GEKISOU SENTAI CARRANGER - ZENKAI! RACER SENSHI (SNES)

The original Power Rangers were imbued with the power of dinosaurs to aid them in their fight against evil. Later Power Rangers fought with the essence of jungle animals and ninjas coursing through their bodies. Some Power Rangers were given the spirit of modest family saloons and SUVs. See if you can guess which ones I'll be writing about today as I look at Natsume and Bandai's 1996 Super Famicom title Gekisou Sentai Carranger - Zenkai! Racer Senshi! The more astute amongst you will have spotted the clue in the title.

I'm no Power Rangers expert - I never really got into it as a kid, which seems odd given it's got dinosaur robots in it - but I know the basics, having absorbed them through cultural osmosis, my younger brother's insistence on watching Power Rangers: The Movie over and over again and (surprise surprise) through videogames. The way Power Rangers works is that footage is taken from an entry in the long-running Japanese Super Sentai series and reworked for an American market, the Japanese actors removed and replaced by "teens with attitude." Thus the 1992 series Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger was adapated into the first Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers series and Gekisou Sentai Carranger - the subject of today's game - became Power Rangers Turbo. If you were the kind of hardcore Power Rangers Turbo fan who spent their youth bemoaning the lack of a videogame based in the series, this one's for you.

Something worth mentioning before I get into the lycra-clad pugilism that this game offers is that Gekisou Sentai Carranger was not released on a standard Super Famicom cartridge. It worked with a device, developed by Bandai, called the Sufami Turbo: an adapter with two slots for smaller cartridges, like a siamese Super Game Boy. The point of the Sufami Turbo was twofold - it allowed for the cheaper production of games thanks to not requiring Nintendo's involvement, and the two-cart system allowed data to be shared between two games in a similar manner to the lock-on mechanic from Sonic and Knuckles. The Sufami Turbo didn't exactly set the hearts of Japanese Super Famicom players ablaze - there weren't many compatible games and the Nintendo 64 was released in the same year, so it's ended up as a curiosity and little more. Gekisou Sentai Carranger doesn't even take advantage of the link feature, so for the purposes of this article you can pretend it's a normal Super Famicom game.

Here are the Carrangers themselves, arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow except for orange and purple. Has there ever been an Orange Ranger? I might look that up later. I'm sure there's a wiki. There's always a wiki. A vast, encyclopaedic and faintly creepy wiki.
Anyway, the Carrangers. I'm sure that's supposed to be a gesture signalling barely-restrained, hot-blooded determination, but it looks like the Red Carranger is calling me a wanker. Screw you, Red Carranger.

Let's not fight, Red Carranger. Let's not fight each other, I mean. That green bloke over there is fair game, so go and punch him instead. Red Carranager is most likely the leader of the team - the red ones usually are - so he seemed like the right choice to lead the charge into Gekisou Sentai Carranger's first stage and the battle against these green blokes. Apparently they're called Wumpers. Why yes, I did look that up on a wiki. The Wumpers are the footsoldiers of a gang of delinquent space drivers called Bowzock who are tricked into destroying planets by an evil being called Exhaus. I'm beginning to suspect that Gekisou Sentai Carranger is not particularly serious, even for a Super Sentai show.

The Wumpers don't pose much of a threat, especially now that I've managed to uncover a sword by jump-kicking into a traffic sign. I'd have thought that being given a weapon was part of the whole "become a Power Ranger" deal and that I wouldn't have to find my cosmic blade by beating up street furniture, but like I said I'm not a Power Rangers expert. Maybe hitting roadsigns is how I prove my worth. We can't have just anyone covering themselves in spandex, sticking their head into a Tupperware box and claiming to be a Power Ranger, now can we? Many are called, but only the finest sign-kickers are chosen.

As I'm sure you can tell from the screenshots, Gekisou Sentai Carranger is a basic side-scrolling-action-platformer-type affair. Extremely basic, in fact, with only two buttons used for jump and attack. That's all you'll be doing in this game, jumping and attacking. You can't even crouch, which which make it easy to compare Carranger to a stripped-down Mega Man game. Gekisou Sentai Carranger is to Mega Man 7 as Duplo is to Lego: the same basic concept only chunkier, smoother, easier and not nearly as complex. What gameplay there is works well enough, with responsive controls and no frustrating gameplay mechanics - there's just not much of it.

One thing you can do is collect a steering wheel icon. This summons a car that your Ranger then uses to smash into their enemies. I get that Carranger has an automobile theme but promoting hit-and-run driving seems a little out of place. It just feels less wholesome than stabbing enemies with a sword, a statement that makes no sense but which nevertheless feels true. Also, check out that car. If you were nine years old and someone told you to draw a fast car, that's the car you'd draw.

