Chandragupta: Warrior Prince (PSP)

Chandragupta: Warrior Prince was released on PS2 and PSP by Sony in 2009, exclusively in India (GameFAQs lists a European release, but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that this happened. Also, GameFAQs only lists that release, with no mention of India. I haven't played the PS2 version, but on the PSP it's a single-plane beat em up with some platforming bits.

When I first started playing it, I hated this game. The first stage has enemies that are constantly blocking and awkward to fight, constant tutorial messages abruptly halting the action andsome truly awful platforming sections with almost unavoidable traps. I perservered though, and in the follwing stages, I actually found myself having a lot of fun: the enemies were more numerous, but also a lot more co-operative in my attempts to kill them, making the action flow a lot better. Furthermore, the platforming sections were less frequent, shorter and a lot less sadistic.

Another positive the game has right from the start is the fact that it looks amazing, presented as it is in a 2.5D style reminiscent of the likes of Pandemonium or Klonoa, that goes great with the beautiful ancient India setting, one which I think has always been criminally underused in the medium of videogames (and comics, action cartoons, etc. too, come to think of it).

There are some downsides to the game, though. Firstly, there's a "feature" that, in my opinion is something that works to the detriment of many modern action games: the fact that special moves and weapons are unlocked as you progress through the game. It's boring, annoying and adds nothing to games. Secondly, there's the whole mechanic surrounding firing arrows. There's some enemies that'll be lurking in the background shooting arrows at you while you fight melee enemies in the foreground (or vice versa). The only way to beat them is by shooting them with arrows, and this is done by holding down the right shoulder button, aiming your crosshair with the analogue stick and then letting go to shoot. All this time you're completely immobile and unable to defend yourself from other foes. Thirdly, it's only a minor complaint, but the boss fights are terrible. Each boss is just a regular enemy with more health, who will go into the background every now and then to summon a small group of regular enemies for the player to fight while they watch.

Another complaint that's not one concerning the game's mechanics, but still quite disappointing is the fact that Chandragupta himself is light-skinned, while the enemies he fights are dark-skinned. It's especially noticable and unpleasant in the second stage, featuring a young Chandragupta defending his village from "a gang of thugs". It's a phenomenon I've seen before in the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics that adapt stories from Hindu mythology and Indian history, but those comics at least have the excuse of being made in the 1960s and 70s. We should expect better from media made in this century.

All in all, Chandragupta is an okay game. It's nothing particularly special to play, but it does look amazing, and I don't know of any other games that were made in India or specifically for that market, so it's a bit of a curiosity, too.

Sumo Fighter Tokaido Basho (Game Boy)

Beat em ups are a genre conspicuous by their (relative) absence on the original Game Boy, which seems especially odd, when you consider how many fighting games there are on there (and you'd think fighting games would be both harder to pull off on such weak hardware, and scuppered by the hassle one had to go through to play GB games against another player). Sumo Fighter is one of the proud and the few, however, and it bucks the usual trend of having beat em ups starring slender martial artists or gritty thugs by starring a mawashi-clad, muscle-bound sumo.

The plot isn't anything special, however, he's just journeying across Japan to save a damsel in distress. The setting is very stereotypically Japanese, though, with stages featuring Mt. Fuji, bamboo forests, and Japanese-style castles. The enemies keep in line with this too, with ninjas and geishas and so on. One of the ninja enemies actually bears in incredible likeness to Ryu Hayabusa from the Ninja Gaiden/Ryukenden series, oddly enough.

Anyway, the game itself: you travel across (or sometimes up or down) the stages, jumping on platforms, and beating up enemies as you'd expect. As well as the typical slapping and throwing, you can also perform a running headbutt, and a big dramatic stomping move that damages everything onscreen. Unusually, in beat em up terms, the big stomp attack doesn't come with a limited amount of uses, nor does it deplete the player's health, but instead it just takes a few seconds to perform, and while doing so, leaves the player vulnerable to attack. There's also an experience/levelling up mechanic, that allows you to gradually increase your attack, speed and max health. Experience isn't gained from beating enemies, though, but from collecting mushrooms and gunbai, and from completing bonus stages. There's a few kinds of bonus stages: thumb wrestling, which I was terrible at, arm wrestling, which was a lot easier, and at least one more that I didn't encounter (since bonus stages are chosen at random when you find the gate to enter them). They're the quickest way to build up a lot of experience points, though they don't appear often.

