MIGHTY FINAL FIGHT

Ahh, Metro City, town of a million punches, where the mayors are filled with ferocious justice and people store their meat in oil drums. Come with me as I go through Capcom's 1993 NES jaunt to The City That Never Sleeps Because It's Too Busy Punching People, Mighty Final Fight.


Everyone knows Final Fight, don't they? Well, if you don't, it's a side-scrolling beat-em-up, and for many it's the side-scrolling beat-em-up. Of course, the NES couldn't handle a direct arcade port, so instead Capcom chibified all the characters; thus MFF was born.
The plot is the same as every Final Fight game: Mayor Mike Haggar's daughter Jessica is kidnapped. Haggar blames Cody at first, which is a little harsh, but of course it turns out that the Mad Gear gang is behind it all. This time, instead of kidnapping her to force Haggar to do their bidding, Mad Gear's leader Belger has fallen in love with her. Aww. So, our heroes set off to rescue her, and Belger will soon learn that love really can be painful, painful like an elected city official drop-kicking you in the face.


Haggar, Cody and Guy are all playable, and, it must be said, kind of adorable. Well, except Haggar.


Obviously, I'm going to play as Haggar. Guy appears to have learned a form of ninjitsu based on tickling your enemy into submission, and Cody doesn't have a sweet moustache, so Haggar is the only choice. The gameplay is pretty much the same as the grown-up Final Fight, all of it coated with that unmistakable Capcom sheen of quality. One difference is that MFF features an experience point system: clobber goons, get stronger. You get more EXP for dispatching them with certain moves: the lowly and oft-repeated jumping kick scores a measly one pont, but suplexing a guy is worth more. Plus suplexing is just better.


You start off in the slums, moving forward and suplexing guys left and right. The enemies are chibi versions of previous FF goons, including Rolento, who sports a truly sinister smirk. The boss is Damnd / Thrasher, and he is great. He asks you to join Mad Gear, and of course I said yes. Well, joining a gang is what all the cool kids are doing, right? But I saw turned down because apparently I looked like too much of a mama's boy. It's takes some brass balls to say something like that to Haggar, so credit to Damnd. I still beat him to death, though, and then it's on to stage two, the Riverside. WARNING! The riverside contains Poison!


She really doesn't look impressed, huh? I really love that sprite. There's a lot of character crammed into about twelve pixels there.
The boss is Sodom, and Haggar wastes no time in letting the Japan-obsessed weirdo know who's boss:


Damn right.

Stage three is set in the old town, and the very first thing I did on this stage was suplex a guy down a hole, and yes, it was as cool as it sounds. Haggar didn't get to be Mayor for nothing, you know.


The music, which is excellent throughout, is especially good in this stage. If you like the music from the NES Megaman games, then you'll get a kick out of it:

Stage three's boss is Abigail, and he's angry. Well, you would be, being called Abigail and all. A nice touch is that when he grabs you, instead of his normal deadly grapple, he tries to kiss you. Haggar does not look impressed.


Stage four is the factory. The factory has a section where you're in a lift. Of course it does, this is a side-scrolling beat-em-up. They always have lifts. Always. Always. At least on this one you can kick guys of the side for an instant kill. You can also see the floor number changing as you descend, which is a nice touch. The boss is Sodom again, but red. Once you beat him up a bit, he changes his atack pattern and starts dashing around, trying to tun into you. I fail to see what running in Haggar is supposed to accomplish; You might as well run into a tree. It is a rare example of a boss getting easier once you've dealt him some damage.

The final stage is set in the Bayside area, with more great music:

You have to fight Abigail again and Sodom again, again, which feels a little cheap, but I can't feel too bad when I can do a piledriver. Yes, you can pick a guy up and piledrive him into the floor, or, if you prefer, you can piledrive them onto another enemy's head. Performing that maneuver gives me a kind of satisfaction that should probably be reserved for more important things, like getting promoted or becoming the first man on Mars. It's like a tiny voice in the back of my head says ...yeah! under its breath every time I do it.
The last boss, Belger, uses a nice turn of phrase at the start of the fight:


Unfortunately, he is a dick. I know that, as the head of a vicious crime syndicate, it was unlikely that he was going to offer me a cup of tea and a biscuit, but he's cheaper than bargain-basket copies of Jordan's last single. He stands at one side of the screen shooting rocket fists at you (oh, did I not mention that he's a cyborg now?) and when you make it over to him, he legs it to the other side of the screen. This is very, very frustrating, but I guess it made it feel all the sweeter when I trapped him in a corner an pummeled the everloving crap out out him. Then he explodes (because he's a cyborg, you see). Jessica is reunited with her meat-mountain of a father, and Metro City is once more at peace. Yay!


