Panic Road (Arcade)

Video pinball games make sense on home systems, as there are factors of cost and space that make keeping a pinball collection at home incredibly unrealistic for anyone but the most crooked robber barons. In arcades, though, they're a much odder prospect, since most places that have arcade machines are also places you're likely to find pinball tables, so who would bother playing an untactile facsimile when they can play the real thing? Which is probably why, off the top of my head, I can only think of two pinball arcade games: the pornographic Gals Pinball, and this one, Panic Road.

Panic Road features some early examples (maybe even the first, but I'm not sure on that) of a video pinball game having features not possible on real tables, too: there's roaming, destructible enemies in place of stationary bumpers, there's multiple tables, and were those multiscreen tables real, they'd definitely be abnormally long compared to their peers. You don't get to choose which table you play, though, as the game takes a videogamey approach to progression. Each table has a goal, which reveals a key when fulfilled. Hit the key with the ball andgo to the next table!

The problem is that the game doesn't tell you what these goals are, and they're not particularly intuitive, either. The first table's goal is to collect the numbers 1-2-3 that are in a row about midway up the table, the ocean-themed table two has you hitting every clam on the table so they open up, and though I made the key appear on table three, I still have no idea what triggered that. It just seemed to happen. At least the table's themes are varied, though: table one is in a little garden with mushrooms, strawberries and wooden fenceposts, table two is as mentioned before, in the ocean, while the third table is just an arrangement of random objects, like moles, pencils, disembodied hands and a pink mountain.

Panic Road is an okay game. The opacity of each stage's goals is a problem, as are the slightly odd ball physics (which can be forgiven considering the game's age), and it obviously doesn't hold a candle to many of the console pinball games that would come later, but it's a fun enough distraction. I imagine it wasn't very popular with arcade operators, though: my first credit with no prior practice lasted over 20 minutes, and none of those that followed were any shorter.

War: The Final Assault (Arcade)

I'll start this post with a disclaimer: this game isn't emulated perfectly in MAME by a long shot, and while the original cabinet uses some buttons and a big gun handle-shaped analogue stick for controls, I had to make do with a Dual Shock 4 and jimmying together some controls that were pretty close to a modern first person shooter through trial and error. Since it would be unfair to comment on the quality of the game under these circumstances, consider this post as being for informational purposes only.

As far as I can tell, though, it's a pretty good attempt at bringing contemporary console first person shooters (circa 1999, when the game was released) to the arcade! I only played the single player mode, though it seems that it has both co-op and versus multiplayer modes, judging by the attract mode demos and the high score tables. Single player mode has you going through stages killing lots of enemy soldiers and robots. Sometimes you'll get to pick up a more powerful weapon, which is nice, too, and there's a fair few different kinds. Also, when you kill human enemies with an explosive weapon, they burst into chunks of meat, which is also nice.

The game's set in futuristic Siberia, and your enemies are a kind of generic bad guy army that takes vidual cues from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, though judging by some of the names of later stages seen on the highscore tables, it looks like aliens get involved later on, too. Visually, the game looks great: everything's huge and colourful and chunky, and there's cool propaganda posters on the walls too. The robot enemies are a bit boring, though, which is a shame as the human enemies look alright, despite being a bit generic. Though there was apparently a scrapped N64 port in the works, the whole time I was playing, the thought that ran through my mind was that it looked like a lot of western-developed Dreamcast games. Of course, it didn't get ported there, either.

As for how it plays, it's a mixed bag. I do like the linearity of the stages, and the fact that there's big red arrows telling you where to go, as something that's always frustrated me in single player FPSes is getting lost in the stages. I don't know why, but it always seems to happen! One thing I really didn't like though, is that there's quite a few bullet sponge enemies, and they only get more frequent as the stages go on. I only played until the fourth boss, and by then, just getting through each room was becoming laborious.

Though I was essentially playing it at half speed, thanks to a combination of the emulation being in its early days, and my laptop not particularly being a powerhouse (though I don't know if it runs faster on more powerful computers, or if we will just have to wait for the emulation to get slowly closer to perfection), I mostly enjoyed War: The Final Assault. It's colourful, there's explosions and stuff, and there aren't many arcade games like it. (Off the top of my head, I can think of Last Survivor, Outtrigger, and that Counterstrike arcade game?) Try it, I guess, see how you get on.

TH Strikes Back (Arcade)

You might remember a few years ago, I reviewed a Spanish arcade game entitled Thunder Hoop. Well, the TH in this game's title stands for the same thing I guess, since this is the sequel to it. Like its predecessor, it's about a guy who looks a lot like Son Goku (though this time round, it's more of a "Dragonball Z as drawn by Rob Liefeld" kind of Goku than the original game's shorter, more cutesy Dragonball style) running around platform stages shooting stuff.

Unlike the original though, TH Strikes back has less of an Amiga/Microcomputer feel to it, having a much faster pace, and more of an influence from console games as well as its arcade peers. There's generally a lot less careful platforming in this one, as you storm ahead as fast as you can, constantly shooting the many crowds of one-shot enemies, making you feel like the super-powered fighter your character resembles visually. The game has the "semi-auto" shooting, where you can shoot as fast as you can press the button, which is always satisfying, especially during boss fights. All in all, it's generally pretty fun to play. If you like Contra or Metal Slug and want a not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-good alternative, TH Strikes Back is a decent enough effort in that regard.

With the talk of the actual mechanics out of the way, I want to talk about the game's graphics. I've already mentioned the main character being a bit unoriginal, but the enemies are all pretty interesting. There's weird biological horrors, sleek, shiny sci-fi women who look like they've been ripped from the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal, floating cast-offs from The Real Ghostbusters, and even weirder biological horrors. The backgrounds are nice, too, being a mix of standard sci-fi spaceships and tech along with some shameless Giger-cribbing. All the enemies also have unique deatth animations, which for the most part have them exploding, spreading their innards all over the place, but special note should be made of the aforementioned sci-fi women, who upon death, inflate until they burst. I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt since this game came out in 1994, but in our post-deviantart 2018 world, it does seem like that might have been some fiendish, perverse animator catering to his own special interests on the sly.

There's another cool little touch that kind of covers mechanics and aesthetics at the same time: enemies generally don't instantly kill you on touch. Bullets and other projectiles they shoot do, but the enemies themselves will instead initiate some attack when they touch you, and if you're quick enough, you can kill them before they actually pull the attack off and kill you. Like the death animations, those are all different for each enemy too. Lots of attention to detail in this game all round, which is a nice surprise when you consider that a lot of western-developed arcade games are just ugly, cheap cash-ins with the minimum effort put in.

TH Strikes back isn't going to change your life, and there's lots of better games in the genre, but it's still got enough going for it that you should at least play a few credits and have a look for yourself.

Black Touch 96 (Arcade)

The title Black Touch 96 might sound like some creepy Qix-clone with lewd pictures in the background, but it's actually something totally different and equally as bad: an unfinished Korean beat em up (with lewd pictures between stages)! Though it's unfinished and therefore a bit rough around the edges, it still has all the typical hallmarks of terrible Korean arcade games we've come to know and hate over the years: low quality sampled music, power up items that don't seem to do anything, sound effects stolen from other games (in this case, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) and generally unbalanced difficulty are all present and correct. However, it also has some quirks of its own, mainly aesthetic, to stand out from the awful pack.

For example, the enemies. There's only a few of them you'll fight throughout the game, but they are at least unique. There's a mutant man-baby thing that hits you with a wrench, a bald woman who takes off her wig to hit you with, and a fat guy on a skateboard wearing shorts, a vest and a horned helmet, among less interesting ones like the biker-without-a-bike, and recoloured versions of bosses you've already beaten. Of course, all of the above reappear again and again with different colour palettes, though their difficulty and how much health they have seems to be completely unrelated, as one enemy will go down in two hits, while the next one of the exact same type will take twenty seconds of solid pummelling. Solid pummelling is also the strategy for beating every boss: get them to the edge of the screen and hammer the punch button until they die or your arm drops off.

There's no choice of characters, you're stuck with a generic muscular guy, and your attack options are limited. You've got buttons for punches and kicks, a jump button that's completely pointless (you do a tiny little jump in place, and if you press kick while doing it, you do an unimpressivle spin-kick that removes a third of your own health bar), and you also have a once-per-life bomb attack. The bomb attack is at least hilarious, though, as rather than killing all the enemies onscreen, it just makes them run away. On that note, I should, in the interest of fairness, commend the game on its sprite-pushing ability: the character sprites are all pretty big, and the screen does get crowded at times, with up to six enemies at a time. There's no weapons to pick up, though, and very few power ups (lots of point items, very rare health packs that restore a miserly amount of HP, and even rarer invincibility potions and extra bombs), and really no variety at all in the stages other than the backgrounds (though they're not bad-looking, unlike the blotchy characters): just walking left to right fighting crowds of the same few enemies over and over.

There's not much to recommend about Black Touch 96. To be fair, that might be why the developers didn't finish it, they just saw that it was a dead end. Some arcade prototypes are glimpses at concepts that were just too out there to be marketable, or at cool games that just came about at the wrong time. This isn't one of those ones, though, and it's not really worth your time.

Super Bubble 2003 (Arcade)

There's an unusual story behind this post: a total stranger on Youtube sent me a message saying that the only information they could find on it anywhere were short video clips, and asked if I could write a post about it. I'd never heard of it before, and looked up those short video clips, and it looked okay, so here this post is.

For a long long time, I've lamented that I would often see screenshots of freemium MMORPGs and mobile phone games from Korea with really, incredibly good pixelart and sprites, always sad that there was this pool of talent there was was a perfect fit for cool, fun, arcade-style games, seemingly doomed to an eternity of their art being wasted in a world of nickel-and-diming micro-transactions and grind-based games. Meanwhile, Korean arcade games had a reputation for not only being incredibly low in quality, but also for stealing art assets from western and Japanese games. Super Bubble 2003 bucks both trends by not only being okay to play, but by having all-original (as far as I can tell) artwork!

And that artwork is truly excellent. All the characters are super-cute and well-animated, the points items are all lovingly rendered sprites depicted various foods, everything's bright and colorful without being garish; it's all just really high quality. I think the only negative thing I can say about this game, visually speaking, is that there's no visible life counter! The music and sound effects are pretty unremarkable, if you're wondering.

As for how it plays: it's a Bubble Bobble clone. Like most BB clones, it doesn't, as far as I can tell, copy the original's Druaga-esque system of byzantine secrets-within-secrets, only the core mechanics of trpping enemies in bubbles and popping them for points items. It does a pretty good job of it, though, and it does add a couple of other things to the formula, too: there's a tug-o-war minigame that appears when you collect a magic wand, and a giant/invincible mode that happens when you collect a bootleg Superman icon. The minigame is pretty much impossible to win, as far as I can tell though, so I have no idea what the prize is. The giant/invinciblity power up is nice, having its own super-cute sprites rather than just blowing up the regular-sized ones.

It's got a very steep difficulty curve that almost instantly shoots right up after you finish the first set of fifteen stages. I shamefully have to admit that I credit-fed up to the mid-30s to take screenshots, but I find credit-feeding incredibly boring so stopped there. It's proper difficulty, though: it doesn't change the rules on you or any other underhand tactic like that. With a lot of practice and skill, you could totally 1cc this game eventually. Whether or not it's a recommended play hinges, I guess, on your tolerance for that sort of thing, possibly tempered by your desire to see super-cute sprites. Give it a try, I guess?

Brave Blade (Arcade)

I'll start by being honest here, and admit that the thing that drew me towards this game is the graphics. They're that amazing kind of 3D graphics that was prevalent among arcade fighting and racing games from the mid-90s up to about the turn of the century, but it's a rare example of a shooting game in that visual style. And it does it with flair, too, as Brave Blade is set in a great-looking medieval/world war I/giant robots world, with all kinds of cool stuff in it. The developers clearly knew what they were doing too, as the first stage is very short, and ends with a boss fight against a giant tank that transforms into a robot with an awesome animation, and that boss (and its transformation animation) appears prominently in the game's attract mode too.

So, the game itself? You pick one of five pilot/knights, each with different weaponry, and you shoot and slash your enemies, of course. You've got three buttons: shoot, which just shoots, slash/guard, which is your powerful melee attack when tapped and a guard when held, and your power up button, which activates your powered up mode, during which you're invincible and can only melee attack. Regulating all of this is a power bar at the bottom of the screen, which goes up when you destroy enemies (or certain kinds of enemy bullets and missiles that can be destroyed) and goes down when you guard. You can only activate your powered form when it's full, so I recommend never bothering to use the guard (though I'm sure there's probably expert players somewhere who'd tell you I'm incredibly wrong and stupid, I can't see the advantage of it).

The scoring system is centered around the collection of Battle Garegga-esque medals, which at the most basic level, work in the same way as Battle Garegga's: their value starts at 100 and gradually works its way into the tens and even hundreds of thousands, though if you let one drop off the bottom of the screen, it's back down to 100 points a pop. The twist Brave Blade adds is that you can accelerate the accumulation of value in medals by repeatedly attacking them with your melee weapon, which also makes them bounce up the screen a bit, giving you a little more time to collect them too. Of course, if you're doing this, that'll take your concentration away from fighting the enemies and dodging their attacks, so there's a lot of risk/reward play going on. Personally, I'm a bit cowardly, so I only juggle the medals while I'm powered up.

