VGJUNK

FAMILY FEUD (SNES)

2012-02-23T08:47:00.006-08:00

People always complaining that you spend too much time watching TV? How about that old chestnut that videogames will rot your brain? Dammit mum, leave me alone! Well, why not combine the two into one synapse-frying cavalcade of fun (cavalcade not guaranteed) with Imagineering's 1993 SNES our-survey-said-em-up Family Feud!

If you're British you'll probably know this better as Family Fortunes, the quiz to find the most obvious answer, formerly presented by human punchline Les Dennis and currently hosted by Boltonian charisma vacuum Vernon Kay. It now goes by the name All-Star Family Fortunes, although this is something of a misnomer as the fame level of the participating celebrities is so low it makes Come Dine With Me look like the Oscars afterparty.

I could make the point that the name-change from Family Feud to Family Fortunes highlights a cultural division between the US and the UK: the original name is angry, combative, while the British version focuses more on the rewards of the game (because, as a nation, we are greedy). It probably got changed for a really boring reason like copyright issues, although I personally would have changed it anyway because the phrase Family Feud conjures up images of warring tribes of inbred mountain folk.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though - maybe you've never seen Family Feud. Perhaps you live in a country that doesn't broadcast some version of the game, although having seen the list of international versions this seems unlikely unless you're living in the undersea kingdom of Aquatica or North Korea. Maybe you're part of a government experiment to monitor the effects of light entertainment deprivation. Whatever the reason, a game of Family Feud goes like this: you're asked a question. In the example above, the question is "Besides a clock or watch, what in your home displays the time?" This question has also been asked to one hundred people, and it's your job to give the answer that the most other people said.

Obviously, you're going to say VCR despite the fact that this is 2012 and VCRs are now a relic of a distant, forgotten age. Still, fifty-four other people said "VCR" when asked the same question, so you get fifty-four points. I hope you're proud of yourself. Hang on, only fifty-four? This game was released in 1993! The VCR was the nineties' equivalent of a grandfather clock! Maybe half of the people quizzed were Amish or something.
There are a few other complications, namely that you have to find all the answers on the board to get the points. If you make three incorrect guesses, the opposing team can steal all your points by finding one of the remaining answers. Sadly an incorrect guess isn't accompanied by most famous part of the British version: the robotic "UH-UHH" noise that sounds like Robot Satan trying to be sassy.
There's also a final quick-fire round, but that'll be along in a while. For now, let's meet the families!

Second from left: Chuck Norris. Second from right: Lucille from Arrested Development. We can only assume that this isn't a family but is actually a government hit-squad comprised of people who can utterly destroy you (be it physically or mentally). That guy on the far right is their handler, which is why he looks so goddamn nervous.

A normal enough family, but I'm a little worried about the guy on the right. I don't want to make snap judgements or anything but he looks like the kind of guy that... does things in the lingerie sections of large department stores. Keep those hands where I can see them, buddy.

Ah yes, the Poshington-Smythes. So glad you could join us! I'm joking, of course - there's no way this family can be all that conservative given that the father's wearing a suit which I can only describe as really fucking blue. They'd never stand for that at the country club. At least, I assume he's the father: he could be a hostage for all I know, kidnapped for his vast knowledge of what one hundred people will say when asked a simple question.

Here's the final family, and I guess they're pretty normal even if the guy on the right does look like J. Jonah Jameson. Hopefully there'll be a question about Spider-Man. Notice how they're all wearing the same perturbed expression, like someone just off-screen is singing nursery rhymes while dressed as a clown and stroking a stuffed cat.

Once you've selected a family to represent you, the game begins. The first round is the Bullseye round, where you can add cash to the prize pot by finding the top answer and being quick on the buzzer.

After that, you're on to the meat of the game as the two families attempt to complete the board. It's not exactly a complex gameplay system, but it works pretty well. All you're doing is typing the answers in by moving a cursor about, but it's pretty fast and while the game is strict about spelling it will quite often help you out if you don't put the exact answer it wants by accepting things like "video player" when the answer is "VCR". Of course, whatever system they used to implement this can go awry. For example, one of the questions I got was "After a child moves away, what do his parents use his room for?"

Being as immature as I am I entered "vigorous intercourse", because by this point I'd sort of lost interest. The game seemed to appreciate my "wit", though...

...because it accepted it as a correct answer - "storage", to be specific. I really hope this was included by the developers as a little joke, because the alternatives are too bizarre to contemplate. Maybe "intercourse" is a slang word for storage in America. "I'm just going to intercourse these boxes in the intercourse locker". No... no, that can't be right.

Then there are things like this. The question was "Things other than presents you give people on their birthday." I'd like to draw your attention to the sixth answer. Maybe where you're from, pal. I'd be disappointed if I was expecting a surprise party and instead I received a butt-paddling. At least it'd still be a surprise, I suppose.
So, it's a pretty decent game and it works well, but there a couple of other things that I particularly enjoyed about Family Feud that I'm not certain were intentional. First, and something that made me literally laugh out loud and was presumably unintentional, is the way the teams celebrate winning the round. The winners clap merrily, proud about their knowledge of the habits of one hundred randomly-selected peons. The losing side... they're not quite as impressed.

Look at those stony-faced bastards. Nobody likes a sore loser, Romeos.
The other thing is that, as I mentioned before, I'm pretty juvenile. If you're like me, that means you can derive a good amount of humour from the way the game makes it far, far too easy to enter unfortunate and borderline offensive answers. Like so:

Or this:

Or even this (I'm sorry).

Sometimes the fruit hangs too low, even for me.

That's how to squeeze some more fun out of the game, at least. There's a metagaming suggestion for you: get some friends over, play Family Feud and award points based on who comes up with the funniest / most disturbing answers.

Oh, and there's the final round where two family members get the same five questions and must provide an answer each, hopefully reaching two hundred points overall and securing the big cash prize. It's a bit easier than on the actual show, because you're not supposed to be able to see what the other person's answers were and you can't submit the same answer twice, but the game handles it well enough. I was a little confused about the top answer for "place with big lawns" being "golf course", because they aren't lawns. They're, like, fairways and shit. If you try and have a picnic in the middle of golf course you'll quickly be ejected from the premises.
That's pretty much it, really. If you win, you can keep going as champions but once you reach $80,000 in winnings you're forced to retire in case you bankrupt the company.

No fanfare or ceremony, not even a small glitter explosion. I suppose the cheque for eighty grand will salve the pain of not getting a parade.
Family Feud really isn't all that bad. It know what it wants to do and it does it pretty well. The presentation is decent if hardly mind-blowing and if you really want to play a TV quiz show on your SNES then you could do worse than this (for example Wheel of Fortune, which is dull as sin). The main thing I've taken away from this is that Family Feud is a game that wouldn't exist nowadays. Technology has advanced and there's nothing here that you couldn't do in a web browser. It'd certainly never be a full-price release on a current-gen console, and as such it's something of a relic of the 16-bit era.
It does have a lot of questions, though. I don't think I saw any repeated while I was playing, and I played it for quite a while. If you're wondering just how many there are, some madman on GameFAQs has transcribed every question and all the possible answers. It's a feat that makes me feel a little better about writing articles for retro games nobody cares about.

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10 MORE WEIRD FINAL FANTASY ENEMIES

2012-02-20T12:08:00.001-08:00

A while ago I wrote about ten of my favourite bizarre Final Fantasy enemies, because to my addled mind a vicious rabbit riding a floating lettuce and psychedelic toads are things worth writing about. A selection of just ten enemies simply wasn't enough, however - the Final Fantasy universe is home to so many freakish creatures that it makes the deep ocean look like a particularly disappointing petting zoo, one that only contains an arthritic donkey and a couple of uninterested guinea pigs. So, here are ten more weird FF enemies, a list inspired by my recent time spent with Final Fantasy V and my first encounter with these guys...

Ghila Cat, FFV

Furry death charges screaming from the skies! The Pusswaffe strikes in a whirlwind of scratching claws, knocking over ornaments and getting under your feet while you're trying to feed it! Yeah, it's a cat with hang-glider wings. That's just cruel. Why would you put wings on a cat and throw it into battle? All the cats I've ever encountered have not reacted well when I've thrown them through the air, and I've thrown a lot of cats. My data samples are big enough that I feel confident to say that very few cats like being thrown through the air, and fewer still possess the highly developed chest muscles and aerodynamic nature required to stay airbourne on home-made wings.
Of course, I'm assuming the cat didn't make the wings itself in some kind of misguided attempt to become a more efficient hunter of birds. This is Final Fantasy, after all. Maybe it did make the wings itself, but I wouldn't want to delve too deeply into the possibility as it would make a mockery of the concept of evolution.

Abomination, FFIX

Where does Square get off calling this thing an Abomination, huh? Sure, it might look like something you'd find clogging the drains of someone who really, really loves blackcurrant jelly but that's hardly his fault, is it? Frankly, I think you should be impressed by the Abomination's front teeth, which serve it well in wintry weather by both acting as a snowplow and providing extra grip in icy conditions. It could help you clear your driveway after a heavy snowfall, and it wants to help. Just look into its eyes! Eye, I mean. Anyway, that's a facial expression that simply speaks of a certain nervousness when meeting new people, not an insatiable desire for carnage and death. Plus, it wriggles around on its little hair-tentacles and it's kind of adorable.

Kagura, FFIII

Just look at that face. Go on, soak it in. That neon-green seahorse couldn't possibly be any happier about being a neon-green seahorse, which is what makes him so weird. He shouldn't be happy - the only use for neon-green seahorses in this world is as a punchbag for any group of adventurers that happen to wander past. He'll be dead in seconds, but you can bet that he'll keep on smilin' even as he's filleted by each warrior's unflinching blade.

Face, FFVI

Well, it's definitely a face. You can't deny that. The Playstation version of FFVI may have re-translated its name to "Phaze" but there is no doubt that what we have here is a gigantic hovering face. It'd fit nicely into Gynoug. As such it raises a lot of questions, questions like "does it have a body somewhere?" and "how does it float?" and "why does it look so bloody smug? If I didn't have a body, I doubt that my overriding emotion would be smugness." Well, I can answer that last one - it looks so smug because it knows what's going on. Indeed I believe it may know that answers to all things, but Face's desire to do nothing but fight adventurers means that this vast repository of knowledge is now lost to us. What a smug prick.

Slapper, FFVIII

First off, I should point out that "slapper" means something else entirely here in Britain. That's fine for providing some juvenile snickering, but the real weirdness here is in how ordinary the Slappers are. They're just guys who were playing ice hockey when a rival school / mercenary training facility happened to crash into them. After the hordes of fearsome monsters, evil witches and elite military officers that Squall and company had previously fought, a quick dust-up with some guys carrying sticks must have been something of a relief. Personally, I'm choosing to believe that this entire encounter was orchestrated by the Slappers' coach as an impromptu training session designed to promote team unity. Sadly, all the team members were killed and the coach is now trying to drink himself into an early grave.

Skull Eater, FFV

A squirrel with the name of death metal band, the Skull Eater is definitely adorable. That is, when he's not eating skulls. Look, he's got one is his paws right now! I think. It could be a grey nut or something. It doesn't actually look much like a skull, which might be because the Skull Eater is a palette swap of an earlier, less demonic squirrel enemy. I'm starting to doubt that these guys even eat skulls at all. They're probably just the squirrel equivalent of the unpopular kid who becomes a goth and changes his name to "Raventear Darknight" or something.

Balor, FFIII

A muscular body covered in writhing tentacles and possessing a gaping, tooth-lined maw is pretty weird, I guess. Not all that weird for an FF game, though - you're unlikely to come across one in your local Tesco, but in the world of Final Fantasy they're probably the equivalent of chickens or cranky old ladies on the bus. No, I'm much more interested in his unusual pose: all I can see when I look at Balor is a monster caught in the middle performing a blistering air guitar solo, stopped in his tracks by sheer embarrassment as his father bursts into the room to find out what all the noise is about. God, Dad! Why don't you ever knock!? I hate you!!

Marionetteer, FFIV

The Marionetteer is an enemy that summons dolls to fight for her in battle. I find dolls pretty creepy, and the Marionetteer is not helping any. Don't be fooled by the fact she looks like a dragged-up version of Mr. Dink from Nickelodeon's Doug - there are no whimsical lessons about adolescence to be learned here.
I'm pretty sure that bird on her back is grooming her, too. Not only does she command an endless legion of sinister dolls, but she also has poor personal hygiene and is infested with lice.

Alluring Rider, FFVI

It's a whip-wielding, semi-naked woman riding a flying tapir. There was little chance of the Alluring Rider not featuring on this list. The reason she didn't appear on the last list is because, erm, I forgot about her (which seems an unlikely thing to happen given that she's a whip-wielding, semi-naked woman riding a flying tapir, but there you go.) At least she makes slightly more sense than some of these enemies, because she does appear when you're trapped in the "Dreamscape" of one of your party members. This makes me wonder whether she was drawn from something the enemy designer actually dreamt about. I hope so - it'd have made the dreamscape planning meeting quite interesting.
"We need monster ideas for the Dreamscape area. What have you got?"
"Well, I did have a dream the other night that we could use..."
"Go on."
"Well, right, there was this woman, and she was naked from the waist down..."
"I see."
"And she had a whip."
"Okaaay. Well, we'll put it on the "maybe" pile."
"Oh yeah, and she was riding one of those animals that look like elephants crossed with pigs, you know, with the little trunks?"
"You mean a tapir?"
"Yeah!"
"She was riding a tapir. I see. Tell you what, we'll put that one to one side for now, shall we? And I tell you what, maybe you should take a little time off work."

Ghirofelgo, FFVII

Both disturbing and comical, the Ghirofelgo is not someone you'd want to take anywhere in a dinghy. He fights by swinging around on a chain, determined to get some use out of his otherwise pointless lower half, but if you hit him hard enough he falls to the ground. There he lies, floundering around on the floor like a turtle that's been flipped on its back and has also had its flippers replaced with razor-sharp pendulums. You fight these guys in the Shinra Mansion so it's likely that they're the result of Professor Hojo's twisted experiments, in this instance an experiment into designing the world's most disturbing long-case clock.
Maybe they aren't Hojo's handiwork, though. Maybe they evolved, their unusual mutations spurred on by the high levels of Mako radiation in the area. If so, nature has dealt them a cruel hand. I can't see what their primary prey would be, unless there's a species of rodent in the Shinra Mansion that are so terrified by Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum that they suffer instantaneous and fatal coronary failure at the mere sound of a swinging blade.
You're right, that's just too fanciful. We'll stick to the original idea that Ghirofelgo are sentient beings who have had their legs replaced with pendulums in a grotesque perversion of science, forever doomed to swing from chain to conveniently-dangling chain in an abandoned mansion. Final Fantasy VII is a surprisingly dark game sometimes.

And there you have it, ten enemies to baffle the senses and make you wonder just why that seahorse is so happy. He must be up to something. Something fishy, even. Goodnight!

(All images taken from the Final Fantasy Wiki)

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GYNOUG / WINGS OF WOR (GEN)

2012-02-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

You know what the Megadrive had plenty of? Horizontally-scrolling shoot-em-ups. Here's another one! It's Masaya's 1991 winged-avenger-em-up Gynoug, also known as Wings of Wor.

First things first - how do you pronounce that title? Guy-noog? Jinnog? The Japanese characters transliterate as something like "Jinougu", so should it sound like "Jinoog"? Who knows, and indeed who cares? It's not important, because as far as I can see the word "Gynoug" has no connection to the game whatsoever and might well be six tiles plucked from a Scrabble bag. It's how they named Q*Bert, after all.

You're not told the plot, either, at least not by the game itself. One minute you're looking at a muscular winged warrior in skintight blue leggings and then bang, you're playing the game and facing off against... whatever these things are.

Experiments have proven that you can cross-breed garden gnomes and bicycle handlebars, but the resulting offspring are disturbing at best. Perhaps someone at Masaya misinterpreted the phrase "Star of David" - that does rather look like the face of British naturalist David Bellamy.
That pointy weirdo might have tipped you off as to why I'm talking about Gynoug in the first place. Like I said, the Megadrive / Genesis has plenty of scrolling shooters, and Gynoug isn't exactly packed with innovation. What it does have is weirdness, with plenty of enemies and bosses that are very different from the usual spaceships and mecha, and really that's all I'm interested in for today.

I mean, look at this guy. He's the first stage's mid-boss and already the biology of your opponents has become completely unfathomable. I think there's a bit of turtle DNA in there somewhere. Also some rocks. Rock-turtles are hardly an uncommon enemy type in videogames, but this one has the added touch of a face that'd give the Cenobites nightmares. Look at all those holes! Who knows what could be lurking in there? I doubt it's puppies. Or, like, they're puppies but with insect legs where their eyes should be and their fluffy little tails constantly secrete a corrosive slime.

I know I'm focusing on the art design, but don't get me wrong - Gynoug's gameplay is more than up to scratch, it's just not very original. You fly through the stages, shooting everything that moves and collecting power-ups to help you shoot said moving things. The weapon system is probably the most unique aspect of Gynoug's gameplay. Our hero fires blue energy pellets, and this main weapon rather unusually has two separate power bars. Collecting red gems increases the power of your shots, while each blue gem you gather increases the spread and therefore screen-coverage of your attacks. One hit is, as per bloody usual, all it takes for you to lose a life but unlike games such as Gradius you don't revert back to your painfully-weak starting state when you die- instead you lose a red and a blue orb. The power level of your weapon is indicated by the blue and red bars at the top of the screen.

You can also pick up magic scrolls to equip you with a limited-use sub-weapon. In the picture above, our hero is using the Energy Ball. It's not really a ball, but it can be extremely useful because it negates the enemy's bullets / plasma orbs / caustic bodily fluids / whatever it is they're supposed to be firing at you.
Weapon system aside, Gynoug is very straightforward. Luckily, it's still a lot of fun to play thanks to sharp controls and a difficulty curve that starts at "challenging" and ends up in the region of "may God have mercy on your soul" but does so in a smooth, balanced manner. Enough about that, though, and back to the madness. Here's the boss of the first stage!

Clive Barker's re-imagining of Thomas the Tank Engine really is something. You've got to fight a train with the face of a man, or possibly a man with the body of a train, and the whole thing raises some disturbing questions. Questions like "is it sentient?" and "why would you build that, it seems terribly impractical and I fail to see how it improves on existing locomotive designs." It rather reminds me of the work of British artist John Blanche, who you might be familiar with through the art he produced for Games Workshop.

Stage two throws you something of a curveball, because those are just seagulls, right? I mean, obviously they're seagulls with the ability to fire some kind of deadly projectile from an unidentified orifice, but they're still just seagulls. Disappointing. The second part of the stage takes place beneath the ocean waves which means we must be in for some real oddities - after all, the sea is where all the truly weird-looking creatures live.

Coelacanth? Pretty cool, but hardly a soul-rending, utterly alien horror from the stygian depths. Even the mid-boss is only a giant whelk. Has Gynoug lost its way already, its creative juices spent after the first stage? Well, why don't we ask the end-of-stage boss?

It's a pirate ship with a human face that vomits deadly orbs at you. That's better! See, I know Gynoug was just holding out on us... Wait, there's more?

Turns out it wasn't a pirate ship with human face, it was just a hat belonging to an even bigger head. My mistake! You might have noticed by now that a lot of the enemies in this game are faces. Floating faces, faces attached to vehicles, faces that live under the sea and wear galleons as hats: it all rather makes you wonder about the art designer's personal issues. A former mask salesman, possibly? Maybe they just really hate faces, which seems like it'd be a condition that'd really impede your day-to-day life, as well as setting up the gimmick for some Batman-style villainy.

The next stage sees us firmly back into the realms of the bizarre as our winged avatar heads through a castle filled with coffins that dispense slime-mummies, bunches of floating skulls and the creatures pictured above. I think they're brains that hop around on a single leg, which not only makes an interesting enemy for a shoot-em-up but would also be my top pick to be introduced into the next generation of Pokemon.

Here's one of the slime-mummies now. Aren't they adorable? Like humanoid blobs of semi-solidified barbeque sauce. Our hero cares not for adorability though, and he blasts them back to whatever hellish condiment-dimension they came from. Why he does so is something of a mystery - the game itself certainly doesn't contain any plot. According to the manual for the US version, you're playing as Wor, a "winged battle master" whose home planet of Iccus has been corrupted by a virus that creates hideous mutants... although these mutants also have a leader, known as The Destroyer. So was this virus all part of Destroyer's plan? Or did he just notice that a ready-made army of face-shaped mutant warriors had appeared and thought "hang on a minute, I could use this rag-tag bunch of grisly abominations to take over the planet"? None of this is ever explained, although I have my doubts that this is the way the story originally went.

Enough about the nonsensical story! It's time to fight another man-faced train! This one's got a flame-thrower for a tongue, and it actually one of the hardest parts of the entire game. I forgot to get a screenshot, but the man-train here likes nothing more than filling the screen with bullets and then producing his volcanic tongue, giving you very little room to manoeuvre. Your job is made harder still by the fact you can only hurt him when his mouth is open. Luckily Wor is quite nippy and easy to control so dodging his attacks never feels impossible, but it's a long, difficult fight that feels claustrophobically frustrating.
Another boss that's a vehicle with a human face. I'm predicting it now: the next boss will be Budgie the Little Helicopter and The Destroyer is actually Brum.

Stage four starts with a change of pace, as you have to steer Wor through the narrow corridors of an industrial area, all while blasting away at the obstacles in your path and the occasional hovering wizard.

Of course, touching the floor or the ceiling or pretty much anything will cause you to explode and die. Don't forget that Wor is the "battle master" of this planet. Iccus is not a planet of great champions.
I like that the stages are getting more and more visually interesting as the game progresses. I'd have hated to have been stuck in those dreary caves that made up the first stage for the whole adventure, and it also gives you something to look forward to. What strange landscape will we happen upon next? Well, you'll have to beat the stage four boss to find out.

When steampunk costuming goes horribly wrong! Hang on, this guy isn't vehicle with a face. In fact, his face only makes up a completely reasonable percentage of his total area! I can't feel too hard done-by, though: this monster is still so tough he uses a steam boiler as a Walkman. He also attacks by firing red blood cells at you, which doesn't make any sense - they should be white blood cells. Also he's a floating torso with his heart on the outside fighting against a hawk-man. His external heart points to his possible origin as a collaboration between Umbrella and British Gas - an attempt to produce a self-maintaining boiler, maybe (and bio-weaponry, of course). It's also his weak spot, unsurprisingly.
In all seriousness, this boss is great. It looks fantastic, a combination of an interesting design with excellent graphics, and the fight itself is fun. He's got the same tendency to fill the screen with projectiles as the previous boss, but there's more space to move around in and as a result the battle feels more tense and exciting than tedious and frustrating.

For stage five, Wor takes a detour and ends up in Salamander. We're supposed to be saving the planet Iccus, right? I can see why Iccus would have caves and oceans and industrial districts, but organic meat-tunnels? It must be that virus' doing, and the virus also filled the place with floating skulls, monocular space-limpets and vicious amoeba towers.

Also faces. "One face is not enough," said Masaya, "so here's a monster made of loads of faces stuck together." I particularly like the upside-down face at the top, who must be hoping that the seagulls from stage two don't reappear and drop their "payload" into his upturned nostrils.

As for the mid-boss, well, he's just a naked man floating around in a sitting position, occasional sneezing out deadly blue pellets that spilt into several smaller yet equally deadly blue pellets. As far as Gynoug goes, this seems almost quaintly pedestrian. Not so much with the end-of-stage boss.

I tried several times, but there's no way I can talk about this boss without mentioning that his entire lower half appears to be an enormous, bleeding, ventricle-covered alien penis. How did that one slip by the censors? "What do you mean 'It looks like a penis'? That's just his mutated leg. If you're seeing dicks everywhere that's your problem, pal." Thankfully, he doesn't fire from the tip of his, erm, lower appendage. Just everywhere else.
This seems like a good time to mention that Masaya also developed the infamous Cho Aniki series, a series best known for its homoerotic depictions of bodybuilders, vehicles with faces and generally bizarre (and sexual) tone. It would seem that the same graphic designer worked on both Gynoug and Cho Aniki: this does not come as a huge surprise.
Once the mutant wang-beast is defeated, Wor arrives at the final stage of the game.

