Matou no Houkai: The Hero of Babel (Famicom Disk System, 1988, Carry Lab/Pony Canyon)

It doesn't matter that this game is a rip off. That's not the issue here at all. What is the issue are the faults that make it inferior to what it's aping.


First of, for those not in the know, Matou no Houkai: The Hero of Babel is a Famicom Disk System game that closely resembles Castlevania. After having played it I'd actualy say the similarities are sorta superficial and don't reach further then the first level or so, beyond one or two things.

The game starts you off inside a rather sparsely lit castle. Unlike the Belmonts, your hero here follows the more common sense route of using sharp metallic objects instead of whips and I can't fault him for it, I'd probably do the same, if by some miracle the world suddenly became 2 dimensional, poorly animated and filled with all sorts of monsters who have nothing better to do then do go back and forth seemingly without purpose forever.



However, don't go thinking about going on your merry slugfest just yet. You'll soon realise that, unlike in the Castlevanias, your jump is basicly a cosmetical additional, who'se purpose is ocasionally jump up a stair (and you can just hop up automaticaly by <i>walking </i>towards the stairs) or over a flame in Level 5, however as far as bridging any sorta gaps is concerned.....well he's no Mario, let's put it at that.


Indeed, the levels are laid out so you think you're supposed to jump over a gap but then fall through - either because of an invisible block or just because. However, and this is the biggest difference between, well ya know, the levels are actualy circular, which means every floor and platform loops around so you just have to go to the side if you can't go up directly. Also finding invisible elevators is crucial to getting anywhere.

Further differences include the fact you never leave the towers, unlike in Castlevania 2 where indeed traveling betweent he mansions is a big (and possibly highly unwelcome) part of the game. Here you're always in a tower and never see as much as a window or terrace.



Every level or "floor" of the tower has many doors and various secrets you need to discover. I mainly followed a guide so I can't say how comprehensible the character dialogue is, in comparisson to....I reffer you to the previous "ya know". Finding all the secrets enables you to get plot critical items and extra special weapons. For example the bombs are necessary later on to find secret entrances and rooms. You use these by selecting them in the menu and then pressing attack and down....however once you collect a weapon you keep it at all times and simply need enough "WP" ammo (usualy collected from enemies) to hurl it continously. One rather annoying detail, you can actualy hit yourself with your own weapons if they bounce back and <i>will </i>take dammage.



Enemies, upon defeat, drop chests (you also find chests in walls and lying around in various rooms). These may contain either WP, sometimes Luck (which I have no idea what it even does) and Life, although regular enemies never seem to drop that.



The game also features experience points. These seems to increase your maximum life, but don't realy seem to influence your attack power much.

Pictured: Your "fight" with the true final boss

Now the least impressive thing about the game is it's level design. Because there realy isn't that much to speak of. Gaps in the floor you bridge on horizontal or vertical elevators, ladders and monsters appearing every single time your feet touch a new platform. The monsters spawn so predictabely and act so similarily that fighting them isn't all that fun.


The mini bosses are slightly different, with each level having several. These either have or don't have a health bar but generaly act the same. Also there's a boss at the end of every level, unlike a <i>certain </i>other game brought up previously. However the bosses all have the amazing ability to warp from one end of the screen to the other, and even be on both sides at once.


The games biggest problem by far is it's inventory. Here every single potion and weapon's recharge takes up a seperate slot, which means these may prevent you from obtaining critical items such as keys from chests. However the chests dissapear upon non-collecting them anyway and this can seemingly lead to an unwinable state. In addition you have trapped chests, which face a different direction then normal ones, may have power downs in them and in at least one level I couldn't get the level exit key because I collected a trapped chest without using the item necessary to untrap it and it was just gone and refused to come back even though the pillar it was hidden in reset when I left the room.


If you manage to sucessfully get to the end of the fifth level, you have to face the final boss, under a time limit, something not present until now. You have to use the final special weapon, a spell book, to kill it quicker, however if, like me, you didn't bring any WP refills with you then you have to finish the guy off by hitting him with your sword. Easier said then done when the guys fires off clusters of bullets so tightly packed that hitting/awoiding all of them is a matter of extreme luck and he seems to have an area around his sprite where he gives you dammage even though you're not touching him directly.


After you beat him you get a choice of three doors. These lead to a different series of bosses, however your health or WP stock doesn't get replenished at all. Worse, the timer is still going. And the absolute worst thing is that even the shortest route has you face the boss of level 3.

