BLINKY'S SCARY SCHOOL (COMMODORE 64)

For today’s Halloween-themed offering, we’ve got a Commodore 64 platformer / collect-em-up that takes place in a dark and twisted universe – a world where, when you die, you’re not allowed to embrace the sweet respite of the grave but instead you’d better get down to Undead Tesco and buy some pens and ring binders because you have to go back to school. Truly a chilling concept, and it’s one we’re going to explore with Zeppelin Games’ 1990 potion-em-up Blinky’s Scary School!

Here’s Blinky now. He’s the ghost, not the frog. Is “Blinky” the name he was assigned when he died and became a ghost? I hope so, I wouldn’t like to think that “Blinky” was his name while he was alive unless he was a Mr. Magoo type and he died during a comical accident in which his poor eyesight made him mistake a chainsaw for an electric toothbrush. However he met his end, Blinky’s a ghost now, and he might look familiar to you because I mentioned the Amiga version of this title screen when I was looking at spooky Amiga opening screens. You know, I think I prefer the Commodore 64 iteration, despite it being lower resolution: the colours feel a bit nicer, the castle has a flock of bats shooting out of it and that frog looks less like it has a comically large pair of breasts here, which is what I saw on the Amiga version.
Also note that Blinky’s red nose and oversized shoes mean he’s almost certainly the ghost of a clown. That means there’s something out there powerful enough to banish a clown to the afterlife. I pray we never meet it.

Oh, those are eyes. For a moment I thought they were a top-down view of a pair of slippers. Anyway, while it might look scary I don’t think that building in the background is supposed to be the scary school itself. Blinky has to pass a haunting test, but it’s more of a workplace placement situation and he’s off to the ancient castle of the McTavish family, because Blinky’s Scary School has a slightly more involved plot than I was expecting. Apparently the current inhabitant of the castle is one Hamish McTavish – because if you are coming up with a Scottish name, then why not get as stereotypical as possible – and at some point his ancestor created a ghost-expelling machine. Blinky’s ghost exam is to get into the castle, find Hamish’s bedroom and scare the sleeping Scotsman. Unfortunately Blinky exudes all the heart-stopping menace of a damp sponge, so maybe I’ll find something in the castle that’ll help.

The game begins, and we get confirmation that Blinky’s Scary School definitely deserves a place on the Halloween Spooktacular. A status bar containing no less than five skulls, a bubbling cauldron and Blinky himself, who looks a lot more ghost-like than he did on the title screen, with a smug expression that suggests he thinks he’s got this haunting test all sewn up. Don’t get cocky, Blinky. I’m the one who’ll be controlling you, after all.

Blinky’s Scary School is a flip-screen-scrolling platformer at its core, so I spent a little while shuffling Blinky around the first couple of screens and trying to get used to his jumps. All his movements are controlled using the joystick, and I don’t know whether it’s down to the joystick I was using or the game’s programming but jumping diagonally – you know, the jump you’ll be using the most during the game – felt frustratingly difficult to pull off at first. I really had to concentrate on moving the joystick diagonally, that was the problem. It felt like the game wanted a very specific input, otherwise you just ended up jumping straight up or walking sideways. It made for a rocky start, but I did eventually get a handle on it (with the occasional annoying misstep) and my mood never sank too low because I saw that framed picture on the wall and my brain decided it was Lucy Lawless. I don’t know why my brain decided that, but I’m not about to convince it otherwise.

On the next screen along, I found a bit of guidance in the form of a mysterious scroll. If you look at the screenshot with the cauldron in it, you can see that there’s a high ledge on the left that Blinky can’t reach. That’s where we need to go, and to get there we must concoct a potion by following this recipe and collecting various items scattered around the game world. Grab the right ingredients, drop ‘em in the cauldron and Blinky can float up to the ledge and progress. So, what do we need? A bottle of Blinky’s favourite fizzy pop. I wonder what brand he likes? Mountain Boo? Fanta-sm? Spookozade? Because he’s a ghost, you see. You also require a fish, some perfume (presumably to counteract the fish smell) and self-raising flour, because this game likes puns as much as I do. One thing I wasn’t sure about was the way the perfume is referred to as a birthday “grift.” Is that a typo, or is it implying Aunt Edna is a con artist specialising in fragrances?
There’s also the hint that “travelling is quick by loo,” and we’ll get to that.

