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

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

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

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

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

Spark Man (Arcade)

Spark Man is a Rolling Thunder-esque walking shooter from South Korea, with a few of its own eccentricities, both mechanically and aesthetically.

It begins before a coin is even inserted, with the title screen depicting the hand of god bestowing electric life unto an androgynous cyborg. Androgynous apparently being a very apt word in this case, as between coin insertion and the start of the first stage, the player is treated to a profile of the game's protagonist, including their country of origin (Republic of Korea), date of birth (1994, which along with the given age of 16 sets the game in 2010/11), parents (Electroman and Fire Lady) and then sex, for which both male and female symbols are listed. Does Spark Man identify him/herself as being somewhere on a gender spectrum, rather than a binary male or female? Amazingly progressive for a game from 1989!

Most of the game doesn't do anything particularly exciting or innovative, having the player saunter from left to right shooting awkward-looking guys dressed in red (with the odd guy in green and every now and then, a panther or two), occasionally picking up a temporary weapon power up (which last for far too short a time).
There are a few interesting ideas in there, though. Roughly once a stage, a (somewhat stupid-looking) flying platform, allowing the player to fly around the screen dropping bombs on enemies. The bosses have another nice little quirk: they're all (as far as I've seen) giant robots (including what I assume is an unlicenced cameo from a Star Wars AT-ST), and rather than having health bars, they have visible crew members on board, a certain number of whom must be shot before the robot dies.

"Somewhat stupid-looking" is a phrase that can be used to describe a lot of things about Spark Man. The enemies and protagonist have an awkward, uncomfortable way of standing and walking, the flying platform, and the way Sparky sits on it look bizarre, and the stages, apparently set in America and the USSR both look like they were drawn by someone who had only the flimsiest knowledge of the countries. I'm not saying any of the art in the game is bad or poorly-drawn, there's just some kind of vague offness about how it all looks.

For all it's faults, Spark Man isn't a terrible game, if you're curious, there's no reason not to check it out, but if you don't you're definately not missing out on a classic or anything.

Cyborg 009 (Mega CD)

So, it's a licenced game based on Shotaro Ishinomori's comic of the same name. But unlike most comic licenced games of the early 90s, rather than being aimed at kids, Cyborg 009's presentation seems to suggest that it's more at nostalgic adults. There's opening credits before the title screen, that, though they don't appear to be a direct recreation of the openings of either Cyborg 009 tv series that had been made at that point, do definitely invoke the feel of 1970s/late 60s Japanese sci-fi/action, and the options screen is styled like an old 1970s TV, with a knob that turns as you go up and down.

The game itself, however is pretty standard for a 90s licence game: it's a platform game where you shoot enemies and collect stuff. It's a pretty high quality one, though. It looks nice, the difficulty is pretty reasonably balanced and it has a nice little gimmick in 009's temporary super-speed ability. Pressing C makes 009 quickly dash forward at high speed, and starting from a few stages in, a fair bit of the level design is based around successfully using this ability in conjunction with jumping to get to higher or further away platforms than can be reached with normal jumps.

Your weapon for most of the game is a beam gun that can only be fired straight ahead, and can be powered up three times (though the only effect of the power ups is that the beam does more damage. Unfortunately, this leads to a (fairly mild) case of the Gradius slippery slope, especially when fighting bosses. Though all the bosses have fairly easy to learn attack patterns, you're still likely to take hits unless you have expertly-honed, lightning fast reflexes, and if you lose a life, you lose your powerups too, meaning that now you have to start the boss fight again, only this time you have to dodge for longer, giving you more chances to mess up. It's far from being the worse case of the problem I've ever seen, but it is a mild irritation. The worst part of it is that it renders the game's progress save option a little less useful, since that starts you at the beginning of the stage in which you saved with the default number of lives and no power-ups.

The game looks and sounds very nice, as previously mentioned, it's very much presented in a retro-Japanese style, but even ignoring that, the graphics are nicely drawn and colourful, and the music fits perfectly. One of the bosses even has a mildly impressive faux-3D effect going on in the background, though it doesn't really come across well in a still screenshot. There's also cutscenes between each stage, and though I'm not a fan of cutscenes as a concept, these are also nicely done. Unlike a lot of Mega CD cutscenes, they're almost full screen (with black borders at the top and bottom for a wide screen effect), as brightly coloured as the in-game graphics and not at all grainy. It seems that rather than using low quality FMV, the developers decided to go with a more extravagant version of the cutscenes seen in various cartridge-based games, like the Valis series or Ninja Gaiden. One little technical oddity though, is that if you're playing the game via an emulator, the voices will be out of sync, presumably due to the lack of loading times.

Cyborg 009 is a pretty fun game, I've never read or watched any version of the original story, so I can't vouch for how faithful an adaptation it is, but if you just want to play a decent Mega CD platformer, it's worth a look.

Elevator Action Old & New (Game Boy Advance)

So obviously, everyone knows of the Elevator Action series, probably through the amazing arcade game Elevator Action Returns, but I think this entry into the series has gone mostly unplayed, released as it was, only in Japan, and apparently not in great quantities.
The cartridge contains both the original Elevator Action and a whole new game. The original is what it is. I won't waste too much time talking about it, but it's definitely a game that lives in the shadow of its sequels: it's

brutally hard, fiddly to control and moves like it's set at the bottom of a treacle ocean.
The new game lets you pick from three playable characters, with different stats. There is a fourth character unlocked after completing the game with all three characters, but I didn't go that far. I got most of the way through with one character before giving up on the game. The game's stages are split into 8 sets of four, which all have to be played through individually, which presents one of the biggest problems the game has. Because you get a whole new set of lives every four stages, this makes getting through the first three quarters of the game incredibly easy. You might argue that this is to make the game more palatable for a handheld console, but compare to another GBA game, the excellent Ninja Cop (which itself has a few similarities to the Elevator Action series), which allows the player to start at any set of stages, but also goes straight into the next once one is finished, with the continuing score adding an extra incentive to play the game from start to finish in a single run. Elevator Action New doesn't even have scoring, so the player is literally just trying to get from start to finish.
With that complaint out of the way, you might wonder why I didn't complete the game, even once. The thing is, once you get to the penultimate set of stages, the game does two things that totally throw the difficulty from "pointlessly easy" to "unfairly difficult". The first thing is a new enemy, big robots that stomp around the floors shooting lasers, and who take ten shots to kill. For context, consider that your ammo is limited in this game, even for the default gun, and the player starts each stage with only 30 bullets. The second is the fact that the stage layouts are no longer simple vertical buildings with the exit at the top or bottom. I gave up on

the game, when, after finding all the secret files in one stage, dying to a time out when I couldn't seem to find the stage exit anywhere.
The game isn't a total write-off, though. There is one new element that I really liked in this game: the disguise power up. It turns the player into an enemy for 10 or so seconds, allowing them to walk about the stages freely, without any enemy interference. It's only a simple little thing, but it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save this game. I never expected EAN to be able to stand up to Elevator Action Returns, but the fact is, it doesn't even stand up to its Game Boy Color antescendant Elevator Action EX, which is a great game, and one which I definitely recommend, should you have a need for some portable elevator-themed espionage.

Buster (X68000)

Buster is a platform game, that's clearly been heavily influenced by Arcade platformers of the late 1980s, like Wardner and Legend of Hero Tonma. In it, the player travels, in the traditional manner, from left to right, killing enemies as you go. The only part of the game that's particularly original is the sword meter, which decreases every time you make a normal attack, and replenishes gradually when you're not attacking. You do also have an alternate attack, in the form of a splatterhouse-esque sliding kick, performed by pressing the

attack button at the same time as hitting the ground after a jump or fall. The sliding kick doesn't deplete the sword meter, and in fact quickly replenishes a large portion of it.
Don't mistake unoriginality for low quality, though: Buster is an excellent game that also has great graphics and music. The controls are tight and the stages are designed with deliberate precision. Nothing in the game feels arbitrary or accidental.
There is an aspect of the game that will put many off, however: its difficulty. The stages are designed with precision, and they expect to be played with precision in return. The first stage allows the player to get acquainted with the controls and mechanics, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, the game no longer has any mercy. There are jumps which require pixel-perfect accuracy, and a little later, situations that require that accuracy in jumping, but also perfect timing in attacking, and all in tiny timeframes with no space for error.
Because the game is so well made, this can get frustrating, but it's the right kind of frustration that a difficult game should invoke, where the player knows that they are at fault, and not the game. If you want a hard,

