DEVILISH / BAD OMEN

What with me talking about the likes of Monster Maulers, Money Idol Exchanger and Growl recently, VGJUNK was starting to look like some fluffy magical gumdrop world where everything is made of twinkling roses and powdered kittens, a strange place where I ended up rather enjoying all the games I played. Well, you can forget all that today, as it's off to the Megadrive where I'll be playing Aisystem Tokyo's ball-busting assault on the laws of physics, Devilish.

Although, I played the Japanese version, which is called Bad Omen, which is what I'll be calling it from now on. It's contradiction time already, because although I've already said Bad Omen is rubbish, (and it is,) it does have some good things goin' on. The first of these is the plot, which may be the greatest plot to any videogame ever. The plot is that a demon, whose name is a symbol à la Prince, sees a happy prince and a happy princess and becomes terribly jealous. The demon decides to destroy their happiness; but how? Raise a demonic army to enslave them and their people? Fry them with his evil fire-breath? No, he chooses an altogether... different approach.

That's right. He turns them into two stone paddles. As revenges go, it's hardly up there with your Titus Andronicus-style cannibalism revenge; hell, it's not much better than clingfilm over the toilet bowl. I have come up with three possible explanations for this strange plot:
1) The demon only knew one magic spell, which happened to be one that turns royalty into stone paddles.
2) While fooling around with dark forces that they didn't fully comprehend, the prince and princess accidentally turned themselves into stone paddles and made up the whole "evil demon was jealous" excuse to spare their blushes, or,
3) Lots of hallucinogens.
Whatever the reason, the stage is set for Bad Omen. The stone paddles may have tipped you off as to what kind of game Bad Omen is already, but in case they haven't, it is a clone of Breakout / Arkanoid. You control a paddle (or in this case two), moving from side to side as a ball bounces up and down the screen. You have to get your paddle in the way to stop the ball from falling off the bottom of the screen, smashing whatever bricks are in your way at the top of the screen. You know the one, you've probably played it a million times, or possibly you played it once, realised it was dull as sin and never played it again. Well, that's the basic premise of Bad Omen, although it does feature a few minor complications. The first is that you have two paddles positioned above eachother. You control them at the same time, but the bottom paddle can only move left-to-right, while the top paddle can go anywhere it damn well chooses. I assume that there are two paddles to facilitate the two-player mode, but I didn't try it, so I wouldn't know. It's not that I don't have any friends, it's just that the reason they remain my friends is because I don't make them play shitty games like Bad Omen with me.
The top paddle can also rotate 90 degrees, allowing you to bounce the ball left or right. This comes in useful for Bad Omen's other twist on a tired old concept. Rather than a static playing screen, in Bad Omen you have to move the ball up the screen (and sometimes left or right) to progress, like a kind of platform-game version of Breakout, if you will, with each stage even having a boss at the end.
A couple of things before we dive into the painful experience of actually playing the game. For some odd reason, whenever there is a screen transition outside the main game, (between levels, for example,) it is accompanied by a demonic zip.

The screen gets unzipped by that thing there, the most HEAVY METAAAAL clothes fastener I have ever seen. Peculiar. The other is that you get a nice bit of digitised speech when you start the game:

If it didn't say Bad Omen right there, I would have considerable difficulty telling you what he's supposed to be saying, which is exactly as it should be. Personally, I think it sounds more like he's saying "Black Oven".

Anyway, the game itself. You start off in a small village-like area, although the game refers to it as "Graveyard" and there are certainly skeletons around, fire-breathing ones that knock your ball about. There are some little demon guys too, but they're not much hassle, and you'll mostly be concentrating on smashing the many, many bricks in front of you to get to the end of the stage. It all sounds very jolly, but it doesn't take long for Bad Omen's problems to become apparent. The main one, and it's a pretty insurmountable one, is that the ball physics is dreadful. Your ball careers off flat surfaces, including your paddles, at wildly inconsistent angles. God help you if it bounces off something that isn't smooth, because the ball can and will go anywhere except where you might reasonably expect it to go. Add to that the fact that sometimes the ball inexplicably passes through the paddle, and it makes you wonder about the people who made this game. After all, they managed to take a game mechanic that worked perfectly well fifteen years before this game was released and screw it up royally. It's like taking the spark plugs out of a Rolls Royce engine and replacing them with chocolate replicas.
Did I mention that this game has bosses? They're not even made of bricks! (Well, one of them is). Stage one's boss is this demon.


