Action Hollywood (Arcade)

A derogatory term that's popped up with regards to modern open-world games is "tidying up games", referring to the fact that they're all mostly the same mechanically, and that they all give you a large, open playing area and a checklist of things to go and "tidy". They're very popular games, though, since while they aren't particularly exciting, they aren't really bad, either, and until a player cottons on to the fact that they aren't being excited or stimulated, they can be both addictive and time-consuming.

In many ways, Action Hollywood is a kind of forbear to those games, though purely by coincidence, since this game was never popular enough to have influenced anything. Not only is it completely inoffensive and unexciting, but it's a game about walking around maps tidying them up. Well, you're walking on floor tiles to change their colour, rather than picking things up, but mechanically speaking, it's the same thing. There's also lots of extra points items hidden in the walls, and enemies roaming around.

You can't say they didn't at least try to get a bit of excitement in there,  since there's a slightly Bubble Bobble-esque thing regarding the enemies. When attacked, they fly away from you until they hit a wall. Any enemies they hit along the way are killed, and killed enemies drop points items. You can also kill enemies by hitting while they're dizzy next to a wall. Its' still not enough, though, as there's just no satisfaction in doing it.

The "Hollywood" theme is an excuse for having stages with different themes: jungles, medieval, gothic horror and sci-fi, and you can pick which one to start on. An odd thing to note is that a short sample of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme repeatedly plays during the castle stages. They all play exactly the same, though, other than different graphic sets (including different spprites for the player character, which is something, at least).

In summary, Action Hollywood is an incredibly average game that is neither good nor bad, it simply exists and takes up time. If it was a game that came packaged with a computer's operating system like Solitaire, that'd be fine, but it's an arcade game, and the makers expected people to pay to play it, which is practically an insult.

Kozure Ookami (Arcade)

So, Lone Wolf and Cub, sometimes known as Babycart or Shogun Assassin, is a very well-known comic and series of movies about a guy named Ogami Itto and his three year old son, who goes around violently killing lots of people. I have to admit that I've never actually read any of the comics or seen any of the movies, but I do know that much about them, but doesn't everyone? This game's a beat em up based on that story.

Obviously, you play as Itto, and you go about with your son in a backpack, slashing lots of guys to death. Though it's a belt scrolling beat em up, in terms of mechanical complexity, it inhabits a kind of middle ground between the simpler single plane beat em ups that came before it, like Spartan X, My Hero, et al., and the more complex belt scrollers that would come later, the Final Fights, the Streets of Rages, and so on. There's no comboing, but you do have a block button, and can perform a couple of different slashes with your sword by holding a direction as you press the attack button.
There's very few power-ups, with the most exciting being the famous babycart itself, which will appear for a short time, giving you increased movement speed and a projectile attack. Interestingly, if you press the block button while the babycart is present, you'll instead dismantle it to create a halberd, giving you slightly greater attack range for a short time instead. I assume there must be some advantage to doing this, though I'm yet to have figured out what. Another one is a little piece of paper (I think?), that does nothing until you collect three, at which point, you're whisked away to a duel mini-game. Be the first to attack after the counter reaches zero, and you cut your opponent down, and get a big points bonus. You don't lose a life if you fail, you just get sent back to the main game without a bonus.

Other than that, the game's structured pretty traditionally: you go along the stages killing enemies until you get to a boss, then you kill the boss and go onto the next stage. Starting with the second stage, though, the game does commit a heinous design crime: there's platform sections, with instant death pits, while you also have to avoid enemies jumping out of the pits and the game doesn't even have a dedicated jump button (you press block and attack together to jump). It's unfair, it's no fun, and it's an awkward break from the constant disembowelling that makes up the rest of the game. I'm not going to say it totally ruins the experience, but it's definitely a significant detractor.

That one big flaw aside, though, Kozure Ookami is still a pretty great game, and it does an especially good job creating a mood and forging its own identity through the way it looks and sounds. I'd say it's definitely worth a look.

Bermuda Triangle (Arcade)

Some of SNK's pre-NeoGeo games are well-remembered, and much-loved, like Athena, or the Ikari Warriors series. Bermuda Triangle, by contrast, is neither remembered or liked. This is half an injustice, as though it definitely doesn't deserve to be liked, it should at least be remembered for being one of the most bizarrely-designed shooting games there is.