Mighty Final Fight is damn good fun, you know. By not trying to shoehorn the arcade version into a NES cart, Capcom came up with something a little different, and it's definitely worth playing. So go to Metro City, young warrior, and punch an oil drum for me!

MURDER SHOULD BE MORE FUN, AND WITH JOYPADS

Do you know what made the fine, upstanding member of the community that I am today? A near-constant diet of videogames and horror movies. Yes, I've been ingesting both these media for longer than I can remember, and they have yet to turn me into a cannibalistic mass-murderer, but that may change if the vision I am about to put forward ever comes to fruition.
You see, I love slasher films, and I love videogames, but the two have never really come together in a truly satisfying way. Each of the big four slasher franchises (Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hallowe'en and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) has had a videogame made of them at somepoint, and they are all invariably terrible. For example, here's the terrfying Jason Voorhees in the NES version of Friday the 13th:


Yes, well. He's hardly very menacing in his lilac jumpsuit. I love the way he's holding his clenched fists at his sides, as though he's hopping from one foot to the other in excitement/anticipation/murderous rage.
There was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre game for the Atari 2600, too. If you have any sense, that sentence will scare you more than any film ever could. Here's some gameplay footage:

And so on. What I want to see is a modern slasher-film stlye videogame. A serial-killer sim, if you will. We probably shouldn't put that on the advertising, though. That's one of the problems with this kind of game though: people will object to the violence, but then again, is Nightmare on Elm Street really any bloodier than, say, MadWorld?
What I'd like to see is a game not based on any particular horror franchise, but rather one that takes all the various tropes of the slasher genre and uses them in the game. So, at the start the game you must create your playable monster. The choices you make at the start of the game determine the kind of killer you end up with. Why did they become a killer? Childhood trauma and mental impairment, a la Leatherface? A Freddy Krueger-esqe villain from beyond the grave? Religious mania like Carrie's mother? Their genesis would affect the way they play the game, whether they have supernatural powers or just like stabbin', whether they're more at home in a rural or urban environment, that kind of thing. You can choose their trademark weapon, too, and then it's on to the game.
The gameplay would be a kind of action stealth-em-up, I suppose, where you sneak around disposing of slutty teenagers and nosy strangers. Of course, you can't just machete every single one, oh no; we don't want the audience getting bored. So, you get points and prizes for mixing it up a bit. Sure, take the first few out with the knife, but then you start hanging them on mounted deer heads and trapping them in cages made of chainsaws. That'll get 'em scared! Bonuses will also be awarded for using typical slasher film scare tactics. For instance, you make your victim think you're hiding in the bath. They gingerly creep over, summon their courage and yank back the shower curtain to reveal... nothing. Then, just as they breath a sigh of relief, you step out from behind the door and bash 'em on the head with a spade. ONE MILLION BONUS POINTS AWARDED. If you can kill the teens just as they're about to start having sex, taking drugs or both, well, so much the better.
With the addition of an early-eighties VHS-cover design ethic and a John Carpenter soundtrack, this could well be the best game ever made. I expect the larger games companies to be knocking on my door any day now with offers of fabulous wealth. Until then, I guess we'll have to make do with Splatterhouse. Here's hoping the new one is the god-awful trainwreck I'm assuming it's going to be.

DASHIN' DESPERADOES

In 1993, Data East released a game called Dashin' Desperadoes, and it was met with pretty much no response of any kind. Well, yawns maybe. But I'm going to do my part to stop it simply going gently into that good night by writing this article. You'll all thank me when the post-apocalyptic survivors find this article and form the new world religion around a game about cartoon cowboys and their quest to please a vicious harridan.


Before we start, I'd just like to mention the bit of speech at the start that says "Presented by Data East". Any regular readers will know I love little bits of digitized speech, and this is no exception. I think it's the way the announcer speaks like he's slowly, gradually being paralysed by the venom of some particularly unpleasant tropical spider. You can listen to it here.