First things first: check out that parallax scrolling. That's a really lovely touch in a game that acquits itself well in the graphics department. It has the occasional mis-step - it can be difficult to see what's going on amidst stage five's veiny bio-nightmare, for example - but on the whole it makes excellent use of a muted color palette, unusual art design and some nice effects like the rotating caverns and these clouds. Sadly, the clouds are the only positive in this stage, and that's because it's a boss rush.

Yawn. Over the time I've been writing these articles, I've come to possess a substantial pool of hatred for boss rush levels and the unimaginative tedium that they bring. I'm fine with having a recurring boss, or a boss rush as a separate game mode, or even including the boss rush as a post-game bonus stage like in Konami's Crime Fighters series. It's just that when it takes up an entire stage - essentially reducing an already short game from six stages to five - it seems like a lazy and ultimately disappointing way of padding out the game.

Speaking of disappointing, here's the final boss. His actual physical form isn't so bad. I can get behind a demonic caterpillar foetus as a final boss, even if he is sorely lacking in the face department. No, he's a letdown simply because he's so tedious to fight. His only attack is to unleash a swarm of what I think are mint imperials into the air. These things float around aimlessly, getting in your way and acting like a slow-moving obstacle course. You can only hurt the boss by shooting him in the eye, and that's fine - the eye is a staple weakpoint of shooter videogames. If you're looking at him and thinking "but he doesn't have any eyes", that's because his eye is that brown sphere in his stomach. You can't hurt it when it's closed, but every five seconds or so it opens for a split-second (and I do mean a split-second) so you can get a hit in. That'd be a difficult enough set of defences to break through, but his hovering golf balls block your shots and they sure do like to congregate around his eye.

His orbs aren't really all that difficult to avoid, so the epic final conflict between good and evil becomes a rather dull war of attrition, with the Destroyer's plan apparently being to bore you so thoroughly that you lose concentration and fly into an orb. It's a real shame, because Gynoug had been a very enjoyable game up until the final stage.
If you have the patience you'll eventually get enough hits in to finish him off and the planet Iccus will be saved, because destroying the Destroyer also removes all trace of the terrible virus. Somehow.

The short ending shows Wor returning to his pedestal and turning into a statue. See, this is where my suspicions that the story presented in the American manual does not correspond to the original Japanese version. I wouldn't be surprised if Wor is actually an angel, summoned out of statue-based storage to fight a demonic evil, hence the final stage taking place in a rather heavenly setting and the hellish tone of the enemies. Of course, this might all be rubbish and the truth is that Wor's reward for saving Iccus is to be turned into a roosting spot for the local pigeons.

Despite the final stage, Gynoug / Wings of Wor has to go down as a good game. I'm by no means an expert on what constitutes a good shoot-em-up amongst the hardcore fans of the genre, but I can say that I enjoyed playing it. It's not just the graphics and the weird artistic stylings, although that certainly helps - it's just a fun and simple game that controls well and is very challenging but never treats you with outright contempt. If you like shooting things in the face, you should get professional help, but in the meantime this might tide you over. Plus, that guy was totally wearing a pirate ship as a hat.

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CRIME CITY (ARCADE)

2012-02-09T12:03:00.000-08:00

After suffering through Rise of the Robots for the last article, I think I've earned a holiday. Yeah, that sounds nice - a refreshing trip to a colourful world of simple, enjoyable gameplay and ridiculously OTT Japanese arcade aesthetics. Somewhere like, ooh... how about Taito's 1989 run-'n'-gun police-em-up Crime City?

Crime City is a dangerous, violent place - I believe it placed second in a recent poll of "worst possible places to live", just behind Herpes-upon-Thames - but luckily there's a pair of dedicated and vigilant police officers who will stop at nothing to clean up the streets. Just how seriously do they take their duties?

Physics, you can take the week off. Law of the Jungle? Fuhgeddaboudit. There's a new supreme law in town, and their names are Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady. Any similarities between these guys and the heroes of the Lethal Weapon franchise are entirely a product of your twisted mind. You should probably go and see a doctor or something; you're imagining things, seeing Lethal Weapon everywhere. Tony's surname is a mere coincidence, nothing more.

The call comes in from HQ - there's been a prison break! Tony and Raymond are woken in the middle of the night and tasked with rounding up the escapees. How will our heroes react to having their sleep disturbed?

Okay, wow. That's quite the opposing set of reactions. I mean, I'm very much not a morning person, but I've never declared a "kill time" when I've been awoken before my eight hours are up, sleep still crusting the corners of my eyes as I wearily load my revolver. Raymond has serious anger issues, and you'd hope he's not like that all the time because it'll put a serious strain on his partnership with Tony if it comes up on a regular basis. What if a crime happens during their lunch break or something? "I'm sorry guys, but you'll have to stop eating because there's a hostage situation downtown."
Tony: Well golly gee!
Raymond: I see, we shall move forward to the murder. *Begins silently loading his firearm*.

Right, here we are at the start of the game. Have a look at the screenshot, and then take a guess what the gameplay's going to be like. Go on, I'll wait. Done? If you said "you walk across the screen, jumping over obstacles and shooting bad guys in the face" then congratulations, you must have played a videogame before. Crime City is not an innovative game - in fact, it seems to borrow quite heavily from Namco's Rolling Thunder, particularly with your limited-ammo pistol and the way your health bar works (taking a physical hit decreases your health, getting shot is instant death) but without the jumping between different vertical levels and hiding in doors that's so prevalent in Namco's title. As always, the goal is to reach the end of the stage and defeat the boss. Like I say, Crime City is about as fresh and original as a Bruce Forsythe comedy routine.

Back to the prison break, then. Having escaped from jail, the inmates decide to grab their guns and head straight to the city's shopping district en masse for a spot of retail therapy. It's hard to keep up with the latest fashion trends when you're banged up - just ask this guy in the bright green suit, complete with Peter Pan hat. No wonder he needs a gun. At least Tony's clothes look like something a human being might have conceivably once worn in public, although his common-sense outfit is rather undermined by the way he minces across the screen.
That yellow-and-white thing in front of Tony is a bag of drugs. I don't know what kind of drugs - although it's definitely an insidious poison and not insulin or something. Given that Crime City is about urban crime and was released in the late Eighties, it's almost certainly some kind of new, ultra-addictive and utterly deadly designer drug called something like Thrill or Grind or Salad. Enemies sometimes drop these bags of Flunk when defeated, and you can collect the drugs for points. Remember that, kids: if you see a bag of drugs make sure you pick it up, especially if you find it near the corpse of a gang member.

The first stage is short - Crime City's shopping district is small, what with all the crime and all - and soon enough you'll reach the first boss. His name is Joe, and he's got a machine gun. What he's also got is the IQ of a small potted plant. He can't escape from behind those boxes, which is ironic given that he presumably led the jailbreak in the first place, and the bullets he fires move so slowly that the only way they could hurt you is if they suddenly developed sentience and started calling you mean names. All you have to do is crouch behind the boxes, wait for Joe to finish firing, stand up and execute him in a manner that will probably lead to an internal investigation (although you will be cleared of all charges in the end).

Oh look, we made the front page. Is Tony trying to put the cuffs on Joe? I think it's a little late for that, man. Also, STOCK PRICES. The Daily Taito isn't afraid to tackle the big stories, I see.
Now that the first stage is over and I've spent a little time in Crime City, what can I say about it? Well, it's fun. Nothing fancy and certainly nothing original, but it gets the basics right. Tony controls nicely, the level design so far seems challenging but fair, and Taito have given it such a thick layer of the bizarre, colourful madness that defined late-Eighties/early Nineties arcade games that it's impossible not to smile when you're playing it - the over-the-top and weirdly translated text, the fact that half the enemies look like rejects from West Side Story, Raymond's descent into madness, everything comes together in a rather satisfying way.

A bank robbery is the theme for the second stage, and Tony is rushed to the scene by helicopter. Well, not too the actual scene: for some reason, you're dropped off on top of traffic hurling along a motorway. Am I sensing some hostility towards our hero from the other officers of the CCPD? "Sorry Tony, we can’t take you all the way to the bank. Budget cuts, you know? Good luck!" And then a motorcycle tries to insert itself into your intergluteal cleft. Thanks, guys.
So, you hop your way along the cars. Falling onto the road means instant death, which seems fair enough. Once you've traversed enough vehicles, you can move on to the second part of the stage.

It's an underground garage filled with even more dangerous cars than the bloody motorway, constantly trying to ram you as you make your way through. Duke Nukem has snapped and taken a girl hostage, possibly as revenge for his treatment in Duke Nukem Forever.

Then there's a rather abrupt shift to an into-the-screen shooting section that works much like the similar stages in Contra, except not as maddeningly difficult. I don't know why it's here, and there aren't any more of them in the game, but hey: it's a change of pace, at least. Once you've made it through the Parking Lot of Pain, you'll emerge in the bank itself, ready for a confrontation with Richard the Bank Burglar.

Not wanting to be outdone by Duke, Richard has taken a hostage too. By the looks of her, she's Jessica from Final Fight, so Richard should count himself lucky that it's Tony that turned up to save her and not her dad. Richard has a shotgun that can make fighting him tricky, but as you can (not) see from the picture, Tony's latent mutant ability to turn invisible has just activated after being kicked in the head by a fat man in a ski-mask. You can't hit what you can't see, and soon Richard is dead and Jessica can return home to Metro City.

The next crime to fight is a smuggling operation that operates out of a junkyard. It's a nice, isolated spot for gunning down criminals without worrying about things like arrest procedures or human rights or the police department's ammunition budget. You know, for all that the Daily Mail and Britain's other right-wing rags bang on about the evils of videogaming, you'd think Crime City and other games of this ilk would be right up their alley. Criminals? Shoot 'em all, that's what I say! Justice should come from the barrel of a gun! They're sub-human scum who don't deserve to live, and they're probably... foreign, too. Disgusting!

Earlier I mentioned that Crime City takes its inspiration from Rolling Thunder, which seems appropriate given that these cops have a special attack - a rolling attack. Holding diagonally down and pressing jump makes your character roll around like an excitable child at a school sports day, and unlike the usual defensive roll found in videogames this human cannonball act can be used to attack. You're not immune to bullets when you're using it or anything, but if you're careful you can complete the first mission and large parts of the rest of the game just by doing roly-polys everywhere. You can even launch yourself into their air and do it, surprising your foes with the full weight of the law and the full weight of a grown man curled into a ball.

The second half of the stage takes place in the obligatory warehouse. After all, where else are you going to store your illegally-smuggled good? Waiting at the end is the boss, a rotund man called Fritz who carries what appears to be (judging by the projectiles it fires, at least) the cannon from a pirate galleon. I hope that's what he was smuggling into the country, looking to score a lucrative deal with a pirate-themed supervillain and his ship's crew of hired goons.
Yet again, Fritz is a boss who is trapped behind some boxes. This time you have to jump and shoot him. It's not a difficult fight, and soon Fritz is dead. I mean, incarcerated. Yeah. No time to relax, though: the mayor has been kidnapped!

Ah ha ha ha! "Oh maaaaan, kidnapped again? Mom's gonna kill me!” I should forgive the mayor his sudden lapse into teen-speak, though - it must be traumatising to be kidnapped by a 1950's biker and a man with a baguette for a head.

Our hunt for the mayor leads us back onto the streets, although these streets are meaner than the ones in the first stage. They're also a lot busier, with enemies constantly appearing from all angles, throwing fire-bombs, taking pot-shots from high windows and wearing fetching maroon denim ensembles. Crime City is starting to get quite tough now, but I've got to give credit to Taito for implementing a pretty smooth difficulty curve in a game this short. It never feels unfair, just challenging, and that's something that any game should be commended for.

Here's the boss. He's called Bob. Hello, Bob! Nice weather we're having, eh? Oh, I see you’ve tried to kill me with a flamethrower. Well, if you're going to be like that I shall be forced to fill your kneecaps with enough lead to sink an aircraft carrier. Fuck you, Bob.

You'd better tell him, Bob. Tony is the good cop. You don't want Raymond to interrogate you - not if you ever want to be able to look at your genitals again without throwing up.

Either Bob told the cops where the mayor's been taken, or they just burst into a random office building and started shooting everyone inside. Either option seems equally plausible. If it was a random choice, it was a bad one because this otherwise normal-looking office building has laser cannons mounted to the ceiling. I don't know why: to prevent the staff from wasting time on Facebook, maybe? I'd make a joke about "getting fired" here, but we're both too good for that.

Not wanting to risk facing more laser cannons, Tony decides that the best way to proceed is to take a tiny elevator down to the ground floor, via the outside of the building. A helicopter appears, but it's too shy to appear on screen properly and ends up being an easy target. Still, all this high-tech hardware must mean they're taking me seriously. It'd be nice if my superiors gave me a little support, though - where's my squad car, or SWAT backup, or even a bullet-proof vest? No wonder this is a City.
Once you reach the ground floor, there's a short section on the streets and then bam, you're at the final boss already. Who is the mastermind behind this nefarious scheme? What twisted genius would dare to enact a plot so fiendish?

Oh, it's the mayor. Wait, what? Well, it's definitely not a twist that I saw coming, or indeed one that makes much sense. The only explanation is that the mayor is suffering from an extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome. He's had his head turned by the exciting life of an outlaw - his cushy job in a comfortable office just wasn't real, man! The street is where a man can feel truly alive, alive for the first time! So he grabs another pirate cannon and starts blasting away at the very man sent to save him. What an ungrateful arse.
He's trapped behind more boxes, you'll notice. Just jump and shoot. All crime can be solved by jumping and shooting, as long as there are enough boxes around. Boxes are the very foundation of our new, just society, where Tony and Raymond reign over all as the Supreme Law.

Okay, now I'm confused. Tony is confused, too. You can tell by the way he's flouncing off screen.

The Daily Taito has a fresh new look, but they're still spelling words wrong in their front-page headlines. Poor show, 3/10. We did apparently rescue the mayor, though, so there's that. Now the mayor owes us, we can manipulate him into making all those lawsuits from the families of the criminals we murdered disappear. Beautiful.
With that, Crime City is purged of all forms of villainy forever and ever. It'll have to come up with a new name now. Personally, I'd go with Box City, change its flag to a box on a plain background and give the Mitchell & Sons Crate Manufacturing Company the key to the city.
Rather than any credit being given to the people who actually made Crime City, the ending consists of a sunset scene with a scrolling list of all the characters in the game.

That's how I knew all the boss' names, you see. Although I'd have called the fourth stage's boss Bob anyway. He looks like a Bob. This is jolly and everything, but then the game suddenly throws a curveball at you.

So Mike the mayor was kidnapped by his evil twin brother Tom, for reasons we can only guess at. Assuming that's what (BROTHER) means and he's not a monk or something, anyway. Nice of Taito to really flesh out the story there.
Never mind the revelations about fraternal kidnapping: here's my favourite part of the ending.

Bob, boss of punks, seducer of women, haver of baldness, liver of life!
I complained about Rise of the Robots being stale and unoriginal, so what's the difference between that and Crime City? For a start, CC is fun to play. It does exactly what's expected of it, and it does so without ever frustrating you with shitty controls or arbitrary deaths. It's a short game, optimised for the coin-sucking arcade market, but that's part of its charm - it never outstays its welcome. While it doesn't add anything new, it also doesn't completely ignore/refuse to include any of the features and advancements of games that came before it, unlike Rise of the Robots (you can't turn around in the Amiga version. I still can't get over that).

Oh, and you enter your name on the high-score chart by shooting it full of bullet holes. That's pretty neat.

You want an espresso shot of no-nonsense arcade action dressed up in wonky mistranslations and cheerily colourful graphics? Then give Crime City a shot - you'll probably enjoy it. Just remember - these cops may be the Supreme Law, but crates save.

P.S. Did you enjoy the adventures of Tony and Raymond? Does your heart yearn for just one more encounter with these paragons of lawful excellence? Well you're in luck, because it turns out that Tony and Raymond are also the stars of Taito's police driving game Chase H.Q. Here's a bit of text from the Chase H.Q. flyer:

They also appear in the CHQ sequel Special Criminal Investigation. So there you go - three seemingly-unconnected games that actually share the same heroes.

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RISE OF THE ROBOTS (SNES)

2012-02-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

Everybody deserves a second chance, right? Well, maybe not. I suppose it depends on how badly you fucked up the first time - I mean no-one's going to let Hitler have another crack at running Germany, are they? Videogames are much different than genocidal dictators, though, and maybe when you slated that one game, you got swept up in a blizzard of bad review scores or the bitter put-downs of your friends. Maybe that game you decried as an unplayable piece of shit in your callow youth is, in fact, a deeply flawed but still interesting title, maybe with some innovative features or excellent music or something to recommend it. That could well be the case with many games. Mirage's 1994 beat-em-up Rise of the Robots is not one of those games.

When I started replaying Rise of the Robots, (or as we call it here in Yorkshire, Rise uh t' Robots,) I thought hey, this'll be easy to describe - everyone remembers RotR. It was infamous, a gaming horror story to be relayed to your friends in the same way you might tell the tale of a hook-handed cannibal around a campfire. You think you're tough because you played Mario is Missing? Well, I suffered through Rise of the goddamn Robots. Cue sharp gasps from all present, followed by the consoling looks of those who are sympathetic but also glad they'll never share your pain.

But then I realised that isn't the case anymore. RotR is nearly eighteen years old. A whole generation of people has grown up playing videogames since then, and they/you probably won't have a clue about gaming's most traumatic example of why you shouldn't put graphics before gameplay. Consider this article an educational tool, then - a warning from the past that's still relevant today.

RotR is a one-on-one fighter in the Street Fighter 2 mould, if the "Street Fighter 2 mould" is that black goo that surrounds the showers in student accommodation. Rather than a cast of expert martial artists gathered from across the globe, Rise promised to deliver what every young boy really wanted: fighting robots. I know I wanted a game about fighting robots, raised as I had been on a steady diet of Transformers and Voltron. There was no way this could fail, right? As long as there were robots and they punched each other, this was going to be the game that made SF2 look like Mortal Kombat and made Mortal Kombat look like a Punch and Judy show performed by two syphilitic tramps.

The prospect of gladiatorial cyborg carnage was merely a bonus, however. Rise of the Robots' real K.O. punch, the thing that would assure its place at the top of videogaming's Mount Olympus, the thousand-carat diamond in the game's already jewel-encrusted crown, was the graphics. These weren't just any graphics though, oh no: these were graphics so futuristic that Nostradamus once saw them in a vision and said "fuck me, there's no way anyone will believe these graphics. I'd better not write this one down." You know how Mortal Kombat used digitised "actors", filming real people performing martial arts moves and then using that digitised footage as the in-game sprites? That's how RotR worked, but instead of using inferior human meatsacks they created full CGI models of each robot and then digitised them.

That's, like, twice as futuristic as any other game, right? And to Mirage's credit, they graphics do look pretty good. For this article I played the SNES version, that being the version I was (unfortunately) most familiar with during my childhood. The sprites themselves aren't bad at all, and apparently it looks even better in the Amiga versions. They might look a little grainy in the screenshots, but when they're in motion they glide about quite nicely. They've got a lot of animation frames, they're smooth, what more do you want? Here's the thing, though - and this is a personal opinion about aesthetics, so feel free to disagree with me - digitised graphics look bloody awful, on the whole. They always did. I don't know if this is a widely-held opinion or if it's just me but I cannot stand digitised graphics. So, RotR looks pretty sharp for a game with digitised graphics, but that's like saying it's pretty handsome for someone who just french-kissed a hornet's nest.

Unfortunately, the above-average graphics are the game's sole redeeming feature. Things start looking bad with the appearance of the plot. These robots must have some reason to rise, after all, so Mirage did what all lazy videogame developers do: they got out their scrapers and set to work on the big barrel of sci-fi clichés. They came out with a real fistful over over-used plot-points, too: if it's about computers and it's bad, then it's in this game. Out-of-control nanomachines? Check! Artificial Intelligence reaches sentience, initiates Operation Kill All Humans? Check! Computer virus that can reprogram anything even tangentially related to a microchip? Check! The only thing that's missing is a robot being reprogrammed by lightning strike.
The overall gist, then - the "Supervisor" AI has gone mad. You are a cyborg, or rather you are Cyborg, and you're immune to the virus because you're got a squishy human brain encased in your crunchy metal shell. Defeat the Supervisor, save humanity, receive free chassis waxings for all eternity from a grateful populace. To save the world, you must defeat the six robots that stand in your way. Sounds simple, right?

Well, yes - RotR is a very simple game. It's extremely simple, in fact. This is because the developers looked at all the advances that had been brought to the flourishing beat-em-up genre through games like Street Fighter 2 and said "fuck that, we don't want any of those gimmicks spoiling our pure and unsullied fighting experience!” What you end up with is one of the most barren, empty videogames I've ever had the displeasure of playing.
The first problem is that you can only play as Cyborg.

He doesn't look great up-close, does he? As he's your only playable character, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Cyborg comes packed with combat techniques, or possibly the downloaded memories of history's greatest warriors, or at least some kind of cyber-truncheon for clobbering his enemies. Of course, he has none of these things. He can punch, he can kick, and that's your lot. No particle cannons or energy swords here, just the kind of generic melee attacks that you'd learn on your first day at Kickboxer School. Honestly, there's no evidence that Cyborg is actually a cyborg at all. I mean, just calling yourself "Cyborg" doesn't make you a cyborg, otherwise I'd have changed my name to Godzilla years ago. For all we know, he could just be a passing member of the Blue Man Group who happens to have lost all his clothes.
Sadly, Cyborg is all we have, so let's begin the "Arcade" mode and meet our first opponent.

It's a Loader robot, for loading things. Not for fighting. This should be easy.

And so it proves to be, because RotR's gameplay is even more horribly broken than the rest of the game. You'll immediately notice that the controls are slow and leaden; judging by the amount of time that passes between you pressing the button and a punch or kick occurring, Cyborg must have the computational power of a goddamn potato. There are no special moves at all, and as the punch has a much shorter range than the kick you'll quickly realise that the punch is functionally useless. By this point, you're down to three moves, total: kick, jumping kick, crouching kick. The bulk of the game consists deciding of which of these three attacks to perform repeatedly, and then doing so.

You see, the computer is monumentally stupid. Pretty much every fight can be won by simply walking forwards and pressing kick repeatedly. Your opponent will just keep walking into your foot, over and over again, the virus that turned them evil also having apparently disabled all of their senses and any combat programming they might have had.
If "walk forward and kick" doesn't work, why not try "crouch down and kick" like I did on the second opponent?

Not only does it keep the gorilla-shaped Builder at bay, it also affords you plenty of time to gaze at Cyborg's lovingly-rendered, ray-traced buttocks.

Next up is the insectile Crusher, although "Pincers" might have been a more apt name. Or "Snippy Harold". Jesus, something, anything to make this game more interesting. All of the robots in the game have the same set of moves, so you'll know what to expect already. He uses a lot of jumping kicks, and you might be tempted to try to block them, but don't bother. While you can block, you still take damage. So much damage, in fact, that blocking is rendered utterly pointless. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the reason for this is that Mirage supposedly thought that their computer AI was so incredible that the CPU would be able to block every attack you could throw at it. The ability to hurt your opponent through their block was added to give you, a mere human, a chance of victory.
Or maybe the battle will pan out for you like it did for me - I hit the Crusher twice and then stood still. The Crusher also stood still. We both stood still, until the time ran out and I won by virtue of having more health. I've just noticed that health is called "NRG" in RotR. That alone is reason enough to never, ever play this game.

Having destroyed all the industrial robots we could find, we're finally faced with an actual fighting robot in the form of Military. I've got nothing to say about Military, really. He's very similar to Cyborg, except he'd got claws on his hands. We all know how long the military has been trying to come up with the ultimate delivery system for fingernail-based death, and this robot just might be it. Personally, if I'd spent hundreds of billions of dollars on an indestructible war machine I'd expect it to be able to eliminate targets from a distance of more than seven inches.
Forget this prick, though: look what is promised to us on the intro screen!

