Shenmue I & II (PS4)

 It is the first of April again, and as tradition dictates, it's time to write about a game that's a bit more well known than the usual fare. And this year, it's the turn of SEGA's divisive, absurdly ambitious adventure (and its sequel). In case you're wondering, I'm firmly in the pro-Shenmue camp. 

 

For those who don't know, the Shenmue games tell the story of a young Japanese man in the mid-1980s named Ryo Hazuki, and his quest to get revenge on Lan Di, the mysterious martial artist who killed his father. Well, they tell part of that story anyway. Unfortunately, though the games are absurdly ambitious, those ambitions never even came close to fruition. This story's been told many times before, but the original intention was for Shenmue to be twelve games, all as long as the first. Shenmue I is the first chapter in its full intended length, but then chapter two was skipped entirely, and the second game comprises chapters three-to-five. I haven't played the third game yet, but I do at least know that the story still isn't finished after twenty years.

 

But anyway, despite the reduction in scope from the original plans, these games are still incredible. They're open world adventures where you gather information, occasionally get into fights, and if you feel like it, you can waste time playing various side games, including a bunch of actual SEGA arcade games contemporary to the setting. Though they weren't the first open world games, you could make the argument that they were the first modern-style ones, with all kinds of distractions and things to do alongside the main quest. 

 

I could also talk about the way every character in the game has a name, backstory, and daily schedule, no matter how minor they are, or all the other bizarre and incredible things that are in these games, but to do so would be to do them a disservice. They're games that are much more than the sum of their parts. There's just a certain magic to them that's hard to describe, and judging by the way some people have reacted to them over the years, it's something that you either get or you don't.

 

Though I finished the first game a few times back on its original release, I never got all the way through the second until its HD rerelease. Furthermore, though I was always a fan of the games, it wasn't until I'd played all the way through both that I really realised how special and beautiful they were. Beyond the specifics of the plot and mechanics of the games, they're also a celebration of life, with themes of personal growth, the way people, places and events come and go with ever-shifting levels of importance, and all that kind of stuff.

 

There's a lot of stuff to see and do and find and collect in the games, but they aren't really made for completionists. Instead, it makes everyone's experience of the game slightly different: most of the main points will be seen by everyone in mostly the same way, but there's plenty of stuff you'll see that your friends might not, and vice versa. I mentioned earlier that I played through the first game a few times back on the Dreamcast, but on my recent playthrough of the PS4 port, I saw for the first time a pretty lengthy dialogue seen that is not only fully voice-acted (like all the game's dialogue), but even has a unique flashback cutscene. And unless you do a specific set of actions, you might never see any of that stuff! And there's a whole bunch of things like this in both games!

 

The atmosphere of the games is also noteworthy, in how immersive it is. There's some kind of magic captured in these (by 2021 standards) low polygon models and grainy textures, such that you can practically smell the environments you're exploring. Even playing back then, as a fourteen year old in the north of England, I recognised that these games were instilling in me a nostalgia for places I've never been to, at a time (slightly) before I was even born. I know lot of people don't think highly of these games, but to me, they're two of the best and most important ever, and I think everyone should play them both at least once.

Lin Zexu No Smoking (NES)

The odd title Lin Zexu No Smoking (also known as Lin Ze Xu Jin Yan) can be explained away by the fact that in this game, you play as Longyin Yan, an agent of the nineteenth century Chinese official Lin Zexu, and you spend the game trying to stop the opium trade in China, by fighting against the evil British and their treacherous allies. This all takes place in a beat em up, with some very light adventure game trimmings.

Those light trimmings seem to be an attempt at telling a TV serial-style story through an eight bit videogame, which is very ambitious, though unfortunately, the game doesn't really live up to that ambition. Basically, at the start of each stage, you're given an order, like, go and investigate the British Museum. But you can't go straight there, you have to ask around to find out who might know the way, then find them and ask them for directions. This wouldn't be too bad, were it not for the invisible walls that actually stop you going anywhere until someone's told you the way to get there. And this happens for pretty much every location you need to get to on foot. A particularly egregious case is when you're looking for a secret passage in a garden. The secret passage is hidden in a well, but you can't go down it until you've spoken to the woman nearby who lies and tells you that there's no secret passages nearby.