There's not much more to say about this stage, really - simply move from left to right, defeating the Wumpers in your way. It's a piece of cake if you have the sword, but even though you do lose your weapon if you take a hit, Red Carranger's fists and feet are more than enough to get the job done.
The only surprising thing you're likely to encounter is the dark section pictured above. If you miss a jump and fall off the bottom of the screen you don't suffer the usual videogame death: instead you have to get through this optional area, illuminated only by the light that beams directly from your face and which must be terribly distracting, until you can rejoin the regular path. All of the game's stages feature these areas as punishment for poor platforming, although it does make jumping over chasms considerably less nerve-wracking when you know a fall won't result in immediate death.

Naturally there's a boss at the end of the stage, and the wiki - oh glorious wiki, oh wise and all-knowing wiki - informs me that this pompadour-sporting, body-shaped-like-a-cartoon-heart-having, eyeballs-where-his-nipples-should-be interstellar fiend is called BB Donpa. He's Bowzock's music man, as you can see by the musical notes he's firing at me, and he's known as "the Beethoven of Outer Space". I have never wanted a time machine more in my life, just so I can travel back to the turn of the 18th century, find ol' Ludwig van and show him a picture of BB Donpa while explaining that he's "the you of outer space." To this, Beethoven would no doubt respond with a confused expression and the words "what? I can't hear you, I'm deaf."

Once he's taken enough damage, BB Donpa leaps into the distance and summons cars that hurtle out of the sky in an attempt to crush the Carranger. It looks impressive, I'll grant you that, but it's easily avoided by walking in the opposite direction. Donpa's attacks are taken straight from the most basic textbooks of videogame villainy - Thwart Heroic Upstarts and Conquer Worlds the Dr. Wily Way or Bowser's Plumber-Stompin' 101, something like that - and as such you'll have no trouble avoiding Donpa's projectiles and punching him to death.

Your reward for clearing stage one, besides a shot at tackling stage two, is this picture of the Carrangers themselves. I'm impressed by how serious they look, considering how they're dressed. Do I detect a faint hint of aloofness emanating from Green Carranger? I reckon he thinks he's better than this. He's probably right.

It's Yellow Carranger's turn, and as she... hang on, is the yellow ranger a girl in this one? Oh, she is, okay. Yellow Carranger heads out across the moonlit clifftops, where the Wumpers are hanging around and not really causing much of a nuisance. That's not going to stop Yellow from punching them all, mind you.

In fact, she loves punching things so much that her weapon is a giant knuckleduster. I think that's what it's supposed to be, although given the vehicular theme of Gekisou Sentai Carranger I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't start out as some sort of anti-theft steering lock that Yellow has fashioned into a set of brass knuckles.

Aside from slapping Wumpers about and wondering when you're going to be given the keys to the giant robots Power Rangers usually have access to, Carranger's gameplay revolves around finding gears. You're aiming to collect 250 gears before the end of the game, and I'll explain why that is when we get there, but for now I'll just say we need to find them. Sometimes they're dropped by defeated enemies, but mostly they're hidden in the scenery and can be dislodged with a swift punch. It's not just obvious targets for punching, like the road signs, that hold gears: they can be hidden in any bit of the background, from these tree stumps to the corners of cliffs, ruined cars and bits of scaffolding. This means that 90% of the game is spent attacking every part of the screen that isn't just empty air in the hopes of discovering some gears or the weapons and health power-ups that can also be found. It's hardly the most thrilling of gameplay mechanics, but it's a good job Bandai included it because otherwise there's just not that much to do.

Apart from fighting bosses, I mean. This is MM Mogu, and he's Bowzock's "best eater." That's quite the come-down from being compared to one of the greatest composers in history. It sounds like something a parent would say about their distinctly un-gifted child: "his brother's captain of the football team, his sister plays first violin and Mogu? He, uh, well, he can eat real good."
Unsurprisingly, Mogu is even easier to beat than his predecessor. He's only got one move, which is to grab your Ranger with his fork and chew on them, but before he does this move he clangs his cutlery together and generally makes it really obvious he's about to attack. I'm sorry, MM Mogu, but your threat level is down there with a week-old puppy or athlete's foot. I'm still going to punch you until you explode, of course.

The Pink Ranger tackles stage three. The Pink Ranger is definitely a woman - if you can count on the Power Rangers franchise for one thing, it's to rigidly stick to gender norms regarding the colour pink. Also, rubber monsters.
Stage three is a cave / construction site environment, and you're soon faced with the first enemy in the game that might make you pause for a moment. This mining Wumpers cause rocks to fly out whenever they strike the ground, and they can be unpredictable. They're unlikely to kill you or anything, because health items are are more common than vile insults in a YouTube comments section, but it can be annoying if you get caught between them and they buffet you around. Even if you were to run out of health it's not a big deal, because it's impossible to get a game over in Gekisou Sentai Carranger. Yup, you have infinite lives and while dying sends you back to the start of the level or boss battle the stages are so short it makes little difference.

