VGJUNK'S FAVOURITE GAMES, PART 2

Last time out I wrote about ten of my all-time favourite videogames, but because I am an indecisive sort I just kept going. So, here are another ten, in no particular order. It was a fun exercise, and I hope you found a couple of games you've never played before that you try out and end up enjoying.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call (3DS, Square Enix / indieszero / 2014)

I am obsessed with this game, I really am. Not since Tetris has a game exerted such a strong “just one more go” influence over me, and that’s okay because the Final Fantasy-based rhythm action game is perfect for playing in short bursts. It’s also perfect for playing in marathon sessions, if you ask me. Okay, so how you feel about Theatrhythm is, in large part, dependent on whether or not you like the soundtracks of the Final Fantasy games. I love Final Fantasy soundtracks and I love rhythm action games, so it was an easy sell for me.
If you’ve never seen it in action, Theatrhythm has you tapping and swiping along with music tracks from the Final Fantasy series – over two hundred of them included in the game – and it’s a simple gameplay system that works perfectly. Inputs are precise, the difficulty levels are excellently balanced and it’s packed with that sense of pleasure that comes from getting really immersed in the action.
The gameplay is excellent, but as bonus it’s all wrapped up in an extremely loveable package. Square Enix are putting more effort than ever into leveraging the history and characters of the Final Fantasy series into lucrative spin-offs with games like Final Fantasy Explorer, Record Keeper and Brave Exvius, but it’s in Theatrhythm that it comes together the best. That’s partly because it’s all just so sweet and charming. Some people will complain about the cutesy, doll-like character art, but personally it’s preferable to yet another CG model or FF6 sprite edit. There’s fan service aplenty, stat-boosting art cards to collect. You can make a party composed entirely of dads. Even the online versus mode is a pleasure. Sure, there aren’t many players about and when you do get a match you’ll probably be stomped by someone with a playtime of 999 hours, but even if you lose you swap a little profile card with the other player, which includes a new map for the game’s quest mode, and you also get one of the game’s collectable cards. The way it works is that you each pick a song and the one that you battle each other over is randomly picked - and the majority of the time, an online opponent who won the virtual coin-toss will pick the song you chose last time, so that everyone gets to play the track they want. I'm getting old and soppy enough that this kind of unenforced ettique is very heartwarming to me. Like I say, Theatrhythm Curtain Call is utterly charming and it’s also the only game to make me say “I wish they’d keep releasing DLC for this.”

God Hand (PS2, Clover / Capcom, 2006)

The game that was so much of a cult thing that it stopped being a cult thing and became widely known, God Hand came out of nowhere and finally got the transformation of the beat-em-up genre from 2D to 3D right. The ultra-weird presentation that revels in such glorious insanity as wrestlers in gorilla costumes and fat demons called Elvis is the perfect parter for a deep, challenging and customisable combat system. It’s not a game that wants you to have an easy time of it – it gets more difficult they better you play, for starters – but it only treats you mean because it knows you’ll get so much satisfaction when you master the combat.
A harsh taskmaster, then, but one that exudes such a loveable sense of dumb fun that it’s impossible to get angry at. And hey, if you do get angry, you can kick a dude in the balls to relieve said anger, complete with cartoon “ding” sound effect. Finish the whole game for the best and most appropriate ending to any videogame, then head straight back into it on a higher difficulty. When it all clicks and you’re dodging attacks almost without thinking and counter-attacking with suplexes, you’ll be glad you did.

Global Defence Force (PS2, Sandlot, 2005)

Another cult game, this second entry in the still-going-strong Earth Defense Force series is the one that first revealed to me (and many others) the inestimable charms of the EDF. I remember hearing about it through the GameCentral page on the late, lamented Teletext service, where they gave it a glowing review. “What the hell”, I thought, “it’s a budget game so I might as well pick it up. Maybe its as good as they say.” It turned out to be even better, the ultimate surprise package. It’s a simple premise, born from the sci-fi movies of the fifties: giant insects are invading the Earth. Shoot them. Shoot them and shoot them and shoot them, because there are bloody thousands of them, crawling over buildings, scurrying across beaches and occasionally calling in an off-brand Godzilla for back-up.
Quite a few games on this list have what I’d describe as a feeling of purity about them, where they do one thing but do it exceptionally well, and Global Defence Force fits exactly into that category. The graphics might be ugly and the slowdown rampant, but it’s worth it to have destruction on such a huge scale. You haven’t lived until a group of tarantulas the size of buses are leaping at you, only for you to send them back where they came from with an enormous plasma cannon. Five difficulty levels, two very different playable characters and dozens of weapons to collect give it plenty of longevity, too. Try the Inferno difficulty level, if you fancy a challenge. It even says in-game that only a handful of people in the world will complete it, so if you’re the kind of person who responds well to that kind of antagonism, then have at it.

