Aworg (Mega Drive)

Aworg is one of a few games released via download for the short-lived, Japan-only Meganet internet service for the Mega Drive. It stars a cyborg (who, in my eyes, bears a mild resemblence to Megaman X), holding a paper fan in each hand and no weapons. The cyborg flaps the fans to achieve awkward flight, and is charged with the task of collecting three keys in each stage, and then exiting the stage via portal. (The title screen refers to the protagonist as a "hero in the sky", though as far as I can tell, his actions aren't partiularly heroic.)

The stages are full of obstacles, stationary and mobile. There are spikes, orbs, and aggressive floating aliens. The orbs and aliens can be killed, either by use of Aworg's special health-draining attack, by pushing them into spikes, or through repeated headbutts. Pushing enemies is a more complicated affair than it initially sounds, as its done by facing away from your target and flapping. It takes a while to get used to manage doing this and also actually avoiding other obstacles and getting to where you want to be. Headbutting is a more simple affair, being somewhat reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin's charging attack, but since enemies take multiple hits, it's hard to dispatch them without taking damage yourself. Speaking of damage, the game gives the player a different amount of starting health for each stage, presumably in accordance with the stage's difficulty, though I assume that later stages will combine sadistic layouts with austere health rationing.

The game's not what you would call fun to play, and though it's biggest failing is that it's way too hard, it's too hard in a way that dares the player to play again, and try to get a little further. If you in the mood for a vintage masocore experience, Aworg might be a game you'd want to seek out. If not, it definitely isn't. And as for the odd title, I'm assuming that it's some kind of mangled portmanteau of the words "air" and "cyborg"

Fighting Masters (Mega Drive)

Though Fighting Masters' release date came six months after Street Fighter II came along and changed fighting games forever, it seems it was too early for SFII to have has any influence on it. In fact, Fighting Masters looks so old-fashioned that for a long time, I actually dismissed it, assuming it was another unplayable mess along the lines of the infamous Tongue of the Fatman. When my curiosity finally overcame me and i actually played the game, I was pleasantly surprised: Fighting Masters is a pretty fun game that's also totally bizarre in a number of ways.

For starters, there are only two buttons used, along with the d-pad: and attack button and a jump button. As well as the simple control scheme, there are also no combination attacks or special moves in the game: each character only has single strikes and throws, with throws doing massive damage and apparently being the cornerstone of the game.

Each fight has only one round, and they all take place in small arenas with walls at each side. Combatants can be thrown into walls, adding even more damage to that inflicted by the already devastating throws. In single player mode, health is managed in a similar manner to survival modes seen in later fighting games: rather than just getting a full health bar for each stage, your health regenerates at the end of each fight, though it's pretty generous, and you'll often end up with at least as much health as you started with anyway.

Aside from the mechanical eccentricities, the game also contains strangeness in the designs of the fighters. Though there are two human characters: a wrestler and an amazon, I can't imagine anyne ever picking them when they're up against such a menagerie of opponents who all manageto be weird and different, while still managing to adhere, however vaguely, to typical upright humanoid shapes.

There's fairly typical monsters, like a dragon, a griffin-man and a boxing cyclops, as well as a tokusatsu-esque blade monster thing, a stone monster that's just the head of a pharoah with arms and legs sticking out, but best of all is the portly blue monster with several red-nippled breasts hanging in a ring formation around its neck and shoulders.

In summary, Fighting Masters is no rival for what we'd now consider a "proper" fighting game, but it is a lot of fun, thanks in no small part to it's varied set of characters.

Mamono Hunter Yohko: Dai-7 no Keishou (Mega Drive)

You're probably already aware that this game is based on the anime known in english as Devi Hunter Yohko, but I can't say how faithful an adaptation it is, since I've never seen the show. Many years ago I had a poster of it that came with an issue of Animerica, though.

Anyway, the game is, as you'd expect from a 16-bit anime licence, is a platform game. At first glance, it seems pretty generic, but it does have some slightly more subtle qualities in its favour. The biggest is that the stages aren't laid out like a simple left-to-right path with a few enemy shelves, but right from the first stage will have the player being led in every direction (although the downside to this is that the game does also feature a few leaps of faith). Yohko's weapon is pretty interesting too. Though her normal attacks are just sword swings, holding the button down summons an energy ring, which be thrown by releasing the button, after which it comes back, and can be kept around by continuing to hold the attack button.