To start with, it uses a rotary joystick, which is only strange from our modern point of view, because no games have really used them since the late 80s, which is when this game was released, and when SNK had a minor fascination with the device, releasing (as far as I'm aware) more rotary joystick-controlled games than anyone else. But as I said, it's only a starting point, and though at first glance, Bermuda Triangle looks like a generic late 80s shooting game, it has a whole bunch of weird gimmicks thrown in.

So, your ship. The first thing you'll notice about it is that it's huge, big enough that avoiding enemies and their shots is a lot more difficult than it is enjoyable. Then, as you play, it'll keep changing form. This is because your health bar and the power of your weapons are linked: when you collect power ups, you gain health, and when you get hit, you lose power. When your ship gains or loses enough health to have its weapon power go up or down, it also changes form. Coupled with the fact that your ship is huge and will be getting hit a lot until you get used it, along with the fact that power ups appear seemingly at random, this all adds up into a baffling experience for the first-time player. With this, I can at least see what they were trying to do here: the idea of a form-changing ship is pretty cool, and the concept of weapon power and health being linked makes sense from a thematic standpoint, if not one of game balance. It's just the execution and a lack of explanation that really let the game down here.

Bermuda Triangle's other big weird mechanic is the way you play through the stages. First, you fly up the stage, like you would do in any other vertically-scrolling shooter. But then, you reach the top, and start going backwards, back down the stage, still fighting off enemies (using the rotary joystick, or whatever substitute you've configured for yourself in MAME to turn your ship's gun around). THEN, when you get back to the start, you fly up the stage a second time, with different enemy layouts than the first time, and at the end of this run, you fight the boss. It does this for every stage, and I really have no idea what the developers could have been thinking with this. Was it a way of trying to force players to change their firing direction? Was it just an attempt at making stages longer without having to draw more background graphics? Whatever the reason was, it falls on its face. It's annoying, it doesn't make any sense, it's a bad move all round.

I really can't recommend playing Bermuda Triangle, and I find it strange that it was released. It feels like some kind of experimental game that might have been made internally to try out a bunch of ideas the devs had, but it was actually released into arcades, though presumably, not many, and not for very long.

Splendor Blast II (Arcade)

So, you remember the early 90s, when the first big 3D arcade games were coming out? Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, and so on? It's shameful to say it now, but at the time, I wasn't impressed. Since I was a poor kid who couldn't afford a Saturn or 32X, and lived in some podunk village with no arcade, I only ever saw still screenshots of these games, that looked like a bunch of ugly boxes. Obviously, yers later, I saw these games in motion and was made to be ashamed of my thoughts and actions. I clearly didn't learn anything, though, as upon seeing stills of Splendor Blast II, I thought it looked like just another 80s shooting game with ugly low resolution graphics. Then I actually played it, and it turns out I was wrong on many fronts: it's actually an innovate futuristic racing game that looks amazing in motion, and the backgrounds look that way because it uses a kind of pre-mode 7 rotation effect to fake 3D!

This game was actually never released, though it is finished, and we can only play it thanks to Shoutime getting ahold of a copy and dumping the ROM, and we should all be thankful for that, as it really is a great game. It's pretty much as you'd expect from a futuristic racing game: spaceships instead of cars, racers risking life and limb, interfering space monsters and a little bit of shooting, as well as that old chestnut, the "fuel gauge that serves as a combined health bar and time limit." You race through the stages at high-speed, dodging obstacles and overtaking your opponents. The latter half of each stage will also let you shoot to destroy obstacles and aliens, though not your opponents, who will manage to avoid getting hit every time (though you can use this to your advantage by getting them out of the way). At the end of each stage, you get a bonus based on which position you finished in, how quick you were (as long as you finished in under a minute) and just a bonus for finishing. You also get some of your fuel back, at a rate which seems to be directly tied to how large your bonuses were.

It really is a game ahead of its time in a few ways. Obviously, there's the graphics, which look great in motion. Not only are they super-fast, but the psuedo-3D effect looks really cool as well, with some parts being especially good, like the lava stage with has columns of flame shooting out of firepits, like something from the hellish planet Apokolips in Jack Kirby's Fourth World. There's also the fact that you are actually racing against opponents. Though the game won't end if you place low at the end of a stage, the bearing that your placement has on the energy you get back would severely hamper your chances of surviving the next stage. But the fact that it keeps track at all is something to talk about, as most racing games in 1985 pitted you purely against the clock, with other racers only there to give you a points bonus when you pass them (though SBII does that too, of course).

