SHOOTING RANGE (NES)

I used to have an NES Zapper, but my younger brother decided it would make a good bath toy. It's okay, it was years ago, I'm over it now. There are two consequences to this: one is that my Duck Hunt high-scores will remain forever unbeaten, and the other is that I never got to play TOSE and Bandai's 1989 NES marksmanship-em-up Shooting Range. Oh, cruel fate! Well, I'm going to put that right today, and judging by the sheer amount of creative effort that went into coming up with the game's title, I'm sure it will be fantastic.

Seriously though, Shooting Range? You couldn't come up with anything more enticing than that? Here's a couple of better titles, for free from me to you. Bullseye Fun-Pack. Crazy Carl's Circus of Bullets. Target Shooting X-Treme: Ultimate Annihilation Edition. He Who Zaps First Zaps Longest. See? It's not difficult. I can only assume the only other candidate for the title of this game was NES Lightgun Game 001, and that was shouted down for being too interesting.

You get to choose between a Normal Game and a Party Game. The party game is not "shoot the tail off the donkey," nor is it a harrowing combination of Russian roulette and pass-the-parcel. We'll get to it later, but first we'll be exploring the normal game, which makes up the bulk of the action.

Shooting Range is not exactly packed with content: aside from the party game, there are three stages and a bonus round. The first stage is obviously Wild West-themed, because I'm not lucky enough for it to be about the deadly onslaught of the sentient mutant cactus folk, and stage three is set in space. As for stage two, it's a house? I'm going to kill that house. Okay, got it. Stage two, murder a house. But first, cowboys.

Here we are, then. The Old West, where the natives balance oversized peppermint candies on their heads. Those are the targets you need to shoot, not the native Americans. In fact they're the only targets you need to shoot in Shooting Range, and every stage has you shooting these circular Umbrella Corp logos rather than the people and animals that litter the stage. Why did TOSE and Bandai go for this division between the recognisable people / creatures and abstract targets? I have no idea. Maybe they didn't want to be accused of promoting violence. Maybe they couldn't be bothered to draw a different set of sprites showing a native warrior bleeding to death from a gut-shot, his life fading away as his blood soaks into the desert sand? The only semi-convincing reason I can come up with is that it makes it very clear what you're supposed to be shooting at at any given time, but that would still be true if you just had to shoot the characters. They stand out pretty well when they're moving around the screen, it's not like they're particularly camouflaged.

A cowboy ran by. He wasn't carrying a target, so I couldn't shoot him. I mean, I could shoot at him, and naturally I did, but because he wasn't carrying a red-and-white pinwheel he remained unaffected by my gunfire. Now that I see him in a still picture and not dashing across my screen in the manner of someone running for the bus while trying not to look like they're running for the bus, I've noticed a couple of things. One is that he's got a badge, so he must be the sheriff. The other that he appears to be smoking, in an NES game that (as far as I can tell) was only released in the US. I guess that one snuck past Nintendo of America's censors, just like this cowboy snuck past my gunfire.

A lone white dove flies by with a target in its mouth, a sign that the flood waters have receded and Noah's Ark has come to rest on top of a factory making Christmas sweets.
The problem is that the odd bird and unshootable cowboy just aren't cutting it. To progress in Shooting Range, you have to reach a target score before the time runs out, and there simply weren't enough enemies appearing on screen for me to collect the points I needed. Thus condemned to failure, I sat and waited for the inevitable while staring at the desert scenery, which was sort of relaxing in its own way.

Then I realised you can use the D-Pad on a connected controller to move your viewpoint left and right, allowing you to track down other enemies and targets that may have eluded you. I even got to see the cowboy doing something! He was trying to shoot me, or at least trying to scare me by pointing his target at me. He can't hurt you or anything. Shoot him without worrying about the consequences! Except make sure you actually hit the target, because every shot you fire results in your energy meter decreasing, and if it empties completely then it's game over. You can refill it occasionally with power-ups dropped by defeated targets, as well as finding the odd hourglass to give you extra time, but on the whole it does not pay to be wildly shooting your gun even if this is the Wild West.

