Revenge of the Ninja (Mega CD)

 Of the four eighties Japanese laserdisc arcade games that got ported to the Mega CD by Wolfteam, this one, originally entitled Ninja Hayate, is definitely the least well-known. Maybe because the port was only released in North America, for some reason? Either way, it is very much one of these old arcade laserdisc games, so if you hate QTEs, you might as well stop reading now: there's nothing for you here.

 

If you are still here, you might wonder what Revenge of the Ninja does  to stand apart from its stablemates. The answer, unfortunately, is not very much. In terms of how it actually plays, it's probably the simplest of these games: there's prompts for the four cardinal directions, and to press a button. No sudden quizzes like in Time Gal, no second button like in Road Avenger/Road Blaster FX, and thankfully,  none of the awful crosshair aiming nonsense from Cobra Command/Thunderstorm FX. 

 

In fact, the one time the game mixed things up a little in the time I spent playing it was an absolute negative: a sudden choice between three directions, two of which led to a death, with no way of knowing which was the right one. Some Rick Dangerous memorisation nonsense right there. Other than that, the main difference seems to be structural. The stages are a lot shorter than in most of these games, sometimes only consisting of four or five inputs. Furthermore, after the first stage, and before the final few, the middle stages seem to appear in random order, which is kind of interesting. Though it does mean that you're seeing action scenes in total isolation from each other, and there's a loss of story cohesion there.

 

In summary, Revenge of the Ninja is the second-worst of the four "interactive anime" games on the Mega CD, though it is still a lot better than Cobra Command, which I personally consider to be near-unplayable. If you've been through Time Gal, Road Avenger, and the 3DO game Strahl, and you still want more 80s anime with QTEs dotted throughout, then you might want to give Revenge of the Ninja/Ninja Hayate a try. But not a moment sooner!

Cliff Hanger (PC)

 The more astute among you will have noticed thst this game takes more than a little inspiration from Data East's 1990 arcade game The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy. That game saw the eponymous hero fighting off villains while standing atop moving vehicles and in other precarious situations. It's probably the best Indiana Jones videogame, despite not having the license. The 2011 PC game Cliff Hanger, from Shuyusha, takes the expected indie approach to making an update: though superficial aspects of the game are simplified (ie. all the stages have the same situation, that of fighting atop the wings of large aircraft), it refines and expands upon the game's mechanics.

 

The main way in which it does this is in how your attacks work. Though Edward Randy attacked with a whip, mehanically, it acted much like any other weapon would, always going in a straight line, and mostly in one of eight directions. The chain with which you attack in this game is a lot shorter, and you can't swing from it, but it is more versatile in other ways. A neutral attack sees you swing the chain downwards from above your head, and since your platforms are usually tiled, this is pretty useful for hitting enemies that are slightly up- or downhill from you. Up and attack gives you a straight diagonal upwards attack, while forward and attack goes straight out in front of you, as does attacking while crouched. 

 

Most interesting, though, is the attack you get from pressing an upwards diagonal with the attack button. It's a launcher! And because of how you hit every enemy that's in range when you attack, you can launch a whole crowd of enemies at once, for midair violent fun! Of course, this is a game with a heavy emphasis on managing large crowds of enemies, so there'll always be more of them around to spoil your fun. But that only serves to make it more satisfying when you thoroughly wreck a bunch of guys at once. As well as all these normal attacks, you also have a projectile attack that takes a couple of seconds to charge, but does a lot of damage, taking out most normal enemies in one hit.

 

Though the stages all take place atop aircraft, there's still variety to be found between them. The backgrounds change, of course, but the main thing is that they all (for as far as I've managed to get into the game, at least) introduce at least two new kinds of enemies. There's generic soldiers weilding various kinds of weapons, jetpack girls flying around firing energy blasts, and even stuff like guys in helicopters flying around strafing you with machine gun fire! Going by the definition of "purity" that I've put forward before, it's definitely a very pure game: all the enemies have clear, definite roles, as do all the moves and attacks you can perform. The bosses also each have a few attack and movement patterns that you can learn and react to.

 

I've mostly praised this game so far, but it's not without flaws. A small one that you'll get over quickly is that at first it seems a little stiff, a little repetitive, and it feels like the enemies can all take way too much of a beating. But once you get into the flow of how the game works, those problems should fade away. There is, however, a bigger problem that's almost the exact opposite, in that I didn't really notice it until I'd played the game a few times, and it only gets more annoying over time. Jumping attacks just don't seem to work properly: the input for them is very stiff and strange, and you have to kind of jump, wait a beat, then attack for it to come off. The worst part is that this feels so unnatural that I suspect it might be a programming error, rather than a poor deliberate design choice.

 

For all its flaws, though, Cliff Hanger is a very fun game. It's another one I got from DLSite, where it only costs a few pounds. If you're curious about it, I definitely recommend picking it up. (I've started mentioning where I get PC games because people were requesting it, but it still feels uncomfortably like an ad to me. There's nothing I can do about that though, really.)

