War Games: Defcon 1 (Playstation)

 Two of the first things you'll be confronted with regarding this game are anachronisms. Firstly, it's a tie-in to a movie released fifteen years earlier, and secondly, despite being released in 1998, this game has no save option, and if you want to keep your progress, you have to do so via a password system! But what is the game? It's one that has very little in common with the movie whose name it bears, being a 3D shooting game that plays kind of like an inferior spin-off from the Strike series of games. No hacking or global tension here at all!

 

So, you can play as either NORAD (humans in tanks and jeeps and such) or WOPR (various different robot things), and you're  given a series of worldwide missions, which mainly involve going to part of a map, killing all the enemies there, then going to a different part of the map and killing everyone there. It's all kind of arbitrary, especially if you accidentally wander to the wrong part of the map and kill the enemies there, at which point you'll fail the mission, literally being told you did things in the wrong order and ruined everything. Compare to the aforementioned Strike games, in which you could mostly take on a stage's objectives in any order, and sometimes there might be a tactical advantage to be gained from taking things in a certain order.

 

There's other problems, too. The biggest being the controls. Though there's lots of vehicles to control in the game, they all control the same, and they all use the "swivel and accelerate" system (or "tank controls," if you prefer), with no capacity for strafing. Furthermore, you can only shoot directly in front of you in all of them. So combat against other units means you and one enemy staying still and shooting at each other until one of you explodes. If the enemy explodes , you move on and do the same thing to the next one. If you explode, either you start back at your base with the next vehicle in your allocation for the current stage, or if you were already on the final one, you fail the mission. 

 

Aesthetically, it's fine I guess. It's got a similar look to other western-developed Playstation games that take place on battlefields, the one that keeps coming to mind in particular being Populous: The Beginning, despite the wildly different themes and settings between the two games. But there's nice terrain, cute little buildings decorating the place, and so on. I even really like the models for some of the NORAD vehicles! Something I have to address, though, is that the game does suffer from "the western mecha problem": all of the mecha are just ugly grey boxes plopped on top of a pair of chicken legs like a mechanical version of Baba Yaga's hut. The more powerful the mecha, the bigger the grey box, and not a single arm or hint of aesthetic flair among them.

 

Despite all the bad things I've had to say about War Games Defcon 1, I actually don't hate this game. It's okay. I think if you were to pick it up, you'd probably play a couple of stages, think to yourself "that was alright, I'll have to get back to it some time", and then you'll never play or think about it ever again. But you probably won't hate it!

Solitary Fighter (Arcade)

 Solitary Fighter is the sequel to a much better-known game, Violence Fight. Though its more of an expanded rerelease, since it has exactly the same plot, and it mostly plays in the same way, with the main (but not only) difference being the addition of a few more playable characters. This is probably a contributing factor into why it's so forgotten, but the biggest factor is definitely the circumstances of its release: it has the misfortune of being a pre-Street Fighter II-style fighting game released in 1991, the same year as Street Fighter II. So no matter what, it would have looked like a weird, awkward throwback.

 

But here in 2025, it's that weird awkwardness that makes it interesting: it's a fighting game, but not following the formula that SFI codified. So, it's set in 1950s America, and all of the characters are fighting for cash prizes in warehouses and other such places. Most of the stages are in a beat em up-style forced perspective arrangement, whereby you can walk in eight directions, as well as jumping. Though some stages only let you walk on a single plane (I wonder if this was an attempt at making the game look at least partially like SFII, since apparently, major changes were made to a 1992 Taito game, Dino Rex, for the same reason).

 

You have three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. Pressing punch and kick together makes your character crouch, and pressing either of the attack buttons together with jump does a special  move of wildly varying usefulness. One of the characters, a balding fat idiot dressed in stars and stripes has headbutts instead of kicks. While you're fighting in the beat em up-style stages, sometimes armed audience members will invade the fight, but the thing is, they're just interested in violence, they don't seem to care where it goes. They'll start out attacking one fighter, then change their mind and attack the other, until they take enough hits themselves that they decide it's no longer worth the effort and give up.

