Commando Steel Disaster (DS)

 Okay, so you might notice that all of the screenshots for this reciew are of the game's first stage, and usually, I wouldn't review a game if that's all I could see of it, but this is a special case. Most of my time playing this game was the DSiWare version which I have on my n3DS. I don't have any way of taking screenshots of DSiWare games, though, but I knew the game was released as a regular DS cartridge, so I played that too, for screenshotting purposes. It turns out, the two versions aren't the same!

 

The basic core of the game is the same, of course: it's a pretty decent Metal Slug clone. You go through stages, shooting lots of guys, and occasionally robots and tanks and helicopters. There's a whole bunch of temporary power-up weapons, destructible parts of the stages with hidden items, and most other Metal Slug things. Except that vehicles only appear in special seperate substages, not as thing you can just climb aboard in the regular stages. It's pretty good. Obviously nowhere near as good as the first few Metal Slugs, but maybe in the same league as the later entries.

 

The differences between the two versions are all related to difficulty. The stages in the cartridge version are a lot longer, to the extent that entire sections are removed from the digital version. Of course, I've only seen the first stage of the cartridge version, but the first stage is made up of three sections: one on a jetbike in a forest, one outside in the snow, and another inside an underground military base. The digital version of the first stage, meanwhile, and the indoors section is slightly truncated, as well as the larger gatekeeper enemies having significantly less HP. The enemies in the digital version generally have less HP, and they inflict less damage on the player, too.

 

Which one is better? To be honest, there's no perfect version. The cartridge version is a bit of a chore: I could definitely overlook the difficulty if the stages were shorter, and the bigger enemies didn't feel like such bullet sponges, and while I definitely prefer the digital version's faster pace, it also feels like there's no challenge at all, and most of the times I've played it, I've actually gotten bored and stopped playing the game long before I came close to dying. 

 

So I guess the only conclusion is that Commando: Steel Disaster is a game with two different versions on the same platform, both of which are terribly flawed, in almost completely opposite ways. Just play Metal Slug X instead, is the best advice I can give here.

Pocket Pro Wrestling - Perfect Wrestler (Game Boy Color)

 Its strange that though handheld consoles in the nineties were often treated as lesser systems aimed at kids, and filled with licensed games of wildly varying quality, wrestling games were relatively rare compared to home consoles. In fact, GameFAQs only lists six wrestling games for the Game Boy Color, and one of them is WWF Betrayal, which isn't even a wrestling game, it's a beat em up starring wrestlers. 

 

Pocket Pro Wrestling is the only one of the six that isn't a licensed tie in to a promotion that now belongs to WWE, so there's no tie-ins to Japanese promotions, nor are there any Fire Pro games. But that's okay, since the wrestlers in this game are all thinly-disguised stand-ins for wrestlers popular in Japan in the nineties, and it plays kind of like a Fire Pro game. Like in Fire Pro, you perform moves by pressing a button at the exact right frame in the lockup animation that occurs when the wrestlers walk into each other.

 

There's a few differences to Fire Pro, but they don't do much to make Pocket Pro stand apart. The most obvious is that the ring is shown as a regular square instead of a diagonal one, and that doesn't really affect game at all. The next most obvious change is one that actually kind of harms the game: there's only one button for moves, as opposed to at least two, sometimes three, in the Fire Pro games. I guess this is linked to the fect that there aren't actually many moves in the game overall, with each wrestler having six main standing throws from a pool of maybe ten or so? 

 

Another thing there's a conspicuous lack of is match types, as there's actually only one: singles match. There are a few modes: there's a championship mode where you fight every other wrestler, and can continue or use passwords to pick up where you left off if you lose, a survival mode, which is the same but without continues or passwords, and a King of Fighters-style team battle mode, where two teams of three wrestlers fight one at a time. I think I'm being a little too harsh on a low budget Game Boy Color game, but when a game is so similar to an already-existing series of games, it's hard not to compare them, and to point out the ways in which the imitator falls short.

