The following is a rambling log of thoughts, experiences and opinions that might, if you squint a bit, loosely be termed a review.

Bioshock should need little introduction, so I shall limit the formalities to saying that it is at heart an FPS with a limited weapon / Jedi-like ability upgrade system that allows for some degree of customisation to your player as the game progresses. The setting itself grabbed the most headlines, however, with a once prosperous undersea city run as the logical extension of relentless, government interference free capitalism that has seen it go from a position of strength to almost falling apart. You must stumble around trying to piece together what’s happened and.. well, we’ll take that as it comes, shall we?

Day 1

I believe I’d played Bioshock for a grand total of two hours, after having it sit on a shelf for a year or so. THe mechanics of the game seemed initially repellant to me, and I wasn’t hurting for other games to play. Still, time to take another look at it.

I seem to remember the biggest brouhaha being made over the graphics in Bioshock. If we’re going to be all technical about it, the graphics aren’t actually all that brilliant, even for the time, at least on the basis of the first couple of levels. The texturing is somewhere between adequate and dull, and the character models aren’t all that complex or interesting.

What people meant was that the style of the graphics was worth making a brouhaha about, which also ties into the audio design, the scattered diaries of people going progressively more insane and the always compelling trick of dumping you somewhere dilapidated that was once idyllic, without knowing why it’s fallen so far and so hard.

I’m actually enjoying this a lot more than on my first dalliance, perhaps because I’m more open to taking in the ambience of the piece rather than just thinking about the game mechanics, which at the moment are little advanced over any of the ten-a-penny FPS’s littering the 360 landscape.

Lets see if this view holds up to a more extended play.

Day 2

We take a relaxing run through the fisheries.

While I’m trying to forget that I already know the twist in this little narrative’s tale, that aside I’m enjoying the gradual uncovering of the the conflict between Rapture creator Andrew Ryan and his rival, the underground crime boss cum hero of the people Frank Fontaine, with Ryan’s increasing obsession and paranoia seeming to be the catalyst behind the collapse.

Doesn’t really explain why there would be so many diaries scattered around the place so randomly, though. Perhaps a naughty dog did it.

It occurs to me that the decision whether to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters in this game is a pretty perfect distillation of all of the thus far fairly feeble attempts to introduce morality into a video game narrative. BioWare are the prime proponents of this, and while games like Jade Empire and Mass Effect are some of my favourites, their moral choices were so needlessly poles apart that they may as well have all been replaced with Bioshock’s version – do I murder a small child for personal gain, or not?

Day 3

So, after today’s efforts, I think I’m round about halfway through the game. Some of the cracks are starting to appear. I’m being sent on a worrying amount of fetch quests to progress. Kill seven members of a cult for the McGuffin they’re carrying? Find seven bottles of distilled water? What is this, a MMORPG?

I suppose it’s really no different from Doom’s whole “find the red key to get the yellow key to get the blue key to get to the exit” schtick, but that wasn’t attempting to build a cohesive framework around its shooty shooty bang bangs.

Regardless, I have a soft spot for the mentalisms of Sander Cohen in Fort Frolic, even if the whole level basically reduces to electrobolting Spider Splicers and clubbing them with a wrench.

Well, pretty much all of the game so far has reduced to that, to be honest. I think I’ve not even used half of the other weapons so far. Why alter a winning strategy?

Oh, and to satisfy my ob-com tendencies, I decided to get that “Luck Winner” ‘Achievement’ on the slot machines, which consists of standing in front of a machine and hitting ‘A’. For about half an hour.

Thrilling! And nothing garners a real sense of achievement like a totally random event that has no base in skill whatsoever! Go, design team!

Day 4

While it’s not become what I’d call a chore to finish, I’m just heading into the last level with pretty much all of the lustre taken from the piece. The past few levels have been a succession of irritating tricks that I suppose were supposed to make me, or my character, or whatever fusion of the two, feel powerless. Like a puppet, perhaps, given the revelations of the final third that I shall gloss over in the admittedly massively unlikely event that anyone who wants to play this game hasn’t done so by now.

Regardless, there’s really very few more annoying tricks to be played in a game like this than arbitrarily losing control of my character to allow something narratively convenient to occur without me tapping away on the ‘Bludgeon with wrench’ button to ruin the precious structure of the game, and that’s exactly what happens here. This has the exact opposite effect of what was intended. This does not draw me into a narrative. It attaches a high explosive to the fourth wall, blows that sunuvabitch up and reminds you that you are wasting a perfectly sunny evening, with the World Cup on as well, swinging a virtual wrench into the approximately eleventy millionth ‘mad doctor’ enemy character model.

And as if that’s not irritating enough, it follows up this with an equally arbitrary ‘lose all of your powers for a bit’ section, as your control of your plasmid upgrades goes haywire. This might be less of a problem if the weapons in the game weren’t so disappointingly dull. Even with what would seem to be a varied selections of different ammo types for each weapon, essentially giving each weapon a secondary and tertiary fire mode, this just gives minor bonuses against certain types of foe. It’s just the same old shotgun, pistol, grenade launcher, etc that I seem to have been using since the dawn of FPS’s.

The only difference here being that they might as well not exist, because even against what I assume to be the toughest enemies in the game you might as well just batter them quickly into submission with a wrench that freezes things, somehow.

Excitingly, the next level looks like it will feature an escort quest! If it also includes a power-up that reverses your controls, we’ll have a complete set of every shitty trick ever pulled in a video game!

Day 5

Well, it’s all over bar the finger-pointing. The last level falls mach in line with the rest of the game, albeit in a silly helmet, and while I’ll give the last boss some credit for being different it certainly wasn’t particularly challenging. It also continues the last few level’s theme of playing with or removing elements of the game mechanics present throughout the rest of the game, in this case the Vita-chamber respan points.

This, you’d think, might give the encounter a bit of an edge, but assuming you’ve bought enough Medikits, shotgun and grenade ammo from the suspiciously closely grouped vending machines before the lift to the encounter there’s really no problem with the last fight. And you’re certainly not going to be short on any of those items in the first instance, what with all that wrench-based action going on.

So, it’s been mildly diverting for a few days, and I certainly didn’t want to throw the game out of the window at any point, so I suppose I got my money’s worth from the game, which if I recall correctly was about ten quid. I shall leave the game to percolate through my braintank for a few days before wrapping this up.

Finger Pointing

More than any other game I’ve played, Bioshock asks for a degree of collusion with the game designers’ ideas on how it should be played, and the enjoyability of the game is directly proportional to the degree to which you go along with it. I hadn’t bothered to turn off the ‘tutorial’ hints that pop up occasionally, and so quite often a message would pop up saying that I was low on health packs, but wealthy, so I should go buy some at a vending machine. But why, the cynical mind would enquire, should I bother when the penalty for running out of health is to respawn at the last respawn-o-vitachamber I passed, with the same weapons loadout and indeed every other attribute as when I died? Well, there’s the small matter of running back to the scene of the action, but none of the levels are so large as to present any real problems on that level, and with the amount of backtracking required in some of them may also present a handy shortcut.

In this game you have, to any reasonable standard, immortality by default, without a cheat code. Unless you’re really looking to max out the achievement points from the game, there’s no incentive at all to play the game ‘properly’. Why sneak up on splicer and snipe them with the crossbow, why bother tediously photographing and researching splicers, why bother finding all of the weapon upgrade stations, when the route one approach of running up to an enemy and hitting it with a wrench remains as resoundingly effective at the end of the game as it does at the start?

For the most part, the answer to most of these questions is that it’s more fun that way, and if you’re playing the game to have fun rather than simply complete it, you should perhaps play it that way. Unfortunately, at least as far as I’m concerned, it’s not much more fun to play it the way it’s been designed to be played, and it involves an awful lot of faffing around, so I choose to remain in Wrenchville, Respawn County.

The back of the box promises a game experience like no other, which is a prime example of marketing hyperbole, given that this is a game experience very much like a dumbed down subset of System Shock 2 with a 1940′s graphical edge. Narratively it uses exactly the same tricks, but Bioshock’s simplified approach to the genetic enhancements common to both games removes a lot of the choices that made SS2 more compelling. This wouldn’t be a problem if the combat mechanics otherwise felt smooth and fluid, with interesting weapons, but Bioshock feels dated on this score, more like a contemporary of Timesplitters 2 than Modern Warfare.

Right then, the storyline. There’s a school of thought that narrative has no place in a predominantly interactive medium such as gaming. I see the point, especially for games that have never and should never be battered into that structure. No-one is hurting for lack of a story arc in the Need for Speed series. Most developers’ idea of developing a story is to grind everything to a halt, show a pre-rendered movie then continue blasting away, which is at best a mere distraction.

Valve do this well in the Half-Life series, by subsuming the narrative throughout the game in a way that if all you want to do is run and gun, you don’t even have to pick up on it. Well, for the most part, as there’s the odd unskippable cut scene moment, but a lot of the game’s flavour comes from scrawls on message boards and overheard NPC conversations and the like. Crucially, the most interesting events in the game were happening around you.

In Bioshock, like Dead Space and the System Shock games, the most interesting things in their scenarios long before you first hit the ‘start game’ option. Not necessarily a problem, but at times it feels as though everything down to the level design has been construed more with the intent of supplying a visualisation of the previous societal collapse than it does with providing a enjoyable playing experience. I would dearly love for this game to have spent as much attention on its gameplay as its setting, as then this would be a truly remarkable experience.

As it stands, it’s an interesting, visually markedly different setting attached to a pretty dull, challenge-free, often repetitive game with limited variations in enemy design and weaponry. Narratively and visually it’s interesting, but mechanically it’s at best workmanlike and that’s assuming you play the game rather than abuse the inherently flawed game design choices.

10/10? Game of the Year candidate? Not a bit of it.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Something of an odd choice for Japanese game design deities Treasure, this. Departing from their recent run of Triple A shooters to do a sequel to the top notch Sega Saturn Guardian Heroes, an RPG tinted side scrolling beat ‘em up characterised by huge, er, characters, fairly spectacular spellcasting effects and the kind of graphical zooming trickery that set jaws dropping amongst those who hadn’t yet subscribed to the prevailing wind of 3D killing off 2D gaming. Above all, it was a tremendous amount of fun as we’ve come to expect from that particular codehouse. Jaws dropped again when the news came that Nintendo’s humble pocket system would play host to this welcome yet unanticipated sequel. Surely it could never do the original justice?

Sadly, no, it can’t. But it has a damn good go at it, and in the process pushes the hardware beyond the limits anyone had thought possible. The game starts with your death, which would seem unfortunate but allows the legendary Undead Hero to inhabit your body, the design of which owes more to Gunstar Heroes than Guardian Heroes. This big dead fella you may remember as your large sword swingin’ golden armoured CPU controlled helper in Guardian Heroes, and while the newest incarnation relies more on fisticuffs than swordplay you’re by no means defenceless.

