10-MINUTE WONDERS - January 2000
| As the videogames business has "matured" over its
20-year history, so it’s done what so many people do when they become
"mature" – stopped having fun. Where the early games were all
attention-grabbing quick thrills, designed to be over in minutes in a blur of challenge
and excitement, modern games are more and more often huge, overblown, pretentious affairs
that demand you devote half of your life to them. Games like Final Fantasy VIII (Roman
numerals in the title are always a dead giveaway, by the way) or Legend Of Zelda force you
to wade through literally hours and hours of tedious story-reading and trudging back and
forth across enormous maps for every moment of actual fun they grudgingly give up. Those of us who don’t want to surrender all of our free time to someone’s goblin-strewn fantasy land and enjoy games that you can just pick up and play for a few minutes before going to the pub, though, have been unusually lucky over the last few months, as a whole bunch of games that offer bite-sized chunks of fun right up front have somehow sneaked past the software publishers’ Seriousness Police and made it out onto the streets. Whatever kind of games you like and whatever kind of gaming machine you’ve got, there’s something out there right now that, like a good woman, will let you have 10 minutes of top fun and then get on with the rest of your life. BOUNCING! Pong (Playstation/PC, Hasbro) Reviewed last month, this update of the ancient bat-and-ball game that started the whole videogames craze off in the first place has dozens of really clever and cute variations on the theme, broken up into short levels that you can easily knock off in a few minutes, before saving the game onto your memory card for the next time you’ve got 10 minutes free. RACING! Ridge Racer 4 (Playstation, Namco) Racing games really ought to be 10-minute arcade-style gaming at its finest, but since Gran Turismo no home driving game has been complete without a ridiculously involved structure that forces you to practically build your car from scratch and pass half-a-dozen tests/"training" levels before it’ll actually let you out onto the road. Ridge Racer 4 is different. Based on the finest traditions of the original Ridge Racer coin-op, R4 has all the unlockable secrets, extra cars etc of other racing games, but in a structure where you can load it up, immediately have a single, exciting race, save the game and still have made a worthwhile contribution to the final goal. The fact that it’s the most beautiful racing game ever is just a bonus. PLAYING! Mario Party (N64, Nintendo) This strange mix of board game and dozens of little fairground sideshows is best played in four-player mode with a load of mates round. But excellently, the more you play it, the more of the little sub-games become available to be played on their own without having to play the board-game section at all. At around 30 seconds each, you can have a quick blast on a whole bunch of your favourites (all the while earning more points to unlock yet more little games) in the time it takes for your taxi to arrive. FIGHTING! Soul Calibur (Dreamcast, Namco) This absolutely gorgeous-looking beat-‘em-up is a 10-minute wonder in some bad ways, too – it’s so incredibly, stupidly easy that even a total moron can complete the "Arcade" mode within 10 minutes of unwrapping the game from its packaging for the first time. Twice. But more impressively, Soul Calibur also includes a "Mission Battle" mode, which sets dozens of little individual challenge fights which, when you beat them, unlock lots of secret bonuses, new locations and extra game modes. And again, it’s a doddle to knock off just one or two at a time in a spare moment while you’re hanging around waiting for your girlfriend to choose which shoes she’s going to wear. Actually, come to think of it, make that five or six. SHOOTING! Point Blank 2 (Playstation, Namco) Like racers, light-gun games are an arcade staple that ought by rights to be quick-thrill merchants at home too. Trouble is, without having to pump pound coins in every 90 seconds, you tend to just plug your way through the whole game in a oner, and with something like the Dreamcast’s excellent port of House Of The Dead 2, that’s half-an-hour up the spout. If time’s tight, you want something like Namco’s brilliant Point Blank, a collection of really clever little one-off shooting challenges that last as little as four seconds each. PB2 is more of the same as the original, only even cuter, and while (like Mario Party) it works best with a bunch of players, every two-minute session on your own is great fun in its own right, and more importantly hones your skills for when you next want to wipe the floor with your mates. Heh. BLASTING! Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh (N64/Dreamcast, Treasure) Pronouncing the name is the least of your worries if you want to lay your hands on a copy of this game – it’s only out in Japan, in limited-edition numbers, and will almost certainly never come out over here. But your friendly local import-games shop or website will happily sell you a copy, and it’s well worth every moment’s effort, because this is a totally fantastic old-skool game from the development team who are the world’s best-kept gaming secret. Almost impossible to describe except as a cross between Spectrum classic Jet-Pac and awesome arcade veteran Robotron, Bangaioh boasts a retro look concealing the most over-the-top pyrotechnics seen in a videogame in years, with up to 500 individual sprites flying and exploding around the screen at a time in a manner to which static pictures just can’t do justice. The game is an all-out points battle on 44 stages, each of which is scored individually and takes just a few minutes to tackle every time. The only trouble if you’ve got a train to catch is that Bangaioh is so good and so incredibly addictive that you won’t want to stop at one. |
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