Sadly, not the demon that caused all this mess, because then the game would be a lot a) shorter, b) easier and c) better. Much, much better. I'm sure you can figure out how you defeat this boss. If not, I fear there may be something wrong with the very cells of your brain.

Stage two is set in a clock tower, and it all goes a bit Castlevania. There are some sections where the ball is carried around between the teeth of some giant cogs (as shown above), which would be fine but sometimes they get stuck and fall irretrievably off the bottom of the screen. Thanks for that. I'd rather deal with Medusa Heads. The boss is a clock, and you beat it by getting your ball to fall into one of the holes corresponding to the number on its face. I have no idea if it's random, or you have to get them in certain holes; all I know is that I fluked it, and I was glad to see the back of it.

Stage three is in Waterfall country, and as you can probably guess, the waterfalls push your ball the wrong way. Not that there ever seems to be a right way, and thus we have stumbled across another of Bad Omen's major flaws: it's all luck. You never seem to have even a modicum of control, and everything is left to the fickle gods of fortune, which does not make for a satisfying gaming experience. The only thing of any merit contained in level three is the boss, the Treant pictured above. His main merit? He looks like he should be in Altered Beast, or perhaps more like a parasitic twin surgically removed from Whispy Woods.

Stage four is the Seaside, and the side of the sea they mean is the underside. This is probably the most bullshitty stage in the game, for reasons that are probably apparent when you look at the picture above. You can't see anything! It's like trying to play the game with some net curtains stapled over your eyes. Add to that the fact that you're barely given enough time to finish the stage (didn't I mention you're timed? Well, you are) and throw in some enemies that can paralyse you for what feels like a geological age, and you have a nice recipe for a pad being hurled out of a window, preferably into one of those machines that crushes cars into cubes. The bosses are this pair of watery dicks:

They're called Undine, and their vaguely tentacular bodies and round mouths make me wish I was playing Day of the Tentacle instead.

Next up is a volcano. Those faces in the shot above can extend their mouths and grab your ball. And then they just hold onto it. And hold onto it. And hold onto it. FOREVER. There is a section where four of them are positioned next to eachother, and they just casually passed the ball between them for one hundred thousand years. Also, the volcano has smaller volcanoes inside it. Is that even possible? Please, if you're a geologist, let me know. The boss is a volcano too, but his only attack is to create more balls for you to keep in the air.

Finally you reach the demon's lair, which is apparently on a "Prairie". Rather than being a little house, it's a maze of tight, winding passageways that you must navigate your ball through using the game's imprecise and inconsistent controls. It is exactly as frustrating as it sounds. The final boss draws near, probably rueing the fact that he'd built his lair out of the very blocks that only two stone paddles and a magic ball could break. Serious lack of foresight there, buddy.

There are three of him, and there's a heart in the middle that you have to hit to hurt him/them. He only really has one attack, which is to throw a load of balls onto the playing field, hoping you will lose track of which is yours and let it fall. Luckily, I got the ball stuck between the heart and the top of the screen where it bounced back and forth, allowing me defeat the demon in what might well be record time. Thus, the game is complete and the paddly royalty are returned to their rightful forms.

The prince appears to have a pegleg in that shot.

As I'm sure you've probably guessed, I didn't like Bad Omen very much. As I said, it has a couple of things going for it, one being the mad-as-a-bag-of-weasels plot. The other is the music, which is really very good. It was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, better known these days for his work with Square-Enix on titles such as Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics (a real favourite of mine), and it is one of the best Megadrive soundtracks I have ever heard.
Highlights include the introduction music, which makes the goofy plot just that bit more touching, which is no easy feat:

The first stage music is great too, especially the bass sound.

