Harem (Arcade)

If you're cool and smart enough to be reading this blog, you'll aware that modern videogames, especially the big-budget AAA titles are full of casual misogyny and racism, though it's the subtle kind of misogyny and racism that hollywood movies use all the time, so it mostly goes unnoticed. There are, however certain relics from the distant past that act like videogame equivalents of The Black and White Minstrel Show or Love Thy Neighbour, examples of the bad old days when overt hatred was the norm. The most widely aknowledged example obviously being the rapacious and imperialistic Atari 2600 title Custer's Revenge.

Harem, the only known videogame output of the Italian company IGR is another such example. In it, the player controls a slightly portly beturbaned man who roams the desert kidnapping women and carrying them back to his harem. Attempting to stop him are knife weilding guys who live in tents, who will run around trying to catch the villain (which is you, obviously).

There are three stages in the game, the first two are pretty much the same: your victims are travelling, either by camel or car and you use you throwing knives to destroy their transport and carry them away to the harem at the bottom of the screen, while avoiding the guys. The third stage has the women sleeping in tents at the top half of the screen, with the player going into the tents to snatch women and carry them away. The player can complete a stage either by filling all six beds in the harem, or by killing all of the women's protectors.

There's a couple of other mechanics too, like a constantly decreasing bonus timer that counts down from 500 to determine how many points your next kidnapping will score you. It resets with each successful kidnap and a life is lost if it reaches zero. A nice little detail is that there's an oil well in the background that will start to run dry as the bonus timer decreases. I guess the player character is not the owner of the harems he's filling, but merely a mercenary in the employ of some corrupt oil baron? There's also another enemy, in the form of a large pink snake that only seems to appear on the last stage, and is bigger and faster than your human assailants.

Harem is only worthwhile as a historical curiosity. The game isn't exciting or interesting enough to be worth your time, even before you get to the offensive theming of the game.

Spark Man (Arcade)

Spark Man is a Rolling Thunder-esque walking shooter from South Korea, with a few of its own eccentricities, both mechanically and aesthetically.

It begins before a coin is even inserted, with the title screen depicting the hand of god bestowing electric life unto an androgynous cyborg. Androgynous apparently being a very apt word in this case, as between coin insertion and the start of the first stage, the player is treated to a profile of the game's protagonist, including their country of origin (Republic of Korea), date of birth (1994, which along with the given age of 16 sets the game in 2010/11), parents (Electroman and Fire Lady) and then sex, for which both male and female symbols are listed. Does Spark Man identify him/herself as being somewhere on a gender spectrum, rather than a binary male or female? Amazingly progressive for a game from 1989!

Most of the game doesn't do anything particularly exciting or innovative, having the player saunter from left to right shooting awkward-looking guys dressed in red (with the odd guy in green and every now and then, a panther or two), occasionally picking up a temporary weapon power up (which last for far too short a time).
There are a few interesting ideas in there, though. Roughly once a stage, a (somewhat stupid-looking) flying platform, allowing the player to fly around the screen dropping bombs on enemies. The bosses have another nice little quirk: they're all (as far as I've seen) giant robots (including what I assume is an unlicenced cameo from a Star Wars AT-ST), and rather than having health bars, they have visible crew members on board, a certain number of whom must be shot before the robot dies.

"Somewhat stupid-looking" is a phrase that can be used to describe a lot of things about Spark Man. The enemies and protagonist have an awkward, uncomfortable way of standing and walking, the flying platform, and the way Sparky sits on it look bizarre, and the stages, apparently set in America and the USSR both look like they were drawn by someone who had only the flimsiest knowledge of the countries. I'm not saying any of the art in the game is bad or poorly-drawn, there's just some kind of vague offness about how it all looks.

For all it's faults, Spark Man isn't a terrible game, if you're curious, there's no reason not to check it out, but if you don't you're definately not missing out on a classic or anything.

Express Raider (Arcade)

Hello! Remember me? It's been a while since I last posted, sorry! I've been busy with things like re-learning how to 3D model and other miscellany.

Anyway, Express Raider is an arcade game released by Data East in 1986, and it's a pretty early example of a game in which the player is the bad guy. I won't say first, because even if there's no earlier villain arcade games (which there might be, I haven't checked), there's probably something from the 80s british computer scene that features a playable bad guy.