Off we go on our scavenger hunt, jumping over pits and avoiding monsters while we collect items, of which we can only carry three at a time. On the Commodore 64. While playing as a round-ish white creature with big red feet. Wait a minute, this is a Dizzy game! I thought something felt familiar, and yes, BSS does play a lot like one of Codemasters’ much-loved games starring Dizzy, the tumbling, frolicking egg-thing. This is a shame, because I’ve never really enjoyed any of the Dizzy games. They’re okay, I suppose, but they always felt a bit too difficult, too loose, too meandering for me to really enjoy, plus I never liked not being able to carry every item I find. That last one’s a personal thing, though. Hopefully I’ll enjoy BSS more than the Dizzy games. It does have these thoroughly adorable, wide-eyed spiders on its side, so it’s off to a good start.

Exploring the castle works just as I expected it to, with a maze-like (although mercifully small) layout packed with spike-pits and wandering critters. It’s compact enough that I can easily remember where I’m going and where I’ve been, while still being convoluted enough that I had to pay attention to where I was going lest I wander onto a new screen and directly into the path of a marauding snail.

Right off the bat (an enemy we’ll see later, quelle surprise,) the enemies make it clear that they’re going to be the most annoying thing about BSS. They don’t really do much besides wander back and forth so they’re at least predictable, but they’re also right in the bloody way all the time. They’re surprisingly fast, too – even the snails - and when you consider that their sprites are quite chunky you’ve got fast-moving, space-occupying monsters crammed into every narrow corridor and Blinky has no way to harm them. The saving grace is that Blinky does have a health bar, and quite a generous one at that, but on almost every screen there are enemies that are extremely difficult to fully avoid. BSS quickly becomes a test not of how quickly you can kill the enemies or how best to avoid them, but rather planning your route so you spend as little time in contact with the creatures as possible because you will be touching them. Trying to limit the amount of damage you take is all you can do, and as I’ve said before being unable to avoid taking damage is something that annoys me in videogames so it’s a good job BSS has cute critters roaming through a spooky castle to balance out the frustration of trying to jump past a dangling spider that’s moving as though it’s had all its blood replaced with espresso.

You might have realised that with only three inventory slots and four items needed for the potion, you’re going to have to make multiple trips to the cauldron. Well, fear not, there’s a time-saving trick I can share with you all. If you’ve got a bog roll in your possession, you can flush yourself down these toilets and be teleported back to the cauldron. It’s a method of transport that might wreak havoc with Blinky’s sense of self-esteem, and the hygiene issues that result from the plumbing dumping its contents into the cauldron room – which seems to be the closest thing this castle has to a kitchen – don’t bear thinking about, but it beats walking all the way back from the furthest reaches of the castle.

Having collected all the ingredients for the potion, which wasn’t difficult because it’s not a huge area to search and the items are mostly immediately recognisable as the items from the poem, Blinky gains the power of flight for the three or so seconds it takes to float up to this ledge. It’s a very nicely animated and extremely smooth little scene, and overall I’d say the graphics and especially the animations are BSS’ strongest suit. Blinky himself is particularly slick. In fact, the developers were so proud of his animation that they put another Blinky at the bottom-right of the status bar that mimics all of the main Blinky’s movements, and I can’t think of any other reason for this inclusion other than to show off how nice Blinky looks.

Now we’ve got a whole new section of the castle to explore. It looks a lot like the other part of the castle, but as the rest of the castle looked cool I don’t have a problem with that. The only problem I did have is that there are a few sections where you have to jump up to the screen above and it doesn’t work very well – it feels like you should be jumping diagonally between the platforms lining the pit, but if you do that you’ll fall back down. Instead, you have to get to the top-most platform on the screen and then jump straight up.

A little further in, you find another recipe. This one’ll turn Blinky into an air bubble so he can travel underwater, and once again it involves collecting a bunch of items and chucking them into a cauldron. Does no-one use cauldrons for making rich and hearty stews any more? Anyway, this time we need eye of newt – you can’t beat the classics, can you? - an air canister, some chewing gum and  Aunt Edna’s scones, for ballast. Poor old aunt Edna’s getting a rough ride in this game, huh? Looking at these component it seems clear Blinky is going to make a bubblegum bubble, fill it with air and use the scones to weigh him down. So what’s the eye of newt for? Panache? Maybe it’s the witchcraft equivalent of MSG.

Exploring this part of the castle allows you to get outside and see the moonlit sky, which I personally think looks particularly nice. The purple glow of the clouds is definitely going to get BSS another point on the Halloween-O-Meter. It’s a small detail, sure, but the ways of the Halloween-O-Meter are fickle and unknowable.
I’m not so sure about these bats, mind you. Mostly because they don’t look much like bats, but also because it seems they’re about to fly into each other face-first but you don’t get to see a comedic scene of the two bats mumbling apologies to each other and awkwardly saying “you know what they say, blind as us, ha ha.”