Night Slashers (Arcade, Data East, 1993)

Of all the hundreds of games I’ve played in my time writing VGJunk, Night Slashers is the one that stands out as being my luckiest find. I might never have played it otherwise, but since I did it’s shot straight onto my list of all-time favourites. It combines a genre I love with my favourite setting to produce a side-scrolling beat-em-up that takes place in a gore-soaked horror world of Frankensteins,  mask-wearing psychopaths and zombie bowling. That’d carry it a long way even if it wasn’t any fun to play, but happily Night Slashers is one of the more refined examples of the form. It’s got the basic brawler set-up of multi-attack combos, throws and a special health-draining attack, and then it piles plenty of extra moves on top of that: charge attacks, screen-clearing magic spells and the ability to wedge zombies into the ground like tent pegs so you can kick their exposed heads off, amongst others.
You all know of my love for Halloween by now, and there are very few games more evocative of the season than Night Slashers. It’s even more of a gory B-movie than most gory B-movies, and being freed from the limits of what special effects can accomplish allows it to be packed with things like monsters whose flesh melts off when you punch them, all set to a wonderful soundtrack that I’d describe as action-horror-rock if I had to give it a genre. Night Slashers might not be the best arcade brawler, not while the also excellent Alien vs. Predator exists, but it’s just - just - my favourite.

Shining Force 2 (Megadrive, Sonic Software Planning / Sega, 1993)

As an RPG fan living in Europe, and especially as a SNES owner, the nineties were kinda rough. So many of the classic RPGs of the 16-bit era never made it to our shores. No Final Fantasy VI, no Chrono Trigger, no Earthbound. Of course you can buy all those games though various different services nowadays, but that’s no good to pre-teen, summer-holidays-to-fill VGJunk, is it? Happily I managed to get my console RPG fix through a borrowed Megadrive and Shining Force 2: the jolliest, most candy-coloured RPG out there. Just thinking about Shining Force 2 means I’m immediately hearing the town theme in my head, a musical theme that by rights should appear under the definition for “jaunty” in every single online dictionary.
Yes, Shining Force 2 is a happy game, a cheerful game, a strategy RPG where, if truth be told, the strategy rarely gets more complicated “try to fight enemies one at a time.” Not every RPG has to be unfathomably deep to be enjoyable, though, and sometimes it’s nice to just command your fairy-story characters about the battlefield without worrying about personal affinities or elemental alignments or what have you. Shining Force 2 is a great example of this kind of gaming experience. A colourful world to explore, packed with weird characters and dialogue with a slightly wonky translation that only adds to its charm, Shining Force 2 has a certain childlike sweetness to it. Would it be one of my favourites if I had had access to Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as a kid? I’m not sure. Maybe I wouldn’t love it quite as much as I do, but I’d always have room in my heart for an RPG that lets the player put a werewolf, a vampire knight called Lemon and knock-off Gamera in their party.

Blood (PC, Monolith, 1997)

Anyone who’s been following me anywhere on the internet will already know all about how much I love Blood, and that’s a lot. Back in part one I said that Silent Hill 2 is the game that most feels like it was made for me, but Blood runs it a close second. It’s a first-person shooter created using the Build engine, much like Duke Nukem 3D - but where Duke Nukem 3D is a parody of and homage to over-the-top action movies, Blood is all about horror. “An undead cowboy with a pitchfork fights evil cultists” is an elevator pitch that makes me realise it’s probably a good job I’m not in charge of a movie studio. Everything about the world of Blood is just completely, spiritually nourishing to me, the computer game equivalent of a big mug of soup in November– the horror movie references, the sinister carnivals and haunted hotels, the ghost enemies that scream like someone with their testicles caught in a bear trap, all of it.
The setting is great, but it wouldn’t mean much if the gameplay was rubbish, but Blood delivers in that regard too. It’s got the classic, rocket-speed carnage that the golden age of PC shooters was so wonderful at creating, but with its own unique style of combat. Even the lesser enemies can be utterly deadly, so there’s less focus on the huge swarms of monsters you’d see in, say, Doom, and more emphasis on tightly-constructed corridors and smaller arenas, with excellent level design all the way through the game. The enemies are fantastic and nicely varied, and the selection of weapons is probably my favourite in any first-person shooter, from familiar friends like the double-barrelled shotgun to the destructive power of the dynamite bundle to more exotic tools of death like the voodoo doll. It’s the closest you’re likely to get to being the “hero” of your own gore-soaked horror movie. A Bruce Campbell-em-up, if you like, and that feeling is probably why I play through Blood at least once a year.

Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360, Access Games, 2010)

Let’s get this right out in the open: a lot of the time, Deadly Premonition isn’t that much fun to actually play. The controls are bad, the combat is repetitive and dull and I always seem to get one or two huge glitches whenever I play it. However, none of that matters, because Deadly Premonition’s gameplay is merely a vehicle for transporting a truly bizarre and completely captivating storyline. The comparisons to Twin Peaks are immediate and obvious, but Deadly Premonition twists that familiar setting into its own unique experience, creating a world that looks at first glance like low budget trash but eventually reveals itself as a game with a rare depth of personality. The game’s star, FBI special agent Francis York Morgan, is a truly fascinating character, and not just by the usually low standards of videogame characters. Driving around and hearing York talk about the movies he’s watched sounds like it’d be insufferably dull but it ended up being my favourite part of the game. You don’t often get such a glimpse into the inner life of a videogame protagonist, and as York makes his way through a surreal plot with a shocking twist at the end I find myself being totally captivated by this weird world full of oddball townsfolk. It’s also one of the very few games to make me feel genuine emotions. I had a lump in my throat at the end of the game, and it wasn’t the usual hastily-swallowed sausage rolls.
Deadly Premonition is a great example of what videogames that might be lacking in technical proficiency can make up for in sheer imagination and ambition. It starts out as a supernatural murder mystery but goes on to take in so many different themes, always tinged with a unique sense of humour, that any problems I have with the gameplay are completely negated. Of course, if you told me that you hate Deadly Premonition, I could totally see where you’re coming from. Not every game has to be for every person, though, and that’s the great thing about Deadly Premonition.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (PS3, Ubisoft, 2008)

I can’t believe I’m putting this game on the list. It’s a fairly generic tactical FPS in which terrorists get shot in Las Vegas. It’s pretty decent, although hardly more evolved than any of its predecessors. And yet, when I was thinking about this list I kept coming back to it for one simple reason: the Terrorist Hunt mode. I have spent so much time and had such a good time playing that mode, specifically playing it couch co-op with a friend. Just the two of you, a very limited number of respawns and a mansion / oil refinery / casino filled with terrorists who skipped the “camouflage” portion of their training camp and turned up in bright red fatigues.
I couldn’t even tell you what it is about this mode that was so appealing to us, leading to RSV2 becoming our go-to game any time we fancied some shooter action. Maybe it’s the way the terrorists sometimes command their comrades to “Aim and shoot!” just before you aim at them and shoot them, the irony being as devastating as the machine-gun fire. Maybe it was the uncomplicated, solid combat combined with the tension of only having limited lives. I have no idea, I really don’t. I guess that’s why they call your tastes “tastes.” I like the taste of Dr. Pepper, but I sure as hell couldn’t explain why.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Arcade / PS1, Capcom, 1998)

I’m pretty bad at fighting games. I’ve explained this before, it’s because there are so many of them that I want to play that I never have the time to sit down and really master any single game. I’m greedy, basically. Street Fighter Alpha 3 is the closest I’ve ever gotten, though, thanks in part to it being just the right level of complexity for me: lots of different fighting systems and three separate fighting “styles” to chose from, but nothing I can’t wrap my head around. Obviously there are many other Street Fighter games I could have had on this list – the impact of Street Fighter II’s SNES port is hard to exaggerate, that game became almost a religious calling for some kids – but SFA3 is my favourite of the bunch. I don’t know how well it’s regarded these days, having never paid attention to things like “balance” and “tier lists,” but it’s got that classic, super-slick fighting action that made Street Fighter famous in spades. It also has the most appealing graphics (to me, anyway) of the series, with big, cartoony sprites, and a huge roster of characters new and old. The PS1 version even adds a “World Tour” mode with RPG-like elements. At its heart, though, Street Fighter Alpha 3 is simply Street Fighter. Timeless, classic action that’s honestly yet to be improved on in a big way. Nowadays, if I’m going to play Street Fighter I’ll probably play SFV… for a while. Then I’ll hop straight back over to SFA3 and spend entire battles doing nothing but Dan Hibiki’s rolling taunt.

Chrono Trigger (Squaresoft, SNES, 1995)

What can I say about Chrono Trigger that hasn’t already been said a hundred times before? Not much, that’s what. Creative talent operating at the height of their powers to craft a true masterpiece, every aspect of the game slotting together to form a veritable Voltron of delights. A time-travel story that not only works, but opens up the possibility of over a dozen endings! Quite probably the best soundtrack on the SNES! Memorable characters, a team-up battle system, singing robot cats! Chrono Trigger is the ultimate gloomy afternoon videogame. Go on, try it text time it’s dark and rainy at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Get under a duvet and play some Chrono Trigger, it’ll warm you right up.

There, I think that lot ought to do it for now. Some games were omitted because, while I do love them, everyone else does too and they don’t quite feel as special to me personally. Honourable mentions include Zelda: A Link to the Past, basically every Super Mario platformer but especially Super Mario World, Final Fantasies 5-8, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Timesplitters: Future Perfect and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. What did I learn from this? That my tastes are pretty mainstream, mostly. There’s not much here that you’d mistake for being obscure, with the exception of Night Slashers. Also I’m a massive Playstation fanboy, apparently. And with that, I’m off to try to complete my CollectaCard collection in Theatrhythm Curtain Call, an endeavour that I’m sure is going to end up with me found dead from exhaustion, surrounded by probability charts and drop-rate tables.

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HALLOWEEN EPHEMERA

The VGJunk Ephemera series continues, rising from its mouldering tomb to strike fear into the hearts of the living with five more pieces of Halloween-appropriate videogaming detritus! Are they spooky? Well, that depends how scared you are of bad art and the sub-par medical assessment of life-threatening injuries. First, let's look at some adorable pumpkin men.

