150 SNES games reviewed

Day 9

Takeda Nobuhiro Super Cup Soccer /Super Goal 2


I have plainly admitted that on most days its been a case of stick my hand in the box and providing the game is not a game of a genre I have played in the last few days I play it and then talk about it. I did things a little bit differently this time, I actually picked this game out. I didn't pick it out because of the game itself, I picked it out because it represents something I wanted to talk about.

Now days we live in a very much Coke and Pepsi world when it comes to football games, there is Fifa and there is PES and more often than not that's as much choice as you have, one or the other. Now back in the days of the Super Nintendo there was a lot more choice than that, sure there was Fifa and there was International Superstar Soccer (the game which eventually became pro evolution soccer) but there was also a lot of other games. Loads of companies would try there hand at the football genre and this is something I miss. Choice is a good thing and the more options one has when it comes to games the better I feel it is.

So today I have been playing Takeda Nobuhiro Super Cup Soccer by Tose which was published by Jaleco. Or to give it its American name Super Goal 2. The first Super Goal made it to these shores but the second one was only brought out in Japan and America as far as I know (there was at least one further sequel in Japan).
Now in my hour or so of playing I learned a few things one being it ain't so bad, sure the computer seemed to get away with fouling me a lot even in the penalty box without it giving me a free-kick or penalty every time apart from once. I also found it pretty hard to score goals but then I am not the best at these sort of games, the important part is I got in to it, I was enjoying myself and never once did I stop and go boy don't I wish I was playing Fifa, to all intents and purposes this game provided a perfectly entertaining spot of football. There was all the options you'd expect, exhibition, season, penalty practice, you can pick which ever country you want to be, you can choose the formation you play in. Of the pads four face buttons one seems to be a hard shot, one a soft, one a high shot and the other passes to whichever player has pass flashing above his head.



Back in the day this game seemed to get a lot of score on the range of 6 to 7, Nintendo Power gave it 3.1 out of 5. I tend to agree with this basic score range. What do I want you might ask, well I would like it to be a little easier to score but more than anything what I really wanted was a little piazzas, a little bit of flair. I want to hear GOALLLL shouted when some one scores, I want to see a close up of a player screaming Yes or punching the air. I suppose that's one of the problems with having a lot of options it makes you want more. Nowadays when the only choice is largely Fifa or Pes (unless you want a wacky game like Mario Strikers etc) you dont tend to ask for as much maybe that's why both of them can come out every year and ask for £40 with just a handful of new bells and whistles.

I got this game in a bundle of Japanese carts , I think it was 5 carts for £10 and to be honest looking on ebay you can get this game Japanese for £3.60 including post, if you want an American copy it will cost you a little more, around £10.

Day 10



So many games had the word Super stuck on the front, I suppose it is only natural, part of it was a marketing gimmick obviously a way to let people know that this machine was so far beyond the last one that it required that label.

Unfortunately a lot of games didn't live up to there super title, largely I feel it was because some companies felt that they could give you the same experience as they had on the NES with just upgraded graphics thrown on top. Now Super Metroid has the added Super and the added Super graphics but it is so much more than that, every facet of the game, graphics, sound presentation and gameplay have been worked on and polished up to a gleam. I think the game stands as a prime example of what needs to be done to take a successful game from one generation to the next without it becoming a lazy effort to ride on the shoulders of past glory.

The beauty of the game is that you start of with very little power sure you can shoot and move around but there is always something getting in your way an area you cant reach a door you cant open a puzzle you don't quiet have the pieces to solve quiet yet. So you carry on, you do what you can do and you wait you wait until you have something you didn't have before, till you can do things you couldn't do before.



There are also so many secrets so many little extra missile tanks you can get if you just look hard enough. Picking this game up again to have a go in order to write this was a pure pleasure, the most pleasure I have had so far in this exercise. I resisted doing a big game like this though because a lot of you will have played it and even those of you who have not played it will have watched some video or read some article about the greatness of this game. Many other people have said it before probably most of them have done a better job than me. This game to me is a 10 out of 10, I could talk all day but by the end that would still be the point I would end up making.

The price of this game even for cartridge only gets so ridiculously expensive, I only own it because I brought a Pal UK cart of a market back when the gamecube was first coming out, before the price of second hand snes games went through the roof. I actually only spent like £2 on it if memory serves. For once I am not even going to focus on how much this will cost you to track down instead I am just going to say think long and hard about if you need the original cartridge, you can download this game on for example the Wii U for under £7.

Imagine this people are paying £40 for a cartridge of it, yes I think the game is worth £40 but still. If you don't already own a SNES your paying we will say £40 again so this game is costing some people £80 to play.

The game is available on the Virtual consoles of both the Wii and Wii U but for this example I will show you how far £40 can go on the Wii U. I cant remember exact prices and I am not going to look them up I am just going to wing it..   Super Metriod is about £7, you can download that , next I would download Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition this will cost you £12, it is a brilliant game that owes a lot to Super Metriod, it is a Mexican wrestler paranormal themed Metr0dd with a brilliant sense of humour. Trust me when you have finished Super Metriod you are going to want more of the same and this game delivers it with a smile. Then hit the virtual store again for Fire Emblem as it is another brilliant game which if you try to track down real will cost you an arm and a leg here it will just cost you £4.40 at the moment also grab Kirby's dreamland 3 (another snes game) from the virtual console its like £4 at the moment.... Take the £10 you have left and look online, look for sales and pick a random game which looks like a bizarre cult classic in the making, order it and put it away in a draw without ever taking of the shrink wrap because you can bet your butt one day you'll see it on ebay and go Oh my gosh this game is going for crazy money.

Day 11




Championship Pool came out in 1993 and as you can obviously tell from the title it is a pool simulation, it was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy and the Mega Drive.It was developed by Bitmasters and released by Mindscape.

The game is a straightforward, it is a virtual version of pool, in which you can play either one off game, tournaments, play multiplayer or even just practice. Now I like the presentation on this game, it offers you what looks like a wealth of choice and options but it also has a layer of style. Your opponents are represented by little pictures, you get to see the coin toss for who goes first etc but once you actually start playing looks wise there is nothing to seperate this from any budget pool game you could pick up on the live markets of various device stores.

In the past I don't remember there being a whole lot of games based on either pool or snooker at least not on consoles, the truth is I hadn't even played this one when I was a kid. I brought this game for £3.50 with free postage from ebay purely for this thread, I did own a pool game when I was a megadrive/snes owner but it was Side Pocket on the Megadrive and I never looked for another one as that always filled my pocketing needs. When I try to compare this in my mind to side pocket well then side pocket wins, but I cant really be sure if its a fair competition having not played side pocket in ten years maybe I am remembering it through the eyes of a child.