As for the beat em up sections, they're not totally horrible. Even though there's rarely more than two enemies on screen at a time, they still manage to be challenging, and you do have a few moves at your disposal, though honestly, the only really useful one is your flying kick. Once you get to the jungle and enemies start shooting projectiles at you, the difficulty drastically shoots upwards, too. In fact, there's apparently a part later in the game where you take to the high seas and fire cannons at British ships, but after over half an hour trying to get past one particular gun-toting enemy on the beach, I had give up for the sake of my sanity.

Despite its various huge flaws, I can't bring myself to be too harsh on Lin Zexu No Smoking, as like I said, it is a very ambitious game, both for the hardware, and for the time it was released (in 1996, even on the Playstation and Saturn this kind of story-heavy action game wasn't that common). It's not a good game, but it is at least worthy of note. And one last thing: if you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend doing so on an emulator with the NES's sprite limit turned off. Otherwise the game is a flickery mess. Not to the point of unplability, but it is very ugly and dampens the experience.

Ankoku Shinwa: Yamato Takeru Densetsu (NES)

Also known as Dark Myth, this is an adventure game based on the 1976 comic, all focussed around Japanese and Buddhist mythology, with a particular focus on the creation myths of Japan. The comic only lasted a single volume, so I assume it wasn't massively popular when it came out, with both this game and an OAV being released in 1989 and 1990 respectively, over a decade later. I can't say for certain, but I'm going to lay the credit for both adaptations at the feet of the Teito Monogatari franchise of novels, comics, movies and anime, that really re-popularised Japanese mythology and mysticism in the 1980s.

The game itself has typical 80s menu-based Famicom adventure game sections where you look at, walk, talk to, get, and use things, places and people, each one puntucated by a boss fight done in the style of a 2D platform game (but with no platforms). The adventure sections are actually pretty easy, there never seems to be more than three options for each action you can take, and even working through trial and error, you shouldn't face too many problems, except for one. Paradoxically, the game, at times, assumes you're an idiot, which makes the puzzles harder.

For example, there's a point where you encounter two statues, one with an empty eye socket, another with a removable eye-shaped gem. Obviusly, the solution is to take the eye-shaped gem from one statue and put it into the other. The thing that got me stuck, though, is that the option to put the gem into the eyehole doesn't appear until you check your late dad's journal, which will helpfully tell you "put the gem in the eyehole!" Figuring out that I had to look in the journal led to me having to look up a guide, and it makes no sense to me that the game forces you to do that as part of the puzzle, rather than using it as an optional hint.

The action sequences are very brief and very easy, and would barely be worth mentioning if they weren't unusual by their simple presence in the game. They're not terrible or a chore, but neither do they add a lot to the game. The game's difficulty is a mystery in general, though: the story's subject matter is pretty dark, with lots of deaths and a fair bit of violence, and the way the story's told in the comic and the OAV is also very dense, to the extent that it almost seems like it was made with the intent of being an edutainment piece on Japanese myth and ancient history. Contradictory to the tone and style of the source material is the game's difficulty. It all feels like it was made for a much younger audience than the other versions, and maybe it was?

Though the subject matter is interesting, and surprisingly rare in videogames, I still feel like everything about this game just makes it a weak substitute for either of the other versions of the story, and you'd probably be better off reading or watching one of those.

