Arcade - Ghosts 'n' Goblins

Arcade
Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins

If you were any kind of arcade rat, there isn’t any way in the world you won’t have heard of this one. The big talking point whenever this game is discussed is the absolutely UNFORGIVING and totally EXTREME difficulty level. And it’s true, and you’ll discover very quickly, if you somehow haven’t played this before, especially when you first encounter Red Arremer.

If you’re saying “Who?”, tell you what… Stop reading this article, either hunt down MAME, or a Flash version of the game, go and play it for a bit, and when you meet an enemy that isn’t a plant, zombie or crow, that’s Red Arremer. He probably killed you. Twice.

Now, I played this game a LOT. It was probably one of the most common games around, probably almost as common as Double Dragon, if not more. It was one of those games that an arcade would have as long as it had electricity. But one particular instance of this game stands out in memory more than any other, and that was at a holiday campsite in Perranporth, Cornwall.

Y’see, their Games Room was basically a shed, away from all the rest of the site’s buildings. Inside the Games shed were several well-known games… Gladiator, Q*Bert (in fact, this was where I discovered Q*Bert for the first time), Mat Mania (a.k.a. Exciting Hour), G’n’G and Chase H.Q.

G’n’G and Mat Mania resided down at the bottom end, and these had someone on them from opening to closing, guaranteed. There was a very good reason for this… someone had broken the locks on the coin mech doors, so opening the door and jiggling a little piece of metal behind the coin mech rewarded you with as many credits as you could eat.

EVEN WITH THIS, progression beyond level 2 was asking too much.

No explanation of the game yet… hmm… ok, here we go. You play the role of Arthur, Knight of Legend (King, even?), and whilst relaxing with your good lady (Princess Guinivere or Prin-Prin depending on where you’re from), she is suddenly snatched away by one of Satan’s demons. On goes your best suit of armour, and with a seemingly endless supply of lances in your pocket, off you trot to try and save her.

Forgetting to question exactly why you were camped in a graveyard (How romantic!) that is where your quest begins. Zombies rise from the ground to attack you, Venus Fly-Trap style plants spit balls at you, and one hit from any of these will knock every last piece of armour from your body, leaving you running around in only a loincloth. One more hit will strip every bit of flesh from your bones, signifying the loss of your 3 lives. Believe me, you’ll see that a lot.

Reaching Red Arremer will result in 1 of 2 possible outcomes… you’ll get lucky and hit him sufficiently to kill him almost straight away… or he’ll avoid your feeble lances and sweep down straight through you, and if that didn’t kill you, the next sweep or his fireball will. And this is only the mid-way point of the 1st level, believe me, it gets so much harder.

The graphics are great, little touches like how your skull comes to rest on top of the pile of bones as you die, or the different weapons you can pick up along the way (look for enemies with a pot attached to them). The weapons vary from Daggers (usefully fast)

You may find yourself accidentally summoning an enemy from one of the graves… these enemies can actually turn you into a frog or a duck! It might seem pointless, but it’s not… killing the magician type thing is worth 200 of them. Apparently.

But why make life harder for yourself? Well, truth be told, the first level is POSSIBLE. Frustrating, but definitely POSSIBLE. After all, even I’ve completed the first level. But after that? Not without cheating. Unless you’re really and truly an excellent games player. There’s a very good reason this game regularly features in lists of “The Hardest Games Of All Time”.

Oh, just so you know, say you do manage to beat the game, you have to do it twice to see the “real” ending, and the second time through you’ll be facing faster enemies… Wonderful!

Still, there’s worse ways you could waste a few hours…

Arcade - Sunset Riders

Arcade
Sunset Riders

Yeee-haw! Saddle ‘em-up and git riding with those Sunset Riders!

>ahem<. OK, that was probably the most clichéd and downright cringe-worthy opening of any review I’ve ever done. I apologise unreservedly, and promise that the rest of this review will not contain any more “Wild-West” themed jokes, puns or clichés whatsoever. No siree, not a one.

So, what in tarnation is this game about? Well, the “Sunset Riders”, as far as I can gather, are a bunch of Cowboys out to clean up the town and bring in the outlaws, dead or alive. Basically, it boils down to a side-scrolling run-and-gun platformer, similar in vein to Rolling Thunder more than anything else. In fact, that’s probably the best comparison you can imagine, you can hop between the ground and a higher platform, nip through doors to hide or grab power-ups (occasionally getting a kiss from a bar floozy and perhaps a drink too), and one hit equals death. In fact, this game is punishingly difficult, especially when you’d more than likely find it set to at least “normal” difficulty in the arcades.

The graphics are knee-slappingly good, with some hilarious touches, such as the standing on a rake and getting slapped in the face, or getting blown up by the spectacularly tall explosions, but don't worry, you'll no doubt get to see all the funny death sequences since you are so likely to die with alarming regularity.

You've got a choice of four heroes to take the game on, there's Steve and Billy who wield pistols akimbo (firing 2 bullets at a time in slightly different directions), then there's Bob and Cormano with their shotguns, which basically just means bigger bullets. I've never seen one, but apparently the game was available as a 4-player simultaneous cabinet as well as the standard 2 player one. Whether this would work well with the massive cartoony graphics, I don't know.

The side-scrolling shooting action is occasionally broken up by different styles of gameplay, for example you’ll find yourself riding a horse (chasing a train) and there’s also the occasional “Shooting Gallery” level, where you basically have to flick your joystick to one of the nine possible positions and hit fire as the outlaws pop up.

Whilst I did play through the whole game once (cost me a bloody fortune, it did), it would take an enormous amount of skill to get through the game in one credit. But then you wouldn’t see all the hilarious graphical touches… it’s a two edged sword if ever there was one.

Add to that the great sound and gameplay, it’s well worth a few credits to try again. If you can find it.

SNES - Rock 'n' Roll Racing

SNES
Rock ‘N’ Roll Racing

If it wasn’t for the musical score, this game would play in near silence, and would simply be called “Racing”.

Yep, there’s nothing Rock ‘N’ Roll about the game itself, but the choice of music on offer while you race is spectacularly good. Of course, just as graphics alone do not a good game make, neither does a soundtrack.

Luckily enough, then, this game was pretty good, at least for a while. Taking a kind of isometric viewpoint, the graphical style is reminiscent of Skidmarks, or even RC Pro-Am, and the handling’s fairly similar too. You will find yourself skidding quite nicely round corners, and the whole thing moves at a fair old whip.

Let’s get some semblance of order to this review. You get to choose one of various racers to take through some kind of racing league, where you must earn a set number of points to progress to the next division. The racers you choose from have their own benefits, some accelerate better, some handle better, some have a higher top speed. Leagues are held on a series of planets, and in order to be competitive you will need to upgrade your vehicle when you can.

There is, as you might expect, hidden characters in the game, one is Olaf from The Lost Vikings, the other is a mysterious shadowy character, and they both have the benefit of improved stats above anyone else. Whilst Olaf is accessible through a button combination on the character select screen, “The Shadow” is only accessible through a password.

And so we’re off to our first planet, and the races begin. The first set of tracks are very uncomplicated efforts, which is a good job as your car’s handling isn’t up to much at this stage. For that matter, neither are your power-ups. With each race you’ll earn points, and you need a certain number of points to progress to the next set of races, or indeed next planet. However, as you earn money in each race, you’ll probably not want to move on early, maximising your money for upgrades or new cars.

Upgrading your car is simple enough, there’s the usual components that can be upgraded; the tyres, engine, and armour, for example… but then there’s the weaponry. No futuristic race game is complete without some form of weaponry, right? The actual weapons used depend on your vehicle, but you can increase the amount of ammunition you carry… which is magically replenished each lap.

So the weapons then… there’s 3 categories of weapon, your “Forward” weapons, “Rear” weapons and “Boosts”. To begin with, they’re all pretty crap, you’ll get weak little bullets to fire forwards, “Slipsauce” to drop behind you, and a Jumping ability which can be used to cut corners, but is more likely to cause you to fall off the track than give you any real benefit.

