Vertical Force (Virtual Boy)

 Vertical Force is one of those rare games for a console with a big gimmick that not only exists to shoehorn in the use of that gimmick, but is also just a decent game that happens to do so. In this case, it's a vertically-scrolling shooting game, that utilises the Virtual Boy's 3D gimmick to give the stages two layers. But it otherwise does just play like a pretty decent shooting game.

 

Specifically, since it came from Hudson Soft, it plays very much like a title from the Star Soldier series, other than the layers thing. And even that could be considered to beuilding upon the weird thing in the original Star Soldier where you would sometimes fly underneath bits of scenery if you approached them from certain angles. But now you've got a button to shoot and a button to move in and out of the screen (or since the game is top-down, to increase or decrease your altitude).

 

They really did a good job of working the gimmick into the game and using it in interesting ways, too. The second and third stages are especally full of fun little moments that use it. In the second stage, there's these whirlpool things that can suck you down to the lower level if you fly over them at the top level, and the third stage has lots of big rock formations that you need to fly over and under. Unfortunately, it does also feel like the rest of the game was left a little neglected.

 

It's very barebones and featureless for a 1995 console game, and especially if you consider it a part of the Star Soldier series, as even the PC Engine entries from years earlier had things like high score tables that saved (Vertical Force doesn't have high scores at all), Caravan modes, and so on. Vertical Force just has the main game, and that's not a particularly difficult one: on my second play I managed to get to the penultimate boss, and I think I'd be able to clear the game on a single credit without much more practice. (Though Ihaven't been able to replicate that success since, so maybe it was a fluke?). It's only four relatively short stages and a final boss that gets its own stage.

 

So, Vertical Force is a decent enough shooting game, that's also a little short and definitely too easy to be a long term interest, especially with the lack of high score tables. But if you want to play every Star Soldier game, this is definitely one of those in all but name (the default weapon even powers up in the same patterns), and also I'm going to assume that anyone playing Virtual Boy games in 2024 is doing so via emulation, so you're not going to feel like you've got much to lose.

Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Mega Drive)

 Games on SEGA consoles that star Disney's main mascot characters have a great reputation, and they deserve it. Quackshot, World and Castle of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper, and others are all widely-beloved classics that radiate quality from the moment you turn them on. There are some lesser titles, though, that aren't so fondly remembered: Fantasia, for example was hated when it came out, and only comes up in discussions of terrible Mega Drive games nowadays. Goofy's Hysterical History Tour has it even worse: it was released without anyone even noticing, and Idoubt that any of those few that remember it do so fondly.

 

It starts out pretty much as soon as you turn the game on: for some reason, it has its own slightly different, slightly cheaper-looking versions of the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Enterprises Ltd." and SEGA logo screens. And the title screen has that strange, intangible look of cheapness that a lot of (but defintiely not all) US-developed Mega Drive games have to them, especially ones aimed at kids. Things briefly start to look up once you actually start playing, though, as Goofy himself has a pretty decently animted walk cycle, and the extending arm device with which he's armed is pretty interesting too, and actually brought to mind better games, like Bionic Commando or  The Magical Quest starring Micky Mouse. 

 

That's about the sum of the positive things I have to say about this game, though. The longer you play, the less fun you'll have. There are enemies every where, and they're all insane damage sponges. You're constantly having to make leaps of faith, being expected to just jump off of cliffs into the void, and hoping there'll be something to land on when you get there. Or you've got to jump down onto a tiny little platform that can only just be seen when you crouch (and of course, you can't jump straight from crouching). There are apparently several epochs on Goofy's eponymous tour, but after about an hour of playing (and I would have given up long before that without save states), and after finishing at least seven or eight surprisingly long stages, there was no end in sight for the prehistoric age, with its one background image and one tileset.

 

The thing that finally made me give up on the game, though, was a sequence of jumps that made heavy use of the extending arm I praised only a couple of paragraphs ago. The thing is that by default, pressing B makes Goofy extend the arm diagonally upwards in the direction he's facing. If you press left or right while presing B, it'll stretch out horizontally instead. All sounds normal so far, right? Unfortunately, the sequence in question wants you to jump and grab platforms above and  to the right. So, you have to press C and right to make the jump, holding them long enough to get close to the platform, then let go of both and press B on its own to stretch the arm towards it. But instinctively, you'll still be pressing right when you press B, and the arm will stretch out horizontally, causing you to fall onto the spikes below. There's a few of these jumps in a row, all identical, and if you fail one, you either start again, or you lose your last bit of health on the spikes below and got back to the start of the stage.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but Goofy's Hysterical History Tour isn't worth your time. It's boring, frustrating, and ugly. One final example of how it's a shoddy producation as well as a terrible game, though: like most platform games, you can hold up to pan the camera upwards and see what's above you. But Goofy has no accompanying animation for this! He doesn't even turn his eyes upwards, he just stands there as the camera pans. So to re-iterate: game's awful, don't bother.