The Terminator (Mega CD)

 It might seem a little odd for me to be writing about a game that's a tie-in to an incredibly popular mainstream movie. But there's a few mitigating factors at play here. Firstly, it's a Mega CD game, and almost every Mega CD game can be considered at least a little obscure. Not only that, but it's also a platformer on the Mega CD, and it was released in 1993, and to the magazines of the time, that was an unforgivable crime. Around about 1993-94, even games now considered universally-beloved classics like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier were getting bad reviews for being "just platformers", and to exacerbate this, critics at the time had somehow gotten the idea that the Mega CD was some kind of wonder consoles that would change the very meaning of videogames, giving us hyper-realistic graphics and games that were indistinguishable from playable movies, and anything that fell short of this was lambasted. Except Thunderhawk, for what I'm sure are totally legitimate reasons.

 

The Terminator, then, is "just a platformer", and it's definitely not as good as those Treasure games I mentioned above. But what it does do is utilise the strengths of the Mega CD to create a big, exciting audiovisual experience. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think it's using a deeper colour palette than the stock Mega Drive would normally support, and there's a few subtle bits here and there in the way certain sections scroll and such that probably wouldn't be impossible on a cartridge, but would at least been a bit of a hefty test of skill for the programmers. There's also clips from the movie played between stages, and the very dark lighting and muted colours of the movie really make for a good fit into the very limited FMV capabilities of the Mega CD. I haven't gotten through the entire game (though I have played more than half way), but it seems like none of the clips used contain any spoken dialogue, which is interesting. Even moreso when you reach the Tech-Noir nightclub, where the BGM is a track made up of little samples of the movie's dialogue. "It's just me.. and him. Cyborg. Cyborg. Cy-cy-cybernetic Organism." and so on.

 

The music is a high point in general, with the aforementioned track being a very of-the-time kind of electronic dancy type thing, and a lot of the other stages being backed by some also very early nineties American-style hair metal instrumentals, mixd with a little movie soundtrack epic bombasticity (you can really tell I'm not used to writing a lot about music here, can't you?). The music was clearly an intentional selling point, too, as three of the five big bullet points on the back of the US case mention it. (It's also credited to Tommy Tallarico in the intro, but in the year 2026, what does that even mean anymore?) The back of the Pal box doesn't mention it at all, with a much more standard, flavourless paragraph just describing the game. I do want to mention that the front of the boxes are very different, somehow, though: the PAL cover is simple, but effective. The Terminator logo and the classic portrait of the T-800 on a black background. The US cover is deranged, however: that same portrait, but copied and pasted around a few times, with a different filter on each one in a very silly and cheap-looking manner.

 

As for how the game plays, it's pretty good. You play as Kyle Reese, and the first few stages have you running around post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and Skynet's base, killing lots of evil robots, until you get to the time machine. Then you're in 1980s Los Angeles, killing lots of punks and hair metal fans. It's kind of similar to the movie tie-ins that Acclaim were putting out on SNES and Mega Drive at around the same time: well-animated sprites, enemies that can take a few hits before dying, lots of ladders to go up and down, and a dark colour palette. It's simpler than those games tended to be in good ways, though: you armed only with your standard machine gun and grenades, rather than having a bunch of gimmicky weapons with limited ammo to swtich between, and while the enemies do take a bit of a beating, so do you. Best of all, you pretty much only ever have to make your way in a generally rightwards direction, with exploration beyond that being optional and rewarded with power-ups. No getting lost in vast labyrinthine stages.

 

There's a few very distinct enemy types in each era, with maybe one or two new ones introduced per stage at most, and they all have very learnable behaviour, another thing I consider a big positive. It's satisfying to see a bunch of enemies you're about to fight, you know how to fight them, and then you execute that. Another cool thing is that you get a whole new look after you time travel! In the future, Kyle's in his military-like resistance outfit, with a futuristic machine gun, then after the jump (since nothing can be brought through the portal orb thing), he gets a trenchcoat and rifle, and his grenades are replaced with molotov cocktails. These 1980s weapons still handle exactly like the 2020s ones, but it's still a cool visual touch.

