Retro Prefect

An open letter to Mr.Sega

2011-08-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Sega (the hedgehog)

In recent months it has come to the attention of myself and many of my cohorts that perhaps your company has gone ever so slightly downhill. Whether or not this can be attributed to scarlet fever, the vapours or some such other "Semite related illness" is beyond my knowing. I do however propose many fresh and inspiring new ideas, may I remind you I was once voted at school "Most likely to succeed at Sega Bass Fishing", as I'm yet to play the game some would argue A: My stake in your company affairs is minimal B: I have thrown away what could have been a glorious career in virtual fishing. I leave that thought open to you, along with several other new concepts that might put the "Rocket" into Chu Chu Jet Set Radio!

SONIC 4-D

Of course we've all heard of Sonic 3-D (except most people) but what about Sonic 4-D! Sega releases a new peripheral which allows players to manipulate space in such a way that it's not as good as it sounds! The basis of the game is Sonic has lots of rings around his messy bachelor pad but Uh-Oh...Amy Rose and her ring allergic mother are coming to dinner! Through Sonics eyes you must pick up rings while avoiding other "Female" duties such as washing the laundry, tidying up and other things that women enjoy!

STREETS OF MINOR DISCONTENT

In a radical break from previous installments in the "streets of "series (streries), Axel and company visit the humble town of Keswick in the search of a passive aggressive crime lord known as Gary Thornton. Unfortunately as a business man Gary has no hordes of street punks, but on the plus side their is a two hour lift stage!

ALEX KIDD IN FAILED REVIVAL WORLD

After trying to shoehorn Segas once never loved mascot into many of its party games, the cards are placed firmly on the table in an all out declaration of wanton Alex Kidd whoring. See as his once semi-passable platform antics are translated into the cel shaded realm, with sub par results! On the plus side, games of "Ro! Cham! Beau!" has now been replaced with a cover system 3rd person shooter

GOLDEN AXE 9 GILIUS GOES DWARF

Deniably popular Dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead fights his greatest foe yet, opium addiction! The game plays similar to previous installments, only the battle against the evil Death Adder and his hordes is nothing more than a rampage through unprepared civilian settlements in a drug assisted haze

ALTERED MAN

Man from altered beast, worried at how the ravages of time and lycanthropy have affected his once youthful face; turns to facial surgery as a means of reinstilling his once unwavering confidence. As the operation goes wrong however, Altered Beast man finds himself weeping in the mirror shouting nothing except "Power Up!"

PAMPLHEX ZONE

Budding pamphlet writer "Pam Flet" is placed smack "Pam" into the "phl-action" when a rival Pamphletier traps Pam in to her very own personal pamphlet pam-tastrophe! Will Pam ever make it out alive, or is it too "Pamph-late" to do a "Pam" thing "Pam-bout" it!? PAMPHLET!

DR.KINTOBORS PLEASANT HARICOT MACHINATION

Before Robotnik their was Kintobor, and before the Mean Bean Machine their was...The Pleasant Haricot Machination. See the prequel to a much loved puzzle game, ripped off from a much loved puzzle game unfold before your very eyes. Find out what drove a promising scientist to personify a single foodstuff with a negative personality, all will be revealed in a game which there has never "Bean" before. (Unless you've played Puyo Puyo)

CRAZY MILKFLOAT

It's time to make some craaaaaaaazy milk deliveries that say a big "Milk you!" to the humdrum nanny PC milk brigade of today! Play as several ethnic and sexually diverse characters in a role dominated in reality by middle aged male sex offenders! If that wasn't enough milk for your money, then what about music by Christopher Cross, the powerful voice behind much loved hit "Arthur theme" and "Arthur 2:On the rocks theme"...and many more!

NiGHTS: INTO REPRESSED MEMORIES

In the last and final installment of the N lower case "I" GHTS series, N lower case "I" GHTS takes his/her ever precarious role as a vessel for children's dreams to levels deemed unsuitable in the waking world. Encouraged by NiGHTS frequently to touch him/her in areas he/she has/hasn't, with the promise of freeing them from a realm of nightmares...what a catch 22 situation! The seasonal release of Christmas NiGHTS: Into Repressed Memories guarantees to feature it's own theme song...again written by Christopher Cross

PANZER DRAGOON FUNF: NICHT HABEN!

In an attempt to glorify an"adequate" series into cult status, only five copies of the next installment will be released, all in a easily perishable cardboard sleeve with disks placed carefully next to the pins of live grenades. Enjoy this epic 26 disk adventure for the cost of a small house or large caravan, just remember not to enjoy yourself too much however as playing the game will ruin the collectors value by a conversion rate of £29 per minute of on rail shooting

JET SET SUPERVISED COMMUNITY SERVICE

All crimes must be paid for, and Sega teaches just that in a brand new installment of the skating series. Beat and his gang must pay for their many acts of vandalism conspiring as art. The game will feature a song about a brother being super and everyone will skip it...this will not be written by Christopher Cross

SUPER MONKEY CUBE

What could be more fun than a monkey rolling in a ball you ask? Answer, a stimuli starved monkey forced into the confines of a static cube. The game works like a Tamagochi or Digimon, only the monkey is always guaranteed to hate you and will die within weeks on account of mental starvation and ridicule from passers by. (Not suitable for those who sympathise with the views of "so called" animal rights groups, more like animal WRONG!)

SHENMUE PETITION

In a hilarious nod to fans of the Shenmue series, Ryo accepts the death of his father and starts one of millions of ineffectual petitions to revive a series which nearly led Sega to bankruptcy. There will be toy capsule machines but they will just contain the generic nostalgic comments of anyone who at some point owned a Dreamcast and fan fiction written about Lan Di having sex with sailors

ZOMBIE REVENGE "PIPE-DOWN"

Dreamcast title Zombie Revenge has been radically re-hauled to appeal to the "Pipe loving generation" of today. Subtle differences invoke a modernised style of game play such as the inclusion of at least one pipe per square meter of floor space, pipe zombies...the product of a bite infected pipe. A level which accurately depicts the inside of a pipe from the perspective of a pipe. Also the game will feature no sound effects except the phrase "Pipe" and all music will be the sound of a pipe banging against a "Pipe". (Q: What's the sound of one pipe clapping? A: NAUTILUS!)

Now with regards to my inevitable royalties Sega, feel free to place the money under my door at exactly 5 o clock. I cannot stress this enough, mother is feint of heart and fears anyone who merchandises hedgehogs so I must be in during the transaction. I look forward to your feedback (E.G. None required...perfection) and hope in the future you wont use the the medieval period unless of course you put the word "Zone" after it...

Regards

B.O. Nanza Bros

Fighting game spectacular!

2011-05-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. First annual meeting. 01/01/1990

Morton Kombat (Chairman in charge of getting over here): The first meeting of the Non-Capcom/SNK fighting game union is called to order. You all know why we are here…

Battle Arena Tom Shinden (Treasurer of Smuckleberry pie) : Well I don’t know why and it’s making me rather (Southern) Cross.

Morton Kombat: Well then I will explain that we are here to plan good ways of destroying our mutual enemies of Capcom and their SNK lackeys. As long as Hadou-can we Hadou-cannot stop trying to take a share of those delicious fighting game profits.

Battle Arena Tom Shinden: But how can we do that? Where can fighting games go now that Capcom have used up all the racial stereotypes?

Joel Calibur (Assistant cog motion capture artist.): Well my plan is to introduce 10% more cog throwing into all fighting games.

Morton Kombat: You and your cogs! I declare this meeting finish(ed) Him!

Nero Divide (New aged whack manager): Hey guys did I miss anything?

Joel Calibur: Yes THE POINT!

All: HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

Which is to say I’m going to try to review every fighting game I have played but haven’t already reviewed. i.e. every non Capcom or non SNK fighting game. It may sound like a huge task but I’m not intending to do a very good job! (Also I realise that I didn’t get to review Marvel Vs Capcom 3: At Worlds End. My opinions on that are “Too much Girl Wolverine not enough Stages.”)

Battle Arena Toshinden

I believe the Toshinden series eventually abandoned the “Battle Arena” prefix, possibly because the Toshinden nature of the series could no longer be confined to official battle arenas but more likely because the Toshinden series wasn’t selling very well and they needed to save on print costs. The final game in the series is infamous for being packaged in envelopes with “In-dun 5” scrawled across them or at least it would be if that had happened. (Possible marketing idea?)

I only ever actually played the original Battle Arena Toshinden and a demo of Toshinden 2, a very stupid demo which let you play as the only two new characters in the game. As you may have guessed I don’t have particularly strong feelings for the series but I must have seen something in those blocky characters as I not only bought the Playstation version but felt the need to add the PC version to my games collection. I cannot recollect the reason for doing this. It may have been because it came in a twin pack with Wild Ambition: Fatal Fury or it may have been because I enjoyed the voice acting so much. What other game features a man with a heavy Scottish accent repeatedly shouting “Deadly Raise?” (Or as he would put it “Deedly Rhease!”)

Scots-warrior aside this game has little to recommend it and so it is deservedly cast into the dustbin of electronics boutique alongside many copies of Gex: Deep Cover Gecko and Krazy Ivan. I should however mention that the stage music on the raft level is probably the best music ever created.

Overall I’m awarding this game a paltry half Rungo out of Ellis.

Tobal No.1

Too my inexperienced young eyes Tobal No.1 was very exciting for two reasons.

1. It came in a slightly different (and in my opinion better) case than other Playstation games. 2. It had a quote on it that said “Sell your granny and play Tobal until your fingers BLEED”.

Which was an entirely irresponsible thing to say to an impressionable child, imagine my disappointment when I found it impossible to even sublet my grandparents. Even worse when I eventually “saved up for” (convinced brother to get for his birthday) Tobal and commended playing I realised that my fingers would never bleed because I was a robot with fingers made of pure steel.

This did not stop me giving Tobal more attention than it rightfully deserved and becoming overexcited about its rubbish quest mode. “Other fighting games don’t even HAVE a quest mode” I was heard to utter on more than one occasion. It’s probably even true that Ill goa could beat Kazuya in a fight but there was no need to take out an advert in the local paper.

“Red skinned devil man in off shoulder number seeks pointy haired goon for punching in face.”

So great was Tobal No.1 that it eventually got a sequel, the aptly named “Tobal No.1: Reloaded” (Tobal No:2) It was never released in Europe due to the legendary European hatred of Emperor Udan. I was able to get a naughty copy from a man on the market and am able to confirm that it featured a Chocobo as a playable character. Everyone says “Yeah so what?” in unison and goes back to replaying Metal Gear Solid to unlock the Stealth Suit.

Overall I would give this game Nork out of Nork.

Bonus Tobal jokes!

Q. Why was the Gren Government unpopular?

A. Because they had to make lots of Gren Kutz to public services.

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Ill goa!

Ill goa who?

Ill goa the shops tomorrow!

Q. What do robots do when they can’t remember the words?

A. They just Hom!

Q. What animal says moofu?

A. To-cow No.1!

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Udan

Udan who?

Udan – t wanna dance!

Virtua Fighter

An interesting story about Virtua Fighter is that one time I had to take Castlevania IV back to gamestation because they had sold me an American version that wouldn’t fit into the SNES. However the man said I could only have “credits” so I had to try and decide what to have their and then. I spent ages looking for something I actually wanted but couldn’t concentrate properly because they kept playing the song “Freestyler” by the Bomfunk MC at ear splitting volumes. (This was in the days before Gamestation went all corporate so the staff used to play their awful taste in music at ear splitting volumes. Why do you not play songs from games in games shops? Also they used to try and ask me about games I was buying like “You can play as the villain in Sonic Adventure 2” as if I had been desperate for years to play as Dr Robotnik.)

The moral of this story is that I ended up getting the special edition of Virtua Fighter for the Sega Saturn BUT they didn’t put the bonus disc in so it wasn’t very special at all!

From this experience I concluded that Virtua Fighter is just a rubbish version of Tekken with very boring characters such as Jeffrey McWild and Jeffrey McTame. A lot of people seem to think that Virtua Fighting is very skilful but then a lot of people tried to stack up enough chairs to reach the moon and look how that turned out! (All the chairs fell over on a man’s leg and one of the chairs went inside a Pink Panther cartoon booth.)

Overall I give Virtua Fighter a “Yeah straight from the top of my dome” out of a Gold Dural.

Last Bronx

Would it be a brilliant character trait if I started saying “Last Bronx” instead of Last Straw? i.e.

Me: “I can’t believe you broke my copy of Last Bronx, this is the last Bronx!”

Jonas Bruner: “Please accept my Fighting Vipers.” (My brother says Fighting Vipers instead of apologies, also he was offering me his copy of Fighting Vipers.)

Uncle Pete: “What the Fighters Megamix is going on!?”

Actually I don’t really know what the difference was between Fighting Vipers and Last Bronx, other than that one of them featured being able to knock off people’s armour and that the prequel to Last Bronx would be called First Bronx. Look here is my review of Fighting Bronx: Megamix because I can’t pick them apart in my brain.

You press a button to punch and another to kick or you can press the block button to block. The first one to lose his energy does not win. The last boss is Called Urabahn and he wears a coat also you can fight as a car and an Arabian man.

Overall I give Fighters Megamix a Rent a Hero Number one out of 5.

Soul Series

The best thing about any of the Soul Blade/Edge/Calibur games is the song from the beginning of Soul Blade – “Transcending History and the World a tale of souls and swords eternally retold – that will eventually feature ill conceived guest characters.”

Apart from welcoming you repeatedly to the stage of history the soul games comprise of jabbing each other with weaponry and making Sephiroth in the custom character creator over and over again. Why don’t more game feature custom character creation? It seemed like we were going to get it all the time in the Playstation era but then everything went online and rubbish. Speaking of rubbish, many people like to ‘talk rubbish’ about the Soul series so lets expose some popular myths.

* The original Dreamcast Soul Calibur is the best – WRONG it has a nice quest mode but actually plays the same as all the others. It’s just that you only played the Dreamcast one and then got bored with the series and started playing Call of Calibur: Modern Cervantes instead. (A game where pirates throw swords at each other and you pay £7.50 to buy new treasure maps.)

* The Gamecube version of Soulcalibur II was the best because it sold the most copies, also Link was the best guest character. – WRONG the gamecube version sold the most because Gamecube owners had no other fighting games to choose from. (Other than Bloody Roar 3) Also all guest characters are equally awful because they won’t return in future games meaning that there will never be a ‘complete’ edition. This goes double for the awful Necron character.

* Soulcalibur II was the best – WRONG it has a rubbish mix of characters including NO SIEGFRIED and no character creation. Also one of the characters has an owl for a head. “Ocladan, bottler Sam more like!” Soulcalibur II is actually the worst entry in the series because even Soul Blade had nice music.

*Soulcalibur III is not the best – WRONG it is the best.

Overall I’m giving the soul series a Voldo out of Li Long.

Mortal Kombat

Two stories about Mortal Kombat –

When the original Mortal Kombat came out the connected ad campaign featured people stood in the middle of the road shouting “Mortal Kombat” it also dubbed the day it came out “Mortal Monday”. I tried to excitedly discuss “Mortal Monday” with my school pals but they didn’t know what I was talking about. I really hated my school friends.

Jonas Bruner made a Terry Nutkins character in Mortal Kombat Armageddon. Imagine the look on his face when Scorpion roughly grabbed Mr Nutkins by the waist and ripped off the top half of his body. Suffice to say he can no longer watch the Really Wild Show (Because they don’t make it anymore.)

The main selling points of Mortal Kombat were blood and John Turk but in the modern era every game has stupid amounts of blood and digitised sprites have been replaced with generic looking 3D. Stripped of these unique features Mortal Kombat can only be sent to the depths of generic fighting game hell alongside War Gods, BioFreaks and Dead or Alive. The only way to save it is for Midway to become un-bankrupt and invent a new technique of motion capture so that the game looks like Mad Dog Macree or The Journey Man project. Unfortunately this will never happen and they will keep adding new generic characters like “Fendrex” and “Dashon” .

In the meantime lets all enjoy our hazy members of the original Mortal Kombat –

Daz: “I remember on Mortal Kombat when Sub Zero would throw a harpoon and say please could you come in this direction!”

Bazzer: “I remember that you could unlock Kintaro on the pit stage by getting a perfect victory with Arden Lynn.”

Renton DX: “They should well make a Street Fighter Vs mortal Kombat because those games have comparable levels of gameplay and Mortal Kombat isn’t at all a gimmick laden mess.”

Overall I’m going to award Mortal Kombat a Blind Kenshi out of a Blind’s Dungeon.

Guilty Gear

In my opinion those gears have an awful lot to feel guilty about as this in another game series which promises the presence of gears and then fails to deliver on these promises with nary a cog to be seen. What can be seen is a very nicely animated 2-D fighting game that will never do very well because nobody can be bothered to learn non-streetfighter related button inputs.

At one stage I became very good at guilty gear and learned how to do things like “dust attacks” and “Roman Cancels” but then realised this was utterly pointless as literally no one else in Europe was bothered about playing it. I have since forgotten all my ‘gearformation” which is probably for the best as Guilty Gear 2 wasn’t a fighting game at all but a sort of RTS. (The reason for this being that the developer had gone mad from making too many character’s whose names were heavy metal references i.e. Vinny Aerosmith and Fujin Fighters.)

I would have scored Guilty Gear a lot more highly but I’ve just spent a weekend listening to Jonas Bruner go on about how Potemkin is his favourite character so it’s only getting a Zato 1 out of Zato 5.

Zero Divide

Q. Is Zero Divide the prequel to One Divide?

A. There is no such thing as One Divide!

If you could have a “One Divide” with anyone who would it be? A champion athlete says that he would have it with Martin Luther King and ask him why the game Zero Divide was so rubbish and whether or not a slow moving, robot themed 3D beat em up had anything to do with civil rights.

Martin Luther King has never played Zero divide but if he had he would probably have a dream where games featuring blue humanoid robots kicking red crab robots were judged not on their box art but on the fact that they were useless and rubbish.

Overall Zero Divide gets a lowly segregated swimming pool out of five.

The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. annual meeting. 01/01/2002

Martin Arth (Associate editor of Falco Punching): Hello friends, does the game “Super Smash Brothers” count as a fighting game?

Morton Kombat: NO!

(And that’s why I haven’t reviewed it.)

Tekken Series

It’s ironic that even though Tekken is now up to it’s sixth incarnation the only game where you can play as Tekkenman blade is in Tatsunoko Vs Capcom! Of course I am merely “Tekken your leg” I know full well that it’s actually Yatterman blade! (In Japan Tekken is known as Yatter and Tekken Tag Tournament is known as Yatter Yag Yournement – sounds more like double Dutch eh readers!?)

Anyway the Tekken series is at core a game about child abuse, specifically abuse by dropping child into volcanoes. However there is a message that if you drop enough children into volcanoes you yourself may find yourself dropped into a volcano. As Nietzsche says “He who spends long periods of times dropping children into volcanoes must be careful to not get dropped into a volcano himself, or if he does he must make sure that he has a devil gene so that he can come back to life.”

The good features of Tekken are how there are lots of secret characters to unlock and proper endings such as a Jaguar man running an orphanage or a blonde woman having her shoes stolen this is outweighed by bad features such as killing of Jun even though she was the only character I bothered to learn the combos for (they all have 3 ring circus in the middle) and adding stupid modes such as “Tekken Force” and “Whatever Tekken Force is called on Tekken 6”.” I also strongly disagree with how Yoshimitsu has been allowed to change his appearance from boxy tin man with a rapier to Skelington with a wheel on his back and a light sabre. Where is all the classic Yoshimitsu fan service? I would also insist that they bring back Kuminitsu but she would probably end up being a crocodile made of flames.

