Uppers (PS Vita)

I really, really wanted to like this game. On paper, it has so much going for it: it's a modern beat em up that relies on neither ham-fisted nostalgia nor a grind-driven negative difficulty curve, and it has a ton of cool ideas and a lot of visual flair. It's all ruined, though, by one massive insurmountable flaw: it might not have a negative difficulty curve, but it doesn't have a positive one either. It's got a difficulty flatline. What I'm saying is that it's incredibly easy, to an extent I don't remember seeing before in an action game that wasn't made for very young children.

But I'll get back to that, after talking about the game's positives.  Like how all the stages have crowds of girls loitering around the place, and you can get statistical bonuses by impressing them with your fighting. Impress them enough, and they'll even give you love letters! There's also some weird slot machine thing involving them where you can win more bonuses, and a weird minigame that lets you lift a girl's skirt by tapping the X button fast enough for a few seconds. This stuff's all a little unseemly, but it is, at least, original. In fact, I don't remember a beat em up that has you trying to impress onlookers in this way. Surely it hasn't taken 30-odd years of the genre's exitence for someone to come up with this idea?

What I think is the game's best point is its use of weapons and the environment. Rather than being able to pick weapons up, carry them round and use them to clobber enemies, they're all instead parts of the stage. So you use the O button in the right place, and you'll swing round a lamppost to kick the enemies surrounding you, throw a motorbike into a crowd, or event flip a pick-up truck onto a group of foes. Conversely, you can punch, throw, and kick enemies into things to elicit effects: you can cause them to smash through walls, collapse piles of girders, explode burning barrells, and so on. Both these features really add an anarchic feel of mass destruction to all the fights, which is nice.

Of course, that brings us all back to the problem of the game's difficulty. All those cool ideas and visual bombast don't mean much when the game itself is easier than breathing. There's no tension, no friction, and no real excitement. Most of the enemies go down in two or three normal punches, meaning that you only need to use the cool environmental stuff for the tougher enemies and bosses. And even they don't put up much of a challenge. Uppers is definitely the game to play if you ever want to sympathise with Superman's "world of cardboard" speech. I've been playing for over two hours, with hard mode switched on, and still there's no challenge. It might well get harder at some point later in the game, but an action game really shouldn't make you play for multiple hours before getting to the "real" start of the game. Because if it does, then you're likely to just give up on it. Like I have given up on Uppers. One final note: it does have a proper printed manual, with colour illustrations and staples and everything!

Cross Wiber - Cyber Combat Police (PC Engine)

Last year, I reviewed Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji, which is one of the most-played PC Engine games among those of which I actually own real copies. Cross Wiber is the sequel to that game, and it too is a tokusatsu-themed single-plane beat em up. This time, though, the aesthetic is one more contemporaneous to the tokusatsu shows at the time, as opposed to the 1970s retro look of the first game. Think Blue Swat or Mobile Cop Jiban, as opposed to Kamen Rider or Battle Fever J. The best part of this is that one of the bosses from the first game (the fire-breathing giant frog-man) reappears in the new style, looking totally different, but also instantly recognisable.

The new look is generally pretty great all round, though: everything's very detailed and well-drawn, and it has a little bit of a gritty edge to it, and there's lots of shiny technology and gooey monsters. The game itself has had a few changes made to it, too. For example, where transformation in the first game was dependant on collecting an item, this time round, you just have to press the select button when your health is high enough to have some blue segments. There's really no reason why you wouldn't transform as soon as possible, but requiring you to manually do it does make it feel a little cooler.

Just like last time, there's red, green, and blue forms to transorm into (the default is red, and the other two have to be collected as items), and the weapons for each form are the same, too: red has a sword, green has boomerangs, and blue has a gun. It seems the devs realised that the gun was the best weapon by a long distance, so its use is reliant on battery power, and the blue form is reduced to using punches and kicks when that runs out. Other than these small differences, and a shooting stage where you're riding on a hoverbike, it's very similar to the first game, but with a new coat of paint.

