Alias: Arch Rivals - Wrestling Game Type: Sports / Wrestling
From the team that eventually brought you Golden Tee, comes one of the better retro wrestling games I've ever played. There is a ton of fun to be had with this off beat wrestling game and it's just oozing personality. If Arch Rivals and a "normal" wrestling game got together and had some sort of strange bastard child, Battle Royale would be it!
Oh la la....
Character Selection... "process"
Where to begin, oh I know.. just look how hot the announcer is for starters. Anyway, the game starts out and you are able to select how many live players (up to five) or how many computer players you wish to go up against. Next, you have to select which wrestler you want to play as be it Sumo Master, Executioner, Mongo Kahn, Spitfire Spike, and Meateater. Most fighting games of this nature revert this selection process to a simply highlighting a headshot of whichever character you wish to fight / wrestle as, but Battle Royale does things in a very different and refreshing way.
The character selection screen is actually more of a mini game. Each player (computer or human) starts as a manager in the locker room and literally fight each other to select which wrestler they want. If your opponent is going for Executioner, and that's who you want, you better book it over there and be ready to punch the hell out of the other player / npc before they get there first. It's a very cool (read: unique) competitive process... even before the actual game starts. I'd highly recommend checking out the profile screen for each wrestler via the main menu as they all have different stats. Make no mistake that this is a fantastic party game, and I believe it would still hold up by todays standards. Add in some sort of adult beverages to the mix and you have yourself one heck of a smack talking game extravaganza that is sure to provide several hours of fun among friends. Of course, you'd have to own the turbo tap accessory in order to do this... but I truly think Battle Royale merits tracking the peripheral down.
The object of the game is simple, knock down your adversaries and throw them out of the ring. Something that I really fell in love with was the way you could still cause a ruckus after being thrown out of the ring as your wrestler can still kick opponents through the ropes. How diabolical and ruthless... I love it!
Causing trouble outside of the ring
Vicotry is mine!
There are several other nifty features on display in Battle Royale such as instant replays and a unique health bar system which is represented via the arm bands of the wrestlers themselves making this one of the cooler TG 16 titles I've played to date. Do yourself a favor and check this one out!
This game needs to be remade... NOW!
Battle Royale match footage via youtube:
If you want a copy of Battle Royale (and you do)... CLICK HERE to search for it on ebay.
Alias: Pong... WITH DEMONS!!!, Crossfire... The Video Game. Game Type: Future Sports / Arcade
Cue creepy demon / alienlike voice "Let the game... commence."
Just look at that incredibly rad box art up above... look at it, take it in. It's really gnarly stuff and if it looks familiar, thats because you've most likely seen it before. Turns out that cover image was designed by Melvyn Grant and was originally used for the 1981 novel The Steel Tsar and eventually the 1987 reissue of the Judas Priest album Rocka Rolla. Re-usage and unoriginality issues aside, damn it looks cool and I would have bought this game back in '92 based on the cover art alone. What a mistake that would have been. Ahhhh... Psygnosis. They had some of the coolest (and most misleading) box art in the history of video games in the 80s and 90s. Crazy stuff, do yourself a favor and google "psygnosis box art" if you're unfamiliar with their amazingly rad art style which usually entailed crazy looking demons and such. It turns out that Psygnosis and Reflections co-developed Ballistix for the TG16. Yeah, THAT Reflections.. oh come on, you know them. The guys behind the nifty Shadow of the Beast series, Driver, and as it turns out... upcoming titles such as Far Cry 3 and the 2012 E3 stunner, Watch Dogs (both being co-developed with Ubisoft Montreal). Apparently there were lots of drugs done in the early 90s when developing Ballistix, or all of that grunge and plaid went straight to the developers heads. Ballistix is a strange game which has an even stranger idea of control. Lets get on with it shall we? Lets get this over with...
