Hana no Star Kaidou (Famicom, 1987, Victor Musical Industries)

This game is the dictionary definition of cheap. Any other game that you may have labeled as such in the past at least didn't have random projectiles fired at you from the ceiling every twenty seconds to steal a level-critical item away while nearby enemies' bullets have the exact same result, inside of a lengthy maze that, if you fail to present said item at the last screen, will boot your ass right back out.

What is it with games calling me gay recently ?
First Vanslug, now this.

And you have to not get hit in either of your sprites.

Here's where we get to the meat of the whole thing. Hana no Star Kaidou is a game where you control two characters at once. With a single d-pad. Now this might not seem so bad, after all Binary Land had the same premise. However where that was a simple puzzle game, this is a side scrolling platform game with "exploration" maze elements. And trying to get two characters to land on two different platforms simultaneously is just as annoying as you would think it is.

The controls are basicly as follows: press up, your characters stay glued together, press down and they go apart. Now while this might have worked in a less action oriented game, here you're expected to jump over gaps, onto platforms, avoid enemies and enemy bullets as well as the random projectiles coming usualy in a group of three, that the game uses to take away your items, and that in adition to that staple of all fine platforming, the moving platform that does not move you with it. Alone this might be difficult, but with two characters it's nearly impossible.

And were these problems not enough, the game itself also tacks on a maddening level design, mixed with cryptic level objectives, usualy delivered in horrible pidgeon english before a level. And yes, these never actualy tell you anything that you can interpret in any usefull manner. For example, if one simply walks along on the first level, they get stuck at a seemingly impassible wall. Most gamers online seem to get exactly this far before quiting. As in those that even survived this long. The trick is, there are staircases and subways on screens of levels you use to go to different spots. Sounds logical right ?

Well what would you say if I told you there is a spot in Level 5 that recquires you to go back into the subway you came out of four consecutive times, each time landing in a completely different location. In the begining you might not even know that you can access these locations, because the staircases and subways and the one building you can go into look no different from all the places you can't go into that are just there for decoration.

The intro. With additude.

In addition, the game designers went the Adventure Island route and made so that even if you somehow manage to not get killed, standing still doing nothing will drain your health anyway and eventualy kill you. In a game where every level's layout is a maze, and who'se exit building even more so.

All this with controls that are simply counter intuitive.

In order to go upstairs , inside of a buiding or down into a subway, you have to press up, right/left and the fire button. The goal itself is seemingly random and can be anything from shooting at a block somewhere in the level to make a suit come out to stunning and then "collecting" one random enemy to get an item from them. And here is another thing a casual player would not figure out. You stun certain enemies and if you shoot them again they go away. But if you instead walk towards them, with both your sprites, and press up, the enemy will be gone and replaced by an item. Sometimes. Sometimes, when it's an ugly female fan or a black person, trying to "collect" them will kill you.

And you have to pretty much guess at random to try and collect everyone, because not only does the game recquire you to have item X when you reach the goal, but also a randomly increasing number of record-like things (that  are yellow and look sort of like bagguetes), otherwhise, like if you don't have the correct item, it will simply kick your ass out of the building, and collecting the records from people (and not the ones that randomly appear sometimes from enemy spawners) is also the only way to increase your time.

Yeah.....uhm.....let's just move on.

Speaking of the end-of-the-level-mazes, these buildings are humongous, with many screens and dead ends leading into all sorts of directions each time. Trying to get through these while essentialy timed is rather difficult, but made exponentialy worse by several factors. First, the screen will only scroll up or down if both of your characters are on the same elevation and this can lead to many deaths trying to navigate both of your seperately falling characters onto a ledge. Second,as noted in the very first paragraph, while there is generaly a room with the level item inside the maze, each second screen or so the game throws various projectiles from the top of the screen, and these touching either one of the two characters not only takes away your item immediately, but will also subsequently take records away. And the same things can be said for most enemies, some of which can't even be stunned and take a ridiculous amount of hits in a closed off area with holes just barely big enough for two people to jump through simultanouesly to beat. The only good thing is you can leave the room and come back and the enemy-door will spawn something else.

As you can probably tell the game is not fun as a result. It's a slow moving, cumbersome experience that controls badly, and where ten minutes of fighting your way through a maze can be undone while you're staning on the ledge right next to the goal. It's cryptic, badly designed and rather repetitive.

