Battle Zeque Den (SNES)

Battle Zeque Den is so close to being a good game, it's such a shame that one big problem has to go and ruin it.
It's a platform/beat em up, starring teenage girl versions of those timeless characters Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy. They all have their own special moves and such with fighting game-style inputs, too. It looks really really good, with big, cool sprites and colourful, nicely drawn backgrounds. The formula isn't really original, just go right and beat guys up. It's nothing special, but it's fun to play.
What ruins the game is the difficulty. It's not just "very hard", it's "absurdly, unfairly hard". The enemies can, and will remove most of your health bar with only 2 or three punches. Health restoring power-ups are rare, and give you back such a tiny amount that it could almost be considered an insult. If you somehow manage to get past the first boss, you don't even start the second stage with a full health bar, just what you had left over from fighting the boss. Then the game drops a bunch of rocks on your head with little warning and you get game over.
I really did want to like this game, playing it over and over, but the fact that it is just a completely unfair slog means I can't recommend playing it to anyone.
This post is really short, isn't it? I'll pad it out with this silly video of me playing Altered Beast with a cheat on so that i change into the Werebear on every stage. Oh and another thing: the Wikipedia entry for Battle Zeque Den is really terrible, in case you were wondering.

Disc Station #12 (PC)

Hooray! It's the first of the PC Disc Station volumes! And it's full of stuff! But the only parts we're interested in are the games, so let's go straight to the first one.
In this case, "the first one" refers to the excellently entitled "Bomber Through Gogo! ~Jump Hero Gaiden 2~", which is a Bubble Bobble-esque single screen platformer. You get three characters to choose from, though to be honest, you should only pick the devil-woman Linda, since she can fly. Anyway, as is the fine ancient tradition for this genre, to pass each stage, you have to defeat every enemy. Every few stages there's a boss too. Your method of attack in this game is to drop little bombs on the ground, then kick them around.
I'll admit that at first, I didn't really like this game. I thought the attack method was awkward and stupid, and you have to prss up to jump, which is always a negative. But! After I played it a few more times to get screenshots, i really started to warm up to it. Once you get used to the unusual controls, it's a ton of fun kicking bombs and having stuff exploding all over the screen. Plus, the graphics are some spectacularly luxurious pixel art, just as you'd expect from mid-90s Compile.
The second game on the disc I'm just going to refer to as "Gensei", since the full title is in Japanese and I can't read it. It's a top-down action game in which you control a tiger with a sword, going from room to room slashing monsters and stuff.
Most of the game is nothing especially original or anything, with the exception of the various gimmick rooms in each stage. These include a room where you stand in place while enemies fire elaborate and intricate bullet patterns that, provided you did stand in the right spot, pass harmlessly round you. There's also a room with a quick game of Space Invaders and one with a baseball player, against whom you have to hit a few home runs.
Gensei is an okay game, but 's not really very exciting. You'll probably get bored of it after a few plays.
The other two games on the disc I don't have much to say about. One of them, Sniper, won' go past the title screen, no matter what I do. The other is a remake of the first Madou Monogatari game, and since it's an RPG in Japanese, I don't have the patience for that sort of thing. It does have the super-cute end credits on the disc as an .avi file though, so I've uploaded that for your viewing pleasure, along with a couple of cool images from the disc's bonus folder.