Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure (Mega Drive)

 

 Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures. For a couple of short years, I loved the TV show, the comic, and when it came to pass that a Mega Drive game was coming, I became obsessed with wanting to play it, even using the screenshot maps in the second issue of Sega XS as a substitute until I was able to. As was the fashion at the time, the game would obviously be a platformer where you defeat enemies by jumping on their heads.

 

There would be a second Tiny Toons Mega Drive game a few years later, a comedy sports title. But by the time it came out in 1994, I'd long since lost interest in the show. Buster's Hidden Treasure though, I did get to play, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a pretty good, and very well presented iteration of the generic Sonic-wannabe game. Buster can run really fast, even to the point where his legs start revolving in a circle like Sonic's do, and the first few stages take place in grassy plains, and the final ones in industrial factories.

 

There's some weirdness in here, though. Tiny Toon Adventures was a silly comedy show, so while they managed to use a villain from the show, Dr. Gene Splicer, there's no enemy army to populate the stages. There's a recurring eney who's supposed to be a character from the show named Rhubella Rat, though they look like her (and also there's lots of them). Big muscular dog character Arnold also turns up a bunch of times as an enemy. There's also some cute little bats and birds and other normal animals. Then there's a ton of weird things. Like little blue goblin creatures, werewolves, egg-shaped guys who defy gravity and release circles from their mouths to attack, and so on. I was all ready to talk about how these things were clearly made up last minute, and how they didn't fit with the aesthetic of the series' world, but on doing a bit more reasearch, every one of them actually is from the show, even if they only had a single appearance each.

 

The plot's also kind of over-written, too. Buster Bunny finds a treasure map in the attic at Acme Looniversity, so he and Montana Max race to get the treasure (which could have been the plot for a somewhat more unique game, with Spy VS Spy/Trap Gunner/Dashin Desperados=style sabotage-action gameplay), and also the evil scientist Dr. Gene Splicer has been kidnapping Buster's friends to put brainwashing hats on them. I guess that doesn't really matter, though.

 

Most importantly, the game itself is pretty good. As mentioned before, the strong pointi s definitely the presentation. Buster himself has a ton of animations that all look great. There's even animations that aren't even really necessary, like in areas with low ceilings, he'll walk around with his ears hanging low instead of pointing upwards. But there's also a tons of great-looking animations for crawling across the ground, zip-cording down ropes on his ears, and hanging from horizontal ropes by his hands. The backgrounds all look really nice, too, though unfortunately, it feels like a bizarrely long segment of the game takes place in a series of caves.

 

It also plays pretty well. As already mentioned, it's definitely a Sonic imitator, with fast-paced platforming, and lots of ramps and slopes and momentum-based shenanigens. There's a couple of things that kind of let it down, though. Sonic can easily and quickly smash through enemies by rolling, initiated by the player pressing down on the D-pad. Buster, to make things slightly different, slides along the ground, an action initiated by pressing the B button. It only works when he's at top speed, and assigning it to a button rather than down makes it a little less intuitive, just enough that you forget to do it, and just run into the enemies and get hurt. It's not helped by the fact that unlike Sonic's roll, it's only a short move, and it slows you down, you can just keep going with it. Also, those cave stages that take up such a long segment of the game's middle parts are also very cramped, slowing affairs down to a crawl (much more than, for example, Marble Zone does), and they're also a lot longer and more difficult than the stages preceding and following them.

 

Buster's Hidden Treasure is a decent enough Mega Drive platformer. It's worth playing for the excellent graphics and animation, but if it stops being fun in the caves, there's no real reason to feel bad about quitting there. It's unfortunate that as well-made as it is, I'm not sure it would even get into the top twenty Mega Drive platformers, and definitely not the top ten. It's fine, though.