Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird GB (Game Boy)

So, I was attracted to this game due to it being a vertically-scrolling shooting game on the Game Boy, which is pretty unusual. The Game Boy does have some surprisingly great shooters, of course, but they tend to scroll horizontally, like Nemesis II, for example. It's also interesting because instead of a ship flying up the screen, you're piloting a giant robot, walking up the screen.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do a very good job of representing vertical shooting games on the Game Boy, on account of it being rubbish. The problem is not just that it's easy, but it's also boring. You trudge up the stages, easily killing the occasional enemies (that mostly don't even really look like anything besides abstract shapes). You can take eight hits before getting a game over, but after you've taken one or two, you can rely on a nice convenient power-up to come along and restore you back to full health.

As a result, I completed Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird the first time I played it. Then I completed it again to take screenshots for this review. The thing is, before you start playing, there's a character select screen, with two characters to pick from, and the title "select your level". Whichever you pick, there doesn't appear to be no difference at all, either in the character you're controlling or in the difficulty of the stages. Mysterious. Either way, the game's about ten minutes long, and they aren't even ten particularly exciting minutes.

I don't recommend wasting any time on this game, unless you really need to play every Game Boy shooting game, or if you're completely obsessed with the anime on which its based and need to experience everything to do with it. Otherwise, don't bother.

L'Aigle de Guerre (GBA)

The Game Boy Advance being a big step up in power from the handhelds that had preceded it meant there were various attempts at genres that were previously impossible on handhelds. Like how there are a whole bunch of GBA first person shooters, for example (I know the original Game Boy had Faceball 2000, but that's a far cry from a port of Doom). L'Aigle de Guerre is an attempt at squeezing a real time strategy game onto portable hardware,and a fairly successful one at that.

Well, it's successful at being an enjoyable game, at least. I suspect that fans of super fast-paced multitasking PC real time strategy games will probably be left a little cold. It is a lot slower paced, which is at least partially down to the fact that instead of a cursor, you control Napoleon, as you ride around the battlefield, telling your soldiers where they should go in person. Other than that, the game mostly focusses on capturing bases by sending infantrymen, the weakest units into them.

Infantrymen are the weakest, but you need to send four into an enemy base (or a neutral city) to capture it, cavalry are faster and more powerful, and artillery are the most powerful, but they move very very slowly. On some stages, you'll also get various kinds of boats, but they're pretty much just nautical versions of your land units. Like I said, most stages will have a main enemy base to capture, but some of them are boss fights, like a giant monster troll thing, or Horatio Nelson surrounded by giant cannons and endlessly respawning soldiers.

The plot is something that's definitely worth talking about in this case, as all of the characters seem to be people who actually existed, with the main villain being the strangest of all: wax museum proprietress Marie Tussaud, depicted ingame as being an evil monster-summoning witch who wants to take over the world. Only Napoleon and his plucky band of French military commanders can stop her!

L'Aigle de Guerre is a pretty fun game, and I definitely recommend that you give it a try. Like I said earlier, though, don't go in expecting something like Starcraft or even Command and Conquer. It's its own thing!