Realm of the Dead (PS2)

Europe was a pretty good place to be a PS2 owner, as for some reason, we had a lot of smaller publishers buying the rights to many lesser-known Japanese games and releasing them here, which is apparently something that didn't really happen in North America. Obviously, a lot of those games were awful shovelware garbage, but it also meant we got to play some amazing classics like Global Defence Force and games that were more interesting than they were actually good, like Zombie vs. Ambulance. Realm of the Dead is one of those many piles of low-budget Japanese titles that was brought over, but it doesn't really fall into any of the above categories, that is to say, it's particularly good, it's not terrible, and it's definitely not interesting.

Realm of the Dead is a gory, zombie themed beat em up, but unlike most zombie games, it's set in medieval times. So instead of killing zombie cops and office workers, you kill zombie knights and fishwives. You've got weak attacks and strong attacks, you earn points that are used to buy upgrades between stages, et cetera. There's really nothing about this game that stands out at all.

It could be said that it does at least paint a somewhat realistic picture of the medieval world, with most locations being brown, dirty and damp-looking. Very damp-looking in some cases, as you're going to spend several consecutive stages early in the game wading through identical-looking sewers, killing the same enemies you kill everywhere else.

Yeah, this is a pretty short review, since there's only so many ways in which it's possible to say "this game is mediocre". Like I said in the Raging Blades review, there are plenty of great beat em ups to play on the PS2 before you get to ones like this, and if you really want to play one with zombies and gore, I'd say go for Zombie Hunters 2. If horror isn't essential to you, then once again, I urge you to play God Hand.
This game is also known as Bakuen Kakusei: Neverland Senki Zero

Big Fight - Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean (Arcade)

Probably the best thing about playing obscure games is when you find a game you've never even seen anyone talk about online and it turns out to be an unsung classic of the genre, and that's what i realised had happened shortly after I'd started playing Big Fight - Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a beat em up, of course, and it's from the early 90s, and though the early 90s was something of a boom period for the genre, that also means there was a lot of pretty terrible cash-in garbage released then, too.  Big Fight is not one of those pieces of garbage. In fact, it's surprising it was released all the way back in 1992, since it's so packed with cool ideas. It even rivals critically acclaimed entries into the genre that came much later, like 1995's Guardians/Denjin Makai II. It's a terrible shame that it was apparently Tatsumi's last ever videogame.

So anyway, as the game starts, it appears to have a pretty typical set up for a beat em up: some bad guys are up to no good on an ocean liner and three heroes go out there to stop them. Those three heroes being, as you'd expect, an average guy (Kevin), a speedy girl (Zill) and a big strong guy (Gear). Straight away, the player can benefit from the game's first gimmick: each character has one or two fighting game-style special moves, the most useful being Zill's leaping, burning knee attack thing, performed by double-tapping forwards and pressing attack. Another thing, the characters seemingly have little or no recovery time for their normal combo attacks, meaning that the player can attack pretty much as quickly as they can press the button.

After you've taken some damage, you'll come across the next of the game's gimmicks: the anger meter. Appearing only when the player is knocked down and a low health, the anger meter is filled by rapidly tapping the attack button before the character gets back on their feet. If it's successfully filled (a knack that shouldn't take long for players to pick up), the character rises to their feet with a special attack (as in the typical beat em up health-draining all-round attack) without the health loss, and for a short time, all their attacks do extra damage and set enemies on fire. It's a nice way of giving ailing players a little help surviving just a little bit longer to the next health power-up.

A little way into the first stage, the game allows the player to choose one of three routes, though I'm pretty sure all the areas get covered eventually, this is still a pretty important choice to make, since ach of the three areas you can choose to tackle first obviously ends in a different boss, and that's where Big Fight's coolest gimmick comes in: at the start of each stage after the first, the player can change their character, with defeated bosses joining the playable roster! The bosses are a pretty varied bunch, too: there's the typical beat em up dominatrix, an offensive Native American stereotype (but offensive racial stereotypes never stopped anyone playing Street Fighter II, did they?), a bizarre pharoah character with long limbs and laser eyes, a cartoonish sumo wrestler, and presumably a few more, since I've not yet been able to complete the game.

Anyway, this game is excellent, and I strongly recommend you go and play it. It's not perfectly emulated in MAME, but there's only a few minor graphical glitches that don't affect gameplay, and don't make the game significantly uglier. Hopefully, it can start to recieve the recognition it should have got a long time ago.