Music by Brian May, guitar maestro of rock legends Queen and Doctor of Astrophysics? Incredible! Maybe RotR can yet redeem itself with some tracks from a true great of classic rock!
No, of course it fucking can't. Despite the neon-green promises of the opening screen, Brian May's music does not appear in this game. Sorry, I tell a lie, there's a roughly ten-second long clip at the start of the game, but all the actual in-game music was composed by Mirage. Apparently issues with May's record label meant that RotR would have been delayed had they waited for May's soundtrack, so Mirage decided to just plow ahead without it.
I honestly think that this is the one element of the game that pisses me off above all others, more than the shitty, repetitive gameplay or the host of baffling design decisions. They couldn't even manage to get the bloody soundtrack into the game correctly! It seems frankly amazing that this game runs at all.

Comin' up next is the Sentry. Look at him, trying to impress us with his Tai Chi moves. Kicking his nickel-alloy ass will be a great pleasure and might also help relieve some of my frustrations about the whole Brian May debacle.

Ah. Maybe I spoke too soon. Sentry looks pretty big and he probably oh no wait I've just jump-kicked over and over until he's defeated. It's all just so tedious. Everything is syrupy-slow and loose, with no real sense of contact. There's nothing to learn, no skills to master, absolutely nothing to engage the brain (except to ponder the awfulness of this game). I'd rather be letting a robotic arm from a car factory chase me around with its welding attachment than be playing this - at least then I'd be getting some exercise... and then, just as I've given up all hope, RotR manages to make me crack a smile.
Between stages, RotR manages the admittedly impressive trick of playing some FMVs. Getting any kind of video onto a SNES cart, even the short, shrunken scenes in this game, is a real achievement and it shows that the only thing in this game that's handled in a less-than-ghastly fashion are the graphics. Mostly these clips show your opponent before and after the fight, with nothing particularly special about them, but the one that plays when you beat Sentry... I dunno, there's just something about it that makes me laugh every time.

He's just so casual about it. I'm not sure it's supposed to be funny, but Cyborg's nonchalant (and rather un-robotic) reaction to defeating Sentry is the one bright spot in this game, and by god I'm going to cling onto it like society's mocking laughter clings to a trainspotter.

After you've disposed of Sentry's remains, it's time for the final confrontation with the Supervisor. It's taken all of five minutes to get here, but it feels like an eternity. The Supervisor is a completely shameless copy of the T-1000 from Terminator 2, except she's sort of lady-shaped. Not that the T-1000 couldn't be a lady if it wanted to, it just decided that being Robert Patrick was a better bet. One thing the Supervisor has over the T-1000 is the ability to suddenly transform into whatever this is. A head massager? Lemon zester?

Terrifying, I'm sure you'll agree. Just kick her to death and get it over with. That's Rise of the Robots completed. Thank Christ for that. Do you get anything for completing the game? Well, it repeats all the cutscenes you've already watched under the guise of a "replay", does that count? The answer is no, it does not count.
It's rather telling that there are no credits at the end. I completely understand, guys - I wouldn't want my name to be even loosely associated with this. We'll just let Brian May take the fall, alright?
What you do get during the "ending" is a code to fight against the Supervisor in two-player mode. Did I mention there's a two player mode? Because there is, and it's even worse than the single-player game.

Player one can still only play as the Cyborg, while player two can choose his robot. However, no attempt at balancing the characters has been made. Player two could be the much more powerful Sentry and absolutely destroy the Cyborg every time, which is bound to get a little frustrating for the oversized synthetic Smurf.
There are also "Special" moves that can be enabled at the options screen. They're activated by tapping a direction four times followed by attack, and they grant you such game-breaking powers as invisibility, reversal of your opponent’s controls and complete fucking invincibility. Amazing. Here's a tip: never ask your friends to play RotR with you. Either you'll kill them, they'll kill you or you'll both leap off the nearest tall building in a double suicide bid.

If you've been paying attention, you'll have realised that Rise of the Robots is a truly atrocious game. Don't forget that this is the SNES version, though. This might blow your mind, but the SNES version is one of the better ones. The game was ported to many different consoles (including the 3DO and the Game Gear, of all things) and there were some differences between them. The SNES version, like I say, is one of the better ones. If you wondering how it could be worse, just ponder the Amiga version.
In the Amiga version, you can literally (and I do mean literally) complete the game by holding the joystick in the up-right position and holding down attack. The Cyborg performs flying kicks over and over again, and the enemies will eventually just crouch there and take it. Here's a video showing just that.

It gets better - in the Amiga version, you can't turn around. Cyborg is trapped, forever facing to the right, and if the enemy traps you in a corner you can kiss your ass goodbye because jumping over them isn't an option. Honestly, you can't turn around? The mind boggles. Amiga Power magazine famously gave this version of RotR a review score of 5% and frankly that's a display of generosity that makes Santa Claus look like Ebenezer Scrooge.

So what went wrong? How did a product so fundamentally broken manage to get a full-scale release? The answer is, I fear, down to money. Too much of it was spent on graphics, and by "too much" I mean "all of it". Actually, that's not true - the other thing that RotR had on its side was a gargantuan advertising campaign that pummeled gamers from all sides in the year or so leading up to the games release. There were magazine ads, TV ads, cinema ads, a constant steam of information leaked from the developers. There was even a RotR novel, for Christ's sake - if it's anything like the game, it'll be six pages covered with the ink-smeared imprints of a baboon's testicles.
So, between the graphics - this was a time when CGI was the big, expensive thing - and the advertising, there was nothing left for anything else. The graphics will have taken so much room on the cartridge (or disk - the Amiga version ran to 13 disks) that everything else had to be left out to make space. You know, things like options and game modes and fun. Terrible clunky gameplay, an utter lack of imagination, the same old videogame clichés recycled over and over again, the fact that the music isn't by Brian May - it all adds up to something especially terrible. The lesson we can take from all this? Never, ever put more emphasis on graphics than on gameplay unless you're making some kind of art-gallery-visiting-simulator.
As I said at the start of this article, some games deserve a second chance... but not Rise of the Robots. It really is as bad as everyone says it is.

The worst thing? It sold well enough to receive a sequel. Think on that as you lie in bed tonight, pondering the uncaring nature of the chaotic universe we live in.

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FLYING HERO (NES)

2012-02-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

With a title like Flying Hero, my first thought was that this game would chronicle the exciting adventures of a Chinese bootleg Superman; the kind of superhero you find in toy form on semi-legal market stalls the world over with names like "Superbman" and "Dark Gotham Vigilance Warrior", badly constructed from razor-sharp plastic and daubed in toxic paint. It's amazing I didn't spend more of my childhood in A & E, really. Flying Hero is sadly not about the adventures of these cut-rate crimefighters - it's actually the story of some true heroes, brave men and women who risk their lives on a daily basis by flinging themselves about on trampolines and calling in airstrikes. I am, of course, referring to the Fire Brigade. Flying Hero, created by Aicom and released in 1989 for the NES, lets us venture into their dangerous and thrilling world. How exciting!

Is that our hero? Okay, so he's not the most conventionally attractive leading man, but the Fire Brigade doesn't select candidates based on the squareness of their jaw or the firmness of their pectorals - they're chosen for their bravery, compassion and most importantly their aerodynamic profile. Flying Hero here may look like a bat that's been forced into a space-suit and thrown face-first into a window, but you can bet he's got a drag coefficient that'd put an F1 car to shame.

Upon starting the game, you're greeted with a scene of a cutesy fire engine driving up to an apartment building. Notice that the ladder attached to said fire engine is far too short to be of any practical use - this will become important in a moment. Also notice that this building isn't actually on fire.

Now it's on fire, catching light just as our hero arrives. That seems awfully convenient. Given the rather unorthodox methods used by these particular firemen, I can only assume that they're some kind of freelance fire-fighting operation that drives around looking for situations where their skills are needed. Some days must be a little lacking in terms of towering infernos. They've got quotas to meet, families to feed, and if a day is especially slow then who could blame them for giving nature a little nudge. Maybe someone might, say, drop a lit match in the wrong place. Perhaps somebody has tampered with the building's electrics. Whatever the cause, the building is soon ablaze and the Flying Hero has to rescue the poor inhabitants (and their fat wallets) trapped within. He does this via the power of trampolining.

I always though that firemen using trampolines was something that only happened in cartoons, but it turns out that it really was a real-life part of the fire-fighter's arsenal, even up until fairly recent times. Unlike in cartoons, it rarely ended in comical hi-jinks - people bouncing out of them and cracking their skulls or simply ripping right through them was a fairly common outcome - but they did save lives with much greater frequency than if people just leapt straight onto solid pavement.
The Flying Hero doesn't use fire-fighting trampolines in the traditional manner, though: rather than waiting for the rescuees to come to him, he uses the trampoline to bounce up to them.

Flying Hero is a nothing more than a twist on the classic Arkanoid style of gameplay. Instead of using a paddle to smack a ball against breakable blocks, you control the two firemen holding the trampoline at the bottom of the screen, moving them left and right to catch the Plummeting Hero and launch him back up to rescue more citizens and put out more fires. There are a couple of ways you can clear each screen: you can either extinguish all the fires by bumping into them several times during your flights, or you can rescue all the people hanging out of the windows. You do this by bouncing past them, which will trigger a display of the kind of raw steel-balled bravery not usually seen outside recipients of the Victoria Cross. The victim grabs onto the Flying Hero as he speeds past their window, trusting that not only is this weirdo who just flew by someone that they can put their faith in, but also that those two guys on the ground will catch them with their trampoline. If you do manage to catch the Flying Hero and his terrified passenger then the poor soul is rescued, some points are added to your score and you go flying straight back into the action.

The game is given an added pachinko-y flavour by the way FH interacts with the obstacles in his path. He'll sail right through a window containing a civilian, but he rebounds off the fires. Most stages also have a small red bird that flits left and right across the screen with no discernable purpose other than getting in your way, and the Flying Hero will rebound off him, too. You can see him on the left-hand side of the picture above. It may look like he's roosting but he's actually surveying the scene with his cruel, unfeeling eyes, patiently waiting for these creatures to get cooked just the way he likes them before descending in a whirling mass of feathers and talons to eat his fill.
So, there are things you'll bounce off and things you won't, and because you move quite slowly compared to other Breakout clones it feels like there's more emphasis on trying to predict where the Hero's various collisions will send him than on honing your reflexes to razor-sharp fineness.

There are also plenty of power-ups to collect that appear when FH bounces into a burning window, leaving you to catch them with your trampoline. The most commonly-appearing items are large bags of money. The Flying Hero's shady operation is starting to make sense now - once he's set light to a building, he can use the confusion and panic as cover while he loots the place, the occasional "rescue" making him look like a hero and feeding his twisted ego.
Other power-ups include the usual fare you'd expect to find in an Arkanoid clone. There are pick-ups to make your trampoline bigger, or to make FH put out the fires in less hits, or even to spawn another little Hero so you've got two of the little bastards bouncing around the screen at once. That might sound good, but in practise it means that one of them is going to be introduced to the pavement pretty quickly. Often, the two Heroes will bounce to opposite ends of the screen, forcing you to make a decision about which one will live and which will die. And here I thought this was going to be a cheery, colourful trampoline-based action game, not a “proclaim judgment on the worth of these men” simulator.
Some stages even have a power-up that'll let you end the stage early. If you spot a trumpet, make sure you grab it and a raincloud will appear to put out all the fires. It’s very useful, and if sort of makes sense. If you grab a walkie-talkie - well, it definitely ends the stage...

...by summoning a helicopter that destroys the building with a bomb.

The Flying Hero will stop at nothing to ensure that no trace of his crime remains. Sure, there were still people left alive in that building, but they were going to burn to death anyway. The bomb was the merciful option, really. Embrace the bomb. Also, please throw any bags of cash may have down to our ground crew.
The last item, which I think is supposed to be a Swiss Army knife, whisks you away to a completely different bonus stage.

This is the eternal punishment for FH's many, many crimes: an endless grey corridor lined with unmarked doors. What lies behind each door? A person who needs rescuing, a stick of dynamite, some kind of vengeful fire demon? Maybe the stairs to the next floor? Oh no wait, it's a key. Flying Hero has escaped to the next stage. Not even the mystical forces who bind the universe can punish him for long.
That's quite a lot of words about what really isn't much of a game. Watch the Flying Hero bounce around and don't let him fall to his grisly death. Do this for thirty-two stages. That is all. The bonus stages break up the gameplay a little, in their own tedious way, but mostly it's just the Flying Hero ~~starting~~ fighting fires in various different locales.

Like these wooden houses, for instance. My, but they do look terribly flammable. It'd be a real shame if they caught fire somehow. All it'd take is one misplaced spark, and the whole thing could... hang on, is that monkey?

Why do you need my help? You're an ape, for chrissakes. Just climb down! By adopting the lifestyle of the hu-man and living in a low-cost apartment building, you have lost touch with the ancient ways of nature and now you shall burn for your hubris. Silly monkey!

Some stages are two screens tall, like this castle filled with wailing princesses. You've hit the jackpot this time, Flying Hero! Think of all the luxury items just waiting to be thrown out of windows and into your waiting trampoline. You somehow managed to sneak into a royal castle and set fire to the large stone building, so I guess you deserve a big reward. Or, you know, the guillotine.

You even get to head into space! The bird is replaced with a UFO, which is a nice touch. It also gives Flying Hero a convenient scapegoat when the fire investigators start asking questions. Who are they going to believe: a hero who risked his life to save the trapped astronauts or some alien who just happened to be hovering around the crime scene? Sadly, they missed a trick here by not giving the space stages a different gravity level, although I suppose having your characters move any slower would have made the space stages trivially easy.

And then there are these weird stages. What can I say other than it's a place where top-hatted aristocrats live side-by-side with cat people in giant cucumbers located in a graveyard? It's probably some kind of hippy / goth / furry commune. With giant cucumbers.
If you manage to make your way through all thirty-two stages - and that really depends more on your boredom threshold than the difficulty level of the game - then you're rewarded with a pretty fantastic ending.
Not really, it's some text on a plain black background. Here it is in full:

"Like this way people have saved their lives and all of fire was extinguishd by brave young fireman. And people got a great deal of peace and love. Someday, somewhere, if you find fire accidents, then you may call brave fireman please encouragement them.
Thank you for your playing this game.
Can you enjoi this game.
See you again,
Bye-bye."

Fantastic. It all seems worth it now. I'll be sure to encouragement every fireman I meet from now on.

I can't really call Flying Hero a good game. There's not really enough to it for it to be a good game. The most fascinating thing about it is that it really shows how far videogaming has come. I don't just mean in terms of graphics and sound, but more that this was (presumably) a full-price retail release. It came out in the same year as Castlevania 3 and only a couple of months after Final Fantasy II. That fact that something so basic could be released in the same bracket as these (and many other) more advanced, complex NES games is kind of amazing. Say what you like about the state of modern gaming, but there are very few games released these days that display that level of disparity in the amount of complexity and content.

Taken on its own merits, though, it's a fun little timewaster. The graphics are decent, although there are only a couple of music tracks and they get very tiresome very quickly. The controls work well, the physics are solid and once you've figured out that FH can bounce on the heads of his comrades as well as the actual trampoline but items can't, you've got something that might entertain you for twenty minutes or so. If nothing else, it's make a good mobile game, especially given that the only controls you need are to move your trampoline left and right. If there isn't already an iPhone game about trampolining firemen, then I'd be very surprised.

That's Flying Hero, then. Pray he doesn't arrive in your neighbourhood with a can of petrol, dreaming of wealth and fame.

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UFO KAMEN YAKISOBAN (SNES)

2012-01-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

Quick, off the top of your head: what's the coolest superpower? Flight? Super-strength? Some kind of skin condition that renders you immune to paper cuts? Wrong, wrong, wrong. The correct answer is a keen sense of justice and complete mastery over the raw power of noodles. Don't take my word for it, though: consider the evidence put forward by Den'z's 1994 SNES beat-em-up UFO Kamen Yakisoban: Kettler no Kuroi Inbou.

That's UFO Mask Yakisoban: Kettler's Dark Conspiracy in English. I think. Perhaps it'll make more sense once we meet our hero, the fearless and lycra-clad Yakisoban!

Hailing from the Noodle Planet, Yakisoban is a steely-eyed hero with a heart full of valour and a packet of instant noodles on his head. Yakisoban is preparing to marry his sweetheart when tragedy strikes!

His fiancée is abducted by the evil Kettler! If you were wondering, Kettler is the one with the kettle on his head. He looks like the Mad Hatter, except more mad. Steaming mad, you could say. Yakisoban cannot let this injustice go unpunished, so he sets off for Earth to free his lady love and put paid to Kettler's malignant ambitions.

His spaceship / car is also a packet of noodles. It's powered by soy sauce, which helps to keep fuel costs down.
Alright, so you might be a little confused about what's going on. "Surely," I hear you say, "they didn't set out to make an action-packed fighting game and decided that the best hero for the job would be a guy with the power of noodles?" And you'd be right, of course they didn't. That'd be silly. Yakisoban was actually spawned by the unfathomable forces of Japanese advertising.

He was created in the mid-Nineties to promote Nissin's UFO brand of instant noodles through tokusatsu-style antics, always foiling the diabolical Kettler with his noodle-themed powers. Imagine if the Power Rangers gained their powers by having scalding water poured into their helmets rather than something as boring as shouting the name of a dinosaur.

UFO Kamen Yakisoban is an advertisement for Nissin noodles. An advert in the form of a side-scrolling beat-em-up, sure, but an advert is what it is and if the idea of product placement sickens you to your very core then you should probably stop reading now, and maybe try to calm down a little. Have a relaxing hot bath or something. Like how you might boil some noodles to satisfy your oh no it's taken hold of me already.

The game begins in an amusement park, a location that I assume Yakisoban chose on purpose as it's one of the few Earthbound environments where he's not going to stick out like a sore thumb. Sharp-suited goons appear to hassle you - I suppose they're Kettler's troops, but they could equally just be the park's security guards trying to evict you for dressing as an outside superhero. Try getting into Disney World dressed as Bugs Bunny, see how far you get. I managed to reach the Epcot Center before their tranquilizer darts took effect.

Yakisoban has a few tricks up his sleeve. Aside from the usual basic combo activated by pressing the punch button repeatedly and the ever-present jumping kick, double-tapping a direction will cause Yakisoban to roll around, away from danger or into the fray. Pressing attack while you're rolling results in a devastating flying-kick.

So devastating you can kick a man so hard in the throat that his eyes pop right out of his head. Kettler doesn't stand a chance!
Unlike most beat-em-ups of this style Yakisoban doesn't have a special move, activated by pressing jump and attack, which clobbers the surrounding enemies at the expense of a portion of his own health bar.

Instead, holding the attack button down allows you to charge up Yakisoban's secret attack: the Sauce Beam. Releasing the button lets you fire a damaging spray of dark, salty justice ahead of you. Yup, you've got a pair of soy sauce guns. Powerful, invincible soy sauce cannons, even, blasting the enemies aside with their awesome power while also enhancing their flavour. Yakisoban even shouts "SAUCE BEAMU!" whenever you use them. It's pretty great.

Hopefully you'll have a good idea of Yakisoban's skills by now, because soon enough the first boss strides into view. Skates into view, rather. He slides around a lot; a difficult task, given that he's wearing iron clogs, but he pulls it off well. Oh, and his head is some sort of frying plate and he throws what looks like pancakes at you. You haven't lived until you've unleashed a flying kick that meets a deadly pancake in mid-air, nullifying the attack with your foot.
The first boss isn't much of a challenge - simply avoid his attacks, whack him when he stands still and remember that he's invincible for a while once you've hurt him - and soon Yakisoban will be one stage closer to rescuing his fiancée.

Although not before you've taken care of the boss in a more permanent fashion by using Yakisoban's disturbing-looking noodley powers. I've spent a lot of time on the internet; I know what normally happens when anything tentacle-like ensnares someone in Japanese media. I think my sense of discomfort is justified.

Stage two takes place in a restaurant, and the absurdity of Yakisoban's appearance is made apparent by the expressions of the diners in the background. Just look at their faces: they're not used to having their lunches interrupted by a fight between a space-born noodle warrior and pie-throwing chefs with... kettles on their feet? That's a harsh punishment. Fail Kettler once, and you must have your feet permanently immersed in boiling water. Nobody fails Kettler a second time.

The restaurant's actual chefs - the ones with un-boiled feet and trousers that are white and not boiling-plasma pink - seem much less surprised to see Yakisoban. Well, chefs are notoriously volatile. They must see this kind of thing all the time, although probably with less noodle-themed headgear. You'd think a hat of that size and shape would seriously hamper Yakisoban's movement and balance, but he bears his burden well.
This is a good place to mention the graphics. They're hardly in the uppermost tier of the SNES' capabilities, but they do have a lot of charm. UFO Kamen Yakisoban is certainly a colourful game, colourful enough to make Konami's early-Nineties arcade titles look like Fallout 3, and there's generally quite a lot going on in the background, like that chef nonchalantly frying his food as a battle to decide the future of both Yakisoban's love-life and instant noodles everywhere rages through his kitchen.

And here's the boss, a fork demon made of forks. My knowledge of Japanese is hardly stellar, but I think he's called Mr. Fork. Go on, children: wave to the nice Mr. Fork, lest he spear you with his steely prongs and carry you away to his underground lair / cutlery drawer. He should team up with Gamera villain Guiron to form the ultimate table-top tag-team.
Once again, he's not too difficult to beat as long as you remember that all the bosses in this game enjoy a period of invincibility after they've been damaged, and they like to use this time to fly into you as fast as possible.

This image brought to you by the Council for the Promotion of Chopstick Use.
Next up is a construction site, and this is where some of the weirder enemies begin to appear. I mean, I can handle suited thugs and even the kettle-footed chefs were appropriate to the scenario, but what the hell are these little green things?

Not the one on the left: that's a tiny dragon in a china bowl, obviously. I mean those monocular green freaks on the right, the ones that look like the alien from The Thing found its way into a stationery cupboard. At first I thought they were walking portions of fries - because of the food theme, you see - but on closer inspection they're just too small and sharp for that. They must be either chopsticks or toothpicks...

...and these equally unsettling "ladies" are made of chopsticks, so I guess the little green fellas are toothpick holders. Back to those chopstick ladies, though: I think they're even creepier that the toothpick monsters. They look so cheerful, even when Yakisoban is kicking them in the face. Nothing should be that cheerful during a kick to the face, especially not if they have chopsticks for legs. Even that dog is spooked out by them. I can only assume that these wooden-legged abominations have been sent specifically to kill me, and they're formed from the combined anger and disgust of every waiter in every Chinese restaurant where I asked for a knife and fork.
Luckily, Yakisoban has another crime-fighting tool in his soy-drenched arsenal that shouldn't be overlooked. If you can find one laying about the stage, you too can wield the awesome power of the Unicycle of Justice!

It's a unicycle that makes you invincible, allowing to hurt bad guys by riding into them. Absurdly dramatic music plays the entire time this is happening - for the opposite effect, you'd have to watch footage from the Somme Offensive with "Spanish Flea" playing over the top. This is obviously where the true power of Yakisoban's noodle-bowl hat is revealed, as its wide shape and perfectly-distributed weight help our hero to keep his balance.
The unicycle won't last forever, (more's the pity,) and before long the stage's boss arrives to try his hand at defeating you.

His floating, disembodied hand at that! Once more, I'm left puzzled about what the hell it's supposed to be. Candy Floss? Pre-chewed bubblegum? Sentient strawberry milkshake? That last one sounds like a new Ben & Jerry's flavour - Sentient Strawberry with Reasonin' Raisins. But I digress. Lumpy here seems like more of a challenge than the previous bosses, but that might just be because the extremely unsubtle Nissin advertising that fills the center of the screen is slowly blinking, glowing, luring you in with promises of a delicious noodley warmth that the other brands just cannot match. That kind of thing will distract you from the globs that the boss is throwing at you, but with a bit of patience you'll get past his defences and land the mortal blow. But what's this?!

