At some point last year I became obsessed with getting a copy of this game, not because I’d heard it was particularly good or interesting or rare, but because of the ‘fingerboard’ controller accessory you can see pictured above.
I love stuff like this; odd little experiments and gimmicks that developers come up with for their games. Things like the Lenslok anti piracy device, the little paddle controller that came with ‘Puchi Carat’, and even Namco’s fantastic ‘NegCon’ controller that I mentioned yesterday, all have enthralled me at various points in my games collecting history.
So it wasn’t a surprise that Yanya Cabalista’s tiny skateboard deck attachment caught my attention.
I set up an eBay alert and waited patiently. Eventually, about two months after I started looking, I was able to get a Japanese copy with the board for a decent price. Weirdly, a day or two after that, an American copy was listed ‘disc only’ for a pittance so I snapped that up too.
Annoyingly, when I went to play the games, neither would load using my Swap Magic discs, so they went onto the shelf as curios for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, however, I started having some loading issues with ‘Ridge Racer V’. I was poking around in my PS2 and realised the brake release pin on the disc lid wasn’t working properly and this was slowing the disc down. As I fixed this issue I was reminded of the Swap Magic problems, so I tried it again, and it worked right away!
Long story short, (too late!?) today I’m playing the American version of ‘Yanya Caballista’, with the fingerboard from the Japanese version, on my European PS2 Slim, using Swap Magic 3.6.
‘Yanya Caballista’ is a skateboarding game that ostensibly has a lot more in common with ‘Jet Set Radio’ than Tony Hawk. You play as one of seven characters (three available from the start) and skate around a small open environment performing tricks and collecting coins.
The art for the characters and the world is not just cel-shaded but full-on cartoon style.
A lot about this game makes you think it's a tie-in product to an anime series - even the Japanese name: ‘Yanya Caballista featuring Gawoo’ leads you to believe it’s making reference to at least one pre-existing property, but this isn’t the case, the game is an entirely original product… in so many ways.
The ‘Gawoo’ of the Japanese title are little alien creatures not dissimilar in appearance to the Morolians from ‘Space Channel 5’. They have arrived in the city of New San Francisco and proven immune to any method of extraction… but they do spontaneously combust due to over excitement when in close proximity to a well landed skateboard trick… You know what to do Caballista!
The game offers a normal control scheme for those without the fingerboard but I’m fortunate to be able to play as intended. The underside of the fingerboard attachment has two little cups that fit over the end of the Dual Shocks analog sticks. You hold the controller at 90 degrees to the usual position, dpad at the bottom, buttons at the top, with a thumb on each end of the fingerboard. Through the board, the game is controlled entirely with the sticks and the L3 & R3 buttons. It’s surprisingly comfortable and the control scheme built around it works very well.
So, you hoon around these areas, doing basic tricks near the Gawoo to get rid of them.
There’s no map indicating where they are so there’s a lot of exploration required and a decent amount of verticality involved. The level opens up to larger areas after a certain number of Gawoo are defeated and then, when they’re all dealt with, the boss Gawoo appears who takes several tricks to take down and, unlike the basic Gawoo, moves around the level.
There are two other game options on the menu but they’re basically variations of practice mode. The main open-world Gawoo trouncing is basically the whole game.
All these modes, however, suffer from the same problem, and it kinda, sorta, maybe, possibly ruins the whole game.
Skating about the city in ‘Yanya Caballista’ is great fun. The controls are responsive and it has its own particular brand of good looking graphics. There are no ground based tricks in the game so in order to dispatch a Gawoo you have to jump… and the jump physics are really bad.
As soon as your character is airborne it’s as if they opened a parachute, or the game has engaged a slo-mo effect. You gently rise into the air and then meander back to earth like you’re falling through soup; there’s no sense of weight or proper momentum.
It’s bizarre. If the rest of the game moved like this it would make sense, but it doesn’t, all the other movement is snappy and feels good, jumping - the core gameplay mechanic - is floaty and feels horrible.
I will admit that after the initial shock of how wrong this feels passed I was able to play on and get some enjoyment from the game, but make no mistake, better jump physics would have made this game a cult classic rather than a mere curiosity.
There is fun to be had here: The ‘challenge’ method for unlocking characters is pretty addictive, and seeing the bizarre boss gawoos is reward in itself, but I could never fully shake the disappointment of just simply jumping.
