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.

Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel (Mega Drive)

Before the Fire Pro series came along in the early 1990s*, wrestling games were kind of awful. They'd be stiff, awkward affairs in which victory seemed to be down to luck as much as skill. I was surprised, then, to play this game and find out it's actually pretty great!
It's based on (and starring) real-life wrestler Cutie Suzuki (information you may have already gleaned from the title), though all the other wrestlers in the game are fictional. I assume someone at Asmik is a metal fan, since one of the characters is named "Helloween I. Sato" and another "Megadeath Saito". It's actually the second wrestling game on a Sega console that I know of to be based around a real-life female wrestler (the other one being "Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto" for the Master System, which was released as generic old "Pro Wrestling" in the west, as well as having all the characters turned into men. Booo.). Nowadays there aren't any, which is a shame. A game based around the Ice Ribbon or Shimmer promotions would probably be a day-one purchase for me. OH WELL.
Anyway, as I said at the start of the review, the game is a lot better than I was expecting. In single player mode, you pick a wrestler** and then go through a series of tournaments and leagues, winning trophies until you get to the final "Grand Champion" tournament. Well, I assume it's the final one. It's as far as I've been able to get so far, anyway.
During the match, you can do typical wrestling attacks and moves, including jumping onto a downed opponent from the top rope, which can even be done if your opponent is lying on the floor outside the ring! You have to be pretty quick to do it, but it looks awesome, does tons of damage andis incredibly satisfying. The wrestlers' health is shown by their portraits at the top of the screen: the less happy they look, the closer they are to losing the match, especially if they're shaking. When your opponent is looking their most unhappy, the music will change to a faster and more dramatic tune, and if you can get a pin at this point, you've pretty much won the match.
There's even a primitive form of running commentary, but only in text form. In the corner of the screen, a relatively normal looking guy, accompanied by one of his guest hosts (including a dinosaur, Colonel Sanders and a guy who speaks in nonsensical engrish) will constantly be talking, all in japanese unfortunately.
In summary, this is a really fun and cool game that's a lot better than I was expecting and definitely a lot better than most of it's contempories in the genre.

*Although the Fire Pro series started in 1989, it didn't really kick off until the SNES games a few years later (in my opinion).
**PROTIP: Press C to see their names. Why aren't they displayed by default? Who knows?

Wicked (Amiga)

It's nice to play a unique game, that doesn't have anything else like it. Wicked is a unique game, as far as I know. Even now, 22 years after its release, there doesn't seem to be any copycats or clones.
I should probably talk about it now, then.
The intro tells the tale of some guy (that's you) who has undergone a painful ritual to become a firey star thing to battle evil. The battle against evil is mainly about the cultivation of celestial mould.
The game's a single screen shooter, and each stage has various things in it. There's you, an enemy (just one), the sun/moon and lots of gold and grey mould. The gold mould is good, the grey mould is evil, and your job is to make each stage only have good, gold stuff in it. Among the mould are big pimple-looking pod things, which are what creates the mould. These things also create seeds at random, the good seeds you have to pick up and strategically drop on the good mould to encourage it's growth, and the evil seeds will sound an alarm, and you have to go over and kill them before they make another evil pod.
Shooting the evil mould turns it red for a few seconds, which kind of "fertilises" it, making it possible for the good mould to grow over it (though of course, evil can grow over good whenever it likes). You win the stage once all the evil pods are covered by good mould.
It's not completely simple, though! There are complications! The biggest being the previously mentioned enemy that's on each stage. These enemies take the form of various "evil" things: dragons, demons, spiders, etc. and the hover about shooting stuff at you and trying to kill you.
There's also the sun/moon thing in the centre of the screen. When it's showing the moon, you can't hurt the enemy (but you can still shoot the mould, or the game would be insanely hard). They can still hurt you when the sun's out though. Killing the enemy is only temporary, but it does make things a lot easier not having them around for a while.
Sometimes the face in the centre will open up, revealing a tarot card and releasing an orb. Collecting the orb has a different effect depending on the card shown. Some are helpful, others not. I won't list all of them, but make sure you never ever collect the moon or tower orbs, or they'll make things a lot more difficult for you.
The game is pretty well presented, having a generic occult/pagan/new agey theme, and the title screen music is very atmospheric, though it's a shame there isn't any music in-game. The stage selection screens are especially nice to look at.
I used to have this game when I was a kid and owner of an actual amiga. I liked it back then, and I still do now. It's unique, atmospheric and fun. Go and play it.

Action Puzzle Prism Land (Playstation)

I know i review a lot of playstation games on here, but that's mostly because there are tons and tons of interesting playstation games that are also really obscure! There are quite a few DS games I want to write about too, but I can't take screenshots of those. I might do it without screenshots eventually anyway, because there are a lot of really cool games for DS that hardly anyone knows about. Anyway, here is another playstation game!
It's an arkanoid-like, which you could probably have guessed from the screenshots. To be honest, when I loaded this game up for the first time, and i saw the catboy and the fairy, i wasn't expecting it to be that great. Luckily, i was wrong. It's one of the best arkanoid-likes I've ever played!
What makes it so great? Well, it takes cool elements from other games of the same genre, like power-ups, points bonuses for combos, boss fights, etc., and puts them alongside some really good level design, and it's own gimmick (and biggest draw): the fact that most power-ups don't cancel each other out!
Most of these games have power-ups, but you can usually have one power-up at a time, for example: you get a power-up that makes your bat wider, but if you collect the multiball power-up, it'll go back to it's normal size. In Prism land, most power-ups can be collected together. You can have the elongated bat and the multiple balls and other effects all happening at once!
Not only that, but the power-ups themselves work in cool ways too! For example, the multiball power-up: Instead of just splitting your ball once into three or four, it splits the ball in two every time it hits the bat. And it does this with every ball that hits the bat, leading to balls everywhere. The elongated bat power-up too works slightly differently to most games in that you can collect it more than once, leading to a comically huge bat. And there's more: remote control balls, giant balls, one-use exploding balls and so on. And most (if not all) of them can be used together!
There was also a European release of this, called "Prism Land Story" that can still be bought for very very cheap online. Be warned, though: for reasons beyond my ability to discern, the morons who localised it removed the ability to save high scores or progress. Great work, idiots.

Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII (Mega Drive)

There are a lot of unlicenced fighting games. There was a fairly lengthy article/review
round up of a bunch of NES ones on the old insertcredit site. As a subgenre, it doesn't have
a great track record. With the exception on Kart Fighter on the NES, most of the ones I've
played have been practically unplayable. Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII shuns this long held
tradition, though, by actually being fairly fun.
You know it's going to be good when you see the intro (or, if like me, you are impatient and
skipped theintro, when you see the character select screen): The roster is made up of
characters from 6 different games, plus real life! Really! The whole roster is Ryu (Street
Fighter), Geese Howard (Fatal Fury), Kyo Kusanagi (King of Fighters), Goku (Dragonball Z),
Ryo Sakazaki (Art of Fighting), Cyclops (X-Men) and real life human beings Michael Jordan
and Mohammed Ali! I don't know if there's any last boss or endings or anything, because I'm
rubbish and can only win 2 or 3 fights. I'm going to assume there aren't any, though.
All the fictional characters are ripped straight from their respective games, while the two
sportsmen are semi-original sprites. Semi-original as while they are obviously newly drawn
for this game, all their animations are just traced over Lucky Glauber and Heavy-D from King
of Fighters 94's American Sports team.
Some of the stages look familiar too, though I can't tell if they're all stolen or just some
of them. Or if they're ripped directly from their original games or just copied by sight.
One or two also have a similar graphical style to backgrounds seen in other Chinese Mega
Drive games, like Shui Hu Feng Zhuan for example. Some of them are animated though, which is
a nice bit of quality for a bootleg game.
As for how the game plays, it's alright. The game only uses one punch and one kick button,
the characters all have both specials and supers (which is extra cool, since most official
fighting games on the mega drive didn't have supers!).
The specials and supers don't always work when you want them to, though. And sometimes they'll just happen of their own accord, too. I hate to lower my standards for a certain
kind of game, but in this case, i'm going to say it works well enough for what it is.
Even with its flaws, it's still leagues ahead of your typical unlicenced fighting game, plus
the gimmick of having a bunch of heroes, a villain and two sportsmen in the same game is a
nice novelty too.
As for sound, it's pretty good. No horrible tortures of the MD's sound chip to make your
ears bleed, and a fair bit of speech, too. The one that sticks out most being cyclops'
famous "OPTIC BLAST!". Amusingly (and inexplicably), the music for Ryu's stage is the Mighty
Morph'n Power Rangers theme.
One last thing: If you want to play this, you'll probably have to resort to a rom. There was
a guy selling actual cartridges of this and a bunch of other unlicenced Mega Drive games on
ebay, but he got shut down, proving yet again that copyright lawyers are nothing more than
that robot putting up the "NO FUN ALLOWED" sign from that old Sonic comic.

Fatal Fantasy VII, Again

Just posting a funny curiosity: remember "Fatal Fantasy VII", the weird yaroze fangame thing? The opening menu for that is actually a nice little homage to the menu from this old Japanese demo disc for the real Final Fantasy VII!

Dangan (Playstation)

This game is quite the disappointment. When you start playing, and see the top down 3D graphics, and start beating a few guys up, it seems like a nice, fun game. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to turn sour.
As I mentioned, it's a top down beat em up with 3D graphics. #The four face buttons on the playstation controller are melee attacks (a single button that does a string of attacks, as is beat em up tradition), shoot (you start off with a completely useless infinite ammo handgun, but soon collect other, slightly less useless guns), an all-round attack that drains your health if it connects, and a dodge button.
Actually controlling you character and beating up/shooting the enemies is actually pretty fun, though it's turned into a chore by the problems the game has, most of which concern difficulty.
The first problem is the many, many stationery gun turrets that litter the stages. They do quite a bit of damage and they never stop firing. They also tend to appear in groups.
The second problem is the fact that the regular enemies spawn endlessly and randomly offscreen.
These two problems work together to ensure that rather than fighting enemies, the best strategy is too run ahead to the exit as quickly as you can, since if you stop to fight the enemies, the turrets will tear you apart, and if you stop to destroy the turrets, the enemies and the other turrets will tear you apart.
So, after you've ignored all the enemies and got to the boss? Well, since you didn't fight any enemies, you didn't collect the ammo they randomly drop. So you're at a disadvantage already. (Well, sort of. The boss fights are really hard, even with ammo.)
So, in summary, Dangan is a game that could have been great, but just isn't.

Famimaga Disk Vol. 1 - Hong Kong (Famicom Disk System)

This is only going to be a shortish review, because there are Playstation games about which I intend to write, but I like to ensure a bit of variety by making sure that each new review is a different genre and system than the previous one. So the first update in months, and it's essentially filler. Woo.
So! I recently started exploring the romset of the Famicom Disk System for the first time, and found out about a few cool games I hadn't played before (plus versions of Metroid and Kid Icarus that allow for saving). Anyway, this is the one about which I have chosen to write, because it took me by surprise, I hadn't heard of it before, and since it was apparently a coverdisk for a Japanese magazine twenty years ago, I'm sure it fulfills the obscurity quota.
So, looking at the screenshot, you might make the same mistake that I did on first sight of this game and think it's a Shanghai clone. It's not. It's actually slightly more complicated than Shanghai. Although you are removing tiles in the right order, so it is a bit like Shanghai.
What happens is, you are given this arrangement of tiles (there are a few shapes from which to choose, plus an option to create your own, and before you start, you enter a 3-letter code, which decides how the tiles will be arranged, which I guess means there are... 17576 different tile arrangements for each shape), and you can take away one tile at a time. The game randomly (I think) decides what character of tile you can take, and you recieve between 20 and 320 points for removing a tile, depending on how many other tiles are touching it, more tiles touching equalling more points. The catch being that if a tile doesn't have any others touching it from below, it falls and your game ends, which makes going for the big-money tiles inside the pile a lot riskier than the 20-80 point ones on the outside. Clever!
But is it actually fun to play? It's alright. A nice enough diversion to emulate on a handheld or laptop while watching TV, but not interesting enough to devote a decent amount of time or concentration to. And you probably won't play more than one game in a row without getting bored of it.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 52: The Pro Wrestling 2 (Playstation)