The Pink Ranger's weapon is a bow: somewhat more graceful than knuckledusters, but also less useful. A projectile weapon sounds like a good idea, but when the sprites are so large and the play area so compact you rarely get a chance to make the ranged attacks work for you.
I also found out that the Pink Ranger can double-jump. None of the other Rangers I've used could double jump, although now I'm wondering if they had special talents I didn't notice before. I'm at a loss to think what they could be, although I know they definitely don't include crouching. It's amazing how little you notice the ability to crouch in a game like this until it's taken away. I compensated for my loss by performing more jumping kicks.

The best part of this stage is undoubtedly the penalty route. If you fall down a hole, you find yourself in a dark corridor with only an indestructible monster bulldozer for company. You can knock it back with punches but it keeps on coming, giggling to itself the whole time as it tries to crush you to death. It's a shame I didn't know about this before this week, it would have been a shoo-in for the Halloween ephemera article.

It's the boss. I... I don't really know what to say about him. His name's NN Nerenko? And he's Bowzock's graffiti artist? I'm not sure how throwing your tag up ties in with being... whatever that thing is. Multi-faced circus clown with Popeye's forearms and cacti for shoulders? He's freaking me out. It's his placid expression. He's like Hannibal Lecter, seemingly calm on the outside but underneath he's all about sadism and eating human flesh. And petty vandalism, but that's just Nerenko, not Hannibal.
I don't remember much about this fight. I think my brain tried to block it out. All I have is the vague recollection that Nerenko attacks by detaching his spiky shoulders and rolling them at you, and that the fight was easy because it was the only part of the stage where the Pink Ranger's bow was useful.

Look, up in the sky! It's the Blue Carranger, and the oddly adorable Wumper that's trying to blow him up by throwing cartoon bombs while he hides behind an umbrella! It's no great shakes in the gameplay department, but Gekisou Sentai Carranger is at least fun to look at. The graphics are big, bold, nicely cartoony while still being well detailed, and the enemies have a lot of personality. Sure, in the case of the last boss that personality used to belong to Ed Gein, but on the whole the Wumpers are a charming bunch and it's regrettable that I have to beat them to death.

Blue Carranger's weapon is a gun, a much more practical choice than Pink's unwieldy bow but one that still suffers from the problems of need some distance between you and the target for it to be truly effective. Blue has a special move, too, and my earlier comparisons to Mega Man seem ever-more accurate now that I'm playing as a blue guy with big feet who can slide along the ground. The slide isn't nearly as useful as Pink's double jump, especially on this stage where I have to do some actual platforming, but it's better than nothing.

This stage has a mid-boss, the moon-headed creep known as Deputy Leader Zelmoda. The echoes of Mega Man are coming thick and fast now: when you hit Zelmoda, he turns into a ball of electricity and flies to the other side of the screen, hurting you if you get in his way, much like the battles with the Yellow Devil in the Mega Man series only easier. Much, much easier, as Zelmoda's attack pattern has all the unpredictability of the ocean tides and can be avoided every time once you seen it twice. He either goes straight across the screen or wobbles across on a sine wave, and the most interesting part of the fight is the face he pulls when you manage to hit him.

Sorry, did I say interesting? I meant terrifying. He looks like Quentin Tarantino after a 50,000 volt shock to the genitals.

The stage's main boss is much more sedate. There's nothing to fear from an elf with a robotic pumpkin-burger for a head, except the tornadoes he can fire at you because they're the most difficult attack to avoid in the entire game. They're not hard to avoid, just the harder than anything else in the game. Have I mentioned that this is an extremely easy game? I don't feel like I'm pushing that angle hard enough. Your nan could complete this game. My nan could complete this game, and she struggles with changing channels on the TV.

The boss' name is KK Esu, and he's a lowly dishwasher for the Bowzock gang, but when he takes a hit his secret is revealed - he's actually champion space car racer Speed King Max, who has been brainwashed by the Bowzocks. I find the best way to deal with any neurological impairment is to punch the victim as hard and as often as possible, and if you manage to hit the boss enough times Speed King Max regains his memories and flies up into the heavens, all sparkly-like. Like an angel, even. I think I killed Speed King Max. This isn't going to reflect well on the Power Rangers brand.

