THE VIDEOGAME TREASURES OF ALIEXPRESS

AliExpress is a Chinese e-commerce site where sellers come together to offer their wonderful wares to the world at large. It's your go-to shopping destination for glow-in-the-dark Chairman Mao t-shirts and novelty condoms that come packed in Spongebob-branded tin cans, but it has two specific features that caught my interest: video game merchandise and a loose interpretation of international copyright laws. So, here are just a few of the treasures I found during a quick search of AliExpress. Did you know that they sell costumes of videogame characters? Well, you will after this lot.

Princess Peach Sit On Mushroom Collection Figure

At first glance I though this one might have been an official Nintendo product, but that's because I'd only seen the top half of it before scrolling down to reveal that Princess Peach is in the middle of putting her socks on. I understand that if Princess Peach wears socks then yes, at some point she must have put them on, but it's hardly the part of the Super Mario universe that you'd expect to see a figurine of. Do the other figures in the range include Luigi trimming his moustache, or Bowser filling in an application for a bank loan (hey, flying pirate ships aren't cheap)? No, this one is for a much more niche market, a niche that that would be, how can I put this? Excited by Peach's barefootedness. There are 450-ish results for "Princess Peach feet" on DeviantArt, and 99% of them would lead to severe embarrassment if you were caught looking at them. The creators of these images are presumably banned from every shoe shop in a twenty-mile radius of their house.
The worst thing about the figure is that Peach comes with two shoes but only one sock. That would drive me absolutely spare if I owned this.

Animation Game Super Mario Mario Keychain

Mad, staring eyes devoid of humanity are so common in these kind of toys that it's almost too obvious to mention, but that Mario keychain offers such an extreme example of the phenomenon it becomes impossible to ignore. You'd freeze in terror every time you tried to unlock your front door if that thing was dangling off your keys. Also, notice that Mario's colour palette suggest he has picked up a Fire Flower. Imagine a man with that expression and the ability to shoot fire out of his hands jumping out of your wardrobe and hissing "it's a me, Maariooo!"
Then there's Luigi. What's Luigi doing with his hand? He's either sniffing his finger -  a nauseating thought, considering he's a plumber - or he's trying to offend some German tourists with a Basil Fawlty-esque Hitler impression.

Super Mario Brothers Mascot Costume

Welcome to World 9-1: the cardboard box storage world! There are quite a few full-body Mario costumes on AliExpress. None of them look quite right, but this is definitely one of the better ones. The biggest problem with this costume is that Mario's ears are far too high up his head, but the tailor did at least capture Mario's famous child-bearing hips.

Captain Luigi Super Mario Brothers Double 2

Much inferior on the dungarees front, these ones, but I appreciate the effort of the photographer in arranging the cardboard boxes in a less haphazard fashion. As Mario and Luigi gaze into each other's eyes, I can't help but think they're coming up with a sinister plan. There's definitely something conspiratorial about their pose. Their ears have already swivelled to focus on the invisible signals being beamed down from their mothership. Soon enough, the Earth shall fall beneath the springy boots of the Bootleg Mario Brothers.

Brand New Adult Size Super Mario Costume

Who the hell is this? It's not Mario, that's for sure. Mario has never dressed in green - we have a Green Mario for that, see above - and he certainly never wore a bowler hat. The bowler is the hat of the upper-middle class, and Mario is obviously working class. Okay, maybe he's not the salt-of-the-earth labourer he used to be because he does hang around with a princess a lot of the time, but still.
So who is this? He's got an M on his hat, angry eyebrows and a certain wild wooliness to his hair, so I'm going to say he's Mercutio, Mario's crank-addicted cousin who just got out of prison and who is known to children everywhere thanks to his famous catchphrase "it's-a me, Mercutio, gimme all your money or I'll cut you".

Super Mario and Luigi Plush Mascot Costume

Okay, this one is just creepy. It's like the twins from The Shining, expect wearing trousers made from semi-inflated binbags.

Customized Costume Sonic the Hedgehog Mascot

Over to Mario's famous rival now with Sonic the Double Hand Amputee, apparently. Well, you don't need hands to go fast, so I suppose he won't mind too much. This picture, though... I personally find it rather unsettling: the grainy look of a photo taken with fifteen-year-old digital camera, Sonic accusingly holding up his stumps with a faint expression of disgust, the other costume in the background slumped in a cardboard box like a shed skin. You could make a good short horror film where this is the final shot, Handless Frowning Sonic intermittently lit beneath the flickering fluorescent lights. "You're too slo-ow!" says Sonic, and the screen fades to black.
Wait, he can't say anything because he doesn't have a mouth. Well, scratch that one then.