Seigi no Mikata (PS2)

Most tokusatsu-themed games, whether they're based on actual shows, or just inspired by the genre's aesthetic and concepts, are fighting games or beat em ups. That's what I was expecting from Seigi no Mikata, but it turned out to be something completely different: an adventure game that attempts to simulate the entire role of a main character in a tokusatsu show, not just the parts where they're transformed and fighting enemies. In fact, the game emulates the structure of a tokusatsu TV show in general: there are episodes rather than stages, and each episode had opening and closing sequences and an ad break in the middle! Furthermore, your goal isn't necessarily to win every instance of combat, but to achieve a minimum percentage of the TV ratings each week.

Before you get to doing any of that, though, you do get to choose the look of your hero's transformed state. It's not a super in-depth character creator, since you can just mix and match parts for arms, legs, torso and head, but it interesting in another way. All the parts you can pick are blatant homages to classic tokusatsu and anime shows like Gatchaman, Kikaider, and even going all the way back to the likes of Gekkou Kamen, the first Japanese TV superhero from all the way back in 1958.

So, if it's not all combat, what does this game actually entail? Mostly, wandering around a small Japanese town (as a side note, if you like low-poly renditions of small Japanese towns, and I know some of you do, this is a pretty good one), talking to people and sometimes helping them with small problems, like herding their cats, finding their dropped contact lenses, and so on. Talking to people and solving their problems gives very tiny ratings boosts, while standing still doing nothing causes them to plummet. Every few minutes, though, there'll be an event, which means you have to go to the right location before it starts. (Amazingly, for the entire first episode, I managed to do this every time, entirely by chance. After that though, I went and found a guide, just in case). An event might be just a conversation with the other characters on the show, a battle with some mooks or a villain, or sometimes both. During the conversations, there are usually multiple choices, that can affect the ratings, though they'll slowly rise all the time an event is happening no matter what you do.

As for the combat, it's a disappointment. It starts with a little button-mashing minigame to do decide who goes first, then whoever does go first gets to pick their ten attacks (they can be punches, kicks or throws). After that, the other side tries to guess which ten attacks the attacker chose so they can defend. The whole thing then plays out, and if both sides are still standing, it starts again, but with the roles of attacker and defender reversed, until one side falls. It's not exciting at all, but since this isn't an action game generally, I guess they didn't want any difficulty walls for the adventure game fans that were probably going to buy it. But even Shenmue's branching path-style QTBs were better than this.

Seigi no Mikata is a game that I really wanted to like, as it's clear a lot of love went into its creation, and it is of a very high quality and full of ideas. The problem is that it's just so boring to play! A lot of your time is spent wandering around waiting for the next event to happen, and the events themselves aren't particularly exciting, either. You might level the same criticisms at Shenmue, but I'd say the difference is that in Shenmue, you have to actually investigate to make the events happen, plus its depictions of 1980s Japan and Hong Kong are so richly textured and full of life that it can get by pretty well on its atmosphere alone. In summary, play Shenmue instead of this, sorry.

Iblard Laputa no Kaeru Machi (Playstation)

It's another one of those ~aesthetic~ Playstation games, like previous Lunatic Obscurity entry Kaze no Notam, and while Kaze no Notam was vaguely inspired by the work of artist Hiroshi Nagai, Iblard Laputa no Kaeru Machi is explicity and specifically based on the work of artist Naohisa Inoue, right down to his paintings appearing in some stages as clues.

Besides being an artistic showcase, Iblard is also a first-person adventure game featuring simple puzzles, which are mainly solved by using the right item in the right place. It's actually a lot like a version of Yumemi Mystery Mansion, but set outside and with realtime 3D graphics instead of prerendered FMV fakery, and it is actually from the same developer as both Mystery Mansion games. There are seperate stages, and each one only includes a few items to use and a few items to work with, meaning that all the puzzles are very easy to solve: even if you somehow don't figure them out, it won't take long to get through with trial and error. Another nice thing is that though there's some text and spoken dialogue, there's very little, and you don't need to understand any of it to get anywhere (at least, not in the few stages I've played through).

