PADDLE FIGHTER

Forget World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2: did you know that way back in the mists of time, people in Japan could play videogames online... using their MegaDrives? Well they could, and it was almost certainly a better experience that modern online gaming because your opponent couldn't send you a message calling you a "fagget spammer jew n00b". You could also download games, and here's one of them - it's Sega's 1991 timewaster Paddle Fighter.

A hush falls over the arena. The crowd nervously clutch their betting slips in their sweaty fingers as the two competitors enter. The combatants take their places; the atmosphere grows charged, electric. The audience know something special is about to happen, something that will live on long after they're dead, told and endlessly retold in epic tales of sporting combat. The plucky young contender picks up his paddle with one hand and reaches into his pocket with the other. Then he puts 50p in the slot and they start playing air hockey.

Yep, it's air hockey. Plain ol' air hockey, but in videogame form. Okay, maybe not plain air hockey, but we'll get to that soon. First, let's meet our hero!

You play as an androgynous, elfin man-woman called Binbowie, a rookie air hockey player with a pocket full of arcade tokens and a heart full of dreams. I'm going to refer to Binbowie as a "he" just for the sake of consistency, although that might well be wrong. Judging by those ears, he might be one of the fairy folk; I can only hope he doesn't turn me into a toadstool or something for disrespecting his ancient race. I have no idea what the plot is, it being in Japanese and all, but given that binbou in the Japanese for "poor" I'm going to assume that Binbowie is a David Bowie impersonator who has fallen on hard times and need the air hockey tournament's prize money to get his life back on track.
Once you've chosen to start the game, you're thrown into an air hockey battle with your first opponent:

U=Mazler might look like a badly-typed insult from an internet forum somewhere, but it's the name of your first opponent. An anthropomorphic camel in a shirt and tie, he grew up living in the shadow of his cooler older brother Joe Camel. While Joe Camel made a fortune advertising cigarettes to children, U=Mazler struggled to earn a living playing competitive air hockey, the bitterness and shame twisting him into the borderline psychotic that he is today.
Actually, now I look at him again he looks more like a kangaroo. Well, there goes my elaborately-crafted backstory.

So, air hockey then.You've got a paddle, and you have to knock the puck into your opponent's goal. First person to seven points wins the match. But wait! Even by the standards of the early nineties that would have been considered pretty fuckin' slim pickings, gameplay wise, so there are a few extra complications. One is that for every minute played, the goals get a little wider. Honestly, it's a pretty decent mechanism that forces you to work harder as the match progresses.
You also have two power-ups that you can use up to three times during the match. One is always the same - it creates a barrier across your goal for a while, which is nice. The other one seems to be random, changing between matches, and it has various effects. You can make the puck multiply, make it disappear, charge it with electricity so it paralyses the other paddle or even summon a picture of Binbowie wearing a clown nose that floats around, distracting your opponent. Unless your playing against the computer, of course: the machine doesn't give a fuck if you're dressed like Kaptain Boffo. That is why the machines are superior to us: the ability to remain unfazed by the sudden appearance of clowns.
Once U=Mazler is defeated, it's on to the next chump. And here she is!

O=Imoko is a strange gypsy lady who, judging by that smile in her picture, really loves air hockey. Like, "sneaks in at night and licks the paddles" loves it. I'd stay away from her if I were you, Binbowie. She's also got the power to make her face appear and float around the table, getting in your way.

Well, that's just bloody charming. Still, she's easy enough to overcome, even with her dark, soulless eyes peering deep into the furthest recesses of your mind. Next up is this jolly fellow:

Manian10 is an insect of some kind, except, you know, advanced enough to want to play air hockey at a professional level. He's got a trick up his sleeve (carapace?), too.

A table with angled sides! Surely against the rules of the Intergalactic Air-Hockey Association, but Manian10 gets away with it because he's a giant space bug. You can piss him off if you want; personally I'd prefer to not have him insert his parasitic larvae into my face.

