Galaxy Deka Gayvan (PC Engine)

 Deka means Detective, so I guess the title is an attempted parody of the 1982 TV series Space Sherriff Gavan, though that parody only goes as far as the title and the fact that the player characters transform into Metal Heroes-style armoured forms. Which makes this the third Metal Heroes-inspired PC Engine single plane beat em up I've covered on this blog. What a weirdly specific subgenre! As single plane beat em ups go, it's pretty basic. The stages are just completely flat planes, and you go from left to right beating up enemies until you get to the end of them. You've got a little three-hit combo, plus jumping attacks and a couple of throws. Beneath your health bar, you've also got a power bar, though! It's for managing your transformation! You can transform at any time, and the meter slowly increases while you're not transformed, and slowly depletes while you are.

 

The game's biggest problem is that the transformation is so limp. You don't get any new attacks or abilities, even the animations for your attacks while transformed are traced over the sprites for your untransformed attacks. It's so unimaginative! I guess you have higher attack and defence while transformed, but the difference is so incremental that you'll barely even notice. It might even be a placebo and there's no difference at all! Considering that it's around this gimmick that the game is built, it really sucks the joy out of the whole thing.

 

There's a few other things I want to talk about, though: in its favour, it is one of very few PC Engine games with a two player co-op mode, and  it's an early example of a beat em up with a versus mode that lets you play as a few of the enemies, too. And on the subject of enemies (as well as returning to the subject of parodies), some of them are from other games. Games from other companies, so they're unofficial references and/or parodies, not guest stars. There's a pair of enemies who are literally just Ninja and Kunoichi from The Ninja Warriors, and a little later there's an overweight version of Guile from Street Fighter II. As well as being fat, there is an actual joke in the Guile parody: he has an attack where he attempts a FLash Kick, but falls over onto his back afterwards. It's not a funny joke, but it is something, at least. (Also, the NW parodies first appear in stage 2. They don't appear in stage 3, though, so when they returned in stage 4, I thought to myself "The Ninja Warriors, Again?")(Now that's what I call attempted comedy!)

 

I can't really recommend Gayvan, unless you're really really desperate to play a co-op beat em up on PC Engine. If you really want a Metal Heroes-inspired game and you don't need a second player to be involved,  then just go for Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji. That game is excellent, and if you're buying real copies, it's like a tenth of the price of Galaxy Deka Gayvan. This is an inoffensive game, but it's also an unexciting one with so much wasted potential. To make it worse, it's from Fill-In-Cafe, who'd later go on to make a bunch of really great fighting games and beat em ups.

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Game Gear)

 When it comes to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers videogames, I think most people's first thoughts will either be the single plane beat em ups on Mega Drive, or the awkwardly entitled Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Fighting Edition on SNES, which is mainly remembered for the legacy it spawned in the form of Gundam Wing: Endless Duel and the Gundam Battle Assault series. But, as I found Dangerous Road while looking up a list of every game developed by SIMS, I noticed this on the list. I looked it up, saw some of that beautiful pixel art that the Game Gear has as its trademark, and needed to know more. So this isn't a super-obscure game, but it's one I think a lot of people will have automatically written off as shovelware and never tried out.

 

Interestingly, it's actually pretty similar in structure to the Gaoranger and Hurricanger games on Playstation: each stage has you picking a ranger, then playing through the action scenes of an episode. You fight some putties, the human-sized version of the weekly monster, and sometimes goldar will show up, too, and once you're done with that, everything gets bigger, and you control the Megazord against the giant version of the weekly monster (and again, Goldar sometimes shows up here). 

 

The game keeps things focused entirely on the first season of the TV show, and actually makes great use of the license. There are seven stages, the third and fourth of which are dedicated to that season's most iconic storyline: Green With Evil. Stage three has you fighting the brainwashed green ranger Tommy in human- and giant-sized forms, while the second has you fighting the Dragonzord, followed by a final battle to free Tommy's mind. Of course, the best thing about this is that for the final three stages, you can play as Tommy in the human-sized parts, and for the giant-sized parts, you get to pick between the Megazord, the vanilla Dragonzord, and best of all, Dragonzord battle mode. I think this might be the only game where that particular robot is playable, even!

 

The rangers all have their own movesets, and Tommy happens to have the most effective and cool-looking moves, and while the three mecha are pretty equal in power, they do still all play pretty differently to each other, and it's cool to have the choice of three really great-looking designs. The Game Gear, like the Game Boy, has more decent fighting games than you might think, especially the ports of Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury Special. But those are ports, and even though SNK are renowned for the great storylines and characters in their games, they are still designed around the idea that they'll be played against human opponents. 

