Battle Tycoon - Flash Hiders SFX (SNES)

I complain a lot about how many action games, especially those released in recent years, are ruined by the addition of experience points, skill progression, and the negative difficulty curve that those features create. But of course, there are exceptions to every rules, and Battle Tycoon is one of them. It's the sequel to a PC Engine game I've not yet played called Flash Hiders, and both games seem to be pioneering forays into the kind of long, robust single player modes that later fighting games like the home ports of Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution would have.

Obviously, there's the traditional modes where you just pick characters and fight against other human players or computer-controlled opponents, but the meat of the game is in the "Advance" mode, which has you selecting a character that you'll stick with for the duration, while you fight opponents, gain experience and raise your stats. This mode is split into days, and at different times of day, you can go to different places: the official arena to take part in fights against random opponents at random power levels, the street fight arena, where you can choose your opponent from a whoever's present on that day, the gambling den where you can bet on fights in which you don't personally participate (though, if you want, you can actually sit out of fighting altogether and have the computer do it. though the strategy/raising part of the game isn't really deep enough that this would be worthwhile for anyone), an item shop, a place to save your progress, and your apartment where you can look at your stats.

Mostly though, you just take part in fights and watch numbers gradually go up. There's an interesting thing to note about the character stats in this game, though. There are four stats: Attack, Guard, Speed and Point. The first three are obvious, but Point is a pool of extra stat points that can be assigned as you see fit at the start of every bout. All the fights are so easy that the stats don't really seem to matter very much at all, but it's a nice touch. It's an enjoyable mode, and when it came out, there probably wasn't really anything like it. It's kind of surprising that a game like this, that is, a longform action game that's totally accessible to the JP-illiterate doesn't seem to have any kind of fandom in the west already. You would have thought it would have been a hit as far back as the imports market in the 90s, especially when you get onto how it looks and sounds.

How does it look and sound? Well, it's obvious that the developers not only had a target audience in mind, but they knew exactly hoe to hook them. Everything about this game is aggressively designed to appeal to 1990s anime fans (or as they were known at the time it came out, just regular anime fans). The character designs, the stages, even the menus, all look like they could have been licensed from a hundred different OAVs of the time, with music that comes as close to the ideal as the SNES can muster, too. The sprites are a little smaller than most fighting games of the time, but the quality of the artwork is still generally of a very high standard and the whole game looks great.

I totally recommend trying out Battle Tycoon. It looks incredible, and though it's not a particularly sophisticated fighting game, it's still fun enough and the single player mode is, as mentioned, years ahead of its time. It really makes me want to splash out on a 6-button PC Engine controller and a copy of the first game, too, since that has things like full-screen pixel art cutscenes and CD quality music.

Vindex (Amiga)

This was going to be a post about a game entitled "Space Harrier: Return to the Fantasy Zone", which is one of those semi-official western sequels to Japanese games I talked about in my review of Dragon's Revenge. It's an especially obscure one, too, since as far as I can tell, it was only released in a compilation along with the original Space Harrier as well as a couple of other arcade ports. Unfortunately, it only had the option to play using the mouse, which was so fiddly and useless as to render the game completely unplayable. And that's not just my personal dislike of mouse controls in action games, Harrier really did just seem to jerkily zip around the screen at random. So instead, here's Vindex, another sprite scaling shooting game on the Amiga.

Vindex at least has functioning controls, which puts it a step above SH:RttFZ. Unfortunately, that's about all it has. Well, that's not fair, some of the backgrounds look okay in a minimalist sort of way. Only the backgrounds, though: your ship and the enemies look very generic and bland, with the final boss looking particularly like a very unimaginative child's drawing of a robot.

As lackluster as the graphics are, at least they're there, which is more than can be said for the music. It might just be because I associate sprite scaling games with SEGA and Taito, two companies who always put great soundtracks in their games, but Vindex's lack of music is really weird and jarring, and makes the game feel incredibly empty.

It doesn't play well, either: all the hitboxes seem to be huge, and every time you lose a life, you go back to the start of the current stage. It's an exercise in tedium, and completely devoid of fun or excitement. I even resorted to using a level select cheat just to take a few more varied screenshots (which is also how I saw the rubbish-looking final boss, who is also incredibly easy to kill, probably easier than any other part of the game). It probably goes without saying at this point, but Vindex is a game I definitely don't recommend. It's so tedious, in fact, that I had to look at the earlier paragraphs in this document to remind myself of its name. I don't like writing such overwhelmingly negative reviews, but sometimes there's just nothing positive to be said about a game.

