The Duo-Ver: Software Sampler

Since I promised you earlier, here are brief reviews of a random assortment of TurboDuo titles.  Some of these games I enjoyed, and others not as much, but they're all worth mentioning here!

GATE OF THUNDER

Even the explosions explode in Gate of Thunder.

It’s a little easy and a little generic, but it’s hard not to love this side-scrolling shooter, offered as the star attraction of the game-packed disc included with the TurboDuo.  You’re the pilot of the Hunting Dog, a sleek police ship, and it’s your mission to bring down Don Jingi and his seemingly limitless rebel forces.  Luckily, you’ll never be at a loss for weapons thanks to Wildcat, the cargo ship that frequently drops shields, homing missiles, and power-ups.  In fact, Wildcat is a little TOO generous, maxing out your firepower in minutes, then sweeping the playfield of enemies with each new visit.  Gate of Thunder may not be a challenging game, but it is a feast for the eyes and ears… your foes leave a trail of flames as they crash to the ground, bosses fill the screen with firepower and their own mass, and the synth-infused soundtrack is catchy and invigorating.  The end result is a game that wouldn’t have been out of place on the more advanced Sega Saturn or Playstation.

YS IV: DAWN OF YS

Er, yeah.  Thanks a lump, pal!

A little disclosure before I begin… I supplied three voices for the recent English fan dub of the game.  It seemed as good a way as any to achieve video game immortality!  With that out of the way, let’s talk about my complicated relationship with the Ys series.  I first played Ys on a Master System emulator in 1996, and found the combat system simplistic to the extreme and wholly unbecoming of an action RPG.  Despite this, I just couldn't stop playing... I was spellbound by the attractive graphics and charming characters.  That tradition continues with Ys IV, which throws enough twists into its beautifully illustrated story to keep you hooked for hours.  I still don’t like rubbing my crotch against monsters to slay them, but it’s easier to accept if you think of this as an ordinary RPG with really efficient combat, instead of the Zelda-esque action-adventure it first appears to be.

DRACULA X: RONDO OF BLOOD

Singing at bats is actually more effective than you'd
think! Maybe it screws up their echolocation...

The last of the classic arcade-style Castlevania games is also the best… and curiously, the only one not released in the United States, where Castlevania reigns supreme.  (Before you ask, the watered down Super NES game most certainly does NOT count.)  It’s especially frustrating in hindsight, as Symphony of the Night was designed as both a sequel and a love letter to a chapter of the series most Americans never knew existed.  So what’s so great about Rondo of Blood, anyway?  Well, the CD-quality soundtrack, full of tunes that would later find their way into Symphony of the Night, is definitely a plus.  However, there’s also the sharp graphics, lush with detail and rich with color, and the stage designs, with their cleverly hidden forks in the road.  Revealing one of these alternate paths unlocks the option to play as Maria, a frilly beastmaster who’s just a few steps behind Marvel vs. Street Fighter’s Norimaru as the most hilariously incongruent bonus character in a video game.

THE ART OF FIGHTING

"This is the greatest game EVER!" -
Every fourteen year old boy in 1992.

The Art of Fighting was one of a handful of story-driven Neo-Geo games offered as a response to Street Fighter II.  They didn’t have the nuanced technique or sure-footed control of Capcom’s smash hit, but damn if they didn’t make a strong first impression with their gripping plots and astonishing graphics!  The Art of Fighting took it to the next level with beefy brawlers whose faces bear the scars of combat and special moves which let out the resonant ring of a gong on impact.  The TurboDuo leaves no stone unturned in its conversion, and even tries to reproduce the zooming camera from the Neo-Geo game.  Without hardware scaling, the effect leaves something to be desired, but at least they tried!  It’s not the best fighting game on the TurboDuo, but The Art of Fighting smokes the decidedly less impressive conversions on the Super NES and Genesis.

FORGOTTEN WORLDS

"You cannot defeat me with gaping sphincters alone!"

Here’s a fun little anecdote for those interested… Forgotten Worlds was the game that cemented my decision to buy a Sega Genesis back in 1991.  I still stand by that decision, but if I had seen the TurboDuo version first, that Genesis would likely have stayed at the store.  It pains me to say this, but Forgotten Worlds on the TurboDuo towers above its Genesis counterpart as the best home port of this stylish shooter.  You lose the option to play with a friend (the system DOES only have one controller port, after all), but you get brighter colors, larger sprites, all the (embarrassing in retrospect) voice acting, and the top-notch arranged soundtrack you’d expect from a TurboDuo game.  For a hermit like me, that’s more than a fair trade.

SHOCKMAN III

Don't let the picture give you the wrong idea.
It's really, really not as cool as it looks.

This franchise didn’t get much traction in America, with only one game officially released here in the States.  After playing this, though, I’m thinking that may have been for the best.  Kaizo Chojin Schbibinman (a Japanese title which takes a strange turn for the Yiddish about halfway through) casts you as a sword-wielding cyborg, cutting his (or her!) way through hundreds of robot thugs.  The action is distressingly low on technique, with a sword swipe being your only means of attack, and the level design doesn't get interesting until later in the game… if you can stay awake that long.  The graphics in Kaizo Chojin Schmendrick or whatever are up to the TurboDuo’s usual high standards, with lots of color-drenched, futuristic scenery, but there’s little variety to be found… and little reason to spend much time with it.

MARTIAL CHAMPION

Hey Goldar, why the long face? (And the Andy Rooney
eyebrows? And the crappy gameplay?)

A Sega Saturn it’s not, but the TurboDuo has its fair share of solid fighting games.  Street Fighter II’: Championship Edition!  Fatal Fury Special!  World Heroes II!  And then there’s Martial Champion, which doesn’t belong anywhere on that list.  Originally planned as a sequel to the groundbreaking Yie-Ar Kung Fu, Martial Champion juiced up that game’s graphics while barely evolving its prehistoric gameplay.  The TurboDuo version preserves everything you didn’t like about the arcade game while throwing out its sole saving grace, the massive characters.  Instead, you get shrimpy fighters that would barely cut the mustard on the GameBoy Advance.  Martial Champions is one of the few TurboDuo fighters on a disc that doesn’t require the performance-boosting Arcade Card… and believe me, it shows.

STRIDER HIRYU

Leapin' larvae!

The troubled history of Strider on the TurboDuo is the stuff of legends… and myths.  This much is true… the game took years to finish, and its development was shifted away from the SuperGrafx after NEC realized that nobody owned one.  However, that rumor you heard about the despondent game designer who killed himself over the finished product?  Total bunk.  You’ll understand how the rumor gained so much traction when you play this, though.  Strip away the slick cut scenes and the voice acting and that extra round and it’s clear that the game is a step below its Genesis counterpart.  The character sprites are kind of fugly, the control isn’t nearly as responsive, and everything explodes into garish yellow clouds.  Beyond all that, the new stage is pretty contrived; a flat stretch of desert broken up with encounters against a tank and the world’s most athletic ant lion.  Should a wingless, bottom-heavy insect really be able to leap out of the ground like Shamu after a chunk of tuna on a stick?  Admittedly, that doesn’t make any less sense than a game that took three years to make being worse than its cartridge-bound Genesis counterpart.

The Duo-ver: A Second Shot at the TurboDuo

First, a little background. In those bygone days we call the early 1990s, Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Friends was the most popular show on television, and compact discs were making their first timid steps toward becoming the video game industry's preferred storage format. I wasn't on board with any of these things. I reacted to the Sega CD with frustration and disgust, and laughed off the TurboDuo as NEC's last desperate grasp at relevancy in a market dominated by the Sega Genesis and the freshly released Super NES.

"Bah, they're just overpriced gadgets that'll drive a wedge in the market!," I told myself... and on that point, I was right. "It's not like they're using much of that space on the disc anyway... it's just a dumping ground for grainy full-motion video!" I was pretty much right about that, too. "Someday we might need compact discs, but only for a truly revolutionary game console... like the 3DO!" Okay, so I blew it with that observation, but my skepticism about these add-ons was nevertheless justified. There had to be some reason Nintendo passed on a CD-ROM drive for its Super NES...

