Jerry Glanville's Pigskin Footbrawl (Mega Drive)

Before I actually start talking about this game, I want to talk about its title. Say it out loud: "Jerry Glanville's Pigskin Footbrawl", and there's something somewhat satisfying in the way it flows. So much so, that for years, I'd assumed that Jerry Glanville was a fictional character, invented purely for the sound of his name, but apparently, he's some kind of sporting multiclasser, having been an American football player as well as a driver in two kinds of car racing. Anyway, it's a port of an arcade game that didn't feature any license, but getting sportsmen's names in titles was a big strategy for early Mega Drive games in the US, so I guess Jerry was the only player they could get who would put his name on this incredibly tenuous adaptataion of the sport.

It's played in a vaguely belt scrolly kind of way, on pitches littered with various objects and hazards. An odd quirk compared to most team sport games is that you control the same player for the entire match, which, since the camera follows the balls, means that you spend a lot of the time offscreen trying to catch up. You do have one little sliver of control over your teammates, however: when you press the punch button, everyone on your team throws a punch at once. Obviously, the main aim is to get the ball to your opponent's end of the pitch, scoring seven points when you do. There's also a "possession" meter that slowly fills while a member of your team has the ball, and if it's full when you score, you get an extra point.

Mostly, this is a pretty fun game to play, with only two major problems: there is both too much and too little of it. Too much because the shortest a single match can be is ten minutes, plus all the intermissions and so on whenever anyone scores and at the end of each quarter. Too little because it's incredibly bare bones: there are only two teams, "Red" and "Blue", and single player mode consists of playing one game as the blue team against the red team. There's no season or career or anything to be found here. There are two pitches, though: the first half of the game takes place in a field, and the second half in a dungeon.

Pigskin Footbrawl is an okay game, but it's really only worth your time if you have at least one friend who's very enthusiastic about playing lots of long matches in a sports game where every match features the exact same teams playing in the exact same venue, forever.

Dragon's Revenge (Mega Drive)

So, you might remember a while back, when I reviewed Jaki Crush, the sequel to Devil Crush. Well, in a convoluted sort of way, Dragon's Revenge is also the sequel to Devil Crush. You see, it was Tengen who brought the Mega Drive port of Devil Crush to the west, and while they did so, they also changed the name to Dragon's Fury, and removed pentagrams, coffins, crosses and various other things, so as to avoid offending any 17th century witchfinders that might have bought a copy for their kids. Despite all that, the sheer quality of the game shone through and it was enough of a hit for Tengen to make this weird semi-official psuedo-sequel to their bowdlerisation of someone else's game.

So, Dragon's Revenge takes a lot from its forbear: a three screen high main table, various bonus stages, even things like having a dragon's head on the bottom screen, a woman's face in the middle and a skull on the top. Though the woman and the skull are pretty different to the ones in the first game. The woman was a regular old pixel art sprite in the first game, and gradually turned into a snake monster as you did stuff, but now she's made up of digitised photos of a real woman's face, and as you do stuff, she wakes up and starts talking and going "ooh!" like she's in a carry on film, then she kind of floats around the table at random for some reason too. The skull is still pretty much the same as it was before, functionally speaking (it's a portal to a bonus stage), but it does look like a cool demon goat skull, so that's nice.

The bonus stages are a lot like the ones in Devil Crush, too: you hit either a big monster or lots of little monsters with your ball to kill them. None of them feel as fun though, and they all have a very cheesy 80s fantasy novel cover look to them, too. I guess the one where a bunch of little goblin men stand on a waterfall and throw their endlessly-regenerating heads down the screen is funny, though. It seems that there's some kind of plot business going on regarding the bonus stages, too, as whenever you exit one, you're shown a screen where a witch and some monsters loom over a bunch of orbs (if you successfully complete one of the bonus stages, which seems to take forever, the orbs are revealed to have generic fantasy heroes trapped inside them).

You can describe a lot of things in Dragon's Revenge as being "like Devil Crush, but inferior", which probably stems from its cash-in, almost mockbuster origins. It's uglier, less fun to play and the music isn't as good, and to top it all off, it really doesn't have an identity of its own. I could go on and on listing every little thing I didn't like about it, but that wouldn't be interesting for me to write, or for you to read. I don't recommend you play it, except out of grim curiosity. Play any of the actual Crush games instead, or even Kyuutenkai Fantastic Pinball, which, other than the name and the cute theme, is essentially a fourth (fifth?) Crush game.

