Air Rescue (Master System)

 The original arcade version of Air Rescue was a sprite-scaling version of the ancient game Choplifter, which saw you flying around in 3D rescuing very ugly soldiers from active battlefields. Though it might have been possible to make a decent job of porting it to the Mega CD, attempting to do so on the Master System would have been an act of Ozymandian hyubris. Luckily, that's not what's been attempted here, Master System Air Rescue is more like a decade-later sequel to Dan Gorlin's game.

 

Once again, you're in a helicopter, and once again, you're rescuing little guys. Most of the differences between this game and Choplifter are small, but there's also a lot of them, so it's a different enough experience. The controls are better: there's no longer a button to change which direction you're facing, there's a bunch of weapons to choose from, and you no longer have to sit around waiting for your rescued guys to slowly and individually disembark when you fetch them back to base.

 

The biggest difference is that Air Rescue has significantly more complex stage design than Choplifter. Which you'd expect, with there being a decade bewteen their respective release dates. Right from the first stage, you've got more interesting fields of engagement than Choplifter's flat battlefields. The first stage is a theme park that's been taken over by terrorists, then you're rescuing people from a burning building, a commercial airport, some sinking cruise ships, and some kind of giant underground facility. They all have their own unique feel and hazards, and it doesn't just feel like they're a bunch of hitboxes arranged into different shapes.

 

There is one problem, though. Every stage has terrorists shooting at you, and I guess all of the various disasters were caused by them too? I don't think the game needed that, to be honest. The disasters could just have been disasters, and danger could have been added through gradual escalation of the disasters: boats sinking with civilians still on them, explosions in the burning building, and so on. Maybe all this stuff would have been a little out of reach for the Master System? The game does look great generally, and it was ancient hardware in 1992, so it's likely they were already pushing it as hard as it could go? Still, the constant presence of the terrorists feels a little silly, and I think it would have been better to keep them as a final stage thing. Like "you saved people from passive disasters, but now you have to rescue them from an actively hostile threat!", you know?

 

Despite its shortcomings, I've enjoyed playing Air Rescue. It's a decent enough implementation of a classic concept. It's nothing special or life-changing or anything, but it's not bad, either. It is pretty unforgiving, though, so be prepared to have a little patience when you first start playing.

Venus Wars (NES)

 One of the big hits of that early era of anime movies being released in English in the early nineties, Venus Wars is about (like you might expect) various violent conflicts happening on the relatively recently colonised eponymous planet. It's one of those anime that's known more for looking really cool and having a lot of meticulously animated machinery than anything else. The most famous of those machines are the monocycles, motorbike things that only have one massive wheel, so the natural choice of genre for a videogame in 1989 would be a kind of into the screen racing/shooting game, like Mach Rider.

 

And that's half of the approach taken here! What makes it interesting, is the combination of the race-shooting with the other half of the equation: turn-based strategy! I guess it's like an ancient forebear of The Unholy War/Little Witching Mischiefs or Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki, as you move your units around a grid-based map, and when they collide with enemy units, they enter a little psuedo-3D shooting segment! You can control their speed with up and down on the d-pad, while the two face buttons fire your normal infinite shots or your very limited homing missiles, respectively.

 

While all of your units (except the two trailers that refuel all the others) are a ragtag bunch of rebels on monocycles with the same weapons (but different stats), there's a few different kinds of enemies. There's VTOL jets, a few different kinds of tanks, weird little bouncing robots, and so on. Your homing missles are best used against the flying enemies, since to hit them otherwise means shooting while pulling a wheelie (holding down on the d-pad), which is a little awkward, especially when you're also dodging enemy fire.

 

A few stages in, with almost no warning, a new enemy type appears and brings with it a new playstyle! The enemy type is gigantic tanks, and the playstyle is top-down eight-way shooting! The first time this happened, it really took me by surprise, and my poor biker was crushed almost immediately (don't worry, they just go back to the trailer and they're fine again once the next stage starts). Every time after that, though, these giant tanks are a lot easier and quicker to beat than the normal units, and that's even taking into account that they don't have the sixty second time limit that battles against the regualr units have.

 

Venus Wars (which is listed in some places as "The Venus Wars: Back to the City Io") is a pretty fun game! It's a little repetitive, so I don't recommend playing more than one or two stages in a single sitting, but otherwise I've been enjoying regularly going back to it for the past week or so. There's a translation patch for it out there, with which I have been playing, but I think if you happen to find a reasonably-priced cartridge for sale, there's very little text, none of which is essential, so you can probably play this untranslated pretty easily.

Puppet Zoo Pilomy (Playstation)

 This is an interesting case (even if it's not much of an interesting game): though it's a Japan-only release, that release does contain a full English translation, and it's a game where language would be a barrier to playing, if there was actually any kind of progression in front of which for a barrier to be placed. You'd think the novelty of being a Japan-nly game with a full translation would be enough to at least get it some attention in the west, but I'd never even heard of it until someone mentioned it on a forum a month or two ago.

 

There's a pretty obvious reason why no-one would have bothered to investigate it, though, especially back in times of old when one would have been expected to pay money to take a risk on an import game. The fact is that, as you can see from the screenshots, it looks like an educational TV show for pre-school children. But those appearances are deceptive, as I don't think anyone of any age could learn anything from this game.

 

You play as a child-like thing with a yellow blob sidekick (supposedly, the yellow blob is the eponymous Pilomy), and you go to a scientist's lab to get "puppet" parts, then to an assembly factory to put the parts togetherinto complete puppets. "Puppets" in this case refers to low-poly semi-realistic animals, and you can mix and match the parts to create weird chimerae if you want. Certain head-types can even be used as tails, to create amphisbaena-esque monsters. Then you go home, look at your mirror to put your creations into a world, and then ride your spaceship thing into the mirror to go and look at them in the world.

 

While you're in the world, you can feed the creatures, and giving them food that they like gives you more hearts, which are the currency used to get more pupper parts from the scientist's vending machine. But the thing is: there doesn't seem to be any way to leave the world and go home, so you don't get to use these hearts? There's other ways of getting them, like just walking around the town where most of the game takes place and being nice to the people you talk to. 

 

The biggest problem Puppet Zoo Pilomy has is that I've already described the entire game. That is: there isn't any actual game in here! You just make your weird animals and then you go and look at them, and that's it. You aren't tasked with making a weird zoo that draws visitors, or pitting your creations against other creatures or anything like that. After you've done that for about ten minutes, the only remaining point of interest is something that isn't translated, or in fact, even in the actual game: as you save the game more times, the name of the save in the Playstation's memory card management screen gradually tells a little story of Pilomy suffering a dark fate. Of course, I didn't find this out myself, there's a little article about it here. In summary, though: don't bother with this.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Lethal Foes (SNES)

 It's really strange that this game didn't get a worldwide release. I can only assume that Acclaim had some kind of stranglehold over Spider-Man console games outside of Japan, because this is a lot better than any of their efforts. It is, as was the fashion at the time, a 2D platformer, and of course, you play as Spider-Man, and you traverse various stages, at the end of which are various iconic villains, or sometimes The Beetle or Alistair Smythe, since it was the mid-nineties, after all. (Despite the game's title, and the presence of The Beetle, it's not actually and adaptation of the "Lethal Foes of Spider-Man" miniseries, which I read a couple of weeks ago specifically to find that out. It's pretty good, by the way: it focusses mainly on infighting and fueds between various B-level Spidey villains).

 

An interesting twist that might make the game seem harder than it actually is when you first play it, is that you aren't expected to fight every enemy. Until you get to the boss of each stage, your real enemy is the time limit. They're a lot tighter than you'd expect from what seems like a typical action-platformer, and some of the stages are fairly maze-like, too. So you've got to find your way through the stage as quickly as possible, and only bother fighting enemies when they're actually in your way. I wonder if this was an attempt at a simple kind of stealth-over-combat style of game? Either way, it's different, at least.

 

In accordance with all of the above, you have a lot of movement options! As well as walking, running, and crawling on the ground, you can also cling to walls and ceilings, plus any walls in the background behind you, too. You can also web-swing, which is something that's in surprisingly few 2D Spider-Man games. It feels really good to do, too! You just hold one of the shoulder buttons, and you'll web-swing in that direction. There's a massive downside to this, though: a lot of the stages are set in cramped locations like sewers or laboratories or subway tunnels, and there's not enough room to swing. How disappointing!