Why is it so bad you ask ? Well because the level 3 Boss is the only boss in the game who spends 90 % of his time banging his head against the ceiling, completely out of your reach. Even if you had any weapon ammo left, it wouldn't reach him. And he fires off small egg like things that burts into multiple projectiles which - thanks to the "enemies and projectiles can teleport from the egde of the screen but you can't" "feature", are even harder to hit/avoid. And in addition to this you have to have enough time after you beat this guy to go up the stairs in the next room, talk to the princess, use an item and wait for a second or two. And if you die you have to redo the whole level.


I wanted to like this game but it becomes monotonous with it's "no brains needed" level design and the fact the last boss fight is nearly impossible unless you're loaded with special weapon refills.

Heavy Nova (Sega Genesis, Holocronet/Micronet 1991)

This robot has been specificaly designed to run into wall

Heavy Nova is a game where the blocking is so good it effectively kills the game. To elaborate on this notion, the game is a typical robot game of the era, which tries to combine one on one fighting segments and platforming segments, except one good look will tell you what they spent all their time effort on. The platforming stages are realy short and the only thing that keeps you from jetpacking through them in under twenty seconds are the annoying gates and things positioned around the levels. Even so, the levels are still pretty short and only cover a few screens and there's only a handfull of items in each, at most. There's basicly a single type of in-level enemy you'll run into all the time, an annoying little bugger thagt shoots missiles diagonaly and whom they just love to position just off the edge of platforms, so when you try and duck under his shots you get hit and fall back. And this will happen to you alot because you can't jump in this game.

The afforementioned little bugger that shoots missiles

Basicly the programers took a fighting game engine, where you jump by pressing up, and slapped it onto a platforming segment with holes and mines and stuff. And worst you don't just jump you jetpack upwards and in order to avoid landing on the next thing you should be jumping over you have to jam the opposite direction to your movement, otherwise you'll overshoot and take dammage. This mechanic realy makes platforming a chore, especialy when you involve laser turrets, timed gates and some....weird transparent glass brick that flies around the level erraticaly and can't be destroyed except for right at the very end....for some reason. Also sometimes you'll run into invisible walls preventing your jetpack ascent because the programers want you to take this one specific route, and being able to go round the same suspended platform from the opposite directon would make too much sense I suppose.

I can just hear Tchaikovsky in the background

Once you manage to get to the end of a level you'll be treated to a session of interpretive dance. I say that because 90 % of each battle involves opponents simply jumping around and pirueting in the air (a jumpkick attack that you now just have, even though you still can't jump normaly when you'd need to). And here is where the whole "block" thing comes back into play. You avoid an enemy's attack by either "jumping" upwards with the jetpack or crouching down. This is naturaly rather easy to do, to the point where almost all of your shots will miss because the opponent will naturaly avoid them by moving towards you. You have a long list of moves but you need to acquire the apropriate level up icons in the platfoming segments to use them, and they're so unreliable that you can just rely on good old fashioned punches and kicks, and you'll get as much enjoyment out of this as you would desperately trying to throw your missiles at the opponent (they can only be fired from a certain distance away for some reason) and him ducking down before every single one of them.

Basicly every single character in this game can be repurpossed as scrap metal as far as I care.

Warlock (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1994, LJN/Trimark/Realtime/Acclaim)

The fact of the matter is, yes, I should have known better. This is LJN/Acclaim we're talking about after all. Their track record recquires no great analysis. The game's reviews are also not that great. And yet, I had some hopes for this title. Mainly because it seemed to be a basic platformer where you jump around and shoot energy bolts at werewolves.

It's a lot less impressive if you have to spend six levels in it.

But the problem is that while this game starts out okay, it never stretches to become anything more, and it repeats the parts that are "okay" about it so much, until eventualy you stop tolerating even those. But lets start at the begining.

The controls is where people usualy start complaining about sub-par videogames, and this game is no exception. The basic attack is alright, aside from the default ducking whenever you fire off a shot (and the fact that "early on" you're shots don't travel the whole length of the screen, meaning you have to engage in a fair fight with the energy beam shooting enemies), but the roll move is impractical and you will execute it more often then not when you weren't thinking of doing anything of the sort, and roll right into harms way. Worst of all though, are the spells. You pick these up individualy in every level, and there's lots to go around (each slot can supposedly hold 255 spells, but it only shows you have 9, which is sort of impractical), and you will need it since health magic literaly regains one point of dammage each (indicated by your face turning into a skull in the typical 90's way) and there are spots where getting hit is pretty much guaranteed.