A quick image search for "Naohisa Inoue" brings up lots of paintings of incredibly idyllic fairyland gardens overflowing with flowers, and those are the environments you'll be exploring in this game. Although there are some minor hazards, they're both easy to avoid and very unlikely to kill you, and they seem to be there simply as some kind of token gesture towards being a traditional videogame. The visuals and music and lack of real threats combine to make a very safe-feeling environment, and everything's very cosy and dreamlike. If you've ever been in either a very verdant garden or a very overgrown bit of forest on a sweltering hot summer afternoon, this game's got a similar feel, to the extent that you can almost feel the pollen going up your nose.  I think the low-poly models and low-resolution textures really help that feeling, and that this would be a very different game were it made at any other time in the advancement of videogame technology.

Iblard Laputa no Kaeru Machi is a game that's completely devoid of excitement, and isn't interesting mechanically, either. However, it is a perfect example of how a game can still be good and worthwhile while not being "good" in any kind of traditional sense. It perfectly creates an atmosphere and the simple puzzles are in there for two reasons: firstly, they give you a reason to fully explore each stage, as solving the puzzles will mean going to each part at least once. Secondly, they create a (very mild) feeling of being a little bit lost in a nice, though strange, place, a feeling which is helped by the fact that the map works like an actual map: there's not movie "you are here" dot, and instead you have to look at certain landmarks on the map and then look for them in the stage to get your bearings. Though it might not be the easiest game to track down, I strongly recommend that you do.

Wizkid (Amiga)

I'm not sure if this game is really obscure. I think of it as one of the better-known Amiga games, but I've never actually seen anyone on the internet talking about it, and even the best-known Amiga games don't tend to have a lot of fame outside the UK. So I think it's safe. It's also a childhood favourite of mine, and it's pretty unique, too.

It's the sequel to a much-loved (though I never got into it) C64 shooting game called Wizball, and you play as Wizball's son, Wizkid. Like his dad, Wizkid is a floating orb with a face. He's tasked with defeating screens full of enemies by headbutting bricks in their general direction. If you run out of bricks on a screen, you move onto the next uncompleted screen, minus any power-ups you had. The power-ups on offer are a clown's nose (which lets you juggle bricks on top of your head) and dentures (which let you hold bricks in your mouth. There's also coloured notes that gradually fill spaces on a tune at the top of the screen. When the tune's filled, it rains money and the game completely changes.

First, you're taken to a shop, where you can buy an assortment of seemingly-random objects, like a newspaper, or some coloured glasses. All the items have uses somewhere, though a lot of them are very obscure (I think the developers must have realised this, since the game tells you when to use them). The big change comes with the exits from the shop screen, of which there are too: one that takes you back to being just a head, knocking bricks around, and another that gives you a body, letting you play the other half of the game.

That other half is a kind of simple adventure game taking place in the backgrounds of the head stages. Adventure games have a reputation for having their own logic at the best of times, but Wizkid takes this to extremes. For an example, I'll describe for you some things you can encounter in the first stage. You can ring a bell to summon a door, behind which hides an angry, barking dog. Post a newspaper in the door's letterbox and open it again, and the dog will be calmly sat on a toilet, reading, allowing you to go inside and solve a little weight/pressure pad puzzle. Alternatively, you could go do the well, where you'll find men's and women's toilets. In the women's toilets, you can sit on a toilet and make poo shoot out of a volcano, while in the men's toilets, you can flood the well by flushing a blocked urinal, or you can put a token in the condom machine, inflate the condom that comes out and use it to float away to a series of secret rooms.

And the whole game is full of weird nonsense like that. The point of the game is that you're trying to find a bunch of lost kittens to row a boat to the villain's castle and rescue your dad. I actually got to the "rowing the boat" part as a kid, though I never had enough kittens to get any further. There's one kitten on each stage, and they're hidden in different places, or sometimes you get them by clearing every screen in the head-only game.

Wizkid is a game I definitely recommend. There's nothing else like it, it's bizarre and funny and actually fun to play. Playing it now, though, it seems that I'm a lot worse at it than I was 20 years ago. Boo.