The fact that this game was never released is bizarre to me. It's obviously a complete game, and not only is it a great one, but it's also an innovative one that's years ahead of its time. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that maybe Alpha Denshi saw SEGA's Super Scaler games and thought that their vertically-scrolling effort looked old hat in comparision? Anyway, now that it's available for everyone to play, I strongly recommend that you do so as soon as possible.

Fire Trap (Arcade)

The wikipedia page for 1982's crazy climber says that that game might be the only arcade game that's not a twin-stick shooter two use two joysticks and no buttons. That's definitely wrong, though, as Fire Trap is another game with that control system. Although, to be fair to whoever wrote the Crazy Climber wiki page, Fire Trap is essentially an update of that game with really nice graphics.

And those graphics are really nice. You scale lovingly-rendered isometric highrises, rescuing people and putting out fires, and when you have a second or two spare, you can take in some gorgeous views of the surrounding cityscape. And while it was typical for city-set arcade games of the 1980s to take their visual cues from the likes of The Warriors or Terrifying Girls High School, Fire Trap emulates a more optimistic, luxurious view of the decade of decadence: rather than climbing graffiti-covered tenement estates, you're climbing luxurious condos in the sun. The second stage is a particularly proud example of eighties excess, being set on a building constructed of pink concrete, with occasional swimming pools and sun decks. On a sidenote of probably-unintentional satire, you could say that the most eighties element of the game is that you get more points for finding a sack of money than you do for rescuing a trapped human.

Anyway, I have some bad news: although the game is really really nice to look at, it's not so nice to play. It's not only incredibly hard, but frequently feels unfair, and even mean-spirited. It has that same "evil fire" that almost every other fire-fighting game seems to have (in fact, it might even be the first appearance of the phenomenon), and the flames will shooting homing orbs of fire at you as you're climbing around. Not only that, but once you near the top of the building, a huge hovering, invincible fireball will start floating around, faster than you can possibly avoid it, meaning you just have to hope that it doesn't crash into you as you climb the last few windows to the top. In case you're wondering about the controls, up and down on each stick move the respective hands of your character in the pushed direction, pushing left or right on either stick moes you sideways, and pushing the sticks in towards each other shoots upwards. Obviously, I was emulating, and while you might think the most logical setup for these controls would be the two analogue sticks of an XBox 360 controller, but I actually found this to be slightly less responsive and immediate as I'd like, so I figured out a scheme utilising the d-pad and ABXY buttons of a USB Saturn pad, as well as mapping the shot command to the right shoulder button. This allowed for much quicker movement, and just felt a lot nicer, especially when building up the right rhythm for speedy ascension. (Were the last few sentences a bit pointless and self-indulgent? Maybe.)

Anyway, yeah; Fire Trap is a beautiful game, but you'll save yourself a lot of stress by just going and looking up a longplay video of it on youtube.

Karian Cross (Arcade)

Karian Cross is yet another Korean arcade game, but I think it's by far the most professionally-made and high quality Korean arcade game I've yet featured on this blog. It's a typical versus-style colour matching puzzle game, with chains and junk blocks and all the usual hallmarks that come with the genre. Obviously, though, it does have one unique mechanical element to call its own, and it does display a pretty high standard of presentation, too.

The basic tactics are pretty much a total rip of Puyo Puyo: get three or more blocks of the same colour touching, and they'll disappear, then those above will fall, and if those match too, they'll disappear and so on. Racking up big chains in this manner means dumping lots of junk blocks on your opponent. The first to fill their well up to the top with blocks loses. The unique factor comes in the form of the junk blocks themselves: they're normal coloured blocks, trapped in transparent cubes, and when normal blocks disappear next to them, they're freed from the cubes. Of course, if they match, they disappear.

So a smart player can (and will have to) include the junk blocks in any planning they do while preparing chains. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that, like a lot of similar games that have multiple playable characters, each character dumps junk blocks on their opponents in different patterns. An interesting twist Karian Cross puts on this is that some characters will have junk blocks coming in from the sides or bottom of the well, as well as falling from the top.

As for the presentation, it's generally of a high quality, with well-drawn characters and backgrounds, and a nice general theme of medieval european fantasy holding everything together. There's one really great little touch in particular, in that each character has differently-shaped blocks: some characters have swords or axes, others have gems or different kinds of fruit, and so on. It gives the impression that unlike a lot of Korean videogames, especially arcade titles, it was made with some real care and passion put into it, and not just as a cheap cash in.