Balls everywhere
Essentially, Ballistix boils down to a digital version of shuffleboard, I mean pong, wait... actually its alot closer to that board game from the 80s called Crossfire. The more I think about it, this game is JUST LIKE Crossfire, except instead of firing marbles from a stationary gun on one end of the board, you can move around while you do it. The marbles that you fire serve to move the puck around the board itself and eventually (hopefully) into your opponents goal. Sounds kind of fun in theory and pretty straight forward, but for for some reason it's much more chaotic and ridiculously clumsy than it should be. I found myself accidentally directing the puck into my own goal... behind my character (or ship, not sure what the player is supposed to be) on far too many occasions. It's mainly just a button mashing extravaganza of asshatery that leads to a screen filled with balls. Or as I like to call it, Ballistichaos (tm).
Hello... is it me your lookin for...
On the plus side of things, there are over 100 courts to play on, and they change after you or your opponent score three goals. So Ballistix does have some serious diversity going for it. You can actually play with another player if you feel so inclined, or against the CPU, or even by yourself on a lonely court and wallow in your utter loneliness. Well, just you and the creepy demon guy and skeleton hand puck dropper, how romantic. Of course the CPU is about as smart as the lamp sitting here on my desk so playing against the computer really isn't too much fun. It just roams around the board essentially mirroring your actions and besides, trust me when I say that you'll be your own worst enemy and much more of a threat to yourself than that pesky CPU player.
I'll just put this here...
The music... is now stuck in my head, and I hate it. It seems to me that there is only one piece of music in this entire game that starts when the Psygnosis logo pops up and is unrelenting until you turn the damn game off. There is some digitized speech (well one line of dialogue which is represented at the start of this rant) and cheering to be heard, but other than that the sound design just basically gets the job done. I really shouldn't be too hard on the sound in these games as they were doing the best they could with what they had to work with at the time.
It seems this game scored in and around the 70% area when reviewed after it came out. I'd say those scores are fairly accurate, if not a little generous. Immediately after I started to play Ballistix, I honestly couldn't wait to move on to the next game in this series...and leave this bizarro version of pong...
Digitized version of Crossfire...
Whatever... in the digital dust.
Here's the obligatory gameplay video
And for those of you who are tragically unfamiliar with Crossfire (let alone its amazing commercial), feast your eyes on this.. "it's the ultimate challenge":
If you still want a copy of Pong, Crossfire, Ballistix... CLICK HERE to search for it on ebay.
All 4 of the American TG 16 hu cards starting with an A have been played...so naturally a party was in order. Bonk was clearly more excited than I was and had one hell of a long night. He's still going, that crazy little bastard!
In this last round of Turbografx 16 craziness, I blasted things as future Bonk, kicked Ted Smalls ass, found out absolutely nothing about Andre Panza, and learned how to destroy an alien ship from the inside out while only utilizing a pinball.
The B's will be particularly exciting I think as a few of my favorite games are in this next section. The Bonk trilogy (maybe that's why the little guy partied so hard), Bloody Wolf, Bomberman, Blazing Lazers... man, good stuff up ahead, good stuff!
Alias(s): The Kickboxing (Japan), Kickboxing with a No Name AssClown Game Type: Fighting / Sports
Gung Ho from G.I. Joe...err Panza.
In order to truly understand Futuras Andre Panza's Kickboxing.. I mean REALLY understand it, we need to understand the man, the myth, and the legend presented in this games namesake, Andre Panza himself. We ask ourselves, just who is Andre Panza? After a quick google search.... I found absolutely nothing, well, aside from choice pictures like the one shown there to the left. Classy.
Faces only a mother could love
From the back of the game box: "Forget the movies. Forget the make-believe. This is the master, 3-time World Kick Boxing Champion Andre Panza, and the reality will stun you!"
And to the three of you who actually follow kickboxing (or followed the "sport" in the 90s), that might mean something.. to the rest of us, it means absolutely zippo. Actually this game did stun me though, some of the art is actually quite good (not to mention the top notch rotoscoping of the various moves), but some of it is stunningly bad. Like W T F bad, just look at the mugs of some of the player characters you can choose to play as there to the right. Wow, looks like that artist was bored to death... or high.
Steely Flint... in the flesh.
Hug it out... HUG... IT... OUT!
