Gunnm: Martian Memory (Playstation)

 Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point. Though I also haven't read the second sequel series, Mars Chronicle, so maybe I have some subconscious aversion to stuff with Mars in the title? Anyway, none of the sequels were out yet when this game was made, but it does apparently adapt the entire original series, with all its tragedy and misery and a severely toned down version of its violence.

 

In case you don't know, the manga details the life of a cyborg girl named Alita or Gally (depending on the version), who is revived by a doctor in a post-apocalyptic world after literally wasting away on a scrapheap unconscious for an unknown, but presumably very long amount of time. The world in which the series takes place is an incredibly horrible one, of constant violence, suffering, and all-new levels of inequality made possible by the mass adoption of artificial bodies capable of replacing almost the entire human body (except for the brain and spinal cord). Even one's own bodily autonomy is subject to sale or theft, and the threat of losing everything to debt or crime is ever-present. Furthermore, everything seems to be filthy and rotting on Earth, while some unseen class with absolute power live in presumed luxury in a city in the sky. It is, essentially, the world in which conservatives want the rest of us to live.

 

Anyway, in this world, you play as Alita/Gally, and you find out that you've got deeply buried memories of being a master of Panzer Kunst, a powerful martial art created on Mars. So you become a bounty hunter, a participant in violent future sport, and more, in search of your place in the world, and hoping you'll find the secrets of your past and where they might lead you in the future. I've played about five hours of the game, which got me through the first couple of arcs, with Makaku's killing spree and Hugo's tragic obsession, and then a little way into the Motorball arc of the manga. The game's got a semi-open world structure, though it is a very small world compared to ones that would come later, and pretty much all the NPCs you meet will only ever say things related to where you need to go next.

 

The first couple of hours will mostly be spent wandering the backstreets and wastelands killing minor bounties to get the upgrades and items that'll let you beat the first few bosses. It's fine, the combat is pretty fun, and these enemies go down quick enough that the grind never feels too heavy. Something cool that happens here and there is that at certain points in the story, you get new bodies, which tend to look cooler than those before them, as well as being big upgrades statistically. Eventually, all this street combat is replaced (presumably temporarily) by Motorball matches, short beat em up-like stages with an all-new control scheme in which you smash a whole bunch of jobbers until the boss player turns up for you to fight. Structurally and mechanically, it's a pretty simple game, but there's just something about it that's very gripping, and while most of my sessions have been about an hour long each, that time flies by.

 

I think a lot of that can be attributed to the game's presentation. It looks incredible, with the Playstation's low-poly models and those dirty low resolution textures used to amazing effect at realising the grimy, horrible world of the Scrapyard. There's also some nice use of lighting, too, as each location can be lit for daylight, dusk, or night time (though these change dependent on the story, not on your actions or the passage of time), adding a whole bunch more atmosphere. Something that carries over from the manga is also the unspoken horror of the world: there are no monsters, mutants, or aliens here. Not even any autonomous robots. Every weird creature you fight, all those semi-sentient deckmen you meet who exist only to provide basic, specific services, every giant freak, or pathetic wretch put together from spare parts is someone that was once human, and still is a human brain who has found themselves, through some kind of circumstance, in the bodies you see there.

 

If you're a fan of the manga, this game is definitely worth playing, it follows the story very closely, and though the NPCs are incredibly vapid, it still does an amazing job of creating a very atmospheric theme park version of the scrapyard to explore and fight weirdos in. It is a shame how much the violence is toned down, too. Obviously, it could never have been as violent as the manga is, but this game is almost completely bloodless! Still, the flaws are relatively small compared to how fun, atmospheric, and engrossing the game as a whole is, and I definitely recommend giving it a try. Such a shame it never got an official translation at the time, too! Especially since the manga and its animated adaptation both did. 

Spriggan Mark 2 Re:Terraform Project (PC Engine)

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a puzzle or shooting game with little text of little importance. However, it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool in this assumption, because Spriggan Mark 2 is actually an insanely ambitious game to have been released on an eight bit console in 1992.