It's always hard when it comes to recommending puzzle games of this type. Most of them are good, sometimes even great, but the problem is, they're all also really similar, and the truth is that the Puyo Puyo and Magical Drop series and Money Puzzle Exchanger are so good, any games that want to offer competition have to offer something really special. Unfortunately, Karian Cross is yet another example of a good puzzle game that just can't compete with the titans at the top of the genre.

Diet Family (Arcade)

When I first saw this title, and the fact that it was made by the Korean company Semicom, I was instantly interested. This was mainly because, as I've covered before, Korean arcade games aren't always completely original, and I thought that it might at least be a fun knock-off of the excellent Data East game Diet Go Go (which I covered on this blog many years ago). It's actually a totally original (as far as I can tell) Galaga-style shooting game, with a bit of an unhealthy approach to weight loss as its main theme.

So, you play as one of five characters (and if they're a family, as the title suggests, then it looks like it's two daughters, mum, dad and their weird blue cat thing), and set out to destroy/avoid food, and eat only the tasty diet pills. Yeah, that's a bit weird and unpleasant, isn't it? I mean at least Diet Go Go had the protagonists dressed like they were going to do execise too, and the food that evil scientist was giving out was all massive cakes and legs of meat.Most of the food in Diet Family is pretty healthy stuff like fruits, vegetables and sushi!

But all that aside, the game is at least full of interesting ideas mechanically. For example, scoring and obtaining power-ups relies heavily on the game's comboing system. Unusually, that system focuses entirely on accuracy, rather than the more typical speed, as your combo counter goes up for every one of your bullets that hits an enemy in a row, and resets if one of your bullets flies offscreen. As the combo gets longer, more and more items and power-ups will make their way down the screen to you. It works fairly well, though the requirements to get a power-up for your weapon are incredibly steep, needing twenty sucessful shots in a row. On the other hand, as you get further into the game, there are more enemies coming at you in thicker patterns, so it does get easier to rack up big combos as you go along.

The way your lives work is different, too. You have three lives and an energy meter. If you take a hit, the energy meter decreases, depending on the strength of the enemy that hit you (you're told the strengths of the different enemies at the start of each stage). It goes up a tiny amount for each diet pills you collect. If it decreases past the bottom of the bar, you'll lose a life, your sprite will get fatter (though this is only cosmetic, you aren't slowed down or anything), and the energy meter will be back near the top again. If you collect enough pills to make the meter go over the top, and you've lost at least one life, you'll get another life back, though the meter will be back at the bottom. So it's easier to claw lives back than in most shooting games, though you are limited to a maximum of three (plus a full energy meter).

Saying whether or not I actually recommend Diet Family is a difficult one: though I didn't personally find it to be a very enjoyable game to play, I can also see that it's definitely competently made and designed, and someone with more patience for its accuracy-based mechanics could very well get a lot of fun out of it. What a terrible, fence-sitting conclusion!

Metal Freezer (Arcade)

I know what some of you might be thinking, and this game doesn't have anything to do with Dragonball Z. In fact, it's a futuristic maze game, that's almost as good as the game that I (and I'm sure many other people) place at the top of the genre, Raimais (and yes, I realise that this marks two arcade games in a row that I've compared to better-known games by Taito. The thing is, if you like arcade games, you like Taito games. They just put out a ton of varied, high quality games in the 80s and 90s!)

Anyway, Metal Freezer has you placing floor tiles over what appears to be exposed electronics, though functionally, this is exactly the same as collecting stuff in almost every other maze game that exists. It might actually be a spiritual sequel to another game from the same publisher named "Mustache Boy", albeit with a significant aesthetic improvement (but I'll get back to that later). Anyway, in four out of every five stages, you simply have to move over all the exposed electronics squares to place floor tiles over them, while avoiding/destroying the enemies roaming around. Every fifth stage has you getting through a tight obstacle course-like stage and reaching the exit as quickly as possible.

There are several distinct types of enemies, and they all do different things. For example, one type of enemies drags you towards it with magnetism, while one drills holes in walls to create more work for you, and another shoots goo at you that prevents you from jumping for a few seconds. Touching any of them loses you a life, though you aren't nearly as defenceless as you would be in most maze games, as you can shoot them with your freeze ray as much as you like (well, it has an overheat meter, but unless you go crazy with it, that won't even matter), turning them into ice cubes that can be pushed off the stage, into walls, or even used to crush other enemies.

