Danger Express (Arcade)

 This is an unreleased and unfinished game that came to light relatively recently. Though it's clearly unfinished, this mostly manifests as what we can generously call "presentational eccentricities" that would have presumably have been ironed out before release. Things like the very default-looking font used for a lot of the text, and things like getting a "bonus for breaking stuff" at the end of each stage. It is totally playable, though, and it's a shame that it never got officially released, because it's a lot better than most western-developed arcade games ofthe nineties.

 

The main thing that stands out in Danger Express is its aesthetic, which I've seen other people describe as looking like a fake videogame you'd see characters playing on a TV show. That's a fair enough description, but while I played, what came to mind for me is that it was like some long-forgotten vanity project of a straight-to-VHS no-budget action movie had somehow got a licensed tie-in videogame. All it really needs is the addition of a cutscene starring Cameron Mitchell and it'd be perfect.

 

What is that aesthetic? It's an amazing combination of sprite scaling and digitisation, with real life actors dressed as generic goons walking in and out of the screen. There's even some kind of psuedo-live action cutscenes! They're not really proper videos, but more like short gif-like animations using frames from a live action video. To maximize the amount of scaling that gets done, Danger Express also eschews the usual horizontal scrolling seen in most beat em ups in favour of having all the stages go into the screen like a melee-based Space Harrier. It seems unlikely, but I wonder if the developers had played the PC Engine game Jinmu Densho, which is a similar concept, mechanically at least (though to be honest, Danger Express is a much better implementation of the concept).

 

Naturally, then, a train is the perfect setting for such a game: lots of narrow corridors, giving a good reason as to why you're walking in a straight line through waves of enemies. So that's how it goes (except for a few outdoor excursions to backalleys, docks, or at the casino): you walk from the back of the train carraige to the front, killing everyone who tries to stop you, including soldiers, ninja, strippers, wrestlers, bikers and so on. Interestingly, some stages give you a rifle, while others are purely melee, except for the occasional inclusion of a temporary pair of nunchaku that shoot balls of lightning.

 

The most surprising thing about Danger Express is how good it is, though. Most games that use digitised sprites tend to be awkward, stiff and no fun to play, while western arcade developers in the nineties had a penchant for putting out cynical, hateful coin eaters. Danger Express bucks both trends! While the action isn't exactly super-smooth, it's fast and enjoyable enough to cover up the cracks, and the difficulty is actually prety reasonable: on my first attempt, I got about four stages into it (out of nine), and I think it's probable that with some practice, it could actually be 1CCed by a skilled player.

Metamorphic Force (Arcade)

 Two unfair criticisms that are often aimed a beat em ups as a genre are that they're unfair quarter munchers, and that they're repetitive to the point of mindlessness. This might sound a little too harsh to some of you, but I think the blame for both of these can be laid at the feet of Konami's licensed beat em ups of the late eighties and early nineties: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, X-Men, etc. I know a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and I do too, but they definitely live up to those stereotypes more than the average beat em up (especially the western versions, which were made more difficult to squeeze those few extra coins out of players), and the popularity and ubiquitousness in the past means they're the games that a lot of people think of first when it comes to the genre. It's really a shame that the best entries Konami made in the genre came out just as it was waning in popularity: Violent Storm was one of them, and Metamorphic Force was the other.

 

I think most people already know about Violent Storm, with it's bizarre soundtrack and wide array of bone-crunching throws, but Metamorphic Force seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar for some reason. The simplest way to describe it would be as a combination of SEGA's Altered Beast and Konami's X-Men beat em up. You pick one of four guys, each of whom has been granted the ability to transform into a different werebeast by the Earth goddess, and you walk across various fantasy landscapes beating up monsters until they explode into glowing goo. Each playable character has their own beast form, as opposed to each stage having a beast form ala Altered Beast, and they mostly just make you bigger, stranger, faster, and a slightly expanded movelist. Interestingly, a lot of the enemies you face are also werebeasts: lizardmen, elephantmen, hedgehogmen, and so on.

