Original Release: Birdy Soft, 1990, PC-88
A strange physics action-puzzler that sees you racing to protect a young animu lady’s purity from horny aliens
Hole Chaser (PC-88, Birdy Soft, 1990)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: Master-B
Hole Chaser is untranslated other than the opening menus, so my best guess at the story is that an unsuspecting schoolgirl is sold off into slavery to aliens by Incognito MacGyver and her boyfriend follows in hot pursuit in the worst-handling UFO of all time.
As far as the gameplay goes, you navigate the Trial of the Pachinko Caverns using Asteroids-like semi-Newtonian physics. You have to rotate the ship and apply force in the opposite direction to slow down, and the game is all about finesse as you can quickly get up to ludicrous speeds while overcorrecting and end up careening all over the place (and the maps are carefully arranged so that this almost always sets you back quite a bit).
There are only six levels in total, but you’ll soon find that’s more than enough to drive you crazy as it’s a hell of a time just getting past the first one. The difficulty is in each level having a fairly tight timer, and you getting kicked all the way back to Level 1 if you run out of time. The fifth and six levels also hit you wiith the rude surprise of spanning two screens instead of one.
Without save states I probably would have gone no further than Level 4, but I was able to fanagle my way through the game in about an hour with save scumming and document its lewd tale. The alien kidnappers apparently like long and slow seduction, so it appears your goal is to reach the girl before he whips out the ol’ alien babymaker. The H screens between levels are mostly static, with just a tad of an animation loop here and there, and accompanied by very ominous music.
On that subject, given how frustrating and annoying the gameplay is the only real appeal here is the lewds and a surprisingly good soundtrack for something this stupid (from the guy who did the music for Princess Maker 2 and Rusty among other games).
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