Crimewave (Saturn)

So, Crimewave is a game from pretty early in the Saturn's life, and it's a UK-developed game! No-one ever talks about western-developed Saturn games. Except Deathtank, obviously. It set in some kind of horrible dystopian future britain, which is apparently run by the Conservatives (as you'd expect any British dystopia to be), as the police force have not only been privatised and run for profit, but they can also get away with "accidentally" murdering random passers-by with only the feeblest of penalties.

Of course, you play as one of these mercenary cops, driving around the streets until the red arrow appears, pointing you towards your quarry. You get one hundred Meks (the currency of the future (at least it's not "credits")) for every perp you kill. The penalty for killing passers-by is a relatively meager 5 Meks a pop, by the way, and that only comes into play once you've already killed a few. At every multiple of 500 Meks, the gate to the next area opens, and you go there to hunt down and kill criminals. A couple of areas in, you also have rival cops to deal with, who not only want to kill the criminals, but also stop you from doing so. The "free market" in action!

The problem is that though it looks sort of similar to the first two Grand Theft Auto games, while driving was fun and exciting in those games, with their handbrake turns and trivial crashes, it's a pain in Crimewave. Every bump with another vehicle knocks you back some way, and every bump with a stationery object brings you to a standstill and forces you to awkwardly reverse out of the situation. All this while you're also chasing criminal vehicles that can go pretty fast right from the start of the game. It leads to an incredibly frustrating experience, and if you let an enemy get out of sight, an incredibly tedious one too, as you're left futilely chasing an enemy car that's just slightly off screen.

It seems like the developers wanted to make an exciting, fast-paced futuristic car-chase/shooting action game, and while it's a great idea, the execution is just a little bit off. It's so annoying, too, as Crimewave is so close to being a hidden Saturn classic.

New York Warriors (Amiga)

So, European-developed shooting games, especially ones on the Amiga historically have had a repuatation for being terribly designed, boring and just generally not very good. New York Warriors, though it's not a patch on the likes of Mercs or Gun.Smoke, at least tries to redress that balance by being actually pretty good.

It's been said before that one of the main signifiers of quality for a home game in the 1980s and early 90s was how much like an arcade game it was, and New York Warriors (as it's called in adverts and on the game's box, though the title screen says N.Y. Warriors) is a lot like an arcade game, in more ways than just mechanically. It takes the grand old Japanese arcade tradition of "taking inspiration" and "paying homage" to other media in its setting and character design and makes it its own, with the setting itself being a mish-mash of The Warriors and Escape From New York, with one of the enemy gangs also being called "The Ramboids" and described as being "very sly".

Aesthetically, it gets the whole 80s VHS apocalyptic dystopian action movie look down pretty well, and all the stages look excellent. There's nice little details, too, like rats scurrying across the streets occasionally, and people sleeping on park benches. There's some problematic elements too, though, like the enemy gang of Chinatown being ninjas, and the one black gang being called "The Ganjas" and looking like lazy caricatures. And the fact that you get points for killing the aforementioned sleeping homeless people.

How does it play, though? It plays pretty well, actually. It's fast-paced, and though it's very difficult, rarely feels unfair. In fact, at first glance, it'll look a lot harder than it is. In some ways, it's actually ahead of its time too. For example, there's pretty much always massive clouds of enemy bullets coming from every direction, and though they don't have the elaborate patterns of later danmaku-style STGs, and the emphasis is on destroying the enemies quickly to stop the flow of bullets rather than being able to weave a path through them, it's still a striking sight to see in such an old game. There's also a nice touch regarding the power-ups: if you collect one power-up while you still have remaining ammo on a previous one, the game'll remember the earlier power-up and switch back to it when the newer one runs dry. It even does this for multiple power-ups, so long as you manage to stay alive that long. Another nice idea it has is that along with easy, normal and hard difficulty settings, there's also one named "flame", which is harder than the hard setting, but tilts the scales in your favour somewhat by giving you an unending supply of the best weapon in the game, the exploding fire laser.

