SNES Review Sunset Riders

When I first started my Super Nintendo 150 Reviews series I had a whole bunch of rules, the main two were that I was only going to review games where I owned the actual cartridge, and I was going to review them on actual hardware. I stuck by these 2 rules firmly for the entire 150 reviews but then as I came up to my 152nd review I decided I was going to loosen up a little, I had achieved my objective after all so why not relax a little bit. So for my 152nd Review I used the Everdrive my wonderful Fiancee had gotten me for Christmas and I reviewed an unfinished prototype game using the Everdrive to play it on actual real hardware. After this I proceeded to review a few more unreleased games but then I decided hey why don't I review some of the games I always wanted to review but couldn't either find, afford or ones where I just couldn't justify spending like £80 just to review a game.

It was at this point that I decided that I wanted to take a good long look at the game Sunset Riders. What drove me towards this game was the fact I had found some tickets to get half price admission to The American Adventure theme park in the bottom of a bag while doing a spot of deep cleaning, the weird thing about this is that The American Adventure closed years ago. This got me to thinking about the times when I would go there as a very young kid in jeans, a wrangler jacket with a Sheriffs star on it, a gun belt around my waist carrying a set of matching plastic pistols and a white cowboy hat. This was the start of me thinking that cowboys were perhaps the greatest thing ever which was only proven even more true when I was shown the films of the Duke AKA John Wayne, and then I saw the Young Guns films which made me want to be an outlaw like Billy the Kid. It was when I was almost at cowboy fever pitch that the MegaDrive/Genesis version of Young Guns dropped into my life courtesy of Santa Clause one fine Christmas morning, I have to give my parents a huge shout out here not only did they always keep the magic of Christmas alive but they always did there best to makes sure that I could darn good presents not just by spending money but also by listening to what I liked and making very good decisions.

I have to admit that I don't actually remember when I got the Super Nintendo version but I do remember being surprised as all heck when I loaded it up and on the title screen you could see four heroes on horseback and then when I pressed the start button and I had a choice between Steve, Billy, Bob and Cormano I just felt absolutely spoiled for choice. Bob became my go to character, it was a mix between me really liking the shotgun weapons spread and the novelty of him not having been in my MegaDrive version.

Click here for My Sunset Riders YouTube Review

So if you haven't played Sunset Riders it is basically a scrolling shooter game where you move largely from left to right making your way through the level to reach your bounty, an individual you have been hired to take down in a blaze of glory. You can get two  power-ups  along the way, these come in the form of sheriff's badges with one of them increasing the speed as which you can fire and the other basically making you dual wield, so your character instead of having a six shooter or a shotgun will have two pistols or two shotguns at there disposal for double the damage and double the fun.

The games graphics and sound although not arcade perfect are just about as close as you could expect and give the game a darn charming and fun atmosphere, the music is great for getting you in to the right mood to play the game and for making it feel even more action packed. Even more important than this though are the controls. Yeah they might be simple with there basically being three buttons one to shoot, one to jump and one to slide, but they feel awesome, they are super responsive and your soon doing exactly what you want the very second you want to do it. This means that if you get shot or get blown up by dynamite your never cursing the game itself your instead only cursing yourself and become determined that with a bit of practice you can get better and make less school boy errors.

If I was to give Sunset Riders a score out of 10 then I would have to give the game a 9 or even 10 out of 10 the game is simply a joy to play especially in two player. Some people might argue that with only 8 stages and its arcade nature that there is very little replayability or reason to return to the game but I would argue that with the games sense of fun and its charm its easy to return to the game for a quick enjoyable blast no matter how many times you have finished it, its just a great game to dip into for a bit and enjoy yourself. The game is very very expensive even for a cart only version so I cant help but recommend that people either look for it on Virtual console style services or that you look into investing in something like an Everdrive.

SNES Review 38: Road Runner's Death Valley Rally AKA Looney Tunes: Road Runner

What is in a name? I often find it funny when the name of a game gets changed from region to region, sometimes there are legal reasons sometimes they just think a particular name will help something sell better to a certain group of people. Here we have a game known in Europe as Looney Tunes: Road Runner, in America as Road Runner's Death Valley Rally,and in Japan as  Looney Tunes: Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote. The game is based off the Looney Tunes characters Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, maybe the name has something to do with the cartoons popularity or image in each region who knows. What I do know is I probably like Japans title the best as Wile E. Coyote is the star of the show in my mind. Sure we are supposed to like Road Runner but why? Because he runs away a lot and makes cheeky little meep meep noises? I cant help but relate to Wile the guy/animal who is just trying to do what is expected of him, who is trying to eat, to survive and keeps having life backfire in his face.

I kind of walked in to this game expecting a mediocre game, largely because it is made by SunSoft and its a Looney Tunes game, so I was judging it a little bit based on my thoughts to Tazmania which I played a while ago.

The graphics are pretty decent, they have a fair degree of character in them but don't get bogged down with to much detail, the sprites for Wile and the runner are cool and the graphics automatically remind you of the old cartoon while still managing to be clear and not get in the way of the game itself. If I have one major gripe in this area however it is the fact that the backgrounds are the same throughout the entire level, this does make things seem a little more boring at times than they perhaps should but I guess its not the worst thing in the world.The sound in this game is a little hard for me to judge sound effects wise there is very little, there's the typical skidding noise, a jump noise, a pecking noise, the odd meep meep and a few noises associated with things attacking you. The music for the levels well it sits right on the middle of the fence between being catchy and annoying to the point that I cant even come to a conclusion if I like it or hate it....all I can say is you wont find yourself doing a Mario and humming any of this latter when you have moved away from the console.

The gameplay is kind of what you'd expect your the runner and you run, Wile is constantly after you and you are trying to escape from him. So each level has you running past obstacles, making jumps and trying to find your way until you reach the finish, usually at the end of the level there will be some quick confrontation with Wile for example in the first level he chases you with a steam roller, you win and you get to see him beaten usually in the end somehow by one of his own devices in typical comic fashion. The ways that he tries to stop you may change but the strategies and weak points are always pretty easy to work out and adapt to on the fly. The largest flaw is that the gameplay is repetitive, which gives you no incentive to play the game for extended periods. The speed at which the game can move sometimes because an issue as things fly past without giving you adequate time to deal with them, it was almost enough to make me wish that I was playing a Pal copy on a Pal machine to see if the usual drop in speed pal games can experience helped. Knowing other games I have set aside to review though I know that this is an issue quite a few platformers bumped into, some of them could really have used a good long play on the sonic the hedgehog games to look at how they deal with this issue.

Road Runner: Death Valley Rally is an average game in every single way. It just leaves you with a feeling of complete and utter averageness, its not good enough to remember nor is it bad enough to laugh at or get mad at, it just exists in the middle neither good nor bad. 5 out of 10 all day long. If you want to try it a Pal cart will fetch you about £10 you might get an American for closer to £5 but strangely the Japanese copies I have seen have been more money, maybe people don't realize that its the same game or maybe not may came out over there, who knows sometimes the retro video game market is a beast with no rhyme or reason.

150 SNES games reviewed #34: Power Drive

When I buy retro games they tend to belong to one of three categories. They are games which I owned as a kid and want to get again because I have fond memories of them, games I remember friends owning and which I have fond memories of playing at their houses, or are games which I can get cheap and figure what the heck I will give it a bash.

 

My PowerDrive SNES YouTube Review 

 

Today’s game comes from the second category. I had quite a few friends at school and all of them owned one console or another, but the most owned console was probably the SNES. Not everyone had the same taste in games though. So sometimes when I would go to visit a friend’s house I would get to play a game that I otherwise wouldn’t have got to try. One particular friend was mad on sports – cricket, football, boxing, motor racing – and unless it was a crazy sports related title like Punch-Out!!, he would have it.

One day when I went round he had a new game, one I hadn’t really heard much about and that game was Power Drive. The first thing I noticed on its case was that it was published by U.S Gold, but at the time I had never heard of the developer Rage Software.

U.S. Gold was founded in Birmingham in  1984 as the publishing division for a software distribution company called Centresoft. Its primary reason for existence was to republish popular US computer games in the UK. For ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC users the U.S. Gold logo became a big part of our lives. U.S. Gold no longer exists and nor does Rage Software. Rage’s first title, Striker, sold more than one million copies and established Rage as a major creative force in the interactive entertainment industry. But ironically the very thing that started them off – a football title – would ultimately be its undoing. In 2000, Rage began to expand into publishing. Due to a long run of games that did not sell as expected, the lack of sales and costs associated with their  David Beckham franchise tends to be considered to be what ultimately led to the company going bankrupt in 2003.

