Guardians (Arcade)

Also known as Denjin Makai II, this is a game that I'm not totally sure about including. It's very well known among arcade fans, but conversely, it's almost totally unknown to everyone else. There's some reasons for this, like it being a beat em up that came out just a year or two after that genre's original heyday was on the wane. Plus it's in at that level of technology where it was way too advanced for a port to the Mega Drive or SNES (in fact, the game to which it's a sequel got a SNES port for which a lot of compromises had to made, so this one had no chance), but a lot of people would have ignorantly stuck their noses up in the air at a port to Saturn or Playstation.

 

It's a massive shame too, as it might well be the best beat em up from before the recent genre renaissance. You constantly have a whole bunch of attack options, and it offers superior solutions to some long-standing problems the genre had back then. There's a whole bunch of characters to choose from, all of whom are wildly different in design: there's a ninja and a kung fu guy, a big triceratops-man, a very Shiar Empire-looking bird-girl, a muscle-bound soldier, and more. Though the controls are the same for all of them, they all feel very different to play as. Not only do they have different attacks, and different speed/damage/etc. stats, but there's little things, too, like how they utilise weapons, or how much meter their different specials consume.

 

Because this is a game that has both special moves and meter. There's three action buttons in the game: melee, jump, and projectile. Like pretty much any other beat em up, you can repeatedly press melee for combos, and you can also press it with a direction while you're jumping for a few different air attacks. None of that uses up meter, of course, but you have several different options that do. There's the traditional all-around emergency attack, and it did feel pretty liberating once I realised it uses meter rather than health, and there's the projectile attack, which is very useful and uses the most meter for most characters. Finally, each character has a couple of special moves, performed by holding the melee button and either moving the stick side-to-side or up-and-down. That might be a slightly awkward-sounding input method, and in a fighting game, I think it would be (it brings to mind Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), but in a beat em up it works really well. You can quickly learn to hold the button at the end of a combo and immediately go into a special.

 

As well as mechanically, there's lots to love in the game's theme and aesthetics, too. The setting is some kind of futuristic dystopia, though not one that's suffered environmental collapse, as locations include various kinds of big cities, a theme park, a moving train, a forest, a military base in the desert, and more. They all look amazing, with lots of super-detailed pixel art. The enemies are very varied, too, with futuristic soldiers (including what appears to be some kind of penal regiment with their wrists in pillories), a few different superhero-like characters, and weirder things like big-eyed humanoid crocodile monsters. The one weak point I can think of in this area is the boss music, which sounds more like it should be on the options screen of a sports game.

 

Obviously I recommend playing Guardians, it's excellent. It works fine in both MAME and Final Burn Neo, and since Hamster have put out a few Banpresto games already, it'll hopefully turn up in the Arcade Archives series someday. How nice it'll be to finally play a legal version of this game on a home console, a mere thirty years late!

Solitary Fighter (Arcade)

 Solitary Fighter is the sequel to a much better-known game, Violence Fight. Though its more of an expanded rerelease, since it has exactly the same plot, and it mostly plays in the same way, with the main (but not only) difference being the addition of a few more playable characters. This is probably a contributing factor into why it's so forgotten, but the biggest factor is definitely the circumstances of its release: it has the misfortune of being a pre-Street Fighter II-style fighting game released in 1991, the same year as Street Fighter II. So no matter what, it would have looked like a weird, awkward throwback.

 

But here in 2025, it's that weird awkwardness that makes it interesting: it's a fighting game, but not following the formula that SFI codified. So, it's set in 1950s America, and all of the characters are fighting for cash prizes in warehouses and other such places. Most of the stages are in a beat em up-style forced perspective arrangement, whereby you can walk in eight directions, as well as jumping. Though some stages only let you walk on a single plane (I wonder if this was an attempt at making the game look at least partially like SFII, since apparently, major changes were made to a 1992 Taito game, Dino Rex, for the same reason).

