16th January 2011, 10:45 PM
Covering newer SMS games, and the light gun games because I got a gun.
Covered here:
Alien Syndrome, Black Belt, Hang-On / Safari Hunt (each will be covered separately), Kung-Fu Kid, Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting (will be reviewed as one game), Miracle Warriors, Missile Defense 3-D (covering again because now I can play it), Rambo: First Blood Part II, Shooting Gallery, Thunder Blade
Alien Syndrome - Alien Syndrome is a conversion of the popular Sega arcade game. It's a pretty bad port, unfortunately; anyone wanting to play Alien Syndrome on a home console should play the NES version or the Wii remake, not this SMS release. The multiplayer is alternating only, not simultaneous like on the arcades or NES, which is deeply disappointing. The graphics aren't very good. They aren't the worst, but they leave a lot to be desired. The game won't work with Genesis controllers, so you're forced to use one of the pretty poor SMS controllers for this thing. Controls aren't great either. The game is playable, as you run around the mazes killing aliens and figuring out how to get off each floor, but even though I like the other versions of this game, Sega's own SMS release just doesn't match up at all. Games on both the SMS and NES were usually better on SMS, but not in this case.
Black Belt - Black Belt is actually a Fist of the North Star game. While the NES and GB games with this license kept the title in North America, Sega's SMS and Genesis ones did not, and got retitled with generic themes. Still though, once you know what this is the theme is obvious, because nothing was changed except for the title, character names, and maybe some of the story. In the game you play as some guy who totally isn't Ken the Eagle, who punches people and makes them explode. Unlike the Genesis game, in the SMS one the exploding people are kept intact in the US release, which is good because apart from that this game isn't very fun. The game is a side-scrolling action/beat 'em up game. The best comparison I can make, gameplay-wise, is China Warrior on the Turbografx. Black Belt plays very, VERY similarly to that game, except with occasional fighting game style boss battles included at the end of each level. Gameplay within each level is very, very similar to China Warrior, as you walk to the right and hit people. Use punch and kick correctly against the correct enemies, jump over some things, jump up and collect the health-ups floating through the sky (China Warrior does the same thing too, health-ups come floating by in the air) by holding down and then pressing jump to do a higher jump, and punch lots of people and make them explode into parts. In the main levels, graphics are decent but quite small; the fighting game style boss battles, however, have nice large sprites. Just like China Warrior the game is frustratingly difficult, and I don't find it nearly fun enough to get very far, but I did stick with it enough to get to level 2, which is more than I can say for that game... It's got no continues too, of course, but on the SMS that's somewhat expected.
Hang-On - Simple mid '80s racing game, and a port of the arcade game of the same name. You drive forwards and see if you can get to the end of the course, pretty much -- this game isn't exactly complicated, and there are no options. Still though, it's simple fun. The game looks nice enough and plays well. The scaling's okay. I think I might have more fun with this than Super Hang-On for the Genesis... that one has lots of options and features, and better graphics, but somehow the scaling on most of Sega's Genesis games just looks so terrible to me that I find them barely playable.
Kung-Fu Kid - This game is a sidescrolling platform/beat 'em up game, pretty much. This game is inspired by Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, apparently, because you can jump to the top of the screen and hit people on the way down. The graphics are colorful and cartoony and look pretty decent, for the system. Gameplay isn't amazing, and is frustrating at times, but the game plays decently. The game is a little easy to exploit at times, though. For instance there's an enemy limit on screen, so if too many enemies are on screen more simply won't appear. Enemies chase you too, so if you go past some enemies and then just keep going, they'll just fruitlessly run after you and you can walk quite a ways with no opposition. Handy. Bosses are much trickier, though, and you'll definitely want to memorize their patterns and when to attack because there are no health-ups in the levels and if you die you start the stage over. This game's not great, but it's alright, definitely some fun. (Continues... yeah, no, like usual for platformers on this system)
Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting (Light Phaser required) - This game has two different modes, as the title suggests, but it's good that there are two, because each of these as a full game would be ... quite limited. This is obviously a very early SMS game, and the graphics are simplistic and not very good. Audio's no better. Gameplay's not too bad though, really. In Marksman Shooting, targets appear, police enemy outline style, for you to shoot. Each appears for a limited time, and you get different amounts of points for where you shoot the target -- the most for hitting the heart, the least for the outer edge. That's cool, the other SMS lightgun games I have don't do sectional damage (and nor do my NES Zapper games, I think). You move on to the next stage if you hit a high enough percentage of shots, a certain (and steadily increasing with each stage) percentage of your shots need to hit to move on. Fail to hit the target percent and you lose, start over from the beginning of the game. No continues or extra lives here. Trap Shooting is like Duck Hunt's skeet shooting mode, but on the SMS, pretty much. Hit the targets as they come flying up, try to hit enough of them to move on. I like Marksman Shooting better, but this one's okay I guess.
