The Fighting Wolf AT (MSX)

For such an early entry into the belt scrolling beat em up genre, and from a relatively small company like Technopolis Soft, it's impressive how versatile the controls in The Fighting Wolf AT are. With only a D-pad and two buttons, you can walk in eight directions, punch, kick, and even duck and jump! Unfortunately, you only ever have to walk left, walk right, and punch, and in fact, doing anything else will diminish your chances of survival.

So, each stage consists of a few screen's worth of a repeating background, though it doesn't matter if you walk to the end or not, only that you defeat every enemy. Although it would be more accurate to say that rather than "beating every enemy", you're beating enemies until they eventually stop spawning. Each stage has exactly two kinds of enemy: one that spawns on the right of the screen, and one that spawns on the left of the screen. Beat one, and an identical one will take its place. Keep doing this and after a couple of minutes, you've beaten the stage.

I don't know how long the game is, but the technique that got me to stage five (the enemies do gradually become more enthusastic about trying to fight back, and you only get one life) is just to repeatedly punch one enemy until it's dead, then turn around and punch the enemy on the other side until they're dead. By then, the enemy on the first side will have respawned and walked up to you, so repeat the process. And that's pretty much the entire game. The background changes each stage, as do the sprites for the enemies, but they all play the same.

There's not much more to say about this game. It looks okay, except when the screen scrolls, and the music isn't terrible I guess. The best thing I can say about it is that the enemies in th second stage are a woman and a baby, which is kind of odd. Don't play The Fighting Wolf AT, it's rubbish.