The more compact second model
of the Sega CD. Same grainy quasi-
games, now in a smaller size!

However, hindsight (along with emulation, and the fact that the price of a Sega CD has fallen off a cliff in the past twenty years) has revealed something to me; something that had been obscured by all the red I saw after console manufacturers expected me to buy an upgrade for a system I just purchased. Sure, these early CD-ROM systems were loaded with regurgitations of games you already bought on cartridge, cartoons fiendishly disguised as video games, and those weird novelties where Phil LaMarr stitched together music videos to vex an evil, uh, Phil LaMarr. However, if you were willing to dig through this mountain of instantly dated detritus, you could find gold in them thar hills!

There was a handful of worthwhile titles on the Sega CD; games that took advantage of both the capacity of the CD-ROM format and the handy features not available on a bare-bones Genesis. There are plenty of gamers who still swear by Sonic CD, even with its tricky time travel play mechanics, and Final Fight CD is likely to go down in gaming history as one of the best conversions of Capcom's jaw-dropping beat 'em up. Then there's Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side, a fighting game that's almost as ambitious as it is bloody (and boy is it ever ambitious!), Konami's interactive comic Snatcher, and several GameArts RPGs that helped fill a gaping hole in the library of the standard Sega Genesis.

The TurboDuo came with Ys Books I &  II, Bonk's Adventure,
Bonk's Revenge, Gate of Thunder, Bomberman, a HuCard
game, and a signed naked photo of Jonathan "Johnny Turbo"
Brandstetter. TTi Technologies was really eager to move
these things in 1993...

There were a few diamonds in the Sega CD's rough, but it was the TurboDuo that sparkled most brightly. The system wasn't as advanced as the Sega CD; essentially a CD player with extra RAM. However, support for the TurboDuo was stronger, with twice the available games. Gamers eagerly accepted it as the next generation of the TurboGrafx, because the CD-ROM format was a necessary step up from the cramped confines of HuCards. R-Type, a game that had to be split into two cards when the TurboGrafx first launched in Japan, could easily fit on a CD, with plenty of room left over for animated cut scenes and a soundtrack spun right off the disc.

TurboDuo games also had their own unique style, which was a world apart from what the Sega CD had to offer. In keeping with TurboGrafx tradition, software for the TurboDuo was unmistakably Japanese, with candy colors, saucer-eyed heroes, and frantic gameplay. This was in stark contrast to the Sega CD's library, which suffered from the anemic color palette of the Genesis (the only shortcoming the add-on didn't address) and either dialed down the action or put it well out of the player's reach. Full-motion video games were distressingly common on the Sega CD; on the TurboDuo, they were far more the exception than the rule.

The legendary Arcade Card,
with a whopping two mega-
bytes of RAM! (Trust me,
that was a lot for a game
system back in the day.)

The only problem is that TurboDuo games were also hard to come by for Americans. Before the Saturn made importing cool (or just necessary... thanks, Bernie), the few gamers who took up arms with the TurboDuo in the 16-bit console wars had to purchase Japanese games from mail order stores. The most extravagant of these titles demanded the Arcade Card, which significantly boosted the system's RAM while emptying the wallets of TurboDuo owners. (It's never easy backing the underdog in a console generation, is it?)

I consider myself a gaming historian, but the TurboDuo is one of those blind spots in my knowledge of the industry... I was fiercely loyal to the Sega Genesis as a teenager, and never owned a Turbo anything until years after the system was taken off the market. (If you ever saw those idiotic Johnny Turbo ads in GamePro, you'd understand why.) While I'm not proud that this gap exists, it does give me a rare opportunity to relive the past, playing all this great software as if it had just hit store shelves. And that's exactly what I've been doing over the past week. I'll cover some of the standouts of the TurboDuo library in future updates of this blog, so stay tuned!

Pretty, Dull: The Ballad of Altered Beast

A typical scene from Altered Beast.  Not shown: Boredom.

Altered Beast is something of a mystery in hindsight.  It’s hard to understand what anyone could have seen in this sluggish action game, mindless even by the low-brow standards of late ‘80s beat ‘em ups.  It’s even more puzzling that Sega released Altered Beast for a half-dozen home game consoles, and offered it as the pack-in for the Sega Genesis when that system first launched in 1989. The only thing about Altered Beast that won’t come as a surprise is that Sega offered a free Genesis game through the mail as a peace offering to players who spent a whopping ten minutes finishing their first.

Take that, weird-looking Golden Axe steed!

So, what was the appeal of a game like Altered Beast?  I didn’t get it even as a teenager, but my brother was drawn to the graphics, which were not only advanced from a technical standpoint but imaginative, surreal, and even a little haunting.  Serpents burst forth from the ground, zombies fall apart with the pieces leaping toward the camera, and weird creatures nip at your heels as you fight to rescue Zeus’ daughter from the nefarious necromancer Neff.  It was a macabre spectacle that would have no rival until the release of another beastly action title, the brilliantly illustrated Shadow of the Beast.

Past the window dressing, Altered Beast is a bare bones beat ‘em up, not far removed from its more contemporary cousin Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja.  The armies of the dead and an assortment of mythological beasts are barfed out of the right side of the screen, and you dispatch them with punches and kicks.  The stages are occasionally sprinkled with pits, but they’re more effective at robbing the player of quarters than breaking up the monotony of the flat level designs.

On your journey, you’ll sometimes cross paths with packs of Cerberuses... or is it Cerberi?  Anyway, you’ll find sparkling white hellhounds hiding in their midst, leading to the game’s hook.  If you can sink a fist into one of these beasts before it finds sanctuary at the edge of the screen, it curls up into a shining blue ball of energy.  Catch the orb as it snakes its way upward and your hero gets a welcome boost of strength, bulking up his muscles while adding similar heft to his attacks.

A-rooooooo-ken!

Oh, but I haven’t gotten to the best part!  Grab three energy balls and things take a turn for the furry, with your resurrected soldier taking one of five super-powered animal forms.  You’ll be hurling hadoukens as a werewolf in the graveyard, soaring above the swamp as a lightning-powered dragon, and turning cave dwelling creatures into stone statues with your deadly… bear breath.  I’m not sure I follow the logic of this one, but the look of agony etched on the faces of your petrified victims (and the sadistic joy of shattering them afterward) makes it worth the suspension of disbelief.

Snatching all three orbs also brings the stage to a merciful end, and prompts a showdown with Neff.  The sneering villain, looking very much like Robert Englund in his Nightmare on Elm Street prime, transforms into a screen-filling monster in a last-ditch effort to send your hero back to his grave.  You can see the strain on the art staff as the game progresses… while Neff’s first form, a tower of rotting human debris with bones and skulls buried in its foundation, ranks up there with R-Type’s Doppleganger as one of gaming’s most visually stunning bosses, things quickly go south from there.  Your next fight is with a watermelon packed with eyeballs.  A few stages later, you challenge a plump crocodile with a glowing belly, which looks like a Care Bear Cousin that didn’t make it past focus testing.  It’s like the boredom that swiftly sets in when you play this game eventually got to the designers themselves.

Beer would have been really helpful for this review,

I'll tell you that.

So there you have it.  Altered Beast looked great for the time, but its scrawny ass couldn’t cash the enormous check its graphics had written.  It didn’t make much of an impact on the gaming culture, either.  Sure, you’ll find occasional relics like myself who still remember Zeus’ distorted cry of “Rise from your grave!” from the Genesis version of the game.  However, when Sonic the Hedgehog finally came to America, Sega wasted no time making it the Genesis pack-in, swapping out Altered Beast with such mindboggling speed that it would have left even their spiny blue mascot slack-jawed.  There have been a couple of half-hearted attempts to revive the Altered Beast franchise in the 21^st century, including a wrongheaded Game Boy Advance remake with grotesque-for-all-the-wrong-reasons rendered graphics, and a loose Playstation 2 sequel with ball-squeezin’ action.  Lately though, Sega has been content to leave the series in its grave … and even Zeus himself would find it tough to argue with that decision.

The Abominable Dr. Chaos (or, "Goonies Did It, Goonies Did It!")

I’ve always had a morbid fascination with the work of Pony Canyon, the Japanese music label that took a brief detour into video game publishing.  With the aid of shady programming teams like Atelier Double, Marionette, and the dreaded Micronics, Pony Canyon was responsible for some of the most heinous NES titles to bear Nintendo’s seal of approval.  Who could forget the stiff sports spectacle that was Winter Games?  Or Super Pitfall, the wrongheaded sequel that made its ancient 2600 predecessor look state of the art?  Or Hydlide, the tedious, massively ugly adventure game that was instantly antiquated by The Legend of Zelda… yet was released three years later in the United States?

Dripping blood in an NES game?
Well, that's a plus. I guess.

I know I can’t!  Those wretched games were etched into my brain like a dirty word on the top of a middle school desk, and Dr. Chaos made the deepest, most jagged cut.  The game was released in response to the growing popularity of the action-adventure genre first made popular by Metroid, and was most similar to Konami’s The Goonies II, down to the close-quarters combat and the rather irritating first-person scenes separating one area from the next.  However, while The Goonies II leaned toward the comical, with its characters and setting lifted from the quirky Warner Bros. movie, Dr. Chaos took a darker turn, set in a creepy mansion teeming with man’s greatest crimes against God and nature.

(I mean, aside from other Pony Canyon games.)

You are Michael Chaos, and your mission is to tear your scientist sibling Ginn from the madness he’s created.  Your only weapon when you step through the front door of this house of horrors is a dagger. It’s better than the crappy rocks you were given to fight serial killer Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13^th, but after getting nipped by the mice skittering around the floor for the millionth time, you’ll wish Michael had the foresight to bring along a nice shoulder-mounted bazooka or that awesome spread gun from Contra.  (Let’s face it, what game WOULDN’T be better with one of those?)

Look out, it's the reanimated corpse of
Thurston Howell! And he's got zom-boobs!

Alas, he’ll have to find his weapons of mass destruction in the first-person scenes, triggered by walking through one of the mansion’s many doors.  In keeping with NES tradition, the 3D in these scenes is awful, with plainly adorned rooms and movement restricted to ninety degree turns.  However, they’re the only place you’ll find the pistols, machine guns, and grenades you’ll need to have a shot at survival.  They’re also the gateway to the zones; long, linear gauntlets with lots of freaky monsters in the middle and an especially dangerous (if especially dumb) boss at the end.

Completing a zone gives you a piece of the game’s ultimate weapon, a wave cannon which you’ll use to put an end to the puzzling final boss.  Actually, all of them are pretty damned strange… you’ll tangle with everything from a stampeding pillbug to a ghost with a weight problem, keeping one hand on the controller while using the other to scratch your head in bewilderment.  However, Canbarrion is the star attraction in this freak show; a bobble-headed lion with a flaming mane.  Sadly, for all his potential as a savage death-dealer, he doesn’t really do anything.  No, Canbarrion is quite content to perch on his ledge, belching fireballs and disappointing players who expected the game to reward them after sitting through three hours of its often frustrating and unwaveringly creepy crap.

The least threatening lion since those guys
who sang "When the Children Cry."

So the game is a pass for NES fans, and I probably could have saved both of us a lot of time if I had put that in the first paragraph.  However, there’s something strangely compelling about Dr. Chaos, in spite of its flat, repetitive backgrounds, the Gordian-knotted pathways to each zone, and the shrill eleventh note you’ll dread hearing each time you open a door back to the interior of the mansion.  For all its flaws, the game seems like a more streamlined package than The Goonies II, which was stuffed with nearly twenty items and even more labyrinthine levels.  (Sometimes less is more, especially when there’s less to confuse you.)  Also, for those of you into that kind of thing, it’s one of the few NES titles that’s genuinely scary, with character designs straight out of your nightmares and nasty surprises hidden in some of those 3D rooms.  You’ll open a cabinet expecting to find a health potion inside, only to have a horrifying imp jump into your now-wet lap.