 

Maybe the weirdest element of the game is the health bar. It goes down in inconsistent, seemingly random amounts in response to characters taking attacks, and also it'll often start going back up again immediately afterwards. And getting a character's health bar to zero isn't enough to knock them out, you've got to hit them again after that (and if it goes back up, you'll have to deplete it again). Plus, it seems like you can't win with a throw? It makes for a game that feels very imprecise and unpredictable in a way that removes any satisfaction from victory.

 

Solitary Fighter isn't a completely terrible game. I do really like the setting and how the game looks in general, and I am always on the lookout for games that offer takes on fighting that feel different to typical fighting games. But none of this is enough to make it good. I think the absolute best you might hope for is having one or (at most) two fights with a friend, as a little comic relief between better games.

Burger Kitchen (Game Gear)

 

 This is the first game I've played from Habit Soft, who've physically released a bunch of newly developed games for a variety of old consoles! With the exceptiong of a URL on the title screen, it really looks, sounds and feels like it could have come from the Game Gear's actual heyday (in contrast to something like M2's GG Aleste 3 from 2020, that pushes the hardware to its absolute limit, making a game that would have seemed impossible on the home consoles of the early nineties, let alone the humble Game Gear). Even the cutified burger restaurant theming calls to mind the fascination Japanese pop culture had with McDonalds (and similar chains) for a couple of years, as seen in things like Project A-ko 3 and Space Fantasy Zone.

 

How it works is that you've got a playfield that's four spaces high and eight spaces tall. Into the field will fall horizontal pairs of burger layers, being the burgers themselves, the top or bottom halves of the breadcake, or slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bacon (that looks more like salami), and that weird egg slab that only exists in burger restaurants. You lose when all the pieces pile up to cover the top space of either of the two middle columns. If two identical pieces are placed atop each other, they disappear, but you score no points.

 

To actually score points, you've got to construct burgers according to various recipes. There's got to be bottom bread on the bottom, a certain collection of ingredients in the middle, and a top bread on top. Then the whole thing will disappear, and you'll score the "price" of that particular recipe, or half the price if the ingredients were right, but in the wrong order. You'll have a quota of certain specific recipes to make a few times to clear each stage, but you still get points for non-quota burgers you make.

 

There's two game modes, the first of which being mission, where, upon completing a stage's quota, you go onto the next stage with a shiny new empty playing field, and which ends after five stages. The other is endless, where filling a quota will immediately start the next one, but since you can make any burgers for points, you really just need to have remembered all of the recipes and make what you can, when you can. Endless mode never clears out your playing field, and once you get to its equivalent of stage five, the quota has an infinity symbol, and the game just continues until you get a game over.

 

The game's cute and it's decently fun, and I do keep going back to it. But there is a frustrating little problem. Every recipe has to have a bottom bread on the bottom to be valid, and it's pretty often the case that there'll be no bottom bread pieces in the first few pairs that drop. Now, you can hold one for later, like in most modern Tetris games, but it's still frustrating that you can't even start putting things together for the first few drops. I'm ot sure exactly how I'd fix this, except for maybe eliminating the bottom bread piece and having a permanent layer of them beneath the playing field? It's not a massive problem, but it does bother me a little, especially since it's there every time you play,pretty much.

 

Burger Kitchen is a game that's cute, but very flawed, but also one to which I keep returning despite those flaws. It's really difficult to decide whether or not it gets my recomendation! I guess I'll say: it's fine? Play it if you want?

Ganso Jajamaru-kun (Wonderswan)

 

 The original Ninja Jajamaru-kun was a fairly early Famicom release, and is typical of such, being made up of very similar stages that gradually increase in difficulty, and through which the player progresses by killing all of the enemies, rather than by reaching a goal. Also typical of many games of the time, there's various little semi-secret methods for scoring extra points (and by extension, gaining more lives). Wikipedia says that Ganso Jajamaru-kun is a remake of that original game, but I'd say it's really a sequel that happens to skew closer to the original than the earlier sequels did (as they tended to follow the trends in the platform genre in the late 80s and early 90s).