 

Power Rangers has the advantage of being made specifically for the Game Gear, and so it's also designed around being a single player story experience. So you have five (six later on) characters all with their own movesets, but no matter who you pick, you'll be playing through the same storyline with the same opponents. The game doesn't need to come up with reasons for allied characters to be fighting each other, plus considering this is a cartridge-based game for a handheld in 1994, being able to save space by re-using Goldar and evil Tommy as opponents was surely a big help to the developers.

 

This is a pretty great game! It's definitely better than the Mega Drive Power Rangers games, and I'd say it's an equal-but-different altenative to Fighting Edition, too. All of the MMPR seemed to get univerally slated on release, but if you ever feel the need to play an of-the-time Power Rangers game, you'll have a better time with this one than you'd have with most of the others. And if you finish it, the Game Gear's Power Rangers The Movie game is pretty much exactly the same as this one, but with monsters from both the movie and the second season of the TV show.

Dangerous Road (3DS)

 I had big hopes for this one. The title made me think it might be some Destruction Derby-style racing game, or maybe something topdown like Action Fighter or Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, Raising my hopes higher was how I discovered it: on a list of works by SIMS, those tireless stalwarts of the Master System and Game Gear in the early nineties, and I was excited to learn that they were still around and active as recent as 2016. They even worked on the most recent Ape Escape game in 2023!

 

Unfortunately, actually playing the game dashed all of those hopes. As Tak Fujii once said long ago, while toiling in the Konami shovelware mines: "It's a Frogger". I think the last time I saw a Frogger knockoff was on the Atari 2600, but here's one that came out in 2016 on the 3DS. It has a couple of new ideas, though! There are four playable characters, each with their own special ability, like being able to slow time for a few seconds or having slightly faster movement than the others.

 

The aim of the game is very slightly different to traditional frogger, too. Instead of just crossing the road to get home a few times per stage, you've instead got to go back and forth seeking out numbered flags (in order), before getting the stage clear flag. That's in the main Goal Run mode, at least. There's also that insanely irresponsible Survival Run mode. This one sees you trapped on a busy multi-lane highway (with a few train tracks to mix things up too), and your only aim is to survive for sixty seconds. It didn't really hit me how crazy it was for a game that seems to be aimed at kids to literally have a "play in traffic" mode until after I'd stopped playing. 

 

I think what really hurts this game is the lack of scores. Especially in Survival Run: there's a star item that appears occasionally that gives you five seconds of invincibilty, destroying any vehicles that hit you in this time. It's a mildly amusing effect the first few times, but they might as well have just made it an item that reduced the remaining time by five seconds. If there was a score, and you got points for destroying the vehicles in this way, there'd be some point to this. I guess you'd score points when not invincible by playing chicken, and moving out of the way of vehicles as close to being hit as possible. But then I guess that would also exacerbate the irresponsibility of the mode.

 

This is a game that exists. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. There's nothing about it that I can recommend, as it's just completely unremarkable. I played it because of the title, and to see what SIMS had been up to in recent times. Through reading this review, you've now got that information, and don't need to bother.

Sigmatica (PC)

 So, I've recently been worried that the level of obscurity of the games I cover hasn't been as deep as it could have been. In an attempt to assuage that feeling, I got ahold of a compilation disc of games made by the Chiba University Computer ResearchingSociety in 2013. Most of the games were very simple, very short minigames that I'd struggle to write a full post about (so I'll do a big patreon exclusive compilation post about all of them in the near future). But this one, Sigmatica (or Σtica The uncorporeal domain, as the title screen calls it), stood out head and shoulders above all of the others.

 

Like you can tell from the screenshots, it's a shooting game! And though it uses an abstract visual style, with the player ship and all of the enemies being represented by simple wireframe polygonal shapes, the Touhou series was definitely a big influence on it. The most obvious manifestation of this is the way the screen is laid out, with the big info column on the righthand side of the screen showing your score, lives, bombs, and the number of bullets you've grazed. There's also the fact that the bosses take a long time to kill, with multiple healthbars, and distinct bullet/attack patterns to go with each healthbar.

 

It's a very simple game, as far as modern shooting games go. You can shoot and bomb, and you also have a focus shot that slows your movement. I'm not 100% on how the scoring system works, but I think you score more points the more grazes you do, and when you bomb, all the onscreen bullets turn into points items, too. So it's in your interest to graze and to use bombs at the most dangerous moments. Which is all pretty logical for survival play, too, with a little bit of risk thrown in by the graze counter. Even moreso is the end-of-game bonus you get: big bonuses for each stage you finish and how many grazes you got in total, plus if you finish the game, more bonuses for how many lives you had left over.

 

Which kind of brings up the only real problem I have with the game: it's really short! Only two stages! I know it's only a student project and all, but I was really getting into it, and then it suddenly ended! I guess that's a pretty good problem for a game to have, though. There isn't really much more I can say about Sigmatica. It's pretty good, and I hope its developer went on to make more shooting games in the decade since its release.