Ijlimae-jeon: Manpa Skijeok-pyeon (PC)

I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I love sprite scaling as an aesthetic, and that's definitely helped by the fact that a lot of sprite scaling games are all-time classics like Space Harrier, Outrun, Night Striker, and so on. I should have known there'd be some terrible ones out there somewhere, though, and Iljimae-jeon is one of them.

You'll have guessed from the title (and the presence of Korean text on the title screen above) that it's a Korean game, and from what I've read online, the plot is about a character from ancient China finding themselves sent through time to futuristic Japan. Obviously, I don't know how accurate that is, as while there's a long text intro (thankfully skippable), I can't read Korean.

So, you pick one of three characters, and set out into a game that's kind of like a mix between Space Harrier and Cabal: your character is confined to moving left and right across the bottom of the screen, while aiming a crosshair all around it, but they're also constantly running forward while the enemies come running from the distance in the opposite direction. starting with the superficial complaints, it's probably the ugliest game of this type I've ever played, with the ground looking like the worst example of SNES Mode 7 graphics you can think of, and the enemy sprites looking small and undetailed even when they get up close.

The enemies definitely will get up close, too, as your feeble heroes takes several shots to defeat even the most common jobbers among the enemy force. Even the delivery boys carrying the power-ups take a fair few shots to take down. The bosses, as you can imagine, are even worse. There's no health ar given for them, and their attacks don't change as you fight them, so you just spend long, agonising minutes shooting them and avoiding their attacks (except for the ones that are unavoidable, like when the second boss swooces all the way across the bottom of the screen) until suddenly, they explode and the stage ends.

One final note, I've never been given as much trouble getting a PC game to run as I have with this one, not even other Korean DOS games, like Still Hunt. Part of that is down to the fact that I never owned a PC as a kid so I don't have any experience running DOS in general, though. I wouldn't normally bring this kind of thing up, but this game is so terrible, and it took such effort to be able to play it that it was just adding insult to injury.

Obviously, I don't recommend this game at all.