Oh, and one last thing. It’s hard to read about this game without someone mentioning ‘Jet Set Radio’ (I’ve even already done it myself) and as a massive fan of that Dreamcast classic I feel the need to point out that ‘Yanya Caballista’ is not even a tiny fraction as good. They may look a little alike, but that’s as far as any comparison should go.
I love stuff like this; odd little experiments and gimmicks that developers come up with for their games. Things like the Lenslok anti piracy device, the little paddle controller that came with ‘Puchi Carat’, and even Namco’s fantastic ‘NegCon’ controller that I mentioned yesterday, all have enthralled me at various points in my games collecting history.
So it wasn’t a surprise that Yanya Cabalista’s tiny skateboard deck attachment caught my attention.
I set up an eBay alert and waited patiently. Eventually, about two months after I started looking, I was able to get a Japanese copy with the board for a decent price. Weirdly, a day or two after that, an American copy was listed ‘disc only’ for a pittance so I snapped that up too.
Annoyingly, when I went to play the games, neither would load using my Swap Magic discs, so they went onto the shelf as curios for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, however, I started having some loading issues with ‘Ridge Racer V’. I was poking around in my PS2 and realised the brake release pin on the disc lid wasn’t working properly and this was slowing the disc down. As I fixed this issue I was reminded of the Swap Magic problems, so I tried it again, and it worked right away!
Long story short, (too late!?) today I’m playing the American version of ‘Yanya Caballista’, with the fingerboard from the Japanese version, on my European PS2 Slim, using Swap Magic 3.6.
The art for the characters and the world is not just cel-shaded but full-on cartoon style.
A lot about this game makes you think it's a tie-in product to an anime series - even the Japanese name: ‘Yanya Caballista featuring Gawoo’ leads you to believe it’s making reference to at least one pre-existing property, but this isn’t the case, the game is an entirely original product… in so many ways.
The ‘Gawoo’ of the Japanese title are little alien creatures not dissimilar in appearance to the Morolians from ‘Space Channel 5’. They have arrived in the city of New San Francisco and proven immune to any method of extraction… but they do spontaneously combust due to over excitement when in close proximity to a well landed skateboard trick… You know what to do Caballista!
The game offers a normal control scheme for those without the fingerboard but I’m fortunate to be able to play as intended. The underside of the fingerboard attachment has two little cups that fit over the end of the Dual Shocks analog sticks. You hold the controller at 90 degrees to the usual position, dpad at the bottom, buttons at the top, with a thumb on each end of the fingerboard. Through the board, the game is controlled entirely with the sticks and the L3 & R3 buttons. It’s surprisingly comfortable and the control scheme built around it works very well.
So, you hoon around these areas, doing basic tricks near the Gawoo to get rid of them.
There’s no map indicating where they are so there’s a lot of exploration required and a decent amount of verticality involved. The level opens up to larger areas after a certain number of Gawoo are defeated and then, when they’re all dealt with, the boss Gawoo appears who takes several tricks to take down and, unlike the basic Gawoo, moves around the level.
There are two other game options on the menu but they’re basically variations of practice mode. The main open-world Gawoo trouncing is basically the whole game.
All these modes, however, suffer from the same problem, and it kinda, sorta, maybe, possibly ruins the whole game.
Skating about the city in ‘Yanya Caballista’ is great fun. The controls are responsive and it has its own particular brand of good looking graphics. There are no ground based tricks in the game so in order to dispatch a Gawoo you have to jump… and the jump physics are really bad.
As soon as your character is airborne it’s as if they opened a parachute, or the game has engaged a slo-mo effect. You gently rise into the air and then meander back to earth like you’re falling through soup; there’s no sense of weight or proper momentum.
It’s bizarre. If the rest of the game moved like this it would make sense, but it doesn’t, all the other movement is snappy and feels good, jumping - the core gameplay mechanic - is floaty and feels horrible.
I will admit that after the initial shock of how wrong this feels passed I was able to play on and get some enjoyment from the game, but make no mistake, better jump physics would have made this game a cult classic rather than a mere curiosity.
There is fun to be had here: The ‘challenge’ method for unlocking characters is pretty addictive, and seeing the bizarre boss gawoos is reward in itself, but I could never fully shake the disappointment of just simply jumping.
Oh, and one last thing. It’s hard to read about this game without someone mentioning ‘Jet Set Radio’ (I’ve even already done it myself) and as a massive fan of that Dreamcast classic I feel the need to point out that ‘Yanya Caballista’ is not even a tiny fraction as good. They may look a little alike, but that’s as far as any comparison should go.
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