Brave Blade is an excellent game all round. It plays great, with a bunch of fun systems that all interlock together well, and it looks amazing too. I definitely recommend playing it. It's just a shame that it'll probably never get any kind of home port like some other, more well-known shooting games have been getting in recent years.

Heavy Smash (Arcade)

Other than a few remaining outliers like the Everybody's Golf series, sports games that aren't staid, po-faced "simulations" starring real life players are a pretty rare thing nowadays, and sci-fi/fantasy-themed games about fictional sports even moreso. And that's a shame, because those games are usually pretty great, Heavy Smash included.

What it is is a lot like a simplified, horizontally-scrolling version of the Speedball, where armoured players carry the ball and try to throw it into the goals at either ends of the pitch. This being an arcade game rather than a computer game, Heavy Smash does everything in a much louder, more colourful and generally more flamboyant manner than the Speedball games, though. There's also the addition of a power bar, whose main function is to determine how powerful you shots at the enemy's goal are, with the most powerful being like special attacks from a shonen anime, and being able to blast the opponent's goalie into the goal along with the ball at close nough range. The controls are pretty simple, and perfectly suited to a Mega Drive port that never happened: you have three buttons, the middle one is jump, and the other two each have two different functions, depending on which team has the ball. One of them is for taking shots at the opponent's goal, or attempting to tackle a ball-holding member of the opponent's team, while the other either passes the ball to one of your teammates, or, when your power bar is full, shoots a projectile at your nearest opponent.

Interestingly, the game has two scores. There's the number of goals you've scored in the current match, of course, but there's also a regular old arcade game score, too. This latter score goes up when you score goals, tackle enemy players and pick up the ball, and there's also end of match bonuses for things like scoring hat tricks and so on. Another little quirk is that though the standard length of a match is ninety seconds, if you get six points ahead of your opponents, the match is called off and you're declared the winner outright, so it is theoretically possible to attempt a speedrun of this game. Less cool is the fact that if the scores are tied when time runs out, the game goes into sudden death, and if no-one scores before that time runs out, the CPU player wins.

All the teams except one are nationally themed, and true to form for a Japanese arcade game, there's plenty of stereotypes. The Japan team are samurai, the Italy team are gladiators, and so on. But there's also some non-stereotypical teams in there too: Spain are also represented by a team of samurai, and Brazil are represented by a team of guys with electric superpowers? Also, at first glance, Australia's team are the only women in the game, but when the usually-masked Japan team score a goal, the bare-faced portrait that comes up appears to be a short-haired woman, which is interesting, I guess?

In summary, Heavy Smash is a game that's a lot of fun to play, and it looks awesome, too. Plus, it's yet another game you can look at and ask "why did this never get a home port?" So go and do both those things!

Lethal Crash Race (Arcade)

Lethal Crash Race is a game that can pay testament to the incredible popularity and influence of Street Fighter II on the arcade scene of the early nineties, as though it's not a fighting game, it clearly takes a lot of influence from Capcom's epoch-defining game. That's not to say that it's one of those racing games that's heavy on the fantasy and violence: though a lot of effort has clearly gone into ensuring that ramming your opponent's car is fun and satisfying, it's not an essential part of winning, nor are there projectile weapons or other power ups to be collected on the track.

Instead the influence is more structural and stylistic. There are eight characters to choose from, each with their own cars (all of which are mis-spelled knock-offs of real cars), and their own stages. Their own stages because rather than being a game in which you race a whole load of cars round stadiums for several laps, Lethal Crash Race instead has short one-on-one races of about a minute in length, along various linear tracks all across the world. Not only that, but each character also has different quotes for the beginning and end of each race, my favourite being the rich old man who cheerily declares "this might be my last race."

It's got a really nice feel to it, it's fast and smooth, and as mentioned, bashing into your opponent is satisfying. You're not going to destroy them, but you can knock them off the road, and into rivers or other obstacles. It looks great, too: though the style of the time was all sprite scaling, moving into low poly models, Lethal Crash Race puts up a good fight with its top-down view, having great-looking cars and nicely detailed stages. It looks kind of like if Grand Theft Auto was fully 2D and a bit more detailed and zoomed in, and since it's set up so that your car is always driving up the screen, there's a really cool rotating camera effect on tracks with big round turns.

