150 Mega Drive games reviewed #5: Atomic Runner (aka Atomic Runner Chelnov)

There was an arcade game called Chelnov – or to give it its full title Atomic Runner Chelnov – Tatakau Ningen Hatsudensho, which would translate as Atomic Runner Chelnov Fighting Human Power Plant. It’s a bit of a mouthful right? It was developed and published by Data East in 1988.

 

My Atomic Runner Megadrive Review 

 

One of the things I love is when a game has a big history behind it, mostly because sometimes the stories which exist in the background of a games history can be very interesting and almost as worthy of note as the games themselves. This is one area in which Atomic Runner Chelnov certainly delivers.

There was a heap of controversy surrounding this game’s original arcade release. With the Russian-style hammer and sickle being present on the title screen, the fact the game’s story/the main character Chelnov’s origin is that he received his power due to a nuclear explosion and his exposure to the radiation. And on top of this the fact his name is spelt very closely to how Chernobyl, the site of a real life nuclear disaster, is written in Japanese (チェルノブ and チェルノブイ. Well, when you throw all of this together it is easy to see how this game got some major attention in a bad way. After all when you basically base your game on a disaster – in this case the Chernobyl disaster – just a year and a half after it happened you’re clearly going to annoy people. Just imagine if you took the last high school shooting or terrorist bomb incident and started producing a game on it now and made the dots pretty easy for anyone with half a brain to connect. You’d basically be asking for a lot of fuss and controversy, wouldn’t you?

The arcade game was ported to the Mega Drive in 1992, but it wasn’t a straight conversion, in fact there were a lot of alterations. The Japanese version kept the same name as the arcade version, but in Europe and North America it was released with the much simpler title Atomic Runner. The game’s plot was also altered. Chelnov was no longer a coal miner caught in a nuclear blast. Instead he was a regular guy wearing a special advanced combat suit the whole nuclear angle was removed. In fact basically the whole story was changed.

I will quickly run down this version of the game’s story in all of its B-movie glory. Chelnov was a young scientist who worked with and lived with his father and sister. They lived a happy and peaceful life and then one night when Chelnov went for a jog he heard a huge explosion coming from the direction of his home. He ran back home to find his father barely conscious, with Chelnov’s father’s dying breath he explained beings called the Deathtarians had caused the explosion and that they were a species who had ruled over the Earth long before the dawn of mankind and that they had returned now to claim what once was theirs. Apparently Chelnov’s father had known about them all along and that’s what all of his and his family’s research was for. Chelnov’s father points towards a metal case saying that inside the case there is a suit – a suit which will increase a human’s power making him a super human and inside the suit there are various weapons and devices. Chelnov’s father also tells him that he must put on the suit and defeat the Deathtarians and not only does the fate of the world lay in his hands but also the fate of his sister who they have kidnapped. With this Chelnov’s father passes away and with this Chelnov puts on the suit and becomes the atomic runner. You would think the game starts here, but no, it goes on to tell you Chelnov was overwhelmed by the share number of Deathtarians and became their prisoner. He was then tortured in an attempt to brainwash him, just as they thought they had broken his will though he lashed out in anger and broke free.

Now I like a B-movie plot as much as the next guy but I do have to admit I actually think the plot is a little heavier than it needs to be. Yeah there are a million games and films where someone killed someone’s dad or kidnapped someone close to the main character but do we really need to give the player/main character three reasons to hate the game’s villains? Surley either the killed father, the kidnapped sister or the imprisonment and torture on their own would have been enough reason to explain why Chelnov wanted to defeat the bad guys, we didn’t really need to throw cliché on top of cliché did we?

So, you start the actual game by breaking out of an alien facility. The game plays like a run and gun game, except it’s auto-scrolling. This kind of makes it feel unique compared to your usual run and gunner and in honesty I find the fact it’s always pushing you forward as opposed to letting you kind of just stand about adds to the game’s arcade feel. There are a variety of weapons and power-ups to collect, a whole bunch of enemies to kill, some pretty awesome bosses, and so much more.