Yakisoban... defeated?

No, of course not. Nothing can stop the wheat flour-powered justice that courses through his veins and in an instant Yakisoban is transformed into Yakisoban Great! It's an almost entirely cosmetic change: his costume becomes more yellow, and his moves look different (although they're still the same basic attacks). For example, his post-roll flying kick is replaced with the functionally identically but strangely erotic "flying bodybuilder" pose that you can see in the picture above. It's a power that no man can resist - even that clown has surrendered himself to Yakisoban's savoury assault.

We're at another amusement park for stage four. This one has a ghost house, but such cheap tricks will not frighten a hardened intergalactic noodle warrior.

That might, though. It's certainly making me feel uneasy. The creepiest thing about the giant head with the tiny, ready-to-strangle hands is that it doesn't attack you. It just watches. Yakisoban punches his way through Kettler's troops as the sinister head looks on, and once you're out of the ghost house it's time for the boss battle.

This fight pits you against the evil Yakisoban imposter, erm, Fake Yakisoban. You can't see this on that screenshot, but he has the word USO on his chest instead of UFO, "uso" being the Japanese for "lie". It's not really a costume I can see fooling many people, but the laws governing Japanese superheroes states that they must always fight their evil doppelganger at some point. In this case, I really like the way they're fighting on the amusement park stage in front of a crowd who presumably think this is all part of the entertainment. Or maybe they know that Yakisoban is a space warrior, but they figure that they've already paid for their ticket so they might as well get their money's worth. Either way, I can see Yakisoban receiving a very lucrative offer from the park's owners in the near future. Five shows a day at 10, 12, 2, 4 and 6, his own private trailer and all the condiments he can carry - an offer that would tempt even the staunchest of superheroes!
USO Kamen might have similar moves to our hero, but he doesn't know how to use them as effectively. He also lacks access to Yakisoban's two ultra-top-secret, limited-use attacks. Holding the R button and pressing attack activates the Agedama Bomber, a powerful technique that hits all enemies on the screen in an explosion of crispy-fried batter bits. Doing the same with the L button produces the devastating Aonori Flash, paralysing the enemies with a sprinkling of seaweed powder. Yakisoban was denied entry to the Justice League due to the inordinate amount of time that the other heroes spent vacuuming up after him.

With the fake Yakisoban defeated, the final stage awaits. Our hero assaults the studios of UTV, where Kettler is participating in a TV broadcast. He's probably complaining about how dangerous theme parks have become these days.

It's not a long stage, and now that you've gotten used to Yakisoban's moves it shouldn't be much of a problem for you. This gives me a chance to talk about one of my favourite aspects of the game: the music. UFO Kamen Yakisoban is, as you can probably tell, a pastiche of the Japanese tokusatsu entertainment genre. That's the one where superheroic warriors in skintight costumes battle against guys in rubber monster suits - series such as Ultraman and Kamen Rider. UKY does a great job of sending up these hyper-dramatic sagas, and the best and most accurate way it does this is through the music. Here's stage five's theme:

If you've ever seen a tokusatsu show or a classic super-robot anime, you'll be able to tell what a great job Den'z did of recreating that signature sound. Even if this is all new to you, the music is fun and (for me, at least) extremely catchy, and it does a great job of accompanying Yakisoban's bizarre antics.

Back to our story already in progress! Having smelled the aroma of impending savoury justice, Kettler ditches his disguise and reverts to his kettle-behatted form. I think the newsreader's shocked expression is down more to the gold lapels and bow tie of Kettler's outfit than the revelation of his evilness.

Once again, I love the background here, particularly the guy in the top-right who is so scared his arms have become perfect right-angles but not so scared that he decided to leave or anything.
Kettler is hardly the most imposing villain, but his goofy appearance conceals a surprisingly tricky opponent. When he's not stabbing you with his giant fork, he can attack from range by shouting at you. Terribly rude, yes, but undeniably effective, and it can be tough to land a hit. It may be difficult but if you persevere, and if the Gods of Convenience Food are smiling upon you, then Kettler's dark conspiracy can be foiled. Well, squirting soy sauce into someone's eyes is bound to incapacitate them for a while. Then you can finish them off with the deadly noodle attack!

Kettler is defeated, Yakisoban is reunited with his lady love and they travel back to Noodle Planet for their wedding and subsequent buffet. And that's it, UFO Kamen Yakisoban is complete!
This is not a game that's going to deeply rock your world or open up a brave new horizon in the field of side-scrolling beat-em-ups. It couldn't be called a bad game, because everything about it works pretty well. The graphics are detailed, colourful and fun and the music is perfect for the mood. Yakisoban has a decent variety of moves, he controls well enough and (the occasional issue with hit detection aside) the game plays smoothly. It has its problems, of course: the main one is that it's just too short. There are only five stages, and not particularly long ones at that, and there's no real replayability value.

Personally, though? I love it. I can see why some people wouldn't - in the end, it's nothing more than a slightly above-average belt-scrolling fighter - but something about its over-the-top nature just strikes the right chord with me and I find myself grinning through every playthrough and humming along to the music long after I've put the pad down. It's just good, clean, fun. The most impressive thing is that despite it being one long advert, it never feels cynical. There's none of the forced "attitude" that was foisted upon many advertising mascots in the Nineties, there's no tacked-on and completely insincere environmental message like in Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators: it just took the dopey subject matter and ran with it, and for this I salute it.
One last thing: here's a Japanese TV commercial for the game. The noodle attack looks just as creepy in real life.

Fight, Yakisoban! For everlasting portions!

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NIGHT STRIKER (ARCADE)

2012-01-24T12:10:00.000-08:00

Games these days have 3D graphics all sewn up, but we shouldn't forget the early attempts by games developers to offer gameplay in a 3-dimensional space: things like early wireframe maze games, Nintendo's migraine-magnet Virtual Boy and, most successfully of all, Sega's Super-Scaler games of 1980s. You know the ones - titles like Space Harrier and OutRun that created a sense of three-dimensional movement by using scaling sprites that started off small and got bigger as you approached them, giving a sense of forward movement hitherto unmatched in videogames and only replicable at home by taping sequential drawings to the walls of a staircase and then throwing yourself down it.
While Sega were the undisputed masters of this technology, other developers also tried their hand at Super-Scaler-style games and today I'll be looking at Taito's 1989 arcade attempt Night Striker.

I can't believe the gaming industry waited until 1989 to use the name Night Striker, possibly the most eighties name for anything I've ever heard. I'm fairly certain that changing Striker to Stryker and then writing the title three times in hen's blood on the sleeve of a Duran Duran album will cause the zombified corpse of Ronald Regan to rise from his grave, so, uh, don't do that. Instead, enjoy the spine-tingling chills promised by the attract mode!

Gasp!

Oh no!

Yes, sir! Pushing start button now, sir!
Yes, Night Striker decided that one clichéd videogame plot simply wasn't enough and offers you both the "terrorist organization" and "kidnapped girl (oh, and her dad)" reasons for getting into your "special armored motorcar" and shooting things a lot. As always, the terrorist's goals are vague and ill-defined - no ideological statements are forthcoming, no demands for the release of political prisoners or the return of native lands are ever made. They're just... kind of a bunch of dicks. City-attacking dicks.

Even their choice of kidnapped scientist seems half-hearted. Dr. Lindvery Maska - a name Taito clearly created by picking Scrabble tiles out of a spinning tumble dryer - is an expert on lasers. I dunno, it just seems a little dull. At least the scientist in Avenging Spirit was an expert in Ghost Energy. Kidnapping a laser expert just makes me wonder if the terrorists have a lot of problems with the lenses in their CD players.

What about the game itself, though? Well, it's pretty much just Space Harrier. You fly forward and shoot at the bad guys. There's one fire button, and the joystick allows you to move freely around the screen. Unlike Space Harrier, you're not fighting in a fantasy landscape filled with bizarre alien creatures and segmented dragon bosses, you're battling through a futuristic city filled with tanks, helicopters and segmented dragon bosses.

It also takes some inspiration from OutRun, like the branching system pictured here. At the end of each stage there's a short section in a tunnel where you can choose which route to take by going left or right at the fork. Unlike OutRun, I'm not sure that taking the right-hand path increases the difficulty - it might do, but I didn't really notice. Towards the end, Night Striker gets so hectic that it's difficult to notice much of anything that isn't the enemy's constant missile attacks without your UN-sanctioned flying police car exploding into a million smouldering pieces.

Enemies love to crowd right up to you and block your view of any incoming attacks, twirling aside at the last second like some mechanical matador to reveal a plasma blast coming right at you. The gameplay techniques you will need to survive become evident very quickly: hold down the fire button and concentrate on dodging as much as possible, hoping that your barrage of energy blasts will clear a path while you dart around the screen avoiding homing missiles.
Night Striker also contains a hell of a lot of hovercrafts.

Hundred upon hundreds of hovercrafts. I'm guessing this is down to the terrorists' habit of kidnapping random scientists and forcing them to aid the terrorists in their diabolical plans regardless of said scientist's chosen field. Occasionally this works out great and they kidnap a virologist who can create them a new bio-weapon or something, but more often than not they end up with an agricultural scientist who'll help them breed a race of disease-resistant battle-sheep. At some point down the line, world-renowned hovercraft expert Dr. Aerode Slizador fell into their clutches and, well, the rest is history. As were all the terrorists' normal, non-hovering boats.

Every stage falls into one of two general gameplay styles: there are the "open" stages that are mostly filled with waves of enemies, and there are "tunnel" sections where the focus is more on avoiding the obstacles that some thoughtless clod has placed in said tunnel.

It's almost like they don't want me racing through these tunnels, intent on destroying their criminal organization. This feeling is only intensified by their decision to set a pack of cybernetically-enhanced wolves on me.

In the terrorists' most misguided abduction yet, they kidnapped respected dog breeder Suzanne Worthing of Faversham, Kent. They'd been targeting her sister Julie, a software engineer specializing in data encryption, but they were so embarrassed by their mistake that rather than admit it they kept Suzanne and put her to work building an army of robotic dogs.
I have an issue with the scale of these robo-wolves. How big are they supposed to be? Bigger than my car? That does seem to be the case, making these wolves around eight feet tall. Miss Worthing is a shoo-in for Crufts this year, let me tell you.

The branching system is a little misleading, and the promise of twenty-one unique stages is never really delivered on as many of the stages are quite similar: there are three or four "Tunnel" stages that only really vary in background colour, for instance. Night Striker is a game that wears its inspirations on its sleeve, up the arms and all the way across its back, and it'll never win any prizes for innovation, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game. There are a lot of things to recommend it, starting with something that might just be personal to me.

A lot of the game takes place in whatever city the terrorists are attacking, and it's a shining neon metropolis, a cyberpunk-styled urban jungle dripping in hot pink and electric blue signage, huge tower blocks and monolithic corporate pyramids. I absolutely love this type of setting, Blade Runner seen through the filter of a Japanese arcade game, and it was the main reason I checked Night Striker out in the first place. It might not mean much to you, but for me it pretty much made the whole game worth playing on its own. I particularly like the use of VFD-style fonts throughout the game, a nice touch that makes you feel like you're piloting a VCR from the later eighties rather than a sophisticated combat vehicle.
The only problem with Taito's future-retro styling of the game is that your ship's on-board computer has all the subtlety of a kick in the knackers. You start off with five "shields" - that is, hit points - and when you drop to two shields remaining the ever-so-eager computer makes sure to point this out to you.

You're not helping! This is only making things more dangerous!

See?!

Oh, I see. I'm dead. I suppose you can write on the screen as big as you like now. You know, seeing as I'm dead and all.
Another quality component of Night Striker is the music, composed by Taito's in-house band Zuntata (although in this case I think most if it was done by Masahiko Takaki). It's mostly the kind of upbeat, semi-jazzy level themes that you'd expect from Zuntata, and my personal favourite of these is the Suburbs theme, which goes by the rather grandiloquent title of "Trance Parlant in Blue".

Every now and again, though, the soundtrack takes a strange detour into a different genre, best exemplified by the ending theme.

That sure doesn't sound like the music that should be accompanying my triumph over the terrorist forces, but there you go. Perhaps our hero is forever scarred by what he's seen and done. Perhaps we're supposed to be reminded of the human cost of this war on terror. Maybe they just thought it was a nice bit of music that didn't really have a place anywhere else on the soundtrack. All I know is that I rather like it.
Speaking of the ending, here's probably Night Striker's most interesting feature. Depending on the path you take, you can end up at one of the six final stages from P to U. Each stage sees your flying car transform into something else for the remainder of the stage. For example, if you reach stage P, then you transform into a bipedal robot.

Also, the final boss of stage P is a pair of industrial cranes. That's a little underwhelming, I'll be honest. If your ultimate super-weapon is a piece of completely-legal construction equipment then you may want to rethink you plans for global conquest. Start a building firm instead, there's more money in it.
Each final stage also gives you a different ending, meaning there are a total of six ways to end the game. Here's stage P's bit of poorly-translated congratulatory text:

"It took not so many hours" is right. Night Striker is a short game, and you can rattle off a playthrough in about twenty minutes if you know what you're doing.
Stage P is one of the less interesting ones. Let's try another one. How about stage S?

This is probably the coolest final stage, because your car turns into a motorcycle and we all know only cool dudes ride motorcycles. It's also set on a vast chequered plain filled with Buddhist temples and demonic stone heads, and at this point the game is getting dangerously close to becoming an exact copy of Space Harrier.

When you clear the stage our hero crashes his jet-bike into the enemy base, causing a huge explosion that wipes out all the terrorists forever and ever. And also presumably kills all the scientists they were holding captive. It's not all smiles and rainbows in this ending, though - there's a price the player must pay. "The player has however lost a big thing. Fare well to my machine" he says. Oh god, I hope it wasn't another sentient vehicle like the car in Mad Gear. I don't think I can bear the responsibility for another sentient car's death. Quick, let's go to a happier ending!

Stage U transforms your car into a death-dealing double-barreled laser machine, slicing through the vast navy of enemy hovercrafts with ease. You know what this ride is good for? Impressing ladies. This is handy, because stage U ends with you rescuing Dr Maska's dinghy-bound daughter.

I'm not sure what the "it was very good" is referring to here. The daughter's escape attempt? It wasn't all that great: if I hadn't happened to choose this stage, she'd still be bobbing around the ocean, encircled by hungry hovercraft. It can't be referring to the translation job, which managed the perversely impressive trick of spelling "daughter" correctly and incorrectly in the same bit of text.

A sudden volley of fireworks sets the romantic mood, and the girl and our hero settle down for some James Bond-style post credits fun. Where did those fireworks come from, anyway? Were they somehow tied to the head terrorist's vital signs, primed to explode when he flatlined? That sounds pretty cool, actually.

You've probably already figured out if you'll enjoy Night Striker, but if not, allow me to help. Have you every played Space Harrier or Afterburner, and if so, did you enjoy them? If you answered yes to both these questions then you should give Night Striker a go. It may be unoriginal, but it does what it sets out to do and it does it well. The presentation is good, with smooth graphics and a catchy soundtrack. It plays well, too, and reaches a nice level of hectic, missile-dodging action in the later levels while never becoming frustratingly hard. The sense of speed it delivers is impressive, and my only real problem with the gameplay is that projectiles can be obscured when there's a lot going on.

It's not a long game, but the branching paths do give it some replay value, and if you just want a short jolt of frenetic arcade action and you like the cyberpunk-inspired aesthetics then give Night Striker a try.

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POPSTAR MAKER (PS1)

2012-01-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

Forget Civilization, Mega-Lo-Mania and Populous. The Sims? Screw 'em, they're small time. Black & White? It's difficult to take a deity who manifests as a giant zebra seriously. No, if you want real power over the hearts, minds and most importantly wallets of millions of steadfastly loyal Consumer Units then the way forward is to become the manager of a highly successful pop group. Normally that'd take huge amounts of cash, hundreds of contacts in the music industry and ruthless streak that'd make a piranha blush, and I'm going to assume those are things that you don't possess (except maybe that last one). Never fear, though! Eidos and Teque Software have come to the rescue of wannabe music moguls the world over with their 2001 Playstation music management sim Popstar Maker!

Oh god, look at that artwork. Buckle up, kids: we're in for a bumpy ride here.
This should be perfect for me: what with my goatee, ponytail and paunch, I already look like a stereotypically pathetic music agent. The premise of Popstar Maker is simple. You're given £50,000 and tasked with creating the greatest pop group since Daphne and Celeste. A daunting task, I know, but I'm sure we'll make it through and get rich by siphoning money away from the band members through a series of unfair contracts. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though: first we have to select the emotionally subnormal meat-drones that will make up our band. They will all have Heart-Wrenching Backstories. This is extremely important. Right then, who shall we take?

Jack is average in all departments. He tries to compensate for this by wearing a vomit-smeared boilersuit with the arms and legs removed. He also wraps his feet in black electrical tape, which he says is a security measure enacted to "nullify their sensors". He's the heartthrob of the group!
Heart-Wrenching Backstory: Wants to raise money to fund his shelter for puppies with cancer.

Liverpool and England midfielder Steven Gerrard has given up his footballing career to pursue his dream of becoming the world's greatest pop singer. His many years of playing football at the highest level mean he's used to the crowds of adoring fans and occasional death-threats from fans of rival bands, but just how will his excellent passing skills and ability to command a midfield serve him on stage? Stevie G is the brooding and mysterious member of the band.
Heart-Wrenching Backstory: As an England player, his international career brought him nothing but bitter disappointment.

Called Jo Jo after her parents noticed the similarities between her and a circus monkey of the same name, Jo Jo is the only member of the group with any real talent. However, she has a face like a bag of smashed crabs and must therefore be hidden at the back of the group at all times. She's the mother figure within the group, which is weird because she's, like, seventeen.
Heart-Wrenching Backstory: Failed clone of Jennifer Lopez.

Last but not least there's Kelly. Cheerful and bubbly, Kelly was found in the ruined city of [REDACTED] after successful infiltration of the Red Zone by Tac-Squad 5. She's normally the life and soul of the party - until she starts singing, when suddenly [CLASSIFIED - "DOMINION" LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED TO ACCESS FILE]. Boys love her for her winning smile and toned body, while the girls are taken with her kind, sweet personality. She's a marketing department's dream!
Heart-Wrenching Backstory: Subject is the last surviving [EXPUNGED] and will continue to be wracked with grief until the stars align correctly and she can finally [DATA CORRUPTED: UNEXPECTED EOF].

You can have between one and five people in your band, but I think I'll stick with four. If it's good enough for the Beatles, it's good enough for... erm... what's our band called again?

Once your band has been assembled and has passed the many rigorous tests to ensure it appeals to all key demographics, age ranges and ethnicities, you're given control of your media empire.

Here's the main menu, from where the day-to-day running of Flesh Hammer Inc. will be handled. We'll get to the options in turn, but first things first: let's get into the studio and lay down our first hit single!

Of course, this means buying the rights to a track that someone else wrote and recording it with our own caterwauling vocals. You have to start out with a cover version. It's the Law of the Manufactured Pop Groups. By performing cover versions you can gradually assimilate yourself into the public consciousness, letting your targets get used to the sound of your voice via songs they've already heard until they're sufficiently softened up. Then you can drop your own "original" tracks! For now, though, let's buy a few pre-made songs. We'll start with "A Little Bit Flat" by Grammy-winning fictional songwriter David Love. David's down on his luck - his first band, David Love and the Hot Spurts, were an extremely popular skiffle combo until the punk movement of the seventies changed the music scene forever. Now he writes songs for assembly-line pop groups, hoping he'll make enough money to at least stop the repo men from taking his prosthetic leg.

Once you've selected a song, it's time to make it into a single. Be mindful of the aesthetic tone that your band is trying to strike when selecting the single's specifics. Flesh Hammer's unique mix of California soul and the sound of children smashing bin lids together is obviously best symbolized by the simple yet brutally effective image of a thick-soled shoe on a blue background, but this will not be true of all your releases! Some might require the full Nineties treatment, in which case you should go for an alien's head on an acid-yellow background. Bangin'.

You can't just go releasing singles willy-nilly, of course. Your band members are as untouched mounds of clay, virgin spirits to be moulded into singing sensations. To improve their skills as well-paid marionettes, you must train them by setting aside a training day and spending money on them. No, that really is it. Just click on the stats you want to increase, some money will leave your account and the band member might get better at whatever you told them to get better at.
The blue section of the bar is their current skill level, while the orange section is their potential. As you can see, Kelly's got a decent singing voice but her low charm stat means she has the brusque manner of a cabbie with haemorrhoids.

The other thing you can do is put on a spectacular live show to raise your profile. Twenty-six people turned up to Flesh Hammer's first gig, an Aztec-themed extravaganza at the Basement Club. The lives of these twenty-six people were presumably changed forever that night, because who could have been present at the genesis of Flesh Hammer's rise to stardom and not been moved to tears? We'll never know what it was like, because you don't actually get to see your band perform. Not yet, at least.

Jo Jo isn't happy with the workload, and I'm worried that her mutinous nature could spread to the other band members. Stevie G has already been caught trying to chew through his standard-issue Performer Restraint Harness, and those things aren't cheap. I'm sure Jo Jo will realise the error of her ways after some "re-education". I'd terminate her contract now, but she's the only one of these pathetic apes who can dance and sing. Anyway, once our new single, For Your Smile, climbs the chart she will become compliant enough.

I've done it! I'm a musical genius, a maestro of marketing, a colossus of the European pop charts not seen since David Hasselhoff tore down the Berlin Wall with nothing but the emotional battering ram of his voice. I'm Colonel Parker and Simon Cowell rolled into one! I'm Colonel Goddamn Cowell! Fetch me some epaulettes, right now! The band seems content - even that traitor Jo Jo mumbled a meek apology. I told her she'd see I was right. They'll all see.
No time to rest on our laurels, though! After our recent chart success, the band came to me with the idea of writing their own song for the next single. Why not, I said - these fans will buy anything we put out!

There's a built-in music editor that works like a Fisher-Price version of FruityLoops: simply place samples in the squares to create a tune. You're limited to a certain number of samples per track, so it's hardly overwhelming, although the fact that there's no copy-and-paste functionality makes creating a song longer than four bars or so an exercise in grinding tedium. It's handled about as well as it could have been on the PS1, I suppose.
Several weeks later, Flesh Hammer had produced their latest single. Having a collective IQ equal to six ounces of frogspawn, they couldn't decide on a title. Jack's suggestions included "Song", "Noisy Sound" and "Noisy Song Sound". Kelly began to chant the seven secret names of [EXPUNGED]. In the end, we just picked some letters out of hat and POP RECORD-2YN was ready for release. Now, bear witness to the aural majesty that is Flesh Hammer!

The call soon came in - we were number one with a bullet. Pop Record-2YN had become the season's ultimate party anthem, champagne flowed even more freely than the tears of our enemies and I placed my earnings in an off-shore bank account. Times were good.

We were at the top of our game. The debut album went to number one. We were invited onto every TV show in the land. The band, already becoming inured to the trappings of success, became involved in ever-more obscure and hedonistic practises, strange religions, vast quantities of mind-altering drugs. They got together and decided that they would no longer put out the same old musical clichés: they were visionaries, riders on a cresting wave of musical exploration not seen since Ug the caveman figured out that hitting a rock with a stick made sort of a cool noise. They came to me with a new single - bold, original, and completely tuneless. They called it Acid Salad, after an incident involving the buffet at Stevie G's wedding which my lawyers have advised me not to discuss.

I was a little dubious, but in the end I relented. Besides, as much as I despise Jo Jo, her haunting "come together!" lyric really gets under your skin. The band started a tour in support of the single - The Flesh Hammer "Up your Alley" Tour - and audience reaction was even better than I could have expected. I suppose I shouldn't have worried. With dance moves like these, it was a guaranteed success.

Once you created your own songs, you'll be given the option of watching a performance of them whenever a gig rolls around. You can switch between camera angles. That's it. I mean, I suppose you could look at it, but I wouldn't recommend it. The band members possess the grace and fluidity of a deck-chair and their dance routines seem to have directly lifted from videos of people being electrocuted. By the way, this is the Aztec themed stage show. Yep. Maybe the Downtown setting will look better?

