Hang on, Frankenstein lives in a castle but Dracula only has a house? If there's one thing I associate with Draculas, it's the ownership of castles, castles that are generally filled with spikes and diagonal staircases and the floating disembodied heads of figures from Greek myth. Maybe Dracula's at his summer home or something. As for Chameleon Man, where else would you find one but the graveyard? Well, yes, I suppose a jungle does sound like a more likely location.


Aww, the monsters are shy, look. Dracula, Frankenstein, honey, it's okay, there's no need to be afraid. Hell, wait 'til you see the character I'll be playing is, that'll definitely alleviate some of your fears.
Chameleon Man has a touch more confidence. Perhaps too much confidence, he looks a little cocky to me, like he's got a gameplay gimmick up his sleeve that's going to put an end to my monster bashing ways. I'm on to you, Chameleon Man.


Upsetting feelings swirl around me as the hero of Monster Bash makes his entrance. I'm glad he told me he was the hero, because if you were just to look at him in his basic state you'd have a hard time guessing that he has what it takes to beat up monsters. Like a fusion of Teletubby and Troll Doll offered as a special McDonalds tie-in, our hero has all the monster-bashing potential of a unloved soft toy that'd been left in an oil-slicked gutter puddle. I... I just don't like him, alright? He's too vainglorious. "I am the HERO!"? You haven't even done anything yet, don't let's further sully the word "hero" by applying it to weird red-and-yellow monkey children who have done nothing more heroic than standing vaguely near a graveyard.


Holy crap, did you see what he did to Dracula? That vampire melted like a tub of Raspberry Ripple with a fat dog sitting on it. I take it back, kid. You are the hero. Just don't zap me, okay? I'm not as tough as a Dracula, even if I am immune to garlic and crosses and direct sunlight. Well, maybe not that last one. I don't get outside much.


The game's begun and here we are in Dracula's house. Dracula's five-story house, no less, which is quite grand and possibly pushing the definition of "house" slightly. Dracula's château, then. Some of the impact of the château's interior is lessened when you realise that the entire ground floor is nothing but fireplaces. You probably should have spread those around a bit, Drac. It's going to be freezing in the attic and unbearably hot near the front door.
So, Monster Bash is platformy-mazey-dodge-em-up type of game in which our slightly unconvincing hero is tasked with destroying Dracula. He can throw a small lightning bolt from his hands, which is useful for eliminating the lesser enemies on a stage - bats, in this case - but it won't have any effect on Drac himself.


In order to gain the mighty power of the Super Zap, on each stage our hero must follow a certain sequence of events. First, you've got to walk over a candle to light it.  This isn't a problem in Dracula's mansion, because he takes the same approach to candle ownership as hippyish women who read Anne Rice novels, and there are plenty of them kicking around. Just climb up to them - no jumping in this game, folks - and touch them to light them.


With the candle lit, the mysterious and apparently photoelectrically powered sword in the centre of the stage is activated. Touching this gives our hero the power of the Dracula-destroying Super Zap... but only one of them, and it's on a timer. This leads to the second half of each stage's gameplay, which involves avoiding all the lesser creatures - because if you shoot them, you lose your Super Zap - while chasing the "boss" around the screen, trying to tag him with your magical bolt. Is it any fun? Yeah, I thought so. It all moves along at a pleasingly zippy pace, with your hero rushing back and forth, trying to pin down Dracula as he moves between the glowing warp portals in his various fireplaces. Drac's even got a a synthesised laugh sound effect, something that will endear me greatly to any videogame that features one.


Eventually Dracula dithered for a few moments too long and I managed to catch up with him in the attic, where he felt the full force of my Super Zap and melted into the puddle of aristocratic Transylvanian goo promised by the intro. There's no way Dracula's coming back from that one, folks. No way in hell.


The second stage is Frankenstein's castle. No debates about building nomenclature here, this is definitely a castle. It's got parapets and everything.
Everything about Monster Bash is fairly adorable, with the possible exception of the hero, but those charms are especially apparent in this stage. This Frankenstein looks like a Muppet version of the famous monster, and those wolfmen are just delightful. There's a lot of character packed into a tiny amount of pixels there. I think it's the elongated snouts, you can just tell that the designer was having trouble conveying the notion of werewolfosity until they hit upon the idea of giving them extra-long, almost eel-like muzzles. It sounds like it wouldn't work, but it comes across beautifully.


Frankenstein's castle naturally has a different layout than Dracula's summer house or wherever that was supposed to be, and the main difference is that there's only one candle to light. The other twist is that you can fall down through the holes in the floor on the left and right edges of the screen. These come in extremely handy when you finally collect the Super Zap, because Frankenstein has the playful soul of a scampish child and he likes to hide from the player by using the magic doors to teleport from the top of the castle right down to the basement. You can use the doors too, but more often than not when I embraced their reality-warping powers I emerged straight into the waiting and not exactly tender arms of Frankenstein. There's a certain degree of patience involved in Monster Bash, especially after the Dracula stage, and waiting until you think Frank's going to a door and then falling through the "jump down zones", as the game calls them, is what I found to be the best way to win.


Thirdly, there's Chameleon Man's graveyard home, where the action becomes more maze-like than ever and there are new gimmicks aplenty. Just getting to the candle is a real task in itself, trapped as it is in a tomb at the centre of the screen. Chameleon Man's associated minor enemies are spiders, albeit spiders that look more like psychedelic rave crabs, and those spiders do not give you a moment's peace. You can zap them, but they respawn almost instantly and scurry through the graveyard with the demented energy that only something coloured like a radioactive lobster could possess.


Then there's Chameleon Man himself, pictured here trying to insert his tongue into our hero. While chameleons should rightly be most famous for their always-hilarious boggle eyes, they're better known for their colour-changing ability, which is pretty cool I guess but not as good as being able to watch the football and keep an eye out for the unmarked government helicopter that constantly monitor us at the same time. Chameleon Man may have gained the ability to walk upright but he didn't lose his colour-swapping powers, and as the stage goes on he will gradually change colour to match the background.


Except... he doesn't, really. He turns black instead. I've looked into this as thoroughly as I can thinking that maybe it was an emulation error, but as far as I can tell he is indeed supposed to turn black and not, as the arcade flyer says, invisible. He is invincible while he's black, immune even to the powers of the Super Zap, but you can definitely still see him. My theory is that he was originally intended to match the background colour exactly and thus become invisible, but Sega realised that having an enemy that you can't even see on what is already a difficult stage to survive made Monster Bash take a sharp swerve from "challenging" to "slap-yourself-in-the-face frustrating" and so they compromised on turning him black.


In order to make the Chameleon Man vulnerable again, you have to walk our hero over one of the colour change spots on the floor - these change the colour of the background, unsurprisingly, and render the Chameleon Man "visible" and ready for the face-melting impact of the Super Zap. As an added twist, the coloured gates dotted around the stage also open and close depending on the colour of the background: step on the blue button and the blue gates disappear but the red and green ones stay closed, and so on. This is a much more engaging gameplay mechanic that Chameleon Man's polychromatic abilities, because it give this stage just a shade more strategic depth - using the gates to block off enemies that are coming to eat your souls (or whatever it is Chameleon Man wants to do with your soul) isn't the most reliable survival tactic in the world, but when it works it's good fun.


After defeating the vile menace of Chameleon Man, our hero celebrates by shaking his backside at the camera. Thanks, kid. I hope you feel good about yourself.  He probably does feel good about himself, you don't often shake your booty if you're not feeling great. A depressed stripper might, I suppose.


What do you mean, the monsters will catch me this time? They caught me last time, repeatedly. Monster Bash is a simple game with clear gameplay objectives, but it's also a game that will punish you for making a single wrong move and sometimes you won't even know that it was the wrong move until you've made it, especially on Chameleon Man's stage. However, you can continue if you lose all your lives, a feature I wasn't expecting to see in an arcade title from 1982.


Then it's back to Dracula's house to repeat the same three stages over and over again in an endless loop. I presume it's endless, anyway - I got to about round six or so without noticing much change and that was enough for me. If there is an ending, I'm sure someone will let me know, but I feel fairly confident in saying that our hero is condemned to an eternity of fighting two of horror's most iconic monsters and a lizard man.


It doesn't seem to get much more difficult as you progress, either - if anything, it becomes easier as you quickly familiarise yourself with the screen layouts and monster behaviour, which seems erratic at first but which definitely has some kind of pattern to it. For instance, almost every time I defeated Frankenstein I did so by catching him on the second floor at the left-hand side of the screen, where he seems to get caught in two minds about which way to run. Of course, in Frankenstein's case he may well actually have two minds. Chameleon Man's stage also becomes much easier once you realise that chasing after him is a wasted effort that will almost certainly end in spidery death: a much more consistent tactic is to stand still, wait for Chameleon Man to come to you and Super Zap him as he runs past.


Of the three stages, Chameleon Man's is at once the most interesting and the least fun to play. It's still enjoyable enough, and the gimmicks of the stage help to keep you engaged, but there are perhaps a few too many spiders for comfort and worst of all it's really easy to get stuck on the corners of the walls, even when you feel like you should have plenty of room to spare


On the whole, though, would I recommend you give Monster Bash a try? Yeah, I absolutely would, especially during this Halloween season. I've used the word "charm" already in this article, but that's definitely what it's got, from the basic but cute sprites to the voice samples of Dracula's laugh and Frankenstein's unhealthy-sounding grunt, and overall it's pleasant little title that's worth trying out even if you only play it for ten minutes. And to cap this article off, I just found out that the player character is called Lil' Red. In light of this new information, I have mentally constructed a story where Lil' Red is a devilish emissary of hell who has been sent out into the human world to bring these monsters back to the stygian depths in which they belong. I'm sure you'll agree it's a much more likely scenario than "weird teddy bear kid kills all the monsters".



As for the Halloween-O-Meter, I've decided to award Monster Bash a seven on my increasingly arbitrary scale of Halloween-ness. A pretty decent score that was influenced by the famous monsters on display and the lead character's willingness to run around in a graveyard, but points were deducted for music that's about as spooky as a nice warm bath and that old Halloween-O-Meter crippler, a total lack of pumpkins.

So, this is Castleween, unless you're playing the American version, which is called Spirits and Spells. Or the Japanese release, which is Mahou no Pumpkin (Pumkpin's Magic). I'm not sure the game needed three different titles, and all three make sense to some degree, but I think I'll be sticking with Castleween because it reminds me of three things I love: Halloween, Castlevania and the band Ween. Sadly only one of those things makes an appearance in Castleween, but it is the most seasonally appropriate of the three, as we shall see from the intro.


Our heroes are two young trick-or-treaters called Alicia and Greg, dressed in the time-honoured costumes of a witch and a devil respectively. Alicia, Greg and their friends are making their way through a forest in search of a fabled house filled with "thousands and thousands of sweets," because in these modern times kids are too distracted by their tablet computers and loom bands and brutal gang initiations to heed the lessons of fairy tales. If they had taken the time to read Hansel and Gretel they might have thought twice about entering the deep dark woods to find a candy-themed house.


They find the house, and quelle surprise, it's home to a terrifying, child-endangering evil. The Bogeyman is here, and he's whipping out the kid's souls, a process that turns them to stone because all the kids in this village are actually garden gnomes that wished super hard to be real children, I guess? Greg and Alicia are spared this grisly fate - The Bogeyman having presumably reached his quota for the day before they arrived - and so these two plucky young scamps set out to find The Bogeyman and free the souls of their friends.


The game starts out in a graveyard, so not only were these kids wandering around a spooky forest on Halloween, it was a spooky forest right next to a cemetery? I blame the parents for either not instilling their children with a sense of self-preservation or for not letting them watch enough horror films.
There's nothing much to say about the gameplay at this stage, because Castleween is run-n-jump platformer of the type that you'll have played many times before. Get from one end of the stage to the other, avoiding the enemies and obstacles like these briar patches and collecting goodies in the form of trick-or-treat candy and magic "sparks".


Here, Alicia is confronted by some ghosts with terrible posture. As she looks out of the screen at the player, her eyes seem to say "get a load of these idiots, their backs are going to be so painful that they'll wish they could die all over again." Well, luckily for them they can die again, because Alicia can dispatch monsters by whacking them with her hat. I assume her hat has razor blades sewn into the brim a la Oddjob.


After a while, you'll come across Greg waiting patiently atop a blasphemous altar of dark magic, which seems like a smart move to me. It's the monster equivalent of entering a church for sanctuary, and because of its protective aura Greg has remained unharmed, allowing me to switch characters.
The ability to swap between Alicia and Greg at certain points is one of Castleween's more interesting features, and both kids have different skills: Alicia floats when she jumps and can fall safely from any height, and her special move is more useful, while Greg's pitchfork attacks have a little more range and he can double-jump but will lose a life if he falls too far. Each kid also has another, less obvious skill, but we'll get to that later. For now, you can assume that to progress in the game it's wise to switch characters whenever the opportunity arises.


I mentioned special attacks, and here's Greg's: like all good demons, it revolves around hellfire, and pressing the R button will cause flames to shoot out to the left and right... as long as you have some sparks. Sparks are the key to success in Castleween, for two reasons. One is that they allow you to use your special power - with no sparks you can't use it at all, but once you have ten you can burn your enemies to a crisp, with the attack becoming more powerful as you hold more sparks (that aren't consumed when you attack, by the way.) The other reason to collect sparks is that they act as a health bar in the same way as Sonic the Hedgehog's rings. If you take a hit and you don't have any sparks, you lose a life: get hit with sparks in your possession and you'll lose all your sparks but you'll still be alive. Unfortunately, unlike in Sonic your sparks don't scatter around the screen, ready to be re-collected for a limited time - one you're hit, all those sparks you have so assiduously collected are gone forever. I think this single gameplay quirk is Castleween's most frustrating feature, especially when coupled with the difficult later stages where enemies are hard to see coming.


For now, though, it's proving quite an enjoyable little romp once you realise that it's safest to treat every element of the screen as a potential threat to your life until you can prove otherwise. Trees? Probably going to try to slap you? Paving slabs? Will launch geysers of flame when stepped upon. In the screenshot above, Greg is standing next to a witch who is definitely trying to kill him because, y'know, witches and kids, but unfortunately for her she's standing on a slope and her infernal pact with Satan didn't cover shooting her spells diagonally downwards. Or protecting her knees from a vicious pitchfork assault, for that matter.


I'm really enjoying the environments so far, I can say that much, with backgrounds packed full of cartoonish Halloween charm. They were clearly created by people who have watched Nightmare Before Christmas a fair few times, but I like that sort of thing. I'm less enamoured with the sprites, though - created as 3D models and then digitised for the GBA, they've got some charm to them but they're often fuzzy and ill-defined, especially in movement. "Hand-drawn" sprites would have almost certainly been a drastic improvement, but I can't blame the developers for taking this option because sprite work is a time-consuming process and they had a shortcut available: Castleween was also released as a 3D platformer for the Gamecube and Playstation 2, and I would be surprised if the polygon models from the console editions weren't digitised for use in this Game Boy Advance version.


Greg leaps boldly into a swarm of demons, but don't fear for the young tyke because these demons recognise Greg as one of their mephitic brood thanks to his choice of Halloween costume. That's each character's other power - the power to be ignored by monsters that broadly match their outfit. Greg can scamper past devils unmolested, while Alicia remains untroubled by witches and she can also hitch a ride on certain spiders that try to capture Greg as a food source for their thousands of scurrying young, their countless tiny legs scrabbling for purchase on Greg's flesh as they seek the weakest areas of his body through which they might nourish themselves on his very life essence. Hey, the game's not scary so I'm just trying to inject a bit of season-appropriate terror.
The ability to sneak past certain enemies becomes much more useful later in the game, when you have more opportunities to choose which kid to play as, and getting it right can mean the difference between an unimpeded stroll to the goal or fighting your way through a bunch of glorified ghost train decorations. It's a fun little touch that I enjoyed very much, to the point where I think I would have preferred Castleween to have placed more emphasis on disguises.
And while I've got a screenshot of Greg jumping up, I should mention his sound effects. Greg makes a noise every time you jump, as platforming characters often do, but it's not the usual "sproing" type sound or even a grunt of effort - Greg instead makes a disgusting gagging noise, the sound you might make after inhaling the heady aroma of a dead dog that's been lying in the sun for a couple of weeks, every time he jumps. I take back what I said about losing all your sparks being the worst part of Castleween, I'm awarding that particular honour to Greg sounding like he's about to blow chunks every time he lifts his bloody legs up.


After passing through several graveyard and castle themed stages - Castleween takes a strange approach to stage layouts, with the levels being of wildly varying lengths but mostly being clumped into three distinct "themes" - Alicia is faced with a boss, and that boss is... The Bogeyman? Already? No, it's not the end of the game, and a scene just before this fight reveals that The Bogeyman is merely a pawn in the plans of a Mad Scientist who wants the children's souls for some diabolical scheme. Child soul harvesting? I think that's going a bit far even for a Mad Scientist. Even Dr. Frankenstein restricted himself to using parts that were already dead.
The Bogeyman may look cool - evil jack 'o lanterns perched on top of capes usually do - but he's not up to much in a combat situation. He walks back and forth until you jump up and smash him in the face with your hat, which causes him to rethink his battle plan and to instead stand at the end of the screen and roll easily-hopped pumpkins at you. Repeat this a few times and kids everywhere can stop hiding under their duvets, because The Bogeyman is defeated.


"Okay, you win," says The Bogeyman. "Your friends are in this creepy house over here. You should follow me into what is 100% guaranteed not not be a trap. If you can't trust me, the sum total of all childhood nightmares given flesh, who can you trust?"


And so Alicia and Greg plummet into the haunted house, The Bogeyman's cries of "suckerrrssss!" (presumably) ringing in their ears. Time to escape from this haunted house, then.


Possessed suits of armour? Check. They're day-one, ground-floor elements of any respectable haunted house. You gotta have the suits of armour that might remain still or might attack you as you wander past. Of course, Castleween confounded my expectations by having every suit of armour try to murder me, which rather lessened their impact. Their psychological impact, I mean. They still take all your sparks if they hit you.


Also in the haunted house: this adorable picture of the Mad Scientist, The Bogeyman and an unidentified Frankenstein-type monster. They look like they're having the time of their lives, their beaming smiles born from the pleasure of genuine friendship as they all crammed into the photobooth together so that their trip to the seaside would be forever commemorated in this photo that they had blown up and framed. They say that the key to happiness is to do what you love with the people you love, so it's a shame that the Mad Scientist loves ripping the eternal souls of children from their bodies and the people he loves are either made from corpses or are the physical avatar of terror. He could have been in inspiration to us all if only he loved fly fishing with his wife or something.


As the haunted house continues, there's not much new to Castleween's gameplay, either in terms of what this game has already offered up or when compared to other platformers before or since. The "disguise" element of the two characters is an interesting if underused addition, but otherwise it the same collection of pit-hopping antics you've seen a million times before - jumping across moving platforms, bouncing up high off springy platforms, trying not to land on platforms covering in grasping spectral hands. You know, the usual. As to whether it's any good... well, it's not bad. As I was playing I wasn't cursing my decision to give it a go or anything, and although it's mostly solid it does have flaws. One particular thing that bugged me - and I admit this is a personal peeve with platformers - is that you often have to jump straight up onto platforms that you shouldn't be able to reach, only for the game to declare "eh, close enough" and pop you up onto the platform because your feet got near the upper edge. Other than that, there are a few problems common to the less polished examples of the genre that appear in Castleween - sometimes it's difficult to tell where the edges of platforms are, and there's the occasional bit of input lag, most noticeably on Greg's double jump - but nothing game-breaking.


The game does become quite difficult quite quickly. Part of that is down to the small screen area making it easy for enemies to lurk just out of view, punishing you if you try to play with pace. The real kicker is the spark situation, however, and because taking a hit means you can't use your special attack Castleween evokes almost Gradius-like levels of despair after losing your powers. This is especially true with Alicia. Her special power is being able to throw her hat, which she can aim up and down, and losing that power during a section like the enemies-floating-around-moving-platforms scenario pictured above can turn Castleween into a more frustrating experience than it could have been or even should have been, and a compromise of either being able to immediately able to regain some lost sparks or always having a limited special attack that's simply powered up by sparks would have made it much easier for me to recommend this game.


Maybe I'm just being too gentle on a game that's pummelling the still-warm places in my heart with its cutesy Halloween atmosphere, but despite all the flaws I just mentioned I still think it's a fun little game that I would have played a bunch if I'd owned it as a kid. It's got plenty of hidden item stashes tucked away for you to search for, areas in which exploration is rewarded, and on the whole the core gameplay is definitely solid, if lacking some fine-tuning.


Suddenly, a vampire descends to attack our heroes! Honestly, there's a vampire. He's behind the text. Look, you'll just have to trust me on this, alright?


See, here he is now! What do you mean, he doesn't look much like a vampire? In fact, you'd say he looks more like a deep-sea fish struggling to escape from inside another, larger deep-sea fish? Okay, yeah, that's fair enough. He's hardly up there with Count Dracula or Barlow from Salem's Lot in terms of vampire menace. Hell, I think Count Duckula has him beaten on that front. At least if you encountered Count Duckula there's a chance some horrible fate would befall you, even if it was just due to Nanny's incompetence. This vampire's aura of terror is further diminished by the fact he makes a squeaking noise like a rusty bicycle every time he flaps his wings.
As for the actual fight, the vampire flies around spitting fireballs down at you for a while before gliding into hat-battering range. This is possibly the most difficult part of the game, because for some reason or other I had an absolute nightmare of a time getting Alicia to jump at the correct height. Still, I got there in the end. I wasn't going to let this thing beat me, I have my pride.


Short, balding and with facial features like a scrunched-up tissue, and yet the Mad Scientist is still somehow more threatening than the vampire. I think it's down to his refusal to wear safety goggles when mixing what are no doubt extremely dangerous chemicals. He's a maverick, a man on the edge. There's no telling where the depths of his depravity may end.


The final set of stages take place in the Mad Scientist's laboratory, although "laboratory" might be pushing it a bit - this is more of a Mad Steel Foundry, packed with molten metal and pipes that leak hissing jets of steam. Maybe this is the core of the Mad Scientist's sinister plan: after "accidentally" dropping his nephew into a crucible, the Mad Scientist discovers that children's souls are the missing ingredient in a super-strong and much cheaper alloy that will allow him to corner the market in metallurgy.


It seems appropriate that I'd run into this enemy down here. I think this is literally Satan himself, a goat-legged force of evil who appears by drawing a flaming portal in the floor. He's got so many demons at his command that Greg is just another face in the crowd to him, which is helpful. Again, terrible posture on Satan. No wonder all these bad guys are so, well, evil, they must have been driven to it by the pain of having a spine shaped like a map of the Monaco grand prix. The Father of Lies should invest in an ergonomic replacement for the throne of Hell.


I'm not too pleased with Castleween's decision to ditch its previous Halloween aesthetic for a somewhat generic "heavy industry" setting, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the section where our heroes are chased by a killer robot. That's the robot on the left of the screen. Yes, I know it doesn't look like something you have any need to be scared of unless you suffer from a phobia of smashed-up bicycles, but it looks a lot better in motion, and I like the way it's "head" is just a nub. I think it might be a tin can. A tin can with a child's soul stuffed inside. Say what you will about the Mad Scientist, but he uses every bit of the soul and nothing goes to waste.


Here is the Mad Scientist's version of a Frankenstein, "Frankenstein" in this situation being a generic descriptor for an animated golem of stitched-together human flesh in the same way that you  might say "hoover the carpet" when you own a non-Hoover brand vacuum cleaner. Dr. Frankenstein's lawyers will be on the case, no doubt. Anyway, this is presumably the same Frankenstein from the portrait in the haunted house, although he seems a lot less jolly here. He's also very flesh-coloured, which is sorta unnerving for reasons I can't adequately explain. This monster's rosy complexion implies that the Mad Scientist has finally cracked the whole dead-tissue-restored-to-life thing, but I'm so used to seeing green Frankensteins that this guy just doesn't seem right to me.


Now this is proper mad science. The Mad Scientist has a PhD in Unholy Tampering With God's Natural Order, and this demon foetus was his final dissertation / his means of showing them who's mad, showing them all! 


The final stage is the Soul Reservoirs, and here's Alicia freeing a bunch of souls from the glass jars in which they were trapped. There are a few souls hidden on each stage, plus a ton of them on this stage. The game keeps a running total of all the souls you've found. I did not find all the souls. Whether this means some of those kids are doomed to an eternity of statuehood was not discussed.
Looking for souls is the main impetus for exploration and a reason to try out each area as each kid - often souls are hidden in such a way that you need to reach a switching point, change characters and then go back through the area you just cleared to find out whether, say, Greg's double jump can net you some goodies. It helps give the game something extra beyond the usual linear level progression, at any rate, although it would perhaps be more enjoyable if there was more of a difference between Alicia and Greg.


That's the Mad Scientist saying "this is the end of the line for you!", not Greg. I would definitely have preferred it if Greg had burst into the Mad Scientist's lab and said "this is the end of the line for you!" while thwacking his pitchfork into his hand, but c'est la vie.


It's the final encounter with the Mad Scientist, and it's not much fun. Boss battles are not Castleween's strong suit, and they all follow the same pattern - boss throws a few projectiles and then comes over so you can hit them in the head, repeat until the boss is dead. In the Mad Scientist's case the projectiles are difficult-to-doge bombs dropped from his hover-chair, and he has the fiendish trick of activating an electric shield to zap you if you're too eager to hit him, but these are only minor deviations from the theme. At least he's much easier than the vampire, purely because I didn't have to jump to hit him.


Oh, so all the kids do get their souls back, which means it was pointless me searching for them. Also, these kids have rubbish Halloween costumes, aside from the ghost. The kid in the middle is supposed to be dressed as a skeleton (I think) but he didn't even bother with a skull mask. Lazy, just unacceptably lazy.


With their adventure over and their tired legs carrying back home to the loving embrace of their parents, I'm left to reflect on Castleween / Spirits and Spells / Mahou no Pumpkin and it's one of those occasions where I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's a respectable attempt at creating a traditional platformer with a few interesting element bolted on, but the problem is that's all it is, with nothing really to set it apart from the crowd. Everything about it is just "okay" but yet I still enjoyed it, although I'm not sure if that's purely down to the spooky setting. It definitely didn't hurt, I know that much. So, if you're in the mood for a traditional platformer, you love Halloween and you can overlook some slightly woolly edges and Greg's dry-heave jumping sound, then I suppose I can just about recommend Castleween.


Now we turn to the Halloween-O-Meter, and Castleween gets a predictably high score, only missing out on the full ten out of ten thanks to the steel mill stages not really being in the Halloween spirit. Does it have pumpkins? You bet your ass, and they serve the important function of bestowing extra lives when collected, so I feel I'm justified in awarding nine out of ten.



Three different releases means three different box arts, so I'm going to show them to you now. This is the US version, and it's not bad. It's a touch generic, and Alicia has a serious case of sausage fingers, but overall it's okay.


The European version sadly doesn't even reach those heady heights, with Alicia looking like a stock 3D model in a witch costume and Greg being some sort of plague doctor / devil hybrid, an concept that sounds better than it looks.


Happily the Japanese cover is far superior and is lovely all around, the cutesy characters feeling much more appropriate for the mood of the game. I love that Bogeyman, and because the logo features a pumpkin it is clearly the winner of this unofficial box art competition and also my heart.

A small green demon falls in love with a nurse wearing a bin bag as a hat. I don't think she's a real nurse. That can't be a regulation uniform unless she works at St. Ann Summers hospital, and any real healthcare professional would avoid standing in a pool of blood. That syringe should be in a sharps box, not lying on the floor of the ward.


Full disclosure - I'm writing about Bloody thanks to stumbling across its cover art while working on the Spooky Computer Game Covers article. It's a striking image, I'm sure you'll agree, and I just had to know what kind of game could be responsible for the artist capturing its essence as a hypoxic cat head menacing a surgeon. My immediate thought was "not the good kind," but we'll see how that pans out as I play the game.


Like seemingly every Spectrum game I write about, Bloody is a hover-and-dodge adventure with a ridiculously strict difficulty level and the ability to fly instead of jumping like any self-respecting platform hero. You play as the creature in the middle of the screen, some mixture of a Mogwai, ALF and one of those kid's pop guns that fire ping-pong balls. You fly your gremlin around the screen, avoiding as many things as you can, while striving to move to the right. Your character can launch projectiles out of his mouth / snout / face-hole to destroy enemies. So far so standard, but the real question is why?


To answer that, I turned to Bloody's instructions. Now, Bloody is a Spanish game, but thanks to a combination of Google Translate and the tattered remnants of my Spanish GCSE, I just about managed to figure out the story. You character is actually called Bloody, and he's an alien from space, not a grotesque devil from Hell as the cover art would suggest. Bloody takes a trip to the Solar System, where his sensors detect life. This is great for Bloody, because he's hungry and the only thing he eats is animal blood. That's right, Bloody's name is the equivalent of me calling myself Colonically Unhealthy Processed Meat. Anyway, Bloody locates a veritable feast in the form of General Hospital's blood bank. The translation gets a bit fuzzy here, but I think there's also something about Bloody falling in love with Patricia Perez, the nurse in charge of the blood bank. So, the aim of Bloody is to help an extraterrestrial vampire fight his way through a nightmare hospital so he can drink up all the vital human blood meant for extremely ill people, and possibly to get laid. It's not what I was expecting from the cover art, granted, but as a slice of unexpected weirdness I'll grab it with both hands.


If War of the Worlds has taught us anything, besides the chances of anything coming from Mars being a million to one, it's that aliens are not adapted to handle the disgusting germ-riddled atmosphere of Earth. This proves to be true for Bloody, and as he makes his way through the hospital his gravest danger comes from disease. You can see a disease in the screenshot above, it's the depressed space hopper with an S on the front. Touching one of these causes Bloody to contract a randomly-assigned illness, denoted by the colour of the cell at the bottom of the screen. If you don't cure Bloody's illness quickly enough, he dies - and he doesn't just die, it's game over regardless of how many lives you had left. Don't worry about forgetting that he's ill, though: the developers thoughtfully made the outer borders of the screen flash in a manner that should worry any photosensitive epileptics playing when Bloody is about to peg it.



To cure Bloody of whatever haemorrhagic fever or brain-melting virus has infected him, you have to find and fly through the appropriately-coloured and impractically large syringe. In the screenshot above Bloody is infected with the blue disease, so this yellow syringe is no help to him and he will probably die suddenly, alone and unmourned on a hostile alien world. There are also white syringes for restoring your health, which you will need to make the most of because coming into contact with almost anything drains your health, presumably because it's all coated in germs.


The need to find and remember the locations of these syringes adds a certain amount of not-unenjoyable tension to the game, and once you've got the hang of Bloody's momentum-heavy flight controls they make negotiating the obstacles challenging but in a predictable and thus almost kinda fun way... but sadly Bloody throws away this potential by being a royal pain in the arse to play. For starters, in the traditional manner of Spectrum platformers enemies randomly pop onto the screen constantly and hover into you, totally unimpeded by the physical world around them. Or maybe they'll spawn right inside you, where you can't dodge them? Who knows?! That's the kind of mystery and excitement that awaits you if you play this game. Aside from the disease-carrying enemies there are flying mouth-lump born from a rotten branch that dropped off Pac-Man's family tree, and pills almost as big as Bloody himself.


You might think that in an environment so biologically hostile as this one that large amounts of medicine would be a welcome thing to find, but I suppose eating 80% of your body weight of any drug is not going to be good for you. Also, don't let the Daily Mail see that mushroom growing out the hospital floor, they'll be knocking out articles about EUROPE'S SHAMEFUL THIRD WORLD HOSPITALS for weeks.


I was going to complain about Bloody being such a weakling that even water saps his life-force faster than listening to Christmas music in June does to mine, but on closer inspection I think that blue-and-white stuff might be electricity. I can cut Bloody some slack if that's the case. I'll just have to remember to steer him away from the large wooden trough filled with unmoving, inert electricity, although I notice that Nega-Pac-Man can splash around in it just fine.


A personal reminder: never visit a Spanish hospital because apparently they use penknives as scalpels. Also the corridors are packed with enormous penknives.


One especially aggravating thing Bloody does a couple of times is to make you walk behind foreground scenery that completely blocks your view of the action unless you happen to be near a window. I've circled Bloody for you, because I'm nice like that. Wouldn't want you getting eyestrain searching for him, it could be that NES Where's Waldo game all over again. I know Bloody is a grotesque little freak, but as much as I'd like to not be looking at him it's kind of important to my ability to finish the game.


The poor design decisions reach a peak with this transition between two late-game screens. The orange line represents the edge of the screen, right? And remember that you can't see the next screen until you enter it. So, travelling from left to right you have to avoid the severed hand. I understand this, I've watched Evil Dead II enough times to know that severed hands are bad news. You can't fly past the hand, though, because it's taking up so much of the screen, so you have to walk under it... where the next screen begins immediately with spiked balls all over the floor. Thanks for that, guys, it's definitely a part of the game I enjoyed and I didn't loudly describe it in terms that would make a sailor with Tourettes blush. To proceed unscathed you have to fly diagonally upwards through the narrow gap between, ahem, the fist and the balls, which would be a difficult task even if you could see where you were supposed to be going. Which you can't. Screw you, Bloody.


Other than the above, there's not much else to say about Bloody. It's a very short game, about thirty screens or so, and if you knew what you were doing you could easily beat it in less than ten minutes. All that remains is to show you a few more screen, because if Bloody has anything going for it, it's the nightmarish neon hellscape that this hospital inhabits. For example, there are giant skulls aplenty, a common decorative motif of all hospitals. All hospitals I've ever been to, anyway. Of course, my local hospital is a meat processing plant by day, and at night vagrant who calls himself Doctor Fun sneaks in and performs surgeries that are, at best, medically unnecessary. It's the postcode lottery, what can you do?


I do enjoy those syringes, though. It's as though someone tried to counteract patients' fear of needles by building a massive, cheerfully coloured Fisher-Price-looking needle, not realising that a) the increased size of the needle only scares patients more and b) these syringes take three people to operate, which is not an effective use of an already strained workforce.


I bet these microscopes don't get much use, either. There's not much need for magnification when the germs are large enough to be visible to the naked eye and are also trying to eat your naked eyes.


If you do have the patience and dedication (or the POKEs) toe reach the end of Bloody, your reward is a trip to the only room in the game that isn't trying to murder you, where the lovely Patricia Perez is waiting. She's brought some helium balloons that spell out Bloody's name, how thoughtful of her. Now Bloody can take his reward - all the human blood he can drink and the chance to make some hideous hybrid babies, which funnily enough is how Tom Cruise is usually rewarded for his movie work.
Bloody, then. Not a great game. Barely even a game at all, and not just because it hardly lasts ten minutes. You float around, you die a lot, you complain about things hurting you even though you were sure you weren't touching them. The virus infection system could have been interesting had it been more fleshed out, and the mechanics of Bloody's floaty flight are relatively well implemented, but on the whole it's a frustrating experience that didn't live up to the promise of its box art. To be fair, no Spectrum game was going to live up to that, though, was it?


Six pumpkins on the Halloween-O-Meter for this one - it didn't have much in the way of monsters, misty graveyards or jack 'o lanterns, but it does possess enough of an unsettling atmosphere to get some Halloween cred. This is true of a lot of Spectrum games even if they aren't supposed to be creepy, thanks to the brightly coloured sprites floating around on a black void of a background like the terrifying spectres that haunt each and every one of us on All Hallow's Eve.

The Casper in question is Casper the Friendly Ghost, the cartoon character created when someone decided that what kids really wanted to read about were the adventures of a dead child. Okay, maybe that's not fair - some iterations of the Casper franchise state that he's just "a ghost," which are simply another magical creature like goblins or elves. I'm most familiar with Casper through the eponymous 1995 live action / CG movie, because my younger brother really liked it and so it was never out of our VCR. My main memories of it are Bill Pullman Bill Pullman-ing to the max and Casper having a slightly creepy fixation on Christina Ricci, to the point of whispering "can I keep you?" to her while she sleeps as though she were a stray dog. Actually, that's a lie: my main memory of the film is Dan Akroyd's cameo as Ray Stantz, in which he flees terrified from Casper's house despite claiming for all those years that he ain't afraid of no ghost. I felt betrayed, you know? Anyway, Casper. He's a ghost, he's friendly, that's about the extent of his character.


He's so friendly that he's invited a bunch of human, non-dead children for a party at his mansion. What do their parents think of this? We'll never know, because they're nowhere to be seen. I guess they decided that Casper's trio of dickish ghost uncles - Stretch, Stinky and Fatso - were good enough chaperones. How much trouble can a bunch of unsupervised preteens running around a haunted, dilapidated mansion really get into?


One ghost who is most definitely not friendly is Kibosh, the villain of the piece. Peering into his crystal ball - apparently he's the ghost of a fairground clairvoyant - Kibosh is so disgusted to see Casper associating with the "fleshies" that he uses his magical power to make the kids disappear. At first he seems like a straightforward undead bigot who is opposed to the mixing of the living and the dead, but a more simple explanation is that he just wanted children's party to end. I've been to a children's party. I can sympathise.


Then there's a map, for some reason. If your child abduction spell has the side effect of leaving a map showing where you've taken the kids at the crime scene, then you need to work on your act.
So, map in hand, Casper travels the world looking for his lost friends. That's why that game's called Casper: Friends Around the World and not Casper: Friends on My Front Lawn.