This game is a bit of a curious oddity now, since it was made by Yukes, shortly before they made the first WWF Smackdown game for THQ. It doesn't have any licence, obviously, so, when faced with the chance to create any kind of colourful, outlandish characters the likes of wshich pro wrestling is famous for, Yukes chose to fill the roster with... lots of pale, balding men in underpants. And a martial artist woman.
Other than that, though, thje game plays pretty well. As you would expect from a budget game, it doesn't have a ton of modes, just an arcade-style single player mode, exhibition matches, and a create a wrestler mode.
I didn't save anything from the CAW mode, but i had a quick look, and you could just mix and match heads, bodies and torsos.
The single player mode has you choosing a character and then having a series of fights against the other guys.
In exhibition mode, you can create your own matches. There's only three to choose from, though: Single, 4-Way Dance, and Deathmatch.
Deathmatch mode is the coolest part of the game. It's a single match, but you can apply a bunch of crazy modifiers to it. You can choose any combination of normal rope/ electric barbed wire/no rope and normal mat/straw mat/concrete mat, as well as turning on and off Inferno mode, in which the ring is surrounded by flames, and the winner is the wrestler who throws their opponent out of the ring to a firey death. (Amusingly, you can still get out of the ring yourself, resulting in an instant loss). Having a match set to concrete mat/no ropes/inferno looks pretty cool!
An interesting thing about the game is the fact that a lot of the animations for moves and taunts are being recycled in yukes' WWE games to this day. Is that interesting or just insulting?
Anyway, this is a pretty fun game, despite its simplicity and boring cast.

Mean Arenas (Amiga)

This is a maze game for the Amiga, presented like one of those deadly future gameshows thatr seemed to be so popular on that computer (there was this, the killing game show... I'm sure there were others too...)
The most obvious thing to talk about with this game is the presentation, which is quite nice, despite the game having an obviously very small budget and probably being made by only a couple of people. There's lots of voice samples, all the time while you're playing, such as your character going "ooh!" when taking damage, the crown cheering when you kill enemies, and the presenters commenting when you collect power-ups or die. I had this game as a kid, and the main thing I remembered about it before playing it again in recent times was the "Studio" bits before each stage, where the two presenters of the show would tell you the theme of the next stage (dungeon or spaceship or whatever), and something would happen like one of them farts, or a microphone breaks. Those bits were hilarious when my age was only a single digit, but now they just seem a bit weak and embarassing. But the game was probably made by a couple of fourteen year olds, so it's unfair to be too harsh on the rubbish humour. The best part of all the voices (and possibly the whole game) is the sample that plays when you finish a stage, that says "MARRRRRVELLOUS" in an amusing upper class cad sort of manner.
The game itself is pretty average. You go around the mazes, which are all quite a bit bigger than the stages in most games of this type, the smallest being a few screens high, and later one the stage start to have multiple floors and the like, too.
There are more differences between Mean Arenas and most other maze collecting games, too. The pace is a lot slower than say, Raimais or Pacar. As well as collecting a power up that lets you kill enemies by walking into them for a short time, as is common with these games, you can also collect fireballs that you can store to shoot at anytime, too. There are lots of keys to open doors, switches to change the stage's layout and other gimmicks and traps in each stage too, a change from the typical maze game which has the enemies posing the only threat.
Overall, the game is pretty good, though the slow pace and huge stages, while different, do make the game seem a bit of a boring slog at times. It's entertaining enough for a couple of games, though.