The main thing that annoys me about championship pool is that it seems to be very unforgiving even on your first opponents, you break pocket a ball take a shot pocket another ball and then you miss. You would think that you would watch your opponent take there shots and then when they screw up you would be put back in control, but no that's not quiet how it works. Basically someone decided that watching the computer play would be boring or something so instead they've made it so you screw up, it says its the computers go, you get a screen saying that the computer has had its go and now its your turn again. You have a look and the computer has pocketed 4 balls, 4 balls which you have no idea how many shots it took it to pocket, 4 balls you dont feel you could have got given 6 shots due to were they lay on the table the last time you saw them. So the computers fortune seems to almost border on an unholy pact with the devil and you have no way of seeing how they achieved this herculean pool feat and just have to shrug and go OK. Problem is you then pot another ball and then miss then you get a message saying the computer took its shots and won the game you loose, you don't even get to see the winning shot.  For me this just makes me feel very disconnected from it all... I know that in a lot of games everything is decided by random dice throws or some form of statistical probability matrix but when you can see it happening you kind of forget this and get drawn in to the magic of it all.

I would rate this game 4 out of 10... It might have got better out of me back in the day but now days there are so many pool or snooker based games you could try. Looking on line it seems like the going rate for it cart only Pal is about £8, it goes for more and sometimes you see it for less, I even managed to get my cart for £3.50 with free postage.. So if you have a SNES and dont have many games it wont break the bank, I am not saying my 4 out of 10 is a concrete score, read the good and the bad sides and see what you think about them, it might not annoy you like it does me

Day 12 

 

Wing commander.

Not sure how many of you will have heard of Wing Commander, its a long running franchise which started out with the original on the PC which was then ported to various systsms including the SNES, hence me talking about it.

Wing Commander can  basically be called a space combat simulation. It wasn't the first game of its type really but it was unique with its branching mission tree, complex characters and attempt at a cinematic style story. You start as a rookie pilot aboard the  Tiger's Claw, before you start blowing stuff up you get to walk around the ship, talk to other pilots, talk to the bartender etc. There is a lot of stuff that is there purely to try and make your adventure seem realm for example you can enter the barracks were you will see other pilots sleeping, you will see and hear water dripping in to a bucket on the floor and you can open your locker to see your shirt and see what rank you currently are , what ,medals you have.



Once you visit the breathing room then that's when things really start, first you attend your breifing were your told what your mission will entail, who your co-pilot will be this is all done with a mix of text, graphics and animation. Once this is over you get to see animation of you running to your ship in your gear with exciting music playing to get you pumped up ready for battle. You start out heading to check points to investigate them and its not long until you meet the vicious feline Kilrathi. In the first mission you'll have to fly through an asteroid belt and destroy several small lots of Kilrathi before making your way back to your base ship. The best part is if you die you get to watch your own funeral which contains more animation and text than some games bother with for an ending when you've completed the whole game and attained everything possible.

I found that the game works quiet well at drawing you in to the plot, making you want to see how the story unfolds, in a very short space of time you begin to form opinions on the other pilots you forget that there all drawings with AI attached and begin to go  Bossman is cool but I cant stand that Iceman. With the fact that there is a chalk board on which you can check your kills against other pilots kills it can become quite competitive. There are times that you can almost forget your on a game you will get so into it.

The downsides of the game are in my opinion so few and so slight that it is hard to pick real fault, there are more things you can do than there are controls on a SNES pad but they got around this by means of tricks were you hold one button while pressing another to do something totally different from what that button would normally do.

This game must have done quiet well on the SNES in the day, maybe because there wasnt a lot of stuff like it. It did so well that a PC expansion pack was turned in to a second wing commander SNES game (Wing commander the secret missions and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi was ported to the SNES (it was never released due to financial projections and a drop in SNES sales by the time it was finished unfortunately). The sad thing is that the original Wing Commander on SNES had been handled by Mindscape on behalf of Origin and what happened was that they tried there best to recreate the PC game on a SNES, Origin handled the second one themselves and apparently went to great lengths to tailor it to the SNES to build it from the ground up as a version that would best appeal to Nintendo players



I would rate Wing Commander as a Solid 8 out of 10. I have owned my copy since I was young and it was the start of  a brilliant adventure, I happily brought wing commander the secret missions and then when I found out that Wing Commander 3 was coming to Playstation and it had Mark Hamill of star wars fame in it I nearly exploded. I had a look online at prices for this game and you can get it pal for like £10 sometimes it is even boxed for that price, so really you cant go wrong, the only possible thing worth pointing out is that you can get the PS1 Wing commander 3 complete for the same price and as this is a bit more advanced if you own a Playstation you might decide that 3 is in fact a better starting point for you. All of the Wing Commander games are basically linked but they all tell more or less self contained stories so there is no real issue with dipping in to the series at any point.

Back in the Super Nintendo's day there was so many platformers, so may beat em ups and so many sports games the real beauty of Wing Commander was and still is that there is so very little on this platform like it, sure we have faster arcade style stuff like StarFox and then there are the first person shoot em ups like R-Type but actual tactical space combat like this is not really one of the machines big selling points so it makes it stand out all the more.

Day 13




So you have a game which is basically a vehicle for a real life star, but you find out that he is only a star in your country, no one else knows who he is what do you do?  You could just remove the connection to the star and hope the game sells on its own strengths , you could try and find a person or people famous to the other markets you want to release it in, or you could just add robots, yeah that's what you could do you could just add robots.

This is what happened to Serizawa Nobuo no Birdie Try the Japanese Super Famicom game staring
Japanese Professional golfer Nobuo Serizawa. Nobuo Serizawa was replaced with Eagle the robot and the game got the name MecaRobot Golf because well robot + anything = better doesn't it?

The whole robot thing is a gimmick, and not a good gimmick, not one layered with reasoning but a rubbish palate swap of an idea. Buying this game I had another game in mind and that game was the Neo Geo game 2020 Baseball a game in which you have whole teams of robots playing baseball together with excellent presentation and gameplay. Sure nothing is actually wrong with MecaRobot golf it controls in a similar way to most golf games with pressing buttons at the right time in accordance to a mete, there are a decent number of holes but the robot thing serves no purpose at all. You don't even play as a robot your a human trying to beat the robot. I have read notes that there is some story to this game that in the world in which this game exists humanoid robots are considered to be second-class citizens, there rights are limited and one of the things they are not allowed to do is participate in golfing tournaments, so a rich benefactor purchases Eagle and builds all of the golf course for him to play against the robot on. This story must have just been manual fodder though as I never got any of that from playing it. All I got was Im playing as a boring generic man against a poor transformer sprite for no real reason at all.



Other than the weirdness of its birth there is nothing to much I can say about the game, the musics fine the graphics are decent if not amazing and the game plays fine, its just another average 5 out of 10 game.. don't get drawn in by the robots. I spent £3 on getting my cart and that includes postage.. It doesn't come up for sale that much over here as its an American import that never saw release here and well in Japan it came out but with the title I have given above, if you do go for it on the rare occasions it surfaces it never seems to go over £10 … heck after buying mine I saw a boxed copy that was a bit beaten and battered for £8

Day 14



Its funny how sometimes all you need to see is a companies name on a box and its enough to get you excited in fact its sometimes enough to make you buy something on the spot with no real research. Back in the PS1 days I remember a lot of people would feel totally safe in just picking up anything with the Square logo on. Now for me a company who I have always rather Liked is Taito. They made a lot of great games back in the day so the sight of there name on a cart is cause for a hopeful smile.

