Lucifer Ring (Playstation)

You may have gathered this from how often they're featured herre, but i really love beat em ups. They're a great, under-appreciated genre, and one which I honestly believe still has a lot of unexplored potential. Here is a post about yet another one of them.
It's on the Playstation, which is nice, since the 32-bit era was something of a dry patch for the genre. It's also got a pretty generic fantasy setting, but let's not hold that against it. The setting does have an advantage, in that it means the game has tons of different enemies, to the point that I really think it could have benefitted from an in-game bestiary (two points, though: this game was Japan-only, so an in-game bestiary would probably have been of no use to me, and also, I think most games would be vastly improved by the inclusion of a bestiary. I love bestiaries.). The usual problem of pallette swapped enemies doesn't even rear its head until the third stage, and even then, it's done quite well, with the "new" re-used enemies having different weapons and attacks than their predecessors.
So anyway, you play as a guy named Nash, and you go from one end of a generic fantasy location (forests, temples, caves, etc.) to the other, beating up every monster you meet. It all looks very nice, if you like low poly models and the like (and if you don't, what's wrong with you? weirdo.). There's a few power-ups to get, including the usual health refills and extra lives, plus the less common magic swords. There are at least two kinds of magic sword (though there might be others later in the game, maybe?): fire and ice. There doesn't seem to be any kind of elemental weakness/resistance system going on, but the ice sword has the advantage of being able to randomly freeze enemies for a few seconds. But oddly, the enemies are invincible while frozen, making it slightly less useful than it first seems. There's also a normal sword anti-power up that you should avoid.
The game is mostly linear, though once or twice each stage you'll find yourself at a branching path, and usually the most difficult path (or the one with bottomless pits on it) will be the one that leads to magic swords and extra lives. There's four action buttons: jump, normal and strong attacks, and the usual "damage everything emergency magic" button. You charge your magic by taking or causing damage, like the power bar in a fighting game.
It's a fairly fun game, the only big faults being the difficulty, which is a bit too high for my liking, and the lack of a co-op mode, an omission that is always baffling in beat em ups. Really, who makes a single player-only beat em up? Tsk.

Mystical Fighter (Mega Drive)

This game has so many Japanese stereotypes, you'd think it was a British game, made for the Commodore 64 during the 80s ninja/martial arts craze. But it is, as far as I can tell, an actual Japanese game, made in Japan and everything.
The enemies are stereotypical Japanese things like samurai, running ninjas, sumo wrestlers, kabukimono, and so on. The player character is some sort of kabuki/noh/priest guy (oh dear my ignorance is showing). Even the health pick ups are small platters of sushi!
Other than these things, though, it's a mediocre and generic beat em up, into which not a lot of imagination has gone. There isn't even named player characters, just that one guy, and player two has to be a pallette swapped version of him. Jumping and rolling across the ground use the same sprites, as do the sliding/flying kicks that your guy does when you prress attack while rolling or jumping. There's also a magic system that works in exactly the same manner as in Golden Axe. All the scrolls you're carrying are used up at once when you press the magic button, and more scrolls causing a more powerful attack. One nice little thing I liked though, was that you get a whole three different throws to chuck enemies about with! One has your guy spinning around then flinging the enemy in one direction in a mildly amusing manner, another has you lifting enemies above your head and chucking them (this one is especially satisfying at the liff's edge in stage 2) and the third has you leaping into the air and smashing your victim into the ground. Choosing between the first two throws is a matter of how quickly you press the attack button after grabbing the opponent, and the third is done by jumping and pressing attack after grabbing.
There's not really much reason to recommend this game to anyone, but there's no reason to avoid it, either. It's not especially excellent in any way, and it doesn't look much nicer than most Master System games, but it's not terrible to play or anything.
This game is also known as Maou Renjishi

The Muncher (C64)

The Muncher is a C64 game that was also a tie-in with Chewits. Except that the version I played for this review didn't appear to have any kind of Chewits branding in it, and the title screen says "Monster". But other than that, it's the same game.

