Zeiram Zone (Playstation)

So, this is a beat em up based on the excellent Zeiram movies (well, the first one is excellent, at least. I haven't seen the second one yet, or the spin-off animated series.) In it, the main protagonist of those movies, Iria, goes to various planets to apprehend evil-doers and space criminals and the like, by defeating them in battle and trapping them in crystals, just like she does in the movies.
The controls are more like a fighting game than a beat em up, with up being jump and the four face buttons assigned to LP, HP, LK and HK. There are even special moves, the three I've managed to figure out are:
Quarter Circle Foward + Punch to do a swipe with a lightsabre-type weapon
Quarter Circle Back + Kick to do a big flippy kick thing that can attack enemies in front of and behind you,

and
Dragon Punch Motion + Kick for a quick kick combo.
The game mostly plays like any other regular beat em up, walking along and beating up monsters and robots and other weird things as you go, though rather than the typical belt scroller movement, the game uses L2 and R2 to allow you to jump between planes, Guardian Heroes-style. The boss fights are slightly different, being more like a primitive 3D fighting game, and the plane-switch buttons become left and right sidestep buttons.
The game is pretty fun to play, as simple and clunky as it is, and though the graphics are pretty poor even by the standards of 1996 3D games (and on a related note, the CGI cutscenes between stages look awful), the enemy's designs do look pretty cool and original, my favourite being the robot cranes that attack at the start of the "Ghost Castle" stage.

There is a big problem with the game, though. A few stages in, you'll reach the "Bio-Ship" stage, which is full of huge moving traps that drain your health on contact, and the game's control scheme doesn't really equip you well enough to effectively avoid them. Getting past this area has been impossible for me so far, which really is a shame, as I was just getting to enjoy the fighting mechanics and figuring out the best strategy for different enemy types and so on. It's made even worse by the fact that the Bio-Ship stage itself also actually looks pretty cool.

Maze Heroes: Meikyuu Densetsu (Playstation)

Finally, I can post here again! The computer on which I play games and emulators was broken, and now it's fixed! (By removing and re-inserting the RAM.)
So anyway, Maze Heroes is a board game-style pseudo-RPG thing. The player moves around a multi-route path of tiles until they get to the tile with the boss on. Beat the boss and go on to the next stage. Other than the Boss tile, there are five types of tile making up the mazes: blank tiles do nothing, tiles with a bat on take

you into a battle with a regular enemy, blue tiles with a star on will either give an item or heal the player, and skull tiles will either poison or hurt you. The last kind, the question mark tiles will randomly give one of the effects of the other four tiles when you land on it. 
Obviously, you'd never bother stepping on skull tiles if you had a choice about it, so the number of tiles the player moves each turn will be a number between one and five, selected randomly. The random number generator is also seen in battle, deciding how much damage you and the monsters inflict upon each other each turn, though unlike movement, the numbers for damage rolls depend on various stats. Defeating enemies sometimes grants items, so fighting is always preferable to standing on a trap, which will only hurt the player with no reward.
The player can improve their stats either by strength/intelligence increasing items that can be won in battle, or by finding new equipment on the star tiles. Spells (which are mostly offensive) and healing items can be found either way. This leads to the biggest problem the game has: the only way to have a chance against the boss of each stage is to go around the board, hoping to get the items and spells you need to strengthen yourself to
fight it, then going and making an attempt at doing so. Luckily, getting killed just means going back to the start of the current stage, keeping your stat increases and new equipment, but even this small blessing only serves to make the game even more of a mindless, random slog.
On the plus side, the game does look very nice, with the artwork for the random enemies being especially nice, and the mindless nature of the game does make it a painless way to pass half an hour or so. Still, I can't really recommend Maze Heroes or anything.

Nekketsu Oyako (Playstation)

So, the title apparently translates as "hot blooded family", and refers to the three playable characters: a dad and his son and daughter. The dad, Rando is the worst character. He's slow, can't pick up most of the guns in the game and has less moves than the other two. His two redeeming features are his Haggar-esque jumping

piledriver and the fact that he's the only character who can use the (very rare) bazooka weapon. There's also a beer health pickup that only he can use, but it doesn't heal very much and it's at least as rare as the bazooka (I've only seen one of each). The daughter, Rio is a little better. She moves faster, and has a fun little move where she can pogo around on top of the enemies' heads. There's also a nice little touch with her when she picks up a weapon and walks around with it, she does so while carrying it on her back. It's a pointless thing, but it adds a little personality. The son, Tora is the best character by far, though. He has a bunch of moves, like a flying kick that bounces off the top of enemies upwards and away, a brutal moves where he repeatedly slashes a knife back and forth, doing and ton of damage, and he's the only character of
the three who can run.
The game itself seems at first to be a regular, generic beat em up, though it does have a couple of interesting gimmicks, like the versatility and mobility of Tora's moveset, and the fact that though you obviously start with a single bar of health, even when its full you can collect more food to fill it up a second bar (like in the Dynamite Deka series).
The setting is pretty cool, too. The first stage takes place on the city streets like any other beat em up, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, things take a more surreal turn. A whale smashes through the bridge on whivh you're standing and swallows you, leading you to spend the next stage inside and on top of the whale, fighting the usual thugs and goons along with boxing gloce-wearing octopi and weird creatures

made of water. The next stage mostly returns to normalcy on a theme park island resort, but includes a really cool section where you fight big crowds of enemies on top of a roller coaster.
Nekketsu Oyako isn't anything special, but it is pretty good. There's also an english path available, though there's barely any Japanese text in the game, and none of what there is is essential for progress. The game's worth playing, but you should definitely play as Tora if you do.

Damdam Stompland (Playstation)

Obviously, I can only speculate about this, but it seems very much like this game exists mainly because someone working for a small developer discovered how to make the Playstation do a thing, and they wanted to make a game to show off that thing. The thing in question being the real-time rendering of shadows, which are actually shaped by the models casting them, and which also change length and direction in reaction to the

light source.
The game itself is simple one of shadow tag, as seen in the excellent Urusei Yatsura movie Only You: the idea isn't to tag your opponent's body, but to stamp on their shadow. Do it three times before your opponent does, or before the time (the matches only last a single minute, which goes by very quickly) runs out to win.
You can't just walk on to the shadow to score a point, but must press X to do a stomping action. Circle jumps and square does some kind of sliding tackle type thing that doesn't seem to serve any purpose, other than moving straight ahead very quickly.
There are numerous characters and arenas (arenae?) in the game, though they aren't specific to each other. There aren't any boss characters as far as I can tell. Some of the characters are typical cartoony humans, along with a robot (who bears a striking resemblens to Goriki from Kia Asamiya's Steam Detectives), a

mushroom-man wearing wooden armour, and strangest of all, a severed fish head with human legs. And it really is a severed head, as the wound is visible from certain angles. There's also a nice bit of flavour in the game, with big colourful illustrations between stages and in endings, and the game over screen shows a picture of your defeated character looking depressed (or in the case of the fish head, eaten).
The arenas are all completely different, offering different ratios of safe area and Dead or Alive-esque danger zones. The safe areas also have different features in them, such as conveyor belts, moving obstacles or even just that fact that one stage's safe area is a tiny, low friction square in the centre of the map. Another hazard comes in the form of little sombrero-clad cactus-men, who will stomp on the shadows of the unwary.
I like this game more than I had expected to. It is a lot of fun to play, though I can imagine it might not have a

lot of long-term longevity, being based as it is on a single idea, and it did take me a few games to get used to playing it (though a good part of this was working out the controls, a task of which I have helpfully absolved you). There's also a definite low-budget feel to it, it really wouldn't be out of place in the Simple 1500 series (two notes here: firstly, long-time readers will surely know I would never regard this as a negative point, and secondly, if i remember rightly, there is actually a game of regular tag in the Simple 1500 series).