The final stage has arrived, and the honour of tackling falls to Green Carranger by virtue of him being the only ranger I haven't used yet. The first half of the level sees you negotiating a half-built space-road and destroying the flying Wumpers that are overseeing construction. The evil Exhaus' big plan was to manipulate the Bowzocks into destroying the Earth, thus making room for his cosmic highway. You might recognise this plot from the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although Exhaus' poetical talents are not noted. What I can tell you about Exhaus is that he doesn't make an appearance in this game at all, presumably because he's (according to the infallible and all-knowing wiki) bigger than a planet. Don't worry, there's still a final boss to deal with.

Here's the Green Carranger causing havoc in a space-bar with his big gun. That's his weapon, a big gun. It's like the Blue Carranger's gun, only bigger. Green's special power is that if you hold the button down after you jump he floats back to the ground more slowly, which I suppose makes him the Princess Peach of the group. If only Peach had a big gun, maybe she could deal with Bowser herself instead of relying on Mario to save her. Plumbers are not known for their dependability, so I'm sure she'll be ordering that gun any day now.
Oh, and I looked it up - the Red and Yellow Rangers do have special powers. Yellow runs slightly faster than the others, and Red does double damage to enemies when he attacks with his sword. How exciting. That does mean that Red is the best character to use, because a lot of Gekisou Sentai Carranger is spent waiting for the bosses to become vulnerable again once you've hit them, and the faster you can dispatch them the fewer times you'll have to wade through their easily-avoidable attack patterns.

Speaking of easily-avoidable attack patterns, here's the final boss: President Gynamo! He's half dynamo, half gynaecologist! Not, not really, but he does have the power to make vehicles sentient - an admittedly interesting power, and one that sets up a possible future crossover with Thomas the Tank Engine. Gynamo's helldozer may look impressive, but there are only two ways for it to hurt you. It either fires some blobs up into the air that then rain down on you and which are easily avoided by moving sideways, or it can launch its plow at you. That's your cue to do some damage because while the plow has been sent out to crush you, it's not protecting the front of the truck, so you can hop over the advancing shield - a particularly simple task if you're using the Pink or Green Rangers - and smash Gynamo's ride up. Do that a few times and Gynamo is defeated!

But wait! As the spacestation collapses, a loose rock falls from above and clonks the heroic Ranger on the head. No, I'm not making this up. While the Carranger is disabled by his new-found concussion and several impacted vertebrae, Gynamo seizes his chance to blow up the Earth.

The Carrangers are defeated, the Earth is destroyed and Gynamo survives to continue his evil reign alongside a woman who looks like she's just been fired out of a cannon and through a row of flamingoes. What a bummer. Surely the game can't end like this?

Not if you collect a load of gears, it won't. I said they'd be important, and collecting gears is the key to unlocking Gekisou Sentai Carranger's good, happy and much more Power Rangers-y ending. For every fifty gears you find, one of the Rangers' vehicles is restored to working order - a pretty sweet deal for the Red Ranger, who gets a spiffy red sports car, but less exciting for the Yellow Ranger and her boxy 4X4. Collecting 250 gears over the course of the game repairs all five vehicles, allowing them to combine into the giant robot RV Robo. Let me guess, in Power Rangers Turbo it was called the Turbo Megazord.

With the RV Robo at your command, Gynamo's typically Super Sentai plans to grow to giant size are thwarted and the Earth is saved. Saved by a cutscene, that is, because while you may have spent your time repairing the RV Robo that doesn't mean you're allowed to control it. All that effort and not even one chance to pilot a giant robot? What a rip-off.

Aside from the disappointing lack of robo-combat, Gekisou Sentai Carranger - Zenkai! Racer Senshi was a fairly enjoyable experience. Sure, it's a Fisher-Price version of Mega Man, it's about as challenging as beating Stevie Wonder at I-Spy and the simplicity of its gameplay makes Tetris look like Dark Souls, but so what? It's fun and breezy, a nice twenty-minute escape for those times when you've played every other SNES action platformer worth bothering with. I'm especially fond of the graphics, as mentioned previously, and the soundtrack is good too - catchy and appropriately heroic. Here, check out the stage one theme.

In short, if your standards aren't too high and you like Power Rangers, you can probably squeeze some fun out of this one. If you like piloting giant robots, stay away. It'll only break your heart.

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SNES SPORTS GAME CROWDS

While I was writing about Super Soccer, a thought occurred to me. Sports games generally have crowds, and with the advent of the 16-bit consoles, they were generally crowds detailed enough for you to pick out individuals. Drawing these groups of sports fans was someone's job. A person was tasked with creating fake people to watch other fake people play a digital version of a sport. It is perhaps a symptom of reading too many horror novels - or simply more evidence that I need to grow up - that this concept feels kinda weird to me, and strangely fascinating. So, with the expectation that no-one but me will be interested in this article, here's a look at some SNES sports game crowds.

