Kid Chaos (Amiga)

 According to legend, this game started out as a pitch to SEGA for an Amiga port of Sonic The Hedgehog, or possibly an original Sonic game made for the Amiga. I don't know if that's true, but surely anyone would just pre-emptively assume that SEGA wouldn't endorse a port of their mascot character and hardware showcase to another company's system? Though rumours of an Amiga Sonic were pretty prevalent in the early nineties, with screenshots of something claiming to be such a thing appearing in some magazines.

 

It's clear that even if the above legend isn't true, that the gme was definitely heavily influenced by the Sonic games, at least. Your character (a caveman brought to the future by scientists, and inexplicably given a flat-top haircut and a leather jacket) runs really fast, with momentum being gained or spent running up and down hills. He attacks with a spinning jump attack. 

 

There's also a non-conventional health system that's different enough from Sonic's rings, but you can see the influence in there: you start a stage with ninety-nine hitpoints, and after taking damage, you slowly recover at a rate of one HP per second, plus one for every one of the half-apples flowing around that you collect. One original element is your destructive quota: in each stage, you've got to destroy a certain amount of objects to open the exit. The objects in the first set of stages are flowers, which I did like. The idea of a game where a caveman who's dressed like a stereotypical modern-day thug on a mission to destroy every flower he finds has a kind of Beano-ish charm to it. One of the later stages has the object literally just being ring monitors from Sonic, which does dampen the originality points a little.

 

The weirdest part of this is how damage is dealt: instead of different enemies and hazards dealing different amounts of damage, each stage has a "damage factor" announced on the introductory briefing screen, and everything that can hurt you in that stage will do that amount of damage. These start out at a reasonable thirty or fourty points of damage, but rising to the ludicrous heights of eighty-five later in the game. Which brings up the game's biggest problem: the difficulty. I actually got as far as the second section of the second set of stages under my own power. That stage is run under a strict time limit, you've still got to find your quota of things to destroy, and there's spikes on almost every surface. Furthermore, the spikes are very small and don't stand out much visually when you're stood still, let alone when you're moving as fast as you can to beat the clock. On top of all of that, that most hated bugbear of European microcomputer platformers is also present: tiny drops of liquid that fall down from the ceiling and hurt/kill the player.

 

So, I used passwords to see later stages in the game, both to take more varied screenshots for this review, and to see if this stage was just a weird difficulty spike in an already-hard game. Nope, the game continues to be a miserably harsh experience. All the stupid comments people say about Sonic games, about how they're meant to be about speed, but the traps and enemies never let you go past (it's very telling that such "critics" have such a hard time with a series of games that are incredibly easy to complete) are actually true about Kid Chaos. Except it's not just that there's lethal enemies and hazards all over the place, but also that the eponymous Kid is so unruly in his movements. That is to say, he's always sliding arond everywhere! The game demands precision, but doesn't allow you to give it! 

 

I'm really disappointed in Kid Chaos. The idea of a weird reskin of a rejected Sonic project was interesting, and of course, being a Sonic-like means that the old "one button controls" problem wouldn't have mattered, either! This could have been one of the best Amiga platformers, and maybe one of the best Amiga games in general, but actually playing it is just such a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

WWE Brawl (3DS, Prototype)

 Long, long ago, there was concept art going around for something called WWE Brawl, a game in which superhero-like cartoony versions of WWE wrestlers would fight in somewhat fantastical environments. It was no secret that this game existed, WWE even still have a bunch of the concept art up on their official website! I remember there being some excitement for it among wrestling fans, but unfortunately, it never materialised. Until earlier this year, when an unfinished prototype of the 3DS version leaked online, being the version about which I'm writing today.

 

The game was apparently in development since 2009, with the leaked version being supposedly from around 2011, which puts it very early in the 3DS' life. It also puts it at a time a few years before WWE started caring about female wrestlers, and as such, the roster is all-male (though the concept art on WWE's site does feature the infamously useless Kelly Kelly as a member of "the resistance", she isn't in this version of the game). There are twelve playable characters, though, and they're made up of who you'd excpet from a WWE kids' game from around 2010: there's Cena, The Undertaker, Kofi Kingston, The Big Show, and so on.

 

Most are pretty much as you'd expect, though two I thought were especially interesting are Kane, who's a big, white-skinned monster-man, and Randy Orton, who has a bunch of tubes attached to him, like the Batman villain Bane. Also, looking at the concept art again before writing this, I saw that Triple H was also counted as a member of the resistance, which makes little sense, not least because the game has him dressed as a medieval king. But WWE games are infamous for their insistence on always portraying him positively.

 

As for the game itself, it's kind of like Power Stone. You fight in one of the three arenas: a blank grid world, the lobby of a fancy building (you can also take an elevator to the roof, where an Adamski-type UFO will shoot lasers at you), and some kind of cartoony sci-fi factory/lab place. There's also crates lying around, which can be broken open to reveal weapons! There's a sword, a baseball bat, a bazooka, and a giant tire. The four face buttons are assigned to jump, attack, throw (your opponent, since this is a wrestling-themed game, after all), and pick up weapon.

 

It really seems like it'd be a pretty decent game, had it actually been finished and released. All the problems I have with it, other than the slightly boring roster, are due to it being a prototype. There are only three stages, though there are spaces on the menu for eight more. A bigger variety of weapons would also have been nice. And, of course, you can only take part in one-on-one fights in this version, and after the fight ends, you're sent straight back to the title screen. Plus, the CPU opponents are all incredibly easy to defeat. Naturally, it can be assumed that with proper arcade/story modes, escalating difficulty, and maybe also group battles, the finished product would be a lot better than this.

 

There's not really much point in recommending or not recommending WWE Brawl. I've said what I think of it, and if you didn't know it was out there, you do now, and can satisfy your curiosity on your own if you want to. I do think it's a shame it got cancelled, though. Like I said, it does seem like it was going to be a good game. Still, there were plenty of vaguely similar games released on 3DS in Japan, at least. Beast Saga: Saikyou Gekiotsu Coliseum, for example.