Champion Wrestler

Taito - 1990 - Japan

HuCard

Whenever possible I try to avoid reviewing games I haven't fully completed, but I'll make exceptions in certain cases. Today's exception is Champion Wrestler from Taito.

CW is a port of an arcade game of the same name, one that I had never heard of prior to acquiring the game for my Duo. To be honest, the details surrounding how I actually got this game are foggy. It's certainly not something I sought out on purpose; I'm pretty sure this was one of those "good buddy freebies" your chums like to throw in when you're buying a bunch of other shit off them. You know the type. More often than not, these freebies are worthless, awful games that you'll never play (hence the reason they were given away for free in the first place). Unfortunately, Champion Wrestler is no exception.

Wrestler plays out like any WWE match would-- hit your opponent over the head with chairs, perform ridiculous acrobatics in hopes a stray limb might incur damage on your enemy, etc. The problem with Wrestler is that the control scheme fucking BLOWS. I mean, it's horrible. Atrocious. I cannot really convey in writing how terrible the "concept" behind CW's controls is. It would probably be more accurate to say that Wrestler just doesn't have a control scheme. CW takes button mashing to a new extreme. Because that's all you can do, and hope that you are fruitful in whittling away your enemy's health before yours diminishes. You have a "power" graph at the top of the screen that increases as you rapidly waggle your joystick from left to right, all the while attempting to position yourself (still waggling) so that you can inflict damage on the opposition. If somehow you manage to maneuver into a spot where damage might be an option, it then is your job to start mashing the I and II buttons and hope you pull something off. So you can see the problem here-- there are no cool button combo "moves" to memorize, no strategy in defeating your nemesis, essentially no amount of "skill" is going to benefit you in this game. I don't know about you, but I find this simply unacceptable.

From the title screen, you can select a game mode-- 1P vs CPU, 1P vs 2P, and a couple other modes. Having been outsmarted in my attempts to sucker a friend to play this still-moist-and-steaming pile with me, I resigned to go it solo in the 1P vs CPU mode. You have a choice of 8 different characters to play with, including Taito's own "M. Rastan" from the Rastan Saga series. I suppose it doesn't really matter WHO you pick, but I seemed to have the most luck with "B. Machine".

When a game fails so utterly and completely in the gameplay department, it doesn't really matter how good the aesthetics or any other aspect of the game are. That's a sad truth, because visually the game actually doesn't look half bad. In true Taito form, graphics utilize lots of colors and it's clear not much had to be sacrificed in the arcade to console porting process. I didn't encounter a whole lot of variety in the arena in my handful of runs with CW, but that's not completely unexpected. Music is adequate, if not somewhat good. Again-- what a shame.

At the end of the day, I have to wonder how much Champion Wrestler retailed for when it was new. And I also have to wonder how many kids went out and paid full sticker price for it, and what their reactions were upon getting home and powering it up for the first time. Shit, I got it for FREE and I feel like I got ripped off.

CAL III

~ CAL III ~

Birdy Soft / NEC Avenue

Super CD-ROM

1994

What you experience here is more of an "adventure" than the straightforward sequence of confrontations in CAL II. Rather than simply walking a path and meeting up with girls in ridiculous situations, you tour a variety of places and, well, just keep on picking from the available options. Unlike its predecessor, CAL III isn't littered with choices that lead to undesirable conclusions. In fact, it wasn't until very late in the adventure that, upon answering a sphinx's questions incorrectly, I finally suffered a Game Over. There may be others (a battle with a goofy Hydra being one potential spot of doom), but I've never encountered them.

There's seldom any reason for caution when making your selections, as the chances of blundering into a Game Over are so low. It's nice not having to endure the frustration of replaying segments just to reach a decisive question again, but now there's even less reason to pay attention to what's actually going on. But then, there just isn't much going on in this game anyway.

You'll run into a wide variety of characters, from scheming deities to Alice (in Wonderland), but very little happens aside from lengthy discourse, most of which takes place as you look at boring, redundant desert backdrops.

Occasionally, something genuinely funny happens, but for most of the adventure, I have to struggle just to stay awake. CAL III is incredibly short and quite uneventful, and contrary to what many players likely would expect, it doesn't present much "erotic" material at all.

Urusei Yatsura: Stay with You

~ URUSEI YATSURA ~

Hudson Soft

CD-ROM

1990

Here we have a high school lecher and a green-haired alien girl who wants the guy's stick. Annoyed by the lad's wandering eye, the extraterrestrial "cutie" gives him thunderous electrical shocks in futile attempts to keep him in line. Together they go off on an adventure that takes them from familiar school hallways to the frozen far reaches of outer space.

