You can always rely on ’90s HAL for a few things: adorable sprites, a fairly low difficulty curve, and a short runtime. Trax predates Kirby’s Dreamland by about a year, but you can see its roots here. Lots of lil round guys! A smooth onramp for new players into a genre that’s typically less forgiving! 4 entire levels! “Go! Turn! Shoot!” is a perfect introduction in the game’s opening cutscene, because yeah, that’s about all you’re gonna do!
The core mechanic here lies within the tank’s controls. Your war rig is canonically a janky lil thing. Its treads have been replaced with tires, its rounds are fairly small caliber, and its turret can only turn clockwise. You can snag a range of powerups that’ll help with the second of these issues, but you’re going to be spinning in circles for the entirety of your playthrough. This wacky aiming scheme means that the game being a bit more forgiving doesn’t compromise its tension too much, it just transfers it from threading needles while trying to position yourself for a reprisal to threading needles while trying to line up your shot in the first place. Granted, the double turret power up ends up circumventing a lot of this as it lets you shoot forward and backward at the same time, thereby halving the amount of time it takes to line up said shot, but you don’t have to use that all the time, y’know?
As is the case in a lot of bullet-dense action games, the slowdown is frequent when the action gets hot and heavy. There are plenty of shmups or shmup-adjacent games that are worsened for this, and maybe this is a preference thing, but I never found it worthy of complaint here. Trax’s funky turret controls mean that every additional bit of reaction time makes a difference, and nothing in this game feels better than perfectly rotating your turret while dodging bullets and popping the offending parties from left to right in slo-mo. Plus the game’s kind of intended to be easy, and the slowdown ends up being an asset there.
Games like this are entirely made or broken by the quality of their levels, and by extension enemy wave placement. Trax’s levels are…fine. Placements are simple, always solvable with the unupgraded silly spinny shooter, and the game is so generous with lives that you probably won’t need too many attempts to roll credits. Instead of providing puzzly layouts to memorize or high-intensity gauntlets, Trax is more interested in memorable setpieces. My favorite joke is level 2’s midboss, which starts like the classic mirror match battle then takes a turn that got a legitimate laugh out of me.
Trax is a bit of an odd duck to evaluate in the modern day. Its not especially well known as far as HAL games go, but those who are aware of it have a tendency to talk it up a bit more than I think it warrants. Don’t get me wrong – it’s cute! It’s fun! I’m glad I played it, and would recommend you spend the 20ish minutes it takes to beat “Funi Tank Game” if it sounds like it’d appeal or you’re just curious to dig into HAL’s history. Just don’t expect anything mindblowing here. There’s a reason we haven’t seen this concept revisited since its release: they used all the ideas they had in this single cart, and there were only so many to begin with.
Wack Game Boy Zone 