Truck Kyousoukyoku - Ai to Kanashimi no Rodeo (PS2)

This game's title means "Truck Mad Dash Melody: Rodeo of Love and Sadness", and it can most easily be described as "Outrun in a truck", though it's also much more than that! Like Outrun, it is a linear against-the-clock racing games with branching paths (though the branches just lead to different routes through the same stages, not to completely different stages as in Outrun) there's also a little bit of Chase HQ in there, not to mention the different feel a truck has compared to a Ferrari, and on top of all that is this game's distinct style and theme.

The basic premise is that you pick one of four truckers and drive overnight to return home to your loved one. The journey takes place over five stages, the time limits for which are incredibly strict, and that's only the first part of this game's brutally steep learning curve. Not only are the time limits strict, but hitting other vehicles actually carries a time penalty! There's one exception to that rule, though: the evil trucker in his demonic truck who turns up once a stage. You actually get time back for ramming him! There's also branching paths, as I mentioned before, and interestingly, you get different time extensions depending on the route you take though a stage, and obviously, some routes are shorter or easier to get through than others, so over the course of several plays, you can eventually figure out the best way to go. And you will have to have several plays, it took me over an hour before I could get past the first stage without credit feeding!

There's also an "original mode" which has you going on longer, less exciting missions. For example, the first mission (and the only one I played) has you driving around town collecting fish, and at one point the evil trucker shows up to shoot bombs at you on a perilous winding mountain path. I came very close to finishing this first mission a few times, but the fact that a single attempt takes nearly five whole minutes combined with the generally lower level of excitement mean I quickly gave up on this mode. No great loss really, as the arcade mode is pretty compelling on its own, and original mode is just the standard "pad out the home release" type stuff.

Now, the most interesting thing about Truck Kyousoukyoku to me is the setting and general aesthetic. The most obvious part of all this is that all the trucks in the game are Dekotora, gigantic and luridly decorated trucks that have had their own subculture in Japan for decades. I think probably the place most people in the west will have seen them is in the background of Sodom's stage in Street Fighter Alpha 3? Another cool thing is that it's set in Japan during what appears to be the 1960s or 70s, by my reckoning, with dramatic character artwork and a soundtrack of sad-sounding romantic ballads to match. It's something that really makes the game stand out from the crowd (though to be honest, the crowd of games about driving trucks has never been very big, though it was probably at its biggest around the turn of the century when this came out).

So yeah, if you're interested in a checkpoint-based driving game with a different feel and a differrent style to it, and you're willing to climb a steep learning curve, then I definitely recommend Truck Kyousoukyoku. As an aside, TCRF notes that the game has a debug mode, that includes a model viewer for all the vehicles in the game, as well as one for all the stages, so videogame tourists who know how to use action replay codes and that kind of dark sorcery might also want to check it out.

Megatudo 2096 (Playstation)

The first thing I want to say about this game, before I actually say anything about the game itself, is that though there's no Japanese text ingame as far as I can tell, the title itself is somehow mistransliterated, judging by the voice on the title screen. That voice calls it "Megatude 2096", which is actually a worse title than the one written down, as it sounds like the dominant personality trait of a 90s platformer's main character.

Anyway, this is a 3D fighting game, in which all the characters are giant robots, rendered with glorious gouraud shading. It works especially well, too, as it makes them all look exactly like unpainted plastic model kits. The backgrounds are more traditionally textured, but they look pretty good, too. Despite all that, there's still something about Megatudo 2096 that just feels incredibly low budget, especially on the title screen and menus.

Another thing in its favour, though, is that it does try to do a few unique things mechanically: rather than just having normal, mundane side-stepping, the game takes advantage of the fact that its characters are robots with the "linear dash", which is essentially a very fast kind of strafing on rocket-powered roller skates. It's also an early example of a projectile-based fighting game, like the Psychic Force or Senko no Ronde series. It's still a bit primitive, though: for example, you don't automatically switch between projectile and melee attacks based on the distance between the two fighters, but instead there's the slightly clunky inclusion of a weapon change button. As far as I can tell, you'll never actually want to use you melee weapon anyway, since the best strategy in this game for beating any opponent is to just linear dash in circles around them while constantly shooting.