Overall I’m giving Tekken a Gon in Sixty Seconds out of the Fast and the Brian Furious. (And that’s mostly because of the time my granddad played the original Tekken and proclaimed “I am the law!” while playing as Marshall Law.)

Dead or Alive Series

Blah Blah ‘JIGGLE PHYSICS’ blah blah blah MEDIOCRE FIGHTING GAME blah blah blah EH READERS!?

Blah blah VOLLEYBALL …………. SIGH (Blah blah) Blah blah blah JESSE HOLD ON BY B*WITCHED blah

Overall it gets a predictably written review out of a Kage is actually pronounced Cag-aye.

Star Wars Masters of Teras Kasi

The best feature of this game OR ANY GAME is that it features a Tusken Raider named “Hoar” (Sounds like Whore!) and a Gammorean named “Thok” (Sounds like fuck!!)

After that it’s just a fighting game but with lightsabers and Jodo Kast and a really bad Harrison Ford impersonator. It’s not even that bad a game but it did get a lot of bad reviews at the time mainly because people weren’t yet used to the Star Wars franchise being abused in ludicrous ways. It may seem a bit silly that Princess Leia can beat Darth Vader in a fight but is that really worse than Jabba the Hutt’s gay purple cousin? The answer of course depends on whether or not you have seen Star Wars: the Clone Wars.

Anyway this game is well renowned for me making everybody play it at my Brother’s birthday party and trouncing everyone until I made the mistake of picking Jodo Kast. I was clearly being over confident and should have known that even in video games a fake Boba Fett will never defeat Darth Vader, especially if the person playing as Darth Vader is hyped up on caterpillar cake.

Overall I’m giving Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi an Easier than shooting Womp Rats back home out of a Mara Jade.

Psychic Force Series

A solitary copy of Psychic Force could be found loitering on the shelf of my local Electronics Boutique for many years. On many occasions I nearly gave in to temptation and bought it, attracted as I was by its anime style box art and ever falling price. Eventually that branch of Electronics Boutique closed down because of an overestimation of the demand for Rayman pens and Electronics Boutique being a rubbish name for a shop. I can only imagine what happened to that copy of Psychic force, more than likely it was thrown in a big skip and then incinerated alongside Buzz Lightyear. (Spoilers!) But I’d like to think it ended up being bought by a well meaning millionaire who later found out it was his grandson. (Why he would care about that but not his own daughter who he chucked out as soon as she became pregnant is anybodies guess.)

The point is that I got my copy of Psychic force from Barnsley market for £2.50 the funds were provided by Uncle Pete as part of an extensive bribery package relating to attendance of a cousins wedding. Actually the point is that Uncle Pete told me that the Cousin would be wearing a gold waistcoat AND had learned the song “True” to sing at the wedding reception. The waistcoat was merely cream with gold trim and the DJ forgot to bring the Spandau Ballet hit and so no singing occurred. An altogether disappointing experience and further evidence to support our suspicion that Uncle Pete has a flagrant disregard for the truth.

You may not be able to trust your parents/guardians but you can always trust psychic force to provide an adequate game experience. Again a lie because Psychic force is nothing but a proto- Bandai anime game with bad voice acting. Hearing a character called “Wong” say “Da Worwd is Myne” might have been amusing to those sailors in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story but those sailors found themselves on the receiving end of some Jeet Kun Do and now have an aversion to anything even vaguely Chinese. Meanwhile Psychic force is trying to convince us that Keith is a legitimate name for a villain with icicle powers, a stark contrast to the fire controlling main character simply named “Burn”. Was Freeze considered too common for a man wearing a cape?

Psychic force 2012 wasn’t much better; in fact it was almost exactly the same but with Dreamcast graphics instead of Playstation graphics. I think the company that made the series went bust shortly after, possibly as a result of ordering production on too many Keith action figures.

Overall the Psychic force series gets a “Phew Barely made that” out of Keith.

Evil Zone

A good advert for this game would have been “Do not enter the Evil Zone” because it gives the impression that the Zone is so evil that nobody would want to enter it and so makes you curious about playing the game. After all could anything truly be that evil? (Its probably a Zone about Justin Biebers he readers!?)

Q. What Pokemon causes lots of arguments on Youtube?

A. Justin Bibarel!

Q. Why do people go on about Justin Bieber so much?

A. because the button has broken off their radios making it impossible to change the frequency so they will be forced to listen to his songs until they either get a new radio. (Which they can’t because of the credit crunch) or destroy his career by saying bad things about him.

Q. Who is Justin Bieber?

A. I have no idea.

Maybe if Justin Bieber had done an advert for Evil Zone where he says “Zone out of Evil!” it would have sold more copies. As it was only two people ever bought the game – me and the person that ran the Angelfire Evil Zone site. I can only speculate from the lack of a sequel to Titus the Fox in Marrakesh that this was the final nail in the Titus coffin. (Fingers crossed for an HD fan remake!!!) A great shame because Evil Zone is probably in my top 150 favourite games even though it isn’t really a fighting game at all, it’s an anime parody simulator with a ropey fighting game bolted on.

The fighting is in fact so ropey that it only uses two buttons and if I remember correctly one of those in block. (The other is not-block i.e. attack) However it looks very impressive and you wont even care because you will be too busy remembering the between fight cut scenes which present each fight as an episode form a TV show based on the character you are playing as. My personal favourite is businessman Keiya who operates a self help service between fights and gives advice on problems such as “My wife doesn’t like me drinking beer.” Generally his advice is sound but occasionally he just tells them that he hates them. Similarly if you are a hard time imagining this making a good game then I hate you and I am going to hold down the square button until I have charged up two crystals after which I will fire thousands of unblocakble missiles at you.

Evil Zone is getting Danzaiver out of Danzaiver and if you don’t agree with that you can ‘zaiver off!

Naruto/Dragonball Z/Bleach/One-Piece/Saint Seiya/YuYuHashuko

If you like this anime you will enjoy seeing all your favourite characters having a battle and using the specials moves that they use in the show. My personal favourite is “Antagonist that becomes secondary protagonist” although it features all the characters up to the “Big baddie appears from space is tougher than all other baddies so far” saga. This is the “Ninety Third” game of the series out this year and they are all pretty similar but this one is definitely “the best”.

If you are a fan of this show then you will enjoy a lot of the fan service elements such as “main character” doing his “special move that he invents to defeat the baddie at the last minute.” You’ll also like elements such as using the original voice actors from the show even though the voice acting in the show is probably rubbish and scraping the barrel for new characters such as “man from filler episode A” and “Insensitive racial stereotype contestant number 3”

I’m going to give this game a gold cloth out of a PoPo but upgrade that to a Spirit Bomb if you are a fan of the show in question.

Blazblue

Fact: BlazBlue was originally going to be called “Battle Frentox – Alberto Waltz” but the characters were so strange that during beta testing the head of Arc System works (Mr Yashimoto) was heard to exclaim “What in the blue blazes is going on here!”. A knight who was guarding the game thought he had said “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!” and so the game became BlazBlue.

Actually that fact may not be a fact at all it may be a nega-fact or “lie”. I have no way of confirming this either way because I have only played Blazblue for half an hour when Jonas Bruner brought it round for some disappointing 2D action. During that time I wasn’t able to pick up much about the game other than the fact that calling a match a rebel dosent make your game not be Guilty Gear 3. I also learned that BlazBlue does not have many characters in it. I have read that this does not matter because all the characters are very interesting and well balanced but tot hat I say imagine how good the game would have been with twice the amount of interesting and well balanced characters.

The bottom line is that I cannot be bothered learning any more obscure beat em ups, especially ones where people have extraneous moves like throwing flower pots or extending limbs in unrealistic directions. Blazblue is getting a Continuum Shift out of Continuum Ctrl Alt Del.

The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. annual meeting. 01/01/2007

Dennis Inoba (Head of shitake mushrooms): Hello chums, sorry for being late to the party. Does my new game Dissidia count as a fighting game?

Keith: No of course not, it’s just Virtual On with big hair and swords. (The Guinness book of world records disagrees saying it is the first fighting game spin off from an RPG series. The Guinness book of records is stupid because they hadn’t played Spectral Souls!)

Dennis Inoba: What about Ergheiz?

Keith: Go on then.

Dennis Inoba: keith out.

Keith: I INVENTED KEITH!

Ergheiz

Or to give it it’s full title Ergheiz: God bless the ring. In this case God did bless the ring with Final Fantasy guest characters which caused us to take an interest in a game that we might have otherwise ignored. (Also the first time Zach was a playable character fact fans) This was no bad thing because Ergheiz is surprisingly competent and plays a bit like a less frantic version of Powerstone in that you can run in all directions and navigate environmental hazards such as boxes or small fences. Ergheiz also features a dungeon crawler style quest mode where you play an archaeologist who falls down a well and has to fight their way through a dungeon consisting mostly of shark men and shitake mushrooms. I would have said this was a welcome addition to the game only the first boss was an immortal octopus and getting killed made you lose everything and start again. As the saying goes “Octopus boss results in a sales loss.”

So yeah you can play as topless Sephiroth, It has to get Neo Bahamut out of Bahamut!

Gundam Battle Assualt

Or as the game would have it “Gundam Batta Attalt!” and who am I to argue? (A man who can pronounce words properly that’s who.)

Mangling of the English language aside this game concerns giant robots from the various Gundam franchises having serious disagreements and then solving these disagreements in the form of a 2D fighting game. We only actually recognised the Gundam Wing characters but rest assured there are enough Gundams in this game to give you a good grun for your Gundam. Fan favourites such as Zaku, Zaku II and Char’s Zaku stand alongside more obscure offerings like the Full Armour ZZ Gundam and the humble Hi-Gogg. Perhaps they should have got JEAN CLAUDE GUN-DAM to be in it! (They couldn’t get him because he was busy filming Kickmaster 3: Legend of the Legs.)

For a Playstation game Gundam Battle Assault certainly packs in a high volume of animations. (Albeit very slow clunky ones.) It also features the ability to not care about this game if you know nothing about Gundam. (i.e. almost everybody) However the mangled remains of several Gundam model kits left at my parent’s house mean I will never be objective enough to properly review this game.

Therefore Gundam Battle Assault is getting a non-applicable out of a Zeong.

That covers every fighting game ever made (apart from Killer instinct, Balls and Shaq Fu) I hope my comments will help you decide which fighting game to buy. (None of them)

Marvel Vs Capcom 3

2011-04-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Back in those halcyon years of the Sega Dreamcast, the average fighting game fan was overwhelmed with choice. A choice severely stifled by a pad so ineptly designed for the average gamer, that anyone was a hadouken away from permanent carpal tunnel syndrome. Nowadays us poor gamers don’t get much when it comes to fighting games, the once annual King Of Fighters series has somewhat dwindled in popularity ever since it was realised they weren’t that good to begin with, Street Fighter 4 was essentially Street Fighter 2: Arsehole boss edition and Blazblue was Guilty Gear HD, replacing heavy metal music with heavy grating voice acting. But after a good decade of nothing along came Marvel Vs Capcom 3, a game which offers us gamers that wealth of fighting fun once more. X Box 360 fans will also receive the added bonus of having to play the game with a controller designed by a man who hates D pads

Alan Log- Mr Bill Spates, here is my controller what I’ve done. You will find it to be most “X-Boxellent”!

Bill Spates- I DO find it X-Boxellent, I do indeed! But hark, I am troubled by this unwieldy D-Pad…it is most unfavourable to my autistic, entrepreneurial thumbs

Alan Log- Fear not Mr.Spates, for all first party games require precise stick rotating, see for example Rotary Norris and the Heli-Bunch , round table traverser 3-D and Biggy Shackletons pro plate spinner. The future has no need for a D-Pad, because a D-Pad does not move forwards! (Unless it moves forwards)

Bill Spates- I am convinced and this meeting is adjourned…SO SAYS BILL SPATES!

Unlike many of Capcoms previous VS offerings, the upgrade to 3D (or 2.5D) guarantees work has actually gone into the game whereas previously, characters were thrown into games with the hope they would stick. No more recycled sprites which unfortunately means in terms of roster size, MVC 3 has taken a step down when compared with the second instalment. I’m sure many fans will forsake the removal of beloved cactus Amingo and remain perplexed at the continued inclusion of Shuma Gorath, especially as downloadable content. Some of the new character choices are somewhat bizarre too, while I am a self confessed M.O.D.O.K. fan even I question what characters were blackballed before they settled on the mongol headed technocrat that we all don’t know and don’t love. I find something unsettling in the degree of attention that has gone into shading M.O.D.O.K.’s face; it’s sobering to think that at some point during the production phase of this game, a developer was tasked with designing that gnarled countenance for weeks, perhaps even months. I can hardly bring myself to look at it for more than half an hour without needing a lie down so my heart goes out to this probably now deceased, or at least mentally scarred developer. A great relief washed over me however when I found out Zangief would no longer be present in proceedings, lumbering oaf characters are not my forte, and Zangief is the most lumbersome of oafs. Alas, inheriting his title is the slightly better, if not also slightly more homoerotic Haggar of Final Fight fame. Does his title as Mayor of a City named after a transit newspaper give him any advantage in battle? No…but repeated use of his spinning attack certainly does!

Because of modern times, games now have to feature some form of unlockable or additional content to justify paying the many sovereigns required to ensure Indy developers continue to make puzzle games that are clever and intuitive but ultimately not that good. Marvel Vs Capcom 3 has gone the way of so many half-hearted games by promising the addition of unlockable artwork. If I wanted to look at pictures of Super Skrull punching nothing in particular, then I would attend the Tate Skrull exhibit. But as it is, I don’t…I find Super Skrull to be somewhat crass and dismissive of any view which opposes the destruction of the cosmos and on the whole he gives Skrulls en masse a bad name. He needs to take a long hard look at himself, but not while using Sue Storms powers as he will turn invisible. All said and done however, he is one of the best characters in the game…two Skrumms up from me!

As the third instalment in the series, Capcom have added many new technical elements which only Asians will ever be able implement efficiently into any battle, it all plays very nicely and you’re never a photon shot away…from a photon shot of fun! We definitely haven’t seen the last of Capcom’s new 3D models which as of yet have not been prostituted to other VS titles, but expect a game featuring M.O.D.O.K. and a squad based cover system to top the Christmas charts this winter, 4 out of a potential 5 (I’m a member of) S.t.a.r.s.

Retro Christmas Offerings

2010-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas is obviously the most important time of year as it’s the time when I get the most presents (double the amount of birthday and five times the amount at easter!) The games industry obviously knows this because 75% of the games released in the year come out just before Christmas, hence last week alone saw the release of Modern Duties: Will Smith Ops, Medal of Duties: Taliban Ops, Golden Sun 3: Djinn Ops and many other ops related games. However the games industry seems reluctant to make any games that feature Christmas, more than likely because of political correctness gone mad. Anyway here is a list of the top 5 games (only 5 games) which feature Christmas in some capacity. Just remember that having snow in a game doesn’t make it Christmassy because all games have snow levels – even Rayman: Raving Rabbis

Shenmue – If you play the game up to December then Christmas lights will spring up in Dobuita town centre. You may even spot Santy Claus forcing himself between toy capsule machines or getting into fist fights with the burger bear. Just like in real life the Shenmue December the 25th is extremely disappointing, no one gives you any presents AND if you have the job at the docks you still have to turn up for work. In many ways Ryo is like the boy that Santa Clause forgot, he never got any presents and his daddy had been killed by a man in a dress.

Christmas rating – Plasma Sword 2: Blitzens Revenge

Christmas Bonus - Shenmue sailor discussion
“Sailor location known?”
“Sailor location denied!”
“Identify Sailor?”
“Negative!”

Sonic Adventure – Yet again Dreamcast era Sega showed us the true meaning of Christmas by giving us presents, presents in the form of free DLC. If only they had invented ‘Sega points’ and charged 10.50 for downloadable Christmas outfits they probably wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. Essentially Sega is George Bailey only instead of trying to commit suicide they keep inventing new friends for Sonic. Eventually they will realise that no amount of Blaze the cat can destroy the simple joys of a pine tree mysteriously playing the NightS theme and whenever Sonic collects a ring in a game that doesn’t feature werehogs or Arthurian legend an Angel gets its wings. (Or at least a Chao)

Christmas Rating - Heavy Rain(Deer)

Christmas Bonus – New ideas for Sonic friends
Prentox the Vulture, Logarithm the studious porcupine and Uriko the Half Beast.

Christmas NightS into Dreams – A game so Christmassy that it even has Christmas in the title. Also it plays a Christmas medley while you play it, everything is made of candy canes and presents and all the unlockables are called “Christmas presents”. This would be the perfect Christmas game if only NightS: Journey into Dreams hadn’t changed our perception of the main character from a mute dream sprite to a transsexual jester.

Christmas Rating – 9 Lords a Leaping Lizards Mario adventure book.
Christmas Bonus – A fond reminiscence of NightS pinball on Sonic Adventure.

Dance Dance Revolution: Euro Mix – Does one Christmas song qualify a game as Christmassy? The real question is how many Christmas songs does Rock Band have? I don’t know as I have never played it but what I do know is that someone should start a Facebook campaign to get Silent Hill to Christmas number one.

Christmas Rating – Let it project Snowblind
Christmas Bonus – A Christmas joke
                        Q. What did you get for Christmas?
                        A. Presents!

The Sims 2 – You can potentially force your electronic slaves to have Christmas every day as there is no calendar in the Sims or if there is it is in Simlish so instead of Christmas it would be called “Melcranks”. EA went so far as to release a special Christmas edition of the Sims but so far as I could tell it was just the bog standard Sims with a houseplant reskinned as a Christmas tree. Still “Beggars can’t be juicsters” and its always fun to see a family dressed a teddy bears give each other presents while the youngest cries for help in a room with no doors or windows.

Christmas Rating – Merry Christmas (Warcraft is over)
Christmas Bonus - Q.What is John Simm's favourite game? A. SimmPsons road rage.


The moral of the story is that more games should feature Christmas either in the form of DLC for Trauma Centre where you have to do a c-section in a stable or a game based on the Santa Clause 3 where you can press a button to make Jack Frost keep saying “I INVENTED CHILL!”

Gears of War?

2010-10-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

Is Gears of War retro? Maybe not but if I don't keep going who will? Not Patrick Moore as he's too busy giving out cheats on the Mario advert.
- R.LaFemme

My first attempt at enjoying ‘popular’ computer games resulted in me firing my copy of Modern Warfare onto the dual carriageway.* So you would think I would have more sense than to dive back into the ‘American Shooting’ genre that makes up 90% of the Xbox catalogue. However I am nothing if not ‘sense-less’ and so dived straight into playing the most popular Xbox game that isn’t Halo of all time – Gears of War.

