One Lump or Two?

I was talking about one of Telenet Japan's games in an earlier post, and in light of that discussion, this feels worth mentioning. I was poking around the internet and found an article about the company on another blog, Videogames: Reflections of History. Telenet's been shuttered for thirteen years now, with most of its intellectual property migrating to Sunsoft, but while it was active, it was using this logo:

Uh, what. This looks less like a company logo and more like the end result of an altercation between Bugs Bunny and Italy's biggest cartoon star La Linea.

"Whaddaya MEAN 'abba shabba doobie?!' Thems FIGHTIN' words!"

(Yes, I watched a lot of The Great Space Coaster when I was a kid. I had to do something while waiting for the bus to arrive.)

Enough of that silliness. I wanted to mention that a Russian programmer has hacked Rock 'n Roll Racing for the Genesis, to not only get it up to speed with its Super NES counterpart, but to add a lot of content that neither game had. There are new tracks, new characters, and smarter AI, along with rotating planets in the character select screen (oooh!), six car races (aaah!), and the soundtrack peacefully co-existing with announcer Larry Huffman (wow!). If you've got a Sega CD, you can play real songs from Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Steppenwolf, rather than their grating Genesis covers. 

I've never been a Rock 'n Roll Racing fan, but you've nevertheless got to admire the dedication in reviving a game that hasn't seen an official release in over fifteen years. Here's a little footage of the hack in case you're interested.

And while we're at it, here's some footage of a PC remake of the Ghosts 'n Goblins game released for the Wonderswan!

It's ostensibly based on the Wonderswan game Makaimura, but it's more of a melange of the first three Ghosts 'n Goblins games, with new attacks, reactions from Arthur, and even a little voice work to round it all out. The game costs... whatever you want to pay, but the suggested donation is four Euros ($4.41). Thanks to Ed Mandy for mentioning the game on his Twitter page and adding a little, uh, flavor to my life.

A Little Something Extra

Getting bored with your Sega Genesis Mini? Not for long! Here's a handful of games you can add to the system to extend its replay value... it'll take maybe ten minutes using Project Lunar, and they all work fine with the the standard M2Engage emulator.

CHIKI CHIKI BOYS
Sega/Capcom

We're familiar with Chiki Chiki Boys now thanks to the Capcom Classics Collection games, but way back in 1993, the Genesis port of this obscure arcade title came as a big surprise. "Chiki what now? When did this come out? Who made this game, anyway? Capcom?! Why didn't I hear about this before?"

It's as tough as it is cute. And it's very cute.

What's even more surprising is that Chiki Chiki Boys on the Genesis is better than its arcade counterpart. It's been rebalanced for home play, so you can take more hits from enemies but you can't cheat death by dropping in more quarters. Here, you get one life and one continue... lose them both and it's game over. You can buy a continue to replace the one you've lost at the end of each stage, but the price goes up with every purchase, and the money you've spent is money you can't use on better swords and shields. Forget the cute, colorful graphics in Chiki Chiki Boys... you'd better get good in a hurry if you want to have any hope of finishing it.


Past that, it's the same game, a silly side-scrolling jaunt that borrows as much from the original Dragonball cartoon as it does past Capcom arcade titles. As a chubby warrior, you'll swat hairballs, lobsters, and animated peapods with your sword, scooping up the coins they leave behind and casting screen-clearing magic spells in times of distress. The action is kept simple and bosses lean toward the ridiculous, with a Dracula in boxer shorts being a highlight. The music is full of jubilant horns, adding to the game's optimism and peppy energy. Chiki Chiki Boys isn't long or complex, but it's fun the whole way through; the kind of game you might have rented on a whim in the 1990s and thought about keeping for a couple more days. B 

FROGGER
Majesco/Morning Star

This was the last officially licensed game released for the Genesis. "Too little, too late," you say? Hardly! This came at exactly the right time, the same year as the famous Seinfeld episode that paid tribute to the arcade game, and shortly before copyright issues took a hatchet to its soundtrack. Every home port of Frogger released since has had its music altered to keep the lawyers happy, and the game just isn't as fun without the original set of tunes.

It just feels right that Frogger was the last game
on Sega's most popular game system. I mean,
sure, we know it was a Konami game now...

That makes the Genesis version of Frogger by default the best one you can buy. It's not identical to the arcade game... the programmer who ported it wasn't good enough to reach the later levels, forcing him to make new patterns from scratch. However, if you're not earning six figure scores like George Costanza, you'll have to examine the game under a microscope to notice any differences. The attract mode which explains how to play is still there. The vibrant colors and tight, responsive control are still there. The sound effects, supplied by the Z80 processor which also powered the Frogger arcade game, are still there. If it doesn't hit the bullseye of arcade perfection, the Genesis version of Frogger is just a couple millimeters and a dorky new title screen away from it. B+

GAIN GROUND
Renovation/Sega

A personal anecdote, if you will. I learned to play chess at an early age, but I never learned to play it well. To truly master the game, you've got to plan your strategies well in advance. Moves that seem safe or even advantageous at the moment could lead to disaster five, ten, or even twenty moves later. Some people can see that far ahead, but alas, I don't have that gift.

