Police Chase Down (PS2)

The english title for this one's a bit of a misnomer: though you do play as police officers, you aren't chasing anyone down, but are in fact on security detail. You pick one of four motorbike-riding police officers (amusingly, three of them get descriptions like "member of an elite unit" or "the force's most decorated officer", while one guy is just "a respected highway patrol officer"),and go on missions to protect limosines

from gangs of thugs on motorbikes and in vans, who would cause harm to the passengers within. So it's like Chase HQ, minus the chase, but plus escort missions.
Having to protect a fairly slow-moving vehicle while riding a quite fast one is really fiddly, and you'll often be either turning round to go back and fight enemies who've appeared from the rear, or just plodding along as slow as you can (which means pressing the accelerator every few seconds, since the game doesn't support the Dual Shock 2's analogue buttons) to keep pace with the limo.
If the limo's health is reduced to zero, or the time runs out, you fail the mission, if the limo reaches its destination, you succeed. But while you're playing, the game doesn't actually tell you how far you are from the goal, which is annoying, and leaves the player in a kind of limbo, not knowing whether or not the limo has

enough health left to make it. Which it might not anyway, as it might drive into some obstacle you didn't see and instantly lose all its health, which happened to me once.
I could go as far as to say that Police Chase Down is the second-worst of the PS2 Simple Series games I've played, with only Eternal Quest/The Dungeon RPG being worse on account of the fact that it's incredibly boring and the PAL version isn't even fully translated!
So in summary, I don't recommend this or Eternal Quest.
This game is also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 7: Saikyou! Shirobi King ~Security Police~

Dahna: Megami Tanjou (Mega Drive)

I think "Megami Tanjou" means "birth of the goddess", but I'm not toally sure on that. But anyway, this is a violent fantasy-themed platform game, in which you play a white-robed swordswoman, who we might guess from the title, might be named Dahna and could possibly either be a goddess or may become a goddess in the future. There's cutscenes explaininng the story, but of course, they're all in Japanese so I don' know what

anyone is saying in them. It doesn't matter!
The game starts with a village under attack by an evil wizard and his minions. They're chasing people with swords, burning down buildings and causing all kinds of ruckus, until our heroine rides in. On the back of an ogre. Yeah, the game starts with a cool bit of spectacle, as you control the ogre, smashing the puny humans with swipes of your giant claws, or just jumping on them. This is made even cooler by the game's liberal use of gore: though it's not in the same league as Splatterhouse 2 or anything, it still throws about a lot of red stuff for a platform game released in 1991.
After a couple of minutes, the evil wizard shows up to banish your ogre away, leaving only Dahna and her sword. In later parts of the game, you also get to ride a horse and a griffin! There might be more things to

ride later than that, I don't know. I don't know because the game is really, brutally hard. You only get a small life bar and no lives (I must shamefully admit that I had to make use of the 5 continues the game provides to play enough of it to write about), and not only are life-restoring items painfully rare, but you don't even heal between stages! The one small mercy the game provides is that at 100,000 and 200,000 points, your life bar not only fills, but extends too! If only it did this at 300,000 too I might have survived another stage or two. It's not only the health situation that will kill you, but there are also segments with collapsing platforms and bottomless pits, which wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that controlling Dahna's jumps feels so bizarre and unnatural. I can't really describe in words the bizarre way that precise jumps both look and feel in this game, but it makes it a lot harder to do them.
There are positives to the game, and they're mostly aesthetic. Although the graphics are fairly simple and the sprites small, everything is still pretty well drawn, and the characters do manage to convey a certain amount of personality with what they've got. It's also obvious that the developers of the game were fans of 80s live
action fantasy films, as the game has a strong aesthetic in general that radiates a certain atmosphere similar in feel to films like the Deathstalker series, and others of that slightly grimy, low budget ilk.
The atmosphere and personality the game has unfortunately aren't enough to get around the brutal, ooften unfar difficulty, though, and I can't really recommend playing this one. And I definitely don't recommend paying the high prices the game fetches online, either.