Mortal Kombat 1 Classic Set

Nothing wrong with the figures here, they look like any pound-shop "fighting" toys that have been given a Mortal Kombat makeover. No, I just like the way they've been arranged for the photo, because it looks as though Reptile is trying to break up the fight between Scorpion and Sub-Zero. That's Reptile, always the calm, level head in the group. The calm, level lizard head hidden beneath a mask of human skin.
One thing I never understood about Mortal Kombat's ninjas were their outfits. Why are they quilted? "For warmth" would be the obvious answer, but they're running around and doing assassinations and other such ninja activities all day, would it really be advantageous to have half a duvet wrapped around you in those situations? It must be armour, which would explain why they have a big flap over their genitals.

Street Fighter Akuma Cosplay Costume

"I am the ultimate fighter! I am the master of the Satsui no Hadou! I am... Steve! I work in the finance department, I think we met during that training session the other week. Yeah, I'm good, how are you? Cool, cool. Hey, how does my hair look? 'Like a volcano that's erupting candy floss instead of lava but somehow stupider than that?' Oh."

The Legend of Zelda Plush Stuffed Toy

Twelve inches? No wonder he's blushing (I'm sorry).
I think this is a legit Nintendo product, by the way. Were people crying out for a plush toy of Link wearing an expression of transfixed lust? What is he even looking at? A red rupee? A hookshot? I bet it's the hookshot, they're always the most exciting items to collect.

Pac-Man Pinky Deluxe Adult Costume

This isn't even the worst Pac-Man costume I saw on AliExpress. One was just an orange mini-dress with eyes sewn onto it, so if you wanted to dress as the orange ghost for Halloween but, you know, sexy, then you're covered.
The twist with this costume is that you can tuck your head and arms inside which, if it's dark enough and you're wearing black leggings, could make it look as though you're a floating ghost. As long as you remember to crab-walk everywhere, anyway. If that's not enough of a thrill for you, with the application of some brown paint this outfit could easily be converted into a "piece of toast" costume. Two costumes in one! You can't argue with value for money like that.

Vintage Rockman Megaman Mega Man 5 Action Figure

Here's an interesting one - a copy of the Mega Man action figure from the Ruby-Spears cartoon, presented under his Japanese name of Rockman. You can tell it's the cartoon version because the button / lump thing on his forehead is a diamond instead of a square. There are no company names or logos on the packaging, so I'd have to assume this is a less-than-legitimate reproduction. This begs the question: why? Why make toys from a Mega Man series that wasn't very good and went off the air in 1995? I suspect the answer is that whoever made this came into possession of the original moulds - or copies of the original moulds, at least - and knocked this thing up, because that's how these things work. There's a joke in here somewhere about Chinese bootleggers caring more about Mega Man than Capcom do, but that's a bit too negative for me so instead I'll draw your attention the the sweet laser sword Mega Man is packaged with.

Pretty Good Final Fantasy Case for Samsung Galaxy

Nothing unusual about the item itself, a mobile phone case featuring stolen artwork of Terra from Final Fantasy VI is something I'm not surprised to see on this site. I am surprised, and childishly amused, by that description, however. Hey AliExpress seller, how's your FFVI mobile phone cover? Oh, it's pretty good. It could be better, it's a shame the cut-away areas are over Terra's head, but on the whole I'd say it's pretty good. Could be better, but it's not bad.
I am a terrible self-publicist - my CV is just a scrap of paper with "relatively competent human, no major neurological impairments" scribbled on it - but even I could come up with a better description for a product I'm trying to sell than "pretty good." Just "good" would have been more convincing, for starters.

Final Fantasy VII 7 ShinRa Neon Sign

I have to be honest, I kinda like this. I would hang a neon ShinRa sign from a wall in my house. No-one else would ever see it, because I'm the kind of person who would hang, in the place where they live, a tacky neon version of the logo of a fictitious power company. No, it's okay, I've made my peace with that.

Final Fantasy X Tidus Cosplay Costume

One thing that looking through these item has taught me is just how ridiculous Tidus' outfit is. You don't really get the full scope of its stupidity until you've seen it in the flesh, so to speak. It looks like the result of running a toddler's wardrobe through a woodchipper and then randomly sewing the pieces back together.

Resident Evil ID Card USB Flash Drive

"Ahem... I think you'll find that while Leon Kennedy was briefly a member of the Raccoon City Police Department, he was was never attached to the elite STARS unit. Furthermore, the picture of Leon used on this card was clearly taken during the events of Resident Evil 4 and by that time Raccoon City had been destroyed - are we really supposed to believe, ha ha, that Leon was promoted to the special police squad of a city that no longer exists? This sloppy fact-checking reveals a total disdain for the Resident Evil canon and thus I am forced to rate this item one out of ten."

