The X Button

Running Free

DRAGON BALL: THE ANIME: THE MOVIE: THE GAME REVEALED
Finally, it appears that a game based on the Dragon Ball movie may be inevitable. A recent bit of PR about Twentieth Century Fox's new senior vice president of “new media” refers to “Dragon Ball” (one word now, it seems) among the properties the company views as prime console-game material, along with Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian. It's the most preliminary of preliminary announcements, of course, and we'll likely never hear of a live-action Dragon Ball game if the film tanks at the box office.

CHI'S SWEET HOME (NEC Interchannel, DS) I maintain that it's impossible to hate Chi's Sweet Home. Even if the idea of an adorable kitten's mundane adventures doesn't appeal to you, the show at least has the courtesy to never waste your time; each episode of Chi's squeaky-voiced escapades clocks in at three minutes. I get the impression that the Chi's Sweet Home DS title was designed along the same lines: Chi wanders around, Chi plays games, and Chi gets showered with affection. Players can also go the Nintendogs route by petting Chi, playing with her, and generally giving her the attention that all cats demand. However, the majority of the game consists of Chi stumbling into various mini-games, including the time-honored pastime of animal sumo wrestling. No, really.

X-EDGE
(Namco X CAPCOM, a promising yet pathetically easy crossover strategy game from 2005. If X-Edge is similarly undemanding, it'll still please anyone who wants to see Morrigan kick around stuffed devil-penguins. A North American release may seem unlikely, but if a publisher over here will take a chance on the even more obscure mash-up of Chaos Wars, there's a sliver of hope for X-Edge.

BLEACH: DARK SOULS (Sega/Treasure, DS, $29.99) Treasure's first Bleach DS game was one of the best portable fighters around, and it left little room for improvement as far as the basic play mechanics went. That's why the sequel, Dark Souls, refines and adds to the original's well-woven gameplay. The card system is expanded to let players tap into four power-ups at once, and there's a new, out-of-canon storyline that should prove just as interesting as a Bleach movie plot (i.e., not at all). Yet it's the enormous cast of characters that ropes in many a Bleach fan, and Dark Souls comes with 17 new playable cast , including battle-thirsty Ikkaku, flirtatious Matsumoto, bratty Kisuke, ive Ururu, morose Izuru, the inimitable Don Kanonji, and even a hatful of Hollows. For the players with no idea who any of those people are, Dark Souls comes with an in-game encyclopedia that supplies the voluminous backstories of Bleach. Get Excited If: You won't need that encyclopedia in the slightest.

GUILTY GEAR 2: OVERTURE (Aksys/franchise's ever-looming villain, who we know only as That Man. Guilty Gear 2's reviews could be charitably described as “mixed,” but a lot of fans, myself included, will give this a chance even still. Get Excited If: You own at least one Guilty Gear soundtrack.

THE LEGEND OF KAGE 2 (Taito, DS, $19.99) The original The Legend of Kage did one thing right: jumping. It was an otherwise middling game on the NES and in the arcade, but the Kage of the title sure could jump long and high, soaring through forests of ninja foes. The Legend of Kage 2 uses the two screens on the DS to re-capture those floaty, long-range jumps, and Taito's also decided to improve the original's limited gameplay, as Kage and his co-ninja Chihiro have 30 different abilities, from shurikens to spells that create shadow doubles. The game's only a dozen levels long (24 if you count Chihiro and Kage's run-throughs separately), but its challenges lie in old-school memorization. It's not as reckless as The Legend of Kage was 22 years ago, but anyone who played the original could tell you that more deliberate pacing is definitely a good thing in this case. Get Excited If: You had the gall to tell your third-grade friends that The Legend of Kage (which you owned) was better than Ninja Gaiden (which you didn't).

ONE (Dreamcatcher/Telltale, Wii, $29.99) No, they're not anime. In fact, it would take such a stretch to link SAM and Max to Japanese gaming that I'm not even going to try. Yet it's hard to imagine SAM and Max striking disinterested chords in anyone who enjoys a thoroughly offbeat graphic adventure game. Indeed, many anime fans likely Steve Purcell's original SAM and Max comics, the 1993 LucasArts game, and perhaps even the short-lived cartoon. Telltale's new SAM and Max titles have already made the rounds through GameTap, but the Wii version presents an excellent opportunity to grab the first six-episode “season” in a convenient package. With its emphasis on conversations and loose-logic puzzles, it's all very much a endearing and cartoonishly violent adventure. Get Excited If: You ever complain about how LucasArts and other companies stopped making graphic adventure games.