The game’s controls can best be described as interesting. So what can you do in your super powered suit? Well you can fire right, you can fire left and you can jump. You need to fire backwards and forwards as enemies will come at you from both directions. As previously mentioned your always travelling forwards, you can move further forwards on the screen but as its always scrolling forwards you can’t go backwards. An interesting thing is as well as shooting enemies you can also jump on them in order to harm them, when you do this you will hurt them and simultaneously bounce off of them as well, in this way you can sort of bounce from enemy to enemy. Also, when you are jumping, if you land on top of an enemy you’ll bounce off and do damage, instead of dying. This is a key mechanic. But be sure you’re jumping! If an enemy hits you from below while you’re on the ground, you’ll die. Your boots only provide invulnerability when you’re not touching the ground, evidently, for whatever reason. This definitely can be frustrating, when you try to jump on an enemy under the floor but just miss and they come up under you and kill you. Jumping on enemies can be a little hairy, but you’ve got to do it. This is the only controls-related complaint I have with the game. Jumping on enemies mostly works fine, but could have been done a little better. Its important to note you die in one hit, be this a hit from a bullet or physical contact with an enemy (well, apart from the contact of your jumping boot with an enemies head). There’s no shield. When you die, you get sent back to the last checkpoint. Fortunately this game has a fair few checkpoints, so you don’t usually lose too much progress. The game is pretty darn hard with its one hit death, but this is helped by the large amount of checkpoints and also the fact if you keep dying without making progress then the game will put more powerful power ups in front of you to try and help you. It still is a hard game and this doesn’t totally negate that but it does make things a little bit more bearable at times. The game is one of those old games which is actually rather short, its difficulty kind of makes it seem longer than it is. In all honesty if the game was easier then you would simply fly through it.

The graphics for this game are a little hit and miss. As far as its arcade conversion status goes, I would argue that the graphics here are actually an improvement over its arcade cousin, yet they’re still not that great compared to some other things you will find on the Mega Drive. Everything does run smoothly though and I actually like a lot of the changes that were made to the Mega Drive version. One thing I have to say is the backgrounds are a heck of a lot more interesting and detailed on the Mega Drive and you do get lots of enemies on screen at once. I need to give this game a huge shout-out when it comes to its soundtrack. It’s just dripping with quality tunes which do help make the game more enjoyable than it would otherwise be. I found this game was a little better when running at 60hz. Maybe it’s just me but it just seemed to work a little better when running faster and the music sounded better at that rate as well.

OK so if I am to score this game what am I going to give it? Well I would give it seven out of 10. It’s a good enjoyable challenging but short game. I don’t think it’s a world changer or a real classic and to be honest I think with its history it almost makes a better story than it does a game. I would warn you though if you are not the kind of person who can cope with frequently dying and just getting that little bit further each time then this is probably not the game for you. If you want to buy it then boxed copies tend to sit around the £35 mark with loose cartridges being about £15 when I have seen them.

150 Mega Drive games reviewed #3: Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude!

My first memory of Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! was seeing it at the house of one of my friends when we were young. He was an amazing guy who would pretty much perfect anything he put his mind to.

 My Greendog YouTube Review Video

The first thing I really saw him perfect was Greendog, then later it was Ridge Racer and finally it was the electric guitar. He made the game look like a work of art. He hadn’t owned it long but he seemed to totally understand everything about how it worked and he made it look darn easy to play.


I didn’t actually own it till years and years later. I think I got a boxed copy complete for £5 from an indy game shop and in all honesty the second I saw the game it made me think of my friend. Simply put, for me that game will forever be linked to him because not only is it the first time I saw it being played, I have also never seen it being played so well anywhere else.

OK so lets start with the story. Well, the main character is called Greendog which you could probably guess from the game’s name, and he has an issue. This issue is the fact that he was surfing and then he wiped out finding himself on a beach with no surfboard in site and a strange necklace around his neck. He soon finds out that the necklace can not be removed when a ‘beach babe’ appears before his eyes and informs him that the necklace is cursed and that he will be stuck wearing it until he finds the lost parts of an ancient Aztec treasure. Without the treasure he will be stuck with the necklace unable to remove it, unable to surf and – worse than that – every single living thing in the world will attack him. OK, so in a world where so many games involve random creatures trying to kill you for no apparent reason its actually pretty interesting to have a reason given here for why your character is homicidally pursued by birds, crabs, starfish and all manner of other creatures.