At first glance, it is very very similar to the original game: each stage has eight enemies roaming around a stage with four floors. Parts of the floors can be destroyed from underneath, and some of these destroyed floor panels will reveal power ups. There's also the secret power up that will only appear after you've already had three different power ups, that summons a giant frog for you to ride around. But there's some new stuff. Like the sakura petals the princess drops aren't just optional items to get more points and access to the bonus stage. In this game, if you don't collect a petal on a stage, you'll have to go back and do the stage again before you're allowed to fight that area's boss. (Boss fights being another new element that wasn't present in the original).

 

There's some other eccentricities I've noticed regarding this petal business. When you finish a stage, if you didn't lose a life, you'll get a time bonus. It's pretty easy to zoom through the stages quickly and get a big time bonus, but the clock starts at 120 seconds, and the princess won't drop the petal until it reaches ninety seconds (I word it like this because if you collect the watch item that adds seconds to the clock, she still waits for it to say ninety, rather than when you've been in the stage for thirty seconds). So you might want to repeat stages for more points. Except! That after every boss you beat, the amount of points-per-second awarded for time bonuses increases by ten. So while you'll get more points in the short term by repeating stages, this means your score won't be increasing as quickly as it would if you just progressed through the game normally (plus the repetition is a hassle).

 

There's some improvements over the original that really stem from the fourteen years between the two games' releases. Like, the controls and Jajamaru's movement just feel smoother, more responsive, and generally a lot better in this game. Furthermore, it looks great. It's obviously all rendered in eight shades of grey, but the backgrounds are beautifully drawn, and there's even the occasional full screen piel art cutscene. Though it's a game that was old-fashioned on its original release a quarter of a entury ago, Ganso Jajamaru-kun is still a game that I think is a lot of fun, and definitely worth your time (though like almost all Wonderswan action games, it fetches a completely obscene price on the secondhand market in 2025, so definitely just emulate it).

Fighting Road (NES)

 Something that really interests me in regards to game design is iteration and evolution: adding new ideas to existing concepts, as well as early experimental steps towards what would later become popular genres. Fighting Road represents an attempt to add more complicated storytelling to an early Yie Ar Kung Fu-style fighting game. It feels like such an ecolutionary step towards the style for which SNK would later become known that I even went to check that Takashi Nishiyama wasn't involved in its creation (as far as I can tell, he wasn't).

 

The story told in Fighting Road would fit right into a 1970s kung fu movie: the protagonist goes looking for his brother, fighting various other martial artists along the way, as well as learning that his brother has joined an evil gang. It's told via some great-looking cutscenes that make use of blocks of text and still pixel art. Technological limitations do kind of dampen the excitement in that in the first six stages, you fight three different opponents, as well as recoloured versions of those same opponents meant to represent different characters. To be fair, the characters are big and well-animated for a NES game in 1988, so they probably did take up a lot of space on the cartridge, meaning that a completely new opponent for every stage would have been an expensive prospect, and may even have forced compromises in regards to the cutscene art, which seems like it was probably a big selling point for the game.

 

To make matters worse, as well as repeated opponents, each stage consists of two fights against that stage's foe, which a cutscene in the middle. Clearly, a problem with the game was that the designers had a very specific concept for it, and they were desperately trying to juggle their intentions regarding storytelling, keeping the cost of production down, and ensuring that the game wasn't so short and easy that players finishd it the same day they bought it. But thirty-seven years later, shorn of that context, what you've got in Fighting Road is a conceptually interesting game that's turned out to be more than a little bit boring in practice. 

 

Another problem is that it doesn't really feel good to play. I mentioned before that the animation was surprisingly good, but it's unfortunately too good. There's too many frames for every action you might take, meaning that there's a bit too much of a delay between you pressing the button and your character executing the action. You've also got a pretty big repetiore of moves at your disposal, and most of them are easy enough to figure out, but you've got a power meter that theoretically allows you to fire a projectile attack once it starts flashing. However, even after looking up the command for this attack online, I've not been able to successfully pull it off even once.

