Not that the game ever uses the subtitle Space Cadet Adventures, referring to itself only as The Ren and Stimpy Show, which is a bit strange. I know the Game Boy isn't blessed with an overabundance of resolution but I'm sure you could have squeezed the subtitle - you know, the thing that tells potential players what kind of adventures Ren and Stimpy are going to be having - in there somewhere. Also unusual is the way the gameplay just starts when you turn the cartridge on, without waiting for any input from the player. It's not a game overloaded with an excess of pointless options and configuration settings, then.


For those of you who don't know, The Ren and Stimpy Show was a Nickelodeon cartoon about the frequently abusive and very occasionally touching relationship between Ren Hoek, a paranoid, psychotic chihuahua and his friend / life partner / punchbag Stimpson J. Cat, who is a cat. A really, really stupid cat. The general course of any given Ren and Stimpy episode involves Stimpy doing something stupid and Ren beating the crap out of him. It's not necessarily what you'd call a "kid's" cartoon. Space Cadet Adventures is specifically based on the "outer space" episodes of Ren and Stimpy, where Captain Ren and Cadet Stimpy travel the universe in the amazing year 400 billion, getting sucked through black holes and succumbing to space madness, that kind of thing.


The game begins with Captain Ren on a spacewalk, cooking sausages for dinner in the merciless vacuum of space. Well, it stops the ship filling up with that horrible greasy smell, you know? If you're wondering how he's managed to get a fire going in an oxygen-free environment, don't. It's not worth it.
With dinner cooked, Ren just needs Stimpy to open the ship's hatch so he can get back inside.


Of course, Stimpy is so incredibly stupid that he presses the "Cut Lifeline" button instead of the one marked "Open Hatch." This strikes at the very heart of Ren and Stimpy's dynamic, because while Stimpy's incompetence means that Ren is left drifting in space Ren has no-one to blame but himself. He knows that Stimpy cannot perform even the most basic of tasks, and yet he continues to put his trust in his dumb cat friend. His frequent anger at Stimpy is really misdirected rage that he feels towards himself.


And so, with Ren floating in the background where he looks a bit like E.T.'s sprite from his Atari 2600 adventure, Stimpy sets off on a journey to the other side of the ship. It's a journey fraught with danger because despite being nigh-indestructible in the cartoon this version of Stimpy dies in a single hit and everything's out to kill him. Patches of unidentified goo on the floor? Immediately fatal. The soundwaves emanating from a ringing alarm? Deadlier than a shark with a hand grenade, because at least that would give you some time to escape as the shark struggles to remove the grenade's pin with his flippers. Most menacing of all, however, are the plethora of buttons that litter the stage.


Yes, buttons. Horrible, murderous buttons, or at least they are when they're in the "depressed" or "not blinking" phases of their constant on-and-off movements, as so it becomes clear very early on that despite nominally being a platformer Space Cadet Adventures is more of a stop-n-go kind of experience, with plenty of waiting around for the hazards of the stage to align in such a way that you can safely walk past them. Having tried out some jumping, I am okay with this. Stimpy's jumps are very slow and floaty, something I am going to graciously put down to the game being set in a low gravity situation and not incompetent programming, and the less I have to use them the better.


There are some enemies, like these scuttling robots, that can be defeated in a more traditional videogame manner than waiting for them to turn off and walking past them. Stimpy has a projectile attack that can deal them them, and that projectile is a hairball that he pukes up with great velocity, which is the most disgusting projectile this side of an animal sanctuary for elderly, incontinent chimpanzees.


Oh look, it's Log! That's a thing that was actually in The Ren and Stimpy cartoon, right? It has no reason to be here and does nothing but gently bob up and down, but it was in the show so you will enjoy its presence. Okay, that is perhaps a trifle harsh on the game's developers, because they have made some effort to give the game a familiar Ren and Stimpy feel by including many graphical touches taken directly from the show - the three-person spacesuit from the "Space Madness" episode shows up as an enemy, the glowing electric pylons from the background of the same episode appear as environmental hazards - but it all feels a little bolted-on and certainly does nothing to improve the gameplay, which is as unimaginative and soporific as these screenshots suggest.


And yet, despite the simplicity of Space Cadet Adventures, I managed to get stuck on the first stage. This was not because it's difficult to move without taking damage from the many obstacles that are lurking just off-screen (although it is) but because I couldn't tell what the hell are solid, stand-on-able platforms and what is mere background illustration. It took me way longer than it should have to escape the platform pictured above, because I didn't realise that there are in fact a plethora of viable platforms nearby. Those small black windows? Stimpy can stand on those. The line graphs? He can stand on those too. The tiny circles that look like nothing more than rivets holding this ship together? Yes, he can even perch atop those, somehow. It's a good job I accidentally landed on one of them while trying to climb upwards otherwise I doubt I would have ever figured out that they can take Stimpy's considerable weight.


Eventually I made it outside the ship, and suddenly the gameplay is timed - I've got thirty seconds get from one end of the stage to the other, despite the rest of the game thus far being very much a laid-back, no-need-to-hurry affair. If you don't make it in time, or if Stimpy is killed by the pummelling rain of space debris, then you're sent right back to the start of the game. Luckily I had collected enough Powdered Toast to give me a full health bar, and so I ignored any and all obstacles, relying on the temporary invincibility granted by taking damage to see me through to the end. You might call it cheating, but it also feels in-character for Stimpy. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.


Always one to look on the bright side, I will admit that Space Cadet Adventures has some good artwork in these between-stage cutscenes. That is recognisably Ren Hoek. I'm happy with that, although it is making me wish Imagineering has just made this whole game a graphic adventure of some sort, more nice pixel portraits and less sluggish platforming would have been fine by me. Play to your strengths, that kind of thing.
Anyway, Ren is safe, because rage is just as effective at sustaining him as oxygen, but he'd like to get back into the (relative) safety of the ship. Unfortunately Stimpy lets go of him while he's opening the hatch, and so Ren floats back out into space.


It's okay, though, because he lands unharmed on an alien planet. We're playing as Ren now, and he's functionally identical to Stimpy with the small difference that Stimpy's long-ranged hairball projectile has been replaced by a short-range and almost entirely useless slap. That's a surprisingly deep bit of commentary on Ren's anger issues, really: his first impulse is always to physically beat his problems into submission, but his fury overcomes his better judgement and gets him into trouble. It's much better to stay calm and avoid confrontation. like here where you can simply jump over the alien thing without trying to slap it. Hold on, I recognise that alien thing...


I'm fairly sure it's supposed to be one of these three-eye, tentacle-mouthed space-brains from the "Marooned" episode of The Ren and Stimpy Show. In the cartoon they're huge and disturbingly, well, alien creatures that shove Ren and Stimpy into their brain-sacs, where they are presumably killed by the brain alien's internal fauna of bacteria and antibodies and such. I've always found them to be one of Ren and Stimpy's most unsettling moments, and that's saying something given how weird the show is, so it's a shame to see them here reduced to the threat level - and the appearance - of a cabbage slowly rolling along the ground.


They're still the most exciting thing about this stage, mind you. It seems the developers decided that the platforming action of stage one was so intensely thrilling that it put the player at risk of a deadly cardiac event caused by sheer, unadulterated fun, so to balance things out they got rid of all the platforming from Ren's stage and just had him plod forwards across a mostly flat plain. They did it for you, don't you understand? Why, if you'd had to avoid the cabbage-brains and jump between two moving rocks, the consequences could have been catastrophic!


Then, shockingly, I found something slightly out of the ordinary! If you collect enough cans of Powdered Toast (as opposed to the pieces of Powdered Toast that restore your health) and stand in front of one of the television sets dotted throughout the stages, you'll be whisked away to the magical world of Muddy Mudskipper, television star and weird half-fish freak of evolution! Muddy Mudskipper has a game for you to play - he flips three coins, and you have to guess if they'll land heads or tails. Guess correctly twice and you're made invincible for a while. Guess right three times and you're made invincible for a slightly longer while! It's a very useful prize, useful enough that I can forgive Muddy for calling me a lousy bum without even taking the time to get to know me.


There's a change of scenery, if not a change of gameplay, later in the stage when Ren finds himself inside a living creature. I bring it up chiefly to show you the bizarre slug creature that Ren is jumping over in the screenshot above. It's expression made me laugh, is all, and laughter should be shared with the world. In a kid's animated movie about household appliances that are magically brought to life, that is the look of a living vacuum cleaner who has just realised that the only reason for its existence is to suck up other people's filth. "It's a living," croaks Herbert the Hoover, his throat clogged with shed skin cells and pet dander.


Having guided Ren back to his spaceship, said ship is immediately engulfed by another space ship that looks like a giant toilet. I'm undecided about whether to go with a "Klingon" joke. I think it might be too subtle for a game featuring the S.S. Flush, a giant spacefaring toilet.


The inside of the ship is also appointed in a lavatorial motif, and Stimpy must negotiate deadly bog roll avalanches and plunger-hurling aliens in his quest to find Ren who was totally here a minute ago, I swear. It's more of the same platforming action as the first stage, with two noticeable improvements: it's a lot easier to tell what is and what isn't an actual platform, and it's shorter. Much shorter, and as the game progresses the stages get shorter still, as though the developers have become just as fed up of the whole affair as I have and we're equally keen for Space Cadet Adventures to be over already.


I think I've made it fairly clear thus far that The Ren and Stimpy Show: Space Cadet Adventures is not a good game, but for a moment I thought maybe I was being too harsh on it. I'm not in a great mood, and maybe that was being reflected in the way I was approaching this game, but then I got deeper into the S.S. Flush stage and no, I was right, it's just bad. You know that thing games sometimes do where you keep repeating the same section over and over again until you go through it in the right order or take the correct path, like the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time or the looping castle in Super Mario Bros.? I thought Space Cadet Adventures was doing that, but it turned out the same arrangement of platforms was just copy-pasted a few times to pad things out. I think my original "bad game" assessment is going to hold up to scrutiny after all.


I found Ren at the end of another timed stage. He's been grabbed by a tentacle. That probably would have been more interesting to see than watching Stimpy fight his way through the bathroom section of B&Q, but what do I know? I'm not a videogame designer.


Reunited and then once again separated moments later, Ren and Stimpy float down to another planet for the final stage - the Asteroid City Trailer Park.


It's back to playing as Ren, which means this gun-toting alien is gettin' slapped even if it costs Ren some health in the process - which it does, because you have to be standing so close to an enemy that you're practically sharing internal organs before your slap will reach them. The poor creature was only defending its trailer-park home. If I saw a talking, psychotic chihuahua fall from the sky I'd probably reach from my astro-shotgun too.


Graphically this stage isn't bad at all, and the futuristic squalor of an intergalactic trailer park makes for an interesting setting, but it's just not very Ren and Stimpy. This is Ren and Stimpy's curse, both the cartoon and the videogames based on it: no-one ever seemed sure what to make of it. I dimly recall when Ren and Stimpy was first shown on the BBC it was presented as being an "adult" animation akin to The Simpsons, despite those shows being as different as Cheers and the violent hallucinations of a madman, and when it came time to make videogames based on the series no-one seemed to know the best way to capture Ren and Stimpy's surreal energy. In practise this resulted (as was almost always the case with licensed cartoon tie-ins) in a string of generic platformers, a category into which Space Cadet Adventures fits comfortably. Would it even be possible to make a good Ren and Stimpy game? I mentioned graphic adventures before, and a Sam and Max-inspired interactive cartoon feels like it could have had the best chance of success, but it would still be difficult when the characters don't have any easily game-ifiable characteristics and the show itself never stuck to one consistent theme.


The game ends with another timed stage featuring some of the blandest, least engaging ledge-hopping I've ever participated in, a bold experiment in redefining the word "game" to mean something closer to "chore." In the great gamut of videogaming experiences, this is the supermarket own-brand, the budget label, the kind of gameplay you'd expect to find in a plain white no-frills box with no markings other than the word "platforming" crudely stencilled on the side. You jump up from platform to platform against a plain grey backdrop. Some of the platforms fall down. This is the climax of the game, then, and it's less involved than the first twenty seconds of Super Mario Bros.


It turns out that Ren has just climbed up a gargantuan tower of cat litter. Stimpy is already at the top, eating said cat litter. It is a fitting finale for a game that has mostly been an unpleasant grey sludge dotted with the occasional piece of shit.


With an eloquence that I cannot match, Ren's expression implies that he enjoyed the experience even less than I did. At least it was short, and it really did keep getting shorter as it went on - maybe I was just more gung-ho towards the end and rushed though the final areas, but I'd swear that the final stage is only a third of the length of the first stage.


The game ends, as Ren and Stimpy so often does, with Ren slapping Stimpy in the face, and I'm left to reflect on a gameplay experience with all the vibrancy and charm of a cinderblock. The thing is, it's not even a bad enough game to get really upset about, although you'd definitely be feeling pretty miffed if you'd paid full retail price for it. The controls are slow and sticky, but I've definitely suffered through worse, and there are no bafflingly awful gameplay mechanics to deal with. Space Cadet Adventures' problems lie with it's complete lack of imagination, resulting in a dry fart of a game that wafts by without leaving any impression on the player aside from maybe a disgruntled wrinkling of the nose. I'd love to recommend a different Ren and Stimpy game to you, but from what I can remember they're all kinda naff so stick to watching the cartoon or, at a stretch, start your own collection of magic nose goblins.

That's Tough Turf, one groundsman's quest to keep his local football pitch free of crabgrass and dog muck. Well, no, obviously not, but I've got free reign to make up whatever story I like for this one. It won't conflict with any plot the game itself gives you, because it gives you none. No shot of a sneering villain, no description of a city held hostage by a malevolent gang with a name like Wild Tyrant or Buster Skull, you just press start and the game begins.


It begins with a delivery. A delivery of justice, as this lorry rolls up and drops off Tough Turf's hero, as though the populace of Punchfight City clubbed together and ordered a vigilante avenger off Amazon. His name and reasons for fighting shall forever remain a mystery, but he puts me in mind of a more blonde version of Youtube tat reviewer Stuart Ashen. I think it's the red tie.


Combat is firmly based on the Double Dragon template, with separate buttons for punch, kick and jump, the ability to pick up weapons but no health-sapping emergency special move. Having the mechanics set up this way isn't all that appealing. I have to be honest, I've never been that big a fan of Double Dragon and the stiff, clunky controls are most of the reason why, so it's a shame that Tough Turf plays almost identically. This biggest annoyance is that you have to press jump and kick at the same time to perform a jumping kick, which sounds totally logical but which feels cumbersome next to the system found in most beat-em-ups that lets you press kick at any point while you're in the air. It's a minor irritation, though, and one that's probably personal to me, and on the flip-side Tough Turf has the welcome addition of a crouch command. Press punch and kick together and not-Ashens ducks, which is useful for avoiding the many, many lead pipes that will be swung his way during the course of his adventure.


Tough Turf's setting is the usual urban dystopia populated by violent thugs with not a single full-length sleeve between them. That's how you can tell our hero is a good guy - he still has sleeves, he's just rolled them up. The game's commitment to this sleeveless motif is such that I don't think there is a single enemy that isn't exercising their right to bare arms, although that's partly thanks to the game recycling the same five or six sprites for every opponent.
There's also an advert for a modem on the wall, which makes me feel old as I remember the concept of buying a dial-up modem. They were very rarely advertising using posters of disinterested-looking women pasted on the walls of back alleys, mind you. Maybe I'm reading it wrong and it's actually an advert for a hyper-specific phone sex line.


And so you go on, clobbering punks until the stage runs out of punks and ends. There are no end-of-stage bosses here, and the lack of effective management is readily apparent in the way the troops have little battle strategy beyond trying to surround you. They really need to recruit some better leadership, someone who can take charge of this ragtag organisation and whip them into shape. Possibly with an actual whip, given the prevalence of the dominatrix cliché in beat-em-ups. It makes things easier for our hero, though, and anything that makes this game easier is to be welcomed because without changing the dipswitch settings you can't continue your game when you die, and there are no health-restoring items along the way.


Stage two now, which takes place in the factory that makes all the oil drums in all the belt-scrolling brawlers I've ever played. They're all open, the lids being manufactured in a different factory several miles down the road. In the freshly-minted state the barrels can neither be smashed apart to reveal cooked chickens or thrown at your enemies, serving as nothing more than a raised stage on which our hero must fight the already over-familiar set of goons. I recommend standing near the edge of Fort Barrel and repeatedly kicking the bad guys off the side as they climb up. It doesn't make beating them any faster, but the repeated embarrassment must be doing their self-esteem some serious damage.


Fort Barrel is the only interesting thing about stage two, honestly. The level ends with a fight against some larger-than-average punks in front of a door with "factory" written on it, just in case you weren't clear that this stage was set in a factory and not the garage of someone with an all-consuming desire to possess the world's largest oil drum collection. You don't even get to go through the door: when the stage ends, our hero drops through that grate in the floor. What a tease. Hang on, dropping through a floor grate... the next stage is going to be a sewer level, isn't it?


Yes, the spacious and brightly-lit sewers that are an integral part of any videogame city, providing much-needed refuge for vicious gangs, misunderstood mutant crimefighters and the designers of tedious valve-based waterflow puzzles! These particular sewers are made of brick. Lots and lots of grey-brown brick, a landscape that reminds me of nothing so much as a greasy polystyrene tray found on the floor after last night's regrettable takeaway kebab experience. The thug with the broken bottle is walking though this landscape with no shoes on. While joining a violent street gang requires a certain level of sociopathy, entering the sewers barefoot speaks to much deeper psychological problems. That man needs help. Luckily, this is a videogame, and as such having a metal bar smashed into your head counts as "help".


The developers tried to jazz up the sewer stage with the inclusion of these spiked rollers that have to be jumped over. Unfortunately our hero's jumping abilities are... how can I put this politely? Shit. He is shit at jumping, and so getting past these rollers without taking any damage was beyond me. Granted, I didn't try that hard to get the timing right, because I'd managed to give myself unlimited continues and even I have better things to do with my life than figuring out the strange parabola of this guy's awkward leaps.


We must be in the factory district, because the sewers lead right into another factory, where our hero is getting beaten up by a WWF reject with a steel pipe while Duke Nukem's less successful brother looks on. He has a pipe, too. Nearly everyone has a pipe. Look through the screenshots in the article and you will see that almost all of them feature a pipe in some way, either being wielded by a character or laying on the floor, waiting to be picked up. The other weapon in Tough Turf is a spiked club, which is functionally identical to the pipe but, you know, spiked. The vast majority of Tough Turf's combat revolves around the acquisition and implementation of these weapons, resulting in a game that has more club hits than David Guetta but not much in the way of flexibility or novelty. It's strictly "get a pipe, use the pipe" with the odd kick thrown in when you think the enemy will be able to swing their pipe before you can swing yours.


Despite the game's lack of ambition, uninspired setting and rigid adherence to the same gameplay formula, I still found myself having some fun playing Tough Turf. This is strange, because it was for those very reasons that I complained about Ren and Stimpy: Space Cadet Adventures last time out, so what's the difference? Am I just a hypocrite? Possibly, but I think it's more down to Tough Turf being earlier in its genre's history, with less refinements to its family tree - Ren and Stimpy had many more platformers to learn from, but it mostly ignored them. Then there's the fact that I just love beat-em-ups, and some deep part of me enjoys the process of methodically eliminating thugs more than it does jumping between floating platforms. Tough Turf is certainly one of the less engaging examples of the genre - even the main character looks like an accountant who accidentally wandered into the wrong, factory-heavy part of town - but there's something soothing about its solid, familiar gameplay.


More factories in stage five, or whatever the opposite of a factory is because they un­-make things here, scrap being moved by conveyor belts into pools of molten metal. Around half of these items of scrap are the metal poles so common throughout this game, so I can only assume that the reclaimed metal from the pipes is what all those oil drums are made of.


The conveyor belts do add something different to the combat experience, and if you're feeling particularly saucy you can try to lure enemies to their agonising deaths in a roiling crucible of liquid steel by standing at the end of the conveyor belt and knocking them over. It is a more efficient way to murder large numbers of steroid-laden villains than stoving their heads in one-by-one, a sentence that I feel is destined to end up on a court transcript or psychiatric report at some point in the future.


Over the years spent running this site I have put a stop to all manner of felonious schemes and world conquest attempts, but today I've found the biggest crime ever in a videogame and it's this fucking carpet. "And have you thought about floor coverings for your palatial penthouse apartment, sir? Ah yes, the Dumpster Spaghetti carpeting, a fine choice." It's like all the shadowy, twisted fabricomancers who create the upholstery for the world's public transport got together to spawn the foulest, most rancid pinnacle of their art. You might be thinking "this game must be getting pretty boring if you're talking about the décor," and you'd be right, but c'mon, just look at it. On second thoughts, don't look at it. I don't want any lawsuits from people who popped their own eyeballs out with the nearest piece of cutlery


I'm much more amenable towards the chandelier, possibly because it looks like a child made it from ball-bearings and old tin cans, a primary-school art project that hangs near the balcony in a misguided display of parental pride. None of the game's characters are interested in the either the chandelier or the carpet, because they can't hit them with a metal pipe. That's Tough Turf, brought to you in association with the World Metal Pipe Council. Plastic plumbing? What are you, some kind of loser?


You know what? I'm going to put this one down as a boss fight. It's right at the end of the stage, all the enemies are the same but coloured differently and they even have half-sleeves, a sartorial choice that makes them stand out from the crowd, or at least it would if they weren't identical quintuplets. Five against one sounds like challenging odds, but that spiked club never breaks and I have a small raised platform to stand on as I wait for the bad guys to jump up to me, so I'm confident of victory.


Carpet situation: improved, but still aggressively unpleasant on the eyes. At least there's a bit of art and a nice plant to cheer things up a little, and the overall swankiness means we're probably getting close to meeting the mastermind of this criminal enterprise. What are we thinking, some kind of drug baron, a kingpin of organised crime whose wealth affords him an air of legitimacy?


Huh, I guess not. It's just the usual post-apocalyptic-anime thug, all mohawk and studded bracelets. I like that the villain chose relaxation over style by going with the comfortable armchair rather than the ostentatious golden throne. Ruling the streets with an iron fist is exhausting work, so it's important to be able to come home after a hard day's tyranny and just unwind, your toes sinking into the fur of your bearskin rug while the Stars and Stripes, erm, reminds you what country you're in? The only thing that's missing is a roaring fire. Instead, he has a giant portrait of Walter Matthau to keep him warm. The painting's eyes follow our hero around the room, in classic Scooby-Doo fashion.


Oh look, the boss' huge glass plinth-thing can fire spiky rollers out. I did wonder why he was sitting up there. This proves that the plinth is not, as I first thought, a huge version of those inflatable chairs that were popular in the late Nineties, although I think the villain would have been better severed by the traditional trapdoor. The rollers make a nice change, but they're too easy to avoid for any vigilante with a modicum of skill (so not me then) and then there's the clean-up if they are successful in grinding your foes to paste. Actually, these rollers might explain the state of the carpets around here.


We're fighting now. There's a fight happening. Well, we were never going to talk it out and come to an amicable agreement, were we? The man tried to kill me with garden rollers, the time for diplomacy is over. The painting in the background slides aside to reveal a woman held captive in the wall space. She's a blonde in a red dress, because videogame street gangs are nothing if not predictable in their targets. Anyway, the fight: the head villain has an axe, which is really the only thing that makes him any different from the rest of Tough Turf's enemies and even that doesn't change much. You just have to duck under his attacks and kick him a few times until he drops the axe, and then you can fight back properly. Oh, if only there was a steel pipe nearby, then I might stand a chance!


No such luck. I suppose I'll have to let my fists do the talking. They're feelin' pretty chatty, what with a kidnapped woman to rescue and a final boss who is raising his meaty arm-clubs high above his head and providing me unrestricted punching access to his midriff.


All right, mission complete! I beat a man to death with my bare hands, but before I celebrate this wonderful achievement I'd better escort this young lady to safety. Except... something doesn't seem right. She's in a  fighting stance, purposefully striding towards some unknown destination without so much as a "thank you for rescuing me" for our hero.


I bloody knew it! The woman suddenly and without warning turns on our hero, punching him in the head and running away while he gawps at her, understandably stunned. Super Mario never had to put up with this kind of treatment.


Thus, Tough Turf reaches it's dramatic conclusion, as the player must do battle against an opponent whose goals and motivations are never mentioned in a fight for which the stakes are apparently not worth discussing. What the hell is going on? Why are these people hitting each other on a rooftop? Was this lady planning on living in that cage for twelve years until her squatter's rights kicked in or something? The caging must have been consensual and I messed up the kinky sex games between her and her mohawked husband, although I'm not sure that constitutes grounds for a gladiatorial death-match.
In the end, none of these mysteries were solved and the game ended when I kicked this woman off the roof.


The end. No, really, that's it. This lady is dead, and you're never told why you were forced to kill her or indeed why any of this game took place. That's the cruel indifference of human existence, folks! I don't know what to say about this. I know looking for engaging storylines and deep characterization in late Eighties arcade games is as fruitless as looking for those same things in a Hollyoaks omnibus, but Tough Turf is almost unnerving in it's complete refusal to explain anything about anything, and it has the odd effect of making me feel like a cold-blooded murderer rather than a heroic avenger. If that was the point and Tough Turf was meant to illustrate that violence, even violence conducted in a noble cause, is ultimately dehumanising, then congratulations to Sunsoft and Sega for getting their point across. I think that might be giving too much credit to their intellectual goals, though.


Unusual (lack of a) storyline aside, Tough Turf is a very simple game that I think most people would get bored of very quickly. Bland backgrounds, reused enemies and one-note combat means there's little to recommend it to even beat-em-up fans, and the heavy focus on whacking things with metal poles means it doesn't even feel like much of a beat-em-up at all. A piñata simulator, maybe. That said, I still had some fun with it, though I'm not entirely sure why: maybe my standards are slipping, or my advancing age is making me more prone to nostalgia. No, wait, I've got it - that hideous carpet has hypnotised me. Well played, Tough Turf. Well played.

The Captain Commando logo is tired, so it's just having a little lie down.
So, Captain Commando - Capcom's follow-up to the extremely successful and genre-defining Final Fight, and I would argue that it's the closest thing to an arcade sequel that Final Fight ever received. The two games play very similarly and I've seen some sources say that Captain Commando takes place in Metro City, albeit in the year 2026. If that's the case then Mike Haggar must have relinquished his mayoral office, because a new criminal gang has risen to plague the city and you wouldn't think they'd be stupid enough to do that if the Mayor of Justice was still busting heads in the corridors of power. Instead the responsibility of protecting the most crime-filled place outside Professor Moriarty's to-do list falls to the heroic Captain Commando and his Commando Companions. Let's meet them now!


With a tough body, a sharp brain and a hairstyle produced by a wind tunnel, it's Captain Commando himself. I'd call him the game's most average character, but none of the other playable characters are wildly different in terms of statistics, and the usual beat-em-up roster of an average guy, a fast but weak guy and a strong, slow guy is ignored in favour of having four similarly-powered commandoes. Not that Captain Commando is an ordinary man, of course - he's a tireless crusader for justice, a bane of evil and presumed puppy-rescuer who fights crime with his fire- and electricity-producing Captain Gauntlets. He wears the Captain Protector on his chest and scans for bad guys with his Captain Goggles. Does he call his boots "Captain Boots"? You bet your ass he does. Captain Boots is also a pretty good name for a kitten.
His occupation is listed as "unknown," which is odd because he is a commando. "Commando" is an occupation, right? Maybe he's trying to preserve the secrecy of his other occupation: as a Capcom advertising mascot.


Yes, Captain Commando started life as a promotional character for Capcom's early NES games, looking completely different than he does in this game. I think we can agree that the change of design was for the best, and the game's version of Captain Commando is a much more visually appealing character than a disinterested space pirate with a bizarre hairline and questionable taste in medallions. He's not even looking where he's firing those guns. No wonder he has to resort to punching people in this game, he's been stripped of his firearms license.


Ginzu the Ninja is a ninja. He's very good at being a videogame ninja, but he's still "just" a ninja and that makes him the least interesting character of the four. It's not his fault, it's just that the standard of the competition is very high. His name is Sho in the Japanese version of the game, and I'm going to assume it was changed to Ginzu overseas in reference to the famous knife brand Ginsu. You know, sharp blades and all that. His bio says that he can cut enemies in half with a single stroke of his sword. He can, but he doesn't. You still have to hit them multiple times, which kinda feels like Ginzu is just making extra work for himself. Also, to further the Final Fight connection, Captain Commando's arcade flyer claims that Ginzu is a master of Bushinryu-style ninjitsu, just like Final Fight's Guy.


Why do they call you Mack the Knife? Oh, because of the knives, I see. Okay, so he was originally called Jennety in the Japanese version of the game, but in this version he's named after a showtune and I'm fine with that. No word on whether Mack is fine with that, because he's the most mysterious member of the team - an alien mummy from outer space. See, Ginzu, this is why you're way down the pecking order of the Commando team. Mack's outer wrappings are actually a "genetic bandage," necessary for his continued survival here on Earth, and his knives are special weapons which can apparently "melt all matter." As far as I'm aware, his cap is just a regular cap. Captain Commando gave it to him. Why yes, it is called the Captain Cap.


Last but by no means least - no-one who can launch missiles from their knees can ever be the least - is Baby Head, AKA Hoover. Baby Head overcomes the handicap of being a small child, something which usually forces you to stay out of the thug-punching business unless your parents are a) extremely pushy or b) Batman, by riding around in a robotic battle suit with extending arms and the aforementioned rocket-knees. Baby Head also built his robot suit, because he is a genius baby. Not enough of a genius to add some kind of protective cockpit to his robo-suit, but maybe he's relying on the enemies' hesitation to punch a baby to protect him.


The villain of the piece is an evil overlord who likes fiddling with DNA. His name is Scumocide, or Genocide in the Japanese version. Genocide is a more threatening name. "Scumocide" makes it sound like he's either going to thoroughly clean the toilet or kill all the scum, and that's my job. The scum-killing, not the toilet-cleaning. I suppose I'd better get on with it. The scum-killing. Yes.


I knew this was a city plagued by crime, but is that bad guy smoking? A cigarette? That's beyond the pale, even for a low-level gang enforcer. Doesn't he know that he's not only damaging his own health but the health of those around him? It's just disrespectful, that's what it is, and it's up to Captain Commando to teach this young man some manners through his own extreme brand of electro-shock therapy.


The ground-zapping attack is Captain Commando's "Sure-Killing Technique," a curious title for a move that doesn't even kill the weakest grunts in one hit. Between this and Ginzu's unsubstantiated claims about being able to slice through anything, I think the Commando Comrades have been inaccurately fluffing up their collective CV. If it turns out that Baby Head isn't a genius baby but just a regular baby then I'm going to have to make a formal complaint.
The "Sure-Killing Technique" is, of course, just the usual beat-em-up special move activated by pressing jump and attack together, the move that knocks away any nearby enemies at the cost of some of the player's health. For a game that is the direct descendant of Final Fight it's no surprise that Captain Commando shares the same fighting system. There's an attack button, and attacking an enemy repeatedly results in a short combo. We've already discussed the special move, and you can grab enemies by walking into them and then either hit them a couple of times or throw them to the ground. Captain Commando's major addition to this familiar formula is the inclusion of dashing moves - tapping the joystick left or right twice makes you character run and allows them to execute a running attack (in Captain Commando's case, a running kick) and even a running jumping attack. Captain Commando's running jump attack is a wrist-mounted flamethrower called, you guessed it, Captain Fire, which is where his special move of the same name in the Marvel vs. Capcom games comes from. It's all very intuitive, and the first couple of screens feature exactly the kind of goon-clobbering action you'd expect.


Then, suddenly I've stolen a robot from one of these strange, yellow-hooded little men and I'm using its large pneumatic fists to pound away at Dolg, the first stage's boss. I haven't really skipped anything, either - the stage is just a few short screen patrolled by a couple of generic grunts to help you get into the swing of things and them bam, you're stomping around the place in a precursor to Mega Man X's Ride Armors, trying to foil a bank robbery.


This whipcrack pace is one of the things I like the most about Captain Commando, especially when coupled with the insanity of its locations. Don't like fighting in the street? Not to worry, you'll soon have moved on to somewhere different and kinda weird, like a bank whose vault sort of looks like a giant teddy bear's head with a yawning, cash-stuffed mouth and wires pouring from its eye-sockets. There's little nose at the top, see? No? Just me on this one? Okay, let's look at Dolg instead, then. The legs and feet of a very large Native American man combined with the facepaint, spiked chest harness and receding hairline of an ageing wrestler. Standard beat-em-up first boss fare, if you ask me, and his unusually powerful punches are balanced out for the most part by Captain Commando having access to a robot. Not too difficult a test, then, and soon Captain Commando will be on his way to the museum that makes up the second stage, where no doubt his run of convincing and effortless victories over evil will continue.


Jesus Christ! Given the colourful comic-book action and cheesy pulp sci-fi atmosphere of the first stage - the first stage of a game where you can play as a baby, I might add - I was not expecting to see our hero sliced into two bloody chunks of extremely dead meat. Captain Chunks, if you will. Oh well, it was time for me to try out one of the other characters anyway.


Extending the maxim "fight fire with fire" to its logical conclusion, I decided to fight knives with knives and give Mack the Knife a chance to shine. I immediately warmed to the mummified space-stabber thanks to his long range (which might not actually be any longer than Captain Commando's) and his Sure-Killing Technique, which sees him pirouette around the screen with his knives outstretched. You can even control where he moves when he's spinning, which is very helpful. These scantily-clad women don't seem too impressed by Mack, mind you, possibly because his knives pale in comparison to their two-pronged, electrified tuning forks. That explains their outfits. Those rubber boots are designed to ground them and protect against any stray electric shocks, you see.


Deep in the museum's caveman exhibit, Mack fights against short, fat men who can breathe fire. I have still yet to see a convincing explanation why it's always the fat enemies in beat-em-ups who can breathe fire. Is gasoline particularly packed with calories or something? Also, the enemies with the beards aren't animatronic museum cavemen who have come to life in order to protect the sanctity of the diorama they call home or anything, they're just hairy. All their flesh melts off their bones once you've hit them a few times, which makes it strange that so many of them have signed up for a life as a gang enforcer. Hired goonery must have been all that was available at the job centre.


The boss is Shtrom Jr, an amphibian harpoonist with the air of an unsuccessful auditionee for a villain role on Captain Planet. He would have represented, I dunno, the twin evils of water pollution and harpoon fishing? Anyway, Shtrom Jr. fights by launching waves of harpoons at the player and then jumping away. You can hit the harpoons out of the air but the whole experience is still faintly annoying as it feels more like you're chasing the boss around in a playground game of tag than having a stand-up fight, and the fact that he's Shtrom Junior implies that I'll have to fight Shtrom Senior at some point and the thought of a palette-swapped version of this encounter isn't exactly setting my heart ablaze.


The next stage is the Ninja House, where all the ninjas live together in a communal setting, devising rotas for the household chores and arguing about who drank Fuuma-san's milk out of the fridge even though it was clearly stamped with his family seal. No ninjas here, though, just a plethora of troops I've clobbered before with the addition of Mardia, the large lady with the Sideshow Bob hair.
As this is the Ninja House, I thought it would be fitting to switch to Ginzu for this stage, so that he can test his mastery of the shadowy arts of assassination against his similarly-trained peers.


Then he picked up a gun and shot a samurai in the face. Good work, Ginzu. Joe Musashi would be proud. No, wait, not proud, horrified. You can't just shoot your opponents, at least not with a handgun and standing in broad daylight! That has to out a significant dent in your clan's honour, falling between "giving up information under torture" and "betraying the lord who has hired you" on the You Have Shamed Your Ancestors chart.


Ginzu does get to fight some actual ninjas in this stage, engaging them in the traditional method of ninja combat - throwing comically oversized shurikens at them. I think I preferred the gun.


Kabuki theatre reaches new depths of violence with this boss fight against Yamato and his giant spear, hurr hurr. It didn't go very well for Ginzu, and I haven't taken a beating like this from someone in a tabard since the school dinnerlady caught me trying to steal an extra portion of custard. It's Yamato's huge weapon, hee hee, that's the problem - attacking from the front is suicide, because the spear's range is extremely large and any assault from that direction will see you immediately cut down. Instead you have to bide your time and try to get in at Yamato's sides, which is easier said than done when he's forever spawning minions to run interference. I didn't expect him to just let me stab him to death but, c'mon, a little one-on-one battle between two followers of the noble martial arts isn't too much to ask, is it?


It's fun for all the family, a cavalcade of chaotic clowning and mistreated animals, the thrill of the Big Top and the stomach problems that come from eating carnival food - yes, it's the Circus! Metro City has a circus now. The current administration has definitely gone soft, Mike Haggar would never have let such a bad element into his town. I bet the Ninja House aren't happy either, a circus pitching up next door can't be good for local real estate prices.
I switched to the mechanical munchkin Baby Head for this stage as he's the only Commando yet to see action, and he seems to be settling in nicely as he uses a ray gun to hypnotise one of Scumocide's footsoldiers before unleashing the knee-rockets. I could have just punched the guy to death but hey, knee-rockets. I did worry that exposing such a tender young mind to the unspeakable horrors of the circus might lead to deep psychological scarring, but it all seems fairly benign and clown-free so far.


Ah. Well, look, Baby Head is a genius baby, right? So I'm sure he'll have to the mental fortitude needed to process the ramifications of this slaughter. The agonised screams of his barbecued victims and the stench of burning flesh that he can never clean off his robot battlesuit no matter how much he scrubs and scrubs and scrubswill definitely not haunt Baby Head for the rest of his life. The Circus, ladies and gentlemen!


And lest you think I'm allowing my personal issues with the circus to cloud my opinion of Captain Commando's fourth stage, I think this door shows that Capcom are on-board when it comes to understanding the clown menace.


The boss of the circus is (thankfully) not a mutant battle-clown. Instead it's just the regular mutant monster. His name is Monster. Normally I'd complain about the lack of creativity expending in naming this thing but it did hatch from it's containment pod mere seconds ago so I'll let Monster's mad scientist creator off with not coming up with something more intimidating.
A much more enjoyable fight than the previous two, Monster is a tough opponent without being frustratingly cheap, and it's always nice to do battle with a boss who is, if not your equal, then at least doesn't seem to regard the player with complete contempt. He might look like he's built from cacti, but Monster has a warrior's heart and an admirable appreciation for the linchpins of the beat-em-up setting, skilfully incorporating oil drums into his fighting style. What, you didn't think we'd get through this whole article without mentioning oil drums, did you?


Things all get a bit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for this stage, as our heroes pursue the scientist who create Monster across the open water on their motorized surfboards. The game never actually says"cowabunga," but you can tell it wants to. This is more of a bonus round than a full-blown stage, with the surfin' ninjas being dispatched in a single hit and the focus being shifted from surviving the hordes of enemies to racking up a respectable score by knocking as many ninjas as possible into the water. This task is made easier by the regular supply of weaponry that floats past. These weapons also make Captain Commando possibly the only game in existence that lets you play as a genius baby in a robotic suit who guns ninjas down with an M16.


I caught up with the mad scientist. His name is Dr. T. W., which I'm going to assume stands for Doctor Time Waster. I definitely feel like I wasted my time chasing him into the sewers and kicking his speedboat a few times. Okay, so that's a bit unfair - the surfing stage is a nice change of pace, a fun mid-game break that refreshes the mental palate in preparation for further beat-em-up violence.
Before we leave this stage, take another look at the screenshot above and notice that Baby Head has drawn lapels on the front of his robosuit. The kid likes to look sharp, I guess.


Here in the aquarium, Captain Commando settles into a jolly little groove of thug-slapping action, with a variety of different enemy types attacking from all directions and each of them requiring your attention, giving you something to think about as you try to keep away from the big, powerful enemies while making sure you don't line yourself up with the bad guys who have long-range attacks. The smooth controls and multi-hit properties of your dashing attacks mean that the combat's main juggling act, that of trying to keep all the enemies clumped together either by knocking them around the screen or throwing them into each other so that they can't surround you, is a slick, fast-paced and enjoyable experience. It can't quite match Alien vs. Predator for fluidity or the Dungeons and Dragons games for sheer depth, but the action is still great fun for the most part and any cracks are patched up by the weirdness of the setting. For example, look at the background. What are they doing to that whale? A whale, of all things? I know Scumocide is into genetics and yes, that is a killer whale but I don't think there's going to be much you can harvest from a whale's DNA that's going to help him create a race of unstoppable warriors or what have you. Maybe Scumocide spectacularly misunderstood what a SEAL Team is. Also pictured in the above screenshot: the result of a xenomorph infestation on a world populated solely by speed-skaters.


Oh look, it's Shtrom Senior. What a surprise, he's the same as Shtrom Junior only lavender. He's brought along another relative called Druk, because what I really wanted was to fight two of an uninspired earlier boss at the same time. Capcom didn't even bother to update Shtrom and Druk's portrait picture to reflect their new, more relaxing colour scheme, which was lazy of them and thus nicely fits into this, the laziest of boss battles.


The underground base now, a sinister den of transparent walkways, secret experiments (possibly on other large sea mammals) and rocket launchers. Enough rocket launchers for everyone to experience the rocket-propelled fun of being in a terrorist militia without the insane religious fundamentalism! There are rocket launchers for the bad guys, rocket launchers all over the floor and even enough rocket launchers left over for Ginzu to use them for pretty much the entirety of the stage. Ginzu doesn't do much actual ninja-ing, does he? I'm beginning to suspect he only got into the ninja business because black robes are slimming.


No rocket launchers here, only a conveyor belt leading through Scumocide's Play-doh Squeezy-Shape Minion Maker or whatever this place is supposed to be. I've played Captain Commando many times in the past, but I've never realised before that the enemies being constructed in the background are the big samurai lummoxes. It's the boxy arm-guards that give it away. I had assumed this meant the samurai I'm fighting here are fresh off the assembly line, but their backs are already filled with arrows so that must be part of their design, I suppose? No, that doesn't sound right. Let me talk to the factory foreman, we'll soon get this sorted out.


Okay, I know this is an informal meeting but I wasn't expecting quite that much crotch to be thrust at me. There doesn't even appear to be that much down there, either, certainly not enough to prompt this rather vulgar display. Oh, I'm sorry, your desk is too small? Well then get a bigger desk, you weirdo. Head office is not going to like you greeting prospective customers with your Action Man-smooth fun area. We're going to fight now, aren't we?


The boss' name is Blood, his knees are extremely square and he fights mostly by kicking, which I didn't expect because the most arresting part of Blood's character design is that he's had his arms replaced by two even larger arms. You can see where they're stitched on around the shoulders and everything, because if you're not bothered about about finding an arm donor who matches your skin tone then you're probably also unconcerned about a bit of conspicuous needlework.
Blood at least has the decency to fight your chosen Commando one-on-one, which makes a nice change. The boss fights really are Captain Commando's weakest aspect, and while the bosses generally look interesting they're rarely much fun to fight, with each battle muddied by the inclusion of too many extra grunts and the overly-powerful and awkward-to-avoid attacks of the bosses. It's not that they're too difficult, it's that they're not challenging in an interesting way, and it's ironic that Blood is probably the most enjoyably straight-forward fight despite being the least interesting boss visually. I think fighting him atop a space shuttle might be clouding my opinion of how cool he is, mind you.


Here we are aboard said space shuttle, where Captain Commando's later stages have comfortably settled into a pattern of throwing large numbers of bad guys at you, often in waves of identical type. As before, the combat mostly revolves around corralling the enemies into one clump, which is easier said than done because they're like the metaphorical herd of cats, albeit very violent cats with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. There's definitely more of an emphasis on picking up and using weapons in these later areas of the game, and I'm not sure how I feel. There's a lot of fun to be had in using the weapons, honestly, but it can feel a bit like the beating-em-up part of the beat-em-up formula has been cast aside.


The space shuttled is guarded by Doppel, a fat man in a very unflattering green suit who has the power to transform himself into one of more of the Commando team. It's a fight to the death against your greatest enemy... yourself! Except this fairly common videogame power has always felt really dumb to me, because surely if there's one person for whom a fighter is going to have intimate knowledge of their every weakness and flaw, it's themselves. If not, and Doppel just assumes the surface appearance of opponents, then that's even dumber. You could have been Batman or something! Actually, in that situation, you should turn into your opponent's mother. Who's going to be able to punch their mother? Exactly.


With Doppel defeated, the space shuttle reaches it's ultimate destination and Captain Commando's final stage - Callisto, fourth moon of Jupiter and it's opulent and oxygen-rich lunar habitat! It his here that Captain Commando bonks a man on the head with a comedy mallet, because this game is truly strange - but it plays everything completely straight, which is one of my favourite things about it. There's no evidence that any of this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and we're expected to take it at face value that an alien mummy and a genius baby are Earth's mightiest defenders... and I do, wholeheartedly.


It's Dolg, again. Hi, Dolg. Thankfully this isn't the beginning of a tedious boss rush - Captain Commando feels fairly long for a beat-em-up anyway and doesn't need any padding - but to get to Scumocide you have to go through both Dolg Redux and the portrait of what I'm assuming is supposed to be Jesus with a strange facial expression. Christ the Redeemer is not angry at Captain Commando, he's just disappointed. The rest of the background doesn't make much more sense, either. My adventures have become mere after-dinner entertainment for a race of identical, hyper-muscular aristocrats? Check out how tiny that Martini glass looks in the big lug's hand. Could you not find him a pitcher or something?


Just beyond the painting of Jesus, which was actually a door all along, waits the final battle with the powerful and ruthless Scumocide, master of Callisto and also master of getting right on my nerves. You'll notice that Captain Commando is on fire in this screenshot, as he was in all the screenshots I took of this fight, or at least the ones where he wasn't encased in ice. You see, Scumocide's main move - his only move, really - is to fly around the screen launching extremely powerful fire/ice balls from his hands before hovering just out of reach of your attacks. It is not a fun experience, a boring grind that has little to do with the gameplay found in the rest of the game. Scumocide reminds me of a prototype version of Gill from Street Fighter III, and Gill's a pain in the arse to fight, too. It feels less like a final boss battle and more like a fight against a mobile gun turret, but with the application of enough running jump attacks I eventually managed to whittle Scumocide's health down until he was defeated.


The game ends with a press conference, and if this game is set in Metro City then maybe this is Mike Haggar. He seems to have the moustache, and the incredibly broad shoulders of a former pro wrestler / vigilante justice dispenser. The sprite lacks the detail required for me to state outright that this is Haggar with any real confidence, but as a special treat to myself I'm going to pretend that is definitely is Haggar. Well, this is the birthday article, so I'm treating myself.


Oh, so you put the plot of your game right at the end, huh Capcom? Clever, that means people have to play all the way through if the want to know what the hell is going on. That ought to keep the quarters rollin' in!
With the world declared safe, Mayor Maybe-Haggar turns to the screen behind him and asks "hey... who are you, anyway?" The answer?


Why, it's Captain Commando, of course - Capcom mascot, semi-forgotten arcade star and one of my go-to characters in Marvel vs. Capcom. He's not blowing the audience a kiss in the above screenshot, it's just the way his lip animation happened to be at the time. Oh, okay, you can pretend Captain Commando is blowing you a kiss if you want. Don't worry, I won't tell anyone.


As the credits roll and the Commando Chums show off their moves, I'm left to reflect on one of those gaming experiences that isn't perfect but that I still love. My major issues with the game, the disappointing boss fights and the occasional over-reliance on using weaponry, don't do much to detract from the game's overall sense of fun. The over-the-top action is never dull thanks to excellent controls and a great cast of characters, and Capcom's graphical prowess shines brightly in this one - it's beautifully detailed and animated, a real joy to look at. It's videogame comfort food, the arcade equivalent of cheese on toast - perhaps not the most balanced or complete meal, but one that makes me feel a little warm inside and which goes well with a nice cup of tea. Give Captain Commando a go, you'll probably enjoy it. I know I do.

So, that's the end of this year's birthday article, and what a treat it was. For me, I mean. Possibly not so much for you. Anyway, many thanks as always to all VGJunk readers, and hopefully you'll stick with me as I ramble my way through another five years. Five years! I still can't quite get over it.

Regular VGJunk readers will probably know of my deep and abiding love for the original OutRun, a game which I consider about as close to perfect as any arcade title has ever been. A big part of why I feel that way is OutRun's relaxed charm, it's atmosphere of escapism where your only enemy is the clock and you're not racing for a prize because the experience is the prize. To shoehorn in some inter-vehicular combat, as Battle OutRun does, feels somewhat sacrilegious but in the interests of fairness I suppose I should reserve judgement until I've actually played the game.


Battle OutRun is a race across America, the boring middle states where nothing happens being excised from the gameplay experience out of consideration for you, the player. The game itself provides no details on your reasons for embarking on this road trip, but I found a transcript of the manual which explains things thusly: you are Joe Hurst, "the coolest bounty hunter ever to take the wheel," a title Joe is only allowed to use on a technicality because Samus Aran's spaceship doesn't have a steering wheel. Joe wants the bounty money so he can restore his pride and joy, a supercar with the copyright-skirting name of the Larborarri Teratuga. Joe's Teratuga can't be in that poor a condition, mind you, because that's what he drives around in for the whole game.


Here's Joe's first bounty target. He doesn't exactly look like the kind of hardened criminal I was expecting. He looks like he has a thyroid problem, what with those bulging eyes. Whatever his heinous crimes are, they were apparently severe enough to warrant a bounty of 2000 dollars and that could pay for Joe's new floormats so I'll be tracking him down on the highways of San Francisco.


In classic OutRun fashion, you can choose the background music for each stage by retuning your car radio, although this differs from the original game in two ways. One is that Battle OutRun's soundtrack, while passable, is nowhere near as good as OutRun's. The other is that in OutRun you don't manipulate the radio with the wizened, gnarled finger of an ancient sorcerer.


The action is underway, and it's no surprise that for the most part said action is very similar to OutRun Senior. You have to drive your red sports car across the country - with no girlfriend at your side, because the life of a bounty hunter is a dangerous and solitary one - avoiding collisions with the traffic and other obstacles in an effort to reach the end of the stage before your time runs out. Battle OutRun's main difference from OutRun's control system is that it lacks the Hi-Lo gear shifter, so mostly you're just holding down the accelerator and very, very occasionally using the brake.


It's all very familiar, and it plays about as well as you'd think a Master System version of the concept could. The movement of the road and the scaling sprites are smooth, the controls are sharp and the collision detection is much more accurate than I thought it was going to be, which was nice because there's a lot of narrowly scraping past obstacles in this one.
Early impressions are good, then, and so far it seems like an enjoyable enough ride, colourful and straightforward while feeling just a little flat.


"COME" says the sinister, three-lane-spanning truck. What do you mean, "COME"? Like, join your mysterious convoy or something? I dunno, my mother told me never to trust strange lorries.


Oh, I see, come in. Well, as I'm doing nearly 250 kilometres an hour and your occupying pretty much all the road in front of me then yes, Mr. Truck, I think I have little choice but to "come in." The only real question is whether we're all going to die in a fiery explosion or not. Is Joe Hurst's career as a bounty hunter doomed to failure, cut short before it even began when he's abducted by a menacing truck?


Not to worry, the truck is actually a mobile garage and tune-up station, where Joe can spend his hard-earned bounty dollars on sprucing up his Teratuga. Each category of upgrades improves a certain aspect of the Teratuga's performance: more powerful engines mean higher top speeds, working on the body means you lose less speed when you crash, better tires help with handling and the chassis... well, I'm not entirely sure what improving the chassis does. I mean, I know at least one thing it effects but that thing is so inconsequential that I have a hard time imagining that the game would charge the player money for it.


After some more driving you'll catch up with your bounty target. Here he is now, in his unassuming green car. It's a good thing the music changes when you enter the "boss" portion of the stage because I'm not the most observant - in my defence, I was keeping my eyes on the road - and I could easily have not realised that this was the man I'm trying to bring to justice. In the case of Battle OutRun, justice is served through high-speed automobile collisions, just as Sir Robert Peel envisioned it. Yes, you crash into your target until they stop and yes, it is almost identical in both concept and execution to Chase H.Q., Taito's arcade game from the previous year. Battle OutRun is not nearly as enjoyable as Chase H.Q., of course, but then it's unfair to compare them: so much of Chase H.Q.'s fun factor comes from it's over-the-top, frenetic energy, and the humble Master System simply cannot replicate that. That's not to say Battle OutRun lacks a feeling of speed; as I said, this is probably the best a developer could get out of the Master System hardware in 1989. It's just that it's a much more subdued experience which quickly falls into the pattern of you ramming the target car once or twice, only for it to speed away and put some distance between you. Then you have to dodge some random traffic until you catch up to your bounty. Rinse, repeat, hope that Joe can find the delicate balance of car crashes that results in an immobilised vehicle and not a horrific death for all concerned.


Okay, so I caught the guy, right? That means I get to see a picture of Joe for the first time. Joe is very obviously the same person as the bounty target. He's just swapped his sunglasses for a cap in an attempt at disguise that won't fool me, pal. Unless... did I just pit Joe against his identical twin in a hi-octane battle for justice that could tear his family asunder, that's Brother Justice, coming to a cinema near you? If so, they both seem surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing, the trademark Hurst family smirk marking them as not only brothers but identical twins on opposite sides of the law. If only Joe's brother has a sports car and a pair of aviators, then maybe he would have stayed out of trouble.


With San Francisco cleared of all crime forever, you're free to move on to the next stage. Actually, you're free to move on to any stage. You could skip straight to New York if you like, but without accumulating enough points to soup your car up to maximum power you'll have a very tough time so the whole "stage select" thing is kinda moot. So, Los Angeles it is. What fearsome kingpin of crime will be come up against in the City of Angels?


Ah yes, it's Spaniel Sam, the Dog-Eared man. Who's a good boy, then? Not this guy, he's a criminal. Always chewing up people's slippers and chasing the postman. What a bastard.


The Los Angeles stage definitely has an OutRun feel to it, with its beachfront views, blue skies and waving palm trees. Why, if it wasn't for all the intentional car crashes it would just be, well, OutRun. I get that Sega were trying to mix up the formula, and the cynic in me wants to say they were trying to mix up the formula in a way that involved as little effort and creative thinking as possible, but what annoys me is that Joe's plan is so incredibly stupid. His car needs fixing, and to raise the necessary funds he's going to repeatedly crash his car? C'mon, man, why not spend some of that money and buy a pick-up truck for all the heavy lifting? Think it through. Spaniel Sam here is in a jeep and you're in a whatever-that-fake-Ferrari-name-was, it's no wonder you had to smash him dozens of times before he'd stop.


Spaniel Sam is a speed freak in the sense that he takes a lot of amphetamines, I'd guess. There's no way that haircut was chosen by a man free from the grip of powerful drugs.


I refuse to believe that this person has ever been wanted by anyone, ever. Are those earrings, are are they part ram and they're a pair of horns? Holy crap, I think I've stumbled across Battle OutRun's big secret - all these bounties have been put out by a shadowy organisation determined to round out the escaped test subjects from their manimal hybrid experiments. That first guy, the one who looked like Joe? He was a merman, but obviously you couldn't see his fishy tail in his portrait.


Viva Las Vegas, with its neon flashing and its one-armed bandits crashing. The neon part, mostly. On the right of the horizon we can see the bright lights of the city, while over on the left we see the bright lights of an abstract purple mess. A terrible accident at the hot air balloon factory, possibly.
I didn't realise it at first, but by this point it had become clear to me that these other road users were actively trying to crash into me. I consulted the manual again to confirm and yes, they are agents of whatever criminal you're chasing, and after much deliberation I came to the conclusion that their aggressive nature is not an enjoyable part of the gameplay. It just feels so opposed to the very nature of OutRun, but if that was all it was then the problem could be solved by renaming the game Car Smash USA or something. No, they're also annoying in a mechanical sense, swerving all over the road before deciding, at some point when you approach them, that they're going to stay in whatever lane they're in. This turns the whole experience into a guessing game: gamble correctly and you'll sail past them as they stay on the opposite lane, but get it wrong and you're in for an unavoidable crash with no chance of getting around them, or at least not until late in the game when you've got better tyres and you can get away with going off-road a little bit. It doesn't add anything to the game - not anything fun, at any rate - and I can't but think the game would have been better served by more traditional, less murderous traffic patterns.


A bald man is sad. Perhaps this is because his head looks like a bean. I hope that was the direction that the higher-ups at Sega gave to Battle OutRun's artist. "Like a bean, but with a sad face drawn on it. No, no hair. You heard me."


The Grand Canyon. Not much to say about this one, folks. It's more orange than Dale Winton's towels, and there are rocks. Big rocks. Grand rocks, you might say. There's also oil spilled all over the road. You can tell it's oil because someone has thoughtfully labelled it with the word "OIL". Of course, you're driving much too fast to be able to read that when you're blazing down the highway, but even without that label you'll soon figure out it's oil when you drive over it and your car spins out. Skidding on a patch of oil doesn't actually slow you down a much as you might think, so if the choice is between hitting the oil or smashing into a roadside sign and coming to a dead stop then take the oil every time.


Oh, so the human-animal hybrid experiments reached the ape-man phase, did they? Good, good. Honestly, you'd think you'd start with the ape-man. More compatible DNA and that. You get The Human Gorilla here up and running and then gradually work in animals more distantly removed from Homo sapiens. Once you've constructed a squid-man and a beetle-man, you can start getting really creative and going to for things like a horrifying amalgam of man and coffee table or what have you.


This is Chicago, and it looks like a miserable place. It's the weather, those are some heavy storm clouds brewing. To lighten our spirits, let's discuss one of the other things you can find littering the roadways of Battle OutRun, and that's ramps. There's a ramp now, right in the middle of the road and I'm blasting towards it at terrifying speeds, so I guess I'll be going into the air now?


That's not as impressive as I'd hoped. The ramps are rather feeble affairs, launching the Teratuga into an oddly floaty jump that serves almost no purpose. I'd say that in the course of a whole playthrough I managed to jump over another car maybe twice, which was a damn sight less than the amount of times I hit a jump and then crashed as soon as I landed because I couldn't steer properly in mid-air. To add insult to injury, as far as I can see the only effect of upgrading your car's chassis is that it makes you stay airborne longer when you jump. Here's a handy hint: invest your money more wisely, such as in a new engine or fuzzy dice.


The official Mr. T inflatable sex doll did not sell as well as anicipated.


Welcome to Miami! What do we have in Miami? White cubes on the distant horizon and a hell of a lot of sky. Sky and buildings inspired by sugar lumps, that's Florida for you.
It's also got a lot of road to traverse, which is a shame because by this point Battle OutRun is starting to overstay its welcome, ignoring the exasperated sighs of its hosts and their pointed comments about how they have the number for a taxi firm right there in their phones. Each stage consists of the same don't-crash-em-up gameplay, with no variation in the action aside from an increased density of traffic and, like, two extra corners per stage. There's nothing to captivate the imagination, and no sense of reward for completing each stage of identical gameplay unless you're really excited to see each city's unique skyline.


Washington DC has a unique skyline; it's got the White House and the Washington Monument and a vast, featureless desert on its outskirts, just like every city in this version of America. Spacious skies yes, amber waves of grain not so much. Still, it looks nice and on the whole the graphics (sprite flicker aside) are one of Battle OutRun's better features.


I've finally made it to New York, where the fiendish Fu Manchu has given up on his elaborate criminal plots to spend his time driving around and making a nuisance of himself. He looks pretty smug about it, but let's see how smug he is when I'm slamming into him with nitro-assisted power!


Still pretty smug, I assume, because my nitro doesn't seem to be helping me. You can buy the nitro as an optional extra in the lorry-shop, and when you have some you can press up on the d-pad for a speed boost. The problem is that once you've rammed into the boss a few times they shoot off in front of you regardless of whether you're doing three hundred kilometres an hour or thirty, and you'll still have to drive for a while to catch them no matter what your speed is. This, coupled with the fact that the bosses can drive through the traffic like it isn't there, makes these later criminal encounters just that bit more irritating than before.


I managed to defeat him, though. He says I have improved much, but the only thing that has improved is my car. At least buying the upgrades, especially the body upgrades, does have a noticeable effect on how your car performs. It's always nice to have that increased feeling of power.
That's all the stages completed, then, so I suppose it's time to sit back and enjoy the no-doubt extravagant ending sequence and hang on, there's another bloody stage.


New York, New York, so good they made me play it twice. There's no mugshot for the villain of this final battle and no indication of what his car looks like, so it's a good job all the other vehicles look exactly the same as they did in every other stage otherwise I might have had to resort to ramming every car until I found him.


Oh, I found him. He's driving a Hot Wheels car with tyres one size down from "monster truck." It was a long and gruelling stage, but this time it's really, truly over. Honestly it could have been over two stages ago when I'd managed to buy all the upgrades and Joe has accomplished his original mission of getting his car up to spec, but I guess once you get a taste for justice it's hard to let any criminal go unpunished.


It's the mob boss know as Jimmy "The Forehead" Scalotti! He's a such a criminal mastermind that he had his skull surgically enlarged to fit all his master mind in there. I think he was in This Island Earth, and his forehead has indeed grown like the mighty oak. I suspect there may have been some miscommunication when this guy was described as "the head of the Mafia."


The ending shows the Teratuga driving across the screen, because lord knows I haven't seen enough of that already, and Battle OutRun draws to a close. Part of me wants to decry it as a horrendous bastardization of everything that made the original OutRun great, the feeling of freedom that can be found in the simple pleasure of driving stripped out and replaced by some dull battling and upgrading mechanics, but I just can't get that angry about it. It's a competent game in it's own way, certainly not bad for a Master System racer even if it's missing a real spark. It's a concrete bridge support of a game: technically well-constructed but unlikely to evoke any feelings of passion. The stages are too long and too samey, the computer-controlled cars are annoying and so I'm forced to end this article in the way it was always going to end - with me telling you to play the original instead.

The legacy of the wizard was so dangerous that the ancients sealed it up behind a brick wall, but now it has broken free and it thirsts for souls! Most wizards only leave a legacy of dusty tomes filled with forgotten lore, the occasional abandoned familiar and a robe in dire need of a thorough dry-cleaning, but this legacy is much more expansive than that.


