MARIO PAINT MASTERPIECES

Da Vinci. Rembrandt. Van Gogh. All the most widely-recognised master painters in history. What do they all have in common? That's right, they all chose to stick with the same tired media of paint and canvas, instead of utilizing the mighty technological power of Nintendo's Mario Paint. Yes, they may be know as the true masters of their art, but think how much better they could have been has only the SNES been around during the Renaissance. To prove this point, I have selected five masterpieces and re-created them using that most powerful of expressive techniques: Mario Paint. In case you are such a phillistine that you don't recognise these works of art, I have included the (vastly inferior) originals at the bottom of the post. Prepare now to have your minds blown and for artistic wonderment to flow into the fleshy mass within!

(Click for a larger view)
First of all, I know Mario Paint has a limited number of colours, but this doesn't matter. A truly visionary artist will use this to his advantage! Notice how I have improved on the original with some truly vibrant colours, as well as the fact that the subject now resembles Dr. Wily from Megaman that much more. The use of perspective when rendering the chair is what truly elevates this to masterpiece status.


Have you ever seen fruit painted so beautifully as this, so real you want to reach into the picture and take a bite? No, of course you haven't, you uncultured swine. The depiction of the sea surpasses even the works of Turner, and the figure is so perfectly formed that his shrivelled left hand becomes a beacon of hope, not a hideous disfigurement. Salvador Dali once said "I myself am surrealism," but he was obviously wrong. Because I am.


The world's greatest masterpiece. Ah, those haunting eyes, that half-formed smile. All my own work, of course. The original was just some dowdy woman with no eyebrows. The shading of the jawline gives her a real sense of strength, and it certainly doesn't look like a five-o-clock shadow. That overly-fussy background had to go too, and I'm sure you'll agree my new one is far superior.

An artistic statement of a world in anguish, and what could fill a man with more anguish than trying to draw anything with the SNES mouse? The noodle-y hands of the original did not go nearly far enough for my liking, so have replaced them with what is essentially spaghetti. Imagine the anguish you would feel if you had spaghetti for hands. Also, another perfect depiction of the sea.


Ha ha! Screw you, Mario Paint! I win! If only the SNES had a printer, I could knock a few of these out, glue them to canvasses and sell them on the black market. I'd be a millionaire in no time.
Well, I hope you feel suitably cultured now: I'm sure you'll agree that Mario Paint is the only true choice for creating works of such ground-breaking importance. If you feel like recreating a great work of art using the divine medium of the SNES, email it to vgjunk@hotmail.co.uk and win absolutely nothing.

EL VIENTO

Boomerangs? Check. Hair like a small green hedgehog? Check. The world's most irritating bats? Check. Okay then, we're all set for WolfTeam's 1991 Megadrive game El Viento.

I vaguely remember playing this back in the day, enjoying it, and then not being able to remember why I enjoyed it. So I figured I'd play it again and find out, hopefully without being horribly disappointed. The plot is that age old story: Evil cult wants to resurrect a/the dark lord, and the chosen one must stop them. In this iteration we have, in the red corner, the evil Hastur. Is this the same Hastur from the Cthulhu Mythos? Well, we shall see. In the blue corner we have Annet, a young girl who can run like the wind and throw boomerangs like Crocodile Dundee. This all takes place in the 1920s, which is a nice change of pace as far as videogames go.

You start the game in a city, and the first things to notice are the excellent music, composed by none other than Motoi Sakuraba, who composed the music for most of the Tales series as well as Shining Force III, and the well-above-average graphics. Annet herself is particularly well animated, especially when she's running about. The basic gameplay is in the side-scrolling action platformer mould: you run around, jumping between platforms and throwing boomerangs with gay abandon. Oh, and you can throw fireballs too, which is always nice. The enemies in the first stage are a strange mix: there's your obvious-enough mafia goons in trenchcoats, and then you're suddenly attacked by what appears to be Vega from Street Fighter riding a motorcycle. There's a section of climbing up the buildings while men appear in the windows and drop any number of household items on your head, and so far it's all going pretty well. The controls are nice and fluid, the graphics and music are very good, and the whole thing is, well, fun. Fun! In a videogame! Who would have thought. Around halfway through the stage, you're attacked by a gangsters in a bright pink Model-T Ford, which I guess puts paid to the notion of "any colour so long as it's black," and then it's on to the boss, which turns out to be a very incongruous-looking giant tank. Quite how this futuristic battle machine ended up in the 1920s is anyone's guess but there it is, pumping out shells while you throw boomerangs at it. I assume these are magic boomerangs, because they make fairly short work of the FUTURISTIC SPACE TANK. When the tank is a bit damaged, you can see the driver: it's one of the gangsters, complete with fedora. That's the kind of era-mixing oddness I can get behind. Once he's defeated, you get a nice cutscene, as you do between all the stages. The odd thing is that at no point during the cutscene are you told who is talking, so I like to choose one character and pretend they're saying eveything. It makes them all sound like mad people, which is only going to add to the fun of the game.

