Adventurous Boy (Mega Drive)

I really wanted this game to be good. I like pirate games, I like the Mega Drive, and I like shooting games.
You can probably tell from the screenshots that it's a blatant rip-off of Super Fantasy Zone, with similar stages, a similar visual style and music that sounds like weird cover versions of the music from SFZ. Unlike Super Fantasy Zone, though, Adventurous Boy is terrible.
It might lure you into thinking it might be a fun game, with its okay graphics, and its nice, easy-going first stage, but this game is evil!
The first hint of danger is your character's default flying speed: really really slow. Luckily, a shop will appear once you've collected some money (see? Super Fantasy Zone!), and you can buy some bigger wings to go faster. And by "can", I mean "must": the game is no fun at all to play with the default speed, and you'll probably die very quickly too. You should also buy the Track Missiles, since they also make things a lot easier.
Like in that other, more famous game, there are ten enemy generators in each stage, and when they've all been destroyed, the boss will appear.
This is where the game shows its true colours. If you manage to kill the boss without losing a life, then everything will be fine, you'll go onto the next stage and a good time will be had by all (except the boss, obviously). If you get killed during the boss fight, you'll then experience the harshest and most frustrating case of "Gradius Syndrome" I've ever seen. You'll be back to your default speed, which is a lot slower than the speed at which the bosses move. So slow is your default speed, that even though this game gives you a few hit-points per life, if you get touched by the boss, you won't be able to move fast enough to get away before losing a life. And when you respawn, the boss will likely still be near where you died, if not still right on top of that spot, and you'll die again.
By setting the difficulty level to easy and putting the amount of starting lives to the maximum, I've managed to get as far as the third boss. I won't be trying again to get any further.
I love hard shooting games, but this game isn't hard as much as it is broken and unfair. And the way in which this difficulty arises makes me think it wasn't even intentional, which seems like a real shame. Those chinese guys thought they were putting out a nice, fun (though unoriginal) shooter, but because of a couple of little flaws, it's completely ruined.

Pop'n Tanks (Playstation)

The first thing that I'm going to tell you about this game is that it has a nice 2D animated intro before the title screen, as well as nice 2D animated intros for each character in story mode. So I'm slightly biased towards it, as like all good-hearted people, I really like it when 32-bit era games have 2D animated videos in them.
Anyway. The game's about one-on-one tank battles, in small brightly coloured cartoony tanks. All the tanks are different, both in looks and in weaponry. But you should be aware that the tank with a cake for a turret is the best one, since its special weapon sends out some flying exploding giant bananas that are really hard to avoid and do tons of damage.
There's two main modes to play in: Tank World and Story Mode. Tank world is the more in-depth of the two modes; you pick a tank, choose a name for yourself and the tank you chose, then try to fight your way up the rankings. When you win a fight, you go up in the rankings and also gain a tank part. The main problem with this mode is that you don't get to choose your opponents, just the stage on which you fight them. And the fact that I'm so rubbish I can never get more than one or two ranks places above the bottom rank. Waah.
Story mode is basically what would be called "Arcade Mode" in any other fighting game. You pick a character (these characters don't appear in the Tank World mode, and the tanks they have are all the default tanks you can choose from in that mode) and figght the other characters, and the characters will have a conversation before each fight. I don't know what the plot's about because it's all in Japanese. But like i've probably said a million times before, if the plot's so important that your inability to understand it will keep you from playing a game, you're a massive idiot.
As for how the game actually plays, it's mostly pretty good! The tanks are really fun to drive around, to the point where I wish there were some kind of Choro Q-esque adventure mode so I could drive them round without being shot at. The battles are nice and fast-paced, too, and although I'm terrible at the game and almost constantly lose, it rarely feels unfair. Tying in with the animated cutscenes, the battles do a good job of looking like what battle scenes from a late-90s Japanese cartoon about brightly coloured tanks would look like, were such a show to exist (and if it does exist and I just don't know about it, please inform me!).
Pop'n Tanks, then. It's alright. Plus, I'm tagging it as a fighting game, and you can't stop me!