The main difference, which is a big factor as to why I don't like this as much as I did Cyber Cross is the difficulty. The first few stages are very, very easy. A lot easier than the first game ever was. Then along comes the sixth stage, which takes place atop a bunch of metal pillars, with instant death pits below and gangs of floating monsters going about the place, waiting to slightly knock you to your doom. It just feels like such a letdown that instead of designing stages and enemies that challenge you in combat, the devs inserted this kind of test of memory and luck. It's not a total game-ruiner, but it did deflate my enthusiasm for it quite a bit.

As it is, Cross Wiber is a game that's decent, but far from essential. The most damning thing about it, though, is that it's both less good and more expensive than its predecessor. I won't tell you not to play it, but I'd definitely direct you towards Cyber Cross instead of it.

Kamen Rider SD - Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine (SNES)

I was attracted to this game when I saw some screenshots of it, and it appeared to be a side-scrolling racing game, which is pretty unusual. When I played it, though, it actually turned out to be a beat em up in which the player and all the enemies are riding in or on vehicles. That's pretty unusual too, I guess? Unfortunately, it doesn't have much effect on the game itself.

I assume that the idea of having all the characters on vehicles is to give the impression of an exciting, high speed battle, but that feeling never comes across. You can increase or decrease your speed at any time by pressing the shoulder buttons, but it doesn't really change anything besides the speed at which the background is scrolling, and fighting at 149 kilometres per hour feels exactly the same as fighting at 605 kilometres per hour. It's with those scrolling backgrounds themselves, though, that I place the blame for the this game's lack of excitement.

The thing is that the game never really feels fast or exciting because you're never going anywhere: each area has a background image that's maybe two screens long, and you go past it over and over again until you've beaten all the enemies in that area. Then your character just speeds offscreen to the next area. It feels like you're fighting on a treadmill, and it's not helped by the fact that each stage has a few areas in it, and each background gets used at least twice.

As for the characters, though this game does apparently star every Showa era Kamen Rider, you don't get to pick them, each one gets their own stage, that can only be played in order. A strange approach, when compared to Masked Rider Club Battle Race, which not only lets you pick whichever Rider you like, but is generally a much better game all-round. It's a shame it never got ported to any home systems, really.

There's really no reason to bother with Kamen Rider SD: Shutsugeki!! Rider Machine, unless you really need to have every Kamen Rider game ever released. Even if you want a SNES beat em up with Kamen Riders in it, this isn't the one to go for.

The Cyber Shinobi (Master System)

This might be just how I rememer it, but it feels to me like the Mega Drive's Revenge of Shinobi/The Super Shinobi was a pretty big part of early 1990s UK childhood, and is still beloved to this day (making its omission from the EU version of the Mega Drive Mini seem like a foolish oversight). The Cyber Shinobi, by contrast, was barely ever heard of back then, and not well-remembered today. A big part of this is probably down to the fact that it was on the Master System rather than the Mega Drive, but another big factor is probably the burial it got in pretty much every magazine at the time. It was written off as an ugly, stupid cash in on the popularity of the Shinobi series.

Those criticisms aren't entirely unfair, though. The sprites and backgrounds are okay, but the game's whole look is ruined by a massive ugly grey HUD taking up the top third of the screen. The strange thing about this is that there's a prototype version of the game where the HUD was still massive, but it was at least a bit more colourful and less ugly. It's also definitely cashing in on the name of a popular series, since it's not a Rolling Thunder-alike like the original Shinobi or Shadow Dancer, nor is it an action-platformer like the previous year's Revenge of Shinobi. Instead, it's a single-plane beat em up with occasional platform elements.

It's mostly actually pretty okay to play. There's some kind of boring design choices (like you you move along a bit, stop to fit a few waves of the exact same guys, then move on to do that again on the next screnn), and some terrible ones (parts of the ground that fall away to drop you into a deathpit that look identical to every other part of the ground, leaving you with Rick Dangerous-style memorisation), but it's still good enough to hold your interest.

