It all started so well. Using my meager funds, I purchased Flamma from the gladiator market. I invested in him, watched him take his wins and losses in the arena, and had him nursed back to health when he was injured. Sure, I arranged for his family to be killed in an accident so that he wouldn’t lose sight of the important things, but I thought we were tight. Then one day he slipped away from my security, gathered some like-minded barbarians, and attacked me at my home. My other gladiators were in no condition to stop these brutes, and my estate was burned to the ground. My head was left on a pike, a final show of Flamma’s lack of gratitude. Well, that’s how it goes sometimes in Gladiator Manager (Free), a rather enjoyable little strategy game from developer Renegade Games.

As the title says, this game drops you in the role of a gladiator manager. It’s ancient Rome, the days where people would fight ferocious beasts or each other for the entertainment of the masses. You choose your nationality, each conveying a particular benefit, and head into the virtual lion’s den that is the world of gladiator management. You start with some funds and the basic necessities like a training ludus and a couple of slaves to work on your estate. Your first order of business is to head to the market and pick up your first gladiator. Grab him a weapon too, while you’re at it.

Broadly speaking, your goal in this game is to enter your gladiators into tournaments to win fortune and fame, increase your standing, and wipe out your rivals. The game is played week by week, with your actions mainly limited by the number of active gladiators you have on your roster and how much money you have left. You can buy slaves to perform various tasks on your estate, upgrade your facilities, attempt to sabotage your rivals in various ways, and enter your gladiators in whatever tournaments are available. The longer you play, the more your options open up. While it’s initially a very straightforward affair, you’ll soon find yourself having to deal with all manner of matters.

Since you’re just the gladiator manager and not the gladiator, all you can really do during the battles is watch things play out. Before each round, you’ll get some information about how fair of a match-up it is. If things look a little dire, you can always bribe the guards to “forget” to unlock the opponent’s chains, or accidentally leave the door open to the lion cage, and so on. If you’ve got money and influence, you can get away with an awful lot. Victories will grant you money and more influence, while your participating gladiators will gain fame. Lose, and at best you go home with a bruised ego. At worst, your gladiator could be injured or killed. And don’t forget: your rivals can cheat just the same way you can.

Between battles and during the passage of time, random events will pop up. You’ll have to make a choice, with some only available if your status is at a certain level. It’s often a matter of losing resources (money or slaves) or influence, but you’ll also have a chance to earn money, pick up new gladiators, or get more slaves. While these aren’t the most complicated of affairs, their presence reminds me a bit of The King of Dragon Pass. That’s a good thing. When I first fired this game up, I was expecting at best something along the lines of Monster Rancher, but as the strategic layers continued to be revealed I found myself more and more impressed at just how much there was here.

The game does its best to at least get you off on the right foot. It will present you with objectives when you start a new game, and if you follow them you’ll more or less find your feet before long. Completing them can even reward you with gems, which are the only way the game monetizes. Gems can be used to buy a variety of things, including new weapons, tournaments, events, and more. If you manage to finish every achievement in the game, you’ll get enough free gems to buy just about everything on offer. If you want to finish out picking up those remaining things or simply want to get the jump on acquiring things, you can buy gem packs for $3.99 and $7.99. You get a whole lot of game here without dropping a single cent, so you could almost see a gem pack purchase as a tip to the developer if you’re inclined to.

Anyway, that’s how it is. Back to the game. Gladiator Manager is a game of momentum. When you’re winning, it’s a lot easier to keep on winning. You can afford all those upgrades to your compound, opening your options and keeping your gladiators happy, healthy, and well-trained. You can pay for more slaves to increase your income or guard your gladiators. You can afford those bribes during tournaments and weather those random events more easily. Your influence will also keep going up, allowing you to exert your power in other ways. But you’re not invincible. All it takes is one bout of bad luck and the whole operation might shift gears into reverse.