Anyway, those aesthetics, eh? At first, the game'll look no better or worse than any other mid-budget late-80s arcade game. But there's a lot of great little details in there that you'll gradually start to notice! Like the way every type of floor and wall block has a different animation for when the stage fades to black on completion. And there's the cool cyberpunk wireframe progress map that displays at the start and finish of every game. All these little things add up to lift Metal Freezer a little higher than its contempories, and make it feel a little bit more professional.

Anyway, Metal Freezer is an excellent game, and I strongly recommend giving it a try!

Blocken (Arcade)

For years, I thought that Taito had made the first competitive block-smashing game in 1997, when they combined Arkanoid and Puzzle Bobble into Puchi Carat. But it turns out that Visco beat them to it by three years when they released Blocken, which for some reason seems to have been totally forgotten and never even got ported to a single home system, despite its ground-breaking concept.

Each match sees the two opponents each smashing blocks in their own seperate well, and the match can end in one of three ways: a player can win by clearing all the blocks in their well, or they can lose by either losing their ball off the bottom of the screen (though each player does start with a row of multi-hit bricks behind them, so this rarely happens) or by having their bat crushed by descending blocks.

It could be said that it's less "pure" than Puchi Carat, though, as while Taito's game uses nothing but blocks, ball, bat and the bottom of the screen to create the rules of engagement, Blocken uses a similar system of power-ups to the infamously brutal SNES competitive puzzler, Tetris Battle Gaiden, in that certain blocks drop stars, which, like the power pellets in TBG, can be saved up and used towards various ends. Using between one and seven stars will push your opponent's blocks down one row for each star used, and if you used more than five, you'll also summon the games mascot, a small winged ball creature, to come and repair one of your protective blocks. If you keep collecting a few more stars after you've saved up seven, your star gauge will start flashing, and cashing in while this is happening gets you all the lesser benefits, as well as a few seconds in a kind of super-mode where your ball smashes through blocks without bouncing off them, and your bat becomes enflamed and indestructible, also destroying blocks it touches.

Once you figure out how the rules of the game work (or have someone explain them, like I just did), it's actually a lot of fun! It doesn't have the aesthetic polish or mechanical purity of Puchi Carat, but it's definitely as fun and totally worth playing. Plus, even without that game's polish, it does have a lot of it's own nice little touches, like how the ball can hit stars on their way down the screen, knocking them slightly off course, or how each of the AI opponents has a slightly different-looking bat. It's little things like that that can really add a lot of character to a simple game like this.

Blocken's a game I definitely recommend seeing out if you enjoy block-smashing games or competitive puzzlers (or both), and it's a shame it never got the attention or recognition it deserves.

Curosities Vol. 10 - Playable Politicians

There's plenty of games starring real people, most of them being atheletes, with some musicians and actors and even the occasional comedian. Less common, though still more than you'd expect are games starring politicians, a few of which I'll be looking at today. There are actually quite a few omissions from this post, like Bill Clinton's appearance in NBA Jam, and pretty much the entire cast of the old Spitting Image fighting game, but I've tried to stick to games that are relatively obscure, and also to games where the politician in question is clearly the protagonist and/or main character.

So the first game is probably the most well-known of the ones appearing in this list, though at the same time, its star is the politician with the least fame outside his own country. SEGA's 1985 arcade game I'm Sorry is a single-screen maze game that sees Kakuei Tanaka (Prime Minister of Japan between 1972 and 1974) walking the streets of Japan collecting gold bars and avoiding sex scandals. It's got a nice risk/reward mechanic, whereby you don't get any points for the gold bars until you take them back to your mansion, but the amount of points increases greatly with each bar collected before returning home. Still, it's more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an actual good game, and even without knowledge of Tanaka's career, seeing tiny little 80s sprites engaging in BDSM and such is mildly amusing the first few times.

Next up is a politician who is, pretty prolific, as far as videogame appearances go. As well as having two otherwise unrelated games of his own, he also makes an appearance in Street Fighter II. Of course I'm talking about the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev! I can only assume that Japanese game developers saw him in the news and thought he was cute or funny-looking or something?