Danan the Jungle Fighter (Master System)

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

Pacar (SG1000)

At first glance, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that Pacar is just a crap, lazy rip-off of Pac-Man, but with cars (the name is probably as close to "Pac-Car" as Sega could get without being sued). In reality, it's a pretty great rip-off of Pac-Man!
The fact that the ghosts and... yellow thing have been replaced by cars isn't just an aesthetic change, it leads to the first, and probably most important difference between Pacar and Pac-Man: cars go much slower in reverse. This means that if you want to change direction quickly, you have to turn 90 degrees. You can drive backwards, but it's a lot slower than going forwards, which is pretty dangerous when there are enemies around.
There are other differences, too. For example, there are two mazes instead of one. The game alternates between the two, and each time you clear both mazes, the end of level bonus increases, as does the number of blue cars in the maze.
Blue cars are the most common enemy type in the game, and they just passively drive around the mazes, not making any special effort to try and kill you. Each maze also has one orange car, that appears after you've been in the stage for a certain amount of time. The orange car is much more agressive than the blue ones, actively chasing you around and trying to kill you.
Like Pac-Man, Pacar has special larger dots that temporarily give you the ability to kill the enemies. Like everything else that Pacar takes from it's predecessor however, there's a little more strategy to the power dots.
Firstly, they aren't waiting ready on the map for you to collect them from the start, one appears for every 30 normal dots that you collect. Secondly, the blue cars can collect them, although doing so gives them no special advantage, it does rob you of the chance to get some extra points, both by killing the enemies (the points awarded for which double in the exact same manner as, that's right, Pac-Man), as well as the quite hefty 300 points that each power dot is worth.
There is quite a bit more strategy to the game that i won't go into here, since this is meant to be a review, not a guide.
In summary, though it's not quite as good as later maze games such as Raimais or Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Pacar is still a very good game, definately better than it's inspiration, as well as being a lot more playable today than a lot of it's contempories.

Jushin Liger (1989) Ep. 1

I'll start with the most obvious thing to say about this show, that it inspired the gimmick of a great wrestler of the same name, who uses the cartoon's opening theme as his theme song to this day and who in turn later inspired a live action movie. That's pretty much why I wanted to watch this in the first place, having been a fan of the wrestler for a few years and all. If I'm honest, I wasn't really expecting very much from it.
I was pleasantly surprised! There is a lot to like about this show. Lots of action, it looks nice, dramatic music.
The show starts with some kid dreaming about being killed and eaten by big monsters, before being woken up by his dad. We find out the kid's name is Ken, and he then makes breakfast before going to school, and on the way to school, flips up the skirt of the girl he likes, insults her fat friend, and beats up his own fat friend. Classy.
During class something terrible happens outside! The giant head of Skullgreymon descends from the skies and unleashes a few giant monsters, who wreck the shit out of Tokyo. And this must be the most fragile Tokyo ever, since it takes less than a minute of monstering before it looks like a typical post-apocalyptic cartoon: dark skies, ruined skyscrapers, and so on.
The army turn up, and not only make their usual inept attempt at killing the monsters, they actualy make things worse, as when one of the monsters is hit by tank fire, it splits in two for some reason.
Anyway, more devastation goes on until Ken finally summons Jushin Liger, which only bears a slight resemblence to the wrestler, and looks more like a heavy metal version of Lord Zedd from Power Rangers. A hole opens in Liger's chest, that Ken flies into, before a bunch of bony cable things attach themselves to Ken. Jushin Liger is some kind of living giant robot made of muscle and bone or something. There's then a pretty long (and actually very good) fight scene with Liger beating up/killing the evil monsters, while the real villains also do plot stuff in their giant ship (that really does look like Skullgreymon's head). He usus martial arts more than wrestling, though. One bizzare highlight is that at one point, Ken decides he needs a weapon, and that since he's in a (sort of) giant robot called "Jushin Liger", he'll just summon a sword, and it's called "Liger Sword". And that works.
Liger defeats the monsters, the bad guys run away, episode ends.
As I said at the start, I wasn't expecting much from this show, only watching it out of curiosity, but it actually turned out to be really entertaining, and by the time the next episode preview came on, I really wanted to watch another episode! Unfortunately, as far as I know, this is the only episode that's been subtitled. One last thing: while watching this show, various little visual things reminded me a lot of Go Nagai, then when I looked up the release date on Wikipedia, turns out it was actually by him! Oh ho!