Yes, when you start losing it quickly becomes a downward spiral. Not only will you earn less and see your influence wane, but your gladiators will get injured and their loyalty will decrease. You’ll have less money to fix things, and random events can force you to send injured gladiators into combat, making things worse. You might eventually end up with no gladiators due to death or abandonment, and if you have no money to hire a new one you’ll simply have to drag one of your slaves up to join the active roster. Eventually you’ll run out of funds, then influence, and that’s pretty much it. Head back to the title screen and try again.

But you know what? Even losing is kind of fun in Gladiator Manager. One of the ways it really calls The King of Dragon Pass to mind is in how each playthrough feels like a unique story. There are just enough variables and random happenings in the game that it takes a very long time for any two playthroughs to feel the same. That’s a good thing, because you’ll probably have at least one or two skunky runs while you’re still learning how things work. The amusing series of events that can lead to your end makes it easy to forgive the game and fire up another run right away.

With all that said, there are some rough edges here. The UI has some sloppy bits, and sometimes text will spill out of the boxes. While the game does a decent job of teaching you the basics, some of the more advanced features aren’t as well-explained. There are bugs now and then, with things not activating properly or the flow of events playing out in a weird way. I will say that the developer seems very attentive and has been updating the game very frequently, so I expect the game to keep on improving as time passes. This review is mainly where things are at this very specific point in time. I can’t give bonus points for potential futures, so keep that in mind if you’re reading it after a month or two of updates.

Ultimately, I think Gladiator Manager is pretty neat. It doesn’t cost you anything to download the game and see a great deal of what it has to offer, and if you have any love of management sims or strategy games I think trying it out is a very cheap gamble with a potentially high pay-off. It’s not as simple as it initially seems, and learning how all of its various bits work and how to put them to work for you manages to tickle the ol’ brain muscle just the right way. Give it a shot, but be careful about trusting that Flamma fellow. He’s a rude boy.

A few months back, Hamster and SNK released Stakes Winner in the ACA NEOGEO mobile line. As I am wont to, I reviewed it and found it to be a really enjoyable and unique game that fit the needs of mobile gaming quite well. Well, now we have Stakes Winner 2 ($3.99). What are the differences? Is it better? Worse? Will it pull ahead by a nose, or is it just another old nag? I’m trying to write like an old GamePro writer. Do you like it? Probably not. Look, I’ve done so many of these games, it’s getting hard to write an introduction paragraph. The main thing is that we’ve got the follow-up to a game that surprised me in a pleasant way, and it’s time to see if this one can do the same.

Stakes Winner 2 was a relatively swift sequel, as these things go. The first game was an immediate hit in Japan when it hit in late 1995, and SNK wasn’t going to rest on its laurels. Developer Saurus was tapped to make another game in the series, and it wouldn’t be the last time it would have to take on this task. It would, however, be the last time Saurus would do so on the NEOGEO hardware. Given the quick development cycle of just one year, you can probably imagine that the game doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel. In a lot of ways, it feels very similar to the first game. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something to keep in mind.

That means the racing action is going to be familiar if you followed my advice and played the first game. You’ll have to manage your stamina as you make your way around each track. grab useful items, and try not to run into any of the other horses while doing so. There’s a new Burst move you can use once per race in the final sprint and it can be the difference between victory and defeat. Each horse now has a stat for this ability, so you’ll want to consider that when picking between the now dozen-strong roster. Jockeys now have some special moves of their own, busted out with fighting game-style commands, and this adds yet another layer of strategy to each race. The races are faster and even more fun than before, and while I will once again bang my drum that this game is super-fun with another player, it’s good enough to enjoy even if you’re riding solo.

Those new jockey moves come courtesy of the Jockey Training selection between races, a new feature added to the game. Pay a big chunk of money, get a slick move. You can also pick these moves up if you manage to beat a Rival when they challenge you. As before, you can also train your horse in a minigame between races to get some permanent upgrades to their stats, an essential part of keeping pace with the pack as you go deeper and deeper into the career mode. You’ll also find yet another new addition between races in the form of a special shop. You can spend your hard-earned money here to buy items you can use in the next race. So here again we see the basic foundation of the first game left intact but with new things built on to add some complexity and strategy to the proceedings.

