Spriggan Mark 2 Re:Terraform Project (PC Engine)

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a puzzle or shooting game with little text of little importance. However, it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool in this assumption, because Spriggan Mark 2 is actually an insanely ambitious game to have been released on an eight bit console in 1992.

 

When it comes to console shooting games in 1992, I always think of the PC Engine's Soldier Blade. It's an excellent game, and very impressive for the hardware, but when you compare it to the likes of Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer and Thunder Force IV being released on the Mega Drive in the same year, it makes NEC's console look like it was being left behind. Spriggan Mark 2 flies in the face of that, being years ahead of its time in design terms, if not technological. It does appear to be an attempt at making an interactive anime in the form of a shooting game.

 

There's a ton of cutscenes, many with that "big pixel art" style that was so popular at the time, especially on PC Engine CD, and even more impressively, there's also a lot of voice acting to go with them! They tell a very Gundam-like story of stolen prototype weapons, colonists on Mars breaking away from Earth's control, and all that kind of thing. It doesn't skimp on the action, though, as while there's a minute or two of dialogue happening between each stage, and sometimes boss fights will also have a little chat-break preceding them, there's still full shooting stages, sometimes with dialogue and Sonic 3 & Knuckles-style visual storytelling happening while they play out, in a pretty seamless manner.

 

The actual shooting is pretty standard for the era: you have a standard machine gun with infinite ammo, and you can also press select to cycle through a bunch of more exciting weapons with limited uses, like homing missiles and a beam saber (you'd think that would be of infinite use, but it does a ton of damage, and I guess the developers sided with balance over logic here). Flying around firing off homing missles while dodging enemy fire and experiencing your comrades playing out their dramas feels great! There's some really amazing moments of ludonarrative cohesion to be found in this game.

 

Another aspect that feels very much ahead of its time is your health bar: it's a lot longer than you would expect from a shooting game of this vintage, and not only that, it slowly regenerates over time! My original theory was that this was because the developers had gone to a lot of effort to tell a story, and they wanted to ensure that the player will easily live to see it through, but to be honest: the game is still pretty difficult. In a few days' play, I've been able to get as far as the third stage. I don't know how many stages there are, but just judging by what's happening, it feels like the story's still in the early parts of playing out. Technologically, there's also what appears to be little moments of sprite scaling and rotation. It could also be a really good job of faking those effects, but either way, it's impressive.

 

Obviously, this is a game worthy of anyone's notice, especially now that it's been translated into English, so the story can be enjoyed by the JP-illiterate. People (rightly) talk a lot about Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire when it comes to impressive PC Engine games, but Spriggan Mark 2 should definitely be in that conversation, too. And it does all the stuff it does without use of the Arcade Card, too! 

Hammerlock Wrestling (SNES)

 Also known as Tenryu Genichiro no Puroresu Revolution (which was also a tie-in with the excellently named 90s promotion WAR: Wrestle And Romance), Hammerlock Wrestling is a game I vaguely remember trying out back in the ancient days of DreamSNES. Something about it just caused me to bounce off of it (something I've identified and will get into later), but its unusual and very effective presentation did stick with me, so I went back to it decades later.

 

The thing that really stands out about Hammerlock when you start playing a match is that the screen is split into three horizontal areas: the middle shows the arena, and the little sprites of the wrestlers and referee inhabiting it, and the top and bottom areas showing big close-ups of each wrestlers. As the action gets underway and the actual match gets going, the middle part will sometimes be moved to the top or bottom, to allow for a big version of a move that's taking place in-ring, filling two thirds of the entire screen. It's a display of spectacle befitting pro wrestling! 

 

Even more impressive is that while you might expect the individual wrestlers to be represented in the larger scale animations by generic pugilists, but no: the entire roster of twelve wrestlers each has unique sprites at both sizes! Very impressive for a cartridge game released in 1994! In fact, this is generally a game that could only have been released at this time: eight-bit consoles would have a hard time with the three-way split-screen, never mind the huge animations, while this whole approach would have been pointless on more powerful consoles that could push polygons, and with them, offer moving cameras.

 

What's also interesting about the roster is that while it's mostly made up of the regular faces you expect from Japanese wrestling games of this era: copyright-friendly versions of Hulk Hogan, Big Van Vader, The Great Muta, and so on, a lot of them have been changed more than they usually are. Hogan's stand-in Sam Warhammer, for example, looks more like a red-bearded viking than an orange-skinned surfer guy. Also, it's a little unusual that there's no fake Jushin Liger in there, but there is a fake Lex Luger. And only one fake Road Warrior.

 

So, that thing that turned me away from the game in my teenage years? Well, like a lot of the better wrestling games, it attempts a Fire Pro-like timing-based system, but the problem is that it's not really clear exactly when you're supposed to make the input to successfully perform moves when going into a lock-up. I've somehow mangaed to win a few matches, though I can't do it consistently, and it seems like when I think I've figured out the timing, the next match begins and I'm getting it wrong every time once again. I'm not sure if it's a flaw in the design, its implementation, or (most likely) my playing, but it's frustrating.

 

Hammerlock Wrestling (or Genichiro Tenryu no Puroresu Revolution) is obviously a high-quality game, and I really wish I could figure out what it is that's stopping me from consistently pulling off moves successfully. As it is, though, I definitely think it's worth a try, at least, just to see a game with such an ambitious presentation. It really feels like that even though it was developed as a tie-in to an independent promotion, the developers wanted to make a game that stood out, looking bigger and more spectacular than the games put out by the likes of New Japan and WWF.