Mizuki Shigeru no Yokai Butoden (Playstation)

A fighting game where all the characters are Japanese folk monsters is a pretty nice idea, in theory. Unfortunately, the act of putting that theory into practice has, in this case, been done with more enthusiasm than talent.
Some of the monsters in this game I'm familiar with from comics and cartoons like Urusei Yatsura, Ushio and Tora and Usagi Yojimbo. These include oni, karasutengu, sickle weasel, snow princess. There's also a few I'm not familiar with, like the weird lumpy-headed dwarf thing and the old woman who is very aggressive with her kisses. There's also two boss characters who are (as far as I can tell) unplayable. They're both also western-style monsters: a female demon who might be some kind of succubus, and a cloaked grim reaper type.
As for how it plays, it's kind of terrible. The controls are stiff and unresponsive, and everything feels very awkward. The clunky controls even make something as fundamental as special move inputs unreliable, and possibly in reaction to this, the shoulder buttons serve as macros, each one having a special move assigned to it. This in turn leads to the game's one interesting mechanic (which I strongly suspect wan't even intentional): these macros cancel the animations of normal attacks, meaning you can do some super-fast (and ridiculous looking) 1-2 combos. Against an AI opponent who isn't expecting these kind of tactics, this completely breaks the game, since it gives them very little hope of fighting back. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to play against a human opponent, but I'd be really interested in seeing some high-skilled fighitng game players totally break the game.
Oh, and I didn't know until I looked it up for this review, but Mizuki Shigeru is the creator of the popular GeGeGe no Kitaro comic/cartoon/movie franchise.
(Sorry about the weird layout of this post, but blogger is being stupid and uncooperative again)

TRL: The Rail Loaders (Playstation)

Hello! I'm back again! I apparently get the same amount of monthly views whether I post or not! Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Anyway, on to today's game. I think it might actually be a port of a Korean PC game, but I'm not sure.
It's hard to categorise, but I'm listing it as a shooting game and a puzzle game. Mostly a shooting game though. But unlike most shooting games, you play as a train on a track, and as such, your movement is mostly restricted to moving back and forth along that track, as well as jumping over obstacles. You also have an AI-controlled parttner, who's performance mostly varies between useless and annoying.
You do get some small choices as to where you go in the stages, as there are switches here and there along the way that change the route you're taking. The problem with this is that you don't know which routes are the best unless you've playted through the stage before.
Along the way, there'll be other trains on your track going the opposite direction that you'll have to shoot, and brown... things that you'll have to jump over. Your gun isn't a typical destructive weapon, instead shooting a large bubble that your enemies safely float away inside.
At the end of each stage, there's a boss fight, during which your train will inexplicably take flight. The first boss is a pushover: you can just sit in front of its weakspot and shoot until it dies, but the second boss is a lot harder, constantly attaking, and hiding its weakspot away most of the time.
I haven't beaten the second boss yet, and to be honest, I probably never will. The game, despite being original, just isn't very good. I don't recommend wasting any time playing it.
 END.

Brave Prove (Playstation)

One thing I've noticed about the Playstation's library over time is that there's quite a few games (often by smaller developers) that seem to be heavily inspired by games that were, at the time, exclusive to SEGA consoles. The most well-known examples being Gunner's Heaven/Rapid Reload and Panzer Bandit, which pay "homage" to Gunstar Heroes and Guardian Heroes, respectively. Gamera 2000 and to a lesser extent Omega Boost are very similar to the Panzer Dragoon games, and there are a whole bunch of Virtual On imitators (including Reverthion). Brave Prove is another one of those games, with the inspiration in this case being the Story of Thor games (called Beyond Oasis in America, for some reason).
Not that being an imitator is a bad thing, Gunner's Heaven and Panzer Bandit are both great games! Brave Prove is, too.
Most of the game is spent fighting enemies and exploring dungeons (or exploring the countryside between towns). Like in the Thor games, you fight with a short sword, and have a few special moves that are done with combinations of the d-pad and attack button. Also like Thor, you gradually meet and recruit various elemental spirits who allow you to use magic. There's even a type of enemy that's almost exactly like an enemy you fight in the Thor games.
I've enjoyed playing this game a lot, and it's often hard to get me to like RPGs. Where Brave Prove succeeds is that there's very little in the way of dialogue and cut scenes. Of the five hours I've played so far, I estimate that less than 10 minutes has been spent skipping through boring text boxes. The lack of text also makes the game accessible, despite being untranslated. Although there is one guide for the game on GameFAQs (amazingly, written all the way back in 1998, only a month after the game's release!), I've only had to consult it once or twice, and those times were just when I'd gotten lost. You aren't missing anything from being unable to read the text (except the plot, but that's almost definitely boring cliched tripe anyway).
There's not really much else to say, really. It's an action RPG. It looks and sounds really nice. It's fun to play. It's very similar to the Story of Thor games. There's practically no language barrier. The End!

