Castlevania (NES Review)

October 26, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 11 Comments

Castlevania
aka Akumajō Dracula
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Konami
First Released September 26, 1986
Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection

“EXCUSE ME! If you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about our lord and savior, Jesus Christ! Hello? Anyone there? I’ll just leave this pamphlet here and come back tomorrow!”

My history with the original NES Castlevania is a personal one. I first experienced it in the mid-2000s, in the form of the Game Boy Advance NES classics re-release that I fished out of a sales bin. By that point, I’d played Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow. All games I absolutely loved, that I would have easily called some of my favorite games. Then, a few months after Aria released, I was critically injured in a life-altering car accident. The epilepsy I would develop at 16 stems from the head trauma sustained on that day. I’m lucky to be alive, frankly, but the injuries were pretty bad. It would be months before I could even hold silverware. The accident happened in November, 2003, but I didn’t really start gaming again until early 2005, after making my first genuine attempt late in the Summer of 2004 and finding that, while my right hand was healing nicely, my left hand just didn’t want to cooperate. The biggest problem was just holding the controller. My left hand was so badly damaged that its pinky has a permanent crook in it that still causes me controller-holding issues to this day, along with constant numbness in my fingertips. Early-on, action games were out of the question. When I finally started going again, my hands would cramp and/or fatigue really easily. Physical therapy helped, but I kind of figured video games were the physical therapy.

The most underrated aspect of Castlevania, IMO, is that it’s a milestone in settings and set-pieces. Like right here, where the location of the final battle with Dracula can be seen off in the distance. Even better is this comes at roughly the halfway point of the game. Video games didn’t typically do one-time backgrounds just for the sake of world building in 1986. Ultimately, a game designer is trying to create the illusion of an entire world out of a series of 1s and 0s. Castlevania’s world is more real than just about any franchise that got its start on the NES, including Super Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. It’s head-and-shoulders above them, in fact.

And then I got that original generation Castlevania, and Cathy got her groove back. By time I slew Dracula, a couple days had passed, and it felt like I’d gotten gaming back pretty much as I had it before. It was the perfect game for that, because it has some of the most pure, refined action on the NES. Nothing too advanced. No insurmountable odds. With two or three very rough exceptions, the OG Castlevania is action-platforming boiled down to its most base components. Castlevania isn’t as bold as you would think, mostly utilizing basic level design mentality. It’s mostly made up of straight corridors where enemy placement is 98% of the challenge. It’s why brief sections where the environment poses a threat stand out. Like the section pictured here:

The flying Medusa heads only happen when you beat the game. And this is rough spot #1, because the collision on these is piss poor. Given how polished the rest of the game is, it’s kind of stunning how badly done it is. EVEN WORSE is that they didn’t improve it all that much in Castlevania 3 years later. Anyway..

Those three spiked presses are an iconic section of the game (granted, for all the wrong reasons) and they last, oh, maybe five seconds? And then they never show up again! Those are the only three instakill presses in the entire game. It’s kind of astonishing how restrained Castlevania is, but thank god for it, given how bad the collision for this section is. Later, a section underground where you have to hop across moving platforms to avoid falling down an instakill moat? Again, it lasts a few seconds, and then nothing like that shows up again, but that section is also pretty rough. It’s almost as if they realized the polish wasn’t coming along, so they stuck to the basics that they knew they were getting correct. You can see this when you compare those brief moments to the extended sections where the level design is just a straight line with maybe a couple blocks of debris or a split-level with staircases, and the gameplay is genuinely perfect. Honestly, it also kind of helps to make Castlevania feel like an actual castle, doesn’t it? Like, how many spiked presses does one Count need to own? Three feels more practical and ergonomic.

Castlevania is loaded with these hidden point secrets. Even though points are worthless without online leaderboards, I have to admit that every new time I’ve found one, I’ve squealed with delight. Is there a platform somewhere for no reason? There’s a good chance it’s to reveal one of these hidden treasures. Though not all of them are available in the first quest. The Gradius-based Moai statue can only be found after beating the game.

Castlevania’s levels are divided into “stages” marked by doors. The stages really mark the respawn points if you die, so I’m going off the overall levels. If there was an “Opening Level Hall of Fame” Castlevania would make it on the first ballot. An absolute masterclass in easing players into the game’s universe that never overwhelms but also never condescends. Whip the candles. Whip enemies. Climb stairs. Throw your sub-weapons. Basic stuff the instruction book covers, and with enemies that have generally basic attack patterns. The most common enemy, the ghouls, charge straight ahead. The bats fly at you in a slight wave pattern, and the panthers lounge before dashing at you. The most challenging of the first level’s basic enemies are the fishmen, who launch out of the water, but even then, they’re slow to react and allow players time to defeat them before they spit projectiles at you.

You’ll also notice their placement is spot-on. There’s no cheap shots in the first level. Having this small section in the water prepares you for a later, more dangerous encounter over a large section of water.

The choice and location of the enemies in Level 1 makes for a good confidence builder, but it also helps you to figure out the key to survival in Castlevania. There’s hidden stuff in the walls. How will players figure this out? In the very first instance of the health-restoring food hidden in the walls, the game has you encounter a bat that you can’t avoid. When you inevitably whip at it, you’re going to bust through the wall and reveal the food. By the way, this was one of the very few Angry Video Game Nerd lines that actually made me laugh. I chortled when he said the food must be “dirty.” Yea, food found randomly in a crumbling wall in a centuries-old castle owned by the embodiment of all that is evil having dirt on it would be my chief concern too.

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It’s notable that the first level only has TWO jumps over pits, in the cellar with the fishmen. While later Castlevanias would balance jumping with combat, the original game very much is focused on fighting baddies. I counted out the jumps in the first five levels. There’s approximately two dozen where there’s a risk of dying directly due to the jumps, some of which are optional. And really, that’s through four levels, because the fifth level has NONE. Not a single jump over a pit. Wow! So, really, the first stage gets you where you really need: ready to whip a whole lot of enemies. Yet, as basic as it is, the setting is especially spooky. Tattered curtains and holes in walls. It’s creepy. Then, you see a giant bat hanging from the ceiling. Is it the Count already? Nope, but it is a pretty good first boss and the perfect cap to the perfect level. Yep, perfect. This is right up there with 1-1 in Super Mario Bros., the fight against Glass Joe in Punch-Out!!, and yes, even Green Hill Act 1 in Sonic The Hedgehog. First levels don’t get better, folks.

If you have the axe, this fight is a cinch. Especially with the first double shot in the game hidden right there. But, if you use the whip, it’s a much more intense and satisfying battle. You know, I don’t think I ever tried fighting Castlevania’s bosses without sub-weapons. You can tell they weren’t really made to be fought with the whip. Depending on where it lingers, you might have to wait for it to dive down and attack you to get your licks in.

Besides the spike presses, I don’t think there’s a single moment that Castlevania doesn’t prepare you for. Well, except maybe the Medusa heads. They fly in a giant sine wave pattern and are among the most annoying enemies in gaming history. If you think they’re bad now, try playing the second quest after you beat the game. “How do we make this harder? F*ck it! Just add Medusa heads!” This is also the introduction to one of Castlevania’s most quirky features: the ability to use being damaged to circumvent large sections of the stage. You see, Castlevania’s most notorious feature is the violent knock-back that happens when you take any damage. Well, at least when you’re not walking on the stairs. It can turn a flesh wound into an instakill down a pit. BUT, if you time it right, you can use it to do the world’s most masochist double jump, and in certain areas of the stage, it allows you to circumvent areas of the game. It’s rarely useful, at least in Castlevania I, but there’s a spot or two it works on. I imagine speed runners must love the Castlevania games. Hell, I’m not a speed runner and I was giddy when I pulled this move off for the first time, especially since there’s a health refill in the very next room.

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The second level is also the introduction to the “any monsters will do” mismatch of cultures that makes Castlevania, well, Castlevania! The second boss is Medusa, who has absolutely nothing to do with vampire mythos, Transylvania, or gothic horror. It’s a Greek myth about a woman who had sex with a God, pissing off another God who decided to punish her for the nerve of having a little cuddle. Eventually mummies, the Grim Reaper, and even f’n Frankenstein show up. Why would Frankenstein be in a game set in 1691? Frankenstein takes place in the 1700s! And why the hell would he fight for Dracula? He wouldn’t be swearing his hatred for humanity for a few decades at the very least. Castlevania is like Monster Squad, only theoretically loonier, yet done without the satire or 80s stereotypes. It’s played with absolute sincerity, and it’s kind of scary.

I kind of like that she’s just a disembodied head. So this is post-Perseus Medusa. On the downside, she doesn’t even turn you to stone.. at least in this version.

In terms of gameplay, my biggest question is simple: are the sub-weapons overpowered? Actually, I think they are. With the right load-out, many enemies are reduced to little more than cannon fodder. The solution is simple: either the sub-weapons should cost more hearts or the game should give you less hearts. Only the stopwatch costs more than one heart to use, at a whopping five for five seconds worth of freezing enemies. Meanwhile, the easy-to-use boomerang, holy water, and axe cost you 1 heart each and they shred enemies and bosses, especially if you have the double/triple shot. The opening giant f’n bat? Four seconds with the axe. Medusa? I once took her down in three seconds with a triple boomerang (though I wonder now if I had it set to easy mode, because jeez, that looked pretty quick). And look at how you can fight the mummies with the holy water!

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But, even if you don’t have a safe spot, you don’t need it. The holy water burns and stun-locks every boss, except Dracula’s first form, which is only vulnerable on its head. If you can pick-up holy water, you don’t need to spam it, like you do with the axe or boomerang. You need only to learn how to time it right. Now, granted, you have to actually not die, and you have to avoid grabbing any other weapon by accident. Assuming you do die, you’re still not totally screwed. If you’re not in the final stretch before the boss and you have the time to build up hearts, you can quickly get the double shot/triple shot back. There’s a trick to it that doesn’t require you to find these items in the walls. Every ten kills (including projectiles) with a sub weapon nets you the double shot/triple shot. If your aim is true, that means you only need ten hearts to net you the double shot and twenty to earn you the triple. With the exception of the final level, you should be able to do it quickly. Here I am with the triple shot knife right in the first section of the first stage, though I should note the double/triple shot dropped from candles, not baddies.

Granted, I had to grind-up hearts, but I’ll be damned.. it works!

Despite its reputation, Castlevania isn’t that difficult, at least through the first five stages. I never feel like the odds are overwhelming against you, and the enemies, even the Medusa heads and hunchbacks, have easy-to-grasp patterns and predictable placement. Castlevania 1 is a very clockable game. Maybe it’s hard the first time, but it’s easy to learn and satisfying to master. NOT difficult to master, but satisfying. For this review, I ran through the game three times. In my run on the Japanese version, I played terribly in the fourth stage, with only two ticks of health left going into Frankenstein’s Monster. Having two ticks of health left is basically saying “one more hit and you’re dead.” But Frankie and the hunchback that sat on his shoulder didn’t even get a chance to move thanks to my triple-shot holy water. That was around the time I realized “um.. I haven’t died yet.” And that brings me back to the whole “personal journey” Castlevania has been a part of.

“Oh well, it beats being played by Robert De Niro.”

In 2005, a full six years before I started Indie Gamer Chick, I didn’t know Castlevania was the perfect action game to help me build my timing and my confidence back. I thought I was just going to play it for an hour or two and put it back in my case. I’m lucky, really. Retro gaming wouldn’t be on my radar for well over a decade after I picked it up. If it hadn’t been on clearance, I don’t think I’d have bought it. My curiosity as to what it would be like could best be described as mild. I never imagined it would be such a milestone game for me that I end up going back to it from time to time. Replaying Castlevania as an adult really started four years ago, with Castlevania Anniversary Collection. I still enjoyed it just fine, but by that point, I’d played the superior Castlevania III, which I not only liked more, but I considered to be the best NES game ever made. And Super Castlevania IV, nerfed as it is, is a damn good time. Both those were, you know, IN THAT COLLECTION! Castlevania 1? A slightly-overrated game with only six levels that’s mostly straight corridors? Why, that one is downright fuddy duddy.

I used to quake in my booties over the stairs. Not so much anymore, though I imagine that’ll change for Castlevania III.

It wasn’t until I replayed the game when they added Japanese ROMs to Anniversary Collection that I came to admire the fact that Castlevania 1 laid out the perfect foundation for a game franchise in a measly six levels of action. By this point, I found myself replaying it pretty frequently, usually as an excuse to review other things Castlevania-related. I reviewed a series of ROM hacks based on it (read that HERE). Or, hey, I got a TurboGrafx 16 mini and it has Rondo of Blood? Well hell, I might as well bust-out Castlevania 1 again! Along the way, I noticed something: I was getting pretty dang good at it. Slowly but surely, I phased out using save states and rewinding, and the next thing I know, I’m beating the game without cheating every single time. I’d only done that once before, back when I was 15 years old and recovering from that f’n accident, but this was different. Because not only had I beat it without cheating, but the first time I did it in my modern IGC existence, I only died once!

Why would the Grim Reaper work for Dracula? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Yea, I’m sure this is “explained” and then retconned and explained in another way but, yea, no. It’s the goddamned Grim Reaper! Dracula should be working for it. OR, maybe he does. Maybe Drac got Simon Belmont’s post-it note. Now there’s an obscure reference.

The idea that I could beat Castlevania without losing even one life seemed far-fetched back when I first played the game in 2005. It’s got a reputation, and even at my best, I was never that good. After I had another single-death run last year, it didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Part of it is memorization. I know which candles NOT to whip mid-air that would take away my weapon. I know that the triple holy water and not the triple boomerang is the key to making the game absurdly cheesable. I know where the enemies are going to be coming from and can avoid being knocked backwards into a pit. My second one-death run’s one fatality was in the dumbest possible spot. This one:

See that little hole between me and the stairs and the skeleton? Yea, well, I didn’t.

On the plus side, I would never forget that hole was there ever again. Really, as long as you practice with the holy water, don’t take any candles that are a risk of death by falling, memorize where the enemies are going to be during the pits (which there aren’t as many pits as you’d think) you can do it too! Getting deep without dying in Castlevania isn’t that hard. Sacrilege, I know, but I’m NOT a professional gamer. Not even close. But, I realized a couple years ago that acing Castlevania didn’t feel as unfathomably out of reach like it would for my other favorite NES games such as Life Force or Contra. I knew I could do it. Long before I was making single-death runs in Castlevania, I was so proud of myself for not taking any damage in the “Infamous Hallway” that leads to the Grim Reaper on my first time playing it on Anniversary Collection. Now, I can do that every single time. It’s not that tough, actually. My mistake was relying on the boomerangs. My logic seemed sound: they travel nearly the full length of the screen AND then come back, dealing double the damage. But, the knights can shield the boomerangs, and bosses aren’t permanently stun-locked by them. They have no defense against the holy water. These days, I have that hallway down to a science. It’s easy once you figure out how to rush and manipulate the enemies.

It’s not until the final level that Castlevania truly becomes a monster. Few NES games build up to a perfect crescendo quite like it. The funny thing is, it’s BY FAR the shortest level. It’s not even close, actually. But, the challenge is incredible. The giant f’n bat that’s the first boss? The final level starts with a broken bridge that has five of them! And it’s not like they nerfed them for this section. They take as many hits as before, and you don’t have the hearts to just spam them with sub-weapons. That’s why I did the most heroic thing I could do: I legged it.

