CASPER: FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD (PLAYSTATION)

Ghastly ectoplasmic phantoms! Blood-curdling spirits of death! The unquiet souls of those who refuse to leave this realm! Those would all be great things to have in a Halloweeen videogame, but today I'm writing about Realtime Associates' 2000 Playstation game Casper: Friends Around the World so instead you get to enjoy the adventures of a winsome lump of marshmallow fluff. Sorry about that.

The Casper in question is Casper the Friendly Ghost, the cartoon character created when someone decided that what kids really wanted to read about were the adventures of a dead child. Okay, maybe that's not fair - some iterations of the Casper franchise state that he's just "a ghost," which are simply another magical creature like goblins or elves. I'm most familiar with Casper through the eponymous 1995 live action / CG movie, because my younger brother really liked it and so it was never out of our VCR. My main memories of it are Bill Pullman Bill Pullman-ing to the max and Casper having a slightly creepy fixation on Christina Ricci, to the point of whispering "can I keep you?" to her while she sleeps as though she were a stray dog. Actually, that's a lie: my main memory of the film is Dan Akroyd's cameo as Ray Stantz, in which he flees terrified from Casper's house despite claiming for all those years that he ain't afraid of no ghost. I felt betrayed, you know? Anyway, Casper. He's a ghost, he's friendly, that's about the extent of his character.

He's so friendly that he's invited a bunch of human, non-dead children for a party at his mansion. What do their parents think of this? We'll never know, because they're nowhere to be seen. I guess they decided that Casper's trio of dickish ghost uncles - Stretch, Stinky and Fatso - were good enough chaperones. How much trouble can a bunch of unsupervised preteens running around a haunted, dilapidated mansion really get into?

One ghost who is most definitely not friendly is Kibosh, the villain of the piece. Peering into his crystal ball - apparently he's the ghost of a fairground clairvoyant - Kibosh is so disgusted to see Casper associating with the "fleshies" that he uses his magical power to make the kids disappear. At first he seems like a straightforward undead bigot who is opposed to the mixing of the living and the dead, but a more simple explanation is that he just wanted children's party to end. I've been to a children's party. I can sympathise.

Then there's a map, for some reason. If your child abduction spell has the side effect of leaving a map showing where you've taken the kids at the crime scene, then you need to work on your act.
So, map in hand, Casper travels the world looking for his lost friends. That's why that game's called Casper: Friends Around the World and not Casper: Friends on My Front Lawn.

The first stop is Hollywood - the glitz, the glamour, the poorly-constructed street lights! Oh, what a dream to be here in Tinseltown, plodding slowly from left to right and jumping to collect the occasional crystal. Casper: FATW is a platformer, I suppose. There's jumping involved. There are enemies to either avoid or to dispatch by throwing your "ghostly spheres" at them. I want to make a testicle joke about Casper's ghostly spheres, but I can't improve on the phrase "ghostly spheres." As well as walking left and right, you can also move into the background at certain pre-determined points.

That's what Casper is doing here. He's walking away from the camera, his face hasn't fallen off. Although, if he's semi-transparent shouldn't I be able to see the backs of his eyes? Also, why is he paying attention to the velvet rope? You're a ghost, just float through it. Embrace the benefits of having popped your clogs before you sprouted your adult teeth. Being friendly doesn't necessarily mean being a complete walkover, Casper.
As you can probably tell, Casper: FATW is a kid-friendly platformy adventure with a minuscule amount of attempted educational merit dusted on top like sprinkles at the world's least generous ice-cream parlour. As ever, "kid-friendly" means "designed for idiots," at least in the early stages, but I suppose it's jolly enough. Okay, competent enough. Well, there's a lot of delay between pressing jump and having Casper do anything, but that will be fine as long as there isn't any platforming in this platform game. Taking all that into consideration, I can confidently state that this is a videogame.