Once I'd figured out you can move the screen with the pad - a clumsy, inelegant solution to a problem that need not exist - clearing the first stage was not much of a challenge. That's not meant as a boast, it's the first stage and I'm playing on the easiest difficulty (although all the difficulty level changes is how much time you start with to complete each stage). I'm looking forward to the next stage, though, because now I know it's a ghost house.

We've got a house, we've got a ghost, so now I know that "ghost house" wasn't just a clever name intended to lure me in.

It's not just ghosts, either: all manner of horror movie monsters are roaming around, from werewolves to vampires to mummies. I am now fully on board with the whole "shoot only the targets" mechanic, because all these monsters are so adorable and precious that I wouldn't want to shoot them anyway. Forget Shooting Range, Bandai should have called it Look at That Mummy, Sinking to His Bandaged Knees in Abject Despair Because I Shot His Target: The Lightgun Game.

I think my favourite are these Frankensteins, though. They look more robotic than usual, as though the Mad Doctor who built them was running low on cadavers and had to make do with odds and ends from his garage. And look, they're holding their targets like lollipops! Aww. I can't help but imagine that the original Creature wouldn't have been quite so bent on destroying his creator if Frankenstein had given him a big lollipop.

If you shoot their targets, the Frankensteins look at the now-empty space with an air of calm puzzlement. It's pretty great, and it makes me wish the whole game has been based around this monster theme. I like puzzled Frankensteins, but now I want to see confused witches, baffled warlocks, uncomprehending elder gods from beyond the stars, that kind of thing. Oh well, I can enjoy it for what it is -  decent if uninspired target-shooting action that does at least try to mix the movement patterns of your targets up. Some stand still, some move horizontally and the werewolves frantically jitter around the stage with their targets balanced on their snouts in a manner that suggest the brand of flea powder they're using is not very effective.

The previous paragraph may have implied that there are no witches in Shooting Range, but there are. They're just not confused. They know exactly what they're doing, be it carrying targets for you to shoot or engaging in terrifying bacchanalian rituals that let them commune with the dark lord Satan.

After the ghost house, there's a brief bonus stage interlude in the form of this bottle-blasting minigame. Simply shoot all the bottles to win, although things are complicated by the fact the bottles remain resolutely bullet-proof aside from the second or so when they're flashing white. Presumably this element of timing was designed to stop the player from going hog wild and getting through the bottles faster than Oliver Reed, but as the rest of the game is all about precision shooting I think it would have made a nice change to include a stage where the only thing being tested is how fast you can pull the trigger.

The final stage has an outer space theme and is heavily influenced, in terms of monster design at least, by the Alien movies. These pink things are very facehugger-esque. "Maybe you just want them to be facehuggers, VGJunk," I hear you say, "because you love the Aliens franchise so much." Well, fair enough. These things could quite easily be generic space insects, your common-or-garden Astro-Spiders.

I mean, these pop-eyed blue things definitely aren't related to the Aliens series, unless they were planned to appear in the ill-fated kid's cartoon spin-off. Speaking of cartoons, they look like something from The Real Ghostbusters. Nothing Alien related here, then, until you shoot their targets...

...at which point they turn into an eggs from which the facehugger-type enemies hatch and jump at your face.

Also there are monsters that are clearly xenomorphs, albeit orange ones. There's one now, lurking at the right-hand side of the screen and pondering how it's going to get an parasitic embryo into the target it's carrying given that it has no face to hug. So, there you are. Aliens. It's hardly surprising, Aliens has been more of an influence on videogames than probably any movie ever, from Contra to Doom. They're not usually quite so tangerine, mind you, aside from the dog aliens in Alien Trilogy.

The final stage even has a boss of sorts: the happy union of tentacles, eyeball and brain, all coming together with the sole purpose of making you lose the game by running out of time. The boss doesn't attack in any way, so it's down to you to take it out by shooting it right in the eyeball several times. This task is made more challenging by the boss possessing bullet-proof eyelids and a sleepy expression that tends towards Droopy levels of drowsiness, making it surprisingly difficult to hit the boss who is fifty percent eyeball in the eyeball. Still, I got there in the end, once I'd figured out it was easier to wait for the boss to fly in front of my sights rather than chasing it around the screen.