SILENT HILL HOMECOMING (Konami, PS3/Xbox 360, $59.99) In truth, the sixth proper Silent Hill game (not counting that digital comic or the arcade shooter) will be on store shelves this very week at the earliest, and it's gone through a lot to get there. Homecoming saw its position as the fifth Silent Hill usurped by a PSP game, and it even weathered a shift in developer names, as the original team at The Collective became Double Helix Games. After all of that, Homecoming has emerged as the first Silent Hill where you'll play a combat-trained hero: Alex, an ex-soldier who heads back to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen and finds that it now bears an unmistakable resemblance to the mist-shrouded Silent Hill. Alex wields his scavenged weapons with greater efficacy that previous Silent Hill stars, but he's still lost in two different worlds; one a foggy, mysteriously vacant small town, the other a nightmarish dimension full of warty-headed nurses and blade-handed spiders. Silent Hill games have tried to catch up to the beloved second installment for years, and Homecoming's developers are playing to a tough crowd. At least they can throw in Pyramid Head for some easy points. Get Excited If: You got the UFO ending in the first Silent Hill or the dog ending in Silent Hill 2.

SPECTROBES: BEYOND THE PORTALS (Disney/Jupiter, DS, $29.99) Spectrobes has Disney's name plastered all over its cover art and website, but the game beneath was developed by Jupiter, the Japanese outfit that's making a name for itself with Bakugan Battle Brawlers. Beyond the Portals brings back the space-police heroes and RPG-like focus of the first Spectrobes, and that includes battles in which officer Rallen and his recruited Spectrobe beasts run straight into action-based melees with enemies. Get Excited If: You're still young enough or shameless enough to play the first Spectrobes on your DS in public.

Today's undiscerning young anime fans may know Jaleco wanted to make one of them back in 1986, just as the TV series was wrapping up its 195-episode run.

Jaleco couldn't get the license for an Urusei Yatsura arcade game. So they made one anyway and changed a few things. The developers called it Momoko 100% (left) and didn't try terribly hard to hide its roots. In this side-scrolling platform-jumper, Momoko spends various phases of her life running through a burning building, starting off as a preschooler and getting older with each level. As music that totally isn't Urusei Yatsura's opening theme plays on, Momoko seeks out escalators and trampolines to get her to the roof and her rescue, all while she's hounded by assorted creatures and forced to defend herself with what's either a pea-shooting straw or an actual firearm. Like the typical arcade game of 1986, Momoko 100% is a repetitive, brightly colored maze run, designed to grab money and do little else.

When the time came to port Momoko 100% to the Famicom (Japan's NES), Jaleco suddenly found the rights to Urusei Yatsura. Momoko was out, and Lum was reinstated, along with a storyline that involved an earthquake, a rift in time, and a plot contrivance that forced the green-haired alien princess to live her life out again. Jaleco wasn't about to design a new game, of course, so Urusei Yatsura: Lum's Wedding Bell finds her reliving that life in Momoko's invariably flame-engulfed institutions of learning, starting with “infant school” (there's a joke about Japan's educational system there) and culminating in that highest of aspirations for all women: marriage.

Some things changed, of course. The 8-Bit version of the game scales back the arcade graphics to the same primitive grade seen in early Famicom titles, while the music is a constant warble that sounds vaguely like Urusei Yatsura's opener. The drop in visual quality is understandable, but other problems aren't so easily excused; Jaleco tried to replicate the background details from Momoko 100% in Lum's Wedding Bell, resulting in garish colors that often hide Lum and the enemies she faces.

This wouldn't matter if Lum's Wedding Bell had sturdy play mechanics, and yet it never gets itself together for that. Lum fires lightning bolts, but the game's engine is so malformed that they won't always hit enemies correctly. Jumping is also awkward, particularly when dealing with the trampolines that propel Lum up one level. Even though grabbing an energy shield can protect her for a limited time, most of the levels see Lum dying after one hit or slipping into the roaring flames below. And, like many mid-1980s games with arcade sensibilities, there are no continues. You've got three lives, and you'd better save them and any extra ones for the latter stages.

It's a crawling, frustrating, hopelessly ramshackle bore of a game, but most anime fans of the 1980s probably didn't care. They'd seen the commercial (above) and wanted to watch Urusei Yatsura and all of its characters brought to crude pixel life on their Famicoms. Sadly, there aren't many familiar faces here outside of the ending, in which Lum, clad in a wedding dress, dashes into a church and kisses Ataru, who promptly falls over. The game then begins anew, as though nothing had actually ended. Yes, it's just like the Urusei Yatsura TV series.

There's more to Urusei Yatsura games than Lum's Wedding Bell, as the series also inspired a PC Engine title and a stunningly animated graphic adventure for the Mega CD (Japan's Sega CD). This leaves Lum's Wedding Bell the weakest of the pack. It's interesting to see an icon of '80s anime mixed into an old-school arcade port, but the results will satisfy no one in search of a good Urusei Yatsura game on an old Nintendo system. If you want that, you'll have better luck hacking Super Mario Bros. 2 to turn Princess Peach's hair green.

Prices on second-hand Famicom games have gone up in recent years, pushing Urusei Yatsura: Lum's Wedding Bell into the $20 range. If you're paying that much for something so unsatisfying, at least make sure the seller throws in a box and manual. And maybe a bonus copy of Bad Dudes.