There is a big problem with the game though: that it's just far too hard to actually enjoy. The first stage goes pretty well, though there is a moment towards the end during which the player has to climb a huge wiggly beanstalk, while being pushed around by strong winds that randomly change direction, but the second stage is where the trouble really starts. The second stage is set in and around a volcano, and for some reason, whether it was a deliberate design decision or just an accident of programming, fire does insane damage to Yohko. Rather than just damaging her once, it constantly causes damage for as long as Yohko is in contact with it. This makes the stage itself pretty hard, but the boss is an insane chore, since not only does he breath fire across the ground, but also leaps around willy-nilly, and touching him drains half of Yohko's health. I did manage to struggle through and eventually get all the way to the start of stage 4, but no further.

It's really a shame that the game is so insanely hard, as mechanically, it's not too bad. Yohko is fun to control, killing enemies and cancelling their shots with the sword and ring is nice and satisfying, and there is some cool ideas in the stage designs, too. But the difficulty kills it, the game doesn't feel challenging as much as it just feels unfair. Don't bother playing it.

Dahna: Megami Tanjou (Mega Drive)

I think "Megami Tanjou" means "birth of the goddess", but I'm not toally sure on that. But anyway, this is a violent fantasy-themed platform game, in which you play a white-robed swordswoman, who we might guess from the title, might be named Dahna and could possibly either be a goddess or may become a goddess in the future. There's cutscenes explaininng the story, but of course, they're all in Japanese so I don' know what

anyone is saying in them. It doesn't matter!
The game starts with a village under attack by an evil wizard and his minions. They're chasing people with swords, burning down buildings and causing all kinds of ruckus, until our heroine rides in. On the back of an ogre. Yeah, the game starts with a cool bit of spectacle, as you control the ogre, smashing the puny humans with swipes of your giant claws, or just jumping on them. This is made even cooler by the game's liberal use of gore: though it's not in the same league as Splatterhouse 2 or anything, it still throws about a lot of red stuff for a platform game released in 1991.
After a couple of minutes, the evil wizard shows up to banish your ogre away, leaving only Dahna and her sword. In later parts of the game, you also get to ride a horse and a griffin! There might be more things to

ride later than that, I don't know. I don't know because the game is really, brutally hard. You only get a small life bar and no lives (I must shamefully admit that I had to make use of the 5 continues the game provides to play enough of it to write about), and not only are life-restoring items painfully rare, but you don't even heal between stages! The one small mercy the game provides is that at 100,000 and 200,000 points, your life bar not only fills, but extends too! If only it did this at 300,000 too I might have survived another stage or two. It's not only the health situation that will kill you, but there are also segments with collapsing platforms and bottomless pits, which wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that controlling Dahna's jumps feels so bizarre and unnatural. I can't really describe in words the bizarre way that precise jumps both look and feel in this game, but it makes it a lot harder to do them.
There are positives to the game, and they're mostly aesthetic. Although the graphics are fairly simple and the sprites small, everything is still pretty well drawn, and the characters do manage to convey a certain amount of personality with what they've got. It's also obvious that the developers of the game were fans of 80s live
action fantasy films, as the game has a strong aesthetic in general that radiates a certain atmosphere similar in feel to films like the Deathstalker series, and others of that slightly grimy, low budget ilk.
The atmosphere and personality the game has unfortunately aren't enough to get around the brutal, ooften unfar difficulty, though, and I can't really recommend playing this one. And I definitely don't recommend paying the high prices the game fetches online, either.