For my troubles, I received... a bronze medal? Oh, come on, I shot everything you asked me to and even some things you didn't! "You need to work a little harder," it says. You know, I'm not sure I do. There are many things in my life I need to work at - my personality, my potential employability, cleaning the grout on my bathroom tiles - which are much more important than Shooting Range.

However, those things are difficult so I pretended they didn't exist and went for the gold. Hooray for solid life choices! It turns out the key to being the best is the bottle-shooting minigame, as destroying all the bottles within the time limit nets you a very large points bonus. Is it worth it? No, not really. I already knew my play is wonderful. It's a modern re-imagining of Macbeth, it's going to blow the critics away with its fresh new take on the Bard!

Oh, right, and there's also the Party Game mode. It's whack-a-mole, except it's shoot-a-mole. Shoot-a-target, anyway. The targets pop up from the holes, and you shoot them. Sometimes the orbs at the back light up, and you have to shoot them to activate a new wave of targets. This is easily in my bottom twenty worst parties I have ever attended. It doesn't get into the bottom five, because there were no drunken arguments or embarrassing lapses of intestinal integrity.

I'm happy with being average. I'm certainly not going to play the party game again. If you really want to see the other endings, do it yourself. What am I, your mother?

And there you have it, Shooting Range is over; almost before it started, such is the brevity of the included content. What is there is diverting enough in a very basic way, and aside from having to hold the Zapper and the pad to play the game - which adds nothing and is merely awkward - I can't think of anything that you could change to make it better without making it an entirely different game. Apart from more stages, I mean. What is available is fun and cute, so if you're after a very basic NES lightgun game then you'll probably have at least some fun with Shooting Range. If you're after a deeper, more involved NES lightgun game then, erm, tough. I don't think there are any.

Recently on VGJUNK:
Learn all about America in All About America!
A love letter to Mega Man 3!
Traitorous Foot Soldiers in TMNT II: Back From the Sewers!

KAMEN RIDER (SUPER FAMICOM)

It's 2016, and I'm back from my festive break (I'd like to say "relaxed and refreshed", but "fat and stressed" is closer to the truth) with more words about old videogames, and where better to start, during this period of rejuvenation and change, than with a game about a man who transforms himself into a righteous instrument of justice by waving his arms around and shouting? It's Sun L and Bandai's 1993 Super Famicom henshin-em-up Kamen Rider!

I'll be honest, I don't know much about Kamen Rider beyond the basics. It's a long-running series of Japanese superhero shows starring a man who becomes a grasshopper-themed purveyor of vengeance, presumably because all the cool animals were already taken as superhero identities. Kamen Rider is phenomenally popular in its home country, and if Ultraman is the Japanese equivalent of Superman then I suppose Kamen Rider would be Batman. There are roughly twelve thousand Kamen Rider series, including a new one that started last year, but this game is about the original Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider has a motorcycle, which is why he's called Kamen Rider and not Kamen Jogger, and his most powerful move is the Rider Kick. That is about the extent of my knowledge on the subject of Kamen Rider, and because this game is all in Japanese that's unlikely to change. If you want more detailed info on the Kamen Rider franchise, I'm sure there's a nightmarishly detailed wiki out there, but I'm just interested in the game.

The intro depicts two young ne'er-do-wells harassing an old man and stealing his treasured family pipe, all viewed through a mirror crafted by an Aztec Nazi. No, of course not, The young man on the left is Kamen Rider 1 and so I guess the one in the 1920's newspaper boy hat is the imaginatively-named Kamen Rider 2. There's evil in the world in the form of terrorist organization Shocker, and the Kamen Riders have vowed to bring an end to their tyranny right after they've finished playing keep-away with this guy's plumbing supplies.

Here are the Kamen Riders. They're posing, which seems to make up around seventy percent of a Kamen Rider's workload. The rest is punching freaks, so let's get on with that, shall we?

