| pollution_skunk's Last 25 Game Reviews |
Alien Soldier
07-12-15 11:03 PM
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VISUALSHOCK! SPEEDSHOCK! SOUNDSHOCK! NOW IS TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE!
You all are probably already familiar with Treasure, the small Japanese company responsible for such classics as Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy, two of the best (and craziest and also prettiest) games on the Genesis, aren't you? If so, good - this means you're a retrogamer all right! But if you're a [i]hardcore[/i] retrogamer like me, you also know that, as good as these two games are, they are merely a tiny fraction of the company's long and awesome history, and that what Gunstar Heroes did - crazy explosive action that focused on huge boss battles and pattern memorization while also offering players a huge degree of freedom due to the absurd numbers of weapon combinations and special moves that your character can perform, incredible system-pushing graphics and sound that wow players up to this day, a quirky band of characters that are all peppered with an absurd sense of humor and a nutty, barely-comprehensible and overly-deep storyline that is completely unnecessary (in the Japanese version, at least; the international version's plot is fairly straightforward) -, this game, Alien Soldier, did much, much better. How? Let's check it out!
GAMEPLAY (DEPTH + ADDICTIVENESS + DIFFICULTY): 10/10
After a loooong, slooooow and completely unnecessary opening text crawl and a very simple yet attractive title screen/main menu (whose Japanese version has this review's engrish-y title emblazoned on it), the first thing you see in Alien Soldier is the weapon select/character customization screen, which presents you with six "Force" weapons and, for some reason, a whopping [i]twenty-six[/i] HUD configurations, some of which even hide important data from the player for an extra-hardcore challenge (if the game itself wasn't hard enough). After picking four weapons out of these six (you can occupy your loadout with more than a single copy of any weapon, too, and this quirk actually becomes important later on the game, when ammo is scarce) and your HUD of choice... Read the rest of this Review
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Metal Black (World)
12-06-14 09:57 AM
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Metal Black - One Of Taito's Biggest, Brightest Gems
Taito, the company responsible for the creation of shoot-em-ups with the release of Space Invaders has always had strong ties to the genre through its long history as a quirky arcade giant, with two of their most notable brands being the Dariusand Rayforce series. Metal Black, one of the many off-shoots the company produced during the early 90's, is also considered one of their greats due to how unique it is.
In the distant future of 2042 AD, a mysterious race of aliens originating from the Nemesis, one of Jupiter's moons, begin an onslaught on an environmentally-damaged Earth using massive laser beams as their weapons. After discovering and reverse-engineering the invaders' power source - energy molecules known as "Newalones" (a Taito-ified spelling of Neurons, later corrected in Space Invaders Infinity Gene, its spiritual successor) - U.N. scientists kickstart the development of a new fighter craft named the Black Fly, whose weapons are powered by the exact same molecules as the aliens'. By 2052 the invention was finished and ready to roll out into outer space, but its use by the military was strictly forbidden by the peace treaty signed by the U.N. itself, who was afraid of starting an intergalactic war which could damage the environment even further. As a result, what was left of civilization was completely wrecked, leaving the dead planet's last hope in the hands of a lone rogue pilot and his stolen Black Fly.
Such a cool premise also makes for some interesting gameplay mechanics. Your ship has a twin blaster that fires forward as its sole main weapon and the iconic giant laser as it's bomb. The power levels of both are indicated by a single gauge at the bottom of the screen (bottom-left for Player 1, bottom-right for Player 2) that you fill up by collecting Newalones - as you grab more and more of them, your standard shots get bigger and stronger and the gauge fills up. You can unleash your laser at any time you want, but when in full pow... Read the rest of this Review
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Contra - Hard Corps
11-11-14 09:11 PM
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Contra Hard Corps - MY FAVORITE GAME EVER!
OK, guys and gals of Vizzed. Here it is. My very own review of what I consider the best run-'n-gun ever and the best game on the Genesis (which is my favorite console of all time, just so you know): Contra Hard Corps, one of the several "black sheeps" of the famous Contra franchise and arguably the best game in the series. Let's review it already!
SOUND: 10/10
First of all, I have to tell you all how [i]unbelievably freakin' awesome[/i] this game's soundtrack is. Back in the old days, Konami was known to create amazing tunes that pushed each console's sound hardware to the limits while sounding ideal for the situations at hand. The first two NES Contras had some rockin' PSG/ADPCM tunes fitting for the macho run-'n-gun action they provided, while The Alien Wars went for a more "epic action movie" approach that matches the game's darker and more cinematic tone.
