Wolfchild (Mega CD)

Wolfchild is that precious, rare kind of Mega CD game: it came from a western developer, but it isn't a terrible FMV game or boring edutainment title. Though to be fair, it is from Core Design, who had a reputation in UK magazines, at least, for making great Mega CD titles, after seemingly every publication in the UK lost their minds over their sprite scaling shooter Thunderhawk. It does one bit of FMV though: a charmingly ugly animated intro.

Oher than the intro though, Wolfchild is a pretty typical early 90s platformer, albeit one with something of a psuedo-gritty "dark superhero" setting, that you might see in some of the comics and tabletop RPGs of the time. You play as some guy who's used science to turn himself into a psuedo-werewolf, to go and defeat the evil Chimera group and rescue his scientist dad. Oddly, Wolfchild apparently takes its cues for werewolf abilities from Altered Beast of all places, as the main advantage of wolf form is that you shoot fireballs from your fists.

How transformation works is linked to your health bar: above a certain level, you're a wolfman, below that level, you're just a manman. There's some kind of subtle levelling up ystem in place whereby your maximum health increases as you make your way through the game. I'm not sure whether this is related to scoring points or collecting items, though, as the game does nothing to draw your attention to it happening (I didn't notice it until I'd already played the game a few times). Other than that, this is a pretty standard decent-quality platform game.

There's a few little problems the game has, like how even in wolf form, and after collecting some power-ups, you still don't feel particularly powerful, and the power-ups themselves have a problem that you see in a fair few western platformers of the time, whereby they all just look kind of like tiny indistinct polished orbs (everything else looks great, though. Especially thr backgrounds). There's also one stage of the game that has a few instances of what some call "Rick Dangerous nonsense", where hazards just suddenly pop out of the scenery without warning, meaning the first time you go through an area, you have no way of knowing they're there, and you just have to remember them next time. There's not enough of it to ruin the game, but it is still annoying.

Wolfchild isn't some great classic, but it's not bad, either. I receommend at least giving it a look, definitely.

Racing Aces (Mega CD)

There were a few games on the Mega CD that used a combination of a few very low poly models and FMV backgrounds to try and trick players into thinking they were 3D, the most well-known probably being Silpheed. Racing Aces bucks that trend by actually being a  game with full 3D stages! As you might have figured out from the title, it's a racing game about flying old timey aeroplanes around racetracks.

Unfortunately, it's a concept that doesn't really work very well, at least it doesn't here. It's just so fiddly, and it also feels so slow, even when you collect the turbo boost power ups. I'm sure it's not a frame rate issue, as though the frame rate does chug a bit, the Mega Drive version of Virtua Racing manages to be a fast and fun racing game under similar conditions. Maybe it's the fact that it's a game about racing planes? There's no accelerator, of course, and you have to keep dipping down to maintain speed, then pulling back up to avoid the ground.

The unfortunate fact is that the whole time I was playing this game, I was thinking of all the ways it could have been better. It would have been better if they'd made it a ground-based racing game, or a Pilotwings-style flying stunt game, or maybe even pushed the boat out and pre-empted the PS2's Sky Odyssey by about a decade and made it a relaxing biplane exploration game. It's a shame, because it really is impressive what they've managed to achieve with this game, and it's just no fun to play at all. It's barely even worth mentioning the incredibly dated stereotypical Japanese characters, because it's not like they're spoiling an otherwise decent game through their presence.

Anyway, more about how the game actually plays. You pick a character from the massive roster (though as far as I can tell, they don't actually play differently to each other), then you'll compete in a series of races against eight of the other characters, with the usual rules that you get championship points for finishing races in high positions. There's an extra caveat in that you can also shoot down your fellow racers, and each kill is worth one championship point too (downed pilots respawn after a couple of seconds). That's actually a good design decision, that I wish was more common in racing games that also have a combat element. I'm sure you remember when I criticised S.C.A.R.S for having a completely pointless scoring system tied to destroying your opponents. There's lots of tracks, and as you go along, you can buy better planes and upgrade them, and so on, but otherwise, that's pretty much it.

