Speed Freak

Back in the early days of arcades, before polygons hit the scene with 1984's amazing I, Robot, arcade games were manufactured with two different types of displays: raster and vector. Raster displays were made up of the colorful little dots we know as "sprites", whereas vector displays were made up of lines and dots, allowing them to display a form of primitive 3d. Though Star Wars and Tempest are undoubtedly the most famous vector games, coming from Atari, other companies also threw their hat into the vector arena, such as Vectorbeam, who had a short run of vector-only games, starting with 1977's Space War, and including today's game, Speed Freak. Speed Freak is a first person driving game, providing simple but clean and aesthetically pleasing landscapes to drive through.

Like the much later Outrun, the goal is not to win the race by outrunning other cars, but to get as far as you can without running out of time. The controls ain't Gran Turismo, being that you only have a gas pedal, 4 gears, and steering, all working in a fairly arcadey fashion, but they serve their purpose well. The course you drive on is randomly generated, and has both roadblocks and other cars to avoid, as well as bits of background color such as hitchhikers, trees, cows, and birds. Speed Freak is a simple game, but a pleasurable one. The minimalist graphics are actually quite soothing, mimicking a night drive through the desert, and the fact that crashes don't kill you also makes the whole experience more relaxing, though you do get to see a neat explosion, as seen below.

Dynamite Dux

Continuing yesterday's theme, Dynamite Dux is yet another obscure Sega arcade game, this time a beat em up. You play as either a blue or pink duck Bin or Pin, trying to rescue your owner from the evil king Achacha the great, who took her away in a "miracle ball" to achacha world. Though Achacha world is supposed to be a different place than earth, it still has places named "texas" and "chicago", with evil penguins in the desert and giant fireballs in the city. Must be sort of a Sliders thing. Though the game plays mostly like a standard double dragonish game, there are a few interesting wrinkles. If you hold down the attack button when unarmed you can charge up for a huge punch, and you can also pick up various types of weapons, such as a squirtgun, a bazooka, and more. The graphics are colorful and interestingly shaded, and even feature some subtle sprite manipulation and scaling. The music is typical 80's Sega, cheery and rendolent of blue skies. Overall, Dynamite Dux is not a timeless classic, but it certainly deserves more than a downscaled Master System port.

Teddy Boy Blues

Here on woodgrain gaming, I do not only cover games by obscure companies nobody has ever heard of, I also cover obscure games from well-known companies. Now, Sega is still a household name, despite the sad failure of the Dreamcast and also the failure to make a playable sonic game in recent years. During the 80's, though, while they did produce some incredibly popular and revolutionary games, such as Outrun and Space Harrier, they also made a few projects that have mostly been forgotten today, having only received watered-down Master System ports, or Genesis ports nobody played. One of these such games is 1986's Teddy Boy Blues, based on a popular japanese song by Yohko Ishino. After a quirky but well-animated intro screen, you, as a small beret-wearing boy, must shoot his way through increasingly difficult sidescrolling stages full of odd japanese enemies such as blue ninjas, evil dolls, and dragons.



The stages are fairly small, and loop on themselves, only changing when you manage to kill all the enemies onscreen before running out of time, which happens gradually as a scary black furry blob looking something like a langolier eats up your time bar. There don't seem to really be any weapon upgrades, and overall the game is simple but gets more and more challenging as you get overwhelmed with enemies, which you have to collect once you stun them in order to prevent them from eating up your time. There are also two different bonus levels; a shooting gallery and an overhead stage starring Yohko Ishino herself. Overall, Teddy Boy Blues is a visually and aurally pleasing Sega arcade title, with their 80s pastel aesthetics, also seen in Fantasy Zone. Teddy Boy Blues is a simple and charming title, but lacks anything to make it truly stand out. It was ported to the Master System, but without the pop song connection, and with somewhat downgraded graphics, and also a little-seen Megadrive/Genesis port, both of which have vanished into the mists of time.

Fantasy Land

Fantasy Land is Hard Head 2's slightly less deranged Italian cousin. Like Hard Head 2, you play an ugly little boy who must fight more and more perplexing foes in order to rescue a girl, though in this case you are at least a slightly deformed elf rather than a bald simpleton in overalls. With a variety of magic fireballs you must fight ooga booga tribesmen, leatherboys, killer plants and various other weird creatures as you go through seemingly random settings, from a typical fantasy forest all the way to a more modern city and factory. Despite some hideous character design, Fantasy Land has an appealingly different look and feel to its graphics, more like a gussied-up pc game instead of the usual colorful, rounded sprites of its japanese counterparts. The game also controls fairly decently and plays fairly, though frustratingly at points. At times it feels less than solid, in a sort of floaty Alex Kidd way. Overall, though, a fairly decent game, nothing too special but not as horrible as the ugly characters had me fearing.