It’s time for a bit of glamour here at VGJunk. Sunny Beverly Hills, high-end plastic surgeons, Playboy models – they all feature in today’s article, an article about an action game that made the bold decision to contain as little action as possible. Brought to the Playstation in 2001 by the Shanghai branch of Ubisoft, it’s the all-expenses spared cheesefest VIP!


You might recognise the lady with the gun as former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. Or you might not, I don’t know how old you are. Is Pamela Anderson still famous? I’m not sure, I don’t keep up with these things. I get the impression that she’s not famous enough to land a starring role in a television series these days, but back in the heady days of 1998 Pamela Anderson was enough of a draw to get her own starring vehicle in the form of VIP. That’s right, today’s game is a licensed title is based on an America action-comedy show starring Pamela Anderson and a bunch of other people you’ve never heard of. I’d say the odds on this one being a lost classic are fairly low.
Now, I’ve never seen an episode of VIP, so I’ve had to get my information about the show from the internet. This was one of the increasingly rare occasions that looking for said info didn’t immediately send me to a vast and comprehensive wiki on the subject, so this might not be 100% accurate. From what I can tell, VIP is the story of Vallery Irons, portrayed by Anderson in a way that plays up her ditzy blonde image. Vallery accidentally saves a famous person’s life, and is then hired by an agency of bodyguards to the rich and famous to act as the public figurehead of the company as a publicity stunt. Potential clients are lured in by the charms of Vallery Irons Protection – hey, that’s where the name of the show comes from! - while a team of professionals do the actual work. However, despite being a klutz Vallery always manages to save the day herself. She’s basically Inspector Gadget, except only one part of her body has been surgically enhanced. And speaking of plastic surgeons, that’s a good introduction to the game itself. Segue-mobile, away!


This disturbing lump of turn-of-the-century CGI is Dr. Kindle, a plastic surgeon who loves plastic surgery so much he’s crafted his own hair out of plastic. Those aren’t sunglasses, they’re the result of a twisted experiment to give people the eyes of the common housefly. Dr. Kindle has a problem, and it’s not just that he owns the world’s ugliest mobile phone: a small army of hired killers is storming his house. Naturally, there’s only one place that he can turn to for help.


Yes, this looks like a job for the VIP team! Thankfully, the CGI work is much better on Vallery than the good doctor, and I’d say that’s a fair likeness of Pamela Anderson. The face might be right but the voice isn’t, however, and none of the show’s cast performs any voice acting in the game. Instead, Vallery sounds a bit like Malibu Stacy from that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa designs her own talking doll. That won’t stop Vallery Irons, though, and she’s straight over to Dr. Kindle’s mansion to save him.


Okay, here we go. Vallery’s ready for action, and she’s not going to let some bloke in a suit stop her. Combat is joined, but how is this going to work? Like a side-scrolling beat-em-up? Or maybe a God of War type - square for light attack, triangle for heavy attack, that kind of thing?


Ha ha, oh, you poor fool. If that was the case, VIP might have turned out to be mildly interesting, and Ubisoft weren’t about to allow that to happen. You beat up the bad guys, sure, but Vallery’s attacks are performed by inputting the short button sequence that appears in the middle of the screen. That’s right, it’s a rhythm-action game with no rhythm. Imagine Parappa the Rapper without any music or fun or charm. Kick, punch, it’s all in the sequential tapping of buttons.


Enter the sequence correctly, and quickly enough, and Vallery will attack. In this case, she’s bashing the guy with her handbag because, erm, she’s a lady? I have no idea. I know she’s got guns knocking around the VIP office, but she neglected to bring one and instead pummels her way through the villains. I can’t fault her confidence, that’s for sure. Fail the sequence and the enemies will either move closer or attack, but that’s not likely to happen when all you need to press is down and then X.


Have created a small pile of unconscious men with the Louis Vuitton logo forever imprinted onto their skulls, Vallery runs to the next scene. The animators have done an incredible job of capturing the awkward, stilted jog of someone wearing a skin-tight dress and six-inch heels. I don’t think it was intentional. Everyone in the game runs like that.


What’s this? Another, completely different style of gameplay? You’re veering dangerously towards “collection of minigames” territory, VIP. This time it’s a crosshair shooter, and while Vallery sensibly hides behind a gatepost, her team-mate Nikki stands right out in the open and shoots the bad guys from three feet away. This one works pretty much as you’d expect - you put the crosshair over the enemy and press fire. If they don’t fall down, press fire a couple more times. You get different amounts of points depending on where you shoot them. Turning a man’s kneecap into shattered bone soup with a lead garnish is worth only a quarter of the points you get for shooting him in the face, for example. The hitboxes are a little strange, in that any shot where a part of an enemy is inside the green reticule counts as a hit, making the aiming feel loose and overly-generous. Time Crisis it ain’t, but so long as you remember to reload it’s, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for? Functional, that’s it. Let’s not go crazy, though. It definitely doesn’t put the “fun” in “functional.”


Oh good, we’re back to the hand-to-hand combat. Get used to seeing it, because it makes up about seventy-five percent of i’s gameplay. That’s a shame, because it’s extremely tedious. It’s just so slow, that’s the problem. You have to stand around and wait for the enemies to come to you before you can input the buttons. Then, when you have hit the enemies and knocked them to the ground, you have to stand around again and wait for them to stand up and come in for another try. For every second or so that you spend actually inputting the commands, there are at least ten seconds where you’re doing nothing. Ninety percent of the fighting segments are waiting, and tapping out combinations of buttons is most certainly not interesting enough to be worth the wait. Apart from requiring more buttons to be pressed later in the game, nothing about the combat ever changes, either. It’s the same sequences to activate the same canned animations over and over again, against numbers of enemies so over-inflated they don’t so much bog down the game as tie breezeblocks to its ankles and throw it into a swamp. There are some very minor quirks to the fighting system, though. One is that if you do really badly, eventually the game will start offering single-button commands to help you get out of danger. Sometimes commands come right after each other, and if you’re quick enough you can string two attacks together in a vain effort to speed things along. However, if you are quick at inputting the commands you actually get fewer points, because attacking just before the timer runs out nets you a “counter” bonus. Of course, you can’t see the timer, so getting counters amounts to nothing but blind luck.


The stage ends with Nikki threatening the mansion’s door at gunpoint. The door remains tight-lipped, so Nikki kicks it down. That’ll teach it.


The search for Dr. Kindle continues inside, with plenty more of the already-tired fighting “action” to wade through. This time it’s Nikki’s turn to put the tensile strength of her leather trousers to the test. The different characters do have different animations, which I suppose is something. Not something especially good or interesting, but something.


Vallery bravely fights on, despite losing her left arm from the elbow down. She’s a real trouper, this one. She’s clinging onto that handbag with the grim determination of someone who will do absolutely anything to protect her client, apart from swapping her bag for a billyclub or something.


It turns out the doctor was hiding in a cupboard. Judging by his still very unpleasant-to-look-at face, I suspect this is something he does a lot. You know, when the villagers storm his house with pitchforks and burning torches. He looks like a creature given life after being formed from clay, a golem created by an artistically challenged Rabbi who’s only reference picture was of Gordon Ramsey.


Our heroes attempt to flee, but there’s a shocking twist: a Jesuit priest has taken up a sniping position and he has them in his sights!


This leads to an astonishingly dull sequence in which Vallery runs away while Monsignor Assassino takes pot-shots at her. Never for a second imagining that the player might want to have direct control over their character, Ubisoft instead made this a section where you have to tap left or right every now and then so that Vallery can use her incredible precognitive powers to dodge the bullets before they’re fired. It’s so insultingly simple that you’ll have no trouble clearing it unless staring at Dr. Kindle’s face has sent you blind, and the sniper faces a long trip back to the Vatican to inform the Pope of his failure. I think we’ve got real potential for a VIP / The da Vinci Code crossover here. Potential for it to be the worst form of entertainment ever conceived by human minds, I mean.


The VIP team are a target now, and as their headquarters are attacked by the villains, control switches to Tasha as she attempts to sneak away. That’s Tasha in the screenshot above, demonstrating why you should never run on wet linoleum. The “escape” segment consists of the worst “stealth” gameplay I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across, which is saying something considering the amount of times I’ve complained about enforced stealth sections in modern games. It takes the brain-dead simplicity of the “avoid the sniper” scene and marries it to the drawn-out waiting of the fighting sections: stand out of sight until the nearby enemies aren’t looking, then press either left or right when the prompt appears to move to a new hiding spot. It is to Metal Gear Solid as chewing on discarded underwear you found in a roadside puddle is to haute cuisine, and twice as likely to make you ruefully reflect on the life choices you’ve made.


Kay, the team’s computer expert, gets her chance to shine with this minigame. It’s difficult to explain the concept concisely, but here goes: the red line is the pattern you need to match. It scrolls from right to left, and as each segment reaches the left-hand side, you can move your line – the grey one – either up or down in an attempt to get the two lines to match up. Once you’ve got a segment correct, it turns green and locks into place so you can’t accidentally change it on a subsequent pass. That’d be very easy to do, because the amount of time you’re given to manipulate each segment is only a couple of seconds, so there’s some frantic button-tapping when you’re trying to the get bigger spikes into place. Fortunately it loops around a few times so you get more than one shot at each part, and overall it’s not a bad little diversion. It’s hardly the most graphically compelling interface you’ll ever see – it looks like the ECG results of someone in the middle of licking a plug socket - but it’s fast and fairly unique. It beats the hell out of a sliding block puzzle, I’ll tell you that much.


Kay has proven herself to be a valuable asses to the team. She describes herself as “the Shaquille O’Neal of computer hacking.” Yes, I can see the resemblance.


The world’s dictionary-makers may have launched legal proceedings against me to prevent me from using the word “action” to describe VIP’s gameplay, but I will not be intimidated and the action continues as one of the VIP members beats up a tree. This man’s name is Quick. I’ll leave it up to you to ponder how he got that name. It certainly wasn’t for his speed in beating up trees, and this scene that adds absolutely nothing to the game manages to make minutes feel like months. For her part, Vallery stands transfixed in the background, horrified by the meaningless arboreal abuse she’s witnessing. It makes sense to me: judging by Vallery’s wooden pose, she’s part tree herself.


Quick moves on from hassling defenceless trees to shooting thugs. He has a rapid-firing assault rifle rather than a pistol, but that doesn’t make much difference to the gameplay. What did make a difference was that I figured out the quirks of the reloading system. You fire bullets, and when you run out you press circle to reload, right? The thing is, “reloading” in this game magically makes more bullets appear in your gun’s magazine. There’s no reloading animation, no vulnerable moment while you slap in a fresh clip – press reload and your gun’s reloaded. It’s an efficient system, that’s for damn sure. This means that you can fire and reload at the same time, so if you press circle and X together you’ll never run out of bullets, meaning you can spray lead around with wild abandon. You have to hear the reloading sound effect repeatedly, sure, but it might make you feel nostalgic because I’m fairly certain it’s the same sound effect that plays when you collect a weapon in Goldeneye. But what about my accuracy statistic, I hear you cry? Well, yes, there is an accuracy stat on the between-stage results screen. However, the accuracy stat - get this - has no relationship to the shooting stages. I assume it only measures the accuracy of your button presses during the fighting scenes, so if you want to take a novel approach to gunfights and defeat you foes by putting so many bullets into the air that they end up breathing them in and choking on the bloody things, go right ahead. VIP’s not going to penalise you for it.


At some point, a little more plot is revealed. Dr. Kindle tells the team that he did some facelift work for the Mafia, and now they’re coming to kill him. Why? Supposedly the doctor worked on the mob boss’ nephew. The mob boss says the doctor is blackmailing his nephew, while the doctor says all he did was send his patient the bill. It’s difficult to know who to believe. On the one hand you’ve got the Mafia, not know for being the most honest and upstanding members of society. On the other hand, did you see Dr. Kindle’s face? He looks like the title character from an Eighties comedy where a caveman somehow travels to the modern day and takes the medical community by storm. And he never takes his sunglasses off, you can’t trust someone like that. The thing is, this is never resolved in-game. The mob sends more gangsters than you’d find in a complete box set of The Sopranos to kill this guy, but you never find out who’s telling the truth. Vallery Irons is a strong believer in the “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” school of thinking.
Oh, by the way, the head of this crime family is called Don Macabre. He had better be a god-damned vampire gangster. C’mon, VIP, you’re 99% of the way to being completely bananas, you might as well go for the gold.



There are a few fight scenes that take place on a beach, the terrified holidaymakers presumably fleeing as Vallery and her friends do their best to fill every hospital in a thousand-mile radius. Having beaten one of the tougher thugs, Quick exclaims that he should go back to his boss and “tell him how that floor tastes.” Okay, Quick – if that is your real name – a couple of things. One, who refers to a sandy beach as “the floor”? The ground, maybe, but the floor? That’s just weird. The other thing this guy can taste is a mixture of sand, blood and his own broken teeth, so give him a break and lay off the trash talk, okay?


The gang then learn that the Macabre mob family are dealing in stolen microchips – a revelation that inspires one of the cast to say it’s “time to download some hurt,” and they don’t mean a torrent of Johnny Cash covers. Honestly, I’m not sure what they mean. An email with a Word document full of insulting phrases attached, maybe. Anyway, they head to a computer trade fair to put a stop to the Mafia’s plans, the upshot of which is that Tasha ends up in a boss battle with the sniper priest. Like all highly-trained snipers, the priest stands in plain sight, at a distance from which throwing house bricks would be just as effective as using a high-calibre rifle. He pops out every now and then, and you have to shoot him before he shoots you. Thankfully, his oversized hat means you can always see where he’d hiding. Not exactly a tense shoot-out, then. Shooting him when he pops up feels more like training a cat to stop scratching the furniture by shooting it with a water pistol than anything else.
Once you’ve shot the priest enough times, he runs away. I was half expecting him to drink a glass of water and have it spray out of the holes in his body like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but no, he just leaves. Good job he wore his bullet-proof cassock, I guess. Anyway, with him out of the way, the VIP team can access Macabre’s computer files – so long as they can break the encryption. So, what high-tech cybersecurity measures must Kay bypass to get the valuable intel?


Sliding block puzzles. Not one, not two, but three sliding block puzzles. This is why you don’t put Fisher-Price in charge of your computer security. Ever the hallmark of laziness in game design, the sliding block puzzle is a perfect fit for VIP, a game that never makes even the slightest effort to be fun to play. The only saving grace is that because they’re pictures of faces, sometimes the pieces will align in a manner that creates a portrait of a weird, potato-faced alien.


So, what else happens in this game? Well, how about a scene where you tap X as fast as possible so that Vallery can hold a door closed. That exciting enough for ya? No? What if I told you that Vallery can hold the door closed with such raw force that the three grown men on the other side are sent flying backwards, even though the door doesn’t actually move? Good work, Hodor.


Another segment sees Vallery fending off a group of gun-toting mafiosi by hurling bottles of booze at them. I know your eyes are inevitably being drawn to the chairs in the foreground, with their avant-garde design and the faces of what look like serial killers from the Seventies printed on the upholstery, but ignore those and instead focus on the gumption of a woman who fights fire with a half-full bottle of Disaronno and wins.
I might have joked about Vallery beating people up with her handbag earlier, but honestly it’s nice to see Vallery (and the other female members of the VIP team) getting things done for themselves. They all perform plenty of brutal beatings and gun crime, that’s for sure. There’s a section where Vallery is abducted, but rather than waiting for a rescue she escapes on her own and pummels dozens of people in the process. VIP even passes the Bechdel test. I’m not saying it’s a feminist masterpiece or anything, but still, I expected worse from a game that lets you use the points you earn to unlock photos of Anderson in her lingerie.


That’s right, there’s a photo mode – after each stage some new shots are unlocked and you can purchase them with points. Some of them are photos of the real actors, so if you want a blurry, low-res picture of Pamela Anderson and you’re not willing to travel back in time to an internet newsgroup from 1998, this is your chance. Some of the pictures are stills from the game’s cutscenes, just in case you can’t get enough of the incredible graphics. Even better, some of the early photos are from cutscenes that play much later in the game, so you can spoil VIP’s plot for yourself if you like.


Here’s a screenshot that really sums up the experience of playing VIP: grindingly dull button-tapping combat between two ugly polygonal models against a muddy, boring, pre-rendered backdrop that could double as the car park in one of the more psychologically subtle version of Hell.


The gang decide to go after Don Macabre himself and put a stop to his criminal enterprises once and for all. Quite why they feel the need to bring down the mob all on their own is never discussed. I suppose now that they’ve battered or gunned down hundreds of the Don’s men, they figure they might as well finish the job. This is Don Macabre himself, by the way. He is not a vampire. Look, I’m as disappointed as you are.


Having chased the Don to his private heliport, Nikki has to blow through the doors using C4. The C4 is planted by, you guessed it, performing a sequence of button presses. These sequences are such an integral part of the game that it’s a shame VIP didn’t manage to make them work with 100% accuracy, and sometimes the game will tell you you’ve pressed the wrong button even though you definitely haven’t. I played a lot of Just Cause 2, and that game has some much longer and more involved button-pressing sequences. I don’t think I’ve ever made a mistake performing them in Just Cause 2, but VIP was semi-regularly telling me that I wasn’t doing it right. Normally I’m happy to admit that I might just be bad at something, but in this case I’m convinced the game has to take the blame.


During the final confrontation, Vallery is held at gunpoint by the Don. With a level of sheer appropriateness that borders on ironic genius, you beat the final boss by tapping X as fast as you can. That’s it, that’s the final boss battle. You don’t even have to hit the button that quickly. It’s kind of perfect: what other way could a game so utterly devoid of imagination end?


Once you’ve tapped enough to fill the bar, Vallery’s berserker rage kicks in. Ignoring the gun pointed at her head, she spins around – all of this with no input from the player, mind you – and beats the everloving shit out of Don Macabre. Like, absolutely batters him. There’s no way that she hasn’t beaten him to death with her bare hands. The Don is dead, his internal organs rapidly becoming external, and the VIP team have saved the day.


Vallery’s post-murder quip? She says “trick or treat that.” No, I don’t have a goddamn clue, either. Unless he really was a vampire and this game takes place on Halloween. She says it with a look of genuine psychopathy on her face and her hands on her hips. Everyone’s got their hands on their hips, except Tasha. Always a rebel, that one.


The game ends with a brief cutscene that’s nothing more than a joke about breast implants and then boom, VIP is over and we can all return to our loved ones, haggard and raw from the experience. Okay, so maybe it’s not quite that bad. It’s a terrible game, sure, but at least it’s insane enough to be worth a laugh or two. The real problem with VIP (aside from the inclusion of sliding block puzzles) is that it commits the worst sin any videogame can – it’s boring. Really, really boring, outside of the cutscenes. What a shocker to learn that QTEs: The Videogame is boring, right? There’s just such an embarrassing lack of effort in every aspect of the game, and if the developers couldn’t be bothered to make it interesting, then why should I bother playing it? Exactly. But I did, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it. Writing this article is what I think they mean when they tell you to turn lemons into lemonade, although in this case the lemons were emitting a soporific chemical that threatened to put me in a coma while I was squeezing them. Watch the cutscenes on YouTube if you enjoy sub-B-movie action and nonsensical trash-talk, otherwise pretend this game doesn't exist.

It’s gaming with a social conscience here at VGJunk today. Well, sort of. An effort to safeguard public health, promulgated by a tiny man with no arms, whose crusade for human betterment attracts the ire of Satan himself. It’s just like that time Lucifer tried to corrupt Jamie Oliver’s eternal soul because he wanted kids to have healthier school lunches, only with more beeping noises than R2-D2’s rap album. Brought to the ZX Spectrum in 1985 by Atlantis Software, it’s the browbeat-em-up Nicotine Nightmare!


There’s not much of a title screen for this game, so instead here’s the loading screen. I only mention it because that “Gold” logo is making me want to eat a McVities Gold Bar, despite them being sickly-sweet enough that I’d regret it after two bites. I wouldn’t stop eating it after two bites, of course, but I’d be regretful.


Speaking of doing regrettable things to your body, that’s what Nicotine Nightmare is all about, specifically the vile sin of smoking. Yes, Nicotine Nightmare is here to convince you all to give up smoking, although having played the game I’m not sure it had any idea about how to convince people to quit. It doesn’t tell you why smoking is bad, aside from a standard governmental health warning, but it definitely wants you to feel like smoking makes baby Jesus cry. It’s not subtle in that regard: equating stopping smoking and saving the world seems like a bit of a reach. I’m not sure switching to e-cigs is going to have much impact on global warming. I must admit this opening text had me in something of a moral quandary – there was a moment when my answer to the question “do you sincerely want to save the world” was “no, not while there’s a trilogy of movies about goddamn Tetris in the works,” but in the end I had to say yes.


This could be a problem. I’m not good at tests, especially not tests of my strength of character. Having said that, I played all the way through this game so there must be some steel at my core. Also, full disclosure, you’re probably asking the wrong person to stamp out smoking, because I am a smoker and a thirty-year-old Spectrum game isn’t going to succeed where willpower and Nicorette have failed. Why do I smoke? Because I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why, and I don’t need Beelzebub to remind me.


The game begins and the name Nicotine Nightmare starts to make sense, because the concept is reminiscent of a fever dream. You control the small man with the yellow face. He’s trapped in a nonsensical dreamscape of giant cigarettes, but fortunately he’s brought two watering cans with him. It was a choice between gardening tools and trousers, apparently. You can fly up, down, left and right, and your goal is to extinguish six cigarettes by poking them with your watering cans. That’s simple enough, although the twitchiness of the controls means that it can be difficult to line yourself up correctly. You can douse three cigs before your watering cans run dry, and when that happens you have to float back down to the bottom-right and refill them at the water pump. However, the devil is not about to let one of his most finely-crated tools of human misery be destroyed by the less-famous brother of Mr. Chips from Catchphrase, and so the Prince of Lies dashes about re-lighting the cigarettes you’ve put out. He’s a real hands-on kind of boss. Actually, that’s a pretty insensitive thing to say about someone who doesn’t have any arms.


Put out enough cigarettes and the stage comes to an end. Satan, defeated and humiliated, returns to the bowels of Hell and is not seen again for the rest of the game. If I was the devil and I’d just been shown up by a floating weirdo armed with a pair of watering cans, I’d keep my head down for a while too.


Nicotine Nightmare certainly doesn’t go lightly on the bombast, does it? It promises a task somehow even arduous than beating the devil, an assault on the cigarette factories of the world that will take months to complete, the most elaborate case of industrial sabotage in human history. So, how is this going to work? Am I going to be flying over to Philip Morris headquarters and pouring a watering can full of LSD-laced water into the coffee pots?


Never mind, it’s a generic platformer now, like Jet Set Willy but without the precision and strange charm to carry it. Your character, who continues the game’s tradition of not giving anyone arms, can move left and right and jump. That’s it. He has to get into the factory – the extremely well-signposted factory, they must have had some trouble with delivery drivers relying too much on their satnavs – and turn off all the machinery by jumping into the levers dotted around the place. This first screen is extremely simple, with the only complication being that you die if you fall too far so don’t just drop down to the exit once you’ve hit the switch like I did.


The next screen is considerably more difficult. A constant stream of cigarettes rolls down the ramp, and you must hop over them Donkey Kong-style to reach the lever. Naturally, the slightest contact with these cigarettes is immediately fatal to our hero, which makes his decision to take down the tobacco giants either extremely brave or deeply stupid. I look forward to the sequel, where a man with a shellfish allergy decides to punch every prawn in the world’s oceans to death.
So, this is a tough little section at first, until you’ve gotten used to the way your character handles. Everything takes place on an invisible grid rather than the smooth scrolling of something like Super Mario, so each press of a direction key always moves you exactly one “space” horizontally. When you jump, there’s no smooth arc, but instead you travel in a perfect diagonal until you reach the apex and fall straight downwards. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that as a system, especially for a ZX Spectrum game, but the problem is that Nicotine Nightmare requires some precise jumping and it’s completely down to luck whether pressing right and jump will make our hero jump diagonally-right or take one step right and then jump. It’s a small difference between the two things, but the wrong one almost always means death.


Next up: a daring raid on the manager’s office. I suspect the manager feels a little insecure about his leadership position, that sign on his office is so big King Kong could use it as a cummerbund when he goes to the Monster Island prom. Maybe that’s why the manager is so intent on killing our hero, he feels like he’s got to be aggressive in dealing with this saboteur so nobody can question his authority… and yet, the two men are identical, as though the programmers wanted us to understand that anyone could rise up and be the hero that eradicates all tobacco products from the world, if only they’d open their eyes to the evil they’re perpetrating. A cynic might say they’re the same person so the developer didn’t have to draw a new sprite, but I’m going to stick with my reading about the innate potential for goodness that lies within all people.


Okay, now this is just getting weird. Who is this factory making cigarettes for, the Jolly Green Giant? I think our hero has been driven so insane by his anti-tobacco crusade that he sees anything cylindrical as a cigarette and he’s accidentally blundered into a lumber mill. God help him if he ever visits the Parthenon, who knows what kind of prison time he’d be looking at if he knocked that down.
The fiddliness of the platforming really comes to the fore here, because it’s all about jumping from the exact, correct position rather than timing, and as a result it’s kind of a pain in the arse. There are four levers, and they have to be triggering in a certain sequence, only the game doesn’t tell you that sequences so you have to figure out the order before you can plan out the most expedient route. It’s not too bad if you get a bit of luck with the controls, though, and once you’ve hit all the switches it’s a simple matter of jumping over to the giant levitating cigarette and riding it to the exit.


Congratulations, you’ve done it. No-one will ever smoke another cigarette again. I’m sure all the people put out of work by this fact will land on their feet somehow. Maybe they can switch to growing weed instead. What do you mean, you don’t believe this is the end of the game? Do you think they’d let Mr. Lung Liberator stand on the podium at the Olympics if he hadn’t saved the world? Yes, the entire game really is just those five screens. You can complete Nicotine Nightmare in less than five minutes if you know what you’re doing and don’t get distracted by, for example, going for a smoke break. I know this was a budget game, but the pickings here are so slim that if you looked at them from a certain angle they’d be bloody invisible. What is there works in a way that’s occasionally frustrating but no more so than many other Spectrum platformers, but it’s so shallow that to try and come to any kind of conclusion about it is pointless. You might as well try assigning a star rating to a blank piece of cardboard: whatever score you give it, it’s going to feel ridiculous. Getting people to quit smoking is a commendable goal, and I’m sure that whoever created Nicotine Nightmare would say that if just one person was put off smoking by it then it was all worthwhile, but I think that’s very unlikely to have happened. It might have put people off working in a factory, sure – it posits a world where deadly products are allowed to roll around unsupervised and a madman with a grudge could burst in at any moment and destroy your livelihood – but as a smoking cessation tool it’s just like it is as a game: unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

I can’t believe it took me six years to write about Capcom’s punk-pounding arcade classic Final Fight. Much like running a mayoral election campaign or weightlifting until your torso’s big enough to cause a localised solar eclipse wherever you’re standing, I guess writing about Final Fight required a lot of preparation. However, once you’ve got Mike Haggar in your system he will not be denied, so today it’s time for Capcom’s 1993 SNES sequel Final Fight 2!


I’ve always been surprised that Final Fight – a big hit in the arcades – never got an arcade sequel. I suppose it’s a combination of Capcom’s arcade division being busy knocking out updates to Street Fighter 2 and the SNES’s success providing a good platform for a game that Capcom could show off as being arcade perfect. That’s certainly the case with Final Fight 2, which is as just about as visually impressive as the original arcade game.


Previously on Final Fight: Belger, crime boss and leader of the vicious Mad Gear gang, pays for his villainy when Cody punches him out of a fortieth-storey window. Not a believer in the potential rehabilitation of criminals, is Cody. He also doesn’t appear in Final Fight 2, having gone on a vacation with his girlfriend Jessica after the events of the first game.


With Jessica safely outside of kidnapping range, the re-formed (as opposed to reformed, which they definitely aren't) Mad Gear gang set their sights on new abduction targets – Rena, girlfriend of Final Fight hero Guy, and Rena’s father Genryusai. Genryusai is a ninja master and Guy’s teacher, which makes you wonder how he managed to get kidnapped by some goons that look as though they’d struggle to tie their own shoelaces, never mind capturing a master of ninjitsu.


When the Mad Gear gang strikes, there’s only one person to call: Metro City’s mayor and former pro wrestler Mike Haggar. That’s exactly what happens when Rena’s sister and trainee ninja Maki calls on Haggar and asks for his help in the rescue mission. Haggar immediately ditches the business of running a city, rips off his shirt and heads off to help. I’m sure the deputy mayor of Metro City is used to this kind of thing by now.


Also involved is Carlos Miyamoto, Brazilian swordsman and friend of Haggar. I say friend, he’s Haggar’s lodger. Well, Haggar was never going to be roommates with an accountant or something was he? Even though a remake of the Odd Couple starring Haggar and a normal person who isn’t a combination mayor / warrior of vengeance would be pretty great. Carlos is something of enigma. We only really know two things about him – he loves kick’n butt and he also loves needlessly replacing letters with apostrophes.


Three fierce warriors ready for battle, then, and they adhere to the usual beat-em-up trinity of a fast but weak one, a slower, stronger one and Average Man. An alternative way of looking at it would be “Mike Haggar and two chumps,” but that’s perhaps a little unfair. Sure, scantily-clad lady ninja might not be the most groundbreaking piece of character design, but sword-wielding Brazilians who work as spokesmen for the Denim Council in their spare time don’t come around all that often. In fact, I think I’ll start with Carlos. Having a sword might be pretty handy.


Those jeans do not look they’re doing, erm, “lil’ Carlos” any favours. Hopefully Carlos can channel the pain into a deadly rage that comes crashing down on his enemies before the lack of circulation to his penis requires medical intervention.
Unlike the first Final Fight, which was confined to Metro City, Final Fight 2 is a globe-trotting adventure that sees our heroes pitch up in a different country at the start of every stage. In this case it’s Hong Kong, all poorly-maintained back alleys and equally hovel-like buildings. Not a great advert for Hong Kong’s tourist business, then, but a perfectly acceptable arena for beating large men to death with your bare hands.


As for the beatings themselves, they’re controlled in the same way as the original Final Fight. In fact, the gameplay of Final Fight 2 is identical to that of its predecessor and thus identical to most belt-scrolling brawlers. One button for attack and one for jump, repeated attacks lead to a combo, you can grab enemies and either pummel them or throw them, there are jumping kicks and, of course, you can press both buttons for a spinning desperation attack that knocks down all nearby foes at the cost of some of your health. You know how it works, and I’m happy to take an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” view on this system. There really is nothing else much to say about FF2’s combat, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. The fighting generally flows at a decent clip, and it’s as satisfying as ever to throw enemies into their comrades. The warm embrace of a spinning piledriver is as comforting as it is liable to make you two feet shorter, so I’m going to have a good time playing the game – just don’t go into FF2 expecting genre-shifting innovations.
Also, check out the background – there’s Chun-Li, enjoying a bowl of noodles at a back-street food stand. The guy on the left also looks a bit like Lee from the original Street Fighter. There’s some evidence that Lee help train Chun-Li or at least knows her, although I know saying he appears here is a bit of a stretch. It’s making me wonder where FF2 fits into the Street Fighter timeline. After Street Fighter Alpha, because Chun-Li’s wearing her classic outfit rather than her athletic gear, so let’s assume that Chun-Li is enjoying some well-deserved rest before trying to track M. Bison down again.


Just in case you weren’t one hundred percent convinced that this is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, here’s an oil drum. Inside the oil drum is a cooked joint of meat, ready for eating. As I say, FF2 is not out to challenge the conventions of the genre.


There are also a few weapons you can pick up – no steel pipe, tragically – including a tonfa and a plank of wood. There’s also a knife, and when I say “a knife” I think there’s only one knife in the entire game. Perhaps that’s why Cody didn’t bother turning up for this one. I’ll be honest, the weapons aren’t especially useful, and while the extra range is nice you can put out more damage using your normal moves.


Waiting at the stage's end is, shock horror, a boss. His name is Won Won and he’s a large chap with a rather fetching bow in his hair. What he doesn’t have is a meat cleaver. He does in the Japanese version, like all good murderous Chinese chefs should, but it was removed from the Western versions presumably to prevent kids from thinking that kitchenware makes a good weapon. Planks of wood? That’s fine, but don’t hit people with meat cleavers, kids. Anyway, Won Won’s not up to much in the boss stakes so long as you keep moving, with his attacks being powerful but slow. He’s got a big sideways chop, but his favourite is the flying elbow drop.


It doesn’t look all that menacing in a still image, does it? It’s got a something of a “paint me like one of your French girls” vibe to it, with the addition of Won Won staring at his own biceps in the same way that I stare at freshly-baked pizza. Fortunately you can see Won Won’s shadow while he’s up in the air, so make sure you’re not standing there when he jumps and you’ll soon be on your way to stage two.


Now Carlos is in France. Paris, specifically, unless they’ve moved the Eiffel Tower. It looks considerably nicer than Hong Kong, even with all the bins all over the place. As ever, your goal is to beat up everyone you see. What’s not so clear is why they’re all walking around on tiptoe. The insistence of Mad Gear members on not wearing sleeves is fair enough – how else are people going to see your muscles otherwise? – but no reason is forthcoming as to why they’re daintily shuffling around like ballerinas. With their legs clamped together, too, it’s like they’ve gone out of their way to find the least stable martial arts stance imaginable short of wearing rollerskates while suffering from an inner ear infection.


Other parts of Paris aren’t looking so good. This area was sealed off with chain-link fences, but Carlos karate kicked his way through them all. The playable character in this game do have a problem with being told they can’t go somewhere, and it’s a problem they solve by smashing through whatever barricade they find. In the case of the fences it makes a little more sense, although someone still has to come and clean that up when two out of the three character are ninjas and could easily have jumped over the fence, but they do it to doors, too. None of the three have the intelligence to try the handle before bashing their way through any doors they find. A small detail, but it did start to bother me after a while that no-one ever thinks to try rattling the doorhandle before resorting to the ol’ ultraviolence.
Also of note is the punk in the green shirt. His notable features include looking very nineties and having most bizarre shirt collar I’ve ever seen. It’s like a toga held together with a belt at the shoulder, I think? Right off the catwalks of the most avant-garde fashion houses, that one. Plus his glasses make me think he looks a bit like Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo.


The Andore family make their return in FF2– they’re the giant wrestler types, based on Andre the Giant. One of them later became Hugo in Street Fighter III. Yeah, those guys, and they’re the same punch-sponges that they were last time. They’re a threat when there are other, more mobile enemies about, but on their own they’re not much of a problem to deal with. That just makes it more annoying that they’ve got so much more health than everyone else, and that’s my biggest problem with Final Fight 2: on the higher difficulties especially, there are just too many Andores and they take too goddamn long to defeat. Later in the game some of them have more health than the game’s earlier bosses, and repetitively pounding away at them does become a slog, he said while resisting the temptation to make a “just like your mother” joke. You know what might help? If Carlos would use his bloody sword. He’ll only swing it when you use his special attack. Why even bring the sodding thing if you’re not going to use it? Ties your ensemble together, does it?


The end-of-stage of stage boss is Freddie, a military man who’s sort of an amalgam of Macho Man Randy Savage and a shaved gorilla. He’s got Zangief’s chest-hair on loan, too. Speaking of Street Fighter characters, there’s Guile in the background, watching the fight and wondering why no-one’s shooting magical energy out of their hands. I assume it’s Guile, anyway. I can’t imagine two people having that haircut. As for Freddie, he fights like a souped-up Andore, with his main attack being a dashing chest-slam. He can pick you up and throttle you, too. Freddie’s not a complex man, and neither is he a particularly interesting one to fight.


The Final Fight series’ vendetta against perfectly ordinary cars continues in FF2, with a between-stage bonus round that sees you trashing a car for fun and profit. Well, fun anyway. Okay, not “fun,” but the chance to burn off some pent-up aggression is is probably a good thing for the cast of FF2. Did you see Haggar’s grimace on the character select screen? He looks like he’s about to bite his own face in half. I understand the fires of vengeance are boiling your blood, Mike, but I also understand that you’re getting on in years and if your heart explodes it’s liable to level a city block.


It’s Maki’s time to shine now, and she’s arrived in The Netherlands, ready to continue the fight. Yes, this is Holland. I’d understand if you mistook it for Transylvania or the second stage of Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, but it’s The Netherlands. It’s the windmills, you see. That’s how you can tell.
Maki, then. She’s a bit faster than the other two but she does less damage – although her power’s not so low that you’d notice much of a difference. Her special move sees her planting one hand on the floor and spinning around with her legs out. Not much evidence of her ninja training, then. No evidence of trousers, either, which seems unfair. Guy had the same master as Maki and he gets to wear trousers. Maybe it’s like belts in karate, you’re only given trousers once you attain a high enough rank.


Here we see Maki about to whack a small fat man with a two-by-four. I wonder what page of the ninja handbook “channel your inner Hacksaw Jim Duggan” is found on. Yes, Maki is yet another videogame ninja who’s not great at, like, being a ninja, but I’ve developed a theory about that. All these ninja masters in videogames are actually failed Olympic gymnasts and circus performers who are attempting to cash in on the ninja craze of the eighties by offering “ninjitsu” lessons. Sucker in some students, teach them how to do a backflip, give them a couple of shurikens bought in bluk from that sketchy market stall the also sells bongs and figurines of Native Americans and send them on their way while you pocket their cash. It would explain a lot, honestly.


Okay, maybe this stage is set in Transylvania because the boss is here and he’s definitely some kind of Frankenstein. He doesn’t look stitched together, but there’s an unmistakeable air of “hulking corpse reanimated in mockery of the natural order” about him. Maybe Igor was out looking for suitable bodies and this massive lump of a man just happened to be fresh on the mortuary slab, saving Igor a lot of time and digging, and freeing him up do do whatever it is Igors like to do in their spare time. Something unspeakable involving electrodes and hump salve, one imagines.
Bratken’s a lot faster than he looks, and he likes to charge across the screen putting his bulk to good use. I struggled against him for a while, but then I realised what the problem was: I was trying to force it and land blows when it wasn’t safe to do so. Eventually I figured out that wasn’t helping, so I passed the time between Bratken’s vulnerable moments by beating up all the lesser minions that were cluttering up the room. Bratken mostly did his own thing, scooting around with no real aim in mind. Sometimes he got close, so I threw one of the goons at his face, which kept him busy. Then I chipped away at his health until he died. Farewell, Bratken, we hardly knew ye.


Next up is England and the train yards of London, where Maki is performing a jumping kick that leaves nothing to the imagination. She’s actually kicking this guy in the face – the fact that he has a small explosion emanating from his crotch is (I hope) entirely coincidental.
Thinking about it, Capcom seem to have a habit of including trains in English stages from the Street Fighter universe. Birdie’s Street Fighter Alpha 3 stage is also set in a train yard, Dudley’s SFIII: 3rd Strike stage is set outside a Tube station and the British stage from Street Fighter V is set inside a train station, which I’d say is enough examples for it to be a thing. I’m not sure why, though. It’s either because of Britain’s history at the forefront of railroad development during the age of steam, or the pervasive influence of Thomas the Tank Engine.


The music here’s interesting, too – a strange mixture of jazzy bass runs and Henry Mancini’s famous Peter Gunn theme, which isn’t a direction I expected Final Fight 2’s soundtrack to take, but it works. The rest of the soundtrack is okay, with nothing that particularly leaps out at me besides the first stage’s theme, which is nicely high-tempo and would fit extremely well into a Mega Man X game.


The stage continues atop a moving train. I noticed the train had the logo of a circus on it earlier. The   stage boss had better not be a clown. For now, though, Maki has to deal with this rotund man who’s trying to counter her ninja skills with 50,000 volts of pain delivered via tuning fork. It’s understandable that this guy brought a weapon. He’s basically spherical, Mike Haggar could probably punt him far enough to set a new field goal distance record. You might remember that the original Final Fight also had short fat men who charge at the player, and when I say FF2 does little to differentiate itself from its predecessor that includes the thugs you’re fighting. They have different sprites, but just like in Final Fight there regular grunts, slightly stronger grunts who can block, the giant Andores and skinny men in red who dash onto the screen to throw firebombs. There are even more acrobatic fighters who were female in the original Japanese version but were changed to men in the overseas releases. Mad Gear must still have the same listing in the job centre that they used to recruit the previous batch of goons.


Oh god damn it. If I’d known how often writing about videogames would bring me into contact with clowns, I would have never started this bloody website. On the plus side, I can only associate the name Philippe with the character from Achewood, so when this clown jumped out of the box his captors had imprisoned him in all I could think was “here comes a special boy!”
Like all clowns, Philippe is irredeemably vicious and relentless in his desire to destroy his foes. His favourite method of carnage is a sliding kick, which I had a huge amount of trouble avoiding. Getting whacked by his white cane, which he undoubtedly stole from a blind person? Not a problem, I could deal with that, but when he came after Maki’s ankles with the ferocity of an angry wolverine fired from an air cannon, I admit I struggled. In the end I just had to take the hits and out-muscle Philippe, comforted by the knowledge that while I may lose some health in the process I am creating a world with one less clown in it.


Okay, I’ve made you wait long enough: it’s Haggar’s turn, and the terrifying mountain of muscle, machismo and moustache is here to clean up the canals of Venice. He’s not much changed from his appearance in the first game: he’s invested in some fingerless gloves for a better grip on Mad Gear throats, and his new lower-leg accessories are both stylish and practical, but he’s got the same moves as always. Of the three characters I’d say Haggar is the best, and that’s not just personal bias. He hits people harder, you see.


I can’t help but think that the guy in the background is going to have his holiday photos confiscated by the police as evidence.


There’s a scene where you stand in an elevator while enemies jump in to fight you, because this is a Capcom beat-em-up and one that’s beholden to its precursors at that. You know that bit in Watchmen where Rorschach says “I’m not locked up in here with you, you’re locked up in here with me”? Yeah, it’s like that except Haggar is a cool guy and not someone people mistake for a cool guy.


A familiar face appears at the end of the stage: it’s Rolento, a boss from the first game and future Street Fighter character. Okay, so FF2 calls him “Rolent” but it’s definitely Rolento. He fights in the same way, rolling around so fast he leaves a blue trail and climbing up on the background where, for some reason, he can’t be hurt even though one good shove from Haggar would send him plummeting to the ground below. He also throws grenades around, which sounds very dangerous until he does it a few times and you realise all his grenades have the explosive power of someone breathing into a paper bag and popping it. What, do you want to kill Haggar but not kill him too much, Rolento? Are you hoping the bangs will surprise and confuse your opponents, allowing you to roll to safety like Sonic the Hedgehog? I just don’t understand your plan. Come down here so we can discuss it through the means of a spinning piledriver.


The final stage is set in Japan. I have no idea why it took us so long to get here. If a ninja master was kidnapped, Japan would be the first place I’d look, but after a long European tour we’re finally here, and what a start to the stage it is. Haggar’s about to suplex this poor sod. Nothing unusual there, Haggar performs more suplexes in a day than the WWE gets through in a decade. However, he’s about to suplex this man straight onto a land mine. There are finishing moves, and there are finishing moves. Man, I love videogames.


As Haggar clobbers his way through this tranquil Japanese garden, I feel an urge to capture the moment in a way that’s appropriate to the location. Thus, a haiku:
Mayor of Justice
in flight, graceful as the swan.
Large boots bring swift death.


The new boss of Mad Gear is revealed! His name is Retu, and he’s a kabuki dancer with spinal problems. Not exactly what I was expecting, but it’s an interesting enough look. However, the fight itself is on the ponderous side, thanks to Retu’s aversion to getting hit. His most dangerous move is a Ryu-style hurricane kick, which seems to have priority over everything and makes it very difficult to get close. Even when you do get close it’s unnecessarily difficult to land a full combo on Retu, so the fight becomes a poke-and-retreat war of attrition that feels at odds with the non-stop action of the rest of the game. It’s a disappointing fight, although having Rena and Genryusai hanging in the background is a nice touch, but with enough perseverance (and the fact that the timer ticks down very slowly) eventually Retu will run out of health and Mad Gear’s latest kidnapping plot is brought to an end.


The game ends, and Haggar reflects that his debt to Guy is paid. Carlos says nothing, perhaps wondering why he’s even here. Or maybe he’s sad that in any other situation he’d have the biggest chin in the room.


Rena sends Guy a grammatically wonky letter. I’m guess she means “so we can be together,” but I’d also accept that she might be telling Guy to get himself together. Your sweetheart was kidnapped and you didn’t even bother coming back from training to help out? We’ve been all around the world, too, so unless you were training on Mars you’ve got no excuse.


You got that right, Guy.
Final Fight 2, then. I’m trying to come to a conclusion about it, but it’s a strange one. So many of the things I’ve said about it would probably put people off: it’s a rehash of the first game with nothing new added, the bosses aren’t that exciting and sometimes wading through the later enemies’ extended health bars can be a genuine chore… and yet I still really enjoyed it. Obviously I love side-scrolling beat-em-ups, and Final Fight is good enough that another Final Fight is something I’ll always want to play. If it’s simple brawler action you’re after, Final Fight 2 delivers. In summary, I like it a lot, but you might not. A lame conclusion, I know, but FF2 suffers from being the middle child between the genre-defining original and Final Fight 3, which made some attempts to spice up the formula with things like the Super Moves.


That said, did you see when I suplexed that guy onto a land mine? It doesn’t get much better than that. There's even a two-player cooperative mode.
Before I go, here’s something I haven’t done for a long time: I’m going to put Final Fight 2 through the VGJunk Beat-Em-Up Bingo process.


Twenty out of twenty-five is a high score, but it’s about what I expected. Some of these were compromises – Retu’s hideout isn’t a mansion in the usual sense but I think it was classy enough to meet the requirement, and I’m counting Final Fight 2 as two words and a numeral rather than three words. Still, I’m amazed that it wasn’t pushed up to twenty-one by the inclusion of a steel pipe. Fortunately this shocking oversight was corrected in Final Fight 3.

Today’s game is all about those acid-bleeding, multi-mouthed terrors from beyond the stars, the xenomorphs. By my counting this will be the seventh article I’ve written about games related to the Alien franchise, from bonkers lightgun adventures to plodding Game Boy borefests to one of the best beat-em-ups ever made. This time it’s the turn of the Commodore 64, and Activision’s 1986 express-elevator-to-hell-em-up Aliens!

This Aliens is not to be confused with the other C64 Aliens, which was released by Electric Dreams in 1987 and is a completely different game. This one is sometimes referred to as Aliens: The Computer Game, but that doesn’t to much to minimise confusion because I've also seen the Electric Dreams version referred to as, you guessed it, Aliens: The Computer Game.
I’m sure you’ve all seen Aliens before, and if you haven’t then you should probably go and fix that. If you still don’t know about Aliens– maybe you’re offended by internet strangers telling you what to do and are refusing to watch the movie on principle – here’s a quick recap. Ellen Ripley, sole survivor of the first Alien movie, travels back to the planet LV-426 with a squad of colonial marines. The colony on the planet has been overrun with xenomorphs. The marines think they’ll be able to easily defeat the aliens, but the stealthy creatures overwhelm the technologically superior marines for all your “Vietnam war analogy” needs. Ripley fights the alien queen in a glorified forklift and then leaves the planet with the few survivors, including a small girl she found hiding in an air duct. Honestly, I’m not sure why I bothered telling you all that, because the game itself does a fairly thorough job of explaining what’s going on.


Yes, unlike Konami’s arcade version of Aliens, a game that takes the basic premise of the movie and then says “yeah, but what if Ripley was Space Rambo and we just made up a load of new mutant aliens?” this game sticks very closely to the plot and dialogue of the movie. So closely, in fact, that this opening text is copied directly from the film’s script. “The stars shine like the love of God” wasn’t the game’s programmers getting poetic in an effort to jazz up the intro, that’s a line from the script’s opening paragraph. Actually, the line in the script is “The stars shine like the love of God – cold and remote.” I wonder why they left that bit out? For space reasons, or an attempt to avoid offending religious sensibilities? Maybe they just thought it was a bit too flowery. If you’re the person responsible, please get in touch.


Before the game begins, you’re treated to this low-res recreation of the scene from Aliens where Ripley briefs the marines on the xenomorph threat, with the dialogue taken word-for-word from the script. The image is at once ugly and charming in its simplicity, although even with the blockiness it’s still immediately recognisable as the scene it’s supposed to be. I instantly heard Hudson’s lines in Bill Paxton’s voice with perfect clarity, I know that much. As much I have enjoyed some of the wilder takes on the universe in other Aliens game – I can’t imagine there’s anyone who wouldn’t be enamoured of Capcom’s decision to give Arnold Schwarzenegger a giant robot arm in AvP– it’s nice to have a game that sticks so faithfully to the source material. I cannot express enough my genuine love for the first three Alien movies and the universe they created, which is one of my all-time favourite fictional worlds. I’ve seen the movies dozens of times, as a kid I read the novelizations almost every week, I had the toys, played the games and literally bought the t-shirt. My point is, you should probably expect a hefty portion of bias in this article.


Here we see a fine selection of the colonial marines’ arsenal. Not pictured: nukes, knives, sharp sticks. Like an anxious parter on the eve of an overseas holiday, Aliens: One of the Computer Games Called Aliens tasks you with making sure you know where everything is before you depart on your mission. The name of a piece of equipment appears, you click on the corresponding item, then repeat until you’ve identified them all. It’s very straightforward, and you can puzzle them out even if you’ve never seen Aliens before. Of course, being the youthful Aliens dork that I was, I had a copy of the Colonial Marines Technical Manual so I’m more than prepared for this minigame. I think this might be the fastest I’ve ever cleared any section of any videogame, honestly, and that includes entering my name on high-score tables. Well, in that situation there’s the tough decision to make between BUM and POO, isn’t there?


The first “proper” action of the game sees you piloting the dropship from the USS Sulaco down to the planet’s surface. To do so, you have to fly through a course made of floating rings: fly outside the rings and the compliance meter drops, and if the meter hits red you fail and have to try again. The course itself is very twisty-turny, which is strange. Like, there’s a clue in the word “dropship.” I shouldn’t need to do this much piloting just to fall straight downwards. The lack of any visuals other than the rings is disappointing, but the “3D” effect on the rings themselves, the sense that you’re flying “into” the screen, is actually quite impressive.
Going back to the Colonial Marine Technical Manual for a moment, I remember that in said book the fully-loaded dropship is described as “handling like a drunken cow,” and while it’s not quite that bad in this game it does feel very heavy. You need to start turning well before the next bend and towards the end, when your route would resemble spaghetti in a blender if you mapped it out, learning the course becomes almost mandatory. It’s a surprisingly difficult start to the action. In fact, it’s probably the hardest part of the whole game, so try not to be too discouraged if your first few attempts at flying the dropship prove deadlier to the marines than any amount of xenomorphs.


Landing accomplished! Ooh-rah, and so forth. The entrance to the colony of Hadley’s Hope might look a little more “futuristic parking garage” than “futuristic space colony,” but that fits with the bleak industrial setting of the movie. The marines are indeed deployed, but sadly there’s no scene where you get to drive the Armoured Personnel Carrier around.


In fact, the game skips forward to the marines’ first contact with the aliens. As you can tell by this text, it doesn’t go particularly well for them. Please, no swearing in the Commodore 64 version of Aliens. There might be children present. Now, while in the movie the aliens tear through the marines like a combine harvester careening through a puppy farm, the game gives you a chance to save the marines during the next gameplay segment.


You see the tiny man in the upper-left corner of the screen? The one with the brown overalls and what appears to be Princess Leia’s haircut? That’s you, that is. Well, it’s the marine you’re controlling, anyway, and the aim of this stage is to make your way through the maze-like colony and back to the safety of the APC.


There’s the APC now. I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s such a safe haven that you don’t even need to climb aboard in order to be protected, you just have to be on the same screen and you’re safe from harm. Of course, getting to the APC isn’t so easy. For starters, you have control over four different marines, each of them located in a different part of the maze after everyone got separated when the spurting acid hit the metaphorical fan. You switch between them with the function keys, and the more marines you guide to safety the more lives you’ll have in the later stages. The things to keep an eye on are the monitors at the bottom of the screen: if they start flashing red, that means a marine is in danger.

Oh no, Corporal Dietrich has been ambushed by some slightly unconvincing aliens! Once the xenomorphs appear, you can’t leave the screen until you’ve fought them all off in a simple wave-shooter section that you could say is like Smash TV, if you were feeling extremely generous and Smash TV was a much more mediocre game. You press the fire button to fire your gun, quelle surprise, and you can move around while firing in a fixed direction if you hold the button down. The aliens attack from all angles, their usual lightning pace slowed to an arthritic hobble by the power of the C64, and your goal is to mow them down without letting them touch you. It works about as well as you'd expect, with the real problems coming when an alien appears at a diagonal to your current position. You can only fire in the four cardinal directions and the aliens move at about the same speed as your marine, so lining yourself up for a shot without getting grabbed can be difficult, and I sometimes ended up with a veritable conga line of skeletal star-beasts following me around as I tried to get into a good firing position. It’d help if you knew what directions the aliens were going to come from, which makes it a damn shame that your motion tracker does bugger all except provide a bit more atmosphere.


Here, Private Frost is being attacked by two aliens at once, but in their boundless exuberance they’ve run head-first into each other like an especially dark scene from a Chuckle Brothers show. Ha ha, no, I’m kidding, Frost is being dragged away to act as an incubator for a chestburster. That’s how the aliens operate, but there is a way to prevent this terrible fate: the xenomorphs will only attack a marine who’s on their own, preferring as they do to pick off their targets one at a time. Thus, one way to get through this section is to try to keep all the marines as close together as possible while they move through the maze. That way if a red “aliens are coming to ruin your day” warning starts blinking, one of the other marines can quickly dash to the same screen and prevent the attack. It’s an interesting set-up, and while it can be slow going as you inch each marine forward in turn that’s preferable to them all dying. There’s a surprising amount of tension to it as well, with the threat of a new alien ambush increasing with each screen you traverse, forcing you to gamble on whether or not to make a dash for the APC.
Also, I feel like I should mention that Frost is black in the movie but in this game he’s got the same pink skin tone as the other marines. It feels like a real oversight in a game that’s otherwise so accurate to the source material, but perhaps I’m asking too much of a movie tie-in on the C64.


The next gameplay section is completely different. I mean it plays differently, it’s still about a marine trying not to be killed by aliens, it’s not like you're suddenly thrust into the dark world of political machinations in fifteenth century Venice or anything. How this one works is that you control the lone marine on the right of the screen. The aliens move in from the left, and you have to move up and down so that you’re on the same plane as the onrushing aliens and then fry them with your flamethrower. If an alien gets past you, it kills one of the other marines. You can see the other marines at the bottom of the screen, patiently queueing up as though they’re waiting for a bus rather than a horrifying death via extreme pregnancy. The aliens start off at a pace you might describe as “dawdling” in another, less terrifying species, but gradually increase their speed until they’re setting new land speed records, and it all gets terribly frantic. One nice touch is that if the aliens get right up to you, they actually back off because they’re scared of the flamethrower’s pilot light, but more than anything it feels like a Game and Watch game. I could very easily see this as an LCD game from Tiger Electronics, possibly contained within an incredibly uncomfortable-to-hold plastic case shaped like a xenomorph’s head.


Oh hey, would you look at that. I got the shape of the unit wrong and you shoot vertically rather than horizontally, but otherwise I was pretty close. I’m not sure if this LCD game was ever released: it’s based on the cancelled Operation: Aliens kid’s cartoon (which I’ll never get tired of mentioning, because it was a kid’s cartoon based on Aliens) and was supposedly never released as a result, but the instruction manual can be found online, so who knows? All I know is that I want one.


After the simplistic but entertaining early stages, Aliens: The Computer Game rather shits the bed with the next level. It’s a maze, presumably intended to depict the remaining survivors making their way through the air vents. The white square is Ripley and the marines, the red dots are aliens and it’s so visually boring that it’s difficult to actually look at without your eyes swivelling around just to give themselves something to do. The gameplay’s not any better, either: there’s only one way out of the maze, so once you’ve learned the route the entire stage becomes trivial. Until then, it’s a tedious tip-toe through the ductwork, with lots of waiting for nearby aliens to wander off somewhere else, because the restrictive nature of the tunnels means you can’t go around them. If an alien grabs you – by which I mean if your white dot touches a red dot – you can order one of the marines to blow themselves up with a grenade, taking out the alien and giving you a chance to escape. This is why you need to keep as many of them alive in the early stages as possible – so you can use them as ambulatory land mines.


Next up, it’s Ripley’s turn to get in on the xeno-blasting action (I think she might have had xeno-blasting action in the Aliens toy line, come to think of it) as she heads deep into the aliens’ nest to rescue Newt. It’s pretty much the same as the “get the marines to the APC” stage, although it has a couple of quirks that make it much more difficult. For starters, Ripley’s pulse rifle only has 99 rounds of ammo, which is frankly not enough. Luckily you can leg it past a lot of the aliens, and you’ll have to because Ripley couldn’t find room in her pockets for a few extra magazines. She doesn’t even have a flamethrower gaffer-taped to her pulse rifle like she does in the movie, so I’m deducting some Authenticity Points. There’s also a time limit now. It says seventeen minutes, but it runs faster than real time so it’s more like ten minutes.


The most challenging new aspect, however, is that you’ve got to find Newt and then get back to the elevator you started at. This is not easy when the aliens’ nest is a vast grey labyrinth of identical corridors, but there is one thing you have that can help: pressing space makes Ripley drop a flare on the ground. Do not forget to do this regularly. I did forget. Look, I was being harassed by deadly space creatures, forgive me if this Hansel and Gretel shit slipped my mind.


Ah ha, I must be getting close – I’ve found the room where the aliens store all the bishop’s mitres they’ve collected.


Oh good, I found Newt. Having a tracking device that tells me how close I am to Newt certainly made that a lot less painful then it could have been. Now I’ve just got to retrace my steps. Okay, sure, my brain was determined not to remind me to drop flares, but I’m sure I can remember which way I came.


I’m fairly certain the queen alien wasn’t here before. That’s the kind of thing you would remember. You know what? I think I’ll find a different route. Sorry to disturb you, your highness.
So I did find a different route, and I managed to guide Newt to safety by running past all of the aliens I saw and praying they wouldn’t realise my gun was drier than Stewart Lee doing stand-up in the Gobi Desert. Of course, those of you who’ve seen Aliens will know that’s not the end of the story, and there’s one final confrontation left.


In the wild, a feral powerloader will often spread its arms as wide as possible in order to create a larger, more intimidating silhouette. Coupled with its vocal warning cries, this is often enough to scare away predators. However, this does not always work, and in this case a battle for survival ensues.


That’s right, it’s Aliens’ climactic final scene, where Ripley climbs into a powerloader and wrestles with the alien queen. The queen’s sprite is mostly decent – it could have done with a bit more colour – but it’s very difficult not to be distracted by the face. The weird, boxy face. It has very prominent eyes, which is odd because one of the defining features of the xenomorphs’ design is that they don’t have eyes, and especially not ones that look as though they could do double duty as letterboxes. Standards of verisimilitude are slipping, but it’s hard to care when I’m fighting the alien queen in a powerloader.
Oh yeah, the fighting. Well, you control the powerloader’s claws, and you can move them up or down and side-to-side. If you move one claw up, the other one moves down, and when you’ve got a claw extended it’s a simple matter of bashing the queen over the head with it. I found the easiest way to do this was to wait until the queen was between the edge of the screen and the “outside” of your claw. Once you’re in that position you can repeatedly slap the queen with the back of your giant metal hand.


After enough slaps, the queen’s health will be depleted and you can grab her with the powerloader’s claw, dropping her out of the airlock and into space. Is the queen dead? Probably not, but she’s someone else’s problem now and that’s all that matters. And so,  Aliens: The Computer Game is complete.


Thanks, Bishop. I’m proud to have exceeded your expectations vis-a-vis the capability of a human to destroy the universe’s most fearsome killing machine. Now crawl over there and fetch your legs, they’re making the place look untidy.


The game ends with Ripley and Newt settling down for a well-deserved hypersleep. I’m not sure why Ripley shaved off most of Newt’s hair before they got into bed, but I’m sure it’s a vital step in the cryogenic process.


As yet another game that’s a compilation of smaller, underdeveloped games, Aliens suffers from the same problem as always: it spreads itself too thin rather than expanding on the interesting stuff. Most of the games aren’t bad, the pipe maze being the exception, but the levels where you’re exploring the colony are easily the most interesting and so you’re left wondering what could have been if they were more fleshed-out. An entire game about controlling a squad of marines, one that ramps up the tension already found in those section as you struggle to keep everyone alive, could have been a very interesting experience. That’s sort of what the other C64 Aliens game is like, except that one’s a first-person shooter. But that’s enough of dreams and maybes: this is the game that exists, and it’s pretty okay. Perhaps a little too limited to be really enjoyable in the modern age and it leans a little too hard on memorisation at points, but it’s not the worst Aliens game I’ve ever played and it’s buoyed by its faithfulness to the source material. Plus I got to control a powerloader. That’s all I really wanted. Honestly, I think that’s all I’ve really wanted since I was about 12.

It is with great... hang on, what’s the opposite of excitement? Indifference? Okay, it is with great indifference that I present for your reading pleasure an article about Gravity-I’s 2007 Game Boy Advance version of Deal or No Deal! Wait, where are you going?

Oh, you decided to stick around, did you? Because I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d left. Well, here you are and yes, it’s a Game Boy Advance recreation of the world’s premier television show about opening boxes and anonymous phone calls. There’s a two player mode! Imagine the incredible odds you’ve have to overcome to find another person with a Game Boy Advance and a copy of Deal or No Deal, never mind a person who met those criteria and was willing to play Deal or No Deal. You’ve got more chance of finding Lord Lucan in your underwear drawer.


Here’s the game’s title screen, but who the hell is this man? He looks like a nightclub hypnotist with a string of restraining orders and unpaid bar tabs. The villain from a bootleg James Bond movie with a title like Target: Silverfire. A man whose YouTube channel is a fifty/fifty split between the clear intellectual superiority of atheism and pick-up artist techniques. A harsh assessment, maybe, and unfair accusations to level at someone I’ve never met, but I’d avoid him if he tried to talk to me in a bar.
Okay, so I looked it up and his name is Howie Mandel and he hosts the US version of Deal or No Deal. He seems like a decent enough bloke. He’s got an extreme irrational fear of germs, apparently to the extent that he built another house next to his house that he can live in when one of his family is sick. It’s a bloody good job for him that he’s a wealthy celebrity then, isn’t it? Otherwise he’d have to build some kind of decontamination tent out of Tesco carrier bags and packing twine. The reason I didn’t recognise Howie Mandel is that the UK version of Deal or No Deal is presented by bearded nutjob Noel Edmonds, a cosmic-ordering peddler of “magnets that cure cancer” pseudoscience bullshit and the man responsible for inflicting Mr. Blobby on an unsuspecting world. I would take Mandel over Edmonds any day of the week.


The first thing you see when you start the game is this lengthy (and unskippable) text crawl which reminds the player that, amongst other things, they’re playing a game and that no real money is involved. Well, that’s one award Deal or No Deal has in the bag: Most Patronising Videogame. It does make you wonder whether the developers have had trouble with this situation before, though. Maybe they knocked out a Who Wants to be a Millionaire game and people kept turning up at their offices with photocopies of their GBA screens and demands for a massive cheque.


You know when I said Howie Mandel looks like a Bond villain? Yeah. A villain who wants revenge on 007 for supergluing his fingers together. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to fetch me a bottle of nail polish remover.”


Howie then unleashes his rather unnerving army of faceless mannequins, each of them carrying a numbered case. He refers to them as his “26 better halves,” which by my calculations means there are thirteen and a half Howie Mandels out there. That seems like too many Mandels for one planet to sustain.


Now I have to pick a case. I went for number thirteen in defiance of superstition, and because I felt sorry for lady number thirteen because she doesn’t quite fit on the screen. Deal or No Deal is a good illustration of the differences between the cultures of the USA and Britain: the US version has shiny metal cases presented by a group of glamorous women, where as in the British Deal or No Deal the boxes are plain red cubes controlled by bog-standard members of the public. We are but a simple island nation, after all.


So, how does Deal or No Deal work, then? Essentially, it’s a guessing game. Each case contains a cash value, and your goal is to leave with as much money as possible. What happens is that you pick some cases to open, and the cash values contained within are eliminated from the game. After a while, the mysterious banker will call you on a special telephone and make you an offer, based on the values still in play. So, you want to eliminate the lowest values first, pushing up the average of the remaining values so that the banker offers you a more lucrative deal. Or you can just open all the cases and stick with what’s in the case you chose if you’re feeling especially brave. Showing the lack of imagination that’s plagued me for my entire life, I elected to start with case number one.


Well, that couldn’t have gone much better, could it? The lowest possible value, eliminated with my first pick. The banker must be bricking it.


And so on it goes, with the player picking six boxes to open in the first round and enjoying – sorry, enduring– the case-opening animation every time. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the person responsible for this game’s graphics did not work as hard as perhaps they might have. I mean, it’s a videogame, you’re freed from the restrictions of television and limited only by your imagination! Instead of a case, you could have placed the number inside the abdomen of a giant space lizard and had an astro-barbarian hack his way to the number with his laser-axe. Okay, that’s just a first draft, but you get the idea. If I’d wanted to see this many cases being opened I’d have applied for a job at airport security.


The first round is over, and it went rather well. All the biggest numbers are still in play, so I’m in line for a good result. Time to hear the banker’s offer, then.


That’s one heck of a telephone, arriving in 2007 after a time-portal opened up during the filming of a Duran Duran video. I would unashamedly have that telephone in my house.


The banker’s offer was a derisory $34,000. What’s worse, the game actually does that bloody “pause for dramatic effect” thing that TV shows do in these situations. Well screw you, Deal or No Deal, because I’m playing this on an emulator with a fast-forward feature, so I win this round. As much as anyone who’s playing a GBA version of Deal or No Deal can be considered a winner, anyway.


Obviously I didn’t take the deal, so that means another few cases to open before the banker makes a new offer, the cycle repeating until my incredible box-choosing skills meant I’d played just about the perfect game of Deal or No Deal. Trust me, I’ve got my legal team going through that disclaimer at the start with a fine-toothed comb, searching for a way that I can leverage my talent for guessing into cold, hard cash.


In the end, I made a deal for $330,000. Turns out my box only contained two hundred bucks. How thrilling.
That’s about it for the main “Deal or No Deal” game mode. My conclusions? It’s about as accurate a videogame version of the game show as you could hope for. It plays Deal or No Deal. If you want to play Deal or No Deal for non-fabuolous imaginary cash prizes while sitting on the toilet then this is a perfectly acceptable way to capture that experience – although I’m sure there must be a mobile phone version, that’d probably be easier these days. At least you’d be able to see the screen properly, something certainly not guaranteed when using a GBA.
As for the non-gameplay stuff, it’s a mixed bag. One impressive feature is that there’s a lot of digitised speech from Howie Mandel crammed into the cartridge, and it’s very crisp and easy to hear. You could argue it’s easy to get that much speech in there when the game itself must surely take up next to no space, but still. As for the graphics… well, you’ve seen them. They’re pretty horrendous, grainier than a year’s subscription to Wheat Farmers Weekly magazine and lacking any kind of flair. Particularly challenging on the eye is Mandel’s 3D model, especially in motion.


There is something genuinely unnerving about the way his facial features slide around on his egg-like head, as though his expressions are formed by a highly-coordinated colony of amoebas that are always on the move.


The fun doesn’t stop there, though! There are two other game modes included, in the incredibly unlikely event that you somehow become bored with the main game. The first is the Vault Game, the goal of which is to crack the combination to said vault. You pick three numbers – represented, of course, by the cases from the main game – and you’re then told whether each number was higher or lower than the correct combination. You use this information to make another, more informed guess, until you arrive at the correct code to open the vault. The amount of money you win (and, just to make this perfectly clear, this is not real money and the developers will not give you any real money) decreases with each unsuccessful guess. Is it any fun? As a tiny lockpicking minigame in a different, better game it would be okay, but as a standalone thing it’ll keep you interested on a timescale usually only used by scientists tracking subatomic particle interactions.


The other minigame is High or Low. Open a case, then guess whether the next case's cash value will be higher or lower than the previous number. It’s one hell of an achievement to keep making games that are each more boring than the last considered the level they started at, but Deal or No Deal is extraordinary in that regard. You don’t even get a special congratulations screen if you manage to guess correctly for every single case in High or Low, something which I managed to do on my very first attempt. I put this down to spending so long trying to scrounge up cash in God Hand via the video poker game.


I don’t think I’ve ever written about a game with so little need for a concluding paragraph, but I’d feel weird not including one, so here it is. Deal or No Deal is a game that perfectly recreates the mechanics of the game show but without any of the tension and potential schadenfreude that comes from seeing someone gamble away the chance at winning a life-changing sum of money. If you like Deal or No Deal enough for that concept to excite you then hey, this is the game for you, although I will point out you can recreate the game yourself at home by using folded bits of paper and having someone shout a number at you every now and then. It also gets extra points for not including Noel Edmonds.

No, I haven’t broken the Z key on my keyboard, today’s game really is called Crazzy Clownz. Released in 2001 by Leisure and Allied Industries – a company name that just screams fun – Crazzy Clownz is a ticket-dispensing arcade machine featuring clownz of varying degrees of crazziness. Whether the extra Zs are supposed to denote heightened levels of craziness or a game so boring it’ll put you to sleep is yet to be revealed, although I’ve got a strong guess about which one of those is the case. Something that definitely won’t put you to sleep, and indeed may eliminate the very concept of sleep from your psyche, is the title screen.


For pity’s sake, clown, you’ve got company. Put a shirt on or something. Notice that this clown has no eyelids, presumably having sliced them off with a razor so he can see all things at once, never resting for a moment. He looks bad enough as a still image, but just wait until you get a load of him in motion.


Dear Lord, that’s not pleasant. Someone sat down and made that, you know. Human effort was expended on its creation. Mankind has wrought some truly bizarre things during the course of history – the Sphinx, a financial crash based on tulips, the career of Jedward – and this clown is right up there with the most baffling. Why has he replaced his hair with a crystalline candy floss substitute? Why does he only have one tooth? Has he been eating his own rock-candy hair, and that’s why he’s only got one tooth? There are no answers to these questions, of course. Normally this is where I’d describe how sinister this clown is, but honestly he’s so ugly that I just feel sorry for him. That’s not to say there’s nothing sinister about Crazzy Clownz, mind you: I managed to find a sales brochure for the game and two of its selling points are listed as “design that attracts children” and “luring circus theme music,” so if you’re looking for a hook for your horror novel then there you go.


Here’s the gameplay. It’s your standard Breakout / Arkanoid clone with a circus twist: the bricks are balloons, the paddle is a trampoline and the ball is replaced by a shirtless clown in hideous trousers, a phrase that also works as my plan to make the sport of golf more interesting. The balloons have points on them, and the more points you get the more tickets the machine will give you at the end, because Crazzy Clownz is a redemption game. You know the kind, it gives you tickets that can then be exchanged for prizes if you take them to a small booth staffed by a bored teenager with a name like Ricky or Shannon. The gameplay is just about okay, in an ultra-basic kind of way, and you’ve got some degree of control over where the clown flies depending on which part of the trampoline he lands on. You don’t lose a life if the clown misses the trampoline or anything, you just lose a bit of time as you wait for him to recover from shattering his coccyx and climbing back into action. The most notable thing about the gameplay is that you control the trampoline with a physical steering wheel for no real reason that I can discern. If you told me the developers had a surplus of small steering wheels kicking around the office, I’d have no trouble believing you.


The only other thing to pay attention to are the special “TICKETS” balloons. Each one’s got a letter of the word “tickets” written on it, and if you collect all the letters you get a jackpot bonus and some extra tickets. I’m sorry I don’t have anything more interesting to say about this aspect of Crazzy Clownz.


I thought I’d done okay, but my efforts (my efforts to stay awake, mostly) only netted me a measly three tickets. What the hell can I get with three tickets, beside a look of contempt from Ricky in the prize booth? One of those plastic moustaches that you clip to your septum in a manner that’s both uncomfortable and unhygienic? Half of a pencil eraser shaped like an ice cream? You know what, forget this – I’m going back in and I’m not coming out until I’ve collected all the “TICKETS” balloons and won the jackpot.


It turns out I had to cheat by giving myself some extra time in order to win the jackpot. Funnily enough, the final letter always seems to appear just as the timer runs out. There’s a random element to the placement of the letters and I’m sure it’s set up in such a way that every now and then they appear at a rate that allows you to collect them all, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to play Crazzy Clownz long enough for that mythical moment to roll around. Not because the gameplay is boring and unchanging, although it is, and not because I have better things to do with my time, because let’s be honest, I don’t, but because the game plays “Entrance of the Gladiators” on a constant loop even during the never-more-inaccurately-named attract mode. I could feel the music making me a worse person with every iteration. Any further exposure, and I’d have been finding out what happens when you forego “guilty” or “not guilty” and enter a plea of “clown music” during a murder trial.


There, I won the jackpot. Now I can afford a light-up yo-yo that doesn’t light up or an oversized novelty pencil. I am satiated.
And there you have it, that’s the entirety of Crazzy Clownz. A mediocre Breakout knock-off with only one stage, a repellent coating of clownosity and the vague feeling that you’re being cheated while you’re playing it. Why did I even bother writing about it? It’s an equal mix between believing that all games should be remembered even if they’re ugly, joyless nonentities, a strange fascination with the not-really-videogames nature of redemption machines and the chance to say “look at this clown, he’s ugly as balls.” I’m sure I’ll write about a “proper” videogame next time, but I had fun delving into the existence of these crazzy clownz and sending my spellchecker into fits in the process. I did learn some things about Leisure and Allied Industries, the creators of this game: they’re based in south-east Asia and Australia, which explains why the clown in the game has an Australian accent. They operate a chain of family fun zone places, referred to on their website by the almost heart-stoppingly exciting title of “video amusement facilities,” called Timezone. They also put out another ticket game called Ripper Ribbit. I will never be playing that game, because it cannot possibly live up to my mental image of a cartoon frog stalking his victims through the foggy streets of Victorian London.

Now we know what happened to the fabled city of Atlantis: an aggressive species of giant sentient bats invaded and claimed the city for their own, the former Atlanteans telling people that their home had sunk beneath the waves to avoid the embarrassment of explaining to people they were defeated by bats. Or the title of today’s game is a portmanteau of “battle” and “Atlantis,” if you’re really so afraid to access the wondrous powers of your imagination. Yes, it’s Konami’s 1987 arcade shooter Battlantis!


I’ll be honest, when I first looked at this title screen I thought those tendrils were the angel’s legs and they were rubbing their crotches all over the logo. Also, it looks like I’m already too late to save Atlantis. That rather takes the pressure off our hero, doesn’t it?


Battlantis doesn’t offer the player much in terms of plot. The title implies there’s some kind of battle involving Atlantis, and a bit of poking around informed me that the hero’s name is Cripeuss III and he’s out to stop the “Boss Enemy” Asmodeus. Aside from that, the game does give you a little information about the game’s enemies if you leave the attract mode scrolling for a while, which is something I always like to see. If I’m going to be killing these guys by the dozen then I should at least know their names, right?


So the game begins, but what kind of game is it? Well, it’s Space Invaders, with a pinch of Galaga. A single-screen shooter in which the player shoots rows of monsters as they descend towards their position. That seems like a very strange game to be making in 1987: Space Invaders was almost a decade old by that point, and at the speed videogame trends bloom and die it might as well have come out at the same time as the Magna Carta. Not one to thrill the player with its novelty, then, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a bad game. Maybe Konami have managed to put a fresh twist on the formula? Well, it doesn’t start out feeling that way. It starts out feeling, you know, like Space Invaders. You move left and right along the bottom of the screen, using your slow-firing weapon to pick off the monsters one at a time. There are a couple of barricades in front of you, barricades that can be destroyed by projectiles, that provide either cover or an irritating obstruction depending on the current monster situation. The fantasy setting makes it look a bit different, at least, although in this case the fantasy also includes modern firearms because if you look closely at Cripeuss’ sprite he appears to be carrying a double-barrelled shotgun. Now I’m disappointed that Battlantis isn’t an Army of Darkness tie-in. It would take very little effort to change Cripeuss in Ash and the monsters into Deadites, so someone please get on that. I can’t offer you money for your efforts, just the knowledge that you’re making the world a groovier place.


Shoot all the monsters and a boss of sorts appears, a slightly larger monster carrying a shield that requires multiple shots to destroy. Thankfully the miniboss tends to stand still, throwing easily-dodged Olympic torches at the player. Thus the fight devolves into little more than tapping the fire button and hearing the incredibly weedy plink-plink-plink sound effect of your bullets hitting his shield, occasionally sidestepping the boss’ attacks.


Stage two: The Devil’s Whack-A-Mole. No wonder Atlantis sank, it’s full of holes! Holes filled with winged demons, who attack by flying directly at Cripeuss rather than moving in the regimented downward movements of a traditional Space Invader. They only take one shot to kill, so there’s that, but they’re also quite fast and there’s a veritable swarm of the bloody things.


This leads me to the biggest problem with Battlantis, and that’s the utterly ruthless difficulty level. Now, it’s a well-documented fact (documented by my win/loss record on Street Fighter V, mostly) that I’m not great at videogames, and arcade games are usually more difficult than their console counterparts. However, I don’t often struggle to get past the second stage of any game, but it took me more than a few tries to clear this one. The standard one-hit-kills are in place, and when coupled with a basic weapon with all destructive power of a paper bag filled with the sneezes of tiny kittens, Battlantis is really stacking the odds against the player. Enemies are fast and numerous, many of them fire projectiles and what’s worse is that when they reach the bottom of the screen they can climb up to your castle’s battlements. I know the enemies reaching the bottom of the screen is a pretty standard way to lose a life in games like this, but it feels so much harsher in Battlantis because they’re right there at the side of you and you can’t do anything to stop them because apparently Cripeuss has such severe back problems that he can’t even rotate his goddamn torso. There is a weapon that shoots projectiles sideways, but to use it you have to collect two power-ups at once. That doesn’t sound too bad, but all the power-ups in this game are timed; you don’t get to keep them until you lose a life, you get to keep them for about ten seconds. You can’t hold the button down for continuous fire, so you're in a race to see whether your will to continue or your thumb gives up first. Oh, and you’re limited to five continues by default, so you can’t even credit-feed your way through the game. Just bear the punishing difficulty level in mind for the rest of the article, because I’m guessing it coloured my opinion of Battlantis. See if you can figure out where I gave up and started using cheats.


Stage three has a proper boss in it, and frankly it’s a relief to know that I don’t have to worry about him reaching my castle and attacking from the side. Cripeuss’ complete lack of peripheral vision is usually a real problem, but not against the game's big bosses, and I can concentrate on shooting this thing while avoiding the triple goo-balls it slings around the place. It’s just a shame that the boss isn’t more interesting to look at – its most notable features are the two massive thumb-prints on its shoulders, as though it was made of clay and the sculptor didn’t bother smoothing it off.


Battlantis isn’t much to look at all over, really. Lots of flat colours and basic animations, with few of the enemies having much character. That said, looking closer at the little guys in the red robes, they appear to be carrying rocket launchers. Shoulder-mounted anti-vehicle weaponry is a decent substitute for character, if you ask me.


I take it back. That’s too many rocket launchers. I’m only one man, one man with a double-barrelled shotgun that I very rarely get to power-up into a large crossbow that can pierce through multiple opponents. This is all too much for me.


Ah, this is more like it. Finally, Battlantis throws me a bone and gives me a break from the otherwise relentless tide of death by pitting me against a frog. A really angry-lookin’ frog, sure, but it’s still just a frog.


Then the frog gets hit by lightning and mutates into a monstrous behemoth of a frog, revealing a deep lack of understanding about how frogs work. Put fifty-thousand volts through a frog and all you’re going to get is a very unpleasant mess and an aroma that you’ll never forget. Please note I’m not speaking from experience here. How great would it be if that’s what happened in the game, though? The frog hops out, gets zapped and pops like an overfilled water balloon, Cripeuss moves on to the next stage with a slightly bemused look on his face.


And so Battlantis continues, with Cripeuss defending a castle in a land that I thought was covered in soapy lather at first, perhaps formed when the soap factories of ancient Atlantis began to sink. On closer inspection, I think it’s supposed to be snow. I also collected a power-up that lets Cripeuss throw extremely ugly-looking bottles at the monsters. The bottles explode when they land, allowing you to take multiple enemies out at once, assuming they're kind enough to stand in a clump. As well as this and the slightly more powerful crossbow weapon, you can also collect as speed-up icon and once that makes you invincible. The invincibility power provides the only time in the game you don’t feel like the “before” model from a fifties bodybuilding advert, because you can run into the enemies that scrabble up your parapet, if you’ll excuse the phrasing, to defeat them.


Oh look, a dragon. A dragon that spits pizzas! You don’t see that every day. Unless you work at Domino’s and that’s the dark secret to their success.


There’s a stage set in space, by the way. This sudden change in altitude is never explained. How would you explain it, anyway? The ancient Atlanteans really were spacemen and their city did not sink into the ocean but rather flew back into the cosmos that spawned them? That’s ridiculous, I’m sure no-one could believe that.


Battlantis’ level of difficulty continues to do unfortunate things to my blood pressure, but in the interests of full reportage I should say that at least there’s a consistency to it. The hit detection is a more than a little generous in favour of the enemies, but it’s not unpredictable. One thing that’ll make your life easier is learning the order that the monsters attack in, because there’s a surprising amount of... not strategy, exactly, but needing to know what comes next. In many of the stages, if you don’t defeat the enemies in the right order, you’ll be too far away to get across and deal with the next batch before they reach your castle, so learning attack patterns is almost mandatory if for some reason you’re desperate to see the end of the game. Speaking of which…


Here’s the final boss – Asmodeus himself, one assumes – and he’s a big, ugly lump. He feels very Konami-ish, that’s for sure: I could easily imagine him appearing in a Contra game. In fact, I’m not sure he didn’t. He also reminds me a bit of Smash TV’s bosses, especially because you can blow his eyeballs out. It’s a simple battle in concept – destroy the fleshy sacs on the side so they can’t spawn projectiles, pop his eyeballs and then finish the job by shooting his exposed brain. Is there any greater physical flaw than “an exposed brain”? Testicles so long and pendulous you risk standing on them whenever you walk, maybe, but that’s a weakness that unlikely to appear in a Konami arcade game, so instead it’s the brainmeats that take the punishment. A bloody good job, too: this fight is long enough, I dread to think how long it’d have dragged on if Asmodeus was in possession of a fully-formed and eminently sensible skull.
I get the impression that it’s a very difficult fight. Asmodeus puts a lot of projectiles into the air, including ghosts that can land on your castle. I can see how that would be a challenge. You know, if I wasn’t already deep into the “screw this, time for cheats” portion of my playthrough.


With Asmodeus defeated and Atlantis free to fall into the ocean in its own sweet time, Battlantis draws to a close. Your reward for suffering though it is a rather cute picture of the development team, which is nice. I’m not sure why they’re pictured kneeling in a flowerbed, but it goes to show that bizarre decisions at Konami are not a recent development.
There’s something else to note here. A message that read “more stages to go.” That’s right, Battlantis has a second loop. It’s fair to say I felt a lot of trepidation in hitting the start button, but I managed to summon up the courage somehow.


The backgrounds are the same as before but somehow, against all the odds, Konami managed to make the game even harder. More enemies, tougher enemies, multiple minibosses to be fought at the same time: grinding through it is an exercise in masochism that I would not recommend. It’s not as though there are any new bosses or anything.


There is a stage where the monsters are arranged in a swastika. Okay, so it’s the manjji symbol rather than a Nazi thing, but it still took me a back the first time I saw it. I expected the monsters to be evil, but not, like, Nazi evil.
Anyway, I played all the way through Battlantis again. You get a slightly different ending, and when I say “slightly” I mean in the way that having nine of your fingers ripped off in a terrible combine harvester accident is slightly better than having all your fingers ripped off. Would you like to see this one extra screen, the sum total of your reward for suffering through Battlantis two more times than anyone ever should?


Thanks, but I knew that already.
Battlantis, then. A game that’s not quite bad enough to hate, but one which feels lazily composed and with a difficulty level that sucks all the fun out of proceedings with the efficiency of your parents standing in the doorway and giving thumbs-up during your first romantic encounter. There’s nothing to thrill the imagination here, folks, and that means it’s not worth slogging through the hugely-outdated-even-in-1987 gameplay. On the plus side, the art on the arcade flyer is pretty rad, to use the parlance of the time.


Straight from a Dungeons and Dragons expansion, this one, with some great monster illustrations. However, things get a bit weird if you look at Cripeuss for too long. At first glance he appears to be wearing nothing but golden underpants that leave absolutely no room for any external genitalia, but on closer inspection you can see folds near his, erm, intersection. So, he’s either wearing trousers that match his skin tone or he has a very unfortunate skin condition. Then there’s his cape. Nothing wrong with the cape itself, it’s the fact that he’s attached it by clamping it directly onto his pecs that troubles me. He also has a shield. I wish I’d had a bloody shield in the game. Anything to make Battlantis a little easier would have helped to make it more enjoyable, but as it stands we’re left with the videogame equivalent of assembling flat-pack furniture in the dark: fiddly, not much fun and unnecessarily difficult.

You know what the 1980s had? The ZX Spectrum, Britain’s premier home computer for lovers of very rubbery keyboards. The 1980s also saw ninjas reaching the peak of their pop-culture influence. If only someone had thought to combine the two! Oh wait, they did. Many, many times. There are more ninjas on the ZX Spectrum than in Godfrey Ho’s filmography, and for your viewing pleasure I have assembled a collection of cover art from some of those games. Some of it may be amateurish by today’s standards, but you cannot deny that these are indeed games with ninjas in them. Apart from the ones where you look at them and think to yourself “that’s clearly not a ninja,” I mean. But hey, who are we to judge what a ninja looks like? Have you ever seen a ninja in real life? No, you haven't. That’s kind of the point.


Let’s begins, as seems appropriate, with a game simply titled Ninja. I wonder if there was a meeting where the creators sat down to think of a name and were delighted to find that every other ninja game was called “ninja this” and “ninja that” but the name Ninja remained unclaimed. That’s serendipity, that it. As for the cover, it’s not bad at all. It’s got a guy who looks like a ninja on it, which is a good start, even if he did get a bit overambitious when designing his ninja claws. Having a two-for-one sale on spikes, were they? Those things must be forever getting tangled up with each other, and I can only imagine the carnage that would ensue if he stored them in the same pocket as his headphones. A closer look reveals a few other quirks: this one’s totally on me, but at first glance I thought the victims in the bottom left were wearing aprons, making me think that the ninja was terminating the staff of his local B&Q. Then there’s the fist at the bottom, positioned in a way that gives the impression that the ninja keeps it tucked in his trousers until the moment is right for it to strike, swiftly and without mercy, from out of his open fly.



Poor old Ninja Commando, his ninja face-mask doesn’t fit quite right and it must be very unpleasant to be running around doing your ninja business with the constant sensation that your mask’s about to slip over the end of your nose. I did try to decipher the writing on his headband, but I only got as far as tentatively identifying the first character as the number seven, so if you’ve got any better suggestions let me know otherwise I’m going to assume he’s been a ninja for seven years and his co-workers got him a special headband to celebrate. Maybe it’ll give him the confidence to defeat that much larger red ninja.



Well, no cover art is ever going to live up to that title, is it? It’s relatively action-packed, I suppose, but I’m not sure I’d describe it as a massacre. A ruckus, possible. Ninja Fracas at the outside. The most interesting thing about it is the relaxed demeanour of the man in the background who’s being stabbed in the face. That’s the unbendable will that martial arts training gives you.



In which Conan the Barbarian meets his most dangerous foe: an out-of-scale ninja who catches him in a deadly ambush. Makes sense to me, if you can take down Conan then you’ve truly earned the title of Ninja Master. He clearly knows what he’s doing, he’s using a flying kick to disarm his opponent while the barbarian’s distracted by Cinderella’s castle.


If that ninja looks familiar to you, it might be because you’ve seen the poster for the “classic” Golan-Globus movie Enter the Ninja. Conan does not appear in that movie, so sadly this cover is as close as we’re ever likely to get to seeing Conan vs. the Ninja Clan.



Hey, I’d recognise that midriff anywhere: that’s RoboCop’s abdomen! Okay, RoboCop’s abdomen with a big scoop taken out of it, but still. I’m not sure how stealthy a mechanical ninja is going to be, but on the plus side he can manufacture his own clouds of disorienting smoke. Oh, and according to the back of the case his name is Ninjabot 1. Make sure you wear your plastic hood when you go out to slay your enemies, Ninjabot 1. It’s forecast rain.



I think I’ve mentioned this before somewhere else on the internet, but that is clearly a samurai and not a ninja. Samurai fight by a code of honour, and would never stoop to knocking a child off a skateboard, not even if that skateboard happens to be the ugliest thing ever crafted by human hands. The full-face helmet, combined with the samurai deelyboppers, (I assume that’s the technical term,) kinda make the BMX Ninja look like a Gundam, don’t you think? I know they put out a new Gundam series every two minutes – gotta keep those shelves stocked with toy robots – so here’s my pitch for the next iteration:Gundams on Bicycles. That’s it, everything else is the same but all the mechs ride around on appropriately-sized bicycles. It might make some of the fight sequences a little awkward, but any problems can be glossed over by having one of the characters pop a wheelie.



Here’s one I’ve definitely written about before, in the article about the game itself, but I couldn’t not include it on this list because c’mon, it’s called Ninja Scooter Simulator. That’s the kind of thing that just makes you glad humanity bothered to evolve its way out of the primordial ooze. All the salient points about this one are covered in the earlier article, but I’m still bemused that the ninja appears to be wearing loafers and I still have no idea how that back wheel is supposed to be affixed to the scooter. Oh, and the ninja seems to be trying to cast a magical spell on his sword. Look, buddy, I’m sure you have just as many questions as the rest of us but I don’t think you’re going to find the answers in your sword. Did I mention that you don’t actually play as a ninja in this game? Incredible.


One of the problems with wearing the all-concealing black attire of the ninja is that you don’t get much sun. Even I’ve got more of a tan than this ninja, and I shun the daylight like a vampire with meningitis. He has a defiant stance, this ninja, in that he’s defying you not to look at his exposed nipple. That’s his plan, you get hypnotised by the nipple and then bam, he throws his pet snake in your face. The old Sneaky Snake Nip-Whip, the ultimate sure-killing technique.



Time for some not-terrible artwork with the Spectrum port of Sega’s classic Shinobi, and apart from the logo making me crave liquorice there’s nothing wrong with this one. All right, so Joe Musashi looks less like he’s framed by the setting sun and more like he’s about to be turned to paste by an oncoming train, but aside from that it’s good. It’ll give you a sympathetic knee ache if you look at it for too long, though.



Admittedly I’m not a zoologist or anything but that isn’t a hamster. I don’t know what it is, but hamster is right out. A cracked-out Ewok, possibly. Whatever it is, it’s shaved its limbs and is taking a rare pleasure in slapping that mouse. I’m getting conflicting messages about how much the Ninja Hamster’s enemies really want him dead, too: the mouse is wearing boxing gloves, presumably because he thought this was all going to be a bit of harmless exercise, but the crocodile is carrying a  mace. Personally, I think the crocodile has the right idea. The Ninja Hamster needs to be dealt with as harshly as possible. Just look at his face, he’s way too into the violence. Sure, he’s knocking people out with unarmed combat now, but give it a few months and he’ll be having all the woodland critters lined up and shot.



Having played the Commodore 64 version of Ninja Rabbits, I can assure you that “Microvalue” is a very appropriate label for it to be released on.
There’s nothing that says a ninja can’t also learn karate – everyone should have a hobby, after all – but it’s annoying me more than I’d like to admit that the star of International Ninja Rabbits is wearing a karate gi and not a ninja outfit. Not even a mask! I guess he wants to make damn sure everyone knows he’s a ninja rabbit and not a common-or-garden human ninja. It makes a real mockery of that "ninja combat" blurb, because he's obviously using karate, but more importantly whoever designed this cover managed to make the promise of "ninja combat" look boring. You wouldn't think such a thing could even be possible, but here we are.



The glut of animal-themed ninjas is surely the result of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ runaway success, although ironically the word “ninja” was scrubbed from their name and replaced with “hero” in the UK, as “ninja” was deemed to be inherently violent and liable to drive British kids to silently assassinate their friends in the school playground. Don’t worry, they’re the same four radical turtle bros you know and love. Leonardo still leads, Donatello continues in his suspiciously vague role of “doing machines” and Michelangelo still sits splay-legged with his crotch on full display for all the world to see. What, were you expecting decorum? He grew up in a sewer.



There’s another TMNT game. It’s a decent approximation of the cartoon’s style, although the turtles’ grimacing faces make it clear that skateboarding through an open sewer pipe is not the tubular thrill-ride they thought it would be, but they can’t lose face by admitting it was a bad idea.



Here’s the grammatically confusing Last Ninja 2, and when you are drawing a large number two for your cover art, at what point do you have to concede that it’s gotten away from you a little and your two is now too big? Okay, okay, so I’ll admit that this is a decent cover for a game about a shogun who travels through time and conquers New York, even if it doesn’t feel particularly ninja-y. Why, those could just as easily be the eyes of a mad wizard, vengeful ghost of a mafia boss or any other entity that might want to take over Manhattan. It needs a headband with some unrelated Japanese symbols on it, maybe a few shurikens. Hey, that’s a good point – all these ninja covers and not a single throwing star between them! It’s probably for the best given the, ahem, unpolished nature of most of this artwork. Any shurikens involved would probably have looked as though they’d been crafted using the same production method we used as kids: cutting rough star shapes out of Coke cans using a pair of rusty tin snips. It's a technique that leaves you with shurikens that don't fly very well and won't stick in things when thrown, but handling them will slice up your fingers like you approached Freddy Krueger for an ill-advised high five.



There are so many ninjas on the Spectrum that we’ve reached a point of ninjas within ninjas. The big ninja seems tense or at least very warm, the sweat pouring down his nose serving as a good example of why you shouldn’t keep your head completely covered all the time. The little ninja in his eye? Not so much. That ninja’s having the time of their life. They’re not doing a flying kick, they’re leaping into the air and clicking their heels together at the sheer joy of being a ninja. My best guess is that they’ve just seen their careers advisor from high school. The shadowy world of espionage in feudal Japan is difficult to break into, is it, Mr. Johnson? Well, who needs a back-up plan now!?



It might seem like a bit of a stretch, but the game’s blurb describes Kage as “a young ninja” and besides, there’s no way I was going to let that outfit slide. Who knew they had mankinis back then? Kage is out to rescue a kidnapped princess (as though there’s any other kind of princess) and he must have been given this task when the rest of the royal family saw him and said “look at what this weirdo is wearing, he must be pretty bloody brave.” Technically it’s a pretty good cover, with some dynamic cartoon action and a man in the background who appears to be carrying a carton of french fries on each ear, but I just can’t get past Kage’s clothes. It’s not even the near nudity and prospect for some truly bizarre tan lines, it’s that it looks so damned uncomfortable. You’re a ninja, Kage. Your uniform is essentially pyjamas. I would start seeing that snuggliness as a perk of the job, if I were you.



The only thing “incredible but true” about that tagline is that it’s truly, incredibly inaccurate. I don’t even understand what part of The Ninja Warriors is supposed to be true. That ninja warriors once existed? Because I think even that is up for debate, or at least the idea that real ninjas did a lot of warrior-ing is. They certainly didn’t fight cyborgs in a futuristic dictatorship, which is what happens in The Ninja Warriors. I feel the composition of this piece is rather unfair on the red ninja, too, especially considering she’s the player one character of Ninja Warriors. For a ninja it’s probably a relief to know your face is obscured, but that’s what the masks are for.



You know, I always thought wolves had necks, but it seems I was mistaken. Apparently they’re all neck. Thanks for clearing that up, Shadow Dancer. Also, it’s nice to see Lawrence of Arabia’s still getting work.



Or Ninja Gaiden to you and me, and here’s a cover included because a) it’s good and b) it’s incredibly “of its time.” There’s no way you could place that artwork at any other period than the late eighties / early nineties. Bright colours, a ruddy great ninja, and even graffiti-style lettering that adorned thousands of market-stall t-shirts during my youth. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, even without checking, those aren’t real Japanese characters. However, the Japanese should definitely adopt them as the pictograms for “gnarly” and “x-treme.”



Finally for today, my absolute favourite ninja cover on the ZX Spectrum with Saboteur, a cover that has most certainly earned that exclamation mark in the title. Where can you start with this masterpiece? The title's sort of accurate, I guess. If you're trying to sabotage something, then murdering everyone in a three-mile radius will probably get the job done. Or how about the fact that the ninja has upgraded from primitive weapons like the sword to a fully-loaded MAC-10? He’s even put a silencer on it, as a gesture towards his ninja heritage. Then there’s his face, an expression of complete sensory overload, the look of a man who was pushed to the limit by the loud noises and flashing lights until he broke and began operating on pure instinct like a puppy during a fireworks show. No, the very best thing about it is that the ninja isn’t even looking at the man he’s kicking in the head. He’s a busy guy, he doesn’t have time to stare deeply into the eyes of each person whose life he snuffs out. I get the impression that the saboteur is very easily distracted, and should probably consult his doctor about potential ADD treatments.

There we go then, a hefty chunk – but not all – of the ninja-related covers of the ZX Spectrum. What did we learn from this look at the ancient shadow arts? That ninjas never use shurikens and they like to stand out in the open and fight, mostly, putting ninjas in the same category as professional boxers and half the clientèle of my hometown’s pubs at kicking out time. What a mysterious breed they are.

I really like Final Fantasy V. It might not be the crowning achievement of the SNES’s RPG library in the way that Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger are, and neither is a revolutionary megahit like Final Fantasy VII, but it’s got plenty of its own charms. A fun ability system with dress-up potential  (which, honestly, is something I really like in an RPG,) a simple story of heroic warriors and evil trees, a great soundtrack and a hero whose name you’re well within your rights to transliterate as “Butz.” Sadly I don’t have the time to participate in this year’s Four Job Fiesta, but I’ve had “In Search of Light” from the game’s soundtrack stuck in my head for days and it’s made me really want to write something about FFV, so here’s today’s article: a look at all the summonable monsters in the game, from oversized chickens to oversized chickens made of fire.


I was going to say that the chocobo is a mainstay of the Final Fantasy series’ summons, but thinking about it you can’t conjure large ostrich-like birds in all that many of the games. After FFV I think (and someone can correct me if I’m wrong here) the chocobo only appears as a summon in FFVII, and even then it’s teamed with a moogle. I think this is probably because of the chocobo’s increasing prevalence as a mode of transport. Being able to summon a chocobo in the later games would be akin to reaching out to the magical realms beyond and calling forth a bicycle.
Final Fantasy V’s chocobo isn’t quite as refined, design-wise, as chocobos that would appear later in the series. The legs are ganglier, the neck more crooked, and then there are those eyes: massive, saucer-like peepers that give the chocobo a constant expression of shock. If the plush, fluffy chocobos of games like Final Fantasy XIII are the regal thoroughbreds, then this chocobo is the runt of the litter who lived a tough life on the streets before some kindly group of adventurers took it in. I like it, though. This chocobo looks like it’d be handier in a fight, plus it’s scrawny enough that there’s little risk of the party turning to it for sustenance if their supplies run out.


When you use the chocobo summon, there’s a random chance that you’ll be visited by the fat chocobo instead. That isn’t an ironic nickname. Maybe chocobos hibernate through the winter months and he’s been packing away the gysahl greens in preparation. The difference between the fat chocobo and the regular kind, other than their cholesterol, is that the fat chocobo hits all enemies on screen rather than just one. Of course, the chocobo summon is pretty weak, so there’s a chance you’ll never use it enough times to see the fat chocobo. He’s out there, though. Eating. Wark-ing. Having naps. I’m jealous of the fat chocobo, is what I’m getting at.



Sylphs plural, even. Two small fairies in green swimming costumes. Look, every summoner has to start somewhere, all right? You can’t dive straight into the earth-rending megadragons on day one of Summoner School. Not that the sylphs don’t have their darker side: they restore health to the party, but they get that health by draining it from the enemies. They’re more like miniature trained attack vampires than your usual fairies, so at least the concept is fairly metal even if the execution looks like a successful range of soft toys from the eighties.



This is a weird summon, because remoras are real fish. They’re the ones with the strangely-evolved fins that let them stick to other, larger sea creatures. It sort of makes sense that summoning Remora paralyses your opponent briefly – I know I’d stop whatever I was doing if a fish attached itself to me using an organic suction cup – but there’s nothing particularly magical about a remora. In this case “summon spell” could easily equate to “having a bucket filled with fish.” The remoras in FFV don’t look much like the real-world fish, however, instead clearly being based on piranhas. Now, “bucket full of piranhas”? That’s a special attack I would end up using a lot, unlike summoning remora. Maybe one day there’ll be a FFV sequel that includes the Fishmonger job. As you level up, you learn the secrets of larger buckets with larger fish inside, until you’re dropping aquarium tanks packed with great whites onto the battlefield.



First up in a trio of classic elemental-themed Final Fantasy summons is Ifrit, Square’s take on the Efreet of Middle Eastern legend. Ifrit possesses the power of fire, and if this sprite is any indication that fire might be a little too hot even for him. He’s definitely shielding himself from something, as though he wasn’t expecting his attack called “Hellfire” to be quite so fiery. He’ll tone it down to “Heckfire” next time, I’m sure. Or maybe he's shy, just because you're a terrifiying demon of flame doesn;t mean you're exempt from self-confidence issues.
Someone once told me that Ifrit’s horns reminded them of disgusting overgrown toenails, and ever since that’s what I’ve thought of when I see them. I’m telling you this in the hopes this knowledge works like The Ring and I’ll be free of it forever.



The ice spirit Shiva just looks bored. “Ho hum, another day, another monster to freeze to death.” I reckon she knows she’s just a temporary fixture, until the party finds more powerful summons later in their adventure. That would be pretty demoralising. Or perhaps as a facet of the Hindu deity Shiva, she has already seen all this before. I’ve often wondered how the Hindu god Shiva – a male god who has more to do with fire than ice – became a female ice spirit, but then I realised I was thinking about it too hard and Squaresoft probably just liked the name. In fact, I’ve seen some suggestions that “Shiva” is just meant to be the word “Shiver.” I’m not sure I buy that. If it was true, I'd expect Ifrit to be called "Burny" or something, but it’s an interesting theory.



Then there’s Ramuh, the old man with the electric stick. There’s little to say about Ramuh, who doesn’t change much between appearances and does his job of electrocuting monsters with a minimum of fuss. The most interesting thing about him is his beard. If you look through a list of all the times he’s appeared in the FF games, you gain a respect for the amount of effort put into giving him ever-more bizarre and elaborate facial hai.r By the time we get to Final Fantasy XXV, his moustache will be seven miles long and composed of loop-the-loops and dangerous hairpin turns. His moustache is already weird enough in Final Fantasy V,  mind you: one side’s drooping and the other side’s curled up in the air in a way Salvador Dali could only dream of. I assume he ran out of moustache wax half-way through sorting it out. I also assume this happens to Ramuh on a regular basis.



It’s Titan, former scourge of the Greek gods, now a large naked man squatting in a position that speaks to either an imminent wrestling move or a chronic bowel obstruction. You might be thinking “hey, he’s not naked, he’s wearing a belt that holds a fake horse tail near his rear end,” but let me tell you that you will be refused admittance to the bank or your child’s parents evening or an airport terminal if you turn up wearing nothing but a belt and a fake horse tail.



Good ol’ Golem, always one of my favourite summons, makes an appearance in FFV. I don’t like him for his looks, if I’m honest. He’s just a monster-man made of rocks, which is a design we’ve all seen a million times even if this particular iteration does only have one arm. I think Titan covers FFV’s quota of “man-shaped lumps that look as though they were carved from stone” very well, thank you, and this Golem certainly isn’t as interesting as the Golem in Final Fantasy VI because that one’s a robot. No, I like Golem because of his special power: when you summon him, you’re placed under his protection and if you’re attacked by physical means then the Golem’s hand pops up out of the ground and deflects the blow. This, one assumes, is why his sprite only has one arm. It’s very satisfying to see your enemies being denied, that’s the thing.



Catoblepas, or Shoat as it’s sometimes called, is based on a mythical monster that the ancient Greeks described as being able to turn a person to stone with a glance. Being literally petrified by looking at something seems to have been a real worry that played on the collective consciousness of ancient Greece, but it’s not so much of an issue with the Catoblepas as it is with Medusa because the extreme weight of the catoblepas’ head means it’s always looking downwards. It's the Eeyore of the ancient bestiary, really. Looking at this sprite, and particularly the Catoblepas’ single eye, I’m guessing that its design was inspired by real-life animals born with the mutation that makes them cyclopes.



How unfortunate to share your name with a festering sore. Okay, yes, and also a gemstone, but still. It’s a problem I imagine herpetologists get tired of dealing with. Luckily for Carbuncle (and, presumably, some herpetologists) it's pretty cute. Not “puppy in a Halloween costume” cute, because it’s got a distinctly alien look to it and a rock in its forehead, but something you could see yourself owning as a pet. Keeping it fed might be an issue, mind you. I can't imagine Carbuncle would survive on Pedigree Chum.



Mild Final Fantasy V spoilers ahead: Syldra starts the game as the ship-towing companion of playable character and pirate captain Faris, but various events occur and Syldra ends up becoming usable as a summon towards the end of the game. While her non-summon sprite looks a lot more dragon-y, summon Syldra is a Loch Ness monster / plesiosaur type creature. She also looks rather cheerful, probably because she doesn’t have to pull a pirate ship around any more. Surprisingly, Syldra’s elemental attack is wind rather than water. If you’re a big fan of water-theme dragon monsters, don’t worry, FFV has you covered. Syldra’s not a bad summon, either, and with some smart wind-boosting equipment set-ups she can do a hefty chunk of damage. Is it worth all the faffing about to make that happen? Maybe not, FFV does have a lot of ways for you to do big damage. Personally, I like to throw large sums of gil at my problems or, when I last went through the Four Job Fiesta anyway, to pray that my Dancer would deign to activate their high-damage Sword Dance ability on a regular basis.



Another common recurring summon in the series, Odin works the same way as he always does: instantly killing weaker enemies, or doing damage to bigger foes that are immune to instant death attacks. Don’t fix what ain’t broke, that’s Odin’s motto. His sword has a handy can-opener attachment, and his horse Sleipnir has six legs. The mythological Sleipnir had eight legs, but look at that sprite and tell me where you’d cram in another two legs, huh? My favourite thing about FFV’s Odin is his pose, his outstretched arm in a mocking “is that the best you’ve got?” stance. I mean, it’s probably nothing of the sort: Odin’s above such petty concerns and his pose is simply him trying to keep his balance while carrying a huge sword and riding a horse with surplus limbs. That said, he is the Allfather of the Norse pantheon, you’ve expect him to be at least a bit of a show-off.



I promised you big watery fish-dragons and let it never be said that I’m not a man of my word. I’m looking at Leviathan’s face, and I find myself thinking “what would the Joker look like if he were a fish? There have been so many alternate takes and spin-offs of the Batman universe that I’m sure he was a fish at some point.” Then I remembered the classic episode of Batman: The Animated Series where the Joker uses a special toxin to give a load of fish his face and my question was answered. I do think Leviathan has a really cool sprite, though. Very sinuous, a great colour scheme and again a cheerful expression. There you go, then: being a sea monster is the secret to true happiness.



Yep, that’s definitely a bird made of fire. I’m sorry, folks, I’ve got nothing. You’d expect something more impressive from a top-level summon, especially after Leviathan looked so good, but sometimes you’ve just got to have a bird made of fire. There’s not much else you can do with Phoenix, except spell its name wrong every god damned time.



Finally you've got Bahamut, a relatively classic western-style dragon. His neck doesn’t look very comfortable, does it? It’s all bunched up, he’s going to get a cramp. Nice wings, though. I’m not sure if the artist was going for a crispy crystalline coating or the iridescence of a butterfly, but they make a nice change from the usual leathery wings. The more I look at Bahamut, the more I get a subtle xenomorph vibe from him – it’s the segmented tail and neck, combined with the black parts of his colour scheme. It seems appropriate, Bahamut really could take off and nuke a site from orbit. In the end, though, Bahamut is just another dragon. An imposing, dangerous dragon to be sure, but still just a dragon. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by later Final Fantasy games, where Bahamut becomes a laser-firing space dragon. That’s the kind of thing that could spoil anyone, although it’s going to lead to a rapidly-escalating draconic arms race, with consumers demanding bigger, ever-more-laser-packed dragons. Hang on, I'm making that sound like a bad thing, which it clearly isn't.

That’s all the summonable creatures from Final Fantasy V, then, and if I had to pick a favourite I’d probably go with Leviathan based on looks and Remora for concept. If there’s a better use for the mystical arts of sorcery than firing piranhas at people, I’ve yet to hear it.

You’re all familiar with Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, but get ready for the fresh and furry stylings of Catulus Caesar, the cutest, fuzziest, most snuggly-wuggly leader in all of Ancient Rome! Thrill as he directs his legions from the comfort of a cardboard box! Be amazed as a video of him conquering Gaul is uploaded to YouTube and gets a million hits because he does a little sneeze at the end! Oh, all right, today’s game isn’t about a cat that leads the Roman Empire, as wonderful as that would be. He’s simply a cat named Caesar, in Andromeda Software and Mirrorsoft’s 1984 vermin-control-em-up Caesar the Cat!

This is the loading screen for the ZX Spectrum version of the game, which is the one I’ll be looking at first. There’s not much to say about it, other than that Mirrorsoft was a publishing arm owned by the Mirror Group, producers of the British tabloid The Daily Mirror. I don’t know why, because it’s a business venture like many others, but the idea of a newspaper company also publishing computer games just seems strange to me. For non-UK readers, The Mirror is the newspaper that used to employ the enormous gasbag and multi-year winner of the World’s Most Punchable Face award, Piers Morgan. If you’re American, I speak on behalf of my country when I say I’m sorry he spends so much time in your fine nation.


Here’s the title screen, where the endless battle between irreconcilable foes is once again joined. It’s cat versus mouse, and you’re the cat. There’s Caesar at the top of the screen, sitting around and not doing much like all good cats should. There are also mice, one of which is eating the game’s title. Caesar lets the mouse do its thing, saving his energy for the game itself, and I let the title screen run for a while to see what would happen when the mice ran out of text to gnaw on.


Gah! I was not expecting the sudden appearance of Caesar’s huge disembodied head. The numbers are either some kind of score total you need to keep Caesar happy, or a countdown until he unleashes his doomsday weapon.


“My cat has no nose.”
“How does he smell?”
“He can’t, he doesn’t have a nose. It’s very sad.”


The game begins, and you’re presented with Caesar, some mice and a packed larder. The rodent infestation is hardly surprising with all this uncovered food knocking about. At least put some cling film over it, jeez. There’s a real feast on display here: suspiciously-coloured cheese, red and black food logs and what I took, at first glance, to be a rosary hanging from the top-left corner. I think it’s actually supposed to be a string of sausages and the cross is attached to the lid of the bottle underneath. Would it be sacrilegious to suggest that the Catholic Church start looking into edible rosary beads? Oh, and remember that red jar, it’s important later. Anyway, you control Caesar on his mission to rid the pantry of mice, and controlling the cat is as simple as using the joystick – no other buttons to worry about with this one, folks. The larder is split into four horizontal rows, and Caesar can go up and down to move freely between them. It’s a maze game without the walls, in a way.


Catching a mouse is, in theory, as simple as walking on top of it. As you can see above, Caesar delicately picks the mouse up in his mouth, and you then have to carry it to the door that appears somewhere on the screen (it’s the red-and-blue rectangle at the top-right, in this case.) I assume the mice are removed in this way to spare the player the grisly sight of Caesar batting the mouse around for a while before moving in for the kill. It’s a good compromise, in my book. Having a cat walk all over your food is unhygienic enough without the room being splattered with mouse innards.


However, Caesar the Cat is much less forgiving than the premise might lead you to expect, turning a cutesy romp into a surprisingly tense race against time. The most important thing to remember about catching mice is that if you move on to the same horizontal level as them, they’ll disappear. The way to catch them is to approach from a different row and only make your move when you’re directly above or below them. However, you can’t take too long about it because your score is constantly running down, and if it reaches zero it’s game over. So, speed is of the essence, but don’t get too over-zealous in your joystick wranglings – if you accidentally try to move Caesar beyond the confines of the screen, he bangs his head into the wall and you’re docked a chunk of points for your tacit endorsement of animal cruelty. The mice disappear and reappear pretty quickly, so you might think that a good idea would be to sit in place and wait for the mice to come to you. Don’t do this. I did, and I couldn’t figure out why I was getting almost immediate game overs. It turns out that if Caesar stays still for more than a couple of seconds, the rate at which your score decreases multiplies about ten-fold. I’m allergic to cats and have as little to do with them as possible, but even I know that constant frantic scurrying goes against the very essence of cat-ness.
If that wasn’t enough obstacles on your road to a pest-free pantry, there are also some jars on the shelves – the pink one on the right, the blue one in the middle and the previously-mentioned red jar. If you move up or down while touching the jars, they fall off the shelves and break. Two of them cost you a points penalty if you smash them, but if you break the red one…


That’s the jar in which Caesar’s owners store the smallpox samples they smuggled out of a Soviet virology lab during their escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and smashing it is an immediate game over, complete with vaguely threatening message. When you do get a game over, the game plays a beepy version of Auld Lang Syne, the main effect of which is to make you realise how weird it is to hear Auld Lang Syne on a day other than New Year’s Eve.


If you manage to survive all these pitfalls and catch enough mice, the screen is reset and the black mice are replaced by blue mice. The opening screen also implies the existence of rare and elusive red mice, but I can’t confirm that because I didn’t manage to get past the blue ones. The problem is that they eat all the food really, really quickly, and every time a piece of food is devoured, you guessed it, you lose a bunch of points. How much faster are the blue mice than the black when it comes to sating their relentless appetites? Put it this way: I didn’t even notice that the black mice were eating the food but the blue mice get through this enormous buffet like, well, I get through an enormous buffet. So, the red mice will go forever unwitnessed aside from that brief glimpse on the title screen. Caesar the Cat is a fun little game in short bursts, but the dedication – and luck with the mouse’s positions – required for mastery is no justified by the amount of entertainment on offer.


Here’s the Commodore 64 version, and it must be said that this game (in all its forms) is cute as heck. There was a BBC Micro port, too, which looks much the same as this C64 version but with a more garish colour palette.


The C64 version plays identically, although the playfield looks a little different and the generic smashable jars of the Spectrum version have been replaced by stacks of cups and a fancy teapot. The teapot is this version’s “instant failure” breakable, so let’s assume it’s a priceless family heirloom. Also of note is that someone appears to have racked up a game of pool in the bottom-right corner.


There’s nothing to choose between the different versions in terms of gameplay, and while part of me wants to say that the gentler colours and larger objects make the C64 version the superior one, I have to say I think I prefer the Spectrum Caesar for one simple reason: the seeds in the watermelons make it look like they’ve got grumpy jack o’lantern faces. I do like the graphics in both versions, though. The C64 version especially has a nostalgic “’early reader’ kids book from the seventies”  aesthetic that reminds me of half the books in my junior school’s library, thanks to the semi-abstract food illustrations and the yellowy-brown colour palette.


It lacks a real hook to keep you coming back and it’s random enough that it probably won’t hold your attention if you were aiming for true mastery in the way something like Pac-Man might, but for a tiny little game about cute animals that controls well and moves quickly Caesar the Cat is a fun way to spend ten minutes, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Back once again – three small words guaranteed to get “Renegade Master” stuck in my head – with a fresh set of five miniature moments from a variety of games, it’s the return of the VGJunk Ephemera series! Yes, it’s another selection of inconsequential bits of game that make me say “nice” whenever I see them, or at least they would if I was in the habit of talking out loud to myself as I play videogames in my lonely shame-zone.

When I wrote about the summons of Final Fantasy V, I mentioned that I’m fond of the Golem summon whenever he pops up, and I particularly like his appearance in Final Fantasy Tactics.


Here is the FFT version of Golem, looking like The Thing going through an awkward teenage phase. Even for something made of rocks, this Golem really looks like he’s made of rocks, as though the rabbi (or whatever the Ivalice equivalent of a rabbi is) who created this particular Golem was distracted half-way through the carving process. Just because he's taken the form of a fossilised mound of chicken nuggets doesn’t make him bad at his job, mind you, and when you summon the Golem your characters are still placed under his protection. This means that when a physical attack comes your way, the Golem’s hand appears and blocks it, and it looks like this.


It’s specifically this animation that makes FFT’s Golem my favourite. The satisfaction of your enemy’s attack being casually rebuffed is nice, but it’s the way you see them actually hit Golem and rebound from the impact that makes me like it enough to write about. I appreciate the surreality of the entire thing, too. There was no way that ninja was expecting, when he started swinging his blade, that a huge stone hand posed in the universal gesture for “no” would appear and take the hit.  Presumably the sudden jarring impact also dislocated the ninja’s shoulder, and the fact that the ninja doesn’t take any damage is a rare flaw in an otherwise excellent game.


Sticking with animations but moving on to Nintendo’s classic wet-slalom-em-up Wave Race 64, which is one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64 and is still a lot of fun to play even now thanks to its sunny atmosphere and excellent water physics. One thing that Wave Race 64 lets the more confident / arrogant (delete as applicable) player do is perform tricks while they’re jet-skiing around the game’s courses, and my favourite of these stunts is flopping around in a circle on your stomach.


With the possible exception of some other straight sports games like Tennis, Wave Race 64 might be the most “realistic” game Nintendo have ever produced, and that’s why I love this animation so much – having played Nintendo’s other racing games, you might expect this spin to be flashier, to put the “buoyant” in flamboyant, but no. This looks exactly like a slippery person attempting an ill-judged trick in choppy seas, and there’s something about it that’s terribly charming to me. Maybe it’s the way the rider doesn’t react when they land and the jet-ski slams into their midriff, grimacing through the pain in an effort to look as cool as a person in a life vest can look. Who knows for sure? The heart truly is a mystery, but one thing is clear: the first thing I’ll be doing after I finish this article is playing Wave Race 64 and making my character spin around in an undignified as manner as possible.


Goldeneye was unarguably the king of multiplayer shooters on the Nintendo 64, and its reputation as host of the best four-player murder-fests only seems to grow with every passing year. It’s a position I can’t really argue against, not when I played so much Goldeneye multiplayer that I’m surprised every time I see Pierce Brosnan and his head isn’t shaped like an improperly-stored cereal box. However, one overlooked N64 shooter that I had a lot of fun with as a young person was Acclaim’s Turok: Rage Wars, a multiplayer-focused take on the “time-travelling Native American fights dinosaurs” franchise. It had a solid core married to some fun weapons and interesting game modes, like the one where players randomly turn into monkeys. Still, that wasn’t quite enough to keep me and my friends hooked, so in an example of what is now called “metagaming” but was known back then as “pissing about,” we came up with our own game mode.


One of the weapons in Rage Wars is a napalm launcher. I know it looks like a poor first draft of a robot caterpillar, but it’s actually a gun capable of firing sticky napalm bombs that can be detonated at the push of a button, like so.


With the power of the napalm gel in hand, we devised a new four-player game mode. One team of two has the napalm launchers, and covers each other in explosive gel. Their goal is to kill the other team of two as many times as possible, but only using the splash damage of the exploding napalm. Thus, Team Napalm has to get as close as possible to the other team, gradually whittling down their health with repeated detonations, while their targets try to stay out of their way. A lot of Rage Wars’ stages are quite small and constricted, so that’s easier said than done, and when you add in the frantic bickering of Team Napalm as they demand that their team-mates blow them up right this instant, c’mon, he’s trapped in a corner, it makes for a frantic experience. Each kill earns a point, the teams switch roles at the end of the game and whoever scores the most points after x amounts of matches is the winner. In this way, I think it’s safe to say we extracted maximum value from Turok: Rage Wars.
On a related note, I tried playing some of the game to capture the GIF above. The default control scheme is that the analog stick is for looking around and the C-buttons move your character, and years of playing more modern shooters meant my brain simply could not handle the functions of each stick being on opposite sides of the pad to what I’m used to. It would only be slightly hyperbolic to say that it threw me into a dimension of pure confusion where the laws that govern our human world held no dominion.


As strange as it might sound, there are some games you can play that don’t involve computers or consoles. Who knew, right? One such game is Subbuteo, the much-beloved tabletop recreation of football where the exciting soccer action is controlled by flicking plastic players with rounded bases around on a green blanket. I mean flicking in the literal, with your fingertips, sense. A cherished part of many a young football fan’s childhood, my own included, Subbuteo’s popularity meant that a computerised version was a certainty and so it came to pass in 1990 when Goliath Game released Subbuteo: The Computer Game on a variety of formats. While it loses the pleasure that the tactile nature of real Subbuteo offers, a computer game version does make some sense. You might not be able to find a willing Subbuteo parter, and if you did there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’re the kind of uncultured barbarian who ignores the rules and does nothing but blast shots towards goal from all over the pitch. There is a clearly marked shooting zone for a reason, you idiot. Playing Subbuteo on your computer also has the advantage that you know none of your players are going to be broken: the ankles of the plastic figures are notoriously fragile and, much like the ankles of West Ham striker Andy Carroll, will snap if so much as a gentle breeze caresses them. This isn’t about the game itself, though, but specifically the screen where you select the colour of your team’s kit.


As seen here in the Atari ST version of the game, your players are presented as though they were a box of real, physical Subbuteo figures, complete with styrofoam packaging and a goalkeeper on a stick who looks like he’s in the process of being robbed at gunpoint. For comparison, here’s what a real box of Subbuteo players looks like.


Without wanting to slip too deeply into wistful “when I were a lad” territory, there was always something slightly magical about seeing a Subbuteo team all boxed up like this, especially if it was some exotic and ultra-obscure team like Red Boys Differdange, or when you realised that Arsenal would make a perfectly good stand-in for Rotherham United. Looking at this kit-changing screen, I’m certain that whoever designed it felt exactly the same way.


Finally for today, a musical interlude courtesy of Squaresoft’s SNES masterpiece Chrono Trigger. It’s got one of the best soundtracks on the system - one of the best soundtracks period, even – and here’s one tiny thing about it that’s hardly vital to its success but which I’m still very glad of. At one stage in the game, our plucky heroes engage in battle with grumpy wizard and potential party member Magus, and the fight gets its own special musical theme. The whole track is great, but I’m here for the laughter sound effect that plays during the song. You can hear it at about 1:02 in this video:


I don’t have anything insightful or clever to say about it, I just think it’s super neat. I know some people hear it as baleful sobbing, but it will always be laughter to me. My only question is who’s laughing? It’s got a certain dopey quality to it, so I doubt it’s Magus. I can’t imagine him haw-haw-hawing like a drunken hillbilly. Although, Magus does say “if my fate is to die, then I must simply laugh!” at one point, so maybe he’s secretly a much more chucklesome fellow than his dour demeanour suggests.
One of the reason that I think it’s laughter rather than weeping is that I’ve listened to the Brink of Time album, a collection of acid jazz Chrono Trigger remixes. Magus’ battle theme is covered on the album, complete with laughter.


You can hear it at about 47 seconds in, and while it’s (rather impressively) played on a guitar now that’s definitely a laugh. There you go then. Case closed. Chrono Trigger is a game that laughs at those who play it. That’s fine by me, frankly. I’ve had so many happy hours playing Chrono Trigger that it could steal my girlfriend and slap my mother and I’d still love it.

“Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” goes the theme song, and if today’s game is any indication you should probably try checking the bargain bins of your local videogame retailers at the turn of the millennium. It’s Bonsai Entertainment’s 2001 undeserving-of-the-plural-em-up Sesame Street Sports for the Game Boy Color!

Yes, it’s a Game Boy Color game based on a kid’s TV show. A terrible fate to befall any children’s franchise, and an especially cruel blow for something as universally beloved as Sesame Street. But maybe I’m too hasty in my judgement. Sure, games like Rugrats: Totally Angelica, Doug’s Big Game and The Tweenies: Doodles’ Bones have set a dreadful precedent, not to mention shaving years off my lifespan, but this is Sesame Street we’re talking about. Surely the muppet-based joie de vivre of Sesame Street is beyond the corroding influence of a zero-effort GBC cash-in? Well, yes and no, as well shall see.


Hitting start brings up a screen of Elmo and Big Bird, who seem to be commentators for the events ahead. At least, commentators is what they’d be if they ever commented on anything. Instead they resolutely maintain their silence, only offering the player their glassy-eyed stares. Big Bird in particular has the expression of someone who knows that neither he nor the player have any idea what they’re doing here, and he sympathises.


Time to pick a character, and all your favourites are here! Not my favourites, mind you. No Snuffleupagus, no Count von Count and worst of all no Oscar the Grouch. Given that I so often write about licensed Game Boy Color games, it should come as not surprise that I feel a kinship with a grumpy creature who surrounds himself with trash.
So, you’ve got Ernie, Telly, Cookie Monster, Grover, Zoe and Elmo to pick from. In keeping with the messages of free thinking and spontaneity espoused by Sesame Street, I’m going to break free of my usual insistence on beginning at the obvious starting point, which in this case is the top-left. Instead, I’ll be starting with Cookie Monster. Everyone loves Cookie Monster, right? Unless they run a biscuit museum, I suppose. Plus, that is a really great portrait of Cookie Monster, mostly because he looks completely mental.


The Sesame Street sports spectacular gets underway with Cookie Monster on a space hopper, a phrase I never thought I’d have cause to use but I’m glad that I do. Cookie Monster is taking part is a kind of bouncy steeplechase, and he must reach the end of the course as quickly as possible. To do this, you hold right on the d-pad and press either A or B to jump – bounce, I suppose – over obstacles.


This being a Cookie Monster game, there are of course cookies to collect. Magical, hovering cookies. Jump into them to collect them. You do actually seem to be collecting them, too, and the number at the top continues to rise as you grab them. That Cookie Monster doesn’t immediately devour them strikes me as being against the very essence of his character, but what do I know? I haven’t seen an episode of Sesame Street in decades. Maybe he’s learned some goddamn self control since then.


For a moment I thought that stall in the background was selling hundred-dollar hot dogs. The fact that I’m paying so much attention to the background should give you an idea of how engrossing the gameplay is. It’s easier to ignore as a “buy now” popup from WinRAR, frankly. In fact, I think it might be impossible to actually concentrate on, it’s so braindead. You move right and jump over things. Occasionally there’s a water fountain that propels you into the air so you can reach high-altitude cookies. It’s so simple a toddler could do it, which is presumably the point, but even most toddlers would quickly tire of it.


If your don’t fancy a hot dog, maybe you can hit this stall instead and buy yourself a Hotig. Delicious, mysterious Hotig, it’s good for what ails ya. How much does Hotig cost? JO, that’s how much. Wait, I’ve just remembered what “JO” is sometimes an abbreviation for. You can keep your damn Hotig, you sicko.


I collected 15 cookies and cleared the course in forty-six seconds, according to Big Bird and Elmo. Half of that time was spend grinding Cookie Monster up against obstacle to see if anything interesting would happen. It didn’t.


The sports odyssey continues as Ernie takes to the water in his bathtub. Not since the time of ancient Greece have sportsmen competed in the nude, but Ernie’s out to change that. Off he goes, down through the raging torrent, occasionally hauling his entire bathtub out of the river as he jumps to collect the rubber duckies scattered throughout. You might be thinking “that seems very similar to the previous stage,” but you’d be wrong. It is in fact identical to the previous stage, except with different graphics.


The most baffling thing about it is that you still have to hold right on the d-pad to move right, and the presumed current of the water has no effect on the movement of your bathtub. My only explanation for this is that the river is very shallow and Ernie has simply kicked his feet through the bottom of the tub so he can run, Flintstones-style, along the river bed.


On to Telly’s snow-themed sledding event. He’s wearing a woolly hat to protect himself from the cold, bless him. However, it’s not going to protect him from the landing after this jump, an acrobatic effort that the experts would described as having “gone tits up.”


I’m kidding, of course. You can’t hurt a muppet. They’re made of felt, for a start, and Telly will always land on his sled no matter how you hurl him. I did hurl him a fair bit, too. It seemed appropriate, given that he’s racing down a hill on a plastic tray… except he isn’t. Just like the other two stages, you have to manually move Telly to the right, despite the fact that he’s sitting in a sled atop an icy slope. At least with Ernie you could argue that maybe his bathtub is more of a boat and it’s equipped with an outboard motor or something, but Telly’s complete disregard for the force of gravity is impossible to justify. They could have made his stage a little different but no, it’s exactly the same. On the plus side, that snowman is fairly adorable.


It’s Grover’s turn now. He’s on a unicycle, teetering his way past the Fish Hut, which I assume is like a Pizza Hut but they only serve fish. Only serve fish as food, I mean. The Fish Hut is on land, so it's unlikely to sustain itself on a fish-only clientele. I’ve always had a soft spot for Grover, probably because as a kid I had a Grover soft toy. The arms of said toy were long enough for you to knot together so you could wear him like a cape, much as an ancient hunter might wear the pelt of a mighty beast he’d slain.


I see that misplaced apostrophe, Sesame Street Sports. That scuba hire business better be owned by someone called Kayak, otherwise I’m going to have to write a strongly-worded letter about this betrayal of the educational principles that Sesame Street stands for.


All the stages have a certain item – cookies, rubber ducks and in Grover’s case, balloons – that you can collect, although as far as I can tell there’s absolutely no reason to collect them and no punishment if you don’t meet some vague balloon quota. This makes it all the more confusing that in Grover’s stage, there’s a small boy with a bouquet of balloons standing around at the end of the stage. Grover can take all the child’s balloons and saunter away. Grover, you arse, you don’t even need those balloons.


Next up is Zoe’s dirt-bike track, and it’s probably the most boring of the lot. That was a hotly-contested category, let me tell you. It’s the same move-right-and-jump gameplay as all the others – loose, floaty jumps married to a complete lack of challenge – but with a blander background.


The final stage is Elmo’s rollerblading, musical-note-collecting extravaganza. The inquisitive little furball skates his way through a part of Sesame Street that’s in dire need of some pothole repairs. I can sympathise, Elmo. Some of the roads near my house would give the Mars Rover a real challenge.


I don’t think thrusting your groin at the potholes is going to help, Elmo.


Oh look, it’s the Twin Towers. This game was actually released a few weeks after 9/11, which is a little unfortunate for the developers. Still, it’s a Sesame Street game. I’m sure nobody took umbrage.
Let’s focus instead on the musical monkeys. Their organ constantly pumps out musical notes that Elmo can collect. As mentioned, Elmo has no reason to collect the notes, but maybe you’re really into racking up high scores and you have a lot of free time. The best thing about this organ is that it’s being operated by a monkey who has another, smaller monkey as his assistant. Having spent years watching his human captor operate the organ while forcing him to dance, the monkey could take no more and rebelled against his master. Given that chimps tend to go for the eyes and the testicles when they attack, it probably wasn’t a pretty sight. However, the monkey knew of nothing of life but the organ grinder’s trade, and so he enslaved a smaller monkey and become that which he most despised, setting in motion a dark and terrible cycle of events. I’d keep a close eye on Monkey Jr., if I were you.
Once you reach the end of Elmo’s stage, that’s every “event” completed. What’s your reward for mastering such varied disciplines as “bouncing right and jumping” and “floating right in a bathtub and jumping”?


Absolutely bugger all, that’s what. Not tallying up of your scores, no congratulatory messages, not even a heartfelt thank-you for somehow managing to stay awake for the entire game. It’s straight back to the character select screen for you, bucko. Repeated playthroughs and further investigation bore no fruit, so I have to assume that this really is all that Sesame Street Sports has to offer. It’s an astonishingly slight amount of gameplay, and the gameplay that is there is so boring that it borders on pre-surgery anaesthetic levels of sleep-inducing. It’s a game for kids, sure, but none of the developers seem to have much of an idea about what kids might want to play. When my nephew was three he was playing much more complex and engaging (and educational) game than this, and Sesame Street Sports would have bored him into discarding it after about five minutes. The nicest thing you can say about it is that the gameplay works as (presumably) intended and that some of the graphics, particularly the characters themselves, look fairly decent, but it’s still got that stink of cynical money-grabbing all over it. It's too much of a non-entity to really hate, though - unless you were some poor child who spent their pocket money to buy it. It is my sincere recommendation that you watch an episode of Sesame Street rather than playing Sesame Street Sports. You might even learn something, although if you’re short of time please note that watching a full episode of Sesame Street takes about four times as long as playing through this game.

You’d better have the details of your local optician close by, because you’re probably going to need to make an appointment after today’s game: it’s Microids’ 2014 good-job-there’s-a-hint-button-em-up Hidden Files: Echoes of JFK!

That’s right, it’s a game with a plot about the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Yes, there are still people out there that dispute the historically accepted events surrounding JFK’s death, but fortunately this game is daft enough that it’s unlikely to stoke the fires of their paranoia. I don’t have much time for conspiracy theories, for the simple reason that I cannot imagine any government being competent enough to keep secrets of this magnitude, well, secret. The Moon Landing deniers are particularly aggravating to me personally. Perhaps one day they’ll all band together, buy a rocket and piss off to the moon in search of evidence. That’d be nice.


Somewhere, at some time, a car crashes. The driver is killed, and thus we have our starting point for a wacky adventure through the shadowy half-truths that lay a shroud over a turbulent time in American history.
Apologies, by the way, for the grey box that pops up in the corner of some of these screenshots. A byproduct of the image capture process, unfortunately, and not something that’s part of the game itself. I'll say this to it's credit, Hidden Files definitely doesn't have a look based around grey boxes.


It transpires that the dead driver was a journalist named Jack Olsen, a man who claimed to have come into possession of shocking new evidence regarding JFK’s assassination. This is a case that goes all the way to the top, right to the Oval Office. Here’s the President of the USA now, meeting with the head of the FBI and looking thoroughly like a bootleg Barack Obama.


The FBI’s response is to assign one lone agent to the case. I know, you’d think such a potentially earth-shattering revelation would require the attention of more than one person, especially given that someone’s already been murdered. Not to worry, though, they’ve got just the woman for the job. When you’re dealing with a sinister conspiracy that manipulates the lives of the unwitting American people, there’s only one person you can turn to: FBI Special Agent Sully. Yes, I read it as Scully the first time I saw it, too. I’m not sure whether I’m disappointed I won’t be playing as Dana Scully or relieved that Gillian Anderson won’t be appearing in the form of a plasticy bootleg CG model.


Here’s Sully now, ready to bust the case wide open. She will be once she’s got these photos of Olsen printed out, anyway. With those in hand, she’ll no doubt be heading to the crime scene and bringing the full power of her keen analytical mind to bear on the problem.


Except that’ll have to wait, because the printer’s knackered. That’s right, your first task in this game of intrigue and dark secrets is some light office maintenance. Well, you don’t want to cram all the thrills into the first few moments, do you? Then there’d be nowhere to go to but downwards, but if you start with changing printer cartidges then even filling in paperwork would seem captivating by comparison. Speaking of paperwork, I hope she remembers to fill in an expenses report, you wouldn’t want the cost of ink cartridges coming out of your own pocket.


Luckily there’s a spare cartridge in the laboratory next door, and here’s where we get our first taste of Hidden Files: Echoes of JFK’s gameplay. It’s a hidden object game! You know the sort of thing: there’s a big screen packed with a cluttered mass of random objects, and you’re tasked with finding the specific items listed at the bottom of the screen. Cross off all the items on your list and the scene is completed, usually giving you an item that you need in order to progress in the game. Ever since I played Halloween Trick or Treat last Halloween I’ve become slightly obsessed with the hidden object genre, especially the spookily-themed ones, of which there are a significant number. They range in complexity from the likes of Halloween Trick or Treat, with nothing but hidden object scenes and the odd mini-puzzle, to games that are almost full-on graphic adventures with more fleshed-out puzzles and inventories of collectible items. Hidden Files falls somewhere in the middle: it’s mostly hidden object stuff but you do have an inventory, although the “puzzles” involved are all extremely simple “use key on door” things. Or “use ink on printer,” in this case. Also slightly different than the norm is the interactivity of some of the scenes, such as his lab where you can open and close the drawers to reveal more objects. To finish each scene you have to clear the list and then – and only then – can  you pick up the item you actually need, which was a little annoying in this case when I immediately spotted the ink cartridge but had to spend five minutes engaging in Sully’s obsessive cleaning routines.


Now that the printer’s working, I can start assembling the “My First Big Case” scrapbook, complete with photos of the President and Jack Olsen. Olsen’s got something of a young Jeff Goldblum about him, don’t you think? Well, he did before the sudden introduction of that tree into his day.


Before Sully can start piecing the evidence together, she has to access her encrypted computer but it’s locked behind a minigame, and it’s a good example of the level of challenge and complexity you’ll be getting from the minigames in this one. Simply swap around the segments of the lines until you’ve got three continuous lines. It’s not exactly rocket science. It’s not any kind of science, honestly. What’s the easiest kind of science? GCSE geography? Even that’s more challenging than this minigame, and from my dim recollection GCSE geography was ninety percent colouring in maps and ten percent comparing rainfall charts.


The trail leads Sully to a garage near the crime scene, where she hopes to find the black pick-up truck that rammed Olsen’s car off the road. The garage also appears to be part junkyard, so at least there’s some reason for a huge pile of random crap to be laying around, unlike the squalor of the FBI offices. Nice reference to the famous “rebrum” scene from The Shining up there, too. Hang on, was it "rebrum" in the movie? Yeah, that sounds right. I know ambulances are supposed to have backwards writing on them, but this is ridiculous, ba-dum tssh.


I roused the owner of the garage – a man who looks like Ross Kemp fell asleep on a radiator – from his slumber. Unfortunately, I captured this screen shot during the blur between the two frames of his facial animation and so his mouth has taken on the disturbing appearance of a fleshy optical illusion. Go on, take a look at it and try to figure out where his top lip is. Anyway, Donny here goes back to sleep, allowing Sully to ferret around his premises. You can click on his office door and it tells you it’s very well soundproofed, which I believe is what criminal investigators call “a lucky break.”


I dunno, expensive mechanics’ tools?
I said that all the inventory-based “puzzles” are utterly brain-dead, and they are, but this one at least confused me for a moment and that’s the closest that this game gets to challenging the ol’ grey matter so I guess I’ll have to take it. The thing is, this cabinet is locked, with what appears to be a combination lock. Naive fool that I am, I assumed that I’d have to find the combination to said lock, but it turns out I had to crush a car and scoop the acid from the car’s battery into a plastic bottle and then use the acid to dissolve the lock. That’s battery acid that couldn’t melt through a Coke bottle, let me remind you. Oh well, there’s not much of a game world to wander around in – the garage consists of two screens – so I soon figured it out and managed to open the cabinet. I wonder what could be inside.


A submarine gun, huh? I always though submarines used torpedoes, but maybe that’s why I’m neither an FBI agent nor a naval officer. The presence of the underwater weaponry clues Sully into the fact that this mechanic is, in fact, completely dodgy. I know, what a shocker. She also finds some white paint, and there’s a freshly-painted white pick-up truck in the room, but that’s not quite enough evidence for Sully. She has to find some paint stripper as well, just to make sure. If it were me and I was alone in a decrepit garage with a mountain of a man who owns illegal machine guns, I’d call for back up, and possibly an exorcist just in case his weird multi-mouth wasn’t a simple animation smear. I guess Sully is just a lot braver than me.


Again, this does look like a scene that you might find in a criminal garage. Your local Kwik-Fit would surely be more organised, but here? It makes sense. I did have a lot of trouble finding the garden fork, mind you, but that’s because I was looking for a garden fork. Like a spade, but with prongs instead of a blade, that kind of thing. The only tool I’ve ever seen or heard of as being described as a garden fork, in fact. Turns out the game actually wanted me to click on the small rake hidden just under the desktop. Not to worry, there’s a button you can click that shows you where one of the items is hidden, and it recharges over time so you can keep using it which is helpful if you don’t know this difference between various garden tools. This is a problem you’ll often come across if you play a few hidden object games – the tendency for words to mean more than one thing in English. For example, I played one where I spent a long time looking for an aeroplane, only for it to turn out that “plane” meant the thing you shave wood with. Fortunately, that’s not much of a problem in Hidden Files.


Sully’s next stop is Olsen’s apartment, which has either been ransacked by intruders searching for his secret JFK files or it’s the maid’s day off.


Huh, maybe it is the maid’s day off. He’s quite the complex fellow, this Olsen. Crusader for truth, loser of no-claim bonuses, spoiler of cats. There is, naturally, a section where you have to find the CDs to play for Byzance the cat so he’ll eat his tuna flakes. If you don’t, Byzance won’t stand still long enough for you to grab the key hanging from his collar. Sadly you never get to hear what kind of music Byzance deems mandatory for mealtimes, although I’m going to assume it’s Slayer. I’ve got no evidence to back that up, but I’ve got no evidence against it, either.


There are the CDs now, carelessly left on the floor outside of their cases. Everyone’s got their own pet peeves, and one of mine is people not putting optical media back in their box. I think that’s a reasonable thing to get annoyed about, right? I know some of my CD collection probably deserves a brisk scrub with a belt sander, but that’s not the point.
More hidden object action then, and as this is 90% of Hidden Files’ gameplay I should probably talk about it. It’s... not great, to be kind. On a personal level the realistic style of the graphics is nowhere near as appealing to me as the “truck full of Halloween tat crashes into a tacky family restaurant” aesthetic of Trick or Treat or the general spookiness of any other horror-themed hidden object game.  That’s about my tastes, though, and they can safely be disregarded. However, the layout of the scenes isn’t much fun either, with a lot of items that aren’t organically hidden in the scene but are instead lightened, made semi-transparent or have their colour changed entirely. Like, sometimes you’re asked to find cherries so you’re looking around for a bit of red, but all the cherries in this game are green. You can see some on the left, list above the item list. I know green cherries are a thing, but it still doesn’t seem right to me – and then the game does the exact same thing with green strawberries. I had to use the hint button far more often than I usually have to in these kinds of game and it was very rare that I did so and then thought “oh, duh, I should have seen that.” All the scenes are reused at least twice and sometimes even three times, although the second time is usually much easier because you’ll remember where you saw half the objects the first time though.


As it happens, Olsen hid his top-secret Kennedy findings beneath a Fisher-Price puzzle of coloured lights, a sort of combination lock for the illiterate. The solution for this puzzle is on a huge painting in the middle of the same room. I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but I’m beginning to doubt Olsen’s credentials as a functioning adult, never mind someone capable of bringing the darkest secrets of the US government to light. There was no need to have him murdered, his killers could have offered him a shiny penny to stop digging and I suspect he’d have been happy.
Sully gains access to Olsen’s files despite his high-tech security measures, but there’s not much to go on: only a single fingerprint from a possible suspect. Sully seems to have reached a dead end when the fingerprint analysis (in the form of a spot-the-difference minigame) reveals it belongs to an unidentified John Doe. Well, it looks like this case is over, back to investigating the mysterious deaths of young women in rural towns populated by strange characters, or whatever it is the FBI does.


But wait! With exceptionally convenient timing, Sully receives a phone call from Erik Square, one of Olsen’s colleagues. He tells her that the man she’s looking for is named Walter Wood, but the condition for this information being shared is that Sully will protect Erik from the people who want to see the truth buried. Yeah, sure, I’m sure I can manage to protect you. Federal Bureau of Protection, that’s what FBI stands for!


Ah. I may have overestimated my protective capabilities. In my defence, if you’re in the run from hitmen then maybe you shouldn’t sit somewhere with your back to a door. Any old Tom, Dick or Humphrey Bogart impersonator could spring up and shoot you. I suppose I’d better chase after the killer, then.


Oh ho, we’ve got a bit of an action scene, have we? Action in the loosest possible sense of the word,  but an unexpected diversion none the less. The hitman pops up in random places around the screen, and you must click on him to shoot him. Shoot him ten times to clear the stage. There’s really nothing more to it: you don’t have to reload, and the hitman never fires back, perhaps being so confident in his abilities as a marksman that he only brought one bullet. It’s true to the hidden object genre, at least. You look for something and click on it. The only differences are that there's only one thing to click on and that thing appears to have time-travelled here from the 1940s.


You shot him ten times, you absolute psychopath! Did you think you were going to bring him in for questioning afterwards, maybe with a cheery joke abut how he’s one up on 50 Cent? But no, Sully uses her medical expertise to ascertain that the hitman was killed by a gunshot to the back and not, you know, those ten other bullets.


It’s not technically a smoking gun, but it’s still warm and that’s close enough. The shadowy conspirators have now started an unstoppable chain where each hitman is himself assassinated in turn, so hopefully by the time I reach the end of the game the villains will have thinned their own numbers so thoroughly that I’ll have no opposition.


Sully’s next task is to break into the CIA archives and find information about Walter Wood. She accomplishes this by sneaking through the air vents, despite there being a security camera pointed directly at the area. This is less surprising when you realise that the top-security CIA facility employs one lone guard, and he’s on break. It’s nice that they put a few plants around, though. Really brightens the place up. Keep that bamboo in mind, it’ll come in handy in a minute.


Getting though the air vents requires navigating a maze, a task made more difficult by the fact you can only see a small portion of it at a time. It’s still not hard, though, and the only notable thing about it is that the CIA air system covers roughly the same square footage as Birmingham city centre.


Here’s the reason you need bamboo: the switch for the security system is protected by a laser grid, so Sully comes up with the incredible plan to use the bamboo as a blow-pipe and spit a small pebble at the switch to deactivate it. Maybe you’re like me and you’re wondering why Sully didn’t just cut a slightly longer piece of bamboo and poke the button. My conclusion is that Sully’s kind of an idiot, but maybe you have a kinder interpretation.


Here’s the CIA lab, which is somehow even messier than the FBI’s lab and with the added danger of guns laying around all over the place. One of the items to find here is the letter C, and I was convinced it was supposed to be the C in the word “scan,” but it wasn’t. That C is merely a red herring, but that doesn’t stop it being irritating when you find an item that the game’s asked you for only for it to turn around and say “no, not that one.”


The raid on the CIA furnished me with Walter Wood’s home address, so Sully dashed straight over there to confront him, pausing only to smash his window in with a brick. Maybe you should have shot the lock ten times instead, Sully.
It was around this point that I realised you can actually use the mouse wheel to zoom in during the hidden object scenes. This made things significantly easier. I’m not bitter about struggling through the first four-fifths of the game without the zoom, certainly. A few choice expletives and I’d totally forgotten about it.


I finally caught up with Walter Wood, and he doesn’t seem to bear a grudge over me putting his window through and breaking into his house. A man who seems to be rather enjoying the life-and-death struggles over the secrets he possesses, a man who looks like the old bloke from Up if he sold his soul to Satan in exchange for success in the business world, Walter Wood simply sits in his chair while you rummage through every square inch of his house looking for the keys that unlock his safe.


Here’s where the logic behind Sully’s investigation starts to get a bit strange. Sully’s looking for the keys, and she decides that Walter would have only hidden them around the things in life he loves the most: in this case, making pottery and bonsai trees. She’s got no reason to believe this is the case, but that’s not going to stop her going on a Zelda-style rampage and smashing every pot she sees – after finding all the matching pairs, of course. Amazingly, this line of inquiries seems to be correct and Walter did indeed hide one of the keys in his pot, presumably dropping it in there while trying to recreate that scene from Ghost.


Then there’s the key hidden under this bonsai tree, which brings me to something that infuriates me about a great many of these hidden object games. On a surprisingly regular basis, there’ll be a puzzle where something’s hidden in the dirt and it needs digging up… but your character will point-blank refuse to dig without the use of a tool. You have a tool, you plum. Two of them, even! What, are you worried you’re going to ruin your manicure? It’s loose soil, not drunken scorpions with anger-management issues, get your bloody hands in there.


The hidden object scenes also reach their nadir in this area, when you’re asked to find sticks of chalk that have been placed on white backgrounds. It’s a good thing this is right at the end of the game, if this had been one of the first scene I doubt I would have continued. I would accept some argument that this, in fact, is not actually a good thing and I could have used my short time on this Earth more constructively.


After all that, I got the tape. It reveals that some unknown person was involved with maybe having JFK killed, not even giving away the identity of this John Doe. It’s not something that would hold up in court, and so the game ends on a rather underwhelming note. The President burns the recording in his waste-paper bin, revealing the White House's rather lax spproach to installing smoke alarms. Sully, for her part, simply leaves. She doesn’t have an opinion on the situation, or if she does she doesn’t say anything about it.


The game ends with the President deciding to keep everything covered up, reasoning that the American people aren’t ready for the truth. Not that there’s much truth to go at, really, and everything flops into an unsatisfying conclusion that left me feeling like I’d missed something, like there should be an extra chapter or something. I don’t think there is, though, and so I’m going to say that’s the end of Hidden Files: Echoes of JFK.


Now that I’ve become something of a hidden object game connoisseur – a title I never asked for but will bear with solemn dignity – I’m going to proclaim that Hidden Files: Echoes of JFK is not a particularly good example of the genre. It’s not that appealing visually, the hidden object scenes are sometimes constructed in a way that’s irritating and the minigames are utterly pointless in their simplicity (although a couple of them do at least have the feel of actual law enforcement work to them.) It’s not terrible, though, and I don’t regret playing it. It’s dumb enough to be entertaining, and I do genuinely find hidden object scenes very relaxing to play. One interesting thing is that there are facts about JFK scattered around on each screen and as far as I can tell they’re all pretty accurate, so you can learn something about a great historical figure while you play. Ironically, that makes this game more educational than the Sesame Street game I wrote about.

In the admittedly very unlikely scenario that I was ordered, possibly at gunpoint, to rank all my favourite games, I would struggle from number two downwards to get them into any kind of order. However, for my number one slot there can be no other choice: it’d be Konami’s classic spook-em-up Silent Hill 2 every time and probably for all time. There are a lot of games I like, but there’s yet to be another that feels so perfectly me, like it was designed solely to provide the exact experience I wanted. What makes Silent Hill 2 so great? It might sound facetious but the answer is everything. It’s a game of rare depth and even rarer nuance, one of the very few video games from a major developer that tackles some truly heavy themes – suicide, euthanasia, child abuse – and handles them in a manner that’s heartbreakingly tragic and impressively non-exploitative.  Every aspect of its design, the characters, the graphics, the music and sound work, is pitch-perfect, creating the only videogame (well, apart from Soft and Cuddly) that’s managed to inspire a lasting feeling of dread in me. It’s assembled with such precision, craft and subtlety that every little detail of the game feels purposeful and redolent with meaning. On top of that, in Pyramid Head Silent Hill 2 produced one of the greatest monsters in any medium. A haunting mixture of the human and the abstract, Pyramid Head is unlike so many monsters in that it has a purpose beyond simple slaughter. It’s got something to teach you, and the idea that you might even be better off for knowing what that something is makes for a creature that’s more unsettling than any other.
As an aside, while there are plenty of reasons to dislike the Silent Hill movies (because they’re not very good, mostly,) the one thing that really annoys me about them is Pyramid Head’s redesign. By replacing the featureless geometry of the original’s “helmet” with a spiky, overly-fussy lump of metal, so much of what makes Pyramid Head unnerving is lost, and the movie version becomes yet another mindless murder machine with a head like a rejected trap design from a later movie in the Saw series.
Obviously every game on this list has earned its place in some part because of personal tastes that others might disagree with, but in Silent Hill 2's case I’d argue that there's not another game out there with such a consistent and expertly-crafted mood of melancholic horror, and as tiresome as the “are games art?” debate is I’d put forth Silent Hill 2 as the premier example of “yes, they bloody well can be.” Maybe one day Konami will reveal that their business decisions over the last few years have all been part of an elaborate hoax and they’re actually going to start making good games again, but until then I don’t think Silent Hill 2 is going to be topped.



