Or is it? Apparently not, as the game refers to itself as Terraquake an adventure starring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I think this is the more accurate title, because there's definitely quaking going on but the game is not all that super.
I'm sure most of VGJunk's readership is of an age that knows all about Masters of the Universe, or as I and everyone else I've ever interacted with calls it, He-Man. They didn't seem to be masters of the country they lived in, never mind the entire universe. Anyway, He-Man is the story of young Prince Adam of Eternia, who receives the Sword of Power from deep within Castle Grayskull. The sword transforms him into He-Man, muscular defender of justice and aficionado of furry underpants. This is handy - the defender of justice bit, not the bearskin kecks - because Eternia is plagued by the evil Skeletor and his minions. He-Man and Skeletor fight, toys are marketed and a moral lesson wraps things up at the end, in much the same way as every other cartoon from the Eighties. Then He-Man became various computer games, including this one.


Of all the possible genres available to them, the creators of MOTU: Super Adventure went with a text adventure in order to recreate the action and excitement of the cartoon. That's a little worrying. I'm not sure Prince Adam has much of a cerebral side. He named his very masculine alter-ego He-Man, for one thing.
The game begins with Prince Adam standing before his father, King Randor. Ignore the images of He-Man and Skeletor at the sides of the screen, they're simply for decoration and aren't floating by the king's shoulder like the angel and devil of morality. For his part, King Randor look like an anaemic, grumpy lion. So, the gameplay - it's a text adventure, so you type in commands, usually in a verb - noun structure and then become frustrated when the game can't figure out what you're trying to get it to do. In this case, I kept trying to talk to the king by entering TALK RANDOR, but I was rebuffed by the parser, which told me that it "won't help". I was almost resigned to the fact that I wouldn't be able to talk to anyone at all in this adventure game when I realised the mistake was not mine. The creators of the game had spelled the king's - the very first character you interact with, don't forget - name wrong. They called him "Radnor" instead of "Randor." This king is not nearly radical enough to be called Radnor, but here we are and this immediate lack of quality control does not bode well.


Now that I know his "real" name, I managed to talk to the king. He told me to "go my son and seek out He-Man," which you'd imagine won't take long. I also looked at the king, causing Prince Adam to offer a scathing appraisal of his own father, as you can see above.


Wandering around the castle lead me to Prince Adam's bedroom, where we learn that Adam never sleeps and doesn't even know how to use a bed. An insomniac virgin, that's our hero. Looking at the bed reveals that "the bed posts hide your secret," so I tried ripped one off the bed and holding it aloft, hoping I'd transform into He-Man. The problem here was that the text parser was confused by the words "bedposts," which in turn confused me until I figured out that "posts" was what it wanted to hear. Trying to determine which arcane collection of words will get your character to do the thing you want is a puppy-filled meadow of joy in almost all text adventures, and MOTU: SA is no different.
Aside from the bedposts, the best thing about this scene is that the ever-present sprites of He-Man and Skeletor take on new significance as they gaze at each other from opposite sides of a four-poster bed. It's difficult not to detect a faint undercurrent of romantic tension, as though Skeletor's just about to tell He-Man he's never done anything like this before and he hopes he'll be gentle with him.


As it turns out, there was a switch on the bedpost that revealed the secret cubbyhole where Prince Adam stores the Sword of Power when he's off doing the opening hospital wings and meeting foreign dignitaries side of being a prince. There's no time for diplomacy now, though, and as Adam grabs the sword he is transformed into He-Man, mighty warrior of goodness! Okay, so I've found He-Man - he was inside me all along and not in a wishy-washy Disney sort of way - so the game's over now, right? Well, no, of course it isn't. Now you're He-Man, you can get to work on solving the constant earthquakes that are plaguing the land. How do I know there are earthquakes? Because for the first third of the game, the message "the earth tremors more violently" appears after every single action you take. Fortunately it stops doing this later, even before you've turned off (spoiler alert) Skeletor's earthquake machine, but while it's there it's a completely unnecessary annoyance clogging up an already very slow game.


After playing Shadowgate I was rather wary when I found a room full of mirrors, but walking through one of them lead me to a confrontation with the evil Mantenna, minion of Hordak! Hordak does not appear in this game, more's the pity. Poor old Mantenna has not come out of the conversion to the digital age well, has he? He seems shy, almost apologetic, and his leechlike circular mouth now looks like nothing more than a butthole right in the centre of his face. Also, they spelled his name wrong, despite managing to spell it correctly on the same screen. That's two characters we've met now and two names spelled incorrectly. I'm looking forward to my battles with Beestman and Skeleter.


Ever the diplomat, I tried talking to Mantenna in an attempt to find a peaceful resolution, but that didn't work and he killed me instantly. The weird thing is, he killed He-Man by throwing a "web of intrigue" over him. I, erm, don't think that's what a web of intrigue is, chaps. Surely a web of intrigue is the kind of thing you'd see in a densely-plotted spy thriller full of double-crosses and sinister machinations? Did the developers think a web of intrigue was a physical thing that the KGB used to ensnare their victims? Or maybe the effect is psychological, and Mantenna has so thoroughly convinced He-Man that he's a Soviet sleeper agent that our hero gives up on his quest and wanders off to steal atomic secrets.
Whatever the case, the only way to proceed is to attack Mantenna. This causes He-Man to murder Mantenna with his sword. Not capture him, not disable him, the Sword of Power apparently vaporises Mantenna, and there's no coming back from that. The text even describes Mantenna as "terrorised." I'm beginning to suspect that the makers of this game didn't really get He-Man.


After taking the special item dropped by the late lamented Mantenna, I travelled back through the mirror and out into the Eternian countryside. This is where MOTU: SA really gets going, as you travel through the land looking for items to collect and villains to defeat, eventually uncovering the path to Skeletor's lair atop Snake Mountain. These early screens are notable because they reveal that Eternia's roads are paved in solid gold, so I guess the royal family are the worst kind of bacchanalian despots. You could have spent that gold on building some hospitals for the common man, King Randor, but no - you just had to have a gold-plated driveway. Still, it explains why Skeletor is so keen to conquer the kingdom.


Eventually I wandered into a bar, which wasn't painful because it wasn't an iron bar. No, it's the Man At Arms Inn, owned and operated by He-Man's staunch ally Man-At-Arms. As a British person I am very disappointed that it's not called the Man At Arms Arms. Man-At-Arm himself is not looking well, with the unhealthy grey skin tone of a chimney sweep with tuberculosis. It seems the business of running a public house is tougher than I thought. He also appears to be wearing an old-fashioned telephone receiver on his head, but I won't hold that against him because he gave me a weapon called the Moleculator.


Here we see He-Man, powerful warrior and protector of the innocent, scrabbling around in the dirt to collect some broken glass, presumably muttering under his breath about how Superman wouldn't have to put up with this shit.


He-Man can't even get into Castle Grayskull without some hideous creature trying to attack him. He's not very observant, either: I told him to look at the moat, and he assured me there was nothing special in there. You might have seen the swamp-monster of Grayskull Castle enough times for it to stop being special, pal, but have some consideration for the player.


I'm still having trouble getting into the castle. I feel like entering the hero's base of operations should not be this difficult. Could the Sorceress have not helped me out somehow? To be fair, this time the difficulties I was having weren't my fault. I kept trying to use the drawbridge but the parser wouldn't recognise the word, because some joker decided it's actually called the jawbridge. Because the castle is a skull, you see. Normally I'd salute such dedication to punmanship, but not when it's preventing me from progressing in a lacklustre text adventure. Puns are powerful things, and should be saved for appropriate situations such as conversations with friends, articles about old videogames and eulogies.



After far more effort than was strictly necessary, I made it into the castle and thus into the presence of the mysterious Sorceress. She told me that Skeletor is behind the earthquakes. Thanks, lady. Sorry if that sounded sarcastic, it's nice to have clarification of the extremely obvious plot point. Oh no, I can't stop being sarcastic! I'm sooo sorry!

The moment I decided that Castle Grayskull could fuck right off was when I entered the Math Room. The Math Room. A room for maths! Why is this here? Is He-Man going to sit down and knock out a few algebra problems? Look, I don't want to be too harsh but have you seen He-Man's haircut? He's obviously not an intelligent man. I can't imagine him doing any amount of maths, let alone a sufficient volume of maths to require an entire room dedicated to that specific purpose.
The upshot of entering the math room is that I found a bead and something called a "minus manacle" so this is obviously one of those kinky sex dungeon math rooms.


Having exhausted the castle, I strode back out into the gold-paved wilderness only to be confronted by the dark magician Evil-Lynn. Did the game spell Evil-Lynn's name wrong? You bet your ass it did, and yet against it managed to do so while spelling her name correctly on the very same screen. It's kind of amazing, really.
This time I didn't bother trying to chat and went straight into attacking Evil-Lynn with my sword. Unfortunately she predicted this and trapped me with a freezing spell aimed at He-Man's feet and that's it, game over. The way every enemy encounter in MOTU: SA works is that there's one specific solution and if you don't do it immediately then you die. This can be irritating, especially if, like me, you keep forgetting to save, and it took me quite a few attempts to realize that what you're suppose to do here is jump. Jumping makes He-Man leap over the magic spell and hack at Evil-Lynn - the game's words, not mine - until she too is killed. You'll notice that I only entered "jump" there, not "jump and hack someone to death with a sword." It seems to me that those should be two separate actions, the jumping and the murdering. Just don't let He-Man play hopscotch with your kids, okay?


At this point of the game, I turned to a walkthrough. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, because this is an adventure game from 1987 and there was no way I was going to get through it under my own steam. MOTU: SA doesn't really feature puzzles as such, just using the right item in the right place, and while I managed to figure out the majority of them thanks to the odd small clue - the picture of the fish on the abacus I took the bead from, for example - there were more than a few that I'd have never figured out. Take this section, for instance, where you have to shrink a mirror by attaching the minus manacle to it. It would never in a million years have occurred to me to combine a manacle and a mirror. I was also having trouble navigating, which I accept is totally down to me. It's not a particularly large game-world and you could easily map it out on paper, but unlike in, say, Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man I could never quite put together a reliable mental map.
Also note the reference to the "sign of the speculum" in the screenshot above. "Speculum" is Latin for "mirror." I'm telling you this so you don't go Googling "speculum" because it also means something else that you might not want to see on your image search results, especially if other people are in the room.


It's Beastman, one of Skeletor's minions! I think he was basically Skeletor's right-hand man in the cartoon, because raw animal ferocity and a low IQ are just what you want in a trusted lieutenant. As with all the villainous characters you encounter, there's only one correct way to deal with Beastman, and that's to throw a magic hexagon on the floor. This freezes time momentarily... but you need the hexagon again later, and picking it back up unfreezes Beastman. So, as you'd expect, He-Man does the most heroic thing he can think of: he stabs Beastman to death while he's paralysed. This game really is more intense than I expected. What's MOTU: SA's subtitle, The Day He-Man Finally Had Enough of Skeletor's Bullshit? Blimey.


I bumped into Mossman on my travels. They spelled his name correctly! Well, you wouldn't want to upset Mossman, would you? He might angrily grow very slowly on the north side of your body. He's pledged his loyalty He-Man, possibly worried that angering our merciless hero would lead to a swift death, and so Mossman tags along for a while. At least, he does once you use the command "get Mossman," relegating him to the status of an inventory item. But why would you want the King of the Lichens following you around anyway?


Why, so that he can drink the foul water of this swamp for you, naturally! You're a good egg, Mossman. Disgusting, but good. Of course, now I feel bad that He-Man didn't mention Snout Spout. You know, Snout Spout? He-Man's ally, the cyborg man with the head of an elephant, whose entire purpose in life is to suck up large volumes of water and then spit them out somewhere else? Yeah, I probably should have given Snout Spout a call on this one. Sorry, Mossman. I hope the violent gastoenterologial episode you're about to experience doesn't prove to be fatal.


Also appearing in this game is Mer-Man, gormless guardian of the waterways. Mer-Man came out of the transition to Commodore 64 graphics better than most of the other characters, and his usual expression of slack-jawed bogglement is captured nicely. This is where the "fish on the abacus" clue I mentioned earlier comes into play, and dropping the bead into the water causes the bead to multiply. Mer-man slips on the carpet of beads and is Home Alone-d into the lake. Considering what's happened to all of his colleagues, I'd say Mer-Man has gotten off very lightly indeed.


After receiving some vague advice that I could summon the friendly wizard-creature Orko by lighting a fire in a high place, I made He-Man climb up a mountain. There was a wyvern up here defending its children, but my Sword of Power made short work of it and the wyvern fell off the mountain. The wyvern's children are then described as "following their parent over the edge," just in case you were worried that MOTU: SA was going to stop being so relentlessly bleak any time soon.
There's also guano on the mountain. He-Man won't have anything to do with the guano, although looking at it does trigger a surprising reference to David Attenborough. Man, I'd love to see Attenborough do a documentary about Eternia, I want to hear him get awe-inspired by a man called Fisto with a very big hand.
And yes, I did order He-Man to eat the guano, but he wouldn't do it. He doesn't have the iron stomach of a Mossman, I guess.


Orko responded to my signal fire, and now he's following He-Man around and not really doing much. Orko has one specific function that you need to use in order to complete the game, so I really wasn't kidding when I said these "party members" are basically just inventory items. If you don't know who Orko is, he's one of the few characters that knows He-Man is actually Prince Adam, and he operates as the same kind of vaguely annoying "cutesy" sidekick character that every cartoon of time time was legally mandated to include. Ghostbusters had Slimer, Thundercats had Snarf and Orko fills the role in He-Man, operating as a floating Black Mage-esque magician who keeps trying to do magic despite his spells never working properly, which is like giving a blind person a loaded shotgun and telling them they're at a clay pigeon shoot.

Orko's sole purpose is to open a secret tunnel into Skeletor's lair, which you achieve by bringing him to this screen. However, the first time I tried it I managed to get stuck. You see, boulders roll down the hill, and you're supposed to jump over them, but I accidentally went back to the previous screen. Every time I tried to return, I was instantly crushed by the boulders, leaving me with the two options of either a) loading a saved game or b) standing around forever, staring at Skeletor's distant castle and wishing I was friends with a wizard who knew what the bloody hell he was doing. It was a difficult choice.


Summoning my dwindling reserves of patience, I finally made it into Snake Mountain and was immediately glad to be following a walkthrough, because I didn't expect to have to do any plaiting in this He-Man game. That's right, you have to assemble a grappling hook by plaiting some reeds into a rope. That's not a bad puzzle, truth be told - there's a certain logic to it, and you are told that the reeds are fibrous so you might be able to puzzle it out yourself. It's just the verb "plait" that I struggled with. It's just so out of keeping with the concept of He-Man as a whole that I never would have thought of it on my own.


Deep inside Snake Mountain lies Skeletor's High School Computer Lab, complete with rows of obsolete PCs with ineffective web filters! Actually, this is MOTU: SA's only real "puzzle," with a combination lock that must be cracked by inputting symbols in the correct order. Happily, I already knew the correct order. A rock monster told me. He told me after I destroyed his body, leaving only his head alive. The code was my reward for sparing his life, although it might have been kinder to finish the job. A rock monster that's just a head? I'm pretty sure that'd be more accurately described as "a talking rock."


At last, the final confrontation! He-Man barges into Skeletor's inner sanctum, and Skeletor responds by trying to shoot He-Man in the head. Good call, Skeletor. You can't give He-Man an inch. Just ask Beastman's grieving family. Unfortunately for Skeletor, I've still got the time-freezing hexagon, so I chucked it down and stopped time. Skeletor's power bolt freezes inches from He-Man's face, our hero somehow resists what must be the overwhelming temptation to pull down Skeletor's pants and draw a moustache on his skull, and by pulling the lever that operates the earthquake machine the game is completed.


Your reward for saving Eternia - saving it a fortune on patching up the solid gold roads damaged by the quakes, I mean - is a simple "well done" message and the revelation that, unlike almost everyone else he met in the game, He-Man spares Skeletor's life and has him imprisoned. His show trial will be a brief mockery of justice, his execution swift and public.


If you're judging Masters of the Universe: Super Adventure as a He-Man product, then you have to say it's a failure: a basic text adventure with licensed characters hastily slapped into place, the tone of the cartoon completely ignored as He-Man carves a bloody swathe through a variety of misspelled minions. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that He-Man was a exquisite treasure of a show that should be treated with reverence, but I loved it as a kid and still have a lot of affection for it now (I have a Mantenna figure sitting on my desk as I write this) so it's disappointing to see it treated so poorly. Part of the problem is the same as with the Questprobe games, especially the Hulk one: He-Man simply isn't a good fit for the action-free text-based scenario.
But what about simply as a game? Well, it's okay, I suppose. Somewhat restrictive and very light on actual puzzles, but I've played a lot worse and while many of the "puzzles" seem baffling at first there's usually at least one vague clue to help you out. Much like myself, it's a little slow and not very interesting, but hardly terrible. At least Orko wasn't in it much.

A landmark title, a true classic, a game that defined a genre and a logo so powerful even a brick wall cannot contain it, that's Final Fight. Why is it called Final Fight when there will obviously be fights that follow it? I don't know, maybe Capcom just thought it sounded cool. Or the characters have been fighting all day and this is their final fight before bedtime.


Final Fight is set in Metro City, which is not a town you'd want to live in despite its beach-front location. Sure, property prices are low and there's a large park, but it's not worth the inconvenience of being ruled by violence and death. Violence and death aren't going to get the bins collected on time or have the potholes on the high street filled in, are they? Luckily for the residents of Metro City, one man with the determination, vision and biceps necessary to clean up the streets has just been elected.


Hello, Mike! Mike Haggar is a man that needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. A former pro-wrestler and street fighting champion, Haggar has entered politics and been elected as mayor of Metro City in a rare example of a videogame plot that's become more believable over time. Maybe one day we'll get a Final Fight prequel, a Nobunaga's Ambition-style strategy game where you have to guide Haggar into office by managing his election campaign, but for now we'll just have to assume he was a single-issue candidate running on an "I will personally cripple every criminal in the city" ticket.

The main criminal gang in Metro City is Mad Gear - presumably they named themselves after their favourite Capcom arcade game - and the game beings with them making the spectacularly foolish decision to kidnap Haggar's daughter Jessica in the hopes that this will force the mayor to cooperate with them. It's understandable, I suppose. I can't imagine Mad Gear being the kind of organization that does a lot of research, and it's not like they could have looked up Haggar's Wikipedia page and saw that his pre-mayoral life was dedicated to beating the everloving shit out of people.


Also involved, and bringing the total number of playable characters up to three, are Cody and Guy. Cody is Jessica's boyfriend, and she's been his "sweet heart since child hood." If nothing else this shows that Cody has the vast reserves of bravery required to take on Mad Gear. He must do, if he's willing to date the daughter of Mike Haggar.
Guy, on the other hand, is vaguely defined as being Cody's and Jessica's friend, although his real reason for participating is basically "hi, I'm Guy, and I'm also here." Guy is a ninja, which is handy when you've got a gang to take down, and because there's not much call for ninjas in the modern world Final Fight gives him a good opportunity to keep his ninjitsu skills honed to a razor edge. The fact that he wears a bright orange and very conspicuous ninja suit means that Guy's fighting skills have to be kept sharp.


Here they are, then: the three amigos. Guy stares pensively into the distance, as ninjas are wont to do. Cody looks, and I don't want to be cruel here, like he'd fail an IQ test. Then there's Haggar, who was so desperate to get onto the streets that he only had time to put on one suspender. Fierce warriors all, although it's weird to think that I'm taller than both Cody and Guy. Not combined, obviously. In a move that may shock those of you that follow me on Twitter, I'm not going to start with Haggar. Instead Guy gets that honour, because I accidentally pressed start before moving the cursor.


The game begins in the slums of Metro City, where Mad Gear have erected a wall of oil drums with the intent of stopping people from entering their domain. That's right, Final Fight is so much the quintessential beat-em-up that the very first thing you hit in the game is an oil drum, and Guy sweeps them aside with a spinning kick before chasing after the very large man who has kidnapped Jessica. You know, I've played Final Fight hundreds of times but it's only just clicked with me that this section of the city is contained behind a huge barbed-wire fence. I wonder who built that fence? Haggar's mayoral predecessor? Or did Mad Gear themselves build it to keep people out? We may never know; if Mad Gear did build it then at least they should be able to find construction jobs once they've recovered from the beating they're about to get.


Now the action really begins, and it's the same action as most arcade beat-em-ups: one button each for attack and jump, repeated attacks result in a combo, there are throwing moves and pressing both buttons together results in a spinning attack that knocks down all the enemies around you at the cost of some of your health. Final Fight differs from other arcade games that use this combat system because it's the game that invented this combat system, or at the very least cemented it as the way beat-em-ups were designed for years to come. Renegade and Double Dragon may have preceded Final Fight and laid a lot of the genre's foundations, but Final Fight is the game that came onto the scene, smashed the competition aside and said "look, this is how it's done" via a combination of simple but engaging combat, smooth action and huge sprites packed with character.
Anyway, Guy is punching some thugs, which he is honour-bound to do as a member of an ancient ninja clan. It's working out okay at the moment, because the thugs keep walking into his fist. There's no intelligence test on the Mad Gear entry exam, it seems. Mind you, even if the bad guys were posing more of a challenge, Guy's got some unexpected tricks up his sleeve...


...like the ability to rotate each part of his body completely independently! How can you defend against Guy's attacks when you can't even be sure which way he's facing? That's right, you can't, which is why I managed to brush these punks aside with ease before heading down into a nearby underground passage.


The underground passage presents the first chance to use Final Fight's icon steel pipe, which is nice. Not for this street punk, mind you. Not during the late eighties, when the surgical methods needed to remove plumbing supplies from the human body are in their infancy. Guy is fairly adept at swinging the pipe around, which is probably down to his ninja training. Katanas, steel pipes, it's all just hitting people with bits of metal and that's a transferable skill.


The dilapidated streets of a large American city. A ninja called Guy momentarily pauses in his mission to destroy Mad Gear, a criminal gang who hate justice almost as much as they hate sleeves. A metal pipe and roasted joint of meat lay on the ground. I think this image might be the perfect encapsulation of the arcade beat-em-up genre.


Before long, you'll encounter the first boss: it's Damnd, the large man who we saw holding Jessica earlier, and also the guy who called Haggar with Mad Gear's demands in the intro. While all the other lieutenants of the Mad Gear empire are content to wait at the end of their assigned stage, it seems that poor old Damned is stuck with all the grunt work, but it doesn't seem to be getting him down - just look how cheerful he is! No wonder he looks so happy, he thought Mike Haggar was coming for him but Guy has turned up instead. Or maybe he's just heard that a neck donor has been found and he can have the operation soon.
Damnd isn't much of a challenge, despite his bulk, and all you need to do to beat him is stay out of his way until he's finished attacking and then walk up and grab him for a throwing attack. It's all very straightforward, but Damnd's real threat comes from his ability to call in an endless supply of cannon fodder enemies as reinforcements. Because Final Fight's difficulty level is almost entirely tied to how many enemies are on screen at the time, you'll probably take some damage if you let Dannd summon his posse. He gets their attention by jumping away to sit on a wall and whistling, during which time he can't be hit...


...even though I've clearly got my foot so thoroughly in his face that I should be able to feel his brain stem between my toes. Also, it's nice to see that Guy's bizarre physical abilities are not limited to twisting his torso at unnatural angles - he can also stretch his limbs as required. Ninjitsu and yoga have a lot in common, I guess.
After a while spent hitting Damnd between mopping up his reinforcements, the boss will fall and stage one is over. Unfortunately, Damnd must have handed Jessica over to another member of the gang between the start of the game and now, because she's nowhere to be seen, so I'd better get moving to stage two in the hopes I can save Jessica from a traumatic experience as the baton in the world's most evil relay race.


The subway is the setting for stage two, and I've switched to Cody, mostly so I can try to figure out just how tight a t-shirt has to be before it shows off the outline of each individual abdominal muscle. What, do you buy your shirts at Mothercare, Cody? That can't be comfortable.
While Final Fight sort of falls into the usual three-character system of a fast character, a strong character and one who's somewhere in the middle, there's not all that much difference between Guy and Cody. Guy's attacks are faster, but not by much and they both have a jumping, spinning kick attack. The biggest difference is that Cody's much more into stabbing people, and he's the only character who can use the knives that litter the stages repeatedly and at close range rather than throwing them at the enemies like Guy and Haggar do. What I'm saying is that Cody is almost certainly a dangerous psychopath.


As you can see, it doesn't take long for Final Fight to really start ramping up the amount of enemies on screen at once, and the key to not dying constantly is effective crowd management. Keeping as many thugs on the same side of the screen at once in very important, and to accomplish this you can use the jumping kick to knock enemies down where you want them, or grab and throw them to the other side of the screen. A move that I always used to overlook but have since come to appreciate is the "dropping" aerial attack: a normal jumping attack knocks enemies to the ground, but if you hold down on the stick while performing a jumping attack - in Cody's case, this makes him fall knees-first onto his target - you don't knock them down and you can follow up with a combo or a grab.


The other important thing to bear in mind when dealing with crowds is knowing what kind of attacks each enemy will do. The members of Mad Gear are split into a variety of distinct fighting styles, with each style usually having two or three colour variations or head swaps. For example, in the screenshot above Axl - the guy with the headband and the lapels large enough to double as an emergency hang-glider - is one of the enemy types that can block, so you know to get close when he's defending himself and throw him somewhere more convenient to you. The guy in red runs onto the screen and throws a petrol bomb... well, I was going to say "at Cody" but that's giving him too much credit. He just chucks it onto the screen and then runs away like someone releasing an angry wasp that they've trapped under a cup. So, you know you'll be fine as long as you don't stand on the same horizontal plane as Mr. Molotov. Thus, the appeal of Final Fight's gameplay comes from quickly puzzling out the best approach to each threat and reacting appropriately to keep said threat contained.


Deep within the subway system, Mad Gear have set up an illegal bloodsport arena, which is where you fight Sodom, the next boss. Before I talk about Sodom, though, I'd like to draw your attention to that incredibly half-arsed attempt to pad the turnbuckle. I don't think wrapping a duvet around a steel girder is going to fool the safety inspector, chaps.
Anyway, Sodom is a samurai. A sliding samurai, in fact, and the challenge of this fight comes from avoiding the dashing attack Sodom performs every time he gets up after being knocked down. Stay away from him, that's my advice. Try and get around to his sides, where the lack of peripheral vision allowed by his helmet makes it easier for you to hit him.
If Sodom looks familiar to you but you've never played Final Fight, that's probably because he was later introduced as a playable character in the Street Fighter Alpha series. They gave him the personality of a massive dork who really loves Japan, with all his win quotes being poorly-pronounced Japanese phrases. It's kinda wonderful, and I'm glad that this hulking, sword-wielding killer almost certainly has a shelf full of cutesy anime girl figurines back at his hideout. Of course, the Street Fighter connection is very strong in Final Fight - Guy and Cody both later became playable characters in Capcom's famous fightin' franchise, as well as a couple of other characters we'll be seeing later, and the game was famously touted as "Street Fighter '89" before the Final Fight name was chosen.


Also later appropriated by Street Fighter is the bonus round, in which you beat a car to death with your bare hands. Why? Why is Cody doing this? I notice the car's numberplate reads "JAPAN," so is Cody such a vehement supporter of the US automobile industry that he'll give any Toyota or Honda that crosses his path a sound thrashing?


Oh, I see, the car belongs to a Mad Gear member. That's all right then. The villain's plans to use the carpool lane have been triumphantly foiled! This guy's going to be late to the underground cage fight now, and it's all thanks to Cody.


Now we're into stage three, and the wait is finally over: here comes the Mayor of Justice himself, Mike Haggar! I'd love to tell you he's skydiving into the stage knowing full well that he's tough enough to not need a parachute, but this is just his jumping attack.
Why do I like Haggar as a character so much? I'm not entirely sure. Being the protagonist of an arcade beat-em-up, it's not as though he's given a lot of deep characterisation. I think one factor is the sheer absurdity of a government official ripping off his shirt and single-handedly pushing Metro City's intensive care units to bursting point, plus the fact that he's a little different from the usual young karate champ or ninja - "moustache dad" is not a character you see all that often. Plus, he's got the most fun set of moves, with a spinning clothesline as his special attack, the ability to suplex goons and the mighty jumping piledriver.


I know Metro City is a rough burg but you'd think the patrons of this bar would have at least some interest in two enormous slabs of muscle knocking seven shades out of each other  in the middle of the room. That one guy behind the bar has just about managed to summon enough of a shit to look up from his newspaper, but no-one else seems to care. Maybe it's because Haggar and his opponent look like they're dancing rather than fighting, although I can assure you that they're not. The man in the red is Andore Jr., one of the many multi-coloured members of the Andore family you'll fight on your adventure. They're all based on Andre the Giant, or are possibly a series of failed clones of Andre the Giant, and the Andore in the pink clothes later became Hugo in Street Fighter III.


I was trying to walk through those doors, but another Andore Jr. picks Haggar up by the throat and carries him back the way he came. It's a little weird that Haggar doesn't fight back in any way. Is Haggar trying to play this off as being part of his master plan? If so, I'm not buying it.


Andore Jr. drops you into yet another underground fighting arena. Running unsanctioned bare-knuckle fights must be more lucrative than I thought, because Mad Gear don't seem to have any other revenue streams and paying bribes to mayors, building fences around the slums you've claimed as your turf and repairing your car after some vigilante beats it up can't come cheap.
The fight is against two members of the Andore clan, F. Andore and G. Andore. I've seen it suggested that they supposed to be Father Andore and Grandfather Andore, but I'm not sure I buy that given that they look exactly the same age. No, I think they're Francis and Greg Andore, brothers who wish they could escape the family traditions of deadly cage fights and set up their own accountancy firm. That's why they've left all these weapons scattered around but refuse to use them, they're hoping someone will do them enough damage that they don't have to fight any more. Well boys, it's your lucky day. Haggar's going to make your dreams come true.


After the cage match it's back onto the streets for a more free-form style of physical expression, and I'm having a great time. Supposedly Gandhi once said that happiness is when your thoughts, words and deeds are in harmony, but that's only because as a pacifist Gandhi never picked up a street punk and suplexed him into another street punk. Sorry, Mahatma, but you're really missing out here.


The boss of this stage is Edi. E, a corrupt police officer. You'd probably still have to fight him even if he wasn't corrupt, because Haggar has definitely committed enough crimes to warrant arrest but he'd not going to come quietly, is he? Edi is corrupt, though, which is why he doesn't hesitate to pull a gun on the mayor as soon as he sees him. Patience, and making sure you're never standing directly in front of him, is the trick to beating Edi. Let him come to you, maybe throw one or two of the regular enemies that wander into the fight at Edi just to keep him on his toes. One thing I like about Final Fight is that despite being patently ridiculous, it actually side-steps a lot of the logical flaws in this type of game. In other games you might wonder why the bosses fight you one-on-one, but here they've always got back-up that's more than willing to punch you in the back of the head if you stop paying attention. Why don't the heroes go to the police? Because the police are trying to kill them, lured over to Mad Gear's side by wild promises of extra buttons for the front of their shirts. Why not go straight to the gang's leader instead of walking across the city? Because it seems that Jessica is being passed from one boss to the next and the player is always a step behind. I wouldn't quite call it "world building," but it means you can spend less time thinking about inconsistencies and more time introducing punks to the wonders of plumbing supplies.
Oh, and one more thing about Edi E: before the fight begins, he spits out a wad of chewing gum. You can then pick up that chewing gum to restore some of your health. I think that is the most revolting thing I've ever done in a videogame, and I played the Splatterhouse reboot where one of the finishing moves involves shoving your fist up a monster's arsehole.


Stage four takes place in a steel works, which makes sense: having seen Haggar fight, Mad Gear have probably come to suspect that he may actually be a Terminator and they're planning to knock him into a vat of molten metal. The main feature of this section is a series of flame jets that spurt up through the floor, causing damage if you're standing on them. Normally I'd complain about this but the fire hurts enemies too, so sometimes you'll be merrily fighting punks when, as heart-warmingly as an unexpected letter from a distant lover, the charred body of a Mad Gear goon flies into your life.


Here's an image that begs a question - a terrible, shameful question - what do you think Haggar's crotch smells like? I'd guess "Old Spice and vengeance." I'd ask Poison, but I don't think she'll be in any fit state to answer questions .


This being a beat-em-up, there is also the mandatory "elevator ride where goons drop in as you travel" section, although in Final Fight's case it gets a little more credit because the enemies don't just fall in from the sky: you can see them sitting on the girders, waiting for the lift to pass while trying to recreate the pose from that famous picture of the construction workers. They're going to use their own version of the photo for the annual Mad Gear fundraising calendar, you see.


Waiting at the top is Rolento, the end of stage boss. A military man, Rolento's combat training allows him to hit people with sticks and roll around throwing grenades all over the place. Rolento was clearly not enlisted in any actual army. A a dangerous paramilitary force of acrobats, tumblers and assorted buffoons that hold allegiance to no nation, perhaps. That said, Rolento always manages to do a decent job of giving me a kicking, mostly because I always underestimate the range of his throws. Fragmentation grenades I can deal with, judo I am apparently ill-equipped to handle.
Rolento is yet another character that eventually made the transition to the Street Fighter series, which by reckoning brings the total up to six (Guy, Cody, Hugo / Andore, Sodom, Rolento and Poison). You might notice that Haggar seems to be a rather glaring omission from that list, and he was presumably not included because his moveset is basically identical to Zangief's. That made it all the more magical when he was included in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. You can spend your whole span of time on this Earth without ever knowing what you truly want out of life, but then you see Haggar hitting Doctor Doom with a metal pipe and suddenly everything becomes clear.


Once Rolento has been dishonourably discharged, another bonus round appears. This time you have to smash a bunch of glass panes, and this time I really can't think of a reason why Haggar would take time out of his busy schedule to do this. The car, sure, you're depriving a Mad Gear member of the joy of vehicle ownership, but why the glass? Are Mad Gear really just a construction company that do violent crimes as a side-project? Will this delay the building of their new headquarters? Whatever the case, Haggar is the best of the three characters for this bonus stage because his long, almost simian arms can smash multiple panes at once.


The next stage is the Bay Area, and as Final Fight stages go it's probably the weakest. It's still a four-out-of-five, don't get me wrong, and the combat is just as fun as ever, but there's nothing new introduced and there are possibly just a few too many enemies.


That said, look at this happy dog. I've changed my mind, this is the best stage.


So Metro City is New York, then? Because that appears to be the Statue of Liberty, unless Final Fight takes place in an alternate universe where the French went mad with the large bronze women and started handing them out to every major city in the US. The Statue of Friendliness, maybe. The Statue of General Tolerance. The Statue of Rich and Fruity Cabernet Sauvignon, if that wine glass in her hand is anything to go by.


Another reason that this is my least favourite stage is the boss, Abigail. He's just not very interesting, being yet another Andore palette-swap with a different head. His gimmick is that sometimes he gets really angry and runs at you. That's why he's red, he's not the result of an experiment to cross a pro wrestler with a tomato or anything. The problem (for Abigail, I mean) with his charging move is that it can be easily avoided through the expedient method of not standing right in front of him.
By the way, Abigail isn't called Abigail because he has cruel parents: he's named after the album of the same name by King Diamond, and his facepaint even resembles Kind Diamond's. A lot of the enemies in Final Fight are named after musicians or bands, and I wrote a bunch about that years ago, which is why I haven't really mentioned it in this article.


Now we're into the final stage, and while we're still on the city streets and still causing Metro City's chiropractors to rub their hands with glee the surroundings are a little less of a bleak urban hellscape than in the early stages. What this area also has it a lot of background signs that reference "NIN-NIN," that being the nickname of Final Fight's designer Akira Nishitani. It might seem a little vainglorious to slap your nickname on so much of the background, but if you've just created Final Fight and you're about to go on and make Street Fighter II then frankly you can do as you bloody well please.


Most of the final stage takes place in the opulent mansion of Mad Gear's leader, and unsurprisingly he has the style and refined taste of a Premiership footballer or Russian oil baron. I don't know if that wallpaper is supposed to be a rich golden colour, but it isn't. It's very green, with flecks of reddish-orange, as though the walls have been coated with stuffed olives. The giant strands of spaghetti that have been plastered to the walls only serve to continue the theme of food-based décor. As for the carpet, well, that's just a goddamn hideous carpet.

The rooftop gardens are much nicer, with swimming pools and palm trees, although you'll just have to take my word for it because every screenshot I took of this area is obscured by a tsunami of testosterone and sleeveless vests. It's like being trapped on the bouncy castle at the Bodybuilder's Association's family fun day.


Finally, after a long day of extreme violence (notice how the game started off in the daytime, passed through evening and night and now it's daytime again,) Haggar finds his daughter. She's in the clutches of Belger, Mad Gear's leader. Belger is a bald man in a wheelchair. Beating the crap out of someone in a wheelchair might seem a little beyond the pale, but not to worry - as well as being a champion street fighter and city mayor, Haggar also has the very power of the Lord coursing through his body. He simply has to lay his hands upon Belger and feel the holy energy of Jesus Christ fillin' this poor man with his righteous healing power, can I get an a-men!


HALLELUJAH! It is truly a miracle, the demons have left his body and now Belger can walk again! Now I don't feel so bad about suplexing him, but that's easier said than done because as well as somehow still having dozens of subordinates around to join in the fight - quite how they're not all dead or in traction by now is beyond me - Belger also has a rapid-fire crossbow that can quickly sap your health if he, let's say, unloads all his bolts into your back while you're busy fighting a stray Andore. Of course, if you're really feeling like a badass, you can use Haggar's spinning lariat to punch the crossbow bolts out of the air. If you aren't feeling like a badass then use the lariat to block the bolts, because I guarantee you'll feel like a badass afterwards.
Maybe it's because I've perhaps played Final Fight more than the average person, but Belger is not as difficult to defeat as you might expect. He can be dangerous, sure, but it's also not too hard to keep him under control. I think that's another thing I like about Final Fight: by arcade standards it definitely feels do-able. It's not easy, but neither does it feel like it was designed solely to suck quarter after quarter out of your pocket. So, I managed to knock out Belger relatively easily, and now Haggar can drag him to the police and see him punished for his many crimes.


Oh, right, the police are corrupt. In that case, just kick Belger out of a fortieth-story window, that'll work too. He's really got a death-grip on that crossbow, huh?


And so our story draws to a close as Haggar is reunited with his beloved daughter. Judging by that final line, I think his beloved daughter may have been replaced by a robot copy. This ending is making me wonder what happened to Mrs. Haggar, though. Maybe she was also a robot, an early prototype. Haggar later focussed all his efforts on building better mechanoids, growing out his facial hair, earning a doctorate in robotics and changing his name to Thomas Light.


The best part of the ending is that Cody tries to leave Jessica behind and pulls some macho lone-wolf nonsense, but Guy will not put up with that kind of bullshit and slaps Cody around until he stays and talks to Jessica. Good work, Guy. They teach relationship counselling at ninja school, do they?


Then Jessica leans in for a kiss, presumably just to shut Cody up. It's difficult not to read her "oh Cody..." line as anything other than weary contempt for his Batman-esque speech about being unable to rest until every ne'er-do-well has had their teeth knocked down their throat.


Final Fight, then. What else can you say? It's a wonderful game that still holds up very well today, and I would not hesitate to recommend you play it as soon as you can. If nothing else it's an important historical document, the linchpin of a whole genre, and it's easy to see why it was such a hit: slick controls, relentless and satisfyingly brutal action, the sense of vibrancy and scale that only the arcade experience could provide in 1989 and Mike Haggar, Videogaming's Best Dad. Do I have any complaints about Final Fight? Not any that aren't very minor nitpickings. It would have been nice if the difference between Guy and Cody was emphasised further, and stage five could do with something a little extra to spice it up, but that's about it. All in all, it's a game I dearly love and an excellent choice for this year's birthday article, although I'm amazed I didn't get around to it sooner. Unfortunately, Final Fight never received a real arcade sequel, so I can't cover that next year - but in many ways, Street Fighter II is Final Fight's true sequel. Now that's what you call a run of form.

Another VGJunk anniversary article comes to an end, and another year of the site begins. Thank you, as always, to everyone who reads VGJunk, to everyone who follows the Tumblr or Twitter and leaves messages and are generally just fun internet people to share the information super-highway with. I'm glad you seem to be enjoying VGJunk, and I'll be back later with more of this nonsense. There might be a little more of a delay than usual, mind you. Dark Souls III did just come out, after all.

Is this your first time riding a horse, sir? It's okay, equestrianism isn't for everyone. Hopefully we can find you a nice tricycle or something. Maybe even a doctor to fix your neck.
Despite the promise of the title screen, horses do not feature in this game at all. I think that's probably for the best, on this evidence.


Gladiator wastes no time in pitching you into a life-or-death struggle, as you inch through the corridors of a castle while someone or some thing throws a relentless stream of fireballs, bats and knives at you. That makes it sound a bit like a Castlevania game, but it isn't: Gladiator is a side-scrolling test of reflexes where the key is to defend yourself using your sword and shield. The height of your shield is controlled by moving the joystick up and down, and can be positioned either high, low or in the middle to deflect oncoming attacks. Your sword, on the other hand, is controlled by the game's three buttons - one each for high attack, middle attack and low attack. Using your shield as protection has the benefit of being sturdy and dependable (so long as you're holding it at the right height) where as swinging your sword can leave you vulnerable while you're flailing your arms around but allows for added reach and gives you more points for eliminating any projectiles, and points eventually turn into extra lives.


Our hero is called Great Gurianos, by the way, although I feel a little uncomfortable calling him "Great." Greatness has to be earned, and he didn't seem very great when he was wildly swinging his sword at a bat in an attempt to collect the golden shield it was carrying. I think it was supposed to be a devastating overhead strike, but he looked more like he was casting his line during a relaxing fly-fishing trip.


But what's this? After a couple of minutes of corridor-walking, Gladiator suddenly becomes a one-on-one fight as a warrior straight from the Bondage Dimension appears to block Mediocre Gurianos' path! He looks like a Zardoz cosplayer whose mother wouldn't allow him out of the house until he put on some shorts, but thanks to the game's attract mode I have a little more information than that.


His name is Solon, and he is a sword man. Okay, that checks out, he does appear to be carrying a sword. Sure, I think it might be Sailor Moon's Magic Crystal Dream Sword or what have you, but it's definitely a sword. Well, sword-like. Sword-adjacent. Solon's bio also describes him as a "blockhead fencer," which bodes well for my attempts to stab him to death.


Maybe we're both blockhead fencers. Fencing coaches the world over would look at us and slowly shake their heads, tears of frustration welling up behind their beekeeper's masks. It's our fighting stances, you see. They're very top-heavy. Leaning over on your tippy-toes might give you a little extra range, lads, but it's not good for your balance.
As for the combat, it reminds me a lot of Taito's own Great Swordsman, another one-on-one swordfighting game where a single strike can lead to victory or defeat, and the goal is to land a blow on a vulnerable area of your enemy. However, things here are more complicated than in Great Swordsman, for a couple of reasons. One is the inclusion of shields, which allow you to block at one height while attacking at another. You can also reduce your opponent's shield to a measly stump by attacking it repeatedly, although this never seemed to hamper their ability to block my attacks any. You can also shatter their weapon, which is much more useful.


The main difference is armour, though. Both Gurianos and his foes are wearing suits of armour composed of multiple parts - helmet, breastplate, shinguards, that kind of thing - and a successful hit will knock the corresponding piece of armour off. That's why Solon's not wearing his chest-straps any more; it's because I poked him in the chest with my sword, not because he got too hot and removed them or decided that he wasn't into BDSM after all. Once a body part's armour has been stripped off, a subsequent blow to that same area will prove fatal. For a game from 1986 to have such large sprites with visible damage is very impressive, and there's even a bit of sampled speech, so Gladiator is a title that would probably have stood out in the arcades of the time.


Unfortunately for Solon, his title of blockhead fencer turned out to be accurate. I held my shield up high, and all he did was attack my shield over and over like I'd taped a picture of a large spider to it. That left me free to aim for his bare chest. That ended the fight fairly quickly. My reward? Another fight against Solon. Then another. Three Solons in a row, each as thick as the last. Maybe Solon is his surname and they're all brothers. There's a very disappointed Mr. Solon Sr. out there somewhere, regretting not stumping up the cash for a better swordfighting teacher.


Eventually a different challenger appeared before me, resplendent in her bright pink armour. This is Irene, and she is a mighty lady.


See? It says so right there, and who am I to argue? I'm just a shirtless warrior wearing iron pants, I'm not qualified to judge how mighty a lady is. That said, even I noticed that Irene's attacks seemed a little hesitant, and she frequently left herself open if I took a step back and let her swing her sword for a while. Another casualty of over-extending, then, and Irene's lunges towards my rippling adonic chest meant I had lots of opportunity to smash her over the head. Thus Gurianos emerges triumphant from mortal combat with his valour and dignity unsullied.


Until he decided to pose over Irene's corpse, that is. Nice work, Gurianos. Real great of you. I know, I know, if I had muscles like that you wouldn't be able to get a shirt on me without a team of a dozen people and some strong tranquillizers, but maybe now is not the time.
Apparently, in the Japanese version of the game you can strip off all of Irene's clothes for some brief nudity, because, well, Japan. So, if you've ever wanted to see what a cartoon nipple looks like when it's shrunk to the size of a single pixel, play the Japanese version. Or I can save you the time: it looks like a single pink pixel. I sincerely hope the very thought of such a thing has not whipped you into a frenzy of sexual excitement.


After Irene, there's another short section of fireball-blocking and bat-chopping, which illustrates the basic flow of Gladiator's gameplay: walk for a while, fight a few people, walk a bit further and hopefully find the golden shield and the crystal ball the restores your damaged armour. This section also provides an insight into Gurianos that you rarely get for other videogames heroes, and that's that his preferred underwear is purple silk briefs. Look, if you're going to be wearing heavy armour all day you deserve at least a touch of opulence, right?


I guess we know where all those fireballs came from: this Karnov wannabe is spitting them out. He's not important enough to get a bio during the attract mode, so this man will forever remain an enigma. We will never know the reason he chose to wear underpants with a big yellow stain on the front, which now I think about it is kind of a relief. Anyway, to beat this guy simply move towards him, blocking his fireballs with your shield, and then stab him somewhere that isn't his shield.


The stabbing was not fatal, although judging by his expression I suspect he wishes it had been.


Walking up some stairs leads Gurianos to stage two and another short path where he must defend himself. Rather than fireballs and bats, he is now beset by bricks - yes, just regular old house bricks - and golden axes. Maybe Taito should have called this game Golden Axe! Wait, never mind. You can also see a sword on the floor that I managed to knock out of the air: if you press down when standing on it you can collect it for bonus points, and collecting several swords will turn your sword red. For a long time I had no idea if there was any benefit to having a red sword beyond the obvious considerations of style, but supposedly if you hit an opponent's shield fourteen times with the red sword Gurianos temporarily becomes invincible. I see Gladiator takes place in an age of unfathomable magic, then.


Here is a man who went to the blacksmith and demanded that he make him a suit of armour so unique and avant-garde that the rest of the gladiators would be struck dumb with envy. The blacksmith, fearing for his life and desperate for inspiration, cast his eyes desperately around his forge before seeing a bunch of grapes he was saving for his lunch. The blacksmith breathed a sigh of relief.


This is Zaid, a club giant. So, what, like Armand van Helden? No, of course not, he's a giant with a club. Except that's clearly a sword he's carrying, not a club. Zaid is a complicated man. He's also "a big good for nothing fellow," which is coincidentally the job description I have on my business cards.


After a couple of regular Zaids you'll fight Super Zaid and hey, he actually has a club this time. He also has armour so visually repellent that when you're fighting him I'd recommend covering one side of the screen with a sheet of paper and hoping for the best. That's easier than it sounds, because all the various flavours of Zaids seem to attack at the same height as you more often than not, meaning that if you hang back and keep attacking at the middle height you'll eventually break their weapon. That makes it a lot easier to get close and finish them off, especially when you bait him into trying to hit you with his tiny sword hilt.


Once Zaid is defeated, punished by the gods of combat for wearing that goddamn armour, you can press down to steal his mace, which replaces your sword. Hang on, is it stealing if he's dead? Looting, I suppose. Pilfering, maybe. Anyway, you can use his mace, and for a while I was confused as to how this was an upgrade. It's the same length as the sword so your reach is the same, and it's not any more powerful because one hit (well, two hits) is all you need anyway. It wasn't until right at the end of the game that the much more aggressive enemies revealed the true power of the mace: it pushes your opponents further back when you hit them, giving you more breathing space. Make sure you collect the mace, then, because it's almost mandatory for the final few enemies.


Pictured above: Gurianos, about to have his silken briefs punctured by a stray arrow. The arrow was fired by this unnamed warrior woman, an Amazon with the ability to lay down a veritable curtain of arrows and, upon closer inspection, a gaping sore where her face ought to be. Her bright pink sandals are presumably intended to distract from the disgusting ruin of her face. Luckily you don't have to see the Amazon for long, because she's not wearing any armour, and just like the fireball spitter all you need to do is block her arrows as you advance and then introduce her to your sword or mace, whichever you're carrying at the time.


Gurianos has made it out into the fresh air, and a relaxing stroll along the castle battlements awaits. It's the same hot object-blocking action as before, only this time you're deflecting boomerangs and strange pulses of energy that look like an illustration of how radio waves work from a junior school textbook. But VGJunk, you cry, you said this was a relaxing stroll and having axes thrown at my face seems like it'd make me anxious and quite possibly dead rather than relaxed!


Well, hectoring voice in my head, I say that because you can hop up onto the ledges in the background, thus avoiding the entire stage and all its attendant dangers unless you forget to press up to jump over the gaps. Personally I was already getting bored of these bombardment stages, so the option to not participate in them is one I will readily and gratefully take.


You'll be shocked to learn that Gurianos must fight some knights along the way. This one is green, except the parts of him that are pink. He's a one-man public safety announcement about not falling asleep in the sun or buying your armour from a colour-blind blacksmith.
I'm not really sure how I beat these opponents, you know. While some of the enemies do seem to have definite patterns, with these ones I either couldn't spot it or had lost so much interest that my brain refused to absorb it. Instead, I just kept thrusting my sword at their feet. Their swords broke, their shields broke and then eventually they become so consumed with ennui that they let me stab them in the shin, a fatal blow in the days before penicillin.


There's also version in red armour who is not noticeably different from the others aside from the fact that once you've defeated him, Gurianos stamps on the poor sod a couple of times. So much for Great Gurianos. From now on, I'll call you Kinda Petty Gurianos, or Sore Winner Gurianos.


The end of the stage is guarded by a familiar body with a different head and weapons, who wants to stop Gurianos because... well, I don't know, really. All these lives, all this carnage, all this death with no reason or motive. I know Gurianos is supposed to be collecting some gold so is this guy, what, a ye olde rent-a-cop? Give it up, man. It's not worth dying for, and Violent Psychopath Gurianos will not let anyone stand in his way.


Thanks once again to the intro, we can see that this character is called Agathon and he's a clumsy fighter. If these people have been guarding the treasure, then their boss should probably review their hiring policies. There must be someone out there who isn't a clumsy fighter or a blockhead fencer. Agathon's bio also says that he's a Two Swords Man, which I'm not sure I believe. He's got two weapons, yes, but they don't look like swords to me. Lengths of metal piping in a classic arcade beat-em-up fashion maybe. Rolled up magazines? Sure. But not swords.


Oh, I see. Agathon was hiding his swords inside the rolled-up magazines. Clever, very clever. People think you're going to show them an article about a woman whose cat saved her life by calling an ambulance and then bam, three feet of cold steel is enjoying the brand new sights, sounds and smells of their upper intestine. He may be a clumsy fighter, but he makes up for it in cunning, like a fox with its shoelaces tied together.


This castle must be taller than I thought, because I've climbed up to the final stage and it appears to be the featureless void of space. An Oscar statue has come to life and is very carefully peeling all my clothes off with his sword. Things are getting weird in Gladiator, and they're also getting extremely difficult - the Gold Knight is fast, accurate and relentless. To defeat him you'll need every ounce of your concentration and skill, and even then fifty percent of the time he'll suddenly kill you anyway. If there is a strategy for this fight I couldn't tell you what it is. Prayer, possibly.


Every time I beat the Gold Knight it definitely felt more like luck than judgement - as you can see here, he's done a very thorough job of stripping Gurianos down to his kecks - but I'm realising now that all my victories came via hitting the Gold Knight in the legs. Maybe that's his weakness, he's got delicate ankles.


Your final opponent is a skeleton, and now I'm really disappointed that he's not included in the intro because I want to know what his name is. Zartunak, Consumer of Souls? Skinny Dennis? Fat Dennis (it's an ironic nickname)? Maybe he's Death itself, representing Gurianos' ultimate battle - the battle against his own mortality. No, I'm sticking with Skinny Dennis.


Rather than armour, the skeleton simply loses his bones if you manage to hit him until he's nothing more than a floating skull and one bony arm. Naturally this makes it even harder to hit him, but it doesn't hamper his fighting skills any and I died here over and over again. One of those times I simply gave up: we seemed to become locked in a never-ending cycle where the skeleton would block all my attacks but would only swing for my shield. Ten full minutes this went on for, both of us clanging off each other with no progress made and no end in sight until I decided I'd had enough and purposely moved my shield out of the way. You cannot best Death, after all.


Except you totally can, and in our the next battle I managed to kill Skinny Dennis almost immediately. I think the trick is that you have to attack just as he attacks, in the same spot, and hope that your blow lands first. I gambled, and I won. What did I win? Well, I think I might be the first living person ever to see Hell's unholy cathedral, so that's nice. I can't wait to get the photos developed.


At long last, Gurianos has accomplished his goals and reached the treasure place. You know, the place where they keep the treasure. It's one of those parts of the house that you don't have a good name for, like the junk drawer or the cupboard under the stairs. Yup, the treasure place. Amazing.


Gladiator is a decently-constructed game with impressive visuals and plenty of little flourishes and secrets - I never did manage to produce the magic shield that's supposedly in the game - but ultimately it just left me cold. I don't really know why, and I'm sure Gladiator will have its fans, but the walking stages were repetitive and the combat simply wasn't all that fun to me, despite it being mostly above average. It's certainly not as much fun as Great Swordsman, which felt much more precise and less twitchy, and Gladiator just isn't the game for me even if I really love the vault at the end being called the "treasure place." Someone enjoyed it, though, because it was ported to some home computers under the name Great Gurianos (I'd have to imagine he's even less great on the ZX Spectrum) and even received a pseudo-sequel in 1992's Blandia. Maybe I'll check it out some day, on the off chance it tells me what that skeleton's deal was.

Okay, so the title screen's about as interesting as a sightseeing trip to Coventry but it gets better, I promise. Let's have the intro bring us up to speed, shall we?


Well, that's everything explained nice and succinctly. Pinball worlds, blast things, avoid the goons. No, ignore that last part. Don't avoid the goons, you might hurt their feeling. Shoot them instead and feast on the warm spray of points that gushes from their shattered bodies. Because Nitro Ball is at least thirty percent pinball, one of your main aims is to rack up the biggest points total you can and that's not going to happen if you ignore the enemies.



Here are some of the fabulous prizes you can win in Nitro Ball, with everything from sports cars to one of the gold coins from Scrooge McDuck's money vault. That must be one hell of a car if it's worth the same as an ocean liner. Maybe it's the actual car from OutRun.
Also of note is the "H" item, which apparently activates hudging. I have no idea whether or not I want to get hudged. It sounds like if someone who harboured a slight resentment towards you went for a playful nudge and accidentally hurt you.


As I'm playing alone I'll be controlling Gary, an ex-Navy sregeant. Hey, dyslexia is not a bar to joining the armed forces. Gary is confidently strapping on his armour, blissfully unaware that this game features one-hit kills and he might as well have wrapped himself in tissue paper like a last-minute Halloween mummy.


If I had friends, I might have been able to see Harry in action. Gary and Harry, brothers in arms. Harry is an ex-police officer, fired for using a ridiculous gun that looks like an uzi with a Super Soaker barrel instead of his standard-issue sidearm.


The game begins with the host appearing on a holographic screen and announcing that the first stage will be Strange Football Field. He is not kidding.


Once the gameplay starts, the comparisons to Capcom's Mercs become almost unavoidable, with a very similar style of run-n-gun action where the combat takes place on a long vertical screen and you can only fire in the direction you're facing. No twin-stick controls here, sadly, but it doesn't hamper the gameplay any. Gary moves at a fair old clip, and the controls are precise and reliable, although it did take me a while to compensate for the starting weapon's projectiles not travelling all the way across the screen. Just lift your gun up a little, Gary! What's the matter, is it too heavy for you? Aww, diddums - but you'd better figure something out quickly, otherwise a gun turret shaped like an American football is going to perforate you. Strange football field, indeed. If the NFL are really looking to promote gridiron in other countries, I think adding pigskin-covered machine gun nests to the Superbowl should do it.


Yeah, something like that, that'll get the Europeans right into American football.
The other game that Nitro Ball draws influence from - to an almost lawsuit worthy-degree - is Smash TV, although aside from them both being top-down arena-style shooters the connections are more obvious in the setting. Both games are framed as a deadly futuristic game show, both games have blonde announcers in a sparkly jacket, both games have voiced sound clips shouting "Bingo!" and "Good luck!" and both games see you collecting consumer goods for points and have a post-stage screen where your points are totted up. The biggest difference is that the protagonist of Smash TV has realised the futility of their existence and doesn't bother wearing chest armour. However, don't misunderstand me: I'm not complaining about the setting being pilfered, because Smash TV is great and, ah ha, I love it. It must be disappointing for the games developers and sci-fi writers of the past who thought the game shows of the future were going to be hyper-violent deathmatches when what we actually got was Total Wipeout. Maybe one day we'll get a version of Pointless where Richard Osman drops his usual comedy patter and coldly executes the losing contestants with a single gunshot to the back of the head, but until then I'll have to stick with watching The Running Man over and over again. This is not a problem for me.


Then a cheeky chicken appeared and started throwing the contents of a sultan's spare room at me. Can I quit now? I've just picked up ten Rolexes and I'm not a greedy man. I'd like to cash out my winnings. No? Oh, okay then. Thank you anyway, chicken mascot. I'm grateful for your generosity, although it was slightly soured moments later when you turned around and started waving your arse at me.


The third and final pillar that Nitro Ball proudly stands upon is pinball. Yes, regular, mechanical pinball, transposed to the shooter genre. The pinball theme is evident in several ways, the most obvious being the focus on racking up a high score and the preponderance of pinball table parts in the levels. Each stage is packed with buffers, bumpers, rails and holes, just as you'd find on a pinball machine. These can almost all be shot and destroyed for points, but even better than that is using the enemies to score points. Regular grunts fall over and roll around when shot, and you can shoot them into the buffers or down holes for big bonuses and extra items, so as well as the usual "shoot everything and don't get shot" mechanics of the genre Nitro Ball has an extra layer of trying to score points by shepherding goons into the right position and then knocking them into the table elements with precise shooting. It's a combination that works fantastically well, especially in the earlier, easier stages when you've got more time and space to plan your moves.


Just in case that wasn't enough pinball for you, you can also collect a power-up that turns you into a pinball. It's not very subtle. It does make you invincible, though, so you switch from fighting enemies to fighting the ball's slightly weird, momentum-influenced controls. It's pretty good fun.


Eventually I made it to the first boss, and he's not as football-themed as I thought he was going to be. He looks more like Jason Voorhees gave up slaughtering teens and became a baseball catcher, and also his head shrank to a ridiculously tiny proportion of his body mass. This is not a problem unique to this boss, as we'll see later.
He's fairly standard as first bosses go, being mostly content to stand at the top of the screen and fire at you, either using three-way spread shots or a solid laser beam. All very predictable, and you can even hit the TOUCH DOWN panels to get yourself a special weapon. Here's I'm using the Ring Laser, which launches a spray of blue discs roughly in front of you, and very handy it is too. You can also find a missile launcher - although "rocket hose" might be a better name for it, given it's firing rate - a flamethrower that passes through enemies, and the Rail Blaster, which isn't an edgy reboot of Thomas the Tank Engine but a gun that fires a thick, chunky wedge of pure death and is easily the best of the weapons. True to Nitro Ball's refusal to countenance anything approaching subtlety, the weapons are described in the intro as weak, medium, strong!, very strong!! and incredibly strong!!!



You also have a limited use "Z Weapon" that makes you pirouette while Christmas baubles fly out of your body. The Z Weapon's description is simply "!!!!" so it's either the most powerful attack in the game or it feels like stubbing your toe on the corner of a marble fireplace.


The boss goes down, Gary moves on to the post-stage round-up and you're treated to a nice comic-book style illustration of said boss. I take back what I said earlier about the boss looking like Jason, it actually looks like the Michelin Man, risen from his dank and rubbery tomb to slay all those who would buy other, inferior brands of tyres.


Stage two is the Combat Field, a theme that is a little disappointing in it's plainness after the last one. It's not even a Strange Combat field. It also has the effect of making the game look more like Mercs than ever...


...although the whole "become a living pinball" thing definitely reduces any sense of over-familiarity. Those poor fools manning the turrets are going to wish they had a supple wrist soon, very soon, just as soon as I wrestle the pinball in right direction.


Halfway through each stage there's a short challenge area, usually in the "destroy x enemies / objects in y seconds" mould. In this case, it's a race to blow up ten tanks. The tanks helpfully have "TANK" painted on the side, just in case you mistook them for a small jar of pickled eggs or something. I'm trying out a tactic where I crawl towards the tank on my belly so I can shoot it from close range, and I definitely didn't die because I momentarily forgot that tanks have big guns.


The boss is a gun so big that it takes two tanks to carry it. The smaller tanks also have three guns each, and if guns were living, sentient creatures with feelings then I'd imagine these smaller guns would be feeling pretty goddamn inadequate right about now. Thankfully, gun's aren't alive. It would be horrendous if they were, brought to life only to be told that their sole purpose is to kill unless they're extremely lucky and they're one of the chosen few that get to start races.
So, how big is the tank's big gun?


Very big. Foolishly big. So big that the logistics of manufacturing and delivering these shells would cripple a nation's economy, yet slow enough that a man named Gary can dodge them. They also look, and I know this is just me but I can't not see it, like the top half of a sock.


Between stages you get the chance to participate in a bonus round with no enemies and treasure, treasure, treasure! All the points you amass here are added for your total for the next stage, and accumulating points here is extremely helpful (if not mandatory) if you want to beat the stage's record and earn an extra life for doing so. I managed to do so on the next stage, after collecting enough motorcycles and crowns to put together the world's most regal biker gang, with plenty of sapphires left over to order a bulk lot of denim vests and "SATANS KINGS" patches. The problem is that to access the bonus round you have to stop a spinning reel of numbers so that it matches the final two digits of your score. However, the number the reel stops on seems to be predetermined - I tried loading saves multiple times and pressing the button at different ponts and the same number always came up, so you're out of luck if you don't have an appropriate score at the end of the stage.


The next stage is Ghost Town, which is rather exciting for me. Ghost Towns are my wheelhouse, and with this I am so far in my wheelhouse that I've made a pillow fort. The gameplay is the same as ever, but you're fighting zombies and off-brand Slimers. Smilers, even, sinister grinning spectres that have somehow retained their eyebrows after death despite losing their legs. After a while, you can ignite the trail of oil and blow up the tanker, and it's all rather wonderful. Graphically Nitro Ball is a real treat, with well-animated sprites and very detailed environments that are packed with destructible scenery and charming flourishes. For example, the name of the company on the oil tanker is Incredible North Oil. No hiding their light under a bushel for them, they're very proud of their oil and they want everyone to know it.


After completing this stage's mid-point challenge, a goofy living car appeared and started throwing pianos at me, as though I'd unwittingly wandered into a Warner Brothers cartoon. Thanks, mysterious car who I guess is thematically supposed to be haunted or possessed or something. Yeah, possessed by the spirit of generosity! For those of you into deeply obscure videogame references, the car looks a bit like Tryrush Deppy's meaner older brother.


I'm sorry, everyone. I tried my best to get a decent screenshot of the Grim Reaper enemies in this section - you can just about see one hiding behind a zombie in the top-left - but I just couldn't manage it. There was so much going on all the time that I never got a clear shot. It will simply have to suffice that I can assure you that in this game you can shoot the grim visage of Death itself right in the bony face. And who do you always fight after defeating Death?


That's right, it's Dracula! A Dracula, anyway. A larger-than-usual Dracula with no feet, but definitely a vampire fancy enough to fall into my own personal category of "A Dracula." I like to think he's the mayor of Ghost Town, having narrowly defeated The Wolfman in a recent election. It was his "The Candidate With Bite!" slogan than really won over the voters.


The boss' main power is to summon a flock of ineffectual bats to fly into your bullets, although I suspect this is actually an attempt to lull the player into a false sense of security before zapping them with his eye-beams. I just wanted to show off how the boss' cape gets visibly damaged as the fight progresses, which I thought was a nice touch.


The next stage is Aliens World, and because this is a videogame that specifically means it looks like the works of H.R. Giger, rest in peace. He's airbrushing biomechanical dongs on the side of Lucifer's totally sweet van now. Anyway, that means a lot of fleshy architecture, bones galore and skulls sticking out of other things. It's a lot more colourful than your usual Gigerian hellscape, mind you. Lots of rich blues and salmon pinks. It reminds me a lot of the PC Engine pinball game Alien Crush, which seems appropriate.


Just in case you think I'm overstating the influence of the Alien movies' design aesthetic on this stage, take note of these eggs that are one hundred percent straight-up xenomorph eggs. Sadly facehuggers do not hatch out of them. Instead, there's a snake monster with the face of a lady writhing around. Two lady faces, actually, one at either end. Which one is the front and which one is the back? I'm not sure, and I'm going to pretend they're both the front. The alternative is too unpleasant to think about.


The boss is the top half of a skeletal monstrosity composed of sinew and bone that walks around atop two columns of severed testicles. What a cruel twist of evolution. No wonder he's so angry, and the boss's rage - and constant attacks with screen-filling spread shots - are where Nitro Ball starts to get really difficult. The Z Weapon can help you if you're in a real tight spot, and I was just starting to get the hang of things...


...when one of the bony snake-demons suddenly rocketed down the screen like a stupid dog that hears mail being pushed through the letterbox, crushing Gary beneath its vast bulk while the boss rides on top. I should have known this was going to happen. There are clues everywhere. It says "DIE" in big letters right over there! Of course, I was killed by this attack the next time it happened, and the next time, and the time after that. I think this is because I was trying to concentrate on several different things at once and that never works out well for me. I can either dodge the snakes, avoid the projectiles or keep away from the boss himself, Nitro Ball, but I can't do all three. Not at my age.


The final stage is the Space Station, and I was a little worried it wasn't going to be as interesting as the earlier stages, but then I noticed the regular enemies are Terminators and my fighting spirit was reinvigorated. Not just Terminators, but Terminators that roll into balls when you shoot them and careen around the screen. Skynet's remorseless armadillo battalion, that's what you get in Nitro Ball. I haven't seen Terminator Genisys, partly out of an irrational hatred of the word "genisys," but I have to assume that it would be vastly improved if all the Terminators could roll up like woodlice.


If you're looking for Gary in this screenshot, good luck. You can just about see his hand on the very left edge of the screen, because he's been sucked out of an open airlock and into the vacuum of space. Episodes of Nitro Ball must get incredible ratings, viewership figures high enough that the company behind it put money into building an actual space station and launching it into orbit instead of using a set decorated with tin foil and flashing lights. Maybe Nitro Ball is so popular that it's created an unshakeable social connection between all of Earth's peoples, and now that they're united by a love of Nitro Ball they've stopped having wars and can therefore spend all their former military budgets on constructing interstellar death-traps. It must be a weird time to be a NASA scientist, is what I'm saying.


Then the chicken mascot from the first stage reappeared as a cyber-chicken. He's still wearing dungarees. Why would you go to all the trouble of becoming a cool cyborg and then ruin it by dressing like a toddler? You're a goddamn enigma, Cyborg Chicken Mascot.
As I approach the end of Nitro Ball, I can tell you with some confidence that it's a really fun game. It's fast, relentless and exciting, and despite almost every one of its constituent parts being ripped off from somewhere else it still manages to feel unique. It looks really nice, (even though I had some emulation issues in the Alien stage,) with plenty of small details and fun enemies. Even the soundtrack is above average:


Is there anything I'd change about the game to make it better? I'm not sure. As much as I enjoy twin-stick shooters I don't think that particular control scheme would work here, at least not without some major rejigging - a lot of the bosses would be laughably easy if you could still shoot at them while moving away from them. Auto fire would have been a nice addition, because I don't often get sore thumbs playing shooters but by the end of Nitro Ball my firin' finger was definitely feeling the burn. A "dodge" move would be a fun addition, and I do mean more for fun than anything else, because while it'd be helpful to dive out of the way of certain attack, like the monster snakes during the Aliens World boss fight, mostly it'd just be cool.