Next is Ponk=0=2. That's quite a name. Anyone who played a lot of Golden Axe will recognise the strange decision to include an equals sign between the character's names. In fact, if you did play a lot of Golden Axe then you're probably thinking "DEATH=ADDER" right now. I always assumed it was just an affectation used to make the names look cooler, and it is, but there's more to it than that. Here's an article from the often-entertaining Back of the Cereal Box with a more in-depth look at the "equals" phenomenon.
You maybe have noticed that Ponk=0=2 is a robot. That's because Paddle Fighter seems to be a game about air hockey that just happens to be set in the distant future. Obviously, normal air hockey is dreary as sin and not worth the time and effort of making a game about it, but futuristic air-hockey? Sign me up for that shit right now. In fact, I'd like to see more arcade games set in unusual time periods. How about a version of skeeball set during the Vietnam war, where you have to roll hand grenades into a Viet Cong foxhole? Or Crusades Whack-a-Mole: bash the pop-up Saracens with a Bible on a stick.

Next up is Otomisan, a woman who appears to be part-way through her assimilation into the Borg. She got half-way through reconfiguring her body with biomechanical implants so that she could join a vast, interconnected consciousness and then stopped for a while to play some air hockey.

She's also got an oddly-shaped table, this time somewhat coffin-like in its design.
Next!

G=Mamius is here, and he looks booored. He's a green alien guy with a mohawk and a soul patch, and he seems to be regarding you with ill-concealed disdain. He's probably pissed off that he spent several thousand years in cryo-statis, travelling across the universe as everyone he ever knew and loved died, only to reach Earth and find out that all anyone gives a shit about is air hockey.
It's not even great air hockey, either. The main point of air hockey is to beat your opponent by twatting the puck across the table as hard as possible and then sheepishly going to collect the puck as it flies off the table and lands next to some dead-eyed chav sitting at a fruit machine. You can't do that in Paddle Fighter, because you can't get the requisite amount of force, and therefore future air hockey is inferior to our current air hockey technology.
Another thing is the sound effects: for me, the defining characteristic of arcades isn't the various bleepings of the videogames, the sound of someone trying to surreptitiously thump the coin falls or even people's incredulity at how many tickets it costs to get even the most basic of prizes. No, it's the thwinck thwinck thwinck sound that air hockey tables, proper air hockey tables that aren't in space, make. That sound isn't included in Paddle Fighter. In fact, I'm fairly certain it's impossible to replicate, as though the brain cannot hear it correctly unless you're standing in a leisure centre or a seaside amusement arcade.
Oh, and the music? There is one track that plays during gameplay. It's a thirty-second loop of the most inane plinky-plonky crap I've ever heard. Hopefully, with the aid of this powerful anti-psychosis medication, I will one day manage to forget it.

Your final opponent is P=Master, ancient master of the mystical arts of air hockey, and a proper nightmare to defeat. Despite his status as the final boss, he's got a surprisingly boringly-shaped table.

Be prepared for your encounter with this guy to last about the same amount of time as the rest of the game combined. Perhaps his giant ears give him some kind of radar-sense, allowing him to predict your every move. Luckily, I am a pathetic shell of a man who has nothing better to do than put in the time required to defeat him. Your reward: well, you get a bit of a text crawl that I'm sure is telling you that congratulations, you are the new champ. Yippee.

I think that says something about being the number one air hockey player in the cosmos, a title with the same cachet as "world's tallest midget".
And that's Paddle Fighter. If you're really desperate to play a videogame version of air hockey, then this will do, I guess. The physics are decent, and there's a two-player mode. Just make sure you turn the music off: I don't want to feel responsible for a rash of Paddle Fighter-related suicides.

QUIZ DAISOUSA SEN: THE LAST COUNT DOWN

If you’re the kind of person that believes violence isn’t the answer, then I have just the game for you. I hope you’re good at trivia questions instead, because otherwise you won’t get far in SNK’s 1991 quiz-em-up Quiz Daisousa Sen – The Last Count Down. Also, you’ll be off my team for the pub quiz.

