Legendary Axe II

~ THE LEGENDARY AXE II ~

Victor Musical Industries / NEC

HuCard

1990

A kick-ass hack-and-slasher in the vein of its widely lauded predecessor, LA2 is unique because of its atmosphere: I've yet to experience another game quite as dark and brooding and melancholy as this one. The overhanging feeling of despair isn't conveyed through cinematic events; instead, it's established via elements of in-game presentation. The music is so grim and somber; the enemies, so bizarre; the stages, so bleak and unforgiving. And there's no new dawn to look forward to, as even the concluding sequence is completely fucked up. I know a fellow who doesn't enjoy playing the game because it depresses him. I understand why he feels that way, but I can't say I'm similarly repelled by the darkness. In fact, said darkness is what draws me into the adventure.

The soundtrack plays a major role in establishing that compelling atmosphere. It's received so much praise over the years that additional commentary probably isn't necessary, but I must note its effortless segues from quiet sadness (Stage 2) to strong, heavy riffage (Stage 3) to outright creepiness (Stage 5).

And speaking of Stage 5... what a wonderfully crazy level it is. Within the grotesque "innards" constituting the level's boundaries roam fire-breathing ostrich monsters, slithering worm creatures, and slime men who attack via glorious limb-splitting suicide. It's utter madness, disgusting and eerie and outlandish... and absolutely awesome.

A stormy tower ascent follows the memorably abominable Stage 5 and precedes the game's biggest surprise of all: a high-tech, maze-like final stage, which would be difficult to pass even if its complex layout were your only concern. But you'll have to deal with the brutal robots who inhabit it as well.

Those robots are sure to knock you around quite a bit, but you won't take any particularly harrowing falls during your encounters with them. However, earlier levels that require you to make lengthy climbs to their peaks (2, 4, and 6, specifically) host plenty of enemies and traps that can send you reeling back to their starting points, and steps and leaps must be retraced against tight time limits.

Dark and weird are clearly the running themes here, whereas the first Axe explored a broader spectrum of concepts. I wouldn't change Axe 2 for anything, as I love the uniqueness of it, but I do prefer its multifaceted predecessor overall. Still, this one has its advantages: it provides you with three main weapons to wield as opposed to one and pits you against a giant mega-bastard of a final boss.

R-Type

~ R-TYPE ~

Hudson Soft / Irem / NEC

HuCard

1989

I've always appreciated this sidescrolling shooter's well-thought-out level designs; there's rhyme and reason to every aspect of every one of its stages. And brilliant board construction is hardly the only thing it's got going for it: its enemy designs are legendary, its graphics are remarkable, and its soundtrack is memorable and diverse. Despite all those positives, I've never particularly loved the game, as I find it falls short in many respects when compared with certain other strategy-emphasizing titles, and admittedly, I tend to prefer fast-paced Thunder Force-type shooters to the slow breed that it belongs to. Still, with my affinity for high-level challenges, I can't help but give R-T a play every now and then.

I do enjoy it for the most part. It hits its strategic stride with the stretch that comprises levels 4-7 before wrapping up with a somewhat-lame final mission. The first three stages are rather slow and easy, but they're veritable shooter-hall-of-fame displays considering the bosses and tunes they feature.

While that breakdown certainly indicates that the game provides a quality experience, I feel that it's too methodical and lacks spontaneity. Now, I like a good "thinking man's shooter" as much as the next guy, but some other mind-games-focused blast-'em-ups like Sinistron and Rayxanber II are superior to R-Type in my estimation, as they involve more-prominent "twitch" elements and force the player to make more spur-of-the-moment decisions, not to mention that they're even more aesthetically appealing than their forerunner.

Let's consider Rayxanber II. No matter how much you memorize of its fourth and sixth stages, they will always be challenging and you will always have to play well to get through them. Plus, Ray II plays fast--it's a Thunder Force-style shooter that calls for as much strategizing as an R-Type. Completing the first seven levels in R-T becomes perfunctory once you've figured out the correct paths to take and positions to occupy, and the plod-along pacing certainly doesn't make matters any more exciting.

Now take Sinistron. It doesn't even truly become rigid until its fifth stage begins. Just prior to that point, it demands that you play through an intense and ferociously difficult segment where you need to count on your reflexes more than anything else in order to navigate a gauntlet of asteroids and bullets. The only time R-Type's gameplay approaches this appealingly frantic style is during its final stage, when green baby-like things and dull spinning things kinda float about the screen; and even then, Sinistron's level of action murders R-T's.