 

I really wish I liked Fighting Road more than I do. It's an interesting game that's a few years ahead of its time, but unfortunately those few years do make a difference, and the technology and the concepts in game design just weren't there yet to support the kind of game that it wants to be. I'd say it's worth a look out of curiosity, but not really much more than that.

Card Captor Sakura: Clow Card Magic (Playstation)

 While there's a very well known Playstation puzzle game that's a Cardcaptor Sakura tie-in (Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart), but this one, which is an entirely orignal game, rather than a themed re-skin of an existing one, is not so celebrated. Having now played it, I can see a few reasons for that. Not that it's necessarily a bad game, but it definitely doesn't have the broad appeal that "Tetris with characters you love" does. 

 

The biggest problem the game has is something I'll get to later, but the second biggest is that upon first playing it, it's not really clear what you're supposed to do. You choose to play as either Xiaolang or Sakura, and each stage sees your chosen character walking along a long transparent grid-marked road in the sky. Ahead of you, you'll see spinning Clow Cards in four colours: red, green, blue, and yellow. You shoot magic at them, and they disappear. Sometimes, you'll shoot one card, and a whole bunch of them will disappear, awarding you points.

 

What's happening here is that there's a kind of rock-paper-scissors circle involving the four colours, whereby shooting one colour will cause adjacent cards of the next colour in the cycle to disappear too, and they trigger the next colour, and so on. The cycle goes Red-Green-Yellow-Blue. In easy mode, it doesn't matter which button you press to shoot at a card, while in normal mode, each of the four face buttons is assigned a colour. If you shoot the wrong colour at a card in normal mode, it spawns a card of that colour. So, if you're smart (and dextrous), you can strategically place new card among the pre-existing formations to link together massive chain reactions and get many more points.

 

There's also a bit of a meta element to the game: each stage also has a meter for each of the four colours. The meters fill up as you vanish cards of their respective colour, and when filled to the top, you capture one of the Clow cards. Capture all four cards in a stage and afterwards you'll also get a fifth one. Get all the cards across the ten stages in story mode and you go on to play the extra eleventh stage and see the real ending (unfortunately, all the story scenes are the same with both characters).

 

Now, onto that biggest problem previously mentioned. What it is is that there's no playable modes other than the story mode (in which the stage layouts are identical every time), in easy or normal difficulty. I think it's a game that would have really benefitted from an endless score attack mode, or maybe even some kind of competitive mode. But you'll play through what there is in a few hours at most, and there's not much else in there, which is a shame. If you can read Japanese, there is some extra value in the very extensive Clow Card Uranai mode, which allows you to have your fortune read by various characters from the show, on a variety of subjects, using the Clow cards for cartomancy rather than the tarot.

 

Clow Card Magic is an incredibly cute game, and it's definitely worth the time of any Cardcaptor Sakura fan, since it does such a great job of capturing (ho ho) the look and feel of the show and its world. For anyone else, though, it probably won't hold your interest, and the re-themed Tetris is probably a better bet for you. (Apparently, the mode that appears in later Tetris games that builds on the ideas of that game is considered one of the great monumental challenges for Tetris players!)

Kanon Defence Force (PC)

A while ago, I reviewed Gensokyo Pro Wrestling Muscle Tag Match, a game which dared to ask the question "what if Touhou characters were in Kinnikuman Muscle tag Match?", and in that review, I mentioned that putting Touhou characters in things was the more modern version of putting characters from visual novels in things. So here we have Kanon Defence Force, a game that puts characters from the visual novel Kanon into an Earth Defence Force game. Or rather, an isometric 2D approximation of an Earth Defence Force game.

 

I don't know anything about Kanon, because I have no interest in visual novels generally. But from an oursiders perspective, I think it might be about sad little girls dying of tuberculosis or something? Anyway, this game has you playing as a selection of those little girls, and you go around shooting what appears to be a huge army of people in frog mascot costumes. Interestingly, these frogpeople do parallel the bug monsters from the EDF series. They start with regular frogs who shoot yellow stuff at you (like EDF's ants), then there's ninja frogs who jump around throwing webs (like EDF's spiders), and though I haven't been able to get more than about eight stages in, I really hope there are kaiju frogmen and centipede frogmen later in the game. I guess there's an incentive for me to keep playing, right there!