Resident Evil 5 Albert Wesker Black Coat Costume

Here, that bloke from Maroon 5 does a bit of modelling work on the side. Why is the idea of someone being barefoot while dressed as Wesker so repellent to me? Maybe it's because all the places Wesker tends to visit - biological warfare labs, Antarctica, volcanoes - are places where wearing strong, sensible shoes is a must. All I know is that this picture, which its lack of footwear and strange, doll-like pose, is creeping me out even more than Sonic's Cardboard Dungeon. If you're going to Photoshop something like this, please airbrush some shoes onto it.

Factory Direct Squirtle Turtle Pokemon Cartoon Character Mascot Costume

"Oh, you're my best friend in a world we must defend, but mum and dad say I can't hang around with you any more. They say you're a bad influence, Squirtle. It's all those fires you start. You're thinking about starting a fire right now, aren't you? You've got that look in your eyes again."

Pokemon Mega Evolved Charizard X Mascot Costume

Finally, there's this thing. This goddamn thing. You know how occasionally something catches your funnybone just right and you laugh and laugh and laugh at it despite it not really being that funny? That happened to me the first time I saw this Charizard costume. And the second time, and the third. I'm still chuckling about it now. It's that head, that freakishly elongated noggin with horns that defy their usual swept-back position on Charizard's head to stand tall and proud and extremely cumbersome when passing through doorways. If you cover the head up, the rest of the costume looks fine; if you cover the body up it looks like a vampire carrot. I think I'm going to ask the seller if they'll do me a custom order for just the head. There is literally no end to the possibilities when you have a fuzzy mascot headpiece that's supposed to be a fire-breathing dragon but which resembled the most terrifying root vegetable imaginable.

My AliExpress shopping trip is over, and such treasures I have found! All these items came to my attention during a only a quick browse of the site, so god knows what's lurking further in the depths. If you find anything particularly wonderful / horrible, feel free to share it in the comments. Unless it's one of those sex pillows that kept coming up when I looked for Tekken stuff. Don't share those, please.

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GONBEE NO I'M SORRY (ARCADE)

Today at VGJUNK: The eighties! More specifically, the mid-eighties! A 1985 arcade title from Coreland (now Banpresto) and Sega called Gonbee no I'm Sorry, in fact. Now, that's very specific, but what is this game actually about? Well, let's check the title screen for clues.

A cheerful-looking man with a bulbous head rises from Mount Fuji and waves his fans about patriotically. He doesn't look sorry. He looks excited, dynamic, ready for anything. It's the face of a man who's about to star in a videogame that may look like a simple rehash of Pac-Man... because that's what it is.

It's a maze game. You know how maze games work - run your character around the maze, collecting items and avoiding the bad guys. Get all the items, move to the next maze, repeat until the bones in your wrist have crumbled to the consistency of wholemeal flour. That's you at the top of the screen, near the building with "IN" on the door. The guys in shades are your enemies, and the yellow squares are the items you need to collect. The barrel is a barrel - it will kill you upon contact, but because it lacks a will of its own it feels harsh to label it an "enemy".
That's all well and good, but I'm not writing about I'm Sorry because it raises the bar for maze games to dizzying new heights or anything. No, I'm interested in your character. You're not playing as a merciless yellow mouth-demon devouring the spirits of the dead, or a morose blob with no head and eyes for nipples, or even a sports car fuelled by the blood of young women - it's more interesting than that. You're playing as former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.

Well, a caricature of him, at least. Unless his head really is that size, in which case the Japanese people must be commended for looking past this bizarre deformity and electing him to the highest office in the land.
But why choose P.M. Tanaka? That's because he was so corrupt he'd make Silvio Berlusconi look above board... oh, who am I kidding, no-one can make Berlusconi look good. His fake tan and hair-plugs are proof of that. But Tanaka was a shady character, to say the least, with the most famous of his scandals being that he was paid almost $2 million in bribes from aerospace company Lockheed to buy their planes for use in the national airlines.

With that knowledge, you'll realise that you're collecting gold bars and this is a game about Tanaka's bottomless greed. Yes, Tanaka is essentially Wario. The aim of the game is to collect all the gold bars on the stage and take them to the house at the top to deposit them, presumably into an untraceable Swiss bank account. It's political satire! Not particularly timely satire, given that this game was released two years after Tanaka was found guilty, but it's the thought that counts. Someone at Coreland was so angry about Tanaka's dodgy dealings that they developed, coded and released an entire arcade game just to make him look stupid, and that's the kind of motivation that I can get behind.

Tanaka has a lot of enemies, but unlike Pac-Man he knows how to defend himself. He can jump, useful for avoiding the packs of roaming barrels that lurk in every stage. Tanaka can also take the direct, no-nonsense approach beloved by the voting public and just punch the shit out of anything that gets in his way. Well, except barrels - they're immune to both punches and bribery, making them the natural enemy of Tanaka and his ilk.
The first set of enemies is simple enough to deal with: just jump over the barrels and either avoid or clobber the shades-wearing hoodlums. Really, make sure you avoid those guys. They're weird. If they catch you...