There's a few small problems with the game, and they mostly stem from the stage design. Firstly, the game's sprites are huge and detailed and they look great. Unfortunately, the stage design doesn't cater to them very well, and there's often very little room to safely fight, which can end up in you taking a hit or two through no fault of your own (which is a big deal early one, when you can only take three hits). Secondly, there's some inconsistency regarding the bottom of the screen: on one stage, you'll be climbing ever upwards, and the bottom of the screen will always be a bottomless pit, even if you know there's a platform literally one pixel below it. The next stage, you'll be going down and not only are you expected to constantly be falling off the edge of the screen, you're often making blind leaps of faith and just hoping there isn't going to be an enemy or some spikes when you land.

These little problems aside, though, Sumo Fighter's a pretty good game. It looks great and it's definitely one of the better Game Boy beat em ups (in a totally different league to the likes of WWF Betrayal, for example).

Dragon Wang (SG-1000)

Pre-Final Fight beat em ups are interesting, in the same way that pre-Street Fighter II fighting games are, in that Final Fight kind of standardised the genre (I know Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun was also very influential, but FF was definitely a watershed moment). There were a few standard tropes before the afore-mentioned games, though: enemies that appeared at random rather than at planned intervals, standard enemies being one hit kills and generic chinese-style martial arts settings were more popular than the crime-ridden urban hells popularised by FF and NKK. Dragon Wang mostly follows this formula to a tee: each stage is some kind of multistory palace, with one-hit enemies running in from the sides of the screen at random.

The player has two attacks: kicks and flying kicks. Though the flying kicks never ever connect so they might as well not be there. Also though the SG-1000 controller has two buttons, they're both assigned to kick, forcing the player to press up to jump. Such a stupid, annoying little problem that's there for no reason at all. There's two kinds of regular enemies: guys who come right up to the player to kick, and guys who stand back and throw knives. Because of the random generation, though, the knife guys can sometimes show up at the worst times, surrounding the player from both sides, protected by walls of kicking guys.

The one unique gimmick the game has, though, is that rather than just go from left to right until reaching a boss at the end, they explore the floors of the palace seeking out bosses to fight to get keys and rescue the girl. The bosses all have their own health bars, and each has a gimmick, whether it's a weapon or the ability to teleport or being a robot. There's three bosses on the first stage, and each subsequent stage adds one. What's horrible about fighting the bosses is that there's no pattern or strategy to learn: they move and attack at random, so you just have to hope you're lucky enough to get enough attacks in to kill them before they do it to you. You health does get replenished after you beat them, though.

I wanted to like this game, it does have some charm and it looks really nice, as most SG-1000 games do, thanks to the system's idiosyncratic colour palette. Unfortunately, the more time spent playing it, the more obvious its flaws become,  and the more painful it gets to play.

Bujingai (PS2)

There's pretty much one thing everyone knows about this game, if they know anything about it at all, and that's that famous Japanese musician/actor/general celebrity Gackt lent his likeness to the main character, Lau Wong. The thing is, Lau mostly just looks like what you would picture in your head if someone asked you to imagine the young male protagonist of a Japanese-developed PS2 game. The game's set in a lavishly realised world that combines the aesthetics of a near-future cyberpunk world with those of stereotypical Chinese wuxia fantasy, and it's a fast-paced 3D platform/beat em up. In fact, my friend who lent me his copy for this review described it to me as "the game he wished Devil May Cry was".

It is definitely very similar to the Devil May Cry series, especially the third entry, whos release date it preceds by over a year. You go about the levels, swordfighting monsters and demons and the like, as well as doing a bit of platforming here and there. Gackt aside, the game's real gimmick is how it incorporates that aforementioned wuxia influence in both its combat and its platforming.

