It's no Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, but I'd prefer it be a well-designed puzzler than a mere funny PC-98 meme. Sex 2 ahem
Bit^2's 1993 train-crash avoidance simulator starts you off with an egghead of a railway operator asking you to manually operate their trains. Why? All the company's sensors & computers have gone haywire, and only you have the skills to run it all until it's fixed! Simple enough, just give me the master control panel and—oh, wait, I have to flip every little switch. Every train's gotta pick up their passengers or cargo, then make it safely to the exit. Someone's gonna owe me money after this job.
Chitty Chitty Train leaves you plenty compensated, thankfully. The game's mouse controls are smooth yet precise. Its audiovisuals are rock solid, from jaunty chiptune marches to the intricate pixel art. (Seriously, why doesn't this title get more attention from PC-X8 art rebloggers and art bots?! The eroge picks are getting old, fellas.) And just like you'd expect from a meticulous PC puzzler from this era a la Lemmings, each level offers plenty of challenge. Well-designed challenges, might I add.
We're far from Transport Tycoon and its descendants here, with nary an automatic timetable at hand. Think of it more like an arcade-y, non-sim distillation of A-Train's transit mechanics. All your train scheduling happens through manually clicking on switches, calculating how long different types of cars will travel the circuit you put them on. Quite a few early puzzles give you very limited headroom, stacking multiple moving engines across shared track they'll easily bash heads on. Planning your moves and switch timing is the meta, but a good amount of improvisation can help when least expected. It hardly feels like a train version of Sokoban, where you're so obviously restricted and can only realistically solve the puzzle in a given way.
Best of all, there's a map maker! Creating and sharing your levels via the game disk might have mattered more back in its heyday, but Chitty Chitty Train's such a small game in size that it's trivial now. You can try it out today via PC-98 emulators (hint: check a certain Archive), and I think any fans of old-school logic games will get plenty out of this very overlooked romp. Although the game's always had English menus, the recent fan patch does translate the opening if you're interested.
Bit^2's 1993 train-crash avoidance simulator starts you off with an egghead of a railway operator asking you to manually operate their trains. Why? All the company's sensors & computers have gone haywire, and only you have the skills to run it all until it's fixed! Simple enough, just give me the master control panel and—oh, wait, I have to flip every little switch. Every train's gotta pick up their passengers or cargo, then make it safely to the exit. Someone's gonna owe me money after this job.
Chitty Chitty Train leaves you plenty compensated, thankfully. The game's mouse controls are smooth yet precise. Its audiovisuals are rock solid, from jaunty chiptune marches to the intricate pixel art. (Seriously, why doesn't this title get more attention from PC-X8 art rebloggers and art bots?! The eroge picks are getting old, fellas.) And just like you'd expect from a meticulous PC puzzler from this era a la Lemmings, each level offers plenty of challenge. Well-designed challenges, might I add.
We're far from Transport Tycoon and its descendants here, with nary an automatic timetable at hand. Think of it more like an arcade-y, non-sim distillation of A-Train's transit mechanics. All your train scheduling happens through manually clicking on switches, calculating how long different types of cars will travel the circuit you put them on. Quite a few early puzzles give you very limited headroom, stacking multiple moving engines across shared track they'll easily bash heads on. Planning your moves and switch timing is the meta, but a good amount of improvisation can help when least expected. It hardly feels like a train version of Sokoban, where you're so obviously restricted and can only realistically solve the puzzle in a given way.
Best of all, there's a map maker! Creating and sharing your levels via the game disk might have mattered more back in its heyday, but Chitty Chitty Train's such a small game in size that it's trivial now. You can try it out today via PC-98 emulators (hint: check a certain Archive), and I think any fans of old-school logic games will get plenty out of this very overlooked romp. Although the game's always had English menus, the recent fan patch does translate the opening if you're interested.