 

When it comes to console shooting games in 1992, I always think of the PC Engine's Soldier Blade. It's an excellent game, and very impressive for the hardware, but when you compare it to the likes of Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer and Thunder Force IV being released on the Mega Drive in the same year, it makes NEC's console look like it was being left behind. Spriggan Mark 2 flies in the face of that, being years ahead of its time in design terms, if not technological. It does appear to be an attempt at making an interactive anime in the form of a shooting game.

 

There's a ton of cutscenes, many with that "big pixel art" style that was so popular at the time, especially on PC Engine CD, and even more impressively, there's also a lot of voice acting to go with them! They tell a very Gundam-like story of stolen prototype weapons, colonists on Mars breaking away from Earth's control, and all that kind of thing. It doesn't skimp on the action, though, as while there's a minute or two of dialogue happening between each stage, and sometimes boss fights will also have a little chat-break preceding them, there's still full shooting stages, sometimes with dialogue and Sonic 3 & Knuckles-style visual storytelling happening while they play out, in a pretty seamless manner.

 

The actual shooting is pretty standard for the era: you have a standard machine gun with infinite ammo, and you can also press select to cycle through a bunch of more exciting weapons with limited uses, like homing missiles and a beam saber (you'd think that would be of infinite use, but it does a ton of damage, and I guess the developers sided with balance over logic here). Flying around firing off homing missles while dodging enemy fire and experiencing your comrades playing out their dramas feels great! There's some really amazing moments of ludonarrative cohesion to be found in this game.

 

Another aspect that feels very much ahead of its time is your health bar: it's a lot longer than you would expect from a shooting game of this vintage, and not only that, it slowly regenerates over time! My original theory was that this was because the developers had gone to a lot of effort to tell a story, and they wanted to ensure that the player will easily live to see it through, but to be honest: the game is still pretty difficult. In a few days' play, I've been able to get as far as the third stage. I don't know how many stages there are, but just judging by what's happening, it feels like the story's still in the early parts of playing out. Technologically, there's also what appears to be little moments of sprite scaling and rotation. It could also be a really good job of faking those effects, but either way, it's impressive.

 

Obviously, this is a game worthy of anyone's notice, especially now that it's been translated into English, so the story can be enjoyed by the JP-illiterate. People (rightly) talk a lot about Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire when it comes to impressive PC Engine games, but Spriggan Mark 2 should definitely be in that conversation, too. And it does all the stuff it does without use of the Arcade Card, too! 

Hammerlock Wrestling (SNES)

 Also known as Tenryu Genichiro no Puroresu Revolution (which was also a tie-in with the excellently named 90s promotion WAR: Wrestle And Romance), Hammerlock Wrestling is a game I vaguely remember trying out back in the ancient days of DreamSNES. Something about it just caused me to bounce off of it (something I've identified and will get into later), but its unusual and very effective presentation did stick with me, so I went back to it decades later.

 

The thing that really stands out about Hammerlock when you start playing a match is that the screen is split into three horizontal areas: the middle shows the arena, and the little sprites of the wrestlers and referee inhabiting it, and the top and bottom areas showing big close-ups of each wrestlers. As the action gets underway and the actual match gets going, the middle part will sometimes be moved to the top or bottom, to allow for a big version of a move that's taking place in-ring, filling two thirds of the entire screen. It's a display of spectacle befitting pro wrestling! 

 

Even more impressive is that while you might expect the individual wrestlers to be represented in the larger scale animations by generic pugilists, but no: the entire roster of twelve wrestlers each has unique sprites at both sizes! Very impressive for a cartridge game released in 1994! In fact, this is generally a game that could only have been released at this time: eight-bit consoles would have a hard time with the three-way split-screen, never mind the huge animations, while this whole approach would have been pointless on more powerful consoles that could push polygons, and with them, offer moving cameras.