 

There's not much more to it! Rather than the item-based progression system in EDF, it's got a more traditional levelling up system, whereby you get a bunch of experience points at the end of each stage, gradually getting more HP and MP, and sometimes unlocking more weapons. Structurally it's just like EDF, though, with you picking a difficulty level and a stage, then returning to the menus after you complete the stage (or fail to). Best of all, just like in EDF, most of the scenery is destructible!

 

Regarding the scenery, as mentioned, I have no knowledge of Kanon's canon. So, for those of you who do have that familiarity, I have a question: is it explained in there why all of the stages in this game are covered in snow? And why some of the stages take place in Egypt, also covered in snow? Or is it just yet another case of an otaku game developer inserting into their work stuff they thought was cool that they'd seen in Mu magazine?

 

Kanon Defence Force is an incredibly okay game. For this review I've played a couple of sessions, each more than an hour in length, which is absolutely not the best way to play it. I'm sure it's a lot more enjoyable playing a stage or two now and then in isolation over a long period of time, but plaiyng it like I did, it's really worn on me. But if you were to play it, I'm sure you wouldn't be doing so after days of failing to find a suitable subject for review on your wekkly-updated blog. Even so, if you do intend to play it, I'd say get it from the Internet Archive, rather than hunting down a physical copy. (On the subject of physical copies of doujin games, I found out the other day that copies of Platine Dispositif's Comiket 87 STG sell for significantly more than what I paid eight years ago. But I'm too stubborn to sell.)

Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.

Mon Mon Monster (MSX)

There's two particular types of nonsense that have long since been exorcised from the language of modern games design. Rick Dangerous nonsense is when a game's made up of nothing but memorising the locations of invisible threats, and then demonstrating that knowledge to avoid them in succession (because they're invisible, and it's impossible to avoid them without foreknowledge of their locations). The other is Tower of Druaga nonsense, whereby progression through a game is blocked by obstacles that need to be tackled in a certain way, with no in-game clues as to what those means are, or often even that the obstacles themselves even exist. Mon Mon Monster (also known as Mon Mon Kaibutsu) is an example of the latter kind.

 

The first stage is pretty normal, to lull the player into a false sense of security. It's split into a few segments, but each one just has you going from left to right fighting enemies and punching blocks, until you find the door to the next one. Eventually, you'll reach the boss, and can punch him to death. The second stage is a lot less clear. It seems to take place on one massive map, there are doors that lead nowhere, doors that send you to an earlier part of the stage, and the boss awaits in a hidden room, behind two destructible walls that don't stand out in any way, and have no clues pointing towards them. The third stage seems to take a moderate place between the previous two, being semi-linear with dead end passages if you take a wrong turn. Though I haven't yet been able to reach the end of stage three, so maybe there is more nonsense to look forward to there.

 

I should probably also describe the game itself, right? Well, other than the implementation of Druaga Nonsense, it's a pretty typical eight bit platform game. You play as a little Frankenstein's monster guy, and you can punch and jump. When you punch, you also shoot out a projectile attack. Enemeis can be hurt by punchs and projectiles, but bosses and blocks have to be punched up close. Sometimes blocks have items in, that might power up your projectiles, restore your health, or give an extra life. In terms of quality, it's not up there with the big names of the era, but it's still a little above average. It mostly feels good enough to move around, jump, and so on. There's a weird technical quirk that means your projectiles are sometimes invisible, but they still hurt the enemies, so it's not a big problem.

 

That's all I really have to say about Mon Mon Monster, to be honest. It's a robust enough platformer, especially considering its age, but I just don't have the patiences to keep searching for invisible routes to progress. Other than that stuff, though, it's not that difficult a game! If only the developers had designed their stages without the assumption of clairvoyance on the part of the player, this would have been a much better game.