Wiz n Liz (Mega Drive)

Videogames magazines of the early to mid 1990s had something of a strange vendetta against platform games. Even unquestioned classics like Gunstar Heroes, Contra Hard Corps and Alien Soldier would get average-at-best reviews from a lot of magazines, simply for looking like platform games. Obviously, this meant that there were great games that fell by the wayside, and since they never had the series or developer associations that those games had, they never gained the renown they deserved. Wiz n Liz is one such game.

Though it's a UK-developed game that was only ever released on home systems, it could honestly stand up alongside the best single player arcade games, as it is purely about going fast and scoring points. I'd even go as far as to say that with a different aesthetic, the game's design could totally be used to make a perfect Sonic arcade game! The main meat of the game is running arond the stages, which are only a few screens across, rollercoaster-like in design and looping (kind of like the multiplayer stages in Sonic 3), where you collect rabbits, which turn into letters. The first task of each stage is to collect the letters to spell a word at the top of the screen, once that's done, you just have to collect the rest of the rabbits (who now turn into clocks, fruit, and stars, all of which I'll explain shortly) and go to the exit as fast as possible, you have to do two or three rounds of this per stage, depending on the difficulty level. There's no enemies, other than very easy bossfights that occur every eight stages, and your only threat is the time limit.

You start the game with two minutes, and your remaining time carries over from stage to stage. When it runs out, you lose a life, but there are various ways to claw back the seconds. The main two are the clocks that the rabbits drop during the stages, as each one will give you three seconds back at the end of the round, and a glowing time orb worth thirty seconds that appears in a random place on the stage whenever you get down to lesst than ten seconds left on the clock. Now that the clocks have been explained, I should do the other two items, right?

The stars don't really do anything on their own, other than give you points, but with the aid of certain fruits and vegetables, they can do a lot more! The fruits and veg, you see, are spell components, and between stages, you put two of the food items in your posession into a cauldron to get various different effects. This is where the game hides and almost Bubble Bobblian level of secret stuff: as well as item shops where you can spend you hard-won stars on more fruit, extra lives and a few more precious seconds, there's at least three mini-games that can be played for more points, level skips, a fake game over screen and various other weird things. Though obviously, a player who wanted to maximise their score would go online to look up a list of all the recipes for the most useful spells, I would honeslty advise against doing this, as there's a lot of fun to be had in getting a different surprise between every stage, and of course, the world seems a lot bigger when you don't know exactly how much there is in it, right?

Obviously, Wiz n Liz is a game I completely recommend you go and play as soon as possible. It really is a double shame that it never got an arcade release back when it came out, and that it doesn't have the cultural cache to ever get any kind of remake or rerelease on modern consoles. It's a game that excels in pretty much every department and deserves to be much more famous than it is.

Kid Chameleon (Mega Drive)

It's been said many times that Sonic the Hedgehog was SEGA's answer to Mario. This isn't just true on the basic level of being a company mascot, but from the way Sonic's first game was designed, to his brash, rebellious personality made him different to Mario, and by extension, made SEGA different to Nintendo. Kid Chameleon can also be said to be SEGA's answer to Mario, especially Super Mario Bros. 3, a game which saw Mario take on various different forms as the game went on.

While Sonic's games were almost totally different to Mario's, other than being platform games, Kid Chameleon is very similar to SMB3 in a number of ways: a main character who transforms, blocks containing power-ups that are broken from below and so on. But philosophically, Kid Chameleon shows a different set of ideas to Nintendo's game. Super Mario Bros. 3 is designed like a game adults think children should enjoy, while Kid Chameleon feels as if a ten-to-thirteen year old had played SMB3, and designed their own heavily-inspired game in an exercise book stolen from school, and then somehow their drawings had become an actual game. (I'd like to note that I don't mean to disparage either game here. They're both classics, of course.)

As you play Kid Chameleon, you can hear that kid's voice saying "Mario changing into a raccoon or a frog is okay, but what if you were a badass dude in shades, and you could turn into a knight or a samurai?", and then of course, the more you play, the further the ideas get from the family-friendly Nintendo fare: "What if you were a nazi tank in hell that shot skulls? And then you turned into Jason Voorhies and got chased around by giant skulls that scream 'DIE!' at you?". The structure of the game feels faily adolescent, too. The stages are huge, and full of secrets. Secret areas, invisible power-ups, and of course, secret exits that lead to extra secret stages.