 

You have three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. Pressing punch and kick together makes your character crouch, and pressing either of the attack buttons together with jump does a special  move of wildly varying usefulness. One of the characters, a balding fat idiot dressed in stars and stripes has headbutts instead of kicks. While you're fighting in the beat em up-style stages, sometimes armed audience members will invade the fight, but the thing is, they're just interested in violence, they don't seem to care where it goes. They'll start out attacking one fighter, then change their mind and attack the other, until they take enough hits themselves that they decide it's no longer worth the effort and give up.

 

Maybe the weirdest element of the game is the health bar. It goes down in inconsistent, seemingly random amounts in response to characters taking attacks, and also it'll often start going back up again immediately afterwards. And getting a character's health bar to zero isn't enough to knock them out, you've got to hit them again after that (and if it goes back up, you'll have to deplete it again). Plus, it seems like you can't win with a throw? It makes for a game that feels very imprecise and unpredictable in a way that removes any satisfaction from victory.

 

Solitary Fighter isn't a completely terrible game. I do really like the setting and how the game looks in general, and I am always on the lookout for games that offer takes on fighting that feel different to typical fighting games. But none of this is enough to make it good. I think the absolute best you might hope for is having one or (at most) two fights with a friend, as a little comic relief between better games.

Prop Cycle (Arcade)

 There have been times in the past where I've put disclaimers at the start of arcade game reviews, because I was emulating, and the original game had some kind of specialised control scheme or gimmicky cabinet that I couldn't possibly replicate at home. Prop Cycle represents a particularly big case of this, as the original cabinet had a whole exercise bike on it, plus fans blowing wind into the player's face. But that elaborate cabinet full of moving parts is almost thirty years old now, and there are very few arcades around in the west that aren't just full of worthless garbage like coinpushers and fruit machines, so it's very unlikely most of us are ever going to encounter a functional Prop Cycle and be able to play it. So, I'm here to ask (and answer) the pertinent question: is it worth emulating, and could it have worked as a Playstation game back in the day?

 

For those who don't know what this game is, it's a game in which you pilot a pedal-powered aircraft around various stages, popping balloons for points or extra time. In easy mode, you pick one of three stages, and you're just playing for a high score in that stage. In advanced mode, you play each of the three stages, with a tighter time limit, balloons in more difficult positions, and to progress from one stage to the next, you have to hit a score quota. Advanced mode has an exclusive fourth stage, the floating continent of Solitar, but unfortunately, even through practice, turning down the difficulty, and using continues, I haven't managed to get there.

 

It might sound like scant material for a home release, but a lot of Namco's Playstation games in those early years were pretty brief. I think it wasn't until Soul Edge and Tekken 3 that they really started to pile on the extras for the home audience. Plus, it's the quality of what's in there that really matters, and that quality is very high. The game takes place in an idyllic world, obviously inspired by Laputa (as so many great videogames are), and it's all realised in some of the most beautiiful low-poly graphics you'll ever see. It's prefectly directed, too: for example, the second stage has you fly into a tunnel inhabited by (peaceful) giant worms during daylight, and as you emerge from the other side, the music changes and you're flying around a little mining village beneath a beautiful starry sky.

 

The one problem with playing through emulation is that I haven't been able to figure out a way to perfectly map the controls of the cabinet to a controller. The best I'e been able to manage (using a Dual Shock 4) is to map steering to the left analogue stick (like you'd expect), and using L2 and R2 to decrease and increase the speed of the pedals turning. It's far from perfect, but it is good enough to make playing the game an enjoyable, if slightly fiddly, experience. Of course, the theoretical Playstation port that doesn't exist would have been able to come up with something more bespoke for the game, maybe even coming up with a scheme that involed Namco's NeGcon controller. But that's just me making educated guesses on other stuff Namco did around the same time.

 

Prop Cycle is a great game, definitely worth your time to emulate, and in my opinion at least, it would also have been a worthwhile Playstation port at the time, and I think it's a shame it wasn't one. I've never been able to play it on an actual cabinet, but hopefully that'll change someday. I do know that in recent years, there's been at least one Prop Cycle-like game, complete with bike controller and fans, released by a Chinese company, but the only cabient I've encountered of that was way too small for my giant long legs to comfortably be able to pedal.