When my friend popped Power Drive into the cartridge slot I have to admit that it was nothing like what I expected. Putting it simply Power Drive is an arcade racing game based around rally driving. There is not a great deal of opening presentation to the game, you pick your car from an initial choice of two and then you start your career.

The graphics are isometric, you can see the whole of your car almost as if its a remote control car that you’re looking down at. This might seem to be a little basic at first but with the tricks under the game’s bonnet such as full sprite rotation and super smooth screen scrolling in every direction you soon realise that what looks on paper like average graphics actually look a hell of a lot better when moving. There are a few tiny issues with screen flicker but this mostly happens when the arrows that warn you of upcoming turns appear over the top of other objects. It’s only a momentary issue and you can still tell what direction the arrow is pointing so it doesnt really affect your game. There are night levels, and the following might sound like a strange thing to praise but the car’s headlights are handled brilliantly. Both of the headlight beams are animated separately, which just looks brilliant. The two lights overlap each other and it’s just a brilliant little touch which I can’t help but mention. That’s enough about the cars and their headlights, it’s time to talk about the backgrounds. They at first seem a little bit basic. The tracks and the scenery both look a little plain at first but they are full of subtle little details which take into account the characteristics of the country you are in.

The music is typical early nineties game music. I can’t claim it’s amazing but then again it’s not bad. Basicaly it does its job which is to be moderately exciting and to muffle the engine noises, etc so that they dont became a pain in the butt. You can turn the music off if you would prefer to hear your engine or if you’re going to play your own music while you play.

The game has three types of stages, they are individual time trials, head-to-head races against the computer, and skill tests. There are eight rounds of gameplay, set across a range of countries. As you race you get prize money for winning races but it is important to note that the cost of repairing your car is very realistic compared to other games, meaning if you have repeatedly ping-ponged your car off of the walls then 90% of your prize money is going to be spent on knocking your car into shape. You can race with a knackered car, but it becomes harder and harder to control and slower so it’s not really recommended.

At first this game will seem hard because it doesn’t control like a lot of other SNES racers, or at least not many of the wildly popular ones. If you have played either RPM Racing or Rock n’ Roll Racing then Power Drive would be down your alley. Once you get used to the controls though it becomes a challanging but fun driving game. I would give this game eight out of 10. I really enjoy it still today and can easily throw it on for a quick hour again and again. This game can be got for around £10 to £15. If you want to try it I would keep my eye on the various sites and try to grab a copy as close to the £10 mark as possible. The game is not wildly talked about and doesn’t seem to have any particularly big cult following.

150 SNES games reviewed #28: Ryan Giggs Champions World Class Soccer

Ryan Giggs Champions World Class Soccer was the game I played a little last night as well as early this morning. It is obviously a football (soccer) game and it was released on the SNES as well as the Mega Drive. It was developed by Park Place Productions and published by Acclaim.

 

My Champions World Class Soccor YouTube Review 

 

You might not have heard of Park Place Productions largely because they were a bit of a bright light that burnt out very quickly. They were founded in 1989 and in 1993 they had become the largest independent developer of computer games. They had  130 developers making 45 games for 14 different publishers. At the end of December 1993 the company collapsed spectacularly. Basically they didn’t hit some targets they had been set by publishers and as a result of this they were denied payments, pulled out of contracts and literally left Park Place Productions up the creek without a paddle.

The first thing to note is that the whole Ryan Giggs thing is a bit of a con. The UK release featured a picture of the player on the game box and the cartridge label but any real connection to the guy or inclusion of his name ends there. The German version featured a player famous to them Sepp Maier, and the French featured a team likely to interest them, Paris Saint-Germain. None of the three have anything to do with the game beyond the box art and cartridge label though so from now on sod Giggs I will be referring to this as Champions World Class Soccer (or CWC Soccer if I get lazy).

Modes of play included in the game are the standard type, exhibition match and tournament mode. There are the obvious options to turn certain things off and mess with how long the matches last etc but nothing out of the ordinary.

The game’s presentation is pretty decent. There is a TV announcer talking about the match before it starts – talking as in text along the bottom of the screen, but the text is pretty cool. It mentions which team you are and what is good or bad about you. For example I got something on the lines of the following for my first match: “England have always been good at defence but there shooting record is a little unpredictable”. The in game graphics are pretty much the bog standard average football game graphics from this point in time so I don’t have a lot to say about them, they don’t make or break the game.

I like the fact that there is a big blue star around the character you are in control of. It is very easy to know who you are and then there is a button which seems to exist just to help you do little tricks either dribbling the ball around your feet, turning backwards for a second or shooting forward quickly – well, quickly for this game. Unfortunately this is the point at which my review has to get a little bit sour I am afraid that personally I feel that the gameplay is bad. The game is slow, both passing and shooting are hard and frustrating to the point you’ll soon find yourself turning the air blue.

Sometimes it takes a few seconds for your character to become properly attached to the ball like you do in most football games. You will have ran on to the ball and it just wont end up under your control so you’ll be running backwards and forwards hoping it attaches to you and then a computer controlled player will just run straight up and claim it with no problem or pause in proceedings.

In my opinion this game is the worst SNES football game I have played so far. I like the TV start, I like the fact it makes it obvious who you are but I don’t really like the controls or the gameplay. It also didn’t give me my any of my demands such as great goal scoring animations or a voice shouting “Goal!”. I would give this game four out of 10 . It’s not unplayable but there are much better games out there for your cash. If you decide that you simply need this game to live the good point is it will cost you only £4 or £5 to buy it online and get it posted to you.

150 SNES games reviewed #27: Top Gear

Top Gear (or as our friends in Japan would know it, Top Racer) is a racing game for the SNES. It was developed by Gremlin Graphics and published by Kemco.

 

It was one of the first racing games to be released on the SNES, so when it came out it was immediately popular. Everyone I knew back then seemed to have either this or Exhaust Heat with the lucky and truly dedicated having both. Top Gear and its two sequels – Top Gear 2 and Top Gear 3000 – were created by the same developers as the famous Lotus series of games which had been released earlier on the Amiga and the Mega Drive. It is important to note before anyone gets too excited this game has no connection to the TV show with the same name.

My Top Gear YouTube Review 

The good points are that the game feels very fast. I hadn’t played it for a fair few years and when I started playing it this morning I was very surprised at how fast it felt. It is also very bumpy in a way which is kind of hard to explain, but it is worth noting because I remember back in the day a few people I knew couldn’t play it because when it was in motion it made them feel sick. I love it as it actually helps to make you feel like your in there racing. But it’s important to note before anyone goes out and pays for this game, it might be worth looking for some footage on YouTube so you can see if it affects you.

I lost my first few races which meant instead of progressing I kept seeing the starting screen again. But I soon realised I wasn’t paying proper attention to my gears. You don’t get to choose a car or buy add-ons for it, or to even mess with its handling and tires. If this is something that is important to you then your probably better off with Exhaust Heat. Once I started paying attention though I soon found I was up there fighting for pole position again and again. This is when the game began to get really fun, but just when I thought I had seen it all, when I thought I had it in the bag, that’s when things changed a little bit.

I’d noticed there were pit stops but I had never seen the need to use them, sure I had got a little bit tight on fuel at times but there was always just enough to see me fly past the flag in first. You see short races don’t  really require a pit stop and refueling, but the lengthier ones will see you come to an abrupt halt half-way around the track in one of your later laps if you’re not careful. This adds a whole new level of strategy to proceedings as you begin to have to think about when to have a pit stop, how long to stay in the pit, sure you can see your position getting worse while you’re being filled up but you know that in the longer races if you don’t fill up then you’re going to come to a stop and lose. Whole races can be won or lost based on your judgement of when you should pull in for a pit stop or how long you can put it off.

The graphics are good for the time. The screen is always split even when you’re playing on your own. In this case there is a computer rival in charge of a car on the bottom half of the screen. I like the music in this game, it might not be technically brilliant but it is fun. It fits its purpose of pumping you up for the races brilliantly and makes a change to all those games back then which suffered from having no sounds in game apart from that farting rumbling engine sound which used to be popular. I would give this game a good solid seven out of 10. It is a fun game but I miss having a choice in terms of what car to drive and the options to tune it up and buy upgrades. Basically this game just seems like a very big slice of arcade fun not that that’s a bad thing, but you need to keep that in mind if you’re thinking about getting this.