There's also a couple of interesting design choices, like the projectile weapons: you collect a P item, you get eight projectiles. But what's interesting is that you can collect up to 24 projectiles, and the amount you have determines what you shoot. At one to eight, you shoot weak shuriken, nine to sixteen are slightly more powerful bullet/missile things, while seventeen to twenty-four are grenades, which are not only more damaging than the other two, but they also explode for splash damage, but they're thrown in an arc instead of shot straight forward.

Furthermore, those "fight the enemies in a stationary screen" thing isn't that bad, either. Every screen has a different layout of platforms and obstacles, along with stationary enemies that shoot at you while you're fighting the more mobile melee enemies. This means that each of those stationary screens is at least a different encounter, making you find the best place to be in each screen to fight the enemies it throws at you. The problem is the repetition within each one: having only one wave of enemies per screen would speed things up, or having multiple waves made up of different parties of enemy types would make them fell less of a slog.

So, The Cyber Shinobi is an okay game sunk in its time by the weight of the name with which it was lumbered. I think if it didn't have Shinobi in its name, it wouldn't have been hated quite so hard by the critics of the time, but it also probably would have sank even further into obscurity. As it is, it's an okay game, and, like most Master System games, you can get it dirt cheap, and it definitely contains like £2 worth of fun.

Futari wa Precure Max Heart Danzen! DS de Precure Chikara o Awasete Dai Battle (DS)

So,there's quite a few licensed beat em ups on the original DS, and a lot of them seem to be based on superheroes: The Mighty Thor, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, and so on. This game, with what might be the longest title of any game I've ever featured on this blog, against all odds, might well be the best of them, and an actual worthy entry into the genre in general.

Of course, it's based on one of the earlier iterations of the long-running magical girl franchise Pretty Cure, and it seems like the developers decided to eschew contemporary conventions and, instead of making "just a licensed game" or "just a game for little girls", actually bothered to make a good game that happened to be based on a license for little girls. AS already mentioned, it's a beat em up, and it's firmly in the time-honoured belt scrolling style. You know how it goes: you go from left to right, fighting enemies, picking up food off the ground and occasionally fighting bosses.

Of course, it's not that simple, and PreCure brings a few new ideas to the table to help it stand out. For example, friendship is a big theme in the TV series, so whichever of the two characters you choose to play as, the other one will also be present, controlled by the CPU to help you. (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a 2-player co-op mode, which is a huge shame and one of the very few black marks against this game's name). But the friendship theme doesn't end there! There's a super meter, which can be used to perform powerful, full-screen team up moves, plus something I don't think I've seen in any other beat em up before or since: when one character gets knocked down by an enemy, if the other is in the right position on the screen, they'll catch their fallen partner efore they hit the ground, restoring a little health and gaining a little bit of super meter. It's cute, it's original, and it fits the game's theme perfectly.

Some other good points, that aren't innovative, but they do stand out from the game's contemporaries are the omission of various hated  "features" seen in many twenty-first century beat em ups. The biggest is that there's no levelling up, there's no equipment, and there's no skill shops: you actually get to just play the game, without grinding or losing interest towards the end because of a negative difficulty curve! In a beat em up released in 2005! Can you believe it? The other, lesser omitted albatross is one that I was actually only reminded of recently, when I tried to play the aforementioned Thor and Go-Busters DS games: constantly having the action stopped by text boxes telling the player "press B to jump!", after you've already spent the first two seconds of the game pressing the buttons to see what they do. This one doesn't seem to crop up in action games so much any more in 2019, and it definitely isn't missed.

Other than the lack of multiplayer, the only other real problem this game has is that it's a bit too easy. I know it's a kids game, but an optional hard mode would have been nice, at least. But besides that, this is a legitimately good beat em up, with nice sprites, that isn't thematically reliant on nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, and brings new gameplay ideas to the genre. I definitely recommend it.

Spikers Battle (Arcade)

The Dreamcast, despite being, in most respects, an incredible machine for people who wanted to bring the arcade home, had only two beat em ups released for it (as far as I can remember, at least). And one of them was Soul Fighter. The strange thing about this is that SEGA had a series of beat em ups in arcades at around that time, the Spikeout series, and two of them even ran on Naomi hardware: the fantasy-themed Slashout, and this one, Spikers Battle. They would have made great additions to the DC library, but I guess it's all just more evidence of SEGA being the Paul Heyman of the videogames world: unmatched in terms of creativity and talent, completely terrible when it comes to making money.