Hatris (PC Engine)

According to Wikipedia, Hatris was created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1990. As well as being on PC Engine, it was also released on NES, Game Boy and in arcades. Like his most famous game, Tetris, Hatris was a falling stuff puzzle game, the "stuff" being hats of various styles, such as wizard hats, crowns, etc. At the bottom of the screen are six identical heads on to which the hats land. Stacking five identical hats on top of each other makes them disappear. Near the top of the screen is a line, which when crossed by a pile of hats ends the game.
The game itself is fine. Unfortunately, that's the greatest compliment it can recieve. While not great looking, it's not particularly ugly, while there is music it's so bland, it's barely noticable. The idea is executed perfectly, and there are no frustrating flaws in any part of the game, in fact, it only commits one crime of game design. The most important one: it's very, very boring. There's no tension, reaching higher levels complicates things by adding more varieties of hat, but still, even when all six stacks of hats are reaching the game over line, you don't feel any motivation to try harder, and once you've reached game over you don't feel as if you've lost anything or that you could do better next time, you just find yourself thinking "oh. it's over." This isn't helped by the fact that even if you start on higher levels, your game is probably going to last at least ten minutes before you're even close to getting game over.
Play it once or twice out of curiosity at the unusual concept, and to see the sort-of wierd graphics, but that's it. This is a well made, but very dull game.

Project: Horned Owl (Playstation)

Project: Horned Owl is a light gun shooter for Playstation released in 1995. It has mecha designs (and possibly character designs too?) by Masamune Shirow, and as such will probably light a little spark of nostalgia for cartoon nerds of a certain age, with it being slightly reminiscent of Dominion Tank Police.
As you might have worked out from the first paragraph, in this game you play as cops in giant(-ish) robots, and you shoot evil terrorist robots. Even though you're playing as cops, you get points for destoying the scenery. A subtle satire on the attitude and conduct of real police, or just the developers knowing that people like shooting things? Probably the second one. You get two and a half weapons: your normal gun, your grenade launcher, and when you hold the shoot buton for a second and let go, you shoot a weak scatter shot thing, the only use for which is shooting missiles without having to aim. But the time it takes to charge means you'd be better off just shooting them normally.
The graphics are nice to look at, a mix of 2D and 3D, with the stages themselves being made of polygons, and everything you can shoot (with a couple of exceptions like some of the bosses and such) being sprites. It works well. The 3D hasn't aged as badly as most 3D from 1995, with the only real eyesore being the plane in the background of stage 2.
"Satisfying" is the best way to describe how the game plays. There's just something that feels good and chunky about shooting the robots, and the robots exploding. You know, one of those strange unnamed feelings you get from games that aren't down to any specific thing like graphics or sound or whatever. It just feels right. The feeling of satisfaction is definately helped by the fact that the enemies don't disappear after you shoot them down, leaving you with nice piles of scrap after particularly busy segments. The only real problem is the fact that putting the cursor right at the edge of the screen reloads, which means you can't shoot enemies there. But even that's not too much of a problem, since enemies don't attack from there, you only be shooting them for a few extra points. I would say that the difficulty was a problem, were it not for the fact that although it is really hard, it never feels unfair.
Oh and there are animated cutscenes, if you like that sort of thing. They're not very exciting, but if there's exciting stuff happening in a game, it should really happen while you're actually playing.