 

The X-Men similarities are a little more vague and difficult to describe than the obvious conceptual similarities to Altered Beast. Basically, it just really feels like the X-Men game, but with a bit more polish, and a bit more balance. It's especially evident in the boss fights: I'm sure a lot of you remember the fight against The Blob in X-Men, where the player characters can basically just pummel his to death in a few seconds? The bossfights in this, in the early part of the game, at least, are a lot like that. Still manages to be satisfying, though, the way you can beat your foes, throw them around, and even continue beating them while they're lying on the ground (especially when you play as Ban, the martial artist Minotaur, who literally dances on his enemies' prone bodies with his hooves!), Transformation occurs through collecting a goddess statue, and there's no time limit to it: you stay transformed until it's beaten out of you. Collect another goddess statue while already transformed, and you'll do a fullscreen dashing attack, a lot like Nightcrawler's super in X-Men.

 

The game's presentation is excellent all round. You can see in the screnshots how colourful it is, how big the sprites are, and how interesting the world and the monsters in it are, but the soundtrack is also high quality. Feeling in some parts like the music you'd hear in the background of a really great fantasy cartoon, and in others the  same kind of bombastic chiptune metal heard in the likes of Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive. There was, according to legend, a soundtrack CD was released under the title Konami Amusement Sounds '93: Autumn Edition, but I can't find a single picture of it, a copy of it for sale, or any reference to it existing other than ones apparently copied from Wikipedia (which I think was itself copied from the old MAME history.dat). I'm sure it does exist, somewhere, but it must have been printed in very small quantities.

 

Metamorphic Force is a game I definitely recommend playing. If you do, though, the old rule of Konami beat em ups does still apply: play the Japanese version of the ROM and you'll have a much better time. It's never had any kind of home port, but I'm hoping that Hamster Corp. put it out as part of the Arcade Archive series at some point. They've released other nineties Konami games, so it could happen, maybe! If it ever does, it'll be a day one purchase for me.

Wired Soul (PC)

 I've been saying that the past few years have seen something of a renaissance for the beat em up genre, with the likes of Streets of Rage 4, Ninja Saviors, and Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei all being excellent games that both revived the genre after years and years of diluted efforts, as well as bringing their own new ideas to the table. But Wired Soul predates them all, having come out in 2015 (according to its DLSite page, there might have been a physical release before that). 

 

I've got some bad news and some good news regarding Wired Soul, though. The bad news is that it's not as good as any of the games listed above. The good news is that those games all set an incredibly high bar, and it's still a good game that's definitely worth playing. On first sight, it'll all seem very generic and basic, with the "girl getting kidnapped" plot and the strange lack of grappling or throws, but the more you play, the more you realise that there's a little more under the surface.

 

I guess the devs disregarded grappling to focus on combos, since as you'll eventually discover, you can chain a bunch of attacks together, and it's very satisfying to do so. It also manages this with only one attack button! You get your regular string of attacks by going up to an enemy and repeatedly pressing attack, and obviously, there are running and jumping attacks, too. But you can also perform more powerful autocombos by holding the attack button to fill a charge meter, then releasing when an enemy's in range. Not only that, but you can actually attack twice while in the air, plus you can hit an enemy once while they're on the ground.

 

With a bit of skill, timing, and aim, you can, for example, perform your charged autocombo before jumping up and kicking the enemy another two times before landing beside them and getting a sly ground punch in before they get up. It'll take a fair bit of practice before you can do that kind of thing reliably, but it's very satisfying every time you do pull it off. The only real problem the game has is the difficulty, that feels slightly unfair. For example, it seems like enemy attacks, regardless of whether you're doing a special or who attacked first or anything else like that, always have priority over your attacks. Furthermore, a bar of health doesn't seem to go very far, either: it'll only take a few hits for you to lose a life, especially against bosses. They aren't game-killing problems, but they're a bit annoying, and they stop the game reaching the upper echelons like the ones listed above.

