The Last Tempest (X68000)

This is a game that was almost, thanks to the short-sightedness of its developer, lost to the ages. It's only down to a helpful poster at the Tokugawa Corp forums, who found a way round the game's copy protection that it can now be emulated, played and written about.
On to the game itself, it's an action game taking place on floating isometric islands, and on each stage, the player must find and kill all the enemies therein. The hook is that the player is some kind of evil skull-

worm-thing, and the enemies are angels, saints, apostles and other biblical figures. Enemies are killed simply by repeatedly ramming them with your face. The game delights in being disrespectful and irreverant, too: cherub enemies are labelled "angelic scum", the good samaritan is pointed out with a big red arrow instructing "KILL HIM!", and the homing shots fired by the Archangel Gabriel are "angelic sperm".
The game is a lot of fun, and though the stages all have the same basic goal (kill every enemy), there's still a lot of variety in them, and another nice touch is that though each stage has a boss (usually an archangel, though I've also encountered a bronze serpent summoned by Moses and Aaron, who also float around on their own little island summoning explosions and rains of holy water to further annoy you), they don't have to be killed last, and will often roam about the stages attacking at will.
Another interesting point is that the player character is technically invulnerable to direct attacks, with death only coming from falling off the islands, which actually serves to make it more annoying, especially when, as is often the case, death comes from the player's own clumsiness, without even needing any enemy

intervention.
Despite this frustration, this is a game I'm going to be sticking with for a few reasons. Firstly, the charm of its adolescent blasphemous trappings (as an aside: though it came out in the same year as Neon Genesis Evangelion, since that series debuted in October, it's probably just a coincidence), contrasted with the high quality of the graphics and music and how well put together the game is in general is nice, and secondly, as I said, every stage is unique and full of nice little ideas, and I want to see more of what the game has to offer.
Special thanks to Japanese PC Compendium for helping me get the disc images and the save state needed to run them.

Elevator Action Old & New (Game Boy Advance)

So obviously, everyone knows of the Elevator Action series, probably through the amazing arcade game Elevator Action Returns, but I think this entry into the series has gone mostly unplayed, released as it was, only in Japan, and apparently not in great quantities.
The cartridge contains both the original Elevator Action and a whole new game. The original is what it is. I won't waste too much time talking about it, but it's definitely a game that lives in the shadow of its sequels: it's

brutally hard, fiddly to control and moves like it's set at the bottom of a treacle ocean.
The new game lets you pick from three playable characters, with different stats. There is a fourth character unlocked after completing the game with all three characters, but I didn't go that far. I got most of the way through with one character before giving up on the game. The game's stages are split into 8 sets of four, which all have to be played through individually, which presents one of the biggest problems the game has. Because you get a whole new set of lives every four stages, this makes getting through the first three quarters of the game incredibly easy. You might argue that this is to make the game more palatable for a handheld console, but compare to another GBA game, the excellent Ninja Cop (which itself has a few similarities to the Elevator Action series), which allows the player to start at any set of stages, but also goes straight into the next once one is finished, with the continuing score adding an extra incentive to play the game from start to finish in a single run. Elevator Action New doesn't even have scoring, so the player is literally just trying to get from start to finish.
With that complaint out of the way, you might wonder why I didn't complete the game, even once. The thing is, once you get to the penultimate set of stages, the game does two things that totally throw the difficulty from "pointlessly easy" to "unfairly difficult". The first thing is a new enemy, big robots that stomp around the floors shooting lasers, and who take ten shots to kill. For context, consider that your ammo is limited in this game, even for the default gun, and the player starts each stage with only 30 bullets. The second is the fact that the stage layouts are no longer simple vertical buildings with the exit at the top or bottom. I gave up on

the game, when, after finding all the secret files in one stage, dying to a time out when I couldn't seem to find the stage exit anywhere.
The game isn't a total write-off, though. There is one new element that I really liked in this game: the disguise power up. It turns the player into an enemy for 10 or so seconds, allowing them to walk about the stages freely, without any enemy interference. It's only a simple little thing, but it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save this game. I never expected EAN to be able to stand up to Elevator Action Returns, but the fact is, it doesn't even stand up to its Game Boy Color antescendant Elevator Action EX, which is a great game, and one which I definitely recommend, should you have a need for some portable elevator-themed espionage.