Oh dear. It's less the tough-but-vibrant urban streets, more a run-down shopping arcade in Leeds. It's a wonder that anyone came to these shows at all, but something must have worked. Sales of Acid Salad shot up soon afterward, and by the end of the week Flesh Hammer once again had the number one single in Europe. However, trouble was just around the corner...

Jo Jo quit the band. That traitorous swine! I made her a star, and she thanks me by leaving the band via e-mail?! Disgusting. Poor Jack is beside himself with grief: he knows he can't sing, I know he can't sing, but someone has to front the band now. I'd let Kelly do it, but the cost of her security detail is becoming too expensive. Too many pay-offs to the families of guards who got too close to one of her "special performances".
Interesting wording in this email, though. "Believe me, I've done some degrading things in my time," says Jo Jo. Fascinating. Note to self: find photos of these "degrading things" for future blackmail purposes. No one leaves Flesh Hammer unless I say so.
Was Jo Jo's departure the beginning of the end for Flesh Hammer? Possibly, but I must also take some of the blame for letting the band disappear up their own collective arse. They decided that while Acid Salad had pushed the boundaries of pop music, maybe even bent them a little, what the public really needed was something so mind-blowingly avant-garde that two hundred years later scholars will be discussing it as the turning point in 21st century culture. What they gave me was this.

It was just Jack shouting "oh yeah!", his voice autotuned out of all recognition. No backing music, no percussion, just the stupidest man in pop music hollering two simple words. I'd seen the unmitigated dreck that that made up the pop charts - hell, I'd released some of it myself - but this? Maybe it was a step too far. Maybe people weren't ready for it. After much thought, I eventually cleared it for release. People would buy what I told them to buy.

It reached number two on the singles chart. Number two! One man's voice, no, a robotic approximation of one man's voice saying "oh yeah!" was the second-highest selling single that week. Sadly, it never quite reached the number one spot, and this was where it all came crashing down.
Maybe it was Jo Jo's departure, or that the public simply weren't ready for the mind-rattling artistic vision of Flesh Hammer's second album, Slaves 2 Meat, or that the label didn't do enough promotional work. Whatever happened, the album tanked and tanked hard. It only reached 71st place on the American album charts, beaten to seventieth spot by the soundtrack to Alvin and the Chipmunks 7: Do Not Squeak Ill of the Dead.
The higher-ups weren't happy. I wasn't happy.

I put the remaining band members on a tough training routine, but all they did was bitch and whinge and cry about their "human rights". They've already forgotten where they came from, who made them. I think Stevie G has even forgotten how to tie his own shoelaces, if he knew in the first place. We didn't pick them for their intelligence, that's for sure.

Not you too, Stevie G! You ungrateful little prick! If you leave this band I'll see to it that you and everyone you love spends the rest of their days locked in a shipping container at the bottom of the North Sea, with just enough air and water supplied for you to turn on each other in a cannibalistic rage.
No, I've got to keep calm. Think of a way to get the band's confidence up. I know, I'll put on a huge show! The biggest show Flesh Hammer has ever performed! We'll play at Wombley Stadium, to an audience of thousands. It'll be the best gig Wombley Stadium has seen since Frankie Morcury's legendary performance! Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to make music history here today.

What a show! The songs sound amazing, the Arctic theme looks spot-on and no-one seems to have notice the hastily-dressed shop mannequin we got to stand in for Jo Jo. This is great, there's no way we can fail now!

Fuck.
We're ruined. The fickle whims of the public have destroyed the lives of yet another manufactured pop group.

It's all over, the dream has died and we're all condemned to an eternity of appearing on various "Where Are They Now" programmes. This is all Jo Jo's fault, that venomous harpy. Once day I'll get my revenge, when she's all alone, when she least ex...

Oh look, Kelly won the award for Best Looking Female. Ha! If only they'd seen her true form, the writhing flesh silhouetted on the wall of a tour bus, the thousands of unseeing eyes, long talons rending at the very fabric of our cozy universe, tearing, tearing, forever tearing at these fragile walls! One day she will be free, and then everyone will know. Still, it'll look nice on her mantelpiece.

And that's the end of Flesh Hammer. Too far ahead of our time, we were. Too advanced. Oh well - I'm sure I can find a job that puts my many talents to good use, like estate agent or no-win no-fee lawyer. I'll be back at the top in no time!

Okay, so this obviously isn't a great game. The developers have shot themselves in the foot with the basic concept, for a start. Maybe they come from a parallel dimension where kids don't want to be pop stars; they want to be Simon Cowell. That's fine, I'm all for parallel dimension equality, but that's not how it works here. The life of a band manager is, quite frankly, rather tedious. Popstar Maker only has a very limited selection of things to actually do. The song creator is the main one, and I suppose it works okay in an incredibly rigid and uncreative manner, but there are much better ways of making music even on the PS1. There's definitely no point spending time trying to make an excellent song that will set the charts on fire, because you can literally enter any sequence of samples and it will do just as well. It's almost as though the chart success of a song depends entirely on the amount of advertising that is thrown behind it, regardless of any musical competence!

In the same way that I wondered whether Taito's Front Line was a subtle satire on the futility of war, I think Popstar Maker could very easily be taken for a sarcastic look at the record industry. Things like Jo Jo's line about doing "degrading things" give you the impression that the developers weren't exactly taking it seriously, but best of all is the blurb on the back of the box. It honestly says "Look at the charts today, inundated with manufactured bands. The music business is in need of some fresh talent. Are you the person to make the next super band that will take the world by storm?". That is some deep irony right there, or possibly some deep obliviousness.
It's also an irredeemably ugly game, with polygon model so angular they make Street Fighter EX look like Crysis and one of the worst-looking UIs I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. It's extremely easy too - I had to make a really concerted effort to go bankrupt. I should probably cut it some slack, though. It's clearly a budget title, and I'm so far out of its target audience that I might as well be orbiting Neptune. It did raise one smile from me, though: the name of one of the other bands that sometimes appears is a reference to the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

We put our faith in the musical talents of Blast Hardcheese!
If you're desperate for a band management simulator, I guess you might want to give it a try. Your other options are pretty limited, as far as I'm aware. Otherwise, do the pop charts a favour and steer clear.

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DAHNA: MEGAMI TANJOU (GEN)

2012-01-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

Some games take you by the hand and guide you through a world of excitement and adventure. Some games present many obstacles to overcome, with each new challenge only surmountable through skillful and much-practised use of all your talents. Then there are some games that grab you firmly by the reproductive organs and whisper "you won't be getting much out of me, sunbeam". Dahna: Megami Tanjou is one of these games.

Dahna: Megami Tanjou is side-scrolling hack-n-slash platformer released in 1991 for the Megadrive / Genesis by a minor developer called Information Global Service, a charmingly expansive title for a barely-remembered third party videogame developer. Or maybe they're a huge multi-national player in the data management industry and they just developed Megadrive games on the side? Actually, that'd explain a few things about DMT.
It was never released outside Japan and all the in-game text is in Japanese, so you know what that means: time to make up a new story!

Dahna is an all-American teenager who is heading to her high school prom in her rented horse and cart. Suddenly mounted bandits attack! In a terrifying maelstrom of whirling blades and splattering gore, Dahna's classmates are slain and the deposit on the carriage is lost forever. Our heroine manages to scramble free in the confusion, and looks around to see her home town has been despoiled by an army of warriors with magical powers.

Arming herself with a sword looted from the still-warm corpse of a nearby LARPing Society member, Dahna vows to destroy the evil hordes and reach the prom. She was promised a magical evening symbolising her transition into adulthood, and by god she's going to get it even if it means slaughtering hundreds of trained, bloodthirsty soldiers and countless mythical beasts. In a stroke of good fortune, when choosing the evening's ensemble she went with some sensible sandals instead of the high heels. Truly, some higher force is looking out for her.

Of course, the real plot seems to be the usual Evil Wizard takeover attempt. Only one young lady can stop this tyranny: Dahna, the chosen one (and in this case "chosen" seems to mean "not dead").

Things seem like they might be going in Dahna favour when she starts the game riding an ogre, but don't let this fool you. You'll soon realise that you share a health bar with your cumbersome steed, and given that the ogre is too big and slow to avoid many attacks it quickly become clear that Dahna would be better off on foot. Still, the ogre can kill enemies simply by jumping on them like some grotesque fusion of Super Mario and the Incredible Hulk, so it's not all bad news.

Don't get too attached to him, though - he's soon killed by an evil wizard, and Dahna must head on alone. She'll never make it to the prom in time now! An enemy wearing even fewer clothes than our heroine appears, which is no mean feat in itself. The heat from the burning building he's guarding was simply too much for him and he just had to strip down to his underpants, although no force on Earth can separate him from his kicky legwarmers. I always thought the law stating that a character's toughness is inversely proportional to the amount of armour/clothing they're wearing only applied to females, but this guy's increased toughness implies that it can be applied to males on rare occasions.

For some reason, Dahna heads into the burning building. Quite why she didn't just walk around it is never explained, but I'm sure there must be an important reason. Even more baffling is the fact that there are enemies guarding the inside of the burning building, perhaps stationed there to make sure Dahna doesn't steal all this precious fire they've accumulated. It's an upward scrolling section filled with much leaping from platform to platform, and this is where a big problem with Dahna: Megami Tanjou becomes apparent: the wonky controls.

Dahna can jump. Of course she can, it's a videogame. I've played videogames where tanks can jump. Her ability to jump comes as no surprise, and nor does the fact that you press a button to jump, but the way that the system is handled is just downright wrong. Pressing the jump button makes our hero take a dainty hop upwards, much in the manner of a cheerful young person prancing over a puddle after a particularly pleasant romantic encounter. Obviously, this won't cut it in our current situation of being trapped in Frank Frazetta's version of The Towering Inferno. We need more height, and the way you accomplish this is by holding up on the d-pad as you jump. That's right, IGS thought it would be a great idea to make the jumping unnecessarily complicated instead of simply using the standard "hold button longer for higher jumps" mechanic. There's a reason it became the standard, you know. It wouldn't be so bad if Dahna's high-jumping was tight and controlled, but her ability to leap to ridiculous heights makes her feel like a sex doll that's been inflated with helium, floating around aimlessly and not doing as she's told.

If you make it through the bad guys' fire storage facility and down the other side, you'll eventually reach the first boss. It's a man on a horse! Considering this game's already featured ogres, winged devil creatures and evil wizards, this might seem somewhat anticlimactic, but give the guy a break - maybe this is his first day as a Stage Boss. Everyone's got to start somewhere, and he's still waiting to receive his Stage Boss Equipment from headquarters. If you'd shown up three to five days later, he totally would've had a sweet winged horse and horns on his helmet and everything. Oh man, it woulda been so cool! As it stands, he's just got a spear. I'd recommend defeating him by jumping above him when he charges and stabbing him with Dahna's downward stab attack, an attack that will look very familiar to anyone who's played Zelda II or used Link in Smash Bros.

That's stage one done, and to get through stage two Dahna steals the dead man's horse.

Well, he wasn't using it. It's the second creature-riding section, and some credit must go to IGS for at least trying to mix up the gameplay, even if it shows little to no originality in its execution. The first half of the stage has you running down a mountain in a forced scrolling section that begins to show the other major problem with DMT: the punishing difficulty level. You'll quickly notice that the enemies are positioned in such a way that jumping over one almost invariably causes you to land right in the path of the next enemy's attack. Excellent tactical nous being show by the bad guys there, but it makes for a pretty frustrating gameplay experience. The waves of enemies quickly whittle down your small health bar, and if you die it's back to the start of the level. Oh, and you only have five lives. Yup, five lives to complete the entire game, and as far as I could tell there's no way to get any extra lives. You can increase the length of your health bar by collecting a health pickup when you have full health, but this is made nigh-impossible by the fact that health items are incredibly rare, and I mean one per stage rare. And you don't get your health refilled when you finish a stage, either. The odds on you reaching a health pick-up without having taken even a single hit are vanishingly small. This is a game that sneers at your pain, revels in your multiple deaths and gleefully sends you back to the start of the stage each time. In short, this is not a friendly game.

After a platforming section that is mercifully conducted sans horse, an angry wizard appears to act as the stage's boss. I don't know what school of magic teaches the twin powers of levitation and rock manipulation, but this guy must have been top of the class. His only real moves are throwing rocks and making a big fist out of rocks, and given the difficulty of the preceding stage he seems suspiciously easy to beat. Maybe wrapping himself in a Persian rug somehow weakened his powers.

DMT hasn't exactly been overflowing with interesting new ideas so far, but stage three has at least one thing to catch the imagination: swarms of trained fish-men and their attendant keepers. Some of the more sensitive soldiers, unsuited for the rigours of martial combat and identifiable by their fetching lavender uniforms, are given the task of looking after the army's supply of swamp creatures. If they see you, they'll give a whistle and a group of fish-men leap from the sea and kill you faster than Showgirls killed Elizabeth Berkley's career. To prevent this, you've got to sneak up on the lilac fishmonger and stab him before he can summon his amphibious fighting force. It's a neat little section, although it is somewhat hampered by Dahna's peculiar jumping abilities.

It's not just Dahna's jumping that has control issues, either. Like most games of this ilk, Dahna can crouch. This would be fine except you don't hold down to crouch and release it to stand back up. Instead, you press down once to crouch, and Dahna stays crouched and unable to move until you press up on the d-pad to get her to stand. If you press down again when she's crouching, she'll lie down on her belly and crawl around like Solid Snake, except without any knowledge of CQC or basic survival techniques. I'm sure Snake would frown upon the use of a toga as battle attire at the very least, unless he was transported back to Ancient Rome and he had to infiltrate an orgy.
I originally thought that lying down was completely useless, especially given that you can't attack while you're in beached-whale mode, but it does come in handy when you're fighting these larger gentlemen. They become enraged after you land a few hits, and they start running around and wildly swinging their clubs like a highly-strung arachnophobe trying to kill an invisible spider. You can avoid this barrage by lying on the floor in front of them, presumably because they can't see you past their fat bellies.

The boss is this multi-limbed freak. He starts with two heads and four arms, but after carefully application of the pointy end of your sword he gradually loses his limbs and a large amount of blood. His cause is not helped by the fact that he can only scuttle sideways like some demented crab. Also, I've just noticed that the tower in the background has a face, complete with fiery hair.
After a set amount of stabbings, the boss retreats and Dahna is free to move onto stage four.

No, not really: we all know that griffins are proud, noble creatures who have dedicated their lives to helping girls reach the prom in time. Their reward is a free ticket and access to the buffet.

Suddenly DMT turns into a side-scrolling shooter, with waves of demonic enemies and the occasionally dragon to be dispatched by the griffin's fiery breath. You'd think that riding a powerful mythical beast would make this easy, but DMT is tougher than ever. If you let an enemy slip by, you'll quickly be overwhelmed as all his mates turn up and start getting in your way, usually resulting in death by countless small pokes from those demon's spears. They really are the Zubats of Dahna: Megami Tanjou. To get through this section at all, your only real hope is to memorise where the enemies appear and start firing before they get there. Again, this has to go down as a nice idea that was poorly executed.
If you make it through Griffin Gradius, you'll come to rest on the prow of a ship, just in time for the boss battle. You won't be alone, though...

Hey la, hey la, my ogre's back. Warning: he will smack you in the mouth if you get too close. He's still bitter about the first stage, the poor delicate flower. If you jump over him and destroy his shackles, you can boldly ride him into the fray. Dahna's legs are gonna atrophy at this rate.

There's some kind of huge protoplasmic octopus clinging to the ship, and he needs to be removed. This is where I completely lost track of exactly what the hell was going on - between the transparency effects, the driving rain and the complete lack of any indication as to a) what parts of the boss can damage you and b) what parts of the boss you can damage, everything devolves into a mass of flickering sprites and unfathomable hit detection. My advice is to give up any kind of strategy, take your ogre and jump on this son-of-a-bitch's face. Jump on that octopus like he was a bouncy castle and you're a five-year-old filled with cake and birthday party excitement (although you should try not to vomit all over the place). Just keep on jumping on his face(?) until all that remains is a sticky purple residue between your ogre's toes. Actually, it's sort of satisfying.

Stage five is... well, it's pretty much the same as stage one. You're riding your ogre, enemies appear, you jump on them. You know what DMT reminds me of? Golden Axe. A much less interesting and enjoyable version of Golden Axe played on a single plane, admittedly. I think it's the overall graphical style, and the palette-swapped soldiers. I'd rather be playing Golden Axe, trust me.
Dahna once again proves that she should not be allowed to look after any kind of animal / mythical creature, as she promptly loses the ogre down a hole. Or perhaps the ogre simply got tired of his servitude and leapt into a chasm to get away from Dahna and her ceaseless prattling about the prom.

After a quick climb up a tower, the multi-limbed boss from stage three reappears. Losing half of his appendages and roughly four hundred gallons of blood doesn't seem to have dampened his fighting spirit any. He seems angry, and justifiably so - now that he's only got one head and two arms, that fancy outfit that he had specially made to accommodate his freakishness is pointless unless someone invites him to a "wear the most hideous clothing you can find" party. He's still just as prone to getting stabbed as he was before, and even I had surprisingly little trouble beating him.

At last, it's the final stage! Hooray! It's more of the same. Boo. Here's my major problem with this game: there's no sense of flow to it. This is partly due to Dahna's unnecessarily awkward control system - it makes her feel sluggish and stubborn to control, as though she really doesn't want to be appearing in this videogame. Maybe she's pissed that she didn't get the Tyris Flare role in Golden Axe, I dunno. For example, Dahna can attack with an upwards thrust that is very useful on the upward-scrolling sections... or al least it would be if you didn't have to hold up for a second or so and wait for Dahna to move into her upwards-stabbing pose to do it. It doesn't sound like much, but in a game like this where fresh death is forever pouring in from all sides standing there doing a She-Ra impersonation is liable to get you killed.

It's not just the controls, either. Because enemies in groups of two or more will quickly overwhelm you, you spend most of the non-forced-scrolling sections tip-toeing forward as slowly as possible, hoping to activate one enemy at a time. This gets very tedious very quickly, and it means there's no sense of joy in the freedom of movement that a good platform hack-n-slash will offer. Dahna's a stiff-kneed, shuffling wreck of a main character. It's like playing as my Nan.

Aha, the final boss! It's a girl with a spear.

No, wait, it's a floating sorceress who's stolen Hugh Hefner's dressing gown. Magical powers in Dahna's universe seem to be mostly limited to floating and throwing things. Make the London Eye disappear or something, you unimaginative hack! She's still quite the challenge, mostly because you have to jump to hit her and we all know that Dahna jumps like a plastic bag fired from an air cannon. If you stab her enough times, she'll fall over...

...and summon every enemy in the game in a truly hideous ice-blue colour palette. This boss fight has now officially descended into unsalvageable tedium. It's a good job this is the final boss, because if it'd happened in an earlier level I'd have just stopped playing. As it is, I just about managed to summon the give-a-fuck-ness required to destroy all the bad guys and complete the game.

Except it's not over! Dahna has destroyed the evil empire too late and the school gymnasium is collapsing. Now the prom will have to be cancelled, or at least postponed until humanity has finished burying their dead and reformed some kind of government. In a rare moment of clemency, if you fall to your death here the game doesn't make you do the final boss fight again. Just imagine if you died here and it was your last life, though. I wonder how much pressure you have to put on a Megadrive pad until it explodes into a thousand glittering shards?

Dahna escapes (for some reason, she takes the evil sorceress with her) and they fly away on the griffin. She never gets to experience her high-school prom, leading to a sense of bitterness and resentment that haunts her well into her adult life, poisoning her relationships and leaving her with a strong persecution complex.

It's kind of a shame that Dahna: Megami Tanjou isn't better than it is. There are a few neat ideas scattered here and there, and the overall blandness is almost balanced by some decent animations and well above average music. The main sticking point is really the difficulty level. Have I been mollycoddled for too long by the much lower difficulty of most modern games? Probably, but it's not like I don't enjoy tough modern games - I loved Demon's Souls, for example. The difference is in how games are difficult. Painfully frugal lives and health power-ups and a need for memorisation are not a fun way of injecting challenge. Needing to learn the skills of the game and how best to use them, sure, but DMT goes down the retro route of not really giving you enough to do the job. The awful controls are just the bitter icing on an already underdone cake.

Overall, I'd have to say you should avoid this one. Play Golden Axe instead: at least when you lose your trusty steed in that it's usually your fault and not because the hero threw it down a hole.

Recently on VGJUNK:
Make cliches fun again with Beat-Em-Up Bingo!
Super Mario gets a gun and takes his revenge in Yoshi's Safari!
A terribly blatant rip-off: Magical Doropie!

BEAT-EM-UP BINGO

2012-01-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

As much as I love the side-scrolling beat-em-ups that filled arcades during the eighties and nineties, I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't, on the whole, the most diverse and imaginative genre around. There are only so many way you can walk across the screen and smack a guy in the mouth, after all. Certain common themes reoccur, visual hallmarks become firmly cemented in place and women are kidnapped with alarming frequency. Don't just bemoan it as laziness on the developer's part, though - use these cliches for your own amusement by playing VGJUNK's Beat-Em-Up Bingo!

Click here for the full-size version.

It's simple enough: 25 squares, each one containing a trademark beat-em-up element. Pick a belt-scrolling fighter, play through it and cross off a box every time you see what's written inside during gameplay. Simple!

"Angry Mayor" is not a square.

Here's a quick description of each square, although most of them are pretty self-explanatory.
Go!: The word "GO!" flashes on the screen, just in case you're paralysed with remorse over killing a street punk.
Sunset Ending: An awful lot of beat-em-ups seem to end just as the day is done.
Health Meat: Meat is good for you, meat you found on the floor is even better.
Sleeveless Jacket: Has someone removed the sleeves from their jacket? They're a bad guy, you should punch them.
Boss With Gun: Bosses are dishonourable pricks, and will sometimes shoot at you...
Fire Bombs: ...or they'll get their goons to throw Molotov cocktails.
2-Word Title: Like Final Fight or Violent Storm or Cooking Mama.
Throwing Knife: Don't stab, throw, because that's much more effective.

"I don't know about anyone else, but my arms are freezing."

Subway Stage: Because street punks are too poor to own cars, or sleeves for their jackets.
Ex-Pro Wrestler: It's a short career, but it equips you with all the tools necessary to fight ruthless crime syndicates.
Steel Pipe: Used for busting heads, justice and plumbing.
Kidnapped Female: Well, something has to get our heroes moving. It's usually a girlfriend, sometimes a daughter, almost always blonde.
Special Drains Health: Press attack and jump. Spin around and bash enemies. You look so awesome that it costs you some health.
Oil Drums: The only thing more common than generic thugs.
Clowns: Surprisingly common, commonly nightmarish.
Yellow / Red Health Bar: Yellow is apparently the colour of strength and vigour. Red, not so much.
Dominatrix: A woman in leather, with a whip. Don't people usually go to her to get beaten up on purpose? She seems to be making extra work for herself.

See, she could've been at home instead of waiting on a blustery rooftop.

Power, Speed, Balance: You've got three characters. One of them is as average as a beige carpet. One is faster, but weaker. The other is strong, but slower. The holy trinity.
Elevator Scene: Trapped inside a moving elevator as enemies jump in.
Mansion Stage: Because what's the point of becoming the head of a vast criminal empire if you can't have a nice house?
Mohawks: Hairdo of choice for gutter rats everywhere.
Building Site: Well, you wouldn't want to be fighting in a newly-completed building, would you? You might get blood on the skirting boards.
Fat Charging Men: A larger gentleman who, despite his portly stature, attacks by running into you like a hyperactive Labrador.
Sharp Suits: Has someone dressed up for the occasion? Maybe in a tuxedo?
Graffiti: Writing on the walls in the background is how villains pass the time spent waiting for the heroes to arrive.

When you any of these things in your chosen beat-em-up, cross it off and see how many you've got at the end of the game. For example, I tried it out with Final Final.

Capcom's classic is the big one, the granddaddy of all side-scrolling punchfests and the place where a lot of these recurring themes were born. As you can probably guess, it ticks quite a lot of these boxes.