Kamen Rider is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, so you can call this a fairly self-indulgent start to the year. Assuming you're player one, you're put in control of Kamen Rider's alter-ego Takeshi Hongo, although every time I look at him I want to call him Kabuto Kouji. I have no idea why, because Kabuto Kouji is the hero of Mazinger Z. Maybe it's because Kouji and Hongo both share a fondness for large sideburns. Hongo is dressed in white jumpsuit that makes him look half mechanic, half Elvis, although in his defence Kamen Rider did start airing in 1971. To bring things back around to videogames, in the original series Takeshi Hongo was played by actor Hiroshi Fujioka, perhaps better known to lovers of weird videogame ephemera as the mighty Sega mascot Segata Sanshiro.

Opposing Hongo, although probably not exactly striking fear into his heart, are the troops of Shocker, who dress like beatniks and prance onto the screen like a dance troupe auditioning for Britain's Got Talent. Shocker's true goal is revealed - by creating a soldier that loves abstract poetry and modern dance, they've come close to developing the most easily-bullyable schoolboy imaginable.
As this is a beat-em-up, the gameplay mostly explains itself and, for the most part, doesn't stray too far from the usual genre template. You've got an attack and a jump button, the attack button can be tapped repeatedly for a short combo of hits, you can do a jumping kick, that kind of thing. The most immediate differences are that you don't have a life-draining emergency attack, and that each stage is broken into five or six short vignettes that see Hongo leaping off the top of the screen once he's finished one, rather than the continuous stages of something like Final Fight.

Just in case you were in any doubt that this is a beat-em-up, here's an oil drum that you can smash. There's an item inside, although Kamen Rider is not very generous with the power-ups. There are big health refills, small health refills and (I believe) one solitary extra life. Hey, I've just noticed that there are no points in this brawler! That'd a little unusual. How am I supposed to know the numerical value of each life I take with my bare fists?
One of the beatnik-gymnasts is orange, and he has a rapier. Even their fighting styles are kinda wussy.

Luchadores! Now this is more like it, something manly and tough and easily baited into standing near the edge of this hole so I can kick them down it. So, take a closer look at these masked menaces and ask yourself: are they wearing leather bracelets, or did their evil henchman sweatshirts shrink in the wash and now their sleeves are all too short?

Hongo has been making short work of these Shocker minions with his basic punch combos, but just around the corner lurks a much sterner test in the form of this strange creature. It can spit sticky, damaging webs at you, as though it is some bizarre combination of spider and man. But who is this strange creature? I suppose I'd better check the wiki. Oh... so his name is Spider Man, huh? No, it's fine, I can see why you'd call him Spider Man. I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't call him Spider Man.

Spider Man is a far tougher foe than all the other Shocker goons, with his web attack being especially dangerous, and so there is only one option: Hongo must transform into the mighty hero Kamen Rider (1), which you can do whenever you like by pressing the X button. The transformation consists of Hongo standing there slowly waving his arms, with the enemies paralysed though sheer incomprehension at your decision to break off in mid-battle to get some quick tai chi in.

You're also treated to a shot of Hongo's belt buckle, which facilitates his transformation into Kamen Rider. You have to watch his belt buckle spinning around every time you transform, which is nice and definitely doesn't stretch out into what feels like a goddamn eternity after the eighth or ninth time you've seen it.

Here he is, Kamen Rider himself (note: Kamen Rider does no actual riding in this game, just punching)! Spider Man stands no chance now, although honestly Kamen Rider doesn't play that much differently than Takeshi Hongo. He has a running jumping kick, which is a lot of fun if a little impractical when it comes to actually hitting the enemies rather than jumping past them. I want to say his punches are slightly more powerful than Hongo's but I think that might just be a matter of my own perception - now that I've transformed Kamen Rider I feel like his punches should be stronger, you know?