If you can get past the few unpleasant elements, which are presumably more the result of the game being made by a bunch of late 80s European teenage boys just trying to make a videogame version of the movies they'd seen on video than the result of actual malice, New York Warriors is definitely worth a look. Especially since, as I mentioned, good Amiga shooting games are few and far between.

Olteus II (X68000)

One thing I usually hate is levelling up and buying equipment in action games. The worst cases are almost always beat em ups, a genre that has been completely killed in recent years by developers choosing to replace interesting mechanics and design with endless grinding and enemies that can only be defeated using moves that are only useful for defeating those specific enemies. But I'm going on a bit of an unrelated rant here, as though Olteus II has both experience levels and a weapon shop, they actually make the game more compelling. Plus it's a shooting game, not a beat em up.

In fact, the way the game seems to encourage, rather than punish continuing in contradiction to the genre's norm, it can possibly be considered a kind of dialogue-free action RPG that takes a shooting game-like form. For shooting enemies, you gain experience points and gold. Levelling up via experience increases the amount of hits you can take before dying, and increases the power of your default gun and your charge weapon. You also start the game with two options which do nothing alone. This is where the gold comes into play: there's a shop with a variety of different weapons, and different power levels for each of those weapons, and you can equip a different weapon to each one of the options.

The game's split (as far as I can tell, as I haven't completed it yet) into two planets, of four stages each, and a final techno-organic spaceship with a single stage. The stages on each planet can be done in any order, though you have to complete one planet to go to the next. There's also a system of "days" in effect. You start with 999 days to complete your mission, and every time you play a stage, whether successful or not, takes up one day. I really don't know what happens if you run out of days, as getting to the final stage, maxing out my level and getting enough gold to buy every weapon took about 20-something days and an hour and a half. It'd take superhuman levels of both incompetence and persistence to get through 999 days.

The game's presentation is definitely a strong point. The menus all look great, with little diagrams for the weapons in the shop, and thumbnail illustrations of each stage on the stage select screen. Ingame, it looks really great and very colourful, and though it's a minor shame there isn't any parallax, it does look amazing for an independently-produced videogame from 1991. The music was a surprise, as it sounds like it was influenced more by western computer game music, rather than the arcade and console influences you see in most X68000 games (and especially shooting games).

In summary, Olteus II's idiosyncracies mean it won't be something you'll play for years to come like the more orthodox high-quality shooting games on the X68000, like Cho Ren Sha 68k and the like, but it is an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours.

Pilot Kids (Arcade)

Pilot Kids is a third party game for SEGA's famous and beloved Model 2 arcade hardware, from Psikyo. Though it's a shooting game, as you'd expect of Psikyo, it's pretty different to most of Psikyo's shooters, in terms of both looks and mechanics. On both fronts, I'd say the Psikyo game it's closest to is their weird Space Invaders parody Space Bomber, with it's quirky looks and multi-kill based scoring system.

It's a horizontal shooter, about two kids who get shrunk down, and fly toy planes to fight off all the other toys, insects and other assorted household objects that have come to life in a hostile manner. The players have two weapons at their disposal: a normal machine gun and lock-on homing missiles. The machine gun is almost useless as an offensive weapon, though it does have the useful property of being able to destroy the orange bullets the enemies fire (which, for the first few stages, is all they fire. Towards the end of stage 4, indestructable blue bullets will also find their way into the enemy's patterns). The missiles, then, are your main method of attack, and they're slightly more complicated than most hoing weapons.

Pressing the second button fires a marker, and the player can mark three to six enemies at once (depending on how many power-ups you have). Pressing the main fire button when at least one enemy is marked fires a missile that'll pass through any marked enemies, as well as any others in its way. The missiles are also the key to the scoring system. The first enemy killed by a missile will award double points, the next quadruple, and so on, up to a multiplier of sixty-four.

Though it's not up there with the likes of Cave's games, or even Psikyo's best, Pilot Kids is pretty fun, and has a nice selection of gimmicks. If it had ever got a sequel that refined things a bit and had slightly more exciting stages, such a game would probably be a classic.

There is also an additional mystery connected to this game, though: after a game ends, and you've inputted your initials, there's a counter that starts at a billion points, and depletes by however many points you scored. It keeps track of this every time you play, and I've managed to hack away a little over twenty million points so far. I have no idea what happens when the counter reaches zero, and apparently, no-one else on the internet has tried to find out, either.

Chiteisenki (X68000)

Chiteisenki is a bit of a mixed bag. There's a lot to like about it, but there's also a few annoying little flaws that can easily attract your most fevered hatred. It's a giant robot shooting game by Sprite, wo are mostly known for fangames featuring anime characters, like Ayu Ayu Panic and Akazukin Cha Cha Cha.

You guide your robot through the stages, which look like platform stages, though you can freely fly around them, and your task is to find and destroy the various enemy towers that sit around the stages motionless, firing their weapons and spawning enemies. Each destroyed tower also yields a futuristic treasure chest, that will contain one of the various items, and sometimes also an enemy. Destroy them all and the exit to the next stage opens.

There are a few unique points to make Chiteisenki stand out. The first you'll encounter is the game's use of gravity and recoil: you're constantly being pulled down by gravity, and the recoil from firing your gun knocks you backwards a little. It's just a little touch, but it's contantly affecting how you control your movement. The other main unique point is the extra life system. At the end of each stage, you'll play a roulette game. By default, the prizes on offer are four empty boxes, two items worth 1000 points and two items that will reduce your health by one point. However, one of the items that can be found in the treasure chests is a small bouncy creature, a lot like the Haro robots from the Gundam franchise. Each one of these you collect replaces one of the empty boxes in the roulette, and should you get one from the roulette, it's worth an extra life. Unfortunately, these items can be shot and killed when they appear, and if you do kill one, not only do you lose that one, you lose all of them you have in stock. Also, collecting more than four of them doesn't really have any extra benefit.

The one big problem with the game is how frustrating it can be. Using the Haro items as an example, sometimes a chest will contain one of them and an enemy, and it's way too easy to accidentally shoot the item while trying to kill the enemy. There's also the fact that you start each stage and each life with only three out of your five shields in place (or two if you were unlucky in the previous stage's roulette). And there's also the fact that side from the enemies that are already in the stages, and the enemies that spawn from the towers, a lot of the stages also feature enemies constantly spawning at random from thin air.

All in all, Chiteisenki is a fairly average game. If you think you got the patience for it, it's definitely interesting enough to be worth a look. Oddly, it also has a port to the GBA, though I haven't played that yet. One last note: I did actually get further than the second set of stages, but for no obvious reason, Fraps decided to stop taking screenshots at that point, and I didn't have it in me to start again.

Tyoushin Heiki Zeroigar (PC FX)

Ever since covering Kishin Douji Zenki FX all the way back in 2011, I've been meaning to get back to the PC FX, but as you probably already know, there's really not a lot to play on there if you can't read Japanese. But Zeroigar here is the console's one and only shooting game, and since a fan translation came out for it recently I thought I'd give it a go. Before I get on to the game itself, I have to say that the translation group did a really great job on it, not only is their script entertaining, but the yellow subs they used on the FMV cutscenes are a nice little nostalgic nod towards old subbed anime VHS tapes.

Now, as for the game itself, there's four different modes, all pretty different from each other. The main two are Anime Mode and Battle Mode. In both these modes, there's no scoring, with a system of EXP and levelling up instead. I don't really like this, as since levelling up only happens between stages or on continuing, it actually encourages continuing, when I'm more accustomed to (and in favour of) shooting games punishing continues. Levelling up in both modes increases the player's max HP and max ammo for their sub weapons (upon which I'll talk more later). Levelling up doesn't affect the main gun, which is powered up by collecting items in-game, and powered down by taking damage.