A lot of times when I have seen this game online its been about £8 for an import cart or about £15 for an PAL one, with a boxed copy being as high as £30. I only paid £3 for my cart. The sequel does seem to be a little cheaper and easier to get your hands on though (I will get around to reviewing that sooner or later).

150 SNES games reviewed #25: Ultraman

Ultraman is a fighting game based on the TV series Ultraman: Toward the Future. It was originally released in arcades by Banpresto and Bandai but was then ported to the SNES (It was also ported to the Megadrive two years later, but this version only came out in japan).

I knew before I started this game was considered to be legendarily bad. That it was one of the games to own titles such as ‘worst game ever’, ‘worst game on the SNES’ and various others, which basically amount to say this game is an utter turd.

However, one thing which is annoying about a lot of gamers and even the games media is people talk about games like this without ever having played them. In much the same way that when you ask most people what’s the worst game ever they will throw out answers like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari 2600 or Superman 64 without ever having seen the cartridge in real life.

So with the above said you will probably get the point that even if a game has been called bad by almost everyone and every media outlet out there I still like to put it in my own cartridge slot or CD draw before I am willing to comment on it. I have played E.T., I have played Superman 64 and now I have played Ultraman. I would like to be able to tell you that some of its awfulness is just the product of ever expanding urban legends, that people tried to one up each other with tales of its awfulness and in doing so exaggerated some of its issues. But unfortunately everything that has ever been said about this is true – it is awful.



So to run you through how my time with the game went I will give you a quick explanation. I put the game in and it loaded up the music was OK the presentation wasn’t too bad at all but then I got to the gameplay. For those of you who don’t know who Ultraman is I will give you a basic idea. Imagine a one man power ranger team, where instead of getting in a giant robot if enemies turn big, the dude just turns big himself and that’s pretty much all you really need to know. So you see a scene of him growing and then it’s time to fight. At first you see Ultraman facing off against a monster and you see the power bars with names on under both sides of the screen, your’s on one side the monster’s on the other, and that makes you think we are in the land of Street Fighter II clones again. If only it was a good or even average Street Fighter clone.

Ultraman controls like he has some kind of serious impairment. The way he moves backwards and forwards is clunky. You can never seem to back off quick enough, even though you can do a sort of backwards cartwheel. You can run forward quite fast. The game makes you realise things which are brilliant in the likes of Street Fighter II which you took for granted could have been far, far worse. The jumping in Ultraman is controlled with one of the pad’s face buttons, but it’s so floaty that jump attacks are hardly worth bothering with. In fact the only point to jumping would be to jump over the enemy to gain yourself a bit of breathing room. Of the other three face buttons, one is a punch, one is a kick and the third is your special move button. This is when things get a bit complicated.

On my first go I managed to punch and kick the monster until its energy bar was depleted. This was a chore as there was basically only two kinds of punch – a straight punch and an uppercut style punch – and two kicks – a straight kick and a little jumping fancy kick. Yes, there are no crouching attacks, and different kicks or punches don’t seem to happen if you hold back or press the button for longer or anything, so basically there are four standard attacking moves – six if you count the fact you can chop or kick while in the air (I say if you can count as these will hardly ever hit anything). So ‘finish him’ shows up in the enemy’s depleted energy bar, so I hit him a lot more, and he hits me back lowering my energy. I press the special button and a sort of fireball attack is launched which hits him but doesn’t do anything much. Five minutes latter he has beaten my bar down to zero. Do I carry on like he has and wait for him to ‘finish me’? No, I collapse on the floor and die. So I continue and the same happens again, and again, and again…

At this point it’s safe to say I was very frustrated. I knew I was going to have to do one of two things. I was either going to have to open the manual or I was going to have to dive online. Now something is wrong when you feel the need to run for help during what to all intents and purposes is the first stage of a video game. It turned out the answer was halfway through the manual. There’s a meter in between yours and his which shows how much special energy you have and also displays some choices. As you gain more energy you can choose other special moves. You actually have four of them and when it says finish him only one thing will kill the enemy and that’s to hit them with the fourth special move.

So with this knowledge in hand I again did battle with the first monster. I wore down his energy bar and then hit him with the move and bam, he blew up, job done. I soon learned the problem is you need to beat the enemy up quiet a bit to fill your bar so there’s basically no point using the special moves apart from to use the fourth one to blow up the enemy. Because if you do use the other ones all it will mean is that you’re dancing backwards and forwards kicking an enemy while it says finish him waiting to gain the needed energy, giving it a chance to kill you.

That’s the main problem – the enemies have better reach than you do. They also seem to move more quickly than you do and they can kill you by simply depleting your energy bar without having to do any fancy rubbish to see you off. Add to this the fact their attacks seem to be very quick and damaging, and you can see your plight. When you win it often isn’t because of how good you have been its because the random gods of chance shone in your favour. In one match against an enemy he can breath fire at you again and again, as well as hitting you before you can even reach him. Then in your next match he can seem to just stand there while you approach and punch him in the face again and again. It just feels less like the enemies have any real AI and instead some dice are being thrown in the background the results of which tell them to attack, to shoot fire or to just sit there like a lemon
.

Apparently there are about eight monsters in the game but I couldn’t get past the fifth. Its reach was just too good. It kept shooting fire and I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to keep rolling lemons. Add to this the fact you get a limited amount of continues. You get about two but I did notice myself gaining an extra one due to points/score at one stage.

The graphics in game are rubbish – basic backgrounds, awful sprites – but this could be overlooked if the game wasn’t such a sluggish random mess. As it stands I have to give this game two out of 10. It’s basically broken but kind of has some degree of playability hence the fact I haven’t given it a one. It is by far the worse SNES game I have played during this little experiment of mine, and I can’t remember playing anything else this bad back in the day. I do own another game which was frequently referred to as the worst game on the SNES so we will have to wait and see how that measures up.

If you love bad games or your some kind of sadomasochist who is rubbing their nipples at the thought of playing this then I better give you the lowdown on how much it costs. My copy was £5 from a charity shop boxed with manual and that still feels expensive. The cheapest PAL copy I could find online was £5.99 but it looked like a bear had attacked the front label. There was a boxed copy or two for £15 but seriously buy some good games with that money instead. Or if you’re really that into pain at least save up a bit more and pay a good looking woman to whip you or something. At least, unlike with Ultraman, the view will be nice while you suffer.

SNES Game Review 151: 90 Minutes: European Prime Goal AKA J-League Soccer: Prime Goal 3

If I was to tell you that there was a trilogy of SNES games released in Japan and that the European  markets only got one entry you would most likely assume that what we got was the first entry right? J-League Soccer: Prime Goal 3 is a football/soccer game developed and published by Namco in Japan, It was the third and last part of their Prime Goal series which was released for the Super Famicom (The Japanese version of the Super Nintendo).  It features all fourteen teams of the 1995 season of the J-League, with there real names and logos. The first two games in this series never made it out of Japan

The game was the first in the series to be released in Europe with the name 90 Minutes: European Prime Goal. There were quiet a few changes to the game though for a start the fourteen teams of the J-League were swapped for fourteen European international sides, these are Norway, Romania, Scotland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Holland, Bulgaria, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, England, France, Wales and Spain. In connection to this the graphics have been adjusted to replace all of the Japanese looking players with players representing various ethnicities, logos have been swapped but beyond these cosmetic changes and the game being translated it is pretty much the same game.

I must admit that the Japanese version is a lot easier and cheaper to get hold of and it is very easy to get in to an exhibition match where your playing against either the computer or another player but the game does actually feature numerous modes and it can be a little hard to navigate your way into some of these in Japanese. The European version is a lot better if you want to get the most out of the game but it actually sells for a lot higher price, despite being a football game it seems to demand prices of around £20 for a loose cart and they don't come around as often as you'd think.
OK so as well as having the obvious exhibition mode there is also a tournament mode, and a mode where you can train your own player and have them recruited into one of the games teams, then there is a league mode, an all-stars mode which takes the best players from the fourteen teams and uses them to create two all-star teams to play against each other and finally a cup championship mode.