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Then, after a brief encounter with some bone-throwing skeletons, you move onto a section that features the hawks dropping hunchbacks on you. The game fed you these before as you navigated a literal straight line with no jumps. This time around, it’s easily the most difficult section of the entire game. That includes all the bosses. This brief section contains huge staircases, tight jumps, close quarters, all made significantly harder by the fact that the walls are designed to allow the hunchbacks to jump up from below you, with no means to stop them. This is the final stretch before Dracula, and it’s brutal.

I had a rough guesstimate on how many hearts I’d need to beat Dracula, and I knew how many hearts were available in his arena. Once I knew I had enough, I botled the exit.

It was when I managed to make it through that section with full life that I realized “holy crap! I’M GOING TO DO IT! I’M GOING TO ACE THE GAME!” Then I almost blew it against Dracula, who has two forms, the first of which is only vulnerable in the head and can’t be stun-locked by the holy water. After starting out hot, I blew three consecutive attacks from him. I was down to one final hit when I took his head off. At which point, like so many other bosses, his final form I could stun lock by timing my tossing of the holy water. Not too fast. Not too slow. A nice steady pace and he was toast, and I’d done it. And it feels so good.

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I can’t imagine what Castlevania must have been like for first-time players in the mid-to-late 80s. It had to have been mind blowing how immersive it is. It looks better than any NES game released up to this point. It sounds better. It controls better. As far as games with fixed-jumping goes, it’s very intuitive. Dare I say, the best fixed-jumping on the NES. It’s a charmer, too. The fact that it’s got Dracula, Frankenstein, mummies, Medusa, skeletons, etc, yet it plays them completely sincerely, tongue never in cheek? I mean, come on. It’ll charm the socks right off you! That uniqueness is lost in 2023. Hell, some of their Frankenstein designs in the years since have been embarrassing, and the series took a hard turn into the cheesy territory when Dracula started to monologue on what exactly a man is. I think part of why the original Castlevania holds up pretty dang well is because it has such sincerity. There’s nothing pandering or cynical about it. Well, at least until those end credits. Golly, those were an ominous sign. But, otherwise, Castlevania holds up to the test of time.

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But, what truly makes it timeless, at least for me, is the fact that it’s a “hard” game that’s easy to commit to memory, learn the patterns for, and ultimately overcome and triumph in ways I never thought possible. It’s not even the best Castlevania on the NES, but it is the closest to actual gaming perfection. I think if I put in the type of time and effort I have for games like Dead Cells or Cuphead, I really think I could eventually do a no-hit run on it. What once felt impossibly out of reach now feels like it’s doable. It’s not as if I had to practice at Castlevania for years to get good enough to run through it in a single life. I’ve played it sporadically-at-best since 2019, and ultimately, it was just knowing what item to use (triple holy water, not triple boomerang) and memorizing which candles NOT to whip that put me over the top. Taking no hits will require more time and patience, and there’s sections I’ve never played perfectly. I’m worried about the Grim Reaper. I’m worried about that final stretch before Dracula. I’m worried about Dracula himself. But, impossible? I don’t think so. Do you know what the best thing I can say about Castlevania is? It’s a game that was released a little less than three years before I was born, and I’m sitting here legitimately contemplating whether I could play it perfectly or not, and there’s only one thing I know for sure: I wouldn’t be bored trying.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Castlevania, Castlevania 1, Castlevania NES, Castlevania Review, NES Reviews

Jaws (NES Review)

October 22, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Jaws
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Westone (then known as Escape)
Published by LJN
First Released November, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

We actually don’t need a bigger boat. This boat is perfectly adequate. No notes.

Jaws is historically maligned, in large part because it was an early release by notorious NES publisher LJN. It’s also not exactly a thrilling game, and it was released around the time the really bad Jaws sequels had largely eroded the franchise’s potency. But, what if I told you that Jaws for the NES actually ain’t that bad. Or, even bad at all? It’s not amazing or anything. I originally had typed out the words “diamond in the rough” but quickly deleted them. Diamond is obviously too kind. It’s.. a half-dollar in the rough. You’re pleased as punch to find it lying around. Like, this isn’t a penny someone dropped and determined it wasn’t worth the effort of bending over to pick up. It’s.. a half-dollar! Whoa! Then, about ten seconds later you realize, wait, that’s really only fifty pennies, and you’ve probably passed by that many pennies and not bothered bending over to pick them up. You’re still oddly satisfied, yet bummed that it’s not as good as it seemed like ten seconds ago. That was rambling, but trust me,what I just described is the Jaws NES experience in a nutshell.

Jaws’ gets its first rectal exam.

Jaws is the rare NES game that feels like it still utilizes the type of abstract game design theory that ended with the Atari 2600. A short, very limited, very narrow-scope set of repetitive tasks that combines a couple different gameplay types loosely tied to the game’s theme. In the case of Jaws, the object of the game is to build up your attack power to be strong enough to overcome the humongous and initially ultra-spongy life bar of Jaws. You have an overhead map that has two ports. You have to sail back and forth between them, and as you do, RPG-like random encounters happen. Only, instead of turn-based combat, you play a very rudimentary shooter that lasts 30 to 60 seconds. There’s only four enemies in these encounters: stingrays, jellyfish, baby sharks, and Jaws itself. When you start the game, you basically cause no damage to Jaws at all, and any damage you do cause will heal itself four bars per random encounter. To build up your attack power, you have to rely on randomly-dropped seashells that you then cash in at the two ports for a progressively more costly +1 to your attack power. The only truly wise decision the developers made was forbidding players from going back to the same port twice in a row. You have to alternate between the two, and there’s no doubling-up. You can only collect one additional attack power point at a time.

During random encounters not involving Jaws, the entire battle takes place as the diver (or the sub). BUT, if you hit Jaws on the map, the encounter starts on the boat, where you can lob cannonballs at it. You absolutely cannot avoid Jaws, but it’s like getting free shots in, since once it touches the boat, you become the SCUBA diver and are invincible for a few moments.

So yea, Jaws is a game about grinding, but you don’t need to clear your schedule if you want to try it out. I beat it without any cheating (unless auto-fire counts as cheating) three times this morning, each time in well under an hour, and the third time only required thirty minutes. Thankfully, what little sea combat it has was decently done. It’s not a bad little shooting game at all, but like I said before, it’s basic. Four enemies. Four whole god danged enemies. Really, only two that you frequently encounter. To the game’s very limited credit, they get progressively more aggressive as the game goes along, but come on. It’s so creatively dead. As the SCUBA diver, you only get one single form of attack, and while the Jellyfish eventually do become a genuine nuisance (they got me a couple times), there’s no variety. Also, your power doesn’t affect anything BUT Jaws. Even the baby sharks take the same amount of hits to kill regardless of whether you’re a 1 or a 9. Once you’ve encountered Jaws for the first time, you’ve seen 95% of the game.

The random encounters I think must be based on a predetermined amount of “steps” taken. I noticed that if I rewound the game and changed direction, I’d have a random encounter regardless after the same amount of spots moved. However, I had one span where I crossed from one port to the other without a single encounter. Actually, I came VERY close to making two full passes. Also, it’s worth noting that if Jaws was close by (as pictured above) when a different random encounter happens, it’ll probably show up anyway.

The two ports aren’t even that far apart from each-other, either. That’s especially odd considering how big the map is. It’s not like you have to search to find the other port the first time, either. The game starts on the left port, and once you pull out of the harbor, a straight line to the right will bring you there. If you don’t suffer a random encounter, it takes under 10 seconds to get there. While it’s not a massive map, I get the distinct impression that they originally had bigger plans. Perhaps randomly placing the ports would have helped a lot. The only incentive to search is a randomly-placed submarine that, when you find it, provides you with more maneuverability and a second underwater weapon to use. I didn’t really like using the sub, though, and found its lob-style cannonball weapon to be kind of worthless. I didn’t really want to bother going out of my way for it, either. The task at hand was to build my power, which meant staying in that narrow space between the two ports, grinding out random encounters and hoping for seashell drops. Enemies also drop crabs (which make you go faster) and stars (worth points, which are worth getting since 30,000 points nets you an extra life). Oh, and don’t kill enemies too close to the screen, because your character can’t go all the way to the edge, and you might miss collecting their drops.

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You’re not entirely at the mercy of randomness. When you kill Baby Jaws, it’ll ALWAYS drop a seashell, and killing three or four of them will earn you a visit to a terrible bonus game where you drop cannonballs on jellyfish that are dancing in formation. You earn a seashell for every three jellyfish you hit. As you progress in the game, more baby sharks will spawn. Eventually, it won’t be rare for you to have random encounters made up entirely of baby sharks. The crappy thing, there’s a very fun game buried in this mess. I like the idea of the finishing line not being set in stone, but rather based on when you’re strong enough to take down one single enemy that you keep encountering again and again. Jaws is the only enemy in the game that you can see on the map. After visiting the port for the first time, you get a receiver that warns you when Jaws is nearby. You want to avoid it at first, since it’s impossible to beat it. With each power level, it takes a little less hits to take a single bar off its life. You won’t be able to put any lasting damage into it because its health restores by four bars every random encounter, whether Jaws is part of it or not. It won’t be until around level 5 you can put damage into it. If you’ve got auto-fire turned on, you should be strong enough to beat it on level 7.

By far the most challenging levels in Jaws are those in the shallow waters. Random encounters close to a coastline will happen here. The jellyfish become VERY problematic, especially when they rise out of the bottom of the screen with no warning and start curving through the water. When you die, you lose a power level and your speed is reset to 0. Jaws is a one-hit-death game, which is really the REAL reason you’d want to get the submarine. It acts as an extra hit point that you lose if you touch an enemy. I strongly advise you to not hang out at the bottom of the screen.

When you’ve depleted all of Jaws’ health, the game enters a third-person mode where Jaws comes at you, bruh, but maybe not DIRECTLY at you. It’ll swim progressively closer to the boat, and it’s just a matter of following it and waiting for the right moment. You’re given three signal flares that you can use to make Jaws pop and spin out of the water. There’s a series of lines that acts as a grid of sorts. When Jaws is ON the final line, not between it or in front of it, but touching it, AND it’s lined up with the front of the boat, you use the flare to pop Jaws out of the water, then you spear it with the boat. One shot and it’s dead, and you’ve beaten the game.

My description above might not be 100% accurate. Honestly, this is a pretty haphazardly done finale. Sometimes it feels like Jaws is aligned perfectly, and I still don’t score the kill. If you run out of flares, you have to go get more from the shops. After reaching level 9 in power, each visit to a port will net you an additional signal flare.

Once the baby sharks start appearing more frequently, the bonus stages interrupt the game too often. Sure, they’re 5 to 7 free seashells, depending on how accurately you shoot, but they interrupt the flow of the game and feel completely out of place. I also think a perfect score is impossible.

So, that’s Jaws. History has largely vilified it, but honest to god, folks, it’s not THAT bad. It just doesn’t come remotely close to having enough content. Variety is the spice of life, but Jaws is limited to four enemies, two battle arenas, a really bad bonus game, and a fairly poorly done mini-game finale. But, the concept of the game is enticing, what little gameplay is here is decent enough, and it’s over so quickly that you don’t really have time to get bored. The NES and especially LJN are responsible for some downright travesties of licensed video game shovelware, but Jaws isn’t among them. Given how shoddy most of LJN’s published library is, Jaws might be their finest movie tie-in. Golly, how sad is that fact? But, let it be said, the developers of Wonder Boy worked a miracle here. Do you know what the closest cousin of Jaws is? Sinistar, the arcade classic from Williams. Both are shooters based around building up the ability to kill one omnipresent big bad. It’s a genre that hasn’t really been explored all that much since Jaws, and I really wish someone would. In fact, I genuinely believe that everything presented in the existing game could serve as the framework for an all-time classic. If Westone had added more enemies, items, arenas, and locations on the map (and probably beef-up Jaws to accommodate all this new content) I can’t help but wonder if Jaws would be a celebrated classic. Someone at LJN should have looked at this and said “we’re going to need a bigger game!”

See that? I did a Jaws thing there. You got it.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Jaws, Jaws Game, Jaws NES, Jaws NES Game Review, Jaws NES Review, Jaws Nintendo, Jaws Nintendo Review, Jaws Review, Jaws Video Game

Project Blue (Review)

October 6, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

If you play Project Blue on the Nintendo Switch or Xbox, there’s NO ability to save your progress. There are no save files, and despite being an NES game running on an emulator, there are no save states. That means if you want to play this on your Nintendo Switch and intend to finish the game, you can’t play anything else until you defeat the final boss. That might change eventually via a patch, but keep in mind that Project Blue is a fairly difficult game, even on its lowest difficulty setting. It’s also a game that features lengthy levels with two tiers of checkpoints: “lose a life” checkpoints that are much more generous and “game over” checkpoints that could potentially send you quite a ways back. While it’s a lot of fun, it also means you can’t knock out one stage at a time while playing other games. You can put your console on sleep mode, but once you turn off Project Blue, you have to start over from the beginning. If this was a twenty hour game, that’d obviously be a deal breaker. However, Project Blue thankfully only has four levels that I’d think an average player would need three to five hours to finish. At least on their first attempt. It’s still very annoying that a game in 2023 doesn’t use our space age technology to allow you to record your progress, but you could finish Project Blue on your first attempt during a screening of Avatar. You know, keeping with the blue theme.

What the Xbox/Switch package DOES come with is a damn good instruction book. Seriously, this thing is so NES authentic WHILE being kind of morbidly dark. Hey, it made me smile. I should also note that this is the ONLY WAY you can get the story of the game. While the graphics are good enough to immerse you in the in-game universe, you really don’t get a whole lot of story out of it. What story there is, well, just read the book. It’s all kinds of delightfully twisted.

I didn’t beat Project Blue on Switch. I swapped over to my PC and an NES emulator, because I wanted to play other games on my Switch too. Oh, and because I wanted to cheat. A lot, actually. With rewind and save states. Mostly save states, because those allow for SOME challenge. It’s how I maximize my own enjoyment, which is the whole point of playing games. Also, with a game like this, or any other “difficult” platformer, I normally prefer to knock out a few rooms at a time, then take a break. I probably should have played this more this week, because now it’s 1:19 in the morning and I’m rushing to get this out by time the game releases on Switch and Xbox, because Project Blue is really good and I want people to see this review as it launches. Take all my guesses on how much time you’ll need with a grain of salt. You’ll probably play Project Blue better than I did. It kicked my ass. And I kind of loved it for it.

I’m almost certain this would break your neck. By the way, there’s a handful of different colored borders if you get the Switch/Xbox version. I found the red one to be distracting, but the other two work really well AND took actual effort. Some of the best borders I’ve seen, and I play a lot of games that use borders. I just did Taito Milestones 2, which phones in the borders for 9 out of the 10 games. “Who does this bitch think she is? The border patrol?” Thank you! Don’t forget to tip your waiter!

