Mick and Mack as the Global Gladiators (Mega Drive)

 

If you went back in time a couple of decades, the level of fame enjoyed by the two McDonalds licensed Mega Drive games was pretty much the exact opposite: Global Gladiators was pretty well-known, and has a lot of advertising in magazines around the time of its release, while McDonalds Treasureland Adventure was a much smaller release, that I didn't even know got released outside Japan until fairly recently. But with the Treasure-mania that followed in the wake of Ikaruga in the early 2000s, their game got a lot more attention, and Global Gladiators got forgotten among all the other licensed platformers from the 90s.

 

I actually had Global Gladiators as a kid, and even I had mostly forgotten it (other than the surprisingly good music, which is a far cry from the usual farty rubbish you usually see in American-developed Mega Drive games) until I recently decided to load it up on a whim. The thing is, this is a game that doesn't deserve to be forgotten! It's actually a fast-paced and exciting platform shooter, which sees you playing as one of the eponymous  Gladiators (actually just two kids with super soakers full of brown slime), and shooting monsters in various locales.

 

There's lots of cool little touches that just add to the quality of the game, like how your character's walking/running speed not only builds up as you go in one direrction, but the acceleration rate is affected by going up or down hills, too. Just like Sonic! Your weapon has infinite ammo and shoots as fast as you can hit the fire button, but you still have to pay attention to what you're doing, as the recoil knocks you back just a tiny bit per shot, and can have unattentive players falling to their doom. Another quirk is that there's no bosses: every stage just ends with Ronald McDonald waving a flag.

 

The game's got an overall theme of environmentalism, even having a bonus stage themed around picking up pieces of rubbish and putting them in the right recycling bins. This theming comes trough in some stages better than others. The first stage, for example, is a great subversion of the usual Green Hill Zone knock-off so often used to open platform games: there's lots of green all over the place, but it's actually toxic slime, rather than grass or leaves! And the monsters in that stage fit the theme too, being various kinds of gooey slime monsters. Then that's followed up with an actual forest stage, looking like the Pacific Northwest, and seeing you shooting beavers, fish, and plant monsters. It's obviously not a game-ruining problem, but it is a mildly annoying bit of ludonarrative dissonance.

 

Global Gladiators is definitely a game that deserves a bit more recognition as being a high-quality platform shooter, albeit one with a somewhat strange and ill-fitting license attached to it. If you haven't played it, or if you played it long ago, I recommend giving it a look.

Drive Girls (PS Vita)

 Drive Girls is a game that had been on my Vita wishlist for a long time, and when you look at it on paper, it's not hard to see why: a beat em up developed by Tamsoft, with a weird gimmick? Of course I'm going to be interested! (The weird gimmick being that the playable characters are girls who can transform into cars.) Unfortunately, I recently got ahold of it, and it's a big disappointment.

 

The main problem can be boiled down to the fact that although the Simple series was dead by the time Drive Girls came out, it still displays in abundance the worst excesses of that budget range, despite being sold as a full price title. There's a lot of recycling: the enemies are various kinds of generic giant slightly robotic-looking bugs, with only a few models being repeated in different sizes and colours. Even more egregious is the fact that while the first two stages take place in different locations, stages two to six all take place in the same location!

 

But anyway, the transformation gimmick. For the first few stages, it's a lot of fun! You beat up the enemies, and when a new batch appears in the distance, you transform and drive towards, then into them, as a cool little opening gambit. You'll soon learn that the safest and most effective way of dealing with enemies is to transform and drift around in circles, doing big damages to any bugs that get in your way. Even this gets taken away from the player, though. After about five or six stages, rows and rows of landmines start appearing. The landmines do a ton of damage to you, but they're only set off if you go over them in car mode. So, in lieu of giving the enemies themselves an effective defence against your drifting, the game essentially punishes you for trying to use what is not only its main gimmick, but the most fun and effective way of playing. 

 

As well as the regular beat em up stages, there's some stages where you race another cargirl around a track. These are surprisingly straight-laced and down-to-earth. The only real deviation from a normal racing game in these stages is that you have a boost that's charged by driving through the small groups of enemies dotted around the tracks. It's okay, but nothing special, and very very easy once you've figured out that running over bugs charges your boost.

 

This game was a big disappointment. Tamsoft are one of my favourite D-list developers, but I guess Drive Girls really proves that they are still D-list nonetheless. Go and play one of the Oneechanbara games instead, and don't waste any time on this one.