The Pirates of Dark Water (SNES)

 

The Pirates of Dark Water is a cartoon from 1991 that I've never really cared for. The plot is a kind of thinly-veiled environmental-type thing, where a fantasy world is being slowly devoured by a substance called Dark Water, so some pirates set out to find some magic treasures to stop it. Well, the Dark Water part sounds like a metaphor for pollution, anyway, though the magic treasures part doesn't really fit. But anyway, the low regard I have for the show itself won't marr my opinion of this videogame adaptation, as it actually forms the basis of its greatest strength!

 

Mechanically speaking, this isn't a game with a lot of originality. The only thing it really adds to the generic beat em up formula is a strong attack button that you can use on its own, or at any point during your regular attack chain. (Wikipedia claims that there's lso a block button, though? I must have missed that.) It's not a bad game, but it's not a particularly remarkable one, either. It's obviously very heavily influenced by Capcom's arcade beat em ups, almost as much as Crest of Wolf was. It's still a decent game that's worth your time, though.

 

Why? Entirely for aesthetic reasons. Pirates of Dark Water is a game that manages to stand out from the pack just by having a different setting. If you haven't ever seen the source material, it's got a kind of Spelljammer-meets-Arabian Nights kind of look to it, that works great for a beat em up, offering various kinds of exotic locales, both inhabited and wild. It's also been rendered with a lot of skill, with really charming backgrounds and sprites, and great colour palletes. It all works together to give a feel of swashbuckling adventure as you beat up and chuck about all the enemy pirates. It might seem weird for me to say all this after earlier saying that I didn't care for the cartoon itself, but what can I say? The first time I loaded the game up, I was playing through the first stage, fighting guys in front of a sunset, while off in the distance, more enemies could be seen flying around on dragonback, and I just thought "this is really cool!"

 

Before I end the review, there's a few other things I want to mention regarding the game. First, there's an enemy that starts to appear a few stages in called the Mutarios, which is a little pug-looking monster thing that's hard to hit and continuously runs back and forth knocking you over. I hate it. Secondly, pretty late in the game, there's suddenly a bossfight that takes the form of a little shooting stage, putting you on the back of a dragon, like those guys in the background of the first stage. Unfortunately, it's not very good, mainly because the boss itself spends lots of time flying into the background or offscreen, leaving you sat twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to come back for agonisingly long seconds at a time. Also, for some reason, you don't score points for attacking or killing this boss. Weird.

 

Earlier, I compared Pirates of Dark Water to Crest of Wolf, in the respect that they're both games that borrow a lot from Capcom's various arcade beat em ups, and going back to read my 2017 review of that game, I think I can say the same thing about this one that I did about that one: that it's an okay game elevated by its interesting setting and theming. Unlike Crest of Wolf though, Pirates of Dark Water is very rare and fetches ludicrous prices for legitimate copies online. I definitely don't recommend paying hundreds of pounds for a copy of it, but if you love beat em ups, you should still find some way of playing it.

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.