I don't think bearing in mind that this game is made by Namco that its surprising to find that this game has a very arcade feel to it. If you leave the game to its own devises then your met with some lively music and the logos/flags of the various teams flashed in front of you, it really is the sort of thing you'd expect to see in an arcade. When you start the game you will see that the way the game is played is vertically with one goal being to the left of the screen and the other being to the right. I never played this game back as a kid so now that I find myself playing it I am reminded of the Neo Geo arcade game Super Sidekicks, if you have played that then this game has a very similar feel, it is a very arcade feeling game. I found it much easier to score goals in this than in any of the other football games I have played during my SNES review series, my first game ended 15-4 with me winning(This was playing with two 10 minute halves). Personally this made me enjoy the game though as with me actually being able to score goals and the computer seeming decently capable as well then there seemed to be a lot more pressure to both push the ball in to there zone as well as to try my best to get it out of my own quickly as well. Personally I didn't feel like there was a set way to shoot at the goal which always insured that you scored, obviously the harder you seemed to make it swerving around passing the harder it seemed for the opposing team but there was no sure fire method you could use to cheat. For a long time I didn't think that fouls even seemed to exist in this game as both I and the computer were constantly sliding at each other knocking each other over all over the pitch and yet no one seemed to get carded for it, but then I did eventually see yellow and red cards so I guess the game is just a bit lenient in this regard. If you like or dislike this will depend on how aggressive a player you are I guess, personally I would be happy if I could get away with letting my players headbutt the opposition and getting away with it ( There was actually a football game back on the spectrum which I owned as a kid that actively encouraged you to foul the opposition with no consequences). Also if you can score a goal then the ball find its way into your goalkeeper's hands then you can just hold it until the time runs out for an easy win. The controls are pretty much standard  for a football game when the ball is in your possession then one button passes, one button shoots, and one crosses it in. When you don't have the ball then these buttons either tackle or do things like select the player closest to the ball.

I think that the graphics for this game are actually pretty normal for the time the game was released. They are nice and functional and you can always see what is happening, I never lost track of the ball or wasn't able to determine who I was controlling or who had possession. I love all the touches such as the word GOAL sliding across the screen just after you have scored and seeing little cut scenes of your players charging down the pitch afterwards with the crowd visibly excited.

The sound is pretty decent overall, there is some digitized speech in the game, but it is kind of  hard to understand, alongside this there is a lot of sort of clapping and chanting noises but they have a sort of echoey distant sound to them, they are all put in to the game in the appropriate places along side a little bit of music here and there overall I think it works

I would find myself giving this game a 7 out of 10, of the SNES football games I have reviewed so far (This, Virtual Soccer and Super Goal 2) I have certainly found this one to be the most fun.  I have already talked about the price of this game, it is a bit of a steep game to buy if you want a Pal copy, you can get away with a Japanese copy but only really if you just want to play it on a shallow level without being able to get into all of the modes easily this is good enough for me but it depends on what your personally looking for in a sports game.

SNES Game Review 150: The Adventures of Dr Franken.

OK so when reviewing a whole bunch of SNES games I knew that I was going to come across good games, bad games and average games. I knew there would be things that had aged well and things that had not done so well. Some of the games I had very vivid pictures of in my head, I had played them to death as a kid and literally the second I picked up a pad a lot of it came back, heck some of them I have never really stopped playing. Then there are things like the game I am going to review today, things that I would have seen in shops again and again, and that I might have spent 5 minutes on at a friends house but which I don't have much more than a hazy awareness of.

So the game I am playing today is Dr Franken AKA The Adventures of Dr Franken. The game came out on the GameBoy and the SNES but there were NES and GameGear versions developed which never got released, still obviously the version I am going to be talking about today is obviously the SNES version. The SNES version was developed by a company called Motive Time LTD who I have to honestly admit I can find next to no information on at all other than various lists of things they worked on, apparently though the last thing they worked on was the PC version of Ford Racing in the year 2000. It was published by DMTC in America and Elite systems in Europe. The SNES version came out towards the end of 1993 and in honesty the game is kind of so 90's it hurts.

OK so if your reading this and you don't know I am a massive massive horror movie fan with a particular love for the classics, so to put it bluntly Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and the 1930's universal film based on it are very important to me. I am also a big fan of things that reference this sort of stuff in a fun loving parody style way, hence the fact that I adore the Adams family etc. So I really wanted to like something based of the whole Frankenstein thing even if it was a tongue in cheek joke based sort of thing.

So most people will know that Frankenstein is not the monster and is in fact the Doctor who created him right? Well this game ignores that and makes you a character called Frankie who is the monster, no idea what the Franken or Dr part is about maybe there was something in the manual which gave that away or maybe they just pulled the name out of there collective asses. Still Frankie has a giant cartoon head and wears sunglasses and is trying to be all rad and bad in a Michael Jackson way so maybe he thinks he is a Doctor like Dr Dre or John Cena the Doctor of Thugonomics but he kind of flushes all of this street cred down the toilet by appearing to wear sandals. Now call me silly but if I was really trying to make him cool I would have dropped his Bart Simpson red T-shirt and shorts and gone for jeans a leather jacket and some Nike trainers personally. Now despite only owning a cart and there being no story sequence I went and read around on the internet so that I could provide some story back drop for those that care. Apparently Frankie, wanted to take a trip with his girlfriend Bitsy but they could only afford one plane ticket so he disassembled her and stuck her in a bunch of suitcases. Apparently the suitcases instead of reaching there destination end up all over the world and so Frankie has to go around finding all the bits of his girlfriend in order to put her back together again. So I guess the moral of the story is never saw your girlfriend in to pieces to try and save money just fly with easy jet or go to Skegness again.

OK so in the game you are tasked with playing as Frankie through 20 stages, now in each of these you have to collect four parts and then find an exit in order to complete the stage and move on to the next one. Well I guess this sounds nice and easy then well it would be but unfortunately this game may well in fact be one of the most frustrating and difficult platformers available on the Super Nintendo.

OK so on to the gameplay well Frankie has a button which attacks to the left, one that attacks to the right, one that jumps and one that does a little flip kick. Then you have the trigger buttons the R button shoots a shot that can stuns enemies for a little bit while Pressing L unleashes a powerful fireball that kills enemies. Now this all probably sounds pretty straight forward and like there is a reasonable amount of moves but its actually kind of confusing that if your running one way and you press the wrong button you end up attacking behind you, surly it would just be better to attack in the direction your facing and have a wider range of attacks? What it really feels like is that the games developer wanted to give this game an innovative control setup not because it would help the gameplay but because it would tick a box and make this game different. Its basically innovation for the sake of innovation and frankly in my humble opinion it doesn't work.

Add to these innovation issues the fact that Frankie has very little health, most enemies can in fact finish you of in four to five hits, heck half the time when your jumping at them to fly kick them they seem to hit you as well. You only have three lives as well so with all of this given its a pretty darn challenging game for all the wrong reasons. You can collect icons that refill your, there are also ones which give you extra lives and the game does have bonus stages, these have no enemies and are instead loaded with power-ups and extra lives. In fairness though the stages are not always the best made some of them in fact contain pits and require pretty wild unintuitive jumps. The game also becomes pretty darn repetitive since every enemy takes one hit to kill and well the game just doesn't bother to have bosses at all.

OK so I have been ragging on the game a lot, is there anything much I can say about this game which is in any way good? Well Frankie and all of the enemies are large and nicely drawn, the animation is best described as satisfactory, it feels like it could use a few more frames but the game does have some personality to it. I would also praise the backgrounds, they are pretty rich in detail, vivid and all have there own personality, there are something like 10 different stage themes some of these include castles, dungeons, forests, Ancient Japanese architecture and construction sites.

The audio is also pretty darn good for an older SNES game. The music is pretty catchy and importantly all of it fits the area that it plays in, on the downside though I don't think there are really enough tracks to keep the game varied, which also adds to its repetitiveness. The sound effects also are not to bad at all, they pretty much all fit and work and do what they should do

I have to say that I didn't really enjoy the game at all. It’s a very hard game and in general it soon starts to feel like a chore and when any game feels like a chore you know that it is basically a failure as games are supposed to be enjoyable. The issue is that this game could have been a lot better, with some better controls a few bosses and well just a little more work. The truth is that while I have been doing all of these reviews there have been very few games that were totally irredeemable, even in the worst of them you could see some shred of something good. In fact the honest truth seems to have been that most of the SNES's library was kind of average, it takes a whole lot of good to make a good game, good intentions, good programmers, good decisions and even a dose of good luck, basically it needs all of the stars to fall in to the right alignment and this game just didn't have all of the stars lined up like it needed. I would give this game a 3 out of 10, its a pretty bad game but I cant hate it, I guess if I have learned anything in the last 4 years while I have been working on my SNES review project it is that even the best games have there flaws and even the worst of games have a spark or two of greatness in them that just never quiet got to turn in to a fire.

