GANG BUSTERS / CRAZY COP

Who ya gonna call? Gang Busters! Well, you might if you fancy some retro-arcade top-down shooter action, as found in Konami's 1988 coin-op Gang Busters / Crazy Cop. However, you probably shouldn't call them if you have an actual crime that needs solving, as we shall see.

If movies and televison have taught us one thing about policing, it's that any situation that requires the intervention of law enforcement officers can and indeed must be solved with as many bullets as possible, preferably slow-motion ones that cause criminals to fall over railings when they're shot. This is the route that Gang Busters takes, albeit in the cartoony manner that will be familiar to anyone who played many of Konami's other arcade titles from the late 80's and early to mid-nineties.

It's a top-down scrolling shooter in the manner of Gauntlet but with less mazes and more caricatures of mobsters. The controls are extremely simple: joystick for movement, one button to fire and one button to launch your super rocket shot thingummy. More on that in a while, though; let's take a look at the men of the thin blue line that you'll be controlling.

Well, the thin blue line and the fat green lump, at least. The officer in green is called Smith, and the officer in blue is called (you guessed it) Wesson. Now, Wesson (in the blue) bears some resemblance to a cop. A cop from the "Punk Hair and Cyborg Visor" division, but a cop nonetheless. Smith, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. If you'd shown him to me out of context, I would have had a hard time figuring out that he was supposed to be a cop. My first reaction would probably have been "Why is he using his hand as a puppet and talking into his own ear?" but that's just me. I might have also pondered why he appears to have a bunch of robotic grapes hanging from his breast. Look, what I'm getting at is that he doesn't really look like a policeman. He looks like some emotionally-crippled Sonic the Hedgehog fan's attempt at creating their own original character who is, like, a totally super-fast green hedgehog who has, y'know, a totally dark past but is now a cop. NO HE'S NOT LIKE SONIC!
Actually, Messrs. Smith and Wesson remind me mostly of the Bonanza Bros.

That seems a litle ironic, given that the Bonanza Bros are thieves, and are presumably the natural enemies of the Gang Busters cast. Of course, in turn the Bonanza Bros remind me (and probably quite a lot of British people around my age) of Mr. Chips, mascot of the UK gameshow Catchphrase:

Mr. Chips is the one on the right, by the way. If you would like to know more about Mr. Chips (and why wouldn't you?), do a YouTube search for "Catchphrase Snake Charmer" and witness what is widely regarded as Mr. Chips' finest hour.

Anyway, back to Gang Busters. The game was called Crazy Cop in Japan, which seems a somewhat more suitable title. I suspect the title was changed for the overseas releases because in America the phrase "Crazy Cop" might not summon images of wacky police-based cartoon hijinks, but rather the idea of a lone patrolman snapping and shooting up a crowd of bystanders before turning the gun on himself.

As I mentioned earlier, the controls are very simple, and so are the game mechanics. You control Smith, and your only goal is to get to the end of each stage by shooting as many criminals as you can. It plays pretty much exactly as you'd expect: you can only fire forwards, meaning you have to point towards your foes to hit them. There's no jump button, no vehicles, nothing like that - it's just you, on foot, lining people's lungs with lead.
There are a couple of complications, however. Firstly, there's the power-up system. Rather than picking up individual power-ups or, say, having a Gradius-style power-up bar, you get your power from arresting certain enemies.

The red-suited enemies occasionally appear on screen, scrabbling to gather up their ill-gotten loot. If you shoot them and then walk into them, they are arrested and file behind you like fuzzy little trail of hoodlum ducklings. Each one you arrest increases the power of your gun slightly, up to a maximum of five levels. You can also deposit said crims in the back of the police vans that are parked around the stages: doing so gives you one super-shot for each villain safely incarcerated. It's an interesting mechanic, and one that gives Gang Busters just that tiny extra bit of zip.
The other thing is the presence of the Mysterious Yellow Rocks. You can see a Mysterious Yellow Rock in one of the pictures above. They are big yellow rocks that you can push around the stage, and when an enemy touches they, they die. Thus, it's quite useful to push the Mysterious Yellow Rocks in front of a door that enemies spawn from. I was rather confused as to what the Mysterious Yellow Rocks were supposed to be, given their strange powers. A secret police weapon, perhaps? Or maybe they're just huge lumps of gold that are so tempting to the unstoppably avaricious villains that they explode with greed at the mere sight of them. Sadly it's much more mundane than that, as the arcade flyer says that they are simply "yellow rocks". What a letdown.