They get better though, missiles and “Sundog Beams” (imagine fireballs with homing capabilities) will become available, as will nitro boosts (far more useful than “jumping”!), and various types of mines to drop behind you.

Trying to stop you conquering the game are Rip & Shred, they’ll always be two of your opponents in every race (except if you’re playing a 2 player race, obviously.), the other will be the current planet’s resident champion.

Gameplay aside, then, the “Rock n Roll” aspect of the game came from the music. And what a great soundtrack it was… With tunes like the Peter Gunn theme, Paranoid, Born to be Wild and Bad to the Bone, it tied into the game very nicely, but became a little on the repetitive side after a dozen races... as did some of the races.

Thankfully the gameplay and track layout remained varied enough to keep you interested, whilst Larry, the in-game commentator, will repeatedly tell you who’s “about to blow”, or who finishes a “weak 3rd” in the race.

Whilst I doubt I’d have the inclination to play the whole game through again, I’d enjoy playing through the last planet or something, and I’d certainly recommend giving it the time of day. If you’re a fan of sliding your way round corners at breakneck speed to a great soundtrack, you might just get drawn right in.

Sega Saturn - International Victory Goal

Sega Saturn
International Victory Goal

I NOTORIOUSLY HATE FOOTBALL.

I also dislike Football Games as a general rule.

The problem I have with football is pretty simple. It's so BORING. Seriously, 90 minutes, and no goals? In pretty much any other sport, if a game was held to a nil-all draw for its length it would be exciting end-to-end stuff exercising superb defence, and would be quite exhilarating to watch. In football, these namby-pamby ham-actors are quite content to continually kick the ball in the air and not really get anywhere.

So... Football. Yawn. Booor-ring.

However, over the years, there has actually been some games that transform football into an attractive prospect. One of the main reasons for this is the much shorter game time that is usually imposed. 3 minutes is about the perfect length for a half of football, and as such would cause the players to put in 100% effort for its entire length.

Whilst I never "got" the fuss behind Sensible Soccer (except of course the Bulldog Blighty version with a hand grenade for a ball), I did enjoy Striker and Goal on the Amiga... and International Victory Goal on the Saturn most of all.

There's one very good reason why this game stands out above all other football games EVER. Y'see, at the time this came out (around the same time as Daytona / Sega Rally / Virtua Cop and so on) Sega were in the flow of producing amazing musical soundtracks to accompany their games. International Victory Goal delivered this with so much conviction; it has to be one of the single greatest musical scores ever committed to a game.

Alright, back to the game a second... the graphics themselves aren't the greatest ever seen, but they control so well and handle so realistically, it's like the physics from Virtua Tennis have already been conceived. Sliding or shoulder charging in the wrong direction stymies your progress up or down the field, and when you're chasing a breakaway player on the attack, you find yourself desperately trying to will your player along in the chase, hoping when you finally make that tackle you don't get sent off for it. A shot from close enough to the goal is rarely saved, so time is always of the essence in these situations.

With the tactical choices you can make before each match, you have a level of control not often seen in football games at that time. And you can cycle your priorities towards defence or attack at the press of a button.

I’ve played football games before and football games since, just to see if anything can ever deliver the fun and excitement this title managed to achieve. I can safely say... nothing has come close. Ever.

Whether you like Football or not, take away the boring nature of the sport and think of it as an action game. It becomes exciting in its own way. If you have a Saturn and want a decent sports game, this, Athlete Kings and World Series Baseball are the picks of choice.

Even if you don’t play the game, at least go over to the Galbaldia Hotel and download the soundtrack. Because it’s awesome.

PC (DOS) - Pyro ][ - World Terrorism

PC – DOS
Pyro ][ - World Terrorism

OK, you’re going to have to bear with me on this one. At least, I assume you will.

Whenever the topic of “Best game ever” comes around, there’s one or two games that you can guarantee are mentioned, mainly (it seems) Nintendo games. But there’s always a few “outsiders” who get their names out there, for example the Sim City games (in particular Sim City 2000), or World of Warcraft might get a nod or two.

Then there’s the obtuse games that one or two people will shout out for, but no-one else has ever heard of, or at least can’t remember.

For me, there’s a game that falls into this category. If given the chance to name my “top 3 games EVAAAAR”, this one always sneaks its way onto the list.

I’m pretty sure it was a freebie, too, back when PD (Public Domain) Freeare & Shareware games and demos were distributed from PD Libraries rather than simply flung up to the internet. Pyro ][, whose prequel I’ve never played, was discovered by me in the relatively early days of CD-ROM technology, on a CD called “Hot Sound & Vision 2”, which was essentially a collection of PD software, add-ons and images, put together to save you having to download it all.

The game itself boils down to a simple puzzle game, but requires speed and forethought to complete to the best of your ability.

Forgive the primitive “Worse than an 8-bit” graphics, they’re not important. What matters (and always has mattered) is the gameplay.

The basic objective, then, is to burn down various famous buildings. You start out on the top floor of each one, and must work your way down. You drag a fuse along behind you, which usually takes around 15 seconds to start burning. Most walls are flammable, with the exception of the corners. To reach the walls though, you must either go past petrol cans, or you can spill a can on the floor if you prefer, creating a pool of petrol, which will also light. Then you must escape down the stairs to the next level without setting yourself on fire.

Repeat this for the hundreds of levels that face you. Easy!

Except it really isn’t. It’s FIENDISHLY difficult to make any real distance into the game. Pass your fuse by a petrol can and it will explode, spreading the fire around. Cause too big a chain reaction and you’ll end up having your fire catch up with you. Set fire to the stairs and you cut off your only escape route. Whilst you might think you can just escape without doing too much damage, there's the temptation to burn all the walls down after you’ve left, as you’ll earn a generous “Completion” bonus.

Y’know, writing this, I don’t feel I’m doing the game any justice. Maybe it’s just me (it usually is), but this game had that “one more go” factor. Back in the nineties, when all I had to worry about was school and my weekends consisted of almost all the free time I could desire, much of it was spent trying to progress through this game. I was never good enough to beat it, never good enough to make significant progress, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

It’s a sign of a great game, and if you can put up with the DOS graphics, you might well lose an afternoon to it too.

It looks like it’s still freely available on the internet through the usual abandonware/old DOS games sites, so you shouldn’t find it too hard to unearth, dust off, and set fire to it. BURN BABY BURN!

Arcade - Vendetta

Arcade
Vendetta 

  I can almost imagine how the conversation between the Design team on this one went.

Designer no. 1 – “So, we’ve enjoyed a lot of success with that 4-player cabinet and cartoon licences. It seems the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons converted well to a 4-player side-scrolling beat-‘em up, what now?”

Designer no. 2 – “How about we do another one?”

Designer no. 1 – “Have we got a licence?”

Designer no. 2 – “Let’s just make one up, we could have our own characters who bear a slight resemblance to famous fighters.”

Designer no. 1 – “Right, so Mr T, Hulk Hogan, Jean Claude Van Damme, and… erm…”

Designer no. 2 – “Mike Tyson?”

Designer no. 1 – “OK, but only if we can have some bare-chested randy men in leather hats attempt to gay rape the players.”

>cough, splutter<

Alright, seriously, you might think I’m on the wind-up, but I’m actually genuinely not. Apparently they were removed from the British release of the game, but I SWEAR I saw them in there in a real arcade in Newquay.

We’ll come back to that in a minute. “Vendetta” is actually an alterna-title for “Crime Fighters 2”, but is quite far removed from that slightly archaic-by-comparison game. The sprites are large and detailed, the animation is smooth and realistic, the sound is a million times better, and the game…

Well, it’s pretty damn good. Many will compare it to Final Fight or something like that. In my opinion, this beats Final Fight hands down. The violence is sometimes a little more comic-book than FF, but it’s certainly much more solid, and don’t forget where the game engine and design mainly came from… TMNT and The Simpsons, anyone?