Miracle Warriors -Miracle Warriors is an RPG, and in fact it's the first JRPG ever released on a console in the US. The game is played on a grid-style overworld. The main window shows the tile you're currently on, so your actual navigation is done just on a small window on the side, and you can only see two squares in each direction at any time. That's annoying, I'd much rather be able to see farther than have a big window with plain, mostly empty graphics on it... I know that that's where you fight, but really this system doesn't work well. To be able to play you really must have a map of the overworld, and fortunately one came in the box with the game. Either get a complete copy or print the map from the web before you play. Dungeons will require hand-mapping though, unless you cheat and download those maps too. Fight battles, go to town and buy items (and no, you can't see any farther in town than you can in the overworld, same system), go back out and grind some more, repeat until you beat the game or get bored. You do get party members as you go along, but it's a very, very repetitive and simplistic game. I got this for the historic value, not expecting to enjoy it, and my prediction was right. I was impressed that the decades-old battery is still good, and the saves in all four save slots were fine, but the mind-numbing tedium, and high difficulty level (it's very easy to get killed, enemies are strong, and healing isn't cheap), of the actual gameplay quickly makes me lose all interest.
Missile Defense 3-D (Light Phaser and SegaScope 3-D Glasses Required) - As I said in the first post, the first thing I noticed about this game is the really, really awesome 3d. The 3d in this game is easily the best of any of the four 3d glasses SMS games that I have. The game looks really impressive and things really have depth, the 3d globe and city screens are just awesome. As for the game, you try to shoot the missiles before they destroy the cities. The story is that two countries are shooting nukes at eachother, and you, an outside force in some kind of turret with anti-missile lasers or missiles or something, need to destroy all of the missiles each side fires at the other in order to avert mass casualties on either side. You get three chances to destroy each side's missiles. Each is a one-screen stage where you shoot at the missiles. Each "level" consists of destroying the missiles for both sides, and the stages repeat each level, so that means that there are six screens in this game, three per side. First, you get a chance as the missiles are launched from the launching base. If you miss any (and you likely will unless you're good at the game) you move on to stage two, where you shoot at the missiles as they cross some terrain between the countries. If you fail to hit them all, you move on to stage three, where you defend the city itself from the incoming missiles, coming in fast. If you miss any this time the city blows up and it's game over, and the game tells you that there are no second chances in nuclear war. Succeed and you move to the other countries' stages, and beat that to go back to the first ones at a higher difficulty. The game does eventually end, if you destroy all the missiles for ten rounds, so it's not as bleak a concept as Missile Command, but the thematic similarity is obvious. The 3d helps with this genre, you get a bit of a sense of depth and it makes it a little easier to hit the missiles. Perhaps that's why three of the eight SegaScope 3-D games are light-gun shooters? Either way on that, this game's pretty cool. It requires multiple accessories to play, but it plays well and is definitely worth a try if you can. I'm not a light gun fan (I'm just so horribly bad at hitting anything with light guns that I just can't enjoy them very much), but for a light gun game this one's kind of cool, though I certainly must admit that without the 3-d graphics it'd be much less interesting. Still though, it has them and they look pretty good.
Rambo: First Blood Part II - Rambo is a Commando or Ikari Warriors style vertical-scrolling shooting game where you take a soldier through the jungle, killing as many of the numerous enemies who come your way as you can. The game has two player simultaneous, which is fantastic, and is a pretty good game despite the very steep difficulty. Like NES Ikari Warriors this game is very difficult, with just three lives and no continues without a code, but you won't find a simple at-point continue code in Rambo, unlike that game. There are codes to continue from the beginning of each of the six levels, but that's it. And to make matters worse, for some insane reason each of the levels (two through six) has a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT code you need to input, even though you need to have died at that stage in order to continue from it. Oh come on, that's just evil! As for the game though, it's good. The graphics are quite nice, with large sprites and good use of color. As with many SMS games, you really can see how much more powerful this system was than the NES graphically when you play Rambo. Like with both of the games mentioned above I badly wish that the game had twin-sitck firing, because being able to move in one direction and shoot in another would be invaluable, but you just have to deal with just being able to fire in the direction you're facing. The game has both standard weapons and special ones, and the special ones usually fire up, but they're limited so you can't just use them, you have to get used to shooting only the way you're facing. Even though I like this game, that limitation makes me want to go back and play The Ninja (or Ninja Princess Arcade/SG1000) more, that game's system of one button firing in the direction you're facing and the other button firing up is much better than what these games do. Still, despite the difficulty and frustration, I do like the game.
