Die Bahnwelt (Glodia - Sharp X68000 - 1992)

Die Bahnwelt is yet another Japanese franchise named after a German, or at least German sounding word, which is a Japanese trope I never really understood. Still, despite playing the game without an English patch, cause I didn't check out to see there was one, I still say it's a pretty decent.


You walk around as a brown haired guy with a green haired woman as your partner and shoot stuff. The AI is actually not completely useless and the best part is when controlling the main male lead, the main female lead can't die. Oh she'll start flashing when her health is down but will still keep on tanking more and shooting. So you can use this to cowardly hide behind a woman and let her take the shots for you while you try and blow stuff up. Cheap yes, does it pay off in the bossfights with heat seeking missiles ? Double yes.

Of course the game is not just walking around shooting things, well it is, a lot, because the enemies constantly respawn and take a lot of dammage, depending if you found and equiped the better guns of course, and also if you have one of the four types of ammo in the game, which you collect off of enemies or from chest to power these better guns. The guns that are more then peashooters and don't consume anything come in later, and of course you have to search the levels - which are all quite maze like, to find them. Thankfully there's not too many twists and turns so you'll forget where you did and did not go, and usually there's something that gives you a map in each level.

That's not all though, as most levels have an objective. Usually to blow up things, like turrets and walls with more turrets, or sensors on a wall right next to turrets...this game is fond of turrets is all I'm saying. If you don't play the patch you cat get stuck of course. Like figuring out you have to shoot the green statue things in that one base to make the huge red door stop popping up, or that the grey things which look like ghosts and sit on fountains and stuff have nothing to do with the level objective period.

Sometimes it's just getting a gas mask to go through a smoke filled section and then in the final level you have to get back through the level to open a chest to get a pulse gun for the penultimate boss fight against a mind controlled girl. And problem is all the weapons and items and stuff you had to get to proceed before, they were new. But the pulse gun is something they give you early on in the game and it proves to be quite useless by this point in the game, and the game also WILL throw containers with outdated weapons around in levels before that, so unless you can read Japanese, you'd be stuck for an hour like I was, combing each section of the level over and over again.

The game play is pretty much the same throughout, except that at one point your green haired sidekick runs off and you get yourself a blue haired sidekick instead....but she has nothing usefull on her so you have to search the level to deck her out, and you part ways very soon after you meet. Then the game switches to the green haired girl as your main player (btw the game can get stuck here so I'd use an (a) version of the main game disk here, switch it out during the cutscene after the male hero gets fired up in a spaceship just in case) and you can't normally switch mid game otherwise. Not really sure why you can't do that but be carefull because now the girl can actually die.

You meet a robot friend while controlling her and after a heroic sacrifice makes the robot part of the space ship computer, you meet up with the male hero, after only a bit of seperate playing. After trekking through the last level you face a mech boss, who fires a bunch of missiles and are treated to an ending that officially goes on forever. Bahnwelt's only problem is the fact the cutscenes take way too long, can't be sped up or skipped. Out of the six disks, two are dedicated to cut scenes (an intro and ending disk) and a large part of the third disk is cutscenes too.

It's a good game overall, but the levels do drag on a bit so best go in armed with some patience.

Gubble (PS1, 1996, Mud Duck Productions/Midas Interactive Entertainment)

Where to start with this one.

Well, in Gubble you control a purple alien whose main goal in life seems to be finding new and innovative ways to kill himself using power tools. It's basically Tim Allen's character from Home Improvement, stuck in the body of an alien.

The point of the game is to well.....ride on a bunch of tools, pulling out nails and cutting down wood long enough to then somehow be able to return to your home planet. Don't ask me why.

Gubble rides in his spaceship and can hover over enemies, which is also used to dismount from tools, and when he touches a tool he will mount it and begin using it. The problem is you have no way to attack the enemies so you just have to dodge them. The game does become sort of addicting when you really want to clear out a level as flawlessly as possible, and the music certainly helps you to get in the mood.

However, there are a total of five worlds of this. Which wouldn't be bad except that you only get one life in Gubble and while you have unlimited continues, you cannot save, nor is there a password feature. The PC version of the game had floppy disk icons show up in the overworld for you to use, but either you have to complete a "bonus" to get them or they just aren't here, which amounts to about the same thing.

You see, inside levels you can sometimes find passages to other sub-levels. The S brings you to a secret level. These can sometimes be fun but a lot of the time they are just busy work. Like an entire level where you have to wind your way out of a path that spirals and twists around itself to a maddening decree just to get to the very small handfull of items at the very end....and then you have to make your way back. Through the most annoying enemy in the game, the mini UFO.

All the other enemies in the game are easy enough to dodge, for the most part, having very simple AI, but these guys are a pain in the ass. They come from above and slam ontop of you and the only way to get past them is to trick them to fall and move under them as they ascend afterwards but sometimes the level will simply not give you enough space to do so, especially in the aforementioned Special stage.

The other sub-leve one can enter, via a DNA strand looking thing, is a "Bonus Zymbot". These are a pain and virtually pointless. You go around a small area, continously collectong tools for points. Problem is, you have to keep on collection speed up icons to do it faster, and it seems that you have to get an absolutely flawless run to even collect the coin for these. As a result I never got a single coin throughout the entire game.

As a whole, the game seems really biased against human players. The two difficulties availible are "Novice" and "Expert". And the Novice mode ends after the third world, basically telling you to get your ass in Gear.

Now after you complete a level you can get Bonus points based on if you never got hit in the level and if you beat a certain time limit. Regardless whether on Novice or Expert, I got Best Time maybe three times throughout the game, as it basically requires you to take the absolute shortest way possible and never make a mistake.

Around the second or third world, you will begin to notice how little music there is in the game, the few level tracks get recycled over and over again. Later levels will sometimes be immense, so much so that upon looking at the first level I picked at random in the fourth world, my reaction was "Oh, damn.". Then you run into the levels with the cannons, which fire at you whenever you come near them and which are hard as hell to do because these things never stop firing. And imagine you have to sneak past this thing using a tool and NOT get knocked off. It requires you to press the "levitate" button every half a second !

There are no bosses to spice up the gameplay, and you seemingly have to go through all five worlds in one sitting. By that point the weird, nonsensical noices Gubble makes whenever he does anything will probably annoy you to the point of eating the jewel case.

And that's before you get to the ending.

 

All in all Gubble is an okay game that goes on for a bit too long. You'll probably only play it once, maybe replay the earliest levels but that's about it, there is no need to go back to anything beyond the first world after beating the game once, or hardly a reason to beat it in the first place since your only reward is more levels with horribly precise timing and cannons, until you get a non ending that basically says you suck.

Wibarm (MS DOS, 1989, Arsys Software)

Wibarm is a computer game from the late 80's which origiated on Japanese home computers like the Sharp X1 and the FM 7. It took three years for it to be ported to DOS, the result of which is a game that looks vastly different, however the English version retains the Anime style cutscenes (what few there are) and doesn't thankfully replace them with something more "appealing" towards western tastes like what happened with box art in the 80's. Final Zone II on the Turbo Grafx 16 CD is a perfect example of how western game publishers assumed their customers were mentally retarded monkeys who would be perfectly willing to buy a game with a cover so awful it could be considered an act of war.

Even the cover seems to actually look somewhat like your in game character, though the colors are a bit off.

Wibarm is a Mecha RPG, where you fly around in your Robot suit, and look for enemy encounters. On the overworld this is a singular enemy that is revealed to be multiple enemies when it comes in contact with your sprite and inside buildings it's a magic eye picture that blocks your way. Your robot can change forms, from a standard humanoid form to a plane and then to a ground vehicle type thing, which doesn't really seem to have much use beyond getting through gaps you can't walk or fly through.

You get an overworld to explore, where you fight enemy encounters and look for entrances to buildings. These are where most of the game takes place, as you walk around in a quasi first person view showing your robot from the back. It is inside buildings where you fight most monsters, find energy replenishment and repair item. This is important because your energy goes down every time you attack as well as each time you get hit and you have a seperate dammage meter. If you run out of energy you can still walk around and try to get back to a level base to refuel. But if your dammage meter fills up you die. Worse, if you pass a certain threshold of dammage, your map stops working so you need to use repair systems to make sure that doesn't happen. You also need to find items to improve your weapons and shields.

The weapons consist of a beam which targets a specific monster, a rifle which you have to attempt to aim and a wave attack which attacks everything at once. Now the problem is that you have a limited amount of energy, and you are pretty much constantly picking up upgrades to increase the amount you have, however enemies will simply not take any dammage from any of your weapons until you hit a certain threshold of "ability" points, which you get a certain amount of after most fights.

The biggest issue with the game is that you can't really tell when you will be able to hurt them, as there are no levels or leveling up. You will have to spend time going back and forth from one building to another, popping outside to try and fight stuff in the overworld every now and then, looking for which enemies you can actually dammage, and you'll have to keep at it long enough so that you will become able to kill the enemies you couldn't even scratch before. This gets a bit problematic when levels began to rely increasingly on having hidden walls around. They aren't marked out in any way, and even when you find them, they still show up as just regular walls on the map so you have to remember where they are.

And then you get to the Maze level on the third stage.

Imagine getting through this without a map

It wouldn't even be so bad if the buildings didn't infinitely loop vertically and horizontally, so you can't really map out where you've been. And then it includes maps for other buildings on the same level inside areas of the maze. You can't get to these areas from the maze and they have no relation to stuff going on inside it, however they make it virtually impossible to tell where you've been, as there are no real landmarks inside buildings to help you tell where you are.

There are only four overworlds, however it will take you quite a while to beat. In order to be able to hurt the final enemy blocking the computer you need to get to you need to have almost 27 000 ability points, and most enemies give 100 and less. And unless you defeat pretty much all the enemies in all the overworlds and in all the buildings, you won't have enough. It's a competently made game but the fact that you sometimes just have to hope to run across an invisible wall or ram into every wall in the level sometimes makes progress a thing of luck or extreme tedium.

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.