 

What's also interesting about the roster is that while it's mostly made up of the regular faces you expect from Japanese wrestling games of this era: copyright-friendly versions of Hulk Hogan, Big Van Vader, The Great Muta, and so on, a lot of them have been changed more than they usually are. Hogan's stand-in Sam Warhammer, for example, looks more like a red-bearded viking than an orange-skinned surfer guy. Also, it's a little unusual that there's no fake Jushin Liger in there, but there is a fake Lex Luger. And only one fake Road Warrior.

 

So, that thing that turned me away from the game in my teenage years? Well, like a lot of the better wrestling games, it attempts a Fire Pro-like timing-based system, but the problem is that it's not really clear exactly when you're supposed to make the input to successfully perform moves when going into a lock-up. I've somehow mangaed to win a few matches, though I can't do it consistently, and it seems like when I think I've figured out the timing, the next match begins and I'm getting it wrong every time once again. I'm not sure if it's a flaw in the design, its implementation, or (most likely) my playing, but it's frustrating.

 

Hammerlock Wrestling (or Genichiro Tenryu no Puroresu Revolution) is obviously a high-quality game, and I really wish I could figure out what it is that's stopping me from consistently pulling off moves successfully. As it is, though, I definitely think it's worth a try, at least, just to see a game with such an ambitious presentation. It really feels like that even though it was developed as a tie-in to an independent promotion, the developers wanted to make a game that stood out, looking bigger and more spectacular than the games put out by the likes of New Japan and WWF.

Robo Pit 2 (Playstation)

The original Robo Pit was a game that I rented multiple times back during the Playstation's heyday. Not alone, of course: Royal Video, the local video shop let you rent one game for two pounds, or two games for three pounds, so Robo Pit was usually the undercard to whatever game was the main event: Soul Blade or Klonoa or whatever it might have been. It was a very basic game in which you built a robot and had it fight against other robots (all built from the same pool of parts to which you had access) in arena battles to gradually make your way up the ranks.

 

It was the robot building that kept me coming back: the idea of character creation was so exciting to me back then that something even vaguely close to that got my interest (I was, of course, very disappointed when the creation feature that had been made so much of in magazine previews of Rival Schools wasn't included in the European version of that game. Furthermore, WWF Warzone's inclusion of a creation mode was so effective that it made a lifelong wrestling fan out of me!). Robo Pit 2 keeps that customisation, but has an all-new structure, and an actual plot!

 

The plot is that the arena from the first game has been taken over by evil robots, and you have to liberate it by fighting them all. But you do so by selecting a path through a semi-linear map instead of a list of ranked opponents, so it's a little different. There's also occasional cutscenes set in a moody prerendered techno-dystopia world slightly reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII or Galerians. Slightly. These maps are made up of concentric circles, with the opponents getting more difficult towards the centre, where lies a boss. At least, I know the first one does, and I assume later ones are the same.

 

The problem is that the first boss represents a massive step up in difficulty compared to everything that came before: its standard weapons are more powerful than any you've faced up to that point, plus it can perform wrestling moves on you, which is something of which the game has made no prior mention. These wrerstling moves are, of course, devastating (wrestling is the strongest fighting style, as we all know). He even tells you in his victory quote to train and come back to fight him again. The audacity of an action game explicitly telling you to grind! Anyway, I spent almost an hour after reaching him grinding (which means fighting the exact same few opponrnts over and over) and gaining two levels. He still annihilated my robot without breaking a robo-sweat.

 

If the actual game itself was fun enough, or if the way it looked was a little more charming (while the low-poly robot models look really cool and toyetic when the camera focusses on them for their win poses, in battle they just kind of look like indistinct brightly-coloured blobs), I might have given Robo Pit 2 a bit more of a chance, maybe ground another level or two to see if I could get any further. But it doesn't. It's a somewhat silly-looking game that's very repetitive to play, and the designers, in an effort to squeeze more runtime out of it, have given it a structure that only serves to exacerbate that repetition. There's still something about this game and its forebear that make me want to root for them, but unfortunately, I do have to be honest and say that Robo Pit 2 isn't worth your time, and worse than that, it won't respect your time.