You play as a big green t-rex looking dinosaur (that, even in the version with the chewits branding, doesn't look anything like the dinosair from the Chewits ads), and you go from left to right, destroying as much as you can along the way. It looks a lot like Rampage, though there are differences. Like rather than having to destroy everything, most of the destruction in The Muncher is optional, and just for points, and the aim of each stage is to keep going right until you reach the end and go on to the next stage. You're constantly being attacked by tanks, helicopters and army men, though destroying any of the enemies (as well as passers-by) regains a small amount of health. You have a lot of attacks to kill them with, too, considering you only have the directions and one button: you can reach down and smash/eat enemies on the ground, jump up and smash helicopters in your mouth, and you also have a limited-use fireball attack  Plus, by moving from side to side, you can destroy the buildings behind you with tail whips..
Once your health runs out, your game is over, though there is a trick to come back from the dead by picking up an egg and later dropping it in a radioactive barrel. Either way, once you get to stage 3 (the army base), you'll probably die within a few seconds anyway.
The Muncher is okay. It has a nice big player sprite, and it's less boring than Rampage, but it's not really worth going out of your way to play.

Cyber Egg - Battle Champion (Playstation)

It's yet another Playstation game in which cute vehicles have battles in arenas! It's got some interesting things about it that are worth mentioning, though. And I promise the next Playstation game will be something different.
Anyway, in this game, you control small bipedal robots that look kind of like midget fighter jets with limbs attatched. There are four to choose from initially, with a few unlockable ones too (that I haven't unlocked. There's also apparently no instructions for unlocking them anywhere online, either, but I assume it's the usual "complete story mode" deal.) The pilots of these initial four fill the stereotypes you'd expect from such a game: the red robot's pilot is the typical boy protagonist, the black robot has the tough-looking rival, the green robot has the fat guy and the pink robot has the girl. There doesn't seem to be much difference between the four, playing wise, so just pick the colour you like best, I guess.
The main mode of the game is championship mode, and despite what you might have assumed based on the title and the selectable characters, the game is structured more along the lines of Bomberman's single player mode than a fighting game. You enter stages, you have to defeat a bunch of enemies in each stage, and every few stages there's a boss. The interesting thing is that although you have a health bar (and the enemies also have health, though their bars aren't shown, instead blue sparks of electricity can be seen coming off them when their health is low.), you don't die when it's depleted (and neither do the enemies). Instead, the lower you health goes, the further you get knocked back by enemy attacks, and if you fall off the stage, then you lose a life. This seems to be a lot like the way the Smash Bros. games work, though this game predates the first Smash Bros. by over a year! It's almost suspicious how similar the two systems are!
Each stage is a set of small floting platforms, usually with one large on in the middle. If you jump and land on the edges of the largest platform, it'll tilt in your direction! Also, there are items strewn about the steag, plus various destroyable things like machinery and barriers. Small sweets appear around the stage, either from the power-up boxes (in fact, every stage has a box with eight sweets in it), or they sometimes randomly appear when you punch enemies. Each sweet gives you one point, with which you can upgrade your robot between stages.
I think I've said all there is to say about this game now. Although it's not anything special or life-changing, it is a pretty fun game, and even with my puny attention span, it can make 45 minutes go by like no time at all.

Genseishin Justirisers Souchaku Chikyuu no Senshitachi (GBA)

Gen Sei Shin Justirisers is a TV show. I even saw a few episodes of it, years ago, when I first started watching fansubbed tokusatsu shows, and would download every show I could find. I can't really remember many specific details about the show though, other than being like a slightly more seriously-toned version of Super Sentai, with slightly lower budgets.
THis is a game of it. It's a simple beat em up, you can pick any of the three Justirisers: Riser Glen (red, has a sword), Riser Kageri (blue, has a katar-like weapon and is the token girl) and Riser Gant (black, has a gun), you get to choose your character at the start of each stage. While you're playing, you can choose between fighting with your fists or with your character's weapon. There's no reaason not to use the weapon at all times, though. Especially if you're playing as Gant, obviously.
You can also jump, do a sliding attack across the ground, and use a special attack. The special attack is powered by an "energy" bar underneath your health bar, but there's plenty of items to top that bar up, and the game's so easy, the only use you're likely get out of you special attacks will be as a way to kill the bosses more easily.
The game shares some similarities with the Playstation Super Sentai games (which I should really get around to, some day), in that it splits the action between fighting as the heroes themselves against human-scale jobber enemies, and piloting a giant robot against giant enemies. The giant robot fights aren't very interesting, though: you tap the B button to build up a power bar until it's full a few times, then press A to unleash an attack (there are four attacks, you get the more powerful attacks by filling the power bar more times). In theory, there is an elemen of risk involved in these fights, as the more time you spend building up power, the more likely the enemy monster will attack. Unfortunately, they rarely do, and you can just keep charging up and firing your most powerful attack until the enemy dies.
The game is okay to play, it's not horribly broken and it doesn't have any awful chore-like grinding or anything like that, either. It's just absurdly easy. It was probably made for 10 year old boys, but that's hardly an excuse for this level of feebleness. It's a little more than an hour long from start to finish, and I'm fairly sure I didn't lose a single life along the way, and as I've mentioned before, I'm not really very good at games.