If I'm not familiar with the source material, an anime-based digital comic needs to look good and move along at a reasonably quick pace in order to gain and hold my attention. Nadia was able to reach the elusive level of so-so-ness by delivering in these respects, but Uruseu Yatsura couldn't match the feat--at least not for a good long while. Its anime-style art isn't very good and takes up but a small portion of the screen, and single poor-looking slides often hang around for way too long as characters babble with one another.

The funny parts aren't funny, the spooky parts aren't spooky, and the characters aren't appealing with the possible exception of... a lemming.

Not satisfied with paining players through its slow, boring plot progression and bad looks, UY "features" a dumb tile-sliding puzzle game and presents a few spots where you can indeed end up with a Game Over (although the ones I experienced were very easy to get around). And then there's the somewhat disturbing shower scene (let's just say it ain't exactly Cadet Babbette hiding in there...).

But UY suddenly rises from the doldrums with an entertaining burst at the end of its second "act" and proceeds at an above-mediocre level for the balance of the adventure. Act 3 has you visit jungles, deserts, and war zones... and congregate with bunnies at tea. You'll need to rescue your friends by finding your way across the desert, discovering passwords that grant access to prison cells, playing lever-based puzzle games, and making doorknobs out of gems. And during the brief fourth act, you'll run into a number of interesting characters, including a cyclops whom you must engage in menu-driven fisticuffs. There's even some nice art to behold at the very end.

UY turns things around during its second half by presenting puzzles and tasks that call for relatively high-level interaction rather than the dull, mindless button clicking one must partake in early in the game. It still shouldn't shoot up to the top of anyone's "digital comics to get" list, but it's not one to dismiss out of hand either.

Denno Tenshi: Digital Angel

~ DIGITAL ANGEL ~

Tokumashoten Intermedia Inc. / News Inc.

Super CD-ROM

1994

A guy goes out one day and happens upon a vagabond floppy disk. He takes it home, loads it up on his computer, and watches in amazement as a girl pops out of his monitor. Some giant mecha land outside his house; female pilots emerge from the machines and congregate with the disk-born chick, who can control the mighty pink mecha. They all hang around for a while, lounging, talking, and bathing (but not doing anything particularly naughty). A few mean girls (including an unpleasant "copy" of the pink-mecha pilot) show up in their own giant machines. A showdown takes place, the copy is eliminated, the mean girls move in with the rest of the bunch, and they all decide to play janken.

That's a good chunk of the odd Digital Angel story. DA is a digital comic with primary menu commands (Talk, Watch, Think, etc.) displayed in English. The most appealing element here is the art; the visuals aren't typical old anime-comic fare. The game has a distinctive appearance, and I found myself looking forward to each new panel. The music is also really cool (for a while, at least).

Odd plot plus anime girls plus English menu plus distinctive art plus good music usually equals a worthwhile game, but DA is actually a middling title. The initially intriguing story really loses steam during its second half. There are myriad Game Over and premature-end screens, and while the Game Overs can usually be avoided easily, the only way to get the "true" ending is to master a "slot game," which can be very frustrating and annoying (and the true ending sucks anyway). I played the game a number of times and changed up my choices enough that I was able to view pretty much every scene there is, and unfortunately, the art and audio lost some of their allure during the wearisome process.

Digital Angel is by no means a poor product, but with the nice ingredients it has going for it, it should've made a more favorable impression on me than it did. The first half of the adventure is quite enjoyable, but the aforementioned problems ultimately drag the game down a digital-comic tier or two.

You get awesome power-armor and mecha designs...

...and awesome chick designs. Good combo, eh?

Unfortunately, there's too little cool stuff...

...and too much domestic stuff (especially late in the game).

You'll need to master the slot game to get a "good" ending. Good luck with that.

Algunos

~ ALGUNOS ~

Fill-in Cafe / INTEC

Super CD-ROM

1994

I was looking forward to trying this fighting game simply because it was made by the same folks who produced Asuka 120%, which is my favorite member of the genre. Acquiring it wasn't easy, as it isn't the most common title, and some sellers try to make a fortune off it. So when I finally got it (on the cheap, as you should too if you decide to buy it), I quickly and anticipatedly powered it up and... promptly fought my way through the entire Story Mode. Then I started over on "Hard"... and crushed every challenger I encountered. I hadn't yet looked at the instruction manual, so the only special move I made use of during those runs was a fireball toss (as it's performed via the usual quarter-circle routine). Rarely did I resort to using that move, as I simply didn't need it. And keep in mind that I'm pretty bad at fighting games.