In terms of moves available to you it’s hardly Street Fighter Alpha 3 but it’s certainly streets ahead of Final Fight One, probably it’s closest contemporary on the handheld. Standard ground punches chain into combos so it’s easy to start baddie bashing, although you’ll need to start mixing up attacks to survive the onslaught. Overhead attacks send enemies flying around the screen and a ground pounding attack that would seem more suited to the Hulk knocks down those around you. Aerial attacks prove effective also, and if that’s not enough you could always start laying the smackdown with one of your spell types, which differ slightly depending on your character choice. Homing attacks and lasers? What is this, R-Type?

All of which would probably get you off the first level but not much further unless you learn how to block and counter. The shoulder button when held creating a barrier from most attacks. A swift tap just as a blow is about to land not only stops any damage but knocks your attacker into a stun, or if it’s a projectile it’s returned to sender with extreme prejudice. This is so vital towards the game’s later stages it’s the only way to play it, which does make a short game harder (a good thing) it limits the amount of fun you can have with it (a bad thing). Defeating your attackers earns you crystals, which can be used to level up your characters attack, defence or magic stats as you see fit.

Oh yeah, the plot. There’s not as much pontificating as I remember clicking through on Guardian Heroes, but the Advance incarnation still has more development than you’d expect or probably want from the genre. A thousand years have passed since the last game, and the Heavens have decided it’s time to have another final battle, with mankind on the extermination agenda. You take on a huge but not too varied army of miscreants the heavens have thrown your way headed by Zur who inexplicably looks like a goofish Shakespearean extra but who’s also raised Guardian Heroes‘ fiendish magician Kanon from the dead. You’ll have to deal with the sword swinging footsoldiers, giant ogres, huge robots and mirrors. Don’t ask. In a canny reference to the original / recycling of assets you’ll have to have versions of the heroes of the first game, now unwilling soldiers of the Heavens, who are trying to raise the ultimate warrior.

Lovely, but somewhat superfluous. I suppose it has a better ring to it than ‘Walk right. Kill everything that gets in your way’, but it’s all faintly ridiculous and ultimately breaks up the action. At a short but challenging six levels, there’s a slight suggestion it’s only there to bulk up the playtime. In terms of additional lifespan you can unlock near enough every sprite in the game to play as, either through repeated playthroughs donating the crystals ordinarily used for levelling up your character to a research fella or by having a blast of the survival and time attack modes, themselves unlocked after completing the game on varying difficulty levels.

It’s not enough. There’s no real incentive to unlock all of these characters, no benefits apart from a sense of completion for the dedicated or anal amongst us. It shows attention to detail that essentially every character in the game is properly playable if you put the effort into it, but you’ll still be playing the same game through every time. Unlike it’s elder brother there’s no branching stages, no alternative paths through the game which made Guardian Heroes a viable prospect to replay through a few times. Understandable format constraints make such a scheme impossible on the GBA, but after you’ve spent four or five hours playing this through a couple of times there’s no added incentive to come back to it again.

Which would be a problem if this were a fun game to play, after all Final Fight One offers approximately nada in terms of extras but it’s still a great game to dig out for a half hour rampage now and again. The mechanics of Advance Guardian Heroes make it a more complex game, but also detract from the fun to be had from it. Quickly, and almost immediately on higher difficulty levels it become apparent that the only way to progress is to wait for an opponent to attack, stun him with a block/counter and then unleash a quick flurry of attacks. Repeat until bored. This quickly saps the fun from the game, reducing it to a mechanical exercise in timing.

Fine if you like that sort of thing, but I’m sure it’s not that significant a portion of the population. Technically it’s a very impressive game, pushing the sprite handling and scaling capacities of the GBA past what limits were imagined for it, although it goes a little to far. Slowdown rears it’s ugly head a few times when the spells are sent flying amongst dense crowds, and while it’s rare that it presents a hindrance to gameplay it does tarnish the presentation a little.

The main thing that’s bothering me about this game is that it really doesn’t feel like Treasure made it, despite the obvious reuse of their IP. The touches of personality that raised things like Guardian & Gunstar Heroes and Bangai-o above the normal genre standards was what made them legendary, and there’s only a precious few moments in this latest outing that come close to that. The rest seems somewhat…perfunctory, I suppose. It’s by no means a bad game in any sort of technical sense, just a rather joyless one that’s too mechanical and too short lived to be recommended to all but hardened beat-em-up fans.

Of all the classic games in this current retrogaming fad lauded for their playability in lieu of the graphical fripperies that many more clock cycles are devoted to in this age of technological wonders, one example stands head and shoulders above all others. One game that scrambles Chuckie Egg. That flies higher than Jet Set Willy. That sends Sabrewulf Head Over Heels. That really needs no more cut-rate puns to enhance its reputation. That game, of course, is Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.

Tapping into the Great British obsession with all garden based activities, this barnstormer was released to an unsuspecting world in April 1990 to the astonished silence of all, particularly publishers Codemasters who had their own prolific line of ‘Advanced’ prefixed games but crucially not in the lucrative lawnmowing sector. Providing the most comprehensive grass cutting simulator that has yet to grace the world, you take the role of young, idealistic uphill gardener Fingers McGovern as you try to take your company to the top of the gardening world. Starting off with only the standard issue ‘Patio Sprintette’ mower you have to build up your reputation and equally importantly your bank balance as you progress up the ziggurat.

Upgrading your lawn tending technology as you go, you’ll have to face stiff competition from your rivals and the never ending forces of nature in your quests to keep lawns the country over neatly cropped. Will you be able to join the halcyon ranks of the gardening elite such as Percy Thrower and Alan Titchmarsh or will your burned out career end up on the compost heap? Perhaps a more important question, will you be able to tear yourself away from one of the best games ever created?

You almost certainly will, given that the game revolves solely around holding down the ‘m’ key for a while. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was a practical joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers of the popular and deeply funny Your Sinclair magazine, receiving a glowing write up in the April 1990 issue from Duncan MacDonald, one of the most popular Speccy writers of the time, now an author having recently released the novel S.C.U.M.. Confirmation of the gag came in the next issue, with Advanced Lawnmower Simulator appearing on the covertape with a writing credit of none other than MacDonald.

As the screenshots show, even for a Speccy the mechanics and graphics were …minimal. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game itself was its line of insults on completion of a lawn, as your poor pixel avatar slowly proceeds block by block and line by line up a poorly realised lawn. The game rewards your tolerance with statements along the lines of ‘Call that a mow-job?’ and ‘That’s a bit of an erratic cut. Hellen Keller could have done better’. Still, mow well and you could earn yourself a nice corned beef sandwich.

Hardly a glowing recommendation for a game, or even a passable concept in the first place, but it spawned a wealth of YS reader produced knock-offs all of which being the same game with a few colour codes changed. Striking a chord with the ever quirky British sense of humour, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator lived on not only in the timeframe of its initial release but in a baffling array of ports for platforms as disparate as the VIC-20 and the Gameboy.

Among the admittedly slim ranks of great gaming April Fool wind-ups (the only other enduring ones I can think of off the top of my vacant little head being EGM‘s Photoshopped Street Fighter 2 screenshot claiming the inclusion of the legendary Shen Long, their ‘Lara Croft nude’ codes and the idea that Duke Nukem Forever will ever be released), Advance Lawnmower Simulator stands above all else in terms of invention and endurance.

If this has taken your fancy and you’re up for a spot of hot mowing action, there’s a very decent online Flash version for your delectation and Duncan MacDonald’s original review is archived for posterity and the shrine of all things YS The YS Rock’n'Roll Years.

You wouldn’t look twice at this game if you saw it sitting on the shelf in your local gaming suppliers. At least in the U.S. it gets the slightly more exotic name of Ninja Five-0, but for it’s British release Konami no doubt thought we’d assume it’s a football game and they’d missed out ‘Preston North End’ off the end of the name. So we get a generic title, a generic and unimaginative cover picture and a generic write up on the back that really isn’t going to convince the idle browser to splash out thirty notes on it. That’s a great pity, as it’s one of the best games that’s yet graced Nintendo’s pocket rocket.

As the title suggests, you take control of a ninja who happens to be a cop. Fair enough. There’s some tortuous plot to justify the fact that you’ll go up against a coalition of common thugs, military types and other ninjas, but it’s hardly essential to your experience. Something about masks and the quest for power and whatnot. To this end, or because of this, or perhaps in spite of this (I wasn’t paying much attention. The important thing is that there was ninjas present in some capacity) this alliance of evil takes over certain buildings key to their plans, whatever those happened to be, such as the airport, the factory by the docks, the banks and, err, a cave. Your job is simple, rescue the hostages they’ve taken in each building by simple means of slicing and dicing the bad guys until they’re reduced to small puddles of blood.

The goons come in the usual assortment of gun toting baddies and knife wielding thugs, as well as some chaps who rather care freely lob sticks of dynamite in your general direction. However, you are a ninja and this kind of mundanity isn’t going to be too problematic to deal with, seeing as your shurikens can not only do a serious mischief to miscreants but also knock their bullets out of the air. A swift tap of the left shoulder button whips out your chopper. Ooh-er, missus. Your katana can rather usefully slice through both the flesh of your assailants and the dynamite sticks, neutralising them. Your ninjitsu avatar Joe Osugi can dish out a two hit slice combo with another tap of the button, or if he’s in the middle of a jump he does a rather nifty somersaulting slice of doom that does some serious damage.

These low level goons aren’t too much of a problem, although you’ll have to be a bit more careful with the ones holding a hostage across them as a human shield. Wait for them to shove their captive aside and attempt a few pot shots before either slicing them up or inserting a shuriken in them, or sneak up behind them using the usual assortment of crates and barrels as cover and take them from behind. Ooh-er, missus. You may have a little more bother with later foot soldiers with a penchant for flame throwers, assault rifles and laser cannons however. Also standing in your path are a selection of evil ninjas, who look rather similar to Joe and can attack in similar ways which will present more of a challenge for you to counter. There are also a few lumbering mecha-ninjas wandering around who can take a bit of a beating, but their sluggishness means you ought to be able to dispatch them.

The areas themselves harkens back to the days of Revenge of Shinobi and platformers of it’s ilk, with supposedly commonplace buildings having been designed by someone with scant regard for the safety of anyone inside it. Even as a highly trained police ninja you’ll have difficulty progressing through some fiendish levels that are as difficult as any I’ve seen in recent years. You have one skill above all that’ll help you with this – your ninja grappling hook. Taking inspiration from Bionic Commando and combining it with the acrobatic antics of Spiderman, this enables you safely swing over the various pits of spikes and dangerously placed exhausts that game designers seem to think lurk at every turn in everyday life. You’ll need to learn how to swing over pretty much the entire length of the level in some cases, which is initially a little tricky but very gratifying when learnt. This also enables you to pull out some nifty ninja moves, jumping at the end of your upwards arc to soar in the area and drop down on some unsuspecting thug, slicing him up like a baloney.