The first stop is Hollywood - the glitz, the glamour, the poorly-constructed street lights! Oh, what a dream to be here in Tinseltown, plodding slowly from left to right and jumping to collect the occasional crystal. Casper: FATW is a platformer, I suppose. There's jumping involved. There are enemies to either avoid or to dispatch by throwing your "ghostly spheres" at them. I want to make a testicle joke about Casper's ghostly spheres, but I can't improve on the phrase "ghostly spheres." As well as walking left and right, you can also move into the background at certain pre-determined points.


That's what Casper is doing here. He's walking away from the camera, his face hasn't fallen off. Although, if he's semi-transparent shouldn't I be able to see the backs of his eyes? Also, why is he paying attention to the velvet rope? You're a ghost, just float through it. Embrace the benefits of having popped your clogs before you sprouted your adult teeth. Being friendly doesn't necessarily mean being a complete walkover, Casper.
As you can probably tell, Casper: FATW is a kid-friendly platformy adventure with a minuscule amount of attempted educational merit dusted on top like sprinkles at the world's least generous ice-cream parlour. As ever, "kid-friendly" means "designed for idiots," at least in the early stages, but I suppose it's jolly enough. Okay, competent enough. Well, there's a lot of delay between pressing jump and having Casper do anything, but that will be fine as long as there isn't any platforming in this platform game. Taking all that into consideration, I can confidently state that this is a videogame.


Hey, this isn't platforming. This is Arkanoid, and Casper himself has become the paddle. The first goal of each stage is to find the next part of the map: touching it transports you to this Breakout clone, where you have to free the piece of paper from whatever vaguely stage-appropriate items are surrounding it and then catch it before it falls off the screen. There's no preamble to this, either - Casper just walks into the room, sees his uncles and thinks "well, time for me to transform into a paddle and knock a glowing orb back and forth for a while." Sometimes Casper's uncles throw other items into the mix, either damaging ones like bowling balls that you have to avoid or health-restoring sweets. Stretch, Stinky and Fatso have a lot of complex issues regarding their feelings towards their nephew, but if playing this overly-familiar block-breaking game helps them work things out then I'm all for it. I got the map page, too, so now we can get on with the other half of each stage - finding one of Casper's friends.


Here, Casper uses his ghostly powers to turn into the tattered remains of a carrier bag. This allows him to ride a steam vent up into the air, followed by some brisk springy platform action. Casper can also turn into this parachute form to float down to the ground more slowly after a jump, and he can "levitate" - a gravity-defying manoeuvre in which his legs disappear but he can float horizontally without falling into holes. Transforming like this drains Casper's ghost energy or whatever you want to call it, the yellow bar under his health, and if it runs out he reverts to his usual state of leg-having macrocephaly. There are also a few power-ups that give Casper temporary attributes like wheels and buffness, but we'll see those later.


I found that kid I was looking for. Hooray? I was hoping my journey would have been punctuated by tourists shouting "A G-G-G-GHOST!!" and doing spit-takes, but L.A. was home to nothing but a couple of other ghosts and some jack 'o lantern faces that explode when you walk past them. At least little Timmy (probably not this character's actual name) seemed pleased to see me. On to the next country, then - the country of, erm, South America!


Videogame South America is always jungles and lost temples, and Casper: FATW is no exception. You start in the jungle and then head through a lost temple. That's about it, really. Sometimes these Aztec ghosts try to stop you. Casper, being the friendly ghost that he is, has to destroy them with his ghostly spheres before he can move on. He makes no attempt to talk to these other ghosts, to use rational dialogue or persuasion to make his way past them - he sees them, literally says "these guys don't look friendly," and then throws projectiles at them until they go away. Good work living up to your only character trait there, Casper. Real neighbourly of you.


Because this is a videogame, there's a section in the temple where you have to jump from platform to platform without falling into the lava. I say jump, Casper's horizontal ghost float is much more useful because you can just hover straight across the gaps.
Then Casper gets near one of those spikes on the ceiling and he says "I'd better watch out for those spikes!" Why? What are they going to do, kill you? I think that ship has already sailed, pal.


The next stage is in London. I'm looking forward to the genuinely informative and restrained manner in which Casper will describe the country of my birth.


Ha ha, of course not, Casper starts the level by shouting "right-oh, guv'nor!" in a "Dick van Dyke from Mary Poppins" accent. It's disgraceful, really, and now the game's stages are set in Europe Casper can start doing "comedy" voices without worrying too much about political correctness. You can get away with doing an over-the-top French or Russian accent, but doing the same thing with a Chinese voice would be getting into some uncomfortably territory. And where are the ludicrous, wildly inaccurate depictions of American manners and customs, huh? Oh, right, they're in Japanese games mostly. Personally, I'd be happy if Casper didn't say anything at all, but unfortunately he never shuts up. He's a literal poltergeist, constantly prattling on about the sights in each stage or telling the player what they should be doing next.
Because British people are snooty, the enemies in London have turned their noses up at Casper. Turned those noses up so far that they can sniff the back of their own head, they've achieved a 90-degree shift in nasal angle. This ghost should be working as a sales assistant in a luxury jewellers, not walking back and forth outside some Hogwarts-ified version of St. Paul's. Forget about him, though, and check out that pumpkin face on the right of the screen. See that? They're all over every level, and they're basically proximity mines. Walk near one and after a second or two they explode, damaging Casper and momentarily filling your screen with pixellated pumpkin features. I'm okay with that - the second bit, at least - and once I figured out that you can activate them from a safe distance with your ghostly spheres they stopping being anything like a threat.


Here's one of those power-ups that I mentioned earlier: Casper has sprouted phantasmic wheels, allowing him to dash across this crumbling bridge. No, he can't just float across. Why not? Because the game said so, alright? Casper can only float for an arbitrary length of time, and in this universe ghosts are immediately disintegrated by any body of water more than an inch deep. Hey, there's nothing in the Bible that says a priest can't bless all the water in a city, which is obviously what's happened here. Casper now runs the risk of being exorcised every time he steps in a puddle, which is going to happen a lot now that he's in Britain and he can't hover for more than a few seconds at a time.


Paris is next, and Casper visits the Louvre. He says he's going to see the Moan-a Lisa. No, bad Casper. I'd swat you with a rolled-up newspaper if I could: only I should be making terrible ghost puns. Maybe you should go and look at The Ghoul with the Pearl Earring or Picasso's Boo-ernica instead. No, really, you should - the Mona Lisa is being protected by the corpulent stereotype of a French painter. What was your unfinished business on this mortal plane, monsieur? Half a baguette left in the fridge that you never got to eat? I'm amazed this ghost doesn't have a string of onions around his chest, and surely the only reason he's not guzzling bottle after bottle of red wine is because this is a kid's game.


In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Casper decides to try out this "possession" lark he's heard so much about by ramming his head into an unsuspecting child. It doesn't work, and that highlights one of my biggest issues with Casper: FATW - it's no fun being a ghost. There's nothing especially spectral about Casper's moveset, aside maybe from his handful of transformation moves, but there's nothing very ghostly about being a parachute. Casper can barely float, he can't phase through solid matter, his every movement isn't accompanied by the sound of clanking chains and he can die, the one thing you'd imagine a ghost wouldn't have to worry about. You also have to press a button to duck. I don't think that's related to Casper's ghostliness, but in what is essentially a side-scrolling platformer it still feels weird to not press down to crouch. My point is, if you're going to make a game about being a ghost, give the player something spooky to do instead of retreading the same old tired platforming mechanics with the added pleasure of stiff controls and bland level design. Maybe don't base your game around a character whose soul defining trait is that he's nice, either. Not much room for dramatic conflict in that one.


This ghost? Not nice. It's Casper's uncle Fatso - he's the fat one, you see - and he's under Kibosh's hypnotic spell. This makes his eyeballs bulge out in a genuinely disconcerting manner, so let's stop looking at them and beat him in the boss fight that I'm sure is coming up next.


Fatso has a tray of pies, which presents him with something of a dilemma: does he eat all the pies like the greedy sonofabitch that he is, or does he throw some at Casper? If he wasn't hypnotised I'm sure he would have eaten them all himself, but because this is a fight he throws the pies at Casper, who dutifully dodges the delicious projectiles until Fatso stops for a breather. Then you can jump up and throw your spheres at him until the hypnotic spell is broken and Fatso changes from actively trying to kill Casper, back to his usual self of just being an utter bastard to Casper. Fatso also give Casper part of a special machine and tells him that there are two more parts to collect, so I look forward to fighting his other two uncles at some point in the near future.


Onward to Venice, city of romance, of canals, of somewhat frustrating platforming sections spent bouncing between shop awnings! In the background, you can see the book I need to collect to play the block-breaking game, but I'm here in the foreground, precariously balanced on a pole sticking out of the water. I was so preoccupied with not falling in the canal that I forgot about the book entirely, and when I reached the end of the stage the child I'd come to find said "hey, you'd better go find that book"... and then the game just let me play the page-getting minigame without having to go back and fetch the book. I like that, it was a nice of the game to say "don't want to bother playing half of the level? That's cool, we understand. You can just have the book." Not having to look for the book is going to speed up the process of getting through these stages.


Here's the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When I saw it, I was just about to say "why is the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Venice?" but Casper beat me to it, which made me feel a little like I'd been outsmarted by a 14-year-old videogame for kids. Then I made Casper get muscular by using a power-up and he un-leaned the Leaning Tower, causing an extra life to fall from the top. I don't like Muscular Casper, a powerful ghost child who could probably bench-press me. It's just weird.


This is Moscow. Not much to say about Moscow. It's Christmas now and that, if you'll forgive my slip in Seinfeldism, makes me wonder what's the deal with these kids? The countries that you find them in are clearly their home countries - their, erm, enthusiastic accents make that clear - so why is Casper so set on taking them back to America, especially at Christmastime? And how did they get to a party at Casper's home in the first place? "Gee, Casper, I'd love to come to your party without my parents to be looked after by you and your horrible dead relatives, but you live five thousand miles away, you nutbar." Is Casper regularly fixating on certain children with little regard for their feelings his thing? Christina Ricci's character from the movie is nowhere to be seen, so instead he must have targeted ten children from around the world and brought them to his house. Is Casper's unfinished business that he's never made it through an entire children's party and he can't move on to the afterlife until he's won a game of pin the tail on the donkey? There are just so many questions raised by this game, and no attempt is made to answer any of them.
As for the Moscow stage itself, there's a section where you have to fire a cannonball and then race it to a set of doors. The cannonball opens the doors briefly so Casper can slip through. Any other ghost would be able to float through the doors, but not Casper. He's officially taken the number two slot on my mental list of shittiest ghosts, just behind John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.


This stage is set in Japan, in case you couldn't tell. Casper's getting a good eyeful of that sumo wrestler's arse, and yet he retains his cheerful demeanour so I guess being a ghost also makes you blind. This sumo match isn't even for anything, either, it's just sort of... there. To add some Japaneseness, I suppose. Thankfully you can completely avoid it, and for what is undeniably a low-budget children's game with very few new ideas I can at least praise Casper: FATW for giving the player different routes to explore. As the game progresses the stages become more and more open, allowing you to take multiple paths to the goal and providing a tiny bit of exploration, usually with the goal of collecting crystals. While none of the paths are all that much fun, they've got much better gameplay than most games I've written about that were designed for the under-tens market thanks mostly to the simple fact that you have to pay attention to what you're doing in order to succeed, with obstacles that aren't quite as embarrassingly patronising as usual. If the controls were better, I could even imagine young children enjoying this game, which is something of a shock.


I did like Japan's minigame stage, because it features a tiny off-brand Godzilla. I'd like to call him "Goshzilla," just so I can link to one of my favourite Mystery Science Theatre 3000 bits.
I also tried to see what the Japanese at the sides of the screen says, if it even is Japanese. I think the top character might be "luck," as in "good luck trying to see what you're doing with all this crap floating around the screen!" If you knock the page loose but don't catch it before it falls to the bottom of the screen, you lose a whole life. I lost about five lives while I was playing this game, and four of them where thanks to not catching the page as it fell. The other one was me testing whether lava has the power to banish ghosts (it totally does).


China now, and Casper dodges dragons along the Great Wall, sometimes using bubbling cauldrons to propel himself into the air, sometimes getting hit by spear-carrying ghost warriors because the jump button is about as responsive as the handling on an ocean liner. Swings and roundabouts, innit? My biggest memory of the China stage is the music, which sounds like the soundtrack to a scene-setting montage from an erotic thriller set in Hong Kong. Honestly, the music in the game isn't bad at all - a little obvious in terms of how it's themed to the stage and unlikely to break into your top ten, top one hundred or even top thousand videogame soundtracks ever, but listenable. I might even try to rip the map screen music at some point, it's rather nice.


It's uncle Stinky, with his head appropriately shaped like a cartoon turd, ready to fight his nephew to the un-death!


In this fight, you have to neutralize Stinky's bad breath attacks with your projectiles before using your shots to nudge him off the side of the tower. I thought this was going to be much more simple than it was, because Casper can bounce on those dragon-platforms at the side of the screen and for some reason he gains the ability to throw his ghostly spheres with rapid-fire action if his feet aren't touching the ground. The problem was, I kept bouncing too high and then falling to my death trying to get back on to Stinky's level. Did I mention that the controls in this game are bad? Because they really are, and they ruin what was already an uninteresting experience. It's like sitting down to eat a reheated steak slice from a petrol station because you couldn't go to a picnic and then finding half a cockroach in the gravy.


This stage is set in India. Casper finds himself once more staring at a huge pair of buttocks. For this to happen once is misfortune; for it to happen twice makes you wonder why Casper came to India in the first place. He actually says "I hope I see an elephant!" at the start of the stage, so, ah ha, here you go, kid. It kinda sucks to be Casper - he's dead, for starters, someone kidnapped all his friends because they were having too much fun, he lives with an abusive family and when all he wanted was to see an elephant he gets the ironic genie punishment of staring up an elephant's backside. He must have been a real dick when he was alive.


Now we're in Egypt. You know how videogame Egypt works. Pyramids, pharaohs, sand. The game reaches it's lowest ebb here with some even-more-frustrating-that-usual platforming, but other than that there's nothing here that you haven't seen previously. There is a camel, but it acts just like every other springy platform in the game except that it's alive and presumably feels pain. Unless Casper doesn't weigh anything because he's a ghost, in which case the camel just feels a terrible soul-sapping chill when Casper touches it.


At the top of the pyramid is a boss fight again Stretch, Casper's final uncle who is even less interesting that Fatso and Stinky. At least they had girth and odour as defining features, Stretch is just A Ghost. As for the battle, it's another one where you have to push the boss back, this time towards a sarcophagus, but to hamper your efforts Stretch is constantly throwing pumpkin bombs and bouncing rocks at Casper. It's not fun, there's no precision or flow to it, and the whole thing is a monumental pain in the arse made even more insufferable by Stretch's tendency to teleport behind you, leaving Casper to stand still in a safe spot doing nothing while Stretch attacks a target that isn't there.


To de-hypnotise a ghost, shove them into a pharaoh's coffin. I will have to remember that. Or knock them off the Great Wall of China, but be serious, which are you most likely to have to hand: the Great Wall of China or a pharaoh's coffin? Exactly.


Now that Casper's collected all three parts of the machine - a machine created by the game's villain that no one knows the purpose of, I should remind you - he can gather all the children around it and turn it on. I'm sure this will all work out for the best.


See? It all worked out for the best. Except for all those children who have just been ripped from their homes at Christmastime and forced onto a ghost's playground. It all worked out for Casper, then. He's having a great time, and now that Casper: Friends Around the World is over he can play with these kids for ever and ever and ever. I'll see you all nex... oh, hang on, there's more.


It turns out that if you collect every crystal on every stage you're given access to a secret level - the lost city of Atlantis. I probably should have realised something was amiss when I finished the game without ever encountering the main villain. It starts at about 18 minutes in on the video above, and having watched it I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by being unable to summon up the patience to go through the game again and collect 100 percent of the items, although the ghost of Poseidon looks pretty cool. The hidden stage gives you a chance to fight Kibosh and a slightly different ending, which reveals the shocking twist at the heart of Casper: Friends Around the World - it was the power of friendship that saved the day! And here I thought it was the power of staring at large backsides. Then Casper turns to the camera and says "you too can be a friendly ghost," a phrase that's difficult to take as anything other than Casper threatening to kill me so that our undying spirits can spend an eternity together.


As far as these "made for youngsters" games go, Casper: Friends Around the World is one of the best I've played, a statement akin to saying "today's kick in the testicles was much better than the baseball bat in the groin I usually get!" It's basic, it's slow, it's got horrible gloopy controls and it does absolutely nothing with the whole "being a ghost" premise, but it's also not insultingly easy, the music's not bad and there are multiple paths and even some replay value if you want to get to that secret level. I'm definitely not saying you should play it, but if you get kidnapped by some insane Saw-style maniac killer who forces you to chose between this and, say, Diva Starz: Mall Mania, I would take Casper every single time. Unless it's Muscular Casper. Stay away from me, Muscular Casper.


For a game that so prominently features ghosts, Casper: FATW is rather lacking in Halloweenosity thanks to a desire to educate (and possibly bore) rather than to scare, but I couldn't possibly give a game in which you play as a ghost any less than a 6, and it gets an extra point for featuring pumpkins not only as obstacles but also mid-stage checkpoint markers. A generous total of seven out of ten, then, but I'll have probably changed my mind about it by next week and I'll be wracked by guilt until next Halloween.

I think I might have mentioned this before, but I've never been impressed with the name "Dracula X," especially when it's part of a logo like this with non-standard spacing. It's too easy to read it as "Draculax," the number one vampire laxative. Not to worry though, because this game has three titles so you can pick whichever one tickles your fancy. The original Japanese name is Akumajou Dracula XX, while my favourite is the European title of Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss.


I don't know why they changed the name, but I'd guess it was probably to avoid problems with an existing property of the same name. What I do know is that Vampire's Kiss got a kickin' rad new logo ripped straight from the merchandise of a nonexistent Poison-eque glam-metal band. I just really like that logo, and I can't explain why. I also noticed that they went to the trouble of entirely redrawing the Castlevania logo. The Dracula X version was fine, guys, you're just making extra work for yourselves there.


As the intro fills us in on the usual Castlevania story of Dracula rising from the grave and a member of the heroic Belmont family setting out to defeat the Lord of Darkness, it's time for a little background on the game itself. In 1993, Konami released Dracula X : Chi no Rondo (Castlevania: Rondo of Blood) for the PC Engine CD, the game that bridged the gap between the "classic"Castlevania games and Symphony of the Night, its direct sequel. It featured excellent graphics, superb music, and with alternate routes and people to rescue it injected a tiny bit more plot into the usual Castlevania storylines of "kill Dracula" or, in Castlevania II's case "bring Dracula back to life so you can kill him properly". It's widely considered to be one of the best (if not the best) of the traditional Castlevania games, so naturally it was never released outside Japan. To remedy this, Konami tried to shoehorn the CD-based Rondo of Blood into a SNES cart, dropping features and rejigging stages, and the result was Castlevania: Dracula X. This game gets a lot of flak as a result, but while you could never say it's as good as Rondo of Blood it's still a good game in its own right.


The hero of Dracula X is Richter Belmont, latest holder of the fabled Vampire Killer whip and Chief Evil-Slayer (Vampiric Overlord Division). He's out to kill Dracula, of course... but this time it's personal, because Dracula's minions have abducted Richter's girlfriend Annette and Annette's younger sister (and future playable character) Maria. Why has Dracula kidnapped these young women? Because he's a dick, that's why. Okay, in Maria's case he might have some diabolical plans for her because she has the magical ability to command animals like a Disney princess, but in Annette's case I think he's just trying to piss Richter off. Well, mission accomplished on that front, Drac - Richter is here to take you down, but first he's got to get through this village you set on fire.


Well, it's definitely a Castlevania game: there's a man about to whip a skeleton in the face and everything. In term of controls, Richter is one step above his stiff-kneed progenitors from the NES Castlevania games but he's nowhere near as versatile as the "Metroidvania" heroes or even Simon from Super Castlevania IV. He can only whip straight forwards, for starters: no angled attacks or brandishing your whip and flopping it about in this one. Richter can perform a backflip of (let's be generous) limited usefulness by double-tapping jump, but aside from that it's mostly the same old Castlevania action. You jump, you whip, you collect hearts that power your sub-weapons, sub-weapons that cover the usual spread of daggers that travel straight forwards, holy water that spreads along the ground, axes that you throw upwards in an arc, stopwatches that freeze time for a while and the boomerang that definitely isn't a cross despite hurting vampires and being a cross.


Also featured prominently are staircases made of diagonally-arranged blocks, because it just wouldn't be a Castlevania game without them. The peasants of Transylvania are going to lose their minds the first time they see a spiral staircase.
So far, the first stage is exactly what you'd expect from a Castlevania game - kill some monsters, damage some wall-mounted candles, enjoy the music - although it does feel both slightly easier and a little more... bare than you might expect. Then there's a brief area populated by Medusa Heads, the floating gorgon heads that have caused so many pit-based Castlevania deaths, and it's hard not to take their appearance as the game saying "don't get too cocky, bucko. There'll be plenty more of these later".


Then suddenly you're being chased by an enormous bull-goat-thing, and on your first attempt this dramatic change of pace can be very disorientating. Unlike most Castlevania games, the stages in Dracula X aren't timed and in general the game lends itself to a more patient style of play, but now Richter has to get a move on and jump over these holes, holes that I found surprisingly difficult to get across due to the pressure of being chased by Satan's livestock and not yet quite having a handle on how far Richter can jump. On the plus side, I got a much clearer view of the lovely Mode 7 fire effect in the background. It's a fantastic visual, it really sets this stage apart from the more common Castlevania bricks-n-crypts location and it also serves as a nice motivation to go and kill Dracula. In these earlier Castlevanias it's rare that you actually see something evil Dracula has done - he mostly spends his time up in his tower, waiting for his latest whip enema - but this time he's razed a village full of innocent people, and you're going to be the one that makes him pay for it.


The fire's turned a spooky shade of blue, like a demonic British Gas advert, and that means it's time for the game's first boss fight. It's a duel to the death with Cerberus, which is appropriate given that he's the guardian to hell and all.
Cerberus fights in the manner of a playful puppy, albeit one that can vomit up fireballs, romping around the screen and trying to bump into Richter as you knock the devil dog back with your whip. It's a nice, simple introduction to the boss battles of the game, but that's no reason not to go hog-wild with the power that sets Richter aside from his Belmont ancestors - the Item Crash.


Pictured above: more flying crosses than an explosion at a seminary, all of them whirling around the screen and damaging the boss while Richter hovers, invincible, in the centre of the action. Pressing X activates the Item Crash, (assuming you have enough hearts,) a powerful technique summoned from whatever sub-weapon you're holding. If you've played Symphony of the Night, you'll probably be familiar with Hydro Storm, the Holy Water's Item Crash. Sadly, in this game Richter does not shout "Hydro Storm!" whenever he uses it. Disappointing, I know, but the raw power of the cross' Item Crash crash is enough to both keep my spirits up and annihilate poor Cerberus. On to stage two, then.


The first part of stage two highlights Dracula's slapdash approach to property maintenance, as Richter must hop his way across the crumbling masonry of Castlevania's front bridge while under constant attack from mermen. Just looking at this screenshot is aggravating, because I can see that I messed up - Richter's jump is going to carry him into that first merman, the knockback will send him plummeting to his doom and I must suffer the ignominy of a death at the flippers of a creature with all the intelligence of a ham sandwich. I know swimming around and bumping into the occasional vampire slayer doesn't require the most energetic of synapses, but just look at those gormless faces. They don't have a clue what's going on. It's a good job they have gills, they'd probably forget to breathe otherwise.


Now we're in the castle courtyard, where the reanimated skeleton of Donkey Kong tried to express his incoherent rage by throwing a barrel at Richter. I guess kidnapping Mario's girlfriend was a grave enough sin for him to be condemned to an eternity of servitude in a vampire's thrall.


This stage is also the first place that you meet the spear knights. They're knights with spears, and they know how to use those spears - with extreme aggression and wilful dickery, their misanthropy presumably brought about by being the only group of Dracula's minions that have to wear fuschia-and-blue armour recycled from 90's shell suits. They can block your sub-weapons by spinning their spears, they can attack with huge swings that send you flying across the level, and the second you lose concentration one of them will stab you from a higher platform. I hate the spear knights. If you play this game, you will hate the spear knights too. The good news? They appear in more stages than any other enemy in the game, unless you count bottomless pits at enemies.


Speaking of enemies, here's stage two's boss. It's... a bat. A very large bat, granted, and it has the unusual power to split into a flapping conga line of smaller bats when whipped, but on the whole it's difficult to get excited about a giant bat when I've already faced Cerberus and Behemoth the rampaging bull-goat. Okay, so I ran away from Behemoth, but I didn't have any choice. To beat the bat, whip its giant form as quickly as possible and then get ready to move to a safe spot when the small bats appear. Item Crashing will help, but I suspect you've figured that out already.


Stage three begins with a more vertical gameplay experience, as Richter platforms his way up a deep pit while being attacked from all sides by Medusa Heads, fire-breathing dragon skulls and gravity. This area provides a good example of what I meant when I said Dracula X requires a more patient style of play - in the earlier Castlevanias, the first and third games especially, there was a certain rhythm to the game that you naturally fell into as you played, with the stages being so perfectly crafted that the best way to clear them was to always be moving forwards. This isn't the case in a lot of Dracula X's stages, where the lack of a time limit and non-regenerating enemies means that you can take more time planning your route and clearing the monsters away as safely as possible.


I admit I could have probably beaten these spear knights in the usual whip-centric manner, but summoning a deluge of unavoidable and unblockable holy water provides a level of personal satisfaction that cannot be matched. You can't stab rain, you insufferable bastards.


Here's a top Castlevania tip for you: always take a moment to whip any dead ends you come across. Sometimes these walls crumble away to reveal items hidden inside, because Dracula apparently drank the blood of a squirrel at some point and it has forever altered his attitude to storage. I'd love to believe that smashing up the castle walls to find items is a piece of vampire-hunting knowledge that has been passed down from Belmont to Belmont over the ages, culminating in Richter's dad sitting his son on his knee and saying "now, make sure you bash open the plasterwork because Dracula is the kind of weirdo who hides cooked joints of meat in his crawlspaces."


I know he's the dark lord of all evil who holds dominion even over death itself, but Dracula X's incarnation of Dracula seems like even more of a prick than usual, ordering his monster hordes to position themselves in the most infuriating places imaginable and doing away with the floor in large swathes of his castle. Those two things have come together in diabolical harmony during this section, where Richter must jump across these narrow pillars, where a single hit from an enemy will almost certainly make him fall. It was difficult, until I reached the part where Dracula (metaphorically) said "eat me, Belmont" and had a floor-to-ceiling column of undead dragon skulls installed to block Richter's path. Now you're just being childish, Vlad.
This would be a good time to bring up a facet of Dracula X's gameplay that wasn't a huge part of the earlier games, and that's conserving hearts. Your Item Crash attack is so useful against bosses that you'll want to have as many hearts as possible saved up to use in the end-of-stage battles, which means you end up having internal debates about whether to use them in the stages themselves, which adds a fun little balancing act into the game.


On the other side of the columns, I found a key. A mysterious and very important key that Richter needs to hang on to, which is unfortunate because it replaces your sub-weapon. That's right, no more ranged attacks - you can see I've reluctantly chucked the cross I was previously using on the ground - and no more Item Crashes. All right, so that's not strictly true: you can still use the Item Crash when you have the key, and in a rather wonderful little touch Richter flies up into the air like usual... but nothing happens, and he falls back down as a question mark appears over his head. However, this isn't as useless as it first seems, because the key's Item Crash costs no hearts to use and you're still temporarily invincible when you activate it. It's not a sure-fire method of survival by any means, but there were a few occasions when I managed to avoid taking damage by jumping into the air with a key in my hand and bellowing like a maniac, and very satisfying it was too. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, that's the Belmont family motto, and also how they support themselves financially during the many years that Dracula isn't active.


Key powers, don't fail me now! This stage's boss is Dullahan, the headless knight familiar from a great many videogames, and he's attacking by making rocks fall from the ceiling and thus further reinforcing my feeling that I'd die fifty percent less in Castlevania games if Dracula would just get a builder in to take a look at his brickwork, maybe get a bit of repointing done or something.
This fight's mostly about getting your distances right - Richter's whip has just enough reach to hurt the boss if you stand at the tip of his lance, so you need to get your hit in and then retreat to a safe distance before Dullahan shoots icicles along the ground at you or goes down the old-fashioned route of stabbing you with his lance.


Stage four takes place deep underground, starting with the subterranean jail where Dracula has imprisoned... who, exactly? None of the possible answers I can come up with are particularly satisfying - they're either human captives, in which case Richter has completely ignored their suffering and left them to rot while knowing full well that Castlevania has a tendency to collapse or explode when Dracula is defeated, or they're monsters. Why would Dracula imprison monsters? He'd either have them out there on Belmont-fighting duty, or he would have them killed because I can't imagine there are any crimes against Dracula for which the punishment is not immediate execution. Eventually I settled on a different explanation: these cells are purely for decoration, for ambience. As the Prince of Darkness, Dracula has certain standards to uphold, and you have to have the tortured moans of the living reach a certain decibel level before you can get the vampire version of a Michelin star.


While riding around on this ore-hauling pulley system - Dracula's fabulous wealth comes from his large-scale mining operations, it seems - I noticed a door. I still have the key, which is something of a miracle in itself because if you lose a life, you lose the key, the mysteries of what's behind this door forever hidden from you unless you go back and fetch it because this is a game dripping with contempt for the player. Well, screw you, Dracula X; I managed to hang on to the key and now I'm going to open that door.


Oh look, Dracula does have some human captives after all - it's Maria, the younger sister of Richter's girlfriend Annette. Maria later grows up to appear in Symphony of the Night, where she enters Castlevania once again to search for Richter, who has been brainwashed by Dracula and has gained the power of super-awesome voice acting in the process. Richter learns from Maria that Annette is being held somewhere else in the castle, and that's all he needs to hear - once he's learned that titbit he's straight back out the door to resume his mission, taking the valiant and heroic decision to leave the little girl behind in the depths of the most evil place in all the world. Good work, Richter. I was having trouble fighting off the kamikaze ghosts that congregate around Maria's cell and I'm playing as a trained vanquisher of the undead, but I'm sure the pre-teen who has already been kidnapped by Dracula's minions once will have no trouble escaping from this trap-filled, monster-infested, labyrinthine castle.


After "rescuing" Maria, I made my way through a short section of cave before I reached another door, and that door led to the next stage. No boss to fight or anything! I mean, I'm terrible at Castlevania, but even I couldn't classify "unlocking a door" as a boss fight. So, the key finally proves its worth - it meant there was one less boss for me to get my backside kicked by, and in a very, very distant second place it allowed me to free Maria. Well, onward to stage 5, then. Sorry, stage 5'. Hmm...


It's a little-known fact that Dracula's castle was built directly on top of the ruins of Atlantis. I know the land-locked nature of Transylvania might make that fact seem like bullshit, but look at this unassailable archaeological evidence. What are you, some kind of science-denier? You disgust me.


One of Richter's most famous character traits is his boundless, child-like curiosity, and having him whip any part of the stage that looked even slightly out-of-place paid off when destroying this leak caused the water to drain away, giving me access to the area below. I am unjustifiably pleased with myself for figuring this out. I didn't even need to look at a guide. My parents are very proud.


Waiting below (and looking surprisingly dry, considering) is Annette. "Richter, my love!" she says "you're great and everything, but Dracula grows more powerful by the moment so forget about me and get a shift on!" I may have paraphrased that slightly, but the main point still stands: Richter has rescued the two hostages and now he can make a beeline straight for Dracula. I do hope he's in his throne room, because that's where Richer is heading, but I've already seen that Konami really have it out for the player in this particular Castlevania adventure so I wouldn't be too shocked if Dracula was actually sitting in a bar in the next village, using his evil powers to clairvoyantly spy on Richter as he bumbles aimlessly around the castle.


The boss of this watery stage is an appropriately aquatic sea monster with a body made of several pieces so loosely connected that I wonder whether they've had a falling out recently and they're only grudgingly hanging around together because Richter showed up. If that's the case, they show an admirable amount of professionalism in kicking my arse, and aside from the final battle this is by far the boss I had the most trouble with. It's fast, it covers a lot of the screen and worst of all I could never quite seem to whip it in the head - this is the point in the game when I really started missing Super Castlevania IV's multi-directional whip. It's still an enjoyable fight, though, with lots of delicate footwork required and a good feeling of tension. On my first time through, me and Nessie here were locked in a mortal struggle, the result balanced on a knife-edge until I finally managed to land the killing blow with a mere sliver of my own health bar remaining. Then the boss flew up into the air as a tornado and killed me after it had died. Oh, didn't I mention that all the bosses in this game have one final attack that they pull out once you've depleted their health in an effort to catch you off guard? Because they do, and with this twist Dracula X goes from "hard" to "mean" in my book. It's the difference between a strict but ultimately well-meaning sports coach and that big kid from the estate who gobs in your hair every time he sees you because his parents don't love him.


Stage six is the traditional Castlevania clock tower stage, the usual mix of Medusa Heads and jumping between platforms made from moving gears. There is a hell of a lot of clockwork in this tower, far more than a single clock needs. His pride would never allow him to admit it, but Dracula has clearly fallen prey to some cowboy builders here, a bunch of scammers who took advantage of his post-coffin-nap befuddlement as though he was the kind of elderly grandmother you hear about on Watchdog. "Oh, yeah, you've got to have six storeys packed with nothing but machinery. Sorry, pal, but that's just how these things work. I know it's not cheap, but can you really put a price on the peace of mind that comes from always knowing what time it is? You're a vampire, you can't afford to be caught out by the sunrise. Now, if you just sign here, we can get to work."


Lurking at the top of the clock tower is Death, both the anthropomorphic personification of man's inescapable mortality and the state of losing all your health and dying. I've never really thought about it before, but I suppose it makes sense that Death's generally found near the clock tower, what with him being the Ultimate Timekeeper and all.
As ever, Death's favourite party trick is to summon flying sickles to do most of his soul-reaping for him, the lazy git, but he also flies into Richter every now and then and his mere touch causes Richter to become cursed. More cursed that having to fight his way through Dracula's castle every few days, I mean - he moves around really slowly, not a helpful state when you're trying to avoid the previously-mentioned sickle blizzard. Still, I had a much easier time than I anticipated, but this being Death he has a nasty trick up his voluminous sleeve.


With one health bar whipped away, Death drops to the ground and switches to what I've come to think of as his kung-fu mode, moving faster, rolling around in the form of a difficult-to-avoid scythe ball and enjoying the advantage given to him by the long reach of his weapon. Honestly, if I was still holding the key it could have been a real problem, but I wasn't. I had the cross, I had the hearts, I had a victory through the power of the Item Crash that might have felt a little cheap if I hadn't been fighting, you know, Death himself. Alternate names for Death include Mr. Sickles or Dracula's Bitch, but not to his face.


The final stage isn't much of a stage at all, a shorter-than-usual set of rooms that starts with the glorious image of Richter climbing the stairs to Dracula's sanctum with the castle in the distance below him and ends with this annoying section where spear knights poke at you while you try to ride these floating platforms and collect plenty of hearts for the final encounter. You can see Richter is crouching in the screenshot above, and crouching can play a major part in a successful trip through Dracula X because if you're crouching when you get hit you aren't knocked back. Quick switches to a ducking stance saved me many times on my various playthroughs of this game - sure I took damage, but as we all know Dracula likes to stash food in his drywall and it beats the instant death of falling down a hole.
Now, Dracula is waiting just beyond this area, but before Richter faces him it's time for me to rewind a little and show you what could have been, because Dracula X has a few alternate paths through the game. Remember back in stage three, when Richter had to jump from pillar to pillar and break through the walls of dragon skulls that blocked his path? Well, if you're not the super-genius videogame expert that I am, you might have fallen off those pillars, only to find that the fall isn't fatal and instead it leads to an alternate stage four.


This slightly generic cave stage is probably the least interesting area in the game, but that's your punishment for not making it across those pillars. I'm not saying it's bad, though - it's still a fun area, as almost all of Dracula X is, with the addition of movement-slowing slime pits and pleasingly gloopy mud-men to contend with. The slime pits also get a gold star for being the only part of the game where I got any use out of the backflip move. It would have been a damn shame if I'd gone through the whole adventure without getting to use a manoeuvre that cool. Used it in a practical way, I mean. I used it a ton in the first couple of stages, but I had to stop because constantly backflipping into skeletons wasn't getting me very far.
No stage in this game can be disappointing anyway, not when you hear the music: the Castlevania series is renowned for its excellent soundtracks, and this one is no exception. It's up there with the very best action game soundtrack the SNES has to offer, with the only disappointment being that both versions of stage 4 share the same track, but that's a minor quibble when it's as good as "Cemetery":


I love that pounding bass drum paired with the slightly twitchy strings. That's what a stress-induced heart attack should sound like, which is appropriate because I think this game is literally trying to kill me.


Dracula X also contains one of my very favourite versions of the Castlevania classic "Bloody Tears." That's really saying something, because there are more versions of Bloody Tears that most bands have unique songs and while I can't honestly say I've listened to every single one that is certainly not for lack of trying.