Safari Hunt (Light Phaser required) - Safari Hunt is a simple light gun game. There are four different screens, each a different environment -- forest, jungle, etc -- and animals appear for you to shoot, each worth different point values based on how hard it is to hit them and such. Simple game, like most 8-bit light gun games, but functional enough. The graphics are nice. This might be better than Duck Hunt's main mode, I'm not sure.
Shooting Gallery (Light Phaser required) - Shooting Gallery is a very simple and straightforward, but good looking, light-gun game. Targets move across the screen and you shoot them. All that matters is that you hit enough of them, how much ammo you waste missing or where you hit them doesn't matter. Hit enough to move on, miss too many and it's game over. Sounds bland, right? It would be, except that the game has nice, and somewhat original, graphics. The concept here is that you're in a fair-style shooting gallery, so the targets look like cardboard cutouts and such or are balloons, and if you miss and hit the background, you blow a hole in it and reveal the wall behind the "sky" or "jungle" or what have you that you seem to be shooting at. That's pretty cool, the graphical style kept me playing for a little while even though the simplistic gameplay did not.
Thunder Blade - Thunder Blade is a port of the Sega scaler arcade game. The scaling is removed or done in software here of course, which makes the game somewhat frustrating and annoying, but while definitely subpar it's not completely unplayable. There are two modes to the game. First is a top-down view that looks basic and plays okay. The sprites are huge, which means your ship looks nice but is a big target. As a shmup on its own this wouldn't exactly be much to remember, but it functions at least. The second mode is a rail shooter. Here the game works much worse, as expected. The "scaling" is quite jerky and dodging bullets is difficult. You have to use different buttons to hit ground and air targets in this game, but the ground missiles are more limited (one at a time on screen, I think?) so don't miss. The game's playable -- move around the screen and keep firing and you might get somewhere -- but not that fun. Somehow I do come back to this once in a while, but the SMS just isn't powerful enough to even remotely do scaler games justice.
Covered here:
Alien Syndrome, Black Belt, Hang-On / Safari Hunt (each will be covered separately), Kung-Fu Kid, Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting (will be reviewed as one game), Miracle Warriors, Missile Defense 3-D (covering again because now I can play it), Rambo: First Blood Part II, Shooting Gallery, Thunder Blade
Alien Syndrome - Alien Syndrome is a conversion of the popular Sega arcade game. It's a pretty bad port, unfortunately; anyone wanting to play Alien Syndrome on a home console should play the NES version or the Wii remake, not this SMS release. The multiplayer is alternating only, not simultaneous like on the arcades or NES, which is deeply disappointing. The graphics aren't very good. They aren't the worst, but they leave a lot to be desired. The game won't work with Genesis controllers, so you're forced to use one of the pretty poor SMS controllers for this thing. Controls aren't great either. The game is playable, as you run around the mazes killing aliens and figuring out how to get off each floor, but even though I like the other versions of this game, Sega's own SMS release just doesn't match up at all. Games on both the SMS and NES were usually better on SMS, but not in this case.
Black Belt - Black Belt is actually a Fist of the North Star game. While the NES and GB games with this license kept the title in North America, Sega's SMS and Genesis ones did not, and got retitled with generic themes. Still though, once you know what this is the theme is obvious, because nothing was changed except for the title, character names, and maybe some of the story. In the game you play as some guy who totally isn't Ken the Eagle, who punches people and makes them explode. Unlike the Genesis game, in the SMS one the exploding people are kept intact in the US release, which is good because apart from that this game isn't very fun. The game is a side-scrolling action/beat 'em up game. The best comparison I can make, gameplay-wise, is China Warrior on the Turbografx. Black Belt plays very, VERY similarly to that game, except with occasional fighting game style boss battles included at the end of each level. Gameplay within each level is very, very similar to China Warrior, as you walk to the right and hit people. Use punch and kick correctly against the correct enemies, jump over some things, jump up and collect the health-ups floating through the sky (China Warrior does the same thing too, health-ups come floating by in the air) by holding down and then pressing jump to do a higher jump, and punch lots of people and make them explode into parts. In the main levels, graphics are decent but quite small; the fighting game style boss battles, however, have nice large sprites. Just like China Warrior the game is frustratingly difficult, and I don't find it nearly fun enough to get very far, but I did stick with it enough to get to level 2, which is more than I can say for that game... It's got no continues too, of course, but on the SMS that's somewhat expected.
