WAYNE'S WORLD (SNES)

Wayne's World, Wayne's World, party time, excellent, except this is Gray Matter and THQ's 1993 SNES platformer version of Wayne's World so the party is a wake held to mark the death of good games design and the only thing excellent about it is that the time I spent playing it has led me ever nearer to the sweet release of the grave, where I may forget that I ever experienced this abomination. What I'm saying is, Wayne's World for the SNES isn't very good.

Okay, so that's the overblown histrionics out of the way - it's nice to occasionally go over the top in letting you, the reader, know just how abysmal a game is, but I can't keep it up for long. Anger is so terribly draining.
This is a licensed cash-in job based ever-so-loosely on the first Wayne's World movie, which presents several stumbling blocks. The first is that I bloody love the Wayne's World movies, both of them, they're in my personal top-ten "best films ever" list, and to have those precious memories dragged across the stinking carcass of this game means that writing this article ended up being an almost perverse bout of self-flagellation.

Another problem is trying to figure out how the hell you could turn Wayne's World into a videogame. If you've never seen Wayne's World, go and watch it. Done that? Okay, now explain to me how you would adapt of the story of two rock-loving dorks who broadcast their own television show from their basement, especially given that ninety percent of the "plot" involves Wayne trying to impress Tia Carrere / counter the truly incredible power of Rob Lowe's smarm. personally, I'd have gone with a simulation-type game that focuses on the successful creation and broadcast of an episode of Wayne's World, maybe earning cash for better equipment through minigames like street hockey. Hey, that actually sounds pretty good! It's probably because I put an iota of thought into it, unlike Grey Matter. They just squeezed out an incredibly generic platformer. Before we get to that, though, let's have a cutscene to set the mood.

The intro starts with Wayne and Garth discussing the worst videogames they've played this week. I'm not making this up. They sit there saying "these games sure were shitty" knowing full well that the player will be hurled into one of the most awful 16-bit platformers ever created the moment this cutscene is over. I can only assume the developers realised they'd created a real stinker and included this scene with an knowing wink. The alternative is that they didn't spot the irony, and surely no-one is that oblivious.

The story is this - Wayne and Garth were somehow sucked into an arcade game, whereupon Garth was kidnapped by Zantar the Gelatinous Cube. A moment's hope flickered through me as I realised there was at least some connection to the movie - Zantar the Gelatinous Cube is mentioned in the film by arcade owner Noah Vanderhoff as a game that fleeces kids by being impossible to beat. Then that hope was snuffed as I realised hey, Garth's been kidnapped, which means I won't get to play as Garth. This is a damn shame, because Garth is the best. I feel a close affinity with him. We have similar dating techniques, for one thing.

Here we are then, presumably still trapped inside a videogame because Mike Myers' head is at least 70% larger than usual and there are murderous bagpipes swarming around my feet. Stage one is set in the music store from the movie, a fact I wasn't certain of until I noticed a "NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN" sign in the background. True fact - I've never seen a version of Wayne's World where Wayne actually plays Stairway to Heaven, it having always been replaced by a generic riff due to licensing issues, so it always made that shop assistant come across as a prick who didn't want Wayne playing anything at all. Screw you, guitar shop assistant.

Oh, so you've seen through my cunning plan to avoid talking about this game, have you? Okay, fine. Wayne's World is a platformer of the most basic kind, with one button to jump and another to strum your guitar. Playing the guitar makes it fire out sonic shockwaves, and that's your projectile weapon, so use it to kill the rowdy musical instruments that make up the first stage's foes. The developers managed to get these basic gameplay elements in place. They should have stopped there. Unfortunately for games-playing public, they did not.

Wayne's World gets a lot of things wrong, pretty much everything you could get wrong with a platformer in fact, but what makes it so famously crappy is that such an overwhelming amount of these flaws are dumped upon you within moments of starting the game, any faint glimmer of charm this game may have possessed instantly washed away in a tsunami of shite.
Firstly, the controls. They're floaty, they're loose, they seem purposely designed to make you run just that step too far and collide with an enemy every time you approach one. The controls work in concert with the vaguer-than-a-cut-price-psychic collision detection to give the impression that Wayne is so disgusted by his own videogame that he refuses to have any part of it, forever sliding through platforms he clearly should have landed on or dropping off edges that promised more solidity.

So getting around is a pain, but then so is figuring out where you're supposed to be getting to because every level in Wayne's World is set out as a labyrinth with no hints or markers as to where the hell you're supposed to be going. Also, blind jumps. So many blind jumps, with the screen set so close to Wayne's hydrocephalic noggin that you can barely see what's going on around you, particularly in the vertical plane. You'll drop down to a lower level, there will be an enemy down there and it will hurt you because you couldn't see the bloody thing.
At least you have your guitar ready to blast away the enemies, and it's... okay. It's the least frustratingly broken of all Wayne's World's gameplay elements, even if you can't use it while crouching. If you can get on the same plane as an enemy with falling onto it after a blind jump, then you can generally eliminate it with your guitar.

After ten minutes spent wandering through the music shop maze, I dropped into a nondescript room that seemed to be the same as all the others except it had Garth in it. Hi, Garth! I guess the game is over, then, Garth is rescued and we can all go back to starring in hugely successful movie franchises about grumpy-yet-loveable ogres. Well, one of us can. The other gets to star in The Master of Disguise.

Garth is immediately re-kidnapped by a large purple hand. After suffering through the first stage, I am inclined to let the hand keep him.
Alright, fine, I'll see what the second stage is like.

Hang on, isn't this where I started the game? Oh god, it's looping, I'm going to be trapped in here forever with oh wait, no, this bit is new.

And that's stage two. Just like the first stage but with some slightly different background details, Wayne has to struggle through the music shop in search of Garth. You find Garth in another rectangular section of the level that looks the same as every other rectangular section of the level. Garth is grabbed once more by the purple hand. For his part, Garth seems to be bearing all this with good humour, which is more than can be said for me.

Another stage that looks identical to the others, except now there's a cello that's trying to kill me. I'm trying to puzzle out the logic behind this game's concept, and I'm not getting very far. So Wayne is trapped inside an arcade game, but it's either an arcade game that's based on the music shop he often visits in real life, or the the game is assembling challenges plucked directly from Wayne's psyche? And Zantar the Gelatinous Cube really, really wants to kidnap Garth for some reason. That makes some sense, at least - with his long blonde hair and shy, delicate demeanour Garth isn't that far away from being a videogame princess anyway. Zantar has to take what he can get.

Then I found a boss. It's a guitar, I think, or at least it was once upon a time before the Bydo Empire got their hands on it and turned it into a floating death machine / righteous axe. It flies around the screen, taking pot-shots at you, although its main strategy is to simply hover nearby and hope that Wayne's sluggish controls will cause the two of you to collide. It's a decent strategy, but in the end I managed to prevail by climbing to the top of this phallic hi-fi stack and strumming away as hard as possible. Suddenly the idea that this is all coming from Wayne's psyche has taken a disturbing turn.

Between stages, Wayne and Garth will have a bit of banter that reads a lot like Wayne's World fanfiction. In this case they call each other dweebs for a while, until Wayne managed to elicit a genuine laugh from me by suddenly announcing a "shameless plug" for his movie. That smile was quickly erased when I realised what this plug was going to entail.

The most famous scene in Wayne's World is undoubtedly the one where the headbang to Bohemian Rhapsody, so it was a given that it was going to appear in the game somewhere, and here it is in all its two-frame glory. Hardly spectacular, but nothing too awful, you might think... but that's because you can't hear it, and this is something so incredible that you really have to experience it for yourself.

Wow. Just... wow. It's not that I'm lost for words, the words are there, it's just that I can't quite figure out how to combine them in a way to adequately express the true horror of this abomination. I'm left with only fragments, snatches of phrases, things like "sacrilegious" and "mankind's musical nadir" and "the sounds of two dot-matrix printers furiously copulating atop a leaky bouncy castle." Above all, you ask yourself why? Why would you do this?
I figured it out, though. It was a cunning piece of psychological trickery on Grey Matter's part, because in comparison to that, whatever comes next is going to seem like the elysian outpourings of a kind and generous deity.

Wayne's in a twisted version of Mikita's donut shop now, complete with Mr. Donut Men who are tying to kill you. Garth's Mr. Donut Man in the movie looked much more appetising than these ones. These ones have legs that look more like offal - deoxygenated lungs, maybe - than a sweet fried footstuff.
Each "world" follows the same basic pattern - find Garth, Garth gets kidnapped again, do another stage that looks almost identical to the previous stages of this world, repeat until you find the boss / your will to live is completely drained.

It's extremely faint praise indeed, but I will admit that that coffee shop world is the least frustratingly awful of the bunch. The stages are a little more open, there are fewer (but still plentiful) blind jumps and it's a little more obvious where you're going. Plus, these evil coffee cups kinda look like Beavis so that's a plus.

Mental note - watch the episode of Beavis & Butthead where Beavis drinks all the coffee and becomes a beat poet later.
What you will notice after any amount of time spent playing Wayne's World is just how incredibly slow it is. Not Wayne's movements, because he can get about at a fair clip, but in that if you want to stay alive you have to inch forward slowly, oh-so-slowly, trying to lure the enemies into the range of your guitar because it's very easy to lose all your health when you can't see where the enemies are and the game's mechanics are seemingly insistent on driving you to an early grave through frustration-based self-mutilation. There's no freedom, no pleasure in movement and no satisfaction in learning how to defeat the enemies in front of you, just a tired inch-forward-and-chip-away approach that makes Bubsy seem like Sonic the Hedgehog.

The boss is a syrup-vomiting donut snake, an interesting concept that is genuninely close to being well-implemented but ultimately devolves into the standard "walk around his attacks and shoot" pattern. It might seem like laziness on my part to describe it this way, but that's really all there is to say about any of the bosses in this game - just avoid them. They want to rub up against you, but don't let them and you'll eventually win.
That's the coffee shop completed, so that means it's time for a between-worlds interlude. Say, remember that bit in the movie where Wayne pulls up alongside a wealthy-looking gentlemen, winds down his window and ask if he has any, oh, what was it again?

Ah yes, MUSTARD. Good old brand-free MUSTARD, chosen for it's many fine qualities and certainly not because we couldn't get the license to use the name Grey Poupon and thus keep the goddamn joke intact. Now Wayne just looks like a crazy person, stopping old men at traffic intersections and asking them for condiments.

Pictured: the face of a sane, well-balanced individual.

World three takes place inside the Gasworks nightclub, because why not? We're running out of locations from the movie already. It plays the same as all the other levels only ramped up a notch, your progress hindered by Wayne's oblivious ex-girlfriend Stacy and the fact that every square inch of floor in this bloody place is covered in time-release pyrotechnics.

You know how I was complaining about the game being too slow earlier? Well, you might be shocked to learn that covering every available surface with jets of flame that you have to wait to subside before you can progress has not done much to speed up the gameplay flow. As I waited, for what felt like the nine hundreth time, for a flame to sputter out enough for me to walk past it without taking damage, I started to wonder about the great men and women of history and what they had done with their lives by the time they were my age. Everything went grey for a while, and I woke up several hours later in just my boxers, scratches all over my body, twigs and leaves in my hair and a raging headache. I'm okay now, though. Wayne's World can't hurt me any more.

Not that it'll stop trying, of course. If it's not the laboured Beatles puns, like this beetle with a Beatle cut (you see what they did there?) or the yellow submarine that keeps trying to kill Wayne, it's the relentless grind of the voice clips forcing you to question just how much you really need your ears, I mean really, wouldn't you just be better just ripping them off with your bare hands and cramming the squishy cartilage into your ear canals? Stacy is bad enough, squawking "Hi Wayne!" each time you go near her, but the real pain comes from the fact that each time you collect a power-up Wayne says "excellent!" and each hit makes him say "NOT!" Excellent? Yeah, I can live with that, getting a power-up is pretty excellent (except in this game they mostly just make your guitar fire slightly differently), but "NOT!"? That makes no sense. Who are you saying "not" too? All the evidence is pointing towards Wayne Campbell suffering a nervous breakdown and retreating into a fantasy land of killer coffee cups and floor-mounted flames.

This has mostly been a quick overview, but here's a specific piece of Wayne's World's design that is so bafflingly atrocious that I felt it was important to describe it fully. As you can see, Wayne is standing on the bar. The bar is a platform. That's simple enough. Then there's the stool, which when jumped on acts like a spring and propels Wayne high into the air. Can you see what the problem is? That's right, the gap you need to hop into between the bar and the stool is extremely narrow and you will almost certainly just keep ending up on the bar until the game's fickle hit detection declares "close enough" and the stool fires you upwards. Why? Why would you design it this way? It's so pointless, so bafflingly, needlessly awkward, so utterly shit that it seems to have been done for the sole purpose of making me, me personally, very angry. It's definitely working.

The boss has soothed me a little, because it's Robot Elvis and really, how far wrong can you go with that as your guiding concept? Pretty far wrong, it turns out - the developers thought it would be fun to have the Robo-King say "Mmm, jelly donuts, mmm, jelly donuts" on an endless loop throughout the entire fight. You can't see this, but I'm shrugging in a "I have no goddamn idea" kind of way. My brain has given up trying to fathom out the thinking behind the decisions of this game's programmers. It's as though it were created by an alien race who's only knowledge of videogames were what they had learned from intercepting 1990's SNES commercials.

It's time for another between-stage cutscene, joy of joys, and here's one that anybody who has seen the movie will remember. Wayne is pulled over by a cop, who turns out to be Robert Patrick reprising his role as the T-1000 from Terminator 2. He asks Wayne if he's "seen this boy," showing him a photograph of John Connor. Wayne screams, drives away, laughs are had.
Now, if you've been following this article closely, you'll probably be wondering just how the developers managed to bollocks this one up. Oh, don't worry, they found a way.

The more astute amongst you may have noticed that this is not Robert Patrick. It is Garth. Robert Patrick's agent should be commended for keeping him well away from this piece of garbage, but once again you're left wondering why - why, if you knew you couldn't get permission to use Patrick's likeness, did you forge ahead anyway and not use any other scene from the movie where the gag isn't based entirely around the unexpected appearance of Robert Patrick? I'm afraid I can't answer that. I'm as baffled as you are.

Alright then, here's the final world. It appears to be Wayne's neighbourhood, or at least a warped, dreamlike version where Salvador Dali sorted out the planning permission and Barbie decorated all the houses.

I can't promise that, mysterious signpost.
Mercifully, this world is much shorter than the others, and if you've become sufficiently inured to the bizarre logic of the Wayne's World game then you won't have much trouble getting through it. Well, okay, so there are some bits that might throw you, like that tree on the right of the screen. You see that tree? The one that's clearly in the foreground? Yeah, you can't walk past it. I have no idea why not, and I'm way past caring.

It took the entire game to find him, but there is at least one enemy in the game that's based on a character from the film (unless you count Mr. Donut Man) and it's the guy who demonstrates his vacuum-powered hair-cutting machine on Wayne's show. Yes, it was definitely worth the wait.

After what feels like a geological age but was only a couple of hours, Wayne finally catches up with Zantar the Gelatinous Cube. He's not even a cube. Gray Matter couldn't even get that right.

It's a simple battle - Zantar's only move is to jump from one side of the screen to the other, raining down the occasional ball of goop - and all you need to do is to be patient and shoot Zantar when he opens his eye. Do that a few times and Garth will be saved and we can forget this whole thing ever happened.

Jesus, Garth, what exactly did Zantar do to you? You know what, don't answer that. I've had enough mental anguish for one day.
So that's Wayne's World. The ending consists of Wayne and Garth going through a couple of top-ten lists including "things that make you want to hurl" and "top ten babes," the latter of which admittedly got a chuckle from me by including "Garth's mom" as number three.

Thank heavens that's over. There's a reason that Wayne's World regularly features on "worst games ever" lists, and that reason is that it's really bad. Abysmally bad, worse even than most licensed platformers and that's saying something. For top to bottom there isn't a single thing this game gets right - the graphics are cluttered and ugly, the noises it makes - I hesitate to call it "music" in case Trading Standards come round - are somehow simultaneously punishing and forgettable, the controls are gummy, blind jumps make up eighty percent of the gameplay and the rest is getting lost in the needlessly confusing stages. On top of all that it's Wayne's World, something I dearly love, so to see it abused like this is extra-painful. Did it retroactively make me like the movies less? No, of course not - if that could happen, I'd have burned my copy of Silent Hill 2 after seeing the movies. But the hurt is there, just the same.
I think it best to give Wayne himself the final word on this one. What did you think of Wayne's World for the SNES, Wayne?

Well said, my good man, well said.

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BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (GAME BOY COLOR)

Joss Whedon is currently riding high after the success of Avengers Assemble, but I'll always remember him for creating a different team of super-powered friends who battle world-destroying evil on a weekly basis. I am, of course, talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that televisual mélange of goofy horror, kung-fu, feminism and post-Valley Girl witticisms that entranced me as a teenager. I love Buffy, as I mentioned when I was making the fake NES version, but I've always stayed away from the videogames based on the series. Too great the chance of a tedious licensed cash-in with none of the wit and the charm of the show, those qualities replaced with endless interchangeable enemies and frustrating camera problems. That was then, though. I've played enough dreck over the course of VGJunk's run so far that I think I can handle some disappointment. So, with that in mind, today I'll be talking about Game Brains' / THQ's 2000 Game Boy Color slay-em-up Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

That's right, the Game Boy Color, the unexciting middle child between the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Advance. But look! The Buffy logo is in a nice shade of purple! You wouldn't get that on the plain old Game Boy. Granted, it's not all that exciting at the moment, but I'm sure the GBC's ability to output colours other than spinach green will really lift this game.

See, things are looking better already! There's no recreation of the famous theme tune, but given the sound capabilities of the GBC that's probably for the best. I'm sure you're all anxious to get down to the business of vampire slaying, but as this is a game based on a TV show there's got to be some kind of story, right?

Indeed there is! That means at some point there will have been people arguing over whether this games is "canon" or not. All I'll say is that if this story is a bona fide part of the Buffy universe then it's a good job they made it into a video game, because it'd make for an extremely dull forty-five minute episode. Anyway, Buffy stops by the house of her friend and non-super-power-haver Xander.

So, there was an episode of Buffy where Buffy was actually insane, and the events of the TV series were her psychotic delusions as she drooled her mind away in a psychiatric hospital (it's okay, it was just the effects of a demon's poison, she's not really insane. I know, phew, right?). The events of this videogame must be set during that episode, because this picture clearly shows Buffy peering into a doll's house and checking on the figurines of her "friends" that she's carved out of soap and painted with the leftovers of her prison meals.
Okay, that's a little unfair - the developers were only working with the power of the Game Boy Color, after all. It's not easy to get an accurate likeness of a person in that small a space, let alone three of them. Still, Xander's boxy face, a handsome face constructed from flesh-coloured Lego, a face that bears a striking similarity to the old Mac alert icon - that face makes me laugh every time I look at it.

"Hi, I'm Nicholas Brendon. I starred as Xander in television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but you probably remember me best from the classic 2007 movie Fire Serpent. It was about sentient fire monsters from the sun!"
Moving on - Buffy, Xander and Anya... what? Oh, yeah, that was supposed to be Anya sitting next to Xander. Anyway, after a brief chat Buffy decides to go on patrol through the local cemetery. She's not looking for teenagers doing some cheeky underage drinking: she's hunting the undead menace of the vampire. Although good luck trying to get through a cemetery at night without seeing at least one group of kids sharing a bottle of crème de menthe they've smuggled away from their parents. There's one now!

A vampire, I mean, not a boozy teen. The differences are subtle, but you can tell he's a vampire by the fact he's wearing an electric pink Miami Vice suit. Teenagers get a lot of flak these days but at least they don't dress like Sonny goddamn Crockett.
I'm sure you've figured out by now that this game is a side-scrolling action game where you control Buffy as she kills vampires. Given the nature of the license, there are really only two routes a Buffy game can ever go down - a third-person punch-a-thon or something completely unrelated to the theme of the show, like a Buffy-theme clone of Puzzle Bobble or something. This particular game has chosen the obvious route, and it's your job to re-kill all the various monsters that are roaming Sunnydale.

To accomplish this, you can use punches and kicks. Button A punches, button B kicks, the d-pad moves you around and makes you jump. Simple enough. In case you've got no idea what all this Buffy the Vampire Slayer nonsense is about, and you need a little more explanation than that given by the title (which is a fair amount of explanation, let's be honest), the show is about a girl who has something special about her, something that'll be familiar to videogame players the world over - she's the Chosen One. Chosen to be the Slayer, to be more accurate: a young woman with super-strength / super-reflexes / super-stamina / super-supplies of mid-battle quips who is tasked with killing vampires and demons and occasionally Frankenstein's Monster-type things.

Just punching things isn't enough, though. Being undead, you can't just punch a vampire to death; you've got to stake them through the heart, and that's where the game's fighting system gets a little more complex. Every enemy has a green stamina bar which you can reduce by hitting them. However, they don't die once it's empty - they just, uh, fall over. Then you've got to stand over their prone body and press down and A to stake them. Simple enough, but once they're down their stamina bar refills, and once it's back to max they can get up again. You don't have to wait until their bar's empty, either: Buffy has a very useful sweep attack that knocks enemies over, but of course they get up faster because they still have some stamina. This leads to quite a nice little piece of risk-and-reward gameplay - do you risk getting hit whilst battering your opponent to bloody pulp, or do you try for the quick takedown and hope you can stake them before they can get back up?

Buffy has her own stamina bar, but she also has a health bar. Vampires can only hurt you when your stamina is depleted and you fall on your back, giving them unhindered access to your neck and allowing them to drain your health until you've mashed the buttons long enough to get up. It's not a bad system, and it certainly feels like a decent compromise to what I'd call the Superman Problem - when your main character is supposedly supernaturally tough, how do you make the enemies a credible threat? In Superman's case you don't, and that's why (amongst other reasons) all Superman games are shit, but in Buffy's case I think they've handled it quite well.
That's enough about game mechanics, though, because Buffy has decided she's done enough patrolling for one night and is heading to the local nightclub for some relaxation. Never mind that there was a vampire leaping out of the bushes every ten paces, Buffy's satisfied that a ten-minute patrol of one side of the cemetery will keep the residents of Sunnydale safe for tonight and she really doesn't want to miss happy hour.

Again, it's unfair to be too critical of the art here given the hardware limitations. That's not going to stop me, though - look at Buffy's neck! She's like a giraffe in a halter top. No wonder there were so many vampires about, you could feed a family / coven of five on that thing. She's the vampire equivalent of a KFC bucket.

The next stage is set on the streets of Sunnydale, and the suited vampires have been replaced with these undead biker-gang members. They're carrying chains but they fight pretty much the same, which means they just hop around ineffectually until I can land a decent punch on them. The combat is basic, but Buffy does have a few extra moves beyond the basic punch and kick to liven things up: there's a jumping kick and a forward roll that's very useful for both dodging attacks and quickly covering the distance between our hero and any enemy she's clobbered to the floor. As the levels progress the enemies regain their stamina much faster and therefore get up more quickly, so rolling around like an excited child who's just discovered gymnastics becomes vital later on when you need to close the distance between you and your victims in a hurry.

And then you fight a ninja, in keeping with the 80's theme of the enemies thus far - that decade truly was the golden age of the Shadow Warrior in popular culture. Personally, I blame Alternative Software's 1988 home computer "classic" BMX Ninja. This ninja doesn't have a BMX but he does have a sword (sorry, a katana) that he seems rather reluctant to use, which is downright foolish. If I was fighting a semi-legendary warrior renowned for killing people of my kind - vampires I mean, not ninjas, although Buffy the Ninja Slayer could be an interesting show in its own right - I'd want to use all the tools at my disposal. Or maybe I'd use my ninja techniques instead of standing in the middle of the street and threatening young women.
The ninja isn't very difficult to beat. In fact, I beat him by luring him to the corner, tripping him up and staking him right away. Efficiency is the key here, folks.

