Air Rescue (Master System)

 The original arcade version of Air Rescue was a sprite-scaling version of the ancient game Choplifter, which saw you flying around in 3D rescuing very ugly soldiers from active battlefields. Though it might have been possible to make a decent job of porting it to the Mega CD, attempting to do so on the Master System would have been an act of Ozymandian hyubris. Luckily, that's not what's been attempted here, Master System Air Rescue is more like a decade-later sequel to Dan Gorlin's game.

 

Once again, you're in a helicopter, and once again, you're rescuing little guys. Most of the differences between this game and Choplifter are small, but there's also a lot of them, so it's a different enough experience. The controls are better: there's no longer a button to change which direction you're facing, there's a bunch of weapons to choose from, and you no longer have to sit around waiting for your rescued guys to slowly and individually disembark when you fetch them back to base.

 

The biggest difference is that Air Rescue has significantly more complex stage design than Choplifter. Which you'd expect, with there being a decade bewteen their respective release dates. Right from the first stage, you've got more interesting fields of engagement than Choplifter's flat battlefields. The first stage is a theme park that's been taken over by terrorists, then you're rescuing people from a burning building, a commercial airport, some sinking cruise ships, and some kind of giant underground facility. They all have their own unique feel and hazards, and it doesn't just feel like they're a bunch of hitboxes arranged into different shapes.

 

There is one problem, though. Every stage has terrorists shooting at you, and I guess all of the various disasters were caused by them too? I don't think the game needed that, to be honest. The disasters could just have been disasters, and danger could have been added through gradual escalation of the disasters: boats sinking with civilians still on them, explosions in the burning building, and so on. Maybe all this stuff would have been a little out of reach for the Master System? The game does look great generally, and it was ancient hardware in 1992, so it's likely they were already pushing it as hard as it could go? Still, the constant presence of the terrorists feels a little silly, and I think it would have been better to keep them as a final stage thing. Like "you saved people from passive disasters, but now you have to rescue them from an actively hostile threat!", you know?

 

Despite its shortcomings, I've enjoyed playing Air Rescue. It's a decent enough implementation of a classic concept. It's nothing special or life-changing or anything, but it's not bad, either. It is pretty unforgiving, though, so be prepared to have a little patience when you first start playing.

Venus Wars (NES)

 One of the big hits of that early era of anime movies being released in English in the early nineties, Venus Wars is about (like you might expect) various violent conflicts happening on the relatively recently colonised eponymous planet. It's one of those anime that's known more for looking really cool and having a lot of meticulously animated machinery than anything else. The most famous of those machines are the monocycles, motorbike things that only have one massive wheel, so the natural choice of genre for a videogame in 1989 would be a kind of into the screen racing/shooting game, like Mach Rider.

 

And that's half of the approach taken here! What makes it interesting, is the combination of the race-shooting with the other half of the equation: turn-based strategy! I guess it's like an ancient forebear of The Unholy War/Little Witching Mischiefs or Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki, as you move your units around a grid-based map, and when they collide with enemy units, they enter a little psuedo-3D shooting segment! You can control their speed with up and down on the d-pad, while the two face buttons fire your normal infinite shots or your very limited homing missiles, respectively.

 

While all of your units (except the two trailers that refuel all the others) are a ragtag bunch of rebels on monocycles with the same weapons (but different stats), there's a few different kinds of enemies. There's VTOL jets, a few different kinds of tanks, weird little bouncing robots, and so on. Your homing missles are best used against the flying enemies, since to hit them otherwise means shooting while pulling a wheelie (holding down on the d-pad), which is a little awkward, especially when you're also dodging enemy fire.

 

A few stages in, with almost no warning, a new enemy type appears and brings with it a new playstyle! The enemy type is gigantic tanks, and the playstyle is top-down eight-way shooting! The first time this happened, it really took me by surprise, and my poor biker was crushed almost immediately (don't worry, they just go back to the trailer and they're fine again once the next stage starts). Every time after that, though, these giant tanks are a lot easier and quicker to beat than the normal units, and that's even taking into account that they don't have the sixty second time limit that battles against the regualr units have.

 

Venus Wars (which is listed in some places as "The Venus Wars: Back to the City Io") is a pretty fun game! It's a little repetitive, so I don't recommend playing more than one or two stages in a single sitting, but otherwise I've been enjoying regularly going back to it for the past week or so. There's a translation patch for it out there, with which I have been playing, but I think if you happen to find a reasonably-priced cartridge for sale, there's very little text, none of which is essential, so you can probably play this untranslated pretty easily.