Crimewave (Saturn)

So, Crimewave is a game from pretty early in the Saturn's life, and it's a UK-developed game! No-one ever talks about western-developed Saturn games. Except Deathtank, obviously. It set in some kind of horrible dystopian future britain, which is apparently run by the Conservatives (as you'd expect any British dystopia to be), as the police force have not only been privatised and run for profit, but they can also get away with "accidentally" murdering random passers-by with only the feeblest of penalties.

Of course, you play as one of these mercenary cops, driving around the streets until the red arrow appears, pointing you towards your quarry. You get one hundred Meks (the currency of the future (at least it's not "credits")) for every perp you kill. The penalty for killing passers-by is a relatively meager 5 Meks a pop, by the way, and that only comes into play once you've already killed a few. At every multiple of 500 Meks, the gate to the next area opens, and you go there to hunt down and kill criminals. A couple of areas in, you also have rival cops to deal with, who not only want to kill the criminals, but also stop you from doing so. The "free market" in action!

The problem is that though it looks sort of similar to the first two Grand Theft Auto games, while driving was fun and exciting in those games, with their handbrake turns and trivial crashes, it's a pain in Crimewave. Every bump with another vehicle knocks you back some way, and every bump with a stationery object brings you to a standstill and forces you to awkwardly reverse out of the situation. All this while you're also chasing criminal vehicles that can go pretty fast right from the start of the game. It leads to an incredibly frustrating experience, and if you let an enemy get out of sight, an incredibly tedious one too, as you're left futilely chasing an enemy car that's just slightly off screen.

It seems like the developers wanted to make an exciting, fast-paced futuristic car-chase/shooting action game, and while it's a great idea, the execution is just a little bit off. It's so annoying, too, as Crimewave is so close to being a hidden Saturn classic.

He Jin Zhuang Bei II (Game Boy Color)

I don't know what the title means, or if there's actually a  He Jin Zhuang Bei I, but what I do know is that this is an unlicensed beat em up themed around the Metal Gear Solid games. Despite it's worldwide popularity, Metal Gear Solid doesn't seem to have inspired many pirate games, compared to the likes of Street Fighter or Dynasty Warriors. In fact, before this game, the only previous MGS Pirate I'd seen was a Russian Mega Drive pirate, that was just a quick hack of Crack Down with only the title screen changed.

The game starts with a codec conversation (in Chinese) between Snake, Mei Ling and the Colonel, before dumping you on an RPG-esque map screen. From this map, there are two stages the player can visit, in whatever order they like. There's an incredibly tedious bridge stage, that feels like it goes on forever, and sees Snake fight various kinds of soldiers and also what appear to be martial artists dressed in raggedy jester costumes with sacks on their heads. The other's a kind of warehouse district that doesn't have the jesters, though it does end with a boss fight against a big robot, that towers over Snake (who himself must be about seven feet tall, being significantly taller than most of the human enemy types). I dont know if there's some kind of copy protection that hasn't been cracked, or if there's some I was meant to do but never knew about because I can't read any of the text, but after completing these two stages, I could only play them again, the game didn't open up anything new.

Mechanically, it's very mediocre. Like a lot of other unlicensed GBC beat em ups (especially the many Dynasty Warriors games, and Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War), it has a levelling up system, and for the first few levels of experience, you do very little damage to enemies and every fight is a boring slog. You have a button to attack (doing Snake's punch-punch-kick combo from Metal Gear Solid!) and another to jump. Pressing them together performs a gun attack that drains your health and hardly ever hits, so don't bother with it. Other than that, there's really nothing about the way He Jin Zhuang Bei II plays that's particularly uniue or interesting.

Unless you're a rabid obsessive for either unlicensed games or Metal Gear Solid, there's unfortunately not really much to recommend about He Jin Zhuan Bei II, the various Dynasty Warriors GBC bootlegs are mostly better than it, and it definitely doesn't hold a torch to the excellent School Fighter.