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).

Kettou Beast Wars (Game Boy Color)

Before Crawfish's miraculous ports of Street Fighter Alpha (to the Game Boy Color) and Street Fighter Alpha 3 (to the Game Boy Advance), handheld fighting games outside of the Neo Geo Pocket had a pretty bad reputation, and in most cases, that reputation was deserved. But stretching back into the early-mid 1990s, Takara were publishing ports of SNK fighting games to the Game Gear and Game Boy that were often far better than their peers. A lot of those ports were made by another company named Gaibrain, and it's this partnership that also made this game, based on the Transformers Beast Wars Toyline and TV Shows.

Luckily, their talents aren't limited to ports, and not only is Kettou Beast Wars a game full of enough features to make some console fighting games look bare bones, but it's actually a good game, with every department excelling to the extent allowed by the host hardware. There's eight playable characters, as well as at least one boss character, which would be generous for a fighting game on an 8-bit system, but this being a Transformers game, each character can also transform at any time mid-battle. So each character has two full sets of animations, including movements, attacks and even seperate sets of specials for each form.

The characters that are most fun to play as are Megatron, because he turns into a T-Rex that breathes fire and does flying kicks, and Guiledart, who turns into a Triceratops and has some really awesome-looking throws in his robot form. Of course, the game's concept alone ensures there's some fun to be had no matter what characters are involved, since you can have a gorilla fight a tank at Stonehenge, or a cheetah fighting a squid on the beach.

Those modes I mentioned earlier are a typical one-on-one arcade-style mode, a team battle mode where the player can choose to play as the Maximals (faces) or the Predacons (heels), and something called "quick draw", which I couldn't really work out. There's also a couple of extra modes, like a mode full of text-heavy character profiles, and an odd mini-game, which sees the player hammering buttons to break gems out of a big rock.

Mechanically, it's not super-complex beyond the transformation gimmick (which is admittedly really cool). There's a meter at the bottom of the screen that has to be charged manually, which can be expended in a power-boosting "hyper mode", or on super-moves that I haven't been able to execute. Transformation doesn't have any kind of penalty or limitation, though: you can press select at pretty much any time that you're not taking or dealing damage to change form.

Presentation is pretty great, too, within limits. The sprites are tiny, but still manage to be pretty detailed and full of character and charm, and they're really well animated, too. Backgrounds are a little simple and bland, but the colour choices are attractive enough to make up for that in most cases. Some of the menu screens are a bit weak, being plain white text on a black background, though considering the relatively massive amount of stuff that's packed into such a small cartridge, it's fair enough to allow this concession.

Yeah, I definitely recommend Kettou Beast Wars, at least, if you're for some reason in the market for Game Boy Color fighting games.

Lei Nu Ji Shen (Game Boy Color)

It seems like it's been a long time since I featured a Game Boy game, and even longer since I featured a Chinese pirate original. Lei Nu Ji Shen (possibly also known as "Future Robot") stands out from the usual Chinese crowd by eschewing most of their common flaws.

As far as I can tell, though the look of the main character (and the game in general) is definitely heavily influenced by 90s mecha anime, the setting is original. The visual presentation in general is of a particularly high standard, with nice backgroundsand detailed sprites. There are also some amazing looking full screen graphics for an intro and ending and also for static post-boss screens. The music doesn't live up to the looks though, being a shrill, beeping cacophony.

The game itself is a cut above the norm too, as the controls are tight, if not original, and the game is actually at a playable level of difficulty. The way your robot plays is just like Megaman: he can jump, he can shoot three normal shots or one charge shot, and he can dash/slide by pressing down and jump together. The only addition is that the robot in this game can also double jump. There's even an idle animation, which is just another way Lei Nu Ji Shen shows the extra bit of polish it has above its peers.

The stage design is unfortunately the game's weakest point after the music, as every stage consists of walking from left to right, while constantly shooting and occasionally jumping over a bottomless pit. Even the combat is boring, since there's rarely ever more than one enemy onscreen at a time. The boss fights add a bit of variety, though the stages between them seem to be incredibly long.