Tian Wang Xiang Mo Zhuan (NES)

As you may have gathered from the title, this is yet another unlicenced Chinese game. I don't like reviewing similar games after each other, but that whole world of unlicenced, mostly undocumented games interests me a lot.
It's a beat em up, set, if my interpretations of the images in the intro are correct, in a post-apocalyptic world that has suffered the ravages of both nuclear war and the opening of some kind of evil demon treasure chest.
So, you pick one of four warriors (and if you're smart, you'll pick the orange, umbrella wielding guy in the bottom right of the selection screen) and go about various locations beating up monsters.
The enemies are pretty varied, ranging from aggressive bats and frogs, to humanoid snake and eagle monsters.
Combat itself is okay. There's arent any Streets of Rage-style combos for you normal attacks, though each character does have two special moves, though these two moves are essentially the same for all characters: double-tapping a direction and pressing attack will make your character zoom across the screen, damaging all the enemies they touch (very useful for dealing with the bats, who are awkward to kill with your regular attack), and a projectile move done in the tradional quarter circle forward manner.
As for power-ups, there are the usual health recovery and 1-up items, plus a few other items, that all turn you into some kind of creature (including, but possibly not limited to a dragon, a flying unicorn and a will-o-the-wisp), that give you the ability to fly around, be invincible and kill every enemy you touch for a short time.
This isn't a bad game, it's hard, but not unfair, it doesn't look or sound any worse than your typical NES games, and as far as I know, it isn't just an officially released game with the sprites changed.

Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War (Game Boy Color)

Firstly, this game doesn't have anything to do with Squaresoft's PS2 game Final Fantasy X, so I guess it can be assumed that the X in the title is the letter X and not the roman numeral. What does the letter X signify in this case? Nothing, it's a chinese pirate game, they aren't supposed to make sense.
In this case, it's a beat em up, and to be fair to those crazy pirates, it does keep to a general Final Fantasy theme pretty well: the player characters look like they could be sprites from the battle screens of the pre-32-bit era FF games, and some of the enemies are very recognisable as coming from the series too, such as the goblins and the tonberries (The first appearance of the tonberry, shortly after the second boss is the furthest I've managed to get, as it basically turns up and make short work of stabbing you to death in just a couple of hits!). The plot (as far as i can tell from the textless intro) is also in the vein of the old FF games, having 4 big elemental crystals being stolen or destroyed or something.
There's four playable characters in this: a sword-weilding knight-type guy, a rubbish wizard, an androgynous archer and a chocobo. Unfortunately, only the knight is worth playing as, since he's significantly stronger and faster and just all-round better than the other three. The wizard is the worst, he's slow and weak and crap looking. The archer is almost good, if they were just a little bit faster at moving and attacking, they'd be a lot more fun to play as. The chocobo is obviously just there for novelty value, and though it's fast, it's also weak and its attacks have a very short range.
The game is really nicely presented, other than the rubbish cheap-looking title screen. The character sprites and backgrounds are excellent, and as I said earlier, the player characters would look right at home in the older FF's battle screens (though I must admit, my knowledge of the series isn't deep enough to know whether the sprites are original work by the developers, or just rips from one of the official games. Same goes for the backgrounds, which are very nicely drawn, probably some of the best I've seen on the GBC.) The music is pretty good too, but I know for sure that it's stolen, as it's been ripped from the (surprisingly playable) Game Boy port of King of Fighters 95.
As for the game itself, if you play as the knight, it's a lot of fun! You go from left to right beating up monsters, and even getting experience points that increase the length of your health bar as you level up. Every character has the usual combo attacks, plus a running attack and a special attack that's done with a quarter circle forward plus the attack button, which reduces some of the red bar that appears below your health, and is replenshed bit by bit as you use normal atacks on enemies. If you play as the other characters, it's not so fun, and it's really difficult to get past even the first stage. But it is a really fun game when you play as the knight.

Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight (PC-FX)

So, this is a beat em up based on a cartoon I've never seen. You get two characters to choose from, a warrior-looking boy and a priestess-looking girl, and they both actually play really differently, the boy being a traditional beat em up character, and the girl being able to slowly shoot balls of energy at the enemies. This review will mostly be about playing as the boy, though, as playing as the girl isn't much fun, and is probably best saved for when you're playing two player and you force your friend to be her.
The game doesn't go the usual beat em up way of having a psuedo 3D plane in which you can move up, down, left and right, but rather more of a platformer-style arrangement with just left, right and jumping. It gets off to a strange start with the first ten minutes of play being mostly taken up by a series of boss fights and cutscenes, but once you get past these, it's a lot of fun to play. You know how beat em ups work, you walk along, and beat up enemies until you get to a boss, then you beat them up too. This game also adds a block button into the mix, which you'll have to get used to quickly if you want to get past even the first array of bosses. One cool touch the game has is that a short time into the boss fights, a bracelet power up appears, that turns you into a fully grown adult, giving you more powerful attacks and making you the same size as (most of) the bosses. The small difference between doing this and just having you automatically transform at the start of the fight doesn't sound like much, but it does add a minor element of drama to the fights.
The most obvious thing to talk about regarding this game, though, is the graphics. They are excellent. The sprites are big and colourful, all the characters, right down to the regular enemies look cool (though, since this is a licenced game, that's really more down to the source material. Treasure's Bleach fighting games on DS suffer the opposite, the licence having lumbered them with a cast of boring looking people mostly dressed in the same outfits), and along with that, the animation is excellent. I don't know how powerful the PC-FX is, but looking at this game, I'd guess that it's at least on par with the Saturn. It makes me wonder how differently things would have gone if it became popular, and if Capcom and SNK had decided to make it the home of the 90s fighting game, rather than the Saturn.
In summary, this is an excellent game, and makes me look forward to futher exploring the PC-FX library, having previously written it off as a console full of boring adventure games for simpering milksops who watch cartoons about little girls eating cake. Play it!

Wild Streets (Amiga)

This will only be a short review, as this game is so awful, I couldn't bear to play it for very long. I don't even know why I'm bothering to write about it at all, even.
It's a beat em up in which your character is accompanied by a panther. It must take a special kind of talent to turn this into such a terrible game.
I'll start with the controls. It uses a control scheme that a fair few other action games also use on the Amiga: you hold the fire button, and different things happen when you press a direction. Pressing down shoots, left or right punches and up does a flying kick.
The gun kills enemies instantly, but you only get six shots. Sometimes enemies drop ammo, but this is a random occurance, so you can't plan and ration your bullets or anything. The flying kick is almost useful, as it knocks down any enemies it hits, and does a decent amount of damage. Unfortunately, it ends up being useless because it takes away a fairly large portion of your health. So, you're mostly left with the punch to defend yourself. This too is fairly useless, as thanks to the game's control scheme, you have to be stood still to punch. and the enemies have longer arms than you, so a lot of the time, you walk towards them, stop to punch, then get knocked back by their punch and start again.
Going back to the issue of health, you don't seem to lose any from being hit by enemies, though as i said, you do lose health for using your flying kick. And also sometimes you just lose healh for no obvious reason. When you run out of health, the action just stops dead, no matter what's happening, shows the text "GAME OVER" for a couple of seconds, then goes to the high score table.
One last thing, i might be nitpicking here, but the game is entitled "Wild Streets", but the first stage is in some absurdly affluent looking area full of mansions with huge gardens. Admittedly, i didn't get past the first boss, but still.
The only good thing about this game is the loading screen, which is at the top of this review because there's no title screen.