It seems strange that Japan, a country noted for its values of politeness and honour, would produce a videogame in which a former Prime Minister is stripped to his underwear and whipped by a man in a leather bikini. Of course, then you remember about Japan's eroge market and suddenly it doesn't seem strange at all, but it's still not something I expected to see happening to a caricature of a former world leader in a simple, colorful arcade title published by Sega.

There are only four maps, but each time you progress they get more difficult with the addition of various new enemies, obstacles and traps. The big fellas you can see above are based on famous Japanese wrestler Giant Baba who, if his billed height of 6' 10" is correct, definitely qualifies for the title "giant". With his tight blue trunks and oddly-pointed shoes, he looks much more likely than the other guys to punish you in a disturbingly sexual manner when he catches you, but he just throws you around a bit. You can beat him by punching him, but he takes about six-to ten hits to defeat, probably because he is a giant and you're an elderly politician.

There are other, less human obstacles too - literal fire hydrants that occasionally shoot flames, gates and roadblocks that must be punched out of the way and safes that hold the gold you need and can only be opened with repeated application of the Prime Ministerial knuckles. Athletes arrive to put a stop to your criminal ways, hopping around the stages and being a right nuisance because their bounding movements mean it's difficult to punch them or jump over them. Oh, and Michael Jackson.

That's no surprise - we all know about Jacko's hatred of corrupt government officials. Why, if it wasn't for his music and his bizarre personal life it'd be the thing he's best remembered for. Sega have quite the relationship with the late King of Pop, appearing as he does in Moonwalker, Space Channel 5 Part 2 and this game, as well as his possible involvement in the Sonic 3 soundtrack. In I'm Sorry, he moonwalks around the levels, trying to stop you from reaching all that delicious gold, making no attempt to save and vulnerable children or dance with a space-reporter.

When he grabs you, he turns into a green-eyed vampire who rubs up and down behind you while blood sprays from Tanaka's face. I'm sure this is supposed to be a reference to the Thriller video, but given the allegations about Jackson's sexual proclivities it sure does come off as creepy.

You can also be attacked by these sultry women, which might come as something of a relief given the abuse Tanaka has suffered at the hands of the male enemies.

According to Wikipedia they're supposed to be Madonna, but I'm a little dubious - it could be Marilyn Monroe, or even just some pitiful non-celebrity. Madonna makes sense given the time-frame, and if Michael Jackson's in I'm Sorry then they're obviously not shy about including the top American music stars of the mid-eighties, but I'm still not completely convinced. Maybe I just don't want to accept the appearance of the gap-toothed child harvester in a game I kind of enjoyed. If it is Madonna, you can be sure she's not there for the same noble reasons as anti-corruption crusader Michael Jackson. She's just evil.

I said I kind of enjoyed I'm Sorry, but you know, that seems a little like damning with faint praise. It deserves better than that - while it might not be innovative or ground-breaking or staggeringly beautiful or involving or... wait, where was I? Oh yeah. It's a good, solid maze game. Graphically, it's not bad for a title from 1985 - it's certainly colourful enough, and Tanaka's death animations make it look as though he's really suffering. Even better is the sound, because I'm Sorry manages the trick of only having a very small number of tracks that thankfully don't instantly become insufferably repetitive. I think this is probably because they're actually quite good, and certainly very jolly.

A truly fitting soundtrack to large-scale fraud.
The gameplay doesn't break any new ground, but it's still quite good fun. You might think that being able to kill the enemies without having to first collect a power-enhancing steroid pill would make the game somewhat easier, possibly too easy, but the variety of enemy types and their relentless tracking skills mean that's not the case. You've always got to keep an eye out for those bloody barrels, for example: you might think that going toe-to-toe with Giant Baba is a good idea but you'll look like a fool if a barrel sneaks (and they do sneak, the crafty little bastards) up behind you and crushes you to death.

It's not an easy game, either. Once you've made it past the first few stages I'm Sorry never really lets up with the fiendish nature of the levels. Despite there only being four distinct areas, each time you play a new iteration of the same stage it feels very different due to the new traps placed in your way. Look at the stage pictured above, for instance: those white areas of floor are conveyor belts, and punching open the black safes can be a real challenge when you're gracefully gliding past them, Michael Jackson moonwalking onto the other end in a desperate attempt to put a stop to Tanaka's plundering ways.