Nostradamus (Arcade)

 Though the game bears the name, and the title screen bears the image of the famous french fortuneteller, it's not about him. It's about a war (or possibly alien invasion?) that occurs at the end of the century, which was probably one of his predictions. You know how vague they are. But anyway, this is a shooting game that, as far as I know, has no home ports, and I suspect the reason for that is that in more ways than one, it comes between two eras.

 

The first, and most relevant way it does this is in the same as lots of arcade games that didn't get home ports. It came out in 1993, and graphically, it's beyond what could satisfactorily have been done on the Mega Drive or SNES, but by the time the Saturn and Playstation came about, it would have been old hat, and it's definitely not a popular or famous enough game to have made up for that. It does look really good, though. There's not much in the way of special effects, but there's a lot of amazing-looking super-detailed pixel art in the backgrounds and sprites alike. 

 

The other way in which it stands astride two eras is less relevant to its unported status, since it's an aspect it shares with games that did get ported to home systems, like Grind Stormer and Batsugun: it's one of those games that bridges the gap between classic-style shooting games and later danmaku-style shooting games. There's never super-elaborate or particularly dense bullet patterns, but there is still a fair few enemy bullets coming your way from very early in the game. Furthermore, while you don't have a screen-clearing, bullet-cancelling bomb, you do have a charge shot that, when being charged, manifests as a small energy field following your ship around. This energy field does cancel enemy bullets, so with a bit of skill, you can maneuver around in such a way that it keeps you safe. Of course, that means you aren't shooting, so you aren't killing enemies or revealing the score items that remain invisible until you shoot their hiding places. (I almost called this a danmaku shooter thing because of the hidden bees in the Dodonpachi games, but then I remembered that it's something that goes as far back as 1986's Star Soldier).

 

Something else that's of interest is that the bosses have a unifying theme of modularity. That is to say, each boss is made up of various smaller parts that come together to form the whole boss. What's interesting about this is the way that sometimes you'll destroy one of a boss' constituent parts, and  a different one will fly in, and attach itself to the core and give it a new set of attack patterns. Sometimes, you'll fights some of the segments during the stage as larger enemies that escape before you destroy them, then they come together at the end of the stage to form a boss.

 

Another aesthetic quirk I'd like to mention is that, as well as the in-game graphics looking so good, there's a fair bit of thought that's clearly gone into the game's overall presentation, with the aspect I'd particularly like to highlight being the player characters. There are two characters, though you unfortunately can't pick which one you get: player one is always Dalas (sic), and player two is always Joanna. I don't recognise them, but their faces on the screen that appears after you insert a coin really look like they must have been traced over photos of real people. There'sa possibility that the developers actually hired models themselves, since there's different pictures of the pair on the high score screen, this time in profile. Dalas has a lit cigarette in his mouth in both situations, of course! I wonder if there were plans for more to be done with these characters?

 

Nostradamus is a pretty good shooting game. It won't blow your mind or change your life, but it's still fun enough, and worth pushing through the high level of difficulty to see more of the beautiful pixel art it contains. Luckily, even the animation for your ship exploding looks great!

Martial Masters (Arcade)

 Even down to the most basic level of their PGM hardware being a lot like the Neo Geo, it was always clear that IGS were very heavily influenced by SNK, and in keeping with that, Martial Masters seems at first glance to be an ttempt at making a Taiwanese equivalent to Last Blade 2. I say at first glance, because when you start playing, the period setting (seventeenth century China in this case), slightly brown-heavy colour palette, and smooth animation really bring Last Blade 2 to mind. But when you look a little deeper, you'll discover that this is a game that has its own identity.

 

Before going further, I'm going to contradict that a little by saying that the setting and characters do borrow very heavily from martial arts movies, especially Once Upon a Time in China. However, this actually does serve to make it stand out among fighting games, since there are far fewer games than you'd expect that focus specifically on kung fu, and every character in Martial Masters represents a different style. 

