After starting off way back in 2014 I recently discovered that I never finished my A-Z of MAME Hidden Gems - I only got as far as V... I was pretty annoyed with myself and resolved to knuckle down and get those last four letters squared away.
W and X were covered in the last post, which just leaves me with Y & Z...
If you'd have told me that Y would be by far the most difficult letter to find hidden gems for I wouldn't have believed you. Z I expected to be awkward by Y's just not a letter I'd think of in the same way... if I'd even considered it at all.
And yet, here I have just one game for 'Y', a game I'm listing under it's bootleg name that probably wouldn't have made it into the top ten choices for any other letter:
Yellow Cab
It's not that Yellow Cab (better known as Kamikaze Cabbie) is a bad game - it's from Data East after all and I'm pretty sure they don't know how to make bad games - it's just more 'interesting' than 'excellent'.
Played on a large overhead map the main goal of the game is to pick up a passenger in your cab and take them to another point on the map. From that you may infer that the game is a precursor to Crazy Taxi, but in fact it feels much more like the original Grand Theft Auto.
It's hectic fun and has some extra depth added by the presence of the police and the need to refuel regularly. Despite the my somewhat negative tone here it's well worth a play, but if I was to rank all the games I've covered over the course of this series it would definitely be nearer the bottom than the top.
And so, finally, after four years of intermittent blogging, playing, building, and configuring controls in the tab menu, I've reached the end. It's somehow fitting that this whole thing should finish with that most ubiquitous of hidden gem genres; the vertical shooter.
Zaviga
If you have read many of the other entries in this blog you'll know that I'm far from immune to the charms of a good gimmick.
Zaviga, (like Yellow Cab released in 1984 by Data East) is a vertical shooter whos gimmick is that it takes place both in the air as a jet fighter and on the ground as tank.
The game allows you to switch between the two at will and, from the little I've played, seems to scroll infidelity on a loop, with the enemies getting a little harder each time.
It's fair to say that, being quite an early game Zaviga isn't particularly blessed with complexities.
But complexities was never what this endeavour was about.
Hidden gems remain hidden because at first glance they may look simple, they may seem derivative or dated - but dig a little below the surface and you reveal a game that makes you happy, makes you nostalgic, or just makes you wish you hadn't overlooked it so many times before.
Zaviga captures all that brilliantly.
It may not be as gob-smacking as Boogie Wings, as surprising as Change Air Blade, or as awe-inspiring as Outfoxies... but it has charm in abundance. And really, at the end of the day, what more could you ask for than that?
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