OK so I want to start by talking about the game play. Greendog is a platform game. You go from left to right jumping, swinging and traversing the levels, you have a Frisbee that you can throw at enemies. The real issue with this though is not in what Greendog can do, it’s in the way Greendog controls which can best be described as sluggish. Your button presses never quiet seem to work quite how you want, or quite as fast as you want. At its worst this game can be extremely frustrating. The Greendog sprite feels like a pretty large one really and the hit detection box around him feels like it is even bigger. Add to this his bad slow-motion feeling jumps which often end in either you taking damage that you feel is unjust and can cause people to seethe with rage or even worse instant death on occasion. If you think Greendog is hard to control on land then just you wait until you get him to go underwater.

I do have to give the game some praise though for trying to break things up a bit. There are skating levels, in which Greendog either jumps on a red skateboard or puts on pink rollerblades. And then you have levels with Greendog’s pedal copter, which he uses to travel from one island to the next. In these pedal copter levels you bash the C button repeatedly to remain airborne while using the B button to use the copter’s spring-loaded boxing glove weapon to attack enemies. The game is playable and it is completable despite feeling tough, because eventually you seem to get on board with its janky controls and learn to work around them. If you just watch someone play it and don’t feel what it’s like then you’d be forgiven for thinking that its a great game as there was certainly a lot of effort put into it.

Yes, you could say that Greendog is yet another platformer on the Mega Drive – a console that certainly is not short of 2D platformers, but to its credit I think it does enough to have its own flavour and therefore stand out as its own thing. The game has its Caribbean sort of style you find yourself traversing through jungles, across beaches, exploring an aquarium, visiting a native village and other places. It’s nicely varied while also managing to keep everything connected to a central theme and I think it does this very well. Along the way you will collect items, these are usually foods such as French fries, burgers and doughnuts, but you also get power-ups which upgrade your Frisbee or give you more protection from damage.

Lastly I want to talk about Greendog’s music. In all honesty I think it is simply excellent. Much like the graphics it sticks to this Caribbean style but it also offers a wide variety of tunes. Most importantly I think what is on offer really fits the games general theme, it works well with the graphics and gives the whole package a certain degree of charm. It’s just a shame that these good things about the game are not really backed up by the gameplay.

OK so I tried this game at 50hz UK and 60Hz US and I have to say that the game is more fun at 60hz as moving that little bit faster helps the way the game feels, and the music also sounds a lot better. I did think it was a little bit easier when it was slower though I guess that’s just because it allows for you to be a bit slower in your reaction to enemies, etc.

It is kind of hard to rate this game, I mean on the one hand it is really broken in some departments, but then its full of character and it does make a big effort to break up the action. There is a lot about it I really like and also a lot I dislike. I feel that what it really deserves is a six out of 10. It’s slightly above average and there was certainly all of the stuff here that could have taken it up to classic status but there was also far to much dragging the game back down.

If you really want to play it then complete copies seem to be around the £15 mark, with loose carts being about half this much. While not exactly bad prices there are much better games you could spend your money on.

150 Megadrive/Genesis Review:2 Beast Wrestler AKA Beast Warriors

Beast Wrestler YouTube Review

SO the game I am going to be talking about now is a game called Beast Wrestler AKA as Beast Warriors(in Japan). Did you ever have a game which as a kid you played so much it was a bit of an obsession, maybe it delivered just the right cocktail of things you were into at that precise moment in time that it just felt almost as if it had been made just for you. Well as a youngster this is how I felt about Beast Wrestler. I was massively into wrestling of the WWE favourite but I was also big into monster movies, so combine grappling with a creature feature and how can it be anything other than awesome? Load up the game and let it do its introduction and you will be greeted by the site of all manner of cool looking beasts and what I can best describe as some 16bit foreboding phantom of the opera style music which really sets the scene, hats of to the developers here they really did know how to get people pumped.