While I was exploring, I also stumbled across this. That’ll be Hamish McTavish, then? He doesn’t look like he’s asleep. He looks like he’s about to launch into a Rick Wakeman-esque keyboard solo. Hamish’s sleeping cap is basically a wizard’s hat, too. He is asleep, though, and no amount of Blinky jumping around on the spot will wake him. Looks like I’ll have to find a special item for that, even though I’ve got an air canister in my inventory and you’d think a quick blast under the bedcovers from that would get Hamish moving.

Locating most of the ingredients was easy enough, but I did have trouble finding the eye of newt. Specifically, my trouble was that I kept walking right past it. Why? Because I thought it was a yo-yo, that’s why. Take a look at it in the screenshot above and tell me it doesn’t look like a yo-yo, I dare you. In my defence, there are “red herring” items scattered through the castle like a cassette tape, so the idea of there being a yo-yo laying around isn’t much of a stretch. Also, I assumed the eye of newt would be in a jar or some other container, not the single colossal eye of some gigantic mega-newt.

With the second potion brewed, Blinky can travel underwater. It’s just a couple of screens spent moving your ghost-bubble through the castle’s sewers (as if being flushed down the bog wasn’t bad enough) while avoiding all these angry fish, but it’s a nice change of pace. I was going to say “avoiding these piranhas,” but I don’t think they are piranhas. They look more like sunfish, if you ask me. More games should include sunfish as evil underwater predators. Maybe it’s just me, but they look way creepier than piranhas and sharks, as though an alien consciousness tried to create a sea creature but the only reference material they had were a nursery class’ drawings of fish.

More outdoor escapades await once you’re out of the water, and sadly this is where Blinky’s Scary School runs out of steam. This area is just a flat run of screens with no exploration to be had, and worst of all is this jump. It’s the only jump in the game that has to be cleared with pixel-perfect accuracy, and I do mean perfect. The first time I reached it I ran out of lives and had to come back with cheats enabled. A big part of the problem is that Blinky’s “base” is so wide that it’s difficult to tell which parts of his feet / sheet are able to support his weight or will prove fatal if they touch the spikes. I’ve mentioned this before – the article about Banishing Racer springs to mind – but when the star of your platformer is wider than they are tall it can be difficult to tell where their point of contact with the floor is. For most of Blinky’s Scary School it wasn’t a problem, which only makes this incredibly frustrating section even more annoying.

Eventually I made it across, only to reach a dead end. Oh god, I’m going to have to jump over that pit again, aren’t I? If only the McTavish family hadn’t embraced indoor plumbing, the might have been an outhouse I could have flushed myself down. Never mind, at least I’ve found the item I need to complete the game: an alarm clock. That’ll wake Hamish up, and Blinky will have passed his haunting test. After all, there’s nothing scarier than having to wake up in the morning.

And so I dashed back through the castle, over the Pit of Bullshit, through the sunfish-infested sewers and around the cobwebbed halls of McTavish Castle. I arrived at the bedchamber, my mind filled with images of Blinky’s graduation ceremony, of how he’d look painfully cute wearing a little mortarboard and then less cute when he gets his first letter from the student loan people. All I had to do was leap up and place the alarm clock on the shelf above the bed…

...at which point the game told me to go screw myself. Game over, you fail, Blinky is condemned to an eternity of ceaseless suffering in the foulest depths of Hell. Once more, I have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Turns out that I ran out of time – I was supposed to wake Hamish up before the break of dawn, because waking him up a few minutes early with an alarm clock is sufficiently scary but apparently letting him wake up on his own and seeing a ghost at the end of his bed isn’t.
I’m definitely not going through all that again just to bring you BSS’ “good” ending, because I already know it’s not worth the effort. Instead of this message, placing the alarm clock in time gives you the same black screen with the message “Congratulations Blinky. You have completed your training, and are now a fully fledged ghost. Happy haunting...” See? Not worth trying to jump over that bloody pit again just for that, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“Happy haunting,” the ending says, but is that what I got from Blinky’s Scary School? You know, I think I did. A few issues aside - the pit and the unavoidable monsters, mostly – it’s a pleasant enough romp that does little new with the formula but wraps it all up in an irresistible (to me, anyway) spooky coating, with some really nice graphics and poetic potion recipes that are definitely charming in their wretchedness, something the game itself acknowledges. I certainly enjoyed it more than most Dizzy games, and I think that’s because Blinky’s Scary School is a lot smaller. I felt like I could get more of a grip on it than I could with the Dizzy games or any number of other sprawling home computer collectathons with limited inventory space, so yeah, I had a fun time with Blinky’s Scary School. Plus, you can travel around by flushing yourself down the toilet and I’m dumb enough to find this entertaining.

