Ninja Savior (MSX)

The first thing you notice about Ninja Savior, and the first thing I'll tell you about it, is that despite being made in Europe in 2015, it manages to look, sound, and feel like a Japanese MSX game from the mid-1980s with incredible authenticity. Considering how fake a lot of similar endeavors end up feeling, I think this is something worth mentioning and applauding. So well done on that front, Revelo! But authenticity aside, is the game actually good?

The answer is a resounding "yeah it's alright I guess". It's a very simple game in which you play as a ninja, jumping from one tower to the the other, while trying to exorcise a series of demons. You do this by collecting the talismans and scrolls hanging in the air between the two towers. At the same time, there'll be one or two smaller demons in the gap too, who hurt you if you touch them. Every time you jump, the talismans, scrolls and lesser demons change position.

 Your jumping arc is always the same, and when you're not jumping, you're sliding down the tower. So it's an action game controlled with one button and no directions, based entirely around timing. Also of note is that rather than a traiditonal health bar there's a kind of momentum bar with an X at one end, an O at the other, and a square moving along it. When you collect a talisman or scroll, it moves towards the O. When you land after a jump or when you hit a lesser demon, it moves towards the X. If it reaches the X, you lose a life, if it reaches the O, you go to the next stage. And that's pretty much all there is to know about this game.

Ninja Savior's a game that's very OK. It's not bad and the one-button controls and momentum meter are interesting, but it's not particularly exciting, and it's way too easy. Maybe if later stages had moving enemies or something that would have spiced things up a bit? Anyway, it wouldn't hurt to give the game a try, but it won't change your life either.

Spikers Battle (Arcade)

The Dreamcast, despite being, in most respects, an incredible machine for people who wanted to bring the arcade home, had only two beat em ups released for it (as far as I can remember, at least). And one of them was Soul Fighter. The strange thing about this is that SEGA had a series of beat em ups in arcades at around that time, the Spikeout series, and two of them even ran on Naomi hardware: the fantasy-themed Slashout, and this one, Spikers Battle. They would have made great additions to the DC library, but I guess it's all just more evidence of SEGA being the Paul Heyman of the videogames world: unmatched in terms of creativity and talent, completely terrible when it comes to making money.

Anyway, Spikers Battle is a strange case, in that it's a beat em up that thinks its a fighting game. It controls like a beat em up, has weapons strewn about the place like a beat em up, and most of the stages see you fighting a boss and some goons, like a beat em up. If you were to compare it to any other game, the most apt would probably be the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun/Renegade, with its small stages and gang warfare setting. But on top of all of this, it has a strange fighting-game rounds system in place of lives, whereby to advance past a stage, you have to finish it twice, and to get a game over, you have to fail the same stage twice.

I haven't been able to find any information on how multiplayer modes work, but I'll assume it's like the other Spikeout games, and has multiple cabinets linked together, so maybe the rounds thing makes more sense in that context? Anyway, it's pretty much the only problem I have with this game, and it's not a big one. It's fun to play, looks really cool, everything's fine except for that one thing.

Obviously, if you're brave enough to tangle with Naomi emulation, or rich enough to tangle with Naomi ownership, Spikers Battle is one of the games I recommend you look into. It's a lot less brutal in terms of difficulty than some of its stablemates, too (I'm mainly talking about Slashout here, which is a very difficult game).