There’s big trouble in Quiz City, and only two men have the vast resources of pointless trivia knowledge required to save the day. These men are called Neo McDonald and Geo Kentucky (Not that they can spell their own names correctly or anything).

If you have a pop quiz, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, then maybe you can hire... The Quiz Police. I think they’re policemen, but as Quiz Daisousa Sen is set in some parallel universe where all interactions take place in the form of a quiz, the requirements for joining the force are somewhat different and training mostly consists of browsing Wikipedia for hours on end.

The gameplay of QD is easy enough to explain: as you’ve probably figured out, it’s a quiz game, an early-nineties video game version of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire machines that litter pubs up and down the country. If you’ve ever played Quiz & Dragons on the Capcom Classics Collection, it’s exactly the same setup as that. You’re asked a question, and you have four answers to choose from. Your opponent has a bar with a certain number of segments, and each time you answer correctly, one of the segments lights up. Fully light up the bar and your opponent is defeated, but if you get it wrong, you lose health. There are a few extra complications, such as the occasional power-up with effects such as reducing the amount of options you have to choose from or allowing you to choose the category of questions. A few rounds make you press the answer button as fast as possible, and sometimes you have to reach a total number of points, and you can choose harder questions for more points. That’s really all there is to it.
There are two plotlines to choose from at the start of the game, and that’s where I ran into a small hitch: the game is only available in Japanese, and I don’t speak Japanese. Therefore, I had no idea what the hell was going on, plot wise. However, judging from what I managed to piece together from the images flashing in front of my uncomprehending eyes, I don’t think knowing Japanese would lead to these plots making any more sense. Here’s a quick rundown of what I managed to decipher.

Plot 1: A girl contacts Neo and Geo, possibly about her missing dog. They find a man in a balaclava (who looks like a terrorist from SNK’s The Super Spy) in her house, and then they get arrested. They escape using the power of quizology. They take a plane to Hong Kong, easily getting past airport security despite being escaped felons. There they meet a robot, a ninja, some kind of criminal mastermind and another robot with the face of an old man. Old man robot explodes, they go back to the girl, who is in a graveyard. It all seems like a lot of work for a missing pet, but the girl seems happy enough. The end.

Plot 2:
This one makes far more sense. In a word, Zombies. In a few more words, Neo and Geo are kidnapped by a Mafia boss who dangles them over a shark-infested pool. They escape using the power of quizology. Afterwards, they head to another graveyard, completely ignoring the Mafia boss who tried to kill them with a shark. Zombies begin to rise from their graves, and Neo and Geo take refuge in a creepy house. I have a sudden urge to play Resident Evil, but it quickly passes. They leave and head for the police station, which has been overrun with zombies, who are in turn lead by a vampire. They meet a man in the cells who tells them a thing, and then they break into an installation of some sort. After battling various zombies, they reach their final opponent. It is the President of the USA, and he turns into Satan. They out-quiz The Adversary, and things return to normal. The end.

Now, that all sounds like jolly good fun, but that’s not why I played through a quiz game in a language I don’t understand. No, there’s a much better reason, and that reason is cameos by famous people! I say cameos, I mean SNK took their likenesses without asking. Let’s have a look at them, shall we?

I noticed that when I chose Plot 2, Michael J. Fox appeared. In case you were still at a loss as to who this person is supposed to be, SNK kindly wrote “Mike” on his jacket. Obviously, once I'd seen Marty McFly here I had to work my way through the game and see who else was lurking within.

The Mafia boss with the shark is everyone’s favourite on-screen psychopath, Jack Nicholson. More importantly, he’s wearing a white suit with a red-and-black striped shirt and a gold scarf. Not many things could improve The Sopranos, but every mob boss dressing like that most certainly would.

Spooky Exorcist goings-on!

I would say that Norman Bates’ house isn’t a character, but I guess it’s as much a character as anyone else in Psycho. Just look at that pixel work. It's a thing of beauty.

This police woman turns up in both stories. Two theories as to who she’s supposed to be: I reckon she’s either Lt. Callahan from Police Academy or Brigitte Nielsen.