At its most basic, the combat is similar to most 3D beat em ups: you mash a button to perform combos, hold a shoulder button to lock onto a single enemy, and use the jump button while locked on to roll around and dodge. The attack animations are very stylised, with Lau flipping and spinning and generally engaging in lots of movement and acrobatics while performing even his most basic combos, but the game really comes into its own when fighting an opponent who also weilds a sword and has their own defence meter. When you're locked onto an enemy, if you're not attacking when they attack you, their attack is parried, and you can then counter by quickly attacking, which depletes your defence meter, but only very temporarily. When facing an enemy who also has this skill, the fight turns into a dramatic clash of flailing swords and counters countering counters and so on, and it does a good job of making combat feel and look really cool and fun.

As for the platforming, the wuxia influence is really just a spin on the old wall-running gimmick, just animated in a way that looks nicer, and of course, the skilled player can also jump and flip off of walls on which they are running, and start running on a nearby wall. It takes some practice, but like the combat, it's a small, simple thing that just makes playing the game a little bit more satisfying.

Bujingai is a game that definitely recieves my recommendation. It looks great, sounds great and it's both fun and satisfying to play. A quick look at ebay also tells me that it's available for only a few mere pounds, too!

GG Series Collection Plus (DS), Part 3

This time, it's the biggest and also the best section of the cartridge: the "Action" section, which covers a few genres!

Shinobi Karakuri Den
This game is probably the best one on the whole cartridge, and the standalone DSiWare release actually reached North America, I think, though unfortunately not Europe. You play as a constantly-jumping ninja tasked with destroying cogs that are guarded by various kinds of samurai. You've got a bunch of tools at your disposal: shurikens, a sword, air-dashing, and every few stages there's aboss fight against an enemy ninja. Enemy attacks don't damage you, just knock you back, with death only coming when you fall off the bottom of the screen. The thing is, though, that every time you jump off of a platform, it disappears and another one appears in a random place. I may give this game its own post at some point in the future, because it's deeper and more interesting than it seems at first glance.

Super Hero Ouga
As if to deliberately provide contrast, the next game in this section is terrible. It's a single-plane beat em up starring a hero who bears an uncanny resemblence to Kamen Rider Agito, who fights of many identical enemies and occasionally a boss. It's boring, repetitive and your character feels way too weak. A disappointment all round.

Assault Buster
Getting back on track, Assault Buster is a great little single-screen shooter starring a jetpack-clad heroine zipping around shooting enemy turrets, with a big installation at the end of each stage and a bossfight against an evil-doer with a jetpack every few stages. Interestingly, each boss has a different special attack that's like a significantly-upgraded version of an attack one of the types of turrets use. Assault Buster's a really fun game, and I don't have much more to say about it other than it also looks pretty good, compared to many of the games on this cart, too.

Drilling Attack!!
this one's a platform game starring a robot that looks  lot like Mechazawa from Cromartie High School, and who can also transform into a flying drill. The aim of each stage is to find a keycard and then the exit, with a secondary objective of finding glowing stone tablets hidden inside rocks. There's also a fun scoring system built around consecutively drilling through many blocks in quick succession to build up and maintain a multiplier. This one's a lot of fun, and also really satisfying to play.

The Last Knight
Something a bit different, a top-down action psuedo-RPG. You play as a knight who goes from room to room killing gargoyles and will-o-the-wisps and so on. For every five rooms you clear, you can increase your strength, dexterity or vitality. I recommend always putting points into strength, unless you're on low HP, in which case vitality will restore it and increase the max. I don't actually know what dexterity does, but i never felt weakened by its absence. This game's alright, I guess. It's not bad, but it's not one you'll come back to often, either.

Variable Arms
Back to platform games, with this one's gimmick being that you pilot a tranforming robot in it. In robot form, you can jump higher and have a fast, weak, short-range weapon, and in vehicle mode, you move faster and jump further, and your weapon is a long range cannon with a much lower fire rate. Another one that's pretty average, really. Nothing to write home about at all.

Whipper no Daibouken
A cute little platform game where you play as a little man with a whip who has to traverse jungle stages and get to the exit. This one doesn't have any special gimmicks or anything, but it does have well-designed stages, and it's fun enough to play that that doesn't matter. You can whip in front of you or upwards, and there are anchor-like hooks that your whip can latch onto, too. There's also a few different kinds of enemies that stand in your way, all with their own different behaviour patterns. Definitely one that's worth playing.

The Hidden Ninja Kagemaru
A stealth platform game that sees the eponymous ninja sneaking around stages trying to steal scrolls without being seen. Kagemaru has various items at his disposal, like a camoflage sheet to hide behind while guards walk past, and a magic eye that lets him see the guards' fields of vision. Unfortunately, though the concept is excellent, I just can't get into this game. Maybe it's just limited by its small scope: larger stages and Tenchu-esque stealth kills might have been massive improvements. Worth checking out for the cool gimmick, but not that great a game to play.

All Breaker
Yet another platform game, this time starring a girl with a big hammer, traversing stages with the mission of smashing special orange blocks littered about the place. The hammer can be used to smash most of the blocks from which the stages are built, too, and as the game progresses, different kinds of blocks with different properties start to appear. For example, blocks that are sent reeling ahead when hit, or ones tht are only held aloft by othe blocks, that fall when those blocks are smashed, and so on. Yeah, you probably won't regret spending your hard-earned points on this one.

Nano Creature Nyokki
A strange one this: you play as a microscopic tapeworm thing, and you swim around the screen collecting cubes and avoiding everything else. It's not a bad game, but it's not very interesting, either. I get the feeling this one was probably more fun to make than it is to play.

Running Battle (Master System)

You probably already know this, but the Master System in the 90s was in an unusual position. It was long dead in Japan, and never really took off at all in North America, but in Europe, South America and Australia, it still had enough of an established userbase that it was still getting games released in those territories. While many of those games were made in those territories, there were still games in the strange position of being made in Japan but never sold there, mainly by one of SEGA's subsidiaries SIMS. Running Battle is one of these, as was Masters of Combat, which I've previously covered.

Anyway, Running Battle is a single-plane beat em up about a guy named Gray  seeking out the killers of his partner (and possibly brother?) Brody. It's pretty standard and generic: walk from left to right, kill lots of the same enemy, then do it again. It sometimes throws in an extra element, like wall-mounted guns (that seem to hold an oddly generous amount of extra lives if you destroy them). There's also some power-ups like guns and super strength and a very rare power up that allows Gray to run forward at high speed, ignoring obstacles and pits and killing enemies on contact for five seconds. The most interesting thing about Running Battle, however, is that it feels like an unfinished mish-mash of assets the devs just had lying around.

The game starts in a typical beat em up ghetto stage, though all the stages after it take place inside sci-fi enemy bases. The first few bosses ignore this sci-fi theme, being a dwarf pirate, a cowboy, and a Samurai, each with their own individually themed room. The last two bosses fit better, though: a psychic super-villain and some kind of giant tank thing that's so big, the health bars have to become numbers at the bottom of the screen to make room for it.

So, that thematic jumble explains the "mish mash", but as for the game feeling unfinished? It's not massively glitchy, but rather there's a few little things that imply that the game wasn't tested or balanced as much as it could have been. For example, throughout most of the game, there are doors at the end of the stages. To go through them, the player stands in front and presses up on the d-pad, like a million other games. At the end of the first stage, there's a door, but to finish the stage, the player just walks past it and off the edge of the screen.

There's also the issue of balance. Like I said earlier, the game is really generous with the extra lives once the wall-mounted guns show up, and this seems to be because the last two bosses take very little damage from the player's attacks, but also deal massive amounts of damage with hard to avoid attacks. So the extra lives seem to be a sort of half-solution to this problem, turning te final boss battles into battles of attrition, in which the player has to hope they've saved up enough lives to survive and gradually wear down the bosses.

In conclusion, I don't recommend Running Battle at all. It's not painful to play, there just isn't really anything interesting about it, and it generally feels like it was quickly knocked out on the cheap.

Sukeban Deka II: Shoujo Tekkamen Densetsu (Master System)

Or if you'd prefer, "Delinquent Girl Cop II: Legend of the Girl in the Iron Mask". I should also let the uninitiated among you know that this game isn't a sequel to an earlier Sukeban Deka title, but is based on the second Sukeban Deka TV series, which sees a girl named Yoko Godai, who spent her childhood with her head trapped in an iron mask, taking up the Saki Asamiya codename and becoming the second Sukeban Deka, in the hopes of finding the reasons and culprits behind her stolen childhood. It's an excellent show, and is currently being fansubbed by The Skaro Hunting Society, should any of you be curious.

The game presents a heavily abridged version of the TV show's plot, split into adventure segments and beat em up segments. Unfortunately, the adventure segments make up the bulk of the game, and though I admit that it's a genre that doesn't especially appeal to me at the best of times, Sukeban Deka II's adventure segments are of an especially old-school flavour. There are very few clues as to what is supposed to be done, and though there is an english fan-translation, you'll still probably want a guide to save the tedious effort of going to every room and clicking on everything to find clues and items.

The beat em up sections are much shorter, and similarly old-fashioned, but they're pretty fun. Typically, you'll fight off a small gang of high school boys, before fighting a boss, and though the gang fights are pretty much all the same, the boss fights are really varied, though oddly, they seem to actually get easier as the game goes on.

There's also a couple of 3D maze sections, though they are really just that: empty mazes for the player to navigate that just pad the game out and fill a little bit of extra time.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this game unless you really love the TV series, or if you want a nice little slice of 80s Japanese pop-culture (for some reason, I associate SEGA's 8-bit consoles with the period far more than I do the Famicom, despite the Famicom's near-monolithic popularity in Japan at the time, and it's can't be denied that Sukeban Deka is an important artifact of the era.). But if you just want a Master System beat em up, there are far better examples, like Hokuto no Ken or Kung-fu Kid.

Ninpu Sentai Hurricanger (Playstation)

So, it's a licenced game based, obviously, on the 26th Super Sentai series of the same game (the suit action scenes from which were also used in the US/New Zealand series Power Rangers Ninja Storm). And it came to be released pretty late in the Playstation's life, the reasoning behind which I assume must be down to the fact that it was also very early in the Playstation 2's life and I guess the idea was that the young Super Sentai fanbase wouldn't yet have been able to upgrade.

Predictably, it's an action game, with the player taking control of the Hurricangers and their various mecha, fighting goons and monsters and at some points, other giant robots. Each stage represents an episode of the TV show, and is structured in a manner that will strike a familiar chord with Super Sentai fans. Typically, a stage will open with a section where the player defeats gangs of weak enemies, either in short beat em up segments, or occasionally in crosshair-pointing shooting gallery sections. Next up will usually be an on-foot fight against the monster of the week, which will play like a boss fight to the earlier beat em up segment. Finally is the main draw of these shows: the giant robot fighting against the giant version of the monster from the last part.

The giant robot fights don't play out like the other parts of the game, however: they start with a section with the camera behind the player's mech, in which the ploayer must move from side to side to avoid and deflect projectiles shot by the enemy until an opening to move in closer and attack comes up. When this happens, there's a short sequence in which the player hammers the attack buttons as fast as possible to knock the enemy back, followed by a first-person section that sees the player punching and slashing and using special attacks to deplete the enemy's health.

The game's presentation is perfect, with the in-game graphics being pretty much as good as they could be on the Playstation, and even the use of FMV works in the game's favour. The FMV clips used are short bits of stock footage that are used in the same place as they are in the show itself: transformation sequences, final attacks, and so on. The story mode is only a few stages long, but there are a bunch of extras, like a VS fighting mode, with all the rangers, enemies and monsters as playable characters, and an extra stage featuring a team-up with the red ranger of the Super Sentai show precedin Hurricanger, Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger.

You can probably work out what I think of this game by now, but yeah, I definitely recommend Hurricanger. If you're a fan of the show itself or the genre in general, it's a perfect adaptation, and even if you're not, it's just a really fun action game that's also very well presented.

Bishin Densetsu Zoku (SNES)

Bishin Densetsu Zoku is a game set in Japan,'s distant future of 2010. As far as I can tell (without being able to actually read any of the plot), it's about a boyfriend and girlfriend (either of whom can be selected for play, though the boy is a better fighter) on a fun futuristic roadtrip, who have their date ruined by a bunch of mean goons. Unlike most games with futuristic roadtrips as the main centrepiece of their plots, Bishin doesn't focus on vehicular combat: though the bulk of the game is driving, and there are enemy drivers who can be defeated through aggressive, repeated ramming, the main business of fighting foes takes place in short beat em up sections.

Along with the game's hybrid structure, the other cool idea it has is the passage of time. Every stage has a time limit, but rather than just be a generic number of seconds counting down to zero, each stage starts at a time of day, and the destination must be reached before a certain time. These times also provide contiunity: stage one starts at 9am, and the end must be reached before midday. Stage two goes from midday to 4pm, and the third stage from 4 till 8, with the sun gradually setting as time passes. Time passes at a rate of roughly one game minute for every two real-world seconds. When the player crashes their car, a short beat em up section starts, in which the player must defeat a small group of enemies (who, oddly seem to be almost exclusively female) as the clock still runs.

Unfortunately, despite having all these cool and interesting ideas crammed into it, their execution lets Bshin Densetsu Zoku down. The driving sections are not linear, having the player find their own way from point A to point B on the map. The problem lies in the fact that not only do all the roads look exactly the same, without even Outrun-esque roadside objects to break the monotony, but the on-screen minimap doesn't display the layout of the roads. The result of this is long, frustrating minutes driving round in circles, often finding yourself back at the start of the stage with scarce time remaining.

The beat em up sections aren't much better, either. Though they don't have any massive flaws like the driving sections, they're just kind of bland: the player doesn't have many attacks, there's only one small background per stage (though the boss fights get their own backgrounds, too), and the enemies all look the same, even between different stages.

It's really a shame that this game's not very fun to play, as the concept is cool, and it does have a lot of good ideas, they're just executed poorly. As it stands, I have to say that playing Bishin Densetsu Zoku quickly starts to feel like a frustrating chore, and it's not really worth bothering with.

Evil Stone (Arcade)

Evil Stone is an odd game. It's a beat em up, but rather than taking place on a traditional scrolling path, it takes place on grids of floating rocks. Furthermore, it's a beat em up in which the player has no kind of health counter, and can theoretically take an endless number of hits without dying. Obviously, the catch is that the player instead dies by being knocked back into an empty space and falling to their death. The player can move in four directions, and there are only two action buttons: jump and attack, though jump can be pressed twice to jump two spaces instead of one, and attack can be held for a second or two for a more powerful and longer-ranged charge attack. Aesthetically it's quite interesting, too, as the plot deals with the gates of hell opening, and demons flooding heaven and earth, and the designers seem to have been influenced by both western and Asian visions of hell and its inhabitants, with a slightly stronger emphasis on the Asian.

The game starts with a moderately easy stage to introduce its concepts, though in this case "moderately easy" is relative and should be interpreted as "somewhat less sadistic than what is to come", as you probably won't even reach the boss on your first attempt. A useful thing to know, though, is that you should grind the goblin/demon enemies at the start of the stage until you collect enough power-ups to turn your charge attack into a projectile, otherwise the boss will be almost impossible to beat, if you manage to get that far without projectiles.

After the first stage, any kindness the game may once have shown the player will be thrown out of the window. There will be jumping puzzles, tests of agility, and periods of aggressive bombardment by respawning enemies. Sometimes there will even be jumping puzzles that test the player's ability while they are also being aggressively bombarded by respawning enemies. I had to do some credit feeding to get a couple of stages in, so that I could take some more varied screenshots, but some way into stage 3, I just had to give up altogether.

Despite the fact that Evil Stone is undeniably a cynically designed money-grabbing credit muncher, and despite the insane, sadistic difficulty, it is still technically a fair game. Or at least, I'm fairly certain that theoretically, someone with inhuman skill at playing videogames could possibly have a chance at finishing the game on a single credit after decades of practice. Which, although the difficulty of Evil Stone means that you could never accurately describe it as a fun game, it is at least in a higher league than "pay-to-win" mobile phone/facebook game scams. I still don't recommend playing it though, except as a curiosity.