Columns III: Revenge of Columns (Mega Drive)

Everybody's played Columns, right? It was on the Megagames compilation cartridge that came with my (and probably a lot of other people's) Mega Drive. Also, it's not even the first time it's come up here, as I wrote about a really pointless and rubbish version of it that was featured on the Game Gear 4-in-1 cart.
Anyway, this is one of the lesser-known sequels to Columns. For some reason, the second game didn't get a home port until years later, on the Saturn as part of the Japan-only Columns Arcade Collection. As a result, I've never played that game.
Like most mid-90s puzzle games, this one focuses on versus play, rather than single player survival. In fact, it has no such traditional mode, with the only single player mde being against CPU opponents. There's also versus modes available for up to four players! Another strange thing about Columns III is that there's no scoring at all.
Unlike most versus puzzle games, there's no automatic attack inflicted on your opponent when you do well, but rather, there are two numbers beside your pit that increase as you clear gems. Clearing more gems in one go or scoring chains makes the numbers go up significantly faster.
The large blue number goes up for each individual jewel cleared, plus bonuses when applicable. It maxes out at thirty, and it's your main method of attack. When you press C, for every ten points on this meter, the bottom of the opponent's pit will rise up one square. Doing this attack also has the side effect of trashing the set of jewels the opponent is currently placing, adding an extra bit of strategy to it.
The smaller white number beneath it goes up by one for every set of jewels you clear, and each time it reaches a multiple of twenty, a flashing magic gem appears. These work very differently to how they work in the original game, being split into three parts: a square, and two triangles, one pointing up, the other down. You only get to land one of the three, and each has a different function. The upwards pointing triangle raises the opponent's floor two squares, the downwards one powers your own floor significantly (assuming you have been on the receiving end of your opponent's attacks), and the square has the traditional function of erasing all of whatever colour it lands on.
You'll also recieve items for winning the first few battles in single player mode, which you should really try to save until the last boss.
Columns III is a pretty good game. Definitely a lot more interesting than the original, which I've always found pretty boring, despite its excellent visual and aural presentation. Oddly enough, this game is somewhat lacking in those areas compared to its progenitor, looking and sounding a fair bit cheaper in comparision. Still, it's definitely worth playing.
PS. I've recently revived my long forgotten tumblr account, so if you use tumblr, you should go and follow me and make me feel popular.
PPS. The next post on this blog will be the 100th! Should I do something special? Or just make it a regular post?

Mystical Fighter (Mega Drive)

This game has so many Japanese stereotypes, you'd think it was a British game, made for the Commodore 64 during the 80s ninja/martial arts craze. But it is, as far as I can tell, an actual Japanese game, made in Japan and everything.
The enemies are stereotypical Japanese things like samurai, running ninjas, sumo wrestlers, kabukimono, and so on. The player character is some sort of kabuki/noh/priest guy (oh dear my ignorance is showing). Even the health pick ups are small platters of sushi!
Other than these things, though, it's a mediocre and generic beat em up, into which not a lot of imagination has gone. There isn't even named player characters, just that one guy, and player two has to be a pallette swapped version of him. Jumping and rolling across the ground use the same sprites, as do the sliding/flying kicks that your guy does when you prress attack while rolling or jumping. There's also a magic system that works in exactly the same manner as in Golden Axe. All the scrolls you're carrying are used up at once when you press the magic button, and more scrolls causing a more powerful attack. One nice little thing I liked though, was that you get a whole three different throws to chuck enemies about with! One has your guy spinning around then flinging the enemy in one direction in a mildly amusing manner, another has you lifting enemies above your head and chucking them (this one is especially satisfying at the liff's edge in stage 2) and the third has you leaping into the air and smashing your victim into the ground. Choosing between the first two throws is a matter of how quickly you press the attack button after grabbing the opponent, and the third is done by jumping and pressing attack after grabbing.
There's not really much reason to recommend this game to anyone, but there's no reason to avoid it, either. It's not especially excellent in any way, and it doesn't look much nicer than most Master System games, but it's not terrible to play or anything.
This game is also known as Maou Renjishi

Adventurous Boy (Mega Drive)

