Express Raider (Arcade)

Hello! Remember me? It's been a while since I last posted, sorry! I've been busy with things like re-learning how to 3D model and other miscellany.

Anyway, Express Raider is an arcade game released by Data East in 1986, and it's a pretty early example of a game in which the player is the bad guy. I won't say first, because even if there's no earlier villain arcade games (which there might be, I haven't checked), there's probably something from the 80s british computer scene that features a playable bad guy.

The specific knave over whom your control will be exerted in this game is a nameless train robber/mass murderer in the old west. There's two types of robberies this no-good scoundrel commits: ones where he

boards the train, and ones where he rides horseback alongside it. Yes, it's not "one big score" he's after, he's a career criminal.

The two types of robbery are represented by two types of play. The on-foot robberies see the player walking across the tops of the train carraiges, each of which is protected by a different guardian. This might sound like a beat em up setup, but as the enemies are fought one at a time, in fixed spaces, it's more along the lines of something like Karateka, a strictly Player-Vs-AI fighting game with a single playable character, but multiple opponents, a genre that was pretty much killed by Street Fighter II, and then buried by Rise of the Robots.

Other than the generic tough guy you'll encounter a few times on each fighting stage, there's also riflemen, big guys who try to shove you off the train with a wall of boxes, and the coal-shovelling guy who, on your arrival, diverts his attention from fuelling the train to ending your life. An interesting part of these sections is your health bar, which obviously get depleted via enemy attacks, but also gets restored through your successful attacks, making it something more of a momentum meter than a traditional health bar.

The other bits, the ones that take place on horseback, aren't nearly as interesting as the fighting bits, though they're not the chore I'd originally assumed them to be when I saw them in the game's attract demo. The

easiest way to describe it would be as a kind of horseback cabal-esque shooting gallery. The bottom part of the screen is your moving area, in which you must dodge the enemy bullets, and the top has the train carraiges. Enemies pop up to take shots at the player through windows or from behind walls or whatever, and sometimes a woman will appear with a bag of points for you too (you lose a life if you shoot her, which is really easy to do, considering how frantic these sections are). After you kill a certain amount of enemies at a carraige, you move on to the next until you finally reach the engine, which plays host to a mildly bizarre bonus stage, in which you have the remaining time from the rest of the stage to shoot as manically as possible to find invisible targets while a guy on board the train randomly gives you big sacks of points.

Express Raider is a fun, fairly unique game that definitely meets my recommendation. You should totally play it!

Aa Harimanada (Game Gear)

Aa Harimanada is a sumo game, based on Kei Sadayasu's comiic of the same name. You've probably seen the Mega Drive game based on the comic, which, as was the fashion at the time, was more like a sumo-themed fighting game, with large, detailed sprites and special moves and the like. (As an aside, the UK's Sega Power magazine printed a review of the Mega Drive game, but were apparently too lazy or too cheap to get someone to translate the title for them, so they just referred to it as "SUMO".)

The Game Gear version is, as far as I can tell with my very limited understanding of sumo, a lot more realistic. Though there are special moves in the game, the only reason I know this is because I once

performed one by accident (ashoryuken-looking maneuver that I was unfortunately never able to recreate). The CPU opponents never performed any specials, no matter how far into the game I got. There is one particularly unrealistic-seeming touch left in however: the ability to jump stright up in the air about three or four metres. You can't attack or anything from up there, though, so it's as pointless as it is inappropriate. Winning is possible via the regular sumo methods of knocking your opponent down, or throwing them out of the ring, though there is also a health bar, presumably to avoid stalemates, and attacking an opponent with a fully depleted health bar will automatically knock them down or send them rolling out of the ring.

As you can see from the screenshots, the game's graphics are fairly nice looking, though they're far from the best the Game Gear has to offer, and as you play the game, you'll notice they commit a far graver sin: repetition to an almost absurd degree. There's only one arena in the game as far as I can tell, having played well over twenty stages in, and even worse, there's only on character sprite. It's true, although the many opponents you face in the game all have different names and portraits displayed before each bout, every one of them, including the player character, is one sprite used over and over with the only variations being in skin and mawashi colour. Making this even worse is the fact that the varying skin colours rarely match the colour of the character seen in the pre-match portraits.

Despite this, the presentation in general is pretty good. The one sprite the game has is of a decent size and also fairly well animated, and there's quite a bit of sampled speech, considering it's an early 90s handheld game. Each match also ends with a big, full-screen animation of the winniing move, which looks pretty cool and is only slightly hampered by the fact that again, all the animations feature generic characters, irrelevant of which characters are involved.

Unforunately, though there are a few good points speaking in this game's favour, they are vastly outweighed by the negatives. The aformentioned health bar is the game's real killer, even in light of the recoloured sprites problem, as it removes the need for any kind of skill in the game. It's entirely possible to coast through the game by simply pummeling opponents with palm thrusts and headbutts until they're knocked out, and it seems they never develop any kind of skill to counter such tactics. I've only seen the game over screen because I lost a fight on purpose, and I've never seen the game's ending simply because the boredom of fighting identical, inept opponents always becomes totaly unbearable after about twenty-ish matches.