Some of you might have heard of the following name   Sonic Blast Man. For those of you who ued to go to the arcades as Kids you might remember this name it was the name of a pretty siable arcade cabinet which came with boxing gloves and a punching pad. You would play the game by trying to punch the pad as hard as you could when it told you to. I remember it started with you punching a thug who was trying to assault a Lady and if you got to the end you were trying to punch a meteorite away before it could strike the earth.



I loved this game I would hunt high and low for it in arcades up and down the coast. Apparently in March 1995 Taito recalled Sonic Blastman machines due to reports that some players had sustained injuries while playing the game. Although I have to cry BS on this one, you wore gloves and you punched a well padded sensor. Sure I have seen people injure themselves in connection to the Sonic Blastman machine but these were idiots who were bare handed punching it and had no real idea of how to punch it or worse. I once saw a guy try to run and fly kick the pad in an arcade, he miss judged it and landed on a very painful part of his body as it made contact with the corner of an old operation wolf machine. Yet in America Taito had  to pay a fine of $50,000  for failing to disclose these ''injuries''.

When I heard as a kid that there was going to be a Snes verion of Sonic Blastman my mind went nuts...how could they turn it into a snes game?  It would cost the earth if it came with boxing gloves and a usable sensor pad , plus I could imagine it would be a PR nightmare as one child punched another child while missing the sensor or punched the TV. (What I saw in my mind happening was basically what we all saw upon the Wii's release with all of the remote related accidents, newspaper stories etc). I kind of expected them to go down the old joystick waggling sports games sort of path, where you'd have to bang buttons to fill up a meter or something but then I stopped and thought well that would be awful. The arcade game was very short and was fun purly because of the novelty factor, 5 levels of banging joypad buttons to fill a meter to punch something would have been an awful Idea for a £40 cartridge based home game

The Super NES version I actually a walk along beat 'em up.Sonic Blastman's mission is still to save the Earth but this time it is from all manner of street gangs, terrorists, aliens and robots. The fight starts on a construction site but your soon moving from place to place and its nicely varied for a game of its type.



One down point is that the game is only a one player game much like the original Final Fight was on the Snes. There is only one character as well Sonic Blastman himself which feels a little limiting. As in all walk along beat 'em up's the game consists of defeating the enemies on the screen before continuing walking to the right to face more until you complete the stage. Sonic Blastman can do all of the usual moves for a game of this type he can punch, jump, and grab a hold of enemies. When he approaches his enemies, he is able to grab them from here he can shake them and throw them , or he can unleash a series of rapid punches on them, what he does depends upon the direction  you hold on your joypad.
The bonus levels are an adaptation of the arcade version of the game which is a neat little touch for fans. Obviously they have been converted to be played with your fingers instead of your fists, there not bad (I am still glad they didn't use them for the basis of a whole game though) .

The best thing about the games graphics are the large sprites, they are big and colorful and will remind you of arcade and Neo Geo games to an extent. The backgrounds are more or less what you expect to see in a background on a city neighborhood, factory, and sewer, so there functional but not thrilling. I would argue though that as you get further through the game they become more interesting and seem to have more little details hidden here and there is there.

The music sounds like some kind of jazz elevator music fusion but I kind of like it, I think it suits the game well. The sound effects are pretty decent and give it a good comic book feel you also hear Blastman say little sound bites like  “Take that!”. Overall I think it works.
I would say this is one of the better walk along beat em ups on the system, sure a two player would be nice and its absence along with a few other little things stop me from calling this game perfect but for me its a good 8 out of 10. I think thanks to the big sprites and the simple but fun gameplay this game has aged a lot better than some of the stuff I have been playing, having a go now I enjoyed it as much now as back then.

The game came out in all regions but I have never seen a pal copy in the flesh in my life, not now, not back when released. My copy is a Japanese cartridge which I have had since I was young, I am not sure where I got it, I just remember being very excited to get it. Looking around you might be able to grab a Japanese copy for between £10 to £25 if your lucky, but every time I have seen an American copy its been ridiculous money like £60 or more, and I am still to see a pal copy for sale.

Day 15

You cant talk for to long about the Super Nintendo without talking about the megadrive. Most people when I was young would have one or the other, I was one of the exceptions to this rule. I got a megadrive at first and then latter I got a Snes. I like to think this made me less biased, I was willing to see the strengths of both machines, willing to recognize good games on both platforms.



The Snes game I played today to review was Taz-mania. The game featuring Taz the Tasmanian devil (yes the one from Warner Bros bugs bunny cartoons and latter his own show Taz-Mania). 

This was one of the cases were games bearing the same name came out for both Super Nintendo and Megadrive more or less around the same sort of time frame, but were actually tottally different games developed by different studios. Sometimes this turned out for the best because it meant both machines got games tailored to there own strengths as opposed to a game being made for one then ported to the other or one simply being made taking the limitations of both platforms in to account. Taz Mania on the megadrive was a 2D side-scrolling platform/adventure game which was developed by Recreational Brainware and published by SEGA. Tamania on the SNES was a very different beast and it was made by Sunsoft.

So in Snes Taz-mania in each level Taz must race against time to grab and eat a set number of kiwi birds, a number which if he does not manage to consume will see you loosing. Enemies will attempt to stop Taz by running over him or bumping into him. In all of the level's you run up the road in a fashion a little bit like a car game, you run you jump and you spin in an attempt to catch up to the birds needed while avoiding all perils. The graphics are nice and bright with a big Taz sprite who is full of character, this instantly makes you want to like the game but once you've played for awhile you find that it all feels rather soul-less. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think one is the fact that the controls feel very floaty, I never felt like I was properly in control of Taz, if I managed to catch the birds or not seemed to be based more on luck than any level of skill I did or did not possess. Now any game which makes you feel like your winning or loosing based on your level of luck is off to a bad start because its only going to make you bored even quicker. Add to this the fact that every level in the game is the same, they are all just running up the road looking for birds, sure more gets thrown in rivers to jump extra enemies but it all still feels the same and it all feels like it relies on luck.



Megadrive owners got a platform game, it wasn't the best platform game in the world it scored very highly back in the day, I am talking around 80% but...in retrospect I am not sure that it is in fact that good, to me its more of a 75% kind of game, a good but forgettable game but still at the time it seemed so much better than the SNES game.

You can see why Sunsoft avoided the platformer route and went for something original, something different, it was a brave decision but one that I just don't think pays off. If this bird eating racing had  served as just one style of play in the game, or had been an almost Sonic 2 style bonus level interspersed with platforming it would have been a lot better.

If I had to give SNES Taz-Mania a score I guess it would have to be 3 out of 10. It is perfectly playable its just not very fun, it doesnt have much to bring you back to it. Sure some people would argue that it deserves more because it has good graphics and technically there is not enough wrong for it to deserve a score this low, but lets face it games are supposed to be fun, there supposed to draw you in and make you want to spend your time on them and if they fail to do this then they just fail in general.

I paid £5 for an NTSC American Cart of this game, you can get either a British or American one usually for around £8, heck ive seen a fully boxed pal copy online for £13 before. I cant recommend anyone spend anywhere near £8 for it though to be fair. Its not how bad this is, It is how good some of the other things you could spend your cash on are. If you have a Megadrive you can get a boxed Pal copy of the megadrive version of Tazmania starting from about £5 and this would be cash much better spent.