Right away I should say that Gears of War is probably the most homoerotic game I have ever played, a bold claim considering I used to own pit fighter. A less experienced reviewer might claim it was the most homoerotic thing they had never experienced, but they obviously don’t remember the time that guy kept putting his arm around them and telling them how funny they were. I’m guessing the main market for this game is sexually confused teenage boys who enjoy seeing men’s veins bulging out of their thick necks. You can definitely identify with the characters as the entire game revolves around them trying to deny their homosexuality by pointing phallic objects at other big men or getting inside them with chainsaws. I’m glad to say that by the end of the game the four main characters have killed enough men to feel comfortable rolling around on the grass with each other and having a bit of a play fight. The moral of the story is that there is nothing wrong with being gay but watching four fantasy muscle men kill things does not make you gay because violence is excellent – especially violence against equally muscular men.

Just remember, because this is a modern game you have to do everything as a ‘squad’ because one person fighting all those monsters would be a ludicrous proposition but one person and three unreliable idiots doing it is perfectly feasible. Your ‘Squad’ does change a little bit, but mostly you know that it can never go over four so if an extra person joins you someone else is going to get ‘done in’. This seems to happen early on in the game to demonstrate how bad war is (very bad) but near the end it doesn’t happen because of marketing. So who are the members of your muscleman squad? Allow me to introduce them and pretend they have distinct personalities.

Mark – Mark is the main character who starts of in prison for unknown crimes. (Killing his wife) however in times of war they need every man they can get, especially men who have spent all their time in prison taking steroids and learning how to talk in a gruff voice. Luckily Mark already has lots of war experience (from killing his wife) and it doesn’t take him long to get back into the swing of things. His main motivation is to escape the memory of so many prison rapes by throwing grenades into big holes.

Dom – Dom’s real name is Dominic but he likes to go by ‘Dom’ in honour of Dom Jolly. He is the main assistant of Mark and spends a lot of time looking at him adoringly. He dose mention that he has a wife but if he can’t be that bothered about her or he wouldn’t be spending all his time hanging around with men.

Whiney Man – I can’t remember the name of the whiney man because he wasn’t grotesquely muscular enough to be worth remembering. He does however look an awful lot like Cid from FF7 only instead of swearing and driving space ships with faulty oxygen tanks he makes fantastic wisecracks. The whiney man seems to spend a lot of time making funny jokes about how there are not enough women about but secretly he’s just making sure everyone is on the same page. (The page of man love)

Coal – In my humble opinion Coal is the most hateful character in all of computer games, even more so than the prince from Warrior Within. He looks absurdly inhuman even compared to his muscle-bound comrades but more importantly he is VERY ugly. Coal loves killing things and he is often found telling everyone about how great he is at fighting and how he can’t wait to find some more men to ‘get’ with his chainsaw gun. One day he will realise that he can connect with men in ways other than fighting them but until that day comes he remains the world’s most irritating virtual space soldier.

The game itself is basically Phantasy Star Online but instead of RPG elements you can stand behind things and instead of leaving behind meseta the enemies leave behind blood. Also every character is a ranger. It is most like Phantasy Star Online in that enemies keep appearing from nowhere and then the music goes “ten ten ten ten TEN TEN TEN” to make the atmosphere more tense. Also a lot of the levels are underground caves so you could play those and pretend you were on the caves level of Phantasy Star Online or you could just play the caves level of Phantasy Star Online. The choice is up to you.

Fans of Gears of War (Known as Gearophiles) might accuse me of being slightly unfair as the main point of the game are its cooperative elements. i.e. yet another game relying on your own social interactions to make up for its failings. I tried playing the co-op with Brother Jonas Bruner but he was constantly getting killed or trying to chainsaw me in the back. If anything it was even less fun as was continually making racist remarks or talking about Saint Seiya: The Hades.

My main disappointment with this game was that because it was called ‘Gears of War’ I thought all the enemies would be cog robots and gear operated spiders. However the enemies aren’t cog robots at all they are just more muscular men. Furthermore the heroes work for an organisation called COG but they do not seem to operate any clockwork style machinery. The only cog you ever see is the one representing the mysterious health system, what’s wrong with a health bar epic megagames? Also why is the ability to run named ‘roadie run’? how is it different from normal running?

Overall I give this game a COG soldier out of an annoying car bit.

* Thought for the day: Does Call of Duty have anything to do with Call of Juarez? Also how come the spellchecker accepts Juarez as a word?

Capcom Fighting Game Mega-review (EX + Alpha)

2010-09-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

If you are enjoying the slow trickle of Capcom scrolling beat-em-ups from the Retro prefect then you will probably find this comprehensive review of one on one Capcom beat-em-ups adequate. Enjoy children.

- R.Lafemme

The Capcom meetings

Annual Meeting - 01/12/1999

Captain Christopher Om (Chairman in charge of going for broke): Well men, so far our plan of releasing a good game every five years and then killing it with spin offs is going very well. In fact we are so rich that we can afford to erase the Street Fighter film from everyone’s memory and by that I mean kill everyone that has seen it. Can anyone think of any other way to make lots of money, or as I like to call it “woman bait”.

Terrence Bonne: (Chief of triumph or die): Well sir there is a new console coming out called the Dreamcast. I’m sure it’s going to be a big hit because it’s made by the same people as the Sega Saturn AND it has a memory card with a screen. Perhaps we should release thousands of 2d fighting games and hope that they suddenly come back into favour.

Captain Christopher Om: Good idea Terrence, get on it right away. I’m off to stop the art department wasting pencils on drawing new sprites for Morrigan. If it was good enough for Darkstalkers it’s good enough for Marvel Vs Capcom!

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2002

Captain Christopher Om: Well our strategy of releasing thousands of fighting games for the Dreamcast has left us floundering. Why is this?

Megan Mann (Officer for facing it straight.): Well Sir it wasn’t a total failure as testing indicates that nobody noticed the Dreamcast pad was totally unsuited to fighting games. The trouble is that nobody noticed because only three people actually bought a Dreamcast and they just used them to go on the Dreamarena chat rooms.*

Captain Christopher Om: Well, can anyone get us out of this mess?

Ross O’ Vulcano (1,2,THE END administrator): Well sir we could release a very average game called Devil May Cry that for some reason people will pretend is amazing. Also we can release loads of other games that are a little bit like it but that people wont pretend are amazing. That’s sure to put us back on track.

Captain Christopher Om: Well that sounds good but what about our rich fighting game heritage?

Ross O’Vulcano: Fuck it

Sue Dario 51 ( Visiting advisor in charge of “Ahh Garcien”): Also we should make a game called Killer 7 that no one will buy.

Captain Christopher Om: Good plan, lets get started.

*As an exciting aside, our very own Uncle Pete was thrown out of the Dreamarena chat room for repeatedly typing “Edit the Fantasy”

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2005

Captain Christopher Om: Un Forastero!

Megan Mann: Where’s everybody going, bingo!?

Annual Meeting – 01/12/2009

Captain Christopher Om: Well I think we’ve finally released a version of Street Fighter 2 for everything powered by electricity. What should we do now?

Ross O’Vulcano: Why don’t we bring out Street Fighter 3 for everything powered by electricity?

Captain Christopher Om: No, Ross. I think releasing it for the Dreamcast and the X-box is good enough.

Ross O’Vulcano: But Sir, the controllers….

Captain Christopher Om: NO! People must never be able to easily perform Tyrant Slaughter!

Dr Ian Dark (Manager of feeling it coming over me and feeling it all around me.): Sir why don’t we bring out a NEW version of Street Fighter?

Captain Christopher Om: But we haven’t made a fighting game for ages, what if we’ve lost our Capcom magic?

Dr Ian Dark: It’s fine sir it’s been so long since we released a fighting game that no one will realise if its rubbish, even if we put less characters in it than previous games!

Geese Thompson (SNK spy pretending to be chief of can anyone stop this fighting machine?)
: Oh also instead of putting in lots of characters that people like we could make up some really bland new ones.

Captain Christopher Om: That’s a great idea but I think we should make one look incredibly fat and grotesque so no one will ever want to pick them.

Geese Thompson: Hah! Predictable!

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2010

Captain Christopher Om: Well Street Fighter IV is currently selling better than ‘loaf’, despite being inferior to nearly every fighting game we have ever made.

Ron Lento (Head of in Japan Mike Tyson is called Bega): It turns out that people will buy anything so long as it has fancy graphics! I think now is the time to make a new version of Marvel Vs Capcom…but with far less characters than previous editions.

Geese Thompson: Oh and you should character spaces with characters from games that people don’t really care about like Viewtiful Joe, Onimusha 4, Megaman Legends , Lost Planet or Dead rising. That makes far more sense than putting in characters like Strider or Salazar.

Captain Christopher Om: Good idea Geese, we certainly wouldn’t want to appeal to our fans.

Megan Mann: Well as long as Shuma Gorath is in it I don’t mind.

Ron Lento: Yes, Shuma Gorath is the most important character in the Marvel universe and definitely a fan favourite.

Ross O’Vulcano: I love Shuma Gorath

Everyone except Geese Thompson: MYSTIC STARE

Geese Thompson: Raging Sto…

Captain Christopher Om: GET OUT

Despite my extensive ramblings on the subject of SNK I must confess that my true Fighting love is and always will be the might Capcom. They might have left nearly a ten year gap between Street fighters three and four but as the chicken said in Robin Hood “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. In any case that was punishment for buying Guilty Gear XX. In order to prove my devotion to Capcom I will now recount every Capcom fighting franchise I can remember playing i.e. a lot. As a fun game why not try to count how many of them reuse the Morrigan sprite? (All of them)

Street Fighter II (Turbo/NewChallengers/EX Revival/HD remix)
The original and best? Probably not as the selection of character is poor and Sagat is ludicrously difficult to beat. Street Fighter II was definitely brilliant, but that was in the olden days if you tried to play it now you would just spend all your time trying to work out how to assign a groove to your character (you can’t) or how to do your supermove (you don’t have a super move) or waiting for the announcer to say “Face it straight, triumph…or die!” (he doesn’t say “Face it straight, triumph or …die”). In spite of its problems Street Fighter 2 has been released for anything that can play games, except for the DS because a ‘A hadouken with stylus is about as good as listening to the wireless’. The versions are all pretty similar but I have a particular fondness for the SNES version and it’s huge black bars across the top and bottom of the screen. Still at least I wasn’t like Uncle Benjy playing the knacked Megadrive version, it might well have had the new challengers but you also had to press start to alternate between punch and kick on the standard Megadrive pad. In the end it’s hard to dislike a game that features a bonus stage where you kick barrels and detailed images of your characters mangled face on the continue screen.

I must also give special mention to the fact that Cousin Lone Soldier (almost ten years my senior) insisted repeatedly that I would never beat him at Street Fighter II and then I did. This left him shamefaced saying “Well you won’t beat my brother’s girlfriend”. Because his brother didn’t exist we will never know if this was true. What we do know is that when I was faced with a similar challenge from young cousin Grocery Storer we defeated him soundly by constantly using M.Bison’s psycho crusher. It may seem petty to reduce a child to tears by constantly ramming into him while surrounded by psycho power, but it’s the only way he will ever learn! I later utilised this technique to destroy a small child in a branch of Gamestation.

For this reason I will award Street Fighter II a well deserved “I am the strongest women in the world” out of a “Go home and be a family man”.

Street Fighter III (Massive Attack, Double Impact, Third Strike)
“Make your first move, so what’s it gonna be? Welcome to the new world of Street Fighter III”
The apparent black sheep of the Street Fighter family, if you ever ask a Capcom employee about Street Fighter III they say “What Street Fighter III?” and then run away. For reasons best known to themselves Capcom restricted access to Street Fighter III to the following platforms 1. Dreamcast. 2. All four copies of the X-box version of Street Fighter anniversary collection BUT NOT the Playstation 2 version. 3. An arcade cabinet in the Barnsley Odeon.
   It’s unknown why Capcom didn’t whore out Street Fighter III like they did with every other game they ever produced. (Even Megaman got a re-release on the virtual console.) Maybe they were ashamed of how they tried to look all cool on third strike by hiring a rapper to do the music. “Let’s get it on yeah. Select and make your first pick. Let’s get it on yeah. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6” More likely is that people complained at the absence of Zangief, Hugo is just as craggily and useless just give him a chance! In fact Street Fighter III featured only four Street Fighter regulars (Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Chun Li) causing people to become confused and frightened. If they had only looked deeper they would have seen that the newcomers were all brilliant (except Q, Twelve and Necro who were awful). Special mentions have to go to Makoto who I am surprisingly adept at using, Alex the worlds first none rubbish wresting character, Dudley the worlds first none rubbish boxing character who as a bonus is incredibly posh and Urien who looks like Kramer from Seinfeld. (He is constantly Tyrant slaughtering the door down and saying “These pretzels are making me Aeigs Reflector”)
As the game that first introduced the concept of scarring DNA with the mark of your dignity I am proud to offer Street Fighter III a solid “Lets fight like Gentleman” out of a parrying system that sounds good but is in reality too difficult to use.

Street Fighter Alpha (1,2,3, Max, Upper, Saiko Edition)
I used to love Street Fighter Alpha 3, I really did. It had a character roster that grew with each release (my pet hate is fighting games where certain characters are removed so there is never an ‘ultimate’ version. I’m looking at you Super Smash Brothers.) Had a load of different modes including a decent single player world tour mode, characters had proper endings, there were characters to unlock and above everything else there was no online multiplayer.
I played it so much that my thumb got a dent in it. Unfortunately Capcom decided to try and beat the record set by Street Fighter II for game with highest amount of pointless re-releases. Granted I didn’t HAVE to buy them all but if I didn’t I might have missed out on being able to play as Eagle in the Game Boy advance version! To add insult to injury Capcom then reused the Alpha sprites so many times that the original drawings eventually went on fire. My verdict must thus be that while Street Fighter Alpha is great I cannot even bring myself to think about it anymore. It is therefore awarded an honourable “It’s all about your skills” out of a “Can anybody stop this fighting machine?”

Darkstalkers (1, 2, 3, Chaos Tower)
Imagine Street Fighter but instead of Street Fighters it was monsters i.e. Vampire, Werewolf, Bee Woman. That game would be called “Monster Fighting – on the street” and it would be a blatant rip off of Darkstalkers.
   Darkstalkers has never been Capcom’s most popular series, but in my mind it certainly has a lot of things going for it. Most of those things are related to the abundant lesbian erotic imagery provided by Morrigan and Lillith, but we can also recommend Darkstalkers in the basis of Demitri having a special attack where he forces opponents to change sex and then rapes them (if they are already female he changes them into a schoolgirl) and Vampire lord Jedah who’s main form of attack is laughing at opponents and then molesting them with pink tentacles. I’m elaborating slightly and most of this business goes on behind closed doors but there is definitely something slightly seedy about playing Darkstalkers, which is why I keep my copy well hidden. (Inside the case for Battle Raper 2)
   So is Darkstalkers any good as a fighting game? Well it’s probably average at best but to young men like I used to be such concerns are irrelevant. What’s really important is that you get a story mode where you can level up your chosen fighter indefinitely. I don’t think there is anything more satisfying than levelling up J.Talbain to the point where he can just constantly use his giant dragon firing attack. Constant performing of the half circle towards and punch certainly creates some interesting looking finger craters and it is for this reason I award Darkstalkers a Bishamon out of a Raptor also has a mouth in his stomach.

Plasma Sword (Star Gladiator)
Here is a joke the Retro Prefect told us “You can Bill stein but you can’t Hayato” I don’t understand this joke because I only played Plasma Sword on two occasions before realising it was utter rubbish and also because it makes no sense. For some reason he decided to play Plasma Sword quite a lot and as a result we can only assume his brain became slightly mangled. Plasma Sword is the sequel to Star Gladiator which I haven’t played at all but I can make this joke about “Did you hear about Bill Stein he was (Star) Glad he ate her!” The moral of the story is that Plasma Sword was an attempt to make Soul Calibur in space but it ended up more like masters of Teras Kasi. i.e. rubbish and forgotten. I cant award it anymore than a solitary Arden Lynn out of Jodo Kast but what I can do is make some more jokes.

Q. What’s the difference between Hayato and Black Hayato?
A. Black Hayato makes this look good!

Q. How many toes does Hayato have?
A. Three…a left toe, a right toe and a wild Hayatoe!

Q. What’s the different between Bilstein and a Piano?
A. You can Tuna Stein but you can’t Bil Piano!

Street Fighter EX (+alpha 2, 3)
Street Fighter EX is easily the greatest of the series. It may be slow and ugly as sin but it makes up for it by sheer force of personality. It’s only a shame that the EX characters are never allowed to make their way into the mainstream series because people are missing out on the likes of…
* Allen Snider: What Street Fighter was really missing was a Ryu clone wearing a purple gi and sporting a ginger bowl cut. Although to be fair this one has opted to learn the forward thrusting “Justice Fist” instead of the more traditional Shoryuken uppercut. Never before has an Allen been so fearsome.
* Doctorine Dark: Known as D.Dark by his friends. Doctorine is an insane war veteran who’s special moves involve tying people up with bits of string and then cutting them with knives. In his spare time Doctorine likes to lay down bundles of dynamite while proclaiming “explosive.” Does he have a brother called Nectarine? Only time will tell.
* Vulcano Rosso: Vulcano is obsessed with volcanoes, so much so that all his special moves are named after volcanoes. The only problem is he can’t spell Volcano! (Also he can sort of levitate)
* Darun Mister: Darun comes from an alternate universe where Zangief was born in India and has a wonky moustache. Is that a spinning piledriver? By no means it’s called the Ganges DDT and I INVENTED IT. Darun is so sick of people comparing him to Zangief that the pupils have disappeared from his eyes but it doesn’t mean he can’t tell how fetching he looks in his big gold belt and tiny orange trunks. The real question is “Darun Mister or Mister Darun”
The reasons for these characters not appearing in Street Fighter Iv have never been revealed but needless to say I shall be writing a stern letter to Capcom demanding that Cracker Jack be made the main character of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Until that happens I will console myself with the presence of a photo of Mr T on M.Bison’s stage and award the EX series a Cycloid Gamma out of a Cycloid Beta.

P.S The EX series features the best stage music, especially the Charlie Brown jazz on Guile’s stage.

Tech Romancer
At the tender age of 16 I was first able to experience ‘romance’. At the time I was living in the area of Europe with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy but I still managed to avoid this romance comprising a bit of clumsy fumbling with a drunken girl. How did I manage to miss the veritable orgy of virulent, underage sex happening right outside my window? Easy, I never left the house. How then did I first enter the world of adult affairs? Through the Capcom window that was Tech Romancer for the Dreamcast!

I should probably point out that when I say “Romance” I actually mean “big robots fighting each other”.

That’s because Tech Romancer was a fighter revolving around parodies of various famous giant robots that no one in England is aware of.
As a lvl 5 geek I was vaguely aware that Pulsion sort of looked like it could be from Evangelion and I was able to deduce that G-Kaiser was a parody of whatever Gekigangar was also a parody of. (Thanks for showing two anime series Sci -fi channel!) however with robots such as Dianna-17 and Rafaga I knew only that I had seen something like them in the ‘adult animation’ section of HMV. That and Blodia who seems to feature in loads of games despite Cyberbots itself being a load of old rubbish.

Was Tech Romancer any good? Well it was impossibly slow but that didn’t matter because giant robots are slow but it also featured some very accurate mecha anime sound effects and explosions which made up for its failings. More important it had a mangleated name which meant every review at the time sported a “No this isn’t a game about sex with ipods..” type joke.

For this reason I give it a Wiseduck out of a Twinzam V.