And finally, the Seaside stage music, which is far superior to anything Sakimoto did for FFXII. All the music is on YouTube, so you should check it out.

And that's Bad Omen / Devilish, a game that took a perfectly servicable (if admittedly dull) gameplay mechanic, broke it, and then slapped on a vague fantasy setting and some great music. Do yourself a favour and don't play it!

FIGHTERS OF THE WORLD: RUSSIA

Videogame developers, particularly those working in the Nineties and especially those making beat-em-ups, were not afraid to design their characters based up the best information they had at the time: crude racial stereotypes! In the first of what will probably end up being a series, I'll be looking at some of the many easily-pigeonholed fighters to have emerged from Mother Russia over the years.

Zangief, Street Fighter II

Starting with the obvious? Why, yes I am. Everyone knows Zangief, and everyone knows he's the very embodiment of the stereotypical Russian videogame character. He's big, he's slow, he's powerful and he likes to Cossack dance (but then again, who doesn't?), which is a pattern that pixellated Soviets have followed ever since.

There are a couple of things that you might not know about the 'Geif: one is that he was originally going to be called Vodka Gobalsky. I'm kind of disappointed that this was dropped. Okay, very disappointed. It also points toward the idea that most Russian characters are filthy lushes who get through vodka like, let's say, soda pop (more on that later). The other thing you might not know is that, in the minds of Capcom of Japan at least, Zangief is quite possibly gay. Yes, between some win-quotes about how he dislikes beautiful women, the fact that the idea in Japan is that big, burly, hairy men are more likely to be gay, and this image;

taken from his Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo ending (note the picture of Vega pinned to the mirror), there is plenty of speculation. Not that it matters, because he is a man who wrestles bears for fun. If only you could wrestle a bear, perhaps you wouldn't be such a disappointment to your mother and I.

Soda Popinski, Punch-Out!!

Soda Popinski was probably many people's first encounter with a Russian cliche that wanted to punch them, and he's stood the test of time as a fan favourite. In a game that really was a cavalcade of vaguely-offensive ethnic stereotypes, Soda really stands out, mostly because his original was Vodka Drunkenski. Unlike Zangief, however, his original grain-liquor-based name actually made it off the drawing board and into the original Super Punch Out!! arcade machine, only being changed for the home releases due to Nintendo's strict no-alcohol policy. It didn't really make that much difference though, because Soda's between-rounds quotes were still things like "I drink to prepare for a fight. Tonight I am very prepared!" which even as a kid I knew didn't refer to soft drinks. Between Soda and Zangief, it would seem that Russian fighters have something of a monopoly on awesome facial hair.

Jack, Tekken

Is Jack really Russian, considering he's a robot? Well, he was built by a guy called Dr. Boskonovich, so I'm going to allow it. Plus, he's pretty much the definition of the cold, emotionless Soviet weapon, (being a robot and all,) even looking like Ivan Drago from Rocky. I think it's the hair. Sadly, Jack is probably the dullest of the Russians on this list, and I've only included him due to fond memories of inducing apopleptic rage in my younger brothers by beating them on the original Tekken by repeatedly mashing triangle while playing as Jack. Godspeed, you lumpy Russian failure.

Ivan, Battle Clash

It isn't just human fighters that suffer from this stereotyping; even robots, as seen here in the form of Ivan and his robot from Battle Clash, are affected. Like his compatriots in this list, his robot is huge, can barely move and is much more concerned with defence than attack. You would think that all these giant leaps in the field of robotics would afford the Russians a chance to break free of their traditional category by building a machine that is faster than a whippet with a live electrical cable shoved up its backside, but falls apart if you so much as look at it funny. Sadly, I think the Italians have already cornered this market for their sports cars, so poor old Ivan has to suffer the indiginity of essentially being trapped in a giant (yet not bullet-proof) metal box.

