Pleasure Hearts (MSX)

Pleasure Hearts is one of the early works of M-Kai, a developer who would go onto later fame through his Wonderswan game Judgement Silversword, and even later than that, the XBox 360's Eschatos. Though it's an early work, you can already see that he's a developer with plenty of ability in both programming and game design. In fact, this might be the best-looking game on the MSX (discounting laserdisc games, of course), with all kinds of animation and scrolling tricks in effect.

Luckily, it also plays really well. Though it might look like an old-fashioned horizontal STG, it actually occupies a space in between old-fashioned games like Gradius and the like, and faster danmaku-style games, which had already been populatr in arcades for a few years by the time of Pleasure Hearts' release in 1999. Bullet patterns are mostly confined to boss fights, though, with the stages having large crowds of small enemies each firing individual bullets directly at you, often at different speeds. This is a really strange paragraph to read, isn't it? Sorry about that.

Basically, it's a fast and fun and very high quality game. Interestingly, for a game on an 8-bit system, the scores go really high, really quickly, and score growth seems to be exponential: I tend to hit the one billion mark around the start of stage four, and only a stage later, I'm already at three billion! I'm not totally certain on this, but there is a bullet graze counter among the various other stats and meters at the top of the screen, and I think this acts as a multiplier on the points diamonds that are dropped by some enemies, and which your bombs turn bullets into. Like I said, I'm not 100% certain of that theory, though.

There's even some kind of plot in the game, as evidenced in the optional prologue stage, which sees a fully-powered up ship with a massive score at the end of some grand adventure getting betrayed by its allies and ultimately destroyed by a giant dragon. Presumably, then, the game's plot is about seeking revenge on the traitors and their dragon? I'm only guessing, of course. There's no text or anything as far as I can tell, and it would presumably be in Japanese anyway, even if there was.

I could keep writing about how great this game is, but if I did, it really would be just that: a stream of compliments directed at every aspect of the game. Obviously, I strongly recommend that you go and play this game as soon as possible. It's very easily available online, since M-Kai himself released it and his other MSX games as freeware back in 2009, so go and find it, load it up in your MSX emulator of choice, and have a great time!

Magical Tree (MSX)

The great thing about writing about obscure stuff is that sometimes, you find something great, and can then go on to show it off to everyone, so they can enjoy it, too. This is one of those times. Magical Tree is an MSX platform game about climbing a tree. I first tried it out, because I saw the boxart, and thought it might be a clone of Noboranka, the arcade shooting game about climbing a tree. I was wrong, but luckily, it turned out to be better than that anyway.

I'm sure I've mentioned before the concept of "pure" game design. Don't confuse purity with quality, it's just a stylistic assessment. What I mean by it is a concept that was more common in the eighties and early nineties than it is now: videogames in which each element, be it an enemy, an item, a part of the stage ,or something else, serves a specific in-game purpose and is easily identifiable from the other elements around it. Obviously, this kind of thing is much easier to do in simple, old-fashioned, arcade-style games like this one, but it's something you can also see in Minecraft, which is probably one of the most complex videogames of all time. I'm bringing it up here, because Magical Tree is a game that has this purity, and it does it well.

It is a very simple game: you go up the tree, avoiding enemies and collecting points items. At certain score thresholds, you get extra lives, so there's an incentive for playing for score, if that's not enough of a motivating factor for on its own. But like I describe above, you can easily learn how each enemy type acts, how certain objects interact with certain stage elements, and so on, to figure out every way possible of maximising your score, and of surviving to climb a little higher up the tree. Luckily, along with all of that, it is actually fun to play the game and do all this stuff.

One little stylistic thing that I think adds a lot to the game, and how addictive it is, is the constant on-screen tracker of how far up the tree you currently are. It's a constant reminder of your progress, and an easily-remembered benchmark to compare against earlier runs. It's probably copied from the "how high can you get?" screens, but they only appeared between stages, in twenty-five metre increments, while this counter is constant, and counts every metre you climb. It's just satisfying, you know?

Obviously, I recommend that you play Magical Tree. It's fun and cute and addictive. It seems that I keep finding more and more MSX games to love as time goes on, and while other Japanese microcomputers might have excellent graphics or music, it's the MSX's games that keep me coming back most often.