Dark Native Apostle (PS2)

When Bomberman: Act Zero came out for the 360 in 2006, it was universally loathed, and rightfully so. But an annoying point about the coverage it got is that so much of the negativity was focussed on the concept of a gritty sci-fi Bomberman game, that it was barely mentioned that the game itself was absolute garbage, with only one arena, no local multiplayer, and a single player mode that consisted of playing the same stage 100 times in a row. The thing is, it wasn't the first attempt at a gritty Bomberman for the 21st century. Though it doesn't bear the name of the esteemed multiplayer franchise, Dark Native Apostle was published in Japan by Hudson Soft, and features a protagonist with the ability to drop small timed explosives wherever he goes. (Coincidentally, it was developed by recurring Lunatic Obscurity favourites Tamsoft!)

It's not a multiplayer Vs. arena game, though, but takes the attack mechanic from the Bomberman series and applies to, of all things, a blend of survival horror with the occasional bit of light 3D platforming. Well, "survival horror" in the respect that the plot involves genetic engineering and bio-weapons, and that a lot of time is spent running back and forth finding keys, putting disks into computer terminals and flicking power switches. There isn't anything actually scary in the game, your main method of attack has infinte ammo and there's an ample supply of healing items.

So yeah, you're some genetic engineered bio-weapon guy with amnesia, and you go into the labs where you were made to try and find out your past. It's pretty much the exact same plot as a billion other games that came out between 1996 and 2005. The combat aspect of the game is incredibly easy: most enemies will stand still while firing at you or changing direction, so you can just drop a bomb at their feet to dispatch them. You can hold the square button down and walk away when you drop a bomb to give it a longer fuse, but I've gotten a fair few areas into the game, and beaten a few bosses and this ability has not yet been useful once.

The puzzle-solving aspect of the game is a lot more difficult, though. Well, I think it is, it might just be my being a bit thick. Though you are expected to comb every room you can go into to find every item and clue that might lead to you opening more rooms and progressing. There is one interesting feature the game has involving the upgrades to your powers: you can equip up to four "chips", each of which improves an aspect of your abilities, like the power of your bombs or you max HP or whatever. But, by equipping them in the right order, you can also gain special abilities! Some of these are almost universally useful, like the dash ability. Some are useful in a few certain places, like the ability to see invisible objects. Some are useful in literally one part of the game and then never again, like the ability to drop blinding flash bombs, that only seem to affect the big purple lizard boss you fight in the sewers early in the game. The fact that you often don't get the chips needed to acquire a special ability until around the time you get the note telling you about it is a disappointment, too: playing a second time around with prior knowledge of all the "recipes" could have possibly led to a sneaky bit of sequence breaking, maybe?

Dark Native Apostle isn't a great game, but it's not a particularly bad one either. I guess the core concept alone is interesting enough to be worth a look, though. An obvious comparision to make is to the Playstation game Silent Bomber, which I like a lot more than DNA, though it is a pure all-out action game, so it's not an entirely fair comparision to make.

Curiosites Vol. 7 - Two Bad Neighbours

It's often said that the main strength of the UK microcomputer era is that anyone could make a game about anything, and get it published. The same also applied to licenced games: any TV show or movie could be made into a videogame, as long as it was even moderately popular at the time.

According to legend, the Australian soap Neighbours is actually more popular in the UK than it is in its homeland, and much of that audience is teenagers (I watched it a lot during my teenage years, even!). So there's an Amiga game based on it. Two, actually, one licensed and one a fangame. A fangame based on a TV soap opera over two decades ago! Unfortunately, they're both from the early 90s, roughly a decade before I was watching, so they'll mainly feature characters and stories that I've never even heard of. 