Biff Slamkovich, Saturday Night Slam Masters

Yet another Russian who suffered a name change, Biff is known in the Japanese version of SNSM as Alexey Zazalov, and he's something of a break in tradition as he's the closest thing the game has to a main character. More importantly, his backstory in the Japanese version is that he was trained by none other than The Mayor of Justice, The Uncivil Servant, Metro City's Finest: Mike Haggar, in what has to rank as the greatest ever example of cooperation between East and West. Sadly, he could not teach Biff how to grow a bitchin' moustache, and he's really letting the side down in terms of facial topiary. Of course, one of the other elements of the Russian stereotype is a reverence for the (in)glorious Communist regime, ably demonstrated by Biff in this loss quote uttered after taking a beating from Haggar:

I hereby insist that "By Lenin!" becomes the new standard exclamation of surprise. That's why you don't tussle with the Mayor, son!

Rasputin, World Heroes

A personal favourite, Rasputin is the only person on this list to be based on a real-life, almost-unkillable, faux-psychic pervert. The World Heroes version differs somewhat from the real Rasputin by replacing his belief that "hey you guys, sexual sin ceases to be a sin if we all do it at the same time!" with a more generic "I love everybody" approach which was probably more palatable to a wider audience (or not: I know what a bunch of weirdos you are out there). His moves mostly revolve around creating giant hands and feet out of psychic energy, including making huge feet so that he can, you guessed it, Cossack dance you to death. Perfect! He also has a bizarre Marilyn Monroe win pose:

As creepy in sprite form as the real Rasputin no doubt was. And look, I made it through the whole thing without once referring to him as "Russia's greatest love machine". Fantastic!

So there you go, some of the many proud, noble and often liquored-up and violent Russians who have graced our consoles over the years. See you next time when some other undeserving nation is attacked using the rending claws of "facts" that aren't even true!

MONSTER MAULERS

Three things I love in this world of ours are Konami shoot-em-ups, arcade beat-em-ups and punching things right in the eye. I mean right in their squishy eyeballs. So, a game where all three of these things are combined would be excellent, right? Well, let's find out in Konami's 1993 arcade beat-em-up Monster Maulers!

Like Violence Fight and Crime Fighters, Monster Maulers is one of those games where the title pretty much sums everything up. There are monsters, and you must maul them. Maul them good, for (as the game tells you) freedom and justice. Just why are there monsters everywhere that need a good mauling is explained in the rather wonderful intro sequence:



As you can see from the video, the whole thing is played out as if it were an anime or a super sentai show like Power Rangers; indeed, the game's Japanese title is Kyukyoku Sentai Dadandarn, which translates as something like "Ultimate Squadron Dadandarn". They even get their own goofy yet hot-blooded theme song, and that means Monster Maulers is off to a damn fne start. The basic plot is that a goup of villains fires six monsters down to Earth from their bitchin'-cool skull-based spaceship, and the Monster Maulers have to defeat them. The villains seemed to have been... inspired, shall we say, by Yatterman villains Doronjo, Boyacky and Tonzura.

You might recognise Doronjo from Tatsunoko vs Capcom:

They even have the same skull motif. Nice one, Konami. The Monster Maulers themselves, while posing less risk of inciting a copyright-infringement lawsuit, are still a pretty odd bunch.

In the middle we have Kotetsu, a Japanese fellow who has apparently "combined various Oriental martial arts to become a killing machine". I have no idea what's going on with his outfit. He's not, as I first thought, holding an American football (which might explain some of the random bits of armour he's wearing) but a gourd full of what I can only imagine was enough booze to make him thing that the "loincloth and corset" outfit was a good look. Kotetsu is the all-round character, with a fireball that can be fired at three different angles and a Psycho-Crusher-type deal that comes in very useful. Overall, he's probably your best choice for mauling monsters.
On the left is Eagle, an American pro wrestler whose body is described as "perfect". Well. Of the three characters, he's arguably the one with the best dress sense, but that really isn't saying much. However, he does perform the famous Hulk Hogan pose in his introduction, which means he's alright by me. Also, he has a Blanka-style rolling cannoball attack.
Finally there's Anne, a British girl who is defined mainly by two things: one, she appear to be wearing a pair of red knickers on her head and two, she has a rather peculiar fighting stance:

She scuttles along sideways like that, showing what I believe is her mastery of Chafing Leotard Style Kung Fu. Yowzer. She's got an air fireball, and she can triangle jump off walls, which can be very useful for dodging her opponents, but overall she just doesn't seem strong enough.
Well, that's our heroes introduced. All I can say is it's a good job the universe they inhabit has need of a super-squad devoted to fighting monsters, because I can't really see where they'd get a job otherwise looking like that. But who will they be fighting? Well, let's look at the monsters!

You get to choose your first opponent, so I went for the Dragon. The gameplay is most like a standard Street Fighter style beat-em-up: you can move left and right but not up and down, and you have three attack buttons for light, medium and heavy attacks. Special moves are pulled off in the same way as Street Fighter, too; literally the same, in the case of Kotetsu's fireballs.
I knew the game was off to a good start with the intro, but it got even better when the first attack I made was to jump onto the Dragon's head, grab him and repeatedly headbutt him, and that felt pretty good. The Dragon is the first of several cameos from Konami's Gradius series, in this case being based on the Intruder enemy from Gradius II and Salamander. He's not just a red Dragon though, oh no; he can change into at least two other colours (white and blue), changing his attacks from fire to ice as he does so. Also, he can block attacks with his ear-flaps, which is downright adorable. Kotetsu's upwards fireballs are a real help here, and it's not long before the Dragon is defeated and it's on to the next opponent.

Fungus here is a gloopy, gloppy slime man with gills for eyes. Gills for eyes creep me out, man. Imagine if you had lungs where your eyes should be. He's got a great stage, though; check out that giant piranha / coelacanth thing in the background. He's vomiting up a stream of water while he's underwater! That's amazing, and it makes me wish he was my opponent instead of the slightly dull Fungus.

Next up is Diablo, a Chinese style demon who has copied Kotetsu's loincloth-and-anklewarmers look. He summons a giant pagoda, which is pretty cool, and he fights a lot like Blanka, which is also pretty cool. He's got the same somersaulting hard kick, and he can also turn himself into a Tasmanian Devil-style tornado. I tried offering him a nice, tall glass of OJ, but he wasn't having any of it. When you defeat him, he is rather gruesomely pecked apart by a flock of crows.

At the start of the next stage, your are confronted by a large, man-eating plant called Spider Wort, who summons a stream of little reptillian monsters who look like a nightmarish version of Pac-Man. Once he's dealt with, it's on to the star of the show; the Moai.

You might well recognise this Easter Islander, as he is something of a staple of the Gradius series, appearing as a normal enemy and a boss. He's even branched out into the Parodius and Castlevania games, but in this incarnation he's that bit more impressive because he has a body. I absolutely love his status picture next to his health bar, which has captured an expression of such wearied disdain that it makes you wonder how many other superheroes he's defeated in the past. Maybe he thought fighting one person would be easier that battling a laser-armed spaceship, but he was sadly mistaken and soon he goes down.

Centaur is, well, a centaur. A bright red centaur, no less,and he fights exactly as you would expect a horse to fight, with lots of flailing legs and whinnying. He's even got a mask that you can knock off! For some reason, you fight him in Iraq. Maybe he counts as a weapon of mass destruction. Looking at these bosses, it makes you wonder where the villains got them from in the first place. Was there a monster jumble sale? Perhaps is was some supervillain equivalent of one of those "Lucky Bags" that were always so disappointing as a child. I wouldn't have been disappointed if I'd got an evil centaur in my Lucky Bag, mind you.

On to the final monster, and they've saved the best 'til last.

First up, you must defeat the Serpent, a hideous biological hybrid of various organs who can shoot mutant sperm-tadpoles at you through holes in his sides, making him a pretty grim boss to fight if you suffer from trypophobia. He's not much of a challenge, though, and soon you reach the main event:


Brainy is my favourite boss by a long way, which really is an achievement in a game where you can also fight an Easter Island statue (sorry Moai, you're just not this cool). Why is he so great? BECAUSE HE'S A FLOATING BRAIN WITH ONE BULGING EYEBALL. I shouldn't really need to spell it out for you. If what wasn't enough, his arms are made of eyeballs. As I mentioned at the start of this article, punching eyeballs is one of this worlds great pleasures, so Brainy is assured a spot at the head of the table at the Association of Cool Monsters Annual Fundraising Dinner (they're raising funds for millions of punch-proof contact lenses). Not only that, but he's got a couple of other things going for him; one is that he's based on the Salamander boss Brain Golem. The other is that his stage music is a remix of "Poison of Snake", also from Salamander / Gradius, heard here as the version from Gradius V:

Sadly, Brainy must be destroyed. But of course that's not the end of the game, and our heroes fly up to the villains' ship for a final showdown.

Sadly, the game loses its way a little here. There are a few short side-scrolling sections in which you are attacked on all sides by various robots, and you also have to defeat the robots of the three villians. Now, I love robots, but after the likes of Brainy and Moai, they're just not as interesting, particularly when they're your final opponents.

The first villain (the skinny one) appears in this hot-pink ED-209 clone called Ducker, based on the Gradius enemy of the same name. Most of his moves revolve around kicking and flamethrowing, and I defeated him in much the same way as Dragon; I jumped up, grabbed him and headbutted him into submission, an act made extra-satisfying by the fact that it was accompanied by a clanging sound effect of the kind you might expect to hear when a man bashes his skull against a big metal robot.

After that is Robo-Ape, piloted by the fat villain. He's a robot gorilla, so I think you know what to expect. That said, his best move is when Robo-Ape picks you up, the hatch opens and the villain punches you in the mouth. What was the point of the giant gorilla-bot, then?!

Finally, the Doronjo-type lady appears in the Cosmic Tank, a floating pink chair with drill-arms that looks nothing ike a tank. I was hoping for something a little more grand and dramatic from the final battle, so the Cosmic Tank is rather a let-down. With a final mighty effort, Doronjo is defeated and the Earth is safe once more. Huzzah!

So, that's Monster Maulers, living up to its name, although perhaps they should include (Also Robots) at the end. It's a damn fun, if very short, blast of beat-em-up action that has a lot going for it: The controls are good, the sprites are excellent (and GIGANTIC) and the music is some of the best I've heard recently. Also, if you're a Gradius fan, then it's definitely worth a playthrough to see all the references, and to kick a Moai in his big granite face. It's just a shame that the last stage is such a letdown. Overall, though, Monster Maulers is worth a credit or two of anyone's time.

MONEY IDOL EXCHANGER

I'm going to dive right in here and suggest that most people have probably never thought "I wish there was a videogame that involved changing coins into other coins of different denominations". Then again, I don't suppose anyone ever though "I wish there was a videogame that lets me stack assorted falling shapes in such a way that they form lines across the screen" until Tetris was released, and Tetris seems to have done okay for itself. Will the same apply to Face's 1997 puzzler Money Idol Exchanger? Let's find out! (Here's a hint: no, it won't.)

Also known as Money Puzzle Exchanger, this arcade puzzler is certainly true to its title. It has puzzles, exchanges, idols (Japanese variety, not statues) and most of all it has money. Actually, most of all it probably has anime girls.

You play as anime girls, (or, in one odd case, a Harpo-Marx-haired schoolboy called Coquetry who for some unexplained reason is dressed as a dog,) which one assumes is where the Idol of the title comes from and the game isn't worshipped by some isolated voodoo tribe. There may well be a story, but MIE is so deeply, incomprehensibly Japanese I couldn't begin to tell you what it is. All I know is that it features a lot of money and the exchanging thereof.