Super Soccer

I'll start with Super Soccer, as seems only right: it was a launch title (in the EU, anyway) so it was probably the first crowd many SNES owners saw. It's a slightly sinister scene of blank-faced clones trapped behind a pock-marked concrete wall. If the people at the front paid full price for their tickets, they got thoroughly screwed. Mind you, this screenshot is from a match involving Germany so maybe those fans are going to knock the wall down while a sixteen-bit version of "Wind of Change" plays in the background.

90 Minutes - European Prime Goal

Another football crowd and another giant concrete wall that completely blocks the view of anyone who isn't sitting at least ten rows back. In this case the wall seems appropriate, because this group of fans is even more unsettling than the featureless Super Soccer spectators. These fans have a feature, alright - it's the one bright red pixel in the middle of their faces. I know it's supposed to be their mouths, but it doesn't look like a mouth. It's too bright, too strong a contrast against the paleness of their skin. More than anything it looks like a glowing crimson eye that takes up half its owner's face, an eye that gleams with terrible cruelty whether it's watching the inferior humans being herded into the Disintegration Vats or a third-round FA Cup tie between Rotherham United and Leyton Orient.

International Superstar Soccer Deluxe

ISS gets the look of a football crowd right through the simple trick of having almost everyone involved wear the same colour. The first two examples in this article look like Gap catalogues, but ISS knows that football crowds, when seen from a distance, generally take on the colour of the team they're supporting. Konami have done a great job here, creating a crowd so lifelike that you're expecting to hear them question the referee's parentage at any moment.

Capcom's Soccer Shootout

In this entry from Capcom, the crowd once again lack a coherent colour scheme, although the amount of bright yellow jackets on display point to a possible attempt to change that by some spectators. It was a plan doomed to failure from the start. The only person who can pull off a yellow coat is Dick Tracy, and he's not real.
Also, some sections of this crowd scene tend to resolve themselves into letters if I stare at them for too long, wondering why I thought it'd be a good idea to write an article about this topic.

See, doesn't that look like it says "EDL" to you? Are Capcom showing their support for far-right scumbags the English Defence League? No, of course not, that would be ridiculous. Why would you even think that? Seriously, man, get a grip. Actually, the middle letter looks sort of like a P. That's it, I've decided it says "EPL" which of course stands for the English Premier League, an acronym that makes much more sense given the context.

Super Ice Hockey

Okay, time for a different sport. This time it's ice hockey, a sport that somehow ended up being seen as macho despite being a schoolgirl's game played on ice skates. For any ice hockey fans out there, I'm sorry, I don't really mean to besmirch the sport you love. I know it's a tough, dangerous game full of excitement and missing teeth. Ice hockey can get so exciting that there's a constant danger that the spectators, their wild passions inflamed by the brutal ballet in front of them, will riot at the slightest provocation. To counteract this tendency, the operators of this ice hockey arena have done away with the usual fold-down plastic seats and instead dropped each fan into a waist-deep trough filled with a specially-formulated tar-like substance which traps them in place while leaving their upper bodies free to enjoy the game.

ABC Monday Night Football

American Football. The Football of the Americas. Well, North America. Okay, so just the USA really, but that's fine, totally fine, I've got no problem with American Football. I understand that sports can get tiring, so it makes sense to invent a game where you get plenty of time to stand around and recover between plays. All the armour that the players wear just seems downright sensible, too.

Still, I'm not sure I'd wear those giant shoulder-pads if I was sitting in the crowd, as the miscreants I have circled in the picture above seem to be doing. It's just rude. It betrays a lack of respect and courtesy towards to your fellow fan of The Grid Iron. Yes, I'm sure they do help you get through the crowds more quickly when you're trying to reach the toilet at half-time, but what if everyone decided to wear shoulder-pads? Then where would we be, huh? That's right, the eighties.

Super Punch-Out!!

No complaints about this one, some classic pixel onlookers from Nintendo. The guy at the bottom-centre looks like he could be a mad scientist of some description, but there's nothing wrong with that. Just because you're an educated man, it doesn't mean you can't enjoy boxing. Albert Einstein even sparred with Rocky Marciano once. No, he didn't. I've just made that up. That's what happens when you play Super Punch-Out, you begin to imagine a world where elderly men are allowed to box against much younger and far fitter opponents and jumping off the top rope and kicking your opponent in the face is considered a legal move.

All that waffle was an attempt to distract myself from looking too closely at this particular face in Super Punch-Out's crowd. I was confused and frightened by it at first, because it has some disturbingly canine features and the cold black eyes of a merciless killer.