The Fighting Wolf AT (MSX)

For such an early entry into the belt scrolling beat em up genre, and from a relatively small company like Technopolis Soft, it's impressive how versatile the controls in The Fighting Wolf AT are. With only a D-pad and two buttons, you can walk in eight directions, punch, kick, and even duck and jump! Unfortunately, you only ever have to walk left, walk right, and punch, and in fact, doing anything else will diminish your chances of survival.

So, each stage consists of a few screen's worth of a repeating background, though it doesn't matter if you walk to the end or not, only that you defeat every enemy. Although it would be more accurate to say that rather than "beating every enemy", you're beating enemies until they eventually stop spawning. Each stage has exactly two kinds of enemy: one that spawns on the right of the screen, and one that spawns on the left of the screen. Beat one, and an identical one will take its place. Keep doing this and after a couple of minutes, you've beaten the stage.

I don't know how long the game is, but the technique that got me to stage five (the enemies do gradually become more enthusastic about trying to fight back, and you only get one life) is just to repeatedly punch one enemy until it's dead, then turn around and punch the enemy on the other side until they're dead. By then, the enemy on the first side will have respawned and walked up to you, so repeat the process. And that's pretty much the entire game. The background changes each stage, as do the sprites for the enemies, but they all play the same.

There's not much more to say about this game. It looks okay, except when the screen scrolls, and the music isn't terrible I guess. The best thing I can say about it is that the enemies in th second stage are a woman and a baby, which is kind of odd. Don't play The Fighting Wolf AT, it's rubbish.

3-D Bomberman (MSX)

Though it seems like an obvious thing to have tried at some point in the mid-00s, maybe around the time of the awful Bomberman Act Zero, as far as I can tell, this game from all the way back in 1984 is the only attempt at a first-person Bomberman game. To put that in perspective, I don't even think anyone involved had even realised the multiplayer potential for the series at this point! Obviously, this doesn't use polygons, or even sprite scaling for its 3D effect, instead using Phantasy Star-style dungeons to stage an action game.

By that, I mean they're mazes with identical walls, where your movement is in pre-determined steps, and you can only turn in increments of ninety degrees. This wasn't the only action game from this era to use such a setting, with the most famous example in the UK being 3D Monster Maze, released in 1981 on the Sinclair ZX81, a computer with significantly less power than the MSX. An important difference between that game and 3-D Bomber Man though, is that while 3D Monster Maze had the player as a passive participant, running and hiding from the T-Rex in the maze, the player in this game is tasked with killing the enemies (malevolent green balloons, the eponymous floaters from the UK's localised version of the first Bomber man game, Eric and the Floaters), by dropping time bombs in the grand Bomberman tradition. You can also escape from the maze by finding a ladder, but you don't get any points for this, and I'm not sure if the game has an ending to reach.

The game's execution is about as good as can be expected with the technology of the time, with two small exceptions. Firstly, each of your steps covers the distance of half a block in the maze, which, couple with the stiff 90 degree turning, means you can sometimes get stuck on corners for a few seconds, which can be annoying when you're being chased. The other problem is that there are two types of wall: the indestructible outer wall of the maze, and the destructible walls within, and they both look identical. You do have a small radar that only shows you, the enemies, and the outer walls, but it's a weak compromise. There are other problems, but they're not so much problems with this game, but ways in which someone playing it in 2019 can see that it could have been improved upon with more advanced technology: things like atmospheric stereo sound, the ability to peek round corners, and move in directions other than backwards and forwards would all have added a lot, but obviously wouldn't really have been possible in 1984. Which makes it stranger that it's not an idea Hudson ever revisited, as far as I know.

3-D Bomber Man isn't a bad game, but at the same time, it's more interesting than it is good. It's worth playing out of curiosity, but not much more than that. Also, since I mentioned it at the start, I want to point something out about Bomberman Act Zero: while everyone laughed at that game's attempt at applying a dystopian sci-fi aesthetic to Bomberman, the real problem it had was that it was barely a game at all: the single player mode consisted of 100 identical boring stages, and the multiplayer mode was only playable online. And even then, you could only play in that one stage that's in the single player.

Small Games Vol. 5!

It's time for another batch of lower-key games, and once again, it's an MSX edition, simply because everyone loves the MSX, right? Unfortunately though, it, like all systems, played host to some pretty terrible games over the course of its life, and today's post is a bit of a good game sandwich, with bad games as the bread. The first slice being American Truck. It's one of those top-down see-how-far-you-can-go crash-avoiding psuedo-racing games that longtime readers will know I love. It's a pretty bad example of the genre, though.