 

I recommend trying out The Terminator, and make sure you do so with the volume up high. It seems almost as if someone at Virgin (presumably Dave Perry) had the idea of using the Mega CD to adapt the movie into a kind of playable concept album, and in my opinion at least, it's an idea that really paid off. I'll assume it wasn't much of a commercial success, though, not only because it's on the Mega CD, but also because it's apparently one of the rarer games on the system nowadays. What a shame. It'll probably never get ny kind of modern pot or rerelease either, for many reasons. So you know what to do.

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher (Switch)

 The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar. I do remember, probably more than twenty years ago, spending an afternoon playing one of the GBA Monster rancher games via emulation, keeping the fast forward button held down almost constantly. Even further back, I remember people complaining online that there weren't enough female characters in the anime about whom to write yuri. I am, however, a little more familiar with Ultraman, and with kaiju in general, and right from the announcement of a Monster Rancher game about raising Ultraman kaiju, I was interested. So it was among one of the first batch of physical games I bought shortly after I finally got a Switch late last year.

 

Once I started playing the game, it quickly became one that started taking up big chunks of my time. It's not a game I'm always craving, and not one to which I return every day. But when I do load it up, I'm usually there for well over an hour. The game's got a prertty repetitive design, but in a way that just kind of feels good and eats up time? It's split into weeks, and each week you choose what your kaiju is going to do: rest, train, fight in a tournament, or when they're available, fighting a wild kaiju or exploring a maze-like valley full of treasure. When you train, you pick one stat to increase, or two stats with the downside of slightly lowering another. Tournaments and wild kaiju fights are pretty obvious, and I'll get into combat more later. And all the other things make your kaiju tired, so resting is something you'll just have to do every few weeks. The treasure mazes aren't particularly interesting. You move your kaiju through a simple maze, until you find a place they can dig for treasure. They'll get a few items, occasionally one that might advance the plot a little (if you're even interested in the plot. You could easily play this game for a long long time and never even touch it). 

 

But how do you get a kaiju? The series has, since its start, been famous for the system whereby you put a music CD into your console to generate a monster, and that aforementioned GBA game had you inputting words to make them. In this case, there's something that's kind of a middle ground: the game has an inbuilt database of artists and song names, and at the summoning altar, you search for and select a song that'll probide the basis for your kaiju. The database isn't great, and it really doesn't seem like there's much metal representation, unfortunately. But it's still a decent enough compromise that keeps ties to the series' roots and isn't as boring as just typing in a word, like the GBA game.

 

The combat is interesting, a middle ground between action and turn-based that adds a little extra depth to precedings in a few ways. You can control your kaiju by making them walk towards or away from their opponent. At the bottom of the screen, there's four icons representing attacks, at different distances away from your opponent. You have one attack button, and pressing it will make your kaiju pergorm the attack represented by the icon over which they're curently standing. So distance management is important. Each attack consumes a certain amount of a resource called guts. This is constantly increasing at a speed determined by a few factors. I think (but I'm not sure) that your kaiju's speed stat affects it (it also affects your kaiju's chance of dodging attacks), but their current anger level definitely affects it: the angrier they are, the faster it increases. (Anger generally goes up when you make your kaiju train, and goes down when they win fights. If it reaches its maximum, your kaiju goes on a rampage, which could trigger a few different events).

 

Furthermore, the time limit for all fights, tournament or wild, is sixty seconds. This is actually more important than it sounds as knockouts are relatively rare, and if you're fighting an opponent that vastly outclasses you on paper, you could win a time out victory with a ombination of skill and luck. If you've managed to chip a little of a powerful foe's HP off, and they've missed every attack, you might try to run out the timer with lots of weak attacks, each eating up four or five seconds whether they hit or not. It might not be particularly noble, but it's still very satisfying to pull off.

 

I don't know enough about the Monster Rancher series to say whether the use of kaiju in this one is anything more than a thematic and visual gimmick or not. But even if it is, it's a good one. The ranch menu, that has you overlooking a sweeping vista which your kaiju looming over it is cool, and the battles between the big, lumbering beasts also look and feel cool (and their massive forms make the slow pace of their movement and the time spent waiting for guts to recharge feel appropriate, too). I've had a lot of fun with this game so far, and it's pretty clear when I look at everything I'm yet to achieve that I've barely scratched the surface, and that I'll be coming back to it for a long time to come. I definitely recommend picking a copy up.