There's not really much more to say about it, though. It's a kind of cool-looking, kind of cheap-looking experimental fighting game that you might find interesting for half an hour or so. Maybe more if you play against a human opponent, which I haven't had the opportunity to do, though I'd be interested if it's more tactically interesting when you're not playing against a stupid AI. Another interesting fact is that there's one FAQ for this game on gameFAQs, and it was written in 1996! I always like finding games that have really old FAQs on there. Anyway, if you're curious, give it a shot, but if you don't you're not missing much. Play Psychic Force 2012 instead.

Death Wish 3 (C64)

In case you aren't aware, this isn't the third in a series of games entitled Death Wish, but is a licensed game based on the third in a series of movies by that name, in which Charles Bronson plays a kind of vengeful war diety named Paul Kersey. The third movie sees him descend upon a version of New York that looks more like Rossington, where he falls in love with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, then kill like a hundred people with a variety of guns and the assistance of other local pensioners.

Anyway, it's interesting because it's an incredibly early example of a popular 2010s genre: the open-world tidying game. That is, games in which you can freely roam about a huge map, and there are dots on the map representing things like bosses, minigames and so on that you're expected to tidy up. Obviously, the map isn't particularly big, and the dots only represent bosses (or rather, tactically significant enemies, since they're not any more difficult to kill than the regular enemies), but in principle it's the same. You play as Kersey, and you walk around New York, killing bad guys and avoiding the temptation to kill cops and old women (because doing so reduces your score significantly).

In the interests of simple, readable game design, there are actually only five kinds of people in Death Wish 3's portrayal of New York: cops, old women, criminals, large breasted women who occasionally stop to scratch their bums, and the mysterious guys who run in to clean all the corpses away. The last two types can't be killed, either. So you get points for killing criminals and lose them for killing old people and cops. There's also blinking dots on the map, usually inside buildings. These are the riot leaders, and you've got to get to them and kill them, which stops the current riot and gives you a couple of minutes of peace, quiet and boredom until the next one starts. You just do this until you either get killed by the criminals or you stop playing from boredom.

As already mentioned, it's an interesting concept to see in not only a game from over thirty years ago, but one that's also a throwaway movie license too. However, there's really only a few minutes of fun to be had, as once you've put down one riot, they don't get any harder or add new types of enemy or anything. Plus the way you navigate around the streets is really odd and took me a while to figure out: pressing up or down rotates your view by ninety degrees, and you really need to keep an eye on the map to be able to have a clue as to where you're going. I'd say give it a try, just for curiosity's sake, but don't expect to be glued to it, or to ever have the desire to return.

Silver Valley v1.00 (Master System)

I don't know what it is about the Master System, but for some reason, it seems to attract homebrew with really great production values. For example, a few years ago, there was an amazing port of the Bruce Lee game that was originally on various 8-bit microcomputers in the 1980s. Silver Valley continues that tradition, but this time, it's an all-new game! Just as a disclaimer, I'm assuming from the version number that this is probably the final version of the game, but I could be wrong.

It's a platformer that's clearly heavily inspired by the NES Castlevania games, with bits and pieces that suggest other influences too, such as Megaman, Ghouls and Ghosts, Wonderboy, and even the Switchblade games, which were kind of UK-developed attempts at creating Japanese-style console action games, but on the Amiga. It all feels as smooth as it looks, too: the controls are responsive and great, and you can jump, attack, and shuffle around on your knees. Technically and visually, this game can't be faulted: it's one of the best-looking games on the Master System, commercial or otherwise, and it all feels perfectly robust, too. AND there's even a little game-within-a-game in the form of a playable "Crapman" arcade cabinet,

There are a couple of little problems designwise, though. The enemies, for a start, almost all seem to be massive damage sponges, taking several hits to kill. There's also the lives system: you get one life (though you can take four hits before dying) and infinite continues. It might just be me, but it felt like this really cheapens things, with certain challenges like instant death spikes and almost unavoidable enemies appearing pretty close to the start of the game making it seem like the game wants you to use the continues, which I feel is a problem, because I just feel like using continues, especially when there's an infinite supply of them, drains all the joy out of any game. A change as simple as having three lives instead of just one would go a long way towards making this feel like a much more "complete" game.