The final boss is a robot overlord with two additional brains located in the towers by his sides, and in one final display of "inspiration" Data East made the boss' face look just like a Cylon from the original Battlestar Galactica, complete with phasing red lights in its visor. In for a penny and all that.
As is to be expected from your last opponent, the robo-brain is a real challenge and will not hesitate to suddenly fill the screen with a deluge of projectiles that puts most bullet-hell shooters to shame. If that's not enough, his side-towers are seemingly part brain, part robot and part enormous deadly yo-yos that whip around the screen trying to flatten you. It's a fun battle, even if by this point my thumb was begging me to stop, and in the end I managed to triumph through sheer gumption and thoroughly abusing the Z Weapon.


Gary is now the Nitro Ball champion, so that's where the fame comes from. The wealth is a result of picking up all those ocean liners and grand pianos. What's more, he's miraculously still alive to enjoy these things, so what else could Gary possibly want out of life?


He became a president! Not the president, a president. President Tiny Head, specifically. Makes sense to me, who wouldn't vote for the man who survived Nitro Ball, a man who spent his winnings on a set of Iron Man-esque armour that looks like business suit with just his head poking out? No-one's going to try to assassinate him, that's for damn sure. All hail President Gary, that's what I say.
The other characters also have endings, and because they all have different dreams they claim different rewards. There's a third, yellow character the only appears on three-player versions of the Nitro Ball machine, and he uses his wealth and fame to become a king, crown, ermine robe and all. Harry - sweet, uncomplicated Harry - "bought luxury cars." Harry is not a man overburdened by ambition.


The credits roll, and with a final special thanks to Steve Miller - presumably not the space cowboy / gangster of love - Nitro Ball comes to a close. It's a rare day here at VGJunk, because I've found a bona fide hidden gem of a game, and when the games I play are almost always either shite or well-known then that's something to celebrate. If you want arcade action and beefy men called Gary, then Nitro Ball delivers and you see it out in the wild about as often as Lord Lucan, so if you play it you can have fun and increase your level of videogame hipsterism. All in all, a strong recommendation from me and I might even go back and play it again. Maybe this time I'll try the three-player mode and find out what the other character's name is, although if it's not Larry or Barry I will be extremely upset.

Rugrats was a Nickelodeon cartoon - the second original series they ever made, I believe - about a group of babies that could talk to each other and had wacky adventures thanks to them not understanding the adult world. Much like Doug, it's one of those shows I saw a lot as a kid despite not liking it, because watching any cartoon was better than watching no cartoons at all or even, god forbid, going outside or taking up a hobby. I think the main reason I don't like it is that I have a visceral hatred of baby-talk. A weird personal quirk, I know, but hearing a grown person referring to their parents as "mummy and daddy" sets my teeth on edge and while it makes more sense in a show where the characters are literal babies it still annoys me enough that I could never enjoy Rugrats. At least the show kept Mark Mothersbaugh in work while Devo were on hiatus.


The star of Totally Angelica is, unsurprisingly, Angelica herself. She's the slightly older cousin of Rugrats' main character: a spoiled, narcissistic bully who torments the other characters, which makes for an unusual choice of player character. Of course, none of that comes through in the gameplay, and because it stars a girl then this must surely be a (groan) "game for girls." I hope you like fashion and make-up.


The game begins, and Angelica is dumped into a desolate shopping centre with no other humans present and a décor scheme so vile it'll make you wish humans had evolved in pitch-black caves, thus obviating the need to grow eyes. Here's where I say the one nice thing I have to say about RTA: Angelica's sprite isn't bad. She's immediately recognisable as Angelica, and her animations are okay. It's all downhill from this lofty spire of praise, mind you.


I found a shop called Phil's Fashions. I seem to recall Phil is one of the babies from the show. I'm not going to take fashion advice from a baby. I've been dressing like a teenager from 1998 since, well, 1998 and it's served me very well thus far. I suppose I'd better go in, though. It's not like there's anything else to do and the wallpaper out here is causing my optic nerves to form a union so they vote on strike action.


Inside lurks Grandpa's Cookie Catch. Do I want to catch cookies? No, not really. Couldn't you just give me the cookies, Grandpa? Why do you have to make a weird game of it? Too much time on your hands since you retired, that's your problem.


The goal here is to catch the flying cookies as the toasters fire them towards you. Angelica slides left or right and the cookies always land in one of three specific spots in the left, right or middle of the screen, so as long as you move back to the centre after each cookie is thrown you'll have plenty of time to move and catch the rest. You only need six cookies to win, so if you manage to grab the first six you can put your Game Boy down and do something more exciting, like crossing every individual name out of the phone book with a bookie's pen or reading the shipping forecast for this day twenty years ago, until the minigame finishes.
As you can see, it's a minigame that takes the basics of Pong and miraculously manages to remove every iota of fun, but there's another more important issue here: who the hell puts cookies in the toaster? That has to be a fire hazard. Grandpa's going to have a hard time explaining to social services why he was launching scalding-hot biscuits at his granddaughter.


It is very important to keep Grandpa happy. You know the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life"? It's that kind of situation, except rather than sending you to the cornfield Grandpa will kill you with high-velocity molten snacks.


Here's your reward - some new tights. Hush money from Grandpa, no doubt. Yes, RTAis all about fashion, with the aim of these minigames being to amass a collection of new clothes, jewellery, haircuts and make-up. I can hardly wait to see the finished ensemble.


Upon entering the next shop - Suzy's Shoes - I was presented with the chance to enter Fluffy's Pinball Maze. "Threatened with" might be more accurate, actually. "Punished by," even. Fluffy the cat has the expression of a pet that means to finally gain revenge on its abusive owner, and boy howdy does she have a cruel plan up her furry sleeves.


I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Rugrats: Totally Angelica is the most visually repellent videogame I have ever played. The equivalent punishment for your ears would be sticking your head into a metal drum filled with howler monkeys that have been trained to sing opera. Everything is a hyper-saturated nightmare of clashing colours and unfathomable patterns cunningly designed by the developers to make you look somewhere, anywhere but at the screen in the hopes you won't notice how bad the gameplay is. Well, sorry, Tiertex, but I've put my eyesight at permanent risk so I can see through to that gameplay and I'm sorry to report the the gameplay is complete shite.
The goal of Fluffy's Pinball Maze is to move the ball of yarn through the maze. You have no direct control over the ball, but at each junction you can press the A button to release a spring that nudges the ball onto the correct path. There is only one correct path, by the way. If you miss with the spring, you simply have to suffer through the agonisingly slow wait as the ball trundles back the way it came, bounces off a wall and then trundles back towards the spring so you can have another go. Not that you will miss, because as well as being so boring that even Satan himself would throw in a few power-ups to spice things up, it's also insultingly easy. Yes, yes, I know "it's for children" but what kind of children? Dormice children? Earthworm children? It must have really backfired on any parent who bought this game to keep their kids entertained, because kids love extremely slow and boring games where they have minimal influence over what's happening on the screen.


Our top scientists should start work immediately on investigating the maze's time-altering powers, because the three minutes or so it takes to clear the stage feels like several days. If you do manage to finish without your brain sliding you into a protective coma, your reward is one new pair of shoes from a small selection offered to you, including some high-heeled boots that are extremely inappropriate for a child.


This shop is called Lil's Lipsticks, and it looks like a cast member from Geordie Shore ran face-first into the window.


Oh come on. Sliding block puzzles? Already? This game is rapidly becoming my own personal nightmare, although something incredible has happened: Fluffy's maze was so soul-drainingly terrible that a sliding block puzzle is actually enjoyable by comparison.


It helps that the game doesn't bother moving many of the tiles around. It even shows you the tiles being shuffled, so it ends up being more of a memory game as you try to perform the moves you just saw in reverse. I can just about live with that. Rugrats: Totally Angelica therefore wins the coveted "VGJunk's Least Hated Sliding Block Puzzle" award. The trophy is a three-foot tall bronze hand extending its middle finger.


From the lipstick shop you receive eye shadow, which is not lipstick but it still just as inappropriate for a four-year-old as the boots were. Angelica herself appears to be preparing to slap someone with the back of her hand. Given what I remember about Rugrats the cartoon, this does not seem wildly out of character.


And now, the reason I've been collecting all these items is revealed: it's time for a fashion show. Let's hope the judges are impressed by yellow eyeshadow and pink boots, because that's really all I've got here.


The judges are Angelica's fellow children plus Reptar, Rugrats's fake Godzilla creature. That's Five Babies and a Kaiju, coming soon to a cinema near you. The judges give you a score that I would like to say is based on your outfit, but there's no guidance given as to what is fashionable and at this point all the judges were giving me scores of one and two. Even Reptar, the heartless bastard. He took one look at this child playing dress-up and said "Jesus, you're a mess, kid." That is brutal.
I suppose that you're just supposed to know what is fashionable, because you're cool and hip enough to be playing a Rugrats game. When preparing for the fashion show you get to choose which of the items you're wearing in each category, but I didn't notice an increase in score if I wore a matching outfit or anything. The only things that seem to increase your score are not wearing your default clothing and wearing items from later in the game. But how do you make progress?


There's an elevator that'll take you to the next floor of the mall, but it's only accessible once you've scored more points than the target displayed at the top of the screen. Until I reach that magic number, I suppose I'd better play more minigames. So I did. I even tried the pinball maze again, against my better judgement, and guess what? It's exactly the same as the first time, with not even the slightest change in layout. RTA has somehow surpassed the tedious grinding of even the most hateful Japanese CRPG, but I got there in the end. I found some new clothes, and I put together an outfit that is sure to wow even the most ennui-filled giant lizard: polka-dot tights, a tutu and a shirt covered in swastikas.


See? Straight from the Third Reich embroidery team! Okay, so on closer inspection you can see that they're clockwise, "non-Nazi" swastikas and they'd be much harder to see on actual GBC hardware but still, you'd think that when making a game for kids based on a Nickelodeon cartoon you'd try to avoid anything that might look like a goddamn Nazi emblem.


That outfit was still not quite enough to meet the points threshold - although I can't imagine why - but it helped me figure something out: you don't have to score all the points in one go. They're cumulative, so you can simply keep entering the same outfit, subjecting Angelica to a withering judgement of her looks by her peers, over and over until you've scraped up enough points to move on to level two. That's what I did. I think Angelica could stand to learn a humbling lesson or two.


A new floor of the mall means new minigames, like Tommy's Match and Snap, with an image of Tommy that looks as though a skateboard was edited out from under his feet mere moments ago.


Match and Snap is, well, it's Snap. Pairs of cards flip over, and if they match then you hit the button to win a point. Get four correct and you win the game, press the button when it's not a matching pair and Tommy gets a point. Good old Snap, surely Tiertex can't mess that up? Oh, bless your naivete. The problem is that the card flips sometimes - almost every time I played it, in fact - seem to get stuck in a loop where the same set of four or so non-matching cards are repeatedly revealed and you just have to sit and wait for this to play out. I honestly thought I might never play a more boring game than Doug's Big Game starring Doug, the human equivalent of unseasoned porridge, but an awful lot of RTA involves waiting for something to happen and then not doing much of anything when it does happen.


I did get a new haircut out of it. I call it The Spaghetti Rat's-Nest Disaster.


Another new game is Chukie's Color-Match Machine, and Chuckie's looking very confident for a character whose main defining trait is cowardice. Maybe he's got insider knowledge that Angelica is colour blind.


This one's a simple Simon-type game: Chuckie's machine flashes a series of colours at you, and you have to remember the sequence and repeat it. Is it fun? No, it absolutely is not. Will Chuckie's grotesque face, the visage of a Troll doll that was melted in a microwave and then had a single human tooth shoved into it, haunt your nightmares for weeks to come? Quite possibly. On the plus side, this is one of the more competent minigames, because it works as expected, it's relatively quick and mercifully brief.


Apparently the judges did not find this outfit sufficiently "fly" and "fresh" enough to grant me access to level three. Did Reptar just fly in from Milan Fashion Week or something? I can't meet his impossible standards. All the other judges, sure, I can ignore them. They're babies. I'm not upset about not being fashionable enough for someone who regularly shits themselves, but Reptar? That stings. I crave validation from the giant reptile monsters of this world.
Oh well, I'll just keep entering the same outfits in the fashion show until I rack up enough points to move on, right?


And so Rugrats: Totally Angelica becomes a Sisyphean punishment for some terrible crime I must have committed against the gods. Now I have to repeatedly play the same terrible minigames with no variation, over and over, until I can move on to the next level where more of the same games await. I know Angelica's a pretty terrible kid but she's still just a kid, she doesn't deserve this.


Here's another minigame: Phil and Lil's Bug Hunt, and as hard as I prayed that it'd turn out to be related to Aliens in some way, it is not. Instead it's the vegetable-picking parts of Harvest Moon's gameplay made slow and awkward. It also makes a mockery of the title Totally Angelica, because Angelica doesn't appear at all. Instead, you use one of the kids to lift up plants, your actions hampered by your sprite's tendency to slide into a different position without your input to prevent you from picking a whole row of plants quickly. Sometimes the plants have an insect underneath, and if they do then control switches to the other baby and you have to grab the insect. At least they're out in the fresh air and getting some healthy exercise?


I'll be honest, I've played far too many "kid's" games but none have made me feel my age like this one, where I'm skeeved out by applying blusher to a child. It's one step removed from the terrifying world of child beauty pageants. I cannot wait for this game to be over.


After a long and arduous struggle (to stay awake) I managed to reach the final floor of the mall, where a special minigame lurks: Fantasy World. The first two times I wrote that name out I typed "Fantasy Zone." Oh, how I wish this was Fantasy Zone... although it's not entirely dissimilar. Fantasy World is almost, almost a side-scrolling shooter, where Angelica flies around on a carousel horse. Her goal is to collect enough ladder parts to reach the tower where her favourite doll has been imprisoned. Why doesn't she just fly up to the tower on her flying horse? Because her flying horse is shit, that's why.


This may be difficult for you to believe, given the quality of the other games, but this one is the worst of the lot. This means that the sliding block puzzle are only the third most terrible experience in RTA, which I'm sure is a portent of the End Times. There are many reasons why Fantasy World is the worst, first and foremost being that that it's the longest. Maybe even The Longest Thing. It certainly felt that way while I was playing it. Another problem is that every aspect of the gameplay is completely awful in every way, which you can see is going to hinder your attempts to get some fun out of it. Simply moving Angelica around the screen is an exercise in pure frustration; the horse can't maintain a steady altitude and it's movements are as smooth as a gravel enema. Then there are the other babies that constantly pelt you with projectiles from off-screen. Get hit by a projectile and Angelica is sent flying, completely out of your control, halfway across the stage. You can collect magic wands for your own projectile attack, but this does nothing to the babies and only serves to turn the winch handle on the various wells - assuming you can line yourself up to hit the handles in the first place, when your horse is thrashing around as though it's just realised it's a wooden fairground ride brought to life through dark magics.


Even placing the ladders is a nightmare: you're supposed to simply fly to the place where the ladder needs to be and it's automatically assembled, but the final ladder space is too high for the horse to reach. So, you have to find an apple in the well, which lets you fly a little higher... but the hitbox for depositing the ladder is tiny and also not at the end of the ladder. It's around that area somewhere, but not where you'd think (i.e. where Angelica is in the screenshot above.) I eventually found it by flapping around the area and making groaning noise like a washing machine filled with talking Eeyore dolls.
I don't think I'm really selling this properly. This minigame is astonishingly bad. How-did-this-get-released, barely-playable, what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this bad. The faecal cherry atop a crap cake with diarrhoea icing. But I did it. I built that goddamn ladder.


I won a tiara. Okay, sure. I'm psyched. Maybe Reptar will give me the time of day now.


I've gone for a sort of Cleopatra-meets-lumberjack look. I think it works. Please tell me it works, I can't take this much longer.


It worked, in the sense that I have exceeded the maximum points required, The "points required" counter has not increased. The elevator won't take me to a new floor of the mall. Nothing else has changed. I think I'm trapped, alone forever in this nightmare world. The only other thing I could think of that might trigger an ending is collecting every single item of clothing / make-up / jewellery, and I will not be doing that. I'd sooner gnaw through my own scrotum and use my testicles as finger-puppets to recreate the "Summer Lovin'" scene from Grease.


This is where my time with Rugrats: Totally Angelica comes to an end, then. Congratulations, Tiertex, you did it. This game has supplanted NSYNC: Get to the Show and Russell Grant's Astrological Bullshit and become the single worst game I have ever played. Everything about it is utterly dreadful, and it's served with a toxic sauce of sheer contempt for any of the children unfortunate enough to play it. That's the Game Boy Color: Where Beloved Cartoons Go To Die.

This is Noctis, the main character of FFXV, a game which apparently takes place in a world without hairbrushes. I'm finding it very difficult to warm to an RPG hero who dresses almost exactly like the teenage boys I used to see trying to wangle their way into over-eighteens-only rock clubs. The clothes maketh the man, and in this case they've made a My Chemical Romance fan circa 2005. Of course, my feelings on the matter are almost certainly down to misplaced nostalgia and encroaching old age, so I'm going to look back on what the other main characters of Final Fantasy games were wearing. If anyone is qualified to make judgements on fashion, it's me. You don't suffer through Rugrats: Totally Angelica without learning a thing or two about style.



Already I've hit a snag - the party members of the original Final Fantasy are characterless ciphers whose appearance changes based on what job you give them. So, here's the Warrior of Light, the first game's representative in the Dissidia fighting game spin-offs. He's supposedly based on series artist and hardcore bead fan Yoshitaka Amano's original artwork for the knight class, so he'll do in a pinch. The most immediately arresting feature of the Warrior's outfit is his massive horns - combined with his metal armour, they make it impossible for him to go out in a thunderstorm. Why are they so long? Is this like the Secret Boots from Symphony of the Night and he's insecure about his height? Does he desperately want to ride a rollercoaster but didn't quite reach the "you must be this high to ride" limit? Maybe he lost a fight after being headbutted once and he's determined it'll never happen again.
Horns aside, there are some other nice details here on what is overall a pretty neat design. He's using an ammonite as a clasp for his cape, he's wearing the most vestigial loincloth I've ever seen and best of all there appears to be a sharp-toothed monster face on his belt, as though at some point he won the Heavyweight Championship of Halloweenland.



Ignore the fact that Firion is carrying more garishly-coloured fantasy weapons than a duffelbag at a LARPing event, that's really just a Dissidia thing. However, the later remakes of Final Fantasy II also depict Firion in this style, so that must be how Squaresoft always wanted him to look - and it's not a bad look, either. The bandanna / turban headwear and lighter armour give Firion a somewhat exotic look, and the single shoulder spike will come in handy for both deflecting enemy attacks and hanging his shopping bags on when both his hands are full. The negatives of this ensemble? Well, his cape looks more like a security blanket than, you know, a cape and his trousers appear uncomfortably tight around the crotchular region, but aside from that, yeah, I like Firion's look.



FFIII went back to using interchangeable job-having puppets as its cast members, but the Dissidia version of the Onion Knight is mostly consistent with the original Famicom sprite only a hell of a lot more... ploofy. Voluminous pantaloons, orange thigh-scarves and a feather duster sticking out of his hat give the Onion Knight a certain chicken-like quality. Mmm, chicken and onions. The most puzzling thing about this outfit is the string of fairy lights sticking out of each shoulder pad. I think their purpose is to illuminate and draw attention to the Onion Knight's biceps. He's surprisingly ripped for a kid.



When FFIII was remade for the Nintendo DS, the generic Onion Knights were replaced with actual characters, with names and different models and everything. The main character became Luneth, who you see here. Luneth does not understand how belts work. This is an accusation that can be levelled at great many of the Final Fantasy characters designed by artist Tetsuya Nomura. I don't believe Luneth was designed by Nomura himself, but whoever did come up with the idea of someone wearing three enormous belts as a breastplate must surely have been inspired by Nomura. I didn't play much of FFIII DS, but if there isn't a scene where Luneth begins an action sequence by shouting "okay, everyone buckle up!" then, well, what's the point of playing the bloody game? The belt-armour's most important design function, however, is to distract you from noticing that Luneth is also wearing a hoodie over one of his mum's chunky turtleneck sweaters.



Cecil: now there's a name you don't see much these days. Has any other name fallen off a metaphorical cliff in terms of popularity as much as Cecil has? Well, Adolf, I guess. Anyway, full credit goes to Cecil for being the last main character in a Final Fantasy game to have the common sense to wear proper armour. He might struggle if the monsters attack his arms, but other than that he's fairly well protected. That said, he must have had a few embarrassing moments when he tried to run through a narrow doorway and was stopped by his shoulder-spikes. All in all, though, a good set of classic fantasy armour that's made extra stylish by Cecil's choice of complimentary lipstick.



Another image taken from the Dissidia games, this alternate costume for Bartz - who'll always be known as Butz in my heart - is a recreation of his FFV sprite. Bartz Classic, if you will, and it's a good look for a young wandering adventurer. It's got something of a "squire" feeling to it, the look of someone who's not quite ready to be a fully-fledged knight, although I'm not sure green wellington boots are particularly heroic. Comfortable for trudging across the overworld, I imagine, but also leaving the vague impression that you grew up in the home counties and spent a lot of time around horses. I love Final Fantasy V and I'm very fond of Bartz, who's a simple, well-meaning, non-conflicted RPG hero. That's probably why he can get away with having a popped collar without seeming like a complete arse.


I can't mention Bartz's outfit without bringing up this completely fabulous alternate costume from Dissidia. Bartz doesn''t need armour, he's got dazzle camouflage and combat leggings.



It's often said that FFVI doesn't really have a main character and the game was designed as an ensemble piece, but Terra's on the game's logo and she's always chosen as FFVI's representative in spin-offs and crossovers so she fits the bill better than most. Terra doesn't really have a settled design, either: her hair colour changes regularly and her original sprite had shoulderpads that seem to have been done away with these days, but this is basically her look: floaty and magical, feminine without being sexualised and with shoes that you'd have to put on very carefully unless you wanted to lose a couple of fingers. Terra's outfit is an inversion of most of the ones we've seen thus far in that the arms are covered but her shoulders are woefully lacking protection, but as she was intended for a life of servitude spent riding around in a mechanical death machine her lack of armour makes a little more sense. I think her tights would benefit from a different pattern, mind you, because these ones look like she was eating taramasalata too fast. Still, Terra has one of my favourite outfits in the series and it definitely looks like the wearer might transform into a flying god-monster every now and then. She must buy her clothes at the same store as Bruce Banner.



Ah, Cloud Strife. One of the most iconic characters in gaming, a fan-favourite who helped define the PS1 era. Not bad for someone wearing binbags as trousers. SOLDIER wages are not competitive, it seems. How do you even manage to make your trousers so pointy, Cloud? Do you spend hours ironing in each crease? No, you can't do. That wouldn't leave enough time for hair sculpting. The trousers do a good job of hiding just how weirdly long Cloud's legs are, though, obscuring the fact that his waist is practically under his chin.
Trousers aside, two things about Cloud's outfit draw my attention. The first is that he's wearing surprisingly normal boots. They've got slightly unusual fold-over tops, but aside from that they're common-or-garden work books. I own a pair of boots not dissimilar to Cloud's myself, and I get it, they're very comfortable. The other thing is his weird belt, stolen from a Victorian strongman and with attached suspenders for... what? Holding up the belt? What is it with Final Fantasy games and belts? Actually, now that I think about it the belt and suspenders are probably designed so that Cloud can hang the Buster Sword on his back. You might think doing so would lead to a moment of agony as your vertebrae explode followed by a lifetime in a wheelchair, but here's the theory I subscribe to: the planet of FFVII has much lower gravity than Earth. That's why everyone can jump ridiculously high and Cloud can lift his sword.



It's a "James Dean falls into a vat of liquid anime" look for the hero of FFVIII, and this is almost something you could see a real person wearing. It's basically just a white t-shirt, leather jacket and black trousers, after all, although they do seem to be leather trousers. Swap the leather for jeans and hey, that's almost normal! Oh, right, the belts. There's always something going on with the belts. The crossed belts do make sense when you think Squall's kind of a gunslinger, and FFVIII's intro does show that the Gunblades require ammunition even if you're stabbing the bullets into people rather than shooting them. I'm not sure how those belts aren't falling down Squall's legs, though. Let's say it's magnets. Less readily explained are the belts wrapped around his right leg. Are they spares, in case his other belts fail? Does he hand them out to those without belts, bringing joy to the loose-trousered people of the world? If only FFVIII had received as many sequels as Final Fantasy VII, we might have had a glimpse into Squall's future as the owner, proprietor and best customer of Squall's Belt Shack, the Cheapest Belts in Balamb.



If that's what the cuffs look like, we should all give thanks that Zidane got rid of the rest of the shirt. However, seeing someone wearing cuffs that aren't attached to any sleeves always makes me think of male strippers, so thanks for that, Square. I'm sure there are other things that can be said about Zidane's outfit, but I cannot get past those cuffs. I feel like he should be able to glide short distances using those bloody things. I can just imagine Zidane walking into a jewellers and saying "I need the biggest cufflinks you have. No, bigger. Bigger."
Okay, cuffs aside Zidane has has a very nice doily around his neck and boots that would fill with water every time it rained. He's so close to figuring out how belts work, though! He just needs to buy a shorter one. Or steal one, because he's a thief. An unappealing little goblinoid thief with the disturbing face of a porcelain doll and hair like a bad David Bowie wig.



Good god, and I thought Zidane's design was bad. At least I could kind of see what they were going for with Zidane, but Tidus' outfit is just completely insane. I once described this costume as "the result of running a toddler's wardrobe through a woodchipper and then randomly sewing the pieces back together," and I'm not sure I can come up with a better description than that. I'm going to try, though. He's the ghost of a surfer who died in a terrible accident at a fabric recycling centre. The host of a kid's TV show from a universe where mankind was enslaved by a race of alien clowns. A jigsaw puzzle of garbage dump that's been assembled wrong. He looks, to be blunt, like a complete idiot. He's wearing what appear to be rubber socks, for pity's sake. And again, surprisingly normal boots. Which he swims in. Underwater. Yes, these are Tidus'underwater swimming clothes, because nothing says deep-sea exploration like dungarees. It may sound hypocritical of me to complain about this after I said Noctis' design was boring, but it's possible to go too far in the other direction, you know?



As a child, Vaan was once kicked in the shin. Vowing to never suffer through such pain again, he built a custom set of impenetrable leg armour. Unfortunately, this meant he had no money left to buy any other clothes, and so he had to settle for a vest he made from the leftover scraps of metal. All I can think of is how unpleasant a steel vest would feel as it rubbed against your nipples. Or maybe Vaan is into that kind of thing. If he is, I wish they'd mentioned it in FFXII, anything that gave Vaan even the smallest amount of personality would have been a welcome addition.
They say wearing socks with sandals is a fashion faux-pas, but I'm not sure if that rule still holds when your socks are leather. On the other hand (ha ha,) Vaan has swerved the stigma of wearing fingerless gloves by donning gloves that are only fingers. I should point out that Vaan lives in a desert city, just in case you had any lingering doubts as to the practicality of his outfit. Business on the bottom, party on the top, that's Vaan, and if this image is anything to go by it's a sexy party.



The shoulderpad makes its triumphant return in FFXIII! It's something of a runty, vestigial shoulderpad with no elaborate horn sticking out of it but hey, it's nice to see it back. Lightning is often accused of being nothing more than a female version of Cloud, but I don't think that's fair. True, they both favour the single shoulder-pad and the sleeveless turtleneck, but were Cloud's boot plagued by a swarm of small belts? I think not. I don't mind Lightning's shoe-belts so much, even if they are utterly useless, because she's on of the few FF character to wear a regular, standard belt around her waist in the appropriate manner. Lightning also brings back the cape, something that has been sorely lacking from FF heroes in recent years. Overall, though, I'd say Lightning's design is a little bland and no amount of superfluous belts is going to change that. Unless they wrapped her entirely in belts like some kind of leather mummy. That would definitely not be bland. It'd make the combat a lot more interesting, for starters.

So, in conclusion I think my favourite is Terra and the worst is Tidus by a significant margin, and although I've given some of them a hard time I do like the majority of these character designs. The pre-Final Fantasy IX ones, anyway. They're striking, fun and unique and even after all these years a tiny part of me still wishes I could get away with dressing like Squall. Don't worry, I know I can't and I won't try it. Not again.

That's Casper the Friendly Ghost, of course. I'm sure you all know who Casper is, even if you haven't consumed much media starring the ectoplasmic young lad. If you don't know who he is, Casper is a ghost who is friendly, in contrast to all the other ghosts who each have a personality roughly in line with every Post Office cashier I've ever had to deal with. This posits a universe where the way one becomes a ghost is not by having unfinished business or suffering a violent death but by simply being a proper dick, and Casper is a freakish anomaly that upsets this natural order. That's why all the other ghosts hate him.
Casper the Game Boy game is based loosely on the 1995 movie version of Casper, which I discussed during the article about Casper: Friends Around the World. It's the movie where Casper develops a faintly creepy stalkerish crush on Christina Ricci's character Kat, including a scene where he whispers "can I keep you?" at her as though she were a stray dog. Bill Pullman also falls into a sewer and dies, so it's got some comedy elements. I think the movie is where most British people's knowledge of Casper comes from - it's certainly where I know him from - so hopefully I'll understand what's going on in the game.

The game begins with one vaguely humanoid lump dragging another vaguely humanoid lump towards a spooky mansion. It'd be spookier if the outside wasn't decorated with giant love-hearts, mind you. I have to assume the décor is Casper's doing. Anyway, once you're inside the non-spectral humanoid lump disappears and Casper is presented with four doors, each of them leading to (and take a deep breath now for your upcoming groan) a different minigame. That's right, Casper is yet another Game Boy minigame collection, with the added bonus that the minigames are all ripped off from other games that already exist. I can hardly wait to get started.



Is "ooz" something that really deserves to be protected? It couldn't even be bothered to spell "ooze" properly, and if it cares so little about itself then why should I care about ooz? What has ooz ever done for me?


This is the first minigame, and Casper is off to a bad start in the same way that grabbing your newborn's umbilical cord and using them like a yo-yo is a bad start to parenthood., in that it's much less fun than you'd think it would be. The ooz is at the bottom of the screen and must be protected from the ghosts that fall down from the top of the screen. I think they're supposed to be Casper's uncles, Fatso, Stinky and Stretch, but their sprites are so ill-defined that they could easily be the results of someone filling their nose with cottage cheese and sneezing at the screen. If the ghosts touch the ooz, the ooz is damaged, and if there's too much damage the game is over. So, how does Casper stop the ghosts? By shooting them. You move a crosshair around and shoot the ghosts, thus making a mockery of the "friendly" part of Casper's name. It's hard to imagine a friendly ghost taking control of some ectoplasmic anti-aircraft cannon, but that must be what's happening here.


How does it play? Like a giant sack of arseholes. For starters, it's so visually boring that playing it for too long will cause the kind of hallucinations you get in a sensory deprivation tank, and that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts. Another thing that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts is the collision detection, which is astonishingly bad considering "is crosshair over target y/n" is all it has to figure out - but eighty percent of your shots will pass through the ghosts as if they were, well, ghosts. Eventually I figured out you can increase the odds of landing a hit by aiming somewhere around the ghost's "head," but even that isn't consistent. Oh, and you can't move the crosshair while you're firing and the ghosts move quite fast so if you fire and miss then you might as well give up, because that particular ghost has bested you and your ooz will suffer for it.


Having managed to drag myself through this miserable minigame, an experience which reminded me that the English language is sorely lacking in words that mean both "super boring" and "gratingly unpleasant," Casper was rewarded with some points and some ooz. This screen also says mentions that Casper has seven lives, which seems like a cruel thing to say to a dead person.


I'm trying to think of a way to describe the second minigame without mentioning Lode Runner, but I can't because it's just Lode Runner. The aim is to grab enough vials of ooz (the collectible you can see in the corners of the level) to open the exit while avoiding the other ghosts. See the crumbly-looking sections of floor? If you stand on those and press A, Casper uses his magic wand to disintegrate that section of floor. The non-friendly ghosts then all into these holes and are temporarily stunned and did I mention that this is Lode Runner? A lobotomised, low-effort Lode Runner, but still. Most of the stage is spent waiting around for the ghosts to fall into the holes so you can move past, which doesn't exactly make for a thrilling gameplay experience. The boredom I can just about stand - I'd just been thoroughly prepared by the previous minigame, after all - but my bigger problem is this: Casper has to use ladders to move up and down, and the rough sections of floor slow him down, despite being a flying, intangible glob of friendliness. How the hell is he even climbing that ladder? He doesn't have any feet! If you're going to make a game about a ghost, yeah, maybe make some kind of effort to have it be ghost-related? That'd be nice.


If you touch a ghost you lose a life, which results in this scene where one of Casper's uncles literally kicks him out of the house. If you ignore the fact that the sprites look like absolutely nothing at all, this is easily my favourite part of the game and I purposefully lost lives on more than one occasion just to see Casper getting punted into the night like a drunk at closing time.


The next game finally clinches it: the thing that killed Casper was boredom. A ghost (shocking, I know) drops books from the top of the screen with agonising slowness, and Casper must help the books into the helpfully-labelled book return slot. How can he do this?


By transforming into a paddle / trampoline and bouncing the books across the other screen in a shallow rip-off of the old Game & Watch title Fire. However dull you think that sounds, don't forget that this all plays out at a pace most glaciers would find aggravatingly lethargic. Oh, and the collision detection is shit in this game, too, with books frequently passing through the edge of the Casper-paddle. The only other twist is that sometimes collectable bottles of ooz appear but you can only grab them when you're in non-paddle form. If the game wasn't slower than molasses wearing cast-iron socks this might have made for a more engaging experience as you tried to dash between the books and the ooz. I'm not saying it would have been good, but I'd happily take "marginally less awful" at this point.


The final minigame of the four seems designed to remind me of all the shelves I've ever put up. Thanks for that, Casper. At first, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing here, and all I could do was cycle through a variety of indecipherable sprites, but then I hit the select button.


Oh, I see, so I'm supposed to be setting up an elaborate Heath Robinson machine to... hang on, Kat? Was that supposed to be Christina Ricci?


Of the four colours available to you - a palette that includes black, I hasten to add - you went with white to depict Kat's hair. Good job, team. There's something incredibly depressing about this image, too, a certain dismal air that makes it hard to look at. I think it's her expression. I just cannot imagine what emotion would cause someone's face to look like that, besides the cold embrace of death.


