Moto Roader II (PC Engine)

I don't know a lot about the PC Engine, and the mareting strategies of the companies that made and published games for it, but I think it might be a fair estimate to say that it probably leant towards the otaku end of the market. I say this because it seems like a higher proportion of its sports and racing games have fantasy or sci-fi themes than most consoles, and because a lot of PC Engine games have artwork of scantily-clad anime girls liberally strewn throughout. Moto Roader II is, of course, a futuristic racing game with such teenage boy-baiting artwork featured on its menus and pre-race screens.

For a 1991 console game, there's a fair bit of depth in there too, though. There's three kinds of vehicles to pick from (car, tank and hovercraft), and you can pick a different one for each race. You can also buy upgrades for the tires, body and engine for each vehicle, to improve their steering, health and speed, respectively. Oh yeah, there's health meters, and once they reach zero, it's an instant game over, which is a little unfair, as CPU drivers simply get an automatic last place (even if mor than one drops out), and get to come back in the next race. There's also consumable items to buy, like weaponry (the freeze gun is partcularly brutal) and a one-use repair item. Between the three different kinds of vehicles, there's the usual variations in speed and durability and the like, but one interesting addition is that the hovercrafts, since they float above the ground, can only crash into other hovercrafts.

There's only a few different themes for the tracks, though I guess if it were a more realistic racing game, there'd only be one, so this isn't worth complaining about. Furthermore, there's a couple of different tracks for each theme, and on higher difficulties (and towards the end of the easiest difficulty), the game makes newer, longer tracks by bolting together more than track, with a glowing red tunnel to transition between the different themes.

Moto Roader II isn't a  classic, and I'd go as far as to say that it's barely noteworthy at all. But It's a pretty fun game, like a nerdier version of the Micro Machines games. Though I've only been able to play it single player, it does support up to five human players, which I can only assume enhances the game massively.

Mighty Warriors (Arcade)

I'm sure you all know of the massive fighting game boom that followed in the wake of Street Fighter II and, to a lesser extent Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s, and how along with some classics, there were also some awful, point-missing garbage cash-ins, like Bloodstorm and Data East's unreleased Tattoo Assassins. Might Warriors appears to be one of those cash-ins, though this is just guesswork, as there's very little information about the game's development, or even its release date. The publisher, Elettronica Video-Games, is an Italian company that seems to only make gambling machines now (assuming the company that exists today under that name is the same one).

Anyway, the plot is pretty similar to SEGA's Eternal Champions: a bunch of dead (and exclusively male) warriors from throughout history are given the chance to live again by proving their might. These warriors include the usual Greek, Roman and (very white-looking) Egyptian, as well as a Celt, a non-specific African, a Chinese guy, a viking, some kind of big monk, and, most surprising, a massive Babylonian. Amusingly, it seems the artists had a hard time trying to animate tartan for the Celt's outfit, so they have him in chef-style checkerboard trousers.

They all have their own stages, too, and the stages even have at least two weather/time of day variants each, which is a surprise for a game like this. The reason I'm not mentioning the names of any of the characters, is because they seem to have different names depending on whether the left or right-side player is controlling them. For example, the viking can be Gurdaf on the left, or Gandalf on the right, while the Chinese guy is Hang-Sing or Chang-Kien. I guess this is their way around explaining how two of the same character can be fighting each other?

The game is no classic, as you've probably already assumed, but it does have some more interesting little quirks. Like how before each fight, you pick your character's "mutation". This isn't a special power or trait like you might expect, but one of the other characters that you can suddenly change into at will. Obviously, there's no explanation for this, nor is there any real advantage to doing this in a fight. Furthermore, each character starts every round with a weapon, which disappears if they get to 50% health or lower and get knocked to the ground. There's also little aesthetic touches, like how the continue screen counts down in Roman numerals, and how there's a little animated face between the health bars that says all the "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" stuff. Little touches like these make me think that though the execution isn't great, and the game was almost definitely knocked out as a quick, cheap cash-in, at least someone involved in its creation must have been passionate about what they were doing.

Yeah, Mighty Warriors isn't a game I can recommend at all, but it's a quirky little thing that stands out from the other cash-ins by having a few little sparks of creativity and personality. And also by not resorting to the try-hard me-too shock tactics of games like Time Killers and Bloodstorm.