oday’s article is one of those where I started writing it and then thought “is anybody going to be interested in this? Am I even interested in this?” In the end I decided that I am interested in it, just about, but a more important motivational factor was that I’d already played the game and I wasn’t about to let that ordeal go to waste. So here it is – the 1986 ZX Spectrum game Magic Land of Landlords!


I’ll be honest, I picked this game because of that title. Magic Land of Landlords? It offers so many possibilities. Is it a Valhalla for property owners, where they all sit around drinking mead and exchanging tales of how it took them six months to fix their tenants’ faulty boiler? I’m going to assume it is, a fantastical realm where the rent cheques are never late and you always get to keep the security deposit. But what type of game could hide behind that title? A Monopoly-style property acquisition game, perhaps, although I’m not sure you can, like, own magic land, maaan. Or maybe it’ll be a block-stacking puzzle game, where you have to figure out how many bedrooms you can cram into a student housing property before environmental health come around for a chat.


Sadly, there’s so such imagination on display and MLOLL is a flick-screen side-scrolling platformer starring a wizard. A wizard that looks a lot like a Black Mage from a Final Fantasy game, actually (although this game predates Final Fantasy). A Black Mage with spinal problems and pillow shoved up the front of his robe, sure, but the resemblance is definitely there.
The wizard must reach the other side of the screen to progress, naturally, but barring his path are a floating skull and a blue thing on the ground that I think is supposed to be a hole. Possibly it’s a discarded pizza. It’s deadly to the touch, whatever it is. So is the skull. I’m not sure why contact with the skull is lethal. After all, we’re all touching a skull all the time and it doesn’t kill us, and the skull’s not flying at a high enough speed for it to be death by bludgeoning. I know wizards are supposed to be physically weaker than other classes, but this is taking it too far. We’ll just have to assume it’s a magic skull, what with it flying and being in Magic Land and all.


To get past the hole I’m going to have to jump over it, which is unfortunate because MLOLL's jumping physics are… not good. I’ve had to wrestle with worse when playing other Spectrum games, but MLOLL suffers from that common Spectrum problem of the jumping feeling very choppy, as though you’re moving upwards in a series of small increments rather than along a smooth curve. Couple that with the amount of precise jumps you need to make to get anywhere in this game, and the fact that it’s hard to judge exactly how far you’re going to leap, and you’ve got a recipe for a frustrating (if not atypical for a Spectrum platformer) landlording experience.
I did, eventually and at the cost of two of the wizard’s three lives, make it past the skull and over the hole, rushing headlong into the exciting mystery of screen two…


...where I let the edge of my robe brush up against a hole and promptly died. Good job, wizard, if you even are a wizard and not a collection of easily-startled goldfish with weak hearts who have all crammed into a wizard’s robes in an attempt to explore the surface world.


I persevered, and made it between the holes, basking in the safety of the screen's perineum. Yes, the thing on the right is another hole, but it’s one you can fall through to reach another screen rather than being instant death. I wish the developer had made the distinction clearer. You know, made it look like a hole that leads somewhere rather than a depression in the floor or perhaps a very large coin. Then I might not have spent so much time avoiding these holes and thus missing out on the caves below.


There are also balloons that can carry the wizard up to the clouds. Of all the ways for a wizard to fly, a balloon seems disappointingly prosaic. Could he not have hopped on a dragon or a giant eagle? Or, I dunno, used magic? Okay, so we can scratch that last one. Despite being dressed as a wizard, your character appears to possess no magical skills whatsoever. All you can do – or at least, all I figured out how to do – in MLOLL is jump. I tried everything I could think of, but the wizard resolutely refused to do anything but jump, walk left and right and die the moment anything so much as caused his robe to flutter slightly.


Here we are, wandering around in the clouds. Maybe the wizard does have some magic, then. I don’t think you can walk on clouds otherwise. The first thing that happened when I got up here was an attack by a crawling speech bubble. He looks a lot happier to see me than I am to see him, possibly because the speech bubble knows he doesn't have to contend with the game's jumping controls.


More clouds, more balloons and a blue… thing. A disembodied head wearing a balaclava. Or perhaps, judging by the curvature of its back, another wizard who was bashed so hard on the noggin that his head retracted into his chest cavity. Whatever it is, I’d like to jump over it and move on to the right, but unfortunately every bloody time I tried to do this I ended up accidentally touching the balloon and travelling upwards. MLOLL has a real problem with the cramped and cluttered positions of items, enemies and hazards. I suppose it was aiming for a “pixel-perfect jumping required” kind of feel, but it ends up being a right pain in the arse. Making it difficult to avoid enemies is fine, but making it difficult to move between screens in the direction you want is just bad.


A little further in, the floating head of a witch attacks by dropping squares on the wizard. You might notice that this has bugger all to do with landlords. Magical Land of the Ineffectual Wizard would be a better title for this game, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I did manage to pick up this Omega symbol while I was over here, however. I’m not entirely sure what it does, mind you. I think it might have something to do with the candle on the right, which acts as a time limit as it slowly melts away while you play. I found a few other things while I was exploring, too. There’s a mushroom to pick up on the first screen, for instance, extra lives and even a key here or there. The thing is, I have no idea what they do, either. Okay, apart from the extra lives, even I managed to figure that one out. I certainly didn’t find any doors that looked as though they needed a key, though, and that mushroom remained thrust deep inside my wizard robes for the duration of my adventure, never to be used. Maybe the game ends when the wizard cooks a nice risotto for the final boss or something, but I never managed to get that far.


Into the caves now, where the wizard must negotiate the dangling spiders (fairly adorable) to reach that one-up (also adorable). So, MLOLL gets some points for having that occasional sprite that made me think “aww, that’s kinda nice.” I'm sure those spiders would be blushing if they weren't made of eight monochrome pixels.


These bats do not contribute to the cuteness. I’m not even sure they’re bats. They look more like a set of lungs connected by a trachea. That explains why they’re blue, they can’t get any air into themselves without a diaphragm.


At this point, I’m just wandering around without a clue what’s going on. I picked up a key! I jumped over some monsters! I died a lot, but I’d started using a cheat for infinite lives so that was less of an issue than it used to be – although you get moved back to the entrance of the screen when you die, so it’s still entirely possible to get completely stuck.


Like here, for example. I dropped into this cave, and I couldn’t get out. The only exit is to the right, but as far as I can tell there is simply no way you can jump over the spikes and avoid the spiders and the floating lungs. There’s just physically not enough room for you to get through – the wizard is kind of a chunky sort – without touching something, and touching something means death, and death means re-appearing back on the left of the screen so you can’t force your way through. If I’m on this screen, I ain’t getting out. Now, I tried a lot of things to escape, various key combinations and jumping angles and what have you. I feel satisfied that I exhausted all the possibilities available to me. However, I will also admit that there’s a chance I’m missing something, maybe even something very obvious. A way to use some goddamn magic powers you absolute shit-wizard, even. If you do know of a way to do anything in this game besides jump, please let me know. Feel free to really come at me with it, too. Be as harsh as you like as you explain the very basic concepts of this game that I was unable to grasp. Don’t worry, I just spent several hours trying to play MLOLL, you’re not going to make me feel any more stupid than I already do.


Having been forced to start the whole game again, I avoided the inescapable cave and made my way over to the right where some kind of castle awaits. Finally, a building! There’s got to be a landlord around here somewhere, right? That part of the game’s title has been sorely lacking thus far. I’ve got a key and everything, I’ll just hop over those spikes and run for the door! Well, I’ll jump over the spikes eventually, once I’ve had five or six failed attempts where the spider lightly brushed my hat.


You! Over there! The indistinct lump of blue pixels! Are you a landlord? Who owns this castle? What are they charging for rent? Whatever it is, it’s too much. There are monsters trying to kill me, the floor is an unpleasant shade of yellow and there doesn’t appear to be a toilet. Oh, I get it now. It’s the magic land of the landlords because it’s a land without any kind of rights for tenants, a fabulous world where you can charge whatever rent you like without having to provide indoor plumbing or a roof. Maybe there’s a Magic Land of Builders out there, where every customer is a confused pensioner, or a Magic Land of Astrologers where the populace are just super gullible.


Then I reached a dead end in the castle and that was that. I’m completely out of ideas here. I did manage to find a map of the game, and it seems to imply that you can travel to different sections of the castle when you go beyond that screen with the door on it. I suspect the path you’re placed upon might depend on what keys you’re carrying, but because collecting one of the keys requires you to travel through Bullshit Cavern I never managed to test that theory out.


Supposedly if you do make it onto the correct path in the castle, you’re confronted with this thing. Close inspection has revealed that it’s a face with horns, an upturned nose and a yellow, fanged mouth beneath. However, this knowledge does not prevent me from seeing that mouth as a pig’s snout every time I look at it. Combine this with the stumpy little protuberances at the bottom, and I think the best way to read this sprite is as a front view of a pig. A pig with two snouts, maybe, but a pig none-the-less. Let’s pretend it’s Ganon, taking some time off from failing to defeat a young boy who lives in the woods. There's no Triforce in this magical land, but there are also no battles that turn into sorcerous games of ping-pong, either, so maybe Ganon can find his true level of competence here.
Obviously I never reached this part of the game, so I can’t tell you what happens here. Maybe the wizard finally pulls his wand out of his arse and does some actual wizarding, but I highly doubt it. Judging by the presence of four separate enemies appearing on this final screen, the wizard wouldn’t have survived for longer than half a second anyway, so the game presumably ends as soon as you reach this screen.


“Bravo, you have defeated the terrible landlord,” it says. I mean, I didn’t because I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, but somebody did. So the landlord was a pig monster all along, huh? I guess we know the programmer’s feelings on their rental situation at the time, if nothing else. Quite what the defeat of the landlord means for the common people of the Magic Land remains unclear, but I suspect the answer is “Communism.” That’s why the wizard’s wearing red.


Magic Land of Landlords is pretty crappy game in which you do little besides wander about and die a lot, and it definitely doesn’t live up to the weirdness promised by its title, but I find myself unable to be too hard on it. I certainly don’t hate it. It’s not, well, hateful enough for that. It’s like watching your kid’s terrible school play, where the performance itself is bad but that’s not really the point anyway. MLOLL was programmed by one person named Carlo Altieri as part of a “magazine-on-a-cassette-tape” compilation called Load ‘n’ Run, and under those circumstances there’s only so much you can expect from it. And hey, it might not be the best ZX Spectrum game featuring floating skulls, but it has floating skulls and therefore I’m incapable of truly hating it.

Back in the days before they generally became easy enough for the idea to become pointless, videogames used to have these things called cheats. Sometimes there were secret passwords or sequences of button presses, but if you needed a little extra help getting infinite lives or giving Megaman the ability to leap right off the top of the screen, you could turn to a cheat device. You plugged them into your console, entered various arcane phrases and they magically fiddled with the game’s code to produce useful, empowering effects or, if you were anything like me, you could enter rude words and reduce your NES games to unplayable screens of graphical garbage. You might be familiar with some of the famous names in this field: products such as the Game Genie, the Game Shark or perhaps even Datel’s Action Replay.


Seen here in its NES incarnation, the Action Replay had a long shelf life, with iterations being released all the way up to the Nintendo 3DS era. Of course, as games became bigger and more complex over the years, the codes required started to become far too cumbersome to be input by the player, so Datel hit upon a solution: they released discs full of the codes for specific games. Of course, the Action Replay is not an official, licensed product. That means that when they were designing the covers for these cheat discs, they couldn’t use official art. They had to draw their own art. I think you all know where this is going. Would you like to see some of that art?



Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Close enough to the original that you could be momentarily confused if you saw it from the corner of your eye, yet it completely falls apart under any kind of scrutiny. Vector graphics, apparently run through a filter that makes they look like they’re composed from scrunched-up toilet paper. Interesting that the designer went with a grey block of flats for the central picture, an image that truly sums up the neon-tinged 80s hedonism of Vice City. The bottom-middle picture appears to be a killer whale trying to make love to a tyre, and two of the pictures are of the same woman, only flipped and cropped. Then there’s the real star: the bloke at the bottom-right with the expression of weary contempt. I can only image he was the person in charge of approving this cover, and that’s the face he pulled when he saw the finished article.
There are a couple of other nice things on this cover, too: I like “This Is Not A Game” label at the top, because it’s fun to imagine it’s an exhortation to take this cover art really seriously. I also like the promise of “No Police AI.” Having played a lot of Vice City over the years and witnessed hundreds of police cars driving over cliffs and running down their fellow officers, I suspect “No Police AI” is simply an intrinsic part of the game.




If you prefer your GTA games more Californian, then worry not because the Action Replay has you covered with a San Andreas disc. First things first, that car’s not bad. Recognisably a sports car, and sports cars appear in the game, so that’s perfectly acceptable. Then you get over to the poor lady on the right and it all falls apart. The middle of her body isn’t too bad, I suppose: strangely oily-looking and her right boob appears to have deflated entirely, but not awful. However, when you move away from the centre things start getting worse, so here’s my theory: the artist starting drawing the bit they were most interested in – the breasts – and once those were finished their attention began to wander somewhat. You look up to the face and immediately wish you hadn’t. It’s hard explain exactly what’s so wrong about it without either resorting to complex diagrams or just saying “everything”, but I think the worst thing about it is that half-constructed ski jump of a nose. It looks like something I would draw, and that’s a damning indictment indeed.
Then you look down and get to the hands. “Hands” is a very generous term. “Flesh Mittens” might be more apt. They’re not human hands, I know that much.



Here’s the magical Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world of Baldur’s Gate, as represented by a woman holding two kitchen knives. Sure, why not? They must have kitchen knives in Baldur’s Gate.  It can’t all be dragon-stabbing, sometimes you need to julienne a carrot.



Huh, I didn’t know Picasso went through a Zelda period. Link’s trying to take a moody selfie in front of a temple, complete with pout. An interesting concept, but unfortunately you’re then forced to look at it and try to figure out the bizarre geometry of Link’s arm and shoulder. Is that supposed to be his shield on his back, or a turtle shell? Have his hair and ears fused into one felt-tipped nightmare of biology? Mysteries about, but none so perplexing as just what’s going on with his eyes. Maybe it’s a perspective: Link’s face is ten feet wide and his left eye isn’t really tiny but is actually really far away.



I give my life, not for honour, but for… helicopters? What, you had to come up with a Metal Gear-themed cover and the best thing you could think of to represent the franchise was helicopters? Not even, I dunno, a snake? I bet those helicopters don’t even feed on tree frogs. I am extremely reluctant to use the phrase “I could do better than that” in any situation, because I am painfully aware of my own limitations in almost every field, but in this case I’m convinced I could have found a stock photo of a snake and slapped a vector filter over it. Damn, I’ve just realised what my dream job is.



The tragedy of this cover is that whatever terrible thing this doofus is wearing, it’s still better than Tidus’ actual outfit from Final Fantasy X. Yes, even with the stainless steel abdominal lattice and the bedspread knotted around his shoulders to act as a cape.



Still, it could have been worse: a character from Final Fantasy X’s direct sequel (Yuna, I guess?) is represented as a human(?) head riding a wave of motion blur, a look that gives the impression of an incredibly fast slug. Don’t let the idea of a flying head distract you from that truly awful haircut, though. Just looking at those straggly bits at the bottom is making my neck itch.



That’s a bit more like it. A large part of Wind Waker does indeed involve Link sailing around on a boat. Not a Roman warship, granted, but it’s a more fitting symbol for the game than helicopters were for Metal Gear Solid 3. Still, that doesn’t explain why Link is sailing across a sea of milk. Unless… oh, I get it, Link and his boat are made of Weetabix. That explains the colour scheme, you see. We’re actually looking at the exciting adventures of a bowl of cereal.




Hang on, what? I would never have seen this cover and thought “oh yeah, that’s God of War.” “Muscular bald man” and “monsters” are definitely applicable phrases for the God of War games, so for this cover to include both of those things but still be utterly unrecognisable is kind of impressive. This bloke looks more like the God of Hernias than the God of War, a supervillain whose origin story involves him falling into a vat of synthol. Could the artist have not at least slapped some red tattoos on this Kratos-wannabe rather than just painting his torso black? Oh, I know, you think he’s wearing a vest but take a closer look and you’ll soon realise that there’s no way that’s clothing. I think he was laying in the road and got run over by an asphalt spreader.



It’s-a me, [Name Redacted]! You can try hiding behind the steering wheel of your kart all you like, Mario, but we still know it’s you, with your (genuinely) iconic cap and your Mickey Mouse gloves. Of course, something has gone horribly wrong with Mario’s body, which might throw you off a little. I know everyone’s favourite plumber is supposed to be a little portly, but here he’s little more than an egg with arms and a head haphazardly bolted on near the top. Perhaps that’s why hiding, he’s overcome with shame. Or he’s worried Sonic’s going to see him and mistake him for Dr. Robotnik.
There is a strange amount of variety in how close these covers get to representing the game they’re intended to work with: this is clearly Mario, and the Twilight Princess cover was a straight-up picture of Link, but the God of War one bears far more similarity to any given 1980 boy’s toy line than, you know, God of War. I wonder why that is? Perhaps some companies were known to be more actively litigious than others, although I doubt it. I think the real answer is simply that no-one making these discs and their cover art really gave a toss.



It’s a little difficult to see the “artwork” on this one due to the shape of the packaging, but I think you’ll all agree it’s worth the effort just to see what Bowser would look like with a combover. That’s a proper bootleg Bowser, that is: a piece of official art that has been modified just enough to be legally distinct, and in one way it’s even an improvement of the original: Bowser should definitely wear a cape more often. As a bonus, you can see from the right-hand side of the picture that the artists were still having trouble keeping Link’s eyes even roughly the same size, and as a result he looks like he’s having a stroke while trying to do a Dreamworks face.
However, the very best thing about this cover is that it promises cheats for Brain Age. I’m not usually one to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but if you’re cheating at a brain training game then surely the only thing you’re cheating is yourself.



Don’t get me wrong, I love the Guitar Hero games, but playing along to a rock song with a plastic guitar does take the concept of being in a band and make it look very uncool. It is appropriate, then, that this cover makes playing Guitar Hero look uncool.



Ah, bootleg Pokemon. Now there’s a venerable tradition, bootleg Pokemon have been keeping Chinese knock-off merchants in business for twenty years now. Did I take advantage of Pokemania during my high school years by printing out fake Pokemon cards and selling them to kids at school? Of course not, what kind of terrible person would that make me? Also, its not very financial viable when you consider the costs of printer ink and other materials. Erm, I imagine.
This cover gives us a classic example of some non-official Pokemon, of the kind you’d see adorning market stall goods and news reports about the Pokemon craze that couldn’t get hold of official artwork – slightly altered, enough so that any Pokemon fan would immediately know they’re a) Pokemon and b) not legit Pokemon. So, you’ve got a Piplup with a head so shaggy it looks like it’s attached to a Van der Graaff generator, a Chimchar whose fiery backside won’t prevent it from reading the list of exclusive game codes, a Charizard that’s two levels away from evolving into Pete’s Dragon and a Bulbasaur that’s spent way too long huffing its own spores, if you catch my drift. All in all, some A+ fake Pokemon work.



This is my absolute favourite of the bunch, for a variety of reasons. There’s the bizarre proportions, for starters, with a shoulder that attaches directly to the neck and an arm cannon that would reach down to the floor if not-Samus here stood up. There’s the overall look of the thing, a look that screams “Half-Life knock-off” rather than anything to do with Metroid. If you told me there was an early version of Gordon Freeman in that suit, I’d have no trouble believing you. Assuming the early concepts for Freeman stated he was an only vaguely humanoid mass of protoplasmic tissue who didn’t have to worry about bones or joints, that is. The very best component of this image, however, is not-Samus’ pose, the kind of hand-on-thigh, leaning-in pose that makes it look like they’re about to “rap” with the kids about some “heavy issues.” If they made chairs to accommodate such freaks of anatomy, you can bet not-Samus would be sitting in it backwards and saying “hey kids, I know baby Metroids are ‘totes adorbz,’ but there’s nothing adorable about them when they’re siphoning away the life essence of you and your loved ones.”

That’s about it for these Action Replay covers, which is kind of a shame. I’m sure there are yet more wonderful examples out there, but from some unfathomable reason people seem to be reluctant to take pictures of them. Before I go, though, I should point out that these rip-off covers aren’t exclusive to the Action Replay’s later years.


This is the artwork for the Megadrive Action Replay, starring the Techno Kid. I’m guessing the responsible person’s design process was “this product is for massive dorks, so what if we took a massive dork and tried to make him look cool?” They failed, and thus Techno Kid was born. You know how some things are so bad they become good? Well, Techno Kid’s shorts are like that, except they start at bad, go past good and loop right back around to being awful again. Anyway, Techno Kid’s shoes might have clued you in to his secret origin:


He’s copied from this piece of artwork from the first Sonic the Hedgehog. It was the beginning of a proud tradition.

It’s a shame that most videogame-to-movie adaptations are terrible, because I think a big-screen version of today’s game would be worth making. Of course, that’s only because then you’d be able to use the tagline “Fun is just a stone’s throw away” on the posters. It’s the 1992 Megadrive version of Core Design’s prehistoric platformer Chuck Rock!


Originally released in 1991 for the Amiga and Atari ST, Chuck Rock was soon ported to a wide number of different platforms. So why the Megadrive version? No real reason, it just looks very close to the original but is controlled with a pad with extra buttons.
So, the title screen, then. There’s a band playing. I’m sure we’ve all already made a mental “rock band” pun, so let’s skip that and say hey, the animations of the band are actually synced up to the music somewhat, which is a nice touch. From left to right you’ve got a dinosaur in a wig, a drummer with the Virgin logo on his kit, (because Virgin published this version of the game,) Chuck Rock himself (who is also wearing a wig, as we shall see in a moment) and Chuck’s, erm, buxom wife Ophelia. The Megadrive version goes straight into the action when you press start, although other versions do have an introductory cutscene. The story is that Ophelia is kidnapped and Chuck sets out to rescue her. So far, so exactly the same as 90% of other 16-bit platformers. However, the cutscene shows that Ophelia was abducted by the band’s drummer, whose name is Gary Gritter. Yes, he’s named after and is physically based on former glam-rock singer and current incarcerated paedophile Gary Glitter, making this the second game I’ve played in the past few months to feature the same bit of extremely unfortunate celebrity caricature.


Chuck Rock is a platformer, that much is clear. You jump a lot in this game, as well as avoiding enemies where you can. There are a couple of twists to the formula: for starters, there don’t seem to be any bottomless pits for you to fall into. Some of the pits are filled with lava or spikes, but they all have a bottom. Chuck can also attack, either with a jumping kick or, if he’s standing on solid ground, by thrusting his fat gut at the bad guys. Whether the enemies perish from sheer disgust as a sweaty caveman’s belly rubs up against them remains unconfirmed, but the problem with this attack is obvious: it has almost no range. Like, Chuck’s a fairly chunky chap but even his prodigious gut doesn’t reach as far as his fists would. And anyway, what kind of caveman doesn’t carry a club? You’re a disgrace to the uniform, Chuck.


The look of Chuck Rock is unmistakeably European, isn’t it? Cartoonish without a hint of manga influence, like an alternate version of The Flintstones that started in the pages of The Beano. It’s a good look, though. Nice and colourful, pleasingly solid and detailed sprites, it definitely looks the part.


And now, the secret of Chuck Rock’s title is revealed: he’s called Chuck Rock because he can chuck rocks. Pick ‘em up, set ‘em down, carry ‘em around and throw them at dinosaurs and other dangerous fauna. Rocks: nature’s Swiss Army knife. There are two sizes of rock, small and big, and each kind slows Chuck down either a little or a lot while he’s carrying them. The benefits of carrying a rock, not including “a great upper body workout,” are that when they’re over Chuck’s head they can protect him from aerial attacks, and if a flying enemy crashes into them they will die. Plus you can throw them at things, which is generally much more effective than the gut-bounce. As well as that, the rocks can be used as platforms, either for a little extra height when reaching distant platforms or as a stepping-stone when placed on hazardous floors. It’s a very welcome bit of extra gameplay in what would be a pretty by-the-numbers platforming adventure otherwise.


Not all the creatures are out to kill Chuck. Some of them are actively helpful, like this pterodactyl that carries him across the screen. Now, a confession: I have, in the past, mentioned Sega’s “Cyber Razor Cut” series of TV ads for the Megadrive, and specifically I’ve said that the line “hitch a lift on a pterodac-bird” is one of the worst attempted rhymes I’ve ever heard. However, having listened to the ad again in slightly better quality, I concede that the actual line might be “pterodactyl,” only the pronunciation of the word has been cruelly, viciously mangled in an attempt to get it to rhyme with “world.” It does not rhyme. I think I preferred it when I thought it said “pterodac-bird.”


As I say, the Megadrive version of Chuck Rock is mostly identical to the original computer games, but here’s something that’s different: in the Amiga version, this huge dinosaur tried to take an actual shit on Chuck’s head when he walks underneath it. I remembered this from having played the Amiga version as a kid, and when you are a kid a massive dinosaur taking a dump on your character is the kind of thing that sticks in the memory. Sadly, this does not happen in the Megadrive version, and I can only assume it was removed for reasons of perceived good taste.


And so on you go, guiding Chuck through the jungle setting dispatching dinosaurs with his paunch and occasionally throwing boulders onto crocodile’s heads so you can use them as see-saws to propel you upwards. Unfortunately the crocodiles don’t say “it’s a living!” when you do this, probably because you’ve just dropped a rock on their heads.
It’s all very jolly, and certainly feels as though it’s had a little more craft put into it, a little more love and affection spent, than you might find in the slew of generic run-n-jump platformers of the time. Apart from Chuck having a slight (but manageable) delay on his jumps, it all controls very nicely and hits a good balance of simple, obvious challenges you need to clear in order to progress and hidden areas that require a bit more exploration and boulder-stacking to access. You only really get point items from these side areas, but it’s still fun to see where you can get to.


After a while, Chuck stumbles upon the first boss. It’s an angry triceratops, charging back and forth along the bottom of the screen. There’s a rock down there, too, and your task becomes clear: jump down while the triceratops is at the far end of the screen, grab the rock, climb back up the platforms and then throw the rock onto the triceratops from above like a moronic yob throwing bricks off a motorway bridge onto the cars below. It’s an easy task to accomplish, so it’s a shame that you have to do it a bunch of times to defeat the triceratops. Yes, this fight falls into my least favourite category of boss fight – the one where you do the same basic action over and over. The triceratops doesn’t change its attack patterns or anything like that, so basically the fight is saying “sure, you dropped a rock on a dinosaur once, but can you do the exact same thing ten times?!” Yes, Chuck Rock, yes I can. If I take any damage, it’s because I got bored and my mind started to wander.


Stage two takes place in some caves, every surface covered in slimy, gloopy mud. I sincerely hope it’s mud, anyway. The caves feature many of the cave-based hazards you might expect from a 16-bit platformers, like dangerous stalagmites, falling rocks and scuttling spiders, as seen above. These spiders remind me of the monster version of Drutt from the “Nasty Stuff” episode of classic kid’s claymation show Trap Door, a reference so specific even I’m surprised it sprang to my mind.


Halfway through the stage there’s a lava section, because of course there is. Interestingly, Chuck responds to falling into molten rock the same way Mario does in the 3D Super Mario games – rather than being immediately incinerated, he leaps back out of the magma with a yelp and an accompanying loss of health, furthering Chuck Rock’s status as a platformer that is completely disinterested in killing the platformer by having them fall into bottomless chasms.


There are a few elevators in this stage, powered by dinosaurs running around treadmills, and once you’re off the lift the dinosaurs lie down and have a kip. There are quite a few fun little flourishes like this in Chuck Rock, all of which help elevate it above the average in terms of presentation if not gameplay.


Boss number two is a sabre-toothed tiger. A fearsome foe indeed, made all the more dangerous by the lack of any rocks in the arena that you can chuck at it. This means you have to rely on Chuck’s jumping kicks and belly-bounces, both of which have a range measured in nanometres and are thus ill suited to fighting something with teeth bigger than your head. Most of the damage you’ll take in this fight comes from being unable to halt Chuck’s forward momentum as he attacks, often propelling him straight into the tiger. On top of that, the tiger can also roar, which momentarily freezes Chuck in place through sheer terror. His jaw drops and his skin grows pale, which again is a lovely little touch.
The tiger runs around the arena in a loop, lunging at Chuck when he gets near. My strategy? I didn’t really have one until I managed to get behind the tiger and trap it against that small lip of rock on the left of the screen. Once it was there, I mashed the attack button as far as I could, grinding the tiger to death between a rock and soft, flabby place. A flukey victory, sure, but I’ll take it.


Oh joy, it’s an underwater stage, everyone loves those. A completely different set of physical rules to grapple with, the action rather hampered by the Megadrive’s lack of transparency effects? What’s not to love? Okay, I’m being too harsh there. The swimming portions of Chuck Rock aren’t that bad. It certainly helps that Chuck still moves pretty quickly when he’s submerged, which keeps the game flowing, and half of the stage takes place on land anyway. It’s a lot more awkward to defeat enemies while you’re underwater, as you can probably imagine, but we should commend Chuck for his bravery. He’s not afraid to kick a Portuguese man-o-war to death with his bare feet, whereas I feel queasy if I step on spilled shampoo in the shower.


While the underwater sections aren’t terrible, it’s still preferable to ride over them on the back of a friendly whale.


One annoying facet of Chuck Rock’s level design is that it features far too many blind jumps. Here, for example, the only way to progress was to jump off a cliff (a phrase that looks weird now I’ve written it out) into the water below. The thing is, you can’t see the water below, which is why Chuck’s about to take damage from landing on a jellyfish. Each stage seems to include at least a couple of blind jumps, and the longer I write about videogames the more irritating I find this situation. I like to delude myself that if I can see the danger, I can use my skill to avoid it, even if that’s rarely true.


Stage three follows up some not-especially-inspired level design with an absolutely terrible boss in the form of this plesiosaur. If the Loch Ness monster was a huge dork, this is what it’d look like, snorkel and all. All it does is bob up and down and occasionally blow bubbles at you. These are videogame bubbles and therefore they hit with the force of a .44 magnum round, but they’re still easy to avoid and all you need do to defeat this boss is find the precise distance from which you can float in place and kick it repeatedly without bumping into it. It feels less like a fight and more like synchronised swimming, and even more like a waste of everyone’s goddamn time.


Stage four combines the swimming sections with the almost mandatory ice stage, complete with slippery platforms and frozen enemies. It’s a testament to the overall craft of Chuck Rock that the combination of these two tropes, probably the least-loved of all platformer level types, somehow remains fairly fun to play. It’s not perfect, and in a lot of ways it’s a backward step from earlier areas: there seems to be less emphasis on creative rock throwing, and the increased difficulty level comes from packing more and more creatures into each screen rather than through thoughtful level design. Still, it looks really nice, and I love these ice-crystal backgrounds and the dinosaurs that attack by sliding across the platforms while encased in massive ice cubes.


I also love these snowball-throwing dinosaurs, because they are utterly adorable, slinging their snowballs with a real sense of childlike innocence. It’s a real shame what Chuck’s about to do to it with this large rock, honestly.


This stage also has a brief outdoor section, complete with snowmen that I’m going to assume were made by those same dinosaurs that throw the snowballs. A bunch of them got together and built a snowman, and it’s cute as heck. “If they’re dinosaurs, why didn’t the build a snow-dinosaur, then?” I hear you ask, and the answer is because making a snow dinosaur would be a lot more difficult, especially if you don’t have opposable thumbs, obviously.


Atop a cold and snowy mountain, Chuck faces off against a woolly mammoth in a fight that’s quite similar to the underwater one but vastly improved by taking place on land. The mammoth charges, so you jump up and kick it right in the face. Sometimes it’ll use its trunk to fire snowballs or to suck you towards it, vacuum-cleaner style. I’m standing by my statement that this is a better boss fight than the last one, but it’s still not good, and none of Chuck Rock’s end-of-stage encounters are much fun to endure. They’re the weakest part of the game, that’s for sure, at once boringly simply yet made frustrating by the incredibly short range of Chuck’s attacks.
Let’s look on the bright side, though. All this snow and ice implies that if I just hang around for a while, I won’t have to fight any more dinosaurs. After all, as a giant Austrian once said “what killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!”


Oh. Wow. I didn’t expect all the dinosaurs to actually die. I mean, I know Chuck’s thrown rocks at a lot of them, but not enough to cause the mass extinction event that makes up the final stage. It really must be the Ice Age’s doing.


There are even dinosaur graves, complete with dinosaur headstones, just in case you though this cheerful cartoon romp was getting a bit too cheerful. Chuck is too respectful of the dead to pick up the gravestone and throw it, which is disappointing because I like the irony of beating someone to death with a tombstone.


As with the previous stage, this boneyard suffers from an overabundance of enemies packed into each screen, which makes progressing just enough of a slog that you begin to wonder whether you’re still having fun. At least the enemies themselves are fun, with rattling skeletons and dinosaur mummies charging around the place, and the enemy designs are definitely one of Chuck Rock’s strong points. I especially like the way basic enemies change as you make your way through the game: for instance, the hostile pterodactyls behave in the same way throughout the game, but in the snowy levels they gain a little scarf and in this stage they’re skeletons, and that goes a long way towards making them feel less repetitive.


Here, Chuck breaks the cardinal rule of the Caveman Code by walking directly into a dinosaur’s mouth. Don’t worry, though, the dinosaur is already dead, or at least extremely unwell. All its teeth fall out when you approach it, so there’s no worries about being chewed to death.


This means the next area takes place inside a dinosaur, which is great even if it is full of these disturbingly cheerful hearts. There are dozens of the bloody things in here, so they can’t be the dinosaur’s heart and are presumably a species of parasitic organism that invades other living creatures until their innards resemble the bins behind Poundland on the day after Valentine’s.
I’ve always loved videogame levels that take place inside a living creature, you know. I think it’s the cross-pollination of the bio-organic settings of my beloved Alien franchise, the NES version of Life Force / Salamander and the “In The Flesh” level from Blood. Chuck Rock gets an extra point from me for including such a stage.


Then, with surprising suddenness, the final boss appears. Notice that I am no longer inside the dinosaur. I assume Chuck managed to leave the corpse via the, ahem, most obvious exit. I think by this point it’s fair to say that Chuck has been through some (literal) serious shit, so a dinosaur wearing boxing gloves and a super-sized version of Sir Arthur’s boxers is unlikely to faze him. I do like the dinosaur’s little crown, mind you.
Anyway, the dinosaur will try to attack you in different ways depending on which platform you’re standing on, either with punches or by biting. You’d think the punches would be the least effective of these attacks, what with the boss having stubby little T. Rex arms, but I had far more success on the top platform. The boss comes in for a bite, Chuck boots it in the snout, repeat until the game finishes. Did I mention boss battles aren’t exactly Chuck Rock’s strong point?


Thus the game ends: Chuck is reunited with his wife, and… hang on, so that dinosaur is Gary? I thought I was after the human kidnapper Gary Gritter? What the heck is going on? In search of answers, I checked out the ending to the Amiga version, where I noticed this:


If you look at the ending image without the text in the way, you can see that someone has been crushed by the dinosaur’s falling body. I guess that’s Gary, then. You can understand my confusion, given that Gary doesn’t appear in the final boss’ room or anything, but apparently he was there the entire time. What a lame ending, made worse by the fact I was momentarily led to believe I’d just fought a T. Rex called Gary only to have such a wonderful notion cruelly snatched away from me.
Before we leave Chuck Rock for good, take another look at the ending text, specifically the line about how “Chuck can not wait to get home and out of his leaves.” A couple of points: for starters, the first time I read it I assumed “get out of his leaves” was a euphemism for getting extremely drunk. You know, “Chuck necked a bottle of scotch and got absolutely out of his leaves, started a fight with a bouncer and dropped his kebab,” that kind of thing. Sadly that’s not the case, “his leaves” actually means the foliage Chuck’s wearing as under (and indeed outer) wear. Also, in the console versions it says he’s going on vacation after this ordeal, which is fair enough. However, in the original versions it’s strongly implied that he’s going home to have sex with his wife, which is also fair enough but apparently far too racy for the Sega Megadrive.


Amid the great morass of cartoony 16-bit platformers, Chuck Rock can stand tall as one that’s distinctly above average, especially for one based on a computer game. Sadly it doesn’t quite reach the top thanks to the dull boss battles, too-frequent blind jumps and a rock-throwing mechanic that’s underutilized in the later stages. Presentation-wise it’s very good, with lots of charming (and charmingly weird) monsters and backdrops, plus an enjoyable soundtrack that’s been expanded from the single tune of the original to a track for each level. I’m especially fond of the eminently hummable and extremely bouncy stage two theme. Overall, then, time with Chuck Rock was time well spent. Okay, maybe not well spent. I could have done a lot of chores instead of listening to Chuck shout “unga bunga!” but it was, mostly, fun. I’m still disappointed that dinosaur wasn’t called Gary, though.

So what happened is, I mentioned The Trap Door in the last article, which made me remember “oh yeah, there’s another Trap Door game I haven’t written about! Forget about what I was going to cover this time, I’m going to write about that other Trap Door game.” This, as it happens, was example of me shooting myself in the foot. Actually, “punching myself in the balls” might be a more apt metaphor. It’s the ZX Spectrum version of Piranha Game’s 1987 you’re-a-fool-if-you-dare-em-up Through the Trap Door!


I wrote about the first home computer Trap Door game a while back, and any questions I may have had about whether this was a direct sequel are answered by the title screen. It’s exactly the same as the title screen from the first game, except the artist has just about managed to squeeze the word “Through” in there. That doesn’t exactly bode well for innovation and imagination, does it?
Through the Trap Door is, of course, based on the classic British kid’s claymation show The Trap Door. It’s a show I loved then and still love now, and it’s certainly held up a lot better than other childhood favourites like He-Man or Transformers, possibly because it’s not an obvious toy commercial but also because it’s just so darned loveable. A quick recap: Trap Door is the story of Berk, an amiable blue lump of a monster who lives in a spooky castle and performs two main duties: acting as servant, chef and general dogsbody to The Thing Upstairs (the castle’s unseen but very demanding master) and guarding the titular trap door. The trap door covers a pit that leads to a vast underground space filled with all manner of horrible, disgusting monsters. Berk is… not great at guarding the trap door, and most episodes revolve around something escaping from the pit – often because Berk left the trap door open after throwing rubbish down the hole – and Berk and his friends having to beat it back to the stygian plasticine underworld that spawned it.


Here’s Berk and his friends now. The small lump next to him is the scuttling, beeping spider-mouse-thing Drutt, who is grey in the show but is coloured yellow in this game, thanks either to the Spectrum’s colour limitations or in the interests of keeping him visible against the background. In the middle of the screen is Boni, the miserable, melancholy talking skull who just wants to live peacefully in his little cave and not get involved with the various hijinks, and who is therefore a character I can really identify with.


Sadly, Boni’s hopes for peace and quiet are soon shattered – as they so often are when you live in a monster-filled castle – when a headless skeletal bird flies out of the trap door and affixes itself to Boni. That’s a real stroke of luck for the headless skeletal bird, but it’s not so good for Boni as his new avian body flies itself back into the trap door, leaving Berk and Drutt with a mission to rescue their calcium-rich chum.


Ever the practical sort, Berk wastes no time in jumping straight down the trap door with Drutt in hand. Berk smashes into the floor in a pleasingly cartoonish manner, while Drutt looks on, completely unscathed. Unfortunately the Spectrum’s sound hardware can’t replicate Drutt’s high-pitched giggle, but I guarantee he’s laughing at Berk right now.
So, now we’re in the trap door, what are we actually supposed to be doing?


Well, there’s a locked door over here, so finding a key seems like a reasonable first step. Once found, I can pick the key up and bring it over to the locked door, because that’s the kind of game Through the Trap Door is: a sort of graphic adventure without the parser, plus some platforming. It’s exactly the same system as the first game in the series, with Berk able to waddle around, pick up one item at a time, carry it around, drop it, use it or eat it. The big difference is that rather than fulfilling tasks for The Thing Upstairs, you’re trying to rescue Boni, which means there’s even less guidance here than in the prequel. In fact, almost none of the items give you any clue as to their purpose or function. For instance, there’s a red sweet floating in the sky up there. What will happen if Berk eats it? Who the hell knows? I turned to the game’s instructions for guidance, but they just say they have “strange effects, either helpful or disastrous” so I guess we’re looking at Trial and Error: The Computer Game with this one.


A little more exploration revealed a corridor full of deadly dangling spiders. I was a having trouble getting Berk past this obstacle, because he’s not the most svelte clay monster out there. You might think Berk would be unconcerned by mere spiders after all the horrors he’s seen, but don’t forget these spiders are falling from the ceiling and Berk’s exposed eyeballs are perched right on top of his body. A spider falling directly onto the surface of your eye is enough to freak anyone out, but not to worry – there’s a way to get past. I can switch to controlling Drutt!


This is Through the Trap Door’s big gameplay change over its predecessor: you can swap between controlling either Berk or Drutt whenever you like, and they’ve got their own unique skills and quirks. Berk can pick up and use items, while Drutt is small enough to avoid many hazards and he can jump.


It’s a good job he can jump, too, because the key’s all the way up there and although Drutt can’t carry the key he can knock it to the ground where some poor blue dope can grab it. However, there’s also a ruddy great bat in this room, and this is where Through the Trap Door reveals itself to be a complete pain in the arse. You need Drutt to jump up and touch the key. That’s simple enough. Videogaming 101. Jump into the thing. But then there’s the bat, who flies down from above and pushes you back down when you try to jump. Okay, so you lure the bat to the right of the screen and then quickly move over and get the key, right? Well, yes, in theory. There are complicating factors, the main one being that Drutt can’t jump that high on his first jump. Or his second, or third. Each time Drutt bounces on the spot he leaps a little higher, so it takes time to reach the correct altitude – so long, in fact, that you can’t just bounce underneath the key because the bat will always swoop down and block you. So, you have to start bouncing on the right of the screen, get some momentum up, wait for the bat to appear, jump to the left and hope you land in the exact right spot underneath the key so you can continue bouncing upwards. Slightly too far to either side of the key? Tough luck, it won’t register as a hit so go back to the start and begin slow, cumbersome process again.
Sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? Well buckle your goddamn seatbelt, kid, because it gets worse: Drutt also moves around of his own free will. The moment you let go of the joystick, Drutt will wander off, seemingly at random. I say “seemingly” because often he’s chasing the small worms that appear around the stages, but even when there are no worms about he’ll fidget around and roam the rooms without a care in the world. Any time you’re (nominally) in control of Drutt, you’re wrestling with the controls of a creature that wants to do its own thing and it is infuriating, one of the worst, most wrong-headed game design decisions I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Imagine playing a Super Mario game but Mario is also controlled, simultaneously, by electrodes wired to the brain of an overstimulated guinea pig, and you’ll get an idea of what trying to perform the extremely precise sequence of events required by this section is like.


Somehow, after countless attempts and a huge amount of unnecessary stress that is bound to cause me health problems later in life, I knocked the key down and nudged it onto the spider screen, where Berk has managed to negotiate the spiders and pick up the key. Now I’ve just got the get to the locked door, but (surprise) there’s a problem.


Berk’s stuck at the bottom of this pit, and the door’s up at the top. Berk can’t jump, or rather I’m sure he can jump but he’s not the type. He’s too stoic and straightforward to be bouncing around like that, so he’s stuck down here unless Drutt can figure something out.


After some more jumping with Drutt, which was still awkward and unpleasant but not nearly as god-awful as reaching the key, I got up near the door. This is where the trial and error really starts to kick in, because all I could think to do was to jump in the various sweets dotted around the level and once they were on the floor to slowly, oh so slowly, nudge them down the pit towards Berk.


Well, that worked. Red sweets give you wings, as the advertising slogan almost goes. Well, you get wings from red sweets in this stage, anyway, and the power of flight comes from other sources later on. There’s absolutely no consistency to what effects each item has, just another way that Through the Trap Door takes what should be a simple puzzle-solving adventure and turns it into a punishing nightmare slog. But Berk’s got the key and he can fly up to the door, so I’ve at least managed to make it through level one. It took longer than you might expect even once I’d solved the puzzles, because I didn’t realise you had to be carrying Drutt before you could move on to the next area. After trying to jump past that bat, I’m sure no-one would blame me for wanting to leave the little bastard behind.


The second stage is a lot more linear but no less aggravating, and Through the Trap Door’s dizzying  lack of consistency is never more apparent than in this first screen. You see that hole in the ceiling? There’s a key floating up there, but if Drutt jumps up there he doesn’t knock it down. Instead, a mushroom appears. Berk can eat the mushroom, which allows him to jump. This is a double-edged sword, because while Berk doesn’t jerk around the screen without your input like Drutt does, he’s also a lot, erm, huskier and therefore has even less margin for error when you’re trying to make the very precise jumps over the green monsters that roam the caverns.


Still, after the last stage an activity as simple as “jump over the bad guys” was more than welcome. Berk may be slow, cumbersome, twitchy, imprecise and stuttering in his movements – and he is, as is everything else in the game – but at least I knew what I was supposed to be doing. The stumbling block in this stage was when I found reached a dead end and found this yellow thing and not much else. I think this is supposed to be Bubo, a recurring antagonist – although “irritant” might be a better word – in the show who pops out of the trap door from time to time and generally acts like a little prick. However, in the show Bubo looks like a little prick, with a mean face and general mischievous air, whereas this yellow lump is far more friendly-looking. Maybe this is a member of Bubo’s species who was raised in a loving, nurturing household. Whatever it is, it periodically fires projectiles from the orifice on top of its head. Projectiles that would be perfect for knocking down the key at the beginning of the stage, in fact. But how to get Bubo over there?


It turns out you can pick him up. I know, I didn’t expect to be able to pick up a monster, either. I could only pick up Bubo once Berk had eaten another mushroom, a mushroom that was identical to the first mushroom despite having a wildly different effect. Yeah. So now Berk’s got Bubo in hand, but eating the second mushroom has removed his ability to jump so getting past the deadly monsters in the cavern is going to be tricky. The way you’re supposed to do it is to use Bubo as a mobile gun emplacement of sorts. You place him down, he fires his projectiles into the air, they come down on the monsters and kill them so you can get past. This is where the dread concept of precision once more rears its ugly head. The hitbox for Bubo’s projectiles is tiny, and he fires oh-so-slowly, and the monsters you’re trying to destroy move back and forth, and sometime it just doesn’t bloody work properly even when everything seems to be perfectly aligned. Making it across these three screens becomes the kind of harrowing journey Odysseus would have taken one look at and said “you know what, I think I’ll just live here now” as you laboriously waddle over to Bubo, adjust his position slightly and wait and wait and wait for monster and projectile to align. That’s how you’re supposed to do it, anyway. I used a POKE to turn off the hit detection. I’m kinda dumb, but not a total idiot.


Stage three begins, and that’s a large lead weight. Finally, something recognisable and specific enough that I will surely be able to discern its purpose. Thank you, weight, for being my anchor in this maddening universe. Also this stage appears to be made from snot.


On the next screen, Berk stumbles across an ‘orrible pile of yellow scunge - “scunge” being the deeply evocative word that is used in the show to describe the omnipresent multicoloured slime that is splattered around the castle and often serves as the primary ingredient in Berk’s cooking. What a great word scunge is. I sincerely believe that we should start a campaign to make it an actual word, possibly to describe the stuff you scrape off your oven when you’re cleaning it.


Except, surprise, it’s not scunge but rather a huge and genuinely creepy monster that will eat Berk if he ventures near it. It’s a fun-looking monster, especially those eyes with the trailing optical nerves, although it doesn’t much like it belongs in The Trap Door. That said, one thing I’ll give Through the Trap Door this – the graphics are mostly rather good, especially Berk’s sprite which looks just about as accurate to the show as it’s possible to get on the Spectrum. It’s unfortunate that the backgrounds are mostly pure black, but because the background in the show are a swirling mix of multicoloured patterns it’d be impossible to recreate them on the Spectrum. Impossible without them causing extreme nausea and possible blindness, anyway.


Then, just as things were starting to muddle along in a marginally less painful fashion, Through the Trap Door sets up an astonishingly obnoxious bit of gameplay. Berk needs to get up to the screen above this one, you see, and the only way to do that is to eat a pair of eyes he found on the floor. What, you don’t eat eyeballs you found rolling around on the ground? You think you’re better than Berk, you stuck-up… no, never mind, forget it. The eyeballs themselves aren’t important, what’s important is that eating them makes Berk float upwards like a helium balloon.


And just like a helium balloon, Berk cannot control his own direction, and the lack of air currents in the depths of the trap door mean he’ll only go straight up. This is where Drutt comes in. You have to place Drutt on the small platform at the left of the screen and jump into Berk as he drifts past, pushing him to the right. Oh yes, it all sounds so simple, just like NASA must have thought it sounded simple to point a rocket towards the moon. To accomplish this series of events requires a Herculean effort of will, not just to pull it off but to prevent yourself from ripping the game tape out of your Spectrum, chewing it into fragments with your teeth and spitting the crumbled remains onto a tyre fire.
You start as Drutt, and have him start bouncing so that he’s got enough momentum to reach Berk when the time comes. Make sure he’s as far left as possible, though – if not, he’ll crash into the ceiling and stop bouncing. You can see there’s a tiny hole in the far left of the ceiling to allow Drutt some clearance. I’m not sure whether the programmer only cut out such a small hole due to laziness, ineptitude or sheer contempt for the human concept of “fun,” but there we go. Remember how I said Drutt will move around on his own as soon as you let go of the controls? Well, he’ll also bounce back in the opposite direction if you jump into a wall, so have fun getting the little sod into the exact position required on that minuscule ledge. If you somehow manage that, you have to switch to Berk, make sure he’s in the exact right position, eat the eyes and then quickly switch back to Drutt, praying that you can maintain his bouncing. Berk drifts onto the screen, Drutt jumps towards him and almost invariably misses. Drutt and Berk fall back down, and you have to go through the entire soul-sapping palaver again, fighting the hateful controls every step of the way.


Pictured above: one of roughly twelve thousand failed attempts.
This part of the game honestly made me question what the hell I’m doing with my life. If I put the same amount of effort into something productive or self-improving as I did into try to get two 30-year-old game sprites to bounce into each other, I’d be writing this article from the fifth bedroom of my multi-million pound mansion while the London Philharmonic gently played the Trap Door theme in the background.


I did it, though. I’m not sure how. I think I blacked out for a moment, and then Berk was on the right-hand platform. I’ve never made an emulator save state with such satisfaction in my life.
You reward for making it this far is a short section where you have to pick up worms with glowing coloured lights on their heads and place them into the matching picture frame. It is the sweet ambrosia of the heavens after the last section, even with the annoying bird’s claw that swoops down  to grab Berk the instant he stops moving. Frankly, the claw could come down carrying a boombox blasting Nigel Farage’s political speeches and copies of your parent’s boudoir photos and it still wouldn’t spoil the mood. I am the king, the champion, the undefeated, at least until I stop playing the game and realise how much of my precious time on this Earth I have wasted.


I made it to the final stage. I’m not sure how, but I did. See that skull over there, the one that looks identical to Boni because it’s the same sprite that was used for Boni in the intro? Yeah, that’s not Boni. It’s just a skull. A yellow herring, if you will.


No, Boni is actually the skull of this massive skeleton that’s trying to kill Berk with a comically undersized pitchfork. You’re supposed to shoot the skeleton with a cannon until Boni is knocked loose, a scenario which raises all sorts of questions. Like, is this fair on Boni? Maybe he wants to be part of a full skeleton. It must be a nice change of pace from being an immobile skull that Berk has to drag around in a little cart. On the other hand, although Boni is a grumpy sort who likes to complain, I don’t think he’d ever resort to trying to murder Berk, so I have to assume he’s not in control of the skeleton.


When I reached this point – Berk trapped in a pit, harassed by ghosts and snakes, surrounded by sausages – I knew it was time to admit defeat. Even with guides to hand and various cheats at my disposal, I simply could not bear to continue with Through the Trap Door. The hideous controls, the glacial pace, the fiddliness, all of it became too much. Imagine trying to build an Airfix kit while wearing oven gloves and you’ve got some idea of what it’s like trying to play this game. I looked up the game’s ending, and all that happens is the three friends return to the opening screen while a text box reading “Home Sweet Home” appears, so at least I’m not missing out on much.


Apart from the addition of Drutt as a second playable character, an idea which I admit could have had legs (six of them, even), Through the Trap Door is a real disappointment of a sequel. The first Trap Door game wasn’t good but at least it was interesting and had some potential, but for the sequel to take the exact same gameplay mechanics, concepts and sprites and turn them into such an awkward mess is very disappointing. I can see how this could be a good game, even: trial and error is not necessarily a bad way to figure out puzzles, as long as you’ve got some guidance and, more importantly, you can try again quickly. Through the Trap Door’s biggest failing is that whenever you screw up, the grinding tedium of getting back to where you were is enough to put anyone off.
So, like I say, it’s a real shame. If there was a proper Lucasarts-style graphics adventure based on The Trap Door, with the kind of cartoony graphics you’d find in, say, Day of the Tentacle, then that would be one of my dream games – but instead I’m stuck with this nightmare. Oh well, I can always go and watch the show. You should do the same.

If you’ve read any other VGJunk articles, you’ll know that I need some help with this whole “writing words” business. I’m not too proud to admit it, and I’m willing to seek out the help I need so long as I can get it from a cartoon mouse in a pith helmet. Thankfully, in 1993 Beam Software released a NES game called Mickey’s Safari in Letterland!

The titular Mickey is, of course, helium-voiced Disney mascot Mickey Mouse – everyone’s favourite animated rodent, unless you’re British in which case we’ve got Dangermouse, thank you very much. Yes, I’m still unable to see the appeal of Mickey Mouse, and I’ve still yet to meet a child that likes Mickey Mouse. What are you, Mickey? What is the point of you? I suppose his selling point is that he can slip easily into any number of different roles, like on this title screen where he looks more than ready to venture to foreign climes and oppress the natives for King and country. But, you know, in a family-friendly way. There’ll be lessons about appreciating the differences of other cultures and such.


Three difficulty levels are presented to you when you hit start. “Super Advanced” is rather overselling things. So is “Advanced.” Even “Normal” isn’t exactly what you’d expect. All the difficulty levels are very, very easy, because (as the title might have clued you in) Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is an educational game aimed at very young children. What joy! Delight unbounded! You can learn and have fun at the same time, education and entertainment fused into one. Edutainment, if you will. Combined with the star power of Mickey Mouse, this is sure to be a real winner.


Here’s a map. I was going to say it’s a world map, but it’s not a map of our world. Not with those continents it isn’t. The weird thing is, one of the locations is “Yukon,” which is real place on Earth. Most of the others are generic places like “pyramid,” “swamp” and “jungle,” which could be anywhere. There’s a pile of laundry on my bathroom floor that you could basically describe as a “pyramid,” but the Yukon is oddly specific. Could you not have gone with “tundra” or something, Beam Software? I’m sorry, I don’t know why this is bothering me so much. Let’s just go to the bloody Yukon, shall we?


Goofy’s going to drive Mickey to the Yukon in their their military surplus vehicle. That’s right, he’s been reduced to the role of Mickey’s chauffeur, a role that you’d think he’d be terribly unsuited for. I mean, have you seen the size of Goofy’s feet? Putting him in charge of a pedal-operated vehicle seems like an accident waiting to happen.


The latest iteration of Disney on Ice takes a dark turn as Mickey resorts to seal-clubbing for a quick profit. No, of course not, he’s going to leave this cute seal well alone while he undertakes his quest to do… what, exactly?


Why, to find gems, of course! The gems have letters on them, which is what makes this “Letterland” and not just “land.” Get near a gem and press B, and Mickey will scoop it up using the butterfly net he’s carrying. Each stage has three gems to find, and because I’m playing on “advanced” mode – that is, “medium” mode – they are not exactly difficult to track down.


As for the actual process of getting to the gems, it turns out that Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is a platformer. You jump over enemies and across platforms, with the occasional extra feature to spice things up, like these ice-slide in the Yukon stages, and you grab things things with your net. So far, so much like a great many other NES platformers, but there’s one big difference: Mickey cannot die. I don’t mean in the sense that he’s a huge global brand and beloved cartoon friend who will remain in the cultural consciousness long after you and I are dead, either. I mean that none of the creatures can hurt him, and there are no bottomless pits to fall down. The various animals that inhabit the levels will make Mickey stumble if he touches them, wasting precious gem-hunting seconds, but that’s all they do. At the very worst they might bump you off a platform, forcing you to climb back up, but as most stages in this game take less than a minute to complete even that isn’t going to slow Mickey down too much.
I’ll be honest, I kinda like this approach. Mario gets hurt when a turtle walks into his foot, Megaman can be damaged by bubbles, so it’s nice to play a game where a snowman slowly walking into you is a minor inconvenience rather than an agonising, potentially fatal encounter.


At the end of each stage there’s an ancient stone tablet for Mickey to collect, so I guess he really is travelling to distant lands and stealing their artefacts for the museum. The spirit of colonialism lives on in Mickey Mouse, but I’m sure he’s got a good reason for grabbing these things.


If you collected all three gems in the stage, you’re shown a quick scene of the object that the three gem letters spell out. In this case, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood. Mickey gets very excited by this, frantically hopping up and down. Mickey seems like the kind of character that’d get excited by wallpaper paste or manilla envelopes, so this makes sense.
The thing is, this entire section feels completely pointless for what is supposed to be an educational game. Sure, you might teach kids simple three-letter words, but they can get that kind of learnin’ from books. Why not at least make this a mini-puzzle where you have to spell out a word using the letters you picked up? You know, something interactive? Unless that picture of a log is merely meant to be your reward for finishing the stage. I certainly hope not.


As for the stone tablets, Mickey chucks them into a machine operated by Goofy. The machine is made of paint rollers, a metal dustbin and the scavenged remains of a church organ, but what does it do? I have no idea. Cleans the stone slab, maybe? Look, Mickey and Goofy have been given a large amount of grant money for their letterology research, so you can bet you’re ass they’re not going to spend their time using hot soapy water and toothbrushes.


Once the slab is cleaned, a letter is revealed. You must then select the matching space on this alphabet chart and press A. It’s marginally more educational than a picture of a log, I’ll give you that. Impressively, Mickey has a voice sample for each letter of the alphabet, plus a few others for short phrases like his trademark “oh, boy!” They’re even recognisable as Mickey’s voice, too, which is bordering on the miraculous for a NES game.


After that, it’s back to the Yukon for another stage of snowy frolics and snowman-dodging. Or walking through the snowmen. It’s not like you need to avoid them.
That’s how Mickey’s Safari in Letterland works, (at least in Advanced mode,) then. Go through two simple platforming stages in each “world,” collect the gems and the stone tablet, put the tablet in its correct alphabetical slot, repeat for each world in the game.


The next world I visited – you can do them in any order you like – is the Caribbean. Again, that’s a real-world location, although I don’t think the real Caribbean is 90 percent enormous sandcastles with hammocks that double as trampolines stretched between them. It all looks rather nice, and as NES games go MSiLL has some good (if not quite excellent) graphics. 1993 was pretty late in the NES’s life-cycle so I suppose you’d expect it to look better than earlier games, but it’s big and colourful with some cute enemies and a lot of extra animation flourishes that help to sell the cartoon theme.


Is it just me, or is there always something slightly unsettling about seeing a human ear on its own? I find it very difficult to see a picture of a solitary ear without imagining it’s been sliced off a person’s head. Why yes, I did watch Reservoir Dogs when I was a young teen, why do you ask?


Mickey’s invulnerability even extends to monkeys dropping coconuts on his head. It’s a good job he’s wearing a helmet, a blow from a falling coconut can be enough to kill a man so who knows what it would do it a mouse. In fact, the problem of killer coconuts is such that there’s a Wikipedia page entitled “Death By Coconut,” thus fulfilling my desire for unexpected internet absurdism for today.


Onward to the jungle world, where adorable mushroom-men roam the land and Mickey uses a yawning hippo as a springboard, seemingly unconcerned by the hippo’s reputation as the deadliest killer in Africa. Mickey later use the same tactic with crocodiles, so it’s safe to assume that he’s become aware of his own immortality. He laughs in the face of danger now. Nothing, nothing can stop him.


Here’s an example of MSiLL’s presentation taking pains to be more engaging than you might expect from an educational game made by Beam Software – when walking over dangerous ground like the tops of these waterfalls, Mickey will carefully tip-toe across rather than using his usual jaunty, “I have transcended death” stride.


Things get a little more complicated in the pyramid world, where simply walking to the right won’t find you all the gems. There are multiple pathways and even hidden passages, obscured by blocks of hieroglyphics that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise were walk-through-able. It’s a welcome mix-up of the gameplay, this sudden need to pay even the scantest amount of attention. Even Mickey looks like he’s having fun, but then Mickey always looks like he’s having fun. Mind, I bet Carter had the same beaming smile and can-do attitude when he was raiding Tutankhamen’s tomb.


Well, this proves that this game doesn’t take place in the human world, what with all the ancient pharaohs being mice and ducks and whatever the hell Goofy is. Is Goofy a dog? My confusion stems from Goofy looking nowt like a dog, you see.
It was at around this point in the game that something occurred to me: this game isn’t bad. Sure, it’s not very engaging to anyone over the age of six thanks to its complete lack of challenge, but there’s the core of decent platformer here. Mickey controls fairly well, his movements and jumping physics are sensible and predictable, there are a few gameplay sections that would fit nicely into a “proper” platformer. Yes, I’d say that with a little work and the removal of Mickey’s invincibility you could make a perfectly acceptable 8-bit platformer out of Mickey’s Safari in Letterland. I doubt it would ever reach that top tier of true classics – it’s a bit too stodgy and predictable for that – but I’ve certainly played worse NES platformers that weren’t intended as edutainment for the wee bairns.


There’s a forest world, as mandated by Videogame Law. It’s got all the usual features of a videogame forest world: blue skies, lots of greenery, precious widdle woodland creature, trees with the haunted expression of someone having their soul sucked out of their arse by a demonic vacuum cleaner.


Here’s another minor animation flourish: whenever Mickey has crawled through one of these tunnels he gets up and dusts himself off. It’s cute. The first time. The second time, less so. By the fifth time, the few seconds Mickey spends wiping himself down have extended into an unending chasm of misery, time itself seemingly warped by a cartoon mouse’s desire for a clean shirt. This is also true whenever you fall from a high place: the fall won’t hurt Mickey, but after seeing the same unskippable animation of him hauling himself back up to his feet for the thousandth time you’ll wish it bloody hurt him.


There’s one water fountain shaped like Goofy in the game. Just one. I suppose one is all you need. Who made this, and why is it in the middle of the forest? I assume Goofy made it to satisfy his rampant vanity, but then dumped it in the woods after the (fully deserved) mockery that he received for making a water fountain in his own image.


The final world is the swamp, complete with the cabin from the Evil Dead movies. I’m looking forward to seeing Mickey decapitate Minnie with a shovel.


The rotting shacks and dilapidated paddle steamers mean it’s difficult to play this stage without whistling “Duelling Banjos” to yourself at least once, which brings me to the game’s soundtrack – it’s definitely above average, and almost exactly what you’d expect from a Mickey Mouse platformer. Not amazing, and not likely to haunt your memory after you stop playing, but chirpy and tuneful. MSiLL is really trying hard to get me to like it, and honestly I think it’s sort of working.


As I was jumping around and grabbing these gems, it occurred to me that Mickey is the wrong choice of Disney star for this game. I feel I should really be playing as Scrooge McDuck. Sure, Scrooge is more likely to keep the gems and stone tablets for himself than donate them to the museum, but I still think he’s be a better fit for this kind of adventure. Every day he’s out there making duck tales, after all. What’s Mickey usually doing? Being cheerful and kind to his friends? That’s not that kind of attitude that gets ancient civilizations ransacked, now is it?


In the end, I managed to overcome Mickey’s innate niceness and finish all the stages, delivering the slabs to the museum as promised while an alphabet of gems bounces along the bottom of the screen. Goofy receives no credit for his role in this task.  That’s it, the game’s over. In the interests of completion and because I’m willing to suffer for you, dear reader, I went back and played through the game on the “hardest” difficulty setting. In that case there are four or five stages in each world, meaning you have to collect a slab for all twenty-six letters. The only thing that changes at the end is that there’s a credits roll with the names of the staff. Goofy remains unappreciated. It was not worth the extra effort.


Well, it finally happened. I played an edutainment game that doesn’t feel lazily put-together, utterly pointless or downright insulting. Don’t get me wrong, there’s very little of educational merit in this game, and certainly nothing that you couldn’t get out of a kid’s book for (at the time, certainly) a fraction of the price. However, Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is a game made for very young children that I can actually imagine very young children wanting to play. It’s got a very solid gameplay core with plenty of attention lavished on the presentation, and the fact that Mickey cannot be harmed means even the youngest can play it without getting frustrated – and if they do learn anything along the way, that’s a bonus. Am I recommending that you go out and play it? Oh my, no. You’ll be bored almost immediately. But we can appreciate MSiLL for what it is, even if it doesn’t answer the most pressing question of them all: what is the point of Mickey Mouse?

“What if God was one of us,” Joan Osborne famously sang, “just a stranger on the bus?” That’s fine as far a middle-of-the-road Christian rock ballads go, but it doesn’t ask the really important question: namely, “what if God protected his chosen by shooting their enemies with some kind of celestial crossbow?” Fortunately, for this particular theological brainteaser we can turn to the power of videogames with Exidy’s 1983 arcade shooter Crossbow!


What a cheerful rainbow logo! Complete with an unthreatening dragon and a slightly less friendly-looking thing that might be a bat, or a bedraggled bin bag. Looks like we’re going to be having a jolly, pastel-hued adventure with this one, folks. Or maybe not - as a developer, Exidy are probably best remembered for their hyper-gory arcade lightgun shooter Chiller, or possibly the controversial run-people-over-with-a-car-em-up Death Race. They’ve got form, is what I’m saying, and indeed Crossbow is a lightgun shooter. However, it should be mentioned that on the original Crossbow cabinet the gun in question was, well, a crossbow. A realistic, full-sized crossbow. Of course, I’m playing an emulated version of the game, and so I’m not using a crossbow to control it. I’m kind of bitter about this. Not enough to carve my own crossbow out of lumber and gaffer tape it to my mouse, but still.


Here are the rules of Crossbow. Joke’s on you, I don’t have any friends. Also, shoot monsters and such. I reckon I can just about manage that.


The map screen shows the game’s eight locations, and true to the promises of the intro you can select your route. The thing is, it doesn’t actually tell you which option corresponds to which path, so while I did eventually manage to see every stage it was only after quite a lot of what is technically known as “bumbling around.” You can even go back to stages you’ve already cleared if you choose a certain path, which I suppose is good for those of you looking to amass a high score.


The first stage I happened upon was this moonlit village, packed with a menagerie of sinister creatures. There are witches, there are werewolves, there are wizards and, as you can see in that window at the top-right, the terrifying sight of an axe-wielding wereduck. Bitten by a mallard on the night of a full moon, this poor soul is cursed to transform into a half-man half-duck creature, prowling the city streets to satiate his dreadful hunger for breadcrumbs. That’s what the axe is for, he uses it to chop bread. I know it might look more like a toothbrush, but don’t be ridiculous. Ducks don’t even have teeth.


So, Crossbow is all about shooting things, but there’s more to it than that. Or rather, there isn’t more to it but it’s presented in a slightly unusual manner. Your goal is to protect the merry band of adventurers that slowly, oh so slowly, walk across the screen, defending them from harm by shooting the various monsters and projectiles that are thrown their way. You can see that Robin Hood sort is taking the lead with his dwarven companion close behind, and they will do nothing but walk from left to right while the arrayed forces of Hell try to kill them. It’s never made clear if the adventurers even realise that they’re in danger – their unhurried gait and complete refusal to fight back implies that they think they’re doing nothing more dangerous than nipping down to the shops. They’re not easy to babysit, either. It’s often easy to mock the fragility of supposed “heroes” in videogames, but these weaklings take it to a whole new level: they don’t just die if they brush up against absolutely anything, they burst into flames, complete with agonised digitised screaming. This seems like something of an over-reaction, especially when one of the things that can kill them is a goddamn ant.


Forget that, though – look at that cool ghost! You don’t often see a traditional sheet ghost flying sideways, Superman-style, but Crossbow isn’t afraid to buck trends when it comes to monsters. That explains the duck-man, at least.
It quickly becomes apparent that the trick to Crossbow is prioritising targets. The monsters in the windows might look dangerous, but as fragile as the adventurers are even they cannot be killed by a glance from a witch. What you really need to look out for are projectiles, and in this first stage that means either the fireballs thrown by the wizards, which can be stopped by either shooting the fireballs or shooting the wizard before he can shout “fireballus exploderino,” or the bolts of lightning that fall from the sky. You shoot the monsters for points, but stay vigilant in case any projectiles start falling their way or a monster is standing directly in their path. You start with three adventurers, and if all three of them are killed it’s game over: if at least one of them manages to amble across the street / desert / ice cavern unscathed then it’s on to the next stage.


Next up, the bootleg Fellowship of the Ring visited a volcano. The volcano launches so many deadly boulders into the air that I have to assume it has a personal grievance with my rag-tag band of hikers. It’s probably fed up of people chucking ancient rings of power into it, but never fear: I will protect my charges by shooting all the boulders. With a crossbow? Sure, whatever. It’s a magic crossbow, and I am the patron deity of extremely stupid people. That doesn’t mean I’m infallible, however. I totally didn’t realise you have to shoot that large boulder to knock it over, forming a bridge over the lava. In this instance, it was perfectly understandable that the adventurers burst into flames. I figured it out on my second attempt, though, allowing the adventurers to forge onward, clearing the stage and collecting the treasure for a points bonus on the way out.


Of course, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.
Each new friend works as an extra life, essentially. If you’re good at the game, you can end up with a veritable conga line of shuffling, useless fantasy clichés wandering aimlessly through the kingdom like pensioners at the market.


The desert stage is rather barren, which I guess is what makes it “desert” and not “thriving metropolis.” There are vultures and rabbits to shoot, as well as destructible cacti. I love destructible backgrounds in shooters like this, although you can see that I’ve severed the top of the right-hand cactus and yet it has remained attached. Truly, this is a magical world of mystery. You can also see the afore-mentioned ant about to attack my new friend. Okay, yeah, it’s a lot bigger than a regular ant, but it’s still just an ant. None of this is of any concern to my new friend – who may be a monk, or possibly one of the minions from Phantasm– and he walks forward, swinging his mace in a manner that might be mistaken for carefree joie de vivre in a less deadly situation.


I was going to make a “Bridge Over the River Die” pun, but then I thought “hey, that sounds like the kind of terrible joke I would have already made”, and indeed I have. Oh well, I’ll have to settle for pointing out two monsters. First is that brown thing popping out of the water just underneath the bridge. What is that? I am completely at a loss to describe it, apart from it maybe being part-human. A bloke in an ill-fitting otter costume, auditioning for the role of “Aquaman’s lamest villain”? He’s a goddamn enigma, that’s what he is.
Then there’s the eyeball floating in the sky, with the same heavy-lidded expression of contempt I was wearing whenever one of my friends slowly walked into a deathtrap. If you shoot the eyeball it emits a terrible scream, which is pretty good because hey, digitised speech samples! There’s even a disembodied voice that says “you will die!” when you start the game and boy, is he not kidding. Apparently Crossbow was the first-ever arcade game to include digitised speech, which is an impressive claim, and when it comes to presentation it’s an impressive game all around. Even putting aside the fact you can control it with a life-sized replica crossbow, the graphics are pretty incredible for a game from 1983. For comparison, other big-name arcade games released in 1983 include Gyruss and Donkey Kong 3, so Crossbow’s big, bold and full-colour graphics are a stand-out part of its appeal.


Speaking of Donkey Kong 3, this stage is all about monkeys clambering up and down vines while throwing coconuts at your adventurers. A departure for the previous dungeons-and-dragons-ish aesthetic and into more a Disney cartoon vibe, sure, but it still looks nice. You might think it makes me a terrible person to take pleasure in seeing the apes fall from the trees when you shoot them, but in my defence they started it. I would have been quite happy for my adventurers to walk through this jungle without shooting anything, but someone’s got to protect these dopes from a coconut bombing raid.
This is also where Crossbow starts getting noticeably more difficult. It’s never an easy game – it’s a 1983 arcade game that revolves around shooting tiny moving targets – but the sheer number of monkeys that you need to deal with means you’re making more large aiming adjustments than before, and the apes just keep on comin’ so if you’re a bit late destroying a coconut, that means you’ve got less time to shoot the next threat and so on until your attempts to shoot the monkeys are so frantic that you completely fail to notice your friends walking into a giant carnivorous flower.


You want ice caverns? Well we’ve got ice caverns, by gum! Well, one ice cavern. A yeti of some description peers out from behind a rock, concerned for the state of that poor Amazon woman’s bare feet. Bats on loan from Dracula’s castle fly horizontally across the screen, and they’re just as susceptible to being shot as they are to being whipped. A couple of holes in the ice must be plugged by shooting down the larger icicles, but it’s the constant downpour of smaller icicles that cause all the problems in this stage. No, Crossbow hasn’t gotten any easier since the jungle. Those icicles fall fast, and they’re not big targets, and when it was all bundled together like this I suddenly realised I couldn’t tell whether I was having fun or not. Crossbow is a game about shooting goofy monsters in graphically impressive locations, and that part I’m fine with, but something about it irritates me. I think it’s the concept of protecting the adventurers that sours me on experience. This is strange, because if I think about it logically I know it shouldn’t bother me. Imagine a version of Crossbow where you didn’t have to babysit the adventurers, and you simply had to shoot the various projectiles before they reached the bottom of the screen and caused you to lose a life. That is essentially the exact same game as the "real"Crossbow, and yet seeing these utterly useless and totally defenceless idiots blindly marching towards destruction introduces a constant low hum of annoyance into my gameplay experience. Maybe it’s because you’re so used to directly controlling characters like these in other games that your lack of agency leads to a sort of mental dissonance. Or maybe it’s just me, and I lack the necessary compassion to care whether or not Fake Robin Hood and his band of Merry Morons trundle into a frozen chasm.


Here we see possibly the worst attempt to storm a castle ever recorded in a videogame. So bad, in fact, that my adventurers would have walked straight into the moat had I not shot the chains holding up the drawbridge. You can get away with that kind of behaviour if you’re the goddamn Terminator, but if you’re this character here, who appears to be a bride-to-be who fled to the woods on her wedding day and reverted to a feral state, then you’re not going to have much luck. Still, she’s nearly in the castle now. I can’t see the rest of the adventurers having a problem with it.


Ah. I believe this is what’s referred to as “getting Agincourted.” One crossbow is no match for multiple longbows, and so it proves here. I nearly gave up on Crossbow at this point. Trying to keep this cloud of small, fast-moving projectiles away from the tender flesh of my charges seemed like a bridge too far, especially when the hit detection on the arrows is very fussy. That last part is understandable, at least. It’s difficult to shoot one arrow out of the air with another unless you’re Robin Hood, and I’m not Robin Hood. Neither is my adventurer friend down there, despite his appearance. I’m beginning to suspect he’s actually blind and that’s not a sword he’s carrying, it’s a white cane.
In the end, the only reason I made it through this section is that I realised I could hold the fire button down for rapid fire, which let me keep the number of archers down before they could fire. Granted, I did lose a couple of friends to the occasional predatory pterodactyl – like I didn’t have enough to worry about – but in the end I managed to keep a few friends alive.


It’s a bloody good job I did, too, because this final stage is pretty intense. Swords fall from the ceiling, spears are launched from the wall and a dragon sticks its head into the room every now and then to breathe fireballs into the mix. I feel like the dragon is not really pulling its weight in this situation. If I’m roughly ten times more likely to be killed by a falling sword than a fire-breathing dragon, then the dragon is slacking off. You’re the last line of defence against these treasure thieves, dragon! Have a little pride in your work!


The screen gets a little darker each time you shoot one of the flaming torches, which is fun and has the bonus of making it more difficult to see the infuriating smugness of that wizard’s cocky strut. He did nothing to earn that confidence, nothing.
Oh right, the treasure. You might have noticed that it’s sitting on an extremely suspicious panel in the floor, right in front of a statue of a demon that has spent millennia skipping leg day. Yes, of course it’s a trap door, but surprisingly it’s not a trap. When one of your characters stands on it, the demon’s staff lights up. Shoot the staff and the trap door opens, dropping your character not into the usual spike pit but into a confrontation with the villain behind the horror of Crossbow.


Ooh, the Master of Darkness! I wonder who it is? Maybe it’s the rest of that dragon, having finally decided to get its act together. Or maybe it’s some unseen demon whose dark influence is corrupting the land, a real Sauron type.


Or maybe it’s just some bloke. Okay, it’s the giant floating head of some bloke, but it’s still disappointing that the Master of Darkness has the face of someone who looks like they spend a lot of time performing Shakespeare with their community theatre group. It’s hard to take a villain seriously when he has pretty much the same haircut as I do.
To defeat the Master of Darkness, you must shoot him in the eyes with your crossbow. I find this will defeat most things. The more adventurers you have left the easier it will be, and if you’ve got more than two you can ignore the lightning bolts he fires from his face and plug away at his weak points until he dies.


At least, I assume he dies. All the flesh has fallen from his skull and that’s usually fatal, but he’s also reminding me that I have defeated him and his legions. This must be confusing for the adventurers, who presumably have no idea that I exist and have been protecting them all this time. As far as they know, things just die when they walk past.


I’m having a hard time coming to a conclusion about Crossbow. For starters, in this case playing an emulated version of the game is going to differ significantly from the original experience, and I can’t say with certainty whether it’s a good or a bad game without knowing, for instance, how accurate and easy to use the original crossbow controller was. What I can say is that it looks and sounds great for a game of this vintage, and I’m especially fond of some of the weirder enemy sprites. Shooting bizarro monsters in a fantasy setting is A-OK in my book, and Crossbow mostly puts together a solid gameplay base to make it worth experiencing. It can get frustratingly difficult towards the end, and certain small elements have slightly uncooperative hitboxes, but on the whole the shooting part of the game is fine.


But then there’s the whole “protect these dorks” part of it. I am certain that my aversion to this concept is entirely personal – perhaps as a side-effect of always being crap at Lemmings - and that for most other people it wouldn’t be an issue, but I can’t deny that it winds me up. So, in the end I’ll say that Crossbow is a game that I’m glad I’ve played, but I will almost certainly never play it again. Okay, so I might try that first village stage again, if only to unravel the mystery of the duck-man.

At VGJunk today: a game with a title that sound like someone being ordered to remember a brass instrument. It’s also an unreleased Taito arcade game, so that’s got to be worth a look, right? It’s the 1993 Dr.-Doolittle-em-up Recalhorn!


I only understand fifty percent of “Recalhorn” as a title. The main character can attack with a musical instrument so I guess that’s where the “horn” part comes from, but as for the “Recal” bit, I haven’t got a clue. Does he have to recalibrate his horn after every attack? Was his horn recalled from the market after the mouthpiece was found to be made of asbestos and used bandages? We may never know. The logo’s constructed from musical notes, which might leave you to believe there’s a musical theme to this game, but there really isn’t besides the main character being so bad at playing the horn that the sound can kill animals.


There’s nothing in the way of plot at the start of Recalhorn, although I suspect that might be down to the game’s prototype status. There are a couple of screens of information about the game’s various pick-ups and mechanics, but they’re very dryly presented on a plain green background which suggests to me they’re more of a placeholder than anything. So, we’re left to imagine our own plot for the game. Why is this kid – let’s call him Horn – setting out across the world of Emerald Forest? Obvious contenders would be kingdom-saving and princess-rescuing, but let’s give Taito some credit and say they mixed up the usual formula by having Horn travel to a music shop so he can buy a horn that doesn’t murder wildlife. A noble goal indeed, so let’s get into the action!


The game begins, as is only reasonable, with round one of area one. The game is split into four “worlds” that each contain a couple of stages, and for this exciting introduction to the adventure of Recalhorn, Taito have gone with… a forest stage. Maybe they’re saving all their innovation for the later stages.
Of course, there’s not much Horn can do while he’s up on this cliff, so how’s he going to get down into the fray?


He’ll just jump right off the sodding cliff, that’s how. It’s an easy way of informing the player that they don’t have to worry about fall damage, I suppose, and it gives Horn a bit of character. That character is that he’s a reckless idiot, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with that when it comes to videogame heroes.


Now that the game’s underway, we can see that it’s a platformer, and a very platformer-y platformer at that. Horn can run and jump through the fantastical landscape of, erm, trees and rocks, collecting gems and defeating the hostile animals by either tooting his flute at them or by jumping on them. I’d recommend the latter, for several reasons. The horn is a little difficult to aim because it doesn’t travel horizontally and, as we shall see, you won’t be in a position to use it for much of the game anyway. Jumping on things, however, is much more fun and also allows you to bounce up off the enemies to reach higher platforms and treasures. It’s a perfectly acceptable system, even if Horn does feel a little heavy especially in this horizontal movement, and while my immediate impressions were that things seemed a little generic so far, I was cheered by the really lovely flock of flamingoes that fly past in the background when you reach this point. A prototype game this may be, but it’s almost entirely complete and the developers obviously lavished a lot of time on it.


The rest of the opening stage is a pretty by-the-numbers affair. You ride some hovering platforms, you bounce on some springy mushrooms, you get chased down a hill by some falling debris. I reminds me of a slower-paced Sonic the Hedgehog more than anything, right down to the hero wearing pointy red shoes. I say “the hero”, although I’m not convinced that Horn is in charge of this situation. You see that rabbit-thing he’s wearing on his head? If you look at the lives counter at the bottom-left, it clearly indicates that the rabbit-thing is actually the player, and he’s merely controlling Horn’s body like a fuzzy-wuzzy cordyceps infestation.


Things get a bit more interesting at the start of the next stage. Horn spots something in a cage, and precedes to beat the everloving shit out of said cage in traditional cartoon melee style. Whatever’s inside that cage, it has caused Horn to fly into a violent rage, unless he’s simply infuriated by the very concept of cages.


Oh, there’s a monkey inside. Now it makes sense. The rabbit-thing has ordered Horn to break open the cage so it can spread its parasitical infection to a new host species. This is why the monkey is now under my control and can be summoned to do my bidding. However, monkeys are a notoriously mercenary genus of animal and will only cooperate in exchange for either bananas or gold coins. Luckily I have collected a large gold coin, so I can not only summon this ape to aid me, but I can ride him around!


This, then, is Recalhorn’s true gimmick: the ability to befriend and ride a few different animal companions, starting with this monkey. You can switch animal whenever you like by hitting a button to open a menu and choosing to spend one of the gold coins you’ve accumulated during your adventure. This is why the “horn” part of Recalhorn’s name quickly becomes redundant, because you can’t use your horn when you’re riding and after this point in the game there are very few situations when you won’t be riding an animal because their advantages are too useful to ignore. For example, the monkey can jump far higher than Horn can on his own, and it can hang from certain vines and ropes and carry itself along hand-over-hand. When you’re on the monkey your horn might be useless but the monkey can still attack, with a spinning vertical jump that’s excellent for taking out the game’s many airborne enemies. All in all, the monkey represents a significant increase in Horn’s abilities, even if the increased bulk of a rabbit-thing riding a kid riding a chimp means it’s now a bit more difficult to land on platforms accurately.


I thought it was very rude of Sonic the Hedgehog to show up and try to stop me collecting this monkey coin, though. You’d think he’d have a bit of solidarity with a fellow platforming hero, but he seems to be in a foul mood. Maybe it's because Horn has copied his trademark footwear, or maybe he’s pissed off that Horn gets a capable, dependable monkey helper and all Sonic gets is Tails.


With the help of my simian companion, the rest of the stage was a breeze, even if I did lose a bit of health trying to get a closer look at those bootleg Sonics. It’s appropriate that those hedgehogs make an appearance, because as I say Recalhorn definitely has strong Sonic the Hedgehog vibe to it. The way the stages are divided up feels a lot like Sonic’s Zones and Acts, and take this scene at the end of each stage – you run past these flowers, and for every flower bud you touch a new blossom blooms and you get some extra points. Even better than that, though, is that if you time it so you’re doing an attack or jumping around when the clock stops, you get bonus points for your cool posing abilities. I loved it when when you could do it after bosses in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance and I still love it here.


The next area takes place in some flooded caves, and just after the beginning of the stage where you push a boulder into a spike pit so you can use it as a stepping stone – something I’d hesitate to call a puzzle because the solution is “walk right” - Horn meets his second animal friend. It’s a seal, and I’m sorry, monkey, but you’re out on your ear. The seal’s main advantage is, unsurprisingly, that it can swim. This comes in very helpful in later underwater stages. It’s not that the monkey can’t breathe underwater or anything, it’s just easier to get about when you’re evolutionarily honed for aquatic action. The seal also has a low-to-the-ground horizontal spinning attack, useful for ploughing through groups of land-based enemies and traversing narrow passageways alike, and I might be wrong about this but the wider horizontal “base” of the seal seemed to make it easier to land on top of enemies. Plus the seal is the cutest of the animals, so I feel confident in naming it my favourite.


The seal’s pretty handy out of the water, too. It can’t jump as high as the others, but all the platforms in this (very nicely drawn) waterfall grotto are low enough that it can flop between them easily enough. It should have any trouble dealing with the combined threat of the blobfish and the armadillo you can see above. I say “combined” threat, I think the blobfish offers exactly zero percent threat to that particular equation. That armadillo, though – those are the eyes of a creature with nothing left to lose, and there’s nothing more dangerous than that.


No sooner had I got a handle on seal-wrangling than a spout of water spat me out of the cave and into the first boss battle. It’s a bull. A bull wearing green leggings? Quite possibly. It’s good that it could find some leggings with space for its tail. Anyway, to defeat the boss, you have to jump on its head a bunch of times. Not too difficult, considering all the boss does it run back and forth across the screen. The only challenging aspect is reacting when you do jump onto the boss’s head, because there’s no telling which direction you’re going to rebound in. Maybe you’ll continue bouncing in the direction you're travelling, a la Super Mario. Maybe you’ll bounce straight up and can land on the boss’s head again without touching the ground. Or maybe you’ll hit the narrow area of contact that causes Horn and his steed to rocket across the bloody screen in an almost horizontal arc, usually sending you straight into the dangerous bramble patch at the edge of the screen. It’s a mystery I certainly never managed to decipher, and by the end of this game I’d had plenty of practise.


With the bull defeated, Horn is showered with a wealth of points items that show Taito are still obsessed with giant fruit. From Bubble Bobble to Rainbow Islands to Liquid Kids, you can always rely on Taito for a level of dedication to oversized produce rarely seen outside the world's most hardcore allotment owners.


World two of Recalhorn begins one a treacherous mountain pathway, where Horn meets a lion. Not a mountain lion, oh no, that would make too much sense. It’s your regular old plains-of-Africa type lion, and it’s the third and final of your animal friends. The lion’s strengths are speed and, well, strength. It’s got a lunging bite attack that makes you almost invincible while you’re using it, and it’s got the foot speed to outrun any hazard that might be chasing you. However, the lion’s most prominent feature is that the horizontal distance of its jumps are ridiculous. If you’ve built a bit of speed up, you can jump across multiple screen in a single bound. That sounds great, and it does have its uses, but mostly it makes the lion an absolute nightmare to control. Trying to get a large animal that moves like buttered lightning to traverse any series of platforms is far more hassle than it’s worth, especially with a stack of monkey coins burning a hole in Horn’s pocket, and consequently I used the lion far less than the other two.


That’s not to say the lion is all bad: its charging attack means getting through groups of enemies is a complete breeze, for one thing. It also has a cheerful expression of very cat-like contentment, plus it’s braided its mane and put beads in there so you know it’s a stylish lion. Still, once I’d endured multiple failed attempts at getting the lion across these collapsing pumpkin platforms I knew it was time to switch to a different animal.


As an ice cave was up next, the seal seemed like a good choice. It certainly seems to be effective against this moose, I’ve jumped on that poor thing so hard that its head appears to be exploding like Hitler's at the end of Bionic Commando (only less satisfying.)
The best thing about this stage (which I sadly missed getting screenshots of) is that you’re harassed by a group of weird-looking snowmen with slightly inflated faces that aren’t entirely dissimilar to the blobfish from earlier. If you jump on these snowmen enough times to knock them apart, a cutesy little fox emerges from the pile of snow, looks shocked for a moment and then scampers off into the depths of the stage. It’s a lovely and wonderfully pointless creative flourish, and for a game that was (as far as I can tell) never released beyond location testing Recalhorn is packed with moments like these. There are things like the aforementioned points bonus for posing at the end of the stage, or the way the seal does a little flip when it jumps out of the water, or that the flowers that act as mid-stage checkpoints have an air bubble around them in the underwater stages. There’s a level of polish to Recalhorn that really sells the action, which is mostly above average but rarely excellent.


Now I’m going to ruin all those pleasant vibes by showing you what the monkey looks like when you ram a massive ice spike up his ape-hole.


The boss of this world is a mammoth with a monk’s haircut. You might think having the same hairdo as Francis of Assisi is the weirdest thing about this mammoth, but then you look down and realise it’s got human feet. It’s Frankenstein’s Mammoth! No amount of human appendages can protect it from the lion’s ferocious assault, however, so I just jumped into the mammoth’s face repeatedly. It’s the same fight as the previous bull battle, except that the mammoth can sometimes make icicles fall from the sky. The lion can jump though those, too. Looks like you should have stayed extinct, pal.


Now we’ve reached world three, which begins with a seaside feel. Lots of big blue skies, the gently lapping waves, the convenient grabbable rope bridges for the monkey to swing along. As with the rest of the game thus far, it’s jolly enough and quite good from a gameplay perspective but I still can’t shame the feeling that it’s all a bit… underwhelming. Animal-riding aside, Recalhorn is just a hop-n-bop platformer, and while Taito have clearly devoted an endearing level of care and attention to it, that doesn’t stop the game from being the usual round of jumping on the bad guy’s heads in a forest or an ice cave or at the beach.


This stage is also working hard to justify my comparisons to Sonic the Hedgehog.
Actually, having said that, Recalhorn also reminds me of Bubsy. No, really. Imagine if you can (and I don’t blame you if you can’t) a version of Bubsy that isn’t a frustrating, tedious mess to play. Recalhorn shares a similar sense of speed, a similar fondness for slightly awkward jumps between small, densely-packed platforms, a similar sensation that you’re playing a game that owes perhaps a little too much to its earlier competitors. It’s probably just me that thinks this, and don’t get me wrong: Recalhorn is a much, much better game than Bubsy, but that’s what it reminded me of.


Most of the rest of this world takes place underwater, so it’s a good job I’ve befriended / enslaved a seal. There are narrow passageways of sharp coral to navigate and dive-bombing manta rays to deal with, and it’s just the change of pace the game need to keep things interesting.


Obviously the seal is very helpful in this stage, but it’s not like you have to ride it. The lion’s probably not worth the hassle of flying off the screen and into the automated spike traps of a sunken pirate ship, but the levels are designed so that the monkey is perfectly capable of making it through the stages. One thing Recalhorn does well is providing the player with multiple alternate routes through each stage, most of them tailored to the strengths of a particular animal, and even when they’re as simple as “the higher-up route has fewer enemies but more challenging platforming” it helps to make the stages feel more expansive and enjoyable to explore.


Then you get to the sunken pirate ship’s interior, and that’s where Recalhorn reached the point that made me think “oh yeah, this game’s starting to get kinda difficult now.” Not in an obnoxious way or anything, there are just a lot of enemies about and traps that require a bit of patience and forward planning to negotiate. The only problem with that is that I nearly ran out of time. I nearly ran out of time! In an arcade game! I can’t remember the last time I played an arcade game that wasn’t specifically about beating the clock where I nearly ran out of time. The timers in most game, and especially games like Recalhorn, almost never have any bearing on the gameplay, so that came as something of a shock.


The next boss slops and slithers into view, and it’s an octopus with the cold, dead eyes of a postal worker in the week before Christmas. Do you bounce on it’s face to defeat it? Of course you do. Recalhorn’s not one for providing much variety in its end-of-world boss battles. Because the octopus is constantly birthing a stream of smaller, flying octopuses, if you’re good enough you can get through most of this fight without even touching the ground by bouncing off them. I was not good enough to do this – probably because I felt guilty about battering this octopus during the magical experience of childbirth – but I still didn’t have any trouble beating it and moving on to the final world.


It’s time for Horn’s assault on the hitherto unseen villain’s castle stronghold, a labyrinth of mechanical moving platforms and spiked death-traps, patrolled by axe-throwing knights whose martial prowess is no match for a seal belly-flopping onto them from a great height. You enter the stage by jumping into a fountain just outside the castle and sliding down through the plumbing until you reach the castle itself, and you know what? It reminded me a lot of Castlevania, and not just because I wrote the word “castle” a bunch of times in this paragraph.


I mean really, I cannot be blamed for having this music pop into my head when I reached the “ridiculously overcomplicated clock mechanism” part of the stage.


Honestly, I pity the clock repairman who has to navigate through a million cubic miles of utter mechanical madness, only to find out that the cause of the problem is a long-dead monkey wedged between two gearwheels.


There’s a miniboss in this stage, which I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting any future bosses to be a large animal. I wasn’t expecting it to be a bear with a deadly extending morningstar. It’s been a real rollercoaster of expectations, I can tell you.
To beat the bear, you have to use your animal’s special attack to knock the spiked part of the mace back and forth like a deadly game of tetherball, taking into account the position and momentum of the mace’s oh who am I kidding, you just jump on the bear’s head a bunch of times.


I don’t want to harp on about this stage’s similarity to a Castlevania level too much, and I’m sure some of it is down to me liking Castlevania so much I want to see Belmonts where there are only kids riding monkeys, but as I approached the final boss’s chamber by climbing a long, red-carpeted staircase high into a moonlit sky such comparisons become inevitable.


And here is the final boss. The bastard is stealing all my animal coins! That’s right, for the final battle Horn is stripped of all his money and therefore must fight without his animal friends, thus proving that they were only in it for the cold, hard cash.
As for the boss himself, I haven’t played Undertale yet but as I hang around in the videogame part of the Internet I’ve seen plenty about Undertale over the last couple of years. Apparently some people think the goat lady is very sexy. Well, more power to ya, pal. Anyway, the final boss of Recalhorn sure does look like Asgore from Undertale, right?


An evil version of Asgore, admittedly, but I think the similarities are there. I’m sure it’s nothing more than coincidence, but I thought it was worth mentioning.


As for the fight itself, it’s more head-bouncing. Horn has something of a one-track mind when it comes to this sort of thing, and giving this boss the ultimate flattop is the only way to free the kingdom(?) from this villain’s (??) evil schemes (???). Without the power of your animal friends to call on, Horn can’t actually jump high enough to land on the boss’s head, but fortunately there’s a flying skeletal hand in the room that you can use as a platform. It is never revealed why the hand is helping you. Maybe the boss has been using it to carry drinks around or something and it simply wants revenge.
As expected from the final battle in an arcade game, beating this boss is no easy feat. I wasn’t doing too badly during the first half of the fight, but once you’ve pummelled him for a while the boss will start setting fire to the floor, making it very difficult to achieve a safe landing when you’ve spanged off his head along some unpredictable trajectory.


I got there in the end, though (by cheating). Horn’s reward: a do-it-yourself fruit salad kit big enough to feed the entire population of mid-sized city.
Now that Recalhorn is over, we can sit back and enjoy the ending, which will hopefully explain something about what’s been going on this whole time.


Hmm, yes, I see. The empty castle represents Horn’s feelings of abandonment and isolation after he realised the animals were only helping him so they’d get paid. Or the ending’s broken. Yeah, it’s definitely the latter. There’s definitely supposed to be something going on, but all the graphics that are supposed to be on the “front” layer of the screen are actually placed “behind” the background, so all you get to see is a sequence of various location shots and the occasional flicker of sonmthing happening in the distance. I have no idea whether this is down to an emulation error or because, as a pre-release version of a game, Taito simply didn’t fix the ending because they assumed no-one would ever see it, but it means that the mysteries of Recalhorn may never be solved.


The biggest mystery about Recalhorn is why it was never fully released. As far as I can gather it performed poorly during location testing and was subsequently quietly shelved, which is a shame because this is a well above-average platforming adventure. It suffers a little from occasional bland patches in both the theme of the stages and the level design itself, but it’s mostly very enjoyable. The animal helper system is a welcome addition, and the game does a great job of providing alternate routes for whatever situation you find yourself in – I know I wasn’t keen on the lion, but if you put the time into really mastering how to use it I bet there’s all kinds of game-breaking pro strats that could be squeezed out of having a big cat that can fly across stages like it’s been fired out of a howitzer. On top of that it’s a nicely polished game, with tons of charmingly pointless flourishes and a good soundtrack. The only reason I can think of that it might have fared poorly during focus testing is that it very much feels like a console game. You could easily imagine a SNES port of Recalhorn, and I imagine that it all felt a little pointless to arcade players as a result.
I’d say that Recalhorn has to go down as a real missed opportunity, then – close to, if not greatness, then at least very pleasant fun times. Unless you’ve got a real problem with jumping on animals’ heads, that is.

It’s time for a brief break from retro games today, because I’ve been playing From Software’s Playstation 4 masterpiece Bloodborne again recently and now I want to talk about it. That’s one of the perks of having a videogame website, I can ramble on about Bloodborne without having to see the glassy stares and hear the disinterested “uh huh”-ing of people who have never played it and never will, once again proving that the internet is vastly superior to real-world human contact. So, it’s another edition of the Ephemera series, I suppose, although I’m gonna make a mockery of that name by talking about major game mechanics as well as small details. Of course, this article’s going to contain lots of spoilers for Bloodborne and its DLC, so if you want to experience it all for yourself then look away now, and if you're planning to play Bloodborne at some point I strongly suggest you do just that. Also, I hope you’re not squeamish about eyeballs.


First up, something simple. I thought about what my favourite view in the game was. Now, Bloodborne is a beautiful-looking game packed with sinister, detailed-soaked architecture in a style I can only describe as Ultra-Gothic, and thus almost every location is worthy of praise. I’m especially fond of the haunted-village-meets-organ-farm feel of Hemwick Charnel Lane and the Research Hall’s towering maze. In the end, though, I settled on this.


This is the entrance to the Upper Cathedral Ward, and it’s just beautiful. The quasi-Victorian ironworks of the metal railings and the streetlights, looming towers, a fog-shrouded bridge that leads towards a mysterious building glowing faintly with a light that may seem almost welcoming but probably illuminates something that wants to use your spine as dental floss. There are many reasons why Bloodborne is an excellent game, but this aesthetic, this world, is what makes it a game that feels almost as thought it was designed specifically for me.


Also, I hope you appreciate that I took the time to nudge these two corpses into the corner so I could take the first screenshot without their mangled bodies making the place look untidy.


As I’m sure many of you know, Bloodborne is a spin-off of the Dark Souls franchise, and in a lot of ways it’s a Dark Souls game in all but name (plus a change of setting from “medieval” fantasy to 19th Century horror themes.) One thing it took wholesale from the Souls games are the “gestures” - short canned animations that you can use to make your character point at things, wave hello, bow in greeting, that kind of thing. They’re mostly used for communicating with other players during online multiplayer. Pointing out traps, using the “slow clap” gesture when your co-operator walks into said trap, gestures are very helpful. Well, in Bloodborne there’s a gesture called Make Contact, where you stick one arm up and one arm out at ninety degrees. You pick this gesture up from a mummified corpse, who is standing in said pose, and it’s a prime opportunity for some photography.


Just look at the camaraderie on display here, my character’s arm draped across the shoulder of the corpse like they’re two lads staggering from bar to bar during a cheap holiday in Magaluf.


It wasn’t until I went through my Bloodborne screenshots in preparation for this article that I realised I’d posed with this corpse every single time I encountered it, and I’ve played through the game five or six times.


I started a tradition without even realising it. It’s nice that this evolved organically. You know, the, erm, corpse photoshoot. Nice might not be the word I’m looking for. Please tell me someone else has done this. It’s okay to be a weirdo, but not a lone weirdo.


The Dark Souls games are famed for being difficult, and so too is Bloodborne. A lot of this difficulty comes from the fact that almost everything in these games wants to make your innards outards, and will take any opportunity to kill you violently and with single-minded dedication. In the Dark Souls games, two of the ways you can defend yourself are by a) hiding behind a shield or b) parrying attacks by deflecting them with a shield and then getting a free attack while the enemy is stunned. However, there are no shields in Bloodborne. Well, okay, there’s one in the base game but it’s essentially useless and is basically included to tell you not to bother with shields (which is pretty great in itself). Instead, you can parry attacks by shooting the monsters in the face.


Dark Souls’s shield parry system is fine, but gun parries are much better for several reasons. For starters, it’s way cooler. Brushing aside an armoured knight’s blows with a shield is cool, sure, but not nearly as cool as stopping a werewolf in its tracks using a blunderbuss. I’ll admit that might be personal bias talking, though, and anyway I wouldn’t want to make such a claim of superiority without some gameplay evidence to back it up. So here it is: in Dark Souls, if you miss a parry you will to find out what it’s like to receive an impromptu root canal from a broadsword. This can discourage those of us with poor reactions, leading us to cower behind our shields and not even attempt to parry attacks. In Bloodborne, though, even if you don’t land the parry your gunfire will usually make the enemy flinch and interrupt their attack, so you miss the chance for a powerful visceral attack but you also don’t get torn to ribbons. This means you’re far more likely to attempt gun-parrying in the first place, and the fact that you can only carry a limited supply of ammunition means it’s not (entirely) feasible to simply hammer the fire button and hope for the best, retaining a suitable level of challenge.
Plus, you seem to be able to parry a higher percentage of enemy attacks in Bloodborne than in the Souls games. This is great, because part of my problem with parrying in Souls games is that you have to learn what attacks you can and can’t parry through trial, error and repeated death. In Bloodborne it all feels a bit more obvious, making for faster-paced combat where a well-timed gunshot can turn the flow of a fight.


As a bonus, here’s a clip of me parrying a boss so hard that he tried to flee back to his home planet.


One of the items you can collect in Bloodborne are pebbles. That’s not a cutesy nickname or anything, they’re just small rocks. You can throw them at enemies, and they’re best used to get the attention of a single enemy in a group so they’ll run towards you, letting you fight them one-on-one. Then there’s the pebbles’ item description, which contains some of the densest, thickest sarcasm I’ve ever seen in a videogame.


“Quite thrilling” makes me chuckle every time I read it, possibly because I always imagine it being said by a stuffy English professor from the 1930s. The thing is, when you are throwing pebble at a half-transformed man-beast and you do get its attention, that is actually quite thrilling. There are thrills to be had as the ravenous beast realises you’re there and tries to eviscerate you, that’s for sure.


The pebbles also do a teeny tiny bit of damage when they hit an enemy, so if you’re feeling particularly bold – or you forget what item you have equipped and accidentally chuck a pebble rather than the molotov cocktail you were trying to throw, ahem ahem – then you can even take out enemies by flicking bits of gravel at them. That might seem like a terrible idea, but wait: the damage dealt by the pebbles actually increases as you raise your Strength stat! Skipping rocks at the beginning of the game might only cause one or two points of damage, but if you levelled up and invest heavily in Strength then by the end of the game you can be dishing out five or six points of damage with every pebble!


While blood is the central theme and driving force of Bloodborne’s plot, eyeballs run it a close second. Yes, eyeballs are very important in the world of Bloodborne, particularly in that certain groups attempt to “see” the true mysteries of the universe by growing more eyeballs. This is an effective strategy, apparently, even though you wouldn’t think it would work. If I want to run faster, growing seventeen more legs is not going to help, you know? Fresh eyeballs are also needed to perform certain blasphemous rituals, to the extent that you can be attacked by enemies with a special tool designed solely for gouging out eyeballs. Have another look at the pebble pictured above, and you’ll see it looks like an eyeball, and so on. Eyeballs are everywhere in Bloodborne, something which is literally true when you reach the Nightmare of Mensis area.


They’re coming, as the late, great Bill Paxton once said, out of the goddamn walls. Here in this alternate universe, the books and magazines browse you! Personally, these eyes are all the more unnerving for the fact they don’t really do anything. They’re simply there, unmoving and silent, possibly dead but also possibly seeing all kinds of things beyond the ken of man.


Then you’ve got these things. Eyeball spiders, I guess you’d call them. The legs imply that they were once mobile, and I think we can all agree that replacing a spider’s body with an eyeball significantly increases the creepiness of said spider, so I hope this image doesn’t give you eye-rachnophobia. Ha ha! Ha…
I’m sorry.
Anyway, these things are wonderful. They’re pure decoration, a mood enhancer, an unsettling thing to see out of the corner of your eye, and one of the reasons they're so great is that they’re not explained at all. You can infer how they came into being from the place you find them and what was going on there, but you’re never told what they are or why they seem to be pinned to the floor with weird organic needles. This is an example of one of Bloodborne’s greatest strengths – it’s a game that takes inspiration from Lovecraft and other cosmic horror, but it never makes the mistake of over-explaining itself. It gives you enough info to get an idea – a startling, horrifying idea – of what’s going on, but many of the specifics are never filled in, giving you the chance to ponder these secrets and develop your own theories. This is true of all the Souls games, as you can see by the large cottage industry of internet videomakers and message boards dedicated to analysing the lore of these games, but for my money Bloodborne is the game where the tension between mystery and fact is most finely balanced.


In the same area as the eyeball spiders, you’ll find a boss called Micolash, Host of the Nightmare. I think that means “host” in the sense that one hosts a party, because Micolash certainly seems like he’s having a good time.


What a cheerful chap! Micolash is an interesting boss, because unlike all the other bosses in the game he doesn’t immediately set about trying to kill you when the fight begins. Instead, you have to chase him through a maze, avoiding the skeletal puppet monsters littering the corridors and tracking Micolash down when he teleports around by jumping into various mirrors. Eventually you’ll corner him and you can have a proper scrap, but this completely different style of boss battle seems to upset a lot of people. Many will claim that Micolash is the worst boss fight in the game, which I don’t think it is, but hey, that’s your opinion and I’ll concede that it might not be as exciting as doing battle with enormous were-beasts. Some people also insist that Micolash is the worst boss in the entire Souls series, but in that case they’re objectively wrong, having seemingly forgotten about the intense dullness of the Dragonrider in Dark Souls II, or the utter fun vacuum /  bullshit generator that was Dark Souls’ Bed of Chaos.


Consider this my defence of Micolash, then, because I think this boss battle is really good. It’s a nice change of pace for starters, completely different to every other boss fight in the game, and it’s good to mix things up. The best thing about it is the atmosphere, though. As Micolash runs around he’s constantly jabbering away, spouting a mixture of interesting lore details, mockery and the howling of a madman, as befits someone who performed an arcane ritual that drove him insane and sent him to another dimension. His voice acting is fantastic, too, his dialogue dripping with the conviction that comes from being totally bonkers, coupled with just a hint of pure comedy. You get the impression that Micolash, despite clearly being nuttier than a bag of trail mix, does genuinely have a deeper understanding of the universe than the player does, which fits in perfectly with Bloodborne’s themes of being thrust into world of forces beyond your comprehension. I’ll admit that mechanically the fight has some problems, especially if you die near the end and have to chase Micolash right through the maze again, but for sheer ambience alone it remains one of my favourite parts of the game.


You may have noticed that Micolash appears to have his head stuck in an oversized bird feeder. That’s called the Mensis Cage, and one of your rewards for defeating him is that you can take the cage for yourself. Oh yes, just like the other games in the Souls series, Bloodborne is not afraid to give the player a selection of goofy hats to wear. Here are my top three favourite goofy hats in Bloodborne.


Number three is the Mensis Cage itself. Supposedly acting as an antenna to facilitate contact with the god-like beings known as the Great Ones, it also allows the wearer to experience life as a pet canary. Good for headbutting contests, bad for wearing during thunderstorms.


Number two is the One-Eyed Iron Helm (or the Master’s Iron Helm, depending how you acquire it), which is a bucket with one eye hole drilled into it. That’s it. It’s as though Ned Kelly got distracted halfway through making it. The helmet’s description says it only has one eye hole because the original owner likely only had one eye, but that’s no bloody good to me, is it? It’s hard enough to kill all these beasts without having to squint like Popeye the whole time. There are multiple places in Bloodborne called “workshops,” and you’re telling me none of them had a suitable drill for making a new eye-hole? The One-Eyed Iron Helm is completely ridiculous, and that’s why I love it.


My absolute favourite is the majestic shining traffic cone that is the Gold Ardeo. If Pyramid Head had the wealth and taste of a Premier League footballer, this is what he’s look like. No eye-holes is even more ridiculous and thus more appealing than one eye-hole, and the first time I played through Bloodborne I never took this helmet off once I’d bought it. It even wobbles around when you run, as you’d expect a cone perched on someone’s head would. How perfect. All I can say in defence of its design is that it’s the helmet of the Executioners, who did battle with a group of pseudo-vampires led by a charismatic queen. Maybe they wore these helmets to prevent themselves being captivated by the vampire’s bewitching stares. Then again, rather than using swords and guns the Executioners killed all the vampires with massive wooden wagon wheels, so perhaps practicality is not their strongest suit.


Going back to eyeballs for a moment, and one of the enemies you encounter now and again in Bloodborne are giant pigs. There’s one in the first area, a few more in the woods, and you can find them in the optional Chalice Dungeons. Apart from being taller than a man and unpleasantly bloated even by pig standards, they’re just pigs.


See? There’s one now. It’s a pig, but larger. This is one of the final areas of the game, and when I reached this point during my first playthrough I was more than confident about my ability to defeat the same old oversized pig. So I ran up to it, hoping to land a critical blow while its back was turned…


At which point it turned around, revealing that its face was a mass of writhing eyeballs. I was so shocked by this – shocked enough to let out an audible gasp – that the pig was able to trample me to death while I was distracted. Good job, From Software. You totally got me.



Immature? Yes. Did I laugh out loud? Yes. Did I rate the message as a “fine note”? Of course I did, I’m only human. I’d like to believe that whoever left this note was in the middle of a difficult boss battle when I gave their message a positive rating, and that the resulting health refill they got saved their life. Rescued from death by a joke about butts, what a wonderful concept.


And finally for this article – the Boom Hammer weapon’s jumping attack.


For the most part, Bloodborne is a game of subtlety and precision, but sometimes you just want to leap into a crowd of enemies and smash them with a massive fiery hammer. You can do that too. “No mercy for beasts” indeed.

So, that’s a bunch of words about Bloodborne. If you read them all, thank you very much. I had fun writing them. Almost as much fun as I get out of playing Bloodborne, in fact – but not quite, so now I’m going to head back into the Chalice Dungeons for a while. If you summon a collaborator called Slab Beefbroth who’s carrying a circular saw on a stick, be sure to use a friendly Make Contact gesture.

Having recently experienced something dangerously close to fun while writing about Recalhorn and Bloodborne, I realise that a thorough bout of purifying self-flagellation is in order. Something painful, something viciously unpleasant, something that’s not just really bad but makes you wonder if the people who made it had ever played a videogame before. Oh, I know, let’s have an unlicensed NES game! They’re almost always bloody awful, and today’s game is no exception: it’s Color Dreams’ 1990 why-do-I-do-this-to-myself-em-up Menace Beach!


Oh, I see, you’ve gone for the “extremely unappealing mutant homunculus” look for your main character. A bold choice, admittedly, but one that I don’t think has really panned out. I don’t want to control this kid and experience his wacky adventures, I want to find very large paper bag to put over his distended cranium. Then set the bag on fire. Why has he got slitted cat’s pupils? I have to ask, because having played through the game as this weirdo I can assure you he does not have the heightened agility and reactions of a human-cat hybrid.
Also, I didn’t realise the game’s title was a play on “Venice Beach” until well after I’d finished it. If you saw me in real life – pale and blinking in the light like some troglodytic mole -  you’d immediately understand that I’m not the kind of person who knows about beaches, even famous ones.


When it comes to plot, Menace Beach goes for the tried-and-tested “kidnapped girlfriend” angle. Ignore for the moment that the likelihood of that thing from the title screen going out on the town with a girl and not being banished to a circus sideshow is vanishingly small. This is Bunny, and she’s been abducted and chained up by someone, somewhere. She’s sending out mixed messages about the severity of her situation -  casual disappointment that her date at the “malt shop” has been cancelled, a pun about being “tied up” and finally the subtle threat of violence if I don’t get my skates on and rescue her. And when I say “get my skates on,” I mean…


...get my skateboard on. That’s you, the player character, riding that skateboard. I believe his name is Scooter. I’m guessing it’s an ironic nickname because he really likes skateboards. He likes skateboards so much, in fact, that he spends the entire game riding one. Immediately it becomes clear that Menace Beach is going to be a real test of patience, because it’s a platformer where the main character has wheels. Do these wheels make him slide around all over the place in a manner that would not effect a more sensible, shoe-based platforming star? They most certainly do, and it is dreadful. Imagine a game designer thinking “hey, the kids sure love those ice levels where your character has friction of a knob of butter on a ski jump, so let’s make an entire game that handles like that!” I’m not even off Menace Beach’s first screen and I already hate it.


Then you’re attacked by ninjas. Good old ninjas. Rarely have I taken such an immediate dislike to a game’s protagonist, but as much as I’m rooting for the ninjas to win I’ve committed myself to playing through this game so I’d better beat them up. As well as jumping and sliding off whatever platform you were trying to land on, Scooter can also punch his enemies while he’s on the ground, or he can jump and use a far more effective spinning kick / skateboard clobber attack.
The screen stops scrolling until you defeat the mysterious shadow warrior, which is a shame because I’d have been quite happy to skate past them and on to the end of the stage, but they’re not too difficult to dispatch once you’ve got the hang of the spinning attack’s trajectory. In fact, I would recommend taking some time to get a good feel for the spinning attack, because not only is it good for defeating the bad guys, it also adds a little extra horizontal distance to your jumps, something which comes in very useful in later stages. Not in this first stage, though, because it’s just a flat plane patrolled by ninjas with one rooftop you can jump up to for an energy refill.


That’s pretty much it for the first stage. Move forward, spin-kick a ninja, move on to the next screen, repeat. They’re terrible ninjas, let’s be honest. Plus they remind me of Zool, who at least has the excuse of being from the Nth Dimension to explain why he doesn’t understand the concept of stealthy assassinations.


Also, clowns. Sure, why not. It makes more sense that the clowns would want to harm a child than the ninjas, because they’re clowns.


When you reach the end of the level – I know it says “world” up at the top but I don’t feel comfortable referring to something five screens long as a world – Scooter turns to face the camera and flips the player the ol’ double-bird. This seems like the perfect representation of the experience of playing Menace Beach.


“Meanwhile at Demon Dan’s” it says, so I guess Bunny has been kidnapped by someone called Demon Dan. He sounds like a used car salesman from Texas. “C’mon down to Demon Dan’s! We’ve got hellish hatchbacks, sinful sedans and pick-up trucks desanctified by the blood of a slaughtered goat, all at prices so low you’ll renounce the works of Christ the Saviour!”
As for Bunny, she’s not happy. In fact, she’s really angry that I haven’t saved her yet. I think the word “ungrateful” is what I’m looking for here. C’mon, lady, I’ve only just finished the first stage, so don’t call my masculinity into question. Also I’m playing as a child, telling him he’s not man enough is likely to cause some unfortunate psychological damage.


Stage two takes place in the sewers, where there’s more emphasis on platforms and zero ninjas. Don’t get too excited, though: the ninjas have merely been replaced by an army of Elvis impersonators that judder and flap around the screen in a way that makes a mockery of the grace and dignity of Elvis’ seventies jumpsuit phase.


Then I bumped into a lightswitch and everything went dark. On the plus side I can’t see as much of the game now, but it is making an already frustrating game that much more likely to make me feed my controller into a woodchipper. It’s a strange sort of selective darkness, too, and you can still see the various moving elements of the stage. The thin horizontal white lines are springboards that launch Scooter into the air if he rides over them. The thing at the bottom-left that looks like a tiny corridor leading to a distant light that might offer escape from this misery is actually a spinning… thing that launches Scooter horizontally if he touches it. The frog is a frog. So, what we’ve got here is a level in a videogame that already suffers from poor controls, a level that’s packed with obstacles that further reduce the amount of control you have over your character, a level that’s pitch-black, a level that I would use only mild hyperbole to describe as The Absolute Worst. That is, until you reach some of the sewer stages later in the game which take the same concept and ramp up the difficulty significantly.


Having managed to turn the lights back on, I can now see that there are bombs all over the stage. These bombs become more important later, but for now just know that Scooter can pick them up and throw them, being caught in the blast radius results in immediate death and one of the Elvises wandered too close to one of them and now they’re scouring an area the size of Kent in an attempt to find all his body parts.


Things are not going well for Bunny. Not only is she still chained up and is lashing out at Scooter in impotent rage, but things have taken a creepily sexual turn as her clothes begin to rot off. Hang on, rot off? She’s only been kidnapped for five minutes. What are her clothes made of, stale bread and chicken skin?


It’s back to the surface world for the next stage, where Menace Beach introduces the fearsome sumo warriors. I assume they’re sumos, anyway. You see a fat bloke in a loincloth and your mind immediately goes to sumos, but there’s no other Japanese theme to this game so maybe it’s just a fat bloke in a loincloth. Whoever they are, they really don’t like Scooter (understandable) and will attempt to murder him at any opportunity. They are, to be blunt, a real pain in the arse. They can only be killed by bombs, so you have to grab the bombs that are thrown on to the screen and try to put them somewhere near where the sumo might be at some point and hope. The sumos wander around, not really chasing you but never really leaving you alone either, and between their random wanderings, the fact that a misplaced bomb will kill Scooter in one hit, Scooter’s inability to place or throw the bombs like you’d expect from a normal human person with working arms and their highly damaging attacks, the sumos quickly became the bane of any Menace Beach player’s existence. Oh, and you have to defeat them of you can’t move on. They’re the supermarket own-brand version of Red Arremer from Ghouls n’ Ghosts, except designed without any finesse or charm or fairness, and I hate them. They appear in almost every stage from here on out, too. Fantastic.


More sewers, more sumos, more spinning things that slap the player around the stage. That tiny yellow square is a piston that pushes “out” of the background, poking into Scooter when he rides past and knocking him down to the lower platform. I’ve got to go down there anyway so I can kill that sumo, but I’d like to do it in my own time, you know?


The next stage takes place on a pier, down in the town’s crate district. It’s where they keep all the crates, you see, and also the quarantine zone for the ‘roided-out bodybuilders that replace the ninjas in these seafront stage. They’re pretty much the same as the other above-ground levels, only more annoying because sometimes a seagull will pick Scooter up and carry him back towards the beginning of the stage. These stages do at least contain the one single element of Menace Beach that made me smile – these people who pop out the crates and throw projectiles at Scooter. It’s the face that does it: no matter what the quality of the surrounded game, an expression of such pure goofiness is always going to cheer me right up. Yes, even if they are trying to bottle me like I’m 50 Cent at the Reading Festival. Supposedly Scooter can catch those bottles and throw them at the bad guys, but I’ve gotta say I never bothered. Having spent some time trying to get Scooter to simply move from one place to another, I didn’t fancy testing his dexterity against a glass bottle to the face.


The rest of Menace Beach’s dozen or so stages (aside from the final one) are all variants on these three locales, with the amount of frustrating bullshit ramped up accordingly as the game progresses. To call it “level design” would be woefully inaccurate – it’s more like someone loaded the game’s various enemies and traps into a firehose and blasted it all over the same three generic backgrounds. Menace Beach does get harder as it goes on, but more than that it get more irritating. If the concept of a hangover was adapted into a videogame, this would be it.


I have also come to realise that Bunny hasn’t been kidnapped, and that this is all part of her and Scooter’s kinky BDSM sex games – with a hint of a cuckoldry fetish thrown in, if her warning about Demon Dan preparing to “tickle” her are anything to go by. That’s fine, you can get up to whatever depraved nastiness you like in your spare time but don’t drag me into, all right?


So, did anything else of note happen during the game? Well, there was this time I found a balloon that let me fly over almost an entire stage, removing the need to actually play Menace Beach. That was nice. I enjoyed that bit.


Not so enjoyable was this section during one of the pier stages where I had to try to defeat a sumo while negotiating the small platforms – and just let me remind you, Scooter is still riding a skateboard. The bombs you need are located a couple of platforms away so you have to try to grab them without exploding, drag them over the sumo and throw them down one at a time. It took absolutely bloody ages. I could feel myself becoming a worse person each time I tried it. It’s a good job I don’t own a dog because after thirty attempts at this crap I would have kicked it across the room. No, no, I’m kidding. I would never do that, I love dogs. In fact, maybe a dog is just what I should have had to get through this section. If I could have stroked a puppy after each failed attempt, my blood pressure would be significantly lower.
The “best” thing about this section is that there’s a hole in the platform, and the sumo has no qualms about running off the edge and into the sea to avoid your bombs. This does not kill the sumo, it simply reappears to block your path. If you asked Sisyphus if he wanted to trade his task for this one, he’d say “nah, I’ll stick with the boulder, thanks.” At least that way he’s getting some healthy exercise.


God damn, I love these balloons. See you later, you ketchup-throwing piece of crap.


Unfortunately, there was no balloon available for this section. You’ve got to jump from platform to platform, yeah? But as you can see, there are no platforms available, just the open ocean. It’s a gap of about three screens, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to cross it. I think it’s something to do with finding the right rhythm of jumping, doing a spin-kick and then jumping again to maintain a certain level of horizontal movement that will get you over the gap, but I simply could not do it. Dozens of times I saw the platform I was heading for at the edge of the screen, only for Scooter to fall short. I probably spent more time trying to jump over this sodding gap than I did playing the rest of the game put together. I tried every possible variation of button pressing speed and take-off positions. I looked up video footage of someone else clearing the jump to try and figure out what I was doing wrong. None of it worked. I didn’t suffer through ten stages of Menace Beach’s insufferable bullshit just to be defeated by a large puddle, though, so I reset the game and used a level-skip cheat.


Menace Beach mocks you for using cheats, but maybe if its gameplay wasn’t so shit I wouldn’t have needed to resort to cheating? I feel confident that I have won the moral victory here.


Bunny is down to her underwear now, which conveniently is much more resistant to rotting than her other clothes. She’s also toned down her furious wrath towards Scooter, perhaps because she’s realised that he might actually reach her and if she keeps on calling him things like “dog breath” and “snotface” he might be inclined to leave her to Demon Dan’s tender affections.


This is the final stage, and it’s actually different to all the others! “Thank god for that,” I thought to myself with some trepidation, but it turns out it’s not even that bad! It’s pure platforming, and Scooter must get through the cave as fast as possible because every time he lands from a jump, a stalactite falls from the ceiling at the point where he landed. It’s nothing amazing, and it certainly doesn’t redeem the rest of the game, but the fact that you’re always moving forwards makes Scooter’s lack of friction less of an issue so you end up with a relatively tolerable section of platforming action. In most other NES platformers it would be completely unremarkable, but Menace Beach hasn’t so much lowered my expectations as it has sealed them in a lead casket and dropped them into the Marianas Trench.


It’s time for the final boss and hang on a minute, Demon Dan is an actual demon? A full-on goat-legged, pitchfork-waving servant of evil? I was expecting a Dick Dastardly type, not Satan Himself. Also, I don’t want to defeat Demon Dan. Look at him, he appears to be using his pitchfork as a pretend guitar while doing a duck walk. I bet he’s singing some AC/DC, so all told I felt kind of bad for jumping around to cause stalactites to fall on his head. Get ten or so rocks to fall onto Dan’s bonce and that’s it, Menace Beach is finally over and we can all move on with our lives.


In the ending, Bunny and Scooter go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. Bunny appears to be significantly older than Scooter, to the extent that if I ran this malt shop I’d be calling the police. Mind you, she was chained up for quite a while, so maybe she’s simply been stretched so much that she’s ended up taller.


Oh, and Demon Dan pops out of a manhole and throws a skateboard onto the screen in the least convincing and least welcome sequel hook I’ve ever seen. Okay, second least, because I’ve seen Silent Hill: Revelation.
I usually do my best to give every game I write about a fair chance, because making a videogame is a difficult process that many people have worked hard on, but there was something about Menace Beach that made me take an instant dislike to it and the rest of the game never did anything to change my opinion. The controls are awful, the levels are awkward messes of lumped-together elements and frustrating, impossible to avoid hazards, it’s repetitive and it’s just not any fun to play. I don’t think it’s quite objectionable enough to get into my all-time top five worst games ever, but I hate it with a pure, unclouded venom nonetheless. Don’t play Menace Beach, is what I’m saying.
Before I leave this article behind, two quick notes: I found out after I’d finished the game that you can detonate any bombs you’ve thrown by pressing the select button. That sounds like it would have made fighting the sumos much less painful, and it does but only by a tiny amount because you’ve still got to grab a bomb and plant it correctly in the first place.
The other thing is that, in 1995, Menace Beach was reborn anew. Wisdom Tree, the Christian games company that was founded by members of Color Dreams, took Menace Beach, changed the graphics a little and re-released it as the God-friendly Sunday Funday. This version is about a kid who’s trying to get to Sunday school. Funnily enough, the scenes of Bunny chained up in her underwear are replaced by a Sunday school teacher (who is not chained up in her underwear). The sumos are also changed to equally large but more casually-dressed regular citizens, because I guess the ancient Japanese sport is judged to be unclean in the eyes of the Lord or something. Sunday Funday ends with the line “Sunday is a fun day when you spend it at church.” I sincerely doubt that any of the kids whose parents bought them Sunday Funday were convinced by this argument.

In my almost thirty years of playing videogames, they’ve taken me on some pretty wild adventures. I’ve rescued kidnapped princesses, I’ve battled evil space armadas, I’ve battled evil space armadas in order to rescue kidnapped princesses, but there’s one adventure I’ve never experienced before: the adventure of making your way home from the pub after a few too many bevvies. Well, that’s all changed now, because I’ve played Taskset’s 1984 Commodore 64 cirrhosis-em-up Bozo’s Night Out!


Just in case you were wondering about the theme of this game, the logo is made from beer. I suspect Bozo’s night out will not involve a mentally enriching trip to an art gallery.


Here’s Bozo now, finishing up after a session at his local boozer. The vast quantities of alcohol he regularly consumes have done terrible, terrible things to Bozo’s body. When your torso has ballooned into a shape I can only describe as “pointy sphere” then it’s probably time to cut back on the ol’ vino. I’m not sure why this bar has three books standing on the bar, but it feels like the set-up to a joke that I don’t know the punchline for. Alternatively, they’re a crude rendering of beer pumps. That would make more sense.


As Bozo steps out of Gibbo’s Joint and into the crisp night air, the goal of Bozo’s Night Out is revealed: get Bozo home. That’s it. The only controls are the joystick, which moves Bozo around. You walk him through the streets until you reach his house. It is not, at first glance, a game with much depth.


Of course, you do have to avoid the many people wandering the streets – and it’s busy out there, considering it’s past kicking out time. Old ladies ripped straight from the Monty Python “Hell’s Grannies” sketch, the long arm of the law, blokes who look like the Honey Monster if he joined the EDL, all of them will give Bozo a hard time if he bumps into them. They’re easy enough to walk around, though. Bozo’s in full control of his legs, for now.


The other thing you need to avoid are the grates on the floor, because Bozo lives in a town where gaping holes open up in the pavement at random intervals. The reason for this is never explained. You never see any toilets in the game, so maybe they’re trying to cut out the middle-man between people and the sewers. I wish I hadn’t thought of that.


There’s Bozo’s house now. It’s not far from the pub, just ten or so screens away. I assume this is why Bozo bought it in the first place. Now I’ve just got to wait for that skinhead to move away before I can barge in through the front door, put some toast on and let it burn while I’m taking a very long piss, flip the television to an “erotic thriller” and fall asleep on the sofa.


“Safely home,” it says, as Bozo crawls into bed. Bozo has a huge portrait of himself staring down at him while he sleeps, the weirdo. As a reward for making it home, you’re given five pints, adding to the five you start the game with and filling up the pint-o-meter at the top of the screen. Okay, that’s it, game over.


Except of course it isn’t, and Bozo is such a raging alcoholic that he’s straight down the pub the following night, and indeed every night. The structure of Bozo’s Night Out is thus revealed: leave the pub, guide Bozo home through the dangerous city streets, go to bed, return to the pub and repeat until Bozo has completely filled the booze-o-meter or has been grabbed one too many times by the citizenry. Now that I think about it, shouldn’t Bozo be getting the five pints at the pub rather than when he gets home? I can understand him maybe having a nightcap, but another five pints before bed seems a bit much. Maybe he just does so much preloading before he goes out that he doesn’t need to drink at the pub and only goes down there to play the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire quiz machine.


What with all these hostile people clogging the streets and yawning pits waiting to be stepped in, I thought it might be prudent to wait for one of these green doors to open so Bozo could take a shortcut through the park.


This turned out to be a mistake, because apparently this town’s park is where Hieronymous Bosch stores all his rejected monster designs. You might think the monsters are all just alcohol-induced hallucinations, but not – they’re the real deal, and will beat the crap out of Bozo if he touches them. Also, the inside of the park isn’t to the same scale as the streets, so you think you’ve walked roughly the right distance to reach Bozo’s house but once you leave the park you’ll find you’ve overshot your target and ended up back at the pub. Overall, I’d say it’s not worth entering the park unless you’re absolutely pinned down by pedestrians and the open door offers your only escape route.


These are some really great monsters, mind you. Bizarre, shambling freaks with a heartwarming mix of design influences from British kids cartoons and those rubber finger-puppet monsters you used to get out of vending machines. My favourite is the one at the top-left of the screenshot above: I think it’s supposed to be a skeleton wearing a red cape with a piece of popcorn for a head, but I can’t see its body as anything other than a skeleton encased in a cone of translucent red goo. If someone with more artistic talent than me (e.g. anyone, ever) wants to draw this thing, that would be great. I have no reward to offer other than the knowledge that you made me smile.


You can also touch the mushrooms in the park, which makes the colours freak out but doesn’t cause Bozo to lose pints like touching any other hazard does. This makes sense, because Bozo is roughly 85 percent pure ethanol at this point and thus hallucinogens are unlikely to cause him much harm.


By the time Bozo has necked twenty pints are so, you’ll notice that (understandably) his mobility is beginning to suffer. This is the real challenge of Bozo’s Night Out, then: for every trip home you complete, Bozo gradually becomes more difficult to control. At this point, it’s nothing too much to worry about, and the major issue you’ll notice is that Bozo has trouble walking in a straight line. When you hold right on the joystick to walk home, Bozo will gradually drift up or down and you know what? It’s a remarkably accurate recreation of trying to walk about while bladdered, and I love it. The only thing that’s missing is a massively distorted voice sample of Bozo trying to sing “Show Me The Way To Go Home.”


The altered controls did mean I managed to bump into a copper, who immediately threw Bozo in jail. Who wants to bet it’s for trying to steal the policeman’s helmet and then throwing up in it? And so Bozo loses five pints from the pint-o-meter while contemplating his Drunk and Disorderly charge and shouting at the police that they should be out there catching proper criminals.


Whereas if you bump into the big chaps, they simple beat the crap out of Bozo in a cartoon-cloud-of-dust style. You only lose two pints for this, as you also do for colliding with most of the game’s other hazards. This makes sense to me, getting a kicking might be unpleasant but sitting in the drunk tank gives Bozo a lot longer to sober up. What doesn’t make sense is that when you run into the old ladies they appear to repeatedly pat Bozo on the head, as though he was a tousle-haired young rapscallion and not a fat bloke who patterned his life on Oliver Reed. However, they pat him so hard that he’s forced into the concrete, at the loss of two pints. I have no idea what action the animation is supposed to be implying – hitting Bozo with an invisible umbrella, maybe – but it’s definitely painful.


At the fifty pints mark, Bozo reaches the “take off all your clothes” stage of inebriation. Pictured above: a naked, pink Bozo, moments away from threatening to glass that arcade cabinet because it looked at him funny.


Thankfully, that isn’t actually the case. It’s just that Bozo is now so leathered that the game’s sprites have started changing colour – although stripping naked and running through the streets after fifty pints wouldn’t be all that unbelievable. By now, Bozo is so thoroughly kaylied, so monumentally trollied, so completely and irredeemably bongoed that it’s no longer accurate to say that you “control” him. The directions you move the joystick in only correspond loosely to Bozo’s movements, gentle suggestions rather than firm commands, and as I said earlier it’s a very convincing simulation of what it feels like trying to move when you’re drunk. There’s a delay before Bozo starts moving when you push the stick, and once you let go he’ll keep tottering forward for a while. His walk loops and circles around the screen like an overexcited bumblebee, the player frantically hauling the stick around as Bozo lurches towards a policeman or a hole. If he walks to close to a wall or other obstacle, he’ll bounce off it and stagger away in the opposite direction. It’s all absolutely ridiculous, and also rather good fun.


It might seem hypocritical to me to say I’m enjoying a game because it’s controls are uncooperative, because I so often complain about the handling in other games. The thing is, in Bozo’s Night Out the controls are supposed to be bad. That’s the entire point of the game, and it’s all presented in a comical fashion. The idea of a game getting more difficult as it goes on because the controls are getting worse and worse is an interesting one, and Bozo’s Night Out finds the perfect setting for it – a short, arcade-style game with one central gameplay mechanic.
Also, as you can see above, Bozo has started seeing pink elephants. He’s nearing the end of his quest, you see. If you manage to drink sixty-five pints – an extremely difficult task, given that by this point you have about as much control over Bozo as you do over the weather – the game is over. And what do you win for your efforts?


The Bozo Rotten Liver Award. Yes, this is a game where your reward for completing it is being added to the waiting list for a liver transplant. How incredibly grim, and yet also blackly hilarious.


If you manage to get a high score, you’re prompted to enter your name into the high score table. It’s full of beer-related pun names, and rather wonderfully it’s called The Famous League of Inebriates, which sounds like the name of a truly awful superhero team.  Yes, the League of Inebriates, featuring such mighty heroes as The Pisshead, with the power to harass people at bus stops, Pukespreader, the man who can lay magical land-mines cunningly disguised as piles of vomit and dropped cartons of chips and White Lightning, who was kicked out of the group for luring teenagers into playgrounds at night.


You know, I had a lot of fun playing Bozo’s Night Out. It’s not the deepest game in the world – you’ll probably be bored of it after half an hour or so – but when you play it like you would an arcade game, aiming for a high score and having a chuckle as Bozo rolls along the walls like your nan after one too many Christmas sherries, it’s good fun. It also possesses that “why the hell not?” attitude so prevalent amongst home computer games of the time, when any topic or concept was fair game for a videogame adaptation, be it getting tanked up, lawnmower simulation or fighting the cigarette industry. Happily, with more indie games than ever being released these days it’s a trend that’s seeing a resurgence, and the concept of Bozo’s Night Out would fit in nicely on Steam. Imagine if someone made an updated VR version, people would be all over it. Try it out if you get a chance, then. I’m glad I did. I’m also glad I got though this article without once misspelling his name as “Boozo,” because that sounds like a clown that reeks of gin.

Just in case you thought an over-reliance on sequels was a recent trend in media, here’s a game called Hokuto no Ken 7. To give it its full title, it’s Shouei’s 1993 Super Famicom game Hokuto no Ken 7: Seiken Retsuden – Denshousha e no Michi, which I think means something like Hokuto no Ken 7: History of the Sacred Fist – The Successor’s Path. I reckon I’ll stick to referring to it as Hokuto no Ken 7, thanks.

It’s another strong candidate for the title of “Most Boring Title Screen,” that’s for sure.
So, Hokuto no Ken. You might know it better as Fist of the North Star, the hyper-violent manga and anime about a man named Kenshiro who travels the post-apocalyptic wasteland righting wrongs in the only way he knows how: by slaughtering thousands of people using the ancient martial art of Hokuto Shinken. It’s a fighting style that allows Kenshiro to punch people so hard that they explode, or he can poke the “pressure points” on their body to compel them to die in other, more creative ways, like walking off cliffs or hugging each other to death (no, really). I went into a bit more detail about Hokuto no Kenwhen I wrote about the eponymous Master System game, so check that article out for more info. For now, though, just let it be known that Hokuto no Ken is an extremely gory, incredibly violent and utterly ridiculous series, and it’s also one of my all-time favourite media franchises.


As this is number seven in the series – not including a few other Hokuto no Ken games that weren’t part of this line, like the Japanese home computer game with the wonderful subtitle Violence Adventure Theatre – I suppose I should give a quick rundown of the others. Hokuto no Ken 1 to 4 appeared on the Famicom, with the first two being side-scrolling punch-em-ups inspired by Irem’s Kung Fu. Hokuto no Ken 2 was actually released in the west as Fist of the North Star, making it one of the first officially licensed HnK products to make it out of Japan. Hokuto no Ken 3 and 4 are turn-based RPGs in the Dragon Quest mould, and so was HnK 5, the first of the series to appear on the Super Famicom (albeit with a more Final Fantasy style of battle graphics). When it came to HnK 6, and no doubt influenced by the impact of Street Fighter II, they finally decided that maybe this anime about martial artists fighting each other to the death should be adapted into a one-on-one fighting game. Having played HnK 6, I can tell you it didn’t work out so great. Still, after all these previous attempts, Shouei must surely have a firm grasp on what it takes to make a good Hokuto no Ken game, right? Right?! Look, you can’t blame me for hoping, even if I know the outcome.


There are a couple of different game modes to choose from. Freeplay mode lets you pick two fighters, fiddle with various setting and have a punch-up, and that’s where you can get your two-player jollies. Battle mode is more of a standard arcade mode, where you fight all the game’s characters in a row, and we’ll get to that in a while. For the majority of this article, though, we’ll be looking at the story mode. That’s the mode that tells the story. The story of Hokuto no Ken, I assume. I can read enough of this Japanese to know it mentions both the location Southern Cross and the character Heart, so I reckon we’re going to be starting out by fighting Heart in Southern Cross.


Well, would you look at that, it is indeed a battle between Kenshiro – and you can only play as Kenshiro in story mode – and Heart. That’s Ken on the left, looking as ever like the lovechild of Mad Max and Bruce Lee, with his opponent Heart on the right. Heart’s an example of a minor character who somehow gains a major place within a franchise, and he appears in far more HnK spin-offs than other characters that enjoyed an equally small amount of screen time. Perhaps his fame is because he’s the first adversary in the show who gives Kenshiro even a moment’s challenge – Heart’s whole deal is that he’s so fat martial artists have trouble landing a killer blow. People tend to get their fists stuck inside his gut, you see. In the original material, Ken solves this problem by moving Heart’s fat out of the way by kicking it. Ken solves most of his problems by kicking them, let’s be honest. Sadly I don’t think that special technique is going to be available to me, the player, so I’ll have to go down the usual route of the one-on-one fighter.


Or maybe Ken will shift Heart’s blubber aside by rubbing his crotch against it. When you’ve mastered a secret assassination art with a deadly two-thousand year history, you’re bound to encounter a few moves developed by your weirder predecessors. Just imagine the weird squeaky noise of Ken's leather trousers rubbing against Heart's sweaty gut.


Hokuto no Ken 7 is a fighting game with many features that will make it familiar to anyone who’s played a fighting game before… but with enough of its own strange quirks that it feels rather unusual. You’ve got four attack buttons, a weak and hard punch and a weak and hard kick, you can jump and attack from the air, you hold back to block, and you can perform special moves using a combination of controller inputs and button presses. However, I’d say the special moves inputs have more in common with Mortal Kombat than Street Fighter II: for example, to perform Ken’s projectile attack you hit back, towards then punch rather than using the quarter-circle-forward motion you might expect. Also, and this is the one that really threw me for a loop, both characters’ health bars are constantly refilling. If you’re not getting hit, your health is coming back. It’s such an unusual, unexpected system for a fighting game to have that I didn’t even notice until after ten minutes of fighting Heart when I thought to myself “blimey, this fight sure is dragging on.”


In fact, I had a lot of trouble giving Heart the kicking he so thoroughly deserves. I’d land a few blows, mainly with Ken’s crouching hard kick which makes him fly towards his opponent feet-first like he’s been greased up and fired out of a cannon, but then Heart would retreat and keep me at bay with a barrage of open-handed slaps until his health had refilled. It was awkward, tedious and frustrating, which is not a great first impression for a videogame to make. But then I realised what I should have been doing: using Ken’s special moves. Specifically, using his projectile attack where he forms his spirit energy into the shape of a fist so he can punch people from across the room. That was powerful enough to break through Heart’s attacks and deal substantial damage, but there’s a problem. The controls for performing special moves are abysmal. Imprecise and unreliable, they make the simple act of throwing a fireball an absolute chore, and that’s one of the easiest special moves to do! Back, forward, punch, nice and straightforward, except I could only get the projectile to come out maybe once out of every five attempts. God help you if you want to try some of the more complicated moves. They might come out or they might not, and their lack of consistency makes the idea of reacting to the situation with the appropriate special move completely laughable.


The only move I could produce reliably was Kenshiro’s famous signature move, the Hundred Crack Fist. That’s because you just have to repeatedly tap punch to perform it. It’s a shame, then, that the Hundred Crack Fist is bloody useless. It’s got very little range, takes enough time to get going that the enemy will have moved out of the way and while you’re standing there punching over and over again the enemy will either stand still and get their health back or, more likely, completely ignore Kenshiro’s most iconic and lethal attack in order to jump-kick right through it and jam their ki-soaked feet right down Ken’s trachea.
I eventually managed to beat Heart by getting as far away as possible and repeatedly using the projectile attack. When I got lucky enough for it to come out three times in a row, an alignment of the fates akin to being struck by lighting while cashing the giant cheque for your lottery winnings, the fight was over. And that was only fight number one.


Fight number two is against Shin, Kenshiro’s former friend. I think it’s safe to say they had a falling out, given that Shin abducted Ken’s girlfriend Yuria and poked Ken in the chest seven times, giving him the seven scars for which he is famous, but they did used to be buddies. Not any more, though, and it’s a fight to the death: Ken’s martial art that makes people explode from within versus Shin’s style that focuses on chopping people up from the outside. They’re like chalk and cheese, if chalk and cheese were capable of destroying your body in a multitude of agonising ways.


After fighting Heart, I thought I was getting a handle on HnK7’s gameplay. Then this fight started, and Shin destroyed me in moments by repeatedly doing extremely fast flying kicks at me. I simply could not keep up with the relentless onslaught, especially because the CPU doesn’t have to worry about the special move inputs not working. I was on the verge of giving up entirely, but thankfully I figured out how to defend myself. You see, normal blocks will not defend against special moves. Instead, you have to press L to surround yourself with a magical aura that can block special moves, but the problem with that is your magical aura isn’t unlimited. You see that “OP” bar under the characters’ health? That’s your super bar, basically, and it also gradually fills up as the fight goes. Holding L to block drains this bar very quickly, but also prevents you from being immediately killed. So, block special moves with your special block. Makes sense. However, the OP gauge can also be used for special attacks of your own, which are executed simply by pressing R. The first section of the bar does nothing, but when you’ve got two bars you can fire a projectile without having to do the motion, and three and four segments of the bar being filled allows for even more powerful attacks which you can’t otherwise pull off.


In a better game, this system might add a bit of spice and tactical thinking to the gameplay. Do I use all my OP power to block specials, or try to save it up so I can use special moves that a) are very powerful and b) don’t require me to engage with the bullshit that is the game’s controls? Unfortunately, HnK7 takes this potentially interesting idea and chucks it to one side, because there’s no way you’ll get anywhere in the game if you don’t use all your OP for blocking the constant tsunami of special attacks that all of your opponents use, especially as one hit from a level three or four special can take off seventy percent of your health.


Now Ken’s fighting Rei, the handsome and graceful master of the Nanto Suichou Ken fighting style. In the show they are friends and allies, forced to fight against each other by villainous manipulations, but they get out of it by pretending to be dead. No one seems to have informed the videogame version of Rei about the “friends and allies” bit, though, and he’s just as relentless as everyone else in his desire to see Ken dead. Happily, things went a bit better than in the fight against Shin now that I know how to block special attacks


I even managed to avoid being killed for long enough that the OP bar filled and I could try Ken’s ultimate technique: the Musou Tensei, a move that you can only learn by being really, really sad. I know that sounds like the kind of martial art dreamed up by someone who spent too much time watching The Crow, but it does make Ken completely invulnerable while it’s active. I guess now we know why it’s called the “OP” gauge.


And here’s the man-mountain who forced Ken and Rei to fight in the first place, the king of the Fang Clan. He’s a non-playable character, and he’s unusual to fight against because he only has two moves. He can make his skin as hard as steel, which just means you have to spend more time than usual punching him, or he literally throws his tiny minions at you. That is the entirety of his fighting style; he grabs the smaller members of his bandit army and pitches them at you like baseballs. What the hell kind of scale are we supposed to be working at here? Is King Fang throwing babies at Kenshiro? Maybe that’s it. It would explain why using the Hundred Crack Fist didn’t seem to allow me to punch the mini-Fangs out of the air, because Kenshiro would never hurt a baby.


Next up is Shuu. Guess what? He’s a martial arts master! In the world of Hokuto no Ken, only three types of people survived the apocalypse: martial arts masters, enormous street punks with bodies that look like Conan swallowed the Terminator and impoverished villagers. If you were a middle-class professional when the bombs fell, you were shit out of luck.
Anyway, Shuu. He’s also a good guy, to the extent that he clawed out his own eyes in exchange for Kenshiro’s life when Ken was a little kid. Hokuto no Ken is not a series that does subtlety, as you have probably realised. Shuu’s favourite attack isn’t subtle, either – he pirouettes across the battle with one leg sticking out, spin-kicking anyone in his path. It’s as though someone saw Ryu and Ken’s mighty hurricane kick and though “yeah, but it doesn’t look lame enough.”


The goofiness of Shuu’s spinning kick is only exacerbated by the overall jankiness of HnK7’s graphics. The spritework is passable, but the backgrounds are ugly and when the game’s in motion it looks a real mess, with characters jerking around the screen and special moves that seem to simply shift the player from one place to another with no intervening movements. In fact, every animation in the game looks as though it’s missing about half the frames it should have, and as a result it’s a stiff, unappealing mess to look at.
On the other hand, at least the sound effects are good. There are plenty of “atatata” and “shou!” noises, and frankly that’s half of the appeal of fights in Hokuto no Ken. Everyone sounds like they’ve just had a shovel full of smouldering embers poured down the front of their trousers, and that’s as it should be.


After beating Shuu, it’s time to take on Souther. Souther mostly attacks with this flying kick, so, you know, the same as almost every other character in the game. Souther’s unique quirk – that the position of his internal organs is reversed, making regular Hokuto Shinken techniques ineffective  - is not mentioned, and in fact I think he’s actually an easier fight than Shuu because Shuu’s spinning kick is far more difficult to avoid. That’s not to say it’s an easy fight, mind you. None of the fights in this game are easy, thanks to the sluggish characters, merciless AI opponents and, worst of all, the frustratingly poor controls. This is especially true when it comes the special move inputs, because once you get past the first fight special moves become mandatory. Regular attacks simply don’t do enough damage, what with the refilling health bars. Fortunately, I harnessed my inner martial arts master and formulated an unbeatable method of attack that saw me through most of the game.


It’s simple, really. I used the hard crouching kick attack to fly towards my opponent, then feverishly mashed up and down on the d-pad and tapped punch in the hopes that would cause Ken to use his uppercut special move. Twenty-five percent of the time it did work, and I hit my opponent for big damage. If it didn’t work, or my enemy was pushed back or knocked down, I used the flying kick again and got back to hammering. And that’s the story of how I become the ultimate fighting champion. Hokuto Shinken may be a legendary martial art with a long and storied history, but my martial art can be summed up on the back of a postcard so frankly I think I win on pure brevity.


And now, the Earth-shattering final confrontation between Kenshiro and Raoh: Ken’s adopted elder brother, post-apocalyptic conqueror, horse-owner and bloke who thinks he should be in charge of all the punching of martial artists that needs to be done in this lawless world.


I think I may have built this fight up a little too much. It’s hard to be that impressed by a fighter whose go-to move is that awkward-looking sliding kick you can see above.
While I generally think of myself as a pessimist, I might have to revise that particular piece of introspection because even at this point in HnK7 I was still hoping that a good game – I’d have settled for a decent game – would emerge from the mess. Of course, it never did. There’s really nothing to recommend it, and it all feels unfinished and half-hearted. As well as the problems I’ve already mentioned, the pure core of the game is stodgy and unappealing. Characters get too close to be able to hit each other and then fly apart unpredictably, the hit detection is all over the place… I’m struggling to describe why it’s bad, but it definitely is. It’s one of those game that makes you thankful for the classics of the genre, your Street Fighters and your Kings of Fighters, and helps you appreciate just how hard it is to make a fast, accurate and balanced one-on-one fighter.


The ol’ slide-kick-uppercut strategy once more proved effective, and Kenshiro has finally defeated all of his enemies (and a couple of his friends). Raoh goes to his grave proclaiming that he has lived a life with no regrets. I think I mentioned this in the Master System HnK article, but that cannot be an accurate statement. He appeared in this game, for starters.


When you finish story mode, you’re treated to some credits with gameplay footage playing in the background, and then this: a final image of Kenshiro riding into the sunset on a horse. That’s Raoh’s horse. That’s right, the hero of Hokuto no Ken punches his brother to death and then steals his horse. What a bastard.


That’s story mode finished, but before I wrap this up let’s take a look at the battle mode. You can choose from any of the characters (except Heart and King Fang, who aren’t playable,) select a difficulty level and then fight through the game’s cast in a traditional “arcade mode” fashion. Above you can see Shin doing his best M. Bison impression as he takes on Raoh, so this mode at least lets you live out your burning “what if?” Hokuto no Ken fight fantasies.


The most interesting thing about battle mode is that there’s a whole new fighter hiding in there who doesn’t appear in the story mode: the free-spirited and roguish Juza. That’s him on the right, the bloke with the unfortunate trousers who is surely doing irreparable damage to Shuu’s nether regions with the energy radiating from his hands. Actually, let’s go back to Juza’s trousers for a second, because they look like someone made pants out of lobster shells and then stretched slices of American cheese over the top. Okay, yeah, time to stop looking at those trousers, that description is making me queasy.


The battle mode is a nice addition, I suppose, but it does confirm something I suspected while playing story mode: that some characters are simply better than others. There seems to have been very little effort to balance the fighters, and this was especially noticeable when I played as Shuu because Shuu’s spinning kick is ridiculous. It’s one of the few moves that I could perform reliably, it travels a good distance over the screen, it has very little start-up and deals decent damage. This meant that I rattled through battle mode simply by whirling around like a one-man recreation of Flashdance.


Not even having to fight Shuu’s lime-green doppelganger put the kibosh on this technique, because fake-Shuu made the mistake of trying to use other moves that weren’t spinning kicks.


There’s no ending or anything for clearing battle mode, so I think this is a good place to bring this article to a close – mostly because I’m fed up of thinking about this game. Hokuto no Ken 7 is a pretty crappy game all around, with almost every problem a fighting game can have bubbling away underneath a surface of ugly graphics and shoddy controls. I think I am perhaps being slightly too harsh on it because it’s based on a property I really like, but only slightly. Also, Jagi’s not in it, and he’s my favourite HnK character. If you’re determined to play it, try it in two-player versus mode, because at least then you’re both suffering together, but a better idea would be to take that friend and make them listen to the anime’s theme song over and over again. If they’re not willing to do that, then they’re not worthy of being your friend.

Like a comfortable pair of slippers or an Easter egg that you told the cashier you were buying for your nephew, I’m about to treat myself to something that’ll make me feel all warm inside. That’s right, it’s a side-scrolling beat-em-up! Specifically, it’s TAD Corporation’s 1992 arcade slugfest Legionnaire!


Despite the title, it has nothing to do with ancient Rome or French soldiers hanging around in the desert. It’s an arcade brawler from the early nineties, so naturally it’s about a street gang and the vigilante heroes who step up to defeat them. I’m fine with that, I love a good bit of punk-pummelling action, but now I’ve mentioned it I’d really like a beat-em-up about the French Foreign Legion.
I’m rather looking forward to this one, for a couple of reasons. One is that the other TAD Corporation games I’ve played, specifically the crosshair shooters Cabal and Blood Brothers and side-scrolling ape-em-up Toki, have been generally good, and with enough weirdness to them to pique my interest. This is as you’d expect from a company that was formed by ex-Data East employees. The other thing it that, as far as I’m aware, Legionnaire has been unemulated for years, but now it’s working to a degree that lets you play through the entire game with only a few minor errors. How exciting is that? A whole ‘90s arcade beat-em-up that I’ve never had the chance to play before. It’s the unexpected tax refund of the videogame world!


The set-up is given to you right out of the gate: the vicious Crimson Kings are terrorising the innocent, peaceful inhabitants of Blood City. Wait, what? Blood City? Man, I’m amazed it’s taken this long for a criminal gang to rise to prominence in a place called Blood City. Take me down to ol' Blood City, where life is cheap and the crime statistics ain’t pretty.
Anyway, what does this mysterious image show us? Well, on the right we’ve got the shadowy visage of what I assume is the Crimson King’s leader, a ruler of men and fan of prog-rock music. The rest takes more deciphering, but it looks like there’s a rose in the background, a bloodied knife, (which is probably the town crest of Blood City,) someone emptying out a salt shaker and a statue representing the concept of “a headache.” The rest of the intro goes on to tell us that everyone is outraged, but no-one dares to act until the Legionnaires rise up to challenge the Crimson Kings. Let’s meet our heroes now, shall we?


First we’ve got Alfred, who I’m assuming is the leader of the group because he is the most average. We can see he’s got fingerless gloves and a sleeveless shirt, so I’m sure he’s also wearing shorts because his commitment to never wearing a complete garment is unshakeable.


Occupying the “speedy but weaker” slot on the team is Chris. She actually is wearing shorts, to facilitate all the kicking she does. I notice that Legionnaire’s characters are running a little older than those in most Japanese games. Chris is 24, that’s “spinster with dozens of cats” territory by videogame standards.


If it’s sheer brute force you’re after, look no further than Frank. He’s the muscle man of the group, plus he has a beard. If you look at his forehead, you can also see what appears to be another, smaller skull trying to push its way through his skin. He’s also the happiest of the bunch to be involved. Well, at 39 he probably thought his punk-pounding days were over.


Finally we’ve got Judy. She is not a punk, despite what the Ramones might think, and her picture implies she fights using a very laid-back form of judo. She looks like she’s yawning as she hurls that dude over her shoulder, and that insouciance is making Judy my first pick as a playable character. Hang on, though – there are fourLegionnaires. That can’t be right, it completely unbalances the sacred beat-em-up trinity of a fast one, a strong one and the other, less interesting character! Judy’s a maverick, a wild card, a destabilizing influence that threatens to throw the very core of the genre off its axis!


Never mind, Judy’s been kidnapped. Order is restored, almost as though some cosmic janitor has set things right, and the Crimson Kings have made a fatal mistake – now it’s personal. The Legionnaires were going to punch them all into a coma anyway, but now they’re really going to enjoy it.


The game begins with two Crimson King footsoldiers staring intently at a pair of gas canisters. That’s their entire raison d’etre. Monitor these two highly flammable pressurised containers, and make sure nothing untoward happens to them.


You had one job, you pair of idiots. It’s appropriate that you’re charred corpses now, because you’re about to get fired.


Getting into the action now, and Legionnaire begins in a fairly standard city streets / construction site type environment. There always seems to be some kind of construction site in these games, which makes sense to me. If The Sopranos taught me anything, it’s that organised crime are heavily involved with the construction industry. As for the combat, the basics are the same as in almost every other side-scrolling beat-em-up. You’ve got an attack button and a jump button, attacking repeatedly makes your character perform a combo, you’ve got a jumping kick and pressing attack and jump together performs a powerful attack that knocks down any nearby enemies at the cost of some of your character’s health.


So far, so extremely generic, then. It’s nothing I haven’t played dozens of times before, and the setting and characters aren’t doing much to elevate proceedings. Alfred in particular is a very underwhelming hero, being as he is a Bloke in a White Shirt and Blue Trousers who lacks the classic sense of “American” cool that you see in Final Fight’s Cody. The bad guys aren’t particularly exciting, either, with the usual mix of overconfident steroid abusers, sleeve-haters and the occasional smaller, weaker characters with some kind of gimmick like “exploding” or “owning a knife.”
The only thing in this early area that stands out as being even slightly novel are the gas canisters, which you can punch towards the bad guys for a free hit of explosive damage. They’re especially useful if you’ve bunched some of the goons together, which is not difficult to do when Alfred’s flying kick is so good at knocking people across the screen.


Later in the stage, you start to see a couple of more interesting enemy types - interesting in that they make you wonder how they reached this point in their lives, rather than because they’re interesting to fight. For example, there are these chaps who ignored all the lessons their mothers ever taught them and do nothing but run around holding sharp objects. That’s all they do, they run in a straight line, knives outstretched. If they run into you, hey, bonus, but they’re equally happy to run right off the edge of the screen and you get the impression that they’re doing the bare minimum required to be a Crimson Kings member. Were you ever playing football during a school PE lesson and you pretended you were playing defence, so you could hang around near the back and look involved without ever actually having to do anything? That’s what’s going on with these guys, except replace football with murder. This doesn’t explain why they seem to be beatniks wearing mustard yellow capri pants, but I suspect that’s something which cannot be explained.


Then there are these bouncing balls of baldness, claw-wielding… things that jump around the screen like a flea with restless leg syndrome, trying valiantly to insert their claws into Alfred’s skull. They only take one hit to defeat and their movements are fairly predictable, but they rarely turn up alone and so one of them will often manage to sneak through. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be shanked by a very angry baked bean wearing baby booties, Legionnaire can put your mind at rest.


It doesn’t take long to rattle through stage one, and soon you’ll be facing off against the first boss. His name is Bigman. Because he’s a big man, you see. He was the last one in the queue when they were handing out gang names, I reckon.
So, Bigman is a big man who acts the big man, but he’s very easy to defeat because he’s nothing more than a slightly larger version of the same grunts you’ve been fighting for the rest of the stage. Never attack him head-on – coming at him from “above” seemed to work very well – and you’ll have no trouble beating him.


I even threw in a few of my big-hitting special attacks, because why not? Bigman wasn’t taking any of my health, so I might as well. Plus it looks cool, although sadly all three character have the same special move.


Moving on to stage two, the Downtown area, and I’ve switched to Chris. She immediately became my favourite of the three characters, thanks to her incredibly fast kicks, which are perfect for dealing with the enemies that only require one hit to defeat and can really help you get out of sticky situations like letting yourself get surrounded. Plus, she boots people right in the chin from a standing start, that’s the kind of straight-forward violence I like to see.


It was around this point that I realised there’s more to Legionnaire’s combat than I first thought. As well as your normal combos and jumping kicks, you can also performing dashing attacks. The thing that threw me off was that you don’t dash using the method you’d expect – that is, by tapping the joystick twice towards your opponent, or even using a dedicated dash button. Instead, you double-tap jump to dash in the direction you’re facing. While you’re dashing, you’ve got two attack options. If you don’t hit the attack button but slam into a bad guy, you’ll grab them for a throw attack, as you can see above.


If you do press attack while dashing, instead of a grab you’ll use a powerful charging attack that sends any enemy it hits flying backwards. In Chris’ case, it’s a very “Blaze from Streets of Rage” style energy-punch attack. I’m more than okay with that. If you’re going to, erm, draw inspiration from another beat-em-up, it might as well be Streets of Rage.


I’m relieved I discovered these extra moves before I got much further into the game, because at this point Legionnaire is really making the most of the “gang” part of the street gang theme, and you’re attacked by loads of enemies at once. This is where the game starts to come to life a little: the mass brawls are fast, furious and fun. There’s plenty of fighting to be done, but your jumping kicks and dashing moves mean you’ve got plenty of tools at your disposal to stop the enemy surrounding you, and Legionnaire’s smooth controls means executing said moves is reliable and practical. You’re still going to get hit, especially if like me you repeatedly underestimate the range of those guys with the Big Van Vader hair and the croquet mallets, but it never feels unfair or overwhelming.


Here’s TAD Corporation representing a couple of their other games through the beat-em-up-appropriate medium of graffiti, with shout-outs to Cabal and (just off-screen) Blood Brothers. Plus there’s a Toki sticker up there, complete with a picture of the saliva-slinging ape himself.
In the screenshot above you can also see a wiry fellow with the look of a Tour de France racer to him. You know those little elves in the Golden Axe games? The ones that drop items when you whack them? These blokes are what those elves turn into if you wrap them in lycra and stretch them on a rack. They’re unthreatening, but they drop items when hit – usually point items, but sometimes they’ll dispense small health boosts. Another advantage to playing as Chris is that her kicks are so fast you can clobber these walking vending machines three or four times before they can get away.


Boss number two is the person who abducted Judy during the intro, an unfortunately-shaped individual for whom the low cut tank-top is doing absolutely no favours. Their name is Pretty Piggy, and I hate to break this to you, pal, but only half of that name is accurate.


You know what? That’s a fair response. I shouldn’t judge you on your physical appearance, Pretty Piggy. Instead I’ll judge you for being a kidnapper who works as a lackey for a criminal group. There, now I feel better about beating you up.
Piggy’s got two main methods of attack. The first is as straightforward as you like: he whacks you with a stick. Not a caveman club, not a baseball bat, but a regular ol’ wooden rod, a piece of dowelling he picked up at his local hardware store. The other is that he conforms to the weirdly specific brawler cliché of being a fat person who can breathe fire. I still have no idea why this is such a common theme in beat-em-ups. Did a famous troupe of especially corpulent fire-eaters tour Japan in the 1960s or something, influencing the game designers of the eighties and nineties during their childhoods?


Stage three takes place on a train, and it’s time for Frank to get his hands dirty. The stage’s early screens involve fighting the now-standard groups of musclebound goons, a process enlivened by the bad guys jumping out of crates in the background in what I can only assume was a ruse to avoid them having to pay their train fare by being sent in through post. There was a brief roadblock at around the mid-point, however, when I was beset by a kung fu master who really, really liked using his familiar hurricane kick attack. I kept getting kicked in the head, that was the problem. Then I realised that this Ryu-wannabe is extremely vulnerable just as he lands, so in this instance Frank’s most devastating technique was a small amount of patience.


Speaking of Frank’ powers, I have to say he doesn’t really feel like the slow one of the group. Sure, his individual attacks are slower than Chris and Alfred’s, but his standard combos only include three hits as opposed to the others’ five or six, so he ends up needing the same amount of time to do a similar amount of damage – he just needs less punches to dish out that damage.
I noticed something else about Legionnaire’s standard combos, too: normally when you land the final blow, the enemy is knocked down and they land pretty much where they were standing. However, if you hold up or down on the joystick while doing a combo, your character’s final blow is different and rather than knocking the enemy down but keeping them nearby, it punts them all the way to the other side of the screen. This can be an extremely effective tool for managing the positions of your foes so they can’t surround you, plus you get the satisfaction of kicking people forty feet across the play area. The only proviso on this is that this system only works as described above for Chris and Frank. In Alfred’s case it’s reversed, so his default combo sends enemies flying, but holding up or down makes your combo keep the enemies close by.


Apparently this train is of huge strategic importance, because it has two bosses: a pair of martial arts masters called Dragon and Tiger. Which one is Dragon, and which one is Tiger? I don’t know, I don’t care and it doesn’t matter because they’re both identical. They’re a lot like the kung fu fighter from earlier in the stage, with a lot of spinning aerial kicks. It’s a good job I learned how to deal with that attack earlier, huh? Their only other gimmick is that if you give them some breathing space, one of the pair will form a step with his hands, giving the other boss a boost and throwing him to the air for a faster, more powerful diving kick attack. This can be rather difficult to avoid and the bosses like to get into a pattern of using it over and over again, but the simple preventative measure you can take in this case is to be always punching one of the bosses.


Once they’re dealt with, Rugal from The King of Fighters appears in a helicopter, carrying Judy under his arm. Then he flies away. Okey dokey then, I guess I’ll see him later.


The next stage takes place on a military base, and there’s not much new to see. Lots of fighting the regular grunts you’ve kicked a thousand times before, except with more chain-link fences in the background. That might sound like a complaint, but it isn’t really. Okay, it’s half a complaint – these stages could have benefited from taking place in less generic locations -  but the actual fighting? That’s fine, and I’m having a good time with it. It’s fast, the dashing moves add a little flair to the combat and Legionnaire rarely bogs the player down with waves of enemies with enormous health bars, which is one of my pet peeves about the genre. You do have to fight two Pretty Piggies at once, but they’ve had their maximum health reduced to prevent the above scenario from happening, so I’m not too annoyed to see bosses being recycled.


There are still a few new enemy types being added as the game progresses, which helps. Here, for instance, you’ve got a different kind of kung fu master who is equally vulnerable after missing with his flashy jumping kicks. He’s got a kanji on his back that translates as either “evil” or “misfortune,” and I’m going with “misfortune” because as soon as Alfred gets up from his power-nap this kung fu bloke is going to taste the furious justice of the Legionnaires. “Just five more minutes,” Alfred mumbles, but righteousness is his alarm clock and soon he will answer its call.
There are purple chaps, too, and they finally answer the question of why some many dystopian street gang types wear shoulder pads: it’s because his main attack is to charge into you with his shoulder, gridiron-style. That’s not a very interesting fighting style on its own, but these guys put so much heart and drive into their attacks, bellowing like a lunatic whenever they dash towards you, that it’s hard not to warm to them. They’re giving it their all, and if this was a kid’s TV show rather than a game then these would be the guys who realise they don’t want to be working for a bad guy and switch allegiance halfway through.


Then there’s this guy, who is the hardest (or at least most annoying) boss in the game despite not even being a boss. You’d think that after playing Hokuto no Ken 7 for the last article I’d be well-versed in the power of the Hundred Crack Fist, but apparently not because I kept walking into the bloody thing. That attack is bad enough, but the real trouble starts when you land an attack of your own. Rather than standing there and taking the full combo like every other member of the Crimson Kings, he backflips away while throwing a bunch of grenades at you. Someone didn’t get the memo about beat-em-up etiquette, and as a result this amalgam of Guile and Rolento takes longer to beat than the rest of the stage combined as you land one punch before running away from his grenades.


Frankly, it was a relief to reach this real boss of the stage. His name is General the Hellarm, which makes him sound like a later addition to the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. Don’t worry, I know he’s not really a later addition to the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. I can tell, because he appears in a game that’s not rubbish.
Anyway, Hellarm’s got two tricks, one of them being literally up his sleeve. He can extend his mechanical limbs, and he can create two clones to follow him around. Only the real Hellarm takes damage, naturally, but you can eliminate the clones with a single hit, so it’s easy enough to get him in a loop of waiting for him to create his clones and then picking one to hit. You’ll either batter the real Hellarm before he can react, or you’ll eliminate his clones and reset the whole procedure. Oh, and he can take his hand off to reveal a sword sticking out of his elbow stump. I suppose you’d count that as a trick, too.


We’ve reached the final stage: the Seclet (sic) Area, and Chris is doing an excellent job of holding off about three football teams worth of bad guys on this narrow bridge. You might notice that the guy in the orange seems to be ignoring the law of gravity by not standing on the bridge, but I’m going to put this down to an emulation error. It was pretty much the only error I noticed, but enemies would sometimes walk right into the background or foreground where they shouldn’t be able to go, and once or twice they managed to get themselves stuck. Usually they managed to wriggle free either under their own steam or with the, ahem, gentle persuasion of special attack, but during this stage someone got trapped underneath the bridge where I couldn’t reach them, preventing me from either killing them or moving forwards. Bear that in mind if you’re thinking about playing Legionnaire for yourself.


Other than potential glitches, stage five has a little of everything. More bosses return as regular enemies, small men covered in dynamite fall from the sky and blow up, there are lots of densely-packed enemy groups to battle through and then there’s this, a section where the knifemen run back and forth along this narrow bridge for a while, trying to perforate you more through luck than by design. It’s kinda ridiculous, but in the best possible “dumb arcade game” way. Plus you can take out, like, ten guys with a well-timed special attack, which is satisfying in its own right.


After a while of that, you’re pitted against the leader of the Crimson Kings – Mr. G. My entire being is crying out for me to make a House of the Dead joke, but I’m not going to. I don’t want you to suffer like I did.
Mr. G is, to be blunt, a complete pushover. He’s got barely any attacks and a very small health bar, as you might expect from someone who’s essentially a corporate CEO. The CEO of Evil, Inc., but still. Of course, what this means is that this isn’t even his final form, and I’ll be fighting him again after he transforms. I went through the motions, slapped him around a bit and then, once Mr. G had had enough, I chased him to his moon base using a nearby space shuttle.


That’s right, the Crimson Kings have a moon base. They’re rather more ambitious than your average videogame street gang, I’ll give them that. You never saw Mad Gear trying to colonise outer space, did you? Which is a shame, I’d have loved to have seen Mike Haggar throwing asteroids at people with only his moustache as protection against the vacuum of space.


After wading through a few more waves of goons, our heroes catch up with Mr. G again, but this time he’s serious. He’s wearing his special armour, he’s strapped on his stabbin’ claws and he can shoot blasts of electricity out of his fists or as a projectile along the floor. Unfortunately for him, he’s still a proper chump, and this is probably the easiest final boss I’ve ever faced in a side-scrolling beat-em-up (unless you count the completely defenceless scientist at the end of Crude Buster). If you just never attack Mr. G head on, there’s very little he can do to hit you. Wait for him to attack, come at him from above and smack him about. Repeat this for a while, occasionally using your dash to get in close or away from his projectiles, and he’ll soon be defeated. This might seem a bit disappointing, but personally I thought it made a nice change of pace. The Legionnaires have had a lot of practise at battering people by this point, it stands to reason they’d have little trouble with an old man in a cummerbund.


The game is over, and Blood City has been freed from the ruthless grip of the Crimson Kings. Now it can go back to being the number one tourist destination for vampires all over the world. “Where are our heroes now?” the ending asks, and happily it immediately answers that very question.


That’s it, Frank. You dream big, buddy. At least he’s happy. You have to wonder whether he ought to loosen his apron strings a little, mind you. If you can see your abs through your apron, you’re wearing it too tight.


Further proof that Chris is the best fighter of the three is provided by the ending, which shows her becoming the number one undisputed fighting champ in the world.


As for Alfred, he went home and became a family man. He and Judy are married with children, living in one of the log cabins you so often find in the suburbs. I’ve just realised that the white thing at the bottom-right is supposed to be a baby wearing a bonnet. At first glance I thought it was one of those Japanese snow monkeys that live near the hot springs. Sorry, kid.


Was Legionnaire everything I hoped for? Yes, it was, in that it was a very typical brawler that I’d never played before. Its biggest problem is definitely its lack of imagination, and it leans far too heavily on the oh-so-common beat-em-up themes and locations, particularly when it comes to the not-very-interesting playable characters. However, the gameplay and the flow of the action is very enjoyable. This also suffers from a lack of innovation on a basic level, but the addition of the dashing attacks gives it just enough spice to keep things interesting. It’s the controls are smooth, the bad guys come thick and fast but crucially it never gets bogged down. There are plenty of people to punch but you don’t have to punch them for long before you can move on, and the game’s five stages mean it’s just about the perfect length: any longer and it risked becoming a little tedious.
It’s also a rather easy game, for an arcade brawler. You’re still going to lose lives, but thanks to the many moves at your disposal that work well for keeping bad guys at bay (and I should give special mention to the little-discussed jumping kick here, because its enormous hitbox and high priority make it great for this) you’ll rarely get surrounded. Plus, none of the bosses are coin-gulping slaughter machines. Whether the difficulty level is a pro or a con is down to you, but like I said, it was nice to play something that felt a touch more relaxed than others in the genre for a change.
In conclusion, I’m really glad I played Legionnaire. I had a fun time with it, even though it’s unlikely to be something I go back to very often. Plus I helped a man achieve his dreams of owning a hot dog stand. What could be more rewarding than that?

“I’m gonna play this game,” I thought to myself. “It’s just about looking at things, how hard can it be?” Well, I did play it and now I’m waiting for my optician to call me back with what I can only assume is going to be very bad news. It’s the arcade I-spy-em-up Search Eye, released in 1999 by the Korean developer Yun Sung!


What a colourful title screen. It looks like the logo for a fake search engine in a TV show that didn’t want to pay Google for image rights. That seems appropriate, because Yun Sung were not worried about taking things they don’t own and slapping them into their videogame.


The gameplay doesn’t take much explaining, but the intro gives it a go anyway: Search Eye is a hidden object game. You search for objects with your eyes, but they are hidden within a larger picture. Once you’ve spotted an item on the right-hand list, use the joystick to move the cursor over to it and press the button. Find all the items to move on to the next stage, but if you click on something that isn’t a hidden item you lose a life. There’s also a time limit, and if you run out of time you lose an amount of lives equivalent to the number of objects you haven’t found yet in the scene. That’s pretty much it, so let’s start the game, shall we?


Stage number one: an old couple cause a scene in a restaurant. Why are they both wearing sunglasses indoors? And he didn’t even take his hat off at the dinner table. Debrett’s would have a field day with these two. Anyway, back to finding items. Over on the right, you can see we need a pair of shorts, a spoon, a pinwheel and a mushroom. I found the shorts right away, because they’re barely hidden at all – they’re near the cursor in the screenshot above. I found the pinwheel soon afterwards, camouflaged amongst the foliage of that tree. After that, it all went horribly wrong. I just could not find the other items. I searched, I scoured, I went section by section but for the life of me I could not find the final two items.


In the end, I had to fall back on my magical genie assistant. She looks rather familiar, but I can’t place where I might have seen her before. I’m sure I’ll remember who she reminds me of (or what game she's been ripped from) in a couple of months, when it’ll feel too late to come back and update this article. Oh well!
Every time you use a continue, you’re given a few hints to use: simply press the second button and the genie will appear and show you exactly where one of the hidden items it located. In this instance, and indeed many instances during my time spent playing Search Eye, the resulting revelation made me cry “what?! Man, this is bullshit!”


I have circled the offending articles for your benefit. Both the spoon and the mushroom are part of the old man’s jacket, with the mushroom being especially fiendish because it doesn’t look much like the picture of the mushroom I was given besides them both sharing a common overall mushroominess. So that’s how you’re going to play it, Search Eye? Asking me to find items that look different in the object list than they do in the picture? Well, I’m wise to your shenanigans now, I’m sure I’ll have no trouble from here on out.


As I moved on to stage two – an image of two blokes regretting coming to Antarctica on a camping trip – the knowledge that Search Eye will hide its objects so sneakily actually did help me out. I found the fishing hook in the guy’s sleeve right off the bat, quickly followed by the realisation that the other guy’s hat was shaped like an upside-down sock. Sort of. If you squint, and you have very oddly-shaped feet. Still, it took me a while to find the duck hiding in the guy on the right’s coat collar.
With this, you’ve seen pretty much everything Search Eye has to offer. One hidden object scene after another where the objects might not even look all that similar to the ones on the list. It does get slightly more difficult as you progress, but only because the number of items you have to find in each stage gradually increases from four to seven: the puzzles themselves start off tough and stay that way for the entire game.


“Camping trip gone awry” is a surprisingly common motif amongst these scenes (and I do love that angry bear). Other common themes include, weirdly, people being ill, bedridden or otherwise injured, and various types of interaction between men and women.


My favourite of that latter category is these scene, where a young lady has presumably given this man a swift kick in the knackers. I’m certain he deserved it. I’m not saying he was harassing her or anything, but just look at that horrendous coat and tie combination. Any violence done to this man is fully justified.
All these scenes rather beg the question “who drew the artwork for this game?” Every scene is in the same style and is thus (presumably) the work of the same artist, but I don’t know who that is. It might be because I’m looking at it through a Westerner’s eyes, but it’s got something of the feel of a newspaper comic strip to it, or maybe a comedically-inclined artist: they do remind me of works by noted British painter Beryl Cook, she of the larger ladies and slightly bawdy scenes. I did try to find out who Search Eye’s artist was just by trying to check out as many Korean cartoonists as I could, but I didn’t get very far. They do bear a slight resemblance to works by a cartoonist called (apologies if I get this wrong) Gil Chang Duk (길창덕), but his style is much rougher and even more cartoony than this. The thing is, I really don’t think the art in Search Eye was drawn specifically for this game. It’s got the digitised look of something that’s been scanned in, it’s far more artistically ambitious and well-executed than the rest of the game’s cheap-and-cheerful pixel work, and Search Eye is not subtle about ripping other parts of the game off from different sources, so why should the artwork be any different?
When I say ripping things off, I mean the game’s music. That’s where I can say definitively that Yun Sung didn’t put their own work in. For example, here’s the stage theme that first made me think “hang on a minute...”


If this track sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because it’s Cammy’s theme from Super Street Fighter II. It sounds a bit wonky due to being on different sound hardware, but it’s definitely the theme of everyone’s favourite leotard-wearing amnesiac British spy.


Or how about this track, which is “Free Flyer” from the original Gradius? These were the two that I immediately recognised, but I’m fairly sure that all of Search Eye’s soundtrack has been pilfered from other games. That’s why I have trouble believing the developers came up with all the graphics themselves.


I do like the art, though. It’s a very different style to most videogames, that’s for sure, and there is something quite charming about it. However, I suspect I’m missing a lot of context for many of these scenes, what with me not being Korean and all. That said, I think a person of any race, ethnicity or nationality can look at the image above and see that ox is about to get punched right in the snout.


But then you get things like this indecipherable scenario, where a burly policeman is taking a young man away to do… something? I’m sure there are a lot of videos on, erm, less salubrious video streaming websites that start in the same way, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. The thing that’s throwing me off is the cop’s livid face and particularly his bright red nose, both things I would associate with being super drunk in a “Western” cartoon. Maybe he’s just trying to drag his friend along on a pub crawl.


Maybe you’d prefer the sight of a father, furious with his son for gift-wrapping a cooked chicken? Okay, so maybe that’s a takeaway box, but still, that guy is not pleased about poultry. Is this a Jack and the Beanstalk type situation, and that kid’s traded the family cattle for a single roast chicken? Did dad order the seafood? I haven’t got a bloody clue, folks.


This bloke’s face just makes me laugh. I see a lot of myself in him. Give him a shitty beard and he’d look just like me trying to read my bank statements.
Now, it’s no secret that I do genuinely enjoy playing hidden object games, as anyone who’s read my articles about the Halloween Trickor Treat games can attest. I generally find them very relaxing. So, am I enjoying Search Eye? Not really. It seems I much prefer a hidden object game that gives you a list of items and then expects you to find those items, rather than showing you a selection of images and asking you to find something that may only bear a slight, tangential resemblance to said item. I also really don’t like having a time limit, but as this is an arcade game I suppose it can’t be avoided.


I did make some headway against the game’s rather vicious object-hiding tendencies, though. It was still difficult, but I figured out a few techniques to make my life easier. One was knowing that it likes to hide objects in the negative space between elements of the background, so that’s a good place to start looking. I also realised that some objects are drawn in a slightly different style (or maybe a different resolution) to the backgrounds, so if you can spot a patch that looks slightly off in general then there’s probably something hidden there. It’s like when you’re watching an old cartoon and you can tell when something’s about to move because it’s on an animation cel rather than the painted background.


These tips and tricks don’t help when Search Eye pulls some of its more ridiculous nonsense, as seen in the screenshot above. Check out the third item on the list and you’ll see that the developers have stopped bothering with the “object” part of this hidden object game and now expect you to find A Blob. What an absolute crock of shit.
Oh, and the blob is a blue patch on that blanket, just above the end of the pipe. You know, in case not knowing was going to keep you up at night.


Is there anything else of note in Search Eye? Well, “of note” might be pushing it a bit, but you do get to play a bonus game after every five stages. There are two variants, and this is the first – the game asks you “who are in the same action?” and you have to match the pairs of monkeys that are performing the same animation. That’s it, it’s the same old pair-matching minigame you’ve seen a hundred times before, except this one has dancing monkeys. Those monkeys are either traced from or directly ripped out of Virgin’s Disney’s The Jungle Book game. I’m beginning to suspect that the only part of this game that Yun Sung actually made themselves was the title screen.


The other bonus game is a shooting gallery, where you control a crosshair and must shoot down twenty UFOs in the time limit. The first three times I played this minigame – after which I stopped bothering because it wasn’t worth even the minimal effort of moving the cursor – I managed to shoot down exactly nineteen UFOs. This feels like a metaphor for something in my life, although I’m not quite sure what. Also the UFOs appear to be piloted by the worms from, erm, Worms.


And so goes Search Eye, for seventy stages and thirteen minigames. Even if you knew exactly where all the items were hidden in every stage, it’d still take you over an hour to complete. I’m imagining doing that in an arcade, standing over the cabinet with a small mountain of coins piled up next to me for when I can’t find a goddamn hidden blob, and Search Eye is getting to sounding like torture. And least you probably wouldn't have to worry about a queue forming behind you. So, I’m going to say that this is not a good game. Is it a terrible game? I don’t think so, you can have a little fun with it, up to a point. Just not seventy stages worth of fun.


I believe I already covered this, ending fairy. Yes, it was hard and yes, I sort of enjoyed it, although I must confess most of my enjoyment came from seeing the sheer, brazen cheek of the developers as they nicked assets from all and sundry.
So, that’s Search Eye. An interesting game, but I’ll admit it might only be interesting to me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and give my search eyes a good, long rest.

Somebody once told me “maybe, for the sake of your general mood, you should stop playing licensed Game Boy Color games,” to which I replied “Hey now, not every game can be an all-star, but don’t these lesser games also deserve to be remembered?” Of course, as soon as I said that I realised it was a load of cobblers, and it would be perfectly fine if games like today’s were forgotten – developed by a company called Prolific, it’s the 2001 Game Boy Color what-are-you-doing-in-my-swamp-em-up Shrek: Fairytale Freakdown!


Yes, it’s a game based on the big green meme machine himself. There’s Shrek now, putting the freakdown on some poor soldier. I’m undecided as to whether “freakdown” is a portmanteau of freakout and beatdown or showdown, but I’m leaning towards “beatdown” because this is a one-on-one fighting game. That’s right, a fighting game. On the Game Boy Color. Based on Shrek. I bought King of Fighters XIV this week, I could be playing that instead. Why do I do this to myself?


Here’s a list of game modes, an otherwise ordinary videogame screen enlivened by Shrek’s face peering over the top and exuding an aura of sheer contempt for what he sees. You can fiddle around with options and passwords, you can practise (although in this instance it’s unlikely to make perfect) and you can Play Game. If you Play Game, you fight through a bunch of the other characters in an “arcade mode” style. You might notice that Shrek: Fairytale Freakdown has no two-player mode of any kind, so before I’ve even started playing it’s been condemned to the very lowest tier of fighting game trash.


“Select your Champion,” orders Donkey; say it out loud using your best Eddie Murphy impression, if you like. Strangely Donkey is not one of the playable characters, but most of the other characters from Shrek are. There’s the main ogre himself, of course, plus Fiona, the Gingerbread Man, the Big Bad Wolf and so on and so forth. A bunch of them are locked when you start playing, but it only takes five or six rounds of fighting to unlock every character and you get a password so you can unlock them straight away once you’ve beaten them, which makes you wonder why the developers even bothered having them locked in the first place.


I’ll be playing as Shrek himself, naturally. DO NOT stare at Shrek’s face for too long, lest you be drawn into the same vortex of madness that has clearly consumed the hapless ogre. He’s got the facial expression of someone who was having a nice time at party but just sat down heavily on the host’s cat and now it’s not moving.


It’s impossible for me to see “Let’s Rock!” in a fighting game and not immediately think “Heaven or Hell!” to myself. Hmm, maybe I should play some Guilty Gear after I finish this article.
Also: dear lord what is wrong with Shrek’s face in this game?


“They wouldn’t listen, Donkey. I just wanted them out of my swamp. They wouldn’t listen, and now they’re all dead. It’s just me and you now, Donkey. Me, you and the silent swamp that sees all.”


Okay then, now it’s time for some actual fighting. The graphics sure didn’t improve any, huh? That’s Shrek on the left, and in case you were having trouble working it out from the pixels in front of you he’s fighting the Big Bad Wolf. It’s a one-round fight with very little in the way of gimmicks or elaborate combat mechanics – the only real difference from most one-on-one fighters is that the stages aren’t simply flat planes, and they have different platforms, height levels and even holes you can fall down if you want the fight to be over as quickly as possible.


As for the controls, they’re pretty much as you’d expect them to be. You’ve got a button each for punch and kick – although those are fairly loose definitions and some characters don’t technically kick or what-have-you – and the d-pad moves your character around, with up being jump. You’ve also got special moves, performed using the standard “directional-buttons plus attack” set-up. Each character has (as far as I could tell) two special moves. In Shrek’s case, these are a short-range “yoga flame” type attack performed with quarter-circle back and kick, or a long range projectile using the good ol’ fireball motion. Get used to executing Shrek’s projectile, because you’re going to be using it a lot if you want to get through SFF with the minimum amount of agonised rending of garments. Happily, performing fireballs and the like isn’t all that difficult, because whatever its many, many other problems may be the game is generally quite good at recognising your controller inputs. It’s definitely far better than the input detection in Hokuto no Ken 7, although I suspect that says more about Hokuto no Ken 7’s shocking lack of quality than it does about SFF.


Not that I needed special moves for this fight, because once I’d managed to jump over the wolf’s projectiles and get right up in its snout, I could just hammer kick repeatedly. Shrek used his drop-kick over and over again, and the wolf tried to fight back by doing the same thing. However, Shrek had the health advantage from landing the first blow and so he won the race to the bottom of their respective health bars. He celebrates by waving his arse around. The Big Bad Wolf is lucky to be unconscious.


Onward we go, with the next fight being against Pinocchio. You know how I said Shrek has a “fire blast” attack? Well, it’s a fart. Of course it is, this is Shrek. He bends over and rips out a fart so potent that it immediately combusts on contact with air. You might think this would be an incredibly useful attack in a fight against a small wooden boy, but sadly it isn’t because, surprise surprise, the collision detection in SFF is bloody rubbish. Sure, the methane cannon has the potential to do good damage, but there’s no way of knowing whether it’s going to hit your opponent or not. Sometimes you’ll fart right next to someone and they’ll ignore it or, even worse, risk one of their limbs to reach through the cloud and punch Shrek in the arse. Other times they’ll take damage despite not actually touching the attack. It’s not just this move, either: seemingly every attack in the game is either utterly unreliable or will always hit if you’re even vaguely nearby.


Even Shrek’s regular attacks suffer from this, and after I won the previous fight by doing nothing but drop-kicks, I thought I’d try it on Pinocchio. It didn’t go so well, because despite launching my attacks from the same position only around one out of four made contact. You can see in the screenshot above that I’ve executed what would be the perfect drop-kick by any reasonable criteria – at just the right distance that I should be leaving bootprints on Pinocchio’s retinas – but did this attack do any damage? Did it bollocks. So, that’s another big reason why SFF is a horrible experience, and you spend a lot of fights sort of “inside” your opponent, neither of you being able to land blows unless the seemingly random whims of the game’s collision detection deign it to be so.


I do like that one of Pinocchio’s attacks is his extending his nose at you. There aren’t enough nose-based attacks in fighting games. Get on it, Dhalsim. You can also have fun wondering what lie Pinocchio is telling in order to get his nose to spring out so quickly that it hurts people. I’m going with “this is a fun game that definitely isn’t broken and doesn’t look like it was scraped off the sewer walls in Lego City.”


Next up is the Gingerbread Man. He runs around on little candy-cane stilts! Ha ha, that is fun. Then the fun abruptly stops when you realise the Gingerbread Man has one strategy and one strategy only: he runs, runs, as fast as he can (a genetic trait found in all gingerbread people, it seems) and pelts you with projectiles from as far away as possible. Once you manage to close the distance, you might be able to land one attack – if the hit detection is feeling generous, anyway – before the Gingerbread Man runs to the other side of the screen and does the same thing again. What an absolute pain in the arse this fight is, made worse by basic movement in SFF being slow and soupy, with characters floating in the air and no two jumps ever seeming to have the same trajectory. Much like the first battle, I only won by somehow managing to land the first blow and then trading hits, although in this case we trading projectiles because, unlike in pretty much every other fighting game ever, when two projectiles hit each other they don’t cancel each other out. Imagine Ken and Ryu standing at opposite ends of the screen, hurling endless fireballs that pass right through each other, and you’ve got some idea of just how dull this fight ended up being.


Now I’ve unlocked the Gingerbread Man as a playable character. He looks about as pleased at this development as I am to be playing this game.


It feels a little early for a mirror match, but here’s Shrek versus Shrek in a no-holds-barred grudge match. After all, who could want to beat Shrek up more than Shrek himself? Wow, man, that’s deep. Unlike the combat, where my Shrek and the Other Shrek stood apart, flinging projectiles in the hope that one of us would walk into an attack. Then the Other Shrek got bored and wandered into a pit. If even the CPU characters find this game too dismal to play, then what chance do I have?


Well, this might be useful. I can’t think of a power you’d be more keen to have in a fighting game than invincibility. It’s never explained how Shrek makes himself immune to physical harm. It probably has something to do with onions.


Eager to test out my new impervious body, I rushed into battle with Robin Hood. Except he’s called Monsieur Hood in this game (and in the original movie, apparently.) Monsieur Hood? Is he French now? I’m amazed that this change didn’t cause controversy amongst British conservative types. I could definitely see the Daily Mail running a “HOLLYWOOD HACKS IN FRENCH ROBIN HOOD DISGRACE” headline.
Oh, right, the invincibility. I never managed to use it. I wanted to, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to activate it. I realised it’s got something to do with you health bar, and the “P” icon at the bottom-left only lights up when you’re below a certain amount of health, but I tried every combination of buttons and d-pad motions I could think of and never managed to trigger it. I think I did a fairly thorough job of testing the various permutations – and the Game Boy Color is not exactly overburdened with buttons, so there’s not that much to try – but no matter what I tried, Shrek remained resolutely vincible.


Moving on, to a fight against a dragon. I’m sorry, that’s a lie. It’s actually a fight against those gaps in the bridge. Oh, sure, the dragon tries to get involved by swiping at you with her tail, but those holes were the main challenge. Not a fun challenge, either, so it fits in nicely with the rest of this game.
It’s difficult to judge just how much of SFF being bad is down to it appearing on the Game Boy Color, a platform that’s about as suited to the fighting game genre as an abacus is to hosting a flight sim. It just doesn’t have to the power to be pushing around the detailed, fast-moving sprites that you’d need for a satisfying fighting experience. That said, surely a Game Boy Color fighting game could be better than this one. Shrek: Fairytale Freakdown has that “licensed game” feeling all over it: rushed, uncared for and probably made with a tiny budget, but knowing that doesn’t make it fun to play. It’s awkward to both hit things and not get hit by things, the graphics are mostly bad and occasionally astonishingly ugly, the music is meandering, tuneless bleeping and it’s simply an all-round miserable experience to endure.


Oh look, another special power I never figured out how to activate. I bet if I knew how to use them, it’d seem really obvious. In this case, however, it’s probably for the best that Shrek’s speed power lies dormant. I had a hard enough time controlling him without him being sped up.


After another fight against Shrek – he’s got a lot of issues to work through, apparently – you’re thrown into battle with a hooded executioner named Thelonius. Thelonius’ name is a reference to the famous jazz musician Thelonius Executioner, you see.
The fight against Thelonius plays out as the opposite of the Gingerbread Man battle. Thelonius has a projectile – a throwing axe – but he rarely uses it, preferring instead to run as close to you as possible and grab you in the chokehold you can see above. This is rather annoying, as there seem at first to be no way to avoid the chokehold. If Thelonius gets near you, then you are getting throttled, and it’s difficult to keep away from him because he moves at the same speed as Shrek. I was having quite a lot of trouble with this fight, and consequently feeling pretty crappy about myself for being bested by a goddamn Shrek fighting game, until I realised that Thelonius has no defence against Shrek jump-kicking in place. He can’t grab Shrek while he’s in the air, so just hop up and down on the spot with your legs outstretched until Thelonius walks into your feet enough times to be rendered unconscious.


Here’s one tiny, insignificant detail in SFF that I genuinely liked – this stage takes place in a wrestling ring, and you can jump up to the top of the turnbuckle and launch your attacks from there. This is especially fun when you’re playing as Shrek because one of his jumping attacks is a flying elbow drop, so you can at least pretend you’re Macho Man Randy Savage.


I’m ninety percent certain “Ogre Strength” is code for extreme body odour. Those are green stink lines, not rippling waves of chi formed by Shrek’s sheer martial prowess


The final fight – here’s a tip, go and play Final Fight instead of listening to me complain about this game – is against the villainous ruler of Duloc, Lord Farquaad. Y’know, I didn’t realised “Farquaad” was supposed to sound like “fuckwad” until years after I’d seen the movie. I guess I’m just a pure and innocent soul.
Anyway, Farquaad also has a grab attack that’s frustratingly difficult to avoid if you try and fight him using Shrek’s incredibly short-ranged punches and kicks, but in Farquaad's case he jumps on your head and does a merry jig. This makes it far more aggravating than Thelonius’ chokehold, giving me the drive I needed to power through this fight and finish the game.


Projectiles came to my rescue once again, and I realised that they can hit enemies that aren’t on the screen. In fact, if your opponent does leave the screen, there’s a good chance they won’t bother coming back and you can throw projectile after projectile towards them. Most of the time they’ll just stand there, somewhere off-camera, and get hit. By this point I was more than happy to beat this game without having to see or engage with the other characters.


Here’s your ending. That’s all you’re getting, there aren’t even any credits. Just that same artwork of Shrek with the haunted expression of someone realising they’ll do anything to survive after the apocalypse. Anything.


In some misguided attempt at fairness, I went back and tried out the other characters to see if playing as them makes SFF any more enjoyable. It does not. I think Shrek and maybe Thelonius are slightly slower than the other characters, but beyond that they’re all much of a muchness. I think Farquaad might actually be the “best” character, because he’s got that head-dancing grab attack plus a move where he charges forward with his head down, impaling his foes on the prongs of his crown. It seems to travel right through every enemy attack and deals big damage, so if you want to get through SFF as quickly and painlessly as possible, try insert the symbol of your royal authority into the tender flesh of all and sundry.


I think I’ve covered this, but Shrek: Fairytale Freakdown is a really bad game. Slow, ugly, poorly balanced and unpredictable in the whims of its game engine. What’s worse than that, though, is that it’s so obvious. You and I both knew that this was going to be a terrible game, and the developers made no effort to include anything even vaguely new or interesting. And why bother? The executives who greenlit this game probably didn’t give the developers the time or resources to come up with anything better than this. So, SFF slides down the greasy chute of videogame obscurity and lands in a stinking, foetid pile with all the other licensed Game Boy Color games. I’ll play a good one some day, I swear, but for now I’m going to a) play some of that King of Fighters XIV I mentioned earlier and b) apologise if I got Smash Mouth stuck in your head.

Spring is in the air, the cherry trees outside my house are in full bloom and my hayfever’s staring to kick in. It can mean only one thing: it’s just about time for VGJunk’s birthday! That’s right, today is the site’s seventh anniversary, which is definitely a long enough amount of time to keep me awake at night as I think of all the good I could have done in the world instead of writing bad jokes about videogames for seven years. Anyway, to celebrate these anniversaries (and also because it’s my actual birthday tomorrow) I usually write about a game I genuinely love, but this year I’m doing something a bit different – I’m covering a game that lots of other people love, but which I’ve never fully taken to myself. It’s Sega’s 1991 Megadrive / Genesis gotta-go-fast-em-up Sonic the Hedgehog!


Here’s Sega’s beloved mascot now, with a smirk that betrays the slightest hint of his trademark “attitude.” Sonic looks young, fresh-faced and surprisingly shiny, as you might expect him to in a time before he gained an ever-growing coterie of friends and rivals, before he became a were-hog, before he started making out with human women. That said, Sonic did have a human girlfriend early in this game’s development, but she was eventually cut, thus paving the way for Amy Rose’s later introduction. She doesn’t appear in this game, though, and neither do any of Sonic’s other friends and hangers-on. It’s just Sonic and Dr. Robotnik – or Dr. Eggman, if you prefer – battling it out for the future of their world.
Before I get into the game proper, I should just say that if you are a hardcore Sonic fan and you’re heading to the comments section to leave an angry message about me not liking Sonic, then cool your jets. I certainly don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog is a bad game. In fact, I think it’s a good game, but I’ve never understood why people love it quite so much – that is, to a degree that even childhood nostalgia can’t really account for. So, I’m giving it another chance to get its hooks into me properly. I await enlightenment.


The game begins in the not-inappropriately named Green Hill Zone, a lush and verdant place of green grass, palm trees and chequerboard-patterned cliffs that for some reason always make me think of biscuits. Granted, it doesn’t take much to make me think about biscuits. Sonic the Hedgehog is split into several differently-themed “Zones,” with each Zone having three “Acts” and a boss fight at the end, so we get to enjoy Green Hill Zone’s scenery for a fair while – and doesn’t it look nice? The blue skies, the abundant flora, an amount of colour rarely seen outside a Dulux testing facility, it’s definitely a treat. I’ve never really realised it before, but Sonic the Hedgehog has the look of Sega’s arcade games of the time. Of course, it’s obvious that it would look like the OutRun of platformers, but it never occurred to me until now.


So, what can Sonic actually do in this game? Surprisingly little, as it turns out. He can run, he can jump and that’s about it. He curls into a ball when he jumps, and you can use this ability to jump on the evil robots that populate the stages, smashing them apart and freeing the woodland critters that Robotnik has imprisoned inside. You can also curl into a ball while running by pressing down on the d-pad, which lets you roll through enemies and around the scenery. Running and jumping is more than enough to get Sonic through the game’s levels, but nowadays it does feel rather limited – especially the lack of the spin-dash, which wasn’t introduced until Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Compare this to Super Mario Bros., which was released six years earlier – even Mario could swim and throw fireballs in that early incarnation. Ah yes, Super Mario. You can’t really talk about Sonic without mentioning Mario, can you? I have no qualms about comparing the two series, especially as comparing Sonic to Mario was basically Sega’s entire marketing strategy at the time. Mario definitely wins out in terms of complexity, then, but simplicity’s not necessarily a bad thing so I wouldn’t say its a mark against Sonic.


This simplicity is at its most effective when Sonic is doing the thing he’s most famous for – going fast. And boy howdy, he can go fast. Hold right on the d-pad and watch him fly thanks to theblast-processed power of the Megadrive, around loop-the-loops, through twisting passageways and catapulted off springboards into spike-pits and robot wasps. It’s no surprise that when people think of Sonic they tend to remember the games’ early stages – your Green Hill Zones and Emerald Hill Zones and the like – because their more open layouts and lower difficulty mean that’s where Sonic can spend the most time running around like a greyhound that’s swallowed a cruise missile. That’s when the game play is the most enjoyable and the most Sonic-y and yes, running through them as fast as possible is a lot of fun.


A lot of that fun comes from the level design which, for the most part, is very good thanks to the inclusion of various routes through each Act. You can generally take a top path for a more challenging but more rewarding (usually in terms of the golden rings that Sonic hoards and uses as a life bar) path though each stage, or a lower, slower but steadier route, often with a middle path and the opportunity to switch between routes. This is especially effective in the context of the game’s extremely high pace: it encourages you to play to the game’s strengths by going as fast as you can, knowing that if you mess up a jump you’re (probably) not going to fall down a bottomless pit and you’ll be able to continue along a different route.


Ah yes, rings. Every nineties platformer was littered with shiny objects the player was tasked with collecting, and Sonic the Hedgehog is no different. In this case it’s rings, an object presumably chosen solely because it’s neither a coin nor a jewel. As usual, collecting one hundred rings gives Sonic an extra life, but their more important function is protection. I’m sure 99.999% of people reading this know how rings work in a Sonic game, but in case you don’t: if Sonic takes damage – by touching an enemy or, far more likely, making contact with some kind of spike – and he isn’t holding any rings, he dies. If he is holding rings, he doesn’t die but he drops all his rings, scattering them nearby. If you’re quick, you can pick up some of the rings you just dropped. I really like this system as a replacement for the standard health bar, for two reasons: it gives you a chance to immediately recover from whatever dumbass mistake you just made, and because the more rings you’re holding the more rings you drop when you’re hit, so you’re still encouraged to collect rings rather than simply holding on to one ring like some spiky Gollum. There’s also another reason for stockpiling rings…


If you finish any of the first two Acts in a Zone with more than fifty rings in Sonic’s sweaty, begloved hands, a huge ring appears at the end of the stage. Far from being merely a more extravagant version of the regular rings, it’s actually a portal to a universe of dizziness and eye-punishing graphics. Jump into the big ring and welcome to… the Special Stage.


Well, this is all very different, isn’t it? And not in an enjoyable way, not with the background constantly warping and cycling through an extremely bright colour palette in the manner of a particularly obnoxious Amiga cracktro.
The Special Stages don’t just look bananas, they work in a very different way to the rest of the game. The entire stage is a maze of blocks that constantly rotates, with Sonic trapped inside, curled up into a ball. You can “jump” while you’re in the special stage, although it’s more like you’re “pushing” yourself off whatever wall you’re touching. There are special blocks within the Special Stage, including pinball-style buffers that ping Sonic around the maze and blocks that speed up, slow down or reverse the direction of the maze’s rotation when you touch them. There are also “Goal” blocks, and if you touch those you’ll be set free from this potentially nausea-inducing spinning prison – but don’t touch the goal, because there’s something more important to do in the Special Stages.


Each stage contains one of the fabled Chaos Emeralds, generally located at the centre of the maze and always surrounded by a cluster of blocks that you have to grind Sonic against multiple times before they disappear. Obviously your goal is to grab the Chaos Emerald, although it’s never explained why you would want to do so, at least not in the non-Japanese versions of the game. Greed will have to act as Sonic’s prime motivator, then.
The only reward for collecting all the Chaos Emeralds is a slightly different ending, and after playing a couple of Special Stages I very nearly came to the conclusion that it wasn’t bloody worth it. They’re just not much fun, is the thing, and they’re definitely not a patch on the Special Stages from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. There’s just enough of a random element and lack of control that they feel frustrating and awkward rather than challenging and unique, plus the graphical aesthetic of “Lisa Frank meets bootleg Columns clone” is not one I wanted to expose myself to any more than was strictly necessary.


I did it, though. For you, Dear Reader. Well, I’ve already collected two of the six Chaos Emeralds, I suppose I might as well try to get the rest.


Back out into the real world, and after much running, jumping and bouncing off springs, it’s time for Sonic’s first confrontation with his arch nemesis, the evil Dr. Robotnik. That’s right, Robotnik. He’ll always be Robotnik to me. Anyway, Robotnik wants to take over the world for vague reasons, but he specifically wants to give Sonic a hard time because he really hates the little blue spikeball. The Japanese manual implies that Sonic and Robotnik have fought each other many times before, only this time Robotnik has turned all Sonic’s animal friends into robots, presumably in the hope that increasing Sonic’s friend-rescuing workload will give him more time to conquer the planet. That still doesn’t explain why Robotnik is so bent on world domination in the first place. Maybe he was driven to insanity due to the loneliness of being the only roughly human-shaped person on the planet. Perhaps he foresaw the release of Sonic 2006 and is doing whatever he can to prevent it. Whatever his twisted motivations, he’s here to destroy Sonic, and he’s brought a big flying wrecking ball to get the job done.


Unfortunately for the portly mad scientist / hedgehog hater, if Sonic stands right in the corner of the screen the ball and chain can’t actually hit him. That’s what we call a “design flaw,” Robotnik. Once you’ve figured out the limitations of Robotnik’s flying death machine, it’s a simple matter of hopping up to the platform above and bouncing into Robotnik once or twice before retreating to the safety of the corner. Repeat this a few times and Robotnik’s weapon will explode, forcing him to retreat in his flying machine which is now powered by pure embarrassment.


After that, all that’s required to end the Zone is to break open the containment unit holding dozens of Sonic’s animal friends. These animals are the lucky ones. There were plenty of robots in the preceding stages that I didn’t bother to destroy, leaving the animals inside trapped within their metal prisons. On the plus side, they’re robots now. That’s pretty cool. They’ve got wheels, or they can fly, or turn invisible. If I was a hoppity-floppity widdle bunny, I would probably consider being turned into an invisible chameleon robot an upgrade.


Onwards to stage two, the Marble Zone. It’s got an ancient-ruined-civilization feel to it, and it’s always seemed familiar to me but I’ve only just realised why: it’s because it looks like first stage of Altered Beast should be taking place just off camera.


It also has a lot of lava, so we can probably guess why it’s a ruined civilisation. The setting raises even more questions about the world of Sonic the Hedgehog, because surely these buildings weren’t constructed by chicks and rabbits? Were they the home of Robotnik’s ancestors, and he’s the last, doomed survivor of an ancient race? I’m not particularly au fait with Sonic the Hedgehog’s no-doubt vast and convoluted lore, but I don’t think these questions have ever been answered. Of course, there are many, many questions about Sonic’s universe that have never and probably can never receive a satisfactory answer. Can Sonic naturally run very fast or, as is implied in the game’s original manual and posited by NBA Jam, is it the shoes? Why is there so much Sonic the Hedgehog pornography on the internet? What the hell does “toot toot Sonic warrior” mean? I have no answers, my friends, only questions upon questions.
Oh, and I really like the platforms pictured above: they sink into the lava when you stand on them, just far enough that the grass on top catches fire and chases Sonic as he makes his way across them. It’s more interesting that the usual “platforms that collapse a couple of seconds after you stand on them” set-up, I’ll give it that.


Most of the Marble Zone actually takes place underground, amongst the lava pools and crushing spiked platforms. Sonic will be back here in the winter months when he’s ready to hibernate, but for now he’s got to outrun the cascading magma and ride moving masonry over the molten rock. It’s a set of trials and traps that look more dangerous than they really are, and most of the damage you’ll take in this stage will come if you panic. Taking it slowly is the best way to get through the Marble Zone, as wildly inappropriate as that may be.


Even Sonic himself looks annoyed at being forced to slow down, as well he might. In fact, he almost always looks relatively surly during the game, especially when he’s standing there with his hands on his hips. I say hips, I mean the part of his body where his legs slot into his tubby lil’ torso.


For the Marble Zone’s boss battle, Robotnik has taken inspiration from the natural world around him by creating a lava-dribbling machine. He drops a blob of lava on one side of the screen, setting that platform on fire, before flying over to the other side and doing the same thing, over and over again, forever repeating his ineffectual attempt to defeat Sonic in a manner that sums up the Robotnik / Sonic rivalry rather nicely. My advice? Don’t stand on the platform that’s on fire. There really isn’t much more to it than that, folks.


Next up is the Spring Yard Zone, and where the previous two stages had easily-defined themes – pastoral tranquillity and lava ruins, respectively – the Spring Yard Zone is a difficult one to sum up. A pinball table mixed with a scrapyard, maybe? Or maybe I’m only thinking of a scrapyard because it sounds like Spring Yard? No, a lot of this stage is made of irregular orange-brown metal that looks like rusted iron, that’s pretty scrapyard-ish. Whatever the intended mood, it features a lot of pinball buffers that spang Sonic around the stage and U-shaped “half-pipes” to roll around in, and on the whole it’s a lot more open than the Marble Zone and is consequently more enjoyable. Sonic the Hedgehog plays best when it’s got a bit of room to breathe.


Cope? Look, I’m trying my best but sometimes life just gets you down, you know? Writing this article one-handed while my other hand is shoved in a big bucket full of Easter sweets is definitely helping me to cope, though.


Here’s me making a real hash of avoiding these spiked balls. There are way more spiked balls in this game than I remember. I’m sure there are some interesting psychological insights you can gain from Robotnik loving spiked balls so much and Sonic spending a lot of his time being a spiked ball.
The majority of the Spring Yard Zone finds a good balance between high-speed action and more cautious platforming, with lots of areas that you can charge through at top speed if you’re feeling confident, (or you know the stages well,) but if you mess up and lose your momentum the platforming is still enjoyable as you delicately jump between the deathtraps.


Spring Yard Zone Act 2 offers your sixth chance to enter the Special Stage, so by now I’ve used my pro gamer skills to collect all the Chaos Emeralds. No, of course not. I used a bunch of save states, it’s far too easy to mess up a jump and land on the “Goal” tiles before grabbing the emerald and the Special Stages aren’t nearly enough fun for me to actually practise them.
Like I say, your only reward for collecting all the Chaos Emeralds is a very slightly different ending. There are no familiar-looking pointy-haired golden power-ups to unlock in this one, as Super Sonic wasn’t introduced until Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Therefore, I have concluded that Sonic’s sole reason for collecting the Chaos Emeralds is just because it’ll annoy Robotnik.


Robotnik’s back for another boss battle. This time, he’s put a spike on the bottom of his eggmobile so he can gradually remove chunks of the floor. This might have been an effective strategy if he wasn’t so bloody slow about it, but as it is he lumbers between the blocks at a snail’s pace, giving Sonic plenty of time to smash him up as long as he remembers not to jump into the spike on the bottom of Robotnik’s ship. The way he manages to stretch out the time it takes to complete this basic demolition work might draw appreciative remarks from the world’s builders, but it’s not helping him defeat his nemesis, is it? What Robotnik needs for his robot killing machines is evolution, not revolution. If he’d combined the fire-spitter, the ball-and-chain and the spiked floor ruiner, Sonic wouldn’t stand a chance. But no, he’s got to come up with something completely different every time.


Moving on, and Zone four is the Labyrinth Zone. It’s another ancient ruins-themed area, only this time it’s more Atlantis than Pompeii and there’s a lot of water to traverse.


It’s not much of a labyrinth, either, but Stand On The Switches Zone is a far less catchy name. Least Fun Zone might have been a good name for it, too, because it really is, and it sums up the reason that while I can enjoy classic Sonic games they never get anywhere near my all-time favourites list. Sonic spends the majority of this stage underwater, which means he can’t go fast. His entire ethos, his main selling point, the essence of his character has been completely excised from the gameplay as he sluggishly wades through the briny deep, not only moving slowly but being forced to stop and wait at the pockets of bubbles so he can replenish his oxygen supply. The Labyrinth Zone is an extreme example, but it’s the case in almost every Sonic game that there’s a point where going fast starts becoming a less and less viable strategy, making the gameplay less and less enjoyable.


Obviously, there’s a difficult balancing act when it comes to designing Sonic stages. You want Sonic to be able to move freely and put his famous speed to good use, but if stage after stage were designed like Green Hill Zone the gameplay would become pretty repetitive, and there are some Sonic stages where it feels like all you’re doing to get through them is holding right on the d-pad. It’s a balance that’s possible to get right - Spring Yard Zone and the Zone after this one manage it well – but Labyrinth Zone stops the game’s momentum dead with a dull, finicky section of mostly-underwater platforming and annoying spike traps. Contrast this to the classic Super Mario games: it’s extremely rare that they suffer from a sudden dip in quality between worlds, because they take Mario’s skill set and gradually ramp up the complexity of the stages without ever taking away any of Mario’s core attributes. Also, Mario can swim. Sonic cannot, which is odd because hedgehogs can swim.


That’s not to say that the Labyrinth Zone is a completely miserable experience. Most of it is just okay, certainly no worse than a thousand other mascot platformers of the era, and Sonic has something else that helps it get by: charm. It’s just a very cute game, you know? Check out Sonic’s goofy face as he’s forced down this water slide, that’s the kind of thing I mean. Everything’s so nicely designed and full of character that even when the gameplay flags, there’s always something worth looking at, be it the background details, Sonic’s wobbly pose when he’s standing right at the edge of a platform, or woodland creatures scurrying away from their robot prisons.


Speaking of robots, I think Dr. Robotnik might have been starting to lose interest when he designed a robot that’s just a sphere with eyes. Not to worry, though, he jazzed it up with a few spiked balls. Dr. Robotnik and spiked balls, it’s the greatest videogame love affair since Pac-Man and dots.


Unfortunately, Labyrinth Zone ends with what is probably the lowest point of the entire game. Rather than having a proper boss fight, you have to chase Robotnik up a narrow passageway of platforms while the water level rises beneath you. If you’re not quick enough – or you brush up against one of the many fireballs or spears that line the route – you’ll end up underwater, slowed down by the current and, most likely, drowned. It’s just no fun to navigate, because “straight up” is the only direction that Sonic’s not very good at going fast in, and the small jumps and restricted safe zones do not play well with the blue blur’s somewhat slippery jumping physics. I’m sure the onrushing water is intended to heighten the tension of the situation, but (for me, anyway,) it overshoots “tense” and marches into “annoying” territory, trying its hardest to plant its flag atop Pain In The Arse Mountain.


The entire ordeal is almost redeemed by Robotnik’s reaction to Sonic escaping from this deathtrap. He looks like he really, genuinely expected Sonic to be dead, and then he panics and flies away. This is what I mean when I say Sonic the Hedgehog has charm.


We’re back to the good stuff with Star Light Zone, a place that I think is supposed to represent an under-construction skyscraper, albeit in a pretty abstract manner. There’s lots of running around loops and over curves, with a few new obstacles to contend with that fit nicely into the action. It’s also got my favourite stage theme in the game, which is quite an accolade because if there’s one facet of Sonic the Hedgehog that I can give my complete and unreserved praise, it’s Masato Nakamura’s soundtrack. The Sonic games almost always have good music, and the original is no exception, so let’s have a listen to the Star Light Zone theme.


Here’s my advice: if you’re thinking about learning to play bass guitar – perhaps you’ve realised you’re not cool enough for lead guitar but still have too much dignity to become a drummer – then the Star Light Zone theme makes an excellent first song to learn.


Later in the stage, Sonic is halted in his tracks by a goddamn desk fan. Let’s hope for his sake that Robotnik never finds out about those Dyson bladeless fans.


Star Light Zone gives Sonic plenty of opportunity to roll around at the speed of sound, but when it does slow things down it does so in a far more enjoyable way than the Labyrinth Zone. I particularly like these see-saw / trampoline things, powered by – what else – spiked balls. Jump onto the non-spiky side to catapult the ball into the air, move over to the other side of the see-saw and when the ball lands it sends Sonic flying. It’s a simple yet extremely satisfying mechanic, but the real joy of these platforms is the “bwoing” sound effect they make.


It’s a good job I like the catapults so much, because the boss fight is all about them. Robotnik’s obsession with spiky metal balls has reached its most fevered heights, but like Icarus flying too close to the sun the doctor is overcome by the power of his own creation. He tries to drop spiked balls on Sonic’s head, you see, but the see-saws mean that either a) Sonic can launch the balls back up to Robotnik to damage him or b) the balls can launch Sonic up towards Robotnik. Either way, something spherical yet pointy is going to ruin his plans. These particular spiked balls do explode into deadly shrapnel after a while just to keep Sonic on his toes, but it’s still a relatively easy boss battle in a game packed with easy boss battles.


Then it’s on to the Scrap Brain Zone, the final full Zone in the game. If you like moving mechanical parts, dangling saw-blades that would most definitely not pass a Health and Safety inspection and Sonic’s ability to defy gravity while standing on a gear wheel, then this is the stage for you. There’s not that much to say about the first two Acts, honestly. It’s mechanical, you spend too much time waiting around for platforms to move into the right place, it’s a bit tougher than the other stages and it’s very grey.


There’s also a lot of opportunity to get squashed between moving platforms, which results in immediate death and accounted for roughly seventy percent of the lives I lost playing this game. I can understand that being crushed between two implacable slabs of metal is a good reason to lose a life, but there’s something about the way Sonic the Hedgehog handles the hit detection of these crushing areas that never felt quite right to me. Sometimes you’ll be able to escape even once the platform is already pressing into Sonic’s grossly-oversized skull, but other times you’ll be killed simply for standing near two touching surfaces. It’s an odd quirk of the game engine, I guess, and it hardly ruins the experience, but it’s something you should be aware of any time there’s the potential to get squashed.


Here’s a question for you: if you could find someone who’s never heard of Sonic the Hedgehog and showed them a picture of Sonic himself, do you think they’d be able to tell what animal he is? I honestly don't know, probably because I’ve known about Sonic the Hedgehog since I was a kid. I mean, he’s got a hedgehog-ish little snout and spines on his back… except they look more like hair than spines. Also, he’s blue. Not a common colour for hedgehogs, as a rule. I think there’d be a fifty-fifty chance of identifying him as a hedgehog, which makes sense because there’s a continuum of how much a Sonic character looks like the animal they’re supposed to be and Sonic lies somewhere in the middle. At one end you’ve got Tails, who is more or less just a fox (extra tail notwithstanding) and Cream the Rabbit, whose ears are a dead giveaway. On the other extreme is Knuckles, who looks about as much like an echidna as I do. I don’t know what I’d think Knuckles was supposed to be. Some kind of mole, perhaps. Then there are outliers like Big the Cat, who almost looks like a cat but looks more like a golem created by a race of cat people to protect them from persecution.


Anyway, back to the game, and Sonic has finally caught up with Robotnik. Robotnik is hiding behind a force-field, however, and not even running into it really fast can penetrate this barrier. Then, with an expression of glee so pure and heartwarming that it’s a wonder anyone ever roots for Sonic in these situations, Robotnik stamps on a button that opens a pit beneath Sonic and drops him into a new stage.


Oh, come on. Back to the Labyrinth Zone? Boo. Okay, so while I would definitely have preferred Star Light Zone Act 4, this stage isn’t bad at all. It feels a damn sight more like a labyrinth, anyway, and the pale grey and purple colour scheme is rather appealing. It’s like I’m fighting through a retrospective of 80s graphic design.


I like that this stage feels as though it has a purpose, too – showing Sonic’s resolve by having him haul his spiky arse back up from the depths of Hell just to ruin Robotnik’s day. The end of this stage isn’t nearly as unpleasant as the end of the Labyrinth Zone proper, but it does get pretty hairy as you squeeze through the narrow final corridors. Knowing that the climactic boss battle was coming up, I oh-so-carefully negotiated the fireballs and spikes, determined that I’d go into the final encounter with a healthy supply of rings. It was tricky, but I made it through unscathed. Then the game took all my rings off me anyway. Cheers, Sega.


Here is the final battle, and given what I said earlier about suffering a lot of deaths through crushing I was a little concerned that Robotnik’s entire plan is to flatten Sonic using these giant pistons. Two of the four pistons move into the screen at a time, and Robotnik’s hiding inside one of them. Jump into him when you can, but try to stay patient. In between piston attacks, four balls of electricity will appear above Sonic and then descend towards him, but there’s a big enough gap between them that you can avoid them by jumping straight upwards at the appropriate moment. If that all sounds very straightforward, that’s because it is – the only problem you’re going to have is that any mistake means immediate death, either because you were crushed or because the electricity touched you and the game already took away all your sodding rings. Not a particularly thrilling end to the game, then, but at least the Sonic franchise would have much more interesting bosses in future games.


Before Sonic can deal the finishing blow, Robotnik manages to jump into his eggmobile and fly away. Good. I’m glad. I like Robotnik way more than I like Sonic, so I’m happy to see him escape to safety, back to his evil lair where he will probably give Dr. Wily a call and ask him how he copes with being regularly defeated by a small blue pest.


As the freed animals scamper around the Green Hill Zone and Sonic leaps towards the screen pointing an accusatory finger at the player, as though he’s telling us he’s coming for us next, Sonic the Hedgehog draws to a close. If you’ve collected all the Chaos Emeralds, Sonic watches them spin around above his head which cartoony flowers bloom in the background. If you don’t have the Emeralds he, erm, doesn’t. Either way, all the animals are saved and Robotnik has retreated to lick his wounds, where he will spend his time off watching Star Wars and thinking “hmm, a giant spherical space station, you say?” to himself.


After the credits have rolled, there’s one final scene: if you don’t have the Emeralds, Robotnik juggles them around and tells the play to try again, but if you’ve got them all he stomps on the end title like a petulant child, which rather confirms the whole “grab the Emeralds to piss Robotnik off” scenario.


So that’s Sonic the Hedgehog, a game beloved by millions. Beloved by me, though? Not quite. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game. Very good, even, with lots of things to recommend it: the presentation is impeccable, with some wonderful graphical flourishes and a killer soundtrack. There are dozens of fun, engaging flourishes in the level design, like the see-saws and the water slides, and when Sonic gets up to top speed and you’re ricocheting from enemy to springboard and round a loop-the-loop it’s easy to see why it’s the favourite of so many. In fact, I think I enjoyed playing it more this time than I ever have before, perhaps because I’ve played so many god-awful platformers for the site. Still, there’s something about Sonic– this game, and the “classic” series as a whole - that prevents me from truly falling in love with it. With Sonic 1, the Special Stages are a part of it, because I really did not enjoy them, but it’s more that so often the most fun bits of the game are cruelly cut short and replaced by finicky platforming and waiting for moving blocks.


Sonic the Hedgehog might not be quite my dream game, then, but it was fun to play through it and it was a suitable subject for the seventh VGJunk anniversary. Good work all around, everyone, much patting on backs, etcetera. Hopefully I’ll still be doing this for a good while yet. There are just so many licensed Game Boy Color games to suffer through, after all. Plus, if you’ll allow me to get sentimental for a moment, the past two years (and particularly the last six months or so) have been a deeply miserable time for me, but writing these articles was a ray of sunshine in difficult times – the idea that people seemed to be tolerating or even enjoying these bad jokes about videogames made it feel like I was doing something right when everything else was going wrong. Thanks for that, everyone. Right, I’m off to enjoy my birthday activities, which this year seem to involve emptying out my garage. If anyone wants any half-empty paint cans or garden tools so rusty and neglected they look like set dressing from an allotment-themed horror movie, let me know.

First Sonic the Hedgehog and now this. That’s two games in a row that you have not only probably heard of but might well have even played yourself. I’m getting dangerously close to the mainstream. The mainstream from, erm, almost thirty years ago, anyway. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get back to barely-remembered home computer games soon enough, but for today it’s Konami’s 1989 arcade superhit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

A surprisingly bland title screen for such a well-loved game, but not to worry – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles makes up for it with the game’s attract mode, which is a recreation of the TMNT cartoon’s opening sequence, complete with a portion of the show’s theme tune. It’s the “teenage mutant ninja turtles, teenage mutant ninja turtles” bit you get to hear, with none of the parts of the song that explain the turtle’s personality quirks and that they will cut the evil Shredder no slack. They didn’t need those bits of the song, because Konami have included their own descriptions of each turtle to get you up to speed.


Not that you necessarily need a bio for each turtle. The TMNT franchise has been around for over thirty years now, and if you’re the kind of person who has sought out a TMNT arcade game then you’re probably already well aware that Leonardo leads and Michelangelo is a party dude. Back in 1989, though, the turtles were still getting big off the back of their first animated series – the series upon which this game is based – so there might have been some kids who didn’t know who the turtles were. In fact, I can imagine this game being a lot of kids’ gateway drug to full-blown turtlemania.


Turtle number one is Leonardo, the leader of the gang. We all know he’s the sensible, level-headed member of the team, but I think that description has been influenced by years of newer TMNT media, because from what I remember of the 80s cartoon Leonardo was just as much of a pizza-obsessed dork as the rest of the turtles. Nowadays he really is the leader of the turtles, but back then “leader” was a vanity title. Also, you’d think someone who has dedicated their life to the mastery of Japanese swordsmanship would baulk at the idea of using their treasured blades to slice pizza, but give Leo a break. He’s a hideous green mutant who lives in the sewers, it’s not like he can nip down to Wilko and buy a pizza cutter.


Next up is Michelangelo, the party dude, the turtle most likely to require an intervention at some point in the future. “I just like having fun, dude,” he says as his family and friends gather around him, “it’s not like I have a problem.”


Then there’s Donatello, who nowadays is much more strongly presented as a “nerd,” but back in the day he just “did machines.” The bloke who fixed my tumble drier also “does machines” for a living, but that doesn’t make him a nerd. I will be playing as Donatello last time, because I played as Michelangelo last time I covered a TMNT game and because I’m hoping Donatello’s resentment at being equipped with a stick rather than a cool ninja weapon will translate into a ferocious fighting style.


Lastly there’s Raphael, and his character has changed even more than Leonardo’s over the years: now thought of as the surly, hot-headed rebel of the bunch, in the first cartoon series Raphael was merely a sarcastic, smart-mouthed type. You know the type, you’re always worried that they’re going to invite you to their open-mic stand-up show.
You’ll notice that the turtle’s bios are leaning very heavily on their relationship with pizza. This is hardly surprising, a love of pizza is one of the turtles’ defining traits – but I think it’s mentioned so often because the developers didn’t have much else to work with. Supposedly the game was designed around just the first five episodes of the cartoon, so there wasn’t as much material there as there would be later on: the TMNT cartoon ran for ten seasons, after all. This means that while TMNT does capture a lot of the spirit of the cartoon – in fact, that’s one of the game’s biggest strengths – there are some elements that are surprising in their absence.


The game begins with a fire. The turtles’ friend and confidante April O’Neil is in that building! Being the heroic amphibians they are, the turtles leap into action with no regard for their personal safety and, apparently, no plan for getting to the building beyond “we’ll jump off this building.” That’s either impressive or foolhardy, depending on how much of a turtle’s famous ability for long-jumps the heroes in a half-shell kept during their mutation.


It works out all right for them in the end. Well, mostly. Michelangelo falls on his arse, so it’s a good job I won’t be playing as him. It’d be difficult to fight the evil Foot Clan with a shattered coccyx.


It’s gameplay time, and yes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a side-scrolling beat-em-up. It works a little differently to what you might be expecting, what with it being developed at the same time as Final Fight (the game that really consolidated the genre’s “rules”). Still, it’s a familiar mix of walking around, jumping, jump-kicking and using your attacks to pummel the various members of the Foot Clan that get in your way. You can see some Foot Clan ninjas above, resplendent in their purple and white uniforms, with the turtles and the Foot Clan locked in a battle to determine which group are the least ninja-like ninjas of all time. It’s the usual “walk right and punch things” formula, then, except I’m hitting the bad guys with a stick rather than punching them.


It’s been quite a while since I played TMNT properly, and I’ve played a lot of other, more (let’s say) “traditional” brawlers in the interim, so some of the things TMNT does differently are really jumping out at me. One is that there’s no “desperation move,” a special attack activated by pressing both buttons together that knocks down all enemies near you at the cost of some of your health. The turtles do have a move executed by both buttons, but it’s more of a big, jumping swing (Raphael’s is slightly different) that doesn’t attack in 360 degrees, doesn’t make you invincible while it’s active and doesn’t reduce your health. That took some getting used to.


Then there’s the throwing mechanics. In most brawlers, if you walk right into an enemy you’ll grab them, and from there you can usually hit them a couple of time or throw them (or both). Not so in TMNT. There are throwing attacks – in Donatello’s case he picks his opponent up with his stick and flips them over – but I’m not entirely sure how they work. You attack the enemies and most times you’ll just whack them, but sometimes you’ll throw them. I never managed to figure out whether it’s completely arbitrary or it’s somehow related to the enemy’s remaining health, but my best guess is that there’s some kind of hidden “timer” or combo counter and when it’s full your next attack will be a throw. It’s unpredictable, and that might be a problem in other brawlers but TMNT is so fast-paced and hectic that it’s never much of an issue. Plus, if you throw an enemy into a wall, they slam into it and then slowly slide down to the ground, so any issues with the throwing system are redeemed by that graphical flourish alone.


Having reached the end of this (very short) first stage, the turtles have located April. Don’t look too closely at April’s face, it really brings down the otherwise excellent graphics. Instead, let’s enjoy the arrival of Rocksteady, Shredder’s mutated rhino-man minion. In particular, let’s take a moment to appreciate Rocksteady’s driving skills, because he’s arrived here by piloting an underground tunnelling machine with a massive drill on the front. Considering April’s apartment is at the top of a skyscraper, that is one hell of a drive to pop up through her living room floor.


Boss battle time, and I don’t really know what the best way to approach this fight is. “Not from the front” is a good bet, because Rocksteady has a machine gun and he’s not reluctant to use it. Even when I avoided the gun, however, I’d land a couple of hits from what I thought was a safe position, only for Rocksteady to boot me across the room. Hit-and-run tactics seem to be your best option, then, while keeping an eye out for the moments when Rocksteady goes bananas and starts wildly firing his gun in all directions. At least Donatello’s stick gives him some much-needed extra range, and it wasn’t long before I’d poked Rocksteady into submission. Wait a minute, that means I’ve rescued April. So… game over, then?


Nope, never mind: Shredder has appeared and grabbed April before jumping out of a window with her tucked under his arm. Makes you wonder why he bothered setting fire to April’s apartment in the first place, really. Unless the fire was a side effect of drilling though a block of flats with underground excavation machinery. Yeah, it’s probably that.

TMNT’s first stage is short enough to feel more like a prologue than anything, but now that the turtles – well, Donatello, anyway – have hit the city streets we’re into full-length stage territory. There are lots of Foot Soldiers about, so the turtles have been forced to abandon their efforts to remain hidden from the general populace, presumably enjoying the sunlight and air that smells significantly less like human effluent as they crack heads, perform many jumping kicks and repeatedly fall down an open manhole cover because they’re not paying enough attention. That last bit might be down to me, actually.
Helpfully, the Foot Clan have colour-coded their minions so you can tell at a glance what you’re dealing with: purple soldiers use their bare fists, yellow soldiers have boomerangs, white-clad ninjas wield swords. It’s good to be able to differentiate melee troops from their projectile-carrying brethren, at least, and the different colours mean it feels like there’s a little more enemy variation. Like I said, Konami didn’t have much material to draw on when designing TMNT, so there aren’t that many different types of goons: Foot Soldiers, Mouser robots and those uni-wheeled whip-armed robot things are about all you get.


Well well, look at this. Some kind soul has spray-painted the word “Caution” on the floor – either that, or they’ve spend a long time painstakingly arranging a puddle into those letters – to warn me of upcoming danger. But where is the threat lurking? Is it that crumbling corner of the pavement? It does look like a sprained ankle waiting to happen, but I’ve already safely negotiated that particular hazard. Maybe there’s a Foot Soldier with a high-powered sniper rifle waiting off-screen? But then you take a closer look at the billboard in the background and notice it says “Trapcorp” on it.


Yep, the billboard is a trap: walk underneath it and a couple of Foot Soldiers will push it onto your head. How wonderful is it that the billboard literally told you it was a trap? That’s one of my favourite little flourishes I’ve seen in a game for a while. And, even though I knew there was a trap there, the billboard still hit me. Trapcorp do good work. Wile E. Coyote might want to look into switching suppliers.


Waiting at the end of the street is Bebop, the warthog half of the Bebop and Rocksteady tag-team. That’s Donatello insulting Bebop’s appearance in that speech bubble, by the way. Getting socked right in the jaw may be more justified than usual. Also, glass houses and all that, Donny. I don’t think you’re ever going to be appearing on the cover of GQ, are you?
Given that they’re both muscular mutants carrying guns, it’s no surprise that this fight is similar to the one against Rocksteady. Bebop’s got a little more space to move around in, though, and he uses this to try to shoulder-charge you once you get too far away. The basics remain the same, however; wait until he’s finished shooting or shoulder charging, whack him a couple of times, move up or down to avoid his counter attacks and don’t get too greedy – if you try to unload a full combo on Bebop, half-way through he’ll just thump you across the stage.


After dealing with Bebop, it’s back to the sewers. Not back from the sewers, that’s one of the Game Boy TMNT games. Anyway, there’s not much new to see and do here- bad guys attack, you whack ‘em with your ninja weaponry, so on and so forth. There are a few traps, like these spiked gates, and some of the Foot Soldiers enter the fray by climbing hand-over-hand along the pipes in the foreground in a manner that’s about as stealthy and discreet as wearing a big neon sign on their head that flashes “I AM A NINJA” whenever they move. Overall it’s a pretty bland stage, though. If videogames have taught us nothing else over the years, it’s that it’s very difficult to make an interesting sewer level.


I hope you got lots of practise fighting those Mousers, because Baxter Stockman has arrived for the boss battle and he’s brought hundreds of the bloody things with him. In the most egregious example of this game not having enough TMNT material to work with, Stockman shows up in his far-less-interesting “deranged inventor” incarnation. I know, I know, a mad scientist is usually a very welcome character to include but later in the show Baxter Stockman is transformed into a half-mad-scientist / half fly monster abomination and we can all agree that would be a much better boss fight. Instead what we get is Stockman flying around in a robot capsule thing – after bellowing “Yippee-I-ay!” at you, the weirdo – and throwing Mousers into the fray. You can attack the Mousers but they’ll just keep coming, so you might as well focus on Stockman. The problem with that approach, and this might just be me, but I had trouble lining up my attacks. It’s because he’s flying, I never seemed to be on the right horizontal plane even with Stockman’s shadow working as a guide. Oh well, it’s not an especially fun battle but neither is it terrible. It’s just kinda… there. And now I’ve finished it. Onwards!


The villains pop up between stages to let me know they’re still holding April hostage. Thanks for that, chaps. I might have forgotten what I was doing otherwise. I notice that Baxter Stockman isn’t with you. I assume he was killed during the previous battle. You have my condolences.


More street fighting now, except all of the player characters are musclebound green freaks and not just Blanka. It’s all motoring along at a fair old clip, and both the turtles and the Foot Soldiers are speedy and agile. Still, the combat itself doesn’t feel quite right. It’s definitely fun, and maybe it’s because it’s impossible to play TMNT without viewing it through the prism of all the other side-scrolling beat-em-ups I’ve played, but there’s something a little off about it. For one thing, it doesn’t feel very solid. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but there’s little sensation of weight behind your blows, perhaps due to the game’s sometimes tinny sound effects. Then there’s your standard combos – in most beat-em-ups, once you hit an enemy with the start of your combo they’re stuck there while you unleash your entire combo on them. In TMNT, however, the enemies can interrupt your combo sometimes, and this seems to be especially true when you’re playing as Donatello because of his slightly slower attacks. You can also move while you’re comboing, so if you’re holding the joystick when attacking your turtle will slide around a bit in between each attack. It adds up to gameplay that feels a touch loose, a hair floaty, but because it’s such an all-action, high-impact spectacle you’re left with very little chance for it to become a problem.


Bebop and Rocksteady are back. I’m happy enough with that, I like Bebop and Rocksteady. They were good in Turtles Forever, anyway. It’s a bit of a pain having to fight them both at the same time, especially as they both have guns, but on the plus side they’ve got a move where they both charge at the same time and smash into each other face-first. Being a rhino, I reckon Rocksteady will have come out of that collision better than Bebop.


April has been rescued! You could see her in the background of the previous fight, actually. Bebop and Rocksteady probably should have left her back at the Technodrome, really, but she’s free now and she rewards Donatello with a kiss on the head. Donny doesn’t look much like he’s into it, does he? Then again, why would be? Not many people would want to kiss a mutant turtle, and presumably it works the other way around. If you’re about to send me links to certain website with pictorial evidence that some people do want to make out with the ninja turtles, please keep it to yourself. We both know it’s out there, let’s just leave it at that.


Ah yes, the secret factory. So secret, in fact, that this is the first I’m hearing about it.


The Foot Clan Air Force is suffering from cutbacks, I see. I wonder what transgressions these poor ninjas made to be ordered into battle carrying bombs over their heads? It can’t be “being completely ineffectual in stopping the turtles,” because then the entire Foot Clan from Shredder down would be up for court-martial.
So, the turtles make their way to the secret factory by walking right down the middle of the highway, despite the previous stage showing that they own a van. Okay, sure, whatever, but that does leave them prone to being run over.


Say what you will about the Foot Clan, but they know how to ride in style.


Now we know where the Ninja Air Force’s budget went, they’ve spent it all on these one-man attack helicopters that are unsuited to carrying large ordnance. Donatello is riding a skateboard now, because of course he is. I wonder when the skateboard went from being shorthand for cool to shorthand for trying to be cool but failing? About five nanoseconds after the first advertising exec signed off on a skateboard-riding mascot, I suppose. That won’t bother the turtles, mind you: they love skateboarding, especially rocket skateboarding, because slapping a jet engine on a wheeled plank of wood is the best way to get through the sewers quickly.
It might look like this stage is trying to do something new and exciting, and I guess it is trying, but it doesn’t really work. The skateboard’s always directly under your two-toed feet so it’s not like you have to worry about falling off – all it means is that you have to spend the entire stage doing jumping attacks. It’s all a bit of a pain, really.


Oh, now the Turtle Wagon shows up. Coulda saved me a lot of time and frustration there, lads.


You know what? I’m just going to come out and say it - turtles shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Think about it, there’s no way they’ve got licenses. I’m sure the DVLA would agree that they’re a menace to themselves and others.


While the turtles were busy causing major delays on the city’s roads, Splinter has managed to get himself kidnapped. “We gotta save Splinter,” says Donatello, before standing still and letting the Mousers carry his master away. Good ninja reflexes there, Donny. Very sharp. It’s odd, because it’s not like the turtles need a rescue mission to motivate them, the desire to slap Shredder around should be more than enough to get them moving.


This’ll be the secret factory, then. It features the same Foot-fighting action as the other stages, and it’s particularly notable for featuring a bunch of these spear-carrying Foot Soldiers. They are a colossal pain in the backside, because not only do the spears give their melee attacks far greater range than even Donatello’s whackin’ stick, but they can also throw their spears at you for a projectile attack. I think I lost more health to these pricks than I did to the swarm of gun-toting attack helicopters. Oh, and there are more traps than ever in this stage, notably the mechanical-looking things on the platform below Donatello’s feet. Those are laser beam emitters that damage you if you stand in front of them, so in this case the machines did Donatello.


Halfway through the stage, Shredder sends up one of his drill machines packed with laser-spraying, insectoid drones. I’m sure Shredder doesn’t think they’ll actually stop the turtles – they certainly don’t pose much of a challenge and to call it a boss fight would rather devalue the rest of the game’s bosses. I think he just sent them up to annoy the turtles, then. Well, it didn’t work. Now I’m not on a skateboard I’m having too much fun to get annoyed.


The stage’s real boss is this curiously bird-faced rock soldier. One of Metroid’s Chozo statues gone rogue? Maybe. All I know is that being made of granite doesn’t prevent him from taking damage when I bash him with my stick, which you’d think would be entry number one on the “reasons why being a stone soldier is awesome” list. Anyway, the stone soldier fights very similarly to Bebop and Rocksteady: he’s got a gun (a flamethrower, in this case) and he’ll hit you with a powerful strike if you get greedy with combos or have the temerity to jump towards him. The same tactics for defeating him apply, you just have to be a bit more careful. Before he’s reduced to decorative aquarium gravel, however, take a good look at his flamethrower. That is definitely the Pulse Rifle from Aliens mixed with, erm, the flamethrower from Aliens. Maybe Konami knew they were going to be starting work on an Aliens arcade game right after TMNT came out so they figured they’d get in some practise drawing the movie’s weapons.


Oh, I get it – it’s called the “secret factory” because it makes secrets. Secrets like the Technodrome, the mobile fortress belonging to Shredder’s boss, Krang. That’ll be the final stage, then. I wish more final stages took place in enormous spherical death-tanks with robots eyeballs sticking out of the top.


Well, this shouldn’t take long.


The inside of the Technodrome is about what you’d expect: lots of vaguely sci-fi-looking scenery and dozens of Foot Soldiers. Here, you can see a Foot Soldier is about to harm Donatello by throwing a spear into his back. You’d think the one thing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would be safe from is spears in the back, but the ways of ninjitsu truly are mysterious.
There are also a lot of traps in this stage. Electricity blasters, gun turrets, freeze rays, it’s like a Bond villain’s jumble sale. I’m happy for all these deathtraps to be here, because it certainly enlivens proceedings. Some of the earlier stages were a little bland, especially the sewer, so more stuff to avoid is fun. I had enough chances to use the environment against the Foot Clan – by kicking traffic cones at them or detonating exploding oil drums or opening fire hydrants – that a bit of turnabout actually does feel like fair play.


TMNT even mixes up the standard beat-em-up “ride an elevator while enemies jump in” section by replacing the goons with big steel balls. That made a nice change, mostly because I didn’t have to worry about getting a spear in the back. Plus the turtles can jump really high in this game, so it’s not much of a challenge to avoid the balls.


Here comes another boss, and in fact the game is all bosses from here on out. This one’s another rock bloke – General Traag, to be precise. The fight got off to a bad start, because I was standing next to the door when Traag kicked it open at the start of the battle. Then it got worse when I tried to circle around him and accidentally touched the laser grid covering the now-open doorway. The look of sheer misery on Donatello’s skull is going to haunt me for a while.
So, another day, another rock man. This one also has a gun. I honestly can’t remember if there’s any differences between Traag and the last rock man I fought, other than Traag wearing kicky purple boots. They’re both got the prominent rocky codpieces, I know that much. As with the other rock man, and most of the bosses in the game, it’s more hit-and-run fighting only with more running than hitting. If you’re trying to get through the fight safely, it can take quite a long time, which makes sense when you’re trying to destroy a walking boulder by hitting it with a wooden stick. It doesn’t make for the most thrilling gameplay, though.


Once you’ve beaten Traag, it’s time to face Krang! You know, Krang, the alien brain-creature riding around inside the belly of a bald robot wearing underpants and suspenders? Krang is Shredder’s boss, so it’s a little odd that we haven’t seen him in the game before now and he wanders out of the teleporter screen with very little fanfare. Maybe Konami were trying to keep his appearance a surprise. By the way, Shredder built Krang’s robot body, which tells you a lot about how highly Shredder regards Krang.
As for the fight, at the risk of repeating myself it’s yet another cautious affair where getting a single hit in then running away is your best strategy. Krang attacks with eye beams and a hefty kick, but because he’s bigger and consequently slower than the other bosses he’s probably the easiest one in the game to beat. It’s something of a disappointment, and he was much cooler when he appeared in his giant mode in TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, but just look at his joyous, squishy little face in the screenshot above. Krang’s having such a good time that it’s impossible to be too disappointed.


With nary a moment to draw your breath, once Krang’s been dealt with Shredder appears for the final confrontation. And when I say Shredder, I mean two Shredders. He’s used his ninja magic to create a doppelganger, and I never did figure out if one of them is the “true” Shredder that you should be focussing on or if they both take damage, so I pummelled both of them just about equally. It’s a much more enjoyable fight than the last two, as well – for starters, you can actually get a combo off against Shredder without having to leg it after each successful hit, and as he slashes at you with his sword and you dodge out of the way while trying to keep the other Shredder at bay, it all gels into a fun, fast and slick battle that’s definitely suitable for the game’s final set piece.


It’s a real shame, then, that Shredder also has a wide-range special move that’s an instant kill if it hits you: he whips out his retro-muto-thingamabob and fires it in a three-way spread, turning any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle back into a regular, non-mutant, non-ninja (though presumably still teenaged) turtle. It is avoidable and if you’re quick you can knock Shredder out of the attack while he’s pulling his gun out, but it still feels ever so slightly like bullshit. Does it help that if it does hit you, you’re replaced by a special sprite of a tiny, adorable turtle? Yes, yes it does.


Eventually, though, Shredder was defeated and the Technodrome exploded. Of course it did, this is a Konami arcade game. If the enemy base didn’t blow up at the end I’d ask for my money back. There’s not much to the game’s ending, with it basically telling you what you already know: you won. It is frankly astonishing that there’s not a single mention of pizza in here – instead we’re left to wonder about the mechanics of vaporising something into milkshake. Surely that would be liquidising, not vaporising.


Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the most widely-loved arcade games of all time, but in some ways it’s probably not as great as you remember it being. It’s core gameplay is still fun, in concept and mostly in execution, but it has problems like some not-very interesting boss battle and a light, slippery feel to some of the combat. On a purely mechanical level it’s not as good as something like Final Fight or Streets of Rage, then, but here’s the thing – that doesn’t really matter in this instance. Whatever its flaws, TMNT makes up for them with the pure joy of its presentation. Just look at it – it’s so colourful, so vibrant, so charming in its spritework and animation, and best of all it absolutely, one hundred percent nails the look and feel of the TMNT cartoon. This is the closest you can get to being a mutant ninja turtle yourself without strapping a load of terrapins to your naked body and running through the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As well as the graphics, there’s the excellent soundtrack:


It combines the cartoon’s soundtrack with Konami’s arcade music sensibilities to create a thoroughly danceable set of tracks, if you don’t mind being caught dancing to old videogame music. You won’t be able to help dancing, I assure you. This game probably has the weakest of all Konami’s classic TMNT game soundtracks, but that’s only because they’re all deeply excellent, and TMNT IV: Turtles in Time has one of the best arcade soundtracks ever.
On top of that, there’s one other thing that gives TMNT a push towards greatness…


The four-player mode! Grab three of your friends, neighbours, randos off the street, whoever, and let them play as a turtle each for the true half-shell experience. As you can see, the action reaches a level you could safely describe as “fairly mental” and it’s so much more fun as a result. I’d say it’s about 400% more fun than in single-player, appropriately enough.
Well, that was fun. Enough fun to make me say “cowabunga!” out loud? Maybe if I wasn’t alone in a very quiet house while writing this. There’s something quite dismal about saying “cowabunga” in that setting. Still, y'know, it was fun.

Chess: the timeless game of intellect, logic and psychological sparring that for some reason people still play despite the availability of, you know, videogames. I kid, I kid, chess is fine. I have no issue with chess, aside from bitter memories of being forced to participate in my school’s house chess competitions. I was already low enough on the coolness spectrum without mandatory chess club involvement, thanks. Plus, video and computer games have surely done their part to keep chess relevant, since every computer system and games console ever released features multiple chess titles, giving players AI opponents to compete against, tutorial systems to improve their games and easy access to long-distance internet-based matches. So, am I actually going to play a chess game today? Don’t be daft, did you not see the bit about intellect and logic? No, I’m going to be looking a some of the many, many chess game covers out there. Some of them have robots, so that’s fun.



Obviously you’re going to get a lot of chess game covers that look like this. The pieces of a chess set provide a group of immediately recognisable images, but arranging them into a picture that isn’t just a photo of a chess board requires some imagination and, quite often, an abstract background. In this case you’ve got a space setting, so if you’re not into chess then at least you can imagine the story of a race of intergalactic conquerors that just happen to look like colossal chess pieces. Was that an episode of the original Star Trek series? It must have been. Spock tries to defeat the Chessians at their own game with his logic and reasoning, but the problem is only solved when Captain Kirk makes love to the White Queen and teaches the Chessians that they can never flourish as a species while they cling to their rigid caste system.



“Chess in space” definitely seems to be a common theme, especially amongst the home computer games of the eighties. No lasers or exploding supernovas, though, so what’s the point? This one just looks like they had the astral game board all set up and then someone bashed the underside of the table with their knee, propelling the pieces into the air. Well, not air, they’re in space. You know what I mean.


One thing you get when looking at home computer game covers are the charmingly amateurishly ones, the ones drawn by the nearest person with felt tip pens and a free lunch break, and the chess genre is no exception. That’s the path 16K Superchess took, and I always like to see these, ahem, less polished covers, even if that red bishop looks more like a sad Muppet balancing a ball on its head than ever before.



Here’s another cover with a home-made feel, and the decision to mix regular chess pieces with humanised versions of other pieces makes it look as though the king and his retinue are pretending not to notice the black knight in the hopes it will just go away. That pawn at the back knows full well he’s going to be sweeping up some horse droppings in the near future.



You know when you were a kid and you made your action figures “fight” by picking them up and smashing them together? Yeah, that’s what’s happening here, except it’s chess pieces instead of He-Man and GI Joe. In space. And you’re fighting against Tron.



“Cyrus IS Chess”? That’s a bold claim, isn’t it? There is no other iteration of chess more complete, more perfect, than this 1983 ZX Spectrum game that was (presumably) named after Cyrus the Great, ancient king of Persia, and not Billy Ray. Well, by all accounts there might be some truth to that, and from what I’ve read Cyrus was considered one of the best chess programs of the time.
It was in an interesting decision to use realistic figures on this cover, particularly the inclusion of Henry VIII – a king best known for having six queens. You might think having six queens would give Henry an unfair advantage in chess, but let’s not forget he only ever had one queen at a time. Somewhere just outside the border of the picture, there’s a pile of discarded queens, some of them missing their heads.



“You came to the wrong rank and file, motherfucker.”



Sega tried to make things a little fancier with Sega Chess, but all they’ve accomplished is a drawing of a horse that seems to be recoiling in disgust from its own extremely ugly necklace.



More robots in space – it really is a prevalent theme, presumably to communicate the cold, unfeeling nature of your computer opponent, a foe who will not be distracted when you say things like “I’m gonna move my little horsie over here” and “I thought ‘checkmate’ was just a figure of speech?” during the match. This particular robot’s head is like a cross between a teaspoon and a gimp mask, with additional brain-tubes that pump performance-enhancing nanobots through its circuitry. It also appears to have indicators on its shoulders, so you know when it’s going to change lanes.
If the artwork looks familiar, that might be because it was painted by prolific videogame illustrator David Rowe, who provided the cover art for such famous games as Speedball, Way of the Exploding Fist and, erm, Chubby Gristle. I have to say, I don’t think this is his strongest work, mostly because those green clouds make it look like the robot is farting up a storm.



It seems that around the Playstation / Windows ‘98 time-frame, a lot of companies who were releasing chess games stopped bothering trying to make their covers eye-catching or interesting in the slightest. I think this is maybe because by this point a chess game would be seen as a “budget” title – no-one was going to pay full price for a board game simulation when they could be buying Final Fantasy VII or Quake, right? - so they spent as little money as possible on the covers. That’s how you end up with covers like this one for Chess. It’s a picture of some chess pieces, and hardly a creative tour de force… hang on, does that say Chess™? You can’t trademark chess, can you? Success, the Japanese developer of such hits as weirdo PS1 board-game-card-battle-treasure-hunt-thingBattle Hunter, did not invent chess. So, they’re trying to trademark the “Chess” logo they’ve used on this cover art, then? I wouldn’t have bothered if I were you, lads.



It might just be because I’ve spent too long browsing a lot of very dull chess game covers and it’s starting to affect me mentally, but I feel like these two chess pieces are looking at me. I’m telling you, whenever I look at this cover I get the impression that the pieces are staring back, almost quizzically. Now you’re feeling it too. We’re marked, all of us. The creatures of the Chess Dimension have sensed our presence, giving them a portal to our universe. I’m sorry, I’ve doomed us all.



If ever there was a computer game cover that made the phrase “smooth jazz” leap unbidden into my mind, it’s this one.



One of the more famous games on this list is Interplay’s Battle Chess, which is known for the often comical animations that play each time one piece takes another. Rooks turn into stone golems and smash their opponents, pawns kick knights in the testicles, that kind of thing. It sounds like fun, and it is… for the first three or four matches. After that, you’ll have seen all the potential animations and the ponderous speed of the pieces’ movement drags the hardly lightning-paced game of chess down to a crawl. But I’m here to talk about cover art, not gameplay, and Battle Chess’s artworks is kinda great. A queen marauds across the board, zapping knights and pawns left and right while the king stands in the background and looks disinterested. A good representation of chess itself, then, plus it captures the game’s unique selling point too. The queen is great, but the highlight of this art for me is the bishop in the background, cheering the queen’s murderous rampage in a most irreligious manner. And hey, let’s be glad that slinky dresses with plunging ermine necklines aren’t the official regalia of all queens, because Elizabeth II just had her 91st birthday.



I deliberated about putting Battle Chess’s first sequel on this list, because it’s not actually a chess game – instead, it’s a version of the Chinese game xiangqi, but that game’s close enough to chess that I think it gets a pass. Plus, there was one specific reason I wanted to feature it: the joyous expression of that chariot rider.


“I’ve had the time of my life, and I owe it all to riding a dragon and whipping people!”



Even the Battle Chess series ended up with an outer space iteration, and this cover’s similar in spirit to the original. The queen’s still doing all the work, except now everyone’s claymation and the alien pawn appears to be in the middle of realising he kinda likes being electrocuted. Also featuring a guest appearance by Bruce Campbell’s chin on that knight in the background!



Well, this is a boring cover. Ooh, a shiny CG chess piece that could be either a king or a queen, sitting on a red and black chess board whose colour scheme and general low-rent dinginess is reminding me of the darts-based game show Bullseye. Has there ever been a chess-themed TV game show? Surely there must have been, and if there hasn’t then it’s only a matter of time. TV companies are clearly starting to run out of ideas for new game shows, if ITV making one based around matryoshka dolls is any indication.
So, yeah, a boring cover… until you look in the bottom-right corner and see that it comes bundled with Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Chess Wars. That’s the information I would have led with on the cover, personally, not have it tucked away in a box-out. I’m not advertising genius, but “Terminator Chess, including Regular, Non-Cybernetic-Killing-Machine Chess” seems like a combo that would shift more units.



And here’s Terminator 2 Chess’ very own cover. “Terminator is back in a deadly game of chess,” huh? That’s all well and good but it doesn’t explain why those Terminator endoskeletons have Teletubbies-style stomach monitors now. Unless the Teletubbies are Skynet’s first step towards world domination, I think it’s a mystery that will go unanswered. That strangeness aside, it’s always nice to see the iconic skinless Terminator, even if their videogames are almost uniformly rubbish. At least you can’t go too far wrong with chess, because it’s just chess with Skynet robots and human resistance fighters replacing the usual pieces. This does lead to a couple of amusing oddities within T2JDCW, though: the king and queen of the Terminator side are just endoskeletons wearing crowns, which is absolutely adorable, but the king of the resistance side is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s good-guy Terminator. That’s right, you’ve got Arnie but he’s reduced to being the most useless, least dangerous piece on the board while Sarah Connor does all the hard work as the queen. Probably should have had the extremely important but vulnerable young John Connor as the king, really.



More licensed chess tie-ins, this time with the heroes and villains of Star Wars. I’ve got no smart-arsed comments about this one, it’s just some nice Star Wars art that would definitely have made a young VGJunk take note had he passed it in a shop. I wouldn't have boughtStar Wars Chess, of course, but I'd have stopped to read the back of the box, at least. Darth Vader looks ever-so-slightly like he’s expecting a cricket ball to be bowled at him, but apart from that it’s great.



No examination of chess game covers would be complete without an appearance by the Chessmaster, the mascot and host of Software Toolwork’s long-running chess franchise. The Chessmaster straddles the thin line between “avuncular old wizard” and “the bloke with the car covered in conspiracy theory stickers who shouts insults at kids who walk past his overgrown front garden,” but I’ll say this – he does look like he can play a mean game of chess. Sure, you’ll probably have to listen to him drone on about the superiority of real ale over lager while you’re playing, but that’s the price you pay to face off against the best in the business.


The Chessmaster isn’t the most prominent feature on every Chessmaster cover, mind you. He still appears on this PS2 version, but he’s faded away into the clouds as though he’s finally pegged it and ascended to Chess Heaven. Chess Heaven, coincidentally, is also NASCAR Fan Hell. Instead, this cover focusses on a bunch of extremely unappealing stretched heads that replace the usual chess piece shapes. Except the knight, of course, but that’s already a stretched-looking horses head. There’s something about that smug queen in particular that’s very unpleasant. I think maybe it’s bringing back upsetting memories of being terrified by shop mannequins, which (apparently) I was when I was very young. On the plus side, the bearded king looks a bit like Graham Chapman as King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.



I’ve seen a lot of unforgettable scenes during my years of videogaming, and here’s another: the sight of Putin-hating chess legend Garry Kasparov headbutting an oversized wooden horse is going to live long in the memory.


Of all the chess covers I’ve seen this is probably the best (although not quite my favourite). I’m 99 percent sure it was illustrated by Susumu Matsushita, who is probably best know amongst gamers for his work with Famitsu magazine and on the Adventure Island and Maximo series. It’s just a fun, charming image that’s still clearly about chess without just being pictures of chess pieces. The best thing about it is definitely the bloke on the right slapping his head in frustration as his king makes yet another boneheaded move. There’s going to be a peasant’s revolt any day now.



I never thought I’d see a picture and have my first reaction to it be “that is definitely, one hundred percent an anthropomorphised version of a French novelty condom,” but here we are.



Here’s another ruler who will ruin his country with his vainglorious attempts to convince the world of his might. Imagine the roadway or sanitation improvements that could have been paid for with the money spent on erecting colossal golden chess pieces throughout the kingdom. It’s a real “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” situation waiting to happen. Even the king himself seems to have realised this, holding out a conciliatory hand as if to say “look, I know what you’re thinking, but once we open the gift shop and set up the revolving restaurant on top of the queen, Chess World is going to start raking in the tourist money.”



And finally for today, my favourite chess game cover of the lot. What else could motivate me to play chess more than some 2000s CG artwork that has aged very badly indeed? Not much, I’d even pick this over the Terminator version. It’s even got a skeleton! If I was completely certain that Wizard Chess included a skeleton-only mode, where all the pieces are represented by skeletons wearing different goofy hats, (or one of those rubber horse masks in the case of the skeleton knights,) I’d be scouring eBay for a copy right now. It probably doesn’t have that, sadly. This wizard had bloody well better make an appearance in this game, though, and with any luck he’ll keep the expression he wears on the cover – the pure and absolute realisation that he hasn’t got a goddamn clue what’s going on. Neither do I, Chess Gandalf. Neither do I.

Y’know, if the schoolteachers and morally well-meaning Saturday morning cartoons of my youth had spent less time warning us about the dangerous of street gangs and more time explaining how council tax and pensions work, there’d be a lot less stress in the world. All these lessons about not joining gangs didn’t even prevent me from playing Rainbow Arts’ 1987 Commodore 64 brawler Street Gang! That’s a real failure of the educational system right there. I think I’d have less regrets if I’d joined an actual street gang.So, a game about a street gang, in which you beat people up. Yup. Sure sounds like a computer game, huh? Yes, it is. It’s got a title screen and everything. Am I going to show you the title screen? I am, but I’m stalling because I’m not quite sure what to say about it. Are you ready? Here it is!


It’s the least menacing street gang since my local senior’s church choir went carol singing! Being in a street gang doesn’t mean you have to actually lie down in the street, friend, and having love for the streets should not extend to posing on them “seductively.” I really hope these are the people I’ll be fighting against, it’d be nice to play an easy Commodore 64 game for a change. From left to right you’ve got Vyvyan from The Young Ones’ older and somehow more unkempt brother, a David Hasselhoff album cover that’s come to life, a bloke with a knife who’s deeply regretting his choice of gang affiliation and Tiny Terrence, the capering, cavorting whirlwind of whimsy, with his jaunty sailor’s cap and high-kicking dance moves. They are united by their love of denim and the gaping black cavities where their eyes ought to be. They are Street Gang.


The game begins, and you’re on a street fighting a gang of blokes in green jump suits, so at least the game’s title is fairly accurate. Street Gang is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in that most basic of single-plane styles, with no movement between the background and foreground and very little jumping. You can jump, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You can’t attack while jumping, which makes you very vulnerable.


Instead, you should get right up close to your opponents and punch them, and I do mean right up to them. Our hero’s sprite may imply that he has two functioning arms of regular length, but the range on your punches is so short the only possible conclusion is that our hero has lost his arms below the elbow, possibly thanks to a disease he contracted by posing in the gutter on the title screen. The punching is made more difficult by the lack of feedback you receive, or rather don’t receive. There’s no sound effect played for landing a successful punch on an enemy, so the only way you know that you’re even hitting your target is when they explode and die. It’s not so much of a problem in the early stages where enemies tend to die in one hit, but later on the game really suffers from not telling you what the hell is going on. This lack of feedback also applies to your health bar, which eschews the tried-and-tested formula of having your health represented as, you know, a bar. Instead, it’s that flexed bicep at the top of the screen. Yes, it is a bicep and not a snake wearing a blue collar turning its head. When you take damage, the bicep shrinks oh-so-slightly – literally, a pixel or two is shaved off the top, an almost imperceptible difference that makes it way, way more difficult than it should be to tell how much health you have at a glance. There’s a reason games have health bars and not health upper-arm musculatures.


Then everybody exploded. Okay, cool, guess I’m done with Street Gang. See you all next time!


No, I went back in to figure out what had happened. I think that’s what you call looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The culprits were these men in the brown trenchcoats. I had to take a second look at them to come up with that description, when I first saw them I thought they were supposed to be little old ladies carrying handbags and wearing little old lady hats. It’s fair to say Street Gang doesn’t have the most well-defined graphics. Anyway, these trenchcoat men – are they meant to look like spies or private eyes, possibly? - have guns, and they love to shoot. If their bullets hit you, you’re instantly killed (and you explode, for some reason). The thing is, they can also shoot the other bad guys on the screen, so what happened in the previous screenshot is that three gun-toting madmen turned up and managed to immediately shoot each other in the back. A stray bullet snuck through and killed our hero, too. It’s a strategy that did technically get the job done, but which must make an awful lot of work for the street gang’s human resources department.


What would the Arc de Triomphe look like it you recreated it using mouldy bread and old scabs? I bit like this, I would imagine.
Anyway, men with guns. They are the main focal point of Street Gang’s gameplay from the moment they appear until the very end of the game, and not in a way that could reasonably be considered “good” or “fun.” Because their bullets mean instant death, and because you’ve got limited lives and dying sends you right back to the start of the stage, avoiding their bullets becomes your number-one tip-top priority. Sadly the only reliable way to avoid the bullets is to duck underneath them, but while you’re crouching you can’t move or attack. Thus, as soon as there’s one gunman on the screen the gameplay – such as it is – screeches to a halt as the player crouches, waits for the bullets to pass, moves forward an inch or two and repeats. Weirdly, it’s actually easier the more enemies there are on screen, because ninety-nine percent of the time they all manage to shoot each other to death while our hero remains curled up in a ball like a frightened hedgehog.


I made it to the end of the stage. It was not a long stage, although it felt like a long stage because I spent most of it huddled on the floor doing nothing, which reminded me of most of my Saturday nights and was therefore quite upsetting. As a reward for finishing the stage, I get to play this bonus level. That it is composed of rubbish bins is a remarkably apt aesthetic flourish. You pick a bin and hope a jack-in-the-box with a strangely penile nose pops out. If it does, you get some extra points. It’s so intensely dull and utterly pointless that I’m considering licking the nearest plug socket just to feel something.


Stage two begins with our hero being chased by a roving band of guitarists. At least, they look like they’re carrying guitars to me, especially that one at the back. Street Gang’s graphics are obviously not good, and there are times when the enemies and their weapons really blend in with the backgrounds. This is especially dangerous when facing the gunmen, because half the time you can’t even see their bloody bullets against the background so you’re forced into guesseing when it’s safe to more forwards.


I mean, come on: if you changed these enemy sprites from green to black and gave them sombreros, you could easily turn them into a merciless mariachi band that hound our hero wherever he goes, a concept that’s much more interesting than whatever these goons are actually supposed to be.


Just in case you think I’ve been lying to you for this entire article and Street Gang is actually a rhythm-action game or a slow-paced military strategy sim, here’s some proof that it’s a beat-em-up. It’s got oil drums in it! Can’t have a beat-em-up without oil drums, it’d be like a Street Fighter game without an arcade mode.
This stage also contains what could be the most unappealing caravan in the universe. Trust me, I went on a lot of cheap family holidays to the British seaside, I know what I’m talking about. I don’t know if it’s the caravan’s faint yellow tinge making me think this, but I’m certain the interior would smell like a mixture of a) human urine b) cat urine and c) unidentified urine.


On to stage three, which starts by forcing the player to use Street Gang’s jumping mechanics. An extremely rude situation to foist on the player after two stages of only walking and ducking, I know, but it’s the only way to avoid taking damage from these deranged cyclists. What kind of gang rides around on push-bikes? Brand-new initiates into the Hell’s Angels? Olympic cyclists?  I suppose this guy is wearing a yellow jersey, but then he’s also wearing yellow trousers so I don’t think we can assume he’s the current leader of the Tour de France.
Street Gang’s infuriating lack of feedback rears its head once more during this section. You don’t have much leeway to safely leap over the cyclists, but the game does nothing to inform you whether or not you’ve taken damage. All you can do is keep an eye on the health bicep. If it loses a couple of pixels off the top, bad luck, your trailing toes have lightly brushed against the cyclist and caused you damage.


Here are some fat men that need a good punching. I did try jumping over them, but that didn’t really work, especially since they can attack from the left or the right. I just ended up getting trapped between them, unsure of whether my punches were even making contact and wondering what our hero has against Elvis impersonators anyway.


Are there gunmen in this stage? You’re god damn right there are, and I’m one of them! That’s right, I found a gun on the floor. They might have appeared in the previous stages, but I didn’t find them because their collectable pick-up item isn’t something sensible like a picture of a gun – no, it’s a small black dot that you stand on top of and press down to pick up the weapon. I’ve got a gun now, though, so watch out, rival street gang currently milling around these suburban streets!
Of course, actually using the gun is pointless, because you have to be standing up and standing still to fire it, and your bullets don’t destroy the enemy’s bullets, so you just end up getting shot.


“Use your pistol,” it says. No, I don’t think I will. Did you not read the last paragraph about how all  owning a gun does is make it more likely that I’ll be killed by a gun, in an excoriating satirical take on America’s gun laws? Anyway, I’ve got a much better idea.


I waited around until a bunch of enemies started walking from left to right rather than from right to left. Then I simply followed them across the stage. The ones behind me weren’t fast enough to catch me, and because the game couldn't handle spawning any more sprites on screen I could just jog along amongst them until I reached the end of the stage. That’s strategy, that is.


The fourth and final stage takes place in that classic beat-em-up arena: the construction site. Half-finished buildings and barren earth, plus three members of Devo running around on a girder above our hero’s head. Hang on, above? How am I supposed to get up there?


There are ladders now, plus - whisper it with claws of dread scrabbling against your heart – even some platforming. Okay, so there are, like, two jumps to make. Don’t miss them, though, because if our hero falls more than three feet he explodes. Ah, the old nitroglycerin parachute, I see.
Donkey Kong it most certainly ain’t, but at least it’s some kind of variety and the movement between different vertical levels means there’s less chance you’re going to be shot. It’s still not fun, though. Street Gang is a very bad game, with almost zero gameplay and graphics so ugly they’re actually detrimental to your ability to progress through the game. That said, I can’t quite bring myself to really, truly loathe it. Maybe it’s just because it’s (technically) a side-scrolling beat-em-up, or maybe it’s because any game with a title screen as amazing as this one has earned its right to exist. That’s not an endorsement or a recommendation that you play Street Gang, but I’ll save my bile for something that deserves it even more.


At the top of the half-constructed skyscraper lurks the game’s final boss. Wait, not boss. That’s the wrong word, considering all you have to do to finish the game is walk into him. The game’s final thing, then. I hope those brown stains on his jeans are mud from the construction site, because I’m about to invade his personal space and complete Street Gang. I wonder what amazing ending this game has in store for me?


Oh shit, I’ve broken the Matrix! Or the version of Street Gang’s game file that I’m playing is knackered. Or it’s a bug in the game itself. All viable options to explain why the game has crashed into a mess of flickering, random images which, lets be honest, are no worse than Street Gang’s actual graphics. It was a shame to end the game on this note, and I do like to show as much of these games as I can, so I went looking for the game’s real ending. I found it, and I was not disappointed.


Our hero confronts the rival gang leader and… gives him a haircut? Wait, what? That’s really what’s happening here, he’s snipping away at the guy’s rockabilly pompadour. That’s the end for him, there’s no recovery from this. It’s like when a luchador gets de-masked in the ring. All this poor bastard can do now is shave the rest of his hair off and join a monastery. Again, just to reiterate, the ending of this game involves cutting a guy’s hair off. I think the garbled ending I originally got makes more sense.
On that bizarre note, I bid adieu to Street Gang. Are there any positives to it? The title screen music isn’t bad. Oh, and it’s mercifully short. It feels longer than it is by virtue of being extremely slow, but it’s definitely not a long game. In conclusion, don’t play Street Gang. Do something more productive with your time, like (insert almost any human activity here).

It’s been a long time since I did one of these sprite history articles, huh? Well, who better to mark the return of this (extremely) occasional series than Capcom’s much-loved and perhaps recently overlooked mascot Mega Man? Apologies in advance if I unwittingly switch between calling him “Megaman” and “Mega Man” during this article, but in my defence even Capcom themselves don’t seem to be sure exactly which spelling they prefer, especially when you get to the Megaman X games. Megaman X will not be featured here today, though, it’s good old-fashioned Classic Mega Man all the way. Now, I know what you might be thinking: didn’t Capcom just make one Mega Man sprite and then reuse it in dozens of games? The answer to that question is yes, yes they did – but there are also more pixelly variants of Classic Mega Man than you might expect, so well be seeing those. Let’s start, however, with the game where it all began.


Here he is, the precious and slightly dumpy boy that we all know and love, as he appears in the first six NES Mega Man games and in a host of other spin-offs and merchandising opportunities. With the broad shoulders of a rugby player and wide-splayed legs that provide him with solid footing on even the most perilous terrain, Mega Man is always ready to defend the world from the machinations of the evil Dr. Wily. The line of pixels that makes up his mouth manages to communicate his grim resolve, but his enormous saucer-like eyes means he still possesses plenty of cutesy anime charm without looking too much like a kitten that’s just snorted a fat rail of coke. It’s a sprite that I’m sure we’ve all come to know and love over the years, (I know I have, ever since I first got Mega Man 3,) and it must be one of the most famous sprites in videogame history. It’s maybe not quite in the top tier of iconic game sprites, where you would find Mario’s Super Mario Bros. sprite, Pac-Man and the enemies from Space Invaders, but it’s definitely on a rung just below those. It’s certainly immediately recognisable, and when I decided to write this article I thought to myself “hey, before I look at these sprites I’m going to try to draw the NES Mega Man from memory and see how I close I get.” I bet you can’t wait to see how that turned out.


I think it came out fairly well! Considering my memory is leakier than a sieve on the Titanic, I’d say I got pretty close. I wish I hadn’t, though – drawing this thing really stressed me out, because I knew it wasn’t quite right but I couldn’t seem to nail it down. I would have gotten closer if I’d spent more time on it, but after a certain point I had to ask myself whether I was willing to commit multiple hours to this not-particularly-interesting bit. The answer came very close to being “yes,” honestly. My problem was that I forget just how squat Mega Man actually is. He’s verging on hunchback territory, no doubt weighed down by the enormous head Dr. Light built him with. I can only assume Dr. Light had mastered the art of designing robots brains so advanced they have emotions but he struggled with the miniaturisation process.


For his Game Boy outings, Capcom re-used Mega Man’s NES sprite, except now it’s four shades of grey. It works well enough, although because of the Game Boy’s reduced screen dimensions it does make Mega Man feel bigger than he usually does. The major difference is that his helmet and face are now separated with a black line, which has the unfortunate effect of making Mega Man’s left eye look like it’s trying to escape off the top of his head. On the plus side, Capcom’s decision to use light great rather than white for the “skin” tone on Mega Man’s face was a good one. If his face was white, it’d look like he was running around in y-fronts, knee-high boots and rubber gloves. If that’s how you get your rocks – no pun intended – off, Mega Man, that’s fine, but try to keep it separate from the world-saving business.



In 1994, the first three Mega Man games received a sixteen-bit makeover as they made their way to the… Megadrive? Yes, even after all these years it still seems strange to me to be playing a Mega Man game on a Sega console – although oddly I never felt the same confusion when Mega Man games started showing up on the Playstation. The Wily Wars is a decent-enough conversion of Mega Man 1 – 3, I guess, although the Megadrive version of the soundtracks kinda put me on edge: hearing Mega Man 3’s opening theme coming out of a Megadrive rather than a NES sound chip is disorienting, akin to walking into your house after a few days away to find that someone’s moved all your furniture by a few inches.
But we’re here for the sprites, and how does the Blue Bomber look? Rather good, I’d say. He doesn’t seem quite as chubby, and the extra colours in his shading do a lot to help define his shape while still keeping him from looking too angular. Plus, the ear-things on his helmet are a lot more strongly defined, which gives him a bit more visual interest without going overboard on the greeblies. What are those ear thing, anyway? Do they give Mega Man super hearing or something? He’s already got regular “human” ears underneath his helmet, so maybe these are cyber-earmuffs. He does fight a lot of cold-based Robot Masters, after all.



Mega Man also made an appearance on Sega’s full-colour, battery-devouring, pocket-mocking handheld, the Game Gear. It’s a kind of amalgamation of a bunch of things from the NES Mega Man games, all smushed together into a package that’s not bad enough to make you renounce both Capcom and Sega, but which is still one of the lowest points of the classic Mega Man franchise. Mega Man himself looks fine, though. It’s mostly a pixel-for-pixel copy of the NES sprite, with a few more shades of blue and the curious reworking of Mega Man’s… I was going to say “helmet bulge,” but that sounds utterly filthy. The central crest of his helmet, I mean. It’s been pushed over to the right, turning it into the robotic equivalent of an avant-garde new-wave hairstyle and giving Mega Man a rather lopsided appearance.



For his seventh numbered game, Mega Man finally made the leap from NES to SNES and got an all-new sprite in the process. His ear muffs are more prominent than ever, his hands are starting to look more and more like boxing gloves (except when they’re, you know, a gun) and while he looks good in motion I have to be honest: I don’t like this particular static sprite all that much. Part of it is the pose, which feels a little too rigid, and I know Mega Man’s feet are always very large but they’re reminding me of cow-catchers on old-timey steam trains in this instance. Oh, hang on, I think I’ve cracked it – with the way he’s tilting himself forward, I think Mega Man’s hoping his enormous clodhoppers will give him enough stability to pull off a Michael Jackson-esque forward lean move.
The real kicker is his face, though. Mega Man just seems a bit grumpy in MM7, and while I’m sure it’s supposed to be a look of fierce determination it more resembles the look you give your flatmate when they leave the milk out of the fridge for the fiftieth time, god damn it Kevin, we talked about this. It’s still good, I suppose, it’s just not my favourite-ever Mega Man sprite.



That’s right, they made a Mega Man-themed football game. It was never released in Europe, and for that I am thankful. When I was a kid, if I’d seen a game that combined my twin loves of Mega Man and football I would have relentlessly pestered any nearby family members until they bought it for me, and then I’d have to live with the crushing disappointment that Mega Man Soccer is a bit crap.
At least Mega Man himself looks okay. His thighs are skinnier than usual, which only serves to emphasise the ridiculous size of his feet, and his eyes seem very close together, but aside from that it’s a perfectly acceptable look.



Oh no. Oh no, no, no. I hadn’t realised that writing about Mega Man sprites meant I’d be forced to look at this horrible thing. You can blame Hi-Tech Expressions for this, they received the license to make a couple of Mega Man games for the PC, and to say they made a bad job of it is like saying Brutus made a bad job of being Julius Caesar’s buddy. The PC Mega Man games are to the Mega Man series what the Star Wars Holiday Special is to the original Star Wars movies: generally familiar and containing some of the same characters, but twisted and distorted into nightmarish odysseys of pain and torment. Don’t play them. Consider that an order.
And what have they done to poor old Mega Man? He does not look well at all, with his head like a jaundiced coconut. They’ve given one of gaming’s most iconic heroes a face of a mouldy grapefruit that someone’s rammed a three-prong plug into, this is an outrage! Then there’s his legs, those elephantine stumps that do at least give you an inkling of the PC Mega Man’s lack of athletic ability. He’s so far off-model that he should be badly airbrushed on the side of an ice cream van, not appearing in an officially licensed game.



There’s not much to say about Mega Man’s sprites from this arcade fighting-game spin-off series, because they’re pretty much just the sprites from Mega Man 7 with a couple of differences, most notably a more muted colour palette. He’s still very blue, though. Mega Man was famously designed to be blue because the NES’ colour palette has more shades of blue than any other colour, so I guess we could equally have been living in a world where Mega Man is green. When I make my movie about a guy who travels between dimensions, that’ll be how he knows his invention has worked – when he fires up his NES and Mega Man is green. Then he plays Mega Man for the rest of the movie’s two-hour run time, occasionally saying things like “huh, he’s called Dr. Deceitful in this universe.” A movie with limited appeal to a wider audience? Sure, but then I’m an auteur who cares little for the banal opinions of the masses.



The two arcade Power Fighters games were ported to SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket handheld in 2000, a project which was ambitious, to say the least. The games were heavily compressed to fit on the NGPC, which results in a Mega Man sprite that looks a lot like the NES originals with one big difference: it’s a lot less blue. I quite like this white-and-blue look, mind you. There’s something fresh about it, although I might be thinking that because it makes Mega Man look like the advertising mascot for a toothpaste company. His ear-piece being white also has the effect of making it look as though his ear’s sticking through his helmet. Hey, that means he’ll be able to hear the music in his own games, and we can all agree that’s for the best.



By now Mega Man had made it to the 32-bit consoles, and rather than embracing the brave new world of full 3D graphics, Capcom stuck with sprites. As a result, Mega Man 8 has what is one of my favourite sprites on this list. A big reason for this is that Mega Man’s legs, while still retaining their trademark “novelty snowplough” shape, look much more like legs with connected, functioning feet than before. It’s just a good sprite all around, honestly, with a nice sense of depth and solidity to it, and hands that are big enough to fit the exaggerated, cartoonish style but without being so swollen they look like Mega Man spent the morning punching a wasp’s nest.



Yep, it’s the same sprite as in Mega Man 8. It’s also the same in the Game Boy Advance port of Mega Man & Bass, albeit with slightly muted colours. Well, if it ain’t broke and all that.



Okay, this enormous foot situation is getting a little out of, erm, hand. I know there’s a mechanism inside Mega Man’s feet that helps him to jump higher, but what is it, a Saturn V rocket? Did Dr. Light forego giving Mega Man any kind of gyroscopic balancing system, instead opting for the far more cost-effective solution of fitting him with these colossal metal boots? No wonder Mega Man can’t crouch in most of his games, he’d never be able to get back up again. Plus he’s got the forearms of a strangulated Popeye.
I’m being too critical here. Mega Man’s Marvel vs. Capcom look may be exaggerated, but it’s a style that fits with the comic-book action of the game. He ends up being just as visually appealing as all the other characters in the game, especially when he’s in motion, and it’s one of the few games where Mega Man actually looks as though he’s having fun. Not so much when he’s just standing there, but once the punches are flying he definitely starts getting into it.


“Violence gives me purpose! Hooray!”



Bandai’s sometimes-horizontal, sometimes-vertical handheld also saw the release of a Mega Man game, and indeed there’s a stage in this game where you have to turn the Wonderswan ninety degrees and play it in “portrait” mode. That’s an interesting concept, but not interesting enough to make Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha a good game, by all accounts. It's often described as the worst of the classic-style Mega Man games, and from what little I’ve played of it I can’t see much reason to argue against that assessment – although “worst” isn’t necessarily too harsh a label when you consider the high quality of most Mega Man games.
As for Mega Man’s appearance in the game, I kinda like it. He’s recognisable as Mega Man, but it’s not just a copy-paste job from another game. They’ve done a good job of capturing his usual surly expression, although once again his feet are an issue. I say feet, those are clearly hooves.
After staring at this sprite for a while, I suddenly realised what it was reminding of: an old cartoon. I mean, like, 1930s old. If Fleischer Studios had made a cartoon about a mechanical boy, I imagine it would have looked a lot like this, and I can easily imagine this iteration of Mega Man bouncing up and down in time to a jaunty ragtime tune.



We’re getting into the really obscure stuff now, with Rockman Gold Empire, an officialy-licensed product created for the Chinese market.  From what I can tell, it’s essentially Mega Monopoly, and you move around a board-game set-up, building things and earning money. Nice try, Capcom, but even giving it a Mega Man theme isn’t enough to make me suffer through the raw, grinding tedium that is a game of Monopoly.
The game features all-new (but definitely not “and improved”) character art, and it’s making me nostalgic. Not nostalgic for the old Mega Man games themselves, oh no. It’s making me nostalgic for my early days on the internet, because Mega Man is absolutely drawn in the style of those pixel “dolls” you’d see adorning a million GeoCities sites and Angelfire homepages at the turn of the century. Ignore his over-long, almost simian arms that reach down to his bloody ankles, and I suppose it’s not too bad a representation of Mega Man, but it just doesn't lok right.



Another Asia-exclusive PC title now, this time the Taiwanese Rockman Strategy. This one actually is a strategy game, similar in execution to RPGs like Fire Emblem, although not nearly as fun. The graphics certainly don’t help, with CG models that have been digitised into sprites a la Donkey Kong Country. The process has not worked as well as in Donkey Kong Country, however. Mega Man’s looking very plasticky yet at the same time fuzzier than a grizzly bear’s ballsack, and I have no idea what’s going on with his right hand. Honestly, I don’t think that is his hand. I think it’s a rubber duck. Mega Man defeated a bath-themed Robot Master and absorbed his special power. Get Equipped with Rubber Duckie. Now I’m really hoping Capcom one day decide to revive the classic Mega Man franchise, because I can’t wait to send them my sketches for Bath Man. He’s weak against Limescale Man, you see.



And now, the mobile phone games. If there’s any category in this article where I’m not going to be able to show you every Mega Man sprite, it’s the mobile phone games, because there are a bunch of them and most of them are Japan-only releases. That said, here’s Jump! Megaman, a game in which you make Mega Man jump. That’s it, you can’t even fire your arm blaster (I don’t think). The sprites are rather nice, though, considering the brutal compression they’ve had to endure to fit into a mobile game. Roll especially has come out well, and she’s recognisable as Roll even in so few pixels. Mega Man fares a little less well, with his head sunk so low into his shoulders that he can undo his belt with his teeth and the angriest expression yet upon his miniature face, but it could have been a lot worse. It looks almost like something you’d see in a Pico-8 game, which is a fun aesthetic.



Mega Man Space Rescue is a momentum-based flying game, where Mega Man drifts through space using the power of directional rocket boosters. Think the ships in Asteroids or Solar Jetman and you’ve got the idea. However, Mega Man doesn’t look much like Mega Man, does he? If you removed his trademark ear-things and the crest of his helmet, he’d look just like any old anime-styled character in a blue space suit. And why does Mega Man even need a space suit? To provide him with all that oxygen he doesn’t need to breathe? They’ve even given him an all-new propulsion system when he already had the perfectly good Rush Adaptor available to him, which has the benefit of being made from a robot dog. All in all, a poor showing from Mega Man Space Rescue, and of all the games on this list it’s the one that’s the most cynical cash-in on Mega Man’s name. The actual game has bugger all to do with the Mega Man universe besides you controlling a character that you’re told is Mega Man.


There was also a Christmas-themed variant of the game, under the name Mega Man Rocket Christmas. It absolutely does not live up to the promise of that fantastic title.


Zombie Cafe is a time-management, restaurant-running game with the obvious “zombies” twist and a slightly less obvious “let’s have a Mega Man crossover event” twist. So they did. Now, most of the character graphics in Zombie Cafe are simply-animated digital illustrations which I guess technically are sprites but not in the pixel-based way that this article is focussed on. However, during the Mega Man event there was a pixel (or “dot”) style Mega Man sprite, so let’s take a look at that one.


That… that’s not Mega Man. Those proportions are all wrong. That’s someone in a Mega Man costume, complete with the giant head of a sporting mascot. It must be the person they used to have dress up as Mega Man at press events whenever a new classic Mega Man game was revealed, but as Capcom have apparently decided to stop making new Mega Man games there aren’t many job opportunities for a Mega Man mascot. So, they’ve had to resort to appearing in things like Zombie Cafe while Capcom let one of their most beloved franchises lay dormant. Here’s my pitch for a new Mega Man – make it like Platinum Games’ Vanquish, but with cel-shaded graphics. Have Mega Man sliding around and shooting cartoony robots with his arm blaster at breakneck speed, seamlessly switching between special weapons as he goes and facing off against a new set of Robot Masters in dramatic boss battles. This approach might reduce the emphasis on platforming, (which admittedly is a big part of the Mega Man games,) but I think it’d be worth it.


Of course, this being Zombie Cafe there’s a zombie version of Mega Man. How did Mega Man become a zombie when he’s not alive in the first place? The same way he caught “Roboenza” in Mega Man 10, that’s how. I must say the designers really didn’t put much effort into zombie Mega Man, did they? No tattered clothes, no grave mould, just a green face and a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. However, that trickle of blood does imply Mega Man has eaten a human being, which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to write.



And we’re right back where we started. I think the cyan areas of Mega Man’s body might be ever-so-slightly darker, but other than that it’s the same sprite from 1987. A true classic, then, and a good place to end this article. Long may his oversized azure boot continue to kick the backside of evil as he pursues everlasting peace.

Today’s game is the story of a reluctant father who sets out to destroy his children: it’s Sunsoft’s 1990 Game Boy adventure Gremlins 2: The New Batch!

We all remember the Gremlins movies, right? Maybe not, actually. The first Gremlins was released over thirty years ago, so maybe there’s a generation of kids who’ve grown up with the Gremlins movies in their lives. Wow, what a depressing thought. If you’ve never seen the Gremlins movies, go and watch them now, and if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t take orders from the anonymous writer of a videogame website, here’s a quick recap: The first Gremlins is a horror-comedy about a man who buys a small creature called a Mogwai from a mysterious old man. He gives the Mogwai to his kid, the Mogwai gets wet and spawns an army of the titular gremlins, the gremlins cause mischief and mayhem and occasionally get exploded in microwave ovens.


There’s a Mogwai now! His name is Gizmo, and things have taken a dark turn for the little fuzzball since the end of the first movie. His mysterious old owner has died, and he’s now the prisoner of the Clamp corporation, who operate out of a big tower in New York and are run by an idiot. I’m sorry if you visited VGJunk in search of an escape from having to hear about Donald Trump, but he is one of the main inspirations for the Clamp organisation.


Things are looking up, though: Gizmo’s friend Billy (from the first movie) happens to work in Clamp Tower, so he frees Gizmo and they live together forever in happiness and tranquillity.


Except that doesn’t happen. I’m not saying that Gizmo and Billy’s Happy Smiletime Relaxathoncouldn’t make for a good game, but having Gizmo fight a horde of rampaging gremlins is going to be much easier to sell. No, what happens is that Gizmo gets wet, which caused him to spawn gremlins, who erupt from Gizmo’s very flesh in an agonizing mockery of birth. You’ve got three rules with Mogwai – don’t get them wet, don’t expose them to bright lights and don’t feed them during the poorly-defined period of “after midnight.” That last one always bothered me as a kid. When does it stop being “after midnight”? Six AM? Noon? Are Mogwais bound by international time zones? And what constitutes “food,” anyway? If an especially nervous Mogwai bites its fingernails at five past midnight, have they condemned themselves to the excruciating pain of gremlin birth? These were the questions that haunted a ten-year-old VGJunk, who was perhaps a little too serious as a child and didn’t have many friends.
Before we move on, check out that great artwork of Mohawk, the “leader” of the evil Mogwais / gremlins. It’s an excellent piece of pixel portraiture, even if the shadows in the background do make it look a little like he’s being harassed by a group of sock puppets.


The game begins, and you are playing as Gizmo (naturally) and it is a side-scrolling platformer (of course,) which is I’m sure how most people would expect a Game Boy adaptation of Gremlins 2 to play out. Make sure you collect that pencil, because Gizmo is completely defenceless without it. Once you do have the pencil, however, Gizmo can use it as a bludgeon to batter his opponents into submission. I guess the pen is mightier than the sword, but once you get a pencil it loops back around to being a sword again.


Gremlins 2 is an interesting property to adapt into a videogame. Gizmo is not a terribly exciting hero, let’s be honest – he’s small, weak and not particularly fast, plus he fights using a pencil. That doesn’t sound like a great basis for a videogame star, does it? On the other hand, Clamp Center’s various departments, ranging from the TV studio you can see in the first stage to scientific laboratories, give plenty of scope for different stage themes. Then you’ve got the gremlins: a swarm of monsters that make for perfect low-level cannon fodder – plus, in the movie a bunch of the gremlins gain special powers by drinking science experiments, so that gives you a nice selection of more unique gremlins to serve as bosses and special opponents.
Pictured above is a regular, run-of-the-mill gremlin. I could run over to him and smash him over the head with my pencil a few times, but instead I’ve elected to send Gizmo along the top route and avoid the gremlin entirely. There’s a cube up here that makes boxing gloves fly out to the right and left when you stand on it, which might come in useful later if I manage to wear my pencil down to a nub.


It’s not just gremlins that Gizmo has to contend with: there are rats, spiders and some extremely annoying bats to deal with as you progress. This rat is in trouble, though, because Gizmo’s managed to find a toolbox and now he’s invincible. The toolbox lets you run through the stages, smashing into and destroying enemies at no risk yourself. As far as I can tell, the box has a certain amount of “hit points,” and after it’s depleted those hit points by colliding with enemies it disappears. The box is also immediately destroyed if you touch any spikes, so watch out for that. It’s not much of an issue in the first stage, but later levels have more spikes than an all-male Buffy the Vampire Slayer cosplay competition.
Like a lot of things in this game, the toolbox benefits from being completely adorable, what with Gizmo shuffling sideways through the level with his feet sticking out of the bottom. Graphically, Gremlins 2 is off to a very strong start and maintains a high standard throughout, with simple but well-defined stage elements that let you know at a glance how each kind of platform is going to react when you step on it, and plenty of charming, characterful sprites for Gizmo and the gremlins alike.


For example, here’s Greta, the “lady” gremlin. She’s immediately recognisable as such, even in so few pixels. All she wants to do is give Gizmo a kiss and a cuddle, but you should avoid those kisses like you would the ones from a bristly aunt at Christmas, because they’ll drain your health.


As for the platforming parts of the game, they’re just about what you’d expect. Platforms, holes, spikes, that kind of thing. Gizmo’s got quite a lot of control over the height of his jumps and you can move him around a fair amount while he’s in the air, both factors that become much more important in later stages where there are a lot of jumping challenges that feel like you’re trying to thread a Mogwai through the eye of a needle. However, there’s a slight delay between pressing jump and Gizmo taking off, and what’s worse it seems to be an inconsistent delay, especially when you’re using the springboard platforms, and I’d say ninety percent of the non-boss-related damage I took in this game resulted from Gizmo not jumping when I told him to.


On the whole, though, this first stage is good fun. Lots of jumping, a few different routes and out-of-the-way power-ups to search for and a good overall feeling of Gremlinosity. Many of the paths through the stages are quite narrow and ended up reminding me of games like Quest of Ki or Legacy of the Wizard (but more fun than either of those games,) and later in the game these tight paths only increase, giving Gremlins 2 almost a puzzle-platformer vibe.
You might notice than in the screenshot above, Gizmo has a musical note hovering over his head. Sadly this is not because he’s whistling a jaunty tune as he saunters through the stage – it’s because he’s picked up a radio, which gives him a one-time projectile attack where he throws the musical note ahead of him. That gremlin sticking his its head out of the floor is about to get a blast of music thrown into his face, and as the music kills the gremlin on contact I have to assume Sunsoft have somehow managed to weaponise my own singing.


The first boss arrives, and it’s the one time the game’s graphics fall down a little because I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be Mohawk or the vegetable gremlin. You know, the gremlin who turns into a creature made of vegetables because he drank vegetable DNA, ending up looking like a living Arcimboldo painting? Yeah, that guy. Perhaps I’m only thinking of the vegetable gremlin because this boss attacks by throwing tomatoes at Gizmo, because he doesn’t look that vegetable-ish. So let’s say it’s Mohawk, then. It’s a boss fight right out of Videogame Confrontations 101, and provides very little challenge: you avoid the boss’ tomatoes, mostly by letting them bounce over your head, and then get in close. Once you’re right next to the boss, start mashing the “clobber with pencil” button, and if you’re fast enough the boss will be sufficiently stunlocked that you’ll emerge triumphant in a matter of seconds. No wonder Mohawk doesn’t like Gizmo very much.


After the first stage, you’re given the chance to earn an extra life by hitting this punching bag one hundred times. It’s a pretty great minigame, if only because (as you can see above) if you really hammer the button Gizmo turns into a furious, furry jackhammer of a puncher. He’s getting into Fist of the North Star territory by the end, which I’m sure is the Gremlins crossover we all want to see.


Stage two takes place in the science labs. What kind of science are they doing? They’re trying to determine the most dangerous combination of spikes and springboards possible, I think. From here on out there are a lot of spikes to avoid and an amount of springboards that’d make the World High Dive Federation jealous. The screenshot above gives a fairly typical example: you bounce on the springboard, over the tower of blocks, and then have to guide Gizmo past the spikes as he falls. It isn’t an inherently bad type of gameplay, and indeed the beginning of this stage is quite good fun as you’re forced to focus on precision.


These bats can do one, though. They’re by far the most frustrating of the regular enemies to deal with, because as soon as they get near Gizmo they fly towards him and attach themselves to his oversized head, making it very difficult to hit them with the pencil and doubly so when you’re bouncing around on the springs. Oh yeah, the pencil. I hope you remembered to track it down at the start of the level, because you lose it between stages. That’s right, you start each stage completely defenceless again. I know the pencil’s not much of a weapon – I’m playing as Gizmo the Mogwai, not John Wick – and its minuscule range can be frustrating, but it’s still better than literally nothing.


Greta’s back. This time she’s wiggling her hips in a, erm, seductive manner. A tiny part of me has the urge – the same thanatological urge to jump that one might feel when standing on the edge of a cliff – to put “Greta Gremlins” into Google with safesearch turned off. I didn’t, though. I’m not that daft. Plus, I’ve been on the internet for decades now, I’ve got a good idea what’d be out there. That’s why I drink so much.


Boss number two is the bat gremlin, complete with the famous bat powers of flight and being able to secrete smaller, more annoying bats from his body. The bat gremlin mostly flies around at the top of the screen before attempting to dive onto Gizmo’s head, so your strategy is to move out of the way just as he reaches you and then whack him during the brief moment that he’s on the ground. That’s all well and good, a perfectly acceptable boss fight pattern that I’ve encountered dozens of times before, but then he goes and spoils it by throwing the small bats at you. They home in until they’re on Gizmo’s level and then fly horizontally (and very quickly) across the screen, and I never figured out the best way to dodge them. There were a couple of times I managed to avoid them through sheer fluke, my blind, panicked thrashing of the buttons somehow guiding Gizmo to safety, but for the most part the only advice I can offer is to make sure you start this fight with full health. That way you can mostly get away with ignoring the small bats. Oh well, at least the boss’ sprite looks really nice.


I mean, gee, I hope so. There are hundreds of human lives at stake. If I get all the way to the end of the game only to discover that the gremlins cannot be stopped, I shall feel rather aggrieved, especially as by that point I’ll have beaten hundreds of the bloody things to death with nothing more advanced than a 2B.


Next up is the… wherever this is stage. The CCTV monitoring room? I think that might be it. It’s also where Gremlins 2 collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, forcing the player into a nightmare of suffering and degradation. Okay, that last bit was a little OTT, but the game really does get a lot less fun at this point, mostly because the difficulty goes through the roof. Almost every jump from now on requires pin-point accuracy, and the enemies are placed in ever more fiendish locations. For example, take that big chap up there: he’s surrounded by a rotating ring of spiked balls, so you have to time your movements to dash through the gaps, in a narrow corridor where there’s no room to jump to safety. A perfectly viable platformer challenge, I suppose, although it’d feel a lot less aggravating if Gizmo could duck or waddle a bit faster.


However, the thing that really drags Gremlins 2 down is the preponderance of blind jumps and hidden hazards. Take the scene above, for example. There’s a springboard, and a gap in the platform  directly above the springboard so hey, you probably have to bounce up there. Except no, there a spike block just above that gap, hidden from view until you bounce up there and give Gizmo a surprise lobotomy. This kind of scenario occurs a lot in this game, especially when you’re falling from a platform and you can’t see that you’re about to land on something dangerous until it’s too late. This would be mostly mitigated if Gizmo could pan the screen around a little a la Sonic the Hedgehog, but of course he can’t. Gremlins 2 is a short game, so maybe this emphasis on memorizing the levels was intentionally included to expand the running time, but that doesn’t make it any more fun. It might have flown back in 1990, a simpler, less demanding time when humanity was so undiscerning that Timmy Mallett was allowed to have a number one single with Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, but nowadays it makes getting through the last couple of stages a real chore. At least you’ve got infinite continues.


There’s also this pain-in-the-arse of a section where you have to ride a moving block while dodging spikes. Again, it’s a standard-seeming piece of platformer gameplay, but Gremlins 2 manages to make it feel weird by having the block travel slowly for a while and then suddenly accelerate to “your internal organs are now paste” speeds with no warning. It also loops around on the same path a couple of times, just for extra fun. I had real trouble getting past this section until I figured out that I took less damage and had less chance of being knocked into a pit if I just stood on top of one of the spike blocks and waited for the platform to come to me. I think that’s what they mean by “thinking outside the box,” except in this case the box is covered in spikes.


Even the boss battles are getting worse, and while the electric gremlin may look cool – and he is, because he’s a gremlin made of electricity and that is cool – fighting him is about as cool as having your mum bring you your anorak and acne medication in the middle of your first date. The electric gremlin turns into a lightning bolt and bounces around the screen, only pausing for the briefest moment every now and then. This means you have to chase him around and try to be nearby when he lands on the off chance that he transforms back into his whackable state, but between the pencil’s tiny range and the unpredictability of the boss’ movements he’ll land close enough to hurt you most of the time. He lands, you get hit because you were standing a hair too close, you can’t hit him because you’re stunned by taking damage, he flies off again and the whole tedious process repeats itself. The only saving grace of this fight is that there aren’t any spikes.


Now we’re into the final stage, where I was immediately confronted with one of the most challenging parts of the game. I’ve got to use this springboard to bounce up to the platform with the pencil, you see, so that means springing upwards, veering to the right to avoid cracking Gizmo’s head open on the bottom of the platform, and then moving left while still in mid-air to land on the platform. It took me roughly seven hundred attempts to make this jump. I’m still not sure why. I think what happened was that at first I was being overly cautious because I didn’t want to mess up and land on the spikes, but after a while I flipped to being so frustrated by it that I lost my composure. It was a bad time, and no fun was had by anyone. In fact, I think this section may have made any fun I have had in the past less fun in retrospect, and trying to get Gizmo to that bloody pencil has cast a dark taint over my happy memories.
Still, at least the stage has to get better after this poor start, right?


Wrong, dead wrong, super-duper wrong, wronger than all the answers on every maths exam I’ve ever taken. Gremlins 2 saves its most infuriating areas for last, culminating in this wretched excuse for a puzzle. Gizmo is behind those blocks. You have to get him through this maze of platforms, spikes and holes without being able to see where in the flaming hell he is. It’s just… oh, man, it’s bad. So, so bad. A needlessly punishing gauntlet of bad decisions that only gets worse when you miss a jump and fall back down to the bottom or, god forbid, lose a life and have to fight through the entire stage again just to take another crack at it. Did I mention that you can’t see Gizmo? Awful, just awful. I somehow managed to get though it via pure luck and the ironclad determination that I wasn’t going to let it beat me. Later, I did discover a “better” method, however: if you find a radio earlier in the stage and don’t use the projectile attack, when you reach this section Gizmo will still have the musical note over his head – and the note appears in front of the maze, so you can tell where Gizmo is. God bless whichever of humanity’s foremost geniuses figured that one out, because I sure as hell wouldn’t have.


As for the rest of the stage, most of it looks like this. Now we know where Chun Li gets all her spiky bracelets from.


And then, it’s time for the final boss. It’s Mohawk, but he drank the scientific spider juice so now he’s half-spider, half-gremlin. He also has a lovely (and massive) sprite, and I like that as the final stage went on there were more and more spiderwebs on the blocks to give you a hint as to what was coming up. Well, that’s all the good things about this fight covered. It’s all negatives from here on out, folks.
You see, Gizmo has a proper weapon now – a tiny bow that fires flaming arrows. Great! It certainly beats the pencil, but there’s a problem. The bow only fires horizontally, and Spider-Mohawk can only be hurt by shooting him in the face, which is all the way up there. Plus, just like in your most terrifying nightmares, there’s a constant rain of deadly spiders falling onto you. You can just about dodge them while you’re standing on that tiny platform, but doing so isn’t getting the boss killed, is it? So, what to do?


It turns out you have to get Gizmo stuck to that spiderweb, which then carries him on a lazy path up and down the screen, sometimes bringing you level with Spider-Mohawk’s face so you can deliver some scorching hot justice. However, the little spiders are still falling, but you can’t dodge them while you’re on the web. So, your options are a) stay at the bottom, dodging spiders but not hurting the boss or b) climb onto the web for the chance to shoot the boss, but suffer a constant bombardment of unavoidable spiders. That’s right, as far as I can see there’s no way to approach this boss fight without taking damage, and lots of it. In fact, I think the only way to beat the fight is to make sure you come in with full health, get straight on the web and shoot the boss in the face at every single opportunity you get. In that case, the boss might – might– run out of health before you do. You don’t need me to tell you that this is a terrible climax to the game, but I’m going to anyway because it really is awful.


Eventually the gods of fortune smiled upon me and I managed to beat the boss, thus bringing Gremlins 2: The New Batch to a much-anticipated close. There’s not much to the ending – gremlins dead, Gizmo not dead – but as that’s basically how the movie ends too I’ll let it slide.
So then, Gremlins 2 turned out to be a real shame. It started out rather well, with some perfectly acceptable platforming action, excellent graphics and a soundtrack which, in typical 8-bit Sunsoft fashion, is way above average. They also did a good job, perhaps the best job they could have done, of incorporating plenty of elements of the movie into the game so it feels less like a generic platformer with a Gremlins license slapped onto it.
Sadly it all falls apart towards the end, especially if you’re not into memorising entire stages by playing them over and over or, like me, you really hate taking damage from sources you can’t even see. It’s still better than most licensed Game Boy platformers, that’s for damn sure, and with a few changes and a bit more polish it could have been a real diamond, but c’est la vie. At least there’s the NES version of Gremlins 2, which is a very different but far superior game and one that I would definitely recommend you try out.


There’s one final point in the Game Boy version of Gremlins 2’s favour, though: there’s an appearance by the brain gremlin! Sure, it’s only on the Game Over screen, but I’ll take it. When I was a kid I thought the brain gremlin’s whole “we want to be civilised” scene from the movie was pretty much the most hilarious thing ever, so I’m really glad to see him. Having watched that scene again recently… it’s still great, it really is. So, here’s my suggested order for consuming Gremlins 2-related media: watch the movie, play the NES game and then stop unless you’re really into Game Boy platformers.