Bubble Hero 2 (PC)

Okay, so this review is going to be terrible filler for a few reasons.
Reason one: It had been a while since the last post, and unfortunately, I haven't really been playing anything obscure enough to be worth posting here.
Reason two: There's no screenshots because all the screenshots I took of this game came out all corrupt and strange. This is especially a shame because the graphics were pretty much the only good thing about the game.
Reason three: I could only actually stand to play a few credits of this awful, awful game.

So, it's a Bubble Bobble rip-off for PC. When you first load it up, you might be impressed with its graphics. There's no shame in that, it's got nice big colourful sprites and... nice big colourful sprites. As I mentioned before, that's everything good about the game.
There is no background music, even though there's an option to turn music on and off. There are two buttons like you'd expect from a Bubble Bobble clone: jump and blow. But the jump button only works about three-quarters of the time.
And all these things are leading up to the main event of this games problems, and one that's ruined a previous chinese game I reviewed: the first boss is huge, it's faster than you, it will camp right next to your respawn point to kill you again and it takes a ton of hits to kill. How many hits? I'll never know, as I gave up after four or five attempts. It's even worse than the bosses in Adventurous Boy.
So there's Bubble Hero 2. A legitimately awful game.

Gotzendiener (PC Engine)

This is an action-RPG, made by Gainax. Or at least, they were involved in it's development in some way. It's odd that Gainax's most famous series tend to be about mecha (Gunbuster, Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, etc.), but their games usually have fantasy settings with no mecha at all (Alisia Dragoon, the Princess Maker series, etc.). This game is no exception to that rule.
The scneario is pretty cool: You play as a maiden who's been captured by an evil demon, and as usual, a brave hero came to rescue you, and though he did successfully kill the demon, he was mortally wounded during the fight and quickly followed the monster into death. So you take the hero's sword and set off to find your own way out of the castle.
You go around the isometric stages, solving puzzles and occasionally fighting monsters (I guess the hero must have killed most of them on his way up?). You don't have to worry about understanding Japanese for this game, as other than a couple of animated cutscenes, there's no text or dialogue, and there's nothing in the cutscenes that you need to know to progress. There were a couple of points where I got stuck in the game, though luckily there's a really excellent FAQ on GameFAQs, that not only contains a full walkthrough for the game, it also translates the plot and provides details of the tie-in merchandise that was released for it!
The game looks good, with nice animation and sprites that are detailed despite also being tiny and low-res. The music is good too, having a slightly arabian flavour to it (some people online have compared the game as a whole to Prince of Persia, and there is definitely a similar feel to it in looks, sound and atmosphere, I'm not really familiar enough with PoP to say whether the similarities extend to the game itself. (I'm mostly unfamiliar with it because I tend to die as soon as the first enemy appears.))
The only real problem with the game is that it is incredibly short and, other than the parts where I got stuck also very very easy. I completed it in less than two hours, and as I've mentioned plenty of times before, I'm terrible at games. It's definitely worth playing if you can find it cheap/free, but copies online seem to go for about £30, which does seem a bit much.