Gang Busters chugs along nicely for the most part, with Officer Smith travelling through what feel like some fairly standard locales. You start on the street, as the Red Criminals rob a bank right in front of you, the cheeky bastards. Then you move through some back alleys, through a warehouse, some docks and a trainyard, and finally across some wasteland where the final boss waits. It's all very basic, but well-executed in its simplicity, like a cheese sandwich. There are some unexpected or curious moments though, like finding mould on the cheese for your sandwich. Alright, I'm hungry now.

First of all, flying green sharks wearing sunglasses. Do I need to add anything to that? Well, maybe to point out that pretty much every other enemy in the game is relatively normal. They're just criminal-type guys, mobsters and such, but Konami apparently decide that this wasn't enough to thrill us, so in came the flying green sharks. I'd like to imagine that there was one guy at Konami who one day had a sudden, almost religious awakening and sat bolt upright in his chair, whispering to himself "G-g-green sharks... with shades. Yes, they can fly! Of course! It all makes sense now!". Then he spend the next few years begging his superiors to let him put the flying green sharks in a game, any game, just to get the gospel of the sharks out into the world. Finally they relent and tell him he can put them in one of the less important games like this basic, unlicensed cop shooter, and he breaths a sigh of bliss, codes the sharks into the game, and then dissolves into a pile of dust that is gently blown away on the summer breeze.

Also, none of the enemies have faces, just blank skin. Creepy.

Overall, Gang Busters isn't that difficult. Sure, it's tough, but compared to something like Splatterhouse, it's a walk in the park. That is until you come to a location in the final stage that I like to call Bullshit Gulch.

It's a narrow corridor, with a fire-spewing face at one end, more flame-shooting alcoves along the middle, and an endless supply of big steel balls that roll down the corridor at you. There's no room to move properly, let alone dodge the fire and the steel balls. There's a big doorway at the bottom that covers a fair ol' chunk of the screen so that you can't see where you are half the time. You can't even hang back and try and pick off the mask at the far end, because enemies creep up behind you if you hang around too long. So to sum up: the screen is full of stuff that can kill you in one hit, you can't see yourself and there are infinite enemies. Nice. Maybe it's just me being rubbish, but like the Embryo stage in the aforementioned Splatterhouse, I died a thousand times and each time I died, I wished that a mixture of Tabasco sauce and live spiders was being poured into the eyes and mouths of everyone involved in the making of this game. But like I say, I'm sure it was me being rubbish and not in any way just really bad design.

Just after Bullshit Gulch waits the final boss. Gang Busters differs from most games by not having distinct end-of-level bosses: what you get instead is an arena-type area where enemies come at you from all angles. You also get that at the end of the game, with the addition of the final boss, a man with a tiny hat whose head is made up of 99% beard. He's a pretty dull final opponent, really: I was hoping for the vast, bloated Mother Shark, a huge albino monster wearing a pair of shades the size of a 747 jet. Instead you get this guy, whose name is apparently Mr. Soul. He has a large Gatling-gun-thing that shoots out steel balls, as well as an endless supply of cannon-fodder troops. He's not tough. After Bullshit Gulch, he's nothing. You hear that, Mr. Soul!? You're nothing, you 'orrible little man. You're nicked!

And with that, Gang Busters is over. The credits show prison cells full of the many villains you shot, now miraculously restored to health. In a clear violation of their human rights as well as basic physics, they're really crammed into those cells. This ending is giving off some weird vibes, Konami. Do you really want kids thinking that they can shoot people with no consequences? Tut tut. It's this kind of filth that's destroying our otherwise-utopian society.
Gang Busters is alright. It's not great, but it's not terrible. I do think that it has a enough going to for it that it shouldn't be completely forgotten, lost amongst Konami's better-known (and simply better) arcade output. It's got decent music, and I really like the graphics: they're nicely drawn, and they have a lot of charm. The gameplay's good for what it is, Bullshit Gulch notwithstanding. So, if you want a quick blast of run-and-gun action, then give Gang Busters a go, and you probably won't even regret it or nothin'.

TEKKEN: MISHIMA FAMILY HAIRCUTS

King of Iron Fist: a phrase that stands for fierce battles between mighty warriors, battles fought for honour, revenge, greed, power... No, no it doesn't. For me, it stands for the many goofy haircuts of one family, one family that stands head and follicles above the rest: the Mishima family.
As I'm sure you're aware, the Mishima family are the main characters of the Tekken franchise, so it stands to reason they should have the most bizarre hair, right? Yeah, nothing says "head of a huge criminal conglomerate" like a hairstyle more usually associated with children's entertainers with names like "Shleppo" and "Kaptain Krazypants". Speaking of the leaders, let's start with Heihachi Mishima.

The head of the Mishima Zaibatsu, organiser of the original Tekken tournament and a man who throws his five-year-old son off a cliff because the kid isn't growing up quite as tough as he'd like. He's a man who demands respect, especially in the fields of martial arts tournaments and childcare. Obviously the best way to command that respect is to style your hair like the outstretched wings of an attacking bird of prey. It certainly draws attention away from the lack of hair on the rest of your head. Male pattern baldness? More like awesome pattern baldness.
I'm sure that this hairstyle also enhances Heihachi's combat skills: it acts like a pair of fins, making him more stable in flight and such. It also has the advantage of making him look a lot taller than he actually is, so if he ever has to fight against a cat, he's sorted.
Finally, he has a pretty bitchin' moustache, but it is completely overshadowed by his hair. Complete Moustache Eclipse is the sign of a 'do that should not be messed with. Do not attempt to give yourself this hairstyle if you are not a black belt in karate or an equivalent martial art, as severe neck and head damage may ensue.

Heihachi's son next, and he's gone in a different direction when it comes to grooming.

This is Kazuya Mishima, Heihachi's son who was chucked off a cliff. Luckily for Kazuya, the Devil was waiting at the bottom and saved his life and gave him, y'know, Devil powers, like the ability to spam cheap laser-eye-beam attacks. When he's not in his Devil form, he styles his hair to look like one of those helmets worn by high-speed cycle racers. It's a smooth, sleek, high-maintenance hairdo, requiring seven jars of extra-hold gel and regular access to a wind tunnel.
For some reason, Kazuya always reminds me of the "Sad Onion" symbol you get get on dangerously shoddy Chinese toys:

Kazuya can't have been that sad an onion though, because he managed to have a son to carry on the fine tradition of Mishima hairdos.

This is Jin Kazama, Kazuya's son. You would think that when your father is possesed by Satan, you would come out looking a little more interesting than "shirtless karate man". He's the weak link in the Mishima hairstyle chain, sporting the same 'do as his dad, but with a bunch of floppy fringe bits attached. Don't write it off just yet, though. Take a closer look at the hair when isolated from Jin's head:

It's in the shape of a cuttlefish!

Your secret is revealed, Jin. Your hair is a cephalopod. No good can come of this. Unless, of course, the next Tekken game is set in the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. Then it'll come in handy.

There is one final member of the Mishima clan: Heihachi's father, Jinpachi. He was introduced in Tekken 5, once the technology required to capture the true splendour of his hair had been developed.

Jinpachi knows that the true power of a man cannot be captured by the hair on his head, but only by the beard. Just look at Brian Blessed, he knows where it's at. What a beard it is too, like a man who has been startled while trying to eat an eagle whole. That's his beard in Fighting Mode, by the way: he can turn it upside-down when he wants to look like a wise old man. If you have a beard, you're now looking down at it and feeling a crushing sense of disappointment because it isn't Jinpachi's beard. I know I am.

So there you have it, a family of fist-fightin' freaks with hairstyle that touch both the skies and our hearts. When I look at them, though, I can't help but wonder... could there be more? What if these styles could be combined, like some glorious keratin-based Voltron? Well, I think it'd look a bit like this:


I'm sure you'll all agree that this is the greatest hairstyle in the history of Mankind. If I don't see thousands of people sporting this look in the next few weeks, I will be sorely disappointed.

P.S. If you think you can draw a better representation of the complete "Combined Mishima" hairstyle, then please email it to vgjunk@hotmail.co.uk!

HANA TAAKA DAKA!?

Well, now that the (unusually hectic) festive period is done with and 2010 is over, it's time to get back to writing nonsense about videogames. I thought I'd ease myself into the New Year gently, so I've chosen a nice, jolly game to start 2011: Taito's 1991 PC Engine-based tactical cuteness strike Hana Taaka Daka!?

Yep, like Cotton 100%, Hana Taaka Daka!? takes us deep into the dark heart of Kawaiivania, featuring more fuzzy animals than a pet shop inside a Hello Kitty factory. I must warn you now: Hana Taaka Daka!? (like 95% of all PC Engine games) is a horizontally-scrolling shoot-em-up, so if the idea of blowing woodland critters into a fine pink paste with thousands of megatons of high-tech weaponry doesn't appeal to you, then you are a) probably not going to enjoy this, and b) a better human being than me.

From what I can tell, the story of the game is that an adowwwable anthropomorphic fox chap has his equally adowwwable anthropomorphic fox girlfriend kidnapped by a Tanuki. If you don't know what a Tanuki is, it's a mythical (but based on a real animal) japanese creature that's sort of a raccoon-lookin' thing. They're know as mischievous, jolly little creatures who can transform themselves into any shape and enjoy playing tricks on us dunderheaded humans. Actually, that's nonsense. As anyone who has ever seen the Studio Ghibli movie Pom Poko will know, Tanuki are know for two things: testicles. Great big bollocks are what they are famous for, and Tanuki are generally depicted with a giant, swollen scrotum on proud display, which they can stretch to huge size and transform into things like mattresses, hang-gliders and full-scale water desalination plants. Super Mario, you may remember, can wear a Tanuki suit in Super Mario Bros. 3, which makes me wonder things that I had hoped I would never wonder.

The fox, realising he's not tough enough to rescue his missus, prays at a little shrine and his prayers are answer by (dun dun duuun) a Long-Nosed Goblin, or tengu. Said tengu flies off to kick ass, take names and rescue the (literally) foxy girlfriend with no hesitiation or thoughts of reward. So HTD is based fairly heavily on Japanese folklore, but it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about that kind of thing. It's not like it's important to the gameplay, is it?

And what of the gameplay? As mentioned HTD is a side-scrolling shooter, so you've probably got a fair idea of what the gameplay entails already. The weapon system isn't quite the standard Gradius-style system: if fact, it has an almost Super Mario approach. There are certain power-ups that, when collected, make you grow bigger like a super mushroom: when you get hit, you shrink back down, thus giving you some protection against the single-hit death bullshit of most shooters of the era. Also, I may have exaggerated a little earlier, as our flying goblin friend doesn't really have high-tech weaponry. He has a pink magic shot than can be charged up, and you can also collect two other weapons to go with it. There are projectile attacks, like tiny homing goblins, electricity blasts that hug the walls and my personal favourite, giant spinning tops that mercilessly grind your foes beneath their pulversizing, dreidely points. The other type are bombs that range from smoke bombs to ninja-style caltrops, although they aren't nearly as useful as the projectile types.
Right, time to shoot some stuff, I guess! What do we have first?

OH GODDAMN IT IT'S FIRING EGGS AT ME. The last game I talked about had this, too, although this is nowhere near as distressing as Ninja Clowns' Sexy Chicken. The chicken in HTD just looks deadly serious, like she means business. Firing eggs out of her... egg-pipe to kill a flying goblin is just a job to her. Nothing more, nothing less.
As you can see, the graphics are very cartoony, and personally I think they're really nice. Big, colourful sprites that are well animated and quite charming a lot of the time. It's like playing a cartoon, which is always an effect I enjoy and is something that you don't get too much anymore.
After a while spent flying across the countryside, you head into a cave. At this point, the game offers up a few different routes that you can choose to take, a nice touch that is always welcome as a potential replayability booster.

The cave has platypuses! Vicious one that throw hammers at you, the little pricks. A quick blast of magic pink plasma settles their hash. When you kill an enemy, they generally turn into a Tanuki and fly off screen, which I imagine is supposed to show that they were Tanuki shapeshifting into the shape of whatever you killed. Why they would try and defeat a tengu by turning into a platypus with a hammer I'm not sure. Maybe the Japanese have a whole legend cycle about the Tengu-Platypus war. As Platypuses are still around and tengu aren't, I'm going to assume that the platypuses are responsible for the genocide of the tengu race. The platypuses are Nazis! It all makes sense, and now you're justified in killing them. Perfect!
No sooner have you killed the platypuses and other assorted enemies, the boss turns up, and he's an odd one:

A potato made of flesh? A huge thumb with a face drawn on? A failed attempt to clone Nick Griffin? I'm not certain, but it's probably that last one. (Update: kind reader Emerson pointed out that this freakish fleshlump appears to be based on former wrestler Abdullah the Butcher, right down to the scarred forehead.) Deform-o-Griffin here waddles back and forth, shooting what is either spit or sweat at you in a spread pattern, and it's here that a small but important nuance of the game crops up for the first time. The more powerful you are, the bigger you are and therefore the harder it is to avoid attacks, so you get hit and shrink, making it easier to dodge but making your attacks weaker and taking you one step closer to death. It almost (but not quite) makes the game a risk-and-reward balancing act, which I thought was rather interesting. Then again, I'm quite sad.
Anyway, the racist flesh-potato isn't very tough, and soon the first stage is complete. You get a little cutscene where the goblin meets the fox.

You get a little scrap of paper for completing the level, which will eventually make a picture of... something? I dunno, I missed a bunch of them, as I will explain later. Now it's time for stage two, which takes place at some kind of Japanese festival.

The first thing to notice is the schoolgirls. Their method of attack? Throwing buildings at you. They're pretty hard to avoid too, so you'll be wanting to kill those schoolgirls as fast as you can. Wow, that sentence could look bad out of context, huh? It's not all young girls here though, there's also an appearance by someone who is friendly and lives in your neighbourhood:

Spider-Man! Spidey has fallen victim of the Health and Safety police, who have forced him to wear a hard-hat if he insists on swinging from a thread and running off to wherever there's a "bang-up", whatever that means. He's so angry about the whole thing he's taken to throwing webs at anyone that wanders past. Maybe he's mistaken our hero for The Vulture.
The boss is testicles. No, wait, I mean a Tanuki.

No, I meant testicles. Look at his expression. He is not the kind of mythological shapeshifting racoon-dog to be fuckin' with. He's a stone-cold killer, he's an executioner, he's a pair of testicles that could double as a stylish beanbag large enough to seat a family of five. He's got a magic hat that flies around trying to kill you, but all you really have to do is concentrate on not getting sucked in by the gravitational field of his gonads.
Stage three is set amongst the clouds, and features further proof that the Platypuses are Nazis:

Only evil people fly zeppelins, just like only men with tiny penises drive humvees. The music here is very nice, sounding (perhaps unsuprisingly) like it has been taken straight from some long-forgotten anime series. Soon you come to a floating castle, bedecked with standard-issue gun turrets and not-so-standard witches riding vacuum cleaners.

Unlike the Taunki's testicles, the Hoover-witches really can suck you toward them. The witches look like they're based on a witch from another anime or something: if you think you know what they might be based on, let me know in the comments.
Something strange happened a little further into the level. I shot a random enemy, and rather than dying, he teleported me to a different level full of numbers, clocks and Alice in Wonderland-style white rabbits.

Each stage seems to have one of these smaller stages hidden within, and to get out again you have to find the hidden Tanuki and shoot him. For doing so, you get an extra piece to add to the picture between levels, and because I didn't find all the sub-levels, I didn't complete the picture. Still, it's another reason to replay the game, and that should always be welcome.
Once you've found the Tanuki and escaped the nightmarish number vortex, you're pretty much at the boss.

The platypuses have given up their doctrines of racial purity and the right to lebensraum, and have embraced Buddhism. Sadly, they cannot control their warlike tendencies and soon they are attacking you withe a giant statue of the Buddha, thus missing the point entirely. Also, I don't think the Buddha had an infinite supply of hammers to throw at goblins.
Once he's defeated, the lady fox is rescued and reuinted with her... boyfriend? Mate?

Whatever, they're back together. As you can see in the picture, he greets his lost love by giving her a big lick on the face. Goddamn furries. No rest for the tengu, though, and he's straight back out there to find the kidnappers.
This stage pulls out all the stops for maximum Japaneseness: Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, the works. There's a little locomotive to fight, and more caves to navigate. There's also another secret stage I found, this time based around sugar.

Ants with explosive strawberries patrol a landscape made of pink wafer biscuits, something that I didn't think existed outside Britain. Pink wafer biscuits I mean, not ants. Finding the exit Tanuki on this stage is, frankly, a pain in the arse. He's hidden inside a breakable piece of floor, which is in no way marked as being out of the ordinary, so you have to shoot every single bit of scenery until you find it. It wouldn't be fun in a free-roaming game, but in a scrolling shooter it's particularly irritating, especially when you miss it and have to wait for the stage to loop around again.
Once you've escaped, it's time for a truly terrifying boss battle amongst the falling cherry blossoms. It's time to fight... This Guy!

He's an ancient Japanese fella with big baggy sleeves. I CAN HEAR YOU YAWNING, YOU KNOW. And well you might, because he's not that interesting. Shoot him a few times, though, and his mask comes off to reveal...

Another mask! Jason Voorhee's mask, to be precise. 80's horror icon in Japanese likeness-theft shocker! Okay, maybe it's just a mask that looks a bit like Jason's hockey mask and it's a coincidence. Let's see what happens when we shoot him a little more...

That's no coincidence, no siree. We've got Freddy vs Jason vs Ancient Japanese Courtier going on here. He even fires the famous Kruger gloves at you. Considering this game has so far had a cuteness rating of around 3.8 giga-d'awwws, seeing Freddy and Jason is a shock, but a very welcome one. All too soon the battle is over, and it's on to the next stage.
Stage five is a watery one, with icebergs and even the chance to fight underwater. I went the undersea route, because it has the best enemies.

Strangely rotund skeletal paperboy! Inflatable octopus! World's happiest whale! I've got to say, I think the octopus is my favourite. He starts off tiny, and the more you shoot him, the more he expands. Eventually he bursts, no doubt showering the surrounding area with delicious fried octopus.

The stage's boss is also an octopus. He's supposed to be blowing a whistle in that picture, but it looks much more like he's vomiting out a fried egg. It might not seem it in the picture, but this fight is actually pretty good fun, with you having to dodge underneath the waves he fires as you chase him along. Once he's dead, it's on to the final stage.
The last level is set in a very nicely-drawn Japanese castle, complete with the best kind of guards:

Kimono-wearing wind-up Godzillas with authentic Atomic Breath action! I bet that was an easy sell when the King Tanuki was looking for a home security system.
The rest of the level is filled with many of the enemies from earlier in the game, plus some ninjas and riflemen with very nice (and adorable) sprites. For a final stage, it's not all that tough, and you can reach the final boss with not too much difficulty.

TESTICLES. I may have mentioned this before. Being as small as possible is an advantage here, as Tanuki-Suit Man causes a rain of junk to fall down when is impossible to dodge if you're at full size. I can't really think of anything else to say about this boss, because his sheer bizarreness has overwhelmed me. It is quite a nice reminder that off all the forms of entertainment out there, videogames are probably the most bizarre of all. I don't think even David Lynch would make a film about a man dressed as a woodland creature with grossly swollen genitals dancing under a disco ball whilst being shot at by a long-nosed demon.
Once he's dead, the leader of the Tanukis runs out to berate him and is crushed beneath a falling ceiling. And that's Hana Taaka Daka!? finished. Hooray! The ending consists of a series of pictures, with sections covered up by any scraps of the picture you failed to find in the various sub-stages. I don't really feel like I was missing out on enough to make me play through it again, though.

I like HTD. The graphics are lovely, very well-animated and drawn and, despite the avalanche of cuteness, it never gets overwhelming. The music is good, the gameplay is fun and smooth, and it isn't claw-your-eyeballs-out hard, which is great for me because I'm rubbish at shooters. It gets big bonus points for the enemies, almost all of which are fun and interesting, with an especially big tick going into the box marked "Can your fight a giant Freddy Kruger wearing the costume of an ancient Japanese courtier?", which is always a bonus. So, overall, Hana Taaka Daka!? is definitely recommended if you want to play a shooter that isn't set in space, as long as you have a high tolerance for seeing giant cartoon testicles.

Bonus! Here's the music.

NINJA CLOWNS

Everybody likes ninjas. Conversely, no-one likes clowns. So, if you combine the two you should get something that is the very essence of averageness, right? Well, let's find out by playing Incredible Technologies' 1991 circus of horrors, Ninja Clowns.


Yep, this game is called Ninja Clowns. No, I have no idea why they chose to combine ninjas and clowns. Ninjas are stern, silent, invisible warriors who have been trained to kill without mercy. Clowns are jolly, noisy, gaudy fools who have been trained to kill without mercy. There's not much overlap between the two, is there? Well, it doesn't matter, because Ninja Clowns has nothing to do with ninjas at all. Just clowns. Clowns only. Clowns, clowns, clowns. Ugh. The only reason they called it Ninja Clowns is because Clowns is a very dull title.
Ninja Clowns is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, so the first thing to find out is why, as a simple jester, you have been thrust into this world of violent madness. Kidnapped daughter? Animals in danger? Well, not quite:

Nope, today's reason for punching everything in sight is Killer Zombie Clones, produced in a lab by Twisto the Evil Clown. I don't know why I specified that he's an evil clown; he's a clown, it should be taken as read that he's also evil.
The terrified populace's response to this threat? They summon another clown. You know, like the one that's kidnapped them. Maybe they know that, like ninjas, only a clown can defeat a clown. Although on closer inspection of the villain's silhouette, it appears he's not a clown and he's actually Bowser. I have my fingers crossed that this is the case and his evil plan is actually some complex plot to kidnap Princess Peach.

You're plonked in a dismal street area, with various scumbags for company. As this is a beat-'em-up, you're probably going to want to, you know, beat 'em up, and that's where things get a little tricky. Ninja Clowns has a strange control system in that, unlike almost every other side-scrolling beat-'em-up, there's no jump button. You've got punch, kick and what I think is supposed to be a block but which can't block atacks. Pressing punch and kick together lets you spin around, which is simple enough, but other combinations lead to ever-more unpredicatble results. P+K and left or right makes you do a flying kick, diagonal-down and K makes you roll around, there's a strange jumping move where our hero tries to climb an invisible rope... There's a lot going on, and while it sounds like a good thing to have so many moves, they all feel very counter-intuitive to use, and you keep performing them by accident, not helped by the jerky animation and general feeling of distance between your input and the actions of the white-faced freak you're "controlling".
As you can see, the enemies are a motley bunch, and the first stage is mostly filled with angry cops who throw doughnuts at you and 80's business men who you can pretend are Patrick Bateman. Quite why Twisto wants to take over this town is beyond me, because it's a bit of a shithole. The first stage flies by quickly, with two interesting things to note: One, you can collect a boxing glove on a spring to use against your foes. Anyone who has ever watched a Looney Tunes cartoon knows that a boxing glove on a spring is the deadliest weapon in the universe. The power of a thousand gods courses through your veins as soon as you collect it, and no man can stand against its awesome power. Secondly, Ninja Clowns appears to have pre-empted the pop-culture shitecloud that is the Twilight series by a good fourteen years: there's a sign in the background for a movie called "Dead Teens In Love". There is no possible way it could be worse than Twilight.

Soon you're fighting the boss, who is pictured above. He's a bowler, and he likes to bowl things at you and... that's about it. He's significantly more difficult than the rest of the stage, but once he's defeated, you do get the pleasure of seeing him explode in strangely grotesque manner:

Look at that goddamn clown, watching a man explode with a calm smile on his face. The sick fuck.
After that, there's a brief interlude where you have smash up a lab in an impossibly short time limit, although it's only for points so it doesn't matter. Twisto appears again to curse you. His silhouette looks more like Bowser than ever.

The next stage takes you to the funfair... of TERROR. That's to be expected though, because funfairs exude terror in the same way that girls who wear berets exude insanity.

New enemies abound, including bearded ladies who projectile vomit at you. At least I think they're bearded women, but then again there's nothing to say that they aren't just very nauseous transvestites. There're also Elvis impersonators. They've got accordions, you know, just like Elvis was famous for playing! Most importantly, there are mimes. Mimes that can be punched. Indeed, you are encouraged to punch them because they drop health when you do. As I may have mentioned before, attacking a mime is a rare pleasure that should be savoured like a fine wine, and by including this feature Ninja Clowns has earned itself a gold star.
There are a few more weapons to collect, including (of course) throwing pies and (of course) seltzer sprayers, which is nice. Something that isn't nice is the music, which mostly consists of "circus music" set to grating, painful beats that sound like a calliope being forced to breed with a trash compactor. It's a shame I didn't know about it in time for the Hallowe'en playlists, really.
So, what will the boss of the carnival stage be, do you think? Samson the Strong-man? Siamese twins? Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy? No, no and no.

The boss is a chicken in thigh-high kinky boots and with a rack that makes Kelly Brook look like a twelve-year-old boy. It is, I fear, supposed to be a Sexy Chicken. Welcome to Nightmare Town! It gets worse, though. This Sex-Chicken has to attack you somehow. What's that you say? It could use eggs to attack? Why, of course it could!

