Spriggan Mark 2 Re:Terraform Project (PC Engine)

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a puzzle or shooting game with little text of little importance. However, it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool in this assumption, because Spriggan Mark 2 is actually an insanely ambitious game to have been released on an eight bit console in 1992.

 

When it comes to console shooting games in 1992, I always think of the PC Engine's Soldier Blade. It's an excellent game, and very impressive for the hardware, but when you compare it to the likes of Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer and Thunder Force IV being released on the Mega Drive in the same year, it makes NEC's console look like it was being left behind. Spriggan Mark 2 flies in the face of that, being years ahead of its time in design terms, if not technological. It does appear to be an attempt at making an interactive anime in the form of a shooting game.

 

There's a ton of cutscenes, many with that "big pixel art" style that was so popular at the time, especially on PC Engine CD, and even more impressively, there's also a lot of voice acting to go with them! They tell a very Gundam-like story of stolen prototype weapons, colonists on Mars breaking away from Earth's control, and all that kind of thing. It doesn't skimp on the action, though, as while there's a minute or two of dialogue happening between each stage, and sometimes boss fights will also have a little chat-break preceding them, there's still full shooting stages, sometimes with dialogue and Sonic 3 & Knuckles-style visual storytelling happening while they play out, in a pretty seamless manner.

 

The actual shooting is pretty standard for the era: you have a standard machine gun with infinite ammo, and you can also press select to cycle through a bunch of more exciting weapons with limited uses, like homing missiles and a beam saber (you'd think that would be of infinite use, but it does a ton of damage, and I guess the developers sided with balance over logic here). Flying around firing off homing missles while dodging enemy fire and experiencing your comrades playing out their dramas feels great! There's some really amazing moments of ludonarrative cohesion to be found in this game.

 

Another aspect that feels very much ahead of its time is your health bar: it's a lot longer than you would expect from a shooting game of this vintage, and not only that, it slowly regenerates over time! My original theory was that this was because the developers had gone to a lot of effort to tell a story, and they wanted to ensure that the player will easily live to see it through, but to be honest: the game is still pretty difficult. In a few days' play, I've been able to get as far as the third stage. I don't know how many stages there are, but just judging by what's happening, it feels like the story's still in the early parts of playing out. Technologically, there's also what appears to be little moments of sprite scaling and rotation. It could also be a really good job of faking those effects, but either way, it's impressive.

 

Obviously, this is a game worthy of anyone's notice, especially now that it's been translated into English, so the story can be enjoyed by the JP-illiterate. People (rightly) talk a lot about Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire when it comes to impressive PC Engine games, but Spriggan Mark 2 should definitely be in that conversation, too. And it does all the stuff it does without use of the Arcade Card, too! 

Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Sylphia (PC Engine)

 With this being a vertical shooter by Compile, you might be tempted to think that it's just a fantasy-skinned Aleste game (Though to be honest, that wouldn't really be a negative). But while there's some slight similarities to the Aleste series (there's a few different weapons to try out, and you gradually power up your shots by collecting multiple little P items), it's got enough stuff of its own to be considered its own unique entity.

 

It starts with a really nice pixel anmation intro, showing a female soldier in anceient greek times protecting some civilians from an invading demon army until she's mortally wounded. With her last breath, she crawls into a temple, where she's rewarded for her bravery by a glowing orb that turns her into a battle fairy, and sends her off to destroy the demon hoards. Of course, that fairy is you. After the great-looking intro, the rest of the game doesn't diappoint visually, either: the game itself is full of cool backgrounds, lots of varied monsters that are both well-animated and well-drawn, and the out-of-game presentation is really interesting. Between stages, there's these unique sepia-toned pieces of pixel art that show what the next stage's theme will be, and even the game over screen is cool! It has Sylphia floating above an open, ark of the covenant-style casket, and when you choose not to continue, she descends into it and the lid closes!

 

The game itself, luckily, is also pretty good. There are four different elemental weapons you can pick from (by collecting items, you can't just switch at any time), with wind being the best, fire second, and earth and water being totally useless. As well as the items for changing element, and the aforementioned P items for powering up your shot, another item that appears a lot is something that looks like a little winged CD. Collecting this fills up a meter, and when the meter's full, you get an extra bomb attack. As well as this, the game's pretty generous with the extra lives, giving you one for every seventy thousand points, and if you play well, you'll be getting more than one per stage on average. 

 

It only took me a few tries to get all the way to the final boss! The problem is, though, that after getting a game over, it's a little demoralising to try again straight away. The reason is one you might have predicted if you're familiar with Compile's other PC Engine shooting games: Sylphia is really long, like well over an hour. It flies by while you're playing, but after playing that long and dting, it's hard to get up the energy to start again right away. Still, if you want an easy 1CC, I can't imagine this taking most people more than a week at a rate of one or two attempts a day.

 

Something I'd also like to highlight is the excellent theming, with regard to the stages and enemies. There are no generic enemies in this game, or at least none that are generic enough to appear in every stage. This is because every stage has a theme, and all the enemies fit that theme and are unique to that stage. For example, the second stage has you going through an area full of statues of various stages, and all the enemies are mechanically-animated statues of various kinds: flying cherub heads, fire-breathing colossi, and more. An especially cool little touch in this stage is that when you beat the mid-boss, you see a tiny little pilot escape into the cave its guarding, and at the back of that cave, you see the pilot climb aboard the stage boss: a gigantic mechanical statue, only the top half of which is visible.

 

Every stage has cool moments like that in it to keep you engaged, too. The third stage takes place over a sea, with both archer-manned ships and marine monsters trying to kill you, and it's incredibly satisfying to sweep across the screen with your bomb attack (which takes the form of a big laser), destroying a whole fleet of ships, seeing them all break in half and sink. Then in the second half of the stage you go under the water, and Sylphia's flying animation is replaces with a swimming one! One strange point that's worth mentioning when it comes to the presentation is the music. Specifically, the music used for the boss fights at the end of the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages. In this 1993 greek mythology-themed shooting game, you're suffenly fighting huge monsters to the sound of some Jock Jams dance track, complete with that little "woo!" sample. Bizarre!

 

I feel like I haven't spoken much about the game's actual mechanics, but at the same time, I think that like a lot of pre-1994 shooting games, it's mostly pretty simple. Furthermore, I have said a lot about how the game presents itself, and I think it does that so well, and it's such a large part of this game's appeal that it's the right decision to have taken. Anyway, Sylphia is a game that's has enough concessions for beginners to the genre, while being satisfying enough for existing fans, plus there's always lots of cool details and things to see. I definitely recommend playing it if you haven't already. With the Aleste series getting a small revival in recent times, I hope someone at some point decides to bring back Compile's other shooters (including this one) too, as it'd be nice to see them reach a wide audience, and I definitely don't recommend or even condone anyone paying the ludicrous prices legitimate copies of this game fetch.

Galaxy Deka Gayvan (PC Engine)

 Deka means Detective, so I guess the title is an attempted parody of the 1982 TV series Space Sherriff Gavan, though that parody only goes as far as the title and the fact that the player characters transform into Metal Heroes-style armoured forms. Which makes this the third Metal Heroes-inspired PC Engine single plane beat em up I've covered on this blog. What a weirdly specific subgenre! As single plane beat em ups go, it's pretty basic. The stages are just completely flat planes, and you go from left to right beating up enemies until you get to the end of them. You've got a little three-hit combo, plus jumping attacks and a couple of throws. Beneath your health bar, you've also got a power bar, though! It's for managing your transformation! You can transform at any time, and the meter slowly increases while you're not transformed, and slowly depletes while you are.

 

The game's biggest problem is that the transformation is so limp. You don't get any new attacks or abilities, even the animations for your attacks while transformed are traced over the sprites for your untransformed attacks. It's so unimaginative! I guess you have higher attack and defence while transformed, but the difference is so incremental that you'll barely even notice. It might even be a placebo and there's no difference at all! Considering that it's around this gimmick that the game is built, it really sucks the joy out of the whole thing.

 

There's a few other things I want to talk about, though: in its favour, it is one of very few PC Engine games with a two player co-op mode, and  it's an early example of a beat em up with a versus mode that lets you play as a few of the enemies, too. And on the subject of enemies (as well as returning to the subject of parodies), some of them are from other games. Games from other companies, so they're unofficial references and/or parodies, not guest stars. There's a pair of enemies who are literally just Ninja and Kunoichi from The Ninja Warriors, and a little later there's an overweight version of Guile from Street Fighter II. As well as being fat, there is an actual joke in the Guile parody: he has an attack where he attempts a FLash Kick, but falls over onto his back afterwards. It's not a funny joke, but it is something, at least. (Also, the NW parodies first appear in stage 2. They don't appear in stage 3, though, so when they returned in stage 4, I thought to myself "The Ninja Warriors, Again?")(Now that's what I call attempted comedy!)

 

I can't really recommend Gayvan, unless you're really really desperate to play a co-op beat em up on PC Engine. If you really want a Metal Heroes-inspired game and you don't need a second player to be involved,  then just go for Cyber Cross - Busou Keiji. That game is excellent, and if you're buying real copies, it's like a tenth of the price of Galaxy Deka Gayvan. This is an inoffensive game, but it's also an unexciting one with so much wasted potential. To make it worse, it's from Fill-In-Cafe, who'd later go on to make a bunch of really great fighting games and beat em ups.

Kaze Kiri Ninja Action (PC Engine)

 I wasn't sure of whether or not this game counted as obscure, but I think, in 2023, it does. It's a game that's been through a few phases, as far as its perception goes:I remember in the early 00s, when I was first dipping my toes into emulation and playing PC Engine games for the first time, Kaze Kiri was a game people were always quick to recommend. A few years later, the tide had turned a little bit, and people started saying it was a bit boring, repetitive, and overrated. Than a few more years and it was barely ever mentioned at all.

 

Until recently, I hadn't played it since that first era, when everyone loved it. I'd thought it was pretty good, too, but like I said, those were the days when I was first dipping my toes into emulation. I was playing lots of games for the first time, and for some reason, it wasn't one of the ones that really stuck with me. From my recent playtime with it, I can only assume I wasn't ready for it yet. It's a single plane beat em up, a genre that a lot of people misunderstand as being the over-simple vestigial ancestor to the belt scrolling beat em up. But it's also a genre for which I've grown a huge amount of appreciation in recent years. There's a lot that can be done in the genre, and even today, there's games pushing it forward, like Ninja Saviors (which is a remake, but with enough new stuff that it still be considered an advancement).

 

Kaze Kiri came out in 1994. The PC Engine was already an elderly console, an 8-bit that was still somehow trundling on as the age of the 32-bits was just starting to dawn. But as well as impressive ports from other systems, like Asuka 120% Burning Festival, it was still getting original games with enough new ideas and enough raw talent in their production that it sometimes didn't look like the old grandpa that it was. Kaze Kiri is one such game. The first thing that hits you about it is of course the presentation, in particular, the intro that's made up of incredible-looking full screen pixel animation. The game itself looks amazing, too with animated backgrounds and detailed sprites. Sometimes, you get something that combines the two, like an especially great-looking bossfight against a big clockwork robot in a candlelit room, the flickering light reflecting off its metal armour.

 

The game itself is more advanced than you might expect, too. A year prior, Shinobi III, another hardware-pushing ninja action game had appeared on a more powerful console, the Mega Drive. Shinobi III had a complex-but-intuitive control scheme that allowed a whole bunch of different commands to be mapped to only the d-pad and three buttons. I can only wonder if that was an influence on Kaze Kiri, which performs a similar feat with a d-pad and only two buttons. You can walk, run, and jump, as you'd expect. You can also throw kunai and swing your sword. Plus, you can run, perform a dive kick, a slide kick across the ground, and do quick flips backwards and forwards. None of this is complicated, and you'll figure it all out within a few seconds of starting the game. Then you get on with what the game is: fighting lots of enemies until you've killed enough to fight the stage's boss. It's a simple formula, executed with mountains of style and panache.

 

There's a couple more steps towards modernity, too! Your ability to throw kunai is limited not by a specific supply of the throwing blades, but instead by the fact that doing so depletes your health a tiny amount. On its own, that would be annoying. Maybe even unfair. But couple with the very twenty-first century design decision of having your health constantly (but very slowly) regenerating, it makes total sense as yet another way of streamlining all the game's many systems, making a faster and simpler game while still putting a relatively huge amount of tools and possibilities into the player's hands. Just like the control scheme!

 

After reading all that, it won't surprise you to hear that I recommend Kaze Kiri. To everyone! Go and play it! It's the kind of incredible, high-quality game that can really make you excited about videogames and their design. Don't give a penny to the scamming bastards on ebay, but play this game at your earliest convenience. It's an essential play for anyone who appreciates action games, and it should re-rise to its formerly-held position of prominence in the PC Engine library.

Kaizo Chojin Shubibinman 3: Ikai no Princess (PC Engine)

 It's a strange case, the Shubibinman series, in that thanks to a physical rerelease a few years ago, its best-known entry is a spin-off that was originally only released via Satellaview. And as great as Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman Zero is, it's not my favourite of the series. That honour falls upon this game, the last of the mainline games, and the only one of the series released on CD.

 

The game makes good use of all that storage space, too. There's nice CD-quality music, lots of voice acting, and more excitingly, a whole bunch of almost full screen animated cutscenes! It's a surprise that this game runs using the original CD ROM System card and not the Super CD ROM card, those scenes look so good. The plot, as far as I can tell, is about an alien princess who invades/crashlands on Earth, and also accidentally (?) opens a portal to a demon dimension where an evil king lives. And he also wants to invade the Earth. But there's no translation, so that's just my best guess.

 

Another interesting little thing, presentation-wise, is that the stages kind of flow into each other narratively, like in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but two whole years earlier! You start out in modern Japan, hitch a ride on a flying enemy battleship, then when that's destroyed, your escape craft is eaten by gargoyles so you fall down to earth in some snowy plains where you fight aggressive snowmen until the ground gives way to an undergorund mine, where a train takes you somewhere else, and so on. It makes the game feel so much more fast-paced and exciting!

 

As for how the game actually plays, it's fun. It's a pretty typical 1992 action platformer, elevated by its great presentation mroe than anything. You run around, hit stuff with your sword, jump about, all that stuff. There's a lot of cool little setpieces in the stages too, though, even in the very first stage there's a part where you get to pilot a robot and shoot lightning for a while (again, it should be pointed out that this game also predates Mega Man X by well over a year!), and there's stuff in later stages like running away from lava flows, jumping from aircraft to aircraft, and so on. 

 

One interesting gimmick is your secondary attack: by holding the attack button for a second and releasing it, you can shoot a little ball of energy. As well as being a projectile, it also deals quite a few hits' worth of damage. On top of that, there's also a way to control it after it's been fired. Hold the attack button again, as well as a direction, and you can slightly influence the trajectory of your projectile. It's not really as useful as just shooting at enemeis when they're in front of you, but it's interesting that they tried something a little strange and different, at least. Also worthy of note is that there's no mechanical difference (as far as I could tell) between the male and female playable characters. And it's one of a very few PC Engine games with a simultaneous co-operative two player mode!

 

By 1992, the PC Engine was being left behind by the technical marvels of which the Mega Drive and SNES were capable, and it wouldn't get its second and third winds in the form of the CD ROM Super and Arcade system cards (well, the Super CD ROM card came out in late 1991, but there wasn't much that used it just yet). But Shubibinman 3 must have been a game that gave hope to the console's owners in that time, that there was life in the system yet. It's a great-looking game that's a lot of fun. And this is something I find myself saying a lot when I watch certain lesser-known kids movies from the eighties and early nineties, but it's the kind of thing I would have absolutely loved to have had access to as a kid!

Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos (PC Engine)

 It's my opinion that the PC Engine port of Asuka 120% Maxima Burning Festival is the best fighting game on any 8-bit console, so I was curious about Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos, which was released by the same developers a year earlier. Surprisingly, considering how both Asuka 120% and Fill-in-Cafe's beat em ups Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit all share a few common mechanics like the semi-automatic attack speed, and the clashing attack/parry system, Algunos plays more like a more traditional post-Street Fighter II fighting game.

 

It does have a few points that would have made it a little more unique at the time of its release, though. For example, it was made and designed specifically for the PC Engine, rather than being an arcade port, so rather than making compromises in terms of graphics and controls, it's all designed to be the best it can be on the host hardware. Like Asuka 120%, it can be played to its fullest with a standard two-button controller and the Super CD ROM system card. No need to hunt down rare and expensive six-button pads and Arcade Cards!

 

So, the controls feature a strong attack button and a weak attack button. You can also perform throws by pressing them both together (or by pressing the third button on a six-button pad). Other than that, move inputs are pretty standard for the time, with quarter circles and dragon punch inputs doing something for most characters. There's none of the kind of big innovations we'd later see in Asuka 120%, though, like dashes, backsteps, and so on. (Actually, one character does have the ability to dash, and unexpectedly, it's the big green giant guy). It still manages to stand above a lot of the lesser-known also-rans from the early 90s, though, in that it feels good to play, specials are easy to consistently execute, and the AI opponents aren't unstoppable monsters that make solo play a frustrating misery festival.

 

Where it does stand out, though, is in the setting and aesthetic. The characters, and the world they inhabit all look like they were ripped straight from some gritty bubble-era OAV. The kind of stuff that licensed on the cheap, and dubbed with a load of extra swearing in the UK. It almost feels like some kind of long-forgotten Guilty Gear ancestor, at least in aesthetic terms. I think it might have been one of the first post-SFII fighting games not to have a "martial artists in the modern real world" setting, even. (Not the first, though, as I pretty sure that title would go to Irem's Dino Rex, which supposedly changed genre mid-development when it became clear how big and important the just-released SFII was turning out to be). I was disappointed that the story mode endings didn't have nice animated cutscenes like the intro, though. Oh, and another thing to mention for solo players: the final boss is absolutely not safe for people with photosensitive epilepsy or similar conditions. It constantly emits some of the most violent flashing I've ever seen in a videogame, so be warned.

 

So, though it doesn't live up to the greatness of its direct descendant, Kakutou Haou Densetsu Algunos is still a solid, very enjoyable game, especially when you take into account the host hardware and how early into the genre's life its release date was. If you want to play it, do it via emulation, though. It's suffering the fate that seemingly all PC Engine games suffer these days: absolutely ludicrous prices online. Hopefully there'll come a time when the hoarding speculator scum get bored of old videogames and move onto ruining some other hobby, but until then, emulation is fine. Just an example, and sorry for mentioning Asuka 120% yet again in this review, but I got a copy of that game a few years ago for £15. Looking up Algunos, a less popular, less iconic game, and the cheapest copy I can find is £90. Madness.

Bullfight - Ring no Haja (PC Engine)

 

 Or maybe it's Ring no Hasha, depending on who you ask. Either way, it's a boxing game, of the lesser-spotted side-view variety (as opposed to the more common behind the shoulder/first person view popularised by Punch Out). But it's not just a boxing game, as it attempts to spice things up by also being a single plane beat em up!Unfortunately, neither game is very good. The boxing is actually okay, for the first fight, then the second fight pits you against an opponent with the fists of god, requiring you to get in at least three or four times as many hits in as they do to get them down. You pick one of eight boxers, then one of eight managers (though it seems some managers won't work with certain boxers?), then go into fighting your way up the ranks.

 

Whoever you pick, you block with one button and puch with the other. Pressing a direction with the punch button gives access to a few different kinds of punch, and the first two times you get knocked down, you hammer the punch button as fast as you can to get back up. The third time you're knocked down, you'll lose no mater what. (The same applies to your opponent, too.)

