Gomola Speed

The Good
Starting this game quickly teaches you the game mechanics as you go for a nice welcoming introduction to play the game comfortably without immediate confusion. This is basically the next generation of Snake with a nice slice of Pac-Man. Forget everything you know about simple arcade games, because this one really spices up the fun and puzzle factors. This is just an amazing snake you can work with because you can travel in pretty much any direction, compress your snake, and not worry about collision with yourself or any wall. With a few enemy inconveniences, you just put yourself back together and you're good to go. As you lasso and bomb your way through the levels, each new level will introduce a new gimmick, which will prompt you to want to play the next level. There's mazes, bosses, hidden goals, teleporters, power-ups and much, much more. You could spend hours with this good old arcade style home game.

Graphics are just right with some cyber metallic looking textures, some 3-D angled walls, fantastic lighting effects and a decent variety of level layouts. There's even some presentable anime-esque pictures in between some of the levels. The fast-paced music tracks intensify the mood of the game.

The Bad
While the gameplay is in the best state for players, some parts of the game could do with some finer tuning. Three credits may be just enough for experienced players, but the increasing difficulty would only make players yearn for more continues. Also there's no menu in the opening screen, so accessing the password screen to skip levels cannot be done directly. And be sure to pay attention to your surroundings or you might find that you're short of one snake segment and have to traverse the whole level to retrieve it. Not enough in this game to actually make you rage quit, so that's a bonus.

The Bottom Line
You've played Snake no doubt. You've played Pac-Man for sure. However this hybrid of the two is a largely forgotten TurboGrafx classic that sadly never made its way to American audiences. It is not an exaggeration to say that this maybe the best game of its kind, all stored on a single HuCard. The title is probably not so catchy and the only elephant in the room, but absolutely nothing to stop you playing. Even with the little frustrations present, the game cannot really be broken, it's solid, it's funtastic, and it's waiting for players to get their fingers into action. If this one makes it to Virtual Console, you'll make the right choice downloading this title.