Hey, this isn't platforming. This is Arkanoid, and Casper himself has become the paddle. The first goal of each stage is to find the next part of the map: touching it transports you to this Breakout clone, where you have to free the piece of paper from whatever vaguely stage-appropriate items are surrounding it and then catch it before it falls off the screen. There's no preamble to this, either - Casper just walks into the room, sees his uncles and thinks "well, time for me to transform into a paddle and knock a glowing orb back and forth for a while." Sometimes Casper's uncles throw other items into the mix, either damaging ones like bowling balls that you have to avoid or health-restoring sweets. Stretch, Stinky and Fatso have a lot of complex issues regarding their feelings towards their nephew, but if playing this overly-familiar block-breaking game helps them work things out then I'm all for it. I got the map page, too, so now we can get on with the other half of each stage - finding one of Casper's friends.

Here, Casper uses his ghostly powers to turn into the tattered remains of a carrier bag. This allows him to ride a steam vent up into the air, followed by some brisk springy platform action. Casper can also turn into this parachute form to float down to the ground more slowly after a jump, and he can "levitate" - a gravity-defying manoeuvre in which his legs disappear but he can float horizontally without falling into holes. Transforming like this drains Casper's ghost energy or whatever you want to call it, the yellow bar under his health, and if it runs out he reverts to his usual state of leg-having macrocephaly. There are also a few power-ups that give Casper temporary attributes like wheels and buffness, but we'll see those later.

I found that kid I was looking for. Hooray? I was hoping my journey would have been punctuated by tourists shouting "A G-G-G-GHOST!!" and doing spit-takes, but L.A. was home to nothing but a couple of other ghosts and some jack 'o lantern faces that explode when you walk past them. At least little Timmy (probably not this character's actual name) seemed pleased to see me. On to the next country, then - the country of, erm, South America!

Videogame South America is always jungles and lost temples, and Casper: FATW is no exception. You start in the jungle and then head through a lost temple. That's about it, really. Sometimes these Aztec ghosts try to stop you. Casper, being the friendly ghost that he is, has to destroy them with his ghostly spheres before he can move on. He makes no attempt to talk to these other ghosts, to use rational dialogue or persuasion to make his way past them - he sees them, literally says "these guys don't look friendly," and then throws projectiles at them until they go away. Good work living up to your only character trait there, Casper. Real neighbourly of you.

Because this is a videogame, there's a section in the temple where you have to jump from platform to platform without falling into the lava. I say jump, Casper's horizontal ghost float is much more useful because you can just hover straight across the gaps.
Then Casper gets near one of those spikes on the ceiling and he says "I'd better watch out for those spikes!" Why? What are they going to do, kill you? I think that ship has already sailed, pal.

The next stage is in London. I'm looking forward to the genuinely informative and restrained manner in which Casper will describe the country of my birth.

Ha ha, of course not, Casper starts the level by shouting "right-oh, guv'nor!" in a "Dick van Dyke from Mary Poppins" accent. It's disgraceful, really, and now the game's stages are set in Europe Casper can start doing "comedy" voices without worrying too much about political correctness. You can get away with doing an over-the-top French or Russian accent, but doing the same thing with a Chinese voice would be getting into some uncomfortably territory. And where are the ludicrous, wildly inaccurate depictions of American manners and customs, huh? Oh, right, they're in Japanese games mostly. Personally, I'd be happy if Casper didn't say anything at all, but unfortunately he never shuts up. He's a literal poltergeist, constantly prattling on about the sights in each stage or telling the player what they should be doing next.
Because British people are snooty, the enemies in London have turned their noses up at Casper. Turned those noses up so far that they can sniff the back of their own head, they've achieved a 90-degree shift in nasal angle. This ghost should be working as a sales assistant in a luxury jewellers, not walking back and forth outside some Hogwarts-ified version of St. Paul's. Forget about him, though, and check out that pumpkin face on the right of the screen. See that? They're all over every level, and they're basically proximity mines. Walk near one and after a second or two they explode, damaging Casper and momentarily filling your screen with pixellated pumpkin features. I'm okay with that - the second bit, at least - and once I figured out that you can activate them from a safe distance with your ghostly spheres they stopping being anything like a threat.