Rival Schools (Project Justice)
How is it that the ‘Music Industry’ is constantly complaining about copyright infringement and yet is perfectly happy to thieve other people’s intellectual property? The band “Hadouken!” very rarely sing songs about fireballs and I don’t think that Robots in Disguise would be approved of by Galvatron. Worst of all is the band Rival Schools who forced Rival Schools 2 to be called ‘Project Justice’ and to my knowledge released no songs about the bizarre Kyoko’s office minigame. If music would accept its proper place in the entertainment hierarchy i.e. below anything that has images AND sounds then perhaps we would be getting more games in the Rival Schools series. Instead we get Lady Gaga flashing her private zones to distract from her broken face, where is the (project) justice in that?

In any case Rival Schools is a wonderful reminder or my own school days when I would wander around with my friends getting into fights with children from other schools and occasionally performing team up attacks on them. It may sound cliché but your school days really are the best days of your life, especially when the head boy starts waving a sword around and mind controlling students into being well behaved. I also remember the various mini games we used to play such as “Home run”, “Penalty Shoot” and “Volleyball against cardboard targets” they certainly seemed to make the days last longer even if they did appear out of context. In Japan the game featured a “School Life mode” which centred around character creation, minigames, violence and dating simulation. This mode was pulled from the western release because the English speaking world cannot cope with pretending to chat up Japanese schoolgirls; we are however perfectly equipped to smash them in the face with a baseball bat. Again this recalls my own schooldays as I could never pluck up the courage to talk to girls but I could certainly throw knives at them while laughing hysterically.

For these reasons I am awarding Rival Schools a Raizo out of a Fletcher.

Power Stone (1,2, collection)
“A good beginning may lead to a perfect ending…go for it”
Wise words from the people behind Power stone, a game with much to teach. Mainly those things involve shouting “POWERFUL” whenever you collect a Power Stone but also extend to knowing that you can create a bubble gun by fusing together a ray gun and an umbrella.

This wisdom is wrapped up in what is basically a version of Smash Brothers but with coherent art design. Unfortunately the power of Nintendo and their mascots (i.e. Mario, Evil Mario, Mario’s Brother, Dr Mario and Fox McCloud) is such that no one has even heard of Power Stone. That’ll learn Capcom for making games for the Dreamcast and then re-releasing them for the PSP. To be honest Power Stone isn’t really up therewith Sango Fighter, for sure it’s fun in multiplayer but so is sex and you don’t see me giving that good reviews. (Although the ladies always give it 5g’s eh readers!)

For these reasons I’m giving Power Stone a slightly disappointing Galuda out of Mr Game and Watch.

Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness
Rumour has it that Cyberbots was originally slated to feature only ‘partial metal madness’ but top bosses at Capcom felt that nothing less than Full Metal Madness would appeal to the discerning beat‘em up fan. As it was the game was never released outside of Japan due to strict EU regulations on the portrayal of alloy based mental disorders. Luckily I was able to acquire a dubious copy from my local Cash Converter, the shop of choice for thieves and drug addicts alike. My copy of Cyberbots was mysterious in many ways, the badly photocopied inserts made it clear that this was a pirate game but then the actual disc looked genuine. By far the biggest mystery was that it contained a cover insert for Darkstalkers with a phone number on it. We were eventually able to convince an Irishman to call the number in the hopes of getting a copy of Red Earth. Unfortunately the number had been disconnected and so the mysteries of the Cyberbots disc went unsolved.

As for the game itself I’m afraid that my attempts to solve its mystery were far more interesting than the act of playing it. It turned out that Cyberbots was nothing but a poor mans Gundam Battle Assualt and it’s a very poor man indeed that can’t afford Gundam Battle Assault. Therefore I’m giving Cyberbots a Zaku out of a Zeong.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
If you enjoy seeing 80’s pop stars have their imaginary friends attack each other then you’re sure to enjoy Jojo’s Bizarre adventure. Your appreciation might be improved further if you also enjoy highly unbalanced game play and side stories about people trying to hide bombs in oranges.
   To explain properly – Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is based on the 3rd volume of the manga of the same name. It revolves around highly effeminate young men who can summon ‘special friends’ called Stands which they use to drop tractors onto each other. Unfortunately the powers of these stands don’t really match up to each other so poor old paedophile Allesi with his ability to turn people into children so that he might better molest them dosent stand up to the likes of Jotaro Kujo who merely punches rapidly while shouting “Ora ora ora ora ora”. The playstation version of the game kept the Retro prefect busy for many hours with its full featured story mode, unfortunately I was cursed with the arcade perfect Dreamcast version which sacrificed the story mode for better animation and a few special attacks that were too violent for the impresionable playstation audience. Personally I would have preferred the mini game where you have to throw iron bars at a monkey captain.

Therefore I must award JoJo’s bizarre adventure an Emerald Splish out of an Emerald Splash.

Marvel Series (X-men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Superheroes, Marvel Superheroes VS Street Fighter, X-men vs. Street fighter, Marvel Vs Capcom, Marvel Vs Capcom 2)
There really isn’t a lot of point in playing any of the games in this series other than Marvel Vs Capcom 2 as it’s was essentially produced by Capcom throwing the sprites from those games at each other and then adding a few more Darkstalkers characters and a cactus man. It certainly made sense for Capcom to waste all that time inventing new cactus based characters rather than including favourites from other Capcom games. Who wants to play as Jedah when you could have a space filled up on the character select screen by Ruby Heart?

The odd choices extend to the soundtrack, with the good people at Capcom deciding that over the top battles between armour clad mad scientists and ninjas from alternate soviet controlled universes should be set to thoroughly laid back lounge jazz. A strange choice indeed but it does mean that you can easily fit Marvel Vs Capcom 2 into a sophisticated dinner party without making a scene. In fact there is nothing that makes an evening more agreeable than some lively conversation over the last of the after eights and a Hyper Viper beam. That is until that dreadful bore Anakaris butts in with his repetitious sarcophagus summoning!

Of course the ultimate problem with this game is that no one will ever be satisfied with the character line-up because everyone want’s their personal favourites to be involved. It does seem strange that obscure Dr Strange villain Shuma Gorath gets a place ahead of favourites such as the Dread Dormamu, Baron Mordo or MODOK but I’m sure all the Shuma Gorath fans were ecstatic to see his mystical staring abilities replicated so faithfully. For this reason I must award these games a Sunday best out of a Proton Cannon.

* Funny bonus joke – In Marvel VS Capcom the last boss is Onslaught the sloppy cousin from keeping up appearances!

Capcom VS SNK (1/2/EO)
A true meeting of fighting game giants, SNK made an utter mess of their version but made up for it with the cardfighter games meanwhile Capcom were charged with redrawing all the SNK characters to try and make them slightly less bland. They eventually managed it but the effort was so great that on the Capcom side they only had time to do a new sprite for M.Bison and they had to recycle the rest from Street Fighter Alpha. This means that the game ends up looking extremely scrappy especially as the poor Morrigan sprite appears to have been thrown in a skip and then rescued at the last minute. Despite this Capcom Vs SNK 2 is easily the best of the Capcom fighters and also one of the most difficult to get to grips with. However this did not stop me from beating the games prefect ten times in a row with a team made up of Blanka, Morrigan and M.Bison. An achievement so great that I was actually awarded a handsome certificate. Rumours abound that I made the certificate myself and that I was later beaten nigh on 20 times with Sagat are completely unfounded. Perhaps you should stop listening to fairy stories and do a bit more practicing!
   Again my only other quibble with Capcom VS SNK is the character lineup and by that I mean 1. Who cares about the useless woman from Final Fight 2? And 2. NO DUCK KING
Because of this I’m awarding Capcom VS SNK 2 a well deserved all man team out of Barrensburgh.

Street Fighter IV
Q. How good is the theme to Street Fighter IV?
A. So good that I paid actual money for it on itunes making it the fourth piece of music I have paid for in my life. (1. Star Wars CD, 2. FF8 Soundtrack, 3. Mandy Moore cover of senses working overtime)

So exciting was the release of a new Street Fighter game that I actually bought an X-box 360 to play it on despite the fact that the Xbox is the spiritual home of online gaming and the dreaded first person shooter. I expect buying a PS3 with its lovely d-pad would have been the more sensible decision but then I didn’t have £400 to spare. My impressions of it were that it played more or less the same as every other Street Fighter game, that it looked nice but the characters looked slightly too ‘meaty’, that the anime cut scenes had been drawn by the people that design colouring books and that the main menu was too small to see with human eyes. That isn’t to say that I disliked Street Fighter IV, I thought it was great but I couldn’t help that feel that in many ways it was a step backwards from Street Fighter III. Most of those ways being in just having all the characters from Street Fighter II in it again and having an impossible to beat last boss. Most damaging of all was the revelation that Zangief had gone from laughing stock to the most powerful character in the game – literally a world gone mad.
Speaking of Characters there weren’t nearly enough of them and the new ones all looked like SNK cast offs, that is with the exception of Rufus who is so grotesque that the man who designed him should be fired out of a cannon.

For these reasons I can only award Street Fighter IV a Fajita Buster out of a Tostada Smash.

Tatsunoko Vs Capcom
Tatsunoko VS Capcom is a game made by idiots, ACTUAL IDIOTS. Making a fighting game for the Wii is like making a fighting game for the Gamecube or N64 i.e. pointless only it’s more pointless because the Wii dosent even have a pad at all it has a Wii-mote and a nunchuck (which people always call a nunchunk for no good reason). This is why Tatsunoko VS Capcom has a messed up control system where you can’t decide whether you want to punch or kick. There is a lot of difference between hands and feet just ask ‘person with no legs’. Also Tatsunoko are a rubbish and useless company who have only made Battle of the Planets and then lots of things that look slightly like Battle of the Planets. To make up for this Capcom sabotaged their own character side with people such as “man from dead rising”, “man from Onimusha 4” and “Robot from Lost Planet.” SIGH!
   Tatsunoko vs Capcom has only two things going for it, one is the inclusion of Batsu which allows you to imagine that one day they might make a new Rival Schools game if you keep picking Batsu over and over again. The other is that it features a huge gold robot called Gold Lightan who likes to shout “Gooollllllddddd Ligghhhhhtttaaaannnnn” and whose main attack is treading on people. The Retro Prefect thinks Tatsunoko Vs Capcom is better than Street Fighter Iv but that just proves that he’s an idiot who spends too much time daydreaming about Tekkaman Blade.

I’m only giving Tatsunoko VS Capcom a Polimar out of Casshan and it’s mainly getting that because it was the last game I played before I was drafted.

Pocket Fighter
The best thing about Pocket Fighter is how I asked for it for Christmas and then whenever Uncle Pete went out I would stealth into the present cupboard and retrieve it for hours of ‘super deformed’ fun. By Christmas morning I was of course bored with it, but then I had also asked for Final Fantasy 8 and that had come in cellophane meaning I could not open it until the designated holiday. The moral of the story is that Pocket Fighter is a bit like playing a game with a “big head” mode cheat only sometimes your character will dress up as a cowboy or hit someone with a plank of wood. The other moral of the story is that the best thing about Pocket Fighter is the personality quiz which allocates you a character based on answers to multiple choice questions about your favourite weapon and whether or not you like sweets. The only question that remains is whether people who were “super deformed” would actually look like that or would just be amorphous freaks reminiscent of the elephant man?

Overall it gets a handsome Gem Fighter out of not so handsome Uncle Jem fighter.

Capcom Fighting Jam
Another brilliant jape from the men at future publishing “You may think this is a game where preserves battle each other?” Imagine the confusion when Capcom Fighting Jam did actually turn out to be about jars of jam fighting each other, except it wasn’t about that at all! It was about JARS OF JAM FIGHTING EACH OTHER. At least that’s what it said on the box but actually it was about Capcom being very lazy and making an unbalanced where the likes of strawberry jam (Ryu from Street Fighter) are smashed into the floor by a large damson jam (dinosaur). The end result can be nothing but a ‘jammy situation’. In the U.S the game was known as Capcom Fighting Evolution because the translators spent all day on the phone trying to explain the difference between jam and jelly. In the end they gave all the jelly jars to the bees and went back to trying to understand why Alex can’t air block but Hydron is a kraken that covers the entire screen.
   Fortunately Capcom Fighting Jelly is able to alleviate all its faults by featuring Jedah in a starring role. Personally we never tire of his various laughs and we like to think he is a man who enjoys his work. (His work is throwing rotating scythes at people and then smashing them onto giant contracts) Therefore I risk my professional reputation by awarding Capcom Fighting Jam a Hauzer out of a Krauzer.

So there we have it, a marathon of Capcom fisticuffs critique and what have we learned at the end of it all? Mainly that I don’t actually like fighting games and that instead of buying all this nonsense I should have been increasing my knowledge with Broderbund graphic adventures.

Captain Commando

2010-09-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Very clever of Capcom to sneak a hidden message within its game titles, take the first three letters from each word and what does that leave? That’s right! Tain Mando, the widely known bare knuckle boxer known to his fans as “The Bhutan brawler” despite being born and raised in Staffordshire…the spiritual home of fictional wrestlers. Captain Commando was Capcom’s attempt to create a popular mascot. Like Sega’s Alex Kidd this didn’t really provide a lasting memory, the lesson learned here is you can shoehorn your company’s unwanted characters in as many tennis and kart racing games as you like, people will still meet them with contempt. This is one of Capcom’s earlier attempts and it shows from the quite unashamed recycling of goons. Expect to be punching green man with pillow on head from now until the end of the game! To its credit, the offering of playable characters is somewhat more inspired than most. If the bionic captain doesn’t tickle your groin (which I’ve warned him about), then why not pick from the ninja, the mummy commando…or perhaps the mecha pilot named “Baby Head”. Perhaps owing to the fact that he is indeed a baby and I hasten to add, one with a head. Its a relatively forgettable knuckle based romp that will unlikely please fans into the long hours, not like that whore of the night that is Tetris!

Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories

2010-08-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

If you enjoy long rambling annecdotes vaguely linked to computer games and a healthy dose of casual racism then you are sure to be happy with the news that the Retro Prefect has given me the 'Key to the Kingdom' board game. (I will be playing this game later, here's hoping I'm first to the well readers!) He has also given me the 'keys' to this website so here is my first post with no editorial control whatsoever.

All the best

-R .LaFemme

New York is apparently ‘So good they named it twice’ in my opinion it has nothing to offer that old York didn’t, apart from the gun crime! Needless to say the adolescent version of me wasn’t too impressed by the Big Apple but then the only thing I have ever been properly impressed by was Jurassic Park and I later found out they weren’t real dinosaurs. What I did like about New York though was the fact that it had a giant Toys R Us featuring a model of the dinosaur from Jurassic park, a Lego Darth Vader and most importantly of all a games department full of delicious NTSC region games.

I knew this would be my only chance to ever purchase authentic American games so I had to choose carefully. Uncle Pete could only afford flights to the U.S because of September the 11th and the spectre of international terrorism wasn’t going to loom over us all forever. I had to make sure that I made a wise decision and chose games that had no chance of ever being released in the U.K. (Bear in mind that internet shopping was still an unknown quantity due to the vagaries of 56k dial up.)

How did I fare in my endeavours? I’ll let you be the judge…

* Samba De Amigo – Now released for the Wii but without the Sega game tunes. A marginal victory.

* Final Fantasy Tactics – Eventually released for the PSP but not for ages, it also featured a rubbish new translation which changed ‘Dorter Trade City’ to “The Market City of Dorter”. Another marginal victory.

* King of Fighters ’99 – SNK recovered from bankruptcy and issued compilations of everything also it’s a King of Fighters game. DISASTER.

* Yu-Gi-Oh: Forbidden Memories – Released the month after in the U.K. Another P.R disaster.

And that my friends is the ludicrous preamble to my review of a Yu-Gi-Oh! game.

Forbidden Memories was designed by a man who had obviously once seen a clip of Yu-Gi-Oh! and then blagged his way through the interview by writing the names of the cards on his hands.

Max Pegs (Chief of card HR): So where do you see yourself in five years time?

Yuri O!: Probably Black Lustre Soldier.

Max Pegs: Hmm and why do you want to work for our company in particular?

Yuri O!: Well Twin Headed Thunder Dragon, Mystical Sands.

Max Pegs: Welcome to the company!

Yuri O!: Prodigal Sorcerer!

Max Pegs: Excuse me!?

Yuri O!: I mean um…Bolt Penguin.

Max Pegs: Ha Ha Ha Ha. Very Good Yuri, I like your style!

I say this because Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories in no way matches up to the rules of the card game as seen either in the TV series or in real life. In fact the cards aren’t even card shaped they are in fact square shaped. The game revolves around trying to get the post powerful card possible by fusing different combinations together. Of course these combinations actually make no real sense so it’s just a case of experimenting and then remembering some key combinations.
So ingrained into my mind are these combinations that I can still recite them now. (An amzing feat considering that I can’t remember anything from my degree)

Pot the Trick + Nekogal = Mystical Sands (21000 atk)

Thunder Dragon + Thunder Dragon = Twin Headed Thunder Dragon (24000)

These two combinations got me through a good third of the game by which point I had acquired the all powerful B.Meteor Dragon. If you can’t afford this game then a fairly good simulation would be to imagine a picture of a Witch on a Broomstick breaking pictures of insects and bolt penguins, then imagine a picture of a dragon with two heads breaking pictures of dragons with one head and ultra bolt penguins and finally imagine a picture of a large purple dragon breaking everything. I say pictures because their were 3D representations of the cards available but they looked like they were made of twigs and took ages to load and so were immediately turned off.

It wasn’t just the game mechanics that Yuri O! Couldn’t be bothered to look up on wikipedia. He also decided to invent his own story set in Egyptian times where you must face an evil Pharaoh named “Heishinn” a man with an unfeasibly large face. This is not necessarily as bizarre as the ‘Duelist of the Roses’ game for the PS2 which casts Yugi as Henry Tudor during the war of the roses but it certainly doesn’t help matters that one of the characters is a mysterious blue fellow named ‘Simon Munran’. The questions raised by his blue skin and resolutely non Egyptian name are never sufficiently answered. I expect a sequel “Simon Munran: Unlimited” was planned but ultimately never came to pass because Max Pegs overheard Yuri O! telling his wife how much he loved the Merfolk of the Pearl Trident.

Special mention has to go to the games soundtrack which is actually some of the best music I have ever heard. Unfortunately I am unable to convey these sounds through the medium of words so you will just have to look them up on You Tube or buy the official soundtrack if such a thing exists.

The final thing to say about Yu-Gi-Oh! forbidden memories is that I finished it the very same day I was interviewed on Sky news and made the stunning pronouncement “It’s quite worrying really…basically your life is ruined.” They might have asked me about A-Level results but I was thinking about the nefarious maze inhabited by the paradox brothers!

Overall I’m giving Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories a probably undeserved Pot the Trick out of a Celtic Guardian.

