Martial Masters (Arcade)

 Even down to the most basic level of their PGM hardware being a lot like the Neo Geo, it was always clear that IGS were very heavily influenced by SNK, and in keeping with that, Martial Masters seems at first glance to be an ttempt at making a Taiwanese equivalent to Last Blade 2. I say at first glance, because when you start playing, the period setting (seventeenth century China in this case), slightly brown-heavy colour palette, and smooth animation really bring Last Blade 2 to mind. But when you look a little deeper, you'll discover that this is a game that has its own identity.

 

Before going further, I'm going to contradict that a little by saying that the setting and characters do borrow very heavily from martial arts movies, especially Once Upon a Time in China. However, this actually does serve to make it stand out among fighting games, since there are far fewer games than you'd expect that focus specifically on kung fu, and every character in Martial Masters represents a different style. 

 

This does seem to have posed a challenge for the game's animators, as some of the characters appear to have been animated using rotoscoping. Maybe it was too hard to capture certain styles in 2D without doing that? Whatever the reason, it does result in some very unique-looking fighters, and even though the characters play in similar ways to ones in other fighting games, with traditional special move motions and so on, the different look provided by the overall kung fu theme makes the game stand out in the genre for the way it feels to play.

 

Martial Masters isn't a game without a few features of its own, though, some of which, while maybe not innovated here, were at least uncommon at the time of its release. You can store up to nine pwoer meters, though it's rare to go higher than three, since they're not just used for supers! You can' perform a Guilty Gear-esque burst action by pressing HP+HK while blocking, which is useful, but not as useful as it might have been if you could do it while taking full hits, too. Especially since if you instinctively press HP+HK when you're not blocking, your character will do a taunt. There's a few other uses for meter, too, like launchers, a Vampire Savior-esque power up, and a kind of throw that doesn't deal damage, but does stun the opponent.

 

I briefly touched upon how the game looks earlier, but it does look very good. Mostly. Some of the portraits on the character select screen look bizarre, and as mentioned, the rotoscoped characters stand out a lot in a way that's not necessarily positive. But none of that's bad enough to really spoil the game, and the backgroudns and most of the characters look excellent. To bring up the general kung fu theme once again, it does make all of the attacks, specials, and supers really stand out in a way that is positive. 

 

Martial Masters might not be able to stand up to its contemporaries in that subgenre of "turn of the century fighting games with big sprites and unusually smooth animation" like Street Fighter III, Mark of the Wolves, or Last Blade 2, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. It's a fun game with a unique setting and feel, and it feels good to play. If you want to play it legally, a PGM cartridge would cost you a few hundred pounds, but apparently there was a somewhat recent collection of IGS games on Switch which is presumably a lot cheaper, and includes Martial Masters and a bunch more games (including previous review subject Demon Front).

Speed Power Gunbike (Playstation)

 Some of you might remember that I've already written about Speed Power Gunbike. If you don't remember that, don't worry: it was in a print magazine nearly a decade ago, and I'm probably a lot more clever and better at writing now. Probably. Maybe. This is also one of those cases where I'm taking into account the breadth of my readership and their knowledge of videogames. A lot of my regular readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the game, but plenty of them won't be. And it's not only worth telling those people about because it's a good game, but also because it's an interesting one.

 

It's an Inti Creates game, and if GameFAQs is to be believed (and as I'm increasingly discovering these days, it seldom is), it's their first. If true, they really got off to a strong start, foreshadowing the reputation for excellence they'd go on to  cultivate, though it's a 2D platformer, the genre for which they'd eventually become the most famous. Instead, it's a 3D update of an old concept that's mostly dead in 2025, and was pretty much dead in 1998, too: those road-based action games where your timer is also your health bar. You know: Dash Yarou, Masked Rider Club Battle Race, Mad Gear, and so on.

 

You play as one of three special operatives who get about on special Mospeada-like motorbikes that can transform into trikes and power armour. In bike mode, you go very fast, but it's not very manuverable, and you'll be sent flying if you take damage. In rally mode (the official name of the trike), you're a little slower than in bike mode, but steering is a lot easier, and you just get knocked back a little upon taking damage. In power armour mode, you slowly walk about as you please, or you can charge straight forward for a few seconds, plus you've got access to a whole bunch of weapons and can shrug off most enemy weapons without flinching (though you'll still lose time). 

 

On top of the properties of the different forms, you've also got the transitions between them to tak into account: You can switch between bike and rally mode near-instantly, and either of them can transform into srmour mode in about a second at the touch of a button. But when you transform into armour mode, you'll be charging forward for a couple of seconds, damaging any enemies or destructible scenery that's in your way. But the damage is greater depending on how fast you were going when you transformed. Conversely, when you transform back out of armour mode, you'll go back into the form you were previously. So if you were in bike mode going fast to get that big transform-ram damage, and you need to transform to make a quick getaway while there's still enemies about, you'll be transforming back into the more vulnerable bike mode when you do.