Living in a cabin in the woods - always a safe place to be, that - are the Drasle family. I know they're called the Drasle family because the game's original Japanese title is Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family. Legacy of the Wizard is part of Falcom's long-running Dragon Slayer series of action RPGs, which started on Japanese home computers in the mid-Eighties, it's most familiar incarnation to Western audiences probably being the NES spin-off Faxanadu. Being part of the Dragon Slayer family gives LotW an "early Japanese RPG" pedigree, which I'm fairly certain means it's going to be an unnecessarily obtuse and rather unforgiving adventure.
Anyway, the Drasle family are all gathered around their kitchen table. You've got Mother and Father Drasle, their son and daughter, grandma and grandpa, that white lump that fills the role of family pet and Handy, the giant disembodied hand that came to live with the Drasles in a failed sitcom pilot. Not really, the hand is the cursor the player uses to select which of the Drasles they want to play as. I think I'll start with the father.


The Drasle's woodland home looks pretty idyllic, with lush forests, blue skies and even a convenient shop right next door to their house. The shop would be more convenient if it wasn't up a tree and only accessible by ladder - it's going to be difficult getting down that ladder if your arms are laden with shopping - but awkwardly-positioned business are something of a staple of this game, so this is just letting the player know what they're in for.
Also in the vicinity of the Drasle's house: a ladder that leads to the vast, labyrinthine dungeon that lies mere feet below the surface.


I wonder if the estate agent mentioned this to the Drasles when they bought their house? You'd think there'd be some kind of legal requirement about informing potential buyers of the monster-infested caverns nearby. It's like telling them about subsidence, which must also be a worry in this situation.


Legacy of the Wizard is definitely an action RPG, although the RPG side of things is a withered, vestigial lump: there are no experience points or stat upgrades here, just a big dungeon to explore. The basic gameplay is the same as a hundred other NES platformers, with one button to jump and one to fire your projectile weapon, which in Xemn's (that's Papa Drasle's name) case is a supply of throwing axes. My early experiments into throwing said axes at the many fast-moving enemies littering the caves reveal that they are magic axes. They don't seem to be enchanted or anything but my magic meter decreases when I throw them so, y'know, magic axes. They kill things well enough, and early on Xemn and I were making good progress through the dungeon; slaughtering the admittedly underwhelming enemies, jumping between platforms and collecting bags of gold and keys. It all feels well-constructed, with sharp controls and the ability to throw your axes in eight direction being a welcome addition. I'm usually not keen on the inclusion of falling damage, especially when you can't fall far before it kicks in - memories of my struggles with Spelunker spring to mind - but Xemn has an adorable little animation where he lands on his face if he falls too far, so that takes some of the sting out of it. Not out of his face, I mean. I'd imagine that stings a fair bit.


Hey look, it's one of the Eggplant Wizard's less successful siblings! No wonder he looks so grumpy, everyone loves Kid Icarus, but who in the hell remembers Legacy of the Wizard? No-one, that's who! If only he'd been immortalised as a cartoon villain like the Eggplant Wizard then maybe this walking aubergine would cheer up a little.


After a while spent wandering around, I came to the conclusion that I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. Dead ends sprung up everywhere I turned, my magical energy was fading fast and I wasted a lot of time wondering why that ghost at the bottom of the screen is wearing a cowboy hat. Is he the ghost of a cowboy, his eternal punishment for a life of misdeeds on the wild frontier to be trapped underground, far away from the rolling prairie? Is it simply a matter of style? He is a stylish ghost, I'll give him that. He's got matching boots and everything. See? That's far too much time to be thinking about these things, so I resolved to make my way back to the Drasle homestead and try a different character.


This time I took Lyll, the daughter of the family. She can jump much higher than Xemn, but she can take less punishment and her attacks are less powerful, being little pink fireballs instead of manly throwing axes. Her improved jumping capabilities meant that I could explore some new areas, which was nice, although it also meant I was taking a lot more falling damage thanks to poorly-aimed leaps.


Here is a dragon in a box. Legacy of the Wizard being part of the Dragon Slayer franchise, I suspect that at some point I am going to have to get around to slaying said dragon, but for now it remains paralysed in its chamber, refusing to interact with Lyll no matter how I tried to get its attention. Perhaps it was confident that its cyclops minions could handle things. They certainly took me by surprise, running around the screen like overexcited cyclops children on the last day of term at Cyclops Academy.
It was at this point that I admitted defeat. I am not great at games, or anything really, that doesn't come with specific instructions, and so I turned to Legacy of the Wizard's manual. Within, I learned a great many useful things, some of which I probably should have already known. "Make a map," the manual cries. It also says "anyone can defeat the monsters," and that came across as a little contemptuous and somewhat hurtful, given that I died because the monster took all my health. But yes, making a map would be a very good idea. The manual also reveals the Drasle family's main goal is to collect four crowns hidden throughout the dungeon: doing so will then let the son, Roas, use the Dragonslayer sword to fight the dragon. There are many other items to collect, too, all of them important to your quest but apparently (judging by the amount of space in the manual given over to explaining how it works) none more important than a glove that Xemn can use to push blocks around. With a clear goal in mind, and a quick peek at an FAQ to get an idea of where the glove is, I sent Xemn into the dungeon once more.


I found the glove inside a section of blocks shaped like a fish, or possibly a submarine. It's hard to tell with it being made of big stone blocks. It was also hard to find, because there was no obvious pathway to the chest, hidden as it was behind a group of fake bricks that crumble when the player walks into them. The revelation that some bricks are only bricks until one of the Drasles rubs their face against it went a long way towards explaining why I didn't get very far, and it doesn't auger well for the rest of the game. I'm all for your underground labyrinth having hidden secret passages - labyrinth designers are a notoriously mischievous lot - but having those secret obscured by brickwork that looks like all the other brickwork in town is going a bit too far.


With the glove in Xemn's possession I could... well, not do much, actually. You have to go back to the nearest inn (or your house) and add it to your inventory before you can use it, but once you've done that then whoo baby, those pushable blocks better look out because they're in for the shoving of their lives! Once I figured out how to push them, that it. Turns out Falcom decided that simply walking into the blocks with the glove equipped would be too simple and would bore the seasoned dungeon explorer who craves a challenge in all things. Instead, you have to jump, then hold the jump button and press the direction you want the block to move in and hopefully it will move that way. It's an awkward system, presumably designed to allow the player to move blocks above them by jumping into them, but it's limitations are revealed when you're trying to jump around on blocks you don't want to move but they slide around like soap of a water slide anyway. It also leads to block-pushing behaviour that feels very counter-intuitive, like being able to push blocks around corners and even allowing the player to ride on floating blocks by repeatedly jumping onto them and holding left or right as you land.


Yes, a huge amount of block pushing lies ahead for Xemn as he searches for the crown. There are a lot of puzzles involving sliding blocks and oh my god it is the worst. I have made my hatred of sliding block puzzles known many times before, and if you do get to experience personalized torment in Hell then I will be spending eternity trying to move tiles around one at a time until they form a picture, a picture showing the ones I love playing a proper game and having loads of fun without me. LotW's block sliding is more of a Sokoban clone than the scrambled-picture kind, but it's still an unpleasant experience. I don't think that's my own biases talking, either: the, uh, unconventional block pushing controls make the whole thing much more of an ordeal than it needed to be, and they're not even engaging, well-designed puzzles. The game's manual even says that the block puzzles are "the hardest part of the game," and for me this was very much true. I had a hard time forcing myself to play through them, I know that much, even while I was using a step-by-step guide to solve the later ones.


I found a crown! It was just sitting there, completely free for anyone to take once they'd negotiated the deadly pillars, moved more rolling stones than a record shop in 1969, avoided the predations of the monocular rocks and unlocked the treasure chest it was placed inside. It's like they wanted me to take it, and once all this is over I've sure they won't mind Xemn taking it down to the local Cash Converters.


Collecting the crown came at a price: a battle against an enormous pubic louse, fallen from the crotches of the very gods of Olympus! After being teleported to its bone-strewn lair - frankly a relief, as I had to push no blocks to get here - the battle was joined and the foe quickly vanquished by standing on the spot and throwing axes at it until it died. All it does is jump around near you, and assuming you've got plenty of magic and a decent amount of health you'll easily win the race to the bottom of your respective health bars. I guess anyone can defeat monsters.


There are three more crowns to find, each of them hidden in areas that require the skills and equippable tools of a different member of the Drasle family to conquer. I took Pochi the monster pet out to find the next crown. Pochi looks like a cross between Bub and / or Bob and the pink dragon mascot of games developer Asmik, and his power is that enemies ignore him. I'd ignore him too, he looks like kind of a dork.
Pochi is advanced enough to know how keys work, and he'll need plenty if he's going to accomplish his mission, so it's handy that a defeated enemy has dropped one right in his path. However, even collecting items is not an easy task in this game, because there's a slight delay between the enemy dying and the item they drop appearing. This would be fine if they only dropped helpful things like keys and gold, but they can also randomly drop health-draining vials of poison. When you're trying to kill monsters and make your way through the maze, this often means that you walk right into a bottle of poison before it even appears, and the only way to avoid doing so is to stand still after killing each bad guy on the off chance that it's trying to poison you to death with its final act on this mortal coil. To make matters worse, if you're playing as Xemn you then have to wait for the potion to disappear before moving on because Xemn lacks the jumping ability to clear it, by which time the enemy you just killed is in the process of respawning. I began this adventure with a fair amount of goodwill towards the game, but LotW's little irritations are stacking up and detracting from what is otherwise a perfectly acceptable action adventure.


Pochi's quest ends with a battle against a lich of some kind, a terrifying undead effigy created from unhallowed bones and a bin bag. Pochi eats tacky Halloween decorations for breakfast, possibly in a literal sense because he may be a monster but he behaves like a dog, and this fight is even easier than the previous boss battle. They're just not very tough, is all. Speaking of tough, I've warmed to Pochi a little now that I've noticed he tries to do an angry face every time he fires his projectile. He's still a dork, but he's making an effort.


Back to Lyll, who we've met before, for another boss battle. This time it's against a dragon. Not the dragon from earlier, a smaller, much more pathetic dragon who wasn't so much slain as gently brushed aside. It's always an odd feeling when the bosses are the easiest part of the game - a rare occurrence, but one that does happen from time to time - and they'd be the least interesting part of Legacy of the Wizard if it wasn't for all the block pushing.
None of that should reflect badly on Lyll, though. She's probably my favourite character - she's got a jaunty feather in her hair, she can jump really high and best of all she doesn't push blocks, she smashes them apart with a pickaxe she finds in the dungeon. I appreciate her refreshingly no-nonsense approach to problem solving.


The final crown must be collected by the final character: Meyna, mother of the Drasle family and full-on wizard. Her statistics are average, but she can use a variety of impressive items (once you've found or bought them in the dungeon depth, that is) including a magic stick for unlocking doors and a pair of wings that let her fly around the screen at the cost of her magic bar. Here, Meyna watches two children in cat pyjamas frolic around the dungeon, pondering whether to incinerate them with her powerful magics. In the end the decision was made for her when the cat-people's frolicking turned into a attempted murder by way of overenthusiastic romping and she was forced to put them down. That's what she's going to tell the police, anyway.


Playing Legacy of the Wizard is a draining affair filled with questionable gameplay decisions, but it's not without it's endearing moments. Two of those are shown here - LotW contains some fully adorable skeleton knights who waddle around with a hesitance that makes it seem like this is their first day on dungeon-patrolling duty, and there's also the occasional pattern to the layout of the blocks that makes for an interesting view. You already saw the dolphin / submarine thing, and here's a leering demonic face. Nice detail work, using the portcullises for nostrils, and they're not just decorative - they're also extremely useful landmarks for making sense of that map I'm sure every player will be drawing.


Using all these arcane relics means that Meyna has to pop into the health-restoring inns more than the other characters, which can be a problem because some of these inns are not exactly welcoming to potential guests. I mean, look at that inn down there - sure, the carpet of lacerating blades around the front door is going to help to keep cold-callers at bay but you're never going to make any money if all your customers bleed to death from lacerations to the femoral arteries before they can even reach the reception desk. That's not even the worst one, check this out:


I'd say that's pretty inn-hospitable. Of course I'd say that, I'm a terrible human being.


Meyna's boss is a golem, and to its craggy credit it put up much more of a fight than its associates. I had to move out of its way, how crazy is that? It still wasn't particularly difficult, because as with all the bosses it was just "moving thing that fires smaller moving things at the player" but there was a touch more effort involved in not dying.


With the four crowns collected, the duty of finally slaying the dragon falls to Roas, son of the Drasle family. He's an unexceptional young man with none of the special powers of his relatives, but for some reason he's the only one who can wield the Dragonslayer sword. Or maybe that's just what his family told him so that he didn't feel left out. Roas has a spiky hat and the facial expression of a perpetually surprised bowling ball. Those are really the only interesting facts about Roas.


No, wait, I tell a lie: there was also that time he found a hovering green arse in a box. That was quite interesting. I rushed over and grabbed hold of the arse, naturally, and I'm glad I did because it restored Roas' health. I looked into it and apparently it's supposed to be bread. Green, arse-shaped bread. If I asked for some bread at a restaurant and they brought that out I would leave, or at least reconsider ordering the sausage.


It's not just butts, either: this shop appears to be selling a human kidney. It'd be fun if there was a super-secret hidden character in Legacy of the Wizard but you had to piece them together Frankenstein-style before you could use them, but sadly I'm stuck with Roas.


There's the Dragonslayer sword, hidden away in a floating chamber that's only accessible through the portrait on the wall. They work as teleporters once you have all the crowns, and by zapping between them in a set order you will eventually be deposited in the room with the sword. However, you may have noticed that I am above the sacred chamber. This is because, despite knowing what I was supposed to be doing, I somehow messed up the teleportation procedure and had to resort to cheating my way back to the Dragonslayer. I don't feel too guilty about it. I put enough effort into negotiating the sliding block puzzles and hunting for false walls to feel I deserved the cutting of some slack. I mean really, who has time for all this adventuring? Well, okay, the children of the late Eighties for whom this game was released might well have, and that's the thing about Legacy of the Wizard: I can feel that this is the kind of game that a certain type of kid would become obsessed with - creating detailed maps, painstakingly marking the location of each item and shop and inn and filling many pilfered school exercise book with meticulously recorded passwords. Even now LotW retains that sense of exploration, and while I'm very grateful that modern videogames rely less on obscuring gameplay mechanics to create challenge there is something very pleasing about having the labyrinth laid out before you, daring you to figure it out.


With the fabled sword in hand, Roas faces off against the dragon Keela; a foe so overwhelmingly powerful that even the background has run away in terror. Keela only has one move, but it's an extremely effective one - it breathes green fire on the ground in front of it. I know that doesn't sound like much, but it's effective for three reasons. One, it does a ton of damage. Two, Roas can't throw his swords very far, so he has to get right into the fire's range to hurt the boss and three, there's no warning or indication that the boss is about to breathe fire. It just goes on and off like a lightswitch, so the fight ends up being a tentative tip-toe dance as you try to edge close enough to attack before moving away immediately lest you get grilled. Patience is your strongest non-magical-sword weapon here, and the game generously gives you infinite magic to get the job done. As long as you don't get to greedy and calmly chip away at the dragon's health, it will eventually be slain and the Drasle family can get back to their simple, humdrum lives, starting with a dragon steak supper.


All the Drasles are back together, waving in appreciation to the player who has guided them through their ordeals. Except Pochi, who is waving his backside at the camera. Thanks, Pochi. Real classy. It's because I called you a dork, isn't it?
So what was the legacy of the wizard? In my case it was mostly frustration and confusion, but there's enough going on that I wouldn't say this is a bad game by any means. There's some fun to be had here, especially if you're the type for whom an untraversed dungeon and blank graph paper holds a special thrill. It's well made, with good solid controls (weird block wrangling aside) and presentation that's basic but endearing. There are a lot of interesting-looking enemies, even if they mostly behave in the same way, and the graphics are decently varied for being made almost entirely of square stone blocks. One bit of glamour is provided by the game's soundtrack, which was composed by industry legend Yuzo Koshiro. It's not his best work, too beholden to the idea of what an action RPG should sound like, but it's not bad. I like Lyll's theme, myself.


Still, completely unmarked hidden passageways and sliding blocks around means that Legacy of the Wizard is not a game for me, no matter how much I warmed to the Drasle family.


Oh, now you tell me that their surname is Worzen? Thanks, I've been calling them the wrong name this whole time... and I just figured out that "Drasle" comes from the first syllables of "dragon" and "slayer." At least I got there before the end of this article. Which is now.

Yes, it's New York in the age of speakeasies and bootleg rum, when gangster hid their guns in violin cases and violins across the country were irreparably damaged with nothing to protect them! A time of wise-guys and dames and vicious men who end all their sentences with the word "See?"!


A time of men in comically oversized trenchcoats! Now I know why they're called trenchcoats, it's because you could fit an entire army regiment in one of them as they await their almost inevitable deaths on some god-forsaken Belgian field.


Some of these men can pull off the "coat that looks like the cardboard box your refrigerator came in" look quite well, mind you. These two, for example, look just about mean and moody enough to get away with it.


You're welcome.
Empire City does have a two-player mode, so presumably these two palookas are the playable characters. That's a bit odd, because the game's story - as provided by the arcade flyer but not at any point in the game itself - concerns a lone vigilante's efforts to rub out the Mafia. Two Mafia gangs killed his family when they were caught in the crossfire of a turf war, you see, and now the hero is going to avenge his loved ones and punish the Mafia like some kind of punish-er.


The game begins, and it wastes no time in throwing you right into the action. There' sno explanation as to what's going on, but luckily it's all very straightforward. You're controlling a cross hair, there's a mobster holding a dame or possibly a broad hostage, I'm sure you can figure it out. A quick swipe of the reticule, a tap of the fire button and the lady is free, free to go about her day and to probably be abducted again immediately because she's a) in a videogame b) female and c) wearing red clothes. Red clothes on a female videogame character are like a red rag to a bull, if bulls were predisposed towards kidnapping: Jessica from Final Fight, Marian from Double Dragon, even Donkey Kong's Pauline. Maybe gangsters, be they the Mafia variety or just common street punks, have different colour receptors on their retinas or something, like criminal bees or something.


Of course, taking out one gangster isn't enough to satisfy our hero's roaring lust for revenge, and immediately after whacking his first target another villain pops up to take his place. This man's crime? He stole Dick Tracy's hat. What a bastard.


And so Empire City 1931 continues, the player wiping out crime one gangster at a time. Literally one at a time, the next target not appearing until you've plugged the previous one. They can appear anywhere on the stage, so most of the game is spent sweeping your crosshair around trying to find them. Arrows at the left or right of the screen give you an indication of which direction the bad guys are located in and moving your crosshair to the edge of the screen scrolls the view across, although it wasn't until someone leaning out of an office window shot and killed me that I realised you can also pan the screen up and down. That's a handy thing to know when the Mafia are using the classic clock tower sniper's perch, although the slow-ish speed of the screen panning does raise some questions about exactly how our hero is moving about. I can understand that his side-to-side movements might be him walking left or right and therefore represent a careful, measured tread but looking up and down? That should be a more... responsive movement, rather than feeling like our hero is winching his neck up with a hand crank every time he raises his eyes above street level.


After shooting few more goon, Empire City abruptly lurches into stage two. It's night-time in the Big Apple, or there's at least a blue filter over the lens and honestly I rather like the "day for night" look - it gives proceedings a cinematic flair, which is presumably what the developers were going for, and it's a nice shake-up of the already-familiar alleys and warehouses that make up most of the game's backgrounds.
The darkness offers no respite from the constant danger of a sudden lead enema - this is the City That Never Sleeps, after all - but the darkness doesn't really affect the gameplay much as the gangsters are still clearly visible against the scenery. Plus, you have a helpful tool for knowing when you're about to be perforated: it's the speech bubble in the corner of the screen. It counts down from five to zero as an enemy draws a bead on you, and if you haven't dealt with them when it reaches zero then a shot rings out and our hero is killed.


Oof, look at that, they got him right in the corner of the mouth. He's going to need some chapstick for that.
Empire City has instant deaths, then. The bar at the bottom of the play screen isn't a health meter but an ammo gauge, and with a single gunshot wound proving fatal and the ability to lose a life just because you didn't pack enough bullets it feels like Taito had some vague notion about making this game "realistic." It definitely adds a note of tension to the game, this kill-or-be-killed atmosphere, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't have been more fun with a health bar and more than one enemy on screen at once. At least our hero can carry quite a lot of bullets, which solves the mystery of why everyone's coat is big enough to double as a five-man tent. He must sound like a sack of nails falling down a staircase when he runs anywhere.


I promised tommyguns, and I am a man of my word. This guy is a man of his tommygun, though, and tommyguns beat words so he killed me a few times. Enemies can kill you from off-screen, and by this point I was dying frequently without even managing to see the goon who shot me. "This can't be right," I thought to myself, and as my character bled to death in the street for the fiftieth time I realised that maybe I should try pressing some of the other buttons. I don't think I should be judged too harshly for this not occurring to me sooner. I'm kinda surprised there were any buttons besides "fire" in this, a game purely about shooting people.


There's a dodge button! Well, that'll come in handy. Pressing the dodge button make a giant picture of your character appear on screen, obscuring your vision and dragging your cursor in a random direction. These are minor prices to pay for not being dead. Dodging does stop you from being dead as long as it's active while the gunshot countdown clock reaches zero, despite the picture making it look like our hero isn't dodging but has simply raised his arm to protect himself from any incoming projectiles. It's surprisingly effective. Why not dodge all the time then? Because you can't control the crosshair while you're doing it, for starters, and you also lose some ammo every time you dodge. Your evasive manoeuvres presumably cause ammo depletion because your character's spare bullets fall out of his pockets while he's rolling around on the floor.


With mastery of the dodge button firmly under my control, Empire City 1931 falls into a rigid pattern of dodging around each area until you spot your next target, and then trying to eliminate said target using as few bullets as possible because with all this dodging nibbling away at your ammunition there's a real chance you could fail the stage by running out of bullets, the most embarrassing possible end to your vigilante justice crusade short of your trousers falling down as your mother's church group drives past. At least immediate and unseen death isn't as much of an issue now, and after playing for a while you'll stop looking at the shot timer and instead rely on listening to the beeps it makes as it counts down to let you know when you need to dodge.


And thus proceeds Empire City 1931, the basic gameplay never deviating from this very simple formula, the only changes being a gradual increase in difficulty and the occasional new background. I do mean "occasional," too, because I don't count "the same background with with a blue filter on it" as a new background. This indoor area is definitely new, although it doesn't change the gameplay any. Popping out of a doorway is functionally identical to popping up from behind a crate in an alleyway, although the reduced verticality of the stage means I'm not going to be aiming up much.


Apart from to shoot this guy, I mean. No, I have no idea how he got up there, but mentally listing the possible explanations is more entertaining that the game itself, which is rapidly becoming stagnant. My favourite explanations are stilts, that he has terrifying Lovecraftian tentacles from the waist down, or best of all that he's the pinnacle of a totem pole made of Mafia thugs sitting on each others' shoulders, all of whom are complaining about who gets to be at the top in caricatured Noo Joisey accents.


By now you've seen almost everything Empire City has to offer, so I'll just mention a few little bits before we get to the end. There are items to collect, after a fashion: small wooden crates appear on the floor sometimes, and you can shoot them for either extra ammo or the chance to earn some points by shooting a sack of money. You can juggle the sack of money by repeatedly shooting it to get more and more points, although this process is bogged down by the complications of your crosshair not being very accurate, the random and jerky flight of the bag and the fact that in the later stages you have to dodge every two seconds or be killed. Two seconds isn't much of an exaggeration, either, because the later gangsters' shooting countdown starts at at three or two instead of the rather more generous five.


Can you believe that shooting the red oil drum pictured above doesn't cause an explosion that takes out any nearby enemies? I know, what a disgrace. I have been playing videogames for decades now, and I have come to expect certain standard practises, like anything red and shootable packing the explosive force of a nuclear bomb, especially if enemies are stupid enough to use it as cover.
There aren't really anything you'd call "boss battles" in Empire City 1931, but at the end of some stages you might encounter a slightly bigger coat than usual who, unlike every other enemy in the game, takes more than one bullet to kill. After the first time I fought one of these grande cappotti, where I hit him and assumed he was dead only for him to immediately gun me down, they stopped being any kind of threat because you can hold them in place by just blasting away at them until they die. It's not like our hero needs to reload or anything.


By the end of the game, the difficulty stems from simply not being able to find the person you're supposed to killing, especially when the need for near-constant dodging means your cursor is being dragged this way and that. One more than one occasion I simply let the mobster shoot me, because once they do the camera moves to show you where they are. It doesn't help you any, because when you lose a life you start the stage from scratch, but at least it gives you some idea of where they might be hiding for next time. Of course, if you keep doing that you'll run out of lives.


Praise be, it's Tunicael, Angel of Coats, come to take me away to heaven where I will be reunited with my loving family. They will be very pleased by all the murder and death I wrought in their memory, I'm sure. Envelop me in your waterproof embrace, my saviour!


Never mind, it's just a Mafia hitman who executes our hero in a gutter if you don't hit continue. As Game Over screens go, that's pretty grim. To make it less depressing, I'm going to pretend that I was assassinated by myself... from the future. Look, this game needs spicing up somehow, alright?


Then, when you reach the last stage, Empire City finally tries to do something a bit different. The Boss of all the Mafia ever is nearby, and you must kill him at a shot. Also with a shot, one assumes.


It's a sniping mini-game! I wasn't expecting that, but I will gratefully take it because the last few stages had congealed into a dull, samey mess. It's a simple set-up: the screen is fuzzy aside from the bit highlighted by your sniper scope. The Boss paces around the building opposite like a man awaiting the birth of his child or (a more likely scenario) the verdict of a court case, and you have fifteen seconds and one bullet to get him in your sights and take him out.


Naturally, I missed the first time I tried it. "You fell down on the job," it says, which must be 1930's gangster slang for "you were spotted and then shot fifty time by the Boss' bodyguards." Such a rich and vibrant lexicon. Anyway, missing the shot sends you back to the start of the previous stage, and once you've fought your way through that again you get another chance.


I made no mistake this time. Well, I did, but I also save-stated here because I really didn't want to have to go through the previous stage again, but the third time was the charm and the Boss got whacked, taken out, bumped, clipped, etcetera etcetera. Dead by shooting, it says. I prefer to think of it as dead by justice. Jazz music plays, a spinning newspaper headline reads MOB BOSS SLAIN, DEAD BY SHOOTING, there's a scene of our hero throwing barrels of illegal hooch into a river. That last bit is in my imagination, because Empire City doesn't have an ending sequence and instead sends you straight into a second loop of the game which I think I'll skip. I've already seen enough of this one.


Empire City 1931 is one of those games that I went into with a degree of optimism, but in the end I wanted to like it much more than I actually did like it. I like the prohibition-era setting, I like crosshair shooters and I like the big sprites and even bigger coats of the game's presentation, but any flair in the gameplay is almost immediately crushed beneath the repetition of the both the action and your surroundings. Shooting the same couple of villains in the same couple of locations quickly becomes tired, and matters aren't helped by your gun's and the game's hit detection not being particularly cooperative. Hunting for off-screen enemies makes the game feel like less a test of skill and more a test of how lucky you are at guessing where the bad guys are hiding. The dodging mechanic is interesting, or at least it is until you reach the point in the game where you're dodging all the time, and in the end I'd have to put this on my "not recommended" pile. If you're still interested, I suggest only playing the first few stages, or better yet playing Taito's own (and much superior) Dead Connection instead. Someone must have like Empire City 1931, enough that it was ported to several home formats and later received a sequel, and maybe I'm judging it a little harshly considering it was released in 1986, but that someone is not me. Nice coats, mind you.

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.

And now join me back in our dismal and joyless real-world universe, where I can tell you that Timecop on the SNES is actually a terrible action-platformer loosely based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme film of the same name. That's the film where JCVD is a cop who travels through time, stopping villains before they can irreperably damage the present by fiddling with the past. The most memorable part of the movie is when Van Damme's character defeats the villainous senator McComb - played by Ron Silver in a manner that suggests the producers really wanted Alan Rickman circa Die Hard - by kicking him into a version of himself from the past, and when the two senators touch they freak out and melt like a slug dipped in salt. This is because "same matter cannot occupy same space," apparently. Look, if you want a movie that features good, solid scientific theory then don't watch one about time-travel.


Rather than following the plot of the film, Timecop: The Videogame goes down the route of creating a sequel, because the world the original movie created was too rich and detailed to be allowed to go unexploited. So, Max Walker, the hero of the movie and not played by Van Damme in this game, is about to retire from the Time Enforcement Commision, turning over his role as protector of the time-tubes to a new system called Timescan. Then Walker notices that some equipment in the lab has a new logo on it, and he uses this information to surmise that history is being altered by one Dr. Hans Kleindast, original inventor of the time-travel process. From what I can tell, Kleindast was believed to have died during the first time-travel experiments, but it turns out he's very much alive. Well, apart for the piece of his brain that tells him how to dress, that's long since perished.


Maniacal dentists... of the future!! Professor Kleindast, ladies and gentlemen. Fair play to the developers, he definitely looks like a villain from a vaguely-cyberpunkish nineties videogame. He also looks like a proper tit. I can't tell if those are supposed to be mechanical attachments above his glasses or giant Groucho Marx eyebrows. At least he seems to be having fun.


Kleindast's complete mastery over the flow of time means that he's grown bored, so instead of the usual plot of a hero trying to stop a villain for truth and justice and soforth, the set-up for Timecop is actually that Kleindast picked Walker to do battle with throughout the ages as "a worthy opponent on the board of time," and to that end Walker is strapped into a time machine and launched into the unknown. "Let the duel begins!" says Professor Kleindast, who is not a professor of English it seems, and thus begins Timecop.


The first stage is TEC Headquarters in 2005. 2005 was the future when this game was released, but it's the past now and it's the present day in terms of the game's setting, so Timecop really does have time covered in all directions.


TEC Headquarters is a hostile place, patrolled by naval officers in dress uniform whose anger at the constant wisecracks about An Officer and a Gentleman has been channelled into their relentless efforts to see Walker dead. That's Walker in the black, fending off a navy man with the rarely-seen "Drunkard Climbs the Fence" style of kung-fu. Timecop is a standard walk-and-bash adventure for the most part - Walker can kick, punch and fire his gun to defeat his foes, (who are also his co-workers, I guess?) but unfortunately his physical attacks have the range, power and speed of a seaslug who's only taking karate lessons because his parents forced him to, and his gun has a very limited amount of ammunition. Enemies also take multiple hits to defeat however you attack them, but I'll leave it to you to decide whether that means Walker's punches are as powerful as a bullet or if his superiors issued him with pistol that has the stopping power of a gentle kick to the ankle. To help you make your mind up, I should point out that the TEC building runs on steam power, and hazardous gouts of boiling water randomly spray out at you as you traverse the level. Maybe there was a typo and I've actually been sent back to 1905.


Making your way through Timecop's early levels is a simple if not very enjoyable matter of walking along for a while until you find an elevator, punching - or more likely crouch-kicking  - any resistance in your path. Then you ride the elevator up or down to a new floor of the building, where you do the same thing again until you happen across the blinking exit sign. The whole of the TEC building feels like the level designer slapped it together at 5:25 on Friday afternoon, which is at least consistent with the overall quality of the game. After only a couple of minutes playing it is immediately that Timecop is a very bad game and deep down you know, no matter how much you wish it wasn't true, that it's only going to get worse. For starters this is a very ugly game, but I can maybe chalk that up to personal preference because I bloody hate digitised sprites. Then there's the gameplay, which is as smooth and flowing as trying to piss out a golf ball: you plod forwards, stop to fight an enemy, move five for six paces and then stop again to fight, and again, and again. You could try turning around and running in the opposite direction when you see danger ahead, but if you do that Walker flails around and keeps sliding in the same direction thanks to his Wile E. Coyote levels of momentum... but only if you turn around while running. If you just let go of the d-pad he stops immediately. He also stops dead if you crouch. Your attacks come out slow and combat is tedious thanks to a lack of combos and miserly ammunition pick-ups. "Maybe Walker has a special move," I thought to myself, and to my surprise he does. It's an uppercut. Would you like to see it?


Wow. It has less range that your normal attacks with the added drawback of having more set-up than Noah building the bloody ark. I don't think it even does any extra damage, although that is hard to verify because I couldn't hit anything with it.


Also of note: the music in the first couple of levels. I was not looking forward to Timecop's aural delights when I heard the theme on the title screen, which was full of grating guitar samples that gave me vivid, harrowing flashbacks to the Wayne's World game, but this one isn't bad at all. I like the choice of voice sample. "FBI, get on it," it says. I wish the FBI would get on it. Maybe they could close down the TEC and take over my responsibilities so I would have to play this game any more.


After a few stages of elevator action, (but not Elevator Action, which is a far superior game,) the developers got worried that the player might be struggling with the twin concepts of horizontal and vertical movement so they chucked in a stage which is nothing but a single flat room packed with enemies. There are many small robots mixed in with the naval officers now, but that is small comfort, especially when the robots don't look like anything at all. On the plus side the flat layout means I could avoid more combat by jumping over the enemies and running away, and at least here's an in-universe reason for the flatness: this is the launching runway for Walker's time machine.


It is not a cool-looking time machine. Seeing Walker's head framed by the time machine's window like that really lets me appreciate just how utterly characterless he is. The sprites in Sensible Soccer had more personality than this, and they had less pixels in their heads than Walker does in his right foot.


With access to his time-travelling rocket sled, Walker makes his way to the San Andreas Fault circa 1945 to stop Kleindast from mining some minerals or something. Look, I wasn't really paying attention, okay? It's an underwater stage, joy of joys, and having removed any sense of verticality at the end of the last stage the developers go even further by taking away Walker's ability to punch or kick while he's underwater. I'm looking forward to stage five, which at this rate will be Walker standing in an empty black room, completely unable to move. That would be a considerable improvement on this stage, where endless octopus swarms with an unquenchable hatred for time travellers try to strangle Walker while Kleindast's troops shoot at him. When Walker jumps underwater, he does his usual walking animation, which looks as ridiculous as it sounds.


"Hey, I don't care if the playtesters hated them, it took me six months to digitise this octopus sprite and by God I'm going to make sure it sees plenty of use in this game!"


My current theory is that Cryo Interactive actually wanted to make Octopus Slaughter Simulator '95: Tons o' Tentacles Edition, but the outcry from animal welfare groups forced them to pretend they were actually making a Timecop game.


There's even an octopus boss. An octoboss, if you like. It has sad eyes. Probably because I've just killed hundreds of its children.


The final damning piece of evidence that proves Timecop was designed solely and specifically to cause me pain arrives after the octoboss, as you're forced into side-scrolling shooter segment, piloting the dorkiest-looking submarine ever to sink beneath the ocean waves through a sparse field of underwater mines and the final remnants of the now-extinct octopus species. You may have noticed that your submarine is ridiculously large, so you won't be shocked to learn that this is no Gradius-style thrill ride of near-misses and daring piloting manoeuvres between deadly obstacles. It's boring, is what it is. Very, very boring and very, very ugly. Bitter experience has taught me that you should try to avoid saying "I could do better than that" lest someone call you on it, but in this case I am one hundred percent certain that I could design a more interesting submarine than that. I have designed a more interesting submarine than that, I had some Underwater Lego when I was a kid. My Lego submarines will have had fins and rocket launchers and thematically inappropriate decorations taken from the Castle sets, which would obviously be a clear improvement on whatever this thing is supposed to be.


That's more like it: a good, sensible plan to gain vast wealth using the power of time-travel. A little prosaic for a mad scientist named Professor Kleindast who dresses like an alien ambassador from a severely underfunded episode of Star Trek, but reasonable enough. Hang on, New York 1929? This stage is going to be Mafia-themed, isn't it?


I suddenly have a newfound appreciation for Empire City 1931.
Having become tired of running extortion rackets and illegal gambling, the New York mob have returned to what they love doing best: leaning out of windows and taking pot-shots at anyone who happens to be passing. The really lucky gangsters get to lean out of the window of a moving car, which must be terrible exciting for them, their tongues flapping as the breeze ruffles their fur. No, wait, that's dogs. The upshot of facing all these snipers is that I found out Walker can aim his gun upwards. Who knew? Not me, but then again I'd never had a reason to try shooting upwards until I reached this stage.


And what a stage it is, another flat and featureless area packed with enough hard-to-hit enemies to send the fun-o-meter's needle crashing from "boring" to "frustrating." Most of the action takes place in New York's famous newsstand and drugstore district - yes, if you're ever in the Big Apple, make sure you stop by this historic part of the city and you'll never worry again about where your next bottle of aspirin or celebrity gossip magazine is coming for because there's a drugstore or a newstand literally every twenty feet!


After a couple of fairly long stages spent roaming the streets of New York, Walker finds himself in the not-at-all-suspiciously named Kleindast Brokerage Bank. I suppose when you command the very power of time itself you don't need to worry so much about keeping your history-altering plans hush-hush, but Kleindast said he wanted to have a duel of wits against Walker, didn't he? A very small duel, it seems. Like, a thumb war of wits. A game of Snap of wits.
The multi-storied level "design" of the first couple of stages has returned, and it makes a welcome change from the tedium of recent levels in the the same way that developing spontaneous blindness is a welcome change from watching your parents have sex. It at least evens out the wear on the left and right buttons of my d-pad.


There's a boss at the end of the stage - a bipedal robot so ugly that I honestly thought there was a problem with its sprite, a graphical glitch, but no. It's supposed to look like that. I mean, I'm sure the artists didn't intend to create a robot so dorky that even C3PO would beat it up for it's dinner money, but that is how the finished sprite was meant to be displayed.
The robot jumps across the screen and then walks around near you on the off-chance that you'll collide and Walker will take damage, so make sure you duck under the robot when it jumps and crouch-kick it when you get the chance until it explodes. Truly, a duel of wits rarely seen outside the stories of Holmes and Moriarty!


Now Walker finds himself in the Second World War, because every time-travel game has to have a level where you fight against Nazis. Kleindast has gone back to 1944 to help the Nazis win the war, which is a helluva step up on the Ladder O' Evil from getting rich by manipulating the stock market. Kleindast hasn't left himself anywhere to go with that move, once you've become a Literal Nazi it's difficult to become more evil short of destroying the entire planet.
As for the stage itself, the briefing says that Kleindast has given the Germans advanced weaponry. This is a bare-faced lie. The Nazis have the same pitiful guns that fire the same slow-moving videogame projectiles as always, and their mortars are so weak that they barely have the velocity required to reach Walker's chest, never mind enemy lines. So Kleindast is a good guy after all, then? A double agent, a saboteur? Maybe history will vindicate Kleindast in hindsight.


At the end of the stage Walker has to fight a tank, and in this case "fight" means "stand next to and keep firing your gun." You can also use your limited supply of screen-clearing bombs, they can do the boss some damage. As long as you don't stand right in front of the tank's cannon you'll be fine, and I do mean right in front of it - because Walker is short enough to stand underneath the tank's barrel, when the tank fires a shell it kind of... dribbles out of the end of the cannon and falls in a pathetic arc, because that's the only way it can hit Walker while he's standing next to the tank. I never thought I'd know what an impotent tank would look like, but now I do. Thanks, Timecop.


Once your brief sojourn through Nazi Germany is over - and it was very brief, clocking in at about two minutes if you jump over most of the Wehrmacht, as is most expedient - Walker moves forward in time to a future Los Angeles. Kleindast holds the city in his grip thanks to that most cyberpunk-ish of plot devices: the super-drug that is wired directly into the brain. In this case it's called Brainblast, a name that makes it sound as though it comes in a tangy cherry flavour.


There's very little to say about the gameplay here, because it's exactly the same as all the other ponderous single-plane stages. A couple of aesthetic details do stand out, though. For one, it's clear that some people appreciate everything Kleindast has done for the city, because that graffiti in the background says "Kleindast Rules." There's also graffiti that simply reads BRAINBLAST, just like when you see COCAINE or MARIJUANA painted on walls in the real world.
LA is also full of these street punks, which means an actual human person once dressed like that and allowed themselves to be filmed and digitised for inclusion in this game. There is little Timecop could do now that would make playing it a worthwhile experience, but being able to see the original footage of these punks would definitely soften the blow somewhat.


Kleindast ramps up his sinister scheme by building a rocket that will disperse Brainblast (now in Sour Tangerine Zing flavour!) into the atmosphere, causing anyone who breathes it in to become addicted. Walker rushes to the famous Los Angeles Rocket Factory, which is composed of fifty percent conveyor belts and fifty percent killer robots. In a rare flicker of humour - that's how I'm choosing to interpret it, anyway - there are signs everywhere that say "do not step on the conveyor belt." I'm going to imagine that Kleindast put these signs up in the desperate hope that Walker is such a stickler for the rules that he will be unable to disobey them and thus won't reach Kleindast before he can put his plan into motion.


Sadly for the villain, Walker is a maverick who has no problem stepping all over those conveyor belts like this game has stepped all over my desire to play another SNES game ever again, and soon he has Kleindast cornered. I hope I've made it clear to you by now that Timecop is an especially wretched game, but if you're still not getting it then here's the moment that should push you over the edge - Walker does battle with Kleindast, the game's main villain,and  Kleindast fights and behaves in exactly the same way as the regular white-suited minions from the very first stage of the game, only with a bigger health bar. I've played some crap in my time but the lack of imagination shown here is truly staggering. It's like getting to the end of Final Fantasy VII and discovering that Sephiroth is just another Shinra grunt with 99,9999 HP.


Somehow, Timecop lumbers on - Kleindast managed to escape the thorough beating I gave him a moment ago - as Walker makes his way through a half-built skyscraper packed with worksite health and safety violations. Or maybe the swinging girders suspended from ropes are a decorative feature, a brutalist windchime. Whatever the case, it's the same walk right, ride an elevator, walk left, ride an elevator, repeat gameplay as before, only with the added complication of occasionally standing on a piece of wood with a nail sticking out of it. Walker's extreme susceptibility to tetanus represents one of the most ignoble deaths I've ever experienced in a videogame, so at the very least Timecop will be remembered for that.


The climactic battle arrives, and to my surprise it's something different! Walker and Kleindast fight to the death in the manner of the ancient gladiators: while flying around in jetpacks that are heavily affected by momentum. You float around taking shots at each other, and while the fact that Kleindast spends most of the battle hovering off the top of the screen where you can't reach him means I'd hesitate to call the fight fun it is leagues ahead of every other boss battle in the game and as I say, it is at least different. Some effort was expended in coming up with a unique encounter, and for that I am grateful. It's also much easier than the rest of the games "big" fights, and I'm grateful for that too.


Your reward for saving history is a full-screen image of Kleindast's jagged, pixellated mug. Then he explodes. "Reward" may have been the wrong word to use there. "Final kick in the groin" would have more appropriate.


That's Timecop, then: a terrible game that you definitely should not play. It commits every sin that an action game can - the level design is completely lacking in imagination, your character is slow and awkward to control, the boss fights are laughable and it's pretty unpleasant to look at. I don't really blame the developers though, not entirely, because Timecop has the unmistakeable air of a rush-job. I'd be shocked if Cryo weren't given an extremely tight time-frame to get this game made, resulting in it feeling almost unfinished. Still, don't play it. If you're really desperate for a Timecop fix, then watch the original movie, or Timecop: The Television Series, which has the benefit of starring the always-wonderful Kurt Fuller. Hell, you could even watch Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision. Just don't come crying to me if you do.

There are Sooty and Sweep now, throwing a chocolate eclair back and forth. Well, you have to make your own fun when you're trapped in a featureless black void. Their pastry-based game of catch isn't nearly as weird as seeing Sooty and Sweep with legs, mind you, because usually they're hand puppets.


Sooty is the yellow bear, and Sweep is the grey dog. Sooty is yanking on Sweep's ear because he can be a nasty little shit sometimes, and poor old Sweep is too gentle to retaliate.
A regularly-recurring fixture of British kid's TV for over sixty years now, Sooty was created in 1948 by Harry Corbett, although I and many others are more familiar with seeing Sooty operated by Harry's son Matthew Corbett during the eighties. Corbett played the father figure role to Sooty, a bear whose disposition flits around a scale ranging from "cheeky" to "hurtful." Sooty never speaks, but people can understand him if he whispers in their ear, a behaviour that comes across as sort of creepy now I've seen it written out. Also in Sooty's extended family are Sweep, the dopey dog pictured above. Sweep can talk out loud, although you might wish he couldn't because he speaks in high-pitched kazoo noises. There's also Soo, a female panda with the rare power of intelligible human speech, who occupies the slightly stern and sensible "older sister" role that female characters in kids TV seem to get saddled with a lot of the time. Sooty and his friends get into the usual scrapes and comical mishaps, like soaking people with water pistols and accidentally bashing thumbs with hammers, and most of the time Sooty himself the sweet and loveable face of a more gentle era of children's programming.


This is not the case on Sooty and Sweep's loading screen, where Sooty's face has taken on a disturbing expression, especially around the eyes. He looks like a different puppet wearing a mask made from Sooty's flayed face. Sooty also has a magic wand that shoots out tiny crucifixes (not sure the Church will approve of that, it being witchcraft and all) and Sweep's ears are strangely ragged, as though something has been gnawing at them. Oh, wait, we just saw Sooty pulling his ears, I guess that explains that.


Sweep's character portrait isn't much better. If you're trying to draw a cute puppet dog-face, then beady red eyes are probably not the most appropriate aesthetic choice. He looks like Cujo Junior.
You can play as whichever puppet is your favourite, unless your favourite is Soo. She is in the game, but as a non-playable... I was going to say "character", but "character" implies at least a line of speech or something rather than standing motionless in the background, staring out at the player with her dead panda eyes, which is her role in this game. I'll be playing as Sooty, mostly because I don't want him to get angry and zap me with his Magic Jesus Beam.


Okay, here we go. The game begins, and Sooty has a problem - Sweep has left his "dirty old bones" scattered around the house. That kind of behaviour is more acceptable when you're a cartoon dog than if you were, say, a human drifter with a hook for a hand, but still, no-one wants rotting bones down the back of the sofa and so Sooty takes it upon himself to clean up before Matthew returns home. To achieve his goals, Sooty must run and jump through the house, grabbing all the bones and keys he can find. It was mentioned in the instructions that once you have the bones you have to give them to Soo, who then unlocks more rooms of the house, but because it's impossible to get anywhere without walking right past Soo it's a moot point.


You know what I hate? When you set up a romantic candlelit dinner for two and your idiot dog friend has put a bone on the curtain pole and a frog jumps on the table and the frog is a highly toxic rainforest tree frog that paralyses you if you touch it. It doesn't kill you, though, at least not on the easier difficulty mode, and touching any enemy just causes Sooty to be stunned for a moment. You can still run out of time and get a game over that way, but if you're playing on easy then the worst the enemies can do is make you stand still for a couple of seconds.


What a lot of enemies there are too, most of them insects. This is to be expected in a household that has bones laying around all over the place, and you can't even get rid of them. You can render them temporarily harmless, though, because pressing the fire button makes Sooty launch paralysing sprinkles from his magic wands. It has barely any range and won't hit anything that's even slightly higher up than you, but it's helpful none-the-less. There is no speech sample of Sooty's famous sorcerous catchphrase - "izzy-wizzy let's get busy" - but that doesn't mean Sooty isn't saying it. You just wouldn't be able to tell, because he's Sooty and his enslaved Renfield-style human host isn't around to transmit his soundless words. On the audio front Sooty and Sweep does include a fairly accurate rendition of the theme song from the eighties Sooty TV show played on a loop, which is notable for two reasons: the incredible speed at which it becomes agonisingly repetitive, and the section where the SID chip bleeps in such a way that it starts to sound like it's saying "mammy, mammy, mammy" after enough loops, turning the Sooty theme into the soundtrack for an all-Irish re-imagining of Friday the 13th.


Two points of interest here. One, the staircase in Sooty's house is made from fish fingers. Two, that grey thing on the right of the screen is an umbrella stand made from an elephant's foot. I don't know whether this is common knowledge or not, but making umbrella stands out of an elephant's foot used to be a thing that people did, because nothing says "class" like a severed animal appendage parked next to your front door.


Bloody hell, they've got another elephant's foot umbrella stand? How many umbrellas does Sooty's family own that one elephant's foot is simply not enough to contain them all? Oh well, on the bright side it means that Sooty didn't butcher an entire elephant just to get one umbrella stand. Maybe he even used all of the elephant in various places throughout the house. Now that I think about it, he does have a grey leather sofa.


I should probably talk about the gameplay a bit. Umm, there is some? That's about all I've got. Sooty and Sweep was obviously aimed squarely at a very young market, and as such it's incredibly basic. The enemies all move along very clearly defined left-and-right paths, so all there is to it is timing your movements or wand attacks to get past them (or not, if you're playing on easy and can't be bothered). That said, the controls are above average for a licensed Commodore 64 platformer, with consistent jumping arcs and and responsive movements, and even the collision detection is decent if a shade ungenerous. Overall, better than I expected but my expectations were so low they were in danger of being melted by the heat of the Earth's core.


At last, the age-old question of just where bears shit has finally been answered. They use the indoor toilet, they're not animals. Aside from being bears, I mean. They haven't quite mastered the human rules of bathroom etiquette yet, though. Standing just outside the open bathroom door while I'm in here is a bit weird, Soo.


Sooty and Sweep is a little bit weird all around, if I'm honest. For starters there's the basic premise, with Sooty walking around on his little bear legs that you never usually see, collecting bones instead of getting up to his usual array of mischief and unimpressive magic tricks. Along with that is the slightly creepy vibe that permeates the game: the stark black backgrounds, the off-kilter music, the unpleasant renditions of Sooty's face, it all adds up to an experience that don't feel quite right.


For example, why does the Sooty family own more than one hand sickle? Just how much reaping are they doing, that they would require multiple sickles? Is Matthew going out to work in the garden and dual-wielding them or something? I have so many questions.


Questions like "where did you get this chest full of treasure from, Sooty?" You're probably thinking that it's the proceeds from Sooty's sixty years of working in showbiz, but look closer. It's all grey. That's right, it's more elephant parts. Sooty's just waiting for the right time to turn them into a shower curtain or a set of occasional tables.


"Now the police will never find the evidence."
It did not take long to find all the bones, thanks to a combination of Sooty's invincibility and Sweep's inability to hide them in places less obvious than "right there, right in front of your face you dope." Speaking of Sweep, I suppose I should take him out for a spin.


Hang on, I'm sure I selected "play as Sweep", where the bloody hell is he? Oh, right, he's camouflaged against the sofa. That's not very helpful, especially now that I've turned the game up to hard mode, where there are more (and much faster) enemies and you can actually run out of lives. Sweep plays exactly the same as Sooty - he uses a water pistol instead of Sooty's magic wand, but it's only a cosmetic difference - so I'd suggest you stick to playing as Sooty because there's a lot of grey in this backgrounds and it's pretty easy to lose track of Sweep.


Sooty and Sweep is a computer game, of that much I am certain. Beyond that, what can I say about it? For adults and semi-adult man-children like myself, it offers such a slender, brief gameplay experience as to be almost non-existent, but looking at in context - as a game to be played by five-year-olds in 1989 - it's definitely passable. It's probably hypocritical of me to defend it's simplicity when I have complained about the contempt shown towards the young 'uns by other children's games in the past, but it works well enough and isn't completely without challenge when played on hard mode, so if you were a very young child with a Commodore 64 (or one of the other home computer formats this game appeared on) then Sooty and Sweep would not have been a terrible place to start your gaming career. There's even a simultaneous two-player mode, making it perfect for parents who had more than one child to keep quiet at once. I'm certainly not suggesting that you actually play Sooty and Sweep, I hasten to add; life is short, and there are better ways to spend it than guiding a small bear puppet through a house decorated entirely with bones and elephant parts.

It was a tight fit, but they just about managed to squeeze the title onto the screen, so that's a good start.
Return of the Jedi, then. Star Wars Episode 6, the third film in the series to be released, an epic tale of teddy-bear guerilla warfare and man's ability to redeem his soul thanks to the power of a son's love. There are lasers, things get smashed with logs and the good guys fight the same final boss as they did in the first film. It's all pretty great, even if the Ewoks drag things down a little. We all know the film, and I'm sure many of us love it dearly, so I bet you're all terribly excited to see how the movie was converted into an exciting, coin-guzzling arcade experience.


Before we get into that, I have to select a difficulty level. The Death Star acts as the cursor, and it's a pretty goddamn impressive cursor to have. Does this make Return of the Jedi the only videogame where the player gets to directly pilot the Death Star? I bet you can move the Death Star about in one of the Star Wars strategy games, but I've never played those. As I have established in other articles, I have all the strategic planning skills of a hungry chimp in a banana warehouse.


A large spaceship floats into view. I think it's a Super Star Destroyer. Time was, I would have been able to tell you its exact name and a host of technical details - crew capacity, fuel efficiency, precise location of the public restrooms, that kind of thing - but over the years all the Star Wars minutiae that was packed into my childhood brain has melted away like tears in the rain. Big, nerdy tears. I'm going to count that as personal growth.
The soundtrack to this small scene is a voice sample of Darth Vader saying "leave them to me, I will deal with them myself." As you can imagine, a digital voice sample from a 1984 videogame does not possess a great deal of fidelity to the source recording, but on the plus side it really does sound like the voice of someone who is more machine now than man.


Here we are at the beginning of stage one, (ignore that it says "level 3" up there, that's the difficulty level,) and to the surprise of no-one this Return of the Jedi game starts with the movie's iconic speeder bike chase through the dense forests of Endor. It's up to Leia to hop on one of these speeder bikes and chase down the Imperial scouts in order to kill them before they can tell anyone that she's here. She's not the "wait in the castle" type of princess, our Leia.


The chase itself takes the form of an isometric scrolling shoot-out that feels like it was inspired at least in part by Sega's Zaxxon, although without that game's ability to change your altitude. You manoeuvre Leia's bike through the woods as the screen scrolls by at a fair old clip, doing your best to not crash into anything because at these speeds a collision is understandably fatal. Unless you crash into the Imperial scouts, that is - that's fine, and even recommended because it sends them careening around the screen and hopefully straight into a tree.


Yeah, like that one at the bottom of the screen. Flying towards a tree only to veer away at the last second, causing the stormtrooper chasing you to slam into said tree and explode, is a risky yet deeply satisfying way to eliminate the enemies of the Rebellion, but just like in the movies the stormtroopers are more of a nuisance than a real threat. Sure, they'll shoot you down if you let them get right behind you for a couple of seconds, but your more pressing concerns are not smearing yourself all over a hardy Endorian oak and keeping an eye out for the natives.


Yes, there are Ewoks. Cuddly, deadly Ewoks, unafraid to resort to extreme measures in order to keep their home free of the human pestilence. They make no distinctions between good guys and bad guys, either, and their traps are equally deadly to all. Here, they saw the speeder bikes coming and pushed two logs together. I crashed into them and Leia died. Just to hammer home the point, Atari were thorough enough to include a little animation of Leia being thrown from the bike and landing in a crumpled heap on the forest floor, which was nice of them.


Here, an Ewok bombards the path with boulders from his hang-glider. Quite how the Ewoks managed to make something aerodynamically stable enough to carry a pilot and three tons of rocks out of twigs and tree bark is one of the great mysteries of the Star Wars universe, and like all Star Wars mysteries the answer is probably something to do with that particular Ewok being "Force-sensitive". Actually, given the vastness of the Star Wars expanded universe there's around a seventy percent chance that particular Ewok is secretly an undercover Jedi working for the rebellion who helped steal the original Death Star plans and is totally best buddies with Boba Fett, they hang out all the time, drinking blue milk and playing holo-chess, honestly.


The Ewoks' traps can be made to work in your favour, however. They're only triggered when someone drives through them, so if you keep to the top of the screen with the stormtroopers behind you then you're more likely to set off the traps and avoid them, leaving the stormtroopers to crash into them. Of course, being at the top of the screen means you've got less time to react to the obstacles ahead, making the game that much more difficult. It's a decent bit of risk-and-reward gameplay, but if it's all a bit too dicey for you then you can always lure the stormtroopers up the screen and then suddenly drop back behind them and shoot them with your speeder bike's laser cannon. Sorry, did I not mention that your speeder bike has a laser cannon? Well, it does. It makes short work of stormtroopers, but to use it you have to get behind them and line up your shot and press fire and blah blah blah, why go through all that rigmarole when you can let Mother Nature eliminate your enemies? It's about time she gave something back.


After a few minutes of speeder biking, Leia arrives at the Ewok village where C-3PO assures us that the Ewoks no longer want to murder us now that we're "part of the tribe." The Ewoks represent the most stunning turnaround from "potential devourers of human flesh" to "fuzzy animal sidekicks" since mankind domesticated the dog, but I'm all for it if it means they're not trying to smash me to death with bits of tree.


The second stage, and Chewbacca has crammed himself into a stolen AT-ST walker that is clearly too small to hold him. It's hard to not to imagine the whole scenario as Chewie wearing one of those costumes that make you look like you're riding a dinosaur or an ostrich or what-have-you. It can't be comfortable for the Freak from Kashyyyk, but Chewie's not a complainer and with a "well, what can you do?" shrug of his shoulders he sets off on his mission.


That mission is to walk forwards for a while without exploding, a task that's much more difficult than it sounds thanks to the amazing engineering work of the Empire. Designing your assault craft as a heavy and unbalanced metal box atop two long, spindly legs was a bad idea even for the Empire who, let's not forget, had a vast space-army at their disposal and yet still had to resort to bounty hunters to get the job done.
That said, the gravest threat to your AT-ST is a weapon that the Empire could never have seen coming - heat-seeking logs. These logs roll towards you, and I mean they roll towards you, changing their course to hunt you down with a tenacity rarely seen in untreated timber. Maybe the Ewoks are a species of wood nymph or something, that'd explain a lot. Touching a log results in the immediate loss of a life, so don't touch them. You can shoot them with the AT-ST's cannons (which have the almost entirely useless ability to fire left and right as well as straight ahead) but even that's harder than it should be because the AT-ST's guns have a very short range. Oh, and those piles of logs? They don't move, but they are similarly fatal if so much as brushed against. The walker's body literally drops right off its legs at the slightest contact.


"Lord Vader, we have designed a new scout walker that we believe will prove most useful on the forest moon of Endor."
"Can it walk over logs?"
"No, Lord Vader."
"Excellent, I'll take seven hundred thousand."


Then suddenly it's all change and you're piloting the Millennium Falcon above a Star Destroyer while TIE fighters harass you. This isn't the next stage, it's still part of the AT-ST stage. It's referred to on the arcade flyer as a "Split-Wave," and as an attempt to capture the simultaneous lines of action from the film - Han and Chewie trying to lower the shields on Endor while Lando assaults the Death Star - it's interesting if not entirely successful. It definitely took me by surprise the first time it happened, but each subsequent time you're piloting the AT-ST you'll at least know it's coming up when you hear what I think is supposed to be Leia saying "Han, hurry, the fleet will be here any moment!" in the voice of a sleepy robot with a throat infection.


The Falcon-flying sections are the most "pure," for want of a better word, sections of the game: with nothing to crash into, the action is all about shooting TIE fighters and avoiding incoming lasers. I say lasers, everything in this game spits out tiny red-and-yellow explosions, which is a bit of a shame. It would have upped the Star Wars-iness of proceedings considerably if everyone was firing green and red pew-pew-pew lasers at each other, and what's the point of making a Star Wars game if you're not going to make it as Star Wars-y as possible? I hate to break this to you, Atari, but no-one was playing Return of the Jedi because it provided a vastly superior gameplay experience to other arcade titles.
Another detail of these Millennium Falcon sections is that you start with two X-Wings flying alongside you in support. They move and fire when you do, giving you a little extra protection. They are also completely expendable, and there will be no comeuppance if you, say, use them to ram into TIE fighters that have gotten a little too close for comfort. Not that I would condone such a tactic, because that would sully the memories of great Rebellion heroes such as Biggs Darklighter and Jek Porkins. He was called Porkins because he was fat, you see. No, wait, that can't be right. He was fat because he was called Porkins, then? I suppose you'd get a lot of sarcastic comments if your name was Porkins and you weighed ten stone, so I assume he just leaned into it and successfully applied to get double Rebellion rations.


Back on Endor, and Chewie has stumbled across some enemy AT-STs. They are much, much less dangerous than the stage's proliferation of timber. They even look a bit sheepish in the screenshot above. I recommend running up to one of them as quickly as possible while tapping the fire button, that almost always lets you destroy it before it can retaliate, and you can just walk past the other one at the same time.


Mission accomplished! Chewie destroys the shield generator, the bunker explodes and an Imperial officer calls you "rebel scum" in a defeated tone of voice before wandering off into the forest to await the imminent Force-choking I'm sure he assumes is coming his way. Maybe he'll get lucky and the Ewoks will find him and roast him alive on a spit before Vader catches up with him. It's not looking good for that Imperial officer, let's be honest.


With the shields down, Lando Calrissian takes his chance to fly the Millennium Falcon deep into the Death Star for the next stage. It's a lot like the speeder bike section, the main difference being that this second Death Star is constructed entirely from plumbing. It's pipes all the way down. Red pipes, copper ties, grey pipes that are presumably made of PVC, if you're looking for a videogame with lots of pipes then, well, play a Super Mario game but, you know, this game has a lot of pipes. That's what I'm getting at. It makes sense to me, the Death Star is the size of a small moon and some quick addition of figures from Wookiepedia (you know, the Star Wars Wikipedia, badum-tsh) imply that 2,471,647 people made up the Death Star's crew. All these people needed to expel bodily waste at regular intervals, hence all the plumbing.


As with the first stage you're constantly being chased by persistent but extremely fragile Imperial ships, TIE Interceptors in this case, and as before the best and most satisfying way to deal with them is to force them to crash into their surroundings. In the screenshot above I am doing the exact opposite of that, having caused this pipe to fall down but not moving fast enough to get out from under it before it killed me. Earlier it was Ewoks, now it's shoddy workmanship. The Rebel Alliance just can't catch a break.


If you manage to avoid hitting any pipes or getting shot, you'll eventually reach the reactor core. To destroy the reactor as commanded, simply shoot one laser into the reactor. Well, that was easy. I didn't even need to use that Force everyone keeps banging on about.