Lucifer Ring (Playstation)

You may have gathered this from how often they're featured herre, but i really love beat em ups. They're a great, under-appreciated genre, and one which I honestly believe still has a lot of unexplored potential. Here is a post about yet another one of them.
It's on the Playstation, which is nice, since the 32-bit era was something of a dry patch for the genre. It's also got a pretty generic fantasy setting, but let's not hold that against it. The setting does have an advantage, in that it means the game has tons of different enemies, to the point that I really think it could have benefitted from an in-game bestiary (two points, though: this game was Japan-only, so an in-game bestiary would probably have been of no use to me, and also, I think most games would be vastly improved by the inclusion of a bestiary. I love bestiaries.). The usual problem of pallette swapped enemies doesn't even rear its head until the third stage, and even then, it's done quite well, with the "new" re-used enemies having different weapons and attacks than their predecessors.
So anyway, you play as a guy named Nash, and you go from one end of a generic fantasy location (forests, temples, caves, etc.) to the other, beating up every monster you meet. It all looks very nice, if you like low poly models and the like (and if you don't, what's wrong with you? weirdo.). There's a few power-ups to get, including the usual health refills and extra lives, plus the less common magic swords. There are at least two kinds of magic sword (though there might be others later in the game, maybe?): fire and ice. There doesn't seem to be any kind of elemental weakness/resistance system going on, but the ice sword has the advantage of being able to randomly freeze enemies for a few seconds. But oddly, the enemies are invincible while frozen, making it slightly less useful than it first seems. There's also a normal sword anti-power up that you should avoid.
The game is mostly linear, though once or twice each stage you'll find yourself at a branching path, and usually the most difficult path (or the one with bottomless pits on it) will be the one that leads to magic swords and extra lives. There's four action buttons: jump, normal and strong attacks, and the usual "damage everything emergency magic" button. You charge your magic by taking or causing damage, like the power bar in a fighting game.
It's a fairly fun game, the only big faults being the difficulty, which is a bit too high for my liking, and the lack of a co-op mode, an omission that is always baffling in beat em ups. Really, who makes a single player-only beat em up? Tsk.

Fatal Fantasy VII in English! (And Portuguese!)

I'm sure you remember the previous two times I posted about the strange Net Yaroze oddity that is Fatal Fantasy VII. Well a helpful guy named E. Shiroma has kindly translated the text in the video into both English and Portuguese!

He also added these comments:

* * *

In the first screen of the video there are some words that I didn't mention in the captions.
● "Terra Incognita" is the first game that appears on the list;
● Below the words "Fatal Fantasy VII Playable demo" (フェイタルファンタジーⅦ体験版 Feitaru Fantajī VII Taikenban) there are the following sentences: "You can play only a little!" (少しだけ遊べちゃう！ Sukoshi dake asobechau!) and "Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack - Please insert Disc 1" (フェイタルファンタジーⅦ オリジナル・サウンド・トラック　Ｄｉｓｃ１を入れて下さいFainaru Fantajī VII Originaru saundo torakku - Disc 1 o irete kudasai).

Besides the images are clearly related to Final Fantasy VII, some passages of the text also refers to the game. The "Nude Company" (全裸カンパニー Zenra Kanpanī) makes mention of the "Shinra Company" (神羅カンパニー Shinra Kanpanī).