I don't really know how to end this piece, since Kid Chameleon is already a pretty well-known game, and most people reading this will have probably played it at some point and already formed an opinion on it. I guess there's this anecdote: when I was a very young child, someone told me they were playing this game, and that it was so long and hard, they might not live long enough to ever finish it. Obviously, I suggested that they have it put into their coffin so that they could continue playing it in the afterlife. I was a very practically-minded child, I'm sure you'll agree.

Legend of Galahad (Mega Drive)

The Legend of Galahad is a port of an Amiga game called Leander, and I'm reviewing the port rather than the original for two reasons: firstly, it's the version I remember seeing in magazines as a kid, and secondly, I'm going to assume that the original has some terrible control scheme where jump is mapped to up on the joystick, and I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense. Anyway, it's clearly a British attempt at making a Monster World-esque action platformer, andin some ways, it's a pretty good attempt. In other ways, not so much. Unfortunately, it's the important parts it messes up on.

I'll start on the positives, and specifically on the biggest positives: this is an incredible-looking game. It's got that Roger Dean-inspired airbrushed look that a lot of the higer-profile Amiga games had, and it's very effective. The world in which its set is a kind of mix of northern Europe, with a few mildly stereotypical asian influences thrown in, as well as the aforementioned prog rock album cover style. It feels like the entire game is set among the mountaintops, and the graphics do an amazing job of evoking that, to the extent that you can almost feel the fresh, cold air in your lungs, even in the stuffy humid heat of a British summer (the conditions under which I was playing this game). Another positive is that Galahad himself controls really well. Walking, jumping and attacking all feel good, and he swings his sword as fast as you push the button.

Okay, so then there's the negatives, first of which being that the combat doesn't feel very good at all. Almost every enemy takes multiple hits to kill, and most of them won't make any acknowledgement that you're hitting them: they'll just keep walking back and forth while you impotntly slash at them with your sword. Furthermore, there's other enemies with certain weak spots, that are often in positions that makes them impossible to hurt without taking damage yourself, and example being the giant bugs that appear in some of the cave segments. An even bigger crime is that the rules of combat are applied inconsistently: every few stages, there'll be a dragon. The dragons aren't bosses in the traditional sense, they aren't at the end of stages or anything, though they are unique and they do appear in places that mean they have to be defeated before you can get past them. The problem is that a single hit from a dragon will take a life from you, no matter how much health you have remaining. A dragon can just poke you with the end of its nose and you lose a life straight away. It feels unfair, and it's just a terrible design decision.

The other big negative is the stage design. I've already mentioned that some enemies are placed in positions that make taking damage inevitable, but there's other things too. Like the massive amount of leaps of faith there are: you're often asked to blindly jump into the ether, without any way of knowing what traps await, or where they are. There's also a certain kind of trap that drops a heavy object on the player, killing them instantly. The problem is that its effective hitbox is its entire sprite, so if it's already fallen and you walk into the side of it, you lose a life. Again, lots of terrible, unfair design decisions.

It's easy to see why Galahad (or rather, Leander) would have been a big deal on the Amiga, where there weren't a lot of Japanese-inspired action game, especially ones with such great production values. But on the Mega Drive, the early 90s home of arcade ports? It's got a lot of stiff competition, against which it never had a hope of standing up.

Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior (Mega Drive)

Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior (also known as Barver Battle Saga: Tai Kong Zhan Shi and Final Fantasy) is an unlicensed RPG, released originally in Chinese, translated into Russian (and re-titled Final Fantasy) by pirates and later fan-translated into English. Though accounts of the Russian translation say it's terrible to the point of possibly being machine translated, their renaming of it is actually pretty apt: there's a lot in this game that would make the casual observer think they were looking at an actual lost game in Squaresoft's series.

Before you even get to the title screen, the intro tells us that there was an ancient schism between opposing factions in favour of technology and magic, and that the world is kept in balance by four temples, each in different kingdoms, and each representing one of the four classical elements. So pretty much the scenario seen in the first five Final Fantasies. Then, when you actually start playing the game, you'll see that the battle system is (as far as I can tell) identical to Square's Active Time Battle system, and when you start getting magic, the spells can be equipped to whichever character you like, and you can buy multiples of each spell to give to each character on your party if you like, kind of like a simpler version of Final Fantasy VII's materia system (though to Brave Battle Saga's credit, it does predate that game by a year). On the plus side, it's definitely one of the better-looking RPGs on the Mega Drive, probably down to trying to copy the kind of highly-detailed spritework seen in Square's SNES RPGs.

Upon the unoriginal foundation laid by the intro, the game's  plot doesn't really get any more interesting: there's runaway princesses, demons kidnapping people and trying to wreck the elemental temples, and all the other incredibly cliched RPG stuff. Chinese RPGs on PC have a reputation for being great, romantic epic adventures, but unfortunately, in this case, the developers seem to have been content to ape typical Japanese RPG tropes.

Unfortunately, thogh it's a clear copy of Square's games on a superficial level, it doen't have anywhere near the same kind of quality in scenario writing and game design, being as it is one of the most linear RPGs I've ever played. You're totally unable to to do anything or go anywhere except straight forward to the next plot destination, which makes it even more frustrating that sometimes you're arbitrarily blocked from advancing until you've spoken to the right people in the right order. You might notice from the screenshots that I didn't play particularly far into this game, not even far enough to obtain my fourth party member, but I did play for over four hours, which I think is enough to get a good enough grasp on whether or not the game is worth playing. And even if it's not, a game that expects you to play for hours and hours before suddenly getting interesting is a game that's just not worth your time at all.

In summary, Brave Battle Saga is an unusually high-quality production for an unlicensed game, but at the same time, it's not very interesting to play, it's way too linear for an RPG of this style, and there isn't a single original thing about it, aesthetically, narratively or mechanically.

Curiosities Vol. 8 - Secret Shooting Games

Something I've always liked since I was a kid was secrets in games, and especially secrets that added extra fun to games, like stages or characters. Like most early-90s kids, I was obsessed with Sonic, and got really excited when I heard there was a secret stage hidden in the cartridge, the Hidden Palace Zone. Of course, all that excitement turned to disappointment when I used my cousin's Action REplay to access the HPZ and it was just unplayable garbage with a title card. Even more exciting than hidden bits of games, though, are entire hidden games, which is what this post is about.

Before I really start, I want to clarify the difference between "secret" and "unlockable": unlockable games will be easily accessible from an in-game menu, and the game might even acknowledge the games before they're available. Secret games require cheats or passwords to get to, and the game doesn't let you know they're there if you don't know about them already. There'll probably be posts about some unlockable games on this blog in the future, but today I'm talking about three secret games, that also happen to all be shooting games hidden away in the bowels of non-shooting games. 

First up is Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf for the Mega Drive. It's a golf game, that would be totally forgotten by history, were it not for its secret. And that secret is a simple little game based on SEGA's beloved Fantasy Zone games. It's a single-screen shooter in which you have one life and a constantly increasing score, and all you have to do is stay alive for as long as possible. It's very simple and you're unlikely to last very long, but it is fun. The only problem is that it's a pain to get to: you have to get a game over in the main game, then input the famous Konami code on the game over screen. Getting a game over requires using one hundred shots on a single hole, which will take you about ten minutes. Best to do this in an emulator, and make a save state on the game over screen.

Next is another, much better Mega Drive game: Mega-lo Mania (known as "Tyrants: Fight Through Time" in America), which is a surprisingly deep real-time strategy game about giant immortal floating heads using humans to wage war against each other. Inputting the password "JOOLS" into the game's save/load option also unlocks a weird, vaguely asteroidsy shooting game where you fly around space and impotently shoot at seemingly-intangible enemies, until one of the main game's floating heads says "do you want to be on my side", then flies in and smashes you to death. Yeah, it's not very good. But luckily, Mega-lo Mania is really good, so once you've got over the novelty of having a secret game in there, you can just play that instead.

I've saved the most impressive secret shooter till last, and it's hidden in the early Playstation 3D fighting game Zero Divide. Though it's a game that's been forgotten by history, Zero Divide's got a lot of charm, and that mainly comes from the fact that the developers were obviously very excited about the inherent possibilities of all the storage space on a CD (compared to cartridges and floppy disks) and even the memory card. There's tons of unlockable stuff, some of which comes only after the game's been played for 200 hours, and there's a lot of weird experimental stuff too, like an annoying DJ who comments on how well or badly you play.