While I was thinking about the games that would appear on this list, I realised that a lot of them would be standing in as a representative for their entire series, and nowhere is that more true than with Resident Evil 2. Picking a favourite entry from a franshise that has given me such consistent pleasure over the years was a difficult task, with the original Resident Evil, the Remake and Resident Evil 4 all making good cases for being the finest example of zombie-slaying, evil-pharmaceutical-company-fighting action available. I had to go with Resident Evil 2 in the end, though. If nothing else, the truck driver in the game’s intro who says “Dat guy’s a maniac! Why’d he bite me?!” would be enough to push me over the edge.
When I was finally lucky enough to get a Playstation and the original Resident Evil, it’s fair to say I became somewhat obsessed with it. It’s another game that feels as though it was made just for me, a B-movie in polygonal form with highly-trained police officers fighting against the undead, giant sharks and their own incompetence when it comes to spotting that their boss is the shiftiest man alive. I’m sure that somewhere in a dark corner of a wardrobe at my mother’s house there are still a few notebooks filled with terrible drawings of Jill fighting giant spiders and Wesker getting impaled by the ultimate bio-weapon, put it that way. So, when RE2 was announced, I was obviously very excited, but the excitement was tinged with trepidation – what if it wasn’t as good as the original? What if Capcom cocked it up somehow? Then RE2 arrived, and it was the exact opposite of disappointment. Is there an English word for “the exact opposite of disappointment”? I don’t think there is, so I propose we start using “Resident Evil 2” in those situations. “I opened a letter from the Inland Revenue, and it was a surprise tax refund! What a real Resident Evil 2 of a thing to happen!”
Anyway, RE2 takes the basic structure of the original and cranks everything up. Better graphics, a bigger world to explore, more puzzles and weapons, two playable characters with separate but intertwining storylines and more insanity. A good level of bonkers-ness, and the starting point for the series’ trip into the sheer madness of the later games. It’s the ideal sequel, in a way: everything you loved before, but more. A police station / art museum run by a mad taxidermist. The added tension of the relentless, Terminator-like “Mr. X” Tyrant. The introduction of series mainstays Leon and Claire. It’s all wonderful, and a rare example of a game where I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about it. Some people might complain about the voice acting, but without wanting to sound too harsh those people are wrong.



In hindsight, it was a bold move on Square’s part to follow up the incredible success of Final Fantasy VII with a sprite-based strategy game that eschewed the semi-futuristic aesthetic of FFVII and the upcoming FFVIII in favour of a traditional fantasy setting, but I’ll always be grateful that they did. I’ve played almost all of the Final Fantasy series, enjoyed most of them and outright loved a few, but Final Fantasy Tactics is always the one I return to time and again.
FFT is a three-pronged attack on my pleasure centres. First are the game’s mechanics. I always love a Job system, and FFT offers my favourite of the lot, allowing for a wide variety of customisation options for your characters. It’s not a game particularly concerned with balance, either, and there’s a huge array of completely game-breaking teams you can assemble. Want a character that shouts at themselves so much that they turn into The Flash and can run around the battlefield murdering everyone before the enemies can react? You can do that. I’m fond of giving people guns with a skill that prevents enemy movement, presumably by shooting them in the kneecaps. Or what about the only time I’ve ever enjoyed mathematics, but using the Calculator job class to pick targets based on god-damn prime numbers? I find being rewarded for figuring the intricacies of a game's systems t be very rewarding, and FFT offers that in spades.
Then there’s the story – it does descend into completely bananas “ancient evil gods” territory at the end, but which for the most part is an intriguing tale of political machinations, religious indoctrination and the unfair treatment of the poor by the ruling classes. Finally there’s the presentation, which is adorable. Tiny sprites absolutely packed with character and battlefield in a pleasingly chunky polygonal style, with possibly the best soundtrack in the series to boot. Add in all the secrets and hidden characters, including Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud being more useless then that time he was in a vegetative state, and you’d got a game that I can replay more than probably any other.



I’ve already written a long and florid love-letter to Sega’s arcade racer, so I’ll keep this brief. OutRun is a game where you drive a car as far as you can, and it is perfect. At once completely relaxed and utterly precise, OutRun is about as close as you can get to driving down a beachside highway in a Ferrari without arranging a test-drive under false pretences. In fact it’s better than the real thing, because this way you can avoid human company, all while enjoying some of the best music ever to come out of an arcade cabinet. If you have a 3DS, I cannot recommend the 3D port of OutRun enough. Buy it, then play OutRun while sitting on a sunny beach. Now that’s living the dream.



I had to split the OutRun series into two entries, because OutRun 2006 is such a different beast that its arcade forefather. It’s got all of the original’s atmosphere, though - the same sun-kissed beaches and winding mountain roads that serve as a playground for the sheer fun of driving, the same sense of escapism and the wonderful soundtrack. In my opinion, it’s also the single best example of a retro game being updated and enhanced for a modern (well, at the time,) console. The addition of drifting and the Heart Attack challenge mode keep things fresh, but without sacrificing the atmosphere that made OutRun such a joy to play. OutRun 2006 is one of those games that feel almost pure, somehow, and the simple act of playing the game is so much fun that even if it didn’t look and sound great it’d still be one of my favourite. You could be controlling a shopping trolley in a Tesco car-park and OutRun 2006’s game engine would still make it exciting as you pulled off a sick power-slide around a pensioner trying to reverse her Nissan Micra into a disabled bay.



There’s a stereotype about fans of From Software’s Souls games, and it’s that they’ll take the slightest opportunity to bang on at length about how it’s the greatest series of games ever created, and I’m here to tell you that such people do exist. I know because I’m one of them. Okay, so maybe I’m not quite that bad, and I can rein myself in when I see eyes glazing over, but the Souls games really are a phenomenal body of work. Any of them, Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 – 3, could have made it on to this list but just edging them out for the position of my most cherished is Bloodborne - the one that sits most on the outside of that happy little group.
From’s blood-based Gothic masterpiece follows the template set by the rest of the series but goes off on its own unique tangent, the “medieval” fantasy setting replaced by a quasi-Victorian world of  mutated beasts and madmen, which is precisely the kind of universe that I long to soak myself in like a nice hot bath. The combat is the real star of the show: where one of the pleasure of the Dark Souls games is the wide variety of viable character builds, Bloodborne almost forces the player in operating as a nimble, aggressive, melee fighter. That might sound like a regressive step, but the combat is so finely-honed and responsive that playing the game that way is just so damn fun. A big part of this is down to the “regain” mechanic – when you take damage, there’s a short window where you can restore some of your lost health by slashing tasty, healing blood out of your opponents, encouraging you to get right up in their business. Couple that with the ability to parry enemy attacks not by pushing them aside with a shield, as in Dark Souls, but by shooting them in the face, and Bloodborne offers a masterclass in risk-reward gameplay.
Also exceptional is the world that the action inhabits. Personally I think it’s the best use of Lovecraftian horror that’s ever appeared in a videogame, a universe beset by madness-inducing star-gods and strange cults that worship monstrous blood. Reaching the point in the game where you gain enough wisdom to see what’s really going on in the city of Yharnam is a moment that will stay with me for a long time. It’s a beautiful game to look at, as well. Exquisitely hideous monsters roam the dark places of the world, and the architecture alone is worth the price of admission. Plus, and this is the criteria by which I judge all Dark Souls games, it has a fine array of goofy hats to wear, including a bucket with one eyehole cut out of it and a giant golden traffic cone.



Don’t get me wrong, Doom is amazing and I love it dearly but Quake is just that little bit more special to me. I can remember the first time I ever saw it, visiting a friend who had just installed the shareware version on his dad’s then brand-new Windows ‘95 machine. It was full 3D, man! And faster than a cheetah on a rollercoaster to boot! It blew my mind, and because there was no chance of me getting a computer powerful enough to run it at the time, I made damn sure I found out which of my other friends owned Quake, too.
I think I’ve said this before, but given how many alterations and compromises Quake went through during its development, from vast and complex RPG to Doom But Moreso and Brown, it’s amazing that it turned out as great as it did. Many people will tell you that Quake’s legacy is its huge part in the rise of online multiplayer, which is true, but I’ve never been much interested in that. Instead I preferred the world of offline play, the dank castles and Satanic ziggurats, the intense satisfaction of nailing an Ogre from around the corner with the bouncing projectiles of the grenade launcher. The inclusion of jumping and swimming leads to ever-more fiendishly hidden secrets, the atmosphere is so oppressive you could mistake it for the North Korea government and the action is never less than full-on heavy metal carnage, served completely without irony or pretence.



The ultimate speed crazy dream extravaganza, a game so relentlessly, maniacally fast that all other racing games feel sluggish by comparison, and home to the most bizarre cast of characters this side of The Lesser Key of Solomon, F-Zero GX must surely be the result of Nintendo looking at their previous entries in the F-Zero series and saying “yes, but what if it was more? More of all of it?” And so we were blessed with F-Zero GX, the racing game to surpass all others so long as you’re not bothered about driving actual cars. It’s not a game that messes around: if you want to be good at F-Zero GX, it demands dedication and practise, but although it’s harsh it’s always fair. Okay, outside of the Story mode, anyway. That mode isn’t fair. On the higher difficulties, it’s actually a test the developers included to secretly gather data on just how much rage-fuelled punishment a GameCube controller can take. Other than that, though, F-Zero GX offers a racing experience focussed down to laser-like intensity that provides countless endorphin hits when you blast over the finish line just as your vehicle’s about to explode or as you deftly jink left and right to avoid the holes in the track. Sometimes you’ll get it wrong and fall off the track or have your racer explode, but in my experience it really is a game where practise makes perfect and one of the things I love most about F-Zero GX is that every time I play it I can feel myself getting better at it in tiny increments. Not enough to ever beat Story Mode on the top difficulty, but still.



I’ll be honest, when Symphony of the Night was first released I wasn’t that familiar with the Castlevania series. I’d played Super Castlevania IV and a little of the NES games, but it’s not like nowadays where I’ve played through them all multiple times, so as well as everything else I can praise Symphony of the Night for getting me into the rest of the series in a deeper way. Not that it requires any knowledge of the franchise to enjoy, because SotN takes the themes of the series and spins them into its own unique adventure. The half-vampire son of Dracula, fighting his way through a castle filled with all manner of monsters, spooks and reimagined characters from The Wizard of Oz? I’d have been sold on that no matter the license.
A game densely packed with secrets and obscure flourishes, (as I’ve written about before,) SotN marries the joy of exploring Dracula’s vast lair with tight controls and a wide range of weapons, equipment and special moves, each enemy you defeat bringing you closer to becoming an unstoppable death-dealing instrument of justice with fabulous hair. You can still find new things after dozens of playthroughs, the voice acting reaches a level of “so bad it’s good” that it transforms into the stuff of legend and Michiru Yamane’s soundtrack is utterly sublime. It’s a game that fair sings with quality, crafted with real passion, and is absolutely as much fun to play now as it was then.



Now that the series has been crushed beneath the weight of over-familiarity and a glut of spin-offs and expansions, it’s hard to remember that Guitar Hero was a genuine phenomenon. There are very few games I’ve ever seen – Tetris and early Wii stuff being other notable examples - that had such an effect when it came to getting people who didn’t play videogames interested. Everyone wanted to play Guitar Hero, regardless of whether they’d touched a videogame or a guitar before in their lives. The reasons for Guitar Hero’s appeal are obvious: everyone loves music, it’s simple to learn but difficult to master and despite knowing on a fundamental level that playing along on a chunky plastic guitar isn’t cool, it feels cool when you’re ripping through a Megadeth solo.
The Guitar Hero games hit at a perfect time for me personally, too. I was at university when they first appeared, and I have many fond memories of extremely well-lubricated pre-night-out Guitar Hero sessions. It also works as a good warning system for alcohol consumption: when you become unable to bash out a sloppy rendition of “18 and Life,” it’s probably time to switch to water. All the early Guitar Hero games are favourites of mine. I really enjoy Rock Band too, but there’s something about it that wasn’t quite as appealing as Guitar Hero. As sense that it wanted to be “cool,” maybe, a quality that Guitar Hero most definitely didn’t possess. So, why did I pick Rocks the 80s? Because it’s the one with “Holy Diver” in it, that’s why.

That's quite a selection of games, huh? However, I forgot to stop, and I've got another bunch of favourites to discuss. With that in mind, here's Part 2!

Last time out I wrote about ten of my all-time favourite videogames, but because I am an indecisive sort I just kept going. So, here are another ten, in no particular order. It was a fun exercise, and I hope you found a couple of games you've never played before that you try out and end up enjoying.


I am obsessed with this game, I really am. Not since Tetris has a game exerted such a strong “just one more go” influence over me, and that’s okay because the Final Fantasy-based rhythm action game is perfect for playing in short bursts. It’s also perfect for playing in marathon sessions, if you ask me. Okay, so how you feel about Theatrhythm is, in large part, dependent on whether or not you like the soundtracks of the Final Fantasy games. I love Final Fantasy soundtracks and I love rhythm action games, so it was an easy sell for me.
If you’ve never seen it in action, Theatrhythm has you tapping and swiping along with music tracks from the Final Fantasy series – over two hundred of them included in the game – and it’s a simple gameplay system that works perfectly. Inputs are precise, the difficulty levels are excellently balanced and it’s packed with that sense of pleasure that comes from getting really immersed in the action.
The gameplay is excellent, but as bonus it’s all wrapped up in an extremely loveable package. Square Enix are putting more effort than ever into leveraging the history and characters of the Final Fantasy series into lucrative spin-offs with games like Final Fantasy Explorer, Record Keeper and Brave Exvius, but it’s in Theatrhythm that it comes together the best. That’s partly because it’s all just so sweet and charming. Some people will complain about the cutesy, doll-like character art, but personally it’s preferable to yet another CG model or FF6 sprite edit. There’s fan service aplenty, stat-boosting art cards to collect. You can make a party composed entirely of dads. Even the online versus mode is a pleasure. Sure, there aren’t many players about and when you do get a match you’ll probably be stomped by someone with a playtime of 999 hours, but even if you lose you swap a little profile card with the other player, which includes a new map for the game’s quest mode, and you also get one of the game’s collectable cards. The way it works is that you each pick a song and the one that you battle each other over is randomly picked - and the majority of the time, an online opponent who won the virtual coin-toss will pick the song you chose last time, so that everyone gets to play the track they want. I'm getting old and soppy enough that this kind of unenforced ettique is very heartwarming to me. Like I say, Theatrhythm Curtain Call is utterly charming and it’s also the only game to make me say “I wish they’d keep releasing DLC for this.”



The game that was so much of a cult thing that it stopped being a cult thing and became widely known, God Hand came out of nowhere and finally got the transformation of the beat-em-up genre from 2D to 3D right. The ultra-weird presentation that revels in such glorious insanity as wrestlers in gorilla costumes and fat demons called Elvis is the perfect parter for a deep, challenging and customisable combat system. It’s not a game that wants you to have an easy time of it – it gets more difficult they better you play, for starters – but it only treats you mean because it knows you’ll get so much satisfaction when you master the combat.
A harsh taskmaster, then, but one that exudes such a loveable sense of dumb fun that it’s impossible to get angry at. And hey, if you do get angry, you can kick a dude in the balls to relieve said anger, complete with cartoon “ding” sound effect. Finish the whole game for the best and most appropriate ending to any videogame, then head straight back into it on a higher difficulty. When it all clicks and you’re dodging attacks almost without thinking and counter-attacking with suplexes, you’ll be glad you did.



Another cult game, this second entry in the still-going-strong Earth Defense Force series is the one that first revealed to me (and many others) the inestimable charms of the EDF. I remember hearing about it through the GameCentral page on the late, lamented Teletext service, where they gave it a glowing review. “What the hell”, I thought, “it’s a budget game so I might as well pick it up. Maybe its as good as they say.” It turned out to be even better, the ultimate surprise package. It’s a simple premise, born from the sci-fi movies of the fifties: giant insects are invading the Earth. Shoot them. Shoot them and shoot them and shoot them, because there are bloody thousands of them, crawling over buildings, scurrying across beaches and occasionally calling in an off-brand Godzilla for back-up.
Quite a few games on this list have what I’d describe as a feeling of purity about them, where they do one thing but do it exceptionally well, and Global Defence Force fits exactly into that category. The graphics might be ugly and the slowdown rampant, but it’s worth it to have destruction on such a huge scale. You haven’t lived until a group of tarantulas the size of buses are leaping at you, only for you to send them back where they came from with an enormous plasma cannon. Five difficulty levels, two very different playable characters and dozens of weapons to collect give it plenty of longevity, too. Try the Inferno difficulty level, if you fancy a challenge. It even says in-game that only a handful of people in the world will complete it, so if you’re the kind of person who responds well to that kind of antagonism, then have at it.



Of all the hundreds of games I’ve played in my time writing VGJunk, Night Slashers is the one that stands out as being my luckiest find. I might never have played it otherwise, but since I did it’s shot straight onto my list of all-time favourites. It combines a genre I love with my favourite setting to produce a side-scrolling beat-em-up that takes place in a gore-soaked horror world of Frankensteins,  mask-wearing psychopaths and zombie bowling. That’d carry it a long way even if it wasn’t any fun to play, but happily Night Slashers is one of the more refined examples of the form. It’s got the basic brawler set-up of multi-attack combos, throws and a special health-draining attack, and then it piles plenty of extra moves on top of that: charge attacks, screen-clearing magic spells and the ability to wedge zombies into the ground like tent pegs so you can kick their exposed heads off, amongst others.
You all know of my love for Halloween by now, and there are very few games more evocative of the season than Night Slashers. It’s even more of a gory B-movie than most gory B-movies, and being freed from the limits of what special effects can accomplish allows it to be packed with things like monsters whose flesh melts off when you punch them, all set to a wonderful soundtrack that I’d describe as action-horror-rock if I had to give it a genre. Night Slashers might not be the best arcade brawler, not while the also excellent Alien vs. Predator exists, but it’s just - just - my favourite.



As an RPG fan living in Europe, and especially as a SNES owner, the nineties were kinda rough. So many of the classic RPGs of the 16-bit era never made it to our shores. No Final Fantasy VI, no Chrono Trigger, no Earthbound. Of course you can buy all those games though various different services nowadays, but that’s no good to pre-teen, summer-holidays-to-fill VGJunk, is it? Happily I managed to get my console RPG fix through a borrowed Megadrive and Shining Force 2: the jolliest, most candy-coloured RPG out there. Just thinking about Shining Force 2 means I’m immediately hearing the town theme in my head, a musical theme that by rights should appear under the definition for “jaunty” in every single online dictionary.
Yes, Shining Force 2 is a happy game, a cheerful game, a strategy RPG where, if truth be told, the strategy rarely gets more complicated “try to fight enemies one at a time.” Not every RPG has to be unfathomably deep to be enjoyable, though, and sometimes it’s nice to just command your fairy-story characters about the battlefield without worrying about personal affinities or elemental alignments or what have you. Shining Force 2 is a great example of this kind of gaming experience. A colourful world to explore, packed with weird characters and dialogue with a slightly wonky translation that only adds to its charm, Shining Force 2 has a certain childlike sweetness to it. Would it be one of my favourites if I had had access to Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as a kid? I’m not sure. Maybe I wouldn’t love it quite as much as I do, but I’d always have room in my heart for an RPG that lets the player put a werewolf, a vampire knight called Lemon and knock-off Gamera in their party.



Anyone who’s been following me anywhere on the internet will already know all about how much I love Blood, and that’s a lot. Back in part one I said that Silent Hill 2 is the game that most feels like it was made for me, but Blood runs it a close second. It’s a first-person shooter created using the Build engine, much like Duke Nukem 3D - but where Duke Nukem 3D is a parody of and homage to over-the-top action movies, Blood is all about horror. “An undead cowboy with a pitchfork fights evil cultists” is an elevator pitch that makes me realise it’s probably a good job I’m not in charge of a movie studio. Everything about the world of Blood is just completely, spiritually nourishing to me, the computer game equivalent of a big mug of soup in November– the horror movie references, the sinister carnivals and haunted hotels, the ghost enemies that scream like someone with their testicles caught in a bear trap, all of it.
The setting is great, but it wouldn’t mean much if the gameplay was rubbish, but Blood delivers in that regard too. It’s got the classic, rocket-speed carnage that the golden age of PC shooters was so wonderful at creating, but with its own unique style of combat. Even the lesser enemies can be utterly deadly, so there’s less focus on the huge swarms of monsters you’d see in, say, Doom, and more emphasis on tightly-constructed corridors and smaller arenas, with excellent level design all the way through the game. The enemies are fantastic and nicely varied, and the selection of weapons is probably my favourite in any first-person shooter, from familiar friends like the double-barrelled shotgun to the destructive power of the dynamite bundle to more exotic tools of death like the voodoo doll. It’s the closest you’re likely to get to being the “hero” of your own gore-soaked horror movie. A Bruce Campbell-em-up, if you like, and that feeling is probably why I play through Blood at least once a year.


Let’s get this right out in the open: a lot of the time, Deadly Premonition isn’t that much fun to actually play. The controls are bad, the combat is repetitive and dull and I always seem to get one or two huge glitches whenever I play it. However, none of that matters, because Deadly Premonition’s gameplay is merely a vehicle for transporting a truly bizarre and completely captivating storyline. The comparisons to Twin Peaks are immediate and obvious, but Deadly Premonition twists that familiar setting into its own unique experience, creating a world that looks at first glance like low budget trash but eventually reveals itself as a game with a rare depth of personality. The game’s star, FBI special agent Francis York Morgan, is a truly fascinating character, and not just by the usually low standards of videogame characters. Driving around and hearing York talk about the movies he’s watched sounds like it’d be insufferably dull but it ended up being my favourite part of the game. You don’t often get such a glimpse into the inner life of a videogame protagonist, and as York makes his way through a surreal plot with a shocking twist at the end I find myself being totally captivated by this weird world full of oddball townsfolk. It’s also one of the very few games to make me feel genuine emotions. I had a lump in my throat at the end of the game, and it wasn’t the usual hastily-swallowed sausage rolls.
Deadly Premonition is a great example of what videogames that might be lacking in technical proficiency can make up for in sheer imagination and ambition. It starts out as a supernatural murder mystery but goes on to take in so many different themes, always tinged with a unique sense of humour, that any problems I have with the gameplay are completely negated. Of course, if you told me that you hate Deadly Premonition, I could totally see where you’re coming from. Not every game has to be for every person, though, and that’s the great thing about Deadly Premonition.



I can’t believe I’m putting this game on the list. It’s a fairly generic tactical FPS in which terrorists get shot in Las Vegas. It’s pretty decent, although hardly more evolved than any of its predecessors. And yet, when I was thinking about this list I kept coming back to it for one simple reason: the Terrorist Hunt mode. I have spent so much time and had such a good time playing that mode, specifically playing it couch co-op with a friend. Just the two of you, a very limited number of respawns and a mansion / oil refinery / casino filled with terrorists who skipped the “camouflage” portion of their training camp and turned up in bright red fatigues.
I couldn’t even tell you what it is about this mode that was so appealing to us, leading to RSV2 becoming our go-to game any time we fancied some shooter action. Maybe it’s the way the terrorists sometimes command their comrades to “Aim and shoot!” just before you aim at them and shoot them, the irony being as devastating as the machine-gun fire. Maybe it was the uncomplicated, solid combat combined with the tension of only having limited lives. I have no idea, I really don’t. I guess that’s why they call your tastes “tastes.” I like the taste of Dr. Pepper, but I sure as hell couldn’t explain why.



I’m pretty bad at fighting games. I’ve explained this before, it’s because there are so many of them that I want to play that I never have the time to sit down and really master any single game. I’m greedy, basically. Street Fighter Alpha 3 is the closest I’ve ever gotten, though, thanks in part to it being just the right level of complexity for me: lots of different fighting systems and three separate fighting “styles” to chose from, but nothing I can’t wrap my head around. Obviously there are many other Street Fighter games I could have had on this list – the impact of Street Fighter II’s SNES port is hard to exaggerate, that game became almost a religious calling for some kids – but SFA3 is my favourite of the bunch. I don’t know how well it’s regarded these days, having never paid attention to things like “balance” and “tier lists,” but it’s got that classic, super-slick fighting action that made Street Fighter famous in spades. It also has the most appealing graphics (to me, anyway) of the series, with big, cartoony sprites, and a huge roster of characters new and old. The PS1 version even adds a “World Tour” mode with RPG-like elements. At its heart, though, Street Fighter Alpha 3 is simply Street Fighter. Timeless, classic action that’s honestly yet to be improved on in a big way. Nowadays, if I’m going to play Street Fighter I’ll probably play SFV… for a while. Then I’ll hop straight back over to SFA3 and spend entire battles doing nothing but Dan Hibiki’s rolling taunt.



What can I say about Chrono Trigger that hasn’t already been said a hundred times before? Not much, that’s what. Creative talent operating at the height of their powers to craft a true masterpiece, every aspect of the game slotting together to form a veritable Voltron of delights. A time-travel story that not only works, but opens up the possibility of over a dozen endings! Quite probably the best soundtrack on the SNES! Memorable characters, a team-up battle system, singing robot cats! Chrono Trigger is the ultimate gloomy afternoon videogame. Go on, try it text time it’s dark and rainy at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Get under a duvet and play some Chrono Trigger, it’ll warm you right up.

There, I think that lot ought to do it for now. Some games were omitted because, while I do love them, everyone else does too and they don’t quite feel as special to me personally. Honourable mentions include Zelda: A Link to the Past, basically every Super Mario platformer but especially Super Mario World, Final Fantasies 5-8, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Timesplitters: Future Perfect and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. What did I learn from this? That my tastes are pretty mainstream, mostly. There’s not much here that you’d mistake for being obscure, with the exception of Night Slashers. Also I’m a massive Playstation fanboy, apparently. And with that, I’m off to try to complete my CollectaCard collection in Theatrhythm Curtain Call, an endeavour that I’m sure is going to end up with me found dead from exhaustion, surrounded by probability charts and drop-rate tables.

It’s not Fantasy Zone. It’s not Fantasy World Dizzy, nor is it any of your Final Fantasies. It’s Italian developer Electronic Devices’ arcade game Fantasy Land, and it’s got some pretty weird ideas about what fantasies should consist of. Let’s have a look at it, shall we? Whaddya mean, “no”? Hey, I’ve played through this bloody thing now so you’re going to sit there and learn all about it, all right?


I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you see a title screen and you can’t help but think “this game is going to be crap.” Ugly gradients, a blobby logo in a font where the holes in the letters appear to be a gaping orifices and a main character that looks like someone hastily drew a hobbit during a bumpy bus ride. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Fantasy Land isn’t going to be some hidden masterpiece.


The game begins in a very Ghosts ‘n Goblins manner, as a cloaked villain swoops down and abducts our hero’s romantic partner. Differences from Capcom’s arcade classic include the villain having LED flashlights for eyes and the small parrot nesting in the hero’s hair. So, I’ll be travelling across a variety of landscapes, battling monsters and bosses until I rescue the kidnap victim and murder this floating cloak? Okay, I was just checking it wasn’t going to suddenly turn into a jet-ski racing game or something.


Nope, it’s your common-or-garden side-scrolling hop-n-bop platformer. It even begins with a forest stage, so I doubt we’re going to be seeing much divergence from the usual formula. You play as the small blonde person currently hiding behind his parrot, a character that the game doesn’t bother introducing to us. He may look like a once-ordinary chap who escaped from a car compacter just before his injuries became fatal, but there must be something special about him because he can fire magical bolts of energy from his fingertips. Let’s call him Steve, in honour of Marvel Comics’ sorcerer supreme Dr. Strange. Move to the right, jump over obstacles and annihilate all those who oppose you with the powerful mystic forces you command. You know, the usual.


Sometimes, when you zap an enemy they turn into a giant pear. I think that’s a pear, at least. Perhaps whatever extreme gravitational forces turned out hero into the lump he is also deformed an orange.


You can also jump on the enemies to defeat them, but I wouldn’t recommend this, for several reasons. They take multiple bounces to kill, you tend to spang off them at unpredictable angles and their faces transform into grotesque mockeries of human physiognomy when you jam your boots into their skulls. Stick to using you magic powers, that’s my advice. Your parrot will even help out. It hangs around until you take a certain amount of damage, and while it’s there it acts like an Option from the Gradius games, adding an extra projectile whenever you attack. You can even control the hight of the parrot by pressing up on the joystick, although this ability is rendered entirely useless by the endless streams of enemies that pour in from every corner of the screen. The constant attentions of the earring-wearing, ham-fleshed archers, bald warriors and whatever the hell those grey things are supposed to be means that you’ll never have the time to think about the best place to put your parrot.
This screen also serves as a good example of Fantasy Land’s wonky level design. You see that waterfall? You can’t walk across the top of it. If you try, you fall down the waterfall. That’s okay, I can understand that. So I tried approaching it from the bottom, but it turns out you can’t jump through the waterfall either. I say “though,” your character is clearly in front of the waterfall, but if you try to jump past it you hit an invisible wall and fall down. It doesn’t make sense with the way the geography’s drawn, and I think I'll simply have to accept that Fantasy Land isn’t going to make much sense in general.


The jumping physics work okay, I suppose. A little floaty, but I could generally get Steve the Munchkin to go where I wanted him. I did have problems with accidentally falling through platforms, though. To drop “through” the floor and land on a lower platform, you press down on the joystick… which is also crouch, so there’s a lot of opportunity to fall down when all you wanted to do was duck. That’s why most games map this command to down and jump, Fantasy Land.


Then a boss appeared, as bosses are wont to do. I kind of wish it hadn’t, mind you. Not because it’s a difficult boss to defeat – shoot it and jump over its head when it gets near is about the extent of it – but because it’s creepy as hell. What’s going on with its feet, for a start? I know it’s just an extra-large person in red boxers shorts and thus shouldn't be so unnerving, but I’ve realised why I don’t like it: it’s because its expression never changes. It’s always got that same look of resigned boredom on its face, whether it’s being shot by a pudgy magic-man or pounding said magic-man beneath its gargantuan fists. There’s something disturbing about my potential murderer not being interested in anything I do.


Stage two now, which is set in a castle of some sort. That’s fairly standard for a fantasy setting. Less usual are the men is executioner’s hoods and very snug-looking jockstraps, a garment which gives these enemies a very prominent groinal bulge. I can only assume that Steve’s assault on this castle coincided with the annual executioners versus prisoners football game, and nobody had time to get changed before rushing out to deal with Steve.
Also take note of that skull. It’s sitting there on the floor, not moving, not doing anything and generally being unobtrusive. It hurts you if you touch it, something I didn’t notice was happening as I stood on top of it and my health drained away. That’s another problem with Fantasy Land, it’s surprisingly difficult to tell when you’re taking damage, an issue that’s compounded by the fuzzy boundaries of Steve’s hitbox. He doesn’t get hurt when something physically hits him, he gets hurt when his personal space is invaded.


Also in this castle: some fairly adorable bats and far less adorable rats that don’t so much look like plague carriers but active agents in the furthering human misery through the spreading of the Black Death. There are also these teddy bears you can collect. I presume you can collect them, anyway. I wasn’t about to go near them in order to find out. Not with those soulless eye-holes staring out at me.