On to stage two, and it's out into the great outdoors, where robot totem poles spring up to welcome you with deadly fire. The totems have rather cheerful-looking faces on them, which makes you wonder about the mentality of the villian who (presumably, unless the native Americans had access to some pretty advanced technology) erected them. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge difficulty spike rears up in front of you. And it was all going so well, too. The problem here is jumping across some rotating platforms. Annet should have planned a route that didn't take her directly across the top of a ruddy windfarm, but there you go. Straight afterwards there is a section of crumbling platforms, but they're not nearly so tough. Soon you're at the boss, a witch called Restiana who keeps showing up in the cutscenes. The battle takes place on a pile of crumbling tiles, (fortunately, you can't fall off the bottom of the stage,) and I managed to get her stuck in the scenery and pummel her with fireballs. There's another cutscene: apparently I was at Mt. Rushmore the whole time. I'm sure it was very nice.

Stage three starts in a warehouse. No, wait, I took a couple of steps forward and it appears to be a bar. There's a fat guy trying to glass me to death, so it could be any city-centre bar on any Saturday night, really. A bit further on, a tiny pirate jumps out of a barrel and tries to stab me with an equally tiny knife. Man, it makes me feel happy inside to type a sentence like that.

Hang on a moment, though: a tiny pirate with a tiny sword who jumps out of a barrel? I'm fighting the freakin' Pop-Up Pirate! I guess he had to branch out: the kids aren't interested in board games these days. Onward into the sewers, and what do you get in sewers? Slime, that's what, and here it is. Also fish that you can use as platforms (Annet likes riding aquatic lifeforms, as we shall see at the start of the next stage,) and rats. Lots and lots of rats. It looks like Krusty's Super Fun House down there. After the sewer is a cave, which has trolls. This game sure is sticking to it's stereotypes. There should have been a whale in the cave, that'd have confused people. There are a few dragons to fight, and they give you a new spell that pours water on the ground. It's pretty useless, apart from this one instance where you have to use it to put out some fires. The boss awaits, and he's Zantar The Gelatinous Cube! You have make a dent in him with repeated boomerangs, and then hit his fleshy innards. He's not that tough, and it's on to stage four.

Annet jumps on a dolphin's back and rides out onto the high seas, fighting men in hang-gliders and having a fine old time until suddenly OH DEAR GOD THERE'S PIXELS EVERYWHERE WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!

Yes, this tentacley thing appears and gets in your way, and he really is that pixellated. What the hell were the developers thinking? Did they think no-one would notice? I mean, I've seen some pretty bad Mode-7 scaling in my time, but this is even worse. However, if you look carefully (or possibly from some distance away) the pixel-beast looks a little like the Great Lord Cthulhu himself. So, you're riding a dolphin throwing boomerangs at Cthulhu. Now that's what I call a videogame. Eventually you make it past the Great Old One and into a ship made almost entirely of spikes. The game takes on an almost puzzle-based flavour here, as you gain a sonic boom power and use it to light fuses and get around the hundreds of thousands of spikes that make up the ship's cargo. It's all rather well done, difficult without being frustrating; it's definitely one of the highlights of the game. The boss, however, is disappointing. I think it's supposed to be a ball of coral that shoots (some nicely animated) lightning at you... and that's it. He's not very adventurous.

Stage five is a temple in the Grand Canyon, and after the last stage it seems a little bland. Some statues come to life and try to attack you, some bats grab onto you and drain your health. Yawn. It's rather disappointing after the S.S. Spikeboat. Oh, and you get a new spell that's essentially a bigger fireball. The stage's boss is bubbles. No, not Jacko's monkey, but a pile of suds in the corner of the room. He's pretty tough for lather: his main method of attack is to fill the screen with smaller bubbles that can hurt you, trap your boomerangs and generally be a nuisance. He's the hardest thing in the game so far, but even lather is no match for the mighty boomerang.

Detroit is the setting for stage six, which is a very short stage. You proceed through a factory full of conveyor belts, jumping over junk and avoiding the extremely advanced security system that the owners of said factory felt it necessary to install. The boss is odd in that it's a game of find the lady rather than a straight-up fight: a monster hides in one of three boxes, the boxes get shuffled around and you have to pick the right one to hit. All well and good, until I took a closer look at the monster and realised it's a Mi-Go. A goddamn Mi-Go! The geekiest part of me had a small fit when I figured that out. Now I'm convinced it was Cthulhu, Lord of All Pixels, that I fought earlier.

Another very short stage, where you run across the top of an aircraft getting shot by turrets that you can't avoid until you reach the reactor core, which I suppose counts as the boss. You climb up some descending platforms and shoot the core. Done, next stage please.

The final stage, then, and it transpires that the Empire State building is actually a shrine to Hastur, or possibly Gozer the Gozerian, and Annet has to get to the top. It was all going so well until now, but the game takes a serious downward turn with this stage. Riding the elevators, fighting lizardman and solving some simple door-opening puzzles would be fine if it wasn't for the bats. THE GODDAMN BATS. The bats from stage five have returned, you see. Except now there are thousands of them, crammed into every square inch of the stage, clinging to you and draining your health and being completly unavoidable. THESE FUCKING BATS. My God, the levels of frustration encountered here cannot be healthy, and I now have a deep-seated terror of bats. Thanks, El Viento. Thank you very much. Eventually, against all the odds, Annet manages to break through to the final boss.

Your final opponent is Restiana again. Having recovered from the kicking I gave her earlier, she transforms into a purple hydra-y thing and battle commences. She's fairly tough, what with all the fireballs and such, but after that bat stage anything else feels like a blessed relief. Once she's defeated, there's a cutscene where Annet is upset about having to kill Restiana, but obviously not that upset, and the game ends. No more bats!

El Viento is good. There, I said it, and I'll say it again. It's a good game, with solid gameplay, great graphics and music and A FREAKIN' MI-GO. Sure it has some cruel difficulty jumps, and that bat stage will haunt your dreams for many years, but these are only minor issues which are mostly down to me being rubbish at videogames. So give El Viento a go: just make sure you stop before the final stage if you value your sanity.

BONUS: http://www.bogleech.com/sega-viento.html here has all the sprites from the game. In fact, you should just go and have a look around the site. It's a pretty cool place!

KAMEN RIDER SD: SHUTSUGEKI!! MACHINE RIDER

Grasshopper men riding motorcycles and fighting elephants on pogo sticks? Welcome to the 1993 SNES title Kamen Rider SD: Shutsugeki!! Machine Rider. Man, what a title. They don't make 'em like that anymore (except, you know, they do).


I know pretty much nothing about the Kamen Rider franchise other than the basics: He fights crime, he transforms into a grasshopper-based superhero, he rides a motorcycle and there are approximately seventy thousand different Kamen Rider series, each with a different Rider. As far as I can tell, Kamen Rider SD is a kind of Greatest Hits edition, where various Riders from across space and time put aside their grasshoppery quarrels and band together to fight a common foe. Oh, and they're all drawn in a manner that makes them adowwwable.
As for the gameplay, how can I explain it? Well, if you've ever played Final Fantasy VII, (I think there's about three or four left out there who haven't,) I can explain it pretty easily. You remember the motorcycle minigame? It's essentially a whole game of that. You move your Rider around the screen, kicking out either to his left or right to kick enemies off their bikes/cars/pogo sticks. It's a side-scolling beat-em-up where you can only attack into or out of the screen, basically. Each stage has you playing as a different Rider, and each one has a unique special attack, such as a spinning sawblade or transforming into some kind of blazing comet. There's also a shop where you get to choose a limited-use sub-weapon. but you get so few of them they really aren't that much use.
And that's it. It's kinda fun, but as you can probably guess, when it's stretched out over nine stages with no changes in the gameplay, it gets tired pretty quick. What this game does have in it's favour is graphics. Lovely, lovely sprite graphics. The Riders themselves look great: if they had been released as toys when I was a child I would have wanted, nay, demanded to own them all. The enemies are fantastic, in both senses of the word: the game world seems to be populated by little bobble-headed blue guys called "E"s, who fill the background as well as serving as your adversaries. So, here's a look at some of the pixelly loveliness to be found within.

STAGE 1: City Road

Here we see Kamen Rider popping a wheelie. He's fond of that, as you would be too if you had a motorcycle that cool. Notice the Es in the background. The one on the far right does not look impressed.



Some sections of the background here: First, a nice shop display featuring an E-headed Godzilla, a group of superheroes and an elephant with Y-fronts on its head. Then there's Endina Enes, a good friend of one Mr. H. Ford. Hopefully, he wasn't named after the dog. Nice to see Shia LaBeouf isn't on there. Finally, there's a poster for a very familiar looking android-based movie.

STAGE 2: Country Road

Not much in the background on this stage, apart from this strange tableaux: On the left, a man seduces a woman. On the right, someone getting suplexed. I can only hope this isn't a time-lapse thing and the suplex isn't the inevitable outcome of that guy chancing his arm.


A special mention for the boss of stage two: He is a Ku Klux Klan squid-man riding inside a mechanical spider with fishnet-stocking-wearing women's legs. That is something a bit wonderful. If this guy is an actual Kamen Rider villain, please, please let me know.

STAGE 3: Cave Baster

Just a couple of things about stage three: yes, it is called "Cave Baster", so I guess every so often Rider gets off his bike, finds a huge pipette and pours the cave's own juices back onto itself. I bet that's one delicious gravy. Second, the boss is the afore-mention pogoing elephant. So far, this game's bosses are up to a standard not often seen outside the Parodius games.

STAGE 4: Fire Tornado

This enemy bears rather a resemblance to a Zaku of Gundam fame. Stage 4 also has my favourite band in the game (more on that later) and, perhaps not coincidentally, the best music in the game.

STAGE 5: Desert Battle

It looks like Endina Enes is in trouble here. Perhaps the large fellow is George Lucas' lawyer.



It's just like being in Sagat's stage!



A whole row of statues, one assumes of fallen heroes. I particularly like the luchador with the scythe.

STAGE 6: Big Tank

Nothing much to report in this stage. Yes, the boss is a Big Tank.

STAGE 7: Silk Road

As Rider battles his way along the Great Wall of China, some familiar figures are doing a little Street Fighting up on the battlements. Ken is almost certainly being scrubby, and Ryu looks like he's getting his ass handed to him. The other two just look cool.


The boss is an eyeball monster who flies around in a noodle bowl. You have no idea how long I spent trying to come up with a noodle-related pun to go here.

STAGE 8: Midnight Town

Yee-haw! Welcome to Lass Egass! There is a lot of neon in this stage, along with...


...Mount E-More! They do not look pleased.

STAGE 9: Fung To The Circuit

Okay, this is just creepy.


Luc Besson's lawyers should team up with George Lucas's. I'm sure they have a case.

For some reason, the racing circuit is also showing a wrestling match on the big screens. They look rather reminiscent of M.U.S.C.L.E. toys, which may well be intentional. All I know is their facial expressions will haunt my dreams.
And that's the end of the game, apart from a very short stage where you fight an evil Rider who turns out to be the last boss. The bands I mentioned earlier? Well, during each boss fight there is a band in the background that ties in with the theme of the level. Here's a picture of all of them (click for a bigger view). Oh, except for stage 6, because I haven't got a picture of them. They were a bunch of American-looking soldiers, anyway.

I like Stage 8's Michael Jackson extravaganza, although I have no idea what the hell "Darth Ambassador" is supposed to mean. Vader's more diplomatic brother, perhaps? Less Force choking, more of a focus on economic sanctions against rebel planets. Stage 4's punk band is my favourite, though.
And that's it for Kamen Rider SD: Shutsugeki!! Machine Rider: a briefly fun, mostly mediocre game redeemed by KKK Squid-men and sprite-based copyright infringement.

BRIAN IRONS - THE SHOCKING TRUTH

You know what I love? Resident Evil. Yes sir, Raccoon City has been a happy playground for me over the years. Of all the RE games, though, Resident Evil 2 is and probably always will be my favourite. Yes, the Gamecube remake of RE1 is deeply beautiful as well as fantastically terrifying, and yes, RE4 is sublime from start to finish. But RE2 has something that keeps it lodged firmly at the forefront of my gaming conciousness. Possibly it's simple nostalgia, or the fact that I played the demo so much that to this day I could probably do the first section up to the police station blindfolded. The there's the cast of loveable characters, your Leons and Clairea and Adas, but there is one man, one minor but gloriously realised character who might well be my favourite. That man is the head of the R.P.D.: Chief Brian Irons.



Chief Irons appears in Claire's story, sitting at his desk upon which lies the body of the Mayor's daughter. He offers you some practical zombie-killing advice (which is nice of him), as well as slipping into real creepiness by describing the perfection of the Mayor's daughter's skin (which is not so nice). He asks you to leave, and as you search around you find plenty of evidence that Chief Irons is a rapist, an embezeller and that he hunted down and killed the Mayor's daughter as though he was auditioning for the sequel to Hard Target. Nice. Later, he gets his just desserts: tentacles are involved, and it's no more than he deserves.
So, why does a character who is in the game for only a few minutes stick so firmly in the mind? Mostly, I think it's to do with the voice acting. Gary Krawford makes Irons sound like he's genuinely psychotic and he might snap at any moment. Whether that was intentional or just wonky voice acting, I can't say. It sure works, though.
Here's a little something else that I've noticed about Brian Irons. Zombie Nightmare is a 1986 horror film about a large, beefy man who is killed, comes back as a zombie and goes on to wreak his revenge. It's a pretty bad film. You might have seen it being ripped apart in the stomach-cripplingly funny episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
Anyway, in Zombie Nightmare, the inimitable Adam West (of Batman fame) plays a police chief called Tom Churchman, a violent, corrupt head of police who has a history of abusing women, who now has a zombie problem in his town. Sound familiar? Also, Irons and Churchman look pretty similar.


The same moustache, similar hair, waistcoat and tie. Am I saying that Capcom based Brian Irons on a character in a crappy 80's horror movie filmed in Canada? Well, no, I guess not. But, by God, I would dearly love for it to be true.
Well, that's all for this installment. Watch this video and get a bit of Irons in your diet. And to think that taxidermy used to be my hobby...

HOLY DIVER - AN UNFORTUNATE TRIBUTE TO DIO

A few weeks ago, the world mourned the sad passing of a true rock legend: Ronnie James Dio. Now that I have recovered from my grief, (as well as my shock that he has been outlived by both Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy,) I present a small tribute in the form of an article about Irem's 1989 NES Castlevania rip-off Holy Diver.

This really was a rare (for me, at least) case of being hooked by a game's title, but unfortunately, despite sharing it's name with the song that may well represent the pinnacle of man's musical endeavour, it has nothing in common with Dio's masterpiece. If you're looking for a game where you can jump on a tiger, I suggest you try the arcade classic Tiger Jump 19XX. I, however, am going to play through Holy Diver.

The game offers you no kind of story, so I'm going to make one up. You play as a magnificently-shoulderpadded wizard, who we shall call Dio for the sake of convenience. Dio must urgently find a large amount of Ferrero Rocher with which to cater the ambassador's ball he will be holding that evening, but the only all-night supermarket is located across six stages of hellish terror filled with a cavalcade of evil demons. Undaunted, he puts on his second-best cape (he's saving his best cape for the ambassador's ball, natch) and sets out on his quest.
As previously mentioned, Holy Diver bears more than a passing resemblance to the early Castlevania games. You jump around, fight monsters and go up and down those staircases made of diagonally-placed blocks (you know the ones I mean). Instead of a whip, you shoot fireballs, and instead of sub-weapons you get different magic spells. The first level sees Dio standing at the top of a tree that looks rather like a Twister ice lolly. As if to prove his wizardly powers, he leaps from the tree and into a cursed church. It's curse? To be full of little shirtless men wearing executioner's hoods, men who are desperate to prove their worth by running into any magician they see. There are also some orange knights who hover just out of reach and then dive in to attack, which will become a rather irritating recurring theme with the enemies in this game. So far, Holy Diver is off to a solid, if derivative, start.
Things soon change though. Once Dio has reached the Guns 'N' Roses-esque cross with a skull and snake on it, the game decides you are sufficiently heavy metaaaaaal enough to start being punished by the wildly fluctuating difficulty level. Flying butterfly skulls (this game is rather heavy on skulls) start flapping in from all directions, generally getting in the way while you're trying to fight the orange knights. They're like Castlevania's Medusa Heads, but even worse because they don't just float past you: they turn around and come back at you in a constant stream. Even Dracula's minions weren't that cruel. This early difficulty spike, the kind of difficulty that is not so much a challenge as it is pointless frustration, should have perhaps been a warning signal, but what kind of wizard obeys warning signs? Shooting fire out of your hands must come with all kinds of safety legislation, but I imagine if you can shoot fire out of your hands, you tend to ignore such things. Dio struggles through and eventually reaches the boss, a teal demon who is fond of jumping around and shooting fireballs at you in a manner very reminiscent of Dracula from, you guessed it, Castlevania. He doesn't seem all that vicious though; I think he just wants someone to play with. Oh well, he's dead now, and Dio receives the power of Blizzard.
The second stage, according to the small amount of online translation I subjected it to, is called Offal Hell. Now, that is a bold name for a level. Not the regular kind of hell, you know, with the fire and everything, but the kind that's full of tripe and ruled by demons made of haggis. Actually, most of the level looks like it's made of spaghetti bolognese, with the floor looking like mince and what I assume are lava flows that look like tomato sauce. Maybe this Offal Hell won't be so bad.

The level sees Dio travelling across the mincey land, avoiding demons who fire arrows at your head and using your new Blizzard powers to freeze the tomato-y lava so you can walk across it. Inside the cave, some terribly frustrating bats appear, but the rage they cause with their difficult-to-dodge projectiles is alleviated somewhat by the skeleton dragon-dinosaur things that accompany them. I like their sprites a lot, as they manage to seem menacing and really goofy at the safe time, which is always a good combination. They stage gets more organic and offally as you proceed, until I noticed that the walls were filled with little embryos. Terrifying flashbacks to the embryo stage in Splatterhouse began to consume me, the memory of wanting to stab the developers still fresh in my mind. Luckily, the embryos stay in the walls and I'm free to make my way to the boss. This boss is a giant fleshy wall who fires tomatoes at you, which is probably where all the tomato sauce comes from. He's very easy to beat: I managed to find a spot where his tomatoes could not hurt me and just mashed fire. In fact, he died so quickly that I forgot to get a screenshot. Whoops.
Stage three is set in a jungle, a jungle with lava flowing through it and a constant barrage of bladed wheels rolling at you from all angles. There are some trees to climb, but the trees do have eyes which weep deadly tears at you, so I guess it's not as wholesome as it sounds. The flying butterfly skulls have been superceded by something even more infuriating: unkillable eyeball flies. That's right, they can only be avoided. They're like the angry sun in Super Mario 3, except there are approximately seven thousand of them in every room. This level has a lot of enemies, but the best and strangest is waiting inside the caves later in the level: flying orange angler fish that vomit slugs at you. I have no idea what that's all about: all I know is they're very irritating, and the combination of their orangeness and the green of the background is not a good mix, visually. Add to that the sprite flicker, and you may want to keep some aspirin nearby, or maybe just play a game that doesn't look like the inside of psychopath's head. If you do continue, you'll soon reach the boss, a penisy-looking plant creature that floats up and down and drops worms on you. The boss is far easier than the actual level, which seems to be a pattern with this game, and soon you're on to the fourth stage.
A castle! You gotta have a castle in wizard-based games. Also, rocks fly at you, and if even the tiniest particle of these rocks make contact wth you, you take damage. What is it with rocks in videogames? The only cool rock in a videogame is Geodude: all the rest are just there to frustrate you and knock you off ledges. Goddamn rocks and ledges. Anyway, after a frustrating spell jumping across narrow pillars while gargoyles try to poke you, Dio makes his way into the castle proper, which is populated mainly by giant bouncing skulls in Roman helmets who shoot croissants at you. This is getting a little strange, and I have to wonder how effective a skull would be as a guard. He's got no hands, he can't lock doors behind himself or anything. They did a decent job at keeping me out, but that's mostly because I'm rubbish at videogames. Once I manged to get past them, I emerged on the battlements where a neon-pink golem was waiting for me who turned out to be much tougher than any of the bosses battled so far. Once he's dead, our hero turns into A FUCKING DRAGON. A dragon! Why was this power not made use of earlier!? I could have just flown straight to the shop to get the Ferrero Rocher! Anyway, there's a small side-scrolling shooting section where you control the dragon while a fire-worm chases you, and it's actually quite good fun. Once you reach the other side, you have to sadly ditch your dragon powers and take on the boss. The boss is a tower with eyes on it that slowly rotates whilst you try and stay on the small platforms that float around him. This wouldn't be so bad, but each time the tower's attacks hit you, you fly backwards roughly twenty feet, off the platform and to your death. Eventually he crumbles and it's on to stage five.
The fifth stage starts with a barrage of rocks, except now they're green and almost impossible to avoid because they appear at the same rate as underage girls getting knocked up on a council estate. Maybe rocks are like Kryptonite to wizards or something. My recollection of this stage is a little hazy, because I was concentrating so hard on not dying I didn't have time to take in much of the level. I looked at the notes I wrote down while I was playing, and all it says is "Jesus it's hard". There is a section where you jump across pillars made of what appears to be piles of kidney beans: perhaps the bolognese stage wasn't pasta at all and was actually a chilli. There's a slightly sci-fi looking section, followed by a lot of vertical climbing sections, all of which are a complete nightmare, and then the walls change into skulls. There sure are a lot of different architectural styles going on here. The main difficulty here is the fact that because there are so many enemies firing so much crap at you, the game can't handle it and a lot of the sprites either flicker a lot or disappear entirely, meaning you're constantly getting hit by things you can even see. There a logo which says "BS" in the background at several points: it certainly feels like BS, that's for sure. The boss is... well, I'm not sure what the boss is supposed to be. You reach his chamber, where he is keeping another wizard on a crucifix, and he floats around generally getting in your way. As far as I can see, the boss is a floating pelvis with two fleshy lumps and a small brain in the middle that you have to shoot. Unfortunately, the boss spends 99% of the time off the edge of the screen or under the floor, so you just have to wait around for him to reappear. This is not fun. Once he's deigned to spend some time fighting you, you can destroy him and move on to the final stage.
Confession time: stage six is so difficult, I had to break out the good ol' Game Genie to see me through it. A huge thank you to whoever figured out the code for invincibility. After a section of biological-looking platforms, you fight your way through what seems to be a Victorian red-brick warehouse, then through some very difficult lava waterfalls where even being invincible doesn't make it any easier, through an orange section and then a green jungle area. It's like a videogame version of The Masque of the Red Death, except not good. Not content with stealing from Castlevania, Irem decided to plunder the works of H. R. Giger in both the appearance of the stage and by forcing you to fight facehuggers. Really irritating facehuggers. Speaking of irritating, while the music during the rest of the game is inoffensive if nothing special, this stage has some truly dreadful music on a short loop, which I think is supposed to sound menacing but sounds more like a cat chewing on a robot bumblebee. You can take a few different routes, but they all lead to the same place, and they all force you fight some black golems who I imagine would be nigh-impossible to beat if you weren't invulnerable. Eventually, you battle your way to a rib-cage, at the top of which waits the game's final boss, Black Slayer. He's a giant squishy brain with various appendages that you have to shoot off while avoiding the infinite number of facehuggers he has stashed somewhere about his person. Given the difficulty of the actual level, he's not as tough as I anticipated, and eventually he falls. Of course, he's not dead yet, and our hero transforms into a dragon again for the final airbourne confrontation... which lasts about seven seconds. The evil Black Slayer is defeated, and the game scrolls some ending text.
The end text reveals that your wizard's name is actually Randy. Randy the wizard. I'll just let you soak that in for a moment. But then, in a shocking twist, he is revealed as Randy R., and the wizard you rescued at the end of stage five is Zakk W. I can only assume this means that these two are the guitar legends Randy Rhoads and Zakk Wylde, a discovery which makes the task of slogging through Holy Diver just about tolerable. Sadly, while the ending is telling you this, it shows a picture of two dragons flying away from the screen, so the last thing you see is a dragon's ass. You know, I think that's actually quite appropriate.
Is Holy Diver any good? No, not really. It has a few decent moments, the Blizzard power is quite good and some of the enemy sprites are nice, but all in all, it's a pretty poor game. Also, it has nothing to do with Holy Diver the song, which I guess is just as well because otherwise this would be a pretty crappy tribute to Dio. For a real tribute, go and play Holy Diver on Guitar Hero: 80s. Long may Dio shine on. You know, like a rainbow in the dark. I'll see you all next time.

P.S. Here's a speedrun video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfefSZaDAc