HAPPY BIRTHDAY VGJUNK!

Yes, today is VGJUNK's first birthday! Imagine I'm wearing a pointy little hat or something. As it is also coincidentally my birthday tomorrow, I'm far too busy with the preparatory birthday drinking for a full-size update. Instead, here are five of my favourite articles from the first year of the entertainment colossus that is VGJUNK.

SUPER SIDEKICKS 3: THE NEXT GLORY

I love football, and I love barmy Japanese videogames, so Super Sidekicks is guaranteed pleasure for me. Featuring men on fire and Jorge Campos!

HOOTERS ROAD TRIP

The worst game I've ever played? Quite possibly. A truly dismal "racing" game with some of the most atrocious acting in human history. It will blacken your soul!

BRIAN IRONS: THE SHOCKING TRUTH

An article devoted to probably my favourite minor character in videogames history, Resident Evil 2's psychotic police chief Brian Irons. Read on to find out why he might well be based on Adam West!

LICENSED NES GAMES THAT DON'T EXIST

Come with me as I create fake title screens for NES games that don't exist, no matter how hard I wish they did. Someone, please, make me a MST3K game.

DRAGON'S LAIR - NES VERSION

The game I hate most in all the world, Dragon's Lair gets treated to a long rant by me about how much I hate it. Here's a hint: I hate it a lot, but hopefully in an amusing way.

And that's it for VGJUNK's first year. Huge thanks to everyone who has read it, left me comments and shared it around the internet (yes, all seven of you). It's been great fun, and here's to another year of copyright-infringing side-scrolling beat-em-ups and incomprehensible Japanese puzzle games. Huzzah!

DRAGON UNIT / CASTLE OF DRAGON

It's an age old story: guy likes girl, girl gets kidnapped by dragon, guy battles through a series of deadly stages filled with all manner of terrifying beasts, guy kills dragon and rescues the girl, and then they presumably get down to it right there next to the dragon's corpse. It's the plot of approximately fifty percent of all videogames, including today's offering; Athena / Seta's 1989 arcade mash-the-attack-button-em-up Dragon Unit.

I'm in a quandary already, because this game has two titles. It's also known as Castle of Dragon which, as titles go, I rather like. Welcome to CASTLE OF DRAGON, where you will stay in ACCOMMODATION OF LUXURY while enjoying our FACILITIES OF EXCELLENCE. However, Dragon Unit sounds far more like a euphemism for a giant scaly dong, so it wins and I shall refer to the game as Dragon Unit from now on.
In case you still weren't certain about what was going on in Dragon Unit, the attract mode handily recaps the plot for you in barely-legible text superimposed over an anime princess' severed head. I'll write it out below to save you from any permanent eye damage.

"One day, from out of nowhere, ferocious dragon Zuriv arrived in the peaceful Kingdom of Wenlary. Zuriv destroyed the town and locked the princess on top floor of castle. Two young kings named Duke and Narda left for a journey to rescue the trapped princess."
Not too bad on the Engrish front there.

"Help me!" cries the princess, with her hair like moss and what appears to be an upside-down thong on her head. Actually, look at her hand, she's clearly a robot. I propose a new plot: Ferocious Dragon Zuriv has created the world's most advanced sex droid, and Duke, after countless years of rejection and scorn from Wenlary's womenfolk, takes it upon himself to "liberate" said gynoid from the Dragon's clutches. Also, stop off at the chemist on the way back and pick up some Vaseline.

Here we are then; Dragon Unit has begun! That's you there, the blue fella loitering in the plushly-carpeted castle. It's a pretty swanky joint to be sure, but Duke doesn't look out of place. The gameplay is, as you can probably imagine, very simple. It's a mixture of Castlevania, Golden Axe and every painting Frank Frazetta ever did - you know, standard knights-and-dragons stuff. You've got an attack button for attackin', a jump button for jumpin' and that's it. You move right-to-left, chopping monsters with your sword/axe/morningstar/dark magical energies summoned from the abyssal depth of Hades and jumping across platforms. Oh, and sometimes you can move on two different planes. Exciting!
What Dragon Unit is mostly is a rip-off of Castlevania, particularly the balls-hard arcade version. How much of a Castlevania rip-off is it? Well, draw your own conclusions:

Hmm. Anyway, Dragon Unit moves along at a fair old clip, slicing enemies and collecting what feels like a hundred different power-ups. I managed to pick up four different weapons in the space of about twenty seconds, and while some of them gave Duke ranged attacks like a throwing axe or fireballs, everything still just boils down to "mash attack until all before you is vanquished". As for the enemies, they're all pretty standard so far: knights in armour, wolves and giant bees. The only oddity is this thing:

What is this thing supposed to be? Well, he's obviously quite cheerful, but beyond that he's an enigma to me. Is he a rat-man? Rabbit-man? Whatever he is, he's holding that scythe very gingerly. I'm not sure he's ready for the rigours of a battle against a man as tough as Simon Belmont Duke. The first stage is very short, and in no time at all you're facing off against the boss. Bosses, I mean.

It's two Cylon wizards! That can shoot fireballs at you! Yeah, there's not that much to say about them. Duke has a shield, and in a shocking twist it's actually not useless. More than mere decoration, the shield lets you block certain attacks. As you take damage, Duke loses layers of his armour until he's down to just some furry briefs and a kicky pair of what look like lace-topped women's boots, but his shield is always with him. It's something, at least.
Once the wizards are dead, the next stage awaits. But first, to the map screen!

Yep, that's a map alright. Notice the crucifixion scene in the bottom-right corner; that's something you didn't often see in the videogames of the 1980's. Actually, take another look at the princess...

Case closed. I guess crucifixion is how they make Blocker lemmings.
Right, stage two:

Spike pits, spiked traps that drop on your head, spikes that shoot up from the floor and flying spikes with feathers on the back. I mean, arrows. The stage is also full of leotard-wearing warrior women who toss swords at you in an extremely nonchalant manner. What's with the gymnastics outfits, ladies? Maybe this stage is actually set in the castle's gym. No dark-soled shoes in the castle!
If you're a gore fan, then these woman might be to your tastes.

Enjoy that, did you? You sicko. Between this and the crucifixion, Dragon Unit is the kind of game I was always being told would turn me into a violent psychopath when I was a kid. Ha! The joke's on them: my psychosis was actually triggered by seeing a hooker get murdered around the back of an adult cinema. I win.

Stage two doesn't have a boss. You just pick a key and that's it, stage over. Unless the key is the boss - a rubbish boss, I grant you, but still trickier than Blade Master's first boss.

Stage three is a dungeon. Inside a tree. I think? Wherever it is, it's got roots and manacles. Also, be-quiffed barbarians who are shirtless to the point of indecency. I'd just like to point out that in the above picture I haven't gained the power to fire armoured boots into the groins of my enemies, (more's the pity,) the barbarian just happens to be standing over a speed-up icon.
They're a bit less nonchalant than the female warriors, which isn't difficult considering the ladies attacked with all the ferocity of someone tossing an empty crisp bag into the bin, but how do they fare in the gore stakes?

Well, their arms drop off and huge gouts of blood spray from the wounds, so I'd say they fare pretty fucking well. Or really badly, depending on how you look at it.
Stage three is extremely short - I mean like less-than-a-minute short - and soon you're at the twin bosses.

A pair of gorgons with honest-to-goodness naked breasts. And Rockstar though they were daring; more like Tepid Coffee, right? The best thing about the gorgons is looking at them from the bottom up. Decent snake-body, good, okay. Decently drawn torso and arms, they're okay, oh look you even gave them some gold bangles as detail, that's pretty good. Breasts? Check. Let's just... oh, you forgot to give them a face, what a shame. They look like Charlie Brown with a shrub on his head, and despite being gorgons they can't even turn you into stone. Shocking.
Once the gorgons are dead, it's on to stage four. How're you doing, Dragon Unit? Still ripping off similar yet superior Konami titles?

Oh, good, carry on. Yep, stage four is either a graveyard in a forest or a forest that just happens to have gravestones in it. You're attacked by the standard assortment of graveyard-type enemies, including zombies, spiders and blue skeletons that looks like the ones in Golden Axe but explode in a goddamn mushroom cloud when you kill them.

I guess that's one thing that Dragon Unit gets right. After a short platforming section, the bosses show up.

I'd like to say defeating these two beetles requires skill and a cunning strategy, but you have to use exact same tactics as all the other bosses: hammer the attack button and hope that they die before you lose the will to live. It was close but they died just as I was reaching for the bottle of bleach and my collector's edition Star Wars glass.

Stage five. There was a stage five? There must have been, I've got screenshots of it. I have a vague memory of climbing up some platforms... nope, it's gone. Seriously though, in a game that's quicker to get through than a book of Richard Littlejohn's funniest articles, stage five stands out as taking me about forty seconds to complete, and that was without really trying. I reckon I could get it down to about fifteen if I suffer a horrible brain injury at some point in the future and decide to play Dragon Unit again.
The final stage, and it's into Zuriv's castle. I hope you like enemies all over the place, filling the screen and generally being a nuisance:

That's a lot of knights, but you'll notice that they're mostly just milling around and not paying Duke all that much attention. Luckily, the one interesting enemy in the game finally turns up here, meaning this stage wasn't a complete bust.

The green wizards here can shoot copious amounts of fireballs, and as there's generally two or three of them on screen at any given time, you will spend most of this stage dead from extensive third-degree burns. Also you will notice than in the picture above, that wizardly chucklefuck appears to be teabagging me, the prick. Luckily I have one thing on my side that he doesn't: infinite continues. Suck it, Orko! Get back to whatever Harry Potter rip-off you're appearing in now.

Dragon Unit is starting to live up to its title now, as a pair of two-headed dragons arrive and proceed to act in the same manner as every other boss so far (every boss that wasn't a key, at least). It's a long, tedious fight, especially when you die, lose all your power-up and have to battle the dragons with a sword that has the same cutting power as a baguette. Again, infinite continues win the day and the last smidgen of interest I might have had for Dragon Unit drains away. But wait, there's more, as it turns out that the double dragons were merely a precursor for the main fight with Zuriv. Yay.

Duke has found the super-advanced sex robot!

"Oh yeah, shit. The dragon. I'll be with you shortly, my silicon goddess!"

So, you get to fight Zuriv. Is that facial hair or teeth growing out of his face? I'd like to see a dragon with a beard. A long, flowing Gandalf number, yeah... If it seems like I'm stalling, that's because I can't remember thing fucking one about this fight. I think I just stood in sword range and pressed attack, occasionally trying to move out to the way of his fireballs but ultimately realising it was a pointless exercise and just letting him kill me. Eventually he dies and I go and soak my thumb in some ice water.

*bzzt* I WILL NOW ACCEPT YOUR INPUT KING DUKE *bzzt*.
Thus the kingdom is saved, except for a bullshit "or is it?" disclaimer at the end of the credits which I'm choosing to ignore because I don't want to contemplate playing a sequel to this pile of old knob. Wyvern Phallus Dragon Unit is not a game that you should be playing. There are a hundred games that do the same thing but better. The music isn't bad, the green wizards are a little bit interesting, aaaand the only other saving grace I can thing of is that it's incredibly short, which is hardly a glowing endorsement. Really though, just avoid it. Not even my made-up plot about a sex robot could save it, and that tells a sad tale all of its own.

RESIDENT EVIL: 15 YEARS LATER, STILL FANTASTIC

A few weeks ago (March 22nd, to be precise) it was the fifteenth anniversary of Resident Evil's original Japanese release. Fifteen years! I can feel the Grim Reaper's bony hand on my shoulder as he whispers "sooooon" into my ear. Anyway - to mark the occasion, here's my rambling and poorly laid-out tribute to Capcom's survival horror masterpiece.

At this point, the Resident Evil franchise is probably Capcom's best-known series, with the possible exception of Street Fighter. Some of that fame is sadly due to the increasingly-atrocious movies, but I'd like to believe it's mostly down to the truly excellent games that make up the core RE series. It all began in the mountains near a quiet midwestern city in America...

A quiet midwestern city that happens to be the home of a ruthless and thoroughly evil pharmaceutical company that spends much of its time exploring how deadly things can be made even deadlier with the addition of various viruses. As a kid, this was the kind of plot I craved. Forget rescuing fuzzy animals or exploring the depths of space, I wanted gore, abominations of science and the occasional sentient limb, if that's not too much to ask. I was twelve when RE was released, and I was already completely desensitized by horror films and books (thanks, mum!).

Well, maybe desensitized isn't the right word; it's just that the sensation I got from horror entertainment wasn't fear, it was "Jesus, this is great! Gimme more!". So as soon as I read about this new game that was coming out for the newfangled PlayStation, featuring members of an elite police unit trapped in a mansion filled with zombies and mutants, it was all I could think about until Christmas rolled around and a copy of RE was waiting for me under the tree. Sheer bliss, and to this day Resident Evil's soundtrack reminds me of Christmas time. "O Little STARS of Bethlehem", if you will. It was everything I'd been looking forward to and more, and here are some reasons why it's still one of my favourite ever games.

The World of Survival Horror

Sure, there had been horror games before. I remember playing a game called Soft & Cuddly for the ZX Spectrum when I was barely past the fetal stage that terrified me. How scary was it? Well, the game's cover art, a painting of a leering ghoul sitting atop a pile of severed human heads, was later used as the cover to an H. P. Lovecraft anthology. Later on, games like Clock Tower and Alone in the Dark brought more horror to gamers. One game that could reasonably claim to be the first survival horror game is a Japanese-only movie tie-in called Sweet Home.

Made by Capcom and released for the Famicom in 1989, Sweet Home sees a group of people getting trapped in a mansion filled with various monsters. Capcom later commissioned Shinji Mikami to create a revamped version of Sweet Home, and this game ended up becoming Resident Evil.
The reasons that RE succeeds in it's mission to terrify are pretty well known: limited ammunition and healing items, claustrophobic camera angles, haunting music, powerful enemies and that feeling of dread you would encounter whenever you entered a new room for the first time, as the loading-screen door creaks open slowly and you wonder if it'll be just an empty room or if a Hunter is waiting to slice your head off oh god he's right behind the door aaarrrrghh!
RE also excels at "jump scares". A lot of people look down on jump scares as a cheap way to get a reaction, and sometimes that's true. When the dogs jump through the windows of the first-floor corridor, though; that doesn't feel cheap. It feels bloody terrifying.

Bad Voice Acting = Good Voice Acting

I am of the opinion that the voice acting in Resident Evil is perfect. Perfect for Resident Evil, that is. From the infamous Jibble Sandwich to Chris's "He is sleeping with the ultimate failure", every. single. line is absolutely in keeping with the game's B-movie atmosphere. You can keep your multi-million-dollar voice recording sessions filled with Hollywood superstars; I'll stick with random, emotionless plebs reading lines that appear to have been translated from the Japanese by Babelfish's schizophrenic brother.
It's difficult to choose a favourite bit of acting from Resident Evil... aww, who am I kidding? My favourite will always be Richard, bitten by a giant snake but still soldiering on to give us vital plot info like TERRIBLE DEMONS... ALSO POISONOUS.



OUCH.
Here's a fun fact: the Japanese version of RE only has English voice acting in it. It was supposed to contain Japanese voice acting, and the Japanese voices were even recorded... but they were rejected for being too rubbish. Richard and his abnormally large wound made it into the game, but the Japanese voice acting was too bad to use. Just think about that next time you chuckle at Jill's wooden delivery.

Intro Movie of the Gods

The intro movie. The introduction to the characters and the game, and boy do they get introduced. As I've said before, this is my favorite cutscene in any videogame, a perfect distillation of the B-movie atmosphere that makes Resident Evil such a joy. At a time when videogame developers were realising that have real human actors in their games almost always resulted in said games having the feel of some kind of community theatre project, Capcom made the bold decision to put RE's cast up there, in the literal flesh.

Chris has a certain Bill Paxton-ness about him, and to me Wesker will forever be that bored-looking guy who's wondering when this shoot for some crappy Nintendo GameStation videogame is going to end so he can get back to working on his screenplay inbetween shifts at Starbucks.
The best part of the intro? That fact that the zombie dogs politely stop attacking and wait for the STARS members to watch Brad fly away in the helicopter... and then they're suddenly running for their lives. It's either that of Jill's anguished cry of "JOSEAH!".
Not-so-fun fact: one of the nerdiest things about me is that I have perfect the memorised the ryhthm that the typewriter sound makes at the start of the intro. Why yes ladies, I am single. Form a queue.

Characterful Characters

Resident Evil gave us Albert Wesker: a villain who, despite being comprised of roughly 4,000 cliches, is never anything less than utterly entertaining. Ask him how he feels about mortals, and he'll tell you that "mortals are so worth nothing to me!". He's just that kind of guy. No tortured past, no sense of grudging respect for the heroes; he's just a smooth, egomanaical bastard who truly believes his is the only one fit to rule the world. The only disappointing thing about the RE1 version of Wesker is that he isn't voiced by D. C. Douglas, who has really made the role his own.

Then there's Jill, who is the real star (no pun intended) of Resident Evil. In Miss Valentine, Capcom hit on what is (apparently) the ultimate goal of all female character design in videogames - a woman who is tough, resourceful, intelligent and frankly a bad-ass while still being attractive. Maybe excepting Samus Aran, it's difficult to think of any female videogame character that gets this balance as spot-on as Jill does. It helps that in RE1, at least, she is completely unsexualised, a rarity in female games characters. Sure, in RE3 she dresses like she's just taken on Christina Aguilera's personal stylist, and it'd be difficult to argue that her catsuit-with-lowered-zipper look in RE5 is anything other than a shameful ploy to sex her up, but before then she was the perfect combination of femininity and kick-ass-osity. How much of a bad-ass is Jill? Well, before joining STARS she trained with Delta Force. That's Delta Force as in the American army's most elite troops. Yowzah.

In fact, I reckon you could make a decent case that Resident Evil is a pretty feminist game. The two female members of STARS survive the events of the game while most of their male comrades are killed, and while the men are generally portrayed as a bit clumsy and dense Jill and Rebecca as depicted as the intelligent ones. Why, Chris can't even play the piano! He must have been ill during the "Beethoven, Rachimaninoff and Bach: Their Application in a Combat Situation" module of the STARS training program.

"I'm a member of STARS!"

Our heroes are members of the Raccoon City Police Departments Special Tactics and Rescue Service. Now you might be wondering why a quiet midwestern town like Raccoon City would need a highly-trained paramilitary force with members chosen from the best of the best, but apparently it was to combat increased terrorist activity in Raccoon City. Oh well, that's okay then. Now, I'm wondering about the real reason they were formed. We're told that they were founded with money partly donated by Umbrella, and in RE Wesker reveals that the STARS members were lured to the mansion so that battle data from their fights with the B.O.Ws could be collected. It might be coincidence and Umbrella took advantage of the situation to try and get some data out of it... or maybe STARS was set up for this very purpose. If so, that's quite some forward planning. I'd like to believe it's true, and given Umbrella's fondness for vast, labyrinthine schemes, it's definitely a possibility.

A nice touch and a bit of continuity between RE1 and 2: when selecting your character at the start of the game, you can see that their ID cards have been signed by Chief of Police Brian Irons, who wasn't officially introduced until Resident Evil 2.

There's a Goddamn Zombie Shark

Did I mention this game includes a mutated Great White Shark? Because it bloody well does.

I think it is impossible for me to dislike anything that features a giant zombie shark. The best thing about the Neptune bio-weapon is the note you can find regarding its progress. It was discontinued because they couldn't make it any more terrifying than an actual Great White Shark. Oh, and as it can only operate in the water, it's pretty much useless as a weapon. What did you think was going to happen, egghead? Did you think it was going to sprout wings and fly out of its tank? Well, okay, I admit that's a possibility. I guess we should just be thankful that didn't happen.

And Finally..

A few little things. Firstly, Rebecca.

When you first meet her in the medical room during Chris's story, she tell you her story about ending up in the mansion and how she's a new recruit blah blah blah. Then she mentions the team's helicopter crashing and says "I serviced the helicopter recently, but something went wrong with the engine..." Wait, what? YOU'RE A MEDIC! What are you doing messing with the helicopter engine? Tell you what, we'll get the team's mechanic to perform surgery on you, see how you like that.

Secondly, I also used to have the PC version of RE. When you install it, all the sound effects and voice acting are simply stored as wav files, meaning it's very simple to replace them with whatever sounds you desire. Immature it may be, but replacing the zombie dog's growls with my own dog's whining and changing all the gunfire sounds to my little brother going "pew pew pew" was utterly hilarious and increased the game's replayability by around 70,000%.

And finally, the Keeper's Diary. An excerpt:

May 16th 1998

I heard a researcher who tried
to escape from this mansion was
shot last night.
My entire body feels burning and
itchy at night.
When I was scratching the
swelling on my arms, a lump of
rotten flesh dropped off.
What the hell is happening to me?


May 19, 1998

Fever gone but itchy.
Hungry and eat doggy food.
Itchy Itchy Scott came.
Ugly face so killed him.
Tasty.

4.

Itchy.
Tasty.

Beautiful.

And that's Resident Evil, father of the Survival Horror genre and an absolute masterpiece of videogaming. Here's to another fifteen gore-soaked years!