Zeiram Zone (Playstation)

So, this is a beat em up based on the excellent Zeiram movies (well, the first one is excellent, at least. I haven't seen the second one yet, or the spin-off animated series.) In it, the main protagonist of those movies, Iria, goes to various planets to apprehend evil-doers and space criminals and the like, by defeating them in battle and trapping them in crystals, just like she does in the movies.
The controls are more like a fighting game than a beat em up, with up being jump and the four face buttons assigned to LP, HP, LK and HK. There are even special moves, the three I've managed to figure out are:
Quarter Circle Foward + Punch to do a swipe with a lightsabre-type weapon
Quarter Circle Back + Kick to do a big flippy kick thing that can attack enemies in front of and behind you,

and
Dragon Punch Motion + Kick for a quick kick combo.
The game mostly plays like any other regular beat em up, walking along and beating up monsters and robots and other weird things as you go, though rather than the typical belt scroller movement, the game uses L2 and R2 to allow you to jump between planes, Guardian Heroes-style. The boss fights are slightly different, being more like a primitive 3D fighting game, and the plane-switch buttons become left and right sidestep buttons.
The game is pretty fun to play, as simple and clunky as it is, and though the graphics are pretty poor even by the standards of 1996 3D games (and on a related note, the CGI cutscenes between stages look awful), the enemy's designs do look pretty cool and original, my favourite being the robot cranes that attack at the start of the "Ghost Castle" stage.

There is a big problem with the game, though. A few stages in, you'll reach the "Bio-Ship" stage, which is full of huge moving traps that drain your health on contact, and the game's control scheme doesn't really equip you well enough to effectively avoid them. Getting past this area has been impossible for me so far, which really is a shame, as I was just getting to enjoy the fighting mechanics and figuring out the best strategy for different enemy types and so on. It's made even worse by the fact that the Bio-Ship stage itself also actually looks pretty cool.

Super Mad Champ (SNES)

According to legend, this game was originally planned to have been a racing spin-off from the Kunio-kun series, though the tie-in was ditched, the game lived on independently. Like Motor Raid and the Road Rash series, it's a motorbike racing game in which the competitors can attack each other as they pass by.

It definitely seems to be influence by the Road rash games, as it features a simple career system, in which the player must spend money to buy and repair bikes and to enter races, while winnig money by placing highly in races.
Although you'll win a prize no matter what place you finish the race in, only the top three prizes are actually more than the cost of entering. Furthermore, only by placing in the top three can the player advance to the next race, rather than repeating it (and paying the entry fee again). Winning isn't the only way to gain money: there are also small bonuses available for every time you hit an opponent, as well as for finishing a lap in a high position. As well as he five race participants, there are also a bunch of guys riding around the tracks in red jumpsuits. Passing or being passed by them doesn't effect your position, but they can be attacked for bonuses, and if they happen to ride by while you're walking around after falling off your bike, they'll dismount and attack you. When this happens, you can beat them up for a hefty bonus (though due to the time taken to

do this, you'll definitely win the race), or you can get on their bike and ride off on it (which is useful if your bike has been destroyed).
The weird thing about this game is something you won't notice until a few races in, once you start buying faster bikes: it's really hard to steer at high speeds! Rather than just taking a nice simple approach to steering, where going faster just means slowing down a little to stay on the road at corners, steering a fast bike in Super Mad Champ is a delicate affair, requiring pressing the accellerate button and the d-pad at just the right times, and holding them just long enough so that you don't skid and fall off your bike in the middle of the road.

Unfortunately, this ruins the game for me. That kind of finicky steering makes the game feel more like the controls are your opponent, rather than the other racers, and it's just not very fun. The first few races are nice, but once you get into the GP1 class races, it's best to just write the game off and start playing something else.