Now that I've become Kamen Rider, I'm ready to face the first end-of-stage boss. It's a dinosaur that spends the first half of the fight wandering around in the background and disinterestedly throwing bombs at you while you mop up the beatniks, before jumping down to take you on mano-a-mano. Surprisingly the dinosaur man's name isn't Dinosaur Man. He's called Tokageron, and he's a former football player that Shocker transformed into a monster in order to harness his tremendous leg strength. That's all it takes to get you on Shocker's radar, huh? One above-average physical trait? I look forward to fighting the Birdwatcher, with their keen eyesight, or a frog-based monster the Shocker created to weaponize the ability to roll his tongue into a tube.
Tokageron isn't much of a challenge as long as you keep moving and don't let him batter you with his tail, although the fight does take longer than I expected: given that he's a former soccer player it's surprising that hitting Tokageron once doesn't result in him rolling around on the floor in simulated agony.

Once you've depleted all the boss' health, and assuming you're in Kamen Rider form, you can press X to finish the job with the Rider Kick. I like the Rider Kick, as special moves go. It's got a pleasing simplicity to it. Kamen Rider is here to destroy evil, not spend ages faffing around with special chants or giant combining weapons. See the bad guy, kick the bad guy, move on. It's all very efficient.

Here's Kamen Rider on his motorcycle, which plays no other part in the game. His motorcycle looks like a six-year-old's drawing of a motorcycle, with gigantic wheels and more exhausts than a Kwik-Fit warehouse. All it's missing are some machine guns, maybe a couple of fins.

Between stages one and two, you're given the option to participate in one of three mini-events, or to ignore them all and move on to the next stage. This one sees Kamen Rider wrestling with a bulldozer, and naturally you have to tap the button to hold the bulldozer back. Keep the bulldozer at bay until the time runs out and congratulations, you win... erm, I'll have to get back to you on that one. I'm sure there is a reward for completing the mission, but I couldn't figure out what it was. A stat increase, maybe?
The bulldozer is the easiest of the three missions, although none of them are particularly strenuous - one has you dodging falling rocks for a set amount of time, and the other fills the screen with enemies and challenges you to survive until the timer runs out, a task made simpler by the reluctance of the enemies to chase you into the bottom corner of the screen.

Okay then, stage two proper begins and it's that classic staple of the beat-em-up genre, the construction site... except there doesn't seem to be much construction going on, unless this is the site of the world's largest sandcastle. While the character sprites are good - a little stiffly animated, perhaps, but drawn in a way I find very appealing - the backgrounds in Kamen Rider definitely fall onto the "waiting in a Post Office queue" side of dull. We've got sand, rocks, more sand and, to really jazz the place up, some emergency barriers. How thrilling.

It's Pickle Dan, the Gherkin Man, here to coat the world in his evil brine. I'm not going to look Pickle Dan up on the wiki, because it might tell me that Pickle Dan isn't his actual name and that he wasn't formerly a retired civil servant that Shocker mutated into a monster so they could control his incredible ability to preserve vegetables in vinegar.
I'm not sure why I'm fighting him as Hongo and not Kamen Rider, mind you. As far as I can see there are no drawbacks to being Kamen Rider, so I might as well be Kamen Rider all the time! It's a decision that definitely won't bite me in the arse later. Also, Kamen Rider wears gloves and Hongo does not. Imagine how it would feel to punch a gherkin into a coma with your bare hands? No, this is definitely a job for Kamen Rider.

The end of stage boss is this... thing. It's got Ookami in it's name, so I guess it's supposed to be wolf-based? It doesn't look much like a wolf. Wolves, unless I've been sorely misinformed by the dodgy t-shirt stall at my local market, do not have horns. Or wear belts. Or boots. Look, whatever this thing is it likes to charge at you, so combined with the horns I'm going to say it's a bull. It charges at Kamen Rider, so move out of the way and then hit the boss. Do this until your chance to finish the boss with the Rider Kick appears.

Then kick the boss out of the window and into a ravine. Rider Defenestration, very heroic.

Hmm, maybe I'll start taking Shocker more seriously now I know they're into crucifying people. What we can also learn from this image is that it's very difficult to draw pixel art of someone in a balaclava, because unless they're right next to the camera they just end up with an expression of cartoonish surprise. Maybe that's why they're called Shocker.