New York. Can't you tell ?

Which is a shame. Using two characters to attack in two different directions at the same time, especialy with maxed out weapons, seems like it could be realy fun, in a completely different game. Similarily, the enemies, while being rather gross stereotypes at times, are realy wacky and unique and so it's a shame fighting these is made into such a chore. The game is pretty much unplayable without a walkthrough or playthrough video and it's so unfun that it frankly doesn't deserve that much attention.

Paris-Dakar Rally Special (Famicom, 1988, ISCO/CBS Sony Group)

Let's be honest people. Dakar Rally race car drivers don't get paid nearly enough.

I mean, the aprox. 30 000 Dollars for first place just doesn't cut it. I mean if it was only an endurance race through hundreds of miles of difficult terrain with a huge chunk taking place in the desert then that would probably make sense.

The rather pointless and clunky RPG segment. All of it.

However, that isn't even the begining of the hardships participants must face every year. Why, beyond the necessity of not only finding a sponsor all on their own, taking care of all the preparations and chasing down random bank employees with their PIN details, they have to acquire the services of a top level navigator. And how else would they employ such a person then have then randomly assigned to them as a result of a button pressing minigame of course !

Remember, chose only the best care
of the one type availible !

And then there's the usual hardships, like having to make sure other drivers don't intentionaly drive into them from behind and somehow dammage their care while being unscathed, and then having to find a way through a maze and use their gas tank to create oil slips to bounce off oncoming opponents into nearby walls, prefferabely until their car explodes and leaves behind some extra fuel ! Otherwise fuel can only be obtained by using a trampoline to catch it as it's levitating in mid-air in the garage.

Who needs pit stops when you can get
all the spare parts you'll ever need by simply
screwing a trampoline to the hood of your car.
GENIUS

Let's not forget the exorbitant costs of modifying their standard issue race car to include an unlimited supply of missiles so they can shoot down all the giant mice blocking their path, or all the cost that goes into making the car completely air tight and manouverable under water so the drivers can waste some time shooting sharks while they dodge missiles and torpedoes dropped on them from above.

You have to also admire the remarkable physical state these drivers have to keep themselves in. Not only to be able to jump gaps to activate switches to turn off flamehtrowers, but also to be able to walk on clouds so they'll have enough room to build up some running speed ! I mean obviously the organisers could structure the competition so that unworthy people incapable of levitation could press these switches as well, but it's precisely this sort of thing that only allows the top in their field to participate !

Actual racing in this cross continential rally ?
Well don't get too used to it cause you'll
only see it again in the last level.
Where there's still nothing resembling actualy
racing anyone to the finish line.

And not only do these brave men have to use their trusted missiles to shoot giant ants and army tanks once they do manage to get to the desert, but also to be able to manouver across an intricate series of rafts with only a split second time to get from one to the other to avoid smashing into bits on the rocks.

Still it's good that in order to come in first place they don't actualy have to be first to cross the finish line or else this race would get simply absurd.




Okay, based on the above I think it is probably clear that Paris-Dakar Rally Special is so close to a realistic depiction of a real life race that it literaly blurs the line between reality and fiction.

The best part of this game.....

Mostly due to the question of how this could have been designed, programed, released and sold without the entiere staff suddenly sobering up and moving to South America under an assumed names.

....is the realism.

Then again ISCO doesn't seem to have developed anything after this so....

Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen (Famicom, 1988, TOSE/Bandai)

An interesting hybrid of an action game and a turn based RPG, and also adapting that part of Saint Seiya which I actualy first saw when I was a kid. How can this possibly turn to crap now ?

What ? Bandai ?

Yeah, figures.

But let's start at the begining: the game is based on a Shonen Jump Manga and Toei anime called "Saint Seiya" or "Knights of the Zodiac". It involved a bunch of guys in mystical armour fighting other guys in mystical armour trying to do generaly nasty things to Athena and the world. The first story arc was by far the simplest and was already structured like a video game, with a series of "levels" accesed after defeating the "bosses" of lower situated "levels" to do battle with stronger "bosses", all to save a damsel at the last one. The series even provides a handfull of different protagonists to chose from for the sake of replay value and variety.