very old fashioned platform game, Buster is definitely one of them. The maker, E. Hashimoto, later went on to make a bunch of fairly well-known PC games, such as Akuji the Demon, and Guardian of Paradise. He's also made a psuedo-remake of Buster, 11 years after the original. I say psuedo-remake, as though I haven't played it, footage I've seen shows that the graphics are completely different (in a good way), and the game looks like it plays very differently, with the character moving around and fighting enemies at very high speeds.

The Castle (SG-1000)

This game's a port of an MSX game, but I'm writing about this version because it's the one I discovered first and because I really like the SG-1000's colour palette.
It's a very old-fashioned platform adventure game of the sort that were popular on various computers in Europe in the 1980s, (l'Abbaye des Morts by Locomalito is a pretty great modern-day tribute to the genre) so much so, that I actually tried to find an "original" C64 or Spectrum version from which the SG-1000 and

MSX versions might have been ported, until I saw the MSX version's title screen, which credits the game's original authors, Isao Yoshida and Keisuke Iwakura.
Anyway, the plot of the game is a generic "save the princess from the castle"-type affair, and to do so, you have to find your way around the 100 room castle. Unlike most modern metrovania games (which could be seen as the spiritual descendents of this genre), combat is far from the player's main concern in this game. Keys are the most important thing, available in various different colours, to open doors of matching colours. There's also potions to increase your number of lives, and various kinds of treasure to increase your score. The meat of the game is working out how to reach each item and each exit in every room without getting killed by any of the enemies or traps in the room. There's items that can be pushed around, like bricks and vases and such, though they all act the same. they can be jumped on top of or pushed from the sides, and they fall off of platforms. They're also your only weapon against the enemies in the castle, as pushing one of these items into an enemy kills the enemy. Dead enemies stay dead, even after leaving a room and re-entering, while items return to their original positions, meaning that a single item can be used in more than

one part of a room, as long as you exit and re-enter.
The controls are obviously simple: the d-pad moves your character, one button jumps and the other, unusually, changes the speed of the game, allowing the player to switch at will between full and half-speed, depending on whether they're waiting for an elevator to come down to them, or timing a risky jump over an enemy's head.
There's not much more to be said abou this game, other than that it meets my approval. It's a lot of fun to play, and it's neither brutally hard nor insultingly easy, and solving each room feels like a satisfying little victory.

Dahna: Megami Tanjou (Mega Drive)

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

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

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

Zombie Hunter (MSX)

This post is going to be shorter than I'd originally planned, as I couldn't stand to play the game any more to learn more about it. This wasn't always the situation,  though. There were acually three stagfes in my appreciation of this game: at first glance, it seemed low, oring and unfairly hard. Later, I gave the game a second chance and it seemed like there might have been a fun game hiding under the rough exterior. Finally, I realised that the game was centred entirely around grinding, for both items and experience.
Zombie Hunter isn't anything to do with the Oneechanbara series (a few entries of which were released in Europe under the "Zombie Hunters" title), it's a side-scrolling action RPG with a generic fantasy setting. In each stage (there are apparently six stages, though I never got past the first boss), the player moves from left to right, fighting a group of enemies every screen or so. On the controller, you have a button for jumping and a button of attacking, while to equip and use items and check up on your stats, presing Ctrl on the keyboard opens the menu. Out of combat, everything is very slow and jerky, I assume this is down to the MSX having trouble doing the scrolling, as the scrolling stops for battles, and they run a lot smoother. Although you fight the same monsters in the same locations each time, you can walk back and forth to repeat battles (which you will need to do. A lot.)  At the end of each stage, there's a boss hiding behind a big door, that must be unlocked with a key.
Like I said before, Zombie Hunter gives the player a lot of grinding to do. Only about halfway through the first stage, there's an encounter with a group of flying squid-like creatures that are nigh-impossible to defeat without rginding another level on top of the one you hould have gained along the way. All items in the game
are acquired through random drops from enemie, including equipment, healing item and the aforementioned boss key. The item grind wouldn't be o bad were it not for the fact that the enemies will drop gold rather than items a lot of the time, and, in the first stage at least, there are no shops. So to make any kind of progress, the player has to walk up and down the stage fighting the exact same battles over and over in the hopes that they'll get strong enough to be able to progress a little further. And the enemies give less experience every time you level up, too.
Don't bother playing this game. Like I said earlier, it's a slow, repetitive slog.