I know that the infamous Stage 7 is the apple of every R-Type fan's eye, but even with all of its enemies and bullets and wall explosions, it's not particularly challenging once you discern the correct path to take. The boss is tough, though, and if you get killed in its trash-stocked lair, you'll most likely be unable to rebound, as you'll be placed at a ridiculous, unfairly situated checkpoint--which is surprising, as every other checkpoint along the way is completely reasonable. Any game can go ahead and take away your means of defending yourself and flood the screen with enemies and call itself "tough." That's not quality design--it's crap challenge and a quarter-nabbing tactic, and it's annoying to experience it in a home console game. It would have been nice if Irem had gone the Sinistron route by granting you the option of returning to the beginning of a stage rather than the checkpoint upon continuing.

In any event, I like the gathering of ships that takes place at the very end, and I do enjoy the ride there for the most part. Sinistron and Rayxanber II are stronger titles, though.

Space Harrier

~ SPACE HARRIER ~

Sega / NEC Avenue

HuCard

1989

Inspired by my brother Alexei's heartfelt review and fond recollections of the game, I decided to give Space Harrier a quick play for the first time in a while. Actually, it wasn't so quick; I must admit it took a few sessions for me to regain my space-harrying skills. That's a good thing, as I like it when a game requires practice. And SH is always a nice change of pace for me; there are few Duo games quite like it (the system, like its contemporaries, was low on into-the-screen blasters), so transferal of sharpened skills from one recently played title to this one is generally out of the question. Before too long, I was back in the zone, tearing through enemies and speeding past pillars until I reached the glorious "Epirogue."

It was the kind of good, clean fun that I'm used to having when I sit down with SH. It's always enjoyable to duel with mammoths and gliding robots and the rest of the game's oddball miscreants.

Plus, many of the tunes are pretty darn catchy, especially the track that plays during the second boss fight.

As for negatives, the game is too repetitive. It takes a number of stages and basically rehashes them with obstacles more abundant and enemies quicker to the draw. The gameplay is challenging and enjoyable enough that the repetition doesn't become a major issue, but I feel the designers were a little short on ideas for the eighteen stages they constructed.

Also, all of the bosses are easy to beat, and some are simply underwhelming. Crushing a frail-but-cool-looking fire-breathing dragon makes for decent-enough fun, but defeating a bunch of little blue things isn't particularly satisfying.

Keith Courage in Alpha Zones

~ KEITH COURAGE IN ALPHA ZONES ~

Hudson Soft / NEC

HuCard

1989

Being that this pack-in action-platformer was my very first Turbo game, I was pretty excited to give it a try back in 1989. Ten minutes into my first session with it, I'd already determined that it wasn't any good, so I shut it off and started playing The Legendary Axe instead. I didn't get around to beating it until a long time after that, as it was a game I never really felt like playing. But as middling as it is, it gradually made its way over to my good side.

KC's flaws have been discussed ad nauseam, but since I like to nauseate people, I'll do a recap. It feels terribly repetitive, whether you're grinding for cash by fighting beanie-wearing midgets and flying cats in the overworld areas or wandering around in the every-path-looks-the-same underworld zones. Also annoying are the slow gameplay in said overworld areas and the inevitable blind leaps into spike pits in said underworld zones.

But enough about the bad stuff. Let's do something that deviates from the Keith Courage-article norm: focus on the game's positive elements.

The basic concept itself is awesome: a goofy fellow bumbles around a wacky overworld and earns cash for blade upgrades and auxiliary bombs; then, he puts on a mecha-like suit, pulls out a lightsaber, and battles his way through a dark, mazelike underworld.

Everyone loves the "donning the suit" sequence that takes place as Keith enters the underworld.

The "gun guy" is one of the most memorable enemies in Turbo history, without a doubt.

Actually, many of the enemies, particularly the bosses, look pretty darn cool, even though they fight like chumps.

There's also the flashing title screen, which got me all pumped up for 16-bit gaming the first time I saw it. The upbeat, electric track that plays during that fancy opening is extremely cool, as is the eerie boss-battle tune, and the sound effects are incredibly dynamic. And let's not forget the bit of text at the end that advises us to watch for a "NEXT KEITH COURAGE ADVENTURE." Man, I'm psyched for that.