 

The lesson to take from the above paragraph is that Speed Power Gunbike is a game that requires its players to learn it. It insists that you learn its controls, the various systems at play and how they interact with each other, how to best navigate the stages, and the most effective strategies for fighting both the regular enemies and the bosses. The first time you play, you'll find a difficult, weird game with clunky controls, and in which you're constantly crashing into things andgetting hit. But the more you play it, the better you get at it, and the better you get, the more fun it is. Once you get the hang of playing it, you'll be speeding along, transforming right when you need to. It all results in a feeling of satisfaction, like that of gliding a pair of scissors down a big sheet of wrapping paper. But better, because you're not cutting wrapping paper, you're destroying stuff at high speed using transforming motorbike power armour in a setting that looks like all the best sci-fi OAVs you watched on VHS in the 90s.

 

That brings me onto the subject of how the game looks. Like you can see in the screenshots, it looks great. But unlike some Playstation games that look great by pushing the system to its limits, like Ridge Racer Type 4 or Vagrant Story, Speed Power Gunbike's secret is slightly different. This is instead a game that looks great by really leaning into what the playstation does well, in a way that few others do. Most of the things in-game are machines, buildings, and bits of big futuristic infrastructure, all depicted using big chunky polygon models, and textures that use lots of simple, solid colours to show the smooth metal and concrete surfaces that are so prevalent in this world. Even going down grey underground tunnels, it still looks great, and those grey moments mainly just make the big colourful moments of spectacle stand out even more.

 

Though this is an excellent game, it's excellent in a way that I can't recommend it unconditionally. If you're likely to just give it one go and give up on it upon the first failure, then don't bother. It's just not for you. Not every game is for everyone, don't worry about it. But if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, and put some effort into developing skill at playing an idiosyncratic action game, then you should definitely look into Speed Power Gunbike, as it's a game that'll give you back as much as you put into it.

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.

Lord Monarch - Tokoton Sentou Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 I first tried this game out a few years ago, when the translation patch first got released, and I immediately bounced off of it. It seemed to be a boring, passive game that mostly played itself, with little input or agency for the player. I recently gave it another chance, though, ans this time, I don't know what's different, but it really clicked with me, and got me hooked!

 

So, it's a real time strategy game for the Mega Drive (a cohort which is stronger than you might think, also including games like Herzog Zwei and Dune II, which is basically the start of what people think of as real time strategy games), and since it's from a time befroe the genre was really codified, it's pretty unique one. You mostly don't have to take charge of building or directly controlling units. They'll just kind of do that themselves. Your soldiers will build forts and roads, and the forts will generate more soldiers.

 

Your input, especially in the ealry stages is pretty much managing the tax rate in real time, and even there, there's a marker advising you on where the best place to put it is. Building forts (and bridges, and other projects) takes money, and your income is determined by some secret algorithm that takes into account the number of forts you have and how high the current tax rate is. However, you need soldiers to do your building and fighting, and their generation is controlled by a similar algorithm that takes into account the number of forts and how low the current tax rate is. 

 

For the first few stages, you'll probably be able to get by pretty easily by just adjusting the tax rate how the game tells you to. Before long, though, you'll have to start telling soldiers to do things like building bridges and fences, sealing up monster-spawning caves, and even directing the directions in which they expand your territory, rather than just letting them spreadout wherever's closest. Another thing you'll start finding use in is ignoring the tax guide and setting it to maximum or minimum for short bursts when you feel like you need a quick injection of either resource.

 

Something I haven't yet mentioned that deserves a mention is how the game looks. Lord Monarch was originally released on Japanese microcomputers, and has been ported to a bunch of different systems. I think the Mega Drive port might be the best looking of them! The graphics ingame are small but detailed, being both full of character as well as clear and readable. Out of actual gameplay, there's an overworld map and a bunch of cutscenes, both of which look amazing. The map is full of really nice isometric graphics, while the cutscenes are made up of big, beautiful pieces of still pixel art. And in all cases, the colours are incredibly bright and bold. It doesn't make use of any special trickery like some Mega Drive games have, but it's still one of the best-looking games on the system.

 

Lord Monarch is a really great game! It's a shame that it never got officially translated at the time of its release, but luckily, yet again, twenty-first century fans have stepped in to fic the mistakes of twentieth century corporations. It's a little odd, and very different to most other strategy games, but it's definitely worth giving it a try. Or even two tries, as my story attests.