But anyway, among its many other features, Zero Divide also includes Tiny Phalanx, a cut-down port of the X68000/SNES shooter Phalanx, a game that's infamous in the west for the bizarre boxart the SNES version got in North America. It's unlocked by holding start and select on the second controller as the game loads up, and it's really good. It looks and sounds great, it's got proper power-up and scoring systems and it's just really impressive for a secret freebie. Since Zero Divide came out in 1995, there were probably full games being released at the same time that were lower quality.

King Colossus (Mega Drive)

It's often an annoying cliche to compare 16-bit action RPGs to A Link to the Past, especially when lazy critics accuse the likes of Story of Thor and Soliel of being "Zelda-clones", when the only similarities are at the most superficial level. But in this case, there's a good point to be made, though it's done by contrasting this one with Nintendo's classic. The thing is, they're good  examples of the differences in the design philosophies typical to their host consoles.

First off, there's the tone and aesthetic of each game: if ALttP can be likened to a fun, colourful adventure anime that gets dubbed on the cheap and aired at 6am, then King Colossus is more like a grim late 80s fantasy OAV that gets dubbed with extra swear words and released on tape by Manga Video. That is, while Zelda does have some dark elements, it's mainly bright and colourful, with the tone being skewed towards fun and adventure. In contrast, King Colossus has your orphaned hero being sold into slavery by the old man that raised him, being forced to fight to the death in an arena as part of a ritual honouring an evil god. (And that's just the start of your hardships).

The contrasts carry over into each game's structure, too: unlike ALttP, KC has no currency to accumulate, nor does it have a large open world to explore. It's a lot more linear and arcadey in its execution. Pretty much the entire game is spent in dungeons fighting monsters (or in the colosseum fighting your fellow captives), with only short expository interludes between them. There's still a little exploration to be done within the dungeons, but the meat of the game is combat. It's fortunat, then, that the combat is pretty good. There's an array of different weapons to find, and not only do the get stronger as you go through the game, but they also attack in different ways. There's swords, axes and spears that attack in front of the player at different lengths, as well as crossbows that shoot over long distances, flails that attack in a circle around the player and others.

The only criticism that can really be levelled towards King Colossus is that it is a little bit too easy. I'm most of the way through the game at the time of writing (and I do intend to eventually see it through to the end), and I've only died at two or three points in the game. Other than that, though, it's a fun action RPG that's a little darker in tone than the usual and it's worth a try if you're curious.

Socket (Mega Drive)

So, if you only know one thing about this game, you'll know that it's a blatant Sonic clone, to an extent that no other game before it had been. Every other review I've read of this game, whether it was in a magazine at the time of its release, or on the internet many years later, has focussed entirely on that fact, and then descended into tedious hyperbole about how terrible and unplayable the game is. The fact is, Socket is a very flawed game, and a very unoriginal game, but it does have a few ideas of its own, and it is a fun game to play.

The eponymous character is a weird kind of time-travelling electric duck from the future, who has to stop an evil time-travelling winged fox called Time Dominator from doing evil stuff throughout history. Socket can run, jump and kick, and has an energy meter that serves as a combined time limit and health bar, something usually only seen in games where the player controls a vehicle of some kind.

But the stage themes tread the familiar platform game ground of grassy place, lava caves, factory, futuristic city, and so on.  Stages come in sets of three, though each stage of the three fills an explicit role: The first stage will be a "High Speed Zone", which always takes place in an amazing-looking future city, and is what it sounds like: go really really fast util you get to the end. It's not challenging, but there is a good sensation of speed as you whizz around. The second will be Athletic, a pretty traditional action-platform stage, with a focus on running and jumping and so on. The third part of each set of stages is the "Labyrinth", a huge, sprawling stage with puzzles and traps and so on, with the emphasis being on actually finding your way to the end of the stage.

As for how Socket plays, it's mostly pretty good. Definitely leagues ahead of the other "poor man's Sonic", Bubsy, at least. There's a few moments where the cracks begin to show: for example, there are lots of very Sonic-esque places in stages that use ramps and momentum and even running up walls, but they're just a little bit too stiff and unco-operative, and jumping from non-flat surfaces can sometimes feel strange an unpredictable. Another problem is that it's incredibly easy, even compared to the Sonic games, which themselves aren't incredibly challenging. Socket's massive heath bar, means there's very little consequence to getting hit, so you can just speed your way through stages, ignoring enemies, spikes, lava pits, and so on. You're likely to complete it on your first or second attempt.