Adorable Pumpkin Men

I mentioned Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti in the Kid Dracula article, which reminded me of two things: one, that Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti's first stage includes a section where a vampire dances to a copyright-skirting 8-bit version of Thriller and two, it also includes a horde of little men with pumpkins for heads who want to kill you.

Aren't they just precious, with their big eyes, their floppy leaf-hair and their huge, jagged grins stretched across mouths easily wide enough to eat a trick-or-treater? They remind me of Sam from the movie Trick 'r Treat, and that in itself is enough to make me very fond of them. I'm forever complaining that there aren't enough pumpkins in videogames to keep me satisfied through the Halloween season, but these little guys are trying their best to redress that balance: not only do they have gourds for heads, but they also attack by spitting out smaller pumpkins!

A pumpkin vomits pumpkins onto an axe-wielding maniac. I think that's the Halloween equivalent of a Royal Flush.

Robot Vampire Music

After trying and failing to conquer the world with robots that can throw bombs or shoot fire out of their hands, Dr. Wily was at something of a crisis point by the time Mega Man 7 rolled around. Did Dr. Wily rise to the occasion, using the many lessons he'd learned during his six previous attempts to take over the world to create the deadliest robot he'd ever assembled? No, he stole a mechanical vampire from an amusement park and gave it a gun that shoots noise.

His name is Shade Man, and he's definitely one of my favourite bosses from the Mega Man series. Did I mention that he's a mechanical vampire? Because I feel that provides an important clue as to why I think Shade Man's pretty great. Another reason is his stage's theme, which sounds like this:

It's one of my favourite tracks from the entire Mega Man series, at once spooky and sinister enough to perfectly match the "robotic horror house" theme of Shade Man's stage while still being dynamic enough for an action-packed Mega Man title.
If that was all there was to Shade Man's musical accompaniments, well, it'd probably still be worth a place in this article. There's more, though, because Shade Man's stage has an alternate music theme - if you hold the B button while selecting his stage, this music will play instead.

It's the theme from Capcom's classic arcade game / brutal frustration engine Ghosts 'n Goblins! In Mega Man 7! Small potatoes to most of you, I'm sure, but that's the whole point of these Ephemera articles. The only problem with this is that both themes are so good that I'm bound to waste time dithering over which one I want to be playing while Mega Man shoots a flying robot pumpkin.

"That Bullet Wound"

Resident Evil 2 now, and a tale of scientists who have no bloody idea what they're doing. Yes, I'm aware that could describe the whole Resident Evil franchise.
Part of Resident Evil 2's plot concerns the creation of the monster-spawning G-Virus by Umbrella scientist William Birkin. Birkin becomes angry at and suspicious of his employers, so Umbrella's truly abysmal human resources department decides to resolve this dispute by sending in a team of armed soldiers to take the G-Virus samples from Birkin by force.

It works out about as well as you'd expect.
Yep, poor old Birkin accidentally knocks a jar onto the floor, and it must have made the Umbrella soldiers jump real bad because it causes the "highly-trained" troops to fill him full of bullets. This turn of events both sets up Birkin as the big spoogly-armed villain of the game by having him inject himself with the G-Virus to stay alive, as well as adding further evidence to the already-substantial "everyone ever employed by Umbrella is wildly incompetent" dossier. Neither of those are what I'm interested in, however. Before Birkin takes the G-Virus, his wife and lab-partner Annette rushes over, full of spousal concern.

She sees her husband bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds, and what does she say? "I'm taking care of that bullet wound first." This line makes me laugh every time I hear it, although I couldn't really say why - I think it's probably because it just sounds so... ineffectual. Like, "well, that's fine then, once that bullet wound is patched up I'm sure the the other six or seven holes in my torso will stop leaking blood and pulverised internal organs almost immediately! Thanks, honey, I sure am glad we ended up working side-by-side in this illicit biowarfare lab underneath a sleepy midwestern town's needlessly ornate police station!" Maybe Annette is just trying to put a brave face on the situation, but given Umbrella's insistence on only hiring people who are so useless they regularly put the entire world at risk through their own stupidity, I'd say there's a strong chance she doesn't actually understand the situation and honestly thinks that Birkin will be fine once she's strapped a bit of gauze to him.
William Birkin, of course, does not get better. He turns into a terrifying mutant who tries to impregnate his young daughter with mini-mutants until rookie cop and all-around dreamboat Leon S. Kennedy blows him up. Annette dies when some pipes fall on her head. The lesson is that if you're employed by Umbrella, Inc., you shouldn't bother paying into their pension scheme.

Advertising of the Dead

One thing that has become a regular Halloween occurrence at VGJunk is my proselytizing about Data East's fantastic horror-themed brawler Night Slashers. I mean, I'll tell you to go and play Night Slashers on any day of the year, but it's a game where you can punch zombies so hard they melt into a puddle of bloody goo so October seems like an especially appropriate time to be playing it.
Aside from the normal beat-em-up action, Night Slashers lightens the mood occasionally with a couple of between-stage minigames.