It's just got a lot of little things wrong with it that all add up to a game that's no fun to play. The scoring system is bad: you only get points for destroying other vehicles, so there's no points gained for distance travelled or leftover fuel or time (though this does make me wonder if the developers were inspired by Goliath, the evil truck from Knight Rider). Instead of the usual fuel meter that acts as a combination time limit and health bar, you have three lives, one of which is lost if you touch the edge of the road, or if you so much as graze one of the black circles (presumably open manholes?) dotted around the place here and there. Also, at least once, I died from crashing into a vehicle, even though this is the only way to score points. I wish this game was better, but it just isn't. Don't bother with it.

Next up is a much better game, A.E., a simple single-screen shooter that was recommended to me years and years ago, though I've unfortunately forgotten by whom. If it was you, sorry! Though this game might like incredibly simple and primitive in screenshots, in motion, it's a different story. The backgrounds are completely static, but the enemies fly around them, and a kind of primitive psuedo-sprite-scaling effect has the swooping in and out of hollow meteors and slaloming through stalagmites and stalactites, and so on. It's a really cool effect that really shows how creative the devs must have been. The game itself is okay, too. Mechanically, it manages to stand out by giving you a fairly unusual weapon: your shots travel upwards for as long as you hold the fire button, detonating into an explosion that lasts a couple of seconds when you release. The enemies come in waves of six that fly away after a few passes. You clear a stage when you manage to successfully wipe out three waves. A.E is a decent game, and I pass on the recommendation I received onto you.

Finally, the second slice of bad game bread is The Komainu Quest, a game that I almost feel bad for badmouthing, since it was originally made as a promotional game for the town of Seto in Japan. I still will though, because it's awful. In contrast to A.E, which seemed to be made by developers who knew both the hardware they were using, and the extent of their abilities in using it, The Komainu Quest is rendered pretty much unplayable, apparently thanks to developers biting off more than they could chew in attempting a scrolling shooter on the MSX hardware (though that has been done by others, before anyone points out, and with spectacular results, too. But that's a story for another day). I say "attempting", because this game doesn't actually have scrolling. Instead, the screen slowly updates as you play, in columns a few pixels wide. The result of this is that sometimes you have enemies already firing at you several seconds before they actually appear, and even stationary obstacles pushing your ship out of the way when all you can see is empty sky. I feel bad for saying it, but The Komainu Quest is only worth playing out of historical curiosity.

Ninja Savior (MSX)

The first thing you notice about Ninja Savior, and the first thing I'll tell you about it, is that despite being made in Europe in 2015, it manages to look, sound, and feel like a Japanese MSX game from the mid-1980s with incredible authenticity. Considering how fake a lot of similar endeavors end up feeling, I think this is something worth mentioning and applauding. So well done on that front, Revelo! But authenticity aside, is the game actually good?

The answer is a resounding "yeah it's alright I guess". It's a very simple game in which you play as a ninja, jumping from one tower to the the other, while trying to exorcise a series of demons. You do this by collecting the talismans and scrolls hanging in the air between the two towers. At the same time, there'll be one or two smaller demons in the gap too, who hurt you if you touch them. Every time you jump, the talismans, scrolls and lesser demons change position.

 Your jumping arc is always the same, and when you're not jumping, you're sliding down the tower. So it's an action game controlled with one button and no directions, based entirely around timing. Also of note is that rather than a traiditonal health bar there's a kind of momentum bar with an X at one end, an O at the other, and a square moving along it. When you collect a talisman or scroll, it moves towards the O. When you land after a jump or when you hit a lesser demon, it moves towards the X. If it reaches the X, you lose a life, if it reaches the O, you go to the next stage. And that's pretty much all there is to know about this game.

Ninja Savior's a game that's very OK. It's not bad and the one-button controls and momentum meter are interesting, but it's not particularly exciting, and it's way too easy. Maybe if later stages had moving enemies or something that would have spiced things up a bit? Anyway, it wouldn't hurt to give the game a try, but it won't change your life either.

Buddhagillie (MSX)

In the US and UK, at least, Wisdom Tree's selection of platformers about biblical figures carrying things on top of their heads are what we mostly think of, when we think of religious videogames. They also have a reputation (that they totally, one hundred percent deserve) for being awful to the point of near-unplayability. But of course, there are videogames with religious themes other than those relating to Christianity in the world, such as the 2006 Judaism-themed adventure game The Shivah, and though I can't remember the name, I definitely remember seeing a video of an Islamic-themed Tomb Raider-like a few years ago. And more infamously there's a game about (possibly even by?) the Aum Shinrikyo sect on PC88. But, as you might have gathered from the title, Buddhagillie is a game about Buddhism.

You play as the Buddha, with the aim of making all sentient beings your equal. This is done by going into hell and fighting the four sufferings (birth, aging, sickness and death), and absorbing the karma they spit out to power your mantra. You can only fly around the left half of the screen, you see, and the beings you hope to free from the circle of reincarnation: demons, asura, humans, gods and so on, all appear on the right side of the screen. So you have to use you sword to absorb karma, to power your mantra nad fire it at them. In gameplay terms, you slash small enemies with your sword by tapping the attack button. Holding the attack button lets you block their bullets, and absorb them. After you've absorbed bullets, you'll shoot your own on the last attack of your three-slash sword attack chain.

So, this is basically a decently-designed shooting game, with a few interesting ideas, and even a proper scoring system. Though those aren't surprising, since it's a homebrew game from 2018 released for free on the internet, and not actually a commercial MSX game from the 1980s. Whether you interpret it as an actual work of religious devotion, or you just see the Buddhist content as a bit of aesthetic flavour, it can't be denied that it does make the game stand out: there's not many games that look like this in the world, or that have selected quotes from the Buddha onscreen at all times.

But is it actually good? Yes! Like I said, it's got interesting ideas, and a proper, functional scoring system (that mainly centers around killing multiple small enemies with one three-hit chain), and it's pretty addictive, too. The only real complaint I have is the fault of the host hardware, rather than the game itself, and it's that there's quite a bit of sprite flicker, and it's very frustrating getting killed by a temporarily-invisible bullet.

Small Game Round Up Vol. 2!

It's time for some more ancient games that are too simple to support entire posts on their own! Today I'll be talking about just two games, both on the MSX, and the first is Godzilla vs. 3 Major Monsters, also known as Gozira 3D, for some reason.

It's a single-screen action game, that's just barely above the level of complexity of a handheld LCD game, or possibly one of the more advanced Atari 2600 games with slightly better graphics. The action all takes place in a classic tokusatsu rocky desert, and starts with Megalon emerging from holes in the ground. Obviously, you play Godzilla, and you just blast him with your atomic breath. Do this 10-15 times (I think Megalon has to have dug at least eight holes before this stage ends, as opposed to reusing ones he's already dug), and Megalon will be replaced by two Kumongas (they're really being generous with the term "major monster" in this game, aren't they?)

The Kumongas will pop up out of the holes at random, to shoot webs and energy bolts at Godzilla, like a more aggressive whack-a-mole game, and I think you have to hit each one three times to be rid of them. The final, and easiest enemy you have to face is King Ghidorah, who slowly flies down from the top of the screen occaisionally shooting a gravity bolt, but mostly doing nothing. Just blast him until he goes, and the whole thing starts again, but slightly faster. It's nothing spectacular, but it's an okay diversion for five minutes or so. Also, the Godzilla sprite looks great when walking left or right (but terrible when walking up or down).

The other game I hve to talk about today is one of possible historical significance, and very little else. Nyannyan Prowrestling might be the first ever women's wrestling videogame. It came out in 1986, the same year as SEGA's Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto, though I haven't been able to track down an exact date for either game, so I can't say for certain which was first. Even if SEGA got there first, this might still be the first home videogame about women's wrestling, if it came out before the 20th of July that year (when Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto's Master System port was released).

Anyway, other than that bit of trivia, there's not much positive to say about this game. All the wrestlers have the exact same sprite, it uses a bizarre menu-based control system (though to be fair, a few early combat sports games did this, including the Boxing and Pro-Wrestling games on the SG-1000. There's a lot of SEGA talk in this review, isn't there?), and for some reason, all the matches take place on basketball courts instead of wrestling rings. On top of all that, you have to play it with the keyboard, as it doesn't acknowledge controller inputs! There's not much more to be said about this game. It's an interesting historical footnote, but not much else. Don't waste your time, except to satisfy your curiosity.

Akanbe Dragon (MSX)

This is a game with an interesting premise, and the quick and easy way of describing it would be to compare it to a combination of chess and the Game Gear game Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki (though it predates that game by a few years). Unfortunately, it scuppers all the goodwill generated by the concept through a few terrible design decisions.

I have to make an admission here: I never got past the first stage of this game. I played for hours, and made many attempts, and I did come close a few times, but in the end, the odds are stacked way too heavily against the player. But I should get onto actually describing the game. There's a map with a grid on it, and each square contains a different kind of terrain: mountains, plains, water, and so on. At the top and bottom of the map, there are two groups of monsters, the player at the bottom, and the enemies at the top. Each type of monster not only has four stats: HP, strength, speed, and jump, but they also have a chess class, which affects how they move on the grid (and like in chess, the aim is to kill your opponent's king).

When two monsters try to occupy the same space on the map, the game has them engage in a real-time, side-view, no time limit battle to the death. All the monsters attack by shooting stuff, though there's still a fair bit of variety in the attacks: some can fire a bunch of shots that quickly go in a straight line, others might only be able to fire off one shot at a time that takes a more wibbly path that's harder to dodge. Though the AI seems pretty good at moving its monsters around the map to keep a tactical advantage, in battle, the enemies all seem to just randomly bounce around the screen shooting at random. They'll still win a lot though, due to the game's biggest flaw: no matter what the situation, the enemy monsters always have significantly higher stats and more HP than your own, making every battle a precarious and miserable slog. Making things more annoying is how the strength is dealt out among your own monsters, with your pawn (amusing mis-spelt ingame as "porn") being second only to the king in strength, while your queen and knight are so weak as to be almost completely useless.

An interesting aside is that entering battle with the enemy king does something slightly different to normal enemies: he has his own specific battleground that overrides whatever terrain type on which you encounter him, and the battle feels more like a boss fight from a platform game. As far as I can tell, the best strategy to take is to get as many of your monsters to fight the king and wear him down before sending your king in to finish the job. I almost won with this method, but I guess the enemy had the same idea, as by the time the enemy king had taken out all my underlings, my king was weakened doing the same. On my last attempt, my king succumbed with only a sliver of the enemy king's health left. Unfortunately, I'd completely lost all patience with the game by this point, and had no desire to make any further attempts.

It's honestly a shame, as I really wanted to like Akanbe Dragon, but the atrocious balance means that I can't recommend it at all. If only playing it didn't seem like a futile uphill struggle, it mgiht have been a hidden classic.

Turbo Girl (MSX)

There might be something I've forgotten in the misty past of this blog, but I think this might be the first western-developed MSX game I've covered here. As well as being popular in Japan, the system also had/has a strong following in mainland Europe, especially the Netherlands. This game, however, is Spanish, and it's a port of a ZX Spectrum game, which you can probably tell just from looking at the screenshots, since it's pretty much a direct port, colour clash and all. (As an aside, I think this might also be the first Spanish game I've featured?)

The game's a shooting game with some platforming. Top down platforming. With multiple consecutive jumps that require pixel-perfect timing and precision. I'm going to spoil the rest of the review for you now: it's pretty much completely negative. This game is just no fun to play at all, nor does it have any other redeeming features, except maybe having a female protaagonist (though you can only really see her on the very eighties title screen).

It's ugly, it's slow, it's boring, and there's no music anywhere except the title screen. The stage design is horrible, too: as well as the pixel perfect death-jumps, there's also enemies that pop up from the bottom of the screen without warning, some really unpleasant checkpoint placing and a general cramped feeling to everything. On top of all this, despite the word "turbo" being right there in the title, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the derelict space stations on which the game is set were submerged in oceans of treacle, as everything moves incredibly slowly, even the bullets.

Another problem the game has is the controls: you can select joystick controls at the start, but the game only recognises one joystick button (presumably a vestigial problem from its Spectrum source), with jump assigned to the space bar. Remember those nigh-impossible jumps I described earlier? I was playing on an emulator, using joy2key to map the space bar to one of the buttons on my USB Saturn controller. If you were playing on real hardware, you wouldn't be able to sdo that, and the game would be rendered pretty much impossible. Especially since the second stage, as far as I can tell, does away with the shooting part of the game completely and becomes entirely about jumping across massive gaps in the floor.

Don't play Turbo Girl, it's an irredeemible, joyless piece of garbage.

Coaster Race (MSX)

It's always impressive to see games on old computers do things that those computers just weren't designed for, like parallax scrolling, or, in this case, a pretty good bit of faux-sprite scaling, in an Outrun-esque racing game. It's even got hills and, true to its roller coaster theming, loops! Plus it plays pretty well, too.

So, on the title screen, you're presented with three modes: 1P SKILL 1 and 2, and 2P GAME. The 1P options are the single player game, but SKILL 2 starts you on the third track instead of the first. The 2P GAME option is even stranger, as rather than being a head to head race, or even a takey-turny time trail affair, it's a strange arrangement in which one player drives on a track using the joystick, while the other makes corners and loops appear by pressing keys on the keyboard. I couldn't figure out what the point of this mode was, as it didn't seem to have any obvious win conditions for either player.

The game itself is pretty standard for an arcade-style racing game of the mid-80s: you're racing against the clock to drive four laps each around five tracks. Hitting other cars results in your car exploding and a few seconds being wasted as you reappear on the track, and you get ten points for each car passed and a hundred for every second left on the clock at the end of each lap. The first thing that struck me when I started playing was how cute this game is: your car is a slightly futuristic, toyetic vehicle, with a big turbine on the back that spins faster as your speed increases. The tracks are cute too since they're all meant to be roller coasters, the backgrounds all look like theme parks. There's a lot of reused elements in the background, so I assume that all the tracks are part of the same park, and you can see differrent bits of it from each one.

The loops and steep hills on the tracks work really well too, which is impressive: you lose speed and accellerate more slowly when going uphill, and then go vastly faster going down the other side. Loops work pretty much the same, but with the added spectacle of the background scrolling vertically, coming back upside down, then coming back again the right way up. I haven't described it very well, but it is a really effective effect for an 8-bit game from 1986. Another nice little touch is that there's also differen times of day! Track one takes place during the day, two and three at sunset, and the final two tracks take place in the dead of night.

Coaster Race is a fun little game with a ton of charm, and I recommend you go and play it. There's even a little surprise waiting at the end of track five to look forward to too!

Penguin-kun Wars 2 (MSX)

There's a chance you might have played the first Penguin-kun Wars game, which was ported to the NES and Game Boy and released in the west as King of the Zoo, but in case you haven't, it was about a fictional sport played by cute animals.

The sport itself (which doesn't have a name, as far as I can tell) is a kind of combination of bowling and dodgeball: the participants stand at either end of a flat plain, each starting with five balls. The aim is to roll the balls over to your opponent's side, with the winner being either the first to get all ten balls on their opponent's side, or the one with the least balls on their side when time runs out. Furthermore, if you hit your opponent with a ball, they're stunned for a few seconds (or vice versa, obviously).

In the first game, this was all there was to it. It had a sports tournament setting, and you simple faced off against increasingly skilled opponents as you advanced. The second game, however, has a (very simple) plot: you go to  the house of your friend to play, only to see them getting kidnapped! So you go off to rescue them. An additional cute touch is that you can pick a male or female penguin to play as, and the one you don't pick is who gets kidnapped. As you're not participating in a sports tournament this time, your opponents don't play fair. There are multiple areas (Mammal World, Insect World, Reptile World, etc.), each with a few opponents to beat. Most of your opponents have some kind of special ability that they have no qualms about abusing, such as the shark, who can't be stunned, instead turning red and ramping up the aggression if you hit him, or the ants, who's special ability is that there are two of them, so if you stun one, the other can still move. The exception is Mammal World, where the locals just seem to be mediocre players that you won't have too much trouble beating.

After you've beaten three opponents in an area, you fight that area's boss, who has even more unfair abilities. For example, the boss of Insect World is a centipede, who takes up his entire side of the field, can throw every ball he has at once and takes multiple hits before getting stunned. There's no versus mode, and I think that's probably for the best: though it's a kind of sports game at its core, Penguin-kun Wars 2 is structured more like a single player action game, with stages and boss fights and so on, and as such is balanced heavily against the player.

Before the review ends, it would be remiss to allow the presentation to go unmentioned, as it's pretty nice for a 1988 MSX game. Each stage has its own background, with an audience of whatever animals live there. One stage, Antarctic World, has a few humans in the crowd, which is odd. Another cool touch is that each stage has unique game over and stage complete screens. It really feels like the developers were enthusiastic about making this game, but unfortunately, that enthusiasm has mainly gone into including as many ideas and variations on the core mechanics as possible, with little regard as to how balanced it all is.

If you're a particularly big fan of the original, and you're desperately clamouring for more, then that's exactly what you'll get from this sequel. I can't help but feel that that's an incredibly tiny niche, though, even by the standards of this blog.