THE HUNTER AR 0062 / BATTLE HUNTER

You'll question the very nature of fate and free will! You'll curse the day dice were invented! Oh, and you might find some treasure. All this and not that much more in Success / Agetec's 1999 Playstation random-em-up The Hunter A.R. 0062, a.k.a. Battle Hunter.

This game is a mystery to me, it really is. I'd never noticed it, never seen a screenshot, never met another person who'd even heard of it. Then one day in 2001, it simply... appeared in my house. I didn't buy it, nor did I borrow it from someone, and my brothers were as nonplussed as I was as to where in the hell it came from. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, and after I'd convinced myself that I hadn't programmed it myself during my frequent blackouts (turns out we had a carbon monoxide leak and it was definitely not related to those all people going missing), I slapped it into the Playstation and thus exposed myself to The Hunter's eldritch charms.
The first thing to do in The Hunter is to create your character. Okay, that's a lie. The first thing to do is mess around with the options. Ooh look, you can change the background wallpaper! While they are all naturally artistic masterpieces, none of the images avaliable at the start match up to this stylish offering:

Warning terrifying Lawnmower Man flashbacks please send help. The Moss Orb of Kal'aak-Zor there should give you some idea of what budget level The Hunter occupies; it's the level usually reserved for the fourth straight-to-DVD sequel to Epic Movie and the "auto"biographies of last year's X Factor contestants.
Okay, once your green sphere is in place, it's time to choose a character. Here are your options, and choose wisely because you'll be looking at them for a long time, often dancing across the inside of your eyelids as you try to sleep.

So who do we have? From left to right there's Fei from Xenogears, Lady Terry Bogard, Russian-looking girl/boy, Doom Marine, Gogol from Cyber City Oedo 808 (showing my age a bit there), Hellsing's Alucard, Hwoarang from Tekken and a girl who looks a bit like Meryl from Metal Gear Solid but that's pushing it a bit. Each character has eight different colour palettes, too. I went with the Meryl-a-like, mostly because she was the one my cursor had stopped on, and I named her Flange.
As the name suggests, the focus of The Hunter is hunting. Hunting relics, to be precise; in a world mostly destroyed by a generic nuclear apocalypse, you play as a mercenary who heads into the ruins to find rare items that he then sells. It's like Bargain Hunt, except much less depressing. Aiding you in your quest to get rich by rummaging through garbage is your Broker, who gives you missions and buys items from you. Any ladies who might be reading: you may want to make sure you're sitting down, because this guy is sure to make you swoon.

He looks like Jason Statham's brain-damaged brother, he's wearing a shirt made of lava and his dialogue is poorly translated.

Okay, there's no need to be like that. The Broker is assisted by a spindly anime nurse who looks like she's about to burst into tears.

Maybe she's upset that her iPad appears to be broken, or maybe she's more concerned about her oddly skeletal fingers. Whatever her deal is, she heals you when you die and as you can see from the screenshot there, she also sells you level-ups. Yep, The Hunter eschews the standard RPG formula of having you work hard and gain experience points in favour of you simply handing over your cold, hard cash. I'd like to say it's all part of the cyberpunk theme of the game, and when you buy a new level what you're really buying is bionic implants and such. Sadly, the truth is simply that the developers didn't really know what they were doing.

Gameplay-wise, The Hunter is a boardgame. You get plunked down in a randomly-generated dungeon, filled with boxes, flags, an exit and three other Hunters. There are two types of mission, although they play out identically: for each time you level up, a new story mission appears and you have to clear it before you can do anything. The game does have a plot, but it's just generic corporate-espionage-oops-we-lost-our-combat-data-find-our-disks dullness. Given the set of utter interest-vacuums that make up the cast, it's nigh impossible to give even the smallest of fucks about anything that's going on plot-wise. Once you've done the story mission for your level, you can access the meat of the gameplay, which consists of trips into the ruins to find a target item and bring it to the surface.