Pictured above is the first minigame, where your character gains points by stomping on the heads of these half-buried zombies. It's Whack-a-Mole for the undead generation! The other minigame is a form of ten-pin bowling where you throw a zombie at some other zombies in the hope that they'll all explode. The minigames themselves are great, but for today I'm more interested in the scenery - the nightmarish forces of the undead are so confident of victory over humankind that they have already begun arranging their own grotesque sporting events, and what do you get at sporting events? Advertising!

These are the two most visible advertising hoardings from the first minigame, and they sum up a lot of what I love about Night Slashers: it's gory horror fun that never takes itself seriously. The Drug Zombie billboard - which is either promoting an undead pharmacy or a punk band - is relatively sedate aside from that square-eyed skull with the heartwarmingly cheery grin, but just look at that sign for Hungry Burgers. The burgers are hungry, alright: hungry for your soul! "100% FREASH MEAT" (sic) the sign declares, and I don't doubt that for a second. Judging by the hand lolling out from between the burger's buns, I'd imagine there's less than a minute between death, dismemberment and the FingerBurger Special with Extra Eyeballs being handed over to a hungry zombie customer.

The adverts from the bowling minigame are even better. Low-price Murderer Chainsaws! Gore-Gore Cola with bloody taste! It's as though someone at Data East found nine-year-old me's sketchbooks and created an entire morbid economy to support all the monsters and freaks I'd drawn. I can certainly appreciate a world where chainsaws are advertised not on their ability to deal with lumber but on their potential for gory death.

You might hurt yourself chasing people through the woods with your Murderer Chainsaw, but that's okay because you can always head to the Ripper Hospital to get patched up. Except, ahem, you can't, because the doctor pictured on that sign is actually Night Slashers' first boss and by the time you reach the minigame you've already beaten him so badly he now looks like a thick, hearty soup with bone-chunk croutons. Thank you, Mad Scientist, for showing me a glimpse of a world where hospitals are advertised by madmen wielding scalpels and shouting "Come on, Operation!"
Finally there's Scream Ice Cream, and you may think that Data East have rather over-sold the ice cream / scream pun on this one, but take a closer look. That ice cream has eyes in it. It's eyes-cream. Consider that your reminder that Night Slashers is fantastic and you should play it.

Dorkstalkers

Capcom's Darkstalkers series of fighting games could put in a decent claim for being the most Halloween-y videogame franchise of them all - the famous monsters of myth and legend do ultra-violent yet cartoony fighting with each other, sometimes against the backdrop of a living steam train or huge god-foetus with an eyeball in its foot.

That's because the eyes are the windows to the sole, ba-dum tshh. Anyway, Capcom tried to excite the imaginations of Japanese arcade-goers by advertising Darkstalkers with bold, colourful, over-the-top arcade flyers like this one:

(Flyers via TAFA)

It looks good to me - if I'd seen this as an impressionable youth it would definitely have made me want to play Darkstalkers, if only to find out what the hell is going on with that werewolf's mouth. However, Capcom's American distributors didn't think this was suitable for the macho and manly US market, presumably because it's a little too pastel and there's (ugh) a girl front-and-center of the image. Would you like to see what they came up with as a replacement?

Ah ha. Ah ha ha ha. Where the hell do you start with this? Maybe with the title, where the designer went went with a gothic font except for the capital letters. Or how about Morrigan's costume, which from the bustier down looks strangely like something that a female version of Wolverine might wear? Pyron is still a being made purely from living flame, except his teeth for some reason, and Donovan's sword looks like a shark's taken a bite out of it. Most fascinating of all is what has happened to Anita's face.

Yikes. Take off that wig, Quasimodo, you're not fooling anyone.

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NIGHT SLASHERS

In an effort to improve VGJUNK, I embarked on a great quest. Dedicating myself to videogames, I became a wandering hermit, immersing myself in electronic entertainment while destroying my enemies, those misguided fools who preach the benefits of board games and word puzzles. Once I had attained true enlightenment, I climbed to the summit of the tallest mountain in the land and issued a plea to Videoludens, God of Videogaming. "Oh merciful and occasionally backwards-compatible God," I cried, "grant me my wish: give to me a videogame that combines my love of all things horrific and macabre with the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre I love so much." The clouds parted and there, bathed in light and wearing a cloak made of unnecessary and overly-expensive peripherals, was my God. "I SHALL GRANT YOU THIS BOON, MORTAL!" he cried, before departing in a crash of thunder. There, standing in a smoking crater beside me, was the game I had be searching for - Data East's 1993 gore-soaked punchathon Night Slashers. Turns out, it's really bloody (pun intended) good!

Okay, so obviously that story isn't true. I found out about Night Slashers the same way I come up with pretty much every game I talk about on VGJUNK: a combination of hazy childhood memories and poking around on the internet. The bit about this being a good game is very much true, though.