OH SWEET JESUS.
Yes, the slutty hen bends over and fires eggs out out it's... area at you. Even worse, the best time to attack the chicken is after it has bent over but before it fires the egg, so you essentially defeat it by repeatedly jamming your fist/foot up its exposed cloaca.
I don't think I'll ever feel clean again. If you manage to interact your fist with the chicken's arse enough times, then you move onto stage three.
Stage three is back on the mean streets, by which I mean the exact same mean streets as stage one, because they just reused the backgrounds. I guess after Sexy Chicken they were too traumatised to come up with anything else. Nothing much is new apart from some different enemies, mostly skinheads and (surprisingly powerful) Girl Scouts. The boss is...

I have no idea what the boss is, or rather I do, but I'm not sure I understand why. He's a roller-skating helium canister with a severed head placed on top as a grisly trophy, and he attacks with balloon poodles. After the last boss, he's almost comforting.

The next stage is set in the Big Top, and the punishing circus music is back with a vengeance. It's mostly filled with earlier enemies, although there are some midget clowns for those of you with coulrophobia and achondroplasiaphobia to enjoy. The boss is a rather mundane-looking magician:

I do like the expression on that rabbit's face.
The next stage is on the streets, again, and they've used the same background, again.

It really does count against Ninja Clowns that're you're just replaying the same stage. I think I'm going to have to rescind my gold star. New enemies are in the form of hippies this time, and they shout such well-known hippy catchphrases as "Wow, man" and "Woodstock, man"; you will tire of this very quickly. The first time I saw their placards I thought it was a picture of a chicken, and they were protesting against the Sexy Chicken. Just as I was about to embrace their cause, I realised it was a mushroom cloud and I started punching them instead. They're pretty violent for pacifists, and quite hard to beat. They killed me a lot, which means this is a good time to mention our hero's death pose:

He may be dead, but his enormous erection will live on! Maybe he's thinking about Sexy Chicken.
The boss approaches, and he's a more old-fashioned kind of nightmare fuel.

Cabbage/bagpipe/clown interbreeding has reached a terrifying new level! Our hero actually looks genuinely pleased to see it, though, and that's possibly because he already knows that once defeated, the boss will turn out to be full of popcorn. Of course.

"Darn! No butter." Wait... were you going to eat the popcorn out of the dead spider-monster's skull? Clowns, everybody. Look upon them and know true fear.
Ninja Clowns is heating up now, and it's onto the final full stage: the Funhouse.

The name "Funhouse" is as misleading as you might expect. It's a constant, groin-crushingly tedious stream of unicycle-riding killer clowns, and the best way to defeat them is to keep doing the spin move repeatedly as they slowly haul themselves out of the floor. The blue-and-orange checks on our hero's trousers, much like the midday sun, should not be looked at directly. Serious eye damage will occur.
There was a boss here, a burly Sinbad type with a scimitar, but I defeated him so quickly that I forgot to get a screenshot. Oops. Anyway, he was just the warm up! It's time for the final showdown with Twisto!

His lack of resemblance to Bowser is bitterly disappointing. That said, I actually really like his sprite, and if you're looking for a fearsome end-of-game boss, a three-headed demon clown is a good choice. He really isn't that tough, with the spin move once again proving the most effective method of killing clowns. That's information that may well come in handy one day. Once he's defeated, Twisto is revealed to be a tiny little clown who was using some kind of super-suit or something, and our hero defeats him by using the famous "hold them at arm's length so they can't reach you" technique that is so beloved of older brothers the world over.
So, Twisto goes to jail, and you can settle down for the long and satisfying ending sequence.

Oh wait, that's it. One still frame. Thanks, Incredible Technologies. The name of your company is a holow mockery, if not a downright lie. Twisto's spell is broken, and everyone is happy and friendly once more. Except the hippies, who will no doubt be continuing with their campaign of harassment against poor, defenceless nuclear power. And what the hell is going on with the sky in that last panel? I think the sun saw the clown driving toward it and turned off all the lights so he could hide.
Welp, that's Ninja Clowns. An odd game, to be sure. Not a good game: the controls are to imprecise, there's too much repetition and the music is too dreadful for it to be considered good. But there are some nice ideas in it, and a few nice graphical touches. I think it's main problem is that is didn't go far enough in embracing the horror element of the game. If the whole think had been some kind of Lovecraftian, Sexy Chicken-filled constant nightmare, it'd have been... better. It's pretty short too, so if you're interested, give it a quick go: you'll probably be able to complete it in half an hour. Just don't expect anything even vaguely ninja-related.