I had so much fun writing about Amiga title screens featuring large, shirtless men that I thought I’d give it a seasonally-appropriate twist with another batch of Amiga game title screen! These ones are just spooky, I mean. They’re not spooky and featuring large, shirtless men. That would be a niche to far, I suspect. Not many games have given their heroes the body of a Greek god and the head of Jack Skellington, more’s the pity. So, here are a bunch of Halloween-tastic Amiga title screens. Please, try your best to stifle your terrified screaming!


I think I’ll start with the best of the bunch for a change, and the title screen for Fright Night is most certainly that. Sure, it’s nothing more than a fairly direct copy of the movie’s poster, but it’s been so expertly converted into pixel art that I don’t even care. I want to see huge fanged vampire heads and devil-dogs formed from clouds appearing in every medium imaginable, thank you very much. Build ‘em out of lollipop sticks, use a giant laser to etch the image into the moon’s surface, create a giant mosaic in a field somewhere using thousands of DVD copies of the Fright Night remake. Some people have even had it tattooed onto their bodies, and the only reason I haven’t is because I’m already covered in scenes from Re-Animator.



Another nice title screen, this time with a pleasing simplicity to it, is this one from The Addams Family. The meticulous placement of each pixel and the crispness of the overall effect is the kind of thing that still makes people love pixel art in these modern times of VR in the home and ten-gig day one patches. For instance, check out that marbling effect on the background. It’s super simple, but totally convincing. I appreciate that the artist went for such a restrained look, too – they could have drawn all the characters on there, but all you need to do is read the words “The Addams Family” and the theme song immediately barges into your head. Bam, scene set, job done.



Yes, there was an Amiga version ofCastlevania. No, it’s not very good. I haven’t played it in a while, but I recalled the controls being particularly unpleasant. On top of that, a big part of the original Castlevania’s charm come from its presentation, and all that is changed for the Amiga version, replaced by ugly, pillowy sprites and slowed-down renditions of the classic soundtrack. Just to prove my point, here’s what Dracula’s final form looks like in the Amiga version:


I honestly have no idea how to describe this thing. It’s got diarrhoea spraying out of its armpits? It’s wearing shades? These are merely hypotheses which can never be proven as fact, partly because humans are not capable at looking at this hideous thing for long enough to unravel its mysteries.
So, the title screen of the Amiga Castlevania does a good job of capturing the half-arsed, bootleggy nature of the entire endeavour. The actual Castlevania logo itself looks quite close to what you’d see on a “proper” Castlevania game, but it all rather falls apart after that. The skulls look slightly embarrassed to be a part of it, as well they might, and quite what barber’s poles have to do with anything is beyond me. I think the worst thing about it is that it’s so resolutely, inescapably beige. I know that looks like brickwork, but it’s actually hundreds of soft furnishings, stolen from elderly grandmothers across the land and compressed together.



If there’s something unusual in your local community, who should you call? Beast Busters! Yes, SNK’s gore-drenched lightgun shooter received an Amiga port, complete with title screen that looks as though someone dropped the logo onto a crowd of zombies without their prior knowledge. Every time I look at it, I think for moment that all the zombies are throwing up the metal horns, especially that one on the right with the long hair.



This should be Night Jog, surely? That Grim Reaper’s got his hoodie on, he’s clearly pounding the pavement in training for something. Maybe he’s getting read to enter a die-athlon. Hey, it’s October, I’m allowed to make jokes like that. He’d probably do well in a long-distance running event, you know. After all, no-one can outrun Death.



Say what you like about the Demons Domain, but it has some beautiful sunsets. Less attractive is the demon himself, an awkward and lumpy individual who’s standing as though he’s got some niggling lower back pain. Then there’s his pitchfork. No sinner is going to be scared of a prodding from that thing, it looks like it’s made from drinking straws and chunks of Toblerone.



I’m sure the artist intended that players see the two people in the upper corners of the screen as staring at each other, but all I can see is the man and the dragon locked in a lover’s stare. That’s why the dragon has placed its tail over the woman’s face, he’s trying to make it look like she’s got a moustache.
So, Night Breed the game (there were two Night Breed Amiga games, as it happens) is based on Night Breed the movie, which means this title screen offers a rare digitised appearance by director David Cronenberg. He’s the character in the bottom-right. He’s a serial killer in a home-made mask, even if this particular rendition has given him the appearance of a particularly menacing chocolate brioche.



Wow, and I thought my Halloween puns were bad. Still, that’s a nice-looking graveyard, even if it is haunted by a ghost detective. He’s risen from the grave so he can hunt down awkward teenagers who think wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat makes them look cool and classy and scare them straight. I know the kids will probably grow out of it themselves eventually, but if Humphrey Boo-gart here can save them a few years of mockery and scorn then he’s providing a valuable service.



The vampire’s empire extends to a small coffin and a terrified old man, so he’s hardly Genghis Khan. Typical vampire, always over-exaggerating his profile and dark deeds. Oh, look at me, I’m the Prince of Darkness, mortal men cower in my wake and mortal women are unable to resist my magnetic charms. Not this vampire, he’s the duke of a cool, dry larder cupboard at best and mortal men and women alike are more likely to be paralysed with laughter at his appearance than transfixed with terror. Of course, it’s unfair to judge the vampire based on this picture. No-one looks their best when they’ve just got out of bed.



A much greater focus on the bubble as opposed to the ghost side of this equation, huh? The reason for this, one assumes, is that the ghost looks like a spectral condom. Best not to highlight that, I think. The bubble’s two deadliest foes – goblins and spikes – are also heavily featured. I think that’s a goblin, anyway. It could just as easily be rubber Ronald Reagan mask, freshly pulled from an algae-choked pond.



Another beautiful title screen from another movie tie-in (so at least they’re good for something) with Arachnophobia, the 1990 movie about East Germans adjusting to life after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not really, it’s about killer spiders. The game also afford the player the rare – if not unique – ability – to play as John Goodman, so it should be treasured for that reason even if you don’t like the title screen. I do like it, though. I like it a lot: the purple sky, the trees framing the screen. That dangling spider is my equivalent of the kitten on the “Hang in there, baby!” poster.



“We dedicate this profane temple to Qu’a Dricepes, God of Squats!”
Also, don’t lie to me, Raven Software. That is obviously a grey crypt.



Oh no! Rock legend and saviour of the badgers Brian May has become a zombie! I wonder how that happened? A kind of magic, probably. I say he’s a zombie, but now I’m not so sure. Zombies don’t tend to carry weapons, so maybe he’s a survivor who’s been mistaken for a zombie and riddled with bullets in homage to Night of the Living Dead.
By the way, if that city background looks familiar to you that’s because it was obviously inspired by (if not outright stolen from) the intro to Streets of Rage. Man, I really want a new Streets of Rage game. You could have them punching zombies if you really want, Sega. Whatever it takes to get Grand Uppah back into the public consciousness.



Blimey, it’s a hard life being a vampire, isn’t it? Beset on all sides by angry priests and eighties action movies heroes carrying stakes, a simple nosferatu just can’t catch a break. This is why most vampires take their victims back to their lair before feasting on their life-force. Don’t just stand there nibbling necks in the town square, you dope. I can only assume this vampire didn’t know the rules, grabbed a virgin and went to town, only to look up half-way through his meal and say “what? What’s the matter?” as the villagers looked on in horror.



“Behold, my brothers! The sacred floor tile of Ba’al! With this, we can finally complete our mission to remodel the kitchen!”



I’m not going to lie, the first time I looked at this I though that frog had a massive rack. Judge me if you want, but I’ve been surfing the information superhighway for twenty years so the idea of someone drawing a frog with a massive rack is not something that would surprise me.
What is surprising is that Binky the ghost seems to be terrified, despite being a ghost. What do you have to be scared of, Binky? Besides Egon Spengler, I mean. That which is dead cannot die, and I doubt they have to pay taxes either, so calm down and get back to school.



There’s not much to this one besides a picture of everybody’s favourite spook-themed innuendo dispenser Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, but frankly that’s more than enough for me. I’d say it’s not the greatest facial likeness, but Elvira has a few, ahem, attributes that are so immediately recognisable that it isn’t a problem. Her hairdo, I mean. It was an interesting stylistic choice to write Elvira’s name in strips of salami, but I’m sure the artist had their reasons. Their office was above a deli, for instance.



A striking title screen for this game, with a lovely, colourful homage to B-movie posters that sadly doesn’t carry over into the game itself. I’d happily play a game that looks like this, you know?Anything with the tagline “Blood! Blood! Blood!” is liable to pique my interest, unless it’s on an ad for a butcher’s shop. I don't even like black pudding.



Last but my no means least – certainly not least bananas, anyway – is Ghost Battle, and what a captivating tapestry it weaves. The hero of this game is a truly astonishing sight, with his metal y-fronts and vacuum-packed abs. Someone’s replaced his eyes with googly eyes, and he’s using those googly eyes to stare at this zombie so hard that rays of pure, righteous fury are emanating from his face. You’d think they’d include a ghost on the title screen of a game called Ghost Battle but no, it’s got a zombie. Possibly a giant zombie, if those tombstones in the middle are any indicator of scale. A colossal man in the most uncomfortable underpants, doing battle with an equally huge zombie. How magical!

The Halloween season is an especially appropriate time to be poking into dark and forgotten corners, and with that in mind here’s a game that’s about obscure as they come: Leland Corporation’s 1991 arcade game Asylum! If you haven't heard of it, that’s probably because it was never actually released. Will that turn out to be a tragic loss to the arcades of the world, or are we lucky that Asylum never saw the light of day? Let’s take a look and find out!

Even if I hadn’t just told you that Asylum was developed in 1991, one look at this title screen is all it would take to let you know this game is thoroughly, one hundred percent nineties. The three playable characters even look like the stars of a failed Saturday morning cartoon from the era, a cartoon that was possibly a gritty reboot of the Troll Dolls. From left to right our heroes are Rip, Rak and Rol, and they are colourful characters both figuratively and literally. I’m going to assume Rak is the leader, because he’s standing in the middle and he’s dyed his hipster beard in a shade called “Riddler’s Delight.” Rol appears to have stuffed a bunch of cardboard boxes up his shirt to form the illusion of muscles, and Leland were kind enough to draw erect nipples on Rip, just to make sure you don’t forget she’s the sexy female character. I’ll be playing as Rip during this playthrough, because she’s the designated player one character and because she’s wearing the smallest, most useless belt.


Asylum has a weird set-up in the sense that, as far as I can tell, the heroes didn’t really have any intention of being in the game. There’s no mention of a heroic quest, no dreams of glory or vengeance. The three amigos are simply standing around near the titular asylum when a floating goat-skulled spirit appears and zaps them with magic that teleports them into the asylum. Why? For what reason are they subjected to the horrors that lurk with, aside from the obvious answer of “crimes against fashion”? I suspect we may never know.
By the way, the hovering spectre is the game’s antagonist, the macabre Mr. G. I’m choosing to believe he’s G from House of the Dead after one too many zombie outbreaks.


The game begins with your character (or multiple characters, because Asylum features simultaneous co-op) being chucked in a dumpster. Without wanting to spoil too much of the Asylum experience just yet, I would say that by the end of the game I’d decided that the dumpster was the best place for them.


Rip gets back on her feet and the action begins! The closest comparison I can think of here is Gauntlet, because Asylum is a top-down run-n-gun monster-slaying romp. Your character can move in eight directions and attack in those eight direction, by throwing knives in Rip’s case, and you’ve got to move through the levels, killing monsters until you reach the exit. Unlike Gauntlet, you can jump in Asylum, so I’m sure there’ll be some super-enjoyable platforming to do later. For now, though, it's all flat floors and disgusting ghouls. These ghouls attack by tearing their own arms off and throwing them. How do they keep attacking after they’ve thrown the first arm? I think we can rely on the wisdom of The Simpsons here and say that a wizard did it. In this case, it’s probably true. Mr. G is clearly some kind of wizard.


Unable to prevent himself from meddling, Mr. G pops out of the wall to tell Rip that this toilet is “way uncool.” I think I would probably have guessed that for myself, Mr. G, what with the puddle of piss and the complete lack of privacy. Except this toilet isn’t way uncool, it’s actually very useful because it restores your health when you use it. This is explained during the game’s attract mode which describes them as “magic toilets,” further evidence that a wizard really did do everything in this game and also giving me the name for my next Dark Souls character. Thankfully there’s no animation for Rip sitting down and relieving herself, which is surprising considering the lack of restraint the rest of the game shows when it comes to grossness.


A few screens later, just past the haunted boiler that spits flames at all those who approach it, waits the elevator that will take Rip to the next level. Conspicuous in its absence is any kind of end-of-stage boss, which did surprise me: Asylum seems the kind of game that would have revelled in the chance to come up with some extremely putrescent boss monsters, but there’s nothing stopping Rip from walking straight into the elevator. Well, there are all the regular enemies, I suppose, but you can mostly run past them in these early stages.


I don’t think this is going to be the usual “fight loads of enemies that drop into the elevator” situation. It’s a little intimate, if any enemies were crammed in then Asylum would be looking at an X rating.
You have to ride the elevator at the end of each stage, and it always works the same way: the lift goes up, but after a while the cable snaps and the elevator begins to plummet. While it’s falling, you can press left or right to nudge the elevator to the left or right of the shaft, the idea being that you can use this ability to avoid the bundles of dynamite that are attached at intervals to the side of the shaft.


However, I never managed to avoid the dynamite. Not once. I put this down to the shocking collision detection, which is so vague that it implies the dynamite has a motion sensor around it the fills up the entire bloody lift shaft. The thing is, it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether you avoid the explosives or not. You always move on to the next stage regardless. You might lose a life – you’d think you would lose a life, given that your character falls three hundred feet and lands on a pile of dynamite – but it’s hard to keep track of how many lives you’ve got, for reasons that will become clear later.


Now we’re in the torture chambers now, and it’s this kind of environment that made me pick Asylum for a place in this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, and a victim of the rack whose torture has caused his legs to pop off like well-cooked chicken drumsticks is surely worth a point or two on the Halloween-O-Meter.
Rip’s managed to power up her attack, so now she can throw a spread of three knives. If there’s one thing Asylum isn’t short of it’s power-ups, which litter the stages like bad review scores on a modern Sonic game. Upgrades to weapon power, changing your attacks into fireballs, speed-ups, invincibility, rotating shields that protect you from projectiles, screen-clearing smart bombs, one called “Death Touch” that lets you destroy enemies by walking into them and point bonuses: Asylum has all these and more, the effect of which is that you’re fighting in your basic, un-upgraded state for a surprisingly small portion of the game.


One power-up that you only get to use once – and thank god for that – is this torch that does absolutely nothing to illuminate this dark area. Asylum’s got plenty of ideas, but it frequently struggles to nail those idea down in a form that isn’t infuriating.


Somewhere in the darkness, there’s a dragon. You can see the shape of it, mostly, and you can definitely see its fiery and instantly-fatal breath. What I couldn’t see was a way to get past it, and like any dragon worth its salt it responds to having knives lazily thrown at its face with disdain and, you know, the deadly fire breath. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out that you’re supposed to jump onto the dragon and clamber across its back to get past it. Hah, take that, yon foul wyrm! It’s always nice to outwit a dragon, I thought to myself as I slide down the dragon’s back and off the tip of its tail. Then it slapped me with its tail on the way out, killing me instantly. There’s a lesson about hubris in there somewhere.


Oh look, there is some platforming. What joy. Okay, so it’s not too terrible in this case, because you’ve got a decent amount of control over Rip while she’s in mid-air and you’re jumping across a flat plane. Later on, things become much less enjoyable because you’re jumping between multiple height levels and the game’s perspective makes it difficult to tell exactly where you’re jumping.


In my haste to clear a path to the end-of-stage elevator, I managed to smash through a secret wall! I’m sure there’ll be lots of helpful goodies in the wall cavity.


Or some kind of giant lava slug and rain of deadly Rubik’s cubes, they might be in there too. Asylum has plenty of hidden areas and power-ups stashed away in hard-to-reach areas, but most of the time these areas are so lethal that they’re not worth the effort of traversing. I mean, sure, I’m glad I came into this room because two-headed lava slugs are always something I want to see, but from a gameplay perspective it’s all risk for too little reward.


The next stage rolls around, and as Rip considers jumping into her own grave and pulling the turf over her head for a very appealing and permanent nap, I’ve had a bit of time to contemplate Asylum’s gameplay and unfortunately it’s somewhat on the dismal side. It’s just not very well put together, with countless minor irritations and a few major ones to boot. Movement is sluggish, especially when you’re turning, and it sometimes take what feels like an ages just to spin around and face the enemies. The strange thing is, your movement speed isn’t consistent, so sometimes you’re wading through treacle but other times you’re merely tiptoeing across a sticky nightclub floor. Everything feels kind of doughy and loose, and on top of that the screen scrolling often forces you to be awkwardly close to the edge of the screen before it’ll pan across.


Asylum also wants you dead. It wants you dead all the time, without any warning, repeatedly. Almost every screen on the game has some kind of instant death trap, most of them completely without any kind of warning. Take this mud, for instance – it looks exactly the same as all the other mud in this stage but if you step on the wrong part of it you’re sucked into some quicksand and it’s goodbye to that particular life. That’s why I had so much trouble keeping track of how many lives I had and how many I’d used, especially when you sometimes respawn in a location that means you’re going to instantly die again – right in front of that fire-breathing dragon is a good example. Even for an arcade game, Asylum leans far too heavily on sudden, unavoidable death to create challenge. You could play the game repeatedly until you’ve learned where all the murder zones are, but Asylum isn’t fun enough for that to be likely so you end up with a game that actively discourages the player from exploring.


I got to the end of the stage and this happened. Some honest-to-goodness side-scrolling platforming, in a game that wasn’t doing a convincing job with the top-down platforming it tried earlier. It ends up being about as fun as it sounds, but I did manage to hop along the moving clouds until I reached the pinnacle of the tower.


Then I fell straight through the final cloud and this winged skull swooped down and grabbed me. I have no idea whether falling through the cloud was a scripted event or wonky programming, but the thought that Rip’s guardian angel takes the form of a screaming bonebox with bat wings sticking out of its temples is a heartwarming thought indeed.


The first chunk of the next stage takes place in these dull, featureless corridors, and marks the low point of Asylum. It brings home just how uninteresting the combat is on its own: if you’re fighting one enemy it’s ridiculously easy because your attacks are fast enough to pin the monster in place, but against two or more enemies it’s a pain in the arse trying to keep them under control thanks to the uncooperative movement controls. Thankfully the preponderance of power-ups – you can see a smart bomb in the screenshot above – and the fact you’re fighting things like flying eyeballs, severed hands and normal people who transform into werewolves if you leave them alone too long goes some way to papering over the cracks in the gameplay.


Previous area aside, something Asylum definitely has going for it is the sheer amount of detail included. The developers were clearly having a blast when they put this world together, and there are countless little flourishes in the graphics and level design to keep you engaged. Here, for instance, is a small waiting room where some people have obviously been waiting a very long time. There’s a scrolling message on the reception desk that tell people without appointments to “park it over there.” In the next stage there’s a restaurant area, complete with walk-in freezer stocked with body bags. When Mr. G pops out of the wall to harass you, which he does with some frequency, there’s a little note on his fold-out section of wall that says “Stand Clear..." except the last letters have been scrawled over so it says “Stand Close.” It’s little flourishes like that which kept me interested in Asylum even when the gameplay was taking the high-speed express to Frustrationberg.


The closest Asylum gets to a boss fight is this little arena, where you’re thrust into combat against clones of the three playable characters. Your mission is to kill these clones, and just to make sure you don’t forget what you’re doing and sit down for a frank discussion of the geopolitical ramifications of global warming or something, someone has handily written “KILL THE CLONES” on the floor in blood. I assume it’s blood, at least. It could be ketchup, but given the grisly themes in the rest of the game I think blood is a safe bet.
As for the actual battle, there’s not much to it because the clones are just as crap at fighting as you are. The real struggle comes afterwards, when you have to jump out of the pit you’re in. You can only jump out on the left-hand side and not along the top edge, despite the ledges clearly being at the same height.


The rest of the stage has an office building feel to it, complete with a boss who throws darts at you as you pass and a coffee machine that has overflowed and created a relaxing water feature in the middle of the office. Not a water feature. A coffee feature, I mean. You move faster for a while once you’ve waded through the coffee, promoting the theory that Rip is actually some kind of plant who absorbs liquids and nutrients through her leg-roots.


I walked too close to this toilet and a fat bald man appeared – the ghost of a fat bald man, even, one who shuffled off this mortal coil in the same manner as Elvis. The apparition then proceeded to whip Rip on the backside with a towel, which strikes me as a shocking misuse of spectral powers. You could be off creating murderous videotapes or earning an honest crust as part of a carnival ghost train, but instead you’re wallowing in these petty juvenile pranks. What a waste of ectoplasm! That stuff doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Apart from ghost trees, obviously.


The next (and final) level begins in that dankest, most miserable of dungeons: the bowling alley. It’s good to see that Mr. G has made space for a bit of R&R in his towering edifice of pain and suffering, although as someone with noodly arms and an aversion to public places the bowling alley is indistinguishable from the rest of the asylum’s horrors.
If any of you do play Asylum and somehow manage to get from one end of the bowling alley to the other without taking damage, please let me know how you managed it because as far as I can tell this section is here for no other reason than to whittle away at your health without there being a bloody thing you can do about it.


Mr. G eats his dinner at a massive table shaped like the letter G. That was a custom order, one assumes. I don’t think Ikea sell a “Huge Letters” range of tables, probably because they know that I and many others would buy them in bulk to spell out messages for the ever-watching extraterrestrial spacecraft, urging them to bring a swift end to the misery of human existence.


After a while, I unceremoniously blundered into Mr. G’s command room / demonic summoning ritual. I must have arrived earlier than Mr. G was expecting, because he hasn’t even had time to finish assembling the robot Frankenstein in the corner. Maybe that thing could have put up more of a fight than Mr. G, who is even less effective as a boss than the three clones were. Just like every other single enemy in the game, once you get Mr. G in your metaphorical crosshairs, there’s nothing he can do as knife after knife pins him against the wall and slowly chips away at his health bar. An encounter embarrassing in its simplicity, you might think, and mostly you’d be dead right… except Mr. G keeps coming back to life when you kill him. This might have been a problem had I not noticed that the doors on the right of the room were open, so I simply ignored Mr. G and walked out of his secret lair.


I then proceeded to steal his extremely green rocket ship, which was nice. By this point I was more than ready to blast out of Asylum at supersonic speeds.


The asylum explodes, as things tend to do when you fly a rocket ship through them. Did our three heroes make it out alive? Who knows, or indeed cares.


The game ends on this unusual note: the chance to win an Asylum t-shirt! The catch is that you have to complete Asylum five times (in a row, presumably) to reveal Mr. G’s true name. I guess once you’d got the whole name you’d ring up Leland and tell them the answer to receive your free shirt. However, after one play-through I’m informed that the first two letters are GN and there are six letters in total, so Mr. G’s real name is almost certainly “Mr. Gnarly.” I’m not just pulling this out of my backside, am I? It has to be Mr. Gnarly, just look at how nineties the rest of the game is.
With Asylum over and no free t-shirt for my troubles, I’d say that it not being released is hardly a major blow for the world of videogames. It’s sluggish, stodgy and frustrating to play, a game that doesn’t seem to have much interest in whether the player’s having fun or not. The thing is, I reckon that with some changes – some small, some much more extensive – Asylum could be a pretty decent game. If it controlled as smoothly and played with as much gusto as, say, Nitro Ball, it’d probably be quite good fun. Certainly, there are plenty of amusing moments and fun details in Asylum, and an overall sense of glee in the disgusting and macabre, that it might have been worth trying to salvage. Sadly, that was not to be, and we’re left with the Asylum we have: unreleased, unloved and unable to stop me from wishing I was playing Smash T.V. instead.


As tradition dictates we head over to the Halloween-O-Meter, and seven feels like a reasonable score to me. It’s too heavily focussed on “gory” rather than “spooky” to ascended to the upper reaches, but six would be too low for a game that does remind me a lot of the trashy eighties / nineties horror B-movies that I spend every October (and every other month) watching.

It’s Halloween season, and what could be more bone-chilling than a Famicom game developed by TOSE? How about one that’s mixed up with the terrifying power of Jaleco to release extremely mediocre games? Ohh, spooky! So, here we go – it’s TOSE and Jaleco’s 1987 Famicom game Youkai Club!

Here’s the title screen, rendered in English thanks to the fine work of some fan-translators. Not that there’s much text in this one to translate, it’s very much focussed on the platforming and the monster-slaying and vast reams of prose are not Youkai Club’s style.
Youkai, of course, refers to the panoply of Japanese ghosts, spirits and monsters that are known under that umbrella. There’s also a youkai that is an umbrella, although sadly that particular creature doesn’t pop up in this game. Nowadays youkai are probably most familiar to people via the runaway success of Yo-kai Watch, but there aren’t any cuddly cat friends in this game. What it does have is the Grim Reaper, floating around the title screen like someone trying to remember where they left their car keys. The Grim Reaper isn’t a youkai, which is a good sign in my book. I like a good mix of monsters. A monster mash, if you will.


Youkai Club is a game concerned only with rip-roaring high-stakes action – I assume that was the intention, at least, even if it doesn’t exactly pan out that way – and so it doesn’t bother with anything so banal as an intro. Instead, when you hit start you’re only shown a screen telling you what level you’re about to enter. I wonder why it’s called Face Mansion?


Oh, right, all the faces. Not the wallpaper choice I would have made, but perhaps I’m too parochial in my interior design tastes. The face part of the name is accurate, but the mansion part is way off, because this is just a big, blocky tower with the odd small room sticking off the side.
As you can probably guess, Youkai Club is an action-adventure game, full of platforming and throwing projectiles at monsters. You play as Akira, a hot-blooded young man wearing a red tracksuit, and his special power is the ability to throw three knives at a time about six feet in front of him. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it seems to be doing a good job of eliminating these bats and snakes. You will notice that bats and snakes are not youkai. Three screens in, and I’ve already been lied to. I bet they’re not even in a club, either.


Ah hah, that’s more like it – this room is haunted by a floating female ghost. I think she might be a yuki-onna, but Japan has such a wide and varied buffet of creepy ghost women that it’s difficult to narrow it down. She might be a ghost, but for some reason she’s still vulnerable to the cold steel of Akira’s knives, so she’s hardly the most menacing foe I’ve ever faced.
When you kill pretty much any enemy in Youkai Club, they’ll drop an item, almost always a small red pellet. These pellets add to your experience meter. That’s what I’m told they do, anyway, because I collected a lot of them during the game and never once did I see my experience bar move after grabbing one. Oh yes, Youkai Club has an experience system, because finding a Japanese Famicom game that doesn’t have “RPG elements” attached to it is a surprisingly difficult proposition. Later on, I’ll find something that actually get the experience bar moving, but for now I’m stuck picking up the pittance offered by the red pellets. One problem is that a lot of the enemies in this game can float through the scenery, what with being ghosts and all, and you’ll often end up killing them while they’re in the walls and thus you can’t grab the items they leave behind.


There’s not much else to the rest of the first stage, just Akira bouncing his way up the tower and stabbing the various monsters he finds. This small goblin is trying to get his stabbing in first, but he’d have to run right up to me and frankly I’d already decided to ignore him. Goodbye, stabby goblin. You can go and tell your goblin friends that you have emerged triumphant in a great battle, if you like.


Waiting at the top of the tower is this blasphemous wizard, and to perpetuate a tired old joke, that’d make a great name for a metal band. Anyway, the man with the cross on his chest is your typical first boss, not doing much besides waddling around at the bottom of the screen, cursing his lack of peripheral vision and flinging the odd fireball in Akira’s general direction. Fortunately the wizard has installed some shelves but hasn’t got around to filling them with his evil knick-knacks, so Akira has somewhere to stand where the boss has trouble hitting him.


Stage two is the monster forest, packed with flying oni / tengu things and what appear to be sponge fingers sticking out of the ground. Hopefully there’ll be a twist at the end of the stage that reveals Akira’s been fighting his way through a giant trifle this whole time.


The first miniboss in this stage is a ghostly woman who pops out of a well, so it looks like we’ve got a prequel to Ring on our hands. Obviously Sadako Senior here can’t sit Akira down and force him to watch a cursed videotape, so instead she throws lots of… things at him. What are those things, anyway? Pebbles? Severed human ears? Let’s go with ears, because it’s the spookiest option. Of course, that doesn’t explain why the ears hurt when they hit you. If ears were painful to the touch, the sides of your head would always be sore.
As for actually beating this boss, I found the best way was to jump up right next to her on the well and attack as fast as possible. She’ll run out of health before you do. This turns out to be the best way to beat most of the bosses in the game: find the spot that lets you take the least damage and stand there chucking knives.


These rock monsters are pretty adorable, bumbling around in a manner the brings to mind marshmallows rather than time-worn boulders of granite. I’d say the enemy designs are the best thing about Youkai Club, with a wide variety of small, simple but charmingly drawn creatures. Certainly, they’re a good enough reason for Youkai Club to appear in this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, even if the stages themselves aren’t all that sinister for the most part.


For instance, check out this grotty ghoul. I have no idea if it’s supposed to be anything specific – it looks a bit like a Zora from Zelda that fell into a basket of mousetraps – but it’s so endearingly ugly that I almost felt bad about sticking knives in it.


Sadly not every monster can be a hit, and the boss of the monster forest is this angular leonine vampire thing that stands in the middle of the room and gets various monsters to do his dark bidding, the lazy sod. You have to shoot him in the eyes to damage him, but as you can see his eyes aren’t always there so you’ve got to spend most of the fight avoiding the flaming dogs and such. It’s not much fun, truth be told, but happily I’d managed to get Akira’s experience bar up far enough that his knives have been replaced by small projectiles I can only describe as “energy croissants.” That sped things along a little.


The next stage begins with a more platforming-focussed area, with narrow pits and jets of flame waiting to knock you down said pits. In true Jaleco tradition, Akira’s controls and jumping physics are resolutely “decent enough.” Your jumps are a little floaty, especially at the top of your arc, and sometime Akira interacts with the scenery in a slightly strange manner. It’s especially noticeable when you’re jumping through a narrow corridor, because Akira’s head will “stick” to the ceiling and you slide along for a while in defiance of gravity. It’s not terrible, though, and it’s at least consistent. The bigger issue is that Akira slides so far backwards when he takes damage, and unlike Castlevania (the game Youkai Club most resembles in many ways) there’s no way to mitigate the knockback. I’d estimate a good eighty percent of the deaths I suffered in this game were caused by a floating skull or some other nasty thing bumping me off a one-block-wide pillar.


I should make it clear that the stages in Youkai Club aren’t linear, but there’s not much exploring to be done because the stages are mostly one big, “main” area with smaller rooms to explore at various intervals. As the game progresses, the entrances to these smaller rooms become less and less obvious, but the stages never really get confusing or anything. There are a few strange moments where you can’t progress until you’ve been into one of the side rooms, but there’s no visible obstruction: you just can’t scroll the screen until you’ve stood in the right place. All in all, it’s an unusual way to gate progress but thankfully it doesn’t lead to much frustration.


The final section of this stage is a jaunt across the clouds. You jump between the clouds, and sometimes an orange cloud appears. Beware of the orange clouds, because they’re made of that really dense water vapour that can push Akira off the platforms. There’s also the tengu to watch out for. That white thing up there, the thing that looks like a diagram of a uterus turned on its side, is actually a gust of wind that the tengu has wafted at me by swinging his fan. Given what I said earlier about falling off narrow platforms, it should come as no surprise that these tengu gradually got bumped up from “annoying” to “hated nemesis” during the course of the game.


The boss of this stage is the Japanese Shinto god of wind Fuujin, complete with his big sack of wind. Feel free to insert your own Donald Trump / Nigel Farage / politician of choice joke here. A bag seems like terrible receptacle for wind, doesn’t it? It’s going to be difficult to keep airtight, you need a jar with a screw-on lid or something. By the way, I was looking up Fuujin and it’s theorised that he was originally, before a long period of cultural assimilation thanks to ancient travellers on the Silk Road, the Greek god Boreas. I’m telling you this because it’s far more interesting than anything that happens in this fight.
With Fuujin defeated, Youkai Club prepares to take Akira to Bone Town.


Because everything’s made out of bones, you see. Why, what did you think I meant?


Oh, neat, a classic western-style witch has appeared to increase the Halloween mood. You know, I’ve come to appreciate witches – both the cute variants but more specifically the traditional hag-like kind – as Halloween monsters a lot more in recent years. I put it down to spending so much time with old people. Anyway, the witches are a good example of what I mean about Youkai Club’s monster sprites being particularly enjoyable. If you look closely at the witch’s face you can see it’s just a white shape with a single diagonal line of black pixels, but that’s all it needs to create the hooked nose and pointed chin of a real cauldron-stirring, newt-de-eyeballing witch.


It’s the Grim Reaper from the title screen, having become so fed up of waiting for the other monsters (or gravity) to finish Akira off that he’s come to the mortal realm to do the job himself. It’s a shame for him that he’s not very good at it, then. You know the standard battle against Death from most Castlevania games? Imagine that, but slower and without all the small projectile sickles flying around the screen, and you’ve got a good idea of what this fight is like. Stand on one of the platforms, tap the fire button, hope you’ve got enough health. The best thing about the fight is that the Reaper always moves towards Akira with his back facing towards his target, so it looks like he’s moonwalking everywhere.


Next up is Dharma Castle, and I’ve got to be honest, it’s a boring stage. There’s nothing new to it and it’s mostly made of haphazardly-arranged blocks in various shades of grey, the colour of excitement. So, instead I’ll take a moment to talk about Youkai Club’s power-ups. There are two kinds: ones that you use as soon as you grab them, and some that you store away as inventory items to use when you need them. The regular power-ups cover the usual run of effects: health refills, temporary invincibility (complete with a hideously ugly palette-shifting effect), a speed-up, books that give your experience bar a big boost, that kind of thing. Then there are the four inventory items. You’ve got a flashlight that stuns all enemies on screen for a while, a bomb that deals damage to all enemies on screen and is best saved for boss battles, a pair of stylin’ sunglasses that let you see and kill a certain type of semi-invisible monster, and the hand. As soon as I picked a hand up I tried it out, naturally. It didn’t seem to do anything, but it did disappear out of my inventory. Oh well, I’m sure it’s not important, he foreshadowed.


The stage is guarded by this walking daruma doll. His main method of attack is sending smaller daruma dolls to roll along the floor after you. He generates these mini-minions by grabbing his midriff and pulling it apart to reveal a gaping orifice from which his children are nightmarishly disgorged. This makes the daruma the creepiest boss in the game by far. The Grim Reaper can’t compete with the self-generated flesh portal, can he? Aside from that, though, I think it’s fair to say that the developers had run out of ideas, motivation or both with this battle. “A square box will do for this boss chamber, I think. Don’t want to get the player too excited, not after daruma has birthed all over the arena floor.”


The final stage is the Labyrinth, (or at least that’s what this fan translation calls it,) but it’s not much of a maze. A few of the entrances to other areas aren’t marked at all and you’ll likely only trigger them by stumbling blindly into their vicinity while trying to fend off a mummy, but I never managed to get lost and my sense of direction is shocking. Also, mummies! If you can call that ugly, motionless boss a vampire, we’re only a werewolf away from getting all the big Halloween monsters on board. Oh, and a Frankenstein, I suppose.


Youkai Club has been doing a good job of gradually ramping up the difficulty as the player progresses, and unsurprisingly this is where it starts getting really tough. There are far more enemies about, for one thing. The problem is that Youkai Club suffers from a milder version of Gradius syndrome – when you die, you lose a chunk from your experience bar. This can cause your attacks to revert to a weaker state, which means it’s harder to get through the stage, so you die more, rinse and repeat. If your attacks get too weak, you’ll have trouble getting through the stages before the time runs out. Your experience bar also acts as your lives: once it’s completely drained, it’s game over and there are no continues. It’s not that harsh, but it’s something to be aware of. No, the real frustration comes later in the stage.


Here is a block, living up to its name by blocking Akira’s progress. You need to move the block, and the only way to do that is to use the “hand” power-up when you’re nearby. There are two of these blocks in the final stage, and there are two hand power-ups in the game. In the entire game. If you happened to miss either of the hands then you can’t move the blocks and you are, as far as I can tell, thoroughly screwed. Go back, start the game over again, pay more attention. There are codes that let you start on later stages – weirdly they take the form of push-button cheat codes rather than passwords – but they only go up to stage three, so you’ll always have to play through at least two-thirds of the game. To make matters worse, the first time I played through this stage I reached the second block, used the hand… and nothing happened. Okay, that’s not quite true. The hand did disappear from my inventory, but the block sure as hell didn’t move.  What a god-awful thing to include in your videogame, and one that has the potential to ruin what is otherwise a perfectly mediocre game.


Your “reward” for getting beyond the blocks is a battle with a clown. A good choice for an honorary youkai, and it’s nice to fight a videogame clown that’s not a scary clown. Just a regular, normal clown seething with the bloodlust endemic to his kind. His attacks are all clown-based, too, which is fun: he walks on top of a big ball, he throws juggling pins and he’s got a fiery hoop. All in all, an enjoyable fight and the chance to hurl fireballs at a clown. What more could you ask for?


Even the evil of a clown isn’t enough to claim the position of Youkai Club’s final boss, an honour which goes to this large pink blob. Presumably it’s some kind of elder creature from a distant star-scape, but mostly it's just there. Rather than doing the fighting itself, the boss summons a load of other bosses from the game to do his dirty work. I mean, it’s nice to see the Grim Reaper again but it doesn’t exactly make for an interesting fight. You might notice that this is basically the same as the fight against the vampire thing, a boss that you have to fight twice during the game, so this glob of chewed bubble gum makes it three interations of the same battle.


This is new, though: the boss creates a clone of Akira that you must defeat. Having played as Akira for the whole game, I was fairly confident that this wouldn’t be a difficult battle. Turns out it was even easier than I anticipated, because clone-Akira only has the un-upgraded knives to attack with.
Once you’ve dispatched all his minions, the boss opens his sleepy eyes and lazily tosses a few fireballs around, which gives Akira the chance to throw his fireballs into the boss’ now-vulnerable ocular region. This damages the boss, because apparently he’s got asbestos eyelids. If he’d just gone back to sleep I’d have been stuck, but as it is I can finish the job and bring Youkai Club to a close.


It’s a good job I wasn’t expecting a lavish ending sequence. Nobody likes to be disappointed.
For the most part, Youkai Club falls snugly into the usual furrow occupied by games that have Jaleco’s name attached to them – an overall feeling of mediocrity, with one inclusion that’s bafflingly awful. There’s nothing wrong at all with the core gameplay: it’s a little loose and floaty, but perfectly acceptable and certainly no worse than a lot of other low-effort 8-bit platformers. The stages are mostly bland, with some peaks and troughs in visual quality but nothing too extreme in either direction, and the soundtrack is above average but only slightly. The monster sprites are easily the stand-out part of the game, for me anyway. All in all, Youkai Club is okay, the complete bullshit of the missable hand power-ups not withstanding, but it’s never going to tear you away from playing a Castlevania game.


A solid seven out of ten on the Halloween-O-Meter for Youkai Club, almost entirely thanks to the selection of monsters and the vague suggestion that Akira might be wearing Michael Jackson’s leather suit from the Thriller video. It would have received a higher score had the backgrounds been spookier, but aside from the faces in the first stage they mostly look like an unfortunate acid flashback in a tile warehouse.

There’s a fine line between horror and comedy, which is probably why there a lot more horror-comedy movies than there are horror-espionage thrillers. Perhaps it’s because so many scary things are, in concept, deeply goofy, or maybe that some things in this world are so terrible that the only possible response is laughter. Sometimes things shoot for horror but fall off that narrow tightrope and land on the comedy side. Konami’s 2004 extreme agoraphobia simulator Silent Hill 4: The Room, the fourth entry in what was (up until this point) probably the most terrifying of all videogame franchises, is supposed to be a horror game. Occasionally it accomplishes this, and in some ways it might be the most traditionally “spooky” of all the Silent Hill games. The first-person apartment sections are very effective, certainly – making me not want to go back and save my game because the kitchen sink is haunted, for instance. However, Silent Hill 4 is also very amusing to me. I genuinely find it really, really funny, and today’s article is about why that is.Before I begin, a couple of disclaimers: there’ll be a lot of spoilers for Silent Hill 4, so if you’re planning on playing it yourself just bear this in mind. Also, a sense of humour is a very personal thing, so if you don’t agree and think SH4 is properly terrifying please don’t think I’m judging you. Anyway, let’s get started.


The protagonist of Silent Hill 4 is one Henry Townshend, and he’s not very interesting. Unlike the first three game in the series, and especially Silent Hill 2, the story of the game isn’t about him. He’s just some poor schlub who happened to move into an evil apartment. It doesn’t help that Henry doesn’t have much to say about the bizarre events unfolding around him, and when he does speak he delivers all his lines in the same sleepy drawl, the voice of a child that’s just been woken up after a long car trip. The best example of this comes near the beginning of the game, when Henry finds a woman who’s been brutally and repeatedly stabbed.


I know that doesn’t sound like a recipe for comedy, but Henry reacts by asking the woman drawing her agonising last breath “are you okay?” in the same tone you’d use to ask someone who’d just stubbed their toe if they were okay. What’s that, Henry? Is the person bleeding all over the place okay? Yes, I’m sure she’s just dandy. The only way this could be more amusing is if Henry said “I’ll go and get a towel” in an exasperated manner.


Reacting to weird happenings in a surprisingly uninterested manner is a common theme throughout Silent Hill 4, and another wonderful example is when Henry’s neighbour and the apartment building’s superintendent try to get into his room.


The superintendent muses that Henry’s room has a history of weird occurrences, and that there are a lot of strange things in the world. Then, as casually as one might mention the purchase of a new kitchen appliance, he says that the umbilical cord he keeps in a box in his room has started to smell terrible recently. Oh, has it? Well, if you will keep in in a regular old box then hang on, what the hell are you talking about?!That’s a super-weird thing to mention, old man, and it’s definitely something you should either keep to yourself or make more of a big deal of. It’s a line that comes so completely out of nowhere that I refuse to believe there’s anyone who didn’t give at least a chuckle when they first heard it. Of course, the superintendent is heavily implied to be the father of Silent Hill 2 protagonist James, so being bonkers must be a family trait.

At one point during the game, a man falls from a considerable height and lands on concrete. Don’t worry, though, he’s fine.


It looks like a painful landing, and it was. You know this because Richard, the character in question, says “Ouch! Dammit!” when he lands. So it hurts about as much as a paper cut, then? Because that’s what his dialogue suggests. I know Silent Hill is all about strange pocket universes where the normal rules of nature don’t apply, but come on.  Silent Hill 4’s habit of being understated to the point of absurdity strikes again, and it’s always good for a laugh.


One of the weapons you can collect in Silent Hill 4 is the Pickaxe of Despair.


It’s a pickaxe. It has “Despair” written on the handle. That’s it.


Speaking of weapons, here’s Henry’s running animation when he’s got the spade equipped:


I don’t have anything particularly deep or interesting to say about this, just that Henry’s jaunty, sashaying gait is a pleasure to watch. It’s half catwalk model and half kid who’s just got a new shovel and is running to try it out in the sandpit. It’s nice to see that the horrors of Silent Hill haven’t broken Henry’s carefree spirit just yet.


Wheelchairs are a prominent recurring motif in the Silent Hill games, usually dotted around to serve as a grim reminder of illness and debilitation. Not so in Silent Hill 4: in this game, the wheelchairs are fed up of being, ah ha ha, pushed around. They’ve risen up, ready to strike back against those who would use them.


This, of course, completely eliminates any creepiness factor they once possessed, reducing them to laughable rattling irritations that engender as much terror as a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. Did I mention that they’re haunted wheelchairs, so much so that they can hurt Henry simply by being near him? How spooky. Still, this ghostly energy doesn’t seem to be nearly as painful as when they crash into Henry’s shins, which probably would be quite painful. My favourite – that is, the goofiest – thing about them is that they do a little wheelie whenever they turn around. They’re haunted and radical.


Amongst the small moments of mirth that make up Silent Hill 4, you shouldn’t overlook the fact that even for a Silent Hill game the plot is utterly bananas. Walter Sullivan, the game’s antagonist, is a case in point: he is spurred to action by the belief that his literal birth mother is a one-bedroom flat. I know Walter was raised by an evil cult in the middle of the woods and their biology classes are unlikely to pass an Ofsted inspection, but that shows a shocking lack of education. Everyone knows that apartments lay clutches of ten to thirteen eggs at a time.
Anyway, the upshot of this bizarre storyline is that someone needs to explain it, a task that falls to Joseph, previous tenant of Henry’s haunted home. How does Joseph give this vital information?


By appearing as a ghostly head and shoulders that pops out of the ceiling, upside down and monologuing. When Eileen sees this, she says “it’s him?” Him who? Mr. Upside-Down Bald Exposition Ghost Man? That’s the only reaction that either of the two main characters can muster, even when Joseph starts repeating “kill… kill… kill...” over and over. You know, it’s hard to warm to characters who respond to these kinds of events with absolutely no interest or emotion. You just can’t empathise with them. If a ghost stuck its head out of my living room wall and started telling me to kill people, at the very least I’d have to have a sit down and a strong cup of tea.


Ah yes, Eileen. Silent Hill 4’s second main character and a ruddy great anchor that drains the fun right out of the second half of the game. About halfway through the game Walter attempts to kill her but fails, and from then on Henry has to escort her through the dangerous environments, protecting her and (most infuriatingly) waiting for her to catch up to you after you’ve run somewhere. It’s one long escort mission, and if you do play through SH4 then by the end you’ll have said “come on, Eileen!” more times than Kevin Rowland.  Just before you pick her up, though, you visit a spooky corridor in a spooky hospital that’s lined with small rooms filled with what I can only describe as “spooky junk.” Here’s what’s in one of those rooms.


Yep, it’s Eileen’s giant head. All it does is sit there, staring at Henry and making weird sex noises. Now, I know there are people out there who found this scene quite frightening, and I’m not going to diminish that because a sense of fear is as subjective as a sense of humour. Unless you’re some kind of super-nerd who’s only scared because a girl’s looking at you, in that case I might make a little bit of fun. I can find no terror in Eileen’s giant head, however, only laughter. It’s a case of it being “here is a scary thing!” rather than the carefully-constructed horror of earlier SH games, but mostly it’s those eyes that make it funny, jiggling around like Mr. Blobby being throttled. If you walk right up to the head, you can make it go cross-eyed. If you are scared of Eileen’s giant head, I suggest you do walk up to it. It’ll definitely relieve some of the tension.


The hospital is also where Henry has his first encounter with the Patient enemies. That’s patient as in someone receiving medical care, they’re not happy to wait for you to come to them. No, they’ll head straight for Henry and try to bash his head in with a metal pipe, and I’m fairly certain it’s not supposed to be an ironic nickname. The Patients are mostly uninteresting monsters that lack any deep symbolism – I mean, I’m sure Henry is scared of having his skull cracked open, but so is everyone else – but they do have one quirk, a quirk which might well be the most famous thing about SH4.


When you hit a Patient, they burp. Their “pain” sound effect is one hundred percent, unequivocally that of a human belch. Of all the possible noise they could have used, the developers of Silent Hill 4 saw fit to have these creatures sound like me after slamming down a can of Coke. What a bizarre, baffling design choice. It gets better, though. The Patients burp every time they get hit, and at one point you can knock them down a staircase, their excess gas singing forth ever time they hit a step. You can see – and more importantly hear - the effect in action in this video, which I suggest you watch because it puts forth the strongest case for my argument that Silent Hill 4 is actually hilarious.


Lastly, here’s the opposite of the burping Patients: something that probably only amuses me, but by heck it doesn’t half tickle me. The thing in question is Henry’s shoes.


That’s right, Henry, your shoes. You can examine Henry’s shoes at various points in the game, and the description will change as you progress.


Here, for instance, Henry can’t remember when and where he bought his shoes. I’d venture “at a shoe shop” and “in the past,” but I guess he wants to be more specific than that.


Yes, Henry, they’re your shoes. Even if you didn’t purchase them yourself, that means they belong to the apartment’s previous occupant, and as you’re locked inside by an otherworldly serial killer and the previous tenant is a ghost and therefore has little need for comfortable loafers, I think you’re safe to lay claim to them.


Oh no, the shoes are from Silent Hill! They’re cursed! They’re the physical manifestation of Henry’s fear of fallen arches! Is that what’s going on here? Is Silent Hill 4 trying to make Henry’s shoes seem scary? You know, I think it is. Well, it doesn’t bloody work. They’re shoes! At one point in the game game, Henry’s shoes can become possessed, but all they do is shuffle into the kitchen leaving behind bloody footprints, which is far more adorable than it is terrifying. Man, spooky shoes. What will they think of next? Oh right, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Shattered Memories, Book of Memories and pachinko machines. Put in that context, Silent Hill 4 is a masterpiece.

There you go, then. Silent Hill 4 makes me laugh more than pretty much any game purposely designed to be funny. I’m assuming all this humour is unintentional, at least: the product of poor voice acting direction and exuberant weirdness, and not a stealth comedy. Ironically, Silent Hill 4 is one of the few games in the series not to have a joke ending, but in a game about fighting burping monsters while a man tries to kill people to wake up his mum-apartment, where the hell else could you go with it?

Dust off your copies of Thriller and start shoving your massive bag of Poundland tealights into every gourd you can find, because it’s finally time: Halloween is here at last! Of course, it’s a time tinged with sadness, because it means Halloween, and by extension the VGJunk Spooktacular, is almost over, but fret not. You can keep Halloween in your heart all year round. Buy a novelty doorbell that plays the violin sting fromPsycho! Instead of a Christmas tree, wrap some tinsel around a pumpkin! Best of all, you can play spooky videogames, and that’s what I’ll be doing today with Capcom’s 1988 sadism-em-up Ghouls ‘n Ghosts!

The electric gremlin from Gremlins 2 has branched out into providing videogame logos, I see. Complete with dripping blood effect! I would argue that no spooky videogame logo can be complete unless it’s dripping some kind of fluid, so Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is off to a good start.
Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is, of course, the sequel to Ghosts ‘n Goblins and the second entry in Capcom’s long-running but now tragically stalled Makaimura franchise. Both games are classics, as are their various console ports and sequels such as Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, so you’re probably familiar with them to some degree, even if it’s only because you’ve played as series hero Arthur in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.


Previously on Ghosts ‘n Goblins: Arthur ran, leapt and fought his way through a nightmarish land plagued by demons and was then forced to do it all over again, before finally rescuing the princess and living happily ever after. Well, living happily until this sequel arrived. So happily, in fact, that a stream of hearts is constantly erupting from the lover’s heads, which is the eighties videogame equivalent of an unutterably filthy, non-stop, three-days-in-a-hotel-room lovemaking session. It was a more gentle time.


Alas, this state of affairs cannot last for long – this is Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, after all, not Kisses ‘n Cuddles– and soon the titular monsters are attacking the kingdom once again. Arthur races back to the princess on his trusty steed, but it’s too late.


Princess Prin-Prin gets a demonic laser beam in the spine, and Arthur’s poor horse is completely vaporised. Looks like Arthur’s quest for revenge is going to be conducted at a walking pace, then.


The action begins, and very typical arcade platformer / run-n-lance action it is too. It’s extremely similar to Ghosts ‘n Goblins: Arthur can run, jump, and attack with whatever projectile weapons he’s currently holding, in this case the basic horizontally-travelling lances that are one of his trademarks. The only difference in Arthur’s core mechanics are that he can attack vertically upwards now, which does come in useful when you’re being attacked by evil buzzards. Buzzards are neither ghouls nor ghosts, but it’s impossible to care when they’re so charmingly drawn, and even they pale in comparison to the scythe-wielding skeletons that jump out of the bushes to chase Arthur around.


Then a spooky wizard popped out of a clay pot and turned Arthur into a duck. Sure, why not? I know I was only three screens into the game but it was proving far too easy. With the handicaps of having no weapons and an uncloseable cloaca that constantly leaks effluent, Arthur can truly experience the punishing level of difficulty that is Ghouls ‘n Ghosts most famous trademark.


Make no mistake, Capcom did not get soft in the years between Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and its prequel, and as we make our way through this cursed land we shall see plenty of evidence that the development team behind this game were actually demons themselves, demons who can only survive by harvesting the misery and anguish of humans. It’s not too bad during this first stage, though. Arthur can still take two hits before he dies, the first hit knocking off his armour and forcing him to fight in his boxer shorts and the second killing him outright. Perhaps he could withstand more punishment if he didn’t buy his armour from Crazy Carl’s Discount Platemail Emporium, all our armour made with genuine soggy cardboard, buy one greave get one free. The monsters don’t take many hits to defeat, and the forest of guillotines is more imposing than genuinely challenging. It’s still a stage where the slightest mistake will cost Arthur his life, but by the standards of the series it’s about as harrowing as a ride on the toytown miniature railway.


About halfway through the stage, the landscape changes to this flatter area where aerial spooksters fly towards Arthur. If you remember Ghosts ‘n Goblins, you might notice that the first stage of that game had an almost identical structure, and in general Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is very similar to its predecessor. In fact, it feels less like a sequel and more like an expanded remake of the original, the Evil Dead II to Ghosts ‘n Goblins’ Evil Dead. That’s not a bad thing, though, especially when one of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts biggest triumphs is that it’s just so fancy. It looks beautiful and it sounds fantastic, and the entire game represents an arcade developer at the height of their powers exploring new techonology, creating an experience so vivid and colourful that it would be years before home consoles could capture it.


As expected, there’s a boss waiting at the end of the stage. In this case it’s a huge monster named Shielder. His most notable attributes are that he uses his own face as a shield, he can breathe fireballs and he’s rocking a killer mullet. Using your own face as a shield, huh? I can understand that, Shielder. It’s the least useful part of my body, too.
Ignore the fact that I’ve managed to have Arthur reduced to a skeleton in the screenshot above, because Shielder isn’t a tough boss at all. I’m just bad at videogame, that’s the thing. Anyway, now that Arthur has the power to throw his weapon upwards you can get beneath Shielder’s head and throw your lances vertically. That generally sorts him out pretty quickly. Once the boss is dead and has finished exploding, you can grab the key he drops – just like the first game, you get the same grammatically tortuous “take a key for coming in” message – and move on to stage two.


Here is stage two – the post-apocalyptic ruins of The Netherlands, if all these derelict windmills are anything to go by. As soon as the stage begins, Arthur is beset by a rain of grumpy rocks that come bouncing down the path, rocks with killer turtles hiding inside. Business as usual, then.
I managed to pick up a new weapon along the way. Notice that I didn’t say I upgraded my weapon, because I’ve traded the reliable horizontal flight of the lances for the arcing, ground-hugging flames of the firebombs. It’s a situation akin to accidentally collecting the wrong subweapon in a Castlevania game, except a thousand times worse because you don’t have a whip to fall back on.


There’s an indoor section where Arthur must traverse a series of rickety wooden bridges. I suspect there is no other kind of bridge in this universe, a world where all pits are bottomless, all waterways are clogged with flesh-eating fish and every toilet seat is disconcertingly warm. In true Makaimura fashion, the collapsing parts of the bridges are often placed at the exact spot where you’re most likely to jump onto the bridge in the first place, hammering home the point that you need a good memory as well as good reflexes if you want to get anywhere with Ghouls ‘n Ghosts.


But then, just as any dreams of conquering the game might have been budding within you, this smug little bastard makes an appearance. That’s right, it’s the Red Arremer from Ghosts ‘n Goblins– he’s back, and as a reward for killing Arthur hundreds of thousands of times in the first game he’s been promoted to Red Arremer King. His new position comes with a towering thrones of skulls, as you would expect for demon royalty, but the difference between him and most lazy, shiftless members of the nobility is that Red Arremer King almost certainly harvested each and every one of those skulls himself.


He also got himself some metal underpants, and he likes to show them off.
Just like in the last game, Red Arremer is not the usual dull creature with no plan but to charge at Arthur. He’s got style, he’s got finesse, and he’s still controlled by the black magic of whatever AI routine Capcom developed for him: the one that makes him behave like he’s thinking about what Arthur’s doing, reading our hero’s movements and waiting for the perfect chance to strike. Even to this day, Red Arremer is one of the most uncannily human foes you’re ever likely to face in a videogame. Plus he can fly and will chase you relentlessly if you try to tun away from him. He’s a real pain in the arse, is my point.


The rest of the stage is on fire, because of course it is. Having the stage not be on fire would be making things too easy on Arthur. At least I didn’t send him into this hellish furnace in full plate armour. This way he can be killed by touching an evil plant instead of drowning in a container of his own sweat.


The boss of this stage is Cerberus, guardian watchdog of Hell. He doesn’t have the three heads of the traditional Cerberus, but he is made of living flame, which rather makes up for it. Cerberus fights by jumping from one side of the room to the other and dropping fireball on Arthur’s head so, uh, duck? The only other advice I can offer is “don’t have the firebombs equipped, because they’re rubbish.”


Stage three begins with Arthur on an elevator, an elevator into which countless enemies spawn. Well, you can’t beat the classics, can you? This is where Ghouls ‘n Ghosts’ difficulty level starts getting a bit hairy, and I have trouble coping purely because there are so many monsters flapping around the place. I’m sure everyone who plays GnG has their own watershed moment that makes them think “maybe there’s a nice hard brick wall nearby that I can smash my head against instead,” and for me stage three is where that happens. I might just be imagining it, but Ghouls ‘n Ghosts always feels more difficult to me than its predecessor, perhaps because the increased power of the then-new CPS-1 arcade board allowed for a greater number of creeps to be on screen at once.


If you somehow survive long enough to reach the top of the elevator, you’re faced with the nerve-shredding terror of a platforming section in which Arthur scampers along retracting bridges made from rhythmically undulating demon tongues. I have never been so glad that Arthur is in possession of all his armour. That alternative would be Arthur tackling this area barefoot, and the idea of a giant demon tongue licking the bare soles of my feet is easily the most horrifying concept I’ve encountered this Halloween season.


Speaking of armour, I managed to find Arthur a resplendent suit of golden proof. It looks impressive, but like cheap jewellery from a home shopping channel it might be shiny but it’s flimsy tat that will fall apart if a monster so much as says a naughty word in its vicinity. The golden armour does have one thing going for it, however: when he’s wearing it, Arthur can hold the attack button to charge up a special magical attack that varies depending on your currently equipped weapon. With the firebombs, for instance, charging up the special attack unleashes a pair of fiery snakes that fly around the screen, killing anything they touch. That’s all well and good, but the moments in this game where you’ve got a chance to charge up your special attack are few and far between.


This boss is called Gassuto, and it’s an eyeball stuck inside a cloud. Congratulations to Capcom for creating a cloud that looks annoyed to be involved in these shenanigans. Gassuto doesn’t want to be part of this at all, does he? I can’t blame him, he’s mostly eyeball and Arthur’s always throwing either fire or sharp objects. Once again, I don’t have much advice to offer when it comes to beating this boss. He floats around, so try not to be standing where he’s floating. I know beating up a cloud sounds like it’d be really difficult, but Gassuto’s not so tough.


It’s been a while since I’d played Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, and I’d forgotten just how gruesome it gets. Stage four, as seen here, takes place in a mysterious crystal cavern that’s overrun with tumorous flesh-lumps and veiny fanged worms, which I believe is called having your cake and eating it.


There’s also an ice-slide section, where Arthur must avoid the predations of the big hands with faces instead of fingerprints while dodging the spiked walls, walls that seem to be made from the very kidney stones of Satan himself. I imagine that if you were to visit this stage for real, it would have a very unique aroma, like the urinals in a pub that only serves fresh goat’s blood.


Then it’s down, down, down, travelling across the disturbingly biological polyp platforms, which are as unpleasantly green and sinewy as a cucumber that spends all its time down the gym. If he wasn’t covered in metal plates, I’d say Arthur should take his chances in the water. Take heart, though – he can jump to the relative safety of that big green island!


No, it’s not really an island. Even if it was an island it wouldn’t be safe, because this is Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. It’d be packed with roving bands of murderous palm trees that can grow weaponised coconuts or something. No, this is Ohme, the fourth stage’s boss: a creature surely designed after and named for the insect-like Ohmu creatures from Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaa. Unlike the more agile bosses Arthur has faced thus far, Ohme is content to sit back and let the various parasites that crawl all over it do the job, so the battle consists of avoiding those creatures while trying to damage Ohme’s heart-lumps when they pop out of its side. It was the last part of that plan I had problems with, because by this point I’d totally forgotten that Arthur can fire straight downwards when he’s jumping. I blame it on the residual mental scarring caused by (involuntarily) imagining those tongues licking my feet.


The final stage is set in a spooky castle, complete with crumbling masonry, windows that put the “stain” in stained glass and the blasphemous sinks of the elder gods, always watching with their cycloptic eye to ensure all who use the toilet wash their hands afterwards. There are also many Red Arremer Kings. There’s one at the top of the screen now, easily avoiding the axe I threw at it.


This stage also has horrible pig-men that attack by vomiting onto Arthur from above, just in case you thought this stage might be a little less grotesque than the previous levels.


Mostly it’s a boss rush, though, and while normally I’d decry the boss rush section as a lazy attempt by the developers to pad out the game, in Ghouls ‘n Ghosts there has at least been some effort made to mix things up. You don’t fight the bosses one after the other in a series of identical rooms, for starters, and there are some changes like the severed arms of multiple Shielders being used as sentry turrets.


You even get to fight Astaroth, main antagonist of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, first on his own and then as part of a diabolical tag-team. He seems to have taken the demotion to “Hell’s Doorman” quite well. His stomach-face seems cheerful enough, anyway. Just like the first game in the series, the boss battles in Ghouls ‘n Ghosts are quite possibly the easiest part of the game – although they’re markedly more challenging than they were in the original. Still, if you’re lucky with the weapon you have equipped and you can get enough hits in before the fight really gets started, often you’ll manage to defeat the bosses in a matter of seconds.


Lurking at the top of the castle is the all-new boss Beelzebub, lord of the flies. Stop looking at his disgusting, wrinkled ovipositor. I know, I know, it inexorably draws the eye towards it but no good can come of staring at that thing.
Given that I just said that the bosses are the easiest part of the game, naturally Beelzebub turns out to be a real pain in the arse to fight. Hitting him isn’t a problem – he’s pretty big, as flies go – but I struggled when he turned into a swarm of flies and zipped across the screen. It took me a long time to be able to avoid that with any kind of consistency, and even then I was one fumbled button-press away from making Arthur look like the windscreen of a car that’s just driven through a garbage dump.


Well, here it is. You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming, but that does little to mitigate the sting of defeating Beelzebub only for a bearded man to appear and tell you to complete the whole game again. Turns out Arthur doesn’t have a weapon with enough magical might to take on the true final boss, so it’s back to stage one to find the Goddess of Battle. Who is this old man, anyway? Merlin? It might be Merlin. I would have expected the most powerful wizard of all time to be more help against these gosh-darned ghouls and ghosts, however.


Princess Prin-Prin also sticks her floating, disembodied oar in, reminding Arthur that he has to be wearing the golden armour to find the magic weapon. Oh good, I was worried that this might be too easy. The Princess says that she believes Arthur will defeat Lucifer, but I’m not so sure.


Here we go again, then. I made it through the first stage just fine, and I had a good time doing so because the first stage of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is one of my all-time favourite stages in gaming: the richness of the graphics, the monster designs, the already challenging but doable difficulty level and the truly excellent musical theme. It’s great, and I love it.
The second stage is where I found the magic weapon, hiding in a chest underneath the rickety wooden bridges. This must be the Goddess of Battle, then. Notice how she has her hands clasped together in an almost apologetic fashion? She should be bloody apologetic, I could have had access to this weapon during my first playthrough!


At least the weapon is pretty good once you finally pick it up. It doesn’t travel that far, but it’s very powerful and the nice, wide projectiles mean aiming is a thing of the past. According to the ending this weapon is called the Psycho Cannon, so I guess we know where M. Bison got his powers from. The ending also says that St. Michael himself gave Arthur the Psycho Cannon. So… not the Goddess of Battle, then? Or is the Goddess of Battle actually Archangel Michael in disguise? It’s not a very good disguise, if so, what with her having red hair and angel wings.


I’ll be honest, I used some cheats when I reached the latter half of my second loop. The idea of losing the golden armour just before the end of the game was a torment too far in a game already dedicated to seeing the player suffer. Ghouls ‘n Ghosts’ reputation for difficulty is well-earned, but is it any harder than any number of other coin-guzzling, one-hit-kill arcade game? Erm, yes, I think it is. I reckon part of why GnG feels so brutally difficulty is that there are plenty of opportunities to put yourself in a position where death is inevitable. This is mostly down to the jumping mechanics, because once Arthur’s airborne there’s no way to change his trajectory, leading to a great many instances where you realise, mid-jump, there you’re about to land on something that wants you dead. It’s also easy to find yourself boxed in by more enemies than Arthur can handle – in other games, especially more modern ones, you know that if you play well enough you can weasel out of most tight spots, but with GnG sometimes you’re just screwed.  It rarely feels unfair, though: it just demands that you practise, a lot. Learning where things are going to be is ninety percent of GnG’s difficulty, and it’s a short enough game that doing so isn’t an overwhelming challenge.


I made it all the way back through the game, past the Red Arremer Kings, across the tongue platforms and beyond Beelzebub, to be confronted with this: the final showdown with Lucifer himself! Lucifer doesn’t get up from his throne during the fight, which is frankly rather rude but he is the devil so that’s to be expected. Lucifer fights by pointing at Arthur so hard that lasers fly out of his fingers, all while sitting in comfort. For once, I actually do have some advice on how to beat this boss: there’s a spot between his legs (no giggling at the back, please) that you can stand in where his lasers have trouble reaching you. If you can find that sweet spot, stand in it and fire upwards, blasting your Psycho Cannon into Lucifer’s vulnerable face. See, if he’d had the manners to stand up when Arthur entered the room, I wouldn’t be able to reach his face and Lucifer would win by default. That’s why etiquette is important, folks.


If you take too long, Lucifer will begin destroying chunks of the floor, but that’s okay, You can just climb up on his knee and start smashing him in the face, just like that time I was ejected from Santa’s Grotto.


Once Lucifer is vanquished, a white bird carries the Princess’ body into the room (no, really,) and deposits it at Arthur’s feet. Then her soul flies back into her body from somewhere off-screen, Prin-Prin is revived and she and Arthur can get back to doing what they do best: making out. He’s a lover and a fighter.


You also get a surprising amount of backstory for your troubles, including such nuggets as the Princess’ kingdom being called Hus, the previously-mentioned information that Arthur is in league with the very angels of Heaven themselves and that he instilled magical power into all his weapons, knowing that the forces of darkness would rise again. Your time would have probably been better spent training up some other knights, Arthur, or maybe finding some armour that doesn’t explode when a skeleton’s robe brushes against it.  The final coda is that the Demon World will rise again someday, so Arthur better get as much making out done as he can while he’s got the chance. That might be something of a paraphrase.


And so, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is finished. Finished twice, even, and as I slowly recover from the mental and physical tension it generates I’ve come to realise that playing GnG is like seeing an old friend you haven’t hung out with in a long time… but it’s your boisterous, over-the-top, drainingly exuberant friend who wears you out. You have fun hanging out together, but once they’re gone you’re glad you don’t spend time with them more often. In a lot of ways it’s a truly great game: it looks and sounds fantastic, the enemies and impressively huge bosses are fun and the level design is pleasingly fiendish. It’s just that difficulty level, the constant, unremitting tide of death, that has the potential to turn people off. Everyone’s different, and if you want a real challenge that you can devote yourself to mastering then Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a wonderful option, but even if you’re like me and don’t have the time (or the patience) to do so then I’d still recommend you at least try it out – the first stage really is excellent – but don’t worry too much about saving the Princess. Just enjoy the ambience, and try to get into a fight with a Red Arremer. That’s definitely an experience.


For the final time this year (I know, I’m sad about it too) we turn to the Halloween-O-Meter, upon which Ghouls ‘n Ghosts scores a mighty 9 out of 10. The inclusion of more traditional Halloween monsters – if Arthur fought a Frankenstein, for instance – would have pushed it all the way up to ten, but nine is a perfectly respectable score and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts remains one of the most thematically-appropriate games you can play on Halloween.
That’s it for the 2016 VGJunk Halloween Spooktacular, then. I hope you’ve enjoyed it! I’ve enjoyed it, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. My only disappointment is that the promised sequel to Halloween Trick or Treat 2 didn’t materialise, so I will have to comfort myself by chucking a Lego man into my box of Halloween decorations and then trying to find it.

Now that the Halloween season is over and the kitschy sweetness of the cardboard ghosts and jack o’lanterns has been put away until next year, we can take a look at something truly horrible: the music industry! That’s right, you can live out you rock band management fantasies with today’s game – the Amiga version of Codemaster’s 1989 talent-exploitation-em-up Rock Star Ate My Hamster!


Here’s the title screen, showing the late Michael Jackson wearing a space helmet. Jacko never went into outer space, did he? I’m fairly certain he didn’t, but honestly at this point no new revelation about Michael Jackson’s life would surprise me. Oh, it’s a reference to him sleeping in an oxygen tent, isn’t it? It says a lot about just how famous Jackson is / was that you can immediately recognise this image of him, even though his face looks like a low-res photo of the moon.
Also on the title screen is the game’s theme tune, which consists of some bleepy music and a squeaky voice intoning “a rock star ate my hamster” over and over again. You might think “Rock Star Ate My Hamster” is a title that was chosen just to be weird for weirdness’ sake, but it’s actually a reference to the time the awful British tabloid The Sun ran the headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster.” Freddie Starr was a British comedian, who did not eat a hamster: the story was cooked up by publicist, convicted sex offender and all-round shitbag Max Clifford. The fake story of a late-night hamster sandwich was good for Freddie Starr’s career, however, and it should give you an idea of just how highly Rock Star Ate My Hamster thinks of those in the entertainment business.


And a business it certainly is: Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a management sim that tasks you with assembling a rock band that will set the charts alight and rake in the cash. Well, sort of. Making money is necessary but it’s not the main goal, and to call it a management sim is a little generous when perhaps “random event generator” might be more accurate.
The game begins with the player being introduced to their avatars and the creators of this musical empire: Cecil Pitt (it’s like “cesspit,” you see) and his young protégé Clive. I think Cecil is supposed to be based on the businessman, MP and poor swimmer Robert Maxwell, but to me he looks more like Bernard Matthews. As for Clive, he’s just some bloke called Clive, as far as I can tell.
First things first, choose how many members your band is going to have. I went with three, for no particular reason. Then you get to choose those band members, and suddenly you realise that the only reason RSAMH was created was as an excuse to draw caricatures of pop stars.


Here, for example, is Wacky Jacko, your Michael Jackson analogue. The strange thing is that RSAMH has you hiring artists that are already famous, famous enough to earn £18,000 a week in 1989 money, so it’s not the “bring up a struggling new band” exercise you might have been expecting.


RSAMH has a couple dozen stars for you to choose from, most of them rendered in an unflattering manner but some treated with slightly more respect: David Bowie and Freddie Mercury get off more lightly than most, as well they should. Also pictured above, to give you a general idea of what you’ll be seeing, are Alice Cooper, Cliff Richard, Elton John and Madonna. When combined with their “comedy” names – Cliff Richard is called “Stiff Pilchards,” for instance – they’re all pretty recognisable, and most of them are big enough stars that even in the future year of 2016 you’ll know who they are. There are a couple, like Tracy Chapman and Midge Ure, that have rather faded from the public consciousness and the decision to combine Salt ‘n Pepa into one two-headed siamese twin called Scratch N Sniffa might throw you off, but on the whole they’re bona fide superstars. The game also rather unfortunately features Gary Glitter. You can’t blame the developers for not knowing how that would look in 2016, but it’s still a grim inclusion.


I can’t leave the rock star selection screen without showing you the ghoulish visage of Phil Collins, a face that looks like someone put a ham sandwich on an anvil and then smashed a human skull into it. Imagine if you felt that thing coming in the air tonight. Oh lord, you’d need years of therapy afterwards.


In the end, I decided to commemorate those musical legends cruelly taken from us in the past year by assembling a supergroup composed of Bowie, Prince, and Lemmy. Unfortunately now I’ve upset myself because we’ll never know what such a collaboration would have sounded like. I’d say “amazing,” at a guess. The game suggested I name my band “The Dead Presidents” but I wouldn’t want to be thought of as ripping off the Dead Kennedys, so I called them “2016 Was A Terrible Year” instead. As soon as I picked that name I realised it sounds way more like a student union indie band circa 2004 than the glam-pop/metal/funk amalgam you’d expect from these three musicians, but I’m stuck with it now.
Before you begin, you also have to decide what kind of equipment you want: new, used, or stolen What’s the difference between each option, besides the price? I haven’t got a clue, and RSAMH wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.


Here’s the main menu, where you can select which task you’re going to inflict on your band that day. You can send them to practise, organise a gig or a short tour, set up a publicity stunt, shower your stars with gifts in an attempt to reign in their primadonna tendencies or record some tracks.


I sent them into the practise room first. It felt like the most appropriate thing to do, you know? You wouldn’t think they’d need much practise, given that they’re all already famous rock stars, but it might help the disparate members of the band gel together into a tight live act. All that actually happens when you do this is that the number of days you sent them in for passes by, and at the end your band re-emerges and you’re sent back to the main menu with no indication as to what effect, if any, their practise session has had. Have they melded their disparate styles into an exciting new genre, or have they already descended into drug-fuelled punch-ups and “creative differences”? It is a mystery.


Okay, it’s time to give our adoring fans what they want. It’s gig time, and 2016 Was A Terrible Year are starting their assault on popular culture in the scabbiest, most flea-ridden pubs they can find. You get to choose your venues, from pubs and clubs to stadiums, and set the ticket price, but beyond that you don’t have any input on the gigs themselves. It should be an interesting experience, because as far as I’m aware the band don’t actually have any songs yet, but I’m sure people would pay good money just to see Bowie, Prince and Lemmy sit around on stage for two hours shooting the shit, especially in this reality where you wouldn’t have to hire a psychic medium for the experience. I know I’m excited to see what this concert looks like.


This is what I get for allowing myself to feel any excitement, huh? You don’t even get to see the gigs! Instead, you’re stuck in the tour bus, counting the ticket sales and dealing with the occasional whinging from your band members. I won’t lie, this is extremely disappointing: I was rather looking forward to seeing my band up on stage – or at least being thoroughly ignored by the regulars in the Dog and Duck – but instead you’re stuck looking at the inside of this bus. This amusingly tiny bus. Based on the proportions of the walls and the dashboard, the band are driving around in a cube.


Suddenly, disaster strikes! Prince – sorry, “Mince” - demands a £60,000 crate of caviar before the show or he’s going to quit the band. As a result, Prince quit the band. Look, I barely even have that much money and I’m sure as hell not spending it on fish eggs, so it looks like the band is down to being a duo. These events pop up fairly often when you’re out gigging (although thankfully not when you’re only got one band member) and rather annoyingly they’re never a bluff. You either pay  the money, or Cecil becomes so enraged by the artist’s temerity that he fires them on the spot. The ability to offer a compromise would have been nice, and if I could have haggled with Prince he might have stayed in the band in exchange for a box of fish fingers or something, but sadly it was not to be.


Suddenly, disaster strikes! Again! I finally got the band into the recording studio so they could lay down their first album, but I forgot that a) studio time is expensive, b) I was still paying wages and c) you can’t earn any money while recording, and so due to the drain on my finances I managed to go bankrupt and get a game over. I partly blame this on my trouble with reading the cash amounts for various things. I think it’s something about the font; I often found myself having to count the number of zeros in any given amount because I was struggling to get the number right at a glance.


Not to worry, I simply started again with three of the least expensive singers in the game: Lemmy (again,) personal VGJunk favourite Alice Cooper and flirts-with-racism, “human massacres are nothing compared to the horrors of KFC” indie tosspot Morrissey. This gives me a chance to resurrect the name Flesh Hammer, last used as a band name in the long-ago article about PS1 band management sim Popstar Maker.


An important part of managing a successful band is getting them noticed, and it’s clear that working hard, gigging a lot and writing good music is right out of the question, and so we turn to the “Publicity” option of the main menu. This randomly generates a news event featuring one of your band members, and they come in three flavours. Pictured above is the first kind, where rather than being headline news your star appears in the box-out at the bottom, accused of something terminally uncool like trainspotting or falling off a pavement. Presumably these stories actually reduce your star's popularity, but because RSAMH gives you no way of keeping track of any stats beyond your bank balance and the sales charts, there’s no way to tell.
Also note that I had to censor some pixellated boobs up there. “The Stun” is, of course, a parody of the previously-mentioned Sun newspaper, which for many years (until last year, even) had a topless model on page three. And they say us Brits are sexually repressed.


Then there’s the good kind of headline, the kind that has your star doing something not necessarily pleasant but rock-star-ish enough to endear them to the general public, like revealing their life as a BDSM slave, trashing hotel rooms or, in this case, eating a house. A lot of the “good” headlines revolve around your star eating various things – bishops, wives, hands – but the one about eating houses seemed to come up far more often than any other during my playthroughs. By the time Flesh Hammer reached the end of the line, Morrissey had chewed his way through the equivalent of Milton Keynes, with so many three-bedroomed semi-detacheds rammed into his cavernous maw that you’d expect the papers to stop reporting on it. “Oh, that’s just Morrissey,” they’d say, “He’s so dedicated to not eating living things that he sates his terrible hunger with the odd Victorian terrace.”


Here’s the third type of news story. You know, the one where your rock star straight-up dies. Usually it’s because of a plane crash, but there are other eventualities, as seen here. I like that the headline is “Rock Star Dies In Nuclear War” and not “Holy Shit, There’s A Nuclear War Going On.” It has a pleasing absurdity to it.
So, that’s how the publicity stunts work. You either (one assumes) lose or gain some popularity, with a roughly one in ten chance that one of your band members will be suddenly killed. No word on whether their death affects your popularity, but if anything you’d think it’d give it a big push upwards. Nothing increases music sales like a fatality, after all.


Speaking of sales, it’s time to get Flesh Hammer into the recording studio and actually make a god-damn album this time. Like everything else in RSAMH, you don’t have much control over what’s going on. Some tracks are generated. You hear a five-second burst of random music when this happens, which I guess is meant to represent the song? There’s nothing so obvious as “genres” or “styles” in this one, it’s all bleep-bloop Amiga ditties. Then you pick a name for the song. Do this eight times until you’ve got an album’s worth of material and, erm, that’s it. I wouldn’t mind so much if the game was sticking more to the “management” side of being a management sim, but Cecil and Clive are right there at the mixing desk so they clearly have more input on the Flesh Hammer sound than they’re letting on and therefore so should I.


Once you’ve got your tracks, the next step is to release them onto an unsuspecting world. This is a simple process: pick which track you want to release (or put out the entire album) and, if you’re feeling fancy, make a video for it. As is probably obvious by now, RSAMH doesn’t let you do anything as fun as directing your own video. Instead, you chose a director, location and general theme – the themes including such potential attention grabbers as “leggy models with whips,” “Greasy Toy Boys Working Out” and “Boring Guitar Poses.” As has now become traditional in this game, you’d assume that hiring the most expensive director and the fanciest shooting location would result in a more popular video and thus more popular song, but there is precisely zero evidence that this is the case.


The weekly sales charts are in, and Flesh Hammer’s début single “Smiley the Rainbow Kitten” is straight in at number nine! Sadly that’s about where it stayed, and no amount of publicity stunts, gigging or band members dying in sexual experiments gone tragically wrong could seem to shift it. Okay, I thought, maybe it’s the song. I’ll release Flesh Hammer’s second single, get the album out, and surely reap the rewards of a sustained media blitz. However, I managed to bankrupt the band yet again, this time when making the video for the second single: I accidentally clicked on the most expensive director, a Steven Spielberg knock-off called Steven Cheeseburger. He wanted three million pounds for his participation, money that Flesh Hammer simply did not have because I imagine it’s resting in strippers’ underwear up and down the country. The problem is that you can’t back out of a decision once you’ve made it and there’s no option to confirm your choices, no “are you sure you want to bankrupt yourself, you big idiot?” button, so I was condemned to suffer the consequences of my mis-click. Annoyingly you can back out of your decision when you’re setting up a tour, but not in any other menus, which I think I’ll just have to put down as terrible UI design.


All right, let’s have one last attempt at reach the pinnacle of pop stardom with The Shitty Beatles. Originally a four-piece ensemble with a mix of established talent and cheapo garbage, a series of tragedies and Mariah Carey-esque diva strops whittled the band band down to just Rick Astley. Ahh, remember rickrolling? Truly that was a gentler time in the landscape of internet pranks. Anyway, The Shitty Beatles being just Rick Astley miraculously hasn’t scared away the sponsors, and he’s been picked up by Joka Cola. Go on, try to figure out what “Drink A Joke” is supposed to mean, I dare you. Like everything in RSAMH, being sponsored has the potential to backfire – in this case, it was later discovered that Joka Cola causes cancer which probably did not do Rick’s popularity any favours. You should have eaten a house, Rick. The common man loves that.


There are a couple of other random events that pop up from time to time, the most frequent being the invitation to perform a charity gig. However, you don’t find out until after you’ve said yes whether you’ll be performing in aid of a genuine charity or something horrible like the Campaign for Public Executions or whatever the next Band Aid is going to be. You can also have your music stolen by pirates – the game is unclear on whether they’re the tape-copying kind or genuine eye-patch-and-peg-leg types – and you can decide how to deal with them. Every outcome costs you money, but buying them out always seemed to be less expensive than sending the boys round, because the boys always get kidnapped and then you have to pay a ransom.


Here we are, then. The Shitty Beatles, chart toppers. I have no idea how or why this happened, because I didn’t do much different from last time I released a single. This is no cause to celebrate, though. You might think that getting to number one is the goal of the game, but it’s far harsher than that: you need to release four platinum records in the course of one in-game year and frankly that was never going to happen for me.


The game ends on December 31, as Cecil and Clive decide to pack in their music management careers. I have only one question about this: why? You were making literally millions of pounds a year with very little effort! Did I read their intentions wrong, and where I thought they were in it for the money they were actually in it for the thrill of artistic expression and the adoration of the record-buying public? Why only one year? Was this all some kind of Around the World in 80 Days style bet between gentlemen? Like so much of RSAMH, it’s utterly opaque and makes no sense.
Even if you do somehow finish the game – it is possible, apparently – all that happens is that Cecil fires Clive. That’s it. You don’t even get invited to an awards ceremony where you can interrupt Wacky Jacko’s performance by waving your arse at him, making the whole exercise pointless.


Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a brisk and pretty enjoyable experience with an interesting concept and the odd funny moment, but as a game it’s pretty terrible. It’s a management sim where you don’t really manage anything, picking options that generally lead to a random result – a result with an impact that you have very little way of gauging. Well, unless a band member dies in a nuclear war, that’s fairly clear cut. Too much of the game remains unexplained: what difference do the different recording studios or starting equipment make? Is there any point to practising? What determines how happy your band members are? Why the hell did you draw Phil Collins’ face like that? That said, a lot of this only matters if you want to “beat” the game, and that’s not really what it’s about. It’s quick to play through, it’s dumb fun and it’s certainly not meant to be taken seriously, so if it sounds interesting to you I’d recommend you’d give one of the many computer version of Rock Star Ate My Hamster a try – just don’t expect it to fulfil any desires you might have for a “proper” band management sim. It’s definitely better than Popstar Maker, I’ll give it that much.

I can’t really think of a good way to begin this article, so I’ll just come right out and tell you it’s about rollerblading. “But VGJunk,” a hypothetical pedant might shout, “I think you mean it’s about inline skating because ‘rollerblade’ is a trademarked brand name,” but that’s where you’re wrong: this game is fully licensed and officially sanctioned by RollerBlade, Inc. themselves. That’s right, if you want the real, authentic rollerblading experience, you’re going to have to play Radiance Software and Hi-Tech Expression’s 1993 NES falling-over-em-up Rollerblade Racer!

Here’s a title screen with all the thrill and excitement of a letter from the bank informing you of their updated terms and conditions. I suppose title screens don’t have to be interesting or look good, really. You’ve already bought the game, and you’re not going to be looking at this screen for long unless you really like the registered trademark symbol. The word “SUCKER!” flashing on a blank background might be more appropriate but would be a little too on-the-nose, so instead we get this.


This is Kirk, star of Rollerblade Racer. Hi, Kirk. Let’s be blunt, Kirk looks like a massive dork, with his colour-coordinated safety gear and his rumpled socks. Mind you, I wasn’t expecting the star of this game to look cool. Despite rollerblading’s attempts to cast itself as a hip and radical means of personal transport, it certainly never felt that way when I was a kid. There was a very clear hierarchy when it came to the coolness of wheels you attach to your feet: skateboards were by far the coolest, rollerskates were extremely uncool and considered to be just for girls and rollerblades were only slightly above that. Then razor scooters came along and muddied the waters, but fortunately by then I was into my teens and thus beyond the age when such things are important. I was too busy trying to get hold of trainers that weren't from the market and made by companies like Adodos and Mike to worry about the trendiest way to fall over and graze your elbows.


Speaking of coolness, I feel like “bladegear” is too cool a phrase to be used in this context. As a name for all your hacking tools in a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia, sure, but not to describe plastic knee-pads and your mum’s old bicycle helmet.
Anyway, Kirk’s got a mission: he wants to participate in the Super Rollerblade Challenge, but before they’ll let him in he needs to earn 5,000 qualifying points. Fortunately for him the eyes of the Super Rollerblade Challenge Observation Team are everywhere, tireless and unblinking, so he gains those qualifying points simply by skating around his neighbourhood. Let’s go and do that, then.


What we’ve got here is an isometric skate-em-up, which is pretty much what I expected. Up and down on the d-pad control your speed, left and right do their usual thing and the buttons either make you jump or duck. What’s missing from this rollerblade race is the racing aspect, because there are no other competitors and it’s not even much of race against the clock: you can run out of time, but you get a fairly generous allotment. No, the real goal is to earn points, which you do by jumping (and receiving a bonus based on your remaining time). You don’t even have to jump over things, and any successful landing will net you points so you might as well be jumping all the time.
In fact, I’d strongly advise you to be jumping all the time, because Kirk lives in a blasted urban hellscape. Rabid dogs, open sewers, cracked pavements – all these thing and more conspire to keep our plucky young hero away from the Super Rollerblade Challenge, and jumping over them is the best way to avoid them.


It was at this point that I realised Rollerblade Racer is essentially Paperboy, probably because Paperboy also features hazardous children on tricycles. It’s Paperboy without the newspaper-delivery bits, then. So, erm, Boy? Yeah, let’s go with that. Paperboy was almost a decade old by the time Rollerblade Racer was released, which is possibly why it feels trite and over-familiar even in these early stages, and the inclusion of the hottest skating trend of the nineties isn’t doing much to elevate it. Still, we can all enjoy Kirk’s splay-legged jumping pose. I particularly like the way his hands have been replaced by small plastic spoons.


After one stage, Kirk has already amassed over half the points he needs. The spies of the Super Rollerblade Challenge, lurking in the bushes near his home with their telephoto lenses, were suitably impressed by the way he jumped over all those dustbins.


Just like Paperboy, there’s a bonus round after each main stage. In this case it’s what I would describe as the crappiest version of Donkey Kong, if I hadn’t played so many unofficial home computer ports of Donkey Kong. Skate forwards and jump over the barrels, that’s all you need to do. The only problem you should have is getting over the first barrel, because it’s right in Kirk’s face and you haven’t had time to build up any speed. Once you’re past that (literal) hurdle it’s easy going, although that didn’t prevent me from contorting Kirk into whatever this pose is supposed to be. Maybe he’s a big fan of The Specials. There's definitely some level of ska music involved in this stance.


Do we have to, Kirk? Can’t you just save your energy for the big day? I know I’m only two stages in but I think I’ve already extracted the maximum amount of fun I can from Rollerblade Racer. It’s relatively competent on a technical level, with decent collision detection and controls that are heavy and sluggish but not to a hugely frustrating degree, but it’s also extremely boring.


The next stage takes place downtown, and I think it’s actually easier than the first stage because there’s less stuff in it for Kirk to trip over. It’s just as run-down as the suburbs, though, and just as packed with wild dogs. Dogs are your constant harassers in Rollerblade Racer, appearing in every stage and lunging at Kirk with such ferocity you have to assume he’s using Pedigree Chum as cologne.


And they look so innocent when they’re waiting for Kirk to pass by, too! I’m certain that all dogs are fundamentally Good Boys, but in this universe there’s just something about rollerblading that sends them into a frenzied bloodlust. Maybe they’re from an alternate timeline where their wolf ancestors were hunted by primitive men wearing inline skates.


Bonus stage 2: the traffic cone labyrinth. Kirk’s arms continue to atrophy, having now withered away to the shape of udon noodles. As he collapses to the ground, his enfeebled arms unable to break his fall, I’m finding it extremely difficult not to fill this paragraph with jokes from the traffic cone scenes from I’m Alan Partridge.


I fell over one too many times and got a game over. See, this is why you should have just waited for the main event once you’d collected the requisite amount of points, Kirk. You just had to push it, and now night has fallen and you have to make you way home in the dark. You saw how bad the city was in the daytime, right? There’s no way Kirk’s going to make it before he’s devoured by the roaming bands of toxi-mutants and the feral dogs with a taste for human flesh.


Having survived the night by hiding in one of the many dustbins left haphazardly in the middle of the road, Kirk resumes his skating odyssey with a trip to the beach. Oh look, he’s getting some sunbathing in. Well, you’d want to look your bronzed best for the Super Rollerblade Challenge, wouldn’t you?


The beach is much the same as the other stage. The puddles of water are patches of sand now, but there are still dozens of killer dogs patiently waiting for their chance to rise up against their human masters. One new thing are the frisbees, which you have to duck underneath. Anything that adds a bit more complexity to Rollerblade Racer is welcome, I suppose, although once you’ve built up enough speed you’ll be past most frisbees before they get near you.


The next bonus stage is a trough. That’s it, you ride through a gutter that’s got ideas above it’s station. You might think it’s a gnarly half-pipe that you can do all kinds of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater style tricks on, but no – approaching the lip of the pipe will cause Kirk to fall over just like he does when confronted by small puddles, grass, kerbs and slightly uneven tarmac. All you need to do, especially because you’ll long-since have collected the 5,000 points, is hold up on the d-pad until you reach the end of the stage. It’s not so much Skate or Die as it is Skate and Die of Boredom.


Boring in a different way, mostly because it forces you into repeated attempts and rote learning of obstacle locations, is the final stage before the big challenge. It’s a park, with narrow pathways, bridges over rivers and staircases to contend with. There are also multiple unattended babies just sitting around, so if you’re looking for a free baby, perhaps one that you can raise as a warrior who will avenge your death when the hordes of rabid dogs finally overwhelm you, then I suggest you get down to this park.


Most of the things that try to ruin Kirk’s day are fairly innocent. The dogs are simply acting on their animal instincts, the beach balls and frisbees are unfortunate mis-throws, the children on tricycles don’t really know what they’re doing… but then there are these guys. They see Kirk skating towards them and they purposely stick out their legs to trip him up. There’s nothing accidental about it: they saw a kid rollerblading along the path and thought “it’d be really funny if I legged this child up.” I think that makes them the most evil villain I’ve ever faced in a videogame, and I’ve completed Wolfenstein 3D.


At last, Kirk has reached the Super Rollerblade Challenge. It might look like the first bonus stage, but that’s only because it is the first bonus stage. But wait, there’s more! It’s also the other two bonus stages! You play the three bonus stages as one consecutive stage, then they repeat a couple of times. That’s it. That’s what I needed all those points to participate in, despite having already played the constituent parts. The developers are showing the kind of innovative thinking you usually only see when the Royal Family needs to come up with a name for a new baby, and honestly it’s about what I expected. I had imagined there might be some other people here - a crowd, even - but there’s no evidence that the Super Rollerblade Challenge isn’t all a product of Kirk’s fevered imagination and he’s set the whole thing up on his suburban street.


Best of all, if you move over to the left and jump onto the pavement, you can stay on the pavement for the whole stage, completely avoiding all the obstacles. Amazing, truly amazing.


The game ends with the same screen as when you get a game over, except now Kirk is waxing lyrical about the quality of the final course. Kirk is easily pleased, isn’t he? Well, as long as he had fun, that’s the main thing. Wait, hang on – further reading implies that Kirk wasn’t actually competing in the Super Rollerblade Challenge and the organisers just let him on the course to piss about for a while. Next time he’s going to compete? Oh no, I’m not falling for that. The game restarted and as far as I could tell it was identical, so there’s no way I’m going through all this again on the off chance there’s another ending. I’ve had enough of that sort of thing, what with playing Ghouls ‘n Ghosts recently. As far as I’m concerned, Rollerblade Racer ends right here, right now.


Some games are bad because of awful design choices, or a lack of budget, or thanks to offensive content… but some games are just a bit rubbish, and that’s the category into which Rollerblade Racer squarely falls. I’d like to think I try to give all the games I write about a fair shake, but sometimes a game just rubs me the wrong way for reasons I can’t really explain. I think in this case there’s an air of laziness that hangs over proceedings, a lack of ambition that’s hardly surprising when you consider it’s a rip-off of a decade-old arcade game. It’s not that terrible to play – I’ve certainly played worse – but the stodgy controls, ugly graphics and lack of anything unique means it’s destined for that great grey void where all the uninspired and forgotten console games end up. So why did I bother writing about it? I haven’t got a clue, pal. Maybe deep down I’m bitter about never learning to rollerblade as a kid.

At the moment, my brain’s too fried to play a “proper” videogame, but that’s not going to stop me from writing these articles because there are enough – more than enough – ephemeral, barely-there home computer games based on kid’s TV shows to keep me going until 2032 or so. With that in mind, here’s one of them: Bizarre Developments’ 1991 Commodore 64 serial-arson-em-up Fireman Sam!

There’s Sam now, holding his hose while his friend Elvis vigorously pumps it from behind. I’m too tired to play videogames that require skill and reflexes, but not so tired I can’t make double entendres, and for that I apologise.
Fireman Sam, then. It’s a game based on the venerable British kid’s show Fireman Sam, which is about a fireman called Sam. It’s set in Wales, it was originally stop-motion but later series were CG, and as the title screen and the show’s theme tune tell us, Sam is the hero next door (assuming you live next door to the fire station). I didn’t watch the original series much as a kid because I was too obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, but having regularly looked after my infant nephew I’ve seen a fair few of the newer episodes. It’s exactly the kind of show you think it is: there’s some mild peril or the occasional fire, the team deal with the problem in a calm, level-headed manner and everyone learns a lesson about not pouring water on chip pans or flicking cigarette butts at the cat.


Also, Fireman Sam’s catchphrase is apparently “Great Fires of London!” presumably uttered in the same shocked tones one might say “Great Scott!” or similar. Seems likes a bloody weird catchphrase for a fireman, though, it’s like a doctor reading your test results and exclaiming “holy smallpox epidemic, Batman!”


Always alert to the call to action, Fireman Sam is in fact so quick off the mark that I had trouble getting a screenshot of him sliding down his fireman’s pole. I hope there’s a crash mat at the bottom or something, the pole is providing so little friction that he might has well have jumped out of the second floor window to get to his fire engine.


Ah yes, the fire engine. I think Fireman Sam’s fire engine is called Jupiter? That sounds about right. Anyway, you’ll be sending most of the game in control of Jupiter, travelling the highways and byways of Pontypandy while responding to emergency calls. You drive and steer using the joystick, and while it’s viewed from a top-down perspective Grand Theft Auto it most certainly ain’t. There’s no other traffic on the roads and no pedestrians to introduce to several tonnes of metal, ladders and hosepipes. It’s all precisely as sedate as you’d expect from a videogame based on a kid’s TV show about friendly firefighters from rural Wales. It’s a good job there’s nothing to get in your way, too, because the fire engine is not the most nimble of vehicles. It can only turn at ninety-degree angles, you can see that it takes up both lanes of the road and you can’t go up on the pavement. This all makes turning around rather more of pain in the arse than it ought to be, and I frequently found myself getting stuck like that bloody scene from Austin Powers.


So, there’s a fire at the Old Lane. How unfortunate for them, a misfortune compounded by Fireman Sam not having a map and the game not telling me even a vague direction to be driving in. On the plus side, the game does play an incredible irritating “fire bell” noise the entire time you’re driving around town. Just what we all need to sooth our frayed nerves.
After some wandering around, much of it spent driving in reverse so I didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of turning the fire engine around, I made it to the Old Lane. It’s that thing at the bottom of the screen. The thing that looks like a pile of hay atop your nan’s old bathroom rug. The hay is suppose to represent fire, you see.


Once you reach the fire you’ve got to put it out, something that’s accomplished using the most Commodore 64-y control method of them all: waggling the joystick back and forth. However, it’s not just a matter of pure waggling speed – the faster you waggle, the harder Elvis pumps the water and thus the higher the water pressure, which affects the angle of the stream. This means you’ve actually got some control over your aim, giving the fire-extinguishing minigame slightly more depth than it could have had if it was a simple race to see how quickly you could wreck your joystick. It might be even easier if Sam could aim the hose instead of standing completely still, making you wonder why he’s being paid a wage when he could easily be replaced by a sturdy tripod, but even so it’s not a particularly difficult task.
Once the fire is out, (or you’ve failed and let the building burn to the ground,) you have to drive back to the fire station to get your next assignment. The problem with that was that I’d spent so long driving around looking for the fire I’d completely forgotten where the fire station was. Cue more aimless wandering, although at least that excruciating fire-bell noise has stopped. Usually this is where I’d complain about not being able to make a good mental map of the game world despite it being pretty tiny, but in this instance I decided to forestall those complaints and actually drew myself a map.


Maybe one day writing VGJunk will lead me to discover a hidden talent, but said talent is definitely not cartography.


Sam’s next mission is… to find a kid’s skateboard. Is that really an appropriate use of the fire service? I suppose in a town as small as Pontypandy, where fires – although far in excess of the national average – are relatively rare, the fire brigade has to look like it’s doing something. So, off we go to find a skateboard. The fire bell is constantly ringing during this section, too, so you know finding this skateboard must be important. They wouldn’t subject the player to such a god-awful racket if it wasn’t important, surely?
I did think the red thing in this field, pictured at the top of the above screenshot, might have been a skateboard, but apparently not. Is that thing supposed to be a tractor? It’s hard to tell, this game has messed up my sense of scale.


See? That’s far too big to be a skateboard, it looks more like one of those fancy, expensive go-karts that I’m definitely still not bitter about never owning as a kid. We made our own go-karts out of stolen pram wheels, stolen construction site lumber and youthful stupidity and we liked them that way, by gum. Of course, we rarely managed to build anything that would move and we certainly never built anything with brakes, so all this reminiscing is less childhood nostalgia and more the after-effects of head trauma.


After another identical mission spent looking for a lost hammer – a mission that made me very glad I took the time to draw a map – a fresh call comes in. There’s a kite stuck on the roof of the grocer’s shop! I bet this is Norman’s doing. You know, the same Norman that lost his skateboard. If you’ve never seen Fireman Sam, Norman is one of the characters, someone I’m sure that official Fireman Sam merchandise would describe as “a mischievous young scamp” when in actuality he’s a cheeky little shit whose complete disregard for authority sees him getting into situations that require the fire service to attend roughly three times a week. Norman is a blight on the town, and if he didn’t exist then Fireman Sam would have very little to do with his time.


Sam arrives on the scene, and is immediately beset by killer rollerskates. Okay, maybe not killer because Sam’s a big lad and a simple rollerskate is unlikely to finish him off, but touching them does make him fall over and fail the challenge. Jumping over the rollerskates is key, then, but for a while I didn’t know what else to do beyond that. I really wanted to know, because jumping over rollerskates repeatedly using the game’s slightly awkward controls is the computer game equivalent of re-grouting my bathroom tiles: hardly likely to send me into a spiral of emotional misery, but tedious and unfulfilling.


Oh, that’s a ladder, is it? Good job putting it in the exact spot where it will most thoroughly blend in with the pattern of the brickwork, I hadn’t felt like enough of an idiot recently so it’s good to get my simpleton-o-meter topped up.


There’s a banana peel on the roof. A banana peel that’s been placed for maximum slipability, even. This must surely be Norman’s doing, the nasty little toerag. Oh well, Fireman Sam can simply jump over the banana peel, because hopping around on slippery rooftops is a great message for a show that supposedly teaches kids how to respond in a crisis.


Sam reaches the top of the roof, only to discover that there is no kite, only a crude painting of one that someone’s daubed on the chimney as part of a cruel prank.


Then the chief fire officer manages to lose the keys to the fire station, because the Pontypandy Fire Brigade is an absolute shitshow. Guess what? Sam, being the only halfway-competent person in this entire backwards-ass village, has to drive around until he finds it. Why isn’t Sam in charge around here? Is he just waiting for the Chief Fire Officer to die or retire? Well, I can see that the kite is flying around again, so next time it gets stuck on a roof maybe the Chief should go and recover it. Maybe he’ll have an unfortunate rollerskate-related “accident” and Sam can seize the big chair.


Next up: Norman gets his head stuck in some railings. Oh Norman, you great tit.
There’s a theory about Norman and his near-constant need for the fire brigade to rescue him, and that’s that Fireman Sam is actually his absentee father. Norman – whose “real” father is never seen or mentioned – somehow senses the bond of family between him and Sam, so he gets himself into trouble just to spend time with the man who might be his dad. Take note that both Norman and Sam have ginger hair. Is this theory a complete load of horseshit? Absolutely, but like I said I ended up watching more Fireman Sam than I ever expected and I had to find some way of getting through it.


Getting Norman unstuck sees the return of the joystick waggling. Once the firefighters have placed the rope around Norman’s neck, you have to hang on, is that really the best way to get Norman free? A sideways hanging? Did you not at least try smearing butter around his head first? It’s almost like you don’t want Norman to get free. Oh. Oh, I see. Nice work, Fireman Sam. The hero next door, indeed.
Anyway, waggling the joystick does make the firefighters pull the rope and it must be the correct thing to do because my score was going up, but there must also be another aspect to this that I’m missing because try as I might I could not get Norman free. Maybe there’s a certain rhythm you need to find, or a button needs pressing at the appropriate time, but I couldn’t figure it out because I was too busy violently thrashing the joystick back and forth like some terrible masturbation metaphor. Then I ran out of time. “That will not do at all,” said the Chief as the firefighters gave up and went back to the fire station, leaving Norman stuck in the railings where the villagers can pelt him with all the rotten fruit he deserves.


After this, Fireman Sam rolls around and starts repeating the same tasks over and over again, mostly the driving around looking for lost property ones, until you run out of time three times. At that point, Sam is presumably drummed out of the fire brigade, leaving the smouldering ruins of Pontypandy and Norman’s imprisoned skeleton in his wake.


Well, that sure was a computer game. Just about, anyway. Perfectly acceptable for the kind of very young people who watch Fireman Sam, I suppose, and unlike so many other licensed games based on kid’s TV shows it didn’t suffer too much from feeling like a shallow, cynical hack-job. There’s some attempt at including varied gameplay, at least. It’s not good by any stretch, and becomes boring astonishingly quickly, but frankly that’s what I needed at the moment: a game that even I, a man who recently put his television remote in the cutlery drawer, can cope with. Still, Sam’s no Thomas the Tank Engine, is he?

Sachen. Thin Chen Enterprises. Joy Van. A Taiwanese company know by many names, but know for one thing: putting out dozens of unlicensed games, mostly for the NES and Famicom. Some of their games are bad, some of them are very bad and one of them has the wonderful title Worm Visitor. Good job coming up with a name that makes it sound like a game about what happens to your corpse once it’s buried, Sachen. Anyway, today’s article isn’t about any one of their games, because then I’d have to play through a Sachen game, so instead here’s a look at some of their game’s cover art. Hopefully I can come up with plenty of synonyms for “amateurish.”


So, not a game about the childhood years of the Batman villain, then? No, it’s about Little Red Riding Hood. It’s a cover made from clip-art, said clip-art being carefully composed to make it look like Red Riding Hood is kicking a goblin right up the arse. She looks like she’s having a rare old time, too. Are we seeing the origin story of B.B. Hood from Darkstalkers here? It’s a short step from kicking goblins to mowing down werewolves with an uzi, or at least it will be when I finally make my own RPG. Joke's on Red, that goblin behind her is about to get her with his invisible garotte.
Also, don’t overlook that weird neckless dog in the background, biting another goblin on the rump. The backside is a goblin’s weak point, apparently. Speaking of rear ends, cover the front end of that dog up and tell me you’re not now looking at the back end of a horse.



“Who is this year’s champion plumber” asks the game’s tagline… except there’s no question mark, so I guess it’s not a question and we’re being told that someone called Who is this year’s champion plumber. Congratulations, Who. I hope you’ve got a nice spot in your house to display your Golden U-Bend trophy. I’m going to assume that the deformed homunculus on the left of the screen isn’t Who, because there’s no way he’s a good enough plumber to win a championship. His oversized apron is a tripping hazard, his spanners are too small and all the pipes in the background are spraying water everywhere. No, he’s the regular, normal kind of useless plumber.



This is the same game as Pipe V, but renamed for the Australian market and given a new piece of cover of art. So, now we get to see the lost Mario Brother slowly drowning to death. Now, I’m not marketing executive – I have a soul, for starters – but I have to think that this image will do little to lure in prospective players. If my kid saw Pipemania and said “daddy, that’s the game I want!” I’d get the phone book out and start circling a few numbers for child therapists.



If you’re going to have your box art be a big picture of a man’s face, what’s the best angle to draw them from? Why, so you can see right up their nose, of course! It really hammers home the feeling that you’re looking at someone laying in a field, staring up at a nearby air show while he waits for the peyote to kick in.



Oh good, here comes the peyote now. What the bloody hell is going on here? Are these thing fighting? Are they even made of metal? That thing at the bottom appears to have seas anemones for hands, and they’re not made of metal. The top, erm, thing is presumably the metal fighter of the title, looking as it does like T-Bob from M.A.S.K. who was at least made of metal even if he wasn’t much of a fighter. I short, I don’t have a sodding clue what’s going on here apart from very poorly placed typography.



Hey, this one’s not too bad! I could see it being the cover of an officially licensed game, and unlike Metal Fighter the picture of a female pharaoh actually has something to do with the title of the game. I mean, it’s not a good picture. It looks too much like the décor in a shabby casino for that, but it’s appropriate and when it comes to the covers of Sachen games thatreally is the best you can hope for.



It doesn’t looks very silent. Bombs tend to be quite loud.
I’ve written all about Silent Assault, and it might sound scarcely believable but this cover art is somehow less ugly than the game itself. You wouldn’t think much could be worse than a life-sized version of those shitty Chinese action figures from Poundland, the ones with names like “USA GI HERO FORCE,” but at least this artwork isn’t composed entirely in garish neon tones. Plus, I like that the soldier is going into battle with his medals pinned to his chest. He single-handedly repulsed the Glorganoid invasion fleet to get that medal, dammit, and he’s going to wear it all the god damned time. I bet he sleeps with it pinned to his pyjamas. Its presence comforts him, distracting the soldier from from the horror that is his own messed-up face. His head looks like a carrot with human features crudely carved into it, an effect heightened by the foliage growing on his helmet. However, if you think this face looks bad, check out the alternate cover to Silent Assault.


Ha ha ha. Hahahaha! Incredible! He’s part human killing machine, part gurning champion and, if his independently-swivelling eyeballs are anything to go by, part chameleon. His sergeant ordered him to put on his war face, but he misunderstood and tried to capture the full horror, savagery and pointless waste of human life of war in one facial expression. He failed, clearly. The last time I saw a facial expression like that was when I tried to explain the plot of the entire Metal Gear series to a friend.



I haven’t got a clue what “Tagin’ Dragon” is supposed to mean. Maybe he’s really into Moroccan cooking and it’s supposed to be Tagine Dragon.
Most videogames are pretty odd when you stop and think about them, but while “Italian plumber jumps on mushrooms” and “blue hedgehog runs fast, fights Teddy Roosevelt” are no more conceptually bizarre than “lounging dragon nibbles the tail of another, transparent dragon” there’s something about Tagin’ Dragon’s cover that’s weirding me out. Perhaps it’s the somewhat sensual way the dragon is acting, the way it’s gently tickling its mouth with the other dragon’s tail while staring directly at the viewer. He likes it when you watch.



Well, okay, green is a colour, I guess? I think it’s more likely to mean “colourful” in the same way you might say someone has a “colourful past.” This dragon is a wrong ‘un, is what I mean. He’s probably been arrested a few time, did a bit of low-level dealing, that kind of thing. As punishment, he’s been trapped inside an Alchemy Gothic picture frame.



It would be a damned sight easier to believe this was a jovial race if you hadn’t drawn this car with a grille that looks like razor-sharp teeth, Sachen. Stephen King’s Christine didn’t undergo the same inappropriate transition from adult material to kid-friendly cartoon that RoboCop and Rambo did, but thanks to this cover we now know what it’d look like if it had.
I can’t fault the game’s title, though. It’s like Mario Kart in an alternate universe where blue shells were never added to the game. Jovial Race is a name that’s almost as endearingly daft as Worm Visitor, and as such it deserves to be on a better game.



Hell Fighter is another game I’ve written all about before, so I already know that despite the promises of this cover art it’s not the story of a male stripper whose hand spontaneously transforms into a ghostly skull. I know, I know, I’m just as disappointed as you are. It’s a story that writes itself, too: stripper accidentally reads aloud from a foul grimoire of forbidden magic while researching sweet new dance moves and the spirit of a long-dead necromancer attaches itself to his hand. The stripper worries that this will ruin his career because his audience wants to see oily pecs and not grim reminders of their own mortality. The necromancer is furious that he cannot continue his sinister designs on the world of the living. But then, the skull and the stripper find that their different strengths make them a great team! The stripper helps the necromancer loosen up and have a good time, the necromancer teaches the stripper how to use black magic to increase his tips, and they become the best of friends. It’s the Magic Mike sequel the world is crying out for, so it’s with a heavy heart that I must reiterate that’s not what Hell Fighter is about.



Hey, I recognise this art style: it’s clearly a rip-off of Susumu Matsushita, the artist probably best known for their Famitsu magazine covers and the artwork for Capcom’s Maximo games. Whether this is merely a stylistic copy or a poor tracing of a Matsushita original is something I have been unable to determine.



I’ve never played Chinese checkers, and now that I know it involves novelty condoms I probably never will.



Ah yes, Strategist: the game where you pick a side in the war between the military and the Formula 1 drivers and lead your chosen faction to victory! The F1 drivers have speed on their side, but the military have the guns and tanks and vast numbers of infantry. Unless the war is being fought over lap times at Silverstone, I think this is going to be a fairly one-sided conflict.
Okay, not really. Strategist is actually a bundle of two poker games, one war-themed and one racing-themed. Still, the cover provides us with a fine selection of bizarre attempts at drawing a human face. The racers get off lightly because they’re mostly wearing helmets, but the soldiers? Not so much. You’ve got a soldier in the middle who’s been issued a rifle despite having no eyes. Immediately to the right of him is a man with the face of a puppet from an “edgy” off-Broadway show, but best of all is the bloke in the officer’s hat, his face a cubist nightmare of nonsensical anatomy. Go on, try to figure out the placement of his eyes if that’s where his sunglasses sit.



More art theft on the cover of the fighting game Street Heroes, with the central hero being traced directly from Boris Vallejo’s picture “The Eternal Champion.” He’s by far the least interesting of the Street Heroes, mind you. Who wants to hear about the adventures of Generic Cape-Wearing Hero when the Tinfoil Crusader and Egyptian Vega are much more exciting prospects? They appear to have the same face, so maybe they’re twin brothers forced into gladiatorial combat against their will. How thrilling! Other than that, the lady in the bikini’s fairly dull, but it’s nice to see a Scooby Doo villain appearing in the background.



Now for a cover that combines copyright infringement with graphic design so brutally unappealing that the addition of Comic Sans could only improve it with Thunder Blaster Man, a game that stars an unlicensed version of a beloved videogame hero. If you can’t figure out who that hero is, I’ll give you a clue: this game is also known by the impressively ballsy title of Rocman X.
Yes, it’s X from the Megaman X series, but in a different timeline where his body was damaged in his latest battle with Sigma but the only replacement parts he could find were Lego Bionicle pieces and coloured craft paper. Also he blasts thunder, I guess, all while trapped in what seems to be a swirling vortex of existential misery. That said, I don't think this is even the most garish outfit that X has ever worn.



“Seal clubbing” is transformed into “seal, clubbing” in Arctic Adventure, and I don’t mean the Kiss From a Rose singer is dancing the night away at a trendy discotheque. No, the seals have risen up and turned the very instruments of their destruction again any who would encroach upon their domain, although sadly they have been consumed by their bloodlust and are attacking innocent penguins. Unless the penguin stole that huge diamond and large seals are what passes for the local constabulary in the Arctic. And yes, I know they look more like walruses but the back of Arctic Adventure’s box definitively states that they’re seals, and if you can’t trust the box blurb on an unlicensed Taiwanese NES game then we are in a very sorry state as a society.



Rolling around at the speed of sound and displaying a now scientifically-inaccurate lack of feathers, it’s Sonic the Hedgehog if he was was a pink dinosaur. Yeah, sure, why not. It makes about as much sense as a blue hedgehog. More so, even. Surely dinosaurs are faster than hedgehogs? I mean, I’ve never heard of a dinosaur being run over by a car while trying to cross the road, have you? I rest my case.



Finally for today, something that immediately became one of my favourite ever covers the second I laid eyes on it. I feel enriched in body and soul just for having seen it. Is this what they mean when they say something’s beyond parody? There isn’t really anything you can say about a bingo game being promoted by a robotic donkey with a police siren on its head vomiting out a stream of number sevens. Well, there are phrases like “wow” and “incredible” and “find me the number for a tattoo parlour, I need to make an urgent appointment,” but nothing that can make the insanity of the piece any more apparent. Bless you, Chrome Donkey, for providing a shining light amidst the darkness of the world. I’m still not going to play an unlicensed NES bingo game, though.

Hello, all. It’s been a while! I won’t bore you with the grim reasons for my absence, but I’m back for the moment and I’ve brought you a festive gift. What could be better, at this most joyous time of year, than an obscure Konami arcade game? Well, lots of things, as it happens. We’ll get to that, though. It’s the 1987 (or possibly 1988) half-baked-em-up Labyrinth Runner, also known as Trick Trap!

Neither title fits the game very well. There aren’t enough tricks and traps for Trick Trap to make sense, and while there are a few mazes the word “labyrinth” implies a scope and grandeur that they most certainly do not possess. I’d have called it “Shootman Jog-Around” but then, as you can tell from the name of this website, I’ve never been good at titles.


You get a little information before the game kicks off, in the form of this image. Evil fiend, dark castle, kidnapped woman. My First Game Plot, got it. That villain looks a little Dracula-esque don’t you think? Maybe I’ve gotten lucky and Labyrinth Runner is actually an ultra-obscure part of the Castlevania mythos. If only there was some more information!


Thanks, Konami. That’s very helpful. So, it’s not Dracula, then? It’s just Devil. No word on whether that’s just a devil or the Judeo-Christian ruler of Hell himself, but we do know that he’s abducted Princes Papaya. Princess Papaya is the ruler of the Vegetaria kingdom, despite papaya being a fruit and not a vegetable. Maybe she’s a puppet ruler placed there after Vegetaria’s annexation by the neighbouring nation of Fruitopia.
The best thing about this image is the “CASTLE” label. Its sheer pointlessness got a laugh out of me, anyway.


The game begins, and we get our first proper look at the hero we’ll be controlling. That’s him on the left, with his trusty shield, his bright green cape and, perhaps surprisingly, his ruddy great gun. I was expecting, I dunno, magic powers – a crossbow at most – but no, he’s got a gun. As he’s mostly green and he hails from the kingdom of Vegetaria, I think I shall call him Cabbage.


So, Labyrinth Runner is a top-down shooter. You move Cabbage around with the joystick, and he can fire in eight directions (although not at the same time, sadly.) He can collect two other weapons as you play, and you can switch between them whenever you like. His shield? Completely useless. He dies in one hit, so the shield must be more of a ceremonial thing. Maybe later there’ll be a stage where he uses it as an impromptu snowboard in order to make a daring mountainside escape, but I highly doubt it.
As for what he’s shooting at, I’m not entirely sure. Some kind of sand-worm, maybe? They pop up from under the ground and spit slow-moving projectiles at you, that much is clear, but beyond that they’re an enigma. They do kinda look like they’re wrapped in tiny duvets, though.


The enemies only get stranger as you progress through the stage. At the bottom-right of the screenshot above, you can see an ambulatory Christmas tree advancing towards Cabbage, ready to slap him about using naught but its pugilistic baubles. Looks like it’s finally fighting back against the War on Christmas. Stranger still are the creatures on the bridge, which appear to be a cross between a crab and a turtle with a human skull perched on top. The Lesser-Spotted Skull-Bearing Crable, if you will. They feel strangely familiar, probably because I’ve fought so many similar creatures in Final Fantasy games over the years.


You’re also beset by a swarm of angry potato people, traitors against the kingdom of Vegetaria. After years of being called vegetables but not deemed “good” enough to count as one of your five a day, they have risen up in rebellion, hoping to carve a better place for themselves in society. It’s a shame none of Cabbage’s weapons are a flamethrower, really. Everyone loves a baked potato.


The three weapons you do get are the default pea-shooter style gun, a laser that fires more slowly but can penetrate multiple enemies and ricochets off walls, and bombs that travel in an arc and cause a large-ish explosion wherever they land – a side-effect of which is that the bombs are useless for hitting enemies right in front of you, because you throw them over the monsters. Your weapons can also be powered up by collecting, erm, power-ups, and as you do so they’ll gain more projectiles in a very helpful spread-shot style.
Here I’m using the laser against the game’s first boss: a pair of Dungeons and Dragons Beholders that have escape their tabletop roleplaying world and found themselves facing a courageous young knight with a laser gun. I would recommend using the laser, too: while your other weapons can also destroy enemy projectiles, the laser is much better at it. Plus, if you miss there’s a chance your laser will bounce off the wall behind the boss and hit them anyway. You can even pretend you meant to do it, like whenever I pot a ball while playing pool.


Stage one is over. The beholders weren’t much of a challenge. Things that are ninety percent eyeball tend to struggle against projectile weapons. Or non-projectile weapons. Or bright sunlight. Anyway, the between-stage map screen promises that many dangers lie ahead, which wasn’t really true of the first stage. The “runner” in Labyrinth Runner’s title is definitely the most accurate part: Cabbage moves at a fair clip and the monsters don’t seems that bothered about stopping him, so you can run past almost everything in the first stage. It’s a very short stage, too, and you can finish it in about thirty seconds if you don’t stop to say “what the hell is that, a walking potato?” like I did.
It was an okay start to the game. Weird enemies aside, there was little to excite the imagination, but the action was smooth and the music was good – not quite the top-tier Konami tunes of something like Haunted Castle, but a solid B. One touch I did like is that you can see the shadow of the castle on the floor while you’re fighting the first boss. Let’s see what stage two holds, shall we?


I was hoping that Labyrinth Runner might kick on from a relatively promising start and turn out to be fairly interesting, but that’s not how things panned out. The second stage is a short series of aggressively grey parapets, linked by bridges and patrolled by giant spiders and non-giant knights – so even the enemies are less interesting than in the first stage. Surely it can’t be that Konami splurged all their creative juices (oh god, what a horrible phrase to use) on the first stage, because while that was pleasant enough it was hardly brimming with exciting new ideas.


Then you reach the boss. This does not take long. The timer for the whole stage is two minutes and I still had well over a minute left when I got here, which goes to show just how short Labyrinth Runner’s stages are.
The boss is a wall. I somehow manages to be even more grey than the stage that preceded it, and that looked like the book of paint samples the Navy uses when it’s choosing a colour for its latest battleship. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of fighting a wall. I can think of a few memorable boss battles against walls. The first stage of Contra, for starters, and the Demon Wall from Final Fantasy VII. No, the problem with this wall is the execution. To damage it, you have to hit the gem in its forehead… except you can’t can’t reach that target with the normal shot or the laser. You have to use the bombs, and of course this is a Konami arcade game from the mid-eighties so you lose all your power-ups when you die. It’s the Gradius problem taken to an extreme, because in Gradius you’re reset to the default when you lose a life but if you’re good enough you can still survive and make progress. Here, you’re shit out of luck if you don’t have the bombs, and you have to spend most of the fight waiting for it to slowly spawn some regular enemies that you can shoot and pray they drop the bomb power-up. It’s a colossal pain in the arse, made more aggravating by the fact that boss takes about seven seconds to defeat if you do have the bombs.


Stage three is a maze. According to the map screen, anyway. I’m not sure you can call it a maze when it’s small enough that you could map it out on the back of a postage stamp. I was having trouble parsing where this is supposed to be taking place – it is a maze carved from stone that’s somehow hovering over a well-manicured bowling green? Possibly. It’s not grey, which is nice, but it’s still not much to look at, and Labyrinth Runner in general lacks the graphical flair you might usually associate with Konami’s arcade game. It’s all just a bit bit boring, frankly.
At least the enemies are a little more interesting here than in the last stage. Demonic whelks and the titular blob from A Boy and His Blob are a step up from the tired concept that is giant spiders (unless you’re playing an EDF game, in which case giant spiders are great). Unfortunately that ice cream is not an enemy, it’s an item you can collect for points. An enemy that’s nothing more than a man-sized cone of soft-serve would have been very appealing to me.


The exit seems to be randomly placed in one of several spots, which I suppose is at least mildly interesting, although the idea of someone wanting to play Labyrinth Runner more than once is a little hard to believe. Oh, and this stage has no boss, either. Konami wouldn’t want you getting too excited after such a thrilling maze, after all.


Oh look, another maze. I think this is actually part of the same stage, which is why there wasn’t a boss. It’s far more blue than the previous maze but no more interesting. “Shrieking, giant-winged bat-head” is a good look for an enemy that haunts an underground catacomb, but other than that it’s basically the same as the last maze.
The most notable thing about the mazes is that they’re so much easier than the rest of the game. The narrow corridors mean there are fewer directions the enemies can attack you from, and if you’ve picked up even one of the weapon power-ups your shots will spread out enough to fill the entire path ahead of you. It makes it feel like you’re walking down the pathways with a large broom simply sweeping the monsters aside as you survey the maze for the thirty seconds or so it takes to spot the exit.


This time there is a boss, and it’s a distant relation of Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I appreciate a horrible blobby tentacle monster that looks like someone drew a face on a particularly disgusting medical diagram as much as the next man, but I’m struggling to remember anything about this battle. I’ll hazard a guess and say that the boss fired some projectiles at me, but I avoided those projectiles and shot the boss with my laser gun. That must be what happened. If it had been different, I would have remembered it.


Next up is the seldom-enjoyable mine cart stage. Are there any good mine cart stages? The ones from Donkey Kong Country aren’t bad, I suppose. They’re very tense, certainly. Feel free to let me know your favourite mine cart stages, maybe I’ll remember one I enjoyed.
I doubt anyone will submit Labyrinth Runner’s mine cart stage as a particular favourite, because it’s pretty terrible. The actually rolling around part is fine, it's just like the regular stages except you’ve got no control over your movements while you’re fighting the monsters. The problem comes when you’re forced to make a decision about what track you want to ride. You can switch between them at junctions, but some of them are dead-ends that result in unavoidable death. If you’re on the wrong track, tough luck, you’ve just lost a life. Oh, and you only get five continues, so if you want to make it past this stage you have to basically memorise the layout of the tracks, or cheat. I did one of those things. I’m sure you can figure out which. If I wanted to spend my time doing lots of boring memorisation and still not coming out of it with much reward, I’d go back and re-do my physics A-Level.


Yes, let’s. That would be a nice change of pace.


The final stage is the clearly-labelled castle itself, the front gate guarded by another pair of bosses that can only be damaged by the bomb weapon. The bosses appear to be half man, half spark plug but somehow less cool than Spark Man. There’s a conga line of strange humanoid creatures that you can kill if you need to collect the bomb weapon – and after the frustrating tedium of the mine cart stage, you probably will – and they might even drop one of the lightning icons that gives you a screen-clearing smart bomb.


Here’s the castle’s… foyer? Lobby? Whatever, it’s this room, where weird soldiers that look like phone books with heads on top repeatedly spawn and chase you around the room. I killed quite a lot of them, using the ruined pillars to funnel them into the path of my projectiles, but nothing much was happening, so I killed a few more. “Maybe it’s some kind of puzzle,” I thought to myself. The geometry of the room and the symbols on the floor and walls have sort of a “videogame puzzle” look to them, don’t you think? But no, they didn’t seem to do anything, so I shot some more monsters. Then I realised I could walk through the doors at the top of the screen and just, like, leave. I’m not sure what it says about me that my first instinct was “this problem must be solved through mass slaughter.” That I’ve played too many videogames, probably.


Just beyond lies this room that only avoids being totally bland by having the Blockbusters board for a floor. It’s also home to the game’s best enemies: fat, turd-like clouds that wear sunglasses and attack by sucking on big cigars and blowing smoke at Cabbage. They’re Slimer from Ghostbusters, if he was less into food and more into emphysema, and I kinda love them.


There’s also a giant centipede to fight. You’ve got to shoot it in its glowing weak point – in this case it’s the arse, traditionally the most vulnerable area of all insects. Unfortunately for the centipede it can only attack by running into our hero, so the fight quickly devolves into Cabbage running in a circle, chasing the boss’ backside while the boss chases Cabbage, forming a perfect loop of extremely forgettable gameplay.


At long last, it’s the game’s final boss! I say “at long last”, it took me less than fifteen minutes to reach this point but it feels like so much longer. The boss is a very angry meatball, which makes sense. You’d expect meat to be the natural enemy of a place called Vegetaria. The boss has large smashing fists, although he doesn’t really use them, electing instead to throw what are either green pumpkins or large bell peppers at our hero. Actually, no. On closer inspection they appear to be unlit green candles, a shade of green that implies they’re scented like lime jelly.


Oh, it’s a robot meatball. Of course. Is this what Twinbee looks like underneath its external shell? They’ve got the same arms, after all.


After applying enough lasers to the boss’ exposed core it will explode, freeing Princess Papaya who was right there the whole time, apparently. She’s so pleased to see Cabbage that she bestows upon him a shower of human hearts, which she has developed a taste for during her time as a captive of the evil Meat Empire.


And that’s it. The game closes with a picture of Cabbage – who is apparently a prince, or possibly the late Prince himself – and Papaya, along with a text epilogue that states they’ve got to travel back to their kingdom and that “another long journey has begun.” For a moment my blood ran cold at the prospect of Labyrinth Runner having a second loop, but I’m happy to report that it doesn’t and it really is over.
Labyrinth Runner started out looking like it might be okay but gradually got worse and worse as it went on, so if nothing else it’s a good metaphor for 2016. There’s just no sparkle to it, no joie de vivre and certainly nothing like the level of quality Konami were capable of releasing at the time. It’s a competent if uninspired gameplay base, smothered by layers of boring scenery and poor design decision, the mine cart stage being the mouldy, fluff-encrusted cherry on top of the cake. It’s not truly awful, and I’d even say it’s more fun to play than Black Panther or Battlantis, but it’s only real use is as a cure for insomnia. Oh well, merry Christmas, I guess. At least the soundtrack was okay.

So, 2016 is nearly over, and the general consensus is that it’s been a garbage year from hell. That’s certainly my feeling on it. As well as all the horrible things that have happened in the world generally, on a personal level the last twelve months have consisted of unremitting grimness and misery, to the point that when recently asked if anything good had happened this year the best I could come up with was that Dark Souls 3 came out. And yet, I’ve got enough safety, security and internet access to be sat here whining about it, so maybe things aren’t so bad. I wrote about a bunch of videogames, at least, even if these year’s content was a little truncated. Some of those games were good, some of them were extremely bad, but mostly they were just kind of there– and now we’ll see which were which with the 2016 VGJunk review!


Having been granted the rights to the most famous videogame character of all time, the Software Toolworks promptly created Mario’s Early Years: Fun With Letters, a game that had little to do with Super Mario and even less to do with fun. However, even that didn’t feel like as much of a waste as RoboCop 3. Ocean had the chance to work with one of the most iconic action stars of the 1980s, a servant of truth and justice who spends of a lot of his time doing the very videogame-y thing of shooting bad guys with a massive gun. What we got was a leaden crawl through boring environments, some terrible platforming and one of the worst final “boss” encounters I’ve ever seen.


A category that always offers up a cavalcade of hilarious mistranslations and twisted perversions of grammar, and 2016 is no different even though it feels like I played fewer poorly-localised Japanese games this year.


For example, here’s the infamous “submarine gun” from Hidden Files: Echoes of JFK. A simple error from “submachine gun,” sure, but one that made me emit an ugly, seal-like bark of laughter when I saw it. I think it’s because it’s said by someone who is supposedly a competent FBI agent and not an overexcited five-year-old on a school trip to the Imperial War Museum.


Potentially the most platformy platformer ever – in terms of sheer number of platforms, at least – Evil Stone included this wonderful level description, even if the level itself wasn’t all that scandalous.


My absolute favourite of this year, however, is from the graphic adventure He-Man Super Adventure, where commanding He-Man to look at his own father results in this withering response. Prince Adam of Eternia is ice-cold.
A special mention goes to Halloween Trick or Treat 2, which resurrected that most gothic of phrases: “spooky dooky.”



Zaid, from Alumer and Taito’s arcade sword-em-up Gladiator, was a strong early contender. There’s no deep reasoning behind that choice, it’s just that the description the game gives him engenders a feeling of kinship in me, as I am also a big good-for-nothing fellow. I also played Mega Man 3 this year, a game which saw the introduction of Protoman to the series. I do like Protoman, and he adds a little mystery and intrigue to a game series which had already firmly rammed itself into a specific groove even after just three entries. However, on reflection there’s really only one choice for the position of “best character.”


In a year where I wrote about not one but two FinalFight games, this honour has to go to Mike Haggar, the Mayor of Justice himself. What is it about Haggar that gives him such an enduring appeal? Is it that the concept of a pro-wrestler turned mayor who beats up street gangs like you or I do the laundry is just so resonant, so powerful, that his appeal is timeless? Is it that we all yearn to ruled by politicians who won’t stand by while injustice goes unpunished? Is it the moustache? Who knows, but I do know that everyone loves Haggar. Sorry, Cody.


Speaking of Final Fight, that’s got a good soundtrack, and the first stage theme from Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is one of the all-time classic videogame tracks – it’s been my ringtone for, oh, five years or so now. Not many of the games I played this year had particularly memorable soundtracks, though, so the top honour goes to the one that I’ve been listening to for over twenty years: Mega Man 3.



Is this decision partly down to nostalgia? Yeah, probably. The Protoman theme featured above still manages to make me feel a bit emotional, probably because it reminds me of being a kid and finally finishing MM3, only to realise that meant there was no more Mega Man 3 for me to play. It’s a great soundtrack even when divorced from the the context of my childhood, though, and if you were going to listen to one soundtrack from this year’s VGJunk games then that’d be the one.


You can always rely on British home computer games to be weird as hell, hailing as they do from a time when anyone willing to sit down and learn how to code could create whatever goddamn game they liked. Thus, this year's weirdest game was definitely Nicotine Nightmare on the ZX Spectrum


A tiny man attempts to destroy all cigarettes for the good of the world’s health. He does this by extinguishing giant cigarettes with a watering can while the devil – presumably the patron saint of nicotine – tries to stop him. Then our hero halts all cigarette production by visiting one factory and flipping some levers. Yes, I’d definitely say that this is a weird game.



An arcade game from Konami about a jungle cat that fights robots is a description that certainly piqued my interest, but that piquing was brutally slapped down the moment I started playing Black Panther. It’s not just that the game’s ugly enough to be prosecuted for crimes against retinas, it’s not just that it gets grindingly difficult to play, it’s that it’s so boring. Did I mention it’s about a jungle cat that fights robots? And yet it’s still insufferably dull.



Of all the games I played this year that I hadn’t heard of before, Data East’s Nitro Ball was the one I had the most unexpected fun with. An inspired melding of top-down shooter and pinball, Nitro Ball offers up a frantic, relentless blast of arcade action that comes packed with great graphics and fun visual details, a good soundtrack and that wonderful feeling of arcade “bigness” that makes it a great choice for some uncomplicated arcade fun.


Just edging out Nitro Ball on the “pleasant surprise” scale is Ninja Gaiden Shadow. The idea of squeezing the tight, precise NES Ninja Gaiden games onto the Game Boy was one that caused me some trepidation, but Tecmo and Natsume did an excellent job: rather than simply stuffing the NES Ryu Hayabusa into a Game Boy game, they reworked the action to make it smaller, simpler but no less Ninja Gaiden-ish. The result is one of the best pure action games on the original Game Boy.



It’s probably this star-spangled toad from the “educational” Amiga title All About America. What could be more American than a frog in a waistcoat doing a tap-dance routine? Now that’s patriotism.


Whoo boy, I played some absolutely god-awful shite this year! Where to start? Oh yes, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, always a good place to go if you’re looking for games that make you regret humanity’s evolution of opposable thumbs. There was Casper, a collection of minigames so dull and dreary it would, appropriately enough, serve as a fitting afterlife for unrepentant sinners. There was Sesame Street Sports, a cynical, barely-there dry fart of a game that made a mockery of its own title by only including one (joyless, grim) sport. Moving up a generation there was the bootleg SNES version of Street Fighter EX, a game that gets some slack for being an unofficial pirate conversion but then loses all that slack by being a borderline-unplayable mess of unfathomable hitboxes and controls so bad you’d get similar results if you dunked your controller in a vat of boiling oil. And who could forget the PS1 nightmare VIP, a horrifying waxwork museum of dreadful CGI, an action game that removed all the action and replaced it with insultingly shallow QTEs?


Even worse than all those was this year’s VGJunk nadir – and possibly the nadir of all videogaming – the Game Boy Color (what a shock) thing Rugrats: Totally Angelica. It represents almost every single way a videogame can be bad, all crammed into a single package. It’s a compilation of utterly abysmal mini-”games,” some of which barely work. The graphics and sound are so bad they make you thankful that the Game Boy can’t emit smells, because if Totally Angelica was an odour it’d be soiled nappies being heated in a microwave. It’s got the cynical stink of a corporate cash-in all over it, combined with the morally unpleasant aspect of applying make-up to a small child. Angelica wears a sweater with swastikas on it. Totally Angelica is, in short, the absolute worst, and it has finally supplanted NSYNC: Get to the Show as the worst game I’ve ever played.


Fortunately, I also played some good games to balance out all this crap. Chief amongst them were a trio of Capcom classics. Final Fight set the template for the beat-em-up and did so with style: visceral combat, huge sprites and tons of character. Ghouls ‘n Ghosts might be rightly famous for its punishing difficulty, but its gameplay is so precise and its world so charming that it deserves its classic status. I came close to picking Mega Man 3 to win this category, too. It’s the pinnacle of the NES Mega Man games, with just enough complexity in the gameplay to keep you invested in a longer-than-you’d-expect game that’s always full of surprises (and robot cats that attack with robot fleas).


That said, I’m going with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Normally I’d discount it because I didn’t write a full article about it, but I didwrite two articles about specific parts of Symphony of the Night and I could write a dozen more, which just goes to show you how great the game is. Not only is it fun to play, this grand adventure of exploration and magical combat, but every moment of the game is endowed with the sense that everyone who worked on it put their heart and soul into its creation. From the core gameplay to the hundreds of tiny details, the expressive graphics and the phenomenal soundtrack, Symphony of the Night is one of those game I will never tire of telling people to go and play.



Yes, I played Halloween Trick or Treat 2 this year and yes, I really enjoyed it. Do any of the other games I wrote about this year include a location marked as “Mall and Dracula’s Castle”? No, I didn’t think so.


As for the article I most enjoyed writing this year, there are quite a few contenders. The aforementioned Halloween Trick or Treat 2 was a good time, and obviously I wouldn’t keep writing about Symphony of the Night if doing so didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy deep inside. Aside from those, the article about why Silent Hill 4 is actually a comedy was a lot of fun to put together, even if it did mean I had to play through the second half of Silent Hill 4 again. It definitely seemed to resonate with a lot of people, anyway.


But it’s International Superstar Soccer Pro that gave me the most pleasure to ramble on about, combining as it does my twin loves of videogames and football, plus a dollop of nostalgia. The remarkable story of Danish courage, a commentator who could do with a lie down in dark, quiet room and the emergence of a hero called Pingel. It had a bit of everything, really.

Well, that’s it for 2016. I will leave you with the reminder that videogames are, on the whole, pretty great. I enjoy them, anyway, even when they're Z-grade licensed-property misery engines. Maybe my new year’s resolution should be to get out more. Oh well, I wonder what 2017 will bring? More of the same, I shouldn't wonder.

Oh hey, it’s 2017. For the first article of the year, I’m going for a real “start as you mean to go on” vibe with a game that’s not only a British home computer game, but also a licensed game so terrible you won’t believe that the developers had the cheek to charge money for it instead of doing the decent thing and personally smashing every copy with a lump hammer. Yes, barely a week since I proclaimed Rugrats: Totally Angelica to be the worst game I’ve ever played, here comes something that’s more than worthy of challenging for that particular title. It’s the Commodore 64 version of Ocean Software’s 1986 princes-of-the-universe-em-up Highlander!

That’s right, it’s a game based on the classic? Cult classic? Let’s go with cult classic action-fantasy film from the same year. Highlander seems to have maintained a fairly prominent place in the pop-cultural memory, anyway, and I’m sure most people know it’s about Connor MacLeod, a member of a group of immortal people who can only be killed by decapitation. The immortals fight each other in order to a) not get decapitated and b) claim a vague and mysterious prize called, imaginatively, The Prize. If nothing else, Highlander is famous for its tagline of “there can be only one,” meaning that the last immortal left with their head attached gets the prize. Despite what this title screen may suggest, claiming The Prize does not turn the recipient into a stone statue with the expression of someone who’s just reached the bathroom after a very long car ride.


There aren’t many options offered to you when you start a game of Highlander. You can play a two-player game against a friend, but friendship is a precious gift and you shouldn’t put it at risk by subjecting another human to this. What else have we got? Well, a few fairly well-rendered pictures of swords. That’s always nice. Everyone loves a good pixel sword. Where would videogames be without swords, eh? Yes, you’re right, I absolutely am stalling. Okay, fine, here’s Highlander.


Yes, it is a one-on-one swordfighting game, because there are few other directions a Highlander game could take. Maybe a business management game where you try to create as many bizarre and forgettable sequels, animated spin-offs and reboots as possible from a series that was wrapped up quite neatly at the end of the first movie. That could be interesting.
You play as Connor MacLeod, naturally. That’s him on the left, with the flowing locks and large brown socks. Your opponent is none other than Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, the ancient Egyptian / latterly Spanish swordsman famously played by the resolutely Scottish Sean Connery. If you’re ever in need of a quick mood-lifter, try saying “My name’sh Ramiresh” to yourself in the most over-the-top Connery impersonation you can. It always cheers me up.


Ramirez wastes no time trying to give MacLeod the ultimate haircut, which is weird because he’s MacLeod’s friend and mentor. You could argue that this is all supposed to be training, but that doesn’t explain why Ramirez is happy to attack relentlessly and then lop your head off. The only real explanation is that no-one at Ocean gave a shit about what they were doing when making Highlander, an explanation amply supported by almost every other facet of the game.


In an effort to defend myself, I checked out the controls and they’re laid out exactly as I expected them to be – that is, they’re supposedly the same as every other one-on-one fighting game for the C64. Moving the joystick moves your character, while moving the stick while holding the fire button produces a variety of attacks at different heights or puts you in a blocking position. So, you can swing your sword that the opponents head, body or most importantly neck, and you can block at various different heights. You can even kneel down. In a game about avoiding decapitation, this seems like the second dumbest move you can make after drawing a dotted line around your neck, but there you go.
However, there’s a problem. Quite a major problem, in fact. None of this works. Oh, sure, your character moves around the screen and sometimes swings their sword, but it has nothing to do with your input. Getting the same move to come out twice in a row when you want it to is about as likely as finding Elvis’ ghost clogging up your downstairs toilet. MacLeod frequently moves according to his own whims, which especially noticeable when he keeps walking backwards without any prompting.


On top of that, the player receives almost no feedback about what’s going on. A constant “ting, ting, ting” sound effect plays that I presume is meant to represent the mighty blows of these swordsmen clashing together but sounds more like a woodpecker trapped inside a paint can, and it has nothing to do with when the swords actually clash. They don’t clash, really. They just pass through everything, air, sword, and body part alike, without any kind of visual feedback, resulting in the juddering, amorphous mess you can see in the GIF above. You do have a health bar, of sorts: it’s the pixel-thick line at the bottom. Sometimes it goes down when a sword comes near you. Mind you, sometimes it goes down when a sword doesn’t come near you, so it’s hardly a reliable indicator of impending decapitation. Your health, or power, or whatever it’s supposed to represent, will regenerate if you stand still for a while, but this is nigh-impossible to see in action because the CPU characters attack with such relentless aggression that you’d think Connor MacLeod had been round their house, defacated in a pot-plant and wiped his arse with their dog.


I was completely unable to defeat Ramirez, but that doesn’t matter because you can load any of Highlander’s battles and there’s no reward for victory anyway. There’s no attempt at a storyline or anything in this one, you simply load up the character you want to fight and then keep fighting them. Even if you do manage to win a fight, all that happens is that you win counter moves up by one and you get to do it again.


This second bout is against Fasil, a low-tier immortal in a business suit and shades. You’d be forgiven for assuming Ocean forgot to draw eyes on his sprite but no, he’s supposed to be wearing sunglasses. They got that detail right, but then managed to misspell Fasil’s name as “Fazir,” because of course they did.
Fasil and MacLeod fight right at the beginning of the movie, in order to introduce the audience to the concept of blokes swordfighting in dingy locations. With that in mind, you’d think Fasil would be the first opponent in the game, a notion only strengthened by Fasil being easier to defeat than Ramirez. I still didn’t have any idea what was going to happen when I moved the joystick, but as long as I was moving the joystick MacLeod managed to jerk across the screen and wave his arms around often enough for Fasil to suffer a spontaneous decapitation in roughly fifty percent of our battles. You can see Fasil’s mistake in the screenshot above: rather than going for the killing blow, he’s resorted to stabbing MacLeod right in the balls, adding further evidence to my theory than all these fights have nothing to do with claiming the Prize and are rooted in everyone having a deep-seated loathing of Connor.


Finally, you can do battle against the Kurgan himself. Did Ocean misspell Kurgan’s name, too? You bet your ass they did. It’s disappointing but completely expected that no effort was made to recreate Clancy Brown’s, erm, unique face for this game, and he’s been drawn with the suggestion of a beard, which makes him look more like a middle-aged dad than a feared killer. A middle-aged dad with ridiculously large feet, at that.
You may also notice that Connor’s head has fallen off. Get used to seeing that if you’re dumb enough try fighting against Kurgan, because he’s ridiculously overpowered in comparison to the other two fighters. I don’t think I ever landed a hit on him. The game wouldn’t tell me even if I did, but I never saw his health bar move, either. Kurgan wins simply by walking forwards and bashing you a couple of times, because his attacks do way more damage than anyone else’s. It’d be nice if you could defend yourself, but as I’ve mentioned the combat in this game simply does not work. Sure, there are blocking moves in the game, but they could be replaced with animations of Connor singing “Touch My Bum” for all the use they are. Let’s say Kurgan’s about to swing his sword, so you think “I know, I’ll block his attack.” The first problem is that you’ve got no way of knowing whether your joystick input is going to correspond to the move you want. Even if by some miracle it does, Connor moves so slowly that you have no chance of reacting in time anyway. Kurgan swings, Connor does something, maybe, and then Connor’s head falls off.


I honestly cannot overstate how utterly devoid of fun Highlander is. Purely in terms of gameplay, this probably is the worst game I’ve ever played. Other games have hideous aesthetics or offensive content or an even thicker coating of money-grubbing cynicism, but when it comes to the basic act of playing the game Highlander is pure, concentrated misery. You’re barely even playing it at all, and that’s what makes it so awful: the whole point of computer and videogames is that the player is in control. That’s what separates them from other media. When that’s taken away, what do you have left? Absolutely bugger all, that’s what.
With all that said, there is one solitary reason to load up Highlander, and that’s the music. There’s only one track, but that track is Martin Galway’s SID interpretation of Queen’s “A Kind of Magic” and it’s definitely worth a listen.


It’s one moment of quality in what is otherwise an abject disaster, and best of all it’s the title theme, so you don’t even have to play the game to hear it. In this way, even Highlander for the Commodore 64 can be enjoyed. And here I always thought I was a pessimist, but that’s one hell of a “glass half-full” statement.

Greetings, True Believers, and welcome to another article all about the fine art of punching crowds of interchangeable, palette-swapped goons! Yes, it’s time for another side-scrolling beat-em-up here at VGJunk, but this time the heroes aren’t ex-wrestlers turned politicians or ex-cops turned vigilantes, they’re household names in the field of comic book entertainment. Well, one of them is, anyway. I don’t think Venom’s that popular. Anyway, here is it: the SNES version of Software Creation’s 1994 action-is-his-reward-em-up Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage!

Logos present: Logos and Logos. Logos are a registered trademark of LogoCorp.


Carnage gets to surf in on his logo, because he’s just the kind of fresh, edgy character the nineties were crying out for. It’s The Sensational Spider-Man Symbiote Super Show! I’m sure you all know who Spider-Man is, but plenty of people wouldn’t recognise the other two. Well, Venom’s the large blue-black chap on the right. He’s bonded with an alien parasite that gives him very Spider-Man-like abilities. He’s also (mostly) evil, and spends a lot of time fighting Spider-Man. The red fellow at the top is Carnage. He’s also bonded with an alien parasite that gives him abilities, although his are less Spider-Man-like and more things like morphing his arms into giant axes. Carnage is very evil. They all fight each other a lot, which is sad because they have so much in common. Comics!


Specifically, Maximum Carnage is based on the 1993 Marvel Comics story arc of the same name. It tells the tale of Carnage’s human host, the wonderfully named Cletus Kasady, breaking out of prison and regaining his Carnage powers. He recruits some other villains into a bizarre “family” of sorts, and Spider-Man and Venom reluctantly team up to take Carnage down. The game’s story follows the comics pretty closely with some minor changes, to the extent that the cutscenes are digitised version of the comic’s panels. It’s an effect that works really well, actually. Putting comic panels in a comic book game seems like a no-brainer, and they’re very well rendered in extremely colourful pixel form.
Here, Carnage offers some sound advice about trust as he breaks out of prison, as well as stealing Arnie’s “you know when I said I’d kill you last?” bit from Commando.  He also declares himself to be “the ultimate insanity,” which is a bit rich when the Marvel universe also includes a villain called Stilt-Man whose power is stilts.


On his way out of prison, Carnage meets the villainess Shriek and a bestial, multi-armed clone of Spider-Man called Doppleganger. Doppelganger is not to be confused with Man-Spider, a bestial, multi-armed mutation of the original Spider-Man. Again, comics! They’re pretty great.


As Spidey swings across the New York skyline, he comes close to having a realisation about his status as an eternal cash-cow for Marvel and now Disney. Spider-Man will never be allowed to rest. He’ll have his powers shuffled around, he’ll join different superhero teams and participate in various universe-altering mega-events, but Spider-Man will almost certainly still be appearing in comics and cartoons and movies long after you and I are dead. You know what? I’m happy with that. I like Spider-Man, and I’m looking forward to playing Maximum Carnage.


As I say, Maximum Carnage is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, and not the first one to star Spider-Man. There’s also his eponymous arcade game by Sega, which is worth checking out. But this is Maximum Carnage, and as he takes on the goons that litter the streets of New York, Spidey’s basic attacks conform to the usual template of the genre. Tapping attack produces a multi-hit combo that knocks down your opponent at the end. You can do a jumping kick, and pressing attack and jump produces a spinning desperation move that costs Spidey a bit of health. You know, the usual. If you’ve played any side-scrolling beat-em-up, you’ll be able to pick up Maximum Carnage’s gameplay immediately.
There’s even an explanation as to why all these people are trying to kill our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man: in the comic, at least, Shriek uses her powers to turn ordinary people into bloodthirsty killers. Maybe that’s why the developers chose to adapt Maximum Carnage rather than another part of the comics, because it gives Spider-Man a large number of generic, unimportant peons to beat up in between fighting super-villains.


Extra, extra! Read all about it! Spider-Man smashes teen’s skull with bundle of newspapers!
There are no weapons, as such – Spidey’s not one for clobbering people with a steel pipe – and you recover lost health via generic heart icons rather than turkeys hidden under bins, but there are some objects you can pick up and throw littering the stages.


After pummelling a few blokes in trenchcoats and kids in unflattering shorts, Spider-Man faces off with the game’s first boss: a pair of agile fitness fanatics called Lizzie and Dana. When I played Maximum Carnage as a kid (and I did, although I never got very far) for some reason I always saw this pair as wearing rollerblades and safety helmets. I don’t know why I saw it that way when it’s clearly not the case. Maybe I just wanted to see Spider-Man fighting enemies with some gimmick to them. There’s nothing heroic about beating up two joggers, even if they are wearing berets and could therefore be mistaken for a dangerous paramilitary exercise group. Oh, and they can attack Spidey by whipping him with their hair. So much for having the proportional strength of a spider. Actually, yeah, what’s going on there? I should be knocking these random citizens out with a single punch. Where are all my spider-powers?!


Oh, there they are. That’s right, you didn’t think this Spider-Man game would be lacking in web-slinging, did you? There are quite a lot of moves to chose from, too. The X button handles web-swinging, which is useful for avoiding enemy attacks and re-positioning Spidey -  a vital skill, because even by the standards of the genre the enemies in Maximum Carnage like to surround you on all sides. The A button is where the more combat-focussed abilities lie. Holding A produces a web shield that can block most attacks, which would be much more useful if it didn’t take a few seconds to appear, seconds in which you’ve almost certainly been whacked by whatever you were trying to avoid. You can also tap the button to fire a web pellet that momentarily traps any enemy it hits, or hold left or right and press A to fire a strand, grab a bad guy and drag them towards you so they can feel the bright red fists of justice. The grab is very handy, and if there’s an enemy on either side out you you’ll even fire two strands and pull your opponents head-first into each other like a spandex-wearing Three Stooges bit.
The web is integrated rather well, all told, and it serves two important functions. One is that it makes you feel like you’re playing as Spider-Man himself and not just some dork in a cheap Halloween costume, and the other is that it adds some variety to the combat. As much as I love beat-em-ups, the usual punch-grab-jumping-kick system can get a little stale, and it’s not surprising that my favourites in the genre, like Night Slashers and Alien vs. Predator, are the ones that add moves to expand on this basic formula. I’m not saying Maximum Carnage is going to be as good as those games, but it’s moving in the right direction.


Once you’ve cleared the first area, the gameplay takes a turn for the insipid as you make Spidey crawl his way up the side of a building while someone pours wet noodles on him from above. It’s not awful, I guess. You have to swing from building to building, and the pleasure of swinging from a thread you find in almost every Spider-Man game is still intact… but the crawling is slow and the projectiles have the annoying habit of knocking you back down a level. I know you have to have some degree of wall-crawling in a Spider-Man game, but this is definitely less interesting and less fun than the fighting.


Once you reach the rooftop, you’re thrown into a fight with Shriek and Doppelganger. I hope you enjoy this fight, because you’re going to be doing it a lot over the course of Maximum Carnage.
They key to victory, appropriately enough for a Spider-Man game, is agility. Shriek can fire large energy projectiles and Doppelganger tends to go for the combat hug if you get too close, so staying on the move and trying to get behind them is the best way to go.


Where was Carnage while all this was happening? Why, he was trying to get J. Jonah Jameson into a romantic mood by posing seductively on his desk. Sorry, did I say “seductively”? I meant “uncomfortably.” It’s a good job the symbiote gives Carnage super-strength, because otherwise it’d be impossible to maintain that “resting on your tiptoes and elbows with your knees behind your ears” pose for more than a few seconds and who knows how long Carnage has been waiting there for Jameson to show up? JJJ’s a busy man, Carnage could have been there for hours.


After that erotically-charged interlude, it’s back to the streets and back to the fighting. "Spider-Man wades through a legion of identikit goons" unsurprisingly makes up the bulk of the gameplay, so it’s a good job that’s it’s definitely an above-average brawler experience. As mentioned, Spidey’s superpowers help him to stand out from the crowd, the controls mostly work well and the emphasis on moving around fits the character. My biggest problem with the gameplay is that the goons take too long to defeat, with health bars that feel like they’re been chipped away at rather than being smashed with Spidey’s super-strength. I know they’re set up this way to provide more challenge and  (presumably) to limit the number of sprites on-screen at any given time, but it has the effect of making Spider-Man feel like a weakling, which is not what you want in your superhero game. He should be able to take out these rank-and-file timewasters with a couple of punches, and the action (and the feeling of being Spider-Man) would be greatly enhanced if there were more enemies with smaller health bars and a wider diversity of attack patterns.


I did figure out Spider-Man’s best move at this point, however. If you pick an enemy up, you can tap A and B to spin them around on your finger like a basketball before chucking them onto the concrete. Is it practical? No, it absolutely is not. It adds little extra damage and gives other enemies a free shot while Spidey’s auditioning for the Harlem Globetrotters. Did I use it a lot? Yes. Well, at the start of the game I did. By the end I was too tired of being bogged down by goons that I stopped using it.


After being rescued from what felt like very mild peril by the superhero duo Cloak and Dagger, Spider-Man finds himself once more doing battle with Shriek and Doppelganger. Most beat-em-ups save this kind of lazy recycling until the latter half of the game, when the palette-swaps and boss rushes come out to play, but Maximum Carnage gets straight to it. I’d understand if this was supposed to be building rivalry, locking you in battle with an inescapable foe who becomes your nemesis, but for that to be the case the fights should change, the stakes raising, instead of being the exact same fight every bloody time.


Venom finds out that Carnage is back, and he’s not pleased about it. Then again, Venom is rarely pleased about anything, unless he’s beating up Spider-Man. It’s a strange dynamic, because from what I remember Carnage is sort of Venom’s son, in that he was formed from an offshoot of Venom’s symbiote. That means it’s time for some parental discipline, and from this point on Maximum Carnage lets you choose between playing as Spider-Man or Venom at certain points. Not only do you get two characters to pick from, but each character has some unique stages.


For instance, if you select Spider-Man you’re placed in a web-swinging chase against the villainous Demogoblin, he of the flapping cape and the fiery hoverboard that is way cooler than Green Goblin’s hoverboard. What is it about Spider-Man and goblins, anyway? He fights the Green Goblin, he fights the Grey Goblin, he fights the Hobgoblin, he fights Demogoblin. Are goblins the natural predators of spiders in the wild or something? Did whatever costumier that supplies all the supervillain in New York accidentally add a digit when ordering goblin costumes? Is it because “goblin” is such a damn fun word to say out loud?


Picking Venom, on the other hand, sees you fighting your way through the streets of San Francisco. As all the action is happening on New York and San Francisco is on the west coast, one must assume that Venom is walking across the entire North American continent, beating up anyone who crosses his path.


In terms of his moveset, Venom is almost identical to Spider-Man. He can web-swing and web-grab and all that, although he uses the symbiote rather than firing webbing. His regular moves look different, but it’s purely a cosmetic change. He’s a little slower and a touch more powerful than Spider-Man, but that’s not why you should play as Venom. No, you should play as Venom because his life-sapping special move is a spinning clothesline, and what could be a more appropriate move for a side-scrolling beat-em-up than that? No word on whether Venom is an ex-pro wrestler, but now that he’s a character in an arcade-style brawler there about a fifty percent chance that yes, he used to be a pro wrestler.


At the end of this stage, Venom was accosted by two balding middle-aged men who tried to kill him by using their umbrellas like fencing swords. I sincerely hope this pair appeared in the original comic, having fallen under Shriek's evil influence. Otherwise, it means that the developers needed a boss for this stage but rather than using one of Spider-Man’s hundreds of foes they went with a deranged bank manager and his almost-identical bank manager friend.


More fighting ensues in a place called The Deep. This threw me off a little, because the only place called The Deep that I’m familiar with is the large aquarium in Hull. It’s not an aquarium, though. I think it’s supposed to be a nightclub. Yes, I wanted to see Venom fight a manta ray too, but we don’t always get what we want.


Now that’s a well-staged screenshot, although it would be better if Doppelganger wasn’t lurking around in the background. It does show that when all the pieces fall into place, Maximum Carnage does a really good job of capturing the look of a comic book. Like, that could be a panel in an issue of Spider-Man, if Doppelganger wasn’t there staring intently at Venom’s leg.
So yeah, I’m fighting Doppelganger again, only this time he’s been joined by Demogoblin. That’s how most of the boss fights in Maximum Carnage work: you’re fighting the same bosses over and over again, with the occasional new villain being added to the mix as you encounter them until you’re punching Doppelganger’s lights in for the umpteenth time only for Demogoblin to jump in as soon as you finish him off, again. It is not a particularly enjoyable set-up. The villains don’t learn new moves or try new techniques as the game progresses, so it’s just boring and repetitive. One proper, more fleshed out fight against each villain would have gone a long way towards making Maximum Carnage a better game.


Having remembered that Carnage’s symbiote is vulnerable to sonic attacks, Spider-Man and Venom realise that getting hold of a sonic gun would probably be a good idea. Their back-up plan is to house Carnage in my back bedroom, because the next-door neighbours have got the builders in and the constant, excruciating squealing of power drills could bring the most powerful villain to their knees, aural weakness or not. Hopefully it won’t come to that, because they know where a sonic gun can be found: in the Baxter Building, home of the Fantastic Four. Sadly the Fantastic Four aren’t home right now, so Spidey and Venom break in.


This activates the Baxter Building’s security system, which is mostly composed of deadly flying Christmas baubles. It’s like a festive version of Phantasm in here! This course of action raises some questions, most pertinently “why didn’t Spider-Man get in touch with the Fantastic Four?” They’re buddies, are you telling me Reed Richards hasn’t invented some kind of communication device that we could have called before resorting to burglary? The other question is “where are the Fantastic Four?” My guess would be that they’re in Hollywood, begging Fox Studios to stop making movies about them.


Venom seems remarkably calm about his mortal nemesis Spider-Man pointing a sonic gun at him, both of them knowing that Venom is just as vulnerable to sonic attack as Carnage is. Maybe they’ve finally managed to establish a little trust. Wouldn’t that be nice?


Another boss fight and another villain enters the fray. This time it’s Carrion, who isn’t a goblin despite looking more like a goblin than all the other Goblin characters. His power is that he can decay organic matter with his touch, which manifests in the game as Carrion flying around, trying to grab your hero’s head like a new-age type who’s just learned about Indian head massage. Carrion can be a real pain in the arse to deal with – not only is he flying, meaning you can’t get him with a proper combo and have to rely on jumping kicks, but he can also teleport out of the way of your attacks.  It’s a combination of abilities that lead to me shouting a hearty “oh good, it’s this prick again,” every time he showed up. The only consistent way I found to damage Carrion is to jump straight up and kick. He’ll teleport away from it, but if you jump straight up and kick immediately afterwards his vanishing act hasn’t had time to recharge or what-have-you and you can land a single blow, scraping a sliver from his health bar. It’s about as exciting as it sounds.


I could stand here ineffectually jump-kicking at Carrion like a chump, but I’ve got a better idea: I’ll call for some help. Most stages have tokens tucked away that you can collect, and when you use a token the superhero they depict appears on screen to help you out. In this case I’ve summoned Firestar, a mutant with the power to control microwave energy but not the power to operate a comb. She torches everything in her path, which is very useful, and most of your other super-friends do a similar thing. There are plenty of them, too, from Black Cat to Morbius the Living Vampire to Captain America himself. They even perform a different attack depending on whether it was Spider-Man or Venom that summoned them, and I appreciate the amount of effort that went into adding them all in. I think my favourite is Iron Fist, because when Spider-Man calls him in he gives you all your health back. Maximum Carnage gets pretty darned tough towards the end, so having what’s essentially a kung-fu medikit on hand is extremely useful.


Speaking of Captain America, he briefly pops into the story in order to save Spider-Man. Okay, not “save.” He pops in to pick Spider-Man out of the dirt after Venom’s given him a kicking, that’s a more accurate description for what’s happening here.


Close inspection of Captain America’s face reveals that he’s one hundred percent done with this symbiote bullshit and he’d rather be absolutely anywhere else.


Where to next? Oh right, Spider-Man goes to a police station and beats up a load of policemen for no real reason that I could see. I’m sure the comics explain why Spidey’s decided to recreate the police station scene from Terminator, but for now I’ll assume that these cops are all under Shriek’s evil influence. Either way, if I was Spider-Man I’d do my best to make sure this little escapade doesn’t become public. He doesn’t want to be giving J. Jonah Jameson any more ammunition, that’s for sure.


After a few more scenes of regulation goon-punching, enlivened only by some of said goons now having access to easily-avoidable firearms, it’s back to the grind of Maximum Carnage’s one never-ending boss fight. The gang's all here now, so you have to fight Shriek and Doppelganger, then Carrion and Demogoblin. Hey, Captain America, get in here and help me!


That’s the combat stance you’re going with, is it, Steve? The Michael Jackson crotch-grab? Well, a hearty chamone to you, my star-spangled friend. You’ve beaten Demogoblin into a coma, and that’s the greatest gift I could ask for. Apart from liberty and freedom, obviously.


Then Carnage shows up to throw his metaphorical oar in. The Ultimate Insanity himself fights like a combination of Dhalsim from Street Fighter and an explosion in a cutlery factory: all extending limbs and fleshy bits that become pointy bits. The best tactic seems to be to stay behind Carnage wherever possible and only attack him when he’s recovering from turning his appendages into fishslices or whatever. In this way, you can gradually chip away at Carnage until he’s defeated and Maximum Carnage is over.


Except it clearly isn’t over. Sure, Spider-Man and Venom stand around having a tête-à-tête about who should have had the honour of sending Carnage to the big insane asylum in the sky, but the ending text read “The End...” and that ellipsis means there’s definitely more to come. I don’t care that the credits have started rolling – and they genuinely do, over this shot of our heroes arguing in a park – that last fight was way too easy.


There we go. Nice attempt at a fake-out – the credits were a good touch – but I saw this one coming. I didn’t predict that Carnage would slowly rise out of the lake in the background, mind you. That was definitely unexpected, and only slightly ridiculous to look at.


At first, the prospect of fighting Carnage again wasn’t a particularly worrying one. I’d already clobbered he a few times by now, so why should this be any different? I’ll simply slap him around a little, drain his health bar and be back to wisecracking and selling pictures of myself to the newspaper in no time. Sadly, this was not to be. Carnage, having realised that he’s now the Final Boss, has considerably stepped up his game and has consequently become a right pain in the ballbag to fight against. For starters, he’s got about five times as much health. That wouldn’t make the fight harder, though, just longer and more tedious. No, the real problem is his new moveset. He attacks faster and harder, and he spends roughly eighty percent of his time doing the move where he turns his arms into giant axes and runs forward windmilling them around. As you can see above, he occupies two-thirds of the goddamn screen when he does this. You’ll take loads of damage if you go near him while he’s spinning his arms, and it seems to last for ages, hitting you even when his animation implies he’s stopped doing it. Patience and well-timed jumping kicks saw me through in the end, though, so now I really have finished Maximum Carnage.


Oh, wait, never mind. We’re still doing this. Are we? Really? All right, fine, we’ve got to be near the end now. The location has changed and Carnage has all his health back, but apart from that it’s the exact same fight, and it’s not any more entertaining on a second playthrough.
The interesting thing about these last two fights is that you can switch between Spider-Man and Venom whenever you want, and they’ve each got their own health bars and supply of lives. They also get a brief moment of invincibility when they’re tagged in, and abusing this invincibility is the only way I managed to beat Carnage for a second time. It was slow, it was boring and it was very much not in the spirit of the superhero comics that spawned it, but it was definitely preferable to being killed over and over again.


As Spider-Man mixes up his famous comic-book villains, yes: Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage really is over, for realsies. It got to be a bit of a slog towards the end, but overall it’s actually rather enjoyable. In patches, anyway. It’s one of those games that’s a bit like looking at any given website’s “Top 100 X Ever” list, where some parts makes sense and others leave you baffled by their inclusion. The core combat is fine. Better than fine, even, with Spider-Man having an expansive array of moves and an appropriately nimble fighting style. It’d be better if it was easier to block, maybe by moving the button to scroll through your superhero helpers from L to Select and thus freeing up L to be a dedicated block button, but apart from that it’s fast-paced and mostly satisfying… but then the boss battles drag everything down by either being the same villains over and over (just as Spider-Man was bemoaning in the intro), or being small groups of uninspiring minions.


Aesthetically it’s a mixed bag, too. The cutscenes’ reworked comic art looks great a lot of the time, and the animations and particularly the playable characters’ sprites are really nice, but then they’re let down by some extremely dull designs on the generic enemies and the odd wonky-looking super-friend, like Captain America adjusting the lil’ Captain while he throws his shield.  The same is true of the audio: most sound effects are fine but a couple seem out-of-place, and the music (composed by self-proclaimed “Worst Band Ever” Green Jelly) is technically not bad, but for some reason I never really took to it. An issue of personal taste, no doubt, and I’m sure there are people out there who really like Maximum Carnage’s soundtrack. It’s a good showcase of the kind of electric guitar sounds the SNES could replicate, that’s for sure. It’s also interesting to see that some famous names from the home computer scene were involved, notably the Pickford brothers and Alien Breed composer Allister Brimble.
Overall, I’m coming down in favour of Maximum Carnage. It’s not perfect, but the good bits are good enough that they outweigh the bad. Am I biased because I like Spider-Man so much? Possibly, but we can all appreciate the pleasure of punching a villain and seeing cartoon onomatopoeia pop out.

When darkness covers the land and the ones he cares about are placed in peril, there’s only one grease-painted, burger-slinging mascot mighty enough to fight for justice. His name is Ronald McDonald, and he’s here to save the day in Data East’s 1987 Famicom-only super-size-em-up Donald Land!


Writing about something called “Donald Land” at this moment in history serves as a grim reminder about the current state of world politics, but we can forget all about that with this, a game all about McDonald’s and the wide variety of colourful characters the company has created over the years in order to sell burgers to kids. You might be wondering why a game about McDonald’s isn’t called McDonald Land: that’s because in Japan, Ronald McDonald is called Donald McDonald. Apparently the reason for this is the lack of distinction between L and R in Japanese, although the fact that the first person to teach English to the Japanese was called Ranald MacDonald might have something to do with it.


If you leave the game sitting at the title screen for a while, eventually you’re treated to a scene where the McDonaldland family are introduced. All your favourites are here – Ronald, of course, Grimace, the Hamburglar, etcetera. However, Officer Big Mac has been renamed “Big Mac Police,” so perhaps crime was getting out of hand in McDonaldland and they’ve had to recruit an entire burger-bonced police force. Their main duties involve beating up environmental protesters.


You also get to see the villain of the piece, who has abducted all the denizens of McDonaldland. Yes, it’s a clown-on-clown grudge match. Whoever wins, we lose.


Getting straight into it, and Donald Land is a platformer, because of course it is. That’s just what you did when you were making videogames based on basically characterless marketing mascots back then. Ronald runs and jumps – here he’s prancing over a gangster who was trapped under a safe he was trying to crack – and generally attempts to make it through each of the stages without dying. There’s not much else you can say about the platforming aspects of Donald Land, really. It all works well enough. There’s a slight delay between pressing jump and actually jumping that might throw you off until you’ve played for a while and gotten used to it, and Ronald can feel a little slippery when landing from a jump. If fact, I’d estimate about ninety percent of the deaths I suffered in Donald Land were because I slid off off a ledge that I thought gravity and friction would tether me to. All in all, it’s not as good as the very best of the genre, your Mario Bros. and such, but it’s well above average for a licensed Famicom platformer.


As well as the leaping and prancing and falling to his death, Ronald can also attack the monsters… by throwing bombs at them. That’s a bomb in the screenshot above, the red thing on top of the pile of boxes. No, not the red thing on the spring, the red thing next to the red thing on the spring. Yeah, the apple. Except it’s not an apple, because it explodes. Now, one look at me will tell you I’m not the kind of person to spend much time around fruit, but even I know that apples aren’t explosive, so Ronald must have painted all his bombs to look like apples. A clown with access to high explosives is a worrying thought, but on the plus side being incinerated in a fiery blast is a far quicker and more merciful death than you’d usually get from a clown.


It doesn’t take long to reach the first boss, which is a goggle-eyed woodpecker that attacks by hammering the tree until things fall out of it. What are those things? I haven’t got a clue. I thought they were eggs at first, but what kind of madman stores eggs in a tree? Apart from, erm, birds, I guess. Also they have eyes. Eggs do not generally have eyes. They have been carefully bred and cultivated over many generations not to have eyes, so you don’t feel bad about cracking them open against the side of a bowl. Sadly, I think “things” is the best description we’re going to get.
The way to defeat the woodpecker is to throw bombs at it, of course, but things aren’t quite that simple and Ronald’s explosives take a bit of getting used to. He throws them in an arc, as you might expect, but the shape of the arc is influenced by whether you’re moving and what direction you’re pressing on the pad. Normally they’ll travel in a predictable arc, but it you’re walking or running they’ll fly further, and you can also drop them at your feet. Then bombs are sticky, too, and if you manage to chuck one directly into a bad guy it’ll stay attached to them until it explodes. Combine this multitude of attack angles with the fact you can only have one bomb on screen at a time (unless you collect a power-up) and mastering the use of your apple bombs becomes the single most important part of Donald Land. Happily, the woodpecker offers some good training as it shimmies up and down the tree… or at least it would, if it didn’t only take one bomb to defeat.


Between stages, you can exchange the burger tokens Ronald has collected for things like extra lives and health refills, and you also get to play a simple card-flipping minigame. Pick a random card and hope you get a Ronald. The more Ronalds you find, the better your prize, but finding a Hamburglar means an immediate end to the game. Here’s my fun fact about the Hamburglar: his full name is Hamilton B. Urglar, a name that all but condemned him to a life of robbing burgers.


Next up is Lake Side World, where the tree stumps are alive and have grotesque faces that light up with joy whenever Ronald stands on them.


The other notable thing about Donald Land’s gameplay is that Ronald can stand on top of enemies. Jumping onto them doesn’t kill them in a Super Mario fashion, but it does mean you can (and sometimes have to) use them as platforms to get where you’re going. For instance, here’s Ronald riding a bird wearing an oversized hat and glasses. Is this a lesser-known McDonald’s advertising mascot? Saucy Beaks, the guardian of the ketchup packets? There you go, McDonald’s, you can have the one for free. Riding on Saucy Beaks isn’t mandatory, but otherwise I’d have to jump across the collapsing log bridge so I might as well make use of the bird while I can.


The weirdness level ramps up as this stage’s boss fight begins. It’s a tag team assault from a small red dinosaur and a young child in a cagoule that attacks by crying at Ronald. As a clown, you’d think he’d be immune to a child’s tears, but they will hurt him and the kid can’t be blown up with your bombs. Instead, you must focus your destructive capabilities on the dinosaur, who runs back and forth like a dog that thinks it just heard you say “walk.” It’s not hard to figure out where to place your bombs so the dinosaur runs into them as they explode.


The third stage is the Forest World, because forest worlds are mandatory in any 8-bit platformer. This one doesn’t differ too much from the usual style of these stages: leap from branch to branch, use insects as platforms, feel a pang of sadness at the levels of deforestation suffered by McDonaldland over the years.


For the boss, you’re faced with a huge fire-breathing mechanical dragon, which is a damned sight more imposing that birds and crying children. Getting hit by the fire is instant death, even, not the usual “lose a chunk of your health bar” you get when hit by every other projectile in the game. Fortunately the fire’s easy enough to jump over – the actual hitbox is way more generous than you’d think – so I managed to dodge the flames and throw a couple of bombs up the guy on top of the boss. I’d assumed they were controlling it, but they’re dead and the dragon just keeps on keepin’ on, spewing out fire and ignoring all the bombs I chucked at it. I’ll admit, I was completely stumped here and I had to go and look up what I was supposed to be doing. Turns out you’ve got to jump into the dragon’s mouth. I would not have thought to do that for a long, long time. It’s just so contrary to the general rules of videogame boss fights, not to mention basic common sense, and the game offers no indication that to progress you have to make what feels like the single dumbest move available.


So, I jumped into the dragon’s mouth. The small man inside, unwilling to test his luck against an obviously deranged clown with no fear of death, immediately raised the white flag and set the captive Birdie free. I commend him on his display of common sense.


This is Sky World, and it’s a bit crap. The hitherto perfectly acceptable run-n-jump platforming has been replaced by awkward-to-control floating in the airborne equivalent of an underwater stage. You have to hold the button to make Ronald float upwards, which he does with all the grace of a shopping trolley falling down a staircase. It’s jerky, it’s slow, it’s boring and Roland has no frames of animation while he’s floating. Overall, we’ve gone from “slightly above average” to “long, resigned sigh.” It’s not all bad, though: at least the enemies are interesting, particularly these flying bags of wind that propel themselves along by farting out a gust of air. They’ve got an expression of true madness on their face, which if sort of endearing. Less endearing is the face in the clouds themselves. They look like they’re up to something.


A dull stage only becomes more tedious once these fairies show up, because they attack by grabbing Ronald and refusing to let go, holding him in place while you mash the buttons. If Data East’s goal here was to make the regular platforming stages seem dynamic and exciting by comparison then they have succeeded, but then again leafing through a three-month-old copy of Heat in a dentist’s waiting room would feel dynamic and exciting compared to this.


The boss is another fire-breathing dragon, except this time not mechanical. I wonder if the woodland folk saw this dragon once and decided to copy it when making their own forest guardian? Look, I’ve got to do my own world-building here, it’s not like Donald Land is forthcoming with reasons why McDonaldland is a dangerous wasteland where everyone wants Ronald dead.
This is another easy boss battle, by the way. Throw bombs at the dragon’s head, hop over the fireballs, job done. Just don’t jump into its mouth and you’ll be fine.


If “Wonderwall” starts playing, I’m turning this game off.


Oasis World is a very vaguely “Arabic” themed stage, but it’s also full of Jawas so maybe it’s supposed to be Mos Eisley. I suppose you could sort of describe Mos Eisley as an oasis. Like, sure, it’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but if all you’ve got on the rest of your planet is sand, gangster space slugs, sand, giant fanged pits that eat people and more sand, you’ll take whatever you can get.


The boss is another dragon, this time a bone dragon that looks like it’s wandered in from a Castlevania game. This game’s got more dragons than the Dark Souls series at this point. This is where the bosses start putting up more of a fight, because apparently divesting yourself of your flesh increases your combat efficiency. It seems to make you faster, anyway, and this boss zips around the screen making it difficult to stick bombs to him unless you’ve really got a handle on how the arcs of Ronald’s bombs work.


The obligatory cave stage is next, and it’s probably the worst of all the regular platforming stages. It’s still much better than the flying stage, but it’s rather dull for the most part. It does feature these adorable skeletons that attack by hurling their skulls at Ronald, though, so that’s a plus. On the other hand, I have never wanted to walk through a door less than I do with that gaping clownstrosity over there.


As for a boss battle, well, you get to fight Grimace’s evil brother, the one they keep locked up in the attic and feed on left-over french fries and discarded paper tray liners. He’s understandably upset with Ronald, whom he views as the architect of his misery, and he won’t rest until Ronald is vanquished. Unfortunately for him, he bought claws to a bomb fight. He did try to tip the scales in his favour by wafting small red ghosts at Ronald, but as Ronald is not Pac-Man he has nothing to fear from small red ghosts.


Onward to stage… what stage are we on now? Six? Seven? I’ve lost count. Anyway, it’s called Pond World even though it’s clearly intended to be a swamp. Alligators tend to live in swamps not ponds, unless you really want to make sure your koi carp are protected from predatory herons.
Again, there’s little else to add about the gameplay in these stages, and the action doesn’t change much from stage one onwards, but I will say that Donald Land has a nicely balanced difficulty curve. It’s getting more challenging, but while many NES platformers would have been reaching punishing levels of difficulty by stage seven, Donald Land remains a rather more sedate affair and frankly that makes a nice change.


Plus you’ve got these fantastic cat enemies, cats that look like they were drawn by a seven-year-old and who have the ability to levitate small platforms. They’re great, and if there’s one area in which I can give Donald Land wholehearted praise it’s the enemy designs. There’s a big collection of freaks and weirdos on display, all of them drawn in a charmingly cutesy way but with just enough creepiness to them to keep them interesting, from the wonky cats to the Jawas and even the jack o’ lanterns that appear in a couple of stages.


The stage’s boss proves my point, I feel. Kinda cute, but not the kind of cute that you’d get in the Hello Kitty family or what have you. I like the way the plant-monster seems to be looking out of the screen, as if seeking an emotional connection with the player themselves. “I’m real sorry about this,” its expression seems to say, “but the vine sticking out of my head is actually a parasite that controls my every move. Please destroy me with your bombs, Ronald, and end my torment.”


This is Harbor World, where the crates are stacked high in preparation for their export to distant marketplaces, and there are yet more cats. You can stand on these cats and use them as springboards to leap to higher platforms. Should I have a “don’t try this at home” disclaimer here? It feels like I should have a disclaimer here. So, don’t use your cat as a springboard. Okay? Use a dog instead, they’re generally bigger and bouncier. How many of you will refuse to ever read this site again if I make a “springer spaniel” joke here?


The boss of the harbour is, of course, a pirate. Ronald throws bombs, the pirate throws bundles of dynamite, so it’s a battle between two well-matched opponents. That said, all the pirate does is walk back and forth along a predictable route while throwing his TNT. I get the impression he’d be doing that even if Ronald wasn’t trying to blow him up. He certainly didn’t seem to alter his behaviour any when I’d managed to stick a bomb to him. You’d think that if there was one thing that’d make you change your routine it’d be “getting attached to an explosive device,” but this pirate possesses a single-minded dedication.


After that fight Ronald must have hurled himself off the pier, because it’s an underwater stage. Yes, we’re back to the bumbling crapness last seen in the balloon stage, with Ronald’s underwater manoeuvrability approaching that of a housebrick with live rats taped to it.  You bob along, slowly and inaccurately, avoiding the scenery and trying – but always, it seems, failing – to avoid the jellyfish that act like the fairies in the flying stage and cling onto Ronald in the hopes he’ll give up his quest out of sheer boredom.


Then Ronald was eaten by a shark. Of course he was. How was he supposed to out-swim a shark? Rather than trying to set a new free-diving record for clowns, Ronald should have stuck to his strengths, like selling burgers and performing controlled demolitions.


Here’s a big octopus that you have to fight. I’ll be honest, I don’t really remember this boss battle, which probably means it was exceptionally easy. The screenshot above certainly seems to back up that conclusion, as Ronald has walked right up to the octopus and gently placed a bomb right on its face.


The next stage – yes, Donald Land is still going strong – is the Ghost Town. The developers don’t appear to have decided whether this meant a Wild West ghost town or a town populated with ghosts, so the end result is somewhere in the middle. There are certainly a lot of wooden barrels piled up in the streets, something I would more readily associate with Tombstone than Transylvania. There may be a lot of stages in Donald Land, but at least they’re visually unique, and the game’s commitment to weird monsters continues. For example, look at the witch at the top of the screen. It’s just a big smirking head with a broomstick coming out of the back, it looks like something from Yume Nikki, and I absolutely love it.


At the end of the stage Ronald does battle with a pair of ghosts. The ghosts of amoebas, if their see-through nature is any guide, and they’re just as fond of tossing explosives around as Donald is. The ghosts have the advantage of being able to disappear and become immune to damage, so you end up with a boss fight that’s less a fight and more a guessing game. Because your bombs take a couple of seconds to explode, you don’t have time to react and throw one when the ghosts appear because it won’t explode before they disappear again. So, you guess where the ghosts are about to appear and throw the bombs before they phase back into out mortal realm. It’s less annoying than it sounds, because your bomb’s arc and generous hitbox mean they cover more of the screen than you might expect.


Normally you’d have to walk through to dark forest to get to the spooky town, but not in Donald Land, where the Dark Forest world follows on after the spectral tag-team. Once more it’s nice to look at but doesn’t do much to mix up the gameplay. Normally that’d be a bad thing, but given how poor Donald Land’s non-platforming stages were that’s probably a good thing. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a maxim that doesn’t really apply to videogames, but it’s working out okay here.
On a side note, this lady flopping around on the floor means that there are two completely separate enemies in Donald Land that attack by laying on the ground and crying. I’m not sure there are any interesting points you can take from this, other than the obvious one of “that’s a weird thing to keep making enemies out of.”


I had to show off this background of sinister leering pumpkins, because it’s very much my kind of thing and I hope you all appreciate it too.


You know, if you removed Ronald and the boss from this screenshot it could almost be a background from a Castlevania game. A Kid Dracula game, at any rate. As for the boss itself, what the hell is that thing? Donald Land has entirely done away with anything resembling a coherent theme, giving us a boss that’s nothing but a lump of pure rage, the mascot character for a range of migraine medication or possibly (and appropriately) a sentient chicken nugget that fell on the floor and became encrusted with dirt. Whatever it’s supposed to be, it fights exactly the same way as the pirate and as such its hash can easily be settled by bombs.


At long last, it’s the final stage. Ronald infiltrates the villain’s castle, hopping over super-deformed knights and equally misshapen skeletons, putting all the techniques he’s learned over the course of the game to use. The game play even gets a little bit of a shake-up here, because rather than being a linear path there are multiple routes through the castle that you can access by riding various elevators. The elevators have slightly creepy faces on them, because Donald Land is committed to its aesthetic.


After making my way through the castle, which didn’t take long because none of Donald Land’s stages are particularly expansive and the only thing that slowed me down was having to fight the two ghosts again, I reached a boss. Not the final boss, not even the penultimate boss, and definitely not an interesting boss, but I felt I should show it for the sake of completeness. It’s a hand with a tail that flies around dropping hands on you. It’s boring to look at and a pain in the arse to fight, because only the hand is vulnerable and said hand is small enough that trying to hit it quickly becomes frustration. Donald Land’s stages have time limits, and if they were any stricter than “so generous they might as well not exist” I probably would have run out of time here.


Almost immediately afterwards, Ronald must save the Hamburglar by… defeating the Hamburglar?  Everyone’s favourite meat-based kleptomaniac is clearly a prisoner, trapped inside a picture frame and shouting “help,” but then he bursts out and tries to kill Ronald with his hat. It’s kinda weird. I guess Data East realised that the Hamburglar is the closest thing McDonaldland has to a villain so it’d be weird if you didn’t fight him, so lets say he’s either under the control of the evil clown who covets his amazing powers of flight and hat-throwing or this is a diabolical clone of the Hamburglar. Either way, any lingering fondness that Ronald may feel for the Hamburglar won’t stop him from sticking bombs to his head whenever the opportunity presents itself. Actually, the bombs will only affix themselves to the Hamburglar’s hat, and because he keeps taking it off to throw at you the fight becomes a matter of timing. I assume the rest of the Hamburglar’s body is simply too slick with burger grease for Ronald’s bombs to find purchase.


And now, the final boss, the evil clown himself. He’s proving my point that the scarier you try to make a clown look the less scary it becomes, and with its deformed body and wide shark-like grin the boss strikes and unusually comic figure for a clown. He’s only got one form of attack, too: he jumps from one side of the screen to the other throwing the occasional balloon at Ronald. Dodge the balloons, throw bombs at the clown, repeat until McDonaldland is once more under the stewardship of its one true clown dictator. This is pretty much exactly the final boss fight I expected, to be honest. At least the background, where the cracked brickwork resembles a glowing-eyed spectre, is neat.


There we are, then. Donald Land is Done-ald Land. To celebrate his victory, Ronald paints the word “HERO” on an oil drum and stands atop it in the middle of the village square, the self-aggrandizing prick.


While all the denizens of McDonaldland come out to pledge fealty to Ronald, I can look back on Donald Land and say “hey, this game wasn’t half bad.” The controls are a touch too slippery for it enter very top tier of 8-bit platformers, and the non-jumping stages don’t half drag things down, but overall it’s a very solid game with plenty of content and a wide variety of locations that at least look different even if the gameplay’s mostly one-note. There are some problems with infuriatingly grabby enemies and the occasional area where you seem to be able to screw yourself over if you accidentally kill an enemy that you need to use as a platform but on the whole I’d definitely recommend giving Donald Land a try if you’ve never played it and you fancy a change from the “classic” NES platformers. The big question is why Donald Land never saw a US release. It’s a well above average game and the small amount of in-game text is already in English, and on top of that it’s about McDonald’s. For better or worse, McDonald’s is one of the true icons of American culture, so it’s strange that the game never left Japan. Whatever the reasons, it’s a game with jankily-drawn cat monsters and haunted pumpkin forests, and as such it was well worth my time.

Today’s article is all about the cover art from various Super Mario spin-offs, but I don’t mean the kind of spin-offs we’re all familiar with. We all know about Mario’s secondary careers as a doctor or a go-kart driver or a competitor in a multiverse-spanning fighting tournament where he may or may not be a child’s toy brought to life by a magical floating hand. No, these are the really obscure Mario spin-offs. Knitting is involved. We’ll get to that, but let’s begin with something you might actually have heard of.


One of several games in the Mario Discovery Series, Mario’s Time Machine is all about learning history. What you’ll actually learn from this cover art, and all the others in this article, is that Mario never, ever closes his goddamn mouth. I think there’s one, maybe two pieces of cover art I looked at for this article where Mario’s gob isn’t hanging open. Sometimes he’s smiling, sometimes it’s the slack-jawed gaping of a man partway through a complex dental procedure, but his mouth is (almost) always open.
As for the rest of this cover, what’s going on? Well, Abraham Lincoln is there, posed in a way that suggests he’s doing his best Tommy Cooper impression. I thought the upside-down bloke at the bottom was Phil Collins at first glance, but I think it’s supposed to be Benjamin Franklin. That’s disappointing, because Mario really does look like the kind of person who would use a time machine to return to 1985 so he can catch the No Jacket Required tour.
Also, the trail coming out of the time machine implies that Mario flew out of that dinosaur’s mouth, promising a level of excitement that Mario’s Time Machine simply cannot provide.



The PC CD-ROM version of Mario’s Time Machine also comes with this cover art, and it’s a real artefact of nineties graphic design, huh? Ugly elements placed seemingly at random, logos all over the place and Mario pointing at a bunch of clipart Koopa Troopas. “Look,” says Mario, “Koopa Troopas. I will jump on them.” He’s a simple man with simple needs.



He’s right there, Luigi! Are you deaf? Bowser’s not the stealthiest of villains, I can’t believe he’s abducting Mario without making enough noise to get your attention. This is why Mario’s the hero and you’re the sidekick, Luigi. Unless… oh ho, I get it, Luigi is fed up of languishing in his big brother’s shadow, so he lets Mario be kidnapped and prepares to step into the limelight. Well, congratulations, Luigi. You’re the star now. Unfortunately the game you’re starring in is Mario is Missing, so you’ve ended up with a real monkey’s paw of a wish there.



Mario teaches typing, but he’s not doing a very good job at it. If you follow the trail he’s left behind, he appears to have typed out “wsx.” That might be a word in the Mushroom Kingdom, friendo, but here in the real world it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re showing your appreciation for the obscure and short-lived wrestling programme Wrestling Society X. Phil Collins and unloved wrestling franchises? I’m painting a really weird picture of what Mario’s downtime consists of here.
Aside from his poor typing, there are a couple of interesting thing in this one. The first is that this picture of Mario should clearly be airbrushed on the side of a dodgy carnival ride rather than appearing on the cover of an official product. I can see it now, Mario on the side of a swinging pirate ship ride, in between a picture of a bootleg Batman who looks like he’s just smelled one of Ace the Bat-Hound’s farts and a Minion. The other is the age rating on the right. I think if you reach the age of 102 without having learned how to type, it’s fair enough to suggest you’ll never master it even with Mario’s help.



Of course, there being a Mario Teaches Typing 2 means there was an original, but the cover’s not very interesting. Mario looks just like official art that’s been placed on top of a keyboard. Neither cover really sells the idea that Mario’s teaching typing rather than fleeing from a giant keyboard.



To play Mario Roulette, you load a single Bullet Bill into the chamber of a revolver…



Okay, that last one got a bit dark, but the image of Mario being caught unawares by a photographer, looking guilty as he hangs around a playground full of children, is a whole different thing. Jesus Christ, could you not have shown Mario actually having fun in his usual wholesome manner? You know, maybe avoid drawing him to look as furtive as possible? Instead, let’s focus on the kid at the top, who is definitely about to smash the other kids over the head with that giant number 3.



Don’t lie to me, Mario. You can’t have fun with numbers. This is fun on a see-saw, with numbers nearby. Sure, mathematicians will tell you that every aspect of the universe is controlled by numbers and as such all fun springs from maths – especially physics-based fun like you’ll find on see-saws – but who ever listened to a mathematician? Not me! That’s why I failed the maths parts of my degree. Twice.



That’s more like it. You can definitely have fun with letters. Not on this website, but in other places.
Mario’s problems with keeping his mouth shut have reached crisis point in this one, with his gob desperately trying to reposition itself to the back of his neck.



“Now you’re printing with power,” hah. As someone old enough to remember using dot-matrix printers and continuous paper, I can testify that using those things definitely sounded powerful, by which I mean they made a right racket. But what better use could continuous paper be put to than printing out enormous Super Mario banners? I know if I’d had this software as a kid I’d have done nothing but. Every square inch of my house would have been covered in low-resolution computer copies of Super Mario Bros. 3-era Mario artwork. Getting a birthday card with best wishes from the Mario Brothers themselves? What could be cooler than that? However, some of the print-out choices on this cover are a little strange. “Thank you! Here’s a picture of a fire-breathing snake!” is a weird one, unless you’re thanking someone for helping you beat Tricylde in Mario 2. As for the Super Track Meet banner, I’d imagine Nintendo’s lawyers would be all over you if you tried to hang it in your school or wherever.



Welcome to the Hotel Mario: such a lovely place, or at least it would be if “Mario” had four syllables so I could do a parody of the Hotel California lyrics. It must be a lovely place, if it’s home to Goombas that dress like Elvis. I know Hotel Mario is one of the least-beloved of all Mario games, but I’m looking at this and imagining the Mushroom Kingdom’s version of Las Vegas, where Elvis-impersonating mushrooms do sets including such hits as “Blue Suede Shrooms” and “Viva Las Fungus.”
I’m not so fond of how the bad guys seem to have undergone the same process that they put Kirby through when he appears on American box art. That Boo’s the worst, their usual spooky mischievousness replaced by a look of genuine rage directed towards Mario. The worst thing of all, however, is the position of Mario’s leg. Take a close look at it, and you’ll notice that it’s sticking directly out of Mario’s crotch rather than being attached to his hips. I’m a little worried it’s not a leg at all.



It looks like Mario’s added “game show host” to his long list of careers, huh? He looks so happy, firing games and pastimes out of his tuxedo jacket. He’s probably just glad he won’t have to jump over any bottomless caverns or lava pits while he’s compering.  The worst he’ll have to deal with is Yoshi eating the draughts board.
As with so many of these covers, this image brings home how just how many times I’ve seen Mario over the years and just how fixed his official image is. Mario’s look shifted around a bit in the NES era and certainly back when he was appearing in arcade games, but since Super Mario 64 he has looked identical in pretty much every single piece of artwork Nintendo have put out. The side effect of this is that you can tell, immediately and at a glance, when Mario hasn’t been drawn by Nintendo themselves. This one’s an obvious case, because Mario doesn’t usually look like an over-inflated pool toy, but even when the images are very accurate they still always seem to be missing that essential Nintendo-ness that marks them out as the real deal.



This one’s just nice. Everyone seems to be having a good time together as friends, which implies they’re not actually playing Mario Party. Princess Peach is in a relaxed mood during a rare period in which she’s not an abductee, and she offers the audience a playful wink. Wario and Waluigi look like the inseparable buddies we all know they are. Princess Daisy is shocked by Waluigi’s monster mushroom. However, best of all is Donkey Kong up in the top-left corner. He doesn’t have a bloody clue what’s going on, does he? They should have called this game Mario Party-e feat. Donkey Kong Screaming Invective Into The Uncaring Universe.



Super Mario’s back and he’s taking quarters, beating up Toads and stealing their dinner money! Finally realised that carrying around those massive Mushroom Kingdom coins is a pain in the arse when he needs to fill up the parking meter, has he? According to this flyer Mario’s the number one most recognisable character in the world, so you’d think he’d be able to park wherever the hell he likes, but I guess not. Relatedly, isn’t it nice that a chubby Italian plumber with a carefree nature and a big bushy moustache became the world’s most recognisable character? When you describe him like that, it’s a wonder anyone remembers him at all and a shock that he’s never been replaced by a “cooler” character. Fortunately, Nintendo seem unconcerned with the notion of “cool.”
As for the artwork, it’s all tracings of official art that seem to have been coloured with felt-tipped pens, so it looks pretty okay. Still, I’m not sure why the artist positioned Mario and Yoshi to look as though they’re about to slam face-first into the ground. The artist’s yellow pen obviously ran out at some point, and it’s strange to see some of these familiar foes coloured in green. I don’t know why Koopa Troopas aren’t coloured green in the first place, actually. Surely turtles are usually more green than they are yellow?



Just two quick things to mention with this one: one is the charming expression of slow-witted contentment on the mushroom Mario’s holding. That mushroom might be about to get eaten so Mario can double in size, but it’s just happy to be out in the fresh air and meeting new people. The other thing is the Hammer Brother on the left. Every time I look at it I see the ear-guard of its helmet as its left eye, giving it a strangely Cubist vibe, or more accurately making it look like one of the many, many Super Mario character I drew when I was about seven years old.



Mario’s quest to become the ultimate dilettante continues as he takes on a job with the police force. Don’t worry, he’ll be bored with it soon enough. He’s only on traffic duty, it’s not like he’s having shoot-outs with drug lords or anything. He’s even convinced Luigi to get a proper job as a firefighter, and aren’t they both having a jolly old time in their uniforms? Ho ho, what fun. Until you see the speed lines coming off Luigi’s fire engine and realise there’s no way he’ll be able to brake in time to avoid committing fratricide. It’s a good job this is happening right outside a doctor’s clinic, they might at least be able to save some of Mario’s organs for transplant. And hey, maybe Donkey Kong’s moonlighting as a nurse or something? That’d be fun.



Finally, as promised, knitting. Yes, this is a “game” that lets you design knitting patterns for sweaters with Super Mario pictures on them. As far as I can tell, despite the title it doesn’t actually teach you how to knit a sweater. It’s hardly the weirdest thing to have Mario’s name attached to it, not when the Super Mario Bros. movie exists, but it does mean that somewhere in Japan, stuffed in the bottom of a wardrobe and long forgotten, there must be at least one Mario sweater made using this software. You can just imagine some kid pestering his grandparents to make it for them, wearing it to school and showing off the 8-bit Goombas emblazoned across their chest, and that’s a strangely affecting thought. I know I would have wanted a Mario jumper. It’d have made a nice change from the fluorescent-coloured bootleg Simpsons t-shirts I seem to be wearing in every photo from my childhood.

The great thing about writing about a Batman game is that I don’t have to explain who Batman is. He is, for want of a less overused expression, iconic. If you see the silhouette of a bat, you know that somewhere on the dark and lawless streets of Gotham City, a clown is getting his teeth knocked out. Today that never-ending ballet of violence is cast in the appropriately monochromatic tones of the Game Boy, with Konami’s 1993 I-am-the-Night-em-up Batman: The Animated Series!

In an effort to promote his brand, Batman has stitched the name of the game onto his cape. No, of course not, this is the logo for Batman: The Animated Series, the cartoon on which this adventure is specifically based. BTAS, as the cool kids most certainly do not refer to it, is the good Batman cartoon; the slightly darker, Art-Deco-ish, Mark Hamill as the Joker iteration of the Batman mythos.   It’s still probably my favourite version of Batman, so I’m looking forward to playing a video-game version of it.


Here’s Batman now, lurking in the shadows and scowling. As this makes up about eighty percent of being Batman, I feel it’s important that they included it in the game’s intro.
Actually, the intro is a rough recreation of the cartoon’s intro, a minute-long mini-adventure where Batman foils a bank robbery and then poses on top of a building, which is the other twenty percent of being Batman. The Game Boy version does a good job of recreating the show’s opening within the graphical limitations of the Game Boy, and there’s an excellent version of the cartoon’s theme music. Honestly, even if the game itself turns out to be terrible I’ll be glad I played it just to have heard a bleepier yet still atmospheric version of Danny Elfman’s classic Batman theme.


I’m not sure where these kung-fu fighters fit into the proceedings, mind you. This is a picture of two martial artists trying to flying-kick each other while a crowd of gangsters gathers around and flips them the bird, right?


Oh, I see, it’s the bit in the intro where Batman leaves the two tied-up bank robbers in the street. “They’re the police’s problem now,” thinks Batman as he scowls in the shadows on a rooftop. “I should get back to thinking up ways to kill Superman for some reason.”


Upon hitting start, you’re treated to a scene that sets up the first stage. Someone is making explosive teddy bears, presumably in an attempt to undermine Batman’s image as the Dark Knight when the public sees him running through the streets with a load of cuddly toys under his arm. Also, try not to look at that clown’s face for too long, because it’ll give you nightmares.
So, we’ve got clowns, laughter and exploding teddy bears. I wonder which villain could possibly be behind this nefarious scheme?


Calendar Man! I mean, The Joker! Obviously it had to be the Joker’s doing. While there are several DC Comics villains for whom “teddy bear bombs” would be a perfectly acceptable method of attack, I doubt that Toyman or The Dollmaker will be making an appearance in this particular Batman game.


The action begins, and within seconds you’re commanding the Caped Crusader to punch a clown. It’s little wonder I like Batman so much.
So, Batman: The Animated Series is an action-adventure platforming affair, as I’m sure you all expected it to be. In these early moments, it feels like a rather generic example of the genre. Batman walks and jumps and punches, and he does so in a very middle-of-the-road manner: not particularly agile, but also not plodding around the place like he’s just woken up after a Sunday-morning lie-in.


The aim of this first area is to find all the bear-bombs scattered throughout the stage. This isn’t difficult, because the level’s not very big and the bears aren’t that well hidden. They’re placed inside large, gift-wrapped boxes, for starters. How does Batman reveal the bear-bomb within? By punching the box, naturally This isn’t one of those Batman products where the World’s Greatest Detective does any actual detective work. For instance, the Joker gets in touch with Batman and explains his plan at the start of this stage. Batman will not need his Holmesian intellect to crack this case.


This isn’t just any action game hero, though. It’s Batman, and as such he should have some abilities that set him apart from the ordinary run of man otherwise he’s just a bloke in a Halloween costume. Well, he does have some special skills, the first of which is the ability to wall jump in a manner reminiscent of the NES Batman game. It’s the skill you’ll need to use the most in this game, so taking the time to master its complexities is vital. Those complexities mostly boil down to there being two different off-the-wall jumping distances, corresponding to how long you hold the button. Sometimes you will only need the short hop, so don’t forget it’s there.


As we move into the combination Build-A-Bear Workshop / bomb-making facility that makes up the later parts of the first stage, Batman gets the chance to show off his other most useful trick: the handy bat-grapple. Batman’s a close second to Spider-Man when it comes to superheroes known for swinging from a thread, so naturally he comes equipped with a grappling gun. There’s no swinging, though. Yes, as strange as it might sound the grapple gun only works vertically, and even then it’s only to grab onto certain ceilings. You can haul yourself up and down on the cable, but you can’t live out your Tarzan fantasies. The most common applications for the bat-grapple are leaping up through specific platforms to reach a higher level, or to pull Batman up, let go of the rope and use the aerial control you have over Batman’s horizontal movement to nudge him towards platforms below. That’s what I’m trying to do in the screenshot above: when I let go of the rope, I’ll be able to make Batman fall onto the right-hand platform. This lack of swinging might seem disappointingly limiting, but the vertical-only Bat-rope is integrated into the stages well and the lack of swinging eliminates any potential problems with awkward swinging physics and difficult-to-judge dismounts.


The bomb factory is attached to a Gothic mansion, because of course it is. This is Gotham City, after all. The only places in Gotham City that aren’t Gothic mansions are Wayne Tower and the sewers where Killer Croc lives. Inside the mansion are wall-mounted candles, so this being a Konami game I naturally tried punching the candles to see if power-ups would fall out. They did not, sadly.


You can’t blame me for trying, though. Just look at it! If you swapped Batman’s sprite for a bloke with a whip and a leather skirt you’d have no trouble convincing people that this was a Castlevania game.


You and I know both knew that the boss of this stage was going to be the Joker, even if the last few screens did make me think, if only for a very brief moment, that it might be Dracula. No, it’s definitely the Joker, he’s laughing at Batman and everything. He looks pretty good, too: recognisable as the character even when rendered in so few pixels, especially in motion when you can more clearly see that his mouth is opening and closing and he does not, in fact, have a yawning black void where his face ought to be.


The Joker’s battle plan is simple: he ducks into one of the hidden doors in the background while spawning a wave of exploding, ambulatory teddy bears. Your first task is to avoid the bears, something I found was most easily accomplished by grappling up to the ceiling and hiding up there until all the bears have blown up. Once they’re gone, the Joker will reappear for a moment, so you can swoop down and give him a smack. He’ll vanish again, summoning more bears, and so on and so forth. After the seventh or eight punch in the head, Joker will come to realise that his plan was, on the whole, a bit crap. Congratulations, Batman! You’ve saved Gotham City once again, and her citizens will rest easy for, oh, seven seconds or so.


The next stage introduces Mr. Freeze – you’d think he’d call himself Doctor Freeze, wouldn’t you? - and he takes his chance to mornge on about his emotional pain, blah blah blah. Listen, Freeze, we’ve all had tragedies in our lives but we don’t go around building ice guns, now do we? Maybe you should channel your negative emotions into something more worthwhile, like artistic expression or charity work or fighting crime while dressed as a flying mammal.


For his part, Batman responds with a very un-Batman-like pun. What is this, Batman and Robin? C’mon, Bruce, stick to the glowering. Also you appear to be talking to the Batmobile.


Oh, and the Scarecrow is there, too. Hello, Scarecrow! I’m sorry, but Batman doesn’t have a pun for you. If he did, I’m sure he’d say something like “as a creator of fear toxins, you’re outstanding in your field!”


The main point of stage two’s first area is to introduce and acclimatise Batman to a new type of threat: people with guns. The clowns in the first stage could sometime throw exploding bears, but on the whole they weren’t into projectile weaponry. These mobster love guns, though. They enjoy nothing more than standing still and firing bullets at head height, watching Batman slowly advance on them by ducking under their shots each time they fire. Whether they enjoy the following events – when Batman punches them so hard they disappear from this reality – is up for debate. Certainly, no-one’s ever returned from the Batman Punch Dimension, so it must be great.


Robin shows up, late. The time he missed will be docked from his wages, or at least it would if Batman paid him anything. Robin’s inclusion in the game is hardly surprising: he featured quite prominently in the original cartoon, to the point that he was pushed to the forefront and the show was renamed The Adventures of Batman and Robin. Whether this was intended to get people interested in Robin before Batman and Robin (the movie) was released, or because network execs decided what kids really wanted from their Batman cartoon was less Batman, I’m not sure, but here he is. Batman goes after Mr. Freeze while Robin tracks down Scarecrow, in what must be quite a blow to Scarecrow’s self-esteem.


And yes, you do get to play as Robin. There are three main differences between Batman and Robin. Robin has a smaller health bar, and when he grapples up to the ceiling he can move horizontally by swinging along like a kid on some monkey bars. Robin is also the only member of the Dynamic Duo to be harassed by floating pumpkins. But where are these pumpkins coming from?


Why, they’re coming from under the Scarecrow’s hat, of course. No, really, Scarecrow lifts his hat up and pumpkins fly out. I have to assume these are not literal pumpkins but are instead manifestations of Robin’s exposure to the fear toxin, although that implies the thing that Robin fears the most is jack o’lanterns. You’d think it would be faulty trapeze equipment.
This Scarecrow battle is a good example of how many of the boss fights in this game play out. The boss is briefly vulnerable, before deploying a set of projectiles or other hindrances and then disappearing for a short spell. Batman or Robin must avoid the projectiles until the boss reappears, during which time you can hit them. It’s simple, pattern-based gameplay of the most videogame-y sort, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the rogue’s gallery are as well-drawn and possess enough individual charm to make each battle feel less similar than they really are.


Back to Batman, who’s making his way through Mr. Freeze’s cryogenic lab. It’s trying to trick me into thinking it’s less linear than the other stages by sending me through various doors to reach the next part of the stage, but there’s still only one path. Let’s put it down to Batman being Batman and thus always knowing exactly where to go, shall we?
The big shake-up here is that the bad guys aren’t just shooting regular bullets at you: they’ve got ice weapons that will freeze Batman solid for a few seconds if he’s hit by them. This forces the player into a more cautious style of play. Getting shot with a regular bullet is an unfortunate but fairly commonplace consequence of being Batman, but being hit by a freeze ray is enough of a pain in the arse that you’ll go out of your way to avoid having to deal with it.


The fight against Mr. Freeze is a little different in that he doesn’t disappear, as such, but he does run away while his massive frosty laser beams bounce around the room, an attack I had an embarrassing amount of trouble avoiding given that they travel along a very predictable path. I was just too eager to punch Mr. Freeze, that was my problem. There’s really not much else to say about this one other than it reminded me of a Mega Man boss fight, but that might just be because of the way the segmented door closes behind you once you enter the room.


Moving on, and Poison Ivy has kidnapped Harvey Dent, who I guess hasn’t become Two-Face yet. Are we looking at a retcon situation, where Two-Face is created when a mutated venus flytrap eats half his face? Sadly not, and Harvey Dent isn’t even the point: Poison Ivy is merely using him as bait to lure Batman into a deadly game of whatever the botanical equivalent of cat-and-mouse is. I’m not especially worried. Any villain whose fiendish schemes can be thwarted by a big bucket of Weedol does not exactly inspire fear.


Then Catwoman shows up and drops a sick burn on Harvey Dent. I know that everyone is boring when compared to Batman, but you could have been a bit gentler on poor old Harv.


The next few areas see Batman making his way through Catwoman’s mansion. I say it’s Catwoman’s because its full of cats and oversized novelty cat-collar bells. She probably stole it from someone else, sure, but she’s put enough of her own stamp on it that I feel justified in calling it Catwoman’s mansion. A lot of it is also on fire, which isn’t very thematically appropriate but does mean that the focus of the action switches from fighting goons to navigating dangerous terrain. It’s a welcome change of pace that feels no less Batman-y than the stages that have come before it.


Here’s Batman with some teeny-tiny cats. They don’t do anything important, I just thought you might like to see Batman surrounded by kittens.


At several points during the stage, you have to fight Catwoman. It differs from most other boss battles because it’s a straight-up one-on-one fight – no gimmicks, no projectiles, just punching and kicking. Specifically, Batman tries to punch Catwoman and then get far enough away that her kicks can’t reach him, which is easier said than done because she’s got surprisingly long legs. Many was the time I thought I’d retreated to a safe distance, only for the tip of Catwoman’s boot to poke me in the eye. She’ll also jump off the back wall and over your head if you try to pin her in the corner, which is the only part of this fight that makes reference to Catwoman’s famed agility. She’s decided to go toe-to-toe with Batman, but as you fight her and she runs away, only to be waiting to do it again in a later part of the stage, it quickly becomes clear that she has no real intention of beating Batman and is doing this for fun. It’s an extension of Catwoman and Batman’s already BDSM-tinged relationship, a superhero 50 Shades of Grey. Well, 4 Shades of Grey, in this case.


“Nothing can stop me from saving Harvey, Selina. Not even our erotically-charged ballet of violence and sweet, sweet pain, two bodies honed to the peak of physical perfection wrapped in leather and latex passionately clashing again and again. No, I’m going to take a very cold Bat-Shower and then save Harvey. I’m definitely going. I’m leaving right now, Yup.”


Now Batman’s heading into Poison Ivy’s botanically-themed lair, a terrifying place of deadly mutated thorns, creeping grass that acts like a conveyor belt and, erm, walking palm trees. I’m sure those are supposed to be coconuts, but they don’t half look like an arse. Fortunately, you can put these waddling freaks of nature out of their misery with a well-placed punch or two. You wouldn’t think punching a tree would be all that effective, but then again you are playing as Batman.


This stage is where the design philosophy behind Batman: The Animated Series’s levels clicked for me. There are a lot of very deliberately-placed traps and enemies that require specific actions, or sequences of actions, to negotiate without taking damage, and as a result the gameplay is less action-oriented than you might expect. There are times when haste is the proper course of action, mostly when you spot an enemy that can be rushed down and eliminated before they have a chance to react, but on the whole this is a game that rewards a slower, more methodical style of play. Paying attention – usually something I struggle with – is key, and although it rarely gets more complicated than figuring out enemy movement patterns and safe landing spots, it all comes together well for two main reasons. One is that it feels like the way Batman would handle things. Superman may be said to have the morals of a Boy Scout, but Batman definitely has the “always be prepared” angle covered and a slower, more thoughtful approach is very much his thing. Then there’s the technical aspect – the Game Boy was not as well-suited to fast, rapidly-scrolling action as the home consoles of the time, so slowing things down prevents the system’s limitations from becoming too apparent.


As for the boss, you don’t fight Poison Ivy directly but rather (surprise surprise) a giant mutated plant. It’s one of those fights that feels difficult at first, but eventually the pattern clicks and it stops being a challenge. Vines appear from the ground, and you avoid them while closing the distance to the big plant. Once you've punched the big plant, a wave of vines will pop up, and the only way to avoid them is to run back to the left of the screen, where you go straight back into dodging vines and closing the distance to the big plant. Ivy will fire the occasional crossbow bolt at Batman, but on the whole it doesn’t really feel like her heart’s in the fight.


A succinct opening for the next stage: the Riddler and the Penguin have escaped from Arkham Asylum! Hang on, why was the Penguin in Arkham anyway? He’s just a mob boss. A mob boss with a pointy nose and a fixation on umbrellas, granted, but that hardly qualifies him for incarceration in a psychiatric institute rather than a regular prison. Of course, the real question is why anyone is sent to Arkham Asylum, a place that’s easier to escape from than a slightly awkward dinner with your new partner’s family.


When it’s a grown man leaping over rooftops and clobbering criminals while dressed as a bat?


The Riddler-themed part of this stage takes place in a series or rooms that would make Super Mario weep with envy for all the power-ups hidden in those question-mark blocks. There are also tiny Riddler dolls with knives for arms who want nothing more than to stab Batman in the shins. Batman’s appeared in so many crossovers that I’m sure Batman vs Puppet Master can’t be too far away, but for now we can mostly ignore the dolls and the roaming enemies that I think are supposed to be chess pieces and focus on the task at hand. That task is finding the correct route though the Riddler’s maze. Every room has at least one switch – and not a very well hidden switch, I should add – that Batman must punch in order to open the room’s exit. However, some rooms have multiple switches and exits, and only one path will lead you to the end of the stage. So, it’s a matter of trial, error and memorisation, or at least it is if you want to finish the stage quickly. Me? I didn’t have anything better to do, so I spent a while randomly hitting switches and travelling in loops until I eventually stumbled upon the correct order. Let’s pretend I did it just to annoy the Riddler, shall we? Ignoring his meticulously laid-out mental challenge and simply brute-forcing my way to the end seems like the kind of thing that would really piss the Riddler off. Consider it my revenge for having to do the Riddler’s Batmobile challenges in Arkham Knight.


The Riddler fight very much sticks to the usual pattern of “disappear and fire projectiles” school of combat, probably more so than any other boss fight because he actually disappears between attacks. When he’s visible, you’ve got the chance to land a single attack before he splits into four Riddler clones. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, because four Riddlers aren’t any more handy in a fistfight than one Riddler, but the clones will then turn into balls of energy and fly towards Batman. You can eliminate the clones by hitting them, but as you can see they’re well spaced out, so the key is getting rid of as many clones as you can. One or two clone-balls are easy enough to dodge, avoiding three is tricky but doable but having all four of them flying at you almost guarantees you’re going to take some damage.


Once the Riddler’s been dealt with, you’re back to playing as Robin in the game’s toughest and probably least fun challenge: a vertical chase against the Penguin as he flees to his waiting airship. There’s nothing hugely complicated about this section. You just have to get Robin to the top of the tower before the timer runs out by grappling to the ceiling above and swinging “through” the appropriate, traversable pieces of the scenery. It’s not even especially terrible to play. It’s just that after the slower approach of the rest of the game it’s a bit jarring for speed to suddenly be of the essence, especially when combined with a tight time limit and dismounting controls that are just sticky enough to be frustrating.


It doesn’t help that Robin’s daring chase is immediately rendered moot by Batman turning up and declaring he’s going to do all the work anyway. Thank, Batman. Robin can go and sit in the Batwing, reading the Gotham City A-Z and drinking Panda Pops like when your dad used to go to the pub and leave you in the car outside.


As Batman makes his way through Penguin's airship, beset on all sides by mechanical swans and the dread power that is hummingbirds– yes, you have to punch some hummingbirds, for pity’s sake – here’s something I really like about this game. Batman wears black, yeah? And thanks to the Game Boy’s four-colour display, a lot of the backgrounds are black. Thus, Batman tends to blend into the background. Normally this might be a cause for complaint, because being able to see your character is quite important, but in a Batman game it totally makes sense. Lurking in the shadows is Batman’s whole deal, and he’s easy enough to see when he’s moving that it’s not as much of an issue as some screenshots might suggest. I don’t know whether this effect is something Konami purposefully exploited to give the game a real Batman vibe or just a serendipitous accident, but it adds a lot of character to the visuals.


It’s time to fight the Penguin, who’s riding around on a flying duck, throwing umbrella bombs and generally trying to stay out of Batman’s way, which seems like a good strategy to me. The Batarangs came in handy during this fight, I must say. What’s that? I didn’t mention you can throw Batarangs? Well, you can. You can switch between Batarangs and punches with the select button. Robin even uses a slingshot instead, which is a nice touch. The problem is, the game seems to be deeply opposed to you using the Batarangs. You have to collect them before you can throw them, and Batarang power-ups are few and far between. On top of that, you can only carry nine of them at a time, they don’t do any more damage than a regular punch and the small dimensions of the Game Boy’s screen means that you’re never really that far away from the thing you want to damage. As a result, it’s entirely possible to forget that the Batarangs are even an option. Still, they were helpful here, with the Penguin floating just out of punching range.


A bad day for Batman and Robin gets even worse as the Batwing is shot out of the sky on the way back to stately Wayne Manor. Which fiendish villain could be responsible for this attack? I mean, I’ve punched most of the big names into unconsciousness already. Is it Maxie Zeus? The Clock King? Egghead?


Oh, it’s the Joker. Again. Arkham Asylum really isn’t fit for purpose, is it?


Check out the crashed Batwing, it’s a nice visual flourish in a game that has plenty of them: the falling snow in Catwoman’s stage is also good, as are the defeated poses most of the villains slip into when you beat them.


Rather than ending the game with one last full stage, Batman: The Animated Series draws to a close with a single boss fight against the Joker and his remote-controlled clownbot, a device that was rejected by Dr. Robotnik for being too impractical. It tries to fall on Batman’s head with its spiked underside, and it’s very easy to avoid and subsequently punch. It can also throw playing cards. These are also easy to avoid. It’s a bit of an anticlimax, honestly, but I’ll let the Joker off because his last criminal caper was only a few hours ago, so he’s hardly had the time to put together a truly fiendish master-plan. “I’ve got a clown-themed robot, so I’ll drop it on Batman’s head” probably seemed like a good idea on short notice.
So, you dodge the robot, punch it a few times and eventually it’ll fly up into the air and land on the Joker, teaching him a valuable lesson about never trusting clowns and bringing the game to a close.


For a game that had mini-cutscenes at every opportunity with accompanying (and rather good) art, it’s strange that the game’s ending is nothing but a few lines of text about how Batman and Robin are hungry and they’re going to get Alfred to make them some dinner. It’s not the content that’s the problem – two hard-working buddies talking about grabbing a bite to eat is a much more enjoyable conclusion than Batman standing on top of a building and monologuing about how he’ll never rid the city of crime – but I’m disappointed that there’s no artwork to go with it. Batman and Robin sitting down at the table in full costume while Alfred serves them from a silver platter, that's the kind of thing I wanted to see.
Batman: The Animated Series is a good game. Even though VGJunk was never intended to be a “review” site, I generally try to come to some kind of conclusion, and while those conclusions are usually a little bit more nuanced than this there’s little else I can say about BTAS. It’s just a good game. Solid, dependable, rarely frustrating, true to the source material and respectful of the limitations of the hardware on which it appears. It’s very similar to Ninja Gaiden Shadow in that regard, and both these games are two of the best action-platformers the Game Boy has to offer. Oh, and the soundtrack is great, too. What more could you ask for? Apart from useful Batarangs, I mean?

There have been too many articles about famous super heroes and icons of the gaming world here at VGJunk this month. It’s time to get obscure, with a game you’ve probably never heard of, a game that might only be interesting because you’ve never heard of it. Oh, and because you can sometimes throw carrots at people. That’s pretty interesting. It’s Mebio Software’s 1993 Super Famicom sports game Go! Go! Dodge League!


I know those two adjacent balls are acting as part of the game’s title, but I’m immature enough that seeing two adjacent balls is making me chuckle, although not as much as writing down the phrase “two adjacent balls” is.
This is a very Japanese-looking title screen, isn’t it? What with the manga style, and all. It’s specifically that kind of manga style you get in lower-end videogames, a style that never looks quite right. I think it’s the hairstyles that do it: the artist knows that anime characters have crazy hairstyles, but they draw hair that looks dumb but not in the usual anime “this is dumb” fashion. I mean, check out that guy on the right. Yeah, the one that looks like a giraffe who’s managed to trick its way into a boy band and is praying no-one notices. His hair is the same shape as the steam cleaner I use on my kitchen floor. The girl in the middle is the only one who comes out of this title screen well, honestly.


As you might have guessed from the title, Go! Go! Dodge League is a dodgeball game. Remember than brief period in the mid-2000s when dodgeball became a thing? That was weird. We’re a weird species. My abiding feeling for the concept of dodgeball is that it’s what PE teachers used to set up when they couldn’t be bothered to plan a real lesson or the football pitch was flooded.
Anyway, it’s dodgeball, Japanese-style. It’s like non-Japanese dodgeball, except all the participants have big heads and huge eyes. You can have a one-off match or take part in a tournament, either alone, against a friend or co-operatively with a friend. Obviously, I’ll be playing alone. I’m not saying that to elicit sympathy, it’s just that I only have one game pad. Rest in peace, my old Saitek P380 joypad. You were a dependable workhorse, even if your D-Pad was designed by someone with a grudge against thumbs.


I decided to play through the tournament. Despite being called Go! Go! Dodge League, this game doesn’t have a “league” mode. You play each team once, and are knocked out if you lose, which is really more of a cup than a league.
You get to pick your team, of course, all of them named after animals from the Chinese zodiac. Okay, so it’s usually a goat rather than a sheep in the Chinese zodiac, but they’re close enough. You might be drawn to teams like the Tigers or the Dragons over the Sheep and Rats, but that’s forgetting two important facts: one is that the rat was supposedly the animal that won the mythical race to decide what order the animals would appear in the zodiac, and the other is that clearly the monkey is the best-suited of all these animals to actually playing dodgeball. They’re agile, they’re used to being in groups and they’re the only animals on the list that can grasp and throw a ball with any degree of accuracy. That said, I’ll be playing as the Rabbits, because that’s where my cursor happened to end up.


Well, I guess that clears up the whole cup/league situation.


Oh hey, the Rabbits have turned out to be an all-female team. This might be interesting if there were any differences between the types of player other than their sprites, but as far as I could tell there are not. The fat players might be able to take more hits before being knocked out, but I’m not certain about that. They might also be slightly easier to hit on account of their size, so swings and roundabouts.


So, it’s dodgeball, then… except it isn’t, really. It’s a very videogame-y approximation of dodgeball. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Dodgeball, if you like. The idea is still to knock out the opposing team by throwing balls at them and to avoid getting hit when they throw balls at you, but it doesn’t follow dodgeball rules. If you catch a ball someone throws at you, that person isn’t out of the game, for instance. You have to hit your opponents multiple times to knock them out, too.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and making a sport less complicated is probably a good idea when you’re working with 16-bit hardware. It’s just that this game isn’t all that similar to real dodgeball, much like Super Soccer doesn’t play much like real football.


How does it all work, then? The mighty Rabbits occupy the bottom half of the court – wait, is it called a court in dodgeball? Let’s just assume it is, “dodgeball pitch” doesn’t sound right. Their opponents are in the top half of the court, so let’s sling some balls! You throw balls with the B button and pass to your team-mates, including those standing around the edge of the opposition’s half, with A. Y makes you jump, while X is used for a kind of diving slide which I guess is meant to help you, you know, dodge balls. I never got much use out of it, myself. It’s not a very fast action, which hampers its usefulness, but the bigger issue is that dodging balls isn’t the best strategy. You should be endeavouring to catch the balls instead. If you dodge the balls thrown at you then sure, you don’t get hit, but the ball flies past you and is usually picked up by one of the opposing team that’s lurking around the edges of the court. Catching the ball is a much better idea, because then you can throw the ball. Specifically, I’d recommend double-tapping the d-pad to start running before you throw, because then you’ll throw the ball harder. You don’t have much control over your aim – the eight cardinal directions are about the extent of it – but the ball will “home in” on the other team a little so long as you throw it in their general direction.


When you manage to throw the ball badly enough that it flies right off the court, and you will do that, you’ll get to see that the extremities of the playing area are rather more visually appealing than the court itself. This beach court, for instance, has a small crowd of rapt sunbathers enjoying the action. Then you look again and realise that the crowd’s proportions are completely different to those of the dodgeball players. The only reasonable explanation is that one of the two groups are not actually human. I’m going with the dodgeball players, because their heads make up eighty percent of their body mass. Not humans, then, but Grey aliens who have come to Earth in disguise so that they may experience this pastime the hu-mans call “dodge-the-ball.” There is further evidence for this scenario later in the game.


The Rabbits managed a nail-biting victory in their first game, triumphing with only one player remaining and that sole player being one hit away from elimination! That’s why she’s white in the screenshot. Players flash when they’re one hit away from elimination, she hasn’t turned into Casper the Friendly Dodgeball Player or anything.


With little fanfare the next match begins, this time against the Dogs. The thing is, one match in Go! Go! Dodge League is almost identical to any other match in Go! Go! Dodge League. You see one team named after but in no way based on an animal from the Chinese zodiac besides maybe their colour scheme, you’ve seen ‘em all. The teams have different sprites in their line-ups – boys, girls, skinny boy, fat boys – but like I say, I never noticed any difference between them. That’s not to say there isn’t a difference between them, but if I played over thirty matches of GGDL and didn’t spot them they must be very minor indeed.


The fourth or so match takes place in outer space, thus confirming my theory about the extraterrestrial origins of the players. The match’s tip-off is facilitated by a traditional Japanese-style alien, too, which is nice. Where we in the West tend to imagine aliens as big-eyed “Grey” type, in Japan they’re often represented by creatures that are basically walking jellyfish with a bit of octopus throw in. If I remember correctly, they’re based on the description of the Martians in War of the Worlds. In videogames, the best example I can think of are the Mars People from the Metal Slug games.


There he is, look, umpiring the match from the sidelines and monitoring the artificial gravity field that allows these two teams to enjoy a dodgeball match that plays exactly as it would under Earth’s gravitational effects. How charming! I wonder if there are any more aliens nearby?


Yes. Yes there are. I think this is what a Space Invader would look like if you got up close. I’m sure our new pixellated overlords will rule our planet with a tentacle that’s firm but fair.


This court has chubby penguins all around it, which measures pretty highly on the ol’ Adorable-O-Meter. I especially like the one that’s peering in from the left. Yeah, the one that looks as though it’s just realised it’s being watched. There’s something about these penguins that looks very Konami-esque, as though they’re related to Penta from the Antarctic Adventure and Parodius games. I mean, I know there’s only so many ways you can draw a cutesy penguin, but they’re definitely got that same look about them.


Less endearing is this sword that the opposition are throwing at my team. That can’t be an accepted part of the rules, can it? It certainly wasn’t mentioned that I’d have deadly blades thrown at me while playing GGDL. I doubt many players would have turned up for this tournament if it had been mentioned. “Dodgeswords” is a very different proposition than “dodgeball.” Admittedly, it’d make the matches more exciting, but it makes it difficult to keep a tournament going if all the players look like a half-finished game of Pop-Up Pirate by the second match.
What’s happening with the sword is that the other team are using their special attack. Every team has one, and they’re all basically the same aside from the object they transform the ball into. In this case it’s a sword. The Rabbits’ special move turns the ball into a floating ring of carrots, which I think we can all agree is distinctly less special than a magic sword. You can perform a special move whenever you like (assuming you’ve got at least two team-mates still active) with no power bar to fill or anything like that. What you do is grab the ball and jump onto the head of a team-mate. Their curiously squishy body will propel you into the air, where you can throw the ball and gasp in wonderment as it turns into a weapon, an animal or a selection of root vegetables. One problem with this system is that there’s no way to tell your team-mates that you’re about to try a special move, and being sensible people they’ll often move out of the way when you try to plant your feet on their skulls. You’ve got no mid-air control of your character once they’ve jumped, either.


Then there’s the special attack itself, which is a strange thing (and not just because, as seen above, the ball is now a presumably very confused sheep). There seem to be different types of special attacks, in two main varieties: one where the ball flies forwards very quickly, and one where the ball floats and hovers around the court in a seemingly random fashion before either trying to land on a player or simply falling to the ground. As with so many aspects of GGDL, I never really managed to determine the mechanics behind this. Some team's attacks do seem to belong to one camp or the other – the sword, for instance, is a more direct attack. Beyond that, however, I could never tell whether my attack was going to confuse the opponent by whirling around them or fly off to a random part of the court. It might be something to do with the timing of when you hit the throw button. I didn’t have much chance to look into that possibility, partly because even lining up the opening head-bounce was a pain but mostly because it didn’t seem worth it. Simply chucking the ball at the other team as hard as possible had a much higher hit rate and took a lot less time to set up.


As I move into the latter stages of the tournament, I have to ask myself the question: am I having fun playing GGDL? The answer is yes, sort of. However, my misgivings aren’t down to the game being bad, per se, but rather that it feels as though it could have been a lot better. The basic ball-dodging and ball-throwing action is solidly decent, but there’s a lot that could have been improved. Take your team-mates that surround the opponent’s half of the court, for instance. You can pass the ball to them, they can collect wayward shots and they can even throw balls at the other team, which is useful in theory… but the fact you only control one character at a time makes it a bit of a pain. If you’re controlling one of the non-active players and, say, you throw the ball at the opposition and they catch it, you have little chance of avoiding the counter-attack because you have to scroll through all six selectable players using the L or R buttons, and it’s slow enough that you probably won’t have time to select an “active” player and move them out of the way. The obvious solution would be to only let you switch between your “active” players and have the ones around the edge move automatically to retrieve any balls that come near them, only giving you control when they’ve actually picked the ball up.


Also, you can catch the ball when someone throws it at you, right? Yes, you can. I’m not sure what determines whether you do catch it, though, adding further mysteries to GGDL’s mechanics. You can press a button to go into a “catching stance” of sorts, but sometimes your characters will simply catch the ball without it. Sometimes they’ll even catch the ball if it’s coming at them from behind, which would give you a distinct advantage if the computer teams couldn’t do it too. Overall, I think it might be a little too easy to catch the ball. This is especially true when you stand right on the half-way line as the CPU runs up to throw, catching the ball and immediately throwing it back before your opponent can react. Often they will do this repeatedly, unable to break through your masterful tactics of getting up in their business. You can also steal the ball from the opposition’s non-active players while they’re passing it around by standing right in front of them. The CPU team never does this. Matches would be a lot more difficult it they did.


And yet, for all these niggles, I’m still enjoying GGDL so the basics must be pretty good. It’s fast, simple action with enough quirks to prevent it becoming too dull too quickly, and while the single player modes are unlikely to keep you interested for long, multiplayer is where GGDL is going to shine. It’s even multitap compatible so up to four players can join in, either as a team or against each other.


The final match of the tournament is against the Elephants, who you might notice were not a team I could select. That’s because the tournament has fifteen matches and there were only nine teams to pick from, so there are a few extra ones that show up. It’s a shame I couldn’t select any of them. I would have definitely picked the Pegasus team.
I’ll be honest, the final match is something of a disappointment. Having matches in space and turning dodgeballs into swords shows that GGDL is hardly aiming for a tone of absolute realism, so for the final encounter to take place on a clay court in a kid’s playground is rather underwhelming. Doing battle on a disintegrating rock floating on the lava of an erupting volcano: that was the kind of thing I was hoping for, not being surrounded by children playing tag.
The Elephants themselves aren’t up to much, either. They seem to be able to knock your players out easier than the other teams, but aside from that they’re the same dodgeball players as ever. It does make you wonder, though: was the team already called the Elephants and their players all being on the chunky side is merely a coincidence, or did they name the team after they’d all gotten together and decided to to just lean into it?


“You Made It!” exclaim the cheerleaders, as they present you with a trophy that is surely far too grand for the winner of a dodgeball tournament. As the confetti falls and the crowd roars their approval, our plucky dodgeball heroes prepare to return to the cosmos that spawned them, content that another planet has been introduced to the majesty of the sport.


So yeah, that’s Go! Go! Dodge League. I had fun with it, but then I tend to enjoy super videogame-ified version of sports. Others will possibly not wrangle as much enjoyment from it as I did. It’s definitely got its flaws, and it’s nowhere as good as titles like Neo Turf Masters or Heavy Smash, but for a simple little dodgeball game with nice presentation, a decent soundtrack and plenty of multiplayer potential, it’ll do for me.

If you didn’t know the Purple Heart is a medal given to US service members who are wounded or killed in action, the title of today’s game would probably seem kinda weird. You’d have to assume it describes the huge stress-induced coronary event that you might well suffer thanks to the game pulse-pounding, non-stop action. Actually, it’s still weird if you do know it’s a medal, because it implies things aren’t going to end well for the game’s heroes. Hmm. Anyway, here’s CRL’s 1988 Commodore 64 military-muscle-men-em-up Purple Heart!

Sirens blare, confetti flutters through the air and party poppers are popped. A banner slowly descends. “CONGRATULATIONS,” it reads, “1,000,000th Piece of Computer Game Artwork Based on an Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Poster!!!”
So, like I said: military muscle men, although they’re nothing to do with the toy line of the same name whose advert I’ve had stuck in my head for well over twenty years now. Someone appears to have shot the game’s logo. How rude.


There’s more Schwarzenegger on the screen that introduces out heroes: Striker, over on the left, has clearly has his portrait copied from the Terminator poster, the shoelace-thin headband hastily added in order to throw off the lawyers. As for Cobra, there’s a decent chance he’s Conan. Not based on Conan, he’s actually Conan, who has awakened in the modern age with his lust for battle completely intact. He’s so keen on military conflict that he somehow managed to fight in both Vietnam and the Falklands.


You’re also shown the weapons that you’ll get to use during your mission. They’re all fairly standard stuff for a military-themed videogame from the eighties. You can tell it’s from the eighties because one of the weapons is an Uzi. Had videogames been the pre-eminent form of popular culture at the time, we’d all consider the Uzi to be as much a symbol of the eighties as we do with shoulder pads, big hair and cocaine.
There’s actually a little scene here where the weapons are introduced one-by-one, and each time one appears a brief sound effect of it firing plays. It’s kinda neat, and it shows a certain amount of, if not ambition, then at least flair.


Here’s your mission briefing, not that you need one. “Shoot everything that isn’t you” would have done the trick much more concisely. It might have been nice to know who I’m fighting against and where all this takes place, but I’m hardly surprised that information isn’t included. Ours is not to reason why, and all that. It’s particularly amusing that you’re advised to “use strategy.” Unless “strategy” is the code-name for a new super-gun that fires a million bullets per second and can only be fired by a man without a shirt on, strategy is unlikely to enter into this game.

And we’re off, charging around and shooting our gun at the many brown-shirted soldiers that are intent on protecting this small hut. So, Purple Heart is a top-down shooter in the manner of Capcom’s Commando (not to be mistaken for Capcom’s Captain Commando) or SNK's Ikari Warriors. There’s nothing so fancy as a rotary joystick in this one, though: you use the stick to move, and you fire in whatever direction you’re facing. You can’t even hold the fire button down to fix your aim in one direction while you move about, which can make some sections rather awkward.


Unusually for the genre, Purple Heart’s first stage takes place in the enemy base. That’s just good tactics, really. If you can take out the enemy’s base right away, you could be home by tea time! Maybe I was too quick to scoff at the uselessness of strategy in this situation.
I’m only a couple of screens in, but I’ve already managed to pick up most of the game’s weapons. They’re just laying around on the floor, you don’t even need to shoot them out of enemies or find them in crates, and that’s good because they all have limited ammo (represented by the green bar in the HUD) and they run out quite quickly. This is not the kind of game where conserving your ammunition is really an option, either.
Of the weapons I’ve used so far, this flamethrower definitely feels like the most useful. Its projectiles can pass through multiple enemies, which is handy, plus they leave a small patch of fire wherever they land that the villains can walk into. The shotgun’s not bad, either, although unlike the wide spread of projectiles you might have been expecting from a videogame shotgun, it actually fires two “rows” of projectiles in a straight line. Some on the design team took the phrase “double-barrelled” a little too literally, I suspect.


And so it goes, the action unfolding in a manner typical of the genre and with little to set it apart from the crowd. You die in one hit, which is to be expected. The opposing troops run around like kids from a nursery that swapped the fruit juice for espresso, firing their guns and throwing grenades with wild abandon, which is also to be expected. Computer game soldiers of the time rarely exhibited much in the way of military tactics. At least they’ve all got guns in this one, half the time in games like this there are a bunch of soldiers attacking you with nothing more technologically advanced than knives. The collision detection has the capricious nature of a romantic poet, often flitting about and offering vague notions when all you want it to do is settle down and give you a solid answer about whether an incoming explosion is going to kill you or not. It’s not good, but in fairness the hit detection in Purple Heart isn’t much worse than in many, many other home computer action games.


It didn’t take long to make it to the first boss: a trio of chaps with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers who are jealously guarding these oil drums, determined that no side-scrolling beat-em-ups will be able to steal them away and hide roast dinners under them. At least, I think there are supposed to be people holding those rocket launchers. Looking at the rest of the game’s bosses suggests this might not be the case, but I can’t help but see the things holding up the rocket launchers as little dudes with teddy boy-style quiffs.
Whatever they are, they shoot rockets at you. Well, cannonballs, really. I think I might have accidentally attacked a Civil War re-enactment society. They fire a lot of cannonballs, too, and the guy in the middle having dual cannons means he can put out so many projectiles that you can’t get past the relentless barrage without losing a life. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “I’ll just take out the two cannoneers I can reach and then deal with the last bloke,” but that’s easier said than done because the cannonballs move so fast that it’s very difficult (and dull, and time-consuming) to dodge between the shots and fire back when you get the chance. Instead, you have to fire diagonally towards the boss. You might think you’re not damaging the boss by doing this, especially because your bullets aren’t actually hitting them but exploding into little firework shapes when they hit the barrel, but you are hitting the boss. Well, you might be. See, the problem is the game doesn’t tell you whether you’re damaging the boss. There’s no health bar, they don’t flash or make a sound effect, nothing, so you end up firing bullets near them until they either “die” or you move to an ever-so-slightly different firing position and repeat the process. As if that tactic wasn’t thrilling enough, it didn’t seem to work at all with the central cannon. To blow that one up, all I could do was stand right in front of it and hammer the fire button, hoping that I’d only lose one or two lives before it exploded. It worked, just about, and that’s how I cleared Purple Heart’s first stage. Spoilers: every boss in the game is like this.


Now Cobra’s in the jungle. He’s just destroyed the enemy base, so I have to assume that he’s actually suffering a Vietnam flashback.
The jungle’s a lot like the first stage, only with more green and brown. Other new inclusions are spikes that rhythmically poke in and out of the ground and small bridges that perform the twin functions of letting you traverse small puddle and giving your character something to get stuck to when the screen scrolling is feeling uncooperative.


Whoever this evil army is, they’ve embraced drone warfare. I’m not sure they had to make the drone look that much like a real helicopter, though. That seems like a wasted effort, unless they’re hoping their foes will think they’re being attack by many distant helicopters instead of teeny-tiny, nearby helicopters.
The problem with these helicopters is the bombs that they drop. If any part of the bomb touches you, you lose a life, even when the bombs are clearly passing over Cobra’s head. This is particularly galling when the grenades the regular troops throw can be walked underneath. No, the only way to avoid this helicopter is to outrun it. Good old Cobra, what a hero. He can destroy whole armies on his tod, he’s faster than an attack helicopter, he rescues puppies from unscrupulous dog breeders and so on and so forth.


He also fights walls. These walls also have large guns attached to them, despite clearly not being big enough to hold artillery, thousands of rounds of ammunition and the crew required to operate them. Yes, the bosses in Purple Heart aren’t exactly thrilling duels of wits or swelling crescendos of martial combat. They’re walls that shoot at you. This one, at least, is far easier than the first boss. Its projectiles are slow enough that you can dodge them and fire back. It’s still boring, but it’s doable without losing all your lives. Don’t lose all your lives, because there’s no continue option and you’ll have to start the game all over again. The game does give you an extra life every time you finish a stage, though, so that’s something.


August, 1944, and the liberation of Paris is almost complete. Cobra has given the Free French the day off. He’ll mop up the remaining Nazis, so don’t worry. I think that’s what’s happening here, anyway. Or rather, I think Cobra thinks that’s what’s happening. I’ve become completely convinced that every stage is this game is actually a delusional fantasy that Cobra is having, imaging himself as the hero of every war of the modern age. That explains why all the enemy soldiers have the well-drilled efficiency of the Chuckle Brothers, and why none of the bosses look like quite like a genuine weapon of war.


Mostly, though, I’d say Purple Heart looks rather good. The graphics are detailed without being overly fussy and the animations are decent. There are a few issues with perspective, but on the whole I like the way it looks. That’s as well-drawn a motorcycle-riding SS officer as I’ve ever seen on the Commodore 64 – it’s just a shame I can’t shoot him. There are some vehicles that drive across the screen at various points, but unfortunately you can’t destroy them. No, vehicles must be avoided at all costs, even when you’re carrying around a rocket launcher. Even if Purple Heart was otherwise a game at the very pinnacle of its genre, it could never be considered a true great because it teases the player with the opportunity to blow up a motorbiking Nazi and then denies them that pleasure.


The boss is a wall with guns on it. Okay, technically being a house it’s four walls with guns on it, but you know what I mean. The goal, as always is to shoot the guns, but apparently the end of this stage is where the game’s creators decided the cut-off point for having fun should be. Cobra’s trapped in that clearing in the trees, right? And there are four guns in front of him. They all fire at once, filling that whole clearing with projectiles, and I am convinced that there is no way to finish this boss fight without losing at least one life and probably more. Once you’ve knocked out a gun or two there’s a safe zone you can stand in, but until then you will be losing a life and that is just incredibly infuriating. I’m totally fine with losing a life if I’m just shit at the game – and it’s bloody good job I am, too – but when there’s no avoiding it it feels like a proper slap in the face. I even tried to look it up afterwards, and as far as I can see no-one else has ever managed to beat this boss without getting hit either, and I suppose it is nice to know it’s not just down to me being rubbish.


Next is the swamp stage, which consists mostly of narrow, rickety wooden bridges and the creeping sense that Purple Heart doesn’t want you to be playing it. A C64 action game being difficult is hardly a huge surprise, but Purple Heart is so obnoxiously difficult – crowded walkways with no room to manoeuvre, unavoidable deaths in boss fights, ropey collision detection – that it becomes impossible to recommend even despite its good points. It does have good points, too: nice graphics, smooth controls and better-than-average screen-scrolling effects amongst them. Like an accidental Viagra overdose, it simply reaches a point where it’s so hard it stops being fun, and if you’re after an arcade style-shooter whose difficulty level forces you into a gameplay style of cautious tiptoeing and rote memorisation, there are better examples to spend your time with.


When I briefly discussed the collectable weapons Cobra can use, I neglected to mention the rocket launcher. That’s because it works differently than the other weapons: rather than firing a series of projectiles, it fires one big rocket that explodes. The explosion creates a spinning bar of fire, like a top-down version of the ones in Bowser’s castle, wherever it lands, and it spins around immolating any enemy soldiers it touches. It sounds neat, and it does have its uses… but you can only have one explosion on screen at a time and you can’t fire another rocket until it’s dissipated, so if you miss, you’re screwed. The other interesting thing about the rocket launcher’s explosions is that their position is relative to Cobra’s position. If your rocket lands, for example, thirty pixels to Cobra’s left, it will always be thirty pixels to Cobra’s left even if Cobra moves. This means that you can fire a rocket and then run away, “dragging” the explosion along with you, which is a much more interesting concept for a weapon than the same tired old rocket launcher.


There’s also a section in this stage based on the queuing system at Primark, except less grim. I kid, I kid. Primark is a perfectly fine store, and especially useful for us slovenly types who are looking for a shopping experience where the clothes are cheap enough that we don’t have to bother trying them on.


This stage’s boss is a tank, as drawn by someone who’s never seen a tank and had only heard them described by an excited child. “That’s not a wall with guns,” you might say, but you’d be wrong. That’s exactly what it is. It certainly doesn’t move around or anything, and despite being a tank it can still be destroyed by shotgun fire. It’s mechanically identical to the second boss, in fact. Man, what a dumb-looking tank.


This stage is called the Icelands. That’s pretty accurate, I suppose. It’s got ice, it’s got land. Against, I’d sticking to my statement that Purple Heart looks pretty darn nice, and this simple yet effective scene of Arctic tundra is probably my favourite-looking bit of the game.


The Icelands, however, do not make it easy. There are too many extremely well-guarded cottages for that to be the case. That said, I think it’s a bit easier than the last stage even if having the enemies fire their white bullets over a pale grey background is the kind of decision that should have had someone shouting “what? No, don’t be stupid” during the planning stages. There’s also no word on whether mums go to the Icelands. Thank you, thank you, this has been the paragraph where I make references to the advertising slogans of a budget frozen food store. I apologise if you came here looking for actual jokes.


If nothing else, I can give Purple Heart credit for being the only game ever in which I’ve been killed by a hostile skiing chalet.


This is the sixth and final stage: Pierworld. Okay, so the game simply calls it “The Final Conflict” but it is definitely pier-heavy. Lots of piers, in various stages of disrepair. Some are wide and spacious, others have rotted away and crumbled despite still being able to withstand multiple grenades being throw at them. This means there are some parts of the pier where Cobra can come into contact with the water. Naturally, doing so immediately costs him a life, which makes negotiating the twisty-turny ruins of the piers even slower and more plodding than the rest of the game.


On the plus side, all the bad guys seem to have shoulderpads, sunglasses, quiffs and mohawks, so Cobra’s military fantasies must have evolved beyond the real world and now he’s imagining himself as a fighter for justice in a lawless post-apocalyptic future where evil men will do whatever it takes to control the world’s jetties and wharfs.


The final boss, ladies and gentlemen. The hat of some gargantuan underwater priest, rising up through the waves to shoot at Cobra with the four cannons attached to its brim. What else can I say about a boss I’ve already fought five times? Apart from that this is shittiest-looking one of them all, I mean? Obviously by this point Purple Heart’s difficulty level has forced me to cheat my way to infinite lives, so it’s not like I spent a lot of time figuring out a valid battle plan here. I suspect there isn’t one. You’ll just have to hope you’ve got enough lives left to outlive the boss.


Purple Heart draws to a close with this image of Cobra being awarded some medals. It’s not much of an ending, but it’s more of an ending than most C64 games have, so I’ll take it. The best thing about it is that Cobra’s clearly pissed off at being forced to wear a shirt. The only reason he put it one is so they’d have somewhere to pin his medals. He wouldn’t have minded having them thrust directly into his flesh, but no-one was strong enough to force the pin into the steel boulders that are Cobra’s pectoral muscles.
Purple Heart is a game that tries to be good, and for that it should be applauded. Many of its technical aspects are impressive, it has a co-operative two-player mode and sometimes-dodgy hit detection aside it plays as well or better than most other C64 games in the genre. It is a shame, then, that the bosses are about as interesting as a boiled rice sandwich and the game’s difficulty level is frustrating enough to make you want to stop playing. It’s a case of close but no cigar, then, but at least I managed to get into a fight with a chalet. That was a new one.

For today’s article, I’ve turned to the Sega Master System for a tale of cybernetically-enhanced warriors – and one chunky bloke with no shirt – who must fight to prove their strength. One of them might even accidentally save the world. It’s SIMS and Sega’s 1993 fighting game Masters of Combat!

Is it just me, or is that a very SNK-looking logo? I could definitely see that typeface appearing on a Neo Geo brawler. But this isn’t the Neo Geo, it’s the Master System, which might cause you to worry about this game’s quality. I think it’s fair to say that one-on-one fighting games for 8-bit consoles are not always entirely successful, to put it kindly. Sometimes it’s down to the consoles lacking the power to smoothly manipulate large, detailed sprites, sometimes it’s because they were released before Street Fighter II reinvented the genre, sometimes it’s because they’re bootleg hack-jobs starring Super Mario characters. Well, I’m happy to announce that Masters of Combat avoids most of those pitfalls and turns out to be a rather enjoyable game. I know, I was as surprised as you are. We’ll get into the gameplay later, but for now let’s set the scene.


I think “landed” is a very generous word to use in this context. “Fell screaming from the heavens and slammed into the Earth, burning and out of control” is more the vibe I’m getting from this artwork.
So, a UFO “lands” near Megalo City, but when people go to investigate no trace of it can be found. Fortunately, the city’s mayor has a plan to distract the populace from these events and maintain civic order.


The fact that this plan took a year to come into force shows that SIMS really understood the tangled bureaucracy of governmental process. This is why every city should have a Mike Haggar in charge. He would never have waited a year, he’d be straight up to the landing site with a plan in mind. Sure, his plan would be “take off his shirt and punch anyone who looks at him funny,” but the voting public loves politicians who take bold, decisive action.
That’s the set-up for the fighting tournament, then. A UFO may or may not have landed nearby, and a year later the mayor declares a round of public bloodsport. I’m sure these two events are in no way related.


Is it that he has no eyes? Probably not, that’s an unfortunate medical condition but it’s not “dreadful.” Whatever his secret is, I’m sure we’ll uncover it as we punch our way through the colourful cast of characters that Masters of Combat has to offer.


Here are those characters. There are only four to choose from, which isn’t many, but hopefully it’ll mean they all feel unique rather than being Ryu / Ken / Akuma / Evil Ryu / Violent Ken / Slightly Under The Weather Akuma / Ryu, But With A Hat types. Their names are, from left to right, Hayate, Gonzales, Highvoltman and Wingberger. None of them have eyes, either. Especially not Gonzales, who looks like a baker formed his eye-holes by pressing their thumbs into a head-shaped lump of fresh dough.


Let’s take a look at Hayate first, because he was on the left of the character select screen. He’s most certainly a ninja, and presumably a cyborg ninja because pretty much everything else in this game has a cyberpunk feel to it. He can throw energy shurikens, and that’s cyberpunk enough for me. Of the four characters, Hayate is the least interesting and the easiest to play as, cementing his role as the Ryu of the game. He seems to have more special moves than all the other characters, for starters: he can throw either one or two shurikens, he’s got a rising vertical elbow attack, a big swing with his katana and a couple of horizontal multi-hit rush attacks. All in all, Hayate seems like the complete package (and he’s fast, too,) so if you’re playing Masters of Combat for the first time he’s a good choice.


Next up is Gonzales, a rebel, a man who takes his own path in life, a man who saw that he’d be kicking robot men and thought “I’m still not going to put any shoes on.” Gonzales is obviously geared towards strength, for one can only get away with wearing purple trousers and matching wrist guards if they are truly powerful. As you might expect from his appearance, Gonzales has the feel of a professional wrestler to him, with body slams, a jumping drop-kick and a flying belly press that underlines his similarity to Karnov at his disposal. Gonzales’ big quirk is that most of his special moves have a delay at the beginning – for example, when you use his charging punch rush he beats his chest before attacking – so to use him effectively you’ve got to have a good knowledge of these various timings. A more technical character than Hayate, then, but also more interesting and fun to use.


I also absolutely love Gonzales’ crouching stance, because it looks like his body is collapsing into itself due to the powerful gravitational effects of his bulk.


Fighter number three, and probably my favourite of the bunch, is Highvoltman. Admittedly this is due in part to his excellent name, a name which prompted a lot of highly enjoyable speculation as to how he chose it. I can only assume that he chose the name “Voltman” at first to complement his electric powers, but then realised that “volt” alone did not convey the furious power of his electrified attacks and it needed a bit more oomph. Either that, or he gained his powers and his compulsive need to fight people after a terrible accident in which he drunkenly pissed on a high voltage cable on his way home from the pub.
Highvoltman doesn’t really fit into a neat fighting game character pigeonhole, and his attacks are a mix of various styles. He has a projectile attack, which comes out very quickly but is also not that powerful and more useful as an annoyance than anything else, but he’s also got a devastating electric punch with a very short range. Like I say, he’s a mixed bag.


Highvoltman has also mastered one of the all-time best fighting game moves I’ve ever seen, in the form of his jumping flip kick. You can see him performing it in the screenshot above. I know it looks like he’s been hit in mid air and is flying backwards but no, it’s supposed to look like that. When you perform the flip kick, Highvoltman leaps into the air with balletic grace, looking for all the world like someone who truly intends to do a flip kick… but then halfway through he stops rotating, contorts into the stance shown above and falls from the sky, landing flat on his back in a manner that seems like it should have a fifty-fifty chance of ending in quadriplegia. The first time I saw it I assumed I’d done something wrong, but no, that’s how the flip kick is actually intended to work. How remarkable. Obviously I used it almost exclusively after I figured this out.


Finally there’s Wingberger, a mechanical man with a welder’s mask for a face and the name of a preppy, upper-crust villain from a high school comedy. As you can see above, Wingberger’s main deal is that he’s got Dhalsim-style extending limbs… although they’re not quite as effective as those belonging to everyone’s favourite yoga master. They don’t stretch that far, and the smaller character sprites (and consequently the large playing area) mean that you’re not going to be kicking your opponent from the opposite corner of the battlefield. Still, they are very useful, especially when employed as a jumping kick.


Perhaps to counterbalance the advantages of having telescopic limbs, Wingberger has fewer special moves than the other characters. He’s got a couple of diving attacks, but best of all he has a mega-cannon that’s so powerful it knocks Wingberger over when he fires it. This makes it especially embarrassing when you fire your cannon and the other player easily blocks it before running over to you while you flop around on the floor like a freshly-landed halibut.


When it comes to playing Masters of Combat, you’ve got two modes: regular old versus battles, and the story / arcade mode. I’m going to run through the arcade mode now, because I will not be satisfied until I find out what the mayor’s evil plan is. I suspect it won’t be about voter fraud or financial mismanagement. I decided to play as Highvoltman, because his name is Highvoltman. My first battle was against, erm, Highvoltman. This means that Highvoltman’s pre-fight trash talk about fighting weak opponents transforms into what I believe the youngsters call a “self-own.”


Good lord, I love that flip kick.
Just by looking at Masters of Combat, you’ll get a good idea of the basic set-up. You hit each other until someone’s health bar runs out, it’s the best of three rounds, that kind of thing. If you’ve played any other fighting games, the same basic concepts apply here. Masters of Combat isn’t a combo-heavy game, so focussing on timing and reacting to mistakes made by the computer are important parts of your march towards victory. In this case, I capitalised on Highvoltman’s mistaken belief that I wouldn’t embarrass myself by repeatedly flopping around using the flip kick. I also used the throw a lot, which works in the usual “get close enough to feel the almost erotic sensation of your opponent’s hot breath on your neck and then press attack” manner. A few flip kicks, a few throws and the occasional projectile launched towards clone-Highvoltman’s face whenever he ran towards me – that was all I needed to seal victory.


“I’ll accept any fighter’s challenge, even if that fighter is me but painted green. Especially if it’s me painted green. There can be only one Highvoltman.”


Fight number two is against Wingberger, who continues the game’s theme of unconvincing pre-fight banter by seemly implying that he’s the worst.


While the basic structure of Masters of Combat is the same as most other one-on-one fighters, when it comes to the controls things get a bit different. The most obvious example of this is that Masters of Combat has one single button dedicated to attacking. That’s it. No light, medium and fierce attacks here: you’ve got a button to punch and kick, and you’ll punch or kick when you press it with the move determined by your character, their position and what direction you’re pressing on the d-pad at the time. For example, Wingberger’s extending kicks are unleashed by pressing the d-pad towards your opponent while you attack. This almost gives MoC’s controls the feel of a “classic” Commodore 64 (or other home computer) control scheme, although thankfully MoC controls far better than any C64 fighting game I’ve ever played.


“But the Master System pad has two buttons,” you might be thinking, “so what does the other one do?” Well, it’s jump, mostly. That’s right, unlike you Street Fighters or your King of Fighterses or what have you, up on the d-pad isn’t jump. I must admit, this took quite some getting used to, but it’s worth it because MoC also uses the jump button for other things. Hold up / up-left / up-right on the pad while you press jump and you’ll, you know, jump. However, left or right and “jump” will make your character dash either forwards or backwards, and down and “jump” will make them slide along the floor. This system is pretty great, and goes a long way to both making MoC’s combat faster and more unique. The dashes work well offensively and defensively, allowing you to scoot out of the way of incoming attacks and punish misses, as well as keeping the pace of the combat up when the widely-spaced combat area might otherwise promote few tactics beyond spamming projectiles.


After stage two, you get a Street Fighter II-inspired – rip-off, I mean – bonus round where you punch a forklift until it explodes. Why? Why the hell not. Maybe the accident that transformed Highvoltman into the warrior he is today happened while he was working a menial warehouse job and the bitterness has stayed with him.
Unlike the car-punching round in Street Fighter II, the forklift can be damaged simply by standing there and punching it. I didn’t do that. I used the flip kick, of course. Well, I wouldn’t want to get rusty during this enforced break.


Hayate’s up next. His stage is some kind of cyberpunk temple and it looks great, as does so much of MoC. The graphics are definitely one of the game’s strong points, with lots of colour and fun, fluid animation that’s detailed enough to give each character a feeling of individuality. There’s some sprite flicker, which is less good, and once or twice it got bad enough that I had trouble seeing projectiles heading towards me, but for the most part it’s not a problem and overall MoC is one of the most visually impressive games I can remember playing on the Master System.


And now, Gonzales hurls himself into the fray, hoping his considerable girth will be enough to overcome Highvoltman’s electric fists. It turns out his hopes were well-placed, because Gonzales proceeded to kick my ass multiple times while I struggled to land a blow on him. Every time I went near Gonzales, he grabbed me and performed an Atomic Drop of such ferocity that Highvoltman’s tailbone assumed a new name, left home, relocated up to his chest and started a new life as a rib. If I stayed away, all I could do was flick Highvoltman’s underpowered projectiles at Gonzales, which was akin to farting at a charging rhino.


At least I could get Highvoltman’s projectile attack to come out with some regularity, which is not true of all the moves in the game. While the special moves in MoC are executed in roughly the same manner as they are in most fighting games – a series of directional inputs followed by a button press – things work a little differently here thanks to the control scheme. Jumping is controlled by a button rather than with up on the d-pad, which frees up the top of the d-pad for use in special move inputs. For example, the command for Highvoltman’s high projectile is up-back, up-towards then attack. After years of Street Fighter and other similar series this took quite a lot of mental adjustment to get used to, both my brain and my fingers having decided that to throw a projectile I should do a “classic” fireball motion and to hell with what the game’s actual controls are. If it was just a case of learning new controller inputs it wouldn’t be so bad, but sadly even when you’re hitting the right combinations there’s no guarantee you’re going to get the result you want. MoC seems extremely fussy about what counts as a “correct” input and frequently – far more than the usual amount that comes from me being bad at videogames – moves just won’t come out when you want them to. The small roster of characters has a decent claim on this title, but I’m going to go ahead and say that the awkwardness of the special moves is the worst thing about Masters of Combat, a game that is otherwise very impressive.


Having eventually managed to beat Gonzales with a combination of jumping kicks and blind luck, the four playable fighters have all been defeated. But wait! They mayor has decided he’s going to get rowdy too. I guess he got caught up in all the excitement. Normally I’d say the mayor’s sudden desire for pugilism springs from the same source as the bloke in the pub who swears he could go a round against the world heavyweight champ despite being an overweight borderline diabetic, but let’s not forget that the mayor has a terrible secret.


The other thing that surprised the citizens was that the mayor burst into flames. He looks pretty happy about it, too. Happier than when he wasn’t on fire, even. That’s definitely not normal.


Surprise surprise, it turns out that the mayor was possessed by an alien. Presumably it’s the alien that landed a year ago, but we have no hard evidence of that. This could be a totally unconnected puppeteer of human flesh from beyond the stars.
The alien set up the fighting tournament so it could locate the strongest human body for it to inhabit. This plan has one large, obvious flaw: the strongest, toughest, most fightingest person is now standing right in front of you as you reveal your plan to steal their body. They're probably not going to acquiesce to that, are they? Think it through, you plum. This also implies that you think you’re stronger than the strongest human, Mr. Alien, which begs the question why do you want a strong human body? If you just wanted to blend in with human society you could pick any human body, and if all you care about is carnage then you might as well just be your natural alien self. The only explanation I can think of is that the alien has travelled across the galaxy to fulfil his one and only desire: to win an Olympic gold medal for weightlifting.


No eyes, elongated head, lived inside a human for a while: yep, I think we can safely say we’ve found another videogame alien inspired by H. R. Giger’s xenomorph.


The Alien looks a lot less like a xenomorph when you see it in full, though. This is mostly because of the wings. Xenomorphs don’t have wings, except in the Aliens toy line. The Aliens toy line also included a praying mantis-based xenomorph, and when you consider the impracticalities of getting a facehugger to attach to a praying mantis I think we can safely discount the toy line from the Aliens canon. They also don’t tuck themselves into a ball and roll at you like Sonic the Hedgehog, which is the boss’ favourite trick. It can even scuttle up the walls and roll from different heights, so get ready to duck if it looks like that’s going to happen.
As fighting game bosses go, The Alien offers an enjoyable level of challenge, a level that the bosses of other punch-em-ups can sometimes miss completely. The Alien’s a more dangerous foe than the other fighters, because it’s faster and more powerful, but it never sinks to “SNK boss” standards of frustrating bullshit. You can outfight The Alien, given enough practise. You’ll probably get beat the first few times, which could have been a problem because MoC only gives the player a small amount of continues – but because there are only four other fighters, it doesn’t take long to get back to the climactic battle.


Of course, the final battle is good because Masters of Combat is, on the whole, a very good game. Okay, so it’s a very good game for a one-on-one fighter on an 8-bit console, at least. Aside from the lack of characters and the occasionally stubborn special move inputs, there really aren’t many negatives. The presentation is good, with excellent graphics and a soundtrack that’s not quite as impressive but still never dips below “decent.” The action is fast and smooth, the dash mechanic keeps things fluid and gives MoC’s combat its own personality. There’s a character called Highvoltman. it’s a game with a lot to recommend it, then, and if it had been released before Street Fighter II (and had it been released in the US at all, which supposedly it wasn’t) it would probably be remembered as a minor classic. However, MoC couldn’t have come out before Street Fighter II, because it is based so heavily on Capcom’s classic, so I suppose that’s a moot point.


In the end, I defeated The Alien through the simple, practical method of learning his attacks and good old-fashioned practise, which is about the most satisfying way a fighting game can end. As Highvoltman looks out over the city he has saved – an ending that’s the same for every character, disappointingly – I’m left to reflect on a game I enjoyed more than I was expecting to. It’s not that impressive when compared to modern fighting games, or even fighting games of the same time period that ran on more powerful hardware, but Masters of Combat is a game I’m glad to have played. If nothing else, Highvoltman’s flip kick is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

It’s no secret that I absolutely love OutRun and consider it about as close to a “perfect” videogame as you’re ever likely to get. Well, it looks like someone at Taito felt the same, because in 1987 they released their very own game about a red sports car driving across America as quickly as possible: it’s the 1987 arcade not-quite-a-Magical-Sound-Shower-em-up Full Throttle, also known as Top Speed!



Seems like it’s called Full Throttle in Japan and Top Speed elsewhere – presumably the name was changed thanks to the existence of the ZX Spectrum / MSX motorcycle racer Full Throttle– but either name is perfectly appropriate for this, a racing game with no brake button. Not that you’d want to use a brake button. If you need to slow down, you can just let go of the accelerator or, if you’re me, crash into every god-damned car on the road.


With very little preamble, Full Throttle chucks the player head-first into the thrilling world of driving like an absolute maniac. Let’s be clear about this right from the get-go: Full Throttle is very much a copy of OutRun. There is no subtlety about it. You race your sports car (a red car, naturally) along various streets, trying to reach the checkpoints before your time runs out. Traffic gets in your way. The 3-D effect of the graphics are handled with sprite-scaling technology. At the end of each stage, the road splits into two routes, left or right, and you can choose which way you want to go. So, it’s OutRun, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Far from it. What could be better than more OutRun? We’ll just have to hope that Full Throttle manages to capture the essence of OutRun’s gameplay.


Here’s one thing Full Throttle has that OutRun doesn’t: nitrous oxide. Three times per stage, you can press a button for a speed boost. During the first stage, the game works very hard to make sure you don’t forget this. “USE NITRO” is a bit blunt, though. Couldn’t you have gone with “NITRO O.K!” or something? It's coming across as rather bossy.


Look, Full Throttle, am I driving this car or are you? If OutRun had nitro boosts, it would never have badgered me to use them. Yes, I know you’re only trying to help. You’re right, the road is nice and straight here and is thus a suitable place to use my nitro. Okay, fine, I will use my nitro.


I feel betrayed.
The nitro boost is a welcome addition, though, It helps differentiate Full Throttle from OutRun at least a little, and if I’m going to be crashing anyway I might as well do it at two hundred miles per hour rather than one hundred.


After a short and simple first stage spent rushing though the city streets, our driver finds himself only 72 miles away from Los Angeles. Los Angels, sorry. Now comes the time to make a decision about which route to take, although honestly there didn’t seem to be much difference between them. Neither path felt more or less difficult than the other, and there’s no branching tree of routes: you pick left or right at the start of each stage, but they merge together at the end rather than fanning out. This means you’re always heading towards the same goal, rather than the five different goals of a certain Sega-developed arcade driving game.


As you can see from the map screen, several of the stages also have a left / right choice within the stage, which adds some replayability – although honestly, I always seemed to end up taking whatever side of the split I happened to be nearest to as I weaved my way through the traffic. Like I say, there’s not much to choose between the routes. If you look at stage five, for instance, you can see that your choice is between “desert” and “desert with a couple of trees.”


None of Full Throttle’s quirks and foibles matter much if the actual racing part is good, and I’m happy to report that it is. It’s definitely fast, I’ll give it that, particularly when you’re nitro boosting. Roadside obstacles and other vehicles are smoothly scaled, and they fly by quickly enough to provide a real sensation of speed. Your car’s handling is pretty good for the most part, too. When you’re moving left or right but not going around a corner – when you’re jinking to avoid traffic, that kind of movement – your car can feel a little floaty, like it’s simply sliding from side-to-side rather than actually turning. That lack of resistance takes a little getting used to, but once you are used to it Full Throttle offers an uncomplicated, high-speed, obstacle-dodging driving experience that feels about as much like the platonic ideal of an “arcade racer” as you’re likely to find.


The course designs don’t feature anything especially innovative or unexpected, but they do provide plenty of twisty-turny roads for you to slide around on like a madman and really, that’s all you need: simply staying on the road and out of a multi-car pile-up is enough to keep you engaged. Speaking of the other cars, they feel bit more like other regular road users than in OutRun, where the CPU vehicles always gave the impression they were trying to get in your way on purpose so they could claim on their insurance. I’d say Full Throttle isn’t as difficult as OutRun, overall. OutRun can still be quite challenging even if you turn the difficulty down, but on lower levels Full Throttle is easy enough to finish even for a relative novice.


There are a couple of things in the environment that give Full Throttle a little more spark, too. I’m very fond of the various billboards that line the roads: while the billboards in 1980s arcade games are almost always fun to look at – and almost always either advertising another of the company’s games or being hastily-altered versions of the Marlboro and Coke logos – there are some particularly good ones in Full Throttle. The roadside trees make a rustling noise if you drive right underneath their branches, which is a pleasing little touch which also helps sell the idea that you’re driving really fast. I like the tunnels, too: a fun visual change that forces you to make sure you’re actually on the road rather than skidding around on the hard shoulder when you reach the entrance, but short enough that they don’t overstay their welcome. I especially enjoy the tunnels because I once managed to completely miss the entrance and slam into the wall with such force that the game momentarily had no idea what the hell was going on, its programming unequipped to deal with someone being so bad at the game. My car eventually vanished and then reappeared on the road, so happily it all worked out.


It’s not all good news for Full Throttle, though, and despite its little flourishes it still feels just a touch bland when compared to OutRun. Yes, I know I’ve done nothing but compare this game to OutRun but if Taito didn’t want those comparison to be made then they shouldn’t have copied OutRun so thoroughly. Anyway, compare this beachside scene to the opening stage of OutRun. It’s technically fine, and the sunset sky is nice, but it feels ever so slightly barren next to OutRun. Maybe part of that is down to having seen it before – racing a red sports car along a beach is something that’s already been done, even if this one is set at sunset.


The most striking example of this blandness comes up when you reach the goal. No adoring crowds, no celebrations, no fun – just the same old metal scaffolding you’ve been driving under for the whole game, only it’s standing in a muddy brown field and there’s a “GOAL” banner draped over it. It hardly feels like a reward, does it? In fact, what is feels like is that there was a circus here recently and they forgot to take the goal sign with them when they packed up and moved on. Seriously, I’m looking at this screenshot and hearing Nick Cave’s “The Carny” in my head. Maybe it’s because the yellow sky and baked earth make it look like Australia.


Before we get to the goal, let’s head back and look at a few of those billboards I mentioned earlier. First up is this advertisement for “Manhattan Vice,” which I assume is a CSI: NY-style spin-off of Miami Vice. It’s an appropriate image, because in 1988 Taito fused the high-octane buddy-cop action of Miami Vice with the equally high-octane arcade driving of Full Throttle to create Chase HQ, a game that’s markedly more fun than Full Throttle itself. This is due in no small part to Chase HQ feeling far less like a shameless rip-off of OutRun.


There’s also an ad for Operation Wolf, Taito’s own military-themed shoot-em-up. Nothing much to say about this one, it’s just the Operation Wolf title screen on a billboard. Seeing it does take me back to a time a) when arcades still existed in Britain, and b) when Operation Wolf was seemingly to be found in every arcade. I can’t think of many games you’d see more often in arcades / leisure centres / at the seaside than Operation Wolf. Not until Street Fighter II came out anyway. And hey, you know what gun you use in Operation Wolf?


Why, that enduring icon of the 1980s, the Uzi, of course! I’m British, so the idea of just being able to buy a machine gun is completely baffling and thus this billboard seemed a bit weird, but then I noticed it says “air soft gun” and that just makes it more weird. Who spends the money to erect a series of billboards, spaced ten feet apart along an entire highway, just to advertise a toy gun?


Here’s another advert, this time for Taito’s trampoline-bouncing arcade game Plump Pop. It’s pretty cute, sure, but I only really mention it because I want to believe that Plump Pop’s working title was Fat Dad.


When you finally do reach the goal, your driver exits his car and lights up a cigarette. Remember, kids: smoking isn’t cool, it’s totally for fools, etc, etc. Mind you, if I’d been blasting through cross-country traffic at these ridiculous speeds, I’d need the warm, relaxing embrace of nicotine too.


“Bravest” might be giving my actions a gravitas they do not deserve. “Driver least concerned with the safety of themselves and others” would be a better bet.
As the credits roll, the rather good ending theme plays and Full Throttle / Top Speed comes to a close, I’m left to reflect on the game that was Taito’s answer to OutRun. Of course, the question was “can we improve on OutRun” and sadly the answer was “no, not really.” It’s a little less interesting, a little less precise and the soundtrack is good but nearly as good as OutRun’s (although few game soundtracks are). That certainly doesn’t make it a bad game, though. You can enjoy a tasty burger even after eating a steak, and that’s what Full Throttle is: a real hamburger of a game. Fast, uncomplicated, not the most nutritious but enjoyable while it lasts – but unlike some burgers I’ve had (late night, post-pub ones, usually) I didn’t regret the experience. Full Throttle is a fun game that’s not quite as good as OutRun. Personal bias? No, I’m stating that as a fact. A man’s got to take a stand somewhere, you know?