 

Wired Soul is a game where the positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I do still recommend it. It was clearly a passion project for the developers, and not every game has to be a senses-shattering instant classic. If you like beat em ups, go and buy it. it's good.

The Pirates of Dark Water (SNES)

 

The Pirates of Dark Water is a cartoon from 1991 that I've never really cared for. The plot is a kind of thinly-veiled environmental-type thing, where a fantasy world is being slowly devoured by a substance called Dark Water, so some pirates set out to find some magic treasures to stop it. Well, the Dark Water part sounds like a metaphor for pollution, anyway, though the magic treasures part doesn't really fit. But anyway, the low regard I have for the show itself won't marr my opinion of this videogame adaptation, as it actually forms the basis of its greatest strength!

 

Mechanically speaking, this isn't a game with a lot of originality. The only thing it really adds to the generic beat em up formula is a strong attack button that you can use on its own, or at any point during your regular attack chain. (Wikipedia claims that there's lso a block button, though? I must have missed that.) It's not a bad game, but it's not a particularly remarkable one, either. It's obviously very heavily influenced by Capcom's arcade beat em ups, almost as much as Crest of Wolf was. It's still a decent game that's worth your time, though.

 

Why? Entirely for aesthetic reasons. Pirates of Dark Water is a game that manages to stand out from the pack just by having a different setting. If you haven't ever seen the source material, it's got a kind of Spelljammer-meets-Arabian Nights kind of look to it, that works great for a beat em up, offering various kinds of exotic locales, both inhabited and wild. It's also been rendered with a lot of skill, with really charming backgrounds and sprites, and great colour palletes. It all works together to give a feel of swashbuckling adventure as you beat up and chuck about all the enemy pirates. It might seem weird for me to say all this after earlier saying that I didn't care for the cartoon itself, but what can I say? The first time I loaded the game up, I was playing through the first stage, fighting guys in front of a sunset, while off in the distance, more enemies could be seen flying around on dragonback, and I just thought "this is really cool!"

 

Before I end the review, there's a few other things I want to mention regarding the game. First, there's an enemy that starts to appear a few stages in called the Mutarios, which is a little pug-looking monster thing that's hard to hit and continuously runs back and forth knocking you over. I hate it. Secondly, pretty late in the game, there's suddenly a bossfight that takes the form of a little shooting stage, putting you on the back of a dragon, like those guys in the background of the first stage. Unfortunately, it's not very good, mainly because the boss itself spends lots of time flying into the background or offscreen, leaving you sat twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to come back for agonisingly long seconds at a time. Also, for some reason, you don't score points for attacking or killing this boss. Weird.

 

Earlier, I compared Pirates of Dark Water to Crest of Wolf, in the respect that they're both games that borrow a lot from Capcom's various arcade beat em ups, and going back to read my 2017 review of that game, I think I can say the same thing about this one that I did about that one: that it's an okay game elevated by its interesting setting and theming. Unlike Crest of Wolf though, Pirates of Dark Water is very rare and fetches ludicrous prices for legitimate copies online. I definitely don't recommend paying hundreds of pounds for a copy of it, but if you love beat em ups, you should still find some way of playing it.

Drive Girls (PS Vita)

 Drive Girls is a game that had been on my Vita wishlist for a long time, and when you look at it on paper, it's not hard to see why: a beat em up developed by Tamsoft, with a weird gimmick? Of course I'm going to be interested! (The weird gimmick being that the playable characters are girls who can transform into cars.) Unfortunately, I recently got ahold of it, and it's a big disappointment.

 

The main problem can be boiled down to the fact that although the Simple series was dead by the time Drive Girls came out, it still displays in abundance the worst excesses of that budget range, despite being sold as a full price title. There's a lot of recycling: the enemies are various kinds of generic giant slightly robotic-looking bugs, with only a few models being repeated in different sizes and colours. Even more egregious is the fact that while the first two stages take place in different locations, stages two to six all take place in the same location!

