Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M (3DS)

 It seems slightly incongruous for there to be a first party Nintendo game here, but it's one that doesn't even seem like it's been forgotten in the decade since its release, but rather no-one took any notice of it at all. They did try to build hype for it, and I definitely remember downloading the demo at the time, too. But no-one cared. If people were buying and playing it in 2015, then they weren't talking about it, and with it being a decade old now and with the 3DS having a minor renaissance in 2025 (thanks to the combination of broke nostalgic young people and the high price of new consoles - exactly how "retro gaming" should be!), I still don't see anyone talking about it.

 

Code Name S.T.E.A.M is a turn-based strategy game, with some mild action elements. You control a squad of very toyetic soldiers, with steam-powered armour and weapons. Moving a space uses up one unit of steam, different weapons use different amounts to fire, usually between two and four. Each of your soldiers generates eight steam per turn, and can store up to ten (though these numbers will change slightly as you unlock more equipment). So if you leave a couple of steam units at the end of a turn, they'll carry over into the next turn. Furthermore, when you fire weapons, you don't just select your target and pick "fire" from a menu: you've got to aim and fire yourself, either using a joystick on the touchscreen, or the right analogue stick if you're playing on a New 3DS.

 

I've played about ten stages so far, and all of them have had the goal of getting at least one of your soldiers (or in one case, an escorted non-combatant) to a goal area on the other side of the battlefield. After a few turns, more enemies will start generating on the map, so if you have infinite patience, you could theoretically keep killing them forever. But the battles also tend to be pretty tight, with my guys often just barely crawling over the finish line to end a lot of the battles. I think this whole semi-turn-based approach might be taken from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles series, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I can't completely confirm this. 

 

As well as the toyetic protagonists, the game as a whole has a distinct aesthetic to it, too. The tech is all steam=powered, and your homebase is a blimp, but a lot of the fashion and such looks more inspired by 1930s and 40s military uniforms, and the world in general is a mixture of lots of brss and polished wood, with American and British flags draped everywhere. It kind of brings to mind a theoretical Fallout cartoon, made for an audience of kids in 1994. (I'll take this opportunity to make clear that I don't consider a work to be "steampunk" unless it's explicitly anti-imperialist, and since the aforementioned non-combatant you have to escort is Queen Victoria, this game definitely isn't that.)

 

This is a decent enough game, I guess. Playing through a stage is a decent enough way to pass twenty minutes or so, and there is some satisfaction to be derived from the active aiming, plus some of the sillier weapons are a lot of fun too, like the Lion Launcher (wielded by a lion-man named Lion, it makes him bounce on top of enemies for big damage), and the healing gun. Plus, if you play it, you can put it on your list of "3DS hidden gems" for internet clout, since I haven't seen anyone do that so far. Also uncharacteristically for a first party Nintendo game, you can pick up an actual copy for a pittance, if you are a cartridge-accumulating little freak.

Saikyou! Takada Nobuhiko (SNES)

 The early-mid nineties were a time of great experimentation in the world of professional wrestling, both in terms of presentational style and in terms of the actual way wrestling was done. I think to most western fans, the most famous part of this experimentation is from the hardcore style as seen in ECW, FMW and Big Japan, that would eventually go on to be copied (in a watered-down form) by WWE for their massively popular attitude era. But there were other innovations taking place at that time, including in a Japanese promotion called UWFi, where an almost opposite approach was being taken.

 

UWFi took note of the rising popularity of kickboxing, mixed martial arts, and other legitimate combat sports, and sought to create a wrestling style that emulated them, and it's this style upon which Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko is based. (It also takes the very early nineties approach of only featuring one real wrestler, fighting renamed unlicensed versions of other wrestlers.) Thie results in a game that plays very differently to any other, not least because the UWFi used a completely different ruleset than that seen in mainstream wrestling promotions. Furthermore, the action takes place on a single plane, like a contemporaneous fighting game (but in keeping with the shoot style, there's no jumping and not really any special moves).