Lethal Crash Race is a fun game with a cool and interesting concept and lots of charm, and I recommend that you go and play it. It's also yet another game that could easily have been ported to consoles, but inexplicably never was, and probably never will be.

Wild Riders (Arcade)

Like usual with arcade racing games, I'll start with the disclaimer that I was playing this on a PC emulator with a regualr game controller, not a real, motorcycle-shaped sit-down arcade cabinet. I'll also add the extra caveat that the emulation of this game is somewhat less than perfect, so the real thing is even more preferred than usual. But I guess that most people reading this, were they to play Wild Riders, would be doing so via emulation anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter that much.

Anyway, Wild Riders is a very SEGA racing game, in which you play as one of two motorbike gang members on the run from the cops in a place called Massive City, which looks like a perfect blue-skied version of Beverly Hills from an 80s cartoon. Of course, you go smashing through parks, pool parties, fancy restaurants and hotels, and so on, all while any pedestrians jump out of the way without fail, ala Crazy Taxi. It all looks incredible too, with a cel-shaded style, incredibly bold colours on everything, and cool little stylistic things like character close-ups appearing in little comic panels.

It also plays pretty great: fast and smooth, just like you'd expect from a SEGA racing game. There's a few unique gimmicks too! Firstly, instead of a traditional time limit, since you're on the run, the counter at the top of the screen shows how many metres away they are from catching you. The number goes up and down depending on how well you're doing, and you can get bigger boosts by exploiting the game's other main gimmick. That other gimmick is that there are various obstacles that you can either jump off of or slide underneath. On a real cabinet, this is done by pulling up or pushing down on the bike's handlebars, while in emulation, you can just map these functions to buttons on your controller, they don't need to be analogue.

The only downside, and probably the reason it never got any ports to home consoles is the length: obviously an arcade game isn't going to be long, but I finished Wild Riders on my second attempt, and there's no Outrun-style branching paths or Crazy Taxi-style free roaming to add variety to repeated playthroughs, leaving you with a game that's beautiful and exciting, but essentially only for five minutes. I guess if a particular arcade had a lot of players all competing for the top score, that'd cause a lot of repeat play, but even in 2001 that'd be a very big if. Any console port would need a lot of additional stuff added, and at a time where SEGA were leaking money all over the place, doing all that for a game with no name recognition probably wasn't a priority.

So yeah, Wild Riders is a (condensed) ton of fun, and looks amazing. It's also, however, probably the most demanding game that runs on Naomi 2 hardware, so if you have a computer that can handle the emulation, it's definitely worth a look.

Demolish Fist (Arcade)

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, beat em ups as a genre entered something of a drought, from which the genre's never really recovered. While shooting games and 2D platformers have plenty of great representatives from both mainstream and independent developers, new beat em ups are few and far between, and a lot of the time, they're ruined by the kinds of stupid game-killing design choices I've complained about in many, many posts on this blog before: levelling up/skill shops, negative difficulty curves, and a new one I only discovered recently: there's a game available on PS4 and PC called Mother Russia Bleeds, and the lives/continue system is so broken as to make it impossible to get a game over (as far as I could tell), rendering the game completely pointless.

But anyway, that drought. It was still very much in effect in 2003, when Demolish Fist was released, and even among the few beat em ups released about that time, this one stands out by being more traditional. Though it's entirely in 3D and you can move and face in all eight directions, the camera sticks rigidly in one position (not counting cutscenes, obviously), making the game play like a regular, old-fashioned belt scroller. And it does a great job of it, too! You walk along, beat up crowds of bad guys, pick up weapons and power-ups and a good time is had by all.

Of course, every beat em up needs to have a gimmick to make it stand out, even if it has no contemporary competitors, and Demolish Fist actually has a few! Firstly, there's a block button. It's not a massive thing, but it's still something that a lot of beat em ups don't have. Secondly, the game takes an approach to weaponry akin to Two Crude Dudes or Dynamite Deka, having tons of stuff available to pick up and swing and/or throw: cattleprods, baseball bats with nails hammered into the end, swords, electrified gloves, fuel tanks, vending machines, motorcycles, cars and so on. The final, and most unique gimmick is the vertigo system. You get a power bar that fills up from attacking enemies, like in many other games. When it fills up, you can press all three buttons to enter vertigo mode, during which you're not only invincible, but you can also attack as fast as you're able to hammer the attack button. This lasts for ten seconds or until every enemy present has been defeated, and it never gets old or stops being satisfying.

