that unworthy people incapable of levitation could press these switches as well, but it's precisely this sort of thing that only allows the top in their field to participate !

Actual racing in this cross continential rally ?
Well don't get too used to it cause you'll
only see it again in the last level.
Where there's still nothing resembling actualy
racing anyone to the finish line.

And not only do these brave men have to use their trusted missiles to shoot giant ants and army tanks once they do manage to get to the desert, but also to be able to manouver across an intricate series of rafts with only a split second time to get from one to the other to avoid smashing into bits on the rocks.

Still it's good that in order to come in first place they don't actualy have to be first to cross the finish line or else this race would get simply absurd.




Okay, based on the above I think it is probably clear that Paris-Dakar Rally Special is so close to a realistic depiction of a real life race that it literaly blurs the line between reality and fiction.

The best part of this game.....

Mostly due to the question of how this could have been designed, programed, released and sold without the entiere staff suddenly sobering up and moving to South America under an assumed names.

....is the realism.

Then again ISCO doesn't seem to have developed anything after this so....