Stage three, and already Kamen Rider has sunk into a grey sludge of repetition, with Hongo pummelling the same beatniks and luchadores over and over again in this and indeed every other stage, all set against some of the most generic backdrops I've ever seen in a beat-em-up. Ooh, shipping containers, the developers are really stretching their horizons with that one.

At least the combat itself is fairly decent, with the ability to transform into Kamen Rider adding a touch of variety. That's not to say that the fighting is flawless, mind you, and my biggest problem with it is that once you've started your combo it's difficult to interrupt it - once Hongo's fists are flying he'll keep on swingin' as you watch, helpless to react, as a masked thug walks up behind you and clobbers you over the head with a 2X4. Combine this with even the most basic enemy's ability to do a lot of damage with very few attacks, and Kamen Rider ends up being one of those games that feels more difficult that it should be thanks to a hero who fights as though he's still shaking off the effects of last night's vindaloo and lager session.

The boss here is Garagaranda, the burrowing bastard. He spends most of the fight tunnelling around underground - an impressive feat considering we're fighting on top of a tower block - before popping up right under your feet for big damage. The trick is to keep running, and even that's not guaranteed to help you avoid him, and the fight becomes a rather dull battle of attrition. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if the game had used Garagaranda's other name of Ambassador Hell.The fight wouldn't have been any different, but I would have received a much higher amount of personal satisfaction if I'd battered someone called Ambassador Hell. What a great name. I'd love to see what Hell's embassy looks like, although it's probably very similar to any dingy, low-rent embassy only with ten times the pointless bureaucracy.

Then something came along that took me by surprise - between stages three and four, you're given the opportunity to change Kamen Rider's moveset! Now the L and R buttons can be equipped with attacks from a pool of different moves, which can be checked out on this screen here, including new combos, double jumping kicks and a host of new throws. I went for a throw-kick combo and a series of more powerful karate chops.
I'm surprised there aren't / weren't more beat-em-ups that included this kind of move management system, and I'll give Kamen Rider a lot of credit for including it. I don't think it's incredibly deep, and frankly I didn't have the time to try out a huge amount of permutations so I can't tell you if there are some combos that can be abused for an easy win, but I'm very impressed that it was included at all. I wish a similar system had appeared in more beat-em-ups, although this may be partly down to my brain's insistence that all games should be more like God Hand.

Excited by the murderous potential of Kamen Rider's new moves, I started the next stage and immediately transformed into the insectoid superman. I was having a merry old time beating up the bad guys, although it would have been a merrier time had I been offered the chance to fight something other than a beatnik, a luchador or an orange beatnik, but then I noticed something. Playing as Kamen Rider rather than Hongo does have a drawback. You see the stage boss's health bar at the bottom of the screen? Now look at it again in this screenshot from later in the stage.

It's gone up. The boss' maximum health actually increases as you dither about teaching these Ginsberg wannabes a lesson about not crucifying people, and if you're playing as Kamen Rider the health bar goes up way faster than if you're playing as Hongo. I'm not sure how I feel about this turn of events. On the one hand, I can see why the developers would want to keep Kamen Rider as a special ability, a transformation to be used in times of crisis, and this is at least an interestingly different way to keep the player from using KR all the time rather than, say, having a limited amount of Transformation Tokens or something. One the other hand, Kamen Rider is far more fun and interesting to play as than Hongo, with a wider move-set and a rather stylish scarf. Personally, my solution would have been to get rid of Hongo altogether and had the player be Kamen Rider all the time. After all, the game's called Kamen Rider, not Takeshi Hongo's Shocker-Smashing Slam-Fest.

Cool, a squid-man. His name is Ikadevil. It's okay, Ikadevil, I still think you're cool even if your name does sound like something from a Moshi Monsters-style creature collecting game. Who will triumph in this, the immortal battle between squid and grasshopper? You'd think Kamen Rider would have the advantage given that the battle is taking place on land, but Ikadevil can summon tiny meteors from the sky so that evens the odds a little. After a couple of deaths at the suckers of Ikadevil's tentacle whip, I eventually triumphed using the cheesiest of beat-em-up strategies: the repeated jumping kick. It took ages. It's a good job I played as Hongo for most of the stage, or I'd still be doing this fight now.