 

But anyway, the transformation gimmick. For the first few stages, it's a lot of fun! You beat up the enemies, and when a new batch appears in the distance, you transform and drive towards, then into them, as a cool little opening gambit. You'll soon learn that the safest and most effective way of dealing with enemies is to transform and drift around in circles, doing big damages to any bugs that get in your way. Even this gets taken away from the player, though. After about five or six stages, rows and rows of landmines start appearing. The landmines do a ton of damage to you, but they're only set off if you go over them in car mode. So, in lieu of giving the enemies themselves an effective defence against your drifting, the game essentially punishes you for trying to use what is not only its main gimmick, but the most fun and effective way of playing. 

 

As well as the regular beat em up stages, there's some stages where you race another cargirl around a track. These are surprisingly straight-laced and down-to-earth. The only real deviation from a normal racing game in these stages is that you have a boost that's charged by driving through the small groups of enemies dotted around the tracks. It's okay, but nothing special, and very very easy once you've figured out that running over bugs charges your boost.

 

This game was a big disappointment. Tamsoft are one of my favourite D-list developers, but I guess Drive Girls really proves that they are still D-list nonetheless. Go and play one of the Oneechanbara games instead, and don't waste any time on this one.

Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei (PC)

 Sometimes, you can just happen to see screenshots or a short video of a game, and instantly need to play it, and that was the case when the trailer for Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei appared in my Youtube recommendations. It looks to be a high-quality single-plane beat em up that's true to its genre, and which is obviously playing on nostalgia while updating the aesthetic just a little bit, and still adding a couple of its own ideas.

 

I have good news: it's exactly what it looks to be! Beat em ups are a genre that have been unfortunately conspicuous by their absence in both western and Japanese indie scenes (with very few exceptions, like Streets of Rage Remake, and Tifa Tan X, a game you should not go and look up if you're in polite company), but FDFM Xiaomei is definitely seeking to make up for lost time. It's obviously very inspired by the progenitor of the genre, Spartan X (or Kung Fu, if you prefer), even having the same little row of boxes showing how many stages you've beaten and have yet to beat.

 

Like Spartan X, this game sees you walk from left to right in various old-timey chinese locales, punching and kicking various enemies, the most populous of whom being the big bald guys with their arms up in the air. But there's also creepy little doll things, birds, snakes, butterflies, sword-throwing guys, kyonshi, and more out to get you, too. And this being an old-fashioned game with old-fashioned values, every enemy type has its own specific behaviour and tactics. 

 

There's bosses too, who are all unique, like the guy who throws his giant head at you, the sad ghost who thanks you for killing her, and at the end of stage four, a cool multi-sprite dragon than summons lightning, and along who's back you can walk, if you like. Best of all, you fight every boss with the same moveset and the same stats as you start the game with. In 2020, Streets of Rage 4 brought back real belt-scroller beat em ups, but right under our noses, Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei had brought back real single plane beat em ups in 2019, and none of us even noticed!

 

It's definitely a revival that I'm very happy to see, and I hope it continues for a long time. If you agree, the best way to ensure that, as far as I can see is to go and buy this game, as well as SoR4 (if, for some insane reason you don't have that one already). There's even a physical release, for those willing to go to all the effort of importing from Japan (and who still have an optical drive on their PC). I highly recommend this game, it's honestly like an arcade perfect home port of a game that never existed. There's plenty of PC shooting games you could give that accolade to, now there's finally a beat em up to join them!

Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban (SNES)

 At first sight, I'd assumed that this game was going to be a clone of Kiki Kaikai, which obviously got my interest right away. As it turns out, it's more of a top-down beat em up, like the arcade game Kyros. Well, with one of the characters, at least. There's two to pick from: a Japanese guy, and a White guy, both of whom give the impression of being effeminate dandies, which is an unusual choice for a pair of action game protagonists.