I eventually got everything set up, no thanks to the in-game graphics. I mean, the game tried to tell me that's an egg-laying chicken when it is quite clearly a duck, and I never would have figured out what the "egg-cracker" was without being told - it looks like an "extreme '90s" version of one of those drinking birds. I got there in the end, though. Attach a rope to the chicken, pull the rope to startle it into laying an egg, the egg rolls down the ramps, gets opened by the egg opener and gracefully slides onto Kat's plate.


"Haahaa, I like egg, egg is nice food."


Once you've cleared the four games, Casper floats up some stairs and enters another room... where the same four games await, proving that Casper is trapped in some kind of purgatorial limbo and he's trying to drag us in with him.


There aren't any changes to the gameplay, either. The Lode Runner knock-off has an ever-so-slightly different layout, and the book-bouncing and shooting games are the same only you have to play them for longer before you're granted the mercy of the results screen.


At least the contraption-building game is a little different - this time you have to wake Casper up. I thought it'd be as simple as dropping the bowling ball onto his dumb, marshmallowy face - I would feel no remorse in doing this to someone who sleeps in a bed with their own name carved on their headboard, complete with trademark symbol. Your obsession with your personal brand has run amok, Casper! Sadly, just using the bowling ball doesn't work. I forget exactly what the correct set-up was, but looking at this screenshot it seems that a tiny chef's hat and a butterfly-catching net somehow combine to launch a rocket from atop a random collection of pixels. The rocket flies up, nudges the bowling ball, the ball rolls down the ramp and knocks the bucket of water on Casper's face. I still think my "bowling ball meets face" plan was better. It has brevity on its side, that's for damn sure.


Guess what happens when you've finished the minigames for a second time? If you said anything other than "you do them all a third time" then I'm envious of your hopeful, optimistic nature. Yes, you have to play them again, except now they're even longer. I'll spare you from having to see them again, instead using this time to tell you that the description of this item as an "ordinary nail" is making me suspicious that it's actually not ordinary at all.


Finally, something different is happening! Casper pushes Kat down a slope while ghosts try to fly into them, and you've got to avoid the obstacles by laboriously dragging the chair left or right. The ghosts are no threat at all and I think every one of them can be avoided by saying as far to the left of the screen as possible. The real danger comes from the rotating... things. You can just about make one out on the right of the above screenshot, it's the thing that looks like a bunch of squares with a broom attached to the end. They cover a huge portion of the screen as they travel, and if you're not in the right position when they appear then you've got almost no chance of avoiding them. At first this didn't seem to be a problem, and getting hit by them appeared to have no negative consequences. Then I noticed I lost a life every time they hit me, but the game didn't think this information was important enough to bother sharing with the player aside from having the life counter silently decrease.


Ah yes, the Lazuras Machine, a device capable of bringing the dead back to life. It's named, of course, after the biblical figure Lazuras, who was resurrected by Juses.


The graphics have finally achieved a high enough level of fidelity to confirm that Casper's uncles Stinky, Stretch and Fatso are present in the game. Their faces being part of the mechanism for controlling the Lazarus Machine goes without explanation, however. Surely it just needs a big lever that flips between "dead" and "not dead," right? Anyway, this is a simple memory game, where the ghost heads are activated in a certain order, which you must remember and replicate.


But I don't want to get ooz for Casper, he whined. I want Casper to go away.


In a desperate final attempt at padding, Casper makes you go through one more "Ooz Runner" before the game ends, making me wonder what I did wrong to deserve such punishment. It's not any different than the other Ooz Runner stages, either - it's all just standing around until the ghosts move into the right places, and playing it provides the same heady rush as waiting for a bus that's already ten minutes late.


Oh thank god, I made it to the end. It's difficult to tell, but the final scene shows Casper and Kat dancing while a choir sings behind them. I know it looks like Kat is trying to strangle Casper, but don't be silly. That's clearly not what's supposed to be happening. I mean, he's already dead. What you need is an exorcism, friend.


That's Casper, then, but there was nothing friendly about making me suffer through this. It's not just a bad game, it's multiple bad games, all lazily cobbled together from boring gameplay, wonky hit detection and graphics that are sometimes so bad that they hinder your ability to play the bloody game. It's all so incredibly dull, that's the thing. You could forgive a lack of quality to some extent if the game was even the slightest bit interesting, but everything included here had been done before and much, much better. The strange thing is, despite the gameplay being just as bad as Rugrats: Totally Angelica and both games being cynical licensed cash-ins, I don't hate Casper nearly as much as Totally Angelica. I'm not sure why that is, apart from the obvious explanation that Totally Angelica takes longer to play through. Casper doesn't have that faint whiff of sexism to it, either, and as bad as the graphics are at least they're not in the retina-searing colours of Rugrats. I suspect the real answer is that Casper is simply so tedious it's reduced my capacity to feel emotions, including hate. I might have to play God Hand for a while before the next article, so I can learn to love again.

Makes you wonder how he came by the name "Greendog," doesn't it? I doubt that's what's on his birth certificate, and a nickname like that must have a story behind it. Maybe he grew up in the bayou and that's what he called alligators when he was a kid. Maybe he makes a living by painting dogs green and selling "My Labrador Was Abducted by Aliens!" stories to trashy magazines. Any theory you can come up with is valid, so go nuts.


While surfing in the Caribbean, Greendog wipes out and smashes face-first into a sandy beach. Embedded head-down and ankle-deep in the pristine white sands, he is unable to free himself and succumbs to asphyxiation. Thus marks the end of Greendog. He was truly a tubular dude.


No, not really. Instead he pulls himself free only to find that he's acquired a golden pendant somewhere along the way, as though he had surfed through an underwater Elizabeth Duke on his way to the beach. Greendog is appreciative of his new jewellery at first, but then he tries to take it off and he can't. Usually I'd assume that this is down to Greendog being too thick to figure out how a clasp works, but as he's barely done anything yet I should probably hold off on accusing him of being dumber than a sack of particularly dense rocks.


Thanks, Exposition Babe. The Aztec Curse has taken the form of a shapely women in order to reveal its secrets, but even in human form it cannot disguise its glowing red eyes, eyes that burn with the fires of the underworld. Or so I thought, but it turns out this is Greendog's girlfriend and she's called Bambi. Bambi is a learned expert in obscure Aztec curses, and she informs Greendog that the only way to remove the necklace is to collect and reassemble all six pieces of the Aztec treasure. She also says that the cursed necklace will fill any animal or creature that sees Greendog with an unshakeable desire to destroy our hero, and I appreciate the attempt to explain why birds and fish would sooner condemn themselves to death than see Greendog proceed unchallenged. All too often are videogame character beset by the unreasonably lethal contents of a petting zoo for no apparent reason, but "ensorcelled by ancient magics" is an explanation I can get behind.


And so it begins. The bird has seen me and, compelled by the curse, will stop at nothing to forcibly insert itself somewhere into Greendog's body.
The basics, then: Greendog is your typical side-scrolling platformer, for the most part. Later stages mix it up, but the bulk of the gameplay consists of the tried-and-true formula of walking to the right while jumping over obstacles and pits. To defeat the enemies, Greendog can attack them by throwing frisbees.


Here's the frisbee attack, and I will be referring to it as a frisbee for the duration, lawyers of the Wham-O Toy Company be damned. Greendog is trying to eliminate the jumping fish, a fish that I think is supposed to be a piranha but looks more like a goldfish with a mouth full of sugar cubes. I would definitely recommend taking out the fish before jumping across the rocks, because if the fish hits you - or you fall into the water - the fish will attach itself to Greendog and drain his health until you shake it off by thrashing around on the controller. That the fish clamps on to Greendog does make it more likely to be a piranha, I suppose, but just imagine how horrible it'd feel to have a goldfish sticking to your bare skin through nothing more than the power of suction.
Speaking of taking damage, Greendog runs contrary to almost every other platformer by not starting you with a full health bar that decreases when you get hit, but rather providing an empty "damage" bar that fills up as you're attacked until it reaches the top and you lose a life. Why the developers of Greendog decided to have it this way 'round is a mystery. Perhaps it was just to make me think I had way less health than I actually did every time I looked at the bar, the cheeky bastards.


Greendog is the mostly the same old platform-hopping, projectile-throwing action that was so prevalent in the 16-bit era, but that's not necessarily a complaint and Greendog mostly handles the meat and potatoes of the action well enough. Greendog's jumps are a little more floaty than you might expect and if you're like me you'll probably end up overshooting a lot of the small platforms in the opening area, but once you get used to them they're not so bad. What is bad - bad game design, pure and simple - is this section here. Greendog can progress no further unless he grabs onto that bird, which then carries him down the waterfall. The thing is, that bird is identical to all the other birds in the stage, birds that damage you if you touch them. So, I spent a good couple of minutes waiting for a moving platform or something to appear because jumping into the previously deadly birds seemed like almost as bad an idea as traipsing through the rainforest with no shoes on.


I made it down eventually, and my reward was some vine swinging. On this front, Greendog gets a thumbs up from me. I've played plenty of games where swinging from vines / ropes / chains has been an exercise in frustration as the direction my character moved in when I jumped off seemed to be determined by an unseen force spinning a Twister-style wheel, but in this game it works very fluidly.


I have reached an ancient Aztec temple. Did the Aztec empire extend to the islands of the Caribbean? I am fairly certain it did not, but here we are, navigating the much less linear stone corridors of this aged site, jamming our frisbee into the animal heads on the wall. That's what's going on up there, it's not sticking its tongue out, and the animal heads work as switches that activate when you insert your frisbee. As I say, it's a much less linear area that rewards exploration - mostly with fairly useless point items, but also sometimes health refills and special items. The special items, activated with a button press, come in a variety of different flavours: an umbrella hat that protects you from damage, a stopwatch that freezes enemies, a hovering frisbee that mercilessly assaults any enemies it sees. While they're quite interesting - I find frisbee based drone warfare interesting, at least - sadly you don't see them that often and they feel like something of a wasted opportunity.


What else is there in the temple? A variety of traps, for one. There are springs that launch you upwards when you stand on them, usually into spikes on the ceiling, but that's okay because if you're paying attention you can see the springs before you step on them. They're cunningly disguised to look very similar to the regular floor, but they can be spotted in advance. The same cannot be said of the crumbling floors, which are indistinguishable from the regular floors and as such can bite me. Falling through a crumbling floor usually means you have to retrace your steps through an area you've previously cleared, which isn't much fun and only becomes less enjoyable when you make it back to where you were and promptly stand on another completely normal-looking collapsing block. The temple stages are okay, but not nearly fun enough for me to want to memorise the structural integrity of every last paving slab.


There's a boss of sorts at the end, a rotating totem pole where each face fires a different kind of projectile - and can only be damaged - when it's facing you. Straightforward bullets and blocks that fall from the ceiling are the main two, so the battle is really all about standing in the right place and pressing attack. I know you could say that about roughly eighty percent of videogame bosses, but Greendog is not the most dynamic chap in the word and so positioning is definitely emphasised over acrobatic dodging. Or you could sign up for the VGJunk Tips Hotline, where I'll tell you my top-secret strategy: reach the boss with full health and hammer the "throw frisbee" button while ignoring its attacks. Shit, I've given away the secret.


With the treasure claimed, (treasure that looks like a demonic doorstop,) Greendog can travel to the next island through the courtesy of his two feet. That's right, he's got a pedal-powered helicopter. Inspecting it closely, it seems to be made from plumbing supplies, a toilet seat and a taxidermied snake as the joystick. He's currently on the island of Grenada, and he's going to pedal his way to Mustique. According to Google Maps, that is a distance of roughly one hundred kilometres. I'm looking forward to the next stage, where Greendog's decision to spit in the face of physics results in his thighs swelling up to the size of mighty redwoods.


Oh, you're actually going to make me pedal to the next island? I wasn't expecting that. Fortunately it's just the final few minutes of the journey, but even that feels like a few minutes too long, and these pedalcopter section appear between every stage. You have to constantly tap the jump button to stay airborne while either avoiding the enemies or bopping them with the pedalcopter's secret weapon: a boxing glove on a spring. It's not a difficult stage. Nor is it an especially fun stage. It's mostly exercise for your thumb, but it does provide the rare opportunity to punch a fish. I don't think I've punched a fish in a videogame since I played Vampire Savior.


The next area begins, and the developers apparently grew tired of the "platforming" part of the platform genre and removed it entirely. The beach is a flat plane with only enemies to avoid and no holes to fall down, thus excising fifty percent of the gameplay. The fact that one of the enemy types is a strutting starfish in sunglasses that explodes as nonchalantly as it's possible to explode when you get near it goes some way towards redeeming the stage, but not nearly far enough.


There's an even bigger problem with this stage, however. As you may have noticed, there is a dog in this stage. The dog follows you around and is non-hostile, apparently being immune to the pendant's curse, which drives all other animals into a frenzied bloodlust - the dog is clearly, on a deep, spiritual level, too much of a Good Dog to be affected. So, there's a dog. Greendog throws frisbees. However, unless I'm missing something, you can't play frisbee with the dog. Excuse my language, but strong emotions sometimes must be expressed through strong words: what the fuck? I've never been so disappointed. As soon as I saw that dog I assumed you'd be able to play frisbee with it but no, this perfect set-up has been completely wasted and the dog is just there. It is an absolute travesty, and due to this colossal blunder I must break my normal rule about not giving numerical scores and award Greendog a rating of zero out of infinity.


True to his radical roots, Greendog spends the next stage skateboarding through another Aztec temple. It was nice of the Aztecs to fill their temple with ramps and half-pipes, and the inclusion of deadly spikes all over the place fits in nicely with their reputation for brutal bloodsports. Did you know, for instance, that in Aztec times the winner of the X Games had their heart cut out with an obsidian dagger?
I appreciate the attempts to mix the gameplay up, and the skateboarding sections are pretty okay. I wouldn't go much higher than "okay," however, because there are some annoyingly-placed springs that launch you back a few screens, and it's frustratingly easy to misjudge when your wheels are touching the ground. If they're not touching the ground you can't jump, and if you don't jump off ramps you're going to to be enduring a lot of very hardcore acupuncture sessions. At least it's not forced scrolling, so you can take your time and get a feel for what the next section holds.


The next island - I skipped the pedalcopter section because they're all functionally and graphically identical - begins with Greendog showing a deep misunderstanding of how snorkels work by walking around inside a giant fishtank. The silhouetted figure in the window at the back, presumably an aquarium employee, does not seem to care that there's a strange man harassing the fish. Then again, there also appears to be people fishing in the aquarium, so Greendog is the least of his problems.


And then I got eaten by a clam.
This is another completely flat level, and being underwater adds nothing to the gameplay beyond making Greendog's jumps even more buoyant than usual, but this is still one of the better stages thanks to some well thought-out enemy placement that leads to a smoothly enjoyable experience that has you almost falling into a Castlevania-style rhythm of movement. It also looks nice, too, with detailed backgrounds and even a bit of parallax scrolling. Many of Greendog's stages are a touch bland, especially the temples, but this one's much more visually engaging.


Speaking of bland temples, this one's underwater! I have no problem with the idea that Greendog can hold his breath for this long, not after he flew his pedalcopter 100 kilometers across open ocean. He's clearly not human. Not, really, go back and have a proper look at Greendog. He's shaped vaguely like a human, but all the details are wrong. His head is a featureless orb of flesh, his "hair" looks like a hat crudely carved from butter and he's got bizarre dinosaur legs. My theory is that Greendog is the first attempt by an alien race to create an infiltration unit, an undercover operative that can blend in with the hu-mans and learn their secrets. Unfortunately the aliens had only heard poorly-translated, third-hand accounts of what a human actually looks like, and so Greendog ended up resembling a mannequin that's been dropped down a thousand flights of stairs.


Here we are in Jamaica with another skateboarding section. The strange thing is, you can choose whether you do it on a skateboard or rollerblades. Is there a difference between the skateboard and the rollerblades? Not that I could see, so naturally I picked the skateboard, because skateboards are inherently cooler than rollerblades despite me forever associating them with Linkin Park and my younger brother's friends attempts to build ramps outside our house.
This section is littered with parking meters. Touching them pushes you back to an earlier point in the stage. Greendog seems overly fond of this mechanic, from the springs to the pipes that suck you up in the underwater stage to these parking meters, and frankly I grew very tired of it very quickly, to the point that it actually took longer getting through the stages because I was adamant I wouldn't fall into these traps, hamstrung by my own pride once again.


Next is the subway, where I'm being assaulted by tourists who look even less human than Greendog. Those aren't human heads, those are potatoes that have been left on a sunny windowsill for too long.
By the way, I looked it up and as far as I can tell there are no subways in Jamaica. My efforts to fact-check this were hampered by the fast food chain Subway's corporate presence in Jamaica. If you want to Eat Fresh in old Kingston Town, you can. If you want to get around the city, take the bus.


Also in the subway are these women, sitting patiently, minding their own business as they wait for the train... until you get close to them.


Okay, wow. That's pretty goddamn racist, and it completely took me by surprise. Congratulations to the creators of Greendog, I thought it was just another fairly uninspired Megadrive platformer but they managed to find a way of making it so much worse than that. I wouldn't have been so surprised had Greendog been developed by a Japanese team - Japanese attitudes towards non-Japanese people are often what you might kindly describe as "not good" - but there's a Ric Green listed as "creator" in the credits and Interactive Design seem to have been based in California so you can't really mitigate it by claiming cultural differences.


After that ugliness, Greendog gets back to its regularly-scheduled gameplay, with another skateboarding section in a temple and another pedalcopter trip before dropping the player into a treetop village populated by what I'm assuming are supposed to be Aztec warriors. Or Australian Buddhist monks, given the robes and boomerangs. It was nice to return to the vine-swinging and enemy avoidance parts of the game, which are definitely where Greendog's gameplay is the strongest. Maybe I'm simply a little burned out on platformers after years of writing this site and what I'm experiencing as blandness is really just over-familiarity, and I can see how Greendog might well have its fans. It doesn't do too much wrong, I suppose, apart from the traps that push you back and, you know, the racism.


The final island is St. Vincent, and it begins with a trip through some waterlogged caves. The water level rises and falls as you progress, and it's an effective way of spicing up the now familiar action. However, Greendog seems to have mislaid his snorkel - perhaps having thrown it away to reduce weight on his pedalcopter trips - so to fall in the water is instant death.


There's even a proper boss! I was very happy to see him. You know me, I love skeletons, especially after fighting that same totem pole boss multiple times. And what could be more appropriate as the guardian of a lost Caribbean treasure than a skeleton pirate? It's a very simple fight, one of those quintessential videogame battles where you hit the boss a couple of times, jump over it when it gets close and repeat.


Things do get more complicated when the skeleton's legs, tired of the incompetence of their upper half, strike out on their own to give Greendog, well, a kicking.
The placing of the skeleton is sort of weird, though. I expected him to be the final boss, but once you rattle his bones thoroughly enough to claim victory the game continues onwards...


...with another skateboarding / rollerblading section that adds new definition to the phrase "tacked on." There's nothing new or interesting about it, so here's a screenshot of me about to impale Greendog on a wall of spikes. It's my fault, I was trying to get to the end as quickly as possible. You've rolled through one Aztec temple, you've rolled through 'em all.


Having collected all the pieces of the treasure, they reform into... a surfboard. A surfboard that appears to be made of rocks, which is weird because the treasures were clearly gold in their separated state. As rewards go, a granite surfboard feels like a kick in the balls. If BMX was Greendog's extreme sport of choice, would he have received a bike make from wet noodles? Also note that Greendog's half-formed homunculus head appears to be attempting a smile, and it's creepy, as though a black slit has been carved into the malleable putty of his face.


Oh, it's a flying granite surfboard. Well, that makes much more sense. Greendog ends with a sequel hook as Bambi says the power of the "Surfboard of the Ancients" still "needs to be released," but apparently Greendog 2 didn't need to be released and apart from a Game Gear port this was the only adventure of Greendog, the grotesque flesh-marionette. I don't think we'll be seeing one any time soon, either. The time of gnarly surfer dude has rather passed us by. There is no place for totally tubular dude in today's fast-paced modern world.


Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude is a fairly average game in a well-populated genre, but at times it does feel like it's at least trying to do something different. It's got variety, I'll give it that, but while the platforming stages that focus on dealing with enemies are quite good fun, the pedalcopter and later skateboarding stages balance it out by being extremely dull. In the end you're left with an an unsatisfying melange of gameplay chunks, like a supermarket value-brand can of vegetable soup - watery and not particularly nourishing. Then there's that moment of ugly stereotyping, which soured me on the whole game. So, Greendog does not get a recommendation from me, as much as it pains me to condemn a game that includes a skeleton pirate.

Not much razzle-dazzle in evidence on the title screen - the logo's a little art nouveau and it's on fire, but it's not doing much to capture my interest. Here's hoping that the plot is a little less generic.


It's an evil wizard, communing with a magic mirror. I don't think I'm making too much of an assumption on this wizard's morality, he's wearing a robe made from scorpion parts and my nan's old curtains. You wouldn't see Gandalf in something like that.


Here's the wizard up close. He's grumpy because he ordered his hoodie online without properly checking the sizing chart. He looks like he's performing his dark enchantments from inside a swing bin, and not even wearing his favourite Ninja Turtles bandanna can cheer him up.


Then a young lady, who is has a ninety-five percent chance of being a princess, is abducted so I guess my hopes for a non-clichéd plot are cruelly dashed. Oh well, it's not that important. Super Mario Bros. 3 has the same plot as Super Mario Bros. 1, and it's one of the best games ever made. Warning: Sword Master is not as good as SMB3. I'm sure you'd already guessed that, but I didn't want to get your hopes up by accident.


Our hero stands atop a cliff, pointing his sword at a distant castle. "I am going to that castle," his posture seems to say, "and I will stab every single thing that I find there, be it man, beast or hideous man-beast." He's a real go-getter, so he is. I hope he brought some comfortable shoes for his upcoming hike through the forest, though. Maybe a cereal bar or something to keep his energy levels up.


And we're off, with our mighty tangerine-coloured warrior hacking his way through a flock of bats. I know a lot of NES games can be described as walking from left to right and hitting things, but that's an even more accurate description than usual in Sword Master's case because you can't turn around. Always facing his goals with unshakeable conviction, that's our hero. As for the hitting things part, unsurprisingly you use a sword. There's a normal forwards stab, a crouching poke for all your hamstring-severing needs and holding up on the D-pad while you attack performs an overhead swing that does slightly more damage but leaves you a little more vulnerable. You've also got a shield, so often overlooked by videogame knights on a righteous quest, and you can hold it high or low to block projectiles. For now, though, I'm simply using a lot of jumping overhand slashes to kill these bats, bats that don't seem particularly invested in attacking the player. If you ignore them they'll fly right past you, but I didn't start playing a game called Sword Master to not hit things with a sword. Anyway, they're bats and this is a videogame so they're obviously evil, demonic bats and they'll surely be up to no good when they get where they're going. I'm just saving some other poor adventurer from having to deal with them later


A skeleton approaches! It approaches quite slowly, the illusory musculature provided by whatever foul necromancer is animating it being no match for being alive, but here it comes and it's determined to run me through with the breadstick it's carrying. This is something of a mini-boss battle, as the screen stops scrolling once the skeleton appears and won't start moving again until you emerge triumphant. This is the general pattern of Sword Master, then: short sections spent chopping up minor enemies and negotiating some light platforming action, interspersed with a large number of one-on-one fights with tougher foes. Not that the skeleton is much of a challenge. Just bait out his stabs and then bonk him on the head. It's the only way a skeleton will learn.


As our lone warrior makes his way through a dark forest on his way to a castle, while being attacked by bats and skeletons, it's very difficult not to make a comparison between Sword Master and Castlevania. Clearly Athena took some inspiration from Konami's classic when they were putting Sword Master together, and that's fine by me because Castlevania is great and I love a horror-themed videogame. However, where Castlevania's stages are tight, expertly-assembled areas that require players to find a certain aggressive rhythm in order to progress, the constant miniboss encounters of Sword Master make it a much more stop-start affair, and thus the Castlevania influence doesn't extend far beyond the aesthetic. It's a nice aesthetic, though.


Now it's time to fight a big blue chap. I was going to call him a Cyclops, but I can't tell how many eyes he has. He doesn't seem big enough to be a giant, and he's a bit too monsterish to be a barbarian, so I don't know what he is. Apart from "angry," I mean. Fighting him is very similar to fighting the skeleton, although this battle is much tougher because the collision detection on his club is not very good, and you'll keep getting tagged by it even though you're sure you're far enough away. Weirdly, it was only this creature's club that I had problems with on that front, and almost all the other attacks in the game have solid, predictable hitboxes. Let's just pretend his club is surrounded by a foetid aura of corruption. Given that the only place he has to store his club when he's not using it is inside his loincloth, I don't think that's too much of a stretch.


The end of the stage is guarded by a wizard, and his purpose is to teach you how to block projectiles with your shield. He loves projectiles, does the wizard. Horizontal projectiles, projectiles fired diagonally upwards, a rain of projectiles that assault you from above, he's a regular Projectile Master. I'd want to keep the man with the sword as far away from me as possible if I was an old man in a robe, too, and while it was working well for the wizard at first I soon learned that I can crouch-walk forwards with my shield raised and that was the end of the wizard.


Stage two is a village on the castle's outskirts, inhabited by zombies, zombies with no legs that have adapted the breaststroke for non-aquatic purposes and the Lost Souls from Doom, although thankfully they're much less aggressive than Doom's flaming skull-monsters.


There's also some platforming. The village's potholes are running out of control, and to top it off they're being patrolled by these indestructible floating eyeballs because gravity alone apparently wasn't enough of a challenge for a man in full plate armour. It's a little aggravating that these eyeballs are indestructible, mind you. Of all the body parts you'd think could be dealt with by the decisive thrust of a blade, eyeballs would be near the top of the list. They should have been hovering thighs, something with a bit of substance to them.


The village exit is patrolled by a knight, and I'm annoyed that he looks cooler than my knight. I think it's the red plume sticking out of his helmet, it gives him a certain je ne sais quoi that my "medieval advertisement for Tango" look does not possess.
The knight has the same reach as you and is a bit more intelligent than the skeletons, so here's where you need to start paying attention if you want to progress in Sword Master. The one-on-one fights make up the bulk of the game, and they quickly become very challenging - but crucially they (mostly) don't feel too horrendously cheap. There are patterns to be learned and movements to be exploited, and if you're looking for a retro game that demands you take the time to learn you opponent's moves, then Sword Master might just be a good bet for you. As for the knight, I had a lot of success with jumping at him and doing the overhead slash while moving backwards in mid-air, which most of the time put me just outside of stabbing range when I landed.


The knight dropped an icon of a shepherd's crook when I defeated him. Have I condemned a flock of sheep to a lingering death on some distant hillside, uncared for and forgotten now that their owner is dead?


Never mind, it was actually a magic wand that allows our hero to transform into a wizard by pressing the select button. The comparisons between Sword Master and Castlevania grow even stronger, because you can also switch to a white-robed mage by pressing select in Castlevania 3, assuming you recruited Sypha on your travels.
Becoming a master of magic allows for an extra revenue stream when you hire yourself out for kid's birthday parties, as well as letting you launch short-range magical bolts from you hands. You can charge the bolts up by holding down the button, too, although your magic is limited: bafflingly, the amount of magic you have is determined by how full your experience bar is. Defeating the lesser enemies between the one-on-one fights slowly fills your experience bar, which is maddeningly not called you magic bar or mana bar or anything having to do with wizardy. If I didn't have the compulsion to press every button on the pad now and then I might never have realised I even had magic powers, and someone playing Sword Master without the manual to hand could easily go through the whole game without ever realising their hidden power. But what can I use my hidden power on?


Ah, Godzilla, you'll do. He shoots fire out of his mouth, I shoot fire out of my hands, that seems like a fair contest... although I think I would have been better off using the sword. The sword doesn't cost magic - sorry, experience - points and has about the same range as the My First Conjuration projectiles the staff provides you with.


The sword is definitely the better option for fighting this lizardman, because he just kept jumping over my projectiles and kicking me in the head like he'd learned all his moves by playing the Ninja Turtles arcade game. Switching between Knight and Wizard modes is fast, but it's a shame it's not slightly faster: it would have been very satisfying to bait the lizardman into jumping over my projectile, only to find that I'd switched to the sword while he was in mid-air and he's suddenly jumping towards an experiment in determining just how good lizards really are at regrowing severed body parts.


Sword Master is not shy about throwing the same monsters at you over and over again, and in this stage you must re-triumph over the knight and the wizard before reaching the end-of-stage guardian. It's the wizard again, but he's supplement his magical attack with a bloody great axe. An axe that he can shoot magic out of. He's a traitor to every set of fantasy game tropes imaginable. Wizards can't use axes, that's not fair. Was he listening to the the blasphemous tome of the ancient sorcerers on audiobook while he did the strength training necessary to build an axe-wielding physique? I think not.
Complaints aside, I rather like the design of the axe-wizard, and of all the enemies in general. They're clean, bold sprites that have a pleasing fantasy look to them, almost like they're based on action figures from a non-existent "Dungeon Fighters!" toyline. Sword Master is a very competently designed, solidly-built game in many regards - graphically it's very impressive, sprite flicker aside, and it's even got parallax scrolling, a rarity for a NES game. The music is above average, with plenty of high-tempo, driving tracks that are a perfect accompaniment to cracking skeleton skulls, even if they never quite approach the quality of Konami or Capcom's action game soundtracks. There's even a voice clip of your character shouting "Huuh!" when you swing your sword, and it takes a surprisingly long to for it to become irritating.


The next stage is all about jumping, and jumping is something that Sword Master has a strange relationship with. For starters, you sometimes jump higher than usual, and I couldn't figure out why. Apparently there's a line in the manual that states "hitting the jump button consecutively allows you to extend your jumps," but doesn't explain what it means by "consecutively." I tried timing my jumps just as I landed from a previous jump, a la Super Mario 64, and I also tried franticly hammering the button at random intervals, neither of which produced consistent results. In the end I put it down to certain parts of the castle's stone floor being springier than others. Luckily you're never forced to use the high jump.
The other odd quirk is that, especially in the later stages, it's rare that you'll make a jump and land solidly on the other platform. Instead you'll hit the edge and spend a moment or two falling off (and kinda through) the platform, but if you press jump again while this is happening you can become airborne once more and nail the landing. At first it seems that Sword Master simply demands pixel-perfect jumping skills, but scrabbling for purchase on the edges of platforms happened so often - and was so consistent - that I've come to believe it was an intentional gameplay mechanic, a sort of half-hearted effort to include Ninja Gaiden-style wall-jumps into the game, and as such it's much less frustrating that it seems like it's going to be the first time you slide into oblivion despite clearly getting your toes on the platform.


The jumping in Sword Master isn't all peaches and rainbows, however. I was stumped for quite a while on this jump, where every attempt I made ended with me hitting the eyeball and either falling to my death or being knocked back onto the platform I just came from. In the end, I had to look it up. Turns out the solution is that you have to walk off the platform, underneath the ball, and then simply jump up off the thin air you're standing on to make it to the next platform. Of course, why didn't I think of that?! I'm really glad this opaque bullshit is the solution, I'd have felt bad if there was a glaringly obvious way past the eyeball that I just wasn't getting.


Ah, I see it was Satan himself who arranged these accursed platforms! Slow day in Hell, was it? Honestly, I don't think this is the Prince of Lies. All he does is hover around the top of the screen dropping three easily-avoided projectiles at a time. It's more impish than Satanic, and it makes this boss considerably easier than most of the previous creatures I've faced. I'm not complaining: I saw I was about to fight a flying red devil-monster and I had a sudden traumatic flashback to Ghosts 'n Goblins, so the fight ended up being a huge relief.


Things have calmed down a little now our hero has reached the castle itself, and it's back to the usual slaying of bats and mini-boss battles on a flat, open level. This is a good time to mention that I've picked up another couple of spells on my travels, which can be switched between when the game is paused. Their uncharged versions are still projectiles, but the "explosion" power has the notable effect of making a bunch of explosions appear if you charge it up. You'll, erm, just have to trust me that there are multiple explosions.


There's not much to say about this knight with a spiked flail. He's red, he's fast and he loves to merrily gad around the castle like the Prince of the Elven Folk. I was so taken by his rambunctious energy that I too leapt into the air, hoping for a graceful aerial battle between two honourable combatants, but he's a cheating git whose armour is apparently much better than mine, so I ended up waiting on the round and stabbing him pettily in the ankles.


There's also a dragon. It's hard to summon up any enthusiasm for this dragon, because earlier I fought a dragon that looked much more like Godzilla and less like a regular dragon that's learned to walk unconvincingly on its hind legs.


As I entered the next stage and crept past the castle's spike traps and roaming slimes, (do slimes roam? Ooze, perhaps,) I was reminded less of Castlevania and more of the NES port of Dragon's Lair - but a NES Dragon's Lair that isn't a hateful exercise in frustration orchestrated by people who wouldn't recognise the concept of fun if it came up to them, grabbed them firmly by their pubic hair and said "hi, I'm the concept of fun and you have wronged me." I think it's the purple brickwork that does it.


The boss is a barbarian, certainly more of a barbarian than the blue troll from the first stage. Why, he's got an axe and everything! He's also got the power to completely ignore the wall of lightning I sent towards him using my new lightning spell. I'm not even sure it hurt him. He didn't act like it hurt, but I confess I don't know how people usually react when they're stuck by lightning. Say "ouch," fall over, sizzle a bit, not necessarily in that order? Whatever the case, the boss did none of these thing, opting instead to embed his axe into my skull as though he's mistaken me for a good source of winter firewood. It's a difficult battle, as are all the battles by this point in the game, mostly because the bosses now have much larger health bars and you have to concentrate for longer when one lapse will see you lose half your health. Did I mention that he can throw his axe like a boomerang? Because he can. We're going to have to stop using the word "barbarian" to describe thoughtless killers, because the level of aerodynamic engineering needed to produce a boomerang axe is the very opposite of thoughtless.


I couldn't help it. It happened by instinct, instinct honed by years spent trying to beat Dracula to death with a whip. I tried to hit the candle, to see if there was a power-up inside. Never have I felt so completely beholden to the media I consume, so thanks for this grim psychological awakening, Sword Master.


This guy is definitely the Sword Master of the title. His sword's made of fire! He can even turn it on and off like a lightsaber. Which he does, repeatedly, the big show-off. Of course, you don't get the title of Sword Master just for carrying around an oversized sparkler: you've got to have the moves, too, which this boss does. Specifically, he has the move where he ignores all my attacks and attempts to char-grill me from the inside. The old Texas BBQ Enema, that's his MO.


Then there's another knight. This one eschews the golden fripperies and flaming swords of his confederate and instead batters you to death with a chunk of metal on a stick in a manner you'd describe as "workmanlike," if relentless unscheduled trepanation is a kind of work. I tried keeping my distance from the nice man with the whacking stick, hoping maybe we could talk our way through his anger issues, but his mace is spring-loaded and will fire spikes at you if you try to give him some space.


And then there's this prick. Goddamn wizards, man. All I wanted to do was hack at him with my sword but no, he kept creating his own walls of electricity that - guess what - knocked me back when they hit me, a property that my lightning walls most certainly did not possess. If only I had some way to hit him from a distance...


Oh, you like magic, do you? Well then, have all the magic you can eat! I know it looks like I'm throwing spaghetti at you but this is pure magical pain, you old bastard! Sword Master? More like Problem-Solving Master!


Oh hey, it's the wizard from the intro. Overall I've been complimentary about the enemy design in this game, but that's not really good look, is it? Like he graduated from Wizard College only to be immediately crushed by a steamroller. A forlorn Christmas ornament. A bootleg Harry Potter bookmark from a Hong Kong market stall. Not threatening, is what I'm saying, and he's not all that good at fighting. Weirdly enough, when an enemy is flying in Sword Master it puts you at an advantage, because you can walk under them rather than being pinned in the corner by the likes of the knights. Sure, the wizard produces more fireballs than a dragon with hiccups, but you can block them all fairly easily and hit him with a jumping slash when there's a break in the bombardment. What a disappointing way to end the game.


Except it's not the end of the game, and I'm forced to eat my words as the real final boss appears and proceeds to initiate me into an endless maelstrom of death. This demon likes projectiles. Really likes them, and all manner of lightning bolts and fireballs constantly spew from every part of his anatomy that we can see. Presumably they also spew from the parts we can't see and his demonic wang is like a literal fire hose, so I'm counting my blessings that I just have to deal with his head and hands. To damage him, you must attack the mirror on the right of the screen, but you can't get near the mirror when you're constantly being slammed by a wall of dark magic. In the end I had to cheat, which was a shame because up until this point Sword Master had been a tough game but generally a fair one, where learning enemy patterns and adapting your tactics would eventually, with practise, lead to victory. This just feels like a big "screw you," though. Is it doable? I'm sure it is, but only doable by people with far more time and patience than me. So, with Game Genie to the rescue and evil mirror smashed, Sword Master can draw to a close.


Maiden status: rescued, presumed grateful. Time to take her back to wherever she was kidnapped from and eschew any offered reward, for a Sword Master yearns only for the clash of steel in chivalrous combat, preferably in a distant land where people haven't figured out how to throw fireballs. Oh, and maybe some new armour that makes him look less like a mechanical carrot.


Sword Master is a game that demands patience and dedication if you want to make much progress, but is it worth it? I'd say it just about is, final boss excluded. It's a well-made example of the genre, with solid gameplay and a nice look to it. It's not a great game - it's too derivative and stop-start for that - but it can be a fun game, so if you're looking for a retro game to sink your teeth into then that's definitely on offer here. Just try not to think too hard about the Sword Master's relationship with gravity.

Doom II didn't change much from the original, because what could you possibly want to change about Doom? That's not to say id Software just made a collection of new levels, however. They also isolated and solved one of Doom's greatest flaws, namely the fact that the shotgun wasn't two shotguns. Thus, the double-barrelled and accurately-named Super Shotgun was introduced in Doom II.


I'm sure most people reading this will have played Doom and used the Super Shotgun at some point, and I'm also sure that anyone who has used it will agree that yes, it is one of the most intensely satisfying videogame weapons ever created. Each pull of the trigger results in a brief frisson of joy as death itself surges from both barrels like the blow of an Olympian god. One of the hard gods, too, not a wimp like Hermes. Everything you're aiming at is either shredded into a demonic flesh slurry or wishes it had been, and the sound - the thud of the gunshot and the chok-chok as you reload - hammers home the Super Shotgun's position as The One True Gun. It never gets old and it never becomes obsolete, either. It's always useful, always powerful and it can clear a room full of people more efficiently than putting one of my mixtapes one at a party. It makes you feel, if only for a fleeting moment, like you're powerful. Then you open a door to a room full of Revenants and have a split-second to marvel at Hell's homing missile technology before that feeling of power evaporates.


Over to my very favourite FPS now with Blood, and a weapon that's satisfying in completely the opposite way to the Super Shotgun. That weapon is the flare gun, and while the pleasure of the Super Shotgun comes from it's raw power and immediacy, Blood's flare gun is more of, oh ho ho, a slow burn.



Hit an enemy with the flare gun and nothing much happens at first: the flare sticks to them, and as they continue their advance you might think they only way the flare is going to damage them is if a passing airliner mistakes the illuminated enemy for a runway and lands on their head. A second or two passes, and then your patience is rewarded - the flare causes the enemy to catch light and burn to death. You might balk at the idea of a gun that doesn't make the bad guys fall over as soon as you pull the trigger, but in this case a pleasure deferred is a pleasure enhanced. It's particularly satisfying when used against the Cultists, the robed, druidic human agents of an evil god that make up the bulk of Blood's enemies. For one thing, even the lowliest Cultist can quickly drain your health if you're caught unawares or trapped by an ambush, so the ability to pop a few flares through an open doorway or window and retreat to a safe distance until the murder barbecue has reached a sufficient cooking temperature is nice. Also, Cultists speak in a made-up demonic language... until they burst into flames, at which point they switch back to English so they can scream in agony without the need for a translator. When the villains drop their eldritch lexicon, that's when you know you've really gotten under their skin.


In an effort to move this article in a direction that makes me seem less like a violent psychopath, it's over to classic SNES racer F-Zero and the thrill of victory - specifically, the way the camera whips around when you cross the finish line.


A more cynical person than I might accuse F-Zero of being little more than a technical showcase for the power of Nintendo's then-new 16-bit console, with the camera flourish that ends each race being an example of flash over substance. It's good flash, though. Satisfying flash, and it's never unworthy of a miniature fist-pump when you blast across the line in first place to the sound of your racer screaming to victory. It's even more satisfying when you win a close race, because you get to see your rivals just behind you as you disappear towards the horizon, safe in the knowledge that they'll never be able to overtake you and you'll never crash into another of the generic, primed-to-explode racers that limp around the course like a wheelbarrow full of semtex.


NBA Jam is one of those sports games that can captivate people who don't give a toss about the sport in question - people like yours truly, for instance. I have no interest in basketball, but over the years I've spent a lot of time playing NBA Jam, and it's always a pleasure to come back to. NBA Jam's recipe for success is not a complicated one: it strips basketball down to its basics and then makes those basics ridiculously over-the-top, a refinement process that leads to non-stop, end-to-end action and lanky men pirouetting through the air like Peter Crouch on an electric pogo stick. The crazy dunks are one of NBA Jam's big selling points - I don't think there's everbeen a game of NBA Jam played where the participants aren't at least subconsciously praying for the backboard glass to be shattered - but personally I get more satisfaction from regular three-pointer.


I think it's the simplicity that appeals to me: the gentle arc, the crisp swish of the net, the commentator not shouting "terrible shot!" at me. There's a zen-like tranquillity to it, or as much zen-like tranquillity as you can summon up with the constant "excited rats in a tumble drier" squeak of shoes on wood. If I'm being honest with myself, and this is probably down to being a Yorkshireman, there's also the satisfaction of frugality. Sure, you might have done three cartwheels, jumped so high that the aviation authorities require you to have a blinking red light on your head and then slammed the ball home while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, but it's still only worth two points. You'll notice that's less than three points.


In Super Mario Bros. 3, Bowser takes over the Mushroom Kingdom by giving each of his Koopa Kids a magic wand so they can turn the various kings of each world into animals, which shows a heart-warming amount of trust on Bowser's part. I get nervous when I see my nephew pick up a cardboard tube, I can only imagine the terror I'd feel if he had access to reality-altering magics. Anyway, the point is that when you defeat a Koopa Kid, they drop the magic wand and it falls from the sky, and it's always felt weirdly important to me that I catch it before it hits the ground.


I know that I'm not alone in this - I've met several people who also felt the strange compulsion to catch the wand. Why? Who can say. I don't think it's a subconscious desire to see Mario gain magical powers, he can already shoot fire out of his hands and fly. It's not like it's going to break, either, although it would admittedly be amusing if it did and Mario had to offer a shrugged apology to each king as they try to command the respect of their subject while in the form of a dog. It just feels right, is all, and it's strangely satisfying when you grab the wand before it lands.


Since Symphony of the Night, all the "Metroidvania" style Castlevania games have given the player access to a back-dash move, which makes the hero scoot backwards as though they've opened their bathroom door to see a cobra coiled atop the toilet tank. Here it is in action in Aria of Sorrow.



Making this GIF for the VGJunk Tumblr was the trigger for this article, because dodging attacks using the backdash is very satisfying, especially when you consider it's not really all that useful. You can't attack while you're backdashing, and most of the time a simple jump or even just walking the other way would be just as effective. That's not the point, though - the point is it's cool, and occasionally downright cheeky. I'm sure this giant skeleton feels like Soma is taking the piss a little. The backdash is especially important to Alucard, because it's stylish and having style is what sets vampires (or their mopey half-human offspring) apart from other monsters. You wouldn't get a gill-man in a cape, would you?


On to a more modern game with From Software's PS4 masterpiece Bloodborne, the glorious amalgamation of Dark Souls, Lovecraftian horror, Victorian Gothic architecture and blood. Lots of blood. Everything is blood. The healing items are blood, the currency is blood, even the rocks are blood. It's great. Series director Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that one of the goals of Dark Souls was to create a game that rewards the player with a sense of satisfaction for overcoming the game's challenges, but that's a bit too deep for this article. Instead, here's something entire frivolous.


Each weapon in Bloodborne can be transformed between two different modes at the press of a button, as you can see above with the Saw Cleaver transforming from a brutal, jagged slab of metal for close-range attacks to a brutal, jagged slab of metal on the end of a stick, for long-range attacks and sawing logs from the comfort of your conservatory or outdoor seating area. It's a simple process, but the way your Hunter flourishes their weapon, combined with the absolutely perfect sound design that accompanies each weapon's transformation, means that switching weapon modes is so satisfying that I did it a lot, even when it was completely unnecessary. I refuse to believe there is a single person who played Bloodborne who didn't have a moment where they flicked out their weapon's alternate mode as they slowly walked towards an unsuspecting enemy, because - and I say this with a complete lack of cynicism - it looks super cool.
But which weapon transformation itself looks the coolest? A difficult choice, but it's hard to deny the Boom Hammer.


It's a sledgehammer with a tiny furnace inside that you rev up by striking it like a match on your shoulder. Again, it's called the Boom Hammer. Don't ever let anyone tell you that the Souls games are too serious.


You know, I'm not sure whether I'd recommend the Earth Defense Force games to an arachnophobe. On the one hand, you spend a lot of the time being murdered by a churning, relentless wall of gigantic spiders. On the other hand, you have access to high explosives.


This is Earth Defense Force 4.1, but the point stands for all EDF games and that point is the indelible pleasure of seeing a giant insect - be it an ant, a spider or your fellow EDF soldiers, who are as insects before my might - violently ejected into the stratosphere by a well-placed explosion. Watch the spider being launched out of the top-right of the frame. He's gone and he's not coming back. A budget title it may be, but few other game series can match EDF for sheer carnage on a grand scale, and sending a spider back to where it came from (outer space, that is) with a rocket launcher is something that will warm my heart every time I see it happen.


There's a clown in Day of the Tentacle, and like all clowns it's a heartless, malevolent presence that lusts for human suffering.


See? A truly ghastly adversary. However, the clown must be destroyed, because dorky hero Bernard needs the laughter box from inside the clown. But how can you slay that which does not live? Turns out it's fairly simple.


You stab it. You get your friend to send you a scalpel by flushing it down the high-tech toilet from the nightmarish future she's trapped in, and then you use the scalpel to stab the clown. It's perfect, really, and the satisfaction you get from it is mirrored by Bernard's expression of glee as he deals the fatal blow. I love the elegant simplicity of the solution to this clown problem - Day of the Tentacle is a game where you have to convince people George Washington is cold by blowing his teeth out with an exploding cigar, so "just shank it" stands out in stark relief and is all the more rewarding for it. Plus, there's the moral satisfaction you get from ensuring there's one less clown in the world.


Capcom's PS2 bushido-em-up Onimusha is a fun adventure, right up until the point where you're presented with a life-or-death sliding block puzzle.


You know what's worse than a sliding block puzzle? Okay, yes, walking in on your parents making love and them not stopping, or contracting smallpox, but what I was going to say was "a sliding block puzzle with a timer." It's not an easy puzzle, either, and all these flaws combined are enough kill my interest in Onimusha, and possibly videogames as a concept, stone dead. So how could this possibly be satisfying?


This is how - the chance to offer a hearty "get bent" to the sliding block puzzle designers of the world.

There you go, then. A collection of brief moments that fill my heart with, if not song, then at least a jaunty whistle. That's what playing videogames is all about, surely? They should be fun, always, and if I find my joy in the act of stabbing an inflatable clown then so be it.

Here's the cat himself, and he looks a bit like the eponymous star of the British cartoon Henry's Cat. More specifically, he looks like a cuddly toy of Henry's Cat that got its paw caught in a mangle and was subsequently left in an oil-slicked puddle to bleach under the sun. He could also stand to lose a few pounds, but then again, couldn't we all? As an aside, every time I see Henry's Cat mentioned I immediately get the theme song for the unrelated British cartoon Roobarb and Custard stuck in my head, for reasons that are unclear to me. Check that one out on YouTube if you want to hear the most aggressively harsh opening theme kid's TV has to offer.


The cat looks much more appealing now that we're into the game proper, in that it looks like a regular white cat. Tales of the Cat could be described as a platformer, although while there is jumping to be done little of said jumping is between platforms or over gaps. Mostly, your goal is to get from one side of the screen to the other while collecting items for points, items such as the strange green icon at the bottom-left of the screen, which I believe is the alchemical symbol for "pointless collectable." The main twist is that you walk from right to left rather than from left to right. Thrilling, I know.


There are many obstacles in the cat's path, and because this is a Commodore 64 game each of them are fatal should you so much as glance in their direction. Cars are the obvious danger, although their threat was diminished once I realised that standing right on the white line meant neither lane of traffic could hit you. Still, negotiating the rush-hour was made difficult by the cat's inability to walk directly upwards: pressing up on the joystick makes the cat move diagonally upwards, creating the illusion that it necked a bottle of scotch before the game began. There are also deadly animals to contend with. I'm not sure if these black creatures are supposed to be dogs, larger, meaner cats or Umbreynard, the Shadow-Fox, Messenger Between Realms. Whatever they are they're slower than you, so you can lure them out of the way and run around them.


On this screen, there's a dead mouse to collect. That seems much more appropriate than a strange symbol. That's Tales of the Cat: the game where you dodge traffic to gather up animal carcasses like an inbred hillbilly preparing for a family barbecue.


I can't decide whether this rotund chap is supposed to be a policeman or a parking warden. I'm leaning towards parking warden. That would be the more British answer, plus I think parking wardens are more widely reviled by the British public and are therefore more believable as someone who would kill a cat for no reason. Speaking of dying, you start the game with nine lives, except they're referred to as "tales," thus ruining a perfectly good "cats have nine lives" joke. Cats are not known as dazzling raconteurs, so them having nine tales doesn't make sense. Unless one of the programmers is into S&M and it's an oblique reference to a cat 'o nine tails.


A new foe has appeared: it's a breakdancer who moonwalks across the screen and poses very little threat. The guy just wants to express himself through dance, is all, and that's fine by me.
You might have noticed that each screen in Tales of the Cat has it's own name, which you can see at the bottom of the screen. Some of them make immediate sense, while others are a references to other things and because this game was released before a large chunk of VGJunk's readership was born a lot of these references will remain a mystery. I know what "Bill and Ben" refers to, of course - it's Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men, the gibberish-spouting nature-gremlins that star in the kid's TV show of the same name. Why "Bill and Ben"? Because some psychopath is trying to kill the cat by throwing flowerpots at it from an upstairs window, presumably while shouting "flob-a-dob this, you goddamn cat!"


As this screen's called "The Bad Seed" I was desperately hoping for an appearance by moribund crooner Nick Cave. I thought maybe he'd stick his head out the window of a passing car and sing a haunting ballad steeped in dark religious imagery, but no. Instead you have to move some bird seed so the bird will vacate the entrance to the next screen. Why is it bad seed, then? Have I poisoned the seed? That's definitely it, the cat species has embarked on a new and deadly phase of their anti-bird machinations.


Now we're out of the city, there's a welcome change of scenery as the urban jungle is replaced by a rural hellscape littered with craters. From barely requiring you to jump at all in the first set of screens, Tales of the Cat does a complete one-eighty and demands nothing but a succession of perfectly-timed jumps from here on out. As you can see, I struggled to get past the first bloody hole - RIP, indeed - but eventually I stumbled upon the solution. Look at the hole on the left. You see that pixel-wide strip of green just below the hole? yeah, you can walk on that. The first hole has one too. Why yes, that is kind of a bullshit solution.


More deep-cut references in the next screen - "Go Wild In the Country" is presumably named after the 1982 Bow Wow Wow song. What does this scene have to do with Eighties New Wave music with a twist of African rhythm? Absolutely bugger all, as far as I can tell. What it does have is birds - deadly birds, naturally. Dogs, cars and flowerpots I can understand, all of those things could pose a problem to a cat. Birds? Not so much. In a fight between cats and birds, cats are usually the victors, unless you're unlucky enough to have an eagle swoop down and abduct your kitten. These are super-birds, then, dedicated cat-slayers that have a secret weapon: shit. The birds shit on you as they fly past. Real classy, that. What's worse is that the droppings linger on the screen for a while after they land, and I died multiple times because I thought I'd avoided the, erm, bombing raid only to step in a pile of crap that hadn't quite faded from the screen.


And then the pain begins. The goal of this screen is immediately apparent - you must jump from the riverbank and land on the small raft that moves back and forth across the water. It is not that simple. For starters, there's a ruddy great hole next to the water's edge, and simply getting yourself into position without falling into the void is a challenge in itself. Then there's the jumping. Tales of the Cat's jumping mechanics are okay. Not amazing, and you're locked into an arc once you're airborne, but they come out pretty quickly when you hit the button and they're consistent. The hit detection on the platform, however...


Ah yes, the grace and agility that cats are famous for is on full display here. It definitely didn't take me about fifty attempts to land this jump, because I am a cool dude who is really good at computer games, he lied. This isn't even the hardest part of the game, either.


"No Nukes is Good Nukes," it says, so the developers will be pleased to know that the Windscale nuclear power plant - which is referenced in the background - is in the process of being decommissioned. Also, the proximity of high radiation levels might go some way towards explaining where all these vicious killer scorpions came from. They're the yellow things on the pipe, and they fly towards you as though they were bullets fired from the devil's minigun. Jumping over them is your only option. That's for the best. You'll need all the practise you can get for the next screen.


Here, then, is where Tales of the Cat decides it's had enough of being a computer game and wants to embark on a new career as a digital flagellation device. In concept it's simple - just like the previous screen, scorpions run along the pipe in endless waves and you have to jump over them. However, there's also a squadron of birds with full intestines and loose cloacae patrolling the skies, ready to unleash acrid, runny hell upon you. There's simply so much on the screen, and it's all moving so fast, that when combined with the game's extremely unforgiving collision detection you might as well give up and try something less frustrating like buying a crate full of gerbils and training them to re-enact the Battle of Hastings in minute detail. Mr. Squeaks will not sit still while you attempt to glue a fake arrow near his eye, I'll tell you that much for free.
You can't hang back and try to figure out a pattern, because scorpions are known for their impatience and there's a fairly strict time limit to each screen, and you can't even use an emulator's save-state ability to scum your way through it because you simply don't have time to hit save and even if you did you're overwhelmingly likely to save in a position where you've screwed yourself. In the end I got past it through sheer blind luck, after roughly four times the number of attempts it took me to land on that bloody raft. It's a section so unpleasant, so agonizingly unfair, that it makes the rest of the game worse simply by existing. You could be eating the world's most delicious sandwich, but you're not going to enjoy it if you know someone's waiting to shove a live porcupine up your backside once you've finished, you know?


On the plus side, it makes every other screen in the game feel like an absolute piece of piss. Oh no, a one-ton weight is going to land on my head if I don't walk slightly to the left! Yeah, nice try. Jog on, pal.


The final "proper" screen features that one boss from the Kirby games. The tree blows leaves at you. I assume the leaves are deadly to the touch, but I wouldn't know because I never got hit by them. That nightmare screen taught me well.
"I Wish I Was A Dog," it says. I wish I was playing as a dog, too. A dog wouldn't care if a bird shit on it. This is the problem with playing as a cat, the preening divas of the animal kingdom.


Then things get a bit weird on the final screen. The usual walking and jumping has been replaced by, of all things, anagram solving. Unexpected, but if it means I don't have to jump over any more scorpions, I'll take it. To finish the game, you just have to pick up each letter in turn and place it on the board so it spells out "Tales of the Cat." There's a helpful clue at the top of the screen, you see.


It sounds simple enough, and I suppose it is. That makes it all the more embarrassing that I managed to bugger the entire thing up and leave myself in a situation where I couldn't finish the game. I don't think this is entirely my fault, however. What happened is that I accidentally picked up the wrong letter. Once you've picked up a letter, you can't put it down. Nor can you put a letter on the board if it's not the next letter in the sequence. You can't swap it for another letter, either. So, once I'd grabbed the E instead of the L I was aiming for, that was it. I tried more combinations of buttons, positions and joystick wagglings than a robot orgy, but that letter E remained steadfastly glued to the cat's face even when I ran out of time and lost a life. So, all I could do was wait for the time to run out over and over until I was all out of lives and hit a game over, which was a stunningly dull end to an already underwhelming game. The thing is, as far as I'm aware, there's no ending to Tales of the Cat and the game simply loops again if you finish the anagram. "Is It Worth Being Virtuous?" asks the message at the bottom of the screen, in a moment of unexpected existential angst. I'm not sure about that, but I'm definitely leaning towards it not being worth playing Tales of the Cat.



It's not really a terrible game, although it does have a few terrible moments. On the whole, though, it's exactly what I expect from a C64 platformer - a jolly enough romp that occasionally demands a level of precision usually reserved for docking with a space station or building a microchip with tweezers and a magnifying glass. It's nice to play as a cat for a change, and it was interesting trying to puzzle out some of the references in the screen names, but it does lose points for reminding me of Bad Cat. On the whole, it's just about better than being crapped on by a real bird.

Okay, it's not a very thrilling start, I'll grant you. Still, pondering the mystery of how this man's lower body came to be replaced by a big rock will hopefully be enough of a hook to draw you in.


Oh. So... not kabuki theatre, then? It's ritualised self-disembowelment instead. Okay, first things first, Taito, this makes Kabuki-Z a very misleading title. Secondly, that's quite a tone you're trying to set before the title screen has even appeared. I hope you've got the commitment to stick with it for an entire game. As for the chap performing the impromptu abdominal surgery, maybe the bloke behind holding the sword can speed things up a little.


There we go. He's killed the guy with the stone legs, his sword-swipes leaving a Z-shaped spray of blood on the wall like that "dark" and "gritty" Zorro reboot everyone's been clamouring for.


Shenron the Eternal Dragon looks on with a disinterested expression. He's probably expecting that guy to be wished back to life via the power of the Dragonballs any time now.
When I think of Taito, I tend to think of either cutesy platformers or cartoonish but relatively non-violent action games - Bubble Bobble, New Zealand Story, Chase HQ, those sorts of things. Based on the intro, I think we can safely assume that Kabuki-Z is not going to be one of those games. But what could it be? I doubt it's going to be a whole game about helping people who get stuck halfway through their attempts at seppuku. It doesn't feel like there'd be a lot of mileage in that, you know? It's my suspicion that Kabuki-Z might be a side-scrolling hack-and-slash adventure.


Well, would you look at that. Scrolling sideways, hacking and slashing at things. What a prediction, I'd better hurry and start my own astrology website. Aries: while work commitments are piling up, a chance encounter may lead to romance. Remember that Ghost Rider cosplayers are not to be trusted and you should hack and / or slash them. Your lucky colour is blue.
The first thing I noticed as I threw myself into the action is that the player character doesn't really walk. He moves around, sure, but he doesn't move his legs. He just kind of... wiggles his feet, so either his ankles have the power of a deep-sea oil drill or there's no friction at all on the floor and the slightest movement is all that's needed to send him on his way.


It looks even more ridiculous when you move around while crouching, gliding across the stone floor of the Giant Samurai Armour Storage Dimension in a pose that suggests our hero was intending to actually propose to that skeleton but somehow things got way out of control and now they're fighting to the death. Best of all, being in the crouching pose is often the best way to approach fights in Kabuki-Z, so you'll see a lot of the hero in this position but with nary a kneepad to be had, the poor bastard.


After fighting a few - and I do mean "a few," because this is a very short stage - fairly harmless skeletons, this guy and his massive Christmas trousers appears to spoil everyone's fun. He's trying to put the Kabuki in Kabuki-Z, as well as trying to put his tiny sickles into my body. Why are your sickles so tiny, kabuki man? Did you forget to convert from Imperial to Metric when you were building them? Do you have an elaborate ritual for preparing watercress when you're making a salad?
Having accepted that I'm unlikely to unravel the mystery of the kabuki man, I went in for the kill, only to find he could block my attacks. In fact, he was really good at blocking my attacks, and as I struggled to land to land a telling blow he kept spawning tiny blue demons that would cling to my bosom and presumably nuzzle around trying to find a milk-bearing nipple. Fortunately, I figured out the boss' weakness before I could be completely drained of my life essence.


Kabuki man likes to jump. He's really good at it, too, sailing high into the air and covering about two screen-widths of distance at his most energetic. However, he doesn't attack while he's jumping - too busy concentrating on his totally sweet backflips, no doubt - so as he lands you can get near him and stab him in the back at no risk to your own safety.


Immediately after beating kabuki man, you're thrown straight into a battle with an armoured skeleton who learned his swordsmanship from the heaviest hitters in major league baseball. Look at the swing on that guy! He's going for a home run, no doubt. He's gonna send me out past the bleachers, a real smash drive into the fourth quadrant and look, I know nothing about baseball beyond it being American Cricket, okay?
A far more dangerous opponent than the kabuki man, the skeleton forced me to look a bit closer at Kabuki-Z's combat system, and it's more complex than it might first appear. There's one button to swing your sword, but the other button isn't jump. Pressing both buttons does make you jump, and like the kabuki man's jump it's a physically impressive but completely useless jump (unless you get pinned right in the corner, I suppose). No, the second button changes your stance, when combined with a directional input on the joystick. Down and the button puts up into the crouching state, which works on a toggle and not by holding down on the joystick, while up on the joystick raises your hands so you attack in an overhead chopping motion. Do not use this stance, because it severely reduces the range of your attacks. Does it make your hits do more damage? I haven't got a clue, I never managed to hit any of the bosses with it and all the regular grunts die in one hit.


It's an interesting system, because the bosses also have these three stances, and the aim of combat is to hit the boss while they're in a different stance to you. If you're in the same stance, such as in the screenshot above where the skeleton would be justified in accusing our hero of cheating during the squatting contest, the boss will block your attacks. So, you've got to focus on the rather difficult task of evading the boss' attacks and striking when they're out of position. Or, and this strategy works for about three-quarters of the game's bosses, stay out of their way until they jump and stab them in their undefended backs as they land. Look, if they're stupid enough to not play to their strengths - range, power, remembering to bring kneepads - then I have no hesitation in taking the easy way out.


Having emerged triumphant, it's a simple mater of lopping the boss' head off in a clean, efficient manner so I can move on to stage two. And it is surprisingly clean, for a decapitation, although I guess the presence of blood means the boss wasn't a skeleton after all. Oh well, he will be soon enough.


The first part of stage two is on fire, and I swear it was like this when I got here. The same skeletons as before scamper through the burning building, desperate to divest themselves of their leather catsuits before the sweltering heat causes them to pass out but prevented by modesty from doing so. Jets of flame occasionally burst up through the floorboards, although they present even less threat than the enemies. So zero threat, then.


Eventually you fall through the floor, and the house's basement / underground corpse pile is patrolled by these capering clowns, who provide further evidence that Kabuki-Z's artist had never seen a human walk. They move in a jaunty, sideways, high-kneed gait, like a crab at a ska gig. It's a shame you can't decapitate these guys, too. Then I could shout "pick it up, pick it up!" as their heads roll around on the ground.


Bosses in Kabuki-Z come around quicker than tasteless jokes after a major tragedy, and here's another: a samurai wearing red whom I suspect went to the same sword-fighting school as me. He was clearly a better student, mind you, and he represents a huge step up in difficulty from the first stage. If you swing and miss while fighting him, you will be punished, so if you intend on fighting him properly - that is, not by exploiting his jumps - then you're in for a rough time.


I like that when you die, your head is surrounded by the spinning blue demons from earlier, as though you've not so much died as succumbed to a hangover caused by drinking Satan's bathwater. What I don't like is that you only have one life and you're sent back to the beginning of the stage if you continue. It didn't take long to get back to the boss - whittling down his health for a second time was a different story - but I did manage to deplete his health bar.


Doing so causes a bony facehugger-looking thing to scuttle onto the screen and attach itself the boss, reviving him while also making it impossible for him to ever wear a coat again. Was the monster just biding its time? Has it been waiting for years for someone to come along and stab this guy just the right amount so it can latch on and start a new life as the world's most useless backpack? I wish I had answers for you, folks, I really do. Instead I can only pass on the information that the symbiosis allows the boss to curl up like an armadillo and roll at you, which I'm not sure is a power worth dying for.


I like the scenery in stage three. The decision to stick the moon in the middle of a field of flowers is an odd one, granted, but I think it gives the scene a strange, dreamlike quality - a quality that is only enhanced by Kabuki-Z's slightly wonky gameplay, which sometimes sees our hero jerking around, teleporting short distances and occasionally being unable to turn around. It was at this point I realised that Kabuki-Z has a lot in common with Taito's Gladiator, AKA Great Gurianos, which in turn owed a lot to Great Swordsman. Like Gladiator, it features very short stages that are merely warm-ups for a series of boss battles, using combat that tries for something more complex than the usual side-scrolling brawler mechanics. Kabuki-Z, then, seems to represent another attempt by Taito to refine this concept, although with not much success, I'm afraid. What was presumably intended to be flowing, dynamic swordfight is instead a dull experience in poking at enemies and exploiting the same weaknesses repeatedly. The weirdness of the setting mitigates this somewhat, mind you.


Here's another boss, a sort of hunchbacked, quadrupedal ape-man. Yet another mysterious figure in the unexplained world that is Kabuki-Z, he threw a projectile at me but I walk past it and slashed him repeatedly until he died, making this the easiest boss in the entire game and the only one where I didn't struggle to make my character stand up properly after accidentally having him crouch.


The boss isn't quite finished, however. Once you kill him, a pair of smaller and much more deadly bosses burst out of his corpse in a pleasingly gory fashion. If I'd known the ape-man was little more than a diabolical piñata, I would have just run past him.


Instead I have to fight his children, or hideous parasites, or whatever they're supposed to be. I don't know what they're meant to be, but I know what they are, and that's extremely annoying. They bounce and tumble around the screen taking potshots at you and making it very clear that Kabuki-Z is not a game that's built around the player fighting more than one opponent at a time. They kinda remind me of Wilykit and Wilykat from Thundercats. This is probably because they're annoying.


After dealing with the twins, our hero is struck by lightning and transported to the next stage. What helpful lightning! It didn't just move him through space, either...


...it gave him a whole new wardrobe, too! Seems that lightning is into some pretty kinky stuff. Maybe it swapped my clothes with someone else's, and somewhere out there the very confused patron of a bondage dungeon is wondering why he's suddenly dressed like a samurai. The new outfit comes with a shield, which is nice, but I definitely preferred my previous get-up. You'll get no judgement from me if S&M is your bag, but I hate sitting on leather sofas so the idea of having my most tender areas snugly bundled up in a leather posing pouch is very upsetting to me. Also, look at those tiny boots. So teeny!
I think it's fair to say that so far, Kabuki-Z has been a weird game. There are tiers of weirdness, though. There's "murderous twin children hatching from a monster's back" weird, there's "sudden leather daddy transformation" weird...


...and then there's "attacked by rocket-propelled chess pieces" weird, which is a whole new level of strangeness and one that I'm fully on-board with. I went into this game expecting to be fighting demons and malformed creatures of darkness, but not expecting an assault by Garry Kasparov's elite ground forces, and in this instance it's nice to be taken by surprise.


The boss is a knight, but sadly not the chess piece of the same name. No, it's just a bloke in armour. Well, his top half's in armour, at least. I've detected a promising area of attack, let's put it that way. But where is our hero? He's jumping around, off the top of the screen. You can just about see his sword poking downwards near that pillar, which is new: the change in costume means that he now thrusts downwards with his sword during his jumps although, much like with the overhand attacks, I never managed to hit anything with it and I think it might just be a cosmetic change. That's not to say he's the same warrior as before, oh no - the addition of the shield means some of his moves have changed, and more interestingly you can now properly block enemy attacks with your shield. If you manage to do so, you opponent is momentarily stunned - represented in-game by their sprite rapidly vibrating, as though they recently licked a plug socket - and if you're very lucky you might even be able to land a free hit while they're recovering. It's an odd decision on Taito's part to suddenly change the basic combat at this late stage of the game, and not a wholly successful one. This fighting style is more interesting - more involved, certainly - than the first, and if it had been present from the start of the game then Kabuki-Z probably would have been better for it.


The end of the stage is guarded by another knight. This one is significantly larger, he remembered to put all of his armour on, his shield could double as a surfboard and he's using a lance. This means he spends most of the fight charging at you, so there's finally a reason to jump. Other than that, he's not very interesting, and soon you'll arrive at the final stage.


And here it is - a vaguely Egyptian land with strange geometric buildings and scimitar-wielding bandits. There are also a couple of instant-death pits knocking around. If there's one thing this game really did not need it was the sudden introduction of platforming elements, so it's a relief that there are only two or three holes total. The most interesting thing here is that the enemies appear to be wearing rubber gloves. Given the general slimy unpleasantness of Kabuki-Z's environments, I'd say that's a good call.


The mid-boss is a big man with a hammer, and ever since I was ambushed by the drag-racin' chess squad the villains of Kabuki-Z are rapidly becoming less and less interesting. Okay, so this guy can summon flaming devil heads to get in my way and I think anyone would have a hard time putting such a feat into the "not interesting" category, but other than that he is just a big man with a hammer.