Kakutou Bijin Wulong (PS2)

I'll apologise in advance for the quality of the screenshots accompanying this post. PS2 screenshots tend to look pretty bad at the best of times, but for some reason this game was particularly unphotogenic.

Kakutou Bijin Wulong is a beat em up developed by Dream Factory, though unfortunately there isn't much trace of their trademark roguelike elements in there, other than a stamina bar that can be used to partially restore the player's health by resting. It does use their typical control method, though, with a face button each for low, medium and high attacks, and shoulder buttons for jumping, guarding and grappling.

It's also based on a comic of the same name (or sometimes known as "Fighting Beauty Wulong"), and though I haven't read that comic and the game is entirely in Japanese, from what I can work out, the game's about a teenage girl (who might be an immigrant to Japan from China?) being taught to fight by an old man (her grandad?), who uses a very on-the-job approach to martial arts tutelage, forcing the girl to repeatedly prove herself by fighting in various situations. And these situations are the stages of this game. Oddly, though the game has its origins in a comic, there's something about the aesthetic and the way the game feels that reminds me more of those slightly seedy low budget tokusatsu heroine movies and series that companies like Zen Pictures put out.

Because the game is really, brutally hard, I've only been able to get a few stages in, and so far I've been on the seedy backstreets fighting criminal goons, in a dojo fighting trainee wrestlers, out in the woods fighting wild bears and then in a wrestling ring in a flashy stadium, fighting pro wrestlers.

The stages are laid out in a typical beat em up fashion: you start in an area and beat up everyone there before moving on to the next area. After a few areas, you'll fight a boss, and then go onto the next stage. An interesting and unique element the game has is that for each area, the player is randomly given five items, which are selected by pressing left and right on the d-pad, and used with up on the d-pad (movement is done using the left analogue stick, of course). These items will be a mix (different every time) of any of five things: health-restoring melons, stamina-restoring cheese wedges, and red, blue or green cards. The cards are the most interesting ones, as each one represents a different special move: blue is a powerful strike straight ahead on one target, green is a hurricane kick-type maneuver that will hit anyone near the player, and best of all, red picks up the nearest enemy for a giant swing, which then damages any enemies that get in the way of it.

This is an interesting alternative to more common systems, like specials limited by a power bar or performed via input commands. Interesting and original, but not necessarily good. Like always with random elements, the "five items" mean the player sometimes has to rely on luck more than skill to proceed, and unlike in some games, such as roguelikes and even Dream Factory's trademark roguelike/beat em up hybrids, rather than feeling like an extra little challenge that forces players to be resourceful and cunning, it just feels cheap, and like the player would be better off resetting and trying again on receipt of a bad hand.

That said though, Kakutou Bijin Wulong isn't a bad game, it's not a chore to play or anything, and though it's on a console with more than a generous helping of beat em ups, it could still be worth a look if you've played a fair few of them already and still want more.

Simple 2500 Series Portable!! Vol. 13: The Akuma Hunters - Exorsister

The first thing you should know about this game is that it bears no relation to the early 90s series of comedy/horror/porn films starring famed comic creator Ippongi Bang. I hope you can get over your obviously grave disappointment.
It's actually got more in common with the Oneechanbara series being, as it is, developed by Tamsoft, and featuring a group of attractive women engaging in combat with horror-themed monsters. Also like the Oneechanbara series, the game has only a few maps,

each having several missions taking place in parts of it. The game has a big flaw that its more famous sister lacks though, which is that most hated bugbear of modern action games, endless grinding. While the Oneechanbara series does have experience points and levelling up, the player's progress isn't particularly impeded by their low level, Exorsister requires re-playing stages over and over to grind for the materials to sell so you can play a stronger weapon that will reduce the awful slog of the next one.
When you do manage to save up for an adequate weapon, the game is a fairly entertaining (though repetetive) beat em up. You go about the stage,

beat up monsters (who do look pretty cool, and there are a fair few varieties of them, too), and while they're unconcious on the ground, you exorcise them. Each weapon has two stats: AP (attack power) and RP (I assume this means rosary power?), their functions are fairly obvious: attack power indicates how much damage the weapon does when attacking, and RP indicates how quickly monsters can be exorcised with the weapon equipped.
Fighting tough monsters, who will have three main advantages over the player, such as lots of health, lots of.. spiritual health(?) and an entourage of goons to protect them,