I also want to talk about this game's setting and aesthetic, which I like as much as the game itself. It's a kind of look that was used in a lot of anime and Japanese videogames around the turn of the century that I'm going to call "sunset dystopia", a world where there hasn't been any kind of cataclysmic event, but it's just kind of lurching slowly towards an eventual apocalypse through societal entropy that's just on the horizon. I guess other examples of the look would be Daraku Tenshi, King of Fighters 99, and Crimson Tears.

So yeah, Demolish Fist is an excellent game. If you're able to play it (and most fairly modern computers should be able to emulate the Atomiswave at a decent speed by now. My pre-owned laptop can manage it, even!), then you definitely should.

Heated Barrel (Arcade)

Heated Barrel is a pretty unfortunate case, as it marks the first time (as far as I can remember) that a game excels in almost all respects, but I can't really recommend it for one particular reason that represents a stupid and unfortunate set of decisions on the part of the developers.

It's a wild west-themed horizontally-scrolling shooting game, presented in a belt scrolly fashion that works really well. You play as a generic cowboy, and you go from right to left shooting crowds of various kinds of bad guys, as well as the occasional bear, bull, ghost or demon. It's very fast and smooth, and feels great to control and play in general. To an extent, it looks great, too. All the sprites are detailed, well animated, and full of personality.

There's not many power-ups or gimmicks to speak of, but the aforementioned smooth speed more than makes up for the lack of mechanical complexity. Repetition isn't really a problem, either, as each stage introduces a whole bunch of new foes to gun down, alongside the ever-present generic enemies. All in all, Heated Barrel is pretty close to being an excellent game, and I wish I was introducing you all to a forgotten, hidden arcade gem. But it's time to get onto that downer I've been alluding to.

The fact is, this game is super racist. From the first stage, a lot of the enemies are racist caricatures: Native American "savages", running around near-naked, throwing stone axes and so on, lazy, corpulent, hairy Mexican bandits with gatling guns and sombreros, and the midboss you fight in the middle of the third stage is a huge, grotesquely muscled black prisoner with a ball and chain and a face that looks like it was drawn by infamous neo-nazi cartoonist A. Wyatt Mann. The style of all the graphics shows that they were clearly trying to emulate the look of classic American animated shorts, the difference being that those shorts are from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, whereas this game was made in 1992. It sucks, but as good as this game is, I don't think that cancels out how awful it is thematically.

Penky (Arcade)

It's a tragic thing, when a game has an interesting concept, but poor execution, and Penky represents one such tragedy. The base concept is actually pretty cool, and so simple and obvious that I'm surprised I haven't seen it done before: You walk around painting the floor, like in the old ame Crush Roller, but rather than just avoiding enemies and trying to paint the whole floor of the stage, you are instead competing with another floor painter to have most of the floor yur colour when the time runs out. I guess it's also a little like Splatoon too?

Unfortunately, Penky is a product of Yunsung, a Korean developer whos games have been featured on this blog before, pretty much exclusively in reference to their habit of making poor-quality knock-offs of Compile games. So it might not be an original concept at all, but just stolen from another game of which I'm not aware. All the typical hallmarks of poor games from mainland Asia are in full effect, though: stuff happening onscreen for no reason, low quality sampled music stolen from other sources (including at least one track from the excellent Mega Drive shooting game Thunderforce IV), ugly characters that look like depressing poundshop toys, and a general air of cheapness.

The negativity isn't just confined to the game's presentation, either: it also plays really badly. Now, the aim, as I've already stated, is to make most of the floor your colour before time runs out. So fast movement should be key, right? And there is a power-up that makes you move very fast for a couple of seconds. The problem is that there's also a bunch more power-ups that don't seem to do anything at all, and a lot of the time your character will be slowed to a crawl, or even just randomly stopping to do a stupid pose, both with no obvious reason or explanation. Also, during the matches, other characters will sometimes appear and wander around, clearing both player's colour wherever they tread. All this adds up to a game that's competitive in concept, but completely down to random chance in practice, making it a useless waste of time.

There's other problems too, like how, if you're playing single player, you'll just fight the same opponent over and over on different stages, no matter how many times you beat them. But really, talking about Penky any longer would just be flogging a dead horse. All you need to know is that it's awful and you shouldn't bother playing it.