You've got the basic strategy RPG options to control your character: you can move, attack, or wait a turn to restore some health. If you decide to move, you'll have your first encounter with something that will soon become the bane of your very existence: dice rolls. Like a boardgame, everything in The Hunter is determined by rolling a six-sided die. While you do have a movement stat, it's generally pretty small and is simply added to your dice roll to calculate your movement. For example, Flange here has a Mv of +2, so if you roll a four you get to move six spaces. So, you move around, collecting boxes that hold various items that might give you a stat increase when held but are generally just there to be sold. Every now and then you might get into a fight. Exciting!

Fighting is, of course, decided by the ancient gladatorial method of rolling dice. As you can see, you have stats for attack and defence, and they work in the same way as the movement stat, getting added to your dice rolls to increase their totals. When you attack, both you an your opponent roll two dice and the numbers are added together, with the appropriate stats being added to that. The damage caused is the difference between the two numbers, so say, for example, Flange rolls a three and a four and "Artist" over there rolls a two and a one. Flange gets seven, plus three for her attack stat for a total of ten. Artist gets three, plus his three defence for six, for a total of six. Flange deals him four damage, which Artist will no doubt recover by waiting on his next turn, and the same thing will happen on the turn after that, and the turn after that, and the turn after that, trapped in some endless stalemate where he gets hit hard enough to be winded but his opponent kindly lets him get his breath back and then hits him again, forever and ever, until the final heat death of the universe. Oh, and there're cards, too!

You might have noticed them in the Hunter's status window; little coloured cards that give stat increases. You start with five, and you're given a new one at the start of each turn or (two if you wait). They have a variety of functions, both in an out of battle, and they're usually the key to success. Blue cards give you extra movement points, red ones increase your attack damage, green ones lay traps for the other Hunters to step on and lose all their cards or have a leg blown off or something equally grisly. Finally, yellow cards increase you defence in combat or raise your ability to avoid traps on the map. The deck is limited, and if you fanny around on one map for too long and run out of cards, a powerful boss monster appears and hunts you down. Quite how the cards kept him at bay I don't know, but I'm sure whatever the reason is it's worthy of a 40-episode arc of Yu-Gi-Oh.
If you manage to get to the end of a mission, you're ranked according to various factors including how often you punched your fellow Hunters and how much trash you scraped up to carry home with you. Rinse and repeat until you've got enough cash to level up, and that's The Hunter.

The main limiting factor of The Hunter is randomness. Almost everything in the game is random: the dungeon layout, the placement and strength of enemies, the location of boxes and the items inside them, the cards your receive, how far you can move and how much damage you do in combat. Now, I'm all for a bit of randomness in videogames. Randomised dungeons can give a game more longevity, and lord knows I spent enough time in Disgaea's Item World, but too much and it's just overwhelming and in some cases game-breaking. Quite often, the dungeon will generate in a way that sees you stranded at one side of the map while your opponents spawn with one foot in the exit, surrounded by item boxes, laughing at you as you roll one after one after one in a vain attempt to catch up to them. If they get the target item to the exit before you in a story mission, that's it, here's the Game Over screen. Load your game, do it again and hope the god of randomness take pity on you. Sometimes the stages give you literally no chance, and that's a terrible situation to be in in a videogame.

Maybe it's not a videogame, but rather a tool of enlightenment, an educational aid designed to demonstrate Man's status as a being cast adrift in an uncaring universe ruled only by swirling, unceasing chaos. If I completed the game (something I never managed), I'd expect the walls to peel back like in Hellraiser and there to be some formless Lovecraftian entity lurking there. He stares into the depths of my soul and says "NOW YOU UNDERSTAND", and I suffer a complete mental collapse as my mind tries to process the immensity of what it has just learned.

So as you can probably tell, The Hunter isn't very good. The gameplay is basic and frequently kicks you square in the testicles, the graphics range from servicable sprites to migraine-inducingly bad bakgrounds and the music... well, the music is odd. Here's one of the tracks:



It's sort of pleasant, although every song sounds like a demo track included with a mid-nineties music creation program. I think it's the samples: I mean, just listen to those guitar samples and tell me it's not from a program called something like E-Zee-MusicMaker DX or something. And yet... it stays with you. I hadn't played this game in about a decade, but as soon as this track started, I could remember it note for goddamn note, and however little I wanted to I found myself first humming it and then putting it on my MP3 player in a distinctly unironic fashion. That's pretty much how I feel about The Hunter as a whole. I really should hate it, or at least not like it, but I keep wanting to go back to it like it's an abusive husband. It's definitely got a case of "Just One More Go" syndrome, and if you're the kind of saddo like me who enjoys games about collecting hundreds of ultimately useless gewgaws, then The Hunter will probably be right up your street.
To summarize my position on the matter, I played The Hunter at about the same time as I first played Chrono Cross. I remember vast swathes of The Hunter perfectly, down to the Broker's dialogue. I remember very little about Chrono Cross, despite having played it much more recently than The Hunter. Whether that's proof of the mind-warping powers of this game or a shocking indictment of Chrono Cross, I'll let you decide.

Don't you forget about
meThe Hunter, then. I sort of love it and sort of hate it, although I would very much like to see an updated sequel for the Playstation Network / Xbox Live or something, with plenty of cooperative dungeon-crawling action but with the random factor addressed. It's not like the rights'll be expensive.

UMIHARA KAWASE

The Ocean: mankind's most terrifying foe and home to evolution's most hideous freaks (I'm looking at you, Pelican Eel). Fortunately, the sea's roiling vastness can be defeated by a small Japanese girl with a stretchy fishing line. Oh, that's okay th.. wait a minute, what?

Umihara Kawase is the name of the game, as well as the name of the heroine. Released for the SNES in 1994, it's an obscure, Japan-only puzzle game with a vaguely anime-style theme. So far, so much like any one of hundreds of games that never made it out of Japan. Umihara is different, though, and it's different for a very simple reason: it's good.

It was developed by a company called TNN, which in a perfect illustration of the Japanese usage of English words apparently stands for "Think about Needs of Notice for human being", a sentence that feels like it could be used as a type of mental torture. Halfway through your interrigation of the prisoner, read them that sentence and ask them to tell you what it means; they'll break soon enough. It was then published by Japanese television channel NHK, which is a bit like the BBC releasing a version of Lemmings or something. TNN managed to make only one other game before they vanished, but they left us with a real gem in Umihara Kawase.

Earlier I said it was a puzzle game, and I suppose it is. However, a better description might be platform puzzler or physics puzzler or something. You control Umihara, the girl in the screenshot above with the bright pink backpack. You've got the d-pad for movement and one button for jumping. Jumping won't get you very far in Umihara, but luckily you also have one important piece of kit: your fishing line.

Pressing Y will extend your line in whatever direction you're pressing. It hooks onto any surface that it hits, and as long as you hold the button down Umihara will hang from the line, waiting for you to do something. The goal of the game is to get through the stages by moving Umihara across the stage and to one of the exit doors scattered about the place, and that's where your line comes in.
Umihara Kawase is all about the physics. Your line is rubbery, and you can reel it in and out by pressing down or up on the d-pad. The first few stages will see you needing little more than the basics to get past the various obstacles and pits between our heroine and the exit, such as hooking onto the ceiling and swinging over gaps. And then it gets a little more complex; say for instance you have to hook onto the floor and walk off the edge of a platform, dangling down to avoid the attacks of a large tadpole. And then a little more complex, and a little more, until you find yourself having to perform all manner of acrobatics and momentum-based catapulting to see you through the stages... and it feels great.