What we have here is belt-scrolling beat-em-up, but rather than the standard street gangs that need a thorough beating (you know, for justice) it's all manner of horror movie staples that you'll be pummeling. A mysterious evil has raised an army of the living dead that has quickly overrun most of humanity, because as a species we can deal with zombies but we soon lose our shit when vampires and wolfmen get involved. The only hope left for the planet is our three playable heroes: the Night Slashers! Yes, I know it sounds like they have a bladder condition that prevents them from getting a good night's sleep but trust me: they're heroes through and through. Let's meet them now!

First we have the glam-haired, all-American monster hunter Jake. His arms have been replaced with bigger, more punchier arms, which probably gives you an idea what kind of character Jake is. It looks like he's also replaced his cowboy boots with robot cowboy boots, but nobody seems to have noticed this.

Next is Christopher, Europe's most famous vampire hunter and winner of the European Mullet Society's prestigious "Hairdo of the Year" title for the last seven years. I love Christopher's design because of the insane world it presents - a world where a man can combine the sartorial elegance of formal wear with the mullet and fingerless gloves of an eighties street punk and still command some measure of respect. Oh, and bicycle clips. Mustn't forget those.

Finally there's Hong Hua, the speedy-yet-weak martial artist of the group. Night Slashers must take place in some distant future where Jackie Chan has sadly passed away, because she's described as "Asia's most revered martial artist".

After a nice little attract mode intro where our heroes save a cowering family by punching zombies in half, the game proper begins as our heroes resolve to purge a nearby hospital. Jake does get cranky when he hasn't had his dialysis, that's for sure. However, the path to the hospital is blocked by a horde of the undead. Our quick-witted champions of justice quickly decide upon the most heroic yet efficient course of action - they mow everything in their path down with a Transit van.

I can already tell that I'm going to enjoy this.
As Night Slashers is a belt-scrolling beat-em-up, I'm sure you've already guessed the basic mechanics of the game: walk from left to right, killing things until you reach the big thing at the end of the stage, which you must also kill. Simple enough, and the controls and fighting mechanics are broadly similar to most other Final Fight clones. I'll get on to that in a bit, though. First, let's enjoy the presentation.

Graphically, NS is very good, with all kinds of well-animated, detailed sprites and interesting backgrounds (particularly the backgrounds in the minigames, as we shall see). The enemy designs are great, being the Hallowe'en monsters we all know and love but with a sprinkling of the sort of over-the-top "bigness" that only seems to come from Japanese arcade games of the nineties. Then there's the music. Make no mistake, Night Slashers has an excellent soundtrack - here's the first stage's theme, the unsurprisingly-titled "Night Slashers!"

I'm pretty pissed off that I forget to include some Night Slashers tracks amongst my votes for HG101's best VGM ever poll. Composed by Tomoyoshi Sato (working under the alias Tom Sato) and the mysterious Mr. K, the soundtrack to NS is probably my favourite soundtrack to any belt-scroller: with its excellent mix of diverse styles, catchy compositions and excellent synths and samples, it stands head and shoulders above most beat-em-ups of this ilk.

Anyway, back to the game. The hospital is full of zombies, the expendable footsoldiers of any self-respecting demon's world-conquering army. The Night Slashers don't rely on any of the traditional methods for killing zombies (or any other creature, really). They just hit them repeatedly until enough parts fall off to stop them being a threat. That brings me nicely to Night Slashers' defining features, the one that sets it apart from its competitors, and that's the wide array of different moves and attacks available to each character.

And I don't mean running them over with a truck, either. The basic controls are the same as every other game of this type. You've got an attack button and a jump button. Pressing attack repeatedly results in a short combo, you can perform a jumping attack if standing on the ground is too cliché for you, you can grab and throw enemies by walking into them and pressing both buttons together activates a radius attack that drains some of your health. Now, that may have been good enough for Final Fight, but Night Slashers decided that simply didn't offer a wide enough scope for battering monsters and added a much expanded move list. There's a third button that casts a screen-clearing magic spell, with a different variant if you're jumping, that takes a hefty chunk of your lifebar. You can also hold attack to charge up a special dashing move, which changes if you're low on health: however, if you charge up too long you become stunned. There are dashing moves, jumping attacks that stomp enemies into the floor where they're trapped for a moment, and even team-up moves in two-player mode such as dual throws.
This wealth of options really opens the game up and gives NS quite the edge over many of its contemporaries and makes even fun and playable brawlers like Vendetta feel rather limited.

While I've been yammering on about the control, Christopher has reached the first boss. As seems appropriate for a hospital you face a crazed doctor who enters the fight by riding a gurney while slicing zombie with his scalpels. If you're playing Hallowe'en Monster Bingo at home, you can mark off "Mad Scientist", I guess.
He's easy enough to defeat - after all, in this situation medical training is a poor substitute for cybernetic arms or mastery of the martial arts - but Night Slashers keeps you on your toes by throwing you straight into another boss battle.

As with all mad scientists, his greatest creation is a lumbering flesh-golem stitched together from necrotic body parts. It's never macramé, is it? You know, a hospital is actually a great place to build your reanimated corpse-man: aside from the easy access to medical equipment, if it’s anything like every hospital I’ve ever been to any mobs of angry villagers will get hopelessly lost long before they reach your secret lab. At least this Creature appears to have been given the correct brain and for a hellish crime against nature he's rather polite.