ChainDive (PS2)

Firstly, I'll apologise for the quality of the screenshots accompanying this post. PS2 screenshots never turn out perfectly, but the shots of this game are even worse than usual.
Anyway, ChainDive centres around a simple concept: your character has a lasso that can be used to swing

from the green dots littered around each stage. There are also enemies, who are defeated by first being frozen by your double-bladed weapon, and then smashed, by attaching the lasso to the frozen enemy and smashing into them.
The genius of the game is that it uses these small ingedients to make every stage different to the last. The first stage seems like a stage from any other mid-00s action game, with the added gimmick of the lasso: you travel from left to right defeating enemies on the way to the end of the stage. But the stages that follow are all totally different. A stage with no floor that has the player swinging from rooftop to rooftop, a stage with an incredibly high tower that must be climbed while fending off attacks, a stage exploring a cave to fin switches, and so on.
All these stages are a ton of fun to play, and the variety ensures that the game doesn't outstay its welcome. The big problem with the game in general though, is the difficulty level. Although the extreme difficulty does
result in a huge feeling of relief and satisfaction, it is still incredibly frustrating until the "trick" of each stage clicks in your head. And there are times when the game seems incredibly unfair, when you're desperately trying to find a dot to hook onto or when you fall into the abyss at the bottom of some stages with seemingly no way back up.
I still definitely recommend ChainDive to curious players, despite all that.

Recalhorn (Arcade)

In Recalhorn, you play as a boy with a horn (of the musical kind, rather than the anatomical) who wanders through a pleasant land being attacked by animals, birds and insects. The horn acts as a weapon, shooting out a little musical note to incapacitate enemies when blown.
Not all the local wildlife want the boy dead, though: a few animals have been locked in cages, and when rescued by the boy, show their gratitude by offering themselves up as summonable steeds, each with their own abilities.
Since the game is a lot harder than it looks, I've only managed to get a few stages in, and only befreinded three of the animals: the monkey, the seal and the lion.
The monkey is the first animal you meet, and its special abilities are very high jumps, and the ability to cling onto platforms and ropes. Next is the seal, who can swim and attacks by sliding across the ground on its belly, and the lion has no special movement abilities like the other two, but is invincible during its attack animation.
This game was actually never released, which is strange, as it's a great game, and the production values seem pretty high. It's actually odd that it was considered for the arcades in the first place, since a lot of elements in it seem like they belong in a console game. The two biggest examples are the fact that extra lives are gained by collecting one hundred of an item, rather than through obtaining certain score milestones (I know there are arcade games that do the 100 items thing, but I associate it more with console games, at least), and, something that might be unique among arcade games: the fact that it has a pause menu for choosing which animal friend to summon. The game would have been a great addition to the early libraries of the Saturn or Playstation. It really is a terrible waste that it's only playable through emulation. Maybe someday there'll be a push to get it dug up and finally released on modern systems, like Westone's Aquario of the Clockwork.
Anyway, as you might have picked up, I like this game a lot. It looks beautiful, sounds pretty good (but if Taito have ever made a game that doesn't have a good soundtrack, I don't know about it), and plays great.
As well as the main animal steeds gimmick, the other thing that's stood out to me is the almost Bubble Bobble-esque little tricks and secrets for finding extra points items: rustling certain bushes, finding different routes through stages and at the end of each stage, there's a large bush with unblossomed flowers. Those flowers bloom when you touch them, and the quicker you can make them bloom, the more points they give you. This reminds me a lot of those little invisible points bonuses at the end of the stages in the first Sonic game.


