Dragon Spirit

~ DRAGON SPIRIT ~

Namco

HuCard

1989

Considering that Dragon Spirit, tame as it may be, allows players to control a fire-breathing beast capable of growing two additional heads as opposed to the usual spacecraft or fighter jet, it’s easy to understand why some people found it appealing during an era in which the 1942 brand of vertical shooter was prominent. But when also considering what was right around the corner for the sub-genre, with Compile in particular just about ready to get its act together, it’s equally comprehensible why, to put it bluntly, few people give a damn about this game anymore.

To witness Dragon Spirit in action is to observe a number of neat concepts being spoiled by poor execution and lackluster presentation. Actually, "lackluster" is generous; the game is ugly as hell, with scenery so unsightly it ruins what otherwise might've been solid stage concepts. Take Area 5, which throws you into a narrow cavern containing razor-sharp crags that move in and out intermittently. Things can get pretty tight here, especially since there are some cunning creatures patrolling the dusky grounds. But when all is said and done, you probably won’t recall the claustrophobic feelings and close calls that you experienced--no, you’ll remember the boring brown interior placed atop a horrifyingly putrid green-brown canvas. To be certain, caves are supposed to be somewhat dreary and shadowy, but this "artwork" is revolting and disgracefully amateurish.

The game plays very slowly and, thanks to the stupidly large hitbox, is often annoying. Area 7 requires that you launch an assault on an enemy fortress. Again, there’s little room to maneuver within the narrow halls, especially with the resident bevies of bats, toads, and “living statues" attempting to eliminate you. It should make for a pretty intense scene--right? Unfortunately, with your dragon flying slowly and your enemies moving slowly (even the projectiles they shoot seem to struggle just to make it across the screen), the scene becomes more tedious than exciting. Imagine, if you will, an SNES shooter handicapped by the type of ludicrous slowdown that the system was notorious for. That’s the level of speed that Dragon Spirit trudges along at--but there is no slowdown at work here.

But amid all this criticism of the visuals and gameplay, let's not forget to give the audio its deserved shellacking. Strings of quiet notes form unassertive melodies that seem to have been included simply because some form of audio was required. I have no idea why people are so fond of this soundtrack, as most of it sounds very plain to me, and the high-pitched garbage in the seventh stage constitutes one of the most irritating chip tunes I've ever heard.

As horrid as it looks and sounds, Dragon Spirit could've been a genuinely memorable adventure had it featured some solid stretches of inspired action. But even its boss battles are plagued by problems that nullify their potential. Specifically, enemy leaders are way too easy to take down if combated with a powered-up dragon.

Outside of those forgettable fights, the gameplay largely consists of dropping “bombs” on ground-based foes. This routine of making precise drops while avoiding slow-moving shots becomes dull rather quickly. When Dragon Spirit does decide to place its focus on shooting and weaving, it becomes an easy affair, particularly if you happen to be in “mini-dragon” form.

Yes, Dragon Spirit does have its interesting elements, and your dragon’s ability to shrink when the appropriate icon is obtained is one of them. Of course, a tiny dragon makes it even easier to avoid the slow-moving projectiles and dim-witted enemies, though I will say that the very last stretch of Area 8 (a spear gauntlet followed by a scythe-tossing boss) is a good challenge.

Everything actually does come together for DS in Area 6, as a little emotion is injected into the aural experience, not to mention that the icy level is really rather pretty.

Surely, this shows that Dragon Spirit's superficial shortcomings can’t simply be attributed to its age. It achieves excellence when it wants to--it just doesn’t seem to want to very often.

Dragon Saber

~ DRAGON SABER ~

Namco

HuCard

1991

This vertical shooter is a heck of a lot better than its plodding predecessor, Dragon Spirit. I had my doubts when I first powered it up, as I felt a disturbing sense of deja vu due to its visual style (the animation, specifically); but before long, Saber proved it has much more going for it in virtually every area than its overrated forerunner. While its animation is indeed similar to Spirit's, its graphics on the whole are much, much better. Stage 4's flower patches work because they look good, a concept unheard of in relation to Spirit. Stage 6's tight ice caverns are reminiscent of Spirit Stage 5's laughably basic and ugly rock mess but are much nicer to look at (not to mention that the action is more engaging, and the level design, more interesting).

You can tell that far more effort went into boss design this time around. There are lots of "big and cool" baddies to duel with here, and you get a number of new attack types to utilize against them.

And the soundtrack is far more assertive and attention grabbing than Spirit's (which some dub "legendary" but has always been considered by me to be less than stellar).

But while Saber is wonderful compared to Spirit and pretty good in its own right, I wouldn't quite rank it among the Duo's elite verticals. Just like Spirit, it makes players deal with a stupidly large hitbox. People who play a lot of shooters develop a feel for where their ship/creature/whatever is in relation to everything else, but the DS beasts, with their enormous wingspans, toss that feeling right out the window. And the journey is a stretched-out affair at nine levels; some strips and bosses end up being throwaways. Stage 5, a "speed run" segment that the game's mechanics simply aren't suitable for, comes off as a sloppy mess.

And I really don't think we need both a fire-snake boss and an ice-snake boss, especially seeing as how they employ similar sets of maneuvers.

So "good but far from perfect" is the verdict on Saber. It's a shooter worth checking out, a must if you enjoy its predecessor.

Somer Assault

~ SOMER ASSAULT ~

Atlus

HuCard

1992

Ever the iconoclasts, the folks at Atlus presented Turbo players with one of the more intriguing characters ever to appear in a video game. The hero of Somer Assault just happens to be a crafty battle-slinky, one who's going up against a rather ill-intentioned sorceress. Quite the clever evildoer, the no-good villainess recruited the mighty, malicious representatives of the zodiac symbols to help her carry out her despicable plans.

The Somer Assault adventure is divided up into twelve mazelike levels, each of which concludes with a showdown between your slinky and one of the zodiac warriors. The odd little hero is hardly defenseless as he flips and flops his way through each stage: he can fire off shots at various angles (the direction that your bullets fly in is dependent upon the position that our flexible protagonist is in while blasting) and nab icons that will grant him invincibility, extra cannons, and additional speed. There are various contraptions contained within each level that can help or hinder your efforts at exploration, including teleportation blocks that warp the slinky to distant locations. While you’ll encounter a fair share of hostile creatures, the main challenge will be solving the mazes before the time you're granted runs out.

In keeping with its astrological theme, Somer Assault requires you to enter your birthdate whenever you begin a new game. When you encounter the boss creature that represents your zodiac symbol, you’ll receive quite a "birthday present" (a veritable smorgasbord of power-ups). Obviously, your journey will be a lot less strenuous after this encounter; but considering that the day you enter determines when you'll receive the present, putting off the party for a while by entering a late-in-the-year date is basically like upping the level of difficulty.

Somer Assault appealed to me instantly, as it's both exciting and refreshingly original, and it just doesn't get old. The mazelike levels are enjoyable if simplistic; the novelty of playing as a slinky never wears off; the music is nice; and the graphics are appealing enough, with some pretty backdrops here and there.

Of course, the game reaches its highest points of excitement during the dramatic zodiac-boss encounters. The bronze giants look great and perform some awesome (and lethal) attacks, and the grim music that accompanies the fights is excellent.

SA is definitely a fun game, but there are a few things I would change about it if I could:

The exchange between the slinky and the sorceress at the beginning is quite entertaining. I would've liked to have seen more such exchanges take place.

I wish Atlus had made the levels larger and dropped the time limit so that players could explore the labyrinths and find secrets at their leisure instead of racing against a clock.

More regular enemies would've been nice, as there are very few and they're mostly meek. Some cooler weaponry (so that the slinky could evolve into a true beast of destruction) would've been awesome as well.

The battle with the evil heads at the very end seems out of place and unnecessary. The fight with the Mimickers that takes place right before it would've made for the perfect final encounter.

Beyond Shadowgate

~ BEYOND SHADOWGATE ~

ICOM Simulations / TTI / Viacom New Media

Super CD-ROM

1993

This puzzle-centric adventure game seemed like a sure thing to me. Shadowgate is my favorite NES game by far, and I even like the N64's much-maligned Trial of the Four Towers. Plus, back in the day, I dug Sierra's Quest games (which this title is highly reminiscent of) and the TG-16's similar-in-style Loom. So all the ingredients necessary for success seemed to be in place here.

Well, being that I experienced lots of awesome monster encounters while playing through the first Shadowgate, I've expected subsequent episodes to provide plenty of cool creatures to deal with. Shadowgate 64 let me down in this regard, but BS comes through with a minotaur, a troll, a wraith, and all sorts of other beasts and demons.

I also expect a good bit of humor in my Shadowgate experiences, and once again, BS does not disappoint, as it incorporates lots of creative ways to die, lots of silly situations for the protagonist to stumble into, and plenty of amusing NPC utterances. The humor here involves goofiness as opposed to the wittiness displayed by the original, but hey, funny is funny. The only scene that takes the goofiness too far is that of the final confrontation, as the main character looks absolutely ridiculous and the dialogue is remarkably awful ("He offered me everything a man could want. But... I'm NOT a MAN!").

Of course, more important than monsters and gags in a Shadowgate game are puzzles, and BS's are pretty darn easy to solve. They're preferable to the absurd conundrums that Shadowgate 64 presents, but the first game in the series is just about perfect as far as challenge goes, so it's a little disappointing that this one doesn't deliver a few more cleverly conceived brain teasers.

The "challenge" to be found here basically comes in two forms. You need to be careful about what you spend your gold on and whom you kill, at least if you want to see everything the game has to offer. I'm sure the designers were thinking replay value here, but I like it when a title of this ilk requires you to make all (or at least most) of the right moves the first time through rather than forcing you to take shots in the dark during subsequent journeys. Also, at times, items you can pick up blend in so "well" with the background graphics that you may not even notice that they're there.

But whether the puzzles in a Shadowgate are hard or easy to solve, I like to have good music to listen to while I'm working on them. The original's soundtrack is a classic, a perfect mix of eeriness and catchiness; and heck, great music is probably what saved Shadowgate 64 for me. The tunes here... well... I don't know if I can really say. You see, every time you step into a different strip, the game has to load, so the music stops playing. You often don't spend more than a few seconds on a single strip, so even if the musical track remains the same in the next one, it has to start all over again. It's possible to jaunt along through four or five different segments and hear just the first few seconds of a particular tune over and over again. What I've heard isn't bad, but it doesn't really compare with the music in the other Shadowgates. There are plenty of ominous tracks as well as a jolly town number.

The interminable cycle of stopping and restarting the tunes essentially kills the atmosphere for me. It isn't until the final all-too-short journey through Castle Shadowgate that I really find myself immersed in the adventuring. There's an awesome hall of monster statues; a creepy organ room where you meet a wild elephant man; and of course, a gong-and-ferryman scene that'll stir up fond recollections for Shadowgate vets.

Castle Shadowgate isn't the only place that looks good here. Sometimes, the background graphics are a little too static, so it looks like the hero is walking past a painting rather than treading through a real environment. But there are beautiful woods, quaint rustic towns, and appropriately dead-looking marshlands in addition to the aforementioned awesome castle strips.

Unfortunately, navigating these neat-looking locales can prove tiresome, as the hero traipses along at a very slow pace. The slow walking in and of itself doesn't annoy me much, but combine it with said hero's inability to walk diagonally and the fact that he controls kind of stiffly, not to mention that you have to do lots of backtracking, and BS ends up feeling slow and tedious at times. Also, the interface is cumbersome; an additional button on the TurboPad probably would've worked wonders for it. The occasional punch-ups feel awful with the scheme that was implemented.

All in all, BS is a good game, but I don't like it as much as I do the original or 64. To be honest, as far as this sort of title goes, Loom has proven to be a little more enjoyable for me. One last interesting thing to note is that BS's protagonist was voiced by the same guy who did a great job voicing Lykos for Shape Shifter (but he delivered a finer performance in SS).