Anyway, Spikers Battle is a strange case, in that it's a beat em up that thinks its a fighting game. It controls like a beat em up, has weapons strewn about the place like a beat em up, and most of the stages see you fighting a boss and some goons, like a beat em up. If you were to compare it to any other game, the most apt would probably be the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun/Renegade, with its small stages and gang warfare setting. But on top of all of this, it has a strange fighting-game rounds system in place of lives, whereby to advance past a stage, you have to finish it twice, and to get a game over, you have to fail the same stage twice.

I haven't been able to find any information on how multiplayer modes work, but I'll assume it's like the other Spikeout games, and has multiple cabinets linked together, so maybe the rounds thing makes more sense in that context? Anyway, it's pretty much the only problem I have with this game, and it's not a big one. It's fun to play, looks really cool, everything's fine except for that one thing.

Obviously, if you're brave enough to tangle with Naomi emulation, or rich enough to tangle with Naomi ownership, Spikers Battle is one of the games I recommend you look into. It's a lot less brutal in terms of difficulty than some of its stablemates, too (I'm mainly talking about Slashout here, which is a very difficult game).

Castle Warrior (Amiga)

Castle Warrior represents a concept I've rarely seen before: the into-the-screen sprite scaling beat em up (the only other example I can think of is Jinmu Densho on PC Engine). Well, it starts out as that, anyway, with your warrior walking down a corridor (in a castle, of course), being assailed by bats and wall-mounted monster arms, and the occasional enemy big enough to force him to stop and fight it for a bit. While the bats and the arms are dispatched with a direct swing of the sword, these larger opponents are battled in a silly little game of violent tennis, whereby they shoot perfectly spherical fireballs at you, and you try to bat them back with your sword. At the end of the corridor waits a big dragon, so big in fact that it doesn't even fit on the screen. This battle, and a later boss fight against a similarly massive snake monster, is fought by moving left and right to avoid attacks, and chucking spears when you get the chance.

The second stage has a similar into-the-screen premise, but this time you're kayaking down an underground river and avoiding stalacmites, angry fish, and other such things. All the stages and boss fights so far have a feel to them that's a kind of combination of a simple LCD game and one of those games they had on saturday morning TV shows in the 1990s, where kids could call in and control a character by shouting directions down the phone. It's all very simplistic, very slow, and very stiff.

After the boat ride, you fight the aforementioned snake monster, and after that, the game suddenly changes perspective, as the final battle is viewed from the side. This seems like a strange decision, having the final boss fight be less graphically impressive than the rest of the game. This fight is against a wizened old wizrd in a red cloak, sitting in a flying throne made from the lower jaw of a giant demon statue. It's also incredibly hard, as the wizard's attacks are both difficult to dodge and massively damaging. I've made a few attempts at beating him, but even with an infinite lives cheat, I could never land more than one or two hits.

There's one last thing to be said about Castle Warrior that I haven't already: it's incredibly short. Like, less than ten minutes. I assume that the huge difficulty spike represented by the final boss is just there so that people can't say they completed it on their first try with no problems at all. Though it's a pretty unique game, and even Jinmu Densho is pretty different to it, so there's not really any alternatives, I can't really recommend Castle Warrior. It's an incredibly short game, and still somehow feels like a bit of a slog.

Sword of Sodan (Mega Drive)

This is a game whose title I'd always seen in lists of Mega Drive games and never bothered to take any notice of, assuming it was some boring, ugly western-developed RPG or something. Then I learned that in 1995, the final issue of Beep! Mega Drive magazine had it listed as the lowest rank Mega Drive game of all time, by Japanese Mega Drive owners. The fact that a western-developed game had gone pretty much entirely unnoticed in the west, while enjoying such notoriety in Japan got my interest, so I investigated. Turns out it's not an RPG at all, but an ugly, boring single plane beat em up!

