Welcome to another installment of Head Off, where we look at games so bad, bizarre or beaten up, you just might flip your lid! These are all titles that Alex has graciously provided me with in order to tortu in order for me to review them. And I have to say, I really did flip my lid over this batch, since not only were there some incredibly bad and incredibly weird games, but he even included a few decent titles whose only problem was incompleteness. There were so many extra games, though, that we won’t have time to look at them all at once. One game, Switch for the Mega CD, I’d like to devote a full review and walkthrough to (but it won’t be a Head Off article since the reviews featured in here are really just first impressions… because I can’t stand to play most of these games long enough for a full review). Likewise, I’ll be holding off on reviewing the decent titles for now. This time around, I’d like to focus on the good old crap! So what are we waiting for? Let’s dig in!

PROJECT V6 (Playstation) – This was the first title I put into my Japanese PS2, and I have to say now that it’s the best of the bunch. Trust me, that is faint praise indeed. The game is a management sim starring a “boy” band from Japan that I’ve never heard of and don’t want to hear of again. The game plays similarly to Satsugyou (Graduation) or Princess Maker, only with a boy band instead of a class of students or a single female. “We can go! We can do!” their upbeat intro song promised me, and, boy, did I believed it.

The game mixes full motion video of the group (who look no younger than 30) with 2D anime representations (who look and act like teenagers). Seriously, if the guys in this group actually cry as often as their avatars do, they should just become an hero already. The objective is to guide them through their career, keep them happy, get their music and videos recorded on time, all while protecting them from vicious members of the public (more on this later). Anyone familiar with this type of game will have seen most of this a hundred times before. You have a weekly schedule for each of the “boys” with any number of activities to schedule for each day (though they should have one day off at least). After choosing what you want them to do every day (or letting the game decide for you), their avatars will be displayed miming the action and a text box next to each one will display several attributes with a plus or minus number next to it. I have to be honest: I have no idea what any of those numbers meant. I could only tell if I was doing a good job or a poor one by the tone of the sound effect that’s played as the text box is shown, and by the fact that the avatar would look frazzled or upset when doing poorly. During all of this, situations will arise that require your attention, good judgment, and possibly encouragement. This is the part where not knowing Japanese becomes a huge handicap. I guessed my way through the responses, and did pretty poorly at it.

On Sunday, you can choose a location in the city to visit. You’re probably supposed to go to a place that one or more of the group will be at. Again, I couldn’t figure this part out. At the end of the month, your boss will have a talk with you about how you’re doing. Needless to say, those were never happy talks for me. Thankfully, I couldn’t understand what he was saying!

One thing that the game does differently is present an RPG-style battle with a member of the public every once in awhile. I got into fights with paparazzi, autograph-seekers, and would-be groupies. And I lost every single battle. These fights are played in typical Dragon Warrior style. The top choice is Attack, underneath that is Magic (which uses one member of the group or any number of differently-colored logos), below that is Defend, and then finally Run. The first fight I got into, I accidentally ran. Needless to say, no one was pleased. The other fights I didn’t fare any better in either. In my own defense, I didn’t totally figure out how to fight until the third one. After losing that battle as well, I gave up on the game.

Goo! Goo! Soundy (Playstation) – The next game I attempted to play stumped me even further. It looks like a Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) rip-off, and in fact that’s pretty much what it is, but it’s also a “Maker” style game that lets you use music from your own CDs and create “dance” patterns for pretty much any song. Figuring this out, though, takes some time since the rhythm game part is hidden in all sorts of “doesn’t do anything really” sections and the maker part is not very self-explanatory. When you start the game, you name your “sound” and then choose its size. All but the “small” size are locked to begin with. Then you choose your stage from names like “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Aqua,” “Forest,” etc etc. The next screen has a large picture of some naked, amorphous, humanoid, demon-thing squirming around to the music, with menu items along the top of the screen: Lesson, Transform, Judge, Stereo, Save and Load.