Until he starts trying to punch you, at least. The two back-to-back boss fights should clue you in to the fact that Night Slashers is certainly not stingy with the amount and frequency of the bosses: Data East clearly had their checklist of horror staples that must be included, and include they damn well did. Frank here is tougher than the Doctor, but repeated jumping attacks will see you through. No sooner have you punched the Creature so hard that all the flesh melts from his bones than a vampire pops up to take the piss and give you your next objective.

In the first level alone we've had zombies, a mad scientist, a Frankenstein's monster and a vampire. I may have to extend the Hallowe'en-O-Meter (not a penis metaphor).

Stage two, and a pleasant hike through the Transylvanian woodlands is ruined by the sudden appearance of hundreds of werewolves that need kicking in the face. This is an auto-scrolling section where you're chasing a horse and carriage, clobbering any of the aforementioned werewolves that get in the way of your righteous fury. Eventually you'll catch the catch the coach.

I regret catching the coach. Waiting to murder you are a wizened Geppetto (looking rather like the corpse-father from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and his demonic puppet boy. "Ah, Pinocchio, I wanted to you to be like a real, living boy. So I made a pact with the Dark Lord Satan in exchange for my immortal soul! Ho ho ho!"

Do I even need to reiterate that dolls and puppets are creepy as all fuck? I think next year, my Hallowe'en costume is going to be a porcelain doll. I'll just sit quietly in the corner of whatever party I'm at, only moving when people aren't looking and taking photos of myself hovering over them when they fall into a drunken sleep. As pictured above, a nice touch with Hong Hua's standard combo is that she sticks a paper ward to her foes as part of it.

A brief saunter through a graveyard brings you to another boss, this time a stone golem with a fondness for performing wrestling moves on you. This is something of a theme with the enemies in Night Slashers, as though their monster training consisted of nothing but watching old Hammer films and reruns of Wrestlemania.

Between stages, you get to play the first of two minigames - a grotesque version of Whack-A-Mole where you have to stomp on the heads of the zombies that pop out of the floor. There's no real reward for it, unless you count the satisfaction of crushing all those paper-thin skulls beneath the heel of your boot. The best thing about the minigames is the backgrounds, showing a crowd of zombies enjoying the action. One undead lady on the left became so excited she removed her head and has started tossing it around. You don't get that at the cricket.

The next stage is set within the vampire's castle, and like all modern dark overlords he's had a lift installed that drops a stream of enemies in with whoever's travelling in it. I wonder if Count Duckula has one? Night Slashers may be good, but there are certain genre clichés that you just can't ignore (no dominatrixes in this one, though).

The mid-boss is a demonic sword who controls a living suit of armour. Aww, he's shy, look. Come on out from behind that pillar and let everyone see how handsome you are, honey.

The armour was guarding the way to the parapets, an area that further enhances the Castlevania feel of this stage. That masked psycho at the bottom of the screen hasn't fallen over, by the way: he's simply using his incredibly irritating slide attack, which he does for pretty much the entire time he's alive. You'll be wanting to make these guys a lot less alive as soon as you see them.

The vampire himself is a big unit, but not too troublesome. You'll notice he's fighting you outside which, given the frequent problems vampires seem to have with remembering when the sun is going to rise, seems like a particularly stupid decision. Not that it matters to the Night Slashers: they'll have pummelled him into a fine paste long before sunrise.

For all his bravado and immaculate dress sense, it turns out that the vampire isn't the mastermind after all and there are some dark portals that need sealing tout suite. Never ones to shy away from a mission that has even the slightest chance of ending in a fist-fight with the undead, our heroes hop on a plane to South America.

Stage four's a short one that's mostly taken up by a battle with these two Aztec gentlemen. Angered by your interruption of whatever blood sacrifice they were planning, they spend much of the fight running around like hyperactive children soaked in full-sugar cola and, yes, performing wrestling moves on you. To the best of my knowledge there was never an Aztec-themed WWF wrestler, even during the glory years of the late 80s/early 90 when every stereotype from voodoo priest to Mounties had a representative in the squared circle. Maybe rituals of heart removal and impalement didn't test well with the 8-15 year old demographic.

The next stage sees more air travel, this time with a battle aboard a plane. The game starts getting pretty tough around this point: as you can see, a lot of enemies start appearing at once and they can drain your life very quickly indeed.

Still, you could always summon a raging storm to show them what for.

In their continuing quest to tick off all the monsters on their "Hallowe'en Superstars" checklist, Data East kindly included a mummy. He doesn't seem at all fazed by the fact that he's been raised from thousands of years of entombment and placed in a metal canister that's hurtling through the sky, and for that I have to give him some credit. Still, he's essentially just a zombie wrapped in bandages and we all know what happens to zombies when the Night Slashers are involved.