Although Lei Nu Ji Shen is, as I've said, a lot better than the usual pirate original, especially the ones that appear on 8-bit consoles, I can't recommend it. Even though it does look really great, it's just not very exciting to play at all.

Sanrio Carnival (Game Boy)

So, it's a puzzle game featuring Sanrio characters on the menu screens, and their faces on the blocks. Match three of the same and they'll disappear, the ones above will fall down, leading to the possibility of a chain. That's it, as far as the core mechanics of the game go. It's a slow rip-off of Columns, with music so awful it can only be that way on purpose.

But! That's not all there is to the game! There are three modes of play available, High Score, Endless and what the fan-translated version of the game refers to as just "Complete Stages". The first two are, as far as I

can tell, identical to each other, and they're the typical puzzle game single player mode in which the player just has to last as long as they can, scoring as many points as they can until they fill the screen up and the game ends.

The third mode is much more interesting, and probably the only interesting thing about this game. In it, there are five stages, each charging the player with a different task, the first and third are trivially easy: clear thirty sets of three or more, and clear five sets of four or more. Stages four and five are a little more challenging: clear ten "doubles" (a double being more than one set of three or more at the same time) and make ten chains. The second stage is the hardest, however, requiring 50,000 points to be scored. It would sound like a lot in most games, but the points in this game go up very slowly, and it's made even harder by

the fact that the well into which your blocks are falling is really small, possibly the smallest I've ever seen in a puzzle game at only six blocks wide by eight blocks high.

Of course, you could, with a bit of practice, complete all the tasks easily. But why would you bother? The game just isn't any fun. The stages gimmick is interesting, but the game itself is so slow and plain, there's just no excitement in it. Considering that it's for the Game Boy, facing stiff competition from many, many better puzzle games, therre's just no reason to ever play Sanrio Carnival. Apparently, the Sanrio name and characters were enough to get it to sell on release, though, as it did receive a sequel two years later.

Qix Adventure (Game Boy Colour)

I'm sure most people reading this blog have played Qix, or some clone of it. If not, the idea is that you claim territory in a big box by drawing smaller boxes inside it, while avoiding the things that already live in there. Most clones build on the original Qix's framework by having pictures be revealed in your claimed territory, and by adding power ups. Qix Adventure has these things, as well as a Pokemon bandwagon-jumping

collectathon element (the late 90s kids anime style the game's visuals have are further evidence of this), as

well as some faux-RPG trappings.
Playing as some kid named Speedy, you arrive on an island full of strange creatures that will, before each stage, engage Speedy in poorly-translated conversation. These creatures also appear in the stages themselves, though not as enemies that need to be avoided. The enemies are the traditional Qix and Sparks. There's also a treasure chest in each stage, though it's locked at the start of the stage, which is where the strange creatures come into things: capture them into your territory and the treasure chest opens. Obviously, capture the chest into your territory to claim the goods it contains. Said goods are the aforementioned collectathon element of the game, as the menu between stages will let you look at the treasures you've collected, along with a short description, also poorly translated. None of the treasures I've found seem to have any in-game use, though there is a screen in the menu for equipping items, and you are given money as well as points at the end of each stage, so presumably, there is equipment to buy later in the game? I've played through a few

areas, and hadn't encountered a shop yet, though. The way the game gives the player money is fairly interesting, too: the amount of money received at the end of a stage is a percentage of the points scored in the stage (starting at 2% and increasing gradually as the player progresses through the game).
Qix Adventure also has on the cartridge a port of the original Qix, selectable from the main menu, which is nice, I guess. If you like Qix and Qix-like games, Adventure is definitely one of the better ones I've played, so it's worth having a look at, though I'm not sure I'd want to pay the £10-ish it tends to go for on ebay.
Shamefully, I forgot to take a screenshot of the title screen while playing, and was too lazy to go back to my other computer to take one, so please make do with this google image searched replacement. I took all the other screenshots, though.