Abalaburn (Playstation)

Abalaburn has two main modes: story mode and arcade mode.I haven't played much of arcade mode, because it's pretty awful. Story mode I have played a lot of, though.
It comprises a 3D roaming beat em up with some huge stages, lots of varied enemies and the occaisional bit of insanely painful platforming.
Each stage basically involves you wandering around beating up monsters until you beat the one that drops a key (pointed out by a small spark floating above its head), which will open a door that leads to that stage's mid-boss, which will be a huge monster of some kind. Then you find another key, and beat the stage's actual boss, which will be more humanoid in proportions (and for most of the game, they will be the other selectable characters. the aforementioned arcade mode is made entirely of these fights). As an aside, the playable characters are very varied in design, with some cool characters (eg. a spiky-haired and chunky-limbed shonen protagonist and a light-footed catboy) and some that are awful (a grotesquely racist caricature and a shape shifting midget thing).
For a few hours, this is all a lot of fun. Eventually the cracks will start to appear. You'll notice that every normal fight consists of doing a short combo, holding block while the enemy does the same, and then repeating until the enemy is dead. And then there are the terrible parts where you have to use the slightly awkward controls to navigate moving platforms, which will take a long time, and will be no fun at all. At least you don't die or take damage for falling off of them, though.
All these minor flaws do add up, but it wasn't until the final stage that the game really killed my desire to play. The final stage, in true Japanese videogame cliche fashion, is a futuristic technology stage, following all the other, fantasy themed stages. It's also got several huge mid-bosses, which are a series of heavily armed (and heavily armoured) tanks. They kill you very quickly, die very slowly and are just no fun at all to fight. It was a shame to have to give up on a game that was, up until that point, so charming and fun, especially so close to the end, but those bosses really were terrible.
It's really a shame this game never got a western release, though. I'm sure I would have loved this as a teenager, if I'd had the chance to play it back then.

WWF Betrayal (Game Boy)

The basic idea behind WWF Betrayal is a good one: have a bunch of wrestlers star in a beat em up. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to the potential of this idea.
To start with, the premise itself is wasted, most likely due to apathy. There are four playable characters, and the three you don't pick you'll fight as bosses. But this doesn't mean the game has a Sonic Adventure-esque story where the playable characters meet each other at different points, but rather they just play different parts in the story whoever you pick. The story is that the wrestlers you didn't pick have kidnapped Stephanie McMahon, and her dad Vince wants you to go and rescue her. For those readers not versed in wrestling lore, there are numerous problems with this: firstly, by the time this game came out in 2001, Stephanie McMahon was not a character who would garner much sympathy in the eyes of young wrestling fans. Secondly, one of the playable characters is The Undertaker, who only a few years previously, had stalked, kidnapped and tried to force a younger Stephanie into a satanic marriage. But apparently, Vince still trusts him to go and rescue her. Thirdly, one of the other playable characters is The Rock, meaning if you don't pick him he becomes a violent criminal, something that's wildly out of character for him. Pretty much anyone could have come up with a better scenario for a belt scroller starring pro-wrestlers.
The problems don't end with the plot, either. The wrestlers all walk incredibly slowly, and they can't jump. Their repetoire of attacks extends to punches, kicks and one wrestling move each, that is used if you manage to get five attacks in without getting hit. The stages consist of slowly walking across various locations (backstage, some sewers, the streets, etc.) beating up referees, policemen and random passers-by (sometimes with the aid of a crowbar or wrench), fighting one of the other wrestlers at the end of most stages. If you die on your way to the boss, you have to start the entire stage again. Generously, if you die during a boss, you only have to restart the bossfight. Also, you don't regain health between stages.
The game does have one nice idea: if you tap the attack buttons while stunned, you regain a small amount of health. That one idea isn't enough to save the game, though. It's an ugly, boring game that completely fails to live up to an idea that should be a no-brainer in making a great game. And another thing, why is it a Game Boy game? You'd think they'd make such a game as spectacular as they could on one of the home consoles.
(Note: Although the screenshots came out glitched, I played the game on a different, working emulator for writing the review)

Hakaioh - King of Crusher (Playstation)

Look! Just when you least expect it, another review of a Japanese Playstation game!
The last few reviews have been a bit too positive, and I've been putting this one off for months now, so I am reviewing Hakaioh: King of Crusher.
The plot is that you are some Japanese guy. Nobody special, has a wife and a baby and an office job. One day while eating breakfast, you get bitten by an evil fly, and start going on a rampage, destroying all your family's possessions. The first time I played this game, I'd skipped the cutscenes, and just saw a game where you play as a guy destroying his furniture (by hand!) while a woman holding a baby flees in terror.
Anyway, ingame, there are two bars on screen. The short red one shows how much of your destruction quota has been met, and when you've filled it up, you can go to the end of the stage. The long yellow one is your health, which is constantly (but slowly) decreasing. It increases a little whenever you destroy something, and you get quite a big chunk back for destroying enemies like tanks and helicopters.
There's two things I should tell you after saying that last part: The first one is that as the stages go on, you gradually transform, first into a werewolf demon thing, later on into a dinosaur, and so on. So you aren't just some angry guy by the time they send the military after you. The second is that you can't attack humans, presumably so you don't attempt to murder your wife and child in the first stage. But what causes a bit of dissonance there is that you can destroy vehicles that contain people, and one stage even has a bridge you can destroy, causing a train to fall into the river presumably killing or injuring everyone on board. But you're a dinosaur by that point, so you probably don't care anymore anyway. Eventually, you become so big and powerful, you can destroy motorway bridges by walking through them (and like the earlier train, all the cars drive off to their deaths and explode) and tread on tanks like they were insects.
I'm probably making this game sound like a lot of fun, like a 3D version of the old Amiga game AAAAAARGH! or something. But unfortunately, it has a few big flaws.
The controls are one of them. Attacking is no problem at all: triangle headbutts, square punches and X kicks, but walking around is awkward, as your man/monster seems to have some trouble turning round. It's hard to explain what happens when you do, it just looks kind of... off, I guess. And it takes a little longer than it should to keep things smooth.
The other major flaw is the camera, which also has issues with turning around. Only unlike the man, it doesn't even try. It always faces the same direction. Usually, this isn't a problem, but if you get to the end of a level and haven't reached your destruction quota, walking back to find more stuff to wreck is a bit of a pain.
The final, smaller flaw is that it'd very repetitive, since every stage is just about moving forwards and wrecking as much stuff as possible. It's not made any better by the fact that the stuff is all pretty sturdy too, often taking several hits to break. I only count this as a minor flaw though, as you can easily just play one stage at a time, save it and come back later.
In summary, this game is repetitive, ugly and awkward to play, and also the shoddy production value make the average simple series game look like a triple A high-budget blockbuster. But despite all that, I've still played most of the way through it, and it seems pretty likely I'll even play it through to the end, as long as no sudden difficulty spikes appear to spoily my fun.

Dangan (Playstation)

This game is quite the disappointment. When you start playing, and see the top down 3D graphics, and start beating a few guys up, it seems like a nice, fun game. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to turn sour.
As I mentioned, it's a top down beat em up with 3D graphics. #The four face buttons on the playstation controller are melee attacks (a single button that does a string of attacks, as is beat em up tradition), shoot (you start off with a completely useless infinite ammo handgun, but soon collect other, slightly less useless guns), an all-round attack that drains your health if it connects, and a dodge button.
Actually controlling you character and beating up/shooting the enemies is actually pretty fun, though it's turned into a chore by the problems the game has, most of which concern difficulty.
The first problem is the many, many stationery gun turrets that litter the stages. They do quite a bit of damage and they never stop firing. They also tend to appear in groups.
The second problem is the fact that the regular enemies spawn endlessly and randomly offscreen.
These two problems work together to ensure that rather than fighting enemies, the best strategy is too run ahead to the exit as quickly as you can, since if you stop to fight the enemies, the turrets will tear you apart, and if you stop to destroy the turrets, the enemies and the other turrets will tear you apart.
So, after you've ignored all the enemies and got to the boss? Well, since you didn't fight any enemies, you didn't collect the ammo they randomly drop. So you're at a disadvantage already. (Well, sort of. The boss fights are really hard, even with ammo.)
So, in summary, Dangan is a game that could have been great, but just isn't.