22 out of 25, to be precise, a full house only prevented by the lack of dominatrixes and circus performers. Oh, and the fact that Cody kicked Belger out of his office window in broad daylight. No wonder Cody ended up in prison.
That's Final Fight, though: the blueprint, the originator. Let's try something that came later, made by a different company. How about Konami's Vendetta?

It's got a similar setting to Final Fight, but it feels and plays quite a bit differently. How did it score?

15 / 25 is a fairly high score, and it could have been higher: you can pick up a knife, but you can't throw it. Just stab, and stab, and stab.
There you go then: the VGJUNK Beat-Em-Up bingo card. Surely there's no game that can score higher than Final Fight? I'll be keeping an eye out for it, and if I find it I'll be sure to let you know. Obviously, this is all just a bit of fun and is in no way an indicator of how good or how derivative a game really is.

If you're playing a belt-scrolling fighter and you've filled in a bingo card, then please feel free to send it to vgjunk(at)hotmail.co.uk and I'll add it to this page. Who knows, maybe I'll retroactively apply it to some of the other beat-em-ups on the site! Wouldn't that be fun?
No, probably not.

Recently on VGJUNK:
Super Mario gets a gun and takes his revenge in Yoshi's Safari!
A terribly blatant rip-off: Magical Doropie!
Clean up the planet with the Troma-tastic Toxic Crusaders!

YOSHI'S SAFARI (SNES)

2012-01-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Well golly gee, that Super Mario sure is a talented fellow. Princess-rescuing is obviously his main racket, but sometimes his adventures see him practising medicine, teaching typing, participating in every sport ever conceived by man and sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - grabbing a gun and embarking on a shooting spree across the Mushroom Kingdom and the surrounding lands. Hundreds of Bowser's troops will die at the barrel of the fat plumber's gun in Nintendo's 1993 shoot-em-up (yes, really) Yoshi's Safari!

The name might imply a peaceful journey spent looking at nature, but bear in mind that the original Japanese title is Yoshi's Road Hunting. Mario's out for blood, not cheerful holiday snaps, and he's going to get it while riding a gluttonous dinosaur.
Plot-wise, Yoshi's Safari sets out to smash the tired conventions of the Super Mario series, to shift the paradigm, to stun players with its bold storytelling decisions. Brace yourself, because here's the twist: Princess Peach does not get kidnapped in this game.

Nope, she's there the whole time. No abductions, no false imprisonments, not even a little light royal endangerment. I know she's a little more independent these days, but in 1993 all Peach was good for was decorating the inside of Bowser's dungeon and participating in the occasional go-kart race. Here, however, she's exercising her royal power to provide military aid to a neighbouring country.

There's trouble in nearby Jewellery Land, which isn't an Elizabeth Duke-style shop specialising in bargain gold chains but a sovereign nation. Its leaders, Prince Pine and King Fret, have been kidnapped and the royal jewels stolen. Look, if you called your country "Jewellery Land" then I'm sorry but you're just inviting people to come and pillage it. Princess Peach, knowing all too well the pain of royal kidnap, decides to help the poor Jewelerylandians and sends in a crack commando unit to put things right. That crack commando unit is Mario, riding Yoshi. Mario has a gun. Thus, the adventure of Yoshi's Safari begins!

Look, Mario, I know you really like the Princess and you want to cram your Super Mushroom into her Item Box and all that, but the time has come for you to get over it and realise that she's been using you. You've rescued her from multiple kidnappings, received nothing by way of reward, and now she wants to use you as some kind of mercenary as "a favour"? Lending someone a tenner is a favour. Feeding someone's goldfish while they're on holiday is a favour. Undertaking a one-man mission deep into enemy territory to overthrow an evil regime is somewhat more than a favour, and I think it's about time Mario took back some self-respect.
As for Yoshi, I suspect the roll-eyed expression of sarcastic impatience that he's wearing on the title screen sums up his feelings about Mario's poor, deluded heart.

Of course, he can't say no to Princess Peach and soon he and Yoshi are choosing which route to take through Jewellery Land.

I'd suggest starting at stage one, but I'm a boring old man. You're young and full of hopes and dreams; you can start at stage five if you like. Ah, the freedom of youth!

Yep, Yoshi's Safari is an honest-to-God lightgun shooting game for the SNES, starring Super Mario himself. Those amongst you familiar with the gaming peripherals of the early '90s probably just read "SNES" and "Lightgun" and realised that this is a Super Scope game. Ah, the Super Scope - I talked about it in the Battle Clash article, and once again I'll remind you that the Super Scope was Nintendo's lightgun for the SNES. Always wanting to be different, the Big N decided that their lightgun wasn't going to be shaped like anything as prosaic as, y'know, a gun; instead they released a two-foot long section of plastic tubing that you had to rest on your shoulder and squint through.

It was a bloody awful contraption, awkward and tiring to hold as well as being difficult to store when not in use, so Yoshi's Safari is going to have to be something special to redeem the Super Scope. I do wonder whether Nintendo found themselves in a bit of a bind with the Super Scope, because what's the first thing that generally appears on any new Nintendo item? A Super Mario game. The Super Scope is for shooting, though, and Mario is the cheerful bastion of family-friendliness (except that time he kidnapped and imprisoned Donkey Kong. It's a good job DK doesn't hold grudges). So they made Yoshi's Safari as cute as possible, but it's still Mario shooting at things - things like Koopa Troopas and Goombas that have been shown in other games to be sentient, feeling creatures - with a gun. It all just feels a bit weird.

The gameplay's obvious enough: point at the bad guys, press fire. Pop pop pop, watchin' Koopa Troopas drop. Yoshi walks along a set path as enemies appear from all sides, you've got to shoot the enemies, and after a while you'll reach the stage's boss. Sometimes you have to press the Cursor button to jump over a hole / some water / the electrified floors Bowser's had installed in his castle, but other than that it's just point and shoot, you bloodthirsty son of a bitch.

It's also got Mode 7. Lots of Mode 7. It's the goddamn Mona Lisa of Mode 7. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration: that title belongs to Super Castlevania IV. The Mode 7 effect is omnipresent, though, as the world rotates around you while the back of Yoshi's head stays firmly in the centre of the screen.
That leads me to the game's primary point of interest (for me, at least): you can shoot Yoshi in the head. This further perpetuates my theory that Yoshi and Mario have an abusive relationship where Yoshi is like a puppy stupid enough to return each time its master kicks it for drooling on his shoes. The worst / best thing about this, depending on how you feel about Yoshi, is that sending a bullet into the back of his skull is pretty much unavoidable. Due to a combination of Mario's rapid-fire weaponry and the fact that some enemies will position themselves right in the centre of the screen, at some point you're going to hit Yoshi.

Look at the hurt in his eyes. While you do lose some health for shooting Yoshi, it's the emotional pain that's really tearing him apart. "I... I thought we were friends. First you sacrifice me so you can jump over a pit and now this? What did I do wrong?"
Aside from the back of Yoshi's head, the list of things to shoot at is made up of Mario's usual rogue's gallery. Koopa Troopas, Goombas, Bullet Bills, Cheep-Cheeps and Spinys are the basic enemies, while most levels have a slightly tougher mid-boss such as a Hammer Brother.

The end-of-level bosses are the Koopalings, Bowser's children of indeterminate maternity who have upped their game by becoming the pilots of heavily-armed battle mechs.

Mario gets a gun, so Lemmy Koopa builds a bipedal battle-tank covered in plasma cannons. The arms race between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Koopa family has disturbing ramifications for the neighbouring countries, and their citizens being to fear that they will soon fall under the yoke of one of these technologically-advanced superpowers.
Most of the boss battles are against Koopalings in giant robots - here, for example, is Morton Koopa Jr. riding a mechanical frog.

The only comment I can offer to this is "why did you build your mechanical frog to look totally stoned?" Not all the Koopalings get a sweet robot ride, though.

Poor Wendy O. Koopa has to make do with the series' trademark pipes. The only way to beat her is to drop anvils on her head, which somehow seems more brutal than shooting her, and the anvil doesn't look like it's enjoying it much either.
Definitely, objectively, inarguably the best Koopaling boss is found in stage 6.

Iggy Koopa gets a robot squid, and the appearance of a robot squid signals to me that this is a game worth playing. All the other Mario games shine a little less brightly in comparison once you remember they don’t contain mechanical squid.
Once you've cleared the first seven stages, King Fret is rescued. Don't celebrate / throw your Super Scope out of the window just yet, though. The King reveals that there are some more stages waiting in the "Dark Realm".

And yes, the Dark Realm does contain a Ghost House. Hell yeah, Ghost Houses are always my favourite bit.

What is this bullshit!? Those Boos are clearly moving while I'm looking right at them, shamelessly contradicting the established Super Mario canon. This is a travesty! I'm gonna get all my friends from the Super Mario message boards to send angry letters to Nintendo. Have they no respect for the fans, trampling all over continuity like this? More like Nintendon't, heh.

The Ghost House boss is a Big Boo, and there's no possible way anyone could be angry at anything ever again after seeing him. Just look at his face! I think that's the most adorable thing I've ever seen in a videogame. Pikachu can fuck right off, he can't compete with this. This charming face of a ghost who's just been shot should be made the new flag of the UN, leading to an immediate cessation of all wars.

After clearing all the other stages, Bowser's Castle appears and Mario moves into the final phase of his mission to liberate the poor people of Jewellery Land. I almost feel a little sorry for Bowser, you know. Dealing with his leadership duties and managing his unruly family must be tough for him, and he's not getting any younger. This seems like a last-ditch effort to forge a legacy for himself, you know? "Fine, I'll give up on the Mushroom Kingdom. It's a stupid kingdom anyway. I'm an angry lizard monster, what do I want with a pastel-coloured land of cheerful mushroom people anyway? I'll take over Jewellery Land, then at least I'll be rich. I've got eight kids to put through university, after all."

"Oh for Christ's sake, it's that bloody plumber again. Just leave me alone, man!"
This time around, Bowser has an impressive-looking robot suit which is certainly more menacing than his usual flying clown-copter thing but not really much more effective. It shows Bowser is learning, at least: it's just a shame he developed his robot armour just as Mario got access to a fully-automatic laser cannon.

Eventually Bowser's armour falls off and he resorts to the not-especially-threatening tactics of throwing Koopa shells at you. Not much of the game is threatening at all, to be honest. The only time I came close to losing a life was during the battle with the Robot Squid, and that was only because I nearly ran out of time. Even Bowser is really no trouble (and this is true of all the bosses) because you've got such a large health bar and your health is usually topped up right before the boss fights start. This means that simply ignoring all their attacks, letting Yoshi soak up the damage from hit after hit after hit and concentrating your fire is a perfectly valid strategy. Kind of a dick move, but valid nonetheless.

Bowser can usually be defeated by grabbing his tail and throwing him around, so what chance does he have against searing laser death-bolts? None, that's what, and soon he has surrendered and is presumably locked away in the Mushroom Kingdom's equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. Given that everything from the clouds to bricks has eyes in the Mushroom Kingdom, it is a particularly effective prison.

Mario saves the world (yet again) and takes all the credit, while Yoshi is locked back in his cage until the next time Mario needs a patsy / mode of transport / sacrificial animal. Remember, Princess Peach sent Mario out as a favour, and you better bet that Princess Peach remembers all the favours she's done for people. One day, when they're least expecting it, when the memories of the time Bowser invaded have all but faded, she will ask the people of Jewellery Land to do her a favour. It will not be pleasant.

Yoshi's Safari is pretty pleasant overall, though. It's certainly the best Super Scope game I've played, but then again that's a compliment on the level of something like "your giant bat-like ears must mean your spectacles never fall off". Graphically it's exactly what you'd expect from a Super Mario title: colourful, bold sprites that are well animated and full of charm. I mean, just look at how happy Larry Koopa is to be piloting his brand-new submarine-onion-sun thing.

Maybe he knew he wouldn't be in another Super Mario game for ten years, so he's trying to make the most of it.
As for the gameplay, it's a basic lightgun game, so you probably already know if you'll enjoy it or not. It isn't particularly dynamic or innovative: the enemies mostly just bumble forward, hoping to collide with you (and by you I mean Yoshi) and cause some damage, or they fire slow-moving projectiles at you. The only real complication to the gameplay is that your gun can run out of power if you hold the trigger down for too long, so you do have keep in mind that you need to hold off now and then to let it recharge.
The lack of challenge would be a major downside to Yoshi's Safari, but this is alleviated somewhat by the fact the once you complete the game, you're given a code that lets you play a much more difficult version of the game with a different colour palette.

It's a nice touch, and the fact that you have a much smaller power bar means there's some actual challenge to be found. The text even changes so that as soon as Mario gets back to the Mushroom Kingdom, Peach informs him that the Jewellery Land royal family is so incredibly stupid (probably due to years of inbreeding) that they have instantly been re-kidnapped. Mario takes this development with better humour than I suspect most would and sets off once more, but then again it's not him who's going to get hurt, is it?

Even within the utterly baffling framework of a Super Mario shoot-em-up, I think the weirdest thing about Yoshi's Safari is the odd feeling of contempt for your green dinosaur pal. Being able to shoot him is bad enough – but you might have done that by accident. It gets worse during the between-stage scoreboard, though, because despite being safe from danger, Mario starts shooting at Yoshi for no other reason that I can see than to scare the shit out of him.

Mario, you absolute dick.
Yoshi's Safari is certainly worth playing, if for no other reason than its bizarre place in the Super Mario series. Next time someone complains about Shadow the Hedgehog and his arsenal of guns, remind them that Mario was there first. As a game in its own right it's okay. It's too easy and it's pretty bland, but the charm and sheer digital sunshine that Nintendo squeeze into all their games just about save it.

Also, the Ghost House is great.

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MAGICAL DOROPIE / THE KRION CONQUEST (NES)

2012-01-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

VGJUNK is back for the New Year, and if 2012 really is the year that the Earth is to be destroyed in a fiery cataclysm then I can't think of a better way to ride it out than by playing obscure NES games. Well, I can think of better ways but none of them are mentionable on a website that is ostensibly safe for work.
Today's 8-bit adventure takes us through Vic Tokai's 1990 action-platformer Magical Doropie, released in the West as The Krion Conquest.

I'll mostly be playing the Japanese version, because the Western release suffered a pretty brutal hack job that I'll talk about later. For now, let's enter a magical world of witches, robots and large pits filled with spikes that are fatal when touched!

The girl in the red Hallowe'en costume is our heroine, Doropie the witch (or Francesca if you're playing the Western version). Have we met somewhere before, Doropie? You look sort of familiar...

It's something about those huge white eyes and that bow-legged stance...

I'm sure the fact that she looks like Mega Man is just a coincidence, and there's no way that Magical Doropie / The Krion Conquest could possibly turn out to be an utterly shameless rip-off of Capcom's beloved Mega Man series. You're playing as a witch, after all. It's not like you're going to be fighting hordes of hyper-advanced robots or anything.

Except that's exactly what's going on. The story begins in a typical enough manner - the Krion Empire has invaded Earth, quickly conquering the planet with their robot army. The Krion robots are so advanced that Earth technology is useless against them, but for some reason they're weak against magic. You can't really blame the Krion Empire for that oversight in the robot-building process, I suppose. "We've equipped each of our battle-mechs with two-foot-thick armour and enough laser weaponry to carve the very planet in twain. What do you mean, "what if they attack us with wizards?" Get out of my laboratory!"

Luckily for Earth, they've got one witch spare who is tasked (in grand videogame tradition) with destroying the entire enemy army all on her lonesome, because apparently there's some kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship between magic, robots and whatever the third element is. Science? Yeah, that sounds about right. Magic beats Robots, Science beats Magic and Robots beat Science because they're just science but harder.

Gameplay-wise, what we have here is a standard-issue NES action-platforming adventure. You must carefully manoeuvre Doropie through each stage, jumping over bottomless pits and deadly spikes, shooting robot enemies with pellets of magical energy and utilising your special weapons effectively until you reach the robot boss at the end of the stage.

It's just Mega Man! Almost no attempt has been made to disguise this fact! Slapping a pointy hat and one black pixel to denote cleavage onto the Blue Bomber is hardly what you'd call a complete overhaul. Magical Doropie is one of the most thorough gaming rip-offs I've seen since The Great Giana Sisters, and it's not just Doropie's design. An example: one of the first enemies you encounter in this game is a small, dome-shaped robot with big round eyes that cannot be harmed until you get close to it, at which point it opens up and fires at you.

But Doropie's a witch, right? So, she couldn't possibly steal the powers of her defeated robot enemies and use them herself, because sheds have to fuse them to her body in a grotesque melding of flesh and metal. Luckily, Vic Tokai had fully committed themselves to... recreating as many of Mega Man's gameplay features as possible and instead of getting equipped with arms torn from the robots you've destroyed, she has access to various magical spells.

Spells that change the colour of Doropie's sprite when you equip them, naturally. Here's where the developers made the single biggest mistake in Magical Doropie - they give you access to all the spells at the very start of the game. One of the most important factors in Mega Man's success (or in the appeal of videogames in general) is that new powers are a reward for doing well, a goal to strive for and a way of gradually introducing new mechanics into the gameplay. As much as people joke about videogames' cruel tendency to send underprepared weaklings to kill demonic overlords and take down intergalactic empires with nothing more than a wooden sword, imagine how boring Super Metroid would be if Samus started with all the equipment she has at the end of the game.

It doesn't help that Doropie's powers aren't particularly interesting or useful. "Normal" is the standard blaster, which you can charge up by holding the button - interestingly, this feature appears here before its inclusion in Mega Man 4. I'm not saying Capcom stole the idea from MD, but I don't think anyone would blame them if they had. I can't see Vic Tokai taking them to court over it, put it that way.
As for the non-standard attacks, "Fire" is a screen-clearing smartbomb that costs a third of your health bar to use, "Freeze" does exactly what you'd expect except you can't use the enemies as platforms, "Ball" fires rebounding projectiles at an upward angle, "Shield" creates a temporary barrier and "Broom" removes dust from a small patch of floor in front of you. Not really, it summons a flying broomstick that works much like the Rush Jet from that Capcom game series, oh, what's it called? You know the one I mean, right? Yeah, that one.

And these powers are, on the whole, bloody awful. The only ones you'll ever use are the standard blaster, the Ball and the Broom. You use the broom a lot actually, and it can get quite tedious having to access the menu to select it every time you need to cross a chasm. As for the other powers, the Fire attack has no practical use and the Shield is semi-useful against one boss, but the most baffling weapon is probably Freeze. There's one section in one stage where you can use it to temporarily put out some fire, but other than that it is so redundant that you almost feel sorry for it, like a blind child who gets a Viewmaster for Christmas. Sure, you can freeze enemies in place... but it doesn't kill them. You know, like my standard magic blasts do. You can't use the frozen enemies as platforms, and unless I'm missing something it has no other abilities. It's Justin Bieber if he somehow managed to join Led Zeppelin.

With deft use of the powers at your disposal - by which I mean the Broom - you'll eventually reach a robot who acts as the stage's master. Ahem. The first boss is Thunder Knight, and his appearance suggests that Dr. Wily landed a lucrative contract building robots for the Krion Empire. That logo in the centre of the room is a dead giveaway. Changing the letter from a W to an A is simply a sign that Wily has set up a subsidiary company, no doubt as some way of avoiding paying taxes.

Thunder Knight is the most interesting thing about the game so far. No-one appears to have informed him that robots are weak against magic, and he spends most of the fight transforming into a laser beam that moves around the room and crashes into you. Luckily we know his real weakness, and that's attacks that come from a diagonal angle. Just wait for him to transform back into a robot and shoot him with the Ball. He just sits here and takes it, his final moments a maelstrom of anguished bafflement about where all this pain is coming from if it isn't travelling perpendicular to the floor.

I like to look for the good in all the videogames I write about here at VGJUNK, and it's a rare occasion indeed when I can't think of anything positive to say. Fortunately, even such a bare-faced clone as Magical Doropie has at least one thing to recommend it, and in this case it's the between-stage cutscenes. Here the source of "inspiration" isn't so much Mega Man as Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden. While they might not be particularly original they are at least well drawn, with an effective use of limited colour palettes.

For me, they're probably the game's high point. Unless, or course, you're a poor Westerner and you're playing The Krion Conquest. Remember Magical Doropie's title screen? It's at the top of this article, the pink one with the big picture of Doropie? This is what The Krion Conquest had in its place.

Ouch. Not only that, but aside from a truncated intro all the cut-scenes were removed from the non-Japanese releases. I have no idea why, but apparently Vic Tokai though it'd be a good idea to remove Magical Doropie's one redeeming feature.
And then it gets even worse for poor little Billy playing The Krion Conquest in Americaland, because in a moment of cruelty so meaningless and brutal even Vlad the Impaler would say "steady on, guys!” they removed the continue option. You start with three lives, and if you use them all it's back to the start of the game for you, fucko; hope you didn't just bite your controller in half in a frustrated rage.

With the removal of the continue system, The Krion Conquest is rendered utterly fucking pointless. It is, I'll be honest, a fairly difficult game. About as difficult as, ooh, let's say Mega Man 3. Even Mega Man games give you a bloody password! Would that have been too much to ask? Between the removal of the pretty graphics and the missing continue option, you begin to wonder what ideas the Japanese developers of the time had about American NES players. They seemed to think that they were all emotionless, videogame-crushing machines, wholly unconcerned with fripperies like cutscenes or story, only interested in the cold-eyed pursuit of gaming strength through gaming pain. Continues are for pussies! With every Game Over, I become that much stronger! Yeah, I dunno. Suffice to say, the conversion from Magical Doropie to The Krion Conquest was poorly handled.
I suppose I should talk about the rest of the game, really. Stage two is an ice stage.

How shockingly original. Yes, you slip and slide on the icy platforms, although there appears to be a strange quirk in the programming: if you duck while you're sliding, Doropie immediately stops dead, only to continue sliding when you stand back up. I assume this wasn't intentional, but maybe having a highly frictive backside is a power all witches possess and just choose not to mention. It'd explain how they manage to stay on their brooms, at least.

The boss is a robot snowman with a stern countenance and, erm... that's about it, really. Look at the way Doropie is standing with her hands on her hips, you can tell she's not impressed either.

The third stage is ~~Bubbleman's stage~~ an underwater stage. Unlike Mega Man, Doropie has to breathe and so you must make your way between the air pockets scattered around the stage unless you want to see a cutesy cartoon witch drown to death. Of course, this is a right pain in the arse and when you combine that with your thoughts of how this stage was better when Mega Man 2 did it, you probably will want to see a cutesy cartoon witch drown to death.

The boss is a robot. Sort of looks like a beetle, I guess. Or he's wearing a hoodie. Look, I'm not a robotics expert, okay?

Stage four is a trip through the clouds, with lots of broom-riding sections, fluffy clouds and long drops into spike pits. One think Magical Doropie has over Mega Man is that unlike an advanced fighting robot you feel a small girl really would die instantly if she plummeted into a spike-filled chasm.

I don't think even the developers knew what this boss was supposed to be. Giant robot kidney? Mechanical turd? His name is Sky Hawk, but he's clearly not a hawk. Like all the other bosses in the game, the key to defeating him to hit him in the head repeatedly with your Balls.

The fifth stage is a bit of a con, because while the manual promises a whole new level it's actually just a three-part boss battle. The final boss battle, to be precise! I have to give Vic Tokai some credit for not padding the game unnecessarily by, say, including a room full of teleporters that force you to re-fight all the bosses you already beat.
The first final boss is hot-pink cross between a Gundam and Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She must be the Krion Empire's most powerful robot, because only possessing the power to level entire cities will let you get away with a colour scheme like that. She teleports around the room, pausing to fire easily-dodged energy bolts at you, but once again magic proves its dominance over our robotic oppressors and the cyber-lady explodes.

The Krion decide to try to fight smart for the next part of the fight, pitching magic against magic with a clone of Doropie herself. This is a tactic you often see villains employing, but it rarely works out for them. I guess "Behold my secret weapon, which is exactly as powerful as you are!" is a plan that looks better on paper. Either way, I've been manipulating these arcane secrets for a lot longer and once again the real Doropie prevails.

