Two Tenkaku (Playstation)

I read somewhere that this game was the winner of the highest award in the Second Digital Entertainment Program (DEP '94) Pro Course. The problem is, the only reference I can find to this program is the same quote regarding this game winning at it, copied and pasted into various pointless game database sites. So for all I know, DEP '94 might not even be a real thing.
Other internet results for this game are mainly made up of scattered forum posts, in which people express their opinion of it. Most of thoe opinions are negative. That's entirely reasonable, too! The game is far from being a must-play classic! It doesn't have an interesting scoring system, the graphics are kind of drab (although the first stage has some nice pixel cityscapes, if you like that sort of thing), and it's hard without
feeling like a fun challenge. To top it all off, it has an incredibly ugly CG intro FMV. Despite all these criticisms, I actually kind of like this game! Or at least, I got mildly addicted to it. If I put it on, I know i'll be playing at least few credits before I get bored and do something else. And the presentation isn't all bad! The title cards for each stage have an unusual "ominous Buddhist chanting" thing going on. The Buddhist theme also finds its way into the graphics in a small way: one of the two bomb types summons a giant Buddha made of fire that shoots fireballs about the screen. (Note: I am not a religious scholar. If I'm wrong and the chanting and the fire guy are from another religion, feel free to correct me.)
I should probably describe how the game actually plays in a little more detail, right? Well, there isn't really a great deal of detail to go into. It's a pretty generic shooter. There are three ships to choose from (I prefer the blue one, as it shoots a cool Dodonpachi-esque laser when you've collected a couple of power-ups), power-ups, bombs, no special scoring system, blah blah blah. In summary, I liked this game, but don't feel like you're missing anything if you never get to play it.

Silk Road 2 (X68000)

It's an action RPG! I actually meant to write about this game ages and ages ago, but never got round to it, then I got stuck and didn't play it again for about a year. But I recently decided to pick it back up, started a new file, and now I'm further than I was before. I'll probably have completed it in the near future!
Anyway, you play as a young elf-girl-thing with a tail, and you explore some nice SNES-looking countryside. There's a map screen, that shows the world split into a grid of squares, each representing one screen. Four of the squares have numbers in them, which represent bosses. When you defeat a boss, you get an item which gives you a new ability: winged bots that allow you to jump, flippers that let you swim, etc. I don't yet know what happens when you beat all four bosses, unfortunately.
The game plays pretty well, and the controlsare well designed, using only the directions and two buttons. The first button uses your weapon, some kind of blowgun that shoots bubbles, and when held down, allows you to select an item, via a Secrret of Mana-Esque ring menu. The second button uses the currently selected item.
After a boss, you'll usually end up meeting a crazy-eyed witch who sells you stuff. Here is my advice: always buy the red and blue ribbons, they're 200 gold each, and they increase your attack (red) and defence (blue).
The game is all in Japanese, though you might be able to get through without understanding. There were a couple of points where I had to ask for help from JP-literate friends, but after they'd told me what the text said, I felt a little stupid, as the solution was always something obvious. So, if you're maybe not as dumb as me, you might be able to get through the game without being able to read the text. There's not much of it, anyway.
Silk Road 2 is a really fun game, and it's definitely worth playing. There's also a PC port of the game, with nicer graphics, and even a babelfish-esque translation patch. I haven't played that version, because reports suggest it's somewhat bug-ridden, and I found this version first and was too stubborn to change.

The Muncher (C64)

The Muncher is a C64 game that was also a tie-in with Chewits. Except that the version I played for this review didn't appear to have any kind of Chewits branding in it, and the title screen says "Monster". But other than that, it's the same game.

You play as a big green t-rex looking dinosaur (that, even in the version with the chewits branding, doesn't look anything like the dinosair from the Chewits ads), and you go from left to right, destroying as much as you can along the way. It looks a lot like Rampage, though there are differences. Like rather than having to destroy everything, most of the destruction in The Muncher is optional, and just for points, and the aim of each stage is to keep going right until you reach the end and go on to the next stage. You're constantly being attacked by tanks, helicopters and army men, though destroying any of the enemies (as well as passers-by) regains a small amount of health. You have a lot of attacks to kill them with, too, considering you only have the directions and one button: you can reach down and smash/eat enemies on the ground, jump up and smash helicopters in your mouth, and you also have a limited-use fireball attack  Plus, by moving from side to side, you can destroy the buildings behind you with tail whips..
Once your health runs out, your game is over, though there is a trick to come back from the dead by picking up an egg and later dropping it in a radioactive barrel. Either way, once you get to stage 3 (the army base), you'll probably die within a few seconds anyway.
The Muncher is okay. It has a nice big player sprite, and it's less boring than Rampage, but it's not really worth going out of your way to play.