The presentation of the game is pretty basic; although the sprites of the enemies look pretty good, the rest of the graphics are perfunctory, and the backgrounds are just digitised photos:

The music is decent if nothing special, and there's nothing in the way of extra options or plot or cutscenes. Even the ending appears very abruptly and is little more than a credits crawl and a picture of a fish. This leads me to a dichotomy in how I feel about Umihara. One on hand, the joy of the game shines through despite the rather bland presentation, and it serves as a great reminder that all of that stuff isn't really important to the pleasure you can derive from a videogame that has an interesting and well-implemented gameplay mechanic. Tetris doesn't need whizz-bang graphics to be fun, and Global Defence Force remains one of my favourite videogames ever despite often looking rougher Amy Winehouse after a lock-in at a brewery.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what could have been, if a company like Capcom had made it and given it a graphical makeover and quality music. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so overlooked, and that would have been great for a game that deserves to not be overlooked. Umihara Kawase did receive a sequel on the PS1, as well as a PSP compilation of the two games that was apparently so bug-ridden as to be almost unplayable. There is a DS compilation too, which apparently is much better, and as the DS is region-free and Umihara requires no knowledge of Japanese it's probably your best bet if you want to swing around on a rubbery fishing line.

Speaking of fish... as you might have gathered from the start of this article, I am not a fan of the sea. While it fascinates me endlessly, I can't swim and deep-sea fish creep the beejesus out of me, like they should creep out all right-minded citizens. At least in Umihara you don't have to go into the sea to meet these fish: they come to you! On legs. Creepy little fish legs.

Look at that goldfish, strutting around on land like he's not some horrible mockery of nature. All the enemies in the game are some variety of fish or amphibian, and they're the main contributing factor to the game's often punishing difficulty level. Octopuses cling to walls and stun you with ink, goofy sharks flap at you and eels spit what I think are supposed to be eggs at you. They always seem to spawn just as you're flying toward them, but it's a measure of the game's charm that I never found myself getting frustrated by them. There are also a few bosses, including GIANT ENEMY CRABS and this perplexed-looking tadpole:

"Why am I huge? I have legs! I'm firing small frogs out of some undisclosed orifice! That little girl is whipping me with a fishing rod I MUST CRUSH HER!"
So then, that's Umihara Kawase. One last thing: apparently the name comes from a Japanese saying about cookery that means "sea fish are fat in the belly, river fish are fat in the back", thus giving river fish a complex about their fat arses.

Umihara Kawase: an overlooked gem that you should definitely try out and then tell people you've been playing a game that's essentially Bionic Commando with fish.
BONUS: Here's a page from Hardcore Gaming 101 about the Umihara series as a whole. It's better than this nonsense, anyway.

D. D. CREW

What do you mean it's been nearly two months since I wrote about a side-scrolling beat 'em up? Well, I can put this shameful fact to rights with Sega's 1991 walk-'n-brawl title D.D. Crew.

Like all the greatest works of fiction, D.D. Crew begins with a pimp telephoning a generic-looking blonde man.

That's F.F., the main character of the game. I'm going to assume he's a cop, seeing as how he's standing in a police station wearing a badge, but it's never really made clear just who these people are. The pimp warns F.F. and his colleagues that "Yo gotta bomb in ya park!!", so our hero sets out with his band of warriors to disarm said bomb. I can only hope that the pimp wasn't wearing his neon orange suit and purple shirt ensemble while he was planting the bomb: that's the kind of outfit that sticks in the mind of potential witnesses, I'm sure.

You get a choice of four characters: F.F., generic beat-em-up hero extraordinaire. If you're thinking he looks like a good cop who's not afraid to bend the rules to get what he wants, you are almost certainly correct. At the very least, I don't think his (ironically named) bomber jacket is standard police uniform. What a rebel!
Next is King, the bruiser of the group. He's probably ex-military, and he's quite possibly Dolph Lundgren. It is never established what he is the King of.
Thirdly there's Buster (sadly not Bluth), a boxer who's got a lot of speed and isn't afraid to use kicks. He's probably my favourite, but then I always seem to prefer boxer-type characters.
Finally you've got Gung Ho, with his "wacky" pseudo-Chinese name. I'm expecting enemies with names like Fai Ting Gai and Lo Lee Goon. He's an old Caucasian man with various martial arts techniques and a ponytail that suggests he's a bleak vision of Stephen Seagal's future.
Once your character has been selected, it's off to the park. Being British, I was expecting a park with trees and grass and maybe a pond, but instead it's an amusement park.