 

But, in its historical context, Pocket Pro Wrestling actually comes off a lot better. While the modern player in search of handheld wrestling fun would just put the Playstation's Fire Pro Wrestling G on their emulation device of choice, that wasn't an option in 2000, when this game was released, and there wouldn't be an actual handheld Fire Pro until the following year, on the GBA. So, at the time of its release, Pocket Pro Wrestling was actually the best handheld wrestling game money could buy (as far as I can tell, at least). So while there's not much reason to play it now, besides historical curiosity, at the time, it would've been a great game to get your hands on. Shame it was never released outside Japan, really.

Other Stuff Monthly #19!

 Around the turn of the century, there was a sudden boom in English translated manga. Fuelled partially by the popularity of various dubbed anime series that were being shown on TV in the UK and US, and partially by a company called Tokyopop pumping out tons and tons of low-priced volumes of series in every genre, it was a time that saw translated manga go from being a niche part of the English comics to the biggest part of it by a long way. Alongside the cheap volumes, there was also a mini-boom of Japan-style manga anthology magazines.

 

It's a shame that there aren't any of these magazines left today, because they were a really nice format, and each magazine had its own identity formed from the kinds of series they'd print, along with the general aesthetic and house style. My favourites were Pulp, which printed a lot of gritty and slightly artsy comics aimed at adults, and Raijin Comics, which stuck most closely to the visual style of Japanese magazines, and had a strange mix of series from well-known creators and stuff by people who'd never been printed in English before. But today, I'm going to talk about a short-lived magazine that I only discovered a few years ago, and seemed to last only a year or two circa 1999-2000: Chibi-Pop Manga.

 

As far as I can tell, this magazine was published by an American comic shop owner, and he took on a business model that I've actually wondered about many times: licensing works from up-and-coming, lesser-known creators, and translating it as cheaply as possible. The most amazing bit of cost-cutting is the way in which one of the series is printed: four shrunken manga pages on each magazine page, fitting a fifteen-page story into five! As well as the manga, the issue I have (vol. 2 #3) also has an error-laden article on the 1999 Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, and a few pages of cosplay photos, presumably from the same event. Unfortunately, the cosplay photos are printed in black and white and the contrast is terrible, so you can barely see anything in them.

 

So, you're probably wondering by now what series were printed in here, right? Here's the list:
The Twilight Files (Fujiwara & Atsu) - A Twilight Zone-esque weird tales anthology type series, hosted by a nameless person who's been interergrated into an information-gathering computer who tells us in this chapter, two stories of scientists experimenting on humans to try and cheat death.
Nagi: Coastguard 2 (Denjiro) - Appears to be a post-apocalyptic action series? There's a girl with metal manipulation powers fighting a giant robot in a ruined city, at least. There's only a few pages of this, and i'd like to see more.
Artifacts Breaker (Ataru Cagiva) - A shonen action series about marital artists with unique special powers, which I think are the result of human experimentation? Like Nagi, the small taste I have here makes me curious to read more.
Fubuki The Female Ninja (Tsugumi) - A very nineties action comedy about a ninja going to a modern day high school.
Adventures of Tokyo Kid (Tetsu Suzuki) - I have no idea what this is about. Most of the chapter is taken up by a young man and a young woman speaking in his apartment, where he reveals himself to be an inventor.
Trout Burger (Syuntaro Masuki) - This is the series printed in the weird shrunken format, and it's a silly comedy where a fast food restaurant employee foils a pair of bank robbers using a can of disgusting vegetable juice and a giant anti-tank cannon.

 

I admire the amateur enthusiast charm that Chibi-Pop Manga exudes, both in the production of the magazine itself, and in the series printed within, and as mentioned, I am genuinely curious about several of them, and I'd like to see more. Unfortunately, I can find almost no information on the series or the creators. Ataru Cagiva is an exception, and seems to have done a few manga adaptations of videogame RPGs. Tsugumi is the other exception, their full name being Nishino Tsugumi, and their most notable work being a single volume story called Hanamaru Angels, which I think was self-published, and even more interestingly, was a bilingual release! I actually managed to track a copy of Hanamaru Angels down, so I'll review it here at some point in the future.