Anime mode is a typical story mode: you play through the stages, when bosses appear there's some dialogue, and between stages there's FMV cutscenes (of the high quality you'd expect from a console built specifically to deliver FMV cutscenes). Also, in this mode, sub-weapons are accumulated and powered up automatically as the player gains experience levels. Battle mode is structured differently, with players choosing one of three different robots and tackling stages individually. The levelling up system is still present, though in this mode, sub-weapons are acquired and powered up by spending money in the weapons shop between stages. You can also save your progress between stages in this mode.

The other two modes are Trail mode, which is a traditional Caravan-style 2-minute score attack, and Sakuraiger mode, which is a kind of alternative to anime mode, using the same levelling and power-up systems, though with different weapons. Sakuraiger mode presents a silly parody of the main story, told in childish crayon drawings, and in it, you play as the main character's sister piloting a giant robot version of herself. Despite the silly presentation, though, it's significantly harder than regular anime mode.

Zeroigar isn't a bad game, and it does have a ton of charm in its presentation (which is generally reminiscent of 90s OAV revivals of older properties, like the 1992-98 Giant Robo OAV series, for example), but it just didn't click with me. You should definitely give it a try, as it's a high quality game, and as I said, the fan translation is great, but it just didn't do it for me.
This game is also known as Choujin Heiki Zeroigar and God Fighter Zeroigar

Ijlimae-jeon: Manpa Skijeok-pyeon (PC)

I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I love sprite scaling as an aesthetic, and that's definitely helped by the fact that a lot of sprite scaling games are all-time classics like Space Harrier, Outrun, Night Striker, and so on. I should have known there'd be some terrible ones out there somewhere, though, and Iljimae-jeon is one of them.

You'll have guessed from the title (and the presence of Korean text on the title screen above) that it's a Korean game, and from what I've read online, the plot is about a character from ancient China finding themselves sent through time to futuristic Japan. Obviously, I don't know how accurate that is, as while there's a long text intro (thankfully skippable), I can't read Korean.

So, you pick one of three characters, and set out into a game that's kind of like a mix between Space Harrier and Cabal: your character is confined to moving left and right across the bottom of the screen, while aiming a crosshair all around it, but they're also constantly running forward while the enemies come running from the distance in the opposite direction. starting with the superficial complaints, it's probably the ugliest game of this type I've ever played, with the ground looking like the worst example of SNES Mode 7 graphics you can think of, and the enemy sprites looking small and undetailed even when they get up close.

The enemies definitely will get up close, too, as your feeble heroes takes several shots to defeat even the most common jobbers among the enemy force. Even the delivery boys carrying the power-ups take a fair few shots to take down. The bosses, as you can imagine, are even worse. There's no health ar given for them, and their attacks don't change as you fight them, so you just spend long, agonising minutes shooting them and avoiding their attacks (except for the ones that are unavoidable, like when the second boss swooces all the way across the bottom of the screen) until suddenly, they explode and the stage ends.

One final note, I've never been given as much trouble getting a PC game to run as I have with this one, not even other Korean DOS games, like Still Hunt. Part of that is down to the fact that I never owned a PC as a kid so I don't have any experience running DOS in general, though. I wouldn't normally bring this kind of thing up, but this game is so terrible, and it took such effort to be able to play it that it was just adding insult to injury.

Obviously, I don't recommend this game at all.

Simple DS Series vol. 39: The Shouboutai (DS)

Time for another Tamsoft game, and I don't think I've mentioned this before, but despite most of their DS output being in the Simple Series, Tamsoft seemed to have an uncanny nack for making polygon graphics on the system. The Shouboutai is no exception to this, bringing some non-violent third person shooting action to the table.

I remember one of the advertising taglines for Sonic Team's Burning Rangers stating that it had "Thrills without the kills", as it was a 3D action game about rescuing people and fighting fires, and The Shouboutai treads similar ground, though in present day Japan, rather than the futuristic labs and space stations of Burning Rangers.