Thankfully everything controls nicely, the buttons are responsive and even the collision detection is good, although I did have sometimes have a hard time telling whether Madonna's kiss attack was going to get me. The only real problem I noticed was that I occasionally got stuck on a corner when trying to disembark the conveyor belts, but that's probably more down to me playing the game while reclining in a position people tell me would be best described as "slothful".

All in all, Gonbee no I'm Sorry is an above-average maze game that sets itself apart with its unusual subject matter. Bear in mind that is a videogame where you can take control of a former Japanese leader and punch Michael Jackson right in the mouth. In the big list of "weird things I've done in a videogame" (and it is a big list, swollen by nearly two years of writing this crap) that has to come near the top. Maybe one day I'll get to play a game where John Major catches Sting in a Boston Crab.
It's fun, cheerful and willfully daft - even the title is a pun, because "sori" is the Japanese for "Prime Minister" - so give it a go if you fancy something quick and easy to play.
The weirdness doesn't end there, though. In fact, this might be the most baffling thing of all about Gonbee no I'm Sorry: despite the utterly foreign subject matter, it got released in the USA.

When I say released, I might be pushing it a little. There doesn't seem to be much hard evidence that proves that playable I'm Sorry cabinets made their way into American arcades, and if you have any evidence that it did happen then please left me know, but the game was definitely translated into English for an overseas release.

I say translated, it's not like there was much text to start with. The title was shortened to simply I'm Sorry and the title screen redrawn to incorporate an unlicensed version of the Rolling Stones' logo, Tanaka's speech-bubbles now read "YEAH" when he stashes his ill-gotten loot and some other items have been altered, but other than that it's exactly the same game. The same game, complete with S&M death animations and the unmistakable likeness of Michael Jackson, which seems like it might have been a barrier to the game being released in the States.

Gonbee no I'm Sorry, then: arcade action plus Japanese politics plus cartoony graphics equals a surprisingly playable little game.

P.S. Completely unrelated to the game, but while I was reading about Tanaka I could help noticing that Japan seems to have real trouble hanging on to Prime Ministers for more than about ten minutes. In my lifetime, Britain has had five Prime Ministers: Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and the sausage-faced posho currently residing behind the big black door. In that same period, Japan has had nineteen. They come and go faster than Chelsea managers. Maybe they should think about tagging them or something.

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GOURMET SENTAI BARA YAROU (SNES)

Alright, we're all thinking it so let's just get it out in the open - Japan is weird, particularly when it comes to entertainment. You only need to Google "Hatsune Miku" to see that. I try to stay away from that whole "ha ha look at these Japanese nutters" angle because I come from a country that thinks Michael McIntyre is really funny and chasing a rolling cheese down a hill is considered a quaint tradition. Well, that and the fact that oddness of Japanese pop culture is a bottomless abyss of such nightmarish dimensions I'm worried I might fall in and never be heard from again. Sometime I've got to mention it, though. Sometimes you start playing a game and go "yep, that's pretty damn weird". Winds' 1995 SNES side-scrolling beat-em-up Gourmet Sentai: Bara Yarou is one of those games.

That's Gourmet Squad: Rose Rascals to us English-speaking folk. It's worth mentioning that "bara yarou" only one letter away from "bakayarou", an angry Japanese interjection that you might shout at someone who was being particularly stupid. As we'll see, that seems quite appropriate and was probably intentional.
It's certainly a title that makes you think, isn't it? Personally, the "gourmet" aspect makes me think back to Pierre le Chef, which wasn't nice, but this is a side-scrolling beat-em-up! My most favourite of all the mid-nineties gaming genres! I feel confident in my prediction that there's no way this could be as bad as Pierre le Chef.

We're only at the intro and already Gourmet Sentai is so strange it almost defies comment. These are the villains of the piece, or at least some of them, and because this game is so Japanese it might as well be wearing a kimono and pioneering advances in electronics I have no idea what is going on. Japanese webpages, translated to varying degrees of coherence, lead me to believe that the plot is something to do with humans emerging from the devastation of nuclear war. The villains, possibly an organisation called "Bath", are taking the entire world's protein supply for themselves and this is a Bad Thing that must be stopped.

There are three characters to choose from, and predictably one is fast but weak, one is slow but powerful and one is average, at least in terms of fighting skills if not wardrobe. Get this, though: the female character isn't the speedster of the team! With this one bold move, Gourmet Sentai has already cast itself as a true maverick in the field of punching people while moving to the right. Of course none of this matters because the differences between the speed and power of the characters are almost negligible, rendering the whole exercise pointless.
By the way, from left to right their names are Bonjour, Mademoiselle and Tres Bien. You didn't think this game was called Rose Rascals for nothing, did you? As far as Japanese games developers are concerned, France is nothing but a vast field of roses dotted with the occasional fencing match between two fey men.