Gensou Tairiku Auleria

Gensou Tairiku Auleria (or just Auleria to non-wapanese. If you call Dracula X "Chi no Rondo" instead of "Rondo of Blood" you're a wapanese and welcome to call Auleria by it's full title and then go stick a 7lb trout in your asshole you racially-confused retard)

Taito - 1993 - Japan

CD-ROM

Auleria is a side scrolling action RPG set in a victorian era/medieval fantasy world. You'll control multiple characters, explore many different lands, and watch some pretty cool cinema screens as you go through the quest. Fans of the Wonder Boy games, Castlevania II, Zelda II, etc, are the people I would say will enjoy this game the most (and also people with the best taste in games). I'm a huge action RPG fan, especially side-scrollers, so I really dug Auleria.

You start the game as a warrior who comes home to his village to find everything burned and destroyed and his woman (I presume) dead. All this is revealed in a cool opening cinema-- when you actually take control of your guy you'll be kneeling at the woman's grave. I couldn't really decipher much anything else from the story except that there's your usual purple and green demon boss guys, chicks with horns, and other 80s anime crap like that.

Action screens vary from countryside roads, swamps, forests, snow covered mountains and deserts to name a few, while dungeons are generally of the underground cave variety. There are also a few instances where you'll have to fight your way through a castle or mountain side to get to a boss.

There aren't any real levels (except dungeons)-- each chapter of the game is instead comprised of many different screens and is walled off from the previous chapter in some way so that you never have to backtrack to locations from earlier chapters. Each screen will scroll right to left, or left to right (there are a few where you go up and down, but they're only in dungeons or castles), and generally end with an option to go to 2-4 other screens. Screens will be either action stages or towns. You'll have to remember which options lead where, which isn't too hard once you get the layout of each chapter down. At first it's pretty confusing since everything is in Japanese, but what I did was just make a mental note of what the first japanese character of each screens name was, and then it was easy to get around. This is important because you'll be doing lots of backtracking and talking to people in towns during each chapter. Don't worry though, there's only about 5-8 people in each town and only like 2 towns per chapter so talking to everyone is SUPER quick.

The controls are a high point because everything is DEAD on-- movement is fast and responsive, although the collision detection is a little annoying sometimes. Button 1 makes you jump, and button 2 is attack. Holding button 2 will charge up your magic attack, which is different for each character (except the spear guy, he doesn't get any magic). Each of the characters have unique abilities, and switching between them is quick and easy. For example; the spear guy has really good range but is slower and can't jump worth crap, your main character is average with a cool fireball magic, and the girl you get is weak but has the best magic, so you have to decide which one is best for each part.

One of the coolest features, or possibly the coolest feature, of this game is leveling up. Two things are sweet about this; first of all your magic gets more powerful as you go up-- you'll start out with a puny fireball but by the time you're a pretty high level your fireball will dominate the screen. The second and COOLEST feature ever in an action RPG is that as you go up in levels, weaker enemies stop appearing! This makes all the backtracking between screens painless since you don't have to waste time fighting enemies that give you 1 experience point. Every time you level up enemies will give you less experience, until finally they just stop appearing. This makes it so you can't immediately max your characters out (like in Ys), and takes away the pointlessness of fighting for no reward. Seriously this one stroke of genius puts this game in top tier in my opinion. I can't believe this ingenius system hasn't been used in more games since it's so simple and obvious.

The graphics are pretty average at best. There are a couple really cool looking spots in the game, but for the most part you won't be impressed. Your characters and the enemies are fairly large, but the animation is choppy. The backgrounds don't feature any parallax scrolling and the color palatte seems rather limited, which is ridiculous on a system known for pumping out both sweet parallax and the best & most vibrant colors of the 16bit generation. These shortcomings don't detract from the game, but still I would have liked graphics that pushed the Duo a little harder since it was released in 1993 alongside other games that graphically destroyed anything the SNES had on offer.

I also started writing a walkthrough for the game back in the day to save people some needless backtracking but I never finished it because my Duo's memory got corrupted. I was probably 3/4 of the way through the game so someone might find it useful. Get the walkthrough here, mah jiggaz.

Genesis game that is better than this game rating- Wonder Boy V

Kyuukyoku Tiger

~ KYUUKYOKU TIGER ~

Taito

HuCard

1989

If you've played other stone-age vertical shooters, then you're probably familiar with the template used here. Fields, seas, and generic military bases make for backdrops as you blast up lots of tiny boats, tanks, and aircraft. Occasionally, a larger, tougher boat, tank, or aircraft shows up and fires bullets by the bunches. And in true Raiden style, the bosses really pour on the projectiles. Actually, Raiden does ever so little more to deviate from the prehistoric norms by eventually taking its battle to outer space. There are no interstellar odysseys to be experienced here... but there are plenty of small helicopters.

Surprisingly enough, Kyuukyoku Tiger is extremely enjoyable. Sure, like Raiden, it's laughably outdated thematically and visually, but it makes up for that with good action and exciting music. In fact, it ends up kicking Raiden's ass, though it sports similarly lame boss designs. Redundancy, too, plagues the end-of-level encounters. Behold:

But taking on these deadly double teams and avoiding the batches of bullets they send at you is a lot of fun, regardless of their simplistic shells.

You can bust 'em up with four different types of weapons, which might seem like a huge assortment when compared with Raiden's limited two-trick system but hardly comes off as impressive when contrasted with the deep gun supplies offered in PCE vertical stars Spriggan and Final Soldier. Still, wielding a powered-up red vulcan or blue Contra-type spreadshot is supremely enjoyable, as you can do serious damage all across the screen.

Building up to that mighty level of firepower can be an annoying process at times simply because the icons you need to snatch tend to drift towards the top of the playfield, leading you directly into harm's way. But such a minor gameplay flaw is easily negated by the otherwise fair, fast, consistent action. While some oldies allow you to snooze for stretches before abruptly sending out huge machines to raze your ass, Tiger keeps you active by filling the screen with lots of enemies and bullets without ever recruiting any sort of unfair entity to challenge you with. And while it ain't cheap, it certainly is exciting, and in some spots it might actually push you to your bullet-dodging limits.

Momotarou Katsugeki

~ MOMOTAROU KATSUGEKI ~

Hudson Soft

HuCard

1990

Katsugeki is commonly referred to as "the good one" when the PC Engine's Momotarou games are discussed. Of course, this has a lot to do with the others being primitive Japanese board games and RPGs that few have spent more than a couple of minutes with. (In actuality, Densetsu II and Densetsu Gaiden are pretty darn good.) But even independent of comparisons with its "inaccessible" siblings, Katsugeki seems to have earned widespread respect as a quality platformer.

That didn't exactly mean that the game would work for me, however. Cartoony platformers generally aren't my thing. I do love a few of them, including New Adventure Island with its urgent pacing and Son Son II with its exploration elements. But I've never been a fan of the adventures that proceed in leisurely fashion as one hops and bops along, picking up coins or what-have-you and contending with mindless little adversaries; the "intrinsic fun" of these titles usually eludes me. So I wasn't all that thrilled to find after a few seconds of play that Katsugeki seemed to be of this lackadaisical ilk.

But upon being given a chance, Katsugeki won me over by providing an enormously wide variety of obstacles and challenges. Flipping platforms, floating platforms, sliding hooks, mechanical crusher claws, spinning razor blades, plummeting stalactites, water spouts, lava geysers, ladder-climbing gauntlets, flesh-covered teeth pits, enemies that give you rides, enemies that hurl their heads at you, flame wielders, bomb droppers, swimming sections, animal-aided aerial fights... you really never know what you're going to have to deal with next in this game. Sure, none of those obstacles or ideas were brand new concepts when Hudson employed them for Katsugeki, but they're implemented so well here, with such frequent and seamless transitions from one to the next, that they seem very fresh and exciting.

Along with handling all that platforming stuff, you'll have to manage your inventory. You can earn money by killing creatures and spend that money in countryside shops, very similar to how commerce works in Keith Courage's overworld areas. Item names being displayed in hiragana will be a downer for some, but it doesn't take a whole lot of experimentation to figure out which ones happen to warp you back to town or restore health or provide special temporary attack powers. And the stores provide pictures of their wares, so you're never at a complete loss when making purchases.

Add in some attractive scenery (particularly the snow-stage backdrops) and catchy tunes and you end up with an addictive winner. But be warned! It's a little more expensive than the other buck-and-under Momo titles. Katsugeki might actually cost a lofty sum of, oh, four dollars or so. But the enjoyment it provides more than offsets the crippling damage it does to one's wallet.