Each level holds a boss of various fiendishness, some looking more or less like inexplicably large ninjas and one looking like a normal sized ninja on the back of an inexplicably large frog. Uh-huh. Some of their attack patterns can seem as fiendish as the level design on first encounters but they’re all beatable once you work it out. It’s a good job you’ve got unlimited continues as there is the occasional section that has a slight reliance on trial and error (or trial and death) which can be get annoying, and it’s about the only significant flaw the game has.

An advantage of being a ninja is that you’ve got some ninja magic to dish out. Once you’ve killed enough goons to fill a power bar or grabbed the appropriate pickup you can tap A + B to destroy any common or garden chappie on the screen, or do a chunk of damage to a boss. There are also a few power ups knocking around in addition to health bonuses, which allow your ninja to fire three flaming shurikens in a spread formation rather than your basic variety and eventually to fire one very powerful, almost laser like shuriken that’ll take down any of the normal guys instantly and do some real damage even to a boss.

It is, I suppose, not all that different to a lot of platformers, but it’s more fun than the majority of them. The control method is probably responsible, it’s terribly intuitive and it’s easy to be lost in a little ninja based world. The graphics have some nice animations and a couple of ropey ones, but there’s always a trade off between character detail and how much playfield you can squeeze of the GBA’s ickle screen. It’s a balance that I think Konami have got right, although you do have the ability to scroll the viewpoint by holding down the left shoulder button. This is rarely needed and it’s easy to forget it exists, which is probably the cause of a few of those trial and error scenarios I was bitching about earlier now I come to think of it.

I suppose if we’re being picky it can’t be a five star game. While it’s the best platform game I’ve seen in years it’s also blatantly nicking Revenge of Shinobi and crossing it with Bionic Commando and the old Megadrive Spiderman games. That alone wouldn’t stop me doling out the top marks but a few additional niggles with some of the levels almost ensuring that you take at least a few hits on a first play and remember to avoid something or jump as soon as you enter a room take the shine off a little. The lack of more than one tune for the normal levels is plain sloppy, and it features another of my pet hates with games such as these. When you as much as brush against a bad guy you lose a chunk of health. Why? Are they coated in acid? Are you allergic to them? Are they undercover porcupines? Were their suits made of scorpions? Likewise killing a hostage by accident or design results in an inexplicable loss of health. Not the sort of thing a skilled ninja should be doing to be sure, but why does this dishonour result in your own disembowelling?

Slight flaws perhaps, and it’s still a fine game. Perhaps the best recommendation I can give it is that with so many varied and interesting ways of pirating games in this age of lasers and particle accelerators (and internet newsgroups, emulators and flash writers, more to the point) I still ponied up the dough to buy a legit copy. If you’ve got a GBA, I’d recommend you do the same. Easily the best ninja based game on the platform given the balls up THQ made of Revenge Of Shinobi.

Not that “More Tekken” is necessarily a terrible thing, but I can’t help but wonder exactly who was hanging on tenterhooks for another minorly updated revision of Namco’s long running, bafflingly popular pugilist simulator. ‘Popular’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘best’ and it’d be a brave man who nails their colours to the Tekken mast for the latter. It retains the usual spit ‘n’ polish the series normally has lavished upon it, with the exception of the rough-around-the-edges Tekken Tag Tournament, and carries out the usual incremental upgrade threat of being slightly prettier, slightly shinier and a few more characters slapped into the box.

If I’m going to have the nerve to call this a review, I suppose I’d better at least mention the game mechanics. You select a character and punch, kick and throw an opponent character in a vaguely unsatisfying way while trying to ignore the silly translucent explosions of colour that accompany every hit to mask the fact that it still doesn’t look like characters are making contact even after umpteen years of development. If you hurt your opponent more than they hurt you, you win and go on to the next round. Repeat this often enough and you win.

Surprising, this is not. Also, Yoda, I am not so why write I this like know I not. Anyhoo, why do we play fight-o-games? As much as we’d like to think of it as a pure test of skill and reflex, really it’s all about the staisfying crunching of bone and skelping of the head. Thing is, Tekken 5, in common with all of its predecessors, has an annoying, floaty, indifferent fight engine that never looks, sounds and thus feels like there’s any pain being dealt out which really stymies proper bloodlust. The entire series has never once made me dole out a sympathetic “ouch” on behalf of my poor little pummeled avatar, something even games as geriatric as Last Bronx can achieve.

I am not, I suppose, the best person to tell you about any intricacies and tweaks made to the game engine. I’ve long considered Tekken to be Virtua Fighter‘s clunky, unwieldy, sluggish, tactically naive younger brother and Tekken 5 proves not to make much of a dent in that opinion. Hell, Tekken even struggles to make it into my top 3D fighters, with VF, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive all being a damn sight faster, fluid and fun. It’s probably better than King Of Fighters: Maximum Impact and Street Fighter EX. Just.

What colours my judgements on this game more than anything else is that after two hours of uneventful, uninspiring play I felt I’d seen quite enough of it. A few more hours confirms this. It’s just More Tekken, and by this point in my life I think I’ve seen Enough Tekken. Unless the inevitable next-next-next generation Tekken 6 does something radically different, I suspect that this will be my Last Tekken.

The answer was to turn the game into an isometric shooter, a forced third person perspective that’s been happily utilised since the ZX Spectrum was a jumpin’ and a jivin’ around with Batman. After falling out of favour for a while it seems to be enjoying a mini revival of late, also used in the recent resoundingly average GBA version of Terminator 3. While the developers Mobius have managed to achieve level layouts that are at time scarily reminiscent of the original PC versions, they’re ultimately hamstrung and defeated by a sheer lack of horsepower.

Unsurprisingly taking the same plotline as the original version, the broad details concern undercover cop Max Payne avenging his murdered wife and child by infiltrating the local Mafia outfit, cracking the case of new designer drug Valkyr with extreme prejudice. Seeing as I’ve already regurgitated the storyline in excruciating detail in my previous review I think I’ll spare those gory details this time through, but rest assured that despite a trimming to fit the cartridge space the story is as noir-riffic and enjoyable as the previous versions.

Dealing with the first thing that’ll strike you on flipping the power switch first, the presentation remains exceptional and frankly astonishing given the space limitations. The glorious graphic novel artwork that made the games’ name remains albeit in slightly less resplendent form, and the overblown gravelly voiceovers are in full effect. Well, as long as you can take ‘full effect’ to mean ‘raspily overcompressed’, but this is still an impressive and largely audible addition to the atmosphere. It’s the presentation of this game’s bigger brother more than anything else that made it one of the most talked about and fondly remembered games of recent times and Mobius deserve great credit in translating as much of this as possible to the handheld version.

The palpable atmosphere ported over allows the player to perhaps be a little more forgiving of the actual gameplay mechanics, which while maintaining a certain amount of fun are flawed enough to prove exceptionally irritating on occasions. On stepping off the train at Roscoe Street station in the games first level, it’s quite likely you’ll be perforated by bullet holes rather quickly. The reason for this is simple, your Mafioso enemies can see you well before you can see them. Being shot at (and more often than not hit) by ne’erdowells that lie somewhere three screen lengths ahead of you and certainly not in your field of vision isn’t exactly an optimal gaming experience.

It’s the best the graphic engine could hope to do really, and it already struggles when the bodies start piling up. The polygonal mini-Max runs and dives around with commendable fluidity while dispatching lead salads, and somehow Mobius have contrived to have fistful of slowdowns only after the action has subsided so I’m inclined to let it off on this charge, although it does knock some of the polish off the game.

There’s a full range of weaponry to dispatch your enemies from the humble Beretta to the M4 assault rifle, although strangely the Ingram seems to have the best accuracy and firing rate, which is more than a little odd. Max seems to be a little more accurate in this version, auto-aim generally doing a good job of taking down your targets as long as you’re pointing in roughly the right direction that you’ve guessed those targets are in. I can only guess that he’s been doing some heavy lifting recently and Max has strained his arm muscles, because aiming at anything above waist height seems to cause the engine a few problems. Several times you’ll be attacked by bad guys upstairs from you, and several times your bullets will fly harmlessly into concrete resulting in your untimely demise.

It’s an extreme annoyance and perhaps unduly so, because for most of the game there’s a lot of fun to be had diving around shooting wildly. Shootdodging is certainly recommended, as it seems to render you more or less invulnerable. Perhaps it’s easier to forgive it it’s flaws given the presentation, the style making up for the substance. And certainly there’s not a lot of substance, the already short original being fairly drastically abridged in its newest form. Poor Vlad, dearest amongst all my friends, is almost excised from the story entirely and does nothing more than offer Max a lift. The essential plot progress remains, although how well it’s received by those not familiar with the original is a question I can’t answer.

Judged as a direct port of the original Max Payne fails on several points, but that’s hardly a fair comparison given the vast gulf in power between the formats. As an arcadey shooter it has far more success, although it still fails in several crucial areas. The presentation is solid as a rock, and by far the most accomplished on the GBA. It’s failing is a basic one, you just cannot see who’s shooting at you and this does mean you’ll spend most of your time shootdodging around firing test shots hoping to hit someone. Viewed as such it’s surprising that the game is any fun period, and Mobius really deserve a lot of plaudits for pushing the envelope of what’s possible for the now underpowered handheld. It’s just taking on a task too big for it, but hopes have to be high for the studios next release. As long as it’s not a chopped down Max Payne 2.

Sega are clearly a rather thrifty company, certainly if their use of the House of the Dead 2 assets are anything to go by, Having saved a boatload of cash by hiring some of the most lackadaisical and unintentionally hilarious voice actor for the game proper, further funds were raised from the arcade, Dreamcast and PC versions, with it even showing up as a bonus in the Xbox House of the Dead 3. All fair game, although using the game as a basis for a touch typing game, The Typing of the Dead was an inspired if abstract move. With this zombie killing pinball game, I think they’ve pushed the name as far as it can go.

Thankfully Sega have graced the Gameboy Advance with a rather decent little pinball game in so doing, three tables full of shambling monsters along with the more common spring loaded flippers and bumpers. Rather reminiscent of ye olde Megadrive pinballer Dragon’s Fury, Pinball of the Dead provides a stiff challenge, multiple subtables, three main tables and many of the sound clips we’ve come to know and cherish so to my perverse pleasure I can also ‘suffer like G did?’.