If you decided that you wanted this game what would you be paying? Well in all honesty most of the time when I see this game it is selling cart only for between £12 to £20, I was lucky and got an American cart for £7 including postage, in honesty though I don't think it was worth even this, the simple truth is that there are much better things you could spend your money on. Some people might find it a little strange that I have let this project end on a not particularly high note but the truth is whenever you have been working on something for a long time there is a kind of bittersweetness which comes at the end of it and who knows just because I have reviewed 150 SNES games it doesnt meen I will never review one again. It just means that I have finished what I set out to do, what I promised myself and others that I would do, and now it means that I am free, free to talk and write about whatever takes my fancy with my work complete.

SNES game Review 148: Secret of Mana

Secret of Mana, was originally released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2, so yep the first thing I am telling you is that this game is in fact a sequel. Seiken Densetsu apparently translates to Legend of the Sacred Sword. the original Seiken Densetsu was released as Final Fantasy Adventure in North America and Mystic Quest in Europe and was on the Game Boy. So the series began as a handheld side story to Square's flagship franchise Final Fantasy, though you wouldn't know this from playing Secret of Mana as all of the the Final Fantasy elements were dropped starting with this second instalment in the series and in all honesty it became a series in its own right with its own fan fare and legion of loyal followers.

So Secret of Mana can best be described as an action role-playing game it was both developed and published by Square for the SNES and released in 1993. Surprisingly this is the first time I have managed to talk about Square in my SNES series, yes they are a great studio but there stuff is usually expensive. In fact I spent £25 on my American cart of Secret of Mana and that was quiet a long time ago before prices really started to jump. I didn't own Mana back when it was released but one of my close friends did, and I used to go round his a lot and play it, I really enjoyed it but for some reason I just never decided to pick my own copy up, maybe its because when I was younger I tended to jump from game to game, so didn't really think an RPG was the best use of my cash. It was years latter when I decided to buy it and I basically just kept checking eBay until I saw a buy it now American copy with free postage. It was this game that actually resulted in me modifying my Super Nintendo. You see I was playing it through a convertor and well it was on a cupboard and when my daughter would run into the room the cupboard would rock a little and this would make the SNES rock and well it would crash, one time it crashed and somehow this ruined my save and I lost 15 hours worth of playing. I then began to think about what I could do to fix this situation, the obvious solution would be to simply sell my copy and spend whatever it cost to buy a Pal version, or heck just purchase an American SNES. Somehow I ended up reading about how to make a UK SNES play import games, and as a result of this I widened the cartridge slot, and disabled the region lockout on my machine and altered it so it ran at 60hz, I could have gotten more clever and gone down the route of switches etcetera but I decided to just have my altered SNES and a regular one as well as bad as this sounds it was simply easier.

OK so what makes Secret of Mana such a unique and often talked about game? Well for a start its a Square game so there is that name recognition but its also a little different for one its not just a single player game its also a cooperative multiplayer game with a system which allows for a second and even third player to drop in and out of the game at any time. You start the game as one character and as you play a further two are unlocked, and well as soon as one is unlocked a friend can jump in and play with you. As an adult this sounds pretty cool but as a kid this was simply amazing, it meant I could drop in on my friend and if he was playing this game it didn't mean that I had to just sit there and watch him play or that he had to come of the game because he had a visitor nope I could just grab a pad and jump right into the game. OK so I think its pretty obvious that being two player its not going to be an old Final Fantasy style RPG where everyone stands there waiting for there turn to attack, no rather than using a turn-based battle system like other role-playing games back then this game instead offers real-time battles with a power bar mechanic. For anyone who hasn't played Secret of Mana I guess id kind of explain this game as kind of feeling like its an almost Final Fantasy meets Zelda a Link to the Past kind of thing. The game also has a unique ''Ring Command'' menu system, when you use this it pauses the action and allows you to make decisions in the middle of battle. 

I might have spent quiet awhile going on about how great it is that people can drop in and out of your game but even if your on your own or don't really like playing games with other human beings then the game still has you covered offering customizable artificial intelligence (AI) settings for your computer-controlled allies. While you control one character the other two will then behave however you have set them to behave with you having choices between having them run in swinging without a care in the world or having them behave more defenselessly staying away from enemies and only fighting when absolutely necessary. Or you can set them to run in swinging. The experience gained is equally shared so you don't need to worry about them either stealing to many kills from you and your character therefore loosing experience, or them cowering too much and becoming weak. There is a fairly large variety of enemies. You get creatures called Rabites, which are pretty much half rabbit half blob, then there are zombies and goblins all sorts of different things sure there are some pallet swaps but its not done to death and in my opinion it doesn't hurt the game at all there are also some pretty darn cool bosses.

OK so lets talk a little about the weapons you get how you attack with them and what makes this cool. You have an area on screen which sits under your character's icon and health meter this shows percentages, if you stop attacking it will climb up to 100% wait for this and the attack will be stronger, so rathter than slashing like mad its often better to hit and avoid to let this build.

As you increase your weapon abilities, which is done by killing enemies with a certain weapon, you will gain techniques. You use these techniques by holding the attack button and you will see a bar fill up to the desired level 1-8 and then when you release your button you will do a more powerful attack, to start with these are pretty simple like a jumping slash but they just get better and better. There are 8 weapons in the game and they are a sword, an axe, a spear, a pole arm, a boomerang, a bow, a whip, and a glove. So what you have is 8 selectable weapons for 3 characters, so you get to control who uses what and when. All of these weapons are upgradable by finding orbs and then taking them to the blacksmith. As the weapons are improved by the blacksmith they get stronger and develop abilities, so you might find that certain ones stun enemies or become strong against particular things. Now you will most likely just work out which are your favourites but its great to have the choice and for me at least it does add some playability as you can try to do things a little different next time, like using the whip, glove and bow instead of the spear, sword and axe. I could talk about this game all day but I don't want to give away everything about the game , and I certainly don't want to talk about the story in the slightest and that's because this game gets a very high recommendation from me and I want people to know just enough to feel curious and to go out and try the game.

OK so I have talked about my history with the game , I have talked about the play mechanics and seeing as I think gameplay is king id kind of be happy to leave it here but I guess I should talk about the graphics and the sound. I think the graphics are beautiful, you have great 16-bit sprites that living in a bright colourful world absolutely dripping with detail, its a wonderful living breathing world in cartridge form. You have large impressive bosses I think its just a treat for the eyes.

As for the games Music well the game has an absolutely fantastic score it is at times peaceful, at other times atmospheric and sometimes beautiful, its just as far as I am concerned one of the greatest game scores on the system which ticks every box and is an emotional roller coaster. As far as sound effects go you have all of the Slashes and such you would expect in a game of this type and most importantly nothing ever feels repetitive or out of place.

Overall I would have to say that this game is one of the very best games on the system, and even if you don't usually like RPG's with this games multiplayer and its spin on it being an action RPG, id recommend that you give it a bash. I feel I need to give this game a very rare 10 out of 10 after all it has to be one hell of a game for you to modify your whole console because of it doesn't it?

OK so if you want to play this game prices for pal carts start at about £40 I have also seen a lot of fake carts knocking around, with some of the owners/sellers even believing them to be real, this is something worth considering. To try and combat this take a good look at pictures of real ones and then study any you consider buying. It is also worth noting that this game made it on to the SNES mini AKA the Super NES classic Edition. It has also had a 3d remake for various modern platformers but I haven't tried that so wont be commenting on it beyond making people aware of its existence.

150 SNES games reviewed #14: Sonic Blast Man

It’s funny how sometimes all you need to see is a company’s name on a box and it’s enough to get you excited. In fact it’s sometimes enough to make you buy something on the spot with no real research.

 

Back in the PlayStation days I remember a lot of people would feel totally safe in just picking up anything with the Square logo on it. For me a company who I have always rather liked is Taito. They made a lot of great games back in the day, so the sight of their name on a cart is cause for a hopeful smile.