The specific knave over whom your control will be exerted in this game is a nameless train robber/mass murderer in the old west. There's two types of robberies this no-good scoundrel commits: ones where he

boards the train, and ones where he rides horseback alongside it. Yes, it's not "one big score" he's after, he's a career criminal.

The two types of robbery are represented by two types of play. The on-foot robberies see the player walking across the tops of the train carraiges, each of which is protected by a different guardian. This might sound like a beat em up setup, but as the enemies are fought one at a time, in fixed spaces, it's more along the lines of something like Karateka, a strictly Player-Vs-AI fighting game with a single playable character, but multiple opponents, a genre that was pretty much killed by Street Fighter II, and then buried by Rise of the Robots.

Other than the generic tough guy you'll encounter a few times on each fighting stage, there's also riflemen, big guys who try to shove you off the train with a wall of boxes, and the coal-shovelling guy who, on your arrival, diverts his attention from fuelling the train to ending your life. An interesting part of these sections is your health bar, which obviously get depleted via enemy attacks, but also gets restored through your successful attacks, making it something more of a momentum meter than a traditional health bar.

The other bits, the ones that take place on horseback, aren't nearly as interesting as the fighting bits, though they're not the chore I'd originally assumed them to be when I saw them in the game's attract demo. The

easiest way to describe it would be as a kind of horseback cabal-esque shooting gallery. The bottom part of the screen is your moving area, in which you must dodge the enemy bullets, and the top has the train carraiges. Enemies pop up to take shots at the player through windows or from behind walls or whatever, and sometimes a woman will appear with a bag of points for you too (you lose a life if you shoot her, which is really easy to do, considering how frantic these sections are). After you kill a certain amount of enemies at a carraige, you move on to the next until you finally reach the engine, which plays host to a mildly bizarre bonus stage, in which you have the remaining time from the rest of the stage to shoot as manically as possible to find invisible targets while a guy on board the train randomly gives you big sacks of points.

Express Raider is a fun, fairly unique game that definitely meets my recommendation. You should totally play it!

Over Rev (Arcade)

You might already know that I love arcade racing games, especially ones from the mid-90s, with their bright colours and relatively low (compared to modern console games) polygon counts. Over Rev is the second racing game Jaleco released for SEGA's Model 2 hardware, and it hits most of the right spots that a 90s arcade racer should. I should also mention here the same disclaimer I put at the start of my post about Motor Raid, that I emulated this game and played it with a normal analogue controller, so my experience will be slightly different to that of someone playing on a real arcade cabinet with steering wheels and fancy moulded seats and the like.

It's got bright blue skies, it's fast, it has cool backdrops, all it lacks is a cool soundtrack. Once you start the game, there are two modes to choose from: Challenge Cup and Time Attack. Challenge cup is the harder of the two modes, but also the one that has a chance of giving a longer game for your credit (if you're a good player). In it, the player drives each track in order, having to not only reach checkpoints to prolong the time

limit, but also finish the race in a minimum position, which starts at 5th and gets higher with each race. (Because I'm terrible, I only got to the second stage in this mode D:). Time Attack mode allows the player to choose any of the four tracks to play on, though you only get one race per credit. All that needs to be done in this mode is get to the checkpoints and finish as quickly as possible, your position in the race isn't important.

The four tracks (there might be a secret track, or maybe a fifth track in Challenge Cup mode, but I haven't found any mention of one online anywhere) take place in Shibuya, Ariake (which includes driving under the Tokyo Big Sight!), Tsukuba (the most boring track, taking place in a racing arena. Are they called arenas? I don't know.), and Hakone (a very nice-looking track taking place in a forest, with waterfalls and trees and such). There's lots of nice little touches, like planes flying past, trains

going over overhead bridges, and so on, that make the stages feel a little more alive, though there doesn't seem to be a crowd of any kind watching on the Tsukuba track, which seems odd.

There's seven cars to choose from, though three of them are very slightly hidden, being revealed when the accelerator is pushed on the car select screen (oddly, the brake is used to select things in this game). Unfortunately, the three hidden cars aren't anything too outlandish or interesting like the hidden horse in Daytona USA, just two more sports cars and a pick-up truck.

In conclusion, Over Rev is a pretty fun game, definitely worth playing if you're sick of seeing Daytona's

tracks over and over again and want something new to scratch your Model 2 racing itch. It's just a shame that it never got a home port, unlike Jaleco's earlier Model 2 racer, Super GT 24hr (which maybe I'll write about sometime in the distant future? I'll think about it.).