After picking the seemingly only normal face out of the bunch I created my career boxer, Steely Flint. Flint wasn't exactly a force to be reckoned with at first, but after some training and a nice montage... who am I kidding, he still sucked after several training sessions in the game. Speaking of training, yes, you can level up / train your personal boxer throughout their career.. and... drumroll please...even save your boxer. Unfortunately, this training boils down to button mashing thus making it no fun at all in my humble opinion. Once you pick your opponent (which can be another player should you wish to subject friends to this horrid fighting experience), you're off to endure the slowest and most clumsy fight you've ever encountered in a game. The gameplay itself is slow, overly complicated, and far more confusing than it should be thanks to strange controls which boil down to holding button I or II and then pushing a direction on the D-Pad to punch, jump, and kick your way to vitory. To make things worse, sometimes it's possible to line up with your opponent as such that your kicks and punches don't even connect. Even more entertaining is the fact that if you get too close you and your opponent grapple one another in the heat of the moment... which may or may not be something that happens in the actual "sport" of kickboxing, hell if I know. Either way, it looks questionable and quite humorous.
Its time for a montage...
Not in the face! Its how I make my mula
Ted Small.. one way or another, you're going down my friend. GOING DOWN! So back to training (read: mashing buttons) I went. Again... and again... then one more time. Eventually my stats were high enough that I felt like I could actually knock Teds lights out, and I'm not kidding here. The health bar for each player is represented by the lights in the left and right sides of the screen respectively... so you actually knock the other players lights out to get a K.O. Very cute Futura. As stated earlier, the rotoscoping / animation on display here is actually pretty solid, and the graphics themselves are fairly vibrant. It's just a shame that the actual act of fighting is so slow and tedious. The sound, woah, is that ref actually talking? Yup! Digitized speech and some solid digitized sound design going on here too. Now that's actually pretty cool since most TG 16 games never added real sound.
Eventually Steely Flint proved victorious over Ted Small and was finally ranked. Too bad I just don't feel like going back into the fray to fight my way up to the man himself, Gung Ho... I mean, Andre Panza. Regardless, victory is mine! Well, some sort of victory anyway...
Steely Flint is on the leaderboard... for now
Obligatory gameplay video from youtube:
If for some reason you want to kick Ted's ass and button mash until you're trained up... CLICK HERE to search for Andre Panza Kickboxing on ebay.
Alias: Alien - The Pinball Experience (A-TPE) Game Type: Pinball
In space... no one can hear you scream.. because of repetition. I really don't have a Crush on Alien Crush. Okay okay, I'll probably take some flak for giving this 2 out of 4 health bars, but let me start out by saying I do really dig this game for it's utter uniqueness.. it's just that the gameplay itself leaves something to be desired.
Alien Crush is actually pretty well done considering it was one of the very early titles for the TG 16, and if you're a fan of the pinball genre, then you'll definitely really enjoy this game thanks to it's addictive "just one more game" quality. Hey, I like pinball, and I really like pinball in video game form, but this isn't exactly a robust gaming experience and had I purchased this one for full price back in '89 I'd most likely be fairly upset about buying it. It would have taken mowing the lawn 5 times to buy this game... and we had a damn big yard not to mention having to endure the 100+ degree Texas temperatures in the summer, but I digress.
Bonus Screen Wave of Aliens
Of course, it needs to be said that Alien Crush is NOT your average pinball title, it's more like you've been beamed on to an alien ship and are using the ships defenses, which happen to look like a pinball and flippers, to destroy the ship from the inside out. It's a unique twist on the pinball genre as a whole and a fairly cool vibe... though it just gets extremely repetitive. This is mainly due in part by the fact there is the one table available to the player which consists of two vertical screens in addition to several bonus "rooms". Now, the bonus rooms are pretty rad. They are more like smallish boss battles or battles against waves of enemies... fought with your trusty pinball. Once again, a cool twist, but not enough to save this game from its pit of self wallowing repetitiveness.