Yuu Yuu Hakusho Dai 4 Tama Makai Touitsu (Game Boy)

 Fighting games on the originl Gamel Boy are an interesting concept, I think. Logically, you'd think they'd all be abject failures, being maybe the most complex videogame genre of the early nineties, on probably the weakest mainstream host hardware of the time. But there's actually some good stuff on there, especially the various ports published by Takara (mostly of SNK games, though the Game Boy has the odd distinction of being the only system where Toshinden is better than Samurai Shodown).

 

This is the fourth and final Game Boy fighting game based on the iconic early nineties shonen anime Yuu Yuu Hakusho, and it has a slightly different feel to it to the fighters ported from the arcade. The big difference can be seen at the bottom of the screen: the meters. Of course, there's the health meter, that works exactly as you'd expect. Beneath that there's the special meter, which limits your use of special moves. And right at the bottom, there's the super meter. This one works a little differently, and a little like the momentum meter in Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu. The orb moves along it, and when it's all the way to one side, that fighter can use their super. 

 

These differences aren't really positive ones though, unfortunately. The special meter is a terrible idea, as it discourages use of specials, and experimentation with specials to figure out the best way to play as each character. I guess it was implemented to avoid situations where one player might repeatedly use a certain special over and over, but there are much better ways of preventing this, preferably ways for the defending player to work their way out of the situation. The super meter might be a better idea in theory, but in practice, it just doesn't work. I played around twenty to thirty fights for this review, and I think I saw it go all the way to one player's side maybe three times? Essentially, both meters serve to make the fights less exciting, not more.

 

There are a few other interesting things to note about the game, though. Like how it gets over some of the limitations of the host hardware by having certain larger special moves alternate each frame between the sprite of the character performing the move and the sprite of the move's effects. It's a nice way of having bigger effects for move, but at the same time, it does make it impossible to take good-looking screenshots of those moves. Another thing is that as well as the normal fighting modes, in which there are nine characters (plus a secret tenth one), there's also an extra mode that sees super deformed versions of four non-combatant characters from the source material take part in silly fights where they attempt to bonk each other on the head with various objects. Oddly, this mode is significantly more difficult than the main mode, and I haven't been able to win a single fight.

 

This is a pretty hard game to recommend. If you're playing via emulation and you just want to play a Yuu Yuu Hakusho fighting game, there's no reason not to go for the legendary Treasure-developed Makai Toitsusen on Mega Drive. On the other hand, if you're putting together a collection of anime-licensed Game Boy games (or of Game Boy fighting games, for that matter), loose cartridges of this one are available dirt cheap, and it's completely language independent.

Polygonet Commanders (Arcade)

 I'll start with a disclaimer: though you can play this game in MAME version .245, it's still officially listed as "not working". I didn't encounter any big glitches or weirdness or anything, so I assume this is just some internal technicality, but I feel like I should point it out just in case.

 

Anyway, it's one of two attempts made by Konami in 1993 at releasing a competitive first person shooter with polygon graphics to arcades. (The other one was called Poly-Net Warriors, and has a similar "unofficially emulated" status in MAME, if you're curious.) Consider that at the time, the biggest FPS on home systems was Doom, which was all sprites, and this is a pretty big deal. Or it would have been if anyone took any notice at the time. Since they were both released in the same year, it's hard to get a solid answer on which of the two came first, but I'm covering this one because I thought it was the most interesting to play.

 

Of course, I've only been able to play it as a single player game, but I think Konami put enough effort into the single player experience to make it worthwhile. You start the game by picking one of eight stages, and in the stages, you have a quota of AI-controlled tanks to kill. It's all time limit-based, and getting killed just wastes a few precious seconds, like crashing in most arcade racing games. Fulfill your kill quota, and you get a new quota and a bunch more time added. Each stage has a few quotae, and getting through them all gets you a big score bonus and passage to the next stage. It should also be noted that, the stages are very small. This does give a different feel to later first person shooters, and it also means that even on the low-powered hardware, there's no need for pop up or fog or other methods of hiding a short draw distance.

 

A big point of interest to me, aside from the very nice low poly graphics, are the controls. There are two joysticks, but the control scheme is totally different to what you're probably accustomed to in modern first person shooters with twin stick controls. It is instead closer to the way you control the mecha in the PS2 RPG Steambot Chronicles/Bumpy Trot. Each joystick represents one of your tank's two tracks, and they each only register up and down inputs. You move your tank forward by pushing both joysticks up, backwards by pushing them both down, and turning is done by pushing them in opposite directions.

 

It takes some getting used to, and since you're thrust straight into combat on even the easiest stage, you'll probably have to play a few practice credits before you're actually able to achieve any kind of success. Other than the movement controls, it's all pretty simple, though: there's a fire button on each joystick, though you only have one weapon to fire, and there's no power ups or other items to collect at all. Your tank can take five hits, and you heal one hit every time you destroy an enemy tank. 

 

Polygonet Commanders is a pretty fun game! Unless you get really into trying to get a high score and survive through all the stages sequentially, you probably won't be playing it for a long time, but the time you spend with it will be a good one. And of course, those flat shaded polygon graphics look great, and they're probably as big a draw now as they were when the game was released, if not more.