Hang-On - Simple mid '80s racing game, and a port of the arcade game of the same name. You drive forwards and see if you can get to the end of the course, pretty much -- this game isn't exactly complicated, and there are no options. Still though, it's simple fun. The game looks nice enough and plays well. The scaling's okay. I think I might have more fun with this than Super Hang-On for the Genesis... that one has lots of options and features, and better graphics, but somehow the scaling on most of Sega's Genesis games just looks so terrible to me that I find them barely playable.
Kung-Fu Kid - This game is a sidescrolling platform/beat 'em up game, pretty much. This game is inspired by Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, apparently, because you can jump to the top of the screen and hit people on the way down. The graphics are colorful and cartoony and look pretty decent, for the system. Gameplay isn't amazing, and is frustrating at times, but the game plays decently. The game is a little easy to exploit at times, though. For instance there's an enemy limit on screen, so if too many enemies are on screen more simply won't appear. Enemies chase you too, so if you go past some enemies and then just keep going, they'll just fruitlessly run after you and you can walk quite a ways with no opposition. Handy. Bosses are much trickier, though, and you'll definitely want to memorize their patterns and when to attack because there are no health-ups in the levels and if you die you start the stage over. This game's not great, but it's alright, definitely some fun. (Continues... yeah, no, like usual for platformers on this system)
Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting (Light Phaser required) - This game has two different modes, as the title suggests, but it's good that there are two, because each of these as a full game would be ... quite limited. This is obviously a very early SMS game, and the graphics are simplistic and not very good. Audio's no better. Gameplay's not too bad though, really. In Marksman Shooting, targets appear, police enemy outline style, for you to shoot. Each appears for a limited time, and you get different amounts of points for where you shoot the target -- the most for hitting the heart, the least for the outer edge. That's cool, the other SMS lightgun games I have don't do sectional damage (and nor do my NES Zapper games, I think). You move on to the next stage if you hit a high enough percentage of shots, a certain (and steadily increasing with each stage) percentage of your shots need to hit to move on. Fail to hit the target percent and you lose, start over from the beginning of the game. No continues or extra lives here. Trap Shooting is like Duck Hunt's skeet shooting mode, but on the SMS, pretty much. Hit the targets as they come flying up, try to hit enough of them to move on. I like Marksman Shooting better, but this one's okay I guess.
Miracle Warriors -Miracle Warriors is an RPG, and in fact it's the first JRPG ever released on a console in the US. The game is played on a grid-style overworld. The main window shows the tile you're currently on, so your actual navigation is done just on a small window on the side, and you can only see two squares in each direction at any time. That's annoying, I'd much rather be able to see farther than have a big window with plain, mostly empty graphics on it... I know that that's where you fight, but really this system doesn't work well. To be able to play you really must have a map of the overworld, and fortunately one came in the box with the game. Either get a complete copy or print the map from the web before you play. Dungeons will require hand-mapping though, unless you cheat and download those maps too. Fight battles, go to town and buy items (and no, you can't see any farther in town than you can in the overworld, same system), go back out and grind some more, repeat until you beat the game or get bored. You do get party members as you go along, but it's a very, very repetitive and simplistic game. I got this for the historic value, not expecting to enjoy it, and my prediction was right. I was impressed that the decades-old battery is still good, and the saves in all four save slots were fine, but the mind-numbing tedium, and high difficulty level (it's very easy to get killed, enemies are strong, and healing isn't cheap), of the actual gameplay quickly makes me lose all interest.
Missile Defense 3-D (Light Phaser and SegaScope 3-D Glasses Required) - As I said in the first post, the first thing I noticed about this game is the really, really awesome 3d. The 3d in this game is easily the best of any of the four 3d glasses SMS games that I have. The game looks really impressive and things really have depth, the 3d globe and city screens are just awesome. As for the game, you try to shoot the missiles before they destroy the cities. The story is that two countries are shooting nukes at eachother, and you, an outside force in some kind of turret with anti-missile lasers or missiles or something, need to destroy all of the missiles each side fires at the other in order to avert mass casualties on either side. You get three chances to destroy each side's missiles. Each is a one-screen stage where you shoot at the missiles. Each "level" consists of destroying the missiles for both sides, and the stages repeat each level, so that means that there are six screens in this game, three per side. First, you get a chance as the missiles are launched from the launching base. If you miss any (and you likely will unless you're good at the game) you move on to stage two, where you shoot at the missiles as they cross some terrain between the countries. If you fail to hit them all, you move on to stage three, where you defend the city itself from the incoming missiles, coming in fast. If you miss any this time the city blows up and it's game over, and the game tells you that there are no second chances in nuclear war. Succeed and you move to the other countries' stages, and beat that to go back to the first ones at a higher difficulty. The game does eventually end, if you destroy all the missiles for ten rounds, so it's not as bleak a concept as Missile Command, but the thematic similarity is obvious. The 3d helps with this genre, you get a bit of a sense of depth and it makes it a little easier to hit the missiles. Perhaps that's why three of the eight SegaScope 3-D games are light-gun shooters? Either way on that, this game's pretty cool. It requires multiple accessories to play, but it plays well and is definitely worth a try if you can. I'm not a light gun fan (I'm just so horribly bad at hitting anything with light guns that I just can't enjoy them very much), but for a light gun game this one's kind of cool, though I certainly must admit that without the 3-d graphics it'd be much less interesting. Still though, it has them and they look pretty good.
Rambo: First Blood Part II - Rambo is a Commando or Ikari Warriors style vertical-scrolling shooting game where you take a soldier through the jungle, killing as many of the numerous enemies who come your way as you can. The game has two player simultaneous, which is fantastic, and is a pretty good game despite the very steep difficulty. Like NES Ikari Warriors this game is very difficult, with just three lives and no continues without a code, but you won't find a simple at-point continue code in Rambo, unlike that game. There are codes to continue from the beginning of each of the six levels, but that's it. And to make matters worse, for some insane reason each of the levels (two through six) has a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT code you need to input, even though you need to have died at that stage in order to continue from it. Oh come on, that's just evil! As for the game though, it's good. The graphics are quite nice, with large sprites and good use of color. As with many SMS games, you really can see how much more powerful this system was than the NES graphically when you play Rambo. Like with both of the games mentioned above I badly wish that the game had twin-sitck firing, because being able to move in one direction and shoot in another would be invaluable, but you just have to deal with just being able to fire in the direction you're facing. The game has both standard weapons and special ones, and the special ones usually fire up, but they're limited so you can't just use them, you have to get used to shooting only the way you're facing. Even though I like this game, that limitation makes me want to go back and play The Ninja (or Ninja Princess Arcade/SG1000) more, that game's system of one button firing in the direction you're facing and the other button firing up is much better than what these games do. Still, despite the difficulty and frustration, I do like the game.
Safari Hunt (Light Phaser required) - Safari Hunt is a simple light gun game. There are four different screens, each a different environment -- forest, jungle, etc -- and animals appear for you to shoot, each worth different point values based on how hard it is to hit them and such. Simple game, like most 8-bit light gun games, but functional enough. The graphics are nice. This might be better than Duck Hunt's main mode, I'm not sure.
Shooting Gallery (Light Phaser required) - Shooting Gallery is a very simple and straightforward, but good looking, light-gun game. Targets move across the screen and you shoot them. All that matters is that you hit enough of them, how much ammo you waste missing or where you hit them doesn't matter. Hit enough to move on, miss too many and it's game over. Sounds bland, right? It would be, except that the game has nice, and somewhat original, graphics. The concept here is that you're in a fair-style shooting gallery, so the targets look like cardboard cutouts and such or are balloons, and if you miss and hit the background, you blow a hole in it and reveal the wall behind the "sky" or "jungle" or what have you that you seem to be shooting at. That's pretty cool, the graphical style kept me playing for a little while even though the simplistic gameplay did not.
Thunder Blade - Thunder Blade is a port of the Sega scaler arcade game. The scaling is removed or done in software here of course, which makes the game somewhat frustrating and annoying, but while definitely subpar it's not completely unplayable. There are two modes to the game. First is a top-down view that looks basic and plays okay. The sprites are huge, which means your ship looks nice but is a big target. As a shmup on its own this wouldn't exactly be much to remember, but it functions at least. The second mode is a rail shooter. Here the game works much worse, as expected. The "scaling" is quite jerky and dodging bullets is difficult. You have to use different buttons to hit ground and air targets in this game, but the ground missiles are more limited (one at a time on screen, I think?) so don't miss. The game's playable -- move around the screen and keep firing and you might get somewhere -- but not that fun. Somehow I do come back to this once in a while, but the SMS just isn't powerful enough to even remotely do scaler games justice.
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