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.

Xatax (MS DOS, Pixel Painters, 1994)

Xatax is, for all intents and purposes, the embodiment of what I always reffered to as a "boring space shooter". You know the kind, the enemies either look like boring chunks of metal or like some vague oval shape with no real distinguishing features. The enemies in Xatax fall into the latter category. There's also about three or four enemy types throughout all the three episodes, and the programers resorted to colour swapping rather quickly.

The begining of every single level, and also
the background of every single level

Worst yet, the enemies themselves are the least concerning part of the game. If your ship is at any half decent power level, or if you just mash the control button quick enough, the enemies pose little to no threat, thanks to their predictable and unexciting movement patterns, and lack of any actual attacks beyond strolling along and hoping that they might bump into you, eventualy.

The level environments themselves are also not likely to kill you, as the scrolling never changes into any higher gear, and there are no obstacles like meteors, moving gates, spikes or anything of the sort to worry about.

The only thing that will possibly end up killing you are the stationary turrets, placed in all possible directions, and sometimes shooting at several different angles at once. These are sometimes hard to shoot or avoid due to the frequency of their shots and the fact that your main weapon, even fully powered up, only goes straight. Getting the missiles is recquired for these, as zig zagging between all these bullets isn't that easy.

Probably the best designed boss of the whole game

Even so, Xatax still remains a pretty boring and uneventfull game. Every level, regardless of Episode (the game has three), begins in the same spacey void with nothing in it, and all the levels take place between a mass of near identical pillars and blocky shapes sticking out of some mechanical space surface that you periodicaly fly through, with the environment never realy changing (this sort of makes the subtitle of Episode 2, "Mutant Wastelands" an absolute lie as you don't see any mutants or wastelands in the entiere thing). The game doesn't even change the enemies between episodes significantly, and there's maybe one added feature per episode (Episode II ads an electric current you have to turn off by blowing the obvious fuse box thing sticking out of it, Episode III adds platforms that turn into enemies eventualy.....into the same enemies you faced in Episode I and they're so slow with transforming that you've usualy long left the general area where they might fly into you), and these are minor and not that well executed.

Pictured: every level of Xatax, ever.

Not even the bosses realy manage to spice things up, as the developers decided to only have two per Episode, aka one each four levels, plus almost all the bosses look and act virtualy the same, they're a torso, not much bigger then your ship, with a couple of turrets and one or two moving gun tails attached to the back, sometimes with something that looks like a head attached to the front. They never attack in any other way then by shooting their turrets at you, and you never have any other option then to just systematicaly blow up all the turrets, after which they die. The last boss is the only exception, as his turrets are indestructible and you have to hit the eyeball shaped thing that opens up in the center, while avoiding bullets, but this isn't realy that hard to do and he goes down real quick.

In the end, you can't even continualy play through all three episodes in a row like with other games, instead having to restart from scratch every time you finish an episode, and the ending you get after beating Episode III is a tiny paragraph much shorter then the endings of both previous episodes, or the several page long-game plot you can view on the title screen. There's realy not much to say about this title in the end, because if you've played one level you've played all 18 of them *.


* Minus the 6 shorter boss levels

Quarth (NES, Konami, 1990)

Tetris is probably the most repetitive game ever. You can deny it to try and protect it's honour, but then again, why would you, it's a 20 something year old game made by Russians.

On that well informed note, allow me to say this: I do not like games you cannot complete. I always preffer to be able to take the game on and beat it, by hook or crook. This is especialy annoying with games with a plot, moreso if the plot involves "saving" someone or rescuing something or vice versa. It just makes the whole act of playing the game seem utterly pointless because, you are not going to save that princess, or ever defeat the evil wizard and save the planet. You're just going to lose and the game's going to laugh at you.

This is level 0.

So when I ran across this tetris-clone that you could complete, I thought I'd at least give it a go. The first level started off promising enough, and I was given the option to play as a bell shaped ship with two angels attached to it for some reason, so I assumed there was at least some creativity involved.

I was wrong.

The main gimmick of Quarth is simple. You auto-scroll through a level and shoot blocks out of your front, trying to complete non-rectangular shapes into the one true proper shape, and you go through 10 brief sections, 0-9, after which you have completed the level and can move on.