It's just you against the world.
Sometimes literally.

Gain Ground borrows heavily from the mechanics of chess, while offering the immediacy of an action game, making it a gift for players like myself who admire the depth and variety of chess, but don't have the clairvoyance to actually play it. At the start of each stage, you're given a handful of time traveling soldiers, each armed with weapons from their respective eras. Some stages can be cleared by anyone, while others demand the skills of a specific character. A gunner is perfect for crowd control on a grassy plain, while the viking's high flying arrows are a must for picking off soldiers perched on castle walls.

Beating a stage requires you to either kill all onscreen enemies (and a few hidden off-screen, which surprise you at the worst possible moments) or lead all your soldiers to the top of the playfield, preferably after finding prisoners of war which add to your ranks. It's a refreshingly smart take on the top down military shooter, making it easy to overlook the dingy graphics and gameplay so unapologetically slow that it makes Ecco the Dolphin look like Sonic the Hedgehog. Stick with it... trust me, they're going somewhere with this. B-

SNOW BROS
Tengen/Toaplan

Simple as it may look on the surface, it's hard to make a game in the style of Bubble Bobble work. The success of this genre is entirely dependent on the strength of the title character's weapon... if it's versatile and fun to use, you're already three quarters of the way to a work of art. If it's boring and ineffective, congratulations, you've just made Super Methane Bros.

These Oscar the Grouch guys with the flames
are the worst.

Nothing's ever going to measure up to Bubble Bobble... even Taito's sequels weren't quite up to par. However, Snow Bros. comes mighty close. The weapon of choice in this faithful port of the Toaplan arcade game is a handful of snow. Keep throwing snow at a nearby enemy and they'll be packed into a snowball. Kick the snowball and it frantically bounces around the screen, bowling over any of the Muppet-like gremlins in its path. Send one snowball into another and they both go flying, doubling the destruction.

Knocking out foes earns you plates of sushi and strength boosting potions, but the satisfaction you get from taking out a crowd of goons with a well-planned kick is the biggest reward of all. Snow Bros. might not be up to the standards of Bubble Bobble, but with its candy-colored artwork and the two player gameplay that most arcade ports on the Genesis lack, it's a damn fine alternative and the best game of its kind you'll find on this system. A-

THE STEEL EMPIRE
Flying Edge/Hot-B

I'm the last person in the world who'd want to give Acclaim any, uh... acclaim. They made a lot of crap for the NES under their own label and their LJN subsidiary, and when they migrated to the Sega Genesis, they took all that crap with them. No, really, we don't want a Genesis version of Bart vs. the Space Mutants. We bought a Genesis to get away from your mountains of cartoon-licensed shovelware! 

The first stage starts with a tune that sounds
way too much like Airwolf to be a coincidence.

However, there was one time when Acclaim stumbled into the right idea. That's when they released The Steel Empire for the Genesis under their Flying Edge label. Sure, there were already tons of shooters for the system in 1992, but how many of those had a steampunk setting, with biplanes and zeppelins and flying fortresses that explode into ugly chunks of scrap metal? There are even newsreels at the start of each stage... they're hard to look at with all that flickering, but at least they show dedication. Hot-B is giving you a fantasy World War I that's cooler than the one we actually got, and by gum you're going to remember it!

The Steel Empire has some clever ideas, but it's also burdened with a lot of issues that makes it feel like it was built from the same rusty gears and springs as its improbable aircraft. The graphics are dim and grungy, with a layer of transparency in the second stage that must have looked nifty on a CRT twenty five years ago but is utterly horrendous on today's displays. The power up system prompts more confusion than excitement, with swirling badges that don't seem to do anything when you collect them. Then there's the slowdown... granted, there's a lot of action and some big, big ships in the later stages, but more work should have been done to keep this game running smoothly, especially on a 16-bit system. The game's supposed to take place in 1916, not 1986.


Having said all that, The Steel Empire is still very good. Not as good as the best shooters on the Genesis, but the bi-directional shooting which lets you defend your flank and a novel setting go a long way toward justifying its presence on the system. Plus it was released by Acclaim in the United States, which considering the rest of its library isn't so much novel as it is miraculous. B-

TODD'S ADVENTURES IN SLIME WORLD
Renovation/Micro World

Sometimes these jaws will just pop out of
nowhere and eat you. Hey, who needs a warning?