A succesfull attack in motion

So how can this possibly suck ? Well the problem lies in the format. Instead of a sidescroller, which you would expect this to be after starting the first level and entering the action section, you get a hybrid action game/and a hybrid action/turn bassed RPG fight mode. The regular action sections are dirt simple, even if there's times when you simply can't avoid hits. While traveling through this area you may notice the "sevensense" bar at the bottom: this fills up slowly for every regular enemy you kill and by larger chunks for the bosses. However the game doesn't like to see you making things too easy for yourself, so just as you've found a nice grind spot and started accumulating some sense points the game literaly drops a meteor on your head. And I don't mean the regular meteors that show up in every stage, I mean the game literaly takes a meteor and fires it at you in the shortest possible trajectory. The bar can be used to replenish the "cosmo" and "life" bars that get depleated with every hit, once you start the boss battle.

The actions sections are still, however, more or less dirt simple. Go forward, shoot the three enemy sprites availible, try to avoid meteors, fail at it, jump over gaps, get shot by archers and then go up to a temple entrance. The only variety is found in special "dimensions" some of the bosses teleport you to.

The Level Map

At the end of an action section you come across a boss. And here's where the "fun" begins. You have several options, from attacking, talking, observing your status and talking/summoning one of the other characters. Depending on the character you can have more then one attack to use. Using the attack effectively seems to be somewhat based on pressing the apropriate directional buttons at the time you cast it, but it's realy hard to tell for sure. After an attack your enemy might say something and....he does an attack that always hurts you. You want to know why ?

Well it turns out you're supposed to physicaly dodge the attack by pressing the correct directional button just before the attack begins. If you manage to dodge sucessfully but in the wrong direction your character will stay out of reach for a while....and will then return to the centre of the screen when 2/3rds of the attack are over, yet takes the exact same dammage if he hadn't done anything.

The action section. Pretty much all of them.

And worst of all, the dodging is like a quick time event. An incredibly quick quick time event with no button indicating when you're actualy supposed to dodge. You're just supposed to know you can dodge just slightly before the bad guy's text stops scrolling....if you didn't press it before. If you did your character does nothing even if you press it at the correct moment later. This means that dodging attacks effectively is related to predetermining when the enemy will stop talking (and they sometimes simply attack you without speaking) and then doing it slightly beforehand.

Worse, the RPG element seems to mostly take the worst elements from the genre and glueing them ontop of each other like some bizarre modern art piece. Basicly the game devotes itself to slavishly adapt the plot of the original series, to the point where it becomes detrimental for a sidescroling fighting RPG hybrid with a free range of selectable characters. That means that if someone lost in a fight in the series, you have to first go into the fight as them, lose and best case scenario have to fight with a new character that pops up out of nowhere, or worse you have to replay the level as a different character, once having to do so four consecutive times. Other times the game will randomly not make it possible to hurt the enemy (although they still can, and will, hurt you) until you talk to the opponent....twice. There's a gimmick like this for virtualy all of the later half of the game.

Having a good ol' chat with the boss.

However, when you don't know what to do and don't follow the invisible road map, you can find yourself in a rather tight spot. Like the last boss. You succesfully deplete all of his life and cosmo and he still stands there, attacking you. You're actualy meant to lose so another character can get brought back and learn a random move to finish him off. However you probably won't know this at the time and worst, at this point the guy only does 3 points of dammage per round. Out of about 799 Life points you can have if you don't screw up. So this will take awhile. And you'll probably swear quite alot.

In the end, Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen is a rather unplayable mess that tries so hard to faithfully adapt the source material that it becomes a large stumbling block.

Fire Bam (Famicom Disk System, 1988, Hal Laboratory)

Now this is an odd one. An action RPG released on the old disk system that not too many people have heard of. Some people get turned away by it's garish colours and it's somewhat cryptic nature, but there is definitely a solid product here, and one holding much more substance then one would believe.

The final Boss knows how to colour coordinate.

The game stars Bam who has to regain the Magic Sword, defeat the clan of the "evil Domes" and "open up" the world. This later term has to do with an interesting twist in the game mechanic. You have one area that serves as a hub (forest) and you're home town where you can go save your game and regain energy, by visiting.....

They seem to turn human later on. Don't
ask me how they stay floating in the air for so long.