Tank Force (Arcade)

Tank Force is the sequel to Tank Battalion, which got ported to NES and Game Boy as Battle City (why was that such a popular thing in the old days, changing the names of arcade ports? Was it a licencing thing?). The GB version of Battle City is easily one of my favourite games on that system, so you should definitely play it sometime. It gains a lot from the simplified graphics and the fact that you can't see the entire map onscreen at once.
But this post isn't about Battle City, it's about Tank Force! And I'll say right now, it's definitely a worthy sequel. In fact, it does everything a sequel should do!
If you don't know, the idea of the game is simple, the stages are simple, slightly mazey single screen maps with destructible walls, onto which enemy tanks will roll. You, also in a tank, keep killing all the enemies until they stop coming, then it's on to the next map.
Tank Force builds well upon this simple formula. The most immediatly obvious change is the improvements in graphics. TF is very colourful, and while the first game had simple, functional brick walls making up the stages, the sequel has various different buildings which, though viewed from above, still give the stages obvious themes: warehouse district, military base in a desert, etc.
There's also a lot of new actual game stuff, too. New power-ups, such as a range of temporary weapons, including a kind of sonic wave weapon that passes through walls without breaking them, allowing you to kill enemies from acros the map. There's new enemies too, including small, fast tanks that drop timed mines, and the biggest addition of all: bosses! The original game had no bosses at all, but every few stages in TF, you'll face really big super-tanks.
I think I'm beginning to sound a bit too much like a press release or something, with all this feature-listing and positivity. The problem is, I do just really like this game! I strongly recommend you play it, as well as the Game Boy port of the original.

Drome Racers (GBA)

This game is a Lego licenced game! This is worth mentioning, because other than a lego logo at the start, you'd never know otherwise. There's no nice friendly lego men like you see in most lego games, just vaguely futuristic-looking cars going really fast.
The coolest and most obviou gimmick this game has is that it uses polygons for the track, rather than the usual mode 7-looking style that most GBA racing games go for. It makes the game look a lot like Virtua Racing, which is kind of funny, since people in the olden days would often joke about how SEGA Model 1 games looked like everything in them was made of Lego! The cars, unfortunately, aren't made of polygons, using the "ugly blobby pre-rendered sprite" style that was inexplicably popular on the GBA, especially for licenced games. The music is worth mentioning too, having a nice Amiga/C64-esque sound to it.
You might think I'm going on about the graphics for so long to put off talking about the game, but that's not true! I just really like this game's graphics. Luckily, the game is actually fun to play, too! There are four championships of escalating difficulty, though you only start with the easiest, and unlock the rest one at a time. Most people would probably play them in that order, but why force them to like that? Some people might want to go straight for the normal difficulty, and a few might even want to go straight to hard! Tsk.
The difficulty curve is almost perfect, except for one problem. The problem being that the AI cars will seemingly have different abilities in each race, meaning that as long as you come in first at least once in a championship, you'll probably win it, since the AI players have so few points because they finish in a completely different place each time. If the AI teams had different distinct skill levels, so there was always one or two of them that were near equal to you from race to race, I think that would have been a great improvement.
The actual racing is pretty fun, and the game moves nice and smoothly, too. There are power-ups, in this game, of two kinds: weapons and boosts. They're assigned to different buttons, so you can carry one of each, which is nice. The weapons are the usual racing game weapons: missile, mine, homing missile, etc. They don't really affect the outcome of the race compared to weapons in most racing games that have them. The game probably would have been slightly better had they been left out, even.
The boosts, however are very important. There are two kinds: the kind that you can store (only one at a time, though) and use whenever you like, and the kind that are used as soon as you drive over them. Collecting and using the boosts strategically isn't 100% vital to winning, but you'll have a hard time doing so otherwise. It's a good idea to get the instant boosts as much as possible, and to use your stored boosts on every straight. Two other boost-related points: they seem to last a little longer if you can avoid bumping into things, so do that, and if you're boosting when you go over a hill, you'll soar through the air, which looks and feels really cool.
Overall, this game is great, despite the complete lack of tension in the championships.
Oh, and there are also drag races to decide which place you'll start in before each race, but they're pointless, since it's pretty easy to just charge straight into first once the race begins, anyway. And I forgot to mention the completely hateful slippy-slidy ice tracks that appear a lot later in the game. Boo.