Here's one of those power-ups that I mentioned earlier: Casper has sprouted phantasmic wheels, allowing him to dash across this crumbling bridge. No, he can't just float across. Why not? Because the game said so, alright? Casper can only float for an arbitrary length of time, and in this universe ghosts are immediately disintegrated by any body of water more than an inch deep. Hey, there's nothing in the Bible that says a priest can't bless all the water in a city, which is obviously what's happened here. Casper now runs the risk of being exorcised every time he steps in a puddle, which is going to happen a lot now that he's in Britain and he can't hover for more than a few seconds at a time.

Paris is next, and Casper visits the Louvre. He says he's going to see the Moan-a Lisa. No, bad Casper. I'd swat you with a rolled-up newspaper if I could: only I should be making terrible ghost puns. Maybe you should go and look at The Ghoul with the Pearl Earring or Picasso's Boo-ernica instead. No, really, you should - the Mona Lisa is being protected by the corpulent stereotype of a French painter. What was your unfinished business on this mortal plane, monsieur? Half a baguette left in the fridge that you never got to eat? I'm amazed this ghost doesn't have a string of onions around his chest, and surely the only reason he's not guzzling bottle after bottle of red wine is because this is a kid's game.

In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Casper decides to try out this "possession" lark he's heard so much about by ramming his head into an unsuspecting child. It doesn't work, and that highlights one of my biggest issues with Casper: FATW - it's no fun being a ghost. There's nothing especially spectral about Casper's moveset, aside maybe from his handful of transformation moves, but there's nothing very ghostly about being a parachute. Casper can barely float, he can't phase through solid matter, his every movement isn't accompanied by the sound of clanking chains and he can die, the one thing you'd imagine a ghost wouldn't have to worry about. You also have to press a button to duck. I don't think that's related to Casper's ghostliness, but in what is essentially a side-scrolling platformer it still feels weird to not press down to crouch. My point is, if you're going to make a game about being a ghost, give the player something spooky to do instead of retreading the same old tired platforming mechanics with the added pleasure of stiff controls and bland level design. Maybe don't base your game around a character whose soul defining trait is that he's nice, either. Not much room for dramatic conflict in that one.

This ghost? Not nice. It's Casper's uncle Fatso - he's the fat one, you see - and he's under Kibosh's hypnotic spell. This makes his eyeballs bulge out in a genuinely disconcerting manner, so let's stop looking at them and beat him in the boss fight that I'm sure is coming up next.

Fatso has a tray of pies, which presents him with something of a dilemma: does he eat all the pies like the greedy sonofabitch that he is, or does he throw some at Casper? If he wasn't hypnotised I'm sure he would have eaten them all himself, but because this is a fight he throws the pies at Casper, who dutifully dodges the delicious projectiles until Fatso stops for a breather. Then you can jump up and throw your spheres at him until the hypnotic spell is broken and Fatso changes from actively trying to kill Casper, back to his usual self of just being an utter bastard to Casper. Fatso also give Casper part of a special machine and tells him that there are two more parts to collect, so I look forward to fighting his other two uncles at some point in the near future.

Onward to Venice, city of romance, of canals, of somewhat frustrating platforming sections spent bouncing between shop awnings! In the background, you can see the book I need to collect to play the block-breaking game, but I'm here in the foreground, precariously balanced on a pole sticking out of the water. I was so preoccupied with not falling in the canal that I forgot about the book entirely, and when I reached the end of the stage the child I'd come to find said "hey, you'd better go find that book"... and then the game just let me play the page-getting minigame without having to go back and fetch the book. I like that, it was a nice of the game to say "don't want to bother playing half of the level? That's cool, we understand. You can just have the book." Not having to look for the book is going to speed up the process of getting through these stages.

