About A Game: Buckle Up! (PSX)
Buckle Up! (バックル アップ), developed and published by Shangri-La, is not exactly a good game by most criteria. It does not control well, is generally pretty janky, and with only four stages in total is giving the appearance of a budget title (even though it originally sold for ¥6600). But it manages to add various small fun and silly bits that made my playthrough a mostly enjoyable experience.
One of those little aspects that don't really influence the gameplay is how when you crash into stuff, your character will shout out "Shit!", "Goddamn!", "Jesus!" or something similar in a little speech bubble. In a similar vein, crashing into trees often makes something drop from it, like a coconut, a monkey or even an alien, and your character will acknowledge it with a bit of dialogue. In the first stage there is a little church with a graveyard, somewhat hidden and definitely off your path, where crashing into a grave will make a ghostly image of two digitized people come out to chase you and drain your fuel. Why is it there? Just for fun I suppose.
The basic gameplay of Buckle Up is that of a car action game, where you don't race anyone and instead have to fulfill various goals to proceed. While the mission briefing usually gives you one specific goal to achieve, I found out after watching a longplay that there are actually alternative ways to finish stages, which I find quite impressive in a game that otherwise seems so barebones.
You're not stuck with the vehicle you start out with, but you can only switch with a few select vehicles per stage which are indicated on your map. Each car has its own damage meter, so it makes sense to find and take a new vehicle if your old one is about to break down. There's some variety in vehicle types, with a monster truck, a bus, a military jeep and a police car among others. Interestingly each car is fixed to either automatic or manual transmission, forcing you to adapt to the changing controls. The vehicles also control quite differently in terms of speed, maneuverability and off-road suitability.
For being so short, the game features quite a bit of narration between stages, all in Japanese text of course. It starts out with our main character and his son/daughter (you get to choose which one you're taking with you, each with a different vehicle) driving to get groceries and getting mistaken for a bank robber on the run by the police.
In the first stage, your goal is to draw enough police cars to you and away from a road block so that you can get to the exit without being gunned down. Drawing police attention seems to mainly involve driving around town and crashing into things, although I'm not sure there is a reliable indicator for your progress or completion. I assumed that the color of the compass arrow might tell you when you're done, but later learned that this is just your car's damage indicator, which might or might not be related to that goal. Since you are constantly being chased by police in this stage, you'll also get to listen to the non-stop sound of their sirens, which can get very grating after some time. After successfully passing the road block there are still some obstacles to overcome, like a jump across a big gap or an Indiana Jones style rolling boulder trap.
If you pay attention to the map of this stage, you might notice that there is a small island in the north that is off the main path to the exit. As it turns out, there is a hidden path through the water to that island, allowing you to completely circumvent the road block and the other obstacles.
In the cutscene before the second stage, we pick up a hitchhiker whose car broke down. It turns out he's the bank robber, and he takes our child hostage to force us to do something for him. So in the second stage, we get to pick up a few drug deliveries on a university campus at night. Most of them are directly accessible, but for one we have to do some extra work to open it up. This is also a little bit of a stealth mission, and we're supposed to avoid attention from the cars and people moving around in the area. For a university, the area is also strangely full of large pits you can drop into.
Funnily enough, the villain gets out of your car before the mission, together with your child (who he's threatening to hurt if we take too long). And he is actually in the stage and on the map, running around with your child in tow. Here's where the alternative goal for this stage comes in. You can chase him and run into him with your car, and if you do it a few times, he runs off and you finish the stage. He's pretty fast and small, but it's not too difficult.
Regardless of how we finished the last stage, we manage to escape from the villain, but are chased by the police into a military training ground. As we enter there is a rockfall behind us, which keeps both the police out and us locked in. So the main goal of this stage is to collect a few dynamite items and use them to open up the exit again. The whole area is pretty rough terrain full of land mines, mortars and turrets. For some reason there is also a tornado going around the stage which can pull you in and throw you around.
If you look at the stage map, you might notice that there is a second entrance/exit gate for the training ground. There are also train tracks going into the direction of that gate, and a train going back and forth on the map. You can hit a big switch near the tracks to divert the train towards the gate, and if you also break all the train traffic lights, the train won't stop and turn around as usual, but will derail and barrel straight through the gate, giving you the alternative goal for this stage.
In the south of the map there is also some kind of harbor, with a navy vessel out in the water that can shoot at you. There are a few turrets placed along the coast which you can operate, leaving me to wonder if you can somehow attack the ship with them, but I couldn't figure anything out.
In the cutscene before the fourth and final stage, our main character and child, the villain, and even the cops manage to stop at the same roadside diner. Like a stereotypical scene out of a movie, they initially don't notice each other, and when they do it quickly turns into another chase.
The goal in this final stage is to wreck the villain's car by crashing into it repeatedly. That's not easy for several reasons. The villain is dropping explosives while driving, which can push your car off the road or flip it over. It's also difficult to get repeated hits in, because you bounce off quite a bit when running into it, and then have to catch up to it again. But the worst part is that it is only really feasible to defeat the villain in the first part of the stage, on the regular road. After that, the path leads through a lake and along a cliff, and trying to get more hits in will most likely throw you off the path and into immediate game over. After many failed attempts, I had to check a playthrough on youtube to see that there wasn't any special solution and you just had to jankily wedge yourself in front of the villain's car. A fitting end for this game.
I expected some kind of alternative goal for this last stage, since the other stages had them, but could not find anything.
This text got quite long, because I wanted to highlight all the fun little bits and pieces that they didn't have to add, and the secret alternative goals for stages. The game controls terribly, has a lot of issues and generally not exactly the highest quality, but for people with some amount of jank tolerance, it can still be quite charming and entertaining.
If you want to have a peek at the game in motion, here's my VOD of almost two playthroughs of the game, and trying to figure out the alternative stage goals: