The title screen "stars" a horrible little gremlin-man insulting the player with a rude hand gesture. That's a remarkably confrontational attitude for the title screen to take, considering it's trying to get people to put money into the machine. Maybe Mitchell were counting on the arcades of the late Eighties being full of easily-antagonised people who could be infuriated into trying to teach arcade machine a lesson. "Stick the finger up at me, you cheeky little shit? Well, we'll see who's the big man just as soon as I get this fiver changed into twenty-pence coins!"
A few other images flash up on the film-strip at the bottom of title screen, although none are as interesting as this guy, with the possible exception of the punk who has drawn a crude peace symbol in the middle of his forehead. Or carved it in there with a jagged piece of glass. Mad Motor's low-res graphics make detailed analysis impossible, although the title logo itself does look good. There was some effort put into it - perhaps too much effort, causing the logo design stage of the game's development to overrun massively and eat into time allocated for other aspects of the game, like a storyline. There's no plot or explanation here, you just insert your credits and bang, you're in the game.


That's the player character on the left, the motorcycle-riding, pipe-wielding chap with the Billy Idol hair and the tenuous grasp of correct road safety practises. Like a true nature's child, he was born to smash people's heads in, specifically the heads of any road users who aren't him, like this phalanx of sensibly-helmeted riders. Why is he doing this? Where are these people going? Were red jackets the only thing to survive whatever catastrophe formed this presumably post-apocalyptic world? I have no answers to these questions, and Mad Motor certainly doesn't provide any. All I do know is that the game takes place in New York. This is Central Park, according to the pre-stage text, and it's looking more verdant and lovely than ever.


So, as you can probably tell, Mad Motor is a drive-along-and-hit-people-em-up that prompts comparisons to Road Rash, (which wasn't released until 1991,) although my mind immediately went to the motorcycle chase scene from Final Fantasy VII instead, to the extent that I started whistling this while I was playing. You drive from one end of the stage to the other, taking out as many bad guys (or maybe they're just indifferent guys) as you can before battling with the boss and moving on to the next part of New York. The gameplay is cumbersome and imprecise, with vehicles bouncing off one another as you try to line up with the frustratingly small area in which a pipe attack will register as a hit. Only clean hits will do, too - unless your attacks are landing right in the sweet spot, usually the very middle of the opposing vehicle, then you might as well be trying to batter them with a feather duster for all the impact you'll have.


Then this happened. This, I was not expecting. When your health bar runs low, rather than simply losing a life the screen is filled with flashing images of out hero mutating into a hideous veiny beast. "I'm alive!" he bellows via the power of digitised speech, "WOLF POWER!" At least I think he's saying "wolf power," the sample is grainy enough for it to be open to interpretation. He could be saying "Full Power!" I would also understand if you heard it as "Bull Power!" although Wolf Power seems to fit his new appearance the best. I would be more inclined towards Bull Power if he grew horns or gored a matador or something rather than getting hairier.


It's not just our hero that gets an upgrade, either: even his bike is transformed into a caterpillar-treaded, double-front-wheeled monster of a machine. These modifications are surely designed to take the extra weight provided by our hero's new bulk, although it would have been amusing to see this giant beastman on a normal-sized bike.
The upgrade to Wolf Power isn't just cosmetic, either, because now you can attack with huge energy slashes thanks to the elbow blades that all wolves possess. You can also attack much faster and with less need for accuracy, allowing you to overwhelm your foes in a blizzard of wolf-powered elbow slashes that will quickly destroy anything in their path. There are only two downsides to this: because the transformation triggers when you run out of health in an Incredible Hulk-meets-Easy Rider fashion, you're only one hit away from losing a life in Wolf mode, and when you die you revert back to your normal - if a man who chases people down and murders them with a metal pipe can be considered normal - form. The other thing is that every time you attack in Wolf mode it plays the same "RAAR!" sound effect that quickly becomes more grating than sandpaper underwear.


The first boss fight is against a pair of skinhead bikers with yin-yang symbols painted on their jackets. Maybe one of them represents the gentle, soft, feminine nature of Yin, but I doubt it. What I think happened is that they both refused to be Yin until their arguing got so bad that their evil overlord threw his hands up and said "fine, you can both be Yang, just get out there and kill the motorcycle werewolf."
They're not great bosses. I think I caught them unprepared as they don't even have weapons, instead relying on their fists to try to punch a man who can turn into a monster when he receives a sufficient volume of punches. It doesn't work out great for them, and soon enough stage one is over.


"Try jumpping?" Like, what, off a cliff? Your motorbike does jump into the air sometimes, but it seemed to be more because I'd hit an obstacle or explosion in the road that propelled me into the air. I tried pressing various combinations of buttons but I couldn't figure out if any of them were making me jump or if I was coincidentally being flung around by the constant impacts. Anyway, the two bosses are trying jumping back there and it doesn't seem to be working out so well for them. I think I'll stick to riding my bike and occasionally transforming into a monster. It worked pretty well for Nicolas Cage in the Ghost Rider movies.
Okay then, that's Central Park cleared. What famous part of New York will we be heading to next, I wonder? Brooklyn? Wall Street? Times Square?


Oh, A Ravine, of course. Well, you don't just want to be going to the same old touristy places as everyone else.


Stage two is more of the same, and honestly so is the rest of the game. Different enemy types appear but they're all in need of the same judicious pipe interventions / claw slashing. While some of them are in cars, hang-gliders or, in one case that makes me question how physics works in the Mad Motor universe, keeping pace with the action despite being on rollerskates, they're more often than not riding motorcycles of some description. This solidifies my theory that this is taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, because if Fist of the North Star and other post-apocalyptic media have taught me anything it that's motorcycles are one of the few things that will survive the purging nuclear fire in large numbers. If cockroaches ever learn how to ride motorcycles, the human survivors will be doomed the moment they step out of their fallout shelters. Millions of cockroach biker, the Hells Roaches, wearing tiny patch-covered vests and roaring through the ruins of human civilisation in search of discarded kitchen waste. Aww, that's kinda adorable.


One new set of bad guys are these bearded men on tricycles. They're so uninterested in the carnage around them that they drive about with their arms folded. It doesn't help them in the violent battle along the New York highways, but at least they'll look cool when they die in a huge fireball.


Speaking of looking cool, here's the boss of the second stage. It's a giant gorilla wearing spiked armour and gold jewellery who uses his simian grace to attack our hero while hanging from a helicopter. Well, that's the 2015 VGJunk Review's "Best Character" category done and dusted already. He's wearing a little crown, look! Oh my stars, how delightful. "I have to wear the crown," he says - because in my imagination this gorilla can talk, naturally - "how else would people know that I am King Ape, king of the apes?"
I'd like to say that King Ape is a wise and benevolent leader, but sadly that's not true, and once your Wolf Power kicks in you'll have no trouble beating him. No trouble apart from the heart-rending necessity of beating King Ape to death, that is. Hopefully his son and heir, Prince Ape, will be able to reclaim the royal crown from his fallen father and grow to become the monkey monarch that this world deserves.


You get a different picture at the end of each stage depending on whether you were in Wolf Power mode or not when you cleared it. That's a nice touch. I'd enjoy it more if I couldn't see King Ape back there, about to become a red smear on the tarmac. King Ape should have attacked by throwing solid gold bananas at me: less dangerous to him than coming near our hero, plus they's encapsulate his dual nature, both his ape-ness and his fabulous wealth.


Here we are in stage three: City Island. The traffic is murder today, he wrote without an ounce of regret for his movie-tagline level punning. If any native New Yorkers are reading this and they want to say "so the apocalypse didn't change much, huh" or something vis-a-vis the traffic congestion, then go right ahead. Congestion is less of a problem when you can smash the other vehicles out of the way with your unholy power, but we should give credit to the two guys in the top-left who have opted for the much more restrained tactic of carpooling.


I don't have an interesting segue into this one, but here are some knights in full plate armour who are riding motorcycles and trying to kill our hero by skewering him on their lances, which they have two of because apparently passing Ye Olde Mettal Horse-Rydyng Proficiencie Test of Camelot means you don't need any hands to steer with. The knights are really tough to take down because they can protect both of their sides at once, but I don't mind because "motorcycle knights" is such a fun concept. The big problem I have with them is that they, as with almost any videogame knight, are making me want to write this bit in faux Old English dialect. If you've ever read any other VGJunk article involving knights you'll know that a) I really enjoy doing this and B) I probably shouldn't.


This thing isn't the boss. The last thing you fight, and the thing that shows up in the post-level victory screen, is another one of the skinhead bosses from the first stage. That said, this Volkswagen Camper shows up at the end of this stage and nowhere else so I think it deserves honorary boss status. It says "Peace Love" on the side but also sports a picture of hand with the middle finger raised. These conflicting messages sent our hero into a rage, but upon striking the van it began to disgorge a stream of smaller vans filled with bombs. I don't know why you'd spent the time and effort putting the bombs inside tiny vans instead of just throwing them at your enemies, but this is a hippy van so I think we can safely put it down to it seeming like a good idea from within a cloud of good vibes, patchouli and weed smoke.


Stage four takes place in one of New York's many deserts, and it's not very exciting - a long, flat stretch of road without even any new enemies to spice things up. The pattern of play has become fixed by this point; each stage sees you being buffeted about by the enemies without you having much control over where your bike is going until you lose enough health for your Wolf Power to activate. Then you can easily destroy all the enemies until you reach the boss, where you'll probably die while trying to figure out how the boss is trying to kill you. Repeat this for the rest of the stages and that's it, that's Mad Motor.


The only thing of note in this stage is this roadside billboard. It flies past at fair old clip while you're playing, but I glimpsed enough of it to think to myself "hang on, was that RoboCop?" Turns out that yes, it was RoboCop, and my ability to recognise the giants of Eighties action cinema after even the most fleeting of glances remains as powerful as ever.
The poster specifically references RoboCop 2, and the question is why? That's not mean as a burn on RoboCop 2 the movie, I just wonder why it's specifically the second RoboCop movie that's being referenced and not just a general appreciation of the future of law enforcement. If Mad Motor really was developed in 1989 - it's difficult to get confirmation on that - then it was made before the film was released, so maybe someone on Mad Motor's development staff was just really looking forward to it? Of course, there was a RoboCop 2 arcade game made by Data East, and Mitchell Corporation did have some business ties (and possibly shared staff members) with Data East... but that game came out in 1991, so if this RoboCop 2 billboard was meant as a reference to that game then it must have been planned surprisingly far in advance.


Then the stage abruptly came to an end. I know that this screen suggests that I was involved in a boss battle against a large truck, but that didn't happen. There was no truck. There was no boss of any kind, just the same old hang-gliders that have been harassing me since stage one. I have to assume that the "large truck" boss was excised from the game as Mitchell knew it was embarrassingly far from the high standards set by King Ape.


Rather more engaging than the desert is the riverside, where the action is mostly the same but you have to steer every now and then to avoid falling into the river when the road ahead changes size. It was also around this point that I realised there's another button besides "attack" - it ever-so-slightly increases your speed while it's held down. I think the fact that I didn't realise it even did anything until the penultimate stage is a good indicator of just how little it increases you speed.


Any goodwill built up by the game making me pay attention to where I was driving and thus increasing the amount of gameplay in Mad Motor by 100% was immediately swept away by this boss battle. It's against two of the knights that I fought as regular enemies earlier. Was the head of this evil organisation so impressed with their previous performances that they were promoted? They're cool enemies and all, but their impact as an end-of-stage challenge is rather diminished by my having bested them in a chivalrous on yon tournament fielde of the Hygh-Waye already. Sorry, I'm doing it again, aren't I?


Just to confirm that the knights are indeed the boss and this isn't a repeat of the boss-less end of the previous stage, here's the victory screen showing the knight about to find out whether the friction of plate armour scraping along a road at eighty miles an hour will generate enough heat to cook a man alive. Our hero seems to think it's going to be an unpleasant experience, and the synthesised speech returns as he croaks "feel the pain, baby!" in an accent that you might describe as Schwarzenegger-esque, if Arnie wasn't a hulking giant of a man and he had a nasty sore throat during the recording.


The final stage is Coney Island, the developers having remembered that Mad Motor is supposed to take place in New York just in time for the thrilling dénouement. I like that water effect, with the sky reflected in the puddles. A few more touches like that would not have gone amiss, because as it stand the game has some fun character designs but it's also coloured in a palette consisting almost entirely of grey and orange, which gets a bit tiresome after a while.


There are cones in the Coney Island stage. I want to believe that this is either a deliberate pun or, even better, a sincere misunderstanding of why it's called Coney Island. In my heart I know it's just a coincidence. Aren't you glad I resisted the temptation to say "cone-incidence"? That would be a pretty terrible pun, no-one should have to read that.


The insanity of Mad Motor reaches a climax with this, the final battle of, I dunno, good against evil? Two blokes who just don't like each other very much, plus a dragon? Some explanation about why I'm fighting this enormous samurai might be nice. His name is The Slasher. I know this because when you start the fight he says "I'm The Slasher!" and, as if to prove his name is no idle boast, he tried to slash you with his spear. He's Slasher by name, Slasher by nature, and I'm convinced that he comes from the same ninja clan as The Shredder, along with their less successful ninja comrades The Lawnmower and The Melon Baller. As with the rest of the game, mysteries abound during this fight. It's never explained why The Slasher's vehicle of choice is a golden station wagon with some aluminium siding welded to the top, nor is any information given about his dragon accomplice. I think the dragon just happened to be there, he's not with The Slasher or anything, and he doesn't seem particularly interested in the fight. With that in mind, you can concentrate your assault on The Slasher. Just get right up to him, nice and cozy-like. This will make it easier for him to hit you, in turn granting you Wolf Power sooner, which you will need because The Slasher has an extremely long reach that make Wolf Power almost mandatory for victory. Other than that, it's all very straightforward: slash The Slasher until he dies (ironically) and then slash the disinterested dragon until that dies (disinterestedly) and you've completed Mad Motor. All that remains is to sit back and enjoy the ending sequence, and it's a doozy.


A grey alien steps from the burning wreckage of a car. Years of watching the X-Files leads me to conclude that this is all part of a vast government conspiracy, a tangled web of plot and counter-plot. Alternate theory: the alien is just be a really bad driver.


A man dressed like a 1940's private eye looks at... something. The alien? Perhaps. He could be reading the specials board outside a restaurant for all the information we're given. All this takes place in complete silence, by the way.


Two men quarrel. The man in the chair turns his back on the other, in a childish display of contempt. "La la la I can't hear you la la," we can imagine him taunting. His chair is topped with a rather fetching antimacassar.


Smash cut to the Chrysler Building. A confused hobo watches the silhouette of The Slasher dragging someone through the sky on his magical flying station wagon. Who are these people? What the hell is going on?



Oh, I see. The egg flying out of an explosion in Manhattan represents the developer's nascent hopes and dreams, created in the chaos of the urban sprawl, which they are sending out into the world via the medium of an arcade game called Mad Motor. Cherish this egg, player, for it contains the oft-trampled spirit of pure creativity.
Okay, so I did a bit of research and from what I can tell Mad Motor never actually made it into the arcades. What I've played here is a prototype, possibly one sent out for location testing, which explains why chunks of the game seem to be missing and things don't always work as you would expect them too. I'm going to guess that if Mad Motor was tested on location then the negative feedback was what stopped them from polishing the game up and releasing it properly, and it's easy to understand where that negative feedback came from. It's just not a very good game. It has some nice ideas - it's hard to argue with Wolf Power - and some enjoyable character designs. There's a certain crude charm to the whole thing, a similar charm to reading an amusing bit of graffiti on a toilet stall, but the actual gameplay is very rough. Crucially, you never feel like you're really in control of what's happening: your bike pings around the stage almost at random, until you power up and you can just keep tapping attack to clear a path. Motorcycle combat has been done much better since, so play Road Rash instead... but if you want to print out a picture of King Ape to keep nearby while you do so, I wouldn't blame you.

Another day, another title screen depicting someone flipping me the bird. I hope this isn't going to become a theme. That would be a terrible theme. Maybe I'll play a Mario game next, just to be sure that the first thing I see when I start up the game isn't an obscene hand gesture. Honestly, if I was this guy and my minuscule elfin hands were so grossly out of proportion with the rest of my body, I'd be trying to draw as little attention to them as possible.
I assume this man is the Danger Freak of the title. Not so much of a devotee of danger that he won't wear both sunglasses and a sun visor to keep the glare out of his eye, though, is he? Why don't you just squint like the rest of us tough guys, pal? It worked out all right for Clint Eastwood.


I think I'm ready to dare my first stunt. That's why I'm called the Daredevil, after all. No, wait, I'm the Danger Freak. Shit. Oh well, I'm already sitting on the motorcycle now, I might as well make the most of it.


Of course this stuntman simulator starts with a motorcycle section. Motorcycle stunts are one of the very first things you learn at Stuntman Polytechnic, just after "falling into piles of cardboard boxes" and "learning how to deal with taking all the risks while some big-shot Hollywood star takes all the credit." Riding the bike is simple, with the joystick controling your speed and up-and-down movement, while holding the fire button and pressing down makes the stuntman duck. This is handy when you need to ride under low-hanging obstacles, like the trestle pictured above.


Or, these redneck-looking types who try to clobber you with a baseball bat as you pass by. I don't think they know that this is a scene being filmed for a movie. If they do know, they don't care. They want the stuntman - I'd call him Hunk Studbuckle but that name's already taken - dead, and they're not worried about witnesses.


Just look at the height and distance he managed to get off that ramp! This movie, which I have already mentally titled The Adventures of Johnny Toughguy, Agent of T.H.R.U.S.T., is going to be the most explosive cocktail of thrills, spills and nerve-shredding action ever committed to celluloid! Assuming I can get to the end of this first stage, that is, and that's proving more difficult that I'd hoped it would. The aim of Danger Freak is to pull off as many stunts - launching off ramps, ducking under trestles and baseball bats - as you can, without crashing too often thanks to the cracked road surfaces and puddles of water that litter the highway. Each mistake causes the "CUT" counter to increase, although the director doesn't actually call cut or anything, he just lets you keep going until either you run out of time or health, or the crew runs out of patience.


This confused me, though, because the failure screen implies that the shoot became "too expensive" and you went bankrupt. Is that because I did too many awesome stunts? Because doing stunts makes the "DOLLAR" meter go up, and maybe that means the cost of the shoot is rising? I'm not sure, but failure is definitely linked to crashing so as long as you pull off stunts and don't mess up too badly you should be able to reach the end of the stage.


At the end of the stage, someone has thoughtfully placed a row of unavoidable oil drums across the road to help slow down your nitro-fuelled charge down the open highway. Don't worry, this stuntman is a highly trained professional and this is all part of the plan. I'm sure he will be totally fine!


See? He's okay, folk! As we all know, a person's spine is one of the few parts of their anatomy that can regrow after terrible, agonising trauma. The human body is truly a remarkable thing.
I haven't edited the animation in that GIF, either - the stuntman really does lay in the road for a while, flapping around like a freshly-landed salmon and no doubt making a mental note of all the crew members who rushed to his aid so he can thank them later, after he's scraped himself off the hot desert tarmac. Which he does, because he's dedicated to his job if nothing else, and not only does he finish the scene but he finishes it in style.


There he goes, surfing atop a sports car before leaping onto a ladder being dangled by a passing helicopter. Few things could make OutRun cooler, but I think being able to stand up on the back of the car while it drives might be one of them. You do control the car, too, moving it into position under the ladder before making your jump. Unfortunately the stuntman will only attempt the jump if he know he can make it, so we are cruelly robbed of the hilarious sight of the stuntman missing the jump and landing face-first on the asphalt. It's not too much of a loss, though, because thank to that previous GIF I have a good idea of what that would look like.


"Well, you seem to be a stuntman!" says Danger Freak during its post-stage analysis. "That's a stoke of luck, we thought you were just some passing vagrant who we stuck on a motorcycle! What an incredible coincidence!"


Hang on, what? Interlude Game? I've only had one stage of this game and it was hardly pushing the boundaries of excitement or duration, maybe you should concentrate on improving that experience before you start throwing Interlude Games at me.


Oh, it's just a Super Sprint clone. That's fair enough, and it's a perfectly acceptable take on the format aside from some extremely unforgiving collision detection, especially at the apex of corners. You don't just slow down if you crash, either - your bike stops completely for a couple of seconds while a "Warner Bros. cartoon character having a fight" style dust-cloud envelopes you. It also says CRASH right over your bike, just in case you hadn't realised you'd crashed and you thought the stuntman had stopped because he'd seen a rare butterfly at trackside and he wanted to cross it off in his I-Spy book.
There are a couple of shortcuts you can take, if you're feeling particularly adventurous: the white gate near the starting line can be ridden under, and the black rectangle in front of the cars is a ramp. The shortcuts are tricky to negotiate, however, with almost pixel-perfect position required to use the ramp especially, so in the end I just ignored them. I'm just not much of a Danger Freak, I'm afraid. I'm a Safety Freak, a Comfort Fanatic. I'm not cut out for this line of work, although somehow I did manage to win this race.


The second scene in Danger Freak is an aquatic adventure, with our hero negotiating various water-borne hazards while riding a jet ski. Unfortunately whoever did the art for this had never seen a jet ski before, so this upside-down angle-poise lamp that we're riding will have to do. This stage works the same as the first, except instead of ducking under things you have to jump over them, timing your leaps to avoid colliding with such common maritime menaces as sharks, naval mines and old men enjoying a relaxing day's fishing.


Hold on, I recognise that hat: that's the same guy from the first stage, the one who was trying to knock me out with a baseball bat. Well, I had felt a little guilty about driving my "jet ski" close enough to his boat that it rocked around violently in the water, but now I wish I'd managed to tip him overboard into the shark-infested sea. Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all. As cold as a shark. You might be thinking "but this is being filmed for a movie, that's probably just a remote-control shark's fin chasing you around," but don't forget that our hero is a danger freak. He's not a danger dabbler, no mere danger dilettante - he refuses to film a stunt unless the ammo is live, the sharks are real and hungry and the every container on set is packed with high explosives.


Logs do nothing for him. Just look at that expression, he has the face of a man waiting in line at the supermarket, not the face of a man in constant mortal danger. He also has the face of a videogame Lemming that's dyed its hair black during an ill-advised goth phase, but that's by the by.
So, jet skiing is fun, sorta. Like the motorcycling, your movements are smooth, but there's a bit of a delay on your jumps so the first few times you attempt this stage you'll likely be jumping too late and bumping into everything during your ascent. Thankfully the delay always seems to be the same, and eventually you'll learn to compensate for it.


At the end of the stage, the stuntmant takes his car-riding antics from the highway to the next level by surfing atop a submarine as he tries to grab the dangling ladder. Like the car, you can also control the submarine, which leads to the question how is he controlling the submarine? With the car you can imagine that he's shouting down to the driver, but a submarine? Is he banging out instructions with his feet like a trained horse or something?
Never mind that, let's enjoy a part of Danger Freak that's genuinely impressive, and that's the graphics. Aside from the stuntman himself, a scrawny fellow with the budding hunch of a young mad scientist's assistant on his back, it's a nice-looking game that features some really excellent parallax scrolling, especially in the first stage where the effect alone is worth loading up the game for.


Another between-stages break, and other top-down motorcycle race. Looking at the layout of the track, it's obvious that the developers want you to cheat by taking shortcuts. So I did. Then when I reached the end my bike didn't stop at the finish line and trundled off the screen completely. I couldn't get it back. The green CPU biker sat at the finish line, waiting for me to return and end the race, but I was forever lost in whatever writhing chaos lurks just outside the boundaries of the screen and so I had to start the whole game again. That was fun.


I'm not sure about wanting to see The Adventures of Johnny Toughguy, Agent of T.H.R.U.S.T. now, you know. A movie where the hero flies around in a baby bath with rockets glued to the side is hardly likely to be the action-adventure extravaganza I had hoped for. And what am I up against in this aerial stage? Birds? C'mon, I was just avoiding sharks and naval mines, what's a bird going to do?


OH JESUS GOD GET IT OFF IT'S EATING MY EYYYYEEES!!


Okay, no, I do want to see this movie if only to find out where Ridley from Super Metroid fits into all of this.
There are only three "proper" stages in Danger Freak, and this final one is the weakest of the bunch. You fly around avoiding things. It's like a shoot-em-up except you don't have guns. A dodge-em-up. A hope-the-collision-detection-works-well-em-up, because you're a big target and the obstacles take up a lot of space (the collision detection is quite good, as it happens). It doesn't make for the most thrilling gameplay experience, and our hero looks like a tit tootling around in his flying machine made from a cardboard box and some empty washing-up liquid bottles.


Okay, two things: is that Mary Poppins, and is our hero trying to look up her skirts? I think the answer to both those questions is yes. Mary Poppins and Ridley, together in the same game. Amazing. It's the greatest crossover event since Top Fighter 2000.


After a few minutes of aerobatic hijinks, the stuntman comes under threat from a missile attack. Oh no! Is this the end of our hero?


No, of course not, assuming you manage to press the fire button in time. If you do, he's launched from the ejector seat and parachutes down to safety with a grin of pure, gormless simplicity stretched across his sunburn-pink mug. He touches down, the scene fades to black, and that's it. Danger Freak is over. The stuntman will return in The Adventures of Johnny Toughguy 2: Johnny T.H.R.U.S.T.s Again.
What else can I say about Danger Freak that I haven't already covered, or that isn't immediately obvious from looking at the screenshots? Erm, nothing, really. It's a nice idea for a game but it's undercooked and extremely short. It controls fairly well, except in the specific situations where it doesn't. All the human characters look like they're wearing a crude mask carved from ham over their faces. It is, in short, an average Commodore 64 game.


That also means it's really hard, and I struggled to make much progress until I discovered a cheat code for invincibility. The code is a date, and when this specific date is entered while you're setting up the game, defining the number of players and the player's name and such, the cheat will be activated. The date is pictured in the screenshot above. It also happens to be my birthday, which I took as a sign that Danger Freak was suggesting - no, demanding - that I cheat my way through it, and who am I to argue with a twenty-six year-old-computer game?

In the last article I said I was going to write about a Mario game next, and like the twisted wish granted by an ironic punishment genie, here it is. It's called Kart Fighter because the fighters involved are drawn from Super Mario Kart, along with the look of the title screen, and not because there's any karting involved. The Fighter part of the title is spot-on though, because fighting is all there is in this game: it's plumbers trading punches, flying turtle shells and unsolicited dinosaur tongue-baths all the way. There's nothing to get in the way of the carnage, and the text on the title screen is accurate in this regard - it says OPTION, singular, and there is indeed only one option you can change. That's the difficulty level, which I will be leaving on the default setting so that I can enjoy Kart Fighter exactly as the developers intended. Well, maybe not exactly as intended because I didn't buy the cartridge from a dingy market stall, but as close as I can get.


Here they are, the Super Mario characters that you know and love so well: Kung-Fu Peach, Mario and Green Mario, Nervous Kong, the gang's all here. At first basing a bootleg Mario fighting game around Mario Kart didn't make much sense to me, but then I remembered that it was the first time that Nintendo had assembled all these characters in one place. It's easy to forget that, after decades of seeing the Mario family get together to compete in every sport under the sun, but Super Mario Kart was where it all started and so it doesn't take much of mental leap to go from "Mario characters racing" to "Mario character kicking the crap out of each other," especially at the time of Street Fighter II's phenomenal success.
Anyway, for your enjoyment I present my adventures through Kart Fighter. I will be playing as Mario himself, as seems most appropriate. If you're red-green colour blind this means that you get the bonus experience of seeing me play through Kart Fighter as Luigi.


Opponent: Nokonoko (that's Koopa Troopa to you and me).
Fighting Style: Shell Defence.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Revenge for his countless fallen brothers.
This Koopa Troopa must be the most elite warrior of his race, because Mario hit him with a fireball and he didn't immediately die. No matter how amusing it would have been for Hummer Team to include a character that is instantly defeated if it touches a projectile or is jumped on from above, Kart Fighter's Koopa Troopa has been through a rigorous training schedule that allows him to survive these minor blows, although he is still susceptible to being kicked in the face. The lack of buttons on the NES controller means that you're limited to one button for punches and one for kicks, but other than that Kart Fighter is a by-the-numbers recreation of Street Fighter II. You block by holding backwards, you can throw your opponent by getting right into their personal space and pressing punch, and you can even put them in a dizzy state with repeated blows.


Special moves are also unleashed using the familiar joypad inputs popularised by Capcom's classic: the first thing I did when I started playing Kart Fighter was unconsciously attempt a quarter-circle-punch motion, my brain immediately making the connections between Mario's ability to throw fireballs and the extremely high likelihood that Hummer Team had completely ripped off Street Fighter II. It worked, naturally, and Mario threw a fireball. He can also do a Dragon Punch, but the command for this is different than you'd expect and extremely finicky to pull off, so Mario's jumping uppercut became a move only performed by accident. Mario is Ryu, then, only without the Hurricane Kick. Mario makes up for this oversight by being sensible enough to wear shoes.


See? Koopa's getting a good look at those shoes as this kick ends the fight. The faces of the combatants are contorted in pain and rage, which is a slightly unnerving sight - even in Smash Bros the characters never look like they want to inflict real harm on their opponents, but one look at Kart Fighter Mario's grimace leaves me with the feeling that he's been waiting years to cut loose and beat a Koopa Troopa to death with his bare hands. Well, now's your chance, Mario, but can you summon that hatred and anger when you face... your own brother?!


Opponent: Luigi.
Fighting Style: As Mario, only greener.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Sibling rivalry.
Mario's facial expression has changed to one of trepidation as he faces off against the Green Machine. Whether he's worried about Luigi's martial prowess or that he's about to see his dumbass brother fall to an agonising death in a lava pit is up to the player to decide.


Luigi is the Ken to Mario's Ryu, differentiated only by the colour of their outfits and the fact that Mario's name is spelled wrong on his health bar. This misspelling may have been intentional, designed to bamboozle Nintendo's lawyers, as if the rest of the game didn't demonstrate quite how much contempt Hummer Team had for Nintendo's lawyers.
Oh, right. Luigi. There's not much else to say, really. He kept trying to hit me with fireballs, forgetting that jumping over fireballs is one of Mario's most finely-honed skills, along with rescuing princesses and falling down easily-avoided chasms through sheer overconfidence (admittedly that last one might be down to me rather than Mario himself). A few jump-kicks later - jump-kicks always seem to work particularly well in bootleg fighting games - and Luigi is defeated.


Opponent: Toad (Kinopio is his Japanese name).
Fighting Style: Pure, unfettered rage.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Endless "fun guy to be around" jokes.
Toad's bulked up, he's gained a foot in height and if the look of fury on his face as he approaches Mario is anything to go by, he's been hitting the steroids pretty hard. Thankfully his new-found dedication to the way of the warrior means he fights in stoic silence, so we're spared the aggravation of hearing a sound even worse than Toad's normal speaking voice: a badly-recreated copy of Toad's speaking voice.


It was at around this point that I figured out the key to victory in Kart Fighter, and that's marching relentlessly towards your opponent while tapping the punch button. Ninety percent of the time you'll either punch your foe or they'll block, giving you a chance to get even closer and allowing you to grab them. Once you've got one throw in you're golden, because you can stand over your fallen foe and grab them again as soon as they get up, allowing you to rack up big damage with no fear of repercussions. Sadly, you can't throw them around forever: eventually you'll trap them right at the edge of the screen, and throwing them a few times from that position will cause their head to clip around to the other side of the screen, whereupon any further throws will propel them back into the centre of the arena. Whether this is down to a glitch in the game's fighting engine or a deliberate effort by the developers to stop you throwing people people around until they're unconscious like a malevolent fairground teacup ride is unclear, but I know which one I believe to be true.


Opponent: Yoshi (again, Yossy is his Japanese name despite it sounding less Japanese than "Yoshi").
Fighting Style: Opens the door, gets on the floor.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Animal cruelty.
There is something about seeing a cartoon dinosaur putting up his dukes like a Victorian bare-knuckle boxer that amuses me on a deep level, so I'm just going to take a minute to enjoy it. Ahh, very nice. Okay, Yoshi. He attacks with his tongue. Don't do that, Yoshi, that's disgusting. Also, Mario is a plumber. Do you really want to be licking a man who travels through sewer pipes on the regular? Just beat him up with your muscular tail, you oddly-proportioned ferret-lizard. Yeah, Yoshi took a bit of a hit in the translation from cutesy sidekick to pugilist. He's sort of... stretched. Maybe carrying Mario for all those years has royally screwed up his back.
Speaking of graphics, if those mushrooms in the background look familiar, it's because they're ripped from Little Nemo for the NES. In for a penny, in for a pound on the whole "copyright infringement" thing, hey Hummer Team?


Opponent: Donkey Kong Jr.
Fighting Style: King of Iron Swingers Tournament Winner.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Well, Mario did once imprison his dad.
From dinosaurs to apes now, as Mario takes on Donkey Kong Jr. and by some miracle is not immediate torn apart by the ape's fantastic strength. You ought to think yourself lucky you're fighting Donkey and not Diddy Kong, Mario. When chimpanzees attack they go for the soft, vulnerable areas; the eyes, the testicles. DK Jr. fights using leaping uppercuts, by throwing banana peels along the ground and by twirling across the screen with his arms outstretched, which funnily enough presages Donkey Kong's similar move in Super Smash Bros.


In the interests of both fair reportage and relieving some tedium, I tried playing Kart Fighter without resorting to constant throws, and the results were not great. Kart Fighter suffers from all the familiar problems of the bootleg fighting game genre, especially those on the NES: the sprites are flickery enough to make me seriously worry about developing a tic in my eye, the presentation is extremely barebones with no win quotes or story to speak of, but worst of all is action that's a bit of a stodgy mess. Unlike a good fighting game, there's no sense of flow to the game, no feeling of smoothness or fluidity to your attacks. The characters are buffeted about the screen by unseen forces, sliding off each other in ways you wouldn't expect, presumably in a lazy effort to stop the sprites piling up on top of each other. Combos are out of the question - when you land a hit, the action actually pauses for half a second, making the game run at a somewhat ponderous pace. The entire thing feels not quite right in an almost undefinable way born from a hundred tiny gameplay flaws congealing together. As I said, that's what bootleg fighting games are like in general, but from what I can tell the Kart Fighter engine was reused for several other pirate fighting games so this game may well be the progenitor of those problems.


Opponent: Princess Peach.
Fighting Style: Gymkata
Reason for Fighting Mario: I have no idea, you'd think she's be more grateful.
With her usual pink pink dress replaced by a blue miniskirt and a serious case of conjunctivitis, Princess Peach pirouettes into battle, determined to do Mario harm by either spin-kicking him or whipping him to death with her hair. Why is Peach dressed in blue? I don't know, because her traditional pink colour scheme is in the game as her 2P costume. Maybe she just fancied a change, maybe Hummer Team were trying to invoke the essence of Chun-Li. Peach does have a Chun-Li-esque fireball, which brings me to another of Kart Fighter's problems: the characters are too similar to one another. It seems like an odd thing to say about a roster that includes a princess, a mushroom man and a gorilla, but all the characters have a projectile attack and either a horizontal "dash" move or an uppercut, which makes things a bit samey after a while.


Still, there is fun to be had with Kart Fighter. It might be awkward and clunky but it's not horrifically broken or anything. The hit detection is decent and the controls, apart from on some special move inputs, are relatively reliable. The computer's bone-dense AI means that it's a game that can only really be enjoyed in versus mode, and on the NES it's probably one of the best one-on-one fighting experiences you're going to find. Granted, that says more about the lack of good fighting games on the NES than it does about Kart Fighter's quality, but if you were desperate to challenge your friends to an NES fighting game for some reason - a time loop has trapped you in 1993, you have a serious mental disorder - then this game might be your best bet.


On a side note, the musical theme of Princess Peach's stage is an 8-bit version of the Koopa Beach theme from Super Mario Kart that sounds a bit like it's being whistled by a robot mogwai. I'm sure the rest of the music in the game is stolen from other sources, but none of it leapt out at me like this one did so presumably it's from games I've never played.


Opponent: Bowser.
Fighting Style: Adorable tinyness.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Small Man Syndrome.
Oh my word, look at this itty-bitty Bowser! He's so adorable, I just want to pick him up and give him a hug. I kept pressing the button, fervently hoping that just one time it'd allow me to give the Koopa King a cuddle, but alas it never happened and I ended up punching him in the snout over and over again.
Bowser is the closest thing Kart Fighter has to a final boss, but he's still got the same moves as everyone else - a fireball projectile and a ramming attack using his spiny shell - and he's still susceptible to repeated throws. No, I don't count throws as a hug. What, every time you hug a loved one does it end up with you slamming them to the ground? Unless you grew up in a family of professional wrestlers I very much doubt it.


Yep, that's the look I'd have on my face if I thought I was going to land on Bowser's, um, prominence.
Disturbing tail aside, Bowser is no more difficult to beat than any other character and you know what? I'm fine with that. It makes a nice change from every other fighting game, where the final boss is a cheap, overpowered test of patience. I mean, it's not like Mario's ever had any trouble beating Bowser before, so why should he now? With the Great King of Evil defeated, Mario's fist-throwing adventure is over...


...Or is it? No, it is quite clearly not over. There's another fight after Bowser and it's against Green Mario. I'm not having another dig at Luigi constantly being in the shadow of his brother, it really is a Mario vs. Mario mirror-match, and Mario's alternate costume is, well, Luigi. The first time this happened I honestly thought the game had looped back around, and it was only because I happened to glance at the health bars and see MARI up there in all its misspelled glory. Mario's attacks are identical to Luigi's, and I've already beaten Luigi once so it'll come as no surprise that this fight did not pose much of a challenge.


Then I was made to fight Bowser again. Here, Mario has thrown his arch-enemy to the floor with such force that half of Bower's body has disappeared in a jittery mess of pixels. That's gonna hurt Bowser's chances of winning this rematch.


Okay, now Kart Fighter is over for realsies. There's no ending, which is a shame - I'm one of those odd people for whom the post-battle quips and ending sequences are an integral part of my enjoyment of a fighting game. I can enjoy them purely for the mechanics, but those extra flourishes are what brings a fighting game alive. Imagine playing an SNK fighter without people calling each other "weenie king" or "pin-headed son of an icecream maker" at the drop of a hat. A dreadful thought, isn't it? I suppose you could argue that the extra screen you get for clearing Kart Fighter on the highest difficulty is an ending, but it's an argument you'd lose because a single screen traced from the podium scene at the end of Super Mario Kart with the words "The End" over it is not an ending. The end of an ending, maybe, but not an ending it it's own right.
Also, check out these high scores. I finished the game without losing a round and I still didn't make it onto the high score table. My total was around 110,000 points. I don't think it's likely that I or anyone else could get six times that to claim top spot. What is likely is the developers randomly slapping some numbers into the top scores without even considering for one millisecond the scoring system of the game they were making.


Kart Fighter is that rare beast - a bootleg game that has something of a positive reputation. I don't think I'd go as far as to say I have positive feelings about it, personally. Not positive feelings about the gameplay, at least, but I will freely admit there's still some pleasure to be gained in watching Princess Peach beat Bowser into unconsciousness using her hair. It's a weirdly transgressive thrill that has been diminished by the passage of time and the release of multiple official Mario slugfests in the form of the Super Smash Bros. games, but it's still entertaining in its brazenness.


It doesn't have enough depth or finesse to keep you engrossed for long, and your interest will probably wane as soon as the novelty of the setting wears off, but for an NES fighting game it's not bad. For a bootleg NES fighting game it's a work of art, a Mona Lisa of almost-good gameplay and intellectual property theft. And, with no qualifiers at all, it's still a lot better than Rise of the Robots.

The title screen isn't doing much to inspire confidence, bland as it is. Aren't the Cisco Heat a basketball team? This isn't a basketball game, nor is it about running a small fast-food outlet despite the vibes I'm getting from the logo. It's actually about driving a police car through the streets of the big city, but not for the reasons you might expect.


Said city is San Francisco, of course. Those of you familiar with San Francisco will have a better idea than I about whether Cisco Heat represents an accurate mapping of the city, but from this attract mode I did learn that there's an honest-to-god part of San Francisco called Treasure Island. I assume this is where all the pirates live.


As a flag-waving marching band traipses across the Golden Gate Bridge in a display of Americana so pure it could only have come from a Japanese arcade game, Cisco Heat offers the player a choice before the action begins. There are two police cars to choose from: a hulking Cadillac-style number that's apparently built "for speed" and a sports car made "for cornering." Yes, that all seems very logical. I think I'll take the car built for speed because, as we shall see, turning corners in this game is such a crapshoot that there is little practical difference between the two except that the bigger car is, y'know, faster.
Also, seeing red police cars just feels so wrong, so contrary to a lifetime of evidence about what colour police cars are supposed to be, that I spent the entire game thinking "no, this isn't right, maybe I'm supposed to be the fire marshal or something."


With a bit of dipswitch wrangling you can change the cars' colour to blue, but I didn't figure that out until I'd played through the game several times so for the rest of the article you'll have to excuse my car looking like an ambulance that decided it needed a change of career.


And they're off! The San Francisco Rally is underway, or to give it it's full title (as found on the arcade flyer)  the National Championship Police Car Steeplechase. That's right, the SFPD has abandoned their duties for the day in order to participate in an illegal street race through a major metropolitan area. You might think that the taxpayers would be less than happy about local law enforcement neglecting their duties to piss around recreating The Cannonball Run, but the citizenry is out in force, cheering on the boys in blue. The boys in red, I mean.
Cisco Heat works in the same way as most other arcade racers of the type: sprite-scaling effects are used to create a sense of 3D movement, the player uses a steering wheel and pedals (as part of a fancy moving cabinet, if you're lucky) to control the action, there's a gear lever with "low" and "high" setting, and despite the presence of other competitors making you think that this is a race, the real goal is to beat the clock and reach the end of the stage before your time runs out. It's all fairly straightforward, so I should have no trouble getting to grips with it. Treasure Island, here I come!


Immediately crashing into the toll booths before I'd even made it off the bridge was not part of the plan, I admit, although the charred remains of the toll collectors do serve to highlight that Cisco Heat is not a serious game. It's cartoonish in its setting, its characters and the unrelenting brightness of the colours. I know San Fran is supposed to be a vibrant, colourful city but I could almost feel the cone cells in my eyes shrivelling away like earthworms in a frying pan as I played.


My early impressions of Cisco Heat were that it fits comfortably into the time-honoured Jaleco tradition of being average but unspectacular. It doesn't have the sense of speed you get from something like AB Cop, and nothing like the same level of precision and overall quality as genre masterOutRun, but it makes up in part for its lack of technical refinement though its sense of character and the bold, designed-to-impress graphics that fill the screen with the kind of "big-ness" that only arcade games could produce at the time. That said, Cisco Heat itself couldn't quite produce all the effects that it tries to - sprites are often flickery and oddly-scaled and the road can become warped. I originally took this to be down to inaccurate emulation, but after a bit of research it seems that Jaleco simply pushed their hardware a little too far and the graphics are not particularly stable even on the original arcade machine.


The USA's reliance on the automobile is well documented, but I'm not sure developing a fleet of buses large enough to carry cars instead of human passengers is an acceptable solution to the problem. Forget about that gigantic bus, though - check out the background and you'll see the awe-inspiring, graceful majesty of the Jaleco blimp. It is my greatest wish to one day ride on the Jaleco blimp. "But the Jaleco blimp doesn't exist," you say, to which my response is you shut your goddamn mouth and find me a blimp and someone willing to make a huge vinyl sticker in the shape of the Jaleco logo.
Also in the background: a big red arrow warning of a sharp upcoming turn.


An extremely sharp turn. A right-angle, in fact. A ninety-degree turn is not an unexpected obstacle in a racing game set in a grid-based American city,  but unfortunately Jaleco's implementation of these corners - which pop up with great frequency during the course of the game - has all the smoothness and grace of smashing a wine bottle open with housebrick because you couldn't find a corkscrew. The major problem is one of viewpoint. Because, as in all racers of this type, you're essentially driving along a flat "strip" of road, you can't see what's on the road that you're about to turn on to. As you try to travel around these corners, rather than the view rotating to show you what's ahead, your car rotates sideways until you've passed a certain point in the turn, and then the view snaps into place to show the next segment of road ahead. It's a horribly implemented and extremely ugly piece of kludged gameplay which in practise means that not only can you not see any obstacles that are just around the corner until it's too late to avoid them, but because you'd can see the edges of the road while you're turning you have no way of knowing if you should stop turning or not. This is the Jaleco Thing, then, the flaw that once again relegates a Jaleco game to the status of also-ran - an entertaining also-ran for the most part, but the top tier slips away once again. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if these right-angled turns didn't crop up every ten seconds, but they do.


I managed to to reach the goal at the end of this short first stage in a creditable (considering how many times I crashed) third place but with only one second to spare on the timer, which is much more important because once you run out of time, it's game over. Wow, that's deep, man. Anyway, I'd be happy enough to call it a day at this point - we've all had a fun day out and nothing's going to top seeing the Jaleco blimp anyway, but as there are four more stages I suppose I should show them to you.


The second stage starts in Union Square, where the predatory megabus lurks in the undergrowth, ready to pounce on any unsuspecting police car that strays to close to its powerful jaws. The first part of this stage plays to Cisco Heat's strengths, with more straights that challenge the player to avoid obstacles rather than throwing them around blind corners, as well as some impressive verticality thanks to the rolling hills. San Francisco has been the setting for many driving videogames, thanks to it being one of the few American cities with potentially interesting and fun-to-drive road layouts. Of course, this being San Francisco, the player is at some point going to have to drive along that famous twisty road. Oh, what was it called again?


Thanks, Google.


Here is Lombard Street in all it's "shaped like a drunken snake" glory. You may notice that I am steering my car in completely the wrong direction. For once, this was not my fault. As I say, Cisco Heat's handling isn't its strongest suite.


What a diverse city San Francisco is - even the local bodybuilders have come out to watch the race. That's Big Steve on the left. Every day is competition day for Big Steve. Yes, Big Steve, your arms are very impressive, but it's okay to wear a shirt sometimes, you know? This is why you didn't get hired for that job at the Post Office. If you stopped posing for one second then maybe you could convince your friend in the blue trunks that he needs to work on his legs sometimes as well as his upper body. If he gains more bulk on his torso his ankles are going to snap.


Stage three looks a lot like the previous two. It looks like the next two stages as well, because Jaleco had a set vision of what San Francisco looks like and these familiar elements are reused throughout the game: there are hills, ninety-degree corners, ocean views and plenty of the city's iconic tram cars for you to crash into. You drive through some gates in this stage that imply you're entering Chinatown, but the theme is never really expended upon and things quickly settle back into the same aesthetic. Happily the game's aesthetic is one thing that I can wholeheartedly praise - there's always a lot to look at as you're barrelling down the street, with plenty of interesting pedestrians and hyper-colourful billboards (mostly for other Jaleco games) to amuse the eye. Sure, taking your eyes off the road for even a moment means you're almost certain to crash into something on San Fran's alarmingly dangerous streets, but as the developers have gone to the effort of filling the world with things to look at it would be rude not to pay attention to them.


Things like this woman, the owner of the least jolly balloons I have ever seen. Quite what special occasion she's planning to attend bearing flat, grey balloons with a sickly pink stripe across them - a clown's funeral, perhaps - but I bet it's going to be a laugh riot. That'a Jaleco-brand balloons, ladies and gentlemen - functionally acceptable but ultimately disappointing.


"Diane, 11:30 AM, February 24th. I have somehow found myself in a cross-city police race. Amazing! I'm not sure how this is going to help me catch Laura Palmer's killer, but I'll give it my best shot."


Here is a billboard of an old man. Hello, mysterious old man. If you have information regarding the identity of this old man, then please let me know. At a guess, I'd say it's someone involved with the American distribution of Cisco Heat, but I can't check the game's credits for anyone called "LB" because it doesn't have any.


Well, this is going to leave a blemish on my service record. Why were there no officers of the law around to bring an end to my rampage of dangerous driving?! Oh, yeah, right. Not to worry, the pedestrians in Cisco Heat are all protected by an invisible force-field strong enough to repel a ton of steel slamming into them at one hundred and seventy miles per hour. These force fields are presumably a gift from the Jaleco Corporation, the monolithic entity that owns San Francisco wholesale. There are Jaleco TV vans, Jaleco public transport, adverts for Jaleco-brand games and movies. Even the police are owned by Jaleco. They control everything. Living in Neo Jaleco City sounds kind of appealing, honestly - government by a group that is often lacklustre but generally well-meaning sounds better than most real-world alternatives (that's satire, that is).


There's a welcome change of scenery towards the end of stage four as the city gives way to the mountains beyond. I spent a lot of time here crashing into the many other police cars desperate to claim the glory the comes with being crowned the Police Rally Champion, glory that they're never going to achieve because most of them are actually behind the player in the rankings, with no chance to catch up. They just clutter up the road, getting in the player's way and refusing to do the honourable thing and give up so they can get back to protecting and serving. It was around this point of the game that I realised my police car came equipped with a horn, and by hitting the I could make the police cars in front of me move aside, which I thought was a nice touch. It would have been even nicer if my horn sounded like a horn instead of a morose cow trying to beatbox, but you can't have everything.


The final stage takes in a sunset drive to Treasure Island, yo ho ho, and perhaps I was a little too harsh on the right-angled corners earlier in this article. Don't get me wrong, they're still badly implemented and not much fun, but after playing Cisco Heat for a while I have at least reached a point where I've learned roughly how far I need to turn before I'm around the corner. This has increased the rate at which I can successfully negotiate these bends from around ten percent to a whopping fifty percent, which is clearly a vast improvement.


Special Guest: The Living Moai, the terrifying blank-eyed doom of the human race! This free-floating stone head is packed with fun, laughter and forbidden knowledge from beyond the veil of reality! Glory to The Living Moai, for your insignificant lives are as worthless as an insect's leavings before him! Pre-show entertainment provided by the All-Star Sundered Ones Dancers, book early to avoid disappointment.


Towards the end of the stage you're given a choice of routes along the James Lick Skyway, which along with Treasure Island has convinced me that San Francisco got all the most childishly amusing place-names in America. Anyway, there's not much difference between the two paths - one goes up, one goes down but they both have the same level of traffic and similar corners - but it would have been good for Cisco Heat to have a few more of these optional routes scattered throughout the game. For one thing this is a short game, and extra routes would lead (you'd think) to more replayability and thus more profits, but also as I've said a lot of Cisco Heat is a little samey and anything to break things up a bit would have been nice. Even just a few shortcuts would have been welcome.


There's the finish line. I notice that I'm in first place. I kinda wish that meant something, because Cisco Heat can get rather difficult and I played quite well to claim the number one spot, but my efforts are for naught because the only arbiter of success is how much time you have left on the clock. They're tight time limits, too, making it especially aggravating that Cisco Heat's difficulty doesn't come from intelligent computer opponents or challenging road lay-outs but from having obstacles pop up right in front of you and giving said obstacles such oversized hitboxes that you'll often crash even when you'd swear you were past them.


It's a little hard to tell thanks to the blocky graphics, but San Francisco's great and good have turned out to congratulate me on my victory. There are our two winning police officers on the left, ready to receive their prize from a man who looks like Ronald Reagan half-dressed in an Uncle Sam costume. I assume he is the mayor, voting into office by a populace charmed by the gumption of a man willing to wear those trousers in public. Next to him is the Chief of Police, trying not to think about all the paperwork that this day-long destruction derby will have accrued. Finally there is a woman with comically oversized breasts. She appears to be wearing a nappy. It's kinda weird.


That's right, I broke every law in the book on my way to the winner's podium. Murder, embezzlement, burning garden waste without a permit - I've got a rap sheet that makes Al Capone look like Ned Flanders. I will surely be fired from the force for this gross misuse of my powers, but not to worry: if this ending screen is anything to go by the human meat-units of the SFPD have been replaced by an army of not-quite-convincing humanoid cyborgs.


"*BZZT* Commence operation Android Overthrow. *bzzt*"
I wanted to like Cisco Heat more than I did. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it at all: when it stuck to having the player race against other cars and avoid traffic, it was a fun if not especially inspired take on the sprite-scaling arcade racer. It's just that many other things conspired to drain some of that fun right out of it. The graphical issues, the unpleasant cornering, the lack of any sense of speed, the unpredictable collision detection, they all chip away at the game until it fits perfectly into the Jaleco Files: fairly good but a long way from great, but there is at least a certain warming familiarity to that. I am glad this article is over, though; it'll be nice to not have to write the word "Cisco" for a while, because the phrase "thong th-thong thong thong" pops into my head every time I do and nobody needs that in their life.

That's Mad Show as in a mad television show and not your cousin's interpretive dance performance that you were forced to sit through that one time. The whole game is framed as a TV show, complete with a screen border in the shape of a really old television set, or as it would have been known at the time of the game's release, "a television set."
Mad Show is introduced by - although sadly not hosted by - a punk lady and a sentient carnivorous plant, a combination that achieves the almost impossible task of making Richard and Judy look even more worthless than usual. It's a shame they're not around for the game itself, and already Mad Show has fallen into the trap of having peripheral characters that are more engaging than the main cast. I don't care what else happens in the game, I'll always be more interested in the imagined adventures of Punk Girl and Venus Flytrap. They argue a lot, but deep down they really care for each other.


This horrible little gremlinoid is the main host, operating Mad Show's machinery and constantly burbling snippets of nonsensical speech. Alright, so I'm fairly sure that one of them is him saying "mad show" but the rest are gibberish presumably passed off as an alien language. No, I don't mean French, I mean an actual non-human language.
The host also suffers from being overshadowed by the more interesting things around him, in this case the crowd in the background. I don't know if they're supposed to be the audience, the production staff or if the show is being filmed in the waiting area of an interdimensional Accident and Emergency ward, but Marrowhead McCool, the punk endlessly throttling another person and that thing on the right with only a mouth where its face should be are all far more fascinating than a small man in a bad suit. The most intriguing of them all is the seemingly normal human baby that crawls around in the background. It cannot be a normal baby, surely. If only I didn't have these minigames to play, maybe I could unravel the baby's mysteries, but perhaps it is for the best that certain secrets remain undisturbed.


After choosing between training and competition modes, the contestant is beamed in. Beamed right into his clothes, that is, which were already waiting for him in the chair. I hope it wasn't too cold in the green room.
There are four events in Mad Show, and the player is allowed to pick which one they take on. Each time you win an event, that event can be selected again, but at a higher difficulty and with more points on offer for a successful attempt. The only goal, as far as I could discern at any rate, is to accumulate as many points as possible in order to claim a place on the Mad Show leaderboard.


It's a leaderboard containing such luminaries as Mr. Spock, Luke Skywalker and Clark Kent, so I have some stiff competition. As for the other names, I know that Targhan is another game by Silmarils, so I'd guess that's where they come from. Jig le Jogger may be a Frenchified transliteration of "jiggly jogger," a name bestowed upon me by a gaggle of unruly schoolchildren during an ill-fated attempt to get fit, but I accept that's a very unlikely scenario. Anyway, without further ado, let's get on with some gameplay.


No, hang on, I forgot that there is in fact some further ado. Before each round of the competition mode begins, you also have to pick a small demon face from a selection of six. Then the little portal in the middle of the screen opens up and a demon pops out. Here, the player is utterly horrified to see a small demon holding another demon's head on a pike. The severed head is wearing a wizard hat, so I can only assume that this demon was executed by a peasant mob for practising witchcraft (and being a demon). The player is clearly appalled by this brutal display of mob vengeance, as well he might be - there is no way that demon received a fair trial.
It took me a while, but I eventually figured out the point of this sequence: if you pick the demon head that matches the one that comes out of the portal, you're awarded some free points and another shot at Tiny Beelzebub's Roulette-O-Fun. Get it wrong and you're taken straight to the next event. An interesting idea in concept, but the whole process is painfully slow. The cursor selecting the demon moves like a treacle-coated slug, then you have to wait for the portal to spin around for a while, then you have to wait for the demon to appear, and after two or three trips on this satanic merry-go-round you'll never want to see it again.


Event one: Space Swords, where years of scouring the cosmos have finally paid off and a perfectly flat asteroid has been found upon which two men can engage in a lightsaber duel. You might think it imprudent of me to describe a common laser sword with the very specific term "lightsaber," but these swords make the same noise as a lightsaber and produce a blade of light from the hilt upwards when activated. The only way they could be more lightsabers is if they had Darth Vader hanging onto one end.


My opponent wasted no time in attacking, rolling towards me in a low-gravity somersault jump. Assuming that Mad Show (like all home computer games involving the swinging of swords) was controlled by holding down the fire button and moving the joystick, I held down the fire button and moved the joystick forwards. I slashed, my opponent jumped onto my sword.


An easy victory thanks in no small part to my opponent's gung-ho nature, but looking back on it I think prancing around his prostrate body like a kid who's just been told they're going to Disneyland was a regrettable show of poor sportsmanship.


Mad Show's second event caused me to ask some deep and searching questions, such as "where am I?" and "what is my purpose?" and "is that a giant eyeball staring at me from the back of the room?" Some of these questions had obvious answers - yes, that is a giant eyeball staring at me from the back of the room - but others required deeper thought and no small amount of joystick wrangling. In the end, I figured out what I was supposed to be doing through blind luck, when I managed to swing the shield I'm carrying like a club. It turns out that your goal here is to use your shield to smash the small blue robot that scurries around the stage while avoiding the projectiles flying towards you or, even better, blocking them with your shield. Well, it's certainly a novel idea for a cyber-sport, although it's not especially well-implemented: even on the lowest difficulty the robot's random, jittery movements and the need for near pixel-perfect accuracy when attacking make this event something of a chore.


But wait, there's more: after you've smashed the robot (which causes it to waddle away in a fairly adorable manner) you're peppered with crossbow bolts. Thankfully I figured this bit out much quicker than the first half, and the combination of arrows flying into the screen and a giant eyeball in the background made it obvious that those two things should get together for fun times.


Okay, so I got the crossbow to shoot the eye but this, this doesn't look fun. It's sort of disturbing - the colour palette, the deeply felt notion that the eyeball is really, really angry. It reminds me of a scene from Yume Nikki, unnerving in a way that belies the simplicity, even crudeness, of its parts. That's probably just me, though.


Into the sewer-prison for event three. Hey, combining the two saves space, it's a practical idea. This is Sawblade Frisbee Murder. Sorry, Sawblade Flying Disc Murder. Frisbee is a registered trademark of the Wham-O Toy Company and they presumably don't want their name attached to futuristic death-sports.
The goal here is simple: throw your razor-sharp cutting discs into the delicate flesh of your opponent, who is down the other end of the tunnel. The sawblades bounce off the walls and return to you, and if you position yourself - specifically, your big metal hand - in the right place you can catch them and throw them again. Sometimes a helpful inmate / sewer mutant will hand you a sawblade, an act which may not redeem them in the eyes of society or the law but which I personally appreciated immensely.


Weirdly, your opponent doesn't fight back, and on the lower difficulty settings he barely even moves, allowing you to take your time lining up your shots. That's easier said than done, and my enjoyment of this event was definitely punctured by the difficulty I had finding the right position for a successful throw. Some kind of grid painted on the walls that allowed you to see at a glance where you were in relation to the other end of the tunnel would have improved this minigame immeasurably, as would the action moving at a speed faster than "glacial." The basic premise of the game is fine and takes me back to many hours wasted at university playing 3D Pong, but it's too slow and unwieldy to be much fun.


The fourth and final event sees the player placed at the mercy of a giant brain's whims. I'm sure the brain would kill you outright if it could, but luckily all it can do is control the conveyor belt beneath your feet. To win, you have to get directly under the brain and fire your gun upwards to hurt it, which is not always a simple task when the floor is constantly moving you left or right, changing speed and shifting direction seemingly at random. I like that you can see the massive flayed hand operating the conveyor belt's control stick, that's a nice touch. Which is funny, because I definitely don't want to be touched by a massive flayed hand.


There are also small creatures, barely visible behind the scenery, that can take some health off you if they touch you for too long. You also lose health if the conveyor belt takes you off the edge of the screen, and that can feel frustrating because all you can do to get back on the screen is hold the stick to the left or the right to run in that direction. There's no way to gain extra speed by mashing the fire button or anything like that, so there's the potential for it to get annoying if the computer decides it's just going to set the conveyor to full speed in one direction for ages.


Once you clear four events, your health is restored and you can go through another set of four events, repeating this cycle until you either run out of health or get so bored that you decide to stop playing. The latter option is the most likely of the two, quite frankly. The games themselves are passable if not very exciting, but it's the wait between games that really makes the competition mode a slog, especially if you're "lucky" enough to pick the right answer in the tiny demon guessing game a few times in a row and have to sit though the several-minute long animation each time. For this reason I strongly recommend playing the training mode: the games are the same and although it means you can't get on the high score table (a mortal blow to Mad Show's appeal, I know) it also means you don't have to spend nearly as much time not playing the game. This is especially true of the swordfighting and brain-shooting events, both of which can be over literally in seconds. The conveyor belt starts you right under the brain, and it only takes one or two shots to defeat on the lowest difficulty level so you can destroy it before it even starts to move, and the sword fighting... well, you saw how keen the CPU character was to leap onto my sword and turn himself into an astro-kebab.


Things do get more interesting on the harder difficulty levels, although that only makes the earlier rounds feel like even more of a waste of time. In the Space Swords event, for example, your opponent takes more hits to defeat and you can sometimes start the fight standing back-to-back, someone on the production staff having conflated the rules of fencing and pistol duelling.
After spending some time further investigating the lightsaber game, I discovered a couple of interesting things. One is that you can laser-stab your opponent before they've even switched on their sword without fear of punishment, Silmarils having either decided that the player should be rewarded for their aggression or that the guilt the player feels after such a despicable act is punishment enough. I also learned that you can fall off the asteroid and die. I learned this by once again prancing around over my defeated foe's body. I was just trying to get used to the low-gravity jumping physics, alright? It definitely wasn't karmic retribution for stabbing my opponent before he was ready.


The robot-bashing event changes by simply having a million-and-one things shooting at you the whole time, forcing you to concentrate on blocking. Here, I turned to smash the robot only for an extremely accurate laser to immediately shoot me in the neck. I can't help but feel that the tiny robot planned it this way, although if it was an attempt at revenge then I imagine it would have been happier if I'd been killed by one of the spring-loaded boxing gloves dotted around the stage, just for that extra frisson of humiliation.
Mad Show's biggest gameplay flaw is that it's just a bit too slow, and that's never more apparent than during the later stages of this event. If your character was lithe and graceful, able to swing their shield around to quickly deflect with incoming projectiles, it would probably be the most enjoyable game of the lot, but the stiff movements mean you don't have enough time to react and chase down the robot in a way that feels satisfying.


