SideArms

~ SIDEARMS ~

Radiance Software / Capcom

HuCard

1989

SideArms didn't make a good first impression on me. I was immediately put off by its drab visuals and impractical weapon-selection scheme (you must pause the action to choose a new gun to wield). Those issues certainly didn't dissolve when I finally bothered to delve deep into the game, but I discovered that it's actually a good, tough, fast-paced shooter in spite of them, a product far superior to the more widely lauded and fundamentally similar Spriggan mark2.

While its music is nice and its adversarial forces never let up, SideArms' trademark element is its alpha drone, a craft that connects to your power-armored warrior to produce a veritable machine of obliteration. As you soar about in combined form, your standard blasts will be accompanied by devastating eight-way spread shots. However, the added girth of the drone will make you twice as vulnerable to enemy fire.

Equip the shotgun and you won't feel so susceptible to attack, as its bullets can annihilate enemy-fired projectiles. It's by far the most useful of the five obtainable weapons, though the laser cannon can down most varieties of oncoming craft with just a single shot.

By offering a plethora of offensive options and sending out foemen in droves, SideArms redeemed itself with me after its inauspicious start. Still, there are a number of things I don't particularly like about it:

It's kind of ugly. The background colors look washed out, and there isn't a single impressive enemy to do battle with. The graphical shortcomings don't bug me much these days because I'm so focused on the action when I play, but they put me off back when I first tried the chip.

The bosses are pretty weak, and you're forced to face some of them numerous times. This particular ship definitely wears out its welcome by the end and is a pushover once you figure out which gun to use against it.

This wheel thing, too, is guilty of making gratuitous repeat appearances, and you can crush its dual-laser-firing form just by employing a simple trick (notice where the player is positioned in the screen cap).

It's cool that you can stock a number of different weapons, but having to pause the game to switch between them can be a real pain in the neck.

I usually don't support the employment of checkpoints, but this is one game that really needs them. As it is, after you die, you reappear at the spot of destruction with only a very brief period of invulnerability; and as your foes tend to swarm, it's easy to lose lots of lives in mere seconds. The fast, relentless, snake-like enemies are extremely dangerous in this regard. The solution, of course, is to practice to the point where you simply don't die, but the learning process can be more arduous and discouraging than it really needed to be because of the frequent occurrences of successive quick deaths.

The game maintains the long-standing TurboChip shooter tradition of horrible "endings."

Knight Rider Special

~ KNIGHT RIDER SPECIAL ~

Pack-in Video

HuCard

1989

I think there are two reasons this chip frequently gets ripped on: many people don't understand the control scheme and dismiss the title before figuring it out, and some are predisposed to hate the game because it's a Pack-in Video product.

KRS is very reminiscent of fellow "car-action" games Chase H.Q. and S.C.I. in both style and feel. Funnily enough, PCE S.C.I. seems to receive praise whenever it comes up in conversation, even though it has a control scheme similar to KRS's and places players in more situations where such a scheme can feel irritatingly inadequate. KRS, on the other hand, regularly receives lashes for "poor gameplay." In actuality, it plays how a good, solid driving game should (if not quite as well as Chase). You get to perform wild leaps with your vehicle, blast your foes with machine-gun fire and laser beams, and fight bosses such as helicopters and dual motorcyclists. I don't know about anybody else, but I think all of that stuff is pretty darn cool.

Enemies hinder you on the road and bomb you from above.

Blast up the end-of-level bosses.

Jumping allows you to avoid obstacles on the road and is essential for defeating the helicopter boss. If you find that your car "jumps randomly," you're not using the controls properly.

Okay, the intermediary screens aren't much to look at.

Don't fret when you find that you're unable to destroy this armored vehicle. You're actually not supposed to wreck it.

Benkei Gaiden

~ BENKEI GAIDEN ~

Sunsoft

HuCard

1989

I'm always up for a good HuCard RPG, but the main reason I was looking forward to playing Benkei Gaiden was that it would afford me the opportunity to listen to another Sunsoft PCE soundtrack. City Hunter, Out Live, and (especially) Batman have high-quality audio, and I was thrilled to discover that Benkei, too, features that distinct sound that Sunsoft was able to pull off with the system's sound chip. Sweet, breezy town tunes and a frantic (but remarkably catchy) last-battle track highlight the effort. The number used for the game's combat scenes is supported by a bassline that sounds an awful lot like a frog croaking really fast, which I find strangely amusing.