An unexpected port of the Atari Lynx launch title, Slime World is ugly, abrasive, infuriating, sluggish, clumsy... and those are its good points! What's bad about the game is that you may willingly subject yourself to all that punishment. For all its many, many flaws, Slime World will get its hooks in you with enormous, labyrinthine levels that just beg to be explored. You'll be swallowed whole by monsters you couldn't anticipate, struggle with an awkward menu system, and wince at the buzzer which blares whenever you're hit with droplets of slime, but you'll keep going, hoping that the next room leads to the exit and your freedom from this dreadful compulsion.

It's not good, is the take home here. Yet the obvious potential of a game like Slime World is what makes it all the more addicting. The concept of a space explorer fighting his way out of the bowels of a gooey planet with a Super Soaker is way ahead of its time, beating Splatoon to the punch by decades. Power-ups are well suited to the terrain, with filters that turn pools of slime into crystal clear water and mega bombs that clear an especially dangerous room of everything... including yourself, if you're dumb enough to stick around for the explosion. Finally, missions are incredibly long, with even the easiest one taking nearly ten minutes to beat. There's nothing else like Slime World on the Genesis... although honestly, maybe that's for the best. D+

VALIS III
Renovation/Telenet

What happens when you cross the girl-powered anime goodness of Sailor Moon with the tough platforming and on-the-fly character switching of Castlevania III? Regrettably, not as much as you might have hoped. Valis III hits the right notes visually, with cut scenes that border on gorgeous. The game was ported over from the Turbografx-CD, and while the voice acting is gone, most of the large, colorful still shots and even the animation has remained intact, to the credit of the design team. The quality artwork carries over into the game itself, with distinct run cycles for each character and parallax scrolling adding depth to the detailed backgrounds. 

What do you mean you don't know how to get
past this part? It says "sliding" right there on
the water tower! Can't you read Japanese?

Unfortunately, Telenet made a lot of questionable decisions that keep the gameplay from being as tantalizing as the visuals. The button layout is a confusing jumble... there's a slide, but instead of triggering it with down and the jump button as you'd expect, you've got to press down and the... character select button? You're regularly accosted by insectoid enemies, which are churned out from the sides of the screen and violently fling you backward on contact, sometimes into a pit. Magic spells are largely useless (in contrast to the handy axe and boomerang in Castlevania), and bosses sponge up all the damage you can send their way and more. If you had a nuclear missile to chuck at them, they'd laugh that off too.

Valis III may have been a necessary evil in 1991, but better side-scrolling action games would come to the system in the years since, and several of those come standard on the Genesis Mini. Just play Alisia Dragoon instead... it's right there. C-

Smell 'Ya Earlier

If you remember Punky Skunk (and you probably don't, since there was very little about this platformer worth remembering), you may have heard that the game was originally planned for the Super NES before it migrated to the Playstation. Thanks to the efforts of game preservationists Kelsey Lewin, Cauterize, and the ever diligent Frank Cifaldi, now we have that early version of the game, titled Cooly Skunk. You can download the game from Gaming Alexandria... however, it's tricky to get running on emulators, with ZSNES refusing it outright. If you just want to watch a little footage of Cooly Skunk in action, you can check it out here.

While the game was modestly improved on the Playstation, with more colorful, less tile-heavy backgrounds, it feels more at home on a previous generation console, where mascot platformers were all the rage. Also, it's worth noting that while you can only play the first three levels of the game, all the assets for Cooly Skunk are in the ROM, and it's conceivable that it could be hacked in the future to make it playable from start to finish. If you wanted that. I did mention there were a ton of games like this on the Super NES and Genesis, right?

Kamen Ground

You know how in The King of Fighters, members of the Ikari Warriors team have a lot of elaborate poses and attacks that don't seem to make sense for soldiers to use? There's a reason for that. Most of these are tributes to Japanese pop culture, particularly cartoons and tokusatsu, the spandex-clad superhero genre of shows which eventually spawned our own Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The Rebel Spark, where Leona thrusts a knife hand into her opponent and makes sparks fly out the other side, is actually a finishing blow from the Kamen Rider Black RX series. 

Hey, don't get mad at me! I didn't come up with this!
(image from Den of Geek)

It's easy for Americans to miss this detail, given the fact that the only exposure most of us have had to Kamen Rider was that lame Saban series from the 1990s where the title character was an alien descended from insects, with a Furby as a sidekick. The 1990s sure were, uh... something, weren't they? Special thanks to Reddit for catching this reference.