Project Blue is maybe the most conventional NES game I’ve played as of yet that also pulls double duty as an elite-tier indie game. Despite being made within the last few years, there’s no modern strings attached. Which.. yea, come to think of it, the whole “you cannot save” thing tracks with that. But I’m speaking in terms of raw gameplay. You, me, and anyone else could believe that this is a genuine lost 1988-1991 NES release that somehow fell through a time warp. It didn’t succumb to the temptation of featuring gore or swearing like so many modern NES indies, nor does it use state-of-the-art (for NES at least) graphics chips to buff up the appearance. It passes the eye test, but it’s not just the presentation that makes it convincing. I’ve played four NES indies now (along with last year’s Garbage Pail Kids, micro-sized metroidvania Böbl, and Tetris tribute From Below) that are good enough to crack my top 100. Project Blue is probably the most believable as a genuine 80s/90s NES release. Defeating Garbage Pail Kids for that title is no small feat. It’s close, but I think the authenticity edge goes to Project Blue.

Even on the “normal” difficulty, this is a tough one.

Do you know what the secret sauce is? This is going to sound incredibly counter-intuitive, but the way to make your game perfectly NES-like is through imperfections, especially in movement and controls. Now, keep in mind that I don’t mean BAD controls. If you have unresponsive or sluggish inputs, your game is probably going to suck. Rather, I’m talking about good controls and movement physics that have a sharp learning curve to them. When that happens, it hearkens back to a time when developers (including Nintendo) hadn’t quite perfected the art of jumping around. In the case of Project Blue, it’s a game based around platforming and shooting your way through a series of interconnecting single-screen rooms. While enemies play a big role, I found the majority of the excitement came from the level layouts. The rooms are built around creating as many hold-your-breath jumps and close calls as any 8-bit game could possibly squeeze in. It’s nearly non-stop, even after you reach the point where the physics are intuitive. Project Blue is like an assembly line that turns out nail-biting platforming moments. And mind you, this isn’t a Super Meat Boy-like punisher. This is more like a Mega Man-style hop ‘n pop action game.

I confess that, after the first boss, I was worried that future boss encounters would be the low-point of Project Blue. But all the other bosses are an absolute blast to battle. Difficult, but clockable and fair. I really love this one, folks.

You don’t hold a button to run, but rather your movement speed builds automatically. Project Blue leans heavily on having to get a running start to make both high jumps AND long jumps. This premise, combined with movement that has a real sense of momentum and inertia, makes for a truly thrilling 8-bit experience. One that somehow feels totally unique while also feeling like dozens of other era-specific games. You get a little bit of Mega Man, but also a little bit of Blaster Master, or maybe Metroid or Journey to Silius, and probably tons of other NES games I’ve never even played. It feels like the developers set out to make each of the rooms feel unique from all other ones, but they didn’t stop there. Enemy placement is so measured and works in collaboration with the harrowing jumps that it feels practically scientific. Some rooms are optimized for combat, while others are optimized for jumping bits. Some combine the two, and some even have the enemies hopping off springs with you. But the bottom line is that nearly every single room offers some kind of unique challenge. Project Blue never feels repetitive. It never feels like they’re just recycling layouts. It never feels like they phoned it in and said “screw it, just shove a placeholder in here!” There’s nothing lazy about Project Blue. It really feels like it explored most everything the basic engine they created could do.

Project Blue also avoided the very worst NES platforming tropes. While I certainly won’t say there’s NO “gotchas” (I legitimately injured my throat trying to comically feign outrage at one death) there’s no invisible floors, no sliding on ice, no enemies that snipe you as soon as you enter a room, no invisible traps, and the bosses aren’t spongy. Project Blue’s challenge is as pure as the driven snow. I genuinely have no clue why driven snow is especially pure. I don’t know, folks. It’s the term. Work with me here.

And I swear, while the movement and the jumping physics are tough to learn, especially compared to modern 2D games, it DOES eventually become second nature thanks to stellar level design. Early on in the game, I struggled with measuring out which jumps I would need to build-up speed in order to clear. By the end of the game, I knew as soon as I entered a room “okay, that last platform I’m going to need a full running start for.” You typically have time to plot out a course. There’s only a couple “think fast” levels sprung on players, and they don’t really happen until the very end of Project Blue. The funny thing is, despite borrowing heavily from sci-fi run-n-jump shooters, the combat takes a back seat to the platforming. Honestly, I think I would have liked Project Blue equally as much if there was no shooting. It’s the rare action game where you could remove that element entirely and lose almost no excitement. It’s not as if the combat is crap, either. But, when I decided the safest strategy was to avoid enemies and leg it for the door, IT WAS STILL EXCITING! Holy cow, when does THAT ever happen? Where a game has good combat, but it could still do without it and be just as well? Almost never. That’s how special Project Blue is.

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Sometimes the decision to make a run for my life was made for me. Not all enemies can be killed, and sometimes you have to weave your way around them while hopping over instakill cliffs AND keeping enough momentum to reach the final platform. Especially once you near the end of the game, the biggest gameplay theme becomes “try not to stop moving.” It’s almost Sonic-like in that regard. And hey, that’s yet another classic game this seems to take inspiration from. That’s the thing about Project Blue: it’s not just borrowing ANY bits from classic games. It’s taking their best parts AND maintaining a sense of originality. It’s really remarkable in that regard, and it also doesn’t feel like it cheated by doing things that modern games would take for granted. It has a minimum amount of enemy designs, like so many NES games do. But, it’s not about how many enemies there are, but rather what the developers could do with them. In Project Blue, their usage is stretched to their absolute limits. Just when you think you’ve seen every possible way the invincible tanks can put up a challenge, you’ll enter a room with a pair of them flying off springs and hitting walls in perfect synchronization. Wow. Project Blue pulls off situations like that all the time, and it always took my breath away.

It’s a looker, too. Lots of tiny little details that give the world a lived-in sense.

Okay, besides those opening paragraphs, this is a little too lovey-dovey of a review, so here’s what I didn’t like: what you see IS what you get with Project Blue. If there’s hidden rooms, breakaway walls, etc, I didn’t find them. There’s only one gun upgrade that has limited ammo. With no permanent weapon upgrades and a linear level design, Project Blue kind of feels a bit on the bare-bones side. It also looks like you’re navigating a series of mazes, but you really aren’t. I figured the game would feature Kid Icarus-style mazes along the lines of the temple levels in that game, but that isn’t the case at all. I never got lost once. For the most part, each room has one entrance and exit. Typically if there are multiple points of entry and exit, they’re blocked off until you zig-zag around in a very linear fashion before coming back to them from a different angle. There ARE moments where I know I could have gone in another direction, typically via some ultra-long jump. But, I didn’t hit those jumps, and I didn’t want to replay Project Blue until I did. I don’t know what I missed, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. When I finished the game, as much fun as I had, I was also ready for it to be done. At least with Project Blue 1. If they ever do a sequel, I’ll be first in line.

With rewind/save states, I needed about ninety minutes to beat Project Blue, but mind you, I had beaten the first world three times before. It takes about thirty minutes per world with cheating. Without? Probably an hour per world. Ninety minutes, max.

BUT, if they ever do a sequel, what my challenge to the development team would be is to turn the worlds into genuine labyrinths that require navigation and maps, and maybe even permanent upgrades. I’m not suggesting they do a full-blown Metroidvania. There’s so many of those nowadays that it’s exhausting. Stick with levels, BUT, make them mazes. Clearly the developers have the talent to pull that off. I can’t stress enough: I have NO nostalgia for the NES. I’m a child of the PlayStation/Nintendo 64/Dreamcast era. This isn’t my wheelhouse. The novelty of playing an era-authentic NES indie in 2023 doesn’t mean squat to me. I’m never going to play Project Blue on a cartridge. No, for as minimalist as Project Blue is, it really holds up on its own as a truly great video game experience. Project Blue is intense and exciting and white knuckle. The combat is solid, but the level design shines like few other back-to-basics action games can do. It doesn’t matter if Project Blue feels like it comes from a different time or not, because all its best qualities are timeless.

Project Blue is Chick-Approved
Leaderboard Ranking: #36 of 309 Indie Gamer Chick-Approved Indie Games*
Top 94.4 Percentile of All 640 IGC-Reviewed Indie Games
Top 88.4 Percentile of All 306 IGC-Approved Indie Games
*Rankings based on time of publication. Check the Leaderboard for updated standings.

Project Blue was developed by toggleswitch, FrankenGraphics, and M-Tee
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Itch.io

$9.99 sang the blues in the making of this review.

A review copy was supplied for Nintendo Switch. Either a second Switch copy or an Xbox copy will be paid for out of pocket by Indie Gamer Chick. Or, rather her father, who wants to play it too. He’s cool like that.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with Project Blue, Project Blue NES, Project Blue NES review, Project Blue Nintendo Switch, Project Blue Nintendo Switch Review, Project Blue Review, Project Blue Switch, Project Blue Switch Review, Project Blue Xbox, Project Blue Xbox Review

Bonk’s Adventure (NES Review)

October 1, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 4 Comments

Bonk’s Adventure
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Atlus
Published by Hudson Soft
First Released July 30, 1993 (JP)
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Despite being very stripped down from the TG-16 original, Bonk NES is actually one of the best looking games the console ever had. There’s an alternate universe where Bonk never came out on the TG-16. Where THIS is the first Bonk, it came out in 1990 instead of 1994 (in the US at least). In that universe, I imagine Bonk is a certified NES legend.

You’ll note that I’m not going in chronological order for Bonktober. If I were, Bonk on the NES would be the fifth game I’d be reviewing this month. However, only the NES game (and some home PCs, but I’m not playing those) tries to be something resembling a direct port of the TurboGrafx-16 original, so I opted to play both back-to-back. It’s really the only true port of Bonk during that era, despite the coin-op and Game Boy titles having the same name. Along with Super Bonk, they’re all entirely original games. Meanwhile, the NES carries over as much of the level design, enemies, bosses, and set pieces from the first game as the Famicom could handle without catching fire. Imagine that: the entire PC Engine trilogy of Bonk released before this NES port of the original Bonk’s Adventure debuted. Incredibly, the game that was pegged as the killer app for the American side of NEC’s efforts ended up as one of the final globally released NES/Famicom games. That doesn’t really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but I found that fact to be an oddly fitting historic quirk.

Remember that the Famicom/NES and the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 are very close cousins in terms of architecture, so it’s no surprise that the NES can come so admirably close to replicating the original’s striking looks.

Remarkably, NES Bonk is still Bonk. It looks the part, with some of the best graphics on the NES, especially for a platformer. Bonk was one of the most colorful games of the era, and I figured the NES would look drab. But, their choices of color palettes were especially wise, with various shades of brown and green that work with the prehistoric theme. I’m THIS CLOSE to saying it works just as well as the colorful TG-16 build. Bonk retains enough charm to count as.. well.. charming, and even managed to keep all the bosses, though a couple play slightly different. This is a really close approximation of what Bonk was on the TG-16. A very impressive effort. So, why isn’t Bonk more recognized on the NES? And don’t tell me it has to do with the late release.

Okay, the late release factored in for sure, but there’s more.

The climbing and swimming controls are, in my opinion, much better on the NES. Sadly, the creepy-ass flower whammies aren’t so much creepy as they are pitiful now. Yea, that’s one in the picture. Sad.

Bonk on the NES has a overall smaller feel to it. There’s levels that have been cut from the TG-16 version. The ice level that actually surprised me with its quality on the TG-16? It’s gone. There’s a memorable segment on the TG-16 where a level immediately starts with a collapsing bridge that leads directly to the level’s exit, but if you don’t make it across, you have to play a swimming stage. That’s gone too. While I mourn the ice stage’s loss.. I never thought I’d say those words.. it really feels like a lot of the gristle was cut from Bonk. On the other hand, the combat that I loved so much feels significantly muffled on the NES. Oddly, the OOMPH is retained, but it’s the enemies themselves that are less fun to fight. They’re smaller, come in lesser numbers, and easier to manage. When you’re powered-up, you can clear the entire screen of baddies just by performing a diving headbutt to the ground. The NES Bonk feeds into my notion that Bonk is meant to be baby’s first platformer.

Probably the best swimming controls on the NES. No button mashing. Just move, swim, and attack as needed. You can even jump underwater while you’re swimming. It’s very nice.

Oh, it’s still fun. I’m giving it a YES! and everything. But, while the three main methods of combat are still every bit as excellent on the NES as they were on the TG-16, the scaled down enemies lead to Bonk NES almost completely lacking in urgency. It’s not as if Bonk was white knuckle to begin with, so the fact that what little intensity it had has been further scaled back stings quite a lot. Oddly, the NES build does have some technical improvements over the original, but all those do is further simplify the game. The biggest positive change is that collision detection feels more accurate on the NES. It controls better, too! The swimming is faster paced, and the climbing is a cinch. Other “improvements” actually hurt. The “bonus stage” flowers stick out like a sore thumb on the NES, which meant I had racked-up over twenty extra lives that I didn’t need. I only died twice the entire time. Once against the third boss, and once against the second-to-last boss. All the bosses feel easier, though, and while the scale of them is shockingly retained, they are nerfed. The second boss doesn’t create a clone of itself, and the final boss seems to have a much more generous collision box.

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I wouldn’t go so far as to call Bonk on the NES a lost classic. Even during those moments where you think to yourself “hey, this is slightly better than the more advanced TG-16 version” you’ll always wish you were playing the original build. I really don’t understand why they made the decision to attempt a port. Look: it’s hella impressive that the NES could even have a game that runs this closely to what is arguably the game that sold the most TurboGrafx-16s in America. But, at the point when this was released, I think it’s a safe bet that most people who REALLY wanted to play it probably found a way to do so. It’s not like this was an arcade port. The NES is not the TG-16 and Bonk’s Adventure on the NES, as good as it is, is also a reminder that paying tribute to the spirit of the original game is always preferable to attempting a port you can’t possibly run. With that said, when the inevitable Bonk Collection hits, I hope they include this, because it’s worth a look, even if only as a historical curio.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Bonk's Adventure, Bonk's Adventure NES, Bonk's Adventure NES Review, Bonk's Adventure Review

Bonk’s Adventure (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

October 1, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Bonk’s Adventure
aka PC Genjin (aka BC Kid in Europe)
Developed by Red Company Corporation & Atlus
Published by NEC
First Released December 15, 1989 (JP)
Included in the TurboGrafx-16 Mini
NO ACTIVE RE-RELEASE

Few first installments in a franchise hold up this well. Usually, they’re little more than a proof of concept. But, Bonk’s Adventure set the bar so high that future games in the Bonk franchise had to go wild right out of the gates. That’s why I’m excited to be reviewing the whole series this month at Indie Gamer Chick. I’m pretty sure only the GameCube and mobile versions are being left out. It’s Bonktober! (Thanks EscalatorBoy! And to think, I was just going to call it “Bonk Month!”)

