Chase H.Q. is a shortened title, the game was originally called Every 80s Buddy Cop Movie's Chase Scene Ever Simulator. Souped-up cars take to the mean streets to bring down crime, one high-speed collision at a time. Countless civilian lives are endangered needlessly. The phrase quis custodiet ipsos custodes has rarely been more applicable to a videogame, although it did take me an appallingly short amount of time to forget I was supposed to be a cop when I played Sleeping Dogs.


The game's attract mode sums up what you're supposed to be doing in a letter from your superior officer, the full text of which I shall recreate here, complete with spelling mistakes for your pleasure.
"You've got a finely tuned sports car with a custom gear shift with two speeds, high and low.
The button on the shift knob is for a five second high-power boost of nitro fuel which can only be used 3 times in any one mission.
Your mission is to catch up criminals, bumb into them until they're weakened, pass them up, cut them off and bring them to justice.
The distance between you and the climinal is on the map at your right.
You've got 70 seconds to get the job done."
Drive fast, bumb into some climinals, I think I can handle that.


Here are the heroes of Chase H.Q., two detectives who meld Lethal Weapon and Miami Vice into one adrenaline-fuelled whirlwind of automotive justice. On the right is Tony Gibson, driver and sports car enthusiast. On the left is his partner Raymond Brody, who constantly spouts snippets of digitised speech whilst also serving as valuable ballast. I've actually met Tony and Raymond before during VGJunk's run: they're the stars of Taito's Crime City, a side-scrolling action spin-off that was released the following year.


Before you can get into the action, you're briefed on your mission via a call from Nancy, your liaison with headquarters. It seems that Ralph, the Idaho Slasher, is speeding into the suburbs in a British sports car, presumably to escape the indignity of having such a lame serial killer name. All this information is fully voice acted by "Nancy," and very nicely voiced too, with clear, crisp speech that's remarkably pleasant on the ear for a videogame of this vintage.
Now, I don't know much about cars, but even I recognise Ralph's car as a Lotus Esprit. This is partly because it was identified as British, but mostly because when I was a kid I had a toy of the submersible Esprit from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me and it shared enough bathtime adventures with me that I'll always be able to recognise an Esprit. I might not be able to catch it, though. Let's hope Tony and Raymond's car is up to the job.


There's a map that pops up during the intro, so I thought I'd check it out before I began the chase. "A Street Lined With Large Buildings"? Is this map the work of medieval cartographers? I notice there's no map for the final stage, but it doesn't matter because it probably just would have said "here be dragons" anyway.


And we're off. Chase H.Q. is underway, and I didn't bring up OutRun at the start of this article just as an excuse to talk about OutRun, although you'd be forgiven for thinking that given my track record. No, I mentioned it because Chase H.Q.'s gameplay owes a huge debt to Sega's classic racer, and the two games play (for the most part) very similarly. At the beginning of each of Chase H.Q.'s stages, your task is to catch up to the fleeing suspect by driving as fast as possible through traffic. As the intro states, your car has two gears, high and low. Don't do what I did and completely forget about this minor but important detail, condemning me to a first stage spent wondering why my car wasn't going very fast even when I kept pumping nitrous oxide into it. The turbo boosts are the other big difference (beside the criminal bashing) from OutRun, and they work exactly as you'd expect - your car goes really fast at the expense of being able to turn corners or avoid other road users. I suggest saving them for the later parts of each stage.


It all plays well. Very well, in fact, with a good sense of speed, smooth scrolling and vehicular handling that finds itself in a sweet spot of arcade playability - not too floaty, but not constantly punishing you for every mistake. You are operating under a time limit, but unlike in OutRun where the clock is utterly merciless on the default settings, Chase H.Q. is rather more generous and will let you get away with making the occasional misstep, like plowing your Porsche into a tree at 180 miles an hour.


The one aspect of Chase H.Q.'s gameplay that can feel a little strange is that you sometimes feel like you're being "funnelled" around corners, with the sensation that the car is steering itself. This is true of most arcade racers of this type, though, and the trick to dealing with it is to remind yourself that this isn't a game to be played like a "proper" racing game where your main aim is to take corners well: to succeed here you have to make left and right adjustments so you don't slam into the back of the traffic ahead of you, and when a corner does come up you've got to make sure you aren't going so fast that you slide outwards through centrifugal force and hit a roadside obstacle.


If you drive well enough, and remember to shift up to high gear, (although only a proper idiot would forget that,) you'll eventually catch up with the perp. Once you've got them in your sights, your time is increased and, in a touch so wonderfully charming that it was worth playing the game just to see it, Raymond takes out the police light and sticks it to the top of the car. Now all these other motorists know that I'm a police officer doing 300kmh along a busy highway and not just some random maniac doing 300kmh along a busy highway.
I'm not sure about that big marker that says "CRIMINALS HERE," though. Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" Mind you, Ralph's certainly guilty of various motoring offences if nothing else, so I'd better ram his car until it's on the verge of exploding.


That's the second portion of Chase H.Q.'s gameplay - repeatedly colliding with the target car until they stop trying to escape the long arm and heavily-reinforced front bumper of the law. Ram them enough to fill the damage bar on the left of the screen to clear the stage, but if you run out of time they drive away. You can continue, but any damage you did to them is wiped away and you have to start the ramming process all over again. This is why I suggested you save your nitro. Also, try to hit them from the side, because that does more damage, although it's easier said than done when you're also trying to not to hit any of the other cars.
Between my determination to uphold the law and Raymond shouting "more, push it more!" down my ear, I managed to tag Ralph enough times to bring him to a halt.


"You have the right to remain silent. We have the right to look cool in pastel suits. Now Ralph, you're going to have to drive yourself back to the precinct, because our car only has two seats. Do you promise to head straight to the police station? No stopping for any slashings? Okay, good, on you go."
Ralph looks mean, but I wouldn't try anything if I were him. Not when Raymond's got his gun aimed right at his buttocks. Ralph also kinda looks like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.


The remaining four stages of Chase H.Q. follow the same pattern: receive a bulletin about a criminal, chase them down and ram them into submission. For stage two the villain is Carlos, the New York armed robber. They say crime doesn't pay, but Lamborghinis ain't cheap so he must be doing all right for himself. I suppose he could have stolen it. He does have form, after all.


I don't mean to keep banging on about the similarities to OutRun, but Chase H.Q. does have sections where your route forks into left and right paths. The criminal has taken one route, so you'd better take the same route otherwise it'll take you longer to catch them. Fortunately, it's always easy to tell which way you're supposed to be going: if the massive flashing arrow pointing you in the right direction isn't enough of a giveaway, then the helicopter that flies in and tells you which way the criminal went surely will be.


I'm afraid I'm going to have to take issue with the promotional strategy of the American Corn Council. Sure, we all want more people to eat delicious, healthful corn, but if you're going to spend all that money buying billboards to promote the wonderful maize lifestyle then clumping all of them together along one half-mile strip of highway is perhaps not the best use of your resources. I mean, I do really want to eat some corn now, but think how many more people these billboards could have reached if only you'd spread them about a bit.


You know, Carlos seemed a lot easier to stop than Ralph. I'm going to put this down to Italian motor engineering. I should be able to make a Lamborghini stop by breathing heavily on it, so bashing it with my car feels like overkill. And he's driving it near all that sand! That's going to severely reduce the resale value. As will it being on fire. You can just write it off at this point, really.


"You're under arrest on suspicion of armed robbery, murder and painting your sports car a horrible shade of 'warm lemon cordial' yellow. You're looking at fifteen years just for that last one, pal."


Next up, some drug pushers. I don't want to undersell the terrible societal effects of these crimes, but is it just me or are these crimes getting less serious as we go on? I think most people would accept that drug dealers aren't quite as bad as mass murderers. I reckon Raymond and Tony have a reached a point where they'll chase anyone in a sports car just to fuel their addiction to high-speed chases. In the next stage I'm going to be running down someone who cut the tag off their mattress.


There's not much to say about this stage specifically other than that it must be a constant nightmare to live in a house an inch away from a three-lane motorway. Instead, I'll describe Chase H.Q. as a whole, although it's probably already obvious what I think about it - it's good. Really good, even, an excellent distillation of the car chase experience into a form that suits the concept well, the brief but action-packed stages forming a perfect marriage with the short gameplay sessions that are the very basis of what arcade games are about. Little details, like Raymond taking out the police light or the sparks that fly up when you scrape along a tunnel wall, serve to enhance the gameplay, which is fair and consistent throughout, and the whole package is simple, immediately accessible fun.


What a lovely sunset. I think I'll stop to enjoy it for a while. In a job so fraught with danger, it's good to take these moment to recharge one's spiritual batteries, as it were. Okay, that's long enough, we'd better find a fire extinguisher before our suspects are burned alive.


A lot of these post-arrest screens seem to show Raymond taking a deep interest in the suspect's backside. I'd be more curious about how their car repaired itself, personally.


This time Tony and Raymond are on the trail of a kidnapper, who is escaping in a car which, to my untrained eyes, looks very wide indeed. It makes sense, I suppose. If you're a kidnapper you'd want a car with a big trunk.


Graphically, Chase H.Q. is very pleasant 95 percent of the time but my word these tunnels are hideous. All that brown, it's as though I'm driving a colonoscopy camera rather than a sports car.


Hang on, where am I? Are there many places in America where the streets are lined with Greek columns? Actually, what with the desert backdrop, I think our heroes might have stumbled across Iram of the Pillars, the ancient city of legend. That's some fine detective work, boys.


Upon intercepting the target vehicle, Tony and Raymond apply their usual crime-busting technique of ramming into the back of it until it catches fire. You do remember that this suspect is a kidnapper, don't you, detectives? A man wanted for a crime where they may well have an innocent person in the boot of their car? If there is someone back there, I have to assume they said "well, at least things can't get any worse" immediately before our heroes starting bashing into them. If Chase H.Q. was a movie, that's definitely the kind of line that would be in the script.


Oh good, there doesn't appear to be an abductee, just a man whose devotion to beige as a fashionable colour palette speaks to deep-seated mental issues.


For the final stage, our heroes are thrust into the murky world of international espionage as they hunt down a spy from the Eastern Bloc. Sometimes I forget that the Cold War was still going on in the age of videogames, at least until I play something where the villains are Soviets.
The target car is listed as "unknown" here, so the game had better mark it when I approach it, otherwise I'm going to have to crash into every car I see on the off-chance that it's being driven by a KGB agent.


One thing for which I will give Chase H.Q. my unrestrained praise is its difficulty curve. So many arcade games start off manageable before suddenly switching to "screw you, feed me credits" about three stages in, but Chase H.Q. has a nice, smooth progression of challenge where the later stages are noticeably more difficult without ever feeling unfair or designed just to take money from the player.


The spy's car is, in fact, marked the second you clap eyes on it, so there's no guesswork involved and you can finish the game using the tried-and-true methods that have seen you through the other four stages. I mentioned it before as a possible negative about the game, but here the game's tendency to funnel the player around corners is surprisingly helpful, allowing you to concentrate on hitting your target and avoiding traffic without the pesky inconvenience of having to steer.


That man does not look like a Soviet spy. I imagine he was chosen by his commanding officers for this very reason.


After clearing five missions, the game is over and to celebrate Ronald Reagan awards our heroes a strip of toilet paper. Reagan - he's actually the police chief - even congratulates you on completing five missions "without a flaw" by saying "bless you," which is oddly sweet. He's got the face of a grizzled, no-nonsense police chief but the personality of a kindly grandma. That probably explains why he never once asked me to turn in my badge and gun, or told me he wanted this case solving by the book.


Meeemorieees, of the perps we caught...
Do yourself a favour and give Chase H.Q. a go. There's a good chance you already have, because it was very successful and it's hardly obscure, but you should take it for another spin anyway because it's an excellent little game with a great atmosphere that only takes about ten minutes to play through. Of course, it's not as good as OutRun, but even I like a change every now and then.

As Thomas the Tank Engine is up there with Mickey Mouse and Spongebob in the pantheon of children's icons, I'm sure you're all familiar with the basic premise of the show (and the books it was based on). The Island of Sodor is home to a variety of sentient vehicles (mostly locomotives) with human faces who are ordered around by a fat man in a top hat. They have adventures, I suppose? I know I was an extremely avid Thomas the Tank Engine fan when I was a very small boy but I'm struggling to recall what happened in any episode besides the usual cartoon mischief. The only one that comes to mind is that an unscheduled water refill from a river once ended with Thomas having live fish in his water tank. I believe the situation was resolved when his drivers caught the fish - with actual fishing rods, no less - and then ate them. It's established that having fish in his guts caused Thomas physical pain, so god knows how weird it must have felt having people angling inside his internal organs. I know, overthinking children's media, that's something that's never been done on the internet before, but it's hard not to when Thomas is a living creature condemned to a life of slavery. Even as a kid I knew that was a bit weird.


He looks happy enough on the stage select screen, his disembodied face fair beaming with pleasure at the prospect of fulfilling the wishes of the Fat Controller by delivering a tractor to a farm.


He doesn't look so keen about taking crude oil to the refinery, though. Thomas' facial expressions are supposed to indicate the difficulty of each stage, but because this game is obviously aimed at very young children Thomas might as well have the same blank look on his mug for each one. There's no point pulling a face about it, Thomas, you're going have to make the trip to the refinery eventually, because the Fat Controller has decreed it and his rule is absolute. He famously once bricked an engine up in a tunnel just because it wouldn't go out in the rain. I put the Fat Controller's malice down to the fact that his parents were mean enough to name him Sir Topham Hatt. Cruelty begets cruelty.


So, I went into this one wondering how you could make a compelling videogame based around a character whose movement is limited to a single direction along a predetermined track, and the answer - or at least the answer supplied by this game - is that you can't. The basic aim of the game is to get Thomas from the left of the screen to the station at the right-hand side of the map, which you accomplish through thrilling left-right manipulations of the joystick. You can also reverse, and switch between tracks by moving the stick diagonally at the junctions. Changing tracks works well and with a good degree of accuracy, which is excellent news because it makes up about eighty percent of the gameplay. I know it sounds a minor thing to be pleased about, but having Thomas' ability to switch tracks be a horrible, awkward mess is exactly the kind of basic, game-shattering error I'd expect to find in a relatively low-rent Amiga game such as this.


Aside from making your way along the track, the most important thing to remember is that you have to pick up your carriage by reversing into it before taking it to your destination. Sometimes it's a passenger carriage, but not during the stage where Thomas is taking children to the seaside. The kids are dumped into the same windowless wooden wagon that you can see pictured above. That's going to make it hard for the little ones to fill in their I-Spy books.


Once you've hitched up your wagon, all you need to do it make your way along the tracks, collecting coal and buckets of water for points while trying to avoid rolling into dead ends, like I have done in the picture above. If you choose to play Thomas the Tank Engine you'll do it a lot too, because you don't get to see much of the track ahead of you. It's a good job Thomas can move in reverse as fast as he can go forward, otherwise constantly finding yourself in impassable sidings might get a touch wearisome. I'll give the developers credit there, Thomas can move a fair old clip when you're holding the fire button down to put him into high-speed mode, although moving faster than the more sedate default pace can be fraught with danger, as we shall see soon enough.


Bang, job done, Thomas has delivered the tractor to the farm. A farm that has its own train station, apparently. That must be convenient for them.
Thomas is so grateful for your help that he shows his appreciation in the only way he can: exaggerated cartoon gurning.


Look, Thomas, I'm willing to help you do your job, but you have to promise to never wink at me like that again, okay? You're creeping me out.


Now, I'm sure the gameplay of Thomas the Tank Engine sounds kinda dull to you, which is probably a side-effect of it being kinda dull. However, I have yet to reveal to you the true challenge of this game: navigating a rail network of such ramshackle construction and mind-bendingly poor design that I could almost mistake it for something I whipped up in Transport Tycoon. Whole sections of track lead nowhere, fallen trees lie across the rails and, showing complete disregard for the lives and safety of both the sentient living trains and their human engineers, the Fat Controller's plan for an efficient rail service is to have as many locomotives sharing the same stretch of track as possible. Other trains from the Thomas series speed around the tracks that you're trying to navigate, moving along seemingly random paths and causing an endless series of collisions and derailments.


None of the other engines give a damn about this constant locomotive carnage, either: it's always Thomas that crashes, Thomas that erupts in a billowing cloud of steam, Thomas who gets sent back a few screens with no appreciable damage. Yeah, crashing isn't exactly a game over scenario here, and in fact I think you can bust Thomas up as many times as you like without comeuppance. Still, it's be nice if the other engines weren't such dicks about it. Here, James the red engine has smashed his rear-end into Thomas' face and does he feel a scintilla of remorse? Just look at his smug face, he's clearly loving every second of Thomas' agony.


You're not helping either, Percy.
I spent more time than was probably advisable tying to unravel the mysteries of the other trains' AI. They zip around the tracks with no readily apparent goal other than to get in your way. They never seem to travel directly towards Thomas if they can possibly avoid it, but as the GIF above shows they're not willing to stop if you blunder into their path, either. Thomas is at the very bottom of Sodor's pecking order, and "move it or lose it" is a motto he's forced to live by. In the end, I came to the conclusion that by never using the speed-up button you could probably play through the entire game without a single crash, thanks to a combination of the other trains' reluctance to move onto the same track as you and the fact you've got more time to see where you're going. There's no rush in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine, and unlike any real railway the Island of Sodor's trains operate on a "whenever the hell you feel like it" basis. There is a time limit but it's "between sunrise and sunset." Better get this cargo delivered and be back in your shed before the sun goes down, Thomas. That's when the vampire trains come out.


I had to purposely wait around for a good ten minutes (the stages take two minutes at most to clear) before I could get a game over screen to appear. The Fat Controller is not pleased, and it's hard to read that first sentence as anything other than a threat. Off to the scrapyard for me, then.


The Fat Controller disappointment in Thomas' performance might be more understandable if the old sod hadn't let his railway fall into such a terrifyingly dangerous state of disrepair. There's a broken section of track here, for pity's sake. I'd say that not having missing pieces of track is Rule Number One of running a successful railway, but then again the Fat Controller doesn't seem to believe in timetables either, or not having different trains travelling towards each other on the same stretch of track. This is what happens when people are put in charge of public services purely because they're members of the aristocracy. Thomas needs better union representation.


On a couple of occasions I collected a bell, which transported Thomas to a bonus game. It's a straight race against three other vehicles: a locomotive I couldn't identify, Bertie the Bus and Harold the Helicopter. You might think Harold has an unfair advantage, what with him being able to fly and all, but his powers of flight are no match for my ability to rapidly tap the fire button of an Amiga joystick. Yes, of course it's a button mashing event, how else did you think it was going to work?


That red train is an embarrassment to living steam engines everywhere. A train, being beaten by a bus? Disgraceful. As a regular user of British buses, I'm amazed Bertie even managed to turn up on time for the start of the race.
I know that the congratulatory message says "You Win Thomas," but for finishing first I didn't win Thomas, I just got some points.


Bite me, Topham. I've literally got all day, and I'm not going to risk increasing my speed until you do something about the appalling state of the tracks that I'm risking my life, such as it is, just by negotiating.


Well, would you look at that. I think some work is actually being done to repair the tracks. That giant spanner isn't some esoteric railway worker's tool for fixing busted train lines, it's just something Thomas can collect for points. Of course, if he really wanted that spanner he'd have to go up and around this section and then reverse into it, because touching the broken track counts as a crash. I don't think Thomas is willing to do that. Not now that a vision of the Holy Grail has appeared to him, floating above a nearby siding.


As the stages progress the track layouts get more complicated, but the game doesn't become any more challenging - it just takes longer, as you head down a dead-end route only to have to back out of it and pick another one. I suppose there's little else to the life of a train.
As always with these games aimed squarely at the under-five crowd, I have to wonder whether it would be any fun for the target audience, and I think this one would, maybe. It's certainly more engaging than something like The Tweenies, because at least you have to pay attention to this one, but thanks to its limited gameplay even young 'uns are going to get bored of it fairly quickly. It does have a jolly enough version of the show's theme tune, and I'll confess that I quite like the graphics - they're nicely detailed and rather charming in their appropriately "model railway" aesthetic, although they could have done with a little more variety. It's slight and occasionally tedious, but if you've got a kid who's obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine - and let's be honest, they all are at some point - you could do worse than sitting them down in front of this.


After some pointless chugging and plenty of crashes brought about by my unnecessary use of the speed-up button, Thomas the Tank Engine is complete and I'm rewarded with this image. Thomas looks pleased, but all the other trains look like grizzled old lags who have just seen a naive new kid step into the prison yard. And with that cheery thought, I'll take my leave of this game.


Oh no, hang on, there's one more thing: instead of the main game, you can play a card-flipping memory-match game. You know how it works, turn over the cards and try to find the matching ones. All I got from it is that Diesel looks like Johnny Vegas.

Nice to know Nintendo expended as much effort designing the title screen as they did coming up with that title.
So, the Super Scope. Everyone's favourite electronic drainpipe. A lightgun that's not shaped like a gun but like plumbing supplies, with a little rest bolted on so you can balance it on your shoulder. I've written about the Super Scope before, and though years have passed I still have no earthly idea why someone would get to designing a fake gun attachment for a videogame console and pattern it after a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher instead of, you know, a gun. Had Nintendo forged a shadowy deal with the world's PVC pipe manufacturers? We may never know. But yes, that's definitely it.


Exciting calibration action! This is all consigned to the dustbin of history now, of course, what with the advent of LCD TVs. If I suddenly had an uncontrollable craving to play Duck Hunt these days I'd have to lug a CRT telly out from the storage space under the house, so it's a bloody good job that scenario is extremely unlikely to happen. I played enough Duck Hunt as a kid, and I don't think it's gotten any better with age.


The six games are are grouped into two categories: Blastris and LazerBlazer. I know you'd all prefer to see some blazing lazers - not the TurboGrafx game - but I'm going to start with Blastris because it's at the top of the screen. Nintendo obviously felt it was the more important of the two, otherwise they wouldn't have put it at the top. I'm not about to argue with the Big N on this one.


If you're thinking that "Blastris" sure sounds like it's going to be Tetris with the addition of some blasting, then congratulations, have yourself a biscuit or something because that's exactly what it is. Well, one of these three games is like Tetris, at any rate. Let's start with that one.


This is Blastris A, and the basic elements of Tetris are in place - blocks inexorable fall into the screen, and you must manipulate them to form full lines across the play area, which then disappear. However, unlike regular Tetris you can't move or rotate the blocks. Also unlike regular Tetris is the fact that the tetrominoes move from left to right instead of falling from the top of the screen as God - or at least Alexey Pajtinov - intended. Seeing Tetris blocks move this way feels very odd. It's like seeing someone out walking their cat on a lead: it's conceivably something that could happen, but that doesn't mean it should.


So if you can't move or rotate the blocks, how do you control Blastris? Don't forget you're using the Super Scope, (as though you could forget,) so the answer is that you shoot the blocks. In the example pictured above, the long green block is moving from left to right, where it's bottom-most square will land on the top of that yellow clump. You don't want that, so take hold of your Super Scope and fire away!


They you go, the bottom square has been blasted off of the Tetris piece. If this was a film, this would be the part where they finally say the title of the movie out loud. Blastris - now you're getting it, and the newly-truncated tetromino will neatly fit into that three-square gap. That's it, that's the game. You have a limited amount of shots, with two shots being restored for every block that drops, so you can't just keep blasting pieces out of the way, but you generally seem to have enough shots available to do what needs to be done. Clear five lines and you'll move up to the next level, where the blocks move faster.


Unfortunately, Blastris A isn't much fun. I think this is because it suffers greatly when inevitably compared to Tetris Classic™, with the player's reduced ability to decide where the blocks will go leading to a sense of disconnection from the action. It was probably just a quirk of the game's randomness, but it seemed extremely reluctant to send blocks along the lower-most row, making it more of tedious waiting game than a challenge of intellect. In normal Tetris, I could have moved the blocks over there myself, and that knowledge was constantly at the forefront of my mind as I whined to myself about the lack of suitable blocks coming in at the bottom of the screen. Also, the blocks move from left to right and that's just not right. Verdict: a noble effort, but an unsuccessful one.


On to Blastris B, which isn't so much Tetris as it is Columns. I'm guessing it kept the name because Blastolumns is an awful title. Anyway, coloured blocks fall in - from top to bottom, thankfully - and you have to align them so they're in matching rows / columns / diagonals of three. Again, you can't move the blocks, but you can change their colour by shooting them, making them cycle through green, blue and orange. It's a nice touch that you can see the next colour in the sequence along the top edge of each cube, so you don't have to worry about forgetting the order in a hectic moment.


There are some blocks whose colour you can't change - these are the ones with the metal borders, an example of which you can see fall in the screenshot above. Aside from that, there are no extra complications or twists to the mechanics, giving the whole experience the feel of playing Columns on a controller with a busted d-pad. Setting up chains, normally a core feature of games such as this, is far more difficult when you can't decide where the blocks are going to land, and just like Blastris A this is an experiment that didn't quite pan out. The only other interesting thing about Blastris B is that in the Type B game there are constant elephant noises playing. I have no idea why this is the case.


Finally on the Blastris side there's Mole Patrol, which has absolutely nothing to do with Tetris and was presumably only included in this half of the game to achieve a three-and-three split between Super Scope 6's games.
Mole Patrol begins with a conga line of small purple aliens - which are quite clearly not moles - grinning at the player before jumping into the green Super Mario pipe on the right.


Then they pop up out of these craters and you have to shoot them right in their adorable little astro-mole faces. It's Whack-A-Mole, but with guns. Cap-A-Mole, perhaps.
It's a very slight offering and it feels a bit cheeky to describe it as a "game" when you're calling this a "six games in one" package, but unlike the previous two games Mole Patrol does make sense. It feels basic, but it also doesn't feel like a failed attempt to shoehorn guns into a puzzle game, so I think it just about manages to take the top spot out of these first three games.


You'll quickly realise that the key to success in Mole Patrol is making quick and accurate distinctions between the colours purple and pink. Amongst the purple moles are these pink moles, and shooting a pink mole makes the whole game speed up to a point where it's nigh-impossible to hit anything for a while. Don't shoot the pink moles. The game is quite clear on this. Why the pink moles are deserving of our special consideration while the purple moles are vermin that must be executed on sight is not explained, but the obvious answer is that it's a grey / red squirrel situation, only instead of nuts the moles eat, I dunno, moon rocks?


Once you've played one round of Mole Patrol you've played them all, and there's not much to do besides watching for the tell-tale plume of dust that appears when a mole is about to pop out of a particular hole and then trying to differentiate between pink and purple as fast as possible. This game is not kind to the colour blind.


I do like this scorecard you get after trying the single-round "Score Mode," even if it does highlight just how ravaged by age my reactions have become. Or maybe I was just too cautious in my mole-blasting ways.


Over to the LazerBlazer side of things now for three games of sci-fi shooting action, brought to you via menu screens populated by futuristic flight attendants. We've got Intercept, Engage and Confront. I think I'll start with Intercept, I'm not good with confrontations.


In Intercept, you have to intercept things. Missiles, specifically, big rockets that travel from right-to-left across the screen and which must be taken down with fire from your Super Scope. Not too much fire, because you only have three shots and they take a while to come back but, you know, some fire.
The big twist of Intercept is that you can't just shoot at the missiles: oh no, because they're moving you have to lead them, firing ahead of them so that your bullet has time to reach them before they fly past. Let five rockets reach the left-hand side of the screen and it's game over. Why yes, it is sort of like Missile Command, although it's a good job that the young John Connor honed his guerilla techniques on that game instead of Intercept. I don't think this would have held his interest long enough for him to become the saviour of humanity.


This "leading the target" aspect factors ever more heavily into Intercept's gameplay with the arrival of these smaller rockets. Except they aren't small, they're far away and therefore you have to lead them by a greater distance. It took me a while to figure that out, as though I were trapped in that bit from Father Ted.


During Intercept's versus mode, you'll sometimes see a cameo from Mario as he's chased across the sky by one of the Koopa Kids. Is that Lemmy or Iggy? I can't tell from this distance. Anyway, if you manage to shoot Lemmy / Iggy, you're reward with a points bonus and the restoration of a hit point.


I did not manage to hit the Koopaling. I accidentally shot Mario instead. Sorry, Mario.


I'm afraid I didn't have much fun with Intercept. Having to lead your targets all the time just isn't that much fun, and the repetitive missile patterns and one-note gameplay aren't exactly thrilling either. One thing I will say in Intercept's favour is that the backgrounds are lovely to look at, and if you're a fan of parallax scrolling then this game is your Louvre, your Sistine Chapel. Next time I'm in a bad mood I think I'm going to load up Intercept, turn off the sprites and enjoy the scenery.


The second game in LazerBlazer is Engage, where you shoot at enemy ships while flying very quickly over some Mode 7 scenery. Very quickly, like, fast enough to make me feel a bit ill if I look at the ground too long. The floor looks like the inside of a migraine.
Spaceships appear and you shoot at them. You have four shots in this mode, so that allows for some less... restrained gunplay, but you still have to lead the enemy ships a lot of the time.


Sometimes the enemy will launch missiles at you. They're picked up by your ship's computer, as you can see in the screenshot above. That small circle is highlighting an incoming missile, so you'd better shoot it down by wildly shooting all your remaining shots in its general direction. Hey, it was a tactic that worked out all right for me. The actual enemy ships don't seem to be much of a threat, so as long as you concentrate on clearing out the missiles you'll do just fine.


You also get your energy recharged between stages. I'm not sure what happens when you run out of energy, because it's separate to your hit points. I mean, I'm sure you still die because I think "energy" is analogous to "fuel" in this context, but I'm not clear on exactly what effects your rate of fuel consumption. If I just streamlined my spacefighter and took all the unnecessary weight out of the boot I probably wouldn't even have to worry about it.


Finally there's Confront, our hero finally deciding to confront the alien menace about why they're doing all this menacing. Not really, there's nothing even resembling a plot in any part of Super Scope 6, although it's not difficult to imagine the protagonist of Mole Patrol being upset about the alien moles digging up his cosmo-allotment.
In this game, Super Scope 6 finally presents the player with an opportunity to blast some spaceships with no worries about leading the target or planning your shots - it's just you, the enemy and unlimited ammunition, and as such it's probably the best game of the bunch. I know that Nintendo were trying to demonstrate the potential versatility of the lightgun experience, but in the end these types of games seem to be at their most engaging when they simply task the player with shooting everything in sight.


Yet more enticing backgrounds, too, even if they are a touch placid for the gameplay. Confront is little more than a generic shooting gallery, where ships pop up and you have to shoot them before they shoot you, but it's all pleasant enough, what with the nice backgrounds and the very Star Wars laser blast sound effects. It gets very difficult very quickly, but then that's true of every game in Super Scope 6 with the possible exception of Engage, so while the games themselves might be ephemeral affairs, you'll still have to put in plenty of practise if you want to complete them. The LazerBlazer games do apparently end after thirty stages, but I couldn't make it that far so if there's a fancy ending sequence I'm afraid you're going to have to see it elsewhere. Like I said, the ageing process has done terrible things to my reactions.


So that's Super Scope 6, half-a-dozen not particularly impressive lightgun games. Confront was okay, I suppose, but not a patch something like Time Crisis or even Yoshi's Safari. The puzzle games were interesting but deeply flawed, Mole Patrol and the first two LazerBlazers are just a bit boring, and the whole package most assuredly didn't accomplish what was presumably Nintendo's goal with Super Scope 6 - to sell people on the Super Scope. Of course, Super Scope 6 was bundled with the Super Scope, so if you owned the game then you already owned the gun, but playing this isn't going to send you running off to proselytise about the power of Nintendo's latest peripheral. It doesn't impress now and it didn't impress when I was a kid: I remember trying it at a friend's house just after he got one, only for the Super Scope to be put back in its box after a quick go at each game, never to be exhumed from its cardboard tomb. Well, we had too much Mario Kart to play to be messing around with electronic drainpipes.

Here's Ken's portrait from the arcade version of Street Fighter II.


Nothing too unusual here, just the face of a man ready for battle, the face of a man determined to give it his all, the face of a man who forgot about his eyebrows when he was dying his hair. It's a serious expression that show he means business, and he's in the business of punches.


By the time Super Street Fighter II rolls around, Ken has a new portrait portrait that show a distinctly more jovial side of his character, a beaming smile plastered across his face. Why is Ken so happy now? Maybe he's really pleased with the results of his trip to the barbers, where he asked the stylist to give him a He-Man hairdo. Perhaps he's excited because he can now punch so hard that his hand catches fire. Another explanation is that after the first tournament, where he fought stretchy Indian men and sumo wrestlers, he has come to the realisation that this Street Fighting lark isn't quite as serious as he thought it was going to be.


Then we get to the SNES port of Super Street Fighter II, and the transition to sixteen bits has given Ken's expression a subtly different cast. The narrowing of his eyes and the different angle of his lush black eyebrows has changed his mood from simple excitement to a psychotic desire to hurt others, his once-winsome smile replaced with a grimace that says to the viewer "I want to punch someone right now," and he doesn't much care who his victim is. Street Fighting can take a terrible toll on a person's psyche, which explains why Guile chose that hairdo.


From one ridiculously-muscled blonde American to another, here's Duke Nukem.


Duke's a man of action and not much of a deep thinker - watching all those eighties action movies so he could steal one-liners from them took up a lot of time that could have otherwise been used for intellectual self-betterment. He also takes a lot of steroids. Still, I think giving him these buttons to push in Duke Nukem 3D was a bit on the nose.


Just look at those things - so chunky and childlike that pressing them is at once strangely pleasing and faintly patronising. They're Fisher-Price buttons, buttons straight off a kid's toy. I half-expect a soothing female voice to say "A is for apple" or something whenever I activate them. Of course, this is Duke Nukem 3D so what generally happens when you push them is that something explodes and Duke repeats a line from an Evil Dead movie.


Final Fight 3 is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in the traditional mould, where brave heroes and elected city officials take to the mean streets to beat up a huge criminal gang, one thug at a time. Most of the bad guys are the usual fare, punks in sleeveless jackets with names like Billy and Ray. Then these weirdos start showing up.


This is Hunter, a baseball player wearing a hockey mask, and I think that's a fashion choice borne more from a desire to look like Jason Voorhees than the expectation that a hockey game will suddenly break out. I just think Hunter is a really neat bit of character design, especially as it comes after mostly fighting enemies that are "normal," as street punks go. I mean, you can construct a mental picture to explain why the likes of Billy and Ray are in this gang - young, deprived men from the wrong side of the tracks who are lured in by the camaraderie and potential financial gain that gang membership could bring. Then you see Hunter, and you start to wonder what his deal is. He likes baseball, that much is obvious, but I guess he likes clobbering people more than scoring home runs, and that's why he's lurking in back-alleys and not in the batting cages. Maybe it's another Splatterhouse-inspired case of a man being driven to violence by a haunted hockey mask, or he recently watched The Warriors and he was impressed by the cut of the baseball-themed gang's jib. Yeah, it's definitely that last one. He saw The Warriors and then came to work the next day trying to convince his fellow gang members that they should have a unified theme, like baseball players. It didn't work, obviously. That's why Guy is consoling Hunter in the screenshot above, a friendly arm around his shoulder as he says "don't worry, Hunter, you can start your own gang, and me and Haggar will beat you up, I promise."


The SNES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters features a character called Wingnut. Here's his character bio:


His favourite activity is Castlevania 2095, appropriately enough for a man-bat. Ever since I saw this as a kid I've been wondering about what Castlevania 2095 would be like. My original theories were that it's a Castlevania game set in space with lasers and Cyber-Dracula and what have you, or it's a TV series in the vein of Beverly Hills 90210. Now that I'm older and a little wiser, it's clear that this is a glimpse into a distant future where the trend for rebooting franchises and giving them the same name as the original has continued. That should actually read "Castlevania (2095)," the Ultra-HD remake of the original game for the PlayStation 74.


You know what, I'm going to expand this one to include Wingnut in general. How the hell did he end up in a TMNT videogame at all, never mind appearing in a fighting game ahead of Bebop, Rocksteady, Baxter Stockman and Casey Jones? He was in one episode of the original cartoon series and some spin-off comics, it's like making a Marvel comics fighting game and including Shuma-Gorath instead of Cyclops. Oh, right. Anyway, the staff at Konami obviously saw Wingnut somewhere along the line and thought "yes, a deranged mutant bat who dresses a little bit like Batman and who no-one has ever heard of, that's the character we want in our game." Good on them, I say, because Wingnut is pretty great, with his big, adorable grin and his lack of interest in the actual fighting tournament, and he deserves his brief moment in the spotlight.


Yes, Wingnut. Yes I do.


In Silent Hill 2, one of the bonuses for completing the game is the chance to collect and wield a chainsaw on your second playthrough. Having a chainsaw in any monster-slaying situation usually works out pretty well - just ask Bruce Campbell - but sadly the chainsaw in Silent Hill 2 is a little too cumbersome to be truly effective and you're probably better off just whacking things with a metal pipe. The chainsaw does have a couple of features worth noting, though.


One is that if you stand around for a while with the chainsaw equipped, James will occasionally lift it over his head and bellow like a maniac. Now, this never happened to me when I was first playing Silent Hill 2, because I was always too nervous of impending psychological demon attacks to stand still, but can you imagine if that happened after you'd, say, set the pad down to make a sandwich? That'd be terrifying, as well as providing a clue that James may not be in the best mental health (or at least it would if you didn't have to complete the game to unlock the chainsaw).
The other thing about the chainsaw is really impossible to see under normal gameplay conditions, but I lead such an exciting life that I spent some time looking through all the textures in the game. Would you like to see that chainsaw's texture?


That's right, the chainsaw has "BADASS" written along the blade. I have to assume that's an after-market modification applied by James himself. I don't think chainsaws come out of the box like that, having the word BADASS on the blade is just going to encourage people to get up to chainsaw mischief, the second-most dangerous kind of mischief (after clown mischief). It's wildly inappropriate for the mood of the game, but then that's one of the great things about the Silent Hill series - they've got just a touch of comedy to them, like the UFO endings and Heather's reluctance to stick her hand down a filthy toilet - and it works beautifully in contrast to the overall grimness of the franchise.
As a bonus, poking around in the textures also provided me with confirmation of the names of a couple of businesses in the town of Silent Hill.


There's a record shop called "I Love Groovy Music," for one thing. What a great name, it's so inclusive - who doesn't like groovy music? That town from Footloose? Exactly.


Then there's a business called Magical Envelopes. I have long wondered what the hell it could possibly be about these envelopes that makes them magical: I know this is Silent Hill, but I don't think the cult's insidious influence extends to granting dark powers to common stationery. The mystery only deepened when I saw the Fashion Envelopes banner, because the idea of a fashionable envelope is one that my brain is not equipped to handle. Maybe it's a command, "fashion envelopes from the paper and glue provided, fill this box with the envelopes you have fashioned, if you see the Red Triangle Thing please report it to your supervisor". That's industry in Silent Hill, folks - the tourist trade, drug trafficking and the best damn envelopes you ever saw.

Yes, Pirates, although the voice that shouts the game's title at the start seems to have forgotten there's a letter R in the word "pirates" and so that particular snippet of digitised speech sounds more like a very tired person saying "pieaats". That speech also plays every time you deposit a coin, which explains why I ended up with so many credits.


Here are the pirates that you will be controlling during your adventure. The male pirate is player one, and the female pirate is player two. I have no idea what is going on with the male pirate's trousers, but I do know they're making me feel a bit nauseous. Did he dip his hands into a tub of guacamole and then rub them down his thighs? Is he being monitored by a primitive infra-red camera that only works from the waist down? The female pirate looks much better, so it's a shame she's the player two character and I don't have anyone nearby who's willing to play old arcade games with me.


There are more terrible fashion decisions in the intro, as I'm told a tale by a salty sea-dog wearing a skin-tight teal turtleneck and a... thing on his head. I don't know what that thing is, only that I have a strong desire to use it to fake some very unconvincing UFO photographs. The sailor's full of stories of hidden treasure, and using the same sleepy voice as the opening speech he tells you that the map is "in the pirate's power". I think. He doesn't enunciate well.


To find the treasure, you must collect one of the three pieces of the map from each of these islands. Cartography is apparently a very loose discipline in the world of Pirates. I'm no geographer, but I don't think the Shetlands (part of Scoland) are that close to Papeete, which is in Polynesia. If I go through this whole game and end up with a "map" that's just a sheet of otherwise-blank paper with "TRESHUR" written on it in crayon I will be most disappointed.


I'll be heading to Shetland first, because it's the easiest of the three islands. I know this because it said "easy" when I highlighted it. Then it said "Cabin Boy," just in case you want the names of your difficulty levels to have a more nautical theme.
With a name as simple as Pirates, there's a lot of possibilities as to just what kind of game this is going to be. I was expecting some kind of action platformer, with buckles to be swashed and and the usual jumping and stabbing to be enjoyed, but instead I got this:


Unexpectedly, Pirates is a single-screen crosshair shooter! Games like this usually get called "Cabal clones", but I can never think much further than SNES classic Wild Guns when it comes to this genre, so that will remain my reference point.
To play the game, you have to shoot evil pirates and other assorted enemies until the bar at the bottom of the screen empties and you can move on to the next stage. As is almost always the case with games like this, the joystick moves both your pirate and your crosshair, unless you're holding down the fire button, in which case only the crosshair moves. You have a limited number of bombs you can throw, although they're not the usual screen-clearing super attacks but rather a way of quickly dealing big damage to a troublesome target. You can slide left or right using the second button to dodge projectiles... and that's about it. Go forth, young seaman, and blast anyone who dares to pop up in front of you like a target at a carnival shooting range.


Yes, even the witch riding the broomstick and the poor serving girl who has done nothing more hostile than walk around carrying some beer. She didn't offer me any, but that's hardly a reason to shoot at her. No, the 2,000 point bonus you get for shooting her is the real reason. I honestly felt a bit bad about trying to shoot the barmaid, so I stopped. I shot the witch instead, because she's a witch. There's less moral ambiguity there. Also, she drops power-ups when hit, and even if they are tainted by the foul blasphemy of black magic I can't turn them down.
You might have noticed that the house in the background is taking something of a pounding, and from this you can learn two things: yes, my aim is terrible and yes, Pirates has one of my favourite little videogame features: destructible backgrounds. Just how destructible are they?


Pretty goddamn destructible. Nix may have been a minor player in the world of arcade development, but it's not often you get to level an entire village in the first stage of a game, so they get a thumbs up from me. It gets better, though. Once you've dispatched enough enemies, the stage finishes and you're greeted by this:


A talking skull-and-crossbones who says "you got it!" with a literal glint in his eye. I... I think I'm in love. Even if I wasn't going to write about Pirates, I would have no choice other than to complete it, just to win the further acceptance of this talking skull.


The problem with playing a game that's part of such a rigidly structured genre is that once you've played one stage there's little in the following stages that's going to surprise you. That said, I didn't anticipate the appearance of that pirate with the big pink cannon. I know what you're all thinking, and if you'll forgive me for a momentary lapse into crudeness I can confirm that when this pirate first appeared on screen, I thought he was pushing his grossly oversized genitalia around in some sort of wheelbarrow. Now you know why they call him "Long" John Silver.


Well, I can't argue with the piratical theme of the third stage - galleons covered in convenient doors for swabs to appear from and cannons to blast away at our hero with. There are flying fish, too: relatively rare, as fish go, but still more appropriate to the swashbuckling setting than a witch on a broomstick, and just as packed with power-ups. Here, the flying fish I've just shot has dropped a skull icon that changes my weapon slightly, making it do more damage in a slightly wider area for a short period of time. You can also collect an icon that upgrades the rounds-per-second of your flintlock pistols from an already very impressive two or three shots a second to a rate of fire usually only seen in aircraft-mounted miniguns. I'll be honest, I prefer the latter power up as it seems to destroy the scenery faster, and isn't the complete destruction of every place I visit the real treasure that I'm seeking?


Then a boss showed up. It's a flying pirate ship - although it looks more like a kid's toy of Noah's ark - that rains down an endless supply of exploding aniseed balls on the player. After writing that sentence I had to check, and for a mere £15 I can get a three kilogram sack of aniseed balls from Amazon. Three kilograms! That'd last me, ooh, at least a couple of hours.
Right, anyway, back on track. There is a boss that you have to shoot, and it doesn't get more complicated than that aside from the the hitboxes on the exploding aniseed balls being way bigger than their sprites suggest. Just move well out of their way and keep shooting and you'll be fine.


With the flying ship defeated, the first island is clear and our hero can move on to the second island: La Isabela, a Caribbean hideaway packed with charming buildings and more pirates than a BitTorrent convention held off the coast of Somalia.
The jump in difficulty between this island and the previous one is immediately apparent, with projectiles - glowing orange orbs, the videogame standard, naturally - flying at me from all angles and less time to shoot down passing hot-air balloons for power-ups. In fact, I managed to clear the whole first island without losing a life until I underestimated the explosive power of the boss' aniseed balls, but right from the start island two is causing me problems.


I understand that piracy is a life of machismo and railing against authority, but I might be having an easier time if our hero hadn't decided to single-handedly assault this naval fortress. What's worse is that he steadfastly refuses to use the cannon at the bottom of the screen, even though it's pointing right at his target. You're a pirate, man! Load the cannon balls and light the taper and whatever other naval lingo there is for firing a cannon. Powder the mizzenmast? By the way, if you ever hear an English idiom and you don't know how it originated, there's a, like, ninety percent chance it has maritime origins. I suppose there's nothing much to do during a long sea voyage besides making up ever-more bizarre figures of speech until even the most basic tasks have names that sound as though they're straight from a bad Tolkien knock-off.


Behold, the Colosseum of ancient Rome, where the Emperors of that great civilisation gloried in brutal pirate-on-pirate combat! Also, they sometimes threw a few turtles in there for good measure! That's what those green lumps are in the middle distance are - turtles that are (understandably) hiding in their shells. I think they're lost.
Pirates is starting to get tough now, but you have a couple of tricks to help you survive beyond just shooting all the pirates before they shoot you. You can shoot enemy projectiles out of the air, for one thing, and very useful it is too. The other thing is that you're invincible during your sliding dodge. This sounds great, and it certainly has it's uses, but sliding's not as fast as simply walking sideways and I found that fifty percent of my slide-dodges ended with me realising that I had slid directly into the path of another bullet and I could do nothing but watch as my pirate stood up and immediately took a slug in the face. It seems odd to say about a game that's so focussed on gunplay and destruction, but patience is the key to a successful Pirates play session - concentrate on keeping yourself alive by shooting incoming projectiles and don't move your crosshair too far away unless you're sure you're safe, that's the way to make progress.


I this case, "progress" means the chance to do battle with this wonderful wooden tank. I like this tank, it's what I imagine a tank would look like if pirates gained access to tank-building technology - a tiny wooden castle on wheels. Sadly, the fight is almost identical to the previous boss battle, but hey - it's got drills! Drills that don't factor into the fight in any way. Hmm.


Island number three, where the evil pirates show a level of balance that will see them easily get jobs as circus high-wire artists if the piracy work dries up.
As the action becomes ever more hectic, Pirates' most glaring flaw becomes increasingly apparent: there's no point looking at the top half of the screen. As you dodge and shoot all the bullets flying your way, there's almost no chance to get your guns above the mid-way point of the screen, and anything going on up there might as well not exist. As you play, the part of the screen you're actually paying attention to shrinks smaller and smaller, which seems like a bit of a waste.


Overall, though, Pirates comes recommended by me. I'm a fan of the genre, so I'm a little biased, but it's a mostly engaging romp with a good level of challenge and some endearingly wonky presentation, especially that skull and crossbones. Any game that featured him would be worth playing. There are the previously-mentioned issues with the limited scope of your playing area, and your crosshairs could stand to be a little more accurate, but Pirates is definitely something I'm glad I played.


For the final stage, our hero assaults a network of caves which the native peoples are desperately trying to defend. Another pirate waddles onto the screen, probably searching for the same treasure map as me, but having two peglegs proved to be too much of a disadvantage for him and I was able to shoot him so hard he did the splits. For his sake I'm hoping he's wooden all the way up to the waist, because that looks extremely painful otherwise.


No doubt frustrated by my slaughter of their fellow indigenous people, the natives bring out their secret weapon - a giant crab that fires smaller exploding crabs at the player. It's evolution's greatest achievement! It's also a damn sight more difficult to beat than the previous bosses, because those little crabs are very agiles and they can explode. I feel like I should really hammer that point home. Exploding crabs, very dangerous. They go well with a garlic butter sauce, though.


The King Crab is eventually defeated, but the game isn't over! One final island has appeared, and now that I think about it that makes sense - completing the first three islands gave me the map, but now I have to go and get the treasure itself. Personally, I would have sold the map to someone else and let them collect the riches while I enjoy my new wealth in a place that isn't packed with explosive crustaceans, but that wouldn't make for a very exciting videogame finale, so off I go.


Nothing has changed for this final island besides the backgrounds, which have an Incan / Mayan / Generic South America Pre-History feel to them. They're not any more difficult than the previous stages, either, and after I died more times fighting that crab than in the rest of the game put together, it was nice to get back on a smoother section of the difficulty curve.


Something I like about Pirates is that everything is a valid target. If it's not the floor, chances are that shooting it will either reward you with a decrease in the "stage clear" bar or a power-up, and even if it's not a tangible reward then there's still the satisfaction of seeing buildings and weird stone heads crumble beneath the might of your pistols.


Here's the real final stage, and, erm, I don't have anything to say about it. It's the same as the other stages, only with a very distracting arrow in the background. Seriously, it's difficult to concentrate on killing the pirates when that arrow is constantly drawing your eye towards the ceiling, where there are no enemies. Well, that witch flew around in that area for a while, but she's not really an enemy, more a mobile power-up dispenser.


After a while the final boss rolls into view, and I have no idea what it's supposed to be. Apart from really ugly, I mean. I'm not questioning its death-dealing potential: the perpetual stream of swirling, hard-to-track firebombs it launches led to our hero spending the fight in an almost constant state of post-death invincibility, but a five-man Aztec drum kit isn't exactly what I was hoping for to top this game off. Where's my giant robo-Blackbeard, huh? Maybe a golem constructed from gallows, to better represent the worst fear of all pirates? Whatever this thing is, it's standing between me and my treasure and as such it has to go.


You know, when I first saw this shot of the pirates inspecting the hoard, the gold-coloured walls and floor made me think that all the treasure chests were empty. That would have been a much better ending, if you ask me, especially if coupled with a screen that showed the two pirates looking at each other while a semi-intelligible voice-over that sounds like it was recorded during a carbon monoxide leak said "but friendship is the real treasure".


There is treasure in those chests, of course, and so the game ends with our piratical pals sailing into the sunset on a ship they probably stole. And they say Grand Theft Auto glorifies crime, I just killed thousands of people and destroyed an ancient civilisation just to satisfy my greed and I didn't get so much as one Wanted star. Mind you, Niko Bellic never had to deal with a giant crab. Unless there's a mod for that. There's definitely a mod for that, isn't there?
Pirates, then. I really enjoyed it! It's fun, it looks nice enough, it's got a cheerful talking skull, what more could you ask for? It's not quite good enough for me to bestow the hallowed title of "hidden gem" to it, but if you like crosshair shooters then go and play a bunch of Wild Guns. If that's not enough for you, then Pirates is a pretty back-up.

We're only at the title screen and already the game is lying to me, because there is only one Camelot Warrior embarking upon this epic quest. He's not much of a warrior, either.


If the loading screen's anything to go by then I'm not even sure he's from Camelot, ancient land of chivalrie and graels and other fascinating medieval spelling choices. He feels sort of futuristic. I think. It's hard to get much of a handle on what he actually looks like. He's got a sword, that much is clear, and he seems to be fighting a tree with an unpleasant sinus infection. His hat is pointy, and his right leg has fallen off, leaving behind a pool of blood. I'm assuming that he'll have both legs in-game, but because this is on the Spectrum he'll probably control like he's only got one.
Camelot Warriors was originally released in Spanish and later translated into English, and by reading both sets of instructions I think I understand the gist of the story: our hero falls asleep, showing the kind of everyman qualities we can all relate to, but when he wakes up he's in Arthurian England. Four objects from the modern world have also been transported back with him, and he must take each of them to one of the four guardians of the land, who will destroy it. So, it's a Prime Directive, don't-accidentally-kill-your-grandad-in-the-past deal. Just imagine how drastically the course of history could be altered if Camelot was lit be electric lightbulbs instead of flaming torches!


The game begins, and there is the lightbulb, placed out-of-reach on an elevated ledge. That's a good piece of design, that: show the player straight away where their objective is, giving them an idea of what direction to take in order to reach it instead of fumbling around at random. The thing is, I'm not sure disposing of a lightbulb should really be a priority. Unless the Knights of the Round Table have also discovered electricity and built a generator, to them it's just going to be a glass bulb that doesn't do anything - hardly likely to irreparably damage the fabric of space and time. Also, why do I need to take it to a special guardian to have it destroyed? It's a light bulb. I destroyed a lightbulb by accident the other week by dropping it on my patio. Maybe Camelot has very strict policies on recycling.
While I was standing around pondering this, that owl flew straight into my face and killed me. One-hit deaths, is it? Lovely.


When I respawned, I took care of the owl with the trusty steel of my knight's blade. He swings his sword like he's trying to hit a home run rather than with the finesse of a true knight, but it got the job done. I've got that wasp in my sights next. Hang on, is that a wasp? A wasp with it's stinger on its face instead of its arse. Or a mosquito.
Defeating these enemies was much more difficult that I've made it sound, and for once it's not just because I'm bad at computer games. Our hero can jump, and he can swing his sword. Which of these commands do you think is activated by the joystick's fire button? That's right, in a decision so backwards it took me the entire game to wrap my head around it, up on the joystick is attack and the fire button makes you jump. I can only assume this is revenge for all the times I've complained about having to press up on the joystick to jump. It might not sound like much of a problem, but when an enemy is coming right at you and you only have one chance to hit it before it kills you, your brain will make you press fire and you will die repeatedly.


Other than that, things work as you'd expect. Move left and right, jump over obstacles and short enemies (because the Camelot Warrior can't crouch and therefore can't stab them) and make your way first to the item from the future / present and then to the guardian. You can see the first guardian here. He's a wizard. I'm going to call him Merlin. He's a wizard, this game is called Camelot Warriors, I figure it's a pretty safe bet. There's no reason to bother him just yet, because I don't have the lightbulb, but I need to drop off the ledge to his level and this is where it becomes apparent that this is one of those games that requires constant pixel-perfect movements, the slightest deviation from the one safe path ending in your sudden death. Dropping down without touching either the owl or the weird pink-badger thing took me a lot more attempts than I'd like to admit.


I refuse to believe that these things can kill me, though. Just look at them! It's a ping-pong ball with legs, just kick it to one side! Imagine the shame you'd bring on your noble house if one of these things finished you off: "Heere Lyes Camelot Warrior, Vanquish'ed on yon Fielde of Battel bye Pac-Man's Undeveloped Cousin".


As the Camelot Warrior makes his way through the monster-infested caverns, I managed to get a screenshot of him in mid-"jump", an action that seems to have nothing to do with the power of his legs. It looks a lot more like he's being pulled into the air by some unseen force that has grabbed his head, dragging him upwards by his bonce. Jumping around in Camelot Warriors has only solidified my theory that this is all taking place on an alien world - a planet with lower gravity than Earth, but a thick, soupy atmosphere that slows our hero's movements as he wades through it.
The actual controls are fine, though. Accurate and responsive, I couldn't pick a fault with them. The Camelot Warrior performs his actions when he's told, and it's a sad indictment of ZX Spectrum games that this can be considered a real (and relatively unexpected) highlight.


I had to go the long way around, but I've finally reached the lightbulb. I'd like to just nudge it off this platform and skip the slightly tedious trip back to the wizard, but I suppose I'd better pick it up.


Of course it doesn't burn, it's not plugged in.


So, I brought the lightbulb to Merlin, and what do I get for my troubles?


He turns me into a bloody frog. That's wizard gratitude for you. I'm risking life and limb to protect the realm from the insidious menace of electrical lighting, while you stand next to your bubbling cauldron - which I'm sure is just hot water and dry ice for effect, you poseur - turning brave knights into frogs? I hope an owl flies into your face, then we'll see how wise and powerful you are.


I decided to make the best of a bad situation and use my new amphibian form to explore this underwater grotto. It was surprisingly difficult to get in the water, but only because I foolishly assumed that touching the bubble on the water's surface wouldn't result in my immediate death. Of course the bubbles are fatal, bubbles in videogames always are. I've died to surface tension more times than I have to gunshot wounds.
There's a television at the bottom of the lake. That'll be the futuristic object I need to collect, then.


This area's like going for dinner at a filthy restaurant with inadequate refrigeration - it's all about avoiding the fish. I quite enjoyed being a frog, you know. Jumping through the extremely tight spaces between enemies and the scenery, or enemies and other enemies - you know, ninety percent of Camelot Warriors' gameplay - was just that little bit smoother when I was a frog, as though I were a shade more aero/aquadynamic.
By the way, that yellow thing in the middle of the screenshot above? That's an enemy. It's all well and good mocking artistically ineffective sprites, but I generally have some idea what they're supposed to be representing. This thing, though? I got nothing. Answers on a postcard, please.


I've just noticed that the frog looks really smug. I suppose you might if you were the only person in the kingdom who can watch Emmerdale. I'm not sure how I'm going to carry this television with my froggy flippers, but let's give it a go.


"The Mirror of Wisdom"? You're being a bit generous there, Camelot Warrior.


Mighty Poseidon, Lord of the Seas and Armchair Relaxer, will help me to destroy this accursed Mirror of Wisdom, hopefully before Jamie Oliver's latest cookery programme starts. Submerging a TV in a lake would have probably done the job anyway, but I don't want Poseidon to feel left out while all the other guardians are flexing their mystical muscles. I'm also hoping he'll turn me back into a human.


Oh good, I'm a man again. I'm also in a cave. The first two areas link together naturally - find a pond, solve part one, get turning into a pond-navigating frog - but once you drop the TV off with Poseidon there's a flash of light and bang, welcome to what might very well be Hell itself. That spider-thing down the bottom certainly looks kind of demonic.
It's a shame that Camelot Warriors didn't keep up the exploratory elements of the gameplay, or rather it would be a shame if our hero moved a bit faster and with a little more grace. Uncovering more and more of the game world as you unlock new abilities or are changed into exciting new animal forms is fun in theory, but not when you character jumps as though an invisible giant is lifting him up by the hair.


It seems that the game's author is beginning to tire of the whole affair, and the third item is in plain sight on the second screen  of this area. I did wonder how I was going to get past that wall / column to reach it - maybe by falling through that hole in the ceiling - but it turns out it isn't really a wall and you can walk right past it. It just looks almost identical to all the other extremely solid walls in the area, that's all. If you look closely, you can see that it's a slightly darker shade of red than the other walls, more of a "Satanic Crimson" than the "Lucifer's Fire Engine" that makes up the rest of the scenery.
The item, by the way, is Diet Coke. I don't know if that's supposed to be a vending machine or a really big can of Diet Coke, but it is unmistakably a Coca-Cola product.

Yes, until you drink too much and the diabetes makes your legs drop off.


Over the puddle and past the skinless badger, that's the way to the end of the stage. Negotiating this harrowing gauntlet is harder than it looks, partly because you can't walk past that tiny blue pebble on the left of the screen. No, you can't step onto it like any normal person would, you have to jump onto it. It makes you wonder how the hell the Camelot Warrior got this far in the first place. In life, I mean How does he fare in the grand halls of Camelot Castle? King Arthur would love to make him a Knight of the Round Table, but sadly the Camelot Warrior cannot make it up the steps into the throne room and thus cannot be knighted.


I found the dragon guardian, but while I was trying to safely navigate past this owl the dragon grew impatient and incinerated me with a blast of fire. Thanks. Now who's going to bring you the Diet Coke, hmm? This owl? I think not. Bit of a cruel one, that, and to any game developers reading this, please don't have previously harmless elements of your game suddenly kill the player without warning because that's really annoying.


Once I managed to get the Coke to the dragon without being burned to death, I was transported to a castle. The castle is home to a radical ghost, who floats back and forth in a pose that makes him look like he's riding an invisible skateboard, invisible skateboards being the very pinnacle of ghost technology.
At first I thought I was trapped between the table and the pillar, but I eventually figured out that you can stand on the purple bits of the pillar and also on that suspicious yellow spike sticking out of the wall. By jumping back and forth you can make your way to the top of the screen, and avoiding the enemies while doing so was surprisingly straightforward. It wasn't easy, not when the slightest mistake means you lose a life and all your jumps have to be pixel-perfect, but Camelot Warriors is definitely getting less difficult as it chugs along. The first few screens are the most difficult by a long shot, with enemies that are (literally) right in your face and some extremely unforgiving drops to negotiate, but by the time you reach this castle the enemies are more spaced out and easier to get into a position where you can hit them with your sword.


Even the platforming sections are easier at this point, because they don't always kills you if you mess them up. Brushing against bubbles is fatal, but falling five storeys onto a granite floor? The Camelot Warrior can shake that one off. Again, this is clearly taking place on a planet with lower gravity than Earth.


Out of my way, owl - I need that telephone, I can use it to call Batman.


Quickly, Warrior! Destroy that telephone before the good citizens of Camelot are besieged... by cold-calls about mis-sold payment protection insurance!


The positioning of that chandelier really tells a tale: the tale of someone who got really fed up with changing the candles on their traditional, ceiling-mounted chandelier
Camelot Warriors is drawing to a close, and once again I'd have to pass judgement on it with the familiar phrase "it's pretty good, for a Spectrum game". Damning with faint praise? Sure, but it's more of a problem with the limitations of the system than with the game itself. It controls well enough, there's an element of exploration, there are bits of decent animation in there. It must be doing something right because I didn't immediately hate it like I usually do with games that require perfectly precise movements with no margin for error. I'd say this is one to play using a code for infinite lives, which I'm sure is out there: having to start the whole game again after making five mistakes isn't much fun, but each mistake only sending you back to the start of the screen is more enjoyable, and it's not like you're missing out on much by playing it this way.


At long last - except not that long, because this game only takes fifteen minutes to beat if you know what you're doing - I have reached the final guardian. He is the shadiest-looking king ever to rule a kingdom, holding court over his castle full of ghosts and spiders while wearing a yellow anorak, his eyes two pinpricks of light beneath his crown. He's definitely someone I want to entrust the safety of the realm to. I feel safe just being in the same room as this creepy, phantasmic royal. Just give him the telephone and slowly back away, Camelot Warrior.


That's it, with the telephone destroyed the adventure is concluded and the player is treated to the "it was all a dream" ending. It took me a while to find Johnny in this picture, but in my defence I was not expecting Johnny to be a severed head wearing a pith helmet. And look, all the objects I collected during the game are scattered around Johnny's bedroom, or the room at the care home where they look after the decapitated safari heads. That's gotta be a Coke vending machine. Actually, I think the staff have just pushed Johnny out into the hallway, the heartless swine, with the TV placed sideways so he can't see it and only a dragon's head for company. No wonder her retread into a mental fantasy.
It's difficult to fully recommend Camelot Warriors, because the hack-and-slash platform genre isn't exactly thin on competition, but I fancied playing a Spectrum game and I could have done much worse than this one. If nothing else, it has reinforced my belief that wizards are an ungrateful, spiteful bunch.

I sometimes wonder if there's any point writing about games as well-remembered and universally beloved as Punch-Out, unsure whether I'll have anything new or interesting to say. Then I remember I never have anything new or interesting to say, and I've been playing Punch-Out a bit recently so here we go.


Here's Mike Tyson. Just in case you didn't recognise him, Nintendo were kind enough to repeat his name over and over again as the background to jog your memory. Now, before I get started, there's the issue of which version of Punch-Out I'll be playing - as I'm sure many of you know, there a few possibilities here. The game was originally released as Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, with the final opponent being Iron Mike himself. Later, the game was rebranded as Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, with Tyson being replaced by the eponymous new champ. As kids, myself and everyone I knew assumed that this was because of Tyson's arrest and conviction for rape, but apparently the license had simply expired and Nintendo chose not to renew it, seemingly thanks to Tyson's shock defeat by Buster Douglas in 1990. If that's the case, the sighs of relief from Nintendo's marketing department probably caused a small hurricane.
There are no differences between the two other than the final opponent and the words "Mike Tyson's" on the title screen, but I'll be playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! anyway because it makes the end of the game a bit more climactic than a bout against some bloke whose name sounds a bit like an insomnia medication.


You'll be playing as Little Mac, a young prospect from the Bronx, pictured above alongside his trainer Doc Louis. Doc Louis looks as though he's just remembered that he was supposed to pick his kid up from football practise six months ago, and Little Mac... well, he looks kinda dumb.


Cheerful, sure, but really, really stupid. Thicker than two short planks nailed onto a copy of War and Peace, denser than a loaf of bread baked using lead instead of flour. When you see the kind of freaks Mac is up against, his apparent stupidity will go a long way towards explaining why he's in the ring in the first place.
Also, I love that "playing the role of Mac, it's you!" line at the bottom. I hope no one was too disappointed that they wouldn't be playing the role of Doc Louis, shouting encouragement from ringside and catching Mac's spit in a bucket.


Doc Louis has just realised that his other kid has been waiting for him in the Tesco car park for nearly three years.
Little Mac's boxing career begins with a match against Glass Joe. He's a Frenchman who's not good at fighting, fancy that. I didn't think that stereotype was around in the '90s, but here we are, about to face a man from France who has has ninety-nine professional fights and has lost them all. I know promising young fighters generally start their careers by fighting untalented journeymen, but with his 99-and-0 record I think Mac would get better practise fighting a lamppost.


Our fighters step into the ring, the bell sounds and Punch-Out is underway, each fight promising up to three rounds of three minutes each as Mac climbs the rankings by pummelling a succession of cartoony and extremely large opponents. I said Mac was mentally dense, but his physical body must be made out of neutron star material because he only weighs three pounds less than Glass Joe despite Joe being eight feet tall with fists bigger than Mac's head.
So how does this work? Well, the goal is obviously to punch the other guy until they go down for a ten-count or, more likely, to knock them down three times in the same round for a TKO victory. To accomplish this, Mac has four main punches - left and right body shots and left and right straights to the head. Mac has two hands, and hey, the NES pad has two buttons, would you look at that, so there's one button for left and one button for right-handed punches, with head shots executed by holding up on the d-pad while you punch.


Yeah, like that. Punching alone isn't enough for victory, however, and the most vital skill to master for Punch-Out success is not getting hit. I mean, that's pretty true in regular boxing, but even more so in Punch-Out where everyone you fight is so tall you have to jump to hit them in the face and they generally weight hundreds of pounds more than you.
The most useful evasive manoeuvre is the dodge - pressing the joypad left or right will make Mac lean in that direction, (hopefully) avoiding any incoming punches. You can block, too, by pressing down on the pad, but dodging is just cooler, so do that.


That's all you need to know to beat Glass Joe - wait for one of his incredibly telegraphed punches, dodge to the side and then whack him in the face. Upon doing to he will be momentarily stunned - you can tell when this is because his expression changes to one of a fish that's licked an electrical socket - allowing you to follow up with more punches to the head. Keep that up and in no time at all Joe's record will be 100 losses, no wins.


Mario doesn't half get around. After this, he's going to go over some applications for planning permission before giving a lecture on the latest discoveries in the field of quantum electrodynamics.
As ever, Mac's face betrays not the merest hint of an intelligent thought.


All right, I'm already ranked number 2! Given how little a threat Glass Joe posed, I would say Mac is definitely ready for the next challenge. Unless the challenge is reading a book or doing simple addition rather than boxing. I think Mac might struggle in that case.


Oh good, it's more fighting, this time against a German fellow called Von Kaiser. I once described Punch-Out as "a pixellated catalogue of as many ethnic clichés as possible" and I think I'm happy to stick with that because this German is called Von Kaiser, and he's not even close to the worst of them. This NES version of Punch-Out is a sequel-slash-remake of the the arcade game of the same name, and it contains many of the same fighters, so whoever created the characters for the original game is to blame. One boxer who appeared in the arcade version but not the NES port was an Italian called Pizza Pasta, a name that's truly amazing for its sheer lack of effort more than anything else. Imagine if they'd set the whole game in Italy, it'd be packed with characters like Linguine Gondola and Vespa Massive Government Corruption. It's a shame they didn't stick with it, I could have been fighting a British contender called Steakn Chips.


Beating Von Kaiser isn't any more difficult than beating Glass Joe, and in a way I think it might even be easier - or at least faster - because Von Kaiser is slightly more aggressive and thus spends more of the fight throwing big, easily-dodged punches that you can punish him after.
What this fight does introduce is a gameplay element that's at the very core of the Punch-Out experience, and that's learning and reading your opponent's moves. Most boxers in the game have a "tell" that lets you know they're about to throw a punch. In Von Kaiser's case, he wobbles his head back and forth like a bobblehead in a tumble drier, giving you plenty of time to get out of the way. Naturally the later fighters aren't quite so obvious about it, but deciphering their movements and learning what comes next so you can accurately counter it is what Punch-Out is all about. I've seen it described as a puzzle game pretending to be a boxing game, and there's a lot of truth to that.


Blimey, that was fast. The Minor Circuit must be a pretty awful division if Glass Joe and Von Kaiser were the second and first ranked fighters, but getting a title shot after only two matches still seems a bit premature. Okay, which country gets a semi-offensive stereotype this time?


Why, it's Japan - nice to see that Nintendo didn't spare their own nation from the avalanche of cultural clichés that make up the game's cast.


Piston Honda is a serious man with serious eyebrows, eyebrows that he waggles to let you know when he's going to clobber you. He's also the first opponent with a real special move, a flurry of four quick jabs that can quickly drain your energy and, even worse, are hard to avoid by dodging. Instead, blocking is the better option here, but you can't just hold down block - Mac drops his guard after each punch, so you have to get into the rhythm of blocking again after each blow. One of Punch-Out's great strengths is that it's a game all about rhythm, of finding the right moments to dodge and feeling the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of a successful flurry of punches, all of it courtesy of a control system that's both simple and extremely precise.


Speaking of controls, there's one other punch I haven't mentioned yet: Mac's Super or Star Punch. Hitting your opponent just as they're about to throw certain punches can jar them out of the move, rewarding you with a star, the counter for which you can see in the top-left of the screen. Each star allows you to press the start button to unleash one giant leaping uppercut that will do a ton of damage if it connects. In the screenshot above, I did not connect, because I am still not very good at Punch-Out even after all these years. At least it gives you a good view of the effort Little Mac is putting into the punch, straining so hard that all his facial features have disappeared.


Once I did manage to hit Piston Honda with a few Star Punches - something that he seems particularly susceptible to - Mac's victory was assured and the WVBA Minor Circuit gained a new champion. Mac's reward? The adulation of the crowd, the chance to step up to the Major Circuit and a small trophy depicting an artist's mannequin standing atop a golden goblet.


Following your championship triumph, you're treated to the iconic scene of Little Mac doing his roadwork while Doc Louis rides a bicycle ahead of him. Little Mac and the Statue of Liberty have the exact same face. This is surely an omen that prove Mac is destined to become the true hero of all Americans.


Mac's first opponent on the Major Circuit is Don Flamenco, a Spaniard who's both a lover and a fighter. Don's bio says he's 23 years old. I know boxing can take a toll on a man, but there's no way he's only 23.


He looks like Prince Charles! Prince Charles after an unfortunate incident involving his head and a vice, but still, there's a definite resemblance to the heir to the British throne. There's the germ of a plot for a family friendly action-adventure movie in there somewhere - European royal is mistaken for a heavyweight boxer and finally learns the value of hard work after training for his upcoming title defence, while two-weight champion "Chopper" Gonzales launches a few ships and goes to a polo match. That's King of the Ring, coming to cinemas this holiday season.


Don seems like a challenge at first, and an aggravatingly cocky one at that: he taunts the player into trying to hit him, and when they do he counters with the Flamenco Uppercut. This could prove tricky if there wasn't a simple way to beat Don Flamenco: dodge his punch, hit him to stun him and then alternate between left and right punches to the face. As long as you keep up the left-right-left-right rhythm, Don will never become un-stunned and you can drain his entire energy bar. If it was any other boxing game I'd suspect this was a glitch, but because Punch-Out places such a strong emphasis on learning and exploiting your opponents' weaknesses I have to assume it was included purposely.


As I took a decent screenshot of it during the Don Flamenco fight, this seems like a good opportunity to talk about Mac's stamina. Measured in hearts, which are recorded in the bar at the top-left of the screen, Mac's stamina decreases when he blocks a punch or misses with a swing of his own, or when he gets punched. When your hearts reach zero, Mac turns pink and can't throw a punch, leaving you to dodge for a while until he gets a few hearts back and returns to his usual fist-throwing self.
I've always thought the stamina gauge was a touch redundant, but then again I think that might have been part of Nintendo's cunning plan - I tended to completely forget about it until my opponent blocked a few of my punches and bang, suddenly I can't fight back and I look like a wad of chewed bubblegum, panic stations are initiated and Mac gets a beating because I wasn't paying attention to how many hearts I had.


Next up: King Hippo. You can tell he's a king, because he's wearing a little crown that definitely didn't come with a Pretty Princess Dress-Up Kit with Real Crystal Accessories. I wonder if Hippo is his given name and he's a king, or if he's the king of the hippos. Either way, I feel confident I can beat him. He's got plenty of chin to aim for, for starters.


Okay, I think this represents at attempt by the fight promoters to surreptitiously slip some inter-species boxing onto the fight card, because I'm fairly sure King Hippo is actually a shaven gorilla wearing gloves and shorts.
Punch-Out's puzzle-like qualities come to the fore in this fight, as you dodge King Hippo's powerful punches whilst trying to figure out a way to actually hurt him - all of your shots are brushed aside until the fateful moment when the king raises his fist high in the air and, crucially, opens his massive gob. This is your chance, Mac - slug him in the mouth so hard that his shorts fall down!


This gives you a chance to clobber Hippo in the stomach while he struggles to hoist his trunks back up, leaving his vulnerable belly-button exposed. I wonder what horrors are lurking under those plasters. I can't imagine Hippo Island has the best medical facilities, I reckon "stick a plaster on it" is about the extent of their medical capabilities. I'm going to guess it's a hernia, which explains why King Hippo can never get up if you knock him down. Not to worry, his boxing career may be over but he's still going to make plenty of cash thanks to his appearances in the Captain N cartoon. Speaking of, I just looked up King Hippo's appearance in that show and I had (mercifully) forgotten that he was drawn with big, floppy man-breasts with extremely prominent nipples. Hopefully one day I'll manage to forget this fact again.


Great Tiger occupies the number one ranking, and as a videogame Indian you know he's got mystical powers, he will meditate then destroy you, something about curry, etcetera etcetera. At least most countries sometimes have slight variations on their traditional videogame stereotypes - the British are posh but also sometimes Cockney geezers - but Indians? Mystics and fakirs, every one.
I love the contrast between the images of Little Mac and Doc Louis on one corner and Great Tiger and the tiger skin in the other, especially because it seems to suggest that the tiger pelt is Great Tiger's trainer. I want it to pop up between rounds and say "don't worry, Tiger, you're doing grrrreat!"


A real test of reflexes, beating Great Tiger requires you to pay close attention to the gem in the centre of his turban. It flashes when he's about to strike, and hopefully you'll be quick enough to get out of the way. It's not hugely difficult, but it is fun, like every fight in Punch-Out - each bout is its own unique experience, and each must be approached with a winning mix of the cerebral (learning your opponent's moves) and the physical (getting out of the bloody way, punching back).


Great Tiger also has a special move where he spins around the ring at high speed, stopping only to throw punches at Mac. Easily blockable punches, it turns out, and you can deal with this move the same way you thwarted Piston Honda's jab combo. Great Tiger's wide open to counter-attack once he's finished, too, so you spend much of the fight hoping he'll do his special move so you can punish him for trying it. Punch-Out is incredibly satisfying in that respect, because once you've mastered your opponent's moves they go from being something to fear to a tool you can use to win, and that's a wonderful feeling.


And now, the main event, the Major Circuit Title Bout between Little "Tiny" Mac and Bald Bull, the champion and future exhibit in the Museum of Oddly-Shaped Human Skulls. Look at that thing, it's like an ostrich egg with a face painted on it.


He's a big lad, isn't he? The original arcade version of Punch-Out had the player's boxer displayed as a wireframe, so you would see the person you were fighting through their body, but obviously this approach wouldn't have worked on the less-powerful NES. Thus, Little Mac was made, well, little and his opponents huge, and as far as I'm concerned this worked out exceptionally well for the the game. It gives you a sense of overcoming the odds, of earning your victories, when you're beating down boxers the size of modest two-bedroom houses. It also allows the NES to impress graphically, with each boxer's massive sprite being packed with character and explaining why most of them are remembered to this day in gaming circles.


Bald Bull is definitely well remembered, and in my case that's because of his Bull Charge special move. Bald Bull hops towards Little Mac in a terrifying game of chicken with one of two outcomes: either Bull gets through and punches Mac hard enough to immediately knock him down, or Mac throws a body shot at just the right time, catching Bald Bull right in the gut and knocking him down. It was nice to discover that the correct timing for this punch, honed through hours of childhood battles against Bald Bull, was still floating around in my central nervous system, and I managed to catch him with the telling blow without even thinking about what I was doing. A pretty crappy superpower, yes, but a satisfying way for Mac to win his second belt.


The trophy's a bit bigger now, there's an egg cup between the mannequin and the goblet.


Little Mac's training at night now, so his bright pink tracksuit now seems less like a horrible fashion mistake and more a piece of hi-visibility safety gear. You should always be careful near roads, but after being punched by Bald Bull I don't think getting hit by a car would even register on Mac's pain sensors.


Now Mac's fighting in the World Circuit, and his first opponent is... Piston Honda again. You also have rematches against against Don Flamenco and Bald Bull, and while they do fight slightly differently - Don has a few new punches and Bald Bull can only be knocked down with Star Punches or by countering the Bull Charge - they're not different enough for me to go through them again. Don Flamenco is still an absolute chump, by the way.


While I'm fighting Piston Honda, I'd like to mention this bit of trash-talking that he sometimes spouts between rounds. Not up to the usual boxing standards, that one. "I'll win by technical knock-out" is hardly up there with "I want to eat your children" or even the usual threats of a comprehensive and extremely painful victory, but I can appreciate the almost poetic style.


A new fighter appears: Russian fizzy drink aficionado and yet another inductee into the Museum of Oddly-Shaped Human Skulls, it's Soda Popinski! Just in case you're having VGJunk beamed to your distant alien planet or something, the soda pop he drinks is actually booze. Popinski's original name was famously Vodka Drunkenski, so just remember that someone once sat down and thought "yes, this will be a good name for the Russian character in my videogame." That was a series of events that actually happened, for real.


There's nothing particularly special about Soda Popinski - it's just a good, solid fight against a tough opponent with no major gimmicks. I mean, the fact that he consumes ten times his body weight in fizzy pop a day is a gimmick, but it doesn't affect the gameplay any. Instead, it's a test of the reflexes and boxing skills you've honed over the previous fights, concentration etched on the player's face as they search for a way to land a Star Punch and desperately try to avoid looking to closely at Popinski's very tight briefs. I guess he misunderstood "trunks" to mean "swimming trunks".


He can't drive because he drank too much soda pop, you see. If you were really into over-analysing videogames, you could build a case for Soda's love of fizzy beverages mirroring Soviet desires to partake in the products of the Western world during the Cold War, with echoes of the production of Marshal Zhukov's "White Coke." I would never go that far, though. I'm too busy laughing at everyone's oddly-shaped skulls.


The number-one ranked Mr. Sandman has a relatively normally-shaped skull, although I'm sure Little Mac is hoping that won't be the case after the fight. It took me until I was approaching adulthood to realise that he's called Mr. Sandman because he's going to put you to sleep, because, like Mac,  I'm kind of dumb. I hope that's why he's called Mr. Sandman, anyway, and he doesn't creep into kids' bedrooms at night and knock them unconscious.


Ah, Mr. Sandman, the bout where so many of my youthful attempts to complete Punch-Out were unceremoniously crushed. It's Mr. Sandman's triple uppercut that's the problem, a flurry of three punches that will absolutely demolish Mac if any of them hit him and which are thrown without warning. Okay, so there's some warning, because Mr. Sandman stops moving for a moment before he throws them, but that just makes you tense up as you wait for the inevitable. My problem was that I always got too tense and then dodged too early, so that Mac was leaning back into position just as Sandman's uppercut came my way.


Of course, in this modern age of the internet and FAQs and embarrassingly accurate fan wikis, I had the key to Mr. Sandman's downfall revealed to me after about seven seconds on Google, and his weakness is his body: specifically, you have to stun him with a shot to the head and then you can get a few hits in on his body. I must have figured this out at some point in my youth, because I know I've fought the remaining boxers before, but I didn't remember this particular trick and I sure as hell wouldn't have figured it out on my own. I know it now, though, and with a bit of good fortune on the uppercut-dodging front I managed to get sweet revenge on Mr. Sandman for all the times he made me shout words at my NES that a nine-year-old shouldn't even know.


The champion of the World Circuit is a body-building fanatic called Super Macho Man. I think it's safe to assume he's worried about the size of his genitalia. Anyone who calls themselves "Super Macho Man" is overcompensating for something.


Yes, he certainly looks like someone who's secure in his masculinity. He found time to dye his hair from grey to black, so once again I'm left wondering whether his official age of 27 is entirely accurate.
After the bruising onslaught of Mr. Sandman, Super Macho Man is something of a relief to fight: he's not so fast, there's no special gimmick to hurting him and his punches seem easier to avoid. He does have one dangerous trick up his sleeve, or down his trunks, though, and that's his super spinning punch.


Sometimes he does it once and it's easy enough to avoid, but other times Super Macho Man spins and spins and spins with his fist extended. I'm not sure how this is hitting Little Mac, given that he barely reaches up to the waistband of Macho Man's budgie smugglers, but hit him it does and it results in a knockdown every time. It was at this point that I remembered that Little Mac can duck by double-tapping down on the d-pad, and I avoided Macho's whirling tornado of pain by repeatedly ducking as fast as I could and praying. Miraculously, this seemed to work, and with his most powerful move neutralized Little Mac could pick off the champion at his leisure.


"Last night, we found a small but great champ" cries the newspaper, although given the huge size difference between Little Mac and his opponents readers would be forgiven for assuming this was an April Fool's joke. Well, this is the April 1st edition of the paper. The newspaper also subtly gives you a password and tells you about the Dream Fight, but I'm more interested in that "Daddy, come back home!" message. Is it directed at Mario, whose picture accompanies the headline? Does Mario have children that Nintendo have kept secret for all these years, assuming that Baby Mario is actually Mario as a baby and not some secret love-child? Or is Mario desperately crying out for some parental affection? Everyone needs a family, and Luigi just isn't cutting it. It's a mystery that will never be solved, because it's time for the showdown we've all been waiting for: Little Mac versus Mike Tyson.


What an excellent pixel caricature of Iron Mike, depicted in happier times before he went to prison and started biting human ears. In fact, both Mac and Mike look genuinely happy to be there, with no greater desire in their hearts than to discover once and for all who is the best boxer in the world. I feel confident. I'm ready. I can do this.


Oh god no, I'm wrong, I can't do this. Please send help.


Tell my family I love them. I'm going into the light now. No more tears. No more pain. No more of Mike Tyson's fists trying to separate my head from my neck.


As you might have guessed, Tyson is a far, far tougher challenge than anything you've faced before. For the first half of round one he does nothing but throw gigantic uppercuts that knock you down should just one of them connect, adding different punches to the mix as the fight goes on. He doesn't have special moves, because he doesn't need them, but while his style may be impetuous his defence is not quite impregnable. The thing is, dodging alone isn't enough any more. It's something you'll probably notice as you progress through the game, but in this fight it's vital to realise that it's also important when you dodge. Move too soon and you'll avoid the punch but have no time to throw a counter of your own before Mike covers up, granting an extra layer of tension to the proceedings. You can get through, though, if your reflexes are sharp enough. There's a dollop of luck involved, too. If it all comes together for you, then maybe, just maybe, you can beat Mike Tyson.


Finger speed? Tyson's gone meta, he knows this is all a game. Anyway, I don't think it was down to finger speed as much as it was about headache-inducing levels of concentration. What happened was this: after a war of attrition, I eventually managed to beat Mike on a points decision. I was so overcome with excitement that, like the big clumsy dope I am, I accidentally hit the reset button on the emulator. Rather than put myself through the wringer again, I used a "one-punch-KO" Game Genie code to beat Mike for a second time, and you know what? It felt good. After all the sweat and toil I put into Punch-Out as a kid, I reckon I'd earned it.


And that's it, Punch-Out is over, Little Mac can retire with a perfect record and I can go through some deep breathing exercises in an attempt to relax my body, which has tensed up like a prison warden who's realised he's lost his keys. Before I finish up, though, there's the small matter of Tyson's replacement in the non-Mike Tyson's version of Punch-Out.


Look at this big palooka. From Dreamland, are you? That might explain why you look like a 'roided-out version Bert from Sesame Street. That's something that should only happen in a dream - a horrible, unsettling dream.


Mr. Dream is nothing but a re-coloured, head-swapped version of Tyson, which is fair enough. I can cut Nintendo some slack on this one, because with Punch-Out they created the best sports game - but not really a sports game - of the 8-bit era and one of the NES' very finest titles. As a workout for mind and fingers there's little to challenge it on the ol' grey box, and it's fondly remembered by everyone I've ever met who's played it, which is amazing when you consider it's a boxing game - a sport that's hardly one of the world's favourites. It's beautifully constructed, with massive sprites that ooze character (and aspartame, in Soda Popinski's case) and a soundtrack of tunes that are instantly memorable and yet never seem to get annoyingly repetitive despite there barely being a handful of them in the game.
It seems pointless to tell you to play Punch-Out, because more than likely you already have, but if this one somehow passed you by then give it a go. If you don't feel yourself getting into it, I'll eat my gem-studded magic turban.

An aqua jack is like a lumberjack, but they cut through plumbing instead of trees. Or it's a device used to raise your boat so you can change its tyres. Or it's neither of those things, and is merely a nonsense phrase that Taito thought would make for a good videogame title. I trust your intelligence enough to let you decide which of those is true. The logo is making me want a delicious, refreshing can of Sprite lemon-and-lime flavoured soft drink. Hey, between this and the article about that Game Gear game they sponsored, I think the Coca-Cola Company could stand to throw me a few free samples.


The intro begins, and Aqua Jack and his female partner Aqua Jill are lying in verdant meadow, watching an aeroplane drift lazily overhead. Credit to Taito, you don't often get arcade action games that start with the heroes relaxing by a lake, possibly telling each other whimsical stories about where that plane is headed.


Ah. There goes the picnic, then. Aqua Jack and Aqua Jill are soldiers - I think, they might just be big fans of sleeveless fatigues - and as such they cannot let this attack on their homeland stand. Burning with righteous anger, they speed to the scene in their high-performance machine. No, not a jet fighter. Not a helicopter, either, nor a tank, jeep, APC or any other armoured land vehicle. They've got something unique, something the enemy can have no defence against. They have...


...a hovercraft. That's why they were hanging around near that lake, I mistook them for soldiers but they're actually ferry operators on their lunch break.
There was bound to be a hovercraft game somewhere amongst the vast library of arcade titles that use sprite-scaling technology. Cars, helicopters, fighter planes, motorcycle and kids who cling tightly to a flying gun as it speeds through a series of alien landscapes have all taken a starring role, so it was only a matter of time before someone got round to bolting a ruddy great cannon onto a hovercraft and calling it a shoot-em-up, which is exactly what is happening in Aqua Jack.


You can get a good idea of how Aqua Jack plays just by looking at the above screenshot, I reckon. You move both the crosshair and the hovercraft at the same time, avoiding obstacles and incoming fire as you float through the sunset swamp while also trying to shoot the various enemies with your massive bullets. Those white-and-yellow ovals are the projectiles that I'm firing, and  their ridiculous proportions elicit two observations. One is that they're bigger than the gun they came out of, so maybe this hovercraft is equipped with more advanced technology that I first thought if they can bend the rules of physical space like that. Secondly, they block your view of an awful lot of the screen, which is not helping with the whole "not dying" aspect of the gameplay.


Okay, this one wasn't the bullets' fault, I was too busy concentrating on those helicopters to notice that I'd sailed into a minefield. Is "sailed" the right word for controlling a hovercraft does? "Piloted," possibly. "Drove" if you're on land.
The next time I came to a mine, I tried to jump over it, because there's a jump button in Aqua Jack. It didn't work, and my second explosive death made me think that maybe Aqua Jack has too many bloody controls. Not only do you have to steer, shoot and jump, but you also have a limited supply of screen-clearing special weapons (I've got to set up a macro to type that phrase for me) and, oddly for a hovercraft, a nitro-boost that's very reminiscent of the one in Chase H.Q. That's not surprising, given that the games run on the same arcade board, but four buttons feels a tad over-generous for a game that's really very simple. Jumping could have easily been removed at absolutely no detriment to the gameplay, and all the turbo boost does is encourage you to forget about shooting the bad guys and just drive / sail / hover towards the goal as quickly as possible. A faster overall game speed and no nitro would have been a compromise that served the game better, if you ask me. Yes, I know you didn't ask me.


Before long I reached the boss, where I witnessed the majestic sight of a heavily-pregnant plane giving birth to a litter of hovercraft, dropping them into the swamp that will be their home for the first few years of their life until they develop the wings and fuselage of adulthood.
I wouldn't worry too much about the hovercraft, they don't do much besides get in the way and you can move a surprisingly large distance to the left and right. Just concentrate on shooting the plane - which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be the plane from the intro - and the fight will be over in about twenty seconds.


Alright then, revenge is ours. The bomber has been neutralized, neutralized into a million tiny pieces, so this crisis is over and Aqua Jack and Aqua Jill can go back to lounging around on the waterfront.


They're just going to stop off to give this guy a hug real quick, then it's right back to the lakeside.


I think stage two is set in The Netherlands. It's got something of a Dutch feel to it, don't you think? Amsterdam is about fifty percent canal, so let's just say that's where I'm heading. These are rather nice canals, too - it doesn't look much in still screenshots but Aqua Jack's water effects are very good, to the point where I suspect the effort of creating them diverted a lot of time and energy that would have otherwise been spent coming up with interesting enemy patterns or power-ups.


Still, it shows off the versatility of the hovercraft as an amphibious assault vehicle. As long as there's a nice, gentle slope out of the water and my rubber air skirt doesn't get popped, this incredibly vague terrorist organisation don't stand a chance! Okay, okay, so maybe I'm being too harsh on the humble hovercraft. It's perfectly acceptable as videogame vehicle go - I know I had a lot of ramping my hovercraft into unsuspecting coastal villages when I was playing Just Cause 2 - but I don't think anyone would argue that a flying motorcycle or something wouldn't have been much cooler and made just as much sense.


For a boss, stage two offers up a tank on a bridge. I'd like to tell you how this boss works, what its attack patterns are, who its favourite member of N*SYNC is, anything really, but it blew up after even less hits than the first boss and so never got to show its stuff. The battle was over so quickly that I didn't even realise it was a boss fight until my hovercraft hovered away without me, so that should be some indication of just how pointless this encounter was.


Before moving on, our heroes take the time to threaten Fidel Castro. I like the way he's pointing them to their next destination, which is down the river. What a spot of luck, with us being in a hovercraft and all.


More greenery, more helicopters and more hovercrafts (evil subdivision) in stage three. With the similarities in setting and the complete non-entity that was the previous boss, it's baffling that stage two and three weren't just combined into one level.
As there's precious little else to discuss in stage three, I'll use this opportunity to mention that your gun has something of a lock-on feature - get your crosshair near enough to a bad guy and it'll "click" onto them until you move the joystick well away from them. It works well, and the extra help with the aiming is definitely appreciated, especially in later stages when shooting enemies takes a back-seat to the increasingly frantic dodging of naval mines and hastily-erected mid-river walls.


Well, the boss is definitely more of a challenge. That is a lot of missiles. Not pictured - my hovercraft exploding roughly 0.03 seconds after this screenshot was taken. Yes, I tried jumping over the missiles and no, it didn't work. I've got infinite continues, that's something of a balm to my bitterness.


Meanwhile, in a never-previously-mentioned part of the game, a bald man in a conference room surveys the carnage that Aqua Jack and Aqua Jill have wrought on a television set that's impressively large by the standards of the early nineties. I assume this is the head villain, then? He's wearing a suit and sitting in a swivel chair, just waiting for a James Bond type to enter the room so he can spin around an produce a pithy one-liner, so he has to be the villain.


Stage four is set on a river, but don't worry, there are some rocks nearby so that ought to keep interest levels high. There are a couple of other things that caught my eye: one is that helicopter, because it reminds me of the main bad guy's helicopter from the cartoon M.A.S.K., which has led me to a shocking discovery. Thinking of M.A.S.K. meant I had to listen to the theme song, only to learn that the lyrics are "always riding hot on Venom's trail" and not "always ri-i-ding on Venom's trail" with a weird vocal hiccup on the word "riding", as I had thought from the first time I saw the show as a kid up until twenty minutes before I started writing this article. Well, that's my M.A.S.K. story, I hope you enjoyed it. Maybe one day I'll tell you my other M.A.S.K. story, about how I found some M.A.S.K. toys in an abandoned steel mill as a kid. Actually, that's pretty much the whole story.


Oh right, the other thing. That would be these walls that pop up out of the water. They're very effective hovercraft countermeasures, and from here on they'll be appearing with a frequency that sadly strays just to the wrong side of annoying. I'm not even sure you can shoot them out of the way - if you can, they absorb a lot of punishment before falling, certainly more than I ever managed to dish out. That probably has something to do with my refusal to stop pressing the speed-boost button, mind you.


Another boss tank on another bridge. Aqua Jack is not going to win any awards for the variety of its enemy design. There'll be none for the balance of its difficult level, either, with this boss being far easier than the previous missile barrage despite the stage itself much more challenging and about twice as long.


Man, Fidel just cannot catch a break, can he?


It might not be any more interesting in gameplay terms, but stage five does at least have a nice atmosphere, the gloomy swamp lit by the occasional flash of lightning. That's why the clouds are glowing orange, there hasn't been a cock-up with the colour palettes.
Now that I've reached the fifth stage, I'm only just over halfway through the game, and that's one of Aqua Jack's more glaring flaws. There's just too much of it, which seems like a ridiculous thing to say about a game you can finish in less time than it takes to watch an episode of The Simpsons and then write an angry tweet about how bad it's gotten, but the experience is starting to feel like it's been stretched very thinly and there are still another three levels to go, and they don't offer much in the way of exciting new moments.


The boss, for example, is a couple of helicopters. These helicopters are red, which at least means they go faster. They explode pretty quick, too. Makes sense to me, attack choppers are no match for a hovercraft.


The Aqua Jack crew grab a bit of down time between stages. They're looking as bored as I am. I say that, but I'm not sure how Aqua Jill is looking because I don't think the game has ever shown her face at this point. Are we leading up to a big reveal? Is she going to turn around during the end credits only to reveal she's a cyborg or Brian Blessed or that there's a yawning portal to a dread dimension filled only with primitive terror where her face should be? I hope so, that'd liven things up.


We're back to this, are we? Cool, I was missing the lush green fields and shallow rivers of wherever the hell we are. That's a lot of radio towers you've got there, Unnamed Evil Organisation. Are you putting out a pirate radio station to fill the time between hovercraft attacks?


"And Then I Drove Into A Wall" could be the goddamn subtitle of this game, especially in these later stages where the difficulty curve has tied itself in such knots that it now adheres to non-Euclidean geometry. They're a pain in the arse, but they're not completely laughable, unlike these things.


I'm no maritime engineer, but this seems like a really bad design for a watercraft. For starters, there might just about be enough room in that cockpit for a person, but not any controls or instruments. Then there's the concept of standing a couple of soldiers on this laughable metal raft in the first place. Oh, they're protected by sandbags, are they? My hovercraft's cannon can destroy a tank so quickly I've barely got time to notice it was there in the first place, I don't think a couple of sacks filled with sand are going to do much to stop me. The actual rafts themselves are dangerous, but that's because they fill the whole river and I kept crashing into them - a result that could have been accomplished just as effectively by an unmanned barge. Those two soldiers died for nothing, they didn't need to be riding on that thing. They could have been firing at me from the bank to distract me long enough for me to crash into the raft but no, there's got to be two men on board at all times. Maybe it's a Health and Safety thing.


When needlessly sacrificing combat troops aboard the SS Death Raft doesn't work, the bad guys respond by send two aeroplanes in to the general region of my hovercraft, where we half-heartedly plinked away at each other until the planes got bored and exploded. Onward to stage seven, then.


I hope for his sake that Super Mario doesn't pop out of any of those pipe.
Ah yes, these pipes. They span the waterways and move towards each other as you approach, eventually blocking your path and causing you to crash. Except when they don't, because sometimes your hovercraft passes through them as though they weren't even there, while on other occasions you're gently buffeted around them with no ill effects. A lot of the game suffers from this feeling of fuzziness, with ill-defined collision detection and the lingering feeling that everything has been thrown together at random. When compared to Chase H.Q., which was a very enjoyable and well-made game, Aqua Jack feels rushed and unloved. The various elements are mostly okay in isolation - shooting's fine, steering's okay - but like a jigsaw puzzle of Piers Morgan's face, when it's all put together it's not very pleasant. The mysterious behaviour of the pipes just happened to be the thing that solidified my opinion on Aqua Jack.


Oh, and the pipes don't scale very well, either. It looks like Aqua Jill has managed to clear them, at least. She'll have to swim ahead and get help.


The boss is something sort of interesting: it's a train on a bridge instead of the usual tank, and each time you blow up the thing that's shooting at you the train rolls forwards, pulling the next carriage into your line of fire. Hang on, that's not very interesting at all.


Whoever is recruiting soldiers for this army definitely has a type.


Here's the final stage. It's grey. I don't have much else to add beyond that. Those mountains look nice, I guess? I was hoping for some new enemies, but the closest I got was a few different bits of background scenery. New lampposts and buildings that look like faintly futuristic multi-story car parks, mostly.


One aspect of Aqua Jack that I can thankfully give my full approval is the soundtrack, a rumbling set of tracks with a classic "arcade" feel. You can usually count on Taito's famous Zuntata sound team to supply something worth listening to and that's the case here, especially the track above which plays during this final stage and did a pretty good job of getting me pumped up for the climactic boss fight. I'm ready, man! This is bound to be good, they've been saving the best for last and you're about to witness a true battle for the ages.


Your final opponent is a wall. Not even an interesting wall like "the Berlin" or "the Wailing", just a wall that shoots a few energy bolts at the player, like boring version of the first boss from Contra. They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but I think walls have to be the lowest form of final boss so please don't judge me too harshly for saying yeah, I'm really glad I crashed into all those walls and pipes, fighting this wall made all that struggle worthwhile.


"Oh man, the river goes right into the enemy base! See, I told you it wasn't stupid to bring the hovercraft, you owe me ten bucks."


With this dramatic door-kicking-down scene, we finally get to see what Aqua Jill looks like and she's disappointingly ordinary. No facial tentacles or nothing. She kicked the hell out of the door, though.


It took me a moment to figure out what was going on in this scene, but it eventually dawned on me that the evil leader has pulled the classic "Dr.-Wily-is-actually-a-robot-double" trick using an elaborate mechanical decoy. This means that Aqua Jill burst into the room and gunned the villain down without so much as blinking. That kind of bloodlust is a common complaint amongst hovercraft pilots.
Not only does the game end with the bad guy getting away, but he even has the audacity to pop up on a video screen just to taunt our heroes.


Hey, I recognise that guy! That's Banglar, the evil mastermind behind Taito's own Ninja Warriors games. Finally, something interesting about Aqua Jack, and now I want to play Ninja Warriors Again, erm, again. This must be a prequel to The Ninja Warriors, then, because Banglar doesn't survive that one. He is also incredibly smug-looking, so presumably he doesn't own any mirrors. It'd be hard to maintain that level of self-satisfiedness if he did.


I play a lot of these sprite-scaling arcade games here at VGJunk, because I almost always like them, but there was bound to come I time when I played one that just didn't do it for me. Aqua Jack has the familiar super-sized, over-the-top arcade feel to it, but it'd struggle to hold your attention over four stages, never mind eight, and it's not a patch on Chase H.Q. or A.B. Cop. Apparently having two initials in your game's name is the key to success. Taito should have called it A.Q. Jack, and probably ditched all the pipes and pop-up walls. I couldn't have hurt.

They know what's up, apparently. I'm glad someone does, I'm still trying to figure out whether the Diva Starz wear enormous shoes to counter-balance the weight of their oversized heads of if their feet really are that big.


Mall Mania, because girls love the mall, you see, so much so that their love eventually morphs into a twisted obsession. I think we've all suffered from Mall Mania at one time or another - trapped in a busy shopping centre around Christmas, trying to force your way through the crowds as you browse through shop after shop full of tat that could never express how you really feel for a person if you gave it to them as a gift. You start fantasising about finding a loaded machine gun. You don't want to hurt anyone, not really, but climbing on top of an ice cream stand and firing a few rounds over the crowd would be enough to make you feel alive for one brief, shimmering moment.


Honey, when you're as stylish and dapper as me, you're always read for a fashion show. I am the fashion show. However, I will help you by going to the mall and performing several minigames - with a heavy emphasis on "mini" - so that all four of the Diva Starz are ready for the fashion show. Would you like to meet the Diva Starz now? Tough, here they are anyway.


The Diva Starz are Alexa, Tia, Nikki and Summer: four grey aliens who crash-landed at Roswell in 1947 and who are trying to fit in by wearing large wigs and lots of eyeshadow. It's the scene in E.T. where he gets dressed up as a bag lady, but with a more hip, glam-o-rama, way-cool style that resonates with the tweens at the turn of a new millennium.
You probably don't need telling this, but the Diva Starz were a line of dolls. Created by Mattel in the year 2000, according to Wikipedia they had changeable clothing and thanks to some metal contacts on the clothes the dolls "knew" what they were wearing, which is kind of a neat gimmick. Then Bratz dolls debuted a year later and became hugely successful, leaving the Diva Starz to fade into obscurity. It seems there's only enough room in the world for one group of funky fashion friends with grossly inflated heads and names that marketing types spent hours deciding on to make sure they had just the right amount of "street cred".


I chose Alexa, because she was the first one highlighted. All her fab stuff has blown away, probably because she was too busy rubbing a salmon fillet on her face to monitor local wind levels, and so the game begins with a mission to collect Alexa's scattered belongings whilst also making your way to the mall on a scooter. That's multitasking, that is.


There's an item to collect, dead ahead! It looks like a penknife. Why are you taking a penknife to the mall, Alexa? Please tell me Diva Starz is going to turn out to be a girl-gang-themed beat-em-up, like The Warriors but with more cute handbags. The Warriorz: Mall Mania. I could get behind that.
I can't get behind this scooter adventure, mind you - somehow, against all the odds, it's even worse than I thought it would be. The scooter moves from left to right, and you press the jump button when you're under and item to jump and collect it. I know it looks like the penknife - okay, I concede it's probably supposed to be a mobile phone - is on the other lane and you should be able to just press up on the d-pad to go and get it, but no, you're forever stuck on the same vertical plane as your scooter slowly trundles towards the mall. Imagine a version of Excite Bike that was programmed by a goldfish, that about sums this one up... and yet there's still some pleasure to be derived from this nightmare.


Specifically, you can make a fun game out of trying to work out exactly what the hell is wrong with Alexa's face. It's clearly not right. When they say "keep your eyes on the road," they don't mean have them fixed on a spot of tarmac three inches away from your front wheel, nor should both eyes be on the same side of your face. She looks like a planarian worm in a bike helmet.


Quick, someone make me a game about planarians who organise a fashion show to raise funds to save their local planarian mall, where they go for planarian pedicures and talk about hot flatworm boys.


Collect five items and you're free to head to the mall, where a selection of "exciting" and "challenging" mini"games" await the player and oh boy, I'm going to need a fresh shipment of sarcastic quotation marks to get through this one. Going clockwise from the hanger, the options are Style Spot, Pet Shop Spot, Snack Spot, Fashion Spot and Music Spot, but I can't decide on which one to select because once again I'm staring at Alexa in an attempt to fathom her bizarre, unearthly physiology. Oh god, I can't see her bulbous pink feet as anything but cartoon testicles, as though the sprite is intended to show a fake rubber penis that's been dressed in doll's clothing. Nope, I'm not going any further with that one, let's quickly head into the Style Spot and hope things are more decipherable in there.


Well, I can tell it's supposed to be a shop, so that's a step up. Alexa goes into the shop. She doesn't walk into it, nor does she stomp or flounce - her whole sprite simply slides towards the door with no animation whatsoever. That's always a sign of quality, when a game has the same amount of animation as a paper cut-out glued to a stick.


Once Alexa has finished sliding into position, your task is to dress her by choosing one article of clothing from each of the categories of hats, tops, bottoms and shoes. The abysmal graphics and the Diva Starz' stylised physical proportions combine to make all of the tops so small as to be indecipherable, while each of Alexa's shoes could comfortably house a family of four.


Those are clown shoes. The actual shoes of an actual clown. I would stake all that is dear to me that somewhere, lurking in one of the festering, gore-strewn pits that they call home, there is a clown who owns a purple pair of size 28 shoes featuring a fetching "pink hearts" motif. Sure, in the clown's case each heart is painted on using the blood of their victims, but on a basic level they're the same shoes.


There is no way to read that sentence besides in a voice dripping with sarcasm.


The pet store next, where you have to guide your Diva Star through a maze until they can catch their lost pet. It was handy of their lost pet to hide in the pet shop, wasn't it? Plenty of pet food about, at any rate, although it would have been embarrassing if they'd sold Alexa's pet...dog? I think that pink lump's supposed to be a dog - to another customer. Oh ho, can you imagine the farce as they try to prove who owns the dog, the poor mutt getting more and more confused as its new owner tries to give it a different name and yes, yes I am stalling so I can think of something to say about this maze minigame. There's nothing to say, though. There are no enemies, the maze is so small you can see almost all of it at once and while there is a time limit it's so generous that you could build your own sophisticated robot dog in the time allowed. This is a game for children, okay, but I'm not sure what species of children - a human child of any age older than about four minutes will find this insultingly simplistic and a small clump of frogspawn could probably get through it on the second or third attempt. This isn't a game, it's swiping the unlock code on your phone or briskly leafing past the adverts in a newspaper.


Oh, Fluffy Starz is a cat. Well, it was either going to be a cat, a dog or, as an outside bet, a rabbit. A horse might have been a possibility if it wasn't for the mall setting, but I was never going to be looking for the Diva Starz' pet boa constrictor, was I? Fair play to Fluffy Starz, though, I think she's the most competently-drawn piece of artwork in the entire game.


What makes a snack divalicious? Does it have insane demands on its rider? Does it order people to remove photos of its bowl from the internet, only succeeding in making more people want to see the bowl? Does it taste like Mariah Carey?


What we've got here is a dessert-based Tower of Hanoi - move the pudding from the left plate to the right plate, moving only one piece at a time and never putting a larger piece on top of a smaller one. When I figured out what this game entailed, I was a little worried because I am atrocious at spatial thinking - this is where my well-documented hatred of sliding block puzzles comes from - but with only three pieces of dessert to move even I could manage it.


A motif for the fashion show, I presume. I think I'll go with Fab-A-Licious, because looking at sugary snacks has left me craving a Fab lolly.


There's something that could almost be described as an honest-to-god bit of gameplay in the Fashion Spot, if you were feeling very generous and had never played a videogame before. Bags with icons on trundle along the conveyor belt, and your Diva Star has to pick up an accessory from the matching bag at the bottom of the screen and throw it into the corresponding bag, a packing method remarkably similar to the one employed by my local Tesco.
This is probably the least unpleasant minigame in Diva Starz, which tell you everything you need to know.


For the last event, the Diva Starz get to strut their funky stuff - sorry, their Funk-A-Licious stuff - by participating in a rhythm action game. Music plays as commands scroll along the bottom of the screen: simply press the right button as the marker reaches the line to succeed. Sounds fun, right? We've all played and enjoyed rhythm games over the years, but those rhythm games have something that the Diva Starz version does not: a connection between when you press the notes and the beat or rhythm of the song. That's right, in this music-based minigame there is absolutely zero correlation between the sounds you can hear and when you should hit the button. The music is one thing, the buttons are another, totally separate thing and never the twain shall meet. Listening to the music while you play actively makes the game more difficult, and not just because it sounds like a mechanical wasp furiously stinging the inside of an ancient synthesiser, but because you end up trying to press the buttons in time with the music and that is not how this works.


See? I managed to fail, because I tried to play the game that this was supposed to be instead of playing the irredeemable pile of garbage that it actually is. I took my headphones off and passed it on the second try. I did not put them back on.


Now the fashion show can begin. Alexa slides to the end of the catwalk, the only animation being her (and Fluffy Starz's) blinking at the bright flashes of the cameras in the crowd. It seems like the backgrounds and other details are based on the options you chose after each minigame. I think my fashion show looks okay, given that I just chose things at random. Don't put me in charge of your fashion show, is what I'm saying.
As the fashion show draws to a close, Diva Starz is over and I can spend the rest of my life pretending I've never played it and hang on, what's this?


Oh no. No no no. I have to go through this with the other three characters? How many fashion shows can one group of besties throw in a week? Run a bake sale or sit in a bath of baked beans for a few days, mix it up a little, christ. Okay, let's get this over with, shall we? It's not like a playthrough of Diva Starz takes long.


Things are a little different, however. More difficult, if difficult is the right word. A hair more complex, perhaps. This is Nikki, and not only was her scooter ride to the mall complicated by at addition of ramps - ramps that had no bearing on the gameplay, but ramps none-the-less - but now she's telling me that the outfit I've picked for her isn't totally wow-a-licious or whatever. I think the first time round I just got lucky and picked a suitable outfit by pure chance, but Nikki here is more fussy than Alexa and you have to keep changing her clobber until she decides that it's to her liking. There are no clues or anything, it's pure guesswork. If you ask me, Nikki's tracksuit-bottoms-and-bandanna ensemble makes her look like she's about to paint the ceiling in the spare room, not attend a fashion show, but I'll bow to her superior judgement on this one.


Now it's Tia's turn, and her scooter trip is getting dangerously close to including some actual gameplay. There are things littering the road that you need to jump over now. Obstacles! Genuine, progress-hampering obstacles! Hey, I'm going to have to take what I can get here.


Here you can see that the box-packing minigame has grown to encompass several more categories of accessories to be sorted. Now it includes sunglasses, squashed ladybirds, heart pendants and old socks! The Tower of Dessert also increase to a maximum size of four layers that need to be moved from the left plate to the right in a meticulous, ordered manner. The Diva Starz are brought together not only by their lover for fashion, but also by their obsessive-compulsive disorder.


The final Diva Star is Summer. Look at her closely and you'll notice that Summer is a large humanoid mouse. Or chipmunk. Some variety of rodent, at any rate. The other Diva Starz suspect nothing. Hey, there's nothing in the rulebook that says a half-human, half-mouse creature can't take part in the fashion show!


Here's the ending. The entire ending. I'm surprised they went with an Impressionist style for the artwork, but that's Diva Starz: Mall Mania for you - constantly revealing new surprises to the player. I'm surprised I managed to finish it without falling asleep, that's for sure.
Diva Starz is a terrible game, a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for it and an experience that contains all the excitement of staring at a blank sheet of paper for half an hour. Yet again it's a children's game that can be described in the same old terms: I know I'm not the target audience, but just because something is for kids doesn't mean it has to be shite. I still don't think it's quite as soul-searing dreadful as *NSYNC: Get to the Show, because there is a tiny sense of progression as the games get more difficult and I believe it was released at a lower price than most Game Boy Color games, but it's still probably the worst game I've played this year. On the bright side things can only get better next time, he said like a gullible idiot.

The secret truth behind Michael Jordan's bald head is revealed - without hair, no-one will know when he goes Super-Saiyan, giving him the element of surprise. Good thinking, Michael.
So obviously this is pirate game, because we're not lucky enough to live in a world where Goku and Michael Jordan get to beat the crap out of each other in an official, fully-licensed product. I can't tell you who developed it or what year it was first released (although 2000 seems like a good bet), but I can tell you it's for the Megadrive and it's called Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII!


There's Michael on the right, but who's that on the left? Is... is that Muhammad Ali? You know, I think that's Muhammad Ali.


Yep, that's definitely Muhammad Ali. Drawing a little moustache on him isn't going to fool me, mysterious bootleg developer.


This just gets better and better. Forget the new Smash Bros., this is the dream match that the world has been waiting to see. Cyclops somehow feels more out of place in this line-up than Michael Jordan, but I think that's thanks to him not being as cool as all these other characters rather than because of any lack of fighting pedigree.
You'll be shocked to learn that Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII isn't the most feature-packed fighting game out there, but it does have a standard "arcade" mode, two-player battles and an options screen, which is at least one more game mode than I was expecting. You don't want to hear about the tedious business of playable modes and options settings, though, do you? You want to meet the cast properly. Yeah, me too, so here they are.


There's basketball legend Michael Jordan, his name here misspelled "Joden" either through a laughable attempt to hide his identity or a simple translation error. Then there's Geese Howard from the Fatal Fury series, Street Fighter icon Ryu, Dragon Ball Z's spikey-haired martial arts doofus Goku, Kyo Kusanagi from The King of Fighters, Marvel Comics hero and no-one's favourite X-Man Cyclops, Muhammad Ali from, you know, real life and Ryo Sakazaki from SNK's Art of Fighting series and later spin-offs. A motley crew indeed, but not as eclectic as they first seem - thanks to Capcom's various crossover games, Ryu has already had a (legitimate) opportunity to beat up half the roster.


I think I'm going to go with Ali, because you don't get to be called the Greatest of All Time without being pretty good at beating people up.


That turned out to be a mistake, because before I could even start chanting "Ali, bomaye" Kyo repeatedly set me on fire. Yes, that's the "oh dear Jesus help me I'm wreathed in flames" sprite from Street Fighter II, and the more eagle-eyed amongst you - or at least the one who have played a lot of 2D fighters - will spot plenty of content that Top Fighter 2000 has taken from other games. Aside from the cast of characters, I mean.
Muhammad Ali may well have his own way to set people on fire in this game, but if he does I couldn't figure out how to do it and Kyo quickly made a mockery of my attempt to punch him into unconsciousness, so it's back to the drawing board. What I need is one of the most laughably overpowered fictional characters ever created, who only gets stronger every time some beats him up or, in this case, burns him alive. C'mon, Goku, let's go.


There's a sight to warm the heart - Goku vs. Geese. Sorry, Gees. Cyclops' name is also shortened to "Cycl," so maybe it's a space issue and longer names just wouldn't fit. That'd explain why Ryu, Kyo and Ryo were included, at any rate.


Top Fighter 2000 is a basic one-on-one fighting game, so basic that it only uses two buttons - one for punch and one for kick. Okay, so you can pause it with Start, too, but arguing about that one is just being pedantic. You jump around, kicking and punching whilst trying to avoid Geese's constant barrage of Reppukens, and one of Top Fighter's most glaring flaws becomes immediately apparent: there's a big delay between pressing the attack buttons and your character doing anything. That's almost to be expected, and laggy controls are one of the great staples of pirate games, but this one has the extra and thoroughly baffling twist that punches have much, much more input lag than kicks. At first I thought this might be because punches are more powerful than kicks and this delay was the game's way of balancing the moves, but obviously it was foolish of me to imagine that the developers gave even a moment's consideration to gameplay balance or feedback by which the player can gauge the power of their attacks. It's just not programmed properly, is all.


Thankfully the Top Fighter version of Geese isn't nearly the terrifying foe that he is in the Fatal Fury games, and I managed to dispatch him via a large number of jumping kicks. I think me and Goku's jumping kick are going to become very familiar with each other, especially if all my other opponents are as fond of projectiles as Geese is. Then I let Geese win a round to see if he'd say "I'll stain my hams... with you, Brad!", as he sometimes does, but unfortunately he didn't. There are some voice clips in this game, but it's mostly just attack names with no pre- or post-battle quips.


Next up: a battle that's been played out a million times in Mugen but never before on a home console as Goku takes on Ryu, the ultimate karateman in a genre packed with karatemen. He is to karate as Nichoas Cage is to overacting, and as such he's a good first character to use if you decide to give Top Fighter a try. All his famous special moves are available, and because he's the character around which so many fighters are based you should have some idea how to use him.


See? That's a Dragon Punch, that is. I'm surprised that the developers used Ryu's Street Fighter Alpha sprite set when there's a perfectly good Megadrive version of Street Fighter II that they could have cribbed from, but I think this version fits better with the cartoony graphical style. Something else I was surprised about in the fight against Ryu is the music. If you're old, old enough to have had an internet connection in a time before MP3s existed, you might have downloaded some MIDIs to listen to. MIDIs were often wonky, not-quite-right recreations of whatever music they were supposed to be, and that's what this stage's theme sounds like: a MIDI. Of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers theme. I think that's the design decision that caused me the most confusion in this game, which is saying something given the selection of playable characters. Go Go Shoryuken indeed.


Muhammad Ali may have been the greatest of all time in the real world, but that's because he never had to fight a super-powered flying warrior who is one of the last survivors of a doomed alien world. Unless you count that comic where he fought Superman, but as that's not on his official fight record I'm going to disallow it.
The problem with the Top Fighter version of Ali is that he's just not fast enough. You'd expect him to essentially be the Chun-Li of of the game, but sadly he's no quicker than any other fighter and his special moves - a big fiery punch and a short-range ground explosion - aren't much cop. I think he's based around King of Fighters character Heavy D, but I'm not familiar enough with KoF '94 to confirm that.


Goku vs. Ryo now, and in my personal opinion the Art of Fighting hero is probably the least interesting fighter of the bunch. He's not bad, but he lacks Robert Garcia's charm and dapper turtleneck sweater. On the plus side, I've figured out how to get Goku to throw a fireball! This has greatly expanded my offensive options - now I can jump-kick or I can throw energy blast, an increase of 100%! It only took four battles and a staggering amount of failed button combinations to learn that pressing down, down and then punch is how you throw a fireball.


Giant Stone George Washington is looking really smug back there. "I cannot tell a lie - I knew how to do all the special moves right away. The super moves, too. Haven't you even managed to figure those out?"
No I have not George, you condescending dick. I know that there are super moves, because I've seen the computer-controlled characters doing them, and I've seen the red bar under my health fill up as the fight progresses, and that's presumably the "super power," but after trying more combinations than the world's shittiest safecracker I remained unable to activate even a single super move. If you work out how to do them... don't tell me. It'll probably be something embarrassingly simple that I've overlooked.


Goku fights against his own clone, a scenario that was presumably played out in some episode of the Dragon Ball franchise. I suppose it'd be hard to tell, what with every character having the same face. From this encounter I learned that Goku can also do a somersault kick, which after some practise I'm going to hesitantly say is performed by inputting half-circle back and kick, and a combo of dashing kicks that I never even got close to pulling off.
As Top Fighter chugs along, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't very good. Once the novelty of the character roster has worn off - although it is a pretty great novelty, let's be honest - you're left with a fighter that's broken in all the ways that bootleg fighting games usually are. Horrendous lag, unfathomable hitboxes, jerky movements, they all feature heavily, and then there's the most specific  issues with Top Fighter, like the fact you can't do anything while you're in a blocking position. On the plus side, I'd say the AI is better than you might expect. Your opponents can be a little too keen on projectiles sometimes, but they never come across as having the metal powers of either psychic gods or victims of human-gerbil brain transplants.


Of course, as soon as I praise the AI I have to fight Cyclops. He can shoot punch-lasers out of his face, and he really wants the player to know about it. I'll be happy if I never hear the phrase "OPTIC BLAST!" again.


I have to assume that Cyclops' choice of a yellow-and-brown costume here is intended to cash in on Wolverine's popularity. Of all the Marvel characters that have appeared in Capcom's crossover game, why did the developers pick Cyclops to appear in Top Fighter? It could have been Doctor Doom!


Cyclops is also pulling the Dreamworks face in his character portrait. Quick, someone make an animated movie of Top Fighter and cast Jerry Seinfeld as Cyclops.


It might not look like it from this screenshot, but my second fight again Kyo went much better than the first, probably because I had a projectile attack that I could pull of with some regularity. On the subject of the special moves, you remember how I said that the command for Goku's fireball was down, down, punch? Well, further experimentation revealed that it isn't. It's actually performed using the usual quarter-circle-forwards motion, it's just that the game's programming is so janky that it essential throws its hands up and says "yeah, sure, whatever" and lets you throw a fireball if you just keep tapping down and pressing punch. It's a good job, too, because doing it the "proper" way is far less reliable thanks to the game demanding that you pause for a moment between entering the d-pad motion and pressing punch. If, like me, you've played a decent amount of Street Fighter or any fighting game with a similar control system, you will find it nigh impossible to leave a pause in the command as your deeply-engrained reflexes kick in. This may explain why I couldn't do any super moves.


And now, the climactic battle. Come on and slam, and welcome to the final jam. Michael Jordan isn't a boss or anything, you fight the characters in a random order, but he's a suitable opponent for the last fight because he's probably the toughest fighter in the game. His cartwheel kick is particularly devastating, and his ability to instantly summon flaming basketballs from whatever alternate dimension he comes from is useful indeed. I wasn't sure about the Ali / Heavy D connection, but Jordan is definitely a reworked version of Lucky Glauber from King of Fighters. It wasn't difficult to puzzle that one out, the developers obviously weren't going to make a character from scratch and there aren't that many basketball-themed fighter game characters to steal. although I would have preferred it had Jordan been based on Magic Dunker from Fight Fever, because then I'd get to write the name "Magic Dunker" a few times and that is a very pleasing name to say. Maybe we can hope for a Top Fighter 2015 where Magic Dunker's sprite is used to replace Michael Jordan with Magic Johnson.


Jordan doesn't have any problem doing his super moves, but honestly I don't feel too bad about not having them in my arsenal because all the ones I came up against were extremely easy to avoid. Hell, my reliance on jumping kicks meant I was in the air 80% of the time anyway, so I dodged almost all of the projectile supers thanks to the law of averages. It would have been an even higher percentage if Goku could fly in this game like he can in Dragon Ball Z, but c'est la vie.


After all that struggle, mostly the struggle to get the controls to respond, this is the ending I'm treated to. You know what? I'm fine with that. I am best, better than all the rest. There a just a touch of (presumably unintentional) comedy to the brevity of it, as though the game is trying to quickly shoo you out of the door, yes, yes, you are best, now get out of here before my wife comes home.


I went back and had another quick run-through as Michael Jordan, and I can confirm that he is the best character. It's a combination of that cartwheel kick and his long legs, there's nowhere to hide when the gangly Jordan typhoon is filling most of the screen, especially when you're fighting on the narrow ramparts of the Great Wall of China. I think that's where this stage is supposed to be set, anyway. If only the developers had ripped off Blanka's stage to serve as Ali's home turf, I could be knee-deep in "Rumble in the Jungle" jokes by now.


Seeking a deeper challenge, I changed the difficulty to Hard. It seemed that the computer's attacks did slightly more damage, and as that's the laziest, cheapest way to make a fighting game harder I'm going to assume that's exactly the case. Also, it doesn't matter how much damage they do if they can't hit you. Because Geese lacks post-fight voice acting, I had to say "you cannot escape from dess" out loud myself. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I totally enjoyed doing so.


As a fighting game, Top Fighter 200 MK VIII leaves something to be desired - play it for a while and you'll be desiring controls and hit detection that work, mostly - but I still had fun messing about with it. I can't quite say that I've played worse officially released, non-bootleg fighting games, although I'm sure there are some out there, but if the issues with the horrible input lag were fixed it would almost reach the heady heights of "competent." One thing that prevents it from being totally unplayable is that it is at least fair, the half-assed game engine providing just as much hindrance to the computer as to the player.
A better way to enjoy the game is to treat it as a kind of digital safari, trying to spot which games the various components of Top Fighter were lifted from; a Fatal Fury background here, a Power Rangers theme there. I still can't quite get over that one. Anyway, all these words can be condensed into one single, defining fact, the fact that I started this article with - in this game, Goku can fight Michael Jordan. What else could you possibly need to know besides that?

Flashgal, aah-ahh, saviour of the universe, or at least a small selection of stages that are infested with the evil minions of this bloke.


Flashgal is one of those arcade games that keeps its cards close to its chest when it comes to plot and motivations. The closest you get to a storyline is a brief scene of this cheerful bald man laughing before walking out of a room. Surely that's not enough impetus for a superhero to go on a side-scrolling beat-em-up adventure? If heroes targeted people just because they laughed and then left rooms, Batman would be beating the crap out of me every time I walk into a branch of GAME and see how much they're charging for the latest releases.
I think there's supposed to be an implied element of organised crime. These guys do have a certain Mafia air to them, and the guy in the middle is presumably a boss, a Don, a kingpin of some sort.


Right then, the basics: Flashgal is mostly a single-plane beat-up-em in the Kung Fu Master mould. Enemies appear on screen, and it's your job to pound as much justice into them with your bare hands as you possibly can. Flashgal's karate moves encompass the familiar trio of punches, crouching kicks and jumping kicks, but the big gimmick is that the screen is constantly scrolling, pushing Flashgal forwards. I think that's what was supposed to happen, at any rate, but what actually happens is that the background is always moving from right to left but the gameplay remains resolutely un-scrolled, with Flashgal going about her business exactly as you'd expect her to if the stage was completely still. This is especially - and amusingly - noticeable when you crouch; Flashgal stays perfectly still but keeps movin' along as though she's sitting on a conveyor belt. Good work, Sega.


As I kick a dog while the Statue of Liberty looks on, I have to wonder - what kind of hero is Flashgal? Well, the kind who kicks dogs, apparently. I should make it clear that the dog was trying to kill Flashgal, and it's only the timing of the screenshot that make seem like the dog is patiently sitting there while I try to kick it to death. I wouldn't worry about upsetting Lady Liberty, because that's clearly a knock-off version of the famous statue that has only been recreated from the armpits up in order to save money.


Now I'm fighting in front of a bootleg White House. Is Flashgal's first mission to clear an America-themed amusement park of criminal scum or something? That'd explain the scrolling, the whole thing is a theme-park ride taking you through the history of the USA, and all these villains are animatronics that have gone berserk. Look, if Sega aren't going to provide a story then I have to come up with my own, right? I understand your concerns about internet fiction based on an existing property, character or franchise, but I promise it won't get weird. Flashgal's not going to start making out with the jet-pack troops or anything.
By the way, the guy doing the kung-fu kick in the screenshot above is a boss, I suppose. The screen stops scrolling when you get to him, the stage ends once you've battered him into unconsciousness and he takes more than one hit to defeat, all of which are good "boss" criteria... but he's just a bit lame. Walk up to him and punch him and he'll pop up into the air, where you can keep walking forward and punching to juggle him into a coma. It's a rare occasion, but in this case I'd tell you to keep the flying kicks to yourself.


Then stage two starts and Flashgal is riding a motorcyle. It's not a good motorcycle, either. It explodes if it touches anything that isn't the tarmac, and the sudden shift from the health bar of the first stage to the instant-death-on-contact mechanics of the second level is aggravating, especially when you realise that you can't attack the enemies in front of you. Oh, you can fire, but your rockets only travel straight upwards, so if there's an obstacle in front of you you'll have to jump over it.


Obstacles like these thing. At first I mistook it for an oil drum - this is a beat-em-up from the Eighties, after all - but on closer inspection it is quite clearly half a Coke can. It's got ringpull hole in the top and the letters "KE" on side and everything. I feel like that's something any half-decent motorbike should be able to knock aside, but I guess my ride isn't even half-decent. Now I know why it blows up so easily.


You can get some use out of the bike's upwards-firing rockets once you reach these monkeys that sit at the top of the screen and throw dynamite at Flashgal. They can't be part of the Mafia, can they? I refuse to believe that apes are allowed into the Cosa Nostra. I mean, big burly guys with names like Rocco and Crusher, but not honest-to-god simian apes. Maybe a specially-trained police monkey who goes undercover to bring down the mob from the inside, the idea  being that a monkey can't be arrested and tried for whacking someone. That's Made Ape, coming to a YouTube channel near you as soon as I can hire a gorilla costume and find someone who can do a reasonable Sicilian accent.


This is more like it: in stage three, Flashgal has a sword. The extra reach comes in handy when fighting the samurai and ninjas that populate the stage, and you can even knock the ninja's throwing knives out of the air if you time it right. I always love it when you can do that in a game, it goes a long way towards making you feel like you're controlling a badass.


While Flashgal is being menaced by an ostrich wearing a tiny crown, let's talk about her character design. She looks like Wonder Woman, and anything you read on the subject of Flashgal will point this out. The game's rather bare Wikipedia article even claims that the game "was popularly known as Wonder Woman Arcade," although I can't find any proof of that.


She definitely looks like a bootleg Wonder Woman in the game's cabinet art, but here's the thing: her sprite looks a lot more like Marvel Comics' Elektra than Wonder Woman. She's got the same red clothes, black hair colour scheme and the same one-shouldered top. The sword seems like a weapon closer to Elektra's trademark sais than Wonder Woman's lasso. The villain of the game is an overweight, bald crime boss in a white suit, which is a pretty good description of the Kingpin, Elektra's former employer / adversary. My comics history isn't great, but wasn't this game also developed during the time when Frank Miller was finding great success with his Daredevil (featuring Elektra) run? I'm not denying that there's a healthy dollops of Wonder Woman in Flashgal's DNA, but I think there's just as much of Elektra.


A bit further along, and there is the Kingpin himself. Is this the final boss already? No, it can't be. I've only been playing for five minutes. I know arcade games are short but that would be ridiculous.
The trick to this boss fight is to stay in the air as much as possible. The Kingpin has a gun that turns Flashgal to stone for a while if it hits her, giving the Mafia goons a free hit on you, so bouncing around and doling out flying kicks is the best way to go. As so often with this kind of "flat" brawler, your aerial attack isn't so much a flying karate kick as it is the extended process of leaping into the air, sticking your leg out and then falling onto the enemy with your outstretched heel. I know I mentioned this phenomenon in the Running Battle article, and I'm sure it's come up in other games. In Flashgal, it's probably your safest method of attack.


After a thorough enough beating, the Kingpin surrenders. His goons keep on fighting even after their master has fallen, but they don't have weird petrification rays so mopping them up isn't much of a problem. Is that it, then? Is crime over?


I guess not, because there's a stage four and it's a crappy side-scoilling shooter. The return of the apes, now grown to gargantuan size as they sit amongst the clouds and throw explosives at Flashgal's gyrocopter, is the only redeeming feature of this Gradius-lite snoozefest of uninteresting enemy patterns and one-note gameplay. I have played a good few games where the action has been interrupted for a stage of side-scrolling shooting action, and I can't think of a single one of them that wasn't a tedious, poorly-arranged intermission at best. At least your helicopter can fire forwards, that's a step up from the motorbike.


Stage five sure is a stage in this videogame that I'm playing. Yup. It's got a new neon background, but it's the same old ostrich-punching action, Flashgal apparently having left her sword in the helicopter. No, I don't have any idea what the deal with the ostriches is or why they're wearing crowns. Are ostriches the kings of the bird-world? No, that'd surely be the peacock, all gaudy and noisy.


Even the boss is nothing new - the Kingpin is back, and he's brought some karatemen with him. An endless supply of karatemen, in fact, a particularly large dojo located just off-screen constantly pumping new recruits into the fray each time you defeat the previous batch. It's a touch more difficult than the first encounter, because the karatemen are better at knocking you out of the air when you try a jump kick than the Mafia henchmen were, but there's still nothing too taxing here.


Then you reach this stage, and Sega decide that the jolly, carefree adventure of Flashgal's early levels has gone on long enough and it's time that the player suffers. A good example is the introduction of the red-suited henchmen. They've got guns, guns that can fire a constant stream of bullets at head height. Ducking underneath the bullets might seem like a practical solution, but it only leaves you trapped in the situation pictured above - you can't crawl towards the gunmen, and you can't stand up or jump towards them because the gap between their bullets is too small for you to get squeeze through without being shot. If you find yourself trapped like this, you'll just have to suck it up and take the hit, I'm afraid.
The key to victory, in both this scenario and throughout Flashgal as a whole, is aggression. Get to the enemy and destroy them before they can set themselves. Accept the damage sustained from being hit by a bouncing tire or small robot bird if you have to, because it beats getting stuck in the middle of a pack of dogs or under the guns of the Red Velvet Mafia. They might technically be in the same genre, but Flashgal is Splatterhouse 2's mirror-image: a fast-paced game where all-out attack is your best chance of survival, , a game that feels somewhat imprecise and which lacks atmosphere, taking place in a slightly bland universe only occasionally enlivened by the appearance of giant green birds.


Oh ho, "lucky!" indeed. Now the tables have turned: this sickly-looking ostrich dropped a gun when Flashgal punched it. Now Flashgal has a gun, and she's going to make them all pay. Or she would if there was much else to the stage, once I'd found the gun I sort of wandered forward, firing off the odd shot, and then the stage ended.


Things took a downturn from there: not only did Flashgal lose her gun between stages, but now she's being attacked by R2-D2's homicidal, yellow-panelled cousins. I'd love to tell you that I'd discovered a Mega Man-esque slide move that's letting Flashgal slip under the lasers, but that's just the pose she does when she's been shot.
Of course, I was being unfair when I labelled those robots as merely "R2-D2's cousins." Thanks to the endless releases of ever more obscure Star Wars toys and the fan community's commitment to documenting any aspect of the Star Wars universe that was even so much as mentioned in passing by a minor character in a third-tier spin-off novel, I can guarantee that there is an astromech droid who is just like R2-D2 but yellow, and that it has been immortalised in the toy form.


Well, would you look at that. The droid's name is R2-C4 and it appeared in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. This information took me less than two minutes to find. Welcome to the future. I think this is preferable to flying skateboards. I would have just fallen off of those anyway.


With danger closing in at every side and the volume of on-screen enemies reaching critical levels, the day was saved when another radioactive ostrich charged onto the screen. Sure, it tried to disembowel me with its powerful talons, but it was worth taking the damage just to let it get close enough for me to punch. Then I could take the gun it was carrying and proceed to the end of the stage in a more orderly fashion.


When I reached the end of the stage, something odd happened. The scrolling stopped, as it does for a boss encounter, and I was looking forward to taking on a bigger foe with some firepower on my side. A large, muscular man started to enter from the right of the screen - you can just about see their arm in the previous screenshot - but then suddenly, and without me doing anything, they turned around and just walked away. Then the stage ended. Did I scare the boss off? I think I scared the boss off. They were going to take Flashgal on, but then they saw that she was packing heat and made the quick (and totally understandable) decision that their sword was not going to provide adequate protection against Flashgal's handgun. Some bosses have the power of telekinesis or deadly martial arts skills, this boss had the power of common sense.


What fun, another vehicle section, with Flashgal taking to the water this time on her jet-ski. As far as I can tell, the jet-ski handles exactly the same as the motorcycle, and yet somehow it feels more irritating. I think part of this is down the the layout of this stage in particular. "Can you jump over this naval mine?" asks the game, and you can. "What about two mines at once?" it retorts, and again, you can jump over two naval mines at once because the jumping parts of Flashgal are so basic, so perfunctory, that half the time you'll get past them without even noticing they were there. Then the game ramps the challenge up to the dizzying heights of forcing to jump over three mines in a row, by which point your mind isn't so much wandering as it is desperately charging towards any other vaguely interesting thought that flickers through your brain.


Flashgal's gameplay isn't giving me much to talk about - it's the same old one-plane brawling you've seen a hundred times before, and it lacks the usual Sega magic - but the simple truth is that Flashgal is one of the very few games where the hero can be mercilessly kicked to death by a flock of angry flightless birds. That's not something that I can just leave undocumented, especially given the "superhero takes on organised crime" motif provided by the rest of the game. In summary: what the hell is going on? I haven't been this confused by a game's setting since the time I tried to play Silent Hill 3 while recovering from abdominal surgery.


I finally get to face the boss that ran away from me earlier, and either Link got buff or it's the hero from the Roman section of Great Swordsman. Only not so great, because all he can really do is slowly swing his sword at you, and for all the complaints I have about the vehicular sections, Flashgal is very nimble when she's got her feet on the ground. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the flying kick is more powerful than any stationery item.
Also, after watching some videos of Flashgal it seems like bosses fleeing in terror when they see my gun is not something that usually happens and you are supposed to fight them with a firearm equipped. Whether their reluctance to stand and fight me was down to an emulation error or me playing a different revision of the game I can't say, but I'm glad that it worked out this way. It's nice to feel powerful for once. That's the lesson to take from this: owning a gun will make you feel like a big (wo)man.


Oh good, more motorcycling. Sega thought that what would make the experience more fun and interesting would be to make it much more difficult. Sega were wrong. Trying to squeeze Flashgal's bulky ride through the swarms of birds and missiles is not fun at all. None of these vehicular sections are fun, and the frustration of this one is still preferable to the tedium of scrolling shooter bit, but Flashgal would have been a better game overall without their inclusion. It's very similar to My Hero, another Sega game from 1985, but My Hero comes out on top thanks to it sticking to what it's good at.


This is stage eleven, and the game is throwing everything at Flashgal now with no attempt to generate a cohesive theme. Dog, ninjas, Mafia thugs, blokes with jet-packs who drop bombs into the fray with the disinterested air of someone flipping playing cards into a hat during a boring camping trip, this stage has it all.


There's another fight with the Kingpin at the end of the stage. Not pictured: the Kingpin himself. He hadn't managed to get onto the screen yet and I didn't get a proper screenshot of this fateful encounter. That's a shame, because this is the end of the game.


Well, sort of - after section 11 the game rolls back around to section 1, which is more of the same with backgrounds you've already seen. There's a chance - a tiny chance, admittedly - that the game does something different if you keep playing it beyond this point, but I'll never find out because this is where I called it a day.
Flashgal is, to use a tired footballing cliché, a game of two halves. One half is a by-the-numbers but quite playable little walk-and-punch adventure, while the other half is bad vehicle sections. I know I keep harping on about them, and it might just be a personal thing, but they're boring, their difficulty curves are weirdly unpredictable and they break up the flow of the game. If Sega had given Flashgal a sword but no vehicles for the whole adventure, I'd have been much happier.


It didn't cause me a huge amount of excitement, but Flashgal does have its positives: the graphics are nice, with a lot of character packed into some fairly basic sprites, even if Flashgal's default expression is "trying to look at her own nose." The controls are crisp, even during the vehicle stages, and there no problems with wonky collision detection... but even for all this, Flashgal feels a little hollow, sterile even, that feeling only being lifted when you're attacked by all those ostriches. Man, those ostriches will bury your head in the sand if you're not careful.

I played Top Fighter 200 MK VIII and yeah, it was an experience. The weird and copyright-infringing character roster was fun, you had special moves, it was alright. Alright just doesn't cut it, though. It wasn't bad enough. I've been playing Streets of Rage and Doom this week, games that are so good that I feel I've build up a layer of psychic armour thick enough to allow me to get through something really bad. And where do you turn for bad games but the 8-bit home computers of the Eighties? Well, yes, the Game Boy Color, but I did a GBC game recently so shut up and "enjoy" this Commodore 64 title instead: Zeppelin Games' 1993 we-tried-to-copy-Street-Fighter-II-but-failed-badly-em-up Fist Fighter!

The art on the loading screen is nice, at any rate. It's also oddly familiar. I'm not saying that the artist ripped it off from a movie poster or something, but I'm also not saying I'd be surprised if they did. It's got a certain Jean-Claude van Damme-iness to it, like if the guy could speak he'd have a inexplicable Belgian accent. Good work on the lettering of the title, too. It'd be a great logo for an energy drink made from crisp mountain water and bovine hormones.


So much for the decent graphics. I've done enough childminding that I can confirm that this screen is the same colour as infant diahorrea. Was that your plan, Zeppelin Games? Lure people in with the relatively competent loading screen art and then bam, right into a world of colours that share their hue with the bodily fluids of a very ill person, knowing full well that the player won't quit the game because they've just waited twenty minutes for the bloody thing to load from tape and by God they're going to play something? Well, it worked. I'm going to play Fist Fighter, although I might do so with my eyes closed.
This title screen includes various common fighting game variables, so you can change the number of rounds and the difficulty if you're into that kind of thing. You can also select your character here, from the five available in the game. I'm going to show them to you now.


At top we have Jay-Cee, a tour guide from the UK because sure, why not? Even tour guides like to strip down to their underwear and punch people from time to time, even if it;' only people who have wandered away from the group or are trying to chip off a piece of the T. Rex skeleton as a souvenir. Hang on, Jay-Cee? JC? As in... Jean-Claude van Damme? My god, I think I was onto something with the loading art. His special move is the Skittle Roll, which is as pathetic to look at as it sounds, and I think he's the closest Fist Fighter gets to a main character.
Second is Merrick, the Brazillian freak with the deformed head who can shoot bolts of psychic energy with his very mind, a technique that's a damn sight more impressive than the primary-school gymnastics Jay-Cee has to offer. Merrick is presumably named after Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.


Next up is Otis. Otis is a very slightly altered version of Jay-Cee. Don't be fooled by the description of his "speciality," there is nothing super about his punch unless you count it being super difficult to connect with.
Below him is Gino, the Italian stereotype whose portait looks like character artwork from a bootleg version of Grand Theft Auto. He's a pizza dude, because he's Italian. I don't know if "pizza dude" means he's a pizza delivery man or someone who's just, like, really into pizza but, again, he's Italian so it's probably the latter. His speciality is "knife". I'm suprised it's not "pizza cutter," if I'm honest.


Last and quite possibly least there's Lee Chung, a Nepalese man with a Chinese name who uses a Japanese martial art because hey, it's all Asia, right? I don't have anything else to say about Lee Chung. I was going to make a Wang Chung joke, but nothing came to mind. Nobody Have Fun Tonight? Nah, I'm not going to force it.
Time to get into the action, and I decided to pick Gino because that's where my cursor had stopped. Having access to a knife seemed like it might be quite useful, too.


All right, here we go - Gino vs. Merrick fighting it out in what is apparently Egypt but could equally be one of those Star Wars sets in Tunisia they left to fall into ruin. We've got a timer, yellow health bars and one on one combat, I reckon I can figure this out.


Nope, I couldn't figure it out. I was trying to get away from Merrick, but all I seemed to be doing was accdentally performing an unnecessarily complex spinning kick. When I wasn't pirouettting around like my shoes were filled with ball-bearings, I was throwing punches with microscopic range that Merrick countered by being four inches away (where I couldn't reach him) and battering me with his mind-bullets. Notice I said he was named after the Elephant Man and based on him, because I don't think the Elephant Man had psychokinetic powers. Maybe in the movie, it was directed by David Lynch.


After handing me a humiliating "perfect" defeat, Merrick slips into some ugly misogyny by implying that I'm a girl and am therefore not good at fighting. I think you'll find that I'm bad at fighting because I don't have a bloody clue what's going on and it had nothing to do with my gender, thank you very much. Gino responds to this cruel barb with a bit of flirting. Did I mention he's Italian?


After consulting the instruction manual, I leapt back into the fray, this time taking control of Lee Chung. Jay-Cee is his opponent in a contest of karate versus the noble martial art of rolling around like a great big tit and wearing ankle socks while you do it.
Okay, so I should probably talk about the gameplay, I suppose. One of the big hurdles of getting a game of this type to work on the C64 is overcoming the limitations of the single-button controller, and Fist Fighter does this through the usual method of having different actions performed by the joystick when the fire button is pushed down and when it isn't. The obvious solution in this case would be for the joystick to move your fighter when the fire button isn't being pressed and for it to make them attack when you hold fire while pressing different directions, but the author of this game thought that would be too straightforward and so mashed the movement and punching controls together into one big mess.


For example, just pressing diagonally up-right on the joystick makes you punch at your enemy's head. Holding fire and pressing up-right unleashes a high kick. The sharper-witted amongst you may have noticed that this leaves no provision for jumping towards your enemy, a staple movement in every fighting game (no matter how many times you get shoryukened while doing it). Instead, to jump towards your opponent you have to press up to jump straight up and them move the stick sideways while airborne to sort of... slide around in the air. You've got quite a lot of control while you're up there, too, giving what little aerial combat there is an unpleasantly floaty feel.


Still, armed with the manual, I managed get enough of a handle on what I was doing to cause Jay-Cee some harm. The leg sweep was quite effective at first, but after a while Jay-Cee would see it coming and hop backwards away from it. I tried again and again to kick my rival in the foot, but he just keep prancing backwards until he was up against the right-hand side of the screen, where he just jumped over my kicks instead of away from them. I kicked, he jumped, ad infinitum. Then I noticed I had more health than Jay-Cee, and that I'd left the fight timer option set to "on". Surely the computer wouldn't be stupid enough to simply jump over and over again until the time ran out and I won by virute of having more health?


That is, in fact, exactly what happened. The AI really is that bad, but as I'm more of a scholar than a warrior I'm going to claim this one as a victory for intellect over brawn. I thought my way to victory. Because "thought" sounds like "fought," you see. It does when I say it, at least, but then again my enuciation is terrible.


To the victor go the spoils, and in this case I'm the victor and the spoils are a scene of some juvenile bickering. "Muuum, Jay-Cee tried to beat me up and then he said my face needs improving, tell him!" It's no "you must defeat my Dragon Punch to stand a chance" but these After-Match Abuse sections are the only part of Fist Fighter likely to raise even the smallest of smiles.
Now I just have to beat the other fighters to clear the standard Arcade mode that every one-v-one fighter is based around, right?


Ha ha, no. No no no. Fist Fighter doesn't go in for anything as fancy as letting the player fight their way through a series of bouts before being crowned the champion. You just pick two fighters, have a match and then return to the menu screen to do it all again or, as an acceptable alternative, feed your Fist Fighter casette into the nearest paper shredder or garbage disposal unit.
I'm not quite finished with this one yet, though, not when there's a whole world of poor design choices to enjoy.


One of Fist Fighter's more egregious gameplay flaws is that the characters are very reluctant to get up off the floor. If you're knocked down by an attack - something that happens a lot considering every move that isn't a basic punch to the head knocks you down - your fighter spends a good four or five seconds struggling to their feet while the characters' positions are reset to be a screen's width apart. Four or five seconds may not sound like a long time, but in a fighting game it might as well be three weeks. I have won entire rounds in Street Fighter II in four or five seconds. Waiting for your character to get the hell up ends up constituting about sixty percent of Fist Fighter's playing time, turning a game that was already slow and very stop-start into a cheerless death-march through a tar pit.


Otis' trash-talking could use some work, although I'm fond Gino's response because I can't tell if he's being sarcastic or if it's a pathetic attempt to stave off further beatings. He's polite about it, at least.


Then there are the special moves. Every fighter has one, activated by holding the fire button and pressing down-left on the joystick... or rather, by holding fire, moving the stick and then letting go of the fire button. I think that's how they work, anyway; getting them to come out consistently was a skill I never quite got down.
Pictured above is Jay-Cee's "Skittle Roll," where he curls up into a ball and slowly rolls into his opponent's ankles. Took a lot of martial arts training to master that one, did it? I have to imagine Blanka is standing just off screen and slowly shaking his head in disgust. The other fighter's specials aren't much better, and each of them have huge flaws that render them almost useless against the computer. The skittle roll can be avoided by jumping into it, because it only damages you if both feet are firmly planted on the floor when it connects. Otis' super punch admittedly does a lot of damage if it lands, but as it has a range that's best measured in microns that's a moot point. Lee Chung's whirlwind kick is a couple of the spinning kicks that every fighter can do, only in a row and with a much longer start-up period.


Merrick and Gino both have projectiles, which are by far the most useful special moves but which are still hardly stellar. You can see Merrick's psychic blast in the screenshot above, it's the pink thing that looks like the ghost of a horsehoe crab, an aquatic spirit seeking vengeance for all its brothers and sister who died thanks to humans harvesting their blood. You can also see that Jay-Cee has easily ducked underneath it: the problems with the projectiles is that they have a huge start-up delay, giving you opponent plenty of time to not get hit by them. I can cut Merrick some slack on this, because there music be some effort involved in channelling the essense of your mind into a tangible thing and then launching it out of your face, but Gino has no excuse.


Gino throws a knife, right? Simple, nice and straightforward. Except before he throws it, he stands there for a couple of seconds while he tries to fish the bloody thing out of his pocket. What, have you got your house keys / breath mints / mobile phone / Pizza Lover's Club membership card in there too, getting in the way? If you're going to use a knife in a fight, get it out before the fight starts, don't waste my time and yours by rummaging around in your pocket like someone scrambling for their bus fare while the driver tuts at them.


Too right you weren't concentrating, you were too busy enjoying your little pocket spelunking expedition. Even when I did manage to throw a knife at Jay-Cee, he simply rolled underneath it. Also, I had forgotten Jay-Cee was supposed to be British until I read his dialogue here. Not only is he British, but he's from the Victorian era, apparently.


I am glad the background of the America stage says DINER on it in big yellow letters, because otherwise I would have assumed I was fighting in front of a crashed UFO made from old jukeboxes. No, wait, that sounds much better than brawling outside a greasy spoon. Nuts.
Speaking of nuts, a lot of the fighting in this game devolves into the computer trying to punch you in the testicles. I suppose that kind of thing will happen with an all-male cast.


Look, man, this giant psychic freak just kicked the crap out of you, do you really think this is the time to be dissing his fighting abilities? The very fighting abilities he has used to rearrange you face, not that you can really tell with these graphics? Or maybe Jay-Cee is genuinely interested in Merrick's 10th-Dan black belt granny. Why isn't she in this game? She couldn't possibly have been less interesting than these chumps.


That's pretty much it for Fist Fighter, the worst fighting game I've ever played that isn't Rise of the Robots: a cynical Street Fighter clone which, in addition to the problems already discussed, has poor hit detection, a small pool of boring and basically identical characters, ugly graphics and wildly varying levels of AI competence. Actually, one thing I can give Fist Fighter credit for is that increasing the difficulty level does make your opponent a bit smarter, mostly noticeable in the way they try for longer, more damaging combos instead of just knocking you down over and over again.
However, the After-Match Abuse segements provide the only real glimmer of enjoyment that can be extracted from Fist Fighter, so I'm going to finish off this article with a couple of my favourites.


A+ punnage from Gino, good work. Because he's Italian! Ah ha ha, they like pizza. Then he's once again accused of being feminine. I sure wish the programmers had bothered to show some of Gino's womanly grace in the actual game, it might have made him a more interesting character to play as.


And finally, my favourite of them all: Otis threatens to kill Lee Chung, and Lee Chung simply accepts this with weary resignation. He yearns for the tender embrace of death. Man, that is grim. Well, see you all next time!
P.S. Don't play this game.

At first glance I though this one might have been an official Nintendo product, but that's because I'd only seen the top half of it before scrolling down to reveal that Princess Peach is in the middle of putting her socks on. I understand that if Princess Peach wears socks then yes, at some point she must have put them on, but it's hardly the part of the Super Mario universe that you'd expect to see a figurine of. Do the other figures in the range include Luigi trimming his moustache, or Bowser filling in an application for a bank loan (hey, flying pirate ships aren't cheap)? No, this one is for a much more niche market, a niche that that would be, how can I put this? Excited by Peach's barefootedness. There are 450-ish results for "Princess Peach feet" on DeviantArt, and 99% of them would lead to severe embarrassment if you were caught looking at them. The creators of these images are presumably banned from every shoe shop in a twenty-mile radius of their house.
The worst thing about the figure is that Peach comes with two shoes but only one sock. That would drive me absolutely spare if I owned this.



Mad, staring eyes devoid of humanity are so common in these kind of toys that it's almost too obvious to mention, but that Mario keychain offers such an extreme example of the phenomenon it becomes impossible to ignore. You'd freeze in terror every time you tried to unlock your front door if that thing was dangling off your keys. Also, notice that Mario's colour palette suggest he has picked up a Fire Flower. Imagine a man with that expression and the ability to shoot fire out of his hands jumping out of your wardrobe and hissing "it's a me, Maariooo!"
Then there's Luigi. What's Luigi doing with his hand? He's either sniffing his finger -  a nauseating thought, considering he's a plumber - or he's trying to offend some German tourists with a Basil Fawlty-esque Hitler impression.



Welcome to World 9-1: the cardboard box storage world! There are quite a few full-body Mario costumes on AliExpress. None of them look quite right, but this is definitely one of the better ones. The biggest problem with this costume is that Mario's ears are far too high up his head, but the tailor did at least capture Mario's famous child-bearing hips.



Much inferior on the dungarees front, these ones, but I appreciate the effort of the photographer in arranging the cardboard boxes in a less haphazard fashion. As Mario and Luigi gaze into each other's eyes, I can't help but think they're coming up with a sinister plan. There's definitely something conspiratorial about their pose. Their ears have already swivelled to focus on the invisible signals being beamed down from their mothership. Soon enough, the Earth shall fall beneath the springy boots of the Bootleg Mario Brothers.



Who the hell is this? It's not Mario, that's for sure. Mario has never dressed in green - we have a Green Mario for that, see above - and he certainly never wore a bowler hat. The bowler is the hat of the upper-middle class, and Mario is obviously working class. Okay, maybe he's not the salt-of-the-earth labourer he used to be because he does hang around with a princess a lot of the time, but still.
So who is this? He's got an M on his hat, angry eyebrows and a certain wild wooliness to his hair, so I'm going to say he's Mercutio, Mario's crank-addicted cousin who just got out of prison and who is known to children everywhere thanks to his famous catchphrase "it's-a me, Mercutio, gimme all your money or I'll cut you".



Okay, this one is just creepy. It's like the twins from The Shining, expect wearing trousers made from semi-inflated binbags.



Over to Mario's famous rival now with Sonic the Double Hand Amputee, apparently. Well, you don't need hands to go fast, so I suppose he won't mind too much. This picture, though... I personally find it rather unsettling: the grainy look of a photo taken with fifteen-year-old digital camera, Sonic accusingly holding up his stumps with a faint expression of disgust, the other costume in the background slumped in a cardboard box like a shed skin. You could make a good short horror film where this is the final shot, Handless Frowning Sonic intermittently lit beneath the flickering fluorescent lights. "You're too slo-ow!" says Sonic, and the screen fades to black.
Wait, he can't say anything because he doesn't have a mouth. Well, scratch that one then.



Nothing wrong with the figures here, they look like any pound-shop "fighting" toys that have been given a Mortal Kombat makeover. No, I just like the way they've been arranged for the photo, because it looks as though Reptile is trying to break up the fight between Scorpion and Sub-Zero. That's Reptile, always the calm, level head in the group. The calm, level lizard head hidden beneath a mask of human skin.
One thing I never understood about Mortal Kombat's ninjas were their outfits. Why are they quilted?"For warmth" would be the obvious answer, but they're running around and doing assassinations and other such ninja activities all day, would it really be advantageous to have half a duvet wrapped around you in those situations? It must be armour, which would explain why they have a big flap over their genitals.



"I am the ultimate fighter! I am the master of the Satsui no Hadou! I am... Steve! I work in the finance department, I think we met during that training session the other week. Yeah, I'm good, how are you? Cool, cool. Hey, how does my hair look? 'Like a volcano that's erupting candy floss instead of lava but somehow stupider than that?' Oh."



Twelve inches? No wonder he's blushing (I'm sorry).
I think this is a legit Nintendo product, by the way. Were people crying out for a plush toy of Link wearing an expression of transfixed lust? What is he even looking at? A red rupee? A hookshot? I bet it's the hookshot, they're always the most exciting items to collect.



This isn't even the worst Pac-Man costume I saw on AliExpress. One was just an orange mini-dress with eyes sewn onto it, so if you wanted to dress as the orange ghost for Halloween but, you know, sexy, then you're covered.
The twist with this costume is that you can tuck your head and arms inside which, if it's dark enough and you're wearing black leggings, could make it look as though you're a floating ghost. As long as you remember to crab-walk everywhere, anyway. If that's not enough of a thrill for you, with the application of some brown paint this outfit could easily be converted into a "piece of toast" costume. Two costumes in one! You can't argue with value for money like that.



Here's an interesting one - a copy of the Mega Manaction figure from the Ruby-Spears cartoon, presented under his Japanese name of Rockman. You can tell it's the cartoon version because the button / lump thing on his forehead is a diamond instead of a square. There are no company names or logos on the packaging, so I'd have to assume this is a less-than-legitimate reproduction. This begs the question: why? Why make toys from a Mega Man series that wasn't very good and went off the air in 1995? I suspect the answer is that whoever made this came into possession of the original moulds - or copies of the original moulds, at least - and knocked this thing up, because that's how these things work. There's a joke in here somewhere about Chinese bootleggers caring more about Mega Man than Capcom do, but that's a bit too negative for me so instead I'll draw your attention the the sweet laser sword Mega Man is packaged with.



Nothing unusual about the item itself, a mobile phone case featuring stolen artwork of Terra from Final Fantasy VI is something I'm not surprised to see on this site. I am surprised, and childishly amused, by that description, however. Hey AliExpress seller, how's your FFVI mobile phone cover? Oh, it's pretty good. It could be better, it's a shame the cut-away areas are over Terra's head, but on the whole I'd say it's pretty good. Could be better, but it's not bad.
I am a terrible self-publicist - my CV is just a scrap of paper with "relatively competent human, no major neurological impairments" scribbled on it - but even I could come up with a better description for a product I'm trying to sell than "pretty good." Just "good" would have been more convincing, for starters.



I have to be honest, I kinda like this. I would hang a neon ShinRa sign from a wall in my house. No-one else would ever see it, because I'm the kind of person who would hang, in the place where they live, a tacky neon version of the logo of a fictitious power company. No, it's okay, I've made my peace with that.



One thing that looking through these item has taught me is just how ridiculous Tidus' outfit is. You don't really get the full scope of its stupidity until you've seen it in the flesh, so to speak. It looks like the result of running a toddler's wardrobe through a woodchipper and then randomly sewing the pieces back together.



"Ahem... I think you'll find that while Leon Kennedy was briefly a member of the Raccoon City Police Department, he was was never attached to the elite STARS unit. Furthermore, the picture of Leon used on this card was clearly taken during the events of Resident Evil 4 and by that time Raccoon City had been destroyed - are we really supposed to believe, ha ha, that Leon was promoted to the special police squad of a city that no longer exists? This sloppy fact-checking reveals a total disdain for the Resident Evil canon and thus I am forced to rate this item one out of ten."



Here, that bloke from Maroon 5 does a bit of modelling work on the side. Why is the idea of someone being barefoot while dressed as Wesker so repellent to me? Maybe it's because all the places Wesker tends to visit - biological warfare labs, Antarctica, volcanoes - are places where wearing strong, sensible shoes is a must. All I know is that this picture, which its lack of footwear and strange, doll-like pose, is creeping me out even more than Sonic's Cardboard Dungeon. If you're going to Photoshop something like this, please airbrush some shoes onto it.



"Oh, you're my best friend in a world we must defend, but mum and dad say I can't hang around with you any more. They say you're a bad influence, Squirtle. It's all those fires you start. You're thinking about starting a fire right now, aren't you? You've got that look in your eyes again."



Finally, there's this thing. This goddamn thing. You know how occasionally something catches your funnybone just right and you laugh and laugh and laugh at it despite it not really being that funny? That happened to me the first time I saw this Charizard costume. And the second time, and the third. I'm still chuckling about it now. It's that head, that freakishly elongated noggin with horns that defy their usual swept-back position on Charizard's head to stand tall and proud and extremely cumbersome when passing through doorways. If you cover the head up, the rest of the costume looks fine; if you cover the body up it looks like a vampire carrot. I think I'm going to ask the seller if they'll do me a custom order for just the head. There is literally no end to the possibilities when you have a fuzzy mascot headpiece that's supposed to be a fire-breathing dragon but which resembled the most terrifying root vegetable imaginable.

My AliExpress shopping trip is over, and such treasures I have found! All these items came to my attention during a only a quick browse of the site, so god knows what's lurking further in the depths. If you find anything particularly wonderful / horrible, feel free to share it in the comments. Unless it's one of those sex pillows that kept coming up when I looked for Tekken stuff. Don't share those, please.

Here's a shot of Capcom's arcade choke-hold-em-up Saturday Night Slam Masters in all it's beefy, technicolour glory.


However, this is a rare occasion where I'm not interested in the Mayor of Justice, Mike "Punk-Pounder" Haggar. Okay, that's a lie: I am interested in him, as always, but he's not the primary focus. Instead have a look over to the left-hand side of the screen. I see a familiar figure in the crowd...


It's Chun-Li, taking an evening off from chasing supervillains around the globe in the name of justice to take in a little sports entertainment! You'd think she'd have had enough of wrestling, what with Zangief smashing her about all these many years, but there you go. That bloke behind her looks kind of familiar, too.


Here he is sporting a more familiar red headband and yes, it's Street Fighter star Ryu. See, now, I have to assume that Chun-Li is either here as part of an undercover investigation - you can't just take the law into your own hands and batter people to death with a steel pipe even if they have kidnapped your daughter, Mayor Haggar - or just to enjoy the show, but Ryu? Ryu is definitely here to learn some new moves and admire the vigorous fighting spirit of these potential sparring partners. There is no way that Ryu knows wrestling is "fake". He just wouldn't be able to comprehend the concept of people pretending to fight.
Of course, that raises another question: is wrestling even fake in the Street Fighter universe? Zangief's spinning piledriver certainly doesn't seem like it's being executed with the cooperation of its intended target. Maybe in a world where people can shoot balls of psychic flame from their hands and if not fly then at least hover menacingly, wrestling had to get real in order to compete. Wrestlers train damn hard, but I don't think they'd grapple with bears if their victories weren't predetermined.


Sticking with Street Fighter, here's the logo to Capcom's cutesified cross-franchise fighting game Pocket Fighter.


The letter O is formed from one of Chun-Li's spikey bracelet things (or an really ineptly-drawn Star of David), but what I never noticed until I replayed the game recently is that the letter G is a clenched fist. I don't really have anything else to add to this observation, I just thought it was a neat bit of logo design. It also has the effect of making the logo look like it's trying to beat itself up.


"Now, Bond, your mission is to infiltrate the Byelomorye dam, evade or neutralize the guards, blow the facility and for god's sake don't sit down!"


Everything, squishy human people aside, explodes in Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 if you shoot it for long enough. Wooden crates? All of them packed with semtex, apparently. Wall-mounted intruder alarms? They go up like a sack of fireworks thrown on a bonfire. But why the chairs, man? That chair looks disturbingly similar to the one I'm sitting on at this very moment, but as I'm not employed by the KGB I probably don't have to worry about it suddenly detonating. It's poor Sergei the Red Army technician you have to feel sorry for, tapping away on his delightfully retro green-on-black computer terminal with the knowledge that the slightest wrong move could see him splattered across the ceiling like a tomato thrown from a moving car. You can bet whoever was operating that computer did not contribute to the billions of lost profits caused by Google putting that playable Pac-Man doodle up. Sergei does his job diligently, never causes trouble and then goes home to his loving wife and sleeps standing up.


Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters is an odd arcade spin-off of the Mega Man franchise that turns the boss battles of the console originals into kind of a one-on-one fighting game, a Mega Man experience consisting of nothing but fights against a series of Robot Masters before the inevitable confrontation with Dr. Albert "I've got one plan and I'm sticking with it" Wily. It's a fun little game if nothing Earth-shattering, but for some reason Capcom chose this obscure arcade-only release to sneak in an important bit of Mega Man canon. Well, as important as the fictitious story of the enmity between a robot boy and Evil Albert Einstein can be.




It confirms that Dr. Wily built Zero, co-star of the Mega Man X franchise. Yes, I know it doesn't say "Zero" by name but that is quite clearly Zero in that pod, and the game's reluctance to say "yeah, that's totally Zero" whilst making it extremely obvious that yes, it totally is Zero is so ridiculous that it becomes hilarious. Bass (Dr. Wily's attempt to build a better Mega Man) even comments on the robot's long, girly hair. If I were you, Bass, and my head was shaped like the McDonald's arches with a Christmas decoration stuck in the middle, I'd keep my opinions about other people's heads to myself. Glass houses and all that.


The new robot is Zero! His powers are "using a sword" and "being cooler than Mega Man X"! Come onnnnn!


StarFox for the SNES - I've been playing it a bit recently and it's held up really well, you should give it a go if you haven't played it for a while. Anyway, after fighting their way across the icy wilderness of the planet Titania and recapturing the weather controlling machine, the Star Fox team catch up to the boss. Not for long, though.


That's right, when the boss sees our heroes it flashes up a cheeky "bye-bye!!" message on its scrolling LED display and then boosts away. The sheer gall of it, mocking me with its glorified bus stop sign before sending minor enemies at me while it hides in the distance, trying to regain its health.
This is pretty great. While the developers of StarFox did an excellent job of creating unique-looking bosses using very small range of polygonal shapes and a colour palette with all the scope and vibrancy of a naval scrapyard, this boss' rudeness gives it just that touch of extra character that made him stick in my mind for the past twenty years. Sure, that character is "rude, also a coward," but it's memorable. Even better, do you know what this boss' name is? It's called Professor Hanger. What is it a professor of? Robotics? Anthropology? Being A Cheeky Little Prick? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that last one.

Well, that's definitely a contender for Ugliest Title Screen ever featured here at VGJunk. I've only just noticed that there is some character art faintly reflected in the word "X-MEN." It doesn't really improve the composition any.


I was never a massive fan of the X-Men comics as a kid so most of my knowledge about them comes from the Saturday morning cartoon, but I recognise the tyrannical villain Apocalypse in the background there. I mean, his name's in the title of the game, so he was bound to show up somewhere. He has recruited into his army Juggernaut, a Sentinel and a humanoid pterodactyl because sure, why not? I don't know who the pterodactyl is, but he must be a mutant judging by the way the Sentinel is trying to disintegrate him. The forces of evil couldn't even hold their alliance together long enough to take the promotional photos. Hopefully this lack of unity will give the X-Men a chance to thwart Apocalypse's plans.


Plans such as the murder of Cyclops, something the X-Men did not thwart, You can tell, because the game opens with the X-Men finding Cyclops' corpse in the ruins of Xavier's mansion.


Cyclops is understandably upset by this turn of events, and he vows revenge on those responsible for his death. Did I mention the plot of this game is all about an alternate dimension where Apocalypse has taken over most of the world, with four X-Men from the "real" world crossing over and then having to fight their way back to their original reality? Because that's what it's about, which is why Cyclops gets the rare opportunity to avenge his own murder. This is all presumably based on the "Age of Apocalypse" comics event, so we're all set for any character with even a loose affiliation to the X-Men coming together to knock the seven bells out of each other. But which of the mighty mutants does the player get to control?


There's Wolverine, because you can't have a game about the X-Men fighting things without the ol' Canucklehead. Fighting is what he does, and he's the best there is at what he do. Does. That sentence got away from me a little there, but I'm going to distract you from my lexical faux pas by pointing out that Wolverine's chin has passed from being a rugged lantern jaw to a full-on Desperate Dan protuberance. Wolverine's Ear-Flap Status: large, moth-like. With a decent run-up he could glide for a considerable distance on those things.


You can play as Storm! I don't have much to say about Storm. She's pretty cool, I guess. Whenever I think of her weather-controlling powers I always imagine whether they'd make it possible for her to corner the market in certain hard-to-grow agricultural crops, providing her with fabulous wealth. Don't pick me for you team of superpowered heroes, is what I'm saying.


Cyclops is the leader, so he gets to tag along. I know ragging on Cyclops for being lame and boring is something of a cliché, but he's just kind of lame and boring. His power is essentially that he can punch things by looking at them. Handy for turning the lights off without getting out of bed, but just not as interesting as other mutant abilities.


Finally there's Rogue. Rogue, Rogue, R-O-G-U-E. I've just got to practise that a bit, otherwise I'll spell it "Rouge" every goddamn time. A slightly surprising inclusion, given that there are many other X-Men better known for their fighting abilities and Rogue's power of stealing other mutant's powers doesn't really come into play, but I'm happy enough with her inclusion.


I decided to go with Wolverine for stage one because, well, he's Wolverine - I reckon he'll provide a decent baseline for learning the intricacies of Reign of Apocalypse's combat. It does have a few quirks, too: there's the usual beat-em-up controls of jumping, using the attack button to perform ground-based combos and pressing two buttons together to unleash a special that hits enemies surrounding you at the cost of some of your health, but there's also another button for heavy attacks that knock enemies to the ground and a special dashing move executing using a fireball motion on the d-pad followed by light attack. In Wolverine's case he launches himself at the bad guys with his claws extended. It'd be more useful it if did more than a pitiful amount of damage, but it's nice to have the option. The problem is that you can also dash by double-tapping left or right, but if you dash and then attack your character immediately stops dead and throws their punch, and the complete disregard for momentum feels a little odd. I was unable to shake the feeling that your dashing special should be towards, towards and attack instead of a fireball motion, and I spent the whole game being ever-so-slightly annoyed that this graceful solution wasn't implemented.


You can grapple and throw enemies, too. It hurts them, although in Wolverine's case I'm not sure why it hurts them because rather than slamming them into the ground he picks up the bad guys and then gently puts them back down in the manner of a mother laying her newborn child in a cot. Well, with the addition of razor-sharp claws sticking out of her hands. I suppose you would be gentle if that was the case.
So, the first stage of robot-punching action is brief and mostly uneventful - the combat works pretty well and the graphics are pleasingly comic-book-y in nature, although the lack of variety in the bad guys is already a worry and I haven't even cleared stage one yet. There are blue robots and red robots, and both kinds fight in exactly the same way. The red ones have slightly more health. It's not exactly a cavalcade of colourful characters, but maybe the boss fight will liven things up.


It's The Blob! The Incredibly Smug Blob, posing like the mascot for a company that sells plus-size swimming costumes. Nothing moves The Blob - he sat through Marley & Me without getting so much as a lump in his throat - but luckily I don't need him to move. I can just stand there while I whittle away at his health bar, and The Blob seems very reluctant to fight back. I had to purposefully stop attacking just to see what tricks The Blob had stuffed in his leotard, and I was rewarded with this.


It takes a lot to distract from the terror of The Blob's lycra-swaddled groin hurtling towards you, but that face just about manages it.


I switched to Rogue for stage two, although in this case "switched to" means "restarted the whole game and selected Rogue," because once you've chosen your X-Person you're stuck with them for the duration. This is probably because there's a a very minor levelling-up system in place that allows you to upgrade a couple of stats between stages, but I would have happily forgone the undercooked RPG elements if it meant I could change characters more freely.
Rogue's fighting style is not too disimilar from Wolverine's, with basic punching combos and a special that sees her flying forward with her fist extended, although unlike Wolverine said fist doesn't have cutlery sticking out of it. I prefer Rogue, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that she doesn't just walk across the screen, she struts.


Look at that pose - hand on hip, utterly confident whether facing robots or, erm, robots. There are a lot of robots to beat up in this game.
The other thing is that for her strong attack Rogue stops messing around and headbutts the enemy really, really hard. It's not that useful, because you'd do much more damage by comboing an enemy rather than knocking them to the ground, but that didn't stop me using the headbutt at every available opportunity.


X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse sure does have a way with faces.


The boss is Cable, Cyclop's son who's older than his dad (comics!) and who has lots of guns and a cybernetic arm thanks to infection by a techno-organic virus (again, comics!). Years of playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 have left me utterly unprepared for a fight against Cable where he doesn't spend the whole affair spamming projectile attacks and shouting "Viper Beam! Viper Beam! Hyper Viper Beam!" but I quickly figured out that this version of Cable wasn't going to be much of a threat. For one thing, he's a giant lumbering ox of a man in this incarnation, like a Frankenstein's monster held together by brightly-coloured spandex instead of the surgical skills of a mad doctor. His guns also don't have much range, and Rogue had no trouble getting up close and smashing his face in with repeated headbutts like the good Glasgow girl she presumably is.


It's Storm's turn now, as the X-Men infiltrate the secret Canadian weapons program Department H. A Canadian bio-weapons program... it just doesn't sound right, does it? It's like a reliable Italian car or England having a good national football team.
The thing the sets Storm aside from the previous two characters is that she use an honest-to-god projectile attack instead of throwing herself at the bad guys. It's rather a familiar little whirlwind, too: between this attack, Rogue flying punches and the general aesthetic of the character sprites, it's clear that the developers were inspired by Capcom's Marvel fighting games. Only graphically, mind you, because in gameplay terms this feels a lot like an attempt to recreate Konami's famous X-Men arcade game. If it doesn't end with Magneto, Master of Magnet, calling me an X-Chicken, I'm going to be very disappointed.


Spider-Man, Spider-Man,
These goons look kinda like Spider-Man,
All dressed up in red and white,
Like Polish flags that are skin-tight,
Look out, here comes the Poland-Man.


Hay look, it's Sabretooth! Sabretooth is Wolverine but evil. Yes. His bones aren't metal. I think that's why he's so grumpy all the time, he was stiffed out of a bitchin' metal skeleton. Sabretooth continues the game's pattern of all the bosses being laughably easy to defeat and even Storm - not known for her hand-to-hand combat skills - can comfortably pummel Sabretooth into unconsciousness.


But wait! Another boss quickly appears, and this time it's the Ragin' Cajun Gambit, mon ami, zut alors and other such French phrases. Gambit fights mostly with a stick, which is a damn sight more effective than Sabretooth's claws or even Cable's guns, and he can also throw exploding playing cards at you like the world's worst croupier. Congratulations, Gambit - you're the first boss I had to pay attention to in order to beat. Not much attention, granted, but a non-zero amount.


Before I move on to the next stage, here's a quick look at Cyclops in action. He's got a projectile too, naturally. The best thing about Cyclops is that when you fire his optic blast his body language suggests he's taken aback by the sudden explosion of kinetic force emanating from his eyes. I'd like to believe that Cyclops forgets about his freakish powers every time he goes to bed, and the first thing he does each morning is open his eyes and rip the ceiling off his bedroom.


Stage four takes place on the back of the X-Men's private jet. The engines are firing out plumes of flame but the plane remains stationary, so whoever's in the cockpit is just wasting fuel because, what, they're a dick? C'mon, X-Man, fossil fuels are a non-renewable source of energy. I know the world has been conquered and enslaved by an evil super-mutant, but that's no reason to further damage an already strained ecosystem.


Look, now you've upset powerful psychic and frequent death sufferer Jean Grey. How come all the other X-Men get code names except Jean Grey? Is telekinesis not cool enough for a code name? Actually, that might be how it works, you only get a code name if your powers aren't mind-based. That's why he's called Professor Xavier and not The Brain or Bald Wheelsman.
Oh, right, Jean Grey. She might be Phoenix, actually. She's got some fire-based attacks, but the real challenge in the fight comes from trying to dispatch all the robo-thugs before they can surround you, all while Jean Grey is trying to set you alight. Make sure you level up your strength at the expense of the other stats, because otherwise at this point in the game enemies start taking too long to defeat. Not in an interesting way, like because you have to fight cautiously against them, but because their health bars are too long.


Now I'm fighting Sentinels while I ride an elevator past a really big Sentinel. You can't have an X-Men game without Sentinels, it'd be like a Metal Gear Solid without over-long cutscenes or a Resident Evil game with a sensible, restrained plot. A little-known fact about Sentinels: if you punch them in the knee, they're programmed to throw up some jazz hands, a remnant of code left over from their original purpose of providing cheap, robotic chorus-line dancers for off-Broadway musicals.


Oh cool, it's Juggernaut. I've always liked Juggernaut. I appreciate the simplicity of his skill set. It's a pretty effective skill set, too, as you can tell by the way he's pounded Wolverine into the ground in the screenshot above. You might think Wolverine's famous healing factor might help him to recover from this setback, but that particular aspect of Wolverine's superpowers is not included in the game and he has to restore his health by collecting big, floating first aid symbols like the rest of us. One thing Wolverine has got, and which I only figured out how to use at around this point, is a special Mutant Power move that you can activate by pressing L when the blue bar under your health is full. I assume all the other characters have a Mutant Power, too, but I forgot to check. Wolverine's is a more-damaging-than-usual barrage of claw slashes inflicted with the raw ferocity of a berserker. Hmm. It definitely helped to see Juggernaut off, but he was never going to win anyway. I refuse to be defeated by a 'roided-out maniac with a bucket on his head.


As I punch my way through stage six and its legions of colourful troops that look like rejected designs for He-Man toys - an impressive feat considering Mattel once released a He-Man toy with the gimmick that it smelled bad - I feel I should point out I'm not even halfway through the game yet. Don't worry, though, things will speed up from here because there's nothing new to say. Each short stage (some are only two or three screens long) sees you fighting some nondescript thugs before taking on an X-Men character regardless of whether they're usually a good guy or not. The fighting is serviceable, although there are problems with it. It can be difficult to tell when attacks are connecting, and sometime when you are performing a combo on an enemy they'll suddenly start ignoring your punches and either hit you or simply walk away. That can be a bit disheartening.


Magneto did not once call me an X-Chicken. Nor did he even welcome me to die. He did produce an exploding Sentinel head from under the floor which softened the blow a little, but I'm still disappointed.


I can pretty much stop describe the levels themselves at this point because there's almost no variation between them other than background. Here, I have been led to what is supposedly Paris thanks to some plot nonsense about finding a Warp Gate to send the X-Men back to their world. Guarding this Warp Gate is Nightcrawler. His superpower is teleportation, and he's using it to teleport his foot up my ass. Having to fight a boss who can dematerialise at will might have been a real challenge, if only Nightcrawler was intelligent enough to not repeatedly rematerialise right on top of the spiky booby-trap on the left of the battlefield. Looks like the devil, dumb as a bag of rocks and a name that makes him sound like a sex offender - life has not been kind to Nightcrawler.


Oh, and you have to fight Psylocke, too. She's only a screen away from the previous fight, so she must have watched Nightcrawler repeatedly impale himself without wandering over to lend a hand. That's why the good guys always triumph - because the antagonists are too selfish to aid their comrades even when they're having obvious trouble with the concept of not having pointy wooden stakes jabbed into them.


What stage are we up to now? Eight? Nine? I've lost count, and I'm not far off losing the will to continue. Reign of Apocalypse is one of those games that somehow manages to feel really short and far too long at the same time, and not even the appearance of the pterodactyl man from the intro can perk things up. His name is Sauron. In the comics, Sauron named himself after the character from Lord of the Ring because he is a huge nerd. Sauron at least has the decency to cover his pterodactyl wang with a rudimentary loincloth. Thanks, Sauron.



You also have to fight Beast, who's looking more gorilla-like than I remember him being. As his fighting style is "kinda like Wolverine but not as good," I didn't have any trouble beating him.


Do you want your audience to know that your work of fiction is taking place post-apocalypse (pun intended) rather than pre- or even mid-apocalypse? Then show them a busted-up Statue of Liberty, it never fails. That thing is like a magnet for Really Bad Times, ending of Ghostbusters 2 notwithstanding. Shit, did I just spoil the ending of Ghostbusters 2? I'm sorry, I really am.
There's Russian metal-man Colossus, hanging around until Wolverine has defeated all his minions before engaging our hero in battle. You see what I mean about the villains needing to spend more time working on their unity? There's no I in team, and there's no I in "group of super-powered bad guys bent on world conquest" either. Get it together, guys.
Oh, and it took me a while to figure out what Colossus' face reminded me of, but I eventually came to the conclusion that the answer is "blue Homestar Runner."


I know I said we were heading to a warp gate, like, three stages ago, but Cyclops decided that before we do that we have to destroy some of the smaller cogs in Apocalypse's machinery of brutal oppression before we assault the big man, with the goal of drawing away some of the troops protecting his headquarters. It doesn't seem to be working, because that's a lot of guys who look a bit like Spider-Man that I have to fight my way through.
Here's a thing about the enemies in this game: take a look at that clump of enemies on the right. You see how there's three of them just overlapping each other? Well, Reign of Apocalypse does this weird thing where an enemy will be standing there before another, identical enemy appears behind it. I don't know if the multiple enemies are always there and just standing right behind each other so you can't see them or if they spontaneously reproduce through full-body mitosis, but it doesn't feel right, especially when you think you've got one enemy to fight and you walk up to it only for it to suddenly turn into identical triplets.


Guarding this stage is the Silver Samurai, a samurai who is silver. I'm sorry, it's late and I'm tired.


The penultimate stage sees our heroes traversing the Golden Gate bridge, but wait! The bridge is guarded by Archangel, the former X-Man with the incredible power of flight! A power that roughly 50% of superheroes seem to have in addition to their other powers. As you can see, Archangel's primary attack is a rock 'n' roll knee slide, which probably explains why I didn't have any problems beating him up.


Then you have to go up against time-travelling mutant Bishop, so named because he's a fairly high-ranking member of the Catholic church. You'd think the shotgun he uses would be more effective than Archangel's knee-slides, but somehow it manages to have even less range than that attack. Always coming into these boss fights with a full bar of Mutant Power is extremely helpful, by the way. Being able to take a third of a boss' health right at the start of the fight just by walking up to them and pressing L is truly the most useful superpower.


At long last, or short last because X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse really doesn't take that long to complete, the X-Men have reached Apocalypse's moon base, and the final guardian of this installation (aside from Apocalypse himself) is... Pyro. Pyro. I've sliced my way through every super-powered individual who's so much as been in the same post code as an X-Man, and Apocalypse has chosen a guy who can shoot fire to protect his inner sanctum? The job of guardian Apocalypse's chamber must be on a rotating schedule and it just happened to be Pyro's turn today, surely. You might as well hire one of those people who juggles fire at carnivals to defend the heart of your lair.
The best part of this fight, this stage and possibly of the entire game is that Pyro can and frequently does get set on fire by the flame jets in the floor. There's being hoisted by your own petard, then there's having your own petard kill you by setting you on fire.


Apocalypse is kinda underwhelming. Yes, he can create buzzsaws to attack you with and yes, he has an annoying special attack where he summons the ghostly image of his four horsemen and it covers the whole screen so there's no way you can avoid it, but... is that it? How did the power to manifest lumber-cutting tools allow you to conquer the Earth, Apocalypse? Also, he's constantly leaking a green liquid during this fight. Like I said, I was never a huge fan of the X-Men comics, so if you can tell me whether or not it's Marvel canon that Apocalypse has what looks like Mountain Dew constantly seeping from his pores, that'd be great.
It's a weirdly easy fight, even with Apocalypse's screen-covering special attack. I think it's because, unlike the more human-sized bosses, Apocalypse doesn't move around much. He just stands there while Wolverine pokes holes in him. I'd make sure you wash your claws afterwards, Wolverine. Whatever that green stuff is, it'll probably take the shine off your claws at the very least.


Yes, Cyclops, let's go home, back to a different dimension where your lives are nothing but endless fighting. Or, maybe you should just stay here and rule as gods now that you've killed anyone who could have opposed you? There's a free moon base going spare here! You can't just turn down something like that. Free moon base!


Cyclops makes everyone go home, the boring sod, and Professor Xavier deduces from their tattered appearance and the way they fell out of a glowing energy portal right in front of him that "there's quite a story behind this." Didn't need your psychic powers for that one, huh, Chuck?


"You don't know the half of it," says Wolverine, everyone laughs like it's the end of an episode of a Seventies sitcom and that's it, X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse is over.
I can't really get the balance right when I try to describe this one: I feel like I'm either being unnecessarily harsh or giving it more credit than it deserves, which probably means it's a very average game. The combat is fun if occasionally unpredictable - grabbing enemies when you're trying to punch them can be a problem, and any enemy projectiles are a nightmare to avoid because they hurt you if they touch any part of your sprite, regardless of whether you're on the same horizontal plane or not. It's got a nice X-Men flavour, with plenty of characters to see, and I rather like the graphics. It's not perfect, but for an early GBA game it's pretty playable.


Then I found some GameShark codes that let you play as any of the other characters. Here, I'm playing as Juggernaut and I've got to say this increased my enjoyment of Reign of Apocalypse ten-fold. Having access to a move where I just stomp around like a demented toddler will do that. I tried out some of the other characters and they all seem to have a fully fleshed-out set of moves, including specials and Mutant Powers. Were these characters intended to be playable at some point in development? I don't know, but I can tell you that this discovery has pushed Cyclops down from 4th on the "characters I'd like to play as in this game" list to about 30th.

A man wearing a needlessly tight jumpsuit stares in disgust at the world's ugliest clock. "What an ugly clock," he thinks to himself, forgetting the old proverb about people wearing bright green onesies in glass houses.
The Lime Avenger here is our hero, ready to save the world for whatever's menacing it this week. Don't worry, the intro will fill us in.


This time it's aliens from the planet Tirmat. I thought they were from the planet Tiamat at first glance, but a closer examination of the font reveals that what I took to be the letter A is actually a capital R. Here's a tip: if people have to closely examine your font, you're using the wrong font.
Rather than the usual "conquest for conquest's sake" alien menace, the Tirmatians are invading Earth because their home planet is about to be destroyed by a rift in space-time  and Earth is the nearest inhabitable planet. You can feel some sympathy for them, under the circumstances. You could feel a damn sight more sympathy for them if the Tirmatians didn't send soldiers back to various point in the Earth's history so they can take over the planet before we discover gunpowder or electricity rather than just asking if they can stay in Earth's spare room for a while until they find themselves a new place.
One other thing: the Tirmatians know enough about Earth to name their spaceship Torquemada, presumably after the 15th-century head of the Spanish Inquisition Tomas de Torquemada. Naming their vessels after someone whose name is a byword for cruelty and intolerance is a possible hint that the Tirmatians are not nice guys.


To counter the Tirmatian menace, the people of Earth assemble a crack team of highly-skilled soldiers who will be inserted into the past to repel the Tirmatian menace.


This crack team is then wiped out before they can even get buckled into the time machine. Oh well, on the plus side our new Tirmatian overlords' meddling with the time stream will probably mean that Mariah Carey's Glitter never gets made.


A slender hope for humanity remains as one man survives the attack, one man who will travel into the past to fight the alien hordes, one man named Dr. Vincent Gilgamesh. Really? That's the name you're going with? Dr. Vincent Gilgamesh. No, it's fine. Yes, of course I think "Vincent Gilgamesh" is a cool name, he looks like a cool guy who can do cool things. He definitely doesn't look like someone who's getting tired of carrying around this car exhaust he found laying by the kerb.




First up is the Medieval zone. Whoa, flashbacks to The Crystal Maze there, but sadly Time Slip features nothing as interesting as Richard O'Brien playing the harmonic and rambling on about his mother - instead Dr. Gilgamesh must use his rapid-fire machine gun to fend off the local peasants who attack with sharp sticks and smaller sharp stick launched from bendy bits of wood. Bows and arrows, I mean. You'll notice that description of the enemy forces doesn't include time-travelling space aliens, because the Tirmatians are nowhere to be seen, so Dr. Gilgamesh has so far taken the incredibly heroic action of travelling to the distant past and blowing away the local population with his highly advanced weaponry. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to save humanity, and if I was Dr.Gilgamesh I'd be constantly worrying about gunning down one of my ancestors and thus ceasing to exist.


Gameplay-wise, it really does just feel like Contra III. A half-baked, less interesting version of Contra III with reduced graphical appeal, but the basic comparison holds up. There are differences, though: you don't die in one hit, and instead you have a health bar with five whole segments! The trouble is, there's no knock-back when you take damage so it's easy to get stuck inside the enemy or obstacle that's hurting you and lose a ton of health. You also only have one main weapon, a machine gun that can be upgraded through collecting power-ups to fire faster and then to fire in a fairly narrow spread pattern. Other than that, you run around and jump over projectiles while shooting the poor unsuspecting inhabitants of this medieval forest.


There's a fight against a hoverbike at the end of the forest. That must be the Tirmatians' doing, then. It's Robin Hood and his Merry Men, not Robin Hood and his Anti-Gravity Gun Platform.
The boss swoops back and forth across the screen, which is shame because you have to jump over it each time and to do so successfully requires extremely accurate timing that I never managed to get quite right, partly because the boss likes to hover off the edge of the screen so you can't see when it's about to fly towards you. If Time Slip did have one-hit kills, it would be have become annoying already. It doesn't, but give it time.


Now I'm in a cavern decorated with a skull motif, being chased by muscular, headless dwarves. There are two possible explanations for this: either the Tirmatians' plan was informed by a grotesque misunderstanding of the content of Snow White, or by a happy coincidence they travelled to a time period that just so happened to be populated by murderous miniature bodybuilders with no heads, creatures that weren't recorded by human history because Dr. Gilgamesh was forced to destroy them all.


After a while, you have to fight a... I was going to say "wizard," but I think that's giving this guy more credit than he deserves. Proper wizards command the very forces of creation with a mere gesture, while this boss drifts around in his dressing gown dropping Christmas decorations on your head.


This dragon is a much more serious proposition, but again: dragons? Not aliens. I think the dragon is my favourite boss in the game, but only because his face reminds me of Mantenna from ­She-Ra. The actual fight is a bit of a chore, because it turns out that while dragons might be slain relatively easily by virtuous knights with keen blades and a well-developed sense of chivalry they're rather tougher to take down with bullets. When the fight does end, it feels like the dragon has become bored of the whole affair and has laid down for a nap rather than because you've done it irreparable physical damage.


We're still in the Medieval era, huh? This first stage sure is going on. I like the prisoners that feebly swat at you from being their cell doors, though. They just seem a bit lonely. Well, they ought to be, I've killed every living thing in a ten-mile radius.


At last, it's the final boss of stage one and at least he fits in nicely with the Medieval theme. Sure, he looks like a Ghouls 'n' Ghosts boss that was scrapped for not being interesting enough, but he's more imposing than that wizard. The boss has a huge shield, which probably explains why it takes more bullets than were fired during the D-Day landings to bring him down. Honestly, I don't know why Time Slip even bothers having a fire button. They could have just programmed the game so that your gun is always firing all the time: the end result would have been the same, and I'd save some wear on my Y button.


Alright, I'm headin' to the Cretaceous! There are gonna be dinosaurs and guns and space aliens, it's gonna be so totally rad that it's gonna make every other SNES game look like Barney's Hide and Seek!


Oh come on. A side-scrolling shooter section? Really? I don't even get to shoot any dinosaurs, just jumped-up trilobites. Ooh, suddenly snuffling around on the ocean floor isn't good enough for you and you've decided you want nothing more than to smear yourself across the front of the jetbike that I now suddenly have access to for some reason? Even by the low, low standards of side-scrolling shooter levels shoehorned into games of otherwise different genres this one is poor. This is mostly down to your weapon being able to fire in eight directions but only if you're moving in that direction, a system which the developers took as carte blanche to make waves of enemies appear willy-nilly all over the bloody screen. Either make it so I can lock my direction of fire or just have the ship shoot forwards and put some effort into coming up with some decent enemy patterns.
So, in summary: sudden shooter sections in run-n-gun games continue to blow goats.


After the dismal jet-bike section, there's a very brief on-foot area that consists of running up an enormous staircase that's launching out big chunks of red-hot lava. Hang on... this staircase is actually a volcano, isn't it? A volcano made entirely of right angles. Okay, whatever, I'm just glad that Time Slip has decided it's not Gradius after all.
Also in the screenshot above, you can see some crystal laying on the ground. You can pick those crystal up for points, and each one also increments the blue bar labelled "TGS"by a tiny amount. What happens when the TGS bar is filled? No, I'm asking you what happens. I never managed to fill it. I want to believe it's something to do with The Girlie Show from 30 Rock, but deep down I know the universe is too cruel for that to be true.


There's a dinosaur at the top of the volcano. Neat. The dinosaur looks more like a dragon than the dragon boss from the first stage did, but he's so cheerful that it doesn't really matter. I wanted to be his friend, but the foul Tirmatians must have brainwashed the volcanosaurus into to trying to kill me so I had to stand underneath it and fire a thousand tonnes of hot lead right into its scaly chin.


Ancient Egypt is next, and as I prepare to gun down this shirtless young man armed only with a spear, a young man no doubt terrified by the strange person who has just appeared from nowhere, I have to wonder about Dr. Gilgamesh's status as a "good guy."


Tremble before Anubis, God of Weight-Training! Judging the souls of the dead is a great upper-body workout, it seems. It's a shame for Anubis that he's the easiest boss in the entire game, then. He should have spent more time working on his legs, because that's where I shot him until he died.


You know, this is starting to remind me of the Pyramid stage from Metal Slug 3. My recommendation is that you play Metal Slug 3 - hell, any Metal Slug game - rather than this. Nice artwork on the sarcophagi, though.


There's a high-tech alien base at the heart of the pyramid. Erich von Daniken would shit a brick if he saw this.
When I write about a game for VGJunk, I generally play it through and then give it a day or so to percolate through my mind, allowing me to come to an unhurried conclusion. When I sat down to write about Time Slip, however, there was nothing there. I had forgotten almost everything about the game besides that it was fairly irritating, and so I had to play it again, making me possibly the only person in the world to have ever played all the way through Time Slip twice. It's a forgettable game, a hour or so of the usual run-n-gun action only with the annoying inability to lock your gunfire in one direction, enemies that are frustratingly difficult to avoid thanks to some loose jumping physics and boss battles that drag on and on and on, not because they're hugely difficult, but because every enemy in this game has ridiculously oversized health bars. I don;t think I needed the second playthrough to figure that out, but it's nice to have confirmation.


The boss of the Egyptian stage has lots of health and a shield of rotating orbs to protect it from harm, so as you can probably guess it's my favourite boss ever. There isn't even anything interesting to say about it unless you count the observation that the orbs look kinda like a face-on view of a robot dolphin. I really hope you find that interesting. That's the level I operate on here at VGJunk.


It's Ancient Rome for stage four, and the developers have really capitalised on the Roman Empire famously being nothing but a series of brick towers with ladders bolted to the outside to create an explosively exciting shooting-things-while-hanging-off-ladder experience. Dr. Gilgamesh is fighting the Tirmatians themselves now. They're scrawny little things with big guns. No wonder your home planet is being destroyed by a space-time anomaly, you bunch of skinny nerds.


Look at this Tirmatian. His broodmates or clone-family or whatever they have on his planet are out risking their lives to ensure the survival of their species, and this guy is just sitting there playing the saxophone. Good job, Glarxxon - while you're busting out the riff from Careless Whisper over and over again, Dr. Gilgamesh is putting an end to your fiendish scheme!


Then I had to fight a twelve-foot-tall David Copperfield. Why? Who the hell knows. He doesn't seem very interested in the fight, either. You could at least look at me when we're supposed to be duelling to the death, you jumped-up party entertainer.
There's another boss fight at the end of this stage, but it's just the floating orbs again in a slightly different configuration and how can I say anything interesting about that when I've just been shooting the world's wealthiest illusionist, owner of several Caribbean islands and, apparently, a literal giant? I can't, I just can't. On to the next stage, then!


What fun, it's another one of these. The background looks good, but that's about as much praise as I'm willing to extend here. By this point, Time Slip's difficulty level has overtaken the generic gameplay as the main reason why the game isn't much fun. There are so many enemies populating the screen - enemies that are difficult to defeat without taking damage thanks to the awkward shooting controls and the bulky sprites - that you might as well have a health bar that constantly ticks downwards. There's very little you can do to avoid any of this on-screen junk, and best of all there are no passwords or even continues, so if you lose all your lives it's right back to the start of the game.


So, the Containment Unit from Ghostbusters was behind everything! The bosses in this game are really uneven in tone, aren't they? Giant suits of armour, dragons and David Copperfield on the one hand, metal spheres and metal cubes on the other. Am I implying that there was kind of Odd Couple dynamic between two of Time Slip's development staff, one a stiff and staid fan of various metallic shapes, the other a wild and zany character who plays a lot of Dungeons and Dragons? They bicker and get into scrapes, but deep down they love each other and, to keep the peace between them, they compromised on what bosses would be included in the game. That's the only reason I can come up with to explain why, in what is ostensibly a fast-paced action game, you have to fight an immobile metal square. All the kids were clamouring to do battle against an office safe, were they?


Dr. Gilgamesh decides that the only way to stop the invaders once and for all is to travel to the planet Tirmat and destroy the heart of their empire. Nice to know that the time machine also works as a teleporter. There's even a little tool that flips out of the side for getting stones out of horse's hooves.
You might notice that this stage has one distinguishing feature: the complete inability to see what the bloody hell you're doing. The game was hard enough before the graphics started looking like an extreme close-up of a flu sufferer's sinuses, and I have to admit it's at this point that I knocked up a GameGenie code to give myself infinite health. The frustration of taking damage from projectiles and enemies that could have been invisible for all the warning I had was getting too much, so I decided to take it easy for the good of my mental health.


That's a bit better - visually, I mean, the game hasn't suddenly become good or anything. No, it started off as an unrewarding chore and it has evolved an unrewarding chore with the addition of a difficulty curve that swooped past "challenging" a long way back and is now hovering around "masochistic".
I haven't even mentioned the sub-weapon system, mostly because it's not very good. You can see that I have a couple of options at the top of the screen - the sub-weapons are one-shot deals that can be replenished by collecting power-ups. One of them is a screen-covering smart bomb, and that's fairly useful, but the others are just variations of the forward-firing rocket-launcher. The problem is that you can only fire them straight forwards, and because the enemies come from all angles then approximately 12.5% of the time your sub-weapons are useless because your target isn't sitting right in front of you.


The penultimate boss is a wall of robotic nipples. Each nipple blossoms in turn to reveal a small gun that shoots at Dr. Gilgamesh. Destroy that nipple-cannon and the next one appears, and so on and so forth. Repeat this until you've destroyed al the cyber-nipples, and then do it a bit more because the developers assumed we'd be having so much fun fighting this boss that they made some of the nipples regenerate.


The final boss of Time Slip is an arcade crane game that tries to pick you up as though you were nothing but a poorly-made Hello Kitty cuddly toy. Can you feel the raw excitement!? This is what I mean about the sub-weapons being mostly useless. The boss is up there, where I can't aim my weapons. I suppose I could jump and fire horizontally, but after playing through Time Slip I've decided I want as little to do with its jumping mechanics as possible. No, I'm going to stand directly underneath it and fire straight upwards, thus saving the Earth.


Oh man, Moist are playing a gig tonight! They're totally my favourite Wet Wet Wet cover band ever, let's go and see the show. Yeah, it's at The Club. It's a small town, we only have one club.
So, Dr. Gilgamesh saves the day by condemning a race of sentient, saxophone-loving aliens to complete annihilation. It all just seems a bit unnecessary. We could have worked something out, surely? The Tirmatians could have gone back in time and warned themselves of the impending catastrophe. We humans could have let them borrow Mars for a bit. Next time, let's try opening a dialogue before resorting to interstellar invasions, hmm? No one had a fun time here today, least of all me.


That's Moist for you, always inciting riots amongst the impressionable youth with their music and their antics and their shallow anti-establishment posturing. The word "Gilgamesh" is written four times on this newspaper page, which seems a bit excessive but then I suppose he did save the whole of humanity from extinction.
If you've been paying attention - and I wouldn't blame you if you hadn't - then you'll have realised that Time Slip is one you should avoid. It's a relatively competent Contra clone that's smeared with just enough poor design choices - the shooter stages, the HUD that covers most of the top of the screen, the useless special weapons - to become an unpleasant experience. Play Contra III instead, play a Metal Slug game instead, hell, even go outside and talk to another human instead. Well, maybe not that last one. Let's not go crazy.

Get out your novelty songs about dancing monsters and bootleg costumes of famous movie characters, because it's that time again. Yes, that time - October is here, and that means this year's Annual VGJunk Halloween Spooktacular has arrived! For the whole of October, I'll be writing about gruesome and ghoulish games packed with hideous and horrifying creatures while apparently applying acres of alliteration. As always I'm terribly excited about this, because October is my most favourite time of the year and games starring Draculas and Frankensteins get me excited like bad movie scripts excite Nicholas Cage.
I'm going to start with the ZX Spectrum version of a 1987 game by the Oliver Twins and Codemasters: the haunted-house-em-up Ghost Hunters. I can't contain myself, I have to tell you right now that it has a pumpkin in it. What else does it have? Let's find out!


Well, it's got a spooky house perched upon a mountaintop, so we're already off to a good start. This is Nightmare Mansion, a dread fortress whose facade looks a little like the face of an angry garden gnome, pointy hat and all. Inside the Nightmare Mansion is your brother, Chuck Studbuckle. He's trapped by the various monsters that lurk within, and it's up to you to rescue him. This shouldn't be a problems, because according to the cassette inlay the player character's name is Hunk Studbuckle. That name's so manly it could have been part of that famous Mystery Science Theatre bit. Hunk Studbuckle cannot fail.


Here's the main menu screen, and there are a couple of features of note. One, those are severed human heads on those little shelves and not cabbages in the late stages of decomposition. Secondly, Ghost Hunters is a resolutely monochromatic game, with everything being depicted in one colour against a black background, but you at least get a choice of colour - either cyan or red. I went with the blue for the purposes of this article. Red is arguably more Halloween-appropriate, but the red-on-black look is a little headache-inducing. That might be a psychosomatic thing, because it makes Ghost Hunters look a Virtual Boy game, but the blue is definitely more soothing.
Then there's the music, which sounds like this:


It's the familiar "sneaky villain" riff, extended into it's own little tune and made to sound like it's being played on an uncooperative dial-up modem. I kinda like it, though. I feel like you could put a strong beat behind it and make a decent dance track. Fun fact: that piece of music, which I have always thought of as "spooky tiptoe music," is actually called the Mysterioso Pizzicata. I'm always learning new thing while writing these articles, but that's my favourite one for a while. I'm half-tempted to get a pet just so I can name it Mysterioso Pizzicata.


When you start the game, the words "GHOST HUNTERS" appear on screen because, I dunno, we wouldn't want you forgetting what game you're playing? But then - get this - the game actually says "Ghost Hunters!" out loud in a screechy robotic voice. Glorious synthesised speech! As soon as I heard it I knew I'd made the right decision in starting the Halloween season with this one.


Okay, the actual game, then. Ghost Hunters is a flip-screen platformer in the usual home computer style in which you control Hunk Studbuckle as he traverses the many rooms of the Nightmare Mansion. There's Hunk now, standing on that column in the middle of the room and showing the world that yes, he is so rugged and studly that he's going to attempt this mission bare-chested. What are the vampire and the zombie over there going to do, bite him? The guy's called Hunk Studbuckle, it'd be like biting an anvil.
The goal of the game is to free your brother Chuck, but to reach him you have to activate the various elevators and moving platforms of the Nightmare Mansion by collecting a variety of different items from the mansion's many rooms. Why does picking up daggers and trinket boxes power up the lifts? I have no idea, but if I had to guess I'd say it's something to do with ghosts.


Here, I have found a Blood Goblet. Presumably that's a goblet for drinking blood out of and not a goblet made from blood. A goblet made from blood would just be a big bucket-shaped scab, and I don't care how urgently my brother needs rescuing, I wouldn't touch anything matching that description.
Collecting the blood goblet causes the pillar in the center of the first screen to rise, which I thought was a nice touch because it hammers home that collecting items makes platforms move. This would otherwise be an easy concept to misunderstand, because the items you need and the specific platforms they activate are rarely located in the same room or even nearby. That's the main crux of Ghost Hunters' gameplay: find an item and then search the mansion to find the now-moving piece of scenery that'll allow you to access a previously unreachable area, an area which will contain another item, and so on.


Ghost Hunters includes an in-game map, which is rather handy and I like that the shape of the mansion here matches up with the mansion show in that first loading screen, with the two towers on either side. However, there's also a bitter cruelty to this map screen. To pause the game and open the map, you press the P key. To close the map and continue the game, you press the space bar - pressing P again resets the entire game. If, like me and pretty much anyone who has played videogames in the last twenty years, you are used to pausing and unpausing games by pressing the same button, then I'm sure that if you decide to play Ghost Hunters you'll have as much fun as I did when you accidentally quit the goddamn game the first, ooh, fifteeen or twenty times you check the map.


While Hunk's flawless body might be immune to the attacks of the undead, his mind is rather more fragile. Fear is what will kill you in this game, rather than being eaten by zombies or whatever it is that the skeletons want to do to you - removing your skin for use as a raincoat, possibly. There are two categories of monsters in Ghost Hunters: one kind are permanent and serve mostly as obstacles to be jumped over, like the rat in the bottom-right of the screenshot above. Then there are what the game refers to as "demons," foul creatures that appear on the screen after phasing in from some hellish alternate reality. A prime example of a demon is the vampire at the top-left of the screenshot above. Yes, the vampire with the unibrow and the droopy cape that makes it seem that he'd be more likely to transform into a fuzzy moth than a bat. This mothlike vampire is so spooky that his mere presence on the screen causes Hunk's "terrometer" to rise. The terrometer's at the bottom of the screen: I'm still a little annoyed it's not spelled "terrormeter," but the ghostly face in the O softens the blow. Anyway, the terrometer: if there's a reading on the terrometer, Hunk gradually loses his Macho Energy.


Now, I'm sure you've been looking at that Macho Energy bar on the left since this article began, wondering whether filling the bar would mutate Hunk into a super-powered, musclebound form or possibly turn him into Macho Man Randy Savage, but I must sadly inform you that it's just a life bar. Run out of Macho Energy and Hunk becomes too scared to continue, with the assumption being that he suffers a heart attack thanks to the raw terror of Count Mothula and his fellow demons.


Thankfully Hunk brought some firepower to the Nightmare Mansion in the form of him "sub-compact anti-matter phantom splatterer," a weapon that is in no way inspired by the proton packs of the Ghostbusters. You might have noticed the crosshair floating around in the earlier screenshots: well, if you hold the fire button down you can move this crosshair and use your weapon to shoot the demons, temporarily sending them back where they came from. Transylvania, I assume.
It's very important to zap the demons as quickly as possible, because Hunk is a coward at heart and it doesn't take long for his fear to render him unable to continue his mission. It's a shame, then, that the shooting portion of Ghost Hunter is not that much fun and eventually bogs down the rest of the game. Because demons hurt you just by being on screen you don't have the luxury of ignoring them, but the crosshair is a little slow to move and has a lot of intertia, so getting it in the right place can be tedious. This is especially problematic because the crosshair doesn't reset to a central position but instead remains in the last place you fired it. If a demon appears at the opposite corner of the screen than your previous target, by the time you manage to drag the crosshair all the way across the screen you'll have lost a huge chunk of your Macho Energy, equivalent to ordering a penis pump online or being caught watching The Princess Diaries.


Here lies Hunk Studbuckle, killed by looking at a skeleton for too long. He died as he lived - shirtless and terrified.
There are some factors that mitigate against Ghost Hunters' decision to essentially have the player's health be draining at all times. The most obvious one is that Hunk can replenish his Macho Energy by drinking from the containers of bubbling, unidentified liquid scattered around the mansion. The instructions say that these are cauldrons, but they look much more like laboratory glassware and you know what? I'm fine with that. I'd much rather drink out of a lab beaker: science has given us an amazing pageant of wonderful things, but nothing good has ever come out of a cauldron. Okay, apart from Asterix's super-strength potion. Even more rewarding than the health refill is the fact that the synthesised "GHOST HUNTERS!" speech plays every time you pick up a potion. I don't care if they're served in a cauldron, a beaker or out of that scab goblet I mentioned earlier, I would drink any number of these potions just to hear that sound effect.


The other thing is the two-player mode, where one player controls Hunk's movements while the other player operates the gun. Now, it may astonish you to learn that I didn't have any friends handy to try out this two-player mode with, but on a conceptual level this has to be the far superior way to play Ghost Hunters. It'd certainly give you more of a chance in successfully completing what is a rather difficult computer game. I was going to say "a ghost of a chance," but this is only the first article of the Halloween season. I don't want to play my hand too early, you know?


To make good on my statement at the top of this article, here is evidence that Ghost Hunters contains a pumpkin. What do you mean, "where?" It's the blue pumpkin-shaped thing in the middle of the screen, next to the shield... oh. This is some kind of Rorsach test situation, isn't it? "Tell me what you see in this random clump of pixels. A pumpkin? Hmm, interesting, interesting..." Look, I'm 90% sure that thing is supposed to be a pumpkin, and I'm going to continue believing that until one of the game's programmers shows up and tells me otherwise.


Here are a few of the game's other monsters. Starting from the left we've got a shambling zombie in an oversized sweater, the ghost of that very sweater, a nonchalant skeleton, what is presumably a mummy standing in a sarcophagus and, my favourite of them all, an adorable little ghost who pops up out of his coffin with a look of spectral confusion all over his sheet. This ghost has no idea what's going on, does he? I think he's only opened his coffin because Hunk has woken him up with all his banging around. Go back to sleep, little ghost. You look dead tired. I'm sorry, but I can't myself - I've been possessed by the Halloween spirit oh no it keeps happening.


I found a goblet. Note that this is a different, completely seperate goblet to the blood goblet from the first screen. The blood goblet is for blood and blood only, whereas this goblet can be used for fine wines, the internal ichor of the god-beats from the furthest stars or even Dr. Pepper.


After spending some time in the Nightmare Mansion, I've got some feelings about this game but I'm not exactly sure what those feelings are. Starting at a basic technical level, Ghost Hunters is solidly built, with good controls and platforming that can get hard, especially towards the end, but which never never demands the pixel-perfect jumping of many other home computer platformers. It's quite nicely animated, too, and overall the game has the feel of treacle sliding down a drainpipe - smooth, but slow. The moving platforms in particular are rather sluggish, and there's a lot of waiting around for the lifts to reach the right position, which isn't situation to be in when you have to keep moving through the rooms as quickly as possible lest sharing the same wing of the mansion with a skeleton causes Hunk to void his bowels.


I like Ghost Hunters' concept more than the actual game, that's the problem. Everything that wants you dead can kill you just by standing around and your Macho Energy drains very quickly, so it's difficult to make much progress without dying. There's no time to stand still and get your bearings - hell, I was once waiting for a spider to move so I could walk under it when a vampire rose from the floor right beneath Hunk's feet, lifting him into the air and scaring our hero to death. The two-player mode and the sharing of the tasks that it entails does sound like the perfect compromise, but in single player I'd have to say that I really like the idea and the setting but actually negotiating the mansion is sadly just a bit irritating.


I also have to take issue with the name Ghost Hunters, because you do not hunt ghosts. Yes, there are ghosts and yes, sometimes you have to shoot them with your magic gun, but "hunt" implies that Hunk has entered the house with the express purpose of bustin' ghosts and that is very much not what is happening here. The player has to avoid the ghosts at all costs. That's not hunting, that's being sensible. Mind you, this works both ways, and the monsters and demons don't really get involved. They're around, popping up in various places and being so frightening that they can turn a man so un-macho that he dies, but they never directly attack the player or even chase after them. The conflict within the Nightmare Mansion is between Hunk and the monsters, two factions who want to have nothing to do with each other and try to stay out of each other's way, like housemates who have had a serious falling out over eating the other person's clearly labelled food out of the shared fridge. Well, if one of the housemates could kill the other with a glance, I mean.


What do you think I've been trying to do? I'm not sure if this is Ghost Hunters' idea of friendly advice or if I'm supposed to be reading it in a sarcastic tone, but the game repeatedly offers up these little snippets of advice as you play. Some of them are more useful than others.


Thanks, that's extremely helpful. I'll bear that in mind. Any other pearls of wisdom you'd like to share with me?


Okay, I think this one is the demons trying to use reverse psychology on poor Hunk. "Whatever you do, Hunk, don't turn the gun on yourself! We demons rely on your fear to survive, and if you're too busy shooting yourself to be scared then we'll cease to exist you big dumb idiot."


After much platforming, most of it enjoyable and surprisingly forgiving of my many errors, I finally spotted my captive brother in a room at the top of the mansion. I was going to make a crack about them being identical twins, but the Ghost Hunters instructions do actually describe them as twins so that rather takes the wind out of my sails on that one. Unfortunately Chuck is trapped between these two suits of armour, so we can't make our escape just yet. I know the perspective makes it look as though Chuck should just be able to step around the armour, but this is a haunted house and the rules of physical space do not apply here. That also explains why I couldn't walk past some candles mounted on the wall earlier. The only other explanation would be that the owner of this house uses candles that are wide enough to block entire corridors, and that's just silly.


That shoe over there is the last item Hunk needs to collect to complete the game. Why a shoe? Your guess is a good as mine. Actually, my guess was that the shoes were like the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz and they were going to take us home, so your guess is, in fact, way better than mine.


That's a much more useful message, Ghost Hunters. Of course, it doesn't go the extra mile and tell you where the exit is, but I took the gamble that I could get out the same way I got in and so I headed back to the first screen.


Oh good, I'm glad my hunch was correct and I didn't have to spend ages looking for the exit. If you're wondering what happened to Chuck, you see him make a run for it the moment you collect the final shoe. Hopefully this means he knew where the exit is and he got out safely, although I'm a little hurt he didn't hang around to thank me after I risked life and sanity alike to free him from his demonic captors.


Hold on, who's Buster? Was my brother's name Buster all along? Buster Studbuckle sounds better than Chuck Studbuckle, I suppose. I've even seen Hunk be called Brad in some magazine reviews of Ghost Hunters, but there's no way I'm accepting Brad as an alternate name for a hero who fought demons without a shirt on.
With Ghost Hunters completed, I can look back on a game that I enjoyed, but only because I really wanted to enjoy it thanks to the interesting premise, the haunted house setting and that digitised speech. A great game in concept but one which is somewhat lacking in execution, although it's far from a total disaster - the high difficulty level and slow movements will probably put off those of you more comfortable with modern games, but neat little touches and good design abound. It's particularly impressive that the house feels much bigger than it actually is thanks to there being several unconnected paths through each room - each room is multiple rooms, if you see what I mean. If you do decide to try Ghost Hunters I hope you enjoy the game, and if you don't enjoy the game then I hope you at least enjoy the robot voice croaking "GHOST HUNTERS" at you. I know I did.
But wait! It's the Halloween season, and that means it's time for the return of the VGJunk Halloween-O-Meter (patent pending)! As ever, the Halloween-O-Meter registers my rating of not how good a game is but how Halloween-y it is - how much it fits in with the spooky season and, in large part, whether it features any jack-o-lanterns. So, how does Ghost Hunters score?


Eight out of ten - a very solid start to this year's Halloween campaign, a score bumped up by the appearance of vampires, ghosts and, of course, that blue thing that I am still claiming is definitely 100% a pumpkin. Will anything be able to top Ghost Hunters' score? You'll just have to follow the VGJunk Halloween season to find out!

That'll be an evil carnival, then. The other option would be evil Spanish meat, and as the world's leading suppliers of delicious hams and chorizos I think it would be unfair to accuse the Spanish of dabbling in evil meat.


CarnEvil's intro begins with a little poetry, because even the gentler arts have a place in the Halloween season. It's not the most lyrical ode I've ever read, but at least it rhymes properly, which puts it a level above the poetry from Demonslair.
The poem tells how CarnEvil can be resurrected by finding a jester's tomb and inserting a magical token. It seems like the horror of CarnEvil should be easy enough to avoid, then. Don't go to the graveyard, don't find the jester's tomb and don't insert coins like it was, well, an arcade game. These aren't difficult tasks to not do.


Of course, there wouldn't be much of a game if some big idiot didn't come along and feed the jester some loose change, and that exactly what happens: while enjoying a night-time ride through the Greely Valley cemetery as part of Spooky Sam's Ghost Tour, our protagonist thinks to himself "hey, screw you, poem - nothing with such an obvious rhyme scheme is going to tell me what to do!" and deposits the fateful clown credit.


Horror movies are often derided for having their characters take the stupidest possible course of action upon finding themselves trapped in a haunted house or being chased by a deranged killer, but I think CarnEvil's introduction has them all beat. You had one job, you dolt: don't mess with the clown grave. I mean, that should go without saying, but you had a very specific warning about this. Now there's a needle-fanged clown's head trying to bite your face off and you have no-one to blame but yourself.


CarnEvil offers the player a choice of three stages at the start of the game, and boy do they all sound enticing. Well, maybe not "Rickety Town" because it sounds like a town where everyone suffers from a Vitamin D deficiency. Haunted House and Freak Show, though, those are gold. Clear all three stages and you can head to the Big Top for the final showdown, and I'll be starting with the Haunted House. It's on the left, so the developers clearly want me to head there first, right?


Happy Halloween, everyone! I hope this image will keep you warm through the long October nights (because you're hiding under your duvet). This is the jester from the intro, a floating head called Umlaut who introduces each stage with maniacal laughter and some Cryptkeeper-ish puns. In this instance, he tells us we're going to meet a ghoul who lost her head and I don't think he means this ghoul overreacted or lost her sense of proportion.


A zombie lurks in a graveyard, and because CarnEvil is a lightgun game in a very traditional mode all you have to do is aim and shoot. Shoot it in the head, if you can. Then shoot every other monster, phantom and circus performer you see until the game is finished. CarnEvil's gameplay is very basic, and if you've ever played an arcade lightgun game before you'll know exactly what to do. There are no gimmicks in this one besides the macabre setting, no special sniper sections or extra controls or mechanics for taking cover, just a shooting gallery of freaks. As such, this article is pretty much going to be a guided tour of CarnEvil's more grotesque sights, because I've already said almost everything there is to say about the gameplay. You can collect a few different, limited-ammo weapons and sometimes you have to not shoot a normal human girl, but that's about it and you know what? I love it. When you get as excited as I do by all this horror stuff, you don't need any fancy gameplay mechanics to have a good time.


C'mon, just look at this - I'm not even inside the haunted house yet, and I'm already shooting grim reapers that have had such a productive day harvesting the souls of the dead that they spill five or six of those souls when you kill them, souls that are now presumably condemned to a horrifying eternity of un-life. Just prior to this, a zombie attacked by throwing a human torso at me. I think it's fair to say I am fully sold on CarnEvil's charms.


Here is an innocent person. Do not shoot the innocent person. Get used to seeing this innocent person, because she appears multiple times in each stage, sometimes requiring you to save her by shooting a nearby enemy and sometimes just jumping up in front of a terrified man with a gun and making a loud noise. Amazingly, especially given that second pattern of behaviour, I managed to avoid shooting my friend here nearly one hundred percent of the time. I think it's because she stands out against the dark backgrounds.


No sooner had I stepped through the front door than I was attacked by Hambone, a hulking undead giant with a hockey mask and a chaingun for an arm. Also, Hambone is on fire. This is a shame, because I kinda wanted to give him a hug, but I'll have to settle for the usual lightgun boss fight - shoot the enemy's weak spot to interrupt their attacks before they can hurt you. In Hambone's case, that means shooting his gun-arm so he can't riddle you with bullets and then riddling him with your bullets. Does that count as irony? "Getting shot while you're trying to shoot someone" isn't in that Alanis Morissette song so it's hard to tell.


More zombies, some with knives, but I'm more interested in that painting in the background that shows a mantis-woman holding a maggot baby. I was so interested in it, in fact, that one of these zombies managed to throw a knife into my skull, but I think it was worth it. I want to know about the mantis-lady. Does she live here? Also, who's maggot baby is that? Because I don't think mantises start out as maggots, do they? Mr. and Mrs. Mantis could not conceive naturally - not after the first attempt, when Mrs. Mantis ate her partner's head - so they adopted. See, it's these little details that can really bring a game to life.
Speaking of the backgrounds and the graphics in general, CarnEvil is very much a game of its time in that regard, with nicely-detailed pre-rendered backgrounds being inhabited by rather boxy polygonal enemies. While I really do like the backgrounds, and they're packed with detail, their pre-rendered nature means there's very little interaction with the scenery. That's usually one of my favourite things about lightgun games, and I've made my love of destructible scenery clear in the past, but while more interactivity with your surroundings would have possibly improved CarnEvil I'm happy enough with what's on offer.


Hambone is back! I love how his name is listed as "Hambone - The Revenge" under his health bar this time. I look forward to CarnEvil Part VIII: Hambone Takes Manhattan.
There's no much new about this fight, except that Hambone's arm is now a gun that fires skulls. A gun that fires skulls. What a time to be alive.


The haunted mansion has a kitchen, complete with zombie cook in a chef's hat, which is pretty magical. I wonder what he's cooking? Spookhetti? Ghoulash? Hey, if that jester skull gets to make these ghastly puns then so do I.
Now that I come to review these screenshots, I notice that there's a bucket full of dismembered human parts at the bottom-left of the screen and a leg on the chopping block. I thought I'd mention it, just in case my bad food jokes made you think CarnEvil was getting a bit too light-hearted.


I feel like I'm skipping a fair few things that I could mention about this stage in the interests of keeping this article under 20,000 words, but there's no way I'd neglect to mention that after climbing onto the roof for undisclosed reasons - reasons one assumes are closely linked to our hero's well-established denseness - a haunted car nudges you off the roof and into an open grave with a comedy tombstone. As if that wasn't great enough, these two zombies shuffle over to investigate, not out of any desire to eat you but just to see what the hell is going on. They just look so confused, you can almost see the vestiges of their brains struggling with the fact that it's usually the dead ones that go in the hole. A tiny part of me felt bad about shooting their heads clean off their necks.


Here's Evil Marie, the boss of the haunted house. So, the Marie in question is Marie Antoinette, then? Okay, good. There's no explanation as to why the reanimated corpse of a French queen is here trying to kill me with an axe, and frankly I don't want an explanation. I'm just happy that this is something someone at Midway decided was be a good idea for a boss in a lightgun game. You don't get to gun down prominent figures from the French Revolution in Time Crisis, now do you?
Given the relative ease of the stage preceding the fight, I was not prepared for how difficult this battle was. The problem was that it took me quite a while to realise that Marie's weak point is her neck - I blame this partly on her ridiculous jiggling breasts. The certainly have a way of diverting the player's attention, and quicker than you can say "did they really give her boob physics?" Marie has lobbed an axe into your skull. Even when you do know her weakness there's still the challenge of actually hitting her bloody (ha!) neck as she pirouettes around in the air, but with patience and some accurate aiming you'll see her off.


I was trying to think of a way to work Marie's death by impalement on a tombstone into a Schwarzenegger-style quip, but the best I could come up with was "let them eat spike" and that's just not good enough, I have standards, you know. Oh, yeah, the spookhetti pun. No, I don't have standards.


On to Rickety Town, a fairground stage that starts with our hero hopping aboard a Christmas-themed rollercoaster where horrible little elves try to smash his head in with oversized candy canes - and if you'd ever seen me packing away the Christmas treats you'd know it takes a lot for me to describe a candy cane as "oversized". The name of the rollercoaster is the Slay Ride, naturally. I'm going to have to check my diary and see what I was up to in 1998, because I think I might have helped design CarnEvil and somehow forgotten about it.


The breakneck speed with which CarnEvil mixes up its locations continues, and soon you're fighting dinosaurs on a prehistoric teacup ride. Not people in dinosaur costumes, mind, I'm fully convinced that these are living bipedal reptiles with a hunger for human flesh. Just look at that thing's eyes, only a feeling creature would have an expression like that - a terrifying yet strangely adorable expression. It just wants to play, but sadly the only game it knows is Human Intestine Jump-Rope.


There's a food court to blast your way through, and in a wonderful touch it's staffed by surly teenage zombies. Their murderous rage is merely the destructive outward expression of the fear that they'll be working the drive-through window all their lives while their friends go off to college and live meaningful, interesting lives. In one of CarnEvil's rare moments of background interactivity, you can shoot the target up there to dunk one of the teen zombies into the deep fryer. Would you think less of me if I told you I found that really funny? You probably should.


In a game packed to the bleeding, suppurating gills with hideous monsters it takes a lot to claim the crown as number one thing you'd least like to find standing at the end of your bed upon waking from a nightmare, but I think Smilin' Bob here has a good shot at the title. He only wants to help. He wants to help you with his wrench. He wants to help you until you stop twitching and leaking. He only wants to help you rest.
Still, there's a billboard behind Bob that promises "Burritos a big as your head" so honestly I think I'll take the risk of visiting Rickety Town.


The stage began with a Christmas theme and that's how it ends, as the player takes on a decidedly un-jolly old elf called Krampus. More Old Nick than Saint Nick, the "real" Krampus is a figure from European folklore who acts as sort of a nega-Santa: while Father Christmas deals with the children who fell on the "nice" side of the list, Krampus takes care of the "naughty" ones, usually by stuffing them in a sack and carrying them away and carrying them away to his lair to do whatever it is that Krampus does to little kids. I'm going with "eat them," because that's the least horrible scenario that came to mind.
CarnEvil's Krampus differs from traditional depictions in that he's less of a hairy, goat-headed beast and more of a giant blue Santa with antlers and hands that look equally effective at disembowelment and raking leaves. There's not much to say about the battle itself because it boils down to shooting Krampus as fast as possible so his attacks don't hit you, something that's not always possible given that your basic gun can only fire a measly six shots before having to reload. I think that's my biggest gripe with CarnEvil: a larger clip for your weapon would have made things a little more enjoyable.
Anyway, you'll be able to bring down Kramups with enough concentrated fire and, let's be honest, he's pretty hard to miss. Onward to the Freak Show!


Yep, that is definitely a freak. You look up freak in the dictionary and you're gonna see a picture of this guy. I mean, I won't see his picture, because my dictionary doesn't have pictures, you big baby. So, what else have we got?


The most common freak you'll see during the first half of the stage is Flap Jack the two-headed man. Where's his other head? Dangling between his legs, legs which are actually the arms of a second torso growing directly from the bottom of the first torso. It must be a common defect in Flap Jack's family because there are plenty of him, popping up to attack and not really minding that much when they get shot. The sound goofy. Sorry, I mean they sound like Goofy. I half-expected them to shout "gawrsh!" upon dying.


At the half-way point of the stage you get to fight Eyeclops, a broadsword-swingin' demon knight who has the distinct disadvantage of a body covered in weak spots. He's got eyes in his biceps, for pity's sake. I don't think that's conducive to a successful career as a medieval warrior. Every time you flex your guns to impress the comely tavern maidens it'll feel like someone's squeezing your eyeball. I suppose it could be an advantage of the pro arm-wrestling circuit - the ability to give your opponent a death-stare no matter where they're looking might give you the psychological edge - but no, Eyeclops is sticking with guarding the entrance to the Freak Show's castle even though he's really bad at it. Eyeclops is also a Cockney, for some reason. Some websites like "ancient Greek" as the rhyming slang for "freak," which is oddly appropriate for a boss named after the Cyclops, but I think someone has made that one up in the recent past.


The inside of the castle is packed with these S&M freaks. Hey, that phrase works both ways - they're freaks who like S&M and they're real freaks about S&M in the same way that I'm a freak for side-scrolling beat-em-ups. You can tell they're really into it, because they've got enormous nails hammered into their bodies like an enthusiastic but amateurish Hellraiser remake. I don't think 50 Shades of Grey ever went that far. Did CarnEvil generate any controversy on its release? This seems like the kind of thing that would generate controversy, although admittedly the impact of this freak is lessened by the way he's got a bucket jammed on his head.


This is what I mean about the limited background interaction - that freak is standing right inside this iron maiden! If only I could shoot it closed somehow, it'd save me a few bullets if nothing else.


Oh, thank you, girl that I keep saving! My dedication to not blasting you the second you appeared on screen all those other times has really paid off.


A trip through the castle's drainage system dumps you in a mechanised area. That's aanother thing I like about CarnEvil, you're always on the move: there's no parade of goons lurching into the same single-screen backdrop in this one, our hero covers more ground than most racehorses do in a calendar year.
The machinery down here is devoted to collecting the corpses of the torture freaks and mushing them into a meaty slop that is then served up in giant bowls. But what could possibly require feeding with an endless conveyor belt of human flesh slurry? If you guessed "the boss of this stage" then yes, you are correct, and what a boss it is.


Say hello to Junior, the gargantuan mutant baby! Holy shit, that is one hell of thing to be fighting in a videogame. I have to wonder whether the developers played Zombies Ate My Neighbours, saw that game's giant baby boss and though "yeah, I like the concept, but it's just not deformed enough." Junior's head is held together by enormous staples, for chrissakes. This is fantastic.


I took cover in an oversized doll's house, but Junior responded by vomiting all over me so I guess it wasn't my smartest move ever. Don't forget, that vomit is composed entirely of ground-up freak-meat. Nothing so wholesome as strained carrots in there.
Apparently, if you go into the game's setting you can replace this boss battle with a fight against a giant teddy bear called Deaddy. This is probably to mollify arcade owners who were uncomfortable with the idea of shooting babies, although I can't imagine that ever being the case.


After many, many bullets, Junior takes so much punishment that he toddles back towards his cot. His cot is also a huge electric chair, which explains why Junior looks like one of my attempts at cooking steak in the screenshot above. Hey, look, officer, I had to shoot the baby, it was either him or me. Officer? No, please, put down the gun!


With the first three levels cleared, you can head to the Big Top and experience all the fun of the circus! And what do circuses have? Staggeringly unhealthy food loaded with e. coli? Well, yes. Animal cruelty? That too, but what I meant was clowns. The worst of all the freaks, the most hideous of all the monsters, a cavalcade of clowns will twirl and tumble from the foetid corners that they call home to murder anyone who enters their garish, greasepainted domain! Roll up, roll up, we've got teeny-tiny clowns with the mouths of sharks and the unmistakable gleam of madness in their eyes!


We've got brutish, hulking clowns that will grind your bones into the dirt of the centre ring with their knuckleduster-laden fists!


Doctor, doctor, I feel funny! Well, so do these madcap medical menaces, merry at the thought of some mirthful malpractise! They're on a mission to revive the use of "sawbones" as a synonym for doctor and it's your bones that are going to be sore! HONKHONKHONKHONNNNK!
So, yeah, clowns. Lots of clowns. There are few things as satisfying as shooting a clown. Even doing it in a videogame is good fun.


There are also mimes. The mimes don't attack, they just keep on doing their mime act, but the developers were obviously well aware of humanity's inbuilt desire to harm any mimes they see and so you're allowed to gun them down with no repercussions. There's even a machinegun power-up provided to help you get the job done more efficiently. Thanks, Midway.
By the way, my favourite thing about the mimes is that if you shoot their heads off, they chase after their severed noggins for a little while before succumbing to catastrophic blood loss.


I'm not sure I like this new Batman reboot.
After shooting your way through most of the clowns Hell has to offer, as well as a few of these bat-mites and rabid circus poodles, our hero climbs up to the high-wire because it is apparently very important to him to let you know that he is the dumbest son of a bitch to have ever lived. He does okay up there, considering he's not a trained trapeze artists (that we know of), but eventually a bat-man sneaks up on him and knocks our hero back doing to the ground.


I think this is my favourite bit in the whole of CarnEvil, which is really saying something - after landing with a thud, a clown ambulance rolls up and disgorges a paramedic team of little clowns, eager to facilitate some pre-emptive organ harvesting. We're only a few days in, and I think I've already found the defining moment of the 2014 VGJunk Halloween season.


Eventually the head villain gets tired of seeing you kill all his minions, and so the final battle is joined. This is Tökkentäkker, and he's a ringmaster, appropriately enough. I assume his name is supposed to look like "token taker," but all I need to know is where his weak-point is so I can sh- oi, get back here!


You have to fight Umlaut first, which honestly took me by surprise. I'd kinda of forgotten about the hideous little bonebox, but it's okay - he doesn't stick around for long. Umlaut's only attack is to try and bite you, which means he has to fly real close and thus present a nice big target for you to aim at. He doesn't have much of a health bar, either, so soon enough it's back to fighting Tökkentäkker.


Tökkentäkker gets to shout "skeletons, attack!" and skeletons do indeed attack. I'm in the wrong line of work. I've never really known what I wanted out out of life, but now it's clear - I want a job where I get to shout "skeletons, attack!" and it doesn't get me fired, like when I worked at that medical supply company.


More of a mini-stage than just a boss fight, dealing with Tökkentäkker involves chasing him around his airship and trying to shoot him the second you catch up to him, because he's very quick on the draw and you get little (if any) chance to knock him out of his attack animations. Skeletons aside, it's a rather underwhelming boss fight and CarnEvil's lowest ebb. Tökkentäkker is just some guy who dressed like a steampunk enthusiast. Earlier I fought a massive devil-baby. Tökkentäkker can't match up to that. It's not a bad fight, just not as engaging as the rest of the game, and thanks to his substantial health bar I was relieved when I finally finished Tökkentäkker off and he fell into the propeller of his airship, where he was unceremoniously diced into a million polygon pieces.


Oh god, someone catch that artist's mannequin, it's not wearing a parachute!


CarnEvil is over, and we're back where we began - our hero fondling a golden token he found in a tombstone. He's going to put it straight back in the slot, isn't he?


Good work, champ.
If Ghost Hunters was a gentle introduction to this year's Halloween Spooktacular, CarnEvil has turned the dial all the way up to maximum with a winning combination of extremely basic but very enjoyable lightgun action and a setting packed with gore, mutants and a thick vein of black humour. I loved it, as you can probably tell. Sadly, CarnEvil never received a home console port and it's never likely to, and it can be a bit wonky when emulated, but if you get a chance to play it I can fully endorse it. Unless you're scared of clowns, killer babies, murderous robots, ghostly French aristocrats and haunted cars, but in that case, what the hell are you doing reading VGJunk at Halloween?


Time to check in with the Halloween-O-Meter, and I've decided that CarnEvil has done enough to to earn the "coveted" ten out of ten rating! How exciting! I was dithering between awarding it nine or ten, but then I realised that the big clowns have pumpkins on their clothes. That did it. 10/10, good work everybody.

The name of the game is Nosferatu and the title screen shows an imposing castle bathed in moonlight, so please try not to recoil in surprise when I tell you that Nosferatu is about travelling through a castle to fight a vampire. You're thinking about Castlevania now, right? Yeah, me too, but as difficult as it is for me I'm going to try to push any thoughts of Konami's classic vampire-slaying series out of my mind so I can judge Nosferatu on its own merits.


A vampire abducts a young maiden, as vampires are wont to do. The thing is, Nosferatu is set in the 1990s, and that's odd for two reasons - one, there's still a traditional eveningwear-and-spooky-castle vampire around in the 1990s and two, he's an actual vampire. He could go to any goth club or "alternative" boutique and just tell girls he's a vampire, thus avoiding the need for abductions. You're just making extra work for yourself here, Nosferatu. Oh, yeah, by the way, he's a vampire called Nosferatu and not "a nosferatu." It is almost impossible not to think of him as Dracula. Nosferatu is probably getting pretty fed up of hearing about Dracula. "Ooh, Dracula, he's so mysterious and seductive, they got Gary Oldman to play him in a movie, lah-di-dah! His ridiculous antics are just making life more difficult for real vampires like me and Carmilla and Steve the Vampire."


You know, it's been a while since I played a videogame where the aim was to rescue a kidnapped girfriend / sister / princess. The last one was Attack Animal Gakuen, I suppose, but this classic and over-familiar story appears once more in Nosferatu. This is the hero, riding his horse to Nosferatu's castle to save his girlfriend Erin from exsanguination and an un-lifetime of floating about in gauzy nightdresses. Again, this game is set in the Nineties. I expected the hero to travel to Transylvania by skateboard, not horse.


The hero's name is Kyle. Since learning this, I have mentally renamed Nosferatu to Kyle vs. Dracula. I cannot undo this. It took a significant effort of will to not enter Kyle vs. Dracula as the title of this article. Kyle vs. Dracula just feels right.
Anyway, Kyle arrives at Nosferatu's castle, where he will no doubt make his way tentatively past the entrance halls guarded by zombies before moving through ballrooms and clocktowers before reaching his nemesis atop the castle's spire.


Or he could immediately be thrown into the dungeon, that's also a possibility.


After pushing a crate to one side to reveal a hole in the floor, Kyle can escape from his cell and thus the adventure of Nosferatu begins in earnest. What kind of adventure is it? Well, imagine if Prince of Persia and Castlevania had a baby, and they taught that baby karate while it was growing up.


Nosferatu is what I'd describe as a precision platformer, although an easier way to explain the gameplay would be to compare it to Prince of Persia. I would be very surprised if there was ever a review of Nosferatu that didn't mention Prince of Persia at some point, but it's a difficult comparison to avoid when the gameplay is so similar - this is a game all about avoiding traps, leaping over chasms and not falling to your horrible bone-shattering death through delicate platforming manoeuvres and an emphasis on timing your movements perfectly.


There's also fighting, and that's where the karate comes in. Kyle's a multi-discipline fighter, mind you - he's got some boxing moves in there too, and they can all be put to use against the hideous denizens of Nosferatu's castle. In this case, Kyle is punching a slimy zombie in the face. If you keep punching the zombie, Kyle will do a short combo in the manner of side-scrolling beat-em-ups everywhere, but there are also a host of other techniques: jumping kicks, running shoulder-charges and crouching uppercuts amongst them. I think my favourite is the dodge. Activated by holding attack and moving the stick left and right, it makes Kyle slip to the side, hopefully avoiding enemy attacks. Sure, more often than not you'll just dodge into an enemy's attack, but you'll kind of feel like Muhammad Ali while you're doing it so it's definitely worthwhile. As a rule, though, the focus of all combat in Nosferatu is getting into a position where you can unleash a punch combo on an enemy, because they do by far the most damage.


Before you start getting all misty-eyed about Kyle the debonair karate-kicking vampire hunter who charges across the landscape on his stallion - a description that's even getting me a little hot under the collar - I should mention that he completely ignores these desperate, pleading prisoners locked in Nosferatu's dungeon. Doesn't even give them so much as a glance. Kyle's kind of a prick, then, but a possible explanation for his single-minded determination is that up ahead is the battle all karate masters dream of - a chance to face off against a Frankenstein.


Trapped in a narrow corridor between a spike-filled pit and a freakish monster assembled from human parts and imbued with blasphemous mockery of life, Kyle begins to wonder if he's really that serious about Erin. I mean, she's fun and all, but having to rescue her from a vampire's castle is going to put a strain on the relationship.
Taking on a Frankenstein in a straight fist-fight is just going to get Kyle pulverised, and the important lesson that you take from this first Frankenstein encounter is that each enemy in Nosferatu has to be dealt with in a specific way. In this case, you have to duck under Frank's double punch, pop up with some hits of your own and then get out of the way before you can repeat it. Remember this technique and apply it to each Frankenstein you encounter, then learn the right way to deal with every other type of enemy in the game, and you'll have made a lot of progress towards defeating Nosferatu.


I made it outside, where I was set upon by an angry hunchback whose nickname amongst his hunchback friends is almost certainly Stabby. Oh, he loves to stab, hopping through the moonlit night and shanking anyone who passes by. It's little surprise that Stabby is the first of Nosferatu's bosses. It makes sense that Nosferatu, while valuing Stabby's intruder-puncturing skills, would want to keep the horrible little goblin as far away from his inner sanctum as possible.


After taking a certain amount of damage, Stabby's true form is revealed. He's a werewolf! A big, stupid werewolf who does nothing but slowly walk into Kyle's fists and get his furry backside kicked. The only problem you might encounter is that if the moon becomes full before you finish the fight, the werewolf regains all its health, but that's only a problem in that it makes the fight longer and not any more difficult.


Dracula may have Castlevania, but Nosferatu has a much more expansive property portfolio. Six castles? Most kings don't have six castle, unless you count King Koopa, and because vampires are always in the last place you look that means I have another five castles to clear before I reach Nosferatu. I'd better get on with it, then.


Here's a fun new cause of death: throttled by a mummy. When he was alive a Pharaoh would had slaves to do his throttling for him, leaving the Pharaoh free to pursue the important Pharaoh business of ruling Egypt, being revered as a god and marrying his sister. Of course, that's all changed now and Imhotep here has to get his bandaged hands dirty. Surely a low point for a once-respected leader, but at least this breaks up the monotony of wandering back and forth along this corridor for countless centuries.



As for the non-monster-related gameplay, did I mention that it's very similar to Prince of Persia? If someone had told me that Nosferatu was an genuine sequel to Jordan Mechner's much-ported classic I would have believed them. The games share nigh-identical platforming action, with Kyle negotiating a similar array of pits, crumbling floors and bladed traps as the prince. It's a game that demands patience and deliberation, two qualities which even my most generous defenders would admit that I lack, so there was a lot of opportunity for Nosferatu to be something I was frustrated by. Fortunately such frustration was avoided for the most part by fluid controls and a clear sense of what you're supposed to be doing and where you're supposed to be heading, at least most of the time. It's a good job, too, because some of the time limits in Nosferatu are very tight, leaving you little time to plan your route.


Stage two's boss fight is a battle against a pair of apes. That's a true seal of quality right there - name me a bad game that includes a bare-knuckle fist-fight against an ape. That's right, you can't. Rise of the Robots doesn't count, because that's just a robot that looks like an ape and not the real simian deal. This, though, this is a no-holds-barred grudge match between man and his closest genetic relatives, and knowing what a chimpanzee is capable of doing to a human if it gets angry enough means that in a real-life situation I'd much rather take on a Frankenstein or a mummy than an ape. A mummy is markedly less likely to rip your testicles off, for instance. Still, in this case the monkeys aren't too much of a threat as long as you don't get trapped between them, and I found that running shoulder-tackles bought me enough space to deal with them one at a time, and once you've disposed of the first ape the other one poses little challenge.


Punching an ape is an undoubted highpoint of this or any videogame, but Nosferatu does an excellent job of keeping the player engaged through other means that aren't related to monkey violence, as implausible as that sounds. A major one is the atmosphere, and Nosferatu is dripping with gothic creeposity - the stages are all flickering candles and solemn brickwork that really feel like the castle of a vampire, albeit an insane vampire with the unhelpful attitude that every ledge and corridor is improved by the addition of deadly spikes. Everything is beautifully animated too, especially Kyle, to the point that on more than one occasion I stopped what I was doing to make him throw out a few karate kicks, just so I could watch him in action. It reminds me of Clock Tower in that regard, with animation that feels more "human" and less videogame-y.


Here's Kyle nonchalantly rummaging through a treasure chest while lethal blades shoot out of the ceiling mere millimetres from his head. "Rescue your girlfriend" may be the overarching goal of the game, but in real terms reaching each new treasure chest is the aim of all this exploration. Each one is like an oasis of restorative calm that soothes the player after each fraught section of dangerous platforming / Frankenstein combat. The chests either contain hourglasses that refill your time limit, or a variety of coloured gems. Blue gems are the rarest and best because they increase your maximum health, green gems restore your health, and then there are red gems. Collecting red gems makes you better at fighting, and the more you're holding (up to a maximum of nine) the more powerful Kyle is and the more moves he has at his disposal. The effect of the red crystals isn't permanent, however, and if Kyle is knocked over by an enemy or falls too far, a red crystal falls out of his pocket and shatters, lowering his total. While this does provide a physical explanation for the common videogame mechanic of a character losing power-ups when they're hurt, it also posits a universe where vampires hoard magical crystals that make a person better at karate just by holding them.


Sometimes, the treasure chests are home to the cheerful ghost of an especially rancid fart. There are no warnings or distinguishing features that mark these chests out as being different: you just have to play the game enough times to form a mental record or which chests contain flatulence so foul it can knock you on your backside.


Boss number three is... well, I'm not sure, really. A zombie of some kind? The way it grabs Kyle and bites at his neck made me think it was a vampire, but we're outdoors in the daytime. So, some sort of ghoul, then. Whatever it is, the flesh of Kyle's body doesn't agree with it because if you kick it away after a chomping session it vomits on the floor. How delightful! There's not much else to say about this one, folks. Dodge and punch, try not to get puke on your Reeboks.


I'm enjoying Nosferatu, but I still have some issues with it. While the controls are mostly good, I found it difficult to get Kyle to run sometimes, and when doing running jump there seemed to be much more a lag than usual between pressing jump and Kyle taking to the air. That said, my biggest problems with jumping were all self-inflicted, because I kept forgetting to switch out of "combat stance" when attempting leaps. This makes Kyle hop delicately to his death instead of performing the proper jump that he does when he hasn't got his fists raised. You can't beat up gravity, Kyle, c'mon.


However, my biggest complaint is that there are some parts of the game that will hurt you without warning or a chance to avoid them. In the screenshot above, for example, the perfectly normal-looking bit of floor I was standing on collapsed, despite all the other crumbling floors in the game being obviously crumblier than a digestive biscuit in a tumble drier. There are some sections where enemies appear from nowhere, which is aggravating, and it serves to illustrate that the key to success in Nosferatu is memorisation. This is a very tough game where the slightest slip can mean instant death, sending you back to the beginning of the stage, so remembering where every unlabelled killer floor or ghost-infested treasure chest is becomes the only sure way to progress, and if you're planning on giving Nosferatu a try then how much enjoyment you get out of it will probably depend greatly on whether you've got the time to note down all these little details.


The fourth boss is a light fog. Not particularly terrifying, as monsters go, unless you're flying a small aircraft or piloting a boat near a rocky shore. The boss' main method of attack is to launch copies of it's own head at you in a manner reminiscent of the first boss of Altered Beast, and so the pattern to defeating this vaguely man-shaped meteorological event is to jump and duck your way past his flying heads, wait for it to attack and then dash in for the killing blow. Quite how Kyle can punch mist hard enough for it to die is not explained. I suspect Nosferatu's magic karate crystals are involved.


By the time you reach this fifth stage, Nosferatu has become oppressively difficult, with death and dismemberment constantly a step away... and it's fun, at least when the game makes it clear where the obstacles are. Tense, definitely, but fun. Perfect timing is required to make any progress, as always, but new traps like these roaming buzzsaws mix things up a little. Every section of Nosferatu is it's own little puzzle, and the most rewarding part of the gameplay is solving those puzzles, especially when the solution is not always the most obvious thing: for example, I was rather pleased with myself for figuring out that Kyle's dodge move is great for getting past the speedier sword traps.


This game also provided me with the rare opportunity to get my arse kicked by a table. Thanks, Seta.


This stage's boss is a stone golem who, considering the difficulty of the castle he's guarding, was surprisingly easy to beat. He fires his fists at you like the rocket punches of an anime robot, but they're easy enough to avoid and once you're in range you can kick him until he collapses into rubble. Of course, once he does collapse into rubble the golem then turns into a giant foot, flies up into the air and tries to land on your head, but you won't get hit by that attack more than once. After the element of surprise has gone, the Big Rock Monty Python Foot attack loses most of it's potency.


"Erin, honey, come inside, you're going to catch a chill," says Nosferatu. "If you're going to stand on the Brooding Balcony overlooking the wind-lashed and barren moors, at least put on a cape. That's why I always wear a cape, you know."


Here in Nosferatu's home even the paintings are deadly, tripping you up as you walk past them. After all this is over, I expect Kyle will return to the castle with a Super Soaker full of turpentine and a score to settle.


On my first playthrough, this was the point where I had to turn to the Action Replay to see me through - not necessarily because the game was too difficult to complete, but because it's difficult in a time-consuming way and I wanted this game to be part of the Halloween Spooktacular, not the Inappropriately-Timed Summer Ghoulfest. That said, no amount of cheat codes helped me through the section pictured above, the area of the game that caused me the most number of deaths. It's a quick-fire platforming section across a spike pit where the platforms crumble beneath your feet, and it should have been as simple as getting a running start and tapping jump each time you hit a new platform, but for whatever reason I just couldn't get it right and countless times I ended up with Kyle trying to haul himself onto a platform that was already disintegrating. I looked for "flying in Nosferatu" and "advanced masonry repair skills" cheats, but none were forthcoming, so I just had to bang my head against it until on the fiftieth-or-so try I got it right.


One benefit of the cheat codes is that I didn't have to risk life and limb - legs, if you want to get specific about the limbs in question - trying to open chests with saw blades right in front of them. Nice try, Nosferatu, but even your dark magics and home woodworking tools can't compare to the awesome power of the Game Genie, RRP £49.99, available in all good stockists.


And here he is, the Prince of Darkness, King of Vampires, the sinister and ageless Dracula! I mean Nosferatu! Sorry, Nosferatu.
Nosferatu's main gimmick is that he spends most of the fight hovering around out of punching distance, which obviously makes him kinda difficult to hit, although from now on I will always be able to use this fight to remember that Fighting-Type Pokemon are weak against Flying.


Once you do manage to slap Nosferatu around a bit, he transforms into a giant bat, because it may be 1990 but some vampire traditions are too deeply ingrained to change. In this situation, just wait for Nosferatu to stop swooping around like a confused bird that accidentally flew into your living room and switch back to his original form, because you won't be able to do the bat any meaningful damage. On the plus side, the bat's attacks are easy to avoid, while Normal Nosferatu has the annoying habit of picking you up from across the screen with his Psychic Vampire Powers and slamming you into the floor. As I've said several times now, the key to success if learning when to move in to attack and when to get out of the way, and once you have his patterns memorised you'll be able to pummel Nosferatu so thoroughly that he'll wish he never crawled out of his coffin.


Kyle rescues Erin, who has hopefully not been turned into a vampire. That would put a downer on things. Mind you, even if she has become a living corpse with an insatiable lust for blood, Nosferatu's dead and there's no-one else around, so I guess Kyle is the proud new owner of six castles. Get rid of all the zombies and Beholders, open the windows to get the old person smell out, throw a few scatter cushions around, they'll be sold in weeks and Kyle and Erin can enjoy their new life of fabulous wealth.


As the credits roll, Kyle's horse makes a reappearance. Kyle riding a horse is the most unbelieveable thing in this game to me, and I took part in a three-way ape fight. A couple of things in the credits caught my eye: one was this graphics design credit for one K. Igarashi. If that name looks familiar, that's probably because it's very similar to Koji Igarashi, better known as IGA - the former producer of the Castlevania series. As far as I can see Koji Igarashi was working at Konami during Nosferatu's development - but maybe he slipped out to help Seta, because otherwise that name appearing on a game about a young man entering a monster-filled castle to do battle with a vampire lord is one hell of a coincidence.


The other thing is this "special thanks" message. "and all other guys who have been real supportive," it says, and I cannot help but read that sentence in the exaggerated Wisconsin accent that Joel, Mike and the bots sometimes used in Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Oh yah, those guys were real supportive!


So Erin's definitely not a vampire, then? I hope not, because otherwise Kyle's going to whispering sweet nothings to a pile of dust once that sunlight reaches them.
I enjoyed Kyle vs. Dracula, but I can imagine not everyone would. It's a very demanding game, and an occasionally unfair game, but I know that if I'd owned it as a kid I would have absolutely devoured it, playing it over and over to learn every facet of its deadly charms and drawing maps of the stages in exercise books pilfered from the supply cupboard at school. Nowadays the experience of playing it was not quite as exciting, although whether that's down to the mollycoddling influence of modern games or a simple lack of time to learn all the game's quirks I couldn't tell you. I certainly can't fault the presentation, though, so if you're looking to play an appropriately macabre game for the season, then this comes fully recommended, and speaking of which it's time for Nosferatu to be subjected to the mouldering embrace of the Halloween-O-Meter!


Eight out of ten for Seta's effort, which might seem low for a game in which you get to punch all the classic horror monsters with the exception of the gill-man, but to me "spookiness" and "Halloween-osity" are two closely related but separate conditions. For something to really have that Halloween spirit it's either got to have a sense of comedy or be an over-the-top goresplosion, neither of which are present in Nosferatu. Still, eight out of ten is a pretty high score, and Nosferatu does include the bonus of ape fist-fights. If that had have been the first bullet point on the back of the box, Nosferatu would be as fondly remembered as Super Metroid.

Surely this one should be called "Devil Sneaks Out"? Because that's definitely what's happening here. The mischievous imp is trying to creep away from his necromantic master, probably for a night of carnage and baby-swapping in a nearby village. "Oh no you don't, sunbeam," says the necromancer. "You're staying right here until we've finished organising our collection of foul grimoires. I don't care if it is Saturday night."



So is this the ghost of a knight, then? Whatever it used to be, its new spectral form has shocked that skull to its very core. I know open-mouthed bogglement is common look for skeletons, but that skull seems particularly taken aback. Maybe it's because the ghost is casting a shadow, something that doesn't seem right to me.



Hey, Serpico, you look awfully calm for someone with a phantom head floating next to your ear. I think he's jealous of your beard. Now that he's become a spectre and his lower jaw has dissolved intro trailing wisps of ectoplasm, he'll never be able to grow designer stubble, let alone a beard as full and lush as yours. Sure, he saves time on shaving, but he's stuck in an eternal afterlife, what does he need more time for? And there you are, sitting in your chair that looks like a chopping board, with your beard and padded vest while, erm... hang on, are trees growing out of your arms? Look, I'm sorry man, I can see that you've got problems of your own. I'll just leave you to it.



Spooked, proclaims this cover in dripping, slime-green text that's so Halloween-y that it's making me want to bob for apples whilst someone singing The Monster Mash throws eggs at my house. It's difficult to single out the best element of this cover - the barely-glimpsed thing lurking behind the door is good, but I suppose there's nothing to beat that jolly skeleton. But wait, he's not just any skeleton, he's theghost of a skeleton! How does that work? Was he already a skeleton before he died? And if he was, what happened to him that was so horrifying that it stripped every morsel of flesh from his bones before it killed him? It's a credit to that skeleton's character that he's managed to remain so chipper after the terrors he has obviously experienced.



Blinky appears to be the ghost of a clown, which fills me with mixed feelings. On one hand, it means a clown died and that's always a cause for celebration, but on the other hand that means there's now a clown out there who can walk through walls and who cannot be harmed by conventional weapons.



And the award for "computer game title that most sounds like the name of a black metal band" goes to Witchfiend! I can see that she's a witch, but she doesn't look much like a fiend, does she? I reckon that title was a typo, and you're actually playing as the raven in a game called Witchfriend. "Familiar" is just so 1600s, you know?



Sticking with witches, here are the covers for the Cauldron games, and if, like me, you grew up in the late eighties then these things are going to bellow "HALLOWEEN!" right in your face like an escaped mental patient demanding to know the way to the nearest machete shop. Just look at those things in the cauldron - between those spindly fingers and the fat, ribbed tail I can't help but imagine the witch is boiling up a facehugger from Alien.
These covers have always reminded me of the thin plastic monster masks that were everywhere during the Octobers of my youth, before all Halloween costumes became based on pop-culture figures or sexy versions of every goddamn thing. Speaking of sexy versions...



Upon re-release by Broderbund, Cauldron received a new Meatloaf-video-esque cover of a sultry witch standing in front of what I am just realising is a glowing pumpkin face. I have to be honest, as much as I love the original Cauldron covers, this one would have appealed to me in its own special way. I'm not afraid to admit I have a type, and that type is tousle-haired Eightes goths wearing oversized Dracula capes.



It's everyone's favourite knife-fingered child abuser Freddy Krueger, appearing on a computer game cover that doesn't feel quite right. After some deliberation I have decided that it looks odd because Freddy is beaming with glee - he looks he's having his photo taken as someone hands him a novelty cheque after his recent lottery win. I know Freddy became more jovial as the movies went on, but this? This is too much. If he ditched the glove and had his sweater repaired, he'd look like a fun uncle instead of a terrifying uncle who kills you while you dream. The background doesn't help, either, looking as it does like a peaceful sky filled with fluffy white clouds. Freddy's Summertime Smilefest is not Halloween appropriate, I'm afraid. Or appropriate at all.



"Dare you enter the Bewarehouse?!"
Well, I dunno, what's in there?
"Terrible puns!"



Apparently, the demon's revenge is causing you to fail your Wizardry GCSE by not letting you get your coursework done, popping in from the infernal netherworld to hover over your shoulder and whisper "hey, hey, whatcha doin'? Hexes, is it? Man, hexes are easy, you loser. Let's go down the park and drink White Lightning instead!" The demon doesn't even seem like he's that into it, so my guess is that Hell itself needed to get revenge against this wizard and the big orange dope here was the unlucky demon who drew the short straw. Kragzhrez, Emissary of All Misery, gets to spend his afternoon trying to break the record for most piranhas in Hitler's rectum at once, but this demon is stuck winding up a nerd. Well, no-one said hell was fair.



Yes, Mr. Potholer, I'm sure you've just been through a harrowing experience, but when you decide to go spelunking for treasure inside the mouth of an enormous rabid bat then you can't really expect any sympathy, can you? What amount of loot convinced you Bat Orifice Cave was a good place to oh, hang on, I've just noticed that fist-sized diamond you're carrying. Yeah, that amount of loot would probably just about do it.



The cover of Ghost Hunters provides a fairly accurate take on the in-game action, even down to the hero being shirtless - a hero whose name is Hunk Studbuckle, lest we forget - and on top of that it makes the "looking at monsters will kill you" mechanic far more understandable. That bald demon thing, a ghoulish creature that looks like a head mould from a Star Trek: The Original Series alien that has somehow come to life after forty years rotting in a storage locker? I've only glanced at a simple drawing of him and I already feel unwell. The real mystery in this cover, however, is just what the hell that red thing is. I can look at it and make out individual details - it's got horns, sure, and its body appears to be a red raincoat - but I can't assemble all the pieces into one cohesive mental picture. I think it's several child ghosts sitting on each other's shoulders under that coat, and by "think" I mean "really hope".



Okay, so let's address the obvious high point of this cover, and that's the title. Werewolf Simulator? Congratulations, you've managed to take being a fearsome mythical beast / representation of man's animalistic urges and make it sound like a dry recreation of the minutiae of a werewolf's daily life, all presented in spreadsheets and tedious micromanagement. My problem with Werewolf Simulator was that I always forgot to lower the landing gear while approaching the runway. No, wait, that was Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The cover werewolf itself is pretty terrifying, honestly, what with those nightmarishly jagged teeth and the curiously insectile eyes. It's just a shame that werewolf race is being let down by the weirdo posing in front of the moon in the background. That's not a muzzle, that's a beak. He's some kind of were-chicken.



This one's just adorable, though. What could be in that castle that is so spooky that even this ghost is scared of it? I'm going to assume that the castle has been bought by a tasteless Premier League footballer who is going to convert the 12th century belfrey into a steam room and paint Louis Vuitton logos all over the keep. That's the twist, the "spookyman" of the title is actually an international footballing superstar who got too rich too young.



Oh, that Satan, nothing can tear him away from his favourite pendulum. "Come down from there, you silly Satan," you plead, but Satan just hisses at you and threatens to condemn you to an eternity of suffering in the sulphur pits of Hell, a joyless place where they don't even have pendulums. Satan's not even doing anything up there, not menacing a buxom young maiden tied to a slab, not operating as a vital component of a long-case clock, he just perches up there all day demanding "tribute" in the form of Gregg's sausage rolls, the freeloading git.



This cover really tells a story, huh? The story of conjoined twins who bought a tacky ring at a car boot sale - but the ring was cursed, and when one of them put it on they became a werewolf! Extensive Googling has taught me that this is not the plot to an Eighties comedy-horror movie, a fact which has truly astounded me but has also given me fresh impetus to rent a video camera and find a pair of conjoined twins, at least one of whom who doesn't mind having fake hair glued to their face.



"Well, Doctor, your experiments have confirmed beyond a doubt that you can indeed use medical science to create an enormous blue demon jaguar head with fangs that constantly drip blood, but the real question is why? Why would you do that? It's knocking the syringes and pills all over the place, this is a disaster."



Forget Edvard Munch's The Scream, this is an expression of mankind's inner dread for the modern age! Existential angst has never before been captured so graphically, if that is what this picture is intended to depict - there's always the possibility of a third ghost shoving its broomstick where the sun don't shine.



Finally for today, I'd like to show you a cover I genuinely love. I Ain't Got Nobody's cover has all the Halloween elements in place: spooky creatures, a lovely colour palette, a really bad pun, it's just spot on. I think it might even be 3D. Of course, it could just as easily be a printing error or a bad scan causing the effect, but sadly I don't have any red-blue 3D glasses handy to check it out. If you do have the requisite eyewear, then please let me know if it is 3D, but please note that I will not accept any legal or financial responsibility if a ghost flies out of the picture and possesses you. I wouldn't worry about it, though. There's only, like, a ten percent chance of that happening.