These things. When you start there doesn't appear to be anything else besides your house in this area. You then leave for the woods, which is also sort of a hub, but with enemies. These range from weird pink bouncing things to humanoid giraffs with giant scissors.


Going around here you discover two things. 1. killing enemies makes them drop fire, which is added to your counter and is actualy used as currency (one best not try to think about that too much) and 2. your starting sword is well and truly useless. It has a reach of exactly 0.3 inches and is just as usefull. The sword is your main means of attack (you do get one later with actual range) because although you do acquire ranged weapons later on, these tend to become useless on some enemies later on.

Your main method of transportation: a living elevator.
One wonders how the big red guy got in here when this
is the only way in.

Going around you find various shop doors where giant....things sell you various items for very high prices, and then another type of door.

Which has no deeper meaning at all.

                                                                        Entering this will either lead to an action sequence or dungeon. The action sequences are rather a pain in the behind (especialy if you don't have the better sword yet) due to how the enemies come at you from above, and how colecting extra health or invincibility is made difficult by both how fast it moves, it dissapearing quickly and the fact that should it land behind you you can never get at it before it dissapears. Then at the end you fight a boss, and there are actualy 7 boss types, although they all do get repeated at least once. And after these boss fights a cinematic occurs. Sort of hard to comprehend when you're going into it blind, but it actualy means the world is expanding - literaly, new areas get uncovered not only in the woods but in your town as well, resulting in the appearance of shops where you can buy some much needed gear.

A giraffe with scissors.
Just.....a giraffe with scissors.

After going through a series of these sequences, you'll be left with the task of clearing out dungeons. They are entered through the exact same doors, but these are, obviously, a lot less straight forward. There are dozens of blind paths, elevators going in multiple directions, keys you need to pick up and every place looks pretty much the same. Defeating the boss will result in the same expansion of the game world, with one exception. Once you actualy have to face the final boss, however you need to get yourself killed here because you don't have the magic sword yet (annoyingly this still takes away a life, even if unavoidable).

Getting thrown about in the Action Sequence

Also speaking of the bosses, one of the action sequence bosses gets an....upgrade here.

Does one even have to say anything to this ?

Clearing all the dungeons makes the red lizard thing be replaced by a woman who gives you the Magic sword with which you finaly put that satanic gremlin in his place.

Fire Bam is an interesting game, but the dungeons are mazes that can get ridiculously extensive and annoying to complete without a walkthrough. Interestingly enough this was one of the many games released by Hal Laboratory, makers of Kirby. The game's director and character designer, amongst other things, was Pikio Midorikawa, who'se only other credit was Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu.

Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab (Sony Playstation, 2002, BAM ! Entertainment)

Dexter's Laboratory is and always has been my most favourite show that Cartoon Network ever produced. While I liked the Powerpuff Girls, learned to appreciate the original Johnny Bravo series and so on, Dexter has always been my most favourite of the lot, outside of maybe Cow and Chicken/I am Weasel, thanks in most part to the tremendous talent of Charlie Adler.

Bugs Bunny Lost in Time looked better then this.

Still, the Dexter franchise has always been dear to my heart. And sadly, I was destined to continously encounter dissapointment whenever I got my hopes up for something more. The New episodes, which ran from 2001 to 2003 had managed, after only a year of production hiatus, to basicly completely alienate me, trying to replace the somewhat angular but recognisable drawing style with the pulsating, contortionist animation of Ren and Stimpy, while also seemingly either abandoning the idea of segments having a point anymore (The Lab of Tommorow) or just plain insult the inteligence of everyone watching (Tele Trauma). The cast was changed, with Christine Cavanaugh replaced by Candi Milo who tries, but just doesn't get it right, and worst of all, the animation at points became painfull to watch, a simple walk cycle proving too difficult for the animators to handle.

The Pointless POV mode

And then, right in the middle of all that, came this game. It starts off with an animated "cutscene" which is, like all "cutscenes", just repurpossed footage from the show, from the original series to be exact. This is made painfully obvious when you have Candi Milo's voice coming out of classic Dexter's mouth, in clips from episodes you've already seen, with the lip flaps almost never matching the words. Worse yet, the cutscenes have the tendency to repeat one or two static or barely moving character poses and superimpose them onto different backgrounds to emphasise the lazyness. A certain shot of Mandark is used at least three times, and this becomes very noticeable given the short length of the game.