Lock n Chase (Game Boy)

The story of me and Lock n Chase is a short, pointless and boring one. This summer, while I was subjected to only a mobile broadband dongle with very limited bandwidth, I noticed somewhere that the entire ROMset for the Atari 2600 took up only 5MB. Seeing this as good value for bandwidth, I downloaded it, and put it onto my GP2X to play while watching repeats of Everybody Hates Chris and 60s Batman.
Overwhelmed by the huge list of games, I started playing the familiar games I played on a real 2600 in times long past (Carnival, Stampede, Othello), then games with interesting titles (Aquaventure, Cosmic Ark) and also, games that I remember seeing advertised in the old (as in pre-dating my birth) Marvel and DC comics I used to buy from the book stall on the market in my teenage years. Lock n Chase was one of those games.
But I'm not writing about the Atari 2600 version, or the arcade game of which it was a port. Today I'm writing about the much later Game Boy port.
It's pretty fun. It's a Pacman clone, as was the fashion at the time, themed around a bank robber being chased by cops. The characters all look like the chicken nugget people that McDonalds had among their many mascots a long time ago (I specifically remember during the 1992 Olympics, Happy Meals came with little plastic nugget-men, each one engaged in a different sport, not letting their lack of limbs stand in the way of their ambitions), and are all wearing hats. The cops are wearing the kind of hats you see cops wearing in old gangster movies, and the player is wearing the kind of hat you see gangsters wearing in old gangster movies.
You waddle around the mazes avoiding cops and collecting round things (which I think we can assume are coins). As usual, collect all the coins and you go the the next stage. There's also moneybags and diamonds, that will periodically appear for a short time every now and then. The moneybags freeze the cops in place for a few seconds, and the diamonds let you chase them for a short time, like the power pills in Pacman.
I should probably go into what makes Lock n Chase its own game, and not just a reskinned Pacman clone. The original gimmick in the arcade version was that there were doors place all over the stages that the player can shut behind them, cutting off any persuing cops (but also possibly creating a dead end for the careless player to be chased down). This feature survives into the Game Boy port, which also gradually adds more gimmicks as the game goes on. The first to appear is kind of the opposite of the original: doors that are closed by default and can be opened for a few seconds by the player walking into them.
I won't spoil any of the other features for you (plus i can't get very far into the game, and have only seen a couple more anyway, but shhh.).
The GB Lock n Chase is a pretty fun game, and even better than the original version. It is also, by extension, better than the PSP version, which is a download over 100MB large from the PSN store, despite just being a ROM of the arcade version packaged with an emulator. THat doesn't even automatically save high scores. Tsk.

Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War (Game Boy Color)

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

The Simpsons: Bart Versus The Juggernauts (Game Boy)

Before I start, I should be clear: this isn't so much a review as it is a warning. I've played this game for more than anyone ever should, and you shouldn't make the same mistake.
This nightmare all started many years ago, when I got my Game Boy. It was preowned, and came with a few games: the 32-in-1 cartridge that I previously mentioned, Super Mario Land 2, WWF Superstars 2 and this one. The Simpsons: Bart vs The Juggernauts.
The game is about a Gladiators-esque gameshow, and Bart's appearance as a contestant on it. There are six events, but you only start with two: A basketball style thing and a skateboarding thing. Although I've managed to get past these two events at some point in the distant past, in recent plays, I haven't managed it, and I've spent hours trying.
In the first event, there's a large black and white grid with a basket at the other end. you have to take a ball to the basket and get back as many times as you can in the time limit. The squares aren't arranged in a checkerboard pattern, and the black ones electrecute you. Get electrecuted three times and the event ends early. Also, sometimes the squares change to their opposite colour. They flash before doing it, but they also sometimes bluff you and flash without changing. Two of the juggernauts are jumping around the grid, and will knock you onto another, random square if you land on the same square as them.
The second event has Bart skateboarding down a ramp to build up speed, then at the end, jumping off the ramp to dropkick a juggernaut off his pedestal. Obviously, there are obstacles on the ramp, like pizza slices and hand smashing through the floor to grab Bart. If the description could end there, this event wouldn't be so bad. To stand a chance of hitting the juggernaut at the end, you have to avoid every obstacle and be at full speed at the end of the ramp. Even that would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that pizza slice can sometimes appear right on the end of the ramp without warning. Then there's the fact that the juggernaut will be holding a shield either high or low, meaning you have to position yourself correctly on the ramp, or just bounce off it harmlessly. There's absolutely no way of knowing whether the sheild will be high or low until you hit it.
By the way, not only do you have to complete these events, you have to do it perfectly, as fast as possible and on your first try, because although you get three tries for each event, to get the amount of points you need to go on to the next set of events means playing perfectly.
Don't play this game! The only slightly redeeming feature about it is the fact that it features some old Simpsons characters that never get mentioned or seen any more, like Dr. Marvin Monroe and Captain Lance Murdoch. Hopefully having written this review of it, I can finally exorcise this demon that has haunted me for years and never play it again.