I really wanted this game to be good. I like pirate games, I like the Mega Drive, and I like shooting games.
You can probably tell from the screenshots that it's a blatant rip-off of Super Fantasy Zone, with similar stages, a similar visual style and music that sounds like weird cover versions of the music from SFZ. Unlike Super Fantasy Zone, though, Adventurous Boy is terrible.
It might lure you into thinking it might be a fun game, with its okay graphics, and its nice, easy-going first stage, but this game is evil!
The first hint of danger is your character's default flying speed: really really slow. Luckily, a shop will appear once you've collected some money (see? Super Fantasy Zone!), and you can buy some bigger wings to go faster. And by "can", I mean "must": the game is no fun at all to play with the default speed, and you'll probably die very quickly too. You should also buy the Track Missiles, since they also make things a lot easier.
Like in that other, more famous game, there are ten enemy generators in each stage, and when they've all been destroyed, the boss will appear.
This is where the game shows its true colours. If you manage to kill the boss without losing a life, then everything will be fine, you'll go onto the next stage and a good time will be had by all (except the boss, obviously). If you get killed during the boss fight, you'll then experience the harshest and most frustrating case of "Gradius Syndrome" I've ever seen. You'll be back to your default speed, which is a lot slower than the speed at which the bosses move. So slow is your default speed, that even though this game gives you a few hit-points per life, if you get touched by the boss, you won't be able to move fast enough to get away before losing a life. And when you respawn, the boss will likely still be near where you died, if not still right on top of that spot, and you'll die again.
By setting the difficulty level to easy and putting the amount of starting lives to the maximum, I've managed to get as far as the third boss. I won't be trying again to get any further.
I love hard shooting games, but this game isn't hard as much as it is broken and unfair. And the way in which this difficulty arises makes me think it wasn't even intentional, which seems like a real shame. Those chinese guys thought they were putting out a nice, fun (though unoriginal) shooter, but because of a couple of little flaws, it's completely ruined.

Dyna Brothers (Mega Drive)

So, I've been having one of those dilemmas I sometimes have where I think the games I'm posting about aren't obscure enough. But I think this one is pretty unknown.
It's a strategy game about breeding dinosaurs to kill aliens. You play as some kind of godlike figure, looking on from the sky. At the start of a stage, there's an egg-altar-thing on the field and also a UFO. You can make eggs for various kinds of dinosaur come out of the egg-altar-thing, and the CPU can make eggs for various kinds of alien come out of the UFO. The aim of each stage is to have your dinosaurs eat all the aliens before the aliens eat all the dinosaurs. You also have various other powers at your disposal: you can make it rain around your dinosaurs, and you can create small localised disasters, such as droughts, floods and meteor impacts.
To do all this stuff uses up points. You start each stage with 1000 points, and you get more whenever your dinosaurs eat anything, so the first few minutes of a typical stage will be spent hatching a lot of herbivore eggs and making it rain around said herbivores so they have lots of grass to eat. Eventually, you'll have enough herbivores that they'll start laying eggs automatically and you won't have to worry about them much unless the aliens start killing them off.
To fight against the aliens, you need to hatch carnivores and oviraptors. Obviously, they eat live aliens and eggs, respectively.
There are some other things you need to be aware of, like the fact that all of your dinosaurs need grass to walk on or they'll quickly die, but those are the basics.
As for whether or not the game is any good; it is! I've played a few hours of it, and I like it a lot! I'm just hoping it doesn't do the usual strategy game thing where suddenly there's a stage that's insanely hard and can only be beaten by following a specific strategy to the letter.
The semi-passive style of play is nice, though. The dinosaurs will mostly go about their jobs automatically without you needing to tell them where to go all the time, which leaves you to focus on making more dinosaurs when they're needed and your various other tactical responsibilities.
There's no english version of the game, and there's very little written about it in english on the internet, either, but someone's uploaded a lot of play videos to youtube, and if you watch one or two of those, you'll easily work out how to play (and also win).
This game also has a sequel, which I haven't played yet, but I am looking forward to when I get round to it.
Now my only problem is that I'm starting to worry that I've been posting too many positive reviews! I can't win!

Kolobok Piramida (Mega Drive)

With some of the games I've recently posted about, I feel like I've sold out a tiny bit, and that they weren't quite obscure enough to meet the original purpose of this blog. So now, I am reviewing a Russian Mega Drive bootleg.
With a tiny bit of research, I learned that it is actually a hack of a homebrew game, also Russian, called Uwol: Quest for Money, which was itself a remake of an old spanish ZX Spectrum game.
Anyway, in the game, you play as a small bearlike thing, and you collect coins in small, one-screen stages. There's a Darius-esque pyramid of these stages, and when you get to the bottom of te pyramid, you get sent back to the top, able to choose a different route down. I wonder if anything special happens if you complete every stage on a single run?
The cool gimmick of the game is that all the stages loop horizontally (but not vertically: if you fall off the bottom of the screen, you die). This is used cleverly in the stage designs, with most stages requiring the player to jump across the "gap" to reach higher parts of the stage.
Obviously, there are enemies in the stages too. Get hit twice and you die, though the first time you get hit, a t-shirt will appear at a random place on the screen, which will let you get that hit back. If you spend too long in a level, the music changes and a ghost appears to chase you round.
The game's a lot of fun to play, and certainly a lot better than the other Russian MD bootlegs I've played so far. It looks okay, and the music is really catchy, too. It's definitely worth hunting down and playing, though maybe you'd rather play the original homebrew, rather than the pirate hack of it?

Lion King 3 (Mega Drive)

In case you haven't worked it out from the title, this game is a chinese bootleg. It's one of the high quality ones, though. There's a more well known one called The Lion King 2 as well, and amazingly, this isn't just the same game with a different title screen!
It's a platform game, with a mix of graphics taken from the official Lion King game, a few from other games, such as Donkey Kong Country and Aladdin, plus some original graphics.
Obviously, you play as Simba, but you get to choose at the start of the game whether you play as cub or adult Simba. Who would ever pick cub Simba? It seems every Lion King game does this differently: The original, official game follows the plot of the movie, and you play the first few levels as a cub, becoming adult Simba later on and The Lion King 2 has a Mario-style power up that turns you into adult Simba until you take a hit.
Seems I'm typing "Simba" a lot in this review.
Anyway, although it's just a generic platform game with Simba as the playable character, it's a lot of fun. Jumping around the stages clawing other animals to death (especially birds. for some reason, there seems to be a ton of different bird enemies, one of which is Iago the parrot from Aladdin with a crazy new colour scheme) or maybe defeating them with Simba's new psychic wave attack (no, really). There is just one main flaw; there are various items (they change depending on the stage) that you're supposed to jump, grab and swing from. The problem is, the collision detection for them is awful, and a lot of the time Simba will just fall straight past them. There are several points in the game where you'll have to do several of these in a row, all above a bottomless pit. If you have the patience to get past these parts, though, they don't completely ruin the rest of the game. It's just a shame that such a nice game has such a terrible flaw.
As for sound, at least some of the music is ripped, being Mega Drivey renditions of songs from the Lion King such as The Circle of Life and I Just Can't Wait to be King (Speaking of which, the awful grab-swing things in this are somewhat reminiscent of the Just Can't Wait to be King stage in the original, although that stage did a better job of ruining the game, since it was a whole stage of stupid swingy jumps, and it was only the second stage at that, so anyone without saintlike patience would just have to miss most of the game.), the rest of the music being either original, or ripped from a source with which I am not familiar. The sound effects are okay, too. nothing spectacular. But there is a kind of flying beetle that makes monkey noises, and the noise Simba makes when he gets hit sounds a lot like he's saying "Quahoon!", the made up swear word that Jack Tenrec says in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs/Xenozoic Tales.
So if you have a bit of patience and are interested in the crazy world of chinese bootleg games, this is one of the better ones that I know of, and is definitely worth playing.
One last thing, there's a white tiger in the intro. No tigers of any kind have shown up in the game so far, although I haven't been able to complete it yet (a later stage taking place in the clouds has a particularly brutal set of swing-jumps), it would be nice if there is some later on.

Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel (Mega Drive)