Here we are, then - Mademoiselle has arrived in a futuristic cityscape, ready to defeat whatever evil stands in her way. In her hurry to leave the house she only managed to put on her shoulder armour, but as long at the bad guys ignore the acres of flesh she's displaying and only attack her upper arms, she should be fine. Cold, but otherwise fine.
The first enemy for you to pummel is a zombie punk rocker, which you can do using the standard punch combo found in all belt-scrolling brawlers. Or you could jump and kick him - that'd work too. What you can't do is press attack and jump together to perform a special attack which also drains your own health, because you don't have one. GSBY truly is a work of avant-garde genius.
However you choose to kill these punks, make sure you do it quickly. Left to their own devices for a while, they decide that their basic punch attacks aren't working out...

...so they split themselves in half with a giant knife that pops out of their chests, locks into position at groin height and jabs away at you. It's like the "lust" death from Se7en, except it also kills the guy doing the thrusting (as you would expect, what with the torso bisection and all). Yep, that's pretty damn weird.
When he dies, he drops an item of food for you to collect, but it doesn't restore your health like food you punched out of a mutant usually does. Almost every enemy will drop some food, actually, but it doesn't work in the way you might be expecting. Just keep in mind that Mademoiselle must be storing that food somewhere. Suddenly those shoulder-pads don't looks so comically oversized.

Dick-knifed punks don't do it for you? Then how about floating robot heads piloted by tiny men? You can also see another kind of punk hiding just at the edge of the screen - he's embarrassed to show himself because he's far too normal for this game. I think he might have gotten lost and wandered over from Final Fight 3. Those heads definitely fit right in, though. They attack by sneezing, a ludicrous idea given that they don't have lungs or a diaphragm. Once you've destroyed them, their tiny pilots run around the stage and can attack you by Cossack dancing on your head. This seems slightly more feasible, although their small size would limit the amount of damage this attack could reasonably be expected to cause.

See, this is what I mean about GSBY being too weird to comment on. What can I say about a green robot with disconcertingly feminine legs and huge hologramatic face that calls to mind the Visionaries toy line, other than maybe "hey, that's kind of strange"? I'll just draw your attention to those legs again. Why are they muscled?
You may have noticed that there are two Mademoiselles on the screen. Don't worry, I haven't suddenly found a friend who will play obscure SNES games with me - I'm as bitter and lonely as ever. She's actually a shadow helper that you can summon by finding a certain power up. Once she arrives she fights autonomously, gets in the way surprisingly rarely and unlike having another human as your 2P you can accidentally hit her and she won't get in a mood and refuse to continue the game until you let her get a "revenge" hit in. Handy.
Once you've broken the hypnotic spell of the boss' well-turned calves, you'll realise that she's not very difficult to beat and you can slap her down, taking the food item she drops in the process. Ah yes, the food items. You'll have collected a few throughout the stage, and it's time to put them to use. How? By getting your robot chef to knock you up a meal, of course!

Kenwood's R&D department has really outdone itself here. Between stages, you can offer the Iron Chef two ingredients and he'll knock you up a meal that restores some of your health. This is important, because it's the only way to get your health back and you only have one life in this game. If you die, you're sent back to the title screen but you can continue from the last checkpoint you reached, which seems rather redundant. Why send you back to the title screen whenever you die, when they could have just used a life system or placed you at the last checkpoint? It's a minor complaint, but it's a baffling decision that shouldn't have even been an issue.

Presumably, this is the "Gourmet" aspect of the title, but I must take issue with this. Eating two random ingredients you found on the floor is not a gourmet dining experience. Do you think Michelin-starred chefs get their ingredients by smacking passers-by until they drop whatever foodstuffs they're carrying? I certainly hope not, otherwise the top restaurants will be serving a lot of chewed gum and Gregg's pasty casseroles. Although, that sounds like something Heston Blumenthal would produce so maybe that's how he operates, but I'm sure it's not standard procedure for the world's best chefs.

Here's stage two, set amongst the dilapidated city streets. Given the bizarre nature of the enemies, the actual stages themselves have been pretty straightforward so far. You might also notice that Mademoiselle is on fire. Don't worry; this is a fairly regular occurrence. Holding R while you attack produces a special punch that can set enemies on fire, but an unfortunate drawback of this is that they'll usually dash straight into you and set you alight, too. It's really not all that useful.

Okay, this is more like it - the second half of the stage takes place on a vehicle transporting hundreds of giant robot feet. This year's Annual Chiropodist's Ball is going to have the most stunning decorations yet! This section involves avoiding the hovering one-armed sword-heads, a task that Mademoiselle couldn't quite accomplish, (no doubt she was distracted by smell of said robot feet) meaning it was time to switch to Bonjour for a while.

As you can see, Bonjour is proud of his body. Luckily for him, it's very easy to show it off because Winds kindly included a "pose" button. If you hold A, your character strikes a body-building pose to show off their rippling muscles, or in Mademoiselle’s case, her backside.