Sawblade Toss remains much the same. You can now collect missiles to fire at your target, which is not as exciting as gaining the ability to fire missiles should be. They're the same as your sawblades, except they don't bounce off the walls. I can't aim the sawblades, which means I can't aim the rockets either. Who would have though that the concept of "gaining the ability to fire missiles" could be so disappointing?


The Brainveyor Belt takes more shots to destroy and becomes ever more twitchy and unpredictable, quickly sifting from "too easy" to "almost impossible" without ever becoming any more entertaining. I should point out that in the screenshot above our hero is not undergoing some Incredible Hulk-style transformation, it's just that one of the flapping creatures has deposited some paralysing lime jelly all over him. Now the conveyor belt can carry him away to whatever health-draining horrors are lurking just beyond the edges of the screen. By now I'd had enough of Mad Show, and so I let his life-force drift away until the game was over.


Mad Show takes the multi-event formula so beloved of eighties home computer developers and does very little with it in terms or gameplay. There aren't enough games, and the ones that it does have are only mildly diverting at best, hampered by feeling of lethargy that blankets not only the events themselves but also the tedium of preparing for each game... and yet I still warmed to it. This is partly because the events are easy to understand and don't collapse into a wrist-destroying gloop of button mashing and juddery controls, but it's mostly because of the presentation. Mad Show has the air of an eighties B-movie, a punk aesthetic that reminds me of films like Return of the Living Dead, and that's something I approve of. It's grotty and almost unpleasant to look at in the most appealing kind of way, so even though the gameplay didn't capture my imagination I'm sure I'll think of Mad Show from time to time. Of course, I'll mostly be thinking "why couldn't the game have been about Punk Girl and Venus Flytrap," but I suppose some things are just too beautiful for this world.

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.

Probably the most common type of SMB hack is the kind that simply replaces the graphics with something else - in this case, Link from The Legend of Zelda. Seems it was too difficult for the author to swap "MARIO" with "LINK" on the title screen, but aside from that this is a fun little conversion.


The game plays exactly the same as the original, as SMB hacks tend to do, and the layout of the levels is unchanged, but the cosmetic shift from Mushroom Kingdom to Hyrule is thorough and nicely detailed. Goombas become Octoroks, you collect rupees instead of coins and picking up a sword lets you shoot smaller swords out of your sword. I know that's not strictly accurate to the Zelda games, but it's much more useful than if Link fired energy beams horizontally like he does in Zelda II. You'd never be able to hit anything, the enemies are so small that you'd constantly be firing over their heads. I suspect that the bouncing path of the Fire Flower's projectiles is the reason that there are surprisingly few SMB hacks that give Mario a gun and have him embark on a bloody rampage. I honestly thought there would be loads of hacks like that because, as I mentioned, "edgy" teenagers.


Replacing Bowser with Ganon works surprisingly well. I guess there's a lot of common ground between "magical bipedal turtle-monster" and "magical bipedal pig-wizard." I find it difficult to take Ganon seriously as a villain, though, and Super Link Bros. is only making it even harder: not only does Ganon keep getting foiled by a literal child, in this appearance he's wearing tiny red wellington boots. I can't feel threatened by someone wearing the same shoes as my two-year-old nephew.



The other most common type of SMB hack is the kind that offers the player a bunch of new levels, usually extremely difficult ones that are pitched at the Super Mario expert. That's why I tried SMB for Hardplayer. I am a hardplayer. I play hard, and I play hard.


I'm lying, I don't play hard. I'm the gaming equivalent of a microwaved marshmallow, and I haven't been good at SMB since I was seven years old. Still, SMB for Hardplayer seems like it has a good balance between increased challenge and demanding that the player replace their entire nervous system with cutting-edge cybernetic upgrades, and I had some fun trying out a few of the stages. I didn't play through every level - this article would have taken many months if I'd played every single stage of all these hacks - but what I did play was pretty good.


I stopped playing this one here, where I attempted to jump over this pit only for Mario to smash into a previously invisible block, causing him to fall to his death. From out of the block that killed me, a one-up mushroom appeared. That's irony, that is.



Luigi is often given a chance to shine in these hacks, presumably because it's easy to alter Mario's sprite into a leaner, greener form. Here he is in Crazy Luigi.


Well then the title of this hack is grossly misleading, isn't it? The craziest thing about this hack is Luigi's proportions when he's in non-super form. His head doesn't change size, leaving his giant noggin balanced on a tennis ball of a body. Eating a mysterious fungus that can transform your physical body is going to affect each individual differently, I suppose.


That actual hack is a nicely composed set of new and fiendishly difficult levels, but that's of minor importance when compared to the fact that the springboards have been replaced by squishy Toads. It's nice to see Toad getting more involved in the grunt work of saving Princess Peach, and because SMB doesn't have any synthesised voice clips you can crush Toad beneath your boots without having to hear the godawful noises he makes in more recent Mario games.



Ah yes, nothing says "gothic" like pastel blues and pinks. An extremely basic hack, this one replaces Mario with Eric Draven from The Crow, changes the Piranha Plants to befanged monsters that'd fit right in to Soft and Cuddly and gives the player one linear underwater stage to traverse, clearly based on the famous scene in The Crow where the avenging undead vigilante swims through the ruins of a lost civilisation.



In this hack, Mario is bald. That's it. He still has his trademark moustache, which is why it isn't called Super Alopecia Bros.
This hack takes place in the same underwater stage as Gothic Mario Bros, and there are an awful lot of SMB hacks out there that take place in this very same stage. I don't know whether this is because one person was cranking out all these low-effort SMB modifications and they just used the same level every time or it it's a "Minus World" style area that appears as a consequence of hacking the game, but I do know one thing - make sure you take the bottom path when you get the choice because otherwise you get stuck in a dead end and have to wait for the time to run out before you can lose a life.



I think that title is supposed to be sarcastic. "Who is our hero? An overweight plumber who gets his strength from mushrooms. Great."


Far from the peaceful greenery of the Mushroom Kingdom, Great Super Mario is Our Hero takes place in what I'm convinced is the depths of Mario's tortured psyche. The intense mental strain placed upon him by being solely responsible for the safety of a woman who is kidnapped more often than UKIP candidates make embarrassing gaffes has shattered Mario's mind, trapping him in a black void filled with Princess Peach, almost nothing but Princess Peach, where she makes up the very world around Mario in the form of the platforms he must climb across but also as a pack of floating clones that hunt him down relentlessly.


Just as there is no escape from his duty, there is no escape from the overwhelming Princess swarm for Mario apart from the black embrace of death.



I thought Super Fucked Up Bros. was going to be about the Krays or something, but no, it's just a version of SMB where the graphics are messed up. I wouldn't even say they're super fucked up, it's not like the glitches spell out words denying the Holocaust or something.



Luigi takes centre stage once again in Mario Had Died. I like that you can choose between "Luigi Game" and "Luigi Game." Because Mario had died, you see. Whether "Mario Had Died" is a typo and it should be "Mario Has Died" or if Mario died but later recovered from being dead is a mystery I fear I shall never uncover, because I won't be playing all the way through this one.


That's mostly because it's really hard, and completely removed from the usual SMB gameplay: in Mario Had Died, Luigi is transformed from cowardly sidekick to flying, fire-breathing agent of divine punishment. Luigi flaps around in the sky, launching fireballs out of his face in a horizontal manner, making this hack more akin to Gradius than SMB. A stream of hearts constantly drifts out of Luigi's body, which is a sign of his boundless love - you see, Luigi is now an angel. Between the flying, the hearts and the cloud-formed landscape, I cannot imagine any other scenario than Luigi having being imbued with the powers of the heavenly host, becoming an 8-bit Archangel Michael and balancing the compassion and mercy of the Almighty against his desire to burn Goombas to death. It's the Super Mario Bros. sequel no-one saw coming!



Mushroom Nightmare is a fairly standard rearrangement of SMB into a fresh batch of challenging levels, but I'm only mentioning it for the music - a transposed version of the classic Mario theme that has, to my ears at least, an almost Russian feel to it.


If there was a Soviet-era clone of Super Mario Bros. - Super Stalinist Comrades, if you will - then this is what I'd imagine it'd sound like. Familiar, yet strangely grim, heavy with the notion that while you may be enjoying a cartoony adventure now, crushing misery is waiting just past the next pipe.


Mario Is Erotic! the title screen shouts, like a maniac who has spent too long browsing internet "art" sites. This is a lie, of course. Mario possesses all the eroticism of an angle-poise lamp.


The creator of Mario is Erotic seemed to realise this early on in the hack's development, and the game ends one screen in with an impassable wall that blocks the player's path. This is a cruel joke to play on all those desperate and deeply damaged people who wanted to see Mario in erotic situations such as performing a fan dance or, I dunno, eating mushrooms seductively while wearing nothing but a Racoon Suit.



There is a "naked Mario" hack, though. Of course there is. Naked Mario has prominent nipples, but fortunately we can't see, erm, "little Mario." You know, his plumber's mate, his Bullet Bill. His genitals, I mean. I am thankful that they were not included in this hack. I fear it would colour my enjoyment of subsequent Mario games had I previously seen his pixelly penis flapping around every time he took a running jump.
I'm honestly surprised that there aren't more hacks dedicated to filling the world of SMB with sexual content, violence and depravity. There's always that faint human instinct to besmirch that which is innocent and pure, which is why it's so much fun to walk over pristine, freshly-fallen snow or to dress a puppy up like Jason Voorhees, and I has assumed the colourful, carefree world of the Mario games would have fallen prey to this instinct many times. Instead, I mostly got other fictional characters and settings crudely jammed into the Mushroom Kingdom.



Speaking of which, here's Mario Gear: Mushroom Eater. I would have gone with 'Shroom Eater, personally. It fits better with the original title.


So, this is Mario Bros. mixed with Metal Gear, and if you're thinking "those two games would mix about as well as NWA and the Ku Klux Klan" then you would be mostly right. Mario Gear consists of one short stage where Mushroom Snake must get past the enemies, a task made more difficult by the fact he can only jump one pixel high. The real danger comes from the creepy eyes in the background: if you walk past them while they're exposed, you're killed immediately.


It's not much fun, and the mental shock of controlling Mario but not being able to jump is difficult to overcome, but I enjoyed this "SNAAAAKE!" message that's displayed on-screen when you die. Which you will. Because Mario can't jump. Solid Snake can't jump either, but then again he can just shoot the bad guys out of the way.



Atario Bros. has a simple yet extremely effective concept: all the graphics are swapped with ultra-low resolution replacements to recreate the look of an Atari 2600 game. It still plays the same as the original SMB, so you get the 2600 aesthetic without the unfortunate side-effect of having to play an Atari 2600 platformer. I think Atario Bros. looks great, and will no doubt have the developers of retro-inspired indie platformers across the world wishing they'd thought of it first.



It's SMB starring Princess Peach. Peach is such a bright and cheerful character that I'm sure the monochrome title screen is merely an attempt to add some class to this hack and not an indication that the game will be in any way gloomy or morose.


I know, I didn't fool you for a second. You knew as well as I did that there would be nothing jolly in this one, and so it proves. A pipe at the beginning leads to an inescapable room. The only other way to go is right. All that awaits you there is an empty black void: all there is to do is to cast Peach down into this void and grant her the sweet release of death. Super Mario Sunshine it is not.



Bowser vs. Wario is another total conversion of SMB, and a very well-made one at that, with all-new sprites and stages waiting to be conquered by Bowser as he fights against Wario in what I assume is a contest to decide who gets the right to defeat Mario. I can't imagine it being about the Princess, because Wario is only interested in hoarding gold, not women who are helpless in the face of repeated abductions thanks to their sheltered royal upbringing. Wario's lust for gold makes him seem normal when compared to Bowser's raison d'etre, and if you make Wario look normal then you have some serious personal issues.


All that is moot however: I couldn't enjoy Bowser vs. Wario because the fact that Bowser has to collect a power-up before he can breathe fire was constantly rankling me. Bowser shouldn't need a special item for that, breathing fire should be as natural to the Koopa King as, well, breathing.



Finally for today, here's a hack called Vs. Airman. What, Airman from Mega Man 2? Because that does look like Airman's stage.


Yes indeed, this one is about Airman, one of Mega Man's most treacherous foes, a robot designed by Dr. Wily after a strange incident at an aquarium where he saw a manta ray trying to eat a desk fan.


The content of this hack should come as no surprise after that introduction - it's a recreation of Airman's stage from Mega Man 2, only with the Blue Bomber replaced by Super Mario himself... and it works surprisingly well! A lot of effort clearly went into getting this one right, and the two styles are melded so gracefully that you could easily see it as a Mario hack of a Mega Man game rather than the other way around. Enemies can still be jumped on from above to defeat them, but they can drop power-ups like Mega Man enemies, and because Airman's stage is focused around platforming it's a good fit for Mario's jumping skills. There's even a chiptune version of the "Can't Beat Airman / Airman ga Taosenai" song that plays while you're Mega Mario-ing it up. It's a tough stage to get through as Mario - Mega Man has a gun for a hand and he still struggles - but it's not particularly unfair or anything, and once you realise that (as is almost always the case for a Mario level) the best way to progress is to run through it as fast as possible it's an enjoyable experience.


Does Mario hover through the doors to the boss' chamber if you jump as you go through them? You best your ass he does. 10 / 10, best Mario hack ever.


Naturally, the stage ends with the battle against Airman, who fights much as he does in Mega Man 2 - by firing tiny localised tornadoes at the player. I quickly realised that being Super Mario is something of a liability here, because he's too big to fit in the gaps between the tornadoes, but that doesn't really matter because you'll be back to small Mario soon enough. Then it's just a matter of hopping through the waves of wind, waiting for Airman to leap towards you and then bouncing on his head to damage him. Repeat this a few times and Airman will be defeated. Sadly Mario does not get equipped with the Air Shooter, but I had fun regardless.


It left me wanting to play some other Mega Man-themed levels as Mario, something I certainly didn't expect to happen when I first loaded it up, but if there are any out there they will have to wait for volume two of my Super Mario Bros. hack chronicles. I may well actually do a volume two at some point, because this article barely scratches the surface of the vast catalogue of rejigged Mario adventures out there, hacks with titles like Super Catholic Bros. and Rage Mario that I didn't get around to playing for this article. I think this will do for today, though, because if I play through the first stage of Super Mario Bros. again I think I may lose my fucking mind.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Shadowgate. I know I am, having played it a lot as a kid. That's why I'm playing the NES version rather than the original Apple Mac release - because I never managed to finish it when I was a kid, so this article is a chance to answer questions that have haunted me for almost twenty years, questions like "what lies in the depths of the Warlock's lair?" and "is there anything in this game that doesn't kill you if you so much as look at it funny?" The NES version is also in colour. That's not true of the Mac original, which looks like this.


Still, the Mac version doesn't look bad. Hell, if you slapped a filter over it that replaced the white with a sepia tone you could get away with saying the game looks like an illustration in some ancient tome. The NES edition is in glorious 8-bit colour, though, so summon your courage and grip tightly your trusty sword as we step into Castle Shadowgate! Except you can't grip your sword because it's not there; our hero neglected to bring any useful items with him despite facing almost certain death in the lair of a mad wizard. At a push you could argue that he brought a sack of some kind, because he ends up carrying a large amount of items and he surely can't just be shoving them all in his pockets, but there's no sword, no book of magical spells, no packed lunch and carton of Capri-Sun, nothing. The druid Lakmir has tasked our hero with entering the mysterious castle and stopping the Warlock before he can summon the Behemoth and destroy the world, and the least he could have done is given us a greeting card with an inspirational poem inside.


In case you haven't guessed yet, Shadowgate is a point-and-click adventure, with a cursor and everything, which I think makes it the first "proper" point-and-click adventure I've ever covered here at VGJunk. The top-left of the screen shows a first-person view of whatever you're looking at, (usually something that can and will murder you in an instant,) the top-right is your inventory and the bottom of the screen either shows your available commands or a text description of what's going on. To play, simply click on the command you want to use and then click on the thing you want to use that command or item on. In this case I need to OPEN the door and walk through. This is not the most taxing puzzle I have ever faced, admittedly, but things soon take a downward turn.


Beyond the first door is a hallway where the disembodied eyes of the evil Warlock peer into your very soul and give you some vague jabber about how you don't stand a chance, blah blah blah. He calls you a buffoon and everything, the cheeky prick, and while you may at first write this off as the hollow threats of an unimaginative villain, there is some truth to the Warlock's words, because the first time I ever played Shadowgate I couldn't get past the first two rooms. The doors at the end of the hall are locked, and I don't have a key. "It's got to be around here somewhere," a youthful VGJunk thought to himself as he scoured every pixel of these opening screens, unable to progress until he buckled and asked a friend how to proceed, the shame of not getting three screens in outweighed by the need to see the deeper mysteries of Shadowgate. Can you guess where the key is, dear reader? Go on, have a think. In fact, here's a clue.


If you press start or select, the game sometimes gives you a hint about what you're supposed to be doing. I say "sometimes" because it usually says "don't quit now!!" like a desperate tobacco marketer, but in this case it reveals that a skull is involved and hey, there's a skull above that door. I can't USE or HIT the skull, so maybe I can OPEN it?


Cue the Zelda item-get fanfare, because there is the key, nestled behind the skull. The skulls rises "as if by magic," huh? Yeah, the magic of me opening it with my hands. For my next trick, you can see that I have nothing up my sleeves except for this key that I'm going to open the door with.
See, when I was a kid I didn't know about the hint feature, and I wonder if the ICOM placed such an obtuse puzzle right at the start of the game to force the player to learn that the hint feature exists. It seems unlikely to me that you'd figure this out on your own - the skull looks like such an innocuous part of the background, and many a time a friend and I have joked about testing people who've never played Shadowrun before to see if they can find the key. I'm certain there are people out there who will be thinking "well I found the key straight away," but if five years of this site hasn't clued you in, I'm a bit thick.


Beyond the locked door is the world shittiest library, where a single book sits on a plinth sticking out of a drab grey wall. Graphics adventure games engender a kind of kleptomania in the player, where any item that isn't bolted down should be picked up in case it comes in useful later, and Shadowgate is no different. I collected the book, thinking that maybe I would later encounter a demon whose one weakness is bad puns and I could defeat it by throwing the book at it, but doing so caused a pit to open up beneath my feet and I fell to my death.


The end of your mortal existence is easier to take when you're ushered into the twilit world by this particular personification of Death, a grim reaper of unusual cheerfulness who has even gone for the comedy option of popping cherry tomatoes into his eye-sockets to give you a laugh before your soul is stripped from its prison of flesh.
Death is what Shadowgate is most famous for. Constant death, sudden death, deaths resulting from poor decisions or the unknowable whims of the monsters that infest the castle or simply from clicking on the wrong thing. The general rule seems to be that if the action you take isn't the specific thing you need to do to progress, you will die, and because it's not always clear what you're supposed to be doing a lot of these deaths can only be avoided through trial and error.


For example, here is the room that I consider "peak Shadowgate," the room that best sums up the game's desire to cause more deaths than cholera. There are three mirrors that you can smash with a hammer you picked up earlier. One of them has a door behind it. The other two lead to immediate death, either through the shards of flying glass slicing our hero in tagliatelle or, as seen here, by sucking him into outer space via a portal behind the mirror. As far as I know there's no way to tell on your first playthrough which of the mirrors is the non-lethal one, so you just have to experiment, die, and remember why you died for next time.


"The Grim Reaper is super needy!! He gets so lonely without you, but he doesn't understand personal boundaries!!"
The constant dying could get aggravating very quickly, but Shadowgate mitigates that frustration in a couple of ways. For starters, if you die the only penalty is that you're sent back to the previous room.


The other way is that the descriptions of your various deaths are the best part of the game. The puzzles aren't up to much, and ninety-five percent of them are simply figuring out which item to use on which thing with a couple of riddles thrown in, and while it is still satisfying to solve them the real joy of the game comes from the (often surprisingly gory, given it's on a Nintendo console) descriptions of your latest fatal fuck-up. Take, for example, the screenshot above where I tried to LOOK at the lava but accidentally MOVEd into it. "Bellowing like a fool" is such a great textual flourish, and everything is written in such an over-the-top, hyper-dramatic way that it's impossible not to be charmed by it. I think a lot of it's down to Shadowgate's steadfast commitment to the double exclamation mark, and everything has such a breathlessly excited air to it that it's like being a kid again and listening to a friend tell you about the super awesome horror movie they saw last night without their parents' permission, it was like, totally gross and a dude got instantly fried!!


There's one death that's not so much fun, and that's when you fall foul of Shadowgate's built-in time limit. Our hero must have a flaming torch lit at all times, collecting spares as he travels through the castle, and they gradually burn out as you explore. If you let your torch run out completely then you stumble around, trip over and break your neck. If I wanted to play as a character who's a bumbling, clumsy idiot with poor control of his own body then I'd go back to playing as Accrington Stanley on FIFA 15, thanks. The torch time-limit doesn't even effect the game in any meaningful way, either, because there are plenty of extra torches just sitting around in wall sconces where any light-fingered adventurer can grab them and you're unlikely to forget to light a fresh one because a strange and wonky piece of music plays when you're about to be plunged into the lethal darkness. It's pointless busy work, essentially, especially if you've played the game a few times and you can get through the early stages briskly.


It's been a long time since I played Shadowgate, and the pervasive air of imminent doom did occasionally play on my mind. Here, for instance, are two bridges. One of them is a sturdy stone construction, which the other one looks like it was built by a drunken dad who decides he's going to make a ladder for his kid's treehouse, half a bottle of breakfast scotch be damned. "Nice try, Shadowgate," I thought to myself as pondered my choice of paths, "but your attempt to trick me into taking the stone bridge will not work. I'm on to you!" With this this notion in my mind and a warm glow of pleasure at outsmarting ICOM suffusing my cheeks, I stepped onto the rickety bridge. It collapsed, and I died. Turns out you need to come back later with a magic potion that makes your body lighter, or as the game charmingly puts it:


Thanks for that, Shadowgate. Now I'll have to turn to this box of Tesco bakewell tarts to ease my pain (other brands of bakewell tart are available).


By the way, on the other side of the rickety bridge is a large snake that is transformed into a staff when you use a magic wand on it. A staff of tremendous beauty, in fact. Phwoar, just look at it. I'm getting hot under the collar just being in the same room as this radiant piece of dowelling.


As I said at the start, the key to playing Shadowgate is to pay careful attention to everything. Any slight anomaly in the background art, no matter how minor, might serve a purpose even if using the LOOK command to investigate it doesn't make it clear. In this laboratory, for example, one of the stones in the floor has a metal ring attached to it. If you LOOK at it, the game tells you it's for chaining up animals, but it you USE it a secret compartment is revealed that contains a very important vial of water.


These things are not always so well hidden - the glaringly obvious rock in the wall of this cavern is the most suspicious thing I've seen in a videogame since last time I played Doom and there was a rocket launcher lying out in the open. I HIT it, and there were gems behind it. I eagerly await my honorary membership of the Association of Gemstone Miners.
Speaking of the HIT command, there is also a SELF command. That's right, in Shadowgate you can punch yourself in the face. I am amazed that doing so doesn't kill you.


Paying attention also extends to the items you collect, and if you want a chance at clearing Shadowgate without referring to a guide then I suggest you use the LOOK command on each and every item and make a note of any pertinent facts revealed by doing so. For example, LOOKing at the sceptre I found tells me that it's "made for a King," so when I found this extremely skinny and frankly rude king who would not talk to me, I knew what item to use on him. LOOKing at a coin revealed it had a well drawn on it, so when I found a well that "puzzle" was solved, and so on.
There are a couple of situations where you have to solve some more involved riddles, mostly relating to combining certain items into a weapon that can defeat the Warlock. Oh, and there's this guy.


He is a sphinx, and sphinxes love riddles. Riddles are like catnip to a sphinx. As is catnip, presumably. You have to answer a riddle to get into the next room, the answer to which is one of the items in your possession, which you USE on the sphinx to answer. The answer to this one was not "David Cameron's true and horrifying form" (my first guess) but rather "a broom." I think that means I solved the puzzle by poking the lion-man hybrid with a broom. He's lucky the answer wasn't "a spear."


So that's Shadowgate. Entertaining in its exuberance, not too heavy on actual logic and occasionally frustrating if you forget to examine every little thing that finds its way into your magical bag of holding. I struggled to get past this hellhound because I forgot to examine the WATER I was carrying. It just says WATER - which doesn't sound helpful in getting rid of a hellhound, it's not like spraying a cat that's taking a dump on your lawn - until you LOOK at it and you're told there's a cross on the bottle. From this I deduced it was holy water, which meant I could use it to banish the hellhound back to its infernal realm. It also means that this fantasy kingdom of wizards, dragons and idiot heroes who can't walk across a dark room without dying is at least familiar with Christianity.


This is confirmed when you fight a cyclops by using a sling to throw a stone into its eye, and upon doing so our hero references the biblical tale of David and Goliath. Maybe Christianity in this mystical land is the same as the Christianity of our world, but I'm going to go ahead and believe that they have their own, slightly different version where Goliath was an honest-to-God (pun not intended) giant cyclops monster and Jesus possibly fought a dragon by throwing a magical talisman at it.
As for the cyclops... well, the shot from your sling was only enough to stun it. Unless you want to to recover and terrorise you once more, you'd better finish it off by running it through with your sword while it's defenceless!


Yeah, hero of Shadowgate, what did you expect? Your actions have consequences, you know. That cyclops probably had a family, hopes and dreams. You have a SPEAK command right there, but you didn't even try to use it, did you? You went straight for the weaponry. Typical bloody adventurer.
Actually, I don't know why the SPEAK command is even there. I don't think you even have to use it once to finish the game. A subtle commentary on the futility of diplomacy? Or just the hero being such an idiot he can barely talk? No, wait, I have a more likely third option - given that everything else is trying to kill him and magic saturates the very atmosphere of Castle Shadowgate, he's probably worried that an innocuous word like "door" or "hello" will turn out to be a secret incantation that turns him inside out or something.


Before I head to the final confrontation, here are a few more of my favourite Shadowgate moments. In this comical tableaux, I forgot that the cursor defaults to MOVE, so rather than LOOKing at this window the hero jumped out of it for absolutely no reason and died. No warning, no hesitation, just "well, I've had enough of this shit. Goodbye!" It was definitely my favourite death in the game.


Our hero the pervert, ladies and gentlemen. C'mon, man, help her out. She'll probably be so grateful that she'll give you that pickaxe blade, it's sure to come in useful later.


Never mind, she was a werewolf, employing the usual werewolf hunting tactic of pretending to be a damsel in distress. Well, it beats roaming through the forest beneath the light of a full moon, I suppose. No need to be picking pine needles out of your fur afterwards, no angry woodsmen throwing the family silverware at you, if you bring some magazines to read while you wait it's the perfect plan. I hear the latest issue of Lycanthropy Monthly has a good article about how spandex underwear can help prevent embarrassment when you revert to your human form.


Singing "shoot that silver arrow through my heaa-aart!" after dispatching the werewolf is probably grounds for my expulsion from the Adventurer's Guild.


You know what they say, if something looks too good to be true then it probably is, but given everything else I've seen in this castle I didn't think it was too far beyond the realms of possibility that a leprechaun really did leave his pot of gold on the castle battlements. It was not death but rather the sense of shame that I fell for such an obvious trap that was my punishment as the floor well away. Considering most of the game takes place either indoors or far beneath the ground, I seem to be suffering a lot of deaths by falling.


Do you really consider pockets a "frivolous adornment," Mr. Shadowgate Hero? What are you, Amish? Considering you're carrying more miscellaneous tat than a whole city-centre's worth of charity shops, I should think you'd be terribly disappointed with this cloaks lack of pockets.


Between the staff, the captive were-woman and this unbelievably beautiful horn, Shadowgate seems to be casting our hero as a hyper-sensitive Romantic aesthete, barely able to function in the real word as the heart-rending beauty of everyday objects overwhelms him. It makes a nice change from grizzled, taciturn military men, although this side of his character would have more impact if he was deeply moved by items that didn't look like crap.


Okay, it's time to wrap this up. Far below the castle, our hero finds a giant door shaped like a skull with laser-beam eyes, locked by an intricate mechanism. I get the feeling I'm on the right path to find the Warlock. The only people who have giant skull doors are evil magicians and James Bond-style supervillains. Actually, if it wasn't for the fact that our hero started the game with no gadgets more advanced that "a stick with fire on the end" I could make the case that Shadowgate is the fantasy equivalent of a Bond story, a lone hero sneaking into an enemy fortress to stop a megalomanaical evildoer from taking over the world. The big difference is that James Bond would have had more quips on hand had he happened across a woman in chains.


Our hero finally enters the Warlock's inner lair, but it's too late - the Behemoth has already been summoned! "The beast is indeed incredible!" it says. Yeah - incredibly adorable! Look at that big sleepyhead, all pink and dribbly and bleary-eyed. The Behemoth does not look too impressed at having its ancient slumber disturbed, so I feel we have some common ground. Still, we can't let the Warlock take over, so we'd better banish them. That's accomplished by bolting together various items you've collected along the way, including the staff and an orb, which somehow turns it into a "living entity" but still remains a staff. That sounds like a pretty terrible form to be alive in. You wouldn't be able to do anything without a wizard's sweaty and no doubt terribly unhygienic hands all over you. Anyway, once you've assembled the magical Staff of Ages, you can USE it on the Behemoth to send it back to the depths.


As it falls, the Behemoth drags the Warlock down with it. Two birds with one stone, nice. I'm glad that we didn't have to kill the Behemoth, I felt sort of sorry for it. I don't think it really wanted anything to do with the events it was rudely dragged into, so it's nice that it can return to whatever dimension of untold horror that spawned it. It won't be so much fun for the Warlock, but then booby-trapping that ledge with a sack of gold was such a dick move I can feel no sympathy for him.


Shadowgate draws to an end, a brief text epilogue is displayed and our hero is granted the throne of a small kingdom and a princess' hand in marriage. The princess is described as "fair" so I'm sure our hero will be paralysed by her radiant beauty. That'll make the wedding night awkward.
I can wholeheartedly recommend that you play Shadowgate, so long as you're not looking for an adventure game that's all about taxing your brain with logical puzzles. If you enjoy ridiculous, overblown descriptions of things like stabbing a werewolf, you'll definitely have a good time, and there's still enough thought required for it to work as an adventure game. I know I enjoyed it, and it's nice to have finally finished Shadowgate after lo, these many years. What will I take away from the experience? Well, I'll have the main musical theme stuck in my head for weeks, but most importantly I have learned to be very careful when looking through windows lest I accidentally jump to my death.

Specifically, a day in the life of Sir Clive Sinclair: inventor, Knight Bachelor of the British Empire and probably the most unlikely non-fictional protagonist of a game I've played since former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in Gonbee no I'm Sorry. There's Clive of the title screen, riding in his famed - famed for being a colossal flop, mostly - futuristic electric bicycle, the Sinclair C5. Sir Clive's company, Sinclair Research, was behind the creation of the very machine on which A Day in the Life appears, and without the mighty ZX Spectrum I would have been unable to play such incredible games as Soft and Cuddly and Demonslair. For this Sir Clive has my eternal gratitude, gratitude that is only partly sarcastic, and I will do my very best to guide him through this adventure.


The day begins, as days so often do, with getting out of bed. Clive must travel to Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood, but there are many obstacles standing between him and a gentle sword-tap on the shoulder from Lizzy 2.


Obstacles such as a roaming television set with an expression of pure malice displayed across its screen, a weird cat-dog hybrid guarding the front door and whatever the hell that thing in the attic is supposed to be. The previous bit of text mentioned a bug, but that's not just some common-or-garden insect, is it? Perhaps it's one of Sir Clive's failed experiments, condemned to a lifetime in the attic because Clive cannot bring himself to destroy that which he has wrought.
That's Sir Clive on the bed, by the way. He's depicted as a floating head, which makes sense to me. The head is, after all, the window to the soul. That's why potential actors give out headshots, why the great and good are immortalised in marble busts, why traitor's heads are impaled on spikes to cow those who would oppose your rule.
A Day in the Life is made up of several one-screen areas, and in each of them with goal is the same: guide Sir Clive's head up, down, left and right to collect an item or two before leaving the area. In this first screen, Clive has to get dressed by picking up his suit, and then get the front door key before leaving. The front door key is in the attic, presumably hidden up there by the bug-monster in order to facilitate a later escape attempt.


It all sounds very straightforward, but as this GIF shows things are complicated by the enemies flying around at high speed, pinning Clive in his bedroom until the precise moment that the monsters' paths align in such a way that he can nip between them as quickly as possible. Does Clive die at the slightest contact with any enemy in the game? Of course he does, this is on the ZX Spectrum, a computer too rugged and manly for things like health bars and fairness.


Screen two, and Clive's hungry because he dashed out of the house without eating breakfast. That means before he can catch the train to London, he must nip into the two shops and grab some sustenance, all while avoiding the clutches of of the roaming park warden and the bloodthirsty gangs of beach balls that loiter outside the shop like delinquent teenager. The beach balls have a evolved a crude form of speech, modifying the flow of air through their valves until they can produce a crude approximation of a spotty thirteen-year-old saying "buy a packet of fags for us, mate".


Nipping into the shops - or through any gap in the games labyrinth of corridors and doorways - would be much easier if it wasn't for A Day in the Life demanding a level of precision usually only required by brain surgeons or amoeba tattooists. This is illustrated by the picture above. In the left-hand image, Clive will not fit through the doorway if he moves downwards. In the right-hand image, he will. There is only one pixel's worth of difference between the two. The term "pixel perfect" gets thrown around a lot (not least by me) to describe retro games' tendency to require extreme accuracy, but in this case one pixel is often literally all that separates life from death. I would say that this lack of leeway in your movements is A Day in the Life's most unpleasant and frustrating flaw. It would have been the game's brutally punishing difficulty, but I don't think that's an error and the game is supposed to be this hard.


Now Clive is at the train station, and I get the feeling that he's is being portrayed as a heroic outsider, and man above the ordinary whose goals are hampered by those who do not understand his specialness. The killer heads of the railways staff are representations of the Establishment, who want to bring Clive down because they are mentally crippled by jealousy or a lack of understanding of his great works, while the tiny, faceless commuters symbolise the ignorant masses - powerless to hurt Sir Clive, but forever getting is his way as they bumble aimlessly through life. All mythic figures must struggle against these things, rise above the bitterness and narrow-minded outlook of those not possessed of such singular talents, and Clive is no different. Okay, a little different. Most mythic heroes did not fail in their goal because they spent so long avoiding ticket inspectors that they missed their train and had to wait for the next one.


Okay, now you're just making things more difficult for yourself, Clive. Without the cutting-edge aesthetic stylings and efficient yet powerful propulsion system of the Sinclair C5 at your command, getting off the train just to buy a copy of the Financial Times is madness!


It seems especially ill-considered to get off the train when the station you're at is on fire, but concerns as minor as an agonising death through immolation are no hurdle to Sir Clive Sinclair, action hero and unfortunate hairstyle owner!


Here we are in London town. It's been a while since I visited my nation's fair capital, but this is pretty much how I remember it looking - the "Go To Jail" illustration from Monopoly patrolling the pristine white streets, the fine dining experience of Carlo's restaurant, the novel use of housebricks as a roofing material. "It'll never work," they said, "the housebricks are too heavy to use in place of tiles," and they were right. Many innocents were killed, and in their rage we blamed the Three Little Pigs for misleading us about the structural integrity of an all-brick building. Yes, the city of London has a fascinating and storied history, but none of that is of interest to Clive. He needs to take the Underground to his next destination, but before that he's got some time to kill. This means you, the player, have to visit the pub, the bank and Carlo's before you can move on. Naturally, I chose to go to the pub first.


Hey, it's always a party when Sir Clive "the Jive" Sinclair is around.


That's not a party. It looks like an alcoholic Morris Dance, the depressing men with bells tied to their legs replaced by pints of Guinness. Still, the glowing pint of beer on the bar is enough of a motivation for Clive weave his way through this strange whirligig of fatal-to-the-touch booze. Not even the floating head with the Mao Tse-tung haircut - possibly the landlord, possibly a damned soul trapped in his own version of Tantalus' punishment where the booze is forever just too fast for him to catch - can stop him.
Once Clive has quenched his thirst, I should probably get some food down him to soak up the alcohol, so on to Carlo's it is.


Things are no less dangerous in the restaurant. I don't want to tell you how to run your business, Carlo, but having three waiters for one table seems like an unnecessary overspend on staff. Also, your roast chicken main is both mobile and deadly and a lone Space Invader has become terribly lost and is loitering around the wine cellar. On the plus side, the starter was good and at least I know the chicken was definitely fresh, so overall five out of ten.
The wine cellar is where I need to go, because it turns out Clive only came in here for the wine and there's none in the restaurant. Bear in mind that Clive has had a lot to drink, it may help to explain some of his later actions.


Are you threatening me, A Day in the Life? Because this feels like a threat. It's also making me ponder the philosophical implications of free will in a universe governed by quantum forces. Maybe I truly didn't have any choice about coming down here, and the fact that I'm writing about this particular game at this particular moment is simply a result of happenstance, a vast number of particle interactions leading me inexorably to this moment... but if that's the case, then morality, logic and any decisions I make are ultimately meaningless. That's getting a bit deep for a thirty-year-old novelty game.


Something that isn't deep is A Day in the Life's gameplay. It's essentially Pac-Man, but without the carefully balanced structure and ability to turn on your opponents that made Pac-Man so compelling.  It mostly revolves around waiting around for a chance to move as the enemies blither about randomly, but you can't wait for too long or you'll run out of time. Combine that with the difficulty of moving Clive's head through the gaps without getting stuck and you end up with a game with the major defining feature of being sort of annoying.


Then Clive completely loses the plot and robs a bank. There's no cashier at the window, you see, so he decides his life is now a sequel to Falling Down. If the Queen hears about this you'll lose your knighthood for sure, Clive. This is not behaviour befitting a British citizen. A true British citizen would have waited around for a cashier to arrive, maybe tutted under their breath a few times, and then gone home and complained to their partner about it.


With those three tasks completed - those three tasks being drinking beer, drinking wine and robbing a bank - Clive can head into the London Underground and catch the tube to Buckingham Palace. Transport for London are vehemently opposed to Clive using their service, and they have drafted in extra staff to capture Clive before he can board the train, but he is a wily foe and has soon slipped out of their reach and will eventually reach the surface world, where the powers of the tube staff hold no dominion.


I find that most tube stations are quite nasty. Indeed, any structure designed around transporting humans from place to place is generally quite nasty. Tube stations, bus stations, multi-storey car parks - unless you like sitting on extremely uncomfortable benches or have an unbridled affection for the scent of piss, they're all nasty.


This one isn't even so bad! It looks clean, anyway. Admittedly death does lurk around every corner but again, that's hardly outside the norm for a public transport station.


It is not often that I see a game apologise directly to the player for how shitty it is, but there you have it. I'm oddly charmed by this message - it kinda feels like the game's author is genuinely sorry for putting you through this - and that feeling carries over to the rest of the game. It isn't a good game, by any stretch, and this is not a genre short of other, better entries, but there's something rather winning about the atmosphere of A Day in the Life, a joviality behind the whole thing that mostly comes through via these between-stage messages. It feels aware of its own stupidity, that's the thing.


Again, this tube station isn't even that nasty either in grottiness or challenge, although that "burger" in the fast food kiosk sets a new record for the worst-looking item of food I have sever seen in a computer game.



This is central London, apparently, and again there are three places to visit. First, off to the barbers to make Clive presentable - and to give him some time to sober up - before he meets the Queen.


The barber appears to be Clive's twin brother. A sense of resentment at the success of his famous, knighted, millionaire sibling may be the reason that he goes hog wild on Clive's 'do and cuts all of our hero's hair off.


In a touch that I thought was pretty neat, Clive's sprite even changes to reflect his new baldness. I say "new" baldness, he hardly had a lush thatch before his trip to the barbers.
Unable to face the shame of attending an audience with Her Highness looking like a hard-boiled egg, Clive resolves to get his hair back. The screenshot above might imply that he does this by attending a Satanic ritual, where by the flickering light of a blood-red candle he beseeches the Lord Satan to grant him virility, body and bounce whilst vials of strange unguents bubble around him, but according to the sign outside this is supposed to be a chemists. I mean, there's nothing to say that a pharmacist can't believe in both evidence-based and rigorously-tested medicines and the infernal power of Lucifer, but I think this is just meant to be a branch of Boots or something. I have no idea about the candles. Maybe there's a power cut.


Hair restored thanks to the, erm, hair restorer, Clive need only collect some shoes from this department store. He doesn't even pay for them. Why did you even rob that bank, Clive? Was it just for the rush, so that you could feel alive even if it was only for a fleeting moment? You can also make Clive hide by moving him into the racks of clothes, which brought back some fond memories of me and my brothers annoying my mother on trips to British Home Stores.
The most interesting thing about this screen, however, is that it's viewed from a side-on perspective and it plays that way, too. Usually you can move Clive in whatever direction you like, but here you can only travel upwards by pressing "up" when you're at the bottom of a staircase. I went back to check, and it's the same on the first screen, too - I didn't realise that these altered rules applied in Clive's house, because I just assumed the controls were bad, but now I know better.


The end is in sight now, with only a contingent of the Queen's Guard standing between Clive and Buckingham Palace. Don't call them Beefeaters, they hate that. Beefeaters are a separate group who guard the Tower of London, perform raven maintenance and dress in a uniform that is somehow even more ridiculous than that of the Queen's Guard.
This screen doesn't say much for the for the Queen's Guard's queen-guarding capabilities, because it's probably the easiest screen in the game. Maybe I'd finally become accustomed to A Day in the Life's mechanics, but I managed to slip through on my first attempt. You might have thought that Clive would have had an invitation or a Royal Summons or something and he could have entered the palace without all this fuss, but no such luck. I'm going to assume Clive left it in the bar.


The final screen is something of a disappointment, because you don't get to see Elizabeth the Second herself. She's away training corgis to chase peasants or whatever it is she gets up to in her spare time, so the actual knighting duties are carried out by a sword that hovers up and down behind a curtain. It's a self-service knighting booth, then, and once you've entered the booth - after first collecting a bow tie, because Clive forgot to bring his - the game is over. An extremely bleepy version of "Land of Hope and Glory" plays, you're given the chance to input your name on the high score table and that's it, back to the title screen for another tilt at this madcap adventure.


With it's fiddly controls, basic gameplay and high (yet also uneven) difficulty level, A Day in the Life isn't a good game and you'll get little enjoyment out of controlling Clive... but there's also something endearing about the experience. Perhaps it's the sheer daftness of the concept, one that reminds us of the "anything goes" attitude of computer game developers in the mid-Eighties. It's difficult to imagine a similarly-themed game being made today: a mobile game where you control Angela Lansbury as she parkours her way across the rooftops of London in order to reach the palace and be made a Dame? It's possible, I suppose, but sadly unlikely. A Day in the Life fits the Spectrum to a tee because it's weird, very British and not that much fun to play nowadays, so as a heartfelt tribute to Sir Clive Sinclair it could not be more appropriate.

Ryu is a Karate Man. He is a man who does karate. Okay, so "does karate" much be selling his dedication to the way of the empty hand a little short, because Ryu has dedicated his entire life to the singular goal of being the best at karate, but that's really all there is to him. There's some vague stuff about honour and compassion in there too, and with this fascinating and nuanced inner life it's easy to see why Ryu became not only the most famous member of the Street Fighter universe but also one of Capcom's main mascots.
As well-travelled as David Attenborough but considerably more likely to punch someone into unconsciousness, Ryu wanders the world searching for opportunities to hone his martial arts skills. Every aspect of his life is focussed towards this end. He lives a simple life with no fixed abode, carrying his meagre possessions in a duffel bag, and it's inconceivable to think that he doesn't fill that same duffel bag with sand and use it as a punchbag every twenty minutes or so. He wears his tattered karate gi at all times, so people always know what he's about, and he always goes barefoot just in case it all kicks off and he doesn't have time to remove his shoes before the violence begins. His dedication to his art is unmatched, and it is for this reason - as well as some other presumed reasons regarding his lack of personal hygiene - that he only has one close friend: fellow Karate Man Ken Masters, his childhood training partner.
One thing that prevents Ryu from being the dullest of all Street Fighter characters is his constant struggle against the Satsui no Hadou, a dark force that threatens to overwhelm him, turning him from a man who desires nothing but karate into a man who desires nothing but karate with the added bonus of someone being killed at the end. Thus far Ryu has managed to contain this terrifying power, but for how long? I wouldn't want to second-guess Capcom, but I'm going to say "until they stop making Street Fighter games," because they can't have Evil Ryu running around the whole time. It'd rather take the edge off Akuma being such a special snowflake.
Ryu's special moves include being able to channel his spiritual essence into a ball of fire - a "fireball," if you will - that he can launch from his hands, and a jumping uppercut. I know that makes the jumping uppercut seem much less impressive by comparison, but trust me, it's pretty good.



After Ryu, Ken is the world's second-best Karate Man. Okay, he's probably behind Akuma too, but third place isn't so bad. Oh, and then there's Gouken, Ryu and Ken's master who turned up in Street Fighter IV having gotten over his unfortunate case of being dead. Ken's really slipping down the rankings here, so let's just say he's probably in the top ten Karate Men in the world.
Though they grew up and learned karate together, Ken is as different from Ryu as can be: while Ryu is serious and focussed, Ken is a carefree and brash sort who lives his life to a level of max-ness that the soft drinks advertisers of the 1990s could only dream of. His demeanour is probably down in part to being extremely wealthy, although not wealthy enough afford a hair stylist who can match the colours of his hair and his eyebrows.
In a game series where it often seems that the only thing that changes between games are the locations in which the fighters beat each other up, Ken is one of the few characters to have undergone any noticeable character development.As the games progressed, he met his wife and had a son, leading to him mellowing somewhat as he aged. He hasn't mellowed enough to stop using karate on people, but when you consider that his peers are still engaged in the same old death-feuds and tumultuous spiritual battles he's a practically at home with his pipe and slippers by comparison.
Ken's special moves are mostly the same as Ryu, including the spinning Hurricane Kick they both share, a move that treats the laws of aerodynamics with the same contempt that Starbucks shows towards tax laws. The other difference is that Ken has so thoroughly mastered the jumping uppercut that his hand sets on fire while he's doing it, marking one of the very few times you'd want your hand to be on fire.



She's fast, nimble and beautiful like almost all fighting game characters, but Chun-Li defies that classification because she's the first fighter that ever fell into it. A young kung-fu master from China, Chun-Li is a kind woman with a strong sense of justice and even stronger thighs, thighs that could crush a car's engine block and which have been the subject of more breathless nerd paeans than Firefly and Sherlock combined. It is no surprise, then, that Chun-Li is a master of kicking things.
Chun-Li is motivated by her desire to see M. Bison, the evil dictator who killed her father, brought to justice. To this end she joined the police force and eventually became a member of Interpol, who have some pretty relaxed rules regarding their officers having a personal interest in the cases they work. You might think that having Chun-Li investigate her father's murderer would lead to worries about such an emotional involvement clouding her judgement and hampering the investigative process, but are you going to tell her that she's off the case? She could kick you in fifty different places before you managed to say "you're too close to this one, officer." The canon of the games does not definitively say that Chun-Li rules Interpol through fear, but the possibility is there if you're willing to read a little deeper.
One aspect of Chun-Li's design that has baffled fans over the years are the big spiked bracelets that she wears. The rest of her outfit is both elegant and practical - you need plenty of freedom of hip movement when you do that much kicking - but the spiked bracelets stand out as being a little incongruous. As an aid to hand-to-hand combat they seem like they'd be more of a hindrance than an asset, so we are left to assume that while Chun-Li may have grown out of her youthful black metal phase, there are some aspects of that period in her life that she cannot bear to part with.
Chun-Li's special moves revolve, as you might expect, around kicking. Sometimes just doing loads of kicks really fast, sometimes spinning-upside through the air in a manner similar to no earthly bird, no matter what the name of the move might suggest. Later, she learned to throw fireballs, because it was the hot new thing all the cool kids were doing.



Zangief is a wrestler, but not just any wrestler: he is the Red Cyclone, pride of Mother Russia / the USSR (depending on the availability of Communism at the time)! He fights to promote the glory of his homeland, in the way only a man wearing naught but a pair of budgie-smugglers and chest hair like a doormat can. Unfortunately this means that poor Zangief is often exploited for political ends, but this also means that in the Street Fighter universe Zangief has cossack-danced with a world leader and frankly if that doesn't prove that videogames are better than real life then nothing will. Hopefully Zangief's storyline in Street Fighter V will see him taking Vladimir Putin to task over his terrible leadership.
Zangief is a big lad, to put it mildly, and he's extremely proud of his muscular body. It's a body that's covered in scars he received while practising his wrestling moves on Siberian bears. These scars tell us little about his success rate in this endeavour: while getting ripped up by bears suggests that he's not great at it, the fact that he isn't dead provides a strong case for the opposite conclusion. I think a lot of these bear fights probably end in draws.
Zangief is unusual for a Russian character conceived in the early Nineties in that he doesn't conform to many of the prevailing stereotypes of the time. He isn't evil, he isn't obsessed with the expansion of Communist influence and he isn't a raging alcoholic, because his body is an extremely large temple, a veritable Angkor Wat of muscle. He's often portrayed as being, if not stupid, then a little naive, and in a way he's a weirdly sweet character.
Zangief's main special move is the spinning piledriver, where he picks up his opponent, stuffs their face right up against his crotch and then sits on them from a great height. For a long time this was the most damaging move in the Street Fighter series, and it is difficult to imagine something worse. His other signature attack is the spinning lariat, which Zangief totally stole from Mike Haggar, the mighty Mayor of Justice, furthering the theory that everyone wants to be Mike Haggar.



The US Air Force projects many qualities. Pride. Military superiority. Absolutely ridiculous haircuts that look like an accident involving a hay bale and a chainsaw. Guile has all these qualities, coupled with a tough, no-nonsense attitude to street fighting. Guile is the very model of a military man, clad in fatigues and wearing both his own dog tags and those of his fallen comrade Charlie. His look is completed by his famous hairdo, a towering plateau of blonde verticality that is apparently held in place by special-order Air Force hairspray. That'd be the "Top Gun" line of haircare products, then, and the quantity of hairspray required to hold Guile's 'do aloft must account for at least a third of the yearly US defence budget. Guile also has the Stars and Stripes tattooed on each bicep, so that no matter which hand he punches you with it's got the power of America behind it.
As with so many Street Fighter characters, Guile has a personal vendetta against M. Bison, who killed his buddy Charlie. Charlie taught Guile both how to fight and the importance of a properly mental haircut, so Guile is understandably consumed with rage towards Bison. He tenaciously hunts Bison across the globe, and in a touching display of international cooperation Chun-Li sometimes helps him out, but Bison is a wily sort and he keeps getting away. So Guile waits, ever vigilant, standing ready for the moment at which Shadaloo can be destroyed. You could say he's a Real American Hero, if that wasn't a registered trademark of GI Joe.
Guile is also Ken's brother-in-law, on account of them being married to sisters. This must make for some incredibly odd dinner-table conversation when the families get together for Christmas or the 4th of July (which we can safely assume is Guile's favourite holiday.)
As for special moves, Guile has less than any other World Warrior with a mere two at his disposal. He can create a small sonic boom by, I dunno, moving his arms really fast, I guess? He can do a somersault kick as well, which is perfect for taking out airborne opponents. God help Guile's little girl if she ever tries to jump into her dad's arms without warning him first.



Sumo wrestling is a proud and ancient Japanese tradition, but as an actual form of combat it is somewhat lacking... unless you're famous sumo and Street Fighter star Edmond Honda. Zangief may be all about promoting the virtues of Mother Russia, but Honda cleaves to no concerns so petty as mere nationalism and instead wishes to show the world the pure, radiant glory of sumo wrestling. So do this, he fights all over the world, slapping and slapping and slapping people while wearing a big sarong until people take sumo seriously. He'd probably have a better shot if he was from a game series that features ring-outs, because in Street Fighter you can't push people out of the arena to win and that's a fairly significant part of sumo wrestling. Still, Honda perseveres, ever striving to promote his sport. He wants sumo to be an Olympic event, and it's hard to argue against its inclusion: it could replace synchronised swimming, for starters. In Street Fighter IV, Honda realises that the only way to effect this change is to become a member of the International Olympic Committee himself. Just let that sink in for a moment. In this fighting game where karate masters and villainous overlords do battle, one of the playable characters' sworn goals is to join the International Olympic Committee.
Being a sumo wrestler, E. Honda is fat... or at least he was, in his earlier appearances. As the games have progressed, he has kept his keg-like shape but has become much more muscular until by Street Fighter IV he is downright ripped. His increased buffness has also coincided with his character becoming ever more goofy, falling deeper into "comic relief" category the bigger his muscles became. Of course, it's a well-known truth that living with giant muscles for long enough eventually draws comedy to a person, a fact which explains Arnold Schwarzenegger's career path from high-octane action flicks to Jingle All the Way.
As mentioned above, slapping is a key part of Honda's battle strategy, and boy he can slap both fast and furious. He can also propel himself forward as a kind of living battering ram, slamming into his opponent head-first and absorbing the impact with his powerful neck muscles. His repeated use of the Sumo Headbutt may go some way to explaining his rather hunched posture.



While it would be cruel to describe Indian World Warrior Dhalsim as "the most famous Street Fighter character that no-one likes", data I have personally gathered seems to suggest that Dhalsim is definitely not held in as high regard as his peers. This seems to be down to Dhalsim being a pain in the arse to fight against thanks to exceptional keep-away tactics. Mastery of yoga allows Dhalsim to stretch his limbs to incredible lengths, allowing him to stay far away from his opponent and yet still punch them in the head. Given this advantage Dhalsim should really be an unbeatable adversary, but his frail body means he can't take much damage before passing out. On the plus side, he can breath fire. Originally, Capcom explained that Dhalsim possessed this power because he was always eating extremely hot curries, although this has since been changed to "a blessing from Angi the fire god" because even Japanese games developers eventually realised that extremely crude ethnic stereotypes don't fly any more. Well, not quite as much as they used to, anyway.
Of all the street fighters, Dhalsim is perhaps the most innately "good," his life dedicated to the betterment of himself and others, fighting for what he believes in despite being a pacifist at heart. Hey, you can't spell pacifist without "fist," can you? And if that fist is on the end of a magically enlongating arm, so much the better. Given that he is such a good guy, it is surprising that Dhalsim is malnourished skeleton of a man with blank, dead eyes, who can breathe fire and who wears a strings of children's skulls around his neck. That does not sound like the description of a "good guy," it sounds like a description of the monster that hid in your childhood closet. Fair play to Capcom for subverting the "beauty equals goodness" trope, then. Dhalsim even managed to find a wife and have a kid looking like he does. It is not mentioned whether he was wearing the child-skull necklace during the conception of his son.
Research suggests that Dhalsim's debut in Street Fighter II did not coincide with a statistically meaningful upwards trend in the numbers of boys aged eight to fourteen taking up yoga. Even though most of them would have known, deep down, that yoga cannot grant the powers depicted in Street Fighter II, you have though there'd have been more than a few who'd have given a go on the minuscule off-chance it would eventually allow them to pester their siblings from across the room.
All of Dhalsim's moves are special, in a way - if you have become jaded enough to accept elongating limbs as "not special" then videogames are unlikely to quench your desire for the extremes of the human experience. His other moves involve spitting fire at various distances, although apparently these flames are only an illusion. That doesn't stop them from inflicting agonising burns, mind you.



Picture the scene: a plane crashes in the dense Amazon rainforest of Brazil. A young boy survives, cast deep into the primeval jungle until years later he emerges as Blanka, the feral beast-man! Except he's not all that feral. Rough around the edges to be sure, and personal grooming is not his top priority, but overall he's a decent sort with a love for nature.
Blanka's most famous and most potent attack is his ability to exude electricity from his green-skinned body: according to ancient Street Fighter lore, this skill was taught to him by the electric eels that raised him in the jungle. It must have been a difficult adjustment for young Blanka as he learned the water-breathing skills necessary to live with his new eel family, but the rewards - both his new-found electric gifts and the nurturing love of Mr. and Mrs. Eel - were well worth the struggle. Spending so long with an animal that you take on its unique skills is an intrinsic part of the natural world that Blanka loves so much, of course. I once spent three years living with a family of hedgehogs and it wasn't long before I too had developed a taste for dog food and healthy infestation of lice.
In one of the most touching scenes in videogaming, at the end of Street Fighter II Blanka is reunited with his long-lost mother, who recognises her son thanks to the anklet he's wearing. It is unrealistic to assume that this is some kind of magic anklet that increased in size as her son grew older, bigger and more beast-like and was not irreparably damaged by the intense environment in which Blanka lived, but it's also unrealistic for someone to live in the jungle so long that they turn into an electric man-beast so no-one will judge you if "magic anklet" becomes your explanation for these events.
Blanka's special moves, aside from his famed lightning attack, mostly consist of curling into a ball and rolling at his opponent, proving that while he may have been raised by electric eels he was cared for at least some of the time by aggressive armadillos.



Kicked out of professional boxing for his disgraceful conduct and for accidentally killing an opponent, Balrog used to be known as Mike Bison but his name was changed before Mike Tyson's lawyers could get their paperwork in order. Balrog is a brutal, amoral character whose primary goal is to get rich as possible, having once tasted the glamorous lifestyle that being the heavyweight champion of the world can bring. A formerly wealthy boxer who had some run-ins with the law and found himself penniless after his career faltered? Man, who knows where Capcom get these crazy plotlines from. With few talents beyond punching things extremely hard - according to some sources Balrog once killed Dhalsim's pet elephant with a single blow, just in case you didn't realise that he's evil - he turned to a life of crime, becoming one of M. Bison's top Shadaloo lieutenants. This is despite Balrog being utterly treacherous, willing to betray his employer at the first sign of personal gain, and possessing a... limited skill set, shall we say. Applications for the job of Merciless Drug Cartel / World Domination Organisation Enforcer must have been fairly sparse.
Balrog may be a dirty boxer, but he's not so dirty that he'll resort to kicking people. All of his moves are punches, with the occasional head-butt mixed in for a bit of flavour. This could have severely limited Balrog's combat options, but he makes up for it in raw power. This may be why he wears his boxing gloves at all times, in order to give his opponents the tiniest sliver of a sporting chance. He may also just be very stupid, a much more likely explanation when considered alongside the other evidence such as repeatedly betraying the powerful ruler of a vast criminal network.
Balrog's special moves are big punches. A big running punch, and a big punch that he launches while standing on the spot. He is not a complex man.



Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that beholder is Vega. He looks around and sees that everything is ugly besides himself, because he is a pure and flawless Adonis. Yes, Vega the ninjitsu matador is a narcissist of the highest degree, a warped individual who believes that beauty is the only worthwhile quality in this world and who longs to destroy anything he judges to be ugly. He's also a psychopath who's bang into murder, working as a Shadaloo assassin presumably for the thrill of ending lives rather than the money. Vega is already rich, being a Spanish nobleman, and he's also a ninja matador. That's something that bears repeating, as it sheds some light on the sadistic depths of Vega's personality - not content with the usual advantages that the matador has over the bull, he learned the shadow arts of the ninja clans so he could truly dominate his foe. This callous contempt for those he deems to be beneath him is at the very core of Vega's character, unless of course he was fighting against ninja bulls, in which case fair play to him.
The only Street Fighter II character to fight using a weapon, Vega attacks with a triple-bladed claw because he gets turned on by the sight of blood like a vampire with some deep-seated psychosexual issues. He also wears a mask to protect his beautiful face. The obvious way for Vega to protect his face would be to stop getting into street fights, but Vega is a deeply conflicted character, his love for stabbing people to death only matched by his love for looking at himself in any nearby reflective surface. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a mirror on the inside of his mask. One of Vega's other prominent features is the large tattoo of a snake that winds around his torso, further proof that you should never trust anyone with a tattoo of a snake. I'm not saying everyone with a snake tattoo is a vicious murderer, but you would be surprised if they were, would you?
As a graceful acrobat, most of Vega's special moves involve aerial assaults and lighting-fast strikes, although one move lets him down in this regard: the Rolling Crystal Flash, which looks like a half-hearted effort for a kid who really doesn't want to be doing gymnastics in this PE lesson.



Extremely powerful, terrifyingly huge, missing fifty percent of his eyes and one hundred percent of his hair, Sagat is Street Fighter II's penultimate boss. This represents something of a backward step for Sagat, as he was the final boss and undisputed street fighting champion in the original game. His demotion was down to his defeat by Ryu at the conclusion Street Fighter, a battle that gave Sagat an intense rivalry with the young Karate Man and a bitchin' scar across his chest.
Sagat fights using Muay Thai, a martial art over which he has attained such a level of mastery that he is know as the Emperor of Muay Thai. When you're declared the "Emperor" of something you know you've made it, but this title does little to satisfy Sagat as he strives endlessly to become the greatest fighter in the world. Yes, he's another one of those characters, and the Street Fighter universe would be a happier place all around if the characters would set more realistic goals for themselves.
Sagat's rivalry with Ryu is a big part of his character, but as the series has progressed, Sagat's feelings on the subject have matured and changed. Where once he wanted to find Ryu and beat him up because he doesn't like him, Sagat now wants to find Ryu and beat him up because he does like him, or at least respects him. Perhaps Sagat has realised that he and Ryu have so much in common: they're both dedicated to honing their chosen martial art, they both refuse to wear shoes, they can both shoot fire out of their hands. Sagat has the edge in the fireball department, being able to shoot them at varying heights and burning either his opponent's chest or their ankles.
Sagat also says "tiger!" a lot. The guy really likes tigers. It's his little quirk. You travel to the small village where Sagat lives and enter his humble house, and all you will see from wall to wall is porcelain tiger ornaments and knick-knacks, cutesy little trinkets with phrases like "go get 'em, tiger!" and "you're the grrreatest!" written on their bases.
As well as his afore-mentioned Tiger Shot fireballs, Sagat's arsenal of special moves also includes the deadly Tiger Uppercut. As Sagat is about seven feet tall you wouldn't think he'd ever need to jump, but he most definitely can and the Tiger Uppercut makes jumping towards Sagat an experience as fraught with the terror of sudden death as storming the beaches of Normandy.



