We'll start with Who Killed Cock Robin, because Humpty Dumpty was involved with the king's men and so we'll save that added layer of royal intrigue to enjoy later. There goes Cock Robin now, flying towards a tree laden with Christmas baubles, or possibly cartoon bombs. Maybe these bombs are what killed Cock Robin, because he suddenly falls from the sky having been murdered in a brutal farmyard slaying. But who killed Cock Robin?


Well, that's cleared that up. Another case closed for Detective VGJunk, and the sparrow is remanded in custody to await his trail for birdicide. Time to move on to Humpty Dumpty Mystery, then.


Oh, never mind, apparently the sparrow's confession isn't trustworthy enough to secure a conviction. I guess forensics couldn't find the smoking arrow. No reason is given as to why the sparrow might make a false confession, with the options being that he's either protecting someone or he's mentally unstable. Either way, he will be charged with wasting police time and I can get on with the business of finding the real killer.


I need to establish who killed Cock Robin, when they killed him and where. Erm, I don't know about the former but the other two answers are "about three seconds ago" and "right next to that tree, I just saw it happen." No-one is asking why Cock Robin was slain, I notice. You'd think establishing a motive would be an important part of this process, but no-one seems interested. Maybe he had it coming.
Okay, first things first - selecting a difficulty level, with higher difficulties having more possibilities that need to be eliminated. I always like to start on the default difficulty where possible, so let's go with four because it's roughly in the middle.


Here's a clue to get you started. "Not an early bird," hmm? Right then, I'll look for the ones who haven't caught any worms.



Here are the suspects: the blockiest bunch of birds you're ever likely to see outside of a Duplo aviary set. You have to guess which one of these birds committed the murder by typing in the corresponding number. I'm going with the swan, because we've already established that we don't trust the sparrow's confession and while the faces of the crow and eagle to have a hint of true psychopathy about them I reckon that makes them a little too obvious. No, it must be the swan, the aloof, regal swan, the only bird with the superiority complex required to think it can get away with murder. They can break a man's arm with a flap of their wings, you know, so just imagine what they could do to a tiny robin.


Next, make you guess as to where the murder took place. Oh, those were supposed to be apples growing on that tree from the title screen. I did meant to select the orchard, because that's where we saw Cock Robin die, but I accidentally pressed 1 so let's hope he was actually killed in the field and then his lifeless corpse was thrown into the orchard in a clumsy attempt to hide the body.


Finally, pick a time of death. I wish I had some forensic data to help me out here; body temperature when the body was found, how far rigor mortis had set in, that kind of thing. I wanted CSI: Farthing Wood, but instead it's just down to a random (at this point) choice. Let's go for 9PM, nobody murders birds in the afternoon and everyone's in bed at 3AM.


The data has been analysed, the suspect has been questioned and the location meticulously searched, and the results are in - one out of my three guesses was correct, and thus we stumble upon the central concept of the game. You're not told which of your guesses were incorrect - maybe the swan had an alibi, or Cock Robin was captured on CCTV while putting twenty quid on the night's football in Ladbrokes at nine o'clock - so you repeat the process using guesswork and logic to find the three correct pieces of the puzzle.


You're given an extremely generous ten chances to get it right - detective work moves at a much more relaxed pace out here in the countryside than it does back on the mean streets of the big city - and between each round you can pick a number to receive a clue, like so. Some are more useful than others. "Has a keen eye"? That'll be the eagle, then. "Right Angled Time" and "Has Many Trees" do a lot to narrow things down, too. Now I know the eagle is the culprit, and that it didn't take place in the field, so means my original guess of 9PM must have been the one I got right in the first place.


And there you have it. The eagle has landed... in prison, and he's looking at 25 to life. He's a jail bird now. I'm glad he's locked away so he can't tear my eyes out with his talon in retribution for that pun.
That's it for Who Killed Cock Robin in the "gameplay" stakes. It's a passing diversion that might have kept young children of the early Eighties entertained for half an hour or so, although I am factoring in the ten minutes it takes for the tape to load into that.


Oh, okay, let's have another go, this time with six of each variable to contend with. Now they're animals, and it's a bloody good job it has their names written right there because I would struggle to identify some of these from their picture alone. The snake and the badger are recognisable, just about, but the cat looks like it's holding a piece of model railway track in its mouth and the "dog" picture could just as easily be a very unfortunate puddle on a bathroom floor.


There are six new places, too. I have no idea why the farmyard is full of little martini glasses with flags sticking out of them, or why the tree in the lane appears to be exploding. Oh, hang on, it must be one of those bomb-trees from the opening screen, of course.


It turns out it was the cat, in the churchyard, with the candlestick. At noon, I mean. Later, at trial, the cat revealed he had perpetrated the crime because he wanted to leave Cock Robin's body on the kitchen floor as a present for his master. He then licked his own arsehole and was charged with contempt of court.


On to Humpty Dumpty Mystery now, and the real mystery is what kind of benevolent god could allow such a twisted, malformed egg-man to exist? Another mystery: does Humpty have trousers made especially for him, or does he simply paint his legs black? Yet more mystery - this game has more goddamn mystery than an X-Files box set - who are these bizarre, place men with fezes and Hitler moustaches, and what is the significance of the symbol on their hats that looks like the underside of a plane? They must be the king's men, performing their solemn duty to keep watch on Humpty Dumpty so that he can never again go on a bloody rampage through the peaceful world of men. It's a stressful job, as the ranks of the king's men are constantly depleted by the ravenous attentions of Humpty's insatiable appetite - why do you think we eat soldiers with a boiled egg, hmm? - and eventually one of these man had to, ah ha ha, crack.



HUMPTY DUMPTY WAS PUSHED, the headline screams. Humpty doesn't seem that traumatized by the ordeal, mind you, Are you really telling me that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again when the worst of the damage seems to just be a large crack? Maybe not the horses, glueing eggshell together is a job too delicate for hooves, but surely the king's men could have put him together again if they had wanted to. This isn't the action of one rogue soldier, then. Everyone hates Humpty. Also, if you're an egg, don't sit on a wall, or at least wear a crash helmet.


Here are the king's men, lined up in alphabetical order. One of them is called Donks. I hope he gets a lot of promotions, everyone will love to hear the tales of General Donks or Major Donks. Donks. That'll be my nickname for Donkey Kong from now on, good ol' Donks and his little chimp friend Dids.


You might have realised by now that Humpty Dumpty Mystery is a variant of the classic board game Guess Who? To find the egg-smashing culprit, you must eliminate the others by asking a series of yes-or-no questions based on their appearance. For instance here I asked "Did He Have a Red Hat?" and no, he did not have a red hat so anyone wearing a red hat is eliminated.


And so you go on, asking questions and occasionally being stumped by the text parser. I just wanted to find out whether Humpty's assailant had a moustache or not, but I could not get the answers I was after until later, when I realised the word I should have been using was "lips". It also took a bit of trial-and-error to figure out "badge" for the thing on their hats and "jacket" for their clothes, but I got there in the end. That was the most challenging part of the game: as in Who Killed Cock Robin you get ten attempts but it's even easier here, and I always managed to narrow my suspects down to a shortlist of one after three or four questions. That's not really a complaint, because these games were specifically designed for children in the 5-10 range, but merely a heads-up that if for some reason you do decide to play this game then be warned that it's not going to fill an entire rainy afternoon.


'Twas Clump who did the deed! I should have known. A red jacket, a blue hat and a toothbrush moustache? That's the portrait of a killer if ever I've seen one, although I'm not sure why I'm seeing twelve copies of Clump's face now that I've identified him. I've either spent too long on this case and gone in so deep that my obsession with catching Clump means that I see him at every turn, or this is a big sheet of posters to inform and warn the public about Clump. Wanted dead or alive for the crime of egg-shoving, that kind of thing.


With the crimes against him avenged, Humpty Dumpty is back in fine health, presuming his legs are supposed to be doing that. It doesn't look like a very comfortable seating arrangement. Speaking of seats, Humpty has once again perched himself atop a wall, having learned nothing from his ordeal.


But wait, there's more! You can also select Humpty game two from the title screen, and how could I resist after Humpty game one was so thrilling? I'll admit, I was drawn in by this mysterious image of a silhouetted king's man, although I'm seeing someone else in that shadowy outline...


There, that's better.


Humpty game two starts in much the same way as Humpty game one, with the attempted murder of a large sentient egg, an egg with two passions in life - sitting in high places and the feel of brick against his backside. Again, one of the king's men is responsible, but this time there was a witness! Unfortunately, the ranks of the king's men are filled from a very small pool of families that have engaged in generation after generation of inbreeding, and so all the king's men look very similar.


It was this guy. He did it. He's not ashamed, he'd do it again in a heartbeat. Someone had to put an end to Humpty's tyranny.


I hope you burned the miscreant's face into your memory, because now he's gone and you have to remember what he looked like. Was his hat blue or red? Did he have a 'tache, or were his pursed and extremely red lips on display for all to see? All the king's men have tiny, creepy eyes like you might see painted on the disturbing idol worshipped by a race of semi-human maniacs, but what colour were these particular eyes? Enter all the details that you can remember and keep guessing the ones you don't. It is not a complex process.


There's even less to capture the imagination in this one than there is in Humpty game one or Who Killed Cock Robin, and it's the last part of this C64 double feature. So, how has a thirty-year-old bundle of children's guessing games held up? Do you really need me to answer that? There's nothing to hold your interest in any of the games once you've played them a single time, they're extremely easy even for the suggested age range and the graphics are, well, let's call them rustic, shall we? Crudley hewn from great slabs of pixels with only simple tools, etcetera. Still, there is a certain amount of charm to it and the games work correctly, which sounds like damning with faint praise but I'm always happy when a retro game isn't horribly broken. Was it worth writing all these words about? I dunno, I had fun doing it and isn't that really all that matters? Yes, yes it is.

Let's begin, as seems appropriate, with Nintendo's own Golf, one of the very earliest Famicom releases. It features a man hitting a golf ball towards a flag, thus effortlessly capturing the very essence of the sport, but here's my problem with it - I know that's supposed to be a cap on his head, but I just can't get my brain to read it that way unless I really concentrate on it. At every passing glance, my eyes tell me that this is the back of a man who has a mere stump where his head ought to be, or maybe that he's popped his collar to a frankly ridiculous degree. His doctors said he couldn't play golf in a neck brace, but he was determined to prove them wrong! And then his head fell off. I have no idea why I can't see it as it's meant to be. However, I know exactly why those purple tee-marker orbs look to me as though they should have electricity arcing between them. It's because I'm a big nerd.



Smashing the stereotype that "Jumbo" is an epithet only suitable for elephants and the morbidly obese, famous Japanese golfer Jumbo Ozaki gained his nickname due to his height. According to Wikipedia he's 5' 11", so I'm on course to be given the nickname Gargantua any day now.
This isn't the most interesting of cover artworks, I'll grant you. There's a golf man and a golf place - you know, the Hole Zone or White Ball Alley or whatever they call it - and some golf words. It's definitely a golf game. The cover has gotten that across in a clear and effective manner. You're never going to mistake it for Doom, so congratulations to the artist on that front. I also like that they included a yacht marina on the left of the image, just in case you weren't one hundred percent certain that you're too poor to take up golf.



These being Japanese covers, it wasn't going to be long before we got to one featuring giant-eyed little munchkin-people with the physical dimensions of a toddler and the hair of a clown trapped head-first in a threshing machine. Here are some now! Just look at 'em, the neckless freaks. The young chap in the foreground is about to take his putt, but in a disgraceful show of poor sportsmanship that girl in the background is shouting at him. I can see it now, he's bringing back his putter, his eyes firmly on the ball and just as he starts his swing his opponent shouts "don't miss, dickhead!"
Also worthy of note is that sun, who has the florid cheeks and slack expression of a teenager who's drunk, possibly for the first time, on a cheap Bacardi knock-off, a teenager who has just decided that now is the perfect time to call Sally from his maths class and tell her he fancies her, forgetting that she has no idea who he is and that it's two AM in the morning. I know that sounds way too autobiographical a hypothesis for it to have been triggered purely by looking at that cartoon sun, but I swear that never happened to me. I would never drink a knock-off Bacardi substitute, not when there was creme de menth that would never be missed by anyone sitting in the drinks cabinet.



What is a "Birdie Rush," anyway? The thrill of coming in at one under par, or trying to get through your round of golf as quickly as possible because you've had a sudden epiphany that you could be spending your time in a glorious myriad of other, far superior ways? This guy certainly doesn't seem to be having much fun, but then I think he's supposed to be a professional. That's why there's a crowd behind him with camera. I need a job where I can wear an outfit like that and still call myself a "professional," but what are my options besides becoming a golfer? Eccentric grandfather in a kid's TV show, possibly. Time-travelling 1920's newspaper boy is the only other one I can think of. Dude, why is "society" and "the Man" so insistent on putting everyone in their specific little boxes, man? I want my bank manager to wear clothes like that. It's not going to affect his ability to do his job or anything, so why not? Might want to lose the spiked shoes, though. They'll mess up the flooring. Related trivia: Nintendo put out some officially-branded Super Mario World golf shoes. Well, if he is going to spend all that time jumping on evil creatures he might as well have jagged metal sticking out of his soles while he's doing it.



This isn't just any golf, this is THE golf, the definitive article, the One True Golf. A bold claim indeed. I can't tell you whether this game is good enough to crown itself The Only Golf, because I'm not going to waste my time playing it. Let's just say it is. The Golf '92 never can and never will be bettered as a videogame recreation of golf. I can tell you one thing about this cover art, though, and that's that putting pencil moustaches on cutesy, super-deformed characters makes them look really creepy. For example, the guy in the yellow shirt at the bottom; he looks like a mean dad who threw away his daughter's Cabbage Patch doll and was then cursed to turn into that very doll, and he's just getting one final round of golf in before his hands become useless fuzzy flippers.



I think that title translates as something like Aim! Top Pro Dreams of the Green, which is a damn sight more interesting than Golf or even The Golf. The cover's nice, too, very tranquil, although obviously it's too dark to play golf at sunset so this has probably been arranged so the player and his caddy can have a romantic moment to help them get over the double bogey on the fifth. So, a good cover, but the game's by Jaleco so it will almost certainly be aggressively average. An aggressively average Famicom golf game from 1993. I think that might be the most average videogame possible.


Okay, so you might know this one better as Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf, a title I always read as Lee TrevinoisFighting Golf. Lee Trevino is out to put a stop to golf once and for all, and he's going to bring it down... from the inside!


There's Lee now. Presumably. I have no idea what Lee Trevino looks like. The only reason I am aware of his existence is this game, and all I know about this game is that it adds an extra little layer to the Simpsons joke about Lee Carvalho's Putting Challenge. I'm sure it's a great game, though. It's endorsed by the US National Video Game Team, after all, and such an august institution would never allow their name to appear on an inferior product.


In Japan it's just called Fighting Golf - no word on whether the Japanese National Video Game Team endorses it - and it has a much more dramatic cover, with dynamic brushstrokes that capture a raw power that Lee Trevino simply does not possess. The intensity of the image is somewhat undercut by the golfer not looking at where his ball is going, mind you.



Another fun, cartoony cover for Golf-kko Open, the undoubted star of which is that cool mole. You can tell he's cool because he's wearing shades, and sunglasses do seem like a good idea to protect oneself from the brightness of this artwork, which strikes me as a bit Keith Haring-ish.


The picture continues on the back of the case, where we can see that the golf ball is caught between ecstasy and agony. The sting of the driver hurts, but it hurts good. Forget about the masochistic golf ball for a moment - possibly a futile challenge, it's not a concept that is easy to forget - and instead check out that snake. That snake has the glazed, anxious expression of a reptile that has, through a series of comical mishaps and coincidences, become a participant in a human golf tournament. No-one has noticed that he's a snake yet, and he's going to front it out. Will there be a heart-warming ending when the snake managed to win the golf tournament and everyone still loves him even though he's a snake? No, of course not. How is he going to hold a putter?



It's a bunker. Yep. The ol' sand hole. Disappointment Beach. The Dunes of Shame. I don't have much more to offer than that, folks. Next!



It's-a him, Super Mario, with a smile on his face as he uses a golf club to batter a mole to death. It's Super Mario Bros.: Groundsman With Extreme Prejudice! Now you're playing with power, and a niggling sense that you're a terrible person.
At least this cover finally settles the matter of Mario's nationality. He is definitely American. No native of any other nation would wear that outfit. Technically, Mario is breaking Federal law by wearing these hideous dungarees, as the US Flag Code states that the Stars and Stripes "should never be used as wearing apparel." That's animal murder and a criminal lack of patriotism in one cover, Mario. What a disgrace.



And now he's goose-stepping! Do you hate America, Mario? Is that it?



This one is my favourite of the lot, a light, summery number that actually looks more like the cover of a tennis game than a golf game. I really like the logo, and the artwork is so cheerful that it manages to make golf look like something worth spending your time doing, but it's offset by the unusual swarm of arrows hovering around the girl, which gives you something to ponder. What do they represent? Are they extremely dense motion lines? Are they pointing in the direction of the ball's travel? Is this a giant woman being attacked by a fleet of the ships from Asteroids? Who knows, but it's an interesting touch none-the-less.


For the sequel, Namco took a more realistic approach. They've still got a lady taking a swing on there, but now there's also a man who seems to be preparing to smash the game's logo with his five-iron. I'm beginning to think that I have some barely-suppressed rage issues, because I'm looking at a lot of these covers and immediately seeing violence. Maybe it's just my own dislike for golf coming through, although it's not like I don't enjoy golf games. Through the transformative power of videogames, almost anything can be made enjoyable. Golf, stacking blocks, typing, you name it. I could probably get some fun out of my own colonoscopy if they let me control the camera and turned it into a little game. "Pilot the all-seeing Eye of Drungarth through the meat-labyrinth to uncover the ancient evil lurking within," that kind of thing. Hang on, I think I'm on to a winner here. I'm going to call the NHS and propose a shared Kickstarter. Don't worry, I won't forget about you when I'm rich.

There was absolutely no contest in this category, as Codemasters' Commodore 64 and Amiga title Prince Clumsy (AKA The Sword and the Rose) was such an unabashed clone of Ghosts 'n Goblins that it is scientifically provable that you can't talk about it without making reference to Capcom's lance-slinging classic. Even if you try to describe Prince Clumsy through wordless mugging and silent charades, an unseen force will carve the words "it's just bloody Ghosts 'n' Goblins!" into your forehead, the blood-markings forever serving as testament to Codemasters' sheer cheek.



I said he would take this title way back in January, and I saw nothing in the intervening eleven months powerful or moving enough to change my mind - the winner is King Ape from Mad Motor. I'm not a complex man, I don't need much more than an enormous, helicopter-riding gorilla wearing a crown, spiked underwear and the Lord Mayor's chains to capture my heart.
Honourable mentions go to the entire cast of Captain Commando, especially Mack the Knife (even his in-game bio describes him as "very cool") and the floating, disembodied head of Sir Clive Sinclair from A Day in the Life. Turns out A Day in the Life of Sir Clive Sinclair's Floating, Disembodied Head is a harrowing one indeed, but Clive bears it all with grace and good humour.



Beavis and Butt-head are difficult characters to build a game around, and Doug is so phenomenally boring that any game based on his adventures was always going to be a one-way ticket to Snoozeville calling at Boredom Junction and Pointlessness Central, so the title has to go to Indiagames'Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Quest for Oz. Buffy's a superb fighter and gymnast who beats vampires and monsters to un-un-death with karate and (that one time, at least) rocket launchers, so it was a shame to see her appear in what is quite possibly the most half-hearted Prince of Persia clone ever created. It does absolutely nothing with the license, either, with Buffy herself being the only character from the show to appear in-game. I know the last boss is supposed to be Drusilla, but even taking into account the tiny resolution of a mobile screen it looks nothing like her and so I'm not counting her.



Looking through this year's articles, I noticed that I didn't write about that many really difficult games. I'm fairly sure that's because my very first article of 2015 was about Spelunker, a game so viciously committed to inflicting sudden and near-constant deaths on the player that it's taken me an entire year to recover from agonisingly grinding my way through it. I don't think I have ever uttered such a stream of foul invective at a videogame in my life, and I've played through Dragon's Lair on the NES.



It wasn't any of the games I wrote about during the Halloween Spooktacular, that's for sure - no, the only game this year to elicit a frisson of fear was Paul Norman's The Trivia Monster. After the unsettling weirdness of Norman's Forbidden Forest, I was hoping for more of the same from Trivia Monster, and boy did I get it in the form of the titular monster's scream, the horrifying sound of a robot programmed only to feel pain trying to drag itself out of a burning cheese grater.



It was a fairly weak year for top-quality soundtracks, but as is so often the case Castlevania came to my ears' rescue with the music from Castlevania Legends.



Quite a few games this year turned out to be much more enjoyable than I first anticipated: Moon Crystal is very close to being a true "lost" classic in the Famicom's library of platformers, Riding Fight was so beautifully dumb that I could overlook many of its flaws and Heavy Smash is just pure arcade fun. However, I have to give this one to Big Fish Game's pixel-pecking hidden object spook-a-thon Halloween Trick or Treat. The cluttered, kitschy mess that makes up the game's environments is an aesthetic that's wired directly into my brain's pleasure centres, and I found the act of hunting around for disguised items deeply relaxing. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I have developed something of an addiction to horror-themed hidden-object games, and since Halloween I have played a considerable amount of them including both the Halloween Trick or Treat sequels and several others. There you are, then: final proof, if proof were needed, that I have no business writing about whether a game is good or not.



I probably should have saved all those words about Return of the Jedi until a couple of weeks ago, huh?



Scare Bear for the C64. Why was it called Scare Bear? Where was that bear even going? Why were tiny astronauts trying to kill him? Did he defund the space program for tiny people or something? There are no answers to any of these questions, leaving Scare Bear as a true enigma for the ages.



I was looking at the list of this year's articles. Battlecry is on there. I could not remember a thing about Battlecry other than you punch people in it and honestly, that's fifty percent of the games I write about. As someone whose brain is nothing more than a fleshy filing cabinet for side-scrolling beat-em-up information, this means Battlecry might be the most generic slugfest ever created.



Always a hotly-contested category, this one, and amongst my favourites are the various messages in the wonderful Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, even the ones that cruelly compared me to Helen Keller.


Shadowgate was another highlight, with text that veers between sarcastically calling out you, the player, for your dumbass decisions like, I dunno, punching yourself in the face, and describing even the plainest items as though they were artefacts of such wondrous beauty that you eyeballs will rub their eyeballs in disbelief should you happen to glance at them.


Doug's Big Game featured a goat emergency, which was nice.


However, the clear winner in this field is Riding Fight, a game packed to the rafters with poorly-translated and utterly charming dialogue, from the orders that villains should be "manacled and punished" to the hero's quip that his wild adventure is "only a daily experience." Best of all is the enigmatic phrase "what a gravy day," a phrase that manages to communicate it's meaning despite not really meaning anything.



Always a tough choice, this, and I'm still undecided whether that's because the vast majority of retro games are shite or because I am compelled to inflict mental anguish upon myself by playing the worst of the worst. So, who were the contenders this year? Imagine: Doctor was seemingly an attempt to put all who played it into a coma with a one-two punch of extreme tedium and being deeply patronising. The same is true of Disney's Doug: Doug's Big Game, and the manufacturers of sleeping pills the world over are praying Doug's Big Game doesn't become common knowledge because it'll put them straight out of business. TimeCop on the SNES? I'm not going to finish describing it, just like the developers didn't finish making the game. Silent Assault was a typical dollop of unlicensed NES misery, and Penalty Soccer must surely have been the result of one man's quest to remove everything you could consider beautiful from the Beautiful Game. You might be thinking "maybe the winner is Barbie: Fashion Pack Games, a title that contains neither fashion nor games?" Well, you're close, but Barbie takes second place. The winner, and winner by some considerable margin, is Game Boy Color abomination The Mask of Zorro. Hateful gameplay and controls, graphics so bad they'll make you wish the very concept of pictoral representation had never been invented and parts of the game that are almost literally impossible all add up to create a steaming pile of excrement that is this close to dethroning NSYNC: Get to the Show as the worst videogame I've ever played.



On the flip-side, there were some games I didn't hate this year. It was nice to finally finish Shadowgate, which remains a jolly little adventure, accidentally leaping out of windows notwithstanding. Captain Commando has been a favourite for many years and thankfully I haven't become any less enamoured with it over time. However, head and bat-wings above the rest this year was Capcom's mighty monster mash Vampire Savior, a product from a company at the very top of its game that is absolutely drenched in detail, care and attention. It's got a great cast of characters, the presentation is fantastic, the gameplay is pitch-perfect and one of the stage backgrounds is a giant god-foetus with an eyeball in the sole of its foot. Play Vampire Savior now or at your earliest convenience, is what I'm saying.



It has to be the one about Halloween Trick or Treat. I just had so much fun writing it that I was disappointed when I'd finished, and it left me feeling more Halloween-y than I have in years and that is very important to me. Also enjoyable were the Street Fighter II Character Encyclopaedia, (because I got to marry my twin loves of Street Fighter and really stupid jokes,) Fright Night, that time I played a bunch of Super Mario Bros. hacks and the big, beefy men of the Amiga's title screens. Rarely have so many lazing tracings of Boris Vallejo pictures been collected in one place.

And there we go, another year down and still somehow VGJunk trundles on into the future. I hope you've enjoyed this year's articles, and grateful thanks to everyone who's sent me an encouraging message or comment. I'll be back in the new year with more of this sort of thing, assuming I can tear myself away from Bloodborne.

I'll be honest, I don't know much about Kamen Rider beyond the basics. It's a long-running series of Japanese superhero shows starring a man who becomes a grasshopper-themed purveyor of vengeance, presumably because all the cool animals were already taken as superhero identities. Kamen Rider is phenomenally popular in its home country, and if Ultraman is the Japanese equivalent of Superman then I suppose Kamen Rider would be Batman. There are roughly twelve thousand Kamen Rider series, including a new one that started last year, but this game is about the original Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider has a motorcycle, which is why he's called Kamen Rider and not Kamen Jogger, and his most powerful move is the Rider Kick. That is about the extent of my knowledge on the subject of Kamen Rider, and because this game is all in Japanese that's unlikely to change. If you want more detailed info on the Kamen Rider franchise, I'm sure there's a nightmarishly detailed wiki out there, but I'm just interested in the game.


The intro depicts two young ne'er-do-wells harassing an old man and stealing his treasured family pipe, all viewed through a mirror crafted by an Aztec Nazi. No, of course not, The young man on the left is Kamen Rider 1 and so I guess the one in the 1920's newspaper boy hat is the imaginatively-named Kamen Rider 2. There's evil in the world in the form of terrorist organization Shocker, and the Kamen Riders have vowed to bring an end to their tyranny right after they've finished playing keep-away with this guy's plumbing supplies.


Here are the Kamen Riders. They're posing, which seems to make up around seventy percent of a Kamen Rider's workload. The rest is punching freaks, so let's get on with that, shall we?


Kamen Rider is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, so you can call this a fairly self-indulgent start to the year. Assuming you're player one, you're put in control of Kamen Rider's alter-ego Takeshi Hongo, although every time I look at him I want to call him Kabuto Kouji. I have no idea why, because Kabuto Kouji is the hero of Mazinger Z. Maybe it's because Kouji and Hongo both share a fondness for large sideburns. Hongo is dressed in white jumpsuit that makes him look half mechanic, half Elvis, although in his defence Kamen Rider did start airing in 1971. To bring things back around to videogames, in the original series Takeshi Hongo was played by actor Hiroshi Fujioka, perhaps better known to lovers of weird videogame ephemera as the mighty Sega mascot Segata Sanshiro.


Opposing Hongo, although probably not exactly striking fear into his heart, are the troops of Shocker, who dress like beatniks and prance onto the screen like a dance troupe auditioning for Britain's Got Talent. Shocker's true goal is revealed - by creating a soldier that loves abstract poetry and modern dance, they've come close to developing the most easily-bullyable schoolboy imaginable.
As this is a beat-em-up, the gameplay mostly explains itself and, for the most part, doesn't stray too far from the usual genre template. You've got an attack and a jump button, the attack button can be tapped repeatedly for a short combo of hits, you can do a jumping kick, that kind of thing. The most immediate differences are that you don't have a life-draining emergency attack, and that each stage is broken into five or six short vignettes that see Hongo leaping off the top of the screen once he's finished one, rather than the continuous stages of something like Final Fight.


Just in case you were in any doubt that this is a beat-em-up, here's an oil drum that you can smash. There's an item inside, although Kamen Rider is not very generous with the power-ups. There are big health refills, small health refills and (I believe) one solitary extra life. Hey, I've just noticed that there are no points in this brawler! That'd a little unusual. How am I supposed to know the numerical value of each life I take with my bare fists?
One of the beatnik-gymnasts is orange, and he has a rapier. Even their fighting styles are kinda wussy.


Luchadores! Now this is more like it, something manly and tough and easily baited into standing near the edge of this hole so I can kick them down it. So, take a closer look at these masked menaces and ask yourself: are they wearing leather bracelets, or did their evil henchman sweatshirts shrink in the wash and now their sleeves are all too short?


Hongo has been making short work of these Shocker minions with his basic punch combos, but just around the corner lurks a much sterner test in the form of this strange creature. It can spit sticky, damaging webs at you, as though it is some bizarre combination of spider and man. But who is this strange creature? I suppose I'd better check the wiki. Oh... so his name is Spider Man, huh? No, it's fine, I can see why you'd call him Spider Man. I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't call him Spider Man.


Spider Man is a far tougher foe than all the other Shocker goons, with his web attack being especially dangerous, and so there is only one option: Hongo must transform into the mighty hero Kamen Rider (1), which you can do whenever you like by pressing the X button. The transformation consists of Hongo standing there slowly waving his arms, with the enemies paralysed though sheer incomprehension at your decision to break off in mid-battle to get some quick tai chi in.


You're also treated to a shot of Hongo's belt buckle, which facilitates his transformation into Kamen Rider. You have to watch his belt buckle spinning around every time you transform, which is nice and definitely doesn't stretch out into what feels like a goddamn eternity after the eighth or ninth time you've seen it.


Here he is, Kamen Rider himself (note: Kamen Rider does no actual riding in this game, just punching)! Spider Man stands no chance now, although honestly Kamen Rider doesn't play that much differently than Takeshi Hongo. He has a running jumping kick, which is a lot of fun if a little impractical when it comes to actually hitting the enemies rather than jumping past them. I want to say his punches are slightly more powerful than Hongo's but I think that might just be a matter of my own perception - now that I've transformed Kamen Rider I feel like his punches should be stronger, you know?


Now that I've become Kamen Rider, I'm ready to face the first end-of-stage boss. It's a dinosaur that spends the first half of the fight wandering around in the background and disinterestedly throwing bombs at you while you mop up the beatniks, before jumping down to take you on mano-a-mano. Surprisingly the dinosaur man's name isn't Dinosaur Man. He's called Tokageron, and he's a former football player that Shocker transformed into a monster in order to harness his tremendous leg strength. That's all it takes to get you on Shocker's radar, huh? One above-average physical trait? I look forward to fighting the Birdwatcher, with their keen eyesight, or a frog-based monster the Shocker created to weaponize the ability to roll his tongue into a tube.
Tokageron isn't much of a challenge as long as you keep moving and don't let him batter you with his tail, although the fight does take longer than I expected: given that he's a former soccer player it's surprising that hitting Tokageron once doesn't result in him rolling around on the floor in simulated agony.


Once you've depleted all the boss' health, and assuming you're in Kamen Rider form, you can press X to finish the job with the Rider Kick. I like the Rider Kick, as special moves go. It's got a pleasing simplicity to it. Kamen Rider is here to destroy evil, not spend ages faffing around with special chants or giant combining weapons. See the bad guy, kick the bad guy, move on. It's all very efficient.


Here's Kamen Rider on his motorcycle, which plays no other part in the game. His motorcycle looks like a six-year-old's drawing of a motorcycle, with gigantic wheels and more exhausts than a Kwik-Fit warehouse. All it's missing are some machine guns, maybe a couple of fins.


Between stages one and two, you're given the option to participate in one of three mini-events, or to ignore them all and move on to the next stage. This one sees Kamen Rider wrestling with a bulldozer, and naturally you have to tap the button to hold the bulldozer back. Keep the bulldozer at bay until the time runs out and congratulations, you win... erm, I'll have to get back to you on that one. I'm sure there is a reward for completing the mission, but I couldn't figure out what it was. A stat increase, maybe?
The bulldozer is the easiest of the three missions, although none of them are particularly strenuous - one has you dodging falling rocks for a set amount of time, and the other fills the screen with enemies and challenges you to survive until the timer runs out, a task made simpler by the reluctance of the enemies to chase you into the bottom corner of the screen.


Okay then, stage two proper begins and it's that classic staple of the beat-em-up genre, the construction site... except there doesn't seem to be much construction going on, unless this is the site of the world's largest sandcastle. While the character sprites are good - a little stiffly animated, perhaps, but drawn in a way I find very appealing - the backgrounds in Kamen Rider definitely fall onto the "waiting in a Post Office queue" side of dull. We've got sand, rocks, more sand and, to really jazz the place up, some emergency barriers. How thrilling.