Along with the usual ball bouncing antics that computerised pinball generally provides, Pinball of the Dead will also see you taking on various pint sized versions of the bosses, although the limited strategy of the lightgun based bigger brother translates to an equally limited ‘keep the ball in play until it dies’. However, seeing as that’s largely the point of every pinball game I’m sure we can let it slide.

As a genre, pinball games are largely limited by the fact that they’re pinball games. Little call for fancy dan 3D affairs and photo realism, which means that there’s hardly been a tremendous shift in the genre since they made the leap to computers. While purists will still argue that only a real bricks ‘n’ mortar table will provide a true p-balling experience, Pinball of the Dead is as good a portable solution as I’ve found. Cribbing graphics and sounds from its bigger brothers gives it a sense of continuity despite the disparate genres, an if you can’t stomach the shame of buying Pokemon Pinball this is a rather neat alternative.

Every once in a while, a game comes along that’s revolutionary. Despite being little more than an advance on the Dune series on a superficial level at least, Command and Conquer was one of those games. Bringing realtime strategy to millions and engrossing them in the battles between the GDI and NOD forces. After Westwood’s absorption into the EA collective, expansion of the franchise into other gaming realms seemed inevitable and the concept of a first person shooter set in this now firmly established gaming world didn’t seem like a bad one. Panned and ignored on its initial release, the game is proving to be one of the more successful budget titles of recent times. Rightfully so, as while it’s not without a number of significant flaws there are enough points of interest to make it worth a fiver of even the casual FPS fans cash.

Set sometime in the seemingly eternal wars between terrorists and the coalition of the willing, you step into the combat boots of the GDI’s most dangerous commando, codenamed Renegade. As good an excuse as any for some one man vs everyone else killing. There’s the usual forgettable linking device of a plot, something about a kidnapped scientist and tiberium research and mutants. Mutants with guns. Needless to say, they must be stopped.

In doing so, you’ll have to traverse the game’s unique selling point – some of the biggest maps seen to this day in a first person shooter accompanied by a near unheard of phenomenon – load times that are to all intents and purposes negligible. Anyone who’s had the unfortunate experience of trekking through the especially awful Postal 2 and it’s quarter hour waits round every corner will appreciate this concept. Perhaps the downside of this is the occasional long slog through mostly empty terrain, but this still a novel experience an that’s not something to be taken lightly in this day and age. Critics would point to the mildly sparse texturing and occasionally basic geometry of the buildings entered as huge flaws, which i always thought a tad churlish. In truth, it’s not that bad and as far as I can see it’s not far off state of the art, at least on it’s 2000 release.

More disappointing is the A.I. routines used by Westwood’s codemonkeys, as in truth they’ve little in common with intelligence. Sniper rifles provide the usual fun ‘n’ games, but it’s a shade disappointing to surgically down one guard from a handy vantage point to have his mate standing nary five feet away, looking directly at the bloody scene to steadfastly bat neither eyelid. While it’s not alone in the substandard A.I. routines by any stretch of the imagination, when something as geriatric as the N64′s Goldeneye can get it right ninety percent of the time it’s sad to see later games get in wrong ninety percent of the time.

Renegade is graphically and sonically decent without ever hitting the realms of spectacular, which I suppose has to count against it in the final analysis. In this day and age it’s easy to become blazé about the quality of games, as we’re absolutely spoilt rotten. Like most people who’ve seen the bulk of the computer gaming revolution unfold under our very thumbs it’s only on the rarest of occasions that we take stock of how far thing have progressed since Pong. Given that this is a FPS where you can run along vast outside landscapes, enter buildings, clear them room by room, blow the smegger up and hijack a tank for your escape, shelling guard towers from a safe distance, remaining unimpressed seems almost churlish. A testament to how many excellent games there are out there that even something as technically impressive as Renegade is regarded as merely ‘alright’.

It must be said that I’m a bit of a sucker for FPS games. I’m also a complete sucker for the Command and Conquer games, so an FPS set in the C & C universe, single handedly achieving what ordinarily took a small army to do was always going to be in danger of floating my boat. While it’s far from perfect, there’s more than enough goodness present for most casual FPS player to pick this up on the budget labels and not be disappointed at all with the investment.

Since the engine’s inclusion in a Matrix-aping section of the 3DMark benchmark, gamers everywhere were drooling for a game to be based on it. It took approximately forever, but when it arrived few were disappointed. You may think the bullet-time feature little more than a gimmick but it’s effective and enjoyable with a solid plot to link the action. Beautifully presented, Max Payne is an absorbing bullet fest from beginning to it’s unfortunately all too soon end.

About four years in the making, this third person shooter is notable in that it delivers one of the most cinematic gaming experiences yet seen. Unlike Metal Gear Solid 2, merely taking the approach of having a thumb-twiddling gamer sit through cut-scene after cut-scene, Max Payne feels like you’re in the middle of a cross between Se7en and Hard Boiled. Level transitions and important in-game plot points are relayed in the form of a mock-graphic novel, with grandiosely overblown prose and a suitably gravely voice over provided by Mr. Payne himself (voiced by James McCaffrey with story and screenplay writer Sam Lake providing the body). The developers go for a pulp fiction dime novel feel to the story and it’s certainly absorbing and atmospheric, which makes it possible to invest far more emotion in the character than some nameless action figure normally seen in this type of game.

Presentation is meaningless unless the game is any good, but thankfully Max Payne delivers more than enough bang for your buck. The third person perspective is generally seen in platform games, which may or may not have shooting elements bolted on a la Tomb Raider. It’s comparatively rare to see it in what is at heart an out and out kill fest, and there’s a solid argument to be made that this might have worked better as a first person shooter. Of course, were that the case it would both feel less cinematic, the third person camera giving it a look a little more reminiscent of a movie, and also would render the real point of the bullet-time feature null and void – showing off.

Despite it’s solid game play mechanics, this game is about looking cool. It’s about drawing dual Berettas from your scuffed leather jacket, diving in flo mo round a corner and shooting a bunch of goons through the eye. It’s about taking some henchman out with a shotgun and watching him slowly be blown away as the camera pans round his jerking body. It’s about shooting a Molotov cocktail out of a gangsters hand just before he’s about to lob it and watching him burn. It’s about being attacked by a goon standing on a flight of stairs beneath you and shootdodging over him, shooting him in the front, top and back of his head as you gracefully glide over him doling out the cranial perforations. It’s about being in a movie. A very blood-soaked, violent movie.

As so often happens in videogames, Max in on a quest for revenge. A prologue has you arriving home one night to your beautiful wife and bouncing baby to find them slaughtered by a bunch of junkies all hopped up on the new designer drug, Valkyr. Wanting to get the bastards behind this drug, Max transfers to the DEA, now reporting to his best friend, Alex. He goes undercover into the mafia under the tender mercy of Jack Lupino, until a call from Alex brings him to Rosco Street subway station for a rendezvous. The place is crawling with mobsters and as Max rightly ascertains Death hung in the air. He reaches Alex just in time to see him killed.

Framed for his murder after being placed at the scene of the bank heist the mobsters were undertaking, Max goes on a one man mission to discover who’s trying to dispose of him, working his way up the henchman chain of command killing them as he goes. He’s on the run from the police, staying one step ahead of Deputy Chief Jim Bravura. The media starts talking him up as some kind of heroic vigilante, much to his distaste. As he say in typically cheese laden fashion, “I hadn’t asked for any of this. Trouble came to me in big dark swarms. The good and the just were like gold dust in this city. I had no illusions. I was not one of them. I was no hero.”

The first chapter of the story is a work of art. Missions, such as they are, flow gracefully from one to the next with few if any sudden jumps in location. The plot is revealed slowly as Max find leads and hounds them down with dogged inevitability. Dealing with the smaller fish make uncovers minor details about Lupino that make the lead up to the episode’s final showdown with the Satan-obsessed mob boss inside his gothic nightclub all the more creepy. It’s usual to actually be shooting anyone with a defined personality in a video game, as they tend to fall back on Hellspawn or some such nonsense.

It’s a great shame that the other two chapters can’t quite match this narrative continuity. Presumably with publishers snapping to get this game out, finally, time that might have been devoted to the plotting and structure was diverted elsewhere. It hits all the plot points necessary, but they don’t have the flow of the first chapter, they don’t mesh in quite the same fashion. A lot more location jumping and less detail in some areas of the story leave much of the rationale for the third chapter seeming tacked on, as though hints were meant to be more integrated in the first chapter but never added. It’s worthwhile pointing out that it’s only (marginally) failing by it’s own high standards.

The game play mechanics remain as sound throughout the course of the game however, so we can probably forgive this. The mechanics are much the same on any version, with the usual forward/back, strafe right/left controls with direction and aiming dealt with via mouse / analogue stick. Ducking is only of much use for steadying yourself when sniping, and don’t expect to get a tremendous amount of use from Max’s jumping skills – this isn’t Super Mario Brothers, we have guns for dispatching enemies.

A tap on the jump button along with a strafe key results in a useful rolling dodge, but it’s liable to be passed over in favour of his bullet-time shootdodge. This has a clear advantage in that you can happily blast away while avoiding whatever flavour of lead is being dispensed your way. And it looks damn nifty diving away from an exploding grenade. throughout the game you’ll pick up a number of nifty weapons, from the Berettas, Desert Eagles and pump action shotguns of the early sections to the high powered sniper rifles and Colt Commando machine guns gained from your Russian ally of sorts Boris Dime. Oh, and never forget the dual Ingrams. Tasty.

Tap the bullet-time button while standing and you’ll enter bullet-time until either cancelled or your time meter runs out. Time is earned back by killing enemies in the method of your choosing. Basically, your enemies and their bullets slow down, as does your actual motion but crucially you can spin your viewpoint and hence aim and shoot those nasty goons no matter how outnumbered you are. Gimmick? Of course, but it’s an effective one. It’s impact may have been diminished somewhat by the multitude of other games bolting similar systems on but Max Payne still has the best integrated and useful system, even including the recently released Enter The Matrix, in a strange circle of inspiration / rip-offs.

It’s a simplification to say that you run through a linear level shooting goons until you reach the next level, but that makes it no less true. There’s no branching storylines, no puzzles to speak of, even few of the fps mainstay ‘find a red keycard’ variety. This game pretty much bypasses your higher level brain functions, relying on reaction times and reflexes more than analytical logic. It’s no less engaging because of it though, and that’s the point. Max Payne is fun, pure and simple. From the ballistics to the overblown dialogue it’s a great, utterly enjoyable bullet fest.

The graphics still hold up to scrutiny today. More recent shooters may have move detailed models and slightly more fluid motion, but there’s nothing at all wrong with the explosions and detail in the game. The locations are a tad barren but that’s only to be expected given the nature of the places Max finds himself in, so we’ll let that slide. The sounds are suitable meaty with deep, rumbly bass explosions and satisfying gunfire effects. for a videogame the score is suitable haunting and cinematic which is still rarely seen in video games.