 

The Japanese guy is the melee character, attacking enemies with a harisen, while the white guy throws roses at them. From this point on, assume that I'm mostly talking about playing as the Japanese guy, because the white guy's attack is so slow and weak, that playing as him solo is almost impossible. He might make more sense in the context of co-operative play, though. As well as normal attacks, you also get screen-clearing magic bomb attacks, limited by needing to collect scrolls before using them. These magic attacks are done in the form of summons, with the white guy summoning maids and butlers, and the Japanese guy summoning ninja and, for some reason, bunny girls.

 

The final skill in the dandy pair's offensive repetoire comes in the form of transformation. Sometimes enemies will drop little percentages as items. Collecting them, obviously, increases the percentage on your player HUD, and when it's over 50%, you can transform your dandy into a gigantic musclebound freak who confidently strides around destroying normal enemies in single punches and bosses in only a few more. You even get a different victory splash screen if you finish a stage in this form!

 

Aside from the unique protagonists, the game's overall aesthetic is pretty interesting, too. The graphics are generally excellent, being both detailed and well-drawn, and after the first set of stages, all set in Japan, the game goes on a bit of a world tour, with stages in China, India, Europe, and Arabia, all with their own stereotypical enemies. So there's kyonshi and martial artists in China, levitating Yogi and an elephant (complete with impressive multi-sprite trunk!) in India, knights, witches, and cherubim in Europe, and so on. Though Arabia just seemed to be another Europe-style castle stage for some reason? That was a disappointment. Still, having gone into the game expecting only Japan, it was a nice surprise.

 

Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban is definitely a game worth playing, bringing some unusual twists to the beat em up genre, both mechanically and aesthetically, and though I haven't been able to play a co-op game, I'm pretty sure that the game was designed with that in mind, and would presumably play even better with a friend.

Werdragon (PC88)

So, I have to start this review with a confession: I've only been able to play the first stage of this game. Not because it was too hard for me to get past (though it did actually take me a few attempts), but because as soon as the second stage started, the graphics were suddenly all glitched out, to the point of being unplayable. It's a shame, as Werdragon was turning out to be an okay game. Not a great one, or even a good one, but an okay one, at least.

Set in a world familiar from a thousand 1980s OAVs, that of a post-apocayptic cyberpunk city, where there's also demons and stuff along with the gangs and cyborgs, Werdragon is an auto-scrolling single-plane beat em up where you play as the eponymous, mis-spelled weredragon. Who is also a cyborg or something put together by a ghost professor? I'm just guessing by what I saw in the cutscenes. Anyway, you go from left to right, killing lots of enemies along the way with your sword, until you eventually get to the boss. You know how these things go.

There's a few twists in there, though! Like the flying drone enemies with the flat tops, who aren't just enemies: sometimes killing them refills a few points of your hit points, and you can stand on top of their flat heads, which is actually essential to avoid getting crushed to death between the left side of the screen and a wall at certain points. You move, jump, and crouch using the d-pad, and you have a button each for attacking left and right. Pressing down and both buttons together also fetches up your weapon select menu, from whence you can pick swords, guns, and magic. The magic is limited-use, and the gun you start off with is too slow and weak for most uses (it does come in handy during the first boss fight though, just because you'll eventually run out of magic, and your sword is almost impossible to harm him with).

Though the game moves very quickly, it also scrolls very jerkily, in chunks of a few pixels at a time. That's pretty common for action games on old Japanese microcomputers, though, so it'd be unfair to judge the game on that, and to be honest, it doesn't work to the game's detriment too much anyway. But, since I could only play the first stage of Werdragon there's not much else I have to say about it. Unless there was a big change later in the game, I can't say that we're all missing out on some big lost classic here, but like I said: it's not bad, either. It's just okay.