 

This does seem to have posed a challenge for the game's animators, as some of the characters appear to have been animated using rotoscoping. Maybe it was too hard to capture certain styles in 2D without doing that? Whatever the reason, it does result in some very unique-looking fighters, and even though the characters play in similar ways to ones in other fighting games, with traditional special move motions and so on, the different look provided by the overall kung fu theme makes the game stand out in the genre for the way it feels to play.

 

Martial Masters isn't a game without a few features of its own, though, some of which, while maybe not innovated here, were at least uncommon at the time of its release. You can store up to nine pwoer meters, though it's rare to go higher than three, since they're not just used for supers! You can' perform a Guilty Gear-esque burst action by pressing HP+HK while blocking, which is useful, but not as useful as it might have been if you could do it while taking full hits, too. Especially since if you instinctively press HP+HK when you're not blocking, your character will do a taunt. There's a few other uses for meter, too, like launchers, a Vampire Savior-esque power up, and a kind of throw that doesn't deal damage, but does stun the opponent.

 

I briefly touched upon how the game looks earlier, but it does look very good. Mostly. Some of the portraits on the character select screen look bizarre, and as mentioned, the rotoscoped characters stand out a lot in a way that's not necessarily positive. But none of that's bad enough to really spoil the game, and the backgroudns and most of the characters look excellent. To bring up the general kung fu theme once again, it does make all of the attacks, specials, and supers really stand out in a way that is positive. 

 

Martial Masters might not be able to stand up to its contemporaries in that subgenre of "turn of the century fighting games with big sprites and unusually smooth animation" like Street Fighter III, Mark of the Wolves, or Last Blade 2, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. It's a fun game with a unique setting and feel, and it feels good to play. If you want to play it legally, a PGM cartridge would cost you a few hundred pounds, but apparently there was a somewhat recent collection of IGS games on Switch which is presumably a lot cheaper, and includes Martial Masters and a bunch more games (including previous review subject Demon Front).

Fearless Pinocchio (Arcade)

 It had been a while since I last updated MAME, but a couple of months ago, Fearless Pinocchio caught my eye, and got me to finally undertake that minor chore. A previously unknown 2D fighting game by IGS with cute, stylised graphics suddenly appearing on the landscape would naturally get my attention. It's kind of a bittersweet game to learn of, though, as it's not actually a fighting game, but a machine for dispensing the tickets that are so important to all the depressing seaside arcades that have replaced fun games with low-quality prizes.

 

Still, it's at least pretending to be a fighting game, and there are some things worthy of mention. It's single player-only, and there's only one playable character, the eponymous Pinocchio. He's on a quest to rescue Geppeto, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook, for some reason. Hook's the last boss, and to get to him, you've first got to fight two of his henchbeings, randomly selected from a pool of five. There's a genie, a witch, a grim reaper, the Queen of Hearts' card army, and the Big Bad Wolf. All the characters are well-drawn and animated, and full of personality.

 

The stages are also full of cool little details, even if there's only four of them shard amongst the six opponents. The woods have a little mushroom/candy house where Little Red Riding Hood and the three little pigs apparently live together, the graveyard has the witch's hut (I guess she and Death are neighbours?), plus a beanstalk with a depressed-looking giant watching the fight. Wonderland's the weakest stage, looking a lot like it's cobbled together from clipart, and Hook's ship has his pirate underlings, and far in the back, a Peter Pan who looks dangerously close to Disney's version standing around and doing nothing to help.

 

You fight using a joystick and one attack button, and while you do have specials and supers, they just seem to be activated by holding a direction and pressing the button a lot. I do really like the super where Pinocchio does the samurai movie thing where he dashes past his opponent while drawing a weapon, with the opponent taking damage after a second or two's delay, but his weapon is a big wooden mallet rather than a sword. The fights have only one round, and no matter what the situation is, if time runes out, you lose. I guess, true to its nature as "not a proper game", it just exists to have the shortest possible time between coin inputs.