Alien Vs Predator

2010-08-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Despite being responsible for many of the events within the film series, the human race seems very keen to omit themselves from every instance involving aliens and/or predators. Why is it that the first film wasn’t titled Alien vs. Humans considering that’s all it was, its only salvation is the bizarre “Batman VS Predator” comic which saw Alfred the butler save the day by shooting a Predator in the face with an antique elephant gun. Like Cadillac’s and Dinosaurs there is a choice of four characters two human and two predators, staunch xenophobes might enjoy not picking the Predator foreigners because they go around killing our jobs and being employed in our women. Speaking of women, there is a woman character…that’s that taboo deftly handled. AVP (Andrew Viper Beam) gets more hectic than the previous two titles, by the final stage you have to wonder how anyone completed this in the arcades. The simple answer is they didn’t, they went home after spending hard earned savings to face a family grown apart by an easily solved beat em’ up addiction. The only consolation is that some bozo had left 20p in the machine so the first credit only cost 30p…but from then on it was all downhill. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Alien Vs Predator is quite good.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

2010-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Cadillacs and dinosaurs had the sad misfortune of being one of those long forgotten cartoons of the 90’s, along with Swat Cats, Jem and anything that featured the phrase “...with attitude!” Understandably, simply combining Jurassic era biology with one specific brand of car seems unlikely to create lasting appeal. Proterozoic Ford Escort had tried and failed long before, but Capcom was unwilling to listen to the rumours and slander spread about the poorly received cartoon series, offering to scrap major elements of the story in exchange for a 4 player fighting romp. To Capcoms credit this worked very nicely, there is no place for story in any game involving fighting. If Street Fighter has taught us anything it’s that a set of vague reasons for kicking the shit out of ones fellow man/woman are ample justification. Save the bollocks for fan fiction writers, they’ll most likely make the Cadillac gay anyway. Cadillac’s and dinosaurs offers the largest selection of food stuffs off the ground than any other of Capcoms titles, a veritable pavement smorgasbord ranging from a single stick of gum…with all its major chewing/healing properties to a bowel punishing lobster left in the baking sun. Although a minor addition, the ability to dash helps speed up the game considerably, unless you play as the requisite hulking oaf character Mustafa, the son Popeye only ever speaks of with contempt…he never graduated from spinach school. Perhaps I would enjoy this game more if only the black man had said "Lets ditch this dino-joint" at least once

Super Sidekicks 3:The Next Glory

2010-07-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dearest friend of mine Rou La Femme began his sporting career at the prime age of 76. Being 46 at the time his ability to transcend his own age still remains a baffling scientific enigma. But his lack of physical skill never got in the way of his ability to get thrown off the pitch by fellow players and in some instances members of the crowd. I think it was the aformentioned individual who summed up the beautiful game in a single phrase "It's a ball based sport...but it aint on no court!"

Whats the story? The next Glory?

Or more accurately “Super Sidekicks 3: The Next Glory”.

Somehow I managed to let Super Sidekicks 1 and 2 pass me by and so had assumed that Super Sidekicks 3 would be the third in a series of games that followed popular Superhero sidekicks (i.e. Robin, Bucky Barnes, Rick James, Benderboy, Fabulocity X and Young Grendell) saving the world. Of course that’s a lie as “The Next Glory” came bundled on my copy of SNK Arcade classics Vol I and so I was able to observe the football related imagery long before I was able to process information relating to the title of the game. In fact I had thought it was called “SNK Grass Masters” until the retro prefect told me to review it.
Now normally I wouldn’t be playing ‘footy’ type games because they rarely feature lengthy cut scenes where Ryan Giggs try to find his true reasons for playing football.

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Back then I could get by with just grazed knees”

Reno Van: Nistleroy “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Gone talking to a wall”

Reno Van Nistleroy: “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle : “….”

Reno Van Nistleroy “….”

However I decided to give this game a go in honour of the “International Coca Cola Cup” which was happening at the time and also because the Retro Prefect had visited and we were running out of stuff to entertain him with because he is so very demanding. Not only did he keep demanding more peanut noodles but he cried for half an hour when we beat him soundly at Saint Seiya: The Hades.

I was expecting The Next Glory to look and play like Super Soccer/Sensible Soccer but in actual fact it has a strange Streets of Rage style viewpoint and Flashback style animations. Conrad Hart might not be playing on the team but the game certainly has the “hart” of rotoscoping, whatever that might be. It also has the ability to play as 64 different teams, I know this because I looked it up on wikipedia. I cannot comment as to whether these teams actually exist or were wearing the correct heraldry (I know there is a team called England but I thought they had pictures of Jeremy Irons on their shirts) but the ability to play as many now defunct African countries always brings a smile to my face. I believe that the players are nameless in order to match their featureless faces but they do manage to differentiate themselves by having slightly different haircuts and skin tones. How do they see the ball without eyes? The same way they manage to make racist remarks without mouths – telepathy!

It isn’t just the unique and slightly disturbing running animations that separate the next glory from the Fifa Street 2’s of this world it’s also the fact that the games last mere seconds as way for SNK to force you into putting more coins in the slot. Worst of their money grabbing tactics is the fact that you effectively have to pay to decide the outcome of a match as after your time runs out you must pay the price and select a rematch, penalties or sudden death. A rematch is pointless as goal scoring is largely impossible due to the restrictive time limits and the fact that it is impossible to actually get the ball into the net without first kicking the ball at the goalkeepers head and briefly concussing him and then stepping over his comatose body to deliver the coup de grace. Sudden Death is perhaps the best value option as you must continually play until someone gets a goal, unfortunately this will never happen even if you try and let the other person win because the Goals Guardian is always AI controlled. Eventually you will be thrown out of the arcade because the manager wants to go home, but not before he presents you with a miniature plastic arcade cabinet for your collection. The best option is of course penalties as this gives you a nice penalty kicking mini game where you get to look at the back of your mans leg as he decided where indeed to kick the ball. A good tactic is to constantly tell your opponent that you are “going left” and then pretend that actually you aren’t going to go left but then you go left anyway. This only fails if they also decide that the goalkeeper should go left but the chances of that are 1/3 i.e. unlikely.
The game also gives you the option to empower your team with different abilities such as “speed” “teamwork” and “power” none of these make a noticeable difference apart from speed as it allows you to constantly run into your opponents and steal the ball by virtue of phasing through them at high speed. Again I don’t know how true to life this feature is although I do hear that Wayne Ronstok always selects ‘Teamwork’ when fighting against the Gargons.

What really elevate the next glory to the upper echelons is the amazingly rendered goal celebrations. These often feature images of your team, apparently illustrated by the man who does pictures for crime watch. My personal favourite is where two players psycho crusher towards one another at high speed but we must also give special mention to the image of the player with the huge rectangular body being hoisted aloft by his team mates. There are others but much like the antics of Confuser Gaz they are beyond my ability to explain.

So as far as football games go The Next Glory is probably the best I have played. The only other football game I have ever played is the one that came with Klik’n’Play featuring inly four players on each team and an incredibly interfering ref. Still The Next Glory never features a man limply saying “It’s a goal” whenever the ball gets into the net so you can’t have everything. For these reasons I would like to award The Next Glory three Bull Boy Shoes out of a Gareth Southgate.

The Punisher

2010-07-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Fans may be familiar with the Marvel comic’s series of the same name, a series which is yet to appear on any of the Capcom VS games despite Frank Castle’s potential for many infuriating projectile attacks. When playing this with friends, the second player has the unfortunate fate of controlling pre black Nick Fury. While filmgoers may have an image of the S.H.I.E.L.D captain as the smooth talking mother who enjoys acronyms of defensive items, the 90’s saw Mr. Nicholas as a middle aged heavy smoker sporting a memorable beige top and matching boots….very autumn! The punisher is definitely the one of the better beat em ups owing to the surprisingly violent nature of the game, it also features a number of drug references that went over my head as a child and came swooping back to scar my mind years later…a mental boomerang if you will. To see the potential damage such a concept can cause, just look at the Australians.

Retro Prefect in: Capcoms non stop coin-op…post op

2010-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Capcom headquarters annual meeting (1989)

Madelyn Von Geargang (Chickens under barrels division): News just in folks, Final Fight just hit the arcades and it’s a big hit, pun intended!

Roland Toe (Supervisor of giant hooks): Even though it clearly steals everything from Double Dragon except for the inclusion of a shemale accompanying a lumbering retard?

Madelyn Von Geargang: The shemale rumours are unconfirmed, and besides…people steal our ideas all the time!

Gordon Axe 2 (Senior Gilius Thunderhead): If I change Cody to Axel, no one will ever know!

Madelyn Von Geargang: In light of this revived interest in the scrolling beat em up/ street em up/ beat em street/ breet em strup…I think we should look into it further, any ideas?

Harry Gar (Former mayor and pipe user): How about we reuse the same game engine on several established franchises over the course of the early to mid 90’s?

Madelyn Von Geargang: Give that man a pipe!

Roland Toe: But my area is small rotating sticks…

Madelyn Von Geargang: I said give that man a pipe!

Anyone who ventured the arcades, or took to illegal emulation several years after their decline will remember that the 90’s was the age of the scrolling beat em up, a game which due to the necessity of 3-D in anything new has effectively marked its demise. Over the course of several years, Capcom was able to gain the rights to a number of popular franchises and somehow shoehorn a lift stage and pipes as weapons into them all.

Over the course of this month, I shall be unleashing several smaller Beat em up reviews as a means of writing less, but making it look like I’m doing far more. It may one day reach the point were I start using bullet points

Comic effect!

Metamorphic Force

2010-07-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

BEAST! No, I haven't taken to shouting Kelsey Grammer on screen portrayals for laughs and giggles as you might assume. Rou La Femme has once again exhumed that bloated videogame corpse of the past in an attempt to provide a post mortem to the grieving gamers of yesterday. Or words to that effect....FRAISER!

Lets face it sports are absolutely rubbish and useless. That’s why football players are always gang raping people out of boredom. Cricket has serious lag problems, Tennis features some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard, the draw distance on weightlifting is atrocious and (get ready for the joke) certain characters in gymnastics are hugely UNBALANCED!!!!!

Despite all this, local sports and leisure complex the Metrodome stands as a pinnacle of human endeavour (in Barnsley). As expected all the sports stuff in there - football courts, boxing castles etc are rubbish but the Metrodome also has several high points such as a wicked wave machine, a sort of anti gravity water slide, the Rigby Suite Carvery and best of all proper arcade machines. Arcade machines with joysticks and buttons that don’t cost £2 a go or require you to make use of a plastic guitar/gun/dance podium/horse. Although they did for a while have the wonderfully dangerous version of Super Hang On where the main challenge is not falling of a steam powered bike. Games were rotated on a fairly regular basis and included favourites such as The Punisher, The Avengers and the slightly disappointing Raiden II. (Disappointing as it didn’t feature a man in a cat basket hat flying across the screen shouting “Aramawoggi”) Burning brighter than all these though was a hidden classic, the undeservedly forgotten Metamorphic Force.

Like all arcade games in the early 90’s Metamorphic force was a scrolling beat em’up, however it had an amazing twist in that it also ripped off the ‘turning into animals’ mechanic of Altered Beast. The trick being that Altered Beast was essentially and unplayable mess with funny voice acting and confusing sexual undertones whereas Metamorphic Force was not only brilliant fats paced and colourful but featured sprites the size of a babies head. What I gleaned of the plot from the arcade attract screen was that some huge ethereal woman in a toga had chucked four guys with animal transformation powers down onto the world in order to do in a load of bipedal animals. I would guess that these animal men were the bad guys as they were mostly baddie animals i.e Frogs/Lizards/Goats they also employed baddie weaponry such as Tridents, Curvy Swords, axes and shields with pictures of skellingtons on them.

You had a choice of four men with which to force these animals into extinction.
They were –

Ivan
A huge mustachioed Russian guy who fought with a log and appeared to have based his fighting style on the bit in chucklevison where old chuckle would swing round with a beam and smack younger chuckle in the face. “Oh dear Oh Dear brother Barry, looks like another trip to the hospital. What do you tell the doctors?” “I walked into a door brother Paul, I’m sorry for being so clumsy” “That’s right brother Barry because you don’t want to split up the family do you? What would mother think!?” Upon collecting a golden statue more than slightly reminiscent of an Oscar Ivan would transform into a bear man and the phrase “BEAST” would emanate from the Arcade machine at ear destroying volume. Needless to say as an impressionable youth I had hours of fun yelling “BEAST!” at people and then cursing my inability to assume an animal form and fight back as they kicked me in the shins.

Max
A mysterious character that turned into a black panther and campaigned for racial equality in extreme ways. No one ever picked him due to Panthers being such a rubbish animal, but I believe his fighting method was “bear knuckles” a wise choice against a heavily armed chameleon.

Ban
Ban, Ban, Ban is a kung fu man. He is also the most boring and generic character – reminding everyone of Axel from Streets of Rage or Cody from Final Fight. Upon attaining beast status he turns into an Ox – the dullest of all animals. In my eyes he should have been ban(ned) from the game.

Claude
Calude is an effeminate French swordfighter and also the best character in the game, if not the best character in any game. He noodles around the battlefield in jodhpurs and a frilly shirt showing off his long blond hair and occasionally stabbing a toad in a loin cloth. Upon achieving the coveted beast form Claude would become a metrosexual wolf with impeccable finger nails. The best thing about Claude though was that if you left his standing still for a bit his idle animation consisted of him flicking and fluffing up his perfect hair. I still hope to one day see Claude become the spokesman/wolf for herbal essences.

Special mention also has to go to the bonus item drop character who looked like one of those sinister Mickey Mouse toys they have in foreign grabber machines. Mostly under names such as “Michael the Disney style rodent friend” or “Uncle Walt’s Lunar Rat”. This mouseman would scurry along the screen with a swag bag of bonus statues which he would be forced to drop when you gave him the beating he so richly deserved. At first you feel a bit sorry for poor messenger mouseman as he has been cursed to be bottom of the animal/man hybrid foodchain. However he just keeps coming back with more statues so we can only conclude that he was a rich pervert who didn’t mind losing a few of his gold statues so long as you would hurt him like the bitch he was.

Overall this game featured graphics, sounds, music, an impossible goat boss at the end of the first level who rather prophetically stated “You will never beat me”, and an impossibly cool French Werewolf. Therefore I would give it Claude Greengrass out of Jean Claude Van Damme.

Poy Poy 2

2010-07-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you who enjoyed poy poy (the first) to the extent that you thought it necessitated a sequel , then I can conclude you've either lived a sheltered gaming life, playing exclusively on unwanted copies of power piggs, skullmonkeys and a variety of other sub-par anthropomorphic titles; or more likely you don't actually exist. Its a shame to see that the 'crate throwing' genre never really took off as it had potential to move into other hybrid areas such as 'first-person crate throwing' and 'crate em-ups'. The latter purely for the opportunity of an announcer saying "Crate combo!".

Poy poy 2 struggles to be anything other than four people throwing things in a confined space, effectively simulating how Russian democracy worked for many years. Konami however has managed to create depth to something that really didn't need any, the Poy Poy cup is that most coveted of prizes among people who don't mind inanimate objects embedded into their faces. Being a televised event one might think the cameramen would like to find some edgy shots to invoke audience participation, clearly the cameraman in question is a junior rookie given a shot at the big time. His unique static camera method may not be the norm now, but when he becomes the first person to nab rare pictures of Spiderman its greenhorn no more!

Playing the 'story' mode in the loosest sense of the word provides that epic feeling of watching the second half of Eurovision. An irksome announcer introduces and closes the show with a grating voice that more than makes up for the absence of awkward banter normally seen between two presenters. Followed by every round is a score tally by a woman who possibly due to equality regulations has just as irritating a voice as her male counterpart. The score tally marathon tends to take between 3-5 minutes as the disk slowly loads up the individual sound bite for each characters name. Considering there are several divisions you begin to resent any competitor with a name over two syllables, especially when they have names like Ten Ten. Clearly he was so adept at throwing things at an early age that they decided to name him stupidly twice.

I'm sure when four players gather round for 'Poy Party' as we all know them might increase the games appeal. I along with many owners of this game however find it difficult to justify inviting three people into my home for the sole purpose of playing something they probably haven't heard of, and I know just about enough to struggle through an article about it. I know many retro gamers are all for seeking out the niche titles, but much like the ark of the covenant they are often hidden with good reason. I'm not saying Poy Poy 2 will melt the faces of the master race any time soon, but it might unlock the secrets of an ancient alien race...that secret being throwing things is the basis for a lucrative TV show.

SNK Special

2010-07-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Having being accosted frequently by former gold bullion enthusiast 'RouLaFemme', it is with mixed feelings of contempt and arousal that I introduce a showcase of SNK offerings through the eyes of Rou. Some might say those eyes are of a blind man, well I say that never stopped Daredevil...from making a bad film

The SNK meetings vol.1

01/05/1994 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage (El Presidente): Right it seems that our plan to sell exact replica’s of our arcade games for about £100 a go isn’t that successful. Apparently people feel that Samurai Showdown isn’t worth taking out a second mortgage for. Does anyone have any ideas?

Geese Thompson (Chief of animating people falling from ledges): Well why don’t we just keep releasing more and more fighting games in the hopes that we can beat the Street Fighter series by sheer force of numbers. Oh and the last bosses should all be ludicrously unfair.

Sir Nicholas Kage: Good idea Geese, I like it!

01/05/1999 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Well we seem to be having problems again. People seem not to like these really unfair boss encounters and they say our games are starting to look a bit old fashioned! Does anyone know how we can turn this around?

Allan Krauser (Head of saying “Out O Bounds”) : Sir why don’t we put all our money into bringing out a handheld console? After all look how much money the gameboy is making and that started off with a green screen!

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like this idea but we need to have some feature to set it apart from the gameboy…a selling point people can really get excited about.

Geese Thompson: Sir how about instead of giving it a d-pad we give it some sort of fudge between a d-pad and a joystick. Also the stick should click incredibly loudly so that when you play it in public everyone will look at what you’re doing.

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like it! Lets get started right away.

01/05/2002 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Right I’m afraid we’re bankrupt and we’re going to have to sell all our intellectual property to a pachinko company. Its been nice working with you all.

Geese Thompson: Sir this isn’t fair, I have loads of ideas for new bland fighting game characters! SNK will rise again. I vow it!

01/05/2004 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Right by marrying into the wealthy Playmore family and for some reason adding their name to my own despite being a man I have managed to raise the funds to recreate SNK except now it has to be called SNK-Playmore.
So what’s the first order of business?

Geese Thompson: Well Sir I think we should buy back all the intellectual property we had to sell last time. It boils my blood to think of my bland designs being used on pachinko machines when they could be being used in lots of new StreetFighter clones.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: But Geese didn’t releasing lots of bland fighting games send us bankrupt before? I don’t think those characters were doing out company any favours!

Geese Thompson: But Sir that’s just because they were ahead of their time. People couldn’t handle how cool Terry Bogard was with his baseball cap and jeans but now everyone’s wearing that. You don’t hear people saying “Shoryuken” these days, nowadays its all “Gng dwn twn fr dbl rnbken m8”. This time it will be different!”

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: You’re right dammit! Go buy back everything, I don’t care what it costs!

Todo Jenkins (Newly appointed chairman of badly mangled dialogue): Sir shouldn’t we update out games for the new millennium? Maybe we could use 3D models shaded to look like watercolour paintings and retain the classic 2D gameplay.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Don’t be foolish Jenkins, nobody would want to play anything like that! Now go away and write some incomprehensible dialogue for the new king of fighters game.