Yesterday, I talked about NEC’s baffling choice for the TurboGrafx-16’s pack-in: Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Here’s the game NEC wishes they could have had instead. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were counting on it, but the US translation got held-up, like everything else about the TG-16. My theory is that NEC didn’t expect the PC Engine to catch fire the way it did in Japan, to the point they even briefly held the title of Japan’s best selling game console (in terms of monthly sales, not lifetime). By the time they realized they had an actual hit product, they had no infrastructure in place for a US launch. Despite the fact that they sold 500,000 consoles in their first week, it took NEC a few months to say “gee, maybe we should try this out in the US.” Then, when they finally got around to it, NEC seems to have hired people who heard the expression “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” and said “gentlemen, we ARE that committee!” Unable to see the big picture, they wasted FOREVER redesigning the physical appearance of the PC Engine. See, focus testing told them that Americans cared most about having a physically large box that played games and looked futuristic. Apparently they’d never heard of the Atari 5200. So, instead of shoring-up software and US partnerships, they focused all their US operations on redesigning the actual look of the console, along with picking a new name for it. One of the biggest “can’t see the forest for the trees” situations in gaming history.

In the days before social media, too many games had alternate regional names that made global branding next to impossible. In Japan, Bonk is known as PC Genjin. In Europe, Bonk is BC Kid. Also, in my head canon, the bad guys are Dizzy’s racist relatives.

If you need proof of NEC’s ineptness, ask yourself “how come Bonk didn’t launch with the TG-16.” Yea, I know it didn’t come out until April of 1990 in the US, but why? When NEC saw Bonk’s Adventure coming along, they should have thrown all their resources towards making sure it was there for the nationwide US launch in November, 1989, and they should have based their entire marketing campaign around it. There’s no way it would have been ready in time for the August 1989 test marketing of the TG-16, but Bonk came out in Japan in December of 1989. That was only one month after the full US launch of the console. It feels like this is a situation where they could have got in under the wire and actually been able to compete with the Genesis and Altered Beast. Remember, there’s no Sonic The Hedgehog to bail Sega out in November of 1989. In fact, Super Mario Bros. 3 hadn’t even been released in the United States yet, and the Super NES is but future dream. Bonk could have conceivably made kids say “instead of a Game Boy/Genesis, I want the system that plays Bonk!” Even head-to-head with the Genesis, Bonk should have given them the edge they needed. Altered Beast v Bonk? Come on! Bonk every time! Platform games were #1 genre, and Sega wouldn’t even have Castle of Illusion for another year. It IS the killer app the TG-16 desperately needed, but it wasn’t ready, and the TG-16 was steamrolled in the United States.

While I don’t think the level design is ALWAYS spectacular, all credit where it’s due for having several memorable sequences. Though, with how this dinosaur plays out, doesn’t that TECHNICALLY mean Bonk is poop from that point forward?

And the shame is, it really IS the killer-app the TurboGrafx-16 desperately needed. Bonk is a big step above a typical mascot platformer from the era. It came up with a novel idea: you play as a caveman with an enormous head who uses it for headbutting. That noggin of his is the basis for maybe the most satisfying combat of its type the platforming genre has seen. Instead of simply jumping on enemies, you can attack them three ways: a standing headbutt, a jumping headbutt (this one doesn’t even require the attack button!), and a diving headbutt. With just three attacks, Bonk’s Adventure gives you plenty of flexibility to do battle with a remarkably fun variety of enemies. The combat is a little deeper than you’d expect, too. The diving headbutt does more damage than the other two attacks, but if you miss, you’re left vulnerable from, you know, braining yourself on the earth below you. Regardless, the OOMPH from these attacks is cathartic and never gets boring. This is helped along with spot-on sound effects, including pinball-like chimes when the killing blow is struck. I love it.

Bonk uses his teeth to help him climb. I’d make a joke but I just found out that climbers actually do this (even if they’re not supposed to). Well, presumably mountain climbers probably don’t use their teeth on the mountain itself. Bonk is hardcore like that. Although if I ever get around to climbing Everest, I promise to use my teeth at some point.

The diving headbutt further has a twist in that you can cancel it mid-air. Do it fast enough and you can essentially glide slowly through the air. Back in the day, the original TurboGrafx controllers had auto fire. I discovered through my TG-16 Mini play session that you can positively cheese many sections of the game with this. As far as combat, it turns all interactions with enemies into a coin flip. Heads: you score the diving headbutt contact. Tails, you take damage, because you weren’t upside down when the contact was made. While the coin flip happens during boss fights as well, it also effectively cheeses them, since you essentially spin mid-air above their hit box and bounce upward with every hit. It also completely nerfs the minigames AND takes the difficulty away from nail-biting long jumps. When I played Bonk games on the Mini, I used autofire. This time around, I didn’t, and besides things like climbing, I had a better time without cheesing the game. The only time I was tempted to turn it on was fighting the very last boss, who is a bit of a bastard. But, fun to battle, like all the bosses are. They were also the only parts of Bonk where I actually died. It’s a pretty easy game that feels like it exists to say “hey everybody, LOOK WHAT THE PC ENGINE CAN DO!”

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And boy does it do it. Bonk flies right on by with its excellent combat, fun set pieces, memorable characters, and pretty good level design. Even the swimming and ice stages are really well done. When do you ever hear me say THAT about any platformer? Jeez. The swimming is really smooth and doesn’t require button mashing. The ice stages have giant ice cubes that you basically ride, and it’s delightful when it happens. Bonk has charm without feeling like it’s trying too hard. Well, except the meat. That’s the game’s power-up, and it apparently makes Bonk angry. Two of them grant you invincibility. And, during the final level of the game, Bonk’s Adventure spit out so many pieces of meat that I basically got a free pass through the final stage. It kept giving them to me even as I was already blinking from the invincibility. It was such a strange decision to make on what is supposed to be the final challenge leading to the last boss. It’s even worse though because there’s an annoying-yet-unskippable animation that happens when you eat the meat. Now, imagine that happening every, oh, five seconds for a good chunk of the final level. Yea, that really put a damper on what should have been the moment where Bonk’s Adventure was spiking the football.

Is it just me or does Bonk look like Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes when he powers-up?

Another interesting decision that I think was probably a bad idea was to have the diving headbutt freeze all enemies on the screen in both powered-up forms. I’d been fine with it being an ability the maximum-powered-up Bonk can do. But, both powered-up forms? Really? At first I thought it was far too overpowered, but then I played the NES version of Bonk, where instead of freezing the enemies, it just automatically kills everything on the screen. Okay, fine, yes, THAT is far too overpowered and the “turn to stone” bit that this version of Bonk does is only marginally overpowered. Still, it feels like Bonk is designed to be baby’s first platformer. And that’s fine, by the way. It’s always preferable that a game be too easy than be too hard, because at least when it’s easy, everyone can enjoy a game to its fullest potential. The fact that Bonk is a joy to play even three-and-a-half decades later speaks volumes to its greatness. It really is something special.

There’s a child-like glee that comes from the combat. Bonk is proof that there’s no substitute for charm.

Okay, so the collision occasionally made me give the game the side-eye. Also, being a stickler for first levels in games standing out and grabbing my attention right out of the starting gate, I have to admit that Bonk’s Adventure has one of the worst first stages of a great game in the medium’s history. It’s really flat and uninteresting. I get that they had to make things simple so that players could get a feel for the rules. Bonk’s combat, especially for the era, was as non-traditional as it gets, and perhaps they didn’t want to overwhelm players. Still, I think they were too conservative and probably should have had a little more faith. And now I feel unclean, because I literally had to look for things to whine about. No, folks, Bonk’s Adventure is truly the forgotten killer app of the 8-bit/16-bit era. The definitive slipped-through-the-cracks-of-history mascot platformer that could have/would have/should have been bigger than it was. If it had come out just five months earlier, it might have been. Alas.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Bonk's Adventure, Bonk's Adventure PC Engine Review, Bonk's Adventure Review, Bonk's Adventure TurboGrafx-16 Review

Keith Courage in Alpha Zones (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

September 30, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Keith Courage in Alpha Zones
aka Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Developed by Advance Communication Company
Published by NEC
Released August 29, 1989
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Keith Courage looks kind of like Pidge from Voltron, doesn’t he? Oh, and fun fact: Keith Courage, and the TurboGrafx-16, came out in the US exactly fifty days after I was born.

When NEC launched the PC Engine in the United States on August 29, 1989, many people didn’t know what they were thinking when they chose Keith Courage as the pack-in game. Well, *I* know what they were thinking. They were thinking “in thirty-four years, a girl named Cathy Vice will look back on this and think we were incredibly dumb idiots, bordering on blithering.” They were soothsayers, in case you didn’t know. Incredibly dumb idiots, but genuine clairvoyants. Indeed, one has to imagine that few companies kicked themselves as hard as NEC must have in the late 80s and early 90s. Released in 1987 in Japan, the PC Engine clobbered Sega’s Mega Drive and even briefly held industrial leadership over Nintendo’s Famicom. NEC seems to have been caught off-guard by their own success and bungled the global rollout of the console us westerners know as the TurboGrafx-16 every single step of the way. They squandered a potential two year head start on Sega, who beat them to US test marketing by two weeks. Sega also had Altered Beast packed-in with their console. I don’t like Altered Beast, but I also wasn’t around. It had arcade familiarity, massive character sprites, and looked cutting edge. The TG-16 was packed with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. And it sucks.

It’s not even really called “Keith Courage.” This is based on a property in Japan known as Mashin Hero Wataru.

NEC’s test launch of the TG-16 only had four games. Along with Keith Courage, there was an arcade racer called Victory Run, a video pinball title called Alien Crush that’s often cited as among the best the genre had seen in that era, and a hugely critically acclaimed action platformer called Legendary Axe. That last one swept up several Game of the Year awards from major publications. If we pretend they couldn’t have pooled from their massive Japanese library for more software and were limited to only the four launch games, it’s arguable they picked the worst one to bundle with the hardware. The only way I could logically spin it was NEC’s US team recognized it was the worst of the four and nobody would buy it on its own, so they said “screw it” and made it the free game. What’s really strange is the three games they didn’t choose look and sound better. When your only competitive edge is the graphics, picking a game that doesn’t look particularly advanced over the NES isn’t wise. It looks more colorful. That’s about it. Being more colorful isn’t a big advantage. Just ask Sega, since that was their edge with the Sega Master System.

For a pack-in game, NEC chose a game with 100% bland level design, 50% of which is extremely slow, plodding “action.” Oh, and the part that’s slow also requires grinding, since that’s the only part of the game that currency drops, and you absolutely NEED that currency to prevent enemies in the fast-paced sections from being spongy. Holy crap, what a boring game. Since you’re going to have to grind either way, grind several thousand bucks up on the stage that drops golden cats on you. They pay off the most. Of course, you might have to wait forever for one, but the non-gold ones pay off too.

You have to slog your way through seven levels, each of which is split into two segments. The first has you walking around as a human with a little nubby sword, killing a variety of enemies to grind up money. Money can ONLY be found in human stages, along with shops that refill your health, sell you ammo for the secondary weapon, and most importantly, upgrade your sword. The level design for these stages is total amateur hour crap. Things like having you hop across lava and just accept that you have to take damage. Do I even have to say why that’s stupid? There’s no actual challenge to it. It’s an automatic life drain that isn’t hard to make it across. It just forces you to refill your health with the nurse, who is right there on the other side. Normal coins are worth $50, and a health refill from the nurse costs $400. So it’s really just an excuse to make you grind up more money. That type of design is all over the human stages of the game. Enemies fall from the sky while your movement speed and the level layout mean there’s no way to climb up a building without taking damage.

Thankfully, I found a few spots where I barely had to move. Like this spot here? The enemies continuously respawn, even if I stand still. While not every kill results in a coin drop, this spot here went even faster than the golden cat section, and for less work, too. The grinding isn’t insufferable thanks to the currency being set high enough, and the most expensive weapon is only $4,800. Well, unless you wait to buy it on the final stage. I nearly crapped myself when I saw the last sword was over $9,000. However, I then realized it was the “Alpha Sword” which I had already gotten from level 6’s shop.

By the way, the swords you buy in the human stages aren’t used in them. You don’t need them to be, since every enemy dies from one hit on these sections. Once you clear the ultra-ultra bland human stages, you move on to stages that return blandness to normalcy. In them, you transform into what looks like a hyper-deformed Gundam character. The stages with these characters feel so different that it’s almost like two completely separate games were surgically attached to each-other. Despite the fact that you’re now a relatively bad-ass looking robot, you don’t really do any robot things. It’s still a hack ‘n slash platforming game, but the action is much more satisfying. The pace quickens by a significant factor and Keith Courage turns into an average-for-the-era action platformer.

There’s only a small handful of enemies in these stages.

Honestly, I think I would have liked Keith Courage better if it had just cut out the human stages. Maybe just re-balance the enemies and remove the “grind up new swords” aspect. Or hell, reward the player with a new sword for beating the boss. Maybe the game wouldn’t have lasted as long, but it would have been preferable to having deliberately slow, deliberately dull gameplay for the sake of contrast. In the robot stages, level design is maze-like and requires you to zig-zag your way underground until you eventually reach a boss. Instead of dropping coins, enemies will drop hearts or numbers. The numbers increase how many of the sub-weapon you throw at once, while the hearts fill up your health and, seemingly completely at random, give you an extra hit point. I couldn’t figure out any reason or even logic to how they give you extra health. It just happens.

It gets so bad that the game just recycles bosses as normal level enemies. Like seriously, the final level consists almost entirely of bosses filling in as normal enemies.

Despite the fact that Keith Courage has two vastly different feeling platform “engines” at play, I was stunned by how samey each of the levels feels. The action stages, especially. They’re very repetitive, with a lack of interesting visuals and only a small handful of enemies to deal with. It makes for an exhausting experience. When the “action” stages become more sprawling, they also introduce some cheapness in the form of blind jumps with instakill spikes in the vicinity. Combine this with very forgettable bosses, and now I’m wondering if I was right that NEC anticipated nobody would want Keith Courage, which is the only reason it was given away for free. It’s really haphazardly programmed too. When the time came to fight the final boss, the f’n thing didn’t move a single inch and just stood there while I hacked it to death. It didn’t even fire a projectile at me. I found out this is a known glitch, but the thing is, it’s not even a hard one to trigger. Just hold right when you fall into the boss arena, I guess. I don’t even think I did that. I think all I did was jump into the hole that I didn’t even know yet was the hole to the final boss arena. This is the type of bug that even basic play testing should have found, and they had a full year between the Japanese and US releases to squash it.

This is it. The final “boss” and I use boss in quotation marks because it literally didn’t move. Apparently, I inadvertently triggered a known glitch.