 

It's really a shame there's no "legitimate" version of this game. A lot of work clearly went into designing and animated the characters, and six playable characters plus a boss wouldn't be too bad for a first entry in a series, especially if they added a background for each one, and especially if the characters looked as good as they do in the game that exists. I guess the best we can hope for is that someone rips all the sprites and puts something together in MUGEN or something. As always with this kind of shady gambling game, I think it's worth playing a few credits in MAME just to see it, though I don't think it's worth putting any money in if you encounter it in the wild. Or maybe it is? I don't know if this is some kind of emulation error or something, but every time I played, no matter how well or how poorly I did, I always got a screen telling me I'd won ten tickets. If a real machine is the same, it might be a cheap/quick way to grind for that cheap plastic tat upon which you've got your eye.

Asian Dynamite (Arcade)

 This is the third (or fourth if you count the greatly expanded PS2 port of the original) game in the Dynamite Deka series. Like so many SEGA arcade games from the 00s, it still doesn't have a home port, but it does run on the easily-emulated Naomi board. Though I do remember the early days of Naomi emulation, that this was one of the games I most wanted to play on that system, and it was so glitchy as to be unplayable. But that was a long time ago, and things have changed.

 

So, in keeping with the series' main gimmick, it's a 3D beat em up where almost every item is a weapon or a healing item. Some are even both, as you can pick up plates of food, pressing punch to throw some food or kick to take a bite. The plot and structure seem to be a strange mish=mash of elements from the previous games: like the first game, you're storming a building that's occupied by terrorists who've kidnapped an important person's daughter. Like the second game, you choose one of three routes of increasing difficulty at the start of the game, plus there are setpieces in this game that are clearly reskins of setpieces from the second game. For example, the small kitchen where you fought a big fat chef in that game is a small room where you fight a big fat panda in this one (well, a guy in a very realistic panda costume, at least).

 

It also keeps and expands upon the costume mechanic from the first game's PS2 remake. There are three plyable characters, and while playing the game, there are three diffrent coloured briefcases that cane appear as items dropped by enemies. The costumes aren't just cosmetic, but they're entire transformations with their own movesets, and most of them also have their own unique ways of interacting with the many weapons littered around the stages. Surprisingly, none of the costumes are references to classic SEGA games. Also, a useful piece of information is that all of Jennifer's costumes are both useless for fighting with and boring to control. But, you should give her a try at least once just because they're also the strangest, being a levitating yoga practitioner, a creepy jester, and (letting the weird trio down a little) a blatant clone of Marvel Comics' character Elektra.

 

Another returning element that's been expanded upon is the scene transition QTEs. They're annoying like all QTEs are, but unlike a lot of worse implementations of the concept, they serve to create a branching path system (like they did in the previous games), rather than being a "press the right button or die" situation. They're expanded on here by sometimes taking the form of little multiple choice questions that you only have seconds to answer, and some of them are even trick questions, like the old "What colour is the word RED in this sentence?", with the word RED actually being blue. I guess it's a way of preventing players from just memorising every QTE and forcing a reaction even from well-versed players. I don't like it, but I do approve of the ingenuity in concept, at least.

 

Asian Dynamite is a pretty good game. If you like the arlier games in the series, this is mostly just more of those. In some cases, it's just bits of those with a new coat of paint (and a hilariously garish gold suit on the main villain). But the new coat of paint, being a big shiny multipurpose Hong Kong skyscraper is nice, and it's a fun and weird game to play. I recommend giving it a try, while we all continue to wait and hope that SEGA starts porting Naomi and Atomiswave games to consoles someday.

Puzzle de Bowling (Arcade)

 I think it's a fair thing to say that iteration and expansion on existing ideas, even if they're someone else's, is a legitimate form of game design. It's a fine line though, especially when you go with an aesthetic that leers very close to that of your ludological muse. Puzzle de Bowling iterates upon the Puzzle Bobble series with a couple of its own ideas, but as inferred, I think making it look so much like Taito's games was a big mistake that gives it the air of a shameless mockbuster.