You probably don't need me to tell you this, but the D. D. Crew controls are the same as every other side-scroller: one button to attack and one button to jump. You can also dash by double-tapping the stick. Special moves and throws work slightly differently than most other games of this type: throws can only be performed on enemies that have been knocked down, and your special move is performed by pressing both buttons while dashing. It's got a long start-up, and if you hit an enemy during this start-up, you fly backwards and take damage.
The enemies are a well-drawn and nicely animated bunch of thugs who don't seem particularly worried that they're standing in a theme park that has apparently been rigged with explosives. There are guys clutching knives who look like Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop, smooth nunchaku-wielding types who dress like competitors in the clown equivalent of Mr. Universe and fat redneck truckers who occasionally like to dress like Warios.

Wha ha ha! My attempts to inform them that the colours of their Wario costumes were the wrong way round were met with a swift punch to the mouth, so at least they stayed in character.
You make your way through the park in the standard fashion, beating you enemies until they fall to the floor and blink out of existence. There's a section in the middle where you have to battle while riding a carousel, complete with never-not-creepy fairground music. It doesn't have any impact on the gameplay, but it's a nice touch none-the-less. And the end of the stage, you climb aboard a Ferris wheel to take on the boss.

Sir, you have a kind and peaceful face. Wait, what do you mean by "roughing"? OH GOD HE'S BEATING ME WITH STICKS.

He doesn't have a name, but he's dressed like a Fist of the North Star reject and he's got a pair of 2x4s that he wants to embed in your skull. It's a tough fight for such an early point in the game, made all the more difficult by the ropey collision detection. Once he's defeated, your exit the Ferris wheel and quickly board a cable car. Well, while you're in the amusement park, you might as well have a go on all the rides, right? And due to the bomb threat, there are no queues. It's a win-win situation.
The cable car fills the position of "lift that keeps filling with enemies" nicely. The enemies are the same as the first stage, and after a while you jump, for no discernable reason, onto the roof of the cable car.

Well, it's a nice view at least. A new enemy type joins the fray here, karate masters in a variety of colours who possess a genuinely well-animated flying kick. A lot of the enemies in this game do have the feel of King of Fighters characters about them.
The relentless hordes still pile on, jumping from god knows where onto the top of the cable car. There's a hatch on the right-hand side of the screen that you can fall into, killing you instantly despite the fact that it assumedly only drops you about seven feet, back into the cable car. Enemies can fall in there and die too, which is helpful if not all that believable. Why would that fall kill them? Can't they just climb back onto the roof and continue the fight? Maybe the drop is just far enough that it shatters their ankles, meaning there's a pile of horribly wounded karate masters down there with broken ankles, writhing in pain and lamenting the folly of not looking where they were walking. Sucks to be the person on the bottom of that pile.
Then, there's a familiar boss.

Yep, it's Bruce Lee. No attempt has been made to disguise this fact. I'm kind of impressed by Sega's balls-out cheek on this one.

He moves like Bruce Lee, he fights like Bruce Lee; in fact, the only way he could be more obviously Bruce Lee is if he was wearing a neon sandwich board that reads "HI I'M BRUCE LEE ASK ME ABOUT MY MYSTERIOUS DEATH!" Luckily, he's not as good as fighting as Bruce Lee, and in fact I think he's actually easier than the first boss. You should have used sticks, Bruce.
His pixellated face reminds me of something...

I can't quite place what it...

Agh! Yeah, his face reminds me of Uboa from Yume Nikki, who most definitely is not a martial arts superstar.
Once he's dead, you get a short bonus stage where you have to beat innocent motorcycles to death with your bare hands like some kind of savage. You get a powerup or two out of them, and then it's on to stage three.

Yes, with a grinding inevitability, here's the construction site stage. It's got all your construction site need: girders, trucks, flashing orange lights, the works. It's even got a lift! A lift that you have to stand on and wait until you reach your destination, fighting karate men the whole time. Joy unconfined!