First up, I'll talk about the official game. It's a racing game, you play as some teenager on a skateboard, and your opponents are other teenagers, pretty evenly divided between boys and girls, riding skateboards, go-karts, bikes and so on. You race around the block, scoring points by going between traffic cones and collecting food. There's also obstacles all over the place, which are the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a version of Paperboy set in a very stereotypical version of Australia: cars, people walking around, and open manholes alongside Kangaroos and Emus (I don't remember ever seeing either of those animals in an episode of Neighbours, though maybe it was different back then?). It's mildly amusig for a few goes, but nothing you'd ever want to play for an extended period, and I don't think the novelty would warrant actually going to a shop and buying it. It does look very nice, though: very bright colours and charming little sprites. 

The fangame is known by the longer title Neighbours: The Adventure, and the title's pretty descriptive, since it's an adventure game based on Neighbours. The inro tells you that the evil capitalist Paul Robinson has bought all the land on which Ramsey Street stands and wants to evict everyone and sell it off for a profit, and you have to stop him.  

I'll have to make an admission here and say that not only am I not really a fan of adventure games, I'm also not very good at them. As a result, I quickly got bored of fruitlessly clicking on things hoping to make something happen and got nowhere. The presentation is nice, though, with low-res digitised photos and actual music from the show, though the few points that use animation do look ridiculous. Generally, though, it looks and feels more professional than the official game. I guess if you like adventure games and want something with a mundane surburban setting, look it up?  

I didn't really go into either of these games expecting them to be good, I just thought it was an odd footnote in history that an Australian soap managed to somehow get two videogames made out of it, and both for a market literally on the other side of the world. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on either of them, to be honest.

Sukeban Deka II: Shoujo Tekkamen Densetsu (Master System)

Or if you'd prefer, "Delinquent Girl Cop II: Legend of the Girl in the Iron Mask". I should also let the uninitiated among you know that this game isn't a sequel to an earlier Sukeban Deka title, but is based on the second Sukeban Deka TV series, which sees a girl named Yoko Godai, who spent her childhood with her head trapped in an iron mask, taking up the Saki Asamiya codename and becoming the second Sukeban Deka, in the hopes of finding the reasons and culprits behind her stolen childhood. It's an excellent show, and is currently being fansubbed by The Skaro Hunting Society, should any of you be curious.

The game presents a heavily abridged version of the TV show's plot, split into adventure segments and beat em up segments. Unfortunately, the adventure segments make up the bulk of the game, and though I admit that it's a genre that doesn't especially appeal to me at the best of times, Sukeban Deka II's adventure segments are of an especially old-school flavour. There are very few clues as to what is supposed to be done, and though there is an english fan-translation, you'll still probably want a guide to save the tedious effort of going to every room and clicking on everything to find clues and items.

The beat em up sections are much shorter, and similarly old-fashioned, but they're pretty fun. Typically, you'll fight off a small gang of high school boys, before fighting a boss, and though the gang fights are pretty much all the same, the boss fights are really varied, though oddly, they seem to actually get easier as the game goes on.

There's also a couple of 3D maze sections, though they are really just that: empty mazes for the player to navigate that just pad the game out and fill a little bit of extra time.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this game unless you really love the TV series, or if you want a nice little slice of 80s Japanese pop-culture (for some reason, I associate SEGA's 8-bit consoles with the period far more than I do the Famicom, despite the Famicom's near-monolithic popularity in Japan at the time, and it's can't be denied that Sukeban Deka is an important artifact of the era.). But if you just want a Master System beat em up, there are far better examples, like Hokuto no Ken or Kung-fu Kid.

Chaos Break (Playstation)

So, in 1998, Taito released an arcade game entitled Chaos Heat, it's a pretty good game, like a 3D beat em up with guns. I'll probably do a post on it at some point in the distant future. For some reason, Taito, instead of porting Chaos Heat to the Playstation, made Chaos Break, a spin-off set in the same universe (or an "Episode of Chaos Heat", as the title screen puts it).