Anyway, the two games were released within months of each other in 1991, with Gorby no Pipline Daisakusen landing first, in April for the MSX. It's a combination of two better-known puzzle games, those being Tetris and Pipemania. There's a Tetris-style pit, lines with open pipes at each side. Blocks with pipe shapes in them fall from above, and the aim is to link the pipes on the right with the pipes on the left. There's a quota on each stage that has to be fulfilled before the pit completely fills up with pipe-bits. It's a surprisingly difficult game, and though it's fun and can hold your attention for a short time, it's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts, with both Tetris and Pipemania both being much better games than it.

Two months later, Ganbare Gorby! reached the Game Gear, and this time, it's a top down action game. In it, you play as Gorbachev, now working in some kind of distribution centre, ensuring people get the bread, medicine and Game Gears that they need, by stepping on switches to make conveyor belts point in the right direction. Obviously, there are some complications: the conveyor belts also have upon them less desirable items, like mouldy bread, poison and gears. (The gears are the unwanted item on the stage with the Game Gear as the wanted item, a joke I've only noticed now that I'm typing it out.) There's also thieves and, for some reason, armed guards wandering about the place, stealing items and beating up Mikhail, to interfere with his work. It's not a bad game, and it's also got a decent difficulty curve, with the stages gradually getting more complex, with more labyrinthine layouts of belts, and multiple different sets of switches, and so on. A de-Gorbied version was also released in the west a bit later, renamed Factory Panic.

Our last politician is a bit of a renaissance man, having also been a conspiracy theorist/TV personality, an actor, and, most impotantly, a wrestler. Of course, it's Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Governer of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003! The game that bears his name, Jesse "The Body" Ventura Wrestling Superstars, a localisation of the Mega Drive game Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden, was never actually released, and the ROM was only found and leaked publicly in 2016. Since Thunder Pro was itself a spin-off of the excellent Fire Pro Wrestling series, it's mechanically sound, and definitely a big step up from other wrestling games of the time. The only real problem it has is that the single-player game is far too easy: I managed to get to the final stage on my first play. Still, it's a fun little game, and other than Ventura himself, takes the usual Japanese wrestling game route of having oddly-named copyright-friendly clones of real wrestlers. You should at least give it a go, if only because it's a recently unearthed lost treasure.

Flame Gunner (Arcade)

The quick and easy way to describe Flame Gunner would be to say it's like a mix of Taito's Dead Connection and SEGA's Virtua Cop, with a couple of extra flairs of its own. Like Dead Connection, the bulk of the game has you in single-screen areas, shooting lots of badguys coming from all sides of the screen as quickly as possible with an automatic weapon. The similarity to Virtua Cop is a little harder to explain, and a little more tenuous, but I'll try: before they actually shoot at you, the enemies in Flame Gunner will have blue lines projecting from the ends of their guns, showing where they intend to shoot. After a second or two, they'll settle on a direction, and the line will turn red, giving you a very small amount of time to get out of the way before they pull the trigger. It might just be me, but that seems a lot like the colour-changing target circles in VC (as well as a couple of other SEGA lightgun games).

Unlike Dead Connection, though, Flame gunner doesn't have charmingly tiny sprites and and detailed pixel art backdrops. Instead, it takes the very mid-90s approach of placing polygon model characters on top of mostly-static pre-rendered backgrounds. I'm sure there's been other arcade games that take this approach (and obviously there are a ton of console games from the period that do it), but none come to mind immediately. It's a good look, to be honest, and it means that MAME does a much better job of running than most full 3D games.

By now, you might be wondering what the "extra flairs of its own" I mentioned earlier might be. Well, there's two of them, and they're kind of connected. Each of the three characters has a different starting stage, and after you finish it (and after you finish ever subsequent stage), you get to choose the next stage from  a shortlist of two or three options. The choice of stages isn't just a choice of favoured locations, as each stage has its own mission, from the obvious "kill all the enemies" to things like destroying a minimum amount of objects within a time limit while an endless stream of enemies come in to try and kill you. There's also the odd boss fight here and there, too, though they're a bit boring and disappointing to be honest.

The weird thing about this game is that I've actually lost more credits to (very narrowly) failing to complete missions within the stringent time limit, rather than being killed by enemies. After a few games, though, I started to figure out the easier missions, and can get pretty far into the game on a single credit now. Flame Gunner is a fun game, and definitely worth having a look at. It's just a shame that, as far as I can tell, it's the last game by the developers GAPS, and their only action game. If anyone knows any better, please let me know!