Fire Pro Wrestling Gaiden: Burning Tornado (Saturn)

 So, you probably already know about Fire Pro Wrestling, the best series of wrestling videogames that there's ever been, right? Well, in 1994, Human, the then-makers of the series, released a wrestling game to arcades entitled Burning Tornado. Fire Pro Wrestling Gaiden: Burning Tornado released for Saturn a year later isn't a simple port, however, but a game that takes elements from the main series and from the arcade game to create a satisfying middle ground between the two.

 

The problem with the original arcade version of Burning Tornado was that it eschewed the Fire Pro series' trademark timing and skill-based playstyle in favour of a system that relied on hammering the attack buttons as fast as possible, as was the style of various arcade wrestling games that preceded it. The Saturn game brings back the Fire Pro style, with a few little changes to make for a faster, more arcadey experience than the main series' simulation style. And from this point on, you can assume that I'm only going to be talking about the Saturn game, not the arcade one.

 

In case you don't know how Fire Pro plays, the basics go thusly: when wrestlers walk into each other, they go into a lock up animation, and to perform a wrestling move, you press a direction and a button on the final frame of this animation. Furthermore, there's a few (typically three) different strengths of moves, and you have to wear your opponent down with weaker moves before moving up to the bigger, flashier attacks, lest you get countered like a fool. Blazing Tornado changes it up through simplification: there's only two strengths of move, and there's a health bar. You know you can start using your more powerful moves when you've got your opponent down to half health. You can win by pinfall or submission when your opponent's health is completely depleted.

 

With this mechanical simplification in mind, along with the drastically shrunken roster of characters, does Blazing Tornado have anything to offer fans of the main Fire Pro series? Yes! The smaller roster of characters means that instead of being constructed from parts in the series' trademark editor, they're all fully drawn sprites with bespoke animations and a ton of personality. There's actually a fair bit of variety in the tiny roster, too. There's a ruebenesque american wrestler, who's trademark move is repeatedly licking his opponent until they submit, but he's also a devout christian who prays for his post-match taunt. There's also a kung fu guy with very few actual throws, a couple of luchadors who differentiate from each other by working in rudo and technico styles respectively, and an androgynous bishonen from Sweden.

 

If you're a fan of wrestling in general and/or the Fire Pro games in particular, I think Blazing Tornado is definitely a worthwhile game to track down. It's got the satisfying gameplay of the Fire Pro games, with the big flashy presentation you might expect from the WWF games that were around at the time. On top of that, the simplification of the mechanics might even make it a nice little gateway game to introduce new fans to the series, so they can enjoy downloading hundreds of CAWs on 2017's Fire Pro Wrestling World and spending countless hours booking their fantasy promotions.

Best Bout Boxing (Arcade)

 Combat sports are often an interesting subject for videogames, especially in the arcade, and even moreso in the mid-nineties post-street Fighter II fighting game boom, when every developer was trying to put out the next big hit about people doing super-powered martial arts at each other. Battle K-Road, which I reviewed a while back, took a more grounded approach, and was a more interesting game because of it. But Jaleco really seemed to have made a tough job for themselves when they decided to release a boxing game into that market. Boxing, the fighting style made up entirely of just punches, in a world where all the other games have not only kicks and throws, but swords and energy blasts and all that stuff too?

 

I don't know how much of a commercial success Best Bout Boxing was (though, with its complete lack of console ports, I assume it wasn't massive), in terms of making a game that could have ended up looking drab and bland into something that stood a chance of standing out in a busy arcade, they were definitely successful! The presentation in this game is amazing, everything is big and loud and colourful, and it definitely takes a contemporary fighting game-style approach to its characters. They're all very distinct from each other, full of personality, and with amazing names like Jose Humdinger and Carolde First. Also, one of them is blatantly just Abdullah the Butcher. There's even an unplayable final boss character, who appears on the continue screen to mock you, looming large like a Fist of the North Star villain.

 

As for how it actually plays, it's easiest to describe it in terms of how it's different from a typical fighting game of the era. Movement is obviously a lot more limited, as you canbasically just move towards or away from your opponent. There's no room to run, of course, nor do jumping and crouching have a place in the boxing ring. Furthermore, all your attacks are punches, with your left and right fists each having a dedicated button, along with a third for doing a special attack that's powerful but leaves you very vulnerable if you miss or get blocked. Adding to the differences is the lack of special moves, as you might think of them in a fighting game: there's no moves activated with joystick motions, for example. Instead, each boxer has a few combinations, activated by using the necessary sequence of specific punches in the right order, and with the right rhythm.

 

Best Bout Boxing is a game that came as a pleasant surprise to me. It took what could have been a tepid, uninspiring basis for a videogame, and made it fun and exciting, not only mechanically, but aesthetically, too. I recommend you give it a chance, too, and I hope to one day hear of it being announced as an Arcade Archives release. One last interesting point I want to mention before ending the review, though: the dip switches give the option to alter the strength of each individual character. I don't think I've ever seen that in any other game! It's especially odd considering that your opponents in single player come in random order. I can only assume it's for arcade operators with unusually patriotic clientele, who want to ensure that their homeland's representative always has an advantage?

Drancia Saga (3DS)

 Apparently, this is an enhanced port of a phone game, and though I don't know what all the enhancements are, I'm going to assume that the most important one is the fact that the 3DS has buttons on it. There's very few types of game where a touchscreen isn't to the detriment of the experience, and though the controls are very simple in Drancia Saga, I can't see it being one of them.

 

What it is, though, is a kind of simple single-screen, single-plane beat em up. Each stage places you in a little one-screen location where enemies will keep spawning. The enemies die in one hit, and you don't need an attack button, as you attack by just walking directly forwards into them. Touch them with any part of you other than your weapon, and you take damage instead. Like in the first two Ys games! After you kill enough of the enemies, a boss will appear for you to fight. Beat it, and go to the next stage. I think there are eight stages. I've got to the eighth stage, and it had the air of finality about it, at least.

 

Though the game itself is very simple, there's a lot of meat in what I'll reluctantly call the meta-game. While playing, various numbers will go up. Killing enemies scores points, and they also drop coins. Collecting coins also scores points. Furthermore, if you kill lots of enemies without taking damage, treasure will appear (and are worth points), and the amount of coins each enemy drops will also increase. Coins themselves have a use as they're used to level up, but I'll get back to that later. When your game ends, you'll be awarded a gem for every hundred points you scored. In the main menu, there's a bar! In the bar, you can listen to the sound test, pointlessly talk to various bar patrons, and most importantly, there'll be a randomly chosen character to buy, for diamonds.

 

It seems like every non-boss enemy is unlockable. Maybe boss characters are unlockable too under certain conditions? I don't know. There's also a bunch of guest characters from other games published by Circle, unlockable by having their host games installed on your 3DS. The game manages to have so many playable character by having them all essentially play the same, with only a few small, but important, differences. Which means it's time to explain levelling up!

 

Every character has their own grid of sixteen squares, connected by a little maze of paths. Each square has something in it: a sword, which expands the length and width of your weapon (oo-er missus), a shield, which reduces the damage you take from enemies, a heart, which (i think) increases the amount of health restored by collecting coins, a show, increasing your movement speed, an orb, giving you a limited-use magic spell, or a burger, restoring your health to full. Some of the squares contain nothing, which does nothing. 

 

To level up, you buy these squares with the coins you've collected. But once you've bought your first square, you next have to buy one connected to it by a path, and so on. Some of the weaker characters have their power ups spread out with lots of blank spaces between them, the strongest characters have a power up in ever square and a path layout that means you can almost always pick whatever you want. Each character also has a magic spell assigned to them, from a small selection. They're all offensive, but some are more useful than others.

 

Drancia Saga isn't a mechanically deep game, and you'll probably figure out the optimum way to tackle each enemy type and boss fight seconds into your first encounter with them. But the absurdly huge amount of characters to play as, along with the general charm of the game and the satisfaction inherent to the super-simple mass-murder of enemies make it a go-to game for me when I want to keep my hands busy while watching TV or whatever since I installed it a few weeks ago. If you like the sound of what I've described here, well, it's a 3DS game that didn't get a physical release, so there's unfortunately no way for you to get ahold of it any more. No way at all. (Wink.)

Kaizo Chojin Shubibinman 3: Ikai no Princess (PC Engine)

 It's a strange case, the Shubibinman series, in that thanks to a physical rerelease a few years ago, its best-known entry is a spin-off that was originally only released via Satellaview. And as great as Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman Zero is, it's not my favourite of the series. That honour falls upon this game, the last of the mainline games, and the only one of the series released on CD.

 

The game makes good use of all that storage space, too. There's nice CD-quality music, lots of voice acting, and more excitingly, a whole bunch of almost full screen animated cutscenes! It's a surprise that this game runs using the original CD ROM System card and not the Super CD ROM card, those scenes look so good. The plot, as far as I can tell, is about an alien princess who invades/crashlands on Earth, and also accidentally (?) opens a portal to a demon dimension where an evil king lives. And he also wants to invade the Earth. But there's no translation, so that's just my best guess.

 

Another interesting little thing, presentation-wise, is that the stages kind of flow into each other narratively, like in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but two whole years earlier! You start out in modern Japan, hitch a ride on a flying enemy battleship, then when that's destroyed, your escape craft is eaten by gargoyles so you fall down to earth in some snowy plains where you fight aggressive snowmen until the ground gives way to an undergorund mine, where a train takes you somewhere else, and so on. It makes the game feel so much more fast-paced and exciting!

 

As for how the game actually plays, it's fun. It's a pretty typical 1992 action platformer, elevated by its great presentation mroe than anything. You run around, hit stuff with your sword, jump about, all that stuff. There's a lot of cool little setpieces in the stages too, though, even in the very first stage there's a part where you get to pilot a robot and shoot lightning for a while (again, it should be pointed out that this game also predates Mega Man X by well over a year!), and there's stuff in later stages like running away from lava flows, jumping from aircraft to aircraft, and so on. 

 

One interesting gimmick is your secondary attack: by holding the attack button for a second and releasing it, you can shoot a little ball of energy. As well as being a projectile, it also deals quite a few hits' worth of damage. On top of that, there's also a way to control it after it's been fired. Hold the attack button again, as well as a direction, and you can slightly influence the trajectory of your projectile. It's not really as useful as just shooting at enemeis when they're in front of you, but it's interesting that they tried something a little strange and different, at least. Also worthy of note is that there's no mechanical difference (as far as I could tell) between the male and female playable characters. And it's one of a very few PC Engine games with a simultaneous co-operative two player mode!

 

By 1992, the PC Engine was being left behind by the technical marvels of which the Mega Drive and SNES were capable, and it wouldn't get its second and third winds in the form of the CD ROM Super and Arcade system cards (well, the Super CD ROM card came out in late 1991, but there wasn't much that used it just yet). But Shubibinman 3 must have been a game that gave hope to the console's owners in that time, that there was life in the system yet. It's a great-looking game that's a lot of fun. And this is something I find myself saying a lot when I watch certain lesser-known kids movies from the eighties and early nineties, but it's the kind of thing I would have absolutely loved to have had access to as a kid!

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance (PS2)

 Back at the time of its release in 2005, Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance had the misfortune to find itself lumped alongside a load of other games in a trend hated by many people (including my friends and I). That trend being the embarassing array of gang-themed games released in the wake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, each expending so much effort telling you how tough and cool they were that it made you wonder who they were trying to convince. But many years later, when I was picking up PS2 games for cheap, I noticed that this one was developed by Cavia, a B-game studio only a few rungs higher on the ladder than the likes of Tamsoft.

 

So I gave it a go, and in the isolation from its peers afforded it by the distance of time, I've been able to see Beat Down in a new light. Thematically, it's still a lot more silly than it seems like it wants to be, but it's in a charming way. It's very much a bunch of Japanese game developers making their idea of what the tough streets of inner city America are like. Mafia members wear identical matching suits, assassins look like vampires with their own trademark weapons, and the tone generally feels kind of like an inner city immersive theme park. In fact, some of the stuff is so strange that I do wonder if it was originally meant to be a Vampire: The Masquerade-style setting that got changed into a gangland theme at some point during development.

 

Themeing aside, there's also a lot of interesting mechanical systems in here, too. Fighting, for example. There's two types of fights you'll take part in. There's one-on-one fights, used for bosses and some other situations, and gang fights, where you beat up a bunch of weaker goons. They both play the same in terms of controlling your character, but the one-on-one fights have the camera somewhat fixed into a fighting game-style position and the characters are locked into facing each other, while you can move the camera and yourself more freely in the gang fights. 

 

Furthermore, the one-on-one fights have a second meter below each character's health. This is the pride meter, and it's got a couple of purposes. If you lose the fight while your pride meter is empty, you can't re-try it, and are forced to either beg for your life and end up in hospital, or get a game over and have to reload your save. More interestingly, if you deplete your opponent's pride meter before you beat them, you can grab them, and upon doing so you're given a few options. You can rob them, interrogate them (some story missions requitre you to find a bunch of specific enemies and interrogate them), and even recruit them as cronies who follow you around to fight alongside you in gang fights and act as team memebers (like a fighting game's team battle mode) in one-on-one fights.

 

The other big interesting system the game has is the stealth/dressing up system. Because the game starts with you turning your back on your mafia life, and because you're still a criminal, there's two gangs who want to get you: the mafia and the cops. Luckily, they both have member bases with memory problems, who can only vaguely remember what you look like. So, while you're going around the city, there's two recognition meters at the top of the screen. They go up a little every time a member of the corresponding gang sees you, and when a group's recognition meter is at 100%, members of that gang attack you on sight! To get the meters to go down, you've got to change your clothes, hair, and accessories! Best of all, once you buy an item of clothing, you keep it for the rest of the game, so eventually, you'll build up a decently-sized wardrobe of stuff out of which you can construct different outfits whenever the need arises. I can't think of another game that isn't specifically about dressing up, but which incorporates doing so into the gameplay in such a way. Which is a shame, really. There's so much potential for this kind of thing, especially with how popular open-world games and action RPGs are nowadays.

 

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance is a game that I unjustly derided and shunned when it came out, but now, eighteen years later, I can admit how wrong that was. It's a game with a lot of interesting ideas, that's decently fun to play. Of course, I recommend doing so, assuming you have the means to play PS2 games in the year 2023. (And I'm sure that most of the people reading this probably do.)