Poor old SNK. Everyone used to say their games were amazing but only the three kings of Europe could afford them and now that you can get their entire back catalogue in the form of PS2 collections everyone has realised they were generally a bit rubbish. Never mind SNK, we still love you and to prove it here is a review of every SNK fighting franchise. (That I have played)

World Heroes: I can’t be too harsh on World Heroes as I was given World Heroes Collection as a festive gift by the Retro Prefect. We wouldn’t want to recreate the feelings of betrayal that occurred when he gave Uncle Pete Sideways on DVD for his birthday and received a very disappointed look. Let’s just say that if you like Street Fighter clones featuring vaguely historical characters such as Captain Kidd the homoerotic pirate, Brocken the cyborg Nazi, Mudman the hilarious racial stereotype cannibal or Rasputin the flower child Russian mystic, then you may possibly glean some enjoyment from this game. However if you prefer games where characters perform the required action when you press the button rather than two years later then you best give it a miss. It’s rare for a games best feature to be a SS officer launching missiles from his knees and it is for this reason that I score World Heroes only one Brocken Bomber out of a Psycho Crusher.

Art of Fighting: More like ‘Art of Street Fighter clone’ eh readers? I know that the games prefect has a soft spot for this series mostly because of a character named Mickey who mysteriously changes from a muscle-bound punk in the original Art of Fighting to a flat topped Guile impersonator in Art of Fighting 2. He obviously felt out of place with the rest of the cast who are all shameless in their imitation of the classic Capcom line-up. Art of Fighting is a sort of Aldi version of Street Fighter so much so that they should have just called it “Pavement Combat” and had done with it, just remember kids ‘Jive’ looks like a Twix so it seems good value for money but the instructions are in foreign and the chocolate is bitter because it is made of ground up glass. The same goes for Art of Fighting and its cast of characters who for legal purposes have different names but use similar coloured packets. Characters like Lee (Masked, claw wielding, ineffectual) King (High and low fireball, kickboxing, cross dresser) Ryo (Fireball throwing, uppercutting, main character) Takuma (Overpowered clone of main character, at parties wears a Tengu mask and calls himself Mr. Karate) can all go back to the continent where they belong! The only exception is Mr .Big (baton wielding pimp sub boss) whose total inability to jump endears him to the nation. For this reason I give Art of Fighting two “I am actually a woman”s out of a Garcia concern.

Samurai Showdown: One of the more highly rated SNK franchises and with good reason. Samurai Showdown combines huge colourful sprites with interesting character design and the fact that it isn’t a blatant copy of Street Fighter. In fact Samurai Showdown managed to popularise a lot of fighting game staples such as the super move bar that increases as you take damage, the ability to kill your opponent at the end of a match and the addition of weaponry. Unfortunately for Samurai Showdown, Soulcalibur later stole the crown of weapon based fighting using fancy 3D graphics and gratuitous cog falling scenes but in our hearts we all know Samurai Showdown was the original if not necessarily the best. Unfortunately a lot of the home ports of the Samurai Showdown games were done by a bottle man and so run at about a fifth of the speed they probably should be, thereby rendering them unplayable. Combine with this the fact that Charlotte is a fencer rather than a Samurai and Samurai Showdown can only be awarded a Cham Cham out of a Tam Tam. (With extra marks for lots of attacks which involve a pause and then something neatly falling into two halves.)

Fatal Fury: A fighting game based around the premise of men (and it is all men in the first one at least) being so angry that they might actually die. Actually it has nothing to do with that it’s just a silly name for another Street Fighter clone. Fortunately it’s not as blatant as Art of Fighting and the characters are generally more charismatic than the Mickeys and Roberts of this world. Fair enough most of the characters look like they could have played dancing gangster’s in the ‘Beat It’ video but I think this only adds to the appeal. Apart from early 90’s idea’s of cool Fatal Fury also featured the ability to leap in and out of the foreground, just like in a real fight. (That takes place on three separate two dimensional planes). It sounds like an incisive play mechanic to stop projectile based characters gaining the upper hand in fights, but really it was a bit rubbish as it meant large parts of the fight were spent chasing your opponent back and forth across the three planes. Such is my love for Fatal Fury that not only am I able to ignore this rubbish feature but I am also going to list and describe every character when I give my score. Therefore I would give Fatal Fury a Terry Bogard - Quintessentially cool in baseball cap, jeans and red leather jacket. Dressing like him and walking around Sheffield saying “Are you ok…BUSTER WOLF” doesn’t make you any friends. Andy Bogard – Terry’s inexplicably Chinese brother. He likes to dress in white pyjamas and pretend that he’s Ryu from Street fighter. Everyone hates him. Joe Higashi – Commonly regarded as the joke character. Kick boxing Joe is actually ludicrously overpowered; he likes to upset people by punching tornados at them or briefly becoming a jaguar’s head. Richard Meyer – Richard is the manager of the Pau Pau café and like all small business owners he is always trying out new ways to attract in the customers. Using a yoyo to attach himself to the ceiling might not be his best scheme but it certainly seems to help him in the constant fights that break out. “You wanted decaf, I’ll decaf your face in with the help of my yoyo.” Raiden – Huge wrestler with the mysterious ability to conjure bees from his mouth for extremely long periods of time. Precursor to the current trend of featuring Luchador style wrestlers in every game ever made. Michael Max – Balrog with a tornado punch and a more potato like face. TunG Fu Rue – Admittedly I had to guess his name on account of it being in foreign. What isn’t foreign is the small Chinese man’s ability to rip his shirt off and become ha huge muscle-bound freak halfway through every fight. Even more mysterious is his ability to regrow his sleeves when he shrinks back to normal size. Duck King – Like all gang members Duck is an expert in funky dance fighting and has a colourful Mohawk. Unfortunately his original MC hammer outfit was replaced in later games by a more conventional hooded top but he made up for it with the Duck King themed rap which plays as he fights.
Geese Howard – Snake faced final boss with an impossible to perform special move known as “Raging Storm”. His hobbies include letting himself fall from balconies and saying things are predictable. Out of Billy Kane wasn’t in the Megadrive version so shut up.

I might possibly add a Blue Mary to that score for ‘Mark of the Wolves’ due to it’s hi res sprites and vision of a future where Terry Bogard has a new coat and is in love with Geese Howard’s son.

King of Fighters: Cross over fighting games are great because they feature all your favourite characters punching each other in the face. SNK must be raging (storm) at the success of the VS. games because they invented the entire formula ten years previously. King of Fighters features characters from Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury and Ikari Warriors as well as many original characters aiming to smash up their opponent’s features. The King of Fighters series has never reached the heights of popularity enjoyed by Foyles War Fighting Jam or Mortal Kombat VS DC Thompson, but that doesn’t seem to have deterred SNK from updating the franchise on a nearly annual basis. Most of the twelve core titles have featured some sort of ongoing storyline however a combination of extremely badly translated dialogue and apathy means that I have no idea what this story is supposed to be. For the most part it seems to involve some of the most difficult and unfair final bosses in fighting game history, lots of clones of Kyo and Geese Howard repeatedly coming back from the dead. It’s hard to dislike a series where throwing your sunglasses at someone counts as a special attack but for every K- and Iori there are about five men in hats with names like “John” and “Ralph.” Furthermore there are too many systems with names like “Tension Break” “Reverse Council” and “Player Mugabe” which only autistic frame counters are able to make use of. It is for that reason that I must award the King of Fighters series one Heidern out of a Jeidern. I would however grant the Maximum Impact spin off’s a Jeidern out of a Heidern as they are the closest thing you can get to Rival Schools without cutting your eye on the broken Dreamcast box of Project Justice.

Last Blade –Samurai Showdown with nicer graphics or a more level headed version of Guilty Gear? Probably one of the better SNK franchises Las Blade was unfortunately cut dead in its prime by the unpredictable nature of my Dreamcast and the low quality of ‘Mr Data’ CDR’s.
Therefore I must give Last Blade an ill informed Last Bronx out of a Last Blade.

SNK Vs Capcom Chaos – SNK prove rather successfully why Capcom make much more money than them despite being far lazier. One infinitely reused Morrigan sprite out a what on earth is Hugo doing in it?

I think that’s probably all of them. By the time you read this an SNK lynch mob will probably have severely Psycho Balled me into next week for my omission of some obscure Japanese only franchise (Like Gal Fighters) or for insisting that King of Fighters ’99 is nowhere near as good as King of Fighter 2001. This sounds nasty but I’m sure after the initial awkwardness we can become firm friends and I will let them try on my water damaged Terry Bogard hat

U.S. Championship V'Ball

2010-07-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

You might be asking yourself "what audacity have Technos, masters behind Super Double Dragon and River City Ransom; got attempting to create a simulation of a common if not exclusive to beach sport? Also, why have they felt the need to abbreviate the sport in question, thus removing the entire 'volley' aspect of the game?" Well fans thats a lot of questions, and in times like these I would suggest you write to your local MP who with any luck is a keen enthusiast of the sport, a 'volley dolly' as they are referred to within certain circles. (Or should that be certain balls?)

Its nice to see a game that doesnt shy away from creating an atmosphere of homoerotic bliss within the tropical locales of Hawaii, Daytona and Croydon. Alas the latter location was removed on the grounds of strict parrying policies, that and the severe lack of beaches in London boroughs. Character selection is resereved to the hand of fate, with each corresponding coin slot there is the choice of one of the following:

Player 1: Man in yellow pants
Player 2: Man in pink pants
Player 3: Other man in yellow pants
Player 4: Former sex offender (In pink pants)

Some players might speculate that yellow pants man and pink pants man are indeed the same person, shamelessly re-coloured to avoid the task of redrawing another homosexual from scratch. A daunting task for us all, but for every John Barrowman theres always going to be a pink pants equivalent if this carries on. I of course speak in jest, there is nothing more manly than sweaty half naked men grunting as they hit balls while looking apathetically towards the bikini clad audience.

Behind those rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia lies the cyclopian-esque ability to shoot beams of light at Ian Mc Kellen, only instead the projectile takes a more spherical form. A unique feature in U.S. V'Ball is the way in which pink and yellow pants can return a serve. Rather than gently patting it over the net like so many of todays budding volleyball enthusiasts. It is possible to smash the ball with enough force to not just knock the opponent off their feet, but also send them hurtling several meters backwards accompanied by the on screen text "KABOOOM!". On the plus side there is nothing more honourable than an onomatopaeic death, which is why I have always considered silencers to be somewhat cowardly. The incapacitated partner then has to rely solely on the abilities of his partner amidst two opponents as he slowly remembers what it was like to have a non crushed spine.

U.S. Championship V'Ball is a game of two halves notably left and right, playing this game alone is tragically unsafe and can cause suicidal thoughts and general questionings of ones sexual preference. With four people however this proves that despite the uncomfortable silences as players grease each other up, it can be a game enjoyed by all. But not too much mind, as theres only so many backs for so many walls.

Super Smash TV

2010-06-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

As we all know 1999 was a year of contemplation for all of us, not two years before had the Queen of our Hearts been so cruelly snatched away from this mortal coil due to a calamitous mix up involving English Royalty and a Lewis Carroll creation of the same name. Still, the public found solidarity in such a premature death by viewing copious amounts of it via a worldwide broadcast. Rou La Femme elaborates in that way he does (with words)

In the year 1999 the main form of entertainment will be a game show where a man in red trousers shoots wave after wave of cyborgs in order to win a toaster. Of course the premise of Super Smash TV seems laughable now; traditional game shows became extinct around 1992 and were replaced by a Geordie man attempting to psychologically torment a group of prisoners into killing/having sex with each other. It amuses the Geordie man to know that everyone wants one of these things to happen but if it ever did it would never be shown on television. With this in mind was Smash TV really that wrong in its bleak predictions? Well yes obviously it was as the technology required to graft a man with learning difficulties to a tank does not yet exist. Does this mean that Smash TV was a bad game? Let’s find out together dear reader. (It was a good game)

In reality Smash TV would have made a poor premise for a TV show, watching two contestants blast away at wave after wave of enemies might have been entertaining for a while but audiences would soon get bored. Thankfully your average games player is slightly less discerning and can derive hours of fun from standing next to a doorway firing wildly at enemies resembling the robots from batteries not included. The first few rooms might encourage the player to assume Smash TV is a mindless blaster, where all you need do is stand in a corner and hold down B until anything that moves is reduced to rubble. It soon becomes apparent that Smash TV is all about making use of available space and carving yourself out a small section of screen that isn’t covered by enemies. This does become a slightly easier prospect in two player mode but then you have to compete with your fellow contestant for a decent share of luxury luggage sets and VCR’s. Really it shouldn’t make much of a difference as to who gets all the prizes but at the end of each level when the values are added up you don’t want to be the one looking dejected as your opponents prize levels reach up to the stratosphere and don’t forget that in the end the winner has the right to say “Imagine if all these prizes were real!”. You wouldn’t want to imagine that your friend had twenty toasters and you only had five, how could you ever look your poor wife in the eye? The children want their toast and you are having to make it in batches, what kind of man are you? Not a man at all ….BUT A MOUSE.

Of course this is all fantasy; the game was so hard that neither red nor blue man would ever make it past the second level. That wife would have no toaster at all and would be grieving for her husband who had died of being run over by a giant face. Sadly the SNES version of Smash TV only provided a finite amount of continues meaning the third and fourth levels would remain a mystery until I bought Midway Arcade treasures and played it through to the end. Needless to say the final half of the game was so hectic that I have not managed to retain any memories of it aside from the fact that the game show host was the final boss.

I have managed to get this far without actually mentioning the host of Smash TV, unfortunately convention dictates that I must now repeat all of his catchphrases and then describe how he would occasionally pop up flanked by transsexuals and wiggle his eyes.

The gameshow host was well random and funny lol I well remember him doing good phrases, I like to think about what he said and done a lol. Also the women in it looked like transsexuals. i.e. they were actually men.

“These prizes are numerous and the amounts of currency are steep. I am in favour of this.”

“I would make a financial transaction where I would exchange that item for a dollar.”

“Utter Problems!”

In my humble opinion the game show host was overrated, he had a stupid face and he had copied all his moves from the far superior Mutoid Man. Now there was a boss to ironically make a fuss about. Let us explore further the legend of Mutoid Man.

Mutoid Man is a large bald man with a tank where his legs should be; he wears a fetching green outfit and is definitely educationally subnormal. His ability to speak is limited to guttural noises such as “Weerghhh” and occasionally saying “No way” but he hasn’t let that stop him get to the top of the pile. How many men do you know that are composed of a metal skellington on some tank legs which is actually covering your own head on the same tank legs? Not many but its certainly comes as a surprise! Not only does Mutoid Man have two helpers on his tank legs who fire cannons at you, but he will swipe you with his meaty fists and fire beams of electric at you from his pig like eyes. He also likes to laugh at people who try to shoot him with the basic gun as it merely ricochets from his powerful frame. The only real way to do any damage to Mutoid Man is using the Whiny grenade launcher to smash grenades onto his face, but even then you run the risk of him absent mindedly running you over. The only thing we can question about Mutoid man is how come he doesn’t get more of a starring role? Instead of the game show host popping up to make quips it should be Mutoid Man shouting No Way and then accidentally crushing one of the transsexuals. He didn’t mean to do it but the police would never believe you. Mutoid Man could never survive in prison, people would be constantly trying to make him say ‘No Way’. Far better take him somewhere peaceful and do him in with the whiny grenade launcher. Personally I would have framed Scar Face for the deed, but no one thinks like that in a crisis.

It is for this reason that I give Super Smash TV one Robotron clone out of it would be better if it featured Eddie the common truck driver from the Weakest Link Game.

Grotesque Moments in Gaming #2

2010-06-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

#2 The Peahat

Today is a very important day, today is the day you take those first tentative steps outside the comfort of your village and into the world of Hyrule. Opportunity awaits you at every turn, there will be ups and downs, adventure and intrigue; giant pineapples drifting menacingly behind you. Perhaps Nintendo's family friendly image comes from a vested attempt by the developers to inflict sheer terror among several generations, Grandmother hasn't been near a fruit salad since (Her views on tomatoes however are somewhat mixed). Ocarina of time seems to throw a lot of disturbing images at the player throughout, when the elf-child protagonist isn't being molested by the shriveled undead; he is being mentally undressed by a blatant paedophile who offers masks as way of keeping his victims quiet. Its greatest horrors however, emerge once the Peahat is innocently stumbled upon. Quickly turning what was once a leisurely stroll across the Hyrule plains into a game of "Avoid the floating pineapple", feel free to turn this expression into a euphemism so long as said erotic act doesn't actually involve the Peahat.(I hear they can be rough lovers) Perhaps the fear derives from the paranoid notion that fruit and vegetables will eventually enact revenge on society for years of abuse, either that or the mysterious disappearance of both my parents at about the same time a large orange bulb began to grow in the back garden.

Sunset Riders

2010-05-26T05:23:00.000-07:00

I think I speak for everyone, with the exception of the Native Americans; when I say that the American West was an era of great prosperity and non violence towards indiginous tribes. It is with this in mind that R.LaFemme presents yet another example of what the Japanese do best, distort Western history for the sake of flashy entertainent. Hi ho Arigato!

So now that Red Dead Redemption is out everyone is saying “What took them so long to make a cowboy game?” and sighing very loudly. I’m sure it’s very good in it’s own way but I don’t hold out much hope for it myself, mainly because it’s a Rockstar game and so will inevitably feature a blocky man walking very slowly around a needlessly large field while the same three NPC’s constantly fade in and out of his range of vision. That’s when you aren’t attempting to complete the game crippling difficult mission that always marks the halfway points of the Grand theft auto games. More importantly the quintessential western game came out in 1993. Ladies and gentleman I present Sunset Riders.

Sunset Riders is essentially a Contra/Probotector clone with high levels or ‘rootin tootin, fancy shootin’ and the kind of amazing racial stereotyping that only the Japanese don’t find offensive. Players are given a choice of four characters, none of them appear particularly heterosexual in this post brokeback mountain world but at the time Graham Norton had yet to invent homosexuality so no one bothered to mention it. That said it certainly passes the time to imagine the character select screen as a fetish club where you are trying to find a young cowboy for a night of rodeo fun. So which hoe down hero can ride all night and which has nothing but a dusty trail? Which Rodeo Romeo has a full chamber and who is just firing blanks? Which six shooting superstar has a life destroying STD? It’s time to play the cowboy selection game!

Billy – Despite his best efforts to look straight (brown hair, guns, blue jeans) his pink top is giving away all his secrets. Billy is a butch man whose two peacemakers give him a speed advantage but mean he doesn’t quite get the same power. Billy is ideal as a first time choice but more experienced players are probably going to want something a bit more forceful.

Bob – He may look like a palette swap of Billy but trust me with his Blonde hair and green outfit Bob isn’t turning anyone away. A confident man who knows exactly what he’s doing and isn’t afraid to tell the world! He might me using the same pistols as Billy but as good cowboy knows it’s not the equipment it’s the way you use it.

Steve – With his green outfit and blonde mullet young Steve is obviously obsessed with Bob. His youth and vigour are in his favour as he sprays everywhere at once with his large shotgun. For all his enthusiasm his shots can be a bit more tentative than the older cowboys and some might say his sheer power is rather over egging the pudding. It’s sometimes fun to play with Steve but his lack of maturity means he isn’t taken seriously as a long term prospect.

Cormano – The first stereotype you will encounter but not necessarily the most outrageous. With his poncho and sombrero Cormano is the quintessential Mexan. Like all foreigners he is hiding a secret and that is the size of the shotgun under his garments. A self assured powerful man with no need for words Cormano is always the classy choice. Unfortunately being a Mexan he more than likely has whatever new animal related decease is doing the rounds at the minute. (i.e. Aryan Flu, Pig Poorly, Randolph AIDS.)