Apparently the game was made by a company called Riot, information on them appears to be rather limited but it turns out that Riot was a subsidiary of Telenet Japan. It came into existence in 1991 when Telenet Japan was expanding but when Telenet started to lose sales in 1993 it was closed with some of its staff being transferred, it was was best known for employing graphic artist and later director Eiji Kikuchi, and music composer Michiko Naruke. The game waqs published by Renovation Products which was basically Telenet Japan's US publisher of Sega Mega Drive games. Telnet would latter go on to be purchased by Sega themselves which is rather fitting seeing as they had heavily supported the Megadrive and only ever released one SNES game.

So with monsters and such you might think that this game is set in the past, well no according to the Japanese Manual this game is set in 2020. So two years from now, but heck when this game out in 1991 the year 2020 probably felt pretty darn space age, and basically well its all about genetic engineering. Genetic engineering has allowed scientists to develop specific life forms called ' dragon warriors' and basically trainers have used these creatures to fight in a wrestling championship. So Ladies and Gentlemen I guess you have two years to save up your cash and decide what kind of monster you would like to own. This is one of those games where if you grab the American version there is some absolutely fantastic Engrish, there are plenty of words pushed together missing adequate spacing and some excellent typos which managed to slip through the translation process, in fact before your first fight you will be called a ''bovice'' when offered your first monster. If your a lover of funny Engrish then this game is one to keep an eye out thats for sure.

The visuals in Beast Wrestler are very mixed in my opinion. I find the monster designs to be very interesting, they are reasonably detailed and there is a fairly good variety of them and I think that they show a great deal of creativity. It is kind of from here that things get worse though the arena is plain it lacks any real care or attention plus you probably noticed I said arena not arenas that's right there is only one so you better get used to looking at the same backdrop as you play. I am also sad to report that the graphics look even worse in motion than they do in static screen shots this is because the animation on the whole is pretty darn stiff and could seriously do with the frames of animation being doubled, it looks odd and well janky. It feels like someone took a lot of time to make the beasts and that they were then just poorly put into the game

The music in Beast Wrestler is far more consistent than the graphics though and more importantly it is in my humble opinion pretty darn great.. It has this fitting orchestral meets 16bit sort of feel, it really feels like the most of the Megadrives sound capabilities was used here. It really does help the game to try and create a dramatic atmosphere. The sound effects though they well I kind of think there a mixed bag the hitting noises are not to bad and the noise when the beasts hit the ground offers a nice satisfying feel but the noise used when one monster bear hugs or chokes another is pretty grating and all of the monsters roar the same when they are beaten. 

When it comes to gameplay, Beast Wrestler is once again a mixed bag. You move your monster/wrestler around with the D-pad with the A button being used to Punch the B button being used for Tail based strikes and the C button being your Special/Signature move button. The idea is to beat your opponents monster till it cries out on the ground 3 times, once you have managed this then you have won the fight. In order to do this you need to cause damage to your opponents monsters and you do this by punching, tail whipping, body slamming, and clotheslining the living heck out of them in total honesty though it is a bit of a button masher, it never seems to feel like quiet what you want is happening.

The game has two modes: match and tournament. Match mode is basically your versus or exhibition mode, in this either two players can go head to head with ten selectable beasts, or one player can fight a computer controlled beast. This is basically good either for just practising or having a quick go with a buddy. Now tournament mode is the real game, this is the story mode, here you use a pre-chosen creature and fight battle after battle. The game has three acts the Pro Test, Domestic Rank and World Rank. You don't have to finish the whole game in one sitting as passwords are provided but they are pretty long so that's worth bearing in mind.

After every other match you win, you get the chance to spend some of your winnings, you can use these gto get various items and serums that can help you raise your monsters speed, strength or stamina. At certain points you will also be forced to merge your beast with a choice of monsters you have already defeated, being told that your monsters badly injured and without merging it its life will be at risk. I think this is part of what really gripped me back as a kid and its something I dont remember experiencing in a game before and wouldn't again until I played Monster Rancher on the PS1 ( A game I would strongly recommend even if it is incredibly pricey).

So despite loving this game as a kid its time to let rip now. The game has a lot of issues the first being that the grappling and damage systems seem unreliable. A lot of the time who wins a grapple seems to be really random, you try to pound the buttons or press them at certain times and nothing quiet seems to help your situation. Apparently the American instruction booklet states that timing is key but in all honesty if there is some kind of proper way to time things I have never really worked it out.