After a long and arduous struggle - the struggle to find a decent range to attack from, mostly - Kabuki-Z reaches its dénouement with this final boss. Let's call him Johnny Four-Swords. I'd be more enthused about the fight if there'd been any indication of who this guy is, what his goals are and why he's got dinosaur feet. None of that is offered by the game, so we'll just have to accept the usual boilerplate answer of "he's a demon lord who wants to enslave the world." He's not even an interesting opponent to fight against, because he's little more than a whirling blender of swords that will strip your health bar if you get too close to him. I'll be honest, I cheated to beat him. Not because I couldn't beat him, but because it was taking forever to do legitimately and it wasn't any fun. That's the sad thing about Kabuki-Z: there's the basics of a decent game in here somewhere. The setting, especially early on, is bizarre and gory enough to stand out, and with more refinement the block / parry / slash flow of the combat could have made for an exciting, tense action game. As it stands, Kabuki-Z feels unfinished, or at the very least incredibly rushed, and missing the vital extra polish that could have made a sub-par game an engaging one.


There goes Johnny Four-Swords. He died as he lived: in a gushing torrent of blood. Well, now that I've completed Kabuki-Z, maybe the ending will fill me in on some of the story, or at least present some reward for our hero?


Or not. You know when I said this game feels unfinished? Yeah.

Here's Wally himself, rendered in the worst colour palette the NES has to offer. He may look like he's been crudely carved from a selection of excrement at various stages of decomposition, but that won't stop Wally Bear from being cool. How do I know he's cool? Because he's riding a skateboard, and he's wearing his sunglasses even though this image is set at night, presumably so he can keep track of the visions in his eyes. But what about Wally's family? Are they cool, too?


No, they are not. Mother Bear looks more like a mule with hair extensions, and Daddy Bear is parading around the house without any trousers on, the filthy get. It's hardy surprising, mind you. The Bears couldn't even afford any furniture, they definitely don't have the spare cash for a pair of slacks. Anyway, Uncle Gary Grizzly has organized a party for Wally and the NO Gang, which is a truly crappy name for a gang. Is it the set up for a "Who's on first" style vaudeville routine? "What Gang are you in, Wally? The NO Gang. So you're not in a gang? Yes. But what's it called? NO!" and so on and so forth. Also, you'd think the last thing a videogame from '92 that's supposedly about keeping kids on the straight-and-narrow would want to do is put the idea of forming a gang into their heads.
Getting to Uncle Gary's is the aim of the game, then. Shouldn't be difficult, I've got a skateboard and Wally's parents wouldn't let him go on his own if it wasn't safe. Of course, it should be safe for Wally wherever he goes, because he's a bear. Who's going to mess with a bear?


I'm not taking advice from anyone who thought that wallpaper with that carpet was a good idea. I'm outta here, squares!


Immediately I've encountered a problem: there's just not much to say about Wally Bear as a game, especially in the early stages. It's generic side-scrolling platformer action with an emphasis on avoiding enemies, because when you start the game you don't have any way to attack. So, left-to-right it is, along what is mostly a flat plane with the occasional wall to skate along or house to climb, all while avoiding the deadly birds and angry dogs. The natural darkness festering at the heart of all birds explains why they want Wally dead, but what's the dogs' problem? Is it, like, a prison thing, and they think if they can take out a bear then everyone will respect them? Maybe they're just dicks. Either way, Wally's skateboard skills are gnarly enough that you can jump over them on your board without much trouble.


Wally's always riding his skateboard, but it doesn't have much impact on the gameplay - he still just runs and jumps like every other NES platform hero, with maybe a touch more momentum than most. There's little to impede Wally's progress through this quaint neighbourhood of white picket fences and rabid dogs, aside from getting stuck on the odd fire hydrant. It's not bad enough to make me want to take up hard drugs, at least.


In an effort to liven things up, I posed Wally Bear in such a way that he looks like he's shitting down someone's chimney. Immature? Yes. Pointless? Also yes. But... well, that's it, really. It was just immature and pointless.


The stage ends as Wally reaches the subway, but before he can board his train he's met by one of his friends - a rabbit in a Croatian national team football shirt. The rabbit fills us in on the situation: Ricky Rat is pressuring Toby Turtle - great work on the names there, fellas - into joining his gang, and for his initiation Toby Turtle must take some pills. Wally Bear absolutely will not stand for that, and so he sets out to save Toby Turtle from a lifetime of grinding his teeth and havin' it large in Ibiza.


As much as I'd rather be playing Ricky Rat and the YES! Gang, I'm stuck with guiding Wally through this subway train. Now, I know it's difficult to make an interesting platformer stage out of a train - the inside of a train, anyway - but couldn't the developers think of one single thing to include that would have stopped it from being the perfectly flat series of identical carriages that this stage ends up being? There are some rats, Ricky's henchmen no doubt, that try to get in your way. However, somewhere along the line I picked up a frisbee that Wally can throw as a deadly projectile so I don't even have to jump over the rats. Inch forward, throw a frisbee at a rat, repeat. Toby Turtle had better appreciate what I'm doing for him here.


Yeah, Toby, you big idiot. Listen to me, Wally Bear, your good friend - you are a complete moron for even contemplating taking drugs, and you're lucky you never swallowed those pills because if you had then your blood would be joining that of Ricky Rat on the rim of my frisbee. What I'm saying, Toby, is that you're dumber than a sack of doorknobs.


I would argue that it's okay to be yourself, unless you leave the house wearing lime-green slippers and a beret. In that case you should be someone, anyone else.


The next stage is pretty much the same as the first, only with a slightly different colour scheme and a new gas station that pops up as a background building. There is nothing interesting about the gas station.
I found another couple of frisbee power-ups on my travels, so now Wally can throw three frisbees at once. It's rare that you'd need to throw three frisbees at once, but they serve another, more important purpose. Wally Bear dies in one hit, until you collect a power-up - each time you get hit after that, the level of your power-ups decreases by one, so frisbees also work as health items. Well, this game wasn't going to let you get stronger by eating mushrooms, was it?


The rats in this stage throw things at Wally. They're probably supposed to be rocks, but I'm going to pretend they're pill and these rats are determined to get the kids hooked on loosely-defined narcotics by any means possible.


Back in the subway, and Ricky Rat has stolen Priscilla Poodle's radio and rather than calling the police she's telling Wally all about it, knowing full well that Wally's commitment to moral fortitude and radical skateboard moves are a combination that Ricky Rat has no answer to. Wally's basically a cooler, more hardcore Batman.


The subway level is identical to the previous subway level, except now I can throw multiple frisbees so I can clear the stage just by tapping both buttons as I hold right on the d-pad to create a wall of deadly flying discs. I would never have thought it possible for this stage to be less interesting than it was the first time around. It's amazing, really.


Once he's out of the subway, Wally Bear finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks, a desolate, war-torn part of town full of ruined buildings and rats that are so enraged by Wally's attempts to break up their drug ring that they're trying to kill him by throwing bombs at him. It rather makes a mockery of Wally Bear's message about staying safe on the streets, unless the idea is to scare kids into never leaving their homes. I think my favourite part of this area are the signs that say "NO" dotted around the place. No what? No anything, that's what. Whatever you were thinking about doing, you better forget about it right the hell now.


Another animal child appears, taking refuge from the nightmarish, lawless world outside by hiding in a multi-storey car park. When a dark car park feels like the safest place in town, you know you're really in trouble. I think this animal is supposed to be a tiger, so he's almost certainly called Timmy Tiger. He informs Wally that he just saw Larry Lizard getting trollied. No-one likes a grass, Timmy. Well, except Wally, he loves it when people snitch and so off he goes to slap the bottle out of Larry's hands.


In his "completely bongoed" state, Larry Lizard refuses to accept Wally's help and tries to kill him with a rock. There's a bit of a shift in the gameplay here, with this stage taking place in a single large area. Your goal: to hunt down and eliminate all the clones of Larry before you can move on to the next area. It's okay, I guess. A nice change of pace, although still very easy if you make sure you're always throwing frisbees. That way, most of the time you'll take Larry out the moment he gets on the screen.


After than unpleasantness is dealt with and Larry's brief flirtation with alcohol has been punished by a barrage of flying plastic, Wally heads into the sewers. I imagine he thought they'd be safer than the city streets, and at least down here there's no-one throwing bombs at Wally, but it's definitely a step up in terms of difficulty. A rather jarring one, in fact, and while the rest of the game so far has been extremely easy, at this point you'll have to start paying attention. There are far more hazards and enemies than before, like dripping sewer water and snakes that haven't evolved enough to be given clothes and alliterative names. Bottomless pits are now a feature, too, and as Wally traverses the many tiny platforms, one slip-up means instant death regardless of how many frisbees you're carrying.
The surprising thing is that it's not terrible. Don't get me wrong, Wally Bear is a dull, uninspired platformer without a single new idea of its own, but I was expecting so much worse. I thought I was going to be suffering through "Chinese bootleg" levels of broken controls and glitchiness but nope, Wally Bear's gameplay is solid. Smooth, even, and aside from Wally being a little slippery when he's on small platforms, there's the core of a decent platformer in here somewhere.


Further into the sewers lies a Satanic temple of some kind, which might explain why the city above is such a shithole. Larry Lizard wanders around outside, desperately searching for booze. Wally dispatches him with a well-aimed frisbee before Larry can once again succumb to the demon drink.


Things are getting weird here in Wally Bear's world. It all started off as real-world lessons (delivered by a cartoon bear, but still) about staying safe, but now I'm hopping across the ancient ruins of a lost civilisation and I have no idea why. Who's that guy up there with the big yellow face? Is he the founder of this city, a city that was later overrun by animals that have learned to walk and talk and distil liquor? Does Wally Bear take place far in the future? If it does, it shows an impressive longevity on the part of skateboards and sunglasses that they're still considered "cool."


Also in the sewers: a ruddy great castle. Yeah, sure, why not? I hope the game ends with Wally finding the Ark of the Covenant down here or something. At least let me knock a Nazi to his death by whipping a frisbee at him. To escape the castle, you have to find the right door by jumping along the very narrow and often hard to see platforms until you find the correct exit. You can see one of these easy-to-miss platforms if you look about half-way up the right-hand side of the central column in the screenshot above. Yes, the three slightly raised bricks. You can stand on those, and if you eventually manage to land on them you can take a moment to rest, reflect and curse Wally for bringing his skateboard on this adventure.


Yikes. Does this make Wally Bear and the NO Gang the only NES game in which a sex offender who preys on children is a thing? I hope so. No wonder this game doesn't have the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality.


Thankfully, Stevie Whateverthehellheis - Stoat, maybe - was wise enough not to get into the strange man's car. I'm not sure I'd want to continue playing if the final stage involved Wally rescuing Stevie from a basement somewhere. Instead, I just have to get to Uncle Gary's house.


The sun has set. It's taken Wally all day, but he's almost there. Just one more section of blasted urban hellscape to get through and then Wally will reach the safety of his uncle's house, where he can call his parents and say "what the hell!? Were you not aware that Uncle Gary lives in a part of town that makes Aleppo look like Centerparcs? You are terrible parents!"
After the sewers, Wally Bear's difficulty level takes another swing back down towards the easier side, thanks mostly to the absence of holes for you to fall into. A nice, relaxing victory lap to end the game, then, and I'm excited to meet Uncle Gary. Would you like to see the building that Uncle Gary lives in?


Jesus Christ, how depressing. I can't look at this building without mentally adding the sound of distant police sirens. What went wrong in your life, Uncle Gary? How did you end up here while my parents have a comfortable if somewhat trouser-less life in the suburbs? No, don't tell me your story. It's probably too depressing for words.


A shiver of dread runs down Wally's spine as the door locks behind him. Uncle Gary gestures to the empty room. "We've all been waiting for you!" he says.


"I see you've brought a new friend." says Gary. Wally looks around. There is no-one with him. "Does he mean my skateboard?" he thinks, while stepping backwards, his feet moving, unbidden, until his back is pressed against the bolted door. Uncle Gary is excited to start the party. Oh, what fun he will have. Such fun!


And then all Wally's friends jump out from wherever they were hiding - up the goddamn chimney seems like the only potential hiding place - and as the party begins Wally Bear and the NO Gang comes to an end. Wally signs off with the advice that if someone tries to make you do something and you know it's wrong, say no. Of course, this doesn't explore the complex issues of morality needed to make such decisions. How do you know if something is wrong, Wally? A simplistic view of such matters will only cause problems later on.


As a game, Wally Bear and the NO Gang reaches a level of distinct mediocrity, and that's far better than I expected. It's not a good game, but it's not awful either. Perhaps it's a bit too easy, but then it had to be - it's aimed at kids, and what would be the point of trying to teach them lessons about personal safety and substance abuse if they never made it past the first stage to see those messages? Poor little Jimmy, he couldn't beat the sewer stage so he got into a car with a stranger. However, those messages are where the game falls down. Maybe it's just because I was a cynical child, but I'm sure Wally Bear wouldn't have taught me anything. I wouldn't have been paying attention to text in an NES platformer for starters, and even if I had there's no explanation about why these things are bad. Just telling a child "No, don't do that" is unlikely to make them not want to do that. Wally Bear got his chance to try again, however - he was used as a mascot and educational aid by the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, including having his own phone line, so you could call Wally for a chat about, I dunno, why you shouldn't be snorting rails of coke instead of eating your school dinner. He never appeared in another videogame, though, and that's probably for the best. While I didn't hate his first and only NES adventure, I reckon a little of Wally Bear goes a long way.

The full gamut of human history is on display, from Oliver Hardy to Pythagoras and what I think is the Ferrari badge hiding in the back there. It's a decent title screen, even if the Thinker has taken on a slightly simian appearance and Lady Liberty looks as though she needs a good night's sleep.


I guess that was the Ferrari badge, given that the graphics were provided by one John Ferrarri.  Not much in the way of options here - you can have up to four players, set controls to joystick or keyboard and also load another set of questions, which bodes well for the game's long-term appeal.


Before you can get into the action, you must select an avatar from an array of disappointingly normal-looking people. They do have a few quirks, mind you, most notably that their eyes have fused together into a single Sonic the Hedgehog-style ocular lump. Also, number one seems to be emitting stink lines. I'll be playing as number five, because his green background makes it look as though he's laying in a grassy field, perhaps dreaming about striking it rich on the country's pub trivia machines.


Pub Trivia's portraits remind me of the characters from Codemasters' own Micro Machines, seen here in all it's NES glory. It doesn't appear that John Ferrari worked on Micro Machines, so I'll put it down to that being Codemasters' in-house style, or John Ferrari being a pseudonym that the artist used to deflect the shame of working on a pub quiz simulator.


Here's the Pyramid of Trivia, a towering monolith that we must ascend by answering questions, starting at the bottom row. Answer the question correctly and you move to the next row, although you can only pick from questions that are touching the one you just answered - for example, if I got the sports question right, I'd be able to pick either the music of the clown on my next turn. So, music, then. I wouldn't poke a clown with someone else's severed hand, which is exactly what's happening here.
Questions fall into the categories of music, showbiz, trivia, and sports, with a special question waiting at the top of the pyramid. Why isn't music in the showbiz category? Who knows, but it works out fine for me because that means there's two categories representing the kind of useless pop culture ephemera that I've filled my brain with over the years. Of course, I was five years old when Pub Trivia was released, so let's see how well I remember my infant years, shall we?


A nice, easy question to start, then? Good, I'll take it. Rather than having to type your answers in with the keyboard, you move your cursor and hit fire to press the appropriate button, which makes sense because that's how pub trivia machines work.


And then the second question stumped me, because it's the kind of thing that only a zoo vet or Las Vegas magician is going to know off the top of their head. However, you've always got a 33% chance of getting the right answer in Pub Trivia, which explains how I got so far into the game the first time I played it. That's fairly typical of any multiple-choice quiz game, although they usually have four options so this game is even more lenient on those of us that have to rely on randomly pressing buttons. The answer here is, according to Pub Trivia, 25 years. I Googled "lion average lifespan" afterwards and was told they live about 10-14 years. Now I don't know who to believe.


It doesn't take long to reach the top of the question pyramid, and nothing much changes while you're doing so apart from the timer moving faster and faster with each rung you clamber up, although I never managed to run out of time on a question. I'm only moving a cursor, after all, and I either knew the answer or was just going to guess anyway. A combination of luck and bored hours spent skimming Wikipedia meant that I eventually conquered the pyramid - but what next?


The Money Maze, huh? I wonder what that's going to be like. Finding a path through a labyrinth of trivia questions, choosing which direction I take after each question, something like that?


Or, you know, it could be the exact same thing as the previous round. What's happened here, yeah, is that Codemasters have completely misunderstood the meaning of the word "maze." There's only one direction to go - up - and you can always see what's ahead of you. That might, in fact, be the very opposite of a maze. You can also see here that I'm playing for some dizzyingly high stakes, with a whole ten English pence up for grabs on certain questions! My character's dream of funding his retirement by clearing out these machines is cruelly dashed.


Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to touch this clown. If I fail to return, tell my family I loved them and that the plans for the giant golden monolith that will mark my grave are in the back of the kitchen cupboard, behind the blender.


The Joker card lets you skip a question. For his attempts to aid a human, this clown is now an outcast from the Dark Brotherhood of Jestership and will be hunted down and punished for his treachery. Imagine a balloon animal wrought from tortured flesh. It will not be a quick death.


And so on goes Pub Trivia, with pyramid after pyramid of questions to answer and, as far as I could tell, no end to the quizzing. Once you've collected some money, every incorrect answer removes ten pence from your total until you go bankrupt, and in the end I had to deliberately lose in order to finish the game. I don't think that's entirely down to the questions being easy, although many of them are, but also because it's easy to reach a state of equilibrium as you keep earning and losing cash. I would say the questions are easier than in most quiz games, but I think part of that is down to Pub Trivia being a British game with lots of questions on British topics. I've played a lot of American quiz games and done far worse, because there's nothing American quiz setters love more than questions about goddamn baseball. Here, though, there are questions about football, a subject which falls neatly into my wheelhouse, even if Uruguay is repeatedly spelled wrong.


The thirty-year-old nature of the questions does cause some problems, though, like not knowing enough about the origin of 80's pop singer Yazz, best known for her 1988 hit version of "The Only Way Is Up." If the Yazz-related question had been "who had a 1988 hit with 'The Only Way Is Up?'" then I've have gotten the answer right, but sadly the game wanted to know her home town and I did not possess that information. Still, there can only be so many questions about Yazz, right?


The very next question was also about Yazz. Someone at Codemasters must have been a fan.


My musical knowledge was redeemed by a question about Iron Maiden, and Pub Trivia is providing a deep insight into what's on Codemasters' office stereo. It's an eclectic mix, to be sure. It's a shame Ozzy Osborne's name was spelt wrong, but in Codemasters' defence Ozzy himself probably has trouble spelling his own name.
And finally, here's my favourite question of the lot.


Not exactly a headscratcher, that one.


Pub Trivia is a quiz game that works well as a quiz game, and who could ask more of it than that? Okay, so some of the questions are a bit too easy, and the questions repeat pretty quickly, and it's less a pub quiz and more a digital textbook for someone in an alternate universe where a GCSE in Yazz Studies is a thing that exists, but for a ten-minute spell it's an enjoyable little quiz game with clowns that occupy the very bottom of the threatening-o-meter. That said, being a home computer game it's missing the little details that really make the pub quiz machine experience: there are no old men in the background complaining about the price of beer these days, no smears of cheese and onion crisp residue on the screen and, most tellingly, no friend hovering over your shoulder and insisting that they know the right answer, only for them to say "oh yeah, it's that one" when you take their advice and it turns out to be wrong. Not a game for the long haul, then, but diverting enough for a short while.

On to game number two now, with TV Games' 1988 offering Blockbusters, and if you thought Pub Trivia was a little lacking in the graphics department then prepare for a whole new world of visual disappointment.


Overall blandness aside, the sight of this hexagonal playfield will bring back memories for readers of a certain age. The ones that spent time time watching daytime TV in the late Eighties, anyway, because Blockbusters is an adaptation of the British game show of the same name. I think there was also a US Blockbusters - and presumably many other countries had their own version - but I know this is the British Blockbusters because it's hosted by the genial Bob Holness. There's Bob now, the gruesome grey visage haunting the bottom-right corner of the screen like the ghost of an accountant who died because he was too boring. Poor old Bob has not come out of the conversion to C64 graphics well, his eyes replaced by emotionless slits and the way his mouth has been rendered making it look like his lips have been sewn shut. Fun fact for you, Bob Holness was one of the earliest people to play James Bond (on the radio, but still.)


Blockbusters is a head-to-head game where each player tries to be the first to create a line of hexagons from one side of the playfield to the other by answering questions correctly. You might notice this puts the red player, going horizontally, at a disadvantage because they have to give five correct answers where as the vertical, blue player can make the connection with four right answers. In the TV version this was mitigated by the horizontal team being made up of two people, as opposed to the one person on the vertical side. No such leniency here, though - it's just me versus the computer. Thankfully the computer is kinda thick, seemingly content to watch the hexagons change colour in any old order rather than trying to make a successful chain and being rather slow off the mark when it comes to giving their answers.


As well as the concept of making a chain across the board, Blockbusters' other quirk is that you chose the next question based on the letter shown, and the correct answer always begins with that letter. This format results in what was Blockbusters' most enduring legacy, and naturally I have captured it for this article.


Asking "can I have a P please, Bob" (the usual jokey response being "no, you should have gone before we started") has long outlived the show itself in the consciousness of the British public, although I'm sad to say that my generation is probably the last that will remember the game show that sometimes made the contestants sound as if they're asking to use the bathroom. I've got a lot of nostalgia for Blockbusters, honestly. I saw it a bunch as a kid, I owned the board game and there's something very visually appealing about the ordered honeycomb of the board combined with the VFD-style letters. My biggest disappointment with the C64 version is that it uses red instead of white as the third colour on the board. For a while I didn't get why this bothered me - and get comfortable, because I'm going on one hell of a tangent here - but eventually I figured it out.


It's because this Buck Rogers spaceship toy by Corgi, one of my childhood favourites, has the exact same colour scheme and some similarly geometric panel markings, and the spaceship and Blockbusters have thus become inexorably linked in my mind. Here I was, expecting some generic Commodore 64 quizzing, but I've ended up saddled with deep thoughts about the mysterious way memories are formed and can be triggered decades later by the ashen visage of a now-deceased game show host.
That's the graphics, but I should also mention the music, and Blockbusters does play a brief recreation of the TV show's theme tune when you win a match. It cannot match up to the intensity of the original, but that's not the fault of the game's composer nor the C64's sound hardware - it's just the the Blockbuster's theme is full on.


It's more "80s" than a giant coke-snorting marionette shaped like Ronald Reagan that's been crudely fashioned from discarded legwarmers and A-Ha singles, and the C64 is clearly not capable of capturing such magnificence. It also gives you a glimpse of what Blade Runner might have looked like if it was made on a budget of £300.



As for the gameplay, it's another perfectly serviceable trivia challenge, but naturally it has some foibles all of its own. For example, here I answered "host" instead of "hosts" and the game refused to accept my answer, which felt a bit harsh. I'm sure Bob Holness would have accepted "host" as the correct answer, he seemed like a nice man. Then a moment later, having not learned from my mistake, I answered "Gurkha" instead of "Gurkhas" and the game said "close enough" - I mean that literally, the message "close enough" appears on screen - and gave me the point. All I want is some consistency, is that so much to ask?
The questions are also perhaps too easy. Is that because I'm old and British? Possibly, but I was playing on the highest difficulty and this was one of the questions.


The easier questions do make sense when you consider the style of Blockbusters (the TV show): it was very fast-paced for a quiz, and because either team could buzz in to answer the question, the answers were generally a bit simpler to keep things moving along at a good pace. Unfortunately, the even on the top difficulty setting the CPU isn't much of a challenge, so rather than feeling like every second counts you end up with a lot of time to answer questions like "can you count to seventeen?" On the plus side, it's a surprisingly responsive game, with very little waiting around. Questions can be interrupted if you start typing so you don't have to wait for them to be laboriously printed on the screen, and selecting the next question is nice and speedy too.


On top of that, Bob Holness' ghoulish monochrome face jerks and twitches as you type in your answers, as though he's so excited to hear your response that he's attached the most sensitive parts of his body to a car battery in a misguided attempt to calm himself down. Blockbusters really does have it all.


If you win three games, you're whisked off to the Gold Run, a special against-the-clock round where you must still make a connection across the board but with a much stricter time limit and answers that start with multiple letters. It's certainly much more challenging than the rest of the game, and I enjoyed it a lot more, or at least I did once I realised that, unlike in the regular rounds, the timer in the Gold Run doesn't stop while you're typing. Once I'd figured that out, it became both a quiz and a speed-typing exercise. Turns out I'm not good at speed typing, and Blockbusters was not generous enough to accept "british nedcial asociaton" as the name of the UK doctor's union. I got there in the end, though. All the Blocks have been Busted, and my only disappointment is that I don't get to take home one of the game show's fabulous prizes, which I'm informed included a dictionary and a filofax.


Of the two games featured today, I just about prefer Blockbusters. Nostalgia plays a part in that decision, sure, but having to type your answers makes it feel a bit more involved and it seems to include a wider variety of questions - I didn't see any repeats while I was playing Blockbusters, and I played both for about the same amount of time. Both Pub Trivia and Blockbusters are solid examples of the genre, though, and if you're looking for a quick trivia challenge you should check them out, especially if you just fell out of a time portal from 1989. If you've got no other quiz games to play, that is. If you're trapped on a desert island with a Commodore 64, these tapes and a hand-crafted, coconut-powered generator, definitely play them. That'll eat up an hour or two as you wait for the rescue helicopter.

Writing VGJunk for all this time has revealed certain truths about videogames to me. Jaleco games are almost always slightly disappointing, licensed Game Boy Color tie-ins are a plot by the devil to darken the collective soul of humanity, and Japan loves mahjong games. Really loves them, judging by the sheer volume of titles based on the ancient tile game. On every format since the dawn of gaming, mahjong games were there and in great numbers, so today’s article won’t be an exhaustive look at the history and evolution of the mahjong game. For starters, I’ve never been able to get my head around mahjong’s betting system, despite knowing the basic rules of the game, and my usual poker tactic of going all-in on every hand will probably not suffice. Instead, here’s a bunch of cover art from Super Famicom mahjong games. I had to narrow it down to one console, but don’t worry, that still gives me more than enough to look at.


You’re going to get some anime in your Japanese mahjong games, naturally. That’s one way to sell the product – by giving you a crazy cast of characters to play against, a bunch of wild-haired, big-eyed challengers of the sort you’re unlikely to meet at your local real-life mahjong parlour. Okay, so I could see the old bloke with the moustache being there in real life, but not so much the rest of them. Do they even let school kids into mahjong parlours? Maybe if their parents are hardcore gamblers and they bring their kids along, making them sit and wait in the corner with a bottle of cheap fizzy pop and a bag of crisps until dad has blown that week’s wage packet.
I’m guessing the generic looking brown-haired guy on the left is the main character, a personality-free cipher who allows the player to project their own dreams of becoming the world’s best mahjong player onto him. I say this because everyone else looks far too interesting to be the main character. Like, check out the slick-looking guy at the bottom right. What’s his deal? Aside from his crippling gambling addiction, obviously.




This poor woman has been in the mahjong parlour so long she’s resorted to eating the scoring sticks. She also appears to be some kind of futuristic cyborg. Sitting around playing mahjong seems like a criminal waste of cyborg powers, but who am I to judge? Even robots need down-time. Except they don’t. Because they’re robots.
The “bishoujo” in the title means “pretty girl,” and that’s another fairly standard type of mahjong game – the kind with cute girls that encourage you to play further because if you do well enough they might take their top off. This is especially prevalent in arcade mahjong games, and if this was an article about arcade mahjong games you’d be seeing a lot more pixellated boobs. Okay, maybe not boobs, I’m not good enough at mahjong to get that kind of pay-off. Pixellated lingerie, at least. You can recreate the experience at home by playing mahjong and looking at a page from the Ann Summers catalogue every time you win a point.



I’ll be honest, this doesn’t look super real. For starters, these young ladies appear to be playing as a three-person team, and I don’t think that’s part of the standard mahjong rule set. The one at the back has the facial expression of someone who’s just about to sneeze. Also, you know, they’re cartoons. If I bought a game called “Super Real Mahjong” I’d be expecting to play against haggard middle-aged salary men and little old women who will absolutely crush you, not rejected cast members from a harem anime.



Ah, this is more like it! A bunch of people who look as though they’re having an absolutely miserable time playing mahjong. So many stern expressions! I guess that’s what you get in the world of pro mahjong. The lady at the middle-left has something of a wry smile, but other than that everyone’s got their game face on.


If this image I found on the official website of the Japan Professional Mahjong League is anything to go by, the game has not become any more cheerful during the intervening years. Given the famously small size of Japanese living spaces, the winner is probably upset because he’s going to have to give up either his bed or his toilet to make room for his giant trophy.



“You’ve stepped into the wrong mahjong parlour, my friend. We’re your worst goddamn nightmare.”



That’ll be ancient literary figure Son Goku the Monkey King, not Goku from Dragonball Z, then? Disappointing. Yes, I know Goku is based on the Monkey King – they both have a nature that is irrepressible, for one thing – but the Money King was never forced into taking driving lessons by his wife so they’re clearly very different characters. This is quite a sinister-looking Son Goku, too, his eyes burning red with ape rage, one of the most dangerous kinds of rage there is. Perhaps he just lost a game of mahjong? Or maybe he did something wrong and the secret phrase was used to punish him, causing the circlet that keeps him under control to contract and crush his skull. It’s most likely a combination of the two: he saw he was about to lose at mahjong so he started urinating on the board, causing his headgear to be activated.



This one’s a Shanghai game – the game where you eliminate matching mahjong tiles from a pile rather than the actual game of mahjong – but I’m willing to loosen the entry requirements for this article for a big blue dragon. I’m actually having trouble telling whether the dragon is a CG render or a traditional picture. Something about his whiskers screams “nineties CG” to me. However it was created, it’s an arresting visual. Exploding blue dragons do tend to catch the eye, especially when they’re balancing mahjong tiles on their nose.



Garfield has tried to sneak onto the cover of this game. He’s even wearing sunglasses to disguise his identity, but he’s not fooling anyone. Get back to your dull comic strip, Garfield, this game is for mahjong fans and lovers of cartoon men whose heads have been deformed into the shape of an eggplant wrapped in human skin. I’m sure those are supposed to be his lips at the bottom of his chin, where all sensible people keep their lips, but I can’t help seeing them as a pair of vestigial testicles. Going back to Garfield, given Jim Davis’ stated goal of creatingthe slobbish cat solely to make money I’m amazed that a cursory internet search didn’t bring up an official Garfield mahjong game. Garfield probably has tons of fans in Asia, so this seems like a misstep. There you go, Jim – you can have that idea for free.



Forget the bunny girl, check out that weird creature running across the mahjong tiles. It looks like a penguin and a pineapple had one-night stand and dressed the resulting child as Batman.



“What shall I draw for the cover art for this new mahjong game?”
“How about a women tying her shoelace while a weird owl-gremlin looks up her skirt?”
“Yeah, I can do that. Do you want me to give her a really messed-up spine?
“If you wouldn’t mind, that’d be great.”



This is a game where various historical figures gather to do battle in the arena of mahjong, including Napoleon, George Washington and Sherlock Holmes, who isn’t real but is out of copyright and therefore free to use. I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the reason for his inclusion. Some of the other characters are eluding me, though. I have no idea who the warrior on the right of the table is, but something tells me he’s probably a playable character in a Dynasty Warriors game. The third man at the table appears to be a caricature of Steve Buscemi, and behind him is what I took to be Abraham Lincoln until I realised he’s wearing a toga. Caesar? Let’s go with Caesar. Which Caesar? Look, I’m not going to narrow down my options by picking one specific Caesar. My history teacher would be appalled with me.



See, the problem here is that you’ve tried to make playing mahjong look cool. I think that was the intention, at least. Is he supposed to be throwing those tiles? If this was an anime I’d swear his arm was in that position so the animators didn’t have to bother moving his mouth when he talked, but as it’s a still picture I’ll assume he’s posing like a big overdramatic dork.




Oh look, he’s back, with a side parting in his hair so deep and precise it must have been carved there by a bloody laser beam, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down to send his mahjong groupies into a sexual frenzy. I half expect that if he moved his hand, the disappearing shadow would reveal he’s got a Phantom of the Opera-style deformed half to his face. Women want him, men want to be him, but all he cares about is the thrill of mahjong and no-one, no matter how big their eyes or how colourful their hair, can tame him.



Now this guy seems like a more believable face of mahjong – a slightly unnerving face, one that you could easily see haunting the gloomy corner of a gambling hall. When your girlfriend takes you home for dinner with her parents for the first time, this is exactly the kind of face you don’t want to see glowering at you over the spaghetti bolognese. Of course, it’s terrible of me to judge a man on his appearance. Whoever he is, he’s probably a perfectly nice chap in real life and mahjong is a fun, friendly game played by families and not just in dingy, smoke-filled rooms. It is possible that playing the Yakuza games has coloured my opinions of mahjong. After all, the main character of the Yakuza games plays mahjong, and he’s also a yakuza member who smashes his enemies’ faces into the nearest, hardest object he can find.



This one’s mostly bog-standard super-deformed anime faces… apart from the one at the bottom, which is genuinely unnerving me a little. It’s that mouth, it’s like a hellish portal to a dimension of sheer pain. Hang on, this is another cover featuring someone who’s about to eat a scoring stick. Is that something that actually happens in mahjong? Are they like breadsticks? Do they come with a dipping sauce?



I don’t want to denigrate the ancient and noble Chinese dragon, but when your mythological creature is a dragon but also has deer antlers, bat wings and the full Santa Claus hair and beard combo, it might be getting a bit busy, design-wise. You don’t need to try so hard, pal. You’re already a dragon, and that’s pretty cool. There’s no need to dress like you crashed face-first through a fancy dress shop’s unsold stock.


Here’s a look I like to call “Wolverine’s Japanese Grandad.” The hair and the sideburns clearly run in the family.



Finally for today, here’s a cover that’s just nice, cute and simple (kinda like me). Hello Kitty’s dominance over all forms of media extends to SNES mahjong games, of course, but it’s that confused fish-man who really steals the show. He’s giving a two-fingered peace sign, but one look at his eyes is enough to tell you that he has no idea what’s going on. What are these tiles for? How does this game work? Why is that cat wearing dungarees? It’s all a mystery to him, but he wants to fit in so he’s going along with it. I think we can all empathise with that desire to be part of the group. I feel you, fish-man.

All your favourite Super Mario friends are here: Mario, of course, and Luigi, as well as Yoshi (who has orange arms for some reason) and Princess Peach. Princess Peach does not look very well. In fact, she looks like she fell forty feet and landed directly on her head, completely obliterating her neck.
Theses familiar faces will be helping us learn all about letters. There were also Mario’s Early Years games released that dealt with numbers and “preschool fun,” but I’ll be sticking with the letters variant because my intense personal hatred of maths even extends to cheap educational games.


Seven minigames await those brave enough to attempt mastery of the English language, each more fiendish than the last! Okay, so they’re not fiendish at all, which is a good thing for a game aimed at four-year-olds. You can play as either Mario, Princess Peach or Yoshi, although there’s no difference between the characters aside from their sprites. Luigi is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he thinks all this is beneath him.


The first stop is Last Letter World. Drink it in, folks – this is probably as close to a Lego Super Mario game as you’re ever likely to see. The goal is simple: click on the blocks showing words that end with the specified letter. Get all three and you’ll be given a new set of words, and might even move on to the next screen.


The next screen is more of the same thing, only with a slightly different layout. I did find Luigi, though. He’s always having a nap at the bottom of the screen, grabbing what precious little rest he can during one of the rare moments when Princess Peach isn't being kidnapped. You can click on Luigi to wake him up, but that doesn’t do much. He just wakes up and stares out of the screen at you, silently judging you when you make a mistake in this preschool educational game. Not that I ever made a mistake, of course.
As a game, it works. I don’t know what else to tell you about it, really. I played it for long enough that eventually the game decided “okay, buddy, you’ve had enough” and kicked me back to the selection screen. I suppose I’ll play another game, then?


The next one I picked was First Letter World. Having just come from Last Letter World, I think both you and I will have a pretty good handle on how this works. Princess Peach still doesn’t look quite right, mind you. She’s giving the back of Mario’s head the crazy eyes. The whole game’s got that slight bootleg-y feel to it – you can see where the original Mario sprites were used, and you can definitely see where they weren’t and the art styles don’t match up quite correctly. Things like the Princess’ coked-out expressions and Luigi’s stubby-legged sitting pose grate on the eye because they don’t look Nintendo enough, if you get my meaning. That said, it’s probably only because I’ve wasted my life jumping on Koopa Troopas that it bothered me.


For instance, look at this Goomba. He’s almost identical to a regular Super Mario Goomba, but not quite. He’s very slightly the wrong shade of brown, leaning towards “unfortunate trouser stain” rather than “rich chestnut” on the spectrum of browns. His teeth don’t look quite right. But he’s definitely a Goomba, very much appropriate for a Super Mario-related game, and as a kid who loved all things Super Mario I probably would have eaten this game up if I’d had it is a kid. Okay, maybe not – I was already well past this stage of language development when my Mario obsession was in full swing – but a Super Mario themed educational game would have held my interest much longer than a similar game starring, I dunno, Mickey Mouse or the members of Ocean Colour Scene.


What… what are you digging that hole for, Peach? Don’t you have mushroom slaves to do that kind of thing for you? Unless it’s a secret and you didn’t want anyone to see you digging. You know what, never mind. I didn’t see anything, your highness.
Also of note is the appearance of one of the Koopa Kids. They aren’t all in the game – I think Ludwig is the only other one to be featured – but Iggy is quite prominent throughout the game. His name has been extended to “Icky Iggy.” The reasons for this sobriquet are not explained, but dark and disturbing possibilities were suggest by my mind every time I saw the rainbow-haired freak.


And now, Vowel World. That’s Vowel World, for all your vowel needs. Huge bargains on vowels. This week only, Us are half-price!
Okay, so vowel world is exactly the same as First Letter World, except the first letter is always a vowel. I think you could have gotten away with combining the two, chaps. In lieu of there being anything more insightful for me to say, I’ll direct your attention to that incredibly shifty elephant. It’s up to something, that elephant, and the secret knowledge that only it possess gives it an illicit thrill. My theory is that the elephant is secretly delighted to have replaced its elephant ears with huge, grey human ears without anyone noticing.


I mentioned the not-quite-right look of Mario’s Early Years, and here’s a good example. When you get an answer correct, sometimes a character will pop up and offer some words of encouragement. Mario might stick his head up and say “Super!” for instance. Because he’s Super Mario, you see. Actually, now I think about it, I think these little phrases only appear once you’ve woken Luigi up, so now we know what he’s there for besides making the place look untidy. Anyway, some other characters also appear. Non-Mario characters, like the strange brown thing emerging from that blue pipe. What the hell is that thing? I feel like I’m rather well-versed in the fauna of the Mushroom Kingdom, but that creature is something different. It possesses a certain monkey-like quality, but without the usual cartoon signifiers of monkeyhood. No prehensile tail, no prominent ears, no bananas. It’s also got a harrowed look on its face, as though it should be screaming rather than congratulating me for knowing that Egg starts with E. It’s those dark circles under its eyes that do it.  If it is a monkey, it’s one that was forced to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day while scientists clipped electrodes to its brain. Wait, never mind, I’ve figured it out. This is a monkey. It has no ears because the elephant used it's powerful trunk to tear them off and attach them to its own head. This theory explain everything.


Next up is Sound World, which you’ll be shocked to learn is a lot like all the preceding worlds. This time you’ve got to click the right picture based on the sound it starts with. I know it sounds like I’m giving it short shrift, but it’s not a bad set-up for teaching very young kids about phonics. To this end, Mario’s Early Years is absolutely packed with voice clips. The most digitised speech I’ve ever heard in a SNES game, possibly, although International Superstar Soccer Deluxe had quite a lot. The entire game is narrated by a child who repeats whatever you do out loud, such as saying “you picked dinosaur, that starts with D.” I think you can guess what action makes the kid say that. There are also, as mentioned, the encouraging voice clips from the likes of Mario. After so many years of Mario having the same voice, I was taken aback when he started talking and it wasn’t Charles Martinet doing his usual cheerful yelping. Instead, it’s the same Brooklyn accent that Mario had in the Super Mario cartoons, the voice that made him sound like he was going to have the boys over to play poker and complain about his wife’s cooking once he’d dealt with Bowser. It makes sense, in a way. This game is supposed to be teaching children about English and I don’t think that modern Mario would be the best person to learn from. The most complex sentence he ever utters is the grammatically incorrect “It’s-a me, Mario!” and mostly he just whoops and hollers. His vocabulary is ninety percent overexcited trapeze artist on his first day at work and ten percent Italian stereotype. As I say, probably not the best English teacher.


Next comes Sentence World, where you must find the correct word to complete the sentence. Here, Luigi is sitting in the mud like the slovenly beast he is. No self-respect, that’s Luigi’s problem.
Like all the other games, this is a perfectly acceptable learning tool for the young ‘uns, but it suffers from the same problem that hampers the rest of Mario’s Early Years: there’s just not enough of it. There’s only a very limited selection of different word combinations, so few that you’ll see them all in a single play session, and as a result the game's ability to keep kids engaged is hampered. Maybe the developers could have included a wider range of possibilities if they hadn’t crammed the cartridge full of speech samples, but they did and so I’m stuck repeatedly confirming that yes, Luigi is in the mud.


At least this mode offers some nicer (and more on-model) artwork, even if I did struggle to realise that Mario is carrying a frying pan and not a magnifying glass. He could be a detective, all right? He’s been every other bloody thing.
On the subject of this screenshot, check out Princess Peach. She has a box over her crotch. I’m ninety-nine percent certain that is is a simple coincidence and not a crude joke on the part of the developers, but having read a lot of TCRF and seen some of the secret developer messages hidden in games I still have that one percent of doubt.


However, this is clearly the best of the games because I got the narrating kid to say “The Princess got a big can” and I’m definitely immature enough to get a laugh out of that. You might also enjoy the idea of Luigi giving Bowser a tug. Hey, whatever, man. If that’s your bag, I’m not here to judge.


This is Building World. Your goal: to find the missing part of the displayed word. This is easily the most tedious of all the minigames, because there are only three words to complete. There’s “red”, there’s “mop” and there’s “bus.” That’s it. I played this game for longer than anyone has in the past twenty years, I changed characters, I even reset the game, but those were the only three words that would appear. If you want prepare your child for a future career of mopping red buses, this is the game to give them. Otherwise, read them a goddamn book or something, you lazy get.
It goes on and on and on, too. I managed to get the first stage, Last Letter World, to end after a while by answering correctly enough times, but in every other game this refused. I’m sure I played each game for as long as Last Letter World, but I was trapped in a loop of endlessly repeating the same questions until I gave up and quit back to the main menu. There’s no sense of reward to Mario’s Early Years, unless you count that weird monkey-creature popping up and saying “I like your choice!” every now and then, which seems like a mis-step. Give the player a little cutscene of Mario and friends running around, or maybe even a short Super Mario level to play through, or something to keep them engaged. The gameplay isn’t enough of a draw on its own, that’s for sure.


The final stop on our whirlwind tour of the alphabet is, appropriately enough, Alphabet World. Alphabet World isn’t a game, it’s simply a slideshow with a different picture illustrating each letter. It didn’t get off to a great start. A is for apple, huh? Wow, how original. I wasn’t expecting anything excitingly avant-garde or anything, but c’mon.


Thankfully, things improved when I reached B and saw Bowser with a top hat, dancing down a staircase like Fred Astaire.  My only complaint is that it’s not animated. Maybe that’s why Bowser keeps abducting Peach, he’s just after a dance partner.


Don’t worry, I’m not going to go through every letter of the alphabet, but there are a few I wanted to pick out. For instance, this cat. This seemingly normal, everyday cat that’s probably shedding hair all over the raspberry ripple. For some reason, the narrator describes it as “crazy cat.” What do you know about this cat that we don’t, Mr. Narrator? What shocking madness swirls within its feline brain? I’m disappointed that I’ll never know the answer to that question, just as I’m disappointed that the picture for “crazy cat” wasn’t a beatnik hammering away at some bongos.


M is for Mario, naturally, and we’re treated to the rare sight of Mario actually doing some plumbing. Some half-hearted wrench-twiddling, by the looks of it, for which he will no doubt charge an exorbitant fee.


I’m beginning to suspect that the developers had something against Princess Peach. Against her face, specifically. They’ve tried to capture her charming, regal nature but ended up with something that looks like a bowling ball wrapped in ham.


Finally there’s Yoshi. Not finally in the alphabet, obviously – I didn’t play through this game without learning something – but I don’t think the last picture is interesting enough to show you. It’s a zipper. If you really want to see a zipper, look at your trousers or something. No, Yoshi is where I’ll draw this article to a close. Yoshi, staring at himself with a judgemental look on his face. Recursive Yoshis. He’s probably thinking about eating himself.
With no ending to aim for and all the minigames played for longer than was safe for my boredom levels, Mario’s Early Years: Fun With Letters is over. The final verdict? It’s okay. The Super Mario license is one that seems a damn good choice for getting the kids of 1994 to play an educational game. It doesn’t have that unpleasant feeling of cynical exploitation that so many licensed kid’s games do, and the minigames are (for a kid) diverting and colourful enough that I could see it having some actual value as a teaching aid. The big problem is longevity: even the most studious of children are going to get bored after they’ve seen every single combination of answers multiple times after just a few hours play, and if this was a full-price release (which I assume it was) then it doesn’t represent good value for money. Then there’s the not-quite-right look of the graphics, which kids will certainly pick up on, because they’re not idiots when it comes to their beloved media characters. On the whole, then, it’s decent effort but there are far better ways to help your kid learn. Methods that don’t feature Princess Peach looking like she headbutted a meat grinder, for starters.

Today’s game is a cutesy Famicom romp through a series of colourful worlds, where a young girl, erm, does things? I can’t really be more specific than that. It’s a confusing game. Welcome to Lost Word of Jenny, developed by Takara and released in 1987. Before we get started, take a close look at the title. Yes, it’s “Lost Word” and not “Lost World.” I hope you don’t have as much difficulty as I – and several others, if a quick internet search is anything to go by – did making the distinction. “Lost World” just feels more correct, somehow, probably because “lost world” is a phrase sometimes used in English whereas “Lost Word” sounds like an indecipherable error message from an ancient computer.


Here’s Jenny now. Jenny has a lot of hair. Perhaps too much hair for such a small head, and it threatens to engulf her diminutive features. If Jenny looks a bit doll-like, that’s because she’s a doll. Specifically, she’s based on the real Japanese “Jenny” doll, which was originally known as “Takara Barbie.” This gave me cause for concern, because playing a videogame based on Barbie is not something I need in my life right now. Things are stressful enough without adding another god-awful minigame collection based around fashion, but thankfully Lost Word of Jenny is actually a platformer.


Jenny is also Cinderella, it seems. Cinderella in space, maybe, what with the featureless black void and the horse kicking up a trail of stardust.


Here’s Jenny now, at the bottom of the screen, long of limb and full of youthful energy. The game begins with Jenny leaving her house and traversing this map screen, trying to reach the entrance to each stage while avoiding the many hazards that block her path. These hazards include cars, which move as though they’re being driven by a chimp fed a steady diet of amphetamines. I can see how that would be a hazard. On the other hand, puppies. Deadly, enraged puppies. Yes, the puppies hurt you if you touch them. No, I have no idea why. I’ve complained before about how many videogame heroes can take damage from bubbles, but this is a step beyond that. At least a bubble could conceivably contain poison gas. A puppy is a puppy. If you asked people to compile a list of the least threatening things in the world, puppies would be number one with a bullet. There are therapies out there that give people puppies to make them feel better. I just can’t get over it. My only explanation is that Jenny reeks of Pedigree Chum.
Also, there’s a building over there marked “NASA.” Obviously, this was my first port of call, but it wouldn’t let me in. Instead, I wandered around for thirty seconds or so until I found a stage that would admit Jenny.


It’s a pirate ship. “Gabacho the Ship,” according to the title that appeared when I walked in. Here’s where I hope that Lost Word of Jenny came with a detailed instruction manual, because at first I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Stages in this game aren’t the usual “get from the left to the right” affairs, instead comprising a few screens, usually with a second set of screens below that you can reach by travelling down a ladder or staircase. Some time spent jumping around and trying out Jenny’s combat skills – she can perform a high kick or a crouching punch – eventually led me to one of the barrels you can see above. They’re the key to completing the stage: find all the barrels and open them (or open them and defeat the creatures inside) to collect the important items they contain. Most important of all are the keys. Keys let you exit the stage, and six are needed to finish the game. Every stage has their own variation on the special containers you need to find, be it barrels, gravestones or gift-wrapped presents, but finding and opening them all is the main thrust of the game.


Already Jenny has proven herself to be better than Barbie. I can’t imagine Barbie kicking a crocodile in the face. Jenny’s got something of Wonder Momo about her, especially those high kicks, but both games were released within months of each other so I don’t think it’s anything other than coincidence. Then there’s this adorable crocodile, a chubby, big-eyed reptile friend. I’d almost feel bad about beating it to death with Jenny’s bare hands if it wasn’t trying to kill me. On the plus side, being a fashion doll means that Jenny can probably put the crocodile’s skin to good use.
I’ll say right now that the enemy design is my favourite thing about Lost Word of Jenny, with some of the most precious little weirdoes I’ve seen in an 8-bit game for a long while. Jenny herself doesn’t have much personality, which is a shame, but the monsters more than make up for it.


For example, check out that mouse. It’s nothing more than a simple cartoon rodent but it’s expertly drawn, extremely basic but packed with character, and it’s a great example of the amount of charm that can be packed into a tiny amount of pixels.


Eventually I made it down below deck, and checking every single barrel finally revealed a pirate. Sadly he did not pop out of the barrel when I inserted a sword. Even more sadly, he decided to sit on top of Jenny and chip away at her health while I struggled to get her into a position to kick him. The crocodile looks on, his glee at his vicarious revenge evident in his expression.
Once the pirate was beaten – I managed to get into a spot where I could crouch down and repeatedly punch him in the Jolly Roger – he dropped a key.


The key opens the grey exit door. Does it open that exit door right next to where it spawned? Does it bollocks. Instead, there are multiple doors scattered throughout the stage, and only one will let Jenny leave, where she will presumably head back to the “overworld” section and pick another stage.


Wait, what? Did you just call me a cow head, Lost Word of Jenny? You cheeky bastard. That sounds like an isult screamed by a five-year-old so angry they can't get their words out.


Never mind, I’m guessing this guy is Cow Head. This stage is a long corridor with little to stand in Jenny’s way – a couple of fiery cauldrons and some moving spikes – until you get to a certain point and Cow Head rises from the ground, intent on putting a stop to Jenny’s vague quest. You have to beat him to progress, which I found out after saying “yeah, see ya” and running for the exit, but the exit won’t open until Cow Head is Cow Dead. Fortunately, I discovered a decent strategy. You can’t see her thanks to some sprite flicker, but I managed to get Jenny to stand just to the left of that cauldron. From there, you can use your high kick to bash Cow Head and he can’t retaliate, trapped as he is on his higher perch. Strong and cunning, that’s Jenny.
I’m glad I figured this out early, because you have to fight Cow Head after every stage. It’s the same level layout and pattern, but it becomes more difficult each time – the spikes move faster and multiple Cow Heads appear at once, some of them on the bottom half of the screen where I couldn’t trap them with my mighty kicks. During those fights, I simply died a lot.
Okay, now it must be time to get on to the next stage proper, right?


Or not, whatever. This stage is announced as “Whomanchun,” and it gives us a chance to play a little game of “Ghost or KKK?” I’m going with ghost, because I really don’t want to imagine there’s a violent racist in this otherwise saccharine Famicom platformer. At most, you could say he’s the ghost of a Klan member, condemned to an eternity of purgatorial wandering for his crimes. Whatever it is, I’d like the name of his detergent because those sheets are immaculate.
During Whomanchun, you play some kind of slot machine game. Numbers spin around in the reels at the bottom. Presumably, something happens. I have no idea what, and I couldn’t detect any influence on later gameplay. How very mysterious.


Now we’re back to the regular stages, with a world made of cake. Now I want cake. I don’t have any cake, so I had to settle for a cigarette and my sixth cup of coffee. I think the cake would have been healthier, so I’ll blame Lost Word of Jenny the next time I see my doctor.
The enemies here are the kinds of things you might expect to see on a giant cake, like giant ants and hunched-over over men with pumpkins for heads. Hang on, that doesn’t seem right. There are two other spookily-themed stages, and the pumpkin man wasn’t deemed appropriate for either of them? He looks like an elderly farmer who was tending his pumpkin patch on Halloween night when he was struck by lightning and fused with his crops, but here he is, trudging his way through the icing.


There are also witches. Someone didn’t think the cake world through at the planning stage and panicked when it came to designing enemies.


Those monsters should have been in this stage. It’s even called Monster’s House! The monster in question must be Dracula, because I’m getting a real Castlevania vibe from this. Diagonal staircases, bats, knights in armour and a hero who struggled to interact with the aforementioned stairs, all the signs are here. That’s definitely one of Lost Word of Jenny’s more irritating flaws: she struggles with moving up and down levels. Staircases have to be approached at just the right angle – and if they’re at the bottom of the screen you risk falling to your death – and ladders are fickle creatures that might let you climb them, or not, depending on whether you’ve got Jenny’s pixels lined up just right.


I headed into the basement. It’s certainly colourful down here, isn’t it? I’d worry about a house with Duplo foundations, but the monsters don’t seem to mind. Speaking of monsters, it’s the definitely-not-a-shitbag-racist ghost from the Whomanchun stages, wandering around with a flaming torch that is not helping in my attempts to paint him as nothing more than a simple spectre. Naturally, Jenny ran straight over there to exorcise him with her blessed fists.


The ghost dropped a number 6. Well, I’m sure it’s not important.


Now I can get into the space stage, which is the closest I’ll ever come to my childhood dream of joining NASA until they loosen their acceptance requirements and start hiring tubby asthmatics who are bad at maths. This stage deviates from the rest by not being a standard platformer. Instead, Jenny can fly as long as you’re holding the jump button, so you can drift through the level and have even more trouble than usual defeating the monsters because trying to kick them in mid-air (mid-vaccuum?) is a real pain in the arse.


As ever, the monster designs paper over the cracks somewhat. This stage has these boggle-eyed little aliens, and it’s a shame I had to kick them to find the keys I needed. I would have much preferred to have made friends with them. It does seem odd that a game based on a fashion doll revolves around her battering her way through the inventory of Fluffy Smilekins’ Plush Toy Emporium, and normally I’d be very glad that they took such an unexpected route – but I like all the enemies so much that this approach has backfired.


Never mind. I retract my previous statement. I reached the graveyard stage and immediately had to fist-fight the Grim Reaper. That’s not just my bag, that’s overhead storage locker in which I store the holdall that contains all my other, smaller bags.
As fun as giving Death a taste of his own medicine sounds, it isn’t that great in practise, and I should probably discuss Lost Word of Jenny’s gameplay. The platforming aspect is fine, staircase issues aside. Jenny handles well, and jumping is reliable and precise. It’s the combat where things suffer. This is a surprisingly difficult game, given the source material and overall pastel-daydream tone, thanks in large part to the very short range of Jenny’s attacks. The saving grace is that she can attack very rapidly, but still enemies have a habit of getting stuck “inside” Jenny as she struggles to hit them. A projectile weapon, even a short-range one, would have gone a long way towards making the combat more pleasant, and Jenny does have one. If you’ve collected enough power-ups, you can use a spray-can weapon – but it’s limited-use, and annoyingly enemies seem to have a roughly twenty-five percent chance of ignoring it completely. Plus, by the time you reach the last couple of Cow Head stages the spray is almost mandatory, so you have to save all your sprays for that which doesn’t help you when the bats in the Monster’s House stage have decided that Jenny’s sinuses would make a perfect new nesting site.


The level design is okay, with nothing to get hugely exited about. In several stage, some of the special containers you need to open are blocked off in such a way that you have to approach the bottom level via a specific staircase from the top level for a soupçon of maze navigation, but that’s about it. It does feel very much like an early arcade game, which is hardly surprising.


The final main stage is Flower Land. Really put a lot of thought into that name, huh, guys? I would have called it Hayfever Nightmare Zone, myself. There’s land, and there are flowers, with leaves for climbing on and praying mantises seeking refuge from a Disney movie about loveable insects. There’s no refuge here, my friends, only brutal hand-to-hand combat. And flowers.


I defeated another Whomanchun, and received the number one. I hope this doesn’t represent a countdown as I gradually exterminate the last surviving members of their species. I also picked up the sixth and final key, which leaves me with only one last Cow Head encounter before I can wrap this up.


Multiple Cow Heads are no joke, unless your idea of a joke is “what would be a terrible thing to put in your kid’s lunchbox.” Still, I’d saved up all my sprays, so I managed to send them all back to the great ranch in the sky. Okay, time to roll the credits!


Oh ho, not so fast. You know those numbers you’ve seen Jenny find throughout the game? I hope you wrote those down. You see, each stage contains one number and one letter, and before you can complete Lost Word of Jenny you have to enter those numbers and letters into this combination lock. The first time through, I did not write those letters and numbers down. I barely even remembered seeing them, so intent was I on trying not to die. Thus, I was literally locked out of the ending, and had to complete the whole game again. Ghosts ‘n Goblins has a surprise competitor for “most dickish end-of-game move,” and as I said at the start I really hope this was explained in the original manual. Even if it was, you just know there’s some poor Japanese kid out there who struggled through the game only to be denied by a tiny frog-faced wizard right at the last. The sheer cruelty of it is astonishing.
So, I played through the whole game again, pen and notepad by my side and a litany of curses seeping through my clenched teeth, until I managed to open the lock. I’m fairly certain it’s random every time, too, so I can’t even tell you the code.


At least the ending is nice, with a roll-call of all the enemies in the game. I think you even get a bit of information about each character: I would take this with a pinch of salt because my Japanese knowledge is on roughly the same level of my knowledge on cardiac microsurgery, but I think it says that the ghost thing is called Biibii and he’s gathered together the world’s most evil creatures. It might be a touch harsh to say I’d have rather just watched this ending than actually playing through the game, but then I do love those monster designs.


Lost Word of Jenny is a flawed game, especially in the monster-punching stakes, and it has a soundtrack so repetitive and wheedling I’d strongly urge you pack your eardrums with old rags and candle wax before attempting to play it. However, I ended up enjoying it far more than I expected to. It’s crisp, it looks nice for its time and there’s plenty to do without it being overlong, and while I’m not saying it’s an undiscovered masterpiece I suspect there are quite a lot of people out there who’d really enjoy sinking their teeth into it. Maybe those people can figure out some of the game’s more confusing moments, like what the small red bird I occasionally found actually does, or why Jenny is relentlessly pursued by a cow skeleton. As for me, I shall end this article proud in the knowledge that I might have helped a couple of people avoid getting stuck on that lock.

With my usual impeccable sense of timing, here’s an article about a football game that I’m posting just after Euro 2016 has finished. In my defence, I’ll claim that it’s an attempt to tide those of us who love football over until the new season starts. I mean, what else are you going to watch, sports-wise? The Olympics? No chance. That’s when they gather all the sports no-one cares about into one place in an effort to get people to give a shit about javelin-throwing or walking as fast as possible. Okay, so I might watch the boxing and maybe, yes, the football, but really I’m just waiting for the new season. To help me through this dry patch, I’ve turned to a PS1 classic – Konami’s 1997 beautiful-game-em-up International Superstar Soccer Pro!

That’s “International” because it features national teams rather than clubs, as depicted by the mighty footballing nations of Brazil and Italy tussling it out on the title screen. Brazil were world champions at the time, having beaten Italy on penalties in the 1994 World Cup final, so it makes sense that they’d be the first two teams you see.
ISS Pro is part of the long and somewhat confusing legacy of Konami’s many, many football titles, so here’s a quick attempt at a history lesson. Konami had made football games before, notably Konami Hyper Soccer on the NES, but they really got going in 1994 when they released Jikkyou World Soccer: Perfect Eleven for the SNES, better known overseas as the original International Superstar Soccer. ISS, and especially it’s 1995 update ISS Deluxe, were the best the SNES had to offer in terms of football, with a perfect balance of fast-paced, arcade-y action and more realistic touches. The ISS series continued on the next generation of consoles with games like ISS 64, all the way up to ISS 3 on the PS2. However, in 1996 the series spun off into Goal Storm for the PS1, the first to feature fully 3D polygonal models. This side-series continued with today’s game ISS Pro, before ending on the PS1 in 2001 with ISS Pro Evolution 2. Still with me? Okay. From here, Konami embarked on one of their most successful franchises – and the only “real” videogames Konami still makes – in the Pro Evolution Soccer series, which is still going to this day. I was going to stay still going strong today, but that’s not really true, and Konami’s football games have now been thoroughly eclipsed by the glitz and glamour of EA’s FIFA series. For a long time the two franchises were neck-and-neck in the race to win the hearts of digital football fans, with FIFA having the appeal of being fully licensed and accurate and Pro Evo generally offering slightly more fun gameplay and, most importantly, the ability to create players with giant pumpkins for heads. Even I have jumped ship to FIFA these days, but for many years I was a big cheerleader for the Pro Evo series, and I have spent a lot of time playing them.


That brings me back around to International Superstar Soccer Pro, and the reason I decided to write about it: the chance to wallow in a pit of unadulterated nostalgia like a self-indulgent hippo. ISS Pro was the football game when I was a kid. I have played thousands of matches in this game. In 1997 I probably spent more time with its polygonal superstars than I did with my own family, and I can’t wait to get back into it.
When compared to modern football sims, ISS Pro’s menu reveals that it’s rather lacking in options. You can play a one-off “friendly” match – quotes included because I played against my brother a lot and those friendly matches were anything but – or a penalty shootout, but no management options, no player editing and not even ISS’s trademark Scenario mode, where you’re given tasks such as “it’s the last ten seconds of the match, score from this corner” and challenged to clear them all. The two main game modes are the International Cup, which is a bootleg World Cup because you have to pay to use the World Cup name, and the International League. For this article, I’ll be running through a cup on the “normal” difficulty setting, because getting through a whole league would take  a week or so. I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up doing a league next time I’ve got a spare week. Maybe I’ll update this article if I do.


Now it’s time to choose which team I’ll be playing as from the 32 countries on offer, from titans of the international game such as Germany and Argentina to relative minnows like Morocco and Scotland. Normally I’d play as England in an attempt to burn off any unwanted feelings of patriotic pride that have built up in my psyche, but after the embarrassment that was England at Euro 2016 I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Instead, I’ll be playing as Denmark. Once again nostalgia comes into play, because I often played as Denmark when I was a kid. Not for any great love of the Danes or admiration for their bacon, but because their kit – red shirts with white sleeves and white shorts – is the closest in appearance to that of my beloved Rotherham United. In later games I’d change the player names to match up with the then-current Rotherham squad. That’s sadly not an option here, but it was always nice to see players of the calibre of Trevor Berry and Leo Fortune-West banging goals in against the likes of Germany. So, the Danish, then. A middling team with no real superstars to call on. Let’s hope for an easy draw in the cup.


Hey, that’s not so bad! France could prove to be a real test, but 1997 was long before Belgium had emerged as a football power and Wales, well, Wales were abysmal. In real life both Belgium and Wales failed to qualify for Euro ‘96, the then-most recent major tournament. In fact, Wales finished rock-bottom of their qualifying group, a group that included such indomitable opponents as Albania and Moldova. I’m not particularly worried about the Wales match, is what I’m saying.


Oh good, my first match is against Wales. That should give me a chance to get back into the swing of things. A nice, easy three points to start the group stage should calm the Danish nerves.


Here are the teams, and there are a few things to discuss. The first is that these are not real players. The ISS and Pro Evo games are often lacking official licenses for things like player names and competitions, so you’re provided with sixteen completely-made up players with names that are roughly appropriate for their country of origin. This is different to some of the later ISS games, where they used players that were clearly meant to be existing footballers but attempted to obfuscate their origins via the often hilarious means of giving them slightly altered names. Thus, Ronaldo became Ronarid and Zinedine Zidane was rechristened Ziderm, which was apparently enough to keep the lawyers at bay.
The other things is the parade of emoticons in various states of excitement. It might give the team sheet the appearance of an overexcited Tweet, but these faces represent each player’s condition, and the better their condition the better they’ll play. For example, most of my team has the yellow face that comes with a middling emotional state,  but the striker Laudrup looks like his wife’s just run away with another man and they ran over a puppy on their way out. Normally this means I’d replace him, but all my back-up strikers were miserable too, so Laudrup will just have to fight through his grief. On the other hand, I found a young lad called Pingel on the bench and he’s definitely up for it, so into the first team he goes. Don’t make me regret giving you a chance, Pingel.


Here we go, then, two teams ready to give their all. Wales will be playing in their “it looks like a dinosaur tried to claw through your chest” away kit to avoid a clash. I should point out that the graphical errors, especially the black dots, are an emulation issue. They mostly appear on red-coloured objects, so it’s a good job I chose Denmark.


The game is underway, and the two teams of blocky, polygonal men try to do the same thing they always do: score more goals than the opposition. For once it’s nice to play a game for VGJunk where I already know all the controls, because they’re the same as they always are in the Pro Evo series (and he first thing I do in any FIFA game is change the controls to match the Pro Evo system.) The most important are X for passing to the nearest team-mate you’re facing, square to shoot – the longer you hold the button, the more powerful your shot – and R1 for sprinting. Defending is a matter of getting in the way, and when you’re close you can press X for a standing tackle or circle for a sliding tackle. I like to think of circle as The Foul Button, and it’s very easy to trip a player so that they go rolling away in a comically exaggerated manner. I’m not saying that’s a particularly good strategy, but seeing your opponent hurtling across the ground like a nitrous-injected armadillo does soften the blow of any incoming yellow cards.


The action is smooth, and unlike many football games of the preceding era flowing, passing football is not only possible but highly recommended. It’s not the fastest game of soccer out there, mind you: the most notable factor that slows things down, and is probably the core gameplay’s biggest flaw, is that players can’t perform one-touch passes. You can shoot first time, but players have to take at least one touch before they can pass the ball on and that does make build-up play and counter-attacks noticeably more restrained.
Still, things are going well. Denmark are enjoying much of the possession, and I’m passing the ball around well in a congested midfield.


Bugger. That wasn’t in the script. Wales have dug deep and somehow come up with a goal, a goal that definitely didn’t come about because I was messing around and tried a back-heel pass on the edge of my own area, allowing Wales’ lurking striker Jenkins to steal the ball and slot it home.


Not to worry, I went straight up the other end and scored when a player broke free and unleashed a drive that the keeper could only parry into his own goal, as you can see in this replay. ISS Pro might not let you view a replay whenever you like, but you get one after each goal and the 3D graphics mean you can rotate and manipulate the camera to see the goal from whatever angle you like. It’s a nice touch, and when you concede it allows you to identify which of your defenders were slacking off. Not that I’ve got anyone to replace them with, my subs are all so miserable that you’d think our manager made then watch The Road instead of giving them a team talk.


The goals are flowing now, and Denmark take the lead. A high ball into the box, a mighty leap from the untested youngster Pingel and a header so ferocious it caused the commentator to shout “that boy must have a steel skull!” Straight into the old onion bag, and it’s two-one to Denmark.
ISS Pro is definitely a goal-heavy game, as you will see over the course of this article. The main reason for this is the relatively small size of the pitch, which means it never takes long to get to the opponent’s goal once you’ve gained possession. Strikers are all fairly good at their jobs, at least from close range, and while the AI of the goalkeepers certainly isn’t terrible they do struggle in one-on-one situations.


The match continued to be a real ding-dong affair, with Wales retaking the lead before another equaliser from Denmark and then, right at the death, a scrappy, toe-poked goal that just about gave me a 4-3 win. A real match for the neutral, then, and after only one game I’m remembering why I loved ISS Pro so much: accurate controls, over-the-top animations, an even closer resemblance to real football than in any of its forebears and goals galore.


Pingel has replayed my faith in him in spades. Spades of goals. Great honking shovelfuls of them. Now I’ve just got to hope he stays happy all tournament, because the players’ mood changes between each match.