The boss of this alternate stage four is the the evil priest who brought Dracula back to life, and his name is Shaft. Yes, Shaft. If your response to hearing this name is juvenile sniggering or immediately singing Isaac Hayes' classic movie theme then congratulations, you're a human being.
Shaft is a bit like Death, and not just because they buy their clothes at the same tailor - he can curse Richter by touching him, and he also has two different forms, although they're pretty similar. Shaft the First summons skeleton minions that you can completely ignore by sticking to the raised platforms, while Shaft the Second attacks by gathering up a ring of tombstones to flatten Richter with, perhaps in an attempt to kill him through sheer irony. Shaft was another boss that managed to kill me after he died, thanks to his ability to explode upon breathing his last like a suicide bomber fuelled by pure spite.


This is the other stage five, and it's got Flea Men. Lots and lots of Flea Men, deposited on your path (or on your head, if you're unlucky) by a squadron of highly-trained bats. Not as good as the evil geese that some Flea Men ride in Symphony of the Night, but still an impressive display of Dracula's innate abilities as an animal trainer.


There's also this area that looks like the inside of a cruise ship. Castlevania is decorated to what an estate agent would call an eclectic taste, but I'm more interested in these sword-wielding knights. I'm very familiar with them from, yes, Symphony of the Night, because a ton of sprites from Dracula X / Rondo of Blood were recycled for that game. The problem was that I couldn't get out of the Symphony mindset when I was fighting them, which led to me standing too close to them and them trying to use the backdash move when they attacked. Richter cannot backdash. He can't forward dash, for that matter, He's an unhurried sort of guy, as Belmonts tend to be, but that didn't help me when Sir Chopsalot and his ridiculously oversized shoulder pads were cleaving me in twain.


Here's a suitably Halloween-y boss - it's a werewolf, and he knows kung-fu. I have noticed that werewolves possessing martial arts skills is something of a theme in Japanese games - this werewolf, the wolf mode in Altered Beast and Talbain from Darkstalkers all spring to mind, and I have no idea why this would be besides the tenuous link between the graceful savagery of a wolf and the graceful savagery of a kung fu movie.
This boss is certainly graceful, bounding around the screen like, well, a dog, except a dog that's trying to kick your face off. My strategy for victory was to run away like a coward until the werewolf tried his extremely short-ranged punch combo and then whip him a few times. It worked out okay.


When defeated, the werewolf returns to his human form. Is it just me, or does he look really pleased about it? There's definitely some joy in his expression, probably because he has yet to realise that he's naked and his body looks like a wad of half-chewed beef jerky.


That's the alternate stages covered - but wait, there's more! If you go left at the end of stage four instead of heading through the second door, towards Annette, you'll come face-to-face with this minotaur. Face-to-groin, anyway, he's a big lad. His most dangerous attack is throwing a handful of rocks at Richter, but the way he does it makes it seem like the minotaur is going for the old "throw sand in their eyes" trick and he forgot that Richter isn't twelve feet tall and unnaturally muscular.


There's even a second boss for stage six - if you didn't rescue both Maria and Annette, which you won't have unless you managed to keep hold of the key and took that specific route, then Death is replaced by Carmilla, a vampire who flies around on a huge skull that shoots its eyeballs at you, making it objectively the coolest thing in the game and taking top spot on the list of things I would consider getting tattooed onto my tender, delicate skin. I'd get it inked on the palm of my hand so that whenever I was feeling down I could simply uncurl my fist and be instantly reinvigorated by gazing into those big googly eyes.
On an unrelated note, I've found that every time I see a clock in a videogame now I subconsciously check to see whether the designers drew it with "IV" or "IIII" for the number four. That's enough nonsense about clock face aesthetics, though - whichever route you take through Dracula X, you will eventually have to take on Dracula himself, and here he is!


Good ol' predictable Dracula. Like Medusa Heads being annoying and the music being fantastic, Dracula's first attack pattern is a Castlevania staple, and Dracula X is no different: Dracula teleports to a location, launches fireballs from inside his cape like pyromaniacal stage magician, and then disappears in a cloud of smoke, repeating the process until either the player is dead or he's been whipped enough times to drain his health bar. Only Dracula's head is vulnerable, and even then only during the short spell when he's fully materialised.
Dracula X brings its own unique twist to this formula, and Dracula's final "fuck you" to the player is to remove most of the floor, forcing you to fight him atop a series of small pillars. This is an alarmingly effective piece of strategy from Dracula, hinting at a frankly terrifying future for the Belmont clan in which their sworn enemy knows what the hell he's doing in term of castle defence, and it turns this battle into an extremely tense affair where the slightest mistake, one mis-timed jump or undodged fireball, will mean immediate death. On your side are the game's tight and consistent controls, so if you mess it up you have no-one to blame but yourself. This form of Dracula isn't as deadly as it seems at first - it's still very difficult, definitely fluttering around the line between challenging and frustrating, but with patience and practise you can make it through without tearing too much of your hair out.


Then Dracula transforms into a giant blue devil. It's a shame he had to ruin the lovely purple tuxedo he was wearing earlier to accommodate this change, isn't it? That suit can't have been cheap, you can't just buy formal trousers with an 80 inch leg at Primark.
Anyway, Satancula. He's big, and that's his primary weapon. He takes up so much space that it's hard to keep away from him, but even more effective is his psychological mass: once he transforms, you know he's going to be much more of a challenge than he was before, and you get scared of him. You panic, you fluff a jump and bang, that's it. Even once you've gotten over that, this is still a ridiculously difficult fight full of big projectiles and beefy devil collisions which, if I'm perfectly honest, ruins the end of the game a little for me. It doesn't feel fair, which means it doesn't feel interesting, especially because the only way I managed to defeat Dracula was to make sure I had plenty of hearts and just use Item Crashes over and over again, and that method is just a bit boring.


Oh well; whatever means he used, Richter has sent Dracula back into temporary hibernation - I mentioned this in the original Castlevania article, but the "Killer" part of the Vampire Killer's name is woefully inaccurate - and he even saved the kidnapped women. Now all he has to do to finish the game is collect the final orb that the boss dropped. It's on a different pillar, making this one of the most nerve-wracking jumps I've ever had to make in a videogame. Can you imagine if you beat Dracula and then fell down the hole? Can you imagine if you did that and it was your last life? It doesn't bear thinking about, although Dracula X generously provides a password system so at least you wouldn't have to start the whole game again.


Richter gave Dracula time to dress himself and fix his hair before the ending cutscene. How chivalrous of him. The ending also reveals that Dracula is still insisting on his throne being right next to the huge windows that let in the very first rays of the morning sun, which is like you or I decorating our bedroom with a large vat of sulphuric acid that dumps its contents into the room once a day.


Richter and Annette embrace as Maria peeks at them from between her fingers and what the hell is going on with Maria's hair? She looks like her head's being shoved through Ferrero Rocher wrapper, or she's dressed up a a mechanical sunflower. Very odd. This picture changes to reflect whether you saved Maria or Annette - if you rescue neither of them, you get a shot of Richter riding back to the village on his horse. I'd stick with the horse, Richter. At least Dracula's not going to kidnap it. As this picture's your only reward for saving both girls you might feel less inclined to bother, but don't forget that you won't get to fight Death if you don't, and really, what's the point of a Castlevania game if you don't get to kick Death right in his bonebag?


With that final thought, Castlevania: Dracula X is over and yes, it is an inferior, cut-down version of Rondo of Blood but that is almost irrelevant. It was certainly irrelevant at the time of the game's original release, when the idea of me owning a PC Engine CD and a £200 game was completely laughable, and it's still irrelevant now because it's a good game. It looks great, it sounds great and it plays great, and most of all it has a deep, dense feeling of Castlevania-ness attached to it. Before this, the Castlevania games I had been playing recently were the later, Metroidvania-style offerings and you can certainly make an argument that those games are somewhat divorced from their forebears, but Dracula X is classic Castlevania through-and-through. It can be ferociously difficult, it definitely makes no effort to give the player a gentle ride, but for precision action gameplay with a wonderful atmosphere it's definitely recommended. The final boss isn't much fun and there are a few too many spear knights, but those are minor quibbles: Halloween and Castlevania go together perfectly, so if you're looking for a seasonal game to play tonight then give Dracula X the love it deserves.


It's a ten out of ten on this year's final VGJunk Halloween-O-Meter rating, and of course it is - Castlevania games are essentially the benchmark by which I set the ten-out-of-ten rating in the first place, so much so that I can forgive them for containing zero pumpkins. I fought the grim reaper, a necromancer threw gravestones at me, there was organ music and the whole thing took place in Transylvania: if I can't give that ten out of ten, then what can I?
Sadly, that's the end of the 2014 VGJunk Halloween Spectacular, but it's been a good one! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it, and thank you for reading in the first place. Normal service will be resumed soon, and the Spooktacular will return for the 2015 Halloween season. It's only eleven months away. I can't wait.

Our heroes are trapped in an alley by gun-toting cops, so I guess this one is over before it's even started. God bless you, Tiny Headed Italian Shirt Man and your Four Fiesty Friends. Many ballads will be sung to honour the time you tried to take on the police with your baseball bats but they had shotguns, ballads with titles like Well, That Could Have Gone Better and What The Hell Were You Wearing?


That title screen must be set in the distant future, because the characters of Power Balls are still alive and well for the duration of the game. They're a new group known as the "Fraggers," presumably brought together by their love of Quake deathmatches, and they're spreading panic through the streets of New York with their powerful balls. Or something, I kinda lost interest. The Fraggers are using Power Ball to enlarge their predominance without the need for expensive creams or untested pills bought from an online Chinese pharmacy, so let's meet these tough street warrior before the action begins and they get their predominance all over me.


Here's Max, and he's the leader. I say this not just because he's the first character on the select screen or because he was in the centre of the title screen's group shot, but because all his stats are listed as "medium" and we all know that there's no more certain route to becoming a leader of your fellow men than by being completely average in all regards.
Max is wearing a stupid hat. It's so stupid that it's defying my attempts to say something about it beyond "it's really stupid." Max is also carrying a plank of wood, and he has a fried egg tucked into the top of each shoe. Max has a lot of problems.


The usual speedy-but-weak female character is next: her name is Carrie, and she's bad at wearing shirts. Oh no, the zip on her wetsuit broke just before the photoshoot! Luckily her nipples are located on the very outer edges of her breasts, otherwise this game would have been unsuitable for children. Nice shorts, though - they fit in nicely with Carrie's theme, which is "punk baywacht."Baywatch, I presume? I don't think she's an actual lifeguard or anything - Dr. Martens are not the ideal footwear for aquatic rescues - so it's purely to satisfy Carrie's aesthetic sensibilities. We had cyberpunk, we had steampunk, now we've got Hasselhoffpunk.


This is I.D. Woo Dop, a name that makes so little sense that I had to read it about fifteen times before I was ready to write it down. That first I is clearly a backwards J, though, right? So maybe it's supposed to be D.J. Doo Wop and the artist in charge of the drawing this text went especially hard on the vino the night before. Woo Dop's open-fronted trousers are challenging Max's hat for the title of Power Balls' Worst Article of Clothing - a hotly contested category - but the real star of this image is the dog at the bottom of the screen that's taking a leak. Thanks, Playmark. Nothing says "gritty street action" like a dog pissing all over the character select screen.


This game has two female characters, which is something of a surprise, and Mei Lynn here is Asian so Power Balls at least made some effort towards diversity in its line-up. It's not the most enlightened take on racial or gender issues - Woo Dop is skirting some uncomfortable territory and Carrie is, well, you saw her shirt - but not everyone is a white guy with stubble, I suppose.
As for Mei Lynn herself, she is shockingly not a super-fast character, but she can jump with the best of them and she's wearing some extremely sensible hiking boots. Just look at her, power-walking her way to a healthier body and a happier future, breadsticks in hand for when she needs a quick snack.


Finally there's Vasquez the bouncer, so called because he looks like he'd bounce if he fell over. He's got the massive cross necklace of a Catholic cardinal and the hunk of vaguely bat-shaped wood you'd expect to see a fantasy giant squashing peasants with, his name / logo is carved from Swiss cheese and I think he's going to end up being my favourite. I started with Mei Lynn, however, because I accidentally moved the joystick back towards her when I was choosing my Fragger.
So, what kind of sport is Power Balls about? The characters are holding loose approximations of baseball bats, so some kind of Ghetto Rounders or something? Rather than performing messy and frankly dangerous drive-bys on rival gangs, the Fraggers challenge them to winner-takes-all baseball games, that kind of thing?


No, Power Balls is an Breakout clone. You bat the ball from left to right instead of bottom to top, and the blocks are replaced with... stuff, but it's essentially the same game. Your character bats the ball back and forth against the objects until everything on the screen is destroyed, and if you manage that you can move on to the next stage to do it all against with a differently-arranged pile of garbage. If you miss the ball and it goes past you, you lose a life. I have no idea why that would be the case. Maybe the Fraggers are so dirt-poor that they could only afford a very limited number of tennis balls and losing one of them, be it down the back of the sofa or off this pier you're wrecking, is punished by a thorough kicking from your fellow gang members.


The most immediately noticeable difference between Power Balls and Breakout, Arkanoid, et al, is that you have to press a button to hit the ball back and you have two buttons to choose from. One hits the ball at a downwards angle, and the other hits the ball at an upwards angle, so you have a little more choice than usual over where you're aiming the ball. The goal is still the same as in every block-breaking game, though: try to get the ball in behind the blocks - suitcases, wooden crates and those red things that I think are supposed to be holdalls in this case - so that it bounces around in there for maximum damage while you patiently wait for it to pop back out so you can hit it again. Some of the stages have a slightly different twist in that there's a bomb hidden in one of the items and hitting it will automatically clear the stage, but mostly it's a matter of smashing every single item in sight.


Just look how exciting it is, too! So many oil drums, it's like a side-scrolling beat-em-up over here! Man, I wish I was playing a side-scrolling beat-em-up instead of trying to destroy an outhouse by whacking a tennis ball against it. And where is my ball? Oh, right, that pelican ate it. He's about to spit it out again, and it will hit that oil drum and bounce away in a random direction. Is the pelican in a gang? Is he defending his turf from Mei Lynn's attempt to enlarge her predominance all over this pier? I have no answers to these questions. Only the pelican knowns, and he's not saying anything (because he's got a tennis ball in his mouth).


Every fifth stage is a boss battle, where your chosen Fragger must overcome the leader of this particular area. The first boss is a huge naked man who launches hadoukens at the player. Okay, that's not quite true - the boss isn't naked, he's wearing little pink panties. The part about the fireballs is true, however, and that's a problem because they'll kill you instantly if they touch you. They're easy enough to avoid on their own, but if your ball's going off the screen in a spot that's also having fireballs launched at it then tough, you're losing a life and there's nothing you can do about. That's always a fun and totally not frustrating way for a videogame to work, uh-huh.
Speaking of how this game works, between the range of characters with different stats, the gang warfare theme, the comically oversized muscle-boss and the preponderance of oil drums, it seems clear to me that Playmark really did want to make a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but realised that was too much like hard work and went for a ball-and-paddle knock-off instead.


There's an inter-stage bonus round where you can vandalise a subway car with a tennis ball instead of using marker pens or melting the backs of the seats with a lighter like everyone else. The only reward I ever seemed to get from the minigame was more useless points, so after the second round of public transit hooliganism I just let the ball disappear without making any effort to go after it. Consider it an expression of my civic pride.


"World" two is set in Chinatown, and thus is packed with all the familiar elements of Chinese culture: dragons, houseplants, enormous cauldrons filled with lava, that kind of thing. I bet that green cardboard box is filled with flimsy plastic bootleg toys based on big franchises, toys that have had their names altered to things like STRENGTH RANGERS and DARK NIGHT VIGILANCE MAN to keep the lawyers at bay.
I've switched to playing as Max now. His hat looks much less stupid from above, and as a bonus it completely obscures Max's teeny-tiny head. There's not much difference between the characters, if I'm honest: the most notable one is their speed, but even that doesn't factor in too much because every character is more than fast enough to catch the ball even if they have to dash right from one corner to the other.


Ignore the dragon peeking in at the top of the screen, and ignore the buzzsaw-looking things - they shoot your ball out in a random direction if you hit them - and just look at all those round objects. I have no clue what they're supposed to be, but they sure are round. Remember all those round blocks you destroyed in Arkanoid and Breakout? No, you don't, because they used flat blocks that allowed for predictable, consistent bouncing physics. Power Balls has none of that, managing to take this incredibly basic formula and cock it up like a young child trying to make their mother breakfast in bed but without the endearing charm. The ball ricochets off surfaces with no rhyme or reason, which is hardly surprising given the plethora of non-flat objects on each stage, but somewhat more surprising is that the half the time the ball travels through any given object, as though it grows tired of bouncing around at the back of the stage, thinks "screw this" and just becomes intangible for a while. You'd think the number one priority when programming a game like this would be to have solid things be solid all the goddamn time, but Playmark are rebels like that.


Here's a boss - his name is Chuang Tzu, and he comes equipped with deadly ninja throwing star action! Those throwing stars are wider than Max's torso, and Max is built like God stuffed two Schwarzeneggers into one sausage casing so those shurikens must be made from manhole covers. That would explain why they are so deadly, but everything is deadly to the Fraggers so it's a moot point.
Defeating Chuang Tzu requires the same level of skill and precision as defeating any boss in the game - the skill to keep hitting the ball and hoping it hurts the boss while not standing directly in line with them. Power Balls' combat is not complicated.


Now we've moved on to aggressively smashing thing in a filthy alley, which makes Power Balls the first alcoholic vagrant simulator I've ever played. It's Carrie's turn to get involved, and I regret giving her a chance; she's fast, but she's too fast and twitchy so you're constantly overshooting the ball. She also hits the ball with one of those Baywatch life-float things, which does at least provide some explanation for the wonky ball physics. It's going to be hard to make consistent strikes when you're using something shaped like an oversized hairclip as a bat.


Graffiti is something of a theme in Power Balls, the specific kind that was around at the time (at least as I remember it as a British kid in the Nineties) when graffiti was making in-roads into popular culture and "street art" was all over everything that marketing types wanted you to think was hip and young and way cool. We all had some kind of embarrassingly "street" t-shirt with a graffiti tag on it at some point in our childhoods, right?
There's some interesting artwork in this alley, not least the flayed two-headed dog that I think is the mark of a gang who really like the Silent Hill games. Then there's the picture of Max with the glowing devil eyes. At first I thought it said "MAD" underneath him, but now I look at it more closely I realise it says "ITALY," the red, green and write colour scheme not cluing me in until now. It makes sense, because Playmark were an Italian company. I think my favourite is the one that says "BAD CITY," because it shows a remarkable lack of passion - sure, this city is bad but it's not terrible or horrifying or anything. If I was reviewing it on a customer satisfaction card I'd score it four out of ten or the slightly frowny face.
Also in this alley: in the bottom-right corner of the screen, there's a man trying to kill our hero by shooting her with a gun. No messing around with tennis balls and flotation devices for that guy, to him gang warfare is deadly serious, providing further evidence that the Fraggers are in fact homeless people with severe mental health issues who have angered the local gangs with their citywide games of destruct-o-squash. That, or the gunman's just trying to protect his collection of briefcases and green wooden chairs.


The boss is a man with two guns. That's why he's the boss, you see. The poor guy just wants to stop Carrie smashing up the vintage sports car he's spent the last three years restoring, and while dual-wielding uzis might seem like overkill in this situation it's difficult to not have some sympathy for him.


Area four: more alleyways and more graffiti. STOP, it says on the floor, and while I really would love to stop playing this game I've kinda locked myself into it now. Power Balls gets just about every component of a block-breaking game wrong, with unpredictable physics, ropey collision detection on your character's swings and items that take far, far too long to break. I've been referring to it as a tennis ball mostly because it's yellow, but frankly it has about the same destructive power and the Fraggers would be much better served by walking over to the items and hitting them. Woo Dop here even has a baseball bat. You know what would be more efficient at breaking things than a tennis ball? A fucking baseball bat.
By the way, you see that picture of a Rasta on the far wall? It's alive, and it will swallow your ball and spit it back out if you hit it. Now we know what was in all those briefcases the Fraggers knocked open - powerful hallucinogens.


One weird thing about Power Balls is that many of the stages are much, much harder at the start than they are once you've knocked a few "bricks" away, which is pretty much the complete opposite of most block-breaking games. They're difficult because the play area is way too small, so half the time you start with a wall of obstacles right in front of you, which is obviously going to make it far harder to return the ball. The result is that half the time you fire one ball, miss the return and then have to wait as your character trudges off the screen and then walks back on before you can try again, extending an already tedious game to lengths far beyond what could be considered safe for human consumption. It's agonising, waiting for either things to break or to get back into the game. I don't think I've sighed so often or so hard at a game since I was a kid and some masochistic tendency was compelling me to play the NES version of Dragon's Lair.


Rastaman is the boss of this area, although he'll soon be due a name-change to Tetanusman if he keeps walking around this alley with no shoes on. Like all the bosses, Rastaman's strategy is to move up and down while shooting projectiles at you, so let's ignore him and focus on the fact that the car from The Dukes of Hazzard is parked here. You might notice that it's the same colour as the ball, and from there I'm sure you can figure out why this became my most hated segment of the game.
On the plus side, I had by this point figured out how to consistently use the power attacks - if you push right on the joystick just as you hit it, the ball will travel much faster, doing more damage to anything in its path at the cost of being harder to hit on the way back. There's almost a nice bit of risk-and-reward gameplay in there and it's the one piece of Power Balls' mechanics that isn't an abject failure, so I'll give Playmark some credit for that. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think power attacks might be the only way to damage the bosses - if you're using the regular shots, then the bosses take about as many hits to kill as you would expect in a real-world scenario of someone throwing a tennis ball at them.


The boss of area five is Mad Wolf. He looks like a weightlifting vampire in an anime wig. He does not look particularly mad. As for the wolf part - well, we'll get to that soon.


It's finally Vasquez's turn to break some things and yes, he is definitely my favourite. He's the most powerful, which means I can break things slightly faster and thus break free of Power Balls' miserable grasp a little sooner. Plus, his power attack is to just punch the ball back where it came from. This special technique will no doubt aid my in my mission to trash this Mexican restaurant decorated with a large picture of Che Guevara. Unlike the Rasta in the previous stage, Che will not... sorry, I'm going to have to bail out of that sentence because I can't think of a way to phrase it with saying "Che Guevara won't eat your balls" or "Che won't take your balls in his mouth."
Having faced such deadly foes as a man with a gun, a man with shurikens and a man with two guns, it is disheartening that I died so many times to flying pizza, thrown into the arena by the unseen chef at the top of the screen. Hang on, that's not pizza at all, it's gazpacho soup! The chef has heard one too many people telling the waiter to take it away and bring it back hot and he's snapped, doling out chilled bowls of rich, tomatoey vengeance.


Now, far be it from me to call Power Balls a liar, but the boss of this area isn't Mad Wolf. It's Lobo, DC Comic' interplanetary metalhead bounty hunter antihero. He has a motorcycle right there. He attacks by throwing chains. It's not subtle.


Just when I thought Power Balls couldn't get any more unlikeable, I reached the final stage and faced a battery of laser turrets. Knowing that I had infinite continues and that I would restart where I left of when I died, I abandoned all pretence of actually playing the game at this point and started half-heartedly whacking power shots around the field. It was a liberating experience, made slightly more enjoyable by the heavily-accented voice that slurs "Power balll" when you insert a coin.


Thankfully there's only one short stage of turrets before the final boss-  a battle to the death against New York city cop and possible latex fetishist (if his customised uniform is any indication) Sergeant Warfield. There's nothing new to say about the gameplay - I think I may have mentioned already that all the bosses are functionally identical - but I do have something to say about Sgt. Warfield's posture, and that is just bloody look at it. Even better, try getting your own body into that shape without falling over. He looks like he's forever lowering himself gingerly onto a toilet, but that didn't stop him gunning me down with alarming speed. Luckily, I had commitment, I had tenacity, I had unlimited credits, so in the end I won through.


Oh, what fun, another boss fight, this time against an ED-209 prototype that even OCP dismissed as being too crap. It has guns. Everyone has guns, except the Fraggers. They have tennis balls, and large hospital bills from the many, many times they have been shot. Okay, enough of this, let's blow up the boss and enjoy the no-doubt action-packed ending sequence. Maybe it will answer all the questions I have about Power Balls, like "why?" and, erm... nope, "why?" is the only question I have about this.


The Fraggers return to their home. Their home is a decrepit, rat-infested abandoned building. Fighting your way through the city until you control all gang-related activities is not how you make the big bucks, apparently. Vasquez looks more like a pirate than a street thug, Mei Lynn knees Max in the groin as part of a fun game they like to play and my blood momentarily runs cold as I read the sentence "your initiation is almost complete" during the text crawl, thinking it might mean there was a second loop or something. Thankfully, I'm fairly certain this is it, and as I'm reminded that "the street warrior's fights are endlesses" I can reflect on Power Balls. That's a shame, because I'd much rather forget all about it.


This is a really bad game that takes a simple concept and mangles it completely. There are one or two half-decent ideas, but playing through Power Balls is an exercise in relentless tedium compounded by ugly graphics, a high and annoyingly unfair difficulty level and a soundtrack with only one track for every stage in the game. Its slap bass samples will haunt me for the rest of my days. In short, Power Balls could possibly be a useful tool when showing people how games that seem extremely simple are in fact meticulously balanced, but as a gameplay experience? I think I'd rather spend the time throwing a ball against my bedroom wall. At least I won't have to hear a synthesised voice boo me if I mess up a catch.

The reason for the Castle of Deceit's name is revealed - far from being an actual fortified structure, it's a sandcastle someone's built atop a stack of old tractor tyres. That's definitely deceitful. You can't say "come over to my place, I live in a castle" and then take your date back to a pile of sand sprinkled over worn-out rubber.


Good lord, what a horrendous typeface. That's what I'd imagine the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man's handwriting would look like, only squashed down and pixellated. This text box is all the in-game information about Castle of Deceit's plot that you're going to get, and it's the usual stuff: evil is rising, scattered magical items can stop the evil, collect the items and save the day. Then it ends with the rather curt order to "BEGIN NOW." I'm doing it, okay? Geez, there's no need to be rude about it.
There's apparently a bit more backstory in the games manual, revealing that the main character's name is Cebo, who must defeat the living hallucinations of the once-powerful mystic Phfax. Nice to see that Castle of Deceit's creators used the classic fantasy fiction method of naming characters by dropping a sack of nails onto a keyboard, although for that true sword-and-sorcery flavour they should have added in a few unnecessary hyphens and apostrophes. Ce-Bo and Ph'fax would have been much better, don't you think?


Wow. Cebo the wizard is not quite the imposing master of the arcane arts that I was hoping he would be. If it wasn't for the fact he can shoot a sparkly little projectile out of his wand I wouldn't believe he was a wizard at all and not just some unfortunate child on his way to a costume party who was press-ganged into destroying the forces of evil, forces such as those terrifying, blood-curdling floating doilys. But Cebo can launch magical bolts, and he can jump, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the core gameplay of Castle of Deceit - it's a platform-hopping, monster-zapping adventure, with added key-collecting and door-opening bits.


It's all very straightforward. Don't fall down pits, because Cebo only knows one spell and it sure as hell ain't "levitate," pick up the keys and move through doors until you reach the boss. There are plenty of enemies about, too, and they represent Castle of Deceit's biggest departure from normal NES action-platforming tropes because some of them dodge your attacks. It sounds ludicrous to be surprised by bad guys trying to not get killed, but think about it: in all the famous NES action franchises - Super Mario, Mega Man, Castlevania and so on - the enemies make no attempts at self-preservation. They either follow set patterns or make a bee-line for the hero. Medusa Heads don't fly around Simon Belmont's whip, Goomba's don't dodge to the side when they see Mario's boot hurtling out of the sky. The only enemy with this kind of behaviour that springs to mind is Red Arremer from Ghosts n' Goblins, so there's a neat encapsulation of Castle of Deceit's combat for you - imagine a version of Ghosts 'n Goblins where Red Arremers make up 60% of the enemy troops.


Sometimes you can use the enemy's desire to not be murdered to your advantage, like in the case of these flying eyeballs. They move vertically through the platforms and if you try to shoot them they'll zip out of the way, but if you jump up and fire above them they'll flee far enough downwards that you can make your way past. Had this idea been fleshed out a little more, with Cebo using his magic to corral monsters into safer areas rather than having to kill them, it could have made for an interesting twist on the genre, but sadly while these opportunities for spook wranglin' do exist they're few and far between, and Castle of Deceit spends a lot of it's time trying to kill Cebo with floods of enemies that can pass straight through walls and floors.


The stages in this game aren't big, and this first one is only a few screens across (although you do have to go from one end to the other and back again) so it's not long before you encounter boss number one: a bug. A flying bug that attacks by either firing paisley swirls or, if it's feeling particularly sassy, tiny little skulls that must have been harvested from the faerie folk of the forest. The big change in the boss fight is that Cebo is firing upwards / into the screen instead of horizontally, and a warm round of applause goes to Bunch Games for making Cebo fire constantly if you hold down the button, but there's not much to this or any other boss fight in the game: clamp your thumb down on the fire button and try to keep Cebo out of harm's way as much as possible. Don't linger at the bottom of the screen, however tempting that may seem, because the boss will fly down and crash into you. Once the bug has been dealt with, don't stop paying attention because any projectiles left on the screen will still be there after the boss has disappeared and it would be very upsetting to die during the small window of time between killing the boss and walking through the exit door, he said with an air of bitter knowledge learned through personal misery.


Stage two is the Castle of the Moons. An appropriate name, given that there are multiple moons in the background, but Bunch Games missed an opportunity to fully exploit their non-licensed status by not calling this stage Castle of the Bastard Moths. You can see three of them in the screenshot above, the horrible things whose blue-and-orange colour scheme is the visual equivalent of drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. The moths are an object lesson in why videogame enemies follow set patterns - because the alternative, to have them bumbling around the screen semi-randomly, is extremely annoying. The moths circle around Cebo in unknowable ecliptical orbits, and so defeating them doesn't feel like a triumph of the player's skill but a momentary confluence of luck, the situation made worse by Cebo not having a period of invincibility after being hit so the moths can park their revolting furry bodies right inside you to sap your health in moments.


At least the brevity of Castle of Deceit's stages means you never have to put up with any enemy for too long, and soon I'd reached the second boss. It's a mantis whose most recent sexual partner got a bit confused after mating and ate his body rather than his head. Thanks, Mrs. Mantis, not I've got a flying mantis head to deal with. No, that wasn't sarcastic: this guy is laughably easy to beat. I stood in the middle of the screen and held the fire button down until it died. I think I may have actually laughed.


Stage three is a little more involved, with Cebo having to make his down through the three levels of the stage by travelling through the various doors and avoiding the cobwebs that, for some bizarre reason, fire projectiles at you when you walk past. There's no indication given that the cobwebs might hurt you or even that they aren't just background scenery, which is nice. Real thoughtful game design, that. See, that time I was being sarcastic.
Despite the webs, stage three is redeemed by it's selection of wonderful enemies, including the always-welcome floating skulls, that thing on the right that looks like someone found an ugly red frog and replaced it's legs with cardboard tubes and the fabulous ghosts.


I mean, just look at this guy! Sorry I didn't know about you last month, buddy, I would have written an article about hooded spectres just to give you the exposure you deserve, and I don't mean exposure to an exorcism. His posture screams "I'm fed up of this shit," throwing his rot-blighted hands up in the air and wailing "oh my god, another baby wizard, Jesus Christ I've had enough of this!" Yeah, I've had enough of this too, my ghostly friend - only three stages in and already Castle of Deceit is wearing out its welcome against the grindstones of repetitive gameplay, frustrating enemies and horrendous sound effects that sound like R2-D2 licking a plug socket.


Still, I can't complain about having a giant skull as a boss, even if it is functionally identical to the previous two bosses. I'm shallow, I admit it. Dragonflies and mantis heads will elicit nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders from me, but skulls? I'm there, man, although my initial excitement has faded now that I've taken a closer look at the boss and realised that it's actually a white bicycle seat with a crude face carved into it. Credit to the developers, that does sound like the result of a mad old wizard's hallucinations.


Things go a bit off-piste here in the Castle of Winds, where multiple factors combine to drain any and all fun out of the game entirely. First and foremost are the eyeball ghosts, tenacious swine that follow Cebo around the level like a Super Mario Boo that's overcome its crippling shyness issues and take multiple hits to kill. That latter thing would be less of an issue if Cebo's projectiles weren't slow and travelled in a straight line instead of a wave pattern. The art of wizardry must really be in the gutter if Cebo is considered its best student.
Then there's the wind that gives the stage its name. Can you see any wind? No, you can't. While that might not be a problem in the real world, we're dealing with a videogame here and if something is going to fling my character across the screen or stop them from moving past a certain point I'd like to be able to see what that something is, please. Some jumps are affected by the wind, some aren't, and only trial, error and memorisation will allow you to figure out which are which, a process not helped by the constant presence of the ghosts, hovering around the player with the unnerving air of the village drug dealer waiting for his underage girlfriend at the school gates.


If wouldn't be so bad if Cebo's jumping physics were good, but - and it may shock you to learn this about an unlicensed NES platformer - they are not good. Rather than moving in a smooth arc, Cebo's jumps tend to take him upwards, move him horizontally and then have him drift back down to the ground. They're not consistent, either: sometimes he'll clip his stupid pointy hat on a ledge and cease all forward motion, but other times he'll float through the corners of the scenery like it's not there.
Watching Cebo's awkward, jerky motions and underanimated leaps, I realised I'd seen it before, only not in a videogame. Then it hit me: Castle of Deceit is an actual, working version of a videogame made up for a nineties TV show. Imagine an episode of The Simpsons where Bart plays  the latest wizard-based platform game - that game would look identical to Castle of Deceit.


"Okay team, we need to come up with a boss for this wind-themed stage. Anyone got anything appropriately windy?"
"How about a purple boulder with a face carved onto it, a face that wears an expression of such abject misery that you expect the rock to end its own suffering at any moment?"
"Perfect, I love it. Good work, Johnson."


My habit of unintentionally choosing to play platform games that have pointless, dull shoot-em-up levels artlessly wedged into them continues. This is Castle of Deceit's latest and most successful effort to make me hate it, an underwater forced-scrolling section devoid of both entertainment and challenge, which is surprising considering the other stages contained enemies that were more than capable of giving me a hard time. The biggest threat in this stage are the bubbles, because this is a videogame and videogame bubbles are deadly more often than not. Look, I don't make the rules, all right? Bubbles: don't touch 'em. You should stay away from cotton wool and puppies, too, just in case.
Cebo can hold his breath forever, by the way. Is that a magic spell? What kind of wizard school did you go to where the first two spells they taught you were "unspectacular projectile" and "waterbreathing"? Was your tutor Bubble Man? Cebo, you are the worst.


And then you're attacked by a writhing mass of rubbery grey tentacles with the clearest, bluest eyes I've ever longingly gazed into. Seems like we're getting into Phfax's more erotic hallucination material now. Hey, the guy's a magician whose head was stuffed so full of the esoteric mysteries of black magic that it started to leak living delusions, the guy's not going to be interested in the usual grot.


There's a fire themed stage, because there always is, and it's very similar to the first stage only with a warmer, more Autumnal colour palette (and lava). It even contains the same enemies, with minor modifications: the doilys are back but now they're made of asbestos (I assume) and the flying eyeballs are on fire. That's how you vaccinate yourself again molten magma, you see, you set yourself on fire a little bit to build up a resistance to lava.
As ever, the gameplay consists of methodically zapping the monsters and moving through the stage's doors. What do you mean, you don't see any doors? There are two in the above screenshot, c'mon. Do you need some help?


There, I've circled them for you. If you squint, you can just about see the three vertical lines that mark the edges and middle of the door. It's a good job I stumbled upon one of these doors through the combination of blind luck and fat fingers that made me accidentally press up on the joypad while I happened to be standing in front of one, otherwise you and I would never have been able to witness the wonders the wait deeper within the Castle of Deceit.


Wonders like the game's least interesting boss. Congratulations, fireball, you're the least engaging point in an adventure that's most remarkable feature is how forgettable it is.


According to the pre-stage text, this is the Castle of Deceit itself. It's only three screens wide and all you have to do to clear it is to engage in some of the most basic platforming "action" ever brought to life by Nintendo's 8-bit powerhouse. But there's a twist! Sometimes the clouds you have to jump across hurt you when you touch them. I didn't say it was a good twist. If I was a less genteel and restrained person, I might describe this twist in language that would make even the average 13-year-old Call of Duty player blush, but instead I'll draw your attention to the decoration above the castle door. Yeah, the one that looks like an Easter Island statue experiencing an uncomfortable bowel movement, that decoration.


There's no boss guarding the previous stage, so instead you're immediately whisked to the Maze of Possibilities. The most likely possibility is that this maze is going to be a poorly thought out and needlessly opaque slice of gameplay that will represent one more nail in Castle of Deceit's coffin lid, but let's put our cynicism to one side for a moment as I walk though one of these doors.


Nope, reactive the Cynicism Matrix and calibrate the Bullshit Gauge to maximum, because this whole stage consist of these five identical doors that you have to walk through in a specific order to reach the end. Does the game give you any hints or clues as to that order? Does it tell you when you've messed up so that you may learn from your mistakes? Did Bunch Games really manage to cock up every single element of this game in the laziest, most half-arsed manner possible? The answer to all those questions is yes. After ten minutes or so I stumbled across the correct sequence of door, and even that didn't feel like a victory because I knew that all it would lead to is more of this game.


Another stage. A very familiar stage, because it's almost identical to stage three but with a different colour scheme. That said, I think it looks really nice - the purple brickwork and the blue-green vines work well together and it seems a much more suitable home for that awesome ghost. It reminds me a little of Kid Icarus, but nicer looking, so a least one thing about Castle of Deceit is better than the same thing in a different game, which is a surprise.


We're into final stretch now, and while it might look intimidating thanks to the plethora of enemies, they start far enough away from Cebo that if you keep firing they'll all drift into your attacks and die before they get close. The real struggle is negotiating the moving platforms - if you try to jump onto them you fall straight through them 90 percent of the time, so instead you have to step delicately onto them when they reach the edge of the pit. The moving platforms also have wings. Did one of the developers think that a floating brick was just too unbelievable in a game about wizards fighting flying eyeballs? Go ahead, slap some wings on it, that'll really help with my immersion.


At last, it's Castle of Deceit's final boss and it really does look like a hallucination so full marks on that front. With the body of a rattlesnake, the tiny, disturbingly human hands of an otter and the expression I make when I wake up in an unfamiliar place and for a moment I can't remember where I am, this boss is unlikely to ascend to the pantheon of legendary NES bosses like Bowser and Ganon, but I am definitely not going to forget him. I will mostly remember him for his snout, which I am unable to see as anything other than two skeletal Pac-Men kissing. The boss' nostrils are their eyes, you see.
Once you've figured out that the boss requires slightly different tactics than the previous end-of-stage "challenges" - you have to shoot off its tail, then its hands and finally its eyes - it's just as easy to defeat as all the others and soon Cebo will have accomplished his goal of, erm... what was I supposed to be doing again?


Oh yeah, restoring the runes that control space and time. I did that, apparently, and for my reward I get this ending. Normally I'd complain about an ending that's 60% black, empty screen space, but honestly I'm just glad that Castle of Deceit is over. No ending sequence could be sweeter than that.


This is an odd game. A bad game, to be sure, but one that's bad in a specific way: it takes the common elements of any given NES hop-n-bop platformer and then gets them all subtly wrong. On a basic level it's almost competent, weird jumping physics aside, but as soon as anything else is added to the mix it flies off the rails. Pseudo-randomly-moving enemies, hazards that you can't see, doors that are almost indistinguishable from the backgrounds, a maze that can't be mapped - all of these things are so close to being viable elements of videogame, but the developer managed to find the factor that makes them enjoyable (or even just bearable) and remove it every time either through a lack of talent or a misguided desire to make Castle of Deceit different from its contemporaries in the most aggravating ways possible. It wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting from an unlicensed NES game, although that side-scrolling stage made it a close call, but I would strongly recommend that if you want to deal with the hallucinations of a mad wizard then you should read an Alan Moore comic instead of playing this.

That's astrology, not astronomy. You can tell because the title screen consists of vaguely Ancient Greek-looking symbols plastered on rose-coloured spheres that swirl towards the player, presumably to confuse and disorient them. If this was about astronomy, it'd have stars and constellations and stuff, not what looks like something your eccentric great-aunt would keep next to a bowl of pot pourri in her bedroom, which she unfailingly refers to as a "boudoir."
If you're following VGJunk on Twitter, you might have seen me make the admittedly bold claim that Russell Grant's Astrology has the worst cover art ever. On a technical level this is clearly not true - it's a completely ordinary photo-and-text job, but there's something about it that upsets me.


I think it's the grinning, beady-eyed face of professional bullshit merchant and D-list British "celebrity" Russell Grant, a man whose large pink head could well be what the word "fleshy" was created to describe. He looks like a less charming version of Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and while I'm trying to prevent this from becoming nothing but a personal attack on the man I wouldn't trust him to predict yesterday's weather, never mind my entire future.
For any non-British readers who won't be aware of who Russell Grant is, he's, well, an astrologer. He was on TV in the eighties and nineties, astrologising, releasing cover versions of Diana Ross songs (no, really) and doing light presenting work. Then he disappeared for a while, until the recent-ish glut of celebrity "talent" shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity MasterChef allowed Grant to seep back into the public conciousness where he maintains a position as harmless, cuddly oddball. As Britain's most (and possibly only, barring Mystic Meg) well-known astrologer, he was a shoo-in to have his name hastily applied to this Nintendo DS release. It was called Astrology DS: The Stars in Your Hands outside Europe, just in case you have a burning desire to get your hands on a copy.


The tone of this article thus far may have clued you in to the fact that I am not a believer in astrology. It's something of a pet hate of mine: astrologers, psychics, mediums, they get my goat in a way that many of the world's more pressing injustices don't, and I'm well aware that's a failing on my part. "It's all just harmless fun," people say, but then they get their phone bill after calling Russell Grant's premium-rate astrology hotline and the fun quickly evaporates. If you want to pay someone to lie to you about your romantic prospects, then just hire an escort. At least that way you get to go out for dinner.


I'm going to try to give Russell Grant's Astrology a chance, though. Maybe it'll be interesting. I might learn something about myself. One plus mark in its favour is that Russell Grant himself does not feature anywhere in the game at all, his appearance restricted to the cover art as the most ill-considered piece of eye-candy ever.
Before the stars can be read and your future divined, you have to set up a profile and fill it with your personal information so that the game can create an accurate astrological chart. So, you stick in your name, date of birth, time of birth and, as you can see above, the place you were born. This is very important, so important that for extra precision you can input the longitude and latitude of your birth location. The spot that you came into this world is a huge determining factor in your astrological predictions, which is why twins almost always lead identical lives.


Once you personal data is in place, you can select one of the main menu's categories to get started. Astro Adviser can give you a daily horoscope, track your biorhythms or provide you with some waffle abut the cycles of the moon. The Horoscope option chucks out vague predictions about your love, life, work or partner prospects. Academy is where you can undergo the rigorous academic training required to become a fully-fledged but in no way regulated or monitored astrologer, and the Entertainment category, named with a charming amount of optimism, gives you the chance play a few minigames. I'm going to make my own prediction right now - those minigames will be bloody awful.
Okay, time for my Daily Stars. What wisdom do you have for me, Russell Grant / shovelware developers?


I have to make myself beautiful for a man, apparently. Straight out of the gate with some weirdly misogynistic ideas about how women should be "adornments" to their men, Russell Grant's Astrology assumes that the user is either a woman or gay and, more upsettingly, that I don't make an effort to look good. I mean, I don't - I'm writing this while wearing jogging bottoms and a dressing gown with holes in it - but it's terribly rude of RGA to assume that everyone who uses it needs a makeover. Anyway, my chosen partner doesn't care how I look. This is probably because my chosen partner is cake, however. Not a good start for RGA's prestidigitous powers of prediction, then, but maybe it will have better luck when it comes to my love life.


Well, it knows that my love life is an emotional pit so maybe it does have magical powers? Now everything is on the up and I'm heading towards romantic bliss, a situation that is represented somewhat abstractly by a picture of shoes and floating numbers. Later on, I'm going to go and buy some women's shoes and play some bingo, and if I meet the love of my life at Wynsor's World of Shoes or Mecca Bingo then I'll be sure to let you know.


Moving over to the Horoscope section, and a lot of it is taken up with an essay about what your astrological sign "means" that feels very strongly as though it's been copy-and-pasted from some other source. I hope that's true, and I hope it's true of all the other text in the game, because otherwise some poor bastards had to sit there and come up with all this vaguely life-affirming nonsense and then input it into the game.
Perhaps part of the reason that I'm so strongly opposed to astrology is that I'm bitter about my personality being the complete opposite of what an Aries is supposed to be like. They possess energy, initiative, pride, courage and ambition, according to the so-called Mystical Space Objects Movement Experts, where as I am a lazy coward with all the ambition and drive of plastic bag floating in a puddle. Explain that, astrologers!


Here's my biorhythm for the day. I have passed my physical zenith. I didn't need a Nintendo DS game to tell me that.


Then I checked the moon cycle information, where I was rewarded with a helpful tip about getting rid of snails. Snails - not a parasite, Mr. Grant. Also, why is there advice about removing garden pests? Who bought Russell Grant's Astrology thinking "it'll be nice to see how my life will unfurl in the areas of love and work, but what I really want to know is which moon cycle provides the best opportunity for snail genocide?" Of course, the answer to the question "who bought this game" lies somewhere between "no-one" and "idiots."


No, you're right, I said I was going to give this a chance and so I shall. I'm going to enrol in the Academy and learn all there is to know about the ancient and infallible art of astrology. There's a lot to learn, too, with three increasingly complex levels of esoteric knowledge that I'm sure would all eventually coalesce into a complete understanding of the universe and its inescapable influence on a person's destiny, if only I could be bothered to read it all.


You know what? This all seems fairly straightforward. I know the basic concepts of astrology, all the stuff about what character traits equate to what element is pretty on-the-nose - being energetic is a fire-type trait, what a shocker! - and thanks to years spent playing Final Fantasy Tactics I know what all the zodiac symbols look like. As I am clearly already an expert, I think I'm going to skip straight to the exam.


Question number one in the exam was to select the animals that appear in the zodiac from the four options on the right. The purple ones are the animals I selected first time, and I got this question wrong. According to this game, there is no goat in the zodiac.


Not knowing the symbols of the zodiac is a pretty substantial error for a game about bloody horoscopes.


I tried again, this time answering all the questions if not correctly then at least to RGA's liking, and the game showed a moment of unexpected self-awareness by seemingly admitting that all it takes to become a successful astrologer is enthusiasm. One of the "top astrology experts," no less, which leads me to wonder how you become a "top" astrologer. Are they all graded like chess masters or something, and if so, on what criteria? It can't be the accuracy of their predictions because the movements of the celestial bodies are fixed and would therefore naturally produce the same results for anyone following the correct horoscope-making rules. Is it purely based on enthusiasm? Is world's top astrologer simply the person who gets in your face about it the most, chasing down passers-by and offering them free readings, shoving copies of this very game through the letterboxes of unsuspecting homeowners? If so, they can keep the job. I'll be right down the bottom of the astrology ranking, sullenly giving out horoscopes only when people insist and saying things like "it's all a crock of shit, you know" while they read the results.


I think it's time to test Russell Grant's Astrology's predictive abilities by heading back in time - changing the DS's system clock, that is - and getting someone's horoscope on a day when I know exactly what they were up to. For example, here I'm inputting the data for Ben Watson. Ben Watson is a professional footballer who plays for Wigan Athletic, and thanks to the slightly unnerving scope of the internet I know when and where he was born. I also know that on the 11th of May, 2013, Ben Watson scored the winning goal in that year's FA Cup final. Without wanting to be too dismissive of Ben Watson's future prospects, that goal almost certainly represents the absolute pinnacle of his football career and so I imagine RGA will have something insightful to say about this momentous occasion.


Okay, that's not too far off the mark - I'm sure Ben Watson did indeed organise some kind of family party after his Wembley heroics, and Wigan lifting the FA Cup was most certainly an unexpected and interesting piece of news (just ask the bookies).


Then it all goes tits-up with Ben's "job" horoscope, suggesting that he spend the most important day of his career simply relaxing. To anyone that says astrology doesn't hurt people: just imagine if Ben Watson had seen this horoscope, thought "you know, I think I will give work a rest for once!" and just not turned up for the match. That would have hurt an awful lot of Wigan fans, now wouldn't it? No to mention anyone who'd had the brass balls to bet against Manchester City in that match.


"The coupling of the impulsive ram and the domesticated and sensitive crab will produce a terrifying hybrid creature with huge claws, powerful horns and a succulent meat that you can eat even during Lent!"
No, not really, I just put myself and Ben Watson together in the compatibility tester. It seems our natures are just too different for us to make a go of it as a couple, alas, although if you actually read the results RGA does essentially say "you're a bad match, but you could be a good match" in an awe-inspiring display of hedging a bet.
As a (relatively, he does play for Wigan after all) successful person, I've realised that Ben Watson is too easy a target for an astrologist's reassuring platitudes, so let's give RGA a chance to really prove itself. I've set the DS's system date to the 16th of May 2010 - the date that saw the sad death of metal legend and continuing VGJunk inspiration Ronnie James Dio.


There wasn't enough space for me to enter Ronald Padavona - Dio's real name - so I had to go with his stage name, but that's okay. If anything it's going to make the horoscope more accurate because while there may be many Ronald Padavonas in the world there was only one Dio. I also assumed that Dio was born on the stroke of midnight. I think it's a fair assumption.
Well then, according to Russell Grant's Random Fortune Cookie Message Simulator, how were Dio's biorhythms on the day he died?


Perfect physical balance, huh? Screw you, Russell Grant's Astrology. Screw your entire concept and its twee, dopey execution packed with unrelated pictures of rock formations and seaplanes, screw your decision to dress up what is really a random number generator as a game and screw your weird advice about when to kill snails.


Still, that line about "receiving the long outstanding recognition you deserve" seems spot on, and Dio's patience and hard work musthave paid off now that he's surely packing out arenas in whatever afterlife was badass enough to take him in. God speed, Dio. I feel kinda bad about bringing you into this crap.


Probably the best thing I can say about Russell Grant's Astrology is that it's no more or less accurate than visit a "real" astrologer, which is to say both of those things are total nonsense. An example: here, all Aries are compared to ants, which is a bit of a kick to the ol' self-esteem. I quite like the suggestion that someone who really buys into astrology will be a good worker in the scientific sector, though.
I was wondering whether any real enjoyment could be gleaned from this title, and then I remembered about the Entertainment category. I can hardly wait to experience these minigames, folks. I think they might kill off what little emotion still flickers in my breast, then I can live my life free of troubling morality.


Game number one: Astropairs, which is the standard pair-matching game. Flip over two symbols and hope they match. Astropairs is so boring that RGA entertains itself by playing a game of noughts-and-crosses on the left side of the screen while you flip tiles. You aren't allowed to play noughts-and-crosses. You don't deserve noughts-and-crosses.
The three minigames each have unlockable, more challenging difficulty levels. The description for Astropairs' highest difficulty level is "you can prove your talent and your intellectual grasp of the material here." That'd be my intellectual grasp on flipping over pictures to reveal a matching pair, would it? Cool, just checking.


Splintered Star is a sliding-block puzzle game, and you know what we say about sliding-block puzzle games here at VGJunk, don't you? That's right, they can take a running jump into a skip filled with used nappies and medical waste. I'm amazed that labelling this with the word "Entertainment" didn't cause the game code to re-write itself into an ASCII art picture of a hand flicking the Vs.


Lastly there's (ugh) Zodidoku, a circular variant of sudoku. It works okay, I suppose, although I couldn't look at this screen without being annoyed that they didn't just call it Zodoku. It's a minigame in an astrology title, I think people would have gotten the zodiac reference without that extra syllable. So, in case we still weren't clear, the answer to the question "can any real enjoyment be gleaned from this" is a resounding no.


That's Russell Grant's Astrology for the Nintendo DS, then - a bad thing based on a bad premise with some very bad minigames bolted on. You can buy copies for one penny from Amazon, so if you need something to prop up a wonky table leg then there you go. I would dearly love to believe that some of the text is supposed to be read with a knowing wink, like the above juxtaposition of a snail and the assurances that Aries is the sign of physical activity, but deep down I know that's not true and this whole thing was thrown together with no thought or care whatsoever. I mean, if I had even the slightest doubt that the predictions given here were accurate, I'd be out there making myself into a man's adornment instead of eating too much mint ice-cream and writing long, pointless articles about the worst kind of hackneyed videogame crap.

Now, I've only seen The Lawnmower Man once, and that was probably about twenty years ago, but from what I can remember it's about a guy who is made more intelligent through the liberal application of Virtual Reality. Time and the advent of the YouTube comments section has shown us the people most certainly do not become more intelligent when plugged into computers for long periods of time, but the nineties were a more optimistic time.


Here's the Lawnmower Man himself. His name is Jobe, and he's a simpleton. Hi, Jobe. The super-grainy film capture here is supposed to show Jobe pushing a lawnmower, but to me it looks more like he's ripping red strands of gore from a mutilated carcass. I haven't been sleeping well recently. Some of The Lawnmower Man's later levels might help with that, actually.


This is Dr. Angelo, portrayed by Pierce Brosnan in the move and a small clump of pixels in this game. He's the scientist who does the very scientific and totally ethical brain-tampering on Jobe, and at first it works - Jobe becomes more intelligent, he engages in some virtual reality sex that looks like someone ordered "a commercial for an early-nineties graphics card, but, you know, erotic," and he develops telekinetic powers, as very clever people tend to do. Stephen Hawking's wheelchair doesn't have a motor in it, he pushes it around with his mind.
To make matters worse, a sinister government agency called The Shop tampers with Jobe's VR funtimes, turning him evil to study the potential military applications of an insane cyber-god with magic brain powers who can be contained by no boundaries. The Shop? More like Weyland-Yutani, am I right?


Only Angelo and Carla can break into Jobe's virtual domain and defeat him. Oh, hang on, it says all that in the screenshot. That's what we're going to be doing in this one, then - travelling into the virtual world to confront a madman with a giant head, just like a contestant on GamesMaster. You can choose to play as either Dr. Angelo or Carla, the mother of Jobe's young friend. She presumably has no experience of virtual reality or saving the world, so I think I'm going to go with Pierce Brosnan on this one. There's no difference between the two characters as far as I could see anyway, so let's hurry up and get plugged into the Matrix. Unless "the Matrix" is a legally-protected trademark of Warner Bros., in which case we'll call it "Blocky Floating World" instead.


The future of computer technology, brought vividly to life by the raw power of the Sega Genesis! Remember, Sega does what Nintendon't, except in this case because there was a very similar version of The Lawnmower Man released for the SNES that has more stages and the power of Mode 7 behind it.
Now, it's very easy to scoff at the primitive slabs of scenery on display here, so I will. It's like slowly drifting through a Lego model of post-Blitz Coventry, or a pair of disembodied hands floating along on a mission to throttle whoever built this extremely dull set of shadow puppets. Aside from that, this VR swoosh-em-up works fairly well. You're always moving forwards, and your goal is to make it from one end of the area to the other without smashing face-first into the scenery. Each time you bump into an object you lose a hit point, and when you lose them all you're sent back to the start. You can move left, right, up and down, so presumably you're flying Superman-style and not walking forwards with your arms outstretched like you're trying to find the bathroom in an unfamiliar house with the lights off, and it all controls pretty well: there's enough momentum in your movements to keep things interesting, but not so much that you lurch uncontrollably around the screen. It's hardly the most exciting videogame action you'll ever encounter - which is a shame, because it makes up about 50% of the game - but it's not terrible.


I think I may have found the exit. Okay, now what?


Oh, so The Lawnmower Man is one of these games, by which I mean games that try out a bunch of different gameplay styles without ever focussing on any one style long enough for it to become a satisfying experience. I know I haven't played any of the component parts aside from the VR bit, but I'm still confident in this early assessment.
This is the other large chunk of TLM's gameplay, a generally solid if rather uninspired run-n-gun romp that presents me with a dilemma: I can't tell if it takes place in virtual reality or not. On one hand, Angelo is carrying a gun the size of a small child that launches a shower of small triangles at the rampaging band of tiny, leotard-clad monkey men that swarm towards him, and that makes me think that this may not be the real world. In the other hand, this is all taking place in an otherwise normal suburban street, whereas the last VR area was, well, you saw it and it looked considerably less real than this.


I've decided to put that question out of my mind for now as I concentrate on fighting this unassuming white saloon. You see all those little brown dots? That's what's left of Dr. Angelo after this car hit him. If I'd know he was actually a mound of cappuccino foam masquerading as a human I would have been a bit more careful with him. I should really be more careful in general, because you die in one hit during these side-scrolling stages and enemies tend to appear in your path very suddenly. This car certainly did, but it's pretty easy to jump over, so I did that. Then I jumped over it again when it drove back the other way, and then again, and again. It wasn't until I messed up a jump and landed on the car's roof that I discovered that's what you're supposed to do, and slamming feet-first into the roof makes the car stop. A policeman got out, so I shot him. You'd better hope this is taking place in Virtual Reality, Dr. Angelo, otherwise there are going to be some difficult questions waiting for you when all this is over.


After a bit of running and gunning - gunning down officers of the law, that it, although in my defence they were trying to kill me both through vehicular homicide and then using standard police-issue molotov cocktails - I found a portal to another VR stage. Gameplay-wise it's the same as the last one, but this time I'm flying through Cyber Atlantis. This main difference between Cyber Atlantis and Regular Atlantis is that Cyber Atlantis didn't finish sinking all the way, and if Atlantis was completely decorated in a beige and purple colour scheme then frankly it deserved to be lost beneath the waves.


"Dr. Angelo, drop your weapon and place your hands above your head. Pay no mind time the fiery rainbow that encircles me. All policemen have that here in what is most definitely the real world. You have the right to an attorney. You have the right to be incinerated down to your component atoms by my fiery rainbow. You have the right to either remain silent or issue a blood-curdling scream, it's your choice."


This miniboss fight against a man on a motorcycle isn't that interesting by itself, but I would like to point out that his black shirt makes it look as though there's just a set of limbs and a head riding that thing. He also appears to be shooting a jet of flame from his knee. That's why Dr. Angelo's wearing kneepads, they contain the raging knee-fires that beset everyone who meddles with Virtual Reality.


Now we're in another cyber zone, one that looks like Angelo has somehow warped himself inside an Atari 2600 game, but something's different. Have you spotted what it is? That's right, his health bar is slightly longer. Oh, and his right hand is a gun now.


That's because this is a Cyber War Zone, and periodically you'll be stopped so that you can engage in the carnival game that is shooting these little robots. The giant THREAT icon hovering around them is - and I do hope I'm not Alanis Morisette-ing the word here - ironic, because they're about as threatening as a feather pillow behind an inch of safety glass. They do shoot at you, but as long as you keep moving from side to side they'll never hit you, and in the whole game I think I managed to take damage from them once. This might make the shooting sections sound boring, and they are - they're easy enough to be frivolous but long enough to grind on your patience - but this is the part of The Lawnmower Man that I think could have benefited from being a game in it's own right. The scrolling is smooth, aiming is accurate and it's the most unique of the game styles, so with more focus, more enemies and more challenge you could build something enjoyable on these foundations. That didn't happen, though, so enjoy plinking away at the one enemy type the Cyber War Zones have to offer.


Oh cool, I found a helicopter! You get to fly it and everything, so I'll use it to traverse this gap where a bridge has been destroyed. Now I just have to land it. Easy... easy... there we go, I've got it!


I don't got it. I never got it, in fact - I tried several times, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to land this helicopter without it exploding and killing me. I approached the landing with all the care and delicacy I could muster, but the second the skids brushed the ground with all the lightness of an angel's kiss Angelo was killed in the ensuing fireball. In the end I just gave up and took the loss of a life. I'm sure it'll be fine. Collecting all the CDs that fly out of the enemies you kill will probably give me an extra life eventually anyway.


"If they have a problem with you, and if they can find you, then maybe you can be killed by... The A-Team! Daaah dah daah daaah, dah dah dahhh!"


Then I had to fight a pair of petrol pumps. That was easy enough, but I wasn't expecting a burning man to emerge from the wreckage. I mean, I wasn't expecting to be fighting petrol pumps either but I thought destroying them would be the end of it, you know? I'm not sure who this person is, but going by the sign on the gas station I think it must be Harley. Sorry about ruining your livelihood and then setting you on fire, Harley, but this kind of collateral damage has to be expected when you're trying to take down a evil super-intelligent computer force. I can't help be feel somewhat responsible, because I am almost entirely responsible.


Somewhere in the depths of cyberspace, the unholy union of man and hang-glider soars through a subpar recreation of Sonic the Hedgehog 2's special stage. It was no fun for anyone.
Thankfully the least common of The Lawnmower Man's stages are these tube flyer affairs, ugly experiences of being trapped in a dimension filled with unwanted Christmas ornaments where the high speeds and twitchy controls mean that trying not to bump into the sides and thus lose health quickly becomes painfully frustrating, especially given the general pleasantness of the other stages. It feels, both graphically and mechanically, like these stages were handed off to the work experience kid just so they had something to do besides make the tea. I'd like to say that The Lawnmower Man's mix-and-match approach to gameplay types was an attempt to capture the fractured natured of existing in both the real world and the virtual realm but a) that sounds pretentious as hell and b) I'm pretty sure it's not true.


Now I'm in some kind of factory, and the graphics artist seem to have gone on strike. It's very grey. Very grey indeed, and mostly composed of slender platforms and lifts that expose huge tracts of the bland, unchanging background. It's a shame, because up until now I've been really enjoying the graphics of the non-VR sections - they're in that really small, fine style that I like, and they're mostly quite interesting.


I don't have anything to say about this VR stage beyond "listen to this".


Aww, the Non-Threatening Robots have built themselves a little castle, how adorable! Unfortunately, their habit of standing right in the windows and having the front door open means that the castle offers little protection from whatever it is I'm shooting at them. Little balls of anti-virus software, maybe?


Okay, the side-scrolling stages must take place in virtual reality because I'm fighting giant robot wasps, and those don't exist in the real world. I would have heard about giant robot wasps if they were an actual thing, mostly through newspaper headlines like ROBOT WASP MENACE TO END HUMAN CIVILIZATION and ROBOT WASPS ENSLAVE ALL, EAT JAM.
Thankfully I had just the right weapon to take them down. There are three types of gun available in The Lawnmower Man - a narrow spread shot that fires the aforementioned little triangles in a mostly horizontal direction, a laser that rebels against the very concept of firearms by having its projectiles randomly turn at 90 degree angles, making it almost entirely useless, and the circle launcher. The circle launcher is by far and away the best, because it fires massive hoops of energy that encircle and destroy any target they hit. Once you've got the circle launcher, the rest of TLM's side-scrolling stages gain a new level of challenge: the challenge of making sure you never accidentally collect the items that switch you to one of the other guns. This means you spend a lot of time waiting for those items to flicker and disappear so you can make your way forwards - not much fun, but it beats having that sodding laser equipped.


"Dr. Pepper, what's the worst that could happen? Well, the vending machine could be infected by a sinister computer sentience, causing it to kill our customers by launching cans of our delicious soft drink into their faces at high speed? No, I didn't think it sounded very likely either but then I saw a scientist get hit with a can of pop so hard that he goddamn exploded and I was forced to revise my opinion."


Now it's raining X-Wing pilots, who have grown bored with all their free time after defeating the Empire and have taken to harassing scientists by wearing jetpacks and buzzing around them. Why does Dr. Angelo violently disintegrate if lightly brushed against by another human? I dunno, he must not eat his vegetables or something.
One neat thing about these states is that the panel in the middle of your status bar changes depending on what's happening in the stage. Sometimes Jobe's cyber-face appears to grimace at the player, it displays details of power-ups that you've just collected and best of all it shows information on the nearest enemy, as you can see in the screenshot above. It's not practical, usable information, just pictures and random pixels meant to imply text, but if you pay attention to it then it can sometimes let you know what enemies you'll be facing before they get on-screen, and that can go some way towards alleviating the problem of bad guys appearing right in your path that these stages suffer from.


I already implied that these VR sections look a lot like Star Fox, didn't I? Rats.


We're deep into The Lawnmower Man's closing stages now, and there's another Cyber Run to be negotiated. My eyeballs pray for mercy, but there is no mercy to be found amongst the whirling colours and flashing lights, only the frustration of repeatedly taking damage from obstacles you'll swear you avoided. It goes on for bloody ages and if you lose a life you're sent back to the start, and I could avoided so many of my Cyber Run deaths if only Dr. Angelo would fly with his arms pointing forwards like he does in the other stages instead of switching to hang-glider mode. Why are you doing that, Angelo? So you can catch the updrafts that exist here in this dark tunnel of cyberspace? C'mon, man, you look ridiculous.


Just before you fight the final boss, the entire point of the game is reiterated for the player. You know, just in case they forgot. I'm not sure that picture is going to help anyone's comprehension, mind you. It looks like a still from a surreal toothpaste advert where the amorphous avatars of toothpaste and chocolate caramel do battle.


Here is the final boss battle, and it's Space Harrier starring Bad Box Art Mega Man! The VR enhancements have given Jobe the incredible power to make his head really big.


Really, really big. Or maybe he's just moving closer to you, it's hard to tell in cyberspace. Anyway, Dr. Angelo is no longer a hang-glider, which is good, and you can move freely around the screen in a manner that means comparisons to Space Harrier are so inevitable that I've made two in two paragraphs. Naturally you're shooting at Jobe, who for his part is shooting back by launching fire from various parts of his facial anatomy, but Jobe himself is not the real target.


Shoot your failed science experiment enough times and he'll get out of the way for a short while, allowing you to focus your fire on these cyber-portals. Shoot them all enough times to change them from "Access Granted" to "Access Denied" and you win. Somehow. I understand that it stops Jobe from escaping into the wider internet, but he's still around, isn't he? With his telekinesis and his murderous rage? It kinda feels like those things might come back to bite me in the arse if I don't deal with them now.


You're right, incredibly underwhelming ending sequence, I should just forget about what's going on and just accept that The Lawnmower Man is over. Now I have to try and sum up my feelings about it, which is more difficult that usual because there are are four or five distinct games in here, so let's take it one piece at a time. The side-scrolling section are mostly decent, or at least not bad, but they never get anywhere close to breaking out of complete mediocrity. The VR stages are well-built and had a lot of potential but suffer the most from the game's lack of focus. There are also a few too many of them with no gameplay variety, especially when you get towards the end and you're flying through a "Cyber Office". The tunnel shooter sections are just plain bad, with ugly graphics, over-sensitive controls and gameplay that's at once boring and anger-inducing. Then there's the final boss fight, which is pretty good.


Overall, The Lawnmower Man coalesces into a grey putty of averageness. Far better than I thought it was going to be but not good enough for me to recommend that you play it unless you're really into the "potential virtual reality future" aesthetic of the nineties, it's got "licensed Megadrive game" written all over it. That was my time with The Lawnmower Man, then. Number of lawns mowed: zero.

Well, that hasn't gotten us off to a great start, has it? A pastel pink Arnie who makes a mockery of the concept of camouflage by dressing like an 80s aerobics instructor. Of course, that may well be why he's pink, because if he was dressed in his usual jungle fatigues the player would lose sight of him as he melted into the background. Predator is a very difficult game and I've never made much progress through it, but I assume that instead of fooling the Predator's infrared vision by coating himself in mud, NES Arnie tricks the remorseless alien killer with the liberal application of glitter body gel.


Because Schwarzenegger is famous and it's important that the people buying the game know that it has a famous person in it, this particular sprite history also gives me a chance to share some more detailed likenesses of Arnie from the various title screens and status bars of the games covered. In the case of the the NES Predator it's a pretty good likeness too, even if his eyes have a certain distracted air to them, as though he's trying to remember whether he posted his mum's birthday card before he set off for the jungle.



Did I miss a scene in Predator where Dutch was pink or something? Maybe the games are based on an earlier version of the script from before the line "if it bleeds, we can kill it" was changed from "if we paint ourselves fuchsia, we can kill it." Okay, this one I can just about accept as being seen through the Predator's heat vision, even if it does imply that Arnie's armpits, eyeballs and hair are all the same temperature.


His in-game sprite isn't too bad, considering the technological limitations of the time. It's shaped like a human, and a soldier in the jungle might conceivably wear brown clothes. Yeah, I'll take it.



In The Running Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ben Richards, a former cop who must participate in a deadly game show after being framed for a crime he didn't commit. In the Commodore 64 version of The Running Man, he does this in the nude, possibly while smeared with butter.



The graphics are understandably much enhanced in the Amiga port of the game, although I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing when it brings fresh new detail to Arnie's outfit. While it doesn't capture the "quilted" and "silvery" aspects that this costume possesses in the movie, it is still a bright yellow full-body jumpsuit, the clothing equivalent of a barbed-wire sandwich or a DVD of sex tips presented by your parents - something that could only be used as an extreme punishment for a terrible crime. Hang on, that makes it rather appropriate.
Anatomy-wise it's a mixed bag: Arnie's bicep is as big as his head, which seems about right, but I have no idea what's going on with his lower-right leg. I think his calf has secretly been working out on its own. Overall, it does not seem unreasonable to surmise that Ben Richards was feeling a little sensitive about his weight before his big TV appearance and so he chose a jumpsuit that works like those "illusion slimming" dresses with the panels down the sides.



Okay, I'm starting to notice a theme here.
Pinkness aside, the the most notable feature of this sprite is that it has captured a facial expression of pure, malevolent evil. A stone-jawed grimace, eyes that are nothing but black pits devoid of emotion - if it it wasn't the colour of chewed bubblegum there could be some real menace to this sprite. At any rate, I now have a good idea of how the Doom movie would have looked like if they'd cast Arnie to the play the Baron of Hell. Awesome, that's how.



By comparison, the sprite from the C64 version of Red Heat is a little dull, but at least he's hugely muscular and flesh coloured, a combination it took us a surprisingly long time to reach.



Don't worry, though, because the C64 version of Red Heat isn't without its own moment of graphical madness. In this case it's the loading screen where both Arnold and Jim Belushi have fallen right to the bottom of the uncanny valley. Amateurishly painted shop mannequins with the piercing blue eyes of a white tiger? Nightmarish latex masks like the ones featured in the movie White Chicks? God only knows, but I'd never have thought that Jim Belushi could look the better of the two. Also, in the Red Heat movie poster that this is traced from Jim Belushi has a cigarette hanging out of his gob, but it's been removed for the game's artwork. The fact that ultraviolence remains uncensored while other things are cut is a topic still relevant today, but in Red Heat's case it feels especially egregious because the game's composed of literally nothing but a shirtless man smashing other shirtless men's faces in by headbutting their noses through the backs of their skulls.



The Spectrum's limited colour palette means that this incarnation of Quaid from Total Recall will cause your eyes to go on strike if you look at it too long, but it does capture the essence of Arnie quite well in that it has a freakishly large upper body. This sprite looks like the Incredible Hulk in slacks and sensible shoes, and it's making me nostalgic for the glory days of Teletext. For those of you not familiar with Teletext it was a sort of television-based pre-internet internet, or movie listings and football scores displayed in chunky pixels if you want to be more prosaic about it. This Arnie would be right at home on Teletext, possibly as a guest host of Bamboozle. There we go, I've set a new record for the reference that only the very narrowest slice of the VGJunk readership will get.



Still mostly green but in a manner that's much gentler on the eyes, the NES version of Quaid is an oddly put-together sort, a shambling meat-marionette whose waist isn't attached correctly, the legs poking out at unusual angles as he tries to get himself into the pose of a Victorian bare-knuckle fighter.


A good recreation of the Governator's mug on the title screen, mind you: his skull may be a little taller than usual, but a solid likeness on the whole that's topped off with an expression of faint amusement, like maybe he's remember his favourite bits from the movie. "I used an elevator to rip his arms off and then as he was falling to his death I said 'see you at the party, Richter!' so that was cool."



Admittedly I'm not one hundred percent certain that these sprites are supposed to represent Arnold - they could easily be a different model of Terminator, one based on the generic ideal of an eighties action star rather than a specific actor. It definitely doesn't look much like Arnold. The one firing its gun in particular looks far too cheerful to be Arnie. Far too cheerful to be a Terminator, even - this is supposed to be the efficient, emotionless extermination of the human race, not Skynet's Sillytime Smilestravaganza.
Also, the reason that you get not one, not two, but three of the same sprite in the screenshot above is that the Megadrive Terminator game takes place in an alternate Terminator reality where Skynet has the ability to build a new Terminator every seven seconds, leading to an extremely difficult game where killer robots swarm around like germs on a dive bar's urinals and I couldn't get a shot where they weren't overlapping each other like a murderous conga line.



The NES take on Arnold's most famous role sees the T-800 Terminator wearing the biker leathers from the movie and... an eyepatch, possibly? It's hard to tell when the face is made of about 20 pixels. Dare I say that this Terminator is looking a little... chunky? Somewhat well-fed, like maybe they should have called this one Tum-inator 2: Fudgement Day? Oof, I'm sorry, that was bad. Here's a picture to make up for it.


It's nice to have constants in your life, things that are reassuringly unchanging. The fact that metal death skeletons from the future who wear Arnold Schwarzenegger like a winter coat are still The Coolest is one of those constants that I can cling to like driftwood in life's stormy waters.



I don't know who this guy is, but he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's the stunt double, the bootleg action figure, the star of The Asylum mockbuster movie The Eradicator. Impressively meaty forearms, though, even if a flat-top so perfectly level that you can land planes on it and a tiny button nose are making him less intimidating than he perhaps should be.


"Hasta mañana, kid. Follow me if you don't want to die."



When Ocean made the Amiga version of Terminator 2, they were aware they had the license and they could have made the characters look like they did in the movie, right? This screenshot is taken from the Terminator's first encounter with the T-1000 in the mall, a scene where Arnie is wearing one of the most iconic outfits in cinema history - an outfit that Ocean apparently decided was just too good to use in their game, and so we get a Terminator wearing a spray-on shirt instead of his famous leather jacket and shades. Would it really have been that difficult to give his some sunglasses? He's even got a more accurately-proportioned nose in this one so they wouldn't slide right off his face.



"Arnold, honey, it's very cold today so make sure you wrap up warm if you're going out to fight crime, okay?"



Last Action Dad, more like. He reached middle age, saw that his hair was thinning and decided to reclaim his lost youth by buying a leather jacket and some blue jeans but he's not fooling anyone. Just look at those dark circles around his eyes, he's a tired old man with nothing to offer a world obsessed with youth and dynamism, and as such it's hard for me to not sympathise with with him. It's only that fact that he chose a jacket the colour of infant diarrhoea that's stopping me from declaring my solidarity.



If your t-shirt is so tight that it shows off each abdominal muscle, then your t-shirt is too tight. Not that I would tell this lumbering sasquatch of a man that, I'd be too worried that his pop my head off and use my skull as a drinking bowl during his primitive bacchanalian rituals. I like that they didn't give him a face, just the idea of a face. It's a daring piece of impressionistic spritework, a Monet of the home console age.


Oh look, they did give him a face. Just not Arnold Schwarzenegger's face.



As always seems to be the case with these sprite history article, we end on a high note with a Capcom arcade game. For legal reasons the Dutch sprite in Alien vs. Predator might not technically be based on Arnie, but it still totally is and what's more it captures his essence better than any of the others we've seen today. It's huge, it's imposing, it has loosely-defined facial features that still somehow suggest that their owner struggles with English pronunciation and I love it. Even better, someone at Capcom thought "you know what would make Schwarzenegger even cooler? If he had a giant robot arm," and that person was one thousand percent correct. He uses his robot arm to punch xenomorphs right in the mouth. Both their mouths, even, and with that I'm going to end this article and go play some Alien vs. Predator.

With it's relatively sedate title screen and a logo that looks as though it was carved from Turkish delight, the opening moments of F-Zero are gentle, almost unassuming, but I can still remember the first time I saw it - visiting a friend who was an only child with a well-off family, a perfect combination of factors that led to him getting a SNES and most of the launch titles within months of it being released. We'd played a bit of Super Mario World, and while we enjoyed it it didn't set our hearts afire or anything. Don't get me wrong, Super Mario World is one of the finest games ever made, but in the EU it was less than a year since Super Mario Bros. 3 had come out and Super Mario World felt like more of the same. Super Soccer and F-Zero, though - they felt like a huge step up from the NES, especially once I'd seen F-Zero in motion and realised that the whole game looked like that, super-smooth and blisteringly fast, and it wasn't just some fancy effects brought in for the intro. I was so enamoured of ­F-Zero that when I started making fake videogame magazine using an ancient typewriter with an ink ribbon drier than a mummy's arsecrack, the entire first issue was devoted to F-Zero. What I'm saying is that this won't be an impartial, objective review.


On to the actual game, and let's meet the playable characters. Except we won't, because while there are characters in the driving seats of these vehicles, Captain Falcon being the most famous of them, they're never seen in-game. Instead, all you get to see are their F-Zero machines: four in all, with a range of stats, starting with the Blue Falcon. Captain Falcon's racer is an all-round machine average in every regard aside from being piloted by the coolest man in the galaxy. It also has an all-in-one windscreen and sunroof, like a Citroen C4. A good choice for the beginner, this one.


Ah, the Golden Fox, or the Flying Iron as we used to call it as kids. With the highest acceleration but the lowest top speed, the Golden Fox is a craft for the more experienced F-Zero pilot thanks to its tendency to slide around corners like a greased-up cat on a laminate floor. The Golden Fox is piloted by Dr. Stewart, a handsome and fabulously wealthy doctor who is also a race car driver and, one presumes, the hero of a romance novel who has somehow escaped into a different reality.


Next is the Wild Goose, another average craft that is extremely similar to the Blue Falcon only green and unaerodynamic. A little slipperier on corners, maybe. Its pilot is Pico, a vicious alien who lusts for death and carnage. You can tell he's evil, because he named his car after the most evil kind of bird.


Finally there's the Fire Stingray, a great big lump of a machine that sort of looks like a flamboyant fish. My personal favourite craft, it's the complete opposite of the Golden Fox: takes forever to get going but is the fastest once it is going, and it sticks to the corners better than anything else. Those are the qualities that make it my favourite, and not because I feel a kinship with anything fat and pink. The Fire Stingray's driver is Samurai Goroh, a samurai thief who wears the traditional samurai attire of a samurai sleeveless vest and a samurai flying cap. He's Captain Falcon's rival, although I'm not sure Captain Falcon sees it that way.


To get a look at the drivers we can turn to the manual, which famously included a short comic showing Captain Falcon doing his day job of being a bounty hunter before getting ready for the latest F-Zero race. Two things to mention here: one is that Dr. Stewart's name obviously wasn't nailed down at this point because the comic calls him Dr. Stuart, and the other is that everyone know that Pico is a murderer but nobody seems to give a shit.


The comic also shows just how much Captain Falcon looked like Judge Dredd in his first appearance. Giant gold birds all over him, black leather outfit, a face-obscuring helmet that he never takes off - I'd be very careful walking around Mega-City One dressed like that because if Dredd sees you it'll be straight into the iso-cubes for impersonating a Judge.


F-Zero features fifteen tracks split into three leagues of five, so let's begin with the Knight League (the easiest of the three) and its first track, the iconic raceway of Mute City. Unlike many other racing games of the time, there's no secret trick to getting a speed-boost by holding the accelerator at the correct time in F-Zero. If you hold down accelerate too early your vehicle will lurch ahead for a moment but then slow right down, allowing the other racers to breeze past you. However, and this is my top ­F-Zero advanced driving tip, the computer-controlled cars always start the race by driving forwards in a straight line, so if you're in a craft with lower acceleration (i.e. not the Golden Fox) you can use the momentary speed boost to position yourself right in front of one of the faster racers. They will then ram into your from behind, pushing you up to high speed and causing them to fall back. A bit of a dick move, sure, but Pico has already threatened to murder me so I think some start-line argy-bargy can be considered as close to fair play as F-Zero gets.


Then you're away, hurtling around the track at preposterous speeds and it's just plain good fun. F-Zero­'s then-unparalleled sense of speed is often mentioned as its main defining feature, and it certainly is a technological achievement that blows anything the NES could produce out of the water, but there's more to it than that. For one thing it's also extremely smooth, both in terms of the scenery flying by without so much as a hiccup and the perfectly implemented and surprisingly delicate controls that allow you to experience the high-speed action without the frustration of not being able to get your craft to go where it's supposed to be going. I think a big part of the control scheme's success is down to the addition of the air-brakes - operated by the L and R buttons, holding them down allows you to not only take corners at much sharper angles than you could otherwise but also to make fine left and right adjustments without having to use the d-pad.
That said, the sense of speed really is the key to F-Zero­'s success and it's all thanks to the SNES' famous Mode 7 graphical effects that allow the background to be scaled and rotated on the fly. It's sometimes said that F-Zero is nothing more than a tech demo designed to showcase the SNES' graphical grunt, and while I think that's a little harsh - there's a finely-honed gameplay experience under all the sparkles and stardust - it definitely made a powerful statement about just what Nintendo's new console was capable of.


Looking at Mute City, I think there might be something to the whole F-Zero / Judge Dredd connection, you know. As a vast, sprawling metropolis that covers the landscape as far as the eye can see, Mute City certainly shares some similarities with Dredd's home of Mega-City One, and the vehicle designs would fit nicely into the pages of 2000AD, but I suppose we'll never get to see much more of Mute City to look for further similarities because the F-Zero races take place on aerial raceways suspended many miles above the city. That's what all the glowing barriers around the edge of the track are for, they're to make sure you can't fall off.


Except you very much can fall off - mess up a jump after being launched from one of the game's ramps and you can plummet off the track and down to a fiery death in the city below. Good work, Captain Falcon, that's someone's bedroom that you've smashed your rocket-car into. To live in Mute City is to live with the constant terror that a flying racecar is going to fall from the sky and crush everything that you care about, but on the plus side it must keep house prices low.


Captain Falcon claims first place and the SNES seizes the chance to flex it's graphical muscles a little by spinning the camera into a side-on position. Because it looks cool, that's why.
Coming in first is the aim of F-Zero - it is a racing game, after all - but it's not the be-all and end-all because it doesn't use the usual points table of most "grand prix" games. Instead, you have to finish each lap in a certain position or higher, or you're eliminated from the race: fifteenth place or higher in the first lap, then tenth or higher in the second and so on until you reach the final lap where you must cross the finish line in one of the top three positions. It's an unusual system that has its merits and its disadvantages - you can come third in every race and still "win" the league and the extra leeway is helpful (and almost mandatory on the higher difficulties) but it does rather detract from the thrill of winning the race. That said, given that I've already managed to spread Captain Falcon's body over several city blocks once already I imagine most F-Zero pilots are just happy to finish the race with their lives intact.


Track two is Big Blue, a course built above an ocean planet, presumably in response to the protests of those Mute City homeowners who live under the racetrack. The course map in the bottom-left looks a bit like a slouching man with no legs. Don't ask what the protuberance sticking out of the right-hand side is, though.
The grey patches on the track aren't scattered piles of cat litter but spots that slow down you craft if you drive over them, so don't do that. Unless you have a speed boost available, of course: then you can boost across them with no penalty, often finding valuable time-saving paths through the grey sludge. You get one boost per lap, (excluding the first,) represented by the "S" icons at the bottom of the screen. Sadly, unlike in the later iterations of the F-Zero series, there's no overenthusiastic announcer to shout "YOU GOT BOOST POWER!" when you collect one.


Big Blue also features this big patch of slippery, eye-punishing track that makes your car slide around if you try to turn on it. Because Mode 7 can only handle flat objects, F-Zero­ makes use of many different "painted on" road surfaces that hamper your driving ability in one way or another, from draining your power bar to magnetically pulling you towards them. In the case of this ice(?) patch, you might be tempted to slam on the brakes when trying to negotiate it, but I'm not so sure. Maybe we should ask Captain Falcon for his advice?


Well, that's that sorted, then. It's surprisingly sound advice, too; braking in F-Zero­ is rarely the best way to negotiate any obstacle, with a combination of using the air-brakes and simply not accelerating usually allowing you to keep more speed through corners. A true story: when I started playing F-Zero for the purposes of this article, I honestly couldn't remember if there even was a brake button, so little is it required. If you find yourself drifting too wide, you can generally get back on course by repeatedly tapping accelerate until your craft is stable again, which is another point in F-Zero's favour - it's a game that's both immediately accessible to anyone who picks it up, but one which also rewards players who master advanced techniques.


From a watery ocean to Sand Ocean for the third track, and here I'm sending the Blue Falcon right into the barriers in an attempt to get a better look at that colossal snail shell in the background. I've always loved that thing, sitting at such a distance that it must be thousands of feet tall to appear so prominently. I love the F-Zero universe, I really do, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't equally interested in the story of a snail the size of Mount Kilimanjaro.


All that dithering around looking at snail shells like some far-future adrenaline junkie reincarnation of David Attenborough meant that I was overtaken... and not just by the other three named racers. Fall far enough down the pack any you'll find yourself being harassed by these anonymous and numerous racers that look like the "space" equivalent of a VW Beetle. They're very little threat on the lower difficulties, but on Expert and the unlockable Master setting they can give you a real run for your money. However, the real members of this interchangeable race team that will cause havoc with your plans for a top-three finish are the the ones that are way down in the pack. There are plenty of them, and they're so slow that you will lap many of them in each race, assuming you can get past them. There are no Formula 1-style rules about moving out of the way of cars trying to lap you in the distant future, and the anonymous craft will bumble about right in front of you, pootling around in your racing line and causing you to crash, their sole reason for entering this high-stakes race with inferior ships that have no chance of winning seemingly being to get right on your goddamn nerves. Well, mission accomplished, you bulbous, dithering pricks. Bravo. Did I mention that some of these machines will be so low on energy that if you touch them they explode, sending your craft bouncing around the course? Because that happens.


One touch I do like is that while they have the same sprite, the anonymous cars are coloured differently depending on whether they're ahead of you in the rankings or are about to get lapped - purple and green for the challengers and orange for the also-rans. It means you can tell them apart at a glance, although it doesn't really matter because either type will try their level best to smear themselves all over your cockpit anyway.


This is Death Wind, and looking at its course map you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in for an easy ride. However, Death Wind - as well as being a set-up for some nicely childish flatulence jokes - has a gimmick, and that gimmick is, erm, wind. A constant wind blows your car to the side as you travel down the long straights, which must be counteracted by either driving into the wind at an angle or using L and R to constantly adjust your position. The third option is to randomly bounce around the track like a rat in a pinball machine, but as that usually results in your craft exploding after all it's power is drained I can't in all good conscience recommend it. Hang on, that means F-Zero is a racing game with a health bar and extra lives. Weird.


The final Knight League track is Silence, and I hope you're a big fan of Pythagorean mathematics because this one's all right angles all the time, apart from the early corner pictured above. This represents F-Zero's first real offer of a shortcut: you can either take the safe but longer path around the gentle curve to the right, or you can head left through a short minefield. Oh, and you have to take a very sharp left at the end of the minefield to make sure you hit the next jump over a patch of slow-down goo. Now, I don't want to get too bossy about this but if you don't take the shortcut every time then you are playing F-Zero wrong. I'm telling you this for your own good: attempting this track on the higher difficulties and not taking the shortcut will almost always lead to you dropping places, so you might as well get some practise in while things are more gentle.


With Silence conquered - "survived" might be a better word - the Knight League is over. Your reward is footage of your craft zooming around the track shot from various angles as your lap times are displayed - and that's it, which leads us to what is probably F-Zero's single biggest flaw: there's just not much of it. There are the fifteen tracks and four racers you start with, and that's your lot. No unlockables besides one extra skill setting, no story or celebratory cutscenes and, worst of all, no multiplayer mode. For whatever reason, F-Zero is a strictly single-player affair, and it's hard not to think that a versus mode would have given it some much-needed extra lifespan for players who , unlike me, weren't obsessed with the game.


Let's get straight into the Queen league, then, and the first track is Mute City II. Yep, we're back in Mute City, where sales of car-proof umbrellas have gone through the roof (much like the Blue Falcon) and the time of day has shifted to a sunset scene. The only major change is that there's a massive roundabout in the middle of the course now. You can go left, you can go right, but they're the same distance and your choice is ultimately meaningless. A harsh life lesson from F-Zero, there.


The second Queen League race takes place in Captain Falcon's birthplace of Port Town, where the track is still apparently under construction. And I thought the residents of Mute City had it bad, but at least their floating death-trap was fully assembled.


Another feature new to Port Town are these magnetic strips that I mentioned earlier. They work like a reverse version of Death Wind's gales but, if you'll allow me to paraphrase from Wayne's World, while the wind blows, these suck, dragging you car towards them and grinding it against the energy-sapping barriers. They're worth the hassle, though, because when you turn a corner near the end of one their magnetic force slingshots you around the bend, and it's a ridiculous amount of fun for something so simple.


Now we've reached Red Canyon. There's not much to say about this one: it's like Sand Ocean visually, but with more jumping and thus more crashing into the arid wastes where if the explosion didn't kill you then the harsh conditions surely will. One thing I can mention is that Red Canyon has a kickin' soundtrack:


It's got a great mix of tense, jabbing horns and a relentless bassline that perfectly fits the nerve-wracking action as you bounce over the desert, and the Red Canyon theme is hardly alone in being great: right out of the gate, Naoto Ishida and Yumiko Kanki created one of the SNES's very best "action" soundtracks, especially if you love those driving basslines.


The Big Blue theme is my favourite. Possibly not just my favourite F-Zero track but my favourite thing. I tried to record it off the TV using a TalkBoy when I was a kid. It didn't work. I never even got to use the TalkBoy to mess with with my sister's date, either, although that might be because I don't have a sister.


This is White Land, where the land is purple and Trading Standards have already been called. Okay, so a lot of the track is white, what with all the fake snow covering it. I assume it's fake snow, anyway. It must be, because the F-Zero racers are hovering so why would snow affect them? Of course, this is clearly some bizarre alien world given over almost entirely to the farming of violets and other purple flowers, so maybe the white stuff is a collection of unearthly crystals that mess with the F-Zero machines' G-Diffuser systems. Oh yeah, the G-Diffuser system is the technology that powers F-Zero machines and also reduces the G-forces felt by the driver, allowing them to scream around the track at five hundred kilometres an hour without their necks snapping like twigs whenever they turn a corner. A piece of Nintendo trivia for you (which I think is fairly widely known now): the G-Diffuser system is also used by the Arwings in the StarFox series. So, F-Zero takes place in the same universe as StarFox, which explains how Fox McCloud's dad pitched up in F-Zero X but not how he turned from an fox into a human.


The last course of the Queen League is White Land II, and yes, it is a little underwhelming to have two tracks with the same setting back-to-back. Nintendo did at least give each track a different variation of the same musical theme, which is pretty cool.
A couple of thing to note about White Land II: one is these blue energy-draining panels that you can save a couple of seconds on by driving straight through them. You lose a bit of energy, but real men don't use brakes and real men don't not drive through roadside obstacles, potentially damaging their vehicles for the sake of a small reduction in lap times.


The other thing is this ruddy great jump over nothingness: my nemesis, my downfall, my thing I swear at more than anything else in F-Zero which is quite an achievement when you remember all those anonymous cars that are driving right in front of you all the time. My problem with it is that it costs me at least one life every time I try the Queen League, because I always forget it's coming up and it's right after a corner so there's no guarantee you'll have enough speed to make the jump. That's fine on the later laps when you have a speed boost available, but for me the first lap of White Land II is usually going smoothly until I remember - too late, always too late - about this whacking great hole in the road. Still, once I've made it past that first lap it's plain sailing and the Queen League is in the bag.


We're in the King League now, and a new league means a new Mute City track. Mute City III takes place at night, and I think it's the best-looking of the three because it's got that neon-hued cyberpunk look to it. You can't have cyberpunk in the daytime, it's like drinking scotch at nine AM - sometimes interesting, but not just right on a basic level. It's nice to see Nintendo taking the colourful, vibrant style that they're known for and applying it to a science fiction setting - their only major sci-fi game before this was Metroid, and that's mostly dark and claustrophobic, quite unlike F-Zero's expansive landscapes.


The tracks are also getting much more challenging now, with some ferocious course designs and an abundance of obstacles that means surviving the race without running out of power is as much of a consideration as coming in first. You see that red circle I'm about to drive over? That's a land mine. Someone put land mines all over the road for the entertainment of the viewers of home. The F-Zero backstory is that the races were put together by a group of fabulously wealthy and extremely bored businessmen, proving that even in the far future you can get away with being an absolute dick if you have enough cash.
Not that I'm complaining about the land mines, mind you, or any of the other obstacles - F-Zero's combination of high-octance racing and precise controls means that weaving through them is never less than exciting, the slickness and pure action creating a racing experience that I don't think was ever bettered on any 16-bit platform.


This is Death Wind II, where the wind is still in full effect but the previously basic loop of the track has sprouted a bulging nightmare section of sharp corners and narrow track. It is a testament to this track's ability to thoroughly wreck your vehicle that it's one of the very few where you're forced to drive through the energy-restoring pit lane.


Third in the King League is Port Town II, and like Death Wind II it takes the first iteration of the course and grafts on a bunch of punishing new additions, like a Frankenstein swapping one of its arms for a boombox that only plays recording of seagulls fighting.
In the screenshot above, I've ended up in a tricky situation because there's no way I'm getting through that kink in the road without either crashing into the Blue Falcon or grinding against the barriers. For all my praise of F-Zero­'s gameplay - praise that is still fully justified - there is one area where it lets itself down, and that's collisions with other vehicles. The problem is that it's all just a bit random, and when you hit another car you're never sure how your vehicle will react. Sometimes you'll bounce off each other in a relatively sedate manner, sometimes you'll shoot off in a direction completely unrelated to the angle of impact and still other times you'll "stick" to the other car for a short while. If there were only you and the three other "named" racers on the track it wouldn't be so much of a problem, but the swarms of anonymous drivers that are there for no other reason than to get in your face mean that finding a clear driving line, especially on these later, tougher tracks - can sometimes switch from "challenging" to "frustrating."


The penultimate track is Red Canyon II, a relatively sedate affair that is markedly easier than all the other tracks in the King League. "Sedate" seems like and odd word to describe a track in which the most memorable feature is the chance to take a shortcut by jumping off the course and then bouncing back onto it by landing on a giant arrow made of jump pads, but there you go.


The final test of your F-Zero skills is Fire Field, a racetrack built on a planet whose surface is an endless vista of roiling lava. I know the founders of F-Zero were very rich and very bored, but just how rich and bored to you have to be to think this is a good idea? And where did they find a construction company willing to build this thing? Most builders won't show up for work if there's a light drizzle, never mind a relentless tide of all-consuming molten rock.


As you would expect from the last course in the game, Fire Field throws everything at the player in an attempt to make their vehicle explodes. Land mines, magnets, slip zones, you name it, it's here at Fire Field in quantities that make me wonder if this track wasn't created solely as a means of using up all the F-Zero league's leftover bullshit. The real malice of Fire Field, however, is found right at the end of the lap, where the game makes you choose between taking the short route along the final stretch to the finish line or going the long way around... which is where the only energy-restoring patch of track is located. That is just cruel, especially on a course where unless you're an F-Zero master you'll need every scrap of energy you can get lest you explode.


Yeah, like that.
I found that the best strategy was to go for the extra energy on every lap apart from the last, and then hope that whatever you've got left in the tank will see you through the final lap, all the while praying that one of the anonymous cars doesn't slam into you or park itself near the magnet rails.


It all worked out in the end, although it would have been a much easier ride if I wasn't playing as the Golden Fox because Fire Field has more corners than a box full of octagons. With a little perseverance, though, I managed to race to victory. By finishing third. Look, I'll take it.
With that, F-Zero is over, and sadly I mean that there's almost nothing else new to do in the game. As I mentioned, you can unlock the Master difficulty level for each league, but that's not much of a reward because rather than making the CPU racers more intelligent or devious it just makes them faster.


Much, much faster, in fact - in Master mode you can be flying along at top speed in the Fire Stingray (the fastest craft in the game, don't forget) and even the anonymous racers will simply glide past you on the long straights. It's not rewarding to beat or even much fun, it's just annoying. You do get a slightly different ending for finishing a league on Master difficulty... but as it just shows a top-down view of your vehicle and offers some generic congratulatory message, it's not really worth the stress of beating F-Zero at the highest level.


As I look back on F-Zero with a more critical eye (or the cynicism of age) I realise that perhaps it is not quite the flawless masterpiece that a young VGJunk believed it to be. It's very bare-bones, the difficulty curve is cheap rather than challenging and the mysterious whims that control the inter-vehicle collisions can lead to some frustration - but it's still a very good game. A great game, even, a game that stormed into the 16-bit marketplace and screamed "look at this cool shit," a game packed with Nintendo's traditional graphical quality and one of the best soundtracks of the genre and, most importantly, a game that is still fun to play even today. Some games do not age well, but F-Zero's mix of of simple, exciting gameplay and retro charm means that it has aged like a fine wine. It's also like a fine wine in the sense that I enjoy it so much that I gorge on it and then get a headache.

If you ever do any internet reading on Knuckle Bash, you're going to see phrases like "homoerotic" and "camp" and "super gay" being thrown around, but why? Just because the entire game consists of shirtless men grabbing each other with nary a single female character in sight? Yes, that's exactly why. Never mind that now, though, because there's wrestling iniquity afoot and it's time to meet the three brave heroes tasked with restoring order to the world of sports entertainment and re-sanctifying the squared circle.


I fucking love videogames. On the left we have an extremely muscular and very cheerful luchador - his name is La Plancha, which a quick search on Google Spain tells me means "The Iron." No, not like the metal, like the thing that you use to get creases out of your clothes. On the right is the still extremely muscular but far less cheerful Jack Brow (or possibly Jack Blow), a brooding sort with piercing blue eyes and a quiff so solid you could use it as an anvil for emergency blacksmithery. In the middle is an Elvis impersonator called Michael Sobut. The chances of me picking either of the other two over Wrestling Elvis are precisely zero percent.
Those are their Japanese names, by the way. Knuckle Bash was actually brought to the West by Atari, who renamed the characters: La Plancha was switched to Dice, Michael Sobut became Clash and Jack Brow's name was changed to Devo, presumably because he can whip it good.


Knuckle Bash is split into two halves, and you're given the opportunity to choose which one you want to take on first. They both sound very tempting, but I think I'll start with the top one. I should point out that the Bulls mentioned in these descriptions are not literal bulls, although I would not blame you for thinking that they could be.


Michael rides into action (past the "Zivenchy" store) on a motorcycle, because of course he does. If he was in a car people might not be able to see his outfit, and that's just not acceptable. As he rides along, the game's plot scrolls along the bottom of the screen at a speed that makes reading it difficult and slightly nauseating, so here it is in full so you can take it in at a more leisurely pace.
"Becoming a professional wrestler has always been my dream. I'll fight to the end to save the sport from the corrupt Mad Bulls. Wrestling heros unite! In a Chicago hotel, a secret meeting has been arranged. The heros decide to obtain the services of a powerful master of NINPOW. His name is 'HAYATE' ninja warrior. He resides in Hong Kong and is known to be a skillful and cunning fighter. The Mad Bulls want him too and will stop at nothing. The heros can't let this happen. Even if it means..."


So, the motivation of the wrestling heroes is that they're trying to save the sport from the Mad Bulls, a group of evil wrestlers whose corruption takes a very vague form. How are the Mad Bulls going to destroy wrestling, exactly? Murder? Extortion? Grossly inflated pay-per-view fees? Whatever their diabolical plan, our heroes will put a stop to it by recruiting the ninja wrestler Hayate, so get ready for some hard-hitting, bone-crunching contract negotiations and extended haggling over image rights and appearance fees. Nah, not really, I'm going to punch him until he joins our side.
The game begins as Michael arrives at the Chicago hotel mentioned in the intro. The hotel is called "Hotel Rats," and I'm no expert on marketing but I reckon naming your hotel after vermin is a poor branding decision. There's a reason the nearby Restaurant du E. Coli was forced to close.


And we're off, punching and grappling in the traditional "one attack button and one jump button" style familiar from so many oter side-scrolling beat-em-ups. To call Knuckle Bash"side-scrolling" feels a little inaccurate, though, because there's barely any side to scroll to. Each area is only a couple of screens wide, so the game feels more like an arena fighter than a belt-scroller, with a small number of enemies to be fought in an enclosed space before moving on to the next "room." The combat is mostly the same as always - tap punch for a combo, walk into enemies to grab them - but forget about that because I'm playing as an Elvis look-a-like in a skintight one-piece jumpsuit and cowboy boots, smacking seven bells out of cartwheeling mafiosi clad in retina-searing suits and hotel doormen built like oaken logs crudely fashioned into the shape of a man, and it is fantastic. Not gameplay wise, not really - it's fast and fun but hardly the next great leap in the evolution of the genre - but, well, you read that description, didn't you? There's nothing here not to like.


Okay, I think I've finished my TripAdvisor review for Hotel Rats. "A good location, interesting décor (I especially liked the fountain of the urinating cherub) but the bellhops became aggressive when I refused to leave a tip and tried to murder me with their luggage carts. Breakfast was adequate. Free WiFi. Overall, two of out five."


This being (sort of) a side-scrolling brawler, you can of course press both buttons together to perform a special attack that hurts all the enemies around you at the cost of some of your own health. In Michael's case, he creates a guitar from lightning and spins it around while shouting "Rock 'n' Roll!" because someone at Toaplan has a magical machine that can see into my dreams. Also, I didn't realise until after I'd finished the game that it's a literal electric guitar, oh ho ho.


Oh, I'm fighting this guy now? That's cool, he looks like a fun dude who definitely hasn't just escaped from a circus side-show.


Here he comes now, repeatedly launching his 'roided-out chest at me while the diners look on with feigned interest and a waiter in a frilly shirt does pirouettes. I think that waiter might encourage me to increase my hotel review score to three out of five, if only in admiration for his sheer energy. Nice to see that the boss is trying to expand the usual range of post-apocalyptic bandit fashions by adding the trailing wisps of a mullet to the usual mohawk, I'm sure that will be next season's hot new look for savage men who exist in a bleak, lawless future.
The boss's flying attacks are powerful but also easily dodged by moving up and down, allowing you to wait for him to land, stand behind him and then punch him in the back of the head when he gets up. This is a fairly reliable strategy for many of Knuckle Bash's bouts, and before long you'll be able to move on to the next vignette of violence. But how will Michael get to the next stage?


By staring at a window while a member of the hotel staff plants a bundle of dynamite behind him, either on the orders of the Mad Bull or in a desperate attempt to save his hotel from further destruction. The dynamite explodes, propelling Michael through the window and into the next fight. The dynamite does not hurt Michael because, much like how fire can only be fought with fire, only wrestling can harm a wrestler.


On the rooftop terrace, Michael must do battle with a kickboxer and a fat hillbilly. The hillbilly has the upper hand, because Michael can't see him past the comically oversized collar of his wrestling onesie, but a few electric guitar attacks and making sure to focus on removing one threat at a time will see him through.


Between certain stages there's a button-mashing minigame which, as far as I can see, provides the player with no reward beyond the vision of some firm, toned buttocks that have been vacuum sealed into a pairs of brightly-coloured silk trousers. Simply tap attack to build power until the timer runs out, when...


...both men punch each other in the face at the same time, possibly in an effort to thoroughly streamline the sport of boxing, or to create a new and punishing version of Rock, Paper, Scissors where you may only throw rock. If you've pressed the button enough times you'll knock your opponent to the floor. That is all.


Hang on, am I going to be fighting this guy or watching him do a strip show for a hen party?


Fighting, then. Also some posing, but mostly fighting, especially when the boss starting busting out his handstand kicks that I was having trouble avoiding until I realised that you can do a sliding kick by pressing both buttons while you hold the stick to the left or right. This move provided a good "in" for me as I used it to close the distance between us in a relatively safe manner. It was such an effective strategy that the boss retreated for a while to regroup, summoning in a swarm of lesser minions for me to deal with while he recuperated.


These minions, to be precise, these louche catalogue models that it's impossible not to imagine having the voices of people who attended exclusive American boarding schools. It's no surprise that you're fighting them at the marina, they were probably born on a yacht. They may even have yacht DNA, who knows what the ultra-wealthy inhabitants of The Hamptons get up to in the summer months.


Now that I've made it onto a boat, I decided that it was time to give La Plancha a try. I'm glad I did, because his special move involves grabbing an enemy, setting them on fire and then using their flaming corpse to batter any other enemies who didn't have the good common sense to run away when a huge masked man set one of their comrades alight. With no accelerant or ignition source readily identifiable, we are left to assume that La Plancha can make people combust using nothing but the white-hot flame of his unquenchable wrestling pride. La Plancha doesn't mess about, which makes it all the more puzzling that he's named after a household appliance.


Lurking in the hold of the boat and bursting through the hull to attack our hero was this gorilla. This gorilla-type thing, I should say, because gorillas do not have green skin and orange fur, as a rule. Or wear shorts, for that matter. Hang on: green skin, orange fur, shorts - this is Blanka from Street Fighter II, isn't it? Blanka, but with a more simian form almost totally lacking in humanity. I say almost because his genitals are covered by clothing, as God intended for the race of Man. Maybe this is what Blanka would have become had he not left the rainforest, fought men and women who could shoot magic soul energy out of their hands and eventually met the humanizing influence of Dan Hibiki. Oh well, rabid Blanka will have to be put down, and because La Plancha can burn him alive with a touch I guess that makes him the man for the job.
Also of note: earlier I mused that Knuckle Bash might not fit into the category of side-scrolling brawler, but I've just seen all those oil drums so we can now state with one hundred percent certainty that this is, in fact, a side-scrolling beat-em-up. That's that kind of scientifical gameology research you get here at VGJunk.


La Plancha takes the battle to Chinatown, a dangerous place populated by men who look like sleazy Seventies movie producers. Look at those two guys in the red jackets and tell me you can't imagine them with a gold chain around their neck, promising you that you'll be a star as you slide into the jacuzzi next to them. There are quite a lot of them, the one who manages to kill La Plancha having been promised the rights to adapt the story of Knuckle Bash into a major motion picture.
I really like the graphics in this section, you know. There are some nice details, like the chefs busily preparing food that has almost certainly had either blood or sweat splashed on it, and an overall pleasing quality to the whole scene. I can't really go into more depth than that, I just like it is all.


Two of Ronald McDonald's bastard sons stab a man to death in a Chicago back alley just because he wanted to clean up professional wrestling, while their supervisor - a large bear of a man in speedoes and a jacket with-rolled-up sleeves - mentally conducts their latest performance review. "Good work on the stabbing," he muses, "but their plain outfits do not reflect the standards of high camp that the Mad Bull organization strives towards. For this, they shall be reprimanded and sent to rummage through Elton John's cast-offs."


At last, I have found the ninja master Hayate, and Jack Brow is here to take him down. Don't worry, La Plancha survived his brutal back-alley shanking, I just thought it was time to show you this guy.
Jack is the least interesting of the characters visually, which is a shame because the way they look is all the characters have to separate them. Their special moves are slightly different, but they all have the same basic attacks and as far as I can tell they all share the same statistics - no-one is any faster or more powerful than anyone else. It's a shame, and more individuality would have definitely improved the game, but it does at least mean you can pick the the character you most like the look of without worrying that you're missing out on a "better" fighter.
As for Hayate, he's master the deadly NINPOW arts of sliding around on the floor like a dog with worms and turning himself into a cartoon tornado, making him a disciple of the rarely-seen Tasmanian Devil no Jutsu. It was a tricky move to counter at first, but then I realised that I could block by holding down punch. This revelation not only made beating Hayate much easier but it also entirely changed the flavour of Knuckle Bash's combat: whereas before I was trying to get in quickly to stop enemies from executing their moves and to finish them off as fast as possible, now I can take things at a slower pace and fight in a more counter-attacking style.


"I'll join you, but I won't fight them. I'll fight to them, right up to their front door if I have to, but I must insist that you respect my wishes not to fight anyone who might figure out how to stop me turning into a tornado."


Hayate joins the Knuckle Bash squad, and before you take on the second part of the game - the grandly titled "Fierce Battle of the Four Mad Bulls!!" - you are even given the chance to change your character. I'll be sticking with Jack Brow for a while, just to see what else he can do, but Hayate will get his turn later.



Another slice of what you might call plot if you were feeling very generous or had just sustained a serious head injury, once more brought to you in a text scroll quick enough to give your eyes whiplash. I think the speed at which these information dumps hurtle by speaks to the overall ethos of the Knuckle Bash experience - it's a game that wants you to get straight into the act of big men slamming into each other, with no time to spare for varied characters or complex moves or words. It's sort of refreshing, to be honest, and Knuckle Bash's weird and wonderful setting means I'm more than happy to overlook it's somewhat mediocre gameplay.
Anyway, here's the intro text of part two in full: "My journey takes me to BATTLE KINGDOM, headquarters of the Bull Group. It's rumored that one of them wants out of the organization. It seems he doesn't agree with their methods... I too was once lured by the temptations of the Bull Group. They are nothing but a gang of criminals, evil as sin."


Jack can't even make it through the car park without being attacked. It's good to see that wrestling is bringing in the big crowds, it's just a shame that the Mad Bulls' profits didn't extend to finding these guys shirts that fit properly. In a universe where (I assume) wrestling is the pinnacle of cultural and artistic expression you'd think that kind of oversight could be avoided.


Oh look, it's the first boss in a different set of colours. The tactics for beating him remain the same - block or dodge his jumping attacks, pummel him with some cowardly but very effective attacks from behind - but as this fight takes place in an actual wrestling ring I found myself subconsciously trying to perform more grabs and more wrestling moves on him. Hey, I'm just trying to give the crowd what they want, and until Jack Brow turned up I don't think they were really getting into it.


I mean, half the people in the crowd aren't even looking at the match! The guy on the far left has spotted a bird that has flown into the stadium and is fluttering around in the rafters, while the two men on the right are mortal enemies who, through a hilarious coincidence, bought tickets for adjacent seats and are so consumed by mutual loathing that they have to look in opposite directions at all times lest they accidentally make eye contact.


It's time to see what Hayate can do. What can he do? He can spin around. His tornado powers are still available now that he's a playable character, and very useful they are too although I definitely got more use out of them as a defensive technique than for doing damage. Other than that, Hayate is the same as all the other characters. I sort of want to say that Hayate's faster than the other characters, but I don't think that's true and I have just been mentally conditioned, through decades spent consuming videogames and action movies, to believe that ninjas are faster than everyone else.
I'd certainly expect Hayate to be faster than this American footballer that he's fighting. I'm not doubting the athletic prowess of American footballers, but they're not ninjas, are they? Actually, American Ninja Football would be great, leaping around the gridiron, throwing the ball like a shuriken, teleporting into the end zone, occasionally performing the silent assassination of the umpires. Anyway, the footballer: he's big, he's strong and he can set the ground on fire by punching it so he's handy to have around on a camping trip. His eyes are also tiny red dots of light glowing deep the shadows of his helmet, so I think he might be Johnny Maximum from World Heroes. Jumping over his grapples seemed to work pretty well, and once I'd figured that out it was a simple enough task to beat him. Then a trapdoor opened up - in the middle of a football pitch, I should remind you - and Hayate was dropped into the next arena.


Now, as we've seen, Knuckle Bash is a weird game, or rather it's a very average game with a weird and completely over-the-top setting. In the case of this stage, however, I think it's worth describing the environment just to fully communicate how bizarre it is. You can ignore the bad guy, because he's just a stereotypical "Arabian" fighter with a scimitar and ploofy trousers, but this background... You're in a wrestling ring, but the ropes are made of barbed wire (and yes, they do hurt you if you run into them) and the canvas appears to be made of marble. Behind the ring, wretched prisoners are trapped in a cage of fire, the punishment for their undefined crimes being to burn to death while watching wrestling. Atop the cell is a raised area where a reclining woman uses a tiger as a pillow and a man dressed as one of the Untouchables keeps checking his watch, as though he has somewhere more interesting to be than this vision of insanity. Further to the right is a figure that you never get to see in full: all you're privy to is that they're wearing leather trousers, they're carrying a whip and they may have a snake wrapped around their body. I am somewhat relieved that the camera never moves up high enough to see the rest of them. It's all rather wonderful, really.


You know what else is wonderful? The power of friendship, and I'm feeling pretty great now that the football player I clobbered earlier has decided to join my cause. His name is Captain, and what the hell was he doing while I was fighting the Arabian? Watching to see who would emerge victorious before he pledged his loyalty to either side, no doubt. Typical mercenary sportsman.


It's the final stage, according to the pre-fight splash screen, so I'd better give Captain a chance before I run out of things to beat up. Nothing much new in the moves department for the football star, although I was getting a lot of use out of his slide attack against the final boss: a flying Japanese demon that can breathe spiritual fire and split into multiple copies of itself to breath three lots of spiritual fire at once. That's a lot of fire to avoid, and avoid it you must because it does a ton of damage. Appropriately enough, I managed to fight fire with fire by exploiting the brief period of invincibility you get when activate Captain's ground-flame special move to dodge the streams of fire. Other than that, it was a battle of patience rather than all-out attack or significant yardage gains, but eventually I kicked the boss in the back enough times to claim victory and clear Knuckle Bash's final stage.


Except, in a shocking twist, the game is not over and the final boss was actually legendary Japanese wrestler Giant Baba in disguise! He was merely testing the wrestling heroes to make sure they had the strength to defeat the Mad Bulls, although I fear he may have taken the test too far as I appear to have beaten him most of the way to death.


Now I can take on the real final boss: deep in his secret base full of random cables, jets of flame and TV sets that are erupting from the floor, it's time to do battle with the grotesque, bloated leader of the Mad Bulls in a desperate attempt to save wrestling once and for all. Hang on, does the boss have the head of a pig?


Nope, he has merely sliced the face off a pig and stapled it over his own face Jesus Christ that is horrifying.


He's an intimidating opponent, all right, and not just because of he's clearly a deranged serial killer with a backstory that probably revolves around being raised on an isolated pig farm by his abusive, inbred parents. All his attacks are highly damaging, but special mentions must go to this grab where he shakes you around by the neck - good for removing almost a whole health bar - and his admirable foresight in installing gas hobs on the floor of his lair from which he can summon jets of flame whenever he bloody well feels like. The attack to really watch out for is his rolling cannonball, though, because that's the one that can be easily blocked and then punished. You'll probably lose a few lives, but Knuckle Bash isn't the credit-hungry coin guzzler it could have been and before too long the Pigman will fall.


Everyone gathers to celebrate their victory, and it's nice to see them all together, even if only because it clarifies that an Elvis impersonator is hanging out with a ninja. "We have one thing left to do," says whichever character you beat Pigman with, but what could it be? Another foe to defeat? The remnants of Mad Bull's evil plan that must be wiped out? No, the answer is "take control of our destiny!" I'm not sure how that works, I would have classed beating up this entire criminal organization as some grade-A destiny-seizing already, but I suppose that as a humble and squishy normal person I will never understand the heart of wrestling hero.


Knuckle Bash ends with our five champions of justice staring out to sea and wondering who to suplex next while some text rounds off the proceedings. I've pasted all the text into one image for you, because I'm nice like that. What a Knuckle Bash it was, they laugh, not realise that "knuckle bash" isn't really a phrase or anything, but at least they can be happy that their story will be passed on from "mouth to mouth." Eww.


I'm glad that I've done my part to pass on the story of Knuckle Bash, even if it wasn't in the traditional mouth-to-mouth manner, because this is a game I had a hell of a lot of fun playing. Eighty percent of that is down to the atmosphere and the setting, but you've probably figured that out already. It's basic but enjoyable game mechanics provided Toaplan with a solid base for their madness to sprout from. Fights are fast and fierce, and the very short running time even feels like a plus because sometimes you want a short blast of arcade fun and if Knuckle Bash went on any longer it would start to wear out its welcome. It has flaws, many of them large and obvious - no real difference between the characters, not much in the way of strategy and bland music that doesn't live up to the rest of the game's aesthetic overindulgence - but for fun, pure, stupid fun, I would recommend everyone give Knuckle Bash a try.

Punch-Out is always a good place to start these articles, because as I've mentioned many times before the game's characters are almost all solely defined by hyper-exaggerated national clichés. Also, because it came out before Street Fighter II - a game that surely helped crystallise the notions of what kind of fighters each country produces, from Brazilian beastmen to Indian mystics - you perhaps get a look at what kind of fighters could have been offered up if it wasn't for Capcom's arcade monolith. In Von Kaiser's case, however, we're immediately presented with the strongest running theme of all in the ranks of the German fighters, and that's militarism.


It's played up much more in the Wii reboot, but Von Kaiser's always been a military man. Unusually, he's aesthetically more akin to someone from the First rather than the Second World War, as denoted by his giant moustache. Most Nazis didn't have moustaches, except, you know, that one. His dialogue from the Wii game also mentions German precision, so that's another German stereotype right off the bat. The "German efficiency" thing is a factor in some of these characters, but not as many as you might expect given that it's a quality of "German-ness" that can be evoked in a character much less controversially than the whole "war" thing. I reckon that's probably because it was assumed that cold and calculating fighting game characters weren't going to sell games, especially during the fighting game boom of over-the-top, in-your-face and occasionally legally dubiousSFII clones.
Did I mention that he's called Von Kaiser, by the way? Because as German-sounding names that a German person would never have go, it's a pretty good one. I don't have confirmation that "Von" isn't actually his first name, but in my heart I believe that his first name is actually Otto or Fritz or something, just to really hammer the point home.



On to the Street Fighter series itself now, by way of Final Fight, with Hugo Andore. Moving from Germany to Metro City as a young man, Hugo's entire family joined the Mad Gear gang because the family that terrorises innocents and kidnaps women together stays together. Hugo is also a professional wrestler, which should come as no surprise when you realise he's based on Andre the Giant, although that does make it a bit odd that he's German as Andre the Giant was French. I think this is the power of the stereotypes coming through: French fighters are almost always lithe, graceful types, which Hugo most definitely is not.


Hugo went on to appear in Street Fighter III, where he continued to be extremely large but with a new face that resembles a half-melted Halloween mask of his old face. He also really likes potatoes, but I don't think that's a German thing. In fact, Hugo is one of the least typically "German" (in the videogame character sense) of all the fighters included here.



Another Street Fighter character who started out in Final Fight, Rolento takes us right back into the category of military Germans even if he does look like he's dressed for a commando raid on a banana farm. Rolento is apparently only of German heritage, having been born in the USA, but that's good enough for me. Like Hugo, old grenade-nipples here graduated from the Metro City school of being pummelled by vigilantes, and a few too many mayoral piledrivers gave him the bright idea of creating a utopian nation built around being in the army. Makes sense to me, if you ask any squaddie what being in the army is like they'll tell your it's a veritable Elysian garden of delights. Rolento really likes armies, always trying to drum up recruits for what will assuredly be a paradise on Earth so long as you like cold showers, five AM wake-up calls and long walks on the beach (in full combat gear). Alright, maybe I'm being a bit harsh on Rolento's plans: he does refuse to use M. Bison's brainwashing machine in Street Fighter Alpha 3, realising that no country can be a utopia if the citizens don't possess free will. When you stack him up against the villains of the Street Fighter series, that makes Rolento seem like a goddamn saint, although the next character might disagree with that appraisal.



Doctrine Dark: military code-name or astonishingly cruel parents? We may never know, because Doctrine's mind has completely snapped, just in case you thought the guy in the gas mask with the mad, staring eyes was a well-balanced individual. Doctrine's condition is down to Rolento, who once upon a time was leading a rival unit of troops to Doctrine's. The two groups go into a playful scuffle which soon descended into an all-out battle to the death. In perhaps the ultimate example of "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt," Doctrine is left with terrible injuries that force him to dress like a scuba diver for the rest of his life. He doesn't blame these injuries on Rolento so much as he does on Guile, who he thinks should have trained him better. That's a bit of a let off for Rolento, frankly.
So, another soldier, but a much more modern one - in videogames, Germans are militaristic no matter the time period, it seems. Doctrine's definitely not one for efficiency, mind you. Engaging troops that are on your side in combat rates pretty low on the efficiency-o-meter.



One minor trend amongst German fighters (and for a horror fan such as myself, a much more welcome sight) is the Frankenstein's monster. I mean, it's possible that bits of him came from soldiers but that's not his main thing. German in the sense that it's his place of manufacture rather than the country of his birth, Victor was - like the monster in the original novel - put together by a mad scientist in Germany, the classic "reanimated corpse jigsaw" look given a fresh new twist via the creative excess of Japanese arcade character design. As such he's most like Hugo on the character front: strong, not too smart and not really evil, per se. It would be pure conjecture on my part to say that some Frankensteinian visual elements seeped into Hugo's SFIII redesign, intentionally or not, but his head does look like something you'd dig out of a gravesite.


Back to Victor, and as well as having the electrical powers that Frankensteins sometimes do in videogames, he can also stretch and expand his limbs when he attacks. Keep this in mind, because it's going to come up again.



Marco is the star of Taito's arcade fighter Kaiser Knuckle, or he's the star to me, anyway. He's a strangely loveable off-brand Frankenstein with a head swathed in bandages, presumably for the well-being of anyone who might otherwise get a look at his face, and shoes that have burst open to reveal his toes as though he were a cartoon hobo. There are few surprises about his fighting style, with lots of powerful strikes and grapples that use his size to his advantage, but Marco can also do this:


As well as being utterly revolting and terribly unhygienic, this move shows that, like Victor, Marco can stretch his limbs to attack. At first I thought this might have been a case of Taito going a bit too hard on the homage after playing Darkstalkers, but apparently both Kaiser Knuckle and the first Darkstalkers were released in July of 1994. That doesn't leave any time for "inspiration" to pass between the games, so we must assume that two different companies coincidentally released fighting games featuring stretchy-armed German Frankensteins in the same month. I have a theory, however - elongating limbs are not a marks of a monster but are, in fact, a deeply German trait.



I assume Helmut is supposed to be German, anyway. His name is Helmut and his head is shaped like German soldier's, erm, helmet, so I think it's a fair assumption to make. Helmut wasn't always a somewhat Nazi-looking cyborg, because Street Combat is actually the Super Famicom anime tie-in game Ranma 1/2: Chunai Gekitouhen only with all the sprites edited into completely different characters that don't require a licensing fee to use. Helmut was originally a skateboard-riding beach bum / high-school principal. Did whoever reworked the sprites have a special chart that showed what the exact opposite of each character was? I'm going to assume yes, they did, because otherwise how would you get from Hawaiian-shirt-wearing party dude to robotic death machine?


Helmut also has an extendable limb attack, if you're willing to accept the generous description of a medieval mace as a "limb."



Brocken looks more like a Nazi than any character on this list so far, to the point that you might feel a bit uncomfortable choosing to play as him. Even if it's usually played down, it's understandable (if not particularly appropriate) that German characters sometimes had these Nazi overtones, particularly in Japanese-developed games. The Second War War was the most important period of the last century, after all, and through a combination of geographical distance and a lack of education on the horrors perpetrated by the Axis powers (both German and Japanese) Nazism is far less taboo in Japan than it is in the West.


Brocken himself is a cyber-soldier with, you guessed it, extendable limbs, like some kind of Nazi Inspector Gadget. That's at least four German fighters who can stretch their body parts, so I'm going to have to declare that a theme, and we're zeroing in on what would be the most German fighting game character of all time - a military Frankenstein with stretchy body parts. Honestly, that sounds pretty cool to me, sans the Nazi overtones.
One final note about Brocken: according to the SNK wiki, he was created for the Third Reich by time-travelling scientist Doctor Brown, a sentence that could also describe the most appalling Back to the Future sequel imaginable.



All of these characters so far (with the possible exception of Helmut) have been of Japanese design, but Hans here is a British take on the German stereotype, courtesy of U.S. Gold's Street Fighter"sequel"Human Killing Machine. It's a sequel to the home computer port of the original Street Fighter in the sense that U.S. Gold promoted it that way despite it having nothing to do with Street Fighter, that is. Anyway, I'm amazed it's taken us this long to see a character in lederhosen, but it's no surprise that it comes from a British designer - I think even more so than war-related stuff the British mind turns to lederhosen, sausages and getting beaten at football when it thinks of the Germans, or at least my generation does. Bonus points for giving Hans the classic "German porn moustache," too.



Siegfried is big, blonde - I was expecting a higher percentage of blonde characters, you know - and, for a master knight who gets possessed by a demon sword on the regular, kind of boring. He's fun to play as, at least, and he still possesses the military theme of German fighters in a much less potentially offensive manner.



Z.W.E.I... sorry, I had to stop for a moment because typing his name out like that is so aggravating. Z.W.E.I., on the other hand, does not look like he belongs to any particular theme, unless you count "potential Final Fantasy XVI lead character" as a theme. It's patently ridiculous to describe a game filled with sentient swords, undead pirates and kung-fu fighters with Elvis hairdos as having a "jump the shark" moment, but if Soul Calibur did possess such a thing then I think Z.W.E.I. would be it. He wears tight leather trousers and fights by summoning a werewolf ghost, so "Turbogoth" would have been a much better name for him, and far less annoying to type.



At first glance, Wolfgang Krauser might appear to have none of the common German features - he's not a soldier, he can't elongate his limbs - but then you realise that he's got a nice bushy moustache and I think I'm going to accept that as part of the German "canon", if you will. It's not the unequivocal porn 'tashe that Hans is sporting, but give it time and I'm sure it could get there with some tender loving care. He'll be roaming Bavaria, offering to fix the plumbing of lonely hausfraus in no time.
Unfortunately, any fond feelings I may have towards Krauser are completely eradicated once I remember that he has a special move called "Blitz Ball" and I find myself unable to dissociate him from the bitter memories of Final Fantasy X's underwater minigame of the same name. I didn't even need Wakka's ultimate weapon, I was never going to use him as one of my main party members.



We've seen a few characters with a Nazi influence, but Taiwanese developer Panda Entertainment decided that they weren't going to pussyfoot around the issue in their DOS fighting game Tough Guy and so they included Wacker, a full-on, undeniable Nazi. For all the horrible things I've seen in videogames over the years, the overblown violence and cheap sexual titillation, a pixel sprite of a character giving a Nazi salute still has the power to shock. That's not even the half of it, either: check out Wacker's projectile attack.


Wow. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that being able to control a playable character who can throw giant energy swastikas around is somewhat beyond the pale. Wacker is an evil character and one of the game's bosses, but still, I'm definitely not comfortable with this and I think "playable Nazi" is a good place to draw this article to a close.
In summary, then: the Germans of the fighting game world are mostly soldiers and often very large. Sometimes their largeness is due to them being stitched together from the reanimated corpses of the dead. A higher percentage of them than you might think can extend their limbs, a trait which I can't think of a way to tie to their Germanness with the possible exception that some Japanese franchise, probably a manga, starred a German character with stretchy body parts who influenced videogame designers. Every German I've ever met has been a thoroughly pleasant and sensible individual, so hopefully they won't be offended by the stereotypes on display here - merely puzzled that, according to videogame designers, there are apparently no women in Germany.

Postman Pat is a British kid's show about a postman named Pat. That's really all there is to it, or at least it was when I was young - these days Pat works for the Special Delivery Service and has a helicopter, apparently. The Postman Pat from my childhood did nothing more strenuous than pootle around the village in his little van, delivering mail and dealing with minor inconveniences like fallen trees blocking the road and letters getting wet in the rain. When I say "dealing with them," I mean he manages to deliver the parcel instead of just posting a "sorry you were out" notice through the letterbox without knocking like any other Royal Mail employee. Pat's most striking physical feature is his head, a cylindrical flesh-tube sporting a nose the size of Pinocchio's after the wooden boy tried to explain to his dad that he was just holding onto the weed for a friend.


The Greendale Rocket of the title is not, sadly, a space rocket. Pat will not be the first person to deliver junk mail to the moon - that honour will go to the brave astro-couriers of the twenty-third century, who will risk their lives to make sure the Sea of Tranquility never runs low on takeaway menus and offers on cheap double glazing. No, the Greendale Rocket is a steam train. The Greendale Rocket does not seem to be working - hardly surprising given that it's a steam train and this game is presumably set in 2007 - and the overall aim of the game is to get it running again.


Pat is ready to help everybody on this major engineering and restoration project, where no doubt his skills of driving a van and walking up garden paths will come in very useful.


So, Postman Pat and the Greendale Rocket is another of those made-for-kids, low-effort affairs that I've become oh so familiar with over the years, but unlike games such as NSYNC: Get to the Show and Diva Starz: Mall Mania, PPatGR is quite heavily based around platforming action. Okay,"action" is far too strong a word. Let's go with "platform meandering". There are still plenty of mingames - shovelware developers of the 2000s were apparently unshakable in their conviction that the young 'uns wanted an endless parade of assorted inconsequential fluff - but jumping around the village and collecting stamps, letters and parcels makes up the majority of the gameplay.
It really is just jumping, too, and Pat has even less moves than Super Mario because at least Mario can run. All Pat can do is hop into the air and (very occasionally) push an object by walking into it. Everything in the game - the platforming, the minigames, advancing the on-screen text - is controlled using only the d-pad and the A button. Simplicity in a videogame can be refreshing. In this case it is not. Pat's jumping controls are responsive, at least, but then you'd bloody well hope so with only one button to manage.


After a while spent wandering to the right, I came across a trough filled with water, or possibly a communal swimming pool. Those things on the side look like diving boards, at any rate. The mystery of why a small English country village has a swimming pool in the middle of the pavement aside, it was too big for Pat to jump across and so I thought hey, maybe Pat can swim?


Pat cannot swim. He cannot even survive the merest dunking, and contact with water causes him to die instantly. Perhaps he suffered an immediate brain aneurysm at the thought of all the paperwork he'd have to fill out to explain his now-waterlogged cargo of mail. "Royal Mail Damaged Mail Insurance Form Question 1: How did the damage occur? Answer: I jumped fully-clothed into a swimming pool. I'm fired, aren't I?"
The solution to this watery obstacle comes in the form of Pat's black-and-white cat Jess. Jess is waiting near the pool, and when you walk near him control switches from Pat to Jess. Great, I thought, cats are agile creatures, so Jess can surely make this jump.


Jess cannot make the jump. I'm beginning to suspect that this pool is not even filled with water but a powerful mutagen. I think Jess is halfway to turning into a cat version of the Joker in the image above.


No, the real solution is to use Jess' cat powers to climb up this drainpipe. Then you can jump across the rooftops and activate the totally normal platform made from extremely common floating rocks. Hey, I've spent plenty of time in small villages in the Yorkshire Dales and I can confirm that outdoor swimming pools with mysterious hovering boulders over them are as common a sight as hikers in questionable shorts.
With the platform moved into position, control returns to Pat, who can continue on his journey. The occasional need to take control of Jess, either to climb up something or to walk through a small passageway, is about as far as PPatGR goes toward creating new vistas of videogaming experience. I suppose it's better than nothing, even if Jess (who is a cat) controls almost exactly the same as Postman Pat (who is an adult human male).


Once the first stage is over - it didn't take long, even with the accidental drownings - you get to play the first minigame. In his mad mail-collecting frenzy, Pat has not only scooped up all the parcels but also a large amount of fruit, vegetables and canned goods. Naturally you have to get these back to the residents of Greendale before they realise no-one's got any food and they loot the village shop, so in this minigame you have to sort the goods into one of these three sacks. Parcels go in the middle bag, fruit and veg on the left and tin cans on the right. To call it a bad minigame might be unfair, because there's nothing here to be bad. It's a complete non-entity with all the drama and excitement of aimlessly flicking through the TV channels late at night.


Stage three: driving Pat's van through the streets of Greendale. To drive, hold A and press up and down on the d-pad to swerve around the hundreds of traffic cones that someone with no understanding of even the basic concept of a traffic has scattered haphazardly throughout the village. The road surfaces are all perfectly fine, there are no workmen present, so why are there more cones here than in the bedroom of a drunken kleptomaniac student? There's a surprisingly tight time limit, too, surprising given that the previous stages were so easy, so I could see kids getting frustrated by the sheer volume of the pointy orange hordes. Not me, though, I'm totally cool and super great at videogames so I breezed past all of them on my way to find Ajay. Oh, right, supposedly the goal of this stage is to find someone called Ajay. I hope he's not hiding under a traffic cone or we could be in for a long search.


Ajay is the driver of the Greendale Rocket, it seems, and he wouldn't get to work until Pat brought him the large prune you can see at the bottom-left of the screen. Ajay demands that he's running regularly before his train will, you see.
That's the basic shape of PPatGR, then; each "world" is made up of a simple-to-the-point-of-redundancy platforming stage and a slightly aggravating driving stage made worse by the nagging feeling that you shouldn't be getting annoyed by something so basic, with a minigame sandwiched between the two. Let's get cracking and see the rest of them, shall we?


Postman Frog, Postman Frog,
Postman Frog crawled out of this bog.
He can't post your letters,
'Cause he got ate by herons,
Postman Frog should not have been employed.
Well, at least the forest-themed platforming stage wasn't the first one out of the gate in this game, although that first trip through Greendale was hardly a harrowing voyage through the decaying urban sprawl.


The second minigame involves hammering the A button to fly a kite, a kite that you must use to collect these unusually airborne letters. If you'll allow me one more dig at the Royal Mail - and if you've ever had a problem with them then I'm sure you will - it would explain a lot about their level of service if they used kites as a regular delivery system. I do hope this is all taking place on Pat's day off, you know. I'm fairly certain ditching your round to piss about with a kite is a sackable offence.
As for the actual event, where the driving was more challenging than you might expect for the target demographic, flying this bloody kite is just hard. Going for the low-flying letters is the problem, as it's all too easy to not press the button quite fast enough and see your kite fall to the ground, and there's no warning of when you're approaching this arbitrary limit. PPatGR gives you infinite lives, so it's not like you're going to get a game over, but it could definitely have been less annoying.


Postman Pat: terrible at flying kites. So bad at flying kites, in fact, that he has to chase it down in a motor vehicle. Quite what this has to do with either the postal service or getting a steam locomotive running is not explained, but that kite needs retrieving and the only way to do that is to drive as fast as possible through the narrow country lanes surrounding Greendale. In this case "as fast as possible" isn't very fast at all because Pat's van has the aerodynamic profile of a pile of housebricks, but it's still sending a dangerous message about road safety to the youth.


As night falls on Greendale, Pat heads to his local for a few pints to relax him after a strenuous day of kite-flying and driving around in his little red van. Unfortunately he overdoes it on the sherry and has to cling onto this wheelie bin for support as he stumbles home, leaving his own "special delivery" inside that the disgusted owner of the bin will have to clean out with a jet washer.
Before you get too excited about the appearance of these pushable items, I should make it clear that they're only part of a puzzle in the same way that opening a cupboard door is a puzzle. You push the wheelie bin (or sometimes a hay bale) over to a wall that's too high to jump over, you jump onto the wheelie bin, jump over the now-surmountable obstacle, et voilà. It's hardly Myst. It's hardly anything, really.


The minigames hit a new low as the vicar gives Pat a bucket and tells him to catch the water dripping through the church roof. "How long will I have to do this?" asks Pat. "Until we raise the eighty thousand pounds needed to repair the roof." Replies the Reverend. "We're having a bring-and-buy sale on Saturday, I'm sure that will do the trick." Is the whole "church needs money to buy a new roof" thing as common in the rest of the world as it is in Britain? I suppose probably not so much in America, those churches aren't generally as old as the one in Europe
There is one impressive thing about this minigame, though: the developers managed to do away with even the A button. It won't be long now before I'm just watching a really bad episode of Postman Pat.


Holy moly, those traffic cones are actually being used in a reasonable, sensible manner! I honestly did not expect to see that. I thought I was going to be forever slaloming through a haphazard forest of cones, distributed around town as though they were dropped into place by slinging them from a helicopter.


Jess pounces on a letter, so that letter will be torn to shreds immediately. That's the kind of thing cats do, right? I don't know. I'm not a cat person nor, despite the rumours, am I a cat-person. A cat person is different from a cat-person, because only the latter transforms into a jaguar at night and slaughters the local livestock. Anyway, here you can see Jess' other talent besides climbing up drainpipes, and that's entering small tunnels into which Pat cannot fit. You can also see that PPatGR does sometimes try reward the player for exploring or at least paying attention: there's another tunnel to the left with collectibles in it, but stepping on the blue button sends you straight back to playing as Pat so you have to have the presence of mind to jump over the button to get the extra goodies. Goodies which do nothing, as far as I can tell - there might be something special for collecting every single thing in every stage but it'll take someone much more dedicated that me to find that out.


The next minigame gives Jess a starring role in a forced scrolling section where the player must catch eighty butterflies, presumably before you run out of screen to scroll through. It's certainly more engaging than catching the dripping water, but then so is starting intently at the back of your own hand for three hours. Oddly, the butterflies are rendered in noticeably poorer graphics than everything else. For the most, PPatGR has been a fairly pleasant game visually - a little fuzzy, perhaps, but nothing like as ugly as these garishly coloured butterflies with their heavy black outlines.


I hope you'll forgive me for skipping the fourth driving section, but you're not missing anything anyway because it's the same as all the others. The final platforming stage, on the other hand, has been tinted with strangely melancholic sunset tones, and it looks rather nice. It'd look better if the collectable items didn't obscure so much of the screen and the status bar wasn't such an obnoxious "filthy motorway service station cafe" combination of colours and fonts, but nothing's perfect.


Here's me forgetting that Jess can't jump any further than Pat and completely missing that platform. It's a good job cats always land on their feet, although that won't matter if Jess falls into another one of Greendale's myriad pavement swimming pools.


There's one last minigame to play, and it's all about stamping parcels and letters while Mrs. Goggins, the postmistress, stares blankly at you from the background. She's been rendered catatonic by the dizzying speed at which these items fly across Pat's field of view, speed that will almost certainly cause you to become flustered and accidentally stamp a birthday present and what the hell are you doing Pat only letters and parcels get stamped! I'm not joking, these items are fair shooting across the screen and it's impossible to stamp them all, so the minigame falls into this weird mishmash where it's not difficult but it's still stressful. As long as you concentrate on not hitting the gifts - because a mistake like that stops your stamp working for a while - you'll be able to do it fine unless you have the world's most embarrassing coronary. "Cause of Death: got overexcited by a children's videogame" is not something you want your family to see.


Then there's one final driving section, the same gameplay as the others but the action's enlivened by the hideous blackness of the Outer Dimensions that has begun to seep into Postman Pat's universe, bring madness and death to all those it consumes. On the plus side, no traffic cones.


That's it, we're done here. Postman Pat has successfully brought together all the things that the Greendale Rocket was lacking: a prune, a wad of crumpled tin foil, a whistle, a wrench and a small bag of dice. Hmm. Maybe you should have brought the locomotive some bigger wheels, Pat. It looks like a shopping trolley that's got ideas above its station with those things sticking out of the bottom. Oh well, I won't be riding it, so when it slides off the rails don't come crying to me. Except you can't, because I've already peeled off into the sunset, having somehow figured out how to do sick wheelies in my post van.


Postman Pat and the Greendale Rocket managed to exceed the expectations I had for it, but then again my expectations had been hammered into the dirt by almost every other "kids" game I've ever played. The minigames are tedious, but they're generally not obnoxious about it and wouldn't you rather be bored than actively upset? That's right. Okay, so the driving sections aren't great either, but the platforming stages are... well, they're alright for very young players. It looks pretty nice and the music is impressively tolerable considering every track is based around the Postman Pat theme. I still wouldn't give this to a young relative to play - I'd give them Super Mario Bros. or a sheet of paper with "VIDEO GAME" written on it - but as these things go it's not soul-crushingly awful. It's amazing how much difference even the tiniest of care and attention can make, and that's exactly the amount of care and attention that went into this one.

There's an Old West bandit now, brandishing his comically oversized pistols while standing in the splay-legged manner of a man who needs to ride a smaller horse. Also, the background is hurting my eyes, and I'm going to need my eyesight to be working with full laser-like clarity if I'm going to become the most feared gunslinger in town, so let's get straight into it.


Rather than having a series of stages or anything like a story, Bang! falls into the "carnival" category of lightgun shooters. Each course consists of a number of randomly chosen, bite-sized shooting minigame that mostly adhere to the Wild West theme, with the harder courses having stricter limits for success but not, sadly, a different array of minigames. Before we get started, I'll come out and say what I'm sure you'll all be thinking about this game at the end of the article: yes, it's a lot like Namco's multi-event shooter Point Blank, but less charming and without playable characters that look like rejected designs for explorer-themed Muppets. In fact, you're never shown what the star of Bang! looks like, so let your imagination run free, I guess? I'm going to pretend that you're playing as no human but rather a sentient, floating revolver that travels the wild frontier looking for the ultimate test of its shooting prowess. I call him Colt Steelflint, and he wears a tiny Stetson.


The random selection of the games you'll be playing is presented through the medium of this old-timey slot machine. I'd call it a one-armed bandit, but that seems liable to cause offence when there's a strong chance that an actual bandit with one arm could be standing nearby. Sometimes you can figure out what a game entails by its icon, but not often - for example, the icon on the left is obviously a firing-range target, so you can guess how that one's going to work, but aside from that? The feather indicates you will be shooting feathers, which isn't much to go on. The word "Hotel" leads me to think that game will take place in a hotel but doesn't reveal any more than that. As for the box on the far right, your guess is as good as mine. I sort of feel like the box is looking at me, though, a sure sign that today's eighth cup of coffee was the one that took me over the edge.


Before each game you're given a set of instructions, even when they aren't needed. I suspect the command "SHOOT!" is going to appear a lot in these tutorials. In this case, everything's fairly straightforward - you get six bullets to score as many points as possible by shooting the target in the centre. Personally I would have rewarded groin shots with more than 10 measly points, but then I am one for creating rich and diverse gameplay experiences.


Here is the game itself. Sorry I didn't have a more graphically interesting one to start with, but I was at the mercy of the random game selector / fruit machine. It's simplicity does at least allow for solid baseline of gameplay enjoyability to be found, and I can say that shooting this target offered a reasonable amount of fun, as these things go. The problem with writing about lightgun games is that holding a physical "gun" is so integral to the enjoyment of the game, and obviously I don't have a Bang! arcade cabinet handy. Therefore all I can say about the game's quality is that it's still fun when played with a mouse, via emulation, and so is probably even better when you're holding a lump of plastic shaped like a six-shooter.


I did it, passing the score quota through a combination of excellent marksmanship and the mental fortitude required to overcome decades of videogame training, allowing me to not automatically aim for the target's head. Your score is displayed over the state flag of Texas. I cannot think of a more fitting backdrop for gunfire statistics.


From there, Bang! proceeds along the same path of brief explanation - shooting action - statistics, penalising the player if they fail to reach the target score for that game by docking them a life. You can also lose a life if you mess up in other ways, such as accidentally shooting Chief Big Nose here instead of delicately blasting the feathers from his headdress. Chief Big Nose endures this insult with the solemn dignity that only a cardboard cut-out of a Native American can convey.
Bang! contains about thirty or so minigames, so I'm not going to go through each one: several of them are slightly different variations on a theme, while others are just boring, so instead I'm going to show you a selection of the more interesting ones. Don't worry, I'll explain what that "box with a target on it" game is all about.


First, the hotel. It's simple enough - bandits appear in the windows, and you have to shoot them. Sometimes babies appear instead, babies with heads the size a grown man's torso, and those you're not supposed to shoot. Of course, Gaelco guaranteed that I'd shoot plenty of babies by having them stand out from the bandits by flapping their arms around and being bright pink. It's okay, they're not real babies... which makes it odd that I'm being penalised for shooting them. Am I currently taking my Cowboy License Test? Is there an instructor standing somewhere off-screen, grading my efforts? "Minor faults: spurs don't jingle-jangle correctly, didn't call anyone "pardner". Major Faults: shot a baby."


At last, the mystery of the target boxes is revealed. You shoot the boxes, and they either throw out a green ball or a bundle of dynamite. Shoot the balls, don't shoot the dynamite. It's a good job that sticks of dynamite are Wild West-ish, otherwise we'd have veered from the cowboy theme pretty early on. Shooting plain green balls is not as engaging as shooting cattle rustlers and babies, that's for sure.


In this game, waves of Indians travel toward the player, some of them blocked from view by the fence in the middle of the screen. Not particularly interesting from a gameplay perspective, granted, but I do very much like the setting. I think Bang! is still supposed to be set in Wild West times, but someone went to the trouble of building a shooting gallery with paper targets on rails, hanging paintings of scenery on the walls to produce a certain ambience, often in a wonderfully half-hearted manner. I mean, just look at the totem pole in the background, the canvas doesn't even cover the whole wall. Imagine the embarrassment of this shooting gallery's owner as he returned from Ezekiel Calhoun's Frontier Signwriting Emporium, new backdrop clutched proudly under his arm, only to realise that he'd messed up a unit conversion somewhere.


The saloon stage is the same as the hotel stage but without any babies. Of course there are no babies, what kind of idiot would bring their baby to a Wild West saloon? Think it through.


I have no idea why this crazed farmer is throwing bombs at me, and having seen the glimmer of madness in his eyes I'm not sure he does either. Does he think I'm going to ransack his barn? Calm down, old-timer, I'm not interested in your barn or your admittedly diverse collection of crates. You lose points for shooting the farmer, which seems counter-intuitive considering he's throwing bombs at me, although that's less of a worry than you might think because these bombs detonate with all the explosive force of a dropped tub of talcum powder. This is probably why I can get away with shooting the bombs, despite them being right next to me. Did I mention that the bombs have shiny golden coins inside them? Because they do. As I said, I have no idea what the hell is going on.


Ahh, this is much easier to decipher: birds want to steal my tomatoes. All the birds. Every bird from the surrounding ten states, converging on my tomato plants in a whirling, flapping maelstrom of sharp beaks and purloined vegetables, the squawking hive mind happy to sacrifice ten, a hundred, a thousand avian lives if it means just one of them gets a tomato. My only recourse in this situation is to grab my gun and fire wildly into the densest parts of the flock, hoping to thin out the birds before I'm left with nothing but empty stalks and newly-developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my trigger finger.


This is all your fault, scarecrow! You had one job. One job! Do these birds look scared to you? Well, obviously they do now that I've been shooting at them but you know that's not what I meant. And don't give me that "hey, I'm a scarecrow and these aren't crows" crap again, you know it's just a name... Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Scarecrow. You know I can't stay angry at you, with your big pumpkin head. Maybe it's my fault for not dangling CDs from your arms or giving you a more menacing hat. This hat that my mum bought for her cousin's wedding just isn't cutting it.
Honestly, I think these bird-shooting stages are some of my favourites in the game. There's definitely a place for the challenge of precision shooting, but every now and then it's fun to just go demented on the trigger in an orgy of feather-pluckin' carnage.


Okay, this is a weird one: cowboys carrying big pink sacks leap onto a stage where some chorus girls are doing the can-can. Let them get to close to the dancers and they'll abduct them: lose all the dancers and you fail. The other girls take their motto of "the show must go on" to great extremes, kicking away even as their numbers dwindle thanks to the predations of the bandit hordes lurking in the wings. You can also shoot the girls clothes off. A real classy feature, that one.


"Don't shoot," says Bang!, negating the entire point of the game. I guess I'll just go home then, shall I? No, of course not. What we have here is the real reason that anyone would get excited about a Wild West-themed lightgun game, and that's the ability to have quick-draw gunfights! You have two bullets and two targets, and you're only allowed to shoot them once they draw their shootin' irons. Do you have the reflexes to put these varmints down before they can take you down? On the lower difficulties the answer is almost certainly "yes" because they seem to forget what they're supposed to be doing between drawing their guns and pulling the trigger. I put this down to them being cardboard cut-outs. This is another of Bang!'s more enjoyable stages, and the one that is best served by the game's Western setting. Even in this cartoony style and against paper opponents, there's still an undeniable feeling of coolness that comes from momentarily pretending to be Clint Eastwood, and it's always the final stage so no matter what course you select or the vagaries of the random game selector, you'll always get to play it (assuming you make it that far).


Whatever course you choose, clearing it always "rewards" you with the same scene of the fruit machine paying out a pile of gold coins. And I didn't even have to shoot them out of a bomb! How wonderful. I like the very subtle detailing on the coins, even if you're extremely unlikely to actually catch a glimpse of it in-game as they cascade out of the machine.
With that, all that's left is to enter you name on the high score table, the background of which looks like this:


If you were looking for a truly awful seduction line to use on someone after you've taken them back to your house / a motel / your mum's spare room, I think "Welcome to Bang City" would be an excellent choice.


But wait, I've got a few more minigames to show you, including this one. The game tells you that your mission is to "smash the cartel," which makes it sound as though you're going to be blowing away drug lords on Miami Beach or something, but all you actually have to do is shoot that wanted poster enough times to destroy it. That strikes me as an extremely inefficient way to destroy a cartel, unless the cartel makes a lot of money on the side by bringing in bounties and you're just trying to cut off their revenue streams. According to one inflation calculator I saw, $25,000 in 1860 would be equivalent to over $700,000 dollars today, so this outlaw must have been into some serious shit.


"Shoot the balloons," it said, but like any right-minded citizen I immediately turned my gun on the clowns. Alas, I should have known that my gun was loaded with regular ammo and not rounds carved from the bones of a saint and doused in make-up remover - the only sure-fire way of killing a clown - but nonetheless I'm sure the President will be sending me a medal to honour my bravery soon enough.
I must confess, I did manage to fail this game despite it being one of the easier ones thanks to wasting time at the beginning, staring at the clown on the left and trying to figure out what was going on with its arm.


Welcome to the inside of the saloon, where the wallpaper is admirably clean, there are men in bath towels trying to shoot you (which reduces your health despite them not being real) and the hookers wear clerical dog collars.


Don't like that saloon? Try this one instead, where the bartender is so beaten down by the misery of living in frontier America that he doesn't even glance in your direction as you shoot all his stock off the shelves. What an absolute dick move on the player's part, so dickish that I've been forced to come up with some possible explanations for this rampage. The player character is either trying to protect the public's health by getting rid of this clearly-tainted booze - god knows what's in those greeny-yellow bottles, it looks like rancid cooking oil - or he's dedicated himself to extreme temperance.


Here in the world's most profitable mine, where hundreds of carts laden with gold and fist-sized precious gems rumble past every hour, some poor woman has found herself chained up right in the path of said carts. She's panicking because that cart is about to run her over, and also because as she is clearly part-octopus she is not meant to be out of salt water for this long and she's starting to dry out. The aim here is to shoot as many carts as possible and also to protect the squid-lady. My first thought was to try to shoot the chain and set her free, but apparently that was a little too logical and instead I had to destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold and jewels. I'm beginning to suspect the player character may only have gotten involved as an excuse to engage in yet more wanton destruction.


The wanton destruction continues as two cowboys - who look a lot like famous Belgian comic character Lucky Luke - throw their hats into the air, where our hero blasts them to pieces. The hats, not the cowboys. Don't worry, the cowboys looks pretty happy about it, possibly having invented a machine that can create an infinite number of identical duplicate hats.


I'll be honest, I'm only including a picture of the otherwise very standard bank robbery stage because I love that picture of Abraham Lincoln so much. He looks so disapproving. He must have seen what I did to that poor bartender's booze.


Finally for today, here's a lady having a bath. Your mission - to shoot as many bubbles as you can. This may seem like an utterly bizarre set-up for a gunslinging challenge, but think about it: this is a videogame, and time and again bubbles have been shown to hurt videogame characters. They hurt Megaman, for pity's sake, and he's a robot. You'd think he could stand up to a small film of soap filled with air. So, there is method to our hero's madness. He knowns he cannot let these bubbles get loose. They could kill hundreds of people if they floated into a densely populated area, and if this woman gets upset at the collateral damage caused by my bubble eradication - I did manage to smash her water jug and her mirror - then all I can say is that she should have known better than to propagate the bubble menace.


That's Bang!, then. I didn't talk much about the gameplay because there's nothing to talk about. There were no moments that made me wonder what the developers were thinking, not on the gameplay side anyway, but then there were no moments that made me think "hey, that was cool" either. It is a Shooting Game where you point your gun at things and pull the trigger, and as such it was a jolly enough way to spend half an hour of your time. If you like cartoon cowboys then you'll enjoy it a bit more than those to whom historical accuracy is all-important. You could argue that time is fleeting and precious and could be better spent on other things, and you'd be right, but that makes no difference to me. I know I would have just spent those thirty minutes reading Spider-Man comics anyway.

See, now, that was a bad way to start this article about, because it's way more interesting than the actual game I'll be looking at today: English Software's 1986 Commodore 64 release Knight Games!


That's Knight Games, the game so good they named it twice (on the title screen, at least) "...bet you can't beat a good Knight," it says, a laboured pun that would fit quite nicely into VGJunk itself, although I would have emphasised "beat" rather than "you." Because you're beating up the other knights, you see. Aside from that bit of linguistic japery, the title screen also shows a knight with a terrible underarm hair problem and an indecipherable mass of pixels where the front of its helmet should be. I think it's looking towards the right of the screen, but I will happily accept I could be wrong. His feet are also so small as to be useless.


A clattering cavalcade of knights in all the colours of the rainbow! If you want hot knight-on-knight action then you've come to the right place, my friend! We've got knights with swords, knights with sticks, red knights, green knights, purple knights, knights that might not even be knights but are in fact just some guy with a bad haircut in blue jeans and long winter coat! That's Knight Games - all knights, all the time!
So, you might have figured out that Knight Games is another entry in the Commodore 64's vast supply of multi-events "sports" titles, a collection of minigames grouped together under a common theme - in this case, knights. There are eight events in all: Swordfight 1 and 2, quarterstaff, archery, ball and chain, pikestaff, crossbow and axeman. I hope that last one's about two knights engaging in a guitar duel filled with shredding solos. One glaring omission that caught my eye in this list of games for knights - these knight games, if you will - is jousting. No jousting at all in this one, I'm afraid. How do you make a game about knights having a tournament and not include the most famous of all knightly tournament activities? It's like the Olympics with the 100 metres, or any television talent show without a preliminary round of god-awful, delusional no-hopers.


Straight into the action with the Swordfighting 1 event, where the player (the knight with the white vest) must hit the computer character (the knight wearing the vest in a colour I believe is called "Washed-In Piss Stain" on the Dulux colour chart) as many times as possible. As per the rules of chivalry, both knights are exactly the same in size and ability to keep things fair, and they must use their skill and tactical acumen to triumph over their opponent.


Sure, I've got skill - the skill to repeatedly tap down on the joystick, which makes my knight stab the other fellow in the face. You might think that one good solid stab to the face would be enough to end a swordfight, especially if you got lucky and it slipped through your opponent's visor, but these knights are tougher than one of my grandmother's "well-done" steaks and they require eighty face stabbings to be beaten. That's what the dots on the left of the screen and the shields at the top represent: the dots are hit point, and when you lose all of those you lose a life, represented by the shields. Remove all of your opponent's shields and you win by "knock out," which I presume is a chivalric code for "massive blood loss."


I didn't just poke my foe in the face, though. I made a token effort to use the other sword techniques, of which there are three more, although none of them seemed quite as effective. Performing these moves is as easy as moving the joystick left, right, up or down, a simple control scheme that I think I've already figured out is too simple to sustain Knight Games through one event, let alone eight. Let's hope all the other non-projectile events aren't re-skinned versions of the swordfighting, eh? That would make for a pretty dull game.


The quarterstaff duel now, where the swords are replaced with sticks and metal helms are swapped for jaunty Robin Hood caps. "Just take a quick look under my skirt," says the man in green, "and tell me if it looks infected up there".


I don't know why neither of these men are wearing trousers. Comfort, possibly. It looks like a nice sunny day, they're probably enjoying the invigorating breeze around their quarterstaffs.
Well, I'd better get the big reveal out of the way - the quarterstaff fighting is, in fact, a re-skinned version of the swordfighting, and so is every non-projectile-based event in the game. It's sticks instead of swords, and the developers did at least give the combatants a whole new repertoire of moves, like the pole-vaulting kick pictured above. Other than that, though, it's the same as before, and victory can be achieved with ease and and significant amounts of boredom by throwing out the same attack over and over again. You'll trade blows and take some hits, but you always seem to out-damage your opponent and claim victory.


I tried to play Knight Games properly, I really did. The manual claims that there are defensive moves that you can use by moving the joystick diagonally, and you can move your character by holding the fire button as you move the joystick, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to fight my battles in a manner befitting a noble knight of yore. I darted in and out of range, I tried to block incoming attacks and counter with blows of my own, but in the end it not only didn't work - even if you block in the right place, your enemy's attacks damage you half the time anyway - but it's completely pointless. Pointless in a literal sense, even, because your only goal in the game is to score as many points as possible. You get a big score bonus if you manage to knock out your rival before the time runs out, but using any other strategy besides standing right in front of them and whacking away like they were a rock wall and you were an inmate of a Siberian gulag will not allow you to beat them before the timekeeping candle melts away. So clobber away, Sir Knight, until the battle is ended and you can put on some trousers.


The archery game provides something different, although sadly that something isn't "fun". A tousle-haired and extremely confused-looking young man who lacks both the lordly bearing of a knight and working knees will be attempting to score points by shooting the targets in front of him. And what are those targets?


Why, motorcycles shaped like horses, of course! What, don't you remember the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain, who refused to accept his death at the hands of the Green Knight and instead burned away on his horse-shaped motorbike, wheelieing though the land of Camelot and shouting "verily, thou canst eat mine dust!"
Okay, so the horses are probably wooden dummies being pulled along that rope, but that certainly doesn't make them any easier to hit. In concept the archery event is simple enough - you move the wobbling, juddering crosshair into the right place and then press fire to loose an arrow, making sure to lead your target. The difficulties you will encounter are twofold. One, the crosshair shakes around like the archer drank twenty cans of Red Bull and then stuck a pneumatic drill up his backside and two, the target area is tiny. Just hitting the horse isn't good enough, oh no: I scored many a hit on the tail or the legs that scored me no points. You have to hit the saddle to be successful. Yes, the saddle is that minute brown square in the middle of the horse. No, I didn't hit it very often. The archery isn't great, then, and certainly not as good as Forbidden Forest, but at least I had to look at the screen to win, unlike the combat games.


The ball and chain now, although they look rather more like delicate fairy wands than instruments of bludgeoning death, and considering how many hits it takes to knock someone out with them the comparison may not be a million miles off. Maybe they look more impressive in motion?


Well, they're enthusiastic if nothing else. Just look at that green knight go! Someone's going to sleep well tonight, bless him.
Instead of writing all these words about Knight Games, I could have just posted this GIF with the caption "that's it, that's the game," because it really captures the aimless flailing (no pun intended) of the fighting action. It's such a shame, too, because a tournament of knightly virtue could be a great setting for a not-terrible game. I like knights, I think they're cool (although that could admittedly be down to a form of digital Stockholm Syndrome brought on by spending so long playing the Dark Souls games) but the only "medieval tournament" games I've played are this and the equally disappointing Defender of the Crown.


This is Swordfighting 2. It is exactly the same as Swordfighting 1, only it takes place in front of a paint-by-numbers picture of a castle. The knights involved have realised the futility of their duel, each man turning to look at the player with an expression of stony contempt somehow written across their bucket helmets. Swordfighting 3 will consist of these knight rallying men to their banner and rising up in open rebellion against the rulers of the land and their capricious, sadistic whims. No, of course not. That would be much too interesting.


This event is pikestaff, which is odd because I'm fairly sure the weapon in question is just called a pike. Were English Software worried that people would think that these knights were hitting each other with large, carnivorous river fish?
The gameplay here is the same as always, leaving the sound effects as the main point of interest. Thanks to the constant metallic sproinging, if you closed your eyes you'd be forgiven for thinking you were playing as someone trying to destroy a spring factory by throwing tin cans into the machinery. However, if you are thinking about playing Knight Games for some reason, I'd recommend doing so with your eyes open. Not because you need to see what you're doing in order to win but because the graphics are probably the best thing about the game, with chunky and pleasingly well-animated sprites that are very rarely not wearing trousers.


Here comes the crossbow game to break up the tedium with a marginally lower level of tedium! There's nothing complicated about this one, just line up the crosshair and press fire to launch a bolt at the targets. The targets spin around, having been hung from the gallows for their unspecified crimes, so you have to time your shots in order to hit the front and score points but after my complete and humiliating failure to get to grips with the archery game this seems easier than falling off a greased log spinning at 5,000 RPM. Plus you appear to be playing as a gingerbread man in a studded leather vest, so the crossbow definitely takes the gold as the best event in the game.


Finally, you get to engage in some axeman. I'm gonna axe this knight some difficult questions, I've got an axe to grind, he should just axe-ept his inevitable defeat, etcetera. You see what you've reduced me to, Knight Games? There's no wonder you managed to pack in such a massive crowd to watch this axe fight. I think these guys started fighting somewhere around the second course and they're still going long after everyone has finished the banquet and has retired to their quarters, muttering about how boring the entertainment was. "Next time I'll hire the close-up magic guy," thinks the king, but there will be no "next time" because these two knights will forever occupy the banqueting hall, clanking away at each other in an empty room until the end of time


Despite nominally being a tournament, there's no grand prize waiting for you at the end of Knight Games, just a list of your scores in the various events and the unshakeable feeling that you've wasted your time. You can see by the incredibly low scores I've posted in them just how much harder the shooting games are than the rest, but that also makes them the most interesting.


It's a shame, because I really wanted to like Knight Games. Knights are cool, swordfighting can be fun and the games gets the most basic elements right - the controls are fairly sharp and responsive (never a given for a C64 game), and there's a decent variety of moves without things becoming overly complex - but it wastes all that by making anything other than relentless attacking with the same move completely redundant. Also, no jousting. How can you not have jousting? Were you worried that you wouldn't be able to create an exciting and engaging digital jousting simulator, English Software? If that's the case, I've got some bad news for you regarding your ability to make a fun swordfighting game. It seems that even the creators were disappointed with their attempts to capture the spirit of medieval combat, because Knight Games 2 is set, get this, in space. Apparently it's even worse than Knight Games 1. The mind boggles.

That brickwork could do with a little repointing. Anyway, there's Toki now, bravely trying to walk upright despite the strain that his grossly oversized head is putting on his spine. He's our knuckle-dragging hero, and the reason that he's lurching around in a vertical fashion instead of giving up and finding some kind of primitive wheelbarrow to cart his enormous melon around in is that he was not always an ape. No, before the game began, Toki was just another Neanderthal with the misfortune to be romantically involved with someone from a late-eighties arcade game, and even existing in a prehistoric time cannot prevent Toki's lady love Miho from being abducted.


Away she goes, kidnapped by the sinister and difficult-to-spell wizard Vookimedlo. That's Vookimedlo on the right, the one that looks like a mantis trying to surreptitiously infiltrate the Catholic clergy. Let's give Vookimedlo a big hand, folks! Oh no, wait, he brought his own. That's sensible, really - if you just use a flying hand as a minion than you don't have to worry about it questioning your diabolical schemes or demanding dental insurance.


Toki was originally built like a brick shithouse and possesses a similar level of intelligence, charging towards the dread sorcerer's magical attack without so much as attempting to jump over it, so Toki must share some of the blame for his current monkey predicament. I can't help but wonder why Vookimedlo didn't just turn Toki in a rock or a houseplant or a fine red paste - my current theory is that Toki was hit with a de-evolution spell, regressing him to state that has evolved the larger cranial capacity of Homo sapiens but not the sense of inbuilt shame that leads to the wearing of loincloths. This is a big mistake on Vookimedlo's part, because while he can still move around Toki will struggle valiantly to rescue his beloved. You should have regressed him back to being a fish, pal.


Even if you hate moving pictures but love words, Toki has you covered with its pre-action warnings of the obstacles Toki will be facing in each stage. I really like these: they're hardly great literature, but then great literature never got me excited about seeing an ape regain his manhood. Bite me, books.


Thus begins Toki, as classic a run-n-gun arcade game as you're ever likely to find and as comfortingly familiar as the groove your arse has pressed into the sofa. Toki needs to get from one end of the stage to the other, but in his path are a host of aggressive creatures that don't quite look right, as though the game takes place not in the mists of prehistory but on an alien world where apes coincidentally also shed their fur, began walking upright and will eventually invent the McRib. Take those animals flying above Toki's gargantuan head, for example. They are definitely not birds. I mean, I'm no super bird expert person - ornithologist, that's the word I was looking for, thanks internet - but Earth-birds have wings and don't look like creepy trilobites.
To get past his many foes, Toki can use several tactics. He can avoid them, although as we shall see later that often ends up causing more problems for him down the road. In familiar videogame fashion he can jump on top of enemies to kill them. He can also do this.


Toki can spit projectiles to kill enemies, although if his facial expression is anything to go by doing so causes him considerable pain. That's a damn shame for Toki, because you're going to be spending most of the game launching a constant stream of bubbles from his poor abused mouth, especially (and extremely usefully) because you can fire them either horizontally, vertically or at a forty-five degree upwards angle. I did wonder whether these were magical projectiles, possibly a remnant of the wizardry that turned Toki into an ape, but as the game was ported to the Megadrive (amongst several other consoles) under the title Toki: Going Ape Spit, I think we have to assume that what he's firing is warm, wet wads of monkey phlegm. How delightful.
So, that's Toki - move through each stage, hopping and bopping and drenching your enemies in your deadly sputum, until you reach the boss. Top tip: the bosses can only be hurt by good deeds and kindness. No, I'm kidding, you have to flob all over them. Play Toki for thirty seconds and you'll know almost exactly what you're in for during the rest of the game, but not in a bad way.


I have revised my opinion about alien worlds. This is definitely Earth. No other planet would be stupid enough to invent American Football.
On the right of the screen shown above there's a see-saw that encapsulates Toki's approach to platform problem-solving. There's not much heavy thinking goes into planning your route, with the path to take and the jumps to make being plainly laid out before you, and the challenge is almost always being not "can you figure out where to go?" but "can you do it without dying?"Toki reminds me of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts in a lot of ways: you could happily describe them both as "platformers" and there are plenty of gaps in the landscape to jump across, but if you removed the enemies then the basic ledge-hopping action probably wouldn't hold your attention like it might in, say, a Koopa-free version of Super Mario World.
Toki also invites comparisons to Ghouls 'n' Ghosts in that it gets really bloody hard. Not as difficult as Capcom's famously sadistic arcade classic, but on the other hand at least Sir Arthur can take a hit and survive - Toki's death is immediate should he come into contact with anything more menacing than the ground beneath his feet. Maybe Vookimedlo's spell didn't just turn Toki into in ape, it turned him into a really sickly ape whose ape mother was dangerously overprotective and as such left her son with no chance of surviving in the wild. Can you make a spell that specific? I have no idea, I'm not a wizard.


Stage one's midboss is the Gate of Moornah. It's not really a gate, but I can understand why it's called a gate because there isn't a concise word for "imposing golden monkey-powered slab with powerful steam jets and spring-loading boxing glove fists". It looks menacing at first, as any machine operated by furtive apes will do, but all you have to do to beat it is time your climb up the vine on the right so that Toki isn't scalded to death and voilà, you've passed the gate.


I was not expecting the first boss proper to be a Mr. Potato Head in a suit of golden armour. Honestly, I don't know what I was expecting. Some kind of dinosaur, maybe. What are the natural predators of apes, anyway? Bigger apes? Well, this boss' main form of attack is to fire monkeys at you so maybe that was his thinking. In the world of Toki apes are the most versatile of all creatures, serving as guards, soldiers, floating brass gate operators and ammunition, unless that's all being done by two or three monkeys with exceptionally well-developed CVs.
Anyway, the boss follows a pattern straight out of Being A Videogame Boss 101, in that he fires some projectiles at you and then jumps to the other side of the screen, repeating the process until Toki either drowns in apes or manages to spit on him enough times to claim victory.


Stage two is Lake Neptune. Lake Neptune doesn't just contain sharks, it is bloody infested with them, so chances are I'm going to have to cross it by swimming rather than by fashioning a crude canoe by hollowing out a monkey.


Yup, swimming it is. Just look at Toki's face: he's normally such a cheerful sort, but the raw terror of swimming through a shark-infested lake, even with his eyes protected by goggles, means his usually jolly expression is replaced by one of steely determination. Or maybe he's upset with the stage introduction's misleading description of the lake's shark volume, because while there are some swimming around they're mostly just minding their own business. What the briefing should have said is "WARNING: Tenacious Piranhas," because unlike the sharks the piranhas will relentlessly hunt Toki down unless he methodically exterminates them, and because they're smaller and harder to hit than the sharks that's not as easy as it sounds.


This makes it particularly aggravating that the mid-boss can vomit up piranhas. Keeping live piranhas in your stomach shows admirable dedication to the cause of evil, and when combined with a shield that can block your attacks this boss can put up quite a fight. Sadly it's not an enjoyable fight, because this underwater adventure is really a side-scrolling shooter section in disguise, and you all probably know by now how much I love side-scrolling shooter sections that have been artlessly crammed into platformers. It's not terrible, I suppose, nor is it really"scrolling" because you can move Toki wherever you like, but it's still probably the weakest part of the game, surely born out of one of the game's developers insisting that room was made for the slightly overweight fish-beast they'd drawn. I can understand that, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.


Here's the second boss, and I spent way too long trying to figure out whether it's whole head is one giant eyeball or if it's a mouth with an eyeball inside. "Why would you have an eye in your mouth, that seems like it's asking for trouble and a lifetime spent avoiding spicy foods," you may ask, but the boss is unconcerned by ocular damage because he can create as many eyeballs as he like, spewing them all over the screen and forcing Toki to deal with them because if left alone these semi-autonomous eyeballs quickly fill up the screen. Yes, this inbred mutant progeny of the Michelin Man's family fights a lot like the first boss, but he's more durable and his projectiles will cause you more problems if they slip through your wave of spittle. I get the feeling this will be a common thread running through Toki's boss battles.


Stage three is the Marble Zone. No, sorry, it's the Caverns of Fire. You have to have a fire stage, they're the awkward first-date silences of videogaming. As you might expect, traversing the Caverns of Fire sees Toki bounding across lakes of lava and avoiding jets of flame, because while Toki is pretty fun game to play it is not blessed with an abundance of originality in terms of level design. If the next stage isn't ice-themed I'll... well, it doesn't matter what I'd do because the chances of the next stage not being ice-themed are about the same as me finding Lord Lucan hiding in my airing cupboard.


I've compared Toki to Ghost 'n' Goblins already, and one area where that comparison is strongest is in the game's ability to catapult the player from areas of relative calm to full-on monster jamboree in mere moments. Take the area pictured above: free from deadly foes, unless you count the lava spout on the floor and there's not a lot I can do about that. Then I move half a screen to the left, and...


Bang, four monsters, one of which - the ghost at the top of the screen - literally appeared out of nowhere. I would have been in a better position had I jumped on top of that evil monkey like I intended instead of jumping over him and putting myself right in the centre of the melee, but it still stands to illustrate that the key to success in Toki is cautiously eliminating all resistance before moving on.


The relatively sedate pace is also encouraged by Toki not being the most athletic ape in the world. His jumping skills are good, but he walks around at the gentle place of an elderly rambler, and the famous agility of the simians only ever comes into play during these rare vine-swinging sections. I know Toki spent most of his life in the lumbering beef-mountain form of a professional bodybuilder and as such is not accustomed to gracefully swinging through the treetops, but a few more sections where being a spitting monkey meant a different playstyle than could be replicated by a man with a gun would have been nice.


I was just about to say that this boss burps at you, but it quite clearly does not - rather, it spews out stone letters that spell out the word "BURP". Whether this is bizarre coincidence or the boss swallowed the letters in that specific order for later regurgitation is by the by: the simple fact is that b-b-b-burp is the word. The word that will destroy you. Enough about his attacks, though, let's take a look at the boss itself. It looks completely insane, its tiny eyes pivoting in separate directions, the lumpen, tumorous flesh of its body studded with appendages that look as though they've been deep-fried in batter. This thing's name is Mogulvar, apparently, a name which must surely be an acronym for Meat Organism, Guarantees Upset Lunch Via Acid Reflux. He's certainly making my stomach churn, so let's get to the next stage.


Oh look, it's an ice stage. I was going to go for some extreme sarcasm to describe this turn of events, but I think I went to far and "sarcastic" rolled back around to "unimpressed." It's got all the usual trappings of an ice stage, like a backdrop of glittering crystals and, erm, that's it. Toki doesn't do anything to develop the winter wonderland theme barring a few ice-appropriate enemies. No slippery floors, no falling icicles, no vision-obscuring flurries of snow. Still, the inclusion of an ice level is entirely justified because it means we get these adorable penguin enemies. I say enemies, they don't really attack Toki or anything, they just have bad haircuts and waddle around in a boggle-eyed stupor like Burning Man attendees.


Toki vs. Cthulhu: The Ultimate Battle now, and this time Toki's glum expression makes sense because he's about to get a squid in the eye. A squid in the eye will kill him, regardless of what eye protection he's wearing. Toki knows this, and he has become resigned to his fate. When you compare this expression to the one he's sporting on the status picture at the bottom left of the screen, where's he's beaming with the glee only found in apes that have been given a coupon for fifty percent off bananas, you can see how far his spirits have fallen.
The main thing I took from this fight, the aspect of it that's forever seared into my meoery, is that every time you shoot the squid it makes a noise like a human dry-heaving. Thanks for that, TAD Corporation. Between the previous boss and these gagging sounds I'll be sure to play Toki next time I accidentally swallow a dangerous chemical that I need to eject from my stomach post-haste.


Fighting a mammoth made of ice has really perked Toki up, look, although I wasn't nearly so happy because this is where I started to die a lot. The mammoth's boomerang-like tusks are hard to avoid and demand your full concentration, leaving you little time to attack the boss during its vulnerable moments when it stops blocking its body with its trunk. Then it whacks you with the trunk, and you die. It's a battle that requires deep reserves of perseverance, as you would expect from an attempt to melt an ice mammoth using only the warmth of your saliva.


You know where you are? You're in the Dark Jungle, baby! You're gonna frrrryyyy... this large bird. With your spit. Somehow. I do not profess to understand the full ramifications of Vookimedlo's magical curse, but I can offer some practical advice: don't kill the birds over the spike-pits, because then you won't be able to grab the fully plucked-n-cooked birds that they turn into. If Toki wasn't so much of a wuss that he had a health bar I'm sure these roast dinners would restore all your hit points, but as it stands they give you some bonus points.


One thing that Toki sometimes does with its gameplay that I like is the idea of leaving enemies alive so that they may serve your purposes. For example, here you can see a tempting extra life floating too high to reach with a normal jump, so you have to find a way to get underneath it without killing the moth and then use that moth as a platform to bounce your way up to the prize. It's not an incredibly prevalent gameplay quirk, but it does pop up from time to time and provides a nice twist on the rest of the kill-everything-on-sight gameplay and can be pretty fun. The exception is if it leads to one of the "rabbit in a jar" power-ups that give Toki a pair of shoes, because they make him jump way higher than usual and frankly they're a goddamn liability, sending you careening to your death as you struggle to get used to the extra distance on your leaps.


Hey, it's the hand that kidnapped Toki's girlfriend and he's brought so friends to the party! His body and limbs were not invited to the party. Appendages only, plus the heart - a wonderfully designed heart, straddling a disturbing line between cartoon shape and veiny reality. If you cut out Big Bird's heart, that's what it'd look like.
One look at the screenshot tells you how the fight goes - avoid the hands and feet while shooting the heart when it's exposed - but it all comes together nicely, being challenging without getting too frustrating thanks to Toki's reliable controls. There are some occasional hitbox issues, and the game is very ungenerous when making jumping attacks because you have to land right on top of an enemy, you can't come at it from the front at all - but on the whole it's a very solidly-built game.


Upon starting the sixth and final stage, I dithered for a moment and was immediately slain by a monkey knight. Whatever happened to "ape shall not kill ape," huh? Vookimedlo - a name that's a lot more fun to say out loud than it is to keep typing out - has made his final stand in a steampunk city of metallic tubing and impractical jets of fire. That's fine, though: I can deal with the usual onslaught of enemies lurking in places that make it tricky to winkle them out.


What I couldn't deal with was the sudden introduction of these high-speed mine cart sections, where the developers decided that the player wasn't dying quite fast enough and so they sat the player on a rocket-powered sledge and launch them face-first towards spiked balls and yawning chasms. Once you've tried them a few times and gotten used to the carts' momentum propelling Toki through the air whenever he jumps from one to another it becomes somewhat more manageable... until you reach the very end of the rails and hit The Golden Pipe of Fatal Bullshit.


Let me set the scene for you. Toki is travelling at high speed towards the end of the rail, where he must jump off or die. Jump too late and he'll fall to his death: jump to early and he'll slam face first into that metal column, fall down and then die. This jump has to be made under completely different jumping physics than the rest of the game, by the way, and if you accidentally collected the high-jump shoes then it's going to be that much harder. Even if you do make it through that tiny gap, a monkey soldier is already shooting energy bolts at you. Jump up to dodge those and you're almost certain to hit either the second monkey or the bird. At this point, Toki's difficulty curve has reared up like a scorpion's tail and is repeatedly stinging you in the face, and it's a section of such (out of character for this game) joystick-snapping frustration that had I known about it in advance I might never have decided to play Toki in the first place. Can it get any worse? You bet your furry monkey balls it can. When you lose a life, you don't spawn where you died but rather back at a checkpoint earlier in the stage so you can't brute-force your way through. Then, just to cap it all off, when you run out of lives you're greeted with this screen.


That's right, whereas for the rest of the game you can continue as many times as you like, on the final stage you're limited to a mere five continues. If you run out of continues the games tells you that Miho will forever remain Vookimedlo's captive. If you see that screen after dying at The Golden Pipe of Fatal Bullshit over and over again - and there's a good chance you will - then please try to remember that videogame controllers and computer monitors are expensive and you should not try to shove one through the other, not matter how much better it will temporarily make you feel.


I got through it in the end, though. I'm still not sure how, I think I entered a zen trance for a moment, but whatever happened I finally reached Vookimedlo. Sadly the final battle isn't particularly interesting, because it's essentially the same as the previous boss but with a longer health bar and the added distraction of two buff lizard-dudes staring at you from the background the whole time. It's a tough battle, particularly when Vookimeldo's trying to poke you with his hand, and the fact that you have to fight back from the last checkpoint to try again when you mess up doesn't make it any more fun, but it wasn't nearly as brutal I thought it was going to be given the area leading up to it. Dodge some attacks, gob on an exposed internal organ, it's all in a day's work for Toki and soon he's defeated Vookimedlo, saved Miho and, most importantly, evolved back into a paragon of studly manliness.


Just look at all those hearts - there can be no doubt that Toki has fully regained his manhood. YOUR QUEST IS OVER, it says, but then it tries to trick you into shoving more money into the machine by asking whether I can repeat my glory. Nice try, TAD Corporation, but I've had enough ape juices for one day. I'm going to sit back and enjoy the credits instead.


I actually did enjoy the credits, because you get a roll-call of all the enemies and bosses and I love it when games do that. I didn't get a chance to mention Galartor earlier but yes, he is the flying, severed head of a cross between a monkey and a bat.


You also get this rather wonderful shot of the development staff dressed as characters from the game. I'm assuming Kitahara was the director, because I think he's been given the honour of dressing as that awesome penguin.
So that's Toki, also known in Japan as JuJu Densetsu, a name that just makes me think of Alice Cooper. A good game? Sure. A great game? No, not really. It's too derivative and too unambitious to be great, but for uncomplicated arcade fun with some moments of endearing weirdness thrown in it's a good way to spend an hour or so. If nothing else, you can use the burp-launching boss to supplant whatever other nightmares you've been having recently.

An easy one to start with: the winner of this award is Attack Animal Gakuen, because Attack Animal Gakuen is Space Harrier with altered sprites and inferior music. Instead of playing as a man with a flying gun you're playing as a schoolgirl with a flying gun, which was apparently enough of a change to keep Sega's lawyers at bay. However, one of the game's basic enemies is a skeleton wearing sunglasses so Attack Animal Gakuen is clearly a vast improvement on the Sega classic.


Konami's arcade gig-em-up Rock'n Rage is all about music - okay, so it's mostly about smashing people in the head with a guitar, but there's a musical theme to it, and that theme is "famous songs that Konami surely didn't pay a licensing fee for." How much would the rights to a Madonna song have set you back in 1986? I'm going to guess "millions of dollars," but that didn't stop Konami from slipping a snippet of "Like a Virgin" into Rock'n Rage's Ancient Rome stage, along with "Rock Me Amadeus" and this version of "Twist and Shout," among others.




The animation on the mud from The Chaos Engine. It's just so perfectly gloopy, so soothing to look at, so inviting. You could slide right into it and have all your troubles and worries just melt away, and as the troubles and worries of the characters in The Chaos Engine are of the "deranged mutant army bent on humanity's destruction" variety then they could definitely do with a nice relaxing soak.



This one goes to Greg Hasting's Tournament Paintball Max'd for the Game Boy Advance, a first-person shooter that takes away the usual no-rules power fantasies of the genre and replaces them with a digital recreation of an activity that's more fun in real life anyway, catering to the extremely small subset of players who would rather shoot a wad of paint at a human than launch a missile at a giant robot or something equally outside the realm of normal human experience. Being a first-person shooter on the Game Boy Advance, it also attends to a second niche group - masochists.



I'll be honest, playing a console-based strategy game recreating the trials and tribulations of founding, expanding and managing an airline did not sound like a fun time, but once I got into Aerobiz Supersonic I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. That might not sound like a glowing endorsement because I thought I was going to enjoy it about as much as watching a twenty-hour video compilation of my most embarrassing high-school moments, but it turned out to be pretty good fun, with a great balance of complexity and simplicity.




An honourable mention must go to the ZX Spectrum version of Ninja Scooter Simulator, a game which by all rights should have been an unmitigated disaster but which actually played quite well (in an extremely limited way).


A very difficult choice between F-Zero and Castlevania: Dracula X, both of which are firm personal favourites and contain some of the best tracks on the SNES. In the end I decided to give it to Castlevania, because, well, it's Castlevania music, isn't it?






It wasn't supposed to be a comedy, but one game got more genuine laughs out of me this year than any other - the computer text adventure Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man. From the hilariously ugly sprites like the villains pictured about, to freezing Hydro-Man merely by turning an office thermostat down, to carrying in my inventory the unconscious bodies of at least four people as well as half an Ikea catalogue's worth of office furniture at once, the whole adventure was so completely bizarre that to laugh at it was the only sane response.



Trying to pull off the joystick gymnastics pictured above in the Commodore 64 multi-event "sports" title Western Games. Even the cartoon cowboy from the manual knows that it's complete bullshit.
Second place: that bit at the end of Toki. The bit with the rolling platform and the narrow gap you need to jump through. The bit where I died more times than during the rest of the game combined. Yeah, that bit.


There were some excellent contenders for my favourite bit of in-game text from this years games: here are just a few of them.


This one from Spinal Breakers really appeals to my immaturity. His "magnum missile" is his genitals, you see.


Smash TV's promise that you're entering a Lazer Death Zone is so honest and to-the-point that it's impossible not to love.


The post-fight trash-talking from awful C64 fighting game Fist Fighter was definitely the best thing about the game.


My number one favourite piece of text, however, is this large pink-haired kabuki man calling me a jackanaps in arcade boxing game Prime Time Fighter. At once completely nonsensical and deeply insulting, this boxer's cruel barb will live long in my memory.
On the subject of Prime Time Fighter, the reason I didn't include that game's hugely aggravating final bout in the "frustrating moments" category is that it didn't feel like a moment, it felt like a goddamn eternity.



Playing as an alien who comes to Earth to feast on delicious human blood is weird. Playing as an alien who is in love with a human nurse and must fight his way through a hospital filled with flying pills and giant syringes to reach the object of his affections? Super weird. Put them together and you've got Bloody, runaway winner in this category.



While I find it hard not to talk about how great Knuckle Bash's wrestling Elvis impersonator Michael Sobut is at any opportunity, as anyone who has spoken to me in the past month or so will testify, my deepest affection is reserved for the skull from Pirates who pops up between stages to rattle his jawbone and say "you got it!" in his heavily-accented digital voice. I don't care if he's not a "character" in the usual sense of, you know, having some character, but he's my favourite all the same.



Also near the top of the pile for this category is Michael Joden from bootleg fighting game Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII, a martial arts master from an alternate universe where NBA star Michael Jordan's life took a different path and he trained in unarmed combat instead of basketball.


In a year when I wrote a whole article about clowns, it's something of a surprise that this award doesn't go to one of those mirthful merchants of malevolent merriment. Instead, the character that upset me the most this year was the boss of the Mad Bull group from Knuckle Bash.


He's a grotesquely overweight psychopath who cut the face off a pig and stitched it over his own face. As a lover of horror movies I have seen all manner of unsettling and horrifying bodily mutilations, but something about the surgically-affixed pigskin mask makes me feel uncomfortable on a visceral level.



Runner-Up: Junior, the deformed, colossal mutant baby from CarnEvil. One of Junior's main attacks is to vomit on the player. Eww.



You know, when I played Diva Starz: Mall Mania, I thought to myself "this insultingly half-arsed melange of eye-gougingly bad graphics and gameplay so underdeveloped Sea Monkeys would get bored of it after five minutes will be a shoo-in for the worst game I play this year," but I was wrong. Instead that "honour" goes to Russell Grant's Astrology, a cynical cash-in predicated on human gullibility. I admit that some of my contempt for it is down to a personal distaste for the subject matter, but no matter your feelings on astrology there is no excuse for a game with a section labelled entertainment that consists of sudoku, a pair-matching game and a bloody sliding block puzzle.



Unlike 2013, a year when my subconscious apparently decided that I needed to be punished for my sins by playing a lot of really terrible games, in 2014 I reversed that trend and played a decent amount of genuinely good games. As such, there are a quite a few contenders for "best game I played for VGJunk this year" - Castlevania: Dracula X is a great "classic"Castlevania game (final boss battle excepted) with excellent presentation, Smash TV is a masterpiece of full-on, unrelenting arcade action, CarnEvil satisfied my love for horror movies in a wonderfully gory fashion, The Chaos Engine is beautiful to look at and fun to play, Punch-Out is one of the very finest NES games ever made and it's almost puzzle-based gameplay is still hugely enjoyable today and while it's not really that great I do have a huge soft spot for Mega Man Battle and Chase. However, top of the pile for reasons including its razor-sharp gameplay, the amazing soundtrack, its unparalleled sense of speed and a healthy dollop of nostalgia is F-Zero. I loved F-Zero as a kid, I still love F-Zero now and I will love it in the astro-year 2071 when my disembodied brain is playing F-Zero to distract itself from the ever-increasing threat of robot armageddon.



I think it's probably the one about the bootleg videogame tat I found on Chinese shopping site AliExpress. I still think about that "Pretty Good Final Fantasy Phone Case" sometimes and laugh to myself. As for articles about one specific game, I'm fond of the one about Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man, thanks to the absurdity of the entire enterprise, or the Crude Buster article for similar reasons and because it's just so darned crude.

Right, 2014 can get lost now. That's it for another year at VGJunk - a pretty enjoyable one, truth be told. Big thanks to you if you've been reading this nonsense over the last year, and if you've got your own suggestions for any of these categories then hey, feel free to tell me in the comments. I'll be back soon to take VGJunk into the alarmingly futuristic-sounding year of 2015. Maybe I'll get an obnoxious robot sidekick.

The Atari 800 isn't just new to VGJunk, it's completely new to me personally, as I've never used one before either in real life or via emulation, so if you're a fan of the system then don't get too angry with me if I get anything wrong. Why the Atari 800? Because an extremely generous contributor to the VGJunk Patreon requested that it be so, and I'm happy to fulfil the request. Variety is the spice of life and all that, and it's nice to try out a new system, although I don't think I'd be going out too far on a limb if I said that playing the Commodore 64 version of Spelunker would have been a very similar experience.


I'm not coming into Spelunker completely blind despite never having played it before, because there's a certain aura of, if not fame, then at least of notoriety about the game. Specifically, it's notorious for being agonisingly, brutally difficult thanks to movements that require pixel-perfect accuracy and a main character who has the survival potential of a freshly-hatched chick in a snake pit. Have I ever mentioned that I'm really bad at video games? I think I'm going to be suffering for my art with this article.


Something else I know about Spelunker is that the Famicom version (pictured above) had a surprisingly large cultural impact on Japanese gamers: not only is the hero of the game something of a mascot for the bargain bins in used game stores, but his delicate physique also spawned slang words for people who get hurt easily, in the same way that we in the West might say "he really Sonic-ed his career" when someone used to be good at something but now just keeps stumbling from one disaster to the next.
Enough preamble, though; I'm here to play the Atari 800 version, so let's get into it. "It" being a system of underground caverns, I mean.


Here we are at the very beginning of the game. Your mission: to explore the cave network and find the treasures hidden deep inside while trying not to die horribly at every turn. You're playing as the little green fat man in the middle of the screen. If my body shape was "perfectly spherical" (no, I'm not quite there yet) I'm not sure I would have picked an activity that involves wriggling through narrow passageway and twisting channels carved in rock, but this guy's a spelunker through and through. Nothing can keep him from his spelunking: not his physical frailty, not his lack of equipment, not even the fact Mr. Spelunker's mere presence attracts the wandering spirits of the dead.


I'd barely been playing the game for five seconds, testing out the jumping mechanics to confirm that yes, they're like Castlevania's in that you can't change direction or alter the flight of your jump in mid-air, when a ghost floated onto the screen. An adorable ghost. Just look at that little marshmallow friend, boogieing through the cave in a manner that you could describe as "Hip-shaking" if his hips hadn't faded away into a wisp of ectoplasm. I wish I was a Ghostbuster so I could trap it in my Containment Unit, which is what I call a great big hug.
Touching the ghost is fatal to the spelunker, of course, but then so is almost everything else. Spelunker warns you when a ghost is approaching by playing the Mysterioso Pizzicato (I'm really glad I learned what that that tune's called) but that's the only favour you get - the ghosts appear randomly as you play, they kill you with a touch, they can float through solid obstacles and the only way to defeat them is to, erm, do whatever the spelunker is doing to them in the GIF above, and even doing that will reduce your lifespan.


You see, not only is the spelunker more fragile than a politician's promise but he'll eventually die even if you just have him stand still in a safe spot, because he's dependant on a limited supply of a life-giving something that gradually ticks down over time. If you run out, you lose a life. You can see the gauge for it at the bottom of the screen. I called it a "something" because I've seen two differing accounts of what it's supposed to be. One explanation is that it's the spelunker's air supply, the other that it's a supply of (possibly nuclear) energy. I personally lean towards the "energy" theory. Sure, it makes sense that you'd die if you run out of air, but the items you collect to replenish your supply are glowing ringed rods that look way more like an atomic power source than an air canister and the real clincher is how you destroy the ghosts. Pressing space while the ghosts are fairly close to the player makes them disintegrate at the cost of some of your "energy" bar, and I refuse to believe that blowing a puff of air at a ghost is enough to banish it from the mortal realm. No, it's definitely a flashlight of some kind and the spelunker has to regularly pick up fresh batteries along the way.


The only other traditional enemy in the game are the giant albino bats that hover around certain areas of the game world, usually areas where having a giant albino bat constantly defacating on your head - their poop is fatal to the touch, naturally - makes progressing much more difficult. Thanks, giant albino bats. The spelunker can momentarily halt their remorseless onslaught of shit by launching one of the flares you can collect throughout the game near them, the sudden illumination of the usually-dark cave presumably stunning them thanks to the sense of deep shame that overcomes them once they can see the terrible effects of their weaponized arseholes.


Never mind the ghosts and the bats, however. The spelunker's greatest and most deadly foe is gravity, and if he falls down a drop longer than his own body height he is immediately killed. I do mean immediately, too, and Spelunker doesn't even give the player the minor satisfaction of seeing their character slam into the floor: once he's fallen the deadly distance, the spelunker simply disintegrates in mid-air like the seeds of a dandelion clock. Yes, that's it, it explains his spherical shape and his sheer unsuitability for existence in a corporeal universe - the spelunker is actually the seed-head of a dandelion. It's a good job I don't play videogames as a way to experience different worlds where I am not powerless and feeble, isn't it? It is a rare occasion indeed when I play a videogame where I myself would unequivocally fare better than the main character in the same situation, but that's Spelunker for you.


So you can't fall more than the slightest distance, but that's okay: this is a platform game, I shouldn't be falling down holes anyway. The thing that really provided the repeated blows to my metaphorical gaming testicles was the spelunker's complete lack of momentum, especially when walking off of platforms and ledges. As soon as he steps off into the void, all forward motion is cancelled and the spelunker falls straight down. This is different to pretty much every other videogame I have ever played, where you have some horizontal movement when you walk off a platform, and I just could not wrap my head around the notion of Spelunker's uncontrollable death-plunges. This lack of momentum probably accounted for more of my in-game deaths than any other factor, especially when traversing these elevators - every time, every god damned time, the subconscious part of my brain that has been moulded by decades of videogames that follow the same rules said "you can just walk over to the other side, your momentum will carry you across and you'll drop down onto the opposite platform!" but no, Spelunker doesn't work that way and I lost more lives falling into the elevators' central gap than I would like to admit.


This mine cart section was much more pleasant. Move your cart along the track, timing your movements so that the jets of flame from the ceiling don't melt you head. It's smooth, it's simple and there's no way I can fall off an elevator while I'm doing it. So far I have painted a picture of Spelunker as a capricious and sadistic foe that craves the bitter tears of those who play it, and I think that's a fairly accurate representation. That said, the controls are actually pretty good (with one expection). They're consistent, that's the main thing. The spelunker's jumps are always the same height and distance, and he jumps when you press the button. If the controls were worse Spelunker would be nigh-unplayable, but as it is they're good enough to trick you into thinking "hey, maybe I could actually beat this game."


After a while spent carefully negotiating the caves, falling off elevators and accidentally blowing myself up with my own dynamite that I was using to demolish some otherwise-impassable mounds of pink dirt, I hit a transition screen. "Now Entering The Ropes," it says, and it is not kidding.


I count sixteen ropes in that screenshot alone. It's a cavalcade of ropes, an orgy of ropes, an amount of ropes not seen in one place since the Great Rodeo War of 1895. Ropes festoon the caves of Spelunker, and they work as you would expect - you can climb up and down them, and you can jump between them. You have to jump between them here, it's the only way to get to the other side, and that's a damn shame because the otherwise-decent control system falls apart here. You have to press left or right and jump at the exact same moment, otherwise the spelunker will just sidle off the edge of the rope and fall to his death. This means that jumping from one rope to another always feels like a gamble, and when you reach a section like this, where you must swing across many ropes in a row, the odds of you surviving get lower and lower with each successive leap. Then you mess it up and have to do it all again, always trying to remember that each jump leaves you slightly higher up on the next rope and if the spelunker bumps his head on the ceiling while he's jumping he will, you guessed it, fall to his death. So, to recap, Spelunker takes what should be the flowing, dynamic motion of swinging between ropes and turns in into a frustrating roulette where any sense of enjoyable movement is killed stone dead either by the finicky controls or having to move slightly down the rope before each jump. The ropes are the worst part of Spelunker, which is impressive considering it also contains randomly spawning, relentless instakill enemies who require the expenditure of your life-force to destroy. At least the ghosts are cute. The ropes are just bad.


Yet Spelunker still has something to recommend it. It straddles the line between "extremely difficult but ultimately fair" and "screw you for having the temerity to play this game" and while it does often fall onto the wrong side of that divide, when it gets it right it can be rather enjoyable. Precision-hopping through the pitfalls and venting geysers is entertaining thanks to a simply and mostly accurate control system, the miniature graphics are appealing in their simplicity and the game gives you just enough leeway to think that maybe if you stuck with it you'd be able to complete it, each new game seeing you get a tiny bit further than last time before you make an easily-avoidable error and lose your last life.


Spelunker doesn't half go out of it's way to alienate the player, though. For example, here are a pair of locked doors. The blue door requires a blue key to open, the green door a green key. The keys are scattered throughout the cave. That's all straightforward, and about as "videogame-y" as a videogame can be, but the first time I reached this door I didn't have a blue key and there was no way for me to go back and collect it. There is a chance that I was just being a dope and didn't spot a route to climb back up to the earlier areas, but given Spelunker's outright hostility to the player I don't think that's the case. I think it just let me reach a point where I could neither continue nor retrace my steps, leaving "waiting around until my energy runs out and I die" as my only course of action. If I was playing this on the original hardware I would have had access to a second option, but "smash the Atari 800 in with a cricket bat" isn't any more useful.


Going over this waterfall in a little barrel was fun, though. Much more fun than the bit directly above it that involved swinging through the ropes, negotiating the moving platforms, grabbing the key and then doing it all again to get back. I must have done it, because you need every single key to reach the end of the game, but I don't remember doing it. Maybe in ten years I'll visit a hypnotherapist who can reclaim these no-doubt traumatic repressed memories.
You know, when I started exploring this cave I really thought the spelunker was going to be the first person to have ever ventured into its depths, but the mine carts and convenient barrel prove that's not the case. I really wish he had been the first person down here, then I wouldn't be scrabbling around in the dirt for keys that the previous explorers left in locations chosen out of pure spite.


I am now entering the Shaft. No, I cannot dig it. All I can do is die, repeatedly.


One of the other big set-pieces in Spelunker is this geyser-powered lift, a mighty jet of water that propels a little raft up and down at regular intervals. It seems fun at first, but the more you have to use it the more you realise that it's a truly reprehensible piece of level design. In a game where your "health" is constantly draining away, having to stand around waiting for an elevator that's in no hurry to get to you can be teeth-grindingly frustrating. Then when you do manage to get on the lift, a ghost spawns nearby. Your ghost-destroying flashlight / air jet only works when you're standing on solid ground. The raft does not count as solid ground, so you have to jump off the long-awaited elevator, deal with the ghost and then wait for it to come back so you can climb aboard again. There are also those two blue doors halfway up the shaft. You get one chance to use them, turning them into a bridge that lets you cross to the other side... until the geyser moves past the bridge, removing it from the game and leaving your without the keys required to try again. It's a good job Spelunker had already tenderised me somewhat by this point with it's unflinching dedication to my digital suffering, otherwise the geyser would have prompted some angry cursing rather than the exhausted sighing (and cheating, I cheated a bit) that saw me through it.


I have found a large and extremely pink ziggurat. Holy cow that ziggurat is pink as hell, is what I imagine a casual onlooker would say. Why is it so pink? Was it raised as a tribute to ham? A noble cause indeed, but perhaps unlikely given that meat is rarely quite that pink. Maybe I'm ascribing intention and form to an object that possesses neither, and this is in fact nothing but a gargantuan mound of chewed bubblegum. Go, spelunker, climb atop this glistening pile of saliva-drenched glory! Onward, to wherever the hell it is you're going! Let neither gravity nor ghosts nor masticated gum stand in your way!


Now this is more like it, I'm definitely ready to enter some treasure.


Hang on, this isn't treasure. This isn't treasure at all. This is yet more death, a thousand mis-judged jumps between moving platforms stretched out before me and not so much as a gold dubloon in sight. Oh well, I've come too far to stop now. I told you about all the cheating I'm doing at this point, right? Good, just checking. Wouldn't want you thinking I had any idea what I was doing.


At long last, the spelunker reaches his goal - another extremely pink ziggurat, this one with a box on top of it. He's so excited to see it that he suddenly gains the ability to smash his way through the solid rock around him in order to reach it. Had that skill in your locker the whole time, did you, pal? That might have been helpful, oh, I dunno, during the rest of the bloody game. No, I'm not angry. I can't be too angry at you, you waddling spook magnet. I can't even shout at you, because you'd just die.


Well, maybe not "skillful" and "brave" so much as "stubborn" and "pig-headed," but I got there in the end. I am apparently only one of the people to reach this fabulous treasure - a treasure so fabulous that the player never gets to see it, I assume because it's so awe-inspiring that it will stop your very heart in your chest - so I'm not holding out much hope that there'll be anything remaining but the dregs. It's going to be like a box of chocolates with only toffee pennies and empty wrappers left in there, isn't it?
For one horrible moment I thought the game was going to make me climb all the way back out of the cave while carrying a sack of loot, but thankfully that's not the case and Spelunker really is over.


I didn't have much fun playing Spelunker, but I don't think you're supposed to have fun with it. You're supposed to beat it, beat it into submission through memorisation and your own personal suffering. Can I recommend it? Yes, but only if you're the kind of person who really likes that kind of thing. It has a certain appealing precision about it, rope jumping notwithstanding. Removing the always-decreasing energy bar, or changing it to only power the ghost-killing torch, would have gone a long way towards making Spelunker more enjoyable, I can tell you that much. It's an interesting relic of a time when computer games held their players in utter contempt, but in 2015 it's just not that much fun. If you're after a cave exploration game that will kill for making slight mistakes, I would recommend Spelunky over this, and if that doesn't quite provide the level of challenge you're looking for then, erm, trying playing it with your feet or something? Look, why do I have to come up with all the ideas?
And that's Spelunker. Next time I'll be trying a more soothing activity, like picking up shattered glass using only the clenching of my bare buttcheeks.

There's no franchise that I've investigated more thoroughly in my years writing VGJunk than the Alien universe, and they have been a wildly inconsistent bunch of game so far, ranging from the truly excellent to the simplymediocre to the utterly bizarre. We'll see about the gameplay as we go along, but that first paragraph should have clued you in that Konami's Aliens arcade game is not going to the the most faithful adaptation of the source material.


I trust we're all familiar with the source material, yes? It's the story of a species of acid-bleeding, human-impregnating, double-mouthed space monsters and the unfathomably stupid corporation that wants desperately to catch them, sacrificing dozens of innocent lives in their twisted take on the antics of Dastardly and Muttley. It's also the story of Ellen Ripley, mid-level officer aboard a commercial mining vessel and top-level badass who gets into all kinds of wacky scrapes with the xenomorph menace. I don't know why I'm telling you all this, though, because the Alien franchise is still hugely popular today and has been parodied and referenced a hundred thousand times. I mean, it came within a hair's breadth of getting its own kid's cartoon, for pity's sake (and that might come up again later). All you really need to know is that this game is based on Aliens, the second movie in the series. That's the one where lots of aliens kill a bunch of people, as opposed to one of the films where one alien kills a bunch of people.


The game starts with a scene that's almost like one from the movie, with the Colonial Marines landing on LV-426 to investigate the planet's doomed colony. The major differences are that everyone involved is fully aware that the place is crawling with aliens before they've even opened the front door, and that the special marine task force is comprised of two people, one of whom isn't a marine. Those Smart Guns must be really smart if they just hand them out to civilians with no combat training.


The game begins, and it's in the run-n-gun genre, although that title suggests more haste than is apparent in Ripley's fairly measured pace. A walk-n-gun game, then, where the Konami's commitment to the "gun" part of that equation extends to having two fire buttons. One makes you fire in the direction you're facing, and the other makes you fire in the direction you're facing while crouching. You can move while you shoot, but other than that Ripley's movements are limited to climbing the occasional ladder - no jumping or combat rolling in this one, just a left-to-right saunter through a horde of xenomorphs so densely packed it implies that the colony of Hadley's Hope had a population roughly equal to metropolitan Tokyo.


Right from the word go, it's clear that things are a little off with Konami's take on the world of Aliens, as though the designers has it explained to them by someone who'd watched an edited version of the movie during a boozy transatlantic flight a long time ago. It's just little things, at first: Ripley is blonde now, presumably so the headset she's wearing stands out a bit better. The aliens in this first stage are fuschia-coloured and shiny, as though they were carved from Turkish Delight, a far less menacing look than their usual dark colouring. You can see Newt, only survivor of the colony and owner of a scream so painful and high-pitched you could use it to drill through solid rock, in the background. Newt is carrying a toy rabbit, despite the movie containing several scenes showing that her preferred companion through this litany of nightmares is a severed doll's head. It is perhaps a indication that I have seen Aliens too many times that I know that doll's head is called Casey. I think I might end up getting more aggravated by the changes from the movie than the average person, which is a shame because there's a lot of them.


Those of you who aren't fully paid-up members of the Aliens Nerd Brigade need not feel left out, though, because soon enough there are such wild deviations from the (ugh) "canon" that even a casual viewer will notice them. For example, here are some aliens being birthed from grotesque and veiny amniotic sacs. You know, just like how aliens aren't born. The xenomorphs have a very specific life cycle: a facehugger latches onto a host's head and slams it's ovipositor down their through without so much as buying them a drink first. It lays an alien embryo in the hosts's chest, the baby alien jumps out of the host's chest, causing irreparable shirt damage and certain death. Ta dah, one new xenomorph. This horrific forced insemination is kind of the alien's whole deal, so to replace it with these boil-in-the-bag space monsters feels more than a little pointless.


There are facehuggers in the game, mind you, and plenty of them. Here they have formed a sort of honour guard welcoming me to the first boss fight. The thing is, the facehuggers can't hug your face. All they can do is scuttle through your feet. Well, they're not called foothuggers, are they? Sure, you lose a bit of health if a facehugger runs over your toes but it's better than unplanned parenthood.


Then the boss shows up, and if it wasn't clear before that Konami were going to take xenomorph design in bold new directions then this end-of-stage encounter makes it clear. It's a big purple... thing. An alien, I guess? I was going to call it a Super Facehugger or something but on closer inspection is has very little in common with a facehugger. It doesn't have much in common with anything. I am at a complete loss to describe it, other than to say that despite it's deviation from the usual xenomorph body plan it keeps the phallic aspects of their physiology with it's stretchy pink neck and eyeless head. That's how it attacks, by poking Ripley with it's engorged head. It's kinda gross.
You might have noticed that the gameplay has changed from a horizontal to a vertical layout, but what does that mean for you, the player? Bugger all, really. You have one less plane you can walk in because you can only move left and right, and once the boss takes some damage and switches to firing balls of energy at you, you might as well be playing Space Invaders. So, not the most engaging boss fight in videogame history, but this is only stage one so there's plenty of time for things to improve.


I can't stop to chat now, though - my ride is here! I don't know how it got here when the intro clearly showed Ripley leaving it parked outside, and if it managed to drive this far into the colony then it seems terribly reckless to have gone through the first stage on foot,  Maybe Ripley just wanted to break in her admittedly very cool new shoes.


Stage two sees Ripley standing atop the APC as it thunders down one of the colony's tunnels, shooting the massed aliens with her Smart Gun rather than using the ruddy great cannons attached to the front of the vehicle. There's a point where these things go from "badass" to "deeply stupid," Ripley. The APC is driving towards Newt, who has managed to get to the other end of this tunnel without dying somehow, a task I couldn't manage even with a gun in my hand and a military vehicle under my feet. You can see how close you are to your destination by looking at the bar at the top of the screen. Newt seems to be eyeing the oncoming APC with a degree of trepidation, as though she is unconvinced by the viability of a rescue effort involving a woman with no military experience surfing an armoured personnel carrier.


Newt is right to be wary, because just as Ripley reaches her a flying alien swoops and and steals her away, causing Ripley's sprite to do a "shocked" motion that makes it looks as though she's slow-dancing with the invisible man.


Stage three begins with Ripley entering the air ducts, where the movie's iconic motion tracker comes into play. Unfortunately, the motion tracker is completely useless. It shows which direction the alien threat is coming from and when they'll be close enough to shoot, but because you're in a narrow vent and the alien attacks are constant, you already know the answer to those questions - they're coming from the left or the right, all the time, making Aliens' motion tracker the most pointless piece of equipment in the franchise since the stun-rods from the first movie that never get used.


We're on an express elevator to hell, going down. That's a quote from the movie, you see. It's not hugely relevant here because this elevator is far from being an express, trundling slowly into the bowels of the colony while aliens leap onto it from all sides. I brought in Corporal Hicks, the player 2 character, here, both so that you get a chance to see him and also to serve as an expendable distraction while Ripley concentrates on shooting the aliens that have climbed to the top of the elevator and are trying to snap through the cables. If they manage to sever all three cables, the elevator falls to the ground and your character immediately loses a life. Of course, this being an arcade shooter you can return to life in the spot where you fell, although I have to admit in this situation it felt even less reasonable than usual. I'm not sure why - being slaughtered by a xenomorph and then immediately carrying on from where you died is equally ludicrous on the face of it, but there was just something about seeing Ripley fall five storeys, crash into the ground at a fatal velocity and then spring back to her feet that made me stop and think, "huh, that looks weird, even for this game."


A plus point in Aliens' favour - incinerating the aliens once you've picked up a flamethrower is intensely satisfying, thanks to their detailed "burning to a crisp" sprites. Say what you like about the weird xenomorph designs and the inappropriate colour scheme, but there is no denying that this alien is definitely, one hundred percent on fire.
There are a few other weapons to pick up along the way thanks to the occasional power-up object that cycles through the available firepower options, allowing you to pick which weapons you'd like to use. The power-ups always cycle in a set order, however, so as you shoot them out of their containers and dash forwards to collect them you are much more likely to end up with the homing rockets than any other weapon, because they're the first power-up in the queue. That's not such a bad thing, though, because the homing rockets are probably the best weapon, allowing you to keep moving forwards without having to turn around constantly to shoot the aliens sneaking up behind you. The other available weapons are a three-way spread gun that isn't much cop thanks to the narrowness of most of the game's play areas, and a rocket launcher that doesn't home in but which is still preferable to the basic Smart Gun.


This boss is an alien who has evolved two combat adaptations of wildly differing usefulness. On the one hand, it has grown a coating of bulletproof plates all over its body, allowing it to curl up into an impenetrable ball and roll around the screen like a deadly pill bug with a well-used gym membership and a deep hatred of humanity. On the other hand, it's projectile attack is to release fluffy little cotton wool balls. If you crouch, I don't think the cotton wool can even hurt you. This makes figuring out tactics for the fight a breeze: move away when it's in ball mode, crouch and fire while it's pollinating the area dandelion-style. It's not a difficult fight, and it does rather bring to mind the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" when it comes to alien physiology.


As if the aliens weren't bad enough, now I've got humans trying to kill me. That one up the top even has the twin advantages of possessing both a gun and the bottom half of his body, making him something of a priority target.
These "possessed human" type enemies pop up in a fair few Aliens games, although I'm never really sure why. There's no precedence for them in the Alien movies, and if I wanted to shoot humans with guns I'd play any other shooter. I'd say it's an effort to introduce more diversity into the pool of things you're killing, presenting the player with an enemy that can fire projectiles back at you, but the xenomorph in Aliens are such a varied bunch that it seems unnecessary to include these poor unfortunates at all.


Then Ripley falls into the sewer - trust me, she's behind that explosion somewhere - because even in deep space you can't get away from sewer levels. The floating corpses are a nice touch, as chestbursters leap out of them when you get close, but the spider-aliens populating the top of the screen look more like something out of The Thing or, appropriately enough, the Aliens toy line. In 1992, toy manufacturer Kenner decided that the extremely violent, nightmare-inducing Alien universe would be a great basis for a collection of children's toys and honestly they were not entirely wrong - I had a lot of them as a kid and I loved them (and I still have the Power Loader and Bull Alien within ten feet of me as I write this). They were apparently intended to tie in with an Aliens-based kid's cartoon, of all the wonderful, mind-boggling things. The cartoon never surfaced but the toys did, and a lot of the aliens in the line feel like they could have taken some inspiration from this very game. One of the toys featured an alien "parasite" that was just a xenomorph head with little wings, much like the enemies in this game that attack you in the air ducts. There was an Arachnid Alien that bore some similarity to the first boss, as well as a flying alien kinda like the one that abducts Newt. I don't think there was any cross-over of inspiration between this game and the Kenner's toy line - the toys were mostly "what animal can we make a xenomorph version of?" including a Mantis Alien that must have started out as one teeny-tiny facehugger - but it's interesting that even in the early nineties, the aliens were losing a lot of their horrific mystique.


And then bang, out of nowhere you get to ride in the Power Loader, smashing aliens with your big metal claws and making mechanical whirring noises with your mouth as you do so. Well, you do that last bit if you're me, at least. So far Aliens has been a thoroughly generic side-scrolling action game that's trying to cruise by on the strength of it's movie license and a few half-arsed and feebly-implemented twists to the formula like the motion tracker and the APC stage, but giving me the opportunity to stomp around in a Power Loader means it's sins are all but forgiven, sins such as making some of the xenomorphs bright orange and giving them face tentacles. If the xenomorphs take on some of the characteristics of the host they emerge from, then these freaks must have impregnated and hatched from the cast of a children's TV show like Sesame Street. It'd explain the garish colours and occasional fuzzy aliens.


Ripley wades through the alien hive. There are colonists cocooned in the walls. Ripley knows full well that this means they are doomed to an agonizing end coupled with the disturbing knowledge that their death means one more xenomorph in the world. Ripley completely ignores these poor souls, not even taking a moment to grant them a quick death. Good work, Ripley. Real neighbourly.


Once again, words fail me as I try to describe one of Aliens' bosses. It's the Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 in a biomechanical skirt, it's a xenomorph whose arms were replaced by stretchy tendrils that boop Ripley on the head rather than clawing her to death, it's head can be retracted into an unpleasantly anal-looking sphincter, it's, it's... oh, I don't know. It's in my way, that's what it is, so I have to shoot it a lot before I can move on to the next area. The regular side-scrolling parts of the game aren't up to much but these vertically-oriented ones are even less interesting, limiting the player to two possible actions, like a stripped-down version of the similar parts of Contra. That's actually what Aliens feels like more than anything else: an inferior version of a Contra game with none of the fluid movement or exciting boss battles.


Another APC-based stage now, where as well as the aliens Ripley must also be wary of fly-tipping. There are boxes of junk along the path and you have to shoot them out of the way lest they bounce up and hit you in the face, a problem that could easily be solved by, oh, I don't know, riding inside the armoured vehicle? I know I'm belabouring this point, but come on.
If you really don't like the APC sections - and no-one would judge you harshly if that's the case - then I suggest you play the Japanese release of Aliens because they were completely removed for that version, or possibly added in to bulk up the overseas versions. There are a few other changes in the Japanese version, too - some things are different colours, each stage has a title shown before it starts and the final boss has a couple of different moves - but the lack of the APC sections (and the complete removal of Newt from the game) is the biggest, and it cuts down an already-short game to something you can finish in fifteen minutes.


Konami really put a lot of effort into capturing Newt's likeness, huh? "Yeah, yeah, I watched the film. The kid? Yeah, I can draw her. She looks like every other kid in the world! Blank, smooth skin for a face with two black dots roughly where their eyes should be. What do you mean? That's what my kids look like, pal. Are you saying my kids are ugly?"


After the second and thankfully final APC ride, there's an extremely short stage to negotiate, and by "negotiate" I mean "run through as quickly as possible." Having played through Aliens a few times now, I have learned that the easiest and most hassle-free way to get through the game is to move right as fast as as you can while holding down the fire button, especially if you've managed to collect the homing missiles. It speaks to the game's lack of quality that forging ahead, only veering off course to walk around the occasional facehugger, is a completely valid tactic, because it allows you to both clear out the aliens ahead of you before they can get themselves set while also allowing you to just walk away from the stragglers, who soon get bored and lose interest.


I'm going to say that this boss' mass is supposed to be mostly brain, because if science fiction has taught me one thing it's that having a massive brain means powerful psychic abilities and telekinesis is my explanation for how this xenomorph is controlling the facehugger-filled bubbles that surround him. The facehuggers don't pop out of the bubbles and attack you or anything, they just get in the way, making it difficult to shoot the boss itself. My solution to this, a solution that I admit was partly born of a growing sense of boredom with the game, was to park Ripley right inside the boss and keep firing. She'll take damage, she might even lose a life, but it's by far the fastest way of killing the boss and you'd probably take the same amount of damage if you tried to fight it "properly" anyway.


Another stage, mostly the same as the others. I'm showing this otherwise uninteresting screenshot because if you look in the background there's a little poster depicting a Moai head, the sometime Konami mascot. Also in this screenshot: the alien looks like it's getting ready to give Ripley a boost, possibly as part of an ill-advised gymnastics routine.


Sometimes in Aliens you get the choice of walking along an upper or lower level, although once you drop down to the bottom you usually can't climb back up. My advice to you is to take the top route wherever possible. I think this screenshot provides a good visual aid as to why this is the best course of action. I don't think it'd be in-character for Ripley to say "so long, suckers," but by god that's what I'm imagining her saying.
By the way, notice there are genuine alien eggs down there. So what the hell was with those flesh-sacs that the fully-grown xenomorphs were popping out of earlier? Were they actually sleeping bags, and the aliens near the colony entrance were fast asleep when Ripley arrived?


A boss with the power of rudeness now, as these leaping aliens refuse to look Ripley in the eye even as she's shooting them. That's just bad manners. Okay, so their real power is that they start off small (like the one standing on the floor) and keep getting bigger and bigger as you shoot them. Of all the weird alien abilities in this game it's the one that I can most easily accept, given that the aliens in the movies go from chestbusters to full-grown warriors very quickly without ever seeming to stop for a snack. The problem I do have with this fight is: how did Ripley know that the aliens were going to stop growing? She starts shooting and they start getting bigger, so she shoots them so more and they get bigger still. Eventually they do explode and die, but there must have been a moment during the battle when Ripley thought to herself "hang on, I think I might just be making more problems for myself here" as visions of four skyscraper-sized aliens pop into her head.
Despite their gimmick, these aliens don't pose much of challenge. The stages themselves being harder than the bosses is a bit of a theme in Aliens, and the difficulty curve in general is all out of wonk: aside from the final one I think the first boss is the most difficult, and because the difficulty of each stages is mainly based on how short it is there's no consistent gradient of challenge.


Oh look, a platter of delicious health-giving meat laying on the floor of a sewer and within clawing distance of an alien who thinks he's hidden underneath the floor but who is, in fact, easily visible. You know what, I think I'll skip that particular meal, all the same. I don't trust any videogame meat that I didn't find under a dustbin or hidden inside a castle wall.


I've been giving Aliens some stick for it's aesthetics, but I do honestly like the look of some of these later areas. While they may not bear much resemblance to an official Weyland-Yutani-constructed colony, they've got that "arcadey" feel to them, and especially now that I've reached the colony roof the aliens have more license to scuttle up walls and along ceilings like any self-respecting xenomorph should be doing.


Roll up, roll up, come one and all to witness the miraculous powers of the Electrical Alien Brothers! Gasp in amazement as Ripley shoots they while they pass 50,000 volts between their weird furry heads! Shriek in delight as their attacks are easily avoided through the tactic of not standing right between them you big idiot! Demand your money back as one of them dies and the other just sort of stands around doing nothing!
Okay, between the spider aliens, the gargoyle-looking aliens and this electrical double act I have come to the conclusion that Konami got their wires crossed and thought they were working on a Gremlins 2 game before realising their error and hurriedly altering the graphics.


In the depths of the infested colony, there is an alien queen. I'm sure you are not surprised to learn this, as an Aliens game without an alien queen is like a civilised discussion on an anonymous internet forum - I think it may have happened once, but it's vanishingly rare. Queenie herself isn't much of a threat, tethered as she is to her pulsating egg sac, which is the target you should be aiming for. It's segmented, and each time you do her enough damage one of the segments falls off so it acts as a disgusting, monster-spawning health bar, which is pretty neat. The real danger here comes from all the eggs and the facehuggers they produce. You can't even clear out the eggs, because as fast as you destroy them they are replenished. Not by the queen laying them - she has egg shyness and can't deposit her genetic material while someone's looking at her - but by other aliens who carry the eggs into the chamber like skeletal butlers. You'd think they'd want to take a more direct approach in dealing with the woman shooting their matriarch, but they must not be getting paid enough to take those kinds of risks and so you're free to plunk away at Her Highness until her egg sac explodes, something which I'm sure has definitely killed the queen once and for all and we won't be seeing her again, say, at the very end of the game.


Wow, look at that cyberpunk megalopolis down there. Those colonists must have been damn hard workers. Seems a shame that it's all going to blown up soon. Normally I'd call this the usual Konami Ending, but that is what happens in the film so for once it makes sense.
By coincidence (I wasn't expecting to get it for Christmas), I've been playing Alien: Isolation recently, and it makes for an interesting contrast with Aliens. In twenty-four years we've gone from an overly-familiar action game with a xenomorphic coat of paint and none of the elements that made the movie great to a fastidiously accurate recreation of the Alien universe that tries it's utmost to restore the alien's terrifying reputation. I don't have any deep or insightful comments into what this means, beyond the obvious observations on the advances in gaming technology and possibly that videogames are "maturing" ever so slightly. I just think it's fascinating, is all, especially as I've been playing videogames long enough to see both ends of the spectrum.


Before you can finish this stage, there's a boss fight against the same big-brained, orb-carrying boss that you fought before. It's just as tedious as it was the first time around, but I thought I should mention that just before that rematch you can see the queen walking past in the background, eliminating any chance of the final fight taking you by surprise. It's not like the suspense was killing me or anything. but really?


This is final fight, by the way. Konami stuck pretty closely to the queen's movie design for this sprite, so it's no surprise that it's the best-looking creature in the whole game. Why, I was so busy admiring it that I neglected to move away from her deadly tail attacks. I tried a few more times, and while I was managing to shoot the queen it didn't seem to bother her much and she kept killing me. What I need, I thought to myself, is a big yellow friend.


Yes, that'll do nicely, and thus the queen versus Power Loader fight from the movie is recreated. If I'm being honest, this is not a good boss battle. It's pretty terrible, actually - it seems impossible to tell when the queen's attacks are going to hurt you and the Power Loader is too slow to dodge them anyway, so the fight devolves into tapping the fire buttons to swing the Loader's arms around until the queen gets bashed enough times for you to win. The thing is, I don't care. I'm in a Power Loader, fighting the alien queen, and sometimes that's all you want out of life. The arcade cabinet could shoot a live hornet up my trouser leg every time I pressed attack and I'd still be enjoying myself, especially when the queen is low enough on health for you to pick her up, carry her to the airlock and chuck her out into space like a huge robot bouncer minding the doors of the worst nightclub in the Solar System.


There she goes now, falling into the vacuum of space. Let's hope she burns up on re-entry when she drifts close enough to a planet to be caught by its gravity. Imagine how pissed off she'll be if she survives the trip.


I don't know what an alien's flung is - a specially adapted lung that allows them to breathe in hostile environments, perhaps - but whatever it is it's in timeless space now and Aliens: The Movie: The Videogame is over. I'm kinda glad it's over, because I was just getting more and more disappointed as it went on, Power Loader sections excluded. Take away the Aliens­-flavoured coating and you're left with a sub-standard - especially by the standards of what Konami could produce in the arcades at this time - run-n-gun game that half-heartedly tries a couple of gimmicks that don't work very well. The whole thing feels like a rush job, a licensed product that Konami carelessly knocked out so they could get back to work on better titles. The graphics are okay but not amazing, the alien designs are strange but not in an especially interesting way and even the music - something that Konami coin-ops can normally be relied upon for excellence - is underwhelming. It's not a bad soundtrack per se, but it's not nearly as good as something like the Turtles games.


I can still just about recommend it, though, especially if you are an Aliens fan. It's a very short game that doesn't demand much attention, so if you're after a brainless shooter to knock through in twenty minutes, it's not too bad a bet. Just try to to waste too much time trying to figure out what animal those electric aliens must have hatched from in order to give them both lightning powers and a mop-top hairdo.