 

So yeah, that's Chibi-Pop Manga: a clear labour of love for all concerned that unfortunately seems to have been totally forgotten. I enjoyed it, though, and if anyone can offer more information on any of the series listed in this post, please contact me! Also, I apologise for the phone photos, but my ancient scanner has no drivers for Windows 10. Forced Absolecence!

Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.

Ma Cheon Ru (Arcade)

 You're all familiar with Shanghai, right? The game about picking up pairs of Mahjong tiles out of a big pile in the right order? Ma Cheon Ru is based on a kind of variant of that. I can't find a name for this variant, though I think the most well-known games to feature it are the Dragon World series by IGS. 

 

How it works is that like in Shanghai, there is a specially-arranged pile of Mahjong tiles and you have to pick up all the tiles, with restrictions on which tiles can be picked up. Also like in Shanghai, the main restiction is that you can only pick up tiles that aren't covered by other tiles, and which have at least one of their horizontal sides untouched by other tiles, too. You aren't trying to match pairs to remove them from the game, though.

 

It's a pretty simple concept, but it's one that's kind of hard to explain in words. You have to match trios of identical tiles, but you don't have to pick them up together. Instead, you can hold up to six tiles in your hand (picking up a seventh that isn't the third tile of a set results in a game over), and tiles vanish from your hand when you've made a set of three. Get rid of all the tiles in the time limit and you finish the stage and go onto the next one. It's a genre I've only seen in arcade games, and pretty much all of them ramp up the difficulty very very quickly.

 

What makes Ma Cheon Ru stand out though, is the bonus stages (if you play it after reading this, I recommend going into the settings in MAME and setting it so they appear after every stage instead of after every third stage). There's nine different bonus stages that take the form of Tanto R-style minigames, with a wide variety of subject matter, like shooting parachutists, repeatedly punching a guy in the face, throwing objects at ugly people, and so on. They break things up pretty well, and you can get power ups for the main game if you score enough points in them. 

 

In fact, it seems like a lot more care and attention went into the bonus stages than the main game itself, and I wonder if the devs actually wanted to make a minigame compilation, but their publishers said that they needed to make a tile-matching puzzle game instead? We'll probably never know. Either way, I don't think this little subgenre is actually as fun as regular old vanilla Shanghai, but if you're going to play one of these games, Ma Cheon Ru at least has some mildly amusing bonus stages in its favour.

Super Bikkuriman (SNES)

 A few years ago, I reviewed a platform game for the Game Boy based on this same property, and it wasn't great. But because the character designs are interesting enough to capture my interest, and because old licensed fighting games are also interesting to me, I decided to look at this SNES adaptation. Unfortunately, it's even worse. A lot worse.

 

In single player, it takes the old pre-Street Fighter II approach of having only two playable characters facing off against a bunch of CPU opponents in a set order, though all the characters can be played in versus mode. It's also like a pre-Street Fighter II game in that you don't get any special moves. All you get is punch and kick, a slightly stronger punch and kick executed by pressing forward at the same time as the button, and a flying kick that only works sometimes. I have no problem with simple fighting, I've recently been getting obsessed with Psikyo's arcade-only martial arts fighting game Battle K-Road, which doesn't have much in the way of moves, and half its roster are headswaps of the other half, but this is an incredibly barren effort.

 

It doesn't even look good! In still screenshots, it looks like it might have fit in among fanmade X68000 games from a couple of years earlier, while in motion, it looks even worse! The characters have barely animation, and when you look at other games coming out on the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993, it stands out even more. It's a shame, since, like the Game Boy Super Bikkuriman game, the box and label art are pretty nice, and probably suckered in some unfortunate victims back when these games were first released.

 

As I played this game more, and as I was thinking about writing this review, it gradually dawned upon me the best possible way of describing it succinctly: it's anime Rise of the Robots. The terrible animation, the lack of playable characters, and the complete absence of any fun or excitement, but this time you've got knights with very long hair fighting various monsters, instead of a blue ugly robot fighting different coloured ugly robots. Just like Rise of the Robots, though, Super Bikkuriman is a game that's not worth playing at all. It's not even bad in a funny way, it's just boring.

