The Unconverted

Arcade games that never made it home

Nick finds more obscure games for you

GO! GO! MILE SMILE Developer: Fuuki Year: 1995 Genre: Maze

■ Sometimes it isn’t hard to see why a game never made it to home systems. Honestly, when the first word that comes to mind to describe a game is ‘anachronism’, it probably isn’t a good thing. Go! Go!

Mile Smile is quite enticing, but we’re imagining that it would have been a pretty tough sell in the arcade market of 1995. Even if maze games hadn’t fallen out of fashion long before the mid-nineties, by that point players had access juggernauts such as Sega Rally,

Tekken and other 3D extravaganzas – and we could play some of them at home, too, thanks to a roster of decent console and computer ports. Of course, we’re not the type to be concerned about whether or not a game was fashionable when it was released, because we’re not tremendously concerned about that now – and it turns out that Fuuki’s colourful maze game is quite neat.

Go! Go! Mile Smile plays like a cross between Pac-man and Qix. You play as an egg, operating from within a protected perimeter zone, and must venture out into the maze to collect items in order to move onto the next stage. Of course, it’s never an easy task as the maze is populated by evil critters that would quite like to wreck your day.

Your journey into the maze leaves behind a chain of chicks, and the further you probe the more danger you’re in – not only are you unable to cross your own path, but enemies can hit at any point along the chain. Opportunities to defeat enemies are limited to rare power-up appearances, but you do at least have a quick retreat button to pull yourself out of dangerous situations. Every so often you’ll encounter a boss battle, which switches things up a little by giving you targetbased challenges.

In terms of presentation, it’s not the most sophisticated looking game. The two dimensional graphics aren’t cutting edge – especially considering that it was released in 1995 – and the sounds are mostly just passable, although we do have a soft spot for the dodgy English voice work. But it’s all pleasant enough, and if you divorce it from the context of its release date it’s a pretty compelling example of the maze game genre.

VOLFIED 1989

■ There’s not a lot that directly compares to Go Go Mile Smile, so we’ve gone for a Qix variant instead. This one’s great, with plenty of power-ups and interesting backdrops. It was converted to many systems including the pc engine, Mega Drive, Commodore 64 and the 16-bit home computers.

AQUA RUSH Developer: namco Year: 1999 Genre: Puzzle

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We’re not entirely sure why Namco chose an aquatic theme for this puzzle game, as it has little bearing on the game design. However, that doesn’t particularly matter as the game itself is rather interesting. Your job is to reach the end of a long column of blocks in

Tetris-esque fashion. The primary differences are that you’re scrolling the screen upwards, and that instead of tetrominoes, you get

blocks that are three spaces wide. You can add your own extensions to all three columns using the game’s three buttons, and when one line is clear, all the remaining blocks shift upwards, detaching from one another to fill in the gaps and create combos. The game quickly becomes quite challenging as you’ve only got a short amount of time to decide on the sort of shape you want to create, but thankfully it’s broken into stages rather than being endless.

We’re genuinely quite surprised that this one never came to consoles, as it doesn’t seem like it would tax the Playstation, a format Namco was prolific on. But it’s also quite light on content and would probably have required some work to bulk up for a home release – and that’s only if you could get past the odd theme in the first place.

PUZZLED 1990

■ This is a lot like aqua rush, but you’re going down the screen, you’re using tetrominoes and you only have to free the trapped balloon. It’s available from the comfort of your living room on neo-geo aes and CD, on modern consoles digitally via arcade archives, and on the neo-geo X and neo-geo Mini.

NFL BLITZ 1997

■ Midway’s juiced up take on american football includes real teams rather than crazy themed gangs, but provides similar thrills thanks to its lax interpretation of the rules – sadly, the nfl required the outlandish shenanigans to be cut back in later games. You can get it for playstation and Saturn.

DIRTY PIGSKIN FOOTBALL Developer: Play Mechanix Year: 2004 Genre: Sports

■ If you’ve ever longed for an American football game where convicts face off against wrestlers and aliens throw down with Vikings, congratulations – you have a very imaginative mind.

And luckily, your ideal game also happens to exist in the form of this Atomiswave sports outing.

Dirty Pigskin’s brand of gridiron is simplified. Teams have five players each, and many aspects of the game have been removed – there are no penalties, kicking and first downs for making yards, so if you can’t score in four attempts then you’ll turn possession over to the opposition. The three-button control scheme offers you a couple of passing options on offence, the ability to tackle and change players on defence, and a turbo button on both. Once your special bar is filled, it’s possible to perform a special pass or tackle turbo. These changes make for a considerably quicker and more exciting take on the sport.

Unfortunately, Play Mechanix’s games don’t tend to come home and this one was no different. It could have been fun, but it would have needed a lot of work to meet the expectations of a console game in the mid-noughties.

BEST OF BEST Developer: Suna Year: 1994 Genre: Fighting

■ Few titles have failed more spectacularly to live up to their name than Best Of Best. Here is a low-rent

Street Fighter II tribute act, complete with woeful balance issues, amateurish graphics and some truly bizarre design decisions. We’re not sure why the Statue Of Liberty climbs the side of a boat that you’re fighting on, but it does. Even the interesting ideas fail in their execution – fighters can crawl away when recovering, but if you attack as they do, the game displays a message on the screen that criticises you as ‘unmanly’!

What’s remarkable is that this game came out in 1994, a time when fighting game innovation and quality was at a zenith in the arcades. Could you imagine playing this over the likes of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Mortal Kombat II, The King

Of Fighters 94, Virtua Fighter 2 and

Tekken? Absolutely not.

Is it unfair to expect a small Korean developer to compete with the top end of the fighting game market? Probably. But frankly, life isn’t fair and your life is likely too precious to waste on games this underwhelming.

■ These switches marked ‘Push!’ are the key to defeating the boss. Later bosses require you to push the correct switch, or have many active at once. ■ The boss itself will stay in this area, but the arrows show the locations from which it will launch attacks. Go near them only when necessary!

■ The key to high scores is to pick up lots of items without fully retreating to the safe zone, as doing so will reset your score multiplier. ■ Most enemies have a start-up delay to their attacks, giving you a chance to retreat – so long as it’s attacking the front of your line.

» [Arcade] These stage layouts can be tricky – see how it blocks lines from forming?

» [Arcade] Arenas are themed, as you can see by the this outer space alien stadium.