Snes game review:40 Acrobat Mission

So once again I am doing a review of a SNES game which started out life as an arcade machine before being converted, which you would think means once again I am going to be talking about things that were left out and changes that were made but no the main difference here is that the game I am talking about today is probably one you have never heard of as it was only released in Japan. I cant remember ever having seen or played the arcade machine so I am just not going to worry about that and judge it based on its self and to a least some degree its competition on the SNES.

When I tell you that the name of the game is Acrobat Mission you will probably say what kind of name is that for a game? Is it a game where you are an acrobat, some kind of platformer but no it is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up

The first thing I noticed was that as the game began the story scrolled up the screen and I could read it, yes its a Japanese game but literally all of the language in it, the options, the story is in English which makes it pretty cool for importers.

To start with the graphics looked colourful but basic, in fact you could almost believe that you were playing a NES game, add to that the fact that I pressed all of the button and only one of them actually seemed to do anything and that was shoot, the next thing I tried was holding down the button assuming that there would be some kind of charge attack and well nothing happened. I carried on playing it not really expecting much from it then as things went on it hit me this game ran at a nice speed, even though the players ship seems to be a really basic sprite a lot of the enemies seem to be larger and more detailed. Then I began to collect power up's and found that not only did they effect the way my ship fired they also allowed me to do charged up shots if I held the button, and the bombs I collected actually appeared on the ship and disappeared once I worked out the button which you have  to press to fire them (So in the end there are 2 buttons to use). When you die, which you will because it is a reasonably tough game, instead of instantly exploding or disappearing your ship actually sort of limps along with steam coming out of it, while this is happening your  still in control and can steer your burning space ship, you can in fact steer it into something so that when it explodes you can take enemies with you, I found this to be a really neat and interesting little idea.

The graphics are not the best but there is a lot of variety it puts Super Stirke Gunner I played about 10 days ago to shame in this area. It also has large bosses the first is a large battleship which is so long it is actually about four screens in length and covered in guns. The bullets It fires are larger than your ship and it can be tough because it tracks your movement and shoots at you.An other interesting little fact is that you don’t die if you physically touch enemy ships, sure if you run in to bullets your screwed but you can fly through enemies and get away with it. There is also space debris which can get in the way of your ship and your shots, this is something I like sure its another simply touch but the beauty of this game is all of its simple touches.

OK as for the bad side, by shoot-em-up standards this game has a very limited selection of weapons pick ups, there is the standard shot and then two or three special shots you can get by picking up letters, compare this to the absolute tonne of weapons in other shooters at the time like UN Squadron and its a little disappointing.

Another problem some people have with the game is how short it is, this game relies on being very hard after the first 2 levels to kind of prolong the game, there are only 5 stages and when you think that this game was at one point a full priced retail game that seems to be just a little short of what I think would be a fair number.

I would give this game a hearty 7 out of 10, its not perfect but it was a very pleasant surprise. Unfortunately its not available either as a Pal cart or American but with its heavy use of English and the fact  that it ran on both a modified machine and a very simple converter this is not a bad game for someone who wants to start importing or at least it would be if you could find a cheap copy, the only copy I can see online at the moment is like £25, I brought this from someone as a package deal 7 Japanese carts for £14 all of which apart from this were sports games.

150 SNES games reviewed #32: NBA All-Star Challenge

The game I am going to be talking about is NBA All-Star Challenge. It was developed by Beam Software and published by LJN (Acclaim in japan). It was released in Europe in 1993.

 

Back when I was younger there was only one NBA game that ever got plugged into my SNES, and there was only one NBA related game that I ever played at friends’ houses. To cut this rambling intro short, it wasn’t this one.

My YouTube NBA All-Star Challenge Review 

The first thing you will notice upon playing NBA All-Star Challenge are the gameplay options. There’s one-on-one, three point challenge and horse. This is the game’s first problem. You will have most likely bought it expecting to play full real games of basketball and here you are playing games that only involve two players one either side, and only involve half a court.

When it comes to picking your player, you’re not met with a list of names or even player pictures. No you’re met with a list of 27 teams, and when you click on one of these teams you will see the player that the team has been allotted. So if you are a fan of basketball you better hope you can remember who played for who back when this game was released and hope that they were the chosen one for that team. Of course if you’re not so keen on basketball as a sport and just like a knock around fun sports video game to mess around on this point is a bit mute. Still the main body of this game feels like something that would be just a bonus/side mode in another game which is not a good start.