Here's the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When I saw it, I was just about to say "why is the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Venice?" but Casper beat me to it, which made me feel a little like I'd been outsmarted by a 14-year-old videogame for kids. Then I made Casper get muscular by using a power-up and he un-leaned the Leaning Tower, causing an extra life to fall from the top. I don't like Muscular Casper, a powerful ghost child who could probably bench-press me. It's just weird.

This is Moscow. Not much to say about Moscow. It's Christmas now and that, if you'll forgive my slip in Seinfeldism, makes me wonder what's the deal with these kids? The countries that you find them in are clearly their home countries - their, erm, enthusiastic accents make that clear - so why is Casper so set on taking them back to America, especially at Christmastime? And how did they get to a party at Casper's home in the first place? "Gee, Casper, I'd love to come to your party without my parents to be looked after by you and your horrible dead relatives, but you live five thousand miles away, you nutbar." Is Casper regularly fixating on certain children with little regard for their feelings his thing? Christina Ricci's character from the movie is nowhere to be seen, so instead he must have targeted ten children from around the world and brought them to his house. Is Casper's unfinished business that he's never made it through an entire children's party and he can't move on to the afterlife until he's won a game of pin the tail on the donkey? There are just so many questions raised by this game, and no attempt is made to answer any of them.
As for the Moscow stage itself, there's a section where you have to fire a cannonball and then race it to a set of doors. The cannonball opens the doors briefly so Casper can slip through. Any other ghost would be able to float through the doors, but not Casper. He's officially taken the number two slot on my mental list of shittiest ghosts, just behind John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.

This stage is set in Japan, in case you couldn't tell. Casper's getting a good eyeful of that sumo wrestler's arse, and yet he retains his cheerful demeanour so I guess being a ghost also makes you blind. This sumo match isn't even for anything, either, it's just sort of... there. To add some Japaneseness, I suppose. Thankfully you can completely avoid it, and for what is undeniably a low-budget children's game with very few new ideas I can at least praise Casper: FATW for giving the player different routes to explore. As the game progresses the stages become more and more open, allowing you to take multiple paths to the goal and providing a tiny bit of exploration, usually with the goal of collecting crystals. While none of the paths are all that much fun, they've got much better gameplay than most games I've written about that were designed for the under-tens market thanks mostly to the simple fact that you have to pay attention to what you're doing in order to succeed, with obstacles that aren't quite as embarrassingly patronising as usual. If the controls were better, I could even imagine young children enjoying this game, which is something of a shock.

I did like Japan's minigame stage, because it features a tiny off-brand Godzilla. I'd like to call him "Goshzilla," just so I can link to one of my favourite Mystery Science Theatre 3000 bits.
I also tried to see what the Japanese at the sides of the screen says, if it even is Japanese. I think the top character might be "luck," as in "good luck trying to see what you're doing with all this crap floating around the screen!" If you knock the page loose but don't catch it before it falls to the bottom of the screen, you lose a whole life. I lost about five lives while I was playing this game, and four of them where thanks to not catching the page as it fell. The other one was me testing whether lava has the power to banish ghosts (it totally does).

China now, and Casper dodges dragons along the Great Wall, sometimes using bubbling cauldrons to propel himself into the air, sometimes getting hit by spear-carrying ghost warriors because the jump button is about as responsive as the handling on an ocean liner. Swings and roundabouts, innit? My biggest memory of the China stage is the music, which sounds like the soundtrack to a scene-setting montage from an erotic thriller set in Hong Kong. Honestly, the music in the game isn't bad at all - a little obvious in terms of how it's themed to the stage and unlikely to break into your top ten, top one hundred or even top thousand videogame soundtracks ever, but listenable. I might even try to rip the map screen music at some point, it's rather nice.

It's uncle Stinky, with his head appropriately shaped like a cartoon turd, ready to fight his nephew to the un-death!

