Other Stuff Monthly #23!

 With a front cover that looks more like an ad you'd see on the back cover of a videogame magazine, Vortex #0 is the only publication Electrobrain Comics ever put out. Well, kind of. There are two versions of it: the full thirty-two page version, which has a comic story and a strategy guide for the game that shares its title (a Super FX-powered 3D shooting game for SNES), as well as a nine page version that only includes the comic.

 

The comic tells a prologue story for the videogame, and it's surprisingly complex, fitting a lot of stuff in its low page count. The eight planets of the Deoberon system (ruled by Emperor Deoberon) live in peace, with only one of them having any kind of military installations, just in case. Barkahn, one of the local lords, hates this arrangement, and believes the system needs more defence, which he sets out to prove by attacking one of the planets and killing a bunch of people, then trying to take over the whole system.

 

Emperor Deoberon sets his scientists to the task of coming up with a way to stop Barkahn's villainy, and they create a magic computer that sends Barkahn, his armies, nd the four planets they conquered into another dimension. When everything dies down, Deoberon and Barkahn both die, and Barkahn's best friend, Vercingetorix, vows revenge, and his scientists find a way out of the prison dimension, and they steal the magic computer that sent them there. So the game casts you as the ace pilot sent into the prison dimension to defeat Vercingetorix and retrieve the computer. Phew.

 

Then there's the walkthrough, taking the form of lots of captioned screenshots, telling you what's in each stage, and what you need to do to get through it. The way some parts are written makes Vortex seem like a game that would be a confusing bore to get through unguided: "Cany you find all of these hidden keys, bonuses, and tunnels? You can't defeat Darius without them all!", "Don not allow Xerxes to close in on you! He will fire a weapon that will destroy you immediately!", and "You must have four electro bombs to defeat Vercingetorix!", that kind of stuff, you know? Sorry to bring this concept up two posts in a row, but it sounds like the kind of advice sitcom characters give each other when they're all temporarily obsessed with some unseen videogame that's never ben mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

 

Other than all that stuff, the other items worthy of note are two ads in the inside pages of the front and back covers. In the front, there's an ad for a game I've never heard of before: Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme Skiing and Snowboarding, while more intriguing is the ad in the back cover. It shows neither a title nor any screenshots, only a motorcross biker, and the promse od a hot newe Super FX title from Electrobrain, to be announced in the fourth quarter of 1994. I can't find any evidence of this game being released or announced, nor can I find mention of any Motorcross games from Electrobrain on lists of unreleased SNES games.

Danger Express (Arcade)

 This is an unreleased and unfinished game that came to light relatively recently. Though it's clearly unfinished, this mostly manifests as what we can generously call "presentational eccentricities" that would have presumably have been ironed out before release. Things like the very default-looking font used for a lot of the text, and things like getting a "bonus for breaking stuff" at the end of each stage. It is totally playable, though, and it's a shame that it never got officially released, because it's a lot better than most western-developed arcade games ofthe nineties.

 

The main thing that stands out in Danger Express is its aesthetic, which I've seen other people describe as looking like a fake videogame you'd see characters playing on a TV show. That's a fair enough description, but while I played, what came to mind for me is that it was like some long-forgotten vanity project of a straight-to-VHS no-budget action movie had somehow got a licensed tie-in videogame. All it really needs is the addition of a cutscene starring Cameron Mitchell and it'd be perfect.

 

What is that aesthetic? It's an amazing combination of sprite scaling and digitisation, with real life actors dressed as generic goons walking in and out of the screen. There's even some kind of psuedo-live action cutscenes! They're not really proper videos, but more like short gif-like animations using frames from a live action video. To maximize the amount of scaling that gets done, Danger Express also eschews the usual horizontal scrolling seen in most beat em ups in favour of having all the stages go into the screen like a melee-based Space Harrier. It seems unlikely, but I wonder if the developers had played the PC Engine game Jinmu Densho, which is a similar concept, mechanically at least (though to be honest, Danger Express is a much better implementation of the concept).

 

Naturally, then, a train is the perfect setting for such a game: lots of narrow corridors, giving a good reason as to why you're walking in a straight line through waves of enemies. So that's how it goes (except for a few outdoor excursions to backalleys, docks, or at the casino): you walk from the back of the train carraige to the front, killing everyone who tries to stop you, including soldiers, ninja, strippers, wrestlers, bikers and so on. Interestingly, some stages give you a rifle, while others are purely melee, except for the occasional inclusion of a temporary pair of nunchaku that shoot balls of lightning.

 

The most surprising thing about Danger Express is how good it is, though. Most games that use digitised sprites tend to be awkward, stiff and no fun to play, while western arcade developers in the nineties had a penchant for putting out cynical, hateful coin eaters. Danger Express bucks both trends! While the action isn't exactly super-smooth, it's fast and enjoyable enough to cover up the cracks, and the difficulty is actually prety reasonable: on my first attempt, I got about four stages into it (out of nine), and I think it's probable that with some practice, it could actually be 1CCed by a skilled player.