is simpler than it seems at first. You just need to stay locked on to the target, and wail on them, dodging out of the way when they look like they're going to attack. When they're down, the best way to exorcise them is to charge the spell up close (which makes it charge much quicker), then run away from the crony monsters before casting it, so they don't interrupt it with their attacks. And don't bother killing the cronies until you kill the target, as they'll quickly respawn.
Anyway, although I've enjoyed this game, and spent a good few hours playing it, I can't call it a good game or really recommend it. The fact is that the grind of having to repeat stages to get equipped for the next ones is just so boring, and there are much better things to do with your time than waste it on that kind of rubbish.

Raging Blades (PS2)

Raging Blades is a beat em up that, though it never saw an arcade release really feels like it should have had one (there is the possibility that is was made from the remains of a cancelled arcade game, but this is purely speculation).
In it, you pick one of four generic fantasy characters (Gray the Knight, Bud the Warrior, Raybrandt the Wizard, and Tina the Monk), go to various generic fantasy locations, including the much loved RPG staple, the "ancient lost civilisation with guard robots and big glowing crystals" and fight lots of generic fantasy

monsters. There's also two secret characters, Iria the Valkyrie and Alicia the Fallen Angel, who have to be unloacked with a cheat, though it you save after doing the cheat, they stay unlocked permanently. They're both a lot stronger than all the other characters. Alicia can't be selected in Story Mode, though Iria can.
Doing said cheat also unlocks an extra mode, called "Full Attack", which allows players to change characters when they continue, and more importantly, removes the boring story narration between stages.
As for how the game actually plays, it's pretty good. Like the setting, the mechanics won't win any prizes for originality, but it's fun enough, and the stages, though cliched, do have a lot of atmosphere to them. You don't get any lives in the game, just  single health bar, though continues are limited, so if you wanted, you could treat them as a stock of lives, without letting it weigh too heavily upon

your conscience.
You progress through stages in the traditional beat em up manner: walk along, stop to fight a group of enemies, carry on walking until you get to the next area. The stages themsleves are easy (other than the last stage), but the miserly distribution of healing items means you often won't have a lot of health left by the time you reach the bosses, and the bosses are significantly harder than the stages.
There's also a Duel Mode, which unfortunately isn't a reprise of the Duel Mode found in the first two Mega Drive Goolden Axe games, but rather a versus mode, in which up to four players (which means it's not really a duel then, surely?) pick either one of the main cast or one of the enemies and fight each other. I think it has all the enemies in the game, I didn't actually check. Sorry!
Like I've said throughout the review, there's definitely nothing original about Raging Blades, but it's fun and

it's atmospheric and it looks nice, so it wouldn't be a totally terrible idea to get it. Especially since it doesn't fetch particularly high prices online: my copy (like a lot of the non-import PS2 games I write about here) only cost me a penny plus postage from amazon. There are definitely better PS2 beat em ups you should get first, though. Like God Hand. You should definitely have God Hand.
This game is also known as Raging Bless

Zeiram Zone (Playstation)

So, this is a beat em up based on the excellent Zeiram movies (well, the first one is excellent, at least. I haven't seen the second one yet, or the spin-off animated series.) In it, the main protagonist of those movies, Iria, goes to various planets to apprehend evil-doers and space criminals and the like, by defeating them in battle and trapping them in crystals, just like she does in the movies.
The controls are more like a fighting game than a beat em up, with up being jump and the four face buttons assigned to LP, HP, LK and HK. There are even special moves, the three I've managed to figure out are:
Quarter Circle Foward + Punch to do a swipe with a lightsabre-type weapon
Quarter Circle Back + Kick to do a big flippy kick thing that can attack enemies in front of and behind you,

and
Dragon Punch Motion + Kick for a quick kick combo.
The game mostly plays like any other regular beat em up, walking along and beating up monsters and robots and other weird things as you go, though rather than the typical belt scroller movement, the game uses L2 and R2 to allow you to jump between planes, Guardian Heroes-style. The boss fights are slightly different, being more like a primitive 3D fighting game, and the plane-switch buttons become left and right sidestep buttons.
The game is pretty fun to play, as simple and clunky as it is, and though the graphics are pretty poor even by the standards of 1996 3D games (and on a related note, the CGI cutscenes between stages look awful), the enemy's designs do look pretty cool and original, my favourite being the robot cranes that attack at the start of the "Ghost Castle" stage.

There is a big problem with the game, though. A few stages in, you'll reach the "Bio-Ship" stage, which is full of huge moving traps that drain your health on contact, and the game's control scheme doesn't really equip you well enough to effectively avoid them. Getting past this area has been impossible for me so far, which really is a shame, as I was just getting to enjoy the fighting mechanics and figuring out the best strategy for different enemy types and so on. It's made even worse by the fact that the Bio-Ship stage itself also actually looks pretty cool.

ChainDive (PS2)

Firstly, I'll apologise for the quality of the screenshots accompanying this post. PS2 screenshots never turn out perfectly, but the shots of this game are even worse than usual.
Anyway, ChainDive centres around a simple concept: your character has a lasso that can be used to swing

from the green dots littered around each stage. There are also enemies, who are defeated by first being frozen by your double-bladed weapon, and then smashed, by attaching the lasso to the frozen enemy and smashing into them.
The genius of the game is that it uses these small ingedients to make every stage different to the last. The first stage seems like a stage from any other mid-00s action game, with the added gimmick of the lasso: you travel from left to right defeating enemies on the way to the end of the stage. But the stages that follow are all totally different. A stage with no floor that has the player swinging from rooftop to rooftop, a stage with an incredibly high tower that must be climbed while fending off attacks, a stage exploring a cave to fin switches, and so on.
All these stages are a ton of fun to play, and the variety ensures that the game doesn't outstay its welcome. The big problem with the game in general though, is the difficulty level. Although the extreme difficulty does
result in a huge feeling of relief and satisfaction, it is still incredibly frustrating until the "trick" of each stage clicks in your head. And there are times when the game seems incredibly unfair, when you're desperately trying to find a dot to hook onto or when you fall into the abyss at the bottom of some stages with seemingly no way back up.
I still definitely recommend ChainDive to curious players, despite all that.

Nekketsu Oyako (Playstation)

So, the title apparently translates as "hot blooded family", and refers to the three playable characters: a dad and his son and daughter. The dad, Rando is the worst character. He's slow, can't pick up most of the guns in the game and has less moves than the other two. His two redeeming features are his Haggar-esque jumping

piledriver and the fact that he's the only character who can use the (very rare) bazooka weapon. There's also a beer health pickup that only he can use, but it doesn't heal very much and it's at least as rare as the bazooka (I've only seen one of each). The daughter, Rio is a little better. She moves faster, and has a fun little move where she can pogo around on top of the enemies' heads. There's also a nice little touch with her when she picks up a weapon and walks around with it, she does so while carrying it on her back. It's a pointless thing, but it adds a little personality. The son, Tora is the best character by far, though. He has a bunch of moves, like a flying kick that bounces off the top of enemies upwards and away, a brutal moves where he repeatedly slashes a knife back and forth, doing and ton of damage, and he's the only character of
the three who can run.
The game itself seems at first to be a regular, generic beat em up, though it does have a couple of interesting gimmicks, like the versatility and mobility of Tora's moveset, and the fact that though you obviously start with a single bar of health, even when its full you can collect more food to fill it up a second bar (like in the Dynamite Deka series).
The setting is pretty cool, too. The first stage takes place on the city streets like any other beat em up, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, things take a more surreal turn. A whale smashes through the bridge on whivh you're standing and swallows you, leading you to spend the next stage inside and on top of the whale, fighting the usual thugs and goons along with boxing gloce-wearing octopi and weird creatures

made of water. The next stage mostly returns to normalcy on a theme park island resort, but includes a really cool section where you fight big crowds of enemies on top of a roller coaster.
Nekketsu Oyako isn't anything special, but it is pretty good. There's also an english path available, though there's barely any Japanese text in the game, and none of what there is is essential for progress. The game's worth playing, but you should definitely play as Tora if you do.

Kamen Rider Black - Taiketsu Shadow Moon

Obviously, the title is what attracted me to this game. Most Kamen Rider games are either based on the post-2000 series, or are based on the classic series, but made many years later (for example, the Kamen Rider and Kamen Rider V3 games on Playstation), but the game is based on an older Rider and was

released at the same time as the show was airing.
It's a mostly standard single-plane beat em up, in which you travel from left to right, punching creatures along the way, and fighting a boss at the end. Every three stages there's a fight with an area boss, which is pretty cool as the sprites for these fights are double size.
There's also occasional motorbike stages, which, since you walk so slowly in the regular stages are a breath of fresh air. These stages play a lot like the motorbike stages in Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle: you ride along at a decent speed, jumping over pits and obstacles.
The walking stages that make up the bulk of the game aren't so fun. As I already mentioned, they're very slow, and there are further problems to be found in the controls, which have two strange and very pronounced quirks. The first one you're likely to notice is the bizarre way jumping works in this game.