Keith Courage is proof positive that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. I really can’t justify how anyone in charge selected this of all games to be the title that would launch their console. Maybe they thought Nintendo’s lead was insurmountable and they were happy to scratch-out a decent profit, but I call BS on that. They had soundly beaten Sega in Japan by having superior software, and they had taken a huge chunk out of Nintendo’s market share. Even if it was under-powered compared to the Sega’s Genesis, NEC should have had a lot more confidence than they showed. Bundling Keith Courage feels like a white flag of surrender, because this game, at its absolute very best, would be a lower B-tier NES title. Not exactly a flagship piece of software that signals to consumers “see! We are taking the fight straight to Nintendo! You can trust us! We have confidence in our software!” Maybe they were counting on Bonk’s Adventure as probably the best chance the TG-16 had to dethrone Nintendo, but it wasn’t ready by launch. See though, neither was Sega’s Sonic, but they still bundled Altered Beast, a game people wanted, to hold the fort for the killer app. NEC could have done that, and they had a variety of options (TG-16 knowingly bundled mediocrity, and gamers responded accordingly. Meanwhile, in an alternate reality, the TG-16 was bundled with Legendary Axe and gamers today are fighting over what’s better: the Sony PlayStation or the NEC Xbox?
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones Review, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones TG-16, Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru, Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru PC Engine, Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru Review

Taito Milestones 2: The Definitive Review – Complete 10 Game Review + Ranking

September 28, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

Of all the collections I’ve reviewed so far, I was most worried about Taito Milestones 2 going into it. I really thought these would be middling games that would be tough for me to get interesting reviews out of. My fears were all for naught. Okay, yes, the fighting games were shallow enough I could barely squeeze them for a single paragraph each. But, the other eight games made for good review experiences, if not good games. The bad games were bad in ways that lent themselves to my review style, and the good games made me feel like I’d found buried treasures. Hell, if you had told me going into Taito Milestones 2 that I was about to play one of the best arcade games I’ve ever experienced, I’d not imagined it could be true. But it is. Seriously, don’t skip the Liquid Kids review, folks. The full game reviews are down below the ultimate verdict.

There is one big difference: three of the games in Taito Milestones 2, at least as of this writing, cannot be purchased separately as Arcade Archives titles. Those are Darius II, Dino Rex, and Solitary Fighter. Dino Rex and Solitary Fighter are two of the worst fighting games I’ve ever played. BUT, Darius II? REALLY good, folks. So, there’s some exclusives you can’t buy separately. At least for now.

MOST of the time, the instructions are really good. Visual aids included. Clear wording. Non-vague.

I’m going to take the lazy way out and say that everything I said about Taito Milestones 1’s emulation applies to the second volume. You can read that review for my thoughts on the overall presentation, since it’s identical here. Taito Milestones 2 features ten games using the Arcade Archives emulator, minus the signature modes like Hi-Score or 5-Minute Caravan. The emulation is solid and allows for button remapping and autofire, but doesn’t have things like quick save, quick load, or rewind. I’m awarding no bonus and issuing no fines for this collection and setting a value of $8 per quality game because that’s the sold separately price on Arcade Archives. I’m not saying Capcom’s games are worth $3 less because I like Taito more than Capcom. I’m saying it because they cost $3 less to purchase separately.

THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THIS COLLECTION

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

At a standard value of $8 per quality title, Taito Milestones 2 needs to score five YES! votes. The final tally is as follows:

YES!: 5 Games
NO!: 5 Games
Standard Price: $39.99
Total Value: $40

Taito Milestones is worth the MSRP on the merit of its games alone. It’s for sale digitally here.

Victory to Taito Milestones 2!

And by the way, I can’t stress enough how much the top three games in particular I enjoyed. Darius II and Metal Black are above average shmups that should make fans of that genre very happy. And hey, if you’re REALLY into bullet hells, you’ll certainly enjoy Gun & Frontier more than I did. I just couldn’t take the punishment. Same with non-shmup NewZealand Story, though its difficulty wasn’t the only reason it got a NO! from me. Meanwhile, Kiki Kaikai and Legend of Kage provide solid b-list levels of enjoyment. So, why get this set? Two words: Liquid Kids. Simply put, it’s one of the best coin-ops I’ve played and probably the best arcade hidden gem I’ve ever found. This set looks like it just squeaks by with a victory, but those top three are worth buying a set for. I am recommending a purchase of this set and I’m seriously about to name a game as possibly my favorite arcade platformer ever. But, my readers are going to be like “yea, but $39.99 with almost no extra features?” Actually features missing from Arcade Archives. A $39.99 compilation made of sold-separately games should have MORE features, not less. It’s not wise to rely ONLY on having a better all-in-one value, especially since Inin insists on including games like Dino Rex or Solitary Fighter that nobody would want! Even as exclusive games, really? I’d of rather they just stuck Jungle Hunt or hey, Bubble Bobble on here.

FINAL RANKINGS

How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!

Liquid Kids
Metal Black
Darius II
Kiki KaiKai
Legend of Kage
**TERMINATOR LINE**
The NewZealand Story
Gun & Frontier
Ben Bero Beh
Dino Rex
Solitary Fighter

GAME REVIEWS

Ben Bero Beh
Arcade Release: November, 1984
Arcade Archives Release: October 1, 2020
Unknown Director

This feels so desperate to be Taito’s version of Burgertime/Donkey Kong/Etc. Their iconic side-view character game. All I could think of is the Rugrats superhero episode.

Did Taito ever once in their lives say “no” to a game? I ask because when their output is bad, it’s shockingly bad. In Ben Bero Beh, you play as a superhero who has to rescue a girl by making your way to the bottom of a screen as a building burns all around you. Wait, logically speaking, wouldn’t the point be to get to the TOP of the screen? If the girl is at the bottom, why can’t she just walk out of the building? Either way, you have to just make your way to her, avoiding obstacles and putting out the fires. You do this with stunningly sluggish, unresponsive controls and some of the most greedy quarter-thieving game design I’ve encountered, with gameplay that seems to consult with a magic eight ball on whether it will work the way it’s supposed to. “She wants to jump. Will we let her jump? OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD!” Spraying the fire DIRECTLY with a hose? Maybe it’ll register, and maybe it won’t. I needed a whole day’s worth of gameplay just to be able to clear seven levels, though I did finish with one of the 40 highest scores ever recorded.

These things poke out and, if you don’t back-up, you get reset to a previous door. Once, it sent me all the way back to the top. I wonder if anyone ever stopped and asked themselves if they were having fun playing this?

I literally can’t believe how bad Ben Bero Beh is. Bad in every way a video game can be. Controls? Horrible. Collision? Awful. Cheap deaths? You betcha. Even the act of walking down the stairs is unresponsive unless you line up perfectly with them, and then sometimes, the fire lingers right at the base of the stairs. I’d heard about people having conniptions before, but Ben Bero Beh actually set one off on me. I threw my controller into the corner of my couch and paced back and forth in my living room, screaming, cussing and swearing revenge. What happened? Well, I got to the very end of a level, made the last jump. As I did this, a door opened into me. There was zero way of anticipating this would happen. No visual cues. No warnings. Just BAM, GOTCHA, life lost, start over. This game does that a lot, and it doesn’t even have the benefit of being fun BEFORE it starts unfairly taking the lives from you. Ben Bero Beh? More like Bland Zero Meh.
Verdict: NO!

Darius II
Arcade Release: September, 1989
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Directed by Hidehiro Fujiwara
Designed by Hidehiro Fujiwara and Takatsuna Senba

In Taito Milestones 1, The Ninja Warriors utilizing the triple-wide screen felt cynical. Here, it feels inspired.

Call me a hypocrite, but I’m totally cool with shmups being brutally difficult, quarter thieving bastards. Well, within reason (see the Gun & Frontier review below for what isn’t “within reason”). Of course, when a platformer is unfair, it’s usually via janky controls and cheap GOTCHA deaths. When it comes to arcade shmups, as long as the controls are fine and I can come back to life where I died, I’m like “please sir, may I have some more?” regardless of how cheap it is. Darius II has more problems than an algebra textbook and cheapness is chief among them, but it controls nice and smoothly, so it’s free to kick the ever-loving stuffing out of me. It’s one of the most satisfying and unique arcade experiences I’ve had yet. It was so good that I think I’m going to check out the full Darius collection. I was only familiar with home ports on platforms like the SNES that didn’t utilize the arcade’s signature triple-wide screen (or is it “only” double wide? F’n thing is huge either way). While Taito Milestone 1’s Ninja Warriors doesn’t use it properly at all, Darius II justifies the existence of such a system. It works, and it’s AWESOME!

The level design and enemy placement can be frustrating, but I enjoyed the set-pieces and the progression, even if the “choosing your path” was a bit of smoke and mirrors. I tried playing twice and honestly, the levels didn’t feel better or worse, though those rare instances where a boss changes were nice.

Awesome should not be mistaken as perfect. Darius II”s most frustrating problem is being very stingy with the power-ups. Like in Konami releases, you have to wipe-out an entire wave of enemies for them to drop an item. The only stage where it’s relatively simple to get your guns charged-up is the first level, where the enemies enter the screen in easy-to-peg patterns. From there out, the screen is so spammed with bullets and the enemies that drop the items are so erratic in their movement that I went the rest of the game from level two onward only getting maybe two guns, and I lost them quickly. Oh, I got more item drops than two. I’m not totally pathetic. But, the items drift upward, and wouldn’t you know it? Many of the enemies that drop items linger right at the very top of the screen, so as soon as the item drops, it vanishes. Pissed me off so badly. It’s worth noting that, when I played co-op, I noticed it was much easier to get items. They should have nerfed the requirement for solo play.

Zone E had some of the worst bullet visibility I’ve encountered in any space shooter.

Darius II also has an on-again/off-again relationship with bullet visibility. In my first play-through, it wasn’t an issue. The specific path of levels I took never had any point where I couldn’t see what was happening. When I played co-op, it became an issue when I entered Zone E, we couldn’t keep track of anything. While that’s a rarity in Darius II, when it happens, it comes close to ruining the experience. On the other hand, the game actually feels like it utilizes the triple-wide screen to maximum effect. Whereas Milestone 1’s Ninja Warriors had no use for the super wide viewing angle and draw distance, Darius II thrives on it. I can see why this wasn’t a successful franchise for home ports. This isn’t just a matter of adding “charm” to the experience, but rather genuine gameplay value. The sheer amount of stuff you have to keep track of is overwhelming, but in a good way.

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The extreme difficulty will probably be a turn-off to many gamers, but Darius II has unlimited continues, which takes the edge off. A complete circuit of seven levels only takes half-an-hour or so to finish. So, the experience is over and done with really quick. However, thanks to the branching paths, there’s actually over two dozen possible levels you can visit, and on levels 5 and 7, there’s even multiple different bosses. It’s really cool that even the final boss might change, depending on your course. Darius II being a tight-ass with the power-ups sucks, but the set-pieces are a lot of fun and the aquatic-themed boss fights I enjoyed the hell out of. Is Darius II too hard? Yep. Does it even matter? Not at all. I’ll confess: I didn’t think I’d have a LOT of fun with any game in Milestones 2. I was bracing myself for decent-at-best coin-ops. For Darius II, I replayed it three times after the first run. That says it all!
Verdict: YES!
$8 in Value added to Taito Milestones 2

Dino Rex
Arcade Release: November, 1992
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Directed by Chiho Kimura and Takatsuna Senba
Designed by Naomitsu Abe, Yosuke Tsuda & Takaaki Tomita

Oh, you think I took a screenshot that looks like I’m humping that T-Rex, but the actual gameplay is more innocent? THINK AGAIN! The move sure looks like it’s humping your opponent.

Don’t mistake this as a rip-off of Primal Rage. This predates Atari Games’ dino fighter by nearly two years. I’ve never actually played Primal Rage (or if I have, I’m spacing it), but I have to believe it’ll be better than this. Dino Rex was probably the worst fighting game I’d played by a major developer until I played Solitary Fighter later in this very set. At least with Dino Rex, the concept seems fun. But the two-button gameplay is far too limited, and the “action” feels like a boxing match where the referee has to call for too many breaks. If the two dinosaurs occupy the same space for too long, the “trainers” come out with whips to separate them, and it takes FOREVER for this to happen. I played as a giant purple dinosaur.. insert obvious BARNEY joke here.. and one of my special moves appeared to be laying down and taking a nap. The only way I could beat the CPU, even on the easiest setting, is to spam one move over and over. Dino Rex held the position worst addition to the Taito Milestones lineup until Solitary Fighter. This is why the strict ten-game limit annoys me. It means stuff like this TAKES a spot, instead of just being a throw-in +1 game.
Verdict: NO!

Gun & Frontier
Arcade Release: January, 1991
Arcade Archives Release: August, 2022
Designed by Brody Tadashi, Takayuki Ogawa, and Yasuhisa Watanabe

Two hours of dying to get past one checkpoint on the final “real” level.

Hardcore shmup fans will probably have a coronary, because I admit that I’d never heard of Gun & Frontier before I fired up Milestones 2. I didn’t even know what the genre was going to be. Going off the name, I was under the assumption it was Taito’s answer to Capcom’s wild west shooter Gun.Smoke. But, it’s nothing like that. It’s a bullet hell type of shmup, and it’s awesome for two, maybe three stages. Awesome action. Awesome bosses. Awesome set pieces. I was dazzled and overjoyed, thinking this was going to be the secret killer app for the collection. But then, the game just goes completely nuts, spamming the full screen with enemies and projectiles. Since you don’t respawn instantly and instead reach checkpoints, you have to actually clear the sections on the game’s terms. When I reached the point where I spent two hours trying to clear a single check point, I decided I had better things to do with my time and started using the terrible interrupt save state feature.

The final boss changes the format entirely, giving you six bullets to get past this shield. If you miss, you get a bad ending. Gun & Frontier really started so strong too, but the fun stopped long before I finished the game.

I’ve said it a million times before: any idiot can make an insanely difficult game. It takes no effort and even less talent. Just spam the screen with projectiles and enemies. Look at Mario Maker or Little Big Planet’s user made levels. Playability and logical difficulty scaling take effort and a vision. I don’t see any of that here. It took me ten hours of gameplay to make what was probably twenty minutes of actual gameplay progress. The checkpoints on that last stage become too spread out and the screen becomes too spammed. Oddly enough, I then beat the second-to-last boss in just two attempts, and enjoyed it enough to be reminded of the potential Gun & Frontier had that it squandered. After a truly bizarre (albeit climatic-feeling) finale, the game gave me a bad ending for not hitting the last-last boss with one of the six shots I was given. So, why the NO!? Well, your plane moves too slow and has too big of a hit box, and the slowdown becomes BRUTAL about halfway through the experience. A bullet hell where you can’t even squeeze through the spammed screen because of ungenerous collision detection is just not exciting. If the collision had been better, I’d of spent a lot less time with this, but it would have been a better time. See how that works?
Verdict: NO!

Kiki Kaikai
Arcade Release: September 18, 1986
Arcade Archives Release: July, 2016
Directed by Mikio Hatano

Take my word for it: pause the game, and set the shooting to “autofire.” Your fingers will thank you.

I’ve never played Pocky & Rocky, the famous SNES game that’s actually the sequel to this very game. I’d never played Kiki KaiKai ever, or even heard of it. It makes sense, since this never came out in America. I’ve been calling it “Wacky Commando” because that’s essentially what the game is. You throw what I’m pretty sure are playing cards at a series of enemies in a top down shooter, while handfuls of enemies swam the screen. I’ve not had a ton of luck with such games, whether it be Capcom’s Gun.Smoke or Konami’s Gangbusters. So, imagine my surprise that I had a pretty decent time with Kiki’s Death Delivery Service.

This is one of those games that highlights how valuable a satisfying boss fight is. Without them, I’m not so sure this easily gets the YES! it got. It’s not as if the levels were awesome. They’re typically just fine, but achieve only the bare minimum needed to not suck. Then you get to the bosses, and they feel like they’re a make-good for middling level design.