Before the Fire Pro series came along in the early 1990s*, wrestling games were kind of awful. They'd be stiff, awkward affairs in which victory seemed to be down to luck as much as skill. I was surprised, then, to play this game and find out it's actually pretty great!
It's based on (and starring) real-life wrestler Cutie Suzuki (information you may have already gleaned from the title), though all the other wrestlers in the game are fictional. I assume someone at Asmik is a metal fan, since one of the characters is named "Helloween I. Sato" and another "Megadeath Saito". It's actually the second wrestling game on a Sega console that I know of to be based around a real-life female wrestler (the other one being "Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto" for the Master System, which was released as generic old "Pro Wrestling" in the west, as well as having all the characters turned into men. Booo.). Nowadays there aren't any, which is a shame. A game based around the Ice Ribbon or Shimmer promotions would probably be a day-one purchase for me. OH WELL.
Anyway, as I said at the start of the review, the game is a lot better than I was expecting. In single player mode, you pick a wrestler** and then go through a series of tournaments and leagues, winning trophies until you get to the final "Grand Champion" tournament. Well, I assume it's the final one. It's as far as I've been able to get so far, anyway.
During the match, you can do typical wrestling attacks and moves, including jumping onto a downed opponent from the top rope, which can even be done if your opponent is lying on the floor outside the ring! You have to be pretty quick to do it, but it looks awesome, does tons of damage andis incredibly satisfying. The wrestlers' health is shown by their portraits at the top of the screen: the less happy they look, the closer they are to losing the match, especially if they're shaking. When your opponent is looking their most unhappy, the music will change to a faster and more dramatic tune, and if you can get a pin at this point, you've pretty much won the match.
There's even a primitive form of running commentary, but only in text form. In the corner of the screen, a relatively normal looking guy, accompanied by one of his guest hosts (including a dinosaur, Colonel Sanders and a guy who speaks in nonsensical engrish) will constantly be talking, all in japanese unfortunately.
In summary, this is a really fun and cool game that's a lot better than I was expecting and definitely a lot better than most of it's contempories in the genre.

*Although the Fire Pro series started in 1989, it didn't really kick off until the SNES games a few years later (in my opinion).
**PROTIP: Press C to see their names. Why aren't they displayed by default? Who knows?

Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII (Mega Drive)

There are a lot of unlicenced fighting games. There was a fairly lengthy article/review
round up of a bunch of NES ones on the old insertcredit site. As a subgenre, it doesn't have
a great track record. With the exception on Kart Fighter on the NES, most of the ones I've
played have been practically unplayable. Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII shuns this long held
tradition, though, by actually being fairly fun.
You know it's going to be good when you see the intro (or, if like me, you are impatient and
skipped theintro, when you see the character select screen): The roster is made up of
characters from 6 different games, plus real life! Really! The whole roster is Ryu (Street
Fighter), Geese Howard (Fatal Fury), Kyo Kusanagi (King of Fighters), Goku (Dragonball Z),
Ryo Sakazaki (Art of Fighting), Cyclops (X-Men) and real life human beings Michael Jordan
and Mohammed Ali! I don't know if there's any last boss or endings or anything, because I'm
rubbish and can only win 2 or 3 fights. I'm going to assume there aren't any, though.
All the fictional characters are ripped straight from their respective games, while the two
sportsmen are semi-original sprites. Semi-original as while they are obviously newly drawn
for this game, all their animations are just traced over Lucky Glauber and Heavy-D from King
of Fighters 94's American Sports team.
Some of the stages look familiar too, though I can't tell if they're all stolen or just some
of them. Or if they're ripped directly from their original games or just copied by sight.
One or two also have a similar graphical style to backgrounds seen in other Chinese Mega
Drive games, like Shui Hu Feng Zhuan for example. Some of them are animated though, which is
a nice bit of quality for a bootleg game.
As for how the game plays, it's alright. The game only uses one punch and one kick button,
the characters all have both specials and supers (which is extra cool, since most official
fighting games on the mega drive didn't have supers!).
The specials and supers don't always work when you want them to, though. And sometimes they'll just happen of their own accord, too. I hate to lower my standards for a certain
kind of game, but in this case, i'm going to say it works well enough for what it is.
Even with its flaws, it's still leagues ahead of your typical unlicenced fighting game, plus
the gimmick of having a bunch of heroes, a villain and two sportsmen in the same game is a
nice novelty too.
As for sound, it's pretty good. No horrible tortures of the MD's sound chip to make your
ears bleed, and a fair bit of speech, too. The one that sticks out most being cyclops'
famous "OPTIC BLAST!". Amusingly (and inexplicably), the music for Ryu's stage is the Mighty
Morph'n Power Rangers theme.
One last thing: If you want to play this, you'll probably have to resort to a rom. There was
a guy selling actual cartridges of this and a bunch of other unlicenced Mega Drive games on
ebay, but he got shut down, proving yet again that copyright lawyers are nothing more than
that robot putting up the "NO FUN ALLOWED" sign from that old Sonic comic.