I was inspired by your post to give that game a go again, on emulator. It was pretty rubbish actually, but the concept was ok, it was just a bit boring.

Yeah that was my main gripe with it the fact its simply boring...

Thanks for commenting Wolvie  its nice to know someones reading

I've tried a couple of games now, but both only for five minutes each, so I'm intrigued, but would never become a collector like you. I'm interested to find out what games are going to be coming up!

I have mentioned before that when it comes to Football games back in the snes days there was a wide selection as apposed to todays simple choice of Fifa or PES, so I thought that it was about time I looked at another one. So I took a look at Super J league Soccer which was made by Hudson Soft... Your most likely to have heard of Hudson  due to there most popular series of games Bomberman or .due to the fact that they made the first 8 Mario Party games for Nintendo
On a side note Hudson Soft ceased to exist as a company in March of 2012 and was merged with Konami Digital Entertainment, although Konami intend to carry on using the Hudson name.

Now the first thing I am going to say about Super J League is that it has a wonderful intro, but the truth is you cant describe what this game does when left to its own devices as an intro there is no story, what we really have here is an arcade attract mode. Basically some lively football music with a nice chant running through it is played while the game goes from showing you a bit of in game footage, to pictures of clapping fans, to the games name and then back to small what can best be described as football comic strip pictures, it almost reminds me of one of those brilliant Amiga software demonstration discs you used to get, the type which would show you pictures graphics and music just for the purposes of entertainment. If you cant tell this is something I love about this game



Now Originally I didn't realize that what I had been playing was a Common game, a game which came out in England with some minor alterations, you might have heard of it in fact , it was called Virtual Soccer. Basically all they did was put in the English language and change the teams from Japanese first division teams to national teams. In the process of buying games for this series of reviews I very nearly went and brought Virtual Soccer which would have meant I had wasted my money buying the same game twice. Something I did notice was that the game has a speed option and you can play it at normal speed or fast speed, but even normal speed is quiet fast and this is something I like, you can choose to play from 2 views I chose the overhead view which made it look like a game I am sure most of you will have heard of  ''Kick Off''

I found it hard to shoot but then I am usually bad at these kinds of games, passing didn't seem to go quite where I wanted it to go, but unlike the last football game I played the ref at least seemed fair calling for yellow cards when I was fouled as well as when I fouled the computer. When you score there is the satisfying goallll I wanted to hear in the last game but still I dont think enough fuss is made for my taste you can see the little man is celebrating but I still want to see it more up close, I want to see players punching the air or hugging each other in a cartoon panel or well something

I am glad this game exists because I love having a wide variety of choice and there are things I really like about this game, the presentation, the speed the goallll sound byte after you score. I guess I would give this game a 5 out of 10, despite it giving me some of the things I Said I wanted to see in a football game during my last football game review it was a step forward in some areas and two steps backwards in others.

Fortunately for anyone who would like to try this game the English pal cart can be got from ebay for about £3 including postage... I paid £2.25 for the Japanese version including post. This does raise an interesting point about importing though, the fact that games can change from region to region so sometimes some research is useful to make sure your not buying an altered version of something you already own.

So I guess I am still searching for my perfect 16bit football game.

Day 17

In 1991 a game began to appear in arcade up and down the country, in fact it began to appear around the world. This game was not a brand new piece of intellectual property no in fact it was a sequel and strangely enough it was a sequel to a game no one had really asked for a sequel to, a sequel to a game that most people hadn't even played.

Nintendo scored a massive triumph over their main rival Sega in 1992 when they managed to secure the first console port of this game. They knew it would  make sales of there Super Nintendo hit new heights. When the first previews started to pour in there was one thing they would say, one rough statement that would be in there amongst the praise amongst the excitement and that was ''This conversion looks to be arcade perfect’'. In all honesty this wasn't quite true, the conversion was not arcade perfect but it was so close that without the arcade machine and home version side by side and a well trained eye the difrences were to slight to care about given how fun the game could be.

I am sure by now some of you will have realised what game I am talking about and if not then I am sure it will soon dawn on you. This game was responsible for the sudden increase of a whole genre and just as Nintendo hoped it did cause its machine to fly off shelf's. I remember the pure desperation kids at my school had when it came to trying to get there hands on it, copies had sold out locally, adults had even resorted to buying new super Nintendo's which were bundled with a copy of the game. A lad brought an American NTSC copy of the game into school, just the cartridge no box, no manual and when he removed it from his school bag and laid it on the table people just wanted to look at it, to touch it, you would have thought that he had produced the holly grail from his small brown satchel bag.




 I am of course talking about Street Fighter 2 , The world Warrior. Having grown up playing on the atari 2600 and the spectrum the NES and Master System having 2 buttons seemed revolutionary to me. So the fact that the Snes had 6 main buttons and all 6 of these would be used in Street fighter 2 almost blew my mind. This small little point made it feel like an arcade game in your home. I had of course played street fighter 2 in the arcade and I have to admit back then that when I got to play the snes version the subtle differences were not picked up by me at all.



So now I will talk about the game. So there are 8 playable characters you pick one and then you fight the other 7, get past these and you have to take on the 4 boss characters who are not playable in this version. The graphics are still decent, I think they've aged quite well, the music though, I absolutly love the music. I think Capcom just ticked every single box, there are elements in the music which seem to remind you of the country and character the tune belongs to but then all of them seem to be upbeat and full of energy, they also seem to speed up in tempo in order to follow the action going on around them and this effects you inside on a deep level, the music gets faster you feel you can get faster, you feel you can take out your enemy even quicker even more stylishly. With 8 selectable difficulties there should be one which is just the right side of challenging for more or less anybody. With a little effort the special moves are easy enough for anyone to learn and once you know the sequences they work pretty much every time unlike some of the other games which tried to copy this game.

Special mention needs to be made to the bonus level smashing the car up, yes it is somewhat borrowed from Final Fight but it is so satisfying. This game has a lot of re-playability first there is the fact you can try to see the ending for each character but then with the vast amount of difficulty settings on offer you can keep upping the difficulty giving yourself a new goal to strive for and the skills you gain in doing this can then be used to show your friends who the boss is in multi-player.

I would give this game a nice solid 8 out of 10. I have owned my cart of it for so long that I cant remember how much I paid, in fact I have two carts one Pal one American.... this is one of the games were a lot of people have a lot to say about the Pal conversion, the fact that it is slower and that it has fairly sizable boarders, personally it doesn't bother me, unless you run the two versions side by side you'll never notice. Should you buy this if you own a Snes? Well this is where things get a little tough. It is the first of 3 versions released for the machine, all of which have made there way to the Virtual console service. If you do decide you want this version and on cartridge then it will set you back between £5 to £10 which is well worth it but you might want to stop and consider all of your options first (If you own a ps3 or xbox 360 then for £15 to £20 you can get the Ultra version of Street Fighter 4).

Day 18


EA sports its in the game, or so some of the old games used to say. I never quite got this, I didnt know what they really meant, I presumed that they meant that EA sports games had great playability a certain je ne sais quoi (a special quality which defies explanation). I never got this though myself, sure from time to time I would enjoy a EA Sports title but most of the time I saw them as being a celebration of style over substance, it was less about what was really ''in the game'' and what they could put around the gameplay, what they could add to the presentation which would make there game seem like the A* football game or A* American football experience.



This might have seemed a slightly strange start to this review when I tell you that the game I have been playing is ESPN Speed World and that the game was made by a company called Park Place Productions and was published by Sony, youll see what I mean with the rest of this review though. The game was released in 1994 exclusively for North America  as it was based on a TV series of the same name that was shown over there. The game has an official ESPN license but despite being about racing Sony didn't gain a NASCAR license, so your racing NASCAR Winston Cup stock cars but the real-life drivers names and likenesses are not here. At the start of the race though your met with some digitized footage of ESPN sports broadcaster Dr. Jerry Punch which I am sure back in the day looked and sounded amazing but to my eyes now it looks rather poor.

Everything seems to be there, the tracks the cars the commentary, its only when you start driving that you realise something is really wrong. You don't feel like your in control of a car at all, you feel like your in control of a skidding line. Sure with some practice you can start to score wins but it never feels fun it feels like a chore from start to end. I have literally have had more fun on racing games on the 48K spectrum than on this game. This is when you start to realize that people would have realized this game was a pile of trash much quicker if it wasn't for the license and the fancy digitized speech and graphics glued on to this basic mess. It is a real lesson in how video game companies tried to polish a turd with licenses and a bit of fancy presentation.



I spent £5 on this game including postage. I basically brought it because I was looking for cheap games I hadn't played or really heard of before. I figured that I would take a shot at this game, and in honesty I regret it. If you want to try this game either because you don't believe me or you like bad games there are a few important things to consider. The first is that It was only released in the USA so you'll need either an NTSC machine, a modified machine or an import converter,  and the second is that your more than likely going to have to import it from America (buy it from an ebay seller over there) This means that even if you can get it cheap there's going to be a fair bit of postage, a pain in the butt weight and a larger risk of it getting lost in transit, or the post services trying to charge you some kind of import tax on it etc. I strongly Recommend you don't bother as I rate this game as a 3 out of 10 at best, its certainly one of the worst ones I have played for this so far.

Day 19



Pinball Fantasies is a pinball game which was originally made for the Commodore Amiga  by Digital Illusions CE, it was a sequel to there earlier pinball game Pinball Dreams (which was also ported to the Super Nintendo) . A further sequel was released in 1995 called Pinball Illusions but this never made it to the SNES, a remake of it called True Pinball did eventually make it to the ps1 and Saturn though and some of you may have played it.

This game has four different themed tables and they are as follows Party Land is a table based on an amusement park, Speed Devils is a table focused on car racing, Billion Dollar Gameshow is a table based on the idea of a game show and then there is Stones 'N Bones which is a horror themed table based on a haunted house. The sound is functional, the controls although basic serve there purpose well and the graphics are bright and colourful. You would think that it sounds like I like this game well I kind of did like it on its original platform the Amiga.



The problem is that the game when it was on the Amiga was on three disks and was about £10 as far as I can remember. So once you take these 3 disks and plant them on to a Snes cart they are suddenly selling it for £40 and if anything it was a slight step backwards as the SNES did not seem to have as large a colour palette as the Amiga. 

I suppose when trying to rate this there are several ways to look at it, I could mark it down for being a port from a none Nintendo machine with no real effort to play to the machines strengths. I suppose though you need to look into what peoples options were at the time both on the Super Nintendo and on its direct competitor the megadrive.. Well on the Snes you have Pinball fantasies  Pinball dreams and Super Pinball (I have never actually seen or played this one) and thats pretty much it for Pal pinball games, if you look abroad at Super Famicom games there is one called Battle Pinball which people tend to speak very highly about, there is also one called Jaki Crush which tends to receive mixed reviews, Super Pinball had a sequel that didnt make it here. As you can see though your options as a snes gamer were very limited when it came to pinball.

The megadrive had Psycho Pinball, Sonic Spinball, CrueBall, Dragons fury, Dragons revenge all of them seem to be tailored much more to the hardware. I would argue that if you want to look into retro pinball games your much better looking at the Mega Drive or the PS1 (There was an excellent import only Power Rangers Pinball game on the PS1).


I would have to rate Pinball Fantasies as a 6 out of 10... its not a bad game, in fact it is at times quiet fun, but it doesnt have any real lasting value. If you have no one to play against no one to beat or to challenge to beat your high scores it all becomes shallow and pointless far to quickly.  You can get a Pal copy of the game Cartridge only for about £10, boxed complete copies seem to settle around the £40 mark

Aren't all Nascar games a chore?? 

That pinball game looks awful, but I remember playing Sonic Spinball from that era and really enjoying that. I think the current Zen Pinball is really a pinnacle in virtual pinballing. I just wish I was better at it!

I can remember playing so many of these games. Nice trip down memory lane.

The main issue with the pinball game is that it was an Amiga port.... a port with no real effort it was on 3 disks and they basically got slapped on to a cart with as little effort as possible. I think the SNES could have had a very good Pinball game made for it

I think most of the Super Nintendo's best games are ones that were made specifically for the machine or at the very least went through a process of being tailored to its strengths.

I ordered a few more carts that I am awaiting to arrive but the problem is with how much people want for the games now even Cart only....  I spent £35 and have the following coming   UN Squadron (pal), Powerdrive (Pal), Power rangers Zeo racers (NTSC American), Micky Mouse's Magical Adventure 2 (NTSC Japanese), Donkey kong country 2 (NTSC Japanese)

Day 20



Cannon Fodder can best be described as an action-strategy shooting game. It was developed by Sensible Software and originally published by Virgin Interactive for the Amiga in 1993. It got rave reviews across the board from pretty much every Amiga Magazine at the time despite also causing controversy with its humorous take on war. Virgin soon ported he game to other home computer systems as well as to the following consoles Jaguar,Mega Drive,SNES and 3DO. 
With my complaints about some other games being ported to the SNES people could expect me to get a bug in my butt about this game, after all the controls pretty much show themselves to be mouse controls pushed on to a pad (play if for just 1 minute and you will see what I mean, you move a cross-hair on the screen and then press a button to move to that point or another button to shoot in that direction.)

The player directs troops through numerous missions, battling enemy infantry, vehicles and installations. The game is incredibly playable sure the controls might be a little strange, it might also seem a little basic and maybe in some ways it is, but it just works. What the graphics lack in quality they make up for by having an amusing cuteness to them.
Cannon Fodder doesn't feature much music. There is no music during the missions themselves, instead these are accompanied by sounds such as  bird cries, and of course gun fire explosions and the screams of the dying There are a few tunes that play during the briefing and debriefing screens though and these really help to set the scene. 



Cannon Fodder's greatest strength is its dark humorous tone, this is what made some people originally love it but also caused a lot of controversy. Its creators always talked about how they intended it to convey an anti-war message, which some reviewers and fans at the time recognised and which to me seems obvious now. The problem is that certain newspapers and solider related charities had real issues with it, they thought that it was making war in to too light a subject and taking the piss out of those who had suffered and died in war.

Cannon Fodder is definitely a game that I would refer to as a classic and unlike some other games from this time period it is still very playable. That is in part down to its simplicity but you also need to thank its dark sense of humour. This was a rare treat of a game in the fact that there was a message hidden behind the action, back when other games just wanted to sell themselves to you as mindless action this game had a point.

 Every time a gravestone appears on the hill, every time you have lost a man you cant help but mourn for his death the  soldiers are not just a group of faceless numbers, by giving them names, by allowing them to rank up and by a cross being added to the hill for every loss you start to view them as people, you have favorites, not many other games achieve this with the exception of Fire Emblem and Xcom. I am going to have to give my first decimal score here. I cant decide between 7 and 8 so  7.5 it is.

I was incredibly lucky with this game, I went to a retro store one which is usually stupidly expensive (they charge £15 for the old NES super mario bros and duck hunt cart despite having 3 copies in stock for one) and all they wanted for this was £4. Having looked online you can get the Cart of this game in pal for about £13 or if you want to spend a little more you could get a boxed copy for around £25. Important things to note though are is that this game was available on everything you might be able to get a cheaper version on another format some of them such as the Amiga version have little things missing from the snes version (the title song has amusing lyrics).

Loved this game. I had it on the Amiga CD32.

Day 21



Exhaust Heat (released in America as F1 ROC: Race of Champions) was a racing game developed by the Seta Corporation for the super Nintendo Entertainment system. It was released in 1992.

The game had to work against the odds to get noticed having come after Nintendo's own F-Zero. F-Zero had pulled out all of the mode 7 graphical tricks that it could and had an excellent sound track and even more importantly a great sense of speed, at first in comparison to this Exhaust Heat seemed to be seen by most people as something of a let-down.

Initially you will notice that the graphics are not up to the standards of F-Zero and the game doesn't feel anywhere near as fast. Once you've progressed and completed a few races in the career mode though things start to change. You earn cash and this cash gives you access to more powerful engines, better tyres etcetera. You soon learn that with the right modifications and settings your car can move like greased lightning.  



The career mode in this game is excellent, its less of a flash and bang racer which you will feel happy to spend 5 minutes on now and then and more of an all out consuming racer, this is its big strength. This is not to say that the game is boring because it is far from it. To compare this to a game I previously reviewed ESPN speed world, in speed world the minimum number of laps you can do is 10, and quiet frankly after a race or two ten laps begins to feel like an eternity in some kind of realm of complete boredom. Here in Exhaust Heat my first proper race was 3 laps, 3 laps which actually felt exciting. In the first race I managed to come 4th despite the fact I thought I had put in a really good effort, for a second this was annoying as I didn't really see how I could have done much better  but then I remembered another game I had played not long ago and that was Moto Gp 2013 on the Playstation Vita, in that game it had taken a fair amount of time for me to get in to the game and some effort before getting a 1st . This is the kind of game Exhaust heat is, you need to put in the effort but sometimes you have to slog along a little working till you can afford the upgrades till you can learn every curve of the track its not an easy game but it is a very rewarding one.
If I was going to take a quick look at this games negative points I would have to say that it looks very plain. There is  little variety in the backgrounds and  the cars themselves are small and lacking in detail. Add to this the fact that  there is no in-game music , which is a shame as the music featured in the game in other places is brilliant. The Grand Prix mode does not just last for one season  you seem to be able to carry on as long as you want. I believe 

On thing to bear in mind is that the game hasn’t aged  particularly well, its still playable but it now looks very much like a dog, I would advise you not to let this get to you though, if you can get past the surface layer to the real depth of the game I think your in for a treat.

I would give this game a Nice solid 7 out of 10. There are copies of this game Cartridge only online for as little as £5 including postage, you can get fully boxed copies for under £15 if you want to go full on. At £5 anyone who has a SNES should seriously consider giving this game a bash.

Day 22



Super Strike Gunner or Strike Gunner S.T.G as it was known in America is a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up game originally made by the company Athena it released in the arcades byTecmo (in 1991) it was then portered to the Super Nintendo this version was published/distributed in the UK by Activision.

There was quite a wide supply of shooters back in the 16bit days and although the Megadrive seemed to end up with more of them the SNES wasn't exactly left short. This game though seems to have been forgotten by a lot of people. When people talk about shooters on the SNES they tend to talk about Axlay, Gradius III, Super R-Type, or U.N. Squadron, very rarely will people mention Super Strike Gunner.



In super Strike Gunner you take  control of a high-tech jet, called the "Strike Gunner" (hence the games name), and like most games of this type you face wave after wave of enemies, in this case they range from helicopters, to jets, to tanks and so on. In this case you fly up the screen vertically with stuff generally coming down at you (some things will come from the side of the screen or the bottom corners but most stuff tends to fly down towards you). When you start each level though you have a large choice of  special weapons, there is a catch though, you can only choose one weapon to use and you can only use it for one level. Among the choices are heat seeking missiles and super stronger lasers there is even a Mega-beam Cannon, which seems to just blow the living hell out of anything in more or less one shot.



You have a special power bar, this decreases when you use your special weapon. Some of the less powerful special weapons will drain the bar very slowly but then there are others which will just make the bar disappear in seconds heck one weapon depletes the bar in one. There is however a friendly aircraft which comes to you usually several times a level and drops things to help you, it can drop power ups which speed you up, increase the power of your ships main weapon, or fill up your special weapons bar.
 
Over the years I have seen this game receive all kinds of reviews and scores... back in the day I think it got score generally around the sort of 65% mark. Some called it a mediocre shooter complaining that it was slow-paced and repetitive, with levels that felt too long and had predictable enemy waves. Yet others seemed to love the boss fights and the super weapons.  I will say that the backdrops are very basic but I found the game rather enjoyable. In a world which has seemed to want all shooters to turn in to full on bullet hell ballets I found this game rather refreshing. I am going to go so far as to say I think people have been a little harsh to it over the years and have slightly under rated it. The game is not an all time classic but its a decent game so I would have to give it a 7 out of 10.

I do recognise that there have been better shooters on the SNES but this game not bad at all.

If you want to try it you tend to see copies of it come up now and again for around £10, if anything it seems to be a game which is much cheaper and easier to pick up in pal. My copy was got from a market 5 years ago for around £3 but the days of walking back from markets with 3 or 4 SNES games seem to be long gone.

Day 23

Final Fight 





I try to keep games like this that everyone will know to a bear minimum or at least thin them out as much as I can but I kind of felt that I needed to get Final Fight out of the way and not in a bad way. The game was important for a lot of reasons, the fact that it was on the SNES but not the megadrive was one of them this was part of the reasoning behind Sega coming up with the Streets of Rage Franchise. The game touched and effected the whole of the market. I am going to try to talk about it but do my best not to retread over the exact same ground everyone does (this will be hard with how much the game has been talked about).

Final Fight is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up produced by Capcom. Originally it was released as an arcade game in 1989. Final Fight was the Seventh title Capcom made to work with its CPS-1 arcade system board. The CPS-1 worked a bit like the Neo Geo, you had a system board and other smaller boards could be mounted on top of this, the large board was the guts of the arcade unit and the small board held the actual game. I actually own a CPS-1 Board but the only game board I own for it is Pang 3.



The game is set within the fictional Metro City, In the arcade game you get to pick one of three characters—former pro wrestler turned mayor Mike Haggar, his daughter's boyfriend Cody, and Cody's friend Guy. The whole idea of the game is to take down the Mad Gear gang and rescue Haggar's daughter Jessica.
The game originally began development as a sequel to the first Street Fighter arcade game but the genre was switched from a one on one fighting game to a walk along beat 'em up and the title was changed following the success of Double Dragon. This is probably one of the main reasons that Final Fight characters have popped up in Street Fighter.

When the SNES version was released it was in some ways limited, there was only Hagger and Cody Guy had been dropped (although there was a version released in some territories called Final Fight Guy which removed Cody from the game and replaced him with Guy), there was also a level stripped out of the game and then there were some minor changes in connection to policy's Nintendo had for games released on there machines (Female members of Mad Gear were altered to appear male as Nintendo had objections in regards to the ability to violently beat up women even if they were busy trying to knife you to death). None of this broke the game or made a huge difference to how it played, I do think that with some effort they could have squeezed guy in ( I have seen games cheat to free up room by using the same legs or arms for characters before sometimes just colour swapped and I am sure there would have been a way to do something like this to free up a little room). The main thing that people tend to talk about is the fact that the game has no two player mode, which I have to admit is a shame as this was one of the things that made the arcade machine so popular the fact that you could go through the whole game with a buddy. It is not a game breaking deal though as long as you know about it in advance. The Graphics are big, bright and impactful, the music is just as good the only negatives there are cant really be termed negatives with the game and more deficits from the arcade machine.




The game is a great walk along beat em up to play on your own and even bearing this in mind I would have to give it 8 out of 10, however I fully recognise that if you want to play with a buddy or have a friend around you would be better looking at one of its competitors or even one of its sequels (they are expensive though usually).
I have had my copy since I was a kid... I brought it before I even owned a SNES, it was September and I knew I was getting my SNES for Christmas, I already had a cheap converter and Final Fight came up for sale NTSC American in my local games shop a place called Games world for £10. I used to get £5 a week pocket money and £2 a day lunch money So I did what I think most game crazy school kids would do. I took an apple and a bottle of Water to school everyday without my parents knowing and ate these for dinner while pocketing the money waiting for Saturday to come so I could buy Final Fight... Following this kind of logic I had a nice little collection by the time Christmas rolled around.

If you want to buy Final Fight well Pal versions exist but whenever I see them they are crazy money, NTSC American versions crop up for around £15 for a cart. To be honest if you have a Wii U you can download Final fight for £5.50 (the SNES version) If you have a PS3 or Xbox 360 you can get a perfect emulation of the arcade machine for about £6.50 it can be found under the title Final Fight: Double Impact, and for your cash you get both Final Fight and another Capcom game called Magic sword (which was also ported to the SNES).

Day 24

Super Fire Pro Wrestling 3 



Super Fire Pro Wrestling 3 Final Bout was released in 1993 as part of the Fire Pro Wrestling series.  Due to a large number of complaints receive about the game's difficulty, Human released Super Fire Pro Wrestling 3 Easy Type which is actually the version I own. The main difference in it apart from a substantial lowering of the difficulty is the fact that all of the hidden wrestlers are unlocked from the get go. 

The first thing you will notice once you get past the vast screen of Japanese writing which represents your choices you will be met with what I think it is fair to say is a massive list of characters, you will scroll through some of them going, no idea who he is, oh he looks neat and then you'll fall upon  American wrestling stars most of us will likely know such as Hulk Hogan, Sting, Rick Steiner and the Ultimate Warrior. Each wrestler is ranked based on their attacking ability, their defensive ability, and their running speed. There are approximately 60 Wrestlers in total which if you compare this number to other wrestling games back at roughly this sort of time is impressive. Another interesting thing to note is that the original version of this game Super Fire Pro Wrestling 3 Final Bout was the first game worked on by the now famous Suda51
 


The game initially looks quite simple, the graphics are not great  but the game controls well, has all of the moves you'd expect in a wrestling game, punching , grappling, running etc. The game is full of little things which make you warm to it though , I obviously dont have a massive knowledge of 90's Japanese wrestlers but I have picked every single WWF/WWE and WCW star who appears on the rosta, I have been able to work out who they are (there names are in Japanese so this has been done purely based on the fact that they obviously look like who they are supposed to be) and I have played as them, instantly noting that the moves they use are moves frequently used by there real life counterparts. The Warrior does the Gorilla Press, Hulk Hogan does his signature leg drop and so on and so on. There are digitized sounds that come from the wrestlers and cheers that come from the audience members, the music is fitting and overall this adds to the experience. Two of the buttons on your controller are used for strong blows, another button is used for low blows and the other face button makes you run. 

The language is a bit of a barrier it took me a bit of messing around choosing this option and then that option with no idea of what I was selecting, but once I got myself in to career mode it was easy enough to play round after round and make some progress and I have to admit that I was enjoying it. If someone was interested in this game I wouldn't say that it is to heavy going but you need to be the kind of person willing to work around the language barrier.

The score I am giving to this game is 6.5... this score is not an overall mark of the games quality its the mark of how much fun your typical English Super Nintendo fan would have with it, taking in to consideration issues such as having to fiddle with the language barrier, how it has aged etc. I think if you were someone who could read Japanese when this game came out it would have been the absolute mutts nuts it would have been an easy 8 or 9 out of 10.

If your after this well it might be hard.... I have seen a few copies of the regular version of this for around £13 some boxed some cart only, but you'll need a Japanese machine, or a import converter or a modified machine. As for the exact version I have reviewed the easy type version, I haven't managed to find one for sale at the moment. It is an interesting game I would recommend you to read about it, watch videos on it etc  but I think your money in this case is better spent elsewhere either on a more modern wrestling game with all the bells and whistles or something a little easier and cheaper to get on the SNES (for example Exhaust Heat).

Day 25



Ultraman is a fighting game based on the Series,Ultraman: Towards the Future. It was originally released in arcades by Banpresto and Bandai but was then ported to the Super Nintendo (it was also ported to the Megadrive a full two years latter than the SNES but this version only came out  in Japan) 

Yes I knew before I started that it was considered to be legendarily bad, that it was one of the games to own titles such as ''worse game ever'', ''worst game on the Super Nintendo'' and various others which basically amount to say this game is an utter turd. One thing which is annoying about a lot of gamers and even games based media however is the fact that people talk about games like this without ever having played them, much in the way that when you ask most people what's the worst game ever they will throw out answers like ET on the Atari 2600 or Superman64 without ever having seen the cartridge in real life.

So with the above said you will probably get the point that even if a game has been called bad by almost everyone and every media outlet out there I still like to put it in my own cartridge slot or cd draw before I am willing to comment on it. I have played ET, I have played Superman64 and now I have played Ultraman. I would like to be able to tell you that some of its awfulness is just the product of ever expanding urban legends, that people tried to one up each other with tales of its awfulness and in doing so exaggerated some of its issues but unfortunately everything that has ever been said about this is true it is awful.



