The X Button

Story of the Class

Every good dungeon hack is all about hatred. The game hates the player and shows it by serving up mazes full of tenacious enemies that may deliver death at any moment. Yet the game must hate with the proper artful touch; it must know when to push a party of adventurers to the brink of doom, when to punish them for exploring just a bit too far, and when to leave just enough of a margin so the resourceful and lucky might escape. The original Class of Heroes hated too recklessly and rewarded too seldom, but much of that is amended in Class of Heroes 2.

Like its predecessor, Class of Heroes 2 sticks to the rigid challenges of Ye Olde Wizardry Games. It's most noticeable in the throngs of monsters that appear quite often as your party of six treads labyrinths, and they harrow players throughout the many dead ends and wrong turns. It's also not a quick-paced RPG, as surviving the first real maze and gaining decent equipment takes several return trips. Yet Class of Heroes 2 knows when to lay off. The mazes are no longer randomized, and it's easy to defuse the traps that seem to lie inside every treasure chest. The game also offers a good deal of variety in its classes and races, and it's easy to assemble and class-change a party of dragon-kin knights, angelic healers, and cat-earned puppet mages. It doesn't capture the same delights as Etrian Odyssey's dungeon-mapping depths and exhilarating F.O.E. clashes, but there's a healthy sense of direction driving players to a newly uncovered section of the world map.

There's no captivating tale to be found within Class of Heroes 2, but that doesn't deny it character. As he did with so many RPGs in the days of Working Designs, Gaijinworks director Victor Ireland strives to imbue every inch of dialogue and description with as much personality as possible, and it brings life to the game's academy of would-be adventurers and their teachers. It won't stand with the best of the dungeon-hack renaissance, but Class of Heroes knows how to hate you properly.

Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons brawlers were ahead of their times in a strange sense. Video games tried to capture the workings of a tabletop D&D session in the 1990s, but such was beyond the grasp of an industry where online gaming was larval and consoles supported only two players. Yet Capcom pulled it off in the arcades, where four players could pick from variety of D&D archetypes and hack through side-scrolling stages full of kobolds and goblins and, yes, a screen-filling dragon or two. All of that is preserved quite ably in Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, which features the original Dungeons & Dragon: Tower of Doom and its sequel, Shadow Over Mystara.

We're now in an age where countless online RPGs replicate a combat-heavy Dungeons & Dragons experience, but Capcom's old brawlers still command a certain respect. They're solid in their level design and mechanics, with moments of quarter-eating arcade greed, and they're surprisingly broad for mid-1990s fare. The character classes range from the usual fighters and healers to a well-balanced elf mage and the sequel's nimble thief, and Shadow Over Mystara further enhances the combat with special moves culled from Capcom's fighters. There's also a lot to see for an arcade export, as the story branches quite frequently and offers all sorts of textbook-fantasy sights. True, it's the stuff of those old Dungeons & Dragons novels with names like Dragons of Summer Vacation, but it's enough to reward those who come back for more.

Arcade brawlers of the '90s always suffered from repetition, and Capcom's take on Dungeons & Dragons can't quite escape that. For all of the game's diverse paths, the same enemies pop up a bit too often, as though the dungeon master's pulling from a really limited bestiary. The control also snags when menus for items and spells pop up, as it's hard to navigate them while dodging arrows and angry mer-folk. That's the price of complexity in an arcade game.

The tale in this trilogy of indie shooters is a perplexing one. It actually starts with ALLTYNEX Second, which itself is a sequel to an old FM-Towns shooter called Alltynex. This in turns leads to…you know what? Let's just start with the oldest game in The Tale of Alltynex. That'd be Kamui, a 1999 shooter that emulates Taito's old Layer Section titles (and is actually the last of the trilogy, story-wise). The player's craft can target ships passing beneath it and destroy them with a laser, and the multi-plane mechanics add a lot to the conventional shooter stylings. Tap the lock-on button while firing standard shots, and the ship spews an energy beam that can actually deflect certain shots. It all figures into Kamui's level design, which improves upon just about every cliché of 2-D shooters. Bullet-hell volleys of enemy fire are arranged with care. The boss-rush before a mad-computer mastermind consists of entirely new enemies. And there's plenty to shoot on both levels. Dented only by a little sluggish control, Kamui stands just the best professional shooters of its decade.

RefleX, released in 2008, ditches Kamui's multi-layer targeting for an energy shield with two uses. Certain enemy bullets are absorbed, but others are bounced back to the target in much the same way they arrived. It turns each oncoming ship into an experiment, as you'll have to test just how the shield handles their shots, and you'll need to time the deflector just right. RefleX remains a 2-D shooter, though the sprites are sharper and the effects more elaborate than ol' Kamui. Yet it doesn't have the same intensity, and Kamui's piercing laser remains the more satisfying instrument of destruction.

ALLTYNEX Second, the latest in the series (and the first in the story), picks and chooses from its predecessors. It adopts an auto-targeting laser, but without the multi-plane attacks of Kamui. Instead, the laser button also brings out an energy sword, inviting your ship to start some close-range slashing. Certain bullets are absorbed by the blade, and the game forces you to test out each type of projectile, much like RefleX. While Siter Skain's shift to 3-D isn't as appealing as their hand-drawn work, the game rarely wants in level design or shooter homages. You know the R-Type tradition of fighting your way around a huge battleship? Well, ALLTYNEX Second has you attacking all sides of a space colony, using the coils of a robot snake to block the station's laser barrage.