Anyway, the game itself is about running from one end of the stage to the other. Yup. You play as a cowboy called Will who has to race his rival, a cowboy called Rick, across the various obstacle-strewn stages. The reason they race? Well, it's because they want to get to a girl called Jenny.


See, now, I have to take issue with Jenny. She clearly has some kind of sociopathic disorder, encouraging two men to risk life and limb by running through ever-more-dangerous landscapes simply to win her affection. Also, she makes out with whichever cowboy gets to her first. She's not fussy, the slut.


The gameplay in Dashin' Desperadoes is surprisingly good fun. Sure it's lightweight, throwaway fun, but it's still fun. The concept of a platform racer was not one that was mined particularly deeply, and on playing DD it did strike me that it seems pretty unique. Considering I've been playing videogames for around twenty years now, any videogame that feels unique is worth a look, frankly.
The basic mechanics are simple enough: You've got a jump button, natch; you can roll along for a short while in a sort of dash maneuver, and you can throw a weapon at your rival. Both players are completely invincible, but getting hit makes them stop for a while. So, the game boils down to running and jumping from one end to the other while trying to touch as few of the obstacles as possible. There are different routes to take in each stage, the general theme being that the higher-up routes are harder to get to but contain less obstacles.

You will learn to hate your rival Rick with the searing intensity of a thousand exploding stars, though. On any difficulty other than easy, the slightest mistake means failure, as Rick blithely jogs past you, effortlessly avoiding the hedgehogs/lava falls/crows/men opening doors that populate the stages while you seem to stumble into every obstacle around. His bombs seem to find you whereever you are, and his explosions last much longer than yours, I swear. He never misses a jump. In fact, if he's so perfect, why doesn't Jenny just have him!? What a dick.


Rick's dickmoves grow in scale during the third stage of every world, where he kidnaps Jenny and tries to escape in some kind of vehicle, be it a car, a plane or a blimp. You have to chase behind him, throwing bombs at the vehicle until they stop. Bear in mind this happens every three levels, so during the course of the game Jenny gets kidnapped six times. That's well beyond even Princess Peach levels of kidnap: at least she usually manages to stick to one kidnap per game. Despite her protests during these stages, by the next level she is encouraging the cowboy's rivalry again. Jenny has serious mental issues.


The music's pretty good too. The highlights are stage 2-3 during the blimp battle:

And stage 6-2, in the pyramid. The pyramid is full of lava. I presume the pharaoh wanted to take hundreds of tons of boiling rock with him into the afterlife.

So, all in all, Dashin' Desperadoes is not awful. It's fun while it lasts, the graphics are nice and the music is pretty good. More importantly, it's a bit different. In these days of bald space marines, that means something. I'll leave you with this advert, featuring the box art:

(click for bigger)

Jesus, look at those mouths. They look like the Rice Krispies elves after seeing terrible... things in some distant war. And what's going on with Jenny's arm in the background there? At least the buzzard looks happy...

NOBUO SERIZAWA'S BIRDIE TRY AND ITS EVIL, SOULLESS TWIN FROM THE FUTURE

So, there's this Japanese golfer called Nobuo Serizawa. Here he is:

What a cheerful looking guy. He's got a blog and everything. In 1992, he lent his likeness to a SNES golf game called Nobuo Serizawa's Birdie Try. That makes sense. He's a Japanese golfer, it's a golf game from Japan. It's a perfect fit!


But wait! We want this game to be released overseas, and nobody is going to know who the hell Nobuo Serizawa is (sorry, bro). Well, we'll just get another, more recognisible golfer for the foreign releases. Oh dear, no famous golfers want to be associated with our little game. What are we going to do!? I've got it! Let's replace Serizawa with A TERRIFYING ROBOT WHO WILL HAUNT YOUR NIGHTMARES UNTIL YOUR SOUL IS GIVEN THE SWEET RELEASE OF DEATH.

A quick renaming of the game to Mecarobot Golf and the job is done. I think this game has disproved the commonly-held notion that to make something 10,000% cooler, you just add robots. That is not a cool robot. He does have some rather well-defined buttocks, though:


As if that wasn't enough, the poor girl at the front counter of the clubhouse gets an entirely unnecessary make-over.