Then I got over it because I realised it looked like Jake from Adventure Time. you see, Jake loves boxing. He once sparred against Rocky Marciano...

Foreman For Real

Another boxing title, another spectator right at the front who looks like a mad scientist. I think I'm onto something here.

Riddick Bowe Boxing

No mad scientists in this one. Disappointing at first, but closer inspection reveals plenty of interesting characters - the most interesting of them all being found in the top-left corner, where you can see that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln has left the White House and travelled here via the spectral highways of America to watch a boxing match. You'd think he'd want to avoid being anywhere that makes him feel like he's sitting in a theatre, but there you go. In the top-right in a man with a face that resembles, if you'll forgive my crudeness, a close-up photograph of an arsehole, and at the bottom-right is either the villain from a silent movie or an Easter Island statue in a suit, I'm not sure which. Maybe both. A moai that ties women to train tracks, and then stares inland with an enigmatic expression. Oh good, another movie that I have to set up a Kickstarter for. Fantastic.

NBA Give 'n Go

Basketball: a sport no-one seems to enjoy, at least when it's on the SNES. Some people in this crowd would rather stare at a blank piece of cardboard than watch the game in front of them. Is this some form of protest? I hope not, because if it is it's a bloody awful one. You've already paid to get in, doofus. You might as well watch the game. Maybe they're protesting against the advertising so prevalent in modern sports by refusing to look at it. Maybe they're just reading the newspaper. Maybe they have all been stricken with a disease that takes the form of extreme narcissism, a neurological condition that compels sufferers to gaze into a mirror at all times, and their desperate family have brought them to this basketball game in the hopes it will snap them out if it.

NBA Hang Time

NBA Time to Hang Yourself, more like. If the fans from NBA Give 'n Go could find no pleasure in a basketball game, then this crowd looks as though it could find pleasure in nothing besides the sweet embrace of death. They're just so grey, so emotionless, so utterly lacking in the usual vivacity associated with a sports crowd. The three guys at the front look like accountants in purgatory.

Super Dunk Star

Not like these basketball fans, who are so excited to be here that they have, almost to a man, ripped the sleeves off their shirts. Finally, a little passion! Of course, their flailing arm movements speak more to a passion for the ancient art of semaphore than anything else, but I'll take what I can get. I think the blonde woman with her arms spread wide is signalling that a plane is clear for landing.

Al Unser Jr.'s Road to the Top

Suddenly I'm hungry for Skittles.

Wakataka Oozumou - Yume no Kyoudai Taiketsu

To finish, a crowd that just looks good. Detailed enough to be interesting without distracting from the action, this sumo audience is mostly a well-proportioned bunch aside from the kid who look like their shoulders have been grafted directly onto their hips. It seems cruel to take them to a sumo match, really, given that they don't have stomachs.

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MY HERO (ARCADE)

As the Foo Fighters nearly sang, "there goes my hero, watch him as he kicks an ape-man in the teeth." So close, Mr Grohl, so close. It's Sega and Coreland's 1985 kung-fu-em-up My Hero!

That's one romantic-looking title screen for a game that, as previously mentioned, involves kicking ape-men in the teeth. Maybe I've been going about this all wrong. Maybe the ape-men just need some love and affection. Maybe we should all get together and contemplate the majesty of nature, the glorious cyclical motions of the sun and the endless surf. There is a world of beauty out there, a world beyond the kicking of teeth, but even as I write this my heart aches with the knowledge that all there is in my life is slapping people about. C'est la vie.

As the game begins, our hero Steven and his girlfriend Remy have just left the bookstore and are heading over to Coffee Snack for a spot of lunch. They'll be disappointed when they get there and find out that all Coffee Snack actually serves are tomato plants, but that disappointment is postponed when the thug behind them kidnaps Remy and runs away.

I know it looks like the villain whacked Steven in the balls as he ran past, but that's just the pose our hero makes when his girlfriend is abducted in broad daylight. As always in the land of Videogame Japan, the police force have totally capitulated to the rampaging hordes of street gangs, leaving them free to abduct schoolgirls and loiter outside corner shops and whatever else it is that delinquents do. I'd better go and take the law into my own hands, then.

My Hero is simplicity itself, a two-button, single-plane beat-em-up that bears more than a passing resemblance to Irem's arcade classic Kung Fu Master. Your mission is to guide Steven from left to right, beating up street thugs as you go. You have a jump button and an attack button, and by moving the joystick in various directions as you press attack you'll get different moves, like a high kick or, erm, a low kick. You can also do a jumping kick which, in a break from tradition, is executed every time you press the jump button regardless of whether you pressed attack or not. It might seem like an unnecessary expenditure of energy, but are you telling me that if you'd mastered the art of performing totally sweet kung fu kicks you wouldn't use them to get everywhere all the time? No, I thought not.

