Scorpius (X68000)

As you look through the screenshots for this post, you'll notice that they're mainly from the first two stages. That's because this game is brutally, incredibly difficult, and though some of the difficulty comes from stupid, unfair design decisions, such as obstacles that are impossible to avoid without foreknowledge of their location, a lot of it does simply come down to the fact that Scorpius is just a game that just seems to be designed entirely around the player's tears.

It's a horizontally-scrolling shooting game, and the gimmick that gives the game its title is that each of the three ships has a retractible scorpion-like tail that extends from their rear. The tail fires shots from the end, though aiming it takes a fair bit of getting used, as the tail moves in a manner vaguely similar to (though much harder to get the hang of) your dragon's tail in Irem's 1989 arcade game Dragon Breed. You can also put the tail away, and shoot normally, which is the best thing to do in most circumstances. Don't, however, neglect to learn how to control the tail, since it becomes absolutely vital to survival as soon as the middle of stage 2.

The game's big claim to fame is that it was put out by Shinseisha, the publishers of the legendary arcade magazine Gamest. It's clearly was a labour of love, too: the graphics and sound are both of a very high quality, especially when you take into account that this was a 1991 release, it could easily have come out two or three years later and still fit in fine among its contemporaries. Of course, the other side of the coin is that it's definitely made solely for an audience of super hardcore arcade fans. There are no concessions or allowances made for players who don't have either the skill to play well, or the fortitude to learn. I have to admit that I eventually fell short on both counts. Scorpius is just too hard for me! I had to give up after a straight hour's play, I managed to get to the third stage, then losing all my remaining lives within seconds. I'm ashamed to say it, but I was almost in tears.

It's easily much more difficult than even more modern danmaku-style shooting games, but with that level of extreme difficulty comes the physical sensation that comes along with all the best shooters. While reaching and fighting the second boss, I was on edge the whole time,feeling immense pressure and tension, followed by incredible, though brief, relief when the stage was done. All I can say is that if you want that kind of feeling, and you think you have the fortitude to stick with the game, and push through the trauma it inflicts, Scorpius is one you should seek out. No-one will think any less of you if you don't, though.

Curosities Vol. 10 - Playable Politicians

There's plenty of games starring real people, most of them being atheletes, with some musicians and actors and even the occasional comedian. Less common, though still more than you'd expect are games starring politicians, a few of which I'll be looking at today. There are actually quite a few omissions from this post, like Bill Clinton's appearance in NBA Jam, and pretty much the entire cast of the old Spitting Image fighting game, but I've tried to stick to games that are relatively obscure, and also to games where the politician in question is clearly the protagonist and/or main character.

So the first game is probably the most well-known of the ones appearing in this list, though at the same time, its star is the politician with the least fame outside his own country. SEGA's 1985 arcade game I'm Sorry is a single-screen maze game that sees Kakuei Tanaka (Prime Minister of Japan between 1972 and 1974) walking the streets of Japan collecting gold bars and avoiding sex scandals. It's got a nice risk/reward mechanic, whereby you don't get any points for the gold bars until you take them back to your mansion, but the amount of points increases greatly with each bar collected before returning home. Still, it's more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an actual good game, and even without knowledge of Tanaka's career, seeing tiny little 80s sprites engaging in BDSM and such is mildly amusing the first few times.

Next up is a politician who is, pretty prolific, as far as videogame appearances go. As well as having two otherwise unrelated games of his own, he also makes an appearance in Street Fighter II. Of course I'm talking about the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev! I can only assume that Japanese game developers saw him in the news and thought he was cute or funny-looking or something?

Anyway, the two games were released within months of each other in 1991, with Gorby no Pipline Daisakusen landing first, in April for the MSX. It's a combination of two better-known puzzle games, those being Tetris and Pipemania. There's a Tetris-style pit, lines with open pipes at each side. Blocks with pipe shapes in them fall from above, and the aim is to link the pipes on the right with the pipes on the left. There's a quota on each stage that has to be fulfilled before the pit completely fills up with pipe-bits. It's a surprisingly difficult game, and though it's fun and can hold your attention for a short time, it's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts, with both Tetris and Pipemania both being much better games than it.

Two months later, Ganbare Gorby! reached the Game Gear, and this time, it's a top down action game. In it, you play as Gorbachev, now working in some kind of distribution centre, ensuring people get the bread, medicine and Game Gears that they need, by stepping on switches to make conveyor belts point in the right direction. Obviously, there are some complications: the conveyor belts also have upon them less desirable items, like mouldy bread, poison and gears. (The gears are the unwanted item on the stage with the Game Gear as the wanted item, a joke I've only noticed now that I'm typing it out.) There's also thieves and, for some reason, armed guards wandering about the place, stealing items and beating up Mikhail, to interfere with his work. It's not a bad game, and it's also got a decent difficulty curve, with the stages gradually getting more complex, with more labyrinthine layouts of belts, and multiple different sets of switches, and so on. A de-Gorbied version was also released in the west a bit later, renamed Factory Panic.

Our last politician is a bit of a renaissance man, having also been a conspiracy theorist/TV personality, an actor, and, most impotantly, a wrestler. Of course, it's Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Governer of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003! The game that bears his name, Jesse "The Body" Ventura Wrestling Superstars, a localisation of the Mega Drive game Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden, was never actually released, and the ROM was only found and leaked publicly in 2016. Since Thunder Pro was itself a spin-off of the excellent Fire Pro Wrestling series, it's mechanically sound, and definitely a big step up from other wrestling games of the time. The only real problem it has is that the single-player game is far too easy: I managed to get to the final stage on my first play. Still, it's a fun little game, and other than Ventura himself, takes the usual Japanese wrestling game route of having oddly-named copyright-friendly clones of real wrestlers. You should at least give it a go, if only because it's a recently unearthed lost treasure.