Cyborg Z (Zemina, Master System/MSX)

First of all I must give thanks to the awesome that is Hardcore Gaming 101, because of their wealth of articles on interesting subjects related to video gaming, that personaly allowed me to discover many things I would likely never have come across.

One of these is todays offering, by (in)famous Korean bootleging company Zemina. Known, if at all today, by their hack and paste "Super Boy" series (a hack of SMB's so pathetic that only in the last game do they actually change the main character sprite in any way), as well as ripping off a whole bunch of other well known video games at the time, from making an inferior clone under the brilliant alias of "Boggle Boggle", to just stealing the game altogether and simply hacking their own name and "copyright" into the game. If you desire to learn details, I reffer you to this highly insightfull article.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/korea/part1/company-zemina.htm

Now, there are exactly 3 titles in Zemina's library I have had any interest in. The first is "The Three Dragon Story", which seems both very interesting and very challenging from what little I know of it. The second being Cyborg Z, a vertical shooter when you take charge of a, persumabely, huge mecha and blow stuff up. The third is Magic Kid GooGoo, Zemina's only known outing on the NES. However, the first one is nowhere to be found, while the third one is apparently legendary in it's obscurity. In fact, my first search for Cyborg Z was also met without results until I happened upon some good soul on the ol' internet who happened to have found and dumped the Master System version.

First of I was dissapointed in that the game refused to work on a Fusion, but, to my everlasting surprise, the file, clearly having the "sms" extension, works in an MSX emulator. It doesn't even recquire you to change the extension !

So I got to playing. The game, of course, scrolls in a rather arthritic sort of way, but this was a well known problem on the MSX 1, and the game is literally just a port of the MSX version for the Master System, both being apparently very similar, program-wise.

The first couple of levels go by well enough, but then you begin to notice that while the levels themselves change, the scenery is mostly uninteresting, with the same enemies repeated throughout the first 5 stages. Even the bosses, while being different in appearance and attacks, generally recquire a similar strategy of going left and right , dodging bullets and spamming one of the special weapons into the bosses face. Also, all of them are prohibited from actually going near you physicly, due to some laser barrier, which means the boss will always stay at the top third of the screen.

I always find myself adoring late 80's and early 90's video games for including things like old, then contemporary computers, and multi-colored floppy disks as colectibles, I'm not sure why

 Also, every level is rather long, with a lengthy trek, a mid boss, another lengthy trek and then the final boss, always fought in the same,plain black room. But the enemies and environments are so same-same that it just makes you wish the level was over already and you could fight the boss. And your main objective in every level is virtualy the same. Go around, shoot at enemies and primarily at turrets which may or may not contain power ups and which are littered throughout a good 70 % of the levels, while trying to save up as much of your special weapon ammunition as possible.

Only level 6 picks up a tad by inserting a couple of new enemies, but it's level 7 that's my favourite. Not only because of even more new enemies, but because they all fit into the scheme of the level, which looks like you're flying through some giant computer. Level 8 is a bit more plain and quite frankly a bit frustrating due to the amount of bullets thrown at you. And the final boss looks more goofy then anything, more like a huge action figure then anything to be afraid of.

However, it's all worth just to see the spectacular ending

Right ?

Overall, the game is a little too long to really even be interesting and unless you spam the hell out of the bonus wheels while a) having the target skills of a professional sniper or b) cheating, you probably won't prevail until the end of the game.