Generations Lost (Mega Drive)

 You could say that Generations Lost is a game with a lot of ambition. Or, if you were less generous, you could say it's a game that's surprisingly pretentious for a mid-nineties platformer. In terms of how it plays, it lies somewhere between a traditional action platformer, and the very precise cinematic platformers like Another World or Flashback. It's also got a plot that feels like it must be licensed from a movie or comic, even though it's not, as you play a guy on what appears to be a post-apocalyptic earth, where sciences and technology are considered to be mystical artefacts by the now-primitive inhabitants, and you see things like people bowing in worship to walls of monitors, and so on.

 

According to Wikipedia, the game was originally meant to have a totally different plot and an X-Men license, which seems a little odd to me for one reason. Your character is equipped with a futuristic bracelet gizmo, that shoots out a grappling energy beam, which is mainly used for grabbing onto platforms directly above you, though it's occasionally used for swinging, too. The thing is, the sprites for when your guy is hanging or swinging from the grapple beam look a lot like poses Spider-Man would take in similar situations, a lot more than they do any member of the X-Men.

 

Anyway, you navigate through the stages, there's enemies to punch, switches to punch, and sometimes devices to interact with using your science bracelet. That last thing is mostly just a slightly differently-flavoured version of hitting switches, but it does look cool. The stages themselves also look cool, especially the first two. They're full of detail, and the whole aesthetic is a combination of overgrown jungle and ancient ruins, but with parts where bits of technology and loose cables are exposed. Unfortunately, the latter half of the game takes place in locales that are pure technology, which while competently drawn, isn't as interesting to look at. 

 

The big problem the game has is the difficulty. Or rather, it's not that it's difficult, it's more that it's unfair. There's lots of Rick Dangerous-style situations where traps aren't visible until you trigger them, whether it's because they're hidden in the scenery, or because they're at the bottom of one of the many leaps of faith the game requires you to take. Even when you've learned where the traps are and how to avoid them, and despite your guy being able to take a few hits before losing a life, it often does feel like the game was designed with near-perfect play in mind: there's only a few stages, but they're big and long, and healing points are few and far between. I guess that goes along with the "cinematic platformer" thing, though: you're kind of an actor in the story and you're expected to get all your stunts right, maybe?

 

There's a fair few positive things to say about Generations Lost. The developers clearly weren't content with churning out a generic platformer, and they seem to have had some aspirations towards making a game that was really special. It also looks excellent, like I already mentioned. Unfortunately, it's not much fun to play, and that's really the most important thing, isn't it? I think the best recommendation I can give to this game is to go and watch a video of someone else playing through it, just to see the great backgrounds of the first couple of stages.

Suho Jeonsa (Master System)

 Pretty much every block-breaking game that's less than thirty-five years old has some kind of special gimmick. Looking at the two games I consider to be the best of the genre, Prism Land Story has its crazy stacking power-ups, and Puchi Charat has the competitive element and the general application of (a modified version of) the Puzzle Bobble 2 rules, for example. Suho Jeonsa (also known as Suho Cheonsa and Power Brick)'s got a few ideas up its sleeve, and it somehow manages to have a similar structure to a more well-known game from a few years later.

 

Bascially, the stages in Suho Jeonsa are split into to halves: the first half has you breaking bricks in the time-worn manner (though for some reason, instead of being at the bottom of the screen, you're on the left side f it?), though the aim isn't to break every block, but to break one specific double-sized block in the centre of the screen. Every block, centre or otherwise, takes two hits to break, which is annoying, but they did at least put a little bit of charm into this element. Every stage has a theme, like animals, or cakes, or whatever. There's even an emoji stage, which is surprising in a game from 1994! But anyway, the first time you hit a block, it changes somehow, in keeping with the theme, like the animal blocks fall over, with their feet pointing at the camera, tubes of paint get squeezed out, and so on.

 

The second half of each stage has you fighting a boss, which will appear in the form of a big weird thing (still sticking to the theme of the stage, though), that randomly hovers around the screen, occasionally shooting an instant death shot. You kill the bosses just by hitting them with the ball a bunch of times, and they don't really ever get any harder. Their presence does make Suho Jeonsa kind of feel like a weird primitive version of Psikyo's 2001 arcade game Gunbarich. While the bosses never get harder, the actual stages do, though in an annoying, unfair-feeling way: they gradually start with rows of blocks closer and closer to the left edge of the screen, giving you a smaller and smaller amount of space to work with.

 

There's not much else to say about Suho Jeonsa, except maybe that the aforementioned "Power Brick" version was released only in Australia as part of a four-in-one cartridge, that contained three other Korean-developed games. But Suho Jeonsa was the first version of the game I found, and there's no text in there anyoway, other than the intro, so I stuck with it. As for whether the game is worth playing, eh, it's okay. I wouldn't pay big money for it (being a decades-old unlicensed cartridge, I'm assuming it's probably at least fairly rare, in any of its forms), but it's a decent enough block-breaking game, on a system that doesn't have many, so it's worth a look via emulation if you're curious.