The only problems the game has are the somehow less detailed and less well integrated plots for chapter two, pitting Max against the mafia again, but a higher authority, and chapter three with Max uncovering dirty government secrets and black operations relating to his wife and child’s death and the Valkyr drug. These chapters are over too quickly as well, and for any competent gamer won’t present much of a challenge to fly through in the default and only difficulty setting available. Once completed, it unlocks two more modes, Hard Boiled which is exactly the same but with more resilient guards, and New York Minute, which is exactly the same but with a tight time limit that’s only extended by killing goons. I’d have appreciated the opportunity to try the Hard Boiled mode from the off to extend the games longevity but there’s little to encourage you to immediately play the game through again. New York Minute is interesting but bloody difficult.

A very few of the levels are a shade annoying. The last level of chapter one and the prologues for chapter two and three rely at points on walking over narrow beams and paths. While the control system works perfectly for frantic gunplay it’s less effective for tight manoeuvring, resulting in a few frustrating falls from grace. This is largely dependant on the version you’re playing as well, the PC version suffering a little less than the console ports. This alone is enough to take the gloss off the experience, and the exceptionally irritating level in Jack Lupino’s restaurant that’s being torched as a trap is a masterpiece of scripted event annoyance and random death, with no real hints given as to which way to go. This leads to multiple reloads after trying a path, burning to death, trying another way, getting a bit further, burning to death, lather, rinse, repeat. Frustrating in the extreme.

Versions exist for the PC, Playstation 2 and the Xbox. The original PC version is the best and the standard the all others must be judged by, but they do a good job matching up to it. The keyboard/mouse combo is unquestionably the best way to control it but the analogue nature of today’s joypads mean it’s possible to retain much of the accuracy in movement and aiming. There’s a very slight jerkiness on some of the PS2 levels but it’s never intrusive, and some of the textures have succumbed to it’s memory limitations and it’s a little less detailed as a result. Again, nothing major. The only real difference is that a few of the additional ‘dead end’ corridors that Max can explore in the PC version that generally only house a few more bad guys to off are mysteriously blocked off in the console versions due to memory limitations, presumably.

The PS2 version is therefore a very good conversion given the machines age. The Xbox port shares all of the PS2′s minor flaws, but it’s a little harder to forgive it. After all, the Xbox is arguably more powerful than the PC’s many played Max Payne on on its release, so there’s certainly no excuse for fobbing off Xbox users with a (even very slightly) cut down port when they could have had the full-fat Max Payne experience.

Niggles aside, Max Payne remains one of the most memorable and enjoyable games you’ll complete, and it’s just a shame that there isn’t more of it. Still, given it’s age and the impending release of Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne (strangely subtitled a ‘noir love story’, presumably with added bullets) you’ll be able to pick this up for somewhere in the region of twenty quid at the absolute most, and around a tenner if you shop around.

As an aside, here’s a few more of my favourite Payneisms…

“The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding.”

“He was trying to buy more sand for his hour glass. I wasn’t selling any.”

“I was so far past the point of no return, I couldn’t even remember what it looked like as I passed it.”

“Valkyr had been meant to be a white-winged maiden that would lift you to a warrior’s heaven. But it turned out to be a one-way demon ride to hell. The devil was in the drug. I knew. I had met him.”

“Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back.”

and the attention grabbing opener…

“They were all dead. The final bullet was an exclamation point on everything that had lead up to this moment. I released my finger from the trigger, and it was over.”

Eeugh. Mortal Kombat games have been at absolute best mediocre, and hadn’t managed to reach those dizzying heights with its 2-D incarnations of late. Even so, this is a particularly awful translation that seems to have been either rushed out the door without playtesting or programmed by someone who hasn’t played a fighting game before.

The basic formula has remained unchanged for years, with you taking control of a warrior to go up against the domination schemes of some evil entity, normally Shao Khan. For the purposes of this review, lets pretend that the recent Mortal Kombat : Deadly Alliance doesn’t exist, on the basis that that’s actually a pretty decent game but I’ve no inclination to go into the differences at the moment.

MK:Advance is one of the earlier titles, but we’ve seen that the machine can ably pull off SNES translations so this shouldn’t have been an impossible job to pull off. This is essentially a version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which instantly limits it’s appeal. MK always worked best as a simple, uncomplicated fighter and reached it’s peak with Mortal Kombat 2, in my opinion anyway (and it’s a not uncommon one). The versions of MK3, and eventually MK Trilogy tried bolting on various additions like a ‘Run’ button and combos that required seven hands to attempt, making the whole thing seem even more clumsy and unwieldy than it already was in stark contrast with the balanced simplicity of its eternal rival Street Fighter 2, which was a damn sight easier to control yet still allowed for complex combos.

So if it wasn’t enough of a handicap to be based on one of the lesser versions, codemonkeys Virtucraft did themselves no additional favours by utterly breaking the game in conversion. It’s actively unplayable. I’ll get round to the bugs in a moment, but even if these weren’t there you still could not get any slight element of joy from this mess. I like to delude myself I’m decent at 2D fighters. After all, I’ve been playing the damn things for years. I started this baby up in its default normal difficulty and decided to have a quick blast on the shorter, novice tree of opponents to warm up. A computer controlled Scorpion quickly boxed me into a corner and panelled me to death in ten seconds.

Flustered, I changed the difficulty down and started again, to a similar CPU inflicted humiliation. It just was not possible to land a hit, let alone a combo on the computer. Being a stubborn old fool I persevered but any tactics used in any version of any fighter I tried failed, leaving my poor controlled character in a pool of blood. Now, I’m a veteran of these games stretching back to IK+ and the Speccy versions of Street Fighter 1,Human Killing Machine and Yie Ar Kung Fu. I can play these games well. When I’m struggling to get past the first character on the easiest difficulty levels it’s reasonable to assume that something’s broken.

The most obvious example to point at is the one which got me on that first ill-fated round. If you end up backed into a corner, the CPU can simply walk up to you and barrage you with a variety of attacks. Blocking these is easy enough but it only prolongs the inevitable, as the chip damage quickly drops that energy bar sliver after interminable sliver. In most sane games that have allusions to playability in this situation blocking an attack pushes your opponent away from you, allowing a chance to counter attack and get the hell out of this corner of death. MKA doesn’t. At least in this case, the attack animations should have some pause in the animation to allow a well timed counter attack? Well, you’d think so, but noooooo, not for MKA, no sir. The sloppy and sluggish controls ensure that you simply have no escape apart from the off switch and a swift lob of this cartridge out the window, hopefully to be eaten by a passing animal ending back in the bowels amongst its ilk.

It’s not all bad, if the difficulty is set low enough you can pull of the same trick to the computer for a few cheap, hollow, joyless victories. If that’s not your scene, why not take advantage of some of the most horrifying bugs ever witnessed on a console? Virtucraft have missed some of the most baffling bugs in collision detection, gameplay mechanics and A.I. yet seen. Want to quickly get through to the last boss? Pick Liu Kang and throw high fireballs continually, all the while marvelling at the CPU characters unfailing ability to run into them at full pelt. Want an exercise in randomness? Why not select Scorpion and marvel at the phase shifting spear that has a fifty/fifty chance of passing through an unblocking opponent leaving him unscathed. A few other characters projectiles have similar issues, mainly when used close in. I suppose in some way it makes up for Scorpion’s ability to otherwise just keep on hitting you with his spear after one initial success, while in all proper versions he’s stopped by some inexplicable force called playability from throwing another one until you’re un-stunned. Watch in awe after defeating a character in the endurance round to have the graphics immediately and jarringly glitch to the next opponent, rather than the usual slicker method of the vanquished foe exploding and the fresh meat somersaulting in from off-screen.

Virtucraft can’t have spent any time playtesting it, but they must have spent a reasonable amount on the graphics and sounds. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 wasn’t exactly a thing of great graphical beauty but it’s survived the translation well, the backgrounds becoming a trifle fuzzy but the combatants remaining as distinct as they can be, given the series propensity for palette swaps. The sound is admittedly as good as it could have been. The GBA music chip does a pretty good impersonation of every other version and while the tunes themselves are a touch spartan they fit the bleak backdrops well. All of the speech samples seem to have made the transition well, with Shao Kahn’s booming ‘Excellent’, Scorpion’s trademarked ‘Get over here’ and Liu Kang’s wailing all present and correct.

23 characters are selectable from the outset with another two apparently unlockable, although quite why you’d want to select any of them is beyond me. It would, after all, doom you to another round of this joyless mess. Thankfully a quick scout about some other reviews detail the same ludicrous difficulty problems so if I’m just being inept I’m in good company. I suppose I should give some consideration to the fact that it’s a port when marking it, and ii does do a few things well. It’s a great shame that it’s made such an utter balls up of the only reasons you’d want to play it.

MKA is easily the worst version of Mortal Kombat there has ever been and stands a sporting chance at being the worst 2D fighter ever seen. I’d rather get arse cancer than play this game again. Avoid.

A few initial points so as not to waste some folks time – if you don’t like old school, random encounter SNES style RPGs this isn’t the game for you. If you don’t like developers’ habits of lazily porting old SNES games over without changing owt, this isn’t the game for you. If you’ve already competed this on said SNES, this probably isn’t the game for you.

Anyone left? If none of these points bother you unduly, you’ll find that Breath Of Fire 2 is a competent, challenging RPG-em-up that has a few deft touches that compensate for a mildly formulaic plot, as these things go. We are introduced to a young boy named.. well whatever you want, with a limit of four characters. Being an egotist I chose to name him Tipy, but to fit in with the overall scheme of the games let’s call him Ryu. He’s charged by his father to find his younger sister, and the usual wandering about talking to everyone establishes she’s playing in the hills behind the village. Off you trot, finding her only to be attacked by a demon five times you size. Before he can slaughter you and get through to your sister, your father shows up and saves you. Before returning to your village, your sister says if you go and sleep by the dragon slumped over the hill, you may dream of your dead mother.

Yes, dragons. How else do you think it ended up being called Breath Of Fire? Think it was about curry eating? Anyway the dragon is regarded as protector of your village, with the inhabitants praying both to the Dragon God and to the rising new church of St. Eva, although some people are a little suspicious of the newcomers. After sleeping there for a while you do indeed have a strange dream with strange visions of an eye and some mystical ranting. After waking up and heading back to the village, you enter the twilight zone, with nothing being as it was. Your family has vanished, with no one remembering them, so you are taken in by the church.