I don't want to be too harsh on Silver Valley, because it's obviously a passion project for its creator, and it really is an admirable effort, too. But at the same time, I do have to be honest when I'm talking about a game, no matter what its source. I can only hope that if eruiz00 ever finds this review, they take it for the honest, constructive criticism it's intended to be, and that I hope they continue making games after they're done with Silver Valley, as it's clear they have a ton of talent. And everyone else reading this, I of course recommend you give the game a try, because despite its problems, it's still and impressive achievement.

Zusar Vasar (Dreamcast)

Zusar Vasar is the kind of game that just doesn't get made anymore: it's a racing game that isn't about driving either go-karts round theme park-looking tracks or realistic cars around realistic tracks. Instead, it's a futuristic (possibly post-apocalyptic) chariot racing game, in which the chariots are pulled by robotic animals of various kinds. And they race around a variety of locations: mountains, jungles, ruined cities, and so on.

The whole chariot deal isn't just a gimmick, either: it significantly affects how you drive around. The main controls have you steering with the analogue stick, and both triggers are accelerate, one assigned to each of your robots. The X button is also used for your boost, that takes a few seconds recharge after use. Obviously, the weight distribution of a chariot is different to a car or motorbike, too. Mainly, there's a joint between your "engine" and the back of your vehicle, which has no power of its own and just rocks about as it's pulled along. So those are the first few quirks to which you have to get used, but there's more.

The "more" comes in the form of the fact that there are three different kinds of race: one the ground, in the air, and in the water. And they all feel totally different. My recommendation is to play a few air races first, as they're the easiest way to get used to the whole "dual acceleration" thing, and getting a handle on that makes all the races a lot easier. The water races are a lot harder to get a handle on, though, as your craft sways and bobs around on the water and swings like crazy on corners. The ground races are somewhere in the middle, of course, and after you've played a few they're not much more difficult to get through than a normal arcade-style racing game.

As for structure, there's the obvious modes for single races, time trials and a season mode, plus there's the "single battle race" mode. When I saw this mode on the menu, I wondered why there wasn't any battle race season mode. Once I actually played it, the answer was obvious: this mode is an enjoyable, but somewhat unfair, little slice of organised anarchy. Before you start a race in this mode, you choose your animal and chariot, and you choose a normal and special weapon too. The normal weapon can be used as much as you like, and the special weapon has a cooldown time even shorter than your boost. The result is six chariots all trundling around, constantly shooting each other, there's explosions all over the place, and it's just generally anarchic. It's a ton of fun, but it'd be infuriating if you were actually trying to consistently win to try and progress through a season.

Zusar Vasar is a game I'd place alongside the likes of Speed Power Gunbike: it's a game that initially seems unforgiving to the point of being no fun at all. But like Speed Power Gunbike, play it a bit more, get used to it's idiosyncracies, and you'll be hurtling along and having a ton of fun. The Dreamcast is such a widely-loved and thoroughly talked-about console that there aren't many hidden gems on there that everyone doesn't know about, but I think Zusar Vasar can be considered one of them.

Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting (DS)

Hajime no Ippo is a comic about boxing that's been running (and continues to run) since 1989, and it's had a few videogame adaptations in that time, too, some of which got brought to the west (presumably after being de-Japanified) as the "Victorious Boxers" seres. Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting wasn't brought over, but there is a partial translation patch out there for it, and, to be honest, even without the patch it's probably pretty easy to figure out.

As you'd expect, it's a boxing game. There aren't really any special gimmicks or anything, just regular old punching. You do havce a super meter, but all it enables are really powerful punches, no special powers or anything. Some mention should be made of the controls: the default scheme is a touchscreen affair, that has you poking and swiping in a bunch of boxes on the bottom screen to do different punchs. Like most touchscreen gimmicks, it doesn't really work, and you'll quickly be using the pause menu to change to some proper button-based controls, which work much better, having left punches mapped to Y and B, right punches mapped to X and A and special punches performed by pressing both button for one hand.

Though I'm not a fan of the old cliche that handheld games are best when they're playable in short bursts (because I personally like to play long handheld games while watching TV), I have to say that Hajime no Ippo really excels at that sort of thing. Obviously, each bout is a few minutes long at the most, and the game saves automatically after each one. So even if you just played one fight everytime you sat on the toilet, you'd still be making a little progress each time. The fights themselves are enjoyable enough, too. It never feels like there's as much precision or as many options available to you as in a fighting game, but punching is very satisfying, and not only does the game never seem unfair, but there difficulty curve is smooth too, and your opponents not only get harder very gradually, but they also each seem to have their own fighting style and tactics.

