Danan the Jungle Fighter (Master System)

Danan the Jungle Fighter isn't a very well known game. Most Master System games aren't that well known on the internet to begin with, but this is pretty obscure even among those.
It's a platform game, but with a bit of dialogue here and there (not much by today's standards, but tons compared to most 8-bit games) and it has experience points and equipment. The plot is okay, better than most 8-bit games: in ancient times, a legendary warrior sealed away an evil god and saved the world, and now the tribe next door is trying to bring back that evil god. This is all pretty routine stuff for a videogame plot, until about halfway through the game, you get to the shocking twist that it's actually an army of psuedo-nazis trying to resurrect the evil god, to turn the tide of a war they're losing. There's even a surprising bit of vague racism when you meet one of the Nazi bosses. The end of the game is a bit rubbish. You "fight" some evil priest guy, which looks more like you're repeatedly stabbing him in the bum, then the evil god appears, and dies incredibly easily. I don't know how not-hitler expected to win the war with that thing's aid when it can be easily defeated by a half naked man with a knife. Sorry about the spoilers, if anyone was planning to go and play this game.
The levelling up via experience points only raises your max HP, to make your attacks more powerful, you have to find the knives that are hidden in the game. Not very well hidden, though.
The graphics are pretty good, and the animation, though simple, looks nice enough. Danan's attack animation looks like he's shanking someone, prison style, though. The music is boring and repetitive, but you'll probably barely even notice it's there.
Oh! Another thing, you can collect monkey faces, that allow you to summon animal helpers. But you never will, they're a bit useless, and the game never gets hard enough that you need any help anyway.
And that's the main problem with Danan: it's both easy and short. It's less than an hour from start to finish, which wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that you'll probably finish it on your first go. There is an option at the start to take either the normal route, or "A Very Rugged Path", which is supposedly harder, but the guy doesn't actually let you take the rugged path. i thought it would possibly be unlocked after finishing the game, but that's not it either. Strange.

Pacar (SG1000)

At first glance, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that Pacar is just a crap, lazy rip-off of Pac-Man, but with cars (the name is probably as close to "Pac-Car" as Sega could get without being sued). In reality, it's a pretty great rip-off of Pac-Man!
The fact that the ghosts and... yellow thing have been replaced by cars isn't just an aesthetic change, it leads to the first, and probably most important difference between Pacar and Pac-Man: cars go much slower in reverse. This means that if you want to change direction quickly, you have to turn 90 degrees. You can drive backwards, but it's a lot slower than going forwards, which is pretty dangerous when there are enemies around.
There are other differences, too. For example, there are two mazes instead of one. The game alternates between the two, and each time you clear both mazes, the end of level bonus increases, as does the number of blue cars in the maze.
Blue cars are the most common enemy type in the game, and they just passively drive around the mazes, not making any special effort to try and kill you. Each maze also has one orange car, that appears after you've been in the stage for a certain amount of time. The orange car is much more agressive than the blue ones, actively chasing you around and trying to kill you.
Like Pac-Man, Pacar has special larger dots that temporarily give you the ability to kill the enemies. Like everything else that Pacar takes from it's predecessor however, there's a little more strategy to the power dots.
Firstly, they aren't waiting ready on the map for you to collect them from the start, one appears for every 30 normal dots that you collect. Secondly, the blue cars can collect them, although doing so gives them no special advantage, it does rob you of the chance to get some extra points, both by killing the enemies (the points awarded for which double in the exact same manner as, that's right, Pac-Man), as well as the quite hefty 300 points that each power dot is worth.
There is quite a bit more strategy to the game that i won't go into here, since this is meant to be a review, not a guide.
In summary, though it's not quite as good as later maze games such as Raimais or Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Pacar is still a very good game, definately better than it's inspiration, as well as being a lot more playable today than a lot of it's contempories.