As for the Halloween-O-Meter, I think Blinky’s Scary School deserves a commendable eight out of ten. You’re playing as a ghost, for starters, and while it doesn’t contain the werewolves, Draculas and Frankensteins it’d take to reach a nine or a ten there’s plenty of Halloween-y ambience in the spooky castle and scuttling spiders. Also, I believe I mentioned this but sunfish are creepy as hell.

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FIST FIGHTER (COMMODORE 64)

I played Top Fighter 200 MK VIII and yeah, it was an experience. The weird and copyright-infringing character roster was fun, you had special moves, it was alright. Alright just doesn't cut it, though. It wasn't bad enough. I've been playing Streets of Rage and Doom this week, games that are so good that I feel I've build up a layer of psychic armour thick enough to allow me to get through something really bad. And where do you turn for bad games but the 8-bit home computers of the Eighties? Well, yes, the Game Boy Color, but I did a GBC game recently so shut up and "enjoy" this Commodore 64 title instead: Zeppelin Games' 1993 we-tried-to-copy-Street-Fighter-II-but-failed-badly-em-up Fist Fighter!

The art on the loading screen is nice, at any rate. It's also oddly familiar. I'm not saying that the artist ripped it off from a movie poster or something, but I'm also not saying I'd be surprised if they did. It's got a certain Jean-Claude van Damme-iness to it, like if the guy could speak he'd have a inexplicable Belgian accent. Good work on the lettering of the title, too. It'd be a great logo for an energy drink made from crisp mountain water and bovine hormones.

So much for the decent graphics. I've done enough childminding that I can confirm that this screen is the same colour as infant diahorrea. Was that your plan, Zeppelin Games? Lure people in with the relatively competent loading screen art and then bam, right into a world of colours that share their hue with the bodily fluids of a very ill person, knowing full well that the player won't quit the game because they've just waited twenty minutes for the bloody thing to load from tape and by God they're going to play something? Well, it worked. I'm going to play Fist Fighter, although I might do so with my eyes closed.
This title screen includes various common fighting game variables, so you can change the number of rounds and the difficulty if you're into that kind of thing. You can also select your character here, from the five available in the game. I'm going to show them to you now.

At top we have Jay-Cee, a tour guide from the UK because sure, why not? Even tour guides like to strip down to their underwear and punch people from time to time, even if it;' only people who have wandered away from the group or are trying to chip off a piece of the T. Rex skeleton as a souvenir. Hang on, Jay-Cee? JC? As in... Jean-Claude van Damme? My god, I think I was onto something with the loading art. His special move is the Skittle Roll, which is as pathetic to look at as it sounds, and I think he's the closest Fist Fighter gets to a main character.
Second is Merrick, the Brazillian freak with the deformed head who can shoot bolts of psychic energy with his very mind, a technique that's a damn sight more impressive than the primary-school gymnastics Jay-Cee has to offer. Merrick is presumably named after Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.

Next up is Otis. Otis is a very slightly altered version of Jay-Cee. Don't be fooled by the description of his "speciality," there is nothing super about his punch unless you count it being super difficult to connect with.
Below him is Gino, the Italian stereotype whose portait looks like character artwork from a bootleg version of Grand Theft Auto. He's a pizza dude, because he's Italian. I don't know if "pizza dude" means he's a pizza delivery man or someone who's just, like, really into pizza but, again, he's Italian so it's probably the latter. His speciality is "knife". I'm suprised it's not "pizza cutter," if I'm honest.

Last and quite possibly least there's Lee Chung, a Nepalese man with a Chinese name who uses a Japanese martial art because hey, it's all Asia, right? I don't have anything else to say about Lee Chung. I was going to make a Wang Chung joke, but nothing came to mind. Nobody Have Fun Tonight? Nah, I'm not going to force it.
Time to get into the action, and I decided to pick Gino because that's where my cursor had stopped. Having access to a knife seemed like it might be quite useful, too.

All right, here we go - Gino vs. Merrick fighting it out in what is apparently Egypt but could equally be one of those Star Wars sets in Tunisia they left to fall into ruin. We've got a timer, yellow health bars and one on one combat, I reckon I can figure this out.

Nope, I couldn't figure it out. I was trying to get away from Merrick, but all I seemed to be doing was accdentally performing an unnecessarily complex spinning kick. When I wasn't pirouettting around like my shoes were filled with ball-bearings, I was throwing punches with microscopic range that Merrick countered by being four inches away (where I couldn't reach him) and battering me with his mind-bullets. Notice I said he was named after the Elephant Man and based on him, because I don't think the Elephant Man had psychokinetic powers. Maybe in the movie, it was directed by David Lynch.

After handing me a humiliating "perfect" defeat, Merrick slips into some ugly misogyny by implying that I'm a girl and am therefore not good at fighting. I think you'll find that I'm bad at fighting because I don't have a bloody clue what's going on and it had nothing to do with my gender, thank you very much. Gino responds to this cruel barb with a bit of flirting. Did I mention he's Italian?

