First 50:
51. Gauntlet IV Mega Drive
52. Alex Kidd in Shinobi World Master System
53. Psycho Fox Master System
54. The Ninja Master System
55. R-Type Master System
56. Momotarō Katsugeki PC Engine
57. Overcooked: Special Edition Switch eShop
58. Parasol Stars PC Engine
59. Star Parodier PC Engine
60. Cadash PC Engine
61. Dead or Alive Ultimate Xbox
62. Dead or Alive Ultimate 2 Xbox
63. OutRun 2 Xbox *NEW*
64. Pop'n Twinbee SNES *NEW*
Replays!:
1. Bare Knuckle III Mega Drive
2. Die Hard Arcade Saturn
3. The World of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Mega Drive
4. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble 3DS VC
5. Trip World 3DS VC
Here's reviews 16-17 of 28!
OutRun 2
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Outrun 2 was a game I’d been on the lookout for for a while on Xbox, and when I finally spotted it in the wild earlier this year I knew I had to pick it up and finally give it a shot. The original OutRun was a game I thoroughly expected to dislike, based on my general opinion on other Sega sprite scrolling games like Space Harrier and Hang-On, but was pleasantly surprised to fall in love with, thanks to it’s chilled vibe, easy to pick-up-and-play gameplay and fantastic soundtrack.
In OutRun 2, you once again cruise down 5 stages of track with your girl in the passenger seat and some sweet tunes on the radio. Pulling off from the beach, you venture through a variety of settings in order to reach the goal at the end of the the 5th. At the end of each stage though, you get given a choice to go left or right, each leading to a new section of track with a new theme, resulting in branching paths to 5 different end points, but often with several ways to reach each. Taking the left path results in an easier track, whilst taking a right takes you to a trickier section. Theoretically at least, as I thought some of the middle paths were the trickiest, but generally the idea held up overall. Reaching the end gives you a goofy ending just like the original (with a different one for each path) and a chance to place your initials on the high-score screen.
As well as the classic arcade stylings though, OutRun2 offers some new content in the form of Heart Attack mode. In this mode, you have to impress your lady friend by achieving each of the tasks she sets you as you drive the course. These might be to overtake other cars on the road, to drift around corners, to hit or avoid traffic cones or to stay in certain coloured areas of track (generally either the inside, outside or middle of a corner). Do well in these sections and your gal pal will shower you with affections in the form of hearts and give you a rating from D to AAA (and above, maybe?). The goal in this mode is to reach the end having impressed your lady the most.
An extension of this mode is seen in challenge mode also – challenge mode takes each of the games 26 sections of track and gives you challenges to achieve on them. Some are simple or similar to Heart Attack mode, but some are a little bit zanier, such as one where you must keep track of numbers being displayed as you drive in order to solve the maths problem and take the right exist at the end. Do the numbers equal 26 or 29? You decide! Another might have you getting more points if you keep your speed above a certain point. Challenge mode is a lot of fun although slow to get started as you unlock each section of path by finishing the previous one – so early on you have to do them in order, whereas later you can branch out as in the main mode. You can unlock additional cars and more by playing through these challenges.
OutRun 2 controls quite similarly to the first with very arcade and unrealistic controls, but it’s big addition is drifting, which can be used to take tough corners very tightly and at speed. This is very useful on the harder difficulty tracks as your regular turning circle isn’t very good, but to get high scores on some of the challenges I found that you had to learn when not to drift, as a drift is ever so slightly slower than turning without drifting, and so sometimes you’d go faster by taking the corner gently instead.
OutRun 2 is a fantastic follow-up to the original game which keeps all of the things that made the first game great, whilst building on it enough to make this feel modern and new. The additional gameplay modes are a lot of fun, and the remixed versions of the original’s music are also good, although the new tracks are more questionable. This is absolutely a worthy game to pick up on Xbox, so if you spot it for cheap, give it a go. You won’t be disappointed.
P.S I had a hard time finding images specifically of the XBox port of Outrun 2, so it's possible a few of these are from other versions of the game. Sorry! The actual game looks pretty decent though.
Pop’n Twinbee
Pop’n Twinbee is a vertical scrolling shoot ‘em up by Konami. Now some of you may know my opinion of old-school Konami shooters is a bit hit-and-miss, and that certainly carries over to this game. It’s a game of some highs, and some lows, for sure.
In Pop’n Twinbee, you play as Twinbee and/or Winbee, off the save the planet from and evil doctor or something, I dunno. You do this by flying upwards and shooting your way through the stages to make your way to the bosses, as you might expect. Twinbee and Winbee are armed with a standard shot, but also a bomb which is used to kill ground enemies who cannot be shot by other means. Bombing is much slower than shooting, so ground weapons can be tricky to deal with, but they also tend to drop health to recover your life, so that’s nice – Twinbee and Winbee can take a couple of shots before dying. You can also hold the bomb button to release a short range punch which does a lot of damage and destroys bullets, or unleash an army of chibi-bees which act as a screen clearing bomb using the X button.
You can power up Twinbee and Winbee by collecting coloured bells, each with different effects – blue bells increase your speed, purple provide a spread shot (which sucks, it shoots too slow and is short range), whilst grey provides a power shot. Pink, green and flashing bells are the ones you want though – pink bells provide a shield, green add options, and flashing bells add an extra chibi-bee to your bomb stock. Your options can be set to work in 3 different ways per ship, with Winbee and Twinbee actually functioning in different ways. I used the surround option as Twinbee which creates a box of laser beams, but lacks as much protection or focused firepower as the others. You can stock up to 4 options, but you’ll lose one each time you take a hit, so having a shield is crucial to maintain your firepower.
The tricky element of Twinbee comes from it’s power up system – bells appear when you shoot clouds and fall down the screen, but they start bronze and only award points. Shooting them enough times will change their colour and bounce them back in the air, but a single extra shot will cycle them back to bronze. Often clouds appear in clusters, so you’ll be bouncing around half a dozen bells whilst trying not to shoot them past what you want and also avoiding the enemies now swarming you due to the lack of shooting – it can be very frustrating to gain even the simplest of power ups. Early on in the game, things are calm enough that it’s not a big issue, but by stage 5, there’s so much crap on stage that it becomes a nightmare to keep everything on the go – especially as the last few stages are absolutely filled with torrents of enemy bullets. If you die, getting re-powered up is hideous.
And thus we hit the same problems as always with Konami shooters. Pop’n Twinbee is a bright, colourful and fun shmup for the most part, but as is par for the course with Konami, it’s overly punishing to players, with a single death often being enough to make the game unwinnable. Luckily I managed to keep my shield count up and push through the last level using my extra lives I’d accumulated, but it was pretty tough going and I narrowly avoided a game over overall.
Pop’n Twinbee is a fun game to pick up and play every now and again, and it’s great fun in 2 player where you can grab your partner and hurl them at enemies, but it’s a game you should go into expecting to enjoy just for the fun of playing it. If, like me, you’re determined to see it through to the end, prepare for frustration to be hidden under that sickly sweet exterior.
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