The Shutokou Racing (Game Boy Color)

 I think I've mentioned this before, but I really like the simple top down racing games that have SEGA's Monaco GP as their patient zero. Zippy Race, Rally Bike, Mad Gear, that kind of thing. It was very much a genre of the eighties, though, and 1998 seems like a very late time to be releasing one, even on the Game Boy Color. This is only conjecture, but I feel like The Shutokou Racing was probably a passion project by someone who was themselves a fan of the genre, and wondered to themselves how it might be modified, and made into a longer, more "console-like" experience.

 

I'm sure that last sentence has struck dread into the hearts of some readers, and I have to say your suspicions are correct: this game is a grinding festival. Basically, there are four races, and the place in which you finish one race is your starting position in the next race. You've got a number of lives that deplete every time you crash (the starting number determined by your equipment), and running out of lives is the only way to get a game over. Instead, finishing a race, no matter where you place in the ranking, gets you some prize money. If you aren't in first place by the end of race four, the season restarts, but your money and equipment carry over. So you're expected to just keep failing until you're eventually rich enough to get the upgrades needed to go fast enough and win the season. 

 

Then you can play the second season, which is harder, faster, and more exciting, though it still relies on the cyclical grinding structure. There's also a "Classic Mode", which is a much simpler game, harkening back to the original Monaco GP, with enemy cars just mindlessly bouncing left and right off the sides of the track. Unfortunately, it's a lot slower than the original, even on hard difficulty. Another thing to note is that the game's main mode even has the "ambulance of death" that occasionally zooms up from the bottom of the screen, wrecking all in its path, which is also very specifically a Monaco GP reference.

 

Though I hate grinding in action games as much as any other sane person, in this case, I don't think it's a gamekiller, at least. The fact that the game's on a handheld makes it a nice little thing to occupy the mind while semi-watching some mediocre TV or something. I'd have preferred something closer to the arcade games mentioned up at the start of this post, but The Shutokou Racing isn't a total write off.

Other Stuff Monthly #18!

 Wow, what a long month it's been! Feels more like eight of them, doesn't it? Anyway, I'm finally able to start getting though the backlog of board games that's built up from Kickstarters and cheap online sales over the past year or so, and as such, I've regained the motivation to make these posts (though having said that, there isn't going to be a sudden string of monthly board game posts. I've got other stuff to cover, too). First up is a game that sat on my shelf for months, the communist-themed worker placement game Red Outpost!

 

Set in an alternate (better?) world where the USSR never ended and ventually made its way to the stars, the players take the role of the people in charge of a newly founded Soviet space colony, telling which workers to go where and at what time. It creates an interesting dynamic, as while you are competing for victory points, resources that might be in seperate player pools in other games, like workers, and the resources they produce, are instead communal. During the game, you get points for instructing workers to produce efficiently, but the big scoring happens after each day (there are two days in a game, and each day is broken down into five phases), when the mood of each worker is assessed, and each player who moved that worker during the day scores points based on both the worker's mood and how many times they moved them.

 

You can improve a worker's mood by sending them to do a job at which they're skilled (send the fisherman to fish, the shepherd to the pasture, and so on), or by giving them time off. Conversely, if you think one player stands to rake in a lot of points from a certain worker, there are also ways to decrease their mood, like sending them to do an ill-fitting job, framing them for stealing from the warehouse, or even having them spend some time in the gulag. So you can try and risk putting all your eggs in one basket for a big payoff at the end, or try and keep a few workers at slightly above-average levels of happiness, or you can concentrate on sabotaging the other players and making their favoured workers unhappy.

 

It took a few turns to really get into the swing of Red Outpost, but once we did, it was a really fun game. I think the Soviet theme really comes through in the game mechanics, and it's also a game with a lot of player interaction and opportunities for aggressive or sneaky play. I'm not sure if they're in the retail version, or if they're Kickstarter only, but the components are also really high quality: differently-shaped wooden meeples and tokens for the workers and resources, player counters with little hammer-and-sickles printed on them, and beautiful painted artwork on the board, too. Altogether, Red Outpost is a really fun game with great theming, and I definitely recommend at least giving it a try if you get the chance.

