Skeleton Warriors (Playstation, 1996, Playmates Interactive Entertainment, Inc/Neversoft Entertainment, Inc.)

Skeleton Warriors is a 13 episode cartoon from the 90's which seemingly wasn't based on any pre existing property when it came out. Additionally, unlike many cartoons from the era with a single main goal, this series apparently resolves said conflict by killing off the main antagonist in the final episode, instead of just hoping to go on forever and thus never bothering to resolve everything.

The PS 1 game came out a year after the cartoon ended and has you control Prince Justin. Already this is a bit of a shame as the original show had three main characters, the Princess Jennifer who could fly, and Prince Joshua, who could travel through shadows. As such you're only left with the guy who'se power seems to be swinging a sword really good. Granted he can shoot projectiles from his sword as well, but these aren't that effective and you will be using quite a lot of ammo in later stages.

The game is somewhat of a platformer, though the level design is very linear and for the first half of the game there is almost no platforming to speak of......except for the completely out of nowhere minecart sequence in the first level which requires you to jump over things you can't possibly avoid the first time around, so it's mostly down to memorisation. Your character moves from left to right, smacking skeletons with his sword. After they fall apart you have to collect the crystal or other item they leave behind, otherwise they will reform in a couple of seconds and you'll have to beat them again. Now in the show, removing the heart crystal turns the skeletons back into humans but here it seems to pretty much just kill them.

The best way to defeat an enemy is to jump on top of them and keep hitting down, as you will not be hurt and can just continue to jump up and down on an enemy until they fall apart. In the beginning of the game you can just rush the enemies with your sword, but later on you pretty much have to jump ontop of the enemies to have even a chance of getting through a section, as the screen will fill up with enemies who will start shooting projectiles at you, and even though you can block hits with your sword, this won't help you from taking a bullet to the back.

It's around this point that you'll start to notice how weak your main character is. Sure, he has 100 hitpoints, but most attacks from enemies will deal 10 dammage, which escalates to 15 and 20 later on. Some of the smaller enemies only do 5 dammage, but most of them still take out at least 10 % of your health in one hit. And the problem is that almost all health pickups in the game are dropped by enemies, as there are very few pickups out in the open, and the enemies are finite, meaning they don't respawn if you kill them. This wouldn't be so bad, except the health items most enemies drop restore a whopping 1 health point. Some restore more, but again, the majority don't and not every enemy drops a health pickup either so you'll be lucky to have any health left by the end of the stage at all.

You also have to make it through several levels and a boss fight before the game fully recharges your health on it's own. These are usually not so bad if you have health, as you can brute force your way through the boss, but be warned, the bosses have a second form where they will come back together after being beat once so basically their healthbar is twice as long as it appears.

After tackling the bosses, ranging from a skeleton midget, a skeleton ape with multiple arms and a few less interesting ones, you move on to the next stage. But before you do, there is a driving bonus round you have to pass through where your character's hoverbike flies over some hilly terrain and gets shot a lot. It's really hard to even land a hit on any of the enemies, so your best bet is to fly up and just go left to right and right to left every few seconds to avoid the bullets fired in your direction. In the end, you don't even need to beat these sections as getting killed here just boots you to the next level with fully recharged health and without any lives lost in the process.

The later levels do try and mix things up a bit with stages taking place in giant tubes where you are pursued by huge spike balls, to section where you travel from the foreground to the background and back. The problem is the enemies mostly just shoot you a whole lot so these stages have you take tons of dammage unless you happen to have the homing weapon. This is one of a few extra weapons you find along the way, which give you the ability to fire off more powerfull shots from your swords but due to them taking more energy to fire, they aren't really that usefull, except for parts where you have to climb on ceilings and have a skeleton hanging on the next platform shoot you as soon as it comes into view.

It's here you will probably find out that, unlike most platformers, falling down a pit doesn't kill you, it just has you comedically bounce back up, almost to the top of the screen, while taking dammage. Now you can't really rely on this due to the very ineffective health pickups, however there is one section where it's pretty much necessary to use this to your advantage. There's an area with platforms that slowly turn about as you stand on them only to start spinning after a few seconds. Now this wouldn't normally be a problem, except this part is a series of multiple of these platforms over a gaping pit, and you need to have a running start to be able to clear the distance. Which is doable, even if a bit hard to pull off precisely due to the not very effective method of acceleration the game uses, namely the old "press a horizontal directional button twice fast". This is a very impressise way to get your character to run and you can easilly screw up and end up falling short of a jump. In the end, this doesn't matter much as this area ends with you having to make vertical leaps and I swear the first jump is way too high for you to be able to make normally.

Baron Dark and his oh-so-deadly knife. Should have brought a gun, honestly.

The final stretch of the game is a boss rush, culminating in a showdown with Baron Dark (yes the show really called him that even before he turned into a walking skeleton) who is suprisingly easy. Despite teleporting around, all he does for most of the fight is just stab upwards. Oddly enough when I started the level, he proceeded to throw screen filling energy balls that killed me pretty much instantly, but when I came back, he never did this again. I was surprised just how easy it was not to get hit once by this guy, and his second form is mostly more of the same.

It's hard to say how accurate this game is to the source material. I remember watching the show when I was a kid, and I did rewacth the first episode before this review, as it was one of only two that are readily availible. It's an okay game but the later sections are definitely tough. There is a bit of an esthetic similarity to Skull Monkeys, which is understandable I guess. Still at least here, you aren't murdering people you're supposed to be saving and who just got manipulated by the bad guy so I guess that counts for something.

Robocop 2 (Amstrad GX4000, Ocean/Orion, 1990)

The Amstrad GX4000 is nothing but a footnote in console history. And I mean this, with no hyperbole.

For example, the PC Engine, sold in the US as the Turbografx 16, is regarded as an underdog in the retro console market and very few people talk about it. Despite selling 2.5 million units in the US.

The GX4000, image courtesy of wikipedia

The GX4000 sold a whopping 15 000 units. Despite Britain being a much smaller market then the US, in less then a year it was being sold for slightly more then the sale price of it's games, or only £30.

The reasons for this is probably the lack of an established console market in Britain. The NES there was handled very poorly marketing-wise, and there was a blooming computer gaming market with several competing computers, with budget games going for £2 or less. One of the leading computer brands of the time was Amstrad. The company produced 9 different versions of home computers, 3 types of notepad computers, 7 types of word processors and 29 PC Compatible computers, one of which was an Amstrad computer with a built in Sega Genesis/Megadrive.

So having as many computer products out as they did, the dumbest thing they could have done when trying to market their britain-only games console that was trying to take on both Sega and Nintendo, would be to take games availible on their computers for £4 and rerelease them for said console, priced at £25.

Robocop 2 is one of the few cartridge-only games released for the console. It is a bit of an odd thing. Published by Ocean, it was apparently developed by the people known as Orion, which seems to have consisted of only three people, who'se names in the credits are written in signature form and are thus completely illegible.

The game is a mish mash of three different styles. The main game consists of platforming, with two different "bonus rounds" between levels consisting of a puzzle game and a crosshair target range shooter. Your half man half walking metallic battering ram can jump and shoot his gun at several different angles. The problem is you won't be using that gun very much, as 90 % of gameplay is spent jumping over gaps and timing death traps.

You see, the level design has thrown out all measures of realism and has instead gone for a "Willy Wonka's Death Sport Arena" layout, where the whole level is filled to the brim with laser guns, pitts of molten metal, magnets in the walls, what look like giant metal accordions, giant spikes embeded into walls, artificial lightning generators, rock and barrel dispensers and basically anything else you can image. Unless Circe de Soleil gets into the drug smuggling racket, I don't see how any business could be done here by anyone, legal or otherwise.

There are very few enemies you can actually kill (about six in total) and they are guaranteed to get a hit on you as they start shooting you the moment you come into their line of fire, even shooting you diagonally down through a platform. As you can only aim your gun at certain angles, you are going to take at least some hits before you can get safely below the bad guy and shoot him in the ass. Your health is represented by your energy meter, which is always going down. But unlike say Adventure Island, your energy runs out real fast, and you can only ever really get recharge items in bonus rooms you find along the way.

Some of these are easy, but some are just insane as far as difficulty is concerned. Let's just say the room with one way conveyer belt platforms leading up to a series of "mystery tiles" which somehow kill you when you just jump past them, with about one inch worth of safe space you have to jump up on is probably not worth your time.

Unlike your healthbar, your time limit is fairly generous, and you can find recharges along the way, so it's less of a hassle. There is one more item you can collect that actually does something other then gives points, a short term invincibility shield, however I only ever found it in one spot in the final level and it runs out very fast and there's nothing much in the way of deadly obstacles in your way when you pick it up. Sort of a waste of time, really.

The level ends at a seemingly random place at the very end of the path, after which you get your score and move onto the second gameplay type this game has to offer: the puzzle game.

It's supposedly the Robocop trying to recover fragments of his memory, but really all it is is a huge pain in the backside. You move about the computer maze, and have to avoid the chips. You can move the tiles vertically and horizontally if you press down the fire button and then pick a direction but on the other hand you can only ever cross a space once. Sometimes you may be lucky and move a piece of still-untrodden land behind you, but most of the time you will just screw yourself over. There is no way to really practise this and you have to complete four screens of this in a row....unless you go "screw it", hit the enter button and just skip the whole thing. I only ever managed to complete the second round but I'm not sure if completing both does anything for you except get you points.

Afterwards you move onto the target practice round. These seem to serve no point then to prolong the game though, as they are static and not a lot happens in them. Also your hits will sometimes not count if your crosshair isn't dead center on the guy.

At the very end of the last level awaits a boss battle and it's amazing how lazy the programmers were. Seeing as how they didn't bother with sticking to anything halfway plausible in the level design, you'd think the boss battle at the end would be a good place to put your platforming skills to the test. But no, it's literally only a matter of having full health when going into the fight, as the boss fights you by running into you and there's no way to avoid him as he's so much bigger then you. You just have to have enough energy to be able to pass through him twice and run off, shooting at him every few steps. At the end the thing doesn't even explode, the game just randomly cuts to the score screen and then goes to credits.

In the end it's not a bad game, but a bit on the underwhelming side which I guess also contributed to the system's failure.

Ulises (DOS, Opera Soft, 1988)

I've never been much of a computer gamer. I was born around a time when up to date gaming on the computers was just a bit too much for my pocket. However I was born so late that I never really got to see any of the older 16 bit computers in action, let alone used them, so I was kind of out of luck on that front either. And as for the console gaming market, well....

Unfortunately, I also grew up in a post communist country where the existence of the NES is an obscure footnote which barely anyone knows about or gets covered in any detail. Even if there will be a programme on TV about old school gaming, it will mostly just focus on old 16 bit computers, and maybe, maybe have an Atari 2600 make an appearance. The system was never permitted to be sold here officialy, due to it being a "luxurious" product of "capitalist burgeois classes" and thusly something not compatible with the "socialist way of life". The only memory people in this country have of having played any of the classic NES staples were possible due to ill-documented famiclones smugled from Poland which thus received no widespread circulation.

However, the computer scene wasn't exactly well represented either, as gaming was generally frowned on as an unnecessary side product when compared to industrial and business usage. In fact, old news coverage of a computer "expo" from the 80's stated that "the only aspect of computer programming not present is gaming, as an evolutionary dead-end". This coupled with high prices and state mandated wages in state owned companies in an unfunctioning isolated economic system meant that computers were not very common, and home brew games (as there were few, if any, official game releases in the country) were thus also not very widespread.

I am adding this just as an explanation as to how my country could have so little exposure to gaming, on either platform.

In the west however, things were different. Not only were there official releases and ports of games by big gaming publishers released for the various home computers, there were also many original studios and publishers putting out original content. Less famous then the various British developers would be the company Opera Soft. During their short time in operation (they formed in 1987 and seem to have not released anything of note after 1990, going out of business in the early years of that decade) they published a handfull of games, none of them being much remembered today, beyond a game version of The Name of the Rose.

This game came out in 1988 on a variety of platforms, though only the DOS version is covered. It concerns Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, though the game itself doesn't have much to do with the mythological figure. It's basically a platformer where you jump over gaps, climb ropes and try to rescue a bunch of identical godesses who don't do much but stand around in semi risque attire.

Sadly, it's one of those platformers. The kind where there wasn't any thought given to enemy placement and they just constantly respawn over and over again. It becomes incredibly overwhelming, especially when trying to platform. And since you can't turn around when climbing up a ladder, this makes the game very frustrating.

Which is a shame because there is some genuine level design, the backgrounds are never the same for too long and, even if there are only six enemy tpyes, there are noticeable differences between them: the birds just fly at you, the minotaurs chase you and then turn into super fast bulls that charge you, the centaurs shoot arrows at you which can't be avoided, the fire demons which sort fly at you at an angle and the fire skeletons which shoot fireballs at you and don't die but who'se sprites don't actually hurt you and the.....giant geographical globes kinda roll in your general direction.

Not helping matters is the control scheme. Whoever thought the buttons should be Q (UP), A (DOWN), O (LEFT), P (RIGHT), Space (attack) and Entet (pause) has never even glanced at an average keyboard layout, which makes it very confusing to correctly jump over gaps at first.

One odd question though, could this have started out as a game staring Thor ? The blond haired Ulysses could very well fit the bill and there's the fact his weapon (and the icons which indicate how many lives he ha sleft) is a big ol' hammer, which isn't something one would associate with Greek myths.

Overall the game, while looking nice for 1988, would probably drive you crazy if you tried to complete it without save states.

Defenders of Dynatron City (NES, Lucasfilm Games / JVC Musical Industries, Inc. 1992)

You wouldn't think this would be so bad. At first glance this seems like a fun action game where you run around, switching between different heroes and beating up robots to clear up sections on a map to thus feed into your inate OCD cleanliness obsession. And that IS what the first level is about. You pick one starting hero, and get an aditional trio to select whenever you wish to, going about shooting robots, each taking two, please note, TWO hits.

Then you get to the boss. It's a blimp that doesn't do many interesting things, sorta goes left and right and can pretty much never hurt you. A few hits and it's dead and the supercharger item falls out. Pick that up and it's on to level 2. Which is sorta the same as level 1, just a new area on the previous map. You go here, blast at a few dinosaur robots, however at this point the kid gloves start to come off as each of these robots take a lot more hits then the robots on the previous level, but it's still fairly manageable. Then you get to the boss.

No, the above screenshot does not deceive you. That is not a random enemy, but an end of level boss. And despite how underwhelming it looks, and how easy it is to dodge it's shots, it's real power lies in it's secret alleigance with the level timer. You see, every stage has a random time limit. There is really no reason for this, and yet it becomes your undoing in stage 2. For some reason even if you do get every powerup item in the city (and trade in the monkey character for the dog, one of the main hero characters who you can thus have on your roster along with one of the two other "main" heroes) this thing refuses to go down. I literally ran out the timer and had to sacrifice the hammer head guy. You see, the character you had selected when the timer runs out gets "captured" which is kinda like when it happens in TMNT, except it can screw you over big time.

Once you beat this guy you move on to level 3 where you have to run into the sewers, running back and forth in a maze that is actually less confusing then the city street layout (also tip, the in game map is totally useless as it shows things from a weird angle and thus will just confuse you) and here you will first be screwed over by the fact not all your characters can jump. Yeah, this is apparently considered a "super power" with it's own meter and everything. Problem is there are bats around which you can't hit from the ground so you have to wait around ladders, going up and down to get a clear shot. However given the short amount of time, you don't have much time to do this.

Also you will notice that you have some money if you picked up the powerups in level 1. For some reason defeated enemies don't leave cash but you apparently just sort of have it the moment you pick up a power up item in a store. And you get like 10 bucks for each one so at most you have 40 dollars. You probably spent most of it on food to replenish health in the second level. Well, you could replenish your health in this level, in theory, but you have such a short timer you don't have time to do so. So you move along and get to another boss, static boring machine sort of thing which you can kill with about four shots from the top of a ledge and then you move on to the Cola factory level.

And here is where the game screws you over. You see, there is no way to get out of this building. So there is no way to go buy health items. If that wasn't enough every screen has a pair of enemies which each take from 25 to 35 hits to beat. And if that wasn't enough every screen is filled with floating green bubbles which each do four dammage, seemingly cannot be destroyed, one of the characters cannot avoid them at all because Ms. Megawatt cannot jump, at all. Basically you will get utterly decimated here, with the bubbles killing all of your heroes. You'll be lucky to have the dog left by the end with any health at all.

If you manage to somehow get past that, you are treated to a really cheap bait and switch. You see, you emerge outside on the streets for your fight with Dr. Mayhem. At first you think you can finally go buy some health but no, you cannot leave the area, at all, nor go inside any of the shops. And to top it all off Dr. Mayhem is horribly cheap as well. All he does is run into you and smack you for tuns of dammage. Oh and of course the game not only doesn't bring back your other "captured" team mates seeing as you can't got and find them, nor does it give you back any health after the previous level, at all. Plus he has tons of health, having three shields you have to beat down before you start hurting him at all and even then it takes some time for him to go down after that. You pretty much just have to hope to get him stuck in a running back and forth animation where you can stand still and not take dammage, or have all the Superchargers somehow, which is doubtful at best seeing as you probably used them to finish off the buzzsaw robots in the previous level faster so the bubbles wouldn't get you.

And for all that you are rewarded with

Saying "this game sucks" is a bit of a cliché perhaps, but god if it doesn't describe this thing to a t.

Mo Shen Fa Shi/Demogorgon Monk (Famicom, Waixing Computer Science & Technology, ???)

Unlicensed games are a mixed bag. Some are good, some fairly decent and others are cornerstones of many internet gaming reviewers clame to fame. Most of the games covered are usually either cheaply made American/British action games with terrible controls, awful graphics and bad hit detection. However, there is very little discussion of the Chinese bootlegged and unlicensed RPG scene, despite there being quite a few games of this type around, mostly because of the language barrier. As a result few if any of these games get noticed or receive anything beyond the vaguest mention.

Today's subject is one of these games. "Mo Shen Fa Shi", as the transliteration of the title supposedly goes, is a very simple turn based RPG based on the Journey to the West. It was made by Waixing Computer Science & Technology, who'se known games include rip offs of other titles like Super Contra 7, or games which steal sprites and assets from other games en masse. It's possible this game does so too, but there is no information about it online except the fact it was produced by Waixing.

There are no ulterior motives in posting this particular screenshot at all.

The game itself at first seems to be a regular turn based RPG. However, there are some notable differences. For one, there are no "inns" or anything similar in this game. Instead the characters regain health and magic after each fight automatically, to a certain extent. This is not a problem later on but becomes one towards the one of the game.

Another difference is that there is little to do in the game other then talking to people and fighting enemies. Despite not knowing Chinese one can force one's way through the game by simply fighting the boss characters visible on the screen and talking to people. There is little chance of not knowing where to go as you can only go into areas that you have to go to next. Otherwise the game simply notes the area as being somewhere you can go by displaying a name, but will not allow you to go inside, even if there is seemingly nothing preventing your entry. In addition, NPCs and defeated boss characters will not repeat dialogue that they've already said, so one can check quite easily if he missed a necessary conversation by simply attempting to talk to them again. There is little need to really know what they say in depth as the conversation usually amounts to an event flag which opens up a previously inaccessible area.

The only other thing one can really do in this game besides random encounters is walking around the stage picking up items from treasure chests and opening closed passages. The former is done by bumping into the chest while holding b and pressing the direction button. It seems really impressise and hard to replicate exactly. The latter is done by going around the area, touching an object that looks like a keyhole, floating around in the middle of nowhere, and press B which magically makes what resemble stone pillars blocking your path disappear. There is little else beyond buying some health items and upgrades.

One notable thing about the game is that it is set on one map, which is however divided into three areas. Once the player gets teleported to the other side of the river, there is no way to go back to the starting area. It is at this point where the game becomes more imbalanced. There are two boss characters here, both of whom use an attack that hurts the entire party for 200 or 300 dammage respectively. Progress having been much smoother before, one has to start going around and grind the enemies in this area, far tougher then those in the first area. It's here that the auto healing function stops being much of an asset, as there is only a certain amount of health and magic that regenerates after a fight and if you keep running into the skeletons, you will probably keep on losing energy rather then getting any back.

After you move on from this area, you are in the final part of the game. Confusingly, there are several caves and towns here which, despite looking like the other towns, are not locations at all, but just part of the background. Here you will face off against the tiger boss, who can hit your whole party for 500 dammage. The problem being that, even if you have all four characters maxed out to level 30 and all using their elemental summon spells to attack the guy, you can't survive long enough to beat him if he gets to use his group attack even twice. So you have to hit him with normal weapons, hope to god his A.I. decides to just attack one of your characters normally, so you can hit him with your highest level spells twice.

This all while basically all of the enemies here are way stronger then you and can take up to 7 attacks in the 900 dammage range to go down, and 90 % of enemies here come at you in pairs. You really wish you could spend all that XP your counter isn't even displaying anymore after it reaches 9999 and all the gold you're getting to get stronger weapons, armour etc. But there is nothing of the sort here, nothing to make these battles any less of a pain. This is probably the biggest flaw in the game as there is nothing to really work towards, no special weapon that you spend hours grinding to be able to buy and kill off a boss that's giving you trouble, nothing to decrease the amount of dammage you take, or decrease the cost of your spells, give you more spells etc. When you've beaten the Tiger, Elephant and Bird bosses which all have the same annoying powers as Tiger, you have to go into one of the seemingly inaccessible towns from the side, make your way through a forest like area, down a specific path to end up in a dark temple interior, talk to a buddha statue, then coverse with two guys on opposite sides of the temple and you win.

You are rewarded with some chinese text which seems to be a list of staff and then the game resets to the title screen. Not exactly thrilling but then again, one should probably not expect any epic lengthy ending from a game like this. The experience overall is entertaining, though less engaging then a proper, professionally developed RPG.