In this fight, you have to neutralize Stinky's bad breath attacks with your projectiles before using your shots to nudge him off the side of the tower. I thought this was going to be much more simple than it was, because Casper can bounce on those dragon-platforms at the side of the screen and for some reason he gains the ability to throw his ghostly spheres with rapid-fire action if his feet aren't touching the ground. The problem was, I kept bouncing too high and then falling to my death trying to get back on to Stinky's level. Did I mention that the controls in this game are bad? Because they really are, and they ruin what was already an uninteresting experience. It's like sitting down to eat a reheated steak slice from a petrol station because you couldn't go to a picnic and then finding half a cockroach in the gravy.

This stage is set in India. Casper finds himself once more staring at a huge pair of buttocks. For this to happen once is misfortune; for it to happen twice makes you wonder why Casper came to India in the first place. He actually says "I hope I see an elephant!" at the start of the stage, so, ah ha, here you go, kid. It kinda sucks to be Casper - he's dead, for starters, someone kidnapped all his friends because they were having too much fun, he lives with an abusive family and when all he wanted was to see an elephant he gets the ironic genie punishment of staring up an elephant's backside. He must have been a real dick when he was alive.

Now we're in Egypt. You know how videogame Egypt works. Pyramids, pharaohs, sand. The game reaches it's lowest ebb here with some even-more-frustrating-that-usual platforming, but other than that there's nothing here that you haven't seen previously. There is a camel, but it acts just like every other springy platform in the game except that it's alive and presumably feels pain. Unless Casper doesn't weigh anything because he's a ghost, in which case the camel just feels a terrible soul-sapping chill when Casper touches it.

At the top of the pyramid is a boss fight again Stretch, Casper's final uncle who is even less interesting that Fatso and Stinky. At least they had girth and odour as defining features, Stretch is just A Ghost. As for the battle, it's another one where you have to push the boss back, this time towards a sarcophagus, but to hamper your efforts Stretch is constantly throwing pumpkin bombs and bouncing rocks at Casper. It's not fun, there's no precision or flow to it, and the whole thing is a monumental pain in the arse made even more insufferable by Stretch's tendency to teleport behind you, leaving Casper to stand still in a safe spot doing nothing while Stretch attacks a target that isn't there.

To de-hypnotise a ghost, shove them into a pharaoh's coffin. I will have to remember that. Or knock them off the Great Wall of China, but be serious, which are you most likely to have to hand: the Great Wall of China or a pharaoh's coffin? Exactly.

Now that Casper's collected all three parts of the machine - a machine created by the game's villain that no one knows the purpose of, I should remind you - he can gather all the children around it and turn it on. I'm sure this will all work out for the best.

See? It all worked out for the best. Except for all those children who have just been ripped from their homes at Christmastime and forced onto a ghost's playground. It all worked out for Casper, then. He's having a great time, and now that Casper: Friends Around the World is over he can play with these kids for ever and ever and ever. I'll see you all nex... oh, hang on, there's more.

It turns out that if you collect every crystal on every stage you're given access to a secret level - the lost city of Atlantis. I probably should have realised something was amiss when I finished the game without ever encountering the main villain. It starts at about 18 minutes in on the video above, and having watched it I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by being unable to summon up the patience to go through the game again and collect 100 percent of the items, although the ghost of Poseidon looks pretty cool. The hidden stage gives you a chance to fight Kibosh and a slightly different ending, which reveals the shocking twist at the heart of Casper: Friends Around the World - it was the power of friendship that saved the day! And here I thought it was the power of staring at large backsides. Then Casper turns to the camera and says "you too can be a friendly ghost," a phrase that's difficult to take as anything other than Casper threatening to kill me so that our undying spirits can spend an eternity together.