New to stage three are these military muscle men. Between the truck drivers, karate masters and the soldiers, there isn't really an overarching theme with this evil cabal. Perhaps the soldiers are part of an affiliated union that's come out in support of the karate dudes. The soldiers (unsurprisingly) have guns, but I don't think I ever saw them fire them. Maybe they're actually oversized novelty cigarette lighters. They do sometimes drop grenades when defeated, however, and they definitely do work. Once the lift has reached the top of the building, it's time for a boss battle.

That comma make it seem as though she's addressing me as "Alive". This boss is, I suspect, the closest that D.D. Crew is going to have to the almost-mandatory dominatrix, and it's a job she throws herself into with admirable relish.

She's got a morningstar, which I guess is sort of like a whip for the most dedicated of masochists. She's powerful, too, and two hits from her can kill you. Dealing with her is like dealing with a hyperactive child; let them tire themselves out by spinning around and shouting, and then when they're tired, creep up and carry them off to bed. Except in this boss' case, "carry to bed" equates to "punch in face".
If you manage to defeat her, a man who I assume is the pimp from the intro appears and fires a rocket at you:

That is pretty cool, to be fair. Our hero leaps from the rooftop and falls through the sky. You can move him left and right. At the bottom of the fall, there's a pile of cardboard boxes. I missed them. Sorry, man. Luckily, our hero doesn't seem any worse for wear, and it's on to stage four.

This stage is fire escapes. I mean, you have to fire escapes. Fire escapes fire escapes fire escapes. The whole stage is one long, uninteresting trudge down some fire escapes, with the same enemies as before attacking you and generally being a huge boring pain, like a drill in the eyeball. I'm pretty sure this stage took longer then the rest of the game so far combined. After countless aeons, you reach the ground and the boss battle.

That's quite the come-on, but I'm afraid I'll have to pass.
The boss is a breakdancer/capoeria type guy in purple hotpants, and if you've ever fought against someone on Tekken who's playing as Eddy and mashing the buttons, you'll know how irritating that can be. It's a tough fight, because Eddy here spends about 97% of the fight performing handstand kicks that a) do massive damage and b) render him completely invincible.

Eventually you'll defeat him, though. And you didn't even have to take a load!
There's another bonus stage before stage five, in which a woman in a leotard throws power-ups at you. Once she's exhausted her supply of items, you bust out of the gym she inhabits and leap into the next stage.

It's a factory, and you know what that means: conveyor belts and exploding barrels. Oh, where would games developers be without conveyor belts and exploding barrels? Well, hopefully they'd be sitting down and thinking bloody hard to come up with some new ideas.
After stage fire escapes, this level rockets past in the blink of an eye. That's mostly due to the conveyor belts, which handily drop a lot of your enemies into holes which lead to wherever the holes at the end of conveyor belts go. Wherever they lead, I can only hope it's unpleasant.
There's really nothing new here, aside from one small section where you have to avoid falling garbage. No new enemies and the same music, but it's quickly done with and the boss shows up.

Oh god, everything they say sounds revolting. Our goofy friend here starts with a pile of exploding barrels that he throws at you like an inbred Donkey Kong. Be prepared to use a quite a few continues to get past this long-armed weirdo. Speaking of his arms...

Look at those things. They are clearly not human arms; human arms don't bend that way. After a while, he ditches he barrels and resorts to running into to you as fast as he can, which is apparently even more painful than a barrel of volatile, super-heated chemicals exploding right in your face. Go figure.
Once he was defeated, I took a moment to ponder something. Why was he there in the first place? Our hero, who appears to have no clear destination in mind, could have taken any route he felt like. If he'd been more sensible, he probably wouldn't have taken the route that led him through a dangerous factory full of vicious killers. Has the pimp told our hero exactly what route to take, and he's blindly following it like the idiot he no doubt is? It's possible, but I'd like to believe a different scenario: the pimp has stationed his henchmen in all possible locations between the amusement park and his lair. There are hundreds of other routes, each one packed with fat truckers and knife-wielding thugs, and each one has a different boss at the end. Actually, that's quite depressing; there could be bosses the player will never get to see! And they would almost certainly be more entertaining than this boggle-armed, barrel-launching fuckwit. If you're of a creative bent, send me your suggestions and drawings of what you think these unseen bosses might be to vgjunk@hotmail.co.uk.