I translated the compound word makōshū (魔公衆) as "public devil", but I think it could have been better (I'll end up changing the translation later…). Ma (魔) means several things: "devil", "evil spirit", "danger", "temptation", "disaster", etc. As I don't know exactly what the word means in this case, I used the most common meaning. Kōshū (公衆) means "public". Makōshū is a pun on the words Makōro (魔晄炉), which was translated into Final Fantasy VII as "mako reactor", and kōshū benjo (公衆便所), that means "public toilet". As you may have noticed, "mako" is composed of the kanji ma (魔) and kō (晄). Kō means light, shine.

Two Tenkaku (Playstation)

I read somewhere that this game was the winner of the highest award in the Second Digital Entertainment Program (DEP '94) Pro Course. The problem is, the only reference I can find to this program is the same quote regarding this game winning at it, copied and pasted into various pointless game database sites. So for all I know, DEP '94 might not even be a real thing.
Other internet results for this game are mainly made up of scattered forum posts, in which people express their opinion of it. Most of thoe opinions are negative. That's entirely reasonable, too! The game is far from being a must-play classic! It doesn't have an interesting scoring system, the graphics are kind of drab (although the first stage has some nice pixel cityscapes, if you like that sort of thing), and it's hard without
feeling like a fun challenge. To top it all off, it has an incredibly ugly CG intro FMV. Despite all these criticisms, I actually kind of like this game! Or at least, I got mildly addicted to it. If I put it on, I know i'll be playing at least few credits before I get bored and do something else. And the presentation isn't all bad! The title cards for each stage have an unusual "ominous Buddhist chanting" thing going on. The Buddhist theme also finds its way into the graphics in a small way: one of the two bomb types summons a giant Buddha made of fire that shoots fireballs about the screen. (Note: I am not a religious scholar. If I'm wrong and the chanting and the fire guy are from another religion, feel free to correct me.)
I should probably describe how the game actually plays in a little more detail, right? Well, there isn't really a great deal of detail to go into. It's a pretty generic shooter. There are three ships to choose from (I prefer the blue one, as it shoots a cool Dodonpachi-esque laser when you've collected a couple of power-ups), power-ups, bombs, no special scoring system, blah blah blah. In summary, I liked this game, but don't feel like you're missing anything if you never get to play it.

Cyber Egg - Battle Champion (Playstation)

It's yet another Playstation game in which cute vehicles have battles in arenas! It's got some interesting things about it that are worth mentioning, though. And I promise the next Playstation game will be something different.
Anyway, in this game, you control small bipedal robots that look kind of like midget fighter jets with limbs attatched. There are four to choose from initially, with a few unlockable ones too (that I haven't unlocked. There's also apparently no instructions for unlocking them anywhere online, either, but I assume it's the usual "complete story mode" deal.) The pilots of these initial four fill the stereotypes you'd expect from such a game: the red robot's pilot is the typical boy protagonist, the black robot has the tough-looking rival, the green robot has the fat guy and the pink robot has the girl. There doesn't seem to be much difference between the four, playing wise, so just pick the colour you like best, I guess.
The main mode of the game is championship mode, and despite what you might have assumed based on the title and the selectable characters, the game is structured more along the lines of Bomberman's single player mode than a fighting game. You enter stages, you have to defeat a bunch of enemies in each stage, and every few stages there's a boss. The interesting thing is that although you have a health bar (and the enemies also have health, though their bars aren't shown, instead blue sparks of electricity can be seen coming off them when their health is low.), you don't die when it's depleted (and neither do the enemies). Instead, the lower you health goes, the further you get knocked back by enemy attacks, and if you fall off the stage, then you lose a life. This seems to be a lot like the way the Smash Bros. games work, though this game predates the first Smash Bros. by over a year! It's almost suspicious how similar the two systems are!
Each stage is a set of small floting platforms, usually with one large on in the middle. If you jump and land on the edges of the largest platform, it'll tilt in your direction! Also, there are items strewn about the steag, plus various destroyable things like machinery and barriers. Small sweets appear around the stage, either from the power-up boxes (in fact, every stage has a box with eight sweets in it), or they sometimes randomly appear when you punch enemies. Each sweet gives you one point, with which you can upgrade your robot between stages.
I think I've said all there is to say about this game now. Although it's not anything special or life-changing, it is a pretty fun game, and even with my puny attention span, it can make 45 minutes go by like no time at all.

