PixlBit

Strider is undoubtedly a cool game, especially for one released in 1989. It's a non stop series of action set pieces with a heavy emphasis on awesomeness! In a dystopian near future where a mysterious dictator has taken over the world (he's totally an alien entity that plans to purge the world with fire) and as the youngest and greatest of the elite Strider organization, you are sent to take him out!

The Street Fighter franchise is a worldwide powerhouse that has been popular for decades, even if its cultural foot print hasn't been as large in recent years. All that is due, however, to Street Fighter II, and not this slow, clunky, horribly unbalanced first effort from 1987. Not that it has to be balanced. You start up the game and immediately play as Ryu (I've heard Ken is playable too but I don't know how to pick him). The other characters are not playable, so they don't have to be balanced. The game plays like a series of boss fights, which by itself isn't damning, even considering how things are stacked against you. It's the fact that it's, well, slow and clunky and not very much fun to play. There are so many great Street Fighter games that there is really no reason to play this one.

The Speed Rumbler, 1986, is basically Mad Max. You live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland plagued with car gangs, one of which has kidnapped your family. You have 24 hours (actually 24 minutes, I think) to get them back. You do that by driving and shooting your way through six top down stages, and it starts off pretty well. Your car drives a little stiffly but it's manageable. There are a lot of bad guys to shoot, both in other cars and on foot, as well as other hazards like exploding barrels and boulders. You can also free prisoners from little standalone jails for bonuses and power ups. If your car takes too much damage, it will catch on fire and you need to get out of it ASAP. It's cool that you can go on foot even if you're probably gonna die. If you can survive and make some forward progress, a new car will be dropped off for you. It seems like a missed opportunity, however, that you cannot jump in an empty enemy car. You'll just die and instant deaths is one of my big pet peeves with this game. Okay, you're very vulnerable when not in your car; that makes sense. But there are enemies with instantly kill your car no matter how much life you have. That is super frustrating. Continuing that theme is the time limit. You have to beat the game in 24 minutes, which gives you 4 minutes to beat each of the six levels, and the game makes this a hard limit. If you hit 4 minutes before reaching the end of the level, you gotta start it all over. So doing well on earlier levels does you no good in the later levels. You get no time bonus.

Side Arms, a 1986 scolling shooter, is an interesting follow up to Section Z. Even though it came out a year later and explores some of the same ideas as Section Z, I feel that Side Arms fails in almost every way that its predecessor succeeds.

Section Z is another Capcom game whose NES adaptation is probably more well known than the 1985 arcade original, similar to what happened with Bionic Commando. Unlike that game, however, Section Z's arcade version is still quite playable and fun. You play an astronaut with a jet pack and gun that's infiltrating an alien bio horror space station...or something. The important part is that you fly around shooting stuff. Section Z seems like a typical side scrolling shooter at first but then you realize you can change the direction your character is facing (left or right) with the push of a button. It's simpler than Forgotten Worlds but still makes the fire fights more interesting. Then you hit a lateral dead end and start ascending a shaft vertically. These vertical sections are tough because you can still only shoot left or right. Then you reach the top and go left (instead of genre-standard RIGHT) before descending again. These changes help keep things interesting and provide a satisfying sense of progress. Speaking of which, the game starts at Section A and proceeds all the way through the alphabet to Section Z, but these all bleed from one into the next. There are no levels breaks, which is a nice little immersion booster. The only exception is when you fight a boss every five or six sections (all the bosses I fought were sadly underwhelming). The game congratulates you and tells you what section you're heading into with on screen text. Otherwise it's just you and the hostile aliens.

I've got to give it to Quiz & Dragons, a 1992 arcade game. I've never played an RPG quiz board game! Well, okay, the RPG aspects are really light. It has a generic fantasy setting and each of the characters (barbarian, wizard, amazon warrior, and ninja) have a special ability that will randomly come into play. There is no leveling or stats or anything like that. The board game is pretty superficial as well. A big digital die determines how many spaces you move and while there are a few branching paths, it's mostly just a series of trivia fights. That's the game, basically. Each enemy requires a certain number of correct answers to defeat and your character loses a life with each wrong answer. While the stages do change aesthetically, the fights are all the same, even for the bosses. The questions really date the game too. While I did very well on the history and science questions (and merely okay on the plethora of United States trivia lol), the '70s and '80s minutiae killed me. Who starred in this TV show, who won that Oscar, what team drafted so and so. My gosh, SO MANY baseball questions!

Mega Twins, released in arcades in 1990, is a beautiful game. It would have looked right at home on the SNES, and that was still a year out from release (in America at least). This action platformer sees two brothers—the sons of the king—defend their land from invading monsters. And what adorable monsters they are! The whole game is colorful and cheery and filled with little visual touches and comic moments. One of the later bosses, for instance, is a vampire but underneath his large cloak-like wings he's just a dude in a bow tie and boxers and a funny hat. When he blows up at the end of the fight his boxers go flying off and can land on your head if you jump into them, which totally makes your little guy freak out. It's a completely unnecessary little sequence but adds a ton of personality to the game. The graphics look heavily inspired by Dragon Ball (especially the promo art) but I found no evidence that Akira Toriyama worked on the game, and certainly that would be a major selling point. But whoever was ripping off his style did a good job!

In some ways Magic Sword seems like a continuation of the ideas in Black Tiger (which we established earlier is ultimately trash), albeit streamlined for more fun. Magic Sword is a sword and sorcery fantasy adventure that sees your heroes ascending an eldritch tower to destroy the Black Orb, the ultimate evil artifact which will allow the dark lord Drokmar to rule the world. That boils down to you beating the crap out of everything, naturally.