 

Like you've probably inferred, Puzzle de Bowling is a lot like Puzzle Bobble, but with a bowling theme. Also, the characters are cute anthropomorphised signs of the zodiac. There's a bunch of different-coloured bowling pins at the top of the field, and you roll different-coloured bowling balls at them. When the balls stop moving, they become pins, and if this results in three or more pins of the same colour touching, they'll vanish, and any other-coloured pins hanging off of them wil fall off, too. If you manage to get lots of pins in one go, you can get strike and split bonuses. 

 

The mechanical quirks come from the bowling theme. There's gutters at either side of the field, and you can get a gutterball, though I'm not sure of what the penalty is for doing this. It can get balls of unwanted colours out of the way, at least. The big one, though, is the way you can put a little curve on the ball. As well as moving your character left and right along the bottom of the field with the joystick, there are three buttons related to controlling the ball. Before you roll it, you can press the left and right buttons to determine a point at which the ball will veer in the respective direction. So you can get the ball into awkward little nooks that would require a difficult trick shot in Puzzle Bobble.

 

It sounds like it's an ability that would make the game far too easy, but it doesn't work out like that in practice. The puzzles in the solo puzzle mode are designed in such a way that though the curving system is very helpful, it won't get you out of every jam, and the weakness it has in versus mode is that it does take a couple of seconds longer to line up a perfect curved shot than an okay straight one. I'm sure with practice, high level players could theoretically be able to play accurately at high speed. But, obviously, this game is so forgotten, it's very unlikely that there are any high-level players anywhere in the world. Especially since its only home port was cancelled before release.

 

Anyway, and I feel like this is something I've said about other puzzle games in the past, Puzzle de Bowling is a decent enough game. It's fun to play, and like I said, its lack of originality isn't too much of a black mark, as it's obvious that the developers had an idea they wanted to try out that was an iteration on an existing one, and that's fine. The aesthetics, though, feel a bit cheap. The character designs are incredibly generic, and if you put the characters in Puzzle de Bowling up against those in its contemporaries like Magical Drop 3 or Puchi Charat, they're just lacking a certain intangible something to make them appealing. But here's the part I'm sure I've said before: the later nineties were an amazing time for puzzle games, and lots of really excellent titles were coming out. So why would you ever play this one over any of the others? It just isn't as good or as interesting or as exciting as any of them. Give it a shot in MAME if you're curious, but don't expect it to stick with you.

Uchuu Daisakusen - Chocovader Contactee (Arcade)

 So, Chocovader was an early 00s toyline in Japan, made up of little plastic figures disseminated via Kinder Surprise-style hollow chocolate orbs. Most, though apparently not all, of the figures were based on descriptions of aliens given by people who'd encountered them in real life (plus a few inspired by pop culture aliens, like the xenomorph and Dan Dare's enemy the Mekon). So they are Chocolate Invaders. There's a Game Boy Adance game based on the toys that I think is some kind of Pokemon-like monster catching RPG, but this arcade game is a fast-paced minigame compilation more along the lines of Bishi Bashi Special or Tanto-R.

 

Building on the toyline's concept of taking inspiration from real alien encounter reports, a lot of the minigames are actually based on the events described in those reports. For example, there's a report that in 1979, a group of tiny angel-like aliens broke into an old lady's house and caused mischief, messing up her christmas decorations and such. So one of the games has you playing as one of those aliens, repeatedly jumping on the old lady's furniture, trying to bounce as high as you can before the time limit runs out. You play as the alien in all the games, and there's a kind of silly-but dark feel to a lot of them.

 

You'll play as a classic nineties Grey, choosing the right shaped metal implants to put in people's brains, the Flatwoods monster building up energy to mass-abduct people from an urban area, and a whole bunch more, based on stories of which I'm only vaguely aware. After each game, you're given a score, a success percentage, and a letter grade, and the same will happen at the end of your credit, which gets you a go at four minigames. 