With that ordeal out of the way you are free to mince around the levels which involve shooting absolutely everyone you see, prancing around on the backs of bison and trying to claim the reward on the end of level boss. Some sections even involve being on a horse, these are impossible due horses being naturally predisposed to being shot in the legs by bandits. Still the thought was there. Even where free from the huge liability of the horse there can be no denying that Sunset Riders is a difficult game. The game takes a semi-realistic approach to gunplay in that if you are hit by a bullet you immediately die, thankfully the bullets are huge flashing globes which move at speeds at least perceptible to the human eye. To tell the truth I don’t think many gunfighters were able to avoid the kiss of hot lead by jumping nimbly over the bullet, but it would be certainly be worth a try. In a further simulacrum of real life wealthy players would be able to purchase new lives (well in the arcade version anyway) whereas the poor with only one 50p to their name would be forced to rely on the NHS. They should call that the National Hopeless service, my uncle went in with a broken toe and when he came out he was infected with the T-Virus. Trust me when you come home one day and Uncle Pete is chomping Granddads’ leg it’s a real shocker. Thankfully the home console versions of the games didn’t force you to shove 20p pieces into the cartridge and you were free to set yourself up to 9 continues which should be more than enough to complete the game on easy. If like me you are inept then you can always not play it on an emulator, buy the arcade cabinet and then set the cabinet to free play. An extreme measure? Maybe but it’s definitely worth it. With an amazing soundtrack which can’t help but make you want to shoot things, people shouting “wahoo” on the title screen, lots and lots of old west prostitutes and a special fluttery wanted poster effect Sunset Riders has a lot going for it and I haven’t even mentioned the boss battles.

While there’s nothing thats different in the way you actually fight the end of level bosses the characterisation of each bad guy can easily match up to any of the Metal Gear games. Who needs Psycho Mantis when you could be duelling against Simon Greedwell the overweight land baron who quips “It’s time to pay” before shooting at you from the presumed safety of his balcony. How about Sir Richard Rose the toffee nosed final boss who cheats by keeping a boiler door up his vest a-la Back to the future part 3? Best of all though is chief Scalp-em/WigWam (depending on whether or not you are playing the SNES version) the Indian chief who is essentially a more dangerous version of Little Plum from the Beano. Presumably Konami still holds the rights to these characters so would it really be too much to ask to have them crop up against Solid Snake some time in the future? I’m sure that constant Money related puns over the codec would never get tiresome. “Hey Snake you’re a 'credit' to the organisation.”

Sunset Riders makes a fantastic antidote to the current crop of po-faced-greyscale-emergent game play-sandbox-call of duty-licensed music-microtransaction style nonsense that everyone loves at the minute so for that reason I would give it three fistfuls of dollars out of a maverick annual.

Bonus feature

Top 5 Cowboy Games

1. Sunset Riders – Flamboyant men in chaps shooting each other and asking to be buried with their money.

2. Samurai Western – Flamboyant men in chaps try to shoot a samurai who proceeds to cut them all to bits. Like all the best games it features a robot cowboy and the ability to customise your character by placing animals on their shoulders.

3. Wild Arms 2 – The only good Wild Arms games but also the best RPG to not feature the words ‘Persona’ or ‘Final’ in it’s title. Innovative features include not having a stupidly large 3D environment to explore, not having a real time active battle system and not giving the characters really irritating voices.

4. God Hand – Only the first level may actually bear any resemblance to the old west but any game where you can uppercut a clown into the moon has to make every list ever made.

5. Custer’s Last Stand – She was asking for it.

Monkey Puncher

2010-05-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated, the phrase "Monkey Puncher" may sound less like a seminal gameboy colour title, and more like the KKK's main agenda. As it is, I'm not sure racists are too keen on the idea of simian beasts being trained in the art of fisticuffs...but what do I know?

Like all of today's free roaming, too big to actually enjoy games; the player is given the opportunity to select either a Male (Kenta) or Female (Sumire)avatar. As we all know women are hopeless at boxing and before you pull out the sexism card, may I remind you that Million Dollar Baby is a work of fiction. Also women are more likely to be kidnapped by monkeys as King Kong taught us, (Based on true events) which is the entire justification for the game. Rather than calling the police on rouge apes taking away our siblings, it makes far greater sense to train the very thing that created the problem in the first place. Deforestation might be harming the planet, but its ridding us of humanities greatest menace in the process.

Monkey training is perhaps one of the most intense acts of animal cruelty ever witnessed. As personal trainer you must subject the simple minded animal into performing several gruelling training sessions each day. For an animal who's exercise mostly comes out of flinging shit at its close relatives, sit ups and skipping doesn't come naturally. Worse still is the expectation of monkeys as errand boys. Give them the shopping list for the week and they make their way to whatever supermarket doesn't mind wild animals roaming the aisles. (Lidl) Worst of all, as trainer you can scold your monkey for getting the incorrect items on the shopping list. I personally restrain from placing the blame at the feet of bubbles, even if he did bulk purchase crates of bananas instead of the Gin like I asked. I think he notices I get violent towards him when I've had few.

Once your monkey has become a deformed abomination, similar to people who are muscular before adolescence; its time to compete in the official monkey punching circuit. This is by no means an underground tournament run by Cuban immigrants, but rather an epic sport on the international stage. Its about time RSPCA finally put aside its petty values for the sake of a violently entertaining activity. Maybe the half unconscious monkey might even get the opportunity to test new make-up before it hits the shelves....lucky them!

One of the greatest features of this game is its unique narrative, where most game developers from Japan decide to translate the game in full. The kind fellows at Monkey Puncher HQ thought it might be a 'hoot' to make up the English as they went along. The friendly pet shop owner will greet you with "Welcome, my monkey is friendly today", were I not so aware of the broken English...I may be under the impression that the term monkey referred to something far less innocent.

Monkey Puncher appears to be an enigma, having never met a single person who has played this title I have my doubts as to whether or not it actually exists. Often I will wake in the night wrapped in a cold sweat, I then turn to my bedside and caress the small Gameboy cartridge to assure myself of its existence. Perhaps one day I will find the Statue of Liberty collapsed on a stranded beach...then I will come to the realization that is was called "Human Puncher" all along...

Zool

2010-04-29T07:27:00.001-07:00

Once again my old friend Rou La Femme has gotten himself into a sticky situation. That mishap with the Maltese natives means he must lie low for a few weeks. In his defence I would have made the same comparison with a certain light spherical chocolate treat, so without further gnu...

Children are foolish that’s why so many of them end up meeting old men off the internet. It’s also why games like “Kronk’s New Groove Party Racing” ride high in the charts while all the remaining copies of “Evil Zone” were sent to fight in Afghanistan. I was a child once and that’s why, when asked what game I wanted for my birthday, I picked Zool.

Memories of the time suggest the selection was made along the lines of

1. I want a jumping game like Sonic II on the megadrive.
2. You can’t get Sonic II on a Gameboy because it can’t display blue.
3. Mario looks a bit rubbish, he doesn’t appear to have any sort of early 90’s radical ‘attitude’.
4. If 3=True and 2<1 get Zool because the only other game in Woolworths is a boardgame called “The Great Floatini”
I should have gone for The Great Floatini. To this day I wonder what amazing anti-grav technology was employed to produce the floating effect. (No doubt imagination and strings)

Zool was some sort of amazing ant ninja from “The nth dimension”. People used to do things to “the nth degree” a lot in the early 90’s and when I say people I mean businessmen in sitcoms and extreme sportspeople on Saturday morning kids TV. (This was before the spelling of extreme was official changed to X-Treme! In order to make it 10% more radical.)
With his knock off sonic trainers (possibly bought on a market by his mother) and his lightsaber/baton type weaponry (which was never employed in the game). Zool seemed set to rock the shit out of that tiny green screen.

The first few minutes of Zool seemed promising, after all it did bear the much sought after Nintendo Seal of Quality. An award of comprisable quality to the Roy Castle clean air award. More importantly we were proudly informed that Zool was sponsored by Chupa Chups. Who knew that Chupa Chups had such financial strength? No one and I get the feeling that Zool set the cause of Chupa Chups back several decades. Only now have they started to recuperate by marketing themselves in bag and stationary form at teenage girls - just like playboy!

Well Zool never featured faux pop-art images of women sucking provocatively on lollypops. (Or indeed suggestively fondling a Slammer Whammers case full of fake Chupa Chup pogs and their ludicrously effective metal slammers.) What it did feature was an ant Ninja struggling to advance beyond the second level. No easy task when your enemies included spiked pits of instant death, an unhelpful control system where sometimes you stuck to walls and sometimes you merely jumped at them ineffectually like a youtube parkour video and worst of all the same music from the title screen playing through the entire game. Against all this Zool could do nothing but jump on the heads of his enemies or fire ineffectual ninja pellets at them. (To all the young people out there head jumping used to be the primary method of attack in all games, mostly because it didn’t require any extra animations leaving precious memory space for password save systems. Unfortunately head jumping faded into obscurity when 3D graphics made any kind of precision impossible – just ask the Jersey Devil or Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.)

Each level of Zool had a theme and the people at Gremlin did some amazing things here because instead of “Easy Forest level with nice music, Slidey Ice Level, Burny Fire Level, horrible unresponsive controls underwater level, final metal level and level where you kill civilians in an airport they made the first level a level based on sweets- which weirdly featured little in the way of cupa chups. I can only presume liquorice allsorts were easier to animate. The second level was based on musical instruments. Beyond that I have no idea because the instrument level was so frustratingly difficult that I put my copy of Zool inside a guitar and could never get it back out. The instruction book did promise two other exciting levels but having not experienced them first hand I couldn’t say if they existed or what the theming of those levels were. Hopefully the final level was a journey into the nth dimension with such twisted logic and imagery that you realised the entire game up to that point had been a clever post modern satire of rubbish ports of rubbish Amiga games. (All Amiga games were rubbish.)

Poor Zool. The only good things about the game were the eerily lifelike movement of the bumblebee boss on the sweets level and the delight of another attempted Mario type Macot being slowly killed by apathy and poor choice of corporate sponsorship. We can all take comfort in the fact that Zool now rests with comrades such as Aero the Acrobat, Titus the Fox, James Pond and the recently deceased Crash Bandicoot. Never again will we see their like, mostly because games companies have moved on from trying to create Disney style mascots, now it’s all about ill defined anti-heroes with badly selling spin off graphic novels.

Overall I would rate Zool: An ill conceived sequel featuring a female zool and a dog zool and two choose your own ad

Numan Athletics

2010-04-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

Scientists provide us with all the answers these days, were it not for scientists we would be without everything we take for granted. Computers, mobile phones and Tron, all gone in an instant. One thing they can never provide an answer to however is the future. A future were the Olympic Games are so desperate to grab audiences, that ‘Train pushing’ is now an official sport, the Niagara falls is deemed safe enough for the high jump; and India is represented by an incredibly insensitive racial stereotype….it’s also called Numan Athletics.

Numan Athletics is effectively track and field to the extreme, if normal athletes run 10 miles and hour, then this game makes them run 1,000. It’s like seeing through the eyes of Daley Thompson for just one day; only Daley Thompson is blind due to the fact he is constantly outrunning light. Points are rewarded for each respective event; the winner is given the opportunity to write down a whole range of three letter insults as long as they hit the leader board. The events in question are:

Turbo Dash- As explained before, fast running….only faster. You have to do the old alternating button trick as quickly as possible; those who win gain the prestige of victory. Those who don’t survive through their 30’s without contracting arthritis…everyone’s a winner!

Interceptor- Stop missiles from a large naval battleship hitting you, the quicker the reaction the higher the points. One would think the world was put off by the prospect of large cannons ever since Cher heaved her whored self on top of one in an attempt to turn back time. If Doctor who has taught us anything it’s that time doesn’t work like that, and the traumatic memories shall forever remain in our heart, in the case of the doctor…hearts.

Tower Topper- In an attempt to make France look like something other than arrogant, they have opened their sweaty arms to the idea of freaks leaping between buildings parkour style in an attempt to reach the top. Kudos to France and its symbolic olive branch, perhaps now we can all forget the sordid events of world war 4 and look forward to the dystopian Shatner vision that is the TekWars.

VS.Express- In the future trains are unable to use breaks in an incentive to reduce carbon emissions and get rid of the new breed of vagrants known as “Arriva urchins”. Therefore it is up to professional athletes to stop them with bare hands, I would say don’t try this at home but I can’t imagine many people have a fully serviceable locomotive in their drawing room…or a drawing room for that matter.

Scud Toss- Perhaps the most unethical event of them all. Scud Toss involves players throwing a dangerous looking missile across the African Savannah. I can understand that an event like this might not go down to well in a built up area, but when you see a zebra coloured crater 500 meters away you know that Michael Jackson wrote earth song for a reason.

Nonstop Rock Chop- Fairly self explanatory bar the nonstop aspect to proceedings. Athletes smash their pudgy fists into jagged rocks, so that one day they can lift that trophy with the bloodied nubs at the end of their wrists they once called hands.
Numan Sniper- The most nerve wracking of games, this involves extreme dedication and reflexes as player’s fire upon the disturbingly frequent occurrences of Kraken and Kuthulu rising from the Arctic Ocean. My sympathies are with the Loch Ness Monster who has no doubt been demoted to kitchen duties what with the freakish mutations of future marine life.

Niagara Jumps- My mother had a saying “If you’re going to do something well, do it over the 10th largest waterfall in the world”. Alas, the ill fated advice came with a price as she tumbled down into the crashing foam; both she and the world were not ready for a gritty musical based on hydroelectric power. The Niagara Jump involves athletes leaping three times in quick succession against the unrelenting downward pull of a naturally formed death trap. While it’s not my place to comment on the dangers of waterfall leaping, I find that there should be at least some financial compensation left for the grieving family.

Numan Athletics is best played in 4 player mode, because each player number has a corresponding character, this will undoubtedly lead to disputes regarding who’s who. So here’s a who’s who of who’s who:

Sharon- Representing France is the only woman in the entire Numan Olympics, a woman who despite her stature can stop trains with sheer brute force. She’s the sort of person who could easily get away with domestic abuse upon an impressionable male, for your information she was a gentle woman and the train shaped marks on my arm are from getting carried away with my monthly train role playing get together

Masaemon- Representing Japan is the blackcurrant haired warrior known as Masaemon. While he may not be the best, he certainly gives it a try. What other athlete holds up two paper fans after a gruelling event? Some critics would have you believe that a man who speaks English and is clearly Caucasian couldn’t possibly descend from Japan. Well lucky for us the future doesn’t judge people on looks and nationality when representing a country. I would say this is a better future, a brighter future…a Numan future

Harry- Cocksure harry is what the ladies call him, oddly he doesn’t seem interested in all the female attention, but in no way does that make him gay I assure you! Representing America is the ladies man about town; clad in a Lycra ensemble he provides hope to the young Americans of today. Yes he does live with his overbearing mother and yes he has a tendency to frequent public bathrooms for long periods of time in the middle of the night. But they are merely the quirks of a man who definitely has an interest in women.

Bongo- In the days before political correctness, people were legally obliged to portray Indians as hulking brutes that shared the same name as a percussion instrument. Much like Daley Thompson, Bongo tries not to get bogged down by the racist nature of Olympic sport, and for that I admire him…his favourite food is probably curry as well

This is definitely one of the better track and field copycats, I would go as far to say its better than the source material. If there is ever an option to play as a green haired foreigner named after a musical instrument it’s usually a good sign. If you are the beneficiary to an aging Dukes fortune, then I strongly recommend you buy this in its arcade-only form. If you are however one of the common masses, then you have more to worry about than the purchase of hard to come by arcade cabinets. Should you luck upon this machine amongst the grimy coastal areas of the UK, ignore the faecal encrusted buttons, ignore the paedophile in the corner and absorb yourself in the sport of freaks. But seriously, do watch out for the paedo…

Grotesque moments in gaming #1

2010-03-23T08:49:00.001-07:00

Much like every video game journalist (If I can call myself that), I have resorted to trashy top ten style articles. Throughout my life I have witnessed many terrible things, murder, rape pillaging...all by my own hand. It's a sobering thought to think that video games can provide even I, a man with the loosest of Morales; a sense of uninhibited fear. Often this fear comes from most unexpected of places, the likes of resident evil and silent hill pale in comparison to the disturbing events I have witnessed on screen. While certain family members have suggested I confide such details to a phycho-analyst, I see informing everyone of my pain as mandatory to the healing process, even if the sniper rifle in the corner whispers otherwise. Enjoy!

1# The sun

The source of life...or so you might think. The reason you are told to never look directly at the sun is purely an act of common sense by parents. If Super Mario 3 is anything to go by, the sun is a disturbingly unpleasant individual, the intense heat he is subjected to every day has put him in a perpetually menopausal state. I would be happy to see the world plunged into darkness and devoid of vegetation, until a dust bowl effect plagues the world with unending blight. Just as long as that sun should never emerge again. My only concern is whether or not there is a moon equivalent, it might be considerably smaller, but its a lot closer to earth and constant comparisons to his brighter sibling may have caused him to develop a serious Napoleon complex. Its an extreme measure on the part of the sun, of all the threats to the galaxy, the most noble of causes is thwarting a plumber saving a princess. His methods are incredibly destructive and cack handed at best, by weaving down to earth the sun brings a rein of destruction. Boiling the seas, melting the polar ice caps and providing unhealthy amounts of UV to billions of people. Perhaps its naive of me to think something older than the concept of time would have a more calculating plan of action. Then again, solar entities aren't well known for their mental prowess.

Navy Seals

2010-03-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

The zulu raids were a period of gross misconduct on the part of the British empire, but also the place I grew to know some of my most cherished aquaintances. Rou La Femme, affectionatley known by the lads as "Spear dispatcher" is one such friend. In a sordid attempt to ride upon the coat tails of my success, he has taken his hand to my trade. Being a forgiving type I have humored the old boy with his 15 minutes in the limelight, so enjoy....but not too much mind.

At the moment the Armed forces are enjoying levels of popularity unheard of since World War II: Requiem. Wars are being fought; help for heroes is using injured army men trying to stop the falling ratings and Modern Fighting: Ghost Battlefield 3 – Call of Honour is everyone’s preferred way of being abused by American teenagers.

Things weren’t always this good though. In the old days games very rarely featured thinly veiled representations of the Iraq conflict instead relying on ‘fictional scenarios’ which included unlikely events such as devils invading the moon or children finding discarded weaponry in the woods. Thank goodness then that as a youngster I managed to get my hands on Navy Seals for the gameboy.

This exciting title pitched you as an elite navy SEAL waging war against a vaguely defined terrorist cell. Each exciting level saw you infiltrate what appeared to be a giant crack house and stop the terrorists from blowing it up. Each crack house was staffed by angry terrorists who would try and deplete your life bar by running headlong into you. A surprisingly effective method of attack given that your highly trained Seal was armed with that popular videogame stalwart, the Uzi. I would say thought that the terrorists appeared to be something more than human. From the neck down they sported a smart jeans and jumper combination and were even so kind as to have the right amount of arms and legs. However they also appeared to be gifted with only one large eye each and a sort of pointed wolverine haircut/helmet. Further to this they could absorb several bullets into their bodies without even flinching. They also had the uncanny ability to phase through solid floors in order to sneak up behind you. Coupled with this inhuman threat was the peril of falling pieces of masonry which could appear at any moment and smash the unnamed army character to bits. An especially gratifying feature when the game is requiring you to leap onto adjacent platforms while being chased by a terrorist. Even better the masonry would apparently regenerate so that retracing your steps left you vulnerable to the same piece of masonry you had just avoided. When faced with all this the obligatory spiked pits are a familiar and comforting friend.