One more cool thing is that you can now choose between two… what are they called? Derbies? Well, you can pick between Europe or America this time, which means you’ve got two completely different modes to clear in story mode, each with their own tracks. Given that you will likely be playing this mobile version of the game in single-player, that kind of extra content is extremely meaningful. All the new ways to spend money add another consideration to your gameplay choices, because your final winnings is your score. If you spent more along the way, your score will be lower. To push your score higher, you have to rely less on the various helpers the game offers. In this ACA NEOGEO version, it’s even more important since you’ll be posting that score to the leaderboards to compete with other players.

Look, I’ll wear it proudly: I love Stakes Winner and I love its sequel even more. I didn’t think I would, but after giving them a fair shake I think these are some of my favorite non-fighters on the NEOGEO. The second game is one of the deeper single-player experiences available on the platform, as far as I’m concerned. I know this kind of game is odd for Western tastes, but if you’re patient with it and take it on its own terms, I think you’ll love it too. As a game, Stakes Winner 2 is excellent.

How is it as a mobile experience, though? Well, as mentioned you aren’t going to get to play the fun multiplayer mode unless you have external controllers and a desire to huddle around your mobile device. I think it’s wonderful even as a single-player experience, so it can survive that loss. As for the controls, I do have to admit that pulling off the special moves is a bit trickier than I’d like on the virtual stick. It’s a bit better to play on an external controller if you have one, but I’d say it’s still mostly fine on touch controls. Just be aware this is a more complex game than the first one and that means the controls have more to deal with.

The extra ACA NEOGEO modes are here, and the Score Attack mode is a great challenge. The Caravan mode doesn’t do much for me on this game, but you can’t win them all. The usual options are available, so you can tweak game settings, controls, and so on as you like. Hamster’s emulation is as on-point as ever, so the game looks, sounds, and plays just the way it should. I’d like to do my usual whinge about not having internet or wireless multiplayer, but I acknowledge that some of these games are so niche that I should be happy we’re getting them at all.

If you liked Stakes Winner, you’ll love Stakes Winner 2. While the core of the game remains the same and the overall presentation hasn’t changed a great deal, the additions to the single-player mode significantly enhance the overall experience. It’s a zippier game, a more strategic game, and just a better experience on the whole. There aren’t many games like this out there, especially in English, and I think those who are willing to take the gamble on something unusual will find themselves rewarded for their courage.

As Hamster and SNK’s tireless mission to get as much of the NEOGEO library onto mobile continues, the wheel finally lands on Thrash Rally ($3.99). It’s a top-down rally racer from the powerhouse system’s second year on the market, originally developed by the folks at ADK. Interestingly, we’ve already seen the game’s spiritual successor, Over Top, arrive in the ACA NEOGEO mobile line. With that in mind, is there room for Thrash Rally in this increasingly crowded roster? Time to go through the usual questions to see if we get some unusual answers!

SNK wasn’t exactly known for racing games, and I don’t think the NEOGEO ended up changing that perception much. I’m not sure if it was because the hardware was ill-equipped to keep pace with the powerful units SEGA and NAMCO were pushing into the arcade space, or if SNK just felt like they couldn’t really keep up with the competition in a design sense, but we ended up seeing just six racers on the console/arcade hybrid. That’s counting two horse racing games, too. Thrash Rally was the first racer on the system where players controlled cars, and the only top-down one.

The choice to do a top-down racer at this point in time was an interesting one. While this particular branch of the racing genre was still fairly successful on consoles, the more spectacle-heavy arcade scene had long since ditched them in favor of behind-the-back vanishing horizon games. Indeed, we were only a year away from the complete and utter game changer that was SEGA’s Virtua Racing. Even with a bit of scaling thrown in for spice, Thrash Rally looked a bit unimpressive for an arcade game of its vintage.