Lower Screen - Which in no way is the Alien Queen
The art stye consists of some good pixel pushing to be sure... but it feels a little "phoned in" to me. I mean really, just look at my screen cap to the left, it looks like something lifted straight out of H.R. Geigers concepts from Alien (or more recently... Prometheus). The producers said ALIEN, and the designers just literally interpreted it. I suppose this could have been a decent marketing ploy as every teen in America was just coming off of the sci fi / Aliens kick from the mid to late 1980s. You have facehugger posers, chest burster posers, and an alien queen poser right smack dab in the middle of the bottom screen. The artists were clearly not ashamed at their blatant.. um... "inspiration"? To their credit though, the lone pinball board / table is vibrant with life and animations. Some of which are appropriately repulsive, the spider like ball launcher is definitely a thing of nightmares. Man... I HATE spiders. To quote Ricky Gervais, they're always eerily in the "ready" position. Never EVER do you simply see a spider lazing around, laying on its side, just layin there saying "hey dude, whats up?". Ugh! Moving on.
Upper Screen - Yup, thats a brain.
The sound and music are fairly well done, but like the artwork, are clearly inspired (read: lifted) from other film scores prominent in the 1980s. To the game's credit, it does give you the chance to choose one of two pieces of music to listen to while playing.. but one of the tunes just devolves into generic techno rock and the other, well the other is really, really, REALLY close to the infamous Jaws theme by John Williams. Heck, the bonus screen music is one note shy of being a note for note rendition of the theme from Terminator by Brad Fidel. The sound design is alright and does the job, but nothing spectacular.
As unique as Alien Crush is, it just gets a bit too repetitive for my taste. Though I have been finding myself going back again and again over the last day just to try to beat my current high score (2,608,500). Maybe thats the important thing to take away from this rant / review. Despite the ripped off art style and music, there is a certain addictive quality to this simplistic game. A very visceral time sucking feeling that is only rarely accomplished these days in modern games (Minecraft and FTL, I'm looking at you). But in the end, I found myself getting bored really quickly after feeling like I've seen all there is to see in the game after a fairly limited amount of play time.
Game over man. Game over.
Here's a gameplay video for you to judge for yourself:
If you still want a copy... CLICK HERE to search for it on ebay.
Alias: PC Denjin Punk Cyborg, Bonk to the Future (tm) Game Type: Arcade Shooter
Clearly at this point, way back in 1992, Hudson was really starting to crank out some quality games and push the TG 16's hardware to the limit. Let me just start by saying Air Zonk is a really cool game that oozes personality, has great music, and done in a very funky / unique art style. I dig it.
Make no mistake that this is clearly the Bonk franchise re-imagined as an arcade shooter transplanted into a futuristic setting. There are TONS of bonk art assets which have been reappropriated, reimagined, and reused for this cool little shooter... the smiley face pickups? Check. "skull wearing little dudes"? Check. King Drool? Double check. This is Bonk... TO THE FUTURE!
Upon loading up the game I knew I was in for a unique gaming experience when I was asked to select the games difficulty which is a statement as to what to expect from this game in of itself. The three difficulty modes? Sweet (Easy), Spicy (Normal), and Bitter (Hard)...very cute hudson, well played... all of which I tried, the latter two provided one heck of a challenge. Each difficulty dictates how much damage the larger enemies can take and how many lives you start the game with. Speaking of the larger enemies.. this system is known for its large boss sprites and Air Zonk is no exception. There is some great pixel pushing on display here, in fact I was very much getting a Megaman vibe while playing. Not a bad thing at all!
Boatman?
Bonk.. err.. Zonk, future Bonk... whatever... has a squad of warriors which will show up to help him defeat the forces of Drool. They all have special powers, are wearing sunglasses, and have come here to kick ass and chew bubble gum... and they're all out of gum. Only one member of the squad blows... cause he's a blowfish. Damnit, sorry, I'll try to keep those remarks at a minimum from now on. Anyway, "THE DANGER SQUAD" (as I came to call them) is a cool touch and before starting your quest to defeat Drool the game asks if you'd like them to show up automatically or manually. Like Aero Blasters... the levels are varied, the enemies that all show up are fun to look at and vary in appearance, and there are a handful of pickups. Unlike Aero Blasters however, I didn't really care for the powerups in this game... they were just lacking "umph" to me and not as plentiful!
You're dead? So what? So lets dance!