The next stage is an airfield, and as you might except it is full of soldiers. Some kind soul (or dangerous incompetent) has left grenades lying on the floor for you, so pick 'em up and use them on your enemies. There's not much else to say about this stage, really. The boss soon arrives, and it's the pimp from the intro!

What does that even mean? My response would be "Nice to see you again... to death!"
Don't get too excited though, he's not the final boss or anything. He's got a rocket launcher, which is always useful in a hand-to-hand combat situation, and after a while he drops it in favour of a machine gun. It's a surprisingly easy fight, certainly easier than the other bosses since Bruce Lee, mostly because you can knock him over and throw him around. After he's sufficiently pummeled, our hero boards a helicopter and files to the headquarters of the mysterious Zero Corporation. They're mysterious because they haven't really been, you know, mentioned or anything.

Once you land, you head into the skyscraper to find...

The first boss. Oh God dammit, you're going to make me do a boss rush, aren't you? Thanks for that, Sega.

At least the bosses get nice new rooms to fight in. Once they're all defeated again, you finally make it to the President's Office and the last battle.

Yes, I'm sure "evrything" does. So, the final showdown is against a businessman who has never previously been mentioned and who can't speak English very well. He fights with a sword, and then he suddenly has two swords, an upgrade that doesn't really seem to help him any.

He's only got one move, a sweeping sword combo, and as you probably guessed it's very powerful. He's not particularly difficult to beat, though, and in the end I think that the prick with the barrels emerged as the toughest boss in the game. Considering the other bosses include this master swordsman and Bruce Lee, I think Gimpy Kong has done very well for himself.
Once you've beaten the president, the game is complete; in a shock twist, the president is revealed to be...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy! Duhn duhn dunnnn! I guess his Short Man's Disease finally got the better of him and he decided to take over the world. He says "So, crime doesn't pay after all" and then (presumably) dies. Zut alors!
Hang on, isn't there something we're forgetting? What about the bombs that were in the park? I didn't see them being disarmed or anything; in our hero's haste to try out all the rides and beat up the boss, he seems to have completely forgotten about the bombs. Oh dear. Cue a shot just before the end credits of the smoking ruins of the amusement park, charred carousel horses and burning candyfloss littering the ground as our heroes fall to their knees and weep.
No, of course not. The actual ending credits are much less interesting than that. You get a shot of the New York City skyline at sunset, complete with King Kong perching at the top of the Empire State building, along with a portrait of each of the fighters.

Oddly, there are no credits; perhaps a sign that the creators of this game were ashamed of it and did not wish to be publicly identified. They're in Videogame Witness Protection now, living under new identities and making terrible shovelware browser games.

And that's D.D. Crew. I really want to like this game, you know. It's got some good things going for it: the graphics are nice and the music is good, hip-hop in style and possessing a certain flavour that I can only describe as "Sega-like". Here's the first stage music:



Pretty good, in that gloriously cheesy '90s way. Also, it has Bruce Lee in it, which is always nice. Sadly, D.D. Crew misses out on greatness for a number of reasons. There's a very small selection of different enemy types, and some stages (particularly the fire escapes and the final boss rush) smack of desperate padding. The bosses can feel cheap, and the music, while good, is repeated too often. All in all, I'd have to say I'm glad I played it, but I'll probably never play it again. Now, if only I could find those bombs...

BONUS!

After a while, I couldn't stop seeing the fat truckers as long-lost Mario brothers, so I knocked this up.

(Click for bigger)

SILENT HILL 2: NES EDITION INTRO

I love Silent Hill 2, I love the NES and I love chiptune music. So, I thought I'd bundle all that love together into one package, and the result is this fake intro for SH2 if SH2 were a NES game. Enjoy!

(Click through to Youtube for a better look.)

And there you have it, the introduction to a Silent Hill 2 NES game that sadly doesn't exist. I hope you like the chiptune version of "Theme of Laura (Reprise)" as much as I do!