Contrary to how it looks this thing is virtualy harmless.

This is usualy due to the bats and other flying enemies, who'se paths are so erratic that shooting them in time before they bump into you is a matter of either luck or split second timing. And there are ALOT of bats in this game.






Then, towards the end, there are enemy spawners and infinite spawn locations where not getting hit seems absolutely impossible, which is always the mark of great game design.

The last set of levels and now they roll out the generic
"punk guy with long hair" enemy type. Not a good sign.

Finaly, your worst, most feared enemy in the game, are pits. Because if you die once, you lose all, let me repeat, ALL the magic spells you got throughout the whole game up to that point, which can total several hundred if you bother to look for all the secret areas in a given stage. This means you've now gone to loaded with regeneration and offensive spells to being absolutely destitute and incapable of throwing a single thunder spell.

But there are many areas in the game where there's another level of platforms below the edge of the screen. However there's very little indication,so you can end up killing yourself trying to find new places to go. And in addition to all this, falling from too great a height kills you too.

Now this could all be forgiven....maybe, possibly.....if the game was varied and surprising but that is not the case.

The level themes repeat over and over again, usualy just switching between two slighly different ones for awhile before changing to a different theme that will get altered with some other theme for about six levels etc. The game is exceedingly long, with 15 stages, and the begining can be very deceptive. You have to collect six runestones to stop the Evil One (I'd make a joke about this being the Devil disguised by throwing a children's blanket over the head with the hoofs still very visible, but the game is technicaly movie based and I'm not familiar with the source material, so I can't do that), but you get the first two in the first two levels. And then you go on....and on....and on and nothing.

Yeah. Reel threatening,

 


To top it all off there aren't realy any moments where the game breaks the monotony of switch puzzles and swinging axes you have to jump over and fire spewing gremlin statues you have to get past, besides one a good 8 level in where you turn into one of the enemies and have a laser duel with a different laser throwing enemy, and the final boss fight....which is incredibly easy if you held on to your stock of magic. Otherwise you fight the same almost generic enemies and get hit by bats over and over again until you win, get a one paragraph text ending and immediately get mesmerised by the end credits.

Sadly I don't think you'll want to play that far.

Sakigake!! Otoko Juku - Shippuu Ichi Gou Sei (Famicom, 1989, Bandai/TOSE)

From the same developer that brought us Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen comes this gem, and only a year later. Because disgracing just Masami Kurumada was not enough I guess, so Akira Miyashita joins the fold of the many many people who'se work got bastardised by TOSE.

The "progress" map which comes up so
rarely you'll forget it even exists most of
the time.

Now let's get something straight here. This game is not as bad as Saint Seiya ODKH (hereafter reffered to, somewhat incorrectly, as Saint Seiya 2). Almost nothing on this earth is. That's not to say this game is good, but I'm just giving credit where credit is due in that TOSE in a mere one year's time managed to learn to make a game who'se mechanics are comprehensible to non Harvard graduates and that even theoreticaly respond in a way which can be replicated when the need arises. But don't fret, the absolute monotonous game length and the complete lack of any entertainment are still retained to preserve that classic TOSE feeling.

And the game begins. And never even remotely
looks like anything else but this.

 Not being familiar with the source material this time around, I can't realy say how much this game tarnishes the original's good name, but I will probably wager a guess and say the manga at least depicts the characters distinctly, and doesn't instead resort to having them share the same model except for the one on one fights. This is especialy heinous since playing as the different characters would most likely be one of the main reasons why anyone would even buy this game at the time. Because TOSE never develops for anything but a currently running series it seems and it's pretty bad when there's something I can say Saint Seiya 2 actualy did better. Once again, not good mind you, better.

And no, putting piranhas in your game hasn't
been original since Super Mario Brothers TOSE.

The game is basicly just a dirt simple action side scroling beat em up....almost. Because we all know the that if TOSE would have to actualy develop something and not try to "improve" it in some way then they'd need alot of snowplows down in Hell. You have to wander around entering doors and try to find your way to the boss. Every place looks pretty much like every place else and an incorrect choice simply loops you back out. The enemies are usualy the exact same (and the game only has three sprites for them anyway) so that doesn't help. Later on the game adds moving platforms, necessity to go down trap-like shafts (some of which simply loop you back out) or hitting a completely invisible wall that prevents you from passing until it doesn't anymore.

The begining of the game, with every character selected
in turn.