 

There are, of course, high score tables for every individual game, as well as for an entire credit, but what's really interesting is a feature that's now long since abandoned: an internet ranking! The cabinet itself wouldn't be linked to the internet, but instead, you'd be given a password along with your score, and you'd be able to input that password at the website abduction.jp (which now contains information on a "Class Action to end Parental Child Abduction In Japan", though you can see the high score table on the Wayback Machine). There, you'd be able to see your place among the best players in the land until about 2003, which appears to be when the site was taken down.

 

Chocovader Contactee doesn't have the insane manic excitement of the Bishi Bashi Special games, but I do like it a lot more than the Tanto-R games, and the theming is really cool and pretty unique among arcade games. It's a shame (though obviously not a surprise) that the high score website is no longer online, but I think it's still worth a bit of your time as a silly curio if you're interested in aliens or paranormal stuff in general.

Gamshara (Arcade)

 I'm sure I was far from the only person who had been waiting a long long time for this game to be added to MAME, but at the same time, it's a game of which a lot of other people will be totally unaware. It's also an interesting little anachronism, being a Cabal-like that was released in 2002. But I guess that's a big part of why it had such allure in all those years it went unemulated, and also why it was only big arcade game enthusiasts who really cared about it.

 

Though Cabal was obviously the patient zero of the genre, I think a more widely accepted point of reference nowadays would be Wild Guns, thanks to its excellent remake on modern consoles a couple of years ago. In case there are readers for whom neither game is familiar, it's kind of like a light gun game where you move an aiming reticule around the screen to shoot at enemies that pop up or wander across your field of view, but with the added caveat that you're also controlling an onscreen character in the foreground, who has to avoid the incoming enemy fire.

 

The controls are as simple as you'd expect: the reticule always moves when you move the joystick, your character only moves when you aren't holding down the fire button. You also have a jump button. You can jump while shooting, though you won't keep shooting while you're in the air, and while you're in the air, you're also invincible. I'm still slowly building my skills (I can currently get as far as the boss at the end of the fourth stage, a water ninja who summons a water spout to drop dead bodies and sunken boats on your head), but I'm pretty sure the secret to good play is going to lie in the fact that you can do an invincible jump without letting go of the fire button. A third button activates Gamshara mode, which causes a big explosion and gives you a few seconds of super-powerful shooting.

 

The game is set in samurai times, and sees you picking one of two machine gun-toting samurai who are fighting against the enemy forces alone. There's Saika, described as "powerful", and Hotaru, described as "speedy". This isn't just a stat difference, though, as they each have a skill the other doesn't: Saika has a powerful charge shot that's fired by releasing the fire button after every couple of seconds of holding it down, while Hotaru has a double jump. Despite the differences, I can make just about the same amount of progress as either character, though I tend to score better as Saika.

 

On the topic of scoring, the system for doing so in this game is simple and fun: shooting stuff, whether it's enemies or bits of destructible scenery, builds up a chain meter, and the amount of points scored for killing enemies is multiplied by the current number on that meter. So, if you play well, you can be gunning down rows of one-hit-kill ninja (which is very satisfying, and happens a lot), and scoring well over ten thousand points from each one. I quickly realised that this means that holding your fire for a few seconds to run around collecting the piles of gold that are worth a couple of thousand each is a waste of time.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but despite the long wait, Gamshara is definitely not a disappointment. It's a ton of fun to play, it's got a bunch of interesting systems to get into, and I'm looking forward to getting better at playing it, and also seeing it get the love it deserves from more players now that it's actually accessible. The only negative thing I really have to say about it is that the pre-rendered sprites are kind of blobby and ugly, but I think there's enough spectacle and imagination in what they're depicting to make up for that. It's also not as good as the Wild Guns remake, but that's an absurdly high bar to reach. Those NatsumeAtari remakes are among the most perfect videogames ever made, after all.