Between fights, you can also participate in little touchscreen "training" minigames. Your trainer will tell you that these increase your stats, but I can't actually find any mention of these stats anywhere else, and I think he might be lying just to shoehorn in another touchscreen gimmick, as developers were wont to do on DS games, especially licensed ones. I still attempt one before every fight though, because what if he's not lying.

There's not much more I have to say about this game other than to describe the cool little touches there are, like how your face gets swollen as it receieves punches, which manifests-ingame as the edges of the screen getting slightly darker, and you can have your trainer put an icepack on it between rounds to lessen the swelling. Also between rounds is the only time you get to see your own face, and just how lumpy your opponent's made it, which is cool too. Anyway, I have to admit that I haven't played a lot of boxing games in my time, but this is probably my favourite of the ones I have played, and that includes Super Punch Out.

Micom Slayer (PC)

So, this is a free Japanese game, and if I forget to add the link here when I upload this post, please comment and remind me to (since I write posts as plain text documents well in advance of them actually being uploaded). Anyway, it's also a total love letter to the 8-bit microcomputers (or "micoms", if you will) of 1980s Japan, like the MSX, the Sharp MZ-700, the NEC PC88, and so on, as it's a semi-linear platform game about a girl on a quest to collect them all (plus a few slightly later 16-bit computers too).

There's twelve stages, two each for each area, and each area is based on a particular old computer, with graphics and sound to match (though your characters' sprites are always modern and hi-res. I don't have much experience with some of these computers, but to my eye, all these homages seemed spot on. I especially love the MZ-700 stages with their blocky text mode enemies and such, they're just really cute. I was even able to identify some game-specific homages, too, with a stage that looks just like Lode Runner, and bosses that harken back to the likes of Donkey Kong, and, oddly, Capcom's awesome arcade platformer Black Tiger.

Anyway, these stages are all huge and filled with treasure chests, which contain keys, food (for replenishing health, of course) and coins (if you have at least one hundred coins when a character dies, you can bring them back) or, very rarely, a computer. The computers don't do anything, other than their collection being your ultimate goal. Every stage has two of them somewhere, either hidden in a chest or hoarded away by the stage's boss, who can't be fought until you find the chest with that stage's boss key. Some bosses don't have computers, meaning that their stages must have both of them hidden in chests. What these bosses do give you is new characters.

There's six characters in total, and as well as acting as extra lives, they all have different abilities. The girl who's a clear homage to the Valis games is just generally better at jumping around and attacking than the default character, while the lizardman/troll guy and the stickman can break the large square rocks that block off certain parts of each stage and jump really high respectively. So yeah, there's a kind of backtracking exploratory element in there game, too. Fitting to the game's theme, it's more of a Maze of Galious situation rather than a Metroid or Symphony of the Night one.

There's not much more I can really say about Micom Slayer. It's a great little game that's both fun to play and super-charming, and it's free so I recommend you go and get it right now. The only problem I have is that for some reason, it didn't save my game. Though this is only a minor problem, and I'm sure I've probably set something up wrong while installing the game. If anyone figures out the solution to this problem, please let me know!

Brave Blade (Arcade)

I'll start by being honest here, and admit that the thing that drew me towards this game is the graphics. They're that amazing kind of 3D graphics that was prevalent among arcade fighting and racing games from the mid-90s up to about the turn of the century, but it's a rare example of a shooting game in that visual style. And it does it with flair, too, as Brave Blade is set in a great-looking medieval/world war I/giant robots world, with all kinds of cool stuff in it. The developers clearly knew what they were doing too, as the first stage is very short, and ends with a boss fight against a giant tank that transforms into a robot with an awesome animation, and that boss (and its transformation animation) appears prominently in the game's attract mode too.

So, the game itself? You pick one of five pilot/knights, each with different weaponry, and you shoot and slash your enemies, of course. You've got three buttons: shoot, which just shoots, slash/guard, which is your powerful melee attack when tapped and a guard when held, and your power up button, which activates your powered up mode, during which you're invincible and can only melee attack. Regulating all of this is a power bar at the bottom of the screen, which goes up when you destroy enemies (or certain kinds of enemy bullets and missiles that can be destroyed) and goes down when you guard. You can only activate your powered form when it's full, so I recommend never bothering to use the guard (though I'm sure there's probably expert players somewhere who'd tell you I'm incredibly wrong and stupid, I can't see the advantage of it).