What makes Kiki KaiKai work is having relatively short levels capped off by satisfying boss battles. If the stages had been even a little bit longer, I’m almost certain this would have gotten a NO! The loosey-goosey controls provide a constant annoyance, since you have to face the direction you shoot. It wouldn’t be SO annoying except for the fact that there’s no health and every bullet or single pixel of enemy contact is death. Even worse is that there’s instakill pitfalls or water hazards scattered throughout the levels, some of which barely give you a single character length of clearance, AND you still have to fight enemies around them by points (and thus walking) towards them to aim. While I still enjoyed Kiki KaiKai, that enjoyment is tempered by the fact that this was BEGGING for one more stick.

This was one control stick away from being a contender for Taito’s best arcade game. For real.

The weird thing is, when enemies attack you from all-sides, it sure seems like that’s exactly what Kiki KaiKai was meant to be. Taito were no strangers to unconventional shooting games, too. Look at the pioneering sorta-twin-stick-shooter Front Line. Just based on the enemy attack patterns and level layouts, along with how a couple of the boss fights play out, I’m convinced this started off as a twin stick shooter and it got changed at some point. Maybe it was a cost saving thing. I do know that, had this gone that route, this might have been their best game. Ever. Of all-time. Well, at least in arcades. However, the spectacular boss fights come close to making up for the lack of that second stick. All seven bosses feel unique, and while a couple of the battles are a bit too slow and spongy, they’re clearly the highlights of the game. So, go figure that Kiki Kaikai, FOR NO REASON, doesn’t even end in a boss fight. It ends with this:

In the final level, you play a relatively short battle sequence. Then, the playfield pictured above starts to loop. Since I used one of the enemy-freezing crystal balls to help me get past the combat portion of the stage, I genuinely thought I broke the game. The crystal ball seemed to work a lot longer than it normally did, and then I passed what looked like a graphical anomaly. I had been checking the statues for hidden items and didn’t find any. So, what happened? Well, I must not have checked the statues right the first time, because this sequence has three hidden scrolls. There’s no enemies or timer during this, which is the very final part of the game before you board a ship and the credits roll. Quite possibly the worst way I’ve ever seen a quality game end. This is the Game of Thrones Finale of video games where you say out loud “god damn WOW, holy crap, that was stupid and dumb and a major letdown.”
Verdict: YES! but god damn WOW, holy crap, that ending was stupid and dumb and a major letdown.
See, I told you so.
$8 in Value added to Taito Milestones 2

The Legend of Kage
Arcade Release: August 10, 1985
Arcade Archives Release: October, 2015
Unknown Director

Legend of Kage was released to Arcade Archives during their “lazy era” in 2015, back when they could barely muster the enthusiasm to do a handful of pages of information for the instructions. These days, I praise them for their well written, visual-aid-heavy instructions, but Kage still has the same lazy era instructions it did in 2015. If I hadn’t had such a decent time figuring things out, I’d probably be angrier that they couldn’t bother re-writing Legend of Kage’s instructions, which lack things like, say, a description of the scrolls I found in the trees. This is a $39.99 collection of games. For the majority of my followers, $39.99 is a LOT of money. Couldn’t you take that extra day or two just to rewrite the instructions?

I admit, this one shocked me. With comically high jumping, feathery combat, physics that see your player and enemies ricochet off each-other like pinballs, and game design that rewards avoiding conflict like you’ve assumed the role of the world’s most passive aggressive ninja, I kind of figured I’d be slamming Legend of Kage. How the hell was THIS such a successful release for Taito? But then, I realized I spent a full day trying to understand how such a stupid game could be so attractive, and I never got bored the whole time. It’s baffling, because this is a bad game, but I couldn’t put it down. There’s four levels that repeat endlessly, with each round having its own objective. In the first level, you have to defeat three blue monks and one red one. You can jump super high into the air, climb trees and hop from branch to branch if you wish, but this is needlessly risky. When I stopped trying to traverse the upper part of the level and just ran along the ground, I was a lot more successful. In fact, I dare say you never want to jump at all unless you’re forced to do so.

The most boring section, easily.

In the second section of the game, you just have to waste ten enemies. This can be more annoying than it seems, since any enemy that walks off the screen, even a single pixel in length, disappears. Like the trees in level one, you can interact with the environment. In this case, that means you can hop into the river, but there’s no benefit to doing so, adding lots of risk without balancing that risk with reward. The biggest problem.. by far.. with Legend of Kage is that it gave players all these different abilities and stages with scenery and interactive elements, but then created a game that actively punishes you for using them. Whether it’s hopping along treetops, jumping into the river, or especially grabbing the columns in the fourth stage, there’s really no practical reason to utilize the climbing mechanic. Or the sword for that matter, at least on the offensive end of the spectrum. Enemies who defend against the sword, which eventually is nearly all of them, clash off you with a dramatic recoil that typically makes you vulnerable to other enemies. Sometimes it’s funny. I cracked myself up seeing how long I could juggle a single baddie with it before one of us screwed up and lowered our guard. It was quite a while, too!

I found using a zig-zag pattern on this stage was most effective. Jump left. Jump right. It’s the best way to avoid the enemy throwing stars while also giving you enough momentum to jump higher.

The third level is the only stage that requires jumping. You have to leap up a series of platforms to reach the final stage. Unless Kage requires you to use the sword, you’re better off with the throwing stars. You have an unlimited supply of them, which was probably a bad idea. You can toss them five directions, which turns into eight mid-air. They’re fast moving and cover the length of the screen, making it one of the most overpowered basic weapons in any platform arcader of the era. I have a theory that originally they were going to a limited pick-up, which would have given incentive to actually explore the trees and other elements of the game. Maybe they decided the sword combat wasn’t fun enough, or maybe it was too difficult the other way, but the level design makes much more logical sense when you imagine the throwing stars being pick-ups you have to actually explore the map for.

Most of my deaths happened around the staircases. Castlevania was like “hey, there’s an idea!”

The final proper level has you running up flights of stairs. This is a level where you REALLY don’t want to jump if you can avoid it, since you stick to walls, land on unnecessary platforms, or end up behind the stairs. You can’t leap up the stairways and there’s really no way to take them faster. This is the one part of the game that I held my breath every time, since ninjas might appear and throw stars at you that you can’t really see since the stairway graphic covers them up. There were times where my character just keeled over, dead as Kelsey’s nuts, as if taken by natural causes. I had to check the replay to see the faint pixel of an enemy in its throwing motion. In theory, you can defend against the ninja stars (and seemingly ONLY the stars, no other projectiles) with your sword. In those rare instances where I pulled this off, it was awesome. But the timing never felt consistent.

I’ll give this to the bosses: they have an authenticity to them I didn’t expect.

After the fourth stage, you have a boss fight. Typically, I’d beat the first boss in the amount of time it takes to press a button, since one throwing star seems to do the trick, and it was rare that I needed to do anything else. The second boss usually puts up a better fight, but I’ve also had instances where I killed it instantly. Other times, it took me nearly a minute or longer, and it wasn’t rare for me to die in the battle. From here, the game recycles (although there’s still one new season left to see, winter, but you’ve already gotten the ending). From this point, your sword is basically worthless, since most enemies start throwing fireballs at you instead of stars. It takes maybe ten minutes each cycle. Maybe.

You have to physically cut the princess loose in the fourth stage. This is followed by an extended, flow-killing cut scene of the two escaping. And it IS a cut-scene where it even automatically kills an enemy.

If the above review makes it sound like I hated Legend of Kage, I didn’t. This is one of those rare instances where I realized that I was having a good time despite the fact that this really isn’t a very structurally sound game. Even with absolutely baffling design choices that don’t benefit anyone, players OR arcade operators, I found myself having fun as I would bounce around like I just smoked a speedball and head-shot ninjas with a shurikens. It’s janky as all hell and I would scream in agony when I’d accidentally bind-myself to the climbing mechanism, a move you can do on the fourth stage for seemingly no reason besides killing you. But, I have to admit, I enjoyed Legend of Kage. Haphazard as it is, I loved using the throwing stars. Very satisfying they are, and I also enjoyed challenging for the high scores (I’m #48 globally as of this writing). Even if Legend of Kage is a bad game, I stand by my belief that it’s a fun game, too.
Verdict: YES!
$8 in Value added to Taito Milestones 2

Liquid Kids
Arcade Release: August, 1990
Arcade Archives Release: December, 2021
Directed by Toshiaki Matsumoto
Designed by Nobuhiro Hiramatsu

Hey, wait! Oh HEY!! This is WONDERFUL!!

Where did THIS come from? Liquid Kids is the surprise star of Taito Milestones 2, going down as one of my favorite experiences since I started exploring retro gaming. Think of it as a close cousin of Bubble Bobble, only built around that franchise’s water bubbles. And, instead of a series of single-screen, combat-focused levels, it’s done as a side-scrolling platformer. The end result can throw its hat in the ring as perhaps the most underrated arcader EVER. It has to be in the conversation. The funny thing is, in my recent review of the Sega Genesis version of Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, I pointed out that the slow movement speed of the game is usually something that doesn’t appeal to me, but Castle of Illusion pulled it off. To my astonishment, Liquid Kids is even slower than Castle of Illusion, and I like it a lot more.

There actually are single-screen areas in Liquid Kids that act as hidden rooms. I have a hunch that the game started development with this style of gameplay in mind, but they realized it was too easy and too similar to Bubble Bobble and its ilk, so Taito decided to boldly explore platforming. It worked!

Liquid Kids is the poster child for my theory that “pace” and “tempo” aren’t the same thing. A game can be slower paced in movement, combat, or exploration, like Castle of Illusion. But, as long as the gameplay doesn’t let up and maintains consistent tempo of action beats or happenings, tempo will override pace every single time. That’s regardless of how slow a game paces itself, and no game demonstrates that more than Liquid Kids. While there’s power-ups that increase your movement speed, they work in a similar fashion to Bubble Bobble’s speed-up, which I always hated for its lack of smoothness. It’s not as bad as Bubble Bobble, but it’s not a highly desirable item, either. Of course, if you don’t like your speed, you can always collect a pig, which is the item that decreases your speed. Seriously, Liquid Kids leans heavily on the slower pace, and you have to admire the balls for an arcade game from 1990 going THAT direction. Actually my admiration comes from the fact it totally works. It’s ALWAYS exciting to play.

Liquid Kids is gorgeous. I can’t stress enough that it’s very modern for a 1990 game, often taking those tiny extra steps to immerse you, with changing seasons and parallax scrolling. I tried playing it on the PC Engine and it just didn’t have the charm. Oddly it felt like it played faster, too, but not in service to the game.

This really is “Taito Single-Screen Action Games: The Side-Scrolling Game” with just a hint of Super Mario Bros. thrown in for good measure. To attack enemies, you throw water balloons at them. The water balloons are functionally like the water bubbles from Bubble Bobble and will wash over the platform, knocking the enemies loopy. Any enemy who is stunned can be kicked like a Koopa shell in Mario, taking out a chain of enemies. The combat is shockingly flexible, as you can hold the attack button to charge-up larger balloons, which cover a bigger surface area and give you more (literal) splash damage, or you can throw smaller ones faster for more close-quarters combat. While there’s items that will increase the size of the water balloons, increase your rapid-fire ability, or speed-up your ability to make the larger balloons, you can’t really rely on them. You see, you’re going to die. Quite a lot, actually.

The variety of enemies and set pieces is very satisfactory. I seriously can’t stress enough: Liquid Kids feels like it comes from the current era. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it’s an indie tribute to Taito.

Even on the easy setting, Liquid Kids has punishing level design, brutal enemy placement, and some astonishingly hard final bosses. There’s a few points where I think maybe they went a little overboard. To Liquid Kids’ credit, it’s very generous with checkpoints. So are the bosses, come to think of it. All the bosses are hard, but Liquid Kids does take pity on players. Regardless of the difficulty (I think), whatever progress you make on the boss battle’s life bar carries over between lives and even continues. Even in the case when you’re fighting a mini-boss made up of three Orko looking things that rain rings of fire on you, once you kill one, it remains dead.

These mo-fos were the bane of my existence. AND it turns out I could have missed them. Go figure.

Of course, it took me FOREVER to kill just one, but once I did, the rest of the fight was a cinch. Oh, and for God’s sake: don’t let a battle end in a tie. I tied one boss, taking off its final tick of health at the exact moment I died. When I came back, it had a full health bar and I went full pony (I screamed myself until I was a little hoarse, DAMNIT, I’m getting “going full pony” into the lexicon if it kills me). The final boss does get a full bar every battle, but only on its final form, which took me probably a couple dozen tries to beat. By the way, every single boss is a joy to fight.. yes, even the last boss and those damn Okro things.

The bosses even have world-building secrets hidden within them, as well. Like this boss? Let me just say, get your licks in BEFORE the arms catch fire.

Liquid Kids will go down as one of my favorite games ever. It even has replay value a typical arcade game doesn’t offer. After beating bosses, you’re given branching paths, but don’t think of the paths as alternate levels. 5 out of 6 times, the left door is the “easy way” and the right side is the “hard way.” In my first play-through, I took the left path every time, then when I replayed the game, I took the right door every time. I found out the sixth and final option has it reversed, which feels like a bit of a GOTCHA! If you go right, you only fight one Orko. My first time, I took the left door, which eventually took me to the battle with three Orkos that had me ripping my hair out and screaming in frustration. In a good way. Liquid Kids never crosses that line. Oh, it leans right up to the line once or twice. Gives the line a good, hard look. But, nah, it never crosses it. In fact, of any arcade platformer I’ve played so far, I dare say it does the best job of balancing high difficulty with fairness. Sadly, the two player mode isn’t co-op. I normally would care, but in the case of Liquid Kids, I was actually a little excited for it.

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I never could have imagined a game in Taito Milestones 2 would be in the discussion for the best coin-op platformer I’ve ever played. Liquid Kids is up there, and if it’s not the king of the mountain, it’s close enough to cut off the king’s toes. Incredible look. Great play control. Memorable set pieces. Some of the best action game bosses ever made. Tons of secrets (I didn’t even mention the warp zones or the connection to NewZealand Story). And it’s even got a hidden gem quality about it, so you get to feel good about yourself for playing it. If this wasn’t sold separately on Arcade Archives, I’d award bonus value for it. This is easily a $20 game by itself. I don’t understand what the point of bundling games sold separately is. Don’t get me wrong: I think this is a $40 collection in value for an average gamer, but it would have been even more if you could ONLY get Liquid Kids from Taito 2. Here, it’s clearly THE game you buy Taito Milestones 2 for, and everything else is a bonus. This is the one, folks. It’s REALLY good.
Verdict: YES!
$8 in Value added to Taito Milestones 2

Metal Black
Arcade Release: November, 1991
Arcade Archives Release: November, 2022
Directed by Takatsuna Senba

Once you get out of the first level, the generic gives way to some pretty memorable sequences and set pieces.

Sometimes I have to do a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of a game, but my Metal Black review is going to be pretty dang simple: it’s just a really good shmup. Or, at least it becomes one after the first stage. I can totally get how this slipped through the cracks of history, because after one stage (which is followed by a historically bad bonus round), I was pretty bored. It’s not that it was bad, but it all had this “been there, done that” vibe that made it feel like a poor man’s Life Force (aka Salamander. For God’s sake, please just pick one name and stick with it!). That’s especially funny because Metal Black, at separate points during its development, was both a direct sequel to Darius II to Gun & Frontier. In fact, when you finish the game, it’s called “Project Gun and Frontier II, but it feels nothing like that game, and it barely fits in with Darius, either. This is the closest any other company has come to making a Konami shmup. As for calling this a “poor man’s Life Force”, well, that changes to a “solid alternative to Life Force” from level two onward.

