Arena (Game Gear)

This game is an isometric shooter, set in a dystopian future city. What's odd about this dystopia is that although the world is run by an evil TV station, the game isn't set in a deadly futuristic game show.
Arena came out fairly late in the Game Gear's life, and it shows in the graphics, which are of a much higher quality than you'd expect from the system. It's pretty fun, too. You run around the large stages, collecting keycards, killing enemies and trying to reach the exit. It actually feels a lot like an isometric version of one of the early first person shooters, like Wolfenstein 3D or Blake Stone.
The first few stages are set in and around a series of warehouses, and are fairly easy, though one strange thing is that the indoors areas are much bigger and more spacious than the outdoor ones. After you get through these, there's a stage set around a dirty polluted canal, and after this, more warehouses. Looking online, there does seem to be other settings for stages, but as the river stage takes a massive leap in difficulty, I always lose most of my lives there, and the remaining one or two a short way into the following stage. It's a shame, because until the game started sending enemies that took nearly 10 shots (with a powerful weapon, it would have been twice as many with the default gun) and can kill the player in two or three, I was really enjoying it.
So yeah, it starts off as a fun, nice looking game, but quickly gets killed by it's terrible difficulty curve.

Kolobok Piramida (Mega Drive)

With some of the games I've recently posted about, I feel like I've sold out a tiny bit, and that they weren't quite obscure enough to meet the original purpose of this blog. So now, I am reviewing a Russian Mega Drive bootleg.
With a tiny bit of research, I learned that it is actually a hack of a homebrew game, also Russian, called Uwol: Quest for Money, which was itself a remake of an old spanish ZX Spectrum game.
Anyway, in the game, you play as a small bearlike thing, and you collect coins in small, one-screen stages. There's a Darius-esque pyramid of these stages, and when you get to the bottom of te pyramid, you get sent back to the top, able to choose a different route down. I wonder if anything special happens if you complete every stage on a single run?
The cool gimmick of the game is that all the stages loop horizontally (but not vertically: if you fall off the bottom of the screen, you die). This is used cleverly in the stage designs, with most stages requiring the player to jump across the "gap" to reach higher parts of the stage.
Obviously, there are enemies in the stages too. Get hit twice and you die, though the first time you get hit, a t-shirt will appear at a random place on the screen, which will let you get that hit back. If you spend too long in a level, the music changes and a ghost appears to chase you round.
The game's a lot of fun to play, and certainly a lot better than the other Russian MD bootlegs I've played so far. It looks okay, and the music is really catchy, too. It's definitely worth hunting down and playing, though maybe you'd rather play the original homebrew, rather than the pirate hack of it?