And you rejoin the game years later with you grown into a strapping young lad. Of course, by the end of the game you know what happened but the way these calamitous events are glossed over in the initial stages seems bizarre. Obviously it’s designed to pique interest in Ryu’s situation, but it’s a little odd to go almost immediately from losing your in-game family to your first quest of tracking down an escaped pet despite the intervening years. But that you do, as your first mission as part of the hunters guild, aided by your good friend and large talking dog Bow.

While Ryu’s human (albeit with blue hair), the remainder of your party and people you meet can be anything from monkeys to slugs, in a sentient ass-kicking form naturally. They all have different natural affinities and abilities, the usual mixes of attack power, offensive or defensive magics, healing magics and so on. While many of the spells areknown to more than one character, they each have one specific special ability to set them apart some more useful than others. Ryu can regain a little of his health, Bow has an attack that has a chance of instantly killing your attacker, Katt has a useless skill of taunting your opponent making her more likely to be attacked than the rest of your party and so on.

You gain control of the rest of these characters as you make your way through the game, meeting various people and completing quests. I found the first quest to be irritating, as you will have to spend some time wandering about being randomly attacked for a while to increase your character’s power and statistics before taking on the first bosses. This is one of my pet peeves of late, as you’re essentially twiddling your thumbs unable to progress the main story because you haven’t learned some critical spell or some such nonsense. Thankfully this is the only time it’s really required, with the sizeable remainder of the game being on a better difficulty curve. You may still have to do it to get any newly acquired members up to snuff though, which is tedious and repetitive, although to be honest it’s a flaw present across nearly all RPG’s, so it’s not going to put off too many fans of the genre.

You travel the world taking on tasks of increasing importance and difficulty in an ultimate quest to find out what the strange force is that has appeared in the forests near your old home village that appears to be sucking up all the energy of the world. For certain of these tasks you’ll be forced to have certain characters in your team. There are a total of 8 playable characters, of which you can select 3 to be with Ryu. Expanding this choice after a fashion is the soul fusions that can be carried out after finding various shaman characters around the world. Various combinations are possible, giving either mild stat boosts or in the case of particularly successful ones a whopping great increase and a change in ability for the character. A shamanised Nina gains an extra roughly fifty percent magic point boost and the ability to banish monsters should you tire of slaughtering them. Shamanised characters even get different and equally well-drawn graphics.

Many of your quests boil down to the standard RPG ‘find out you need McGuffin[1], talk to someone who has McGuffin[1] and will exchange it for McGuffin[2], fight a bunch of creatures and a boss to collect McGuffin[2], return and get McGuffin[1]‘, but several show more imagination, and several quest have you assume the role of just one of your characters to make use of their special abilities, such as a lengthy solo quest at Sten’s hometown to vanquish a demon, uncovering much of his (to us) unknown past. It’s useful to see such stabs at character development, hampered only slightly by some strange translation choices that don’t seem quite right.

The game took me something in the region of 30-35 hours to complete, although admittedly that did include a lot of ultimately pointless levelling-up of characters I ended up not using for any length. Nearly a day and a half of solid gaming. To me, that’s a hell of a lot of time. Strange to think then that this picked up some flak for being too short. Jesus, how long do these pencil-necked geeks want to play games for? I used to consider myself pretty hardcore but even I though that I was spending too long on this game than was strictly healthy. If it was any longer I’d probably have bugged out.

Or stopped playing. But the time I’d reached the final battles I was getting more than a little pissed off with the near continual battles that were being thrown my way every four steps, to the extent of running away rather than standing and fighting because I was bored of them. Some especially cheap tricks used by the game in the final area inexplicably strip your characters of their shaman soul fusions, forcing you to either carry on regardless with a weak party or traipse all the way back through these lengthy, monster filled dungeons to get back to your township and reinstate them. Its terrifically annoying and plain sloppy game design, eking another hour or half hour out of a game that’s already long enough.

Despite having multiple endings and two strong, challenging boss fights at the end that can have a tendency to disappoint in RPGs, there’s little to no replay valve. If you wanted to you could try and find all of the tenants for your township (more on which later) to see who’s best, but it’s hardly necessary. Still, given the time spent on it I could hardly say I was short-changed in the value for money department, and despite the minor niggles about the first and last hours everything in between is a great amount of fun. The story is perhaps a little generic overall but in places but there’s a fair amount of unexpected innovation, such as being miniaturised and transported inside a Queen’s body to cure her by literally fighting the disease in place of her immune system.

One other touch of originality is your very own township. Soon into the game you find a hideout that can be used for a free rest and recouperation, and after saving some carpenters in one of the quests they express their gratitude by returning to your crib and building another three houses. Many of the random characters met during your quest will offer to take up residence, providing various services depending on who you pick. Some will be able to teach powerful spells to you, some open up armories so you can gain access to more powerful weapons a little earlier than usual and so on. Others seem to be entirely useless, just wasting perfectly good oxygen.

Graphically it’s fine, if uninspired. It shows its SNES roots very clearly, with limited texturing and flashy effects. Stuff like Golden Sun has shown that there’s no need for things to look quite this bland, but on the positive side some of the character design of the later, larger monsters is very good indeed. Some of the spells have a nice initial wow factor but after seeing them more than a few times you may be thinking that a shorter animation would be nicer, but none of them are lengthy enough to be irritating.

The sound is bland and inoffensive, although more variety would have been appreciated in the world map scenes as it’s possible to grow very bored of the same tune is continually played as you travel. The effects are lacking however, the spells never getting the cracks and booms to match the visuals.

Overall, it’s hardly perfect, and it’s not going to even vaguely appeal to anyone that isn’t a RPG fan already in the way that Zelda or the Golden Sun games have. Similarly if you’ve played through the SNES version there’s little to no reason to buy this apart from the nostalgia factor of playing it again, but this time on the move. For those not deterred by it’s flagrant old-schoolism, there’s enough nice touches to make it worthwhile investing some time in, especially now that the almighty Zelda has finally been released driving the price of this down substantially.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Sega’s Saturn console was, by any possible commercial yardstick, an abject failure. Countless words could be written to describe how this happened and how much of an atrocity it is, but this isn’t the place. Let’s just say that the might of Sony’s marketing machine and Sega’s critical underestimation of the market for newfangled 3D games resulted in the machine’s premature failure. There should be no sour grapes about this, simply put the better console won. It’s currently still in use with games produced for it, giving it an almost unheard of lifespan that only the Gameboy beats.

But quality of hardware is almost irrelevant; it’s the games that ought to count. That’s why many were baffled by the publics seemingly insatiable appetite for average PS fare when there was so many clear ‘triple A’ titles on the Saturn. Sega Rally, Nights, Burning Rangers, Sonic R, Marvel Super Heroes, Virtua Cop, Daytona USA, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Virtua Fighter 2; nothing seemed to spark much enthusiasm outside of the hardcore Sega acolytes, most of whom loved the chunky black box with disturbing ferocity.

It was almost a parting gift from Sega for the dying machine that they bestowed Panzer Dragoon Saga on the world. The two previous games had been on-rails shooters, good-looking, fun to play but never likely to revolutionise the way you thought about gaming. News that the third of Team Andromeda’s dragon based outings was going to be an RPG was met with a few raised eyebrows and doubting remarks. When finally delivered, it was clear just how misplaced those doubts were. They had delivered the best game on the Saturn, and one of the all-time great games that will be remembered fondly by anyone lucky enough to get their hands on the fairly limited release.

It is a time of civil war. The Empire rules with an iron fist. Edge is a young soldier on an Empire ship assigned to work at a mine, with orders to investigate…something. Their captain, who Edge looks on as a father, looks set to announce that they’ve found something. Unfortunately, something has found them. Civilisation is rebuilding itself following a collapse, and the genetically engineered monsters of the previous era still roam the land, killing humans if given the chance. They seem to be getting stronger recently, but even for that it’s an abnormally strong and well-armoured one that interrupts proceedings. They barely manage to drive the monster away, but things take a turn for the worse.

Another imperial ship arrives on the scene, but opens fire on the stationed soldiers. Edge is knocked out for a while, coming to in time to see the other ships leader, Craymen ordering his lackeys to kill the captain. Which they do with aplomb. They also seem to be making off with something from the dig site, which looks suspiciously like a girl sleeping in some sort of chamber. Edge tries to intervene only to be knocked down a chasm, seemingly to his death. Some force field stops him from making a loud splat on the chasms floor, although by this point he’s unconscious again. The poor lad doesn’t have a lot of luck in coming around, as this time faced he’s soon faced by a number of the overgrown crab-like monsters which caused the earlier bother, after a managing to have a brief wander around to pick up a nifty gun.

While you have had some opportunity to get used to the control methods by having Edge wander about the dig site, so far this has largely been a long, prerendered cut scene. It’s a fairly common scheme used by RPG’s nowadays, long intros so you have some idea of the character of the heroes and villains with other cut scenes going over important plot developments. It’s used here in perfect balance with the actual action / fighting / exploration aspects, and you never feel that you’re twiddling your thumbs as the story arc suddenly jumps forward ten steps over the course of another lengthy cut scene, which was a problem I have found with the Final Fantasy series on Sony’s beast.

The scenes themselves are impressive. The Saturn’s FMV capacity was never it’s strongest point, but even it can’t ruin the aesthetics of the work here. Newer games have benefited greatly from technologies relentless march towards a shinier future, their rendering techniques growing to the point of having spin off films. While Saga can’t match that realistic quality, it can match it on stylistics. It carries through to the action scenes too, as the whole thing just feels part of a well thought out and rich world. The locations are convincing too, and this is a hugely important part of caring about the world.

None of which would be worth a toss if the characters weren’t interesting. Edge himself may initially fall into a nicely stereotyped character, out for revenge against Evil No.1 who killed/kidnapped/maimed Friend/Family Member/Pet No.2. What’s important is that over the course of his quest as he tries to catch up with Craymen is that he does develop from this simplistic worldview as he notices how he has the power to right some of the injustices doled out by both sides of this war, to the extent that the initially fiercely Empire loyal Edge ends up having to accept the guidance of Craymen against a greater evil, putting his feelings aside for a better future for this troubled land.

It carries over into the minor characters as well, even those with few lines somehow seem to be complete, well rounded characters rather than bolted on to tell you where to find the Mystical McGuffin No.3. It’s an impressive achievement, one rarely managed by any game. One thing that should perhaps be pointed out is that the voice acting remains entirely in Japanese, due to time and money constraints on the conversion. Saying that this adds character to the game doesn’t exactly sound right, but it’s certainly preferable to a badly dubbed English version that is often foisted upon an unsuspecting public. It certainly fits well with the music, at any rate.

If there’s one thing the Saturn could justifiably say it was leagues ahead of its Sony rival it was the on-board sound. It’s Yamaha chipset is used to astonishing effect, sounding for all the world like a professionally mixed score. To have this generated in real-time by the Saturn is another great feat in a game full of them. The tunes themselves are among the most atmospheric and absorbing soundtracks I’ve heard, which again helps so much in being sucked up into the world of the game.