Tenkomori Shooting (Arcade)

So, an evil witch has kidnapped all your monkey brothers and locked them in her towers. Also her towers are full of shooting minigames. You, as one of the two remaining free monkeys must go to the towers to shoot stuffand save your brethren. It's a lot like what Tanto-R or Warioware would be like if they were made by

shooting obsessives.
Depending on which difficulty you choose, you play through either four, six or nine shooting games, each about a minute long. There is a surprising amount of variety among the games, there are a few obvious ones like "shoot this many tanks/planes", "collect this many medals", "shoot the boss this many times". but there are also a lot of games based on premises you wouldn't associate with shooting.
There's a stage in which you must shoot love hearts at a performing idol, making sure to avoid hitting the waiters, elvis impersonators and dogs who will all assault you in various ways should they feel your love. There's also a stage where a man will ask for certain sushi dishes that are scrolling by on a conveyor belt, to be delivered via the medium of thrown plate.
Then there are stages where you're shooting stuff again, but with an interesting twist, such as a stage that gives you three shots to destroy at least 20 planes, making you aim at clusters of planes close together, to set of a chain of explosions. (If you're really good, you can get all twenty in a single shot). Or a stage where the enemy is a single cell organism that splits in two when shot, and your mission is to split it into a certain

number of copies.
Obviously, since it's a Namco game, there are also stages paying homage to Galaga, Digdug and Xevious (Another possible homage to another Namco game is that the monkeys look a lot like the monkeys from Dancing Eyes).
That's enough boring listing of the minigames, I think. I like this game a lot, it appeals to my short attention span, it rarely feels unfair, even when it's brutally hard and it is very addictive. Having seperate high scores for each minigame along with a highscore table for the highest combined scores is a simple but excellent idea, adding an extra little challenge, pushing the player to get better each time they play. I always say this when I write about an arcade game, but it really is a shame there was no home version of this, it has a lot of potential for

extra modes that would only work on a home port, like being able to play each game individually, and infinite survival mode, and so on. Oh well.

Demon Front (Arcade)

This game is by IGS, for their PGS arcade hardware, a company and a system both mostly known for their high-quality beat em ups, such as Oriental Legend and the Knights of Valour series. This isn't one of those, though: it's a huge Metal Slug rip-off.

Well, rip-off might be a bit harsh. Everything about the game is very high quality, and it does have a couple of new ideas. But the general feel of the game, as well as some of the weapons (the most blatant being the machine gun and shotgun) are exactly like the Metal Slug games. You go across slightly hilly horizontally scrolling stages, killing tons of one-hit enemies, occasionally stopping for a bigger set-piece type enemy, and there are even litle hidden paths and points items gained by shooting the right parts of the background, just like Metal Slug. One thing they were right to steal is the concept of having really nice 2D graphics. To be extra clear, the graphics themselves aren't stolen, but it's obvious the developers knew they couldn't compete with SNK unless their game looked just as good, and it definitely does. Well, a lot of people might prefer Metal Slug's "everything is dirty and slightly melted" style to Demon Front's "really really nice use of colours"

style, but either way, Demon Front looks great.
As for the original parts, the first is that each character has a little pet flying alongside them. Holding the fire button for a couple of seconds makes the pet do their attack, which is different for each pet, and pressing the third button turns the pet into a forcefield around the player which can take a few hits. It's obviously a lot safer using the pet as a shield than a weapon, and when playing, I've survived longer when using this tactic. Once the forcefield has taken its share of hits though, it disappears and won't reappear until you lose a life. Some brave players might want to try being a little more tactical, using the forcefield right up until the last hit, then turning it back into the

pet and using its powerful attack for a while.
There is also some kind of levelling up mechanic regarding the pet, and you get different kinds of experience from enemies depending on whether you shoot them, stab them or kill them with the pet's attack. The levelling doesn't really seem to have a huge effect on what happens either way, though.
All in all, Demon Front is a pretty great game, and is definitely worth playing, and even if it's not totally original, its general quality makes up for that.

GunMaster (Arcade)

As promised in my Dharma Doujou post, I'm doing another post on an arcade game by the little-known company Metro. This time it's a platform shooting game, heavily influenced by Gunstar Heroes.