Zombie Mike Tyson, complete with gappy teeth. The “Unlicensed Mike Tyson Appearances in Videogames” Wikipedia page that I mooted in the Great Boxing Rush Up! article gains another entry. “Appears in Quiz Daisousa Sen. He is impetuous, impregnable, and also a zombie.”

Not sure about this one. The hair makes me think of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, but I don’t think that’s it. He looks familiar, though. If you think you know who it is, then let me know in the comments.

There’s so much glass! Bruce Willis appears in his guise as the iconic vest-wearing, terrorist-butchering, wise-cracking John McClane in his days before the curse of baldness took another brave soul away from us.

Great Scott! My no-doubt copyrighted likeness has been stolen and placed in a bizarre Japanese quiz game! I think I might write an elaborate Quiz Daisousa Sen / Back to the Future fanfic to explain how Doc Brown ended up in Quiz City. A slash fanfic. With BDSM elements. Yeah.

I’ll just leave this here...



I struggled with this one, until I noticed his name is given as “Terrorist”. Then I realised he’s probably Colonel Stuart, the villain from Die Hard 2. Sadly, there is no Alan Rickman.

I think this is Jackie Chan. I hope it’s Jackie Chan. If I had my way, Jackie Chan would be in every game, except ironically Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu. He’s too good for that.

Quiz Daisousa Sen: The Last Count Down, then. Well, it’s difficult to say how good the game is due to my insistence on sticking with such a dead language as English and not converting to Glorious Japanese. That said, I like Quiz & Dragons. Quiz Daisousa Sen is almost identical to Quiz & Dragons, plus it contains Zombie Mike Tyson. I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a big ol’ tick in the “solid design choice” column. I could talk about how the graphics are a good example of SNK’s huge, beautiful spritework, and that the music is pretty good too. But again, Zombie John McClane. Zombie John McClane. You can't argue with that.

THE HUNTER AR 0062 / BATTLE HUNTER

You'll question the very nature of fate and free will! You'll curse the day dice were invented! Oh, and you might find some treasure. All this and not that much more in Success / Agetec's 1999 Playstation random-em-up The Hunter A.R. 0062, a.k.a. Battle Hunter.

This game is a mystery to me, it really is. I'd never noticed it, never seen a screenshot, never met another person who'd even heard of it. Then one day in 2001, it simply... appeared in my house. I didn't buy it, nor did I borrow it from someone, and my brothers were as nonplussed as I was as to where in the hell it came from. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, and after I'd convinced myself that I hadn't programmed it myself during my frequent blackouts (turns out we had a carbon monoxide leak and it was definitely not related to those all people going missing), I slapped it into the Playstation and thus exposed myself to The Hunter's eldritch charms.
The first thing to do in The Hunter is to create your character. Okay, that's a lie. The first thing to do is mess around with the options. Ooh look, you can change the background wallpaper! While they are all naturally artistic masterpieces, none of the images avaliable at the start match up to this stylish offering:

Warning terrifying Lawnmower Man flashbacks please send help. The Moss Orb of Kal'aak-Zor there should give you some idea of what budget level The Hunter occupies; it's the level usually reserved for the fourth straight-to-DVD sequel to Epic Movie and the "auto"biographies of last year's X Factor contestants.
Okay, once your green sphere is in place, it's time to choose a character. Here are your options, and choose wisely because you'll be looking at them for a long time, often dancing across the inside of your eyelids as you try to sleep.

So who do we have? From left to right there's Fei from Xenogears, Lady Terry Bogard, Russian-looking girl/boy, Doom Marine, Gogol from Cyber City Oedo 808 (showing my age a bit there), Hellsing's Alucard, Hwoarang from Tekken and a girl who looks a bit like Meryl from Metal Gear Solid but that's pushing it a bit. Each character has eight different colour palettes, too. I went with the Meryl-a-like, mostly because she was the one my cursor had stopped on, and I named her Flange.
As the name suggests, the focus of The Hunter is hunting. Hunting relics, to be precise; in a world mostly destroyed by a generic nuclear apocalypse, you play as a mercenary who heads into the ruins to find rare items that he then sells. It's like Bargain Hunt, except much less depressing. Aiding you in your quest to get rich by rummaging through garbage is your Broker, who gives you missions and buys items from you. Any ladies who might be reading: you may want to make sure you're sitting down, because this guy is sure to make you swoon.