Buffy's speech bubble is obscuring Xander's face, which is something we can all be thankful for. Plot-wise, Buffy has received a phone call from her former lover, vampire and Intercontinental Champion of Brooding, Angel. He's warning her about danger, quelle surprise, because he never calls just to see how she's doing, the insensitive prick. This all boils down to Buffy entering the sewers, because everyone loves sewer levels.

Today's vampires: undead hobos! Just because you're an undead monster infected with the soul of a demon, it doesn't mean you're safe from the economic problems facing the world today. These vampires, other than possessing a drop-kick attack that makes Captain Kirk seem as brutally graceful as Tony Jaa, are the same as the other vampires, and here we've stumbled onto Buffy the Vampire Slayer's main problem: the dread force that is Tedium.
The thing is, nothing changes. Once you've killed one vampire, you've killed them all, and barring the occasional different move they all fight the same and die the same - do them some damage, trip them up, stake in the strawberry tart, done. Every stage follows the same pattern of Buffy wandering through the area until all the vampires are dead, and she never learns any new moves or picks up any weapons to help with the carnage. I say no weapons, but there are actually the odd items that you can pick up and throw at the enemies. There's a can of paint next to the biker vampire pictured above, for instance. That's all well and good, but what about a sword or crossbow or something? Buffy used a rocket launcher once. I want a rocket launcher.

No boss this time, and Buffy exits the sewers to find she's made a wrong turn and ended up in the zoo. What manner of horrors could we possibly encounter in a zoo? Vampiric kangaroo? Zombified platypus?

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting the Neon Zulu here. These guys put up a little more of a fight, mostly because they're faster than the previously-encountered types of vampire and also because they've got a stick for whackin'. They also make really irritating noises the whole time. They sound like someone recorded a dog yelping in pain, reversed it, converted it to the Game Boy format and stuck it in the game, which seems like a lot of effort for very little reward. Forget their battle cries, though, these guys look familiar...

Super Mario, tribal vampire. An unexpected crossover, but one that I could definitely get behind.
The zoo even has a boss, but he's a little shy:

It's hard to feel threatened when you're hiding behind a lamppost, champ. He might look menacing (and slimy) but he's just as easy to defeat as all the other vampires. Actually I think he's easier to beat because he's slower. There you have it, folks - a boss who is less of a threat than the regular enemies. You don't see that every day.

Everyone gathers at the apartment of Buffy's Watcher / mentor / target of much frankly disgusting anti-British xenophobia / father figure Giles. During this meeting, Giles inspects a worn concrete block, Buffy contemplates a pile of what are either biscuits or large copper coins and Xander and Willow's faces distort further into the nightmarish. Willow looks especially demonic as she appears to be leaking some kind of brown fluid from her eye sockets.
The upside of this meeting is that the plot begins to coagulate. The various multi-ethnic vampires are in town because they have been summoned to Sunnydale by occasional Buffy villain Ethan Rayne. Rayne is essentially the evil-mirror-universe version of Giles in that he's a smug Englishman who's a bit evil and likes to cause chaos by using magic or magick or majjikk, however servants of primordial chaos are spelling it these days. That description makes him sound like Paul Daniels, but don't worry, he's not that bad. Rayne is gathering the world's most powerful vampire clans from across the world, because he needs their leaders to perform an apocalyptic ritual. Oh, and this is all being done under the cover of a Multiculturalism Festival being held at the local university, which makes me wonder whether all those multiculturalism festivals my university held were, in fact, a smokescreen obscuring the dark machinations of a satanic cult. Probably not, because they'd have spent their entire apocalypse budget on flyers and goody bags.

Vampires from around the world, huh? Well, here are the European vampires. They live in an abandoned mansion and dress in formal eveningwear, like all good vampires should. They still look a little like Super Mario, but now with added Fred Astaire. I can't really think of much else to say: the game has already reached a level of repetition that's draining my will to continue. Perhaps this is my own fault for playing the game in one continuous session, because this is a handheld game after all, designed for short bursts of play. Taken one stage at a time the boredom factor might not be as much of a problem, although it's difficult to see why you'd keep coming back to it once you've realised that nothing, apart from the bizarrely-stereotyped enemies, ever changes.