Streets of Rage II (Game Gear)

So, for this year's April fools non-obscure game, I've gone with a game that's really only a port of a well-known game. Obviously, everyone knows the original Mega Drive version of Streets of Rage 2, it's one of the most beloved classics of the entire 16-bit era. But I saw some screenshots of the Game Gear port, and the cute little sprites made me want to give it a go. I did, and it turns out that though it is missing a few elements of the MD version, it's got enough of its own stuff to be considered its own game, rather than a poor man's cut down port.

For a start, it controls differently to the original, which is to be expected, as the Game Gear has one fewer button than a standard Mega Drive controller, but you'll be surprised to learn that they actually added a few things in this department! The attacks that were mapped to the A button are now performed by pressing up-down-one, and they don't reduce your health when they hit. The A+forward attacks are now 1+2+forward, and you now have a limited-use super attack, performed by holding down button 1 for a few seconds and releasing. This is functonally the same as summoning the police artillery in the first game, but now it's a screen-filling special move your character performs, which is a bit less awkward, thematically.

The stages are different, too. There's no baseball field or bridge stages, for example, and the theme park is split into two stages: the pirate ship full of ninjas comes first, and then there's a partially-new stage that combines elements of the alien hive area and the missing bridge stage. This stage even has an all-new exclusive boss! Even better, that boss takes on the SEGA tradition of ripping off characters from pop-culture, as it's blatantly just a Predator, complete with stealth camoflage and triangular aiming reticle.

Now, for the omissions. A minor one is that you now only have one kind of jumping attack for each character instead of three. There's also only three playble characters instead of four, and while Axel and Blaze were obviously not going to be cut, for some reason they got rid of Max instead of Skates. Skates is the worst! There's only two weapon types, though cleverly, one of them is depicted as just a straight line of white pixels, which you can easily interpret as a baseball bat, lead pipe or katana, depending on the situation. There's fewer enemy types, of course, and as already mentioned, some stages have been omitted or merged together. I've also already mentioned how much I love the graphics, but I'll also say that they've done a great job of bringing over the original's legendary soundtrack, too, and this version sounds as good as any 8-bit non-CD console game probably ever could.

Game Gear Streets of Rage 2, then. It's definitely worth playing, even if (or especially if) you've played the Mega Drive version to death. On last thing that might entice you into giving it a go: one of the biggest criticism of the Mga Drive version is that it's too easy. Even with the addition of the supermoves, and the Game Gear's inability to handle crowds of enemies as large as the Mega Drive can, this version is a lot harder, without feeling like it's unfair or unbalanced.

The Fighting Wolf AT (MSX)

For such an early entry into the belt scrolling beat em up genre, and from a relatively small company like Technopolis Soft, it's impressive how versatile the controls in The Fighting Wolf AT are. With only a D-pad and two buttons, you can walk in eight directions, punch, kick, and even duck and jump! Unfortunately, you only ever have to walk left, walk right, and punch, and in fact, doing anything else will diminish your chances of survival.

So, each stage consists of a few screen's worth of a repeating background, though it doesn't matter if you walk to the end or not, only that you defeat every enemy. Although it would be more accurate to say that rather than "beating every enemy", you're beating enemies until they eventually stop spawning. Each stage has exactly two kinds of enemy: one that spawns on the right of the screen, and one that spawns on the left of the screen. Beat one, and an identical one will take its place. Keep doing this and after a couple of minutes, you've beaten the stage.

I don't know how long the game is, but the technique that got me to stage five (the enemies do gradually become more enthusastic about trying to fight back, and you only get one life) is just to repeatedly punch one enemy until it's dead, then turn around and punch the enemy on the other side until they're dead. By then, the enemy on the first side will have respawned and walked up to you, so repeat the process. And that's pretty much the entire game. The background changes each stage, as do the sprites for the enemies, but they all play the same.

There's not much more to say about this game. It looks okay, except when the screen scrolls, and the music isn't terrible I guess. The best thing I can say about it is that the enemies in th second stage are a woman and a baby, which is kind of odd. Don't play The Fighting Wolf AT, it's rubbish.

Lin Zexu No Smoking (NES)

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

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

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

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