Snow Bros.

arcade
Jan 09

A billion years ago on an unsatisfying holiday to Ibiza, this game was my lifeline, and I never saw it again in the wild until I discovered MAME. I've always had a fondness for it, and I had a sudden hankering for single-screen arcade games, so I wanted to dive in and get a feel for what made them tick!

You want to clear the screen of all the baddies, and you do that by chucking snow at them until they've been turned into snowballs, and then kicking those to dispose of them. Snowballs will bounce off walls until they've hit the bottom, so ideally you want to launch it from the top and squash everyone else in its path, or even set up multiple snowballs to create a chain reaction!

The more lavish your reign of destruction, the more bonus items that spawn; most just offer points, but there's a few potions that'll increase your range, speed, and power, as well as one that inflates you big and round and allows you to just destroy baddies on contact.

I like the basics of the game. Levels are relatively compact, but your default movement speed and rate of fire is relatively plodding, encouraging a patient, methodical sense of play. Playing with snowballs perhaps feels a bit more tactile than Bubble Bobble's bubbles: pushing them from the sides or below, using them as stepping stones... there's a fun physicality to it, even if there's more legwork required, needing an enemy in the right spot to form one instead of using empty bubbles however you need.

It does get pretty overwhelming as it goes on, though. There's so many enemies they practically take over the screen, especially when the green fire-breathing critters and blue ninjas can occupy more space with their projectiles or special abilities. The final world also introduces wrap-around screens -- a staple of the genre, but a bit of a curveball after you've gone the whole game without them, especially with zippy bats all up in your business...!

You can jump up through platforms, but you can only drop down if there's a gap in the terrain (something enemies don't need, they can drop where they please!), so navigating levels and avoiding enemies becomes a tricky affair if you want to get the best vantage point. That I enjoy! Using snowballs as mandatory stepping stones to reach essential locations, not so much. The idea is there, but there's just a little too much going on, especially with enemies able to walk through them instead of blocked off, for it to feel truly cohesive in my book.

Toaplan are seemingly best known for their shoot-em-ups (we wouldn't have Zero Wing without these lads!), so the seemingly cutesy and twee Snow Bros. does feel a bit of an outlier, although it's not their only entry in the field. Their trademark grunginess does shine through in the overall art design -- though the small sprites are all chubby and charming, bosses are all exceptionally ghoulish, ranging from merely unsettling to outright disturbing, like a Japanese take on '80s toys like Mad Balls or Boglins...!

You fight a boss every ten levels; you can hit them with snow, but knocking snowballs into them using their underlings is the real strategy. They're a pleasant change of pace, despite how uncanny-looking they are, though some of them do get a bit long in the tooth.

The fourth fight is a pair of slimes that spawn fireballs; hitting those fireballs with snow will turn them into impassable fires, forcing you to either wait it out or try and find an alternate route to get where you want. Again, there's an idea there, but the execution is just too demoralising to want to engage with -- especially when using a continue during a boss fight will reset the entire match, undoing all your progress...!

It's got a rock-solid foundation and makes a great first impression, but it's a shockingly long game that kind of wears out its welcome towards the end. All my praise for its more methodical pacing goes out the window once you realise, bloody hell, there's fifty levels of this to wade through...!

I was curious to sample the home versions to see if they made any adjustments to its difficulty; it feels very much designed to hoover up credits from any dope foolish enough to stick with it for too long. For a hot minute I was seriously tempted to get the Switch remaster, which apparently adds a bunch of new ridiculous content, including the ability to play as the enemies...!? Colour me intrigued! It's a game I still hold a soft spot for, and perfectly ideal for those first couple of worlds, but knowing over half the experience is a bit of a write-off dampens my enthusiasm a tad.

Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves

arcade
Jan 11

I shanghai'd pals into playing this a bunch on MAME decades ago, but never really made it terribly far -- it's fun, though the sort of game that's just very easy to peter out on, but I was keen to study these single-screen games some more. It's more of the same, as you might expect!

In addition to 4-player co-op, a lot of adjustments are made to accessibility and difficulty: levels are a lot more navigable now that you can drop down from platforms by holding down and pressing jump, foregoing the hunt for pits, and the four selectable characters practically transform how you approach the core gameplay!

They're functionally split into "push" and "carry" types -- Nick the snowman handles like you'd expect, throwing projectiles to turn baddies into pushable snowballs that can be kicked to roll to the bottom of the screen. The kappa turns enemies into water balloons that pop into two-way streams, not unlike the Bubble Bobble item. The oni and tengu shoot short-range rays that allow them to absorb enemies, effectively allowing them to carry a projectile with them to new platforms; the former's shots split into two on impact, while the latter spits tornadoes that arc up off the top of the screen.

It completely transforms how you approach the game, allowing for much more diversity in how you play, if also a lot more pandemonium. The first game was essentially a one-note strategy: get to the top, rack up some snowballs, knock 'em down. It would put more and more (and more and more and more...!) obstacles in your way as it went on, but that was the optimum play.

Here, you've reason to come back and try something new, or swap out to a different character if it's not quite working out. It has to optimise itself for so many players and playstyles, of course, but you can tell when stages are built in mind for showing off a certain character's strengths. I'm sure with 4 players it's absolute mayhem, but there's palette swaps to keep track of yourselves if everyone likes the same guy.

It's a much faster moving game too -- the players are that bit zippier, and enemies aren't quite as squirrelly, so it's easier to keep track of the hazards on-screen (to an extent, at least). Levels seem to fly by a lot faster, for good or for ill; it doesn't seem to rely as much on cascading snowballs, with the oni and tengu it's surprisingly feasible to decimate the entire screen just from your staring position...!

I can't remember what the bosses are like, which I generally attest to being a good thing: they can't have been that obnoxious if that's the case...! There's a couple of vertically-scrolling levels where you have to outrun a rising wall of fire (and avoid enemies rolling barrels at you, so there's shades of Donkey Kong in there); they're an exciting change of pace, but suddenly demanding legitimate platforming skills from the player is a bit of a roadblock, and it's very easy to burn through multiple lives or credits because of one tricky jump...!

After the first game's slightly monstrous presentation, this one leans heavily into cutesy-town (barring the international version's frightening character select screen, featuring portraits of glam-rock babies) to the point where it looks nothing like other the dev's games, and feels more like a Korean bootleg -- I had to confirm on Wikipedia it was still an in-house Toaplan production...! It's quirky and colourful and far more mascot-like, but it leaves the titular Snow Bros. feeling like the odd man out, a relic in an aesthetic that's moved beyond them.

It's a far more accessible game than the last one; more accommodating to players of different skill-sets, more incentive to come back and try things differently, not as prone to giving children nightmares... but it does admittedly iron out the quirks that made the original Snow Bros. so distinctive. You're no longer fighting your way to high ground or dealing with the nuances of snowball management, or even truly getting acquainted with the environments, it's just a more breezy ride.

I figure for an arcade game to play with a bunch of pals, maybe that's a good thing! There's not the same shocking difficulty spikes as in the last game (or at least, not as many of them), it's a more free-form experience, but it does mean there's not the same highs or challenges to keep you invested or as eager to come back. It's not bad, just different!

Ninja Clowns

arcade
Jan 25

There's so many games I've ripped sprites from but haven't actually played, and of all the possible examples to finally give some attention to -- Pokemon Ranger, CIMA: The Enemy, Luminous Arc... -- this is the one I decided to act upon. Look, if you've been reading this site for any length of time, you'll know I have awful taste and make terrible decisions. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

An extremely dodgy beat-em-up about beating up random people who've been brainwashed by some contrived means. There's some vague circus themery going on in where you go and who you clobber, but a lot of it might as well be random: businessmen, hippies, bowlers, giant busty anthropomorphic chickens...

What makes it unique is its unorthodox control scheme, where holding a direction and pressing the secondary button pulls off different attacks, from a bum slide to an aerial bonk, to various spinning attacks. On one hand I appreciate the diversity of moves available to the player, mitigating the need for obtuse quarter-circle inputs or situational demands... but on the flip-side, it in no way feels satisfying to use, and a couple moves are clearly stronger than the rest, so why settle for less?

It looks distinct, I'll give it that much, with its ghoulish enemies and weird comic book style intermissions, but its combat is just too stodgy to find any pleasure in. Arcade games by their very conception are kind of a novelty, but this is one that really feels like it has no greater aspirations than drawing people in based on its ridiculous premise. A game to be gawked at more than played for pleasure, so to speak. VGJunk and Kim Justice both have entertaining looks at it, but there's little draw to actually experiencing it for yourself.

Pig Out: Dine Like A Swine!

arcade
Jan

More of this single-screen platformer arcade nonsense! Of all bloody things, I owe it to Zany Video Game Quotes for bringing my attention to this game however many millions of years ago. Who says gimmick websites from web 1.0 weren't educational?

Three players take control of pigs with attitude, running from the butcher and big bad wolves while trying to amass points from food items, or using weapons and traps to foil their pursuers. Rather than clearing all the enemies or collecting every item on-screen, the level runs indefinitely until you collect all 6 randomly-spawning jars of jam, though the longer you survive, the more threats will pile on-screen, including a bombardment of vultures, so you gotta cut your losses at some point...!

The premise is cute, but the execution is just too ramshackle to feel much enthusiasm for. The pigs control extremely stiffly, moving herky-jerky in weird juttery leaps, which is not conducive to the very precise spacing required to interact with the environment, be it ladders, platforms, or whatever else. For a game where you're primarily on the run, to control like crap is pretty much a nail in its coffin...!

It just feels muddy on all fronts. The only means of defending yourself are with limited-use projectiles, but it's hard to tell those pickups apart from the ordinary food items, and even the jam jars are extremely easy to gloss over -- there's no real spectacle to their appearance signifying they're essential to progression. The six jars are to ensure the level lasts at least a minute so you won't be rushing through it, but surely there's got to be a better, more rewarding way of piecemealing progress...?

I gotta give it points for creativity, at least -- there's a fun verticality to its levels, with fun ways of getting from the bottom to the top without just hoofing it up the stairs every time. It seems the order you visit levels is either randomised or dependent on a factor I'm unaware of, as every game starts outside the butcher, but where you go next seems to be different on some runs.

But the feel of the game is just unsatisfying, and not even watching it is much better -- it's just too dang sluggish! A pity, because there's a foundation for something appealing in there, but the execution simply doesn't do it any favours. Bless 'em for trying, I guess.

I Spy: Spooky Mansion

Wii
Feb 02 ~ 05

Yeah, I don't know. I mentioned I Spy as a joke on Discord to someone who was bored, and they had never even heard of the practise before, taking it in a very bizarre direction. And evidently my response to this was, do I have to sit you down and play I Spy: Spooky Mansion for the Nintendo Wii for you to understand this children's game?! Well, joke's on me, because it plays nothing like it does on long car rides.

You click through the rooms of the titular spooky mansion, tasked with finding the various objects or landmark alluded to in the accompanying four-line stanza. Some of these take place in self-contained portions of the room, like a wardrobe or cabinet, but it largely entails looking around the room in full 360 degrees, each of which has a pleasing amount of detail. It's a baby game for babies, but darn if finding things isn't stupidly satisfying...!

What's less satisfying are the mini-games you're forced to play on occasion, mostly because they play terribly using Dolphin's default control setup. They're a change of pace... perhaps too much so? While some are cute at best, the plate-spinning mini-game is actual agony, and the third time playing it arguably asks more of the player than anything else in the game!

The overarching goal of the game is to exit the mansion, and your guide Skelly gives you the run-around. First he claims he'll show you how to escape once you solve all the puzzles, then when he makes good on his deal by activating the Ghost Machine, it turns out it needs a power source. Time to do new puzzles in every room! Then the flippin' thing makes you shrink, and you need to get ingredients for a potion that'll turn you big again. Another round of puzzles! And then you gotta chase a ghost around the house before it'll open the door for you. When you tell me a goal, I expect you to adhere to it, gosh darn it!

Again, this is a children's game, but it's a charming little jaunt, and one that demonstrates the benefits even the most unexpected games get in a group environment. I typically play games on my own, but a game you can share with others and have them meaningfully contribute (even if it is a farce trying to guide me towards what they saw, haha) really adds a lot to the experience. It's not made to be multi-player, but as something to run on a Discord server and folks can pop in as they please, it works shockingly well!

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

SEGA Mega Drive
Feb 22

Pals Nightshade and WanderingFellow were in big Shinobi moods for whatever reason, so I felt compelled to stream this on a whim -- possibly my first time actually beating the game in a single sitting with no savestates? Usually I get fatigued by the final stages, but beating it inside of an hour helped -- having to redo stages is draining...!

It's a game I don't think I've actually written much about, but it's perhaps one of my all-time favourite Mega Drive games -- it's slick, it's solid, it's got a terrific sense of pacing and action, and learning to master the nuances of Joe's movements takes some doing, but is extremely satisfying to pull off. Little things like the slight delay before jumping, the recoil from his dive-kick, it adds a tremendous sense of weight and 'oomph' to the affairs -- you're flighty and zippy, but you're still in control of a muscle-bound man who takes some doin' to get off the ground.

This was my first time using the 6-button moveset, which shifts melee, kunai, and blocking to separate buttons, the latter no longer dependent on holding the button for a second. It's a little bit fiddly thanks to years of muscle memory, but the instant guard is a tremendous boon, and arguably demonstrates just how busted it can be -- the samurai's ground waves in level 1 can be blocked point-blank, allowing you to stab them a lesson before they know what's coming!

I do confess playing it this time did make me more aware of its little fussy foibles. My interest begins to wane by level 5: the burning forest looks striking, but is perhaps the longest and flattest screen in the game, and is followed by the somewhat milquetoast factory. Level 6 is interesting but also a bit of a load; the blind skyward leaps with no idea of what's coming is a drag, paired with how much ground has to be retrod if you die, leaving me too burnt-out to enjoy the challenges the final stage has to offer.

All petty complaints, mind! A game's meant to be challenging and shouldn't last exactly as long as my limited patience; just a reminder of my nebulous critique even for games I love. Its brand of ninja action remains untouched in my book (though Super House of Dead Ninjas is a close second), and helping RQ87 document its prototypes a million years ago remains a cherished memory. I really ought to give the other Shinobi games a spin, but I think this one just pushes all the right buttons for me.

Street Fighter II V

Mar 21 ~ Apr 13

If you want an idea of what Dok and I talked about, imagine a dozen variations of "oh they're gay," "they fuckin'," or "they would make an adorable couple."

Pal herrDoktorat was in a Street Fighter mood and had long been wanting to rewatch this, a show he grew up with and had fond memories of, and one I know next to nothing about, beyond what I remember from RQ87's recap of the series.

I get the impression it's either ignored or derided by a good chunk of the Street Fighter fandom, primarily for not matching the game canon 1:1, instead telling its own story and tweaking the characters' functions and appearances to fit their new roles.

And if you watched the first couple of episodes expecting immediate Street Fighter action, I can see what it delivers being at odds with that. The story begins with little more than country bumpkin Ryu reuniting with rich boy Ken after some time apart, with Ken showing his friend the sights, flaunting daddy's wealth to take them joyriding and -- one of their regular activities, apparently -- cucking airforce crew at bars to goad them into fights. If you came expecting the contemplative, grappling-with-purpose personas of their game incarnations, seeing these two idiot teens might be a bit of a shock!

After getting their butts whupped by Guile, though, they come to the realisation that there's more to martial arts than just what their master taught them, and they begin travelling the world to see what else awaits them. This takes the "world warrior" subtitle in a very literal direction, with the pair travelling to Hong Kong, Thailand and India, ostensibly in search of worthy fighters to challenge and learn from... but the anime revels in the small stuff, too.

That and wishing Chun-Li got to beat up more dudes to make up for the amount of bullshit she has to put up with. Girl does not get many opportunities to enjoy herself.

I'm not a big anime watcher and very out-of-touch with what's the standard of quality in the various decades, but what impressed me about the show is what a lavish production it looks like...! Every location they visit is an excuse for the two to go sightseeing, to soak in the local flavour and find a place to crash, with Hong Kong in particular savouring every moment in their penthouse apartment.

The decompressed pacing of a 29 episode anime allows it to slow down and make the most of these places, even if it's just for a montage or an excuse to go people-watching. It makes these places feel like 'places', not just backdrops for a choice encounter.

Every character, from the main stars to one-and-dones to even background characters in airports, is drawn with luscious care and attention. With only a couple of outliers, you're never going to mistake one character for another. This was clearly from an era before waifish waifus were all animators wanted to draw, as the effort put into rendering the various muscly bods is a sight to behold.

The opening animation is surprisingly spartan for the first half, mostly black screens interspersed with quick combat cuts and long shots of Ryu and Ken running towards the screen. It's arguably a bit cheap, a sign that the animation was already so expensive they couldn't spend much more on the OP... but darn if it doesn't set up exactly what to expect: lavish animations of hunky dudes and also people absolutely getting their shit wrecked.

The fight scenes are shockingly raw and extremely physical -- there's none of that energy projection malarkey here, this is straight martial arts, and by gum do you feel it! Ryu and Ken get a right thrashing throughout the series, occasionally to the point of being out of action for days, and it truly sells the weight and impact of these battles. It's one of the few tie-ins where "street fighter" is an apt description, so many of the fights are against thugs and nogoodniks who are not above hitting low and fighting dirty, and it makes their comeuppance all the more satisfying.

herrDoktorat: Next time, it'll be the ring (marriage proposal)
ragey0: oh my god what a swag move that'd be, grand entrance into the fighting arena before one of them kneels and produces the ring
ragey0: two men enter, one couple leaves

The first half of the series is pretty leisurely, despite some of the wild turns it goes. It's split into story arcs of three or four episodes a piece; their first stop in Hong Kong introduces them to hot-headed film star Fei Long, and then to spirited young tour guide Chun-Li, who they immediately endanger by going to Kowloon Palace, situated in a part of the city that might as well be Escape From New York.

After being introduced to her father Dorai, an investigator looking into an international crime ring, they immediately run afoul of them and Ryu is sent to a Thai prison, where he has to endure the tyranny of its warden. Disgraced fighter Sagat rules the pen with an iron fist, but is painted as an extremely charming figure, one who shares a mutual respect for fighting and self-betterment with Ryu, and the two ultimately become dear comrades and tear the warden a new one.

Sagat is a character I have never ever given a crap about before, but his depiction here was shockingly endearing! He's done bad things, but having a kindred spirit to share his passions with really opens him up, and I was dreading the anime would follow canon just long enough for the two to have a tiff -- he and Ryu are so good for each other...!

Come episode 14 and the series takes on a different approach. The remainder is no longer an episodic affair, but one long chain of events taking place over only two nights, as multiple plot threads intersect and converge in wild new ways...! Ken, Ryu and Chun-Li are captured by Shadaloo and out of commission for so many episodes, and it takes the time to establish all manner of concurrent plots: Bison's scheme for 'reprogramming' fighters to obey his will; Guile and Nash's mission to rescue the group under orders from the CIA; and an attempt on Dorai's life helmed by Cammy and Balrog, the latter of whom is a mole in Interpol looking to snuff out any opposition to Bison's operations.

herrDoktorat: It's incredible that Nash has got this whole other design with a beard and all
herrDoktorat: And he STILL reads as incredibly gay
ragey0: straight-laced loyal airforce partner just radiates gay energy somehow
herrDoktorat: The well cultivated beard, the tight, buttoned up shirt
herrDoktorat: The gay little beret
ragey0: he had multiple of the same shirt because guile just rips it off him at bedtime
herrDoktorat: "total inability to ever understand women" ARE YOU SEEING THIS

With big players like Bison, Vega, Cammy and Guile in the picture now, it might be the kind of action Street Fighter fans are after, but it's still a very different beast from what most of media of the series is like. After the first half felt so 'flighty' by comparison, this really amps up the stakes and especially the tension -- with Ken trapped and on the verge of death for so long, it's strange when he finally enters the picture again...!

It's a great opportunity to play with the new cast though, or see old characters in new lights. After serving only to humble our heroes as an inciting incident, Guile and Nash get to scope out Shadaloo's base, play out secret agent tropes, and be incredibly hunky around one another. Fei-Long as an idiot teen is already more personality than his game depiction has going on, but seeing him conscripted to protect Dorai from Cammy's assassination is a terrific angle. Everyone's getting in way over their heads, basically!

It's an absolutely compelling ride, packed with tension, suspense, moody pacing and dire circumstances, though I can see it being agonising to keep up with week-by-week, if not outright demoralising. How long can you put up with our heroes in distress...? But to ram through three to five episodes a night, it was a darn good ride in my book. So much intrigue...!

Admittedly where episode 13 left off had me suspecting a different outcome entirely. Dhalsim enlightens the two on the hadou, as well as the seven types of ki and chakra that work in conjunction with it, but warns them of the darkened heart brewing within Sagat. Hearing all this mysticism, I expected the boys' next efforts to involve searching for insight into harnessing those powers, and maybe seeking out Sagat once more.

Buuuut nope! Sagat and Dhalsim, despite appearing in the OP, are not seen again outside of flashback. Bison's schemes apparently involve these forces, with his psycho power explained as one of them, but his ultimate goals are kind of wishy-washy. With how much globe-trotting there was in the first half, I was expecting the back half to add a greater sense of intent and purpose to their travels, more than just picking fights with randos. Hats off to them for throwing me a curve ball!

It's only after the fact that you realise some parts don't add up, as listed in RQ87's "plot holes" page. The mysterious bird artifact is kind of explained in Bison's monologue in the final episode, but not in enough detail to really satisfy...! There's also numerous scenes given to Shadowlaw's purchasing of land in the Brazilian rainforest -- something I perceived as relating to their talk of 'shrines', possibly pertaining to the aforementioned forces...?

And then some stuff doesn't really get the screentime it deserves. Zangief shows up for a scrap with Ryu on the beach, then a slugfest with Guile in the Shadaloo base, and is an extremely charming character -- he holds no ill will to his opponents, and makes no talk of his loyalty to Bison, so he seems surprisingly on the level... but Guile leaves him KO'd and neither he nor Vega are addressed again, leading one to believe they were probably cooked in the base.

Some folks might be disappointed Balrog never gets a proper fight scene, despite appearing in his boxing togs in the intro, but honestly, his incredibly sweaty deep cover schtick is such a fun use of the character. The byplay between him and Cammy is just so entertaining, I'd love to see more of him being a secret agent, it's such an entertaining angle! (I momentarily forgot the subtitles used the Japanese names, so during Vega's introduction I was like "are we gonna see a boxer do bullfighting??", which is another great concept)

There's also an elaborate scene given to the Shadaloo crew evacuating in submarines, announcing their retreat to Cambodia, suggesting the adventure could continue with more operations to bust in that neck of the woods, but it wasn't to be, it seems! And then there's stuff like Chun-Li being brainwashed and presented in a darker version of her iconic qipao, looking absolutely boss as hell... but aside from a brief dust-up with Guile, doesn't actually get to do much. Given how she spends the first half of this arc mesmerised into a stupor by Vega, the poor girl doesn't get the best screentime.

Still, I was just impressed by what a stellar ride it was! It remains engaging all the way to the end, even despite the clear attempts at cost-cutting through flashback and repeated footage; the stellar artwork and charming characterisations more than make up for it. Although billed as an action show, it's got a captivating sense of 'place' and pacing, I can't say enough how charming their travels are when everywhere they go feels like a celebration of the richness of the world, however grungy it may be in places.

It's admittedly a little bittersweet acknowledging it after the fact, as I think this might be the best adaptation of Street Fighter...! It demonstrates how fighting game tie-ins are at their best when it's treated like a pick-and-mix, choosing the most fun elements to piece together into a new narrative, rather than adapting the 'core' plot. It's got angles and agendas and lore, for sure, but the characters remain the thrust behind all the events, and that's what makes it.

Nobody feels like a macguffin just to drive other people's plots (putting the three main characters on ice at the start of the Shadaloo arc aside), which feels like a silly thing to compliment it for until you remind yourself what all the other anime adaptations are about.

This was a blast, needless to say, and it kills me not being able to fit every compliment and gushing remark I had for the series into this write-up. I get the impression a lot of folks don't bother with this given how divergent it is from canon, and I have to restrain myself from smacking them and telling them to get over themselves. There's a whole new world of Street Fighter and its depictions to be found here! Broaden your horizons, y'all!

Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation

Apr

One of the first DVDs I bought myself, our pals and I hyped and expecting the world after seeing the Street Fighter II movie, and it never really met expectations. It's just a very different beast and unfit for comparison!

While Ryu's dealing with giving into his inner darkness, his long-lost younger brother Shun shows up, inserting himself into his and Ken's lives and striving to be as good a martial artist as them.

It's an angle that was already hard to accept back in the day -- I ain't suspending my disbelief for something so clearly non-canon! -- and it winds up being the driving force behind yet another "steal the best fighter's data" plot, with Ryu travelling to a tournament to rescue the kid.

What kills any real investment is that it's very much a story about concepts rather than characters. While there's some cute scenes of Ryu and Ken dealing with their new little brother, it just keeps barking on about Dark Hadou this, Dark Hadou that. The whole thing is wrapped up in his struggles with this inner power, and even the rest of the cast are little more than themes tying into it.

herrDoktorat: That story really is a bit ridiculous though
herrDoktorat: Ken's like "ok, time for the DNA test"
ragey0: you can see why people found this premise a bit sketch, haha
ragey0: also i kinda wish ryu had a brother similar to his age and their mom was alive so the mother could be like "ryu why aren't you more like your brother, he runs a company you know"
ragey0: "but ma, i gotta master the hadou and the chakra and the--"
"master washing the dishes first and finding a house and then you can talk"

As a result it lacks the human element -- everything is about Ryu, it's so hard to give a shit! He's the only one who gets to finish fights, because everyone else gets mollywopped and has to crawl away while Ryu picks up the pieces...! The movie's whole world-view revolves around the motherfucker, but we're dragged into Ryu's world without much knowledge of what else is out there. Surely Chun-Li leads a more interesting life when she's not playing bystander to this schmuck's angsting?

To its credit, it has a beautiful and unique aesthetic: a distinctive pastel art design with dream-like backdrops and character designs built on expression, with very unique almost elf-like features. It's got a striking contrast between its beauty and its grit, and when something is meant to be ugly and grisly, it really feels visceral. I clearly don't have the stomach I had as a teenager, because the abuse some of the characters go through, or the final form of Sadler, were more upsetting than I recalled...!

It's definitely striking, but it also feels like it has less consideration for human life -- the island is full of fighters who've been drained to vegetative states or turned into brainwashed drones (those orange baddies might've been robots, or they could've just been brainwashed dudes, it's not stopping to ask or make us care!), and named characters get their shit wrecked to the point of near-death, and it never takes the time to clarify if any of these victims make it out okay or not.

chun-li's only good against jobbers apparently

That's perhaps why it perhaps felt so callous to me: it revels in its violence but has so little time for simple humanity, beyond the sweet scenes of Ken, Ryu and Shun all hanging out. To push the characters aside in favour of the Dark Hadou, which was not depicted in an illuminating or visually interesting way to sell its allures or pitfalls ("aw shit if i don't do a QTE i'm gonna turn into Evil Ryu and my strength's gonna go up at the expense of my HP"), did not do it any favours.

Perhaps because of that, I found myself mentally checking out partway through; when there's so little meaningful character stuff to get me invested, it just felt unpleasant seeing those dudes get run through the wringer and suffer so much...! It doesn't even give us many highlights from the other fighters during the tournament, it's real dry on the fanservice front!

As a teen it was hard to get invested in Shun because this kid's clearly non-canon -- we're not gonna humour this character who's not even Ryu's brother in the games...! But now it's like, oh, this is the guy you're upending your life to meet? Get your priorities in order, kid!

It's frustrating in a way, because it's clearly a solid production -- the music is great, the animation is stellar, the art design's terrific, the performances are good... I just can't bring myself to give a shit about any of the proceedings! The down-to-earth stuff in the first half was solid, but to focus so squarely on Ryu without good supporting characters or letting them share the narrative is a hard task.

ragey0: it was good to watch Alpha again, but I won't lie I was just so deflated after it, it's truly the kind of film that saps the life from you if you don't roll with what it's offering...!
herrDoktorat: It doesn't know what it's offering
herrDoktorat: It's a plate with a single mushed bean in it
herrDoktorat: It's an UK breakfast
herrDoktorat: The British food of anime movies, weird and unpalatable
ragey0: Alpha at least had craft put into it, I can't say the same for British cuisine, haha

He might not have made a great impression in the SF2 movie either, but he at least shared his screen-time with more entertaining characters like E.Honda or Fei Long, so he didn't have to do all the heavy lifting.

Here, Ken and Chun-Li are tethered to Ryu at all times like personal baggage carriers, and are too burdened with that to bring their own charms to the table. Ken is much less entertaining when he's no longer jealous of a ten year old.

It was neat to see it again and get a greater respect for its artistic qualities, but it's a movie with a very particular vision, and if you don't vibe with that you won't be getting a lot from it. I think I'm just miffed they thought Ryu was who we needed a focus film on...!

I feel like telling a similar story but through the eyes of Sakura could be so much more compelling, the idealised fangirl view of martial arts forced to confront the darker side of it, from exploitation to inner conflict to just plain bad eggs. Every piece of Street Fighter media I watch makes me want to write fanfiction, but it shouldn't be because I wanted to watch something better...!

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

Apr

I believe this was Dok's first time watching the movie, or at least the first time in decades, while for me it was one of the first anime DVDs my brother had that was in constant rotation, alongside Cyber City Oedo and Ninja Scroll.

Fanservice: the movie! Although the unfortunate debut of the dreaded "stealing fighters' data" plot, it's very much just a series of vignettes to allow every fighter to get a token scene to themselves, animated to perfection to sells the might and awe of these kickass brawls between superpowered randos.

If what you want from a Street Fighter movie is well-rendered bods and good fighting, then here you go! Everyone looks cool, even when doing mundane things like meditating on a cliff, concocting their villainous schemes, or driving home to snog their wife.

It is a bit dry on the characterisation front, as you might expect, and I'd argue it even does some of the cast dirty? Guile and Chun-Li are paired up in their investigation, but Guile comes across like a brash misogynist in his interactions with her, an unlikeable sod who only turns around after she's hospitalised.

Chun-Li herself is what a lot of folks remember, animated with so much personality and nailing the look of her qipao... but it's also a reminder that she doesn't get to do that much. Girl basically serves as Miss Exposition until it's no longer required, then gets a skeezy shower scene before having to fight in her skivvies. It's a great fight scene, but she is essentially eye candy to give us a change from buff shirtless dudes.

This was my first time watching the Japanese dub, and I would argue the English track really lifts up the movie -- the performances are charming and have a lot more energy to them, with kooky lines that still stick in my mind decades later ("What the hell is that? Tin Man on steroids?"). To be fair, the copy I was watching used dubtitles, and not even properly transcribed ones either -- I was constantly bemoaning to Dok about lines it biffed, completely ruining their impact...!

The dub is perhaps infamous for ditching a lot of the original soundtrack and swapping it out for licensed music -- Alice in Chains, KMFDM, '90s rock and grunge that was very much the branding of Manga Entertainment. it's very strange watching the film without it -- it makes for a quieter, slightly more atmospheric film, but admittedly I'm not sure if that's to its benefit. It just feels kinda blah!

The scene of Chun-Li in her apartment is very different; the US soundtrack is very quick to play KMFDM's "Ultra", pushing it as a hype battle scene between two kickass characters... while in the original, the soundscape remains very low-key, instead emphasising what a terrifying scenario this is, attacked in a moment of weakness by a bloodthirsty killer...!

I feel like watching all this Street Fighter malarkey emphasises what I really want to see -- show me the characters! Show me the world! You want to see bomb-ass fight scenes in your fighting game adaptations, natch, but if you haven't got good characterisation or deliveries then what have you got...!

Perhaps because of that, the aforementioned Chun-Li scene hit different. It's very much just fanservice and voyeurism, an excuse to see her fight with no pants on, but the quiet moment before of her unwinding after a shower... it's the closest to a 'human' moment any of the cast gets.

There's so little we see of the characters that isn't just what we've already seen in the games, or could reasonably assume -- Guile gets out of a plane and is depicted as a stern grumpy gus, we never see him in his off-time or how he unwinds; he's all business, and totally joyless about it.

I'm undeniably spoilt by II V though -- who knew a 12-hour running time could get you more acquainted with a world and its cast? I feel bad for hyping this up for Dok when, well, it's a fight movie -- if all you want is iconography you recognise from the game involved in kickass fight scenes, you're sorted!

But if you're hoping for slightly more fleshed-out depictions of the characters, you might feel short-changed. Still, it's a good fun romp, and you can't not respect it for its sheer production values -- I don't know of a 2D animated game adaptation that's surpassed it in visual fidelity, though I admittedly haven't gone searching.

Street Fighter IV: The Ties That Bind

Apr

Entering uncharted territory, something neither Dok nor I had seen! This has a leg up on the previous entries by actually tying into the game's storyline, so I guess it's kinda sorta canon? Will that give it an edge and make it more distinct and memorable?

Hey, guess what -- it's another fucking harvesting-fighters-for-data Ryu-centric story!! Weirdo organisation SIN wants energy from fighters but especially Ryu, so Cammy, Guile and Chun-Li form an investigative trio, C.Viper is on the wings running reconnaissance for the baddies, and Ken and Sakura get wrangled up in the mess too somehow. Don't get too invested, every character eventually winds up asking, "where's Ryu? I wonder what Ryu's up to?"

I sincerely cannot remember much of what happened, I think I tuned out the moment I clocked what the story was going to be...! I do have to give it credit for its unique vibe and cast of characters, with an interesting climax bringing everyone to a ship, Chun-Li and Sakura teaming up and kicking ass while Ryu and Ken do their bullshit. It's not as fanciful or exotic as the previous tie-ins, and its presentation isn't nearly as lavish either, but it does the job.

I'm a little taken aback by how all the Street Fighter animated adaptations are mysteries in some way -- why are fighters being abducted or brainwashed, who is the mysterious organisation behind it, and what's their ultimate goal?

The live-action movie was the only one to establish the plot from minute one, and let you get stuck into it. I suppose an investigation is an excuse for sightseeing, hitting up a bunch of different locations and characters to find answers, so I can't be bad to it as a hook to hang setpieces on.

I also have to give it credit for treating its female characters a bit better than the prior watches. Cammy has the shit beaten out of her and is out of commission for most of the runtime, sadly, but it's C.Viper delivering the beatdown, so... feminism win? Chun-Li and Sakura get some fun action, and even Ken's wife Eliza factors in somehow, even if it is as a damsel in distress, she still presents more strength of character than I would've expected.

It's fine. It admittedly washed over me without making a strong impression one way or another, lacking the strong animation or iconic sequences to impress in the spectacle department, but it told a story with a better through-line and implementation of its components than the previous entries, and was far more coherent.

All the characters make an adequate turn-up, and though the Satsui no Hadou nonsense still put me to sleep, focusing on other dudes trying to harvest or capitalise on it than Ryu's own inner struggle was a better move.

We'd still a couple other films to watch, like Alpha Generations and the Super Street Fighter IV OVA (and maybe The Legend of Chun-Li if we felt like flagellating ourselves), but I think we were just kind of deflated at this point. We'd peaked with II V, and though it was fun seeing all the different takes on the material, nothing was scratching the itch quite the way we wanted...!

Godzilla

May

If you want to think lesser of me, I really enjoy this movie, and I finally got the chance to spring it on my kaiju maniac pal. He's nuts about all things Godzilla and Gamera, particular the latter's darker-and-edgier '90s movies, and we share a respect and appreciation for the Netflix Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters trilogy (if you want another strike against my taste in kaiju crap), so what better film to put that passion to the test?

I never saw this in cinemas when it was new, but it's hard to forget the advertising campaign that very much took a bite out of The Lost World: Jurassic Park's slogans and imagery, almost setting itself up as an extension of that film. Did its last-minute city rampage leave you wanting? Well come watch our film!

For that reason, it never bothered me that it's not a 'true' kaiju film -- it's very much Godzilla in name only, using it only as a stepping stone to make a dumber Jurassic Park, swapping the adherence to paleo-science for something closer to an all-purpose disaster movie, but played even more laissez faire.

The characters are scared to see a giant fire-snortin' lizard traipsing through New York, sure, but are otherwise unfazed by the ramifications of this, and even practically forget about it once it goes into hiding. It's treated like a temporary inconvenience, something that'll blow over, and instead are just focused on things going back to normal. Even in the thick of this disaster, their priority is on wanting to impress their boyfriend, or landing this job, or standing up for what they believe in... for taking refuge during a disaster, it's a very convivial approach to the matter at hand.

In fairness, a big part of the plot is the scientists and politicians fighting over what they can reveal to the public, and it's Jean Reno's character who's got a stake in the game; he's the one seeking to make amends for what birthed this creature. It does feel very American of the film to offload its angst over nuclear testing onto another country, but I can't argue when Reno's got the best acting chops for it. Dude steals the show!

Godzilla does not have the sheer awe or presence it has in the traditional films, or even any of the dinos in Jurassic Park, but I do appreciate how it's very much an animal. Not unlike the mama t-rex in The Lost World, laying its eggs and protecting them are its only agenda, and the damage it causes is largely accidental on account of its size -- tearing down ships caught in its dorsal fins, stomping through the city, etc.

It's really the military that causes so much destruction, including blowing up the Chrysler Building, nuking Madison Square Garden... it's almost like a parodic follow-up to Independence Day: "how many more landmarks can be wreck?" Seeing the army as such bumbling oafs is so much fun, honestly, and hard to imagine being depicted in a movie of this scale again...!

Besides the somewhat out-of-character attacks on non-hostile ships and submarines at the start, Godzilla otherwise makes no direct efforts to harm what hasn't already attacked it, though when it does it'll absolutely wreck their shit, shredding subs like tissue paper or steering jet missiles back at them. It never acknowledges the humans in any meaningful way, because why should it? They're ants, little more than native fauna it's sharing its nesting zone with. It's only once its eggs are nuked that things get personal, hunting down the heroes with a vicious one-track mind for revenge.

Going back to Jurassic Park again, it is constantly acknowledging that these dinosaurs are real creatures: beautiful, fascinating specimens, but this is not their world any more, and by bringing them back it's endangering the both of us, in a sense. They went extinct for a reason, external forces or not, so what do we do when they're back in the wild again, interacting with an ecosystem that's not prepared for them?

Instead folks are surprisingly blasé about this anomaly, basically staying indoors 'til the military blows it up, and giving it very little thought. It's only when news of Godzilla's hatchlings are brought to light and the risk of the entire country being overrun in them that folks react with any sensible degree of fear. It's not a threat until it threatens the American way of life!

My pal was upset with the depiction and treatment of Godzilla -- it carries no air of deity-like nobility or awe-inspiring might, it's just a big animal, one that goes down after a couple of missile volleys. It serves not a reflection of humanity's hubris and blunders, nor a reminder of how for all our advancements, mankind are still mere ants in the wake of nature's unimaginable power -- it's a nuisance, so we blow it up. It's not even an amazing take-down, it's just, oh, this is the missile that finally did it in...!

It very much takes the "god" out of Godzilla, and is probably apt commentary on the very different ideas of "monster movies" between America and Japan. Only at the last minute do they acknowledge the humanity in the beast; it's tragic that you couldn't have your needs met without incurring the wrath of humanity, but by that point you're dead so sucks to be you. The same mentality from The Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, basically.

Reading the behind-the-scenes on Wikipedia, there's a lot of remarks on how the film was rushed into production with a tight deadline, and as such they never truly committed to a vision, whether it was heroic or malicious... and it being a big monstrous animal was about all they settled on. Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing, I just feel it misses out on addressing some themes that could've taken advantage of that.

By default Godzilla is a force of nature beyond our comprehension, and all humans can do is watch in awe at whatever he plans to do, be it heroic or villainous by our standards. The characters can try and pin an agenda on him, but he's a monster -- how can we get inside his head, and could we ever truly understand his line of thinking?

So this film making Godzilla far more bestial and immediately recognisable in its motive -- a mother looking for a nest -- changes the dynamic quite a bit. The characters don't put two-and-two together until Godzilla's temporarily out of the picture, of course, but it feels like an angle that could've been spun into a more interesting dynamic between man and monster.

Why does Godzilla move from the ocean to New York? You could make it so a bigger monster chased it out of its former nesting site, and this other adversary has a lot less scruples about razing New York when it follows after, forcing the military to back Godzilla's corner as it fights for its turf. Like I said, Godzilla seemingly bears no ill will towards the humans except when they're trying to kill it, so why not build upon that?

I realise this is just repeating the kind of world-building the Monsterverse movies ran with, except they went so hard on the sci-fi/monster angle that humanity might as well be a footnote in the actual storytelling. I feel like the 1998 movie is so human-centric, it lends itself well to that swerve in the status quo: we get a pretty picture of New York and its denizens, so how will life change for them now that they're sharing the Big Apple with an 18-storey savage protector? It's only looking for a home, after all...! (I assume this is the angle the animated series ran with, which I've never seen and kind of got lost in the shuffle of the Kong, Evolution, and Men in Black cartoons of the era)

It's hard to disagree with Roger Ebert's review of the film, remarking that there's no terror, no awe, no majesty to the monster or proceedings... and yet I can't not enjoy this. It's just a big dumb thrill ride! I consider it an honorary Jurassic Park movie, the perfect roller coaster ride to bridge the gap between the second and third instalments.

It's extremely wonky on a lot of fronts (like the surprising lull in the middle of the film after Godzilla's "death" where it's practically just a house party movie...!), and its PG-rated disaster movie ideology is no doubt going to clash with anyone expecting the originals' tone and style, but I feel that only adds to its charms. It's hard to take it seriously when the cast are so bumbling and cornball; it really is a movie where you're rooting for the monster. As far as "franchise blemishes" go, it's up there with the Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros. movies in my book -- not a thing like the source material, but a guaranteed good time when you've no expectations beyond a lot of rompy silliness.

Hirameki Action Chibi-ko Wagyan Adventure

Nintendo DS
May 06 ~ 07

Pal Peck Neck suddenly got deeply obsessed with the Wagyan Land series of games, and it wasn't enough to be drawing his own fanart or starting his own documentation projects, he had to drag me kicking and screaming down the rabbit hole as well...!

It's a Japan-only series starring a little dinosaur dragon robot-lookin' critter, billed at first glance as a mascot platformer by a lot of folks, but it shares equal billing with its variety of basic logic puzzles. Some are staples of video game filler like Concentration, while others are steeped in basic Japanese language knowledge like Shiritori, where you must pick a word that begins with the last letter of the previous word... using pictographs. Hope you know your Japanese animal names off by heart!

Wagyan's main ability is his shoutin' voice, projecting onomatopoeia that can stun enemies, and can be charged up to produce bigger and stronger effects. The game has fun with this in the ice world, where his words actually freeze in midair, forming platforms you can jump on, resulting in a fun pattern of shout-jump-repeat. Wagyan's also got an absolutely darling flutter jump, not unlike Yoshi, with the ability to climb up rocky walls and platforms while using it; enemies also serve as platforms while stunned, so stunning them in midair to reach new heights is an essential skill.

The first world is extremely simplistic, and its difficulty curve is very very shallow -- it is a kids game, after all! But there's some fun challenges to be had, and the game's feel as a whole is just extremely charming. Every few worlds there'll be some gimmick that expands upon Wagyan's toolset, like the ability to flutter-swim underwater, if it ever feels like it's run its course.

The mini-games are naturally a big part of the equation, probably taking up half the slots on each overworld. Some of it's very simple to understand: spot-the-difference, concentration, sliding marbles (or ohajiki) to hit the targets. A good portion of them rely on basic knowledge of Japanese, from the aforementioned Shiritori and its variants, a true-or-false quiz, and a game about assembling hiragana to form a correct word.

The games are timed or played against a computer opponent, and later worlds get especially tenacious in how much pressure you're put under -- foreigners are not giving much time to acclimatise before they're kicked to the curb! Savestates are a must, but I'd dare say the game actually serves a fun unintended purpose as a Japanese learning tool. Sure, all you're gonna learn are basic hiragana and animal names, but just by virtue of playing the mini-games so often you'll pick up what the Japanese word for sheep is sooner or later. The word-assembling game is quite smart in that it'll even present a dictionary definition of the words you make! ... all in Japanese, of course, but it's the thought that counts.

They're pleasant enough, especially with friends cheering or jeering me on in Discord, though they do become a bit of a roadblock later on, especially if you're just here for the platforming. For whatever reason, the Janken (rock paper scissors) mini-game absolutely did my head in; you slide panels of each hand onto the deck, the computer opponent also doing the same and constantly reshuffling their hand, and I sincerely had no idea what was going on. Looking at the manual, I assume the idea is to be the first to assemble a deck that counters the opponent's hand, but it was so fast and furious I just couldn't keep up. If I couldn't beat it by brute force and ignorance, I'd take the route that'd let me bypass it if possible.

The mini-games are a part of the Wagyan series' identity, but I can totally understand them being an unwanted hurdle for folks, and there's not even conventional bosses to look forward to -- they're all just mini-game gauntlets. The closest you get is in the penultimate level, where a giant robot gives chase and demolishes the stage behind you, and can only be stunned momentarily. It's a fun change of pace, if admittedly one I would've liked to have seen more of -- with all the gimmickry around Wagyan's shouts, it could've been fun to see the offensive capabilities of that...!

Some of the levels feature multiple routes that hide secret items (that'll eventually unlock more bloody mini-game stages, apparently), often requiring your single-use flight ability to find them, so there's more than just left-to-right malarkey if that's what you're after. When it comes to games with flutter jumps, I had a much better time with this than I did Yoshi's Island DS, so make of that what you will. If you're in the mood for something breezy, this is worth considering!

Superman

May

I was talking with a friend about superhero films, particularly the ones I hadn't seen, and I figured I really oughta check out the granddaddy of them all, shouldn't I? This is one of many films I've caught bits and pieces of on ITV back in the day (and Channel4's dodgy The Curse of Superman documentary), but never the whole thing from beginning to end... and while it is satisfying to finally know what I'm missing out on, there's something to be said for having to piece together from scattered scenes what you expect a film will be like.

The first 50 minutes might as well be a different film from the rest of the movie. It is the origin story, sure, with Marlon Brando warning of Krypton's destruction, Kal-El sent to Earth, raised by the Kents, yadda yadda. Filming started before Star Wars was a thing, but it does evoke that sense of a grandiose sci-fi epic, really taking the time to tell this tale and let you soak in its alien environments.

People rag on A New Hope for its glacial opening, but at least it had robots -- the sequence on Krypton is entirely old farts in bathrobes, aside from a token appearance of Zod and the boyz. It leans heavily on the melancholia of the situation, the doomed resignation Jor-El and his wife face given the council's ignorance, entrusting the very future of their planet's culture in the hands of their infant child, who they'll never see grow up. I'm not at all clued up on Superman media, so I'm not sure whether adaptations delve deep into this stuff, it's just neat to see the film take the time to let it breathe.

It is shocking to see the destruction of Krypton though. Again with the Star Wars comparisons, I'm kind of used to a planet's end being seen from afar, but this really makes you soak in the terror and calamity in the planet's final moments:jagged rocks bursting from the ground, people flying through the air in slow motion, falling into pits, everything cast in a deathly red, screaming and panicking like nobody's business, all before the whole planet fucking explodes. It's grim! It's larger than life, for sure, but boy is it off-putting to see long before we even get to the super-heroics.

After some bizarre leaps in logic like Clark getting infodumped with tapes of his dead dad and creating the Fortress of Solitude, the film really comes to life once we're introduced to the Daily Planet.

Seeing Clark enter the hustle and bustle of Metropolis is stacks of fun after the serious ponderousness of before; the following chunk of movie is just the world discovering Superman and how he makes an impression on the folks, through a silly montage of him foiling car chases and burglaries, to helping a girl recover her doll from a tree.

The characters are what bring it to life, though. Margot Kidder as Lois Lane has such a breathless manic energy that's hard not to be charmed by. It instantly sells the kind of no-nonsense go-getter she is, a delightful contrast to Clark, practically Superman's caricature of humanity: doofy, bumbling, but ultimately well-meaning.

Christopher Reeves does such a wonderful job in the role, honestly. As both characters, he's never not charming and affable, the kind of warm and genial protector you want from Superman. Despite his incredible powers, he never comes across as haughty or above-it-all, and is forever affirming in the ways he interacts with people; it's only when he comes face to face with Lex Luthor that he puts on a strong front, clearly in no mood to mess around with his sick games.

Lex Luthor played by Gene Hackman was a surprise, having only been familiar with the more suave depiction in modern media, but I love the crap out of him. He's a slick, slimy businessman, a real wheeler dealer, a humble but cut-throat criminal out for basic petty goals, contending with what's essentially a god. It's a classic, theatrical kind of villainy we don't see enough of in modern superhero crap!

Even his henchmen, the bumbling dope Otis and flighty (but with hidden depths) Miss Teschmacher, bring a fun dynamic into the mix, an excuse for him to explain his plans and pontificate on his genius, while forever getting frustrated with their tomfoolery. The film leans on them a lot for comic relief, perhaps to the point of padding, but darn it, I like 'em.

It's got a very dream-like quality to it at times. The entire opening, from affairs on Krypton to being found on the side of the road by the Kents, of Clark knowing he's not of this world, is very low-key and melancholy. The scenes after Pa Kent has his heart attack are reminiscent of Luke gazing at the Binary Sunset in Star Wars, that similar sense of pining for more, and feeling your lot in life is about to shift.

Something about the film's leisurely pacing has an almost 'weightless' quality to it, like you're drifting through affairs. Superman's glacial flight is probably a factor towards that, along with the iconic use of narration over it, first Jor-El narrating his voyage to Earth, then Lois voicing her feelings as she flies with him during her interview... when it's not being comedic, there's a certain whimsy and wonder that's hard to articulate or tangibly describe, but is strangely captivating.

It's the sort of film I could imagine a kid getting a bit bored watching, as it is very much drawn-out and ponderous. It could certainly be tightened up somewhat (the five minutes of opening credits are a sign of the times!), but there's something charming about its old-school sensibilities and allowing it to breathe, not in a rush to get anywhere. You can probably skip the first 50 minutes and not miss much, but still...!

Ass-pull ending aside, this was neat to finally see. The sheer ambition on display is charming, and the cast really lend such heart and depth to these comic book characters, enough that they're still considered the most iconic depictions to generations old and new. It's a misshapen movie in a lot of ways, but that alone's gotta be worth something.

Superman II

May

Superman was groundbreaking and all, but what do you do for a sequel? Have more people with superpowers! Delivering on the setup at the start of the last movie, Zod and the boyz are released from the Phantom Zone and out to cause mischief, using their newfound powers to engage in petty antics, building up to a super-on-super showdown with big red himself.

I love the actors for Zod and the gang; it can't have been a dignified role being expected to point at things while a wind machine knocks them over, or be strung up on wires for half the film, but they make a hell of an impression. After getting acquainted with Superman's quiet, humble demeanour, it's fun to see a bunch of bombastic, theatrical louts using their powers to throw their weight around.

Lex's underlings are quickly sidelined so he can play ringleader and crony to the criminal Kryptonians, giving them the information they need on Superman in exchange for a portion of what they conquer. It's an unusual dynamic but such a fun angle, bringing his sleazy salesman schtick to these all-powerful aliens; even without Superman or his rogues' gallery, I could watch a whole movie of just Gene Hackman being a menace.

Despite the galactic stakes, it's a more comedic, breezy film, leaning on silly goings-on or comments from passers-by to lend a light-hearted touch. This arguably breaks the suspension of disbelief at times, with Zod's barrage of wind against Metropolis interspersed with gags about umbrellas or tipped-over phone boxes. I personally enjoyed it, and it seemed an appropriately comic book-y inclusion, though I can see why folks might object to it, especially when Lois' desperation to prove Clark is Superman comes across like the woman has problems.

Lois discovering (or Clark revealing?) the identity of Superman is the secondary plot, a chance for the two to fully express how much they care for one another -- so much so that Clark willingly gives up his powers to be with her. Though it is a striking scene to see him realise just how powerless he is without them, this sacrifice is immediately reversed with so little fuss you wonder why they even did it.

It only really factors into the final scene, where after the day is saved, the two have the chance to truly express what this means for each other. How can I be expected to live with this? Your burden is greater than anyone on Earth can imagine, but I don't even have the strength to carry the burden of knowing your secret without worrying about you.

It's a genuine moment of passion and drama in the film, and that's the real sacrifice -- to love someone so much to open up and reveal this to them, is to know their life may never be the same again. It's easy for Superman to know he can protect his loved ones, but how's Lois to feel when he's in peril beyond her control...?

It's a terrific gut-punch of a scene, one that really brings up the long-term questions of their hooking up and could end the film with you asking questions -- what's in their future together? Instead Clark literally kisses her stupid and she forgets the whole thing. That's it. Problem solved!

I mean, I get it, it's a light-hearted film that has no reason to end on angst like this, but to set up an angle like this and run it back not just so casually, but in such a chauvinistic way, left me real sour after what's otherwise a pleasant watch. And the fact Superman Returns does nothing to reverse it either...!

I'd listened to Laser Time's Eighties In Depth episode before watching this, accidentally thinking it was for the first film, so ahead of time I was educated on the ins and outs of its production, re-filming a good three-quarters of the footage under a new director and all that. Hearing the actors weren't happy with Richard Donner's replacement explains a lot, especially the weedy voice Reeves gives Clark that appears in no other film.

The human aspect is a bit lacking in the film, and I don't know whether to blame that on the overt campiness, the Lois and Clark angle feeling so flat compared to the bombast of the baddies, or just the friction between the actors and director.

Still, I'm glad to have watched it, and I can see why these first two films made such a splash in their day. They're a little shaky, but through sheer heart and ambition, they do a terrific job of bringing these comic book sensibilities to life, and with such heart and humanity. It doesn't need to be too grandiose, so long as I give a hoot about the people involved, and the fact these depictions have made such impressions decades later stands to show that it hit the mark!

Superman III

May

I didn't even sit down to watch this one, I just stuck it on while doing laundry. That kind of says it all, doesn't it?

Diminishing returns: the motion picture. The second film give us a three-on-one superpowered showdown, so where do we go from there? Another rich guy wants to exploit resources to get rich. It's a repeat! Only with lots of ridiculous computers-can-do-anything nonsense, and side-lining what little returning cast we have by sending Clark back to Smallville for the whole film.

Superman ends up feeling like a side-character in his own movie. Away from Metropolis and his friends, he's foisted into a relationship with old flame Lana Lang, ostensibly to tread new ground after exhausting Lois' angle -- and to its credit, reliable ol' Clark and freakin' Superman stepping into the life of this put-upon single mother dealing with a crappy boyfriend is a fresh angle... albeit one that nearly put me to sleep. It feels out of place with the rest of the film, and is carried entirely by Christopher Reeve's subdued performance. The other actors just aren't a patch on the likes of Margot Kidder, bless them.

Admittedly all of these films are a countdown to when I mentally check out, and this one hit that mark extremely early on, once I realised this wasn't going to be a story I'm interested in or what I want out of Superman. While the second film was slow, I could see it being more immediately appealing to kids because of the super-on-super fights and how larger-than-life it is.

This one clearly wants to ramp up the comedy and silliness, but just doesn't seem to know what line to ride...? Its slapstick is cute but a bridge too far, and as much as I came to love Richard Pryor last year after finally seeing his stand-up, I've yet to find a film that made the best of his talents. His schtick comes across like padding, in a film that's almost entirely padding.

While they're all comic book films, the last two had a healthy dose of heart and humanity to keep them tethered to reality. This one has Superman poisoned by phony tar-based kryptonite that turns him... not overtly evil, just a bit of a jerk. Chasing skirts instead of stopping crime, straightening the leaning tower of Pisa, like something out of an anti-smoking PSA for kids. Reeves admittedly does a remarkable job portraying this skew-whiff Supes, the way he carries himself truly conveying that something's not right.

It culminates in Superman's "bad side" separating and the two fighting in a junkyard, a sequence that does carry weight in how flippin' hard these two wail into each other. I'll give the series credit, they really take an idea and ride it as far as they can, wringing every ounce of drama out of a setpiece before moving on... but there comes a time when I'm like, we get the picture. I applaud the physicality of this battle of wills, this literal battle of good versus evil, we don't need 15 minutes of them putting each other in car compactors.

That, and it's not even the real plot, per se, which is some nonsense about them building a supercomputer that can... do anything, basically. When the best villain the movie can throw at Superman is himself, then clearly something's not adding up. The Lex stand-in is weak, but his two female partners have fun chemistry in their mutual loathing for one another.

Though poorly written and treated as he is, I found Pryor's character charming. Him having to stop the supercomputer in the finale struck a chord with me for some reason. He might not have personally built it, but he designed this thing and refers to it as his baby, his perfect dream machine -- and to realise it's functionally alive while it's in the process of actually killing Superman... I don't know, that just did something for me.

There's an angle in there, of creating something for indulgent intentions and to discover you've imbued it with more autonomy than you could ever have dreamed of, to marvel at what it's capable of, but knowing there's no saving it from a path of destruction. The movie treats technology like magic, though, so this isn't the outlet for it.

It's a film that feels like it knows it's an 'instalment' film; the retread of the Luthor ensemble with none of the old faces, the Daily Planet capper set up at the start, it's a setup that feels no different from an episodic TV show. It's not aspiring to break new ground or set the world on fire, it's just delivering more of the same and hoping that's what people want.

I got some entertainment out of it, but this nearly convinced me to drop the series; knowing Gene Hackman returns for number four is what brought me back. It's the perfect "background noise" movie, something to half pay attention to when you're working around the house, but it's just too unfocused with its cast floundering around to want to be tuned in for.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace

May

Laser Time's Eighties In Depth episode about Superman III said it's the worst of the series, not even a "good" bad movie you can enjoy snarking over with friends... and it's remarks like that that tipped me over into giving this one a bash. If I survived the worst, how bad can this be?

Lex Luthor is back, and I barely need to say more. Gene Hackman is such a delight to watch, even if he's accompanied by a doofy nephew and embroiled in a nuclear weapons scheme, including the creation of Nuclear Man to fight Superman. I don't care what the plot is, so long as this man gets to ham it up for at least 30% of the running time.

Speaking of, boy, is this film breezy! After the previous films all pushing the two hour mark, this one is over and out in 90 minutes, and for that reason alone it makes a surprisingly pleasant watch. It goes to show how the first two films were made to be epic and grandiose, their pacing designed to let us breathe in their world and soak in the majesty, so to speak. Superman III kept that pompousness, but without the content to back it up. This film figures it know what you're here for, and plays out like it's on fast-forward.

This does make it easier to idly watch without feeling it's eating up your afternoon, though it does feel like it's missing something. The Daily Planet is bought out by a scummy businessman, and their headlines are now calling out Superman for his response, or lack of response, to the nuclear summit. Will this lead to a vitriolic reception to Earth's defender, and him needing to defend himself from slander? No, not really, it doesn't amount to anything.

Lex describes Nuclear Man as his son who should listen to his father, but Nuclear Man claims he's the one calling the shots. Could there be a power struggle, a Sonic and Eggman scenario where Lex needs to call upon Supes to stop his rogue creation from usurping power? Nah, Nuclear Man powers off when he's not in sunlight, so whatever dynamic they could've had is instantly ixnayed the moment Lex draws the curtains.

One particular scene has Clark distressed and pensive about the nuclear summit, and Lois asks if he wants to talk it over... and he jumps off the balcony with her. He reveals his secret to her all over again, in a low-budget recreation of their flight together from the first movie... and she remembers! She never forgot, and had been thinking about him all this time!

It's a chance for the two to have a heart-to-heart, to discuss the weight of the world on Superman's shoulders, and how much they mean to each other. They mean the world to each other; Superman gives Lois strength, and Lois makes Superman laugh. He drops her as a joke, but it's otherwise such a refreshing chance to be candid and open with one another... right up until he kisses Lois to make her forget, and it's never brought up again.

A theme throughout this series is how Superman comes across like the 'real' person, and Clark is his facade, his pastiche of humanity. Clark's a goober, he's a doofus, possibly him projecting how simple we folk are compared to Kryptonians, but his actions show he truly cares for the people of Earth. This scene just paints it in a bad light though.

Loving couples can tease each other, sure, but to drop her screaming in the air, using her as an emotional outlet before erasing the exchange from her memory, and remarking "you make me laugh"... the takeaway is Lois is treated like a plaything. I can fuck around with you as I please, because I'm all-powerful, and what can you do about it? I might just be salty it acknowledged that angle I was so entranced by in Superman II, only to squander it so casually yet again. Pour salt in the wound why don't ya...!

That said, there's a couple of sweet, understated scenes with a good emotional core. The scene of Clark in Smallville selling his family's farm is very short and simple, but a nice touch of melancholia, that where he called home is no longer his, but there's still a big world out there to savour.

Superman is poisoned by Nuclear Man and thought dead, and Lois visits Clark to tell him what they know, Clark having to pretend to simply have the flu. He's poorly and withdrawn, huddled in his dark apartment, but trying to put on a brave face for the woman he cares for as the two reminisce on how much Superman means to them.

The throwdowns in this film are so cartoonish and over-the-top it's admittedly jarring to have scenes like this to segue between them, but for such a quiet, subdued little scene, it's the moment that sticks with me the most.

This one's definitely a kids movie; it's a lot more upfront about what it's aiming for, with pratfalls and yuks and multiple super-on-super fights. The fighting gets pretty brutal at times -- I take for granted how Zod's crew were mostly fought with superpowers, their lasers and ice breath and whatnot, but with Nuclear Man those two are kneeing each other in the face and god knows what else. It's hardly graphic, it's just a surprise is all!

By virtue of being so dang breezy, it's hard to be too upset with this one. It's got the cast you want to see. It might not be the plot you want to see, but you're not stuck with it for too long, and there's some silly fun to be had. It takes a film like this to put into perspective what a dud the last one was, so I'll give it that much credit.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

May 25 ~ May 18 2024

If you ever wondered what bodybuilders, professional wrestlers and former American Gladiators do as a side-hustle -- fighting Superman, apparently!
(i'm getting ahead of myself but Vixen deserved better, what a waste of a character)

The real reason I was watching all this Superman stuff -- as build-up to what I really wanted to watch! This seemed to be a constant of afternoon broadcasting on ITV during the late '90s/early '00s, and was the closest thing I could tolerate as an impatient youngster. None of the other shows promised a glimpse of tacky costumed theatrics if you stuck with them long enough!

Although starring a superpowered being from another world (though that's a fact he doesn't discover until partway through the first season, spoilers), it's very much a procedural: Lois and Clark stumble upon a scoop and have to dig up the facts via the ol' fashioned journalistic way -- or with a bit of covert superpower usage to see or hear things Clark's not meant to be privy to. It's a lot of fun, perhaps my window into the staple tropes of cop and detective shows, just with a bit of larger-than-life levity to keep things exotic.

Where the Clark Kent under Christopher Reeves' tenure was very much a persona, this flips it around and presents Clark Kent as the person he truly is. Having lived his whole life hiding his powers to all but his parents, pinning a separate identity to his heroics is a new frontier for him and something he has to come to terms with, especially the celebrity and notoriety it brings him. Dean Cain plays the role well, capturing the man's humble airs but infusing him with a rightful degree of charm and chutzpah.

Lois Lane is arguably the real star of the show; gutsy, spunky, take-no-guff, and putting her whole ass into these journalistic endeavours, played to perfection by Teri Hatcher. The series obviously rides a lot on the viewers' investment in their relationship, and the two have great chemistry from the get-go, from contentious co-workers to well and truly loving one another.

Ma and Pa Kent do so much heavy lifting in infusing the series with heart, and are probably what keeps its feet on the ground when it verges into silly town

The first season feels like it does a grander job of establishing the world around our heroes -- not only are there more supporting characters to shine a unique light on them to bring out their different sides, but even its setting feels that bit more fantastical. The opening two-parter establishes a diverse governing body (either for the USA as a whole or for its NASA stand-in, I forget), and a televised rocket launch ferrying personnel to a space station; it all gives the impression everything's a little more sci-fi than the real world. It quickly dials down on this and leaves the larger-than-life stuff to the realm of quacks and extraterrestrials, mind, but it's cute while it lasts.

Lex Luthor is as much a main character as the star reporters -- he's only the instigator for most of the dastardly deeds, natch, so it frequently cuts to him and his men scheming and calculating, or simply laughing off their losses and looking forward to the challenges tomorrow brings.

John Shea plays him beautifully, such a suave snake of a man, whose monologues are often among the most memorable scenes in each episode, but even the dynamic he brings to the Daily Planet is so compelling; an affable captain of industry who's on good terms with everyone there, but only Clark has seen both sides of him and has to keep his resentment in check.

For lack of a better word, the first season feels like it leans on gender politics and workplace dynamics that bit more. Characters are very invested in each others' sex lives and attractiveness, to the point where even the guy who sells Clark his apartment idly asks if he's gay. This is perhaps most encapsulated by co-worker Kat, who's very much the opposite of Lois in a lot of ways -- the gossip column writer who cares not for journalistic cred or personal integrity, but dishing dirt and looking good while doing it.

She's largely there to make come-ons to Clark, to show that Lois does fancy him when he's the subject of other people's affections, as well as to act as a slutty contrast to Lois' more upmarket sensibilities. She's never the focus of an episode and is largely a bit player, but she's a fun character to have around and serves as a bit of levity around the office, even if she mostly gets saddled with comic relief skits with Jimmy Olsen.

There's a decent sense of heart and community to the first season; many of the instigating incidents are one of Lois' old buddies offering a lead and coming a cropper for it, and she feels it's her duty to avenge them... through journalism! A good chunk of episodes are given simply to how people see Superman, whether it's how much he means to them, or Luthor and his boys trying to deduce the breadth of his powers. There's a lot of roles given to old character actors like Leslie Jordan and Larry Linville, a few celebrity spots like Bo Jackson and Penn Jillette, as well as a few kid-focused storylines to keep younger viewers engaged.

One of the arcs involves teenage runaway Jack being given a job at the Daily Planet thanks to Clark; he wants the kid to have a better life, but Jack is decidedly stand-off-ish. He's a more 'modern' teenager than Jimmy Olsen ever was, aloof and contrarian and talking back to authority, and Clark clearly struggles seeing the kid hate him despite everything he does for him. He finally admits his respect for him during a hostage crisis (a Die Hard homage that's perhaps one of the best episodes overall), and he lends a fun bit of street smarts and outside thinking to the gang's problem solving.

It's a reminder of just how varied '90s TV shows could be on a whim. Episodes obviously have different tones, some more kid-friendly, some tackling the tribulations of adult relationships, while some are more an excuse to cut loose and do something off-beat.

This season has a striking episode where Lex produces a clone of Superman and treats it like his child to instil obedience in it, but speaking with the real deal results in a crisis of conscience, and Clark acknowledging this is the closest he's ever come to having a brother, warts and all. It takes some going before it gets to the good stuff, but I'm a sucker for that kind of melancholia.

The aforementioned Die Hard homage isn't just a chance for Clark to try and solve problems in close-quarters without the freedom to duck away and come back as Supes, but also for the actors to play very different roles in noir-flavoured flashbacks. If there's an opportunity for the actors to play different characters, different versions of themselves, or just go undercover, you know the show will pounce on it every time, to increasingly ludicrous extents. I ain't gonna argue with another showcase of Teri Hatcher's singing.

TONY JAY MY BELOVED
The first season runs through a few aides for Lex (including Asabi, a stoic self defence instructor who is repurposed in later seasons as an Indian spiritualist who assists people in transferring bodies, if you want an idea of how wackadoo things change), but it settles on Nigel. A canny old British gent whose worldly experience serves as fun contrast to Lex's bombastic ambitions, but the two are seemingly inseparable, a good pair for concocting criminal business together.

His appearances in season 2 are perhaps the most exciting, where his history as a former secret agent is brought to light as he acts on Lex's belated behalf, working with (and double-crossing) less worldly criminal partners to get his way. He gets bumped off slightly unceremoniously, but it's always a delight seeing Tony Jay's performances, and it's not often he gets a slightly more hands-on role like this.

Although they're not directly butting heads every episode, the first season is defined by its dynamic between Lois, Clark, and Lex. He's a ruthless businessman seeking to assert power through cut-throat dominance, but only behind closed doors -- he's a man who nobody can bring themselves to hate when they meet him in person, making the simmering distaste between him and Clark all the more entertaining. Having a recurring villain who's also chummy with the regular cast is just such a fun angle to play with!

The first season ends in an explosive storyline where Lex threatens the Daily Planet in a bid to make Lois his bride... culminating in him face-planting the pavement from a couple dozen storeys up. It's, uh, a very outrageous conclusion, and an appropriately comic book-y or tabloid-esque way of bringing it to a close, with no shortage of cockamamie follow-ups to threads left dangling. It's just a bit of an odd vibe to linger on after a strong first season!

From season 2 onwards it feels like the show makes greater efforts to be more lighthearted (verging on camp) with more visible comic-y traits; more scenes of Supes in his togs, more fantastical threats, that sort of thing. Superman showed up for less than two minutes in some episodes, often rolled up as a last-minute fix-it after a whole episode of sleuthing, so I can see why they gave the folks what they want...!

It also takes on a more villain-of-the-week approach, without Lex as a constant instigator, resulting in an influx of guest stars and surprise character actors -- Harold Gould as the father of the Prankster! Sherman Hemsley of The Jeffersons as a nefarious toymaker! Bruce Campbell as the coup-conspiring son of a criminal emperor! They know what they signed up for and give suitably hammy performances, with many villains presented as a duo of abusive smartass and bumbling ignoramus, really channelling the sensibilities of a living cartoon.

More than just Lex's absence, the cast sees more adjustments going forward: Kat and Jack are gone without so much as being written out, and Jimmy is recast to be more youthful and less spunky, presenting him like the innocent younger brother of the crew. Lois' parents now make recurring appearances, presented far more ridiculous and eccentric than their solitary depictions in the first season, and offer a fun bit of family friction and amusing contrast between themselves and the Kents.

However, it does feel like the guest villains drive the show more than anything. Without Kat, Jack, or a Jimmy with attitude, there's a lot less life around the office; Lois and Clark are the stars, and everyone else is well and truly shoved in the "side character" department, to the point where Perry and Jimmy even make self-aware remarks in one episode about being bit players in a soap opera. Ma and Pa Kent stick around as commentary and supportive shoulders to lean on for their relationship woes, but there's not the same 'richness' to the world as that first season.

I don't want my gurning about the post-season 1 storytelling to come across like it's an inferior show -- just one playing to different strengths, one of which is being extremely "Silver Age". It's got the '90s sensibilities of soapy relationship stuff that people tune in for, but also some truly wackadoo plots with real boneheaded resolutions. A story about Bonnie and Clyde being brought back to life throws you a curveball like Clark Kent being gunned down in front of Lois, and him and his parents having to figure out how to rectify this, all the while petty 1930s gangsters are running around going "nyeh".

It's perhaps emblematic of how perception of comic book media has changed over the decades, but I kept expecting more continuity arcs for whatever reason. Season 2 opens with Lex Luthor's ex-wife keeping his body on ice and landing a gig as a workplace psychiatrist at the Daily Planet, leading me to think, oh, is she going to be the new recurring nemesis? Nope, she's busted by the episode's end. In lieu of a singular villain, the threat of Intergang is what lurks behind most plots, though even it doesn't amount to much and effectively peters out after the third season.

If you have to watch any episode of the show, make it one with Tempus and Wells. They're quick to explain whatever past grievances Tempus is following up on so continuity should be no obstacle, and the two as individuals have delightful chemistry with each other and the heroes. It's like daddy's little rich boy wanting to become a bully and choosing the biggest wet blanket to pick on, and still getting his just deserts everytime.

Fans looking to recognise stuff from the comics might be left wanting too: Metallo's appearance is perhaps as close as it gets (and one of the few episodes I recall watching back in the day, because it's hard not to remember Superman melting a bastards's legs off on afternoon television), but is painted more like a turbo-charged greaser than a man with nuance. A superpowered "Deathstroke" shows up late in the series, but is called that for his literal power to inflict strokes to off his targets. There are characters who could be interpreted as analogues for Brainiac and others, but you gotta expect a '90s sci-fi show to just have fun with its silliness rather than adhere to canon.

Speaking of, the most fantastical episodes tend to feature freakin' H.G. Wells and his time machine, recruiting Lois and Clark to help solve issues in the past or future -- often the doing of Tempus, a no-goodnik from the utopian future that Superman ushers in, who longs for the reckless crime-ridden days of yore. Both actors have an absolute ball in their roles, Lane Davies especially yukking it up as this pompous, self-important schemer revelling in petty deeds and goading ol' Wells the whole time.

Although largely an excuse for fun set dressing and roleplay from the other actors, they still manage to work in some great characterisation and growth from our stars, learning bits about themselves and each other that strengthen their relationship.

It's a rocky road, with the second season in particular still showing some growing pains, like the slightly contrived love triangles introduced one after the other midway through (one of which is simply resolved by blowing up the third party with a car bomb). Nothing quite recaptures the vibe of season 1, but if you can live with the change of pace, there's good fun to be had.

It's nice to watch a superhero show that's not high on its own self-importance, one that tries to balance the mundane and the ridiculous and make them both equally interesting; a pleasant bit of fluff with endearing characters and fun plots, a procedural with an element of fantasticism to it. I can see folks finding it lacking compared to modern superhero fare, but I think this suits my tastes perfectly; it's the perfect 'laundry show', one to have on while doing the ironing, and it kept me happily occupied for close to a year. As of this editing (near the end of 2024!) I've still yet to find a show to fill that gap...!

Season 3 & 4: I watched these in 2024 so they're arguably not under the jurisdiction of this page, but fuck it, it's taken me this long to edit the damn write-up, have an addendum!

Season 2 ends with Clark proposing to Lois... and come season 3 she accepts, having finally sussed out that he's been Superman this whole time. It's not without its ups and downs, like a period where Lois just needs to vent her frustrations at all the times Clark flaked out on her, and how being privy to all of Superman's responsibilities is still vexing when all she wants is someone to speak to.

There's a couple of episodes dealing with Supes swapping powers with a normie, and in this season it's Lois, forcing her to pick up the slack and take on not just his world-saving duties, but even his charity work like umpiring a kids' baseball game... and as larger-than-life as it is, it's also a really poignant exploration into their dynamic as a couple.

Lois is now fully aware of the burden Clark carries every day, knowing for all his strength, there's still things he can't fix... and for Clark, to feel what it's like to serve as the supportive shoulder for someone with powers far greater than their own, knowing you can't fight their battles for them.

Though when it comes to memorable episodes... there's one about a trio of Nazis being awoken in the modern day and infiltrating the media to usher in a new Nazi regime with help from a corrupt senator, complete with stormtroopers, re-education centres, and taking over the Daily Planet to print their propaganda. It's very larger-than-life, of course, but also distressingly prescient to the political climate in the past decade; the way the people of Metropolis are won over by their talking points before they go mask-off feels extremely "make America great again".

Even the fact one of the early supporters is Jimmy's friend in the classified departments, a scruffy teen with a lot of big ideas, who's later leading the charge against the Planet and trying to make himself look big, despite everyone dogging on him for being a poo-poo pants nerd with dogshit opinions. Superman lifts him by his lapels and makes him watch a Nazi flag burn with his heat vision. It's very satisfying!

It's all very bombastic, but it ends on a very real and poignant note as Perry ruminates on the whole thing. Just like Jimmy's friend, the senator was a personal friend of his, and it wounds them both to know people they thought near and dear could hold such violence and hatred in their hearts.

It's a reminder that especially as journalists, they can't rest on their laurels of America forever being the land of the free, and they must be vigilant against threats to peace like this. It's carrying on the tradition of classic Superman tales fighting against Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and at the time was probably seen simply as an idle reminder, but with the way politics have gone in recent years, bloody hell. Bit of a gut punch, innit!

(another strangely prescient episode featured a manchild computer dork with a virtual reality realm he traps Lois and Clark inside, an excuse for dopey computer realm shenanigans with Jimmy Olsen as the resident tech wiz finding shortcuts and exploits... but I was distracted how Jaxon Xavier's behaviour, daddy issues, and obsession with the letter "X" really screamed Elon Musk to me. I might just be seeing things though. internet poisoning!)

the series gets so much mileage joking about Clark's paper-thin disguise, you better believe they make the most of it when they're parodying Robin Hood and the Lone Ranger

I feel like season 3 is partly defined by stories about Clark or Lois not acting like themselves -- Lois is whisked to a parallel dimension where a henpecked Clark never became Superman, and she has to coach him into being the hero he's capable of to prevent Tempus from taking power. It's upsetting seeing Clark such a listless drip, and it expands upon the aforementioned dynamic of knowing each others' strengths. He's never as confident as the Clark we know, but to see how their different lives shape who they grew up to be is a fascinating character study, and Lois' commitment to bringing out the best in him is so good.

On the flip-side, Lex Luthor returns for a three-parter involving a clone of Lois Lane, and also Lois forgetting who she is after getting bonked on the head, believing herself to be the femme fatale in the novel she was secretly writing. It's, uh, mostly another excuse for Teri Hatcher to ham it up with various personas, including her dippy flighty clone who she later learns to become friends with, but seeing Clark and Lex temporarily partner up to find her is very entertaining; for everything they hate about each other, they both truly love Lois Lane and want only the best for her. Lex gets shot and buried under rubble by the end, so he's really, really dead! For reals this time!

sorting through my audio notes for this write-up was an ordeal because most of my time was spent exasperatedly recapping the batshit plots, some of which had no relevance to the core themes I wanted to discuss... but this one though

so this rich boy enters the scene and buys the Daily Planet, doing his best to present himself as a good guy, but is aided in the shadows by this mysterious scarred Phantom of the Opera lookin' mfer, following advice left on an encrypted audio tape by Lex Luthor... and it turns out rich boy is Lex Luthor's son!

Actually, scratch that! Turns out rich boy was just an actor, and the theatrical dork is really the son! Except there's very little proof behind it anyway! And in between all their extremely hammy conspiring they're enlisting extremely over-the-top threats to fight Supes, including the aforementioned inexplicably-mechanical Vixen and also a dude who's literally a shadow, who gets killed by turning the lights on, whodathunk

it's only after the fact you realise how much of this has no bearing on anything or goes practically unexplained, a bit of a recurring theme in these late seasons, but it's an entertaining wild ride, innit?

The end of season 3 and start of season 4 deal with the existence of New Krypton, and Clark (or Kal-El) summoned to return and resolve its political turmoil as the rightful heir to the throne. Lois and Clark still haven't gotten married yet, and now they have to tackle where Clark's allegiances lie -- to Earth or his people, to Lois or his Kryptonian wife, how he wants to lead his life versus how this royal bloodline malarkey dictates it...! The series has gotten plenty fantastical by this point, but seeing it approach these questions of relationship and responsibility with a new space-age angle is very entertaining.

A tangent: One thing that's notable is that once the cat's out of the bag between Lois and Clark, the series gets a bit more cavalier about death. Should the villain find out who Superman's identity is, you can expect them to come a cropper by the end in a way that's either an accident or out of Clark's hands -- oh no, the freeze ray they're firing at Superman is bouncing off his chest and right back at them! And they've toppled and shattered before anyone can do anything...!

Anyway, his political rival Lord Nor sends an alien assassin to snuff out Clark, who can copy anyone based on touch, resulting in some japes where he masquerades as Lois or his parents to move in for the kill... but he's totally unequipped to harm Superman, and the whole thing comes across like a farce.

The assassin taunts a great deal and is said to have a galactic bodycount in the thousands, but aside from knocking Pa Kent unconscious has caused no meaningful harm to anyone, and it's hard not to view him as an incompetent goober. Will Clark demonstrate his compassion and problem solving by breaking the cycle of violence and guide the assassin toward a better life? It's a moot point because the assassin kills himself if he fails his mission anyway. They've got bigger issues to deal with!

"How would leaving endanger them?" "Well, they'd be killed. By me."

Lord Nor is the star of season 4's opening two-parter, played to hammy perfection by Simon Templeman as a petty conqueror who takes hold of Smallville and hopes to expand his empire to the rest of Earth, reclaiming it as the new home of New Krypton. Why stay in their crummy ol' space station if this place offers kickass superpowers? It's a fun romp with perhaps the biggest stakes the series has seen yet, all the characters having to pull their weight to fight back not just against this tyrant, but even the US military to prevent them needlessly escalating things; it's the one and only time the series deals with true Kryptonian adversaries, so it goes whole hog with it!

One of the threads in the final season is Lois and Clark finally starting their life together -- they're officially married, they've bought a house together (after realising the house one of the baddies they busted really suited their needs), and they're discussing having children... until Superman learns from his scientist friend in the season finale that his biology would not be compatible with a human's.

But during the night they awake to find a baby in a crib left in their living room! BWUH??? I, uh, have no investment in this storyline and don't expect them to have done it justice, but as far as cliffhangers go, it's a fairly innocuous one to end on.

It's a fun, silly ride, if a bit all over the place. There's some real cockamamie storylines, and multiple attempts to expand the cast that never really work out -- Lois gets a new neighbour in season 3 who's presented as someone she can finally share girl-talk with that isn't Martha Kent, but she ends up being such a space-case they only use her when they need some faux magic, like figuring out a voodoo priest's weakness. That was a weird episode.

If you're more curative of your TV watching, trying season 1 and then sampling episodes from the following seasons is probably the way to go. Every season has its worth, but once Lois and Clark are engaged there are definitely some episodes that feel a little light on material, filling the running time with montages of them pining for one another or whatever. Still, I'm happy to have finally seen the show in full, and it's the sort of lighthearted watch I could happily take more of.

The Legend of Zelda

Jun 23 ~ Jul 07

I watched this on Discord after some pals streamed their runs of A Link to the Past; I'd seen clips, but I had never actually sat down and watched these, and figured I was overdue!

It, uh, kind of character assassinates the cast, don't it. It's 1989 and they hadn't even got dialogue in their own games yet, so there's nothing really to wreck, but it is odd coming back to this after decades of preconceived notions, similar to how I felt with Street Fighter II V.

Link is an outsider to Hyrule, seemingly a wandering hero who happened to get into the kingdom's good graces, and he certainly does his damnedest to make them regret it, constantly begging to be smooched by Zelda. Plots hinge on him wanting to get kissed, his motivation towards any woman is a desire for snogging, and to make things more embarrassing, he'll jump at the opportunity by exclaiming, "oh boy, smooching time!"

It's charming in its own weird way though. to so overtly have a vain, childish, self-serving brat as the hero is kind of interesting, and several of Ganon's schemes hinge on exploiting that -- preying on his jealousy when Zelda shows attention to someone else, or his vanity by turning him into a frog.

Zelda is typically the more level-headed of the duo, the one actually concerned about the problems at hand, like the castle vanishing or her father being kidnapped, while Link begrudgingly does it in the hopes of getting his way. It's a far cry from the various canonical Links, who may be silent protagonists yet have their own quirky mannerisms, but it shows how giving your player character a voice can make or break how people perceive them...!

ragey0: ..... I just realised this Link speaks like those messages when you pick up an item. "50 rupees! Don't spend it all in one place!"

As 15 minute episodes they're pretty breezy, and admittedly their pacing can be a bit wobbly, but they're charming fantasy guff, big on imagery and setpieces and not having to think too hard. Compared to the cartoony Mario fare, it does a reasonable job animating these more detailed designs and the sometimes ambitious action scenes expected of them.

There's a whole lotta vaulting into the air, back-flipping, bouncing off of trampolines and other aerial malarkey, and it even makes fun use of the various items -- boomerangs, bombs galore, even the magic whistle. Early episodes make a point of the two picking up rubies from enemies they defeat, but I can't tell if they do anything... and a couple of episodes have had them literally pull a deus ex machina out of their ass, "That Sinking Feeling" the worst offender, where Link busts out of his bonds with power bracelets that were fleetingly mentioned just once before.

It utilises a good chunk of the first game's enemies, with funky interpretations of their designs seemingly based on their manual art. They typically get to talk and have some manner of gimmick, even if most of them are just dumb underlings. Gleeok and Gibdo get shining appearances in "Kiss N Tell", the latter masquerading as a damsel while the former pretends to terrorise her, all in a bid to lure Link into a trap. Gleeok's heads argue with each other and speak in actor talk; "improvise, darling," "this wasn't in the script!", stuff like that. Just charming, is all!

ragey0: BUG STEED!?!??
ragey0: a part of me's kinda miffed that the Zelda series settled on horses and not something fantastical like chocobos

Link notably 'zaps' baddies with his weapons, sending them back to the "Evil Jar" in Ganon's lair, who then chastises them and grills them for what they've learnt. Conan the Adventurer did the same thing, "banishing the evil serpent men" with their magical weapons, and it's a cute way of minimizing the violence, yet still keeping these baddies in play. Knowing these cool monsters and enemies get irrevocably killed in every Zelda game is such a bummer, personally...!

Ganon's a kooky villain, and it took me multiple episodes to realise, oh, he teleports because that's what he does in his fight. He's an adequate bumbling baddie, though pales in comparison to other villains like Robotnik, Mother Brain, etc -- he's fine, but could be spicier. His schtick of switching between shrill screaming and a low, gurgling growl is something TMNT's Krang did with more panache, honestly.

Truthfully, its locations and art design are really, really nice. The NES Zelda really required some imagination, its dungeons all being samey-looking rooms, but the cartoon excels in interpreting them: Great stone maws and caverns rising from the ground leading to the underworld, the 'dungeons' a wild variety of locales, from fiery caverns to MC Escher-esque spires and walkways, or a tunnel held up by the bones of a great creature.

It presents a sense of scale and awe that the games couldn't define in literal terms, and it's just neat seeing them go hog with it. Heck, to even establish Hyrule as an actual kingdom with, like, things in it, is a turn-up for the books. Like I said, those NES games really required an imagination!

ragey0: Link being so aggressively desperate for attention is a fun angle to give a protagonist
herrDoktorat: Over the eps Zelda seems to be getting more and more receptive to kissing him haha

If I may be self-indulgent, watching it did make me tempted to cover it for Random Action Hour, but mostly as an excuse to screenshot as much reference material as possible. The need for recapping old cartoons with snippy comments is kind of redundant on this modern internet, but with the death of forums, it's harder to find good in-depth discussion about this old stuff.

To talk about the making of something, or to analyse its themes and direction, is what I'm more interested in nowadays; I don't know how much of that came across when I waffled about Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm, but acknowledging its odd standing among its fellow tie-in media, or uncovering its story bible online, was a lot of fun to me. Polygon's oral history of the cartoon is a particular treat, especially hearing of a young Bob Forward (Beast Wars writer and modern day ball shocker) conscripting his teenage sister and even his mother into writing episodes just to meet deadlines...! Their episodes are among the most evocative, honestly, sensing the thrill of bringing fantasy to life in animation.

It's a light, breezy watch that isn't going to set the world on fire, but it's pleasant enough and all the more charming for seeing an animated adaptation this early in the franchise's life, and having to work with so little. Pal herrDoktorat wondered how it would fare nowadays with all the newer established characters...

... but I feel like these old cartoons get a pass because there was so little to work with. The Sonic cartoons past the mid-90s have gotten invariably dunked upon because there's mountains of material to work with, and instead they go "what if we put Sonic on earth, or in alternate dimensions, or gave him siblings," anything but engage with what's at their disposal...!

ragey0: oh no this gleeok is boyfriend material

But it was neat to finally see what all the fuss is about; it's long been an easy punching bag for Zelda fans, dismissed off-hand as the worst thing ever that nobody bothers to discuss, but I think it's cute. Link was admittedly hard to stomach on my first watch, horny cuss that he is, but he slowly grew on me. Zelda and Link make a fun adventuring duo, especially with the implied dynamic (or maybe that's just my headcanon) of Link lackadaisically fighting Ganon because if he were truly defeated he wouldn't get to share company with the princess.

"That Sinking Feeling" and "Underworld Connections" are good Link 'n' Zelda romps, "Kiss N Tell" is dear to my heart for its fun monster representation (and Link being made miserable the whole episode), and "Fairies in the Spring" and "The Moblins Are Revolting" are just dumb, fun episodes, really pushing the silliness to new heights.

While the pacing is a bit dodgy at times, they do a good job filling their running time; it's hard to go back to old cartoons -- even stuff I loved like Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog -- and watch them sputter and flounder in filling 22 minutes...! There's surely better fantasy-adventure stuff out there, but 15 minutes won't kill you.

Dragon's Lair

Nintendo Wii
Jul 07

Dragon's Lair is a game I've been kind of fascinated by for decades despite having no first-hand experience with it -- I've surely said before how arcades are kind of non-existent in Northern Ireland, outside of Belfast Airport of all bloody places, and the closest I've come to full-motion video in an arcade cabinet is vague memories of something akin to the "Kiddierama" cartoon booths; I can hardly imagine they were shelling out for interactive Laserdisc games in a place like that.

There's not much to it! Dirk the Daring enters the castle and is subjected to various lavishly animated setpieces, from duelling knights and snakes or surviving crumbling walkways, and it's your job to press a cardinal direction or the action button when you think it's the right thing to do. If you did it right then the scene keeps playing and you gotta survive another dozen inputs, probably. If you didn't, Dirk eats shit and you have to redo the scene from the beginning -- or if you're playing by classic arcade rules, whisked to a totally different scene and have to react to a whole new situation!

It's very much a game that relies on pure novelty -- I mean, what mechanics are there? It's purely about memorisation and quick reactions, there's no variable factor. It came out before my time, but I can barely imagine what it must have been like for this to be neighbours with the likes of Pac-Man or Tempest... yet at the same time, it almost comes across like a parody of video games. No wits, no skill, no sense -- just react! And you can't even try to learn from your mistakes, because you've respawned in a totally random room now, think fast, asshole! If there's a reason people associate video games with attention deficit disorder...!

It's barely a game, and possibly not even a good game -- if I may commit retro gaming sacrilege, I'd argue that WarioWare is a better representation of twitch-reaction gameplay, with less disparity between its animation and the player's input. Dragon's Lair is very much a game made to be enjoyed by spectators moreso than the player -- I'm too busy focusing on the prompts to enjoy any of this lovely animation...! And yet learning the original arcade cabinet had the screen recessed behind its controls feels like an attempt to dissuade people watching from the sidelines -- if you want to see this action, you gotta play it for yourself!

That said, boy howdy, is that animation worth seeing. There's plenty of games inspired by cartoon sensibilities, be it in gameplay or simply presentation, from Battletoads to Earthworm Jim to B.O.B., with varying degrees of success. By virtue of animation loops being seen over and over again, or madcap cartoon logic kind of going against game design where you learn and understand the tricks of the trade, for a game to truly capture the vibe of a cartoon is an uphill battle... and yet Dragon's Lair makes a resounding splash by kind of eschewing the whole 'game' part of the equation.

The animation is just so mesmerising. The titular lair itself is practically a character itself, just chucking you in all kinds of locations: the cavernous swamp, the rapids, even just the sudden electrical zaps of magic that turn the environment on its head, summoning monsters or breaking the world apart... and the random nature of where you respawn makes it akin to the domain of Castlevania, a creature of chaos that changes on its own and conforms to no laws of building code. Gameplay-wise, it's purely to keep you on your toes and screw you over for not expecting the unexpected, but it lends such imagination and character to the world.

Don Bluth's animation truly is a sight to behold, and the life it imbues in every one of its denizens (or, hell, even effects like the magic, water, crumbling stone...!) makes even the briefest of adversaries that more charming. It's hard not to like the critters out for Dirk's head when they're all so charming, and even his repeated deaths are entertaining on account of how fast-paced the action is (even if some of the sequences are more drawn-out than others, making completing them an ordeal). I'm a softie when it comes to video game death, but Dirk's penchant for comically or gruesomely dying is 90% of his charm...!

I played this game on the Wii collection using the randomised arcade ruleset, with quality-of-life features like direction prompts and whatnot. Admittedly playing the game that way even takes the problem-solving out of the equation, it's purely a test of reflexes, but bloody hell, that's enough on its own.

I finally played the game on account of the Retro Pals' terrific showcase of not just Don Bluth's Laserdisc games, but all the bizarre Dragon's Lair ports and off-shoots, and that's admittedly what made me fall down one of several rabbit holes this year. The game's lush visuals and animation just captured my imagination, and I had to know how a publisher builds a franchise out of this when FMV is out of the question...!

Its compartmentalisation of its setpieces and challenges does lend itself to a more straightforward video game adaptation: the drawbridge with the tentacles, the rocket horse, the knight's electrified tiles... it'd take some genre-shifting, but you could almost envision it as something akin to Battletoads, a similar manic and hectic mentality.

I've yet to try the NES version, and I can't say I fancy its chances of making a good impression, but I did try a bit of the unreleased SEGA Mega Drive version for about four or five levels; it was released on SNES, but the Genesis version feels a bit more polished, with slightly less stodgy controls and inertia. Doesn't make it any less dodgy of a platformer, though. Dirk slides around like momentum's on bad terms with him, and his attacks are shockingly short-ranged and situational.

It plays like a mindless run-and-jump platformer, but its levels are surprisingly large and somewhat unfocused, with multiple possible exits to find in some stages, taking you on different routes... or possibly looping you back to where you were.

Between that, the tricky platforming, and the chaotic enemies warping in out of nowhere, it almost does a reasonable job of extrapolating the arcade's facets into a more conventional premise, but the disparity between how Dirk controls and what the game expects of you is hard to grapple with.

I think I left off after beating the first boss stage, a dragon which I beat by slowly and cautiously throwing knives at it between its fire breath... only to discover there was a second dragon, with only 15 seconds left on the clock. That's one way to capture the arcade game's "think fast, asshole" mentality...! I'd be interested to play more of it, but I can't call it a good game with a straight face. I am very much the dope who will find merit in it somehow, but I'll also tell you there's better ways to spend your time.

The Pals also enlightened me to the existence of two Game Boy instalments, one of which is Franky, Joe & Dirk: On The Tiles, a bizarre mash-up of licensed properties with boxart that'd almost have you expecting a wild point-and-click adventure game starring the characters and worlds of Joe & Mac and Dr. Franken colliding... but no, it's a sliding tile puzzle game. If ever there were a platform with the most games that felt like lies, it would be the Game Boy.

Speaking of lies, Dragon's Lair: The Legend is actually a graphic swap of an old ZX Spectrum game, Roller Coaster, swapping out its theme park trappings for things ever so slightly more mystical or medieval, but not consistently so.

It's a non-linear platforming collect-a-thon, tasking you with collecting two hundred-odd "life stones" across who knows how many screens. Dirk can't attack or meaningfully interact with anything in more ways than just jumping, and the world is shockingly elaborate from the get-go, riding bees and wild boars as platforms across spikes, mine carts to traverse an Egyptian pyramid, and almost surely more crap I'd yet to discover.

It's very surreal-looking, with absolutely nothing Dragon's Lair about it, beyond the slightly adjusted player sprite, nor even anything faintly cartoony or Don Bluth-ian. The bizarre jumping arc is a nightmare, and the acrobatics it expects from you right out the gate are outrageous, especially with no idea just how bloody big the world you're exploring is going to be. I respect the chutzpah of trying to figure out something to do with this license, and I'm surprised there weren't more ZX Spectrum flip-screen platformers converted for Game Boy, but it doesn't exactly scratch the itch.

I did try playing Dragon's Lair II, and good gosh, that game is just an explosion of whimsy and imagination. So many incredible designs, locations, unbridled horniness...! It is among the biggest spectacles of Bluth's work I've seen, with dizzying setpieces like Beethoven's symphony or the destruction of Eden, well worth the price of admission just to watch them in action.

As a game, though, the attempt at narrative and secret-hunting does mean you're forced to master each section to continue, instead of respawning at the start of a random challenge, and I honestly preferred the old method. It kept you on your toes, prevented the game from being repetitive, and also lent an unconscious air of whimsy to the setting, this twisted lair where nothing is as it seems. It's hard to appreciate that when more often than not you'll have been killed by Daphne's mother five times before the adventure even truly begins.

I've said before how the vaguest inclination of interactivity or impetus over a story's outcome can get you more invested in something than if it were a 'static' piece of media -- it's why I keep bringing up charming dreck like Alone in the Dark on Xbox 360, a direct-to-DVD B-movie of a game that, by virtue of slogging through it yourself and having to overcome its dodgy challenges, left a stronger mark on me than if I'd had to simply endure a set running time.

And Dragon's Lair manages something special just by the way it frames its animation sequences -- to see something so sumptuous, so full of love and care, and know it's stuck behind the pretences of a video game is like, damn it, I want this to be something great. How do you take the energy and mentality behind this animation and make it into a more hands-on video game? And how do you take this exquisite animation and give it a theatrical wrapping that feels 'complete' and not just a bunch of random crap that happens for no reason?

As aforementioned, Earthworm Jim's bread and butter was how much it looked and felt like a cartoon, banking on its comic creator's madcap sensibilities... but gameplay-wise, I just find it muddy. The core to the game just feels icky and sloppy, this ambitious hodge-podge that's not nearly as pleasurable as a 'simple' run-and-gun like Metal Slug or Contra. What I've heard about the sequel suggests even the devs took every excuse they could to just chuck random genre-shifts your way instead of honing it. I want to give them a fair shake one of these days, but I'm still convinced the cartoon was the best thing to come out of that franchise.

I'd like to see or make something that captures Dragon's Lair's energy. Part of its appeal is not just in its wackadoo situations, but in seeing Dirk get fucked over by every possible circumstance; he's a fun character to see have a bad time! But unless it's an FMV game with infinite continues, the medium tends to struggle with allowing the player to die in such a way that it's still fun, without the player getting too disenfranchised. Does the less 'direct' control of an FMV game or point-and-click adventure take the edge off...? I'm just rambling, don't mind me.

Anyway, being weirdly obsessed with the series for a week or two was fun, but I don't think the arcade games are for me. I might've just liked the chance to soak in Don Bluth's animation without being subjected to his dodgy storytelling! Though that's on me for being more familiar with his '90s work, I oughta treat myself to The Secret of NIMH one of these days.

Knights of the Exploding Table

PC (Steam)
Jul 07

One of the vexing things about being a Bomberman nutcase is acknowledging when the series mixes things up and presents great concepts or mechanics to play with... and then just never touches them again. Playing Baku Bomberman 2 after so long was a bit of a disappointment, realising how little in common it has with the game it's meant to be a direct sequel to...!

Pal Pulsie's Bomberman Tower fangame builds upon the 2D platforming foundations of Pocket Bomberman, but you're otherwise hard-pressed for Bomberman clones or fangames that aspire to emulate more than just the battle game (i will never stop giving Ubisoft All-Star Blast shit for having zero ideas of its own). Not for lack of trying, if the number of threads on the Bomberman Board announcing remakes of Bomberman 64 that never panned out were any indicator...!

So here comes the cumbersomely titled Knights of the Exploding Table (with the acronym KOTET no less awkward either), a game that's extremely upfront about taking inspiration from Bomberman 64 -- it uses the same intro, menu, control scheme, and boy howdy does it want to follow up on its approach to challenge and level design!

To preface: Bomberman 64 was the series' first true foray into 3D, and used the opportunity to break from convention and present the player with huge open levels to explore. Though each stage is ultimately about finding the exit (or the switch that opens the exit), they can be dauntingly open-ended at first glance, yet make for surprisingly big sandboxes to play in, demanding creative usage of bombs as tools, platforms, or stepping stones to see everything they have to offer, on account of the player's inability to jump or interact with much.

Knights of the Exploding Table pretty much takes that ball and runs with it, and I gotta respect the chutzpah, at least. The early access build has four levels in its story mode (promising six worlds for the final release, making it 24 levels, I presume?), pitting you against a myriad of tricky puzzles and unorthodox navigation to reach the exit, possibly packed with way more enemies, items, challenges, and secrets than most levels of its inspiration...!

It's, uh, certainly ambitious. The first level alone is a sprawling forest hub that's splintered into multiple sub-sections, each one rewarding you with keys to open the exit, or essential power-ups to facilitate finding said keys. It has multiple signposts to acclimatise you to the controls, and even a map to try and show a rough lay of the land...

... but it's an immediately overwhelming way to start the game, and takes a long way to get places on account of your sluggish default speed. You can blow up trees or enemies to harvest power-ups, speed-ups represented as blue potions, but watch out for green potions, those are speed-downs! There's no cap on power-ups, so it's possible to enter the negatives, or become so fast or have explosions so huge you can cheat your way through certain challenges.

The second level is a maze of bridges suspended above water, with switches to toggle access between areas. It mercifully doesn't rely on that as much as I'd feared, but it's extremely aimless and gives no clues on where to go, and especially doesn't mention where to find the remote control power-up, which is essential to clear it. On paper the third level is a lot more linear, simply zig-zagging across the river to the exit at the end, but it also throws so many bizarre new features and mechanics at you along the way, it's practically begging you to overthink everything.

There's zero mention of Bomberman in any of the official descriptions for the game, but just booting the game up is indication enough it's very clearly cribbing from Bomberman 64... but even to people who've experienced that game, it kind of throws you in the deep end.

It's the nature of intentional retro throwbacks to expect a lot from the player, but this feels like it doesn't just lack communication with the player, but you have to get on the developer's wavelength to even understand what's feasible half the time...!

It's not helped by just how janky the game feels, resulting in the player seriously overthinking things when the obvious solution falls prey to glitchiness. Level 3 ends in two swinging logs and a platform suspended over the river. It's too far to reach the other bank, but the suspended platform looks like a dead end; landing on its tends to make the player clip through it into the abyss below. What's a knight to do? It's... actually an abstracted physics puzzle, where you have to swing the platform into range of the other log, which will then launch you to the exit.

(my saltiness probably won't have context unless I mention the golden clovers, this game's stand-in for Bomberman's gold cards. There's five in each stage and they're a purely optional collectible, but they're frequently a more visible short-term objective than the level's true goal, and yet also the source of some of the most obtuse puzzles in the game. Would you ever think to pick up the defeated boss's helmet and use it like a glider? I sure fuckin' wouldn't!!)

Bomberman 64 had limited lives and continues to hinder reckless thinking, but dying only set you back to the last door you entered. KOTET expects a degree of adventurousness and curiosity from the player if they want to succeed, but screwing up will screw you over severely:

You lose all your power-ups, you lose all your gems so you can't even buy back what you lost, and about the only progress that carries over are whatever warps you activated. The warps do typically allow you to reclaim key items with less backtracking, but to lose your offensive power and have to retread old ground at tortoise speeds is seriously demoralising.

It's just not conducive to experimenting and figuring things out, basically. Even the very nature of its bomb-based gameplay gets in the way...! Where Bomberman 64's rival battles were the only time you encountered fellow bomb-using foes, the common goblin enemies can throw or kick bombs your way, and aren't shy about using them.

Most non-explosive damage will merely stun that character and make them drop a power-up, but with more explosions in play outside of the player's control, it puts you on edge more than you'd prefer. It's notable that the first world of Bomberman 64 has maybe one enemy capable of actually killing the player (on its default difficulty at least); everything else is simply an obstacle that'll knock you around. It's hard to approach things with an eye for problem-solving when there's so many adversaries out for blood...!

Combat in general is fussy at best and actively frustrating at worst. Kicking or throwing bombs where you want to go feels imprecise, courtesy of the full 360 degree of movement, and enemies can be extremely tenacious when they want to be, especially the birds, which will hound you endlessly and are a right dickens to actually hit.

It is amusing that goblins and wildlife are prone to in-fighting, but they'll also beeline towards any items lying around and take them for themselves, including keys, so you can't commit to avoiding combat if there's risk of them robbing you like that...!

I think my beef with it comes down to... if I wanted a modern take on Bomberman 64, all you needed to do is smooth out the rough edges. Explain the mechanics and objectives a little clearer, streamline the fussier elements like bomb-jumping and building staircases. I would like to assume a modern version of it would have better language of design to be able to communicate itself better, and not come across as quite so obtuse.

KOTET just goes "actually I liked the obtuse, I'm gonna keep that," and doubles, triples, quadruples down on those aspects, aspiring to be the king of mysterious jogos. I mean, I can't say it isn't a hell of an identity to embrace, but you have to be aware of the repercussions and sacrifices when taking that route. We are not young any more, and we're swamped in way more options than we had back in the N64 days; if a game's giving me guff or not up to snuff, I've seventy million other games fighting for my attention.

I'm glad it exists, and playing it is certainly an experience -- if nothing else I'm glad after so many people craving for a remake or follow-up to Bomberman 64, someone's putting their money where their mouth is. It's a hell of a fascinating game, as indie as indie gets, feeling closer at home to the old-school nonsense I play on YouTube than the modern definition of amateur game. It's a passion project made only by two dudes (and their sister for voice acting), which is a blessing and a curse. It's so stupidly quirky, there's nothing else like it on the modern marketplace, and I can't not respect its choices!

But it's so much their vision that it's hard to critique without just proposing a clean sweep, or wanting the game I envision in its place. Does it even benefit from being a Bomberman 64 clone, to be honest? The explosions are arguably the fussiest part of the gameplay loop, and feel at odds with the overall vibes -- would building something around flails or ball-and-chains be more appropriate?

It's taking all the wrong lessons from its inspiration and fumbling stuff it did effortlessly, while also doing nothing to try and sell itself towards new audiences or establish a strong identity of its own. It's hard to discuss the finer points and possible room for improvement without having to break down and confess, "Dougal, it's all over the place."

You can't be bad to it for a fiver, though, and it even includes its own facsimile of the battle mode and costume shop, with four human or CPU opponents battling it out on a variety of cluttered, oversized maps. Hats off to the devs for acknowledging every facet of their inspiration, and not overlooking fun features! You just gotta accept the game demands you operate on moon logic to make any real headway into it.

My takeaway from all this is that I really need to write my Bomberman 64 essay. I have so many gosh darn opinions on that game, why it's a charming relic of the early 3D boom and also setting a bar that few other exploration-driven games have yet to match, and it's hard to summarise it into a few succinct paragraphs without coming across like a crazy person. Like, moreso than usual.

Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

PC (indie)
Jul 14

The CD-i Zelda games are fascinating to me, and the Game Grumps' playthrough is a perpetual favourite to come back to. I can't think of any other word for it but fascinating, y'know? For a western developer to be trusted with this property, choosing to make a 2D platformer and with strange interpretations of Zelda iconography... it's just something you gotta behold for yourself. Pal herrDoktorat was in a Zelda mood, so I streamed this for him and beat it over the course of a couple hours.

It's hard to compare it to typical Zelda gameplay, so much so that it's easier to just not bother! It's a level-based non-linear exploration-based 2D platformer, so to speak -- you pick a level from the map and romp through it, bopping baddies with your sword and hoping to find some manner of key item at the end of it, be it a new tool, a new quest, or simply unlocking a new level after reaching the exit.

While levels are usually pretty straightforward (dungeons aside), the game's pretty much a big lock-and-key puzzle: running fetch quests either unlocks new areas or gets you a new tool, either required or highly recommended for killing the boss instantly.

On occasion you'll have to revisit areas to do stuff you couldn't accomplish the first time, and Washubi Swamp is a real killer in that regard, with two tough screens of precarious platforming that you have to redo at least twice to get all you need from the area. Seeing folks struggle through this on original hardware looked like a real ordeal, between the limited lives, stodgy controls, and protracted load times every time you die...!

The gameplay itself is very simple, far below the complexity of even Zelda II. It retains that game's shield mechanic, allowing you to block projectiles by standing still, but eschews its stats and magic spells for a traditional inventory of limited-use tools, either bought in the shop or powered by your rubies.

The bombs are fun, ostensibly an 8-way projectile that can clear out most things on the screen, and the ropes are a neat way of engaging with the vertical environments, lending an almost puzzle-solving element to the craggy uneven terrain. The constant need for lamp oil is a drag though, and the new tools you get are extremely situational, too expensive to use as much as you'd like, and ultimately not all that interesting.

It's a wonky game, definitely a hard one to defend or recommend, but man, has it got vibes. Tony Trippi's soundtrack lends a funky up-tempo air to the affairs, and the painted artwork gives the game so much of its flavour. To map platforms to landscape illustrations instead of building levels out of tiles is such a batshit way of doing things, with readability issues and wackadoo perspective all over the place, especially for a game that has a hard time rising to any kind of platforming pedigree... but gosh darn if it ain't extremely aesthetic.

They tonally clash with the MS Paint-lookin' cutscenes, which is another feather in its off-kilter cap. These animations are what gave the game its notoriety, and arguably undermine it in a lot of ways; one of Hardcore Gaming 101's dodgier articles chose to defend the game without acknowledging or depicting them at all. But let's face it, they lend so much offbeat charm and personality to the affair, a real incentive to push forward just to see what freak you're gonna encounter next, be they friend or foe...!

It's worth remembering that this came out in the gulf between Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time: we've had stories and NPCs and dialogue, for sure, but this is such a different way of going about it. Totally incidental characters make such a bigger impression when they're filling the screen with uncanny herky-jerky motion, or talking in such slurred, sing-songy manners that I sincerely have no idea what they're saying. The whole point of the game's cutscenes is to tell a story or provide gameplay hints, but it's such an assault on the senses it's hard to glean anything meaningful from them...!

It's probably the first time every boss in a Zelda game has some kind of setup, though. They're all given an introduction either upon encountering them or via Impa, helping give them a 'place' in the world and under Ganon's command: they're not just chillin' in caves or dungeons, they're active threats to the kingdom, enslaving, transforming, or otherwise pestering the populace and bolstering their ranks. It's a nifty little bit of world-building, and it's perhaps the only instance of a boss directly interacting with Ganon, even if it is simply Hektan saying "yes, master." Look, you gotta glean what you can from these games!

Even the fact Link is out of the picture is neat. His game paints him as more of a goober in his interactions with folks, but Zelda comes across a lot more on-the-ball, if not a bit of a hard-ass. She means business, threatening every foe from Iron Knuckle to the whimpering traitorous duke with her blade, and does not screw around. It's neat having a game that's all her, not even having to share the spotlight. She's a bit strait-laced, but it's one of the more fun depictions of Zelda, honestly.

The plot's a bit of a crock, though. For all the animation and voice acting, none of it really amounts to a meaningful story, and twists and turns mean nothing because there's no meaningful setup for anything. Link's stuck in a freakin' mirror and we never find out why. Duke Onkled sold the king out to Ganon for no apparent motive. The cutscenes are purely for novelty's sake (and for feeding us prime YouTube Poop content all these years later), it's just a pity to finally play the game and realise it's no less incoherent than it was viewing them out of context...!

MAME has made great steps in CD-i emulation (though not enough for me to stream a full game of Girls Club without it freezing, alas), but I chose to play the fan-made remaster that came out a couple years ago to see how it fared. It's pretty good! It's not 100% accurate, natch, but it's very much a smoother experience: loading times are history, the lives system (that kicks you out to the overworld, forcing you to redo a level from the start after dying 3 times) is dropped, and things just plain run smoother.

It also spreads the functions across four buttons instead of two, allowing you to use items and open the menu without inconvenient button combos. You don't need to stab items to pick them up, collision detection and movement aren't as unpredictable and stodgy as they once were, and a few screens have indicators pointing to exits or objects that a lot of players had trouble finding in the original version. Oh, and there's subtitles (with humorous audio descriptions), so I can finally actually flippin' understand more than five words said in the game...!

Being stuck on finicky CD-i hardware for decades has given the games a somewhat mythical reputation, with sites like Quebec Gamers or Polas' Goodtime Retro Cafe the only source of footage for years... when it's probably not worth all that fuss, gameplay-wise. It's quirky and charming, definitely a game that makes my imagination whirr with its imagery and ideas, but not one to spend hundreds of dollars to get your hands on.

The fan remake is arguably the way to go. There's something to be said for how stiff and herky-jerky the CD-i original is, the extra challenge of fighting against its hardware and software limitations, but to be able to breeze through it in such a short amount of time -- and so pleasurably too! -- is a credit to the remake's team.

Superman Returns

Jul

I was increasingly hesitant to watch the next one after every Superman sequel, and having been around to hear this one's critical reception upon release warded me off even more, but I figured if I'd gotten this far, why stop now...!

It's certainly a head-turner just for being a direct sequel to a 25 year old film -- every character's been recast and the setting's been bumped up to modern day, but Supes' inexplicable five year peace-out aside, it otherwise aims to pick up where it left off and carry on the same schtick as the '80s movies.

Much like the first film, the first 20 minutes might as well be a different story. A very low-key, downbeat vignette of Superman crashing back in Smallville and reuniting with Martha Kent, acknowledging all that's changed in his absence, and how much he meant to folks. I should be happy to see the two interact again, but it's a dark, dry sequence that struggles to give us any real insight or attachment into the matter, and also makes no effort to reverse Supes' habit of just ditching his mother at the drop of a hat.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor is out of jail and back in riches after inheriting a dying old lady's wealth, a scene that's staged very over-the-top and theatrically, to the point of making it hard to see what's happening...! Starting the film off with a random old woman's death is going to feel a bit odd no matter the circumstances, and him dropping his wig into the little girl's hands had me thinking it was the body of one of her dogs...!

It means nothing in the grand scheme of things, just a throwaway scene to re-establish the status quo again, while also refreshing us on what an absolute sleazeball Luthor is -- for all his self-congratulatory pontification, dude's not above low-down dirty tricks just to be back in money again. I can appreciate it after the fact, but in the moment it's like, what am I in for...?

It becomes much more itself once Clark is in Metropolis and back in the Daily Planet, and when Superman makes his big rescue, it hits the mark. Brandon Routh does good in the role, and him addressing the people absolutely clinches those little mannerisms that made Christopher Reeves so endearing:

His genuine concern for the people and their safety, but following it up with his cutesy "I hope this hasn't put you off flying" sentiment, it's those little qualities that just hit the mark, offsetting the tension and inspiring faith in the guy...! Capping it off with Lois fainting and sliding down the safety chute is exactly the kind of corny gag the old films would have, and when it goes for them, it captures the vibe excellently.

The film just kind of struggles with tone, though. For one, I feel like the action sequences come across as far too... brutal? Visceral? A certain intensity that's more upsetting than I would've expected or wanted, for lack of a better word. The plane incident is rife with shaky cam, people screaming, and poor unbuckled Lois Lane being banged around every inch of the interior with shockingly violent foley -- I expected her to be paste by the time the scene was done...!

Margot Kidder's a hard actress to top, bringing a great savvy attitude and manic energy to Lois, and her larger-than-life personality didn't just make her a great contrast to Clark and Superman, it made her feel capable, even if she was out of her depth. The extremely young Kate Bosworth just didn't quite bring the same charisma to the role -- the film certainly argues Superman's absence and being a single mother has left her a bit jaded, but the fact she's so comparatively demure and baby-faced kind of offsets that image...!

She's got good moments, including sneaking aboard Lex's boat to snoop around... but that leads into a sequence where she and her son are captured and under watch, as she tries to fax info to the Planet while the guard is distracted. She's caught, and this previously amicable fellow now has her on the ground and is threatening to bludgeon her head in with a cubic zirconium. Lois is injured and crawling away, her son watching in silent panic, and the movie uncomfortably lingers on this threat of violence about to be enacted upon the leading lady...!

It's resolved by the kid having superpowers and flattening the dude with a piano, something fandom was really up in arms about two decades ago, but I'm grateful it's just so tame. All the scenes of Lois under threat just felt so skeezy, and the violence in general just felt unexpectedly brutal.

Superman getting shanked by Lex Luthor with a kryptonite shiv, and he and his goons just kicking the ever-loving shit out of him before chucking him off a cliff... boy, it's rough! It ain't a fluffy watch! The entire last half hour of the film is about the world thinking Superman is dead! We get an amusing vignette with Lex and his lackey to offset the tension, showing them stranded and having lost everything they strove for, but the whiplash is just a bit much.

I think Superman works best when the threat is natural, so to speak -- once again the climax is largely about Superman saving people from a natural (unnatural?) disaster, mitigating the damage to the city and pulling Lois and company out of a sticky situation. To put a face on a threat is a different story; having a threat Supes needs to get physical with feels like a fine line to walk, at least when I prefer Superman's relationship with humanity more than supervillain malarkey. The scenes I mentioned feel like an attempt to bring some of that modern tension and whiz-bang to the mix, but it clashes too much with the low-key stuff in my view.

It stinks, because there is good stuff in here; some great super-heroics and big setpieces, and most notably Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. He's channelling Gene Hackman something fierce -- the slimy businessman pontificating and getting off on his own genius, forever fed up with the goons and ditzy henchlady he's got tagging along. It's rightfully over-the-top, a true throwback to oldschool villainy, which is all the more baffling when the rest of the film wants to be more grounded and grungy...!

It's neat to see it and put it behind me, but it's a film that just struggles to inspire enthusiasm...! Attaching itself to the old films draws a lot of comparisons and expectations, its new angles and plot threads aren't given enough drive to get me excited, and being so up its own ass doesn't do it any favours. It's got glimmers of merit, but at two and a half hours long it's hard to justify trying it unless you're just that eager.

F-Zero 99

Switch
Sep 16 ~

The contents of the September Nintendo Direct had been leaked ahead of time, so there were already rumblings of a new F-Zero game. One of the trailers opened with a first-person shot in the backseat of a truck, with the driver looking back and telling them they're nearly to their destination. A little part of me was like, could this be F-Zero? Are they going to take a wild new story-driven approach to the setting, of a young budding pilot arriving in the big city and trying to make a name for themself?! No, turns out that was Another Code: Recollection. Whoops.

Anyway it turns out the real reveal was F-Zero 99, a reimagining of the SNES original as a battle royale boasting several dozen human-controlled racers, with the grand prix ultimately whittling them down to a mere 20 by the final race. It was a bit of a deflating announcement for some, but for getting fresh mileage out of the wobbly old SNES game, I figure this is a pleasant little surprise!

Having come out before Super Mario Kart, the original F-Zero is strictly a single-player affair, and very much a game of honing your own skills and mastering the tracks, pushing time trials and sheer survival as the main draw... so to now have to accommodate a hundred human competitors and embracing the "death race" angle of it all, it adds a fun dose of chaos to the mix!

The four racers are made much more distinct, leaning heavily into different playstyles: the Golden Fox is always first off the starting grid and a speedy little beggar, but very much wants to be ahead of the pack; it can't take a beating and eats a lot of energy with boosts, but is almost guaranteed a full refill on the recharge pads. Your speed, acceleration and cornering aren't everything, you have to factor in the cost of your boosts and recharge as well to determine how you play!

The Wild Goose was my preference, a heavy bruiser who can tank damage like nobody's business, although its recharge rate is extremely low, meaning you want to use your boosts sparingly... but more reason to destroy foes if you can, because doing so nets you a big chunk of health! It makes the battle royale feel especially predatory, as anyone showing signs of weakness (like their chassis smoking and quivering) is descended upon by passing racers looking for the sweet, sweet recharge they get if they land the killing blow.

This adds the spin attack from X onward to facilitate clobbering dudes, and doing so produces little dots that can be picked up to fill your super boost metre. This is the game's method of rubber banding, allowing you to briefly ride on the "skyway" and bypass big chunks of track -- the further back you are, the longer the ride lasts to give you a good catch-up. It's another thing you want to strategise your usage of though, finding when and where's the best place to employ it on each track -- some parts offer great shortcuts, while offers are functionally no different than being ground-bound...!

They all rightfully spice up the game, and add that risk-reward, do-or-die, make-or-break factor that the SNES version was a little short on. Even wiping out is a chance to have some fun, respawned for a short time as an enemy bumper car and awarded points for how many racers you can knock around.

I do know some folks were a bit miffed that this was the new instalment we'd been waiting decades for. A big part of F-Zero's draw for me isn't just the hardcore racing stuff, but the world, the characters, the setting...! And, er, this game gives us nothing. There's some cute usage of the art from the SNES manual on the menus, but there's nothing to show who's even driving each vehicle. It's strictly a game first and foremost, none of that ancillary stuff!

Mario Kart is still such a people-pleaser and system-seller, I can see Nintendo not knowing what to do with something of the same genre that's way more niche, but I figure this is a fun and apt usage of it. It serves as a valid alternative in its emphasis on skill and massively-multi-player competition, and it's hard to knock it as a freebie! Okay, you need need an NSO subscription to get it, but you know what I mean.

I confess I find it hard to revisit the SNES original -- it's a fine game, it just gets a bit long in the tooth for my liking, between its five long laps per race and taking a while before the challenge properly sets in. With its new widescreen display and analogue movement, this is a much appreciated quality-of-life update even before you get into the battle royale stuff! I'd argue with local split-screen multi-player this would be a respectable package on its own, a superior follow-up to the 3D Classics line on 3DS.

Going on a tangent: Sonic Origins came out this year, the collection of the four Mega Drive/SEGA CD instalments refitted into the fan-made Stealth Engine with new characters and features, and I certainly dig the idea behind it. Playing emulated stuff on a TV just wasn't as accessible in the PS2/GameCube era, so retro compilations were much appreciated -- lord knows there's so many games I had zero interest in, but was tempted by purely because of it having an old arcade game as an extra. Ninja Turtles, Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike...!

While I'm grateful for the greater care put into luxury re-releases these days, a salty part of me is like: buddy, you're the ones with the money and the source code (god willing), gimme something new to play with! Whether it's actually new content or just conveniences like a level select or challenge mode ala Mega Man Legacy Collection, it'd entice me a lot more rather than paying for something that offers little more than a bog-standard emulator.

While SEGA definitely fumbled Origins with its bizarre pricing and DLC situation, it was a surprise seeing folks respond to it so negatively, saying they would've preferred emulation...! We've only had several dozen venues to play the untouched ROMs, say it ain't so! It wasn't perfect from what I heard, and I figure Sonic products are always in competition with the talented creations its fandom busts out on a whim, but I'd like to think the approach of it and F-Zero 99 could be the future of retro re-releases.

There's a lot of classic games out there that still hold up, but could stand to be spruced up a little bit, or even just recontextualised -- the NES Remix series had a good thing going on by shaking up those old formulas with even just bite-sized challenges. A lot of Nintendo's early library gets dunked on for not ageing well, and rightfully so at times, but I feel stuff like Kid Icarus or Ice Climbers just needs the right treatment to give it a new lease on life.

F-Zero 99 is obviously far more than a simple wrapper around a ROM, it's a rebuilt engine with no shortage of features and concessions made to accommodate its new gameplay balance, and not treatment you can suggest lightly for any ol' game, but it's nice to be pleasantly surprised by something on so many fronts.

This kept me occupied for a good few months, serving as a fun compliment to Splatoon 3, and ideal for both pick-up-and-play sessions or sitting down for a grand prix. I think I might've been playing too much that the slow drip-feed of new courses wasn't enough to sate me, and you could see the playerbase shrinking a little over time -- where lobbies used to fill up within seconds, later they would frequently time-out on entries and fill the slots with CPU opponents. Still, very happy to have had a good time with the game!

Admittedly my craving for more F-Zero GX-style gameplay has been sated with the rise of indie fare clearly inspired by it, such as Super Pilot or Aero GPX -- I'm not left having to play WipeOut and grousing about how floaty it feels by comparison. I'm still left out in the cold regarding this fictional universe I love, though. Show me the fanfic! Gimme something, anything! I'll settle for Octoman being in ARMS...!

Trencher

Nov

Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin reported that Keith Giffen had passed away -- not an artist I was familiar with, but clearly a character with quirky output and a unique sense of humour from the sounds of it. Hearing mention of this as one of his all-original works and with only four issues seemed a reasonable title to sample, lord knows I'm terrible at commitments.

The titular Trencher hunts down superpowered individuals (or folks just plain out of the ordinary) in the name of retrieval or repossession, whatever that means. He himself is some sort of cyborg or zombie, a not-all-human "chassis" who's frequently reduced to gooey bits in the course of fighting such powerful foes, but just as easily patches himself together again, supported by his navigator Phoebe and whatever resources she can spare for him.

It's not exactly a comic you read for the plot. There's an underlying question about what exactly Trencher is, what kind of messed-up world he lives in, and why his organisation has it out for superpowered folk, but each issue might as well be a self-contained romp. Trencher himself actively rejects any effort to get invested in anything besides his mission. The fact it's only four issues long might lead you to think it's a limited mini-series... but nope, issue #4 teases a fifth issue that never came to be.

It's very much driven by its art, which is-- phew, how would you describe it? Melty? It's dripping with style, pages etched in heavy, curving line art that's almost like melted wax candles, if not something fungal and organic. You can feel the pen stippling and arcing as it's being thrust onto the page, repulsive lines drawn with a clear, personal vision. It's really something!

It's also very much an acquired taste. The first couple of issues are almost oppressive to read, they're so dense in detail it's hard to follow the action, even when it's something as banal as Trencher entering a hotel. It's definitely got an off-the-wall offbeat charm, right in line with its crass sense of humour: big on people being reduced to chunks, things blowing up, and rampant wide-scale destruction. Big id hours.

It picks up as it goes, figuring out how to refine its art and clarity to better suit the medium, resulting in some truly laugh-out-loud moments like Trencher being punched through practically the entirety of Las Vegas by a single punch. It's a rocky start and takes a while to get the ball rolling, but it grows to have some great comic timing on its pages.

Where it flounders is when it's out of Giffen's hands, so to speak. He draws, writes and inks all the stories, but the colouring and lettering is left up to Lovern Kindzierski of Digital Chameleon, one of the first studios for digital editing of comics... and it's a striking colour set, I'll say that much. The garish cacophony of colours and gradients do lend additional uncanny charm to such ghoulish characters and settings, but it takes away a bit of the grunge, and arguably loses clarity it would've had if it were just in black and white.

What really deflates the 'oomph' the series could have is the speech bubbles and lettering. It's all digital! The word balloons are perfect ovals with clean triangular tails, and though it makes both all-caps and lowercase lettering to decent effect, it just undercuts the grisly, organic feel of the rest of the page. Characters are cursing, shouting, and muttering constantly, and it just loses a lot of punch without that human touch.

The scenery is already rife in Giffen's own lettering: background signs, sound effects, even page numbers! Every page has its own unique incorporation of its number; it might be Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, a tally, a free-floating banner, incorporated into a signpost... every inch of the page is oozing with detail and intensity, even superfluous fluff like the panel borders. Keith well and truly puts his essence on every page.

Which is why the digital lettering is just such a bore. When everything else is oozing character and personality, it lacks punch. I've surely extolled the virtues of Tim Kreider's The Pain, When Will It End? before, but that man does some good art, good essays (we have him to thank for "the mortifying ordeal of being known"), and especially damn good lettering; you can feel the volume in those words! So for something so loud and over-the-top to be robbed of its voice in such a way is just a letdown, y'know?

Fare like WildC.A.T.S. contributed to Image Comics' gritty teenage attitude in the '90s, but its permit for creators to fully own their properties paved the way for the likes of Spawn and Savage Dragon to maintain long-lasting creative lifespans. Trencher is very much one man's vision, ostensibly taking the piss out of its fellow publications, and if you're not on the same wavelength as its author then it's very likely it's gonna do nothing for you.

Apparently the character continued on in crossovers, which is just shocking to me -- there is a mention of "a Spawn" in the first issue, but it's otherwise such an outlandish, crass view of the world it's hard to imagine it being compatible with any other Image property...! Keith was evidently pretty candid in later interviews that he had no interest in doing anything more with the character, and it does kinda feel like a one-trick pony -- without any interest in pursuing plots or different ways for battles to play out, what kind of legs has it got...?

I'm keen to check out more of Keith Giffen's work; Trencher is very much his bizarre, crass sense of humour put onto a page in such excessive, grisly, repulsive, fascinating detail, that I can't help but just be amazed by it. It's distinct, it's unique, it's got character, and it's also exactly why it's tough to recommend. It's a fair enough joyride, but don't go into it expecting a beginning, middle, an end, or a satisfying through-line or anything.

Goof Troop: Space Treasure

SNES
Dec 13

I'd like to think if you know me, then you know Goof Troop is a game near and dear to my heart, one of the best co-op puzzle adventures out there, and what I'd give for more that scratches the same itch. The guff described in my sprite-ripping tutorial overlaps with ROM hacking in a way, and I've long wanted to figure out how the game stores its level data... and while idly pondering that, I was informed an editor had already been built for the game, and a hack with all-new levels to boot. Fancy that!

It's a bit more linear than traditional Goof Troop, levels very clearly segmented into chunks where you survive a gauntlet of enemies, get a key from a block puzzle, unlock the gate, rinse and repeat. It's a bit jarring having played the game my whole life and not knowing these levels like the back of my hand -- having three possible directions to go on the first screen had me paralysed for choice...! It's a little daunting, but it falls into a nice groove eventually.

The difficulty curve is a little skew-whiff, especially regarding block puzzles. The very first one had Rae and I stumped -- possibly because our years of muscle memory was flummoxed at the sight of a puzzle we'd never seen before! -- but as it goes on it felt that more palatable, besides a doozy here and there.

I think playing in co-op might've made us attempt to problem-solve in unorthodox ways, like having one of us stand in a nook that a block would cover, then kick it from the inside, something that's obviously not possible playing solo, but we bashed our way through somehow...!

It does make one appreciate how pleasant the original Goof Troop is, balancing its challenges in equal measure, and making you enjoy the room-to-room action without becoming too aware of its construction or how it's compartmentalised.

Space Treasure definitely felt like, here's the block puzzle room, here's where you have to outrun a bunch of enemies because there's not enough projectiles to bop them all... it throws you between different types of challenges quite abruptly, and often having to survive those gauntlets multiple times if you missed an item!

Though the boss patterns are the same, their arenas are remixed slightly to offer new challenges: there's a pit separating you and the fire-breather, so avoiding his fire is that bit harder when you can't just get behind him...!

The skeleton fight now has two 'phantom' copies as well as the real deal, who exist purely as hazards and cannot be harmed. This does result in some quirks, like the final boss leaving a hitbox behind when he should be out of range, requiring some troubleshooting to figure out what to avoid before trying again.

ROM hacks are a mixed bag by their nature, and matching the nuance and balance of the original game can be a tall order, but to have something that can be played in co-op was just so much fun.

It kills me that there's not more like Goof Troop out there, be it ROM hack or inspired by; the top-down format really lends itself to that kind of co-operative puzzle-solving experience, and though the original is arguably baby's first puzzler, it's such an ideal game for all-ages. It's a little rocky in places (especially its new tilesets for the final couple of worlds), but to have this itch scratched at long last is satisfying.

Combo Rangers

Dec

As long as I've known pal herrDoktorat, the man's been obsessed with Brazilian webcomic-turned-print-comic Combo Rangers; I haven't the familiarity with Super Sentai media or the cultural landscape of turn-of-the-millennium Brazil to visualise its impact quite so clearly, but it's fascinating hearing his love for it and admiration for its author. The series sat dormant for a decade until this Kickstarter-funded reboot, which was also released in English on Kindle and Webtoon.

Superpowers are common among the general populace of New City, but superheroes are a thing of the past, something that bites them in the ass when the threat of the Evol Empire looms over them. The remaining old guard choose five teenagers to be gifted their combined strength and experience, but it's a learning experience for everyone involved, natch: the old heroes having to trust the younger generation, these kids shouldering such a burden, and even the city acknowledging the responsibility that comes with these gifts.

It's obviously a love letter to Japanese media of all flavours, with a contemporary slant and its own irreverent Brazilian edge. The art is oozing with cartoony energy, a quasi-cutesy chibi style that lends itself surprisingly well to dynamic action and also hilarious wild takes -- the fights are no less impactful for their blomby proportions, and it got some great laugh-out-loud moments from me on account of the art or delivery. Mighty Combo constantly steals the show with his ghoulish wild takes.

Seeing it approach the superheroics from both the kids' perspective and the old-timers is a lot of fun -- the banter between these three superhero pastiches with no social lives is probably easier to immediately enjoy, but seeing it explore and flesh out the five kids and their rich inner lives is satisfying to see.

It's a reminder that I enjoy superhero media best when the heroes aren't isolated from the real world; they have their duties, but they've still got day jobs and families just like the rest of us, and these teens have a lot to put up with even before the city's constantly getting exploded every other day.

It's pretty upfront with its messaging: the militaristic-looking Principal Pile makes a big point of treating no student differently than any other, effectively jamming everyone into the same square-shaped hole. But the five kids all have extremely different lives and upbringings: some of them have no innate powers, some of them have unhappy home lives, even if they come from prestigious families. To be funnelled through the same path in life and the expectations of their parents forced upon them isn't exactly inspiring!

So the Evol Empire also aspiring to take away their identities and individuality in the name of being obedient little slaves is a bit pointed, innit, one that finally unites all generations in wanting to protect their lifestyle and their future. The generational divide is a common subject in kid media, telling the youngsters they're lucky to have what they have, yet I'm used to them dancing around the topic or obfuscating it in some way ("but I don't want to be a Viking longshoreman, dad!"). To see something so clearly express how rough it is to be a schoolkid and how powerless you can feel in your destiny is just nice to see!

It's a hundred page book that isn't broken up into chapters or 'issues' the way one might expect from collected editions of American comics, and yet it's an engaging, breezy read. It's a good size of a story that establishes the setting nicely and makes me keen to see what it offers going forward... which might be a disappointment for English readers, as only the first of three volumes has gotten an official translation. You gotta learn Portuguese if you wanna find what happens next! (there is a transcript and translation by Yeonchi on Google Drive, though i've yet to peruse it)

Having known pal Dok and his infatuation with this series for so long, it's rewarding to finally see what all the fuss is about -- again, I can see it having greater novelty in the early '00s when webcomics were a bigger draw, not to mention distinctly Brazilian ones.

To see it get a lavish revamp and an international release is slightly bittersweet knowing it's lost in the crowd of so many other indie works...! Having so little expertise with Sentai media, I can't vouch for what new it brings to the table, but just as an all-ages comic that's packed with heart yet pulls no punches, it gets my blessing.

Scud: The Disposable Assassin

Dec

One of those comics I've known the name of for decades, and figured now was the time to see what the heck it's all about! Admittedly it kind of irks me how if it ain't superheroes, most folks' awareness of oddball comic books only comes about when they're made into video games... but on the other hand, I wouldn't have known about this were it not for its brief stint as a SEGA-published video game, so touché. If folks get into Turok comics through the games, I can't argue.

Scud is a disposable assassin, as you might expect! A mass-produced model bought from vending machines and designed to self-destruct upon the death of their target -- only this Scud cottons on to that fact and isn't too thrilled with the prospects. Ordered to kill the rampaging bio-mutant Jeff, he instead cripples her and gets her put on life support, now taking freelance work to afford the hospital bills to keep them both alive.

Obviously a few wrenches are thrown in the works from then on out, if not the entire toolbox, but It's an absolutely boffo premise to kick off with and a fun ride with little to no stops. His first gig puts him in the good graces of Tony Tastey and his mafia goons, and while every mission winds up doing more good than anyone might've expected, it does earn him more and more enemies, from the military to frenzied tribes to Voodoo Ben, the zombie-summoning founding father.

Though partially co-written by other folks (predominantly Dan Harmon), Rob Schrab is the primary creative spark behind it all, drawing and lettering the whole show, and it has such a fantastic visual presentation. Real balls-to-the-wall action, bursting with kinetic energy and revelling in its sheer mania. Scud himself is such a simple yet expressive design, and the world around him is bursting with flavour; there's very rarely a human-looking human to be found, instead a casual display of freaks, mutants, weirdos, and god knows what else.

It is admittedly a sensory overload at times, with baddies so unreal it's hard to even parse them at times -- Jeff is the epitome of this, a sparkplug-headed beast with mouths on her kneecaps who assimilates anything she consumes into her form, resulting in some real batshit by the time she instigates the Zombie Zoo war. It is a delight seeing just how ridiculous the cast can be; Nathan Twist and his goons are a particular treat: a giraffe with a laser-shooting UFO atop its neck, a crew of literal animal-headed goons (Goatface style), and the head of Jane Mansfield.

Its penchant for off-the-wall random humour might be a bit much for some, especially when Scud and Jeff are prone to shouting wackity-schmackity pop culture quotes in the heat of the action -- something that was very much hip and happenin' in the '90s, but is perhaps a bit waning after '00s internet culture and Deadpool took that ball and ran with it.

But personally, the fact it still builds such a fun, creative world out of all this madness is half the fun. By issue 12 Scud's battled zombie dinosaurs in a giant gestalt robot with his mafia pals, been loaned a werewolf arm and gone to space to try and return it to its owner, and warped back to Earth only to be conscripted into the Mr. Tough-Guy Competition on behalf of his manufacturer.

Reading this after Trencher made a fun, unintended compare-and-contrast. They've both similar sensibilities in regards to violence and excess, but Giffen's series didn't really give us anything to get attached to; the titular character is a no-nonsense gruff guy whose life is a mystery to us, and though it establishes a similar crapsack world around him, it has far less interest in playing with those facets for more than set-dressing or one-and-done adversaries.

We might not learn much about Scud either in those first dozen issues, but he's a more charming character to follow, having set up a perfectly reasonable origin story in the first ish, and giving him such a weird and wonderful world to have to engage with -- he's toast if he doesn't get a job to pay the bills, after all! And his gibbering and acrobatics during combat at least suggest he's having a good time. Better that than be curmudgeonly about what we're here for.

Issue 12 ends with Scud's introduction to Sussudio, a hitwoman hired by Voodoo Ben to capture him, and that's where the series kind of loses the plot a bit. The collected edition (The Whole Shebang) opens with a foreword from Rob's wife, who's very candid about his creative process on the series being fuelled by wanting to impress the women in his life -- evidently what Scud began as, before he got wrapped up in the fun of it -- and subsequent heartbreak, which I assume colours the back half of the series.

Just as things come to a head between Voodoo Ben, Jeff, and the military, time suddenly freezes and Scud and Sussudio are whisked throughout time and space to... do side-quests, basically. Save a medieval town from a baron dragon, sit in on a '80s slasher flick, take part in an alien war themed around Hollywood show business... they're still full of great art and decent moments, but there's an undercurrent that just doesn't sit the same, like it lacks spark.

A big part of it is Sussudio, frankly. She's a badass babe with a kickass attitude, the cat-burglar daughter of absent parents, solely and hopelessly attracted to robots even though she's no time for Scud's antics, and I just found her presence incredibly tiresome. I figure it's trying to play a hot-and-cold relationship that eventually explodes in their love and passion for one another, but I just wasn't feeling it. Pardon the bias, but I'm not gonna trust a '90s pop culture nerd in the comics biz to write good romance, especially when all the friendships depicted thus far had been largely contractual.

There's a wearisome will-they-or-won't-they between her and Scud, who's actively horny about her and declares her his reason for living, however little chemistry they may have, with both getting jealous when the other receives affection from someone else. "Don't run my life for me" is a frequent saying between the two, seemingly finding little pleasure in each other's company, and yet are shackled together by the plot and author's assumed interest in them making amends.

I'm reminded of series 7 of Red Dwarf, where the sudden introduction of Kochanski tips the whole formula on its side and nobody quite acts like themselves, including the disappearance of what were considered core cast -- Rimmer in that show's case, and pretty much everyone fun about Scud. Oswald, Drywall, the newly-established relationship with his manufacturer ScudCo -- all out the window! The comic's already done plenty of plot-hopping, but literally bouncing between setpices via equine deus-ex-machina gives us even less interest to be invested -- what relevance has this to anything we were previously acquainted with?

It leans a lot harder into angst and drama, perhaps best exemplified by the one-off comic revealing the backstory behind Scud's partner Drywall, a little potato sack covered in zippers with an infinite realm of doohickeys and storage space inside him. The Woodstock to his Snoopy, so to speak. He's a cute nonsensical little guy!

Only it turns out he was created by a woman tasked with an "organisation" device, seemingly for harvesting or pillaging after a war or cataclysm. She's abused by her demonic business partner, then replaced when he makes a hellish successor to her creation that abducts her and Drywall's brother, and becomes the new overlord of hell. As backstories and motivations go, it's a quirky way of fleshing out the little guy, giving him a clear motivation and agenda, a life to fight for -- in contrast to Scud, who's kind of figuring out things along the way.

There's just a lot of grunginess in the back half that reeks of a creator going through a bad time -- a lot of women suddenly brought into the picture just to be the source of angst or harmed for shock value, the humour and insults feel more malicious than irreverent, and there's a certain malaise about the whole thing. Even before reading the various behind-the-scenes reports from Rob himself, it's hard to read without cottoning on to how his life is painting his works -- the blockbuster wars story is a dopey premise, but feels like commentary on Schrab and Harmon's pursuit of writing in Hollywood and being burned by the process.

The series infamously ended on a cliffhanger where Sussudio is killed and Scud is tasked with destroying the Earth in the hopes of bringing her back, the series sitting idle for a decade before it got resolved across a four-issue story arc. It's a rightful showcase of Rob's art evolution, some of his best art with great expressiveness and using digital capabilities to terrific effect... but the series had already gone in a direction I wasn't interested in, and it's left picking up those pieces. It has a happy ending that ties everything in a bow, but I'm just not invested...!

I'm very glad to have experienced the series, though, and admittedly becoming more aware of what a sensation it was at its peak was interesting. To lend the reins of this world to other artists and writers in two short-lived spin-offs (The Drywall And Oswald Show and Tales from the Vending Machine, though arguably not worth reading; they have lovely art but read like a poor attempts to match Schrab's flair), for its film rights to be optioned around, and for SEGA to make two video games based on it...!

Between this, Dinosaurs For Hire, their stint with Marvel licenses, and their own properties like Comix Zone and Eternal Champions, SEGA USA clearly had a thing for comics in the 90s, and it's a pity it didn't last 'til they could've better executed on the material. The core concept of Scud lends itself to a great world for games to explore, preferably with gameplay rightfully kinetic and free-form... but I wouldn't be surprised if the burnout from all these projects is why the last few issues wanted as far away from that baggage as possible.

It's fascinating read, and those first twelve to fifteen issues are a tremendous joyride, an explosion of imagination and excess. I said about Trencher how seeing folks' raw unbridled creativity take form really is a treat to see, however messy it is -- reading further into Scud was perhaps more autobiographical than I'd wanted from it, coming across like an artist's revelry in cutting loose, before getting weighed down by the scale of his work and projecting his love life into it.

As is usually the case, there comes a point when it goes places I don't care for, but to voluntarily drop it would've left me wanting; I gotta see it through to know I was valid for wanting to drop it...! I wanna say the good times outweigh the bad, and the visceral impression it makes can't be overstated, just feel free to drop it when it's no longer offering a buzz.

Brutal: Paws of Fury

PC (DOS)
Dec 27 ~

Pal WanderingFellow streamed this on Discord for some reason. It's a game I have long known to be bad, and seeing it in action certainly confirmed that. It also made me realise: nobody's ripped the bloody sprites! So I ripped them from the DOS version... and decided to subject myself to playing the game for a couple of nights. Look, people have ripped the sprites from all the good games, so this is why I keep exposing myself to the dregs.

It's a furry fighting game, as you might expect! Everyone's some form of funny animal riffing on a martial art: Tai Cheetah, Kendo Coyote, Kung-Fu Bunny, blah blah blah. The martial arts fanatics in the audience will be disappointed to hear that their punny names have no bearing on their actual fighting style, as far as I can tell.

Evidently one of the draws of the game is that you 'unlock' each characters' special moves by playing their campaign, and have to input a password to regain access to them. At least, so claimed in Matt McMuscles' video; of the six versions I'm aware of (SEGA Mega Drive, SEGA CD, 32X, Amiga, Super Nintendo, and PC-DOS), it seems this only applies to the SEGA versions, the others have no such roadblock... except the manuals don't list the inputs, because they expect you to learn that after unlocking them!

Characters are invincible while they're performing special moves, and this makes fighting the CPU into the crappiest of crapshoots. Dali Llama will spam his teleport and have only a narrow opening when you can smash his face in, but conversely, playing as him means you can use your headbutt on opponent wakeup and know you can't be interrupted.

Rhei Rat's rushdown attack can be blocked... except the final punch, which is unblockable and requires tight timing to jump out of the way. And if you do get hit by it, he can just do it again on wakeup!

Kendo Coyote is among the most egregious fights in the game; I guess he's meant to be a Blanka character, with acrobatic cannonballs and loop-de-loop somersaults...? He can cover a ridiculous amount of space and practically span the entire screen while turtling in the corner; it's an instant knockdown and he can't be knocked out of it at any point, not until he resets to neutral.

This dude was a serious roadblock, and I think I only managed to get past him once -- nobody else was quite as tough as him, but it's still a dice roll if you're going to get unexpectedly wrecked or not.

That's another thing: you can taunt to refill a smidgen of health, and as far as I can tell, the more damage you deal before taunting, the more you win back. But... there's no time limit, at least not in the DOS version, so matches even against the CPU turn into weird drawn-out slugfests where you both trade blows with each other, double back to taunt, and then go at it again.

I guess that's a meta in itself: with no time limit, there's no incentive to turtle and run out the clock, you need to get in there and land some good hits, and apply pressure so they don't try to heal. But then that's another hiccup: your walking speed is diabolically slow, to the point where it's hard to step out of range of an attack, so jumping is the preferred, faster option.

But then attacking in midair is shockingly unresponsive! It's a six-button game with light, medium, and heavy punches and kicks, though a lot of them are simply the same animation just at different speeds, longer wind-up and cooldown... and in the air, the wind-up on heavy attacks is often so long they don't even start before you hit the ground again! You can just about pull them off if you push the button the instant you input the jump, but it's all a bit baffling.

I'm a heavy-punch-all-day kind of guy, but you're honestly better off spamming lights and mediums -- the ideal way to play is to jump into an opponent and keep mashing quick attacks as you're being pushed away, getting as many hits in and hopefully landing a sweep so you can repeat the process. Dali Llama is great for this with his lightning-fast normals, but he's got an awful stubby sweep, so you want to sneak one in while you can before he's pushed out of range.

It's a very oddly balanced game, and the wild disparity in special moves only exacerbates that. Only one character has a true projectile, Pantha, and for all its wind-up it does little damage and is extremely easy to punish. There's a number of attacks that are 'environmental', so to speak -- King Leon's guitar serves to push the enemy back more than damage them, and I believe there's a couple of moves that simply stun or dizzy the opponent, leaving them open for a clobbering.

Ivan the bear has an absurdly fast charge that the computer can bust out with no wind-up, and an aerial stomp that quakes the ground and hits anywhere on-screen so long as you're not jumping... but the stomp looks no different than an ordinary jump, and its hitbox is active even before it lands, so it's a crapshoot knowing whether touching him will damage you or not...!

Damage output comes across as extremely random: I land a heavy punch on an opponent and it's barely a chip, while getting hit by a standard normal sometimes does exorbitant amounts of damage. Unless there's a counter system it's not telling me about, it just comes across like a very mysterious game...!

I played on the easiest difficulty at the slowest speed, and it's still very hard to keep on top of... though to be fair, that might've been because of DOSbox not throttling the speed correctly. There's no footage of it on original hardware to determine what's right or not!

For all this talk of the characters, none of them are interesting; they might as well be identical! Everyone's a skinny little bastard with twiggy limbs and no musculature, and not even any animalistic features outside of their big misshapen heads!

Foxy Roxy is the only character from this game to make a lasting impression, because 1) she's the only female character and people are willing to overlook her total lack of neck, and 2) there's a shocking drought of furry fighting game sprites, quality be damned.

There's a surprising amount of lore to each of them though, from a long scrolling bio on the character select screen, to even strangely flowery prose in the manual, presented as their reason for fighting and what they seek in life, and what type of player their fighting approach would resonate with. It was very much the style at the time, and I have to wonder if devs in the '90s actually wanted to make a fighting game, so much as someone on staff really wanted to write some character bios.

Speaking of characters, Psycho Kitty is one of the two exclusive fighters added to the 32X and DOS versions, and he looks like he doesn't belong. Where everyone else is pretty generically anthropomorphic, Psycho Kitty is much more cartoony, looking somewhere between Screwball Squirrel and Eek! The Cat. His graphics are totally unlike the rest, looking like he was scanned and digitised, with muddy aliasing that lacks the pixel crispness of the other fighters.

I bring him up because he's quite literally too small and too short to exchange blows with some characters. Like, unless the character is actively clipping into him by walking or attacking, some of his attacks cannot physically land even when he's walking right up to them...! Almost every character's roundhouse kick is the same way, offering way less range and power to the point of total uselessness. Surely that's not common in fighting games, right...?

It's shocking how ugly and unremarkable the roster is for a furry fighting game. You'd think leaning into funny animal Looney Tunes malarkey would be a no-duh, right? Pulling weapons out of hammerspace, bouncing off the walls, all sorts of wild takes -- Psycho Kitty comes closest by being able to run around the boundaries of the screen, but I can't tell what purpose it's meant to serve.

The game leans towards realism in all the strangest places, with backstories steeped in real-world history and politics, and a couple of characters puking every time they get hit. I guess after Clay Fighter, the goofy light-hearted side of fighting games had been cornered, and people were far more invested in something "cool", but this ain't it, my man.

The quality of the art in the game is good, if inconsistent. Each character has an in-game sprite, a character select portrait, a versus profile (only in the console versions?), and an illustration in the manual, and none of them line up 1:1. Karate Croc has sunglassses and weird spindly legs in his sprite, but is much more ordinary looking elsewhere. Psycho Kitty is nude in all his artwork, but has shorts that look crudely drawn onto his sprite. I believe Roxy, Ivan, and Pantha are the only ones who look consistent across the board?

My grievances about the character designs aside (okay one more, Dali Llama's sprite is ugly as sin, motherfucker's manual art looks like a bat, did the designers even know what a llama looked like), the game does look halfway pretty! The backgrounds in particular are beautiful, a variety of animated vistas across the island. The character select screen features a silhouette of each character performing a kata, with silky smooth animation. And some animations are especially lavish, particularly Foxy Roxy's acrobatic aerobics.

It's just a game with its priorities in the wrong places. The '90s was definitely a time of companies going, "we want in on this action!" and proceeding to make an absolute dog's dinner of it, whether they didn't know what they were doing, had no expertise in the matter, or simply weren't enthusiastic about the genre.

Brutal and Rise of the Robots feel like relatives in that they feel designed to make good bullet-points for a presentation, something to wow executives and win over merchandising deals -- playing as every character to unlock their special moves is replay value and longevity, imagine the repeat rental sales! -- but what looks promising on paper just isn't palatable in practise.

It's very light on content, at least the PC version; where the other versions evoke a mystical eastern motif in its soundtrack, this one has only three tracks of thumpin' techno music. The campaign mode is predetermined with no change in who's fought when, and only the 32X or SEGA CD version has a bonus mode, the nebulously titled "Battle" where you seemingly choose a team to try and conquer most of the island -- a fancy set dressing for what's just more 1-on-1 matches. The map is a cute visual at least, reminiscent of Mortal Kombat's tower.

Honestly, I wonder if it should've been a platform fighter. I wouldn't trust these devs with that either, but between its occasional special move built around pushing, stunning, or areas of effect, and the couple of stages with ring-outs (easily the ideal way of fighting Dali Llama), it feels like its foundations would lend itself better to that. I guess what I'm saying is "Rivals of Aether crossover when", welp

I have to respect the game for its presentation and ambition, uneven as it is, but I cannot say with confidence it's good. It's a novelty, a curiosity, but bloody hell, you don't play it for fun, not unless you're looking to revive Saturday Night Scrublords.