The one ray of sunshine, the light of Mr Navy Seals life was the omnipresent sniper. Upon hitting the select button the fantastically well hidden sharpshooter would take out everyone on screen, although naturally falling masonry remained immune to his marksmanship. Unfortunately the Sniper was a fickle lover and could only be called upon three times before he took a hissy fit and went away to look at women in bikinis through his sniper scope.

Now far be it for me to criticise the methods of the armed forces and generic terrorist cells but everyone’s methods in this game seem to be extremely floored. As far as I can tell the buildings being blown up by the terrorists were abandoned, crumbling and filled exclusively with terrorists. I realise that some people don’t condone suicide but is it really up to the Navy to get send troops in to stop a mass suicide attempt. Even if this is the case I would guess that shooting at people is not a brilliant way of saving them. Furthermore is it really good practice to send one soldier and a temperamental sniper as back up?

In the end Navy S.E.A.Ls manages to illustrate just how futile war is, or at least how futile playing games made by Ocean was. Overall I would give it a Charlie Sheen out of a not sure if the game was based on that film or not.

Post courtesy of R.Lafemme

U.N. Squadron

2010-03-21T12:39:00.001-07:00

If this game is anything to go by, then the U.N. are in dire straits. Amidst the glut of countries under its protection, they are unable to squander no more than three planes in the fight against terrorism. Perhaps the game is trying to depict a time when peace prevails; the armaments of the world have been dismantled as they are no longer needed. Well I’m fairly sure I mentioned that issue of a terrorist threat, so unless these planes have the combined power of the X-Jet, Stealth and Jefferson Airplane; then it’s a sad day for the United Nations.

Luckily this is the case; these planes were built on rock and roll and nothings going to stop them now. The entire back catalogue of known Jefferson Airplane songs aside, it’s just a shame the pilots aren’t quite as aptly designed as their flying counterparts. I must warn gamers that this is based upon Area 88, an anime featuring a high amount of intense shouting and 37 areas too many. (Feel free to make your own jokes involving basic subtraction at home!) The characters are as follows:

Shin Kazama: You’d be forgiven for thinking this old chap was indeed related to a certain Tekken family. You might also be forgiven for thinking this old chap is an old girl. Readers might notice I’ve avoided the obligatory observation that Shin might be emo, so allow me to rectify that now. *Joke about cutting oneself here* I’m not sure what the military standard is in Japan when it comes to hair length, but all I know is the first casualty of war is conditioner.

Greg Gates: Yet another highlight of Japan’s collective knowledge of Europe, in a desperate attempt to think of an even vaguely Western name, they have opted for something a director falling from grace might coin to avoid being detected moonlighting in porno’s. (Purely on the basis that Greg Gates it sounds like “Masturbates”) Greg used to earn his living helping hostages all over Europe, so naturally a man who has to conduct himself with the utmost ethics and civil decency is the best man for a job that involves killing faceless terrorists indiscriminately.

Micky Simon: See above regarding knowledge of Western names (Could rhyme with “Sticky Hymen” perhaps?) Courtesy of his Naval background, blonde pompadour and what appears to be the playboy bunny emblazoned on his helmet. He epitomizes all that is right with sexual equality in that most discriminatory of skies. I can hardly blame the East for portraying Mickey in such a way, Top Gun has pretty much set back any heterosexual’s joining the air force for a good 30 years.

In my Gunbird review I explained how the shmup is a contributing factor to arthritis, eye strain and the murder of loved ones...only in fewer words. Well with Auntie Mabel buried I feel I am ready to face society as well as another shmup. U.N. Squadton takes a radical approach by offering a horizontal scrolling screen instead of a vertical one. While it’s been done in many games previously, it doesn’t seem to be the popular choice among this genre, the horizontal method is like Music B on Tetris, its hard hitting lyrics and acoustic harmonies are often overlooked in favour of the manufactured pop superstar that is Music A. I fail to mention music C on purpose as ever since that drug scandal, it singles barely even reach top 40.

U.N. Squadron’s health bar system is unique, or at least it was at the time. Now it’s pretty much the standard within every gritty first person shooter to date. You lose a bit of health, flash for a bit, and all of a sudden your good to go. Luckily you are not subjected to heavy breathing and smears of blood haphazardly slashdotted around the screen like so much wasted jam. (I’m fairly certain ‘Slashdotted’ isn’t a word) The system definitely makes the game easier, which is no bad thing considering lives are limited, which is true of this world as well as you only have 1. Unless of course you go by Buddhist ideology, in that case it’s about 7.

For a world embroiled under severe threat, those stingy bastards at the U.N. find no shame in charging you top whack for missiles used in the line of duty. Being given a free plane at the beginning of the game is just about the only generosity you can expect, but it feels more like one of those dodgy ‘pay nothing for 3 years’ sofa deals. Your basic shots are for free, but power up weapons such as napalm, surface to air missiles and cluster shots will set you back a country’s worth of post-battle reparations. Now it can be argued that these weapons are optional, it is up to the player whether or not they buy them. It is also up the player whether or not they want to get killed by terrorist machinations who shrug off standard weaponry like a fat man against a pea shooter, or if they want to invest their hard earned ‘killing money’ instead on things that will leave memories of the horrific violence for years to come. (I went with the latter, I’m currently facing eviction and my plane has been repossessed).

I trust people to make their own judgement of this game, because once again I have been steadfast unsuccessful in doing an actual review. If I can be accused of anything, it’s enjoying shmups a bit too much, such love is considered the norm in Japan, but over in the England it’s frowned upon more than bestiality. U.N. Squadron has a lot of unique ideas for the genre, and its not overly difficult like oh so many of its brethren. It’s also not too hard to come by these days and it’s definitely one of the better anime based games out there, even if they did remove all mention of it being one.( I wonder if theirs a Tetris music D out there?)

Gunbird Special Edition-Now with more Gun! (Birds sold separately)

2010-02-26T15:37:00.000-08:00

What can be said about Gunbird Special Edition that hasn’t already been said? Well, everything actually. The game was released as a budget title in 2005 and appears to have faded from the scrolling pixel infested backdrop that is time immemorial (or is that time memorandum?). “But what is this?” I hear the people say, “A PS2 review! Why Retro Prefect, either your good looks and alluring charm have since faded thus causing you to create controversy in the videogame world as a misguided cry out for help; or you take the theory that while it is a PS2 game, it is a re-release which harkens back to the bygone days of the 90’s. Also you have the audacity to label yourself the Gamer Prefect by speaking in the third person thus absolving you of any judgement upon your own ego” Well the answer to that long winded question is… a little from both camps. The Gunbird series comprises of two games, each originally released in the arcade and later ported to Dreamcast and PS1. The latter giving claim to a front cover that in no way represents the game in any shape or form. Sex sells as they say, and sex with guns sells even more. Well try telling that to the man pissing blood through the base of his whatsa.

The first in the series is a pioneering experience into the world of eye strain, this is a shmup (Look it up), and like all shmup’s, they are played solely by people like myself who have an obsession with large numbers; and consider anything created post millennium to be heresy. The menu screen is minimal at best, the developers added it in as an afterthought but it does the job nonetheless. One of the most mind boggling options is the choice to flip the screen horizontally. Enjoyment all round for those who can crane their necks 90 degrees im sure you’ll agree. Now I understand this is done to give a ‘true’ arcade feel, but I feel having my TV flipped around on its side may not be the best option. Especially if said TV is delicately mounted to the wall.

So several broken TV’s later I decided to play the game, being a man of adequate gaming prowess, or so I thought. I left the game on its default difficulty, medium. Medium by Gunbird standards is like going to a stake house and asking for medium, instead you are served a black shadow etched onto the plate. The waiter explains your steak has been heated for five hours in a fractional column and then thrown into the suns core. So basically, it’s quite difficult. Like all good games, with ‘gun’ and quite possibly ‘bird’ in the title, there is a choice of 5, count them 5 characters, each one with no back-story to speak of. Im sure the Japanese story was omitted on the grounds of either suggestible references to child molesting, transsexuals galore or both. All 8 pages of the instruction booklet are no help either. From what I gather some people are trying to assemble a magic mirror to grant a wish, they are frequently stopped by three antagonists who like to use poorly laid out text boxes.

The characters are as follows:

Ash- Man with Jetpack who according to Wikipedia is a paedophile, I was only being casually racist when I said the Japanese did that sort of thing but clearly stereotypes have to come from somewhere!

Marion- A young girl/witch, again the paedophile theme continues…with a vengeance!

Valnus- A robot that sounds like slang for the lady part, he has shoulders bigger than his head and from the red stars emblazoned upon them I can only assume he’s Russian. (As all good robots are)

Yuan Nang- A monkey woman on a cloud, I didn’t think Id ever say this but theirs only so many times you can see a monkey woman on a cloud…5

Tetsu- An old man who is most likely wise and judging by his wooden flying contraption a hair brained inventor as well. Avoid at all costs unless you enjoy controlling old people

Now onto the game itself, to grasp an understanding of how this game works, look into the sky and place your finger slightly above your eyes. Get a box of rice crispies (Coco Pops will suffice) and throw them onto your finger, should a single one of them touch the finger then it will explode, re-appear and flash for several seconds. The game play is simplistic as is expected from a shmup; it is however infuriatingly difficult for those of us who lack the superior motor controls to track hundreds of dots on screen. I suppose it’s necessary to follow the ‘practice makes perfect’ rule when playing Gunbird. But practice also makes for a potential fatality of a close family member or beloved pet. My family are still suspicious about the controller shaped marks in Fido’s back…

So onto Gunbird 2, which is basically its predecessor in a shiny coat. It also features two new additional gameplay features. A charge attack can be deployed by pressing square, it’s effectively a poor mans smart bomb but it gets the job done. The second feature is a melee attack. Players foolish and lucky enough to actually get close enough to an enemy to do this should probably think better of it. Not only is it very likely you will drop like a sack of doorknobs upon attempting it, but every time it is used your weapon will power down. As we all know “A weapon powered down will bring naught but a frown”-Gamer Prefect

Like with all my reviews, I have tried to remain impartial with my opinion. Instead I have discredited this game for all its worth, when in fact I have for the most part enjoyed it. This is definitely a game for the shmup fans and those of you who enjoy a challenge. I do however feel the story was a total afterthought and I blame this on poor localisation. However it’s not too hard to come by cheaply nowadays and deserves a place on anybody’s shelf. That is if you have a shelf, I’m not shelf biased or anything…honest (Bloody non-shelvers, coming over here…organising our DVD’s) I give it two "Guns" up...eh readers?

2010-02-15T15:16:00.000-08:00

King of Demons/Majyuuou

I already have distinct regrets reviewing this game, the reason being it took me almost ten minutes to remember what the damm thing was called (Google search engine cant decipher ‘Majyuu’ or ‘Majyoo’), In my desperation I resorted to typing what most characterised the game ‘Castlevania with a gun’. I was genuinely amazed that this came up with the answer. In all my years I have never witnessed a Super Famicom title that uses vowels in such a gratuitous manner. Im wondering how this is spelled in Japanese characters, considering the letter “J” must always be accompanied by a vowel.

I was first drawn to the game when I saw it on a ‘top 100 Super Famicom’ games video. Because I caught a mere 5 second glimpse of the game I was clueless to its name. Being a judge of books; namely their covers (I believe that’s a saying of sorts), I was under the impression that this game would provide of something very different from other chaff seen in Japanese exports. This handy diagram elaborates:

The first level showed promise, it’s perhaps the only Super Famicom game in existence to utilise realistic bullet physics. Contrary to what contra and Gunstar Heroes might have you believe, bullets are not large colourful, slow moving dots. Bullets are small pieces of metal propelled at a speed not visible to the human eye. They are capable of embedding themselves within the human body, creating severe infection and possible haemorrhaging of internal organs. Obviously those “Fat cats” at Nintendo wouldn’t want gruesome depictions of death on a console typically aimed at a juvenile audience, were else are kids going to learn how to shoot? Because of its realism in a sense, the main characters gun actually feels quite satisfying to use. I was under the impression that the gun would be retained throughout the game, but an early boss fight causes the main character (Who I’m sure has a name, lets call him Keith for arguments sake) to transform into a Demon. Bearing in the mind the title, it might suggest that Keith is quite possibly the king…of demons no less! You would be forgiven for thinking the game gets better from such an unusual development; a demonic Keith is the source of every young boys dream. Instead you become lumbered with a gangly butterfly man, the sort of bad boy you might find thwarted by the power rangers on a weekly basis; also he’d be called Baron Butterfly and team up with manic moth in a climactic episode. The major problem however derives from the ear splitting noise made each time Keith attacks; and Keith likes to attack. It can be likened to the high pitch scraping of a rusty pan in the presence of an ill programmed sentient robot. Unable to comprehend the action he tries to imitate the cacophony with his inferior sound synthesiser which in turn causes his master to destroy him piece by piece…that’s what it sounds like.

Majyuuou really encapsulates the feeling that one man alone against the realm of the demons is indeed a tall order; poorest of Keith will unfortunately be subjected to frequent deaths due to the player’s inability to predict everything thrown at them. While stages themselves don’t pose too much of a challenge, bosses are much like my estranged uncle; large, unpredictable and occasionally one eyed. This is especially true near the end, where it seems the demon hierarchy requires some severe restructuring; if a business had so many bosses as this game it would surely have been liquidised within the first month. Especially if said business was run by demonic hordes. Racist I know, but thems the breaks in the cutthroat world of commerce. I am sadly unable to recommend this game to those with anger issues as I fear it could very easily trigger a relapse; I don’t want to be responsible for a single father of two running his 4x4 off the road with kids in tow…not again anyway.

Oh what the hell, Ill recommend it anyway. Those who get the opportunity, I would say play this game. It has some unique features and design pieces that most Super Famicom games don’t. Yes it is at times a challenge but so is contra, and people seem to enjoy subjecting themselves to that torment as well. I shall end on a solemn note, offering my deepest sympathies to dear old Keith; despite his bravest of efforts against the demon horde…he has sadly become seriously ill with a case of what doctors are calling “A bit dead”. I refuse to believe these quacks however and I will continue to have a pint down the nags head with him every Friday. Even though his butterfly anatomy puts off the rest of the punters.

Ushio To Tora

2010-01-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

My expectations of this game were far more than it could promise, on reflection I should have just left this game alone. The pretty pictures on forums gave me the impression that this is a solid platforming romp with adult undertones. Instead It is a clunky half platformer half RPG with some of the most annoying bosses I've ever seen. Hopefully you will forgive me for omitting the phrase "In videogame history" at the end of any negative sentence, as it makes up at least 80% of any youtube game review. (The remaining 20% being an embarrassing attempt to feign anger at games, or express genuine surprise at something which has likely been played many times before.

With that out of the way, perhaps a bit of back story to this game wont go amiss. 'Ushio To Tora' is based on a popular anime and manga series of the same name. Like all anime based videogames theirs that 'hit or miss' risk factor when buying them. Despite my hatred of Naruto (which probably isolates me from the entire Japanese gaming community) I can understand that the games are enjoyable, if not identical to countless Dragonball Z titles, but I digress. The problem with Ushio To Tora is not that its poorly made, far from it. Graphically its impressive and clearly anime inspired, theirs also a major undertone of Japanese folklore imbued within scenery and especially enemies. Its problems arise from how unfair the game is, even the first enemies within the game, a slew of spirits cannot be beaten without taking a fair few hits. Their attack pattern is borderline sentient, and dodging is made all the more difficult by the bizarre jumping controls. Soon after flailing wildly at these ghosts in the hope of beating them, the next screen was a boss battle and my main gripe with game...so much so that I have fallen to a stress related illness known as 'new paragraph trauma'.

See...now the bosses come thick and fast, it wasn't until the third stage that I realised this game wasn't a platformer in the traditional sense, like say castlevania...no. Rather than progressing through the level, ultimately leading to a boss fight, every single level is a boss fight! This wouldn't be so bad where it not for the fact that their attack patterns don't seem to leave an opening. Take the example of this dragon with a floor for a mouth: (or is it mouth for a floor?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FltjmvYMzZE&feature=related
A picture tells a thousand words as they say, and watching this reminds me just how few swearwords their are. Go straight to 4:53 and see for yourself how annoying this boss fight is. I still cannot find a way to beat this monstrosity without taking as many hits as I give, perhaps it is a subtle metaphor for the concept of Karma. In the end I gave up on strategy and decided to nestle myself under the beast and spear its chin to high heaven, while I took several hits it was a lot faster than jumping around to avoid floor mouths yellowing teeth, and it also guaranteed I wouldn't miss. Now bearing in mind I was playing on the easy difficulty, I cannot fathom how anyone could beat this game above anything other. The game offers some respite from being savagely beaten by Japanese folklore, luckily you are given an infinite number of continues each chapter, bearing in mind each chapter normally boils down to 1 or 2 boss fights you can probably blindly spear your way through before you die. Enemies may also randomly drop extra lives or food, the food manifests itself as the traditional rice ball or a not so traditional hamburger. Oddly it always seems to be the wandering ghosts that drop these hamburgers, and here's me thinking vengeful spirits were vegans. (Although it could be quorn)

Id like to comment on the story, but not being able to read Japanese puts a spanner in the works. It has a lot of text on screen between chapters, which I assume is probably a good thing, so....that's that then.

Looking back on my review I think I may have been a bit too hard on a game that doesn't necessarily deserve such criticism. Yes it is frustrating, but nonetheless enjoyable in its own sordid way. Perhaps that's just a reflection of my own masochism and self loathing...or I'm just a sucker for ghostly hamburgers. Either way I would recommend you play this game just to find out for yourself how hard a boss fight can be. For anyone who can complete it past easy difficulty, please write an FAQ as to how. The world must know of your heroism and bravery!

The difficult 1st blog

2010-01-11T13:51:00.000-08:00

Hello non existent fans! Straight from the rainy doldrums of England, Cockneytown upon Hampshire comes the beloved English favourite. The retro prefect! Maybe you havent heard of me yet, but with any luck I will become a common household name, like Mary Poppins, Sherlock Holmes or any one of the many 70's serial killers finally put to justice thanks to the wonder of DNA forensics.

Now, this blog has been put in place for a number of reasons....2!
1. Blogs are where the 'kidz R aT' (Kids are around), to clear this up, I am reaching towards contemporary youth out of interest in current society. Not out of some elaborate mass grooming plan...thats what facebook is for.
2. Konpyuta Spielen! Much like a certain 2nd world war alliance, that sentence is half Japanese and half German! You might notice I forgot to mention Italy...but for years I thought Musollini was the driving instructor on Parappa the Rapper...not really a mistake one would make with Hitler. Maybe Stalin as he does resemble a 2 dimensional sunflower at times.

In a roundabout, not at all way. The aim of this blog is/has/was to provide information on videogames of a bygone age that you youngsters have no idea about. Most notably consoles of the early 90's such as the SNES, Super Famicom, Megadrive, Game Boy etc. If your all nice enough I may even verge into the murky depths of *gasp* modern gaming!

Enjoy (Or should I say N-Joy, because it sounds a but like N-Gage...no lets not)