Does the pose button have any practical use? No, of course it doesn't. You can even manipulate their pose by pressing the D-pad while holding A, but all you get out of it is a glimpse into a parallel dimension where Mr. Universe: The Game was released for the 16-bit consoles. It comes as no surprise to learn that GSBY apparently shares some development staff with the infamous Cho Aniki series - I couldn't find any hard evidence for this, but the odds on there being two game developers in the nineties with such a fondness for oily bodybuilders seem pretty slim. Unlike Bonjour. He's huge.

No time for posing now, though - here's the second boss! Why yes, he does have a syringe sticking out of his crotch, I'm glad you noticed. He uses it to harvest... something from your prone body when he knocks you down, thrusting his solid protrusion deep inside you and extracting whatever the hell he needs. We've officially turned off the Weird Highway and onto Creepy Boulevard here, folks. Just keep punching him until you can escape his needle-y clutches and make a break for stage three.

Oh thank God, bunny girls. You know where you stand with bunny girls. They just want to kick you with their disturbingly long legs, that's all. No violations of your tense, unwilling flesh with these young ladies.

These drooling, Lego-headed weirdoes I'm not so sure about. They don't attack you or anything - hell, they don't even walk. They just move around by vibrating, whining when you punch them and offering no resistance other than exploding at you when they die. They look like a costume from Dead Rising, they are utterly bizarre and they're probably my favourite thing about the game.
They do have quite a lot of health, so now is probably a good time to learn some of the intricacies of GSBY’s fighting system. Winds tried something a little different – apart from the posing, I mean – by forcing you to hit an enemy a few times before you can grab them. For example, a standard four-hit punch combo puts a bad guy in a “stun” state, meaning you can get your oily, muscled hands on them. Pressing punch again clobbers them, or you can press R, L then R to perform a high-damage throw. Alternatively, you can not grab them and hit them with another four-hit combo, causing them to become, I dunno, extra dizzy? Either way, pressing R, L, R in this state will unleash an even more powerful throw: in Bonjour’s case, he flies upward with his rocket pack and slams them into the ground. Got all that? No, me neither. Onwards!

After a quick trip across some battlements, you'll reach the boss. She's just a bunny girl who gets some extra armour and rocket-powered high heels. Punch her for a while and her armour changes colour. Well, that seems rather pedestrian. Has Gourmet Sentai lost its way already, the madness tanks running dangerously dry so early in the game?

No, wait, that's more like it. It's a robot tanuki, and the one thing you can guarantee when a robot tanuki turns up is that (like it or not) you're going to be seeing some big ol' robot gonads, and such is the case here. He's also got robot breasts and a robot penis - if you were looking for a vision into the future of robot sex organs then boy howdy is this guy a treat for you. They even made him face toward the player, despite this being a side-scrolling game. At the very least his mechanical testicles could have been a weak point, but no - this tanuki has­ no weak points, just robot balls precision engineered in a top-secret robotics lab. No wonder he looks so smug.

If you can beat the forest guardian / puckish shape-shifter / robot bollock monster, the fourth stage awaits. It's a circus, and disappointingly it's much less terrifying than a real circus. No clowns, you see. Just extremely camp muscle-men in speedos who attack by prancing into you. Normally this would elicit some kind of reaction, but coming off the back of a fight with the Lord of the Nads it just seems... quaint.

There are plenty of bunny girls to fight, too. If the Playboy Mansion turns out to actually be a front for Hugh Hefner's army of highly-trained, bunny-eared assassins, then we can point to GSBY as an early warning of the doddering sex-turtle's true ambitions.
Bunny girls are all well and good, but what's that thing in the background? At the top, between the curtains?

Why, it's Battle-Armour Winnie the Pooh, new from Disney! After the Hundred Acre Woods was torched by Taliban extremists, Pooh-Bear's lifeless body was taken to a secret government base where he was fitted with the latest in cybernetic equipment and programmed to destroy America's enemies. Let's just hope it wasn't the same secret organisation that made the robot tanuki, otherwise Christopher Robin is in for one hell of a shock.

Beyond the circus lies a disturbing biological hell-scape of intertwined metal and flesh. This is hardly a surprise - the circus was a dead giveaway that something evil was afoot - but there are still shocks in store with the arrival of the boss. It's the moustache-twirling slab of muscle from the intro, and you'll be pleased to hear that he's as French as Gerard Depardieu pissing in the aisle of a plane. The Japanese idea of French, at least, which boils down to lots of prancing, suggestive moaning and him shouting "oui oui oui!" whenever he hits you and "non non non!" when you smack him in the chops. Also, he's a magician. Yeah. He fires doves at you, his top hat contains an evil pocket dimension, he's got facial hair and he's creepy as all get-out. I imagine this is how Paul Daniels sees himself in his mind's eye.

