Banshee (Amiga)

 It's a shooting game, and it's on the Amiga, so I'm sure many of you can predict that this won't be a positive review. I do have some nice things to say about Banshee, though, so look forward to that, at least. I'll start the slating here by stating that this game was only released on the 32-bit Amiga models, the 1200 and CD32. Why, though? There doesn't seem to be anything technologically strenuous going on here, and the 16-bit Mega Drive and SNES, and even the 8-bit PC Engine all have shooting games that are faster and more frantic.

 

That's not to say that Banshee is a bad-looking game, though. In fact, all of its positive qualities are in the visual department. But they're also all the result of some really great pixel artistry, not any special effects or graphical trickery. The game takes place in an exagerrated early twentieth century kind of setting, and all of the backgrounds and sprites are full of detail and life. One thing worthy of highlighting is the way that soldiers die. You're mostly fighting vehicles of varius kinds, but there are tiny little infantrymen running aorund and shooting at you, too. Sometimes when you shoot them, they'll fall over into a pool of their own blood, sometimes they'll crumble into a pile of bones. Sometimes, if you're quick enough on the draw to blow up the transport bringing them to the battle field, they'll flee from the wreckage, with their clothes ablaze.

 

For reasons I'll get into later, I only managed to get as far as the second stage, but it's set in the capital city of the enemy nation, and it's even more full of details. You see women pushing prams, soldiers on roofs who fall to their doom when you shoot them, or riding round the streets on motorbikes, with a gunner in a sidecar shooting at you. I could keep going on about all the cool little things I saw in the relatively small portion of the game I played, but I guess I have to get onto the reasons why all of these things represent a tragic waste of effort and talent.

 

The first problem you'll encounter is that your weapons feel incredibly weedy. Power-ups are rare, and seemingly ganded out at random, meaning a lot of the time, you'll only get useless junk (you can shoot the items to change them into other items, but each one only has between one and three possibilities, and a lot of the time, none of them will make you any more powerful. Another thing that seems to be random is how much of your power you get to keep upon death. Sometimes you'll stay at the same power level, sometimes it'll be slightly diminished, and sometimes it's straight back to the default peashooter. The second problem is one that dawns on you after you kill your first boss: the stages are insanely long. That first boss you kill, if it ended the first stage, would have represented the end of a stage with a perfectly fine and normal length. It actually represents you having gotten a third of the way through the stage, with two more boss fights to (eventually) reach and survive.

 

Another weird thing is that there's no music in the game! Not even in the CD version! I feel like shooting games as a genre are known for having great soundtracks, so one that doesn't have one at all seems very strange, and it feels a little cheap, too, to be honest. It really feels like the pixel artists for this game were let down by everyone else working on it. Looking at Lemon Amiga, this was very well received by magazines at the time, with no review scores lower than 80%. Now, the Amiga specialist magazines I can kind of see, they were clinging to a zombie system and some of the writers might not have played any console or arcade shooting games. But even Gamesmaster, a multi-format magazine, gave it a glowing review and a score of 83%! Doing their readers a disservice, all of them. I won't, though: don't play this game, it's not fun.

Mobile Fighter G Gundam (SNES)

 Round about the turn of the century, when access to SNES emulation became more widely available, there were a few previously Japan-only games to which a lot of people (especially young teenagers) flocked, due to their being tie-ins with anime that were becoming popular in English-speaking countries at about the same time, thanks to the multi-year delay that that process had back then. Sailor Moon: Another Story, Dragonball Z: Hyper Dimension, and most relevant to this review, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Duel were three such games.

 

Sailor Moon was an okay RPG, and Hyper Dimension had the distinction of being better than the only other Dragonball game me and my friends had played at that point, the awful Dragonball GT: Final Bout on Playstation, but Endless Duel was a legitimately excellent game. Like, probably the best fighting game on the SNES, and definitely the best-looking SNES fighter. G Gundam had not yet had any kind of release in the UK yet, and I think wasn't very well-known in the US either, so no-one really paid its game any mind. It's also a fighting game, though, and in retrospect, it should have been excellent: the show was, after all, essentially Street Fighter II but with giant robots.

 

It won't be much of a surprise to careful readers of the preceding paragraph, but G Gundam just doesn't match up to the following year's game in any way. The easiest way to put it is that it feels like Endless Duel was developed to be as good a game as possible, and it also happens to be a licensed game, while G Gundam fits right alongside a lot of the other bog standard SNES anime tie-ins. It even has the presentational quirks a lot of similar SNES games have, like loud, low quality voice clips taken from the show, background screens where the show's logo scrolls by diagonally, and so on.

 

I will say, though, that it is a perfectly okay fighting game. Every character plays differently, they all have special moves with proper input commands, and there's also a desperation move for each of them. There's even a few features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 1994 fighting game: seperate story and arcade modes, and a team battle mode, for example. Plus: the stages have different colour palettes showing the progression of time from round to round! SNK had introduced that feature a few years prior in Fatal Fury, but it was still very rare at the time.

 

I actually do really like the way the game looks, too. It's a shame that it's doomed to be compared to the vastly superior Endless Duel, because just as it plays perfectly fine, G Gundam also looks fairly decent, too. The sprites aren't very big, but they are nice to look at, and detailed in a way that reminds of a particularly great-looking Game Gear game. Which does sound like damning with faint praise, I admit. The aforementioned backgrounds are also very well-drawn, all depicted places in which fights took place in the actual show, too.

 

I've spent most of this review comparing G Gundam to other games, which might not seem fair, but I'll be honest here: it is a very standard, okay, average fighting game. If it weren't for the license, it would have been even more forgotten than it actually is, and if it weren't for the massive shadow cast by the other Gundam SNES fighting game, there'd be very little to say about it. Play it if you're a fan of the show and/or you're curious about it, but don't expect to unearth a lost classic or anything.