The first two bosses were merely a warm-up for the Krion Empress-Bot, who is actually quite impressive. Less impressive when you remember the extremely similar Dragon boss from (you guessed it) Mega Man 2, but as giant robot tyrants go it's pretty cool-looking. I think she's impressed by Doropie's hard work, because she looks like she's about to start applauding you. She damn well should applaud me, too - I could have been getting the same experience through playing Mega Man 2, only with better graphics and music and level design and bosses that don't look like giant robot kidneys, but I stuck with Magical Doropie. I expect my medal is already in the post.
Anyway, considering the difficulty of the game as a whole, the final boss(es) is surprisingly easy and soon Doropie has destroyed the Ladybot-Space-Pope-Empress and saved the Earth. Hooray!

Normally, this is where I'd talk about the quality of the game, but in the case of Magical Doropie / The Krion Conquest, it doesn't matter. No matter how poor or how good the game is, all it will ever be is an inferior knockoff of Mega Man. As it turns out, it's not awful: the graphics are fairly good, the music is tolerable and the controls and Doropie's handling feel a little heavy but not game-breakingly cumbersome, but you can sometimes get a bootleg Louie Vuittarn handbag off the market that's close-ish to the quality of the real thing - but as close as it gets it's always a fake.

I don't hold it against Vic Tokai too much, though. While I was playing Magical Doropie, what struck me most was the feeling that this was a game that didn't quite make it, the sensation that it's less a full game and more an elaborate romhack. According to Wikipedia, the game started out as a Wizard of Oz game, but then licensing issues meant it had to have the Oz-ness hoovered out of it. This is why Doropie has a name that sounds like a resort on the Baltic Sea - it used to be "Dorothy". VC tried to retool the game, plumped for cloning Mega Man and, by the feel of the game, ran out of time, money or inclination during the process. More than anything it simply feels unfinished, what with the pointless weapons and the overall brevity of the game. Then it became The Krion Conquest and anything it might have had going for it was crushed. The conversion even removed the cheat codes, present in the Japanese version, that let you play in an alternate costume or as the male character that Doropie runs across throughout the story.

So, Magical Doropie is just another unfortunate casualty of the cruel world of videogames development, a victim of too little time and money, but as it was supposed to be a licensed Wizard of Oz tie-in I don’t think we're missing out on too much. Give it a go if you want to experience just how similar it is to Mega Man (here's a hint: very), but on the whole the NES has a whole host of much better platformers.

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TOXIC CRUSADERS (NES)

2011-12-29T12:40:00.001-08:00

Christmas is over, and I'd like to thank the sugarcane farmers of the world - their hard work and dedication allowed me to consume an average of roughly 40,000 calories a day over the festive season. There goes my girlish figure. The time for good cheer, twinkling lights and rosy-cheeked gift givers is behind us now, and it's time to get back into the muck and mire with TOSE / Bandai's 1992 NES mop-em-up Toxic Crusaders.

I'm wary about this one. TOSE are hardly known for their stellar output. If anything, they're know for being a mysterious "shadow developer" who have worked on many titles without revealing themselves. They're like the A-Team of games development: If you need some coding done quickly, if you need to churn out a licensed tie-in title, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... TOSE. Except the A-Team generally sorted out whatever mess needed fixing and left everything wrapped up and neatly resolved at the end of the episode. TOSE... not so much.
On top of that, it's a licensed title based on a cartoon. Quelle horreur! Oh, but what a license it is...

Meet our hero. Yes, the lumpy green fella who looks like the unholy spawn of Sloth from The Goonies and a cabbage. His name is Toxie, and he first appeared in a little movie called The Toxic Avenger, where he looked like this:

Less like a cabbage, more like some kind of root vegetable. A yam, perhaps. Anyway, The Toxic Avenger was a horror-comedy B-movie released in 1984 by cult studio Troma. The Toxic Avenger is the heartwarming story of a neo maxi zoom dweebie called Melvin who, via the bullying of his 80’s-street-punk tormentors, falls into a barrel of toxic waste and mutates into "a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength" - the Monster Hero, AKA the Toxic Avenger. He uses his newfound power to defeat the criminals plaguing Tromaville, and when I say defeat I mean murder horribly. Arms are torn from sockets, a man's testicles are used as a punchbag and a child's head (that is, a watermelon in a wig) is graphically crushed. Oh, and there are loads of tits everywhere. Given this pedigree, it seems like an odd candidate for transformation into a Saturday morning kid's cartoon, but that's exactly what happened.

Hey, there's nothing kids love more than gore and boobs. Obviously, all that stuff was removed and for the animated Toxic Crusaders Toxie was changed to a kind-hearted soul who just happened to look like an ogre's ballsack. He spent his time fighting the evil pollution-based schemes of Dr. Killemoff, but thankfully the environmental message wasn't handled nearly as leadenly as Captain Planet, and Toxic Crusaders is a surprisingly funny little show even now. Not Pixar-style "adult humour in a kid’s film" levels of fun, but quite away ahead of dreck like Street Sharks.
As inappropriate as the source material was, this was a time when a lot of adult films were getting a kid-friendly makeover: there was a Rambo cartoon, a Terminator 2 toyline, Robocop action figures... Even Aliens - you know, the film about nightmarish space-demons who breed via oral rape and sudden chest explosion - were in line for a (tragically cancelled) cartoon show called Operation: Aliens.

They still made plenty of Aliens toys, though, and when compared to that concept The Toxic Avenger seems like a charmingly wholesome source of entertainment for the little 'uns. The Toxic Avenger is certainly the most child-like (or childish) of these adult films to be reworked for kids, so at least it has that on its side.
The Toxic Crusaders cartoon wasn't very successful, running for only 13 episodes, but it did last long enough for a spin-off to appear on the NES, and that's what I'll be looking at today. See, I knew I'd get back around to the game eventually.

When devising a plot for Toxic Crusaders, TOSE reached into the big box marked "Videogame Clichés" and pulled out an old favourite: the kidnapped girlfriend. Dr. Killemoff has captured Toxie's extremely near-sighted (and possibly mentally handicapped) girlfriend Yvonne, along with the other crime-busting mutants, and it's up to Toxie to rescue them.

He plans to do this by travelling across Tromaville and using his sentient mop to clobber anything that gets in his way. Yes, Toxic Crusaders is a side-scrolling beat-em-up! Hooray! Well, kind of - while it shares the standard two-button jump/attack control system of most similar games, you can only perform one attack at a time and not the chain combos that you'd get in something like Final Fight. Still, walking along and hitting things in an NES game based on a kid's cartoon based on a low-budget exploitation film? I'll take that.

The enemies consist mostly of Killemoff's Radiation Rangers, hazmat-suit-wearing thugs who throw toxic waste at you. Sadly, it isn't the kind of toxic waste that gives you super powers. Just radiation burns and rapidly-developing cancers. Even in the first stage, they're pretty tough to beat for a few reasons. They're fast, fairly accurate and then there's our old friend collision detection. It's not great in this game, and Toxie is forever being damaged by globs of ooze that seem like they should sail over his lumpen head; even if you can avoid the enemy's attacks, your attacks often pass right through them. In the original Troma films this'd mean that Toxie had literally punched a hole in them, (accompanied by a fountain of unconvincing fake blood,) but here it just means you're swinging at air.
Things are made tougher by that fact that getting hit makes Toxie drop his mop, meaning you have to use you mutated fists to deliver justice. This is a problem, because they have a much shorter range and seem to suffer from even more collision detection problems than your cleaning utensil. You can get your mop back, but I'll come to that in a bit.

Wander along far enough, and you'll reach the first boss. It's an oily mound of sludge with the head of a... rat? Alligator? Wolf? Whatever it is, that's its weak point. The game takes this opportunity to remind you of the difficulty level and until you realise that the best way to beat him is to try to interrupt his attacks before he can use them, the stream of projectiles that this guy launches at you can quickly wipe out your health.

I think the Tromaville Times needs to fire their photographer - that picture is cropped in a painfully amateurish manner. Still, it convinced me that I really did want to be like Toxie: so much so that I planted a tree right away. It must be working, because I'm starting to go bald and my skin has taken on a sickly green hue.

Tromaville High is the next location, and I think it might be on some kind of space-station because the moon is right there. Actually, there's a really nice touch here where the moon rises as you play the stage, gradually lightening the colours of the background.
As for the gameplay, it's the same as stage one except I've powered up my mop to level two and now it fires green lumps of pain at my foes. You can collect replacement mops and health items by destroying the various barrels that roll through the levels, and if you collect more mop icons while you still have a mop in your warty hands then it becomes more powerful. Level one is a normal mop attack, level two gives you an extremely useful projectile and when you get to stage three you can throw your entire mop at the bad guys and have it return to you, often hitting them on the way back for a very handy two hits. You could say it's like a broomerang, a ha ha ha.

Having made it into the school itself, I'm left to wonder why Toxie's here at all. Are the Radiation Rangers dumping toxic waste here too? I suppose it's the ideal place to ditch some harmful mutagens - after all, who's going to notice if teenagers start having sudden growth spurts or erupting in clusters of weeping boils?

The boss is Bonehead and his frankly radical motorcycle/wheeled couch. Bonehead was one of the bullies that tormented the pre-mutation Melvin, and one of the first things Toxie does when he gets his new powers is to throw Bonehead into a barrel of acid rain and mutate him into a skull-faced villain. And that's in the cartoon, not the film. Toxie, you're kind of a dick.

See, Toxie? You did that to his face, you hideous green bastard. The acid bath must have also shaved some points off Bonehead's IQ because he's much easier to beat than the first boss, his only attack consisting of driving back and forth along the same path and lazily throwing molotovs at you.

Stage three: the Tromaville Factory (yes, there's only one). Definitely a more appropriate setting for ecological devastation than a high school, but the gameplay is starting to feel very repetitive already, what with the same two enemy types showing up over and over again. But hark! What gameplay changes through yonder factory break?

It's a platforming section. Oh joy. However, in a rare twist of fortune, this shoehorned-in jumping section isn't actually all that bad. Toxie controls well enough that it's not a complete nightmare getting him to land where you want, and the enemy placement is challenging without being utterly infuriating. All in all, it's a rather welcome change of pace. At the top of the tower waits the third boss...

...or rather, a red version of the first boss. Disappointing. He's still tougher than Bonehead, though.
Stage four takes place on the Tromaville Highway. Once again, Toxie seems to have had a wasted trip: you'd think a highway would be dripping with pollution, but for some reason there are no cars here.

I've been trying not to compare Toxic Crusaders to Konami's NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, but when you're playing as a green, bandana-wearing mutant crimefighter riding a skateboard the overlap becomes too pronounced to ignore. Yes, Toxic Crusaders is quite similar to the side-scrolling TMNT fighters, only not as good due to the much higher difficulty and temperamental collision detection.
One thing that TC does get right is the graphics. Character sprites are bold and well-animated, the artwork in the mini-cutscenes really nails the look of the cartoon and best of all are the excellent background effects. Stage two had the rising moon, and the highway even has parallax scrolling (which that gif I made doesn't really capture all that well). I certainly didn't expect to be praising a TOSE game for its dazzling graphical tricks, but there you go.

Sadly the fancy graphics don't stop this being the most painfully irritating part of the game. I know that NES games of the nineties (especially cartoon tie-ins) practically demanded a skateboarding section, but that doesn't mean you have to make it such a chore to play. The big problem is that it seems almost impossible to avoid taking damage from the Radiation Rangers as they glide about at hitherto-unseen speeds. If only Dr. Killemoff had equipped all his troops with rollerskates, he could be ruling the planet by now.

The boss is less of a pain, mostly because you're not sliding along on a skateboard, and somehow his machinegun ends up being less of a threat than the flimsy wooden barriers that were placed across the highway. I also suffered a particularly embarrassing death here. The boss battle takes place in a shipping container being carried by a helicopter. I didn't realise you could walk out of said shipping container. That big open door probably should have clued me in, but I’m not an intelligent man and around fifteen seconds into my first attempt I made poor Toxie blithely walk straight out of the door and into thin air. Poor Toxie - he trusted me, and now he's a green smear on the pavement.

Because the boss was - aha ha ha, get this - a policeman! Classic.

What could be a more appropriate stage for Toxic Crusaders than a sewer? You might think that Killemoff has already dumped plenty of waste down here, enough to turn the water bright green, but don't be so quick to jump to conclusions: when I was a kid I once had a birthday cake shaped like Yoshi, complete with an inch-thick layer of green icing. I ate pretty much the whole thing, and for a week afterwards everything that issued from my body was as vibrantly green as the mighty rainforests of the Amazon.

There's a swimming section, which would be a pleasant diversion if it wasn't so ball-constrictingly difficult. Of course, it's not hard because of challenging level design or anything like that: there're just far too many enemies attacking at once, and Toxie has the aquatic grace of a housebrick. At least one of his many mutations gave him the ability to breathe underwater, so you don't have to worry about collecting air. I know some of you still have nightmares about the "drowning" music from Sonic the Hedgehog.

As for the boss, it's a submarine. Ayup. A green one. If it's supposed to be shaped like anything, I can't tell what, and I think Bonehead's sofa-cycle is assured a spot as this game's best vehicle.

The final stage is, naturally, Killemoff's base. It's pretty swanky I guess, although as with all villains’ mansions from NES games the colour choices suggest a serious ophthalmic problem on the decorator's part.
All the usual things make an appearance - hundreds of Radiation Rangers, spike traps, annoying robot bird-things - but after the tedium of swimming section, I'm glad to have it back. Maybe that was the developers' plan all along: by including the shitty skateboarding and swimming sections, it makes the rest of the generic and uninspired scrolling action seem fresh and rewarding. Nice try, TOSE, but you can't fool me.

In their defence, the platforming areas in this stage are handled quite well and are nowhere near as shudderingly awful as most bolted-on jumping sections.

Having reached Killemoff's inner sanctum, a boss battle awaits. It's a train, albeit one with a human face, an arm attached to the ceiling and a separate machine that drops drills on your head. I've always wondered what a crossover between Thomas the Tank Engine and Tetsuo: The Iron Man would look like and now I guess I know. There's just something a bit... off about it.

Once you've defeated the train, (by punching it in the face, naturally,) Dr. Killemoff appears and the real fight can begin... and end almost immediately, because this is a very simple and somewhat underwhelming climactic battle. I know Killemoff has four arms, but apparently that's no match for superhuman size and strength.

Armed with nothing but a mop, an unwavering sense of justice and a set of pustules that'd put most teenage frycooks to shame, Toxie saves the day and Tromaville can sleep easy once more, safe from Killemoff's pollution. You know, Toxie's quest to rid the world of pollution seems a little strange when you consider the fact that if it wasn't for toxic waste, Toxie would still be the kind of lonely nerd who brings a gun to work one day and teaches a deadly lesson to all those who have wronged him. It was either that or a suicide that isn't discovered until weeks later when the neighbours complain about the smell, the police busting down the door to find his corpse has been mostly eaten by his fifteen cats.

Toxic waste gave Melvin/Toxie strength, self-confidence, friendship, a path in life and a beautiful if almost certainly brain-damaged girlfriend. He should be pollution's biggest cheerleader, not its staunchest foe!

Putting aside the hypocrisy of Toxie's actions, is Toxic Crusaders a good game? I suppose I couldn't really praise it that highly, but what I will say is that its peaks and troughs are pretty extreme. The graphics are very good, with some really nice touches, and the music is well above average. The gameplay is decent and becomes much more enjoyable once you've played for a while and gotten used to the controls, particularly the fact that Toxie stops for a moment after you've attacked.
I have to give the developer kudos for at least trying to make the game more interesting by adding in some different gameplay styles: so often licensed tie-ins are such low-effort affairs that any attempt to inject something different is worthy of praise, however faint it may be.
TC's biggest failing is definitely the difficulty level. Between the poor hit detection, the tendency for enemies to appear right where you're standing and the sheer volume of foes in some places when it gets tough, it gets really tough. That wouldn't be so bad if the difficulty curve was consistent and didn't bounce around the place like a kangaroo on a space hopper.

Overall, I'd still just about recommend giving Toxic Crusaders a go if for no other reason than that you get to play as the Toxic Avenger. It's rare that you get to play a NES game as a character who once ripped a guy's intestines out and made a joke about it: the only other one I can think of is Kid Icarus. Just do yourself a favour and use the passwords to skip between the levels before the difficulty starts getting you down.

P.S. - Bonus Troma info! Fellow tumblrer spaceleech informs me that Troma were also approached to contribute material for the Xbox 360 Kinect title The Gunstringer. This means the only thing to give me even the slightest interest in the Kinect is Troma. A motion-controlled Toxic Avenger mop-em-up: now that I would play.

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STREET FIGHTER EX PLUS ALPHA (PS1)

2011-12-23T12:31:00.000-08:00

The one-on-one fighting game seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years, and as usual Capcom are leading the way with games such as Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the upcoming Street Fighter X Tekken. Of course, these things move in cycles and after the boom years of the post-Street Fighter II beat-em-up era, the late nineties and early two-thousands weren't the greatest period for the genre. There were still excellent 2D fighting games being released - the Capcom vs. SNK and Marvel vs. Capcom series' spring to mind - but on the whole the gaming public seemed fatigued by the deluge of SFII clones, which is fair enough because most of them were shit (and I'm saving my distaste for Mortal Kombat for another day). It was into this situation that, in 1997, Capcom released one of the most overlooked entries into the Street Fighter series: Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha.

The Street Fighter EX series began as a 1996 arcade release. This received an upgrade titled Street Fighter EX Plus the following year and a few months later it was ported to the Playstation under the title Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha, a title I will be shortening to SFEX from now on because there's no way I'm writing all that out every time. This is the version I'll be rambling on about today.
SFEX’s big deal, its main gimmick, the thing that was meant to wow fighting game aficionados the world over was polygon graphics. No more for us the childish 2D sprites of previous SF games! This is a bold new world of characters so boxy you could use them as shipping crates!

Yes, almost a full twelve years before the release of Street Fighter IV, Capcom made a Street Fighter game which retained the beloved single-plane versus fighting of the SF series but replaced the flat sprites with chunky polygon models that look like the Duplo to SFIV's Lego Technic. I say Capcom made it, but here's the thing: it was actually developed by a separate company called Arika. One of the things that Arika brought to the games (aside from the move to 3D models) was the other thing that SFEX is most remembered for, and that's the significant number of brand-new characters that were added. Can they be as memorable as a green beastman raised by electric eels or a heavyweight boxer who is in no way related to Mike Tyson? Let's meet them and find out!

Of course, there are some of the classic fighters included in SFEX - after all, a SF game without Ryu would be like the Beatles without whichever Beatle was best at karate (my money's on Ringo). The returning SF characters consisted of Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, M. Bison, Sakura, Dhalsim, Zangief and Akuma (and Evil Ryu, if that counts). All the others are fresh to the SF canon and you know what? Some of them are pretty cool.

Allen Snider

Okay, we're not off to a great start here. Allen is, to be blunt, a shotoclone. He's got a fireball, a dragon punch and a really stupid voice that renders him about as threatening as a Huey, Dewey and Louie. He once dreamed of becoming the American Karate Champion, but after getting his ass kicked by Ken he decides to aim higher and be the best in the world. A bit of ambition is a good thing here, I think: in a world where all the other Street Fighters are battling global terrorist masterminds and demonic martial-arts masters who can punch people's souls to death, becoming the karate champion of a country that's hardly renowned for its love for the way of the empty hand seems a little... small-minded.
Despite all his backstory, Allen's main distinguishing features are his bright orange sideburns.

Kairi

Another shotoclone. This one's the emo sort, but he makes up for it by having a super move where he punches right through his opponent's torso. He also suffers from Plot-Convenient Amnesia, which I suppose is fair enough. You'd think more of the World Warriors would have neurological problems after years of severe head trauma. Apparently, he was intended to be the series' main character, but that's an accolade for one man and one man alone. We'll get to him in a bit.

Hokuto

You wa SHOCK! No, sadly not a master of Hokuto Shinken but some kind of dour shrine-maiden type. She's Kairi's sister, but happily she's not another shotoclone. If anything, she feels a little like Karin from SFA3. Also, she has no nose.

Doctrine Dark

Leon Kennedy and Hunk had a baby! No, of course not. One of the more interesting new characters, D. Dark was a former member of Guile's unit. Military unit, I mean. They got into a scuffle with a unit led by Rolento, presumably in the manner of some rambunctious schoolboys, except everyone apart from Dark wound up dead. Oops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this caused him to go straight-up bananas and now he seeks revenge on Guile, blaming him for not training him properly. That's... that's a pretty crappy reason for revenge, man. I should know, I swore vengeance on my high school for not teaching me maths properly and all I got out of it was a restraining order.
Still, Dark's fighting style is interesting - he fights with knives, capture wires and explosives, and his dirty-bastard trickery makes him feel rather unique.

Blair Dame

Not realising the position of "long-legged Street Fighter characters who wear leotards and long boots and fight primarily with kicks" was already filled by Cammy, Blair enters the fray! Okay, so that's not really fair: her fighting style isn't much like Cammy's at all, and leotards offer a freedom of movement that comes in very handy in the world of competitive ass-kicking.
Blair is another fun character, with lots of multi-hit kick moves, an unusual sliding throw and even more unintelligible voice acting than Allen. She's also the game's "sexy" character. Given the primitive nature of the game's graphics, Blair has been handed a rather thankless task, but she tries her best.

Cracker Jack

Yes, he's called Cracker Jack, because his name is Jack and he's a cracker. He's SFEX’s equivalent of Balrog, and he's equipped with dashing punches and a huge punch that can be charged up by holding all three punch buttons. So, like I say, he's Balrog. Except he can clobber people (and projectiles) with a baseball bat, too. And he has a hat.
He's also Blair's bodyguard, and you'd think that his aristocratic employer would have told him that's not how ties work by now.

Pullum Purna

A middle-Eastern princess, Pullum is all about the kicking as well as being one of the few characters who doesn't look really grumpy in their portrait. There's really not that much to say about her, to be honest, except that her trousers are all ploofy. Oh, and apparently she knows Blair through something called the "International Debutante Club". I imagine the elegant world of sickeningly opulent aristocracy seems rather dull after you've travelled with globe to face the strongest opponents you can find, revelling in the sound of their snapping limbs and seeing the world through a red haze as blood drips into your eyes. Still, think of all that Ferrero Rocher.

Darun Mister

Pullum also gets a bodyguard because apparently the women of the SFEX universe can't look after themselves despite being elite martial arts masters. Darun is a wrestler, and to their credit Arika did a good job of not making him feel too much like Zangief despite their similar movesets. This sense of individuality is helped by the fact Darun has a move where he fires his opponent into the sky by thrusting his groin at them.
Also, he seems to be based on the near-legendary Indian wrestler The Great Gama, who also appeared in Shadow Hearts 2 and possessed a moustache that gave him magical powers.

Skullomania

The true hero of SFEX and probably the best thing about the game, I wrote about Skullomania before in the Halloween-y Fighting Game Characters article, but here's a quick recap: he used to be a normal salaryman, struggling with the crushing monotony of his everyday life, until one day he was asked to dress as a superhero for a work event. Then he went crazy, and now he acts like he's an actual superhero. His fighting style matches up very nicely with his weird persona, as most of his moves revolve around him hurling himself at his opponents with no regard for his own safety. He's heavily influenced by tokusatsu heroes such as Kamen Rider, but he's dressed in a lycra Hallowe'en costume so he's obviously much, much cooler than that description can convey. Say what you like about SFEX, but it gave us Skullomania and for that I will always be grateful.

Garuda

Finally there's Garuda. He's SFEX’s version of Akuma, or at least he would be if Akuma wasn't in the game. He's the super-secret boss that you can only face by winning all your battles with super combos and not losing a round. His main deal, aside from looking like some unreleased "Japanese Armour Skeletor" toy, is spikes. He can shoot spikes out of his body at will and from a variety of places including what an immature person might describe as "the boobular region". I'm sure he and Akuma would get on like a house on fire.
One final thing while we're talking about characters - poor Ken Masters did not receive a flattering portrait.