Pressing the jump button once will make you jump straight upwards. To actually jump forwards, you must jump upwards, then at the right time (just before the flip at the jump's summit), press forward and jump together. I don't understand why this was done at all, since it does seem to be a deliberate desicion on behalf of the designers.
Whether the second quirk is deliberate design or just bad programming is less clear, though. What it is, is that rather than changing direction instantly when you press left then right (or vice versa), you step backwards for a second, then turn round. This puts you at a disadvantage in boss fights, since you're unable to quickly turn to face your opponent, and, in fact, tapping the directions only makes the problem worse. This is pretty much unforgivable for players used to the quick reactions of later beat em ups (and even contempory ones, like Altered Beast).

A good thing about the game (though nowhere near good enough to redeem it) is the fact that it does look pretty nice. Even though the sprites are tiny, and all except for Kamen Rider Black himself and the big area bosses are a bit crap and undetailed, the graphics as a whole are very colourful, and the backgrounds, though simple, look nice enough too.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 114: The Jo'okappichi Torimonochou ~Oharuchan GOGOGO!~ (PS2)

This is another beat em up, and I know almost all the Ps2 games about which I write posts are beat em ups, but this time I did actually intend to write about a Japan-only train racing game entitled Tetsu-1: Densha de Battle!, but that game was way too frustrating for me to play long enough to write about. It seems like it

might be enjoyable if you can muster up the patience for it, though.
So, in this game, you play as a female ninja-for-hire, taking on missions for money. The missions all involve finding a villain in their hideout and capturing them. All the missions take place in the same map, a largish town that mixes elements from modern-day and old-timey Japan. The enemies are all ninjas, geishas and so-on, and this coupled with the darumas appearing everywhere and the power-ups including pieces of sushi and maneki-neko statues makes the game's setting seem like an over the top western stereotype of Japan.
Playing the game is pretty simple. You have regular attacks, a useless projectile attack and a lasso, that can be used to throw sunned enemies. The lasso is also required for beating the bosses at the end of each stage, as they need to be stunned and caught, rather than just beaten up.
There are three different types of mission, though in all of them the final objective is finding and capturing the boss. But in some missions, you just have to wander the town until you see a yellow E on the map, showing where the boss is hiding, in others, you have to collect a certain number of round bottle-type objects that are just lying around the stage before the boss's location is revealed and in others, a few keys will have to be found that will be dropped by defeated enemies at random. The key stages are actually really quick and easy, since the enemies keep respawning, so you can stay where you are and keep beating them until you've got all the keys. Later in the
game, there's also a stage where all the enemies are sword-weilding darumas that kill you in two hits.
This is a pretty good entry into the Simple Series. It doesn't have the terrible grinding that some of them are ruined by, and it's not hard or too easy (except for that damn daruma stage, which I think might be optional).

Yainsidae - Age of Wanderer (PC)

This game is based on a Korean TV show, set during the Japanese occupancy of Korea in the early 20th century. Other than that, I don't know anything about the plot, but you pick from one of two guys and walk around town beating up Japanese soldiers, as well as thugs, gangsters and martial artists.
The presentation is excellent, the sprites and backgrounds are all super shard and well-drawn, and the music is really great too. There are some tiny cracks in the presentation here and there, like when the music abruptly changes between stages, but these are very minor. After playing a few times, I also noticed hat background graphics are re-used alot, which is also a negative, but they do look nice enough for it not to matter a lot. Plus, the locations usually have different lighting and bystanders when you re-visit them.
As for how it plays, it's not bad. There's no throw or grab moves, nor are there any weapons, which is a shame. You do get a couple of special moves performed via fighting game-style direction commands, though. The best part of the combat is that your normal combos can be interrupts with specials. This is somehing that really needs to be mastered to stand a chance of beating the bosses, who are incredibly hard. They'll relentlessly pummel you into a corner and keep pummeling if you let you guard down at all, but if you fight back hard enough with your specials and sliding kicks to knock them down, you should be able to get through. There's a cool extra touch during the boss fights, too: you can hear the crowd of watching bystanders cheer or boo when you or the boss gains an upper hand, though unfortunately they aren't animated.



Since this is a PC game, another thing to take into account is how much of a pain it is to get running. Mostly, Yainsidae is fine in this respect, just install it and play. There's one strange issue, though: although the game saves your high scores, it doesn't save your options settings, and by default it uses keyboard controls. So every time you play, you have to go into the options by keyboard and change the controls to joypad. It is a minor thing, but it is also a pain to do every time.

Street Boyz (PS2)

I was going to make the 100th post something special, but I couldn't actually think of anything special to do. I'll try harder for the 137th post, okay?
This is the first review done with the aid of my new capture device, though! That's kind of special, even if the device is a cheap piece of crap. (Don't buy super-cheap capture devices from ebay.they'll fall apart and need to be re-installed everytime you want to use them and you'll have to trick them into giving you sound.)
Anyway, on to the game itself! It's by Tamsoft, who are one of my favourite developers. They're most well known these days for the archetypal modern B-games, the Oneechanbara/Zombie Hunters series, though in ages past they did also make the Battle Arena Toshinden games, and they're responsible for a lot of other entries into the legendary Simple 2000 series (including this one!). Especially interesting are their entries into the Simple DS series, since they tend to have some of the best 3D graphics on the original DS, despite being budget games.
Street Boyz is a beat em up about banchos, those baggy trousered high school thugs of 70s and 80s Japan, and though the name and boxart of the PAL release might lead you to believe that they'd have been replaced with burberry-clad council estate thugs, the game's original plot, character names and everything else has been left intact! Not that any of it is particularly interesting or original, mind you.

How does it play? It's alright. Not terrible, not spectacular. It carries over one of the worst flaws of the Oneechanbara games (or the other way round, as i think this game might have been made before those), in that you're often only given the vaguest clues as to what to do in an area. For example, being told you need a key, but having no clue where the key might be, or who might be carrying it, and like in the Oneechanbara series, this situation is made worse by the fact that the stages are made up of rooms and corridors that all look exactly alike.

The combat is okay, typical 3D beat em up stuff: a button each for strong and weak attacks, weapons to pick up, a super bar to fill, and so on. There is a major flaw here, though. The camera is probably the worst I've experienced in a 3D game, it often seems to go where it likes, and that always seems to be a place where it's hardest to see what you're doing. There is a button to place the camera behind your character, and another button to lock on to the nearest enemy, but these aren't perfect solutions, and in some areas they're disabled. There are a few parts of each stage where all camera control is taken away, because the game wants to show off a nice "cinematic" viewpoint. Unfortunately, while these views do look nice, they're also very impractical.
Although I've said a lot of bad things about this game (and it does deserve the criticism), I've still managed to get a good few hours of enjoyment out of it, and for the prices it tends to go for these days, I'd say it's definitely worth risking a pound or two on.
This game is also known as Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 21: First-Class Brawl! Yankee Leader ~Legendary Shouwa 99 Year~

Battle Zeque Den (SNES)

Battle Zeque Den is so close to being a good game, it's such a shame that one big problem has to go and ruin it.
It's a platform/beat em up, starring teenage girl versions of those timeless characters Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy. They all have their own special moves and such with fighting game-style inputs, too. It looks really really good, with big, cool sprites and colourful, nicely drawn backgrounds. The formula isn't really original, just go right and beat guys up. It's nothing special, but it's fun to play.
What ruins the game is the difficulty. It's not just "very hard", it's "absurdly, unfairly hard". The enemies can, and will remove most of your health bar with only 2 or three punches. Health restoring power-ups are rare, and give you back such a tiny amount that it could almost be considered an insult. If you somehow manage to get past the first boss, you don't even start the second stage with a full health bar, just what you had left over from fighting the boss. Then the game drops a bunch of rocks on your head with little warning and you get game over.
I really did want to like this game, playing it over and over, but the fact that it is just a completely unfair slog means I can't recommend playing it to anyone.
This post is really short, isn't it? I'll pad it out with this silly video of me playing Altered Beast with a cheat on so that i change into the Werebear on every stage. Oh and another thing: the Wikipedia entry for Battle Zeque Den is really terrible, in case you were wondering.