After the cutscene ends you are assailed by the second biggest punch in the face - the horrible CGI. The graphics, for a post mortem PS1 game, are just plain embarassing, and actualy pale in comparisson to those of Jumping Flash, a game released in 1995, a full 7 years prior, on the same platform. But not only did Flash's graphics not look ugly, simply more polygonal, it had huge sprawling environments where the player was completely free to go explore in any direction, something even Crash Bandicoot never managed to do in three games on the platform. Mandark's Lab has neither.

Sadly the Dodgeball minigame doesn't even
provide any kind of decent action, as your glued in place
and can only turn about 130 ° in total

And yet I had some expectations for the game, at least from the simple fact of being able to walk around Dexter's house freely. Sadly, this is not fully utilised, as you can't access the kitchen at any point, and worst of all the game doesn't even feature Dexter's parents in any way, highlighting the true cash in nature of this title.

The fact of the matter is the game consists of a small series of minigames you have to play through to win, the overworld serves as a simple, bare bones corridor from one minigame to the next. The total being 8. And they couldn't even be bothered to actualy think up eight distinct mini games, so you have two nearly identical DDR segments only differing thanks to the different CGI animation in the background.

The First DDR segment (no I'm not going to make that pun) realy
shows just how little time was actualy put into this game

The Minigames are, in order : Dee Dee's (DDR) Dance off, Cootie Call (simplistic rail shooter, where you spray 2 D Cootie sprites), What's Buggin Dexter (chasing after a Computer Bug and swating), Up N' Atom (Flying shooter), Dodge Ball (Creativite eh ?), Soapbox Derby, Molecular Mix off (Dance Off V. 2) and Sub Zero Hero (basicly shufflepuck). All of these are realy basic, and the idea to re-use classic episodes as levels is barely executed, with only two of them.

The game itself can be beaten in about 30-40 minutes, including cutscenes, and outside of trying to beat your high score there isn't much point in replaying it ever again once you finish it.

Dahna Megami Tanjou (Sega Mega Drive, IGS Corp, 1991)

Put shortly, Dahna Megami Tanjou certainly should be an awesome game. The first level has you riding on the back of an ogre for crying out loud !

Screenshot from the shortest level in the game.
It lasts about 40 seconds. No I don't know either.

But....it's not. The main reason for that is the control scheme. You have your standard attack and magic (with three spells, but you only have access to the one you have enough MP for, so if you have full MP you can't use the invincibility spell, period), normal jump and high jump. You can also stab downwards (which I found rarely usefull) and upwards (which I never found a use for). There's a "leveling" system, but all that does is give you an HP increase every time you hit another several hundred thousand points, so honestly you won't be seeing it do anything that often.

Now this all seems well and good, but the problem is the game can't seem to handle two actions happening at once or in close succession. For example, many many times will you run into a situation where you will trigger an enemy on both sides of the screen. Sometimes you can tip toe around to take them down one by one, but there are times when this simply doesn't work.

Hands down the most annoying part of the game.

And this is where the problem comes in. Often you will turn around and stab the enemy behind you, not wanting to trigger even more enemies to come onscreen, and then try to jump out of the other enemy's reach and get stabbed mid jump. This is due to the game taking about half a second after your previous action to get to performing the next one. Or worse you do manage to make the jump, hug the left hand wall, press right and and then the attack button and....you just keep pummeling the left wall as the enemy effortlessly walks up to you and stabs you in the neck. This is made worse by the fact that because the response is delayed, your attack commands can "pile up", in a sense, so it continues to do one thing while you're already holding a completely different button. In regular mode you can sacrifice a bit of magic to get out of this bind, but you simply can't use any while riding the ogre or horse.





But worst of all, this is made exponentialy worse by the fact that one stage is literaly 90 % nothing but a long straight line with enemies constantly popping up from both sides, and the whole linear section of the level you're forced to play with the Ogre. You can't even chose to dismount and take care of the bad guys yourself, hell there's not even any apparent in-game need for you to be using the Ogre in this part, as you have already played through sections like this before and there's sections like this later on as well.

Tis but a Monty Python Refference !