Cyber Egg - Battle Champion (Playstation)

It's yet another Playstation game in which cute vehicles have battles in arenas! It's got some interesting things about it that are worth mentioning, though. And I promise the next Playstation game will be something different.
Anyway, in this game, you control small bipedal robots that look kind of like midget fighter jets with limbs attatched. There are four to choose from initially, with a few unlockable ones too (that I haven't unlocked. There's also apparently no instructions for unlocking them anywhere online, either, but I assume it's the usual "complete story mode" deal.) The pilots of these initial four fill the stereotypes you'd expect from such a game: the red robot's pilot is the typical boy protagonist, the black robot has the tough-looking rival, the green robot has the fat guy and the pink robot has the girl. There doesn't seem to be much difference between the four, playing wise, so just pick the colour you like best, I guess.
The main mode of the game is championship mode, and despite what you might have assumed based on the title and the selectable characters, the game is structured more along the lines of Bomberman's single player mode than a fighting game. You enter stages, you have to defeat a bunch of enemies in each stage, and every few stages there's a boss. The interesting thing is that although you have a health bar (and the enemies also have health, though their bars aren't shown, instead blue sparks of electricity can be seen coming off them when their health is low.), you don't die when it's depleted (and neither do the enemies). Instead, the lower you health goes, the further you get knocked back by enemy attacks, and if you fall off the stage, then you lose a life. This seems to be a lot like the way the Smash Bros. games work, though this game predates the first Smash Bros. by over a year! It's almost suspicious how similar the two systems are!
Each stage is a set of small floting platforms, usually with one large on in the middle. If you jump and land on the edges of the largest platform, it'll tilt in your direction! Also, there are items strewn about the steag, plus various destroyable things like machinery and barriers. Small sweets appear around the stage, either from the power-up boxes (in fact, every stage has a box with eight sweets in it), or they sometimes randomly appear when you punch enemies. Each sweet gives you one point, with which you can upgrade your robot between stages.
I think I've said all there is to say about this game now. Although it's not anything special or life-changing, it is a pretty fun game, and even with my puny attention span, it can make 45 minutes go by like no time at all.

Jammin' (C64)

It's been a long time since the last post, hasn't it? The usual excuse applies: I was spending a lot of time playing games that do not fit this blog's remit. I still am spending a lot of time playing those games, in fact! So, in the hopes that it will stop you forgetting about me, I will write about a game I already knew about.
In Jammin', you go about the place collecting musical instruments and taking them to triangles. The world i made up of four colours, and you can only walk on either the colour you're standing on, or the multicoloured diamonds that are on the conveyor belts. If you're stood on one of those diamonds, you can step off onto any colour you like. So, each stage has four musical instruments and for triangle things. You have to go about, using the conveyor belts as transport, and fetch each instrument back to the triangle that's on the same coloured ground as you found the instrument. (What a terribly written sentence!) While you're doing this, musical notes and strange, bow-legged men wander about trying to take the instrument off you. If the musical notes touch you while you're carrying an instrument, it goes back to where you got it. If the bow-legged men touch you while you're carrying an instrument, they run off with it and you have to chase them. If either of them touch you while you're not holding an instrument, they disappear and you get points.
The game is fairly fun to play, but the real reason I like it is that it just has a really nice, friendly atmosphere. While mechanically it's a bit fiddly (though not enough that playing ever feels like a chore), it's best quality is that kind of intangible feeling. I can't say whether that's just me, or if anyone else will have similar feelings while playing it, or even if that's what the designers intended.
Try it, I guess. If you do, tell me how it went. I'm interested.

Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile (SNES)

This is a strange game. It has the exact same plot as the awesome laserdisc arcade game Road Avenger/Road Blaster FX (Your wife was killed on your wedding day by a gang of Mad Max knock-offs, and you seek revenge in a modified, armoured sports car). It looks like (and is structured like) a shooting game, but you do very little shooting in it. The only shooting you do is firing surface-to-air missiles at helicopters. most of your enemies are motorbikes, cars and other land vehicles, and these guys you dispatch by ramming, either hitting them enough times to make them explode, or more satisfyingly, making them crash into scenery.
You can't just drive into them normally and expect to do damage, though. By pressing the B button and a direction, you charge in that direction with speed and force, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Ecco the Dolphin's method of attack.
Your health bar constantly (but slowly) depletes, but luckily, health power-ups float down the screen fairly often and you have a limited-use force field (which is also very useful for fighting bosses), so unless you take a lot of hits, you shouldn't need to worry about it.
The stages range from post-apocalyptic-looking desert roads to motorways suspended high above futuristic cities and even a nice drive on a beach. They all look great, and the music is also excellent. In fact, the music and graphics are so good, you'd think this game was on the Mega Drive, rather than the SNES*!
The game is pretty great all-round, in fact. It's neither too hard nor too easy, it's a lot of fun to play and there's not really much else like it.
This is where I normally might say "the only problem is..", but in this case, there isn't any real problems with the game! It's great! Play it!