As well as having great graphics, The Shouboutai also manages to simulate the dual analogue-based controls of console third person shooters, with the d-pad or face buttons being used to move around, and the touchscreen being used to turn you character, as well as to aim and shoot. Obviously, since this is a game about firefighting, different kinds of water hoses take the place of guns, and fire takes the place of enemies. Though the first few stages feature normal fire, that mostly just stays still and slowly grows if you don't put it out, you'll soon be up against fires that move around and even shoot smaller fires at the player. There's even boss fights, against such foes as giant angry chemical fires, and burning out cars that are somehow driving up and down the street.

There's some downsides to this game, though they're not big ones. The main one is an issue that crops up in a lot of Japanese budget games, even the big names like Oneechanbara and Earth Defence Force: There are a lot of stages, but not so many maps. So you have stages that just take place in different areas of the same map, with the rest blocked off. There only seems to be three maps in The Shouboutai: a suburban street, the corridors of a hotel, and a factory/warehouse type place. There's also the fact that the game can get a little repetitive, even though there are a few different mission objectives that crop up, from simply putting out every fire, to rescuing civilians. These are the only real faults, and neither of them are significant problems.

I definitely recommend giving The Shouboutai a look, even though there are plenty of 3D shooters on more modern handhelds, it's always nice to see something like this squeezed on to low-powered hardware. And if you want more violence in your TPS, there are a couple of alternative options that I'll cover at some point in the future (and if i remember rightly, they're also developed by Tamsoft).

Rayer Shoot (X68000)

Something the X68000 has a lot of (compared to most systems) is fan-made games based on anime, with a fair few of them being based on magical girl shows. There's a bunch of Sailor Moon fangames on there, as well as a relatively well-known one based on Akazukin Chacha. Rayer Shoot is another one of those, based (as you can probably tell from the very obivously fanart title screen) on CLAMP's series Magic Knight Rayearth. I'm not very familiar with the series, but I do know that it's about three schoolgirls who get whisked away to a magical fantasy land while on a school trip to the Tokyo Tower.

Anyway, despite the amateurish title screen, the game itself is really well presented. Almost commercial quality, even, with nice sprites, lots of colour, decent music, and even voice samples. I assume the samples must be recorded from the anime itself? I should really talk about how the game plays too, right? Well, it's no classic, but it's a pretty good effort.

It's a vertically-scrolling shooter, and the player has control of all three of the schoolgirl protagonists, though only one at a time. Each girl has a different weapon, and they each have a health bar, which slowly replenishes while tagged out. There's also an experience/levelling up system in lieu of power ups, though it seems to take a very very long time to get anywhere with it, and it'd definitely take a lot of skill to even try to keep your three girls' levels balanced.

In fact, playing the game takes a lot of skill in general: those health bars go down very quickly, and the enemies and their bullets are both high-speed and high-quantity. To get anywhere, players really do need to keep an eye on their helath bars and make tactical use of tagging in and out to recover as much health as possible, trying to keep the girl with the highest amount of health in play as much as possible. You also get a bomb attack which is different for each girl and recharges a short time after use.

Rayer Shoot is a fun, well presented game, as well as a nice little artifact of 90s anime fandom in Japan. I definitely recommend it, with the caveat that you go in expecting a merciless challenge.

FZ Senki Axis (X68000)

This game does what I've seen a few games on old floppy-based systems do, in that it has a fancy animated intro, which it puts on a completely seperate disk that's not needed to play the game. So theoretically, you don't even need to skip the cutscene, you can just throw it away never to be seen again. It's not a terrible one, though, it's fairly atmospheric and sets the scene I guess.

Anyway, FZ Senki Axis, then. It's an isometric shooting game by Wolfteam, specialists in making games that seem like they're licenced from late 80s OAVs, but actually aren't. In the case of FZ Senki Axis, it feels a lot like the Votoms spin-off Armour Hunter Mellowlink, except you're in a mecha, and poor old Mellowlink was always on foot with his trusty rifle. Each stage sees the player hunting down a certain number of specific target enemies, which tend to be bigger or faster than the regular drones (or both).