Racing Aces is a game that's ambitious and impressive, and unfortunately absolutely no fun to play at all. I don't recommend it as anything other than a technological curiosity. And on the subject of curiosity, I decided to look up the developers, Hammond & Leyland. Not only was this their only game (as far as I could tell), but most of the results weren't even for this company, but for news stories concerning a pair of cricket players active in the 1930s!

Supreme Warrior Ying Heung (Mega CD)

I've long theorised that the thing that killed the Mega CD was western publishers and their obsession with FMV, since the PC Engine CD, which had almost no support in the west, and had no FMV games, was a pretty big success (in Japan, at least), just by having lots of good games. Until now, though, I hadn't actually played any of the western "interactive movie" style FMV games, only the likes of Road Avenger and Strahl: the "laserdisc arcade" school of FMV games that were made up of long strings of QTEs and cool-looking 80s animation. Those games are pretty fun, if very limited.

Supreme Warrior Ying Heung is the first interactive movie I've played, and using the word "played" is an act of generosity it doesn't deserve. The story sees an evil warlord attacking a small town in sixteenth century China, demanding half of a magic mask from the local martial arts master. If he gets the mask, he'll be all-powerful and go on to rule the world. Unfortunately, the master is too old to fight the warlord, and his best student is injured. So it falls to you, a collection of disembodied limbs attatched to a movie camera to save the day.

There's some good things about this game, that I should mention before I continue with its burial, so here they are: the production values are surprisingly good, in a mid-90s American TV show kind of way, and the video quality is a lot better than most live action Mega CD games. That's about it, though. The big problem is that the developers have tried to make something a bit more sophisticated than the typical QTE festival, and it just doesn't work. This is a problem shared by one of the aforementioned laserdisc arcade games, Cobra Command (aka Thunderstorm FX), which added a fiddly, semi-functional crosshair shooting element to proceedings. Supreme Warrior manages to be go even further with the complexity, and while Cobra Command was pretty difficult to play, this game is practically impossible.

The actual game part of Supreme Warrior has you fighting the warlord's three henchmen, then, if you somehow manage to beat them, the man himself. The fights are completely live action and first person, with the henchmen punching and kicking in the direction of the camera, while you're expected to punch, kick, and block in accordance with the little prompts that appear at the edges of the screen. The problem is that the prompts sometimes don't appear, and sometimes hitting the right direction and button doesn't do anything. I made a few attempts at fighting each henchman, and I never landed more than two hits on any of them. It just doesn't work on any level: it's no fun to play, the basic mechanics don't work, and your hands and feet flying in from the edge of the screen look stupid every time.

I wish I could say it was a shame that this game turned out how it did, and that the concept had so much potential, but I can't see how else they would have done it. I guess they could have made it a simple QTE game like the arcade games that had been originally released almost a decade earlier, or they could have used the movie segments as mere cutscenes to a more traditional action game, maybe with Mortal Kombat-style digitised sprites. But neither of those solutions really offers the kind of interactive movie innovation towards which Digital Pictures strove. Since no-one else has managed to make a good game from the concept in the decades since, maybe it's just not possible?

Annet Futatabi (Mega CD)

For some reason, Wolf Team were very prolific on the Mega CD, whether they were porting other companies games, like Road Avenger and Thunderstorm FX, or making their own stuff, like this game. Annet Futatabi is the third part of a trilogy that also includes the Mega Drive games Earnest Evans and El Viento. Unlike those games, though, it's not a platformer, but a belt-scrolling beat em up, one of very few Mega CD beat em ups that aren't arcade ports.

As a Japanese Mega CD title, it's pretty much par for the course: it's an action game of the sort that the base Mega Drive could have played host to, but with the addition of CD audio, full screen animated cutscenes (in the "animated pixel art" non-FMV style I've spoken of in  a few other reviews, most notably the Saturn game Dinosaur Island) and voice acting. And all of those things are great! The cutscenes are very reminiscent of 80s/early 90s period-adventure anime, like The Secret of Blue Water, and so on. There's even a nice anime-style intro, complete with vocal theme song!