There's something else I should mention before I go. Now there are two ways to hack your Sega Genesis Mini... Project Lunar and a build of Hakchi tailored to the device. Owners of the system are already choosing sides, with some players preferring the hack that came first and others appreciating the additional features of Hakchi. Games that won't run on the default M2Engage emulator can on Hakchi by using PicoDrive instead. Rumor has it that the option to switch emulators will soon be added to Project Lunar, making the decision to choose between the exploits that much harder. Eh, I'll just stick with what I've already got... no sense in complicating things.

The Harder They Are, The Bigger You Fail

I've got some exciting news. Well, it's exciting to me, anyway! After repeatedly getting flattened by the final boss of Dead Cells, the Hand of the King, I finally took the creep down using this loadout:

At the start of this run, I noticed the game was being incredibly generous with its item drops. I was getting weapons and skills early on that normally wouldn't be available until the halfway point, leaving me a relatively easy path to the final showdown. There were a few slip-ups along the way... I got overwhelmed by the spider-like Hammers in the Prison Depths and lost my YOLO mutation to their endless swarm of Corpse Flies. Fortunately, I was able to swig down a health potion in the chaos and escaped to the next stage, where the enemies weren't nearly as relentless.

Ultimately, I claimed victory not only thanks to random chance, but the deliberate decision to concentrate my level-boosting scrolls on the Tactics attribute. That's the one which strengthens your traps, torture devices like crossbows and buzzsaws which let you do sustained damage to enemies from a safe distance. With the Tactics stat at level fifteen, ordinary monsters melted like butter, and even the King's right-hand man couldn't withstand my assault, falling after a couple of minutes. As you can tell from the image above, there was a synergy happening with my gear... the traps covered the ground in flames, while the weapons did extra damage while the Hand was burning. The Sinew Slicer caused bleeding, while the Double Crossb-o-matic salted the open wounds. Throw in a defensive bonus when I was standing near one of the traps, and the last boss didn't stand a chance.

Of course, I could play Dead Cells again at a higher difficulty level, but honestly? This was all the challenge I needed. In fact, it may have been a little more challenge than I wanted. I'll just pull myself away from the table before I get more than I can handle...

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Dead Cells

When I first saw the trailer for Dead Cells, with its title character getting crushed, stabbed, and splattered repeatedly on the way to a distant castle, only to respawn in a dungeon for another try, I didn't think I would like it. After downloading the game from Xbox Live Game Pass and being given the same rough treatment, I'm still not sure I should.

Objectively, Dead Cells is a good game. Hell, it's a great game, scratching that Symphony of the Night itch better than anything I've played since Dawn of Sorrow was released nearly fifteen years ago. Oh yes, I'm aware of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I've played it, I've beaten it, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But that was merely a copy of Symphony of the Night, with some of the assets shifted around a bit. Dead Cells takes inspiration from the later Castlevania games, but the combat is more kinetic, demanding that you be sneaky and light on your feet. You take a couple swipes at an enemy, roll away as they warm up their response, then run in for another couple of strikes, until they explode in a shower of blood and gems. Better yet, toss a trap near where they're standing and watch with perverse glee as they're set ablaze or filled with crossbow bolts. There are dozens of weapon types, and while not all of them are especially useful, they're all plenty imaginative. A personal favorite is the beam of electricity which hones in on enemies and turns pools of water into crackling death traps.

Welcome to Stilt Village, filled with such colorful
residents as cannon-wielding pirates and zombies
with a nest of carnivorous worms for a head.
(image from New Game Network)

Unfortunately, just as you begin to appreciate the spritely and ever so sadistic gameplay of Dead Cells, and admire its desolate backgrounds, with shafts of light peeking from behind trees and through prison bars, you're hit with the bitter aftertaste. Dead Cells isn't just a search action game in the style of Symphony of the Night... it's also a rogue-like, which means that every playthrough is randomized and any progress you make can be ripped out of your hands at the whim of the developers. If you lose a life in the first stage, it's right back to the start you go, with minimal health and a couple of crapsack weapons. If you make it halfway through and get blindsided by unfamiliar monsters and obstacles, it's right back to the start you go! If you reach the end of the game after two long hours and get dusted by the comically overpowered final boss in a couple of minutes, it's... yeah, you see where this is going.

You remember the scene in Groundhog Day where
Bill Murray gets sick of living the same day over
and over, so he invites a marmot to drive him
off the edge of a cliff? You'll not just remember
it after Dead Cells, you'll empathize.
(image from Lion's Roar)

In all fairness, some of the game's most hard-fought items can be kept forever, particularly the runes which open paths to new areas. These new stages, including a subterranean graveyard where straying too far from a source of light leads to profuse bleeding and certain death, keep Dead Cells from becoming too tedious. Nevertheless, it's hard to stick with a game like this, which feels like a Mobius strip made of sandpaper. It's rough all the way through, and after a while, you're not really sure if it ever ends.