After consulting the instruction manual, I leapt back into the fray, this time taking control of Lee Chung. Jay-Cee is his opponent in a contest of karate versus the noble martial art of rolling around like a great big tit and wearing ankle socks while you do it.
Okay, so I should probably talk about the gameplay, I suppose. One of the big hurdles of getting a game of this type to work on the C64 is overcoming the limitations of the single-button controller, and Fist Fighter does this through the usual method of having different actions performed by the joystick when the fire button is pushed down and when it isn't. The obvious solution in this case would be for the joystick to move your fighter when the fire button isn't being pressed and for it to make them attack when you hold fire while pressing different directions, but the author of this game thought that would be too straightforward and so mashed the movement and punching controls together into one big mess.

For example, just pressing diagonally up-right on the joystick makes you punch at your enemy's head. Holding fire and pressing up-right unleashes a high kick. The sharper-witted amongst you may have noticed that this leaves no provision for jumping towards your enemy, a staple movement in every fighting game (no matter how many times you get shoryukened while doing it). Instead, to jump towards your opponent you have to press up to jump straight up and them move the stick sideways while airborne to sort of... slide around in the air. You've got quite a lot of control while you're up there, too, giving what little aerial combat there is an unpleasantly floaty feel.

Still, armed with the manual, I managed get enough of a handle on what I was doing to cause Jay-Cee some harm. The leg sweep was quite effective at first, but after a while Jay-Cee would see it coming and hop backwards away from it. I tried again and again to kick my rival in the foot, but he just keep prancing backwards until he was up against the right-hand side of the screen, where he just jumped over my kicks instead of away from them. I kicked, he jumped, ad infinitum. Then I noticed I had more health than Jay-Cee, and that I'd left the fight timer option set to "on". Surely the computer wouldn't be stupid enough to simply jump over and over again until the time ran out and I won by virute of having more health?

That is, in fact, exactly what happened. The AI really is that bad, but as I'm more of a scholar than a warrior I'm going to claim this one as a victory for intellect over brawn. I thought my way to victory. Because "thought" sounds like "fought," you see. It does when I say it, at least, but then again my enuciation is terrible.

To the victor go the spoils, and in this case I'm the victor and the spoils are a scene of some juvenile bickering. "Muuum, Jay-Cee tried to beat me up and then he said my face needs improving, tell him!" It's no "you must defeat my Dragon Punch to stand a chance" but these After-Match Abuse sections are the only part of Fist Fighter likely to raise even the smallest of smiles.
Now I just have to beat the other fighters to clear the standard Arcade mode that every one-v-one fighter is based around, right?

Ha ha, no. No no no. Fist Fighter doesn't go in for anything as fancy as letting the player fight their way through a series of bouts before being crowned the champion. You just pick two fighters, have a match and then return to the menu screen to do it all again or, as an acceptable alternative, feed your Fist Fighter casette into the nearest paper shredder or garbage disposal unit.
I'm not quite finished with this one yet, though, not when there's a whole world of poor design choices to enjoy.

One of Fist Fighter's more egregious gameplay flaws is that the characters are very reluctant to get up off the floor. If you're knocked down by an attack - something that happens a lot considering every move that isn't a basic punch to the head knocks you down - your fighter spends a good four or five seconds struggling to their feet while the characters' positions are reset to be a screen's width apart. Four or five seconds may not sound like a long time, but in a fighting game it might as well be three weeks. I have won entire rounds in Street Fighter II in four or five seconds. Waiting for your character to get the hell up ends up constituting about sixty percent of Fist Fighter's playing time, turning a game that was already slow and very stop-start into a cheerless death-march through a tar pit.

Otis' trash-talking could use some work, although I'm fond Gino's response because I can't tell if he's being sarcastic or if it's a pathetic attempt to stave off further beatings. He's polite about it, at least.

Then there are the special moves. Every fighter has one, activated by holding the fire button and pressing down-left on the joystick... or rather, by holding fire, moving the stick and then letting go of the fire button. I think that's how they work, anyway; getting them to come out consistently was a skill I never quite got down.
Pictured above is Jay-Cee's "Skittle Roll," where he curls up into a ball and slowly rolls into his opponent's ankles. Took a lot of martial arts training to master that one, did it? I have to imagine Blanka is standing just off screen and slowly shaking his head in disgust. The other fighter's specials aren't much better, and each of them have huge flaws that render them almost useless against the computer. The skittle roll can be avoided by jumping into it, because it only damages you if both feet are firmly planted on the floor when it connects. Otis' super punch admittedly does a lot of damage if it lands, but as it has a range that's best measured in microns that's a moot point. Lee Chung's whirlwind kick is a couple of the spinning kicks that every fighter can do, only in a row and with a much longer start-up period.

