Spartan X 2 (NES)

The original Spartan X (also known as Kung Fu Master and just Kung Fu) was an iconic and highly influential game early in the mid-80s. Though it spawned many imitators on pretty much every system popular in Japan at the time (including an old Lunatic Obscurity subject, Dragon Wang), though oddly, it never got a sequel until more than half a decade later, and that sequel never got released outside Japan, nor did it even come close to becoming as iconic as its predecessor.

There's a few reasons for this: Spartan X, while not the first beat em up, was a fairly early entry into the genre, and brought with it simple, fun mechanics and beautifully simple graphics that made great use of chunky sprites and limited colour palletes to depict a classic kung fu cinema-inspired setting. Where Spartan X 2 falls short is that it keeps the simple mechanics, despite the fact that 6 years had passed, and in those six years, the likes of Final Fight and Nekketsu Kunio Kouha-kun (among others) had totally revolutionised the genre, making Spartan X 2's single plane stages and one-hit enemies look old hat by comparision. That's not to say that the single plane beat em up was totally obsolete: 1988's Altered Beast, for example became an icon of its era by adding all kinds of new gimmicks and mechanics onto the idea (and by being a prominent Mega Drive launch title too, no doubt).

Mechanics aside, Spartan X 2 also suffers through its setting and graphics. Gone are the simple, bright sprites of the original, as well as its chinese setting. It's hard to blame the devs for making things look more detailed and up-to-date, but the real sticker is the new setting, having the game take place in a modern-day world filled with crime and violence, just like dozens of other beat em ups and other action games that had been released in the interim years since the original game.

So, if we overlook the ways in which it fails to be a "worthy" sequel to the original, is Spartan X 2 a good game? I can honestly say it's not a bad game, at least. It's decently fun to play, it looks and sounds al right, and it doesn't feel unfair or annoying at any point. The problem is it's not particularly anything special, either. It really is just another one of many, many beat em ups that's not particularly remarkable in any way. It also has the problem that it's far too easy: you can take a lot of beatings and strangulation before losing a life, and extra lives are given out at every 20,000 points (which happens at least once per stage). There's also the bizarre fact that you gain points while enemies are strangling you, which makes no sense to me at all, either thematically or mechanically.

If you happen find a copy of the Famicom cartridge for a (very) low price, Spartan X 2 is a fun game to add to your collection, but otherwise, it's not really good or interesting enough to go out of your way to acquire.

Curiosities Vol. 8 - Secret Shooting Games

Something I've always liked since I was a kid was secrets in games, and especially secrets that added extra fun to games, like stages or characters. Like most early-90s kids, I was obsessed with Sonic, and got really excited when I heard there was a secret stage hidden in the cartridge, the Hidden Palace Zone. Of course, all that excitement turned to disappointment when I used my cousin's Action REplay to access the HPZ and it was just unplayable garbage with a title card. Even more exciting than hidden bits of games, though, are entire hidden games, which is what this post is about.

Before I really start, I want to clarify the difference between "secret" and "unlockable": unlockable games will be easily accessible from an in-game menu, and the game might even acknowledge the games before they're available. Secret games require cheats or passwords to get to, and the game doesn't let you know they're there if you don't know about them already. There'll probably be posts about some unlockable games on this blog in the future, but today I'm talking about three secret games, that also happen to all be shooting games hidden away in the bowels of non-shooting games. 

First up is Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf for the Mega Drive. It's a golf game, that would be totally forgotten by history, were it not for its secret. And that secret is a simple little game based on SEGA's beloved Fantasy Zone games. It's a single-screen shooter in which you have one life and a constantly increasing score, and all you have to do is stay alive for as long as possible. It's very simple and you're unlikely to last very long, but it is fun. The only problem is that it's a pain to get to: you have to get a game over in the main game, then input the famous Konami code on the game over screen. Getting a game over requires using one hundred shots on a single hole, which will take you about ten minutes. Best to do this in an emulator, and make a save state on the game over screen.

Next is another, much better Mega Drive game: Mega-lo Mania (known as "Tyrants: Fight Through Time" in America), which is a surprisingly deep real-time strategy game about giant immortal floating heads using humans to wage war against each other. Inputting the password "JOOLS" into the game's save/load option also unlocks a weird, vaguely asteroidsy shooting game where you fly around space and impotently shoot at seemingly-intangible enemies, until one of the main game's floating heads says "do you want to be on my side", then flies in and smashes you to death. Yeah, it's not very good. But luckily, Mega-lo Mania is really good, so once you've got over the novelty of having a secret game in there, you can just play that instead.

I've saved the most impressive secret shooter till last, and it's hidden in the early Playstation 3D fighting game Zero Divide. Though it's a game that's been forgotten by history, Zero Divide's got a lot of charm, and that mainly comes from the fact that the developers were obviously very excited about the inherent possibilities of all the storage space on a CD (compared to cartridges and floppy disks) and even the memory card. There's tons of unlockable stuff, some of which comes only after the game's been played for 200 hours, and there's a lot of weird experimental stuff too, like an annoying DJ who comments on how well or badly you play.

But anyway, among its many other features, Zero Divide also includes Tiny Phalanx, a cut-down port of the X68000/SNES shooter Phalanx, a game that's infamous in the west for the bizarre boxart the SNES version got in North America. It's unlocked by holding start and select on the second controller as the game loads up, and it's really good. It looks and sounds great, it's got proper power-up and scoring systems and it's just really impressive for a secret freebie. Since Zero Divide came out in 1995, there were probably full games being released at the same time that were lower quality.