As far as these "made for youngsters" games go, Casper: Friends Around the World is one of the best I've played, a statement akin to saying "today's kick in the testicles was much better than the baseball bat in the groin I usually get!" It's basic, it's slow, it's got horrible gloopy controls and it does absolutely nothing with the whole "being a ghost" premise, but it's also not insultingly easy, the music's not bad and there are multiple paths and even some replay value if you want to get to that secret level. I'm definitely not saying you should play it, but if you get kidnapped by some insane Saw-style maniac killer who forces you to chose between this and, say, Diva Starz: Mall Mania, I would take Casper every single time. Unless it's Muscular Casper. Stay away from me, Muscular Casper.

For a game that so prominently features ghosts, Casper: FATW is rather lacking in Halloweenosity thanks to a desire to educate (and possibly bore) rather than to scare, but I couldn't possibly give a game in which you play as a ghost any less than a 6, and it gets an extra point for featuring pumpkins not only as obstacles but also mid-stage checkpoint markers. A generous total of seven out of ten, then, but I'll have probably changed my mind about it by next week and I'll be wracked by guilt until next Halloween.

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10 MORE WEIRD FINAL FANTASY ENEMIES

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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KILLING ZONE

Very well! I challenge you to a duel within... the Killing Zone! You know, the Killing Zone! Big square place where we do all the killing, between the Gateway of Ultimate Terror and the laundry room. The place where we had Harry's birthday party, before we killed him? In the Killing Zone? Oh never mind, let's just play Scrabble instead.
No, I haven't lost my mind - it's just a conversation I imagined happening between two of the combatants found in Naxat Soft's 1996 Playstation fighting game Killing Zone! Hang on, that makes me sound even more crazy. Tell you what, just ignore this whole opening bit.

Killing Zone is a fighting game, in the same way that violently rubbing a cheesegrater against your groin is passionate lovemaking - imagine, if you dare, a cross between Soul Calibur, Darkstalkers and vast pit filled with medical waste and early 3D graphics. The front cover proclaims it to be a "Sensational 3D Fighter", and as disgust and frustration are indeed sensations I suppose that's an accurate statement.

I'll get on to why Killing Zone is such a festering sore on the face of the beat-em-up genre soon enough, but first let's see why it makes an appearance here on VGJUNK's Hallowe'en month. As you may have gathered from the frankly stellar boxart, Killing Zone is a monster-themed fighter. There's a skeleton with a deformed pelvis who looks skinny even for someone made of bones, a stoned-looking minotaur and a big green chap who I think is supposed to be a mummy. The mummy is reaching out with his clawed hand, not as a gesture of agression but rather as a warning. "Stop," his actions seem to say, "do not play this game, for dread forces are at work here that a mere mortal such as yourself cannot hope to endure!" Well screw you, you big green freak: I played Hooters Road Trip, so this should be a piece of cake.
So, classic Hallowe'en-type monsters (and, for some reason, a couple from Greek mythology) make up the roster: no gi-clad karate masters or Russian wrestlers here. Let's meet them all, shall we?

The Wolfman, or more accurately, the, erm, man. Okay, so he can transform into a wolf - I saw the computer do it once, I swear - but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to activate it. This will become a common theme with the moves in Killing Zone. I suppose he's the standard-issue "generic fighter" type.

A skeleton! One thing that Killing Zone has over Darkstalkers is the inclusion of a skeleton, a monster who has surely earned his place alongside the vampires, witches and ghosts at Hallowe'en's top table. I love skeletons, but I've always found it hard to be scared of them: what are they going to do to you that someone with a full complement of flesh couldn't? Plus, they always look so cheerful. Still, I love skeletons, and it's a shame he appears in dreck like this, really. The skeleton is of the Jason and the Argonauts type, what with his sword and shield, and his Greek heritage leads me nicely to...

...the Minotaur! He's called Batch, apparently. Batch the Minotaur. I don't know why Naxat decided to mix these monsters from antiquity in with the likes of the Wolfman. I can only assume it's because they happened to have a book of Greek myths nearby when they were in the planning meeting.