Death doesn't come as quick as you might think in Zonk, but the harder difficulty levels do make the boss fights a real challenge... sometimes downright frustrating in fact. But when you do die, you're treated to a surprisingly uplifting tune and some enemies dancing to said tune in front of a red background. I suppose the red background was a must as it's the only thing after you're out of lives that just screams YOU'RE DEAD. As stated at the beginning of this review, the sound and music in this game are both outstanding and an utter pleasure to listen to. In fact, the theme heard in the first stage rivals some of the best themes I've heard in retro gaming... including the amazing tunes from Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (ice cap zone anyone?). Hummable, memorable, and very slick music writing / sequencing. Now bear in mind that I played the Hu Card version of this game.. apparently the CD version replaces these tunes with some sort of rockabilly craziness.
Air Zonk is another winner and certainly worth checking out... wow, two in a row, maybe this is going to be easier than I thought. I really hope the next game isn't an arcade shooter, I need a good RPG or platformer to play through, preferably something exceptionally bad for ranting purposes. Damn, just checked, and the next game is Alien Crush.... which is followed by Andre Panza (Who?) Kick Boxing.... which should be extremely entertaining :).
I honestly didn't know what to expect. Arcade shooters such as Aero Blasters weren't my cup of tea when I was younger and the only aerial shooter I owned at the time for my turbografx was Blazing Lazers. Upon booting this one up, I noticed something peculiar in the main menu... three play options which essentially boiled down to giving the player the option to fly one of two different ships or, and this is super cool, play co-op(!!!). Of course since the TG 16 lacked more than one controller port this was probably a downer to many young gamers who picked up the game. Now that I think about it, this may have been a genius marketing ploy as this coop problem could be rectified by purchasing the "turbo tap" accessory which added five controller ports. Since hudson both developed the game AND the console.. i'd say this little conspiracy theory holds some weight. But I digress... Aero Blasters is actually pretty rad and most likely would have convinced me to find a way to purchase the turbo tap.
This is red 5 going down.. they, came, from, behind!
After getting started, I was atually pulled into the game rather quickly. As you'll see from my fancy screen grabs, the graphics are vibrant and the action is extremely fast and furious making cracker jack timing and fast reflexes a must. In fact, later levels in the game move so fast my 33 year old reflexes were having trouble keeping up... but only ever so slightly. Fast and furious gameplay my friends.. fast... and... furious... making Aero Blasters a real joy to play even by todays standards. The game is insanely good about keeping things fresh too. There are copious amounts of varied pickups, my favorite of which is a sled attachment which causes the players ship to rebound off of walls rather than explode when hitting them... there are levels which shuttle you through an extremely narrow tunnel later on in the game which make this attachment extremely awesome (read: necessary for survival). Speaking of survival... or lack there of... death is a beautiful thing in Blasters. Many games within this genre really like to fall back on the old tried and true philosophy of once the player hits an enemy, a wall, fire, an elephant, whatever.. their ship simply explodes. Something I really really dug here was that when your ship is destroyed, it goes down in flames rather than simply blowing up like some henchmans car in a James Bond film.
Pre boss arrival...
Post boss arrival...
Another thing which I really liked was how Aero Blasters seemed to change the levels and vary the enemy types as the game progresses. A great early on example of this is the very first city level... at first it looks extremely colorful and vibrant, but then the first boss ship shows up and decides to put the kilbosh down on the entire city nuking the place thus changing the map to a charred mess of ruins like something out of the junky vision of the future in the Terminator films. The levels themselves are all kept new and interesting too from the city mentioned above, to caverns, and eventually to narrow pathways deep underground in which the player is chased by a form of fighter enemy type. Very tense. The story... wait... was there a story? Hell, I guess I missed that... oh well. Gameplay > Story anyway.
As for the audio heard in Blasters... well... the music and sound was actually the weakest link here in my opnion. Of course being a game composer and retro remixer really makes me bias, but still. Was..not... impressed. I'll let this gameplay video speak for itself.
Sound and music aside, this is actually a great game, one that I'm really glad I checked out... it's a fantastic addition to any turbo fans library of cards ESPECIALLY if you're a fan of shooters! Next up.. AIR ZONK... really looking forward to finally checking this one out, been a long time coming!
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