You may remember in my Pit Fighter review, I talked about your character falling down different ways… well, this game includes a very similar feature. Get hit from the front and you’ll fall to your back, where you can kick on your way up! What a great idea! Get hit from behind and you’ll land on your front, and just pick yourself up a little quicker.

The same goes for enemies, except they don’t attack from the ground. However, you CAN attack them on the ground.

There’s a nice wide variety of weapons you can use... spikey baseball bats, tyres you can throw, boxes and so on, but then there’s the more unusual weapons, like bags of flour (or maybe cement, I don’t know) that make enemies cough in a cloud of dust, or the bucket that you can throw over an enemy’s head, causing him to walk around blindly until you smash him one.

The bosses are an interesting bunch. The first two are pretty easy to deal with, but when you reach the “Missing Link”, things start to get harder. It’s worth it, though, even if just to see the next level, the usual “Seedy street” level.

Yep, you guessed it, this is where the randy men try to play at bumming with you. At least, they will if they’re enabled. The thing is, I don’t get WHY they’re in the game. How did they make it into the gang? “If someone attacks you with a knife, how do you defend yourself?” “I’ll BUM them to death!”. And yes, I couldn’t help but think of Bo Selecta’s version of Elton John when I wrote that.

Comedy value aside, there’s no real reason for them to be there. Simple as.

Still, I’m detracting from reviewing what is, at the end of the day, probably the finest incarnation of the 4-player side-scrolling beat ‘em-up genre. The gameplay itself is finely tuned… you’ll have no trouble with the first couple of stages if you’re a seasoned beat ‘em-up player, but once you reach the 3rd boss (The aforementioned “Missing Link”), the difficulty ramps up quickly and the whole thing gets much trickier very very quickly. But this happens a lot in this genre, look at Final Fight as a prime example, not forgetting that it is often considered the ultimate side-scrolling beat ‘em-up.

For my money, and I would in no way suggest Vendetta is the best game ever, I think it beats Final fight in almost every department hands down. The only thing I would say to Final Fight’s benefit over Vendetta is the speed of it all. Vendetta is definitely not quite as hectic, but that’s no bad thing. Where you had a “scatter” move in Final Fight, you don’t here in Vendetta, so being completely surrounded just isn’t an option.

But then this game was always meant to be enjoyed as part of a 4-player party rather than a single-player.

If nothing else, play it under foreign settings so you can experience the hilarity of the dry-humping members of the Blue Oyster Bar.

Arcade - Teenage Mutant Ninja (Hero) Turtles

Arcade
Teenage Mutant Ninja (Hero) Turtles

At the time, it was the latest craze, the biggest cash cow, milked for all it was worth. From the moment the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first appeared on TV, they were hot property and tie-ins of every nature began to appear. Action figures, medal collections, fancy dress outfits, a movie and the inevitable computer games... and, like The Simpsons, there have been quite a few.

In fact, there’s a lot of parallels you can draw between the Turtles and the Simpsons, especially when it comes to the arcade games that were released.

Just a quick pointer for any international readers here, over here in the UK we went through a period of ridiculous censorship on anything relating to Ninjas or martial-arts especially when it came to computer games. Games like Shadow Warrior, for example, had shurikens (throwing stars) removed and replaced with… erm… darts. Therefore for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (hereafter referred to as TMNT) cartoons, most footage of Michaelangelo fighting with nunchuckas or flails or whatever you want to call them was edited out for the UK. Even the title had to be changed (and the theme music re-edited) to “Hero” rather than “Ninja”. Why? Don’t look at me, I don’t make the rules.