Go on, take a guess what "Sherry" here is supposed to be. No idea? Apparently she's a Dark Faerie, a sub-species of faeries marked by having feathers stuck in their heads and what I believe the kids sometimes refer to as a "ghetto booty". She is presumably meant to be the game's token "sexy" character, an effect which is somewhat undermined by the fact she appears to have been assembled from cardboard boxes.

The Mummy from the cover art puts on the rest of his bandages for his in-game appearance, which is good because no-one wants to see what four thousand years of mummification beneath the Egyptian sands will do to a man's penis.

Rounding out the mythological side of things is the Gorgon, and fair play to Naxat for including a playable character who doesn't have any legs. Unluckily for her, at the time KZ was created the gaming technology required to accurately portray a snake-like body didn't exist, so from the waist down she looks like a string of robot sausages.

Finally there's the Giant, who isn't fooling anybody by calling himself the Giant: he's clearly a Frankenstein's Monster, or the Creature. Considering he calls himself "Giant", he's really not that big, but I supposed "Slighty Larger Than Average Reanimated Corpse Man" is a bit of a mouthful. In the Giant's defence, he's certainly easily identifiable as a Frankenstein's Monster.

These monsters must fight, although no in-game reason is given for their desire to beat the (un-)living shit out of their fellow freaks. In fact, you're not given much of anything in game. Nothing fun, anyhow.

As I mentioned, Killing Zone is a bog-standard 3D fighter, most reminiscent of the Soul Calibur series: fights take place in a square zone put aside for killing, you've got two kick buttons, two punch buttons and a block button, and the rounds in these best-of-three fights can be decided either by K.O. or a ring out. So far, so incredibly generic. What sets Killing Zone apart from other fighting games is the fact that it's one of the worst games I've ever had the misfortune of playing.

Now, if you've read VGJUNK before you'll know that I always try to look on the bright side when I'm talking about a game that isn't exactly over-endowed in the quality department. Games go wrong for all kinds of reasons outside the developers' control, usually low budgets and tight deadlines, and while occasionally I'll play a game whose very existence will wound the core of my being in such a way that my soul will forever be a little darker, (Hooters Road Trip and Dragon's Lair are the obvious candidates,) I can usually find at least one or two things that make a game worth playing. In this case it was quite a struggle, but even Killing Zone has a nanometer-thin silver lining. It's positives are that you can play as a skeleton and a Frankenstein's Monster, and the skeleton has a pretty amusing jumping attack that briefly turns him into a giant skull.

And that's it. Everything else about this game is utterly worthless, and I'd like you all to remember that I played it so you don't have to. I've suffered, I truly have, and if you're stupid enough to play this game after reading this then you deserve everything you get.
Let's start, as seems fair, with the gameplay. It's bad, sure, but why? What is it that makes playing KZ an experience only slightly less painful than replacing the game disk with your genitals and slamming the lid closed? Sadly, it's a combination of pretty much every single factor. The controls are gloopily unresponsive. Characters move with all the speed of a particularly overweight glacier, until you dash which seems to make them teleport. The collision detection is a joke, hitboxes seem to exist in an alternate multidimensional reality that only occasionally interacts with our own and the ring-out system sometimes sees you falling right through the bloody floor. While there do appear to be special moves in the game, I couldn't figure out how to do any of them and you can bet your ass there's no help or tutorial modes in this game.

However, I think my favourite thing about the gameplay is the amazing AI, and I'm using "amazing" in the sense that I am honestly amazed that AI this poor could exist in a videogame released after 1979. I don't use the word "literally" lightly, but Pac-Man literally has better AI than Killing Zone. The best example I can give is that if you hit an enemy and back away as far as you can, your opponent simply will not come and attack you, choosing instead to stand on one spot and swat at the air like someone at the mercy of invisible wasps (a poor analogy, because invisible wasps have no mercy). You can win eighty percent of your fights by hitting them once, backing away and waiting for the timer to run out. Truly incredible.