Merrick and Gino both have projectiles, which are by far the most useful special moves but which are still hardly stellar. You can see Merrick's psychic blast in the screenshot above, it's the pink thing that looks like the ghost of a horsehoe crab, an aquatic spirit seeking vengeance for all its brothers and sister who died thanks to humans harvesting their blood. You can also see that Jay-Cee has easily ducked underneath it: the problems with the projectiles is that they have a huge start-up delay, giving you opponent plenty of time to not get hit by them. I can cut Merrick some slack on this, because there music be some effort involved in channelling the essense of your mind into a tangible thing and then launching it out of your face, but Gino has no excuse.

Gino throws a knife, right? Simple, nice and straightforward. Except before he throws it, he stands there for a couple of seconds while he tries to fish the bloody thing out of his pocket. What, have you got your house keys / breath mints / mobile phone / Pizza Lover's Club membership card in there too, getting in the way? If you're going to use a knife in a fight, get it out before the fight starts, don't waste my time and yours by rummaging around in your pocket like someone scrambling for their bus fare while the driver tuts at them.

Too right you weren't concentrating, you were too busy enjoying your little pocket spelunking expedition. Even when I did manage to throw a knife at Jay-Cee, he simply rolled underneath it. Also, I had forgotten Jay-Cee was supposed to be British until I read his dialogue here. Not only is he British, but he's from the Victorian era, apparently.

I am glad the background of the America stage says DINER on it in big yellow letters, because otherwise I would have assumed I was fighting in front of a crashed UFO made from old jukeboxes. No, wait, that sounds much better than brawling outside a greasy spoon. Nuts.
Speaking of nuts, a lot of the fighting in this game devolves into the computer trying to punch you in the testicles. I suppose that kind of thing will happen with an all-male cast.

Look, man, this giant psychic freak just kicked the crap out of you, do you really think this is the time to be dissing his fighting abilities? The very fighting abilities he has used to rearrange you face, not that you can really tell with these graphics? Or maybe Jay-Cee is genuinely interested in Merrick's 10th-Dan black belt granny. Why isn't she in this game? She couldn't possibly have been less interesting than these chumps.

That's pretty much it for Fist Fighter, the worst fighting game I've ever played that isn't Rise of the Robots: a cynical Street Fighter clone which, in addition to the problems already discussed, has poor hit detection, a small pool of boring and basically identical characters, ugly graphics and wildly varying levels of AI competence. Actually, one thing I can give Fist Fighter credit for is that increasing the difficulty level does make your opponent a bit smarter, mostly noticeable in the way they try for longer, more damaging combos instead of just knocking you down over and over again.
However, the After-Match Abuse segements provide the only real glimmer of enjoyment that can be extracted from Fist Fighter, so I'm going to finish off this article with a couple of my favourites.

A+ punnage from Gino, good work. Because he's Italian! Ah ha ha, they like pizza. Then he's once again accused of being feminine. I sure wish the programmers had bothered to show some of Gino's womanly grace in the actual game, it might have made him a more interesting character to play as.

And finally, my favourite of them all: Otis threatens to kill Lee Chung, and Lee Chung simply accepts this with weary resignation. He yearns for the tender embrace of death. Man, that is grim. Well, see you all next time!
P.S. Don't play this game.

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NINJA COMMANDO (ZX SPECTRUM)

Things that were big in the 1980s: Michael Jackson, Dynasty, shoulder pads... and ninjas. Ninjas were a genuine pop-culture craze, which still strikes me as an odd quirk of fate. Imagine if it had been, say, Aztec warriors who had sparked the world's imaginations during the era of Thatcher and Reagan instead of ninjas: Teenage Mutant Aztec Turtles would have been very different, for starters. Parents who complained about the violence in TMNT might have had a point if each episode ended with Michaelangelo tearing the still-beating heart from his enemy's chest as an offering to the gods.

But I digress. Here at VGJunk a pop culture craze can only mean one thing, and that's cash-in games - and boy were there a lot of those. There are around twenty games on the ZX Spectrum alone with "Ninja" in the title, and that doesn't even include ninja-based but not ninja-named games like Shinobi, ranging from (relatively) serious titles such as The Last Ninja to a slew of "wacky" games with no connection to ninjas beyond the name, like BMX Ninja, Ninja Hamster and Ninja Scooter Simulator. Yes, those are all real games.
With that in mind, I set myself the goal of finding the ZX Spectrum's most average ninja game. Something slap-bang in the middle, something pointless in its blandness and, as is usually the case with ninja games, something that has bugger all to do with ninjas. I think I might have found that game. It was released in 1989 by Zeppelin Games, and it's called Ninja Commando.