Deciphering The Tale of ALLTYNEX's limited narrative results in some strange twists about supercomputers and transplanted brains, but here's the important part: the shooters themselves are great. Though they span two different eras in their appearances, the same exceptional design drives each game.

So what's If My Heart Had Wings all about? Well, it finds a dejected young named Aoi Minase heading back to his hometown, a place of open fields, strong breezes, and hope-filled aerial symbolism. There he ends up in charge of a girls' dormintory and meets Kotori Habane, who gets around in a wheelchair while dreaming of flying. So they bring back their school's tellingly named Soaring Club and recruit other students, thereby complicating Aoi and Kotori's relationship. For example, the bubbly Ageha Himegi just happens to be Aoi's almost-girlfriend from five years ago, while brilliant klutz Amane Mochizuki is building a glider as a tribute to somebody. Like most visual novels, the game's all about dialogue and description, and the story branches to reflect the player's decisions. Of course, much of the sticky melodrama within If My Heart Had Wings is wrapped around flying, with plenty of images of planes, clouds, sky, wind-blown petals, and even wind turbines.

If My Heart Had Wings is also about a new publisher entering North America's visual-novel market, a niche enterprise if ever there was one. It's the first release from MoeNovel, a company that promotes a “visual novel HD” aethestic. Yet fans are far more concerned with the game's underlying content. The Japanese version of If My Heart Had Wings is an adults-only title, but the American edition yanked out all of the naughty sections in order to earn a “T” rating and, presumably, appeal to a wider audience. This doesn't sit right with a lot of visual-novel fans, who are arguably the actual audience for this sort of thing. This could leave If My Heart Had Wings in some neglected middle ground, shunned by hardcore players and never noticed by mainstream fans. Then again, maybe the controversy will get it noticed.

Hiroshi Iuchi is a great friend to devoted shooter fans and eBay scalpers alike. While working at Treasure, he directed Gradius V, Radiant Silvergun, and Ikaruga, all esteemed shooters that now go for exorbitant sums. Iuchi wasn't quite as active after departing Treasure in 2006, but he's rallied lately with a 3DS title called Kokuga, and G.Rev somehow finagled a downloadable release for the 3DS on these shores. It transplants Iuchi's sensibilities to a slightly different sort of overhead shooter, one where tanks glide through neon grids and snipe at enemies from all directions. And no, it's not a Tron game.

The bullet-dodging summons memories of Radiant Silvergun, as does the game's soundtrack, and yet Kokuga has more than Iuchi's older ideas inside a tank turret. Players get power-ups by activating cards during battle, and they start with a stack of 20 random draws that bring weapons or abilities. The game also allows some choice in reaching the last stretch, as the levels are arranged in a Darius-like pyramid for the player's selection. Beyond that, there's a four-player mode where multicolored tanks take on the stages together. Again, this isn't a Tron game. But you can pretend it is. No one will judge you.

The Neo Geo X remains the most obscure and inexplicable of any modern game system: an iPhone-sized handheld that so far runs nothing but old Neo Geo games. Some of those who noticed it last year took issue with the build quality and limited pack-ins, but Tommo shan't abandon the whole idea. The second round of Neo Geo classics is upon us, packed in five separate, surprisingly expensive three-game volumes or one big, equally overpriced bundle. As with the Neo Geo library on the whole, the selection mixes one or two genuine hits in with offerings that were worth a try in an arcade back in 1996.

Metal Slug 2 is an odd choice, for starters. The Metal Slug series hosted some of the Neo Geo's best games, but the second is pointless in light of its remixed incarnation, Metal Slug X. Also of debatable inclusion is Blue's Journey, an early and largely average platformer where people dress like bugs. Top Hunter fares a little better, with multi-plane stages and a Gunstar Heroes atmosphere, but it never rises above the expected. Sengoku is a side-scrolling brawler, a Final Fight slog notable only for its Wild Soda billboards. And then there's Super Sidekicks 3: The Next Glory, a reminder that the Neo Geo had several soccer games.

Of course, there are fighting games aplenty. The King of Fighters '96 is the least necessary; nothing terrible about it, but Tommo really should've cut to the chase and thrown in the 1998 entry. World Heroes 2 Jet is the second-best game in a goofball series that few people care about (though I'll always remember its romantic Rasputin and desperately single Joan of Arc). Savage Reign is a tolerable outing with elaborate stages and long-range weapons, while its sequel, Kizuna Encounter, has a tag-team system and…well, the reputation as the rarest Neo Geo game released in the west. Art of Fighting III: The Path of the Warrior marked the last piece of its particular series before The King of Fighters swallowed it up, and it's a solid exiting note. Samurai Shodown III provides a similar glimpse of its franchsie; it's gorgeous, but the slow-paced combat suffers horrible damage imbalance.

The highlight in this big Neo Geo jambalaya is Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, a stunning reinvention of SNK's first fighting series. The accessible moves and gorgeous style show SNK at their top of their craft, just before the company's downfall in 2000. The Last Blade is along the same lines, with some of the most tastefully reserved aesthetics you'll ever find in a fighting game. Shock Troopers and Blazing Star also sit near the top. The former's a sturdy overhead Rambo-ish shooter with three-character teams, and the latter's a decent side-scrolling shooter beneath its lumpy, computer-rendered look. This leaves the question of just how much all of this is worth. Eighty dollars seem steep for an anthology, doesn't it? Dubious Neo Geo X owners could just get Volume 4, which has Mark of the Wolves and Shock Troopers. That's thoughtful.