Weirdly your character can face in six different directions, but can only attack in two of those directions. There is no block and no real dodge so there’s not really anything you can do defensively. Add to this that the hit detection seems to be a real mess. When you’re fighting the big upright monsters punches and tail whips hit well enough but don't work very well when your fighting against short enemies. Sometimes it looks like your blows really shouldn't be connecting and yet somehow they are. Soon you will find that your kind of managing to get by but its not because you have learned how to play the game its more like you have learned a little bit of the games broken logic.

OK so its a little bit hard giving this game a rating as it was a pretty big part of my childhood, it was a game I invested a lot of time on and yet I want to be totally honest, this game is a real mess, and for that reason I need to give it 3 out of 10. I don't think the game is without merit, there is in fact a lot of things I like about the game but it really feels like it needed a lot more work for it to be a good game. If you want to try the game well it never came out in Europe, and American copies very rarely seem to go up for sale so really you will probably be stuck with a Japanese version and the prices are all over the place I have seen fully boxed versions go for around £13 but some people seem to want a lot more than this for it. Really I wouldn't worry that much there are much better things to spend your cash on.

150 Megadrive/Genesis Games Reviewed 1: Mercs AKA Wolf of the Battlefield 2

 

The game I am going to be talking about for my very first Megadrive/Genesis game in this series is Mercs, or to give it its original name Senjō no Ōkami II which basically translates as Wolf of the Battlefield II. I played this game back when I was a kid and never for a second realised that it was a sequel, in fact at the time I also didn't realise that it had been an Arcade game developed and published by Capcom in 1990 before it was on the Megadrive/Genesis.In fact it had been one of the games on Capcom's Capcom Play System (CPS)arcade Hardware. 

For those interested in the inside of arcade machines the CPS was an interesting bit of kit. It was essentially a large arcade Jamma compatible board with the games then stored on removable ROM cartridges /boards. You could then if you were an arcade operator buy a new small rom cart with a different game on it and change this instead of having to buy a whole new large arcade board, its kind of a little bit like the NEO GEO MVS system SNK used, its most famous for being the hardware that ran the original street fighter 2, and I actually own a CPS board but I only have one rom board for it and that is PANG 3.(Capcom also went on to release an adapted console version of this board in Japan for home users, as well as two sequel boards for the arcades named the CPS2 and CPS3).

MERCS VIDEO REVIEW

This game first came into my life when I got a cheap Japanese copy of it from my local Indy Games store called Gamesworld. I used to buy a lot of import games from here because when they were new and not out over here they were quiet expensive but as soon as the game was out over here the Japanese versions would be dropped to around £5 and I could usually either buy this with my £5 a week pocket money or I could just not eat at school and save up my dinner money to buy games with something I frequently did, I kind of wish I still owned that Japanese copy but oh well at least I still have a copy of it. It was years and years later that I realised that it had been in the arcades and that it was in fact the sequel to the 1985 Commando a game which I actually had played in the Arcades as well as a port of it on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. I am always moaning like heck that various games deserve more sequels and this one actually got one in 2008 called Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 which was a downloadable game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I didn't actually play this till I got the Capcom Digital Collection which was a compilation of digitally released capcom games which had appeared on the Xbox 360, I am not reviewing Commando 3 but I will say its a bit of a lesser sequel in my opinion but still not too bad.

So what we have here is the 2^nd part of a trilogy right? Well the answer to that would be Yes and No I guess. You see Mercs on the Megadrive wasn't actually made by Capcom at all, it was instead converted by Sega and they actually made quiet a few changes. Now most people would expect me to say that what happened was that Sega removed a whole bunch of stuff and made a weaker worse version that there console could more easily pull of right? Well there is a tiny bit of truth to this in that the arcade game was a one to three player third-person shooter game and well this game is a one player game. OK I know people are instantly going to think oh dear removing the multiplayer sucks, just look at how much it effected games like Final Fight on the SNES but really I think Sega did more than enough to cover this, sure a two player mode would have been nice but there is a lot to recommend about this game.

