Midnight Run: Road Fighter 2 (Playstation)

 Yes, this is a sequel to the 1984 arcade game Road Fighter, released over a decade later, long after everyone had forgotten about it, and a couple of years after that whole genre of top-down racing games was pretty much dead and buried. So, Midnight Run is a more modern, post-Daytona and Ridge Racer 3D racing game! It's not just a generic also-ran (an also- midnight ran?), though, as it's got some interesting ideas to make it stand out.

 

Unfortunately, it's a very straight port of the arcade version, and as such, it only has three tracks, which is a little bit stingy in 1997. They do, however, all form a cohesive little fictional world, being set around differernt parts of a single city, at different times of what is presumably a single night. The easy track takes place at sunset, the intermediate track at "starlight", which is just late at night when the stars are out, and the hard track takes place at what the game calls midnight, but looks to me more like the time just before dawn. It's only a little, completely aesthetic thing, but I really like how this touch adds to the fiction of the game.

 

Moving on to the interesting stuff, this being a racing game that takes place on the streets of a city, there's regular traffic on the roads. On its own, that's nothing worthy of note, but as well as your position relative to your fellow racers, the game keeps track of how many vehicles you've passed overall, whether they're in the rce or not. Which ties into the other interesting thing that Midnight Run does: instead of keeping a high score table of lap and course times, it keeps an actual high score table of actual scores that are totted up at the end of the race, with points awarded for the time you took to finish the race, the number of vehicles passed, and the position at which you finished the race. I'm sure it's the kind of thing that racing purists would absolutely hate, but I really enjoyed the novelty and gameyness of it.

 

There's something that needs to be mentioned that is undeniably a good thing or a racing game, too: Midnight Run is very fast. Maybe the fastest racing game on Playstation that involves regular non-scifi 1990s cars in a reasonably realistic world? Even with the dearth of tracks, and the risky choice of scores over times, I don't think anyone can deny that generally, it's better for racing games to be really fast. And the controls are good enough that the speed doesn't make it difficult or annoying to play, either: it all just flows nicely and feels great to play.

 

Konami's trick of making this a sequel to a much older game that just also happened to also be about driving cars really fast worked for me, since I just had to know why there was a decade-late sequel to Road Fighter. I'm glad it did, too, since it turned out to be a great game in its own right, and I definitely recommend it to fans of late nineties racing games (and I know there's a fair few among my readership). Apparently, they actually pulled this trick again, with another Road Fighter game being released in 2010. I'd like to play it, but unfortunately, it never got a home port, and of all the long-standing Japanese arcade companies, Konami seem the least interested in making their library available on consoles if they can't get someone else like Hamster or M2 to do it for them.

Vertical Force (Virtual Boy)

 Vertical Force is one of those rare games for a console with a big gimmick that not only exists to shoehorn in the use of that gimmick, but is also just a decent game that happens to do so. In this case, it's a vertically-scrolling shooting game, that utilises the Virtual Boy's 3D gimmick to give the stages two layers. But it otherwise does just play like a pretty decent shooting game.

 

Specifically, since it came from Hudson Soft, it plays very much like a title from the Star Soldier series, other than the layers thing. And even that could be considered to beuilding upon the weird thing in the original Star Soldier where you would sometimes fly underneath bits of scenery if you approached them from certain angles. But now you've got a button to shoot and a button to move in and out of the screen (or since the game is top-down, to increase or decrease your altitude).

 

They really did a good job of working the gimmick into the game and using it in interesting ways, too. The second and third stages are especally full of fun little moments that use it. In the second stage, there's these whirlpool things that can suck you down to the lower level if you fly over them at the top level, and the third stage has lots of big rock formations that you need to fly over and under. Unfortunately, it does also feel like the rest of the game was left a little neglected.

 

It's very barebones and featureless for a 1995 console game, and especially if you consider it a part of the Star Soldier series, as even the PC Engine entries from years earlier had things like high score tables that saved (Vertical Force doesn't have high scores at all), Caravan modes, and so on. Vertical Force just has the main game, and that's not a particularly difficult one: on my second play I managed to get to the penultimate boss, and I think I'd be able to clear the game on a single credit without much more practice. (Though Ihaven't been able to replicate that success since, so maybe it was a fluke?). It's only four relatively short stages and a final boss that gets its own stage.

 

So, Vertical Force is a decent enough shooting game, that's also a little short and definitely too easy to be a long term interest, especially with the lack of high score tables. But if you want to play every Star Soldier game, this is definitely one of those in all but name (the default weapon even powers up in the same patterns), and also I'm going to assume that anyone playing Virtual Boy games in 2024 is doing so via emulation, so you're not going to feel like you've got much to lose.