Gal Pani X (PC)

You can probably tell from the title that this is a fangame of the infamously seedy series of dirty arcade Qix-likes Gals Panic, but it's actually a double fangame, since the art you're revealing in the stages features characters from To Heart. If you're unfamiliar with To Heart, it's a multimedia franchise with manga, anime, visual novels and other stuff, and around the turn of the century, it was enjoying a similr kind of popularity among doujin circles as the Touhou series has in modern times. I don't think it was ever a big mainstream hit, but it definitely had a lot of fanworks based on it!

 

I actually like Gal Pani X a lot more than I like any of the actual Gals Panic games, though! Part of that might just be nostalgia, since when I got my first PC in 2005, I loaded it up with a whole bunch of freeware doujin games, and Gal Pani X was among them, but there's other reasons too. Firstly, none of the art in this game is actually dirty, it's just cute, so there's none of the unseemly grime associated with Gals Panic. Secondly, despite Gal Pani X mixing in elements of bullet hell shooting games, it feels a lot more fair to play, and it should only take a couple of attempts before you can get to the end of the game in a single credit. Thirdly, and most difficult to explain, it just feels really smooth to play. Moving your ship around, and expanding your area of control just feels really satisfying, like using a knife to cut through something with just a little bit of resistance.

 

So, in case you're totally unfamiliar with Qix-likes in general, or Gals Panic in particular, Qix-likes are games where you have a field inhabited by a large threat (and sometimes some smaller sub-threats), and your job is to eat away at that area, by leaving your safe zone and drawing shapes. Successfully come back to your safe zone without either your or the line you've drawn getting hit, and the area you drew around is added to your safe zone. Any enemies caught in that area are destroyed, too. The Gals Panic series added the twist that you can see the silhouette of a woman in the field, and rather than having to claim a percentage of the field as a whole, you have to claim a percentage of the silhouetted area only.

 

Gal Pani X builds further on this with its elements taken from shooting games. Not only do the enemies fire dense bullet patterns at you, but these patterns can come into your safe zone and kill you there (though I don't think there are any enemy attacks that can destroy parts of your safe zone like some stages in the later Gals Panic sequels have). So you're really only safe from touching the enemies while you're in there. Another element taken from shooting games is grazing, whereby you score extra points for getting really close to enemy bullets without actually letting them hit you. Though in Gal Pani X, it's not limited to enemy bullets, and you get points for grazing on pretty much everything: power ups, points items, bullets, the enemies themselves.

 

Gal Pani X is a game I recommend playing. It's freeware, but the developers' site went down many years ago now, so it might be a little harder to find now. But, surprisingly for such an old game, it runs in 64-bit Windows 10 without issue! Finally, on the subject of tracking down games, the developers of Gal Pani X, D5, also had a game that they didn't release as freeware, named Sispri Gauntlet. It was a bullet hell take on Gauntlet, starring characters from a novel series called Sister Princess. I've never been able to find more than the playable demo of it, and even that was a long long time ago. Please get in touch if you know where I might find the full game.

Of Mice and Sand (3DS)

 I first became aware of this game when it was originally released in Japanese as Sabaku no Nezumi Dan, and though it looked interesting, I just assumed it would never get an English release of any kind and forgot about it. More recently, though, I was browsing 3DS releases, and found that it not only has an English release since I last saw it, but also a bunch of ports to different formats! Despite that though, I haven't seen anyone talking about any version of it, so I guess I'll do it.

 

The game's set in a post-apocalyptic desert world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals (mainly mice, though you do encounter cats and just regular old humans, so there are presumably others out there, too), and you take charge of a small group of mice journeying in search of the mythical paradise of El Dorado. it's a big journey, too: I've been playing for several hours at the time of writing, and I'm not even half way across the world map. They do this in a big armoured vehicle that starts out looking a lot like a Mad Max tour bus, and gradually gets bigger and more formidable. You control any of them directly, though, you just move a cursor round, giving them orders. Build this room, craft this item, drive to the next town, and so on. 

 

At the basic level, Of Mice and Sand follows a classically compelling formula: get the ingredients to craft the items to build the rooms to get more ingredients to craft more items and build new rooms. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. The problem coms in the way that new locations are added to your vehicle's navigational computer. When you get to a town for the first time, you can pay to hear rumours, which includes rumours of nearby undiscovered locations. The problem is that the prices of these rumours increases pretty quickly, and your main source of income is fulfilling requests for crafted items. So you spend a lot of time driving back and forth between towns gathering resources or parked up next to towns waiting for your mice to craft the items you need.

 

I'm not too disappointed with Of Mice and Sand. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to continue playing all the way to the end, but like I said, I have had hours of play over the past week or so since I got it, so it's not like it's totally worthless. Maybe a kind of Cookie Clicker-esque version that let you just set things up and have travelling and crafting happen while you're away would be more palatable? Maybe if it ever gets a sequel, that's how it'll go? As it is, it's no classic, but it's worth a look, at least.

Metamorphic Force (Arcade)

 Two unfair criticisms that are often aimed a beat em ups as a genre are that they're unfair quarter munchers, and that they're repetitive to the point of mindlessness. This might sound a little too harsh to some of you, but I think the blame for both of these can be laid at the feet of Konami's licensed beat em ups of the late eighties and early nineties: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, X-Men, etc. I know a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and I do too, but they definitely live up to those stereotypes more than the average beat em up (especially the western versions, which were made more difficult to squeeze those few extra coins out of players), and the popularity and ubiquitousness in the past means they're the games that a lot of people think of first when it comes to the genre. It's really a shame that the best entries Konami made in the genre came out just as it was waning in popularity: Violent Storm was one of them, and Metamorphic Force was the other.

 

I think most people already know about Violent Storm, with it's bizarre soundtrack and wide array of bone-crunching throws, but Metamorphic Force seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar for some reason. The simplest way to describe it would be as a combination of SEGA's Altered Beast and Konami's X-Men beat em up. You pick one of four guys, each of whom has been granted the ability to transform into a different werebeast by the Earth goddess, and you walk across various fantasy landscapes beating up monsters until they explode into glowing goo. Each playable character has their own beast form, as opposed to each stage having a beast form ala Altered Beast, and they mostly just make you bigger, stranger, faster, and a slightly expanded movelist. Interestingly, a lot of the enemies you face are also werebeasts: lizardmen, elephantmen, hedgehogmen, and so on.

 

The X-Men similarities are a little more vague and difficult to describe than the obvious conceptual similarities to Altered Beast. Basically, it just really feels like the X-Men game, but with a bit more polish, and a bit more balance. It's especially evident in the boss fights: I'm sure a lot of you remember the fight against The Blob in X-Men, where the player characters can basically just pummel his to death in a few seconds? The bossfights in this, in the early part of the game, at least, are a lot like that. Still manages to be satisfying, though, the way you can beat your foes, throw them around, and even continue beating them while they're lying on the ground (especially when you play as Ban, the martial artist Minotaur, who literally dances on his enemies' prone bodies with his hooves!), Transformation occurs through collecting a goddess statue, and there's no time limit to it: you stay transformed until it's beaten out of you. Collect another goddess statue while already transformed, and you'll do a fullscreen dashing attack, a lot like Nightcrawler's super in X-Men.

 

The game's presentation is excellent all round. You can see in the screnshots how colourful it is, how big the sprites are, and how interesting the world and the monsters in it are, but the soundtrack is also high quality. Feeling in some parts like the music you'd hear in the background of a really great fantasy cartoon, and in others the  same kind of bombastic chiptune metal heard in the likes of Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive. There was, according to legend, a soundtrack CD was released under the title Konami Amusement Sounds '93: Autumn Edition, but I can't find a single picture of it, a copy of it for sale, or any reference to it existing other than ones apparently copied from Wikipedia (which I think was itself copied from the old MAME history.dat). I'm sure it does exist, somewhere, but it must have been printed in very small quantities.

 

Metamorphic Force is a game I definitely recommend playing. If you do, though, the old rule of Konami beat em ups does still apply: play the Japanese version of the ROM and you'll have a much better time. It's never had any kind of home port, but I'm hoping that Hamster Corp. put it out as part of the Arcade Archive series at some point. They've released other nineties Konami games, so it could happen, maybe! If it ever does, it'll be a day one purchase for me.