Best of all, he can produce ten-thousand horsepower of groin-thrusting terror by using his top hat as a rocket. Male or female, he's not fussy about his targets. Luckily for us flying about via hat-jets isn't the most effective battle strategy and soon you'll have defeated the pseudo-French weirdo. Now it's time for the final stage!

Space cathedral it is, then. There’s nothing new here, just a long slog through hundreds of enemies you’ve already beaten before. I had worried that GSBY’s nonsensical atmosphere would turn out to be a diversion, a carnival of insanity designed to distract you from the fact that the game isn’t actually that good, and sadly that is exactly the case. It’s not terrible, and it’s certainly not as irredeemably broken as something like Rise of the Robots, it’s just… a bit boring. I know that sounds like an odd description for a game where your character can attack by transforming her breasts into drills, but that’s what it is. The differences that separate good beat-em-ups like Final Fight from the like of GSBY are slim indeed, and in this case it’s the way the enemies fight that drags the whole thing down.

Your foes are slow and ponderous and frankly not much of a threat. They’ve all got pointlessly long health bars – pointless because once you get a hit in there’s very little chance for them to escape. The majority of your time in GSBY’s oddball universe (aside from the time spent saying “Jesus, look at that thing’s knackers”, at least) is spent waiting for them to get up from your combo so you can knock them down again. If you haven’t learnt how to use the more powerful throws by the time you reach the final stage then you’re in for a long, dull level. The first time I played it, before I understood how the throws work, I actually ran out of time in the final stage (although there didn’t seem to be any repercussions from this) because everything moves so slowly. I… I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. I know they say it happens to everyone at some point, but that’s just something they say so you don’t feel bad when you, you know, run out of time.

If you manage to give enough of a toss to make it through the final stage’s swarm of troops you’ll reach the final boss, an alien force that has taken the shape of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 character select screen, but with an eyeball in the middle. He wants to take you for a ride, but not just yet…

…because first he transforms into an invincible astro-genie with a fondness for oversized bracelets. See, this is what I mean about the game being tedious. You can only damage the boss when he’s in eyeball form, and as I’m sure you’ve already figured out he doesn’t like to spend too much time in that mode. That’s just common sense, but it means you spend 90% of the battle up against a villain that you can’t even fight, running away from his one main move where he pulls you to the center of the screen and throws you about. There’s no feeling of climax or even challenge, really: it’s just a boring fight that mostly consists of holding the d-pad in the opposite direction.

Oh, are we done? I kind of zoned out there for a while. Gourmet Sentai: Bara Yarou is over, and the whole thing just feels like a wasted opportunity. I love side-scrolling brawlers, and I love games that take such a gleefully idiotic approach to character and stage design, but GSBY ends up falling flat. Presentation-wise it’s a mixed bag – the graphics are very nice, with some detailed animations, a colour palette that manages to be dark without getting too “muddy” and some genuinely interesting character design. The music is all over the place in terms of the compositions themselves, with some fairly good tracks and others which veer into “irritating” territory, and some of the samples used seem oddly muffled and grainy.
As for the gameplay, it’s a mix between being mechanically competent and just a little dull. The controls work fine, the hit detection is good and you’ve got a few interesting moves at your disposal but that’s all rather redundant when the game has no sense of energy, ambition or excitement, at least when it comes to the gameplay. Plus at only five stages long it's very short.

I’m still glad I’ve played it, even if that’s just because the robot chef makes me yearn for a future where Jamie Oliver has been replaced by soulless automaton programmed to never say “pukka”. It’s just that I’ll probably never want to play it again.

That’s not to say that Winds didn’t try to pull players back in, though. If you’re bored of using the three main heroes, why not try taking control of one of the enemies? Holding L and R on the character select screen lets you move the cursor around at will, and by selecting random bits of the background you can play as the bad guys for a change. You can even play as Drool, the slack-faced robot weirdo!

Of course, he doesn’t have any attacks or even a walking animation and is therefore completely unusable, and the same is true for a lot of the other bad guys, but hey – it’s something, right? Yes, it’s definitely something.

There’s also a an extra piece of art that pops up if you complete the game on the higher difficulty, one that seems to suggest that the Rose Rascals have turned evil and are plotting galactic conquest. That's understandable, they’ve been through a lot and being that close to a cyber-tanuki’s mechanitackle is bound to warp your sense of justice, but it’s hardly a reward that’s going to make me play through the whole game again.
In short, Gourmet Sentai: Bara Yarou should be treated like a trip to one of those oddly-specific museums, like the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum: visit it once, wonder at the absurdity of the whole enterprise and never go back.

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