He looks like Jason Statham's brain-damaged brother, he's wearing a shirt made of lava and his dialogue is poorly translated.

Okay, there's no need to be like that. The Broker is assisted by a spindly anime nurse who looks like she's about to burst into tears.

Maybe she's upset that her iPad appears to be broken, or maybe she's more concerned about her oddly skeletal fingers. Whatever her deal is, she heals you when you die and as you can see from the screenshot there, she also sells you level-ups. Yep, The Hunter eschews the standard RPG formula of having you work hard and gain experience points in favour of you simply handing over your cold, hard cash. I'd like to say it's all part of the cyberpunk theme of the game, and when you buy a new level what you're really buying is bionic implants and such. Sadly, the truth is simply that the developers didn't really know what they were doing.

Gameplay-wise, The Hunter is a boardgame. You get plunked down in a randomly-generated dungeon, filled with boxes, flags, an exit and three other Hunters. There are two types of mission, although they play out identically: for each time you level up, a new story mission appears and you have to clear it before you can do anything. The game does have a plot, but it's just generic corporate-espionage-oops-we-lost-our-combat-data-find-our-disks dullness. Given the set of utter interest-vacuums that make up the cast, it's nigh impossible to give even the smallest of fucks about anything that's going on plot-wise. Once you've done the story mission for your level, you can access the meat of the gameplay, which consists of trips into the ruins to find a target item and bring it to the surface.

You've got the basic strategy RPG options to control your character: you can move, attack, or wait a turn to restore some health. If you decide to move, you'll have your first encounter with something that will soon become the bane of your very existence: dice rolls. Like a boardgame, everything in The Hunter is determined by rolling a six-sided die. While you do have a movement stat, it's generally pretty small and is simply added to your dice roll to calculate your movement. For example, Flange here has a Mv of +2, so if you roll a four you get to move six spaces. So, you move around, collecting boxes that hold various items that might give you a stat increase when held but are generally just there to be sold. Every now and then you might get into a fight. Exciting!

Fighting is, of course, decided by the ancient gladatorial method of rolling dice. As you can see, you have stats for attack and defence, and they work in the same way as the movement stat, getting added to your dice rolls to increase their totals. When you attack, both you an your opponent roll two dice and the numbers are added together, with the appropriate stats being added to that. The damage caused is the difference between the two numbers, so say, for example, Flange rolls a three and a four and "Artist" over there rolls a two and a one. Flange gets seven, plus three for her attack stat for a total of ten. Artist gets three, plus his three defence for six, for a total of six. Flange deals him four damage, which Artist will no doubt recover by waiting on his next turn, and the same thing will happen on the turn after that, and the turn after that, and the turn after that, trapped in some endless stalemate where he gets hit hard enough to be winded but his opponent kindly lets him get his breath back and then hits him again, forever and ever, until the final heat death of the universe. Oh, and there're cards, too!

You might have noticed them in the Hunter's status window; little coloured cards that give stat increases. You start with five, and you're given a new one at the start of each turn or (two if you wait). They have a variety of functions, both in an out of battle, and they're usually the key to success. Blue cards give you extra movement points, red ones increase your attack damage, green ones lay traps for the other Hunters to step on and lose all their cards or have a leg blown off or something equally grisly. Finally, yellow cards increase you defence in combat or raise your ability to avoid traps on the map. The deck is limited, and if you fanny around on one map for too long and run out of cards, a powerful boss monster appears and hunts you down. Quite how the cards kept him at bay I don't know, but I'm sure whatever the reason is it's worthy of a 40-episode arc of Yu-Gi-Oh.
If you manage to get to the end of a mission, you're ranked according to various factors including how often you punched your fellow Hunters and how much trash you scraped up to carry home with you. Rinse and repeat until you've got enough cash to level up, and that's The Hunter.