WWF Betrayal (Game Boy)

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

Serpent (Game Boy)

I'm trying to post roughly one new review a week now. Have you noticed? I still don't get any comments, though. Waaah.
I almost had nothing to post about this week, though, as I've spent a lot of it playing the very un-obscure GTA2 and WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2011, as well as some games that I'm saving for future posts.
Anyway, because of this, I'm posting about a game I've known about for years and years and years, ever since playing it on a mysterious 32-in-1 cartridge I had as a kid. Mysterious for two reasons: the first reason being that I had no idea what the source of this cartridge was, and the second reason being that rather than the usual mis-spelled onscreen menu of games usually found in these carts, it had a little yellow rubber button you pressed to change the game. Another odd thing is that the label showed (really tiny) art for 16 games, meaning unlike most pirate compilation carts, it actually had more games than it claimed to, rather than less!
Enough of this nostalgic rambling though, time to talk about Serpent.
It's strange. You can tell from the screenshots that it's a snake-type game, of the duelling type. I've also played a similar, but simpler game on the Atari 2600, oddly enough also on a pirate cart.
The 2600 game was very simple, each player (there was no single player mode) controlled a snake that was constantly moving, and getting bigger/leaving a trail as it went. If your head touched that walls, your opponent or yourself, you lost.
Serpent has a similar basic premise, but is a more complex game. You start each fight with your body coiled up behind you, and it follows as you move around. It doesn't constantly grow, however. (I'll come back to this.) Also, when your head hits something head on, you don't lose the match, but rather a siren blares as your eyes go all googly. Stay like this for a few seconds and then you've lost the match. So, the goal is to use your snake body and your cunning to trap your opponent's head until it bursts. Alternatively, if you can completly surround your opponent's body, you also win.
Going back to the issue of the length of your body, if you create an enclosed loop, items will appear: white and black boxes with numbers or the letter M in them, as well as black and white missiles. The white boxes increase your body length by the number shown on them multiplied by ten, the black boxes decrease. The M boxes change your size to the maximum of 110 segments or the minimum of 20. The black missiles, if shot at your opponent's head will make them go faster, the white missiles slower.
There's eight difficulty levels, split into mode 1, levels 1-4 and mode 2, levels 1-4. The differrence between the two modes is that mode 2 has little tadpole things floating around the screen, which instantly kill you if they come into contact with your head.
My advice is to get some practice in mode 1 levels 1-2, then move on to mode 2 levels 1-2. Don't bother with levels 3 and 4, as they give the cpu opponent the ability to move their head from one of their body to the other, meaning essentially that the only way to win is to surround them. You don't get this ability, and adding in the length changing power ups, these levels are an unfair mess.
I like this game, it's one of the few from that strange cartridge that I still play today, and I recommend you do, too. In spite of the fact that essentially half the game is useless.
(This game is also called "Kakomun Hebi" in Japan.)