The loading screen is trying to trick me into thinking it's actually called NINIA OMMAND, but that's just typical shinobi trickery that can safely be ignored.
This is our ninja. The way he's gingerly holding his sword suggests that he's not entirely comfortable with the use of bladed weapons, but that's okay because we won't be using one in this game anyway. He also made his ninja hood by pulling a stocking over a motorcycle helmet. At least the loading screen is colourful, but if you're here because you were drawn, moth-like, to the neon hues of the ZX Spectrum then I suggest you turn back now because things are about to get drab.

Monochrome, even. Two fuzzy grey ninjas squat on a fuzzy grey background, unable to bring themselves to look at each other after a recent argument about which kinds of shuriken are the best.
I assume this dismal screen was purposefully designed this way to encourage the player to start the game as quickly as possible, so let's get on with it.

Of course, Ninja Commando is a side-scrolling platformer. I told you I was looking for the average. I'm also looking for the hero, because I seem to have mislaid him amongst the off-white mist that makes up the levels.

There he is, looking not at all like a ninja. He looks like a jogger with his hood up. Is this entire game a shocking case of mistaken identity, where one man out for an evening run is mistaken for a trained assassin? I don't want to start making wild claims about Zeppelin Games' intentions on this one but yes, that's exactly what's happening.

Your mission is to run from left to right, jumping over holes and avoiding enemies, until you reach the end of the stage. Ninja Commando keeps up its sterling work in the field of blandness by adopting this genre, but it shocked me by being far superior to many of its contemporaries when it comes to the controls. They're much better than many Spectrum games, and given the kind of jerky mess I was expecting from a budget-priced ZX game they damn near blew my mind. Your ninja moves smoothly and reacts with precision to your commands, although he doesn't have many skills to master - move left or right, jump and fire is all you have at your disposal. Still, it's nice that I can generally get my ninja to do what I want him to do with the minimum of fuss.

Being a ninja / unfortunate jogger, you have raised the anger of many men, all of whom have sworn a solemn oath to destroy you and all you hold dear. Their plan for achieving this goal is to mill about the levels, getting in your way. Here we can see a column of crash test dummies advancing upon our hero with murder on their minds. "Marching mannequins shouldn't be a problem for a ninja," I hear you cry, and you're right. Sadly our hero isn't much of a ninja because he forgot to bring a bloody weapon with him. You start Ninja Commando bare-handed, and being a videogame ninja touching your opponents causes you to die instantly. Do ninjas and commandos cancel each other out or something, as though a special forces soldier is the positron to the electron of the ninja? Commandos - tough guys. Ninjas - tough guys. Ninja Commandos? That scrawny kid at school who wore corrective shoes and smelled weird.

You aren't completely defenceless, however - it's just that our hero went to the same dojo as Super Mario. To kill an enemy, you must master the deadly martial art of jumping on their head. Yup, jump on their heads. To kill them. And you're a ninja. It's a good job I read the instructions before I started playing this. I don't think I would have figured that one out.
Once your enemies' weakness has been revealed to you, you can start smashing heads beneath your feet which will lead in turn to Ninja Commando's weapons system. You see, there are weapons in this game, it's just that our ninja pal left them all in his ninja bedside table or wherever it is that he stores his tools of death. Kill an enemy, and there's a chance that they'll drop a shuriken for you to collect.

See? Once collected, you can throw shurikens with the fire button and revel in the one ninja-related aspect of the game. It doesn't stop there, though - once you've got the throwing stars, killing more enemies will cause one to eventually drop a bomb pick up. Collect the bombs and they replace your shurikens as your long-range murder option. Bomb enough enemies and you'll collect a flamethrower.

What, you don't think a flamethrower is a suitable weapon for a ninja? Well then you'll probably hate the last weapon, because it's just a gun.

Okay, maybe not just any gun, because most guns don't fire rounds that look like quivering strips of bacon, but a gun is a gun. Notice that the weapons get less ninja-y as they progress - I was hoping to collect a fifth power-up that'd put me in the cockpit of an F-15E Strike Eagle, but no such luck.
You lose your weapon when you die, (or finish the level,) which sounds harsh but isn't that much of a problem because using your weapons in Ninja Commando turns out to be a fairly pointless exercise.

For one thing, enemies just keep spawning, pouring out of the doorways that litter every level to create an endless stream of crash test dummies, generic men with guns or, in this case, goons whose bubble-shaped heads offer all manner of possible explanations. Are they astronauts, traditionally the fiercest rivals of the ninja clans? Men in hazmat suits? Extremely lost Olympic fencers? It's probably that last one - it's a little-known fact that the final step in the training of an Olympic fencer is that they must take the life of a ninja in order to prove their worth.
So, enemies constantly pour into the battle, making standing still and throwing shurikens at them rather redundant when the only reward is more pointless weaponry.