The main limiting factor of The Hunter is randomness. Almost everything in the game is random: the dungeon layout, the placement and strength of enemies, the location of boxes and the items inside them, the cards your receive, how far you can move and how much damage you do in combat. Now, I'm all for a bit of randomness in videogames. Randomised dungeons can give a game more longevity, and lord knows I spent enough time in Disgaea's Item World, but too much and it's just overwhelming and in some cases game-breaking. Quite often, the dungeon will generate in a way that sees you stranded at one side of the map while your opponents spawn with one foot in the exit, surrounded by item boxes, laughing at you as you roll one after one after one in a vain attempt to catch up to them. If they get the target item to the exit before you in a story mission, that's it, here's the Game Over screen. Load your game, do it again and hope the god of randomness take pity on you. Sometimes the stages give you literally no chance, and that's a terrible situation to be in in a videogame.

Maybe it's not a videogame, but rather a tool of enlightenment, an educational aid designed to demonstrate Man's status as a being cast adrift in an uncaring universe ruled only by swirling, unceasing chaos. If I completed the game (something I never managed), I'd expect the walls to peel back like in Hellraiser and there to be some formless Lovecraftian entity lurking there. He stares into the depths of my soul and says "NOW YOU UNDERSTAND", and I suffer a complete mental collapse as my mind tries to process the immensity of what it has just learned.

So as you can probably tell, The Hunter isn't very good. The gameplay is basic and frequently kicks you square in the testicles, the graphics range from servicable sprites to migraine-inducingly bad bakgrounds and the music... well, the music is odd. Here's one of the tracks:



It's sort of pleasant, although every song sounds like a demo track included with a mid-nineties music creation program. I think it's the samples: I mean, just listen to those guitar samples and tell me it's not from a program called something like E-Zee-MusicMaker DX or something. And yet... it stays with you. I hadn't played this game in about a decade, but as soon as this track started, I could remember it note for goddamn note, and however little I wanted to I found myself first humming it and then putting it on my MP3 player in a distinctly unironic fashion. That's pretty much how I feel about The Hunter as a whole. I really should hate it, or at least not like it, but I keep wanting to go back to it like it's an abusive husband. It's definitely got a case of "Just One More Go" syndrome, and if you're the kind of saddo like me who enjoys games about collecting hundreds of ultimately useless gewgaws, then The Hunter will probably be right up your street.
To summarize my position on the matter, I played The Hunter at about the same time as I first played Chrono Cross. I remember vast swathes of The Hunter perfectly, down to the Broker's dialogue. I remember very little about Chrono Cross, despite having played it much more recently than The Hunter. Whether that's proof of the mind-warping powers of this game or a shocking indictment of Chrono Cross, I'll let you decide.

Don't you forget about
meThe Hunter, then. I sort of love it and sort of hate it, although I would very much like to see an updated sequel for the Playstation Network / Xbox Live or something, with plenty of cooperative dungeon-crawling action but with the random factor addressed. It's not like the rights'll be expensive.

UMIHARA KAWASE

The Ocean: mankind's most terrifying foe and home to evolution's most hideous freaks (I'm looking at you, Pelican Eel). Fortunately, the sea's roiling vastness can be defeated by a small Japanese girl with a stretchy fishing line. Oh, that's okay th.. wait a minute, what?

Umihara Kawase is the name of the game, as well as the name of the heroine. Released for the SNES in 1994, it's an obscure, Japan-only puzzle game with a vaguely anime-style theme. So far, so much like any one of hundreds of games that never made it out of Japan. Umihara is different, though, and it's different for a very simple reason: it's good.

It was developed by a company called TNN, which in a perfect illustration of the Japanese usage of English words apparently stands for "Think about Needs of Notice for human being", a sentence that feels like it could be used as a type of mental torture. Halfway through your interrigation of the prisoner, read them that sentence and ask them to tell you what it means; they'll break soon enough. It was then published by Japanese television channel NHK, which is a bit like the BBC releasing a version of Lemmings or something. TNN managed to make only one other game before they vanished, but they left us with a real gem in Umihara Kawase.