This port doesn't have the constant, fast-paced action of its arcade parent, eschewing it in favour of Resident Evil-esque exploration and puzzles, in what can only have been an ill-advised attempt to cash in on the popularity of that kind of adventure game on the Playstation at the time. Ill-advised because, while Resident Evil, as an example takes place in an atmospheric mansion, with many unique rooms containing interesting puzzles and memorable items, Chaos Break doesn't have any of those things.

The setting is a scientific facility that's futuristic in the least interesting way possible: everything made out of grey metal, no decoration, sliding doors, all that kind of thing. The rooms and especially the corridors all pretty much look alike, which I guess is realistic for a facility of this type, but in a videogame that contains as much backtracking as Chaos Break, it's not only ugly and boring, but also impractical, leading to endless flicking to and fro between the game and the map screen in the pause menu.

The biggest crime Chaos Break commits, however, is in its puzzles. Using Resident Evil as an example once again, the puzzles in that game included logic puzzles with verbose clues, block-pushing puzzles, fitting items in different slots, and so on. The puzzles in Chaos break are neither fun nor interesting. To find the first password you need to unlock a door, the player simply has to find it written down on a piece of paper found in the possession of a dead scientist found lying around. The second takes the game to new depths, being a randomly generated sudoku puzzle. Not only is the puzzle itself a tedious, slow, laborious chore, it completely shatters any atmosphere or immersion the player might be feeling, which would be bad in a regular game, but remember that Chaos Break is supposed to be a horror game (though the near-infinite ammunition available coupled with the feeble monsters might have already convinced you otherwise) and the sudoku puzzle is like a testament to this game being an awful, poorly thought out mess.

I'm sure you've already guessed, but I don't recommend this game. It's just an ugly, boring mess. Don't play it.

Street Fighter 2 Interactive Movie (Saturn)

Everyone knows that there was a terrible Mortal Kombat-esque game based on the live action Street Fighter movie, and that the general visual style and some of the plot elements of the Street Fighter Alpha games were inspired by the popularity of the animated movie (and maybe to a lesser extent the Street Fighter 2 V animated tv show), but the fact that there was an interactive FMV game directly based on the animated movie has been somewhat forgotten by history. Just like FMV games in general, ahhhh!

You'll remember that throughout the animated move, there were cyborgs sent out by Dictator to scan the world's strongest fighters and analyse their strengths, and it is one of those cyborgs the player controls in this game. The way this works is that you watch the movie, and during fight scenes, you hold down the A button to bring up a crosshair, use the d-pad to move it around and press B to "scan" moves. Successful scans are met with a "ching!" noise, and supposedly, doing this will make the Cyborg stronger, in preperation for the game's big setpiece: a fight between the Cyborg and Ryu at the end of the game. I guess I didn't do a good job of scanning, since I was only doing tiny, puny amounts of damage against Ryu and got quickly and thouroughly pummeled. Oddly, pretty much the entire movie is included, despite the non-fight scenes serving no purpose in the game, making the Cyborg seem like a bit of a creepy voyeur. You can also press C during most scenes to bring up information, including character stats, what model of car is being driven and so on. There are even incomplete stats for non-playable characters, like Eliza and the guy Ryu one hit KOs in Hong Kong. The game even acknowledges Akuma/Gouki's background cameo with this feature!

The most interesting thing about the game is the exclusive stuff it has, mainly in the form of new graphics and animation. There's an FMV intro in the style of the movie, with all-new animation and there's some very small extra bits of animation in the game just before the big fight. The fight itself is pretty cool, too. It's done in the graphical style of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, with an all-new sprite and portrait for the Cyborg (though its moves are the same as Ken's), and what I think is also a whole new background for the fight, too.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this game. It really is just watching the Street Fighter 2 animated movie, with added button pressing. You'd be better off just watching the movie and then playing a proper Street Fighter game, or if you have the GBA port of Alpha 3 or the 3DS port of Street Fighter IV, both at the same time! Not even the aforementioned exclusive animation or things like the gallery of character design artwork are enough to save it really.