Even that stops being true eventually, because by the next stage there are no new types of enemy, just the same bunch of bikers, poshos and tribal warriors.

We're getting towards the end now, and Angel shows up to... not do much of anything, really. He tells Buffy that the evil ritual will take place at the whirling maelstrom of evil power called the Hellmouth. Thanks for the heads up buddy, although I think there's a good chance I'd have figured that out myself.
And where exactly is this Hellmouth located?

Inside Courtney Love, apparently.

For a place called the Hellmouth this stage is surprisingly sedate, but you do get to meet some new enemies. I think they're supposed to be Egyptian - they do appear near sarcophagi, although quite why there are some ancient Egyptian ruins underneath a Californian town is never explained. These guys come out of Egyptian caskets yet die like vampires, so are they some kind of Mummy-Vampire hybrid? Do they want to drink my blood or do whatever it is that Mummies want to do like, I dunno, murder those that disturbed its eternal slumber? Whatever variety of monster it is it still dies (as so many things do) when you jab a wooden spike through its heart, so I guess it doesn't matter what it is.

This ninja looks a little lost. Deep below the surface of the Earth, surrounded by ancient Egypto-Californian relics, getting punched by that girl from Cruel Intentions, his bewilderment is understandable. I don't think there's much in either the schools of ninjitsu or being a vampire that can prepare you for that.

I've been harsh on the cutscene artwork so far, but it's not all bad: here's Ethan Rayne revealing himself by peeling off a fake face, and it actually looks pretty good. I also quite like the pause menu.

I reckon I could look at that out of context and realise it's supposed to be Buffy, so it's a big step ahead of most of the other portraits. Plus, there's an option to turn the music off. I suggest you exercise this option.

We're into the final stage now, and you have to fight each of the leaders of the vampire clans. They've all ditched their trademark outfits and are wearing robes, so I can't tell you which leader belongs to which group, but this purple-clad chap must be the leader of the guys in the suits. Once you've defeated all the leaders, it's time for the final confrontation.

Not against Ethan Rayne - no, he's not the type to get his hands dirty with actual fisticuffs. Instead you face a generic demon, probably one of Baphomet's less famous relatives who gets all the boring jobs in Hell like stoking the fires and cleaning the rectal impalement spikes. He's big, he can take a punch quite well and he recovers stamina extremely quickly but for a nightmare summoned from the very bowels of Pandemonium he's an absolute pushover to beat. If only he'd used his giant wings to hover a foot or so off the ground I'd have been screwed as my repeated leg-sweeps passed harmlessly below him, but he's not intelligent enough for that and after a brief and extremely one-sided fight he takes a stake to the chest and the game is completed.

Uh, yeah, I guess so? Celebrate all you like. What do you wish to do to commemorate your moment of triumph?

Buffy knows only death now. Nothing but the taking of a life can satiate her bloodlust. Truly, she has become the monster.

And there you have it. Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the Game Boy Color, and what a perplexing ride it was. I say perplexing because even after having played through the game I still don't really know how I feel about it. The combat is fairly good for a title released on a two-button handheld, and it's a damn good job because that's all there is to it. The graphics vary considerably in quality from the sometimes-unfortunate cutscenes to Buffy's smoothly-animated sprites, but I can unreservedly state that the music is a painful mess of unrelated beepings. I think I did the game a disservice by not playing it on its original hardware, because the sense of accumulated boredom would probably have been far less had I played it one level at a time while I was on the bus or something.

It's not a bad game, and it's certainly nice to see the Buffy gang one more time even if they do look like they were drawn by a psychotic with a copy of Mario Paint, but I can't really recommend this game to you unless you really, really enjoy punching a vast horde of vampires - so maybe play it if you're ever forced to watch Twilight.

Bonus!

Here's a handy chart of all the various vampire types and the ethnicities they represent, just in case you happen across one in real life and you need to know whether to say "konnichiwa" or "jolly good show".

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