While I’ve been going through my backlog of Switch games recently, I’ve found a few that were decent but that I don’t think I’m going to put a lot of time into.  Since one of the things that is impressing me about this system is the sheer variety of software available, I figured I’d give them a mention.

G-Mode Archives+ Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai * Milky’s Ambition

The Suchie-Pai games are responsible for my mild obsession with Japanese arcade-style strip mahjong games, and I was surprised to discover that there was a game in the series released for mobile phones in Japan.  G-Mode has actually released Switch versions of dozens of their games from this era, and they’re a fascinating time capsule of mobile gaming just before the smartphone explosion.

On the other hand, while I am not the world’s BEST mahjong player I am confident in saying that this particular version of the game cheats like crazy and there’s no real reason to play it when I could just play the Saturn games which have also gotten Switch releases.

Plus, it ditched the panel match mini game.  That’s just a sin.

Cotton Reboot!

Similarly to Suchie-Pai, the TG-16 version of Cotton was my introduction to cute-em-ups, and I had a lot of fun with it despite being very bad at the genre.  The Reboot version is just as cute and just as fun (and much prettier), and I got to try out the X68000 original that the TG-16 version was ported from, but in the end it turns out that I just don’t have the patience to get gud and simply credit-feeding to the end seems really cheap.  Maybe I’ll come back to it someday and do that.

Panorama Cotton

Something on the order of 25 years ago, when I was living in Los Angeles and regularly stopping by Pony Toy-Go-Round to browse all the neat things I couldn’t actually afford, they had a copy of Panorama Cotton in their import games display case, for I think about sixty bucks.  Since it now goes for over $1500, that’s sixty bucks I should have spent at the time.

Fortunately, in addition to the Cotton Reboot, we got all of the older Cotton games re-released for the Switch, and I finally got to try this weird little Space Harrier-alike.  It turned out to be a technical wonder for something running on Mega Drive hardware – I am reasonably sure the system couldn’t DO sprite scaling, so I have to wonder whether they had some sort of software scaling routine or whether they were just storing all of the sprites at various sizes, Neo-Geo style, and swapping in sprites as stuff got closer to you to give the illusion of distance.

Less fortunately, it turns out that the overall effect is so busy that I have trouble keeping up with it, and much like the side-scrolling iterations in the series I’m just not patient enough to actually get better.  I’m glad I got the chance to check it out as last, anyway.

While none of these hooked me enough to keep at them, I’m glad all three are available.  Two of them hook directly into the part of my brain that remembers being a young weeb and the third, while not for me, presumably does the same thing for some middle-aged salaryman who had Suchie-Pai and friends to help him through the monotony of his daily train commute.