So to run you through how my time with the game went I will give you a quick explanation. I put the game in and it loaded up the music was OK the presentation wasn't to bad at all but then I got to the gameplay. For those of you who don't know who Ultraman is I will give you a basic idea of what he is, imagine a 1 man power ranger team, where instead of getting in a giant robot if enemies turn big the dude just turns big himself and well that's pretty much all you really need to know. So you see a scene of him growing and then its time to fight. At first you see Ultraman facing off against a monster and you see the power bars with names on under both sides of the screen yours one side the monsters the other and that makes you think ah we are here in the land of street fighter 2 clones again. If only it was a good or even average street fighter clone. 

Ultraman controls like he has some kind of serious impairment the way he moves backwards and forwards is clunky, you can never seem to back off quick enough even though you can do a sort of backwards cartwheel , you can run forward quiet fast. The game makes you realise things which are brilliant in the likes of street fighter 2 which you took for granted could have been far far worse, the jumping in ultra man is controlled with one of the pads face buttons but its so floaty that jump attacks are hardly worth bothering with, in fact the only point to jumping would be to jump over the enemy to gain yourself a bit of breathing room. The other 3 face buttons well one is a punch, one is a kick and the third is your special move button. This is when things got a bit complicated.

On my first go I managed to punch and kick the monster until its energy bar was depleted. This was a chore as there was basically only 2 kinds of punch a straight punch and a uppercut style punch and two kicks a straight kick and a little jumping fancy kick, yes there are no crouching attacks, and different kicks or punches don't seem to happen if you hold back or press the button for longer or anything so basically there are 4 standard attacking moves 6 if you count the fact you can chop or kick while in the air (I say if you can count as these will hardly ever hit anything). So we have finish him showing up written in the enemies depleted energy bar, so I hit him a lot more, and he hits me back lowering my energy, I press the special button and a sort of fireball attack is launched which hits him but doesn't do anything much. 5 minutes latter he has beaten my bar down to zero, do I carry on like he has and wait for him to ''finish me'' no I collapse on the floor and die. So I continue and the same happens again and again and again...

At this point it is safe to say I was very frustrated I knew that I was going to have to do one of two things, I was either going to have to open the manual or I was going to have to dive online. Now something is wrong when you feel the need to run for help during what to all intents and purposes is the first stage of a video game. It turned out that the answer was half way through the manual. There's a meter in between yours and his which shows how much special energy you have and also displays some choices. As you gain more energy you can choose other special moves, you actually have 4 of them and when it says finish him only one thing will kill the enemy and that's to hit them with the 4th special move.

So now with this knowledge in hand I again did battle with the first monster, I wore down his energy bar and then hit him with the move and bam he blew up, job done. I soon learned that the problem is that you need to beat the enemy up quiet a bit to fill your bar so there is basically no point using the special moves apart from to use the 4th one to blow up the enemy, because if you do use the other ones all it will mean is that your dancing backwards and forwards kicking an enemy while it says finish him waiting to gain the needed energy, giving it a chance to kill you.

That is the main problem the enemies have better reach than you do, they also seem to move more quickly than you do and they can kill you by simply depleting your energy bar without having to do any fancy rubbish to see you off. Add on to this the fact that their attacks seem to be very quick and damaging, and you can see your plight. When you win it often is not because of how good you have been its because the random gods of chance shone in your favour. In one match against an enemy he can breath fire at you again and again, as well as hitting you before you can even reach him, then in your next match he can seem to just stand there while you approach and punch him in the face again and again. It just feels less like the enemies have any real AI and that instead some dice are being thrown in the background the results of which tell them to attack, to shoot fire or to just sit there like a lemon.



Apparently there is about 8 monsters in the game but I couldn't get past the 5th one, its reach was just to good , it kept shooting fire and I didn't have the patience to wait for it to keep rolling lemons. Add to this the fact that you get a limited amount of continues , you get about 2 but I did notice myself gaining an extra one due to points/score at one stage.

The Graphics actually in game are rubbish basic backgrounds awful sprites but this could be overlooked if the game wasn't such a sluggish random mess. As it stands I have to give this game 2 out of 10 its basically broken but kind of has some degree of playability hence the fact I haven't given it a 1. It is by far the worse SNES game I have played during this little experiment of mine, and I cant remember playing anything else this bad back in the day. I do own another game which was frequently refereed to as the worst game on the SNES so we will have to wait and see how that measures up.

If you love bad games or your some kind of sadomasochist who is rubbing there nipples at the thought of playing this then I better give you the low-down on how much it costs. My copy was £5 from a charity shop boxed with manual and that still feels expensive, the cheapest Pal copy I could find online was £5.99 but it looked like a bear had attacked the front label, there was a boxed copy or two for £15 but seriously buy some good games with that money instead or if your really that into pain at least save up a bit more and pay a good looking women to whip you or something at least unlike with Ultraman the view will be nice while you suffer.

Day 26




Today's game is Prince of Persia. Prince of Persia  is a fantasy platform game, originally developed by a guy called Jordan Mechner and released in 1989 for the Apple II system. At the time the game was held in high regard people claimed that it represented a great technological leap forward in terms of the quality of animation used in video games. As with most games which do extremely well it was soon ported to just about anything that could cope with it. The SNES version was done by Arsys Software a company set up by former Technosoft staff members, it was published by Masaya in Japan and Konami in both the US and Europe. 

I was thrilled when I originally played a home computer version of this game but the thrill had faded a little bit by the time I played the SNES version. Have you ever played a game and decided that it had the basics down right but that it just lacked something? That there were the bare bones of a classic in place but that the project needed fleshing out ? The graphics are plain but the movement is still impressive. For those who have played the original its important to note that the SNES version is in fact longer, consider it a sort of directors cut/extended cut. Instead of the original 13 levels, this version has 20, in the original you had one hour to complete the game but this has been increased here to two hours due to the added length.



My main gripe with the game is that at times the controls feel kind of sliddy, now were not getting in to awful control territory here like Ultraman but there just not as crisp as I would like them. Often you will need to stop running before you run off a ledge and fall to your doom and you just feel that little bit too skiddy for my liking meaning that often you'll end up turning the air blue as you plummet to your death. The game is also more or less silent and although the moment is impressive there could be a lot more flavour added in to the graphics. When it comes to presentation it just seems like a very bare bones production which is a shame.

There are other games though that came out after this title which I feel used this game as a stepping stone and in doing so managed to offer a much fuller richer experience, you might be better off spending your hard earned money on one of these. (I wont name them as I plan on eventually reviewing one or two of them). I think influences from this game can still be seen in some games today, I think there is a definite case to make that this game was an incredibly important piece of software which helped shape so many titles which followed in its wake, much in the same way as Mario Kart helped to birth seemingly a million character filled go kart racing games in its wake , Prince of Perisa's DNA can be felt in more places than I can name, tunnelling its way through action platformer after action platformer

I would give this game a 7 out of 10, it can be frustrating but it is also incredibly rewarding, every time you play you will get a little bit further, you will solve another puzzle or you will work out where you are supposed to be going just before you die, it has a very strong just one more go quality. 

My copy of Prince of Persia is a loose  Japanese cart which I managed to get for a couple of quid a few years ago, if you really wanted to give this game a going over you would be looking at paying between £15 to £25 depending on how lucky you are and if this game has a box and manual or not... I have seen a few boxed American copies going for as little as £13 if you have a converter or modified or import system.