Serpent (Game Boy)

I'm trying to post roughly one new review a week now. Have you noticed? I still don't get any comments, though. Waaah.
I almost had nothing to post about this week, though, as I've spent a lot of it playing the very un-obscure GTA2 and WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2011, as well as some games that I'm saving for future posts.
Anyway, because of this, I'm posting about a game I've known about for years and years and years, ever since playing it on a mysterious 32-in-1 cartridge I had as a kid. Mysterious for two reasons: the first reason being that I had no idea what the source of this cartridge was, and the second reason being that rather than the usual mis-spelled onscreen menu of games usually found in these carts, it had a little yellow rubber button you pressed to change the game. Another odd thing is that the label showed (really tiny) art for 16 games, meaning unlike most pirate compilation carts, it actually had more games than it claimed to, rather than less!
Enough of this nostalgic rambling though, time to talk about Serpent.
It's strange. You can tell from the screenshots that it's a snake-type game, of the duelling type. I've also played a similar, but simpler game on the Atari 2600, oddly enough also on a pirate cart.
The 2600 game was very simple, each player (there was no single player mode) controlled a snake that was constantly moving, and getting bigger/leaving a trail as it went. If your head touched that walls, your opponent or yourself, you lost.
Serpent has a similar basic premise, but is a more complex game. You start each fight with your body coiled up behind you, and it follows as you move around. It doesn't constantly grow, however. (I'll come back to this.) Also, when your head hits something head on, you don't lose the match, but rather a siren blares as your eyes go all googly. Stay like this for a few seconds and then you've lost the match. So, the goal is to use your snake body and your cunning to trap your opponent's head until it bursts. Alternatively, if you can completly surround your opponent's body, you also win.
Going back to the issue of the length of your body, if you create an enclosed loop, items will appear: white and black boxes with numbers or the letter M in them, as well as black and white missiles. The white boxes increase your body length by the number shown on them multiplied by ten, the black boxes decrease. The M boxes change your size to the maximum of 110 segments or the minimum of 20. The black missiles, if shot at your opponent's head will make them go faster, the white missiles slower.
There's eight difficulty levels, split into mode 1, levels 1-4 and mode 2, levels 1-4. The differrence between the two modes is that mode 2 has little tadpole things floating around the screen, which instantly kill you if they come into contact with your head.
My advice is to get some practice in mode 1 levels 1-2, then move on to mode 2 levels 1-2. Don't bother with levels 3 and 4, as they give the cpu opponent the ability to move their head from one of their body to the other, meaning essentially that the only way to win is to surround them. You don't get this ability, and adding in the length changing power ups, these levels are an unfair mess.
I like this game, it's one of the few from that strange cartridge that I still play today, and I recommend you do, too. In spite of the fact that essentially half the game is useless.
(This game is also called "Kakomun Hebi" in Japan.)

Hakaioh - King of Crusher (Playstation)

Look! Just when you least expect it, another review of a Japanese Playstation game!
The last few reviews have been a bit too positive, and I've been putting this one off for months now, so I am reviewing Hakaioh: King of Crusher.
The plot is that you are some Japanese guy. Nobody special, has a wife and a baby and an office job. One day while eating breakfast, you get bitten by an evil fly, and start going on a rampage, destroying all your family's possessions. The first time I played this game, I'd skipped the cutscenes, and just saw a game where you play as a guy destroying his furniture (by hand!) while a woman holding a baby flees in terror.
Anyway, ingame, there are two bars on screen. The short red one shows how much of your destruction quota has been met, and when you've filled it up, you can go to the end of the stage. The long yellow one is your health, which is constantly (but slowly) decreasing. It increases a little whenever you destroy something, and you get quite a big chunk back for destroying enemies like tanks and helicopters.
There's two things I should tell you after saying that last part: The first one is that as the stages go on, you gradually transform, first into a werewolf demon thing, later on into a dinosaur, and so on. So you aren't just some angry guy by the time they send the military after you. The second is that you can't attack humans, presumably so you don't attempt to murder your wife and child in the first stage. But what causes a bit of dissonance there is that you can destroy vehicles that contain people, and one stage even has a bridge you can destroy, causing a train to fall into the river presumably killing or injuring everyone on board. But you're a dinosaur by that point, so you probably don't care anymore anyway. Eventually, you become so big and powerful, you can destroy motorway bridges by walking through them (and like the earlier train, all the cars drive off to their deaths and explode) and tread on tanks like they were insects.
I'm probably making this game sound like a lot of fun, like a 3D version of the old Amiga game AAAAAARGH! or something. But unfortunately, it has a few big flaws.
The controls are one of them. Attacking is no problem at all: triangle headbutts, square punches and X kicks, but walking around is awkward, as your man/monster seems to have some trouble turning round. It's hard to explain what happens when you do, it just looks kind of... off, I guess. And it takes a little longer than it should to keep things smooth.
The other major flaw is the camera, which also has issues with turning around. Only unlike the man, it doesn't even try. It always faces the same direction. Usually, this isn't a problem, but if you get to the end of a level and haven't reached your destruction quota, walking back to find more stuff to wreck is a bit of a pain.
The final, smaller flaw is that it'd very repetitive, since every stage is just about moving forwards and wrecking as much stuff as possible. It's not made any better by the fact that the stuff is all pretty sturdy too, often taking several hits to break. I only count this as a minor flaw though, as you can easily just play one stage at a time, save it and come back later.
In summary, this game is repetitive, ugly and awkward to play, and also the shoddy production value make the average simple series game look like a triple A high-budget blockbuster. But despite all that, I've still played most of the way through it, and it seems pretty likely I'll even play it through to the end, as long as no sudden difficulty spikes appear to spoily my fun.