*Just kidding, SNES fans! Or am I...?

Reverthion (Playstation)

Reverthion is made by Tecnosoft, who are most famous for the excellent Thunderforce series of shooting games. It isn't a shooting game, though, it's a fighting game. It plays like a simplified version of Virtual On, and also all the robots are shaped (vaguely) like animals.
The animal robots on offer are crab, dove, wasp, spider, butterfly, walrus/turtle thing, shark and dragon-looking thing. There's also a boss robot, who is some kind of centaur/spider/multiwinged angel monster. I don't know if the boss is unlockable in this version, though there is also a Saturn version, in which it is unlockable, according to gameFAQS. And judging by videos of it on youtube, the saturn version has slightly nicer graphics than the Playstation version, too. Not that there's anything wrong with the graphics in this version, they're pretty good considering how early in the Playstation's life it came out. And of course, this being a Tecnosoft game, the music is pretty great too!
Moving on to how the game plays, it plays alright. You move the robots using the old-fashioned swivel and go forward tank controls, and you can also jump, boost and do a barrel roll to either side, and you have an attack button. The are apparently special moves in the game, since the CPU opponents all use them against you, but I have yet to discover how to actually do any of them.
It's a pretty fun game to play, and having animal-shaped robots is a nice gimmick, even though it doesn't really affect how the game plays. That's a wasted opportunity in my opinion, all the robots control pretty much the same, with only their speed and the power of their weapons to differentiate them (and their special moves too, I guess). It would have been cool is the dove, wasp and butterfly could all fly, or if the spider could crawl over obstacles, that kind of thing. But I guess that would have ruined the balance of the game. Speaking of which, choose the crab: his attack is only short range, but it's quick and very powerful. Get in close to your opponent and just destroy their health bar. Until you get to the last boss, who has a force field attack thing that makes the crab useless. Bah.

Still Hunt (PC)

It's been a long time since I last wrote about a Korean game. It was one of the first posts on this blog, in fact: Uzu Keobukseon for Mega Drive. I don't know why it's been such a long time, but here's another Korean work.
It's a blatant "homage" to Treasure's famous debut Gunstar Heroes, and it's possibly a bit better better than the other GH homage, Gunner's Heaven/Rapid Reload for Playstation.
So, it's a running and shooting game, then. You can choose from two characters, Jean and Houn, who have the same default weapons, but they each have three collectible weapons (though you can only have one of the collectible weapons at a time). All the weapons can also be levelled up by using them a lot too, so you'll probably want to find the weapon you like most and stick with it. They also each have a few excluive stages, which is nice. Their respective versions of the second stage are especially notable, as Jean has a stage in which he flies via jetpack, while Houn rides across the sea on a futuristic jetski.
If you want an easy ride through the game, pick Jean. One of his collectible weapons, appropiately named the "Exploder" is a fast-shooting missile launcher whose shots leave explosions that linger and cause damage to enemies for a few seconds, and it burns through boss lifebars like nobody's business.
Whichever character you pick, the game itself is a lot of fun to play, it's fast, there's lots of enemies and explosions everywhere, and it's neither punishingly hard or tediously easy. There are only two major flaws: the first is that for a lot of the stages (especially the earlier ones), there's pretty much no level design. You just run from left to right, shooting enemies as you go until you reach the end. The second flaw is that once you get a few stages in, the enemies take just a tiny bit more damage than I'd like. That one's not really a huge deal-breaker, but it does kind of break the flow a little.
The graphics and music are both really great. The graphics have nice, big, colourful sprites, and look like they could be from an early Saturn or Playstation game (like the aforementioned Rapid Reload), and the music has a nice Mega Drivey feel to it.
I should mention the lengths to which I went to get this game running on a modern (well, Windows XP) computer. Obviously, for a game so old, DOSBOX was a necessity to get it to run. Then there was the question of mapping the controls to my USB Saturn pad, which not only required the use of Joy-to-Key, but also, since the game uses the numberpad for the directional keys, and I'm on a netbook with no number pad, I had to use the On-Screen Keyboard to map them. And finally, there's the copy protection! Before the game loads, you have to bet on who will come first, second and third in a race between seven Haro-like robot things (that also appear in the game itslef as power-ups). There are 100 possible outcomes to these races, and I assume the original game came with a sheet or booklet listing them all. Luckily, the list of results isn't hard to find on the internet, and once you have that, you can play the game without worries.
Despite all these shenanigans, Still Hunt is definitely worth playing. Like I said before, it's fast, pretty and explosionful.

