Hell Fighter (NES, 1992, Sachen/Thin Chen ?)

Locating this game I was under the preconception that it was going to be crap. After all, it was so rare and unheard of, and I've had my fair share of issues with unlicensed/weird pirates games, plus the company that released it, while releasing tons of unlicensed games, programmed some of the more infamous games released by Colour Dreams.

So I load it up, fully expecting a badly programmed pixelated mess and am greteed with

It at least looks like someone tried.

In the very first level you also find an interesting ability. You're able to kick stuff right in front of your foot if you press down and attack, and you can use this attack to literaly kick humongous holes in the level, while Mario jumping staircases to pieces with your head. You can make a hole to the bottom of the screen and die, but that's kind of a given. Still, in most levels you can use this to your advantage, or to just dick around when you're bored.


Then you come to realise there are some small ball shaped things inside the blocks (calling them ball shaped sounds better then outright calling them "balls"), which change colour and the thing they do. Orange upgrades your knife attack, firts to a spread and then to homing, green gives you a fireballs (which I only really needed in one place, and which also doesn't seem to be able to get upgraded), red does god knows what, and blue gives you rotating shiels around your character (up to 2).

Only other thing you might find out in the first level - the select button kills you. Not sure why since this isn't a puzzle game, and I really only ran across a single instance where that might have been helpfull.

This boss is easy as hell to take out.....except after he dies he's really not dead yet. Or rather after he dies after he dies he's not dead yet and needs to be killed again to be made deader. If that make's any sense.

The game itself is a pretty simple platformer. Aside from the powerups, (those that aren't in the open can still be seen changing colours inside their respective blocks btw) there's nothing else you need to do. No rooms to enter, no hidden items to find, etc. so you won't probably get stuck.

The game isn't even that hard to be honest. Your homing is pretty much a game breaker, and you default-start the game with 8 lives.

The game does change up the playing fields though. You eventualy can't destroy the whole playing area anymore, there's deadly stalawhatsits hanging from the ceiling, huge rockets randomly embedded into the side of a cave that start to spew fire randomly (I can't even begin to imagine the backstory which resulted in these things being there), and one stage has these clouds that shoot out lighting once two of them meet up so you have to be altert at all times.

Level 4 has a crab who'se weak points don't really get hit by your homing shots, so this is the only spot in the game where using fireballs is recquired, and very speedily at that, seeing how you can't duck, and when the  crab waltzes all the way to the left (and jumping him's out of the question as he's too big and fat and juicy), his right hand (claw ?) dragon head thing (?) will smack into you when it comes down.

The level 3 boss is easy as cake, but can take a LOOONG time, even with your homing missiles. And seeing how he's chilling down below the bridge throwing potshots at you 90 % of the time, I really feel sorry for the guy who actually goes into this fight with the fireball.

Level 5 has you fight a boss standing on a huge chunk of bricks you can slowly chop away. A very easy strategy that I found online was to make a hole in the block, go in, and turn around when the dragon goes to the left and fire your homing shots. You can get stuck between tiles if you don't make enough room though (kind of hard as, as previously noted, you can't duck), so this is the only place where the suicide button comes in handy. Afterwards, just make sure you don't touch it again. Ever.

The last stage has a couple of standart platforming hazards, like huge spiked balls on chains, reversed conveyor belts, and crane's droping blue balls on your head. The final boss is a.......well it's a......sort of a.....

Giant alien skull brain with tubes throwing exploding laser spike balls at you while crying blood.

OF COURSE !

Overall, I'd actually say this is quite an enjoyable little game, and would infact recommend it to anyone interested.

(Sure beats Gallivan as far as variety's concerned)

Gōsō Jinrai Densetsu Musya (SNES , 1992 Datam Polystar)

I went into Musya knowing it was going to be infuriating. And well......it was, and wasn't.

I think that this might be due to the fact that I've suffered through "Ushio to tora" (which I have a bit of a liking for, to be perfectly honest) but I didn't find this game that difficult. Except for some parts.

The Japanese here is also increased by having swastikas/manjis as an indication of how much of each spell you have

The basic game mechanic is simple enough. You jump (and super jump by pressing up before) you poke your spear forwards and you do a spinning fan attack, which can hit alot of stuff comming in to hurt you from multiple directions all at once. It doesn't create a 100 % safe zone, as anything with more then one hit left can still get through and hurt you. You can also use spells, but you have to get them from bosses, and you have to pick up refills every time you run out.

Starting off, you will hate the first two levels. Mainly because 1 your spear isn't very powerfull even if you find one increase here, and 2 you can't poke upwards. At all. Which for some reason I think is totally wrong , if your weapon of choice is a spear. I kept trying to do it throughout the whole game on instict, but no such luck. So the first levels have several spots where carefully avoiding the enemies is your only course of action. Not the best design aproach.

The first boss is annoying, simply because he seemingly takes forever to kill, and before he dies he will most likely hit you a-lot, unless you discovered there's a button for crouching while crawling backwards. Which I guess would have been invaluable here but oh well.

Level two has a confusing first section and an annoying second section. Basicly you have these bombs that look like squirming gooey skulls that explode when you hit them (and they also like to fall right on top of you if you scroll far enough) , after which they spit out four projectiles. 50 % of the time in the main directions, 50 % in all diagonal directions, so if a piece is flying towards you you have to quickly jab at it.....except when you don't have to. I don't know, sometimes a piece flew by me and I was completely unhurt.

The only underwater section in the whole game and surprisingly, you can't swim, only jump slightly slower. Which seeing how long it normaly takes you to land after a super jump.....

The second level boss, called Daruma in the US (his original name Monkey Rock fits better.....and I know that there's a chance someone's gonna name their garage band after it now) is fairly simple, he jumps high enough for you to run under and his colour swaped clones/children/dopplegangers are easily blown to pieces.

The third level is confusing at first. There's a section in the first area where you have to land in spikes in order to get some powerups. Even though one of them is health, they spawn in front of respawning rotating enemy statues, so it's not really worth it. As a sidenote, spikes aren't instant death in Musya, surprisingly. The second area, you can either simply drop down to avoid the annoying flying enemies, or of if you really want to, get to the bottom, go right, grab the invincibility item, go all the way up and get the powerup and then fall down. As far as I know all the holes in the floor spawn you in the same spot. The third section......is annoying. As heck. You have to go through a level filled with camouflaged bouncing enemy statues, while avoiding a respawning tengu masked wearing thing that constantly attacks you, just so you can touch one of the four teleporting statues to move on. And three of them warp you back.

Basicly, go for the low route when possible, and find the one with the glowing eyes. The boss, Fierce Liquid, is annoying not because he himself is a challenge (dumbass can't even turn around) but because of the miny things he spawns that come to get you from both directions. With a fully powered spear, you can kill this guy before you run out of health, but without it you'll have to turn back and forth to kill the little bastards before they kill you.

And now we enter....level rehash territory. Yeah after three levels, they just repeat the past three levels, with almost no changes aside from a new end boss. And level 6 still has Fierce Liquid in it, albeit as a sub boss.

I'd like to point out this game came out in 1992, 2 years after the Super Famicom got launched.

The only noteworthy addition here is level 6's boss, Leech Child, a Dogu statue (those things with the humongous eyes, no nose and really fat arms) who'se second form is......a transparent blob creature with a visible brain. Also,you have to revisit flying Tengu's section again, but you have to jump up at the begining of the level into an area where he can't/doesn't want to go. The level before that will probably kill you off, given how many umbrellas you have to dodge, but that's a whole other story, so be sure not to touch the warp statue that warps you back to that because you might just commit genocide if it does.

The Demon Monster King/The Evil One. His hobbies include ramming his head into the ceiling, throwing up electric balls of homing snot, and cursing his lack of hands to aply visine.

Level 7 has you start out with a falling shaft of powerups, before facing a rather easy submerged level, and then an annoying level where you jump on skulls rammed on top of spikes, amongst other spikes, devoid of such ornamentation, and thus fully capable of piercing you.

The final boss is the Monster Demon King (a name like that sort of predestines you for a career as a world menacing final boss in a video game. Or a finnish rocker) , who'se hard to dodge snot of death is actually easily nullified by the orb spell you have. His second form is a swirling mass of ghosts that you can take out rather easily.

Overall, I'd say the game isn't the most balanced, and the first level really needed to be a little easier. Still, the spear is still about a hundred times more usefull here then in Tora, that's for sure, even when you can't swing it.

Cosmo Police Galivan II: Arrow of Justice (SNES 1993, Nichibutsu)

Repetition is and always was a standard issue with beat em up games in the late 80's and early 90's. Even some CD based games in the genre didn't feel like adding in more then six enemies for the duration of anywhere up to 10 stages.

However, this game has a whopping 4 enemies for 15 stages. And they resort to colour swaps sometime around the first level.

Out of the four enemies, the Borg and Shade are the most boring, and only the Oger and Greader are anything to look at, my favourite being the green Oger swap, because it looks absolutely fake and washed out.

But on the other side, the backgrounds, which are usualy mediocre to half memorable in this type of game, are sometimes incredible.

Whoever worked on this was sorely needed in the enemy design department

But what about the gameplay ? Well you'll soon realise that your standart attacks are, for the most part, utterly useless. The key to beating the game, or even surviving whenever you have two laser firing Borg onscreen at once, are the two diagonal moves - the upward punch (seems to only work when going upwards on the screen) and the shoulder throw. In fact, the latter is so effective it makes the second boss an absolute cake walk.

Cocktease # 1: These guys show up in the penultimate level. First time you see them, you hope it's a mid boss.....and then you just walk past several of them suspended in the background.
Son of a -

The bosses, in order, are: A giant face that spits out three colour swapped creatures that you can easily rape with your shoulder throwing move, and which doesn't take any damage but explodes when all three are killed, a clown that can get obliterated with that same move, a human sized frog with shoes on who'se main annoyance comes from the fact that he constantly jumps up and lands on you and is hard to even hit and Henzo, a sumo fetus who'se main attack is jumping up and hurting you with his impact , on the other side of the screen (because the floor vibrating after he lands his fat ass must really bloody hurt) and doing this often so you can't even come close to actually hitting him. If there was a time limit, this would be a very devious way to try and kill you. As it stands, it's just annoying.

Cocktease # 2: These things have exactly two reasons to be there: 1. to act as a wall to make the playing area smaller and 2. to announce to the player that yes, they were perfectly capable of creating more enemies (these guys even have their own shadow for crissake !) but they chose not to because they hate your guts

The last boss is basicly some guy in armour with a big sword that can damage you pretty severly (but if your attack power is maxed out before this stage, you can dammage him just as easily). After a good beating he sheds his armour and starts running around naked doing - what's that audience ? - yes, constantly teleporting around the room making you waste two and a half eterneties before you can even hit the s.o.b.

And then, after all this, what do you get ? A bit of text scrolling on your status screen and then one static page of credits, with a blinking dot at the bottom a lá the same exact comptutery effect from a hundred other games, and.....that's it.

This wasn't a bad game per se, if as much care went into the enemies as into the backgrounds, it would even be far more memorable then it is. As it stands, I'm not sure I can recommend it. You won't pull out all your hair due to frustration, but you'll have spent a good 40 minutes on something barely worth five.