Day 38: Import Tuner Challenge (360)

A rare foray onto the Xbox 360 in my plan to play one title from my 603 game backlog for every day that the UK is in lockdown. Today's selection is...

Import Tuner Challenge on the Xbox 360
Previous days' entries can be read HERE

Back on the Dreamcast, ‘Metropolis Street Racer’ was the obvious choice for arcade racer fans looking for something to entertain. Alongside this classic, I spent a lot of time playing both of the 'Tokyo Highway Challenge' games. These were pretty simplistic efforts built around the idea that you tune your car, hit the motorway, and flash your headlights at rival street racers to battle them - it was a very addictive race-win-upgrade-race loop.

The sprawling 'Shutokou Battle' series to which they belong, started on the Super Famicom in 1994 and was still going (albeit on Android) in 2017 some 35 entries later.
Less than a third of these games saw release in Europe, so when I found out 'Import Tuner Challenge' was the final console entry in this series, I bought it. It has sat on my shelf for a good while, but now, I'm finally going to play it.

Day 37: The Red Star (PS2)

One title from my 605 game backlog for every day that the UK is in lockdown. Today's selection is...

The Red Star on the PlayStation 2

Previous days' entries can be read HERE

When people started eulogising ‘Nier Automata’ a little while back, many of them were talking about how it cleverly mixed brawling with ranged combat and used various camera angles to mix up the gameplay… I was sure I’d heard this before but couldn’t quite recall when or for what. It transpires that it was for this; ‘The Red Star’, a comic book tie-in game that does all of those things - although it would take a person of quirkier tastes than I to suggest that ‘The Red Star’ is as good a game as Taro Yoko’s modern masterpiece.

Day 36: Lady Sia (GBA)

On a run of 4 disappointments in my quest to play one title from my 607 game backlog for every day that the UK is in lockdown. Maybe it'll be different today with...

Lady Sia on the GBA

Previous days' entries can be read HERE

This is a game from one of those studios who used to churn out licensed fodder for an easy pay cheque. There were loads of these developers on the GBA, I guess the modern equivalent would be the companies that flood Nintendo's eShop with lazy mobile ports and games with names that, at a glance, might be confused for something actually worth buying.

Day 35: MotorStorm: Apocalypse (PS3)

I'm playing one title from my 608 game backlog every day that the UK is in lockdown. 
Today's selection is...

MotorStorm: Apocalypse on the PS3

Previous days' entries can be read HERE

I had a bit of an adventure just getting set-up to play this game. First I had to find a charge-cable for my 3D glasses (when was the last time you saw mini-USB?), then I had to install a decades-worth of missed updates, and then it turned out that this game hated my console. I’m lucky enough to have a 60GB Fat PS3 with the hardware supported backwards compatibility, and as you can probably understand I’m quite protective of it. So, after the third time this game crashed the system with 3 beeps and a flashing red light, I only had one option: Break out the spare!

Day 34: Runner3 (Switch)

I'm playing one title from my 610 game backlog every day that the UK is in lockdown. Today's selection is...

Runner3 on the Switch

Previous days' entries can be read HERE

If you've been paying attention to the number at the start of these posts you may have noticed that occasionally it doesn't change when it should, and sometimes it even goes in the wrong direction.
This is because I'm an idiot and I can't stop buying games. One arrived yesterday, there's one in the post to me as we speak and last week I couldn't resist this at 90% off in the eShop sale.

Day 33: Fired Up! (PSP)

I'm playing one randomly chosen title from my 610 game backlog every day that the UK is in lockdown. 
Today's selection is...

Fired Up! on the PSP
Previous days' games can be found HERE

Before I get into looking at Fired Up!, I noticed that this has moved the 'Played' counter on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my games to a nice round 1100 - so a quick thank you to those of you who are reading regularly for keeping me going. Next target: Getting that 'Unplayed' counter down below 600! Anyway...

It was all the way back on day one of this journey when the random game selector - henceforth to be known as ‘Selectron™’ - last chose a PSP game. That was the excellent Luminees II whereas today we’re in slightly more obscure territory with Fired Up!, a game I think I own because I got it confused with Pursuit Force. (Pursuit Force, by the way, is fantastic!)

It doesn’t take long with Fired Up! before you realise you’re playing the Single Player bolt-on to a very multiplayer focused game. If the back of the box doesn't give enough clues then you’ll soon notice that the design of each of the first two maps bear all the hallmarks of multiplayer arenas. They are clearly designed to be fun as automotive battlegrounds, and the ‘get A and take it to B’ in the alloted time ‘missions’ have been superimposed as something of an afterthought.
Actually, that’s unfair. There is definitely a story, however rudimentary, to try make the missions more cohesive and there are one or two attempts at mixing up the fetch-quests a little: The second map has you burning around taking pictures of suspicious crates as part of an investigation, which is made extra fun by the excellent handling of the buggy you have for this map; it’s a loads of fun to just hoon around in.

As well as the ten or so missions on each map there is some standard open-world filler bulking up the experience. Firstly, there’s your icon-hunt collector-thon. This has the added benefit of increasing the number of health and weapon drops there are around the map. Secondly are the game’s equivalent of GTA’s ‘Frenzys’, these are eponymously referred to as ‘getting Fired Up!’ and involve destroying a set number of vehicles in a set time.