It's Pickle Dan, the Gherkin Man, here to coat the world in his evil brine. I'm not going to look Pickle Dan up on the wiki, because it might tell me that Pickle Dan isn't his actual name and that he wasn't formerly a retired civil servant that Shocker mutated into a monster so they could control his incredible ability to preserve vegetables in vinegar.
I'm not sure why I'm fighting him as Hongo and not Kamen Rider, mind you. As far as I can see there are no drawbacks to being Kamen Rider, so I might as well be Kamen Rider all the time! It's a decision that definitely won't bite me in the arse later. Also, Kamen Rider wears gloves and Hongo does not. Imagine how it would feel to punch a gherkin into a coma with your bare hands? No, this is definitely a job for Kamen Rider.


The end of stage boss is this... thing. It's got Ookami in it's name, so I guess it's supposed to be wolf-based? It doesn't look much like a wolf. Wolves, unless I've been sorely misinformed by the dodgy t-shirt stall at my local market, do not have horns. Or wear belts. Or boots. Look, whatever this thing is it likes to charge at you, so combined with the horns I'm going to say it's a bull. It charges at Kamen Rider, so move out of the way and then hit the boss. Do this until your chance to finish the boss with the Rider Kick appears.


Then kick the boss out of the window and into a ravine. Rider Defenestration, very heroic.


Hmm, maybe I'll start taking Shocker more seriously now I know they're into crucifying people. What we can also learn from this image is that it's very difficult to draw pixel art of someone in a balaclava, because unless they're right next to the camera they just end up with an expression of cartoonish surprise. Maybe that's why they're called Shocker.


Stage three, and already Kamen Rider has sunk into a grey sludge of repetition, with Hongo pummelling the same beatniks and luchadores over and over again in this and indeed every other stage, all set against some of the most generic backdrops I've ever seen in a beat-em-up. Ooh, shipping containers, the developers are really stretching their horizons with that one.


At least the combat itself is fairly decent, with the ability to transform into Kamen Rider adding a touch of variety. That's not to say that the fighting is flawless, mind you, and my biggest problem with it is that once you've started your combo it's difficult to interrupt it - once Hongo's fists are flying he'll keep on swingin' as you watch, helpless to react, as a masked thug walks up behind you and clobbers you over the head with a 2X4. Combine this with even the most basic enemy's ability to do a lot of damage with very few attacks, and Kamen Rider ends up being one of those games that feels more difficult that it should be thanks to a hero who fights as though he's still shaking off the effects of last night's vindaloo and lager session.

The boss here is Garagaranda, the burrowing bastard. He spends most of the fight tunnelling around underground - an impressive feat considering we're fighting on top of a tower block - before popping up right under your feet for big damage. The trick is to keep running, and even that's not guaranteed to help you avoid him, and the fight becomes a rather dull battle of attrition. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if the game had used Garagaranda's other name of Ambassador Hell.The fight wouldn't have been any different, but I would have received a much higher amount of personal satisfaction if I'd battered someone called Ambassador Hell. What a great name. I'd love to see what Hell's embassy looks like, although it's probably very similar to any dingy, low-rent embassy only with ten times the pointless bureaucracy.


Then something came along that took me by surprise - between stages three and four, you're given the opportunity to change Kamen Rider's moveset! Now the L and R buttons can be equipped with attacks from a pool of different moves, which can be checked out on this screen here, including new combos, double jumping kicks and a host of new throws. I went for a throw-kick combo and a series of more powerful karate chops.
I'm surprised there aren't / weren't more beat-em-ups that included this kind of move management system, and I'll give Kamen Rider a lot of credit for including it. I don't think it's incredibly deep, and frankly I didn't have the time to try out a huge amount of permutations so I can't tell you if there are some combos that can be abused for an easy win, but I'm very impressed that it was included at all. I wish a similar system had appeared in more beat-em-ups, although this may be partly down to my brain's insistence that all games should be more like God Hand.


Excited by the murderous potential of Kamen Rider's new moves, I started the next stage and immediately transformed into the insectoid superman. I was having a merry old time beating up the bad guys, although it would have been a merrier time had I been offered the chance to fight something other than a beatnik, a luchador or an orange beatnik, but then I noticed something. Playing as Kamen Rider rather than Hongo does have a drawback. You see the stage boss's health bar at the bottom of the screen? Now look at it again in this screenshot from later in the stage.


It's gone up. The boss' maximum health actually increases as you dither about teaching these Ginsberg wannabes a lesson about not crucifying people, and if you're playing as Kamen Rider the health bar goes up way faster than if you're playing as Hongo. I'm not sure how I feel about this turn of events. On the one hand, I can see why the developers would want to keep Kamen Rider as a special ability, a transformation to be used in times of crisis, and this is at least an interestingly different way to keep the player from using KR all the time rather than, say, having a limited amount of Transformation Tokens or something. One the other hand, Kamen Rider is far more fun and interesting to play as than Hongo, with a wider move-set and a rather stylish scarf. Personally, my solution would have been to get rid of Hongo altogether and had the player be Kamen Rider all the time. After all, the game's called Kamen Rider, not Takeshi Hongo's Shocker-Smashing Slam-Fest.


Cool, a squid-man. His name is Ikadevil. It's okay, Ikadevil, I still think you're cool even if your name does sound like something from a Moshi Monsters-style creature collecting game. Who will triumph in this, the immortal battle between squid and grasshopper? You'd think Kamen Rider would have the advantage given that the battle is taking place on land, but Ikadevil can summon tiny meteors from the sky so that evens the odds a little. After a couple of deaths at the suckers of Ikadevil's tentacle whip, I eventually triumphed using the cheesiest of beat-em-up strategies: the repeated jumping kick. It took ages. It's a good job I played as Hongo for most of the stage, or I'd still be doing this fight now.


Stage five takes place in a fun fair, and there's very little to say about it because it's all the same as the other stages only with a 1000% increase in roller-coaster tracks. Still, I can look at this screenshot and imagine, for a brief moment, how nice it would have been to fight a monster with a huge carousel horse for a head.


Then there's the boss, a lumpy chap called Hiruchameleon. He's got "chameleon" right there in his name, so it's no surprise that his special power is camouflage, and by camouflage I mean the ability to vanish completely and become immune to damage before reappearing right next to you and draining half your health before you can react. At first, this was one of the most frustrating boss fights I've ever participated in - I just couldn't land a blow, and Hiruchameleon never left himself open to a counter-attack. Then, it clicked: if I'm already attacking when the boss reappears, he can't dodge my punches! So I stood there, tapping the attack button, until Hiruchameleon reappeared. When he did, my relentless attacks meant I could grab him immediately and give him a swift knee to the bollocks, or whatever disgusting sack of organs this mutated freak has instead of testicles. Yes, my incredible strategy actually worked. A true hero needs brains as well as brawn.


Into the final stage now, and Kamen Rider faces his most dangerous foe: himself! Okay, so Evil Kamen Rider is probably his third or fourth most dangerous foe, after Ikadevil, the final boss and Hiruchameleon before I figured out his weakness. Evil Kamen Rider is too fond of flying kicks, you see, allowing for plenty of opportunities to hit him when he lands. I don't blame him, I've often said that it you can do flying kicks all the time then you should do flying kicks all the time. It would be hypocritical of me to cast too much scorn on Evil Kamen Rider's tactics.


Then you get a boss rush, because Kamen Rider hasn't had enough problems with repetition already. Even in a really good beat-em-up a boss rush always feels like shallow padding, but here it feels like a Sisyphean task, if Sisyphus was pushing a boulder made of monster parts and cheap attacks. On the positive side, I spent so long chugging through the early part of the stage that the boss' health bar is already at maximum, so I might as well play as Kamen Rider.


The final showdown is against Shocker's secret weapon - so secret, in fact, that I don't think it exists outside this game. Prove me wrong, internet! But first let me tell you about this boss: he's a dick. A real pain in the arse. His claws and tail have a huge range, and each single hit takes about three-quarters of you health bar, so I hope you're looking forward to a fight with the same tentative approach work and potential for sudden, crushing defeat as me asking someone out on a date. It just drags on and on, and it's not even an interesting fight - the boss only really has two attacks, but when he can obliterate you so easily, why would he need any more than that? So you chip away at him, slowly whittling down his health until finally the menace of Shocker is destroyed and all men, women and grasshopper warriors can live in peace.


There go our noble heroes, streaking into the sunset on their bike which do, on closer inspection, totally have fins. Awesome. Thank you, Kamen Rider 1 and Kamen Rider 2. I'm sure you will be a great inspiration to Kamen Rider 3.
Kamen Rider comes close to being a really excellent little game, close enough that I was frustrated by its inability to push itself over the edge. The game's biggest flaw is undoubtedly the repetitive nature of the stages, and more variety would have gone a long way towards making this an easy recommendation, along with the addition of a few tweaks to speed up the combat and make Kamen Rider more responsive. There are some potentially exciting ideas in here, though. Transforming heroes are always fun, and the ability to select your own moves is great, but as it stands Kamen Rider will have to go down as a merely "good" game rather than a true classic of the genre. That said, I've been lying to you: the repetition isn't the worst thing about this game. The worst thing about this game is that it's making me wonder if I can pull off a flowing red scarf when, deep down, I know very well that I can't.

Another day, another poorly-timed article here at VGJunk. I could have done this months ago and surfed high atop the wave of hype for Jurassic World. Okay, so not a wave of hype, most people's reaction didn't seem to go much beyond "oh hey, a new Jurassic Park film," but a fairly strong eddy of hype at the very least. I haven't seen Jurassic World yet, although I'm sure it's about people once again not learning their lesson when it comes to getting a bunch of dinosaurs into one place and having handy human-sized snacks wandering around them. Personally, my refusal to watch Jurassic World comes from being informed that there is not, in fact, a scene where Chris Pratt dresses as a sexy lady velociraptor, Bugs Bunny style, in order to get the other raptors on his side.


Why? Why would you go back to the island. Are you hoping John Hammond is going to offer you a refund on your last trip? I mean, I presume we're playing as some characters from the original film as it says they're going "back" to the island. Maybe it's a revenge thing. Or, more likely, it's about money. Those dinosaurs represent a huge financial investment. There has to be some way to recoup that lost cash, maybe even a way that doesn't involve the grisly death of innocent people! And so, our two "heroes" - two if you're playing two-player anyway, which is a bloody good idea in this game - set out to Isla Nublar in order to shoot those dinos.


"CAUTION -Spitter," it says, and it's nice to know that I only have one type of dinosaur to worry about. I mean, if there was a chance I was going to be attacked by a tyrannosaurus then surely they'd prioritise telling me about that, right?


See, this kind of surprise could have so easily been avoided. Nothing like a nice, gentle start to ease new player into the game, huh, Sega? I can't say I blame them. Reel the punters in with the T. Rex, and then chuck in a few boring areas spent shooting boulders and icicles later, once you've got their money.


Yes, I think I could have figured that one out on my own, thank you very much. Even if I wanted to shoot somewhere else, the T. Rex's head is so big that not shooting it would require a level of marksmanship I simply do not possess.
Immediately being chased by a tyrannosaurus might seem like a needlessly brutal way to introduce the player to the game, but it does a good job of explaining the mechanics, i.e. shoot the dinosaurs in the head. Jurassic Park is a rail shooter, based around the conceit that the player character is driving around the island in one of the film's famous jeeps, and Sega's mastery of the sprite-scaling "3D" graphical effects seen in games like OutRun and Space Harrier is pushed to some of its most impressive heights in Jurassic Park, which shunts some fairly enormous multi-part spriteosauruses around the screen in a very smooth manner. An integral part of the Jurassic Park experience, and one I sadly cannot experience unless someone wants to buy me both the arcade cabinet and a bigger house to put it in, is that the original cabinet was modelled to look like the jeep's seats, and it moved around in response to the on screen-action for that extra touch of "I've been head-butted by a T. Rex" realism. The fancy cabinet makes the game much more of an experience, but can the gameplay hold up without these fancy gimmicks? I guess I'll find out.


After a while - assuming you don't lose all your health and give up, which is definitely a possibility - the tyrannosaurus manages to get his head stuck in this cave entrance while you merrily speed ahead, praising the wonders of evolution that gave you a brain bigger than your teeth.


Any celebrations are short-lived, as a deadly yet strikingly cheerful velociraptor pops up and claws your face off. I can understand his enthusiasm, I get the same expression when food is delivered to my house, too.
The cave is dark, spooky and unfortunately home to some graphical errors, because obviously I'm emulating this. It's actually supposed to be darker, with a circle of torchlight surrounding your gun's crosshair, but missing out on this admittedly quite nice effect doesn't ruin the game or anything.


Hey, raptor, get out of my way, I have to shoot all these rocks in the background before I crash into them, and because Jurassic Park uses positional guns (that is, basically a joystick that moves a cursor) rather than true lightguns, I don't have time to be dragging my reticule back and forth between lizards and stalagmites. This all raises a question about exactly what kind of firearm I'm using here: the arcade flyer says they're tranquillizer guns, but the fact they fire about ten shots a second if you hold the trigger down, shots that can bore through solid rock, makes that seem unlikely. Although, I suppose all guns are tranquillizer guns, in a sense. That raptor is going to look pretty tranquil when it's mounted above my fireplace.


Right outside the cave is a giant herd of stampeding herbivores. I know nature finds a way and all, but nature must have been finding a way every thirty seconds or so if the dinosaurs have managed to multiply to these kinds of numbers this quickly.
Of course, the only thing you can do is to mow down all these peaceful, plant-eating dinosaurs with your gun. Certainly stopping the jeep and waiting for them to pass or just driving around them isn't going to work. The only action you can take here is to drive ever onwards, pressing deep into the heart of the island as fast as your vehicle and your trigger finger will allow, blazing a trail into this prehistoric world...


...and parking your car right up a triceratops' backside. Good work, driver. What, did it just jump out in front of you or something? You've got to watch out of those lightning-fast triceratops, man.


The triceratops is understandably upset by his sudden jeep enema, and he gathers all his triceratops buddies in an attempt to smash you into paste beneath their thundering feet. Luckily their head-frill does not protect them against bullets, so score another one for the modern age.
Now, I'm not one hundred percent sure this is true, but you see how some of the triceratops are a reddish colour while others are blue? I think this is because the red ones only hurt player one, while the blue ones hurt player two. I hope that's true, because it would help to eliminate the tendency for both players to be shooting at the same target when spreading their firepower would be more useful - no matter how many times you say "okay, I'll cover the left of the screen and you cover the right" when playing a lightgun game cooperatively, you always end up drifting into each other's designated area and then some, I dunno, terrorist or what have you, sneaks through the gaps and shoots you both. In Jurassic Park, you're colour-coded! Possibly. It's a difficult theory to test, because the game is relentless. From starting the game to escaping the triceratops herd represents about five minutes of gameplay. Unrelenting, frenzied, finger-clamped-to-the-trigger gameplay without a moment's respite, as though Sega's developers made the game only for their bosses to say "this forty-minute long game is nice and all, but see if you can cram it into fifteen minutes of playtime." As a result, Jurassic Park goes at two hundred miles an hour all the time, which sounds exciting in theory but ends up just being wearying.


I'd love to keep out, but my driver is an insane person with no greater desire than to be killed by a dinosaur. The gate's already busted open, so maybe I'll get lucky and all the dinosaurs will have left?


I guess not. This enclosure is home to the dilophosaurus, the natural show-offs of the prehistoric age, and Sega must have been thanking their lucky stars that Michael Crichton took some pretty wild creative freedoms with the dilophosaurs, giving them the ability to spit poisonous goop, because what kind of arcade shooting game doesn't include enemy projectiles that you can shoot out of the air? Well, here you go, you can shoot their poison goop. You can shoot the dilophosaurs, too. What you can't do is shoot both of these things. Certainly not if you're playing alone, anyway, because there's just too much going on for you to eliminate everything that wants to harm you. I know there are some of you out there who strongly dislike lightgun games with unavoidable damage. I can understand that, you want the game to feel fair. Jurassic Park does not feel fair. It feels like having your head flushed down the toilet, except instead of water it's full of plastic dinosaur toys, so if you like to know that with enough skill you can beat a game unscathed then don't play this one.


A pictorial example: see the graceful flock of pterodactyls, these ancient rulers of the sky once more given license to soar majestically through the air, and because they're all the way over there in the distance I should have plenty of time to pick most of them off.


"Excuse me sir, but have you heard the good news about dinosaur Jesus?"


The final part of the first area - man alive, is this really only the first area? - is a swamp packed with dilophosauruses and wrecked jeeps. So many dilophosauruses. Each female dilophosaurus must lay a clutch of around forty thousand eggs at at time, which might explain why they're all so grumpy. Maybe we should have launched this mission in a couple of year's time, when the huge dinosaur population has collapsed under the weight of its unsustainability, huh?


There's no let-up in the action as you move into stage two, and even the most peaceful leaf-munchers are determined to see our heroes dead. Brachiosauruses leave their giant necks laying right across the the road, forcing your to shoot them in the face as a means of "gently encouraging" them to get out of the way. I really like these brachiosaurs, mind you. They are the stupidest, densest looking animals, real or fictional, that I have ever seen, and I used to have a pet border collie. Oh, to travel back to the Cretaceous era and hear their mighty cries of "duuuuuuuhhhh whaaaat?" echoing through the forests, what a thrill that would be!


Then you drive your jeep up a brachiosaur's tail. Somewhere at Sega HQ, a lightbulb appears over a developer's head and they quickly scrawl "The Flintstones: The GUN???" on a piece of scrap paper.


It was nice of the dinosaurs to put on an aquatic display for us, at least, and this section is the closest Jurassic Park comes to giving the player anything resembling a rest before diving straight back into the antics of the world's worst driver. Having driven through swamps, off cliffs and over dinosaurs, I'm beginning to suspect this entire game is nothing more than a covert advertisement for the power and performance of the 1992 Jeep Wrangler Sahara, the only four-wheel-drive rugged enough to survive the rigours of Dinosaur Hell Island while still providing a ride so smooth you can use it as a mobile gun platform. If you want to learn more, visit your local Jeep dealership.


Oh look, the T. Rex is back. Hello, T. Rex. Still chasing my jeep and ramming it from behind if I don't manage to shoot you in the head fast enough? Good, good, you've got to stick with what you know, don't you? You're sixty-five million years old, there's not much chance of you changing now. Okay, I'm going now. I'm sure I'll see you again soon.


More raptors now. A quartet of raptors. The Beatles of the Dinosaur world. Their hits include Lizard in the Sky with Diamonds and I Want to Eat Your Hand. I'm beginning to regret this series of jokes now that I've noticed one of the Fab Dinofour has been shot, so I'll back out if it by pointing out two things: one is that the raptors make noises that sound a lot like the noises of xenomorphs from Aliens and two, is that lava down there?


You bet your ass it is, because not content with bringing some of history's deadliest predators back to life and charging people to see them, Jurassic Park is also built on an island that is volcanically active, cementing John Hammond's place as one of the biggest psychopaths in the vast span of fiction. Were all the non-volcano islands taken, John, or is this forward planning because one day you're going to genetically engineer a colossal ape monster and hey, it's going to need a suitably dramatic stage for its fight to the death with the T. Rex?


Sega clearly shot their creative bolt early on, and the rest of the third stage consisted of such thrilling high-points as being chased, Indiana Jones-style, by a rolling boulder which was surprisingly difficult to hit despite it filling the entire bloody screen, a fall into a chasm packed with pterodactyls that played out the same as last time I fought them and the raw, unflinching excitement of shooting some more stalagmites out of the way, even though I'm sure the durable frame and and powerful engine of the new Jeep Wrangler Sahara would have made it easier to drive straight through them. I've skipped those, instead bringing you directly to the fourth and final stage. Our heroes have reached the Jurassic Park Visitor's Center. I did not think for even a moment that they would get out of their car to enter the building and, naturally, they do not. It's straight up the stairs and through the front door for a real off-road experience.


It was nice of the dinosaurs to re-hang the "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth" banner. They probably get a kick out of the irony of it.


Directly below the Visitor's Center is the this basement, where the Jurassic Park staff store all the spare jeeps and cages full of dinosaurs. Of course they do. At this point, it is not in the least bit surprising. They probably have a raptor running the till at the gift shop. Forget more sequels, I want a remake of Jurassic Park where none of the dinosaurs escape but the lawyer gets a good look around the facilities, realises what a complete fucking deathtrap the place is and shuts John Hammond down, his "genial old uncle" act wiped away as he breaks down at the failure of his life's work to meet basic safety standards.


You know I said the raptors sound like xenomorphs? Well, they can also hang from the ceiling like xenomorphs. Jurassic Park was probably being worked on at the same time as Alien 3: The Gun (they both have a 1993 copyright date) so I have to assume some developer got confused about which game he was working on. I know there were some liberties taken with the dinosaur physiology in Jurassic Park (and really I suppose they should all be covered in feathers) but I don't think even the most out-there palaeontologist would stretch to the possibility of anti-gravity dinosaurs.


Escaping out of the back of the Visitor's Center, we once again run into the tyrannosaurus. I'm getting kinda fed up of seeing the bloody thing by this point, but at least I only have to defeat it once more before the game is over.


Ah. Two T. Rexes, huh Sega? Very imaginative. I'm thrilled to be doing the same fight I've already been through twice, only in stereo.


Eventually - and rather anticlimactically - the T. Rexes slump to the ground, as though even they are bored with the whole affair. Either that or they're just very tired. They've used way more energy chasing me around than they'd regain in calories by eating me, so the whole day has been a bit of a bust for them.


Thus begins the long and arduous job of clearing up the thousands of dinosaur corpse I have left scattered across the island, a clean-up operation that will no doubt be made more challenging by the volcano erupting nearby, not that Doctors Grant and Sattler here seem to care. I don't think I was playing as the heroes of the original movie, by the way. I'm pretty sure I was one of those two faceless InGen grunts on either side, grunts who, if they had faces to make facial expressions with, would probably look at little peeved that Grant and Sattler are horning in on their photo opportunity with the T. Rex they just brought down.


As we all fly off into the sunset, I am left to reflect on a game that was impressive and disappointing in equal measure. Certainly the graphics are something worth celebrating, being as they are one of the most accomplished uses of sprite-scaling I've ever seen, and while the gameplay has its moments - you're still blasting dinosaurs at rocket speed, y'know? - there's something of a feeling of, I dunno, laziness blanketing the whole thing. Sega's utter refusal to include anything remotely resembling pacing into the game doesn't help and by the end of each playthrough I was staring to develop a headache because it's always go, go, go, and some points of the game do seem egregiously designed just to gobble up credits. There aren't really any new ideas introduced once you've driven up the brachiosaur in stage two, although that is more forgiveable when you consider the game's running time is only about fifteen minutes in total. Part of the problem is that playing Jurassic Park via emulation cannot recreate the authentic arcade experience, and with the full cabinet and the moving seats that's what this is - an experience, rather than a finely-honed game. I suspect there are those out there who would feel that this is maybe a harsh assessment, and that's fine - it's not like I had no fun at all playing it, it just wasn't 100% doing it for me. Still, to date this is the only videogame I've ever played where my vision was obscured by dinosaur snot, so it has earned its place in the history books for that alone.

Alliteration: the Action-Adventure, Starring Rowdy Romans and Gruesome Gladiatorial Grudge Matches! Not the most captivating title screen you're ever likely to see, but let's be generous and pretend it's going for a tone of sombre import rather than just being super boring.


Things are off to a tough start for Spartacus. Well, they would be. He's unlikely to start an uprising if they're keeping him in the Ritz and paying him two million denarii a year. Also I read the phrase "House of Lentulus" and immediately imagined a Roman fast-food restaurant specialising in lentil dishes. The worst fast food place imaginable, in other words.


Here is Spartacus himself, resplendant in the black executioner's hood he was famed for wearing, ready to be lead out into the arena from which he may not return. If I were you, Spartacus, I'd start my escape now rather than after the fight to the death. There's only one guard, and he's right there. You have a sword and shield. He has a whip. If you jump the guard, he will be able to whip you once, at most, before you decapitate him. I can only put Spartacus' decision to not follow this course of action down to his desire to provide entertainment to the regular citizens of Rome, who have paid their hard-earned money for a seat at today's deathmatch. Spartacus is a performer first and a champion against tyranny second, folks.


See, this is an example of the importance of punctuation, because you could read the above sentence and interpret it to mean that Crassus is fighting gladiators, occasionally taking a glance over at Spartacus to see how he's doing.


That is not the case, of course. Crassus is up at the back of the amphitheatre, watching the action from the ancient equivalent of a director's box whilst snuggled up in a comfy purple dressing gown. No, it's Spartacus that's doing the fighting, and here we see him going toe-to-toe with another gladiator. The opposing gladiator's weapon is presumably meant to be a trident, but looks more like an oversized novelty table fork. If the mighty Neptune, lord of the sea, came bursting through the swirling foam carrying that thing he'd be immediately laughed back to his undersea grotto, and rightly so. Anyway, Spartacus the Swordslayer is a one-on-one fighting game, and because it's on the Commodore 64 I reckon I've already got a decent idea of the basic controls: move the joystick to walk around, move the joystick while holding the fire button down to attack.


Yes, that seems to be working for me. Not working well, as you can see by Spartacus' ongoing disembowelment in the image above, but my rough idea of what the controls would be turned out to be mostly accurate. I was a little thrown by moving the stick up and away causing Spartacus to jump towards his opponent. Maybe it was meant to take the gladiator by surprise. I definitely took me by surprise. Other than that, you can waddle slowly back or forwards, block attacks with your shield and swing your weapon either high, low or somewhere in the middle in an attempt to hit the other fighter the six or so times it takes for you to claim victory. Got all that? Good. Now forget it completely, because Spartacus the Swordslayer is a barely-functional mess of jagged sprites that might be be interacting with each other, but if they are then it's according to the strange and unfathomable laws of a universe beyond the ken of mortal man. Collision detection? Yes, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Instead you're witness to sights like Spartacus crouching down and jamming his sword into the gladiator's nethers so often and with such venom that you begin to worry for his mental state with no result, only for the gladiator to waft his comedy fork in the rough vicinity of Spartacus' head, taking a chunk of the hero's health bar with it.


I somehow managed to triumph, though it was definitely more to do with luck than sound planning. I've been playing Spartacus the Swordslayer for about three minutes and it has already revealed itself as a game where sound planning will get you nowhere, except maybe into a big book of hilarious tales of the medical profession as "the man with a fork in the wrong orifice." The crowd aren't happy about Spartacus winning, though, and so Brutus is sent in to teach me a lesson.


Brutus is the same as the other guy, except his hat is grey. No wonder he's the fan's favourite.
In an effort at fair reportage, I gave the fighting another chance and maybe it's not quite as terrible as I made it sound. Don't get me wrong, it's still very, very bad, but at least you can move around and Spartacus is responsive enough that you might even be able to block an attack by raising your shield if you see it coming in time. The thing is, if you're holding your shield up (or holding your sword-arm behind your head, ready to release your strike, which is something else you can do that's sort of interesting) and don't move, the computer player won't move either. You can paralyse your opponent by lifting your arm up and merely threatening to strike, like a schoolyard bully. There's no advantage to be gained from this, because the other fighter starts moving as soon as you do, but it's a strange quirk and it's always interesting to see a fighting game approach Rise of the Robots levels of baffling mechanics.


I am not an ambitious man. In fact, I have been told several times that my lack of desire for self-improvement is my most severe character flaw. However, I now have a great desire to become emperor of somewhere, anywhere, because I realise that having the ability to command an eagle to attack people who displease me is all I want from life and it's something you can only get away with if you're an emperor, or a tribal warlord at the very least.


The eagle is a formidable opponent indeed, and the previous two fights must have really taken it out of Spartacus because while in those battles he could take a trident to the face several times and still come out swinging, the eagle's talons will cause instant death should they so much as ruffle Spartacus's hood. Maybe it's a venomous eagle, that sounds like something a Roman statesman would have access to.
As for slaying the terrible beast, it's a matter of holding your nerve. The eagle flies towards you along a path that puts it in perfect stabbing range, but if you swing to early the eagle will retreat out of reach. So, you must wait until the eagle is close - close enough that in the movie version of Spartacus the Swordslayer it would be the moment where the stars are about to kiss before something interrupts them - and then swing your sword. The eagle won't be able to get out of the way quickly enough to avoid death. Crassus will now be very angry. I imagine he had an emotional attachment to his eagle that he did not feel for his gladiators.


Okay, "Oblivius" was a joke name for a particularly dopey centurion in an Asterix comic, right?


That's, erm, quite the physique you've got there, Oblivius. Very chunky. The Ranger from Quake would like his helmet back, though.
More fighting for Spartacus, then, against an opponent who looks menacing despite his pink armour but is basically the same as the two gladiators you already defeated. He's a little more aggressive, maybe, but because there's no real strategy you can employ beyond "wave your sword around like a raver's glow-sticks and hope the collision detection is paying attention" it makes this fight, and all the fights in the game, very samey.


Deadly arrows, huh? That's okay, I've got a shield and as long as the arrows aren't being carried by eagles I'll just deflect the projectiles and make my escape!


Deflecting these arrows would be a lot easier if I could see the bloody things. There's one heading for Spartacus' ankle right now: it's difficult to see in the screenshot, but in the interests of fairness I should mention they're a lot easier to see in motion. Sadly, Spartacus cannot lower his shield far enough to block arrows travelling an inch above the ground - arrows that must have been fired by a Roman soldier lying on his side in the dirt with his bow held horizontally in a bold new take on archery - so you have to jump over them. Hop over the low arrows, duck under the high ones and block the rest with your shield. It's all very simple, especially because you're given an awful lot of leeway when jumping over the low arrows. As long as you jump at some point while they're on the screen, you'll be given credit for effort and Spartacus will remain unharmed as the arrow flies through his feet.
Dodging the arrows is simple enough, so I stood there and did it for a while. It just kept happening, volley after volley of arrows bouncing harmlessly off Spartacus' shield as the newly-wealthy fletchers of ancient Rome rubbed their hands together with glee. "Maybe I have to get to the other side of the screen", I thought, and so I walked over there... and kept walking right off the edge of the screen. The stage didn't end, though. Spartacus was still there, he'd just moved out of my field of vision, as evidenced by the gradual erasure of his health bar and the sound of arrows thwacking into his unarmoured flesh. I moved Spartacus back onto the screen, where I could see him, blocked a few more arrows then walked off the edge of the screen again, upon which the stage abruptly ended. In conclusion, I have no idea what just happened but I'm glad that it's over.


Another fight against another legionnaire, an encounter that I was having trouble with until I was down to my last health point. Then the legionnaire suddenly decided that his cataracts needed to be removed right now, and he wouldn't get a better opportunity for a bit of self-surgery than while I was standing there with my sword raised to face height. A man walks into a bar. Ouch! It wasn't a bar, it was a razor-sharp sword steeped in the blood of his comrades! Frankly, Spartacus deserves a bit of luck.


Eagles: the member of the animal kingdom with the strongest lust for revenge.


It's exactly the same as the other eagle fight. Not much variation in eagle combat tactics, when you can fly and have rending talons but not opposable thumbs, there's not much else you can do. Next time I see someone complaining about modern games all being brown and grey, I think I'll sit them down with Spartacus the Swordslayer. There's more brown and grey in this one than in an elephant enclosure during an outbreak of dysentery.


Man, the universe really has it in for poor old Spartacus, huh? What was he supposed to do, grab the eagle from behind like Solid Snake and silently slit its throat?


"Wait, was that the cry of a dying eagle? Only an eagle being put to the sword by a fleeing slave would make such a noise, I had better investigate to ensure the continued safety of the Roman Empire. Ave Caesar!"
I'll give Spartacus the Swordslayer this, it does have some impressively large sprites moving around and clashing blades, even if those sprites don't quite resemble humans. Humans that have spent generations breeding on a planet with much higher gravity than Earth, maybe. Chunky Astro-Romans. Wait, wasn't that the setting for an episode of Star Trek?


It's Grand Theft Spartacus, and his wanted level is up to five stars! Time to make a hasty exit, then.


It's a whole new type of gameplay for the final stage, and not one that is particularly welcome - it's the classic waggle-the-joystick-back-and-forth action so prevalent in the sports games of the era, good for wrecking joysticks and damaging wrists but not, it must be said, very conducive to fun. Moving the joystick left and right makes Spartacus' chariot move, sort of - it's all very herky-jerky, and if there's a specific rhythm needed to get him really motoring I couldn't find it. The Romans are throwing spears at you the whole time, and if you move too slowly a spear will be thrown that you can't avoid, slamming into Spartacus's back and killing him. If you are going fast enough, you just have to watch out for the spears at head-height, which you can duck under.


This is not a good game - it's a pretty terrible game, in fact - but my time spent playing it was all made worthwhile by seeing Spartacus ducking in his chariot, his head barely peeking out. It's just inexplicably amusing to me. I think it might be because he's wearing that goddamn executioner's hood, as though the Romans have no idea he's Spartacus and are chasing him because anyone dressed like that must be up to no good. That, and he's wanted on multiple counts of eagleicide.
The chariot escape is a fittingly tedious end to the game that suddenly screeches to a halt when the game feels like it rather than because of anything the player did, and with that Spartacus the Swordslayer is over.


Yes, Spartacus lives to fight another day... until around 71BC, where his uprising was thoroughly destroyed by the Roman forces and thousands of his followers were crucified along the roads of the Empire. Well, it's always good to end on a cheerful note, isn't it? Except this isn't the end, there's a little bit more of an ending sequence that the version of the game I was playing refused to display. Not to worry, I managed to find it on the internet. I wouldn't want you to miss out on the thrilling conclusion, now would I?


Spartacus lives in the woods now, alone and with only the concept of freedom to keep him warm. And the fire, that too. The fire can also be used to cook the eagle carcasses he's gathered, so he won't go hungry tonight!
I'll say it again, Spartacus the Swordslayer is a bad game, a boring game, a game that doesn't really work... yet I can't bring myself to hate it. Mostly that's because hating a videogame is such a colossal waste of energy, but also because this whole game was made by one person who was trying to make an interesting game, and therefore it doesn't summon the ire that a heartless licensed cash-in would. I'm sure there are some C64 fighting games that aren't an awkward mess to play, although IK+ is the only one that springs to mind, and if Spartacus the Swordslayer's combat was a little better then it could have been an interesting take on the genre. Oh well, at least I can add "betrayed by the death cries of an eagle" to the list of wonderful things videogames have let me experience over the years.

Look at this guy, so pumped up with hot-blooded fighting energy that his forehead has exploded. You know you're ready for the brutal rigours of street combat once you start the day with a violent aneurysm.
Street Smart, then. Originally an arcade game by SNK, I've instead elected to write about the Megadrive port, which is slightly different than its arcade ancestor. Why? No real reason. I was trying out a few Megadrive games a while ago and I ended up playing more of Street Smart than I intended, which is hopefully a sign that it's not awful. It is nice, every now and then, to play a game that isn't awful, you know?


There's no messing about with Street Smart, and after this snippet of information about your first opponent - it comes as little surprise that Street Smart is based on an arcade game once you see that even your very first challenger has significantly higher stats that you - you're thrown straight into the action. My target is a blonde man who's wearing no shoes but, rather unsportingly, has a pair of knuckle dusters. Not to worry, I'm sure my Karate Man will be able to handle it with his karate. I'm not being facetious, either: his name is given as Karate Man in the game's manual. You don't get to be called Karate Man unless you're pretty damn good at karate.


It's fighting time, and the Megadrive's three-button pad means Street Smart can offer a button each for punch, kick and jump, I know what you're thinking: "hey, that means jumping kicks!" and yes, you can perform a jumping kick. However, as much as it pains me to throw a metaphorical bucket of cold water on your dreams of hopping to victory with your foot outstretched, the jumping kick in this game is next to useless. I don't think I ever managed to land a single jumping kick the whole time I was playing Street Smart, not even when the intersecting positions of the combatant's sprites suggested Karate Man could have rooted out his opponent's earwax with his big toe. The lack of a proper jumping kick means that Street Smart would lose a few points if I gave out numerical judgements at the end of these articles, but I don't, so instead I'll just tell you to stick with your ordinary punches and kicks.


Those attacks are more than capable of handing the Karate Man victory, mind you, especially as Bobby here doesn't have much in his repertoire beyond "walk forwards and punch." You can keep him at bay with the range afforded by your standing kick, maybe give him a quick elbow if he gets too close. Once Bobby decides he's ready to attack, press punch and kick together to make the Karate Man somersault backwards and (hopefully, some of these guys have very long limbs) out of harm's way. That's the basic flow of Street Smart's combat: get a few hits in, then move away, repeat. It certainly works against Bobby, and it shouldn't take you long to defeat him.


After the fight, you're given a chance to spend some bonus points, which will upgrade your stats. I will be putting them all into power, because I can already float like a butterfly and now I need to sting like a bee. The "sting like a bee" part is particularly apt, given that I have to sting about three hundred times before I can kill someone unless they happen to be severely allergic to karate. It might have been prudent to put some of these points in defence, but my own arrogance assures me I will be hitting much more often than getting hit and so I will upgrade my defence later, once I am strong enough to kick through solid steel.


I won a trophy already? Nice. It'll look good on my Karate Mantlepiece, and I'll look forward to explaining to my Karate Son that I won it for battering a man into a coma in the middle of a San Francisco street while a baying crowd urged me on. The lady in the Treco swimsuit is doing a good job of looking genuinely pleased at having to pose with this violent thug. A career as an accomplished actress may lie in her future. Her hair is exploding off her forehead, too. It is the fashion amongst those on the underground street-fighting scene, apparently.


Of course, you can't have street fighting without illicit gambling, so here you go! What's notable about Street Smart's gambling is that you can bet against yourself and throw the fight to win... not money, because you can't buy anything with it, so... points? You can gamble for points. It's a nice idea, but I've never been one to care about high score and I'll be happy if I can just, you know, beat everyone up using karate. So, put it all on Karate Man, and hope that the odds reflect the gulf in stats between me and my opponent!


This is Sam. Hello, Sam. Now get out of my way so I can concentrate on trying to read what it says on those posters in the background. THE LHTATHC? Well, that's no help, is it? While we're looking at the background, let's trying figure out who the parents of these children are, so we can call Social Services and tell them that they brought their kids to an unregulated blood-sport.


Part of my refusal to take Sam seriously is because he mostly attacks with his arse. Ah, the old flying butt press. I'm sorry, friend, you're no Rainbow Mika and the noble and ancient art of karate has a thousand ways of countering your attempts to smother me with your buttocks. The most expedient of these is walking away from you. It is a tactic I'm sure you have had used against you many, many times in your life.


The Treco lady has changed her swimsuit, but unfortunately has not sorted out her hair, which still looks like a tiny pasta explosion. I thought that Karate Man was winking in the previous victory screen, but now I'm starting to suspect he's got a Popeye-like facial deformity. He also looks as though he doesn't have any teeth. Street Smart is not a good advert for the healthful, nurturing power of karate as an exercise regime, is it?


Yeah, nice try, "Mike" but you are quite clearly Santa Claus moonlighting as a pro wrestler. Jolly Old Saint Nick has to do something to occupy his time during the rest of the year, and what he chose to do was crack skulls. Only trouble is he has to catch the Karate Man first, and I'm getting quite good at moving out of the way. The trick is to not get lured into a slugfest. Street Smart's decision to allow the player to move up and down as well and left and right may make it feel more like a side-scrolling beat-em-up than a one-on-one fighter, but there are no combos here, no Final Fight-style flurries of punches that can be executed by repeatedly tapping the attack button, so you can't always pin enemies in place effectively.


You'll be mostly relying on the kick. If you're lucky and you get the timing down, you can hit the enemy multiple times by moving forwards and kicking, although eventually you'll hit the edge of the arena and have to stop. The thing is, you can still move while you're kicking - and this is a big roundhouse kick we're talking about - so Karate Man spends most of each fight sliding around on one foot like a ballerina that's stepped on a rollerskate. It looks... it looks pretty goofy, honestly, but then this is a goofy game and I like goofy things. Case in point: that poster for BIG AMELICA. I never knew Sergeant Slaughter had a twin brother.


The next fight is against a man called Brown, and it's difficult to say anything about him because he's the same as Sam. It's a little worrying that the recycling of characters has started already, although while the crowd is made up of the same people I like that they've been given a beach-appropriate makeover. I think they're the exact same people, too, and they follow the underground fighting tournament around the nation like Grateful Dead fans with better taste in music.


Hey, the Treco lady got her hair cut! It suits you, very nice. Karate Man continues to look like an extremely drunk person who tripped on their way out of a pub and immediately sprang to their feet in an attempt to show everyone that they're not hurt and are totally okay to drive, c'mon Phil, give me my keys back.


My concern at a potential lack of new characters was put to rest by Larry. Larry is certainly... unique. Larry is also, I am convinced, not entirely human. Those long arms adapted for paddling, the abs that look more like gills, the streamlined, beaky (and disturbingly gaunt) face - Larry is a fish-man, a gill-beast, half-human-half-halibut. That's why we're fighting on a boat, Karate Man had to hire a steamer just to reach Larry's natural habitat of the Sargasso Sea.


Being hauled up from the briny deep has played havoc with Larry's senses, as you can see by his reaction to me standing still. Sadly, in Street Smart you don't win if you have more health than your opponent when the timer runs out, otherwise I could have used this to my advantage. I never knew that a fish's vision is based on movement like a T. Rex. Every day's a schoolday and all that.


A two-versus-one match? Scandalous! I expected more honour from the street fighters of the world. What is the point of victory if it cannot be achieved without cheating? Where is the glory in defeating your foe by burying them under an avalanche of shoeless, tank-top-wearing degenerates? I shall be taking my grievances to the Council of Arbitration for Bar-Room Brawls, Street Fights and Gutter Punch-Ups, but not before I have bested Max and Jone... wait, Jone? Not Jones? Okay, whatever, not before I have bested Max and Jone in pugilistic combat! Is it still called pugilism if you're using your feet to perform amateur yet very enthusiastic dentistry on those that would challenge you? I don't know! I'm on a roll here, just go with it!


The unfair match-ups continue in the next fight, wrasslin' Santa's transformation from Father Christmas into Hulk Hogan is almost complete. The key to victory in these two-on-one fights is to put as much distance between you and your opponents as possible and hope that one of them comes at you while the other hangs back, a tactic that I have made rather a hash of in the above screenshot. Sure, I'm about to land a kick in Santa No. 1's bowlful of jelly, but the other one is going for the flying elbow drop and when it connects that will be two chunks of my health bar gone in an instant. Even once you start putting your bonus points into defence, your foes are always much more powerful than the Karate Man and so the hit-and-run tactics become ever more necessary. Street Smart requires a surprising amount of patience on that front, more than you might expect for this kind of game, and while I'm not saying it's a revelatory experience or anything it does make for an interesting change of pace.


I wonder whether Karate Man feels like he's gotten in over his head. He probably wasn't expecting to be fighting a ten-foot-tall golem of pain with murder in its eyes and one arm wrapped in a bin-bag. What's with the bin-bag arm, Tommy? Did I interrupt you taking your dog for a walk and that's how you're going to pick up his mess?
Tommy's not just big, he also has the power to extend his hitboxes into the space that he doesn't physically occupy. He can hit you without hitting you. Whoa, man, that's deep. It'd be more of a problem if this wonky hit detection wasn't shared by every other fighter in the game - I've had time to get used to it by now - but because Tommy hits like a dump-truck that's been dropped from orbit, evasion become a greater priority than ever before.


"Mr. President, I must inform you that there is an illegal street brawl taking place on the White House lawn."
"Well, what are you waiting for? Have the Secret Service drag a chair up to the roof, then call the Army and tell them to send me the best binoculars they have right away."
"Sir, yes, sir!"


Karate Man's final opponent is Mr. K, another extremely large gentleman who I assumed was a boxer until he started kicking me. A kickboxer, then, and also presumably a crime boss. You don't get a name like "Mr. K" without being a crime boss, or maybe a mascot character for a multivitamin supplement.


Something else that points to Mr. K being a crime boss and not just an unusually large gorilla that was shaved and kitted out with boxing gloves is that his stage is a zeppelin. A glass-bottomed zeppelin, no less. It must be a zeppelin, it moves too slowly to be an aeroplane but it's got what looks like engines on the outside so it's not just a huge hot air balloon. Fightin' a giant monster-man on a dirigible. We've come a long way from fighting on the mean streets, Karate Man, but can you overcome your biggest foe yet? Yes, he can, because it turns out that Mr. K is kind of a chump. If you keep kicking and moving forwards, always sliding towards Mr. K using the one-footed technique mentioned earlier, you can boot him from one end of the stage all the way to the other without him retaliating. Wait for Mr. K to move out of the corner a little - weirdly, your opponents can move further horizontally than you can - then jump behind him and repeat the process. The biggest risk is running out of time, which is what happened to me the first time I fought Mr. K, but not to worry: I had an extra life, the timer reset and I kicked and kicked and kicked until victory was mine. I guess Mr. K is short for Mr. Kick Me In The Face Please.


What, you didn't think a life spent gambling on and participating in illegal bare-knuckle fighting was going to end well, did you? It's not really a viable career plan, and Street Smart knows this - the whole game was a lesson about making better life choices, complete with a sarcastic "congratulations!" message. Congratulations, you're alone, homeless and broke. What did you expect?
No, sadly that's not the case, although that would have been amazing. What has happened here is that I bet all my money of myself to win, and I lost a life because I ran out of time. Even though I got straight back up and beat Mr. K, that still counts as a loss in the bookies' eyes, so I ended the game with zero dollars and zero cents.


I went back and did it again, this time making sure that the kick train to Knockout Town left the station on time and fully fuelled. Karate Man has become incredibly wealthy (for some reason he has decided to convert a portion of his wealth into Scrooge McDuck-style gold coins) and now all the ladies want him. It's probably the sunglasses. I am honestly disappointed that there isn't just the one "your lifestyle is terrible, this will only end badly" ending. Apparently there's also a third ending for when you finish the game with some cash, showing that Karate Man has enough money to buy a car but not enough to attract more than one woman and certainly not enough to think about filling a vault with gold coins so he can use it as a swimming pool.


Oh, and one last thing: there's a two-player mode, although unlike the arcade version you can't team up with a friend but instead have to take it in turns. There's a completely different character for player two, though! He's go a different moveset and everything, or at least they look different. They're still just punch, kick and jump. It's strange that you can't choose between them when you're playing in single-player, though.


When I look back at how I've described Street Smart here, I seem to be painting a rather dismal picture. Plenty of cloned enemies, bad hit detection, limited moveset, occasionally sub-headless-chicken levels of AI... and all those things are true, but I still enjoyed Street Smart for reasons I can't adequately explain. The simplicity of the premise helps. It's nice every now and then to play a game that boils down to "hit everyone a lot." I like the graphics, and the gameplay is mostly smooth although hardly outstanding. It's just one of those things, I guess. I think, deep down, I admire the purity of playing as a karate man called Karate Man.

Yes, they're back from the sewers, leaving a trails of filth behind them and cloaked in the indescribable stench of creatures that live in human effluent and only eat pizza! What diseases do they have? Science doesn't know, but they're definitely full of them!


The turtle brothers gather together for a family snapshot, all of them trying to look as serious and intense as you can when you're a mutant reptile. Fortunately the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are so well known - and are still the subject of new TV shows and movies to this day - that I don't have to explain who they are. We've all grown up with some iteration of the antics of Lennyardo, Micky D'Angelo, Don E. Tellow and Raff, their characters and catchphrases engraved into our hearts and, sometimes, onto our lunchboxes. This particular TMNT game is based on the original cartoon series, so do not expect any of the later TMNT series' slightly darker edge to come through. The closest the first cartoon Turtles got to a dark edge was Raphael telling someone to go suck a lemon.


Pick a turtle, any turtle. It doesn't really matter which, they're all identical aside from the length of their weapons, he says as the Innuendo Police pull up in front of VGJunk Towers. Raphael's sai have a short range, Donatello's mighty and definitely ninja-appropriate stick has a long range but slightly slower attack speed and Michelangelo and Leonardo are somewhere in the middle. Nice and generic, that's Leonardo. He doesn't have Michelangelo's party-dude persona to make him interesting, either. Speaking of Michelangelo, I picked him for the first stage, probably due to lingering resentment that his nunchaku were censored in the UK broadcasts of the cartoon. I spent enough money on TMNT merchandise as a kid to feel that I'm owed these nunchucks, all right?


There's no plot revealed at the start of the game, so those of us without the manual will just have to assume that April O'Neil has been kidnapped. It seems like a pretty safe bet. Anyway, the gameplay: Back From the Sewers is a single-plane side-scrolling beat-em-up with the odd novelty stage thrown in to mix things up, and I'll get right to the ugly truth - this is an extremely shallow and limited game. You can jump and attack, plus the requisite jumping kick which isn't always that useful but is at least a damn sight better than the one in Street Smart. Your chosen turtle lumbers around the screen sluggishly enough to suggest that maybe the thrill has gone out of rescuing April O'Neil and they'd rather be sitting in their underground lair, eating pizza and counting their vast Michael Bay-inflated fortunes. Foot Soldiers - who are both footsoldiers and soldiers of the villainous Foot Clan, and also robots - walk onto the screen just as slowly. You poke the Foot Soldiers with your weapon and they explode, you walk forward a short distance and do it again. Sometimes the Foot Soldiers are hanging from the wall or firing guns or sliding at you, but on the whole it's the same thing repeated, and repeated a lot.


This Foot Soldier is a traitor, a Judas, a backstabbing cur who will burn in the lowest pits of Robot Hell for his efforts to supply the turtles with health-restoring pizza. Michelangelo will go to a slightly higher rung of Turtle Hell for mercilessly destroying the Foot Soldier who was only trying to help him.


Once you're out of the sewers, the turtles' usual desire to remain hidden and unseen by the general populace now rendered moot by every living human having deserted New York, the game tries to stretch itself a little with multi-level areas and Foot Soldiers that attack by throwing manhole covers at you. They are not exactly thrilling additions to the combat. I'm trying to to get too negative too soon on this one, but I can't help but feel it's lacking that certain spark. The limitations of the Game Boy hardware don't help, and I do wonder if the slow movement speed of, well, everything in the game was an attempt to mitigate the blurring effects of motion on the Game Boy screen, but mostly I think I'm comparing it to Konami's other TMNT beat-em-ups. That's patently not fair, but it's a difficult comparison to avoid when so many aspects of this game are lifted from the TMNT arcade brawlers, like the (spoilers) upcoming skating sections and the ability to fall into open drains complete with "who turned out the lights?!" text bubble.


One thing I can't fault are the game's looks. Big, chunky sprites that look just like the TMNT action figures of the time with just a twist of a Japanese manga aesthetic, they capture the feel of the show remarkably well. Then there's the soundtrack, which is probably the best thing about the game, or at least the part of Back From the Sewers that I can recommend wholeheartedly. It's heavily based around the cartoon's theme song in large part, which is no bad thing considering the TMNT theme is a sharpened spike of pure hummability thrust deep into the brain of anyone who's ever heard it. Here, check out this theme from stage three.


Pretty great, but hardly surprising given that Konami's TMNT games include some of the best videogame music of the period.


Back to the game, and Master Splinter pops out of a window, throws a whole pizza on the ground and says "Eat that floor-pizza! Get down on your creepy three-fingered hands and knees and eat it like the animal you are!" He doesn't say it out loud, but he'd definitely saying it with his eyes. Splinter hates himself, you see, he hates what he has become, he hates having to work in a turtles-themed pizzeria that apparently the heroes in a half-shell own and operate. He's a distinguished ninja master, not Papa John.


Splinter's pizza bonanza was a hint that a boss would be appearing soon, and so it proves in the warty and stunningly unintelligent form of Rocksteady. Part man, part rhino, yet somehow able to project enough competence that Shredder trusts him with a gun, Rocksteady represents a wild upswing in Back to the Sewers' difficulty level. It's not that he's particularly challenging to defeat, it's that the entire first stage was so monotonous and simplistic that by the time you reach Rocksteady you've been lulled into a strange torpor and having to pay attention in order to proceed comes as a shock.
Rocksteady mostly attacks by firing his gun and jump at you, so you can negate his attacks by jumping over his bullets and walking under him when he jumps. However, this simple pattern is complicated by the Foot Soldier in the windows above, who joins in by trying to drop flowerpots on your head while you fight. That's some real martial arts training you got there, buddy. Learn that at Ninja Academy, did you?


With Rocksteady out of the way, the turtles can indulge in a Bonus Game, which will almost certainly be pizza themed. I hope the bonus game invoves trying to cram as much pizza into your fat face as possible while simultaneously pushing your feelings of shame deep, deep down inside of you. I'd like the opportunity to put my years of practise to use.


That's sort of how it works - pizzas appear at random points around the screen, and you have to dash around and collect as many as you can. My top tip: you can collect the pizzas by kicking them, which means less time spent slowly walking over to them. Do not try this in real life. Your pizza delivery person will not thank you for it.


I thought I'd take Leonardo out for the next stage. Well, I should probably give him a chance. It's only a bit of forced-scrolling skateboarding action. You can't even fall off the skateboard! Just kick or avoid the Foot Soldiers, how hard can it be?


This is why no-one likes you, Leonardo.


Donatello is making a much better fist of the skateboarding section, even though he's riding a skateboard so tiny I suspect he's stolen it from the most radical and gnarly Prince of the Elf-Folk, and this stage is a nice change of pace from the one-note combat of the first level. It's sometimes a little difficult to tell where you'll be safe from the Foot Soldiers' gunfire, especially the ones in the flying machines, and that's a common theme throughout the game, but mostly it's enjoyable enough.


Bebop is waiting at the end of the highway to challenge you to a boss fight, which is to be expected. You can't have Rocksteady without Bebop. It'd be like Laurel without Hardy, Shaggy without Scooby, Donald Trump without the tiny alien that pilots him from inside in an attempt to undermine the credibility of Earth's governmental systems. There are two things I love about this fight with Bebop, which is otherwise fairly similar to the fight against Rocksteady: one is that his sprite is fantastic, immediately recognisible and nicely animated. The other is that one of his favoured moves is putting his boot right up your turtle's arse. I admire the simplicity of it.


But wait, what's this? After beating Bebop but before moving on to the next stage, I was thrown into the "Rescue Game," in which I faced off against a giant robot policeman. The policebot's name is REX-1. If you've read the Robo Army article, you may remember me mentioning REX-1 in there. I don't know why he's fighting on the side of evil now, although I suppose from his perspective he isn't: the turtles must have committed some crimes for which they must be punished by the law. At the very least, I can't imagine they pay any taxes. So, you have to fight REX-1, and it's quite a challenge. He has a plethora of projectile attacks and the ability to jump on you, plus if you get close enough to hit him, fifty percent of the time he'll just hit you right back. Things are complicated by the fact you don't have a life bar in this fight but rather a timer, and each hit from REX-1 reduces your remaining time. The best way to go about this is to patiently wait at the left-hand side of the screen, avoid the boss' projectiles until he moves a little closer and then get him with the very tip of a jumping kick, which should keep you out of harm's way due to its increased range. If you can do that consistently without ever getting hit you should have just enough time to beat him.


If you win, you can rescue a captured turtle and return them to playable status, making this the game's "lives" system. Once all the turtles are captured it's game over, and freeing one is like finding an extra life. As I'm here and I've already beaten the boss, I should probably let Leonardo out of his cell. He's lucky this isn't The Crystal Maze, I don't think I'd bother spending a crystal to set him free.


Onward to stage three, which takes place in a construction site packed with Foot Soldiers and Mousers, small bipedal robots developed with the sole aim of biting things. Science advanced enough to build a mechanical chomping machine but didn't stop to consider whether it should. The stage is also enlivened by having certain ceiling beams that you can grab hold of and hang from, or use to propel yourself upwards to the platform above. If doesn't change the gameplay all that much - it still has a very stop-start feeling as you inch forwards trying to activate as few enemies as possible at once - but after the first stage was almost entirely flat, level planes it's nice to have even a little freedom of movement. I'm less impressed with these oil drums. They're included because it is Videogame Law that every beat-em-up must include oil drums, but they block your path and you can't kick them out of the way or throw them at the Foot Clan. What kind of self-respecting beat-em-up hero can't smash an oil barrel? There might be pizza hiding under there! On the other hand, given how the turtles got mutated in the first place they're probably wary of unlabelled chemical containers. Okay, you get a pass on this one.


The boss of the construction yard - no, not, like, the foreman or whatever, but the villain waiting at the end - is Krang, the hideous pink brain-blob and Shredder's boss. Krang has done what all disembodied brains, as well as those of us with perfectly functional bodies, longs to do and has built a bipedal mechanized death-suit for eliminating his foes. Good for you, Krang. Raphael regards the mecha-Krang with smug contempt, because that is Raphael's default setting, although his smugness was quickly wiped away once Krang started shooting him. Yes, Krang is another boss that attacks by firing a gun and jumping around. You might be thinking that maybe the Foot Clan should try some different tactics because these ones clearly aren't working, but it's perfectly in keeping with the show. Shredder keeps sending Bebop and Rocksteady after the turtles, after all.


Because there are no turtles currently in captivity, between stages I get to try another bonus game. It works the same as the other bonus game, except in this instance half of the available platforms are covered in painful spikes. At this point, you have to accept that you've gone beyond merely liking pizza and into full-blown pizza addiction.


Stage four sees your chosen turtle chasing Shredder's underground drill-machine through the tunnels it has created, with Shredder apparently kicking Foot Soldiers and flamethrower out the back of his ride every half a yard in order to cover his escape with a blanket of awkward, dull combat. Konami have increased the difficulty level by means of cramming more enemies into each area and having traps designed to activate just as the rhythm of your movements takes you into their path. On paper that's fine, overconfidence should be punished and forcing players to slow down and pay attention to their surroundings is a perfectly valid design decision... but the rest of Back From the Sewers was already a juddery, tippy-toe kind of experience and the addition of having to wait for time flame-jets is not making it any more dynamic.


The collision detection isn't helping, either. I seem to have been complaining about hit detection in a lot of games I've written about recently, so I'm sorry to bore you with repetition but it does hamper a game when there's no consistency in what will or won't harm you, especially a game like Back From the Sewer where there are a surprising amount of very accurate movements needed to avoid projectiles and enemies. For example, see the screenshot above. This rolling boulder will hurt Raphael...


...while this boulder will not, despite it clearly touching our amphibious hero. Part of the problem stems from the game's large sprites. They may look very nice, but being so big leave you very little room to manoeuvre and you end up feeling like a regular, non-ninjitsu-trained turtle. My solution, one which I feel would have improved the entire game, would have been to make everything a little smaller. You'd have more space to move around, and more of the screen being visible would have made planning your attacks an option, rather than having to respond to enemies that can appear right next to you at the edge of the screen without warning.


There's a miniboss half-way through the tunnel, an alien being that resembles the alien from that movie franchise about aliens, you know, what's it called? Oh, never mind, let's just enjoy a boss that doesn't have the same attack pattern as all the others - instead, it hides underwater before bursting out and trying to slice your face off with its claws. Not a bad strategy, all things considered, and I did struggle to get its patterns committed to memory. This monster does appear in the cartoon, and it represents Shredder's attempts at psychological warfare: starting out as an egg that resembles a meatball, Shredder tries to place them on the turtles' pizza knowing that when reheated in a microwave the eggs will hatch into huge, slavering star-beasts. That's right, he tries to turn pizza against the turtles, an act of shocking mental cruelty that cements Shredder's place as one of the all-time most deranged cartoon villains. Of course, Shredder is also a whining, incompetent idiot, so his plan doesn't work.


Oh, hello Shredder. I was just talking about you. Using the jumping kicks, are you? I see you've read my other beat-em-up articles. It doesn't seem to be doing you much good, though, you keep missing me with your kicks but landing right next to me, where I easily stab you with my sai. Turtle Power!


With Shredder being soundly defeated, you might think Back From the Sewers is over, but you'd be wrong. Shredder runs away, but not before shaking his fist at me in a manner that manages to be both curmudgeonly and really camp at the same time.


The next stage begins with Splinter flying the Turtle Blimp towards the Foot Clan's arrangement of hovering platforms while you cling to the underside, so I take back anything negative I've said about this game. Well, I've got one criticism left - why can't I play as Splinter? Is he too much of a radical rat for me to handle? He clearly knows what he's doing, let him get out there and clobber some villains with his stick.


A much more open and expansive stage, this one has you climbing between small platforms while avoiding gun turrets and aerial bombardments. It's good to be out of the cramped sewer tunnels, and interestingly the platforms seem to form an infinite vertical loop: you can fall, but you can't fall off the bottom of the stage and die or anything, and if you keep climbing upwards the platforms you pass will start to repeat themselves. I'm not sure if it's purely moving to the right that triggers progress or if there's some other factor that determines whether you can escape from this gravity-defying labyrinth, but it seemed to take a very long time to get where I was going.


Where I was going turned out to be this rooftop, the arena for a battle with half-man-half-fly mutant Baxter Stockman. Good old Baxter Stockman, source of much childhood anxiety after I watched the episode where Krang gets fed up of him and decides to put him in the disintegrator. I was not expecting to see a TMNT villain flippantly murder someone by erasing them from existence in what looked like a giant microwave. Obviously it didn't work out like that, and Stockman was fused with a fly that followed him into the disintegrator. That's kind of a shitty disintegrator you've got there, Krang. I hope all your equipment on the Technodrome isn't so unfit for purpose, or I'd hate to see what happens when you flush your toilet.
Oh right, the fight. I just stood on top of the doorway in the background and clobbered Baxter when he came near. Ironically, it was actually easier than swatting a fly.


Inside the building is a stone man with a flamethrower and, weirdly, a beaky face. He reminds me of the bird people from Yume Nikki but, you know, made of rocks and not strangely unnerving. I hit him with my stick a few times, that seemed to calm him down.


April O'Neil had been kidnapped? What a shocker! I wonder who kidnapped her. The stone guy? Shredder? You'd think Shredder would have made more of a big deal out of it. I suspect the turtles faked her kidnapping to keep her out of the way, they don't have time to be protecting a journalist while they save New York. My evidence for this theory is that "cowabunga" graffiti on the wall behind here. The turtles must have been here before, who else would go around writing "cowabunga" on the walls of derelict buildings? Whatever the case, April is free now - in a nice touch she has a speech sample of her saying "thank you, turtles!" - and with the damsel un-distressed you might think that Back From the Sewers is over, but you'd be wrong, again.


There's one more stage, a mish-mash of all the other elements we've seen throughout the rest of the game, beginning with a surfing section that's almost identical to the skateboarding part but with a hugely increased chance of losing a life due to extreme toe stubbing. Just walk around! There's a perfectly suitable pathway visible in the background, and it's not like this surfboard is that much faster than running. Or, I dunno, swim. Actually, no, I just remembered the NES TMNT game, forget I mentioned swimming.


Eventually you'll make it into the Technodrome, where there's a battle against another stone man waiting for you. I believe he's called General Traag. I'm flabbergasted that his name is not a rock-based pun of some kind. I like that he's wearing boots. You'd think one of the perks of having granite feet would be not having to go shoe shopping, but here we are.


I'm not sure what's going on with Michelangelo in this screenshot, but it can't end well. It looks like his mutation is running out of control, and Michelangelo's sheepish expression seems to say "sorry, folks, but I will have to feast on your livegiving blood to sustain my transformation. I know it is neither radical nor bodacious, but I must feed, and feed soon."
Awkwardly-captured screenshots of a turtle in mid-jump aside, this final stage is a long, drawn-out episode in a game that hasn't exactly been thrilling even at its highest points. There's a little bit of everything included: mousers jumping from holes in a tunnel, an elevator ride with the usual flood of enemies pouring in, a section of platforming with dead-ends included that you could call a maze in the same way that standing a puddle could be considered swimming. The thing is, it feels like there's no reason to be doing any of these. We've already beaten Krang and Shredder and rescued April, so why are we here?


We're here to fight Shredder again, obviously. It took one hell of a swing to chop him in half with nunchuks, but Mikey has apparently been working on his upper body strength. Not really, what's happening is that Shredder can now disappear and reappear, Dracula from Castlevania­-style, ready to hit you with the sword he also picked up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately for him, the screen is so small that wherever he appears he's close enough to get clobbered, so it's not as effective as you might think. However, there's a twist. Back From the Sewers has three difficulty settings - easy, normal and hard - and rather doing the usual thing of giving enemies more health and harder-hitting attacks on the higher difficulties, bosses in Back From the Sewers actually gain whole new attacks when you're playing on Hard mode. For example, Shredder can teleport directly behind you for an easy hit. It's an approach to raising the level of challenge that you rarely see in any game, let alone Game Boy games from 1991, and Konami must be applauded for not taking the easy route.


We're still in the Technodrome. Still. I know it's a big place but I don't think it was necessary to make the player see every single room.


And finally, Big Krang. Krang in his giant robot body, a body that was designed by Shredder as a cruel jab at his partner in crime / alien overlord. Why else would he build Krang a robot body that looks like an extremely stupid bald man who doesn't own clothes aside from underpants if not as a "screw you" to Krang? It could have looked like anything, but no, Shredder built it to look like a middle-aged British man sleeping on a sunlounger in Tenerife, sunglasses and all, and that was a decision that could only have come from malice.
After the latter stages of the game had been fairly difficult, the final encounter with Krang is remarkably straightforward. All Krang wants to do is jump around, filled with glee at having a working pair of legs. This works to your advantage, because he's not focussed on killing you and you can hit him as he bounces as long as you remember to watch out for when he jumps all the way over to the left of the screen. Keep that up for a minute or so and you'll achieve victory, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From the Sewers is over.


There goes the Technodrome. It jiggles around a bit, which I think is meant to imply that it's exploding. Well, this is the end of a Konami game, it'd be weird if it didn't blow up.


The game ends, as I should have expected, with pizza. What I didn't expect was that I'd be so glad it's over. A classic-era Konami TMNT brawler is something I would have expected to get much more pleasure from than this. It's just missing something, that vital spark that could lift it out of the tedious sludge it inhabits. It's not a terrible game, but it does drag on rather, in a herky-jerky fashion that just rubbed me the wrong way. I guess I just like my ninjas to be more agile. The wonky collision detection doesn't help, either. Still, there's a lot to praise about the game: the graphics are great, as is the soundtrack, the "rescue your captured turtles" mechanic is neat, the gameplay changes on higher difficulty settings are impressive and the look and feel of the cartoon is captured really well. I suspect there are a lot of people out there that played Back From the Sewers in their youth and remember it as a great game, so if you want to tell me I'm wrong then go ahead. There's a chance I am wrong, and it just wasn't quite clicking with me. I'm definitely right about Shredder designing Krang's body as a dick move, though.

This is a very underwhelming title screen for what is definitely my favourite game in the Mega Man series, and there's no intro to go along with it, not even something like Mega Man 2's pan up to our hero posing on a rooftop. Still, I have a great fondness for it, probably because I've seen it more than almost any other videogame title screen. I even have a story about how I came to own Mega Man 3: it wasn't released in Europe until 1992, so it was probably for my eighth birthday that I'd asked for a NES game. I don't remember which one, but before my birthday rolled around I saw Mega Man 3 in a magazine (almost certainly Total!) and realised that no, this was the game I really wanted. Back then there was no chance of getting more than one videogame for my birthday, but as if by magic my grandmother called and said "I can't find that game you asked for, but they have this one called Mega Man 3 instead, is that okay?" It was most definitely okay, and almost enough to get me believing in some kind of cosmic wish-ordering miracle-type Noel Edmonds bullshit.


With no intro to fill us in, we must look to the manual for Mega Man 3's story, although I'm certain most if not all of you are familiar with the core concepts of the Mega Man universe, i.e. stunningly incompetent roboticists and each villain being vulnerable to the weapon of one of his confrères. After trying to take over the world in the previous two games, the evil Dr. Wily has reformed and is helping Mega Man's creator Dr. Light build a new and powerful peacekeeping robot called Gamma. They've also created eight new Robot Masters, which have been sent into the world to find power sources for Gamma. Then the robots go evil, and Mega Man has to shoot them until they reconsider their uprising against humanity. Spoiler alert: it turns out Dr. Wily was behind everything and was not, in fact, reformed. You may have already realised this given that Dr. Wily is still the villain in Mega Man 10, the entirety of mankind screaming out for Mega Man to put a bullet between his eyes and save the Earth from its regularly-scheduled robotic onslaught.
As usual in a Mega Man game, once you hit start you're given the choice of eight different stages to tackle, each of them with a themed Robot Master waiting at the end. Beat all the Robot Masters and you can head to Dr. Wily's fortress for the final showdown. We'll be meeting them all eventually, but let's start with Hard Man.


Admit it, you chuckled at his name, possibly in the manner of Beavis and / or Butt-Head. Just look at Hard Man's face, that's the face of someone who is intimately acquainted with the feeling of people laughing when he tells them his name. I once had a teacher called Richard Head, he often wore the same expression. Also, it was not until fairly recently that I realised Hard Man is based on a cement mixer. Only three world domination plots in, and already Dr. Wily is struggling for inspiration.


As Mega Man strides through the rocky landscape that makes up Hard Man's stage, beset from above by robot bees that can be dealt with by scrolling the screen back a little so they travel off the edge and de-spawn, I can give you a brief description of Mega Man 3's gameplay. You shoot robots, jump over holes and try not to touch spikes because they are Mega Man's most dangerous weakness aside from showing Dr. Wily mercy. Again, I'm sure you all already know this. Mega Man is such a huge franchise, with many of its games sharing the same formula and mechanics, that you're bound to have played at least one of them. There also Mega Man's most famous power to master - when he beats a boss, he gets to claim that boss' weapon for himself. Obviously that doesn't mean anything to us right now, and for the first stage we're stuck with Mega Man's three-shot arm cannon. There are a couple of other things that were introduced to the series in this instalment, and part of the reason I began with Hard Man's stage is that it give me a chance to show most of them off. The other reason is that I always start with Hard Man, because he was the first boss I learned to beat without a special weapon as a kid and that knowledge is deeply and indelibly etched into my brain.


The first new thing is that Mega Man can now slide by pressing down and jump. Useful for traversing narrow passageways, useful for getting underneath jumping enemies and also, once you get over the fear of receiving a bullet in the face, useful for sliding under enemy projectiles. That last one is a difficult skill to master, but you do feel like a badass fighting robot when you pull it off, rather than the hastily-upgraded metal Pinocchio that Mega Man really is.


Another innovation is the ability to call in Mega Man's best friend Rush, the robot Swiss-army dog. He has several useful applications, or at rather he will once I wrest them from the bosses that currently hold them, so for now he's limited to being the Rush Coil. The Rush Coil turns Rush into a springboard, allowing you to propel Mega Man to higher platforms when he jumps on Rush's back. Rush bears this abuse with quiet dignity because he is a good dog, oh yes he is.


Some familiar faces make a return, too, like the Mets, or Metools or Mettaurs or whatever you like to call them, robots designed solely to make you wonder why Wily didn't give all his robots hard-harts that Mega Man's blaster fire cannot penetrate. If Wily had started the original game with Spiky-Hard-Hat Man he'd be Emperor of the Earth by now.


Then, towards the end of the stage, Mega Man falls into a hole and is confronted with a real surprise: a miniboss that isn't a Robot Master but looks strangely similar to the Blue Bomber himself, their arrival heralded by as close to a melancholy whistle as the NES's sound hardware could produce. He's a series staple now, but this is the first appearance of Mega Man's older brother Proto Man - although at this point you don't know who this is or what's going on. You only find out about Proto Man at the end of the game, and it took me a long time to reach the end of the game so I spent a lot of my childhood thinking that Proto Man was, in fact, a woman. I blame this on the European cover art.


Ignore for now the strange juxtaposition of the cartoonish robots and the photorealistic and rather worried-looking Dr. Wily and check out Proto Man on the left there. His trademark yellow scarf is positioned in such a way that it looks like a blonde ponytail, his open mouth looks a lot like lipstick and that armour is closer to pink than red: thus, young VGJunk assumed that Mega Man had a female rival. Sadly, this is not the case and the Mega Man series had to wait until 2008 and Mega Man 9 before a female robot was introduced that wasn't a domestic slave. Whether the artist of the box art also though Proto Man was female is up for debate.


Then there's Hard Man himself, and he wants to smash Mega Man up good and proper. He has two means to accomplish this goal at his disposal: either by colliding with Mega Man or by shooting him. This is true of all the Robot Masters in Mega Man 3, (and the whole Mega Man series and most videogames, really,) but they all have another gimmick to go along with it. For example, Hard Man can fire rocket fists at you, and those fists can change direction in mid air. He can also jump and slam down, and if you're on the floor when he lands then Mega Man is briefly paralysed by the impact. See? Gimmicks! Compare this to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back From the Sewers, where the bosses also tried to kill you with projectiles and collisions but most of them didn't do anything besides that.
The key to beating Hard Man is learning to avoid his rocket fists and remaining patient, concentrating on staying alive and seizing your chances to harm the boss when you can. If you can't concentrate for that long... well, the other reason I always started with Hard Man's stage is that there's an easily-accessible, health-restoring E-Tank waiting to be collected, which gives you a bit of a safety net. You might well need it, because defeating Hard Man isn't as easy as I'm making it sound.


I got there in the end, though - no E-Tank required, thank you very much - and the reward for my hard work was the acquisition of Hard Man's weapon, the Hard Knuckle. Mega Man's expression suggests he is not convinced by the power of this new weapon, but I'm glad to have it: not only is it more powerful than your basic blaster but you can move the Hard Knuckles up or down slightly as they're flying. And Metal Gear Solid V thinks it's sooo innovative.
As with almost every game in the series, each Robot Master in Mega Man 3 has a weakness to one specific weapon, and part of the challenge of the game is figuring out the best order to tackle the game's stages. You might think I'd be heading for whichever Robot Master is weak against flying robot punches next (I know, I'm amazed it's not all of them) but I'll instead be taking a detour to Needle Man's stage, because he's got something that I want. No, not needles.


Needle Man's stage isn't even particularly needle-centric. There are some some moving needles that you have to slide past and these mechanical hedgehogs, but mostly the stage has an unidentifiable theme of green metal sheets and gun-turrets that fire tomatoes. I suppose this is understandable, given that Mega Man dies instantly should he so much as brush against a spike. A whole stage made of needles would make an already difficult game wildly unfair.


This is one of the few actual needles in Needle Man's stage. Fortunately Mega Man can slide forever so long as he's crammed into a small space, so you can just keep moving left and right until the needle retracts rather than smashing straight into it. It's a skill that comes in useful at a few points in the game, even if it does look like it'd play havoc with Mega Man's backside.


After I said all the bosses in Mega Man 3 have their own little twist, Needle Man arrives to prove me wrong. All he does is jump around and shoot needles at you, which to be fair is more than enough to eliminate the casual player. I suppose his gimmick would be that he's the most Glaswegian Robot Master, and he can headbutt Mega Man from a distance by extending the top of his head. Oh, and he's completely immune to the Hard Knuckles I just collected. Makes sense to me, have you ever tried punching a needle? What I don't understand is that little red lump on Needle Man's face / torso. The artwork seems to suggest it's a nose, but on his sprite I can only see it as a single buck tooth.


Beating Needle Man gets you the Needle Cannon and, much more importantly, the Rush Jet. This allows Rush to transform into a flying surfboard, which is as useful as it sounds even if it does make the case that Dr. Light would do better just giving Rush a gun and sending him out on his own to stop Wily.


Snake Man's stage next, and where Needle Man's level had nothing to do with the theme of its boss the same cannot be said of Snake Man's lair: it's all snakes all the time, aside from a brief section spent jumping over platforms so high up they're covered in clouds. The walls are snakes, the floor is snakes, there are little snakes in tangled metal piles...


...and huge snakes that wriggle their metal snake bodies and have, on closer inspection, faces that look more like frogs than snakes. Hmm. Here you can also see my preferred strategy for dealing with the big snakes, which is to fire a Hard Knuckle and then guide it upwards ever-so-gently until it smashes the snake in the chin. As with every Mega Man game, (although maybe less so after Mega Man 4 introduced the ability to charge up Mega Man's basic blaster,) the special weapons are useful for more than just defeating the boss that is weak against them, and many of them come in helpful at certain points because they possess properties that your regular gun does not, such as homing capabilities or being a massive metal fist. This is something that it took me a long time to wrap my head around as a kid. I never really used the special weapons outside of the boss battles, and I'm not sure why. I think it's partly because to switch weapons you have to pause the game and select it, sometimes having to go to an extra screen, and while this only takes a few seconds for an eight-year-old playing an action videogame eight seconds may as well be eight years. It's still a little annoying now. God bless the SNES Mega Man games giving you the ability to quickly switch special weapons using the shoulder buttons.


I can't talk about Mega Man 3 without mentioning Yasuaki Fujita's soundtrack, and I can't mention Mega Man 3's soundtrack without simply saying it's great and you should listen to it. Mega Man 2's soundtrack gets all the attention, but personally I think MM3's is just as good and I'd struggle to pick a favourite track from it. Snake Man's theme is very good, though.


Just to ensure you don't get bored of huge mechanical snakes (as though that were something that could happen) Capcom threw in a section where you guide Mega Man over a chasm using these platform-generating pillars and the odd single floating block. I've played enough retro videogames that the presence of hovering masonry does not usually cause me to raise an eyebrow, but there's something extra-weird about there just being one solitary cube in the middle of the sky. On the plus side, I love these torpedo enemies that have disguised themselves as clouds. If you shoot them they lose their fluffy coating and charge at Mega Man. I generally try not to shoot them. Not because they're difficult to avoid, but because their sleepy expressions are adorable as they drift aimlessly through the sky. Just because Dr. Wily press-ganged them into being part of his plans for conquest doesn't mean I have to break them out of their reverie.


Snake Man: part man, part snake, all robot. Snake Man attacks by throwing snakes at anyone who enters his lair, which is probably why he's been banished to this inaccessible tower high up in the clouds. The snakes work differently than other projectiles because they travel along the floor and up walls, which makes avoiding them a little different that usual. Not that I had to avoid them at this point, because the notion of boss weaknesses has come into play. Snake Man and Mega Man are perhaps more alike than most robots, because they both have a hard time dealing with spikes, and with the Needle Cannon equipped you can tear through Snake Man's health before he's got enough time to throw a lethal amount of snakes at our hero. At least Snake Man fights with a smile on his face. A grinning, isolated, snake-chucking evil weirdo robot, like an android Deep South mountain preacher. And Dr. Wily wonders why he's having trouble conquering the world.


Back to a less coherent stage design now, although it's more understandable here because the boss is Gemini Man and how exactly would you build a stage around the theme of "Gemini"? Have two of everything? I suppose you could have decorated everything with constellations, but Capcom went with a bleak, dark crystal landscape populated by flying eyeballs that cry tears of fire and, erm, penguins. Without the penguins you could argue it's almost horrific in its barren, alien appearance, with the penguins it's just strange.


Then you travel underground and things get even stranger, with pulsating, colour-changing walls that look like gargantuan biological cells and areas packed with frogspawn which, when shot, releases what are either tadpoles or the ghosts of Dragon Quest slimes. The frogspawn is a fun feature that rewards planning, because if you pay attention there are some areas where you can carve through the frogspawn in a way that provides you with a platform to reach items.


Gemini Man can split himself into two, as well as firing a large laser which, ironically, is one of the slowest projectiles in the game. Fighting two Robot Masters at once is a daunting prospect, but Snake Man's weapon isn't called the Search Snake for nothing and it will hunt down the real Gemini Man while you try to stay out of the way.
It has nothing to do with the fight, but every time I see Mega Man in a costume with a white body, the limitations of the NES palette make me think he's wearing tiny y-fronts and knee-high boots. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this article, it's that image.


Top Man's stage is next. Yes, Top Man like a spinning top, because Bubble Man was apparently not an easy enough target for mockery by his fellow robots. Much like with Gemini Man there's not much to work with if you want to make a stage based around tops, unless Mega Man had to fight his way through a Victorian toy shop. Hang on, that would have been much more interesting than Top Man's actual stage, which is some kind of greenhouse. There are a few spinning-top-shaped platforms near the end, but this area would definitely have been better suited to Horticulture Man.
I said at the start of this article that Mega Man 3 was a revelatory experience for me, and the area pictured above explains what I mean by that. I've mentioned this before, but to get to the bottom of the screen Mega Man doesn't have to jump: he can just walk off those platforms and be gone before the enemies ever get near him. When I figured this out it was as though a veil was lifted and I suddenly started thinking about what I was doing.


I wouldn't go so far as to say that every screen in Mega Man 3 is a puzzle, but there are often better ways to deal with the situation than you might first expect. Here, for example, if you hang from the very bottom of the ladder you can shoot the enemy in the head without having to put Mega Man in harm's way, and this approach to playing a game - planning, strategic, manipulating the quirks of the game engine - was a revelation to a young VGJunk. Previous to this the videogames I'd played were one of either two basic kinds. There were Nintendo classics like Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, which were simple-to-understand, "quick to learn and difficult to master" types - indeed, part of the genius of SMB is how simple it appears to be. Then there were games like Ironsword and Low-G-Man that just felt too difficult and chaotic for me to ever have much chance of beating them. Then there was Mega Man 3, where I could learn the best paths and tactics, getting a little further each time thanks to the password system, so that even though it was (and still is) a pretty hard game I always knew I could get to the end. Mega Man 3 made me think more deeply about videogames, and that's one of the reasons I love it so much.


I also love it because you get to fight a big robot cat that attacks by throwing what are either balls of yarn or hairballs at Mega Man. When these balls prove insufficient, it releases a swarm of robot fleas. Robot fleas. How amazing is that! Although we should probably shop Dr. Wily to the RSPCA. That's the Robot Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of course.


Now that I've caught up with Top Man I can put the Hard Knuckles to their proper use. Top Man spends a lot of time spinning around like a ballerina, and I have to wonder whether Capcom made the knuckles his weakness as a tacit endorsement of bullying. Not cool, Capcom, not cool. Also not cool is Top Man's special weapon, which makes Mega Man spin around extremely fast and damage anything he comes into contact with. It's not cool, but it is often very effective, especially against ninjas, which means I'd better go and fight Shadow Man.


I think I've described Shadow Man's stage as a "lava factory" in the past and I think that's a description that still works well. Other possibilities include the facility where they make Cherry Tango or a deeply unhygienic blood bank. As well as struggling not to fall into the vats of whatever this liquid is as parachuting robots try to smash into him, Mega Man also has to deal with the lights occasionally being turned off, leaving him to inch forward in the pitch blackness. These sections would be extremely difficult if the enemies weren't perfectly visible in the dark, but they are so you can eliminate the suicide-bombing living grenades before they run into you and make you wonder about how appropriate they are in an age dominated by fears of global terrorism.


You also have to fight the as-yet-unnamed Proto Man again, although this time it's much easier because the floor is flat and Proto Man only shoots when he jumps, leaving you with the simple task of sliding underneath him and shooting him in the back when he lands. Here's a little trick for you: if you pause the game just as Proto Man is about to appear, the game plays a slightly longer version of his whistle theme.


Shadow Man is supposed to be a ninja, and like all videogame ninjas he's not good at being a ninja. If Dr. Wily had paid him to sneak into Dr. Light's lab, poison his food supply and steal his secrets then sure, that's very ninja-y, but instead Shadow Man waits at the back of a factory, jumping around and throwing the largest shuriken he could carry at Mega Man. Those shuriken could be the size of the hubcaps on Godzilla's car and they wouldn't help Shadow Man, because he cannot stand against the power of the Top Spin. Having the weapon that the boss is weak against can make any fight in Mega Man 3 very short, but this one literally lasts less then ten seconds as Mega Man and Shadow Man jump at each other. Mega Man is spinning around. Shadow Man is not. Shadow Man explodes and I get his weapon: the Shadow Blade, which can be fired at a variety of different angles and is this game's equivalent of Mega Man 2's Metal Blade. You also get the Rush Marine, which lets Rush transform into a submarine. I'm going to start a petition to rename him Rush the Wonder Dog.


You know who hates having sharped chunks of metal thrown into his face? Well, yes, everyone, but specifically I meant Spark Man so I'm off to introduce him to the Shadow Blade. Spark Man has an appropriately electricity-themed stage, with lots of flashing lights and flying plug-monsters that would give a qualified electrician a heart attack, as well as intermittent lightning barriers and, oddly, machines that make cubes of compressed garbage. Junk Man will be disappointed that his gimmick has already been used, once Dr. Wily gets around to building him. It's just occurred to me that Mega Man 3 is one of the few games in the series not to feature an ice, water or fire-themed robot master, and this variety might be another reason why I like it so much.


Spark Man's stage also has a section filled with platforms that lift you upward towards a deadly spiked ceiling as soon as you step on them. It is here that the Rush Jet really shines, and as you casually float past this elaborate death-trap your heart will sing with joy at offering a hearty "fuck you" to those who would stand in your way.


Spark Man is shaped like a spark plug. Whether he was designed this way because his electrical powers demanded it, or if it was just so Dr. Wily could keep track of which Robot Master was which at a glance, I will leave up to you to decide.


The final Robot Master is Magnet Man, and magnetism must be a pretty good power to have if you're fighting robots, although I suppose it could lead to some fairly awkward social situations depending on how much the other Robot Masters value their personal space. Unsurprisingly, magnetism plays a big part in this stage, from these flying magnets that pick Mega Man up can carry him back towards the start of the stage (and which can sometimes be baited into carrying him to the right, which is a boon to any supremely lazy Mega Man player,) and large electromagnets than make life difficult for Mega Man by pulling him towards enemies. Nothing too outlandish - nothing to match, say, the gravity-flipping sections in Mega Man 5 - but fun additions none-the-less.


Most assuredly not fun are these platforming sections. I am fine with platforming sections in Mega Man games, because they always have very precise and responsive controls, and Mega Man 3 is no different. I'm fine with platforming over yawning, bottomless pits where even one wrong move means sudden death because, again, good controls. What I'm not a fan of are these sections where the platforms disappear and reappear in a set pattern, usually in such a manner that you have to jump before the next platform appears or you won't have time to land on them. Yes, yes, I know they're a staple of the series and my dislike of them is probably just down to me being bad at videogames but that doesn't stop me from hating them and wishing I could rename the game to Super Rush Jet in honour of my robodog pal and his magical bullshit-cancelling powers.


It's Magnet Man! He's the one in the air. The one with the big magnet on his head, the one shooting magnets out of his arm. Yeah, him. As well as firing magnets that track Mega Man's movements somewhat, Magnet Man can also generate a magnetic field that pulls Mega Man towards him. Unfortunately for Magnet Man, while this power does have valid combat applications when he's using it he looks as though he's trying to pass an enormous robo-turd. I have not captured a screenshot of this to spare Magnet Man's blushes, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Once Magnet Man is defeated, that's all eight of the Robot Master consigned to the great scrapheap in the sky and Mega Man is positively bursting with all the powers he has harvested from the bodies of his fallen enemies. He's not just made of heavy metal, he is heavy metal. So, time to go and deal with Dr. Wily in his skull-shaped castle, right?


Wrong! You're taken back to the stage select screen, where four of the stages have been occupied by a mysterious shadowy figure. What could possibly be going on in these four new levels?


Not even the game knows! Or The Riddler has joined forces with Dr. Wily, that's also a possibility.


What you actually get is four totally new stages based on the levels they occupied before. Here is Needle Man's second stage, and time has moved from day to night. It's not just a graphical reskin, either, it's a whole different stage that's longer than the original and will test your Mega Man skills to the limit. For example, a big chunk of Needle Man II: The Revenge is a mandatory Rush Jet section with no floor at all and only the occasional platform holding power-ups that allow you to replenish your special weapon energy / electric dog juice. It's pretty intense.


Less intense but much more likely to make me plan a future tattoo are these giant Mets that vomit forth a stream of regular-sized Mets. I don't even really have anything to say about them, I just wanted more people in the world to know that they exist.
The giant Met isn't a boss, although naturally these new stages do have bosses. But who could these bosses be? Probably not Needle Man again, not now that I've stolen his weapon.


The first boss in this new stage is the ghost of Air Man from Mega Man 2. That is amazing, and a twist that was mind-blowing to me once I'd figured out what was going on - Mega Man 3 was the first game in the series that I owned, so when I played Mega Man 2 years later I had an exciting moment of dawning realisation as to why that game's bosses looked so familiar.
So here we are, fighting a boss from the previous Mega Man game. What happens is that the figure of the old Robot Master appears in the air - with a heavy heart I admit this is probably supposed to represent Air Man's programming and not his spectral soul-essence left behind on this mortal plane of existence after the last time Mega Man killed him - and takes over this generic android called a "Doc Robot." The Doc Robot then moves and fights exactly like the Robot Master of yore that has possessed him.


There are two of these old Robot Master in each stage, as well. Here's "Bubble Man," trying to defeat Mega Man at the end of Gemini Man's second stage through the deadly power of, well, bubbles. When combined with the increased length of these mystery stages, these eight further Robot Master fights mean there's almost an entire second game's worth of content that comes after the first eight Robot Masters, so if you're picking which Mega Man game to buy on a strictly value-for-money basis then Mega Man 3 is your best bet. That'd be a really weird metric to decide what videogames to buy, though.
Having to fight even more Robot Masters is a stern test and facing two in one stage makes things even rougher, but generously Capcom did give each of the MM2 bosses a weakness to one of this game's special weapons. Some of these weaknesses are easy enough to figure out - Metal Man doesn't like the Magnet Missile, Bubble Man's general sogginess means he takes extra damage from the Spark Shot - while others are a bit more abstract. I can put Heat Man's aversion to the Top Spin down to that power being weaponised stop-drop-and-roll, but why does Wood Man fear the Needle Cannon when there a weapon that's basically a circular saw blade?


Let's have a quick look at the other extra stages starting with Shadow Man's, where I'm about to send Mega Man to an early grave in the lake of raspberry jam that fuels all this machinery. If those platforms look suspicious, that's because they open up half a second after you land on them, leading to rushing, missed jumps and a terrifying death by drowning in fruit preserve. Yes, the difficulty level takes a brisk hike up Screw You Mountain once you reach this point of the game, although while it's hard it never feels unfair, thanks to a combination of the game's precise controls and the majestic angel that is Rush Jet.


The Rush Marine is less useful but still has its moments, like when Gemini Man's stage suffers some severe basement flooding. That robot fish is looking up, shocked, at the Rush Marine, knowing that the damage caused by letting a robot dog swim past him is going to come out of his pay packet.


Then there's Spark Man Redux, where the difficulty is increased not through anything fancy like mandatory flying sections but by good old fashioned videogame deathtraps like small rotating platforms placed above spike pits. Well, you can't beat the classics, can you? Unless by "classics" you mean the old Robot Masters, because yes, I can beat them. Even Quick Man, who I defeated by throwing snakes at. The return of the Mega Man 2 bosses is a twist that I do like a lot, but you could definitely argue that their appearance is an admission by Capcom, as early as the third game in the series, that all Mega Man games are the same and new ones are made by simply slotting in a different batch of Robot Masters.


Bloody hell, Mega Man is really putting in a shift today, isn't he? As soon as he clears the four extra stages, Break Man arrives and challenges him to yet another boss battle. I think he's called Break Man because this fight is a break from the otherwise rather difficult gameplay.


It's a very simple battle, because Break Man is just Proto Man in a mask and Proto Man has already shown that he's not difficult to beat. It's a climactic encounter that pitches brother against brother, although of course Mega Man doesn't know that. As far as he's concerned this is a run-of-the-mill duel against a Mega Man wannabe who hides behind a shield instead of honourably absorbing enemy projectiles with his face.


Wily ran off with Gamma! This is the least surprising plot twist since... no, I think this is the least surprising plot twist ever. I will be more shocked when Weyland-Yutani turn out to be evil in the next iteration of the Alien franchise. I like the wording, though. "Ran off with Gamma" makes it sound like Wily has eloped with a enormous military robot. They're probably halfway to Gretna Green by now.


At long last, it's time to breach Wily's castle and save the world. Maybe a clue that he hadn't reformed could have been found in the fact he still owns a castle shaped like a skull. No good guy operates out of a castle shaped like skull. Erm, except He-Man. Shit, there goes that theory.


You can tell Dr. Wily is taking security seriously by the way he's hired vicious, bloodthirsty penguins to guard his lair.
As always, Wily's fortress is made up of a series of short stages, each with a unique, non-Robot Master boss waiting at the end. The theme of this first stage appears to be aquatic animals.


This carries over to the boss battle, against a machine that fires turtles at Mega Man. Each turtle you destroy reduces the boss' health, with each subsequent turtle being faster than the one before until you're desperately trying to avoid a rocket-power shelled projectile with enough momentum to smash through the walls of Fort Knox. It's a lot of fun, and a welcome change of pace from the usual style of boss fight.


The next stage is all about sharp things: spikes, snapping bear traps, the arses of robot bees. I don't think I need to tell you that Rush Jet is worth his weight in whatever Mega Man feeds him on (I'm guessing metal bolts shaped like cartoon bones) during this stage.


Now, the punishing struggle against the Yellow Devil. He's appeared in a ton of Mega Man games, and his gimmick is that he's formed of cubes that fly across the screen, damaging Mega Man if they smash into him, before reforming into a pudgy cyclops and giving you a few precious moments in which you can damage the Devil by shooting him in the eye. Then he does it again, travelling to the other side of the screen. I will confess that I am spectacularly bad at fighting the Yellow Devil in all his incarnations. I can just never get the hang of it, and if do then I end up taking a hit and losing my rhythm. My solution to this, now as it was when I was young, is to stand between the Devil's legs and fire the Shadow Blade straight upwards, chugging the E-Tanks I've saved for this specific moment when my health gets low. It's not pretty, but it works.


The third part of Wily's castle, presented to you for completeness' sake. Spikes, moving platforms, you get the idea. It's frankly amazing that Capcom are still managing to keep this interesting and on a gradual difficulty curve.


The boss: Mega Man. Mega Men, even! Three evil doppelgängers that are superior to the original because they can fire their basic weapon at angles other than along the horizontal. Also, two of them are impervious to your attacks, and every now and then they disappear and reappear with a different one being vulnerable like a deadly three-card monte routine. My advice would be to keep moving and hope for the best, but then my advice is generally terrible. I'm sure there's a proper strategy out there but I'm too old, too set in my ways, to change now.


The next stage is, to my eternal disappointment, a boss rush. Each of these teleporters leads to one of the game's Robot Masters, and you have to beat them all again to proceed. This is definitely Mega Man 3's weakest point, and I would be perfectly happy if it was excised from the game completely because it adds absolutely nothing except time on the clock. By this point you've already beaten sixteen Robot Masters, seventeen if you count Break Man, and because you already have all the special weapons you can beat the Robot Masters easily enough. The only real challenge generated by this section is finding the bit of paper on which you wrote down each boss' weakness.


By now you will have fully had enough of Wily's shit, so when he waddles onto the screen in his mecha-crab you will have no hesitation in riding Rush Jet up to head-height and shooting Wily from a position of relative safety. Before you can do this you have to get Wily to lower his shield by destroying the gun that dangles between his robot legs. The best weapon to accomplish this is the Hard Knuckles, so a huge thank-you to whoever at Capcom designed this fight in such a way that it starts with you punching Wily in his metaphorical dick.


Turns out it was a decoy Wily. Mega Man leaps back, startles, as the fake Wily's head bounces about on a spring. The old bastard thought of everything this time!


Including attaching insta-death spikes to the fist of the giant robot he stole. In a case of cruel irony, that fist turns out to be Wily's undoing because Mega Man can use it as a platform to climb up to Wily's command bubble in Gamma's head. How can Mega Man defeat Wily once he's up there? What weapon will bring down this megalomaniacal madman and his rampaging kill-bot? The Top Spin, of course. The best way to beat Wily is to pirouette him to death. How perfect is that? Up in Robot Master Heaven, Top Man turns to his fallen brothers and says "See? I told you, you pricks!"


Plans foiled and robots destroyed, Dr. Wily is seemingly killed when a big chunk of the ceiling lands right on top of him, conveniently getting Mega Man past that awkward "Asimov's laws" thing. Mega Man is also knocked out, but is saved at the last by the shadowy figure of Proto Man, who has finally realised that Dr. Wily is evil. Proto Man is not the most energetic plasma bolt in the cannon, after all.


And so, after a long and arduous journey, Mega Man 3 is over. Wily will return in time, once he's recovered from being crushed into a bloody paste, but for now Mega Man can take a pleasant jog through the verdant fields of Capcomland while information about the various Robot Masters scrolls past beneath him. I'm still not entirely sure whether he's realised that Proto Man is his brother yet. Probably not. As a series Mega Man is anime as hell, and Mega Man not figuring out his family tree despite it being very obvious to everyone else would be a very anime thing to happen.


Dr. Wily got better quicker than I expected - there goes his UFO, flying past the top of the tree. God speed, evil Einstein.
If you've stuck with this article all the way to the end, then thank you for your persistence. I think this the longest VGJunk article yet, but it didn't feel long while I was writing it because I really do love Mega Man 3. Others will disagree but for me it's the best of the "classic"Mega Man games, and while nostalgia is admittedly a large factor in that I think it would be my favourite even if I'd never played it before this week. The Robot Masters are a fun mix, there are twists and turns with extra stages and bosses and overall the soundtrack is my favourite of the series. Apart from the slightly (but unavoidably) clunky method of switching your special weapons, the controls and gameplay are excellent and fall at my favourite point in the Mega Man timeline in terms of abilities: the slide and Rush's new modes add some very welcome mobility options and keep the action flowing, but it's before the chargeable Mega Buster was introduced in Mega Man 4. That's great for me, because I've never liked having to hold the fire button down while playing: it's awkward, it makes an annoying noise and it reduces the number of occasions when you might want to use your special weapons. Even outside of the Mega Man series this is one of the finest action games on the NES, densely packed with tightly designed, fun-filled levels, and it'll be readily available for purchase soon when the Mega Man Legacy Collection is released. Am I demanding that you play it? You know, I think I am.
There you go, then. Article number 500. Only 166 to go before my blood-oath with the Dark Ones is complete and I can return to my grave for an eternity of restful slumber. The next one won't be so long.

Yes, America: a land of freedom and prosperity where the nation's twin flags fly proudly against the purple sky! A land of revolution, of the struggle against oppression, where Lady Liberty welcomes all with open arms and the dancing frogs wear natty waistcoats and star-spangled top hats!


What, you're telling me that your strongest mental association with the country, nay, the concept of America isn't a disturbing humanoid frog doing a soft-shoe routine? Don't you remember the surprise referendum of 1995, when the America public voted to replace the Bald Eagle as America's national animal with the noble frog? It was a tumultuous time indeed, what with all the coins and presidential seals having to be redrawn so they had a cheerful cartoon frog on them. Once the French ambassador had been assured that the new designs weren't mocking him, thing went pretty smoothly, though.


Before I get into the game itself, I'd like to quickly go back to Unicorn Software's splash page. No, wait, no I wouldn't. Having seen this picture, why would I want to look at it again? What is wrong with me? It's simultaneously extremely boring and punishingly unpleasant to look at, like a manual for vacuum cleaner with a nude David Cameron centrefold.


To help you learn all about America, the game offers two modes: History Lessons and Map Reading Skills. Quite how the developers managed to cram the whole sweep of US history onto two Amiga floppies is something I have to see, so I'll be starting with History Lessons and praying that I'm not doomed to repeat them.


What a magnificent tapestry, woven from the lives and dreams of those who made America what it is today. There's the man who first pointed at America! Thomas Edison's famous Very Excited Sewing Machine! George Washington's legendary "I am vexed by all this god-damned snow" speech is covered, as is the early US's desperate need of an influx of competent barbers. I'm not sure who the cowboy in the middle of the bottom row is supposed to be, but I'm sure he's on his way to take bloody vengeance on the man who made his hat so wonky.
Each picture represents a portion of American history, and clicking on a picture will give you some text and yet more pictures about the events in question, the information pitched towards very young readers. I'll be starting with the top-left, because as we all know time flows from the top-left to the bottom-right.


Things are off to a bad start, and not just because the picture is very boring. It is not true that everyone thought the world was flat - humans have known it's spherical for a very long time - so there's a glaring factual error on the very first screen of All About America's history section. That does not bode well for little Timmy's grades.


"Sail over there," says Columbus. "I'm pretty sure that's Asia."
I hope you're paying attention to this text, because once you've read it you knowledge of the subject is put to the test.


The quizmaster is no less than Abraham Lincoln, or at least a mannequin of Lincoln from a struggling waxwork museum that has been possessed by the spirit of the great man himself, because he'll be damned if he's going to let Timmy get a worse grade than that snot-nosed punk who said the Lincoln Memorial was "lame" on their class field trip. Take a good look at Honest Abe, because he's quite a sight to behold. His blue suit and shirt looks frilly even though I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to, and his iconic stovepipe hat has been replaced by something I'm almost certain I made as a kid when I was trying to construct a wizard's hat from construction paper and double-sided sticky tape. Still, he knows how to run a quiz, does ol' Abraham. Make sure you don't get any questions wrong. You wouldn't want to upset Abraham Lincoln, would you?


See? Heartbreaking. He's so disappointed in you, in your refusal to learn about America, in your contempt for his beloved country. Once this article is done, I look forward to pulling out the Big Book of Things I've Done (Thanks to Videogames) and adding an entry for "made Abraham Lincoln pull a face like a drunken divorcee listening to his wife's favourite song."


Your reward for reaching the end of the quiz is this macabre image of the sun setting against a jet-black sky. I don't really understand what mood you were going for here, Unicorn Software. Existential dread? The realisation that all of human history is utterly meaningless in the face of the grinding aeons of the universe's span? A nice "Congratulations" banner might have been better, maybe Benjamin Franklin dancing a jig.
That's about it for the history lessons. Once you've finished the quiz you can go for another round of questions, although they start repeating almost immediately and many of them are simple transpositions like "What Day is Columbus Day?" and "October 12th is what day?"


Other than that, you can try a different style of questions, which are literacy-based: what word rhymes with this one, put the right word in the sentence, that kind of thing. They're easy enough for a seven-year-old kind of age range, I suppose, although they're hardly likely to keep a kid hooked for long unless they're weirdly into making sure Lincoln approves of them. We've only looked at one tiny segment of American history, though, so I suppose we'd better experience some of the others.


Aww, isn't that sweet, the pilgrims and the Indians have made friends with each other, having bonded over a mutual love of corn. As All About America was released in 1987 the native peoples are referred to throughout as "Indians" and not Native Americans, and everything is presented in a sanitised manner that suggests the entire history of America has been a jolly jamboree where nothing bad ever happened. All About America is probably okay for learning a few dates, but not how events actually took place, which is predictably shitty.


Also shitty is the logo on this crate of furs. How are you going to see that in a busy shipping yard? Oh well, at least I learned that the Dutch were bang into furs. Furs and flowers, that's the Dutch.


"Oh maaan, I thought we were friends, Mr Indian! I thought we were Corn Buddies! This is not cool. My vest is ruined."
Here you can see what I mean about the historical truth being made more palatable for younger minds: "Sometimes the Indians and the colonists fought and people died" is quite the understatement. It's such an understatement it's practically subterranean.


Redcoats, huh? Not, I dunno, salmon-coats? "The rose-coats are coming!" does not have quite the same ring of urgency to it, I agree. I'm not saying America would have remained under British control had the soldiers of the crown worn fuchsia rather than red, but if you're an alternate-universe fiction writer then a world where the British army's uniforms were accidentally bleached might be a good jumping-off point for you. Of course, I've played so many retro RPGs that I can't look at this picture and not see it as the king of a fantasy kingdom sending a party of adventurers off to find the magical crystals / kidnapped princess / fortress of the Dread Lord.


Oh hey, I know the answer to this one without even reading the text, because I've been playing Fallout 4 recently. And they say videogames make you stupid! Well, this one might. It's not going to make you any smarter, that's for sure.


"General Washington was a very brave man. Year after year, he kept fighting the redcoats. The loneliness of his leadership position eventually took its toll on Washington's mental state, so he built himself a friend from old blankets, a log and a clown's hat. Logfriend Blanketon was immediately field-promoted to the rank of sergeant and later served as Washington's vice-president."


Here's a fact I did learn from All About America: legendary pioneer Daniel Boone founded a town and named it Boonesboro, the egotistical weirdo. Also, if we're to assume he's meant to be shooting at the Native American in the picture then I've also learned that Daniel Boone might not be the great hunter he is portrayed as.


There's a section about Lewis and Clark's expedition to map the western territories. One of them looks much less thrilled by the prospect than the other, although I couldn't tell you which one was Lewis and which one was Clark. Maybe he's upset because he graduated from a university that hands out giant novelty diplomas.
As I was reading this section, I thought "hey, I already know this" and I couldn't figure out why. Then it hit me: as with possibly every other facet of American culture and history, The Simpsons did an episode about it. I realise this article is implying that I get all my knowledge from cartoons and videogames. You will just have to take my word for it that I have read a book and I do intend to do so again in the future.


Apparently Lewis or Clark later invented the sewing machine. Prior to this, each American had to make all their own clothes by hand, which explains his horrible grey suit but not his weird, stumpy arms.


Some men found gold and others didn't. This man found gold. You can tell by the way he's shouting "GOLD!" and holding a big chunk of gold. Yes indeed, there can be no doubt that this is a man who has found gold. The great thing about this man is that I'm sure that when you look at him, you can hear what his voice would sound like. I know I can. We may differ in whether we think the next word out of his toothless mouth will be "dagnabbit" or "goldurnit," but in essence we all share the same mental voice for this man. Thank you for bringing us all together, grizzled prospector.


Yikes. Obviously anything that purports to cover American history is going to have to include slavery, but I'm not sure this was the best way to go about illustrating this grim facet of the past. Did the slave owner have to be smiling? The game also never comes out and says slavery is bad, just that "the southerners really wanted to keep their slaves," proving again that All About America is a repository of breathtaking understatement if nothing else. You'd think people would already know that slavery is a terrible thing and shouldn't need to be told, but having seen certain comments on the internet there are still definitely people out there who need to be firmly reminded of this fact.


Then things get all rushed together to bring us up to the modern age, with talk of spaceships and one of the worst pixel representations of the Statue of Liberty that I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. Do you know how many videogames take place in New York? Even games that aren't set in the Big Apple feature the Statue of Liberty, like the NES Superman game where the statue has relocated to Metropolis. It's the face that's the real issue here. I'm going to guess that it was the last thing the game's artist drew, possibly late on a Friday night as they muttered to themselves "why does no-one take pictures of the Statue of Liberty? Then I'd have something I could use as a reference!"


All About America poses a dilemma for moon landing deniers: do they stick to their ludicrous beliefs and answer "no," forfeiting the point, or do they answer "yes," secure in the knowledge that they know the real truth despite what the man is trying to indoctrinate them with via the medium of an Amiga quiz game? A difficult decision indeed, unless you're not an idiot.


Then there's the map reading lessons, split into three categories: The Thirteen Colonies, America Before the Civil War and The United State. This is the Thirteen Colonies, where it tells you the names and locations of the thirteen colonies and then points to the colonies on the map and asks you to name them. It's as exciting as it sounds and considerably browner than than you might imagine.


This is the Before the Civil War map, and I think something has gone awry because this is a quiz to test your knowledge of state postal codes. Did those even exist before the Civil War? My only explanation is that Unicorn Software were trying to warn us that a Second American Civil War is coming soon.


And finally, there's the modern US, with such captivating quizzes as naming state capitals and describing the relative positions of two states using compass directions. Look, I never bothered to learn the counties of England, why would you think I'd spend time doing the same for America? Geography is a skill that I, being essentially a hermit, do not require. I'd have much rather learned about each state's representational symbols. For example, Georgia's state shell is the knobbled whelk. I feel happier knowing that. I'll feel even happier next time I tell someone this fact in real life, but that's mostly because I will have said aloud the wonderful phrase "knobbled whelk."


Now I'm done with All About America, but did I learn all about America? No, I did not. It might provide a quick overview suitable for younger kids, but then the difficulty would be in keeping kids interested in what is a pretty dull experience all around. I mean, you saw those maps, right? No, I think I'll stick with getting my historical facts from reputable sources like the aforementioned cartoons and videogames. On a related note, please do not ask me to join your pub quiz team. You will regret it.

Seriously though, Shooting Range? You couldn't come up with anything more enticing than that? Here's a couple of better titles, for free from me to you. Bullseye Fun-Pack. Crazy Carl's Circus of Bullets. Target Shooting X-Treme: Ultimate Annihilation Edition. He Who Zaps First Zaps Longest. See? It's not difficult. I can only assume the only other candidate for the title of this game was NES Lightgun Game 001, and that was shouted down for being too interesting.


You get to choose between a Normal Game and a Party Game. The party game is not "shoot the tail off the donkey," nor is it a harrowing combination of Russian roulette and pass-the-parcel. We'll get to it later, but first we'll be exploring the normal game, which makes up the bulk of the action.


Shooting Range is not exactly packed with content: aside from the party game, there are three stages and a bonus round. The first stage is obviously Wild West-themed, because I'm not lucky enough for it to be about the deadly onslaught of the sentient mutant cactus folk, and stage three is set in space. As for stage two, it's a house? I'm going to kill that house. Okay, got it. Stage two, murder a house. But first, cowboys.


Here we are, then. The Old West, where the natives balance oversized peppermint candies on their heads. Those are the targets you need to shoot, not the native Americans. In fact they're the only targets you need to shoot in Shooting Range, and every stage has you shooting these circular Umbrella Corp logos rather than the people and animals that litter the stage. Why did TOSE and Bandai go for this division between the recognisable people / creatures and abstract targets? I have no idea. Maybe they didn't want to be accused of promoting violence. Maybe they couldn't be bothered to draw a different set of sprites showing a native warrior bleeding to death from a gut-shot, his life fading away as his blood soaks into the desert sand? The only semi-convincing reason I can come up with is that it makes it very clear what you're supposed to be shooting at at any given time, but that would still be true if you just had to shoot the characters. They stand out pretty well when they're moving around the screen, it's not like they're particularly camouflaged.


A cowboy ran by. He wasn't carrying a target, so I couldn't shoot him. I mean, I could shoot at him, and naturally I did, but because he wasn't carrying a red-and-white pinwheel he remained unaffected by my gunfire. Now that I see him in a still picture and not dashing across my screen in the manner of someone running for the bus while trying not to look like they're running for the bus, I've noticed a couple of things. One is that he's got a badge, so he must be the sheriff. The other that he appears to be smoking, in an NES game that (as far as I can tell) was only released in the US. I guess that one snuck past Nintendo of America's censors, just like this cowboy snuck past my gunfire.


A lone white dove flies by with a target in its mouth, a sign that the flood waters have receded and Noah's Ark has come to rest on top of a factory making Christmas sweets.
The problem is that the odd bird and unshootable cowboy just aren't cutting it. To progress in Shooting Range, you have to reach a target score before the time runs out, and there simply weren't enough enemies appearing on screen for me to collect the points I needed. Thus condemned to failure, I sat and waited for the inevitable while staring at the desert scenery, which was sort of relaxing in its own way.


Then I realised you can use the D-Pad on a connected controller to move your viewpoint left and right, allowing you to track down other enemies and targets that may have eluded you. I even got to see the cowboy doing something! He was trying to shoot me, or at least trying to scare me by pointing his target at me. He can't hurt you or anything. Shoot him without worrying about the consequences! Except make sure you actually hit the target, because every shot you fire results in your energy meter decreasing, and if it empties completely then it's game over. You can refill it occasionally with power-ups dropped by defeated targets, as well as finding the odd hourglass to give you extra time, but on the whole it does not pay to be wildly shooting your gun even if this is the Wild West.


Once I'd figured out you can move the screen with the pad - a clumsy, inelegant solution to a problem that need not exist - clearing the first stage was not much of a challenge. That's not meant as a boast, it's the first stage and I'm playing on the easiest difficulty (although all the difficulty level changes is how much time you start with to complete each stage). I'm looking forward to the next stage, though, because now I know it's a ghost house.


We've got a house, we've got a ghost, so now I know that "ghost house" wasn't just a clever name intended to lure me in.


It's not just ghosts, either: all manner of horror movie monsters are roaming around, from werewolves to vampires to mummies. I am now fully on board with the whole "shoot only the targets" mechanic, because all these monsters are so adorable and precious that I wouldn't want to shoot them anyway. Forget Shooting Range, Bandai should have called it Look at That Mummy, Sinking to His Bandaged Knees in Abject Despair Because I Shot His Target: The Lightgun Game.


I think my favourite are these Frankensteins, though. They look more robotic than usual, as though the Mad Doctor who built them was running low on cadavers and had to make do with odds and ends from his garage. And look, they're holding their targets like lollipops! Aww. I can't help but imagine that the original Creature wouldn't have been quite so bent on destroying his creator if Frankenstein had given him a big lollipop.


If you shoot their targets, the Frankensteins look at the now-empty space with an air of calm puzzlement. It's pretty great, and it makes me wish the whole game has been based around this monster theme. I like puzzled Frankensteins, but now I want to see confused witches, baffled warlocks, uncomprehending elder gods from beyond the stars, that kind of thing. Oh well, I can enjoy it for what it is -  decent if uninspired target-shooting action that does at least try to mix the movement patterns of your targets up. Some stand still, some move horizontally and the werewolves frantically jitter around the stage with their targets balanced on their snouts in a manner that suggest the brand of flea powder they're using is not very effective.


The previous paragraph may have implied that there are no witches in Shooting Range, but there are. They're just not confused. They know exactly what they're doing, be it carrying targets for you to shoot or engaging in terrifying bacchanalian rituals that let them commune with the dark lord Satan.


After the ghost house, there's a brief bonus stage interlude in the form of this bottle-blasting minigame. Simply shoot all the bottles to win, although things are complicated by the fact the bottles remain resolutely bullet-proof aside from the second or so when they're flashing white. Presumably this element of timing was designed to stop the player from going hog wild and getting through the bottles faster than Oliver Reed, but as the rest of the game is all about precision shooting I think it would have made a nice change to include a stage where the only thing being tested is how fast you can pull the trigger.


The final stage has an outer space theme and is heavily influenced, in terms of monster design at least, by the Alien movies. These pink things are very facehugger-esque. "Maybe you just want them to be facehuggers, VGJunk," I hear you say, "because you love the Aliens franchise so much." Well, fair enough. These things could quite easily be generic space insects, your common-or-garden Astro-Spiders.


I mean, these pop-eyed blue things definitely aren't related to the Aliens series, unless they were planned to appear in the ill-fated kid's cartoon spin-off. Speaking of cartoons, they look like something from The Real Ghostbusters. Nothing Alien related here, then, until you shoot their targets...


...at which point they turn into an eggs from which the facehugger-type enemies hatch and jump at your face.


Also there are monsters that are clearly xenomorphs, albeit orange ones. There's one now, lurking at the right-hand side of the screen and pondering how it's going to get an parasitic embryo into the target it's carrying given that it has no face to hug. So, there you are. Aliens. It's hardly surprising, Aliens has been more of an influence on videogames than probably any movie ever, from Contra to Doom. They're not usually quite so tangerine, mind you, aside from the dog aliens in Alien Trilogy.


The final stage even has a boss of sorts: the happy union of tentacles, eyeball and brain, all coming together with the sole purpose of making you lose the game by running out of time. The boss doesn't attack in any way, so it's down to you to take it out by shooting it right in the eyeball several times. This task is made more challenging by the boss possessing bullet-proof eyelids and a sleepy expression that tends towards Droopy levels of drowsiness, making it surprisingly difficult to hit the boss who is fifty percent eyeball in the eyeball. Still, I got there in the end, once I'd figured out it was easier to wait for the boss to fly in front of my sights rather than chasing it around the screen.


For my troubles, I received... a bronze medal? Oh, come on, I shot everything you asked me to and even some things you didn't! "You need to work a little harder," it says. You know, I'm not sure I do. There are many things in my life I need to work at - my personality, my potential employability, cleaning the grout on my bathroom tiles - which are much more important than Shooting Range.


However, those things are difficult so I pretended they didn't exist and went for the gold. Hooray for solid life choices! It turns out the key to being the best is the bottle-shooting minigame, as destroying all the bottles within the time limit nets you a very large points bonus. Is it worth it? No, not really. I already knew my play is wonderful. It's a modern re-imagining of Macbeth, it's going to blow the critics away with its fresh new take on the Bard!


Oh, right, and there's also the Party Game mode. It's whack-a-mole, except it's shoot-a-mole. Shoot-a-target, anyway. The targets pop up from the holes, and you shoot them. Sometimes the orbs at the back light up, and you have to shoot them to activate a new wave of targets. This is easily in my bottom twenty worst parties I have ever attended. It doesn't get into the bottom five, because there were no drunken arguments or embarrassing lapses of intestinal integrity.


I'm happy with being average. I'm certainly not going to play the party game again. If you really want to see the other endings, do it yourself. What am I, your mother?


And there you have it, Shooting Range is over; almost before it started, such is the brevity of the included content. What is there is diverting enough in a very basic way, and aside from having to hold the Zapper and the pad to play the game - which adds nothing and is merely awkward - I can't think of anything that you could change to make it better without making it an entirely different game. Apart from more stages, I mean. What is available is fun and cute, so if you're after a very basic NES lightgun game then you'll probably have at least some fun with Shooting Range. If you're after a deeper, more involved NES lightgun game then, erm, tough. I don't think there are any.

The weakest of all the denizens of Doom, the Former Humans are soldiers that have either been possessed by a demonic force or killed and then raised from the dead as zombies. As per Doom's insistence on ignoring everything that isn't shooting monsters, the difference is never explained. I suppose it's academic, really. I lean towards the "killed then revived" angle myself, because it explains why the powers of Hell don't just possess the Doom Guy, although maybe that's because the Doom Guy is the only soldier on Mars sensible enough to wear a helmet.
With barely any health and only attacking by firing weak pistol rounds from what appears to be a length of steel pipe, the Former Humans offer little threat and aren't that interesting apart from one detail: why do they have green hair? So they can be better camouflaged against the verdant lawns of Mars? Is an overwhelming desire to dye your hair like a fourteen-year-old who's just discovered punk music a by-product of demonic resurrection? I have no answers to these questions. I'm pretty sure there are no answers to these questions, but you know what? Now that I've taken a really good look at the Former Human's face close-up, I realise that he has fangs and would probably talk with an extremely unthreatening lisp.



A step up from the Former Human while still being former humans, the Sergeants carry more powerful weaponry in the form of shotguns as well as possessing slightly more health than their green-haired compatriots. That's how it works in the military: the higher your rank, the more powerful guns you're allowed to use, which is why only generals get to drive tanks. With their shaven heads and hands coated in what I like to think of as "gore mittens," the Sergeants aren't much of a threat when tackled from a distance or in small numbers, although having a bunch of then appear right next to you can be punishing. But hey, free shotguns!



The last and largest formerly human monster is the Commando, a chunky chap whose large physique is necessary for lugging around his weapon of choice - the chaingun. Oh, how they love their chainguns, and how the makers of Doom levels love to pack their maps with Commandos, hidden away in alcoves and perched atop sniper nests, raining down death on the reckless and unwary. Because they've got hitscan weapons, if they can see you, they can shoot you, and their presence in a level generally requires a cautious approach lest their chainguns quickly drain away your health. On the plus side, the volume of bullets that they can output means they're great for causing infighting between Doom's other enemies. Doom is a game where the action is studded with intensely satisfying moments - a point-blank super-shotgun blast to the face of your opponent, lesser enemies exploding into a red paste at the gentle touch of your rocket launcher - but few are quite as satisfying as getting a Commando to shoot a big enemy and then watching as said big enemy turns around and reduces the Commando to a former former human.
Also, a close inspection of the Commando's sprite reveals that he is suffering from a very severe nosebleed. As a fellow sufferer of sinus problems, he has my sympathies.



The first and most common of Doom's true demons is the Imp, a snarling, fireball-flinging creature formed by hammering railroad spikes through a pillar of doner kebab meat. They are to Doom as the Goomba is to Super Mario: numerous, ubiquitous and more of a hindrance than a deadly threat until you lose concentration. They are also both brown. Given that one of id Software's pre-Doom projects was an attempt to port Super Mario Bros. 3 to the PC, I think we can safely conclude that Goombas were, in fact, the main inspiration for the Imp.
Imps are everywhere in Doom, vast numbers of them embarking on Hell's crusade to subjugate the world of man, and as such I have probably killed more Imps than any other videogame enemy. Well, any other specific videogame enemy; zombies don't count, because they're more of a concept than a set type. There are many different zombies but only one kind of Imp, unless you're playing Doom 64 in which case surprise, there's a differently-coloured and more powerful kind of Imp. Forget about those, though - this Imp is the original, an icon of videogaming, the easily-perforated vanguard of Hell's assault and best of all they make the sound of a camel when they die.



With elements of pig, bull and humanoid physiology, capped off with the rosy pink glow of something freshly shaved, the Demon is melange of brute force and raw muscle, designed by the forces of Hell as the most efficient bite-delivery system possible. Well, maybe not the most efficient. They could probably do their job just as well without arms, as long as they retained at least a small nub on either side to help them keep their balance.
I love Demons, and for one simple reason: they love running face-first into your chainsaw, and once they're being chainsawed there's very little else they can do. A swarm of angry Demons, especially when there's a convenient corridor nearby that you can funnel them down, is your ticket to a conga line of ammo-preserving chainsaw death. If there's one thing all Doom play sessions should contain, it's a conga line of chainsaw death. If you ever go to see a band called Chainsaw Death - I'm sure there's one out there somewhere - make sure you start a conga line during the gig. They'll probably love it.



Towering, bestial goat-legged demons in the classic fiend-of-the-underworld mould, the Knights are the beige-coloured versions and have half the health but the same attacking power as the Barons, who are very pink. The Barons originally appeared as a pair to make up the boss battle at the end of Doom's first episode, where they emerged from what I think were supposed to be teleporter pods but which always put me in mind of porta-potties. Maybe that's why they're so pink, they're flushed (no pun intended) with embarrassment at being caught coming out of a portable toilet.
Like most demonic enemies in Doom, the Knights and Barons can attack both in melee range and from a distance by either punching the player or launching balls of magical green fire from their hands. Apparently their fireballs are fairly easy to dodge, although I wouldn't know because I'm always intent on getting my shotgun as close to their face as possible.



It can't all be rippling muscles and rending limbs in Hell's army, of course, and that's where the Cacodemons come in. No limbs at all and not much of anything else, either. A mouth, one eyeball, the odd horn here and there and viola, you've got the Cacodemon - capable of flight and capable of vomiting balls of lightning at the player, not so capable at playing Twister. One of my favourite things in Doom is when a map designer places a Cacodemon below the player, because there's something charming about the dopey way they float up into view, and in general there's a sedateness to the Cacodemon's movements that suggests they're not really into this whole "destruction of mankind" thing. A clue to their behaviour might be found in their name: Cacodemon comes from the Greek word "kakos," meaning bad. The Cacodemon is a Bad Demon. Always forgetting to torture sinners, never cleaning out the sacrificial altar after he's used it, that kind of thing. The Cacodemon really needs to pull its (strictly metaphorical) socks up if it wants to make an impression here at Hell, Inc.



A flaming skull that attacks only by the admittedly pretty metal means of the fiery flying headbutt, the Lost Souls tend to clog up the skies and zip around being difficult to hit. There's really not much more to them than that: they're kamikaze creatures that unfortunately don't die on impact, returning once and again to headbutt you like the accumulated psychic energy of all the world's drunken Scotsmen on a Saturday night. They're the hyperactive Beavis to the more laid-back Butt-Head of the Cacodemon, then, although I think their violent ways might not just be a result of them wanting the player dead. Being Lost Souls, they're probably looking for a warm body to inhabit and the Doom Guy offers an ideal candidate... except, as mentioned before, he's wearing a helmet and so they can't get in via his head. This leaves only one other major orifice through which they might enter, and even the Lost Souls, lowliest of all Hell's minions, have more pride than that.



They're squat and they're hot, it's the Mancubus! Wait, I don't mean they're hot as in attractive, I mean because they've got flamethrowers instead of arms. Mind you, I don't doubt that somewhere out in the darker wilds of the internet there are pictures of the Mancubus engaged in a variety of amorous exploits even if the phrase "erotic Mancubus" seems like it should stop the world turning when uttered. Erm, I've rather lost my train of thought now. Where was I? Oh yes, the Mancubus. As it says in Doom II's manual, the saving grace of the Mancubus is that at least he's a nice big target, and while he's got a lot of health he's not rocket-proof now is he? No, I didn't think so. His large girth also means he can serve as a surprisingly effective shield when there are lots of enemies present, and because demons have no compunctions about shooting one of their own in an attempt to get to you they might even kill the Mancubus on your behalf. Have I mentioned that I really love enemy in-fighting? I hope it's in the new Doom and the time that could have been spent implementing it wasn't wasted on creating flashy kill animations that quickly become repetitive.



Oh Christ, this guy. The bane of my Doom-playing experiences, the cause of thousands of digital deaths - a skeleton with rocket launchers. Not just any rocket launchers, either: the Revenant can fire regular rockets and homing missiles, and if you get close enough it will punch you in the head. The punch is definitely their most aggravating attack because it feels like, well, a slap in the face. Like, come on, man, you've got two kinds of rockets and you throw a mean right hook? Give me a break. How can you even punch that hard when you don't have any muscles? But the Revenants will not give you a break, and from Doom II onwards they seem to be densely packed into every Doom level ever made, filling the hallways and clattering around like an avalanche in the stock room of a coat-hanger factory. They are imposing foes, then, with the terror they exude being only slightly diminished by the coating of red gore on their lower bodies making it look like the Revenant is wearing lycra shorts.
Having spent so much time playing Doom, the word "revenant" has become inexorably linked in my mind to a skeleton wearing a rocket launcher, so naturally the first time I saw a poster for the movie The Revenant I instinctively started looking for a pillar to hide behind. The internet didn't disappoint me, either, and the next day I saw a poster for The Revenant edited to replace Leonardo Di Caprio with a Doom Revenant. Good job, internet. I can't help but think Leo would have won that Oscar by now if he'd taken on the challenging yet rewarding role of a skinless murder-demon. He would have to lose quite a lot of weight for the part, mind.



Meatballs of the Damned, the Pain Elemental - a more nurturing demon than most, seeing as it exists solely to puke up Lost Souls. A lumpy matryoshka of evil that wouldn't look out of place atop a pile of spaghetti, Pain Elementals don't really have much more to them other than the ability to create new enemies, although that's plenty bad enough.
You remember earlier when I said that Demons could probably do away with their big, muscular arms and make do with stumps? Yeah, I've changed my mind. Looking at the Pain Elemental, I don't think the gain in efficiency is worth the trade-off of looking like a dork. Now I think about it, it is a little strange that a flying monster with horns, a huge mouth filled with jagged teeth and a single bloodshot eye manages to look so completely unthreatening.




One thing you can say about the Arch-Vile is that in a game where most of the monsters are naked, he somehow manages to look more naked than the rest. I suspect this is a personal thing, as I share a similar pallid skin-tone with the Arch-Vile.
Envisioned by id as a demon healer, one of the Arch-Vile's trademark skills is its ability to bring dead monsters back to life. As such, writing this article has afforded me a rare chance to see the Arch-Vile up close, because when I encounter them in-game I'm always intent on killing them as quickly and from as far away as possible. That doesn't leave much time for a detailed physical analysis, but now I can see that they're a little plain, as demons go, their anonymity masking their deadly abilities. They're the kind of demon you wouldn't look twice at on a tour of Hell, until they use their other attack on you: a fiery explosion that will cause huge damage to the player if the Arch-Vile can see you. That's another reason I've never got a close look at one before - each battle with an Arch-Vile becomes the world's most lethal game of peek-a-boo.



Spider-brain, spider-brain,
He only wishes to cause you pain,
Robot legs, a massive gun,
He eats babies just for fun,
Look out, here comes the spider-brain!
Spider Mastermind, huh? I have to take issue with that name. You built yourself a set of mechanical legs but didn't include a protective dome to encase your delicate brain-meats? That doesn't sound very intelligent to me. I suppose it's all relative: when every other demon is a ravening, bloodthirsty berserker, being handy with a soldering iron is enough to see you elevated to the position of "mastermind."
I shouldn't be too harsh on the Spider Mastermind, because he's been deal a rough hand. Despite being Doom's original final boss, the Mastermind has been overshadowed by the Cyberdemon. It must be a bitter pill to swallow when everyone prefers a walking cow.



The Spider Mastermind also comes in a Fun-Sized version known as the Arachnotron, who possess a plasma rifle instead of their larger relative's super-chaingun as well as some of the deepest, most piercing blue eyes I've ever seen. It uses those eyes to placate the other monsters when they become enraged by the annoying whirring sound that the Arachnotron makes as it walks. Honestly, could you look into those eyes and stay angry at the Archnotron? No, I didn't think so.





The most iconic of all Doom's demons and one of the most famous computer game enemies ever to splatter players across a wall with a well-placed rocket, the Cyberdemon is a grotesque amalgamation of machinery and meat. But why am I telling you this? You already know about the Cyberdemon. He's the Elvis of videogame bosses. Shoot at it until it dies, etcetera. Although time and repeated encounters may have dulled the Cyberdemon's presence somewhat, I can still remember the first time I fought one in the original Doom, which is impressive recall on my part considering the battle lasted about four seconds. If I wanted to get pretentious about it, I could argue that the Cyberdemon's mix of ancient demon and modern technology is a perfect metaphor for Doom itself - taking something from the past and improving it with new technology and added lethality to create something powerful and terrifying. I won't say that, though. Instead I'll say that I like it when you kill the Cyberdemon and it explodes, leaving behind only a pair of bloody hooves, hooves being the most powerful material in the universe.
The Cyberdemon, and all the other demons with robot bits, make me wonder about the nature of Doom's Hell. Is it the literal Christian Hell, or merely another dimension filled with enough demonic horror that a casual observer would say "yep, that's Hell all right"? It's not an important distinction, of course, because this is Doom and anything that isn't shooting monsters isn't important, but I do hope it's actual Hell. The only reason is that I like to imagine Lucifer sitting on his throne and saying "I'll get my revenge against God using the one weapon the Almighty will never expect: cybernetics!" and then Lucifer builds a robot demon out of scraps. It's basically the start of the first Iron Man movie, but with more blasphemy.



Disappointing moments in the classic Doom games are few and far between, but I think the very last boss of Doom II being a wall might be one of them. Yes, it's a very spooky wall, a wall that might have adorned H. R. Giger's kitchen, but it's still just a wall. The evil wall is often called the Icon of Sin, but that's actually the name of the level it inhabits and it doesn't have a "real" name, although some call it Baphomet. To defeat the Icon of Sin - a name which has always sounded to me like the title a controversial pop star might give themselves, like the King of Pop - you have to use rockets to hit a vulnerable spot in the Icon's brain. Famously this target is the severed head of Doom creator John Romero, normally unviewable without cheat codes. I think I would have preferred it if the final boss was just Romero's head, bouncing around on the spike it's impaled on like a pogo stick.

There we have it, folks: all the demons of Doom, except for the mostly-invisible Demons called Spectres, and they're just Demons that you can't see very well. Just read the Demon section again and mentally append "plus 200 percent irritation factor." Which monster is my favourite? I'm not sure I could choose one, not when they all die in such wonderfully gory ways, but if forced I think I'd have to go with the Cacodemon. They just seem like the most chilled out, although their appear is hampered by their inability to give you a high-five.

Why am I playing the Megadrive version rather than the hit Amiga original? No major reason. The controls feel a bit smoother to me, but the real bonus of the Megadrive port is that the status bar is a sensible shade of orange rather than the punishing rainbow colours of the Amiga version.
Anyway, here's James Pond: spy, lover, fish. He likes his martinis shaken, not stirred and presumably not with dry vermouth, and he's surrounded by what to a humanoid fish must be attractive female humanoid fish. There's also whatever the hell that thing in the bottom-left of this little group photo is supposed to be. Two olives floating in a hospital bedpan, maybe. Of course, James Pond is such a rugged yet debonair haddock of mystery that one title screen alone is not enough to contain him.