For a start there are two modes of play, one is called Arcade and the other is called Original. Arcade is basically a one player conversion of the actual arcade machine, it puts you in the shoes of one particular soldier, who can collect various different weapons throughout the different levels. Its good to see the arcade game on offer here even if it is restricted to one player mode, a lot of games would have given you this and then just shrugged off the fact that they'd cut out the multiplayer and gone, ''well it was the best we could do given the hardware''.

The way the arcade mode plays you basically take your guy and travel vertically up the screen shooting enemy soldiers, vehicles and turrets while trying to take as little damage as possible. At the end of each level there is a boss, for example at the end of the first level this is a fighter jet which shoots its machine guns down at the cliff you find yourself standing on while you try to dodge the bullets and take it out. The gameplay is deliciously old-Skool, its simple to pick up but with room to master, basically you move with the D-Pad and shoot with one button and then have a button which uses what is called the Mega-Crash, basically this is your screen clearing/heavy damage bomb button, which tends to be good either for when your surrounded and in danger or to deal heavy damage to bosses. The gameplay is really simple you basically shoot everything, you shoot enemies, you shoot item boxes to open them, and you shoot trees or gates or other things which hinder your progress, all while trying to get shot as infrequently as possible. During certain levels you will be able to get into certain vehicles these include tanks, boats and jeeps and as well as providing a little extra armour to you there also great fun and help to break things up a bit, if you enjoy arcade style games then your bound to get a fair bit of fun from this.

The Original mode, is sort of a rearanged mode with a few neat touches. Ok so first you start off with one soldier, you only have one life and your weapon starts of pretty darn pathetic. At first you feel seriously underpowerd to take on what the game will throw at you and this is much harder than the arcade mode. In fact at the end of the first level you basically have to defeat the arcade level one boss and take so little damage that you will have enough life to make your way into the second level. I would strongly recommend starting with the Arcade Mode and playing this as sort of game + kind of thing.

In this mode you wont find any extra lives but as you progress you will find fellow Soliders/Mercs. These Mercs will have different guns, basically they are the guns you can collect in the arcade mode but here each gun is tied to a different guy and once you have more than one you can tactically switch between them, thereby using the right guy for the right situation. As you gain more items the weapons you have will become a lot more powerful but you will need to decide which of your characters needs to pick up what is in front of you, be it food or power up icons. These extra guys essentially become your extra lives, but if you only concentrate on powering up one of them then when he dies well the others are basically screwed. You will collect medals on your journey and these become a form of currency you can use in shops in order to power your guys up. This added mode is a lot tougher to complete and I feel it adds a heck of a lot more to this title, in fact when I have gotten the arcade version of Mercs on various compilation collections I have often found myself feeling like id prefer to have the Megadrive Version which is something you seldom hear said about a conversion, its a shame that there has never been an enhanced version of Mercs for later systems offering all of the benefits of both the arcade (multiplayer) and Megadrive versions.

 For a pretty early Megadrive game this game has really good graphics, its the kind of thing that people would have wrongly called arcade perfect back in the day, they are in fact not identical to the arcades graphics but they are quiet frankly close enough for me to not care at all, everything looks correct and runs smoothly and when you throw in what I find to be a brilliant action packed soundtrack it all just fits and offers up what I would personally consider an amazing experience. I have actually found myself humming bits from this game long after I have finished playing it which for me is always a sign of a good video game soundtrack. As I try my Megadrive games on both a 50hz and 60hz console I want to briefly touch on that in my reviews, as far as Mercs goes it actually doesn't feel much different when played on either set up, although if you do play the game in a Japanese console you do get the alternative title and the story will be shown in Japanese.

OK so I suppose it is time to give Mercs a score out of 10, I happily give this game 9 out of 10. Its great fun and as well as brining the arcade game home it offers a mode with a little more challenge which helps it last longer as a home experience, I guess its just the lack of multiplayer which makes it loose out on the 10 out of 10 perfection score for me, but id still rather have this version than its arcade counterpart.

OK so if you want to buy this game how much is it likely to cost you? Well Pal carts seem to start around the £7 mark with boxed copies starting at roughly double that, both of which I think are good prices for this game. Obviously if you want to give it a bash I would advice you to look around and decide if you want a loose cart or a complete copy and then go for the best one you can find bearing condition and price in mind.