Monster Puroresu (PC Engine)

This game is a bit of a curiosity: it's a turn-based strategy wrestling game! Mechanically, it has more in common with Pokemon than Fire Pro Wrestling. This actually put me off the game when I first discovered it a few years ago: I saw the title and started it, expecting a probably-awful wrestling game along the lines of

Beast Wrestler or King of the Monsters, and greeted by many little boxes of Japanese text, I instantly turned it off.
Years later, I decided to give it another try and I'm glad I did! Although you'll be missing out on little, unimportant things like the plot or the names of moves, most of the stuff actually related to playing the game is expressed through numbers (and in case you're wondering, the plot, according to a website I found long ago is that an evil demon has taken control of the world, and a human scientist has created a group of mutant wrestlers to fight the demon's forces and liberate humanity).
Each wrestler has five stats: HP, ST, MP, SP, and GT. HP and MP are self-explanatory, serving the same purposes they serve in every game. SP isn't so obvious, and its purpose is still somewhat obscure to me. To explain ST and GT first requires explaining how the game works.
The matches are turn-based, and each turn both wrestlers select a move from their repetoire. Moves come in four categories: hold, hit, power and magic. On selecting a move, each wrestler also recieves a

semi-randomly generated number, the wrestler with the highest roll is the attacker and the other defends. Each move also has its own power rating, higher rated moves do more damage, but tend to get lower rolls. The ST stat also determines how likely a wrestler is to get higher rolls, and GT is a temporary stat, which is increased when a wrestler takes damage, and it can be decreased when selecting a move to slightly increase your chance of getting a high number. After moves have been selected, there's a few seconds during which the players tap button I as quickly as possible to affect a blue/red bar determining how much damage the attacker's move does. This repeats until one wrestler's HP is reduced to zero.
While all this is happening, the top half of the screen depicts the action. Although the animation is pretty limited, the sprites are huge and the animation that there is does do a good job. Moves look painful, even when there's very silly cartoonish things going on like heads being pulled off and limbs exploding. The

wrestlers also all have very expressive faces, and amusing reactions to dismemberment and pain, whether their own or their opponents.
Monster Puroresu is a pretty fun game, though it definitely isn't for everyone. If you like any combination of wrestling, monsters and strategy, and you don't mind wading through lots of Japanese text, you should probably give it a try.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 104: The Robot Tsukuruuze ~Gekitou! Robot Fight~

Before playing this game, all i knew about it was the title, an from that, I assumed it would be a game about giant robots, or maybe some kind of Angelic Layer/Plawres Sanshiro-esque affair with toy robots fighting. The second guess was the closer of the two, though unlike the fighting toy robots seen in those shows, the robots in this game are much more realistic. Rather than being tiny mechanical superheroes, these robots are

blocky machines, awkwardly stumbling about just like bipedal robots do in real life. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen robots pretty similar to the ones in this game in real life, but searches for "bipedal robot sumo/fighting/etc." proved fruitless.
Anyway, the fighting portion of the game has your robot facing another in a sumo-style arena, victory coming from either depriving your opponent of their balance points and knocking them over, or by pushing them out of the ring. The first robot to win three rounds wins the fight.
Of course, the robot in-game belongs to and is controlled by the teenage members of an after-school club, and between the matches, you can instruct the four members of the club to either perform one of four actions (making new robot parts, programming new special moves into the robot,

repairing the robot's parts or changing the robot's parts), or they can spend the week studying to increase their proficiency in one of the four actions.
The makers of the game really got into the high school anime presentation style of the game, even going so far as having the game's intro be in the style of an anime intro, complete with vocal theme song and a fake time stamp in the corner of the screen. The developers' (HuneX) back catalogue (at least as far as their Simple Series entries go) is largely made up of visual novels and romance games, which shows in this game in the form of the unbelievably lengthy dialogue scenes that occur almost constantly between fights, delivered in the format of static pictures with text boxes beneath them. I don't feel like I'm missing much

through my inability to read them, and to be honest, my enjoyment of the game shot up immensely after discovering that you can skip entire scenes of dialogue in one go by pressing select.
In summary, this is a fun game with a nice, friendly atmosphere, even if you skip all the dialogue scenes. It' also very well made, with great production values that really hide the fact that it's a Simple 2000 game. I definitely recommend it.

