He Jin Zhuang Bei II (Game Boy Color)

I don't know what the title means, or if there's actually a  He Jin Zhuang Bei I, but what I do know is that this is an unlicensed beat em up themed around the Metal Gear Solid games. Despite it's worldwide popularity, Metal Gear Solid doesn't seem to have inspired many pirate games, compared to the likes of Street Fighter or Dynasty Warriors. In fact, before this game, the only previous MGS Pirate I'd seen was a Russian Mega Drive pirate, that was just a quick hack of Crack Down with only the title screen changed.

The game starts with a codec conversation (in Chinese) between Snake, Mei Ling and the Colonel, before dumping you on an RPG-esque map screen. From this map, there are two stages the player can visit, in whatever order they like. There's an incredibly tedious bridge stage, that feels like it goes on forever, and sees Snake fight various kinds of soldiers and also what appear to be martial artists dressed in raggedy jester costumes with sacks on their heads. The other's a kind of warehouse district that doesn't have the jesters, though it does end with a boss fight against a big robot, that towers over Snake (who himself must be about seven feet tall, being significantly taller than most of the human enemy types). I dont know if there's some kind of copy protection that hasn't been cracked, or if there's some I was meant to do but never knew about because I can't read any of the text, but after completing these two stages, I could only play them again, the game didn't open up anything new.

Mechanically, it's very mediocre. Like a lot of other unlicensed GBC beat em ups (especially the many Dynasty Warriors games, and Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War), it has a levelling up system, and for the first few levels of experience, you do very little damage to enemies and every fight is a boring slog. You have a button to attack (doing Snake's punch-punch-kick combo from Metal Gear Solid!) and another to jump. Pressing them together performs a gun attack that drains your health and hardly ever hits, so don't bother with it. Other than that, there's really nothing about the way He Jin Zhuang Bei II plays that's particularly uniue or interesting.

Unless you're a rabid obsessive for either unlicensed games or Metal Gear Solid, there's unfortunately not really much to recommend about He Jin Zhuan Bei II, the various Dynasty Warriors GBC bootlegs are mostly better than it, and it definitely doesn't hold a torch to the excellent School Fighter.

Courageous Perseus (PC-88)

So, this game's older than me, and is a very early action RPG. Being developed and released so close to the dawn of its genre doesn't hold it back, though: it takes place in a relatively large open map, and the only restriction on your exploration is your ability to fight the enemies in a particular area.

Unfortunately, that's a bigger restriction than it sounds. The fact it, in Courageous Perseus, if your attack stat isn't high enough, you won't even scratch an enemy that's out of your league, but your stats increase very slightly for each enemy you kill. So, while it initially seems like the game is an open-world action RPG, it's more of a highly treacherous scavenger hunt, where trying to pick up the clues in the wrong order risks life and limb. You can't hang around an area full of weaklings to grind, either, as slain monsters don't respawn. It kind of reminds me of the DSiWare game Crystal Adventure, which is one long puzzle, in which the player has to discern the order in which every monster and item in the game should be collected or beaten.

Since the game provides nothing but an opportunity to conduct your own long-winded experiments in trial and error, it's mostly a frustrating waste of time. Even if you have a list of the enemies in order of ascending strength, there's still plenty of frustration to be had. The main source being the fact that the enemies just move around the screens completely at random, and it's very easy to get stuck between a bunch of enemies too strong for you to fight, leaving you helpless to do nothing but wait to die or hope that they get out of your way before that happens.

There are good points to Courageous Perseus, though. There's the aforementioned free-roaming aspect, which is years ahead of its time. There's also the graphics. While the island itself is just a bunch of yellow, brown and green blobs, with bright blue water, the monster sprites look great. Though they're tiny and only have a couple of colours to each of them, they're all different to each other, and it's clear what they're all supposed to be.

Courageous Perseus is a game that's impressive and very ambitious, but unfortunately, it's not very fun to play. It's worth playing if you have a curiosity about videogame RPGs from a time before the genre was truly codified by the likes of Wizardry, Black Onyx and Dragon Warrior (although Wizardry, at least, does predate it).

If you do decide to play it, here's the first few enemies in the order at which they can be beaten: turquoise soldier, white horse, satyr, centaur. That's as far as I got, so you'll have to work the rest out on your own.