And that’s more or less it. There are four maps in total for the Story Mode but apparently more are/were available as DLC. I played the first two and, in all honesty, I’m not sure I’ll be heading back to finish the other two any time soon.
The best thing I can say about Fired Up! is that it makes me sad I didn’t play it when the multiplayer was active. I mean, yeah, the collision detection seems like it might be frustrating as all hell, and the various weapons are more or less identical but, as I mentioned, the car handling is really fun, and I imagine it would be the best kind of fustercluck with 7 mates.

I was going to end there but there’s just one last thing I want to make a point of: One of the player characters is a Ghanaian called Addo. Throughout the first set of levels his heritage is constantly brought to our attention by the main NPC contact (a white guy) who refers to him as a ‘Crazy African’, ‘my African friend’, or variations thereupon. 
I hate to politicise something which is clearly not based in malice, but the fact that he wasn’t just referred to as a ‘crazy man’ or ‘my friend’ made me a little uncomfortable.
Anyway, far be it for me to get offended on anyone else's behalf, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Fired Up! - Hard to recommend as a single player game, and sadly that's all there is to it today

Day 32: Gungrave Overdose (PS2)

I'm playing one randomly chosen title from my 611 game backlog every day that the UK is in lockdown. 
Today's selection is...

Gungrave: Overdose on the PS2
Previous days' games can be found HERE

If you've read any of the previous posts I've made in this series you may have picked up that my taste in games leans towards the 'action' end of the spectrum. I believe games can do 'story' well, and some of my favourites are of the slower and more thoughtful variety, but I grew up in the arcades; bunking off the last couple of classes on a Friday afternoon to head to Tavistock Street, where the arcades were in my hometown, shaped my preferences for that instant gratification style of gaming, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Additionally, although I don’t know how apparent this has been, I tend to prefer games outside the mainstream. I would never write-off a game just because it’s big budget or popular but I find that the kind of creativity and originality I most love is more often found away from the headline acts.

And so, finally, we come to Gungrave: OverDose, a full on action game that’s definitely not mainstream… remember when I said ‘expectation is the mother of disappointment’?

As you might guess from the name, this is a sequel. The original Gungrave was released two years prior and was annihilated in reviews for being simplistic, easy, and two hours long. These are all valid criticisms, Gungrave was definitely all of those things, but it was also a great looking game - the epitome of ‘style over substance’ - and when you take all that into consideration it’s easy to imagine that the developer was trying to make a playable anime action movie, but forgot that those didn’t retail for £40 a pop. I paid a lot less than that a long time after release and had a fun two hours, no complaints.

In OverDose you play as ‘Beyond The Grave’ a reanimated gunman who seems to have spent his interred years watching Desperado on loop. Yes, ‘Beyond The Grave’ is his name. Later in the game you unlock two additional playable characters; ‘Juji Kabane’, a dual gunblade wielding blind man with a bloodhound's nose (figuratively speaking), and the ghost of a man who haunts a weaponised electric guitar and goes by the name of ‘Rocketbilly Redcadillac’... Yes, really.

The back of the box boasts over an hour of original anime cut-scenes and, in addition to this, there is a fair amount of story conveyed in visual novel style, where each character has an illustration in a panel that moves about and shakes to portray what’s going on in the dialogue - it’s surprisingly effective and put me mind of the ‘Travis Strikes Back’ sections of the recent No More Heroes spin off. The gameplay is third person, viewed from behind the character at distance rather than ‘over the shoulder’. You can control the camera but only as long as you’re holding the right stick; let go and it swings back to the default position. In game, graphics continue the anime theme with simple, stylised shapes and cell shading. As with the original, this is beautifully presented.

The gameplay involves shooting everything on screen, moving to the next room, and then shooting everything on screen. There are melee moves for close combat, a charged move for additional damage, and a super move called a ‘Demolition Shot’ that fills as your death and destruction combo rises. The death and destruction combo counter is called ‘Beats’ - On my first play of the game I cleared the second-level opening stage in a Beats count that reached over 500; this, I think, gives a good account of the sort of gameplay we’re looking at.
There are bosses and mid-bosses in the time honoured fashion, and they vary from insanely creative (a gang boss in a mechanised robo-chair) to utterly infuriating (2 bulldozers that can only be attacked from the side in an area the size of my back garden).
It’s fair to say that OverDose rectifies all of the criticisms levelled at the original. The gameplay is (slightly) more complex, as is the structure, it offers more of a challenge and it was even released originally at a budget price. It’s about four times as long, too, but this is where the problems creep in.

The first Gungrave offered very little variety in it’s gameplay, but as it could be completed in a couple of hours it didn’t really matter. With eight stages and as many hours of game time, OverDose, despite the additional characters and gameplay elements, suffers through repetition. There are some well chosen locations that allow for level specific enemies; machine gun fruit machines in the Casino and bad guys rolling around on trolleys in a Supermarket, for example. But when they can all be defeated by hammering the square button in much the same way as the standard cannon fodder enemies they don’t actually add variety to the game. The irony is that after two hours I thought this was a fantastic game, another two after that I was getting bored.


Which is a real shame. Gungrave: OverDose has a lot to offer action game fans, particularly those with an interest in anime, and it is by no means a bad game, it’s just that, given the bonkers characters and non-stop action, it’s not quite as entertaining as it should be. 

Gungrave Overdose - Style over substance? Probably. But the bigger issue is one of quantity over quality.