Once upon a time, a young man named Aladdin found a whoopee cushion in an ancient cave. The whoopee cushion was dusty, so he gave it a polish and out popped the Genie of Farts! The genie cannot grant wishes, but he does leave the lingering scent of rotten eggs and boiled cabbage wherever he goes.
I may mock the Flatulence Genie, but he’s managed to kill poor old Steve. There he goes now, divested of his mortal apparel and floating off to heaven why I try to figure out what that red mark on his belly is and why the artist seems to have given him very subtle pectoral muscles.


We’ve had a forest world and a castle world, but stage three combines the two with a castle in a forest. The next stage had better take place in a castle that has a forest growing inside. For the first half, this stage is pretty much the same as the previous two, but half-way through it takes a change of tack.


Steve finds some scuba gear and embarks on an underwater adventure! Given how generic Fantasy Land’s gameplay has been up to this point, you won’t be surprised to learn that this swimming section works exactly how you’d expect it to. You can swim in eight directions and, while you can still fire a projectile attack Steve launches dinner forks rather than his usual magical energies. It’s not a bad little section, honestly, although it’s still plagued by the same issues as the non-swimming areas: too many enemies appear with no warning and the zoomed-in playing area gives you little chance to avoid the enemies when they do appear. The swimming section also manages the remarkable feat of making the ruddy great sharks look like the least menacing creatures in the sea.


Also found underwater are gun-toting people in diving suits that remind me of Chelnov, if Chelnov made his helmet by cutting a hole out of a beer keg and covering that hole with cling-film. There are mermaids, too. The mermaids don’t look pleased to see our hero, or maybe they’re annoyed that someone has left a load of naval mines in what is essentially their front garden. Like almost all the enemies, the mermaids have soulless black orbs for eyes, but I think it’s a look that works much better for a half-fish creature of the deep.


Another boss arrives, and I’m calling it a boss just so I don’t hurt its feeling. It’s not much of a guardian, I’ll tell you that. Final encounter aside, the bosses of Fantasy Land are by far the easiest part of the game, because they fall into one of two categories. Either their attacks are very easy to avoid or, as with this stubby-limbed eel, you can hold your position and mash the attack button and the boss will die before you do. A boring fight to be sure, enlivened only by the realisation that the collectable gold bars on the ocean floor are only 18 karat gold. It seems fitting that a game such as Fantasy Land, a game that either can’t or won’t attempt to be anything but mediocre, wouldn’t have the purest gold laying around.


The level design reaches a nadir at the start of stage four, as Steve makes his way across an ocean liner that’s been overrun with pirates. It’s just a flat walk across the deck with the odd box to hop over, but Steve having changed costumes to get into the mood (or maybe to fool the pirates, he does have a pet parrot, after all) is a nice touch.


The second half of the stage takes place in an icy wilderness, where the pirates have wrapped up warm and the penguins are large. Hang on: ships travelling to the Antarctic, mountains in the background, giant penguins: please tell me this is going to turn into a colourful platforming version of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. I want to see Steve driven mad by the unfathomable star-beasts that lurk in the frozen wastes.
Speaking of those penguins, they don’t half remind me of James Pond. This is partly because James Pond II was sponsored by McVitie’s Penguin chocolate biscuits, (a snack that I ate so often as a child that I’m not sure I could face eating one nowadays,) but also because Fantasy Land has a real “European computer game” look it it. If you’d told me this was an Amiga release, I could have almost believed you, thanks to the cartoony but not anime-inspired art style and the fact that there are hundreds of small, mostly useless collectibles in each stage.


Wow, maybe I wasn’t too far off with the Lovecraft connection. This boss certainly has a little of the Cthulhus about him, with his green bat wings and alien demeanour, but I don’t recall any of the Elder Gods having a grappling hook for an arm. Maybe if Lovecraft had focussed less on racism and more on giving his creatures totally sweet cybernetic upgrades, his books would make more palatable reading today.
This is another boss that’s very easy to defeat, thanks to its claw not being able to hit you while you’re crouching, but I do have a lot of fondness for it. There’s something very endearing about just how ugly it is. Like, if I was a parent and my young child drew me this as a picture it would get pride of place on the fridge door, you know? It’s part xenomorph, part Ridley from Metroid and part construction equipment, and that’s a surprisingly lovable mix.


Oh look, it’s another castle! This one’s got lava in it, so I guess it’s the “fire world” to complement with the previous stage’s “ice world.” The level layout is a bit more twisty-turny than that boat, which is an improvement, and there are even a couple of actual platforming challenges to get past, but it’s still lacking something. Excitement, mainly. The whole game feels rather half-arsed, as though the developers had ideas but couldn’t quite transform those ideas into gameplay. Take, for example, the keys. There are some locked doors in each stage that you need a key to open, but the keys are always so close to the doors as to render them entirely inconsequential. Of course, the alternative – maze-like levels in which you have to really hunt for the key – would be much less enjoyable given Fantasy Land’s hitboxes and relentless enemies, but still.


However, this is still the best stage in the game because of these enemies. What the hell are they? I’m not sure, but I’ve got a few ideas, most of which involve a combination of the words “vampire” and “sea creature.” Who was the incredibly brave vampire who sank his fangs into a shark to spawn Count Chompula over here? Did Dracula and the Gill-Man have a regrettable one-night stand after a well-lubricated Universal Monster party and nine months later these fish creatures of the night were spawned? Here’s my personal favourite explanation: they are beluga whales that are dressed as vampires for Halloween.


The game itself might not be much cop, but I’ve got to say I’m really enjoying these weirdo monsters. Here’s a jolly executioner, leaping around the room and trying to menace me with his axe, He’d be more menacing if he wasn’t wearing bright blue underpants and pink boots, but his axe is real. Real easy to avoid, that it. If the axeman could stop himself from prancing all over the room for a couple of minutes, I’d have no way to dodge his mighty axe, but for him gallivanting is a way of life so I had plenty of opportunity to run underneath him.


The final stage takes place, bizarrely, in a modern city. I think it might be Metro City, specifically: street punks roam the area and there’s graffiti everywhere, I’m on my way to rescue my kidnapped lover, this is basically just Final Fight, right? I was confused as to why the villain of a game named Fantasy Land would make his final stand in the urban jungle, but I think I’ve figured it out. He’s actually from the real world, and he needed to kidnap a princess so he hopped over to Generic Fantasy World #7894-B and kidnapped their princess. There aren’t many genuine “daughter of the reigning monarch” princesses in the real world, and if he did abduct a member of the, for instance, British royal family, he’d have the SAS tracking him down wherever he went. So, he abducts a fantasy princess, reasoning that one chubby wizard is going to be easier to deal with than one of the world’s deadliest special forces units.


The city stage is definitely my favourite of the bunch, because it at least offers a bit of a journey: you start off on the streets, climb up a few fire escapes, scuttle through the sewers and then jump across the rooftops. It’s almost not bad, which is a good description of Fantasy Land in general. Almost every aspect of the game is bad but not awful, and if a few areas were improved – most notably the collision detection, enemy placement and general level design – you’d have a game that wouldn’t be amazing but would at least be a passable way to spend thirty minutes.


While I’m up on the rooftops, please enjoy this billboard in the “extremely unsubtle sword-boner” category. Magic Sword, indeed.


There’s also this billboard which implies Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head has branched out into the hospitality business.


Eventually I reached the final boss’ lair, but before I can meet the head honcho I’ve got to take care of these jungle cats. All they do is run back and forth and can easily be stopped by Steve’s magic fingers, but it still takes quite a while to do so because they just keep coming. The kidnapped (presumed) princess spend the whole fight shouting “HELP ME!” from the background, as though I’m fighting all these jaguars just because I’m bang into animal cruelty.


Then the floating cape reappears. Seemingly flummoxed by Steve managing to penetrate his inner sanctum and thrown into anguished confusion by the deaths of his pets, the boss does little more than float about the screen like a moth with a hangover, occasionally throwing balls of energy in random directions. The balls eventually fizzle out and leave a solid core, which our hero can bounce on. That seems to be the best way to avoid the boss while you chip away at his needlessly long health bar. It’s hardly the earth-shattering clash of titans I was hoping for, but at least it’s simple enough that I didn’t have to do it for long.


“My hero!” exclaims the rescued princess. Steve looks dubious. Can anyone truly be considered a hero when they have toilet plungers for feet? Oh well, no time for self-reflection now. Fantasy Land is over, and there’s just the extravagant ending sequence left to enjoy.


There you go, that’s your lot. Steve and the princess get romantic, despite looking so similar that they’re almost certainly related, and Fantasy Land draws to a close.
Well, that was an arcade videogame, wasn’t it? Yes indeed, no-one can say it wasn’t an arcade videogame. That’s about all you can say for it, though, and Fantasy Land is an unsatisfying sludge of an experience. Bland gameplay and dull levels mean it’s something I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone actually plays, but I will give it credit for having some interesting and often charmingly ugly enemies. Play Ghouls n’ Ghosts instead and pretend some of the enemies are vampire sharks, that would be my advice.

Today, a game about robots, cops and meddling studio executives with Probe and Ocean’s 1992 NES your-move-creep-em-up RoboCop 3. You know, a game based on the movie where RoboCop can fly and hangs around with children.

Children like this weird-faced, uzi-toting little munchkin. Doesn’t a six-year-old having access to a submachine gun break some kind of law, RoboCop? Do your goddamn job! It’s going to be difficult serving the public trust when you’re using a schoolkid as a shoulder-mounted gun emplacement.
Okay, a confession: I’ve never actually seen RoboCop 3. I’ve heard about it, and somehow the morbid curiosity that made me watch Hellraisers four through eight (nine is apparently where I draw the line) was not strong enough to get me to sit through the family-friendly adventures of the incredible flying robot-cop. From what I’ve read, though, Robocop 3 the game follows the plot of the movie fairly accurately. I’m sure that if anyone can spin gold from RoboCop 3, it’ll be the titans of game development that are Probe and Ocean. I’m sure Ocean were hoping that this would be as big a hit as their home computer ports of RoboCop, but I’m going to guess that it really wasn’t.


The game begin with a call from Anne Lewis, RoboCop’s partner, and she’s in trouble. Not to worry, dealing with trouble is what RoboCop does best and he’s quickly off to to save her. In a car, he’s not flying yet.
I have to say, that’s some nice artwork on Officer Lewis. Well drawn in a very small number of colours, I’m very impressed with it. It’s a look that really shows Probe’s history as a home computer developer, too.


Not so impressive is RoboCop himself, who looks like he’s having real trouble driving his car. I’m having problems parsing which way around the hand that’s holding the steering wheel is supposed to be facing. It’s not terrible-looking, just kind of awkward.


That, erm, that is true, I guess? Things may well go on behind closed doors, although I don’t see what that’s got to do with RoboCop, who spends most of his time on the streets or inside large industrial facilities. I thought it might have been a hint about a secret in the first stage or something, but having investigated thoroughly I think it’s just weird. Also weird is the description of the criminals you’ll be facing as “splatterpunks,” but that’s the kind of weird I can appreciate. Whatever else RoboCop 3’s failings may be, at least it’ll always have the cachet of having used the word “splatterpunk.”


It will come as absolutely no surprise to anybody that RoboCop 3 is a side-scrolling action platformer where RoboCop travels through the city while shooting criminals (sorry, splatterpunks) and jumping over things. That’s what I always think of when I remember RoboCop: the vast amount of jumping he does. In Probe’s defence, they have at least made RoboCop feel very heavy when he jumps, with every landing producing a satisfying thump as he hits the floor.


What else can RoboCop do, besides jumping? Well, he can aim his gun diagonally upwards, which is handy because a lot of enemies pop out of windows to take pot-shots at our hero. You can also switch between two different weapons: a handgun and a missile launcher. You might think that given a choice between a pistol and a rocket launcher your pistol would get less use than Bruce Willis’ hairbrush, but in practice they’re both about as useful as each other – the missiles are more powerful but slower than the pistol’s shots, so they end up killing things at about the same rate. On the plus side, killing a bad guy with the missiles causes them to fly away off the top of the screen rather than exploding in a bloody mess.


One problem with RoboCop 3’s combat is that it can be quite difficult to defeat criminals when they’re right next to you, thanks to their tendency to stand “inside” RoboCop, where his guns cannot reach. This instance was particularly infuriating, because this bad guy ran up behind RoboCop and kicked him right in his big metal arse. This somehow caused RoboCop damage. That does not seem right at all. What’s the point of the hugely expensive and complicated robotification process if you can still feel pain when someone kicks your backside? Did OCP cheap out and use spray-painted plastic instead of titanium alloy when crafting RoboCop’s buttocks? Actually, that sounds like something OCP might do.


The stage ends in extremely anticlimactic fashion as RoboCop reaches a dead end and has to stand around and shoot a certain amount of criminals before the level abruptly ends. Thanks to the combination of RoboCop’s crouching ability and the enemies’ tendency to fire at head height, most of the combat revolves around shoot people in the groin. Is this inspired by the scene in the original movie where RoboCop shoots that guy’s balls off? Honestly, shoot one person in the genitals and you'll never live it down.


Between stages, you’re given the chance to repair RoboCop by using the maintenance tokens you’ve collected. Simply select which part of RoboCop’s body you want fixed and spend your tokens accordingly. Supposedly, having high damage on a body part will cause that part to malfunction. It always seemed to be the legs, in my case, and every now and then RoboCop will be unable to move for a moment or two if his legs aren’t repaired. I’m not sure whether I noticed this more because the way I played the game (badly) meant RoboCop’s legs took all the damage, or if RoboCop’s so stiff and awkward to control even when he’s fully repaired that it’s hard to tell when he’s on the blink. I figured I’d better explain this system to you, because I wouldn’t want you to think that RoboCop spends his between-mission breathers sitting atop the Throne of Justice, presiding over his court as a jester makes jokes that are really going to struggle to get a laugh.


Stage two sees RoboCop fighting his way through a car factory. Why? I don’t know, the game didn’t bother to explain. All it said was that RoboCop’s making his way to the “ultimate conflict,” and as he’s a Jesus Christ analogue I assume that means he’ll be fighting the antichrist at some point. The thing is, according to what I’ve read of RoboCop 3 The Movie’s plot, Anne Lewis is killed at around this point in the movie. The game makes absolutely no mention of this shocking development, presumably convinced that the player’s desire to eliminate crime will be sufficient impetus for them to continue without the waters needing to be muddied with something so trite as vengeance.


This stage adds a lot more platforming into the mix – fussy, miserable platforming that requires a lot of very accurate leaping from a character who’s made of a ton of solid metal and bloody controls like it, too. Fortunately, missing a jump here isn’t instantly fatal. You just loose health while you’re in the goop. No, the insta-death pits come later in the game, so that’s something to look forward to. Amongst its other quirks, RoboCop 3 also has a strange lives / continues system: you have one life, and when RoboCop explodes the “Game Over” screen appears and you go back to the title screen… where you can continue from the start of stage you died on. So, not Game Over, then? Okay, cool.


Suddenly, a ninja appears. That’s generally how ninjas work, I suppose. So, it’s the agile, speedy ninja versus RoboCop, who may be a hero but who is as lithe and nimble as a bin-bag full of microwave ovens. This seems like it would pose a problem for RoboCop, but the ninja seems less interested in stopping our hero and more excited to show off his totally sick flip jumps. It’s understandable that you’d want to showcase your ninja training, even if it does give the this fight the air of a junior school gymnastics performance with RoboCop in the role of the bored father. The ninja somersaults around the place, RoboCop shoots the ninja when the opportunity presents itself and the pair of them chase each other around the arena in this manner until one of them emerges the victor. On to stage three, then.


What? There’s another half of the stage to go, with another ninja fight at the end? I suppose I’d better get on with it, then, starting with shooting this criminal hiding in a pile of tires. Hang on, that exact scenario also happened in Rolling Thunder! Man, I wish I was playing Rolling Thunder, it’s a much better game than RoboCop 3: where Rolling Thunder has precise controls and easily-identifiable enemies with distinct attack patterns and threat levels, RoboCop 3 is a fussy game with enemies that puddle into a generic soup of felonious activity. There’s simply nothing interesting about them. Even the ninjas are boring.


When stage three does finally begin, a few things are different. For one, RoboCop is walking towards a tank. This fact is highlighted by the artillery shells that occasionally come flying across the screen. You can see one at the bottom left of the screen, where I managed to avoid it thanks to the other change: RoboCop can fly now, because he has a jetpack. It might seem like a very un-RoboCop thing to happen, this sudden change from the future of law enforcement to the Rocketeer, but it’s probably the nearest this game gets to being fun. You boost upwards by holding the jump button, RoboCop moves fairly smoothly and it’s a nice change from his usual leaden-footed stomping. It doesn’t alter the gameplay too much, because you still need solid footing to effectively deal with the enemies, but even if it’s little more than being able to do a big jump it’s a welcome addition.


I do like that graffiti down there, because it appears to say “diet.” Like, as a command, perhaps in response to the hefty thud RoboCop makes when he lands from a jump.


Oh, yeah, I should probably mention that RoboCop can upgrade his weapons during each stage by collecting the appropriate items. His pistol starts off firing single shots but can be powered up to three-round bursts – you know, like how RoboCop’s gun works in the movie – and onwards to a three-way spread shot. I think the spread shot is actually less useful than the rapid fire, because it doesn’t put as many bullets out as the rapid fire and the ability to aim diagonally makes part of the spread redundant. As for the missiles, they can be upgraded to homing missiles. “Homing missiles? That sounds great!” I hear you say, but they’re hardly flawless. For starters, they don’t work on some enemies, most notably the ninjas, who emit some kind of jamming field according to the on-screen text. The homing missiles also aren’t that good at homing, and will often fly around in circles a few times before lethargically wandering towards a splatterpunk. Supposedly there are also explosive rockets, but I don’t think I ever managed to upgrade the missiles that far so I’ll have to take the manual’s word for it.


Here’s the tank, well-camouflaged for the urban hellscape of downtown Detroit. Getting close to it is the hard part, because the grenade launcher on the side emits a constant stream of damaging ping-pong balls. Once you get right up to the tank, however, it’s a matter of dealing with all the criminals that pop out of it, as well as their accomplices who run in from the edges of the screen. A simple enough prospect, but there’s one problem: the splatterpunks have learned how to crouch. This makes it almost impossible to avoid their attacks when you’re fighting them on a flat plane (and makes it that much more difficult to snipe their gonads off), so the only real strategy is to kill them all before your health runs out.


Once the tank is dealt with, the stage is over and RoboCop’s jetpack is drained of fuel, regardless of whether you actually used it or not. This causes the game to order RoboCop to “walk back to the OCP tower.” What happened to that car he was driving earlier, huh? Walk back to the tower, I ask you. Is this any way to treat a RoboCop? He’s certainly not likely to win any speed-walking competitions, so the villains’ sinister schemes – whatever the bloody hell they may be – have plenty of time to come to fruition as RoboCop plods his way back to headquarters like a pensioner on his way home from the pub.


It wasn’t kidding, you really do have to walk back through the stage you just completed. As far as I can tell, it’s exactly the same lay-out as last time. Well, that’s one way to avoid having to design new levels, I guess. Most games make you complete the whole thing before you unlock Mirror Mode, but RoboCop 3 is generous enough to give you an early taste.


The only new things to worry about in this stage are these small, unassuming orbs that are scattered around the place like your nan’s throw cushions. They’re actually land mines that will blow up if you touch them. Exploding throw cushions, then. They’re also prone to some completely baffling collision detection, where sometime you can detonate them with your gun but at other times you bullets will pass right through them. It’s especially strange because the hit detection is pretty much okay in the rest of the game, it’s just these bombs that do their own weird thing.


Waiting at the end of the stage (and pacing back and forth) is ED-209, everyone’s favourite badly-programmed murder droid. It’s still his job to defeat RoboCop, despite being terrible at it. Makes sense to me, would you want to be the one to tell ED-209 he’s been made redundant? I thought not. Anyway, ED-209 hangs around the left hand side of the screen and launches many, many projectiles at RoboCop’s general position. This makes it difficult to get a clean shot at ED-209, especially because you have to shoot him in the head, but I managed to find a sweet spot near his feet where I took as little damage as possible while attacking his weak spot. It’s not quite as efficient as luring ED-209 onto some stairs, but it’ll do.


The final stage is about to get underway, but not before RoboCop 3 offers up a lesson in road safety.


You’re in the upper offices of OCP headquarters. There are multiple ninjas. Ignore the ninjas. Not only do ninjas hate not being the centre of attention, but you can’t hurt them anyway. Instead, the entire final stage consists of walking up to this computer terminal and holding up on the d-pad.


If you do that, RoboCop begins decrypting whatever this computer system is supposed to be. Don’t worry about the ninjas, they’ll spend 90 percent of the fight somersaulting around the screen while RoboCop gets to work. That’s right, the climactic encounter of RoboCop 3 involves the player holding a button on the controller and gazing at RoboCop’s arse. I’ve faced off against some truly awful final bosses in my time writing VGJunk, but I think “fiddling with a computer” might be the very worst of them.


With the computer thoroughly hacked, RoboCop flies away with two children. They’re acting as ballast, I think, lest RoboCop accidentally has an Icarus moment. That means RoboCop 3 is over, which is sort of a relief because even though it’s a very short game it still feels like a bit of a slog. Part of that is down to RoboCop himself, because he’s slow and lumpen. On paper, RoboCop feels like he should make a good videogame hero, but he’s not really a good fit for most action games. There must be some way to make playing as RoboCop fun while still feeling like RoboCop – a lightgun game, maybe – but side-scrolling platformers with lots of jumping are not it. On top of that, the swarms of boring enemies that pop up seemingly at random don’t make the gameplay any more engaging, and there’s a lot of annoyance in constantly taking little bits of damage. On the plus side, it doesn’t look bad and the soundtrack is above average, composed as it is by Commodore 64 music legend Jeroen Tel. Plus, you’re playing as RoboCop. There’s still a ten-year-old inside me that will always be excited by that prospect, even if he is flying around and rescuing kids rather than blowing away perps in an extremely gory manner. So, on the whole RoboCop 3 isn’t quite as terrible as I expected, but I would still highly recommend you watch RoboCop instead of playing it. Hell, I think I’d recommend you watch RoboCop 2 over this. At least it has that scene where the failed RoboCop experiment rips its own head off.

Oh thank god, it’s finally here. What feels like the longest summer in British history is at last on its way out, the nights are darker and stormier and it’s the time when having my desk covered in various pumpkins is slightly less weird than during the other eleven months of year. Yes, it’s October, the most wonderful of all months, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time for the 2016 VGJunk Halloween Spooktacular! Nothing but spooky games and tangentially-related creepiness for the next thirty-one days, plus listening to "Dream Warriors" and the Fright Night theme on repeat. That last bit is just me, by the way. I’m not going to subject you to musical stylings of Dokken every time I publish an article.To kick off the season, here’s something a little unusual: Chinese developer Vast Fame’s unlicensed Game Boy Color title Emo Dao! It shares some of the characters in it’s name with the Chinese name for Castlevania, although as soon as you see the title screen you’ll realise that me telling you that this game is, erm, influenced by Castlevania was kinda redundant.


See? That’s the most Castlevania-looking title screen I’ve ever seen that wasn’t on an officially-licensed Konami product. The only way it could be more Castlevania-y is if it had a swarm of Medusa Heads floating across it. And just look at those adorable bats! Did I mention that I’m excited about it being October?
Now, Emo Dao is an unlicensed Chinese Game Boy Color game that has already made its Castlevania influence abundantly clear, so you might be expecting a simple romhack of a pre-existing Castlevania game. That’s what I was expecting, but I’m happy to report it’s something a bit different. We’ll get to that presently, but first let’s take a look at the intro.


Evil monks, dressed in pointed hoods and shoulderpads that make doorways a harrowing trial, arrive. They do something with magic. Evil magic, one assumes. They don’t look the sort to be making pumpkin carriages and ballgowns for downtrodden serving-girls.


Whatever the monks are up to, it’s scared the bejeesus out of these villagers. The chap on the right seems particularly scarred by the experience, looking as he does like Christopher Lloyd when he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night after remembering he was in Foodfight. If these humble peasants look familiar, it’s probably because these graphics were ripped directly from the intro to Castlevania: Dracula X.


There’s a dragon involved somewhere along the line. That makes sense, the “Dracul” part of Dracula means “dragon,” after all. This is clearly a vampire dragon, is what I’m getting at. There’s also some Chinese text to explain what’s going on, but my knowledge of Chinese is roughly on par with my knowledge of nuclear submarine maintenance, so I’m afraid of a lot of Emo Dao is going to remain shrouded in mystery.


The game begins, and rather than being thrust straight into some side-scrolling leap-and-whip action as I was expecting, our Belmont-adjacent hero finds himself on an overworld map. There’s not much room for roaming, as it’s all narrow paths blocked by various locations. The first ones I found were this tower, which represents an action stage, and a small village.


The village was home to this Crypt Keeper type. I think he might be a save point wearing a waterproof cagoule but, again, I can’t read Chinese. Still, it’s nice to see a friendly face, or at least a face that isn’t trying to chew my face off. Anyway, I bid my farewell to the old man and set off to the first action stage I could find.


Emo Dao really is a side-scrolling action game for the most part, with the overworld serving as little more than a way to move between stages. There’s our slightly beige hero, staring down a one-eyed ghost lady. He’s definitely got the trademark Belmont stance, doesn’t he? Very solid footing, he must have the stability of a mountain goat. He's surely related to the Belmonts in some way, albeit distantly. I was going to come up with a daft name for him and my first thought was “Ralph Belmont,” but then I remembered that’s actually the name of a genuine Castlevania Belmont. Ralph, slayer of evil, vanquisher of Dracula. Hmm.
Does our unnamed hero fight with a whip? Well, yeah. It’d be weird if he didn’t, at this point. However, he’s not very good at whipping, and he doesn’t actually extend the whip in front of him in the traditional Belmont manner when he attacks. Instead, he whips it vertically in front of him. This means your attacks have very little range. On the positive side, these attacks do cover the whole front of our hero from head to toe, and you can attack pretty rapidly by holding down the button, so it’s a bit like having a short-range but damage-dealing shield in front of you the whole time.
So, that’s the gist of Emo Dao. Pretty basic side-scroller action that doesn’t actually feel that much like a Castlevania game, mostly because it’s much, much faster. I wonder what other surprises are lurking within?


A Pokemon attacks! That’s definitely a surprise. I mean, that’s clearly a Grimer, right? It’s the same colour and everything. As far as I know, this is the only Pokemon enemy in the game, which disappointed me more than I thought it would. Emo Dao could have been the Castlevania / Pokemon crossover the world has been waiting for! I’d like to imagine that if a Belmont was also a Pokemon trainer, they’d use nothing but Zubats just to defeat Dracula in the most ironic way possible.


When you finish an action stage you’re sent back to the world map, on the other side of the area you just cleared. From here, I spent most of my time wandering around not really knowing where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing, so I managed to see a fair few stages. If this set-up seems familiar, that’s probably because this is how another of Konami’s 8-bit classics works – Emo Dao is as much a rip-off of the 1987 Famicom game Getsu Fuuma Den as it is of Castlevania. The action and the flow of the gameplay are very similar to Getsu Fuuma Den, but the spooky monsters and whip-swinging hero are all Castlevania.


Here you can see just how short the range on our hero’s whip is. It’s baffling, it really is. A bit of distance is the entire point of using a whip! I want to defeat the evil, not give it a cuddle. My theory is that Emo Dao is based on an earlier game where the protagonist used a sword or his fists. Oh well, at least the whip attacks quickly, and every enemy I encountered was defeated in one hit anyway.
This is great stage for the first entry in this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, huh? Dark forests, glowing eyes peering out in the background, zombies shambling around all over the place. Ah, it’s the videogame equivalent of a nice warm bath. A blood bath, cackle cackle, thunder sound effects, etcetera.


Grimer’s back, and he’s brought a spinal column with him! What a wonderful enemy design, with the spine acting like a plant’s stalk. I call it Chiropractor's Bane. I’m amazed that this isn’t an enemy in a real Castlevania game, it’d be a perfect fit.
Emo Dao’s stages take place in a variety of different locations, from graveyards to woods to caves, although really they’re all the same. There’s jumping to be done, but none of it is on floating or moving platforms: it’s all just bottomless pits to jump over and lumps (for want of a better word) giving the stages their verticality. One thing that marks Emo Dao out as an unlicensed game is that our hero doesn’t have a jumping animation. Press jump and he flies straight upwards without moving a muscle. My best explanation is that our hero has rockets in his shoes, which would also explain how he moves so fast.


I recognise this ghost. I’m sure I’ve seen it before somewhere. The problem is, I’ve seen thousands and thousands of cartoon ghosts. In fact, I probably have seen more carton ghosts than I’ve had dinners, and not just because I really like sandwiches. Thus, I’m having trouble placing it, and I know eventually I’ll remember where it’s from and it’ll be something really obvious and I’ll feel like a tit. So, if you want to speed along the process of me feeling like a tit, let me know where this ghost is usually haunting in the comments.


I think this ghost might be all-new, and he’s a cheerful fellow indeed. These ghosts are one of the few enemies that can fire projectiles, however, and that makes them kind of a pain in the arse. Emo Dao is one of those games where most of the damage you take comes from monsters you couldn’t see because they were lurking off the edge of the screen. The play area is rather cramped, and because everything moves around very quickly you’ll frequently be bumping into boils and ghouls you didn’t see coming unless you take things at least a little slowly. That said, there are still some sections where you have to make blind jumps onto narrow platforms that have monsters on them, which is just awful game design even if you can mostly deal with them thanks to the whip’s rapid fire ability.


This stage has bear traps in it, which I was about to decry as not being very spooky until I thought about unwittingly standing on one and now I will concede that they’re are, in fact, terrifying.
So, Emo Dao doesn’t do anything surprising with the walk-n-whip formula. Every stage consists of the same gameplay, with no new mechanics added that I managed to find. What is surprising, though, is that it’s not terrible. Pretty decent, even! A lot better than most licensed Game Boy Color games I’ve played, that’s for damned sure, with reliable controls, chunky and mostly flicker-free graphics, and the general feeling of being a solid, well-made if unimaginative game.


There were a few cave-based stages, but sadly I never managed to get past them because of these bricks blocking the way. I’m certain there’s a way to get past them, but I never managed to figure out how. Perhaps some kind of special item? Is "very large chisel" an unlockable skill? I wish I knew.


I’d hoped it’d be one of the items I could buy from this charming boutique, staffed by a goblin with a jack-o-lantern face and some fetching bangles. Oh yes, there are items to buy in Emo Dao, and there’s even an experience meter you can fill for that real “with added RPG elements!” feel. I say that you can fill the experience meter – I played Emo Dao for a good few hours and never got anywhere close. Check the first few of screenshots in this article and then compare that to the experience bar in the last couple, and you’ll see just how little progress I managed to make on that front.