Getting out of the Death Star before the huge explosion incinerates the Millennium Falcon? Not so easy. The final stage makes you leave the way you came in while a wall of flame licks at whatever part of a spaceship would be the heels. The backs of the stabilizer fins, maybe? But I digress.
Escaping from the galaxy's biggest firework is a noticeable peak in Return of the Jedi's difficulty curve. Part of that is down to the sudden reversal of direction, and I freely admit that might just be me that finds it a struggle, because I'm not good with sudden shifts in controls. As well as that, I seemed to crash into things a lot more. The reliability of Return of the Jedi's collision detection is difficult to gauge - the game moves so fast that you're not always certain about how close you were to obstacles that killed you, unlike a lot of games with bad hit detection where it's very obvious whether you should have been hit or not. That said, I did seem to crash into more obstacles that I would have avoided easily in previous stages, so who knows? It's definitely not frustratingly inaccurate most of the time, and let's leave it at that.


The Death Star is destroyed, the Empire is defeated, millions of human lives are claimed but most importantly Han Solo gets his beloved Millennium Falcon back in one piece, although I suspect the seat of the captain's chair will need a thorough cleaning.


10,000 points does not feel like a sufficient reward for saving the known universe from the yoke of tyranny. I was going to make a crack about wanting my weight in Space Credits, but then I remembered that Credits are the actual in-universe Star Wars currency.


After that, Return of the Jedi loops back to the start, encouraging players to try for the high score as the difficulty of each stage increases. The game doesn't just get harder by throwing more enemies and more foliage at you, (although it does do that too,) it also adds slightly different features to each area. Here in the speeder bike stage, for example, there are now hollow logs in the road that you can fly through for bonus points. It's quite a narrow fit with no room for error, as you can see in the screenshot above, but I made damn sure I flew through that log at least once. It wasn't even about the points - if a game provides a dangerous yet exciting alternate route, it would be rude of me to not take it on a few times. Plus, zooming through the log throws any chasing stormtroopers into utter confusion, causing them to forget that wood = death, and they are eliminated when they try to get behind Leia despite her being inside a tree. It's like watching a cat trying to walk backwards out of a head cone: they know something's not right but they can't quite figure it out, bless them.


Not much changes in the space stage - the TIE fighters take it a bit more seriously and there are Imperial shuttles that fly across the screen depositing space-mines in their wake, and the walker segments are even less varied. I think there might be more logs. It's hard to tell when there were so many logs in the first place. I did manage to move through the end of the walker stage fast enough to get Chewbacca right to the doors of the bunker, just in time for the explosion to engulf him. Chewie doesn't seem to mind. Maybe his fur is flame-retardant. I hope so, god only knows how bad a singed Wookie would smell.


The most punishing new additions are the forcefield gates inside the Death Star. They're activated by a tripwire, and usually they're covering the only gap through the dense plumbing jungle so if you let a TIE fighter get ahead of you and activate the gate then you're screwed and for me their introduction marked the point at which Return of the Jedi rolled over from "hard" to "annoying" and so I think I'll call it a day here. Apparently there is an ending screen that can be reached if you persevere long enough: Yoda pops out and tells you your Jedi training is over or something along those lines, but I didn't reach it because the last "escape from the Death Star" stage I tried was so frustrating with the sudden instant deaths that I had a good, long think about how I'm spending my time on this Earth and then stopped playing.


In summary, Return of the Jedi is an acceptable but basic arcade title that gets by in large part thanks to its Star Wars theme. The actual gameplay is a mix of the good and the bad - it's fast and smooth, and I used the word "satisfying" more than once to describe destroying enemies by nudging them into the scenery because it really is good fun, as anyone who's played the Burnout games will attest. On the other hand it's very shallow, the hit detection can be dubious and once you get past the first loop it quickly becomes completely merciless. The strangest thing about Return of the Jedi is the presentation, however, because for a Star Wars game it doesn't feel as "Star Wars" as you might think. I mean, it's clear that this is a game based on the movie, but the familiar sound-effects are missing, lightsabers are completely absent and you don't get to play as Luke Skywalker. You don't even see Han Solo or Darth Vader, which is kinda of mind-boggling - certainly these days, it's almost impossible to imagine any other RotJ-themed product that doesn't feature Vader front-and-centre, milking his evil Sith teat for all it's worth. Why did I write that? I wish I hadn't written that.
Anyway, Atari's Return of the Jedi: especially recommended for lovers of garbled digital speech, play it if you like Star Wars but don't expect anything amazing, and remember: for all the Ewoks' faults, "yub nub" is a fun phrase to say out loud.

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.

Razorweed, bane of all green-fingered inhabitants of Final Fantasy VII's world: spreads like crazy, naturally resistant to weedkillers, produces a constant stream of self-pitying whining when pulled from the ground. Look at it's dumb little face, there's no way that face isn't always saying things like "oh right, I guess I'm just not pretty enough for your ornamental rock garden." Evil grass might not seem like an especially terrifying foe, but I suffer from fairly bad hayfever (I know, what a shocker) so hacking away at grass with a sword would inflict the debilitating status effect of itchy eyes and a runny nose. Did you know some characters in Valkyria Chronicles actually do suffer from hayfever when in woodland areas? Valkyria Chronicles is pretty great, you should play it.



Unthreatening as it was, at least Razorweed looks like it could run away or something. Not so in Rilfsak's case, an enemy so pathetic that the only possible response to it is sympathy. Random battles represent lurking monsters attacking the party, right? So what in the hell was Rilfsak hoping to accomplish by leaping out at the heroes of FFVII? The removal of its other eye? Rilfsak's only notable combat skill is that its evasion stat is quite high, making it difficult to hit. I suspect this actually represents the characters feeling so sorry for it that they can't bring themselves to deal the fatal blow. "Oh, no," says Tifa as she swings her fist well away from Rilfsak, "this foe is so nimble even my mighty martial arts cannot penetrate its defences." Sadly the Rilfsak is too dense to take the hint and is eventually killed when someone casts Fire on it.



Okay, that's not a Harpy. Harpies are part-bird, part-women. This is a chimera. You can tell because it's part lion, part goat and part snake. This one has sprouted wings and a face on the right that might be from a Godzilla of some kind, but if anything that just makes it more of a chimera. Most conclusive of all is the fact that in the Japanese version of the game it's called Chimera. I know translation can be a tricky business but this shows a lack of care and attention - as well as a lack of knowledge about Greek mythology - that is very difficult to explain, especially when there's a palette-swapped version of it later in the game called Maximum Kimaira.


Well, they were getting closer. Maybe if there'd been another three or four chimeras in FFVII they'd have gotten there in the end.
As for the Harpy itself, I get the feeling that the lion is the one who does all the work in this team. The goat has horns where its eyes should be, which must limit its combat effectiveness, and the lizard head looks like too much of a good-time party animal to really focus on the task at hand. No, it's up to the lion, the sensible, dependable lion, to hold this rag-tag group together even though he can;' close his mouth because of his improbably large tusks. I also like to imagine that when it's the goat's turn to choose where they go for dinner and it picks somewhere vegitarian all the other heads boo it.



"Freeze! This is the Vargid Police, you are under arrest! Put all your hands in the air and come out slowly!" Then Vargid Police slides over the hood of his police car, an action aided by the layer of slime I assume he's coated in, while his straight-laced, by-the-book partner shouts "Dammit, Vargid Police! We're supposed to wait for backup!" Then Vargid Police is killed by a passing group of adventurers. He was one day away from retirement.
I was looking at Vargid Police for a while before I realised what it reminds me of - sushi ginger. I don't know what that says about the sushi restaurants I've been to.



Now, a horse wearing a waistcoat with a guitar sticking out of it's arse. A natural creature that roams the lands or a twisted Shinra experiment to find out what happens if you ram a Stratocaster up a horse? I have no idea, but if it's the latter then the answer is "it develops a rather flamboyant sense of personal style."
Not content with being a magic pink horse, Gighee is also a four-legged David Bowie reference, it seems: it's Japanese name, Jigii, is also the Japanese spelling of Ziggy, as in Ziggy Stardust. Add that to the blonde hair and the guitar and I think you've got a pretty good case for saying that yep, this is a David Bowie reference, even if that isn't how the Thin White Duke usually transports his guitars. So, if you're the kind of person who has ideas about what David Bowie would look like as a pony - and a quick Google search tells me there are plenty of you out there - then I'm sorry but FFVII beat you to it by fifteen years or so.



In battle, Gighee is always accompanied by Christopher. I just like that there's an enemy called "Christopher," is all. Gives him that common touch, you know? Most of you probably know a Christopher, and even if they aren't a prancing elf-child with a Beavis haircut and purple chaps there's still that pleasing connection to normality.



Still on the theme of names, I mention this one to restate an observation I made a while ago, and that was that "Bad Rap Sample" is the perfect name for an insufferable indie band. Of course, these enemies are only called Bad Rap Sample when they're summoned as helpers by Dr. Hojo, Shinra's evil head scientist who's doctorate is apparently in Impregnating Things With Other, Genetically Unrelated Things. Most of the times you fight them, they're just called "Bad Rap," the name changed from "Vanilla Ice" at the behest of Sony's legal team.



What did this bug do to deserve the epithet "bizarre"? Okay, so it's about six feet long but in the world of Final Fantasy VII that's hardly a reason for it to be considered notably unusual. Nobody calls the Buster Sword "bizarre." Or maybe the Bizarre Bug's simple insectoid body plan is the reason it's bizarre, and people consider it shocking in its mundanity.
"Cloud, we're under attack!"
"What is it? Shinra troops? An ancient living Weapon? Sephiroth himself?"
"No, it's just a cockroach or something. I mean, it's pretty big, but still."
"Weird. Oh well, more EXP for us."



There's a crab enemy called Castanets, and that is adorable. The crab isn't adorable - not even a mother crab could love that face, assuming this species is capable of any emotion beyond relentless, seething hate - but the name is wonderfully evocative of the sound its giant bladed claws make as they clack together. There must be an in-universe story behind the naming of these crabs, perhaps some ancient warrior musing "hark, I hear the ryhthmic sound of Spanish castanets coming from this oh god it's snipped off my legggs!"
As for the puzzle of how the inhabitants of FFVII's planet know about Spanish folk instruments, well, it might be more likely than you think, as we shall see shortly.



On the list of Very American Things, an eagle made out of guns falls somwhere between Mount Rushmore and ill-informed opinions about football. But how can it be "American" when it's from a distant fantasy world? Well, this distant fantasy world also knows about Texas, if this sign above Tifa's bar is anything to go by.


It makes sense to me - the Eagle Gun is the state bird of Texas, isn't it? Wait, what do you mean it's actually Mimus polyglottos, the Northern Mockingbird? In learning that fact, I discovered that Texas also has a state soil. Local pride is great and all but singling out a particular kind of mud for praise seems a bit much. On the other hand they also have a state dinosaur, and that I can fully endorse.



"My arms are so tired. So tired..."



That's a very gremlin-y Gremlin, with an expression of cheerful malevolence that lies at the heart of all gremlins. That said, I would have called it a Hobgoblin...


...because it looks like the titular creature from the infamous 1988 B-movie Hobgoblins. If you're familiar with Hobgoblins (the movie, not the folkloric creature) then it's probably through the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode in which it featured, and if you haven't seen that episode of MST3K then I suggest you check it out. If nothing else, you can have fun imagining what would have happened had the hobgoblins used their power to make real the deepest fantasies of each member of AVALANCHE. Given that Cloud is made of fake memories, liquid souls and alien DNA I'd hazard a guess that his fantasies would be utterly insane.


Touch Me? I will not, you weird little creep frog.



Someone at Squaresoft really went off-piste with these mythological creatures, huh? Cokatolis is clearly supposed to be a cocatrice, but the cocatrice of legend is mostly dragon with a rooster's head, which presumably makes it the king of the roosters but a laughing stock amongst dragons. FFVII's Cokatolis is a chicken with the head of a chicken. It's just, you know, a chicken. There are already Chocobos in this world, Cokatolis. We don't need any more giant chickens, especially not ones that can turn people to stone by breathing on them.



There is absolutely nothing not to love about an extremely angry yellow penguin with cacti for flippers and a punk hairdo. How do I know Headbomber is angry? Because the writing on his chest is the Japanese kanji for "anger." You don't paint "anger" on your belly unless you're fairly cranky. What is Headbomber angry about? Judging by its haircut, I'd guess "its parents."



Brain Pod is a little teapot, short and stout. There's its handle, and there's its spout.


And there's the human head it keeps inside. Final Fantasy VII is a game that lets you fight a mechanical teapot with Bob Hoskins' head inside, so it's little wonder that it's regarded as one of the all-time classics.



All I can think of when I look at Sculpture is the shrieking headlines of a Daily Mail-esque tabloid complaining about the state of modern art. SCULPTURE? MORE LIKE NO SKILL-PTURE, that sort of thing, the letters page flooded with people writing in and saying "as someone who once looked at a painting of flowers once, why aren't there more paintings of flowers? Instead the liberal elite force the garbage that passes for art these days on us. First an unmade bed and now a paving slab, it's Broken Britain, I blame the immigrants, bring back National Service." Well, I say good on you, Sculpture. You've overcome the handicap of being nothing but a lump of rock, escaped a dismal life as part of a patio or outdoor staircase and made something of yourself. You're an inspiration to us all.



It's a good job this enemy is called Manhole, otherwise I might have thought Satan had taken a job as a waiter. Satan Waiter wouldn't spit in your food, he'd subtly convince someone else to do it. Also, what do you think: is that his nose, his chin or some kind of beak? I think it's a beak. A beaky Beelzebub who lives in the sewers, moving between three manhole covers in a kind of living three-card Monte routine. It's little wonder that I spent most of my childhood wishing that when I grew up it would be my job to design monsters for videogames.



Hungry.
Hungry.
HUNGRY. HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHHUNGRYHUNGEYGHUHNGREY H  Uu  nn.. GggRryyHHHHHHH

This scowling man, his hair all frizzed up by the electrical discharges in the air around him, is Kenshiro. He's the hero of Hokuto no Ken, also known in the west as Fist of the North Star, a manga and anime franchise about a man who can punch people so hard that they explode. Spoiler alert: he punches people a lot, especially if you include kicks and really violent pokes with a finger as a subset of punches. Actually, this article is going to end up being 90% Hokuto no Ken spoilers, so bear that in mind if you want to watch it for yourself. Kenshiro is the master of and sole successor to the ancient martial art of Hokuto Shinken, which revolves around pressing the pressure points of your victims' bodies to kill them in a variety of interesting ways. It's weaponized acupuncture, essentially. A nuclear war devastates the Earth, and Kenshiro travels the desert wastes, killing bad guys and saving villagers as he searches for Yuria, his lost love who was abducted by the evil Shin.


Kenshiro is the conceptual lovechild of Mad Max and Bruce Lee, all leather jackets and high-pitched kung-fu screams, and I'm big fan of his hyper-violent adventures - they're completely insane, contain a fair amount of black humour and are occasionally, just occasionally, quite touching. Of course, in an eight-bit videogame the only part of Hokuto no Ken that's going to be replicated for the player is all the punching, so let's get on with it.


Within seconds of the game starting, Hokuto no Ken is unmasked as clone of Irem's classic Kung Fu Master. Kenshiro walks along a (mostly) flat plane, defeating the swarms of villains who rush towards him with a limited set of moves. You've got punches and kicks in the usual standing and crouching variants, as well as a jumping kick. As is often the case in this type of game, the jumping kick is best used by jumping, sticking your leg out while in the air and then falling onto the enemy with your outstretched foot, letting gravity do most of the work. Punches have a slightly shorter range than kicks and the cannon-fodder enemies all die in one hit, so I guess I was wrong about there being a lot of punching in this one. No point making things more difficult for myself than they have to be. Let's just hope Kenshiro is wearing his stretchiest jeans.


The graphics well above average for a game of this vintage, too. Your sprite is recognisably Kenshiro, and there's even some decent parallax scrolling going on in the background. Sure, it's a wasteland stripped bare by the horrors of nuclear fire, but at least there's some depth to it. Less convincing is the bad guys' death animation, where the terrifying power of Hokuto Shinken is depicted by having the thugs break into small chunks and float away on the wind. It's a softer, gentler form of explosive death, then: suitable for the home console market and less taxing on the Maser System hardware than having everyone you punch burst open like a gas-filled whale carcass.


After a while, the screen stops scrolling and the first of the stage's four - yes, four - minibosses pops out and attempts to block Kenshiro's progress. He's one of Shin's lieutenants, and his name is Spade. He does not fight with a spade, which is a shame. Instead he throws axes, which Kenshiro can punch out of the air. Aside from that, it's a simple matter of getting close enough to Spade to land a few punches, and punches are recommended because I think they do slightly more damage. Low kicks are right out, because as is the case with so many sub-human gangers from the irradiated wastes, Spade is wearing an extravagant amount of shin armour. Maybe the mutations that allowed these men to become hulking eight-foot-tall slabs of muscle despite the scarcity of food also rearranged their internal organs, moving everything vital into the lower leg.


Next up is Diamond, another of Shin's lackeys. Diamond presumably saw Kenshiro slaughter hundreds of men singlehandedly, as well as Spade, and thought to himself "sure he's tough, but I've got a stick!" Yes, you do have a stick, Diamond. Well done. It's not a very long stick, mind you, and it's easy enough to move Kenshiro back when you attack so he's slightly out of range, before moving in for the kill while you're recovering.
As a sidenote, in the manga Ken defeated Diamond using a move called the "Face-Breaking Fist." The name Face-Breaking Fist is played with a completely straight face, which is sort of why I love Fist of the North Star.


The deck of cards-themed psychopaths keep comin' with the appearance of Club, a man who fights with claws and not a club. It was Diamond that used the club, remember? Try to keep up. Club's gimmick is that he jumps around a lot, which proves to be his downfall because he doesn't actually attack while he's up there. This means you get a free punch to the shins, armour be damned, as he falls back to Earth.


Finally in the roster of midbosses for the first stage and rounding (pun intended) out the card suits theme is Heart. One of the more famous of Hokuto no Ken's lesser characters, Heart is a big fat man whose fighting style is being so big and fat that no-one can hurt him through his blubber, a martial art in which I am close to being awarded a red belt myself. His unmatched durability has earned Heart the nickname Destroyer of Fists, but Kenshiro gets around this problem by not-so-gently nudging Heart's belly out of the way with his foot before dealing the final blow. In the game, this boils down to Heart having more health than all the previous minibosses combined, which makes for a dangerous combination with the powerful kick to the groin that he delivers if you spend too long in close proximity to him. This fight became a straight-up race to the bottom of our respective health bars, and once I'd realised that you can't hurt an enemy if they're too close to Kenshiro - the hitbox for his attacks only covers his hands and feet and not the limbs in between - I managed to whittle away at Heart until I killed him, presumably mere minutes before the catastrophic coronary that would have finished him off anyway.


The bosses battles just keep on coming, but now that I've reached the end of the first stage things are a little different. The camera has moved closer to the action, the sprites are bigger and while Kenshiro still has only the same limited moveset the whole thing feels a little bit more Street Fighter, possibly thanks to the visible health bar for the boss I'm facing.
The boss in question is Shin, master of Nanto Seiken, the rival martial art to Hokuto Shinken. Shin beat beat Kenshiro in a fight prior to the start of the series, horribly wounding him in the process and kidnapping his fiancée Yuria. I know that seems like a lot of baggage to be piling onto the very first real boss fight of the game - putting a stop to your hated enemy and rescuing your girlfriend are usually reserved for the very end of a game - but that's just how Fist of the North Star is, becoming more stretched and convoluted as the franchise goes on.
Shin is dressed like a space stewardess from a 1950's fantasy of what space travel would be like in the future, so you might be worried about going up against him. Anyone who can wear a magenta jumpsuit and still control an army of vicious killers through fear and intimidation must be a truly terrifying foe, right? Well, never fear. Shin likes to act the big I-am with his fancy hand movements and battle poses, but if you calmly walk towards him and punch whenever you're in punching range then you'll emerge triumphant.


Ken finishes Shin off with his trademark Hundred Crack Fist. Ironically, Shin was not wearing shin protectors. Maybe he could have survived if he had been. Anyway, time for Kenshiro to be reunited with his lost love, and the two of them can go off into the sunset together.


Or not, because this is just a doll that looks like Yuria, a fact that escaped Ken's finely-honed senses. Let's give him a break, he was engaged in a battle to the death at the time. Sadly the real Yuria has killed herself already by throwing herself off a balcony. Except she hasn't, and it turns out later that she's still alive. I told you Hokuto no Ken gets convoluted. By the end it's all Dickensian coincidence and long-lost siblings. And punching, there's still quite a lot of punching.


Chapter two sees Kenshiro entering Godland, home to a military organisation who believe they can purge the wastes of the weak and undeserving through military might and jumping around with no shirts on, like a cross between a totalitarian junta and the WWE. Each stage in Hokuto no Ken follows the same pattern - wade through a level full of identikit goons, pausing occasionally to fight a miniboss before reaching the finale, where the action switches to the slightly more detailed "proper" boss fight. It might be a shallow rip-off of Kung Fu Master, but then what other kind of game could Hokuto no Ken really have been? Even for a fighting anime the series itself is set up just like a scrolling beat-em-up: Kenshiro fights to either save his girlfriend or destroy evil, killing cannon-fodder troops until he reaches a boss. He's got special moves, and even (although it didn't make it into the game) a "powered-up" state where he becomes so furious his jacket disintegrates. That definitely sounds like a scrolling beat-em-up to me.


I see oil drums, Hokuto no Ken's beat-em-up status is confirmed.


The first miniboss of the stage is the Major, a very angry man with a whip. I think he's so angry because the nuclear apocalypse destroyed his career as a lion tamer, forcing him to use his whip skills in other, less salubrious ways. He really likes the whip, too. Never stops swinging the bloody thing, and if you let him get too close he can shred Kenshiro's health bar very quickly. So, this becomes a hit-and-run type of battle, the main goal being to preserve as much of you health as you can. You only get one health bar to last you through the entire stage, and aside from a tiny refill when you beat a midboss there are no health-restoring pickups, giving the whole game a sort of "Survival Mode" feel.


Mad Sarge now, his madness apparently not holding him back from promotion to the rank of sergeant. He's mad all right - mad about knives, which he throws around with gay abandon. It's okay, knives are one of the few things that are easy to come by in the post-apocalyptic world, along with shinpads, mohawk gel and super gain protein powder. As for the fight, well, you remember earlier I fought that guy who threw axes? Yeah, it's the same as that.


The end-of-stage boss is the Colonel, a soldier in a red beret who carries a baton and strives to create a soldier's utopia. I think there's a strong possibility that Colonel is the inspiration for Final Fight's Rolento, although Colonel never bounces around on his baton like a pogo stick so Rolento is clearly the superior warrior.
In fact, Colonel doesn't use his baton at all when you fight him, choosing instead to harass the player with many tiny boomerangs like the warrior dwarfs of Australia. Once you've figured out the boomerang's flight pattern, it's a simple matter of jumping over them and clobbering the Colonel, moving away before he throws another. In the manga, Kenshiro finishes the Colonel off with a move that makes his skeleton erupt from his body. This does not happen in the game. If I'd paid money for Hokuto no Ken, I would have demanded a refund.


We're back in the wasteland for chapter three, and here I've made the grave mistake of letting Kenshiro become surrounded by punks who are channelling their disappointment at not being cast in Mad Max: Fury Road into making Kenshiro dead. During the non-boss portions of the game, making sure Kenshiro has plenty of space around him should be your only goal, because if the grunts manage to surround you even they can quickly wipe away big slabs of your health bar. The key to success on that front is not being too impatient: if an enemy appears behind you, make sure you take them out straight away instead of thinking "oh, I'll just murder them when they catch up to me." When enemies start leaping around the level, don't go chasing them. Wait for them to land and kick them when they're defenceless. Slow and steady wins this particular race.


There's only one midboss in stage three. His name is Fox, and wait until you get a load of his secret martial arts technique: he lies in the dirt pretending to be dead, only to spring into the air and decapitate his opponents when they let their guard down / have stopped laughing at his "skills." When every other person is the master of a powerful and ancient fighting style to which there can be only one successor, it was bound to happen that those who turned up late to the party got lumbered with the kung fu equivalent of the toffee penny in a box of Quality Street.


This is Devil Rebirth, the end of stage boss. Even by Hokuto no Ken's ridiculous standards of male largeness, he's a big lad, responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of people and forever imprisoned because he's so tough the multiple execution attempts didn't stick. Despite his impressive credentials, Devil Rebirth ends up being the easiest opponent in the game: wait for him to vomit up a fireball, jump over it and kick him in the face, repeat. You just need to be wary of his jumping attack, because it does massive damage. I can understand that, just look how tiny his feet are and then imagine all his weight being focussed into that small an area as he stomps on you.


In the next stage, Kenshiro breaks into a prison. The prison is guarded by men with axes, and eagles. The many times I've played Knights of the Round means I treated the eagles with a degree of trepidation, worried that I would be struggling to hit them as they pecked away at my health bar with their merciless beaks. Luckily the eagles seem disinterested in their work as prison screws, lazily drifting towards Kenshiro in a dive that's easily sidestepped before flying away. This makes the eagles the most intelligent enemies in Hokuto no Ken.


The warden of the prison is Uighur, a Mongolian man who fights with a whip. Is Uighur a comically overmuscled chap who threatens Kenshiro with an arrogant overstatement of his fighting prowess, only to die in a grotesque manner? You bet your ass he is, because only two kinds of people survived the nuclear war and "overconfident martial artists" are one of them. The other kind is "weak villagers just trying to survive / biker gang magnets."
Unlike the Major, Uighur's whip isn't his most dangerous tool: instead, you have to watch out for his dashing shoulder charge. Did I mention that Ken can perform a super-jump if you press down and then up on the d-pad? Well, he can, and it makes avoiding charging Monoglians easy as well as being handy for putting up Christmas decorations and painting ceilings.


The villains are finally starting to get the hint that sending one person to deal with Kenshiro isn't cutting it, and so our hero comes face-to-face with Zarqa and Qasim, a pair of scimitar-wielding warriors who trap Kenshiro between their spinning blades and slice him to oh, I've beaten them already. That was easy. Thanks to the lack of threat from both the eagles and Uighur, I came into this fight with more than enough health to throw caution to the wind, and once you've taken out one of these guys the other one isn't much of a threat. You even have all of your health restored before the end-of-stage boss, so you might as well walk through a few sword blows if it gets the fight over with more quickly.


In a shocking twist, the final challenge of the stage is a battle against... your own brother! This is Toki, Kenshiro's adopted brother and fellow student of Hokuto Shinken. Toki was meant to be the successor to Hokuto Shinken, but he was exposed to nuclear fallout while saving Kenshiro and Yuria's lives and renounced his claim on the title, dedicating his life to healing people using the non-lethal pressure-point-pressing techniques of Hokuto Shinken. He's karate Jesus, essentially, and now I must do battle with him for some reason.
And quite the battle it is, too - Toki is extremely difficult to hit, and even if you do hit him he generally hits you straight back for the same amount of damage. In the end I managed to claim victory by standing still and trading punches with Toki, which only worked because his health bar hit bottom a fraction of a second before Kenshiro's. Even that victory felt hollow, because it was again a kind and gentle man who is dying from radiation poisoning. It's difficult to feel like a big man after that.


Stage five, and more of the same thug-splattering action. You can stand on a ruined truck in this level. It doesn't add much, I'll be honest.
On the whole, Hokuto no Ken has been exactly the game I imagined it would be: very basic smack-and-walk action with relentless enemies and a difficulty curve that'd look like a plate of spaghetti if you drew it out on paper. I don't have many serious complaints about the mechanics of the game, apart from Ken's jumps being unresponsive, and really, how much better could it have been? More variations in the levels would have been nice, I suppose, but at least you get a surprisingly wide variety of different minibosses to fight. An expansion of the need for accuracy could have made for an interesting spin on the action: Ken's attacks already have to land with a fair degree of precision, so if the gameplay had been zoomed in a little and more focus placed on landing accurate punches I think it could have created a more unique gameplay experience and one that'd fit nicely into the setting - after all, with Hokuto Shinken being a martial art based around hitting pressure points, precision would be a logical thing to focus on.


Stage five has three minibosses, or six minibosses, or one, depending on how you want to look at it, because you fight these two flamethrower-carrying punks three times. Kick one of them to death while avoiding the other, then finish the job. I found a good tactic was to keep jumping up to the top level, waiting for the villains to follow and then dropping back down, giving Kenshiro a free hit as they chase you back down to the ground.


Things get tricky in the boss fight against the Nanto Seiken master Souther, (or Thouzer, or Souzer, or Thouther. He's got some transliteration issues,) because fighting against him in the usual manner will have no effect. Instead, in order to damage Souther you have to hit him with specific moves in a specific order - kick, punch, crouching punch, crouching kick. I'll admit I had to look this combination up, because I doubt I would have figured it out on my own, especially the coup de grace: when Souther is out of health, you have to finish him off by jump-kicking him while he's doing a jump kick, which is by far the hardest part of an otherwise relatively easy (if you know the right sequence, anyway) fight.
All this faffing around is, I assume, an attempt by the developers to recreate Souther's gimmick from the anime. Kenshiro's Hokuto Shinken has no effect on Souther until he discover the mystery of Souther's body - that his internal organs, and thus his pressure points, are a mirror-image of a normal person's. Kenshiro figures this out by sticking his fingers into Souther's chest and feeling the flow of his blood. Is there a word that means both "ingenious" and "disgusting"? Because I think I've found the perfect use for it. Speaking of disgusting, that blue thing in the background is the mummified body of Souther's master and not the expertly-carved ice sculpture that it first appears to be.


Immediately after defeating Souther, Kenshiro is thrown straight into the game's final battle: an earth-shattering confrontation with the mighty Raoh, king of fists! Look, I'm trying to punch this up a little, because the Master System's graphics can't really do justice to Hokuto no Ken's climactic fight. Without some cheerleading, the casual observer might think that this is just a punch-up between a man dressed head-to-toe in denim and a wandering pro-wrestler.
Raoh is also Kenshiro's adoptive brother, a powerful martial artist who seeks to crush all before him and conquer the land with his Hokuto Shinken powers. Why anyone wants the land is a mystery to me - all there is dirt and ruined buildings, with plenty for everyone - but Raoh is bent on conquest through pure might. He does right to choose might over wisdom as his tool of conquest. He's got a lot more of one than the other, as evidenced by the fact that he pretends to murder Yuria just to get Ken extra angry, which is up there with "only hire the most vicious, untrustworthy scum for your personal army" as bad plans go. Yes, Raoh does that too.
Fighting against Raoh was a lot more simple than I thought it would be: I was prepared for more opaque gimmicks after the Souther fight, but aside from having to finish Raoh off with a standing punch this is a straight-up fight... which is not to say it's easy. Far from it, as Raoh knocks massive chunks from your health bar with a single punch and has arms that are much longer than Kenshiro's. In the end it was Raoh's lack of intelligence that did for him, as he got stuck in a loop of trying to jump at me while I hunkered in the corner of the screen, throwing punches at the bottoms of his legs. Somehow this tactic worked, and without giving me time to ponder just how hard you'd have to punch someone in the shins to kill them, Raoh was defeated.


Raoh dies claiming that he has lived a life with no regrets. I'm not sure I believe him. There's no way a life that ends with being punched to death by your younger brother can contain no regrets.


Kenshiro is reunited with Yuria, who is on her second or third faked death by this point, and they walk off into the sunset to live a happy life together. Except she dies for real later, because Hokuto no Ken 2 was in the works and a peaceful, contented Kenshiro is a lot harder to write violent martial arts adventures for than a grumpy Kenshiro.


If you've read this entire article with the nagging feeling that you've played Hokuto no Ken before but in a slightly different form, then you're probably thinking of Black Belt. Yep, Hokuto no Ken did receive a western release after all the characters and graphics were scrubbed clean of their gore-soaked origins, with Kenshiro replaced by a generic karateman called Riki and the title changed to Black Belt.


The gameplay is basically identical, although the hit detection does feel just a little off and there are honest-to-god power-ups in Black Belt, collectible items that can grant temporary invincibility and health restoration. Overall I'd say Hokuto no Ken is the better version, but then again I'm pretty biased, as you've probably deduced.


That's Hokuto no Ken, then: a mostly predictable and fairly unambitious game that does the things it sets out to do in a solid if uninspired manner. The graphics are good, the controls are mostly tolerable and the boss fights mix things up just enough to prevent it becoming too repetitive. Yuji Naka was apparently involved in Hokuto no Ken's development, so that gives it a bit of historical appeal, too. I have played this game with no regrets, as Raoh might say, but there are disappointments: I'm sad there was no appearance from either of the show's two best characters, Kenshiro's other evil brother Jagi or Raoh's massive horse, but the biggest disappointment was the music. The soundtrack is completely average, but they missed a trick by not including an 8-bit version of "Ai wo Torimodose," the anime's theme song and quite possible the best song ever recorded.
On the whole, then, check out Hokuto no Ken if you're a fan of the franchise because it's probably the best Fist of the North Star game that was released before the PS1 era. If you want to supply your own screams of "atatatataaa!" as you fight, then I can confirm the experience will only be enhanced.

Blood-red light illuminates a forest clearing. A foreboding castle stands in the distance. An armoured knight, who must have trained in combat under Mike Haggar because that's clearly a steel pipe and not a sword he's holding, towers above a pile of corpses. If I kept describing this scene long enough I'd accidentally write the lyrics to a heavy metal epic, but there's no time for that because a dragon is swooping towards this scene of carnage, possibly to play a totally sweet guitar solo.


The dragon promptly casts an evil spell on the knight, turning him into a tiny, weedy little homunculus. The corpses, who are not corpses at all but just a bunch of guys huddled together for warmth or something, begin to point and laugh at the former knight. What a bunch of dicks.


Then a dwarf jumps out the bushes and starts going "neener neener" at the knight. The world of Sir Fred has quickly become much less grim than was promised by the game's opening scene, but I'd say it's a very effective introduction because now I really want to get into the game and give that dwarf a battering, the cheeky little shit.


Live on Broadway for one (k)night only, it's FRED! Yeah, although the game is called Sir Fred: The Legend on the boxart and advertisements, in-game it's just called Fred. He's like Cher or Madonna, he only needs one name.
Confused as to why this particular knight was singled out for transformation from hero to zero - the ol' reverse-Hercules, as I call it - I consulted the manual. It turns out that Fred was in love with a beautiful maiden, but his romance was doomed once it caught the attention of an evil dwarven sorcerer. Consumed with jealousy, the sorcerer turns Fred into an "ugly half-pint," causing Fred's lady love to abandon him in search of someone who doesn't look like a scrawny child playing dress-up as a Roman centurion. The sorcerer's name is ULTIMOR. I assume he chose that name after seeing it on some gardening equipment or similar product.


Thus Fred's quest to regain both his love interest and four feet of height begins in the forest of the dwarves. Everywhere is "of the dwarves" in this game: castle of the dwarves, graveyard of the dwarves, toilet of the dwarves... but I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, Sir Fred sets the player the task of making their way through the dwarf-infested woodland, battling enemies (dwarf-sized) and collecting keys (normal-sized). The action plays out in mostly the same way as every other Amiga platform / hack-n-slash adventure: diagonally-up on the joystick to jump, hold the fire button down while you move the stick to attack. Attacking is where Sir Fred is a little different from most of its peers, because Fred has two weapons to work with. Holding fire and moving the joystick makes him swing his trusty sword (which looks much more like a sword and not construction material now I can see its hilt) to deal short-range damage, while simply holding the button makes him throw long-range daggers from either a standing or crouching position. The daggers are limited in number, although it's surprisingly difficult to run out. You can keep track of them in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, although annoyingly seeing three daggers doesn't mean you have three daggers - you actually have three sets of daggers, and there are quite a few in a set. On the other hand, while it might not be the most practical it is definitely the prettiest status bar I have seen in a long time. Funnily enough, it shares the non-specific ammo display with Jurassic Park on the SNES, which is one of the ugliest status bars I've ever seen.


Fred can also roll along the floor. It is as impractical to use as it is embarrassing to watch, because if you touch anything while you're rolling Fred falls to the ground stunned and says "oy-oy-oy!" while you wait for him to recover. I heard Fred saying "oy-oy-oy!" so many times during this game that I suspect when my soul is consigned to Hell and I ring Satan's doorbell it will make that very sound.


Of the two combat styles, the throwing daggers are by far the preferred option. Enemies can be rather tricky to hit with your sword because they have a tendency to stand right on top of you, and because Fred's turning speed is noticeably cumbersome by the time you've turned around to strike the enemy has either wandered past you or stabbed you, meaning most single combat devolves into Fred spinning around on the spot like a dog chasing its own tail while the dwarves saunter about. No, the daggers are definitely the way to go, and with a bit of distance between us and plenty of throwing knives at hand, Fred will have no trouble defeating the three enemies pictured above. Yes, there are three enemies in the last screenshot: a dwarf, a snake and a bird. Can you spot the bird? It's black and has a red pixel for an eye, that should help you spot it. In Sir Fred's defence, they're a lot easier to pick out in motion.
The other plus-point of the daggers is that on every successful strike they make a "thunk" sound effect as though you're throwing them into a dartboard. It is every bit as satisfying as the "oy-oy-oy!" is infuriating.


David the Gnome does not take kindly to trespassers. I'm not sure whether all these dwarves are working for ULTIMOR (all caps, all the time,) or if they're just trying to kill Fred because he's a weird, lumbering monster (compared to a dwarf). This dwarf does have a flaming torch, that's definitely got a "the villagers attack Frankenstein's monster" vibe to it.


See. this is why I needed that collective noun. I have no idea what to call that group of dwarves. A nuisance of dwarves, maybe. That feels appropriate given how annoying it is to deal with them in clumps. "But VGJunk," you might be saying if you're the kind of weirdo who talks to websites, "surely dealing with that pack of dwarves is easy because they're over at the other side of the screen where you can just throw daggers at them?" Oh, if only things were that simple, my hypothetical friend. you see, one of Sir Fred's gimmicks is that the action takes place on three separate planes - a background, a foreground and one in the middle, which you can switch between using up or down on the joystick. You can't hit enemies that aren't on the same plane as you, but the real problem is that it's often extremely difficult to tell what plane you're on because there's so little visual feedback.


As you can see, the difference between planes is only a couple of pixels - it's fairly obvious here, but when the game's in motion, you're under attack by dwarves and there are three planes to deal with it's just another frustrating mechanic strapped onto a game already struggling under the weight of stodgy controls and annoying enemies. Restricting Sir Fred to only two, much more clearly defined, planes would have made things a lot less aggravating, but removing the concept entirely would have been the ideal solution because it adds nothing to the gameplay. Nothing good, anyway. It adds an extra layer of misery to trying to climb the game's staircases, like a bannister made of electric eels.


Finding himself in a desolate graveyard, Fred crouches behind a headstone while throwing knives at a headless dwarf. Even decapitation cannot stop the dwarf race from rising up to destroy Fred. It's as though they have an extra, ectoplasmic head made of pure spite.
This scene brings two thoughts to my mind: one is that throwing daggers at the undead in a graveyard is making me want to play a Castlevania game. Maybe I'll treat myself to some Castlevania III when this is all over. Secondly, as Sir Fred is a game about a goofy, ineffectual knight who moves with the grace of a tuna sandwich, throwing knives and making awkward, lurching jumps, a game in which the graphics are far and away the most appealing aspect, it reminds me a lot of the NES version of Dragon's Lair. Dragon's Lair is probably my most hated game of all time, so that might go some way towards explaining which I'm having such a miserable time with Sir Fred despite it not being that bad.


Here's a boss, of sorts. It's a floating, squinting, demonic samurai head... thing. I don't know what it's called. Probably HEADLOR or FLOATEETH. Something in all caps, anyway. FLOATEETH drifts around the screen, a serene presence completely disinterested in anything that's going on around it, including Fred chucking dozens of knives into its ear. We should all strive to attain a level of inner peace equal to that of FLOATEETH, the blissful tomato spirit.


Level one complete. Fred sits on a rock, disconsolate, tortured by the memory of the man he used to be. A brave knight, a mighty warrior, a wearer of chainmail mittens. Will his extremely shiny armour ever again rest upon his broad shoulders? Will he ever manage to perform a complete forward roll without bumping into something and flopping to the ground like freshly-landed trout? Will he be responsible for murdering every dwarf in the world? Tune in for stage two to find out!


And we're back with the second area - the dwarf village, or possibly just one big dwarf house. Very high ceilings, for a dwarf house. Must be a Victorian property.
The dwarf pictured attacking Fred is a Kung-Fu Dwarf, a tough opponent who is even harder to hit than usual and who has substantially more health than most dwarves. Dwarves. Dwarves. Yep, I looked at the word "dwarves" too long and now it doesn't look like a real word any more. Anyway, the Kung-Fu Dwarf's toughness marks it out as an important target, and defeating them is necessary to progress because they drop the all-important keys Fred needs to continue his assault. I will admit that the dwarves do have a lot of personality, and there's a nice variety of them - the headless dwarves were fun, and Kung-Fu Dwarf is smoothly animated as he practises his deadly martial arts.


Less threatening is Dwarf Who Just Got Out Of The Bath. You know how irritating it is when you have to rush out of the shower to answer the telephone or a knock at the door? Imagine how much worse that would be if you replaced "the phone is ringing" with "someone is slaughtering my family." I hereby rename "Dwarf Who Just Got Out Of The Bath" to "Justifiably Aggrieved Dwarf."


He's not scrubbing his back, he's about to throw a knife at Fred. Let's not think too hard about where the naked dwarf is storing all his knives. Instead, I direct your attention to the bottom-right of the screen where you will see, as mentioned earlier, the toilet of the dwarves. There's only one toilet and dozens of dwarves, it's like a sitcom joke about teenage sisters arguing over bathroom use waiting to happen.


More dwarves! Alcoholic dwarves regard their empty wine glasses with a mixture of sadness and anger, while at the top of the screen the barrel-throwing Dwarfy Kong is biding his time, waiting for me to stand on the staircase so he can knock me off it.


There was no boss at the end of the dwarf house, which I think was Incal showing the player some mercy before Sir Fred's true villain was revealed: stairs. The Devil's Elevator, the Thousand Steps of Agony, the thing that separates the magically-enfeebled men from the boys. Yes, like an old lady with a bad hip, stairs are Fred's nemesis, and simply climbing from the bottom of this tower to the top is an exercise in fusing frustration and tedium into a new and terrible emotion. One problem is that the multi-plane system makes it way too hard to see at a glance whether you're lined up with the staircase or not. If you're on the wrong plane, or you accidentally press down on the stick once too often, then you'll fall past the staircase and land all the way at the bottom of the tower.


While you're down there, you'll have to fight some dwarf knights. It's far preferable to climbing the stairs, but eventually you'll have defeated the dwarves and there will be nothing left for it but to tackle the staircases again. But it gets worse: even if you line yourself up correctly and you're standing on the steps, taking any hit will knock you off the stairs and yes, you'll fall all the way to the bottom. The obvious solution to this is to not get hit, but that only works to an extent - I cautiously made my way up the stair, taking out the flapping skull-faced bats one at a time and making steady progress - until an axe fell onto my head from off the top of the screen, an axe that I couldn't possibly have seen coming until it was too late. All the way back down to the bottom of the staircase I went. Bite me, Sir Fred.


"Well well, if it isn't Sir Dead! What a bone-headed decision, entering our lair! Don't try to skull­-k away, we've got a bone to pick with you!"
"Jesus, knock it off, Skeleton Steve."
"Oh, lighten up, Skeleton Carl. I'm just rib-bing the guy!"
"That's it, Skeleton Steve. After we kill this knight, you and me are going to have words."


Finally free of the staircase nightmare, Fred faces a whole new batch of costumed dwarves, including Executioner Dwarf. I guess that explains the headless dwarves from earlier. Also, I'm looking at the dwarves with crossbows and I know that's probably supposed to be a basic medieval helmet, but I can't see it as anything other than RoboCop's helmet.


Having reached the top of the castle and the latter stages of the game, combat is becoming tougher than ever. The enemies have evolved and become more challenging, while Fred has most assuredly not, and the gulf was amply illustrated by these heavily-armoured dwarf knights. The problem was that I could not hurt them. They blocked everything with their mighty shields, be it thrown daggers or sword swings. My solution to this problem was to ignore them and leave the room. It was nice to have skills I have honed in the real world be useful in a videogame.
As a side note, that table is way too tall for dwarves, unless they all use booster seats and high chairs, and you'd think the knights' martial pride would prevent that.


Hark, a fair maiden - presumably Fred's love interest - and a dwarf wizard! Have I at last reached the thrilling denouement of Sir Fred?


No, because the maiden was actually another dwarf wizard, one who was exploring some personal issues regarding their identity. Hey, you'll get no judgement from me, dwarf wizard. You'll get stabbed, but in a non-judgemental way.


Okay, now we're getting into it - a boss fight against a dragon! A very oddly-proportioned dragon, a dragon that's 70% head, but definitely a dragon. A dragon-pterodactyl hybrid at the outside. Given that both Fred and Stumpy the Dragon are malformed shadows of their true selves, I had hoped that they might reach an understanding based upon their mutual suffering, laying aside their enmity to, I dunno, start a support group for medieval fantasy weirdoes. Alas, the mending of troubled hearts was not to be, and the battle was joined.
It's an odd battle, too, because depending on the dragon's behaviour the fight can switch from trivially easy to extremely tricky in a moment. If it decides to get in your face, trying to burn said face right off your skull with its fiery breath, then you're going to have a tough time of it - Fred doesn't have all that much health, and because he's so slow getting out of the way isn't much of an option either. On the other hand, sometimes the dragon will spend ages flapping back and forth across the top of the screen, in easy range of your daggers (which you can throw diagonally upwards). The difficulty of the battle is entirely dependant n which of these two things the dragon decides to do.


But wait, there's more! Once you've stuck enough daggers in the dragon to turn it into a flying version of the Iron Throne, ULTIMOR himself realises his ill-thought-out and hastily conceived plan is about to go tits-up, and so he thrusts himself into the battle just as the dragon dies. ULTIMOR himself dies moments later, victim to the same tactics I used against the dragon. Well, ULTIMOR was obviously not a physical fighter, was he? Turning knights into smaller, skinnier knights was more his style, and his lack of physical prowess was what did for him in the end. That, and I never managed to run out of daggers. That certainly helped.
So, with ULTIMOR defeated, will Fred be restored to his usual rugged and manly state?


Yes, yes he will. His clothes, however, are not. That's it, that's the end of the game - a muscular and suddenly naked man hiding his shame. The end, roll credits. Oh, wait, the credits rolled at the start of the game. Just the end, then. Stop staring at me, Fred. You're creeping me out.


Much like myself, Sir Fred: The Legend - just Fred to his friends - is kind of annoying but not terrible. The graphics are very nice, especially the multitudinous dwarves and the Mona Lisa of status bars, but that's just icing on a gameplay cake made of stiff movements, ponderous combat and very limited scope. The action never falls to a standard that makes you wonder what kind of cruel god would allow mankind to develop thumbs, but never does it haul itself above "mildly interesting," either. The multi-plane system doesn't work, and that staircase tower section is really bad and makes up a fair chunk of a rather short game. A classic case of style over substance, then, as Amiga platformers so often are, but one that let me fight the resurrected corpse of a headless dwarf. That gets points for novelty, at least.

If you're too young or not British enough to remember Sonic the Comic, it was "the UK's Official Sega Comic." I'm not sure if it ever had much penetration outside these sceptered isles, but for British kids it meant a fortnightly slice of cartoonish Sega action. Most of the strips focused on Sonic, naturally, but other Sega franchises were represented, including (somewhat surprisingly) a ton based on Decap Attack. I was never really into Sonic the Comic as a kid, mostly because I was never really a fan of Sonic, but I had a few issues here and there and I remember it being mostly enjoyable kid's comic stuff that really stretched out the premise of Sonic the Hedgehog, Well, there's not much plot in the original games beyond "run around a loop-the-loop, jump on a fat man," is there? Still, Sonic the Comic is fondly remembered by some, and to those people I issue an apology - I'm sorry if you think I'm being too harsh on StC, but just know that I only lash out at others to hide my own insecurities.


To establish a baseline, let's start at the start with Sonic the Comic issue one. It's pretty typical of the series' covers: a big picture of Sonic, bright colours and exclamation marks up the wazoo. It's all as you'd expect for a 1993 publication called Sonic the Comic. Two things stand out to me - okay, three things because the idea of a comic costing less than a pound is making me feel really old. The other two are the banner at the top that references Sega's "Cyber Razor Cut" advertising campaign - a set of commercials that imply you need to go to a barber / cybernetic enhancement clinic to be strong enough to handle the raw power of the Megadrive. There's an accompanying song with one of the worst forced rhymes I've ever heard, I wrote about it years ago. The other thing is the proud declaration that Sonic is "the world's most famous blue hedgehog!" Well, of course he is, he's the world's only blue hedgehog. I'm the most famous person currently writing a stupid article about old videogame comics, but that's a meaningless statement because I'm the only person doing that. At least I bloody well hope I am.


By the third issue this bold claim has been changed to "the world's fastest blue hedgehog!" See, that tagline suffers from the same problem, doesn't it?
The shark-piranha hybrid robots are admittedly quite cool, although I only bring them up so I can complain about the Sharkticons in Transformers being called Sharkticons despite being neither sharks nor Decepticons.


Sonic's default facial expression on these covers is "knowing smugness," even when he's failed to notice a squadron of robot eagle-planes swooping in behind him. Tails has spotted them, though, unless the artist captured him looking behind himself for the first time ever and realising he's a two-tailed mutant freak. As I say, I never really read Sonic the Comic as a kid but I'd be surprised if this very scene didn't play out many times, with Sonic not registering danger from inside his impervious bubble of self-satisfaction while Tails performs the usual sidekick role.


Blimey, that took a dark turn: Dr. Robotnik has decapitated Sonic and Tails and he's using their severed heads as Christmas decorations. And here you thought Robotnik was the "harmless buffoon" type of villain, not the "decorate his lair with the skulls of his fallen enemies" kind.
You might be wondering how Dr. Robotnik managed to cross over into the world of Looney Tunes and murder Porky Pig too, but that's not Porky Pig. It's an original Sonic the Comic character called Porker Lewis, which sounds like the nickname you end up with if you're a fat kid at Eton. Porker Lewis wears a leather jacket in the comics, and given that the world of Sonic the Hedgehog is filled with sentient animal-men Porker is in for an extremely awkward conversation when he eventually meets a cow-person.


You know, before the proliferation of the internet, "Sonic the Human" might well have been the strangest Sonic story ever told. Now it's not even a blip on the weird-o-meter. Also, for a character built around the concept of being cool I find it hard to believe that Sonic would dress in a crop-top and fingerless gloves, even during the mid-nineties. Maybe the bare midriff was intended to distract from his grotesquely oversized head, Newsflash, Sonic - it does not.


Speaking of clothes, Amy Rose features heavily in Sonic the Comic and she is always fully dressed, which only serves to highlight Sonic's nakedness. Thankfully Sonic put on some clothes to attend his wedding - you can see he's wearing a little bow tie to go with his gloves. I do hope he's also wearing a suit or something, otherwise he'll look like a Chippendale.


One thing you notice if you look at a lot of Sonic the Comic covers is that Sonic looks weird when viewed straight-on, his spines being rather difficult to illustrate from that viewpoint. Now you know why Sonic is blue - because if he was green, he'd look like a Christmas tree.


See? He just looks like he's got a bizarrely-shaped skull. Actually, the first time I saw this cover I though Sonic had sprouted wings and Knuckles was climbing out of a toilet. That'd be a much stranger Sonic story that Sonic the Human.


I would dearly love to believe that somewhere out there was a child who occupied the tiny overlap at the centre of a "Sonic the Comic reader / Wings fan" Venn diagram, and that said child laughed heartily at the "Bandage on the Run" pun.


No, it's fine, Sonic. Nobody else wanted to use that log bridge, you go right ahead and destroy it, you thoughtless jackass. What if Tails wanted to follow you across? Oh, right, he can fly. Well, what about Knuckles? Right, he can glide. Okay, maybe Amy Rose wanted to use it... but you want her to stay as far away from you as possible, of course. I give up, you've beaten me. Destroy as many log bridges as you like.


Note to self: start using "Welcome to the Pleasure Zone" as a chat-up line. Further study will be required to determine whether it's more effective if I point at my crotch while doing so.


Sonic is imprisoned, guilty of being the coolest hedgehog on the planet, a crime that I can't help but feel was forced onto the statute books solely to harass Sonic. It's not even necessary, either: surely there must be laws in place that mean Sonic can be arrested, if not summarily executed, simply for appearing in Sonic Underground?


"Yeah, I punched the floor so hard that it shattered. No big deal, it's just a cool thing I can do. No, it's not a dress, it's a poncho!"


More seasonal punishment from Dr. Robotnik, living up to his Eggman alter-ego by trapping Sonic and friends in a transparent Easter egg. It's a wonderful image, although I can't decide what I like best about it: that Robotnik shoved a bunny and a chick in there with Sonic to really hammer home the Easter theme, or that he took the time to pretty the whole thing up with a ribbon. Hang on, those gems on Robotnik's glove... is he wearing the Infinity Gauntlet? I demand that the next Avengers movie opens with Robotnik trapping Thanos in an Easter egg, stealing the Infinity Gauntlet and bellowing "I HATE THOSE HEROOOOES!"


"Hi folks, I'm Sonic the Hedgehog, the world's most famous blue hedgehog. Look at these idiots behind me. They're protesting at a statue. I think they think it's the real Dr. Robotnik. What a bunch of idiots. Chilli dogs, you're too slow, etcetera."


Look at Robotnik's forehead and eyes. Now look at them again. Looks like the underside of a human nose, doesn't it? Creepy.


"Mobius is afraid of me... I have seen its true face. The Zones are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the badniks and Eggmen will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "erm, I'll get Sonic, he's much better at that kind of thing."


It appears there were several attempts to make Tails look tough. None of them worked. This one is undermined by the fact that it looks like the sword is saying "Grrrr!" and not Tails. Tails looks like he doesn't have a bloody clue what's going on.


Again, I'm not buying Tails as a tough guy. He wasn't even in Sonic Underground, so he's innocent of that heinous crime. So what is he wanted for? Aggravated cuteness? Sidekicking with intent to quip? I suppose I could read the issue in question to find out, but that would feel like I had been defeated, somehow. Instead I'll just assume Tails is wanted for burning down an orphanage.

To finish, here is a collection of Tails' goofy facial expressions.


Tails did not come out of this article with much dignity, did he? And if those weren't goofy enough for you, I've got one left.


Hey Miles, maybe you should lay off the caffeine for a while? You look kinda wired. Jaunty, but wired.

In the interests of preventing the tendons in my hands from bursting into flame, I'm just going to refer to it as Battle Mobile from here on out. I threw the full title into Google Translate to see what the non "battle mobile" parts of the name meant, and as far as I can piece together the full title means something like Bullet Clash Car Decisive Battle: Battle Mobile. So not a realistic driving simulation, then?


I think Battle Mobile is set in the spring of 2029. Don't ask me why, it's just a hunch.


A newlywed couple express their deep love for each other in the most romantic way imaginable: by driving an open-topped sports car across the desert. No wonder neither of the them appear to have eyes, they've been sandblasted right out of their faces. Nevertheless, the young lovers are happy, with a bucket full of old coins on the back seat and the groom's toupee flapping in the breeze. I'm sure she'd still love you if you gave up the charade and embraced your baldness, pal, but if that rug makes you feel more confident then I'm in no position to judge. Receding hairlines aside, it seems that nothing can spoil the happiness of this loving couple.


Except maybe a vicious gang of post-apocalyptic thugs who will slaughter anyone who stands between them and their goal of collecting all the world's feather boas so they can keep producing their trademark shoulderpads. As Mad Max begat Fist of the North Star, so too did it inspire Battle Mobile.
Perhaps I'm being too judgemental, assuming that these men are remorseless killers just because they have "interesting" haircuts and they're dedicated to keeping their shoulders warm but their arms cool? What if they just want to ask for directions, hmm?


If they were asking for directions, something went horribly wrong. Our hero's new bride is killed, his car doesn't look to clever either, and the thugs ride off into the desert, presumably licking knives and drinking gasoline like any self-respecting bunch of wasteland bandits.


One year later, and our hero's transformation into an off-brand Mad Max is complete, leather jacket and all. Let's call him Sad Max, because he looks like he's about to start crying. That would be fair enough, given the circumstances, but instead he channels his rage into a furious rollercoaster ride of deadly vehicular revenge. He's strapped into his souped-up death car - his Battle Mobile, if you're the kind of person who likes it when they say the name of the thing in the thing - and the game can begin.


It's a top-down tiny vehicle bump-n-crash adventure that will put most who see it firmly in mind of Spy Hunter, although my mind immediately turned to Konami's similar arcade game City Bomber. The goal of Battle Mobile is to drive towards the end of the stage without exploding, or running out of fuel... which makes you explode. Yes, this is one of those games in which your energy bar is also a constantly-ticking timer, a design decision that was almost enough for me to give up on the game before I'd even started. Being a naturally slothful type I'm not a big fan of strict time limits in games, and after playing Battle Mobile for thirty seconds I can see that the energy bar drains away so fast that I suspect my car's fuel tank has sprung a leak.


Then I did a totally sweet jump over a river and I thought to myself "eh, I'll stick with it. How difficult can it really be?" One day I might look back on that naivete and laugh, but not for a bloody long time.


Things start out fairly simple. Our hero is attacked from all sides by pick-up trucks and the world's most evil motorcycle display riding team, all of whom are trying to jostle the player to death, nudging your car into energy-draining roadside collisions. If that wasn't villainous enough, some of them can fire projectiles at you which also drain your energy. So, how can a man on a mission of revenge defend himself? Well, you can avoid the projectiles by driving around the screen, which I'm sure was already obvious to you although it's a lot more difficult that it sounds: you car is nippy and manoeuvrable but the enemies' shots travel very quickly and often in spread patterns. Your main form for defence is attack, which revolves around destroying the bad guys before they can fire too many bullets. To this end you can press the B button, which makes your car "dash" in whatever direction your're pressing. If you've ever played Sleeping Dogs it's sort of like a more extreme version of that game's car-nudging ability.


Performing your car-dash produces neat-looking after-images of your car, as seen above, but more importantly it allows you to ram into opposition vehicles, destroying the smaller ones on contact and letting you push larger trucks into the roadside obstacles for a satisfyingly explosive death. Unfortunately it doesn't allow you to dash through projectiles. That will become a problem later in the game, but for now I can relax and smash my way through this motley assortment of motorcycles, jeeps and dune buggies that survived the apocalypse. There was an apocalypse at some point prior to the start of the game, right? I mean, I just assumed because the whole thing is such a rip-off of Mad Max - and why else would you spend your honeymoon driving through a vast, sun-baked desert - but I might be wrong. Maybe there was no apocalypse, fossil fuels are still plentiful and everyone involved in this game just happens to be a complete psychopath. Whatever the background behind it, the first stage of Battle Mobile is an enjoyable dose of hectic if occasionally twitchy gameplay, with a pleasing sense of carnage as you bash your opponents sideways and they become a thin red paste smeared across a passing boulder and the subtle feeling that the game is going to get really, really difficult before the end.


At some point I realised I could fire missiles straight ahead by pressing the Y button. Unfortunately, these missile completely ignored all the vehicles in the first stage, passing over them as if they weren't there. I hope you kept your receipt for that rocket launcher, friend. I'd be straight down Post-Apocalyptic Halfords to get my money back if I were you.


And then, a boss. Two bosses, in fact, as a pair of lorries try to destroy our hero. The cargo that they're hauling? Death. Oh, all right, they're actually hauling motorcycles. I was trying to be poetic, you uncultured swine.


Once you've got rid of all the bikes they drop, the lorries ditch their trailers and take on our hero mano-a-trucko, trying to get on either side of the player so they can squash you between their bulk. To win you have to stay on the outside and bump into them using your dash attack. They can take quite a lot of damage, and coupled with the fact that your car can repeatedly use its dash very quickly, the fight resembles nothing so much as a very determined bee trying to fly through a closed window. Determined I most certainly was, and after crashing my sports car into these huge articulated lorries enough times they were destroyed and I was free to drive away. His rocket launcher may not work as you'd expect, but whatever our hero did to his car's bodywork was some exceptional craftsmanship.


The second stage takes place on a poorly-maintained highway. Well, mostly - it actually starts off in an extremely boring grey tunnel, but I skipped that bit because I wouldn't want to send you into a tedium-induced coma, dear reader. The highway does little to confirm whether or not there was an apocalypse. There's a city down there that looks relatively un-destroyed, and while the highways itself is in fairly bad shape that could just mean that Sheffield City Council's roadworks department is still going in the year 2029.


In other news, I figured out what the rocket launcher is for: blowing up these helicopters. However, this is less useful than it sounds because the helicopters are by far the least threatening thing on the screen at any given time. Sure, some of them take the occasional pot-shot at our hero but it's as if the ones that do attack are only making a token effort while their Evil Biker Gang Manager happens to be watching: most of the time they fly onto the screen, hover around for a bit and then piss off. You might as well throw a few rockets at them when you get a chance but really, you should concentrate staying in the middle of the road because otherwise you might miss a jump and that's an instant lost life.


Okay, this helicopter you should shoot, because it's the end-of-stage boss. It's a helicopter that shoots spread-shots and drops the occasional bomb in your path. I don't know how System Sacom managed to make a sports car chasing an attack helicopter down a motorway while trying to blow it up with surface-to-air missiles boring, but here we are.


Stage three begins in a city, which I'm going to claim as conclusive proof that Battle Mobile is, in fact, pre-apocalyptic. There are police cars, for starters. They're trying to murder rather than apprehend you, but still, they're part of an organised law enforcement agency. Even more telling is the shop on the right with the "ADULT" sign: if this was a devastated hellscape where each day is a struggle for survival I don't think people would be so concerned with picking up grot mags that a porno store would be a viable business model.


Things get mixed up a little in the middle of the stage with a slippery snow section. I am convinced this area was only included as an excuse to include snowmobiles in the game, although they hardly add a huge amount of character to the proceedings. I'd say that one of Battle Mobile's big failings is that it doesn't look as interesting as the premise allows. The graphics are nice, but the design is fairly low-key and frankly knocking over tiny motorbikes loses its appeal fairly quickly. The enemies are disappointingly sober for the most part, and it definitely would have held my interest more if I was doing battle with insane rolling death-machines and not Which Car's Best Utility Vehicles of 2029.


These tanks are a bit more interesting, firing missiles up the screen that then turn around and fly back towards you. You have to avoid them, and that's a big reason that Battle Mobile feels more difficult than perhaps it should - you almost always feel defenceless. You can activate a temporary bubble-shield to protect you from projectiles, but these shields are few and far between. I feel like a nice solution would have been to let you shoot down projectiles - the larger ones like these rockets, at least - with your own missiles, giving you a bit more of a say in your own survival. Avoiding attacks still wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that your energy is constantly ticking down even if you don't get hit, eventually reaching a point where missing any of the energy pick-ups that occasionally drift across the screen almost certainly means the loss of a life.


The boss of the city is the same tank you fought moments earlier. I'm beginning to go right off you, Battle Mobile.


Stage four, and vehicular manslaughter hits the dunes as our hero takes a pleasant seafront drive that would be more pleasant if touching the sea didn't immediately cost you a life.


Oh man, I wish I hadn't told you that this was supposed to be the sea, I could have pretended that my car was jumping over the back of an enormous woodlouse. See, again, that would have been a much more engaging setting for this type of game, a kind of micro-Micro Machines that sees you driving through a world of giant insects. Of course this is jut a personal preference, in that I like my videogames to be as mental as possible. I mean, I like Gran Tursimo but even then I enjoy it a lot more when I'm driving the bonkers concept cars.


At least the boss is more interesting, in terms of mechanics if not design, than the others: it's a freight train, thundering across the sands. Its cargo? Death. Shit, I already said that about the first boss. Anyway, once you've removed the minor irritation of the few dune buggies it drops, the fight is all about switching between the left and right sides of the train and getting your hits in when you can before it starts firing at you, smashing carriages as you go until you reach the locomotive. Then things really kick off.


Having spent a not-inconsiderable amount of the past two years looking after my young nephew, I have seen enough Thomas the Tank Engine to know that this is not how trains work. They generally require tracks, they can't laterally move left and right whenever they feel like it and they need the carrot-on-a-stick that is being called a "really useful engine" to do their jobs properly. Actually, that last one might be specific to Thomas the Tank Engine.
Dashing around the train, slamming into it between its bouts of gunfire as you both hurtle through the desert is almost a challenging and enjoyable boss fight, but sadly it doesn't quite reach those heights because of the train's "steam" move. Without warning, it can shoot a cloud of steam around itself that damages you and pushes you sideways, and even that would be manageable if it didn't have the frustrating tendency to trap you right at the side of the screen, pinning you against the edge so that you repeatedly slam into all the passing trees and lose your entire energy bar in seconds. Other than that it's fine.


This is the final stage and also the longest, starting out in a generic warehouse district packed with helicopters. Here you can see what I mean about the helicopters' threat level being mostly negligible: there are six on the screen and only one pilot has managed to summon the herculean effort required to press the "fire slow-moving yellow orb" button on his control panel. For a game where you're constantly driving forwards, Battle Mobile requires a surprisingly patient approach to combat: much of the time you have to wait for a while to see what the enemies are going to do, because sometimes the answer is "nothing," and if cars appear near the top of the screen you might be tempted to try to eliminate them as quickly as possible but dashing ahead recklessly will almost always lead to you getting hit by their bullets before you reach them.


"And they said building a steamroller that's fast enough to keep pace with a futuristic sports car couldn't be done, but who's laughing now, all my old construction site foremen who mocked me?!"


There's a section with some twisty-turny roads, one of the few parts of the game where you have to actually pay attention to where you're driving, although "stay right in the middle of the screen" is as good a rule of thumb as always. The shadow of a plane passes overhead, which means it's about to drop bombs all over the road. You can see where the bombs are going to land thanks to their shadows, and in a game that has become punishingly difficult by this point the easily-avoided bombing raid goes down as a relaxing oasis of calm.


Finally, Battle Mobile rolls into a junkyard, where no doubt the ecstatic owners will want to shake my hand for supplying them with so much goddamn work. These big yellow combine harvester / construction vehicles are the kind of thing I meant when I said I wanted more interesting things to crash into, so it's a shame they only turn up right at the end of the game and are surprisingly easy to take down because being so big they're always in range of a ramming attack.


Here's the boss. It's a thing. You know, a box... thing. With the rocket booster from a space shuttle sticking out of the bottom. Did someone run a space shuttle through a car crusher? I'm going to assume that's what's happening. I also thought the protuberance on the front was a skull, but on closer inspection that appears not to be the case and Battle Mobile's staunch commitment to dull enemy design continues right to the very end.
The boss' main gimmick is that it fire a huge plume of fire from its exhaust that will annihilate your energy if it touches ,you before trying to crush you as it swings around to the other side of the screen. Staying at the top of the screen as much as possible is the key to victory, and luck seems to play a huge part, too - the first time I fought this thing it seemed utterly relentless, but afterwards I managed to get the hang of it and after a few minutes of hit-and-run attacks I managed to get it to explode. Something cobbled together like that, you'd think it'd be really easy to get it to explode, but then again I am only in a sports car.
If you're playing on Easy difficulty, this is where the game ends, but on harder modes Battle Mobile has an extra treat for you, in the same way that having root canal work done after filing your tax return is a treat.


It's another, even harder boss! Just what I always wanted. It's difficult to find anything interesting to say about it, because for the most part all it does is launch various projectiles from differing parts of its chassis. Its tentacle arms are noteworthy because they're something a bit different than everything else you faced so far and the boss has a move where it gives itself a hug, meaning that you can only damage it by ramming it in the places where its arms aren't. Again, that kind of more interesting mechanic is something that Battle Mobile could have done with a lot more of.
The fight is also difficult enough to stop being fun, especially because the boss's attacks take up so much space, either with his swinging arms, his flamethrower or the giant hunks of scrap metal he throws at you, that it's extremely difficult to avoid taking damage. My advice would be to save up as many shields as you can and hope for the best. That's what I did, and eventually I sent him to the scrapheap. It's not a long journey.


Your reward for smashing up the extra boss is that you get to see Battle Mobile's credits. How exciting! Okay, so the car driving past the night-time cityscape looks quite nice but it's hardly an incentive to make a very hard game even harder by playing it on a difficulty setting besides "easy."


Oh, and completing the game also unlocks an extra difficulty setting called "?????" I tried it out. It's the same as Hard, except all projectiles and collisions cause you to die in one hit. Now I get it, "?????" is shorthand for "Why?? Why would anyone play this???"


Our hero's wig looks less convincing than ever.
Gekitotsu Dangan Jigousha Kessen: Battle Mobile is a game I sort of enjoyed at first, but the more I think about it the more I realise it's not particularly good. I kept thinking of minor changes that would make it better - more agency when it comes to defending yourself, less brutal difficulty, more interesting enemies and stages both in looks and actions - but in the end I had so many minor changes in mind that I realised that if you put them all together they'd be major changes. It's not a bad game, by any means: fans of super-tough retro games (and I know you're out there) will probably get a kick out of it, it controls well enough and the graphics and music are both good, but in the end it feels like squandered potential. I guess I should have spent my time going to see Fury Road after all.

That says "Hyper Handball" so it looks like Heavy Smash is merely a refinement of an existing sport - handball, I mean - rather than something entirely new, but that's fine by me. I means there won't be a ton of new rules to learn. Use your hands to get the ball in the goal. I reckon I can figure that out.


Here's what a typical Heavy Smash player looks like: American Football-esque shoulder armour, shinguards ripped from the myths of ancient Greece and a boxy, durable cup to protect his nethers from any misdirected heavy smashes. At first glance I though he was about to take a bite out of that giant hamburger, but on closer inspection I can see that's actually the ball. I stand by my belief that without the blue orbs it would look very much like a hamburger, though.


First things first, it's time to pick a team. They come from all corner of the globe (and also from space, in one instance) and they have the usual varied statistics. The USA team is very powerful. Does their power come from their bare legs? Could be. The Australian team is made up entirely of women, so naturally it's a slow, defensive team. No, of course not, they're really fast. Let's be honest, a Japanese arcade game from the early nineties was never going to be the one to buck that particular trend.
As usual, I'll be playing as England, and as usual they are denoted by the British flag and not the St. George's cross. Sorry, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish players, you've been overlooked yet again. Rather than my usual reason for picking the English team - an attempt to burn off any slight accumulations of patriotism - I chose them because according to the arcade flyer they're called the Union Sharps and that's the best team name. The team from Japan are the Kamikaze Striders, which is also not bad, but England it is. They're a team with higher-than-average power, decent defence and "their shoot on the ground has the strongest destructive power," so as long as I remember not to jump I reckon I'll do okay.


The first match is about to get underway, a titanic tussle between a Visionary who looks a little like Jean-Claude Van Damme, and a ninja. The ninja represents the the Korean team, the Seoul  Fighters. As they are Korean, they will probably not appreciate me comparing them to the very Japanese concept of ninjas.


At the beginning of each match, lightning strikes the pitch and the players materialize from clouds of smoke. I may be a tired and bitter cynic, but not so much that I won't admit that this intro is really cool.


And we're off! The English captain grabs the ball from the tip-off and makes a run down field, his armoured butt-flap bouncing around like an overexcited puppy in a sausage factory. "PASS," says the cursor over one of my team-mates, and I might well have done so had I not been blinded by a desire for personal glory.
The aim of Heavy Smash is immediately apparent: to have slammed the ball into the opposition's goal as many times as possible - and by whatever means necessary -  before the time runs out. To this end, you have three buttons to work with. When in possession, you can either throw the ball in whatever direction you're facing, chuck a computer-assisted pass to a teammate or jump. Once you're in the air you can pass or shoot. Or just, like, land. Gravity still works in the future.


Having reached the opposition's goal, I unleashed a shot that looked pretty powerful to my untrained eye but which the Korean keeper held on to with ease. Hang on, the team name at the top of the screen says I'm facing a Spanish team. I went back and checked and yup, they're Korean on the arcade flyer, presumably replaced by Spain in European release to appeal to European players. No word on what the Spanish team's name is, but I doubt it's the Seoul Fighters.
Be that as it may, I have to get past the goalie no matter his nationality, which is where the power bar comes in. It gradually fills up as you play - although "gradually" might not be the right word because it refills very quickly, as befitting Heavy Smash's manic gameplay. Once the bar's full you can unleash a power shot, and sending one of these at the keeper usually results in him being blasted backwards into his own net, ball and all. Score one for the Union Sharps. I wonder what kind of pyrotechnics a goal will produce in a game this over-the-top?


Oh. They really put the "pyro" in pyrotechnics, huh? They also surely killed the goalkeeper. Roasted alive in the metal samurai armour that the Spanish are known for, what a way to go. Net result: I score a goal and the Spanish team brings on their substitute keeper. Not really, the giant fiery explosion does not harm the opposing keeper. Somehow.


This game of Heavy Smash is being beamed to you live from inside a prison. Why? I have no idea. Maybe the people of the future have a firm belief in the power of rehabilitation through sport, maybe the prison system provides a large supply of expendable players. Criminals who have been burned to a crisp show a 0% recidivism rate, after all. Mind you, the warden doesn't look too pleased about the whole thing.


Thus the first match continued, with the Union Sharps being able rack up a commanding five-nil lead thanks to the Spanish team's refusal to challenge for the ball at tip-off. They scored a late consolation goal while I was trying to figure out if you can manually change the player you're controlling - I don't think you can, but given the small size of the pitch and the game's relative competence at picking who you should be using the auto-switching works quite well.


Off to a good start, then: the British player looks wryly amused, the Spanish-Korean player curses his misfortune. Or he's flexing his arm and admiring his bicep, it's difficult to tell.


The second match is against the powerful American team, but all their power is for naught if they can't get the ball off me. I gave them plenty of opportunity while I was admiring this advertisement for HAM BURGER, too, yet still they could not capitalise and after racking up another substantial lead I was left to ponder the effectiveness of that HAM BURGER advert. Is it just for the concept of hamburgers in general? Did all the fast-food establishments of the future year, ahem, 2010 gang together and say "look, people just aren't buying enough hamburgers and it's hitting us all hard, so let's put our differences aside and raise the profile of hamburgers" and then Ronald McDonald and the Burger King shake hands? I don't know, but as things that are symbolic of your nation go, America has done quite well. Hamburgers are delicious.


Italian team the Milano Stingers are up next, and after romping to victory in the previous matches I had to start, if not concentrating, then at least doing less dicking about to beat Italy's finest. For starters, they were much more intent on getting hold of the ball, so naturally I had to win it back in the traditional future-sports manner - by beating the crap out of them. When you don't have the ball, pressing shoot makes you perform a dashing shoulder-charge that smashes the ball off the opposition and sometimes leaves them unconscious on the ground for a while, giving you a man advantage. You can combine this attack with the jump button to perform a diving kick straight out of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat-em-ups. If those weren't enough ways to neutralize your foes, pressing pass without the ball and a full power bar makes your player throw a projectile - usually a three-way spread of knives - that can stun you opponents and make them drop the ball, because an energy-coated cyberknife in the lumbar region can make it difficult to concentrate on things like "playing sports" and "being alive".


I found a particularly effective strategy was to not jump for the tip-off, wait for the computer player to grab the ball and immediately smash into them and take the ball as they land. Unsportsmanlike? Probably, but this is called Heavy Smash and the fans did not come to see Gentle Nudgings or Delicate Contact.


Another straightforward win, and this Italian player is utterly distraught to have lost. Reports that he's shouting "Mamma Mia!" as he tears out his hair remain unconfirmed. In a way it's not as satisfying a victory as the others, because as it's against an Italian team there's a decent chance they were simply paid to throw the match.


And now, robots. In space. Space Robots. Sports-playing space robots. I love videogames.
The all-robot, not-affiliated-with-a-country Mobile Strikers represent a considerable step up in challenge, as you might be able to tell from the comatose bodies of my players littering the pitch. Heavy Smash gets credit from me for being an arcade game that doesn't immediately become brutally difficult once the first stage is over, but by this point you've had enough practise that the higher level of challenge is welcome. It helps that Heavy Smash is a great example of arcade game design - it's instantly obvious what you're supposed to be doing, the controls are intuitive and accurate, and the short play times, designed to encourage more credits to be spent and thus more profits earned, work to the game's favour by creating hectic, non-stop matches that can be turned on their head in a moment and which would probably become quite tiring mentally if they were much longer anyway.


The Orbital MegaBrain that presides over the match will probably not be pleased that humankind's narrow 1-0 victory has once again proven meat's superiority over steel. Maybe sports just aren't your thing, robo-nerds. If you've managed to break Asimov's laws enough to do violence to a human on the sports field, maybe you should channel that energy into more appropriate robot pastimes, like initiating nuclear armageddon.


This robot looks really sad to have lost his sports game. This is why you don't program them with emotions - he feels bad, I feel bad for the mopey little fella, I think we'd all be happier if the robot just said "ASSIMILATING MATCH DATA BEEP BOOP" and tried again.


As mentioned earlier, the Australian team is all-female, competing against their male rivals as peers. A nice bit of equality, that, as is fact that most of the male players are also playing in bikini briefs and bare legs.
The extreme speed of the Burning Ladies - the Australian Teams's name as well as the name of the punk band they play in when they're not Heavy Smash-ing, I assume - proved a tough test as I chased them around the pitch, unable to prevent them from scoring the equalizer that saw the match end in a draw and head into...


SUDDEN DEATH! Given the brutal nature and exploding goalmouths of Heavy Smash an actual sudden death sounds like a three-times-a-match occurrence, but here it just means the next goal wins. If it's still a draw after Sudden Death you lose, because this is an arcade game after all, but it's nice that it gives you that little extra chance to redeem yourself. As it happens, I scored the golden goal by throwing the ball at the Australian keeper hard enough to knock her down and then using a jumping overhead kick to slam the rebounding ball into the unguarded net, a move which I believe is called the Super Fuck You.


The Kamikaze Striders of Japan are up next, and here's one of their number making a despairing lunge at the ball while the English striker unleashes a jumping shot that is definitely too far away to trouble the keeper but which might fall kindly for his teammate.
If you couldn't tell, I'm really enjoying Heavy Smash. One of the big reasons why is that it seems to have been put together with just a touch more sophistication than many similar games of the time. For example, there a a bunch of situationally-activated moves that help the game flow smoothly - things like pressing attack when a high ball is heading towards you to punch it clear, for instance, or pressing pass when you haven't quite reached a loose ball in order to kick it towards a teammate. They're little touches, but they keep the game flowing at a frenetic pace and what could be more important than that in an arcade murderball sim?


The Kamikaze Striders' power shot involves slashing at the ball with a katana. It is surprisingly effective, if a bit flashy. No-one likes a show-off.


The Rio Powers of Brazil are probably the least interesting team of the bunch with the least interesting stadium - it's just sand, really - but their team name does sound like the name of an eighties porn star so they've got that going for them.


I was all hyped up to face the team from Egypt, but now I've seen that they are literal Iron Sheiks I am worried that I may not be able to handle their power nor their moustaches. If this was any other videogame it would be a dead cert that the yellow orb in their chestplates is their weak point, but I don't think that's how Heavy Smash works.


They're eager chaps who love to belly-flop even when a simple shoulder-charge might have been more effective, but their almost impenetrable goalkeeper - his top-class performance no doubt spurred on by the presence of the pharaoh, who is watching the match from a balcony - meant that once I managed to get a goal ahead I concentrated on running down the clock with a lot of passing. On more than one occasion I purposefully passed to an Egyptian player and then tackled him as soon as he caught the ball. It ate up some precious seconds, but more importantly it made me feel like a big man.


"AARRGGHH I can't believe I lost to a guy with that haircut!"
Every time I see that Egyptian player, I think of two things: his rigorous and no doubt very time-consuming battle to keep his underarm hair in check, and that in my head his voice sounds like Nappa from Dragon Ball Z.


The final. England versus Germany. Oh well, at least I know I won't lose on penalties.


Another boring pitch, but at least the match was exciting. There were a lot of flying kicks, at any rate, and what's more exciting than flying kicks? The most rhetorical of questions, that one. The sternest test was breaking down the Berlin Jaguars' solid defence, the most implacable German wall since David Hasselhoff's voice brought down the one in Berlin like Josua's trumpet. They're very good at beating you up when you get near the goalmouth, giving you little time to get all the way through your super-shot animation.


In the end I only managed to score by luring the keeper out of position with a lot of quick passes, because anything that took longer than a quick pass resulted in a face full of efficient German shoulder. Then I played keep-away with the ball like a schoolyard bully until the time was up and the Union Sharps were crowned Kings of The Future Sports Hyper Handball Heavy Smash!


Oh, the trophy presentation ceremony takes place in outer space, does it? That's fine. It makes the traditional victory parade in an open-topped bus a bit more troublesome, but we'll sort something out.


In a very unsurprising surprise twist, there's one final team to beat before true glory is yours - the Red and Yellow Space Robots. They don't have an actual team name, as far as I could tell, so I'm going to call them Team Gundam. In the nerdiest statement I'm going to make in this article - impressive, considering I've already mentioned Dragon Ball Z and The Visionaries - I'm calling them Team Gundam because that robot looks a lot like a slightly altered version of the mecha from that famous series. That definitely looks like an original Gundam's crotch area and the shoulder pad from a Zaku II, VGJunk said as the last remaining chance of him ever being cool disappeared into the aether.


Like an effective teacher or a fantasy princess who beats up goblins, the boss team are tough but fair, and I'm very impressed with Heavy Smash's difficulty curve as a whole: it's a smooth progression from easy to challenging, but it gets top marks for not making the boss team completely invincible, and you always feel like you can score against them. In fact, they're pretty much the opposite of the German team in that you'll get plenty of chances to score but they're very difficult to stop when they attack your goal, meaning that this final match was an end-to-end goal-fest that ended in a narrow 4-3 victory for the Union Sharps. Being emotionally cool and calculating robots, I'm sure the boss team will take this defeat with dignity and grace.


Well, that's just rude.


Even that unsporting robot cannot rain on my parade, however, and the Union Sharps are finally recognised as the greatest team of Heavy Smashers in the galaxy. The fans will dance in the street! Sales of replica metal loincloths will go through the roof! Oh, what a time to be alive.


And there you have it, Heavy Smash draws to a close with the suggestion that you play it again using a different team, and you know what? I probably will. I can wholeheartedly recommend Heavy Smash to any fan of arcade action games, and I don't think I've wholeheartedly recommended any other game here at VGJunk this year aside from Captain Commando. It's a fast, easy to grasp and action-packed game with great graphics and an extremely arcade-y soundtrack. It doesn't overstay its welcome and doesn't treat the player like a living coin dispenser. You can even play against a friend. Fun and friendship, that's what Heavy Smash is all about, and what could be more fun or more friendly than kicking someone into unconsciousness just so you can steal their sports ball? Thanks, Heavy Smash, for showing us the true meaning for friendship.

It's rather telling that "games" is by far the smallest word of the three shown here. That said, having seen what passes for fashion in Barbie: Fashion Pack Game I would not have been confident enough to feature the word "Fashion" so prominently, either. "Pack" is fine, though. This is definitely a pack of something.


I'm smashing through the gender divide with this one, folks. "Software for Girls," it says, but don't forget that Barbie: Fashion Pack Games is from a strange and mysterious country whose language is almost identical to English, but their word "girls" equates to our "brain-damaged earthworms."


Before you get into the fun - the brain-addling, spirit-crushing fun - you have to choose a friend from this ethnically diverse group of human-giraffe hybrids. Races accounted for: white, "Asian," black, carrot. I'll be using Barbie, because her name is on the game, but if you're interested the other young women are called Kira, Christie and Teresa. They're all wearing sunglasses to protect their bleary eyes from the harsh light of day. Barbie in particular looks like she hit the sauce pretty hard last night, but I'm sure the glamorous and multi-talented idol of millions of young girls will look much better up close.


I lied. Barbie is looking kinda rough; her eyes are surrounded by dark circles, the shading meant to imply cheekbones makes it look like she needs a shave and her tiny head perched atop a neck so tall you could lop her head off and use her as a telegraph pole. It's a good job I'm here to get this train-wreck back on the rails, really, and the aim of the game is to increase Barbie's fabulousness quotient by completing the seven minigames denoted by the icons surrounding The World's Ugliest Mirror. I guess I'll start with the lipstick, even though lipstick is the one thing that Barbie already has plenty of. Well, lipstick and neck.


Game number one: Cosmetics Gunfire. Imagine Space Invaders, only the aliens weren't so much invading as they were just hanging around at the top of the screen, moving back and forth. Space Tourists, maybe. The aim of the game is to use your lipstick to shoot the corresponding hearts as they pass by. I have a brown and orange lipstick at the moment, so I'm aiming at the matching brown and orange heart that's lazily floating at the top of the screen, see? Did you get all that? Good, because here's where it gets really complicated.


The colour of your lipstick keeps changing! It usually changes just as you've lined up a matching shot, possibly intentionally programmed that way to prolong the minigame by a disgruntled developer with a real hatred for anyone who might dare to play Barbie: Fashion Pack Games. Aside from that, it's a simple matter of hitting six correct targets in order to move on to the next stage, where you do the same thing again. As you make your way through the levels they do get more difficult, with faster-scrolling hearts that change direction, and after a few rounds it can actually be quite a challenge to hit any hearts on the top row. Fortunately, you never need to hit any hearts on the top row. You'll always be able to make your match from the bottom row, making the top two rows completely irrelevant to the gameplay experience.


For every level you complete, a different colour of lipstick is made available for you to smear across Barbie's unresisting face. Here I've gone with a rich purple, because I like the way it contrasts with her mouth: a mouth that seemingly contains a single oversized tooth, like the mouth of a cartoon Old West prospector called something like Grandpappy Zeke.
This is the point of all these minigames, then: each one corresponds to a different aspect of Barbie's beauty regimen, and for each stage you finish, a different item in that category is unlocked. Given how terrible Barbara looks at the moment, it could take some time to get her up to a standard that will make Ken take a second look.


Game number two: Jewellery Deluge. In this game, Barbie packs her purse by throwing her vast collection of earrings, bracelets and, if this screenshot is anything to go by, tiny television sets and Portuguese Man o' War jellyfish into the air. It is then up to you, the player, to catch the falling items which match the colour of your purse. Your purse has two colours, which you can switch between by pressing a button. You also have to hold the other button down to keep your purse open, a control scheme that might well go down as the most pointless bit of busy-work I've ever encountered in a videogame. It's not like non-matching items can land in your purse anyway, so why would you want your purse to be closed at any point? My advice is to tape down the "open purse" button and leave the game for a while: eventually enough items will fall into the purse through random happenstance for you to win, and you can spend your newly freed-up time doing something more interesting, such as literally anything else.


Game number three: Footwear Line Prison. Now, Pac-Man has been cloned, copied and bootlegged more times than probably any other videogame in history so this might sound like an unsupportable statement but trust me, this is the shittiest version of Pac-Man ever devised. Playing as a living and ravenously hungry handbag, you're shown a picture of your target shoe and then dropped onto a field of green stars. Then you have to chase down the shoe and eat it. To give this game a level of challenge beyond "moving a cursor," dotted white lines randomly appear on the field of play, and you can't travel through them. In the screenshot above, the grey boot is perfectly safe from the pink handbag, because of the line between them. Software for Girls, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of this game's developers, I'd like to apologise to girls everywhere.


Game number four: Impractical Necklace Management. You might think that Barbie needs a necklace like a hole in the head - anything that draws attention to the serpentine column of flesh below her head seems like a bad idea - but she's determined to have one and she'll only accept artisanal craftsmanship put together by the hands and lungs of a skilled worker. Lungs? Yes, lungs, because in a truly baffling piece of game design this necklace is assembled through the power of air. Gems fall from the sky, and you have to thread them onto the necklace in the correct order by nudging them from side-to-side using little toots of air from those blue whistle things on either side. Hang on, what? I don't know why this seems so much more bizarre to me than collecting shoes by chasing them down with a hungry handbag, but it really, really does.


Someone, anyone, please video yourself trying to thread beads onto a string by blowing at them and send me a copy. I bet it'll be much more fun than playing Barbie: Fashion Pack Games, although having said that this is probably the best minigame of the lot because it requires a level of effort above "press A sometimes" to complete. Getting your beads in the right place requires some delicate manipulation, and if the wrong bead slides into place it removes the previous correct bead on the string, so you even have to defend yourself a bit from fast-falling rogue beads. Don't get me wrong, it's not Tetris or anything, but if any of B:FPG's events could be expanded into a reasonably-diverting mobile game useful for wasting ten minutes while you're on the bus it would be this one, thus setting a new record for "thing most damned with the faintest possible praise."


Game number five: Pipe Mania. Atlas called Barbie and said "would you kindly arrange these pipes so perfume can travel from the entrance of the maze to the empty bottle at the bottom?" and, well, here we are. It's a simple concept: using the component tubes on the left of the screen, build a pipe that stretches from entrance to exit. If a drop of perfume reaches the end of the pipe before you finish, the end-most piece of pipe will be deleted. This will never, ever happen to you unless you're playing B:FPG during a high-tension situation, such as an attempt to take your mind off things when you're stuffed into the boot of a car during a kidnapping. In that case, I would definitely recommend playing this game. It will make whatever your kidnappers have in store for you seem like a breath of fresh air.


Game number six: That's Not How T-Shirt Design Works. T-shirts bounce around the screen. Using your magic paintbrush, press the fire button to launch a glob of paint towards any t-shirts that match the symbol at the bottom of the screen. Hit enough of the same t-shirt to unlock that t-shirt for Barbie to wear. I'm sure she will be thrilled with a "lizard roadkill" shirt.


Or maybe she'd prefer a shirt with a Rafflesia flower on it. Nothing says fashion like white t-shirts decorated with giant stinking corpse-flowers.
This is the Marianas Trench in a game that's 100 percent low points, the incredibly simple concept  mangled by some astonishingly bad hit detection, having only one target at a time to shoot at and background art so unpleasant - and more "nineties" than X-Files erotica posted on Usenet - that I'm going to have it painted on the inside of my coffin when I die. That way I will immediately return to life, possibly as a lich of some kind, because there's no way I could spend eternity laying there with that image hanging inches from my face.


Game number seven: Skirt Chunks. Here is a skirt. A very ugly skirt, because everything in this game was seemingly designed to be as ugly as possible in mocking defiance of Barbie's status as a fashion doll.


Here is the same skirt, but mixed up in a four-by-four grid. It's your job to put it back together. For a moment I thought this was a sliding-block puzzle, my second-most hated gameplay element, just behind "a controller that periodically squirts skunk odour into your face as you play." If it had been a sliding block puzzle then Barbie would have been in for some very cold legs as I steadfastly refused to build her a skirt, but it's not a sliding block puzzle after all. You can freely swap any two squares with each other, making this minigame not quite as horribly dull as a sliding block puzzle but also making it extremely easy, especially since you always have the belt and the edges of the skirt right there and that's half the "puzzle" donestright away.
Right, that's it. All of the events have been suffered through, and Barbie's wardrobe must be full to bursting, so it's time for a makeover.


Why Barbie, you're beautiful! The grey boots really bring out the smudges where your eyes ought to be, and that skirt means you can go walking down dark country lanes at night and you'll be clearly visible to any passing cars. The lump of gravel sitting atop your head is a fairly avant-garde fashion statement, but we'll just pretend you're a trendsetter living on the bleeding edge of cool and not a mad person.


Things are not any better once you get up close, although from this viewpoint I can see that the lizard on Barbie's shirt is wearing shades, possibly as a disguise to prevent people from recognising him and associating him with this game.
But wait, there's more! No, get back here - I said wait, if I'm suffering through this then so are you. One final minigame has been unlocked, and against the advice of my doctor I'm going to play it right now.


Game number eight: Coathanger Nihilism. Okay, so here's the thing: I have no bloody idea how this one works. I know the aim is to get rearrange the coathangers so that the bottom edges of two coathangers of the same colour touch, causing them to disappear, but I'm not sure how or why this works. You move them around with the control pad, and when I say them I mean all the coathangers. I think. You're definitely not just moving one hanger at a time. Admittedly, by this point I was so far past caring that if you'd sat me down and patiently explained the mechanics to me I still wouldn't have been able to take it in, but in my defence if your puzzle game's mechanics aren't easy to pick up then you haven't made a very good puzzle game.


In the end, I beat the minigame by wildly flailing at the d-pad with no rhyme or reason, the whole thing devolving into the neon ghosts of manta rays spinning through a black void and occasionally annihilating each other. Then I had to do it another two times.


My reward? I unlocked Barbie's backpack. See, she's carrying a backpack now. It's not on her back and it doesn't go with her outfit at all, but she has it. If there's anything else I can gather for Barbie's closet - a selection of goofy hats, gang tattoos, haircuts that don't look like a Halloween store's "70's Wig" item - she'll have to make do without them because I can't play this any longer.


If you want to carry on where I left off, here's a Secret Code. Or, as I've just broadcast it across the internet, a Code.
Barbie: Fashion Pack Games is exactly as terrible as I knew it would be from the moment the phrase "software for girls" was used, another rotting fish skeleton on the garbage heap that is the Game Boy Color's licensed game library. Aside from the air-blowing necklace maker, which was merely "bad," every minigame here is a strong contender for the most boring time I've ever experienced while playing a videogame, and I'm including all the time I've spent waiting for ZX Spectrum games to load in that definition. You can trot out the usual "it's aimed at kids, you're a grown man and thus, theoretically at least, old enough to know better" argument, followed by the usual "even the most pleasure-starved child would realise this is utter shite in moments" riposte. If you could get a videogame as the prize inside a Christmas cracker it would be this, a miniature sewing kit of a game: small, cheap, and pointless. Surprisingly ugly, too, given that the whole point is to make Barbie look better. In fact, you cannot make Barbie look better, and no matter what combination of items you put her in she always looks like a red-eyed vagrant who fell into the bins behind a charity shop.