The other minigame appears, and this time you have to mash the buttons to build power before hurling a zombie at a bunch of other zombies in the underworld's version of ten-pin bowling. Again, the pleasure of this comes from the background, especially the advertising. Apparently the second bullet point on the Evil Power's to-do list, after "enslave humanity", was "start demonic advertising agency".

The following stage is a combination of a normal stage and a boss rush, with the boss rush aspect coming courtesy of the life-giving powers of the Grim Reaper himself. You'll battle a few of the previous bosses (plus, for some reason, a helicopter) before catching up to Death and beating him to, erm, himself.

The brown robes are his casual resurrectin' robes, these black robes are his more formal "eliminate these mere mortals" attire. He instantly destroys any aura of mystique and horror he might have possessed by spinning around with his scythe held out like a demented carousel. He does a lot of damage, and his attacks are fast and difficult to avoid, but in the end he's not the challenge you might have expected from the Harvester of Souls.
Death also informs you that he isn't the one behind the ghoulish goings-on. He often seems to get a bit of a bum deal in Japanese videogames, does Death: he's rarely the final opponent and a lot of the time (most noticeably in the Castlevania games) he's subservient to entities he really should be kicking the backside of. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride, that's our Reaper.

The final stage, and after a brief bit of combat you reach the final boss: King Zarutz. If you were trying to guess what the final boss of Night Slashers would be, given that we've already seen almost all the classic horror monsters, I hope you said Robot Satan.

Of all the powers that a blasphemous melding of robotics and sorcery could offer, Zarutz went with a particularly frustrating force shield that renders him invulnerable as well as doing you a bunch of damage if you come within thirty feet of him. Undoubtedly effective, but it's hardly summoning a dragon made of ethereal flame or opening a gateway to a dimension filled with giant pubic lice, is it? Must try harder. At least his sprite looks just as cool as you might expect. There's a shot of him in the attract mode that shows he has a Hebrew letter etched into his forehead:

I think it's the letter Ayin, which is apparently related to the eye, so maybe this is his third, psychic eye or something? I'm hardly an expert, so if you know of any other reason why Zarutz would have a Hebrew letter stamped on his noggin, let me know.
Letter markings or not, even Robot Satan cannot stand up to the furious fist of the Night Slashers and he eventually explodes like a poorly-maintained boiler. That's not the end of his evil ways, though...

...because there's another section where you have to chase his floating torso and kick it until it explodes. Only then is the world once again safe from Universal Studios' back catalogue of horror movies.

With Zarutz's power destroyed, the zombies suddenly remember they're actually dead and the monster army melts away. I don't mean like "melts into the crowd" or anything, they literally melt. Nothing in Night Slashers ever dies cleanly: it's ruptured intestines and bubbling soup-like flesh all the way.

Job done! The Night Slashers head their separate ways, and I'm left behind to bask in the glow of having played a very good game. As much as I love belt-scrolling beat-em-ups, it's hardly the most innovative of genres and the difference between an average one and something good like Night Slashers is more often than not down to atmosphere and setting rather than groundbreaking gameplay ideas. Luckily, NS has the perfect setting for me, with more horror classics crammed into one game than I could have ever hoped for. The graphics, music and excellent sound design (there's some fun voice samples in here) set a high standard but it's the wide range of moves, combined with simple and accurate controls, that push Night Slashers right near the top of my "favourite brawlers ever" list and providing stern competition for Alien vs Predator and D&D: Shadow over Mystara.
The flourishes of quality keep on coming right to the end, as each character gets their own individual ending. Jake's is my favourite - like most retired fighters, he can't handle the sedate pace of normal life and becomes a gambling addict.

It's nice to know that he has a pair of human-looking arms that he can pop on when he's not killing demons.
Night Slashers, then: if you have any interest in belt-scrolling fighters, then you must try this out. Data East may have a wildly inconsistent record when it comes to quality, but they really hit the nail on the head with this one.
One last thing - if you are going to be playing this out then you might want to know that the Japanese version has red blood, unlike the overseas version that I played for this article. Personally, I don't mind what colour the blood is: so long as it's a liquid that I punched out of a bad guy, I'm happy. If you must have red blood, play the Japanese version. There are a couple of other cosmetic differences, like Christopher brandishing a cross in his combos instead of the overseas version's glowing rock, and the "GO!" markers spinning around to inform you that where you should be GO!-ing is "TO HELL!". Thanks for that!

A great game indeed, but how will Night Slashers score on the VGJUNK Hallowe'en-O-Meter? If you've been paying any attention at all, you'll probably know the answer is going to be "very highly".

Maximum highly, to be precise! The first perfect score of the season, and the only thing that made me hesitate for even a second about awarding Night Slashers full marks was the complete lack of any pumpkins. Then I remembered the Zombie Bowling and decided that ten out of ten was the only choice. With only a few days until Hallowe'en, can any game challenge Night Slashers as the spookiest game of the month? Who knows? Exciting!

Recently on VGJUNK:
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Part Two of this year's Hallowe'en VGM Playlist!
SNK's Hallowe'en-themed Snow Bros clone Nightmare in the Dark!