You start out picking from a nameless hero or heroine, and then you set out to awkwardly shuffle forwards, swinging your sword at everyone that crosses you path. The game was apparently originally released on the Amiga, though since it uses all three buttons on the Mega Drive pad, plus the start button, it must have been even worse on a system whose controllers had one or maybe two buttons available at best. Anyway, the C button attacks (and you also have to press it in conjunction with the d-pad if you want to change the direction you're facing), B does a little jump that's totally pointless until a few stages in, when you can use it to try and jump over the massive, invisible instant death pits, and the A button drinks potions.

The potions are probably the most interesting thing about Sword of Sodan. There's four different potions to collect, and you can carry up to four at a time. The twist is that when the game is paused, you can pick two of the potions in your inventory to mix together for various different effects, from extra lives, to flaming attacks, to pointless self-poisoning. Otherwise, though, you mostly just shuffle along, hacking at enemies, and hoping you don't get torn apart by the traps in the stages, which are near-impossible to dodge with your incredibly unathletic warriors. Another little point of interest is that some enemies do require a little extra technique to kill, for example, the giants that start to appear at the end of the third stage: press C and up to slash their faces until they take a knee, then you have to stand at he exact right distance to them, and press C and up a couple more times to behead them.

I don't think Sword of Sodan is the worst Mega Drive game of all time, but it is a very bad game, and it's not one you should waste any time playing. It's not really a surprise, but that's how it is sometimes.

Knights of Valour 3 (Arcade)

It's strange that even to this day, none of IGS' arcade games have been ported to home consoles, the only reason I can think of being that no console publisher wants to bother with a Taiwanese company? But still, their beat em ups were always pretty ambitious, taking the inventory system from Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons beat em ups, and gradually expanding on the idea, eventually culminating in this: Knights of Valour 3, which brings various console game concepts and brings them to the arcade.

The biggest and most obvious thing is the use of memory cards. Though this is actuall pretty common in a lot of post-2000 arcade games, this is, as far as I know, the only beat em up that uses them. What does it use them for? For saving your progress in the game, and the stats, equipment and inventory of your character. Yes, it is another beat em up with those dreaded "RPG elements". But in this case, I'm willing to be a lot more forgiving than usual.

There's a couple of reasons for this, the least important being that the "progression" is very slow and very gradual, so it's not like grinding over and over to make the game easier is going to be a big thing, especially since there's a couple of barriers to this: firstly, it's an arcade game, so every time you play and die, that's the price of a credit thrown away, so you'd be better off getting better at the game, than waiting for it to get easier. Secondly, the item/equipment shop is only accessible after completing a stage, so there is a minimum barrier of entry before you can unlock new moves and better weapons and such.

The big reason I'm more forgiving, though, is simply that it's an arcade game, and it's not meant to be played the way I've been playing it (alone, on a computer at home). It's meant to be played in a public, social setting, with other players. And I can really see how that would enhance the game greatly: a group of friends, each with their own memory card containing their character, playing every day on their lunch break or whatever, gradually making progress through the game over the course of months. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any other arcade games that offer that kind of long term experience (like I said earlier, there are other arcade games that use memory cards, but as far as I know, they're all competitive, rather than co-operative), and it sounds like something that'd be really enjoyable. And after you've all finished for good, the memory cards themselves look really cool, so they'd be nice keepsakes to hold onto.

If you're curious about this game, it's still worth playing in MAME: it's decent enough fun, and it also looks incredible, but I have to say that, though it's very unlikely, I really hope I one day get to play it as it was originally intended, since the developers really did make an arcade game that offers and experience you can't perfectly replicate as a home game, even though the game itself could easily be ported to any of its contemporary home systems (Knights of Valour 3 was originally released in 2011).

Ridegear Guybrave (Playstation)

It's a beat em up, and it's not an arcade game, or on a console released before 1994! So, I'm sure you all know what's going to happen, and yes, there are both experience points and equipment shops. But it's not all bad, as the weapons you buy actually all have not only their own models that actually appear on your robot, but their own animations too! So you are actually getting a bit of fun out of them besides the numbers going up.