I guess this kind of gets to the elephant in the corner of the NEOGEO room. As a home console, the NEOGEO was considerably more powerful than anything else you could find at the time. It wasn’t even close. But as arcade hardware went? It was fine, but one of its big selling points for arcade operators was in how affordable it was. It was reasonably priced, generalized hardware that was built to handle a wide variety of experiences. It couldn’t and wouldn’t compete on a power level with more specialized, expensive hardware kits. It had its strengths, of course. When it played to them, the games could have a fair bit of razzle-dazzle. But there was only so much it could do, and each passing year dated the hardware further. The long life of the system must be credited to SNK and its various developers’ art, music, and game design talent. Well, that’s my opinion anyway.

A lot of the games in the early years of the system were trying to puff up its power. The later years came off like SNK was trying to show it could still hang with the competition. But I think if we look at the gooey, delicious middle years, we can find a comfortable groove for its software where it isn’t trying to put up any pretenses and is just enjoying itself. Thrash Rally was an early runner in that field, to me. It looks good for a top-down racer, for whatever that is worth, but it succeeds on its gameplay merits more than anything. I would go so far as to say that it’s a more enjoyable racer than its spiritual follow-up, despite that game having a considerably more gorgeous look.

Thrash Rally is a rally racer where you use your choice of several vehicles and challenge one of two different rally championships. While there aren’t any official licenses in play, everything is very nudge-nudge-wink-wink. That’s particularly the case if you play the Japanese version of the game, where the cars have names like the Toyot GT-Four, Parsche 911, and the Lancian Deleta. The two rally championships are themselves loosely based on the real-life 1992 World Rally Championship and Paris-Cape Town Dakar Rally. You can pick from six cars for the former, which consists of five separate races taking you from Monte Carlo to the United Kingdom. The latter gives you an additional three vehicles to choose from, and it’s just one long race from France to Cape Town.

The game leans more on the arcade side of things to say the least, but you do have to take the terrain into account and learn when to brake and when to gun it. Your choice of car is very important, as each of them have their own parameters that will affect how you have to race. I like the not-Porsche, but I recommend trying them all to see which one fits you best. Unlike a real rally race, there are other drivers on the track with you and you are indeed racing against them. Well, some of them. Some of them are just there to populate the track and get in the way a little. Collision is very loose here, in favor of the player. You’ll often just blaze right through cars in your path, leaving a wreck behind you. You’ll want to aim to get first in every race, but as long as you don’t run out of time you can keep going.

Yes, this is pretty normal as arcade racers go in that you’re up against a clock, an opponent far more nefarious than any competing car. You have to reach each checkpoint before the clock runs out. If at any point you fail to do this, you’re out. You can insert a credit to continue, at least. It’s a solid challenge, especially while you’re getting a feel for the cars and tracks. You can modify the difficulty as usual via the options menu, so you can scale it up or down as needed. Perhaps more useful is the presence of online leaderboards, which allows you to compete with other players’ times. You also get the usual Caravan and Score Attack modes, which are particularly challenging in this game.

You can play the game with an external controller if you have one, but the multiplayer option isn’t available here at all due to it requiring the rarely-used link cable. Touch controls work reasonably well for this game, as it only uses two buttons. Accelerate, brake. Use the virtual stick to steer. Almost as easy as it gets, and it’s more than doable via touch controls. It’s always nice when one of these games plays nicely with touch, and I find myself more encouraged to recommend those that do.

Thrash Rally might not have the graphical sizzle of other racers on the console, but in terms of sheer playability it may well be near the top of the small pack. It fits mobile very well, and whether you’re playing with an external controller or touch controls there is plenty of fun to be had here. It’s kind of funny how top-down racers are probably more acceptable in today’s market than they probably were back in 1991. Well, whatever. If you like top-down racers, pick this one up. You’re not likely to regret it.