I guess when they were taking the Japanese-ness out of the game, they figured they might as well go the whole hog. Did they really think that Western people wouldn't buy the game because the clerk was one of them foreign types? She doesn't even look that Japanese. It's not like she's covered in tentacles or riding a giant robot or anything.

Did I mention that the robot is called Eagle? You know, like the golf term. On an unrelated note, Eagle and Birdie from the Street Fighter series are also named after golf terms. Every day's a school day and all that. Well, I'll leave you with a message from Eagle the Robot.


YOU HAVE BESTED ME ON THE GREEN BATTLEFIELD OF GOLF. CONGRATULATIONS. AS A REWARD, YOUR DEATH WILL BE SWIFT AND PAINLESS. THAT IS ALL.

GODDAMN PIERRE LE GODDAMN CHEF

When I was a kid, back in the days of the mighty SNES (and the slightly less mighty MegaDrive), the aquisition of a new game was a rare event indeed. New games usually only arrived at Christmas and on birthdays, but evey now and then I would be presented with a game out of the blue. Sometimes this turned out very well (like Megaman 3), but more often than not, the no-doubt well meaning family member had bought me an absolute dog, like Mindscape's 1993 debacle Pierre Le Chef is Out To Lunch. I hate this game deeply, but in the interests of therapy, I decided to have another go at it. If nothing else, this article can serve as a warning to anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to play this unmitigated dreck.


First of all, just look at the box art:


That is not the face of a man I want to spend my time controlling. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the face of a date rapist. Why isn't he looking at the anthropomorphic tomato he's trying to catch instead of staring out of the screen at me, the creepy bastard?
Anyway, the basic premise of the game is this: You play as a French chef, and you are dropped into a nightmarish environment of floating platforms, where you must capture various ingredients with a butterfly net and dump them in cage. It is never explained what terrifying cataclysm caused all of Pierre's ingredients to come to life, but I'm going to assume it involved the Large Hadron Collider.
You start off in Switzerland. Wait a minute, isn't that where the Large Hadron Collider is?


Get ready for Switzerland, indeed. So, the level starts, and you have to go and find your food-catching net. Oh, sorry, didn't I mention that you have to go and find all your items, including the THE GODDAMN NET at the start of every single stage? Well, you do. Once you have it, you can start catching the food: just make sure you don't touch the food, because it hurts you. Wait, what? What kind of chef gets hurt BY TOUCHING FOOD!? You would think such a condition might rule you out of the food service industry, but what the hell do I know? Right, food collecting. There's cheese and eggs and tomatoes and what I though was a boulder throughout my childhood but it turns out to be a potato. The world of food preparation truly is a mysterious one.


Once you've got the required amount of food in the cage, a magic door opens to take you to the next level. If you hang around once you've put some food in the cage, some other French prick turns up and lets it out again. In a shocking outburst of originality, he is called Le Chef Noir. If you do have the misfortune to play Out To Lunch, you will want to stab him in his smug French face. Just go to Tesco like everbody else, you pair of fucking dicks.


If you take too long to finish the level, the screen fades to black in a mushroom-shaped silhouette. I like to believe that this musroomy vortex is dragging Pierre into the furthest, darkest reaches of Hell, a place of unspeakable torment from which he will never escape.
You can also get a fruit bonus. I'm not going to make a joke about that, though.


The level design is like a greatest hits compliation of terrible game-making decisions. Now That's What I Call Frustrating Bullshit, if you will. There are invisible traps, identical walls that you may or may not be able to walk through, overly-slippery ice platforms... oh, and the music. The terrible, terrible music, music that will drill through your skull like a jet-powered termite and melt your god-damn brain, and not in a good way.


Eventually, you get to go to other countries. They are all equally terrible. This time, I only managed to get to Greece before I gave up. I vaguely remember France being the last level, and I think China and Jamaica were in there too. But if you're thinking of playing the game to see that, please don't: I don't want to be held responsible. Pierre le Chef? Pierre le Douche, more like. Catharsis is a beautiful thing.

PS: Up until today, I though the game was just called Pierre le Chef. It isn't.

PPS: Here's a gameplay video. Don't say I didn't warn you.