Fortunately Michaelangelo was allowed to fight as he pleased in this, the Turtles’ first appearance in arcades. Bearing a striking resemblance to the old Gauntlet cabinets, the original TMNT arcade machine was one of the first to introduce the Credit Assign button. Rather than having 4 individual coin slots, there was just one. Once you had inserted sufficient funds (or “stuck yer coins in” if you prefer layman’s terms) the “Credit” buttons started flashing. Pressing the relevant button would assign a credit (and the correct number of lives) to that player. This was a good idea, in my opinion, as it prevented people unscrupulously pinching each other’s credits (and yes, as a youngster, I had done that in the past, which, given the chance, I’d like to apologise for!).

Before I get onto the game, it’s worth pointing out how the value of the game changed over the years. When first released, most arcade games were only 10p a play (and fruit machines weren’t overly popular), the 20p rate was often reserved for either new games or the real “big name” games. Naturally this game went straight in at the 20p rate, however most of them were immediately set to 1 life per credit. As time went by and 30p rates started to appear, these were often upped to 2 or 3 lives with it. Of course, there were arcades in Newquay that proudly advertised “All Video Games 10p per play”, GUARANTEED these were set to 1 life only. As usual, there were the bonus credits, so sticking 50p in the machines set to 20p play would get you 3 lives, and a quid would get you 7, from that point of view it wasn’t TOO bad for value.

Right, onto the game, then… By the hell, it was good. The graphics were absolutely outstanding, the sound and music superb, and with sampled speech too? Awesome.

Naturally, the main part of the game was a standard side-scrolling beat ‘em-up, and each player took one the role of one of the Turtles. Each had their strengths and weaknesses; Leonardo and Michaelangelo had the strongest attacks with a medium range, Donatello had weaker attacks, but his bo staff had the longest range, all three used the “Jumping swing” as their special attack (often a one hit kill, activated by pressing “Jump” and “Attack” simultaneously). However, Raphael was slightly different. On foot his attacks were very fast, but had the shortest range (Bringing Sai to a gunfight? D’oh!), but his special was far better than the rest, he would roll and do a sliding kick. Whilst it didn’t often get a one-hit kill, it was very useful for scattering the enemy when things start getting very hectic (the boss fight against Baxter Stockman and the Mousers in particular is a fine example).

The most common enemies were the Foot Clan. All robotic, the colour of their uniform gave you an idea of how they were likely to attack. Many carried no weapon, others carried boomerangs, swords, guns, spears, or even drain covers. With good references to the cartoons, other enemies included the “Capture” robots (the ones with the lassos that capture the Rhino and Warthog to make Rocksteady & Bebop), Mousers, Rocksteady & Bebop, Baxter Stockman, Krang, Shredder and Krang’s Rock Soldiers from Dimension X.

Tactically the game was mainly about timing your attacks to get the first hit in. Most of the time, getting the first hit was key to winning a one-on-one fight, but there are a few exceptions. Bosses can’t just be duffed up, you need to get a few hits in and then move away as they WILL counter, and then go in to hit them again for a knockdown.

Like a lot of beat ‘em-ups, there were some moments of extreme frustration. The battle with Shredder, for instance… As well as his sword, he also carries a mutagen ray, which will turn you back into a regular turtle on contact, immediately losing you a life. Yes, that’s right, one hit from that weapon could effectively cost you 20p to continue right there and then.

In terms of backdrops and scenarios, all recognisable areas from the cartoons are present, including April O’Neill’s apartment, the Sewers and the Technodrome. But there’s one feature I haven’t really talked about yet, which adds so much to the whole experience.

The sound. The wonderful, wonderful sound. It’s awesome. From the excellent music throughout to the sampled speech and awesome 90’s-style effects used in battle, the game simply oozed awesomeness in every clang, crash and kaboom. In fact, once again, thanks to Galbaldia Hotel, I’ve downloaded the soundtrack and it goes very nicely in the car.

I know I mentioned the huge 4 player cabinet, but there was also a 2-player version where you could choose your Turtle, but for obvious reasons that was never going to be as good as the full 4-player experience.

The game was followed up by at least one sequel, and another version hit the arcades as part of Nintendo’s multi-choice time-limited games system, but apart from the almost identical clone, The Simpsons, not much came close to the success of the original TMNT arcade game. Turtle Power!