What does Hard Corps do, however? An eclectic, stupendous mixture of high-BPM EDM and speedy metal, all conveyed through some of the most gloriously harsh FM synth/PSG/PCM the Genesis soundchip (the godly Yamaha 2612) can produce. It's one of those games where the soundtrack is really worth listening outside of the game at the maximum volume and with some groovy high-quality headphones (I recommend BOSE! :P).
This game's soundtrack is also significant to me, in a more personal level. It was Hard Corps that made me love the Genesis, run-'n-guns/shmups and EDM (especially hardcore and speedcore, which this game takes the most influence from) so much, so I have to thank Konami for making me who I am today. :')
GRAPHICS: 10/10
OK, OK, I'm completely breaking my standard review structure here, but this game's graphics and sound really deserve to be praised to no end.
While the Genesis didn't have the same graphical power as the SNES, it more than made up for it with a whopping SEVEN MEGAHERTZ OF BLAST PROCCESSING!!!, which enabled skilled developers to d... Read the rest of this Review
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Space Fantasy Zone (unreleased)
09-26-14 11:13 PM
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Space Fantasy Zone! The legendary cancelled SEGA crossover! Is it a good game?
Before hitting it big in the console market with the Genesis/Mega Drive, good ol' SEGA already had an extremely prolific career as an ambitious and visionary arcade manufacturer. However, since their attempts at penetrating the 80's home videogame market were total failures (except in a select few countries), most - if not ALL - of their arcade classics got versions released for several platforms other than the company's own during that time, with most of them being re-programmed from scratch by third-party companies, and NEC Avenue was the small developer responsible for converting the big blue's revolutionary coin-ops to NEC/Hudson's equally revolutionary (at the time) PC-Engine. Their ports, while decent-to-excellent in overall quality, lacked the extra bells and whistles present in SEGA's own Master System, Genesis/Mega Drive and Sharp X68000 versions, being bare-bones translations of beloved arcade classics like After Burner (II) and OutRun.
But then in 1992 things were about to change with the release of Space Fantasy Zone, a crossover/mashup of Fantasy Zone (which didn't have a PCE port!) and Space Harrier (which already had a PCE port!) for the then brand-new PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² System (whew!). Just imagine this: an exclusive SEGA game! On a non-SEGA console! On a CD-ROM! With in-game art and illustrations by famous manga artist Satoshi Urushihara! It was going to be AWESOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMEEEEEE! Of course the Japanese gaming press was raving about it, with beautifully-illustrated ads promising a 1992 release popping up in every gaming mag imaginable, but in the end it was never released. The reasons behind the game's cancellation were probably the PC-Engine's dwindling popularity in Japan and the subsequent cancellation of its distribution in the West and the fact that SEGA already had a powerful grasp in the home console industry at the time of its development.
The existence of a nearly-finished prototype was unknown until 20... Read the rest of this Review
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Spriggan Powered
09-21-14 09:11 PM
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Spriggan Powered - A neat little Super Famicom shmup, but nothing special, really
Spriggan Powered is a neat little Super Famicom shmup released around the middle of the console's lifespan released only in Japan due to its nature as a tie-in to an obscure mecha anime.
Even though there is another mecha-themed shmup with a similar title published by Naxat Soft and developed by Compile for the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM System (Seiren Senshi Spriggan - Phantom Warrior Spriggan), this game isn't related to it, being developed internally at Naxat and not having many of the elements that make Compile's shmups stand out. Let's see how it stands up to its "legacy".
GRAPHICS: 7/10
The videogame scene in the mid-90's was dominated by the digitized-graphics craze started by Mortal Kombat and popularized by Donkey Kong Country, and while it remained mostly an American practice, a few Japanese companies adopted it, and Naxat Soft was one of them.
Spriggan Powered's cool enemy designs sadly don't shine due to its use of [i]really tiny[/i] digitized sprites, something that should be banned from being used BY LAW. tl;dr: They are very, very ugly. I'll still give it a 7 out of 10, because there are some genuinely cool special effects and details in the background, and at least the developers tried.
SOUND: 5/10
Spriggan Powered's soundtrack would be acceptable for an early SNES/SFC game, but the game was released in [i]freakin' 1996[/i] - one year after Chrono Trigger and Tales Of Phantasia, two after Final Fantasy III/VI and THREE after Secret Of Mana, which many people consider the apex of SPC-700 soundtracks (but I digress). Heck, even some games released in 1991 such as dark and moody Super Castlevania IV and the amazingly mind-blowing, bombastic ActRaiser have better soundtracks than this game. At least the compositions are cool and concise, fitting with each stage they play on, making me give it a 5 out of 10.