The scoring system is centered around the collection of Battle Garegga-esque medals, which at the most basic level, work in the same way as Battle Garegga's: their value starts at 100 and gradually works its way into the tens and even hundreds of thousands, though if you let one drop off the bottom of the screen, it's back down to 100 points a pop. The twist Brave Blade adds is that you can accelerate the accumulation of value in medals by repeatedly attacking them with your melee weapon, which also makes them bounce up the screen a bit, giving you a little more time to collect them too. Of course, if you're doing this, that'll take your concentration away from fighting the enemies and dodging their attacks, so there's a lot of risk/reward play going on. Personally, I'm a bit cowardly, so I only juggle the medals while I'm powered up.

Brave Blade is an excellent game all round. It plays great, with a bunch of fun systems that all interlock together well, and it looks amazing too. I definitely recommend playing it. It's just a shame that it'll probably never get any kind of home port like some other, more well-known shooting games have been getting in recent years.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 60: The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero

Like the last PS2 game I covered, Seigi no Mikata, The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero is a game that's heavily themed around the genre of Japanese superhero TV shows (though you could probably guess that from the title). Being a Simple 2000 game, however, it eschews the strange meta "living in a tv show world" approach of Seigi no Mikata, and takes the more obvious path of being a beat em up in which you fight a bunch of goons before a monstruous boss.

The tokusatsu flavour is still pretty strong, though. Even though the plot is all in Japanese, it's still easy enough to follow and all the classic cliches of the genre are there: the scientist who gave you your powers watches over you, there's generic footsoldier enemies, along with cheesy-looking monsters, and above the monsters, there's occasional fights against higher-ranking, re-occuring enemies, too. In fact, one of those re-ooccuring enemies, named Yabaider is a direct homage to the character Hakaider, who first appeared as a villain in the 1972 TV series Android Kikaider, and even had his own spinoff movie in 1995 entitled Mechanical Violator Hakaider. Interestingly, as it is a budget game, it takes something of a tokusatsu-style approach to cutting costs, too: the same few locations are reused over and over, there's a lot of padding out by having you fight off increasingly large groups of identical footsoldiers, and none of the battles are particularly grand or spectacular.

These cost-cutting measures unfortunately result in a game that is incredibly repetitive, though. Every stage plays the same, and the first half in which you fight the generic enemies gets longer and more labourious each time as they come in bigger numbers and with more HP each time. The bosses also have far too much HP, as once you've learned their patterns, you're left avoiding them and very gradually chipping away at their life bars for several minutes. Of course, maybe if I could read the unlock conditions for more weapons and moves, maybe it would all have been a lot more fast paced, so the Japanese-literate among you might have a better time (though obviously, I can't promise anything. maybe all the unlockables are rubbish).

You can pick a male or female base, and can choose various costume parts, with more being unlocked as you play, along with more attacks and weapons. At first, I thought there was an Earth Defence Force type situation going on, whereby items are unlocked at random when you finish a stage, but on closer inspection, it appears that each item has a specific unlock condition to be met. This is actually the one place where the language barrier was a problem, as the unlocks started to dry up a few stages in, and I couldn't figure out how to force more of them. It's only a small problem though, as early on, I unlocked a laser pistol and a kind of jumping splits kick, which are both incredibly effective at taking down both footsoldiers and bosses alike.

On the subject of the language barrier, it should also be noted that there are rumours of a European release of this game, from 505 Gamestreet, under the title "Power Fighters". However, though it's appeared on various release lists and so on, I've never seen a copy for sale online or off, nor have I seen any screenshots or footage, and no disc image has ever been ripped and uploaded to the internet as far as I'm aware, either. So I suspect that Power Fighters either doesn't exist at all, or if it does, only on some long-forgotten hard drive in Italy somewhere. Of course, if I'm wrong and it did actually get released, and you can prove it, please let me know.

In summary, The Tokusatsu Henshin Hero is almost an archetypal Simple Series game: it's cheap and repetitive, but also very charming and obviously made with love. It's best played in short bursts of one or two stages at a time, it would definitely be agonising to endure for longer sessions.