This rendition of James Pond is... not so heroic. I wouldn't trust him to boil an egg, never mind save the world from a mad scientist, not when he's got the same facial expression as I do when I'm choosing what cake I want from a bakery window. At least my youth spent reading the kinds of authors who think Latin jokes are funny has paid off, because I can tell you that the Latin motto on Pond's fake MGM logo translates to "It's a Dog's Life." Bet you didn't think you'd be getting a Latin lesson when you opened this article, huh? Well, I'm terribly sorry and it won't happen again.


License to bubble? Really? My "license to gill" pun was much better. I would have also accepted "license to krill."


Here we are at the start of James Pond, then, and the titular fishy agent is on a mission to rescue lobsters. To accomplish this, Pond has the ability to freely swim through the water in eight directions, as well as being able to blow bubbles that trap the roving enemies. Once an enemy is encased in a bubble, swim into it to burst it and eliminate your foe. James Pond definitely has a platformer feel to it, but aside from a few areas where you have to flop around awkwardly on dry land there's not much platform-hopping going on so I don't know what genre I'd class this one as. Courier-em-up, possibly: every mission revolves around picking up an item and carrying it to a different place.


In this first mission, that means dragging keys through the briny deep so that you can unlock the lobster cages and set their crustacean occupants free, but do it quickly before they're hauled to the surface by the prowling fishermen who are, let's face it, just trying to make a living. The sea is a cruel mistress, especially when she's working with a halibut who thinks he's Sean Connery.


Once you've rescued enough lobsters, the exit pipe will open and Pond can move on. However, you don't have to rescue all the lobsters before reaching your quota, so it's up to you whether you save the rest (which nets you a points bonus) or just head to the next mission, leaving the remaining lobsters to the mercy of the fishermen and a future involving butter sauce and people wearing bibs. I suggest leaving them behind, because James Pond only give the player limited lives and continues and there's no way to save your game, so conversing your health is a must.


"From Three Mile Island With Love" is of course a reference to Bond movie From Russia With Love as well as the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which famously had what experts call a "nuclear boo-boo" in 1979. Fun fact, in the Amiga version this stage is called "From Sellafield With Love,"Sellafield being a British nuclear plant with a less-than-stellar reputation. I'm not sure I need to rush about saving these fish from mutation. I mean, James Pond is a mutant and he seems to be doing all right for himself. He is a mutant, right? He understands human speech and he's wearing a tuxedo, I don't think he's just a regular fish.


Another clue that Pond might be mutant is that he's not very good at swimming. You know, for a fish. That's not a convincing swimming motion, is it? He looks like he's perpetually thrusting, not slicing through the waters like a master of the aquatic realm.


As well as mission where you need to transport items, there are some missions where you need to drag creatures from one place to another. Before you start wailing and gnashing your teeth at the prospect of that perennial videogame "favourite" the escort mission, please be aware that your charges cannot be killed and will even follow James through solid rock if they're obstructed by the maze-like layout of the undersea stages, making James Pond a strong contender for the title of "Best Videogame Escort Mission." However, it will not win the title, as it will be beaten by every videogame that doesn't include an escort mission.


So goes the flow of James Pond: Underwater Agent. Grab the required items, cursing the lack of opposable thumbs on your slimy flippers, and take the items where they need to go. In this case, James is "liberating" some gold bars from a shipwreck. Where do they need to go? James Pond's Swiss bank account, I shouldn't wonder. The ghost of Captain Bluebeard wants his gold back, however. You can see him in the screenshot above, and he'll do anything to reclaim his treasure so long as it doesn't involve more than floating ineffectually through the water. This kind of lackadaisical approach to piracy is probably what got you killed in the first place, Bluebeard.


Unusually for a game of the time, James Pond doesn't just have discrete stages, and while I wouldn't go so far as to call it an open world game there is a bit of exploration that can be done. Most commonly, this will result in James floundering into a secret room. The secret rooms contain two things: items and death. Just being in a secret room will drain your health, but there are items to be collected for points and therefore (eventually) extra lives, items like headphones and, erm, bog roll. Judging by how shiny it is and its complete resistance to water, I'm going to guess that the horrible, cheap, plasticky toilet paper that you used to find in places where the user's comfort was not important, like schools.
Collecting items is a big part of James Pond. I don't mean power-ups (although there are a few) but points items, which are absolutely everywhere in this game, littering every crack and crevice of the ocean floor and appearing each time you pop a bubble-encased bad guy. What's impressive is that there are so many different types of item to collect, and the overall impression is that the game's artist looked around their bedroom and made a tiny sprite for every single thing they could see. Packs of gum, Rubik's Cubes, cups, teapots, cassette tapes, lamps, tennis balls, wind-up chattering teeth - there are dozens of different tiny trinkets for James to collect, and while I appreciate the effort it does seem like a bit of a waste when ninety percent of them just give you points.


The actual power-ups range from common things like health and time refills to rarer items like the fairy that flies around James and makes him invincible for a while using her faerie magicks, and even a few pick-ups that are more like equippable pieces of gear - there's a top hat that reduces the amount of damage you take, a fish bowl that lets you survive longer out of the water and, as seen here, a gun. Obviously James can't blow bubbles when he's not underwater, so he needs something to murder the surface-dwellers with. It's okay, he's doing it to save some adorable seal cubs. Unfortunately a lot of these seal cubs are lounging around on land, so James has to haul himself out of the water and get them. This is where the game's platforming sections lie, and if you're wondering whether they're any good I would remind you that "a fish out of water" is a common description of someone awkward and unsuited to their role. James bounces around constantly while he's on land, making jumps difficult to time, and the preponderance of invisible blocks waiting for you to smash your scaly head into when jumping may constitute the very opposite of the concept of fun. Oh, and your health constantly drains while you're out of the water, although it is replenished when you get back in the drink. Way to not evolve lungs, James.


These mission briefings are staring to get weird. You've got a gun, James. Why not just shoot the construction workers? This plan with the orchids seems unnecessarily complicated. It also forces you to yet again leave the sea, making a mockery of the title "Underwater Agent." Maybe leave this one to Captain Planet, huh?


Whether or not you enjoy James Pond will depend in large part on how you feel about mazes. None of the stages are vast labyrinths, exactly, but there's often a lot of backtracking because James can only carry one object at a time and it can get a little - okay, a lot - tedious. Something that might help you are mushrooms, just like half the people I went to university with used to tell me. These magic mushrooms - the small browny-red ones you can see on the right there - are actually magic, and touching them will teleport James to a different location in the stage, often a chamber that is otherwise inaccessible. It took me a while to figure this out, and I spent much of the first couple of stages confused as to why I was suddenly in a different room. Eventually I realised that it was the mushrooms' doing, and after that the first order of business in each stage is investigating each mushroom to see which ones work as helpful shortcuts back to the item drop-off point.


If you need a break from the action, you can visit James' home, complete with well-kept underwater lawn. Judging by the wreck of the Titanic lurking ominously in the background, James lives in the far north of the Atlantic Ocean and he has ready access to a large supply of human bones. You know, just in case he needed human bones for something.


A couple of times between stages I was chased relentlessly by this mysterious figure in a yellow trenchcoat, prompting me to spend an embarrassing amount of time scrabbling around for a fish-related Dick Tracy pun. The best I could come up with was Dick T-ray-cy. Like a stingray, you see. Come on, give me a break, after playing James Pond for so long my pun matrix is in dire need of recalibration.


Here's a mission where James needs to get rid of some toxic waste. His solution: drag it onto the beach, where it will become the problem of the Land-Folk. The barrels are actually smashed up by these people that are described in-game as "beach bums" but are clearly English tourists, which was a nice bit of local flavour. Still, it's not a great depiction of English holidaymakers on a sunny foreign beach, because they're not bald, overweight, sunburnt and shouting at waiters very slowly in English with "O"s added to the end of random words.


As is to be expected from a game that started life on the Amiga, James Pond starts getting very difficult towards the end. Time limits become tighter, enemy numbers are greatly increased,and the enemies themselves are more challenging. For example, there are enemies that are completely invisible unless you happen to be wearing a special pair of sunglasses which, I will be honest, I did not manage to find while I was playing the game. They might be invincible, but at least I can see these sharks. I'm glad I can, too, because they're rather sweet and possibly the least menacing sharks I've ever seen in a videogame. Given James Pond's maniacal zeal for fish-based James Bond gags, it's amazing that there is no reference to Jaws in the game. It's good to know the creators were willing to draw a line in the sand somewhere, I guess.


It didn't stop them going with the classic "dogfish" joke, though. No catfish, surprisingly.


"Remember, Agent Pond: don't waste time thinking about getting laid, these mermaids are way out of your league." Ouch, man, that is rough. I'm sure there's something these mermaids might see in James Pond, the suave secret agent and defender of the ocean. High levels of healthy Omega-3, for starters.


Look, the mermaids live in the sunless depths of the ocean with no company apart from flowers and scientists with heads so bulbous they look like they've had a basketball rammed up each nostril, I think they would probably be quite happy to see James Pond, even if it only leads to friendship. However, the mermaids will not even acknowledge James unless he brings them a comb. A comb each, and there are nine mermaids. Could you not just share the comb? It would make my life a lot easier.


Once I reached the last few missions, I started using cheats. The above screenshot may given you an idea why I started using cheats, and James' expression mirrored my own before I gave myself infinite lives and time. In fact, I would recommend giving yourself infinite time from the start if you plan on playing James Pond. It's hard enough without a time limit, especially because your limited supply of lives and continues means that a slow, patient approach is almost mandatory if you want to get past the first few stages. The time limit adds absolutely nothing to the game, so I definitely didn't feel guilty about getting rid of it.


For the final mission, the villains have caught up with James Pond, and he must gather a supply of food before the evil Dr. Maybe - yes, like Dr. No but less decisive - captures James and batters him. Presumably that's meant as another pun, but I'm going to pretend that Dr. Maybe intends to give James Pond a thorough kicking for messing up his plans. But what food will James collect? Fish food? Insect larvae? Plankton?


Nope, he needs pears. Pears, the superfood of the fish kingdom. Is this a thing? Do fish prefer to eat pears? I wouldn't know, the only goldfish I've ever had was fed on fish flakes, and he seemed pretty happy with it. We called him Adolf, because he had a small black patch just above his mouth and not because he kept trying to annexe the hamster cage.


I've just realised what these floating, swollen-headed scientists remind me of: it's an army of Loyd Grossmans! Fetch me a shoe-cake, pronto!
If you have the skill and patience to bubble your way through the army of scientists and killer clams, enough pears can be gathered to provide a long and prosperous future for James Pond, although Dr. Maybe escapes and will return again - James Pond was a hit, so naturally it spawned (oh god these fish pun will not stop) several sequels. Did they keep up the same level of highbrow humour? Well, the second game sees James wearing cybernetic armour. It's called RoboCod. That's a game for another time, though. For now, let's sit back and enjoy the sumptuous ending sequence.


That's it. That's all you get. The chilling message that his life of intrigue and danger will never be peacefully resolved and that same incredibly gormless image of our hero, the one where he somehow looking even more dense than an actual goldfish.


Yes, James, I know you do.
I'd find it difficult to recommend that you rush out and play James Pond: Underwater Agent. It's not that it's a terrible experience, but I'm left with lingering questions about why I bothered with it. The gameplay is fine, if a little too reliant on difficulty, but it never really catches the imagination and bobbing around the sea collecting things quickly becomes monotonous and you start to wonder when the game is going to start for real. Of course, it never does. The most interesting thing about the game for me is how it stands as my mental ideal for what a "European" videogame looks like. One look at the graphics immediately tells you that this is not a Japanese game, although I lack the critical art skills to tell you why that is. It's a combination of rounded shading and a complete lack of an anime influence, I suspect.


I know James Pond has lots of fans, and I appreciate the effort that went into making it, but sadly James Pond just isn't for me. I will, however, give it top marks for its unrelenting dedication to terrible puns. In this respect, James Pond and I are brothers of the sole. Soul. Please send help, I can't stop.

That's right, there are about thirty-five Flash browser games that you can play if the idea of playing a proper videogame is a bit too much for you. Are they mostly clones of simple and overly-familiar games with a hastily applied coat of Pokemon-coloured paint? I don't think I really need to answer that. I'm going to play a few of them - not all of them, because while I still like Pokemon I don't think I would after playing thirty-five Flash games - and report back.


I will be skipping this one, however. I don't need to see a weird tree goblin flinging its seed, thank you very much.


First I have to set up a Trainer Account. You get Pokemon Fun-Bux for playing the games, you see, and I don't want them to go to waste.
Here's my attempt to recreate my glorious presence in the Trainer Creator, and I have to say it's a pretty accurate likeness of me... circa 2002. The same shoes and everything, although I was perhaps even paler back then. I'd aim for a more up-to-date recreation of the VGJunk look, but there are no options for greying temples or pot bellies, so I'll have to spend this article looking at myself from a time when I was fresh and full of life.


It was the most prominent game featured on the page, but I would have headed straight for Escape From Gengar's Mansion even if it had been tucked away in a hidden corner of the Pokemon server, my finely-honed spook-senses pulling me towards it. This will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever read VGJunk in October, but ghost-type Pokemon are generally my favourites, (with poison a close second,) so this was a natural starting point for this Pokemon oddysey.


Ghost Pokemon are desperately lonely creatures, and they just want you to stay and be their friend. Alternatively, this is a ploy to trap a human in a place of inescapable, non-Euclidean geometry so they can feed on their captive's life essence. That's one of my favourite things about Pokemon, some of those Pokedex entries can get pretty messed up.


A Gastly appears - always a good start, because Gastly and it's evolutionary line are some of the very best of Pokemon's first generation - and tries to trap you in the house by giving you directions in the form of a big arrow. However, ghost Pokemon are tricksy sorts and pathological liars, so to escape you must follow the opposite direction. That is, when a left-pointing arrow appears, you hit right on the keyboard, and so on. It sounds simple enough, but you have to hit a certain amount of correct answers within the time limit and making one mistake results in a game over. I'm not sure why one wrong answer is a game over, mind you. Is the Gastly trying to direct me to my death? Yeah, let's go with that. He just wants a friend, even though this mansion is already packed with ghosts.


Clear the first stage and you go up against Haunter, the unimaginatively-named haunting Pokemon. It's the same thing but with more correct answers required to pass, and the addition of the random Pumpkaboo. A friendly and helpful ghost that died without without the lingering resentments of its more purple compatriots, the Pumpkaboo tries to help by showing you the correct button to press. Of course, all this does is throw off your concentration and cause you to fail, so maybe that was Pumpkaboo's plan all along.


Finally there's Gengar, looking as always like a ten-year-old bully and a teddy bear died at the exact same moment, causing their souls to fuse together in the afterlife. Look at the bead of sweat trickling down his fat head, Gengar knows that I've cracked the secret to his directions and will soon be escaping the mansion. He seems a little embarrassed about it.


There you go, Escape From Gengar's Mansion is complete, and as a reward you're given a link to download a desktop wallpaper based on the minigame. I am using this wallpaper right now, because I really do like ghost Pokemon, so I guess this was time well spent. I won't upload it here, but you can just about see what it looks like in the screenshot above and if you really want it you can play through Escape From Gengar's Mansion. Don't despair, it only takes about five minutes, although it is one of the more involved games on the Pokemon website so that'll give you an idea of the kind of things we'll be seeing next.


Things like Drifloon's Fill and Float, a game of bubble, balloons and rainbow-coloured potions. Hang on, isn't Drifloon the Pokemon that sometimes kidnaps children? Maybe this is how it gets close to them, blending in with all the other balloons until bam, sorry mom and pop but little Timmy is gone, spirited away to live in the Cloud Kingdom as a slave to his rubbery, soulless abductors.
Oh right, the game. You hold the mouse button down to make a bubble. The longer you hold the button, the bigger the bubble. If the bubble touches a balloon it bursts, so to score points you need to blow and release the biggest bubble you can in the gaps between the balloons. It is precisely as interesting as it sounds. Next!


No collection of low-effort minigames would be complete with a jigsaw puzzle, and here's Pokemon's take with Zorua and Zoroark Puzzle Pack. Can you call something a "pack" if it only contains two things? I suppose there could be different jigsaws unlocked over time or as you reach higher scores, but I doubt it. Instead you get an "Easy" jigsaw, and a "Challenging" one. This is the challenging option, and I could see where a larger jigsaw with some pieces that show nothing but pure white might be difficult, but this is small enough that it's doable by all but the youngest Pokemon Trainers pretty easily. The real challenge of Challenging mode is surviving the soundtrack, a four-second loop of nondescript parpy tunes that would work much better for forcing dissidents to leave occupied embassies than AC/DC does.


My least-favourite gameplay mechanic - the sliding block puzzle - rears its ugly, pointless and boring head in Eevee's Tile Trial, with "trial" being a fairly good descriptor for it. You slide the blocks to make lines of three matching tiles, which then disappear. At the start of the game you can choose between fire, lightning and water, and if you manage to complete more groups of your chosen element than the other two then your Eevee will evolve, for reasons that don't extend beyond "more points" from what I can see. The problem is (aside from the core issue of this being a sliding block puzzle and therefore The Worst) that the tiles you're dealt are random, so even if you care enough to think hard about your moves you might not be able to evolve your Eevee anyway.


Against my better judgement I actually played this one twice just to show you what happens when your Eevee evolves, other than the high-pitched whining sound generated by Darwin rapidly spinning in his grave. You get points and a picture. It wasn't worth it. There's at least one more sliding block puzzle in this minigame collection, too, so it's lucky (or unlucky, depending on your take) that I didn't play those two games first or I would never have written this article.


Classic three (or four, in this case) card monte action in Psyduck's Shuffle Surprise, where you're told to remember a card's location as it's shuffled around. Pick the correct card from the mixed-up deck and win, which is entirely possible because this is a Nintendo product and they're not running a scam on you or anything. It's probably the best computerised version of three card monte I've ever played, and this is solely down to the inclusion of Psyduck's confused face peering in at the bottom of the screen. Does that make me shallow? Probably, but I feel such a kinship with Psyduck's default emotion - bewilderment so intense it's giving him a migraine - that I'll give him a pass on appearing in this barely-there Flash game. I was trying to figure out why they chose Psyduck specifically for this game when he has no bearing at all on the gameplay and any Pokemon could have filled the role, but then I figured it out: Psyduck is using its psychic powers to shuffle the cards through telekinesis, which is why Psyduck is better than Pikachu. Speaking of Pikachu, I was very surprised to see that none of the games are based around Pokemon's rosy-cheeked mascot. There's a Raichu game, but Pikachu is conspicuous by his absence, something I never thought I'd say about any Pokemon product.


This is Gothita's Portrait Panic, and before I get into the game itself, two things: firstly, I know I said I was burned out on Pokemon games but now I've found out there's a goth pokemon I might have to get back into it. As a closet goth, having a Pokemon that probably listens to The Danse Society on my team appeals to me. I'll catch one, name her Bauhaus and assume she spends all her non-battling time shopping for corsets. According to it's Pokedex entry, Gothita "stares intently at everything," presumably judging the world for its inability to see the dark majesty of the grave. Secondly, that duck has no idea what is going on.


Definitely one of the more interesting games on this list, the aim of Gothita's Portrait Panic is to use your catapult to fire paint-balloons at a drawing of a Pokemon with the aim of colouring in the whole picture. Where most of the other games featured here are extremely simple, GPP is one of the few to try and expand on its basic mechanics: for example, you have to hold the button down to fill your balloon, but hold it too long and the balloon will pop, wasting time and paint. The pictures are suspended on boards, and the boards swing about depending on where you hit them, sometimes making things more difficult but also giving you opportunities to use the motion as an advantage. Because the paint-balloons "splash" in a semi-realistic way, if you can land a shot while the board's at an angle the paint will splash further. These kinds of things, plus a bonus mode and rewards for firing small, rapid shots, mean that GPP is the one game of the bunch that I'd recommend you try if you're desperate to play a Pokemon minigame.


Oh look, there's Pikachu now. If you ever wanted to shoot Pikachu in the face with a catapult, here's your chance to get some practise in.


If you didn't see Turtwig's Target Smash and immediately hear a mental voice yelling "Break The Targets!" you're either a liar or you've never played Smash Bros.


Another of the Pokemon website's more enjoyable games, and as someone who's never played Angry Birds I assume this is what Angry Birds is like except, no-one is ever angry in the twinkling technicolour world of Pokemon. They ought to have called it Happy Turtles, really. Turtwig moves up and down on an elevator, waiting to throw energy balls at the targets. Hold the mouse button to charge up your shot - the longer you hold, the flatter the trajectory - and try to hit as many targets as possible with each throw. Things are made more complicated by obstructive blocks and special coloured targets that disappear quickly if you don't smash them. This one's a pleasant enough time-waster, particularly if you like seeing cartoon turtles vomiting up molten plasma energy.


This is especially true when you finish the stage and Turtwig suddenly remembers Goku is living in his tonsils.


Maractus's Blooming Blossoms is a colour-matching game where you aim is to rotate the circles to make circles containing only one colour, and it works just as well as any other colour-matching game although in this game - as well as a few others - there is a tendency for the playfield to become obscured by the various effects and messages that pop up as you play. It's hard to plan your next move when there a big grey dialogue box covering everything, you know? It's nothing special as a game, but Maractus's Blooming Blossoms does have one thing going for it: a decent soundtrack. Most of the other games have music ranging from "blander than an unmarked manila envelope" to "the blasphemous chimes of Satan's alarm clock,"MBB's salsa tune sounds like the kind of music a sentient cactus creature would make, if it had opposable thumbs and external ears.


If I was trying to describe Munchlax's Berry Bonanza succinctly, I'd say "floppy Puyo Puyo." You drop berries into the arena one at a time, and if three or more of them touch they disappear. Beyond that, MBB diverges from the usual in a couple of ways. For starters, the berries don't conform to a grid like, say, Tetris pieces, and will obey physics to an extent as they roll around, bounce off each other and eventually settle into place. The other unusual feature is that any group of three or more you create won't immediately disappear. Instead you have to stop dropping berries and wait a while, and after five seconds or so any completed groups will disappear. This makes MBB feel surprisingly different to other falling-tile puzzlers than it first appears, allowing you create huge piles of fruit before allowing the whole thing to collapse in on itself. It's a more sedate approach to the genre, then, and one that I reckon could make for a fairly compelling game with some tweaking.


I suppose it makes sense that a game starring Munchlax would be a slow, deliberate affair regarding the consumption of food, even if most of those berries look rather unappetizing. You've got spiked red hell-chunks, lumpy purple ones that are clearly poisonous, cartoon bombs disguised as berries, the Spotted Arse-Fruit and those things on the left that look like the unholy union of grapes and corn. That's the world of Pokemon, where getting your five-a-day will almost certainly result in an agonising death.


More berries and more knock-offs of classic puzzle games with Tepig's Tasty Treat Toaster, which is PuzzleBobble. Puzzle Bobble with a picture of a cartoon pig nearby is still just Puzzle Bobble, you know? It's not even a great version of Puzzle Bobble, my enjoyment hampered by some inaccurate ball physics and the game's steadfast refusal to give me any bloody yellow berries.


It's Jumpluff's Sky-High Glide! Help Jumpfluff get wherever the hell he's going - the shops, a high-powered business meeting, alcoholics anonymous - by flapping him through the air, using air currents to speed him along and collecting extra spores for added lift. Watch out for trees and evil winds that will push you backwards! Wonder why you're still playing bad Flash games! Marvel at the fact Jumpluff has precisely zero frames of animation and floats across the screen like a cardboard cut-out!


For the final game, I went back to where I started and indulged by affection for ghost Pokemon with Gastly's Hidden Haunt, although frankly I wish I hadn't bothered. As I slowly moved cursor through the exact same background for stage after tedious stage, I couldn't help but think that this was an ironic punishment for my slightly shameful admission that I like spook-themed hidden object games. The focus of the game is light cleaning duties, as you search the house for cobwebs to eliminate. There's some interesting stuff done with hiding cobwebs between the layers of parallax scrolling, but because the background location never changes you soon learn where all the hiding spots are, making it one of the few games here that gets easier the more you play it.


There you go, I found Gastly. Now we can all return to our homes and play better, more interesting videogames. Before I sign off, however, because I've played so many games on the Pokemon website I've managed to amass 150 Trainer Points, which can be spent on items of clothing for your avatar. Let's see what all those points can buy me at the store, shall we?


With my 150 coins, I could afford a grand total of two measly items: the ugliest piece of clothing available, because nothing screams "class" like brown and gold spandex, and a Gengar hat. I'm happy enough with the Gengar hat. If I was going to choose a Pokemon  to decapitate and skin in order to use its hide as a hat, Gengar would be near the top of my list.
So, those are some of the games available at pokemon.com. If you are responsible for a small child who likes Pokemon - although I don't think there are many of those left, what with all the sexting and knife crime they have nowadays - then these games might keep them occupied long enough for you to get twenty minutes of merciful rest. Otherwise, I would stick to trying to catch 'em all in the relaxingly predictable and unchanging world of the proper Pokemon games.

Spacy Industrial? That's an interesting name. Are they the manufacturing arm of the Space Navy? I guess we'll never know, as Spacy are a mysterious company with no other games to their name and no mention I could find of who their staff members may be. The appeared, dropped Evil Stone into arcades to resounding lack of interest and then disappeared, presumably back into space.
So, Evil Stone, then. It seems wrong to affix the moral notion of evil to a stone when a stone is incapable of having any ethical alignment. You might think differently if a volcanic eruption has recently propelled a boulder onto your dog, but I think we can all agree that stones cannot be evil. I think there's supposed to be a comma in the title: Evil, Stone makes much more sense, because the game's got plenty of those two things.


Somebody's opened the Hell Gate. Bloody typical. Now there are Demons and Ghost everywhere, and who's going to have to clean up this mess in a manner that reminds me of - but I'm sure won't be as much fun as - an episode of Trapdoor? That's right, muggins here. Not the old man, he's just some old man, although he does give the task of "having back the order of heaven" to us, the player. In arcade games there's often little indication about why you, specifically, are the person most qualified to save the universe, but in Evil Stone you're actually told why you're the right man for the job. It's because you're "the man who carries on Buddha's cherished desire." Well, that's all right then.


Once you've inserted your credits and hit start, the game begins and you're treated to a nice top-down view of a Japanese-style shrine gate and some floating paving slabs. What a strange-looking landscape. I wonder where we are?


A Hell World of Most Scandalous Scene, huh? It sound like a pit of damnation where your soul is forced to read awful "true life" gossip magazines for all eternity.


Here upon the Hell World's poorly-maintained patio, the action of Evil Stone can begin, and it's going to take some describing. On a basic level, it's the same as most action videogames of the time: defeat the enemies, reach the end of the stage and fight a boss. However, the hero of Evil Stone cannot walk wherever he likes, thanks to the gaps between each floating stone. Your only movement options are the ability to jump either left, right, up or down - no diagonal jumping, which will be much more of an issue later - between the stones. You can jump to an adjacent stone, or jump over a gap one stone wide, and that is it.


For example, you can jump over this one-block gap to reach the next section of the stage, but that's the furthest you can jump, which meant that ninety percent of my time playing Evil Stone was tapping the jump button. The other ten percent was me looking up synonyms for the word "jump."


Monsters abound, as you might expect from Hell World, like this rather fine-looking skeleton chap. The cape really give him that extra bit of je ne sais quoi, you know? It might be a Hell World but that's no reason to let standards slip.
If you thought the tightly restricted movement was odd, the combat is where Evil Stone really takes a turn for the unusual. Not so much when it comes to you defeating the bad guys - you kick them in the face, just like Buddha would have wanted - but when it comes to getting hit. You see, the hero of Evil Stone is completely immune to all all attacks from the monsters. This skeleton can jam his scythe where the sun don't shine but our hero will merely be knocked back, and there you have the crux of Evil Stone's gameplay. The only way to die is to fall off the stones, either because a monster pushed you over the edge or, and much more likely, because you spent too long standing on one of the crumbling bricks that make up the vast majority of the later stages.


It doesn't take long for the game to start setting up areas where enemies lay in wait to poke you to your doom, like these horse-men and their extending spears. The horse-men don't seem any more thrilled about it than I am, although that's understandable. They came to Hell World after seeing a advert for jobs as horsemen of the apocalypse, only to realise when they arrived that they'd deeply misunderstood the nature of the position.


Waiting at the end of the Hell World is a boss, a large cyclops with extending limbs and a fetching orange miniskirt. Pretty standard fare as guardians of the dark netherealms go, although the real villain of this fight is that one block towards the bottom of the screen that looks different to the others. That's a collapsing block, and it will fall apart if you stand on it for longer than about a second or so.
The actual fighting part of the fight wasn't so tough, though, because I've managed to collect enough "P" icons from defeated monsters to learn a new move! Now our hero can fire an energy bolt after charging up by holding the attack button for a moment, and as you can imagine a projectile attack comes in very handy. Your special move changes as you collect more power-ups, going from a single shot to a three-way forwards blast to one that moves in a cross pattern. The single shot is more than enough to beat this cyclops, though. Shoot it once, jump over the other side, wait for the cyclops to follow you and repeat until Hell World is but a distant memory.


Stage two is "A Cave Into the Human World," and where the road to Hell World was paved with good intentions, the road to the human world is paved with enormous staring eyeballs. It's not so much a cave as it is some nightmarishly vast accumulation of internal organs, which is a visual aesthetic I'm happy see. It beats the usual forest world - fire world - ice world cycle, anyway.
As you can see, the more open areas of the first stage are already a distant memory, and from here on Evil Stone's levels are all about negotiating narrow pathways and disintegrating masonry.


There's also a greater emphasis on shooting demonic frogs with destructive blasts of your accumulated life-essence. I mean, it's not the singular focus of Evil Stone from here on out but there is a significant increase in anti-frog activity. I need to jump over there, you see, and I could do without landing on a frog when I do so. Even worse, I could get trapped between two frogs. When this happens - with any enemy, not just frogs - your characters is passed back and forth between the two monsters for a while, with you having no control over what's happening, until you're deposited somewhere else at random: usually off the edge of the stage, naturally


Two bosses for stage two, as a pair of fire-breathing ogres stand guard at the entrance to the human world. Furious demons who will destroy all those who dare to trespass in their domain, sure, but they were kind enough to cover their shame with those loincloths so they're okay in my book. Because they take it in turns to breath fire, defeating them is a simple matter of jumping in front of the one that's not currently trying to incinerate you and shooting at it. The problem with that is I managed to run out of time doing so on each of my playthroughs. Fortunately I managed to cheat and turn the timer off. I have enough pressure in my life without bullshit time limits, you know? There's not even any reason for there to be a time limit, it's not like our hero has a cake in the oven he has to get back to or anything.
So, with the unlimited time cheat firmly in place, I managed to chip away at the bosses until they were dead and I could move on to the human world.


I think that's a little harsh. It's not all vanity here in the human world. We have ice cream and videos of cats doing stupid things and the music of Iron Maiden, too.


I know it said we were going to the human world, but it was still a surprise to see a modern city down there. Not as surprising as it will be for the residents of said city when I mess up a jump and they find the remains of a Dragonball Z cosplayer splattered across several blocks, though.


The most common enemy in the human world are these axe-wielding grannies, or trolls, or whatever they are. I suppose being a troll and being a grandmother aren't mutually exclusive. Baby trolls have to come from somewhere. They brought two axes each, but because our hero is not harmed by any attacks they might as well be carrying brooms or rubber chickens or something, which makes them seem less threatening even if they do appear to be composed of pure rage. Evil Stone has a good set of nicely-drawn monsters all around, actually, with the less-common Eastern themes of things like oni, kappas and tengus all present and accounted for.


Hey look, it's the head of the demon army, ba-dum tssh. All he really does is spit out rocks and literally roll his eyes at the player, which felt a little condescending. I'm not going to take that from a boss that looks like a novelty plant pot.
The switch from hopping across floating blocks to suddenly being on firm, flat ground took a bit of getting used to, as did my new attack option: with the timer disabled, I had enough time to grind up to the next power level, Unfortunately, this replaced my three-way forward shot with a cross-shaped four-way blast, and the spread shot would have been far more useful in this situation. I got through it in the end, however, mostly by forcing my ki down the boss' ears.


Erm, thanks? I think? It's true, I am not mean. I am very generous when it comes to giving out deadly fireballs.


Stage four is titled "The Angry Waves of the Dead Spirit World," which is a pretty metal as titles go and you're not even reading this, are you? You're still staring at the lovingly-rendered buttocks of our hero in the screenshot above, aren't you? It's okay, I understand. They are quite distracting, like two firm cantaloupes nestled in a silken bag.


