This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Eeugh. Mortal Kombat games have been at absolute best mediocre, and hadn’t managed to reach those dizzying heights with its 2-D incarnations of late. Even so, this is a particularly awful translation that seems to have been either rushed out the door without playtesting or programmed by someone who hasn’t played a fighting game before.The basic formula has remained unchanged for years, with you taking control of a warrior to go up against the domination schemes of some evil entity, normally Shao Khan. For the purposes of this review, lets pretend that the recent Mortal Kombat : Deadly Alliance doesn’t exist, on the basis that that’s actually a pretty decent game but I’ve no inclination to go into the differences at the moment.

MK:Advance is one of the earlier titles, but we’ve seen that the machine can ably pull off SNES translations so this shouldn’t have been an impossible job to pull off. This is essentially a version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which instantly limits its appeal. MK always worked best as a simple, uncomplicated fighter and reached its peak with Mortal Kombat 2, in my opinion anyway (and it’s a not uncommon one). The versions of MK3, and eventually MK Trilogy tried bolting on various additions like a ‘Run’ button and combos that required seven hands to attempt, making the whole thing seem even more clumsy and unwieldy than it already was in stark contrast with the balanced simplicity of its eternal rival Street Fighter 2, which was a damn sight easier to control yet still allowed for complex combos.

So if it wasn’t enough of a handicap to be based on one of the lesser versions, codemonkeys Virtucraft did themselves no additional favours by utterly breaking the game in conversion. It’s actively unplayable. I’ll get round to the bugs in a moment, but even if these weren’t there you still could not get any slight element of joy from this mess. I like to delude myself I’m decent at 2D fighters. After all, I’ve been playing the damn things for years. I started this baby up in its default normal difficulty and decided to have a quick blast on the shorter, novice tree of opponents to warm up. A computer controlled Scorpion quickly boxed me into a corner and panelled me to death in ten seconds.

Flustered, I changed the difficulty down and started again, to a similar CPU inflicted humiliation. It just was not possible to land a hit, let alone a combo on the computer. Being a stubborn old fool I persevered but any tactics used in any version of any fighter I tried failed, leaving my poor controlled character in a pool of blood. Now, I’m a veteran of these games stretching back to IK+ and the Speccy versions of Street Fighter 1,Human Killing Machine and Yie Ar Kung Fu. I can play these games well. When I’m struggling to get past the first character on the easiest difficulty levels it’s reasonable to assume that something’s broken.

The most obvious example to point at is the one which got me on that first ill-fated round. If you end up backed into a corner, the CPU can simply walk up to you and barrage you with a variety of attacks. Blocking these is easy enough but it only prolongs the inevitable, as the chip damage quickly drops that energy bar sliver after interminable sliver. In most sane games that have allusions to playability in this situation blocking an attack pushes your opponent away from you, allowing a chance to counter attack and get the hell out of this corner of death. MKA doesn’t. At least in this case, the attack animations should have some pause in the animation to allow a well timed counter attack? Well, you’d think so, but noooooo, not for MKA, no sir. The sloppy and sluggish controls ensure that you simply have no escape apart from the off switch and a swift lob of this cartridge out the window, hopefully to be eaten by a passing animal ending back in the bowels amongst its ilk.

It’s not all bad, if the difficulty is set low enough you can pull of the same trick to the computer for a few cheap, hollow, joyless victories. If that’s not your scene, why not take advantage of some of the most horrifying bugs ever witnessed on a console? Virtucraft have missed some of the most baffling bugs in collision detection, gameplay mechanics and A.I. yet seen. Want to quickly get through to the last boss? Pick Liu Kang and throw high fireballs continually, all the while marvelling at the CPU characters unfailing ability to run into them at full pelt. Want an exercise in randomness? Why not select Scorpion and marvel at the phase shifting spear that has a fifty/fifty chance of passing through an unblocking opponent leaving him unscathed.