I guess Dr. Chaos was good for something after all, even if it was just a diuretic.

UnMAMEd: Ballarena by Fisteme

Over fifteen years after its debut, it's gotten very hard to find an arcade game that's not supported by MAME.  Even pinball machines and mechanical devices have not escaped the notice of this exhaustively comprehensive emulator.  However, there's one game that's been on the edge of my mind for years, that I've never seen among the thousands of titles MAME runs.  That game is Ballarena by Fisteme.

Ballarena hasn't just been elusive to MAME... it's impossible to find anywhere!  I've never seen this French-designed coin-op in any arcade, and can't even find a reference to it online.  Looking up "Ballarena Fisteme" on Google just brings up cringeworthy sex acts involving clenched hands and dainty dancers... and if you think I'm kidding, I dare you to try it yourself!

I know Ballarena exists, though, because it was featured in an issue of Video Games and Computer Entertainment, printed exactly twenty two years ago.  Here's a snapshot of the page in question... if you're having trouble reading it, stick around for the Cliff Notes.

 

In his column "Destination Arcadia," VG+CE contributor Donn Nauert describes the game as "a strange mixture of Arkanoid and Galaga."  (Judging from the way the paddle spins along an axis, I think he meant to say "Arkanoid and Gyruss," but that's just splitting hairs.)  Nauert explains that the game is played with a dial, just like Arkanoid, and features a fire button for releasing the ball and firing lasers... uh, just like Arkanoid.  There are ninety-nine stages and sixty-four patterns (suggesting that some patterns are repeated over the course of the game), with the occasional Gyruss-like challenge stage thrown into the mix to keep the action lively.

Aside from the merger of two vastly different genres, what strikes me as most interesting about Ballarena is its use of pre-rendered graphics.  It wouldn't be the first time it was attempted in an arcade game- I think that honor goes to Pac-Mania, or Cube Quest if you actually consider those glorified laserdisc movies to be games- but it was nevertheless a surprise back in 1990, when we were still listening to cassette tapes and watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire on our stone television sets.  The graphics are a bit grainy and the game has the overall presentation of a European shareware game for the Amiga, but I'd still love to see what surprises it has in store in the later stages.

The only question is, will that ever happen?  Nauert asserts that the game was released in the United States, but its complete lack of presence on the internet gives me the impression that Ballarena never made it out of its native France... and may never have been released in arcades there.  Half of me wants to finally end the mystery surrounding this game and play it after two decades of going without... but the other half would prefer that this vaporware be lost to the mists of time forever, just to keep that mystery alive.  After all, these games are rarely as good as your imagination would lead you to believe...

The Night's All Right For Fighting

They say hunger is the best spice, and nobody knew this better than early adopters of the Sega Genesis. Before the system was openly embraced by third party developers in 1992, owners of the machine had to get by with Sega's arcade translations, as well as shaky knock-offs of the games they loved on other systems. DJ Boy may not have been fit to wipe the blood from Final Fight's brass knuckles, and Fighting Masters may have had one tenth the technique of Street Fighter II, but even rough approximations of those arcade hits were enough to sate our appetites during the Genesis's lean years.

And so it goes with Midnight Resistance, originally released in arcades by Data East. With its faceless heroes, heavy artillery, and a brutal difficulty level, it was clear the company wanted a taste of the success Konami had with the Contra series.  There are a half dozen reasons that Midnight Resistance falls short of its inspiration, but Genesis owners long starved of a good run 'n gun shooter sure weren't complaining.

Johnny come lately... but not lightly armed.

If nothing else, at least the story gets points for originality. When a brilliant chemist discovers the formula for breaking drug addictions, he and his family are kidnapped by a drug trafficker and his army of masked, white-eyed zombies. He didn't get everyone, though!  As the chemist's grandson and a decorated war hero, you must infiltrate the heavily armed compound of the sinister Crimson King and free your family from his clutches.  And oh yeah, while you're in there, it probably wouldn't hurt to plant a combat boot in his big red ass.

