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Jade Cocoon is one of those daft monster-breeding RPGs of a similar vein to Sunsoft's recent Monster Seed. If you're not familiar with the genre, it generally involves you walking round a Final Fantasy-type world, chatting to people with silly names and breeding monsters to fight other monsters with. This one is as bonkers as any other of its type, and it works well enough. You play a young pert-bottomed boy who wakes up one day to find the rest of his village magically put to sleep by the baddie of the tale. That's the excuse for you trek off on a quest to summon and breed enough to monsters to defeat the bad guys. All this happens very slowly, and the turn-based combat will be a bit tedious for most tastes, but that's par for the course in the monster-breeding business. Engrossing, if you can cope with this sort of thing.
A futuristic Wipeout-inspired skateboarder, Trickstyle is a curate's egg of a game involving jet propelled floating boards Michael J Fox would die for. The game centres on an area called the Veledrome. From there you enter different rooms in order to choose what you're going to do next. This can be either a challenge in the Veledrome arena where you attempt to unlock new tricks, or you can simply race along one of the game's tracks against the clock to unlock new areas and new boards. The animation, the superbly designed tracks and the sound too are top notch, and the Wipeout-like feel of the racing action is really exciting (either in one- or two-player mode). The trick aspect of the game, though, doesn't work quite so well: there's too much time lag between hitting a button and pulling off a trick, and the tricks themselves are really too simple and arbitrary to offer a very satisfying challenge. As a racer alone, Trickstyle is lush to play and to look at, and will add a nicely weird, Wipeout-ish option to any Dreamcast library.
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