And yes, it's also a game about robots. Giant ones, though they're also super-deformed. Which is probably actually more realistic than big tall, slender mecha. The setting is an island in what I assume is some kind of newly colonised frontier world, as everything manmade seems kind of ramshackle, though there isn't any of the environmental devestation you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic world, with stages taking place in deserts, plains, caves, forests, meadows and so on.

The RPG elements don't just stop at the stat-raising stuff, either: there's towns where you talk to people, buy stuff, and so on. In fact, the towns conspire with the game's navigation system to create some offensively aggregious padding, which actually detracts from the game's quality a lot more than the stats stuff. There's a point early on in the game, where you have to talk to a guy in the second town, then go back to the first town to talk to another guy, then return to the original guy in the second town. The problem with this is that there are two stages between those two towns.

Now, the game's world map doesn't let you just pass over cleared areas, but instead, each area, whether it's a stage or a town, has two exits, one at the left and one at the right. When you leave via one exit, you can only go to the opposite exit on the next stage in that direction. So, how the above quest goes is that you initially leave the first town, and go through the two stages to get to the second. Then you leave the second and go through those two stages again, but backwards, to get back to the first town. Then you have to go through those same two stages for a third time to get back to the second town. I can't remember the last time I played a game with such little respect for the player's time. The combat was actually pretty fun at first: crunchy and satisfying, and with the novelty of trying out new weapons now and then, but after this nonsense, I'd lost all goodwill I once had towards this game.

I think if me and my friends had gotten copies of this from our local totally legitimate import games dealer around the time of its release, it might have been one of our favourites that we'd occasionally talk about to this day. As a more discerning adult with access to emulation and so on, I can't recommend it. If you want action games with nice low poly robots and cool anime character portraits, you can easily find many others that are a lot better than this.

Outlander (Mega Drive)

This is a game I first encountered years ago, in my earliest days of emulation, but back then, I never figured out how to actually play it. Or at least, I never figured out how to play it for a decent amount of time. But before I get onto that, I should describe what the game actually is: it's a would-be sequel to a Mad Max game on the NES (that I haven't played), though the publisher apparently no longer had the license, so they just changed the name.

You play as some guy driving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, constantly assailed by bikers, and later on, people in cars and helicopter pilots. You can fight them off with machineguns mounted to the front of your car, and when an enemy's coming close up next to you, a little side window appears and, if your timing's good enough, you can blast them with your shotgun. Eventually, the little left-pointing arrow on your dashboard will start blinking, telling you that you're near a town and you should pull over (which is done by stopping your car to the left side of the road, then turning the steering wheel left as far as it'll go).

That's the part I never figured out back then, and it's pretty important! The town segments take the form of single-plane beat em up stages, where you walk to the left, taking out any enemies you encounter (all the people you encounter are enemies, by the way), as well as destroying any barrels or crates you find, in the hopes of obtaining more fuel, food or water (to replenish you health), or ammo for your guns. If you don't visit the towns, you won't get any points, as they're totted up based on how many enemies you killed, your remaining fuel and health, and so on as you enter. But more importantly, you'll quickly run out of fuel! (Actually points are pretty important too, since you don't start with any extra lives and you can only get them through points).

If you run out of fuel, you'll come to a stop, and you'll have to do a beat em up stage on the road, which are much harder than the town ones, since there's now bikers trying to take your head off with chains, and you can only kill them with your shotgun, which has limited ammo. In the old days, I'd just keep driving until I reached one of these stages, then quickly get killed. I'm glad I gave it another shot as an adult, and finally figured it out, because Outlander is a pretty fun game!

It's no classic, and it has some big problems, like how the scenery during the driving sections never changes (I know you're driving through an endless wasteland, but with a bit of imagination you can easily come up with a few variants: toxic swamp, ruined city, dead forest, etc.), and how later on there's some unfair stuff like poisoned water that reduces your health, but it's definitely a game worth playing, and it's a shame it's not better known. I strongly recommend you also give it a try!