Genseishin Justirisers Souchaku Chikyuu no Senshitachi (GBA)

Gen Sei Shin Justirisers is a TV show. I even saw a few episodes of it, years ago, when I first started watching fansubbed tokusatsu shows, and would download every show I could find. I can't really remember many specific details about the show though, other than being like a slightly more seriously-toned version of Super Sentai, with slightly lower budgets.
THis is a game of it. It's a simple beat em up, you can pick any of the three Justirisers: Riser Glen (red, has a sword), Riser Kageri (blue, has a katar-like weapon and is the token girl) and Riser Gant (black, has a gun), you get to choose your character at the start of each stage. While you're playing, you can choose between fighting with your fists or with your character's weapon. There's no reaason not to use the weapon at all times, though. Especially if you're playing as Gant, obviously.
You can also jump, do a sliding attack across the ground, and use a special attack. The special attack is powered by an "energy" bar underneath your health bar, but there's plenty of items to top that bar up, and the game's so easy, the only use you're likely get out of you special attacks will be as a way to kill the bosses more easily.
The game shares some similarities with the Playstation Super Sentai games (which I should really get around to, some day), in that it splits the action between fighting as the heroes themselves against human-scale jobber enemies, and piloting a giant robot against giant enemies. The giant robot fights aren't very interesting, though: you tap the B button to build up a power bar until it's full a few times, then press A to unleash an attack (there are four attacks, you get the more powerful attacks by filling the power bar more times). In theory, there is an elemen of risk involved in these fights, as the more time you spend building up power, the more likely the enemy monster will attack. Unfortunately, they rarely do, and you can just keep charging up and firing your most powerful attack until the enemy dies.
The game is okay to play, it's not horribly broken and it doesn't have any awful chore-like grinding or anything like that, either. It's just absurdly easy. It was probably made for 10 year old boys, but that's hardly an excuse for this level of feebleness. It's a little more than an hour long from start to finish, and I'm fairly sure I didn't lose a single life along the way, and as I've mentioned before, I'm not really very good at games.

The Super Shinobi (NES)

Hello! I'm sorry it's been such a long time since my last post, I've been spending too much time playing games everyone's heard of (and that, as such aren't suitable material for this blog), like Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 and Alice: Madness Returns. But here's a new review! I think this might be a record for the most posts in a row that aren't about Playstation games, too, which is nice.
Anyway, The Super Shinobi for NES/Famicom is, despite the title, a port of the awesome and excellent Mega Drive game The Super Shinobi II (which is known in the west as Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master). Although "port" might be too generous a term for this game. Those plucky pirates at SUPER GAME tried their hardest, but it's really more of a loose adaptation of the original.
At first glance, it does seem pretty faithful, the graphics are excellent considering the limitations of the hardware, and the music is alright too (I assume it will probably be of interest to game music nerds too, so they can hear some NES covers of Mega Drive songs...).
The first big difference you'll notice is the scarcity of shurikens compared to the original. This means you'll be going in close and attacking enemies with your sword a lot more. As you go throughout the game, you'll notice that Joe isn't as agile as you're used to, too. For example, his somersault jump doesn't goe as high as it does in the original, he can only hang underneath certain places, rather than from the bottoms of any platforms and, as far as I can tell, he can no longer walljump.
The game also makes a brave attempt at Shinobi III's horse riding stage, but it doesn't really work very well. It's nice that they tried though, right?
I've only managed to get a few stages into the game (to be exact, as far as the "floating cyborg brain thing" boss), and Joe's new found physical disabilities haven't hampered progress so far, though there are some item on platforms that are just slightly out of reach, which is annoying, considering the raised difficulty in this game compared to its source.
The blame for the increased difficulty can be placed on a combination of the weaker hardware, and some slightly inept programming. There are two main problem when fighting enemies: the AI for the stronger enemies seems completely random compared to the original game, so rather than waiting for an opening that you know is coming, the most effecient way of fighting is to get in close and slash at them until they die, hoping that they go before you. The other problem is slightly shoddy collision detection. Not bad enough to be a disaster, just a mild nuisance.
From what I've played of this game, it seems like the most reliable way to proceed is to abuse the hell out of your ninja magics: using the suicide spell when you're low on health, so you can start a new life's health bar without restarting the stage, and using the shield spell whenever you have more than one magic stock, to make that health bar last a little bit longer. It seems the makers of the game were aware of this too, as while the extra magic item is incredibly rare in the original version, there's a few in each stage in the pirate.
All in all, like a lot of these pirate ports, it's a nice curio, but not really a very good game, and definitely not worth bothering with in this modern age when you can just emulate the original.