null1024 null1024This is the first in a blog series about games I like, mostly arcade. They're not really reviews, I'm not scoring them out of ten or anything, I'm just trying to talk about things I enjoy. Some of these games will be very famous, some will be absurdly obscure, who knows. In particular, I'll get around to talking about my current gaming obsessions, Beatmania (both original and IIDX) and Sound Voltex at some point, but it might be a while before I get to them.
Lately, I've been playing quite a bit of Namco's Aqua Rush, an arcade time-attack puzzle game released in 1999. It unfortunately has no home ports except for what looks like a 2007-era J2ME phone game release, which is probably why this game is so obscure. There is very little information about it on the English-speaking internet.
The premise of the game is simple: fill the the gaps in the blocks above you by moving and stretching the pieces you are given. The three buttons stretch the piece out by one block. It's loosely like upside-down Tetris, but due to the ability to modify pieces, it ends up playing very differently. When you clear a line, this causes a chain reaction of any loose blocks to rise upwards. The blocks above slowly advance towards the bottom of the screen in steps, and if any blocks hit the bottom of the playfield, you lose. If you continue, you restart the stage, and the game slows down a bit until the level is cleared (and then goes back to the normal speed for the next level).
The game is much more focused on going fast instead of complex strategy or big combos. It's all about recognizing where you need to be and being prepared to to clear lines. There is a lot of button mashing in later stages to try and fill gaps quickly, and the game is fairly hard to play on a regular controller if you're emulating at home. Strategy and combos still come into play, but the game prioritizes speed above all else.
There are three courses, increasing in difficulty. There is also a hidden endless course, available if you hold all three buttons while pressing start on the title screen. This is a very juicy mode to sink your teeth into, but the game unfortunately doesn't save your initials in this mode. There is a 2 player mode too, but I haven't sat down with someone to play it.
On the third course and the endless course, the game will also give you a piece that is a single unit wide. Be quite careful with them — while occasionally quite useful, they're mostly there to break your flow.
You'll ideally want an arcade stick, or any controller where you can put your three fingers flat on individual buttons. The game will probably give you some amount of RSI though, as it's very mashy. Early levels give you time to calmly press the buttons you need to fill in the gaps, while later stages will have you pounding all three buttons like mad during the very brief time between when a piece touches the ceiling and when it locks into place since there's very little time to think about anything other than where the piece should go, rather than what shape it should take
The game saves scores for each stage, which is excellent for keeping track of your pace. The game also stores scores when powered off, which is extremely nice.
The first course is fairly easy and eases you into playing quite nicely, the second course is a moderate challenge (especially the last stage, which is quite a bit faster than the previous ones and a taste of things to come in the third course), and the third course is just brutal due to how quickly it ramps up the speed. I still have yet to complete the third course.
There's a bit of risk-and-reward to the game. Larger pieces will continue to float upward and cause a chain reaction, but they take up valuable room on the playfield. You can push up to float pieces more quickly (especially since the only scoring metric is how fast you cleared the stage), which is most useful on earlier levels, but you often already don't have much time to react. Later stages in the game barely give you any time to stretch blocks out or speed up their movement, you're left playing on pure reaction.
The aesthetics of the game are great. The whole presentation is slick and clean, even if it's not quite as aesthetically self-consistent as Mr. Driller, another Namco arcade title from around the same time. The sea theme works extremely well with the game concept, the music is cool, it all just comes together really well.
As mentioned earlier, there's unfortunately no real home port available. It does emulate well in a recent MAME if you're interested. It runs on PS1-based arcade hardware, so it's not too demanding for a vaguely modern computer to run, although the CPU is clocked quite fast, something like 100MHz (a stock PS1 is 33MHz), so particularly slow machines might have performance issues when emulating it. It's a real shame there isn't a Switch port or something though, it'd make an excellent on-the-go game, even if you'd probably need to hold the unit quite oddly for ideal play. Maybe one day it'll end up as part of Arcade Archives.
Ultimately, the game is a lot of fun, and I hope this post inspires more people to check it out. My next blog post in this series will probably be about either Panikuru Panekuru or Pochi and Nyaa, two other arcade puzzle games that I like a lot. After that, I dunno. At some point, I'll talk about Dig Dug II, Exerion, Pooyan, Flicky, Mad Planets (I really need to build a controller so I can play this at home, it outright does not work without one), and Gain Ground. I'm mostly putting this bit here to make sure I remember to do writeups on some of these titles. :P
Also, I had this article mostly written for most of the year, I only just now got around to cleaning it up and actually putting it on the site... it's been like 7-8 months or something.