Toad-like rumbling aside, Benkei's battles have some issues. They often feel dragged out, as the text messages that detail the action hang there for a moment as if to make certain the player reads each insignificant tidbit (such as "TWO DAMAGE") in its glorious entirety. You'll probably get used to the delays after a while, but players shouldn't have to get used to such things. Also, if more than one specimen of a certain enemy type is present for a fight (say you've got three giant skulls to deal with), you can choose to attack the group of 'em, but you can't specify which individual beast you'd like to target (so your party members might split their assaults among the aforementioned skulls instead of intelligently killing one at a time, leaving all three alive to perform their own attacks).

The unappealing enemy designs utilized early in the game do nothing to make the prospect of combat more alluring. Too many of the frontline foes are poorly drawn or simply goofy in nature. For a while, wolves and mysterious women in white are the only neat adversaries to be encountered; but additional impressive creatures, including ocean titans and horses with manes and tails of fire, appear later on.

The bosses, while not particularly stout, do look pretty cool (and, in some cases, a bit crazy).

The images that appear in the heroes' profiles were also drawn well.

Outside of the battle-scene and profile sketches, Benkei presents visuals that are likely along the lines of what you'd expect from an old chip RPG.

As you might also expect from such a title, there aren't many captivating plot points to experience. But the story does take a somewhat shocking turn towards the very end (and the essence of the final conflict can be understood by players unable to read Japanese), and during a memorable sequence earlier in the adventure, the heroes investigate a sparkling spot of sea only to be accosted by an enormous water dragon.

Benkei isn't a very difficult game to get through, but here are links to some helpful guides:

http://gamersparadise.fc2web.com/koryaku/benkei/benkei.html
http://kogemaru.sugoihp.com/benkei/index.htm
http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~realrobo/game/benkei/ben.htm

Even if you make use of those guides, you'll need to do some poking around to uncover all of the game's secrets. You never know when you might stumble upon something important.

Star Parodier

~ STAR PARODIER ~

Hudson Soft

Super CD-ROM

1992

I know I pull the "too easy" card a lot when I review shooters. And when I do it, I bet I sound like a no-life-having, Sinistron-loving snot (which, of course, is exactly what I am). But I feel entirely justified in labeling the Star Parodier default-settings experience too easy. The very first time I played the game, I accumulated a stock of twenty-four lives before some bum finally managed to kill me. The second time I played the game, I finished with a surplus total of thirty-three. That's just ridiculous.

The lack of difficulty isn't due to a lack of things to shoot at. In fact, there's PLENTY of stuff to shoot at. But extra lives are available in such abundance and your armaments are so overpowering that you end up with nothing to be scared of. I didn't view that as a good thing; without at least some fear of ship-losing involved for the player, shooters don't seem to have much steam to run on. I realize that much of the focus here is placed on humor and personality, but heck, Parodius manages to be charismatic and challenging at the same time. Star Parodier was enjoyable for me but (you knew it was coming) far too easy (and I mean FAR too easy).

But then I cranked up the difficulty, and SP redeemed itself. The bosses really pick up their games on hard mode, and even the standard foes become more aggressive and display more mettle. Now, a good player will still accumulate twenty-plus lives and wreak plenty of havoc, but the essence of the challenge is that if you die during the hectic later stretches (and lose your power-ups in the process), you might be staring at a string of a dozen or so deaths in a row. This will drive some players batty, I'm sure, but it gives the game an exciting element I was looking for in it: the threat of having to pay bitter consequences for dying. And after discovering the harsh joys of hard mode, I was more forgiving of default, as even I don't mind a stretch of relaxing shooting here and there as long as I can crank the toughness back up when I so desire. As an added bonus, you get a different ending for conquering the sterner setting.

And that's about enough on the difficulty, as there are plenty of other good things to talk about. The game is a success as a charismatic parody. Soldier series fans will be thrilled to find lots of clever nods to the serious space odysseys SP caricatures. Neither said fans nor anyone else is likely to find the title's underwater stretches, snow lands, and Tetris-block terrains exciting conceptually, but the strips are so colorful and gorgeous that it really doesn't matter that many other shooters feature similar sections. It's incredibly neat that you can choose to soar through those areas with Bomberman or a flying PC Engine rather than the usual Soldier craft, and the weapons you'll have at your disposal are quite cool and fun to use (even if they do come down too hard on the default enemies). The bosses you'll wield those weapons against, from the snowman who tosses his own head at you to the giant evil bomberman, are extremely likable. Adding to the fun are comedic intermediary stills that relate to the level-concluding battles. And the soundtrack is really nice; the upbeat ice-land tune makes me nod along, while the mellow opening notes of the giant-fish and snow-guy boss track are appealing in an entirely different way (I kind of wish the number remained low key instead of going crazy after a few seconds).

SP is an absolute must-get for shooter novices and, on hard mode, an enjoyable option for the pros. Of course, two of its serious-minded Soldier fellows (Blade and Final) are also PCE essentials. Super Star Soldier can go to hell.