Yeah, this is a ridiculously easy game, but it does have a number of things going for it. The stages look great, the characters are cool, and the music (what little there is of it) is very good. Unfortunately, the gameplay is lacking; Algunos basically feels like a slower, rougher Asuka. This really is sad; if the game were as fast and as smooth as Asuka, I'd probably be calling it one of the PCE's better fighters. As it is, it's just a mediocre, middle-of-the-pack entry in my eyes, and I think a lot of people would be harsher on it than I'm being.

I'll take this body, please.

Here's the Story Mode story: you meet some cool-looking (if incompetent) fighters and beat the living crap out of them.

Fill-in Cafe came up with appealing character designs and background art...

...but they delivered a product completely lacking in challenge. It really doesn't matter which character you use or whom you face. Victories come easily.

The final fight is simply stupid.

Madou Monogatari

~ MADOU MONOGATARI ~

Compile / NEC Avenue

Arcade CD-ROM

1996

I am writing this with a clear conscience. You see, somewhere, there was a little girl alone in the dark, crying her eyes out.

And I am the one who saved her.

You will hear more self-congratulatory remarks from me; but for now, I only ask that you reach into your past and travel back with me to a time of gloom and misery for the gaming community at large, an epoch during which the PS2 and XBox were merely trying to get their acts together and the pitiful GameCube was entering its initial stages of futility. The sole sliver of light that penetrated the looming dark cloud of mediocrity materialized in the form of the Wolfgames guy's PC Engine listings, which seemed to harbor a limitless supply of trinkets and oddities that I felt compelled to buy. My insatiable hunger for bizarre, expensive rarities ultimately led me to Madou Monogatari, Compile's dungeon-crawler counterpart to their irresistible line of Tetris-like Puyo Puyo games.

Understand that I had absolutely no intention of actually playing this game, as at the time, my extremely limited knowledge of the Japanese language seemed to negate the possibility of making headway in an import RPG. I figured that if the opening cinemas ran their course without a hitch, the game's functionality would be verified, and I could leave it to sit comfortably among my other essentially useless collectibles. But then I ran into Arle.

Arle, the cute little kindergartner who stood in front of an impossibly tall tower and looked up at me with sad, almond-colored eyes.

"I have to go inside, without my sensei... and I'm really scared..."

Good grief. Tell me, reader, what was I to do at this point? A noble warrior such as I, a warrior who had aided the legendary Gogan in CRUSHING the Jagu Empire, a warrior who had accompanied beautiful Babbette on her quest to slay sinister Galam, a warrior who had braved the horrors of Last Armageddon and lived to tell the tale... was this warrior to leave a young girl all alone as she undertook such a perilous mission?

"Damn it," I said aloud. "Let's go."

And off we went on a journey that shattered the foundation of everything this grizzled warrior had come to expect from a video game.

Imagine my shock when discovering that hit points, experience points, and all other RPG conventionalities had been jettisoned in favor of simpler but so much more adorable means of monitoring Arle's status. I needed only to look at my little friend's face to assess her constitution: a wide-mouthed smile meant all was okay, while a whimper equated a plea for health restorers.

I realized XP counters were but an obsolete superfluity when resourceful Arle broke out a tiny ribbon that slowly changed hue from white to deep purple as the heroine herself grew in strength. I grinned despite myself at these revelations and looked forward to a quest I knew would be full of surprises.

And no aspect of this amazingly beautiful adventure disappointed me. Heartbreakingly sweet melodies established an atmosphere of euphoria and wonderment as Arle and I encountered lots of wacky, lovable characters, including a drum-playing, glasses-wearing eggplant man and a devious demon-horned, lion-tailed cheerleader.

Certainly, not all of the denizens of this mysterious tower were overjoyed to make our acquaintance; but when push came to shove, "innocent" Arle would always tell me to stand back as she chanted bizarre incantations and took care of the nuisances with relentless ice storms and raging infernos.

And none of this went down as you'd probably expect. Madou Monogatari takes traditional role-playing elements and adorns them with new garb to make the experience as exciting and adorable as possible. Sleep spells, for instance, are hardly new to the genre; but while they are typically useless add-ons to lengthy magic menus in other games, Madou makes them AN EVENT TO BEHOLD! Young Arle actually dresses up as a sheep and blows on a horn, which itself releases mini-sheep that the enemy counts until he falls asleep!

Now how cute is that?

Well, perhaps not as cute as the courageous one-inch-tall elephant that frequently came romping along to aid us during particularly brutal showdowns.

Certainly not nearly as cute as Arle's gleeful "LEVEL UP!" yell, emitted when her little ribbon reached the desired shade of purple.

But don't get me wrong, reader. This adventure wasn't all laughter and giggles, I assure you. Arle and I had our share of spats along the way.