The gimmick levels (the horse ride and the scrolling shooter level with the eagle) control alot better, since in one you can accelerate and get a high jump (even if the inability to attack enemies coming from behind is a bit baffling) and in the other you have two different attacks at your disposal, plus the ability to fly. The more standard levels, when not being as cheap as described above, are fairly manageable (Except for the fat guy with the club. He's the first mini boss and shows up several times throughout the game. He's okay to deal with until he suddenly freaks out when he starts running across the screen like a madman swaying his sword around and I never found a good way to beat him without getting hurt, minus using magic). There's an amusing four armed and two headed boss who'se limbs you cut off at one point, then he comes back until you cut off his head and then his remaining arm and only then is he finaly dead. However the end of the game is a different story.

After fighting through a short corridor you're faced with - ah, realy, they were this dry for ideas ?

I have a feeling some programmed wanted to go have lunch early.

Oddly, even if you have a full magic meter the game doesn't allow you to use any magic here for some reason. And then in the next fight. And in the next.

What's the point of even having magic if you're not allowed to use it for half the game, and can't utilise it even during the final boss fight ?

This would be realy cool....if you actualy got to fight it.

Speaking of which, you fight some generic wizard dude who flies around and shoots very weak fireballs that dissapear after a few feet. Then when you beat him a shadow comes out, the whole screen starts to writhe and undulate and you're presented with a huge shadowy golem figure in the background, who summons some enemies you've already fought. This part is tricky because he summons up to four at a time, you can't use any magic, and the second thing he summons are two fat guys with clubs. But after you beat them all he....swirls around and dissapears.

Can we say letdown ?

The final section of the game is a short moving platform section where you're saving the wizard from before. I'm not sure why, but they hold hands at the end, so I guess it makes sense.

Overall, this game would have been realy realy good, were it not for the fact you get mercilessly slaughtered by people heroicaly stabbing you in the kidneys while you brutaly assault the left side of the screen.

Guerrière Lyewärd (Sharp X68000, Tokuma Shoten, 1990)

On the one hand, the PC 98 had Rusty, basicly a Castlevania clone of high quality (so high C-Lab recycled the game, tweaked it and made only a few changes to the engine, even keeping identical sprites between versions, to release Totsugeki Mix ! one year after Rusty, but that's a topic for another day). It showed off some skin, but offered chalenging gameplay.

On the other hand, you have the X68000 and Guerrière Lyewärd. A game that came out in 1990, yet feels like it might have come out on the Famicom during launch year. Considering the quality of other Sharp games (Aquales, our old friend Baruusa, Knight Arms etc.), that's not a good thing.

It don't get much better then this.....literaly

Basicly, the whole thing is utterly devoid of any game design whatsoever. Each level posseses a boring background, the whole playing area is absolutely straight, and all the enemies do for almost the whole game is just run up and either run past you or run away. Out of the games 5 levels (the last of which is just the end boss), 3 of them have just two enemies per level, being just sprite swaps of the same enemies from level 1. In fact, the game doesn't even force you to jump until the fourth level (barring the third boss). You only have two modes of attack, punching and kicking, and seeing that kicking can dispose of all enemies and has a longer range (and the punch can't be used on enemies that recquire you to crouch), you will never need to punch. Until level 4, all enemies do to attack is run up and try to punch you, so you will always be doing the same thing.

The "devil". Which is just some naked chick encased in ice.

Worse yet, each level has an obscene amount of enemies you have to kill before you reach the boss, meaning you have to just move forward and then stand, pressing the kick button and turning back and forth every two seconds, which makes the levels boring and monotonous (well, more so).

Only in level 4 do you get enemies that recquire jumping over them or crouching down to kill them, but their shooting makes it so you have to slowly creep your way forward and then jump the moment they come on screen, which manages to grind the game to a near complete halt.

The bosses aren't anything to write home about. Only the third boss recquires jumping, the fourth is a hilariously inept "devil" that is actualy easier then the boss of level 1, and the last boss would probably be a real pain in the whatsit, seeing him showering down projectiles on top of you....if the bad hit detection didn't mean you can just let them pass halfway through you before you can get to kick him in the snout and get the exciting ending of....

A woman walking somewhere in the most embarassing walk-cycle in human history.