In conclusion, this game is very good.and you should play it. The end!

Seikima II Special: Akuma no Gyakushuu! (MSX)

You might (but probably won't) have guessed from the title that this game stars the 80s-90s metal band Seikima II. I hadn't actually heard of them before playing the game either, so don't feel too ashamed. As it turns out, they're pretty good. A bit of backstory that's (sort of) relevant to the game: the band is a group of high ranking demons sent to earth by Satan to spread his worship and also to conquer the earth through the medium of heavy metal. This is relevant to the game, as the game's villain is Zeus, king of the gods and enemy of Satan, who has kidnapped four of the band members of Seikima II, leaving only the singer, Demon Kogure to save them.
He saves them by jumping around various locations collecting stuff. Stuff like heads, ku klux klan dolls, apples and so on. The basic idea of the game reminds me of old british computer games, like Bruce Lee and Jet Set Willy, in which the goal was to explore large maps and collect all of a certain kind of item. This game doesn't have one large map, though; each missing band member is trapped in a different stage, and each stage is split into eight areas, each a few screens wide. As well as the items needed to complete the stages, there's also health increasing blood potions and money. The money is used in the shops (represented by big eyeballs) to buy extra blood potions (which should only be done in emergencies, dues to the scarcity of money), weapon upgrades and musical instruments (one per stage, they have no in-game use, but are necessary to get the best ending).
The "special" part of the game's title alludes to the fact that it's an upgraded port of a Famicom game, the most obvious changes being improved graphics and different jump physics. In the original version, there were two kinds of jump available: high jumps, done by pressing the jump button then left or right, and long jumps, done by pressing jump and left or right together. That system felt stiff and strange, and the more traditional jumping that replaces it in "special" is much preferred. Pointless semi-related trivia: I first heard of this game when I saw Arino buy a copy of the Famicom version in an episode of Game Center CX.
In conclusion, this is a pretty good game. It's nothing special (aaaahhh!), but it is definitely an improvement over the Famicom original. Plus, Seikima II are cool, so that's a bonus.

Metal Law (Amiga)

Despite the name, this game doesn't feature the members of Manowar running about in underpants slaying posers with axes. It's actually about a futuristic cop of some kind who, rather than fighting crime, goes about the place shooting monsters.
The intro claims the game is set in the future, in a place called "Neo York". Is that a futuristic version of New York, or a futuristic version of York? Since the first couple of stages take place in a kind of castley, dungeony setting, I guess it must be York. But then the second set of stages are in a Giger-esque bio-world, so who knows? Or cares?
The two most immediate things that become obvious when you start to play Metal Law are the controls (because it commits the heinous, and all-too common Amiga platformer crime of having jump mapped to up on the d-pad), and the fact that the makers were obviously big SEGA fans.
The main character and the nonsensical plot are obviously based on SEGA's game ESWAT, and the game itself plays a fair bit like Shinobi, and the player's character can even crawl on his knees in the exact same manner as Joe Musashi.
Anyway, it's not a massively complex game: you go right, shoot the (impressively ugly) monsters and try not to fall down any bottomless pits. And there are lots of bottomless pits. And to make things even worse, Metal Law commits another grave platform game crime by having a lot of leaps of faith. You do start to recognise them after a couple of goes, but the situation isn't helped at all by fake-helpful arrows that lead to an unseen pit, nor by power ups that seem to have been placed to lure players to an annoying and cheap death.
Despite it's flaws, which are both numerous and large, Metal Law is still a lot of fun to play. Jumping around the stages, collecting power-ups, and shooting enemies are all enjoyable actiities in this game. It is just a shame about the stupid mistakes the makers made. There are definitely much worse Amiga platformers, though, so it's strange that this one seems to have been so forgotten.