The Street Fighter series has had many antagonists over the years, but none have reached the same "Main Villain" status as M. Bison. A deadly fighter with strange powers who rules the criminal network Shadaloo, M. Bison is a ruthless killer without a shred of kindness or remorse. You kind of have to be like that if you want to get away with calling your criminal organization "Shadaloo."
Like Sagat, M. Bison has gradually become less and less highly regarded in the hierarchy of Street Fighter villains. In his first appearance at the end of Street Fighter II he was presented as a near-unstoppable, nightmarishly powerful fighter, but as time went on and Bison had his arse kicked by various characters he became a regular playable character who was no more menacing than any other.
Bison is still one of the prime movers behind the games' plots, however, always seeking to further his goals and get his hands on Ryu's body. He wants Ryu so he can claim the Satsui no Hadou and become more powerful, although he'd have to come up with a more appropriate name than "Evil M. Bison" if he ever accomplishes this. The Satsui no Hadou would make him less evil, if anything, because Bison is already filled with an evil energy called Psycho Power. Psycho Power allows Bison to fly, perform telekinesis and make flames erupt from his body, and I know what you're thinking: why would you want to replace the super-sweet Psycho Power with the boring old Satsui no Hadou? Well, that's because Bison's body can't handle the Psycho Power. Just as fresh air and exercise will cause my body to disintegrate, so too will Psycho Power eventually overwhelm Bison. To prevent this, Bison made himself a new body. He created it from his own DNA but gave it the form of a teenage girl, as I'm sure we all would if we had access to a cloning machine. This new body is Cammy, but she breaks free of Bison's control before he can inhabit her feminine form. Between this and Bison's "good side" being removed and creating the character Rose, it seems that M. Bison has some gender identity issues.
M. Bison is portrayed as the mastermind behind most of the nefarious schemes in the Street Fighter universe, but there are some hints that maybe he is not as intelligent as he makes out. His plan to capture Ryu has the obvious flaw that Ryu is really good at knocking people out, and Bison's plan to lure Ryu out only succeeds in drawing the attention of Akuma, who promptly and with minimal effort murders Bison. He has managed to cause a great number of the world's greatest warriors to to dedicate their life to seeing him killed, and his hiring policies could use some work: Balrog and Birdie in particular would not be most people's first choice for orchestrating grand master plans. In Seth and his ilk, Shadaloo even creates robots that gain sentience and declare themselves the true leaders, which is the most basic, rookie mistake an evil organization can make. I'm sure Bison would love us to believe that each event happens is cog in his labyrinthine, ineffable plot, but that's hard to believe when said plot involves him dying more than once.
His motives may be unknowable, but the real puzzle of M. Bison is what does the M in M. Bison stand for? Master? Merriweather? Mmmm? Alas, I suspect it will forever remain a mystery. Oh, man, maybe it stands for Mystery!
M. Bison's special moves are unusual in the sense that they wouldn't seem all that special if he wasn't cloaked in Psycho Power while he was using them. His trademark Psycho Crusher is just Bison hurling himself at his opponent, and the Head Stomp is, well, he jumps up and stomps on people's heads. Not much to that one, folks.

There, now you're all up to speed on the core cast of the Street Fighter games. Next time someone asks you about one of these legendary World Warriors, you'll have a wealth of information to impress them with. Via one of the Street Fighter wikis, I mean. Frankly I wouldn't believe a word of what you've read here today.

A Note From VGJunk: as utterly stupid as this article is, it was a lot of fun to write and so I was thinking I might spin this out into a little book or something with a bunch more characters included and whatnot. If that sounds like something you'd like to see, let me know. Also let me know if you think this article was terrible and writing more of it would be a huge mistake. Thanks in advance, your pal, VGJunk.

Videogames set in space: harmless diversions or part of a worldwide government conspiracy to subconciously alter humanity's ideas about a life amongst the stars, a constant feed of stories about deadly alien invasions and interstellar pirates designed to stop people complaining that we aren't living in Lunar City Seven and eating nutri-pills in our astro-kitchenettes? It is clearly that second thing, and if you visit my new site at illuminati-psyops.net/lies/operation_space_hate.html then the evidence there is sure to convince you. Even Konami are in on this sinister scheme, as demonstrated by their 1990 arcade moon-madness-em-up Surprise Attack!

Now that's some classic arcade typography: big, bold and with more gradients than the Tour de France. One look at that logo tells you that you're in for some serious arcade action, and because this is a Konami action game that isn't based on an existing franchise - no Ninja Turtles or Bucky O'Hares here - it's probably going to involve a lone soldier gunning his way through some terrorists. Let's meet those terrorists now!


They call themselves Black Dawn, or possibly their leader's name is Black Dawn. Whatever his name may be, here is the leader of Black Dawn, dressed in an outfit singularly unsuited for space travel. Unless the WWE have decided to draw in viewers by holding the next Wrestlemania on the moon, I think what has happened here is that the terrorist leader is desperate to show off his musclebound physique, but he's also heard that space can be pretty cold so he threw on a cape as a compromise. Everyone still gets to see the gun show but if the merciless vacuum of space gets too chilly he can wrap himself up.
It's interesting that he says Earth will be his in twenty-five hours. Maybe an extra hour will be added to the day in the future, but I can't help but think that the 25-hour ultimatum was a threat that didn't quite go according to plan. "You have twenty-four hours to meet my demands... and to show you I'm serious, you have twenty-five hours! No, wait, that's not right."


Opposing Black Dawn is player character and hero of Surprise Attack, Sergeant John Ryan of the Special Task Force. They call him the Red Thunderbolt, because you see him before you hear him and because he is an avowed follower of Socialist thinking. Or because he wears red, I don't know. His age is given as 32, which makes him an OAP by the standards of Japanese videogames protagonists. It seems that the moon is the one place where high-school students aren't humanity's best hope.


John Ryan's mission is clear - enter the space station and the moon base, take out the Black Dawn agents and disarm the many time bombs they have planted around these facilities. As the screenshot above shows, the Red Thunderbolt is so keen to get his mission started that he is leaping right into the fray. While this may seem like an impressively gung-ho way to assault the enemy forces, don't forget that Surprise Attack takes place in a low-gravity environment so in the scene above Ryan is presumably slowly floating towards the gun-wielding terrorists.


Oh good, he managed to survive his blisteringly stupid approach to covert operations and has made his way to the outside of the space station, where he can begin his one-man mission to eliminate the cosmo-terrorists. This explains the name of the game, then: Surprise Attack sounds like a relatively sedate title for a space adventure - it doesn't even contain words like "laser" or "galaxy" or even "space" - but "surprise attack" is a good description of a single man landing on the outside of a spacecraft and fighting his way through hundreds of soldiers. They'll never see it coming!
Surprise Attack is a run-n-gun game, and in the grand tradition of arcade titles John Ryan is not overburdened with fancy combat techniques. He can walk, he can jump, and he can fire his gun straight forwards. Actually aiming your firearm at the bad guys? A rookie mistake, one that John Ryan is far too much of a grizzled veteran to fall for. You don't reach the age of 32 in the space commando business without learning a thing or two.


To complete each stage, Ryan must find each of the bombs scattered around the area before proceeding to the exit. There are three bombs in the screenshot above, they're the objects with the glowing yellow outlines. Protecting the bombs are the Black Dawn soldiers, a vicious band of killers whose obedience to their master is so absolute that they will follow the same attack patterns that have been drilled into them over and over again, without hesitation or deviation, even if the Red Thunderbolt is calmly avoiding their space-bullets or shooting them in the knees. The bad guy in the red spacesuit on the upper level might think he's safe, but he has reckoned without Ryan's ability to leap up to a higher level of the stage by holding the joystick up while jumping. Even when our hero does jump up there to collect the bomb, it won't effect the evil spaceman's orders or battle strategy: he'll just keep firing at head height, as is the will of Black Dawn. Yes, those bombs are as good as mine already.


Once you've disarmed all the bombs by walking into them, all at remains is to make your way to the Clearan Point of th Missio. It's never hard to find, usually being at the far-right of the stage, but this helpful and very large marker will make sure you can't miss it.


The next stage, and here Ryan is demonstrating one of the two power-ups you can collect. It's called the Mover, a charmingly understated name for a device that covers you in electricity, makes you invincible and lets you fly around the stage, killing enemies just by bumping into them. I would have called it the Super-Powered Airborne Cloaking Electricity Matrix Attack Neutralizer, because people want the sizzle as much as the steak. The other power-up is a simple gun upgrade that changes your weapon from "normal disc" to the more damaging "grenade disc." No, I don't know why they're called "discs" when they are obviously firing bullets.


Now that we're indoors and there's plenty of life-giving oxygen cluttering up the place, we can get our first proper look at John Ryan. He's a typically blonde, blue-eyed all-American hero, and he's shooting all these terrorists with a slightly disturbing smile constantly plastered on his face. Maybe he overdid it on the astro-Valium he used to calm his nerves on the rocketship over here. He also walks with his hand near his face, obstructing most of his vision. Okay, now I get it. I was wrong earlier, the game's called Surprise Attack because Ryan is doing his best to make sure every attack that comes his way is a surprise.


In this stage, the play area is split into two layers, spearated by the glass windows that Ryan can hop between at certain points. Interesting, but not as interesting as the message at the left-hand side of the screen. It's one that will become familiar to you if you spend any amount of time playing Surprise Attack, because every time you collect a bomb this small message saying "U DID IT" floats into view. U DID IT, huh? What a strange way to phrase a message of congratulations for achieving a small portion of your goal. I'm sure it is down to years of reading internet sarcasm that U DID IT does not feel like the most sincere praise I have ever recieved.


And now, a boss. The laser moves up, then fires. The laser moves down, then fires. Not a pattern that will take long to commit to memory, granted, but things are complicated by Ryan only being able to damage the laser while it's open and shooting at him. Luckily it was at this point that I realised the player is invincible while they're performing the big between-level jumps, so as long as you fire and immediately move back to the other level you'll be fine. It's a good thing I figured out this period of invincibility exists, because some of the later stages would have been extremely difficult without exploiting this trick, to the extent that I wonder whether Ryan was always supposed to be invincible during his big jumps or if Konami added it later to give players a chance.


After the boss, there was something that took me completely by surprise: a trivia quiz! Oh man, this is great - I love arcade trivia games, and it's nice to see one that's in English for a change. Hosted by blonde twins who can only be differentiated by their choice of lipstick, possibly seen here during their day off from appearing on Smash TV, the quiz poses a series of space and sci-fi themed questions that you can correctly answer to gain points. Without wanting to brag - because this is not something a grown man can brag about - I found the quiz pretty easy, generally only stumbling on dates because I am terrible at remembering dates. It helps that the questions often include one obviously incorrect answer. Even if you have only the faintest notion of what the Periodic Table even is, you are unlikely to believe that "bananas" is the name for a part of it. My favourite question of all, which I sadly did not get a screenshot of, was "who flew too close to the sun?" One of the possible answers was Eddie Murphy. Ah yes, Eddie Murphy, he flew too close to the blazing sun of Hollywood fame and crashed down to Earth, the starring role in Daddy Day Care inflicted upon him as further punishment for his hubris.


Answer all the questions correctly and the ladies will shower you with kisses. This is terribly cruel on any young nerds who may have played Surprise Attack in their formative years. I'm sorry, kids, but women will not kiss you because you are good at answering space questions. In my experience the opposite is true.


Because we're in space, there's no gravity to keep your feet on the ground (literally) and so in this stage Konami gave Ryan the ability to switch between walking on the normal, boring ground like some common savage, or walking on the ceiling. Oh, what a feeling! The feeling of blood pooling in his brain and causing blackouts, no doubt.


A lack of gravity may account for Ryan's upside-down adventures, but these Black Dawn troops that can stand at a ninety-degree angle to the floor must have something else going on. Magnetic boots, I assume. Just behind complete obedience and a dedication to bloody revolution, it seems that extremely strong ankles are a key feature of any Black Dawn member.


Jumping between the floor and the ceiling is handled in the same way as jumping between the different height levels of other stages and is all very intuitive, but one thing I did struggle wth was crouching while I was on the ceiling. Ducking under enemy fire is an integral part of Surprise Attack's gameplay, and you can even crawl forward while crouched, but doing so while standing upside-down took me a long, long time to master. This is because the past twenty-odd years of playng videogames have deeply engrained within my very soul the idea that you hold down on the joystick to duck. Of course, when you're upside down you have to hold up to crouch, but this simple fact was one that my brain stubbornly refused to accept and I lost many a life to getting shot in the face, all because I kept holding the wrong direction to duck. It's weird, because I recently played Sonic Racing Transformed and whenever I was hit with the attack that reverses your controls, I had no problem making the immediate mental compensations for left and right being swapped, but up and down? I just could not get a handle on it.


Boss number two is the security pod, a hovering dustbin of a machine that is rather more ggressive than the laser cannon, trying its best to crash into our hero with its stubby little body. Again, the key here is to stay on the move, flipping between floor and ceiling when the boss gets close while plinking away at the vulnerable weak-point of its bubble dome.


As we follow John Ryan's ledge-hopping, bomb-collecting adventure, you might be thinking to yourself "this game sure does seem familiar." I understand, I had the same feeling too, and it's because Surprise Attack is Shinobi. It's Shinobi with the ninjitsu exterior scrubbed away and replaced with an outer-space sheen, but the gameplay is so close to Sega's arcade classic that "clone" feels like an accurate word to describe it. It's got the same multi-level jumping, the time-bombs are a stand-in for Shinobi's kidnapped ninja students, there are the same upgrades to your projectile attack - in the early stages of Surprise Attack, the biggest difference is that you don't have a close-range melee attack, which is a shame because the enemies kill you if you touch them. Happily, once you get a ways into Surprise Attack, Konami do shake things up somewhat with gravity flipping and other mechanics, and by the end I gave the game's relationship to Shinobi a mental downgrade from "clone" to "homage."


You know, I think this fan may have a weak point. That's one of the great things about arcade games: their immediacy. There's no time to delicately explain to the player the ins and outs of every situation, and so we're treated to enormous flashing icons and cigarette-paper thin plots that make an episode of He-Man look like Crime and Punishment. As well as the enjoyment of playing games that were often not available to a young VGJunk thanks to their lack of home ports, (as is the case with Surprise Attack,) this brevity and unrelenting pace is one of the reasons I write about more arcade games than any other system.
Surprise Attack is definitely fast-paced. It forces the player to move quickly thanks to the two-minute time limit on each stage, a limit that is certainly manageable but tight enough to stop you from dallying for too long. Plus, you get a grade based on your completion time at the end of each stage and I'd much rather be a Hi-Speed Dude than a Laid-Back Turtle.


This boss is called "Bowler" for some reason that Konami decided not to share with the player. Maybe he's a cricket player in his spare time, in which case it's a good job he doesn't play at Silly Mid Off. It's pretty hard to take him seriously as it is, what with him being all sideways and such.


Back outside in the cold vaccuum of space, John Ryan is attacked by a pair of cartwheeling gymnasts who hurtle towards the player and can only be stopped by a well-placed shot to the head. I mean, getting shot in the face will kill most people, but with these enemies it has to very specifially be a headshot or they'll just keep coming, prancing around like they were somewhere no more dangerous than a school gymnasium and not in space.
I know it's easy to mock the bizarre logic so often found in videogames - it is one of the core principles that drives VGJunk, after all - but the fact that these women have their hair sticking out of their space helmets struck me as so ridiculous that I couldn't take the mature path and let it go unmentioned. Their hair is sticking out of their space helmets! There's no way your suits can have an airtight seal if that's the case, and even if they did then it must be a very painful arrangement. I once got my hair caught in a hand-held electric fan and that was bad enough, god knows how unpleasant having your 'do trapped under your space helmet would feel.


I feel sorry for this Black Dawn member, you know. Not as sorry as I would if he wasn't a terrorist who was trying to kill me, but still: his superiors ordered him to climb all the way out onto the hull of the space station, past the deadly blasts of flame from the rocket engines, where he places a bomb that he has to stand next to until it detonates or the Red Thunderbolt kills him, whichever happens first. The life (and death) of a videogame goon is a brutal one indeed, but at least he gets a space burial, his body drifting through the stars for all eternity. No, you're right, that doesn't seem like much of a reward.


Umm... okay? What do you want me to do about it, tell him a joke? Okay then, here goes. Did you hear about that new military first-person-shooter game? They're calling it The Moon, because it's grey and it has no atmosphere. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Alone, possibly crying to myself.


Now we're on the moon itself, where the danger levels are ramped up by moving obstacles, hazardous conveyor belts that lead to fatal rock crushers and enemies in greater numbers than ever before. The one concession to the player is that Black Dawn soldiers are too stupid to negotiate this chain-link fence, so Ryan has somewhere to hide. Hiding in plain sight, you might say, because this fence is see-through.


In one of Surprise Attack's more comedic moments, I stepped onto this ramp with visions of doing some totally sick skateboarding tricks flashing through my mind. Instead it turned out that this ramp is actually part of an extremely high-speed conveyor belt, and Ryan was hurled upwards to his death. There is no mention of whether he was launched out of the moon's gravitational field and condemned to a slow and lingering death in the depths of space, but I think it's a fair assumption to make.


The largest and most difficult boss by far is the Moon Cruiser, a lunar rover on steroids that rolls back and forth across the surface of the moon, forcing our hero to hide in a hole like a frightened rabbit. You can't stay in the hole forever, and not just because of the time limit: eventually the hole will collapse and you'll be buried alive. Instead you have to time your escape from the hole just right so you have enough time to shoot at the Moon Cruiser while also running away. It was not my most heroic videogaming moment, I grant you, and I struggled to get a clear shot at the weak point because the Moon Cruiser's very soft suspension allows the tyres to ride up and cover the target, but with a large dose of luck I eventually managed to take it down.


The final stages throw everything at the player at once, from more powerful enemies to tricky jumps to moving scenery that can crush the unwary. It all comes together very nicely, too, and one thing for which I can give Surprise Attack great credit is its difficulty curve. So many arcade games start of fairly simple but quickly become punishingly, coin-swallowingly hard, as though an internal switch is flipped from "have fun" to "fuck you" around stage three, but not this one. Surprise Attack not only gradually gets harder but also more complex as you proceed, without ever feeling as cheap or unfair as many of its contemporaries. Most importantly it stays fun - it doesn't have the most original gameplay in the world, but it is quick, responsive and very enjoyable.


One thing that did catch my eye during these last few areas was the introduction of these enemies. My love for all things Xenomorph-related might be making me see connections that aren't there, but these troopers remind me an awful lot of smartgun operator and acid makeover recipient Drake from Aliens. The camo patterns, the white-blonde hair, the hip-level firing stance of his weapon... intentional or not (and don't forget that Surprise Attack was around the same time as Konami's official Aliens game) it was difficult for me to un-see the resemblance.


The penultimate boss is the Pig 10000. There are no pigs involved, it just shoots a laser that then bounces off a series of angled mirrors. Maybe the laser has the power of ten thousand pigs. As bosses go, it's not very interesting. Don't worry, though, another one will be along in a second.


See? Here's Brutus 03, grandson of Brutus 01. I don't know whether Brutus is the name of the pilot or the robot - Brutus would be a good name for a giant robot or the leader of a space-terrorists group - but I do know that the guy in the cockpit is the bloke from the intro so I'm certain that this will be the final battle. The Drake-marine clinging onto the side of Brutus-Bot is mostly there for effect and doesn't complicate the fight any, but my theory that these later parts of Surprise Attack were inspired by Aliens are lent further credence by Brutus' mehcnical claws - those things are taken directly from the Power Loader, and no, painting them green won't fool me.


I didn't even get the boss down to half health before it all became too much for the Black Dawn leader and he had to take a little nap, bless his heart. The pilot having gone to sleepytime dreamland doesn't affect the robot's combat tactics any, and there's much ducking under giant claws to be done, the fight requiring a degree of patience that is lacking from the rest of the game until you manage to land enough blows on the weak point - which is a glowing orb right in the middle of the robot's chest, naturally - to end the fight. Well, I say end: then the top half explodes but the legs make one last effort to see John Ryan dead by charging forwards, with a single accurate shot required to finish them - and Black Dawn - off once and for all.


Contrary to the usual Konami style, Surprise Attack does not end with a huge explosion destroying the enemy stronghold. presumably because even they thought destroying the Earth's moon would be a bit of a downer ending. Instead you're treated to a shot of Ryan staring at the Earth while his commander implies that saving the world from manaical dictators who would unslave the human race is not a "real job." Thanks, boss. I'll remember that next time aliens invade or the President is kidnapped by ninjas and you pick up the Red Thunderbolt hotline.


Would it be churlish of me to say "if you like Shinobi then you'll like Surprise Attack"? Maybe a little, because although the inspiration for Konami's effort is so obvious I'm almost surprised it didn't "inspire" a lawsuit from Sega, as the game goes on Surprise Attack tries it's own thing and succeeds pretty darn well. As a simple, straighforward slice of arcade action there's very little to fault it on - the gameplay is slick, it's challenging but fair and the gravity-flipping adds something interesting. Graphically, I love it, with chunky, colourful sprites that have a lot of character, and I especially like the way John Ryan looks left and right as he walks. It has a trivia quiz minigame, which gets a few extra gold stars from me. If I had to pick some negatives, well, it's obviously about as original as using a fey ukelele cover of a rock song in a TV advert, but I don't think that's a huge mark against it. There's maybe a little too much emphasis on shooting enemies from off-screen, and while the soundtrack is good it's not quite excellent, although that's only an issue because I hold Konami arcade soundtracks to the kind of standard that other people have for Beatles albums or sculptures by Michelangelo. Overall, I would definitely say that Surprise Attack gets the official VGJunk Seal of Approval, and if you do decide to play it then I hope for your sake you get the hang of the upside-down ducking more quickly than I did.

Imagine: Doctor: that's what I'd have to do when I'm ill if it wasn't for the NHS, so three cheers for public healthcare. Ubisoft's Imagine games are a series of around fifty-or-so simulation titles, as long as you're willing to accept the loosest possible definition of the word "simulation," primarily aimed at girls and covering such topics as babies, wedding design and fashion. I'm told that those are things young girls like their videogames to be based around, which came as some surprise to me - when I was a nipper, girls liked playing Sonic the Hedgehog and Zelda. You know, actual games. Funny how times change.
The Imagine games are probably best-known to a certain section of the gaming public thanks to the time IGN gave Imagine: Party Babyz a much higher review score than the wonderful God Hand, this providing the most concrete evidence yet for the total irrelevance of all human endeavour. If Imagine: Doctor turns out to be better than God Hand, I will eat my own hands. That seems incredibly unlikely, however. There's a decent chance that eating my own hands would be better than Imagine: Doctor.


This is the doctor that we'll be imagining throughout the game, our very thoughts and daydreams giving her agency and purpose. Her name is Katie, but you can call her Doctor Katie. Don't be mislead by her supermodel looks and cheerful demeanour - aside from a few unusual quirks, Doctor Katie is a competent and well-liked physician. She's Medically Blonde, if you will, and as Imagine: Doctor begins Doctor Katie is excited for her first day working at her very own practise. I'm excited, too. We're all excited. I can't wait to get in there and start identifying weeping sores and hacking off infected limbs.


The day gets off to an inauspicious start when, before a single patient has even walked through the door, Katie's assistant Helena manages to give herself a paper cut. Oh, Helena, I spent the whole game half-expecting you to take off your glasses and let your hair down, shocking everyone with the revelation that you really are beautiful enough to be prom queen / the popular kid's girlfriend / a semi-successful catalogue model. That never happened, though, or at least as not as far as I saw.
Because she's such a nice person, Doctor Katie restrains herself from shouting "just put a plaster on it, you dope," at Helena, and instead offers her medical expertise to help Helena with this savage wound. Don't worry, Helena, she'll just take the bill out of your wages.


Here's our first experience of hands-on doctoring, and as expected - and as I'm sure you guessed - it takes the form of an incredibly simple bit of touch-screen manipulation. Using the DS' stylus, you grab the cotton wool ball, dip it in that small bowl of taramasalata and then smear it all over the cut on Helena's... hold on, what part of Helena's body is that? I assumed that this paper cut was going to be on her finger, but that does not look like a finger. It looks far too large. Did you manage to give yourself a paper cut on the thigh, Helena? What the hell were you doing in the filing room? C'mon, Helena, get it together. Don't make me regret hiring you before we've even reached lunch on the first day of work.
That brief introduction to the absorbing world of wound disinfection is enough to solve Helena's problems, and with her out of the way Doctor Katie can see to some patients with actual medical issues. First up: a lady who has to go to the toilet a lot.


See? This is how 95% of Imagine: Doctor works: patients come in and explain their symptoms, almost always in the categories of "feeling generally unwell" and "I fell down like a big clumsy oaf and now my leg hurts." You run a few tests via incredibly basic touch-screen mini-"games" and then give them some pills, next patient, repeat.


For example, here we start by taking the patients's temperature by grabbing the thermometer and moving it slightly to the left until it's stuck under the patient's lip in a graphical display of how lips don't work. That's it, congratulations, task accomplished.


Ye Gods, according to the readings on this Fisher-Price My First Thermometer, this woman is on fire! I'm sorry, love, but I think you're beyond my help. Write down this number and then call the fire brigade for help. It's nine, nine, nine. Got that? Good. Now get out of my office before you singe my tongue depressors.


After getting the patient's temperature, Doctor Katie needs their heart rate, and there's only one way to get it - by going through possibly the most tedious task ever included in what you might generously call a videogame! The little pulse dot travels along the screen, and when it reaches the top of a beat - indicated by a red dot and a beeping noise - you tap the button to count it. This takes about thirty seconds. It's amazing how much regret about the direction your life has taken you can pack into thirty seconds. Turns out it's a lot.
Once you've suffered through this digital equivalent of disinterestedly clicking a ball-point pen in and out  for a while, you're given the patient's heart rate and told to write it down. Thankfully, Imagine: Doctor's handwriting detection worked rather well, although I did have a lot of trouble getting it to register the number eight. I can't blame the game for that, though, because I write my eights with a strong leftward slant. It's just a shame that the patients heart rate seemed to end in eight every single bloody time.


This poor lady has gastroenteritis, so Doctor Katie is prescribing her some Bellyden Sir. I think I just realised that's probably supposed to be a pun on "belly dancer" and I wish I hadn't. Maybe they gave it a jokey name to distract from the fact it says "Heavy DIGESTIVE PROBLEM" right there for everyone to see, as if the patient doesn't feel bad enough already.


Once you've filled out the prescription by laboriously dragging the correct number of pills into the appropriate places on a daily chart, all that's left is to sign the prescription to make it legal. This time I signed it as though I were Doctor Katie herself, but any old scribble will be accepted by the game, so if you want to sign your prescriptions Dr. Dumbass or Josef Mengele or simply by drawing an obscene cartoon of a penis, then have at it. Not that I ever did anything so immature, of course.


Aside from illness, the other thing you'll be dealing with is physical injury. I said that Doctor Katie has some quirks, and one of them is that she apparently does not believe the evidence of her own eyes, her faith in medical science being so absolute that she will not make a judgement on an injury or infection before she takes a photograph of it and then cross-references that photograph with her Big Book of Painful Things until she finds a match. In this example, a man comes in and tells Katie he burned his leg. She then photographs the burn and finds a matching picture of a burn before proceeding. She's either extremely thorough or has zero self-confidence.


"Red Blotch"? That a medical term, is it? C'mon, Doctor Katie, get your head in the game!


Maybe a little makeover will give Katie the self-belief she needs, I thought to myself, and so I stopped by to let her chose a new lab coat. Yes, there's a (very minor) dressing-up element to this doctor simulator. I went with the classic white lab coat over the soothing sea-green blouse. It looks the most professional, after all. I can't have her in a blue lab coat, she'd look like she was there to check the gas meter or something. Hey, Ubisoft, there's a free one for you - Imagine: Gas Technician! Take meter readings, repair boilers, say you'll be there at nine a.m. but don't show up until some time around four-thirty, little girls the world over will love it.


I am not a religious man, but I definitely offered up a silent prayer that this monkey scratch was going to play out like the start of Brain Dead and soon Doctor Katie would be slicing through hordes of bloodthirsty zombies with a lawnmower. Sadly, it was not to be and Imagine: Doctor remained as resolutely dull as always. That is a huge problem with this game - if you'll permit me a moment of crudeness, it's boring as fuck. It's the same amoeba-brained set of tasks repeated over and over again, and because the patients are randomly generated it's often the same set of tasks in a row as you get a run of patients all coming in with sprained ankles as though it had suddenly become mandatory for the entire population to wear ten-inch stiletto heels at all times. I mean, I know this is a kid's game and I didn't expect to be telling people they had terminal illnesses or anything, but mixing things up a little would definitely have helped.



It's also insultingly easy. There is literally no challenge to the game, and no way to fail: I tried wiggling splinters around in patients bodies instead of pulling them out, I tried prescribing the wrong drugs, but you just keep getting another chance to try again. Even when things were impossible I still couldn't fail. Here, for example, you have to say "aahhh" into the DS's microphone to get the patient to open their mouth, and for a long time I could not get the game to register my "aahhh" thanks to the deep, manly timbre of my voice. It doesn't matter, though, because after a while Helena comes in, says "you seem tired" and does it for you. Let's keep that between us, Helena, I don't think our insurers would be pleased if they found out I was letting the receptionist perform some the examinations, no matter how tired Doctor Katie is getting.
So, what I'm saying is this: if you want a medical game that has a difficulty level higher than "it essentially plays itself" then buy a copy of the board game Operation. If you're a big fan of pointless videogame busy work that feels slightly insulting to girls, then play this. No, don't play this, even if that is what you're after, you weirdo.


Imagine: Doctor isn't all about the crushing monotony of running a medical practise, mind you. A small part of it is about the crushing monotony of maintaining personal relationships, mostly focussed around Doctor Katie's non-Doctor friend Sophie. Here's Sophie now, and she's terribly excited because she just opened her new shop! Then she immediately starts feeling ill and has to close the shop the day after she's opened it, and guess who has to get Sophie back on the road to wellness?


Doctor Muggins here, of course. Katie gives Sophie a check-up in scenes so overflowing with dramatic tension that they make The Soprano look like absolute shite, but she cannot complete the tests because she suspects Sophie may have eye problems but she doesn't have access to any optometrist's equipment. Rather than helping her friend out by directing her to an optician, Doctor Katie decides that if she's going to be a doctor then by god she's going to be all the doctors, a veritable Voltron of different medical specialities combined to create the ultimate healer. It's Sophie that suffers though all this, losing money as her shop stays closed due to her poor health, while Katie must level up enough to be allowed to use an eye-testing kit.


Yup, there's a sort-of RPG experience system in Imagine: Doctor, and each time you perform a task as simple as applying a cutesy heart-shaped plaster to a cut you gain more experience. You'd think that after placing one or two plaster on cuts you'd be familiar enough with the procedure that further repetitions would do little to further your knowledge of medical techniques, but I guess there's always something new to learn. And who are we sticking a plaster on today?


Well, now we know what happened to James Sunderland after the events of Silent Hill 2: he managed to escape the nightmarish prison of his own guilt brought to life by the town's supernatural power, he changed his name to Jason and gained a few pounds.


After many plastered affixed and thermometers jammed into mouths, Doctor Katie has become skilled enough that she can collect the eye-testing kit from Doctor Nakamura. Doctor Nakamura believes spiritual exercise is the best way to cure most health problems, so don't visit him if there's something actually medically wrong with you. Zen meditation ain't going to reattach a severed finger.


With the ability to test eyes firmly under her command, Doctor Katie can now find out what's wrong with Sophie in a thrilling minigame where you tap the letters on the sight chart until Sophie gets one wrong. Then you change the corrective lens and do it again until you have the correct prescription. Ghouls 'n' Ghosts it most certainly is not. I've always suspected that opticians aren't real doctors, and this just confirms it. All that training just to say "is it better with lens one or lens two?", I knew it had to be a scam.


But what's this? A new friend? I detect a potential love interest for Doctor Katie. No, not Sophie, the douchebag with the bad facial hair and the strange neck problem where the back of his neck is much taller than the front. You should get a doctor to take a look at that, pal. If only we knew of one...


Tony here may look like an ass, but he doesn't seem so bad. He has the good manners not to hassle Katie into looking at his injured arm while she's on her lunch break, which is nice of him. Having people forever asking you to check out their minor ailments while you're not on the clock must be the number one worst thing about being a doctor. That and all the death and misery, I mean.


"Then I had to rescue a puppy from a burning orphanage, and then I went out for a trip on my private yacht." This is some Mills and Boon level storytelling, only without the proclamations of dewy bosoms and turgid yearnings, because Imagine: Doctor is meant for children.
I'm sorry if this article has left you captivated by Imagine: Doctor's romantic possibilities, but I will never know what becomes of Katie and Tony's fledgling relationship unless there's someone even dumber than me out there who's willing to play through to the end of the game and tell the world what happens. I couldn't take much more of Imagine: Doctor and I only made it to the end of chapter three, but I'd be willing to bet that Katie and Tony end up together in the end, Katie bestrides the medical profession as an implacable colossus of medical knowledge, and Sophie's shop becomes a massive success despite being closed eighty percent of the time thus far. Actually, now that Sophie's got her contact lenses, her shop should be open, right? Let's go check it out!


Forty hearts for a plain pillow!? What a rip-off! I had to see twelve patients to get those hearts which for some reason we use as currency here in Bizarro-Town! Maybe Doctor Katie should have charged money for her service. Oh well, it confirms that Imagine: Doctor doesn't take place in the USA. I should have know after I treated all those people but never had to turn anyone away because they didn't have medical insurance. What a wonderful Socialist paradise Bizarro-Town is, where everything runs on hugs! Okay, as I'm such a good mood, I'll buy a square lamp and an astonishingly ugly clock, which Doctor Katie can use to decorate her apartment.


You know, I wish I hadn't bothered.
It was around this point I had to stop playing Imagine: Doctor. Progress was tectonically slow, and while I know that later on you can gain access to such medical marvels as allergy testing kits and an x-ray machine, the prospect of adding yet more searingly dull minigames to the roster was ironically giving me a headache.


Rarely have I played a game that has so thoroughly matched my expectations of it. I was certain going in that Imagine: Doctor was going to be be a collection of extremely weak click-n-drag minigames presented in the lowest of low-effort ways, with graphics better suited to a Poundland beauty product and music so bland I think it might be literally unmemorable, and that's exactly what it is. It is repetitive to the extreme, the non-medicine bits are somehow, against the seemingly insurmountable odds, even more boring than the rest and there's not even a sense of humour or fun about it. For example, some tasks require you to breath into the DS's microphone, but they didn't make you breath into it to warm up the stethoscope before you put it on someone's back? C'mon, you really missed a trick there, Ubisoft - it's little things like that which can give a game some sparkle.


"But it's a game for kids," some people will say. Yeah, a game for kids you don't like or who have not been good enough to have any fun in their lives. I've said it before, but kids don't want shit games any more than you do, and the target audience is no excuse for badness.
In conclusion, Imagine: Doctor is a terrible game, it is definitely not as good as God Hand and the person who left an Amazon review of it that reads "gives you and (sic) insight to what it might be like to be a real doctor" is either a liar or a fool.

Okay, sure, that's a fairly nightmarish bit of typography, although I feel it suffers somewhat by having that hint of green at the bottom. Without the green it would obviously just look fiery, with the pastel green there's the faint suggestion that it might actually be rainbow-coloured. The logo does at least let you know that Basketball Nightmare isn't a standard basketball game, because serious sports simulations don't generally have logos that look as though they were traced from the VHS cover of a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. So, how is Basketball Nightmare different from NBA Live or even Barkley: Shut Up and Jam? Well, as there are no real options to fiddle with or cutscenes to watch, we can get straight into that.


It doesn't look like I'll be playing for the Best Basketball Team Super Trophy or whatever it is they give to best team at the end of an NBA season. This isn't even college basketball, unless that's Hell-Pit Polytechnic up at the top-right. No, this is something... different.


It's still basketball, though! America's Third-Favourite Pastime! Hyper-Netball! You know how it works. Even I know how it works, although that is entirely because of NBA Jam. Pretty much everything I know about basketball is down to playing NBA Jam. As far as I know, Scottie Pippen is still the best basketball player in the world. In any case, Basketball Nightmare is a basketball game. Your goal is to get the ball in the basket more times than the other team. To this end, you can pass the ball between your teammates, you can jump into the air, you can throw the ball towards the basket. You know, basketball stuff. Oh, and your first opponents are a team of goddamn werewolves.


These werewolves can even pull off totally sweet upside-down dunks, because Teen Wolf was only the first wave in a coordinated media indoctrination campaign aimed at convincing the public that being part dog makes a person really good at basketball. Operation K9-DUNK was designed to soften public opinion on the possibility of creating a new basketball league comprised of grotesque Dr. Moreau-esque manimal hybrids. The Chicago Bulls? Now actual bulls, with genetically-engineered opposable thumbs that allow them to grip the ball! The Minnesota Timberwolves? They'll probably win the play-offs, because we all know wolves are great at basketball! The Toronto Raptors? A terrifying experiment that went awry, resulting in several hundred deaths, the details of the incident being permanently expunged from the record!


It's a shame, then, that I'm stuck playing as a team of identical redheaded quintuplets. They are not nearly as interesting as werewolves, but they also don't seem to be inferior to the werewolves, either - they're just as good at shooting, they're just as fast and they don't have the handicap of stopping every few minutes to sniff each other's backsides.


Your team can dunk, too, despite being about four feet tall. This is not as impressive as seeing a werewolf dunk - your players don't flip upside down or hang from the rim or anything - but you do get a rather jolly little cutscene whenever you pull off a dunk, which is nice but quickly becomes repetitive.


Not that I saw my team's dunk animation very often, because early on I realised that shooting from right down in the corner, outside the three-point line, seemed to have a much, much higher chance of success than any other shot. This makes two-pointers, well, pointless, and because dunks are automated and there's only one cut-scene for them, going for dunks doesn't have the "coolness" factor that might otherwise make you want to use them. No, it's best to just go for three-pointers all the time. They're worth more than two-pointers. I'm terrible at maths and even I know that.


With this knowledge, I managed to squeeze a narrow victory out of my first match. The werewolves' captain turns to look at his team's final points total, as if unable to believe that his team of lycanthropes were defeated by five pudgy kids with oversized heads. Operation K9-DUNK is a failure. Now humanity is condemned to an eternity of regular, boring, human basketball.


Next up is Team Kappa. Kappa, if you didn't know, are Japanese river spirits that engage in all manner of hi-jinx from the prankishly mischievous to the terrifying and harrowing, like trying to steal people's souls by pulling a magical ball out of said person's anus. Hey, I didn't invent these myths, I just read the Wikipedia page. There's no need to worry about rectal soul harvesting today, though, because these kappas are here purely to play some b-ball, having cleared a patch of their marshland home to serve as a court, an old toilet seat nailed to a tree making a passable stand-in for a proper basketball hoop.


Kappa are also said to hold a small amount of water in a divot on the top of their head, and if that water is spilled then the kappa is paralysed and may even die. They should be therefore commended for their commitment to the art of the slam dunk, as they risk their very lives each time they go to the hoop.


Perhaps they're all wearing waterproof yarmulkes or something. Anyway, the kappas don't have to worry about their life-water being jostled loose as I try to win the ball off them, because Basketball Nightmare offers the player almost no defensive measures. You can't swipe at the ball and attempt to steal it, and you can't even jump up to block shots. All you can do when you don't have the ball is change which player you're controlling and try to hold up the opposition by standing in front of them. In the vast majority of cases, if you're standing right in their way the opposition player will just keep running into you, unable to get around you and extremely reluctant to pass the ball to one of their teammates. This is what happens when you assemble a squad of monsters - they're monsters, there's no sense of unity or personal sacrifice for the good of the group to be found there.


The next team is made up of hitotsume-kozou, a Japanese youkai that takes the form of a small bald child with one eye. This is another example of Japanese monsters being about as terrifying as a cucumber sandwich - let's not forget that one of the most famous Japanese monsters is a walking umbrella - and the hitotsume-kozou's single eye surely means that they're going to be as bad as basketball as they are at scaring people. No depth perception is going to all but force them to attempt nothing but dunks.


It may look like this demon-child is falling out of the sky, but he's actually in the middle of doing a flip, the big show-off. The somersault dunk is a pretty impressive achievement considering he's wearing sandals, but it does get less and less impressive when he does it every time he gets near the basket. Familiarity breeds contempt, and if a one-eyed ghost child performing a spinning basketball dunk can become contemptuously over-familiar then it must have been really, really overused.


It's a comprehensive victory for the Tokyo Humans, and it brings more valuable data into the plot to create the ultimate basketball player. Elements to include: being tall, part dog. Elements to avoid: cyclopism, wearing sandals. Next!


Holy shit, a team of basketball vampires. Vampires that play in evening wear and top hats. Basketball vampires. It's incredible. Everyone knows that vampires usually stick to sports that use bats, boom boom, I'll be here all week. I bet the Wallachia Nosferatus here have a deep rivalry with the werewolf team. I know there are many things that could have been done to improve the Twilight saga, but few would be more agreeable than condensing the entire series down into one "Dracula meets the Wolfman" basketball game.


Hmm, the vampires look less impressive when you see them up close. They look like they're wearing massive coke-bottle-lensed glasses that are magnifying their eyes, giving them the appearance of dorky kids rather than bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Still, plus points for making your hoop out of human spines, team vampire. It's very "challenge the forces of death for the right to your immortal soul," like if Ingmar Bergman had been influenced by White Men Can't Jump when making The Seventh Seal.


You might think that being a supernatural creature with enhanced agility and reflexes might give the vampires an unfair advantage, but they're no more difficult to beat than any other team in Basketball Nightmare, and that's because the game's AI is nigh non-existent. Once you've scored a basket - and you will if you remember to keep shooting from the corners - then the computer team get possession and they'll try to run to your basket. Unfortunately for them, ninety-five percent of the time they run in a straight line down the middle of the court, which means you can park one of your players there and the opposition will run into them and get stuck, rubbing up against your player like a cat that's just seen you pick up a can opener. From here, several things can happen. Most often, the opponent will stay fixed in place for a good long time before deciding to pass the ball, allowing you run down the clock if you're in the lead. What you really want to do is win possession, but as I said there's no way to steal the ball manually. So what do you do? Well, eventually I figured out I won the ball more often if I moved towards my own basket in small increments, and I think it's because each time you collide with a player there's a small chance you'll steal the ball, and if you keep tippy-toeing back towards your own net that means more collisions and thus more chances for the ball to change hands.
On paper, this sounds like a really bad system for a basketball videogame to use... and it is. It's terribly limited, forcing every game against the CPU into the same, easily exploitable pattern: rub up against the opposition in the hope that you win the ball. If you don't, no worries, because they always go for dunks whereas you can almost guarantee three points if you shoot from the right place. It's really the only way to play the game, too - even if you try not to exploit the system, there's only so much else you can do in a game as basic as this. And yet, despite all this, Basketball Nightmare still ends up being sort of fun. It's simple, but there's a pleasant chunkiness to both the action and the graphics. You just have to stop thinking of it as a basketball game, because it does a terrible job of being that, and embrace it as it's own weird thing.


Game number five is against a gaggle of spooky old ladies. I assume they're spooky, anyway. Everything else has been thus far, so I doubt that I just showed up and challenged the local over-70s church team to a match.


The ghostly grannies can still get some big air, despite their advanced years. Maybe the invention of basketball is what all Japanese spirit entities have been waiting for, centuries spent scaring the odd peasant while they waited for the NBA to get their act together. I hope that's not the case. It's be sad if they'd waited all that time and then a bunch of children turned up and beat them by doing little more than standing in front of them.
The fact that Sega went so heavy on the specifically Japanese monsters makes it all the more puzzling that Basketball Nightmare wasn't released in Japan, or the US for that matter. As far as I can see it only came out in Europe, Brazil (where the Master System lived an extremely long life) and possibly Canada, none of which I would describe as hotbeds of untapped basketball fans or packed with lovers of Japanese ghost stories. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Brazil is bang into basketball, but it seems a strange release pattern for a game of this type.


The Japanese theme continues with the final team, which is composed of tengu demons. I call them the Big-Nosed Sunburned Granddads, because once I get on the court all politeness and good cheer is stripped away by my relentless desire to win. Don't worry, I'll apologise to them afterwards. Hopefully they won't kidnap my team of small boys and tie them to the top of a tree, as tengu apparently do sometimes.


Okay, that dunk looks really cool. That is also the most impressive basketball hoops I have ever seen, even if it does seem a little sacrilegious.


I was rather hoping that, as my last opponents, Team Tengu would be at least a little more challenging than those that had come before, but sadly that was not the case and they fell into the same set patterns as all the others. I did better against them than anyone else, even, because I'd gotten into the groove a little and also realised that blocking them just inside my half of the court meant they'd sometimes pass the ball back over the halfway line, giving away a foul in the process and turning the ball over to me. Fouls in Basketball Nightmare are handled as arbitrarily as every other aspect of the game, with players being penalised for pushing and charging completely at random when they bump into one another. It has to be at random, because there's nothing you can do to cause a foul beyond walking near someone.


With the tengu defeated, Basketball Nightmare's single-player mode is complete: the humans take the Monster Basketball League trophy, because mankind is truly the most hideous monster of them all. All you get for your trouble is pictures of the various dunks as the credits scroll beneath, but as the amount of effort it took to win was minuscule it seems only right that the ending of the game should be so thin.


There is a two-player versus mode, but it makes the frankly unforgivable error of not allowing you to play as any of the monsters. Instead, you're given a collection of palette-swapped national teams to choose from, none of whom come from the Werewolf Kingdom or a Transylvanian YMCA and are therefore utterly forgettable.


Also, Sega seem to have some very odd ideas about what Cuban people look like.
A lack of monsters aside, the versus mode is probably where you would have gotten most of your Basketball Nightmare fun from had you owned it back in the day - playing against a human eliminates the utter predictability of your opponents, which is the game's biggest flaw, and I'm sure you could wrestle some fun from playing against a friend.


Basketball Nightmare leaves me in an odd position - one where I'm not sure if I can recommend it or not. If I told ten people "you should play this" then I'm sure nine of them would come back and say "what were you thinking, this game is rubbish" and I wouldn't be able to argue with them. It is rubbish, especially if you're looking for "proper" basketball game. It's slow, it's hamstrung by a lack of controls and defensive options and playing against the computer is all but pointless... and yet still I had fun playing it. The slam-dunking vampires certainly didn't hurt, but there was more to it than that. Maybe the simplicity drew me in, I can't really say. It's a lot like Super Soccer in that it's a poor recreation of the sport that it's based on, but once you accept it as it's own unique thing then there's maybe a little pleasure in it for certain people. Plus, it has slam-dunking vampires. I know I mentioned that a minute ago. It isn't something you can mention too many times.

Yes, The Mask of Zorro - and it's taking all my concentration to not write it as The Mark of Zorro, which is a different Zorro movie - is based on the 1998 movie of the same name. In the movie, an ageing Don Diego de la Vega, played by the resolutely non-Spanish Sir Anthony Hopkins, passes the Zorro identity on to a young thief played by Antonio Banderas. Zorro Senior reunites with his long-lost daughter, there's something about evil aristocrats running a mine using slave labour, and in the end the two Zorros save the day and all evil men in California live in fear of a masked man stabbing them to death with a knitting needle. This is presumably also what happens in the game, but it's sort of hard to tell, as we shall see.


Okay, that's not too bad. I can see what the developers were going for with the silhouetting, even if it does look a bit like a horse trying to shake off a traffic cone someone's placed on its back.


Oh, that Governor Don Rafael Montero, he's as stubborn as a mule. Well, this mass of black pixels that is either Zorro or the Hamburglar running through a hedge will gladly give Governor Montero the confrontation he desires!


Unless Governor Montero is a grey concrete wall, I don't think this is the thrilling confrontation promised by the intro. That's the whole intro, by the way - it's just those two screen and then boom, you're given control of Zorro but not any further guidance on what you're supposed to be doing.
As for Zorro himself, I think it's fair to say that the makers of this game have done an excellent job of capturing Antonio Banderas' famous good looks. Why, I can see his smouldering charm from here. It's lucky for us that Zorro's hat is easy to draw with pixels.


I ran left and right for a while, marvelling at Zorro's purposeful stride and his flowing cape, a garment that has the grace of a binbag caught in a tree. Then I tried doing something else, and that's where the game started to fall apart. The Mask of Zorro is an action-adventure jumpy-stabbing platforming type of game, so there's a lot of leaping between ledges to be done. It is a shame, then, that the developers hail from a different universe than ours where the laws of physical motion are imprecise and fluid and where gravity sometimes just shrugs it's shoulders and says "look, I don't know what I'm doing, sorry." Zorro's jumps are a horrible mess of unpredictable angles and awkward lurches. He floats upwards fairly slowly but drops like a rock, and the slightest touch of the d-pad during his flight can make him veer wildly off-course, and even if you do land where you'd like half the time you'll accidentally walk off the ledge because of every platform's fuzzily-defined edges. Imagine trying to play one of the 16-bit Aladdin games but every time you press the jump button an electric shock is sent directly to Zorro's genitals and you'll get a good idea of what the platforming elements of this game are like.


Then there's the swordfighting. There has to be swordfighting in a Zorro game. It's kind of his whole thing, evildoers brought to justice by the flash of a blade and all that. Thus, swordfighting, and while it's not as bad as the jumping mechanics it still ain't great. Saffire took what I have come to think of as the Commodore 64 approach to swordplay, in that you hold down the button to ready your sword and then move the joystick while holding the button down to perform different moves. Press forwards for a basic thrust, diagonally up or down for head and leg swipes respectively, and backwards to parry enemy attacks. It reminds me a lot of Defender of the Crown, and it's no better than in that game. The high and low attacks are useless and can be immediately discounted, because they don't do any more damage than the standard thrust despite having less range, and the parry seems to only block attacks about forty percent of the time. Instead, the only way to get anywhere with the combat is to run in, go for one quick thrust and retreat to a safe distance before the enemy can retaliate... but not too far, because if you put too much distance between you they'll get all their health back. The combat is not entirely with merit, mind you - I like these three guys - these three amigos, if you  like - because they act as one enemy, giving the impression that Zorro is fencing against three men at once without it becoming a horrible mess. More of a horrible mess than the rest of the game, anyway.


After wrestling with the controls for a while, I managed to make my way to the rooftops. While he was up there, Zorro started skanking along to some ska music only he could hear after slicing a fat man's trousers off. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. The tattered remnants of your dignity, I mean.


For those of you excited to see Zorro perform his trademark three-slash "Z" symbol, here it is. I'll give the developers some credit: while The Mask of Zorro is punishingly ugly, it has a few well-animated moments and this is one of them. You'll see Zorro's signature move fairly often if you're planning on playing through the whole game (do not do this) because he only does it when he collects a health-restoring heart. They're generally found in room that you enter by walking "into" the background at certain points, sometimes via obvious doorways and sometimes, especially later in the game, through hidden portals located in otherwise unremarkable walls. The game makes sure you never forget the vital detail of your remaining energy by having Zorro's health bar prominently displayed right above his head at all times, which is very helpful and definitely never gets annoying. No, I'm lying, it does get annoying, especially when you're standing right next to an enemy and your health bars overlap, making it impossible to tell who has what amount of hit points remaining.


One of these rooms contained a woman that Zorro kissed to restore all his health. The developers were understandably worried that the graphics would not be able to accurately portray two people kissing, and so they placed a giant heart in the background so that players would know that this is indeed a kiss and not a bundle of rags being tossed about by a strong breeze.


I like to look on the bright side of every game I write about here - even the *NSYNC game made me laugh a couple of times - and I was trying to give The Mask of Zorro some leeway until I fought this man. He is standing on thin air. Not in the usual "oh, it's a platform game so as long as some of my foot is in contact with a platform I'll be fine" way, he is floating, completely unsupported by any solid ground. I know Zorro is a fantastical character, but I didn't know that his universe works on Road Runner rules and no-one falls to their death until they realise that they're defying gravity. This inability to push people off platforms becomes something of a liability later, and you can't even jump over them despite Zorro clearly leaping high enough into the air to do so.


I entered some completely nondescript door, identical to all the others, and the stage ended. No boss, no "congratulations," just a couple of screens like this "20 Years Later" one. So I was playing as the original Zorro in that stage, huh? I rescind my early sarcastic comments about how much the Zorro sprite looks like Antonio Banderas. It's a spot-on likeness of Anthony Hopkins, though.


And here is Sir Ant, training up Zorro Junior to serve as his replacement. I assume that's what's happening, anyway. The Mask of Zorro has a slight problem with getting its plot across. The between-stage scenes are narrated by some digitised speech, which is fair enough if perhaps a touch too ambitious for the Game Boy Color, but the problem is that volume on these cutscenes is is ridiculously low, and when combined with the extreme digital compression it endured to fit on a GBC cart it meant I couldn't make out a single word that anyone was saying. It took until the second or third cutscene for me to even realise there was any speech. I though it was just some unpleasant and unintentional background noise, and I'm sure you won't blame me for coming to that conclusion given what the rest of this trainwreck is like.


In this stage, Zorro the Younger is still in training, despite already having access to all the same moves and sword attacks that Zorro the Elder did. His training consists of stabbing a rotating wooden pole. That might sound simple, but the pole is armed, and the spinning fence post with a sword sticking out of it proved to be one of my most fiendish foes because the small yellow target you have to stab to defeat it steadfastly refused to register my repeated blows for a good ten minutes before suddenly deciding that I'd wasted enough of my already fleeting existence to be allowed to progress. Not a great training montage, I have to say, but if the enemies from here on out come pirouetting at me like Freddy Krueger with a ballet scholarship then I will be golden.


After that brief and pointless level, Zorro finds himself in a mansion packed with bad guys of varying competence. Some of them have swords and know how to use them, and then there are these gentlemen, who attacked me as a pair but who turned on each other the moment I fought back, punching one another into unconsciousness as Zorro stands by, bemused.


This stage emphasises Zorro's gymnastic abilities a little more, and there are many spots from here on out where the player has to swing around on these beams to reach higher places. Of course, it is handled extremely badly, and the angle of convergence between Zorro's sprite and the post he's jumping towards seemingly has little impact on whether he grabs hold of the bloody thing or not. I think it's annoying me so much because I'd like a good Zorro game. Swinging from beams and chandeliers in a graceful, lithe fashion, dispatching enemies with your superior swordplay skills, that would be a lot of fun - so playing a game which clearly wanted to be like that but got nowhere near feels like it's giving me a little extra spite as it kicks me in the ribs.


Okay, that's a sofa sitting on a presumably purpose-built ledge twenty feet up that wall of this mansion. Why the hell is there a sofa there? Are you expecting Spider-Man to pop by for a visit so you got out an extra seat for him? Are you advertising a high-strength adhesive that can affix a couch to any surface and the platform is just there to hold it up while the glue dries? Are you insane, is that it?
The answer is rather more prosaic than that - it's just awful level design. Every stage in the game is put together with a level of care and attention more commonly seen in industrialised meat product manufacturing, random unappetising lumps smashed together to create something that superficially resembles the intended product but which is not much fun to consume. Enemies are plonked down in seemingly random places throughout the levels, half of them standing on narrow ledges where you're forced to lose health fighting them while the other half can be ignored entirely. Structures that are supposed to provide obstacles to the player can often by bypassed, frequently by glitching through them. All in all, The Mask of Zorro is a deeply awful game and sweet Jesus I'm not even halfway through it yet, please pray for me.


Hey look, it's Catherine Zeta-Jones, former Darling Bud of May and current guardian of Michael Douglas' mummified form. Ahh, jokes about the Zeta-Jones / Douglas age gap, they never get old. Unlike Michael Douglas. Credit where credit's due, this isn't bad artwork and is one of The Mask of Zorro's aesthetic high-points, in the same way that a rainbow sheen is the aesthetic high point of an oily puddle.


Zorro's in a barn now. He's fighting Jaws from the James Bond movies, and by "fighting" I mean "repeatedly stabbing in the groin." For his part, Jaws just stands there and flexes his muscles until the needle-like tip of Zorro's rapier causes enough physical damage to kill him. Cut to la oficina de la coroner: "what was the cause of death, doc?""Incredibly painful, that's what."


There's a section where Zorro swings his way through a church, an area that I appreciated if not for the quality of its gameplay then because at least it isn't brown. A pink man with a gun is trying to shoot Zorro, and getting shot means instant death. That's not too much of a problem, because Zorro has infinite lives. Yep, there's no way to get a game over in this one, although you'll still want to avoid dying because as the game progress your respawn points get further and further apart, as though the game has realised how bad it is and it's subtly trying to get you quit playing. I came close to quitting several time, I really did. One of those moments was triggered by the realisation that enemies with guns can shoot through walls. I'm not sure why I expected anything different.


I went out dressed as Zorro for Halloween once, you know. It was great, there's something very liberating about wearing a cape, and the mask meant that most of my face was covered. Of course, Zorro never returned home to find he'd left his sword in the taxi and at some point his sash had possibly been dunked in a urinal, but in my defence I didn't go through the same rigorous pole-based training regimen.


Here is another of those poles. It has been upgraded. It's a Swiss Army Pole now. Giving it an axe seems like a mistake, now it can hew its own lumber and expand the ranks of its diabolical brethren without human help.


I know how you feel, skeleton friend.
I skipped another whole mansion stage, by the way. There was just nothing to say about it. I think I've adequately conveyed what a horrendous mess The Mask of Zorro is at this point, I'm running out of synonyms for "godawful" and because the gameplay doesn't change in the slightest as the game trudges it's not even bad in new and exciting ways.


Zorro runs into Catherine Zeta-Jones in a barn and, shock horror, she comes at him with a sword! So Zorro slices her clothes off. Fair's fair, he did make that guy's trousers fall down, so this is totally gender equality at work. This section is based on a scene from the movie, a scene that according to the infallible knowledge engine of Wikipedia left both actors "aroused." Now I am doubly glad - glad that I know what turns Antonio Banderas' crank, and glad that I can share this knowledge with you, dear reader.


A daring rooftop escape is thwarted by this villain. He may be unassuming, but he's also invincible. Well, sort of. I fought him for a good long time, landing blows as precisely as the clunky controls would allow, but I just could not hurt him. I thought something was wrong with the game, really wrong I mean, and it seems I'm not the only person to think this - I've seen claims made on the internet that The Mask of Zorro is buggy to the point of being impossible to complete, with this specific section cited as evidence. There certainly doesn't seem to be any way around this roadblock. You have to go this way, and you can't jump over Senor Paininthearse, but in the end I found a solution: I just kept stabbing and stabbing and stabbing while holding down the emulator's "turbo speed" button and eventually the enemy started taking damage for no obvious reason and died. I estimate it would have take about ten to fifteen minutes of real-time stabbing for this to happen. I would definitely categorise that under "game-breaking glitches," and I'm disappointed that the game didn't actually break, preferably into countless microscopic pieces that could never be reassembled by human hands.


One benefit of the cutscenes being unintelligible is that you're free to make up your own story to go with the pictures. For instance, in this scene Anthony Hopkins realises he made a huge mistake in passing the title of Zorro on to the awkward and clumsy Antonio Banderas, and in his desperation to find a suitable heir he panics and makes this horse the next Zorro. "Fetch me a horse-sized cape!" he cries, to no-one in particular. "Now, do you know how to fight with a sword? Stamp your hoof once for yes and two times for no."


The final area of the game is set in a mine. I assume that this is supposed to be the mine from the movie, but there's a serious imbalance in the ratio of guards to slave labour. It's all guards, patrolling this neon wonderland of a mining operating and probably thinking about all the lovely gold they could have if they'd remembered to bring the slaves along. Rather than liberating kidnapped men and women, Zorro is liberating these men from their own greed, then, although they're often stubborn and their refusal to get stabbed means this stage drags on like an under-ten's violin recital.


In this stage especially enemies are often placed on narrow ledges or right in front of doors, giving you no room to employ the hit-and-run tactics that are really your only way of engaging in combat without taking damage - and you need to avoid taking damage here, because if you die the respawn point is right back at the start of the stage. My advice to you - aside from advising you to play almost any other game than this - is to engage as few enemies as you possibly can, and if you do have to fight them, remember that you don't always have to kill them. In the screenshot above, for example, if you keep poking towards the enemy with your rapier, they'll just keep blocking your attacks... but eventually they'll move backwards far enough for you to dash through the doorway, leaving your foe alive to tell the tale of the time he faced the mighty Zorro and the mighty Zorro legged it.


And we're done. I walked to the edge of a screen that looked the same as all the others in this gold mine and The Mask of Zorro just... ended. If it was a book you'd go back, convinced you'd accidentally skipped a page, but no, this is it. I know there have been no other bosses in the game but I was still expecting something vaguely climactic - instead you get a message revealing that Zorro is dead, which is hardly the feel-good conclusion you might have assumed a game based on a Hollywood blockbuster to go with. Not to worry, though - it's only Old Zorro that's dead, Young Zorro has survived, having now taken full ownership of the famous name. I assume Horse Zorro also survives.


Oh bloody hell, I hope not.
The Mask of Zorro is probably the worst game I've written about here at VGJunk, or at least it's the worst game that wants to be a game, a sequence of levels put together in a certain order with a core gameplay experience in mind. *NSYNC: Get To The Show and Russell Grant's Astrology are worse experiences, but I can't really think of them as games: they're cynical collections of unrelated shite, minigame graveyards. The Mask of Zorro feels like a "game," but unfortunately it is a terrible one. The gameplay makes a mockery of the words "game" and "play," the graphics are mostly nauseating and the stages are frustrating, ill-conceived clumps of random elements artlessly bolted together to create an experience not unlike an especially bad ZX Spectrum game. Don't play it, unless you're looking for a new benchmark against which to judge all future videogame badness. I'm sure it won't be long before I refer to the next horrible thing in my life as being "a real Mask of Zorro."

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.

World Heroes 2, the fighting game starring loosely re-imagined versions of historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Rasputin and, erm, Bruce Lee, also has a stage that features a pirate skeleton sitting on a pile of presumably ill-gotten booty.


It's such a fabulous hoard that even the treasure chest is made out of gold, which speaks to a level of extravagance not usually seen outside the homes of the most insanely wealthy sheiks. It didn't do this skeletal swashbuckler much good, though, and his animated bones must spend an eternity guarding his loot. This vignette in itself is enough to capture my interest - my love of skeletons has been well-documented by this point, and this particular skeleton even has a pirate hat and a hook for a hand - but there's something more to it. I think it's that hand motion, it makes it look like he's fanning his flustered skull as he watches the two warriors in front of him do battle. "Oh, you silly boys," he seems to be saying, "I do hope you're not fighting over little old me." Well, he's been down in this cave for god knows how long, it's bound to send anyone a little peculiar.



Shining Force II is an RPG, with the usual RPG battles between good and evil. The forces of good are a hardy bunch of warriors, but sometimes their commander might, I dunno, misjudge how far an enemy unit can move, leaving them exposed and susceptible to a beating. Hey, it's easy to forget how far the mobile ballistas can move each turn, okay? Not to worry, there are magic healing spells available that will fix them right up.


See? These medically-trained Tinkerbells flutter in, dispense some invigorating fairy dust to revive and replenish a battle-weary fighter and then flap off again, back to Yon Nurses' Station of the Faerie-Folke until someone else is willing to cough up the MP needed to summon them. This is not a service that is limited to the good guys, either, and certain enemy troops can cast healing magic too. They don't get tiny fairies tending to their wounds, mind you.


No, they have micro-devils instead, miniature succubi who perform the same job but, you know, evil. It's such a lovely little touch, and one that makes sense: I can't imagine fairies wanting to heal someone called the Dark Bishop. The Dark Bishop does not sound like someone whose goals would align with those of the gentle forest spirits. The Dark Bishop sounds like someone who would wear a ridiculous hat, and whaddya know! Seriously, that can't be comfortable on his ears. Just get one a couple of sizes smaller!


Speaking of spells, Playstation classic and firm VGJunk favourite Final Fantasy Tactics has spells! Lots of spells, including one that, yes, heals people with fairies. Fairies are the morphine of any fantasy kingdom worth its salt, it seems, but this is about a different spell. Sometimes when you cast a spell in Final Fantasy Tactics, your character will recite a short incantation. Unless you're playing the PSP re-release of FFT, because the spell quotes were removed from that version. Anyway, here's the quote for the spell Haste.


Layer upon layer of what, exactly? Time? Speed? Light, silken undergarments whose pleasurable caress encourages the wearer to move around more rapidly? I have no idea, but what I do know is that this quote always makes me think of breakfast. You see, when I was a youth the place I heard the phrase "layer upon layer" more than any other was in this TV commercial for the cereal Shreddies.


"Layer upon layer of whole wheat," the advert says, and so every single time I see the Haste quote from FFT my brain automatically summons up the memory of this '90s cereal advert, or at least that one line - I had forgotten all about the stuff with Romeo and Juliet and the Leslie Phillips-esque blue hunger gremlin. Poor hunger gremlin, everyone wanting to lock him away just because he was performing a necessary human function. Anyway, that's how Final Fantasy Tactics and Shreddies are forever intertwined in my mind. I can't believe I'm explaining this to people.


Splatterhouse 3 is a horror game, and usually it sticks to some fairly common videogame methods of horrifying the player.


Things like freaks in hockey masks, headless ghouls, bodily fluids in a wide range of exciting colours, that kind of thing. Did I mention it takes place in a spooky mansion, too? Because it does. That's why it's called Splatterhouse, because you're in a house that you're splattering with those colourful monster juices. As an aesthetic, it's pretty great. I certainly love it, that "oozing from the VHS cover of a horror movie" look, but Splatterhouse 3 has the occasional moment that offers a different, less obvious form of terror. I'm thinking specifically of this line from one of the game's intermissions.


It's just so weird, a startlingly effective evocation of the horrible things that are happening to Jennifer, made stranger by the slightly off-kilter delivery. How do we know that she's beginning to smell of the grave? Did Jennifer catch her own scent, the subtle (for Splatterhouse, at least) change letting her know that something is very wrong? Splatterhouse 3 is timed and a terrible fate will befall Jennifer if you don't get to her quickly enough, and while I'm on the fence about being timed as a gameplay mechanic these scenes add a real sense of tension to Rick's rampage through the mansion. In a series that I've often thought succeeds more at creating an fantastic atmosphere rather than at being a truly great game, this is one of the most atmospheric moments of them all.


Street Fighter Alpha now, and when I wrote about Street Fighter characters the other week I said that Ryu is possibly the blandest man ever to fight a karate demon and shoot fire out of his hands. I'm still sticking by that, but his ending in Street Fighter Alpha shows a slightly different side to his character - a cocky and frankly rather rude side. After being challenged to a rematch by Sagat, Ryu defeats the Emperor of Muay Thai once again, leaving Sagat humiliated. Ryu reacts in a way that you might describe as being a touch graceless.


C'mon, Ryu, don't just ignore him! There's no need to be impolite, even if the accompanying picture shows that Ryu is clearly staring right at Sagat and not ignoring him at all. Maybe it's just a bit of miscommunication: Ryu isn't ignoring Sagat, he's just not rising to his threats.


Okay, nope, Ryu is just being a bit of a dick. No-one likes a sore winner, kid. I think we can chalk this one up to youthful hot-headedness - Street Fighter Alpha being early in the SF chronology, of course. Still, in a way it's nice to see Ryu talking about something other than honourable combat and discovering the true path of the warrior for a change. Sagat probably doesn't think so, though.

I see, it's a front view speed action game. Well, it's nice to have clarification. I have to be honest, that just makes it sound like a racing game, although the inclusion of the word "fight" in the title means it's unlikely I'll just be driving around a track. I figured the fight in question is unlikely to be the fight for the chequered flag, especially once I'd let the attract mode run for a while and seen the biographies of Riding Fight's two heroes. They definitely strike me as the fighting sort.


First up is London lad Burn Bowie. He's fast, he's strong and if that picture on the right is anything to go by he spends his spare time creating wireframe computer models of medieval gauntlets. Well, you've got to have a hobby, don't you? Burn's other hobby is rugby. He's so good at rugby that it's his special ability, so let's hope that Riding Fight has a section where I need to kick bad guys between two upright posts. I was a little confused about what the "visual power" stat referred to, at first assuming it was something to do with how good Burn's eyesight is, but I eventually figured it out - his visual power is how cool he looks. Visual power is measured in units called Norms, where one average person in casual clothes equals one Norm. I weigh in at around 0.7 Norms, thanks to a bad haircut and slouching posture, while Bang is 3.8 times cooler than the common man.


With a visual power rating of 2.0, Burn's partner Keith Jager is not quite as cool. Perhaps people can sense that his name is Keith, and that lowers his score. To any Keiths out there, I'm only kidding, It's a perfectly fine name. Keith's special ability his hunting, which is appropriate given that Jager is German for "hunter." That said, I think Keith's name might come from the combination of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, which works especially well if you assume Burn Bowie is named after David Bowie (4.9 Norms of visual power) for a British rock theme.


Burn and Keith are bounty hunters, two men ready and willing to take on the advanced crime of the cybernetic future in exchange for cold, hard cash. They might not look like taut, coiled springs ready to leap into action as they lounge around their penthouse apartment, but years of experience and a devotion to spiked shoulderpads not seen since the Legion of Doom disbanded means that when a sucker is coming, they're ready. Ready to beat up a sucker, I guess.


So Riding Fight isn't a game about flying a helicopter, then? I thought it might be, what with the first stage starting with a helicopter ride, but the helicopter is immediately destroyed by a ground-to-air missile. Not to worry, though, it's already served its one and only purpose - getting Burn into punching range of the criminals, and as our hero leaps from the burning wreckage the game begins.


Now I know what a front view speed action game is - it's a combination of a beat-em-up and a sprite-scaling racing game. Burn constantly moves "into" the screen on his Marty McFly-approved hoverboard in the same way as countless other arcade racing games where the sprites are scaled according to how far away they are in order to create a sense of movement. Then there's the fighting, which is straight out of something like Streets of Rage with the unusual exception that you can attack in any of the eight joystick directions instead of just throwing punches to the left and right like in most beat-em-ups. The fighting system consists of the usual punch combos, jumping kicks (in this case, jumping up and smashing your hoverboard into the enemy's face) and throws, so it's all very familiar. You might think the addition of the racing game elements would complicate things, but honestly they only add spectacle, not change the gameplay - there are a few sections where you have to avoid obstacles in the road, but mostly Riding Fight goes heavy on the "fight" side of the equation.


You can even pick up weapons dropped by enemies in time-honoured beat-em-up fashion, although because of the constant scrolling you do kind of have to catch them in mid-air rather than picking them up off the ground. That's fine by me, though. Punching a punk while we're both travelling at 200 kilometres per hour and catching the baseball bat he was carrying before it hits the floor is cool, and it's nice to be cool, or so I hear. Not as nice as it is to have a baseball bat, mind you, and when the opportunity to grab a weapon comes up you should make the effort to take it because all of them - baseball bats, scimitars, medieval polearms - are vastly more powerful than your regular attacks.
The auto-scrolling also means that playing it safe is a much more valid strategy than usual: each section of road is a set length, and if you haven't eliminated all the bad guys before the next stretch then they all realise the folly of their pursuit and disappear, handing the baton of criminal responsibility over to their brethren further down the road. Biding your time and throwing enemies into each other to keep them busy is a good way to preserve your health, even if it does feel a touch contrary to the lunatic fist-throwing ethos of Riding Fight.


Also from taken from the beat-em-up handbook is the wide-radius emergency attack, in this case a very neon spinning kick. Unusually for the genre, this special move doesn't take your health when you use it. Instead, you have a power bar that fills up as you pummel thugs - think of it as the Street-Justice-O-Meter - and once there's enough juice in there you can perform the kick. Fill it all the way up and you can even launch a big ball of screen-clearing plasma death, but that's a fairly rare sight because you'll usually be in need of a spinning kick before you bar can max out. In this case I needed my spinning kick to knock away these goons that are leaping at Burn from the back of a lorry. You'll notice they don't have hoverboards of their own. You'd think that simply jumping from a truck hurtling down the cyber-highway would be enough to defeat them without any assistance from Burn, and it is enough to defeat them, if you move out of their way and let them hit the road. I just felt like kicking them on the way past.


This must be the sucker coming, then. His name is Reckless Crusher, and he's wanted for the crimes of stealing a tank and not crushing with due care and attention. He should be manacled or punished, because apparently being manacled is not a punishment. Hopefully beating the shit out of him will count as a punishment.


Okay, I may have come into this fight with rather more bravado than was justified. Reckless Crusher is twelve feet tall and carries an oversized chainsaw in each hand, but at least I don't have to fight the tank he stole. That's because Burn destroyed it by kicking his hoverboard at it. I think I've done the military a favour there, it would have been real embarrassing for them if they'd rolled out a new tank that could be demolished by a single well-placed hoverboard strike.
Anyway, Reckless Crusher isn't as intimidating as he looks, mostly because he's dumber than a sack of rocks. You can stand behind him, punch him in the back a few times and jump away before he retaliates at almost zero risk to Burn's personal safety.


Eventually I knocked his chainsaws away, which lead to complacency and a powerful bear-hug that took a lot of my health. I'll make sure to tell everyone nearby that it was definitely a brutal, bone-crushing grip, too. Based solely on this image you'd be forgiven for thinking that Crusher is gently cradling Burn like a mother with her newborn child, but no, it is one hundred percent a fight to the death. Reckless Crusher's death, eventually, and with his non-manacle-related punishment stage one is complete.


Ah yes, what a gravy day it is. The gravy sun is shining, the gravy birds are singing and Burn and Keith have pocketed a fat stack of gravy for bringing down Reckless Crusher. I like that they're using the money to buy a replacement helicopter, that's a nice bit of continuity.


Next up for our heroes: a coup in the Middle East. They're going to break it quickly. They don't have much choice, Riding Fight is a very quick game, both in the speed of the action and the overall brevity of the game's five stages. I'm not sure who Hula is, mind you. It could be their little robot sidekick, or possibly an unseen informant that gives Keith and Burn their instructions. The Charlie to their Angels, if you will.


They should have called this game Surfin' Scimitar Saracens. Burn's getting involved in the politics of a Middle Eastern country, but don't worry, he's only in it for the money. The action may be taking place on the open sea now, but it's the same as it was before, clobbering anyone nearby as the path scrolls rapidly beneath you. It's quite the fun little ride, too, and while the beat-em-up gameplay doesn't quite match up to the quality of its high-end rivals - it can be a bit confusing, with a veil of fuzziness that affects both the accuracy of the gameplay and the occasionally messy graphics - the charmingly over-the-top and often grammatically challenged presentation is more than enough to paper over the cracks.


A choice of routes? How delightful! I think I'll go to the left (because I'm already over that side of the screen).


Hmm. It seems I have chosen poorly. Not to worry, Burn's hoverboard is more than tough enough to swat away these missiles - these curiously bullet-like missiles - with a single jumping attack, knocking them aside to explode harmlessly nearby. Harmlessly for me, I mean. Eventually they destroy that hovercraft and I assume there's a human piloting it. It is not a gravy day for the hovercraft pilot.
The other route isn't any more exciting, by the way. Just more basic soldiers to either defeat with your fists, to defeat with their own swords for added irony or to ignore until enough time has passed that the next set of enemies is spawned.


Here's Colonel Abdullah. What's his crime? Oh, it's holocaust. Jesus Christ, that's quite a step up from stealing a tank. Colonel Abdullah should be punished, manacled and then brought to trial for war crimes where further punishment can be meted out.


Abdullah calls Burn a "little price-winner". I have no goddamn clue what that is supposed to mean. From context I know it's derogatory, and I understood his previous insult of "you imperialistic leech!" even if it was misspelled as "leach," but "little price-winner" has left me stumped. I thought maybe price-winner was some archaic, Shakespearean insult that a developer at Taito happened to pluck out of some ancient tome, but I couldn't find any evidence of that. I think this one will just have to go down as a mystery. Maybe he meant "prize-winner"? No, I've got to stop thinking about this and get on with the fighting.


It is not dissimilar from the previous fight, although the Colonel is much more keen on jumping around the arena and making it very difficult for me to get a decent screenshot of him. As before, and as with so many other beat-em-up bosses, the key to victory is not getting too greedy - get your hits in while you can, but don't overstay your welcome, because Abdullah can and will suddenly decide that he's going to hit you with a flying kick.


They weren't kidding about going on vacation, huh? Burn's sunglasses are more appropriate than ever, but I don't think those women being flexed at by Keith are especially impressed. The one in the red bikini just looks worried for him, so maybe it's for the best that we can only see his back. Lord only know what horrendous cybernetic enhancements he has going on around the front.


Stage three sees our heroes jetting off to Japan, where according to the pre-stage intro "an incident occurred." Good intel on that one, guys. Nice and specific. You'll be thoroughly prepared once the boss shows up, I'm sure, but first it's FOOD TIME. TIME for FOOD, because the first two stages were hungry work, but in this hectic modern world who has TIME to stop for FOOD? Well never, fear, because Burn doesn't need to stop! Some kindly soul / insane person has littered the highways of Cyber-Neo-Tokyo.exe with metal containers, containers packed with delicious, revitalising hot dogs!


Hot Dogs: Nature's Fuel™. Eat delicious Hot Dogs during your next FOOD TIME. For maximum freshness, please ensure your metallic Hot Dog storage cylinders are tightly sealed and stored away from major metropolitan roadways.


I love the cyberpunk stylings of a futuristic city at night, as I'm sure may of you do too, but it's a little disappointing that I'm only on Riding Fight's third stage and they're already reusing most of the enemies. These two are new, though, a tag team of overweight wrestlers who are so, erm, husky that they need extra-large hoverboards. They can be a real pain if they manage to get on either side of you and get into a rhythm of repeated belly-flops, but that's what Burn's throw move is for. You have another option, too: if you press jump and attack together, Burn throws out a mighty uppercut, and it's extremely satisfying to uppercut these guys back to where they came from when they try to jump on you.


After a while, the electric metropolis gives way to a peaceful glade of cherry trees and an encounter with the latest boss. Her name is Shidzuki, and she's been stealing Japanese treasures. They must be some treasures, because she's got a bigger bounty on her head than the man who organised a holocaust.


Shidzuki has two specialities: magic, and not getting punched. More than at any other point in the game the riding aspect of Riding Fight comes to the fore as Burn swerves and leaps around the many obstacles that Shidzuka throws his way. Sometimes it's glowing balls of energy, sometimes it's walls of fire, and sometimes she dips into the hoary old videogame cliché of summoning identical clones, all of which makes for a fight that challenges both your riding ability and your patience. To make things works, Shidzuka can't be comboed, teleporting to safety after each single hit. This means the fight quickly devolves into the player chasing the boss down to slowly chip away at her health one attack at a time, making it possibly the game's least enjoyable section. I got there in the end, though. No-one can escape the justice of Burn Bowie forever. He's wearing spiked shoulderpads, for pity's sake.


I think you'd have a stronger argument if you weren't the one who knocked her down, Burn.


The next mission begins with the announcement that a "young miistress (sic) of an important man" has been kidnapped and whisked away to the South Pole. I'm going to assume that by "young miistress" they actually mean "daughter," because you'd think an important man would want to keep his mistresses secret and Burn and Keith don't give me the impression that they're huge on confidentiality.


All right, ice knights! Ice knights with big axes that I can take for myself, carving through the enemy hordes while struggling in vain to come up with puns and witty one-liners that include references to both ice and axes. The best I could come up with was "just axe-ept it, I'm as cool as ice!" which is the major stumbling block preventing me from becoming a radical action hero.


Oh no, this poor penguin is trapped on a floating block of frozen urine! Not to worry, I set him free by smashing face-first into the pissberg, sending my penguiny friend up, up and away into the crisp Antarctic sky. He'll be fine up there. He's a bird. Birds can fly, c'mon.


Those knights have guns. Why didn't you bring a gun, Burn? Not every problem can be solved with sunglasses and an attitude you probably describe as "fresh" and "wicked," you know. Okay, so every problem in this game can be solved that way, but how is hoverboarding going to help when you're doing your taxes or planning a household budget, huh? You can't kickflip away from fiscal responsibility!


The boss is Battleship Boyd. Why is he called Battleship? Is it because he's increasingly redundant in the modern era of warfare? Is Battleship is favourite board game? I hope you're not expecting answers to those questions, because you've got the same amount of information about him as I do. All I know is that he takes the rough-and-tumble of international terrorism seriously enough to wear a headguard at all times, even if it does make him look a bit like he fell face-first into a pile of extremely tacky Valentine's Day underwear.


He's also an ice hockey player. Makes sense to me: if ice hockey isn't violent enough for you, international terrorism would be the next logical rung on the ladder.
There's not much to say about Battleship Boyd that isn't already expressed by phrase "terrorist ice hockey player." He can create small icebergs to launch at Burn, but there is no word on whether or not he's responsible for the yellow icebergs. I jump-kicked him a lot, because it helps to dodge his attacks and the wide surface area of the hoverboard makes it more likely that you'll hit him. Poor old Boyd isn't much of a challenge, but at least he died doing what he loved: fighting people while wearing ice skates.


It's a secret base hidden deep beneath the polar ice cap, Burn. Stage five follows on straight from the end of the previous one, and even Burn and Keith begin to suspect they may be in over their heads. The first part of the stage isn't much to write home about, with some now-familiar battles against the same troops you've fought before, but it is merely a prelude for the upcoming series of end-of-game bosses, starting with this one.


As guardians for your secret villainous lair go, the huge mechanical dragon is a good choice. It was good enough for Dr. Wily, anyway, although he went for the less threatening cartoon look while this thing is all about sharp angles, extending claws and flamethrowers. It's really keen on flamethrowers. Sadly, this is the battle where Riding Fight falls into the usual arcade trap of being annoyingly difficult. Overall Riding Fight is still much more merciful than many of its peers, but in this instance the boss is constantly attacking and without giving much warning about where those attacks are coming from, making it a chore to defeat as you rely on attrition and credit-dumping rather than skill. Once more the jumping hoverboard smash shines as a combat strategy: it doesn't do a whole lot of damage, but it does help when you're trying to jump over the flamethrower blasts.


The arch-villain of Riding Fight is revealed-  the international terrorist leader known only as Professor. It was nice of Taito to include this minigame in Riding Fight. The "what could the Professor possibly be a professor of?" minigame, I mean. Can you be a Professor of Unfortunate Haircuts? Actually, with that hair and his unnerving grin the Professor looks like the Beavis from a dystopian cyber-future, perhaps an aged version of the other Cyber-Beavis I've written about before.


The Professor is impressed that Burn made it this far. I was amazed he didn't also say "we're not so different, you and I," but fair play to him, he wasn't so predictably evil that he told me all the workings of his diabolical plan. This may be because he doesn't have a plan, or at least not a plan that extends beyond "kidnap a girl." Maybe he was lonely in his vast underground fortress and he just needed some company. I can't imagine the robot dragon is much for conversation. Anyway, he might not have a plan but what he does have is a large supply of eyeballs wedged in floating patties of hamburger meat, so any theories about the Professor being misguided or misunderstood can be discarded. That's not something a person would have lying about unless they're properly evil.


The meaty eyeball friends all gather together in a sickening mockery of man. It's neat. It's also really well animated, with some extremely smooth motions, although I have to wonder whether I was supposed to find this boss sort of adorable as it stumbles around the arena like a baby giraffe taking its first steps. It's hardly surprising that its movements are hesitant, it has eyeballs for feet. Pros: you can always see where you're stepping. Cons: you're stepping on your eyeball. This battle was a welcome relief after the previous boss, and as a stand-up fist-fight it plays more to the strengths of Riding Fight's combat engine, so I'm going to say that the eyeball monster is the best thing about the final stage.


It's a shame, then, that the game's final boss goes right back to the same awkward, muddled style of fighting found in the robot dragon battle. He's an awkward, muddled-looking chap, too, although I can't fault his commitment to skulls. I count at least five, although now I see the boss - whose name is the incomprehensible P.Dil.Digess, by the way - has a lower jaw sticking out of his groin. Five and a half skulls, then. The others are for fightin', but that's his lovin' skull.
As final battles go it is not the most dramatic encounter I've ever been involved in. In fact, it's so similar to the robot dragon fight as to be pointless. I've done this before, and P.Dil.Digess doesn't have anything new and surprising to show me beyond his many skulls. Burn does his jump-kicking thing, supplemented by a few special attacks that I managed to scrounge up, and the boss' health bar was slowly whittled away. It was about as exciting as actual whittling, but also not hugely irritating or unpleasant, again like actual whittling.


Hold on, so is Hula the kidnapped girl, or is Burn talking to himself? The girl's expression points to the latter explanation, because she looks terribly confused about just what is going on. You and me both, love. I'm still struggling with what the Professor was up to and how he managed to turn into two different monsters, so let's just stick to the certainties, shall we? Burn has saved the day and the kidnapped girl, blasting across the Antarctic waters as he tells the mysterious Hula that this is only a daily experience. We get it, Burn. You're a cool guy.


She seems to think so too, and Riding Fight ends with the marriage of Burn and Unnamed Kidnap Victim. Keith also appears to be in a relationship with Shidzuka. She stole the national treasures of Japan, but Keith stole her heart. Rock song plays, credits roll, and Riding Fight is over.
I'm glad it's over. Not because it wasn't fun - I enjoyed playing it very much - but because it was already beginning to feel a tiny bit repetitive and I doubt an extra stage or two would have added anything of value to the game. It's a compact package, one that's just the right length for this kind of action, and as such I'd definitely recommend you give it a go. The two gameplay styles don't quite mesh perfectly, but they're enjoyable none-the-less, and a lot of the game's flaws are compensated for by its presentation. There's some wonderfully hammy voice acting and Burn and Keith are endearingly­x-treme. They may be two crude dudes (but not, y'know, the Two Crude Dudes) but they're so much fun it's impossible not to warm to them. The game being fun was just a bonus.

Oh no, someone's grandma has been captured by a green dog-pig hybrid monster that was once in the Navy, if that anchor tattoo on its hand is anything to go by! The captive granny is trying to render the monster's gun inoperable by leaking blood all over the barrel in a noble but ultimately futile gesture of defiance. Dog-pig looks more like a pig on the left but more like a dog on the right, where it is being viewed through the scope of a wonky rifle. At first I thought it looked more like a dog on the right because of the colours - a brown dog is not something outside the realms of possibility - but then again pigs aren't generally green and the left-hand view definitely looks more piggish. Well, at least the mystery of where Dr. Seuss got that green ham from has been cleared up.


My old good friends have been kidnapped by Evil Rock Bird, and I must save them. My old bad friends can go screw themselves. The Evil Rock Bird is welcome to them, he can have the pleasure of dealing with them never chipping in money for the pizzas but always eating, like, three slices anyway. If I remember my biology lessons, and I'm fairly certain I do, Evil Rock Bird is part of the same evolutionary line that contains the Rock Lobster. The tip of this branch on the tree of life is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who funnily enough seems to be turning into an actual rock as the years go by.


If you like your computer games to be more simple than the plot of a Where's Wally book but with a damn sight more skeletons, then Bloody Afternoon is the title for you. It's a shooting gallery, and a very basic one at that: monsters pop up, hesitate for a few moments as though the enormity of taking a human life is suddenly weighing heavily upon them, and then try to shoot you. Your task is to shoot them first, by moving your mouse pointer over them and clicking the button. That's it. I managed to shoot that one on the left. You can tell, because his head has exploded like a bottle of ketchup being trampled by an invisible elephant. Hang on, his head was full of gore and such... these aren't real skeletons at all! They're flesh-and-blood creatures who have made the (admittedly excellent) decision to wear skull masks. I feel cheated.


Sometimes these non-skeletons pop up right in front of you. This accomplishes two things: it makes them a bigger target and therefore easier to shoot, and it makes you wonder how the hell a skull-faced monster wearing bright purple robes and carrying a machine gun managed to sneak up to within a couple of feet of the player before jumping up and shouting "surprise!" I assume he shouts "surprise!" anyway. I can't think of any reason why he wouldn't. They're a fun-loving bunch, the non-skeletons: why, just look at the one in the centre-right window. I shot him to death and he's just laughing it off!


Once the game decides you've shot / clicked on enough of Evil Rock Bird's troops, a small wooden board with a picture of a bomb on it pops up. Shoot that and the castle's door explodes, because this fortress is apparently based on the boardgame Crossbows and Catapults. It's not a good security system.


Blah blah very carefully shoot the prisoners blah blah. Look, I'm a busy man, I don't have time to read all that. I skimmed it, I got the gist, it'll be fine.


Here are the prisoners, then, resplendent in their purple jumpsuits. The similarity between the clothes of the prisoners and their ghoulish guards will form the main bulk of my defence during my upcoming court case. The charges against me? I shot a lot of prisoners. My very existence is a repudiation of the Geneva Convention. The problem was that saving the prisoners in Bloody Afternoon requires a certain amount of delicacy - aiming your weapon using the mouse cursor allows for a fairly high degree of accuracy, and so to compensate the developers made the targets you need to shoot really, really small. You can see that the prisoner on the right is holding the padlock to their chains directly over their centre mass instead of, I dunno, at least holding it off to one side or something. You can also detect the faint hint of a scowl on his pixellated features, as though he's almost challenging the player to miss by a margin of mere pixels and accidentally shoot him in the neck. Again, "he looked like he wanted me to shoot him" will be part of my legal defence, although obviously not a very good part.


The most challenging test of my precision shooting skills came from these instances, where a green ghost popped up holding a prisoner in a headlock. This is a manoeuvre that benefits no-one involved: either the monster gets shot and the prisoner goes free, or I accidentally shoot the prisoner and the Evil Rock Bird's forces have one less hostage. It should go without saying that taking advice from a Keanu Reeves film is always a bad idea, but shooting the hostage is definitely not a viable option here. My only explanation is that the villains are trying to demoralise our hero into giving up by making him shoot his friends. That plan would only work if he wasn't a callous merchant of death with no regard for human life, so for once a villain's plot is undone by overestimating the hero rather than underestimating him.
Hitting the monster without harming the hostage is a difficult task, made harder by the player's weapon being a machine gun that fires constantly as you hold down the mouse button. Spraying and praying is not the way to go here no matter how tempting it is to unleash a torrential downpour of hot lead death, but I'll give Bloody Afternoon credit for gradually introducing the the need for accurate shooting - the skeletons with the grey shirts are wearing body armour and can only be killed by shooting them in the skull, so even on the first stage you're taught that you can't just spray bullets around like water out of a poorly-maintained log flume.


"Keep the ghosts busy. Distract them with a song and dance routine, ghosts love Broadway numbers. You can also try the classic "what's that behind you?" routine: ghosts will often fall for it, as their recent death and transformation into an ectoplasmic state has left them understandably nervous. Failing that, just shoot them. That keeps most things busy."


More of the same for the next stage. The distinctly non-ghostly skull appear in the windows, and you have to keep them busy. The one on the top right is definitely going to be busy, picking up the shattered fragments of his head could take all afternoon. All Bloody Afternoon, even, and at a stroke the title of the game suddenly makes sense.
The main additions to this screen are the small semi-circular windows and the prisoners crawling to freedom below the castle. Don't worry, the prisoners are perfectly safe down there, although I think they might all be paralysed from the waist down because they drag themselves through the tunnel using only their arms. It's heartbreaking to watch, it really is, which is why once they're out of the castle I have to leave them to their own devices. I just couldn't bear to watch them hauling themselves to safety without the use of their legs. Don't worry, I'm sure they'll be fine. They can't be shot, at any rate. I know, I tried. Strictly in the interests of knowledge, of course. I wasn't trying to hurry them along or anything.


You can shoot the semi-circular windows, though, and you'd better be paying close attention to them because these sneaky monsters - represented only by a pair of glowing red eyes and the menacing barrel of their gun - will appear in them frequently. Their size makes them by far the most dangerous enemy in the game, because their hitbox is tiny and their lack of a body makes it very difficult to spot them before they start shooting you.


All the prisoners have now escaped, but our mission is not over. The headquarters of this vile legion must be destroyed, and as I'm the only man who still has the use of his lower extremities then I guess I'm the man for the job. Look out The Rock Bird, I'm coming for you.


The skull troops have been replaced by orcs for the moment. I guess they had the bloody afternoon off.
The orc hordes aren't really much different than the skeleton men, and the glowing-eyed monsters are out in force, so the gameplay is not much changed from what's gone before aside from not having to worry about shooting hostages. The thing that really stood out for me what that the orcs look vastly less intimidating when they're in the distance than they do up-close. The far-away orcs are the kind of almost-cuddly lunkheads you'd see as minions in a pre-teen kid's cartoon about a streetwise youth who is sucked into a magical fantasy world, but once they get right up in your face they become grotesque, their faces strangely featureless apart from their pin-prick eyes and disturbing smile. They're not nice to look at, but as the trade-off is that they're easier to kill when they get up close I suppose it all works out okay.


In a shocking twist, the Evil Rock Bird was here all along! Striking fear into the hearts of absolutely no-one, Evil Rock Bird comes to life once you've killed enough orcs and promptly does fuck all beyond opening his beak, allowing you to shoot him to death. Is there a word stronger than "anticlimactic"? Because I could do with one do describe this "fight." I haven't been this underwhelmed with a boss battle since... nope, sorry, this is the most underwhelming encounter with an evil mastermind I've ever experienced. Iggy Koopa put up more of a fight than this guy.


Bloody Afternoon is not quite over yet, however. Before you can escape, you have to shoot a gate, oh, two hundred or so times. Thank god I have a fully automatic weapon, I'm not sure my mouse could take that many clicks otherwise.


Yep, that's definitely a gate. Big ol' metal gate. Looks like it could take two hundred bullets to knock down, sure. I've got infinite ammo, this shouldn't be a problem... but it is, because this final stage is (not surprisingly) the hardest of the lot. Enemies appear more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before and then can wipe away your health extremely rapidly if you don't deal with them, which of course means you don't have much spare time to shoot the gate. Maybe if you'd tried this hard earlier in the game, lads, then Evil Rock Bird wouldn't now be Evil Rock Gravel and you'd still have all those prisoners
As I did have quite a lot of health going into this stage and because my gun fires quite quickly, I thought I'd try ignoring the enemies and focussing on knocking down the gate.


It did not go very well. Nice Game Over screen, though, and it was sweet of the bad guys to take the time to give me a proper burial.


Through a combination of perseverance, luck and holding down the fire button and dragging it across the gate as I switched my aim between targets, I just about managed to destroy the gate. I also did serious damage to my score in the process - every time you fire a bullet that doesn't kill something, your score goes down by a point. It's a nice little mechanic that further promotes the need for accuracy, and because shooting (ha ha) for the high-score table is all Bloody Afternoon has to offer on the replayability front it's nice to have that extra flourish to keep things semi-interesting.


Huh, it turns out I was Rambo all along. It makes about as much sense as anything else in this game, and as John Rambo gazes wistfully on the carnage he has wrought, I accept Bloody Afternoon's congratulations - sorry, Gongratulations - and reflect on what was a fairly enjoyable way to spend an hour or so. Sure, the game's about as deep as a pixie's bathwater, but is that such a bad thing? Not every game has to be an epic adventure, and while Bloody Afternoon never gets more complex than clicking on things really fast like a meth addict filling in an online survey it's enjoyable while it lasts and certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. I experienced a reasonable facsimile of fun while I was playing it, anyway, and as this Bloody Afternoon fades into a Take a Bath and Get Cleaned Up Evening I am left to reflect that with my shooting, it's a miracle any hostages were freed at all.

I've talked about my love for Acclaim's 1999 voodoo adventure Shadow Man before, a game that's sometimes awkward to actually play but which has such a great sense of mood and atmosphere that I'll let it off - I've described it as the game with the biggest gulf between how much I enjoy it and how good it actually is, and part of that enjoyment comes from Shadow Man's very Cockney and wonderfully hammy take on Jack the Ripper.


This version of the Ripper is an architect by trade and a part-time dabbler in the terrifying mysteries of the human soul, mysteries he tries to unravel by cutting open prostitutes. He doesn't have much success, at least not on the soul mysteries front - he does okay with the prostitute murders - until the biblical demon and Shadow Man's main antagonist Legion shows up. Legion explains only certain "dark" souls have the power that Jack seeks, and then invites Jack to come and work for him on his project to build the Asylum: "a cathedral to pain," a sort of Salvation Army shelter for the most depraved scum humanity can offer. This impromptu job interview goes something like this:
"Jack, you're an architect, come and help me build a Giant Hell Church."
"Sure! Where are you going to build the Giant Hell Church?"
"The land of the dead."
"So... I'll need to be dead, then?"
"Yes."
"Cool, I'll be there in two ticks."


Jack does not take a lot of convincing. He may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has the sharpest knife in the drawer, and Legion gets his architect. I've gotta say, that's real convenient for Legion - how often do you find someone who's both an architect and a sadistic, unhinged killer willing to sacrifice their life for the promise of infernal powers? Now he has to wait for a mass-murdering construction crew, a satanic plumber, a psychopathic building inspector to sign off on the project. No wonder Asylum took one hundred years to build.


Jack reappears later as a boss. Self-disembowelment and a trip to Deadside somehow gave him the ability to climb on the the ceiling like a goddamn xenomorph, but mostly he's really into stabbing people with knives. As I watched him flouncing around in the cutscene, it dawned on me that Jack was really starting to remind me of someone. Then it hit me: the overwrought language, the East End accent, the open-chested shirt... he's Russell Brand. There you go, conclusive proof that Russell Brand is the modern reincarnation of Jack the Ripper. I'm just glad Jack didn't call them his knifey-wifeys.


Sega's Master System definitely-not-Castlevania-em-up Master of Darkness now, and in a game about spooky goings-on in Victorian London an appearance by Jack the Ripper is more thematically appropriate than in many of the games I'll be mentioning today. That doesn't explain why Master of Darkness' Ripper greets the player with a piratical "arr!," however.


"You wish to hinder me?" asks Jack, and as his plan is to stab me to death I think I'll have to say yes, I do wish to hinder him. It'd be weird if I just let him stab me to death, right?
His purple suit makes him look a little bit like the Joker, but otherwise this Jack is of a fairly standard type. He's wearing a suit, he's got a big knife. You know, the usual. I think the pirate voice was merely an effort to throw the police off his scent. The Ripper will never be caught if the police are wasting their time looking for Blackbeard.
He's not a very threatening Ripper, either. Any boss that can be defeated by standing on the same spot and wildly swinging your axe about like Conan trying to swat a mosquito is unlikely to engender heart-stopping terror, especially when he's so bouncy. I think he might have been conflated with Spring-Heeled Jack, a different character from Victorian folklore whose party piece was jumping out at servant girls and frightening them.


After you defeat him, it's implied that this Jack the Ripper was actually a waxwork dummy animated through strange magics. I'm sure Madame Tussauds are working hard to recreate these incantations, the punters will be pouring in if they can manage to get Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse up and singing again.


Speaking of waxworks, here's, erm, Waxworks, Horrorsoft's computer graphic adventure. It tells the story of one man's trials as he attempts to remove an ancient curse on his family by travelling back in time via haunted waxworks, including a trip to Whitechapel at the time of the Ripper murders.


That's a heck of a swoon there, lady. It's nice that you're getting into the spirit of things.
So, the player arrives in Victorian London, but unfortunately they arrive right next to the still-warm body of Jack's latest victim, making the local constabulary understandably keen to have a few words with you. Sadly those words are "you're Jack the Ripper" and "here, tell me if this noose feels tight," so the traditional adventure game experience of moving between locations, collecting items and solving puzzles is made more difficult and honestly kinda frustrating by your constant need to avoid the Old Bill. It's the 1880s, they're not much interested in things like evidence and fair trials.
If you manage to avoid both the law and the roaming mob looking to dish out the kind of justice that bears their name, there are still plenty of puzzles to solve, including feeding a dog offal laced with tranquillizers and liberating some tea from a locked warehouse. That last one is the most British adventure game quest I've ever heard of, but once it's done you can face off against Jack the Ripper himself.


Who would have thought that a doctor's bag could make such an effective shield? The big twist here is that Jack the Ripper is actually your brother - the curse I mentioned earlier is that every time twins are born into this family, one will be good and the other will be evil. I thought that was just how twins worked naturally? It's also pretty lame, as gypsy curses go. For starters, how often are twins born into a family, and how does one of them being evil punish said family for their ancient ill-treatment of the curse-inflicting gypsy? Seems to me the only people suffering under this curse are the working girls of Whitechapel. Okay, so trying to kill his own brother is probably not much fun for the player character but have some perspective - at least he gets to stay alive, or at least he will if I ever figure out how to get past Jack's impenetrable doctor's bag defence.


In ADK's World Heroes series, a time-travelled scientist called Doc Brown somehow avoids Universal Pictures' lawyers long enough to reach into the past and gather various historical figures together for the noble goal of watching them beat each other up. Jack the Ripper is one of those historical figures... sort of.


That's quite the makeover. The best thing about this animation is that if you look closely you'll see that Jack not only shreds his Victorian clothes but also shaves off his moustache in a stunning display of precision claw manipulation.
Clearly what happened here is that upon being dragged into the modern age, Jack spent his time catching up on the entirety of cinema until he reached the Eighties and discovered the man he was meant to be - a cross between a Mad Max villain and Freddy Krueger.


He gets really into the whole 80's street punk persona, too, and nothing demonstrates this more fully than seeing him lick the blades of his claws. Punks love licking sharp things. Knives, claws, the lids off tin cans, if it's metal and you can cut things with it then chances are some mohawked thug has slobbered all over it. Videogame hospitals must be full to bursting with vicious young men in sleeveless jackets who are suffering from lacerated tongues and tetanus. I could almost understand it if he was licking blood off his claws, but those claws are clean. Of course they're clean, he keeps licking them.


The World Heroes version of Jack really likes blood, by the way. I know, it's a real shocker, but I thought I should mention it just in case you were still harbouring suspicions that he was a loveable Edward Scissorhands type (he isn't).


Another Jack the Ripper with Slicing Claw Action appears the in the Playstation game MediEvil 2, where once again he is wearing clothes that show off his chest. That's three bare-chested Jack's so far, it's bordering on becoming a theme.


This Jack is also green and somewhat snake-like, pictured above menacing a mummy. The mummy is called Kiya, and she's the love interest of Sir Daniel Fortesque, the skeletal knight who is MediEvil's main character. It's very tense and all as Jack looms over his helpless victim, (and the top hat gives him an extra fifteen percent or so in looming capability,) but the MediEvil games are jolly, cartoony romps so I'm sure Sir Dan will be along any second to save the day.


Yikes. Well, he is Jack the Ripper, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, and it all works out anyway because Sir Dan goes back in time and stops this from happening. If nothing else, all these games are providing good explanations for why the Ripper killings suddenly stopped, be it via skeletal knight interventions, abductions through the space-time continuum or simple axe murder. These explanations are no more far-fetched than some of the real-world theories put forward about Jack the Ripper, if I'm honest. After all, someone once wrote a book claiming that Lewis Carroll was the Ripper and that Alice in Wonderland is full of clues about his dark deeds, which falls somewhere between "the murders were an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by the Royal Family" and "Jack was an exceptionally clumsy vampire" on the wacko-meter.


Capcom's Power Stone series is also a colourful cartoon adventure enlivened by the inclusion of a terrifying serial killer because sure, why not? It certainly perks things up a little. I'm waiting for Jeffrey Dahmer to move into my Animal Crossing town, that ought to make things more interesting. Anyway, this is Power Stone's Jack, and he looks like he wants a hug.


A pointy hug, a hug with knives, but a hug none-the-less. That's the body language of a man desperate for human contact, but his commitment to knives is as strong as any of these Rippers and thus he is destined to suffer a life full of loneliness. Presumably he is swathed in bandages because he keeps trying for unsolicited hugs without putting his knives down, which leads to him getting beaten up a lot.


This ending sequence suggest that his name is actually Jack the Slayer, but I don't think it means of the vampire variety and his sinister stalking of young women of darkened streets means I feel comfortable about including him in this list of Rippers. I'm still not going to give him a hug, though. Not until he puts on some trousers.


The Pokemon­-with-demons-em-ups of the Shin Megami Tensei series also get their own take on Jack the Ripper, and as in Power Stone he looks more lonely than anything else.


"Why do they always run away from my barber's shop?" cries Jack Ripper as he chases after his fleeing customers with a cut-throat razor in his hand, the scent of shaving foam heavy in the air. It's because of your hideous face, Jack Ripper. You look like a carved pumpkin that's been left on the porch until mid-December. I don't care how dapper your clothes are, you should not be working in an profession like hairdressing where there are lots of mirrors around.


Jack Ripper's most prominent role - if anything on the Virtual Boy can be considered "prominent" - was as a playable character in the game Jack Bros., released for Nintendo's ill-fated console and thus almost completely forgotten. It's a Gauntlet-style monster-maze game, and Jack Ripper's power is that he's really good at stabbing things, so Atlus stayed fairly true to the source material in that regard. In the US version of Jack Bros., Jack Ripper was renamed Jack Skelton. I assume that this is because even in the free and liberated year of 1995, Nintendo of America did not feel comfortable about having a character named after a real-world murderer in one of their games.


Okay, so here's the lamest Jack on the list, appearing the Nintendo 64 game Duke Nukem: Zero Hour.


At least he buttoned his shirt up. A mere mid-boss, this version of Jack seems even less intelligent than the others, and that is some stiff competition. Here he's just standing in front of Duke Nukem, trying to stab him to death while Duke pours round after round of semi-automatic fire into him. Then he dies, with no fanfare. The whole thing feels like kind of a waste.


Nearby, there's a recreation of the Goulston Street graffiti, with the word "juwes" replaced by "Dukes". It's an interesting if not particularly well-thought-out reference, which makes it rather fitting for a Duke Nukem game. Zing!


Finally for today we have Ripper, an FMV adventure game released for the PC in 1996. I have to confess, I've never played Ripper, so I read about it for a while only to discover that it's set in the future year of 2040 and it involves the kind of virtual reality that The Lawnmower Man briefly made popular. Would you like to see the Ripper's blood-curdling cyber-visage? No, you wouldn't, but here it is anyway.


He doesn't look comfortable in there, does he? Well, he's got plenty of company because Ripper stars some actors that you've actually heard of and none of them look comfortable either. Yes, it's quite the cast. Christopher Walken giving the performance of his career! Sorry, that should read "worst performance of his career!" Paul Giamatti, the very physical incarnation of the phrase "slovenly bachelor uncle"! Burgess Meredith, in what I really hope was not his final role! Here, check out the trailer, it's... something, chrome-skinned genderless VR humanoids and all.


Naturally I was curious about exactly what the hell was going on in this game, so I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. Unfortunately I didn't learn much. My eyes just kept sliding off the page, as though my brain was refusing to accept the existence of a cyberpunk Jack the Ripper adventure starring Christopher Walken. The few bits that I did pick up include the startling revelation that everyone involved in this spate of futuristic Ripper murders all once belonged to the same group of online gamers who played a Jack the Ripper-themed adventure together. So the basic plot could be described as "extreme online gaming guild bust-up," then? Also, the connection is made between the killer and Jack the Ripper due to their matching MOs, but it is later discovered that the murderer kills by hacking people's brains and forcing their body's internal pressure to rise until they burst. Okay, so, I am in no way a medical professional but I'm sure I could tell the difference between a corpse that has been slashed with a knife and one that fucking exploded. Explosions? Not Jack the Ripper's MO. He's a ripper. He rips. There's a clue in the name. He's not called Jack the Popper.
From what I've heard, Ripper is a pretty bad game, but it does have a gimmick where one of four characters can turn out to be the Cyber-Ripper. One of those characters is played by, you guessed it, Christopher Walken. Christopher Walken once played a virtual reality Jack the Ripper who kills the people on the 2040 equivalent of his Steam friends list. Nope, that's finished me off, it's time to wrap this one up.


On reflection, it becomes clear that Jack the Ripper is a perfect candidate for inclusion in a videogame. He provides a soupcon of real-world interest and he needs no introduction or explanation beyond "hey look, it's Jack the Ripper", but his crimes took place so long ago that his appearance is unlikely to cause offence, and because no-one knows who he was you don't have to worry about any living relatives demanding his removal. The mystery surrounding him allows writers plenty of space to work in weird theories and motives, and he comes with knife-fighting almost pre-defined as a combat style if you want to make your protagonist fight against him. The only thing you should really stay away from is making Jack the Ripper the hero of your game, but no-one would be daft enough to consider that, right?

It prominently features two athletic children. They're probably on a sensible, balanced diet already, but they're not quite in perfect health as they're both suffering from a condition that makes one of their eyes droop closed, not that it'll hold them back from living the active lifestyle. Their eye problems might explain why they haven't spotted the giant cake behind them, a cake that represents a cruel barb from Data East. You can't start talking about diets and then show me a cake slathered in enough icing to disintegrate Godzilla's teeth, it's making me want to eat my body weight in marzipan and I can't afford that amount of marzipan.


Time for some plot, and here's the usual mad scientist type plotting word conquest. Funnily enough he's leering over the Earth in the same way I would be over that cake. So, what fiendish plan is Dr. Dingus here preparing to unleash on the planet?


He's giving out free food! That bastard! Well, it's a refreshing change from the usual doomsday-cannon-aimed-at-the-Earth's-core line of villainy. It's got a certain subtlety to it that I enjoy, because it relies on humanity's tendency towards excess - no-one is forcing these people to eat the downpour of fried chicken and cake, but they do and thus they doom themselves. Everyone becomes morbidly obese, which has no bearing on anything that happens in the game. I think that's the extent of the evil Doctor's plan - "make everyone fat". There's no step two, it's not like he's hiding outside the White House, twirling his moustache and saying "soon the President will be too fat to enter the Oval Office, and then I will be in charge! Muahaha!" Maybe the Doctor owns a company that makes mobility scooters, that would at least give him a motive.


Of course, our brave heroes will not stand idly by and watch the the people of Earth be condemned to a life of diabetes and elasticated trousers, and so the two youths set out to stop the Doctor. I've come to think of them as Punky and Spunky, the Exercise Extremists. They didn't eat the insta-fattening food. They must have been off somewhere filming a workout video or getting their headbands de-loused. They're here now, though, these nameless specimens of physical perfection, and they're ready to travel across the globe in search of the Doctor.


Okay, maybe the enfattening of the human race had consequences more grave than I first imagined. This map does not make for comforting reading - a devilish mountain now covers most of the USA, South America has become a vast, haunted graveyard and a giant carrot looms menacingly over India. No wonder that octopus wears such an expression of wild-eyed bogglement, the world has changed so much and it's left him reeling.


The game itself is a single-screen platformer that owes a great debt to Bubble Bobble and especially to Snow Bros., to the point that calling it "Snow Bros. with obesity instead of snow" feels like a fair assessment of the gameplay. Punky (or Spunky, I never did decide which was which) has to eliminate all the enemies on the screen before he can move on to the next stage, and to do that he has to make the enemies fat. Pressing fire makes him throw a sweet, which starts the fattening process, and once the enemies are fat Punky can run into the bad guy to defeat it. If the enemy was hit by one sweet they only get a bit fat - think Val Kilmer's chunky phase - and you can touch them to send them rolling left or right, where eventually they will pop and die. Hit them with more than one sweet and they'll gain the kind of bulk seen in your late-stage Marlon Brandos, and touching them when they're that size causes them to bounce around the screen, destroying any other enemies they bump into. If they're not fat at all, touching a monster is instant death, so the tactics for Diet Go Go are made apparent very early on: pump up some enemies as fast as you can and kick them around the screen, hoping that they take out the majority of their associates before they get close to you.


Each stage has plenty of monsters, too. Just look at all those gingerbread men, patrolling these platforms while peering at the player with eyes that are either soulless black voids or chocolate chips, the sinister silent guardians of the Dessert Kingdom. Why did I start my mission with the land of puddings? That seems like it would be the hardest place to free from the shackles of obesity. It'll be hard to affect change in the local attitudes toward healthy food when you can take a bite out of Jelly Mountain whenever you're feeling peckish. I should have started at the Giant Indian Carrot.


After a couple of stages, each world ends with a boss battle and they're all pretty much the same. Because you can't directly hurt the boss, you have to inflate its minions and kick them into the boss to cause it damage. The first boss is this evil fairytale queen, who keeps summoning gingerbread men even after I've used their bodies to bash her about five or six times. For their part the gingerbread men suffer this ignominy with quiet grace, never complaining ever once I've pumped them full of sweets and they've ballooned into the grotesque globular freaks you can see in the picture above. That's fatter than you get just from eating sugar, I'm sure of it. I know what's really going on here: my sweets are carefully tailored to the allergies of each opponent. They're not swelling up through calorie intake, they're going into anaphylactic shock.
After kicking enough grossly swollen gingerbread men into the queen - it doesn't take long, as she covers most of the screen - the first world is over. From here our heroes will move from themed world to themed world, doing the same thing as they did in the World of Sweets: throwing overweight monsters at each other until the Earth is safe once more. Next up - a trip to the funfair!


The funfair is packed with killer Pinocchios and angry gumball dispensers, both of which can be made fat with the application of sweets despite that making no sense at all. Pinocchios are made of wood, and gumball machines? Their whole raison d'etre is to be filled with sweets, you'd think this would all be in a day's work for them.


The monsters can also get their calorific revenge by firing their own girth-increasing morsels at our hero. Get hit with one of these and you start getting plump, as you can see here, and once you're fat eating another item of food will cost you a life. Diet Go Go has a very weird relationship with the concept of a healthy diet. Any kind of food will make you fat and a second helping will kill you, which in itself is going to cause some hang-ups, but when your character does get chubby you can't shed the pounds by running around and jumping about, oh no - you have to find a "diet drink," the game placing a higher value on faddy weight-loss aids than on sensible, healthful exercise. Having thought about this nightmarish food scenario for a few minutes, I have reached only one conclusion: that I have spent more time thinking about Diet Go Go's premise than anyone in the western hemisphere.


The boss is a big evil marionette. How do I know it's evil? It's the hat. No man, beast or animated wood golem with a shred of decency would wear that, and the matching pink bootees mean that we can exclude "I got dressed in the dark" or "it's part of a silly joke, ha ha" as possible explanations. No, that outfit - such as it is - was planned, possibly by a mad sorcerer. I'm less worried about the boss than I am that our hero's poor congested heart is going to explode, mind you.


It's the obligatory ice-themed stage! Well, why not get it out of the way early? This one has the usual penguins and snowmen, but it also contains the wandering ghosts of doomed Arctic explorers. You can make these ghosts fat, somehow. I assume the sweets I'm throwing at them are just piling up under their sheets.


As you play Diet Go Go you'll occasionally collect big Data East coins, each of which gives you one spin of the slot machine at the top of the screen. If it hits the jackpot you win a prize - usually this is in the form of a rain of gems that you can collect for extra points, but sometimes it warps you to this special Bonus Game where there's a rain of gems but you have to jump between these clouds without falling in order to collect them. That, uh, doesn't feel very special. My one big criticism of Diet Go Go's controls would be that there's sometimes a delay between you pressing jump and your character actually jumping. In regular gameplay this doesn't matter too much because you can't fall off the bottom of the screen, but it becomes noticeable in the bonus game and it's never fun to fail at something like this, something where you're sure you should be able to do it easily. The game isn't exactly encouraging if you mess it up, either.


"STOP," it commands. "Just... stop. You're embarrassing yourself. We'll try this again later, if you promise to take it seriously, but for now get back to inflating penguins."


Or inflating blocks of ice, even, which I can then use to throw at this ice dragon. The ice dragon is the most challenging boss so far. This is because it is the biggest boss so far, and that means there's more of it to avoid. It also means that it's a very large target for me to kick inflated icicles at, so it's all swings and roundabouts really, innit?


This world's theme: all the enemies are something you might include in a warming autumnal soup, with the possible exception of the carnivorous plant at the top. My main preparation tip for this theoretical soup is to make sure you remove the eyeballs from the mushroom and onion creatures first. No-one wants their soup to look at them while they're trying to eat it.
If you're paying even the slightest bit of attention to this article - and I wouldn't blame you if you weren't - you'll have noticed that Diet Go Go includes pumpkin-headed monsters and therefore gets a big thumbs up from me and my personal cast-iron guarantee that it's worth playing. Maybe not for the gameplay, which is nothing special and requires no real skill, but you can't argue with pumpkin-headed monsters. Literally, I mean, they'll just stare at you with their eye carvings. They're too laid-back to get confrontational. Check out the engorged pumpkin on the right, he looks so mellow. He doesn't want any of your bad vibes, man.


Sadly, the boss is not a giant pumpkin and as such I have no interest in it. It's a one-eyed mushroom. "One-eyed mushroom" sounds like a phrase you really shouldn't search for on the internet.


The undersea kingdom (desolate ruins edition) of Atlantis now, and that penguin in the top-left looks on in horror as Punky causes one of his nest-mates to swell into a barely-recognisable sphere of feathers and blubber. The rest of the sea life is much less concerned with what's going on, which feels about right. I can't imagine the anemones having real deep feelings about their current predicament, if that even is a sea anemone and not a pink bag of fries with googly eyes drawn on it.


All will cower before CRABULON, doom of Atlantis! He is a crab that is significantly larger than a normal crab! Significantly! Yeah, I'm trying to hype him up and it's not working. Even Crabulon (probably not his real name) himself looks dreadfully bored with the whole affair. More interesting is the crab dinner that appeared when I popped one of Crabulon's attack bubble. It has a tiny skull over it, and any food marked with the symbol of the skull it probably not suitable for human consumption... but then again no food in this game is safe. Eating anything will make you fat and, eventually, dead, so why does this plate of crab get the special skull-signal treatment? Perhaps it's just poisoned. The big crab is trying to poison me with smaller crabs. What a dick.


I have to be honest, I thought the stages in Diet Go Go would be more obviously food-related. It started off that way in the Land of Dessert, and I suppose you could argue that the previous stage had a seafood motif, but that's all gone out the window now as our hero jumps-n-plumps his way through Transylvania, which according to the in-game map has been relocated to the USA. It's home to weird snakes that are just a head an a tail - although now I think about it all snakes are just a head and a tail - and Frankensteins that are subtly different than the norm, with blue skin and bolts in their temples rather than their necks. I like it, it makes a nice change.


The boss is Dracula, or maybe a dracula, "draculas" being the subset of vampires who dress in eveningwear at all times and say things like "velcome to my mountaintop castle, ah ha ha!" and then there's a crash of thunder. This dracula looks kinda grandad-ish. If the old man from Up was bitten by a nosferatu and started dying his hair, this is what you'd get. It's a combination of his bushy eyebrows and lack of non-fang teeth that does it.


"Okay, what shall we have as the background for this world? The Taj Mahal? Sounds good, but it need something else, something that'll really bring it to life. I know, how about colossal vegetables? Yeah, that's perfect!" says the designer of Diet Go Go, even as the nice men from the mental health clinic bundle him into the back of their padded ambulance. You might think it's unfair to judge a man just for trying to come up with a unique backdrop for a videogame but then there are those carrot men. They are not the product of a healthy mind.


Some kind of mechanical cooking pot attacks, trying to make our hero fat by throwing steaming hot ladlefuls of whatever's bubbling away inside it around the screen. At first I thought that to damage it you had to launch carrot men at him in such a way that they landed in the pot, but then I hit it on the side and it took damage anyway. I wasn't surprised - Diet Go Go isn't interested in creating a nuanced gameplay experience, you just make enemies fat and kick them around the screen. There's very little planning involved and almost no aiming necessary, so after a while it all starts to feel very rote and disappointingly predictable.


Time for a dinosaur-themed stage now, and it looks an awful lot like Data East's own caveman platformer Joe and Mac. I don't think this is an accident, either, because Diet Go Go includes several references to other Data East games. Not only that, it is heavily based - "directly copied" might be a better way of putting it - on a game that Data East released the previous year called Tumblepop. Tumblepop is almost identical to Diet Go Go in both gameplay and graphical style, the main difference being that in Tumblepop you suck enemies up with a vacuum cleaner and then fire them out instead of Diet Go Go's lard-based executions. The two games even share the same Mad Scientist villain, but Tumblepop has a boss based on the Flatwoods Monster so I'm regretting my decision to play Diet Go Go rather than it's predecessor pretty hard right now.


The two-headed pterodactyl boss lays eggs, which hatch into baby pterodactyls, as you would expect. I threw these baby pterodactyls at the boss until it was defeated, so essentially I beat the boss to death with its own children. That's a bit grim.


I do like these pink slime-blobs. They look like they're having a really good time, their eyes wide with wonderment as they look around this gelatinous alien world. I think it might be Yuggoth. An alternate explanation would be that the player character has been shrunk to microscopic size and placed in the nasal cavity of a very ill person.


A less endearing blob takes on the role of end-of-stage guardian. He doesn't look very happy about it. He's had to come into work during The Time of The Thousand Agonies, the slime-monster equivalent of Sunday morning, just become some weird kid in sweatbands is trying to give the neighbourhood larvae high cholesterol.


Hey look, another horror level! It's got grim reapers and pumpkin men and clowns, because Data East know about the clowns. They understand.


Oh no, a giant ghost! But how do you kill that which does not live? By throwing smaller enemies at it, of course. I thought we'd covered this. I don't have time to be helping it with the unresolved issues of its former life, and our hero can't pick up holy water in case it turns out to be too much like food and it makes him swell up so a regular exorcism is right out. It's going to have to be ghosts slamming into ghosts, like an X-rated Paranormal Activity parody.


I've skipped showing you this stage because it's just another alien world with a slightly different background and recoloured jellyblob enemies, but the boss is about as close as Diet Go Go comes to a noticeable gimmick so I thought I should mention it. The boss, a small germ monster who didn't get past the ausition stage for Dr. Mario, is surrounded by smaller amoebas that you have to pull away from him to use as ammunition. This means that as the battle goes on the boss gets smaller and, in theory, more difficult to hit, although in practise the inflated enemies you're using as projectiles are so big and cover so much of the screen as they bounce around that you're unlikely to have much of a problem landing blows. It's almost an interesting boss fight, but unfortunately it's also the game's best effort at an interesting boss fight, which makes it difficult to praise Diet Go Go as a gameplay experience.


The final stage is set in space, and the background give the player a preview of what London Bridge will look like when the Blade Runner-inspired cyberpunk future really kicks in. We've seen all the monsters in this stage before, except for the spacemen and hold on, I recognise those spacemen: they're Chelnov, the Atomic Runner! They run around the screen and are easily killed, and that's exactly how I remember Chelnov being in Atomic Runner so well done to Data East for really nailing down his character.


Okay, it's time for me to stop writing about videogames and break into the lucrative children's book market. My first effort will be the story of Harry the Grumpy UFO. Why is he grumpy? Because he got stuck annihilating the earthlings while the other UFOs get to go to the cool planets. The elevator pitch is "Thomas the Tank Engine with death-rays." I think it's going to be big.
A youth misspent watching The X-Files and reading paranormal magazines means that I immediately recognised this UFO as a based on the one "photographed" by UFO "expert" and "not a fraud"George Adamski. I forgot my PIN number at the cash machine the other day. It doesn't seem like a fair trade.


The Mad Doctor was inside the UFO all along, but not to worry - with his advanced and miserable-looking spacecraft destroyed, he is utterly defenceless and our hero can balloon him up at will to bring an end to the game, and Data East get a thumbs-up from me for including my preferred "evil scientist is useless in an actual fight" ending. It's not as good as the petulant fist-waving from Crude Buster, but I'll take it.


Yes, I definitely feel like this picture of two gurning children dressed as fitness instructors from 1991 is a suitable reward for the time and effort spent getting through Diet Go Go. I don't even know what those facial expressions are supposed to be. Are they happy? Mocking me? Being injected with high-grade opiates? I doubt we will ever know.


Diet Go Go is not a very good game, especially if you're after a test of skill and reflexes. Every stage plays out the same: inflate the nearest monster, kick it around and then mop up any survivors. You might not think it given that I've written so many bloody words about it, but it's a short game, too, and it's not uncommon for stages to last less than twenty seconds. It's a tired copy of a game that had been released by the same company a year before, but still I warmed to it. This is in large part thanks to the graphics and specifically the creature designs - almost all of them are either cute enough to be endearing or weird enough to be interesting, and they're all very nicely drawn and animated. It's not like the gameplay's terrible, either, it's just one-note and, by the end of the game, unpleasantly repetitious. Give it a try if you really love single-screen platformer or cutesy monsters. Or don't, what am I, your mother? I'm not going to to tell you what games to play. The closest I'll get to that kind of advice is "don't eat poisoned crab dinners," but they've got little skulls hovering over them so you don't need me to tell you that.