The gameplay in Midnight Resistance closely follows the Contra template, with your hero aiming his gun in eight different directions and marching to a confrontation with an enormous, bullet-sponging boss.  There's some light platforming, but the jump button is mostly reserved for dodging the many bullets thrown your way.  All this should be familiar territory to old-school gamers, but Midnight Resistance parts ways with Contra in the way it awards new weapons.  There are no power ups within the stages themselves... they're held in lockers at the end of each round, and you've got to unlock them with keys held by the Crimson King's elite red soldiers.

It doesn't sound like much of a distinction, but it's a more profound change than you'd expect. There will never be a power-up capsule to save your skin in a tight situation, forcing you to struggle to the end of the stage for your salvation. On the plus side, the weapons (both standard-issue firearms and back-mounted missiles) don't vanish when you've been killed in action... you merely drop them, along with any keys you've collected.  You're free to scoop them back up with your next life and use them until they run out of ammo... or fall off the edge of the screen, if you're unlucky.

The arcade version of Midnight Resistance paired the soldier with an eager young sidekick, who can still be seen in the opening of the Genesis version.  Unfortunately, the limitations of the Genesis hardware meant that Junior had to be left behind for this mission.  In all fairness, there is a lot of onscreen activity here, far more than there was in the NES Contra games, and an attempt to shoehorn in a second player would likely have turned the game into a flickery, slowdown-ridden mess.  Nevertheless, it's one of those omissions that will be deeply felt... especially by your friend, who will be forced to twiddle his thumbs while you're having all the fun.

Johnny fights the Blue Angels in one of the
game's best moments. It's just too ridiculous
NOT to be awesome!

The two player action is likely the only thing you'll miss from the arcade game.  Not that there aren't other details missing, but they're largely inconsequential... even better left out in some cases.  The drill sergeant who barks out the names of the weapons as you collect them and the sickly moans of your family as they're rescued recall an age where developers were eager to put voice in their games, but not overly concerned with the quality of the acting. The knob stick's not missed, either... wrenching that stubborn dial into place to adjust your aim was always a bit of a kludge, and it rarely translates well to MAME.  The Genesis port of Midnight Resistance replaces it with a clever strafing system that lets you aim your gun in the direction you point the joystick, then lock it into place by holding down a button.  Firing is automatic and can be toggled on and off by tapping the A button... not that you'll get many chances to stop!

You couldn't call it arcade perfect, but in all the places that count, Midnight Resistance on the Genesis trails just a step behind the original. It looks like the real thing, and it sounds even better, with a remastered soundtrack that brings even more dramatic tension to boss fights. That's in sharp contrast to the ZX Spectrum game, which comes off as a jaundiced parody. (And yet it's regarded as one of the best games on the system, which speaks volumes about not only the machine's inadequacies but the desperation of British youth to play something, anything, that resembled a video game. I'd say Genesis owners feeling the pinch of Nintendo's exclusive licensing agreements had it pretty good by comparison! But, er, I digress.)

The only issues with Midnight Resistance can be traced directly back to the arcade game.  The level designs lean toward the lazy, with your hero marching right for half the stage, then taking a ladder or lift to a fight against some cast-off vehicle from the 1980s G.I. Joe toy line.  One stage is a long vertical shaft filled with drop away floors.  When each floor gives way, you're dropped into a battle against a dozen of the Crimson King's soldiers, then a cluster of gears.  The cycle repeats until the game realizes you're sick of its crap, then gives you a scrap of plot exposition as a peace offering.  Yes yes, Midnight Resistance, all is forgiven.  Just don't let it happen again!

...and proper grammar too, apparently.

It all culminates in one of the dopiest final stages in gaming history. Your soldier races across a field of ribcage-bound organs, only to be stopped by a wall of... King Crimson album covers.  When you're seventeen, the reference flies over your head with ten feet to spare. Twenty years later, when your taste in music has evolved from Estefan, Loc, and Paula to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, all those mugging scarlet faces are impossible to take seriously. The confrontation against the Crimson King, who starts out as a giant fleshy skull in a hockey mask and is eventually reduced to a jet-propelled brain ("the big brain am winning again!  Now I will leave this game for no raisin!"), is less absurd, but only compared to what had come before it.