 

There are a few rulesets in the game, but the main (and most interesting) one is the main ruleset used by UWFi. Matches have a thirty minute time limit, and wrestlers also start each match with fifteen points each. One point is lost when a wrestler is suplexed, or when they escape a submission hold by grabbing the ropes. Three points are lost if a wrestler is down on the floor long enough for the referee to start the ten count. If a wrestler submits to a hold, fails to answer a ten count, or if they're reduced to zero points, they lose the match. In game terms, the wrestlers have two health bars in addition to the fifteen points. 

 

One of the bars regenerates quickly, and when it's depleted, the wrestler goes down and loses three points, while the player has to hammer their controller buttons to try and get back up before the referee counts to ten. The other bar regenerates very slowly, but it only goes down while a wrestler is in a submission hold. When it runs out, they tap and immediately lose the match. Also, while in a submission hold, both wrestlers' players can use the shoulder buttons to edge closer to the ropes or to the centre of the ring.

 

I wouldn't say this is a fun game exactly, and I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to it after this review. But I am always interested in videogames that have people fighting or engaging in combat sports with rules and win conditions that aren't just the typical fighting game knockouts or standard pro-wrestling rules. So I do recommend playing it at least a couple of times to experience that, and maybe it'll click better for you than it did for me. But that's my opinion on it really: not a game I loved, but a game that's interesting and worthy of attention. Also, I hope I wasn't embarassingly incorrect on all the wrestling history back at the start of the review, this kind of shoot style-stuff is a little outside my normal circle of interest. (A little extra note: though I don't often reply to comments on this blog, I do read and appreciate them all.)

Guardians (Arcade)

Also known as Denjin Makai II, this is a game that I'm not totally sure about including. It's very well known among arcade fans, but conversely, it's almost totally unknown to everyone else. There's some reasons for this, like it being a beat em up that came out just a year or two after that genre's original heyday was on the wane. Plus it's in at that level of technology where it was way too advanced for a port to the Mega Drive or SNES (in fact, the game to which it's a sequel got a SNES port for which a lot of compromises had to made, so this one had no chance), but a lot of people would have ignorantly stuck their noses up in the air at a port to Saturn or Playstation.

 

It's a massive shame too, as it might well be the best beat em up from before the recent genre renaissance. You constantly have a whole bunch of attack options, and it offers superior solutions to some long-standing problems the genre had back then. There's a whole bunch of characters to choose from, all of whom are wildly different in design: there's a ninja and a kung fu guy, a big triceratops-man, a very Shiar Empire-looking bird-girl, a muscle-bound soldier, and more. Though the controls are the same for all of them, they all feel very different to play as. Not only do they have different attacks, and different speed/damage/etc. stats, but there's little things, too, like how they utilise weapons, or how much meter their different specials consume.

 

Because this is a game that has both special moves and meter. There's three action buttons in the game: melee, jump, and projectile. Like pretty much any other beat em up, you can repeatedly press melee for combos, and you can also press it with a direction while you're jumping for a few different air attacks. None of that uses up meter, of course, but you have several different options that do. There's the traditional all-around emergency attack, and it did feel pretty liberating once I realised it uses meter rather than health, and there's the projectile attack, which is very useful and uses the most meter for most characters. Finally, each character has a couple of special moves, performed by holding the melee button and either moving the stick side-to-side or up-and-down. That might be a slightly awkward-sounding input method, and in a fighting game, I think it would be (it brings to mind Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), but in a beat em up it works really well. You can quickly learn to hold the button at the end of a combo and immediately go into a special.

 

As well as mechanically, there's lots to love in the game's theme and aesthetics, too. The setting is some kind of futuristic dystopia, though not one that's suffered environmental collapse, as locations include various kinds of big cities, a theme park, a moving train, a forest, a military base in the desert, and more. They all look amazing, with lots of super-detailed pixel art. The enemies are very varied, too, with futuristic soldiers (including what appears to be some kind of penal regiment with their wrists in pillories), a few different superhero-like characters, and weirder things like big-eyed humanoid crocodile monsters. The one weak point I can think of in this area is the boss music, which sounds more like it should be on the options screen of a sports game.

 

Obviously I recommend playing Guardians, it's excellent. It works fine in both MAME and Final Burn Neo, and since Hamster have put out a few Banpresto games already, it'll hopefully turn up in the Arcade Archives series someday. How nice it'll be to finally play a legal version of this game on a home console, a mere thirty years late!