Reverthion (Playstation)

Reverthion is made by Tecnosoft, who are most famous for the excellent Thunderforce series of shooting games. It isn't a shooting game, though, it's a fighting game. It plays like a simplified version of Virtual On, and also all the robots are shaped (vaguely) like animals.
The animal robots on offer are crab, dove, wasp, spider, butterfly, walrus/turtle thing, shark and dragon-looking thing. There's also a boss robot, who is some kind of centaur/spider/multiwinged angel monster. I don't know if the boss is unlockable in this version, though there is also a Saturn version, in which it is unlockable, according to gameFAQS. And judging by videos of it on youtube, the saturn version has slightly nicer graphics than the Playstation version, too. Not that there's anything wrong with the graphics in this version, they're pretty good considering how early in the Playstation's life it came out. And of course, this being a Tecnosoft game, the music is pretty great too!
Moving on to how the game plays, it plays alright. You move the robots using the old-fashioned swivel and go forward tank controls, and you can also jump, boost and do a barrel roll to either side, and you have an attack button. The are apparently special moves in the game, since the CPU opponents all use them against you, but I have yet to discover how to actually do any of them.
It's a pretty fun game to play, and having animal-shaped robots is a nice gimmick, even though it doesn't really affect how the game plays. That's a wasted opportunity in my opinion, all the robots control pretty much the same, with only their speed and the power of their weapons to differentiate them (and their special moves too, I guess). It would have been cool is the dove, wasp and butterfly could all fly, or if the spider could crawl over obstacles, that kind of thing. But I guess that would have ruined the balance of the game. Speaking of which, choose the crab: his attack is only short range, but it's quick and very powerful. Get in close to your opponent and just destroy their health bar. Until you get to the last boss, who has a force field attack thing that makes the crab useless. Bah.

Choro Q Jet: Rainbow Wings (Playstation)

I've been meaning to review this for well over a year now, but for some reason, I'm only just now getting round to it. Now that I've built it up like that, I'm sure you'll all be disappointed at how this isn't a classic masterpiece of games writing. Waah.
Obviously, it's a spin-off of the well known Choro Q series of racing games/ talking car RPGs (CaRPGs?), and it's about military aircraft in general, not just jets. Breaking from the usual Choro Q style, the aircraft actually have human pilots, too! There's a bunch of characters/aircraft to choose from, including a bunny-girl in an attack helicopter, a punk in a stealth bomber and a Sakura Wars knock-off in a cherry blossom painted plane. Other miscelleny includes the usual stuff you get in the Playstation games about which I write, like an animated intro, blue skies, and so on.
The game plays like a combination of the All-Range Mode stages from Lylat Wars, and the lock-on missiles from the Afterburner games. You fly around the smallish stages, shooting down enemies with either your lock-on missiles or your non-lock-on machine gun (which can also be used to shoot down enemy missiles, again like in Afterburner!) until you fulfill the target, at which point "WARNING!" will appear on the screen, and the boss fight will start. The boss doesn't just arrive in the stage, though, rather the game does a slightly awkward feeling thing of having the stage reset, but with the enemies all gone and the boss present.
The stage targets vary from destroying a particular building or all of a certain kind of enemy, to destroying all the enemies within a time limit, among other things.
The early boss fights are often very easy, since for a lot of them, as long as you can keep them in your sights, you can fire all your missiles as fast as you can push the button, making short work of their health bars. Of course, this changes as the game goes on, and later bosses are almost chellenging.
The game never seems to actually get hard, though. And though it's fun to play, eventually, the fact that the missions aren't very hard and, despite the variety of objectives, also play very similarly to each other, you'll probably get bored of the game before you complete it. It is fun for a while, though.