Blind Date Gaming: Burning Paper
I thought I'd try a new thing for the like 3 of you following the junk I do! Since I don't get ample time to play games much, I figured I could try playing some games in time-restricted chunks. Specifically, I'm going to keep these short jaunts in 3-4 hours -- easily capable of being done in a single night. To add to the fun, I thought I'd randomly pull from a list of games...totally not having anything to do with my crippling addiction to randomization, I'm sure. Regardless, since I'll be spending but a night on a game I've got no control about choosing, I figured the parallel to a blind date would lend itself to an interesting name: Blind Date Gaming!
However, how many games can you ostensibly get through in such a short time? Probably not many, but there are several from the older days that might fit that bill (or maybe the whole duck!). I decided to draw from the Game Boy, as its cartridge size restrictions limited game length quite a lot. So let's get started, eh?
My Psuedo-RNG program -- let's call it 'PRANG' for funsies -- selected a winner for the first date. Burning Paper is an arcade-like game the likes of which I've not seen before. It was only released in Japan, it seems, which is a shame because the concept is actually pretty neat! We'll get into the mechanics in a bit. First, let's review the story. And by 'review' I mean mix up what I can piece together is the actual story alongside some of my own creativity (or madness, whichever applies).
You are living in an alternate reality where Dr. Light is creating some potions with a robot frog. He forgets his O-Chem (because let's face it, no one can remember that stuff) and a reaction causes a bunch of creatures to go bloodthirsty and start wreckin' towns. You, Burn Man, have become unemployed as a boss since Mega Man doesn't exist in this universe and need to go eliminate the monsters. Or, I mean, I guess just eliminate a given number of them per level. Whatever! You have a fancy laser that can instantly burn lines into posters. So what, you think you just fry the bad guys, right? Of course not! Lasers can't hurt enemies! You need to burn off pieces of paper posters so the falling shrapnel gives them horrific paper cuts. Duh!
I'm not sure why falling paper hurts more than lasers, but you have to conserve your paper, as you only have so many posters to cut up to attack the monsters scaling the building. You can burn off larger chunks to hit wider spaces, too. Things start getting hectic at the later levels, causing you to slough off more than meant. Enemies can reach the top, too, which brings up the next cool thing about this game: you have to manage dodging enemies up top while concentrating on stopping the ascending ones at the same time. The enemies are creative in their movements patterns and get pretty rough to manage! There are bosses as well, though these guys are usually just susceptible to lasers. They're pretty tough too!
You get new abilities after beating bosses and can find power-ups by defeating some enemies, but honestly? I couldn't figure out how to use them. I sometimes shot meat out when I was lasering, but I'm not sure if that was an item or just poor little Burn Man dropping his packed lunch because he's so dang dedicated to his job of defacing advertisements.
The game is short, clocking in at around 2 hours to beat. However, it's a novel enough concept that it was pretty memorable to me. I'd definitely check it out if you have the means to! I'm not gonna spoil the ending, but you do get rewarded with some broken English after you down the fourth and final boss. My favorite type of ending! Now that I think about it, there's no Japanese language in the game at all. Hunh.
So that's it! I'll try to keep these short, half because I assume walls of text scare people off and half because I don't know exactly how many people are even going to read/enjoy these at all anyway. Regardless, I'll leave you with a final gift: a Sprite of Passage. Consider it a manifestation of the game's soul, character, and being. Regard it with respect, and allow it to represent everything this blind date had to offer on this fine night:
it's a big cheesed off pharoah poster, of course