So why write about a game as basic as My Hero? Well, simple doesn't equal boring, and My Hero is simply a fun little game. Just look at these thugs - they may resemble angry Muppets who stole all their clothes from Eighties aerobics instructors, but they love their work, be it trying to drop bottles on my head or abducting people.

Kidnapping seems to be their main racket, and partway through the stage I happened across punk with a different captive. A school that makes its students wear a bright pink uniform? That seems a bit cruel. I went to a school where uniforms were mandatory and that was bad enough, I can't imagine the abuse you'd get if you had to make the school run wearing something Elton John would reject from his wardrobe for being too garish.

If you can defeat his captor, your clone in the pink will fight alongside you, mimicking your actions and not really being that much use, mostly because he's behind you all the time. The way to get the most out of your new pal is to repeatedly jump-kick everywhere, but that's true even when you're fighting solo. Enemies are infinite and will keep coming if you stand still, so making quick progress is the key to victory and as jumping kicks let you attack and move forward at the same time they're clearly the superior option.

Just as you're getting into the flow of hopping forwards and putting thugs in traction, My Hero throws some more platforming-based challenges at you with fire pits and a hail of cartoon bombs. You can take these enemy-free sections a lot more slowly, which is good because those bombs move fast and one hit means death, but it's a nice change of pace in a game that doesn't have a whole lot of gears to go through.
Also, I've just realised something. Fire pits in games over have fireballs that launch upwards out of them, right? Are they supposed to be embers rising from the fire? Really big embers that can kill a man / Italian plumber on contact? I think I've just blown my mind.

Towards the end of the stage, I had to kick a conga line of dogs in the head. I didn't feel great about it. Maybe a trip to the beach will cheer me up.

Fighting the punk who kidnapped my girlfriend amidst the surf will cheer me up, yeah. Things work a little differently in the boss fight - instead of either you or the bad guy dying in one hit, it's the first person to be hit ten times who loses. All your moves are still the same, which means plenty of flying kicks, and while it's hardly Street Fighter II it's an enjoyable if not particularly structured bit of gameplay. It mostly devolves into a frantic whirlwind of traded punches, and while I'm sure there's an applicable strategy that can help you win every time I managed to emerge victorious by landing one or two clean shots to build up a two-point lead, and then just running up to the punk mastermind and trading blows. It wasn't subtle, but then again this isn't a subtle game.

The struggle was all made worthwhile by this post-victory scene where Steven consoles the sobbing delinquent. Perhaps there is a chance that we can come to understand that we all share the same world, that we need not fight - if we work together and engage in a meaningful dialogue then we can make this a better, more caring place for everyone.

Then a ninja runs in, grabs Remy and jumps into a mysterious portal. My commitment to healing the world through love and unity is being sorely tested. Nothing else for it but to hop into the portal, I suppose.

The portal casts the player back in time to ancient Japan, where fearsome ninja clans ruled the land. Maybe. It's one possibility, but I'm also open to the idea that the portal just sent me to a modern-day ninja theme park or similar tourist attraction. It would explain why the ninjas are wearing cyan body suits with fishnet arm-warmers, as far as such a fashion statement can be explained.

A portly bald man throws Christmas ornaments at our hero. Poor guy, he must have only just started his ninja training. He can't teleport or turn into a log or anything. If it wasn't for the fact that he can change the direction in which he throws his projectiles - something I only realised when I jumped towards him and he threw a shuriken diagonally upwards into my crotch - he'd be completely defenceless. He needs to get himself a partner or something.

My suspicions that Steven hasn't actually travelled back to feudal Japan gain credence when I happen across another of my pink-clad doppelgänger. I set him free, and now we can bust ninja heads together as a team. You might have noticed that this is following a very similar pattern to the first stage, but that's only because it is. First you fight some basic enemies that take one hit to kill - in this case the cyan ninjas, although they're more of a challenge than the street punks because they move faster and don't always walk in on the ground but instead appear in mid-air. Then there a couple of projectile-throwing enemies, followed by a chance to rescue a kung fu friend. If things are going the same way as stage one, next will be a section of jumping over fire pits or other obstacles.

Oh look, Baldy McShuriken took my advice and found himself a partner! Now he can charge across the screen on the back of his wild boar, allowing him to get really involved in the fight instead of having to just stand still and throw projectiles until Steven gets close enough to punch him. Well, I'm sure that was the plan, but unfortunately it turns out that the skills of throwing pointy bits of metal and riding a wild boar are mutually exclusive, and all he can do is cling on to his boar as it carries him towards the jumping kick that Steven has prepared for him. Forget what I said about finding a partner. Just become a postman or something instead.