I use the more generous "influenced by" rather than "ripped off" because while GunMaster does have a lot in common with Treasure's masterpiece, it also adds a lot of it's own ingredients, the most notewothy of which being the fighting game-esque special moves the player can execute. Most of these moves are listed in the game's attract mode sequence, except one move, referred to as "BLOODY DANCE". I haven't managed to figure out this move myself (having done so with all the others, as being the impatient person I am, I didn't bother watching the attract mode until I'd already played the game a few times), but according to internet hearsay, the commands for it are revealed during the end credits.
The game itself sees the player going from stage to stage with each stage being a few screens wide and being taken up almost entirely with a boss fight, a la Alien Soldier (yes, another Treasure game, though in this case
GunMaster predates it by about a year).
I did actually intend to throw away my principles and credit feed to the end to take a screenshot of that elusive move for my precious readers, but unfortunately, the game's emulation in MAME has one small, but fatal flaw: while playing, it might at some random point, for no obvious reason, freeze.
But anyway, you can still play it to see what it's like, and it doesn't freeze every time, nor does any specific

in-game situation seem to trigger the bug, so you might make it all the way through if you're lucky! Plus, even if you're not, you can choose the order in which to tackle the stages (except for the final stage and an easy introductory stage), so you can still see a lot of the game. You'll definitely have to credit feed, though. That's the biggest flaw of the game itself: the unfair difficulty. A lot of the bosses have attacks that are impossible (or at least very close to impossible) to avoid. This wouldn't be so bad is the player had some kind of defensive maneouver, like Alien Soldier's Counter Force, or even just something as simple as a block button would have made fiinishing the game a significantly more realisitc prospect.
As for Metro, while trying to find more information on this game, I actually stumbled across their official website, which is still active, as is the company itself. They mostly seem to make licenced shovelware, as well as a few MMOs and even a couple of entries in the Simple series.

Dharma Doujou (Arcade)

Dharma Doujou (or should it be "dojo"?) is a puzzle game based on a traditional Japanese children's game called Daruma Otoshi, in which a Daruma doll is placed atop a stack of coloured wooden blocks, which the player must attempt to knock away using a small hammer without letting the tower fall over.
Dharma Doujou combines this with the usual matching colours puzzle game mechanic. Each stage starts with numerous towers of blocks, Daruma dolls and other items, and the player, in the guise of a huge-eyebrowed

hammer-wielding monk, must knock away all the blocks to clear the stage.
When swinging at a row of blocks, the leftmost block of that row is knocked into a chamber beneath the playing field. When this chamber is full, if all the blocks in it are the same, they disappear, if not, they rise up to make a new bottom row in the playfield. At the start of the game, the chamber holds three blocks, though this increases by one every couple of stages.
There are two ways to lose the game: either run out of time, or allow one of the block towers to reach the top of the screen. The time limit, rather than being represented by a traditional clock, is shown by a creature

(the creature, along with the difficulty, changes every two stages and so far I've seen a crab, an oni and a pair of koinobori.) climbing towards a finish line in the top-left corner of the screen.
I highly recommend this game. Though it gets very difficult very quickly, it's also satisfying and fun to play as well as addictive. The developer/manufacturer Metro has made a few interesting arcade games, so expect me to be writing about those too in the future.

Motor Raid (Arcade)

Before I start, I should mention something: the actual arcade version of this game comes in a full-sized motorbike cabinet that the player sits on while playing, tilting left and right to steer. I didn't play like that, though. I played Motor Raid via the excellent Model 2 Emulator, using an Xbox 360 controller.
With that out of the way, I'll get on to actually talking about the game. It's a lot like the Road Rash games, but in space and with luxurious and beautiful Model 2 3D graphics. You take part in motorbike races across various planets, and you have the option of attacking your opponents, punching them, kicking them, or clobbering them about the head with your weapon.
There's also a boost meter that gradually fills up as you race. Once it's more than half full, you can double-tap (or on the real arcade machine, I guess you would double twist?) the accelerator to use it. Obviously, the more you let it fill, the longer your boost will last. Less obviously, if you wait for the meter to fill completely before using it, you'll become enshrouded in an energy field and spin your weapon around your head.
There are four main planets upon which the races take place, though you'll only actually race on three of them in a regular game. Your performance in the races decides which planets you visit. I've read online that there's also a fifth planet which appears as an extra fourth race if you manage to place first in all three regular races. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough to make this happen, so I don't know what that extra stage is like.
There's a few characters to pick from, but since I'm not good enough at racing games to really tell the difference, I just pick the default character everytime, a young woman named Robin. After each race, Robin recites the cryptic quote "I won! But I still can't find what I'm looking for...". This is never explained.
In conclusion, Motor Raid is a really great game that you should definitely play, if you have a computer good enough for Model 2 emulation (pretty likely), or you live near a place that has an actual machine (not so likely). It's a shame it never got a home port, but I assume that's because the Saturn had no chance of replicating this game's graphics, and by the time the Dreamcast came along, Model 2 games were starting to be considered "old hat".