The gameplay is a fairly standard affair with one devilish twist - maths. Coins move down the screen, and if they cross the bottom of the screen then it's game over. To stop this from happening, you can pull a coin down toward you, move it left or right and fire it back up toward its coppery brethren. Place enough coins of the same ilk together and they disappear. Simple, except to get anywhere in MIE you'll need to start chaining your disappearing coins together, and this is where the maths bit comes in. Each coins has a value, either 1, 5, 10, 100 or 500, and when they are combined they leave behind a coin equivalent to the next value up. For example, putting five 1s together causes them to disappear, leaving behind a 5. Two fives together, they disappear, and a 10 appears. Two 500s don't leave anything behind but empty space, though. So, the aim of the game becomes forming cascading chains of coins.

If this all sounds very familiar to you from, say, Magical Drop, that's because they're almost identical. So similar, in fact, that Magical Drop creators Data East apparently sued Face over the similarities, resulting in Face's bankruptcy. Oops.
There are a couple of power-ups to complicate matters, one that removes all the coins of a certain denomination and another that moves all coins of one rank up to the next (e.g. 5s to 10s). However, they're more of a hinderance than a help, leaving you pretty much on your own when it comes to making chains. This is unfortunate for me as I have all the foresight of a mayfly with A.D.D. when it comes to puzzle games.

Of course, all this is prefaced by the obligatory anime intro:



A pink-haired schoolgirl who transforms into some kind of superhero? I'm shocked. It does seem odd that this intro doesn't have lyrics, though, really generic lyrics like

Let's currency, we will fight,
Summer memories of copper coins.
Burning money energy,
Love in the Buraux de Change,
Money Idol Exchanger!

Or something along those lines. Speaking of the music, it's pretty much what you'd expect; above-average cheery J-pop midis. However, the theme of Exchanger (who I assume is the main character - you can see her in a few of the pictures in this article) is so catchy that my brain has been playing it on a near-constant loop since I first heard it a week ago. Here it is for your listening pleasure, and I can only hope that it isn't like the tape from The Ring.

What else does MIE have to offer, besides the novelty of being a puzzle game set in some kind of pastel-coloured superhero Bureau de Change nightmare? Well, it's got bad translations. Yay!

I didn't pay the money, no. What are you going to do about it? "You have to pay" sounds like the threat of a lumbering Jason-Voorhees-esque monster, doesn't it? How jolly.

Umm... pardon? I think she's trying to tell you that when you make a chain, the new coin appears at the bottom-right-most point.

My personal favourite. "I shall assist you in my heart." So not in any actual, helpful way, then. Thanks. If politicians were cutesy anime girls, then that is the kind of weasley answer they would give when asked about their response to a major humanitarian crisis.

One of my main problems with MIE is that the main 1P mode where you face off against a CPU rival is just too hard for my age- and booze-raddled brain. After the first two or three levels, your opponents become flawless, rocket-propelled gods, chaining vast fortunes of coins into waterfalls of pure pain while I struggle to even set off the most basic of combos. It's almost certainly down to me being rubbish, but if you're looking for a challenge in your puzzle games then you could do worse. Fortunately, there is a single-player "endless" mode where your only goal is to survive as long as possible. I managed to break into second place on the high-score table, which I believe qualifies me for a job as Governor of the Bank of England (first place nets you Chancellor of the Exchequer).

And that's all I can tell you about Money Idol Exchanger, really. It's not a vastly complicated game, and the gameplay never really changes, other than the CPU opponents getting harder. That said, it's a thoroughly solid puzzler which hold up to the maxim of all good puzzle games: a premise that is simple to learn and difficult to master. The graphics are pretty well drawn and the music veers between above-average and mind-enslavingly catchy. Really, the only thing you need to consider before playing MIE is how much you like anime girls, I guess. Big fan of anime girls? You'll probably like it. Big fan of puzzle games? You'll probably like it. Big fan of anime girls and puzzle games? Well, you might want to have a doctor on hand when you first play it in case your heart jumps out of your chest and tries to make out with your eyeballs. Overall, MIE is well worth a play; even if it does nothing particularly spectacular or novel, it does what it does well. Plus, there's a character called Debtmiser. What's not to like?