Despite every stage having the same overall mission, they still manage to be varied. Not only are the stages set in a variety of different environments, with war-torn cities, countryside battlefields, desert ruins, and so on, but there's gimmicks to them, too. Like one stage has the player in a dark cave, seeking out gun turrets hidden in murky pools of water, and another takes a break from the wide open spaces that are the norm, and has the player storming an enemy base, fighting security systems in corridors. The bossfights are even more varied, with heavily armed war-trains, a pair of fast elite mecha who seem to be inspired by Gundam's Black Tri-Stars and so on.

It's not all good, though. For starters, the difficulty is totally unforgiving, and it'd be hard to blame players for giving up after being quickly destroyed on their first go. The other side of that coin, however, is that the difficulty can really ramp up the tension, leading situations like a player on their last point of health trying to hunt down the stage's last target before getting taken out by a drone. Another problem is a smaller one, and I almost feel as if I'm nitpicking when I bring it up: the fact that there's no kind of acknowledgement when walking over different types of terrain. It's most noticable in the countryside stage, where the player's mech just walks over fields, bridges and water alike, as if the world was one of those carpets with roads and stuff printed on it. All it would have taken would have been a tiny splashing effect around the feet to enhance the experience so much more. But like I said, it's a tiny thing, and I feel silly bringing it up.

FZ Senki Axis is still a good game, and you should definitely give it a try if you think you can handle it. Even if you don't, you could try the Mega Drive port, which is mostly the same, but a lot easier.

Yuureikun (MSX)

This is a fairly deceptive game, as though it might look like a platformer in screenshots, Yuureikun is actually more like a shooting game. Going by strict definitions, it doesn't really fit into either category perfectly, as it's fairly unique. The player controls a little boo-like ghost, who floats about, avoiding bullets, killing enemies and all that other shooting game stuff.

The main difference is in your methods of attack, of which there are two: the first and most damaging is a weird backwards thrust attack that is limited by a long meter above your health bar, and is also the only way to break blocks (which I'll come back to. The second is a small fireball that floats next to you and can be sent out in front of you to attack before slowly making its way back to you. This attack kind of reminds me of Twinbee's fists, though it's slower and less effective.

Enemies drop coins upon death, and it actually took until my second go to work out what these coins were for. As I mentioned before, your backwards thrust attack can be used to smash certain blocks, some will be obvious and some not so much. Hidden inside some of these blocks are power-ups, such as health restorers and time-stoppers, though it's not possible to simply collect them as you like, as every power up you find has a cost attatched in Yen, that gets deducted upon collection. Rarer than the power-ups are little "doorway with a staircase inside" icons, that lead to bonus stages that give the player a few seconds to quickly grab some money and try to find power-ups in the walls.

The uniqueness also applies to the boss fights, as every boss I've fought so far has had a different strategy to it, and oddly, the boss of the first stage was the most complicated so far: it's a face embedded into a cave wall, with enemies constantly coming out of its mouth. To defeat it, the player has to use their backwards thrust attack to send enemies flying into the face's eye.

Yuureikun isn't a super-exciting game, nor is it some lost, hidden classic. It is an above-average game, though, with the graphics and sound being of especially high quality, and though I wouldn't say to rush out and play it right now, I don't think you'd regret giving it a few goes if you're curious.

GG Series Collection Plus (DS), Part 3

This time, it's the biggest and also the best section of the cartridge: the "Action" section, which covers a few genres!

Shinobi Karakuri Den
This game is probably the best one on the whole cartridge, and the standalone DSiWare release actually reached North America, I think, though unfortunately not Europe. You play as a constantly-jumping ninja tasked with destroying cogs that are guarded by various kinds of samurai. You've got a bunch of tools at your disposal: shurikens, a sword, air-dashing, and every few stages there's aboss fight against an enemy ninja. Enemy attacks don't damage you, just knock you back, with death only coming when you fall off the bottom of the screen. The thing is, though, that every time you jump off of a platform, it disappears and another one appears in a random place. I may give this game its own post at some point in the future, because it's deeper and more interesting than it seems at first glance.

