Mighty Warriors (Arcade)

I'm sure you all know of the massive fighting game boom that followed in the wake of Street Fighter II and, to a lesser extent Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s, and how along with some classics, there were also some awful, point-missing garbage cash-ins, like Bloodstorm and Data East's unreleased Tattoo Assassins. Might Warriors appears to be one of those cash-ins, though this is just guesswork, as there's very little information about the game's development, or even its release date. The publisher, Elettronica Video-Games, is an Italian company that seems to only make gambling machines now (assuming the company that exists today under that name is the same one).

Anyway, the plot is pretty similar to SEGA's Eternal Champions: a bunch of dead (and exclusively male) warriors from throughout history are given the chance to live again by proving their might. These warriors include the usual Greek, Roman and (very white-looking) Egyptian, as well as a Celt, a non-specific African, a Chinese guy, a viking, some kind of big monk, and, most surprising, a massive Babylonian. Amusingly, it seems the artists had a hard time trying to animate tartan for the Celt's outfit, so they have him in chef-style checkerboard trousers.

They all have their own stages, too, and the stages even have at least two weather/time of day variants each, which is a surprise for a game like this. The reason I'm not mentioning the names of any of the characters, is because they seem to have different names depending on whether the left or right-side player is controlling them. For example, the viking can be Gurdaf on the left, or Gandalf on the right, while the Chinese guy is Hang-Sing or Chang-Kien. I guess this is their way around explaining how two of the same character can be fighting each other?

The game is no classic, as you've probably already assumed, but it does have some more interesting little quirks. Like how before each fight, you pick your character's "mutation". This isn't a special power or trait like you might expect, but one of the other characters that you can suddenly change into at will. Obviously, there's no explanation for this, nor is there any real advantage to doing this in a fight. Furthermore, each character starts every round with a weapon, which disappears if they get to 50% health or lower and get knocked to the ground. There's also little aesthetic touches, like how the continue screen counts down in Roman numerals, and how there's a little animated face between the health bars that says all the "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" stuff. Little touches like these make me think that though the execution isn't great, and the game was almost definitely knocked out as a quick, cheap cash-in, at least someone involved in its creation must have been passionate about what they were doing.

Yeah, Mighty Warriors isn't a game I can recommend at all, but it's a quirky little thing that stands out from the other cash-ins by having a few little sparks of creativity and personality. And also by not resorting to the try-hard me-too shock tactics of games like Time Killers and Bloodstorm.

FZ Senki Axis (X68000)

This game does what I've seen a few games on old floppy-based systems do, in that it has a fancy animated intro, which it puts on a completely seperate disk that's not needed to play the game. So theoretically, you don't even need to skip the cutscene, you can just throw it away never to be seen again. It's not a terrible one, though, it's fairly atmospheric and sets the scene I guess.

Anyway, FZ Senki Axis, then. It's an isometric shooting game by Wolfteam, specialists in making games that seem like they're licenced from late 80s OAVs, but actually aren't. In the case of FZ Senki Axis, it feels a lot like the Votoms spin-off Armour Hunter Mellowlink, except you're in a mecha, and poor old Mellowlink was always on foot with his trusty rifle. Each stage sees the player hunting down a certain number of specific target enemies, which tend to be bigger or faster than the regular drones (or both).

Despite every stage having the same overall mission, they still manage to be varied. Not only are the stages set in a variety of different environments, with war-torn cities, countryside battlefields, desert ruins, and so on, but there's gimmicks to them, too. Like one stage has the player in a dark cave, seeking out gun turrets hidden in murky pools of water, and another takes a break from the wide open spaces that are the norm, and has the player storming an enemy base, fighting security systems in corridors. The bossfights are even more varied, with heavily armed war-trains, a pair of fast elite mecha who seem to be inspired by Gundam's Black Tri-Stars and so on.

It's not all good, though. For starters, the difficulty is totally unforgiving, and it'd be hard to blame players for giving up after being quickly destroyed on their first go. The other side of that coin, however, is that the difficulty can really ramp up the tension, leading situations like a player on their last point of health trying to hunt down the stage's last target before getting taken out by a drone. Another problem is a smaller one, and I almost feel as if I'm nitpicking when I bring it up: the fact that there's no kind of acknowledgement when walking over different types of terrain. It's most noticable in the countryside stage, where the player's mech just walks over fields, bridges and water alike, as if the world was one of those carpets with roads and stuff printed on it. All it would have taken would have been a tiny splashing effect around the feet to enhance the experience so much more. But like I said, it's a tiny thing, and I feel silly bringing it up.

FZ Senki Axis is still a good game, and you should definitely give it a try if you think you can handle it. Even if you don't, you could try the Mega Drive port, which is mostly the same, but a lot easier.