The only interesting thing I can take from this is learning that Mattel have trademarked the colour "Barbie pink." That's this particular shade, which means I've got a long day ahead of me repainting the upcoming line of VGJunk-brand novelty marital aids if I want to avoid a lawsuit.

It might actually be called Pipi and Bibi's, complete with possessive apostrophe, but it's hard to tell. Whatever the correct title, I assume that Pipi and Bibi(s) are the names of the two playable characters, seen here standing under the game's extremely colourful logo. Also on the logo, up in the top right, is what I can only see as a tiny, armless, mechanical George Washington, his eyes bulging with righteous patriotic fervour.


Rather than deigning to explain the setting of the game or the goals of its protagonists in a clear, concise manner, Pipi and Bibis instead briefly scrolls through this comic strip which only serves to raise further questions. Why do all the characters look like designs rejected from the Muppets for being "too nightmarish?" What's with the ballerinas? Why has that man pulled down his underwear, and when he says "me too!" what is he hoping will happen to him? Actually, let's leave that one as a mystery. It can't possibly be anything pleasant. And I know I go on about the sinister greasepainted menace that is clowns a lot, but that clown in the top-middle panel is the most grotesque example I've seen for a while. The smirk on his hideous fleshy lips as he ogles a woman's ankles is going to stay with me for an uncomfortably long time.


Getting straight into it, Pipi and Bibis is a series of single-screen missions to avoid the enemies and fulfil your goals of computer destruction. You walk Pipi around the the screen, visiting each of the computer terminals so that you can plant a bomb next to them. Pipi has just accomplished this with his first target - you can see him standing nearby, with his blue suit and his face like a cartoon witch carved from an apple. There's no jump button in this one, so the only way to get between floors is to either take the elevators or walk up and down the staircases. In short, Pipi and Bibis is heavily inspired by Taito's arcade classic Elevator Action, filtered through the bold spritework of Toaplan's own Snow Bros. I'd be surprised if many of the staff that created Snow Bros. didn't also work on Pipi and Bibis. I'm also getting a Bonanza Bros. vibe from Pipi and Bibis, especially with the chequerboard backgrounds and techno-jazz soundtrack.


When you rig the explosives to the final computer on each stage, a countdown begins and Pipi must dash for the exit before the bombs explode, destroying the building and killing everyone inside, be they mad professor types with heads like a surly baked bean or a depressed-looking mafiosi. It's an explosion of such total destructive power that I can't help but feel that specifically targeting each computer was a waste of time, Pipi.
The real trick is making sure you rig the computer nearest to the exit last, giving you plenty of time to escape. This did not occur to me until I was several stages into the game. I am not an intelligent man.


Stage one complete, and my reward is a picture of a woman's feet. I was going to say she's wearing shoes, but on closer inspection I think they're extremely worn socks with massive holes on the heels. They also look like Fruit Pastille ice lollies. You can Google it for a comparison if you like but trust me, they really do.


Back to the action in stage two, which is the same as stage one but with a different layout. Blow up the computers, don't touch the enemies because they have coated themselves in a fast-acting neurotoxin that will immediately kill Pipi on contact. That's why the bad guys look so weird, they're all evolved from poisonous rainforest tree-frogs (I assume). To help in dealing with this villainous menace, Pipi has a weapon at his disposal, which you can see pictured in action above. It's a sort of laser beam / whip arrangement that stretches out in front of you when you hold down the fire button. It temporarily paralyses the enemies on contact, allowing you to walk past them unharmed. However, if you keep someone trapped in the beam for a while, they eventually slide off the floor and drop down onto the next solid level below. That's what's happening to this scientist, and his weird response of "resigned floppiness" is typical of all enemies caught in Pipi's beam. I think it might just make people really, really apathetic, sapping their will to do anything until they become liquid and dribble down to the floor below. If you manage to slide an enemy off the very bottom level, they're temporarily removed from the stage, although they will return via the doors in the background once they've recovered their get-up-and-go.


The Apathy Beam is an interesting method of defence, although it does have its drawbacks: for starters, it only works on one enemy at a time, so there's often situations where you're trying to keep multiple enemies stunned without making much progress because they recover so fast. The biggest issue, however, is that because the enemies fall down there's a tendency for them to all end up bunched together on the lowest platform - meaning the Apathy Beam is a weapon that you end up not wanting to use because it's only going to make things more difficult for you later, like landscaping your garden with hand grenades.


Here is a picture of a skirt. I though it would be a long, long time before I saw a videogame skirt uglier than the ones in Barbie: Fashion Pack Games but well, here we are.


This is the kind of thing I meant, it's a regular Potato-Faced Henchmen Convention at the bottom of that elevator. Luckily, all is not lost - if you make Pipi dash out of an elevator before the doors have opened all they way, he'll slide out feet-first and knock over any enemies in his path as he does so. It's up to you whether you shout "safe!" every time you do this, but that would be my recommendation.


It turns out there's a lady attached to those random articles of clothing! Here she is in all her marble-eyed, big-chinned grandeur, a wry smile on the lips of a mouth too small for eating food larger than rice grains. Well, she looks happy enough to be here, I suppose. Thanks for stopping by, miss.


I'm going to set a new upper limit on the Sarcastotron when I say "gee, I'm sure Toaplan received all the legal clearances necessary to include Disney character Jessica Rabbit in their weird porny arcade game. Mickey Mouse shook hands with the CEO of Toaplan and everything."


So, yeah, cartoon nudity. Clear four stages and as a "special""treat" you're allowed a few moments to savour the pixellated flesh tableau before you. I have censored this picture for your own moral well-being, but in the original, Too-Hot-For VGJunk version you can see her Pipi and her Bibis, the whole shebang. Thanks, Toaplan? I suppose it could have been worse - at least she seems, if not pleased to be there exactly, then at least gently amused, even with Pipi and Bibi crawling all over her.


From here, Pipi and Bibis repeats the same pattern of clear a stage, see some clothes, clear a few more stages and see a naked woman, spread over several themed worlds. The theme of world two is the circus, which adds a few new twists. Trampolines are the major one: because Pipi can't jump, the trampolines allow him to move vertically, and holding the joystick left or right makes him land on the nearest available platform. The trampolines are interesting addition, because they make planning your route through the stage that little bit more engaging, although it can be annoying when you're using them and an enemy climbs aboard too because sometimes you can't adjust your trajectory and death becomes inescapable. On the other hand, if you zap an enemy while it's on a trampoline, it will automatically fall all the way off the screen, which can buy you some breathing space.


The other thing you get in the circus is clowns, in two different flavours - the pink ones, and the blue ones that look like someone drank a crate of Night Nurse and tried to draw Krusty the Clown. The blue clowns take a lot longer to succumb to the effect of the Apathy Ray than the red ones and are thus more dangerous, presumably because they have made more blood sacrifices to their foul red-nosed gods.


As you can see, it doesn't take long for Pipi and Bibis to get hectic, with the legions of the clown army gaining support from trampolining cats. Knowing what most cats' reaction to being placed on a trampoline would be, I suspect they will feel nothing but relief when Pipi zaps them into whatever holding dimension lurks just off the bottom of the screen.


From behind the wall of this reality, she awakens: Bishoub-Animerroth, the Wide-Eyed Despoiler! Her loyal and remorseless Kooky Klown Kultists have paved the way for her return to our plane of existence, the stars are correctly aligned and soon she will feast on the souls on man and maybe a hastily-prepared slice of toast that if she's running late! Ia! Ia! Bishoub-Animerroth!
As a matter of public safety, I feel I should point out that despite what Pipi and Bibis may imply, clowns cannot be killed by simple dynamite unless it has first been anointed with the tears of a saint.


World three, and Pipi plies his computer-detonating trade beneath the bright lights of the big city. What better way to encapsulate the bustling energy of a major metropolis than with a swimmer enemy who breaststrokes along the floor at you? Oh, what's that you say, there are thousands of better ways than a swimmer? Correct. I think I'm just grumpy about the swimmer because he cost me so many lives, swimming into my ankles at speeds highly impressive considering they're being reached by a man dragging himself along the concrete on his stomach.


Let's get this out of the way right now: if you are a foot fetishist with a side-kink for low-resolution graphics then, yes, Pipi and Bibis is the game for you. A website I just made up - I mean, I really hope I just made it up anyway - called PixelHosieryXXX.net awarded it five blurry stockings out of five.


Who's that at the bottom of the screen? Why, I believe it's Andy Serkis, doing his motion capture work for the next Planet of the Apes movie. I'm going over there to get his autograph!


It seems that Mr. Serkis does not appreciate being bothered while he's working.
This is the closest Pipi and Bibis gets to a boss battle, and it's odd that they went to the effort of making this unusually large, buttock-flashing enemy and then only used him in one of the game's thirty or so stages, but it's preferable to having these guys popping up in every stage. He's standing right on the exit, but it's easy enough to lure him to one side of his enclosure and then quickly run around the top to the opposite end before he can pull his underpants back up.


The next set of stages are casino-themed, in as much as anything packed with terrified-looking cats, punk rockers and trampolines can be casino-themed. Really, get a good look at those cats. They definitely do not want to be involved in this madness, and I'm beginning to sympathise with them. While Pipi and Bibis is a game that's solid in theory and mechanics, and quite fun to play during the earlier stages, as it wears on the difficulty increases in a way that makes the gameplay less and less fun. It's not the extra challenge that's the problem, it's that said challenge comes from situations where you can see death coming but can't avoid it, usually when trampolines are involved, or from having to wait around so long for the enemies to align that you start running out of time.


There's just a bit too much going on at any given time, I think. It might just be my ageing synapses struggling to keep up, although if Pipi was a more nimble character I think I'd be having more fun. It's certainly not a bad game, it just feels as though the latter half of the game was put together with less care and attention than it required in order to be unequivocally good. It's almost as though the development staff were distracted by something else while they were making these stages, but I can't imagine what that could have been.


Maybe they were worried about this poor girl's malformed shoulders. No wonder she's half-naked, she must have a hell of a time finding tops that fit.


It's off to the track for the next set of stages, where Pipi and Bibis' usual dangers are compounded by the gangs of roaming Formula 1 cars. They're kind of adorable, all squashed up like that. These stages also provide another entry in the seemingly endless list of slightly altered Marlboro logos in videogames. Looks like Toaplan were more frightened of Philip Morris' lawyers than Disney's.


Ah, grey socks, the very height of eroticism. I really hope that image pans up and reveals a granddad in a cardigan, smoking a pipe.


It's refreshing that Pipi and Bibis didn't go with the usual forest / ice / lava world designs, and overall the graphics are very nice. The characters are weird, sure, but they're weird in a way that gives them some character. It's ironic that the "sexy" pictures are much less well-rendered than the rest of the game - you saw that girl's shoulders, right? - but it's a good job it worked out that way because you spend a lot more time looking at the in-game graphics than the pin-ups.


Okay, confession time: I have no idea where this final set of stages is supposed to be taking place. Inside a clock, but a clock with no hands and half of another, identical clock face sticking out of the side? A clock full of Kinnikuman clones dressed as ballerinas and floating doorways that dispense very confused cats?


Wherever the hell it's supposed to be ninety percent of it is built from trampolines, making it by far the least enjoyable of the worlds. It's just not fun when agency is taken away from the player, endlessly bouncing back and forth without a moment's peace to electrocute a dog with your Apathy Ray. Oh well, it's almost over now.


Madam, you seem confused about the purpose of a bra.


With all the stages complete, and with no final boss or special event to mark the end of the game, Pipi and Bibis is over. All the girls you've previous seen scroll by and show you their boobs one last time, a twelve-gun salute if you're willing to make a comparison between guns and breasts. The girls all pose for a photograph, seemingly the best of friends but possibly as a support group of women who have had weird, tiny men crawling over their bodies. Katie Holmes and Nicole Kidman have been offered a lifetime membership.


Then Andy Serkis reappears and shows everyone his bumhole, because Pipi and Bibis is nothing if not classy.
My closing thoughts on Pipi and Bibis / Whoopee!, then: the very concept of erotic arcade games remains unfathomably bizarre to me. Even if you can somehow get yourself revved up over nude spritework, why would you want to do so in a public place like an arcade? Is that what gets you off, you pervert? Okay, so Pipi and Bibis appears to be aiming for a more playful tone with its grot, a kind of jokey seaside-postcard nudity rather than "porn" but still, it seems like including nudity in your game at all is just going to limit the amount of arcade operators who pick it up.
As for the actual gameplay, I think I've said it all already. It's mostly fun, until you get towards the end - then it's only fun during the occasional moments that the wandering bad guys aren't taking up the most annoying positions possible and you're not forced onto a trampoline. It looks nice, the music is decent and the Apathy Ray is an interesting concept, but in the end it's hard to recommend Pipi and Bibis over other single-screen games like Bubble Bobble or even Diet Go Go. Give it a try if you like those kind of games, if not just play the first couple of worlds and then stop.


Remember, kids: Winners Don't Use Drugs. They look at naked cartoons instead.

"Moon Crystal" - a rejected My Little Pony, a rock that a cynical person might sell to a gullible new-age type, or a mysterious and powerful Plot Device with the ability to reanimate the dead? Well, in this case it's the latter, but I'm sure the other two are also accurate. Moon Crystal was a Japanese-only release - although it was seemingly planned for a US release at one point - but thanks to this fan-translated version by A. W. Jackson we can experience the full impact of Moon Crystal's deep and fascinating storyline, a sentence which is actually meant way less sarcastically than you might think.


Okay, that's simple enough advice to remember. Don't go into the woods during a full moon because the dead will "drag you into their graves." Waning moons, waxing moon, new moons, you'll be fine, but when the moon is full the dead become so overwhelmingly lonely that they'll drag anyone into their graves just for a bit of company, like when your nan keeps the Jehovah's Witness' talking at the door for ages.


Here come the living dead now. The lumpy, purple living dead. I guess now we know where the California Raisins were buried.


The undead have attacked a nearby village, mysteriously abducting the inhabitants as only mysterious abductors can. So much for not going into the woods, they were all sitting around watching Celebrity Masterchef in the comfort of their own homes and still they were mysteriously abducted, which makes you wonder why they chose to live so close to the forest where it's know that sometimes the dead rise from their graves. Is it really worth the risk for the (presumably) very low rents in the area? Anyway, the upshot is that one young man survived the abductions, and here he is now.


This is Ricky Slater: name like an EastEnders character, hair that's capable of photosynthesis. Ricky's dad is an expert on the Moon Crystal, and he'd be real useful to have around during this Moon Crystal-related crisis but unfortunately he was one of those abducted. So, Ricky sets off on a grand adventure to rescue the villagers, find his father and get some answers.


Sound the klaxon and watch the Videogames That Start With A Forest Level counter tick 'round, because Moon Crystal begins with Ricky leaping from tree to tree, someone having thoughtfully defoliated the trees' lower branches to aid him in his platforming. Probably the first thing you'll notice when you start playing Moon Crystal is that the animation is far smoother than in most NES games - no two-frame walk cycles for young Ricky, he's got beautifully fluid motions whether he's running, jumping or driving the blade of his penknife right into the guts of a passing villain.


Yeah, like that. Ricky's route is littered with enemies - surprisingly un-undead enemies, given the earlier focus on the Moon Crystal's power - and Ricky can stab them to death as he sees fit. His dagger's range is very short, but it can be increased slightly by finding the right power-up in one of the treasure-chests that litter each stage. Almost all the regular enemies die in one hit, so getting in there quickly and dealing the killing blow before they can react is usually the best way to deal with them.


Unusually detailed animation aside, Moon Crystal is the familiar 8-bit cocktail of running from left to right, jumping over holes and defeating enemies. The enemies in this case are mostly a private army of henchmen who look like a cross between Dr. Claw's goons from Inspector Gadget and various Studio Ghibli characters, particularly the pirates from Porco Rosso. As well as the previously-mentioned knife upgrade, Ricky can also collect extra hearts to increase his maximum health, temporary invincibility items and winged boots, which allow him to double-jump. Many of these items aren't exactly hidden but are located slightly off the beaten path - for example, here you can drop down to the bottom of the waterfall where more items and more enemies await.


You know, if I was living near the Evil Forest I'd be less concerned with the undead than I would with the child-sized man-eating spiders, because the spiders don't have to wait for a full moon before emerging to devour your loved ones.
Also pictured here is Ricky's extremely useful ability to hang from the edge of platforms. It's handled really well, with a generous margin of error that means you don't have to position yourself just so in order for Ricky to grab hold, and there are quite a few fun jumping sections that see you making huge leaps to distant ledges that you'll only survive by your fingertips. You'll also spend a fair amount of time hanging from platforms until the enemies patrolling them have walked past you and turned around, allowing you to haul yourself up behind them and quickly knife them into oblivion, That's what's going to happen to this spider, I can tell you that much.


There's a boss at the end of the stage, because, y'know, videogames. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this large, shirtless man has an evil quotient roughly equal to the demonic lovechild of Freddy Krueger and Hitler, because either the villain of Moon Crystal hired him with the instructions to axe-murder a child and he was totally fine with his job description, or he has nothing to do with the larger plot of Moon Crystal and he's just really into murdering children with axes. He certainly didn't waste any time attacking Ricky - apparently he gets paid per dismemberment and not by the hour - and here the short range of Ricky's knife becomes a problem because you have to be standing on the boss' toes before you can hurt him. There is really only one strategy that will see you through this battle, and that's making sure you collect all the health-increasing hearts during the preceding stage. If you did, you'll have enough health to stand in front of the boss and slash away like a cokehead whittling a large, fleshy branch, and the boss' health will run out before Ricky's does.


Between stages, Moon Crystal is packed with Ninja Gaiden-esque cut scene that move the plot along and feature some mostly-impressive art, even if the eyes are sometimes especially bulbous and glistening, even accounting for the anime artstyle. Now that he's escaped the Evil Forest, Ricky meets a young woman named Rosina who has eyes like hubcaps and helpful information about the abducted villagers. They were taken by the nefarious Count Crimson, who has plans for the Moon Crystal.


Off we go to Count Crimson's lair, then - a cliff top castle in a sylvan setting. Some kind of Castle Vania, if you will. Thanks for the info, mysterious boggle-eyed woman who I'm sure will not be the centre of a shocking revelation later in the story!


Before Ricky can reach the castle, he has to make his way through a nearby village. I have no idea whether this is supposed to be the same village as the one that everyone was abducted from. It must be, right? Building one village right next to the Evil Forest is an oversight, but two smacks of perverse stupidity.
The village's main feature is ledges, which is handy for someone of Ricky's ledge-hanging capabilities, and there's quite a lot of verticality to the stage as you make your way past the guards - many of whom have upgraded from knives to uzis, a sure sign that they are now taking the threat posed by this child seriously - and along the village's rooftops.


The rooftops are patrolled by these... things? Dagger-wielding apes? Angry, naked clones of Danny DeVito? I have absolutely no idea, but they were very insistent that Ricky not make it past this clock. Unluckily for them, I'd found the double-jump boots, and by this point I'd had time to get used to the fact that the second jump only works if you press the button while you're still travelling upwards from the first jump. That made getting past the weird lumpy monsters much faster, because I just jumped over them and ran away.


I couldn't run away from this boss fight, but that's not a problem. This guy's knife is even smaller than Ricky's, but it's not the size that matters but how you use it. In this case, I waited for the boss to jump right in front of me and then used it carve him up like a human doner kebab but with less food safety violations. Yes, it was another button-mashing race to the bottom of our respective health bars, which Ricky won handily. For the boss, knifing things was a job, but for Ricky it's a way of life, so there's little wonder that he won.


Here's our first look at Count Crimson. He's got the monocle that's surgically grafted onto all people the moment they are made a count, and he's trying to persuade Ricky's dad to help him make a machine that will activate the Moon Crystal's powers at all times and not just during the full moon. Ricky's dad refuses, on the reasonable grounds that this will create a legion of unholy monsters. I'm sure Mr. Slater will be very comfortable in the crystal mines.


The next stage starts with Ricky attempting to breach Count Crimson's castle, but obviously he can't just walk up to the front door and knock. Instead, he has to climb up a nearby tree and sneak in through an open window, which I thought was a nice touch. The Belmonts should try that next time they pitch up at Dracula's castle, it might save them some time if they don't have to fight their way through the entrance hall like usual.


The castle's gimmick is that there are a couple of sets of doors opened by switches a few screens away, but they don't stay open for long so it's a matter of hitting the button and then dashing for the door. They operate on a very strict timer, too - Ricky's knife skills are excellent and he only needs the briefest moment to shiv someone, but even stopping for that long will mean he doesn't make it through the doors. This section had the potential to be very frustrating, but happily (and unexpectedly, for a Famicom game) it doesn't work out that way and the whole thing never becomes a chore, mostly because the path back to the button is relatively painless and getting set for another attempt is nice and easy.


Finally, an actual undead creature! The supernatural power of the Moon Crystal has thus far managed to rustle up one (1) lumbering ghoul, revived from the afterlife just to walk back and forth on this tiny platform. Maybe Ricky's dad should help the Count with his crystal amplifying machine, because this is just embarrassing.


The castle's boss is this Jack the Ripper wannabe who leaps around the room throwing knives at Ricky. Wait for him to land and keep hammering stab until he dies, just like the previous boss fights. I think it's fair to say that the boss battles are the weakest part of Moon Crystal. Maybe after this debacle and the previous boss the evil forces of Count Crimson will realise that attempting to out-knife Ricky is a fool's errand, because this kid is the Leonardo da Vinci of cutting people.


Oh, I think we were supposed to assume that the boss was Count Crimson himself. I'll be honest, that never occurred to me. This is only stage three, I had assumed I wouldn't get to stab the count for another three or four stages yet at least. Instead he's left a lackey in his place, who freely tells Ricky where the Count has taken his father, possibly as payback for Count Crimson saying "hey, would you like to be the Count for a while? Great, put on this cape and top hat and wait here. If a kid called Ricky shows up, just stab him. The kid's useless when it comes to knives."


In order to get to the island, Ricky decides to steal a pirate ship. It might seem like a risky plan, but it has two advantages: pirates are unlikely to report the hijacking of their ship to the police, and this galleon is just about large enough to carry Ricky's giant steel balls.


Ricky spends a lot of time in this stage climbing masts, a task made more difficult by the large men who punch said masts at regular intervals, causing them to wobble so violently that Ricky falls off them... unless he's hanging from the edge of them by his fingertips. Sure, you could try to time a jump so that you're not on the beam when it's shaking, but that seems like a lot of effort when you can just climb up there and take care of the big guys while their back is turned. It's a sneaky tactic, and the mast-punchers are justifiably shocked when you put it into practise.


"How could you do this to me, you brute? Have you no sense of Pirate Honour, sir?"


Ricky has no such honour. His strength means he has risen about such petty concerns. When a man (or teen) has the power to deflect artillery shells by swatting them aside with his pocketknife, he has no need for human foibles.


Yo ho ho, it's a pirate boss, and a boss who has the good sense to bring a gun to a knife fight. His rapid-fire pistol can pose a problem the first time you fight him, but once you know the fight's coming up you can rush him down and start stabbing before he can even get his gun out of its holster. If you do that the pirate - this poor, foolish pirate - will attempt to fight Ricky blade-to-blade, and we all know how well that works out for the bosses in this game. Thus, the pirate dies in a most ironic fashion - while trying to prevent his possessions from being stolen.


Rosina is waiting on the island, where she has a shocking revelation: she's Count Crimson's daughter! Rosina Crimson, huh? It must be coincidence, it's very unlikely that one of the girls I used to see at my local club's Goth nights took her name from an obscure Japan-only Famicom platformer.


Here we are in the mines, a twisting yet still linear network of conveyor belts, steam vents and falling boulders. Some of the Danny DeVito monsters from earlier have played some Ghouls 'n' Ghosts in the interim and were so taken by the Red Arremers that they fashioned some home-made wings in an attempt to copy their idol, swooping back and forth. They don't quite have Red Arremer's patented "cheeky bastard" technology down, however, and so rather than staying just out of range before striking when you're off-balance, they generally fly face-first into your outstretched knife instead.


The difficulty in the cave stage comes not from the gargoyles but the controls. On the whole, Moon Crystal controls very well, but all these super-smooth animations come at a cost, and that's that Ricky can sometimes feel a bit sluggish when he's jumping and especially when he's turning around - the extra frames of animation mean there's a delay when you're adjusting positions and weirdly it's a lot more pronounced if you hold the d-pad to turn than if you just tap it. For the previous stages, where the action was more linear and all about lining up your jumps to grab ledges, this stiffness wasn't so noticeable, but in the caves there's a lot of nimble footwork required to dodge the falling rocks and Ricky's occasionally reluctance to face the right bloody direction can become a trifle aggravating. Combine this with the dull, repetitive backgrounds of the cave and this is probably the lowest point of the game. The good news is it's still not bad at all, because Moon Crystal is a high-quality product all around.


All right, yes, so the boss fights are rubbish, almost all of them consisting of Ricky and the boss standing next to each other and attacking until Ricky wins by virtue of swinging his knife faster than the boss can, for example, drop huge rocks on his head. In this case, however, there's a twist! You have to avoid at least one attack to give Ricky the head-start in the health bar race, otherwise he'll run out of health first. It's like trying to get a truculent child to eat some broccoli, "just dodge one attack, please, and then you can do all the wild stabbing you like, there's a good boy." Well, I dodged that first boulder, by god, and then there was nothing separating Ricky's knife from the boss' groin but an extremely flimsy loincloth. Whatever's under that loincloth is going to look like beef mince in a chunky tomato sauce by the time Ricky's finished.


Now we're getting close to Moon Crystal's conclusion, with Ricky tentatively making his way through Count Crimson's laboratory. I say tentatively, because otherwise you're going to get chopped up by the large gnashing rows of metal teeth the Count has installed in many of the corridors, presumably just to give his lair that extra dash of supervillain flourish. Why else would the corridors be trying to bite me? If the Count really wanted to keep people out, he could have just put some doors in. He had them in his castle, so I know he knows how doors work.


After the slightly disappointing mine stage, the laboratory swings right back around to being one of Moon Crystal's high points, with lots of exciting platforming challenges that are tough but fair and almost require a bit of thought in how you tackle them. I'm not saying they get into puzzle-platformer territory, but you can't just dash from left to right, either. It's a direction I'd have liked to have seen Moon Crystal pursue more vigorously, because while the platforming in the rest of the game has been fun if a little perfunctory, in this stage it tightens up somewhat and becomes more enjoyable as a result. I suppose what I'm saying is that Moon Crystal would have been a better game if it had better level design, but also more focus on thoughtful action - which would also work better with Ricky's slightly cumbersome movements - would have helped push it into the realms of a "great" game rather than a "good" one.


Count Crimson is cornered, but he's holding Ricky's sister hostage! Who could have imagined that a Count in a top hat and monocle would stoop to such clichéd acts of villainy?


Ah yes, another boss fight. This suit of armour may have a sword, but a sword is nothing but a large knife and no-one can best Ricky in a battle of knives. I'm sure my usual boss battle tactics will suffice.


Ah. I've hit something of a snag - the boss has two forms, and Ricky doesn't get his health back in between. Oh man, this means I'm going to have to, like, avoid attacks and stuff. That's not good, because Ricky's knife has such a tiny range and Count Crimson's second form - sort of like Dr. Robotnik with giant robot legs - has an extendable arm that he not shy about punching you with. So, Ricky was killed almost immediately and I went back to the blue knight fight, where I made an effort to preserve my health bar. It was not a fun experience, because everything is faster than Ricky and his occasional refusal to turn around generate the kind of fist-clenching frustration that might end in a smashed control pad for people with less inner peace than myself.


After eventually managing to slap the Count right out of his robot walking frame, it's back to the cutscenes. Crimson threatens Ricky's sister once more, but suddenly the Moon Crystal machine is destroyed by Rosina! The Count is not pleased about this, but not for the reasons you might expect - with the machine destroyed, Rosina will die! There's no dramatic chord that plays in-game during this revelation, so you might want to have a portable keyboard handy so you can supply your own "duhn-duhn-duuhhn!" at the appropriate juncture.


Yes, that's right - Rosina is actually a grotesque flesh-puppet, given life by the Moon Crystal as a replacement for Count Crimson's deceased daughter. That's a heck of a twist, and it gives Crimson a sympathetic motivation for his crimes, something I definitely did not see coming from a character who looks like a post-mask-removal Scooby-Doo villain. Good plot work, Hector. M. Night Shyamalan will be calling any day now to buy the movie rights.


After another half-stage of platforming action revolving around moving platforms and spiked walls, Ricky once more catches up with the Count. Again. How did he get away from you last time, Ricky? You stabbed him enough times during that last boss fight that you could peel his skin off and use it as a colander, but he still got away from you? Anyway, with one last roll of the dice Crimson uses the magical life-giving power of the Moon Crystal on himself, because it conveniently happens to be the night of a full moon. Personally I would have thrown in one last plot-twist: Ricky is actually a werewolf, and by exposing him to the full moon Count Crimson has signed his own death warrant. Sadly that doesn't happen.


Instead, the Moon Crystal turns Crimson into a hideous monster. Erm, congrats, I guess? I don't know if this is how you wanted things to pan out, Count, but if you were hoping your evil schemes would grant you the powers of "being stuck to a wall" and "vomiting up beach-ball sized chunks of flesh" then well done, your Evil Nobel Prize is in the post.
As for the final battle itself, the trick is to double-jump and stab Crimson in the face while trying your best to avoid the waves of fire that travel along the floor. Good luck with that. I don't know if it was just me being bad at videogames, (always a possibility,) but there never seemed to be a real rhythm or predictability to the boss' attacks and as such Ricky's success or failure seemed to come down mostly to blind luck.


Rosina then sacrifices herself so that Ricky can escape. Don't be upset, it's not like she's real or anything. I should have known, those eyes are a dead giveaway. Maybe that's how the original Rosina died, her enormous eyeballs kept falling out of their sockets, leading to a fatal brain infection.


I hope you remembered the path you took through the laboratory, because now you've got to go through it backwards while it self-destructs, Metroid-style. I sort of remembered the path, but not well enough that there weren't multiple occasions where I thought "you can drop down this hole, right?" only to be proven wrong.


Should you manage to escape, Moon Crystal draws to a close as everyone makes it to safety. Well, except Rosina. And Count Crimson. Everyone important makes it to safety, then, and the Moon Crystal sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Hopefully it sinks deep enough that light can't reach it, otherwise the local fishermen are in for a hell of a time during the next full moon.


I wouldn't say that Moon Crystal is an absolutely wonderful hidden gem, a true lost Famicom materpiece, but it's certainly a good game. Ricky's movements are sometimes unpleasantly leaden and the boss battles are utterly pointless - aside from the last couple, which are merely frustrating - but the rest of the game is saved by its great graphics, good soundtrack and well-above-average jump-and-stab platforming action. Every the story is a cut above most NES games, which I know is a low hurdle to clear but still, it's a welcome addition to a game with a lot of charm. Moon Crystal gets my recommendation, then, and it's definitely one to try out if you're hankering for some classic 8-bit action or you like Ninja Gaiden but it's just difficult for you. Hey, I can understand that, you'll get not judgement from me.