Uzu Keobukseon (Mega Drive)

This is a korean vetical shooter. It's not very good, though. I'm only posting about it because of it's obscurity.

Here's an animated gif of the intro. I can't read korean, but going by the pictures it's obvious this game is about two midget spacemen on a flying viking ship going to space to fight a demonic PC.

Here's a picture of the first boss. The boss fights look nicer than the rest of the game, being in space. I guess a no-prize explanation for this could be that the bosses are too big to live in the atmosphere/gravitational pull of a planet, so they just float about space and attack you while you're... commuting from one planet to the next.
Most of the stuff at the side of the screen here is pretty obvious, but the number next to the red text is how many times you have to hit the boss until it dies, and the green text with the red speck thing next to it tells you which weapon you're using. The red speck represents the defalut weapon, which is a regular old 3-way shot, that turns into a 5-way, 6-way etc. shot when powered up, but pressing C lets you switch to a different shot, that shoots one bullet in front of you, and one bullet straight out to the left and right of you. This second weapon is weaker and slower than the default, which itself isn't all that great, either. The rubbish weak weapon, coupled with the really fast moving enemies make this game really hard. it took me a few attempts to get past the first stage, but then, that could just be me being bad at games. Either way, the challenge isn't worth persevering through; the game is slow, unoriginal, ugly and boring.
Ugly is especially true. Look at this screenshot from the second stage. It's very brown, isn't it? The first stage is too, with a lot of murky dark green thrown in too. In summary, don't play this game. It is bad.

Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan (Mega Drive)

This is a review of the Mega Drive game, "Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan", and as the ROM isn't yet widely available, it might even be the first ever English-language review of it. Exciting, eh?
Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title, and the obscurity of the game, it's Chinese. I can't read any Chinese at all, so I can't tell you anything about the plot of this game, or even the names of its characters. I can tell you that it was made in 1999, by someone called "Never Ending Soft Team", though.
It seems absurd to have gone so long in a review of a game without actually talking about the game, so I will.
It's a beat em up, and at first glance, doesn't seem like anything special, with rubbish animation, and various things blatantly nicked from other beat em ups. I thought this too, the first time I played it, until I finished playing, and found that well over an hour had passed without my noticing.
I suppose I should get the bad things out of the way first, then.
For a start, it isn't very original. There are three characters to pick from, Average Shonen Guy, Lady Weakbutfast, and Brave Sir Tank, and the controls are like almost every other MD beat em up, with A being the "special", B being "attack, and C being "jump". The animation, particularly on the player characters is awful. The large food and treasure items can be cut up into smaller chunks, in exactly the same manner as in Capcom's "Knights of the Round", and the poses your characters do when they activate their special attack is the exact same pose that the characters in Golden Axe in the same situation. To top it all off, the enemies'death cries seem to have been directly ripped from Streets of Rage.
Despite all these faults though, this is still a great game. Although poorly animated, each sprite is quite detailed, and all have character and charm, from the giant whip-weilding, slightly nordic-looking woman, to the gut-bearing fat arabian guy. The special attacks, rather than having one per character, are instead represented by different collectible items, each containing a different spell, and of which there are at least 5 varieties. The player can hold 5 of these items at a time, which sounds like a lot, making the game too easy, but this is where the game's greatest strength comes in - balance. You get a lot of magic items, but there are always a lot of enemies on screen, with very few calm moments in which to catch one's breath. Similarly, the game is seemingly over-generous with extra lives, giving one every 50,000 points, but again, the excellent balance saves it, at by the end of each level, you're more than likely to be down to your last life, adding extra drama and desperation as you struggle to beat the boss with your last few pixels of life, knowing that if you can just make it, the end of level bonus will take you to your next extra life, and you'll be able to rest easy again.
In conclusion, then, Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan is a great game, that hopefully, over time, will find itself crawling out of absolute obscurity, and into semi-obscurity, because, let's be honest, it's never going to be fammous, is it?

(originally posted on selectbutton.net on 3rd july 2007)