This is level 9

And for the first couple of levels, it was fairly entertaining. But then, as the levels wore on, the only thing that seemed to change was the speed the level goes at. There were still the five basic shapes, and slowly but surely it dawned on me that this game wasn't getting any different any time soon. And in true cheaply made game fashion, it never did.

The only thing this game offers in the later stages is frustration at the near impossible task of filling in the spaces in the relatively short time you have, not aided at all by the slow movement of your ship from one end of the screen to the next. You can't even practice to know what's going to happen, because the blocks more or less generate randomly. And the moment you're faced with a screen primarily made up of horizontal blocks on something like level 9 you can kiss your rump goodbye, because unless you have perfect turbo button/d-pad coordination, as well as use the quickest and most direct "strategy", you'll simply lose a life and die.

And this is.....level five......yawn.

Sadly, the "special" blocks that actualy would be usefull in this situation, ergo those that stop the scrolling for a limited amount of time, appear very rarely, so I'm not quite sure what strategy I'd advise.

Finaly, the game is just not interesting. All the levels look the same (level 0 and 9 even have the exact same level border), each level has the same exact blocks as every other level, there are no added features or hazards beyond the rarely appearing colour blocks, of which only one is of any use in the later stages of the game, and most strikingly of all, there's no background. Ever. The graphics look pretty sub par, and this from a game released in the same year as Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu and the Chip and Dale NES game just to name a few.

Overall, I found Quarth to be repetitive, difficult to beat in later stages, and just plain archaic looking even by contemporary standarts.

The Gadget Twins (Sega Mega Drive, Imagitec Design Inc. / GameTek, 1992)

I love shooters. You will hardly find a person who likes a good shooter more then me, especialy if it's somewhat unusual, because let's face it, alot of space shooters are realy boring unless they have some original designs here and there, and as for plane/jet shooters.....

But this game isn't realy a shooter. It's more of a flying platformer without platforms where you never get any good ranged weapons. It's basicly a game where, in order to hit anything, you have to get right in it's face and punch it. Alas, that isn't the only problem. You see, you automaticaly keep shooting in one direction until you change it.

And then there's the bosses. Their movesets, coupled with all these problems would be more then enough, but nearly each and every single boss takes a small eternity to get to rid off. The first end boss takes 12 hits with an upgraded fist to take down one bar of health. And he has four.

Dude we just barely met !

Only when you get the anvil can you kill some of the bosses slightly easier, but then you have to wait to get an opening to avoid being bumped into, something the bosses love to do. Finaly, the shop system realy stops being able to sell you anything new by level 3, so by the end you'll have hundreds of coins and nothing to spend them on.

This, plus the rather boring bonus levels, make a possitively interesting game boring. The bosses are usualy very boring looking and seem like they have something better to do somewhere else. The only exception is


















I think this guy realy likes the view.

However, I think I'll let this guy express my general impression of this game.

Top Banana (Commodore Amiga, 1992, Hex)

I am not the one to diss a game for being weird. I previously wanted to create a segment specificaly devoted to such games, but have found others have done a far better job of it, so I decided to stop. But I do enjoy a particularly tripy game every once in a while.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about scumbags
destroying our planet - rugby players.

Top Banana isn't one of them. Oh sure it can be described as being weird, but then again, that doesn't mean it's automaticaly playable.

First of all, from the moment you turn this thing on, you wouldn't imagine it's supposed to be an enviromental game. The presence of chainsaws and evil radiation logos is pretty much the only connection I can think of. Gameplay wise, you have to climb up verticaly through the level to escape the ever rising water level, kind of like Rainbow Islands, only infinitely less playable. In your way stand a whole bunch of very poorly drawn enemies that most of the time you only have the vaguest idea of what they represent (I only assume the thing throwing coins at you is some kind of evil tycoon/capitalist person, because the sprite itself looks less human then the main character of Non Human). Your main mode of attack (read:only) is to throw hearts at enemies. There is exactly one upgrade to this, and this make them actualy have some range, but is taken away the moment you get hit.

The third boss. Because.....pilots are inherently evil right ?