Super Hero Ouga
As if to deliberately provide contrast, the next game in this section is terrible. It's a single-plane beat em up starring a hero who bears an uncanny resemblence to Kamen Rider Agito, who fights of many identical enemies and occasionally a boss. It's boring, repetitive and your character feels way too weak. A disappointment all round.

Assault Buster
Getting back on track, Assault Buster is a great little single-screen shooter starring a jetpack-clad heroine zipping around shooting enemy turrets, with a big installation at the end of each stage and a bossfight against an evil-doer with a jetpack every few stages. Interestingly, each boss has a different special attack that's like a significantly-upgraded version of an attack one of the types of turrets use. Assault Buster's a really fun game, and I don't have much more to say about it other than it also looks pretty good, compared to many of the games on this cart, too.

Drilling Attack!!
this one's a platform game starring a robot that looks  lot like Mechazawa from Cromartie High School, and who can also transform into a flying drill. The aim of each stage is to find a keycard and then the exit, with a secondary objective of finding glowing stone tablets hidden inside rocks. There's also a fun scoring system built around consecutively drilling through many blocks in quick succession to build up and maintain a multiplier. This one's a lot of fun, and also really satisfying to play.

The Last Knight
Something a bit different, a top-down action psuedo-RPG. You play as a knight who goes from room to room killing gargoyles and will-o-the-wisps and so on. For every five rooms you clear, you can increase your strength, dexterity or vitality. I recommend always putting points into strength, unless you're on low HP, in which case vitality will restore it and increase the max. I don't actually know what dexterity does, but i never felt weakened by its absence. This game's alright, I guess. It's not bad, but it's not one you'll come back to often, either.

Variable Arms
Back to platform games, with this one's gimmick being that you pilot a tranforming robot in it. In robot form, you can jump higher and have a fast, weak, short-range weapon, and in vehicle mode, you move faster and jump further, and your weapon is a long range cannon with a much lower fire rate. Another one that's pretty average, really. Nothing to write home about at all.

Whipper no Daibouken
A cute little platform game where you play as a little man with a whip who has to traverse jungle stages and get to the exit. This one doesn't have any special gimmicks or anything, but it does have well-designed stages, and it's fun enough to play that that doesn't matter. You can whip in front of you or upwards, and there are anchor-like hooks that your whip can latch onto, too. There's also a few different kinds of enemies that stand in your way, all with their own different behaviour patterns. Definitely one that's worth playing.

The Hidden Ninja Kagemaru
A stealth platform game that sees the eponymous ninja sneaking around stages trying to steal scrolls without being seen. Kagemaru has various items at his disposal, like a camoflage sheet to hide behind while guards walk past, and a magic eye that lets him see the guards' fields of vision. Unfortunately, though the concept is excellent, I just can't get into this game. Maybe it's just limited by its small scope: larger stages and Tenchu-esque stealth kills might have been massive improvements. Worth checking out for the cool gimmick, but not that great a game to play.

All Breaker
Yet another platform game, this time starring a girl with a big hammer, traversing stages with the mission of smashing special orange blocks littered about the place. The hammer can be used to smash most of the blocks from which the stages are built, too, and as the game progresses, different kinds of blocks with different properties start to appear. For example, blocks that are sent reeling ahead when hit, or ones tht are only held aloft by othe blocks, that fall when those blocks are smashed, and so on. Yeah, you probably won't regret spending your hard-earned points on this one.

Nano Creature Nyokki
A strange one this: you play as a microscopic tapeworm thing, and you swim around the screen collecting cubes and avoiding everything else. It's not a bad game, but it's not very interesting, either. I get the feeling this one was probably more fun to make than it is to play.