That's not the face of someone looking forward to a fight. That's the face of someone who's thinking about what they're going to do to your body after they've knocked you out.

Of course, it's all well and good having these fresh new faces to pummel, but it doesn't mean anything if the game's no good. So how does SFEX play? It plays like Street Fighter II, funnily enough. It shares the same control system you all know and love, with three punch and three kick buttons, special moves activated with the time-honoured inputs and a three-stage super bar system. The only major gameplay additions are a generic unblockable attack, performed by pressing two buttons of the same strength and rather reminiscent of the Focus Attacks from SFIV, and the fact that while fighters can get trapped in a corner, a strong hit will push them backward and expand the playfield.

There's a certain emphasis on cancelling moves, particularly cancelling supers into each other, and a few of the old characters received tweaks - for example, Ken and Ryu's usual Hurricane Kick has been replaced with a three-stage kick attack more like Dan's Dankukyaku. Overall, it's the same Street Fighter action you're used to, except with new characters and not quite as fast. That's SFEX’s only glaring gameplay flaw, really: it feels quite slow, particularly if you're used to playing something like MvC3. Everything just has a hint of slow-motion about it, particularly the aerial attacks. Once you've jumped up, you're going to be staying there for a while, floating around like a karate zeppelin. It certainly doesn't ruin the game or anything, it just takes a little getting used to, and some more methodical thinking when you're planning your attacks.

Any slight issues with the gameplay are compensated for by the sheer amount of gameplay modes the game throws at you with a big grin on it's face, saying "hell, I know you love to kick people in the face: here's a whole bunch of different ways to do it!". Aside from the regular arcade mode (which features not one but two secret bosses), there's a team battle mode, survival mode, time attack mode and a watch mode if you essentially want a screensaver of nothing but Skullomania fighting Skullomania. It may not be the only use for the watch mode, but by God it's the best use. There's even a mission mode: much like Capcom's recent fighters you can face a series of trials, starting with things like chucking out hadokens but quickly progressing to ridiculously difficult combos that my enfeebled hands cannot master. Bloody Guile and his charge supers. By completing the trials, you can also unlock the game's hidden characters, who frankly are a bit disappointing: evil versions of Ryu and Hokuto and the two training dummies.

Content-wise SFEX has plenty to go at, but in terms of presentation it's... mixed. Starting with the graphics, and let's be honest here: they're bad. The low-poly models are covered in corners sharp enough to shave on and everyone's hair looks like it's been carved from wood. Well, apart from Akuma - he appears to be wearing the magical Ruby Crown of the Elven-Folk.

Things get particularly bad when the action gets up-close and personal, especially during throws when the fighters become an amorphous cuboid mélange of body-parts.

I hope that's meant to be dust floating out of Guile's groin and not some kind of crotch-ghost.
At least the fighters are well animated and move around fluidly, but it's not just the fighters that are graphically challenged. The menus and HUDs are all very bland and basic, with simple gradients for health bars and poorly-rendered CG backgrounds. Perhaps most disappointingly, there are no post-match win-quotes. I'm pissed off about this because I'm sure Skullomania had some very important things to say, assuming he hasn't gone completely insane underneath that mask and can now only communicate using puppets made of human hair or something.

Speaking of noise, the sound design is even more variable quality than the graphics. A big fat tick goes in the "YES" column for SFEX’s music, because it's all really excellent. Composed and arranged by Shinji Hosoe, Ayako Saso and Takayuki Aihara, I don't really know what genre you'd describe it as - electro-jazz, possibly - but that's not important. You don't need labels when it's this much fun. Standout tracks include Sakura's theme, an impossibly cheerful saxophone explosion called Precious Heart:

I'd be quite happy if this was Sakura's theme in every videogame she ever appeared in. Hell, I'd be happy if it was my theme tune. Also very good is Garuda's theme, "Stronger".

An excellent mix up-tempo synths and traditional Japanese instrumentation, it's a fittingly dramatic track for a hidden boss who fights like an angry samurai hedgehog. Who knew that the one thing more powerful than Akuma's Dark Hadou would be spikes? Apart from Megaman, I mean. Anyway, the whole soundtrack is very good and readily available on Youtube, so do go and have a listen.

On the flipside of the sound design, nearly all the sampled speech is strangely-enunciated to the point of being unrecognisable. I know the Street Fighter games have long been associated with misheard attack names, but in SFEX they're a particularly garbled bunch of battlecries. Here, I made a video to demonstrate:

Is it wrong to make fun of the work of these voice actors, these honest people who are just doing their best in a language they do not speak? Probably, but I'm not above a cheap laugh, and "Juice Kick!" has been making me laugh ever since my younger brother pointed it out when we were kids. Speaking of voices, if SFEX’s announcer - the guy who sounds almost offended by having to say "Plus Alpha" at the end of the title - sounds familiar, that's probably because you know him better as Chris Redfield from the original Resident Evil, AKA voice actor Scott McCulloch.

I'm not really sure where Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha stands in people's estimation of the Street Fighter series as a whole. While it seems quite fondly remembered these days, and the review scores at the time were above average, when I was younger I remember getting the feeling that the general opinion of the game was largely negative. This was due partly to the poor graphics but mostly because it wasn't considered a "real" SF game (probably because so many of the established SF characters were left out) and that the move to 3D models was seen as some kind of cop-out in the face of emerging series like Tekken.

Maybe it's just my personal little bubble of youthful experience happened to contain people who didn't rate SFEX, but all I can think these days is that anyone who thought that SFEX was a bad game simply hadn't played it. It's most definitely not a bad game; at its core I'd say it's a very good game. Admittedly the graphics hold it back slightly, and it might be a little too similar to earlier SF games to make a lasting impact, but it's a well-crafted title with interesting new characters that's still fun to play today. And for anyone who still thinks it's not a "real" SF game, the founder of Arika and executive producer of this game was one Akira Nishitani. He was also a designer on Street Fighter II, so I guess he knows what he's doing when it comes to digital violence.

Sadly, we'll probably never get to see another SFEX game, or even have the new characters appear in other Capcom games. While Arika did make SFEX2 and 3, they had a falling-out with Capcom and because they own the rights to the original characters, Capcom can't use them in any future games. That's a real shame, because I think Skullomania, Blair and D. Dark in particular would have been fun additions to the overall SF family. Sadly it was not to be, and Skullomania will have to live on only in our hopes, dreams and a series of erotic thrillers that I'm writing for the silver screen. Nicholas Cage has been pencilled in for the main role.

If you're a Street Fighter fan and you've never played SFEX, then I can definitely recommend tracking it down if for no other reason than to play as the new characters. If you're not a full-on SF obsessive, then I can't recommend that you go out of your way to hunt it out, not when there are so many better and more readily-available SF games out there, but if you happen across it in the wild then pick it up and give it a go.
I'll leave you with one last bit of madness: Guile's ending.

The thing that gets me about this is the way he holds his arms perfectly still in that weird robotic pose as he somersaults. Oh yeah, and surfing on the F-15. And the fact he didn't notice D. Dark up there with him. I guess the whole thing gets me, really.

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SKELETON KREW (GENESIS / MEGADRIVE)

2011-12-14T09:46:00.000-08:00

Skeleton Krew: following the brave women of the Supermodel Navy as they struggle to maintain constant vigilance in the battle against Sudanese pirates while also trying on lots of ridiculous haute couture hats.
I hope that synopsis didn't get you too excited: for one thing, that'd say something worrying about your televisual preferences. Also, it's obviously not true. Skeleton Krew is actually a Megadrive / Genesis shooter created by Core Design and released in 1995. Still, if you really want to see the adventures of the Supermodel Navy I'm sure ITV will be picking it up some time in 2014.

So, yeah. A game where you shoot things. Projectiles come out of weapons and go into your enemies (hopefully). If there's one thing the Megadrive was more than adequately supplied with, it's games where trigger fingers are itchier than an eczema-sufferer's convention and the air contains a 10% oxygen / nitrogen mix and 90% lead. This one's got skeletons in it!

Three skeletons, to be precise. Well, not skeletons, really: more biomechanical meat warriors with an overwhelming fondness for the colour red. I'm sure you're terribly excited to meet them!

This shiny-headed chap is Spine, the leader of the team. At least I assume he's the leader, because he's the "average" one of the three and that's how these teams always work in videogames (and cartoons), right? The character with the fewest defining features is the de facto leader, because everyone knows kids love characters who are as bland as possible.
I'm sure Spine does a good job as leader, though. You could say he's the backbone of the team.

Rib is the female member of the team. I think. Those could be breasts, or they could be an extra set of huge insectoid eyes - either option seems equally possible. In a design decision so mind-shatteringly avant-garde that future generations will laud it as the pivotal moment when videogames changed from mere entertainment to true art, Rib is the fastest character but also the weakest. Well fuck me, I did not see that coming.
Speaking of fucking, note that it lists the characters date of "Konception" in their data. Not their date of birth, but the moment that the gametes of their skeleton parents fused together to produce a zygote.

And finally there's Joint. Big, slow, tough, that's Joint alright. After two characters, they could no longer keep up with the effort of naming the characters after bones. You couldn't have called him Skull? Or Scapula? Or even Pisiform? I'd have much preferred Pisiform. Maybe they meant Joint as in a joint of meat, which would be fitting because Joint here is bulging with veiny muscle tissue and in fact looks nothing like a skeleton. None of the Skeleton Krew look like skeletons but I'll let Core off with this one because there isn't a word for what they actually are, unless "Iron Maiden-y" is a word now.

Information about the plot is slim - all you're told is that the Skeleton Krew are hunting a villain with the Gothtastic name of Moribund Kadaver across the galaxy for some unspecified crime. It must be serious, though: the Skeleton Krew are after him, and they spell all their hard Cs with a K! That's, like, totally a sign of edgy and tough organizations with serious agendas, like Kriss Kross or Mortal Kombat or the Ku Klux Klan. Sorry, did I say seriousness? I meant severe cerebral trauma.

So, the game itself, and what do we have here? Why, it's an isometric, sort of top-down shooter that bears some similarity to games like Smash T.V. The three buttons of the standard Megadrive / Genesis pad encompass the usual shooter controls: the A button changes your weapon, B is for firing and C makes your chosen Krewmember perform a feeble little hop-jump thing.
That's all normal enough, but here's where the problems start to surface. In this type of game, you do not want to have to face directly at the bad guys to shoot them. It's just not fun. The main reason games like Smash T.V. and Robotron work so well is the dual-joystick system that lets you move and aim in different directions. Of course, the Megadrive pad does not have two joysticks or joypads. It doesn't even have shoulder buttons, more's the pity. To get around this, you can control your Skeleton's rotation by holding two buttons at once. Hold the fire button, and also hold either A to rotate left or B to rotate right.

It takes some getting used to, and even when you've been playing for a while it never really feels comfortable at all. The only advice I can give for using this system is to practise letting go of the fire button to perform quick 180-degree turns instead of holding the buttons and waiting for your character to rotate, because they turn at such a sedate pace that most three-toed sloths would consider them a bit lethargic.

In Core's defence, it's a fairly good compromise, even if it never feels quite right... but forget about that! Look at these beautiful graphics! Yes, Skeleton Krew's stand-out feature is the extremely high quality of the graphics. Pictured in the screenshot above is the first stage's mini-boss: a flesh-covered dropship thing that neatly encapsulates the graphical style - bio-organic, somewhat H.R. Giger inspired (but not too Gigery), cyberpunk-horror, all rendered in sharp, clean sprites with some really excellent shading work.

Skeleton Krew's striking looks seem to be mostly down to a guy called James Ryman, who worked on the graphics for the game as well as producing the official artwork, like the cover for the Amiga version shown above. Poor Rib - she's essentially a flayed mass of polished bone and exposed muscle tissue with hair like a mad cat lady and she's still been sexualised. Still, Ryman's designs are interesting and well-realised enough that he gets a pass from me. Also, I think he might have worked for Games Workshop in the past: a lot of skulls in this game look very familiar. That's right, I'm familiar with a lot of drawings of skulls. What of it?

Anyway, once you've beaten the hovership, you run around the stage for a little while longer and then bam! Suddenly you're in stage two, making your way down a giant elevator shaft in a lift filled with what looks like one of my attempts at making vegetable soup.
Yes, determined to make sure that beat-em-ups don't have all the fun, the entire second stage of Skeleton Krew is an elevator section. At least you do actually get off the lift now and then. Go down in the lift, clear a room of enemies, get back on the lift, repeat. That's the whole stage. It's pretty dull.

In its favour, stage two has an actual boss and doesn't just abruptly end when you reach an arbitrary point. The boss looks excellent, too, and he's pretty unique. You know, for a wall. A razor-fanged walls that fire spiked snakes out of his arms/orifices, granted, but still a wall. I'm a bit conflicted about this boss, I'll be honest. Still, it’s a boss! And he's big and mean-looking! I'm sure there'll be plenty more titanic boss battles in the rest of the game - it's a Megadrive shooter, after all.

Stage three: the sewer duct, which appears to be made mostly of pulsating sphincters. Yowzer. It's... well, it's more of the same, and this is the big problem with Skeleton Krew - there's just not that much to it. Case in point: powerups. There are none. Nothing. No new weapons, no special abilities or temporary invincibilities. There aren't even any health items. You start with your two weapons, a basic rapid-fire plasma cannon and the universe's most pathetic mortar that launches grenades roughly four feet ahead of you and if you don't like 'em then fuck you, buddy, because that's all you're getting. Maybe it's meant to illustrate what a squad of ultimate badasses the Skeleton Krew are - two guns is all they need, and health pickups are for wimps - but it ends up just being boring.

It still looks good, though, and fortunately the graphics aren't the only high point of the game. The music, composed by Nathan McCree in a style most accurately described as really flippin' Megadrive-y, is spot on too. A great mixture of sinister horror and glitchy sci-fi, the stage three theme is a standout and the soundtrack as a whole is excellent at setting the mood and frankly deserves a better game.

Next is stage four: Mars! The volcanic planet, filled with lava, crystals and monsters whose terrifying grins put even Tom Cruise to shame, although their eyes seem more soulful than everyone's favourite cult-worshipping midget.

The gameplay remains the same. Run around, shoot monsters, destroy some power generator things. There is no boss.

Venus is the next stage. Venus, the... irrigation planet? The gameplay at least takes a small detour here, as the level is patrolled by indestructible sentinels who patrol the maze-like walkways and can kill you instantly is you so much as brush against them. This raises another issue with Skeleton Krew: there are three characters, but there is no point playing as anyone other than Joint. He takes much less damage than the other two and yet he's still nimble enough to avoid most attacks. Rib may be faster, but she has all the durability of a china teacup in a cement mixer, and Spine isn't much better, so Joint ends up carrying the whol team on his (admittedly sizable) shoulders.

Yet again, your mission is to destroy power generators. I think that's what they are, anyway: they could be some form of hyper-advance skeleton hi-fi system for all I know. I shouldn't make such wild assumptions. Oh, and guess what? There is no boss.

Stage six and whaddya know? It's the final level already. Already? I've played LCD watch games with more content than this! At least Kadaver's base is the most visually interesting stage, with walls made of talons, saw blades hurtling around the floor and some interestingly designed monsters whose hands have fused together into a gun.

The most surprising thing about this stage is just how easy it is. In fact, the game as a whole is not exactly difficult, and the fact that the password system allows you to start at any stage with a full complement of lives and continues means than completing Skeleton Krew is a damn sight easier than finishing almost every other Megadrive shooter.

Eventually you'll track down Kadaver himself. Thank Christ, an actual boss fight! Kadaver is a David Bowie-esque wizard of some sort whose only real method of attack is shooting a trail of glowing balls at you. Once again, he's far too easy to defeat, but at least I've had the pleasure of doing battle with the skeleton twin of Jareth from Labyrinth.

Oh good, we'll be back home in time for Coronation Street. Sorry, Koronation Street.

No, of course Kadaver isn't dead. He's got a final form waiting for us, obviously. Yawn. To be quite honest, videogames have spent so many years conditioning me to expect any serious evil threat to have a second, or third, or even fourth form that whenever I encounter any media where the villain does die first time, (and stays dead,) it takes me by surprise.

At least Kadaver's true form is suitably grotesque, if a bit of a baffling choice for something that's presumably meant to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies. A cyborg frog with hands for feet? Sure it's weird, but it's not going to keep me awake at night. The best thing about him is the animation of his hand-feet as he waddles from side to side trying to shoot you with one of his many Gatling guns.
He's not much tougher than the first form. He's dead soon enough, and the Skeleton Krew can collect their bounty/get revenge/conquer the universe or whatever the hell it was that they were after in the first place. But first, a tough moral decision!

Well, I'm a nice guy, and I'm sure these gun-toting mutant mercenaries are too. Let's take him in alive.

Whoops. Turns out Kadaver had a gun on his shoulder, and he shoots you. The game dumps you back at the start of the boss fight and you have to do it all again. Second time around, I put a bullet in his head. You win, the game ends and the credits roll. Hooray!

Skeleton Krew is a goddamn Fabergé egg of a game: beautiful on the outside, but ultimately hollow and meaningless. The graphics and music really are top-notch, but the sheer brevity of the game and one-note nature of the gameplay means that I can't recommend it. The lack of boss battles and interesting weaponry hold it back too, which is unfortunate because there's the glimmer of a good game at the core of Skeleton Krew. Maybe the game was rushed to release for one or more of the myriad reasons that unfinished games are produced, and if so that's a real shame. Skeleton Krew, then: a missed opportunity that only hardcore shooter fans should seek out.

P.S. I spent the whole time I was writing this with the theme tune to the mid-nineties action cartoon series Skeleton Warriors stuck in my head. Now it won’t leave. Thanks for that, Core Design.

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9 BIZARRE AND DISTURBING VIDEOGAME COMMERCIALS

2011-12-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

So, you tend to get three types of videogame commercial on TV these days: straight-up game footage with a tagline, "artistic", high-budget efforts like the Halo campaigns and Nintendo's twee "fun for all the family" clips. Things were different in the early days, though. Advertisers seemed unsure how to translate the charms of this new medium into a thirty-second advert, and more often than not they decided to go weird. Sometimes deeply, bafflingly weird, and as that's always interesting to watch here are a few bizarre and occasionally disturbing videogame commercials.
Apologies for the quality of some of these, but bear in mind they are mostly 20-year old VCR rips that have been uploaded to YouTube.

The Legend of Zelda (NES)

Parents concerned about this new "video games" phenomenon? Want to reassure them that it's a fun, harmless pastime? Why not show a commercial that equates playing Legend of Zelda with completely losing your fucking mind!

That's John Kassir, probably best known to most people as the voice of The Crypt Keeper. In this commercial, he portrays a man whose experiences with the digital land of Hyrule have completely shattered his mind.

Now all he can do is prance around, shrieking in terror as he recalls the enemies from the game, screaming Zelda's name at the black walls of whatever secure facility he's been incarcerated in. That's the lesson, kids: playing videogames, even joyful fantasy romps like Legend of Zelda, will leave you mentally and physically traumatised. As we shall see, this is not an uncommon theme in videogame advertising.

Atari Jaguar

More tales of captivity and brain problems with this spot promoting the Atari Jaguar.

It might just be me, but it seems that the implication of this commercial is that the only way to get someone to buy an Atari Jaguar is to literally tamper with their brain. You might think you want a brand-new Playstation, but just you wait until we've attached these electrodes to your temporal lobes.

"Why would I buy a 32-bit system for $300 when I can get a 64-bit Jaguar system for $149?" Because the Jaguar is shit, you idiot.

Sega Megadrive "Cyber Razor Cut"

One of the few videogame adverts I actually remember seeing as a child, Sega's "Cyber Razor Cut" campaign is about, um, well, you see, it's about a barber who turns people into robots?

Or possibly he's some kind of futuristic robot mechanic, it's not really made clear. This one's made bizarre by the disparate elements: there's some kind of cyberpunk theme going on, what with the robot parts and all, but then there's a cockney guy singing a song about Megadrive games with some of the most contrived and forced rhymes I've ever heard. "Hitch a lift on a pterodac-bird"? Really?

Yes, that is certainly a soothing face that makes me want to buy a Sega games console. Fun fact for any fans of purile British sitcoms (like I am): the Barber is indeed played by Steven O'Donnell, AKA Spudgun from Bottom. It truly is a shame that neither the Sega Megadrive nor Bottom are available on the NHS, but at least the song is catchy.

Sega Game Gear

Do not give old people videogames, because this might happen:

Grandpa gets his arthritic hands on a Game Gear and proceeds to have a freak-out worthy of, well, a five-year-old getting a new console for Christmas.

I think the only "radically bodacious experience" that guy's going to be having in the near future is a huge coronary.
Yet again, this seems like a strange message to put out there - namely, the Game Gear is a handheld your grandad will enjoy, and the excitement will probably kill him. Nice work, Sega.

Super NES

I have to classify this one as disturbing, because I think it gave me an erection. That's pretty disturbing.

Donkey Kong Country 3 (SNES)

A sultry blonde in tight jeans dances seductively to the jukebox in an American diner. Oh yeah, baby! Why don't you turn around and come over...

OH SWEET JESUS HELP ME.

Yes, Nintendo decided that the best way to advertise DK's latest jungle romp was to cause the viewer deep psychosexual trauma. Imagine if you were a young lad and the sight of that sexy woman dancing cause the first stirrings of your sexual awareness. Then she sudden turns around to reveal a face halfway between a trainyard wino and Donatella Versace, and that's the image that seeps into your subconscious and scars your romantic relationships for life. Shocking imagery from the Big N...

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi Island (SNES)

...and here's some more, this time advertising Yoshi's Island. What's the best way to portray the cheerful cartoon charms of Mario's dionsaur pal? Why, an almost exact copy of Monty Python's "Mr. Creosote" sketch, of course!

Fat dude exploding? Yeah, that'll work.

Remember, kids: videogames are fun!

NES

And they keep on coming!

"WE ARE NINTENDO. YOU CANNOT BEAT US. SUBMIT. KILL SEGA FANS. OBEY."

No messing around here, just an advert that flat-out threatens you, although given the amount of Super Mario games I've completed Bowser is writing checks that his blocky ass can't cash. Also, isn't the dog from Duck Hunt on your side? Why would I want to beat him? I mean, everyone who's ever played Duck Hunt wants to beat him, but with a stick or something - not in an actual duck-hunting competition.

Joust (Atari 5200)

And finally for today, something that's less a commercial and more a two-minute trip into a hellish Otherworld. You know Joust, right? The old arcade game where men riding ostriches joust with one another? Well, apparently the Atari version is so incredible that playing it for mere seconds will cause the game's characters to suddenly appear and trash your living room.

By my count it takes roughly fourteen seconds of play before ostrich-knights crash through your floor and begin mortal combat right there on your shag-pile carpet. That is some powerful stuff.
So, the knights do battle for a while, and that's fair enough - the on-screen action spilling into the real world is a pretty standard technique that adverts use to show the raw power of these newfangled games. The bizarre bit is at the end, after one knight is dead and the other leaves. Out the front wall he goes, but not before leaving behind an egg. An egg which, for some unfathomable reason, the Atari-playing tool decides to eat raw.

"Oh shit, the egg of a giant mutant ostrich! Just the thing to quell the hunger that gnaws ceaselessly at the core of my being!"
So, he eats the egg, for no real reason other than "this eggs exists". Worse is to come, though, because the egg causes him to undergo a disturbing metamorphosis into a half-man, half-buzzard hybrid.

He has no-one to blame but himself, and possibly Atari for creating a game so powerful it can destroy the walls of space and time. He doesn't even transform into a knight - he's a bird now, which I guess means some warrior is going to jump on his back any second and ride him into battle. What the fuck. Still, at least it's not as sexist and immature as most print videogame ads of the nineties were.

And there you have it - videogame commercials used to be even more baffling than they are now. This is an almost bottomless pit of insanity, so there may well be another article on this subject in the future. For now, I'll just remind you about that sexy chimp lady. Pleasant dreams!
(Thanks to everyone who uploaded these videos to YouTube in the first place!)

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