GAMEPLAY/DEPTH: 8/10
The gameplay is probably the most interesting aspect about... Read the rest of this Review
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Sorcer Striker (set 1)
06-07-14 05:52 AM
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RAIZING REVIEW MARATHON! Chapter 1: Sorcer Striker!
Shoot 'em ups, shmups, spaceship shooters, STGs - call them whatever you want; my opinions on them will never change. And my opinions on the genre can be resumed in a single word: AWESOME. The joy of crushing enemies with screen-filling weapons, the excitement of an intense boss battle, the relief when you survive a bullet hell... These are emotions only a good shmup can provide. I love shoot 'em ups, and I will always do.
So, to celebrate my love for shmups AND my fifth review here on Vizzed, I'll start a MEGA RAIZING SHMUP REVIEW MARATHON! Raizing is definitely my favorite developer of arcade shmups, so consider my next five (six if Sokyuguurentai/Terra Diver gets added to Vizzed *wink wink*) reviews a tribute of sorts to this long-dead and obscure yet legendary developer. So, to start off, let's review Mahou Daisakusen/Sorcer Striker!
STORY: 5/10
WAR! The Gobligan empire has invaded our peaceful kingdom, stealing our high-tech magic-powered weapons along the way! Only four brave bounty-hunters hired by the King and Queen themselves can defeat them!
Gain The Warrior: A reckless assassin-for-hire who is always accompanied by his shoulder-size pet monkey! He's always in only for the money!
Bornnam The Necromancer: A truly wicked and vile necromancer who rides a skeletal dragon for battle and attacks using dark magicks! But due to his old age, he's seeking the bane of his profession: the formula for eternal life! And guess what? The King and Queen have it!
Miyamoto The Dragon: A fierce, skillful samurai who was cursed a long time ago by a Gobligan witch! The curse? Live eternally in the body of a dragon! He reluctantly contributes to the Gobligan War with his magic sword in order to exact revenge on the empire and find a cure for his mystical ailment!
Chitta The Witch: A pretty yet extremely powerful young witch who decides to fight in the war to show the bad guys (and the good guys too!) th... Read the rest of this Review
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Castlevania - Rondo of Blood (english translation)
04-13-14 12:24 AM
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HOT RICHTER-ON-MAIDEN ACTION!
If there is one videogame franchise that transitioned perfectly between different eras and hardware while successfully mixing things up considerably between each installment, it's Konami's classic Castlevania/Akumajou Dracula (Dracula's Demonic Castle) series.
Born in Nintendo's Famicom Disk System peripheral (a floppy disk/diskette drive for the japanese NES) in 1986 as a rather standard action-platformer with (in?)famously stiff gameplay, the original Akumajou Dracula was a surprise hit, receiving ports for the MSX2 OS (under the name of Vampire Killer), arcades (under the name of Haunted Castle) and finally a cartridge conversion (which was re-released much later in Japan with selectable difficulty levels) for the western NES, whose success made the Castlevania name stick to the franchise like industrial glue, at least in non-asian territories.
Riding on the popularity of action-RPGs in mid-to-late 80's Japan and evolving the concepts first presented in the MSX2 Vampire Killer, Konami released the universally-despised Dracula: Noroi no Fuuin/Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the Famicom Disk System in 1987 (it took one year to release the western version this time because of the game's bigger focus on dialogue and the need to downgrade the game's sound and save function so it could run on a standard NES), with the franchise coming back to it's roots (whoa, already?!) after the FDS died with 1989's Akumajou Densetsu (Legend Of The Demonic Castle)/Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (which once again was released much earlier than the American version due to the japanese cart's use of Konami's awesome VRC6 mapper chip, which is sadly incompatible with western NESes due to Nintendo's imperialistic policies at the time. At least it received some slight upgrades and touch-ups in the transition, but the JP version is still worth playing for the fantastic soundtrack and awesome graphical effects alone).
In the 16-bit era, SEGA fanatics g... Read the rest of this Review
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Ristar
02-08-14 08:04 AM
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SEGA's forgotten mascot lives!
The Mega Drive is a "mainstream" console with a weird history. Released in Japan in 1988 as the world's first real 16-bit videogame console (NEC/Hudson's PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 had an 8-bit CPU and soundchip hidden behind a powerful 16-bit GPU), SEGA's machine had the power to conquer the realm of videogaming. But even with it's fast Motorola 68000 CPU and powerful Yamaha 2612 soundchip (the exact same hardware that powered the company's beloved SYSTEM-16 arcade hardware), the system fell flat in Japan, bottom-feeding on the sales charts under Nintendo's much older and weaker Famicom and NEC/Hudson's still-new and comparable offering. While the commercial failure of SEGA's previous Mark III/Master System holds a part of this bad start over it's shoulders, the lineup of games available at the Mega Drive's launch was... how can I put this... UTTERLY TERRIBLE, mostly composed of bad ports of some of the company's arcade games from the mid-to-late-80's and half-baked
"sequels" to them (I'm looking at you, Space Harrier II!).
On North American shores, the story was quite different. Maybe due to the lack of competition from the PC-Engine (still a nipponic novelty at the time), the now-re-branded SEGA Genesis' 1989 release was met with a furious marketing campaign (Remember kids, "SEGA does what Nitendon't!") and SQUEEEES from gamers all over the 'states due to it's (almost) arcade-quality graphics hardware. The 1990 European release was no different due to it's specs mostly matching the all-powerful Commodore Amiga's.
So after estabilishing it's domain (and subsidiaries) on Western shores, SEGA Of Japan had an idea. With the massive success of Nintendo's brand-new Super Famicom console and the looming release of it's international counterpart Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the company was facing hard times in the home console industry (but not in arcades, mind you). Knowing that their machine sold better outside of Japan than it did on it's ho... Read the rest of this Review
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Kirby's Adventure
12-31-13 04:44 PM
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The true kickstarter of the Kirby franchise
As I said before in my Recca review, the NES' last years (1989-1994) were an amazing time for the console and it's owners.
The ugly grey toaster that somehow saved the then-young videogame industry from the Great Crash of 1983 was pretty old at the time, but Nintendo enginereed it so that it could live forever in the minds of videogamers and developers alike! When such achievment is successfully obtained in the virtual entertainment industry (which it was in the NES' case), it's common for dedicated developers to keep making software for it even when better equipment exists out there, and this (seemingly) insane dedication often leads into dev teams "mastering" the hardware they work on - i.e., being able to squeeze every single bit of processing power the console/handheld has to offer.
One of those teams that managed to do so with the NES was Nintendo themselves... Well, not exactly. I'm actually talking about HAL Laboratory (ex-HALken), the Big N second-party/subdivision responsible for Kirby, Super Smash Brothers, EarthBound (partially) and many other classic franchises exclusive to the japanese developer's devices. What few people know is that before being directly combined with Big N in the late 90's/early 00's, HAL was a developer free to work in any hardware they wished to! In fact, their first creation was the Eggerland/Adventures Of Lolo series of cutesy-but-though-with-a-few-quirks sliding-puzzle games, with the first in the series, the eponymous Eggerland Mystery! (yes, it has that exclamation mark at the end), being released in Japan and Europe for MSX1 computers in 1985, three years before they struck a deal with Nintendo. After re-creating and remixing the previously-released Eggerland games for Nintendo's 80's console, their first "original" creation for the nipponic gargantuar was a tech demo showcasing the then-upcoming Game Boy's capabilities. The project presented was a simple platformer with a smiley face nicknamed "PoPoPo" as the p... Read the rest of this Review
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Summer Carnival \'92 - Recca
10-05-13 08:12 PM
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Summer Carnival '92 - Recca review (NES/FC)
The late years of the NES were amazing for those who stayed attached to their good ol' toasters. Most major developers began to focus in the SNES, Genesis and (in Japan) the TurboGrafx-16, letting the smaller dev teams, with their creative ideas, take over the spotlight. Not only that, most companies mastered the hardware limitations of Nintendo's 8-bit system, creating some truly impressive games around 1990 to 1994. The combination of these two factors led to the birth of the best shoot 'em up (if not one of the best games) in the system: Summer Carnival '92 - Recca.
Recca (as I'll call it from now on) is developed by Kindle Imagine Develop (or simply KID), a small japanese company whose titles were published by publishing house Naxat Soft. While most of their previous titles (such as Low-G Man and G.I. Joe) were released internationally by Taxan Soft (Naxat's American division) and later Taito, this game is an exception. It was comissioned by the staff of the Summer Carnival otaku convention in 1992 (hence the full title) to be used exclusively at the event's videogame competitions and as a prize for the winners. Accepting SC's request, KID developed an extremely (and when I say extremely, I mean extremely) intense score-driven shmup that pushes Nintendo's hardware to the limit.
GAMEPLAY: 9/10
First things first. Being a tournament-driven game from the early 90's, Recca has really simple but enjoyable gameplay with only one objective - get the highest score possible. The A and B buttons shoot, Start pauses and Select changes your ship's speed for better bullet-dodging, as enemies and bosses will gleefully throw curtain fire at you. You can get different weapons (blue pods) and assistance satellites that erase bullets (red pods) as you progress through the stages, with weapons being able to power-up by getting the same letter in the pod several times in a row. As you play, you'll quickly discover that every weapon and defensive sattelite... Read the rest of this Review
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