The Karate Tournament (Arcade)

In the period following the release of Street Fighter II, tons of fighting games were released into arcades. Most of them were terrible also-rans like Mortal Kombat, some were the start of timeless, beloved franchises like Fatal Fury and King of Fighters 98. What they mostly had in common is the basic formula codified by SFII that even to this day most fighting games adhere to, with health bars and combos and special move inputs and so on.
The Karate Tournament is one of the few that doesn't follow that trend. The most obvious difference between it and other fighting games is the lack of health bars. Instead, it takes a more realistic martial arts tournament approach, with each fighter having six points, losing one when they take a hit, and two when they're knocked down. Losing all six points means losing the fight.
Three is a pretty important number in this game: you can choose from three difficulties before you start playing, you get three lives, and each location has three opponents to fight. Obviously, when you lose a match, you lose a life, but you have to start the match from the beginning again. A nice little touch is how there's a kabuki referee guy like in the early Samurai Shodown games, announcing and waving flags when a fighter gains a point or wins a match.
The points system makes the fights a lot quicker than in regular fighting games, usually only going for a few seconds and sometimes ending in only 2 or 3 hits. The other big difference is in the controls. Since there isn't any health system, there aren't different strengths of attack. Instead, there's an attack button an a jump button. There's a ifferent attack for pressing the attack button at the same time as each direction, as well as mid-air attacks, and quick mini-combos activated by pressing both buttons plus a direction. As far as I can tell, the CPU opponents all have the same moveset as the player, differing only in their preferred tactics and their skill in using them.
Despite all the unique innovation and originality in the game, my favourite thing about it is the graphics. As you might expect from Mitchell, the makers of the psychedelic Strider-clone Osman, the colour pallettes in this game are all incredibly bright and vibrant, and the animation is also excellently fluid (probably as a positive side effect of there essentially being only one character).



The Karate Tournament doesn't have the lasting appeal of regular fighters, with their varied casts and masses of tactical options, but it's still a game I reccomend playing, as there really isn't much else like it and it does look amazing.

Dolphin Blue (Arcade)

Dolphin Blue sounds like a meaningless title, but both words are very relevant to the game. Dolphin, because you spend the game being accompanied by a dolphin buddy, and blue because a lot of the game is set in or on water.
Because of all that water, there are three kinds of segments in DB. There are parts on land (or more often, on the decks of huge battleships), where you fight on foot. These parts are very reminiscent of the Metal Slug games. Before I'd played the game, I'd only seen a few screenshots, and assumed the whole game was like this. The second kind are the parts that take place on the waves, with you riding on your dolphin buddy's back, and the third kind are underwater, seeing you swimming around accompanied by your dolphin buddy. It's in these parts where he comes in most useful, as he'll go around collecting points items that are hard for you to reach, and can be commanded to attacked the enemy by curling into a ball and bouncing aroud the screen, smashing not only the enemies, but their mines, bombs and missiles too.


It's really a shame that this game has never been converted to any home consoles (unless you count those fanmade consolised Atomiswave systems as such), which is the case for a lot of Atomiswave and Naomi systems. I guess if the Dreamcast had been supported longer, it would have made a fine home for them all. Oh well.
Obviously, I like this game a lot. It's fast and fun to play, it looks really nice, etc. One little touch that I love (and was probably not really intentional on the part of the designers) is that the default gun that you have when your power-up weapons run out can fire as fast as you can press the button. So some of the more tense situations are enhanced greatly, just by the physicality added by hammering the fire button as hard as you can (something I also felt regarding the finishers in Bayonetta, especially the ones which had the player spinning the analogue sticks with as much vigour as they could muster(but I don't think many people agreed with me on that)).