The only bit of gameplay anywhere to be found is in “Lesson.” Even that isn’t easy to find. When you select “Lesson,” you’re taken to another screen with a honeycomb grid of hexagons with various commands/options inside of them. The one that has Track and a number lets you select a music track. This one is paired with another hexagon, either Play or Play The Beats. Play simply plays the song whereas Play The Beats takes you to THE ACTUAL GAME! This is where you get scrolling arrow buttons and have to press the directional pad in time with the beat. Yes, just like DDR. Only more boring (didn’t even know that was possible). The other options are fairly strange; I couldn’t figure out most of them. Sound FX Visual seems like it should give you some control over the visuals in the game, yet it just has a spreadsheet-like table with a list of each track and two things to edit that, for some reason, are darkened and don’t allow you to select them. Maybe you have to unlock this feature, I don’t know. There’s also an option to turn the “pulse” on or off, whatever that is, as well as change the Camera from Norm to Dynma, Dull and other settings I couldn’t be bothered trying. There’s also an Edit option that takes you to a screen which says “Disc Edit” and a bunch of words in Japanese. This is apparently where you can create your own patterns using your own music. This would probably be really awesome for someone who likes DDR. The only use I can think of for it, though, is to torture people who like DDR. I’ll make a stage using Cannibal Corpse. Ha! Try to keep up to that!

So that’s it for the Lesson section. Transform doesn’t do anything besides take you back to the screen where you can choose what size your “sound” should be. Judge is actually short for Judgment, but also doesn’t seem to do anything. You choose which stage you want, and then your “sound” just stands there, wiggling around to the beat. I pressed buttons, but nothing seemed to do anything besides the L2 and R2 shoulder buttons (which lowered and increased the volume of the music, respectively). Finally, I pressed the start button and was actually rewarded with a score! For doing what? I’m sorry, this game just completely confused me. So if you really like DDR and want to create your own patters, don’t care what the characters look like, and enjoy playing at home (does anyone?), then this game would probably be for you. As for me, well, did I mention I hate DDR?

DRAGON BALL FINAL BOUT (Playstation) – Yes, this is the game that was released in America in limited quantities which no one purchased, and re-released by another company in a widely available version that no one purchased while the original print climbed up to astronomical prices. So much ado about such a terrible, terrible game. Honestly, if you are so starved for a Dragon Ball game that you’d consider playing this atrocity, you’d be better off making sock puppets of Goku, Freeza, Vageena, and whoever, and squaring them off in one-on-one fights, one puppet on each hand. The graphics would be better, the controls would actually work, and you might have some small amount of fun while doing it! This… thing… is the polar opposite of fun. I could literally feel my life force being drained away as I attempted to play this. There just aren’t words to describe the horror of this travesty. I would rather witness the Von Hindenburg burst into flames while I was on-board, than play this game again.

So what else is there to say? It’s a fighting game. The graphics look deceptively decent when you first start the game up. There’s a short anime intro that I skipped past because I hate Dragon Ball, and a character select screen with detailed portraits of each character. They talk and move fairly realistically when you select them to fight. But then the actual game begins. Ugly, featureless sprites replace those detailed character portraits. Backgrounds consist of non-descript lumps below a non-descript blue sky (one “arena” is, seriously, nothing but a flat green plane and a blue sky). Everything is pixilated. But that’s just the graphics.  Playing as any character feels like attempting to manipulate a block of wood. One that has no joints. You can push a button and hope that the character responds. I’ll admit, I’m not terribly good at fighting games. I’m a button-masher. And this game is really NOT good for button-mashing, since simply pressing a button will confuses it. Press too many buttons at once and the game just throws up its hands and gives up. To put it bluntly, the game is unresponsive, and figuring out what the buttons do is nearly impossible unless you want to stand around and press each of them one at a time while the CPU pounds on you. Not that it really matters since the CPU also likes to cheat. There’s one move that can be strung along and done over and over in quick succession that keeps you constantly reeling, unable to recover fast enough to even defend against it, let alone counter-attack.

Worse is when the CPU decides to power up a beam attack. There’s probably a very good way of defending against this, but the obvious way (moving an inch to one side or the other) definitely doesn’t work. No, instead your character is frozen in place. Remember the good old days of being an anime fan before anime was huge in America? Remember the excitement of bringing home that $30 DBZ VHS tape with three episodes on it, putting the tape  in your player, and sitting back to watching one character power-up an attack for all three episodes, while he shouts? Remember the disgust you felt? Remember wondering why the person being attacked didn’t just move out of the way since they obviously had enough time to wash a load of laundry? Now imagine that idiot is you, forced to stand around like a slack-jawed yokel, watching as your opponent powers up an attack for half an hour. I almost punched myself in the face for being so stupid until I realized it was the game’s fault for taking away my control. That’s ok though, really. It was enough to remind me that I was playing a broken, ugly fighting game based on the crappy Dragon Ball property, and that I didn’t have to!

By this time, I could feel my head pounding. I was sweating, but then a drop ran down to my lips. Ugh, not sweat; it was blood. My head… oh my head…