The bonus stages are truly putrid and require you to hold a crosshair over targets from a first person camera. They take FOREVER and completely break the core game’s flow. What were they thinking? THANK GOD there’s only two of these; one after stage one and the other after stage three.

Once Metal Black gets cooking, it’s a really nice shmup that goes quickly. I had been worried that the game would be impossibly hard due to the connection to Gun & Frontier. However, there’s no checkpoints, so when you die, you just come back to life. While the enemies are really well designed and the bosses are all very fun to do battle with, the standout mechanic is how power-ups are handled. At times, the screen is littered with little molecules (they’re called “NEWALONES”) that you have to pick up several of to increase the power of your gun. You also have a power shot that’s based on what level your primary gun is. The stronger the gun, the bigger the power shot. HOWEVER, once you fire the power shot, it cannot be stopped until all your energy is depleted and you’re returned to your base-level gun.

In this screen, I’m unleashing a fully-charged power shot. Don’t mistake this for a typical “bomb” type of weapon in a game. The power shots linger and all but the fully-powered one still must be aimed. While they’re fun to use, so is a charged-up gun. I cherish the ability to create your own strategy in coin-ops, and to say Metal Black lets you do that is an understatement.

It’s a really novel “risk/reward” mechanic that also ties well to the game over system. Whatever strength your gun is at carries over between lives, BUT, not continues. If you game over, you have to collect molecules all over again. It works wonderfully, as a fully charged gun is powerful enough that it’s often preferable to the screen-clearing potential of the power shots. BUT, if you’re on your last life, a half-full power shot becomes mighty tempting. The whole system turns a basic shmup into one that’s unforgettable. My biggest gripe with Metal Black is how quickly it ends. The six stages fly right on by, with only the first one being tedious. Stages two through six are thoroughly enjoyable. Yea, the whole storyline is a little pretentious and over-the-top, but I kind of like it for that. This marks two straight Taito Milestone 2 games where I’m shaking my head and wondering why they’re not bigger deals in gaming’s collective memory, because damn yo, Metal Black is a lot of fun.
Verdict: YES!
$8 in Value added to Taito Milestones 2

The NewZealand Story
Arcade Release: 1988
Arcade Archives Release: January, 2023
Unknown Director

Jesus Christ! DID SHE WRITE THAT IN BLOOD?

NewZealand Story is a genuine European gaming legend. I’ve had more than one friend compare it to the Super Mario series in terms of recognition. I’ll have to take their word for it. I played it in 2021, back when my retro gaming YES!/NO! system was based on sampling the games rather than deep diving them. Based on my one world sample, I gave it a YES! Games like this prove why my old system was deeply flawed. I didn’t put in enough time with NewZealand Story. Had I done so, I would have realized that, from world two onward, this isn’t so much a game as an armed robbery that gaslights you into believing you’re playing a video game.

I’ve gotten some blow back on my notion that impossibly hard arcade games are a “scam” in the same way redemption games are. To me, it comes down to whether or not the challenge is fair or not. Liquid Kids is a VERY hard game, but at no point did I feel it just straight-up cheated me out of a life. Meanwhile, there were moments in Kiwi where progression was fully dependent on me falling down a narrow gap (so narrow it could only fit my character), but when I took the blind leap THAT I HAD TO TAKE, there would be an enemy waiting for me at the bottom because they had previously spawned and camped there. Sorry, but that crosses the line from “challenge” to “straight up scam for quarters” because it’s not something you can “git gud” to overcome.

Playing as a little kiwi that has an unlimited supply of arrows to fire at enemies, you have to make your way through massively sprawling levels to rescue your girlfriend. The combat is extraordinarily basic: your arrow essentially functions as a gun, with most enemies only needing a hit or two to kill. The big twist is the balloons: a lot of enemies show up in them, and if you shoot the balloon, the baddies die. BUT, if you shoot the enemy itself, you can steal their ride. This isn’t merely a power-up, either. The majority of the levels are designed around hijacking balloons. Or UFOs that shoot laser beams. Those are fun to use, and in fact, I beat the game when I snagged one right at the end. The UFOs have full range movement without needing to hold a button down and don’t have that “hockey puck” type of traction to them. Oh god, how I wish the whole game had been built around the UFOs.

The spikes are the primary nuisance of the game.

To Kiwi’s credit, there’s a big variety of different balloons, which give the game a nice sense of variety. To its detriment, some of them are a pain in the butt to use, especially since most of the challenge is based around two concepts: spamming the screen with enemies and dickish placement of spikes. Lots and lots and lots of spikes, actually. Apparently NewZealand Story started life as a sequel to the reflex-tester Crazy Balloon. It often shows, with super tight squeezes that require absolute precision movement, in a game that provides you with incredibly imprecise tools. Situations like those in the following pictures spring to mind, where you literally have a character length to get past them with no wiggle room, even though you sort of bounce off the walls until you feather the controls enough:

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By the way, the balloon and the Kiwi are separate, which was pretty cutting-edge for 1988. Of course, that means if you touch the spike with the Kiwi, you die. If you touch it with the balloon, well, you’ll probably die. Or you’ll fall all the way to the bottom and have to restart, so you’ll only wish you were dead. My #1 problem by far with NewZealand Story are the absolutely massively sprawling levels usually range from tedious to infuriating. BUT, they’re almost never fun, at least past the first world, or perhaps ever so slightly into the second world. There’s a lack of elegance to the layouts. A sense that the designers created elaborate mazes, but ran out of gags or clever uses of the labyrinthine design and gave up, saying “eh, just stick a bunch of spikes there. It’ll be hard and players will die a lot and load another quarter.” Before the game’s second world is even halfway over, the fun has already ended, and the design becomes punishing. Tons of dead ends and random guesswork as to which direction is the correct one, with the punishment being “replay everything you already did, only you have to walk all the way back to it.” It got to the point that when I found it to be a blessing when an incorrect path was a complete circle that I didn’t have to backtrack. That was also around the time I realized I might need to reevaluate my original YES! I gave this.

And I’m really just getting started with my annoyances.

There is a chance the water was the last straw that put the NO! over the top for me. It’s actually hard to tell what the breaking point was for NewZealand Story, because it does a lot of things right, too.

I typically like maze-like sprawling levels, but it’s not enough to just have layouts that twist and turn around. The stuff inside them has to be fun, or it’s just busy work for the sake of it. NewZealand Story’s levels, even if they weren’t designed for a high body count, are really just very boring. When the game relies on water, I never once felt the enemies within the water were tough to get past. Instead, the game tries to make you die by having you run out of air. Usually, the spots where you get air are spaced out so you just barely make it, even if you go the right direction and don’t mess around. Okay, that’s fine, right? That should make it exciting. Except, when you make it to the spot with the air, it doesn’t just instantly refill. You have to sit there and wait for the meter to slowly fill back up. Well, that’s just stupid. It totally kills the flow, and this in a game that has a strict timer with an instakill devil once you run out of time. It made my heart sink every time I had to jump in the water, because I knew the next section of gameplay was going to be really boring. And it always was. Every single time. It was like being in gaming hell. Apparently, the game agreed, too, because sometimes it mockingly sends you to heaven. Yes, really.

This whole premise is ridiculous because everyone knows that, just like all dogs go to heaven, all kiwis go to hell. It’s just an objective fact. They’re the most evil of all birds. Soulless spawns of Satan himself. They look adorable, you say? SEE, THAT’S HOW THEY GET YOU! No, I’m not being crazy. YOU ARE!

On some levels, if you lose your last life by being hit by a projectile, instead of getting a game over, you go to heaven with a chance to earn a free continue or something. Apparently there’s some kind of secret to how exactly you’re supposed to beat this, with a vague clue that you’re supposed to “go to the underworld” and OH, see, what did I tell you? This game knows. EVERYONE knows! Evil birds. Wretched creatures. It’s why I never call a person from New Zealand a “Kiwi.” They’re nice folks, and kiwis are evil, period. Taito understood that, hence this game. Anyway, I “beat” two of the heaven stages, which consisted of a series of narrow platforms that were absolutely punishing as all hell. Take a look at how narrow these jumps are:

But, I made it to the end. I reached the Virgin Mary, aka Mary with the Cherry.

I did it! That was INSANELY hard to reach her. Okay, what’s my reward?

After all that, you’re saying I played it wrong? Seriously, the heaven stages are maddeningly difficult, and you’re saying I did it wrong. You’re not telling me that, are you game? You can’t be.

You bastard.

The first time this happened, I was in a waiting room in a doctor’s office, and I think that’s the only thing that kept me from hurling my Switch through a window. It’s been a LONG time since a game pissed me off to the degree this did. That is so god tier GOTCHA bullcrap and some of the most shameful, soulless design EVER. The irony that such soulless game design is based around a literal heaven isn’t lost on me. The secret to how to benefit from these is completely abstract and arbitrary. You have to fall from the right piece of floor or something. And it gets even worse. One of the few positive things I could say about NewZealand Story (no, I have no clue why the game’s title has NEW ZEALAND as one word) is that it has a pretty generous checkpoint system. When you die, be it a life or a full game over, you typically restart close to where you perished. HOWEVER, if you go to heaven, which seems completely random when it happens (it certainly doesn’t happen EVERY time you game over), if you die OR EVEN IF YOU MAKE TO TO THE END APPARENTLY, you have to restart the stage from the very beginning. You lose whatever progress you made up to that point. So, naturally, all three times I went to heaven, it was when I was literally right by the goal for the stage, meaning I had to replay that stage from the beginning. I absolutely HATE this game.

It does this type of thing a lot, where it makes you think the end is right there, but you’re actually not even close.

Whatever. NewZealand Story had already lost me on the boringly long levels, cheap enemy placement, and overall dull design. The combat is nice, don’t get wrong. At least when you don’t pick up the bomb items, which makes hijacking balloons a lot harder. But, whatever lingering “look at the bright side” sympathy I felt for Kiwi ended when I played the final level. You know how EVERY platform game has to have an ice level where you slip and slide? It seems like it’s legally mandated or something. Yea, well, NewZealand Story has those stages too, and they saved them for the very end. I suppose at least it properly scaled the challenge, in that regard. Oh, and it’s not simply enough that you slip and slide. Oh no, it had to have design like this:

Each of those blocks is a slip ‘n slide ice block. Oh, and it goes on for a lot longer than what’s seen here, too. Kiss my ass, NewZealand Story. Past the first world, you weren’t even trying to be fun.

And, for this final stage only, there’s no checkpoints. So, when you die, you have to go back to the start of the most punishing stage in the game. Oh and the walls have a recoil to them and I kept hitting the jumps but bouncing off the walls and falling to my death. AND the game gets ultra cheap with the enemy placement here. At this point, it’s not even pretending to be anything but one final quarter shakedown. So, screw it! I used Taito Milestone 2’s Arcade Archives-based “Interrupt Save” system, which sucks. It meant that every time I died, I had to quit to the main menu of Taito Milestone 2, restart NewZealand Story, and be shown the control screen for it again. As bad as that sounds, trust me: it was preferable to starting over from the beginning of that stage. Funny enough, the bosses aren’t hard at all. I beat every one of them but one on my first try, and one of them I even seem to have glitched-out and beaten with a one-shot kill somehow. Or, actually apparently two shots, one while it was assembling and one when it finished.

After hours and hours of pain and suffering, I beat the last boss in around five seconds. It pulled a Shredder.

How the hell is THIS game legendary? Well, I think the explanation might be that it was ported to just about every console, where presumably some of the hardness is eased off. As an arcade game, the first couple levels feel like a really talented carnival barker who invites you to “step right up” and test your skills. Those first few stages of NewZealand Story tease a game that is LOADED with personality, and that’s not all it has going for it. For all my bitching, I can’t stress enough: the combat is fun and the balloon hijacking system is fun. Oh, and the UFOs are awesome. If they ever remake this, base the game around those. NewZealand Story in Space? Sold. But, much like a carnival, that friendly barker actually hates you and only wants your money. NewZealand Story doesn’t cost a quarter a play anymore, so no worries there. But, that doesn’t help much, because the game still plays like it’s a lot more concerned with nabbing quarters than, you know, earning them.
Verdict: NO!

Solitary Fighter
Arcade Release: 1991
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Designed by Masakazu Iwahashi

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I don’t have a lot to say about Solitary Fighter, a sequel to a game called Violence Fight, itself the owner of the most redundant name in game history. “Violence Fight.” Doesn’t that go without saying, at least in the world of video games? “Violence Fight!” As opposed to what? Non Violent Aggression Fight? I don’t think that would be very exciting. I think Solitary Fighter is close to that, which is why it gets players to just mindlessly mash the two buttons of combat. The game seems to be based around hitting multiple shots in a row, and I say “seems” because, even on the easiest setting, I only won two matches and four total rounds my entire time playing. The AI is just too perfect. Why was this even included? Or Dino Rex for that matter? NOBODY would have asked for them, and Taito has done a bazillion games. These were two of the best “exclusives” you could pull out of your ass? Especially this steamer. At least Dino Rex had the novelty of fighting with dinosaurs. Solitary Fighter seems to have been a technical showpiece. “Hey Capcom, look how big OUR sprites are!” But half the time it felt like it wasn’t responding to my inputs. It’s also possible the perfect AI was single-frame countering everything I did. Eh, I put my time into the eight REAL attractions. Still, the two fighting games being included really puts a damper on the whole set. Hell, dig deep into the archives. Put Crazy Balloon on here. Put Space Dungeon on here. ANYTHING ELSE!
Verdict: NO!

A review copy was supplied for this feature.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Ben Bero Beh Review, Darius II Review, Dino Rex Review, Gun & Frontier Review, Kiki Kaikai Review, Legend of Kage Review, Liquid Kids Arcade Review, Liquid Kids Review, Metal Black Review, NewZealand Story Review, Solitary Fighter Review, Taito Milestones 2, Taito Milestones 2 Review

The Addams Family (Sega Master System Review)

September 25, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

The Addams Family
Developed by Arc Developments
First Released September, 1993
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

See those little blue things? They’re soap, and unlike all the other enemies in the game, they’re f’n instakill no matter how much life you have left. There’s no consistency at all in Addams Family.

I was cautiously optimistic for Addams Family. I consider the SNES game to be one of the best licensed games that nobody knows about and a genuine hidden gem. Sadly, my fears that this was going to be closer to the unrelated and inferior NES Addams were confirmed. Which isn’t to say 8-bit Addams is unambitious. There seems to be something about this property that gets a game designer’s creative juices flowing. What really wrecks Addams family is it has some of the most unimaginably terrible collision detection I’ve ever seen in my life. Addams Family on the Master System has Super Mario-style hop ‘n bop combat. Just jump on the enemies. Easy peasy, right? Well, not so fast. Because I was constantly passing right through enemies and taking damage, even though I was CLEARLY, objectively, hitting them dead-center from well above where their sprites were. It was absolutely unbelievable. I actually think it might be the worst collision detection in the history of platform games.