Odyssey (Amiga)

Apparently, people want to see more posts about european computer games on here. Stuff for the Amiga, C64, Spectrum, and so on. i don't write about these things a lot, as although their games are super-obscure in America, over here, a lot of the game are fairly well-remembered. So it feels like I'm writing about games that everyone knows. Plus, there are people who are obsessed with the games on these systems, and my knowledge of them isn't so great, so I don't want to make myself look stupid, either.
Odyssey, then. It's a platform game with huge stages. Really huge stages. It's also got nice graphics. The best part of those graphics being the fact that the player character actually has different sprites for when he's facing left and right, so his sword stays in the same hand! Amazing!
Anyway, there are seven stages in Odyssey, and as I said, they are huge. They're also split into three segments: The first three stages are the outer islands, and each of these contains a crystal and a sphere of influence. The crystals allow you to turn into animals (one is a grasshopper, another is a sparrow, and the third I haven't managed to get yet.). The spheres allow you to do so on the second set of stages, the inner islands. Each of the inner islands holds a key, and when all the keys are found, you can go to the final stage: the king's castle, where the wizard is being held captive.
You can visit the stages in any order, but you won't be able to do anything in the inner islands until you have the spheres and crystals, and you can't get inside the castle without the keys. Unfortunately, I have managed to find only two of the crystals and none of the spheres, so I can't tell you about the later parts of the game.
But the stages I have played were a lot of fun. You go around caves solving simple puzzles (switches, keys, that sort of thing), and also climb trees, cliffs, ledges and towers high up into the sky. You fight enemies like rock-men that roll around in an annoying manner, and black and red poisonous spiders. You murder harmless innocent little clay-men.
I don't really have much more to say about this game. It's fun, very nice to look at, but also hard. Not hard in the "constantly dying" sense, but rather the "lost and frustrated" sense, though.

The Super Shinobi (NES)

Hello! I'm sorry it's been such a long time since my last post, I've been spending too much time playing games everyone's heard of (and that, as such aren't suitable material for this blog), like Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 and Alice: Madness Returns. But here's a new review! I think this might be a record for the most posts in a row that aren't about Playstation games, too, which is nice.
Anyway, The Super Shinobi for NES/Famicom is, despite the title, a port of the awesome and excellent Mega Drive game The Super Shinobi II (which is known in the west as Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master). Although "port" might be too generous a term for this game. Those plucky pirates at SUPER GAME tried their hardest, but it's really more of a loose adaptation of the original.
At first glance, it does seem pretty faithful, the graphics are excellent considering the limitations of the hardware, and the music is alright too (I assume it will probably be of interest to game music nerds too, so they can hear some NES covers of Mega Drive songs...).
The first big difference you'll notice is the scarcity of shurikens compared to the original. This means you'll be going in close and attacking enemies with your sword a lot more. As you go throughout the game, you'll notice that Joe isn't as agile as you're used to, too. For example, his somersault jump doesn't goe as high as it does in the original, he can only hang underneath certain places, rather than from the bottoms of any platforms and, as far as I can tell, he can no longer walljump.
The game also makes a brave attempt at Shinobi III's horse riding stage, but it doesn't really work very well. It's nice that they tried though, right?
I've only managed to get a few stages into the game (to be exact, as far as the "floating cyborg brain thing" boss), and Joe's new found physical disabilities haven't hampered progress so far, though there are some item on platforms that are just slightly out of reach, which is annoying, considering the raised difficulty in this game compared to its source.
The blame for the increased difficulty can be placed on a combination of the weaker hardware, and some slightly inept programming. There are two main problem when fighting enemies: the AI for the stronger enemies seems completely random compared to the original game, so rather than waiting for an opening that you know is coming, the most effecient way of fighting is to get in close and slash at them until they die, hoping that they go before you. The other problem is slightly shoddy collision detection. Not bad enough to be a disaster, just a mild nuisance.
From what I've played of this game, it seems like the most reliable way to proceed is to abuse the hell out of your ninja magics: using the suicide spell when you're low on health, so you can start a new life's health bar without restarting the stage, and using the shield spell whenever you have more than one magic stock, to make that health bar last a little bit longer. It seems the makers of the game were aware of this too, as while the extra magic item is incredibly rare in the original version, there's a few in each stage in the pirate.
All in all, like a lot of these pirate ports, it's a nice curio, but not really a very good game, and definitely not worth bothering with in this modern age when you can just emulate the original.