 

The bossfights are pretty good, too. The villain sprites look great, colourful, detailed, and shaded in a really nice comicky way. And hitting them feels great! I don't have much more to say about them, to be honest. I've played through about three quarters of the game, and the villains so far have been: The Beetle, The Lizard, Mysterio, Alistair Smythe, Green Goblin, and the guy who's currently stopping me from getting any further, The Scorpion. A very mid-nineties line up, and though I know Venom does show up later, it's nice that the game doesn't solely rely on symbiotes like a lot of Spider-Man stuff from the time did (both of Acclaim's beat em ups, for example).

 

This is a game that's definitely worth a look for people who want a nice, old-fashioned 2D Spider-Man game with some of its own little twists to the typical platformer formula. Though there's very little text in-game, and there's definitely no language barrier to playing it, you might as well emulate it with the translation patch, since the prices for real copies are completely ludicrous.

Dojo Masters (PC)

 Okay, so this isn't an obscure game, but it is a recently-release indie game that I think deserves highlighting. It's been over a decade since I reviewed Champion Kendou on SG-1000, and I still regularly play that game! It really gave me a taste for that kind of very old-fashioned martial-arts-as-a-sport style of play, and though other games like it do exist, none of them have really scratched the itch for me in the same way. As such, I've been fantasising for years now about a game that did, and also which offered some more modern amenities, like properly responsive controls and maybe multiple different styles to pick from.

 

When I first saw Dojo Masters last year, it was a pretty disturbing day, as it looks almost exactly like the game I've been imagining all this time! Obviously, I wishlisted it immediately, and a couple of weeks ago, it finally got released and I bought it immediately, too. I'm glad to say: it doesn't disappoint! It uses only the d-pad and two buttons, which are ostensibly designated punch and kick, but it's a little more complex than that. There's also six styles to play as: Karate, Taekwondo, Kendo, Boxing, Muay Thai, and Krav Maga. There's no actual named characters in the game, either: instead there's generic, androgynous fighters, and when you pick a style, you get to change the colour of their skin and clothes, and pick one of two hairstyles for them. Any other traits they have like personality or gender only exist in your own mental projections. Which is a pretty cool and unique way of doing things.

 

Regarding the punch and kick buttons, obviously some styles don't have both (or either!) of those things in them, in which cases, they obviously do different things instead. For example, Taekwondo has an elaborate system of stances taken by pressing the punch button with directions, and there are different attacks depending on which stand you're currently in when you press kick. Kendo can perform a quick three-hit combo with the punch button, while pressing kick raises their shinai above their head for more powerful attacks. Furthermore, press back and punch puts a kendo fighter into a defensive stance for a split second, resulting in a cool samurai movie cutdown, should the opponent attack.

 

Though I've dipped my toe into online play a little (which went surprisingly well! I think I had a win ration of around 50%), I've mainly been playing single player. There's an arcade mode, where you try and fight through ten randomly-generated opponents of increasing difficulty, and a survival mode, which takes its cues from the survival mode in home versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3, pitting you against multiple opponents at once. Most interestingly, though you'll probably only play it once per style, is the tutorial mode. In only a few short lessons, it teaches you every little detail of how each style controls, and also how each style's tools are meant to work against the opponents. Because they all play so dramatically differently, you will want to utilise the tutorials, especially for the styles whose strengths aren't immediately obvious, like Taekwondo and Krav Maga.

 

It's hard to be objective about Dojo Masters, since as I mentioned above, it's eerily close to being a game that somehow manifested from my thoughts. On the other hand, I guess there's also a lot of potential for disappointment when such a game appears. But of course, I love it. It's a great game, it feels good to play, it was made with a specific goal in mind, and it reached that goal. I definitely recommend etting ahold of it, and I hope that someday it gets ported to consoles. I really wish there were still mainstream handhelds for it to be ported to, too. I'd love to play it on 3DS or PS Vita, though if that were possible, it might end up being the only thing I ever did from that point on.