Some of you who used to go to the arcades as kids might have heard of the name Sonic Blast Man. It was the name of a pretty sizeable arcade cabinet which came with boxing gloves and a punching pad. You would play the game by trying to punch the pad as hard as you could when it told you to. I remember it started with you punching a thug who was trying to assault a lady and if you got to the end you were trying to punch a meteorite away before it could strike the Earth.



I loved this game I would hunt high and low for it in arcades up and down the coast. Apparently, in March 1995 Taito recalled Sonic Blast Man machines due to reports that some players had sustained injuries while playing the game. Although I have to cry BS on this one, you wore gloves and you punched a well padded sensor. Sure I have seen people injure themselves in connection to the Sonic Blast Man machine but these were idiots who were punching it bare-handed and had no real idea of how to punch it or worse. I once saw a guy try to run and fly kick the pad in an arcade, he miss judged it and landed on a very painful part of his body as it made contact with the corner of an old Operation Wolf machine. Yet in the US, Taito had to pay a fine of $50,000 for failing to disclose these “injuries”.

When I heard as a kid there was going to be a SNES verion of Sonic Blast Man my mind went nuts. How could they turn it into a SNES game? It would cost the earth if it came with boxing gloves and a usable sensor pad, plus I could imagine it would be a PR nightmare as one child punched another child while missing the sensor or punched the TV. (What I saw happening in my mind was basically what we all saw upon the Wii’s release with all of the remote related accidents, newspaper stories, etc.) I kind of expected them to go down the old joystick waggling sports games path, where you’d have to bang buttons to fill up a meter or something but then I stopped and thought that would be awful. The arcade game was very short and was fun purely because of the novelty factor. Five levels of banging joypad buttons to fill a meter to punch something would have been an awful Idea for a £40 cartridge based home game.

The SNES version is actually a side-scrolling beat ’em up. Sonic Blastman’s mission is still to save the Earth, but this time it is from all manner of street gangs, terrorists, aliens and robots. The fight starts on a construction site, but you’re soon moving from place to place and it’s nicely varied for a game of its type.



One minus point is the game is only a one-player game much like the original Final Fight was on the SNES. There is only one character as well Sonic Blastman himself which feels a little limiting. As in all scrolling beat ’em ups the game consists of defeating the enemies on the screen before continuing walking to the right to face more until you complete the stage. Sonic Blastman can do all of the usual moves for a game of this type. He can punch, jump, and grab a hold of enemies. When he approaches his enemies, he is able to grab them. From here he can shake them and throw them, or he can unleash a series of rapid punches, depending upon the direction you hold on your joypad.

The bonus levels are an adaptation of the arcade version of the game which is a neat little touch for fans. Obviously they have been converted to be played with your fingers instead of your fists. They’re not bad, though I am still glad they didn’t use them for the basis of a whole game.
The best thing about the game’s graphics are the large sprites. They are big and colourful and will remind you of arcade and Neo Geo games to an extent. The backgrounds are more or less what you expect to see in a background on a city neighborhood, factory and sewer, so they’re functional but not thrilling. But I would argue that as you get further through the game they become more interesting and seem to have more little details hidden here and there.

The music sounds like some kind of fusion of jazz and elevator music but I kind of like it and I think it suits the game well. The sound effects are pretty decent and give it a good comic book feel. You hear Blastman say little soundbites like  “Take that!”. Overall, I think it works.

I would say this is one of the better scrolling beat ’em ups on the system. Sure a two-player mode would be nice and its absence, along with a few other little things, stop me from calling this game perfect. But for me its a good eight out of 10. I think thanks to the big sprites and the simple but fun gameplay this game has aged a lot better than some of the stuff I have been playing. Having a go now I enjoyed it as much as back then.

The game came out in all regions but I have never seen a PAL copy in the flesh in my life, neither now nor back when released. My copy is a Japanese cartridge which I have had since I was young, I am not sure where I got it, I just remember being very excited to get it. Looking around you might be able to grab a Japanese copy for between £10 to £25 if you’re lucky, but every time I have seen an US copy its been ridiculous money like £60 or more, and I am still to see a PAL copy for sale.

150 SNES games reviewed #11: Championship Pool

Championship Pool came out in 1993 and, as you can obviously tell from the title, it is a pool simulation. It was released for the NES, SNES, Game Boy and the Mega Drive. It was developed by Bitmasters and released by Mindscape.

 

The game is straightforward, it is a virtual version of pool, in which you can play either a one-off game, tournaments, multiplayer or even just practice. I like the presentation on this game, it offers you what looks like a wealth of choice and options but it also has a layer of style. Your opponents are represented by little pictures, you get to see the coin toss for who goes first, etc but once you actually start playing looks wise there is nothing to separate this from any budget pool game you could pick up on the live markets of various device stores.

In the past I don’t remember there being a whole lot of games based on either pool or snooker, at least not on consoles. The truth is I hadn’t even played this one when I was a kid. I brought this game for £3.50 with free postage from eBay purely for this series. I did own a pool game when I was a Mega Drive/SNES owner but it was Side Pocket on the Mega Drive and I never looked for another one as that always filled my pocketing needs. When I try to compare this in my mind to Side Pocket then that wins, but I cant really be sure if it’s a fair competition having not played Side Pocket in 10 years, and maybe I am remembering it through the eyes of a child.



The main thing that annoys me about Championship Pool is it seems to be very unforgiving even on your first opponents – you break, pocket a ball. take a shot pocket another ball. and then you miss. You would think that you would watch your opponent take their shots and then when they screw up you would be put back in control, but that’s not quite how it works. Someone decided that watching the computer play would be boring or something, so instead they’ve made it so you when you screw up, it says it’s the computers go, you get a screen saying that the computer has had its go and now it’s your turn again. You have a look and the computer has pocketed four balls – four balls which you have no idea how many shots it took it to pocket, four balls you don’t feel you could have got given six shots due to where they laid on the table the last time you saw them. So the computer’s fortune seems to almost border on an unholy pact with the Devil and you have no way of seeing how they achieved this Herculean pool feat and you just have to shrug and go OK. Problem is you then pot another ball and then miss then you get a message saying the computer took its shots and won the game, you don’t even get to see the winning shot.  This just makes me feel very disconnected from it all. I know that in a lot of games everything is decided by random dice throws or some form of statistical probability matrix but when you can see it happening you kind of forget this and get drawn in to the magic of it all.

I would rate this game four out of 10. It might have got better out of me back in the day but nowadays there are so many pool or snooker-based games you could try. Looking online it seems like the going rate for the cart only PAL is about £8. It can go for more and sometimes you see it for less, I even managed to get my cart for £3.50 with free postage. So if you have a SNES and don’t have many games it wont break the bank. I am not saying my four out of 10 is a concrete score, read the good and the bad sides and see what you think about them, it might not annoy you like it does me.

150 SNES games reviewed #8: Power Moves (aka Power Athlete)

 

Rule number one if you are going to try to make money by copying another game is to make sure you get a copy of the game you’re trying to copy and play the living daylights out of it. Sit and analyse it. Try to see why it is so popular, and what your game needs to contain in order to attract the same amount of fans.

Why am I talking about this? Well basically because the game I have been playing is Power Moves, one of many of the games which came in the wake of Street Fighter II. When playing this game though I am reminded far more of the original (less famous) Street Fighter. Power Moves – known in Japan as Power Athlete – (at least on the SNES, the Mega Drive version was renamed Deadly Moves) came out in 1992 and was developed by System Vision and published by Kaneko. It came out towards the end of 1992, many months after Street Fighter II, which I add because I want everyone to know this key fact.

The one player mode on this game is basically the same as Street Fighter. You get no choice of character you are simply made to play as one guy, in this case an almost Americanised looking Ryu clone with the name Joe. Truly there can be no mightier martial arts name than Joe, maybe his last name is Bloggs? But I digress. You are Joe, you do an energy move from your hands out in a straight line (we all know it as a fireball, just like the original Street Fighter), though the motion to do this is over-complex and therefore a pain. There are only three buttons – one punch, one kick and one jump – if you are very close then the kick button also doubles as a throw. I did somehow manage to get Joe to do another move, it was sort of a two-handed dragon punch which went much more diagonal than the ones we are used to.