 

Then there's the beat em up mode. You slowly walk across a short stage, beating people up (the most effective way to do so is to crouch and keep kicking them, since none of them can crouch), and sometimes jumping for the bags of gold that float by overhead. There's also occasionally mysterious flying knives that atack from offscreen that are nigh-impossible to avoid, so watch out for that. The money from the floating bags, and from defeating enemies is used in the shop to buy various things: a boxing license that lets you fight the stage's boss, a first aid box that acts as a continue, and various training items that sometimes increase your stats a little, and sometimes do nothing.

 

Get to the end of the stage without the boxing license and you're sent back to the start. If you have the boxing license, you go on to fight that stage's boss, which happens in the form of an actual boxing match as seen in the game's main mode. Also like the main mode, the second boss' stamina stat is so high that your punches have almost no effect on him, and after many attempts, I was never able to knock him down more than once. I did try and grind to get stronger, by repeating the second stage over and over to buy training items, but as I mentioned, they only sometimes increase your stats, and I just didn't have the patience to keep doing it.

 

So, Bullfight is mechanically and conceptually an okay boxing game, but the way those ideas are implemented are not so great. And the beat em up mode doesn't feel good to play at all, with its stiff movement, weak-feeling attacks, and flying knives. Also, that thing where the boxing match is already booked, but to participate in it, the boxer has to fight his way through the mean streets and buy a single-use boxing license with his own money from some seedy-looking shop in a bad neighoburhood. This used to be one of the cheapest PC Engine games you could get, but that was a few years ago now, and there aren't really any cheap PC Engine games anymore. If you could still pick it up for less than £5, it might have been worth a look as a weird curiosity, but now that it typically goes for more than ten, I really wouldn't bother.

Dragon Egg! (PC Engine)

Dragon Egg! is one of that strange category of games from around the late eighties and early nineties that totally would have fit in among the arcade games of the time, but it was only ever a console game. Well, maybe 1991 was a little too late to be releasing a very eighties-feeling platformer, but only a little. But two or three years earlier, it would have fit into the arcade scene perfectly, anyway.

It borrows heavily from two popular arcade games of that era, after all: Wonderboy in Monsterland, and Altered Beast. From Wonderboy, it takes the item shops as well as the generally overall feel of things, and from Altered Beast it takes the concept of collecting orbs to gradually take on new forms. You play as a little girl who starts the game carrying a dragon egg around in her backpack, which she uses to bludgeon enemies (which seems very irresponsible). Upon death, enemies will drop either a coin or an orb. Obviously, the coins are for spending in the shops littered about the stages, on power ups and health potions.

The orbs, though, like in Altered Beast, gradually cause the dragon to hatch, and then grow. Growing the dragon doesn't just give extra range to your weapon, but it also affects your movement and the size of your sprite (and presumably, your hit box, though I'm not 100% on that one). By the time your dragon's at full size, you'll be doing massive jumps that cover a lot of height and distance. It makes it a little more difficult to accurately land on small moving platforms, but overall it's a net benefit as it allows you to reach places you smaller forms couldn't and sometimes even skip parts of stages. Oddly, you have to icrease the power of your attacks by buying power-ups from the shop, which seems odd. Also, if you lose a life, it's all the way back down to egg form, which can lead to some Gradius-style slippery slopes, especially if it happens while fighting a boss.

It's the difficulty in general that's the game's main flaw, in fact. It's not as simple as just being too hard, though: the first half of the game is incredibly easy, in fact, and you should breeze through it on your first attempt with very few issues. After there, though, the game takes a sudden and dramatic turn towards being difficult to the point that it feels unfair at times. There are enemies with attacks that come out without warning, or that are impossible to kill without also taking a hit. You could ignore them, but if you've just lost a life, you'll be desperately hoping to get some orbs. Maybe the real strategy is to learn how to get through the game using basic short range egg attack. But even if that were effective, it definitely wouldn't be any fun.

Dragon Egg! is a cute game, and it does start out fun. I won't say it's not a good game, I'll just warn anyone that fancies trying it that the latter half is brutal, and they shouldn't go into it expecting an easy time.