The gameplay is terrible, but what of the graphics? You've seen the screenshots, right? Well, they don't give nearly the right impression as the game looks a lot worse in motion. The main problem is the constant clipping of the polygons, with arms suddenly jutting out of chests like bleedin' Kuato and people performing throws that don't actually connect with your target at any point during the move. The stages are incredibly bland, and the menus are almost non-existent.

In fact, the whole game feels almost nihilistic in it's stubborness to provide anything like entertainment or atmosphere. There's no storyline, no pre- or post-battle banter, no win quotes and no final boss; your "reward" for completing the game is a single screen with the names of all the people involved with the game listed on a plain black screen, like some kind of war memorial. These men are gone, but not before they left an almighty steaming turd on our doorsteps in the form of Killing Zone. The whole thing has the feel of an especially bad Net Yaroze game, possibly one put together by radical French intellectuals as a dark critique on man's inhumanity to man - for you see, we are the monsters!

The presentation is poor to the point of nonexistence, but one thing does stand out: whenever a round starts, a disembodied voice commands you to "reach around".

Perhaps the reason your monster controls so poorly is that they have been stunned by this sudden lecture on sexual ettiquette.

Killing Zone has one thing up it's sleeve that shows a little invention, although as you might have guessed it's incredibly poorly thought out and bafflingly executed. Maybe you noticed the title screen contains an option for "Auto Mode", which sadly isn't a mode where the game automatically deletes itself but rather a Pokemon-style monster training game.

I say it's Pokemon-style, but imagine a playing a version of Pokemon where you have no direct control over anything that happens, ever, and that in this universe all pokemon have their brains surgically replaced with hard-boiled eggs at birth. You begin by selecting a monster, which then takes part in a series of tournaments. The only control you have over it is to give it commands which it then attempts to execute itself (hence "auto mode") but the problem is that your character doesn't interpret them as commands but rather a series of vague suggestions.

Hold the "attack" button and your monster will generally stand in place and flail their arms ineffectually. If you want to see them move backwards but never actually block, hold the "block" button. Pressing "Advance" rather perversely makes them jump straight up in the fucking air. It's a terrible game mode that somehow manages to be even more frustrating than the already-broken manual play, because at least in that mode when you press a button something generally happens, even if it is underwhelming and poorly coded

That's not even the worst thing about it. In the one instance that passes for an interesting idea in Killing Zone, your monser's stats increase as they win fights, and occasionally they even change costume. Neato, you might be thinking, it's like a little monster-battling RPG! Oh, you poor, naive fool. You see, in their infinite wisdom Naxat neglected to include a "save game" option. That's right, every time you load the game you have to start from scratch, rendering the single interesting idea in this game utterly pointless. It takes a special kind of game to be this wilfully awful, and Killing Zone has most triumphantly earnt itself a place amongst the Pantheon of Dreadful Videogames. Take a seat between Superman 64 and Super Monkey Daibouken, you fucking idiot.

Do I even need to do a recap? Killing Zone is bad, bad like a hundred angry scorpions in your underwear, bad like a sudden attack of diarrhoea on a bouncy castle, bad like the souls of those you have killing haunting your dreams every night until you finally hang yourself just so that you can embrace the sweet release of death. And still, it's not hatefully bad - it's not like Dragon's Lair, where everything seems to have been created with the sole aim of making you despise mankind as a species. It just happens to fail on every level, and most importantly on the level of "being fun".

However, between the monsterific cast and the sheer horror of actually playing the damn thing, it is pretty fitting for the Hallowe'en period. Therefore it, gets a seven on the Hallowe'en-O-Meter - some points were lost for diluting the ghoul-pool with the addition of characters from Greek mythology, but overall a high score for any beat-em-up that isn't Darkstalkers.
One final word: apparently, this is actually a sequel, being the bastard offspring of a Saturn fighter called Battle Monsters. Apparently the prequel uses digitised actors as sprites. Dear God. Look upon Naxat's work, ye mighty, and despair.

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