Here is part of the fire pit area. The fire is safely contained between those wooden poles, so it's not a difficult section.

This bit, on the other hand, is probably the hardest part of the game. The snakes bob up and down firing laser beams out of their eyes, and the timing to get past them is very tight, although I did a lot better once I realised that jumping into the empty column between them would protect me and give me a chance to strategise. It just didn't feel right at first, years of videogame experience telling me not to drop into a gap between two platforms. I'd like to spin this into some grand lesson about taking a risk and leaping into the unknown, but I've already described Tetris as a reflection of mankind's permanent yet unwinnable battle to control their universe so I've used my pretentiousness quota up for this week.

I wonder if this is the same beach, only in the distant past? That would be sort of neat, the Beach of Destiny where men do battle across the yawning gulf of years to protect the ones they love. Why did these ninjas abduct Remy, anyway? Running low on women in 18th century Japan, were we? Maybe she's studying geology at school so she knows where all the most profitable mining areas are. That's the kind of knowledge that could come in very handy in the past.
So, this boss fight is pretty much identical to the first one, albeit with a faster opponent who likes to jump and kick at the same time. The best strategy seems to be to slowly walk towards them without attacking. This makes your opponent walk backwards, and when they reach the edge of the screen they bounce off the wall to do a big kick, allowing you to step back and kick them when they land. Do this a few times to build up a points leads and then just go toe-to-toe with them. He's only a ninja, what's the worst he's going to do to you?

A familiar scene unfolds - as Steven consoles the defeated ninja and ponders why they travelled to the future to kidnap a young woman instead of gathering advanced weapons to defeat their ninja enemies or sampling the latest taste sensation from Burger King, a blue-faced ape-man grabs Remy and hops into a portal.

Now Steven finds himself on a futuristic planet inhabited by apes. I think I'll call it World of the Monkeys. Yes, now is the promised time of kicking ape-men in the teeth, and I say teeth specifically because you'll probably be doing a lot of jumping kicks. You can punch them in the throat or kick them in the toes, if you like. I ain't gonna tell you how to enjoy My Hero.

Yes, you can definitely enjoy My Hero. It might be simple, but it's from 1985 so what did you expect? This is still a fun game, though, with speedy but not overwhelming action, responsive controls and a sense of fun, silly slapstick moments and exaggerated facial expressions that give Steven some character when he could easily have been completely anonymous. My only real issue with the gameplay is that it's sometimes difficult to judge how far attacks extend, both yours and the enemies, so the distances involved in, for example, kicking an ape-man in the teeth can feel somewhat fuzzy.

This stage also has an obstacle course area, only this time you're either avoiding spiked metal balls that drop from the sky or you're being chased by this strange green lump of a creature that's continually shooting up at you. The key is to keep heading right as fast as you can until you reach the spiked balls, at which point you can pause and figure out the pattern of their movements. My Hero is also fairly generous with the checkpoints, and when you lose a life you generally restart on the same screen you died on, so if you get really stuck you might still be able to brute-force your way through.

Back to the beach for the mano-a-monkey boss battle, which plays out much like the others. I'm still not sure why this one ape is blue in the face, but I suppose it doesn't matter. Even if that mystery were solved another would replace it, like "why did this monkey kidnap my girlfriend?" and "why is it dressed as Evel Knievel?" These things are unknowable, ineffable, and not worth the effort of your consideration. Just give this uppity ape a slap and we'll be on our way.

Okay then, where (or when) to next? Further into the distant future? Back to prehistoric times, because if anyone's known for grabbing girls and dragging them away it's cavemen? I'm sure it'll be terribly exciting, wherever we end up.

Oh. Well, that's disappointing. After stage three My Hero loops back to the beginning, with the enemies moving at a slightly faster speed, a never-ending triptych of kidnappings as Remy is passed from punk to ninja to ape for all eternity. I suppose there might be an ending, but I played on for a while and I didn't reach it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to play through one hundred stages of this like I did with Spatter. I rather enjoyed this game and I'd like it to stay that way.

There you have it, then. Another Sega arcade game that's fun, colourful and still plays well today even if it's as simple as a margherita pizza. It stands in stark contrast to Ninja Rabbits, the last single-plane brawler I wrote about. Where that game did everything wrong, My Hero gets almost everything right - it's quick, it's smooth and you can actually be good at the game. Sure, it won't hold your interest for long but I'd still recommend you give it a try, especially if you've never played Kung Fu Master. If you have played Kung Fu Master, My Hero might feel a little, I dunno, what's a word that means "derivative, but, like, really derivative"?

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