After a while spent playing Ninja Commando and struggling with the hordes of enemies, it became clear to me that I was playing the game all wrong. I began to think of it this way: Ninja Commando is actually a surprisingly accurate take on the activities of the real ninjas of feudal Japan. Our hero, having slipped into the enemy base to assassinate someone or poison a well or whatever he was paid to do, has been spotted. That's why there are so many enemies everywhere, and what would a ninja do when faced with these overwhelming odds? Run. Run as fast as he could to escape his pursuers and make it back safely to ninja territory (directions to Ninja Territory: go right).

Obviously I just pulled that story out of my arse, but running is definitely the way to go in Ninja Commando. This is because when the enemies first appear on screen, for a few seconds you cannot be harmed by them. If they're flashing when they walk out of their doorway, then you can walk right through them, and if you're quick enough you can get past them and on to the next area before they have a chance to attack. Speed is of the essence, and stopping to actually fight enemies is right off the menu. In fact, sometimes blindly charging forwards is the only reasonable way to progress.

Take the situation pictured above. Having dithered around for too long, our hero has allowed the gun-toting soldier on the platform above to become active, fatal to the touch and armed with one of those wobbly bacon launchers. From this position the Ninja Commando is, to be blunt, fucked. You can't attack while jumping, so even if he had a shuriken, he couldn't take the enemy out via that method. You can't hop over to the next platform, because the arc of your jump will carry you into the enemy and kill you. You could try jumping up to the gunman's platform, but that's a very difficult landing to make without touching him and dying, and even if you did manage it getting past him would still be a challenge because you can only jump straight up or at a set angle. The only other option for our ninja friend is to live out the remainder of his life on that one small platform, ekeing out a living by ploughing the seven square inches of arable land found upon it and building a simple dwelling out of his own clothes.
That's if you hesitated, of course. If you run for it, you can get past the man with the gun before he solidifies, a hearty "see you later, sucker!" on your lips as he struggles to materialise in time to shoot you in the back before you're gone, gone, gone.

In fact, if you're thinking of playing Ninja Commando, then I suggest you cheat to make it a more enjoyable experience all around. There's a POKE you can use to give yourself 255 lives. Use it, and play the game not as a platformer, but as an obstacle course. Run though the levels as quickly as you can, before the enemies can get their acts together. Ninja Commando is surprisingly generous with its in-stage checkpoints, and when combined with a huge amount of lives you'll find that dying is not the punishment it might otherwise feel like. Doing this transforms Ninja Commando from a frustrating, overly difficult and plodding exercise in tedium to a fast-paced test of reflexes and memory where the game's smooth controls and precise-but-not-pixel-perfect tests of jumping can really shine.

The transformation was pretty amazing, and I ended up enjoying Ninja Commando far more than I thought I would. I mean, my expectations were lowered because this is a Spectrum game, after all, but I had fun with it. It does have some flaws, of course: on the whole I actually really liked the monochrome graphics, which at least avoided the colour clashing so prevalent in Spectrum games and gave the game an unusual mood, but it does occasionally get difficult to see what the bloody hell is going on.

At least he's more camouflaged than most videogame ninjas.
There's also the fact that the levels are very samey, and once you've gotten past the first two you've pretty much seen everything that Ninja Commando has to offer. Plus, there are occasional appearances by what I have taken to calling the Bastard Potato.

That's the lumpy thing on the left with the wiggly laser coming out of it. The Bastard Potato is more an environmental hazard than an enemy - it's always active, and it does nothing but sit there, spewing lasers and being fatal to the touch, and it requires some extremely accurate jumping to get past. Of the 255 lives I gave myself, I think these things claimed about two hundred. Luckily they don't appear very often, but now I find myself eyeing the King Edwards in my kitchen with some suspicion.

Oh, and the message you receive for finishing the game is so spartan it feels almost sarcastic. "Well done," say the developers, while clapping slowly. Well, it's a ZX Spectrum game so I was expecting it. Who's the loser now, huh? Hang on, wait, it's still me.
I set out to find the most average ninja game that the Spectrum had to offer, but in the end I stumbled across something which, with a little cheating, managed to exceed my admittedly low expectations and keep me entertained for an hour or so. Would I recommend it to other people? No, of course not. I'm not that cruel. But if you do find yourself wanting to give Ninja Commando a try, I hope this article has helped you understand how to play it for maximum fun yield. And hey, unlike Ninja Gaiden there are no birds to make a mockery of your years of martial arts training and send you plummeting down chasms. It's just got those Bastard Potatoes instead.

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