Still Hunt (PC)

It's been a long time since I last wrote about a Korean game. It was one of the first posts on this blog, in fact: Uzu Keobukseon for Mega Drive. I don't know why it's been such a long time, but here's another Korean work.
It's a blatant "homage" to Treasure's famous debut Gunstar Heroes, and it's possibly a bit better better than the other GH homage, Gunner's Heaven/Rapid Reload for Playstation.
So, it's a running and shooting game, then. You can choose from two characters, Jean and Houn, who have the same default weapons, but they each have three collectible weapons (though you can only have one of the collectible weapons at a time). All the weapons can also be levelled up by using them a lot too, so you'll probably want to find the weapon you like most and stick with it. They also each have a few excluive stages, which is nice. Their respective versions of the second stage are especially notable, as Jean has a stage in which he flies via jetpack, while Houn rides across the sea on a futuristic jetski.
If you want an easy ride through the game, pick Jean. One of his collectible weapons, appropiately named the "Exploder" is a fast-shooting missile launcher whose shots leave explosions that linger and cause damage to enemies for a few seconds, and it burns through boss lifebars like nobody's business.
Whichever character you pick, the game itself is a lot of fun to play, it's fast, there's lots of enemies and explosions everywhere, and it's neither punishingly hard or tediously easy. There are only two major flaws: the first is that for a lot of the stages (especially the earlier ones), there's pretty much no level design. You just run from left to right, shooting enemies as you go until you reach the end. The second flaw is that once you get a few stages in, the enemies take just a tiny bit more damage than I'd like. That one's not really a huge deal-breaker, but it does kind of break the flow a little.
The graphics and music are both really great. The graphics have nice, big, colourful sprites, and look like they could be from an early Saturn or Playstation game (like the aforementioned Rapid Reload), and the music has a nice Mega Drivey feel to it.
I should mention the lengths to which I went to get this game running on a modern (well, Windows XP) computer. Obviously, for a game so old, DOSBOX was a necessity to get it to run. Then there was the question of mapping the controls to my USB Saturn pad, which not only required the use of Joy-to-Key, but also, since the game uses the numberpad for the directional keys, and I'm on a netbook with no number pad, I had to use the On-Screen Keyboard to map them. And finally, there's the copy protection! Before the game loads, you have to bet on who will come first, second and third in a race between seven Haro-like robot things (that also appear in the game itslef as power-ups). There are 100 possible outcomes to these races, and I assume the original game came with a sheet or booklet listing them all. Luckily, the list of results isn't hard to find on the internet, and once you have that, you can play the game without worries.
Despite all these shenanigans, Still Hunt is definitely worth playing. Like I said before, it's fast, pretty and explosionful.

Genseishin Justirisers Souchaku Chikyuu no Senshitachi (GBA)

Gen Sei Shin Justirisers is a TV show. I even saw a few episodes of it, years ago, when I first started watching fansubbed tokusatsu shows, and would download every show I could find. I can't really remember many specific details about the show though, other than being like a slightly more seriously-toned version of Super Sentai, with slightly lower budgets.
THis is a game of it. It's a simple beat em up, you can pick any of the three Justirisers: Riser Glen (red, has a sword), Riser Kageri (blue, has a katar-like weapon and is the token girl) and Riser Gant (black, has a gun), you get to choose your character at the start of each stage. While you're playing, you can choose between fighting with your fists or with your character's weapon. There's no reaason not to use the weapon at all times, though. Especially if you're playing as Gant, obviously.
You can also jump, do a sliding attack across the ground, and use a special attack. The special attack is powered by an "energy" bar underneath your health bar, but there's plenty of items to top that bar up, and the game's so easy, the only use you're likely get out of you special attacks will be as a way to kill the bosses more easily.
The game shares some similarities with the Playstation Super Sentai games (which I should really get around to, some day), in that it splits the action between fighting as the heroes themselves against human-scale jobber enemies, and piloting a giant robot against giant enemies. The giant robot fights aren't very interesting, though: you tap the B button to build up a power bar until it's full a few times, then press A to unleash an attack (there are four attacks, you get the more powerful attacks by filling the power bar more times). In theory, there is an elemen of risk involved in these fights, as the more time you spend building up power, the more likely the enemy monster will attack. Unfortunately, they rarely do, and you can just keep charging up and firing your most powerful attack until the enemy dies.
The game is okay to play, it's not horribly broken and it doesn't have any awful chore-like grinding or anything like that, either. It's just absurdly easy. It was probably made for 10 year old boys, but that's hardly an excuse for this level of feebleness. It's a little more than an hour long from start to finish, and I'm fairly sure I didn't lose a single life along the way, and as I've mentioned before, I'm not really very good at games.