On television a one-on-one shooting challenge would be a kind of exciting showdown a chance for ballers to see who is the better man away from the confines of the game, with no help from your team mates. You would think that in this situation if you get two legends facing off then the crowd would chant, scream and explode. Picture this in your mind, then take that picture and turn it into a video game. Imagine the sprites shooting the cheers as they score the painful exhaled noises of disappointment, still sounds like it could be a decent concept for a game if it was treated in this way doesn’t it?

Well now I have made you build a pretty picture I am afraid I am going to smash it. Is there chanting? Is there clapping? No, there is no sound whatsoever, except the thud of the dribbling and that scuffling trainer sort of noise. No crowd interaction, no music to reflect if you’re winning or loosing, no music at all. This same dreariness carries over in to the graphics. Sure they’re not bad but they’re not good either. The players don’t really look like who they are supposed to be. Sure they might be the right skin colour and roughly the right height, but beyond that they just look like a bunch of palette swaps all of them moving running and shooting in the same fashion.

The game is not bad for what it is, the controls were at first a little confusing. You have to press a button to jump and then press it again to shoot. And heck, if you press it but decide you dont really like your shot chances well you’re going to have to just press it again anyways because otherwise you’ll be charged with travelling. The crucical thing to get over here is that this is not a basketball video game in the way that something like FIFA is a football game. No instead it is a small basketball-based minigame collection which is only really any good for a couple of hours of entertainment at best. I am certain if I had this as a kid it would have kept me busy for like one rainy afternoon and that would be it. I do think that the game is slightly better in two-player but not by miles. So when considering this game and what kind of score it should get well I guess it would be  something like four out of 10 taking everything in to account.

If your thinking of getting this game I will tell you that most of the copies I can currently find online cartridge only are around the £6 to £8 mark including postage and packaging. My copy was a NTSC copy I managed to find online for £3 with free postage. I don’t want to name names and spoil things but there is a much better NBA-related game out there and i’d hold my pennies back for that.

3 Super Nintendo Game Reviews that are just a little bit diffrent.

OK so having reviewed 151 SNES games I figured that rather than jump into another commercial release for review 152 I would instead look at a few rom hacks and even a home-brew game.

 My Mario Kart R Review

My Oh No More Zombies Ate my Neighbors Review

My Jet Pilot Rising Review

150 SNES games reviewed #21: Exhaust Heat (aka F1 ROC: Race of Champions)

Exhaust Heat (released in North America as F1 ROC: Race of Champions) was a racing game developed by Seta for the SNES. It was released in 1992.

My Exhaust Heat SNES review 

 

The game had to work against the odds to get noticed having come after Nintendo’s own F-Zero. F-Zero had pulled out all of the Mode 7 graphical tricks that it could and had an excellent sound track and even more importantly a great sense of speed. At first, in comparison to this, Exhaust Heat seemed to be seen by most people as something of a let-down.

Initially you will notice the graphics are not up to the standards of F-Zero and the game doesn’t feel anywhere near as fast. Once you’ve progressed and completed a few races in the career mode though things start to change. You earn cash, and this gives you access to more powerful engines, better tyres, etc. You soon learn that with the right modifications and settings your car can move like greased lightning.

The career mode in this game is excellent. It’s less of a flash and bang racer which you will feel happy to spend five minutes on now and then, and more of an all-out consuming racer. This is its big strength. This is not to say that the game is boring because it is far from it. To compare this to a game I previously reviewed ESPN Speed World, in Speed World the minimum number of laps you can do is 10, and quite frankly after a race or two, 10 laps begins to feel like an eternity in some kind of realm of complete boredom. Here in Exhaust Heat my first proper race was three laps – three laps which actually felt exciting. In the first race I managed to come fourth despite the fact I thought I had put in a really good effort. For a second this was annoying as I didn’t really see how I could have done much better but then I remembered another game I had played not long ago and that was MotoGP 13 on the PlayStation Vita. In that game it had taken a fair amount of time for me to get into the game and some effort before getting a first place. This is the kind of game Exhaust Heat is, you need to put in the effort but sometimes you have to slog along a little, working till you can afford the upgrades, and till you can learn every curve of the track. It’s not an easy game ,but it is a very rewarding one.

If I was going to take a quick look at this game’s negative points I would have to say that it looks very plain. There is  little variety in the backgrounds and the cars themselves are small and lacking in detail. Add to this the fact there is no in-game music , which is a shame as the music featured in the game in other places is brilliant. The Grand Prix mode does not just last for one season, you seem to be able to carry on as long as you want.

One thing to bear in mind is that the game hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s still playable but it now looks very much like a dog. I would advise you not to let this get to you though, if you can get past the surface layer to the real depth of the game I think you’re in for a treat.

I would give this game a nice, solid seven out of 10. There are copies of this game cartridge only online for as little as £5 including postage. You can get fully boxed copies for under £15 if you want to go full on. At £5 anyone who has a SNES should seriously consider giving this game a bash.

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 147: Super Bomberman 2

Well my 65th Review was for Super Bomberman, which I just kept calling Bomberman totally forgetting the super part for some reason. When I reviewed the original I said that it was part of a long running franchise and since that review a Switch version was released which I grabbed, I also managed to get a copy of the original English Spectrum Bomberman game Eric and the Floaters. I dont want to get into how long this franchise has been going on again but I think the above does that. My purchase story behind Super Bomberman 2 is not a particularly exciting one, I grabbed it years later in a charity shop for a few quid. I should mention now that if you have read my review for the first Bomberman then it might sound like I am repeating myself but that's because this sequel is very much more of the same.

The normal 1 player mode of the game is just like any other Bomberman game. You control Bomberman, and you have to use your bombs to destroy various obstacles and opponents, ultimately using your bombs to turn on light switches that allow you to exit the level and progress on to the next. After completing a set number of levels, there is a boss battle, and how do you think you defeat the bosses that's right you do it by using bombs. You start the game only being able to lay one bomb at a time, this bomb will have a very small explosion, basically it will only harm things one square away in any direction. By destroying various obstacles some of which are bricks and others are mushrooms or treasure boxes it depends on the level you can find hidden powerups, what power ups can yoh get? Well you can pick up a flame this will increase the area your bomb damages, then you can pick up extra bombs so you can lay more than one at a time, you can also pick up shoes which make you move faster and more. Everything you can get in single player you can also get in the Multiplayer battle mode.

It is very easy to play Super Bomberman 2 there are very few buttons to get to grips with and very simple but tight controls. In order to become an absolute master at the game though you need to get smart. You will find yourself starting to understand how everything works, you will learn how large your explosion will be if you pick up a flame icon or 3 flame icons, all of this information will start to lodge in your brain, you will start having a greater awareness of how everything works and how you can use this to your advantage. If a bomb explodes and the flame hits another bomb it will cause this second bomb to detonate early. This is where the game starts to be far from simple as with multiple bombs and power ups you can either intentionally or accidentally cause large chain reactions in an attempts to get your opponents. If you panic and drop bombs all over the place causing huge chains of explosions then you will most likely kill yourself and this is where the game gets good. You need to learn how everything works and then learn how to keep a cool head and how to put your new found skills to work in even the most stressful of situations.

The single player story mode is basically partly there to entertain you when you are on your own but in honesty it also sort of serves as a training mode getting you ready for the real portion of the game the Multiplayer Battle mode. Super Bomberman 2 is one of the few games to use the SNES Multi-tap adaptor and with this you can have up to four players battling to blow each other to kingdom come.

If you don't have a multi-tap, your stuck to playing it in one or two player mode but luckily the computer will join in controlling AI characters to reach the full number. One of the interesting things is that there are multiple difficulty levels you can pick for the AI controlled Bombermen which is helpful as it means no matter what your skill level is you should be able to find an AI level that will allow you to have a good competitive game, its also cool from a training perspective as if your trying to improve you can keep upping the difficulty as you get better. If I have any issues with the AI it is that they all basically play in a highly defensive manner, it would be a nice touch if you could set some parameters that would make one be a little kill crazy willing to die if he took you down with him, then a defensive one, and a risk taker but I guess that's just expecting a lot given the hardware and when this game came out.