By this point, the arrangement of the block in Evil Stone's stages have taken on a more convoluted shape. Because you can't jump diagonally, sometimes getting on the correct path to proceed can be... well, I won't say "a puzzle" because that'd be giving it too much credit, but you do have to think two or three jumps ahead, especially towards the end when almost every block will collapse if you stand on it for longer than the briefest moment. It seems that Spacy did intend for there to be a puzzle element to the gameplay but chickened out, refusing to make the commitment to either all puzzles or pure action. As a result Evil Stone feels like a half-hearted compromise where neither the action nor the "puzzles" are interesting enough to keep you engaged once the novelty factor starts to wear off. It doesn't help that it's brutally difficult even for an arcade platformer - by the end enemies are constantly appearing and there's no solid ground to stand on where you can charge up your special attacks, and it ends up feeling like an ironic punishment. All those times I've complained about games that kill the player in one hit and along comes Evil Stone, where no hits can kill you... but you'll die anyway after the enemies have gloomily bounced you back and forth like a beachball listlessly thwacked around by the crowd of a midweek third division football match.


This boss attacks by throwing his own head at the player. I wonder how he figured out he could do that? Maybe you just know, deep down inside, if you're head is a) detachable and b) will regrow even if you accidentally throw it onto the neighbours' roof or similarly inaccessible place.


Next up is "A Cave Into the Heavenly World," and as the garden path to heaven it's surprisingly bleak, with sinister robed monks and these bizarre flying xenomorph-bat creatures. Now I understand the benefits of the cross-patterned attack, though. Maybe it even does extra damage because these monsters are some kind of star-vampire.


The stage's most impressive monsters by far, and probably the coolest freaks in a game packed with weirdos, are these green gremlins. Having forgotten to bring their twin axes and lacking the ability to create magical energy bolts, the gremlins turn to the hardest, spikiest projectile available to them: their own skulls. That's right, they attack by removing their own skulls and throwing them at out hero, and best of all there's an animation that shows the floppy skin of their now boneless heads crumpling onto their shoulders like a wet dishrag. How great is that? Super great, that's how.


The boss is the Toxic Avenger. As nice as it is to see that Toxie's still getting work, his attempts to smash me to my death with a morningstar show a disappointing lack of heroism from the so-called Monster Hero.


I do hope you're not trying to take credit for all my hard work, old man. If you were, things would get personal and I'd hate to have to launch a tirade against your ridiculous hat. Let me do all the fighting, and you stick to what you do best - carrying cups of tea around without using your hands.


The God World is Tipperary, then?
The final stage, as you might expect, is a culmination of all the vicious tricks and traps that Evil Stone has to offer, with barely a non-crumbling block to be seen and some treacherous and twisted paths liberally sprinkled with monsters. Fortunately, I have managed to tip the odds ever so slightly back towards me by collecting enough power ups to unlock the final martial arts technique, one that will surpass even the four-way shot. But what could it possibly be? A screen-clearing smart-bomb attack? A barrage of homing missiles?


Nope, your leg gets really long and you spin around in a circle. Is this why martial arts always keep their most ancient and powerful techniques a secret? Because they look dumb as hell?


You know, this place is kinda boring for somewhere called God World. God World sounds like a Christian theme park, and as crazy as it sounds I think even a Christian theme park would be more interesting than this. It's nothing but crumbling blocks spaced out in a semi-maze-like arrangement that's not difficult to negotiate but still manages to be aggravating. Then again, I could be making passionate love to a beautiful, intelligent woman who loves me for who I am and even that would be aggravating if Evil Stone's "jumping" sound effect played every four nanoseconds like it does in this bloody level.


It's the end of stage boss and this is God World so... this is God, then? He doesn't seem very godlike. I can't imagine God having hair like a carton of french fries, or being defeated by a man whipping his floppy, fifteen-foot-long leg around in a circle. It's not even a very interesting fight: the boss launches some projectiles, and you mostly ignore them as you concentrate on not standing on the crumbling blocks for too long, occasionally unleashing a spinning kick. If you can manage to keep your concentration for long enough, victory will be yours - the Hell Gate is closed, the Earth is saved and everyone goes out for celebratory chocolate milkshakes.


Okay, I'm starting to dislike you, granddad. What's your problem now?


Oh, I see. Wait, no I don't. What are you talking about? What is going on? Look, make it simple for me and show me what else I need to kick, then I can get on with the kicking and we can start to put this increasingly tedious game behind us.


Kicking an old man? Now this I can get a handle on! I think this boss is supposed to be the same old man who's been jabbering at me nonsensically via the cutscenes. I know he's difficult to recognise without his trademark daft hat, but he's got a beard and the same robe. It's the "why" that's the real question, though, and I have no clue why I would be fighting the old man. Just before this he tells the player to "repent for your thoughtless act," which makes no sense considering I was hand-picked by this old geezer for this mission and anyway, I don't think "kicking a senior citizen" can ever fall under the category of repentance. Whatever the reasons - I'm going to simply assume my elderly mentor is kind of a dick - we must do battle. He fights by throwing orbs of rich, tomato-y plasma around, to which I responded by jumping around and kicking. Bet you never saw that strategy coming, huh? And so it goes on for what feels like far, far too long, until you land enough hits and the whole thing just fizzles out.


Yeah, no thanks to you. Do I at least get some kind of reward?


Ha ha, a reward? Not a chance, you don't even get a ride home and the game ends with our hero jumping from space back down to Earth, or whatever that planet is - a planet where the continents look a bit like Earth's but subtly different, as though affected the the geological forces of a million years. That'll be the sequel, then. Evil Stone 1,000,000: Kick the Future.


Maybe I played Evil Stone while I was in a bad mood or something, but the overall feeling I took from it was mild annoyance. I'm not entirely sure what it did wrong to get on my nerves so much. The gameplay is decent enough if a little one-note, the graphics and monster designs are fun and I should at least give it credit for being fairly unique. There aren't many games out there with a similar style of gameplay, although given how quickly I got fed up of jumping everywhere that's probably a good thing. Hearing the jumping sound effect - a noise that sounds like a dog with a sore throat giving a feeble "woof" - roughly twenty billion times certainly didn't help, either. A lack of excitement and an off-putting difficulty level topped off a slightly below-average experience, so Evil Stone definitely isn't something I'd recommend. Then again, what do I know? I don't trust my own opinions half the time, so you probably shouldn't either. Play Evil Stone and you'll probably love it, especially if you're really into bad translations and even worse paving.

That's right, it's Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha - "Plus Alpha" originally referring to the enhanced Playstation port of Street Fighter EX - brought to the SNES, possibly by a company called DVS Electronic. Wisely, the developers decided not to include their name on the final product.


As you'd imagine, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha: Baffling SNES Edition Turbo is pretty light on content, with only the standard arcade and versus modes available to choose from and a couple of options to fiddle with. There's an option to change the difficulty of your CPU opponents. I'm fairly certain it doesn't actually change anything.


Okay, that's a fairly faithful recreation of SFEXPA's painfully gaudy character select screen, or it least it would be if it wasn't missing half the characters. Despite being based on SFEX, this "port" only includes two of the fighters introduced in the SFEX series. One of them is Skullomania, thankfully, while the other is Hokuto. Already this is a worrying sign, because why bother porting SFEX if you're going to remove all the characters that made it unique instead of just making, I dunno, Street Fighter Zero 6: Rainbow New Challengers Edition or something? Well, the reason for the lack of SFEX characters will become clear once we get into the game. I'll be playing as Ryu for the purposes of this article. Yes, it was quite the emotional struggle not to pick my beloved Skullomania, but I chose Ryu for a reason. After twenty-five years of Street Fighter, I've spent more time moving Ryu around that I have moving my own physical body, so he offers a good baseline for deciding how accurate a copy of Street Fighter this game really is.


Ryu vs. Ken: the eternal struggle. Ryu has a finely-honed mastery of karate and the invincible soul of a true warrior on his side. Ken is a millionaire with a loving family. In a lot of ways, the winner here is already decided.
I'm sure you're all excited to see how the developers of this game managed to cram the polygonal graphics of the original into a SNES cart, and the simple answer is...


...they didn't. The main thing that set SFEX apart from its forebears is completely absent from this version, replaced with familiar 2D sprites. I suspect most of these sprites are based on sprites from the Street Fighter Alpha series - Ryu having a white headband is something of a giveaway - but they're definitely not straight rips of the Alpha graphics, either. Did someone sit down and edit the sprites or draw over them to produce these unconvincing, blobby clones? Probably. They did a bloody awful job, mind you. Just look at Ken's right knee. That's not where knees are in relation to the rest of the leg, not unless his femur is about three inches long.


So, I set to playing SFEXPA and immediately noticed some problems. For starters, there're only one button each for punch and kick. I tried to do a jumping kick but Ryu point-blank refused, jumping into Ken's Dragon Punch instead. Normally this would be a minor setback, but for some reason Ken's Dragon Punch - his regular, unadorned Dragon Punch - hit Ryu about fifteen times and drained nearly two-thirds of his health. I retaliated by throwing a fireball, and to the games credit it actually worked first-time. The ability to perform special moves with any degree of reliability was not something I expected to be included, so there's that. However, everything else about the fighting engine is utterly woeful, a heinous juddering mess of missing frames and unfathomable hit detection. I think in this case, showing is better than telling, so here you go:


I don't know which is my favourite part: when Ryu is tripped and briefly goes completely upside-down, or when Dragon Punches are being traded and the game just decides "fuck it" and pops the characters into random positions. They're both pretty wonderful.
After grappling with the controls for a while, particularly when it came to not pressing the shoulder buttons for heavy attacks because surprise, they don't do anything, I managed to avoid Ken's ridiculously lethal uppercuts long enough to win the fight. Naturally you don't get a victory screen or a win quote or anything like that, but to be fair those things weren't in the original SFEXPA either.


The next battle is against Ryu's deadliest foe: himself! Okay, second deadliest after "this game's shocking amount of input lag." Further proof that these graphics aren't just ripped straight from Street Fighter Alpha is offered here: in the SFEX games Ryu's usual Hurricane Kick is replaced by a jumping triple-kick move which you can see above, so the developers must have drawn new sprites (or at least heavily edited existing ones) for these new moves.


If I wrote a sentence describing every weird bug I ran across during this game, this article would end up longer than War and Peace but with considerably more anguished swearing, but some things cannot be allowed to pass without comment: things like my Ryu refusing to face his opponent while he performs his super Hurricane Kick. Shouting out "HE'S BEHIND YOU!" is something that really should be limited to children's pantomimes or watching horror movies while drunk. Oh, and yes, this game does include super moves, which was a surprise. You can see the super bar just below the health bar at the top of the screen, although how and why said bar fills up is a mystery to me and the CPU often seems to able to summon up a string of uninterrupted super combos one after the other. This is a problem, and the problem is exacerbated by blocking not working properly. You hold back to block as usual, but any multi-hit attack can and will ignore your defences whenever it bloody well feels like it. If Ryu catches you with his super Hurricane Kick and you're blocking, you'll take at least three or four hits out of the fifteen or so it throws out.


Next up is the strongest woman in the world: Chun Li, with her massive legs and teeny-tiny arms and her famous pink dress. Chun Li has reached such an advanced level of martial arts prowess that she is able to to become utterly intangible, turning her physical form on and off like a goddamn light switch.


See? This, amazingly, did not register as a hit despite Ryu's fist - which is bigger than Chun Li's entire head - definitely being in a position that should result in Chun Li losing some health and possibly filing criminal charges. The worst thing is that sometimes this would count as a hit, but SFEX's hitboxes are as ineffable and unknowable as the whims of the jerkiest of trickster gods. This serves to make the game extremely difficult, because while a human player can never truly comprehend what's going to happen from one moment to the next, the CPU always "knows" what's going on. Perform a super move and the computer will have the exact right move ready to counter it, for example, or it'll walk straight through one of your seemingly clean punches and smash you with a Spinning Bird Kick that wipes out half your health. Obviously this makes SFEX a very unfair game, and I was having real trouble getting past Chun Li until I hit upon the One True Strategy: stay as far away as possible, hit them with a few fireballs and wait for the time to run out. They're too dumb to come and get you most of the time, and these tactics are helped by the game clock starting at forty "seconds" rather than the usual ninety-nine - making matches so short that you'd struggle to defeat your opponent before the time ran out even if you could fight properly.


Even in a game as illegally cobbled together as this one, Guile here is looking particularly bootleg-y. I think that's because his sprite is actually based on Charlie / Nash (wait, I think his name is canonically "Charlie Nash" now, right?) from the Street Fighter Alpha series, as evidenced by his ploofier-than-usual trousers and orange vest. They've replaced Charlie's bizarre "Misfits' devilock wrapped around a wire coat hanger" haircut with Guile's marginally less bizarre "mighty desert plateau"'do, but he still doesn't look all that much like Guile. The lack of Stars and Stripes tattoos on his biceps doesn't help, either.
After some painful research - that is, I played some more of this mess after I finished the arcade mode - I realised I could have made my life easier by playing as Guile. This is because projectile attacks were the main pillar of my combat strategy, and Guile doesn't have to charge up his Sonic Boom like he does in other, actually competent Street Fighter games. Nope, you just tap away, towards and punch to throw a Sonic Boom, which makes Guile feel a bit like a Mortal Kombat character.


Long-time VGJunk readers will know all about my affection for Skullomania, a character introduced into the Street Fighter universe via the first Street Fighter EX game - a tragic figure and balletic fighter who lost his mind after his boss forced him to dress as a skeleton for a work promotion and became a costumed... well, I'm not sure "champion of justice" is exactly correct so let's just call him a puncher of faces. I have long awaited another chance to play as Skullomania, but not like this.


Wow. Just... wow. It's so graceful I can hardly take my eyes off it, a statement which, sadly, is almost true. And here I though the digitised clowns in the background would be the most upsetting part of this fight.


It's Akuma. He's waving at me. Hello, Akuma! I hope you like fireballs.
It turns out Akuma does like fireballs, and he spent the entire fight throwing them at me, including a big super fireball and even his trademark air fireballs. Further testing indicates that his other trademark, the deadly Shun Goku Satsu super combo, is not included in the game. This is hardly surprising, as it would be difficult to input light punch, light punch, forward, light kick, heavy punch when there are only two buttons and they don't even work half the time.


I have no idea what M. Bison is trying to do here. I've been playing this game for so long that everything's started to blur into a dizzying mess of indecipherable bullshit. Bison appears to be performing a hyper-exaggerated "slipping" pose, as a cartoon character who's just trodden on a banana peel might. His poorly-drawn boots make his lower half look like he's wearing blue shorts, tights and black pumps, while a giant slug perches on his shoulder. For his part, Ryu is about to plant a Dragon Punch right into Bison's testicles, which is an apt metaphor for playing this game.


Seriously, I'm really struggling here. Between Sakura's pencil-thin thighs and the statue of a green jelly baby in the background, this SNES version of Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha feels like it pushing me to the edge of either madness or a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage.


I know it's crude, but I have to ask: are you farting on Sakura, Ryu? Is that what's happening here? Does the answer lie in the fart of battle? Oh god, I'm so sorry. Do you see what this game has reduced me to? I don't think I've ever said "wait, what? What is going on?" so often in such a short span of time, apart from maybe the time I watched Twin Peaks while I had the flu and was dosed up on Night Nurse.


The final bout of the arcade mode is against Hokuto, one of the characters introduced in the Street Fighter EX series. She's a serious shrine maiden type who sometimes becomes a murderous berserker assassin, as you do. The graphics on her portrait picture are messed up, because of course they are.


Here we see why this Street Fighter EX game barely contains any Street Fighter EX characters: because they've never been represented in sprite form before, there was nothing for the developers to rip off and so adding in more EX characters would have taken a lot of extra effort. I think by now now we have a good idea as to the developer's feelings on "effort," and so we're left with a wonky Hokuto sprite with a waist so thin she couldn't possibly eat solid food and a colour scheme that only dogs should be allowed to look at.


Thus the arcade mode ends as it began, with me throwing fireballs and waiting for the clock to run out. Hokuto didn't stand much of a chance, mostly because she kept doing her "perform a counter attack if someone punches me" move and you can't counter-attack a fireball. I mean, I suppose you could but it's fire. Don't punch fire.


The ending sequence, in all it's majesty! I know you think it says "you are number one," but reflect on that for a moment. Don't you think it's more likely it means "you are no-one"? I'm not saying that this game is so bad that it has stripped away all sense of my identity and left me a hollow shell of a man, but that's just because I only played it for a few hours.


In case you didn't read this article and skipped to the end for my admittedly very important final judgement, let me be clear: Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha is an absolutely wretched experience, and one of the worst videogames I've played in a very long time. It gets every single facet of the fighting game experience wrong: blocking doesn't work, hitboxes come and go as they please, controlling your fighter is like trying to play Operation using a JCB and every character jerks around the screen though someone hollowed out their bones and replaced the marrow with angry wasps.


I like to try to say something positive about every game I play, but in this case I'm struggling to come up with anything. The music's pretty good, but that's because all the music is ripped straight from Street Fighter II. It's poorly compressed and doesn't sound quite right, but a bad version of Guile's theme is still Guile's theme. Erm, it has Skullomania in it? Apart from that, the only nice-ish thing I can say about this game is that I have to admire the sheer cheek of the developers. They were determined to cram Street Fighter EX into a SNES cart, and by god they sort-of managed it. Sure, the cramming process absolutely destroyed the game, but these noble fools dared to dream. I just wish their dreams had been in a medium I have no interest in. Street Fighter EX: The Ballroom Dance would have been fine. I could have comfortably ignored that. Unless it had Skullomania in it, of course.

Known as Oh! Bakyuuun in Japan, I presume the title Ghoul Panic was only chosen because Ghost Panic was already taken. There are no corpse-eating, graveyard-dwelling ghouls in this game, but there are most certainly ghosts. Lots and lots of ghosts. Enough ghosts to cause a panic? I'd say so, because while the ghosts themselves aren't very menacing there are so many of them that you can't help but wonder about the horrific event that took place to cause their restless spirits to all linger in one place.


Our heroes are Kevin and Lisa, who have been turned into cat people. Cons: rejected by society as a freak of nature, spaying and neutering. Pros: you can film yourself doing adorable things and upload the footage to Youtube for fame and profit.


The cat-kids grab their guns and head off to the haunted house, secure in their conviction that if there's one thing that can reverse a curse, it's a hail of hot lead. To achieve their goal, a trio of shadowy figures must be defeated. They're not shadowy enough, clearly. I can tell they're a vampire with his tongue sticking out, a witch carrying a toilet plunger and a Frankenstein wearing a ball gag despite them being silhouetted.


Here are the rules of the haunted house: don't shoot your fellow cats, bomb ghosts or ghosts of the wrong colour. Don't shoot what you're not supposed to shoot. Most importantly of all, don't by the boss's attack. Wait, what? Never mind, it's too late now. I've already hit start and been whisked to the difficulty selection screen.


I think I'll take a quick run through Practice mode. It's been a while since I shot a ghost, I need to find out whether busting still makes me feel good. As you can see, there are also Medium and Advanced modes which offer the full Ghoul Panic experience, unlike the Practise mode which ends after you defeat the first boss. Anyway, I can't start with the Advanced mode. It's difficult, you see. It says so right there.


Look at that ghost. Just look at that adorable little bastard. I don't want to shoot him! You've really messed up here, developers of Ghoul Panic. I don't want to line his lungs with lead, I want to fill his heart with song.
In case you haven't noticed (or have never played them before) Ghoul Panic is very much just Namco's Point Blank series of target shooters given a ghostly twist - a spiritual successor of sorts that replaces Point Blank's mascots Dr. Dan and Dr. Don with a pair of colourful anime cats. As with the Point Blank series, Ghoul Panic doesn't feature the long stages of most lightgun games but is instead a series of very short mini-stages of varying types and complexity. Some of them, like this first stage, are as simple as shooting as many ghosts as possible within the time limit, while others feature gimmicks such as shooting two ghosts of matching colours or getting as high a score as possible with limited ammunition.


The actual shooting action, at least for the moment, is very straightforward. Point your gun at the ghosts and pull the trigger, if you can bring yourself to take these marshmallowy sweethearts out. The way I got through it was by looking at it this way: what am I going to do, kill them?
As you'd imagine, the first stage of Practise mode, this is a very gentle introduction. You've got plenty of time, unlimited ammunition (and no need to reload) and the ghosts are all out in the open, swanning around as though they own the place. Which I suppose they do. They're tenants, at the very least.


Stage one complete and Lisa jumps for joy in all her polygonal glory. The whole game is made of polygonal models that look very PS1-ish, which is no surprise when you consider that Ghoul Panic is running on Namco's System 12 arcade board, an enhancement of the earlier System 11 board which was itself basically a Playstation in an arcade cabinet.


Once you've cleared the intro stage, Ghoul Panic settles into a regular pattern of offering four stages that you can tackle in any order. Once you've tried - although not necessarily beaten - all four, the boss appears. Beat the boss and there's another four stages, and so on until you clear the game. My options here appear to be ghosts holding cats hostage, the ghosts of farts knocking books off a shelf, the ghosts' tasteless recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbour and Some Ghosts Hanging Around In A Room. I'll get to them all, but let's start at the top-left.


In this stage, a trick floor rotates and you must shoot the ghosts that are hitching a ride on the spinning beams. I'll be honest, this is definitely one of Ghoul Panic's less interesting events. The preview screen promised the added complication of cats you shouldn't shoot, but they're reserved for higher difficulties and so you're left to wait for the ghost to slowly rotate into place before picking them off. Next!


The bookcase stage is a speed-shooting challenge, with a fast trigger finger required to blast enough books to meet your quota. Simple enough, although it does raise the issue that these books - which the mission screen specifically refers to as "book ghosts" - appear to have ghosts inside them. Okay, so maybe they're ghosts that took the form of books or wrapped themselves in a protective cocoon of binding and paper, and my gun has knocked them loose. I can understand that. But then it gets even weirder, because these ghosts have halos and are floating towards heaven, as though getting shot has somehow absolved them of all their sins and allowed them to join the celestial choir. Someone at Namco needs to have a good long think about the religious world-view they're espousing in this, a goofy arcade game about shooting ghosts.


This stage is both much more sedate and much less doctrinally challenging. A few ghost planes fly by, and you've got a limited amount of bullets to bring them down with. Don't worry, they're not the most acrobatic fliers in the world, you shouldn't have trouble operating as an anti-aircraft emplacement.


The fourth stage really is just "ghosts in a room." The room goes dark sometimes, but only between waves of ghosts so it's hardly a hindrance. Shoot the ghosts while admiring the Ecco the Dolphin fanart they've got hanging over the bed to progress. Okay, that's not totally accurate. You don't have to admire the dolphin picture to progress. Maybe your family were killed by dolphins. Ghoul Panic isn't cruel enough to punish you if this is the case.


"Face Off With The Boss," it says, and while we'd all like to sit around watching a classic Nicolas Cage / John Travolta movie in the company of Big Boss' mentor, the reality is sadly nothing more than a fight against Frankie, Ghoul Panic's first boss.


Frankie is a baby Frankenstein on a pogo stick. That's right, a mad scientist sewed a bunch of dead babies together and holy hell this is messed up. Frankie was even brought to life in a crib, because his creator obviously spent a lot of time pondering what he could do that would really set him apart from all the others who have blasphemously tampered in God's domain.
Anyway, Frankie bounces around as people on pogo sticks tend to do, only without falling over and hurting himself in a You've Been Framed-worthy moment of comedy. Instead it's up to you to supply the hurt by shooting Frankie as quickly as possibly.


After a while, he transforms into a regular, giant-sized Frankenstein, which made me feel a little better about Frankie's whole "stitched together from children" thing... although now I can't help but noticed that his weak spot is his bandaged navel, as though it's still sore from having his umbilical cord recently snipped.
Large Frankie loses the pogo stick but gains the ability to throw stone blocks at the player, although the blocks are easily destroyed and don't really up Frankie's combat effectiveness any. Keep plugging away at his midriff and he'll be defeated in no time.


Once Frankie is dealt with, Practise mode is over and you can enter your initials in the high-score table. That's one good thing about running VGJunk: I finally have a satisfying set of initials to use in these situation. I don't have a middle name so using my real initials leaves an unwelcome gap, and there are some games that won't let you use ASS or SEX so it's nice to finally have a decent back-up plan if and when my immaturity is denied.
To show you the rest of Ghoul Panic I'll have to move on to the harder difficulties, although I won't be showing off every single minigame there is. It would take forever, for starters, and because the games you get are random I'll never even know if I've captured them all. Instead, here are a few of the more memorable moments from my time spent playing Ghoul Panic.


Here's one of the stages that tests your visual acuity, asking you to shoot the ghost that matches the colour of the one at the top of the screen. I feel the brown ghost really drew the short straw with this one, condemned to an eternity of people making jokes like "are you okay? because you look like shit!" at his expense.


Here is the bomb ghost, one of the things you are not supposed to shoot. That's easy enough in this stage, where one ghost appears at a time and travels between two of the doors in this Escher-inspired room, but later on the bomb ghost will start getting in the way and generally being a pain in the arse.


In each set of four stages, there's one stage that will reward you with a Holy Stone (Meow,) fresh from the Land Without Punctuation, if you clear it. A mysterious artefact, the holy stones possess a secret power that will come into effect later on. For now, simply insert the holy stone into your convenient holy stone carrying case and continue with your adventure.


Determined to get more use out of the pivoting floor in the attic - look, they paid to have it installed so they might as make the most of it, all right? - the ghosts set up a balancing game. Shoot the ghosts in roughly even numbers on the left and right side, otherwise the board becomes weighed down unevenly, swings too far and the lantern ghosts slide and fall off the screen before you can add their deaths to your tally. To their credit, the ghosts are so unflinchingly cheerful that no matter what happens they keep on smiling, happy to be showing off their stacking skills.


This isn't an especially interesting game, the goal of which is to score as many points as possible with just five bullets, but I'd like to draw your attention to my Robin Hood level of skill in placing my first shot bang in the centre of the target. It was, as I'm sure you've guessed, all downhill from there. The ghost's smile suggests he knew it would turn out this way.


The second boss is Vladie, a vampire matador who fires bats from his cape, which seems like a dumb move for a vampire because by the time the bats have finished with me I'm basically going to be leftovers. It wasn't until the second time I fought Vladie that I realised this is very similar to the Magician fight from House of the Dead, if the Magician was less committed to the whole "killing the player" thing.


Here we see the power of the holy stones: if you've picked one up before you enter the boss battle, the stone flashes and removes a chunk of the boss' health before the fight even begins. This doesn't necessarily make things easier, because the bosses aren't that difficult even with full health, but it means less time spent pulling the trigger and that can only be a good thing for your poor index finger.


After taking enough damage, Vladie transforms into a horrible little bat-creature. It's a smarter move than Frankie's transformation because he's a smaller target now, but the switch from vampire matador to "villain's sidekick in a knock-off Disney sequel" is definitely a downgrade. At least he keeps his monocle.


The aim of this game is to shoot the malicious icicle ghosts before they can land pointy-end down on the defenceless cat. This task would be much easier if the cat would stay bloody still, but instead it wanders around under the icicles. After a while I began to suspect that the cat actually wanted the worst brain freeze imaginable, and was rather making a mockery of my attempts to save it. I mean, I managed to save the cat but what good does that do in the long run if the cat doesn't want to save itself?


If I was reluctant to shoot the ghosts, these skeletons pushed me to the very brink of non-participation. They're just so gosh-darned charming, scooting across the screen in a cavalcade of  wacky antics. Normally the phrase "cavalcade of wacky antics" would be enough to make my blood run cold, but because it's being performed by low-poly models of the long dead I'm okay with. They moonwalk, they do high-kicking Broadway routines, and some of the skeletons even dribble a football across the screen doing little tricks. How am I supposed to shoot Undead Ronaldinho, huh? My heart's not made of stone. As always with lightgun games, the basic point-and-shoot gameplay is mostly the same as its contemporaries. It's theme and setting that set game in the genre apart, and in this regard Ghoul Panic is doing a good job of making me glad I took the time to play it.


One ghost, one bullet, one chance. The tagline for a non-existent film that I desperately wish was real, but also a description of this minigame. The ghost is small and far away, which is normally how you'd want a ghost to be, but in this instance the hand-jitters from the dozen or so cups of coffee it takes to keep me going during an average day meant that picking off this spectre with one shot was by far the most difficult objective in the game.


Not much to say about the actual gameplay in this mission - shoot the flame ghosts before they can burn the ropes and condemn the cat to an agonising death - but I wanted to mention it because the artist has captured a look of real madness in the faces of these fiery spirits. Like, "wake up and find twenty-foot tall statue of the Chuckle Brothers carved from lard on your front lawn" kind of madness.


There's a mission where you have to avoid being kissed. I have been in training for this mission my entire life.


Probably the most complex challenge is this pseudo-dungeon crawler, a maze of square rooms that hide abducted cats and, yes, plenty of ghosts. You even get a map to guide you through the maze, and you can pick your direction of travel by shooting the corresponding door. It's a fun little diversion from the usual stages, with there even being an element of choice depending on what kind of ghost encounters you feel most comfortable with. The "battles" are either against a group of wandering ghosts or one big ghost that splits into several smaller ghosts as you shoot it, and because they're represented by different icons on the map you can pick your battles accordingly. Would this concept hold up if spun out into a fully-featured lightgun RPG? I'm not sure, but it's definitely something I'd like to try, so if you know of any such games then let me know.


Do not attempt to remove fleas from your cat by shooting them. It does not work. Or, erm, so I've heard.


Eventually you'll face Witchina, the instigator of the troubles at the haunted house. Given her outfit, I'm going to assume "Witchina" is a portmanteau of "witch" and "ballerina." To make Witchina give up, shoot the end of her magic wand / broomstick. I'd have thought shooting her in the face would have been more effective - it certainly worked on Vladie - but I guess Namco decided that'd be a bit much for what is a pretty cutesy game.


As with the other bosses, Witchina flies around fairly sedately, sometimes pausing to throw a projectile or summon a ghost. I don't know if I was just shooting them too fast, he said in the least impressive boast ever, but the ghosts never seemed to do anything. The balls of lightning, sure, they'll drain your health if you don't get rid of them quickly enough, but the ghosts seemed to be little more than spectators. As such, it's not difficult to chip away at Witchina's broom and secure victory, especially if you managed to collect the holy stone.


Witchina's plans lay in tatters, her march towards world conquest brought to a halt by one pink cat with a gun. That's definitely a sign her plan wasn't very good to begin with. I'm not sure how having a house full of ghosts is step one on a course that leads to dominion over mankind anyway. Maybe she was building an army of ghost soldiers, but as this entire game has been an exhibition of how ghosts can be killed by bullets it's probably a good job we stopped her now and saved her from future embarrassment.
Much more interesting is that Witchina cries about how you've defeated her "brother and father," presumably referring to Frankie and Vladie. Then Witchina calls for her mother.


Ah. I really hope that Vladie and Mama Mia (the name that the game provides for her) adopted their children, because otherwise the vampire and this gargantuan dragon-monster engaged in coitus at some point and that's not really something anyone should be thinking about. You can't help thinking about it now, though, can you? About how it would look like a mosquito trying to suck blood from an elephant's arse? Yeah.


Mama Mia is a fun mixture of the charming and the grotesque, with her ability to swim through lava and launch horrible leeches from her back at odds with the patterns on her scales making it look as though she's wearing a dress and a pearl necklace. She's got a wider range of attacks than the other bosses, although the only one that you really need to watch out for is her flamethrower breath, which you can knock her out of by shooting her in the face. See, I knew that would come in handy again sooner or later.


With Mama Mia dead, the kidnapped cats stream out of the mansion, except for the ones that have icicles stabbed through their skulls or fell into the house's furnace or mysteriously died after being infested by fleas that left bite-marks the size of bullet holes.


And there go all the ghosts. Goodbye, ghosts. You weren't such a bad lot, really. Mischievous, yes, and with a worrying tendency towards animal cruelty, but you were in the thrall of a family of horror movie monsters so I'll cut you some slack. I wish you luck on your voyage towards your heavenly reward. Let's just hope God is more of a dog person.


It turns out that all the cats, not just our heroes, were transformed people, and now the curse is lifted they can regain their human forms. I like that there's one unsupervised baby at the front, crawling to freedom at about twenty miles per hour. Won't somebody think of the children? Especially when that child is going to need a prodigious amount of therapy to get over being turned into a cat and harassed by ghosts.


That's what you normally look like, is it, Kevin? Yikes. I think you maybe should have stayed as a cat.


Ghoul Panic draws to a close as Witchina offers some parting words and one final polygonal panty shot - thanks for that, Namco - before flying off into the night sky.
Well, that was fun. It's difficult to be really specific about the quality of Ghoul Panic, because I'm obviously playing it via emulation and not on a genuine arcade cabinet, and unlike with lightgun games such as Alien 3: The Gun or Terminator 2 I've never played it out in the wild, as it were. Still, assuming the guns work correctly then I can get enough of an idea to say that Ghoul Panic is worth half an hour of anyone's time. The missions are varied enough to stay interesting while offering about as many different types of challenge as is possible without breaking away entirely from the "point and shoot" core of the lightgun experience. It's the setting, the aesthetic of cartoon spookfulness, that's the big draw for me. The various ghosts and monsters are all utterly endearing, and as the low-poly PS1 era look seems to be back in fashion as a visual trend then this is a good place to get your fill of that particular style.