The ridiculousness of Midnight Resistance feels like a product of hapless confusion, unlike Gunstar Heroes, which was unrelentingly bizarre but always had a method to its madness. That being said, I had a lot more fun with this heavily Contra-inspired game than Hard Corps, the official Contra for the Sega Genesis. Sure, it was a much flashier game than Midnight Resistance- the four year gap between their releases practically guaranteed it- but it was just too full of that focus-tested, artificially sweetened extremeness synonymous with the 1990s. If Midnight Resistance was a victim of its own creative indecision, Contra: Hard Corps suffers from knowing exactly what it wants... and having the bad taste to pursue it.

Com-piling it on

Let's talk Compile!  A recent high score contest at AtariAge helped reignite my love for the sadly defunct developer, responsible for some of the most incredible shooters from the 1980s and 1990s.  You may not be familiar with the name, but if you ever spent long, white-knuckled hours struggling to survive in Zanac, MUSHA, or Space Megaforce, you already have an appreciation for their work.

Most of their software follows this template, with occasional deviations.  You're a small ship, fighting the seemingly endless forces of some shadowy evil.  It could be a rogue artificial intelligence, or a bunch of mutant plants turning the world's populace into zombies, or medieval Japanese robots.  Whatever it is, you'll be blowing it to bits with a laser cannon and your choice of eight sidearms.  The laser cannon starts out pretty wimpy, but can be boosted to respectable levels by collecting P-chips held by tiny delivery ships.  However, the secondary weapons are the star attraction, giving your aircraft the power to carve its way through the walls of bullet-spitting foes.  Each weapon is marked with a number and offers its own distinct strategic advantage.  One might give you a rotating shield that soaks up most (but not all!) of the shots thrown your way, while another could arm you with lasers that snake their way up the screen, scorching everything they touch... while leaving your ship vulnerable to attack from behind.  Each weapon is tailored to a different style of gameplay, ensuring that the game is customized for the player before it even leaves the box!

Granted, Compile isn't just known for this successful formula... in fact, it's probably better known for the Puyo Puyo series, which was hugely popular in Japan and shoehorned into a half-dozen unrelated franchises here in the United States.  However, I'll always have the most respect for their line of shooters, which were always comfortably familiar and consistently excellent.

Well, almost always.  I only remember Compile dropping the ball with their shooters twice, and both times it was because they parted ways with the Zanac formula that had served the company so well in the late 1980s.  The first game was A.E., recently released for the ColecoVision as Anti-Environmental Force.  Designed by Compile back when it called itself Programmers-3, A.E. combined the mesmerizing enemy patterns of Galaga with explosive rockets.  You held down a button to fire one of these missiles, then released it to detonate the warhead and hopefully catch a flock of flying stingrays in the explosion.  It was a clever idea in theory, but in practice, it forced the player to plan way too far in advance to take out the cartilaginous fish. If you hadn't memorized the extravagant enemy patterns, you were going to spend a lot of time shaking your fist impotently at the stingrays as they sailed off into the distance.

Then there was Guardic.  I was excited beyond belief when I discovered that there was a prequel to the NES favorite The Guardian Legend, but that was only until after I spent some time with it.  The big issue with Guardic is that it's a shell game.  It presents itself as a deep action-adventure title, with weapon customization before each stage and long, maze-like pathways, but you don't get enough of the in-game currency to keep yourself well armed for more than a few stages, and nothing really happens in the corridors... they're just a brief distraction before the next cramped stage filled with mindless, hyperactive enemies.  Speaking of the stages, they're often filled with impenetrable barricades, blocking your bullets while leaving your opponent's own small flickery shots intact.  The lead developer Pac Fujishima went on to start his own company, FUPAC... which will likely be your response to the man after you've played this.

However, it's easy to forgive these two duds when you weigh them against Compile's dozens of successes (all chronicled on Hardcore Gaming 101... you just gotta love that site!).  Break out your favorite emulator and spend some quality time with classics like The Guardian Legend, Power Strike, and Space Megaforce... you'll be glad you did.