There are about ten maps you can choose from in multiplayer mode, and each one is different. The first map is sort of your bog standard no thrills one but each one from then on is  unique having its own quirk which makes it stand out and makes playing on it just a little bit different. For example one map has that sort of Pacman style thing where if you exit from the top of the map you reappear at the bottom. Sounds simple but it means that you can basically go from one side of the screen to the other in seconds and get the drop on your opponent or that they might do that to you.

Graphically the game is kind of basic but bright and fun and full of character, it might not be anything that flashy but it has aged well and it offers a pretty wide amount of variety which helps to keep things fresh.The sound in my opinion is good it manages to be cutesy catchy and it also manages to work with the on-screen action to make the game feel tense in the best possible way.

Super Bomberman 2 is definitely a very good game, especially if you have a multi-tap and a bunch of friends to play with. If you aren’t interested in a party game and prefer being a solo player then the single player game is not too bad but your really missing the part that makes this game the stand out classic that it is. Of course being a sequel there is the inevitable question is this one better than its predecessor? I find this a really tough question to answer as I am kind of biased to the first Super Bomberman because all of the levels and tunes from the game are burned into my brain, its the one I played as a young lad and its the one I have the really fond memories of. I gave Bomberman a 9 but I find myself having to give the second one an 8. Its still a brilliant game and I know some people prefer it but for me its just not quiet as good. If you want to try Bomberman 2 then the cheapest Pal carts I could find of it were about £25 with boxed copies being around double this. I would argue that the game is worth it but I would say don't worry about getting more than one of the SNES Bombermen games because there all just sort of variations of the same thing and hey it might also be worth looking at different versions on other formats, I am particularly fond of Bomberman Battlefest which was a download game for the Xbox 360 which has recently been added to the Xbox one via there ever growing backwards compatibility service, as this is only £6.75 to download I personally think its a complete steal and if you have been living under a rock for the last 30 years and don't know what  Bomberman is it would be a great cheap place to start.

SNES Game Review 146: Judge Dredd

 

OK so today's game is an interesting one in that it is a game based on a film which was based on a comic. I first came in to contact with the character of Judge Dread when I was young when I was shown a copy of 2000 AD a weekly science-fiction anthology comic. I think it went a little like this. I was reading a Spiderman comic when a bigger kid went ''oh kid why you reading about a wimp like that look at this its got this guy in it called Judge Dread he is proper well cool.'' OK I don't have such a good memory so I might be making his words up a bit but they probably involved something proper 80's like references to one thing being rad and the other gay but you get the picture. I have to admit I enjoyed the comic and I have picked up the odd 2000 AD related comic since then but I am far from a hardcore fan but put simply Dredd is a law enforcement officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One. He is not just any law man though he is a street judge which basically means that he is a police officer a judge, jury and an executioner all rolled into one, in this world there are a bunch of Judges but basically Dredd is the meanest and toughest of them all.

Well Judge Dredd made his live action film debut in 1995 in the unsurprisingly titled Judge Dredd. In this film he was portrayed by Sylvester Stallone. When it was released the film was  totally panned by critics and well by almost everyone. It did receive praise in some areas these being its  its visual style, its effects, stunts and action sequences. One of the things the fans seemed to have the biggest problem with is that Dredd removes his helmet and is in fact helmet-less for the majority of the film. Apparently though despite all of the hate it grossed more than $113 million worldwide against its budget of $90 million so it at least didn't loose anyone money. In total honesty though I have to admit that I actually kind of like Judge Dredd, its not a world changing film but its a decent action film with a few laughs and its a good enough way to pass a few hours.

So what we have here then is a game which started out as a much loved cult comic became a not very well liked movie and then became a game which actually received reviews ranging from good to average back in the day. I need to admit something right now though, I might have seen the film back then but I never bothered with the game for the simple reason I just kind of decided it would probably suck and so just gave it a wide berth.

OK so lets start with the games story, well for a start if you saw the movie, well the story is pretty much the same, it follows the film very closely up until right near the end. You actually get a text crawl in the intro giving you the whole set up for the world telling you about Mega City One and the Judges and what life is like in this world. You have two levels where you basically get to be Dredd doing his regular job being an officer of the law. It is then here that you learn that Dredd has been found guilty of murder and is exiled from MegaCity One into what is called The Cursed Earth. After this its basically making your way through the cursed earth and then back to MegaCity one to prove your innocence, to get the guy who framed you and to basically kick his ass. Something critics of the movie will like is that the Dredd in this game never actually removes his helmet, your in the Dredd uniform for the entire game, what do I think about this? I actually think its kind of stupid, he gets exiled in full body armor essentially in his police uniform yeah like that would happen but yeah this probably makes some critics of the film a bit happier.

OK so now its time to talk about the gameplay. Controlling Dredd is pretty easy. You run around with a button for jumping, a button to kick, one for shooting, then you have a button to switch weapons and the last one I will mention is the arrest button. Something which doesn't seem to matter beyond points but is kind of cool given the character is not only can Dredd just waste enemies he can also sometimes arrest them. You will see enemies throw up their hands and surrender and if you approach them and press the arrest button then Dredd will cuff them and they will be floated away presumably to jail on a little platform.

One of the good things about the game is that enemies come along in all shapes and sizes, you have a variety of different looking criminals and then latter you get ABC Warbots and skinless clones, something called Judge hunters. There are a couple of boss battles, you even get to ride one of the judges bikes for a nice change of pace but things like this could have been done more often as this doesnt compare that well in the variety and keeping it fresh stakes as something like Indiana Jones's Greatest Adventures which I reviewed recently, in fact despite this games attempts at variety this game feels like it starts to drag on a bit and if you are anything like me then you will most likely begin to feel your interest just dripping away. Some of the level objectives also seem like more of a slog than anything, find this, blow so many crates up etc. You tend to find you can get a bit lost in levels and start feeling your doing a chore not playing a game, in this way the game reminds me of Spiderman and the Xmen Arcades Revenge with the bomb deactivating etcetera. The great thing about the character of Dredd is that he is an arse kicking bad ass and I just feel this game needed to be a little more straight up action, a little more Contra style. I will admit though that things get a little more fun when replaying levels as you know the layout and where to go to meet your objectives instead of feeling like your wandering lost.

OK so I just want to quickly go over the games graphics and sound. The graphics in this game look quiet good really. Nice character animation, the graphics are a little bit comic book visuals meet Flashback and in my opinion it really works. The scenery and characters are very colorful and I would say represent the source material well. Overall its not a bad game graphics wise at all. The music in this game is kind of generic action music but in honesty it has a sort of dark gritty theme to it all and it helps set the mood well, it certainly fits the charters and world and doesn't grate. The sound effects are all pretty much what you would expect, although seriously they needed to throw in a few voice samples in my opinion, having him occasionally say ''I am the Law'' perhaps when beating a boss or something would have been a nice little touch. 

OK so now is the all important score part of the review, what am I going to give Dredd? Well after much deliberation I have decided that what Dredd deserves is a 6.5 out of 10. Its a reasonably enjoyable game, much better than average but there are also a heck of a lot better games on the system. I spent £8 on my cartridge only Pal copy and for me I think that price is about right, that's this games sweet spot in my opinion. If you can get it for something around that point then id heartily say give it a bash. Looking online at the moment cartridge only pal copies tend to be about £12 to £15 with fully boxed copies going for £25 to £30.

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.

Retro Game purchases: February 2018

So I started February's retro purchases on the 4th of the month by buying Kickle Cubicle for the NES cart only for £5 and like I always say you cant beat a NES game that is not a sports game for this kind of price.

I didn't buy anything else until the 10th when I grabbed  snake rattle n roll for the Nes cart only for £5 which I was very happy with as I always like picking up games made by Rare. I also managed to grab a PS1 disc only copy of Alundra 2 for £3.50. Its kind of funny as it wasn't that long ago that I grabbed the original disc only for about £5 so now I have got both of them and I got both of them on the cheap disc only. I made a case for the first one so maybe I will make a case for the second as well but who knows its not like I have enough free time to do all of the little projects I would like.

On the 15th I got an American SNES cart of Desert Strike for £5, and an American SNES cart of Redline f1 racer for £5, I got both of these mostly for my 150 SNES game review project which is moving on very well at the moment. These arrived via ebay sellers and the prices include postage. I also grabbed a NES cart Bart Versus the space mutants for £5 from a local indy games shop.

On the 16th I  grabbed DarkWing Duck cart only for Gameboy for £5 from a charity shop, I was really happy with this as not only do I love blooming capcom Disney stuff but I also got the NES version not long back so its cool to have both of them.

On the 21st I got Lode Runner Twin for SNES Japanese cart only £5, and Super Bases Loaded for SNES American cart only for £5 obviously this is more stuff for my SNES review thread. I also got Tiny Toons Adventures Babs Big Break Gameboy cart only £1.50

On the 24th I went into a local indy game shop and I managed to get Disagaea 2 for psp complete for £12, which I am very happy with as well its something I have wanted for a long time. I am very into the PSP as a machine to collect for especially when it comes to role playing games. I also grabbed a copy of Wrestlemania challenge for the NES cart and manual for £3 and Sim City for SNES pal cart only for £4 from the same place. Then in the mail I recieved Golden fighter S for SNES Japanese cart only for £5 including postage.

On the 25th I received a whole bunch of things I had gotten online, the postage was free. I got The Smurfs cart only for GameBoy for £1, The Jungle Book cart only for GameBoy for £2, Side Pocket cart only for GameBoy for £1.50, Cool spot cart only for GameGear for £1.50, CJ Elephant Fugitive cart only for GameGear for £5, and HyperZone cart only for SNES Japanese for £4. Now I got hold of HyperZone because its a game I really wanted to review and if you have been reading this you will see that I have done so. The purchase I was most excited about that arrived on this day though was CJ Elephant Fugitive as this game usually goes for a lot more and is not that common, apparently the rom of it only got dumped for the first time about a year or so ago.

So what is my favorite purchase of the month? Well I guess maybe Disagaea 2 or CJ Elephant Fugitive, I am also pretty pleased with getting Alundra 2 even if it is a disc only copy. I am kind of surprised that I spent as much this month as I did. According to my calculations I spent £84 which is not to bad an amount ideally Id like these purchases to slow down and as I have nearly finished my 150 SNES review series they very well might.

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 142: HyperZone AKA HaipāZōn

HyperZone AKA HaipāZōn is a shooter video game developed by HAL Laboratory, , yep the fellows responsible for Kirby obviously its a SNES game as I am reviewing it. HyperZone's gameplay is usually defined as being a cross between a racing and shooter game, if I wanted to describe it I would do so as follows basically the game is Space Harrier meets Fzero. If you have played those titles which I guess the majority of people will have then this will probably start to put you in the right frame of mind for this game. 

OK so the object of this game is to try to safely navigate each level while shooting enemies and earning points when you reach the end of the level then you will do battle with a boss. If you earn enough points then the next time you start a new level your ship will be replaced with a new upgraded ship, I have to admit I really like the fact that you see your guy leave his old ship and enter the new one its just a neat little touch. There are 8 levels to the game and there are six available upgraded ships so its worth trying to rack up as many points as you can.

The game this game most closely resembles is definitely F-zero. The spaceships you pilot would not look out of place in that game at all, then there is also the fact that your on a track with very obvious boundaries which look quiet a lot like those in Fzero, you have the same flickering engine lights at the back of your vehicle, you also have similar glowing panels on the floor that recharge your power bar, the whooshing noise made by the engine is also pretty much the same. The game is obviously using mode 7 and all of these what feel like little node to Fzero kind of make it feel warm and familiar despite the fact that before I began playing it for this review I had never even touched it before.

So how does it control? Well your always constantly traveling forwards, you don't have to press an accelerator if you need to slow down then there is a button for this but doing so actually causes your ship to slowly be damaged. There are only actually two buttons needed one to break and one to shoot, although the controls are mapped so A, Y and R all shoot and B X and L break, this is kind of neat because you can then work out what feels more comfortable for you. Your Dpad moves the ship both from left to right but also up and down the screen so that you can steer and avoid enemies and obstacles. All of the controls feel nice and responsive so whenever something goes wrong it feels like your fault entirely which is always a good sign. As I stated earlier HyperZone contains eight levels however if you finish these then the game restarts from the beginning with you continuing in your final ship and then the game loops, apparently infinitely. If you like score chasing then you will probably like this game as its very arcade like. You can pick up and play this game in a second, its very easy to get to grips with, my daughter came into the room while I was playing it and soon she was having ago and doing very well at the first level with like sod all help. The thing is though that the game might be easy to pick up and the first level might be pretty easy but boy does the difficulty really shoot up. The game is a darn hard game, your going to have to develop some mad skills to get all of the way through it.

OK so I guess it is time to score this bad boy, well I would give it 7 out of 10. I find the game very enjoyable especially when played in short bursts, it is easy to get into but soon becomes hard, I think a lot of people would say too hard but if your the sort who likes a challenge then this would appeal to you. I was pretty darn certain that this game never came out in Europe, I did some research I talked to other collectors who seemed to agree and yet there are currently a bunch of Pal carts on ebay. So how much did I pay for this game, I spent £4 on a Japanese cart, if you want to try it well to be honest prices seem to be all over the place, people seem to be asking for £18 for Japanese carts in this country with an American import loose cart being a similar price after postage. Pal carts also seem to be selling from £18 to £25 but I really cant remember ever seeing this in the UK while I was growing up, maybe it just didn't come out here but did release in other Pal territories.I guess sometimes with these old games some of the info about where they were released and in what kind of numbers are just sort of lost to the past.

150 SNES games reviewed: #7 Krusty’s Super Fun House

No TV series makes it past 20 series without someone realising it has the potential to sell a lot of other stuff by association.

The Simpsons was a largely adult-humoured comedy which children seemed to become obsessed with. So it was no surprise when the Bart vs. this and that games started to pour on to the NES. It didn’t even take the programme being around long for it to begin to happen. Bart was the main Simpsons character who was focused on when it came to games, so when a Krusty the Clown game was announced it almost took me by surprise. I can’t remember who had it first, but it seemed to be one of those games that almost all of the SNES owning guys at school got hold of.

What neither I nor the rest of the guys knew back then was that Krusty’s Super Fun House originally was not a Simpsons title at all, it was a game called Rat Trap. So whatever you think of the game you cant really call it a rushed cash-in on The Simpsons’ name, as the game was completed in its original form long before The Simpsons was attached to it. Acclaim, bought the finished game and decided to make a large return on it they would make alterations and turn it into a Simpsons vehicle. This made it the first Simpsons game not to feature Bart as the central character (although he does appear in it).

Rat Trap was developed as an Amiga game, and non-Simpsons versions of the ROM/disk image can be found for those interested in that kind of thing. Whether the game ever saw any kind of limited release in its original Rat Trap form, I have no idea, maybe it was and that’s how its ROMs ended up online, or maybe it was leaked by someone close to it. What was originally intended to be an Amiga game ended up having the Simpson’s license added and then ended up being released for the Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System. SNES and Sega Mega Drive. From a business stand point I cant say I blame them, the more machines it is on the higher sales potential it has, which is something a lot of companies seem to have forgotten nowadays while they try to court exclusivity deals and pay cheques from various system owners.

The main goal of the game is to slaughter the rats by leading them to what I can best describe as semi-automated killing machines. Back then no one saw anything wrong with the murder of cartoon rats. I can only imagine what would be said if something like this came out now – PETA would have a field day. After all they already think that in order to become raccoon Mario, Mario takes his super knife and slices his way into a live racoon pulling its guts out with his teeth, which until they put the idea in to my head I merely thought it was magic, or that he slipped on a raccoon onesie and gained new powers due to mental illness (wouldn’t you be ill if you saw bullets with talking faces and dinosaurs who could eat things twice their size?).

To get the rats into the killing machine, Krusty needs to do a bit of puzzling, lifting up blocks and putting them in the right place for example. The graphics and the way this works has a bit of a Lemmings feel to it, which is no bad thing in my opinion (I just wish it was a little more like Lemmings).

Krusty is also armed with a small supply of weapons in the form of custard pies or balls. These have no real use when it comes to the rats but there are other characters around such as snakes which will attack Krusty and he can use these to defeat them. Strangely, there are massive parts of levels the rats never even go near, and in fact they couldn’t even reach if you messed up, but you can explore these areas and kill the enemies there, for points I guess. To finish a level you need to kill all of the rats and then return to the starting door to hear a little jingle and then move on to the next one. Sometimes the level will be made so you can’t just go back and you need to go forward and then around to get back, beating the enemies in your way to get there.

The graphics are bright and functional, if not amazing. The Krusty sprite looks good but the fact he is constantly smiling seems a little strange given the Krusty we now know and love. I guess this game came out quite early in The Simpsons’ run so Krusty was a little more child-friendly back then, and he hadn’t been fully characterised as the alcoholic, only in it for the money scumbag we all know and love.

The game is functional and at times fun, but I really believe no one would even bother to play or look for it now if it was not for the attached Simpsons license. I score this game five out of 10. It is just plain average. So average that at times it hurts. I am sure I enjoyed this more when I was younger. I rate this game much higher as an example of good business decisions than as a game.

I paid £3 for my NTSC cart of this game not long ago, but looking online £8 seems to be about the going rate for it in either PAL or NTSC. So for once I am actually showing you a game you can get without needing either a import machine or a wad of cash.

150 SNES games reviewed: #6 The Rocketeer

So I tried to play The Rocketeer and prior to the game starting there were a few screens with drawings and words, but with my Japanese copy they were of very little help.

The game starts and what I am met with is nothing like I imagined. In my head this game was a 2D R-Type style shoot ’em up, where I flew from left to right as the rocketeer saving the day and instead here I am flying a yellow what looks like a crop dusting plane against a red and a blue plane round and round these pillars in a race.

The controls are clunky at best and things seem to favor the AI controlled planes. If I hit them it send me towards the ground. If they hit me the same thing happens, I head towards the ground. I failed to finish the race time and time again. I just can’t seem to manage the 10 laps but I push on with the hope this is just the start and if I can somehow get through this there will be the glorious treat of seeing my character strap on the rocketeer’s rocket pack and I will be flying shooting and doing something much better.

Eventually I finish the race but in second place, I am shown the same failure screen I have been met with so many times before, but I try again and again spurred on by the hope of something better – eventually. I finish first I scream to the heavens in triumph – rocket pack here I come – but no I am robbed. I am back in the plane racing again but this time I need to complete 15 laps not 10. Another hour passes, I get better at managing 10 laps, but can’t manage 15 so I am stuck. I press reset and leave the machine in the hope it will play a gameplay demo which will at least show me some future stages. I need to see something worth playing to renew my hope.

So I watch with bated breath and the first thing it shows me is what I have just been doing. I wait a little longer and there he is The Rocketeer…. and he is flying around and around racing with the same bloody planes on the same course. This is when I simply gave in, I decided the game might change, you might finish one more race and get the rocket pack and then one more and fight crime but it doesn’t matter because I will never bloody see it.

I got this game in a lot of four Japanese games for £10 and that kinda seems too expensive. I won’t claim I am the first person to say this – that honour goes to Dara Ó Briain of Mock the Week fame – but:

“Video games are the only form of media which withholds content from its users unless they are good enough at it. A book or film has never quizzed anyone or made them pass a test to be allowed to continue reading or watching.”

When I first heard him say this it didn’t quiet make sense, after all it’s the challenge that makes video games what they are, is it not? Now I have flown around this course 300 times it makes a little more sense. When I reviewed fellow movie license Hook I said how good it was that Tinkerbell just flew in sprinkled you with fairy dust and got rid of the need for levels which would have featured a boring powerless Peter Pan and by playing fast and loose like that with the source material had led to a better game. Well, this kind of treatment would have been very welcome with The Rocketeer, just skip the dull plane flying and races and slap him in the suit from stage one.

The graphics are about as basic as you can get on the SNES and I can say pretty much the same about the sound. I haven’t mentioned them until now as even if this was the best 16-bit game I had ever seen or heard it would not make up for the awful gameplay. Another thing that annoyed me is the two player mode. I foolishly thought maybe you’d race against each other but no it’s one of those you watch me play a life then I will watch you. A further annoyance is that despite the two player being of a take turns variety it still expects you to have two joy-pads. If it’s only one at a time then a pass the pad system would have been a nice little choice. Overall I have to give the game two out of 10, its that blah.

I already mentioned what I paid so how much would you have to pay if you fancy being a video game masochist? There does not appear to be a PAL version as far as I can tell but if you hit eBay you can get a Japanese cart for £5, but again you will need a foreign console, modified machine or converter and a lack of self-preservation.

I recommend you don’t bother. In fact I am going to go so far as to recommend a modern game which you can get much cheaper. A game which I think represents the idea of being a rocketeer much better than this piece of excrement, despite being its own IP.  The game I recommend is Dark Void. Sure it didn’t get brilliant reviews, but I really enjoyed it and its now super cheap I saw it in Game the other day for £2, and although its never going to be considered a classic I consider it something of a flawed gem.