France are up next, and this shot of Petersen and his luxurious, cubic mane of hair give me a chance to talk about one really good thing and one bad thing about ISS Pro. The good thing is the inclusion of a dedicated through-ball button – that is, a pass that goes into space for a team-mate to run on to rather than a pass that goes directly to feet. An integral part of real football, the through ball was never really captured adequately until this generation of football games, and ISS Pro was one of the first – if not the first – to map the through ball onto a single button and have it work fairly well. It’s a delicate balancing act, because it’d be easy to make the through ball far too powerful a tool by having the player you’re passing too always know exactly where the ball’s going. ISS Pro reigns this in by making defenders good at cutting out wayward through balls, but it’s still an extremely useful tool when the situation is right for it.
On to the bad, and you see how Pingel is standing next to Petersen, staring at his team mate with ill-concealed lust? Yeah, that’s all he’ll do, despite there being space ahead of him. ISS Pro’s player positioning is very rigid, and your CPU-controlled team-mates will often simple refuse to make any kind of move. If you’re the forward and you’ve got the ball, midfielders won’t make runs ahead of you to provide you with a passing option, forcing you to play it backwards and hope they move into a better position. It’s not a game-breaking problem but it can be frustrating, especially when you can see a great opportunity if only someone would make the effort to shift themselves.


After struggling against Wales, France proved to be much more amenable to letting me tackle them, and in the end I ran out a four-nil winner. I think what’s happening is that all that time spent playing ISS Pro is coming back to me, because France surely can’t be worse than Wales. It didn’t help the French cause that their centre-back scythed Pingel down in the area. Pingel got up and put the resulting penalty away. The kid’s got ice in his veins.


My final group stage game was against Belgium, and a scrappy first half meant I went in at the break with a slender one-goal lead. Then I started the second half by lumping the ball into the Belgian area using R2, a button marked as “centering” which you can use to cross balls into the box or, when you’re elsewhere on the pitch, to smash it up field in the preferred manner of League Two defenders up and down the country. The result of this aerial bombardment was that eventually one of the Belgian players was so overcome with ennui that he turned the ball into his own goal in an attempt to feel something. It didn’t make him any happier. I didn't do much for his identical twin brother’s mood, either.


Having topped their group with three wins out of three – Pingel scoring more goals than England managed in the whole of Euro 2016 along the way – Denmark are into the knockout stages of the tournament and a round-of-16 clash against near neighbours Sweden in a battle for Scandinavian bragging rights.


Another disappointing thing about ISS Pro, albeit a very minor one, is that the “away” team always plays in their change kit even if there’s no clash. It just doesn’t seem right to be playing Sweden and Brazil (spoilers: I beat Sweden and then play Brazil) when they’re wearing blue and not their trademark yellow.


 I made the mistake of underestimating Sweden and overestimating how good my players were at slide tackles, and while the referee seemed to have forgotten to bring his cards and was too embarrassed to admit it – although frankly some of the tackles were so heinous they should have the police looking at them rather than a match official – I was punished when Sweden banged in this free kick. I blame the goalkeeper. What kind of positioning is that?! You’re never going to save anything if you’re in a different bloody postcode. It also didn’t help that only 33% of the wall bothered to jump.


I pulled it around in the end, of course, and a ten-goal thriller ended six-four to the Danes. Pingel wrapped things up with another penalty. Kick it low into the bottom-right corner, that’s how I take all my penalties in football games. It always works, except on FIFA when my tendency to play as shit teams means my penalty takers are usually players with the grace and composure of a nervous chihuahua at a fireworks display. If only I could sign Pingel for my current FIFA efforts to get AFC Wimbledon into the Champions League.


My quarter-final opponents were Brazil: then World Champions, home of some of the greatest talents ever to play the game, the most successful team in World Cup history. This could be a real test for the plucky young Danes.


Never mind, they can’t stand up to Denmark’s bruising, physical style of play. Literally can’t stand up, in this poor sod’s case. He appears to be paralysed from the hair down. The referee has yet to issue Denmark with a single yellow card. Ugly rumours of pay-offs and match fixing begin to circulate and the referee’s parentage is called into question by the fans. The match ends 5-1 and Brazil head home, disappointed but relieved that at least they weren’t beaten 7-1 this time. That’s progress, that is.


Notice that the Brazilians have two people marking Pingel so closely that they could read the label on his underpants if they wanted to. Not that it did them any good, mind you.


His name is Pingel, and he’ll make you tingle. A new icon of world football is born. Going by his current international goalscoring rate, Pingel would be worth about £700 million on today’s transfer market.


It’s Denmark versus Italy for a place in the final. Pingel has a sad condition face. Not the “trapped alone in a black void of nothingness” grey face but the slightly more cheery “oh, I dunno, just a case of the Mondays I guess” blue face. Not that it matters: he could have replaced each of his limbs with a single strand of cooked spaghetti and he’d still be the first name on the team sheet.


I finally managed to receive a booking. I’m glad, I was beginning to suspect either the game was broken or it takes place in a lawless post-apocalyptic future where the only rule is to survive. Given the amount of cynical, hacking challenges that were going unpunished, I began to agree with the commentator every time he said “what a prime example of poor officials.”
Ah yes, ISS Pro has a commentator. While this is a very good game for its time and one that I’m tremendously fond of and am still having fun playing now, I’m only half-joking when I say the commentator is my favourite thing about the game. He is ridiculously over the top, his mood takes huge swings from second to second and occasionally he lapses into complete nonsense. Here, I put together a little video of some of his highlight.


I can’t adequately express just how much I love this commentary. It’s so incredibly dumb, yet utterly unforgettable, the football equivalent of NBA Jam’s famous announcer. Between me and my friend / football game co-op partner, some of his lines have entered that in-jokey lexicon that friends have, particularly his cries of “keeper fumbles” and “goal, goal, SUPER GOAL!” but I think my favourite will always be “SCORCHIO!” Presumably that’s a reference to this sketch from The Fast Show, of all things. Then there’s his varied reading of each country’s name, each one dripping with a different emotion but all of them completely detached from the surrounding sentence. He says “France” like a man struggling to stay awake but his pronunciation of “Mexico” is dense with condescension and “Uruguay” fills him with a sort of rueful amusement. Best of all, as mentioned here, “Nigeria” is said by a completely different person. Incredible.


As the scoreline reaches seven-nil, I’m beginning to regret not playing ISS Pro on the higher difficulty setting. I’m making it look easier than it really is, thanks to squandering several years of my childhood mastering its intricacies, but it’s still not a very difficult game. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s very easy to waste time, so if you get the lead and decide to simply keep possession and knock it around amongst your defenders there’s very little the CPU team can do about it.


With Italy brushed aside as easily as one might sweep the laundry from the exercise bike you swore you were going to use every day, Denmark have reached the final. Their opponents: Germany. Of course it’s Germany. I’m going to make damn sure this one doesn’t go to penalties, I’ll tell you that much. Fortunately, the Danish team are all in good spirits, so I’ll be playing an attacking 3-4-3 formation with Pingel at the point of the attack. He’s a goal machine, nothing can stop him, although if I’m going to be completely honest whichever player I’d played as the main striker would have ended up scoring all the goals.


An early goal from the oft-overlooked Rasmusse settles the nerves, sending a delightful chipped shot over the German keeper and into the far side of the net. I say Rasmusse is overlooked because he can’t compete with Pingel, but I’m also biased against him because his name reminds me of this song, which was completely inescapable for a while and in turn reminds me of drinking dangerously cheap vodka.


As they always do, the Germans put up some staunch resistance… for a while, at least, but it was all clicking for me and I was having a lot of fun. It’s fair to say that ISS Pro is a very transitional game, a mid-way point between the less involved, sprite-based games of the 8 and 16-bit generations and today’s accurate-as-you-like soccer sims, and it has its flaws, but those flaws do not stop it being very good fun. Once you’re locked into the game's mindset, and you’ve learned what you can and can’t do within the confines of the game engine, it becomes a fast-past, high-action football game that was a step ahead of anything else at the time and… well, I keep just wanting to use the word “fun,” but that’s what it is. A ray of sports sunshine, narrated by a madman.


At the final whistle, Denmark had racked up a score of eight goals to three. The performance was wrapped up, appropriately enough, by Pingel smashing one into the top corner from outside the area. That puts him on about thirty goals for the tournament. If there isn’t a small army of drug testers waiting for him in the locker room, then the anti-doping bodies are not doing their jobs.


That’s it, the tournament is over and Denmark are crowned champions before their adoring fans. Only the first eleven players step up to claim the trophy. That means Pingel, who is still technically a substitute, is not involved in the trophy-lifting ceremony. Never have I seen anything so shockingly unfair in a videogame.


The credits roll, and ISS Pro draws to a close with the promise that they’ll see us again in France. This refers to the 1998 World Cup, which was held in France. Denmark made it to the quarter-finals of that tournament, where they were defeated by Brazil. I think we all know why they didn’t go any further. Starts with P, ends with "ingel."


Its flaws range from big ones, like players being unwilling to move when you’re on the attack and most teams being very similar in terms of ability, to smaller things like not being able to change the length of matches outside the friendly mode, but International Superstar Soccer Pro was a great game in 1997 and is still an enjoyable kickabout even today. FIFA may have grown ever more realistic and all-encompassing, but sometimes it’s nice to take a break from that relentless need to be perfect, to escape from FIFA’s utterly po-faced seriousness, and enjoy some (relatively) simple footballing action. That’s something ISS Pro delivers by the bucket-load, and while it’s not something that I’d recommend to a total non-football fan (and if that’s you, then thanks for making your way through this article) but for quick, no-fuss action, especially against or even in cooperation with a friend, it’s difficult to think of a retro football game I’d rather play. ISS 64, maybe. Oh, or the GameCube version of ISS 2. It’s a good series, that’s what I’m getting at here. Now I’ve just got to get the commentator shouting “Scorchio!” set as my phone’s ringtone.

We all know that not every game can huge triple-A blockbuster, and nor should they be. There are countless smaller games, weird games, perhaps not the most commercially viable games, and many of these game that might otherwise have never made it out of Japan have been published by the Italian company 505 Game Street, or 505 Games as I believe they’re called these days. So, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against 505 Games. They’ve published some good, interesting titles. However, one thing they weren’t great at in the PS2 era was cover art, and that’s what today’s article is about: some of the times that 505 Games tried to create striking, eye-catching cover art for their PS2 games, only to discover their artists had access to nothing but stock photos and Microsoft Word Art. As the Marquis de Sade probably said at some point, let’s start with the weird sex stuff and see where we go from there.


At first you might think this is just a poorly-composed image but no, Demolition Girl really is about a giant girl in a bikini. Like many of 505’s PS2 games, Demolition Girl was originally part of the Simple 2000 series of Japanese budget games. The original title is The Daibijin, or The Giant Beauty. A bold decision for a developer to base a game around their extremely specific sexual kink, but it’s that spirit of experimentalism that keeps videogames interesting.
As for the cover itself, the Demolition Girl seems to be staring at the Seattle Space Needle, prompting me into much frenzied typing as I attempt to pen a new episode of Frasier where Frasier and Niles argue about the best way to provide psychological counselling to a hundred-foot tall woman. “With a bloody massive megaphone” is the solution I had in mind. There’s also some scenes of mild farce when Fraiser’s famous view of the Seattle skyline is blocked by an enormous boob.



Continuing with the theme of “games I wish I didn’t have in my internet search history,” it’s Fighting Angels. This is another Simple 2000 game, originally called The Catfight: Catwoman Legend. Yeah. It’s a bikini mud-wrestling sim, essentially. However, unlike in Demolition Girl the combatants aren’t giants, so I have no idea why this cover depicts them as though they’re over twice as tall as a streetlight. Maybe they’re the terrifying, otherworldly angels described in the Bible. That’s why their in silhouette, it’s so you can’t see that their bodies are entirely covered in all-seeing eyes.



Oh, sexy ping pong, is it? Sure, why not. And nothing’s sexier than wearing a giant girdle, as demonstrated by the girl on the right. I’m going to guess all the girls in this game have back problems, so every one of them will be wearing a girdle eventually. My favourite’s the one on the left, purely because she’s the only one of the three who looks like she’s enjoying the idea of playing sexy ping pong, just as soon as she’s finished participating in a sexy motorcycle race. No, wait, she reminds me of Kamen Rider. It’s the scarf. Zip her up, slap on a helmet shaped like a grasshopper’s face and bingo, yet another addition to the vast Kamen Rider universe is ready for action.



Something completely different now, and a game with a title clearly chosen at the last minute when the lawyers informed the artists that the name “Taxi Driver” was already taken. At least, I assume you play as the taxi driver and not a passenger. That would be one crazy taxi game. That name is also taken. You might think I’d be regretting my decision to write about these covers when presented with something as boring as this, but I’m too annoyed that the words of the title aren’t lined up to be bored. Then I get trapped in a weirdly philosophical mental void as I realise that this is a real taxi, driven by a real person, who’s probably still out there in the world with no idea that their cab was used as artwork for a low-budget PS2 game.



Dodgeball? I don’t know about that, but I’d definitely want to dodge these freaks. What’s going on with the guy at the front? He’s so packed with burning dodgeball spirit that his head appears to have exploded. Maybe that will distract him from the misery of having no neck. The more I look at him, the more he reminds me of a bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg Sonic the Hedgehog character. I think it’s the eyes. Get back to your DeviantArt page, you boggle-eyed weirdo.



Yes indeed, now you can experience the thrilling life of one of the world’s most hated professions with Paparazzi, from the same studio that brought you Extreme Estate Agents and Traffic Warden Simulator! I have to take issue with the name Paparazzi, mind you. These are clearly ghost hunters, trying to capture photographic evidence of the white ectoplasmic clouds that surround them. Also, the game’s not about being a paparazzo, it’s about taking pictures of (you guessed it) creepy polygonal girls in swimsuits. That’s why I feel sorry for the bloke in the middle: everyone else has managed to keep their faces covered up, but he might be recognised as the face of Blocky Cheesecake Photographer. I admit that is a very unlikely scenario, but I wouldn’t want to take that risk.



Street Boyz, Street Boyz, what you gonna do when they come for you? Probably turn off my PS2 and play something else, if I’m honest. Then maybe give them a slap for spelling “boys” with a Z. With the white tile background, I can only see this as the wall of a public toilet. The boys are standing back, admiring the graffiti they’ve just scrawled above the urinal trough. Now anyone who’s caught short during a shopping trip will know not to mess with the Street Boyz.



Yeah, I’d be pretty furious if I bought a gun and it used pirate dubloons as ammunition. On the other hand, if you are a hired killer then leaving your victims looking as though they were killed after hitting the jackpot on a novelty slot machine would make for a unique calling card. At least it’s nice to see Ada Wong getting some modelling work in between the Resident Evil games.



I think reducing the life of a soccer player to money, celebrity and fun is a little narrow, don’t you? What about the hours of rigorous training, the knowledge that you’re always one bad tackle away from the premature end of your career, or being depicted as an arrogant, out-of-touch primadonna by the media even as the same media holds you up as a role model for children? The player on this cover may appear outwardly happy, but inside he’s being torn apart, wondering whether his girlfriend would still love him if he worked in a chip shop. On a technical note, it seems like an odd compositional choice to have the player and his partner staring at a giant footballer’s knees with a look of unrestrained glee on their faces. I mean, as knees go they look okay but they hardly seem worthy of that kind of emotional response.



The sports theme continues with Street Golfer, and a cover where an angry man appears to be trying to smash the game’s title with a golf club. Maybe he’s trying to play a round on the M25 and he doesn’t want the floating title drawing attention to his no-doubt illegal golfing activities. Nice work on the “fake Street Fighter logo” look there, 505.



Space Basketball teases the player with thoughts of some kind of jam in space, although you’d be hard-pressed to make the space connection just by looking at this cover. The perfect opportunity to have a picture of someone slamming a ball through the rings of Saturn and it’s utterly wasted. For shame.



Fitness Fun, says the title. It lies. Fitness isn’t fun. Shovelling doughnuts into your face during a 30 Rock marathon, now that’s fun, but not fitness. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this game probably isn’t much fun either. Oh, just call it a hunch. You definitely won’t have as much fun with it as the model on this cover seems to be having as she tones her biceps, because look at her – she seems to have reached a state of transcendental bliss just by lifting a single dumbbell. God knows what’ll happen to her once she gets on the rowing machine. Three strokes and she’ll probably achieve nirvana, freeing herself from the cycle of death and rebirth and attaining a purity of thought that can only come with rock-hard abdominal muscles.
Also, that typography: if it doesn’t also appear on a cheap kid’s skipping rope from Poundland, I will be amazed.



“For the love of God, Montresor!”
“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”



If nothing else, this article is really driving home the importance of good font choices to graphic design. Other than the “hastily photoshopped disc art from a bootleg DVD of The Expendables” title, this isn’t that bad a cover, I suppose. The shark looks suitably menacing, although it might have been better if the shark on the Deep Water cover was in, you know, deep water. This particular terror of the deep looks as though it’s in danger of beaching itself. I hope the old saw about sharks not being able to develop cancer is true, because Jaws here is catching some serious rays.



The only katana action this guy has ever seen is buying a $20 sword from a flea market and uploading footage of himself hacking through milk cartons to YouTube. It’s impressive just how lank and greasy the artist managed to make his hair look, too. Forget katana action, you need the medicated action of a good anti-dandruff shampoo, pal.



Power Fighters, huh? Okay, let’s see. Going clockwise from the top-left, it’s The Silver Spanker, Nurse With A Stick, The Silver Spanker: Black Edition, A Guy From Voltron and Mistress Domina The Rubber Goddess.


Are you allowed to just grab a screencap of a Pringles commercial and use it as your videogame’s cover art? It feels like there should be rules against that. Look at them, with their smiles and their youthful energy, it’s disgusting. Okay, sure, the guy at the front’s happy expression could also quite easily be the grimace of a man trying to pass a whole pineapple through his digestive tract, and the lady behind him has slipped past exuberance and into full-on rage, but I’m sure they’re suppose to exude the appearance of fun times. Here’s my theory about this cover, though: the title is placed where it is in order to cover up the control pads being used. You can see a bit of one of them and they’re grey, so they’re either PS1 or N64 controllers. Or a Japanese Sega Saturn pad, but that seems very unlikely. I've know a couple of people who were hardcore into importing Saturn games, and they were nowhere near as friendly and well adjusted as these people.



I’ll be honest, I did do a Beavis and Butt-Head style “uh huh huh” when I read the word “buzzrod.” Well, the game is called FishingFantasy. If you want your marital aids to be shaped like a small-mouth bass, that’s your look-out. Again, this really isn’t that bad of a cover. The mechanical fish means you can pretend you’re playing a Darius spin-off, and even the logo isn’t as objectionable as some of the other entries on this list. That’s probably because 505 didn’t change the artwork from the original Japanese release, only flipping around the title from BuzzRod: Fishing Fantasy to Fishing Fantasy: BuzzRod. Presumably they did this because they didn’t want people laughing at the word BuzzRod, although I can’t imagine who’d be immature enough to do that.



So, would you say the guy on the right is cowering, cringing or flinching? I’m going with cowering. Whatever he’s doing, he does not look confident in his ability to guard against this incoming flying kick, does he? Someone’s sifu has not adequately prepared him for flying kicks. I’ve seen kung fu movies, I assumed that’s the first thing you learn. Day one: blocking flying kicks, day two: flapping your arms about in a suitably dramatic fashion, day three: battering people with small wooden benches.


Finally, here’s a genuinely unpleasant-looking zombie, a mouldering abomination hauling itself from the grave - the reanimated corpse of Nosferatu, if those teeth are any indication. It’s got a look of decomposing plastic to it, so here’s what I’m thinking: it’s actually a Halloween decoration that’s come to life. My next thought is why has there never been a horror movie about Halloween decorations coming to life and attacking people? Sure, there’s the deadly masks inHalloween III, and that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where everyone turns into their costumes, but as far as I’m aware Night of the Living Tat is not a real movie. If I’m wrong, please let me know. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than a film where an inflatable pumpkin kills someone by forcing itself down their trachea. Was this entire article simply an elaborate ruse to gather information on movies about killer Halloween decorations? Yes. Yes it was.

Here’s the title screen. It’s certainly a title screen. A screen with a title on it. That title is Ninja Gaiden Shadow, the title of this game. Bonus points for being concise, Tecmo.



Set three years before the events of the NES Ninja Gaiden, NGS begins in traditional Ninja Gaiden style with a cinematic cut-scene, or at least as cinematic as the Game Boy can handle. A villainous force has risen in New York, and I don’t mean Vigo the Carpathian: It’s Garuda, a dark overlord with the kind of incredibly vague but definitely evil plan you often get with videogame antagonists. He tells us “my power is the fear of mankind,” whatever that means. Maybe his muscles get bigger every time he jumps out in front of someone and shouts “boo!”


There’s despair in the skyscraper. Full of people in tedious cubicle farm jobs, is it?


A man appears from the darkness. Well, he is a ninja. That’s how ninjas are supposed to work.


That makes sense. This is a Ninja Gaiden game, after all. I wasn’t expecting Bob Ross, put it that way. So here he is, Ryu Hayabusa, one of gaming’s most famous ninjas – which is odd, because after the NES Ninja Gaiden games he disappeared for a while before returning on the Xbox in 2004. I guess Ryu is just so cool that people couldn’t forget him. I know I can’t– childhood years spent being unable to beat the NES Ninja Gaiden have seen to that - which is why I always play as him in Warriors Orochi 3. That, and you can replace his sword with a baseball bat.


The action begins with Ryu outside the despair-filled skyscraper, fighting his way through legions of American football players who can command these mounted rocket turrets to discharge their deadly payload at Ryu. That’s what the enemies look like they’re doing, anyway, as they perform their little hand motions. That said, the turrets are happy to fire at Ryu without any input from their comrades, so maybe the footballer players are just making the hand signals for whatever gridiron play they want to do next. That’s a thing that happens in American football, right?


As I saw this scene, with Ryu caught between the moon and New York City, I immediately thought of the song “The Best That You Can Do” by Christopher Cross. You know, the theme from the movie Arthur. Except the weird thing is that I did know – I remembered most of the lyrics and everything – and that’s strange because I’m sure I’ve only heard that song in passing a handful of times and I’ve never seen the movie it comes from. The other day I forgot the area code for my phone number, but this sing is wedged firmly in the old memory banks. How do these things happen? Has someone been piping soft-rock movie themes into my room while I sleep? Here’s my review of “The Best That You Can Do:” super cheesy, rocking saxophone solo, I kind of love it. Obviously I had to listen to it on YouTube to make sure I had remembered the lyrics right, but I left YouTube open, forgetting that it automatically moves on to the next video. I came back an hour later to find all my recommended videos are now tracks by Foreigner and Phil Collins. These are the sacrifices I make to run VGJunk.


Ryu moves into the under-construction parts of the skyscraper – nobody having any windows in their office is probably contributing to all the despair – and hangs from a beam while he waits for that bad guy to make his move. You’ll be hanging from beams a lot in this game. The gameplay is extremely similar to the NES Ninja Gaiden games, with a lot of running around and slashing with the short-range horizontal attacks of your sword. However, things have been scaled back for this Game Boy iteration, and the most obvious casualty is Ryu’s ability to cling to walls. Yes, sadly Ryu can’t hang from or climb up vertical surfaces in this game. No wall-jumping here, then, but the ability to hang from beams – and the gameplay challenges that are based around this mechanic – make up for the loss somewhat. The other thing is that Ryu’s arsenal of ninja magic (his subweapons, basically) have been reduced to just one: the fire wheel, which launches a circle of fire along an upwards diagonal in whichever direction Ryu is facing. The fire wheels are powered by the collectibles you can find by smashing open crystal balls dotted through the stages, and the fire wheels are extremely useful (if not mandatory) in the later stages, so make sure you grab as many as Ryu can fit into his ninja backpack. No, you can’t see Ryu’s ninja backpack. Of course you can't, it’s a ninja backpack.


It doesn’t take long to reach the first boss, a mechanical menace that crawls around on the floor as though it’s searching for a lost contact lens. That’s why Ryu’s on tiptoes in the screenshot above, he doesn’t want to tread on it.


The boss can also scuttle around on the ceiling. His contact lens is unlikely to be up there. I tried to encourage him back to Earth with a couple of fire wheels, but the boss would not be hurried. He’ll fall back down in his own time. In fact, that’s all he’ll do, and the boss’ only attack is to try and fall on Ryu’s head. It sounds kinda lame, and admittedly it doesn’t make for the most exciting boss battle ever, but when you weigh half a ton gravity becomes a perfectly acceptable murder weapon. Still, as long as Ryu keeps moving and gets his hits in when the opportunity arises, you should have no trouble beating the boss.


Your reward for doing so is a brief scene showing Ryu slicing the boss into strips (Nanto Suicho Ken style, for the three of you that might get that reference.) It’s a fun interlude because a) you get to see Ryu being a badass, something that doesn’t always come across in the gameplay and b) you get a more detailed look at the boss you just fought. I mean, you don’t in this instance because I chose the “please help I fell in a very large paper shredder” screenshot, but you get the idea.


I would be filled with despair if I lived in a skyscraper built from gravel, yes. I’m beginning to suspect this isn’t a high-rise at all. Where the stages in the NES Ninja Gaidens (especially the first one) were mostly horizontal, Ninja Gaiden Shadow has a lot more vertically-oriented sections. The result of this is that it almost feels like a Mega Man game in terms of level design. The developers have done an excellent job of cramming the NES game’s action into the Game Boy, and while there are some concessions – Ryu moves a little slower and there’s the aforementioned lack of some of his ninja skills – this feel one hundred percent like a “real” Ninja Gaiden game.


Part of the reason for this is that the game was actually scaled down for the smaller screen rather than simply forcing NES-sized sprites into a system that couldn’t really handle them. You can see by the comparison above that Game Boy Ryu is a few pixels smaller than NES Ryu while still looking very much like Ryu Hayabusa, meaning he’s got more room to move around the screen. I probably wouldn’t have noticed this had I not been watching the excellent Game Boy World series of videos, which you should absolutely watch if you want to hear someone who knows what they’re talking about discuss Game Boy games.


Ryu has one final and very important tool at his disposal – a grappling hook. It can only be fired straight upwards and will only connect to ceilings and platforms that Ryu can hang from, so there’s no Bionic Commando-style swinging antics, but it’s incorporated nicely into a few puzzle-ish sections. It’s not as fun as being able to climb on walls, but I’ll take it.


The grappling hook sometimes allows you to reach places you might not otherwise be able to explore. Usually there are power-ups in these hard-to-reach spots, but in this instance I appear to have found a Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate. Each Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate comes complete with 9-carat gold trim and a hand-calligraphed message on the reverse that captures the famous moment when Ryu wondered with whom his father had a duel and lost. Available now for only $99.95, stocks are limited!


There’s a new enemy type in stage two: these large chaps with shields. If they’ve got their shield up, there’s very little you can do to hurt them, and at first I had some trouble getting past them. Getting past them without just running through them and losing some health, I mean. The trick is to turn your back on them, at which point they drop their shields and walk towards you as though they think Ryu has simply gone into a sulk and they want to to reconcile with him. Then you can quickly turn around and stab them while they’re not defending themselves. That’s the real ninja magic right there.


Here are the bosses of stage two, a large man and a much smaller man joining forces to create a boss fight with echoes of the Frankenstein battle from the original Castlevania. Big Man tries to shoulder-barge Ryu, while Small Man cartwheels around the room in a desperate attempt to receive the attention he was denied as a child. Not an especially memorable fight, this one, and the key to success is staying out of the bosses’ way and not being too greedy when you get the chance to land a few hits.


Given the original Ninja Gaiden’s reputation for brutal difficulty, I was surprised by how easily I sailed through the first two stages… but then I remembered the NES version doesn’t really get going until stage three, and the same is true of Ninja Gaiden Shadow. It’s difficult in a slightly different way – the lesser focus on jumping over bottomless pits meant far fewer deaths caused by being knocked into said pits by belligerent birds – but here’s where NGS starts ramping up the difficulty. Rotating jets of fire demand accurate movement, and the enemies are more densely packed and fiendishly placed. The saving grace is that there’s no time limit, so you can calmly survey the scene and plan your route before charging into the fray. This is also a very short game, and while there are no passwords the stages are small enough that once you’ve mastered them you can blast through them in no time.


Yes, it’s definitely easier than the NES games. I know this because not once did I fall down a hole during this stage, despite not being able to cling onto walls. NGS is very forgiving when it comes to horizontal jumps, to the point that sometimes you’ll swear you’ve cocked up your jump and are about to experience five hundred acupuncture sessions all at once, only to somehow pop onto the platform you were aiming for.


As the spiked ceiling comes crashing down, I regret making Ryu stop to pick up another Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate. I don’t know what I was thinking. What am I going to do with two Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plates? That’s just an extra thing to hide when people whose opinions I care about come to my house.


This stage’s boss is a man with a gun. A very heavy gun, apparently: he can’t lift it any higher than a thirty degree angle, which means he spends the entire fight shooting the floor a few feet in front of him. If he’d invested in a tripod then this boss fight would have ended up looking Murphy’s death scene in RoboCop, but as it stands Ryu simply has to keep his distance. That’s where the problems start, because Ryu’s fabled Dragon Sword is not all that long, and it’s difficult to get close to the boss while he’s spraying bullets all over his feet like a drunk at a urinal. Once again it’s a matter of patience – a vital ninja skill – as you wait for a break in his attacks. That, or you can try to get behind him and stab him in the back. That’s also a vital ninja skill.


Stage four’s most fearsome foes are these ceiling-dwelling ninjas who can put out a prodigious amount of shurikens. For some reason, Ryu cannot deflect these shurikens with his sword. What kind of a ninja can’t deflect shurikens with their sword!? Yet another example of supposedly mighty  videogame ninjas not actually being very good at ninjitsu. Would it have killed Ryu to lean a move where he stabs downwards while jumping, for instance? I could have gotten a lot of mileage out of that.


Halfway through the stage there’s a fun section where the lights intermittently turn on and off. Makes sense to me, evil overlords probably don’t have “get a full check of the electrical system” at the top of their list when they’re building an evil skyscraper. The gimmick of the dark sections is that occasionally a honking great laser beam will appear, but the laser beam can’t pass through platforms. Thus, Ryu must remember where the platforms are during the brief illuminated sections and then use them as cover when things go dark. It’s a well-implemented section, to the point that I was disappointed it didn’t last longer


Not quite as much fun, owing to me not performing well under pressure as much in videogames as in real life, was this area where Ryu must climb up through a cavern while being pursued by a rising  tide of lava. Please understand that limitations of the Game Boy’s graphics means that in this case “lava” is simply a placeholder and the deadly liquid could equally be scalding hot chocolate or untreated sewage. Whatever it is, here you can see Ryu about to engulfed by it thanks to me having trouble grappling up the ledges quickly enough. This is not a fault of the game, by the way, just me.


Hang on, this game isn’t taking place in a skyscraper at all! Not unless it’s one of those floating naval skyscrapers, because that’s definitely a ship moored in the background. I feel like I’ve been lied to. Yes, okay, this explains the rising “lava” and walls made of rocks, but still. The title “Ninja’s Skyscraper Fight” is looking pretty embarrassing now, guys.
Oh right, the boss. It’s a flying man with wontons for legs. I think he’s supposed to be an ancient nobleman of some kind, although there’s nothing noble about hanging around the dockyards and throwing things at passers-by. All of the bosses in NGS are heavily pattern-based, but this one in particular feels very constrained by the tactics he’s chosen. Move to the far side of the screen to avoid his shurikens, moving to the other side when he floats above you. When he lands, duck under the fan the throws, stab him a few times and then jump over the returning fan. If you can get this pattern down, you’ll be able to beat him without taking any damage. Naturally I got a bit over-exuberant and ran face-first into his throwin’ fan a couple of times, but that’s why I’m not a ninja.


The fifth and final stage now, where the difficulty is ramped up to maximum and NGS takes its first step over the line from “challenging” to “annoying” with these perpetual flamethrowers. They just keep burning and burning, the evil overlord apparently having hooked them directly to a Russian gas pipeline. Normally the advice to fight fire with fire is not to be taken literally – the other fire will beat you with experience – but in this case it’s a totally valid strategy and Ryu’s fire wheel special will get the job done. I hope you’ve collected plenty of them, because by god you’ll need them.


Flamethrowers aside it’s a fun stage, with plenty of challenge and lots of accurate, well-timed movements and attacks required to progress. This is true of Ninja Gaiden Shadow as a whole, and while it’s not quite up to the standards of its NES forebears, Tecmo and Natsume have done just about the best possible job in getting Ninja Gaiden onto the Game Boy mostly intact. It’s a system where action games can suffer, but not in this instance.


At the end of the stage waits Garuda himself, another flying villain with a propensity for airborne attacks. In this case it’s lightning, for the full “evil emperor” experience. Again, he seems to have trouble getting his death-ray right into the corner of the screen, so use that to your advantage. I mock, but the lighting effect looks neat and somehow the Game Boy’s sound chip manages to make it sound dangerous. As always in these situations, for no obvious reason the boss will fly down to street level so you can hit him. He’s simply feeling generous, I suppose.


Okay, now I get it: he just wanted me to do him enough damage so he could transform into a Gundam. A cunning plan to be sure: Ryu was definitely doing better against the lightning. Garuda V. 2 only has one attack, and it’s as rigid a pattern as all the other bosses, but it’s a real pain in the arse to avoid. He spawns three projectiles that hover around for a few seconds before flying towards Ryu. They always come at you in the order middle, bottom, top, so dodging them is as simple as ducking the first and then jumping over the low one but under the high one. It’s simple in theory, anyway, but in practise you’ve got a very narrow window to avoid the attack, plus Garudabot 5000 is zipping around the screen and getting in your way. A tough final boss was always to be expected in a Ninja Gaiden game, though, so it doesn’t feel unduly punishing (and at least it’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.)


I got there in the end, though. It turns out Garuda’s biggest weakness was swords. Who knew! The artist here as done a very good job of capturing the surprised expression of a wizard who transformed into a robot, only to be defeated by a man with a bit of sharpened metal.


Skyscraper my arse, that’s clearly one of Bowser’s castles.
As Ryu strides into the sunset (the castle crumbling behind him as they always do, because villains use their own soul for the foundations) I’m left to reflect on what is really a miniature triumph. Ninja Gaiden Shadow might not be the best in the series – partly because it’s a really good series – but it’s one of the best all-out action games on the Game Boy. The developers took the limitations of the hardware into consideration and produced something that might run a little more slowly and be lacking some ninja techniques but which absolutely deserves to be part of the series. It's well-presented, too, with mini cutscenes, crisp, easily readable graphics and an excellent soundtrack. Like Danny DeVito swimming through treacle, it’s short but sweet, and I’d give it my top ninja recommendation of five shurikens out of five. No, wait four and a half shurikens. It loses half a point because Ryu can’t knock shurikens out of the air with his sword. He must have been pulling a sickie when they covered that at Ninja Tech.