Like the time I used a warp spell to "cheat" and ascend to a higher level of the tower. Much to my surprise, the tactic worked, so as any shrewd strategist would do, I attempted to utilize it once more. Arle rose up... and banged her tiny cranium on the ceiling with a horrifying THUD before plummeting back down to the ground. There I was, sitting with a baffled look on my face as a little video-game kindergartner actually looked out of the screen and chastised me while rubbing the fresh bruise on her head.

"Sorry," I said aloud.

The mischievous scamp got back at me, though. Before long, we arrived at a dead end where an eerie voice made a terrible demand of us:

3000 GOLD!

Arle obviously wanted to pay up. Not one to go against the wishes of my little pal, I took a look inside our wallet to see how much cash we had earned to that point.

17 GOLD

I frowned.

And so began my quest to earn 2983 GOLD just so my barely out-of-diapers partner in crime could drop it all at a dead-end wall for some mysterious voice. But I saved up that money, damn it, because I cared.

And then I watched in horror as two arms extended from the wall, tickled a delighted Arle, and vanished along with my 3000 GOLD.

You would think that some sort of valuable weapon or item or scroll or SOMETHING would be awarded for this endeavor. But no. All I was left with was a smile on Arle's face.

And somehow, that was good enough. I also had a smile on my face, as I realized that I was experiencing a video game that had no peer in its adorableness and ingenuity. And my feeling that this adventure was truly something special only increased as its intriguing plot continued to unravel...

Yes, Madou does have a plot... although it does not place its focus on "surprising" WE'RE ALL FROM THE SAME ORPHANAGE scenarios or "shocking" GEAR CRUCIFIXIONS or "tragic" ALBERT/AERIS/ALAN IS DEAD debacles. Instead, it concentrates on Arle's budding friendships and heated rivalries with the misfits she meets during her journey to uncover the secrets of the great tower...

...misfits such as SKELETON T, the tea-guzzling rogue who gave Arle fits in many a Puyo tournament and who stands as the first-floor boss in Madou. Their initial encounter here, as one might expect, is incredibly dramatic... and absolutely freakin' weird:

SKELETON T: What are you doing here?

Arle: Er... um... [looks at his cup of tea] ... that looks like black tea...

SKELETON T: WHAT??!! YOU HAVEN'T HEARD ABOUT MY TEA??!!

(The tea explodes all over the room.)

SKELETON T: ARRRGGGH!

After such a... er, heated confrontation, one would probably believe that any hope for peace between the two rivals would be irrevocably lost. But things don't always turn out the way we expect them to, particularly not in the magical world of Madou. Arle later finds her old enemy in a decrepit state:

SKELETON T: Tea... I need tea...

Arle: HA HA HA!

(Me: BAHA!)

SKELETON T: Urrrgghhhh...

Arle: Sorry. Here, have some of my tea.

SKELETON T: Thanks! I owe you one!

In Madou, even SKELETON T can become a changed man.

Of course, he promptly attempted to murder Arle the next time we crossed paths with him. But that's what life is like within the dark tower of Madou. It's downright unforgiving... as was verified when Arle and I were forced to face

THE TRIAL OF THE MONKS

This challenge seemed simple enough at first. We entered a small room, whereupon a scary-looking monk asked us five yes-or-no questions. Sadly, his Kanji-ridden queries left me absolutely baffled, so we had no recourse but to guess at all the answers. Keep in mind that this was no small feat, as the evil monk refused to tell us which (if any) of our answers were correct. And so the guessing game began...

YES YES YES YES YES

We were shoved out of the room by the growling monk.

We walked back in.

YES YES YES YES NO

You can imagine how long this process took.

You can also imagine my exasperation when, after spending what seemed like hours inputting YESes and NOes, I finally stumbled upon the correct combination... only to discover that there were TWO MORE MONKS waiting to interrogate me.

Yet I pressed on, as this was probably the only video game I'd ever played that I absolutely felt the need to beat. I had to help my little animated friend complete her mission if it was the last thing I ever did.

NO NO NO NO YES

NO YES YES NO NO

NO NO NO YES NO

And at one horrifying point, it looked like I was going to fail.

Arle and I found ourselves stuck on a floor shrouded in complete darkness, with all of our attempts to use illumination items proving futile. The solution embedded in cryptic Kanji-laden clues eluded me. I threw down my control pad and turned off my Duo-R.

But if Arle taught me one thing during our wacky adventures together, it's that there's always hope. We didn't give in to SKELETON T. We didn't give in to the three crazy monks. And we sure as hell weren't going to give in just because some bum turned off the lights.

I had business to take care of, a mission to complete... and a little life to save.

(And I did it. ^_^)