Zombie Hunter (MSX)

This post is going to be shorter than I'd originally planned, as I couldn't stand to play the game any more to learn more about it. This wasn't always the situation,  though. There were acually three stagfes in my appreciation of this game: at first glance, it seemed low, oring and unfairly hard. Later, I gave the game a second chance and it seemed like there might have been a fun game hiding under the rough exterior. Finally, I realised that the game was centred entirely around grinding, for both items and experience.
Zombie Hunter isn't anything to do with the Oneechanbara series (a few entries of which were released in Europe under the "Zombie Hunters" title), it's a side-scrolling action RPG with a generic fantasy setting. In each stage (there are apparently six stages, though I never got past the first boss), the player moves from left to right, fighting a group of enemies every screen or so. On the controller, you have a button for jumping and a button of attacking, while to equip and use items and check up on your stats, presing Ctrl on the keyboard opens the menu. Out of combat, everything is very slow and jerky, I assume this is down to the MSX having trouble doing the scrolling, as the scrolling stops for battles, and they run a lot smoother. Although you fight the same monsters in the same locations each time, you can walk back and forth to repeat battles (which you will need to do. A lot.)  At the end of each stage, there's a boss hiding behind a big door, that must be unlocked with a key.
Like I said before, Zombie Hunter gives the player a lot of grinding to do. Only about halfway through the first stage, there's an encounter with a group of flying squid-like creatures that are nigh-impossible to defeat without rginding another level on top of the one you hould have gained along the way. All items in the game
are acquired through random drops from enemie, including equipment, healing item and the aforementioned boss key. The item grind wouldn't be o bad were it not for the fact that the enemies will drop gold rather than items a lot of the time, and, in the first stage at least, there are no shops. So to make any kind of progress, the player has to walk up and down the stage fighting the exact same battles over and over in the hopes that they'll get strong enough to be able to progress a little further. And the enemies give less experience every time you level up, too.
Don't bother playing this game. Like I said earlier, it's a slow, repetitive slog.

Bulk Slash (Saturn)

This is actually something of a filler post, having put myself in the unusual position of needing to put a gap between Champion Kendo and Maze Heroes and the RPG and sports game I plan on writing about in the near future. The game itself isn't filler material, though! It's excellent!
It's a 3D shooting game in which the player pilots a giant robot that can transform into a futuristic fighter jet.

The stages are set in the kinds of places that 90s robot anime were set: a city on the bay under a bright blue sky, a blasted desert battlefield, a fleet of big, battling spaceships and so on. While the graphics are generally amazing (definitely disproving the "recieved wisdom" that the Saturn couldn't do good-looking 3D, as if the Panzer Dragoon series, Burning Rangers and various others didn't already do that.), the second stage is especially beautiful, taking place in an amazing cyberpunk city at sunset, during the rain. And then it ends with a boss fight against an amazing looking giant mecha dragonfly with holographic wings!  Easily one of the coolest sights of any 32-bit era game!
The great presentation carries on into the music. The title screen greets you with a short but incredible little

power metal riff, and the in-game music perfectly fits the 90s anime style of the game. There's also a cool animated intro to be seen if you don't press anything at the title screen for a minute or so.
Each of the stages takes place in a pretty big area, which you're free to navigate at will, carrying out your objective, which is different for each stage, including blowing up certain machines, finding ID cards, carrying bombs to the destination in your fighter mode and a dreaded escort mission (which really isn't that hard once you've got a hang of controlling your ship/robot).
The controls are simple, but as effective as they need to be. The d-pad moves, the shoulder buttons turn, A transforms, C either makes your robot jump or changes the speed of your ship, X, Y and Z all point you in the direction of your enemy during boss fights, and B is the attack button.
Using only the B button, the designers hae managed to give the player a wide range of attacks: not pressing it for a few seconds charges your heavy weapon, in robot mode a medium range grenade that causes a big explosion and in fighter mode, an array of homing missiles that seek their prey in a satisfying Itano Circus-esque manner. As for normal attacks, theship mode is simple: press B to shoot your machine guns. In

robot mode, there's a wider variety of options: tapping B when at close range to an enemy slashes with a sword, while holding B shoots your main gun (a machine gun by default, but in robot mode, three temporary power-ups are available: a flamethrower, a raiden-esque toothpaste laser and a short-range three-way gun), though whether you're moving or stationary when you hold the button gives you the Treasure-esque choice between fixed shooting (when stationary) or free shooting (while moving).
I could keep going on and on about how great this game is and other cool things in it like finding co-pilots and so on, but rather than spoiling everything, I'll just tell you to go and play it!