You have two attacks, a short punch and a much longer kick. Normaly this would be enough but the enemies can guard against your moves at least 50 % of the time so you will most likely take dammage. You will definitely take dammage from the invisible holes that are on every level that have no indication of them being there and you will fall into every time unless you just happen to jump over them. The only way to recover health for your specific character is to either find a random guy in a random door who will refill it or....a chorus. (Edit: this does make sense in context of the series)

Yeah you basicly select the option, then the amount of health to be refilled, some guys come onscreen and start singing and your health increases by the amount you set earlier, decreasing the overall amount availible when selecting this option. You can also select this and not replenish any health, for what reason I don't know.

As noted your characters look and behave identicaly, except in the boss fights where you suddenly get new sprites and actualy varying abilities. One of the guy's has a sword, but he loses this the moment he's knocked down once, so it's not much of a plus. The other's usualy have some variety of punches, (the last guy having no immediately visible improved attack ability but he does backflips), one guy has a knife that never falls out of his hand, and one of the bosses that later joins you makes supper fast kicks but seems realy hard to move around.

The bosses themselves just reuse the handfull of rooms availible, and mostly have a very basic run-up-and-hit-you type of strategy. Beating them refills you no health for said character when going to the next level.

And then the game simply goes on and on....and on. At first it changes scenery every two levels but then the last area has around five levels that take place in it and nothing ever realy changes. There's somewhere around 18 levels and the game stops being even the slightest bit entertaining around level 8. At least Saint Seiya 2 had a reason for being as overly long as it was, here it seems completely nonsensical.

In the end, there is nothing you'll remember about this game, and frankly there is nothing here that deserves it.

Fire Rock (Famicom Disk System, 1988, Use Corporation)

Mark Flint. His name is everywhere on this game, short of the cover. Which, given the quality of this piece, is not exactly smart.

His credentials are somewhat hard to trace. He has his name on some games since early Famicom days and his last game I managed to find was the 1997 Running High. All his work that I know of seems to have been developed under System Sacom. His titles range from Pinball games, to sports racing games, and then today's offering.

Fire Rock (no relation to the recently covered Fire Bam) is a stone age-looking platform game, released during a time when games with prehistoric settings were quite popular. The PC Engine had four, the Bonk series plus the Legendary Axe, Joe and Mac appeared on many different consoles, there was the unlicensed adventures of Big Nose on the NES in america, then there was Prehistoric etc. You even had a stone age era taxi game, Ugh for DOS. What sets Fire Rock apart from all of these are the abominable controls.

Unlike the other games mentioned above, in Fire Rock you seem to be controling a caveman with springs for shoes who just took a swim in a pool full of lubricant. Your jump is far too short to reach most platforms and items, and so you'll be left with climbing on walls. Remembering how easy it was in Bonk, imagine the same basic method of continualy pressing the jump button while holding up, except increase the amount of button presses needed to clear the same basic obstacle by about 800 %. Basicly you don't climb, you sort of....inch your way upwards very very very slowly. And in case you happen to fall off, you not only fall down, but slide backwards, most likely into lava, which makes you jump forward and idealy fall back down below a platform you just spent a good five minutes getting up on. You have no control of where you're character will be after you try executing a jump, because more often then not it will simply backfire and kill you.

Now imagine this control scheme applied to a game where you need to jump all the time, and I do mean all the time, plus where precise movements to make it into perilously placed doorways hanging in midair over pools of lava-filled death is the norm.

Your goal throughout the game is to go through each maze like level and the many doors that spontaneously appear in a room depending on from which door you got in, find each boss (the room is a different colour then the norm so it's easy to tell what flock of enemies is just that and which one counts as a "boss"), kill it, then find the necessary items and then find the one door which may look slightly different from the others and leave the level. Along the way you collect torches to increase your fire power (which is agravatingly reset whenever you start a new level), vases for points and hearts to generate a shield that you will immediately lose upon being hit once so why bother and besides you have no after hit invincibility and the boss ramming you into a corner can literaly drain all your life before you come out of your post-hit dammage animation. There isn't realy anything more to say, other then the keys are usualy put in the most ridiculous of places, such as below, the key one finds on the first level.

Yeah, that's an easy start.

Now once again, try and imagine this setup, only one of the later levels is designed around one way secret walkways hidden in walls, ceilings and floors where one incorrect movement sends you plummeting to the very bottom of the maze.

The basic design of the game is not bad, the levels look different enough to not seem repetitive, the enemies and bosses look fun and it seems like it could very well be a much, much better game only if Mark Flint didn't bend over backwards just to infuse it with "realism" thereby making it nigh-unplayable.

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....