Earlier I said it was a puzzle game, and I suppose it is. However, a better description might be platform puzzler or physics puzzler or something. You control Umihara, the girl in the screenshot above with the bright pink backpack. You've got the d-pad for movement and one button for jumping. Jumping won't get you very far in Umihara, but luckily you also have one important piece of kit: your fishing line.

Pressing Y will extend your line in whatever direction you're pressing. It hooks onto any surface that it hits, and as long as you hold the button down Umihara will hang from the line, waiting for you to do something. The goal of the game is to get through the stages by moving Umihara across the stage and to one of the exit doors scattered about the place, and that's where your line comes in.
Umihara Kawase is all about the physics. Your line is rubbery, and you can reel it in and out by pressing down or up on the d-pad. The first few stages will see you needing little more than the basics to get past the various obstacles and pits between our heroine and the exit, such as hooking onto the ceiling and swinging over gaps. And then it gets a little more complex; say for instance you have to hook onto the floor and walk off the edge of a platform, dangling down to avoid the attacks of a large tadpole. And then a little more complex, and a little more, until you find yourself having to perform all manner of acrobatics and momentum-based catapulting to see you through the stages... and it feels great.

The presentation of the game is pretty basic; although the sprites of the enemies look pretty good, the rest of the graphics are perfunctory, and the backgrounds are just digitised photos:

The music is decent if nothing special, and there's nothing in the way of extra options or plot or cutscenes. Even the ending appears very abruptly and is little more than a credits crawl and a picture of a fish. This leads me to a dichotomy in how I feel about Umihara. One on hand, the joy of the game shines through despite the rather bland presentation, and it serves as a great reminder that all of that stuff isn't really important to the pleasure you can derive from a videogame that has an interesting and well-implemented gameplay mechanic. Tetris doesn't need whizz-bang graphics to be fun, and Global Defence Force remains one of my favourite videogames ever despite often looking rougher Amy Winehouse after a lock-in at a brewery.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what could have been, if a company like Capcom had made it and given it a graphical makeover and quality music. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so overlooked, and that would have been great for a game that deserves to not be overlooked. Umihara Kawase did receive a sequel on the PS1, as well as a PSP compilation of the two games that was apparently so bug-ridden as to be almost unplayable. There is a DS compilation too, which apparently is much better, and as the DS is region-free and Umihara requires no knowledge of Japanese it's probably your best bet if you want to swing around on a rubbery fishing line.

Speaking of fish... as you might have gathered from the start of this article, I am not a fan of the sea. While it fascinates me endlessly, I can't swim and deep-sea fish creep the beejesus out of me, like they should creep out all right-minded citizens. At least in Umihara you don't have to go into the sea to meet these fish: they come to you! On legs. Creepy little fish legs.

Look at that goldfish, strutting around on land like he's not some horrible mockery of nature. All the enemies in the game are some variety of fish or amphibian, and they're the main contributing factor to the game's often punishing difficulty level. Octopuses cling to walls and stun you with ink, goofy sharks flap at you and eels spit what I think are supposed to be eggs at you. They always seem to spawn just as you're flying toward them, but it's a measure of the game's charm that I never found myself getting frustrated by them. There are also a few bosses, including GIANT ENEMY CRABS and this perplexed-looking tadpole:

"Why am I huge? I have legs! I'm firing small frogs out of some undisclosed orifice! That little girl is whipping me with a fishing rod I MUST CRUSH HER!"
So then, that's Umihara Kawase. One last thing: apparently the name comes from a Japanese saying about cookery that means "sea fish are fat in the belly, river fish are fat in the back", thus giving river fish a complex about their fat arses.

Umihara Kawase: an overlooked gem that you should definitely try out and then tell people you've been playing a game that's essentially Bionic Commando with fish.
BONUS: Here's a page from Hardcore Gaming 101 about the Umihara series as a whole. It's better than this nonsense, anyway.