Here’s a mummy, because hey, it’s the Halloween season! Specifically it’s a mummy from the Metal Slug games, squashed down so it’ll fit into a Game Boy Color game. If you are going to steal your graphical assets, you might as well steal from the best.
Unfortunately, this is about as far as I managed to get with Emo Dao. I know I usually finish the games I write about, but I explored thoroughly and still couldn’t make any more progress. The big problem was the bricked-up cave stages, whose mystery I never unravelled. I did manage to buy a new weapon, a fireball projectile that replaced the whip, and as soon as I got it I raced back to one of the bricked-up passages in the hope that I could smash the blocks apart, but nothing doing.


The only other thing I found was this minotaur, who occupied a unique tile on the overworld, but even meeting him didn’t lead to anything. When I first saw him I assumed we’d be having a scrap, or at least a bit of chase-me-chase-me through a labyrinth, but all he did was shout at me in Chinese and send me back to the world map. An extremely tentative translation is that there might be something about finding a demon whip before he’d allow me to pass. Maybe it’s tied to the experience meter, but as I said I played Emo Dao for a good long time and never got it more than one-sixth full, and frankly I didn’t have the time or the patience to completely fill it. I’d like to write about some other games this October, you know?


It’s a shame I didn’t have more time to spend with Emo Dao, because while it’s not a game to set your soul aflame it is a half-decent unlicensed Game Boy Color game, and that’s a rare thing indeed. If you’re interested in unlocking Emo Dao’s secrets for yourself, I’m sure you can find it with a bit of internet detective work. All in all, a rather good start to this year’s Halloween season, I feel: straightforward action-platformer gameplay dipped in a crispy batter of cartoon ghosts and spinal column skull-plants. I’m not done with it quite yet, though. Because this is October, that means it’s time for the return of the VGJunk Halloween-O-Meter!


As always, the Halloween-O-Meter is not a measure of how good a game is, but rather of how Halloween-y it made me feel, based on my complex and often-shifting whims. I dithered between a seven and an eight for Emo Dao, but in the end I had to go with the higher score because it’s basically a Castlevania game and giving a Castlevania game anything less than an eight doesn’t feel right. It’s got plenty of creeps, mercantile goblins and Pokemons on the spooky end of the spectrum, so I think it’s earned it. A solid start to the 2016 VGJunk Halloween Spooktacular, then – and I can’t wait to see what else I stumble across before November rolls around and the world goes back to being grey and boring.

I don’t think there’s any game that I could spend more time writing about than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s just so dense, packed with layer upon layer of fun, that I might never run out of things to say about it. So, here we go again with Symphony of the Night’s monster bestiary! I mentioned in the Ephemera article that I could probably write an article just about the game’s enemy encyclopedia and its strange, terse descriptions that often add more mystery than they illuminate, so now I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. Well, it seems appropriate for Halloween, doesn’t it? So, here are a bunch of my favourite entries. Not every single monster – Dracula’s too invested in employee diversity for that to be feasible – but plenty of freaks and weirdoes. 

Let’s begin with Dracula himself, (because he’s first on the list,) and that is the most inaccurate use of the word “destroyed” I have ever seen. Richter managed to mildly inconvenience Dracula, at the very most.
It’s also interesting that Dracula has no extra defence against or immunity to the “Darkness” element. He’s the Prince of Darkness! You’d think that’d buy you a bit of protection. Then again, maybe not. If the entirety of Wales decided to beat up Prince Charles I don’t think he’d have a natural resistance to it.


Are they, though? Feared, I mean. Bats are surely the very lowest monster on the totem pole, below even skeletons and the immobile thorny shrubs. I can’t imagine them being all that feared when Castlevania regularly disgorges headless knights and giant fire-wolves. Feared as an omen of evil, perhaps. When the bat population starts increasing, it’s a good indicator that Dracula is about to awaken from his latest whip-enforced nap.



No wonder the Stone Skull looks so cheerful, he’s completely invulnerable when all his skeleton confrères are reduced to bonemeal the second a Belmont shows up. I know it says “Immune: none”  up there, but that’s a bald-faced lie. The Stone Skull is immune to everything. Judging by his joyful demeanour, I don’t think even harsh words and insults would have much of an effect on him. It’s up to the player to decide whether this skull is stone because it’s a statue carved from solid rock or because it’s the fossilized remains of some titanic man-creature, and I’m going with statue purely because something this cheerful can’t possibly have occured naturally.



Hang on, why is “creature” in quotes? Is the merman not actually a creature at all? Is this… is this a man in a costume? Okay, here’s my movie pitch. A peasant living in an impoverished medieval village can’t find work in any of the traditional fields – maybe his father made him swear to never become a turnip farmer or something – so in desperation he buys a cheap Halloween costume and applies for a job in Dracula’s castle. Hey, it's the only place that's hiring! There’s a montage where he jury-rigs a hosepipe so he can spit jets of water, there are farcical scenes as he tries to hide the fact he’s working for the Ultimate Evil from his family, that kind of thing. The screenplay writes itself, honestly. I call it Mer-Man Up, and it will be coming to a cinema near you never because the world is a godforsaken hole of a place.



This is what I mean when I say the bestiary descriptions often raise more questions than they answer. How they hell (no pun intended) do you possess a table? Were there kids messing with a ouija board, and a demonic entity sensed its chance to strike… but it missed the kids and wound up in the furniture by accident? Blimey, that’s got to be embarrassing for the poor demon. While all the other spirits are murdering priests and making children’s heads spin around, the Ouija Table has to spend all its time scouring the web for the best deals on French polishing.



Do you think the ghosts in Castlevania can earn promotions? Or are they stuck as a low-level ghost for all eternity, cursed to doing the menial jobs – ectoplasm generation, stunt doubles on Paranormal Activity movies, greeting adventurers with a hearty “boo” - because they simply weren’t evil enough in life for a management position? I’d like to hope it’s the former. There’s always a chance that even the smallest ghost might knock a Belmont down a bottomless pit, and that’s got to be worth moving a few rungs up the ladder.



I think I mentioned this on Twitter, but the answer is “both of them.” It says “two-headed” right there. Is a creature with two heads is even going to register on the Castlevania weirdness scale? The real question is which head’s the Bert and which one’s the Ernie.



“Look out, that skeleton’s got a gun!” See, that’s the kind of wonderful situation Symphony of the Night puts you in on a regular basis. How are you going to deal with these skeleton gunslingers? Block their fire with you shield? Turn into fog, because you can’t very well shoot fog, can you? The  choice is yours! Personally, I like to bonk them on the ol’ bone-box with the Moon Rod, because then you can pretend you’re Sailor Moon dishing out justice.



Having played Symphony of the Night a great many times, I would submit that the line “seems reluctant to fight” is a load of horseshit.
You might be wondering why this relatively generic demon shares its name with H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous monster, and I think this answer is “someone made a cock-up during localisation” because, you see…



...here’s another demon called Malachi who actually looks like Cthulhu. Actually, for the first time I’m noticing that Ctulhu and Malachi have the same sprite with a different head. This one is clearly supposed to be Cthulhu, however. The strange thing is that neither of their names in the original Japanese version referenced Cthulhu. Ctulhu’s Japanese name was simply “Devil,” while Malachi was originally called “Evil.” So, someone saw at Evil’s sprite, realised it looked like Cthulhu but accidentally applied the Cthulhu name to a different enemy. I must confess, this mix-up has always annoyed me a little more than it probably should. Still, it’s always nice to play a game where you can technically batter Cthulhu to death with your bare hands.



What do we all think – is the skeleton ape actually a reference to Donkey Kong, or is the idea of apes – be they flesh-coated or otherwise – throwing barrels at heroes simply such a powerful notion that it could spring up in multiple places? I’ve never been able to decide, myself. Maybe the designers though that a regular human skeleton wouldn’t look strong enough to be throwing wooden casks about, but I’m not sure I buy that explanation because those same designers didn’t have a problem with human skeletons that can shoot laser beams out of their ribcages.



If you’re going to perform a demonic baptism on any animal, a toad seems like a good bet. Not much encouragement needed to get it into the water, you know? Imagine if Dracula had tried to demonically baptise a cat instead, it’d be a bloody disaster. I hope he figures it out at some point, though, because I want to fight a six-foot-long kitten.



See, this guy’s strong against darkness! Understandable, given that it's an enormous floating skull. A skull that’s somehow even more attuned to the power of darkness than Dracula himself. He’s even a Lord, but sadly not the lord of Castlevania. This is how you know Castlevania isn’t a democracy, if free elections were held the Skull Lord would definitely romp to victory over Dracula, multi-time loser in the war between good and evil.



I know I discussed this in the Ephemera article, but if you don’t think “specially trained war-goose” is a truly magical phrase then you’re reading the wrong website.



Giant skeleton. That’s it. Giant Skeleton. What else could you possibly need to know? Dracula’s got more skeletons than the goddamn catacombs of Paris, and even if he is immortal he doesn’t have time to be coming up with detailed descriptions for every single one of them. Sometimes “Giant Skeleton” is all you need. In a shocking twist, the Paranthropus shares its name with a species of prehistoric hominid that was smaller than modern humans. It’s an ironic nickname, like if you called a miniature skeleton Stretch.



Are you sure that’s the skeleton of a were-panther? Panther, as in the four-legged big cat and not a creature with an elastic neck that walks on its hind legs and has its forelimbs forever tucked up into a mocking “chicken wing” pose?



He may search amongst graves and knows much wise lore, but that lore clearly doesn’t stretch to style. Come on, Lossoth, try to smarten yourself up a bit. Take a page from Dracula’s book. He might be terrible at destroying the world of men, but he always looks fabulous while he’s attempting it. There’s nothing that says the grave-searching and the knowing of lore are related – perhaps Lossoth finished his Masters degree and then went into the grave-searching business – so there’s no reason you can’t have a separate outfit for each activity.



If I was a member of an all-girls, occult-themed biker gang – and it pains me deeply that I am not – I would be putting in an immediate petition to change our name to The Salem Ghost Witches. The magical powers of the witch, combined with the spookiness and float-through-walls-ability of the ghost, what a perfect combination. The strange thing about this enemy is that is implies that Castlevania takes place in a universe where those executed at Salem were honest-to-goodness witches and not tragic victims in a case of religiously-motivated mass hysteria and petty inter-family squabbling. I think I prefer the Castlevania version.



Ah yes, the musician from Hell. What’s his favourite genre? Punk, if that mohawk’s anything to go by. Of course, now that Lemmy has sadly passed away, the Hellfire Beast will no longer be hell’s premier musician. Hopefully he can pick up some session work.



Man, I love Schmoo – I think it’s that sly lopsided grin, he always looks like he’s having so much darned fun. I just wish I knew more about Schmoo. Like, what exactly is it? The direct visual read would be “a grey basketball sitting on a bundle of bloody rags,” but that surely can’t be what Schmoo really is. I’ve got the strong feeling that there’s an honest-to-god pumpkin underneath that balaclava. I have no evidence for that, but it’s what I’m choosing to believe. Also, I wonder what Schmoo’s real name is, because it clearly says “Schmoo” is just a nickname. Answers on a postcard, please, but I’m fairly certain that Schmoo’s true moniker cannot be rendered in any human language.



Earlier in this article I said that Nova Skeletons fire lasers from their ribcages, but on closer inspection that beam is definitely emanating from the skeleton’s pelvis. A fearsome weapon, indeed. You might think me strange for paying such close attention, but if you can’t stare at a skeleton’s crotch in October then when can you?



There are lots of large armoured knights in Symphony of the Night. Some of them have swords, or owls, or very large knives which are basically swords, or even bombs. Not this guy, though. He gets a rock. Quite a large rock, granted, but that's still just a rock and presumably the entire situation is rather embarrassing for this knight. All those years of being a squire, following the code of chivalry,  jousting in tournaments and for what? A rock. He could be easily and cheaply replaced by a small trebuchet, the poor sod.



So, hey, I finally got around to looking this up and there was indeed an Amalaric of the Goths. Well, of the Visigoths. He was the king of the Visigoths from 511-531AD, and was supposedly murdered by his own soldiers. Evidence that any of these soldiers were multi-limbed angelic creatures is hard to come by. On the plus side, it turns out that many of the names of the royalty of this time are childishly amusing, a personal favourite being Childebert.



Look, is it Fire Demon or Flame Demon? Make your damn mind up!



At one point in the game, you fight fake version of the heroes from Castlevania 3, including Trevor Belmont here. Now I’m seeing this bestiary page again, it strikes me as odd that it’s says this is specifically a zombie impersonating Trevor, which means it’s the toughest, most agile zombie to ever exist. I always assumed the fake heroes were a magical construct of some kind, or maybe a Renfield-type human thrall in a leather skirt, but no – it’s a zombie, and it must be a ruddy fresh one at that. You can visit any British town centre on a Saturday night and see dozens of living, breathing humans that look less lively than this reanimated corpse, so whatever Fake Trevor is doing to stave off mortality must be pretty powerful stuff.



Ironically, the dodo went extinct because they didn’t run away when they saw people. Looks this one survived long enough to learn to scarper, but unfortunately it ran straight into Dracula’s castle. Please, provide your own sad trombone noise here.



Again, this is something I’ve mentioned before but the idea of Death and Dracula being BFFs is just so heartwarming to me. Sure, Death is technically Dracula’s minion, but it says close friends right there and the possibilities that summons up are utterly magical. They gossip about their crushes, they try on hats in the mall, they stay up all night doing each other’s hair. Well, Death does Dracula’s hair, anyway. Dracula probably reciprocates with a nice skull wax or something.



Finally, there’s Dracula again, this time in his massive creature of darkness final boss form. He’s picked up an immunity to the powers of darkness this time, which is helpful for him. My problem with this entry is that description. “Lord of Wallachia, Father of Alucard,” but not “colossal shape-shifting demon with ten-foot demon hands on each side and a gaggle of what seem to be xenomorph heads in the middle”? I think that merits a mention, don’t you?

I’m not really one for the concept of guilty pleasures. If you like a thing, then you like it and that’s that. I’m happy to admit a fondness for Britney Spears’ Toxic and microwaveable hamburgers, and unless your hobbies are things like bear-baiting or throwing rocks at orphans then that’s how it should be. That being said, it’s a little embarrassing just how much I’ve been looking forward to writing about today’s game: Casual Arts’ 2015 PC object hunt Halloween Trick or Treat 2!

Naturally I looked it up, and there are indeed multiple real Spook Hollow Roads in the USA so as soon as I finish this article I’ll be on the phone to the US Immigration Service. Do you think they’ll accept “bad jokes about videogames” as a skill worthy of a visa?
Those of you who read last year’s VGJunk Halloween Spooktacular might recall that the first Halloween Trick or Treat was the surprise hit of the season (for me, at least): a PC hidden object game that consisted of looking for and then clicking on certain items in scenes densely packed with Halloween junk, scenes that looked like a tornado swept through the search results for “Halloween” on AliExpress and dumped the contents on a sickeningly quaint American town. I absolutely loved it, despite the gameplay being minimal at best. The combination of the dialled-to-eleven Halloween theme and the hidden object gameplay which, for some reason, I find very relaxing, combined to make Halloween Trick or Treat one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve ever had while writing VGJunk. So, obviously I was going to write about the sequel, and here it is. Having played a bunch of spook-themed hidden object games since, I was a little concerned that Halloween Trick or Treat 2 might have messed up the formula of the original with the addition of inventory puzzles or match-three sections, but it turns out I needn’t have worried because HToT2 plays almost identically to its predecessor. Let’s get right into it, then!


HToT2’s set-up is the same as the original, in that a parent gives her children some vague encouragement to enjoy Halloween and then leaves them to wander the streets all night. The art style for the characters has changed from the very ugly digital paintings of the first game to these no-less-unsettling CG models. Everyone has the mad, staring eyes of a lunatic and, in the case of mother dearest here, a truly hideous necklace. I know it’s supposed to be two feathers and an arrowhead, but it looks more like three jagged chunks of metal on a bit of string. Hobo chic, I guess you’d call it. There’s definitely a torn-up tin can somewhere near this lady’s jewellery cabinet.


Young Mike here is where the uncanny valley reaches its lowest point, a disturbingly-proportioned munchkin with a hair parting so severe it must have been carved there by a bloody chisel. No, I don’t like Mike, who looks like nothing so much as Damien from a low budget CG remake of The Omen.


Here’s the first scene, and it works exactly as you’d expect. You’ve got a list of items to find, you look around the screen and click on said items, find them all to clear the scene and move on to the next. The rabbit’s in the pumpkin pile on the left, the kite’s in the tree, and so on. The only new twist at the moment are the items listed in red. To find those, you have to click on a certain area to reveal them, and it’s not an addition that works all that well. Most of the time it’s not too bad, because the red items are in places you might expect them to be – for instance, if you’re looking for a bell, you click on a church tower and there it is. In this case Bill’s keys are in Bill’s pocket, which makes sense, but there are a few that are just in random places and there’s no hint as to there location. Well, unless you use the “HINT” button, which shows you exactly where the item is. There’s also the Mega Hint, that shows you where every item is at once, so it’s fair to say that HtoT2 leans heavily towards the “casual” side of the spectrum.


No, it’s not Lex Luthor in a snazzy pumpkin hat, it’s Bill! Good old Bill. Yep, Bill the pumpkin man. He sells pumpkins, and I think he’s also some sort of Halloween ambassador, handing out information about what’s going on in this town during Halloween – and there’s a lot going on because, just like in the first game Springfield (yes, that’s what it’s called) goes absolutely bananas for the spooky season. Like, it’s so full-on and affects every square foot of the town that it goes beyond merely a love of Halloween and into the preparations for a mass sacrifice to some terrible Pumpkin God.


You get to play a little minigame after most scenes, with the emphasis on “mini,” but HTot2 gets roughly ten million points from me for containing precisely zero sliding block puzzles. This first minigame involves assembling the town map by rotating the sections until they’re lined up correctly. And what a map it is! The museum is now a spooky museum, the pumpkin farm is prominently labelled and best of all there’s a Mall and Dracula’s Castle. How wonderful is that? You can nip in for your shopping and have your blood drained by an unholy creature of darkness without having to make two trips! That’s just efficient, that is. Sure, it’s a bit of a come-down for Dracula, but times are tough for everybody and he’ll just have to swallow his pride when people wander into his lair and ask where the vape stall is.


This is Emma, the other child. She’s not nearly as creepy as Mike, perhaps because her nose isn’t quite so piggish and her unsettlingly small and uniform teeth are mostly covered. Emma seems excited that “they’ve spooked up the museum,” so she’s definitely my favourite character.


The next stage is the pumpkin barn, the bustling hub from which Bill tries his best to feed Springfield’s insatiable hunger for jack-o-lanterns. He seems to be doing a good job, there are so many gourds in here that I’m at risk of developing pumpkin blindness. I’ll have to take a break to stare at some cartoon Frankensteins or something just to get my levels calibrated.
You might have noticed that everything looks very bright and jolly for a Halloween game, and HToT2 does have a strange atmosphere to it. It takes place in the most down-home, aww-shucks, white-picket-fence, suburbia-mixed-with-the-country version of America I think I’ve ever seen in a videogame. There’s twangy banjo music playing, everyone’s always smiling and there was an honest-to-goodness “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker in the first scene. This is especially bizarre because, as far as I can tell, the developers of this game are English. Specifically they’re based in Newcastle. Am I disappointed that this game isn’t set in Newcastle and the characters aren’t Geordies? I am, a little. Hearing the kids say “Howay, pet, let’s gan doon the Metro Centre and see Dracula’s Castle, like.” would be pretty great.


The kids head over to Grandma’s house to carve some pumpkins and fatten up on various foodstuffs, including pumpkin pies, cookies and a whole roast chicken. There’s plenty of room for all the food, Grandma’s kitchen is bigger than the entire residences of most people I know. You do actually get to carve the pumpkin yourself, after a fashion: any blue items on the list require you to find an item and drag it to the correct location, in this case bringing the knife over to the pumpkin.
One problem you’re always going to find in hidden object games is deciphering exactly what the item list is telling you to look for. Sometimes this is because words can have multiple meaning, or it might be because of international language differences: I’ve played one that asked me to find a torch, so I was looking for a metal tube with batteries that lights up. A flashlight, I mean. The game actually wanted a flaming torch. I mention this now, because this scene wants you to find “Indian corn” and I didn’t know what that was. I though Indian corn was maize? Turns out it’s those decorative corn cobs one the walls. Well, I’m getting that warm Halloween feeling and learning something!


Some scenes also have a smaller extra scene located within: click the part of the background that’s got sparkles coming out of it, and you’re taken to a close-up window where items can also lurk. The sparkles only appear if there is an item to be found in the close up area, so you can’t forget that it’s there, and it’s a decent way to increase the size of the play area without having to include scrolling.


There are a couple of jigsaws to do between stages. This one, promoting the upcoming Hallowen events that precede the dreadful awakening of the Ancient Pump-kin, shows you a picture of what the completed puzzle will look like. Other jigsaws in this game are not so kind.
Just like the previous game, I spent a lot of time wondering where exactly all the pictures used in this game came from and whether they were all sourced with the proper attention to gaining permission and respecting copyrights. A lot of them do look like they’re either stock photos, pictures used on shopping websites selling Halloween costumes or as though they’ve been snipped out of catalogues. A few of them look like candid family photos, and this Wizard of Oz group is getting into that territory. I don’t think it is a family photo, but the disdainful look the scarecrow is giving the mum-witch as she gets a bit too into the cackling makes me think that they are actually related.


I get the impression that Mike and Emma might be slightly spoiled.
A few scenes in, and I’m enjoying HToT2’s gameplay just as much as the first time around. Nicely cluttered scenes with items hidden in locations that can be devious but rarely made me cry bullshit, unlike the moments in Hidden Files where objects had their colour changed or were made semi-transparent. On top of that, the Halloween-osity rating is off the charts, so I’d still be happy even if playing the game was a more painful experience.


Never mind, HToT2 is making me do maths so it’s the worst game I’ve ever played, zero out of ten, even all these pumpkins can’t save it.


A few of the scenes mix things up by having you find a certain number of one item rather a mixed list, in this case jack-o-lanterns. Frankly I’m amazed there’s a photo of this town that contains only twenty jack-o-lanterns.


At some point along the way, the kids have changed into their costumes. Emma is a fairly standard witch, and Mike is a pirate. I’m not sure I agree with the ever-increasing acceptance of pirates as a Halloween standard. I know kids have been dressing as pirates for Halloween for decades now, but they just never feel spooky enough. If you’re going to dress as some kind of mouldering, salt-crusted undead pirate, sure, but a regular pirate has never sat right me with as an appropriate costume choice.


Springfield is so mad for Halloween that they elect a Halloween Queen, her coronation taking place on a tractor trailer while a bluegrass band herald her tragically short – but vital to the ascension of the Ancient Pump-Kin – reign. Preceding her are the local high school’s specially-trained Halloween dancers. The fear-leading squad, as it were. It’s an event of unparalleled pageantry, so much so that even a Victorian deep-sea diver has hauled himself up from the briny depths to attend the festivities.


Finally, the kids of Halloween Trick or Treat 2 get to do some actual trick or treating! The great thing about living in Springfield is that you never have to worry that a house you visit is going to turn theirs light out and pretend they’re not home, give you a lecture on how Halloween is an unchristian gateway to demonic activity or, worse still, hand out toothbrushes instead of sweets. If their house looked like this and they did refuse to give you sweets, I reckon you’d have a pretty good legal case to sue for false advertising.
I said earlier than the large majority of the game’s hidden objects aren’t maliciously placed, but that’s not to say there aren’t some fiendish items tucked away in the scenes. For example, in this scene you’re told to look for the number one. Go on, try to find it. I’ll wait.
Couldn’t find it? It’s the long vertical window beside of the door. I know, right?


The way Mike delivers this line finally confirms what his strange plasticky appearance had led me to suspect: he’s really a highly advanced candy acquisition android.


The next few scenes follow the children as they make their way to the Spooky Museum. In any other town I’d say it’s a sad indictment of the lack of public funding for educational institutions that the museum has to dress itself up for Halloween in order to get the punters in, but this is Springfield so I’m sure the museum is actually like this all year round.
Before they reach their destination, the kids stop of for a quick round of “find the bone.” Hang on, let’s not call it “find the bone,” that sounds terrible. Femur Frolics, then. So, you have to find all the bones, but in this and every other hidden object scene in HToT2 there are a few other things to find, too. Every stage has three or four golden pumpkins scattered around as an extra set of objects to look for. There are also a few “special” items to locate. I’m struggling to think of a good term for them, because they’re “Halloween Objects” but then so are most of the non-special items in the game. Specifically, they’re cheaply-made and garishly ugly bits of Halloween tat. The kind of things I have covering eighty percent of my desk, basically. For example, in this scene they include the stone gargoyle a the top of the path, the skull-print wellies and that bum bag with the blood leaking out of the zipper. Bum bags are what we in the UK call fanny packs, by the way, because to British ears “fanny pack” sounds like the name of a roving band of extreme feminists. Neither these special items nor the golden pumpkins show up when you use the hint button, so they’re a little extra challenge that doesn’t effect whether or not you clear the stage.


The museum’s… owner? Director? Whoever he is, he’s here to creep out the kids and demonstrate that what little writing there is in this game can be described as “charmingly amateurish” if you’re feeling generous. I do honestly kinda of like it, but I’d understand if people didn’t like it.


The museum’s prehistoric room is a real feast for the eyes, isn’t it? They’re so devoted to Halloween that they risked damaging their (presumably) very expensive T. Rex skeleton by whacking a saddle on it. Well, they have to have a saddle so the skeleton cowboy has a comfortable place to sit and read his newspaper.


One of the other common minigames are these spot the difference games, and they’re the most vicious spot the difference games I’ve ever encountered. That woman’s shirt is slightly more untucked in one of the pictures? Come on, man, I’m slovenly enough that I’d would never had noticed that. On the plus side, there are so many differences to find that you can just start clicking at random and you’re bound to hit a few of them.


As promised, here is the mall / Dracula’s castle. I want this to be a real world thing, I really do. You know how shopping centres get Santas in around Christmas (well, in September these days)? The Dracula version would work just the same, except instead of telling Dracula what you want for Christmas you sit on his knee and pledge your allegiance to his unholy crusade. He gives you a gift of neck-cleaning wipes and blood oranges, everyone’s happy.
They’ve even got a pretty cool Dracula involved. You can tell he’s cool, he’s got a bat-shaped electric guitar. They don’t just hand those out to non-cool people. Also, I’ve just noticed the shop on the left seems to be called “HALLOWEEN” despite clearly being a furniture store. They had bloody well better sell a range of pumpkin-shaped sofas.


Our young trick or treaters stop off for some refuelling, in a diner that serves to further the game’s theme of wholesome Americana. It does make sense – if this was set in Britain, we’d be looking at two teenagers in hoodies and Poundland masks, flicking fries at each other in a grotty city centre McDonalds. I really only included a shot of this scene to point out the beaming spectre peering in through the window on the right. He cannot wait to get in there and enjoy some frosty ghoul soda.


Apparently this is something called “trunk or treat,” where you fill your car boot with sweets and hand them out to children instead of having the kids come to you. That sounds like too much work for my liking. I think this year I’m just going to set up a bucket on a pivot in an upstairs window, so when trick or treaters ring the doorbell I can just tip a few sweets on them without having to walk downstairs.
My problem with this scene is the inconsistency in the awarding of prizes. The VM Beetle has a first place rosette on it, but the second place prize has been given to a man in an Amish costume. Or an Amish man, I suppose, although you’d think the Amish wouldn't be big fans of Halloween. So, are the prizes for the cars or the costumes? I’m not saying that the Beetle doesn’t deserve first place, because it clearly does, but there should be separate categories for cars and owners.


I made it to the haunted hotel, which is run by the same bloke that was in charge of the museum He’s really getting into his role when it comes to scaring children, isn’t he?


The hotel looks just as wonderful as all the other scenes, being so Halloween-y that copies of "Monster Mash" are being spontaneously generated in my computer’s CD drive, but I have one issue: you’re told to find a vampire, but you actually need to click the reflection of a vampire in the mirror above the fireplace. What a colossal blunder to make, Casual Arts! A real textbook mistake. For shame.


Oh hey, it’s the glorious return of the phrase “spooky dooky!” It appeared in the first game too, and it still sounds like the description of a ghost’s turd. I’m certainly glad to see it back.


Okay, you’ve taken this spooky shit too goddamn far with the doll room. When the clown with the knife is the least creepy thing in the room, you could probably stand to dial it back a little. On a jollier note, the paintings on the walls are of the witch and her house from the first HtoT. Yes, I’m well aware I’m probably the only person in the world who cares.


After a few more scenes following the kids’ adventures as they escape from the hotel and run through its gardens, they arrive at home with so much candy that the Nestle executives are out buying huge amounts of coke and Cristal as we speak. You even get to stuff some of the treats into the children’s faces by picking them up and dropping them in their eager maws, which sounds a little weird now that I’ve typed it out. It’s a charmingly appointed living room, too: ghosts wearing top hats can only increase the value of your home.


There’s one last thing to discuss before HToT2 comes to an end, and that the fact that I’ve been gaining coins the whole time I’ve been playing: you can see the counter at the top of the screen during the hidden object scenes. What’s the money for? Purchasing all this tasteful and stylish Halloween merchandise, of course! In truth, it’s a very disappointing feature. Not because all you can do with the items is look at them – no, I’m more than happy to look at these (to steal a phrase from Games Workshop’s 2014 financial report) jewel-like objects of magic and wonder. It’s disappointing because I don’t have a golden skeleton with matching silver sarcophagus in my possession right now. Obviously I looked to see if I could purchase this golden skeleton, and my efforts revealed the source for at least one of the images in HToT2. As this skeleton sold at auction for $365,000, it’s unlikely that I will ever own it, unless I managed to pull of the most unlikely of GoFundMe campaigns.


You know what? I did have a great Halloween with you, Halloween Trick or Treat 2. I’m not saying it’s a perfect game, but it’s a perfect game for me. Simple, soothing gameplay that does exactly what it sets out to do, rarely infuriating and utterly steeped in the kitchsy Halloween junk aesthetic that is a greater balm for my soul than any amount of meditation or good works. If I could get it to play a few Oingo Boingo tracks, it really would be perfect. I can’t wait for Halloween Trick or Treat 3, should it ever be released. There is a third Halloween game by Casual Arts – Halloween: The Pirate’s Curse. I’ve played it (of course I have) and it’s the same as the other two and I very much enjoyed it, but not quite as much as this one. I’ve already made my feelings about pirates and Halloween clear, and one of the kids dresses as a clown in that one. So, I shall sit here patiently and wait for HToT3. It’s not like I’ve got any other games to play.


I think turning to the Halloween-O-Meter for a score may have been pointless in this case. Pretend I stuck an extra pumpkin or two on the end. It definitely deserves them.