If I were to compare Socket to any game, I would actually choose the Playstation 3D action game Speed Power Gunbike. Though SPGB hides it better, there's a shared thread between the two games of being Sonic-inspired attempts at high-speed action games that are just almost great, being held back by a few small, but damning flaws. Also like SPGB, I'd recommend Socket to anyone who has an interest in a kind of alternate interpretation of the Sonic games' ideas.
This game is also known as Time Dominator 1st

Bomboy (Mega Drive)

Bomboy is an unlicenced game from Taiwan that serves as a Bomberman knock-off, and like most modern movie mockbusters, it actually came out before the actual Mega Drive version of Bomberman by a year. Unusually for an unlicenced Mega Drive game, programming-wise it seems pretty robust, with no noticable glitches. The graphics also seem to be both original and of decent quality.

The game has a couple of giant, glaring flaws, however. The most immediately obvious is that the main draw of the Bomberman games, the battle mode is completely absent. There is a two-player option, but it's just "normal mode" co-op play. The second flaw takes a while to sink in, and it's the atrocious stage design.

Every stage seems to be some slight variation on the theme of having diagonal lines of blocks all the way across the screen, with only a couple of destructible blocks in each line. In the grid-based world of Bomberman (or rather, a clone of Bomberman), this makes each stage into an exercise in slow, onerous tedium. It's made worse by the fact that the enemies seem to move completely a random, leaving the player to place bombs nearby and just hope that they wander into the explosion at the right time. The scarce amounts of destructible blocks also makes power-ups a rare occurance, and on one occasion, I'd managed to slog my way through the entire first 5 stages before getting a bomb-up or fire-up item.

You might notice among the screenshots, however, a stage that doesn't fit with the rest. After playing Bomboy for a while, I wondered if it had any kind of intro or anything, so I left the title screen running to see what happened. There wasn't an intro, but there was a rolling demo, featuring a completely different Stage 1-1 than the one ingame. Some further research online reveals that there is an entire different set of levels to the ones I played. So are there two different ROMs floating about? Or the same ROM that somehow plays different stages depending on whether it's being played on an emulator or real hardware? Maybe there's Action Replay codes that might allow players to play both sets of stages? We might never know.

I conclusion, the version of Bomboy I played was awful. But there might be a better one out there somewhere, maybe?

SEGA Master System Brawl (Mega Drive)

So, this is a homebrew, by a guy named Bonaf on the SMSPower forums. It's pretty good, too. The concept is that it takes characters from a bunch of the Master System's most iconic games, and puts them in a one-on-one fighting game, using only the abilities they have in their original games. (If I remember rightly, there was a similar fangame made for PC by a Japanese developer years ago, but with Famicom characters).

The roster is surprisingly big, and contains most of the characters you'd think of first when you think of the Master System, from SEGA's big names like Alex Kidd, Opa Opa, Joe Musashi and Sonic down to lesser-known heroes like Psycho Fox and Master of Darkness' Dr. Social. The only quibbles I have with the roster are that the absence of any characters from Masters of Combat or Virtua Fighter The Animation seems a bit odd, and that Bonaf has used Riki from Black Belt, rather than Kenshiro from Hokuto no Ken. (Though there are some little nods to HnK in Riki's pre-fight quote and winpose).

The presentation is pretty good. Obviously, the music and most of the graphics are taken from various Master System games, so though they won't meet the usual high MD standards, they're still colourful and charming. There are some original graphics, though: each character has a winpose, and though I'm not 100% certain on this, in think they're all-new.

Now for the most important part: how the game actually plays. The controls are simple: there's a jump button, an attack button and a "special" button. The special button only seems to be used by one character though: Psycho Fox uses it to change between forms. Obviously, every character's movements and attacks are different, since they've all been taken from different games and even different genres, and as a result, the balance isn't really that great. Certain characters (Sonic, Opa Opa, and Steve (of My Hero fame) in particular) totally dominate against almost any opponents, while others (Bean, Dr. Social, Wang) can struggle to land a single hit on their opponents.

What I don't want you to take from this is that SMS Brawl is a bad game, because it's not. Despite the balance issues, it's a ton of fun to play, and a great love letter to a system that doesn't get the love it deserves, especially on the NES-worshipping internet, and I totally recommend that you go get it and play it.