Recalhorn (Arcade)

In Recalhorn, you play as a boy with a horn (of the musical kind, rather than the anatomical) who wanders through a pleasant land being attacked by animals, birds and insects. The horn acts as a weapon, shooting out a little musical note to incapacitate enemies when blown.
Not all the local wildlife want the boy dead, though: a few animals have been locked in cages, and when rescued by the boy, show their gratitude by offering themselves up as summonable steeds, each with their own abilities.
Since the game is a lot harder than it looks, I've only managed to get a few stages in, and only befreinded three of the animals: the monkey, the seal and the lion.
The monkey is the first animal you meet, and its special abilities are very high jumps, and the ability to cling onto platforms and ropes. Next is the seal, who can swim and attacks by sliding across the ground on its belly, and the lion has no special movement abilities like the other two, but is invincible during its attack animation.
This game was actually never released, which is strange, as it's a great game, and the production values seem pretty high. It's actually odd that it was considered for the arcades in the first place, since a lot of elements in it seem like they belong in a console game. The two biggest examples are the fact that extra lives are gained by collecting one hundred of an item, rather than through obtaining certain score milestones (I know there are arcade games that do the 100 items thing, but I associate it more with console games, at least), and, something that might be unique among arcade games: the fact that it has a pause menu for choosing which animal friend to summon. The game would have been a great addition to the early libraries of the Saturn or Playstation. It really is a terrible waste that it's only playable through emulation. Maybe someday there'll be a push to get it dug up and finally released on modern systems, like Westone's Aquario of the Clockwork.
Anyway, as you might have picked up, I like this game a lot. It looks beautiful, sounds pretty good (but if Taito have ever made a game that doesn't have a good soundtrack, I don't know about it), and plays great.
As well as the main animal steeds gimmick, the other thing that's stood out to me is the almost Bubble Bobble-esque little tricks and secrets for finding extra points items: rustling certain bushes, finding different routes through stages and at the end of each stage, there's a large bush with unblossomed flowers. Those flowers bloom when you touch them, and the quicker you can make them bloom, the more points they give you. This reminds me a lot of those little invisible points bonuses at the end of the stages in the first Sonic game.


In conclusion, this game is very good.and you should play it. The end!

XESS - The New Revolution (Arcade)

This is a Korean arcade game, that's actually a compilation of three games, two of which had been previously released seperately. Okay, then.
So, the first game is Cookie and Bibi. It's Puzzle Bobble. It has puzzle and versus modes like Puzzle Bobble, the same mechanics as Puzzle Bobble, it is Puzzle Bobble, but with different graphics. I guess the fact that it has different sport-related balls instead of different coloured bubbles is a nice touch, though? It's also a part of a series of three games, all of which appear to be Puzzle Bobble clones. I suspect it might be the second in the series, but I have no idea why.
The next game is Hyper Man, which was originally called Hyper Pac-Man. It's a Pac-Man ripoff, of course. A really good one, though! It seems like the makers wanted to rip off Pac-Man, but then they had a bunch of other ideas and stuck them all in, too. There's different kinds of enemies, boss fights, destructible walls and a bunch of power-ups including (but not limited to) jump shoes, speed-up shoes and a helmet that shoots lasers! Also, unlike the original Pac-Man, each stage has a different layout, and there's room in there for odd gimmicky stages, like a stage that is just dots and ghosts, with no walls. I seem to remember there being a homebrew amiga game, also called Hyper Pac-Man, that also featured the addition of a bunch of power ups and gimmicks. I doubt the two are related, though.
The final game, and the only one that is completely new for this compilation is New Hyper Man! It re-uses a lot of sprites from Hyper Man, but it isn't a Pac-Man clone, it's a single screen top down shooter! On each stage, kill all the blue enemies to go on to the next stage. Dead enemies constantly respawn after death as red enemies, though you only have to kill all the blue ones to advance. There are items strewn about the stages, too, including the points-giving food items from Hyper Man, as well some of the power ups from Hyper Man. Getting points is very important in this game, since your score also acts as an RPG-esque experience system, with your weapon becoming more powerful as your score increases. New Hyper Man is a really fun and fast game, and could really have been released on its own, especially since the other two, weaker games already had been. Maybe they though such a move would be too cheeky, considering all the re-used graphics in NHM? Never stopped bigger, more "legitimate" companies, though, did it?