Stage five takes place in a fun fair, and there's very little to say about it because it's all the same as the other stages only with a 1000% increase in roller-coaster tracks. Still, I can look at this screenshot and imagine, for a brief moment, how nice it would have been to fight a monster with a huge carousel horse for a head.

Then there's the boss, a lumpy chap called Hiruchameleon. He's got "chameleon" right there in his name, so it's no surprise that his special power is camouflage, and by camouflage I mean the ability to vanish completely and become immune to damage before reappearing right next to you and draining half your health before you can react. At first, this was one of the most frustrating boss fights I've ever participated in - I just couldn't land a blow, and Hiruchameleon never left himself open to a counter-attack. Then, it clicked: if I'm already attacking when the boss reappears, he can't dodge my punches! So I stood there, tapping the attack button, until Hiruchameleon reappeared. When he did, my relentless attacks meant I could grab him immediately and give him a swift knee to the bollocks, or whatever disgusting sack of organs this mutated freak has instead of testicles. Yes, my incredible strategy actually worked. A true hero needs brains as well as brawn.

Into the final stage now, and Kamen Rider faces his most dangerous foe: himself! Okay, so Evil Kamen Rider is probably his third or fourth most dangerous foe, after Ikadevil, the final boss and Hiruchameleon before I figured out his weakness. Evil Kamen Rider is too fond of flying kicks, you see, allowing for plenty of opportunities to hit him when he lands. I don't blame him, I've often said that it you can do flying kicks all the time then you should do flying kicks all the time. It would be hypocritical of me to cast too much scorn on Evil Kamen Rider's tactics.

Then you get a boss rush, because Kamen Rider hasn't had enough problems with repetition already. Even in a really good beat-em-up a boss rush always feels like shallow padding, but here it feels like a Sisyphean task, if Sisyphus was pushing a boulder made of monster parts and cheap attacks. On the positive side, I spent so long chugging through the early part of the stage that the boss' health bar is already at maximum, so I might as well play as Kamen Rider.

The final showdown is against Shocker's secret weapon - so secret, in fact, that I don't think it exists outside this game. Prove me wrong, internet! But first let me tell you about this boss: he's a dick. A real pain in the arse. His claws and tail have a huge range, and each single hit takes about three-quarters of you health bar, so I hope you're looking forward to a fight with the same tentative approach work and potential for sudden, crushing defeat as me asking someone out on a date. It just drags on and on, and it's not even an interesting fight - the boss only really has two attacks, but when he can obliterate you so easily, why would he need any more than that? So you chip away at him, slowly whittling down his health until finally the menace of Shocker is destroyed and all men, women and grasshopper warriors can live in peace.

There go our noble heroes, streaking into the sunset on their bike which do, on closer inspection, totally have fins. Awesome. Thank you, Kamen Rider 1 and Kamen Rider 2. I'm sure you will be a great inspiration to Kamen Rider 3.
Kamen Rider comes close to being a really excellent little game, close enough that I was frustrated by its inability to push itself over the edge. The game's biggest flaw is undoubtedly the repetitive nature of the stages, and more variety would have gone a long way towards making this an easy recommendation, along with the addition of a few tweaks to speed up the combat and make Kamen Rider more responsive. There are some potentially exciting ideas in here, though. Transforming heroes are always fun, and the ability to select your own moves is great, but as it stands Kamen Rider will have to go down as a merely "good" game rather than a true classic of the genre. That said, I've been lying to you: the repetition isn't the worst thing about this game. The worst thing about this game is that it's making me wonder if I can pull off a flowing red scarf when, deep down, I know very well that I can't.

Recently on VGJUNK:
The 2015 VGJunk Review!
The surprisingly interesting golf game covers of the Famicom!
Animal and egg crime in Humpty Dumpty Mystery and Who Killed Cock Robin?