Masters of Combat (Master System)

In the early nineties, Street Fighter II had caused fighting games to become incredibly popular. So, ever company started making them, both for arcades and consoles. I assume Masters of Combat came about because SEGA wanted the Master System to have a fighting game, but they realised that a port of SFII would have been terrible (a realisation that went over the heads of Tectoy in Brazil, who made their own Master System SFII years later).
It resulted in a fighting game that's pretty different from its peers in a few ways, and one that, thanks to North America's callous indifference towards the Master System is almost unspoken of online. In factn the only moveslist I was able to find for the game wasn't on GameFAQs or a fighting games wiki, but in an old thread on the SMS Power forums!
The plot is about a fighting tournament in a place called Megalo City (which apparently appears again, years later, as a stage in Sonic Riders) some time after a UFO crashes. There's four playable characters: Hayate, a ninja and the best character, Highvoltman, some kind of SWAT guy with electric powers, Wingberger, a guy in a welding mask with telescopic weapons attatched to his limbs and Gonzalez, a fat shirtless man.
Speaking of the moveslist, that's one of the two big ways Masters of Combat differs from the fighting game norm. Rather than the usual smooth circle-segment motions, special moves in this game are performed by tapping short sequences of diagonals, then pressing the attack button. It's thanks to this unusual system that until I found the aforementioned moveslist, I hadn't discovered a single special move!
Apparently, the Game Gear port (renamed "Buster Fight" and given some really cool boxart) that came out the following year "fixed" this quirk, and has more traditional special move commands. It also has much nicer colour, and the action is zoomed in, so the characters look bigger. Unfortunately, it seems slightly pointless on that system, since the Game Gear also has a couple of (reasonably) good ports of SNK fighting games, like Samurai Showdown and Fatal Fury.
The other big difference between Masters of Combat and other fighting games is what I refer to as the movement button. The Master System controller only has 2 buttons, and while you'd expect them to be assigned to punching and kicking respectively for a fighting game, they aren't. One button is the attack button, being used for punch and kick combos, as well as specials, while the other is the movement button. What this button does is different depending on which direction you press with it: you can jump, slide along the ground, and dash forwards and backwards using this button.
It's an unusual feature, and it's hard to tell whether the game is worse or better off for it. I guess without it, it'd just be an unremarkable 8-bit fighting game that no-one had heard of.

Disc Station #11 (PC98)

This volume is the final Disc Station to be released for the PC98. But, Compile did at least let the system go out with a bang, as this disc is packed full of stuff!
Firstly, there's Jump Hero Gaiden, which is a turn-based strategy game starring characters from Compile's Jump Hero series of platform games. I didn't play much of this, since as regular readers will be aware, I often have very little patience for stumbling through text heavy games that are all in Japanese.I'm sure it's probably fine, though. Similarly, there's also a demo (or is it a full game?) for some RPG, called Melpool Land Stories, that I also didn't play.
There's another Apple Sauce Room-style clicking game thing, too. It's called Tanken, and it takes place in a jungle. It seems a bit more complex than previous games of this type, as there are parts of the image that, when clicked on, open up another, smaller area with stuff to click on! Plus, there seems to be an actual objective: to find three objects that will open the pyramid on the horizon.
Next up is Tanukids, which is basically a top-down version of the old SEGA arcade game Flicky. You play as a dad tanuki (who wears a tie!) who goes around the various stages gathering his many kids to fetch back home, and avoiding the various other animals of the forest who want to stop this from happening for some reason. While there's nothing terribly wrong with Tanukids, it is a little bit boring. You'll probably only play it once or twice.
The fifth game on here is Karakuri, and it's a lot better. It's another top-down action game, but this time you play as a teenage girl with a rocket launcher charged with the task of riddeing a large Japanese mansion of clockwork robots. The rockets you shoot create fairly big explosions, as do shot enemies.So, you can create chain reactions and kill multiple enemies with a single shot, and in grand old arcade traditions, your score increases exponentially the more enemies you kill in one go. The only complaint I have about this game is that it is really, really short and a little too generous with the extra lives.
The sixth (!) game is Firelive, a card game that's worth playing for the awesome character art alone! In it, you play as a guy who wants to form a band, and decides to recruit band members by beating them at a simple card game. The cards are numbered one to five, plus there are joker cards. There's three cards to choose from at a time, and two dice are rolled each turn to decide who picks first. The object is to get a hand of five cards worth more points than your opponent. Obviously, the cards are each worth the number they have on them, but you can also make poker-style hands like two pairs, full house, et cetera to score massive bonus points. The player with the lowest scoring hand has the difference deducted from their life poins, and the game ends when one player runs out of life points.
I really enjoyed playing this game, and like I said, the character art is really excellent too. Definitely my highlight for this volume of Disc Station. THe only downside is that sometimes the game randomly decides to add fifty points to one player's card, which seems pointless and unfair.
Like the previous volume, there were various promotional videos on the disc, the highlights this time being a really cool advert for the Mega CD game Shadowrun, and coverage of what appears to be a pro-Puyo Puyo tournament event.