Of course, great presentation is something of a common theme throughout Wolf Team's games, especially when they're working on CD-based systems. Unfortunately, another running theme is "almost greatness", and Annet Futatabi is no exception. It has all the ingredients for being an unsung classic of the system (and, to be honest, most of the system's classics can be considered unsung, thanks to the received opinion that "the Mega CD was worthless"): it's a fairly nice-looking beat em up, with a cool setting, a female lead and great presentation, plus it's a system exclusive. You can probably guess from the tone of this paragraph so far that it doesn't quite work out like that, though.

And you'd be right to guess that! Though there are some nice little things about how the game plays: the fact that you can run in eight directions, and that you do have a moderately sizable moelist, it all falls apart due to how unfair the difficulty is. Firstly, when enemies attack, their hitbox seems to be bigger than their entire sprite, not just the part of them that's attacking, and it seems to still be in effect for a few frames after the attack animation's finished. So for anyone used to more competently-constructed beat em ups, who might instinctively go in for a throw or combo as soon as an enemy's attack finishes will have to counterintuitively learn to wait a little, slowing the game down and ruining the flow. There's also the fact that you have a big bomb attack that recharges over time, so it can be used multiple times over the course of a single stage. The problem is that when the stage's boss appears, your bomb attack disappears and you can't use it. This just makes no sense at all! I can't imagine what they were thinking when they made that decision, especially due to the fact that bosses suffer (or rather, they benefit?) from the "giant attack hitbox problem just as much as the regular enemies, and they're a lot bigger than normal enemies already.

I really wanted to like this game, and I tried to get some kind of joy from it, but it's just an awkward, frustrating slog. When I got to the third stage, an underground ancient temple full of robots with ranged attacks and the ability to turn invincible without warning, I gave up on it. It's a shame.

Devastator (Mega CD)

It might just be my imagination, but it seems like there's a disproportionally large amount of action games about giant robots on the Mega CD. Devastator is one of them, and it's also part of another sizable category of Mega CD games: anime licenses. It's based on a two episode OAV entitled D-1 Devastator, of which only one episode has ever been subbed into english, by the group ARR, who had an infuriating habit of subbing the first episodes of rare and interesting series, and then never going back to them. Of course, since this is a game on an early CD console, grainy clips from the anime play between stages, though the quality is far from being the worst on the system.

But anyway, Devastator is a combination platform game/horizontally-scrolling shooter, with each stage playing out as either one or the other. There's no half-measures, either, as the platform stages are intricate, and full of traps, while the shooting stages are fast, hectic and full of enemies and their bullets. I admit I wasn't expecting much from a Mega CD game licensed from a long-forgotten OAV and developed by Wolfteam, but Devastator was a really pleasant surprise.

I have no idea what the anime is about, but the developers haven't let it hamper them thematically in any way, as there's stages in cities, deserts, jungles, some kind of incredibly enormous space/hell mansion and so on. The monsters mostly seem to be the same for all the platform stages, though each has unique traps and other elements, while the enemies in the shooting stages seem to be different every time. The bosses in both types of stages are great, too, being massive, detailed sprites, with attack patterns that are fun to learn.

Not only does it play really well, with the difficulty level balanced just right, hard enough to be satisfying and easy enough to avoid frustration, but it also looks and sounds great. It's not just a case of a Mega Drive game being dumped onto CD so they could shoehorn in some FMVs, the Mega CD's strengths are really put on display here, with lots of colours, amazing CD quality music, and even the occasional bit of sprite scaling! (Sprite scaling is always very welcome on this blog.)

The Mega CD is a system with more hidden gems than most people think, and Devastator is definitely one of them. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

Cyborg 009 (Mega CD)

So, it's a licenced game based on Shotaro Ishinomori's comic of the same name. But unlike most comic licenced games of the early 90s, rather than being aimed at kids, Cyborg 009's presentation seems to suggest that it's more at nostalgic adults. There's opening credits before the title screen, that, though they don't appear to be a direct recreation of the openings of either Cyborg 009 tv series that had been made at that point, do definitely invoke the feel of 1970s/late 60s Japanese sci-fi/action, and the options screen is styled like an old 1970s TV, with a knob that turns as you go up and down.

