Yuureikun (MSX)

This is a fairly deceptive game, as though it might look like a platformer in screenshots, Yuureikun is actually more like a shooting game. Going by strict definitions, it doesn't really fit into either category perfectly, as it's fairly unique. The player controls a little boo-like ghost, who floats about, avoiding bullets, killing enemies and all that other shooting game stuff.

The main difference is in your methods of attack, of which there are two: the first and most damaging is a weird backwards thrust attack that is limited by a long meter above your health bar, and is also the only way to break blocks (which I'll come back to. The second is a small fireball that floats next to you and can be sent out in front of you to attack before slowly making its way back to you. This attack kind of reminds me of Twinbee's fists, though it's slower and less effective.

Enemies drop coins upon death, and it actually took until my second go to work out what these coins were for. As I mentioned before, your backwards thrust attack can be used to smash certain blocks, some will be obvious and some not so much. Hidden inside some of these blocks are power-ups, such as health restorers and time-stoppers, though it's not possible to simply collect them as you like, as every power up you find has a cost attatched in Yen, that gets deducted upon collection. Rarer than the power-ups are little "doorway with a staircase inside" icons, that lead to bonus stages that give the player a few seconds to quickly grab some money and try to find power-ups in the walls.

The uniqueness also applies to the boss fights, as every boss I've fought so far has had a different strategy to it, and oddly, the boss of the first stage was the most complicated so far: it's a face embedded into a cave wall, with enemies constantly coming out of its mouth. To defeat it, the player has to use their backwards thrust attack to send enemies flying into the face's eye.

Yuureikun isn't a super-exciting game, nor is it some lost, hidden classic. It is an above-average game, though, with the graphics and sound being of especially high quality, and though I wouldn't say to rush out and play it right now, I don't think you'd regret giving it a few goes if you're curious.

Kettou Beast Wars (Game Boy Color)

Before Crawfish's miraculous ports of Street Fighter Alpha (to the Game Boy Color) and Street Fighter Alpha 3 (to the Game Boy Advance), handheld fighting games outside of the Neo Geo Pocket had a pretty bad reputation, and in most cases, that reputation was deserved. But stretching back into the early-mid 1990s, Takara were publishing ports of SNK fighting games to the Game Gear and Game Boy that were often far better than their peers. A lot of those ports were made by another company named Gaibrain, and it's this partnership that also made this game, based on the Transformers Beast Wars Toyline and TV Shows.

Luckily, their talents aren't limited to ports, and not only is Kettou Beast Wars a game full of enough features to make some console fighting games look bare bones, but it's actually a good game, with every department excelling to the extent allowed by the host hardware. There's eight playable characters, as well as at least one boss character, which would be generous for a fighting game on an 8-bit system, but this being a Transformers game, each character can also transform at any time mid-battle. So each character has two full sets of animations, including movements, attacks and even seperate sets of specials for each form.

The characters that are most fun to play as are Megatron, because he turns into a T-Rex that breathes fire and does flying kicks, and Guiledart, who turns into a Triceratops and has some really awesome-looking throws in his robot form. Of course, the game's concept alone ensures there's some fun to be had no matter what characters are involved, since you can have a gorilla fight a tank at Stonehenge, or a cheetah fighting a squid on the beach.

Those modes I mentioned earlier are a typical one-on-one arcade-style mode, a team battle mode where the player can choose to play as the Maximals (faces) or the Predacons (heels), and something called "quick draw", which I couldn't really work out. There's also a couple of extra modes, like a mode full of text-heavy character profiles, and an odd mini-game, which sees the player hammering buttons to break gems out of a big rock.

Mechanically, it's not super-complex beyond the transformation gimmick (which is admittedly really cool). There's a meter at the bottom of the screen that has to be charged manually, which can be expended in a power-boosting "hyper mode", or on super-moves that I haven't been able to execute. Transformation doesn't have any kind of penalty or limitation, though: you can press select at pretty much any time that you're not taking or dealing damage to change form.

Presentation is pretty great, too, within limits. The sprites are tiny, but still manage to be pretty detailed and full of character and charm, and they're really well animated, too. Backgrounds are a little simple and bland, but the colour choices are attractive enough to make up for that in most cases. Some of the menu screens are a bit weak, being plain white text on a black background, though considering the relatively massive amount of stuff that's packed into such a small cartridge, it's fair enough to allow this concession.

Yeah, I definitely recommend Kettou Beast Wars, at least, if you're for some reason in the market for Game Boy Color fighting games.