Now mind you, Gomez “blinks” in the literal sense when you take damage, but you don’t blink in the “temporary invincibility” sense. So your life very quickly starts to drain when you take damage. When you’re passing right through enemies, that’s sort of a big deal. But, once again, there’s no consistency to any of it. So, occasionally you have situations like this, where I’m literally standing with a spike up my butthole and not taking any damage at all.

There is literally a spike ON ME here, and I passed harmlessly through it. When you can’t even count on basic gaming rules of what is and isn’t going to hurt you, how can you expect to find enjoyment in a game?

On top of all the collision inconsistency, Addams Family is full of dickhead game design. Things like entering rooms and having enemies literally be right next to the door that rush you, or changing the rules on you and having things be instakills. If a spike through your body isn’t an instakill, why would a bar of soap be? Yea, chances are if you slip on a bar of soap in the shower, you’re going to die. But if you fall off a tree ass-first into razor sharp spikes that go up to the small of your back, you’re not just going to suffer a paper cut. The funny thing is that all the platforming tropes are here and all of them are “worst ever” contenders, including abysmal slipping-and-sliding on ice. Addams Family probably has the worst ice-based physics in gaming history as well. The ice level is where I threw in the towel. The fact that there’s instakill gaps, then nearly unavoidable falling spikes and snowballs was the last straw.

IN THEORY there’s gaps to allow you to avoid the snowballs, but because it takes you several seconds to build up momentum to run forward on the ice, the next snowball will be right there to squash you anyway. This is horrible.

Addams Family on the Sega Master System has to be a contender for the worst game the side scrolling platform genre has ever seen. And I’m really annoyed because the actual concept of rescuing the family members and exploring this vast mansion and landscape can and has worked. On the SNES. Here on the Sega Master System, the actual rooms are all unique and distinguishable from each-other, which is incredible for an 8-bit game. But the mechanics of exploring and interacting with this world fail in so many different ways that I question if any time was allowed for play testing. Because folks, this is as bad as it gets.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with The Addams Family, The Addams Family Sega, The Addams Family Sega Master System Review

Batman Returns (Sega Master System Review)

September 22, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Batman Returns
Developed by Aspect
First Released March, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

If not for the jank and the one-hit kills, this would be one of the better action games on the Sega Master System. No joke.

Batman Returns on the Master System has more in common with Bionic Commando than the Caped Crusader. It’s also one of the jankiest games I’ve played. Collision is really bad, especially in the final boss battle. However, as bad as it is for Batman, it’s even worse for the enemies. I was startled when enemies went into their blinking death animation as soon as I scrolled onto their part of the screen. The moment they were rendered, they dropped dead. It was perplexing. I thought this was the first time in my gaming life an enemy died from looking at me. But, it wasn’t that. Get this: when you throw the batarang off screen, then scroll the screen over, if an enemy was within the path of off screen batarang, they will die the moment you see them. Yea, really. It’s as if the game wants you to know you got ’em. I’ve been playing video games my whole life and never seen anything like that before.

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Besides the jank, Batman Returns is a lot better than I figured it would be. There’s only one attack: batarangs. They’re satisfying enough, but it’s a Batman game, and having only one type of attack is a bit weak. There’s no punching and no other gadgets. It’s all batarangs, all the time. It also has teeny tiny sprites. I nearly did a spit take when I entered the second boss arena and saw Catwoman. It was just so underwhelming! On the other hand, the levels are almost mazes that you have to navigate with your grappling hook. This is where the Bionic Commando comparisons come into effect. Getting the hang of how it works has a bit of a learning curve to it, and the physics involved are weird. If you pull yourself up to a solid surface and jump, you will float in place for as long as the normal height of the jump would be before gravity remembers its advantage over you and starts pulling you down. And yes, this is very easy to exploit.

In the final level, you have to perform a LOT of “last pixel” jumping where you get yourself right to the edge before jumping. You can use your grappling hook on these barrels, which helps, but the gaps between platforms would have led to TONS of busy work if I hadn’t lost my patience and started rewinding instead of climbing back up. Thankfully, there’s no timer on levels.

If you want to play Batman Returns straight, you have to deal with the issue of one-hit kills, which is an issue given that collision isn’t 100% spot on. Also, the game has a tiny little problem with cheap enemy placement. You can mostly adapt to this by using common sense. For example: don’t use your grappling hook by anything resembling a door, because enemies will come out of it as soon as you hop up onto the platform, and any contact means death. But, sometimes it really is as simple as just placing an enemy on an unreachable ledge for the purposes of maximum annoyance. The final level had a big problem with this. However, Batman Returns is both generous with respawns AND with extra lives. They’re scattered all over the place. The other items increase the distance your batarang can travel, or allegedly increase your movement speed. If I was getting faster, I didn’t notice. I’ll generously call Batman Returns “deliberately paced.”

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After one stage, I was certain Batman Returns would get a NO! At one point, I walked into a parked vehicle that looked like it was part of the background. It wasn’t animated. It wasn’t moving. It was doing NOTHING, and yet, I died upon contact with it. I blew a gasket when it happened, but after pressing on (you have to blow it up with the batarang) I found the level design really won me over. Levels are laid out like mazes, and while the enemies can be cheap, they’re one-hit kills too. As a short, quick exploration game with a fun method of combat (I dig boomerangs in games), I really actually thought Batman Returns on the Master System was okay. It’s nothing special, and it never really feels like a proper Batman game. But, I had a decent enough time with it.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Batman Returns, Batman Returns Sega, Batman Returns Sega Master System, Batman Returns Sega Master System Review, Batman Returns SMS, Batman Returns SMS Review

Back to the Future: Part II and Back to the Future: Part III (Sega Master System Review)

September 22, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Back to the Future II
Developed by Mirrorsoft
First Released October, 1991
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Oof. Horrible.

I’ve played multiple attempts at making a decent Back to the Future game. The Super Famicom version is probably the best, and it’s still a terrible game that only seems halfway decent in comparison to how god awful the series had been up to that point. Back to the Future II on the Master System is possibly the worst. One of the least fun and most unplayable pieces of trash to ever occupy a game console. It’s reprehensible that this was released. In the first level, you have to skateboard and avoid obstacles such as the sidewalk’s curb. NOT THE SIDEWALK, but specifically the curb. You lose energy if you touch that. There’s also dogs. They kill you. And other people. There’s a girl on a hoverboard that aims straight for you. You get more energy by picking up items vaguely shaped like MacGuffins from the film. Griff’s gang show up too. THEY drain your energy. Even if Griff hits you with a baseball bat, it doesn’t kill you. So hitting a dog.. a tiny little dog.. is death. Being pummeled with a baseball bat by a guy twice as big as you is a boo-boo. You can have five boo-boos before you die. To defend yourself, you have the worst punch in video game history, and that is not hyperbole. I don’t think the pixel actually extends past your body. Yea. Then this happens.

There’s no consistency to the rules, and here, the rules change. You have to clear this entire lake in one motion. If you go too fast, as in faster than the screen scrolls, you stop on a dime and die. Logic be damned. You have to go not too fast and not too slow across the very top of the pond, or else The whole hoverboard section feels like it goes on FOREVER. Then you enter a bonus stage that works like a logic puzzle. Only, if you fail it, you lose a life. You have to pick which doors to open so you never run into your past self. I couldn’t tell what was going on at all.

Fun fact: if you’re on your last life here and you die, you can’t game over on this screen. It reduces your life count to zero, and you continue on.. and now you have infinite lives. Did they even test this? I can’t blame them if they didn’t. I wouldn’t want to play Back to the Future on the Sega Master System either.

AND THEN the game becomes a side scrolling brawler, only the brawling is still historically atrocious. Now, you’re in the “evil” 1985, being stalked by Biff Tannen who shoots at you. I think maybe you’re supposed to punch him, but since your punch seems to not go past the center of your own character model, I’m not sure HOW exactly. Once again, everything that seems like it shouldn’t be fatal is an instakill. I finally threw in the towel when two Biffs were following me and shooting at me. It is unbelievable that this game exists. There is no way the people who made this thought they were coming close to an acceptable, fun video game. It’s shameful.
Verdict: NO!

Back to the Future III
Developed by Probe Entertainment
First Released March, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Weird that the Back to the Future movie that nobody likes is the one that lends itself to gaming the best.

The best thing I can say about Back to the Future III: it’s not Back to the Future II. This one basically copies the gameplay of the Sega Genesis, with the shooting gallery level from the 16-bit version omitted. Unlike Back to the Future II, I actually finished this one. It took me twenty whole minutes, but realistically, I could have beaten it in under ten. In the first section, you ride a horse, shooting people off horses, shooting birds, and occasionally jumping over gaps. At one point, it spawned a bird at the same time it gave me a gap. This is why I needed an additional ten minutes. I kept rewinding this section to see if there was anything I could have done to avoid dying in this specific spot. Apparently, there wasn’t. I still beat the level about two seconds later anyway. It was a lot easier than the Genesis version. In the second stage, you throw plates at Mad Dog Tannen’s henchmen. I got shot about 5,000 times, give or take, and didn’t die.

I didn’t understand the object of the platforming section at first and got stuck behind a barrier. Once I figured it out, it was just a matter of not dying from the terrible combat.

Then there’s a platforming section where you have to move across the train, detaching the cars from it.. I think.. it’s either that or you’re grabbing the magic presto logs from the film. Either way, the game puts up a barrier that you can’t cross if you don’t hit all those targets. You also have to avoid ultra-fast moving blasts of smoke and punch it out with bandits. Once you reach the caboose with Doc, you have to clear one final platforming section with Marty. And that’s the whole game. Back to the Future III is absolutely atrocious, and the fact that on my very first attempt, not counting rewinding, I beat the whole experience in ten minutes? This wasn’t an Atari 2600 game, mind you. I’d think by 1992 the idea of beating an entire relatively expensive video game in ten minutes would be infuriating. Especially when it’s not a fun game. The first level is boring, the plate throwing is stupid, and the third section is janky as all hell. Christ, and to think, there’s many more Back to the Future games out there I haven’t played yet. I long for death.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Back to the Future Sega, Back to the Future Sega Master System, Back to the Future Sega Review, Back to the Future: Part II Sega Master System, Back to the Future: Part II Sega Master System Review, Back to the Future: Part II SMS, Back to the Future: Part III Sega Master System, Back to the Future: Part III Sega Master System Review, Back to the Future: Part III SMS

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Castlevania aka Akumajō Dracula Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Konami First Released September 26, 1986 Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection

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Jaws Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Westone (then known as Escape) Published by LJN First Released November, 1987 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Bonk’s Adventure Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Atlus Published by Hudson Soft First Released July 30, 1993 (JP) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Bonk’s Adventure aka PC Genjin (aka BC Kid in Europe) Developed by Red Company Corporation & Atlus Published by NEC First Released December 15, 1989 (JP) Included in the TurboGrafx-16 Mini NO ACTIVE RE-RELEASE

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Keith Courage in Alpha Zones aka Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru Platform: TurboGrafx-16 Developed by Advance Communication Company Published by NEC Released August 29, 1989 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THIS COLLECTION

FINAL RANKINGS

GAME REVIEWS

Ben Bero BehArcade Release: November, 1984Arcade Archives Release: October 1, 2020Unknown Director

Darius IIArcade Release: September, 1989Unreleased on Arcade ArchivesDirected by Hidehiro FujiwaraDesigned by Hidehiro Fujiwara and Takatsuna Senba

Dino RexArcade Release: November, 1992Unreleased on Arcade ArchivesDirected by Chiho Kimura and Takatsuna SenbaDesigned by Naomitsu Abe, Yosuke Tsuda & Takaaki Tomita

Gun & FrontierArcade Release: January, 1991Arcade Archives Release: August, 2022Designed by Brody Tadashi, Takayuki Ogawa, and Yasuhisa Watanabe

Kiki KaikaiArcade Release: September 18, 1986Arcade Archives Release: July, 2016Directed by Mikio Hatano

The Legend of KageArcade Release: August 10, 1985Arcade Archives Release: October, 2015Unknown Director

Liquid KidsArcade Release: August, 1990Arcade Archives Release: December, 2021Directed by Toshiaki MatsumotoDesigned by Nobuhiro Hiramatsu

Metal BlackArcade Release: November, 1991Arcade Archives Release: November, 2022Directed by Takatsuna Senba

The NewZealand StoryArcade Release: 1988Arcade Archives Release: January, 2023Unknown Director

Solitary FighterArcade Release: 1991Unreleased on Arcade ArchivesDesigned by Masakazu Iwahashi

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The Addams Family Developed by Arc Developments First Released September, 1993 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Batman Returns Developed by Aspect First Released March, 1992 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Back to the Future II Developed by Mirrorsoft First Released October, 1991 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Back to the Future III Developed by Probe Entertainment First Released March, 1992 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Castlevania
aka Akumajō Dracula
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Konami
First Released September 26, 1986
Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection

Jaws
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Westone (then known as Escape)
Published by LJN
First Released November, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Bonk’s Adventure
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Atlus
Published by Hudson Soft
First Released July 30, 1993 (JP)
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Bonk’s Adventure
aka PC Genjin (aka BC Kid in Europe)
Developed by Red Company Corporation & Atlus
Published by NEC
First Released December 15, 1989 (JP)
Included in the TurboGrafx-16 Mini
NO ACTIVE RE-RELEASE

Keith Courage in Alpha Zones
aka Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Developed by Advance Communication Company
Published by NEC
Released August 29, 1989
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Ben Bero Beh
Arcade Release: November, 1984
Arcade Archives Release: October 1, 2020
Unknown Director

Darius II
Arcade Release: September, 1989
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Directed by Hidehiro Fujiwara
Designed by Hidehiro Fujiwara and Takatsuna Senba

Dino Rex
Arcade Release: November, 1992
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Directed by Chiho Kimura and Takatsuna Senba
Designed by Naomitsu Abe, Yosuke Tsuda & Takaaki Tomita

Gun & Frontier
Arcade Release: January, 1991
Arcade Archives Release: August, 2022
Designed by Brody Tadashi, Takayuki Ogawa, and Yasuhisa Watanabe

Kiki Kaikai
Arcade Release: September 18, 1986
Arcade Archives Release: July, 2016
Directed by Mikio Hatano

The Legend of Kage
Arcade Release: August 10, 1985
Arcade Archives Release: October, 2015
Unknown Director

Liquid Kids
Arcade Release: August, 1990
Arcade Archives Release: December, 2021
Directed by Toshiaki Matsumoto
Designed by Nobuhiro Hiramatsu

Metal Black
Arcade Release: November, 1991
Arcade Archives Release: November, 2022
Directed by Takatsuna Senba

The NewZealand Story
Arcade Release: 1988
Arcade Archives Release: January, 2023
Unknown Director

Solitary Fighter
Arcade Release: 1991
Unreleased on Arcade Archives
Designed by Masakazu Iwahashi

The Addams Family
Developed by Arc Developments
First Released September, 1993
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Batman Returns
Developed by Aspect
First Released March, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Back to the Future II
Developed by Mirrorsoft
First Released October, 1991
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Back to the Future III
Developed by Probe Entertainment
First Released March, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED