Bubble Hero 2 (PC)

Okay, so this review is going to be terrible filler for a few reasons.
Reason one: It had been a while since the last post, and unfortunately, I haven't really been playing anything obscure enough to be worth posting here.
Reason two: There's no screenshots because all the screenshots I took of this game came out all corrupt and strange. This is especially a shame because the graphics were pretty much the only good thing about the game.
Reason three: I could only actually stand to play a few credits of this awful, awful game.

So, it's a Bubble Bobble rip-off for PC. When you first load it up, you might be impressed with its graphics. There's no shame in that, it's got nice big colourful sprites and... nice big colourful sprites. As I mentioned before, that's everything good about the game.
There is no background music, even though there's an option to turn music on and off. There are two buttons like you'd expect from a Bubble Bobble clone: jump and blow. But the jump button only works about three-quarters of the time.
And all these things are leading up to the main event of this games problems, and one that's ruined a previous chinese game I reviewed: the first boss is huge, it's faster than you, it will camp right next to your respawn point to kill you again and it takes a ton of hits to kill. How many hits? I'll never know, as I gave up after four or five attempts. It's even worse than the bosses in Adventurous Boy.
So there's Bubble Hero 2. A legitimately awful game.

Dragon Fighter (NES)

Sorry it's been so long since the last post, I've been spending lots of time playing fare far too mainstream for this blog, like Dodonpachi Ressurection and Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and so on. Both of those are really good, by the way.
Anyway, when you first start playing Dragon Fighter, it seems pretty much like any other generic NES platform game: you're a sword guy in a frosty wasteland, it's really hard, you're fighting absurd enemies like killer snowflakes and ninja bears. But then you die and get game over (since there are no lives), and if you're me, you think "That can't be it! There has to be more to this game!", and you find out that there is more to this game, that this game has a gimmick. A really cool gimmick.
There are two meters at the top of the screen while you play. The shorter one is obviously your health bar (don't worry, it gets slightly longer every time you complete a stage), the longer one is your dragon bar. Your dragon bar fills up a tiny amount every time you kill an enemy, and when it's at least half full, hold up and jump together to turn into a dragon. Then proceed to fly around and shoot stuff until it runs out or you change back voluntarily.
Obviously, the cool gimmick alone makes the game a pretty amusing diversion, and apart from that it's not really bad, just a generic NES platform game. It does have one pretty big flaw, though: the only health recovery items are dropped by enemies randomly, so depending on whether the gods are on your side that day, you could get plenty of them or you could get none. In a game as hard as this, that can make a really big difference as to how far you get on a playthrough.

Dino Wars - Kyouryuu Oukoku heno Daibouken (SNES)

So, this game is based on an early 90s kids' movie that no-one remembers: "Adventures in Dino City", which is about a couple of kids who get sucked into the world of a TV show. Though I'm sure I remember the movie just being called "Dinosaurs: The Movie" when I saw it. Strange.
The game itself is a platform game, but going against the trend of licenced kids platform games on the SNES, it's actually not awful.
The game looks and sounds pretty nice, with the backgrounds on the outdoor stages standing out in particular, being very well drawn and colourful.
It plays great, too: the stages are pretty varied, and you can get pretty far into the game, and it'll still be throwing new gimmicks and obstacles at you. Although there are quite a few stages that follow the formula of "ride a moving platform across a long bottomless pit while stuff tries to kill you", but while the later incarnations of these stages get frustrating very quickly, it's a credit to the game that there are at least three types of them (rollercoaster, jetski-type thing, and large mode 7 rotating wheel thing with platforms on it) that all play quite differently to each other.
To fight enemies, you can choose to either jump on their heads, or punch them. Neither are especially great: the punch is very short range, and there are a fair few enemies (especially later on in the game) that like to jump around, and they can do it almost as high as the player character. Despite the combat in stages being poor, the boss fights are actually a lot better, and all very different to each other.
This is a good game, and I'm somewhat surprised it isn't more well known, considering it got a worldwide release. If you're wondering why I reviewed the Japanese version when it got a worldwide release, the reason is that whoever was in charge of localising the game for the west partook in that most hated 90s habit: they messed with the difficulty and made the JP version's hard mode into the western version's normal mode.

Kolobok Piramida (Mega Drive)

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

Lion King 3 (Mega Drive)

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

Danan the Jungle Fighter (Master System)

Danan the Jungle Fighter isn't a very well known game. Most Master System games aren't that well known on the internet to begin with, but this is pretty obscure even among those.
It's a platform game, but with a bit of dialogue here and there (not much by today's standards, but tons compared to most 8-bit games) and it has experience points and equipment. The plot is okay, better than most 8-bit games: in ancient times, a legendary warrior sealed away an evil god and saved the world, and now the tribe next door is trying to bring back that evil god. This is all pretty routine stuff for a videogame plot, until about halfway through the game, you get to the shocking twist that it's actually an army of psuedo-nazis trying to resurrect the evil god, to turn the tide of a war they're losing. There's even a surprising bit of vague racism when you meet one of the Nazi bosses. The end of the game is a bit rubbish. You "fight" some evil priest guy, which looks more like you're repeatedly stabbing him in the bum, then the evil god appears, and dies incredibly easily. I don't know how not-hitler expected to win the war with that thing's aid when it can be easily defeated by a half naked man with a knife. Sorry about the spoilers, if anyone was planning to go and play this game.
The levelling up via experience points only raises your max HP, to make your attacks more powerful, you have to find the knives that are hidden in the game. Not very well hidden, though.
The graphics are pretty good, and the animation, though simple, looks nice enough. Danan's attack animation looks like he's shanking someone, prison style, though. The music is boring and repetitive, but you'll probably barely even notice it's there.
Oh! Another thing, you can collect monkey faces, that allow you to summon animal helpers. But you never will, they're a bit useless, and the game never gets hard enough that you need any help anyway.
And that's the main problem with Danan: it's both easy and short. It's less than an hour from start to finish, which wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that you'll probably finish it on your first go. There is an option at the start to take either the normal route, or "A Very Rugged Path", which is supposedly harder, but the guy doesn't actually let you take the rugged path. i thought it would possibly be unlocked after finishing the game, but that's not it either. Strange.

Diet Go Go (Arcade)

Diet Go Go was released by Data East in 1992. It's a spiritual successor to Tumblepop. The plot apparently involves an evil scientist giving everyone free meat and cake. That bastard. Instead of vacuuming up enemies then shooting them like in Tumblepop, you inflate them with balls, then kick them around at other enemies. This works a lot better than Tumblepop's vacuuming which could sometimes feel a bit awkward and inaccurate.
Instead of always dying with a single hit, if you get hit by an enemies attack (which is usually in the form of food being thrown at you), you become fat and slow, and die if you get hit again. If you get hit by the enemies themselves you die straight away.
Like in Tumblepop, you get extra lives from bonus stages, this time accessed by getting 777 on the fruit machine at the top of the screen, which spins whenever you collect one of the big gold coins that enemies drop. Matching triples of other symbols gets you one of each power-up or causes a whole bunch of points items to appear onscreen. This random element meants this happens a lot more often than collecting the whole word "tumblepop", so you end up getting extra lives pretty frequently.
Like you can see in the video, it's a lot faster than Tumblepop, and i think it's a lot better too. It's actually one of my most played roms in MAME, and one of the few i can come close to completing.

(Originally posted on selectbutton.net on 13/03/2009)