As alluded to previously, the story starts off as a simple quest for vengeance that takes on layer upon layer of twists and complexity as Edge travels through the world. He has to question exactly why the Empire was so keen on protecting and excavating the dig site, and what exactly are Craymen’s plans? Is he actually less of a threat than the Emperor is to the countries own stability? Why are these monsters suddenly growing in power and numbers? How does the woman carried off by Craymen’s ship fit into the story?

Well, that’s quite an important part of the story. She’s revealed to be named Azel, and you reluctantly have to fight her on several occasions. She also rides a dragon, Atolm. This is a bit of a bugger for Edge as he’s taken a bit of a shine to her, and killing her isn’t a great way to gain her affection. He can’t get through her seemingly blind devotion to Craymen and his cause, and it’s this devotion that helps Edge to start to question the world around him.

The fights themselves follow the random encounter pattern that’ll be familiar to most. Later games like Grandia show that it really isn’t necessary to have enemies just appear out of the ether to challenge you, but this doesn’t seem to have caught on too well. Once in an encounter, it’s not quite the common turn-based affair. You have three action bars that charge over time, and actions require you to use these bars. A shot from Edge’s gun burns one bar, and one of the dragon powerful Berserker spells burn up two. This adds a welcome element of timing and strategy to the game, as you may want to go for an all out attack hoping for a quick K.O. or perhaps holding a bar in reserve to heal yourself may be more prudent, an so on. There’s the usual array of attack and healing spells, and each enemy has a weak point that you can use to your advantage to pummel them, especially with the Sniper add-on to Edge’s gun. You don’t have to remain stationary either, indeed flying around or behind your opponent is necessary to avoid their attacks and to find their weak spots. Certain critters can only hurt you if you are directly in front of them, say, so flying to their side allows you to safely butcher them.

How quickly the bars fill depend on what type of dragon you are. After reaching a certain experience level your dragon gains the ability to morph and change it’s properties, such as increasing its defence at the expense of speed, hence taking longer for the bars to fill but taking less damage while doing it. The four basic properties are speed, defence, spell power (spiritual) and attack power, and you can pick nearly any position in-between. Again, this gives great flexibility in how you decide to play the game and that can only be a good thing.

The game will probably keep you occupied for a good thirty hours, so it’s good value for money. As RPG’s go, it has more replay value than average as there are a few extras that you may miss on a first play through, like the two final and powerful forms of your dragon’s evolution. The 100% completion rate is difficult to make, but surely you’ll want your name to live forever in myths and legends by achieving it?

Picking flaws in the game seems trivial. Perhaps you could say that the in game graphics look a little dated and spartan compared to today’s efforts, with the ever-present Saturn low-res texture problem. This is a limitation of the system rather than the game though, so it seems churlish to take it to task for this while they still remain some of the best the machine has seen. Many of the spells are impressive, and the design of the main characters the dragons and the large bosses are superb.

There is innovation throughout this game, from boss fights where you actually have to use your head rather than just plug away continually to the design of the world to the dragon’s changing ability to the involving storyline that doesn’t follow the same tired path many others do. I really can’t think of any flaws apart from those that would be levelled at the genre as a whole, and this is (I think) the best example of the genre yet. Excellent and absorbing in every way, it may well be worth the £100+ that this goes for on Ebay nowadays.

It was widely accepted that during the 16-bit console heyday there were two things that could be done with a comic book licence; turn it into a side scrolling beat-em-up or turn it into a side scrolling platform game. While current generation consoles may put these into 3-D, the only other advancement is Capcom’s stuffing of the Marvel characters into it’s never-ending series of one-on-one fighters. With the GBA becoming a de facto porta-SNES of late, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the movie / comic tie in for DareDevil is a side-scrolling beat-em-up.

What it doesn’t have in originality, it doesn’t make up for anywhere else, I’m afraid. The plot is never a primary concern in these kind of games, and DareDevil does nothing to change that. Matt Murdoch is a lawyer, blinded as a child by a freak accident. His other senses grew to superhuman strength to compensate, giving him a kind of sonar-vision. His aim here, as in the film is to stop the appropriately named yet as far as the comic would be concerned inappropriately coloured Kingpin, the current crime overlord. Along the way double D will have to take out the likes of Bullseye, Elektra and about a billion nameless goons.

DD relies mainly on his chop-sockey-kicky-punchy skills to dispatch of his opponents, with the usual range of jump kicks, spin kicks and punches etc at his disposal. He also has a handy club to fall back on, for when skulls absolutely needs to be cracked, homeboy. And so he runs to the right, beating up all who oppose him, grabbing the usual health and invulnerability powerups, and also DareDevil icons, used to unlock secrets. Eventually you reach a boss, who generally provide more of a challenge than the preceding thugs if only due to the irritatingly cheap attack patterns, requiring more luck than skill to advance. “Frustrating” is a good word to describe this, as is “lazy” and “crappy”.

The only hint of originality is the use of Mr. Devil’s sonar, and even that’s poorly implemented. While this could have been featured more heavily, using it to give you an advantage over your enemies in a great many situations, these possibilities have been sadly passed over by developers Griptonite in favour of a cheap way to find hidden items. Get near a location with an inexplicably invisible powerup and a few lines start popping out of DD’s noggin, ala the way Spidey’s spidersense is shown in the comics. A tap of the shoulder button turns on the sonar-power, the pick-up becomes visible and you can collect it, should you desire. It’s a pointless use of a power that could be used so much more effectively with a little thought.

Griptonite have striven for a more comic book like presentation of the game, rather than the darker visuals of the movie. To this end occasionally opponents will be felled with a ‘Bif!’ or ‘Kerpow!’ logo appearing. This is neither big nor clever, but understandable as the game appears to be aimed more at younger players than the ageing fanboy market.

I could go on, but I’d be repeating myself, much like the game. Jings, even Renegade and Double Dragon let you at least move in more than one axis and they’re both around 17 years old now. This kind of cheap, lazy cash in harkens back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and C64 where movie tie-ins were thrown out by the boatload with no originality whatsoever (if memory serves the Speccy version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was programmed in about a week to rush it out for Christmas). While DareDevil isn’t actively unplayable, it certainly isn’t a good enough game to choose over the plethora of other fighters such as Final Fight.

Role playing games never really took off in a huge way in the UK on the Megadrive, Western gamers seeming to prefer the offerings from Square and Enix appearing on the SNES. Things were a little different in Japan, where gamers happily tucked into Sega-based treats such as Phantasy Stars 2, 3 and 4, and the superb Shining series, starting with Shining in the Darkness, then Shining Force 1 and 2 (which appeared in its third incarnation on the Saturn, and looks to continue on with Shining Soul and it’s sequel on the GBA). It was perhaps a strange business decision for a western company to even think about programming a RPG for the western Megadrive market, but that’s exactly what relatively inexperienced programming team Naughty Dog software did. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because the same team went on to produce the Crash Bandicoot series for the Playstation, before sensibly flogging the franchise off before it became totally stale and making Jak and Daxter.
Published by Electronic Arts, who were just starting the process of focusing entirely on sporting franchises and the annual updating thereof, it was initially scheduled for a release on the Amiga as well, where it may have fitted in quite nicely. In the middle of production, EA took the decision to can their Amiga division, and the aforementioned sporting slant ensured that only one print of the game was made. Clearly this limited both the sales of the game and any kind of widespread knowledge of the game. Which is a great pity, as it’s actually very good.
You take the role of Buc, a young sorcerer in training at Sorcerer’s Guild Academy the City of the Mind. Your master sends you on a few errands, firstly to meet the local priest of Nexus, the heavenly father and creator for this particular plane of existence. The priest warns you of the dangers of the dark side, here represented by the evil god Void, who wants to destroy everything because he didn’t receive enough attention as a child, or some other equally well thought out reason. You are a force for good, whether you like it or not. As will be discussed later, this game is very open ended, but it does have some limitations, which persist in game design to this day. Your next mini-adventure is to retrieve the Guild symbol that has been half-inched by a hermit who lives up a hill just outside the city. During this little trek you’ll notice the game’s weakest feature – the animation, or lack thereof. When the game is sitting still, as the screenshots show, it actually doesn’t look too bad, especially for a Megadrive game. It has a nice isometric viewpoint that allows the world of Usha Bau to be far more realistic than the usual flat 2D maps with little rock and snow motifs to indicate mountainous terrain. However once the character moves through this world map you can’t help but notice that there’s only three frames of animation, those being left foot forward, standing still again, right foot forward. This means that rather than smoothly scrolling around the map it jumps block by block, with the character taking a second after you lift your finger off the pad to stop moving. This is jerky and disconcerting on initial play. Of course it never stops being jerky, but if you can persevere with it for a little while you will become accustomed to it, and it’s well worth playing on. The music is also a brave attempt at producing a tune from the less than adequate Megadrive hardware, and for the most part it succeeds. There are certainly far worse sounding games on the system.

After chatting with the thieving vagrant it becomes apparent that he’s not going to hand over the symbol without a fight, so feel free to provide one. During battle, you are temporarily transported to another plane of existence, which is an unusual concept, but actually makes sense given the customary spellcasting powers of earthquakes and lava flows and the like, which are available in other games but magically (by their very nature) only effect the unfortunate target of the spell, but the land around them gets away unscathed. The technique in Rings Of Power side steps this, but at the cost of making every battle take place on an identical, and dull plain arena. Only magic can be used in these battles, so getting hold of new and more powerful spells and the experience with which to use them is vital. Again this approach has its oddities, as you end up with archers casting an arrow and knights casting a knife, which makes little sense. After casting your one available spell, Stun, enough times to dispatch the tea leaf, you collect the symbol and head back to the Academy.
Your master takes you aside and gives you a spiel about being the most promising of his students, before an assembly of your fellow students arrives to hear an important announcement from the master. It seems that one of the legends of the land’s creation, that of Nexus creating everything using a Rod of Power, is in fact true. Also true is Nexus’ later decision to split the rod into 11 rings and scatter them throughout the land, by this point lost in the mist of the past. After a great deal of research, the master has found all the location of these rings and is going to dispatch his students to collect them before Void’s servants can and use it for their nefarious purposes. Before the location’s beans can be spilt, one of you fellow students attacks your unsuspecting master and kills him, his last breath being a spell to disperse the rest of the students, yourself included around the globe.
You purpose is now clear, collect the rings and hopefully along the way get in some vengeance for your master’s death. While you could attempt this on your own, you will find yourself slaughtered in short order by the various wandering sources of evil, either wild animals, pirates or some other servants of Void. A better plan is to get a squad behind you for backup. And so you do, performing small sub-quests to prove your worth to the various guild masters throughout the world to assemble a team eventually consisting of a Knight, Archer, Enchanter, Conjuror and a Necromancer. This initial stage is the most linear part of the story, but even here there’s a little room for manoeuvre. The order in which the characters join your party is pretty much fixed, but if you want to wander of in search of some of the easier (i.e. less combat oriented) rings then there’s nothing to stop you. It goes without saying that by the end you’ll need a full complement kitted out with appropriately powerful spells to finish it.
Spells are not learned through leveling up in this game, which is unusual. While you still have to achieve a certain level to cast them, the spells themselves must be purchased through the guilds, or the one-stop magic superstore Magic-B-Us. This is effectively just a substitute for buying more powerful weapons and armour, a common enough occurrence in RPGs. Less common is having to continually purchase food and water for your journeys, or else you start to suffer the consequences and eventually die. Cash can be had from the usual killing, and also from trading, with certain places paying a premium for certain good and selling others cheap. While this adds another string to the game’s bow, it can be hugely annoying when you’re forced to break off your pursuit of the rings to get some money together to feed yourself. To be fair, this is only ever a problem if you tire of wandering around on foot and decide to look at the alternate modes of transport available.