The game itself, however is pretty standard for a 90s licence game: it's a platform game where you shoot enemies and collect stuff. It's a pretty high quality one, though. It looks nice, the difficulty is pretty reasonably balanced and it has a nice little gimmick in 009's temporary super-speed ability. Pressing C makes 009 quickly dash forward at high speed, and starting from a few stages in, a fair bit of the level design is based around successfully using this ability in conjunction with jumping to get to higher or further away platforms than can be reached with normal jumps.

Your weapon for most of the game is a beam gun that can only be fired straight ahead, and can be powered up three times (though the only effect of the power ups is that the beam does more damage. Unfortunately, this leads to a (fairly mild) case of the Gradius slippery slope, especially when fighting bosses. Though all the bosses have fairly easy to learn attack patterns, you're still likely to take hits unless you have expertly-honed, lightning fast reflexes, and if you lose a life, you lose your powerups too, meaning that now you have to start the boss fight again, only this time you have to dodge for longer, giving you more chances to mess up. It's far from being the worse case of the problem I've ever seen, but it is a mild irritation. The worst part of it is that it renders the game's progress save option a little less useful, since that starts you at the beginning of the stage in which you saved with the default number of lives and no power-ups.

The game looks and sounds very nice, as previously mentioned, it's very much presented in a retro-Japanese style, but even ignoring that, the graphics are nicely drawn and colourful, and the music fits perfectly. One of the bosses even has a mildly impressive faux-3D effect going on in the background, though it doesn't really come across well in a still screenshot. There's also cutscenes between each stage, and though I'm not a fan of cutscenes as a concept, these are also nicely done. Unlike a lot of Mega CD cutscenes, they're almost full screen (with black borders at the top and bottom for a wide screen effect), as brightly coloured as the in-game graphics and not at all grainy. It seems that rather than using low quality FMV, the developers decided to go with a more extravagant version of the cutscenes seen in various cartridge-based games, like the Valis series or Ninja Gaiden. One little technical oddity though, is that if you're playing the game via an emulator, the voices will be out of sync, presumably due to the lack of loading times.

Cyborg 009 is a pretty fun game, I've never read or watched any version of the original story, so I can't vouch for how faithful an adaptation it is, but if you just want to play a decent Mega CD platformer, it's worth a look.

Yumemi Mystery Mansion (Mega CD)

I remember when the Mega CD first came out in Europe, this game was previewed a lot in magazines. I assume it got so much attention because of the prerendered CG graphics, and the fact that there wasn't anything else like it on the SEGA consoles at that time. Since then it seems to have been forgotten by history. I'd even forgotten about it until recently, when I played it for the first time.
It's an adventure game set in a mansion, that you entered following your sister, who in turn was following a butterfly. You wander about the mansion, seeing it all in first person perspective, and although everything is prerendered, it still moves pretty smoothly, and though the graphics are low-res and very grainy, that only adds to the atmosphere. Atmosphere is by far the game's strongest point. Even though there are no enemies, and there are only (as far as I can tell) two ways to get game over, the game still manages to be creepy just by the strength of the atmosphere it creates, and the bizarre premise in general. The only other characters you meet in the mansion are talking blue butterflies, who are the souls of people trapped in the mansion by its owner, the unseen malefactor referred to as The Hunter. Your objective is to find your sister and get out of the mansion before midnight, at which point you and your sister will join the other residents as butterflies, trapped in the mansion forever.
As there are no enemies in the game, the only things obstructing your escape are the various puzzles in the mansion. Most of the puzzles being of the "find the item/key and use in the right place", made even worse by the fact that you're often given no indication as to where the items will be, and on top of that, some items can be seen from the start of the game, but can only be picked up later in the game when they're actually needed, with no indication that this is the case. I'm slightly ashamed to say that I actually had to resort to consulting gameFAQs for the final puzzle.
Despite all the faults this game has, I still say it's worth playing for the creepy dreamlike atmosphere, especially if you're interested in horror in videogames. It's only an hour or so long, so it's not going to waste too much of your time. The fact that it's so short, coupled with the general lack of gameplay and the fancy graphics does make it seem more like a tech demo than an actual game. It probably would have been more fondly remembered had it been a pack-in with the console than a full price stand alone purchase.
(This game is also known as "Mansion of Hidden Souls")