Panic Bomber World (SNES)

Panic Bomber World is a puzzle game starring Bomberman. It's of the "falling stuff" and "versus" sub-genres. It's pretty good.
It's more complex than most games of this type. You do mainly play by matching up coloured Bomberman heads in rows of three, but that's where the genericity ends. When you match up rows of same-coloured heads, bombs spring up from the bottom of your pit. Every now and then, a lit bomb will fall down into your pit. When the lit bomb lands, it explodes with a traditional Bomberman plus-shaped explosion, and also like in bomberman, any other bombs caught in the explosion also explode like this. Any Bomberman heads caught in the blast don't disappear like you'd expect them to, though. What happens is that the traditional versus puzzle game junk blocks start appearing from the bottom of your opponen't's pit, and the more heads caught in the blast, and the more bombs that go off, the more junk blocks appear. The junk blocks can only be erased by blowing them up with bombs. There's also a red bar next to each player's pit, and when this fills up, a huge bombs falls into their pit and completely erase the top few rows of stuff.
In single player mode, you go to various countries around the world, fight two enemies, then a boss. I don't know how many stages there are, as i've only made it to the third boss so far.
Like I said at the start, this game is pretty good. It's not as good as Super Puzzle Fighter or Magical Drop, but it's still worth playing. If you're a big Bomberman fan (Bomberfan?), even more so, as this game contains tons of cool little variant Bombermen. Although the two "regular" enemies on each stage are just strange blobby things, each stages's boss is a Bomberman themed to whatever country that stage is set in. Jamaica has a laid back rasta Bomberman, America has a cowboy Bomberman, and england has... some kind of awesome badass Bomberman whose battle theme is some cool 16-bit power metal! As well as the bosses, the pit backgrounds also show Bomberman getting up to nationally-themed activities, like lying on the beach or going snorkelling in Jamaica, and having afternoon tea or looking for the loch ness monster in England!
Apparently, this game has also been ported to PSP and Wii.

Diet Go Go (Arcade)

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

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

Deadly Strike (PS2)

Deadly Strike is an old fahioned beat em up. Much more old fashioned than other PS2 beat em ups like Godhand or Koei's Warriors series. You could say it's even more old fashioned than the later Streets of Rage and Final Fight games, since they have tons of moves and combos for each character, and each character in Deadly Strike has one regular melee combo, and a rubbish gun attack.
It's far from bad game, though. I'd say it's one of the better Simple 2000 games, definately up there with the likes of Zombie Hunters 2 and Global Defence Force. Like I said earlier, it's a very old fashioned beat em up. You wouldn't think to look at it, though, the pre-rendered backgrounds all look really great, and the 3D character models look pretty good too, and don't look out of place as can happen with pre-rendered back grounds. Gameplay follows a traditional formula for the genre: you arrive in an area, beat some guys up, then go to the next area. You score more points for quickly defeating enemies one after the other, and the points you get while playing can be used to unlock various things like longer health bars, extra costumes, and so on.
Other than the main mode, there's also Survival Mode, which is exactly what it sounds like, but as the ames is really easy, this can go on for ages and ages before you finally die, and Special Mode, which allows you to play through the main game as one of the regular enemies. This one isn't actually as fun as it sounds, since the enemies are just as weak and slow as they are when you fight against them.

The real reason to get this game though, is the 2-player co-op mode, which is as fun as you'd expect from a beat em up's 2-player co-op mode: very.
The plot is a bit of an odd one: both the manual and the back of the case mention some kind of tournament taking place, though neither the game itself or the intro movie contain anything looking remotely tournament-esque. What the game actually seems to be about, is a bunch of people from the modern day, including among others, a cool guy in a leather jacket, a schoolgirl, and a bouncer going to fuedal japan and beating up a load of samurai for some reason. I don't know why this happens, nor do I know how a bunch of people from the modern day are skilled/strong enough to so easily beat up so many samurai. There are endings when you complete the game, though they just consist of a screen full of small text, apparently talking about the same mysterious tournament as the manual.

(this game is also known as "Simple 2000 Series Ultimate Vol. 16: Sengoku vs. Gendai)