At some point you’re going to have to set sail to other lands, so boats and ships are available. Boats aren’t so good for sailing in deep water, claiming more food and water per movement, but ships can’t sail up most of the rivers. On land, you can get round the map in about half the time if you hire a Dino, which actually uses less food and water than trying to walk over deserts and swamps on foot. Fastest of all is the Dragon, flying over Usha Bau at great speeds at the cost of a ridiculous food and water penalty.
The quests themselves are varied. Many are the typical RPG fare of talk to someone, find out you need McGuffin[1], talk to someone who has McGuffin[1] and will exchange it for McGuffin[2], fight a bunch of creatures and a boss to collect McGuffin[2], return and get McGuffin[1], occasionally with a double cross and additional fight at the end. Standard fare, and nothing to be ashamed of. They’re all well crafted, with some showing a hint of quirky originality (Can’t think of the last time I was required to find a thespians moustache for a spell). Other quests merely involve answering a series of riddles asked by some gatekeepers, which will earn you the Ring of Thought. Most of the quests relate to the Ring they pertain to in some respect other than mere hack and slash quests to get at them, such as the Ring of Mutation having transformed itself into a woman, now living somewhere in a city, requiring it to be tracked down. This game also has the distinct advantage that should you become stuck in one of the quests, there’s usually opportunities to pursue some of the other Rings until inspiration strikes you again. Most of the quests are well enough thought out that’ll there’s no great logical jumps that need to be made, although the one or two that do require it can make the game hugely frustrating. The quest for the Ring of Will is aptly named, as a section in a maze trying to find and walk over switches that are barely distinguishable from the ground requires enormous willpower to stop you throwing the cartridge out of nearest available window.
Still, patience is a virtue, I’m reliably informed, and it’s required here if you want to see the end. The open-ended nature of picking and choosing the quests is something that is rarely seen even now, and an impressive feat for an inexperienced coding team on the Megadrive. The only downside of this is the story’s narrative pretty much vanishes, reducing to just collecting the party, collecting the rings and then having a final battle to conclude the story. This contrasts with the more tightly focused games such as Phantasy Star 4, where it’s still a good vs. evil tale but there is actually some character progression built into the story as their quest continues, and makes the game that bit more personal, and therefore more likely to be finished. Rings Of Power supplies a strong challenge and a well crafted game, but may not prove addictive and involving enough for many people to see it through to the end.

In the current wave of oh-so-nostalgic ‘retrogaming’ that seems in vogue these days I always feel one particular game gets short shrift; Psytron for the ZX Spectrum, a game so complex and innovative that (arguably) it took around a decade for the rest to catch up to it.
On it’s release in June 1984 by a little known company, Beyond, video games on the spectrum were largely limited, primitive affairs. This is not entirely unexpected as the hardware it was running on was largely limited and primitive. Without going into a discourse on the system, the ZX Spectrum 48K this game was designed to run on featured 48K of memory, a Zilog Z80A CPU running at 3.54MHz, and a basic graphics display chip which could only assign two colours to blocks of 8×8 pixels at a time, resulting in some horrifying colour clash when sprites overlapped in each other in these zones. Oh, and a grand total of 8 colours, and a sound chip which could do little more than beep. (Literally. The built in programming language, Sinclair BASIC, used a BEEP command to control it). This is not to say a vast quantity of enjoyable games did not exist, many such as Jet-Pac, Commando, Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg are still regarded as classics. However in terms of scope and depth, these are fairly limited, ‘arcadey’ games. No such criticism could be leveled at Psytron.
The game is set on a planet far far away, named Betula 5. You assume the role of a commander, the Psytron, of the sealed-off base on the planet’s surface, airtight against the hostile atmosphere. The base consists of a number of facilities connected by an inner ring. This is represented through ten separate screens, with your control centre apparently being located in the middle of the facility, the other buildings radiating out. These facilities include the obviously necessary ones as crew quarters, medical facilities, docking bays and atmosphere processing, as well as some more exotic items such as a freezetime generator (what, you don’t have one? They’re simply all the rage in Kensington.) and a matter disrupter bank. All these have various uses throughout the game, so it’s clearly worthwhile keeping them in good working order.
The presence of a matter disrupter bank hints at the presence of some sort of trouble on Betula 5, and indeed that’s the case. The base will come under attack from an un-named alien foe, possibly as some on-going war, perhaps as a metaphor for the soul’s irreconcilability with the mind, probably as a plot device. Thankfully the aliens aren’t going to immediately start a full on assault, possibly as an overtone to a peace offer, perhaps as some way of gauging the base’s resistance, probably as a plot device. And just as well, because this gives us some time to be gradually introduced to the scope of your powers.

The game spans six levels, all on the same base. In the first level, all you can do is watch as the alien ships grow from specs on the horizon to being all up in your face. Their first plan of attack is to drop saboteurs into the base’s inner ring of connecting walkways. You can easily jump between screens using the number keys, giving quick access throughout the base to find these loathsome rapscallions. These doglike creatures bound along to the nearest airlock and then explode, causing a fair amount of damage while doing so. Clearly they must be stopped. This is accomplished by sending out a remote drone to intercept, controlled on the small screen in the bottom right corner. This gives us the drone’s point of view, the idea being to get close enough to shoot the explosive little critter, who tends to jink and bob around to add a little spice to the proceedings. Okay, in terms of your enjoyment it’s unlikely to give Max Payne a run for your money, but unlike Max Payne this game has a lot more to it. Any kind of first person viewpoint was a novelty this early on in the Spectrum’s life, and indeed that of video games, so this was a fairly enjoyable little novelty.
Which is a good thing indeed, because you’ll be playing the level over again five times before moving on to the next one. The rationale for this being to prove your competency before moving on to the next challenge, meaning you must achieve an average score over your last six attempts greater than the target for that level. Once you have, you can progress. This will mean that you’ll have a good grasp of the skills introduced on that level to carry forward, and also extends the amount of time you’ll have to spend on the game to beat it fivefold. Your views on this may vary from being an interesting bit of game design (arguably realistic in that you have to prove yourself to your superiors, or as realistic as space base commanding can get) to being an exceptionally cheap way of blocking your progress. I can’t say it seemed too annoying at the time, however when going back to play it and having lost any saved games I had, being forced to play the same early levels over when wanting to push on was irritating.
The next level allows you to take the fight to the alien pig-dogs in the sky. Standard cross hairs based aim and shoot applies. You must simply destroy the alien ships before they get close enough to drop the saboteurs or the more instantly damaging bombs. The mechanics of this certainly works well enough that this could have been released on it’s own and be hailed as one of the system’s better games, although little more than a Missile Command rehash. In these early levels, the pace is quite leisurely and you should not have too much difficulty in dispatching the occasional ship the aliens send in your general direction. Later, it becomes a manic fight against almost insurmountable odds.
To help in this we are introduced in later levels to the Matter Disrupter, a highly useful facility that will destroy every ship in your range of view. Unfortunately it has a habit of blowing up, a probability of about one in five every time it’s used if memory serves (My manual has unfortunately, gone to rest in a far better place. Kensington, I hear). Should the facility be damaged, this probability rises. Despite its temperamental nature it’s clearly useful. Any damage that is taken to the base, either by bombs, saboteurs or malfunctioning disrupters at this point is automatically taken care of for you.

However, that’s about to change. The next level introduces an almost unheard of, certainly on a Spectrum, element of resource management. It starts off simply enough, again easing you in gently, with only having to assign repair crews to locations that need it. Assigning more people gets the job done faster. Simple enough, but people that are working use more oxygen than those that aren’t so you’ll have to make sure the O2 generator’s in top nick. They also need a certain amount of rest after a shift is finished, so if the crew quarters are damaged they won’t get it and they’ll work slower. They also need food, which is handled automatically at this stage, or they slow down, and eventually die off. They may be injured by bombs or saboteurs, so they’ll have to go to the medical centre, which requires more medical supplies. Oh, and while this is going on the aliens are still attacking, and getting a bit more determined about it. All you have to do for the moment is assign crews and shoot, so you should manage alright.
Next level, all hell breaks loose. Now on top of everything you have to place orders for supplies. These are delivered from a mothership somewhere off the top of the screen, through a transporter beam on the docking bay. If an alien ship flies through this, the beam is broken and the remainder of the supplies lost. This means you’ll have to keep a close eye on this while still protecting the rest of the base. The ship has a limited space, so only a certain amount of goodies can be delivered, meaning you’ll have to choose wisely.
Respite is given by the freezetime generator, which is now introduced and is a valuable ally. It does pretty much what is says on the tin, essentially stopping everything on screen, including your crosshairs, unfortunately. You can, however manage your supply situation and assign repair crews here without having to worry about the nasty aliens as well, which makes things a little easier. It comes at the cost of a huge power expenditure that is only slowly recharged, so you’ll still have to think quickly or suffer the consequences.
The final level has been sent from hell to claim your soul. It’s objective is simply to survive for one hour. And then repeat the feat five times. Good luck. It’s simply a combination of everything you’ve been doing do far but on a more intense scale. It’s difficult to beat this game. It may just be possible to survive it.
For the Spectrum this was an incredibly deep game. The only vaguely action oriented game of comparable scope was the just released Elite, and that was only available on the expensive BBC micro at the time. Psytron has a level of sophistication about it which was rarely matched on the Spectrum, graphics which well disguised the flaws inherent in the machine it was played on and provided a great challenge for even the most skilled of players. I’d say a better action / resource management game could not be found until Westwood’s Dune 2, which didn’t arrive until 1992. Certainly worth a look for any game historian, or anyone not too obsessed with eye candy to appreciate a good game.