Deadly Strike (PS2)

Deadly Strike is an old fahioned beat em up. Much more old fashioned than other PS2 beat em ups like Godhand or Koei's Warriors series. You could say it's even more old fashioned than the later Streets of Rage and Final Fight games, since they have tons of moves and combos for each character, and each character in Deadly Strike has one regular melee combo, and a rubbish gun attack.
It's far from bad game, though. I'd say it's one of the better Simple 2000 games, definately up there with the likes of Zombie Hunters 2 and Global Defence Force. Like I said earlier, it's a very old fashioned beat em up. You wouldn't think to look at it, though, the pre-rendered backgrounds all look really great, and the 3D character models look pretty good too, and don't look out of place as can happen with pre-rendered back grounds. Gameplay follows a traditional formula for the genre: you arrive in an area, beat some guys up, then go to the next area. You score more points for quickly defeating enemies one after the other, and the points you get while playing can be used to unlock various things like longer health bars, extra costumes, and so on.
Other than the main mode, there's also Survival Mode, which is exactly what it sounds like, but as the ames is really easy, this can go on for ages and ages before you finally die, and Special Mode, which allows you to play through the main game as one of the regular enemies. This one isn't actually as fun as it sounds, since the enemies are just as weak and slow as they are when you fight against them.

The real reason to get this game though, is the 2-player co-op mode, which is as fun as you'd expect from a beat em up's 2-player co-op mode: very.
The plot is a bit of an odd one: both the manual and the back of the case mention some kind of tournament taking place, though neither the game itself or the intro movie contain anything looking remotely tournament-esque. What the game actually seems to be about, is a bunch of people from the modern day, including among others, a cool guy in a leather jacket, a schoolgirl, and a bouncer going to fuedal japan and beating up a load of samurai for some reason. I don't know why this happens, nor do I know how a bunch of people from the modern day are skilled/strong enough to so easily beat up so many samurai. There are endings when you complete the game, though they just consist of a screen full of small text, apparently talking about the same mysterious tournament as the manual.

(this game is also known as "Simple 2000 Series Ultimate Vol. 16: Sengoku vs. Gendai)

Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan (Mega Drive)

This is a review of the Mega Drive game, "Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan", and as the ROM isn't yet widely available, it might even be the first ever English-language review of it. Exciting, eh?
Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title, and the obscurity of the game, it's Chinese. I can't read any Chinese at all, so I can't tell you anything about the plot of this game, or even the names of its characters. I can tell you that it was made in 1999, by someone called "Never Ending Soft Team", though.
It seems absurd to have gone so long in a review of a game without actually talking about the game, so I will.
It's a beat em up, and at first glance, doesn't seem like anything special, with rubbish animation, and various things blatantly nicked from other beat em ups. I thought this too, the first time I played it, until I finished playing, and found that well over an hour had passed without my noticing.
I suppose I should get the bad things out of the way first, then.
For a start, it isn't very original. There are three characters to pick from, Average Shonen Guy, Lady Weakbutfast, and Brave Sir Tank, and the controls are like almost every other MD beat em up, with A being the "special", B being "attack, and C being "jump". The animation, particularly on the player characters is awful. The large food and treasure items can be cut up into smaller chunks, in exactly the same manner as in Capcom's "Knights of the Round", and the poses your characters do when they activate their special attack is the exact same pose that the characters in Golden Axe in the same situation. To top it all off, the enemies'death cries seem to have been directly ripped from Streets of Rage.
Despite all these faults though, this is still a great game. Although poorly animated, each sprite is quite detailed, and all have character and charm, from the giant whip-weilding, slightly nordic-looking woman, to the gut-bearing fat arabian guy. The special attacks, rather than having one per character, are instead represented by different collectible items, each containing a different spell, and of which there are at least 5 varieties. The player can hold 5 of these items at a time, which sounds like a lot, making the game too easy, but this is where the game's greatest strength comes in - balance. You get a lot of magic items, but there are always a lot of enemies on screen, with very few calm moments in which to catch one's breath. Similarly, the game is seemingly over-generous with extra lives, giving one every 50,000 points, but again, the excellent balance saves it, at by the end of each level, you're more than likely to be down to your last life, adding extra drama and desperation as you struggle to beat the boss with your last few pixels of life, knowing that if you can just make it, the end of level bonus will take you to your next extra life, and you'll be able to rest easy again.
In conclusion, then, Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan is a great game, that hopefully, over time, will find itself crawling out of absolute obscurity, and into semi-obscurity, because, let's be honest, it's never going to be fammous, is it?

(originally posted on selectbutton.net on 3rd july 2007)