Even on the middle difficulty the game comes is hard, and this is where the game has a little flair of originality. You don’t start with a full life bar, you start with a bit and by beating opponents this bar grows in size as do other bars you can see which represent your strength, speed and defence. You can choose who you want to fight next out of all of the enemy characters but some outclass you by having much longer bars. If you wanted to you could fight and beat an opponent multiple times in order to fill your bars and make your future fights against other enemies easier. You have a set amount of continues, which I think increase as you win fights or at least it seemed that way to me.



At first I found the game so hard that I was almost going to give in, but then it just seemed to click. I got into the rhythm of the game and managed to beat opponent after opponent with very little trouble and this was without repeating fights in order to level up my bars. I only repeated one fight and that was just to see if it would let me. It only took me about 20 minutes though and once you’ve finished the game nothing changes you can still only be Joe in single player and apart from going into the options and upping the difficulty there is no reason to ever play the single player mode ever again, which is a big disadvantage when you compare this game to other games from this period in time.
In the two player mode you can be Joe and any of enemies except for the final boss, which is a bit of a shame as Mega Drive owners got the chance to play as him in their version of the game.



The characters in this game are (I haven’t listed Joe as I have already talked about him):

• Warren: A  wrestler from Hawaii who looks just a touch like a grey-haired Hulk Hogan wannabe.
• Reayon: The token female, clearly she is ‘inspired’ by Chun-Li.
• Vagnad: A huge wrestler with an odd skin colour, he looks like he should be the boss of the game to me. He reminds me of a less weird version of the boss from Street Fighter IV. (Apparently in some of the manuals and information released on the game he was described as a survivor of the Holocaust.)
• Buoh: A kabuki-style fighter. He teleports all over the screen and attacks with his hair. He earns bonus points in my book for not seeming like a complete Street Fighter rip-off.
• Gaoluon: An acrobatic Chinese martial artist, who uses a pair of curved blades both to slash you and to throw at you.
• Baraki: A tribal warrior who shoots flames like Dhalsim while making noises and spinning across the screen Blanka-style.
• Nick: A street dancing matador. His fighting style uses a combination of break dancing alongside quick slashes with a knife, clearly he is meant to represent this game’s Vega.
• Ranker: He is (in the SNES version at least) the non-playable final boss character. He comes across as being a big, army-style guy. Imagine an Arnold Schwarzenegger character who can throw energy across the floor and do a punch equivalent of Chun-Li’s rapid kick move.T

To be honest I cant see anyone bothering much with the two player on this. Not when you could play all manner of other fighting games, it’s not like we were lacking them back in the day, nor are we now really.

I would give this game four out of 10, its not an awful game but there are so many other better beat ’em ups out there. If you want to try this game I think you will need to import it. I haven’t seen an PAL copy but I am sure the Mega Drive one came out over here. I have seen lots of US imports for about £10 for the cart, and a few Japanese ones for £5. I was lucky and got my copy recently for £3.50 with free postage. Personally, I would invest you money elsewhere.

SNES Game Review 145: Pop'n Twinbee

My 100th review for this project was Pop'n Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventure and I mentioned in that review that I should probably review Pop'n Twinbee before Rainbow Bell but that I couldn't and wouldn't be doing that as I didn't own it. (I only review things I have the actual cartridge for) Well as I am drawing to the end of my project I have started being a little more picky about what I review, I have looked at a few things I have really wanted to review but didn't own and looked at getting them. So I grabbed this game purely to do this review.

So Pop'n Twinbee is a top-view shoot-'em-up game originally released in march 1993 by Konami for the Super Famicom in Japan. It was never released in the American market but it did make its way to the Pal regions during November of 1993. If I was to try and explain this game any more I would call it a vertical moving cute em up shoot em up. In fact as far as I am concerned the first game in the Twinbee series Twinbee (an arcade game) alongside sega's original Fantasy Zone are the games I would say kick started the whole cute em up genre. This game Pop'n Twinbee is in fact the 6th game in the Twinbee series but in all honesty when it came out here I had no idea that it was a part of a Series maybe cause it was the first one to hit our shores and back then we didn't have the internet and the freedom of information we have now. I have fond memories of playing this when younger at a friends house but as far as I can remember I never actually owned it, in fact I don't remember ever seeing it in the wild or having the chance to grab it. I guess that's the good thing about collecting as an adult its a lot easier to earn the money to buy the games and to go through all of the trouble of finding them. People might moan when paying £20 for an old game now but remember when we were kids and these games were the in thing they were frequently more than this, there was no internet to help and so tracking a copy down could involve taking the bus all over the place or begging your mum or dad to drive you all about.

OK so the game plays pretty much like any other shoot em up you will have played you travel up the screen shooting enemies and collecting bells which you can either just grab  straight away and gain points or you can shoot them. If you shoot the bells then they will change color with each color representing some kind of power up. If you learn what color means what power up then you can start trying to shoot things until they become the color you need to gain your desired upgrade. You can get a speed boost, a shield, a split shot, a satellite.

This bell-based system of power ups really gives the game a unique feel. At times the screen can be  full of enemies and bullets yet you not only have to think about shooting and avoiding them but you also need to think about the bells. Should you grab the bells now or would going towards them see you shot and damaged, or can you afford to shoot them enough to turn them in to the desired color. It helps that in this game its not 1 shot and you explode, nope you actually have a life bar so maybe you can afford to take a little damage if it leads to you getting the desired power up.

You don't just have to worry about the enemies in the  air at the same height as you though, in fact you have your regular shot but you also have a  separate lock-on weapon which can hit enemies who are below you, then you have a  bomb button which causes your ship to spew a multitude of smaller bees which cover almost the whole screen attacking. If you hold down your lock on button then you can use this to deliver a short-range punch attack, which doesn't seem all that useful to me but its still kind of cool.

The game has seven stages each with a boss at the end and you can either play alone or in two player mode. I find two player to be pretty cool as when playing with 2 players certain options are available to allow you to help each other, you can give the other player a bit of your life energy to replenish there's  or even use your team mates ship as a projectile against the enemys. In the options menu you can switch between normal and couple mode. Now couple mode is something which is very interesting for a multiplayer game like this. If you select couple mode, the games enemies will primarily attack Player 1 giving Player 2 a much easier time of things. This mode is intended to allow less experienced players to still enjoy the game. This is something which I really like as it would allow you to play the game with a partner or child who is less experienced, it is something I would frankly like to see in more co-operative video games. I think it is also important to note that this game has 7 different difficulty levels which is quiet a lot by most games standards, the levels also do seem to have quiet a bit of difference. I think this is great as not only does it mean that there should be a level which suits you but it also gives the game some replayability as if you finish it on one level you can always try to finish it on a higher level (well unless you finish it on level 7 that is).

Not only is Pop'n Twinbee incredibly cute hence my referring to it as a cute em up but it also obviously has a very strong anime influence. The game has lovely color-filled backgrounds, realism maybe cast aside in favor of cuteness but detail certainly is not. The first stage sees you fly over  forests, crop fields and  towns. This is pretty good for a first level some games would have saved each of these types of area for a level all of there own. This game is always providing you something new to look at and its not just the stages. The enemies are also very varied ranging from normal looking ships to angry vegetables to flying attack pandas. Throw on top of this the fact that you have cute short little intermissions between levels and the game is just so delightfully cute and well Japanese.

The audio is also in my opinion so darn happy and enthusiastic it really sets the mood for this games whole personality perfectly. Add to this the fact that there are great sound effects for the the shots and explosions plus some really cute little bits of  voice-acting including little pained cries when your hit and shouts of  glee when you grab an item.This game is just dripping in charm and personality to the point that I simply challenge you to not smile at it, in fact if it doesn't make you smile at some point then I think you might just be dead inside.

So what would I score this game? Well I would give it 8 out of 10 and that's coming from someone who is not really that big into the whole space ship shoot em up genre. So how much are you looking to pay for it if your interested? Well the game seems to most often go for £18 to £25 for a loose pal cart but it is worth looking about as I got mine for £11 for a loose pal cart. even if your not the sort who would usually go for a shump this might well be worth a look as well its just so darn cute and happy. Also it gets a big shout out both for its large range of difficulties but also for its unique couples setting.

My Video on my 150 SNES review Project and what the future holds.

OK so I have recently posted a video on YouTube basically explaining my 150 SNES review project where I am with it and what I am thinking about doing next. Its kind of funny as I started out doing YouTube videos a long time ago and I just sort of stopped. I will say that even the most rubbish of videos takes more work than you would think. This is far from a prime video but it still took a heck of a lot longer than its reasonably short run time. If your reading this blog then you probably know about my SNES review series but you never know you might still learn something new from watching this.

SNES Game Review 143: Hiryu no Ken S: Golden Fighter AKA Ultimate Fighter

OK so the game I am going to be talking about today is called Hiryu no Ken S: Golden Fighter and it is the first game in a series of games often refereed to as either the Hiryu no Ken or Flying Dragon series to be released on the Super Nintendo. I guess your probably imagining that given the fact this game is on the Super Nintendo that the S stands for Super? Well actually I will put you out of your misery with a little bit of trivia here and tell you that the S in the title actually stands for Special.

The Flying Dragon series started in 1985 with an arcade fighting game called Shanghai Kid, when I say fighting game this might put images of Street Fighter 2 in to your head but this game actually predated the original Street Fighter by around 2 years. Flying Dragon Secret of the Scroll is the sequel to this arcade game and it was on the NES. The NES game was less of a one on one fighter and more of a sort of walk along fighting platformer. After the first NES game there were about 4 more NES games and then a GameBoy game (which was a one on one fighter again) and then this which as I said earlier is the first gamer from this series on the SNES. So basically this is the first SNES game in a massive series, a series which most likely hardly anyone in the UK has even heard of after all this game never came out here and the only one of the series up to this point which made it over here was the GameBoy game which was called Fighting Simulator: 2-in-1: Flying Warriors which is a heck of a mouthful, and in all honesty I had never even heard of it until doing research for this review (Until now my only experience of this series was playing the N64 game). This game I am reviewing didn't make it out over here it did make it out in America two years latter with the name Ultimate Fighter. OK so that's enough of a history lesson lets get onto talking about the game itself.

So I guess the first question to answer is well what kind of game is it? Given the fact that the series seems to have swapped its play style around from game to game it leaves you wondering what type of game this will be, well I think its probably best described as a Walk along beat em up. Unlike games like Final Fight or Streets of Rage you can only move forwards and backwards you cant move up and down, so its a walk along beat em up which is on a fixed level much like one on one fighters like the aforementioned street fighter. This in itself is a little bit strange as you cant really avoid enemies and they cant try to flank you like they would in other games, they will be coming at you either from the left or the right and that's it.OK this is not the only game to work like that in fact if your a MegaDrive/Genesis gamer and have played either Altered Beast or Last Battle then yeah its sort of like those. You would think that this would have its advantages that maybe if the SNES's processor only has to think about one plain then its got less grunt work to do but when you play this game you will soon find that it is well the best word I can come up for it is janky. the game moves quiet slow, suffers from a sort of stuttering slowdown at times and just feels like its always in a low gear. There is no choice of fighter your simply the bloke it gives you, there is a punch button, a kick button and this sort of flip forward button and you jump by pressing up, some of the kicks and punches you can do also involve pressing up or down so although it feels like there is a decent range of moves but that there not quiet as easy to use as they could be.

OK so what do I actually like about this game? Well it does have nice big sprites which I think gives the game a good look, there is also quiet a few different enemy sprites which should help keep the game from getting repetitive but unfortunately it doesn't. The games levels just seem to be really long and slow. The game also has pretty decent music and effects. To me this game just feels like a giant vat of missed opportunity. When you are playing it you just get this overwhelming sense that there is a nugget of goodness in there somewhere, that if they had just tweaked a few things here and there increased the speed and made a few alterations that they could have had something worthwhile here but alas I am not here to review what could have been I am here to review what was and is.

I would give this game 3 out of 10, I think if you picked this up and played it then for the first 10 minutes you would think hey this game is not bad at all and think I was being harsh but if you gave it another 10 minutes you would start to see why I feel the way that I do. If you really wanted to own this then Japanese versions pop up on eBay from time to time cart only between £5 to £10 but I have never seen the altered American version being sold here, if your willing to import it from America then it seems to go for around £25 to £30 after postage but it is in no way worth anything near this. I strongly recommend that you ignore this game.

SNES Game Review 141: Lode Runner Twin: Justy to Liberty no Daibouken

Of all of the reviews I have done this must be one of the hardest to write, part of this is because the particular game I am going to be talking about has not been talked about a great deal in the past even though it comes from a famous series. I don't read many video game reviews nowadays but back when I was a kid when the SNES and MegaDrive/Genesis were the in thing I used to read tonnes of reviews, so even if this was a long time ago, I will have read reviews of all of the typical SNES games like Mario World and Zelda etcetera. I didn't know that this game existed till very recently though, I have never heard another persons opinion on it at all. I guess though that this is why I got into the whole SNES review thing to try and introduce people to games they might not have played and to give my opinion on a whole range of different video games.

The game I am talking about today is Lode Runner Twin: Justy to Liberty no Daibouken. This game only ever came out in Japan on the Super Famicom (the Japanese version of the SNES) and despite the fact I played on a lot of imports as a kid this totally went under my radar. I might not have played this game as a kid but I did play a whole tonne of the original LoadRunner on the ZX Spectrum and fundamentally despite the huge step up in terms of hardware this later game in the series is not all that different at least gameplay wise. The game is made by a developer called T&E Soft Incorporated a Japanese-based video game developer which was founded in 1982. Although they made games in a variety of genres, they are mostly known outside of Japan for their video golf games. From what I can see they no longer exist but they did make it into the PS2 era the last game I am aware of them making was Disney Golf, known in Japan as Disney Golf Classic which came out in 2002 in Japan and a whole 3 years later in 2005 in Europe.


I guess you would call Lode Runner Twin a platformer but unlike most platformers you cant jump, so if you cant jump what do you do in order to kill enemies? Well actually you don't kill them its more a case of avoiding them. You cant jump but you can however dig. You only really use three of the pads buttons in this game one button lets you dig to your left, the other to your right and the third button lets you well basically its a quit button, if you get stuck you press this and you die, you loose a life, but its basically there in case you get stuck and cant finish a level. You can dig a hole if you need to drop down quickly but you can also dig a hole so that an enemy can fall in it and become temporarily trapped in it, and while they are trapped well you can walk over there head so this is how you get past the enemies in the game. If a bad guy touches you in anyway apart from his head touching your shoe as you run over him and your dead. The gameplay is pretty darn basic all you do is just avoid the enemies, collect all the gold in each stage and then use the ladder provided to move on to the next stage.

There have been a whole bunch of different versions of LoadRunner on a whole load of different machines but I need to say that this version is perhaps the cutest version your going to see, gone are the stick man visuals of the early games and in are cartoony anime style characters which have a SNES era rpg sort of look to them. You also have bright backgrounds fluid animation and playful music which just goes absolutely perfectly with the games sense of style. Sound effects are spare but fitting, you have a falling noise, a noise when you pick up gold and a spinning noise when you die. OK so one question people are going to want answering is does the game being in Japanese throw up any language barrier which could stop you enjoying it? In all honesty not really, it looks like your missing out on a bit of a story but its very easy to start the game and its so arcade like and simple that even with no help or instruction I managed to work out everything I could do and how to do it within minutes. The game is a very easy game to just pick up and play, unfortunately for me despite its simplicity and its good presentation it just doesn't have a hook, it feels like it is trying hard to grab me but it just doesn't manage it. If I did not need to play it reasonably thoroughly to give it a fair review I feel I would have turned off the SNES and popped something different into the cartridge slot a lot sooner than I did. The funny thing is I cant quiet put my finger on why the game has failed to grab me, it controls well, it looks good, it sounds good its just fundamentally boring. This also makes it incredibly hard to score as it doesn't really do anything wrong really it just is not enjoyable as I would like it to be.

Pushed to give this game a score well I guess that I would give this game 4 out of 10. I know that kind of means that I am saying that the game is less than average, which possibly doesn't reflect a lot of what I have said in this review but the simple truth is that games need to draw you in and make you stick around, games need to be fun or at the least engaging and this one simply in my opinion is not. Looking on ebay now the cheapest copy of this game is £20 when you add the postage on to the price, I actually paid £5. If you can get it for £5 and have a converter or a modded machine then it might be worth a shot to see if you enjoy it more than I did but £20 is definitely far too much and I would advise you to try something else.