It's not perfect, of course, and there are some things I would tweak. The more interesting games only seem to show up on the higher difficulties, but the rewards for playing through the Advanced course are... well, there aren't any, really. The bosses have a few new attacks and are a different colour, but that's about it. I was really expecting there to be some change to the ending but no, it's still just cats and ghosts flying out of a mansion. The boss battles themselves could do with being a bit more interesting, too, and they feel very much like generic lightgun game boss fights when contrasted against the more inventive minigames. These are minor quibbles, though, and Ghoul Panic is an enjoyable blaster that should help to satiate my Halloween urges for a couple of months. I hope it does, anyway. I don't want to wake up one morning wearing a werewolf costume and surrounded by smashed pumpkins and VHS copies of Evil Dead II. Not for a third time.

This masterpiece is the cover that served as the catalyst for this article. How could anyone fail to be entranced by the image of a blue gorilla with soulful eyes who's imagining the final moments of the ape revolution, when the brightly coloured and highly evolved simians chase the last human into the CyberGrids and reduce him to atomic dust?
It's almost always the case that the addition of an exclamation mark to a title is a pointless piece of frippery designed to feign excitement, but in the case of Monkeyshines! the exclamation mark is a vital and well-earned component of the name. I'd be excited too, if I'd nailed the creation of computerized monkeys! Sure, the increasing number of exclamation marks after each bit of blurb does suggest that the developer has cracked under the strain of implementing the computerized monkeys, but the title itself definitely deserves an exclamation mark. My only disappointment with this cover is that there was no banner falling falling behind me or confetti cannons going off to celebrate the fact that this is the one millionth time I've seen the "go ape!" pun in monkey-related media.



You might think that a gorilla with other, smaller, computerized gorillas living in his brain would be the pinnacle of how weird these covers can get, and you might be right... but there's no drop-off in madness, either. Take War of Nerves, for example, where a spaceman is turned to stone by the tentacles of a killer robot that looks like it was built only to kill and scream, and scream, and scream. The box claims the robots are armed with stun-guns, and while you'd certainly be stunned to come under this kind of assault, there's no way this isn't fatal. That is not a robot designed with even one line of mercy in its coding. The big egg that makes up the rear of its body is a receptacle for your crushed hopes and also your crushed bones, but at least when you're being shoved into the robots mouth you get a merciful respite from the screaming as your body temporarily blocks its airway.



The high-tech theme continues with UFO!, and the designers of that UFO were so excited about how cool it would be to build a space station shaped like an atom that they didn't give any thought as to how ship are going to dock with it without smashing into an errant electron. I like that the ship's main computer is apparently only marginally more powerful than an Odyssey 2 itself, but the very best thing about this cover is that there's a die hanging above the windscreen - but because this is the future, it's a futuristic polyhedral die. I bet this guy has a bumper sticker that says "My Other Starship's an X-Wing," too.



A lot of retro game cover art is an attempt by an artist to capture what's going on in the game in a way that looks appealing and not like a bunch of blocky shapes moving around, and this cover is no different, but I can't help but appreciate the amount of effort that went into transforming this basic Space Invaders clone into an interstellar conflict of breathtaking magnitude. What's great about it is that all the recognisable elements of Space Invaders are there - the player's tank, the defensive blocks, the waves of regimented enemies - but everything's taking place beneath the baleful gaze of a monster made of snakes with a giant mouth at its core. The monster appears to be carrying the Emerald City of Oz on its back. I don't think I've ever wanted to play a clone of Space Invaders more in my life.



The madness continues with the cover of Power Lords, a joyous riot of colour where each new look reveals a previously unseen nugget of wonder, like the circuit board pattern on the volcano or the tiny crab-robot that appears to be hanging from the main character's gun. Speaking of the main character, whose name is Lord Adam Power, he is wearing one of the most distressingly ugly superhero costumes I think I have ever seen. I say I think, because superhero costume design is only rivalled by public transport seat upholstery in terms of ugliness, so I might have seen a worse outfit and promptly shut it out of my mind. I think part of the problem is that it's orange, and orange is not a very heroic colour. I can't think of many heroes who wear orange. Oh, there's Aquaman, I suppose. Yeah, everybody's favourite, Aquaman.
If Power Lords seems familiar to you, that might be because it was based on a toy line of the same name, which also got a short-lived comic book series courtesy of DC. I've never played the game or read the comics, and I never will. I couldn't handle the disappointment if they didn't feature a dragon with the head of a cobra flying out of a cyber-volcano.



It's to be expected that the sci-fi and fantasy themed games have pretty wild covers, but even the more sedate genres are given the full psychedelic treatment. For instance, here's a card game with a cover ripped straight from an alternate version of 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL spent less time trying to kill astronauts and more time playing FreeCell.



Even something as simple as team sports gets the Lite-Brite makeover, so kudos to Magnavox for picking a theme - that theme being "pictures you'd get as an unwanted carnival prize" - and sticking with it. As something of a connoisseur and collector of hideous football shirts, I can assure you that the soccer player's kit is in, ooh, at least the top two hundred worst ever football shirts. If you think that's too low, I'll just say there was once an American team that wore a shirt with honest-to-god leather tassels on it. Also, this footballer's shirt appears to be based on the North Korean flag, although that's probably the most normal thing about this image.



"It's fun"? Are you telling me it's fun, or trying to convince me? Because I'm not convinced. Maybe if I could see this space wizard's face I could use his expression to gauge his level of enjoyment and set my expectations accordingly, but I can't. All I can see are his hands, and his rings, which tell me that as well as being a sorcerer he probably runs a dodgy used car dealership on the side.



Now this one is just cool, although it's a shame for them that they couldn't get the rights to Westworld that they so clearly wanted. Still, I personally think that a black void dotted with alien pyramids in a much more engaging arena for robotic gunfight than a recreation of the Old West. Everyone's always having gunfights in the Old West, but when was the last time you saw a duel on the Crystal Plains of J'Hax-Duraan, huh? Those J'Hax-Duraanians are always fighting with the Soulstones of Keth or the Dissociation Ray, so it's nice to see them getting back to good old shootin' irons.


In Europe, the Odyssey 2 was known as the Videopac, (and also received an upgraded version called the Videopac +,) and while the unified look of the Odyssey 2 packaging was dropped the Videopac covers still have a pleasingly amateur look to them. For instance, here is a former samurai sitting down for a game of checkers, mournfully remembering the distant days of his martial prowess, sadness etched into his face as he laments the inexorable passage of time.



Of course, we all remember the beloved cartoon favourites Tim and Gerry, don't we? Tim the cat is always trying to catch and eat Gerry the mouse, and Gerry is such a dick to Tim that we end up rooting for the cat because after all, he's only doing what comes naturally. Well, if you were always on Tim's side then The Mousing Cat is the game for you, because you the whole point is to trap the mouse and then eat it. There's even a brief scene of the cat devouring the mouse piece-by-piece. It's pretty brutal.



I think it's fair to say that the Videopac covers are generally less, erm, visually arresting then the Odyssey 2 ones. Then again, how could you illustrate a game about sending morse code messages - yes, really - and have it look interesting? I dunno, maybe have a soldier in a trench frantically tapping out a message to HQ while shells rain down around him? Yeah, that's actually much more interesting than this guy, who appears to be some kind of Royal Navy middle-management type sending messages with all the urgency of someone checking a receipt to make sure the cashier's given them the right change. Obviously I missed my calling as an artist for videogames about archaic communication methods. If any Odyssey 2 hobbyists out there decide to create the ultimate semaphore simulator, give me a call.



"It those damn submarines' fault, I'm telling you! They come over here and steal our underwater jobs, we should send them all back where... there's a submarine behind me right now, isn't there?"



You can't look through any old computer's back catalogue without seeing at least a few clowns. They've mostly been eradicated from modern gaming, but in the Eighties and Nineties game developers were still labouring under the delusion that clowns were something any right-minded person would want to see. Fortunately, this clown is one of the less horrifying members of his kind. The clownification process is still in its early stages, so you can still see the human he once was even though his feet are grotesquely elongated and his head is starting to resemble a fleshy peanut with a face painted on. Oh, and he can dislocate his right wrist at will. Give it another few weeks and his skin will be bleached completely white, his gloves will have fused with his hands and inflated to three times their normal size and his every waking moment will be haunted by the gnawing need to make balloon animals out of fresh human skin. Still, it's impressive that he managed to tie a knot in a pillow so he could use it as a bow tie.



"Raaar, I'm a tiger! I'm gonna pounce on you!"
"C'mon, Steve, not this shit again. I'm trying to work."



Back to the Odyssey 2 covers for Pick Axe Pete, and he's one heck of a man. A giant of a man, if that mine cart at the bottom of the cover is any indication of scale. Pick Axe Pete roams the wild frontier, smashing through mountains with this trusty pickaxe and taking the gold he finds back to his nest. There's something a little off-putting about Pick Axe Pete, you know. I think it's because he looks like he's made entirely from marshmallows. A giant, fluffy prospector who hoards gold and says "consarnit!"in a voice that's far more high-pitched and reedy than you might expect.



More marshmallow-y men in P.T. Barnum's Acrobats, a game that is apparently an extremely convoluted way for a man to pop some balloons. The big top looks to be packed, so we can assume the audience wasn't told that they'd be seeing two men on a see-saw popping balloons before they paid to get in. Don't judge the acrobats too harshly, though. These balloons contain the unearthly spores that clowns use to propagate their foul kind, and the acrobats must eliminate as many as they can before the balloons float over a populated area. The people in the Big Top are collateral damage. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.



I wasn't going to include this cover, because at first glance it appears to be a run-of-the-mill picture of a knight attacking a castle with siege weaponry, aside from the usual "black velvet painting" effect. Then I looked closer and realised the image was much more complex than that. For starters, the knight appears to be wearing medieval armour but carrying a Roman battle standard. Okay, fair enough, maybe historical re-enactment was invented earlier than I imagined. Then I examined the catapult itself more closely and realised it's actually a castle, with tiny people manning it. Unless they're not tiny people and the knight in charge is fifty feet tall. Yeah, I think I prefer that analysis. A gargantuan suit of armour has enslaved the people of this half Dark Ages / half Roman Empire civilization and is using them as slaves for his own crusade. Or all the people are the same size and the main knight is just standing closer to the viewer. It is hard to tell, but we can agree that this catapult is very big and will do an excellent job of demolishing Sleeping Beauty's castle over there.



Another captivating cover that draws you in but still leaves you with unanswered questions, questions like "why do these insects look nothing like bees, bee's aren't exactly hard to draw?" and "why are there so many R2-D2s wandering around?" and "what did those R2-D2s do that provoked these bees into a murderous frenzy?" The answer to that last question is probably that R2-D2 kept trying to steal their honey and whistling sassily at the bees when they complained. I love it when a videogame makes you think, you know? My favourite thing about this cover, however, is that the French title translates to "The Infernal Hive," which is just a great title and far superior to "Killer Bees." Bees that kill are just fundamentally less interesting than bees that kill but are also emissaries of Satan.



Finally for today, here's the cover for Nightmare. Isn't it precious? Let's just assume that the ghost is coming in for a hug. Sometimes ghosts need hugs too. Maybe it's the ghost that had the nightmare, huh? A harrowing dream about being chased by Eighties comic actors wielding nuclear-powered weapons, the poor thing. I hope it's some consolation to him that this is my favourite of all the Odyssey 2 and Videopac covers. It probably isn't. It's unlikely to take the sting out of being dead, anyway.

That's right, the title isn't a metaphor or anything. The playable character in Black Panther is a member of the Panthera genus of big cats. Or course, in one sense there's no such thing as a black panther - they're either leopards or jaguars that happen to be black, depending on the continent. Someone with more zoological insight than me might be able to decide whether today's game features a leopard or a jaguar, but all I know is that being a cat it's unlikely it'll be carrying a machine gun. C'mon, Konami, I'm begging you to prove me wrong.


Here's the Earth, undergoing an unspecified catastrophe caused by an unnamed assailant. Black Panther is not a game that's big on explaining itself, Konami apparently having decided that "you play as a jungle cat and fight robots" would be a sufficient draw. The land turns red, the seas turn yellow and it's time to get into the action.


Here we are, then. Seems like we're a little late to the whole "save the Earth" party, what with all the ruined buildings and killer robots, but I'm here now so I might as well show willing. Black Panther is a run-n-gun game only without the guns, with your panther careening from left to right and defeating the enemies in its path. Will there be a boss at the end of each stage? I'd say it's a distinct fuckin' possibility, skip.


To eliminate your foes, you have two options: you can either press attack to swipe at them with your panther claws, or jump on them with your panther claws but from above. Immediately a problem arises: all your attacks are very short range. Okay, so technically the jump is long range because you can cover quite a bit of distance, but you know what I mean: you have to land on the enemies just right or you'll take damage. I personally found it best to split the different and press the attack and jump buttons at the same time. That way, when I messed up a jump - which was a very frequent occurrence - and landed right in front of a robot without actually hurting it, I was already slashing my claws at it rather than standing in place and looking as sheepish as it's possible for a mighty hunter of the forests to look.


It doesn't show in the panther's attacks or movements or ability to deal with killer robots, but I'm beginning to suspect that our feline hero is not just any ordinary big cat. For starters, each stage opens with the panther appearing in a lightning strike like it was the Almighty Thor. Also, when you come back to life after dying, our hero is reborn via beams of ethereal light. Did God mean to send down an angel but accidentally hit the wrong button on the Interventionist-Deity-O-Tron? Or maybe God hates this one particular panther so much that he's condemned it to an eternity of being killed by murderous robots. Somewhere, Zeus looks at Prometheus and thinks to himself "Killer robots? Shit, why didn't I think of that?"


On we go, dashing forwards and occasionally leaping onto platforms so we might avoid the deadly menace of the giant scotch eggs, for their breadcrumb coating is fatal to the touch. Fortunately it's not instantly fatal, and Black Panther is generous enough to give players a health bar. Weirdly, your health starts at fifty but can be increased - in the unlikely event that you can collect some health refills without taking a bunch of damage - to up to a total of 100 points.


I have no idea what is going on. It's something to do with Attack Power and, if panthers can get sunburn, also sunburn.


The second half of the stage is mostly made up of a chase section where a robot in a blue box - you can see him at the top-right of the screen - dashes away and drops enemies into your path while you pursue him. This involves quite a lot of running along the perfectly flat stage and making sure to stop and claw at the enemies in front of you, because if you jump over them they suddenly get a lot faster and try to insert themselves right up your backside as quickly as they can. Even the arrival of robot skulls doesn't do much to enliven a rather monotonous passage of gameplay. I can't believe I just wrote that, normally the phrase "robot skulls" will get me, if not to the edge of my seat, then at least out of my usual "I just had fifty percent of my bones removed" slouch and to somewhere near the middle of my seat.


I caught up to the robot in the box and destroyed it, and my reward was yet more blue robots that look like plumbing supplies from an alien spaceship, more aggressively yellow landscapes and ruined skyscrapers that suggest the apocalypse came in the form of a weapon that turns buildings into tiny bales of hay, and a new thing: a set of silver balls that move in and out of the wall, hurting you if you touch them. I'll say this for Black Panther, it's taking it's own unique path when it comes to enemy design.


Speaking of enemies, here's the first stage's boss. It's a, well, it's one of those, erm, you know, one of those things. Yeah. See, this is why you should always check your trash compactors before turning them on in case there are cyber-snakes hibernating inside.
It's a common joke about videogame bosses that maybe they should do something to cover up or disguise their massive glowing weak points before they go into battle, but in this case it goes even deeper - this boss should get to a doctor and have the pulsating red pimple on its head checked out. I didn't even know robots could get pustules, but here we are. I feel sorry for the panther, because he's got to jump on that lump until it bursts and the boss is defeated. I hope the God that keeps resurrecting the panther also has the power to generate hand sanitizer.


Oh good, a sewer level. I suppose I can't complain too much, back in 1987 sewer levels weren't quite as overdone as they are now, and the panther doesn't seem to have a problem with water despite being a cat. The pink things you can see sticking out of the panther in the screenshot above are its fully-extended claws, which gives you an idea about just how short your short-range attacks are. I'm also about to run face-first into a deadly puddle of baked beans.


Just like in the previous stage, about half-way through there's another section of platforms and scotch eggs - except this time I've figured out how it works. Instead of the yellow orbs that increase your health when collected, these orange orbs give you one use each of a special attack when collected. They keep respawning, too, so if you want to you can risk having your health chipped away by the rolling snack food and spend some time collecting a supply of special attacks before taking on the second half of the stage.


I managed to collect a fair amount of Attack Power, which makes my claws do more damage until I run out of them. It doesn't make the gameplay any more interesting but it does make it faster, and because Black Panther is not very good the ability to run forward and casually swat the enemies aside is a welcome change.
Oh, and in one of the very few pieces of - and I use the term extremely loosely - "world building" in Black Panther, you can see that a sign in background makes reference to "N. Tokio." I'm going to assume that means Neo Tokyo. It's almost always Neo Tokyo, isn't it? Black Panther must take place just after Neo Tokyo was about to explode.


The boss of this stage is... whatever the hell this thing is supposed to be. A head of some kind. It's got eyes, a nose, a mouth. Yep, it's definitely a face of some kind. Why it's here and what it's made out of I couldn't possibly tell you. My best guesses are "because the evil alien-robot overlords got fed up of looking at it and ditched it in the sewers" and "ugly rocks." I may not know much about what's going on in Black Panther but I can say with some certainty that it's a very ugly game. The panther itself is fine and has a nice, smooth running animation, but everything else is a crude and rough-hewn mess of clashing colours and enemy design that manages to be boring and indecipherable at the same time.


Fortunately, the colour palette in stage three is a little less punishing, and the panther has adapted well to being outside its usual environment as it leaps between the platforms of the ruined highway.


Or, you know, leaps head-first into a concrete structure. One semi-interesting thing, because "semi-interesting" is the peak of how interesting Black Panther gets, is that if you manage to collect enough orbs to reach 100 health you generate a forcefield of spinning balls that can be launched in eight direction by pressing the attack button. It's a good job you're not playing as a dog, there'd be a lot of wasted time while it fetched the balls back.


Another section of orb-gathering waits in the middle of the stage, and I have come to the realization that every stage in Black Panther is essentially identical: they start with a flat, dull section that takes the concept of level design to dizzying new lows, then there's the same area that lets you collect a few power-ups, followed by a chase sequence with a robot that drops other, more expendable robots into your path and then a boss fight. There are only four stages in the game, so Konami must've really put the extra effort in to make this game feel as repetitive as it does.


Looks like I was wrong when I said the panther wouldn't be getting a gun!


Except I wasn't, because "a gun" and "the ability to spit tomatoes at people" are not the same thing. Don't get me wrong, becoming a one-cat attack of the killer tomatoes is useful and the range it adds to your attacks is more welcome than an earplug salesman at the 2025 Limp Bizkit reunion tour, but it's not a gun.


Oh, and while I'm complaining here's another thing that, like so much of Black Panther, was enough of a rankling irritation to make me wish I'd never bother playing the bloody game: you spend most of the game jumping, because it's faster than walking, you can hurt enemies by jumping on them and despite being some kind of Jesus-panther beamed down from Heaven above, the panther cannot walk on air. Unfortunately, after a few jumps you end up right against the edge of the screen, meaning you can't see the enemies that are coming your way and you end up taking unnecessary damage as a result unless you stop, jump back towards the middle of the screen and start the scrolling from a more reasonable position. I think that falls comfortable under the heading of "pain in the arse."


The next boss is another face, albeit one that's a little more difficult to parse than the previous boss. Like the other bosses it's still basically a cube and its weak point is its eye - which makes sense, I think most things have a vulnerability to big cats scratching their eyes out. However, the thing sticking out of the front, which I think is supposed to be a xenomorph-style second mouth, appears to be coming out of the boss' nose. Whether or not this is supposed to be the previous boss, returning scarred and battle-damaged after our last encounter, or a whole new robot that's going through the mechanical equivalent of hastily wrapping a towel around yourself when the doorbell rings and you're in the shower, the fight is the same as the last one and certainly not any more interesting.


On to the final stage, and this screenshot illustrates Black Panther's rather loose definition of level design quite well: a flat plane broken up by the odd generic block, liberally doused with a random assortment of enemies placed without thought or reason like sprinkles of shit on a cupcake you found in a dustbin.


The final area is a tech-base packed with flamethrowers and retracting spikes, and once you're in there the reason for a panther being sent on this mission rather than someone with opposable thumbs or a gun that doesn't use vegetables as ammunition becomes clear - the panther's sleek frame makes it easier to pass under the various traps. Any human over four feet tall who tried it would never make it through, so it was a choice between either a panther or a child and the panther is less likely to get distracted by a picture of, I dunno, a Minion or whatever it is kids like these days.


If you were expecting the final boss to be anything other than a roughly cube-shape robot skull then maybe you should seek help for your brain problems, because a metal skull-box is exactly what we've got. The big difference is that this one moves up and down while shooting lasers from its weak point, making it almost impossible to land a clean hit on the bloody thing. It was at this point, and with no hesitation or shame, that I started using cheats. You're forced back to the start of the fight if you die rather than carrying on exactly where you left off, and there was no way I was wasting valuable sleeping time fighting this thing more than twice. Thus, cheating. This meant I had a permanent force-field, and I could stand near the boss and wait for its motion to carry it into my, ahem, spinning balls. The boss seemed as happy with this solution as I was and proceeded to bounce into my attacks until it ran out of health and exploded. Again, I have precisely zero shame about finishing the game this way.


You most assuredly will not see me again, Black Panther.
The world is saved, the Earth returns to its original colour palette and the player is left with the stern admonishment that "we must gaze it." What does that mean? I have no idea, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in Black Panther so at least the game's consistent.
How best to sum up Black Panther? It's not quite abysmal enough for me to really call it unplayable dreck, but it's also far too tedious to be described as "flawed but interesting" so in the end I'll have to settle on it being bad. It's just a bad game. Boring, repetitive, low-effort and with the faint feeling that it's not quite finished. It's somehow less than the sum of its parts and those parts weren't very good to start with, and it has to go down as one of Konami poorest offerings from this period. I know not every game they released could be a Castlevania or a Gradius, but when you've set the bar that high a game like Black Panther feels like trying to jump over the bar, missing completely and having the bar whack you in the testicles.

Let's begin with one I think most people who've played Symphony of the Night might know about, even if they've never seen it themselves. Like all good RPGs, or in this case action games with a heavy coating of RPG poured on top, there are status effect that the hero Alucard can fall foul of. The usual infirmities; poisoned, cursed, turned to stone, that kind of thing.


Pictured above: Alucard after being turned to stone. Don't worry, it's more like a crispy stone coating and Alucard can break free after flexing for a couple of seconds because he's just that studly and buff. However, there's a small chance that when Alucard is hit by a petrifying attack, he doesn't just become a handsome and mysterious garden ornament.


Sometimes he turns into a huge demonic gargoyle thing. Why? Because it's cool, that's why, and the fact that it serves no purpose besides being cool is what makes it cool. If you really had to try to justify it, you could argue that the gargoyle represents the dark powers lurking in the heart of the half-vampire Alucard, but to me that seems like more of a stretch that Dhalsim's morning exercise routine.

One of the many consumable items that Alucard can use during his adventure is the Power of Sire, a picture of Dracula that works as a screen-clearing smart-bomb when activated.


Quite why Dracula's grim visage turns the screen into a bangin' rave in order to destroy the monsters is something of a mystery, but then you don't become an immortal agent of pure evil without having a few unexpected tricks up your sleeves.
The most interesting thing about the Power of Sire is that it displays a woodcut picture of Vlad the Impaler when used. This makes sense given that Vlad is supposedly the historical influence for Dracula, but as always when I see a real person depicted in a videogame I'm reminded that if I had a time machine I would forego assassinating Hitler or handing out water wings to people boarding the Titanic and instead show historical personages how they have been remembered by gaming. I can't decide whether I think Vlad would be pleased by the implication that his mere appearance is enough to smite his enemies, or that he'd be upset that history has remembered him as a blood-supping monster. Maybe impalement was all the rage at the time, and he'd find it unfair that only he is remembered as "the Impaler" when Terry down the street impaled twice the number of people that Vlad did.


As is customary amongst lords of the night, Dracula's castle is packed with a menagerie of monstrous creatures including, but not limited to: bats, larger bats, skeletons, larger skeletons, ninja skeletons, demonic puppets from Hell, Great Old Ones, angry tables and, in the Sega Saturn version, something called the Human Face Tree, which is even creepier than it sounds. Once you've killed a monster, its information is added to the game's bestiary for you to peruse at your leisure, and I suggest that you do so because Symphony of the Night's monster list is an absolute joy to read. If I could write another Ephemera article about SOTN's little moments, I could just as easily write one solely about the highlights of the monster list and maybe one day I will, but for now I've picked out one of my very favourite entries.


Just take a moment to bask in the glorious phrase "specially trained war-goose." Not one of your regular war geese, oh no, it's one that been specially trained. Nothing but the best for Dracula's castle. It makes sense that a goose would be chosen for this military role, because geese are the most naturally aggressive and remorseless birds on the Earth. That's why Geese Howard is called Geese: because the only thing more evil than a goose is more than one goose.


One of the monsters (humanoid sub-genre, zombie sub-sub-genre) primed for a good stabbing is the Bloody Zombie, who looks like this.


Okay, so there's some blood on his sword and he's either walked in some blood or he's wearing a pair of Louboutins, but he's not all that much more bloody than any other monster in the castle. Unless he got his name because he's kind of annoying and people kept calling him "that bloody zombie," I don't really see why he's called Bloody Zombie and not just, I dunno, Zombie With Sword.


Oh. Ohhh. Well, it all makes sense now, doesn't it? Now that we've seen his torso erupt like Old Faithful. How delightful! I have to assume that Bloody Zombie only exists because one of the game's developers said "hey, what if one of the monster turned into a literal fountain of blood when you kill it?" That person deserves a raise, and should then put some of that extra money to one side for a therapist. Just in case.


Continuing the monster theme, one of the denizens of the castle's catacombs is the Bone Ark - a fire-breathing dragon skull held aloft by subservient skeleton priests who have the decency to hide their skeleton shame with fetching blue loincloths. You can kill the skeletons so they drop the Bone Ark, but it's much more fun to destroy the dragon skull first because then this happens.


There's just something inherently amusing about seeing skeletons, which you would tend to think of as (literally) mindless drones in Dracula's army, running away in terror with their arms flailing like Kermit the Frog, spurred on by a self-preservation instinct that has somehow overcome the barrier of  them being dead. At least, I always used to see them as fleeing from Alucard's wrath, but on the Castlevania wiki they offer a different perspective: maybe the skeletons are running away in glee, overjoyed to finally be free of their nightmarish burden. I have since decided that this is the interpretation I'm going to stick with, mostly because now every time I see them I imagine the skeletons shouting "yaaaaay!" as they leg it.


One of the nice things about Symphony of the Night as opposed to other Castlevania games is that Alucard ends up becoming kind of a badass. The Belmonts are brave warriors and true, but their continued success against Dracula speaks more to a kind of lunkheaded persistence and Dracula's refusal to make life easier for himself - if he knocked out a few staircases and widened some bottomless pits, the Belmonts would never be able to reach him. Not so Alucard, who can turn into a bat or mist and has access to any number of ways of breaking the game over his knee, ending his adventure as a walking combine harvester fuelled by the blood of his enemies or gaining more defence simply by visiting more of the castle's rooms. However, it seems that might not be enough to boost Alucard's confidence, and he's a little self-conscious about his height, as well you might be when your dad and future murder target can transform into a giant demon. However, help is at hand - erm, at foot? - with the Secret Boots.


The Secret Boots discreetly increase you height. That's right, one of the equippable items in Symphony of the Night is a pair of shoes with lifts in them.


The effect is subtle, so here's Alucard without the boots (on the left) and with the boots (on the right). I added the red lines to make it easier to see the difference, Alucard isn't balancing them on his head as part of a deportment lesson or anything. There you go, then. The Secret Boots make Alucard's sprite a pixel or two taller. Do they do anything else? I imagine they give him a little more self-confidence, but "Self-Confidence" isn't actually a stat in the game so no, they do not. If you wanted to wear the boots you'd have to sacrifice an equipment slot and the associated stat boost for whatever you might have had equipped in there, making the Secret Boots so useless as to actually be detrimental to Alucard's mission, which is what makes their inclusion so wonderful.


One of the weapons Alucard can collect on his travels is the Shield Rod, and it's pretty great. Not only is it an effective tool for cracking open the skulls of those who oppose you, it also has a special power: it can be used to cast a magic spell that's based on whatever shield you currently have equipped. With the Knight Shield equipped, for example, using the Shield Rod's special move causes an armoured horse to appear and grant you an additional twenty points of attack for a while. There are also shield-spells to increase your other stats or attack the enemy, and if you've found the Alucard Shield using it with the Shield Rod amounts to you saying "bite me, game!" as it allows you to ram people with your shield for massive damage, extracting their souls to refill your health meter as it does so. It's what you might call "totally broken." Forget about that, though, because I'm here to show you my favourite Shield Rod spell, courtesy of the humble Leather Shield.


Yep, that's definitely a cow. A big old cow, and in SOTN's atmosphere of gothic horror it's a rather delightful thing to see. Even the world's ruminants are joining the fight against Dracula's dark crusade, granting increased defence to those who call on their aid. It does make you wonder where this cow came from, though. Is it the ghost of the cow whose leather was used to make the Leather Shield? If so, it's very big of the cow to overlook the use of its flayed skin. Or maybe it's a representation of the spirits of all cows, the very essence of cow-ness, and cows are a naturally good species that will always align themselves against the forces of darkness. Or maybe Alucard is tripping balls and simply hallucinating a floating cow appearing before him and granting him its divine protection. I mean, you can make Alucard eat sushi he carved from an "evil mutated octopus" during the game, and that's probably going to effect your brain chemistry. What do they call it? "Headcanon?" Yeah, that's my headcanon now.


Deep beneath Dracula's castle - or above it, once you reach the Inverted Castle - are the Underground Caverns: freezing cold caves populated by ice spirits and frogs, which is a surprising good metaphor for my love life. Anyway, all the dripping water leads to some pretty big puddles, and because it's so cold down there some of them are iced over.


Touching the thin crust of ice causes it to break off and sink, and it's a really lovely effect that was so unexpected the first time I played it that I spent the rest of the game carefully approaching every body of water I saw just so I could play around with breaking the ice. Like so many of the items in this article, the breakable ice serves no gameplay purpose but contributes to making SOTN that much more engaging than most other action-adventure-RPGs, and the fact it was made with such love and care shines through in every aspect of the game, not just magic height-increasing shoes or fleeing skeletons.


You have to assume that Dracula either stole or inherited his castle, because a big chunk of it is a church and that's really not the kind of thing a vampire lord would have much call for. It's like a vegetarian converting their loft into an abattoir. Presumably he keeps it around as a show of power, emphasising just how little he fears the holy light of God, but for whatever reason he owns a church and hasn't converted it into expensive flats for rental. The upshot of this is that there's a confessional in the castle.


Alucard can sit in the confessional and have his sins listened to, although as he's in the middle of a mission to destroy the darkest of evil he's probably confident that he's not going to have to do much penance. Say a couple of Hail Marys for the sin of vanity (because of the Secret Boots) and be on your way. In fact, this priest in the blue robe is so impressed with Alucard that he leaves him a bottle of "grape juice" when he leaves.


You can even hop over to the other side of the booth and pretend to be a priest. Is pretending to be a priest a sin? Not to worry, there's a confessional right here! I like that Alucard clearly isn't taking his role as a spiritual guide seriously, slouching in his chair with his arms crossed. "Oh, you did a sin? How fascinating. Look, just say you're sorry and stop crying, I've got to go and kill my dad."


This lady also has some sins to confess. Very well, my child, I'm listening. Oh, you're pulling the curtain closed? Well, all right, if the extra privacy is important to you then tha...


Okay, that's just rude, and very much not in keeping with the spirit of forgiveness.


As well as various life-restoring potions and magic spells, Alucard can also find a wide variety of consumable food on his journey that can replace his lost health. Can he find a roasted joint of meat hidden in a wall? Of course he can, this is a Castlevania game and there are certain traditions to uphold. The most interesting food item - unless you're fascinated by how Alucard can carry ice cream around in his pocket without it melting - are the peanuts. Not so much for the peanuts themselves, but for how Alucard eats them, Here's what happens when you use a peanut.


Hmm. See, that's not very helpful, is it? Didn't your parents ever teach you that you shouldn't waste food? Never mind, scratch that, they probably did not.


To actually consume the peanut, you have to play into Alucard's attempt to look like a drunk guy at a bar who thinks he's cool by throwing the peanut, moving underneath it and holding up to catch it in your mouth. That is incredible. You couldn't just eat nuts like a normal person - by shovelling fistfuls of them into your greedy maw - could you, Alucard? You just had to show off. He even does a celebratory fist-pump if he manages to eat the peanut, proving that Alucard's decades of self-imposed isolation have begun to take a toll on his mental state. And to top it all off, this is the item description for the peanuts.


Yes, and whose bloody fault is that, Alucard?

There you have it, ten examples of the weird and wonderful touches from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that serve to elevate it to the position of one of my all-time favourite games. If you've never played it before, you should change that as soon as you can. If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, I would also point out that Symphony of the Night is one of the very few games in which you can beat Cthulu to death with your bare hands.