The items themselves are a realy oddly designed: in order for them to do anything, you have to shoot them, then they grow big and then you can collect them. If you try and pick them up without shooting them first, they hurt you. There are three items: the shooting target (weapon upgrade), fawcet (stops the water for a short while) and finaly, the flower, which activates platforms....yeah I didn't notice them at first myself and ended up screwing myself over.

I know it's hard to see, but there's three enemies ontop
of that middle platform. Scout's Honour !

Now, whenever you get hit by an enemy, or an item that you haven't shelled, you not only take damage but fall through the platform you're on. Oddly enough, getting hit makes the water recede (not sure why, but not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth).

Probably the biggest flaw the game has is your jump. There's no way to jump lower then usual, which 90 % of the time means you're going to hit an enemy as high as two platforms above your starting position, and get hurt. For a game that supposedly boasts that it's just as good as Mario or Sonic on the box, this is realy shameful.

World 4 adds backgrounds that consits of 70 % of
mutlicoloured squares nearly indistinguishable from the
backrground - because the game wasn't hard
enough to make out.

Adding insult to injury the second world adds a section where you have to get up to a certain height before your seperate "radiation" bar runs out, or you take dammage. The reason these are so annoying is because not only does the level invert colours, but it also speeds up by 50 plus %, meaning that getting ontop of moving platforms in that very short and very merciless time limit is a chore. But this wouldn't be so bad if these were only present in the "atomic" level, but no, we have an annoying "innovation" and by god we're going to use the ever living heck out of it ! Out of 12 levels, 9 of them have this segment.

Then there's the bosses. Not much to say, except they seem realy random. The first three have very easy patterns of just jumping up and down across the screen (none of them attack you in any other way) which you can easily sneek under. Only the last boss recquires you to actualy use the platforms present to jump over him.

And finaly, even though on the screen you have two hearts peeking from behind your score, this does, in fact, mean absolutely nothing as you are only given one life to finish the entiere game.

And after all that, what is your reward ?

Looking at this for fifteen seconds and then inputing your high score.

God this was a waste of time.

Cyber Cop (Commodore Amiga, 1991, Energize)

I wasn't going to review this one, but in the end, I thought, why not, it certainly deserves some "attention".

First off, you'll probably not feel to comfortable if I tell you the best part of the game is the title screen. And then you find out out through some comments it's apparently rip offed from a painting by a certain Boris Vallejo. Not knowing the man nor his work I can't confirm or deny this, but looking around the net hasn't revealed anything too similar to this, so if anyone could shed some light onto the subject, I'd be glad.

Anyway you start off the game in a promising enough environment. You find the word "pods" written on the screen with a number attached, so you decide that these have to be your mandatory collectibles, so you set off finding them. You'll find out the game scrolls back and forth between screens without problems. But by the third screen you will probably run into an enemy positioned smack dab at the edge of the next one. There's nothing much you can do about that, as the enemies, who constantly respawn, follow you into whatever screen you're on. Now this isn't too bad until you collect all the "pods" (which look more like cd's to me, but I digress) , you decide to turn around. And once you fight your way all the way to the other end of the level, you'll have collected maybe a third of the recquired number.

It's then that you may realise that....the pods only appear, at complete random, when you collect one. An arrow will appear, showing you in which direction to go, but the pods can be on the complete opposite side of the level (I once counted 7 screens between two pods). While the constantly respawning enemies relentlessly chase you around.

And once you get to level 2 and beyond, you have to factor in undestroyable level hazards, like lasers, dynamite soaring ontop of you on balloons, spinning maces, drops of deadly water, the ocational landmine, mine carts, huge spikes, plus the projectiles of the enemies chasing you.

And after four mince-meat-making levels, it's just over. You don't even get any kind of fight with a final boss, nor any kind of ending. You just get a gool ol' fashioned game over, can input your highscore for all the various users of your own computer to see, and then replay again from the start.

Aside from the claims of plagiarism associated with this title, there's realy nothing here to enjoy. The game is a senseless trekk through one death filled screen to the next and then back again, there are only about three enemies who all look the same, your ultimate weapon upgrade obtained after the scene clearing laser is a useless grenade launcher that has no range, the levels are stock and uninspired and realy, the game is literaly nothing else then a walking simulator programed by someone who realy hates you.