A few other characters projectiles have similar issues, mainly when used close in. I suppose in some way it makes up for Scorpion’s ability to otherwise just keep on hitting you with his spear after one initial success, while in all proper versions he’s stopped by some inexplicable force called playability from throwing another one until you’re un-stunned. Watch in awe after defeating a character in the endurance round to have the graphics immediately and jarringly glitch to the next opponent, rather than the usual slicker method of the vanquished foe exploding and the fresh meat somersaulting in from off-screen.

Virtucraft can’t have spent any time playtesting it, but they must have spent a reasonable amount on the graphics and sounds. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 wasn’t exactly a thing of great graphical beauty but it’s survived the translation well, the backgrounds becoming a trifle fuzzy but the combatants remaining as distinct as they can be, given the series propensity for palette swaps. The sound is admittedly as good as it could have been. The GBA music chip does a pretty good impersonation of every other version and while the tunes themselves are a touch spartan they fit the bleak backdrops well. All of the speech samples seem to have made the transition well, with Shao Kahn’s booming ‘Excellent’, Scorpion’s trademarked ‘Get over here’ and Liu Kang’s wailing all present and correct.

23 characters are selectable from the outset with another two apparently unlockable, although quite why you’d want to select any of them is beyond me. It would, after all, doom you to another round of this joyless mess. Thankfully a quick scout about some other reviews detail the same ludicrous difficulty problems so if I’m just being inept I’m in good company. I suppose I should give some consideration to the fact that it’s a port when marking it, and it does do a few things well. It’s a great shame that it has made such an utter balls up of the only reasons you’d want to play it.MKA is easily the worst version of Mortal Kombat there has ever been and stands a sporting chance at being the worst 2D fighter ever seen. I’d rather get arse cancer than play this game again. Avoid.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

A few initial points so as not to waste some folks time – if you don’t like old school, random encounter SNES style RPGs this isn’t the game for you. If you don’t like developers’ habits of lazily porting old SNES games over without changing owt, this isn’t the game for you. If you’ve already competed this on said SNES, this probably isn’t the game for you.

Anyone left? If none of these points bother you unduly, you’ll find that Breath Of Fire 2 is a competent, challenging RPG-em-up that has a few deft touches that compensate for a mildly formulaic plot, as these things go. We are introduced to a young boy named.. well whatever you want, with a limit of four characters. Being an egotist I chose to name him Scot, but to fit in with the overall scheme of the games let’s call him Ryu.

He’s charged by his father to find his younger sister, and the usual wandering about talking to everyone establishes she’s playing in the hills behind the village. Off you trot, finding her only to be attacked by a demon five times you size. Before he can slaughter you and get through to your sister, your father shows up and saves you. Before returning to your village, your sister says if you go and sleep by the dragon slumped over the hill, you may dream of your dead mother.

Yes, dragons. How else do you think it ended up being called Breath Of Fire? Think it was about curry eating? Anyway the dragon is regarded as protector of your village, with the inhabitants praying both to the Dragon God and to the rising new church of St. Eva, although some people are a little suspicious of the newcomers. After sleeping there for a while you do indeed have a strange dream with strange visions of an eye and some mystical ranting. After waking up and heading back to the village, you enter the twilight zone, with nothing being as it was. Your family has vanished, with no one remembering them, so you are taken in by the church.

And you rejoin the game years later with you grown into a strapping young lad. Of course, by the end of the game you know what happened but the way these calamitous events are glossed over in the initial stages seems bizarre. Obviously it’s designed to pique interest in Ryu’s situation, but it’s a little odd to go almost immediately from losing your in-game family to your first quest of tracking down an escaped pet despite the intervening years. But that you do, as your first mission as part of the hunters guild, aided by your good friend and large talking dog Bow.

While Ryu appears human (albeit with blue hair), the remainder of your party and people you meet can be anything from monkeys to slugs, in a sentient ass-kicking form naturally. They all have different natural affinities and abilities, the usual mixes of attack power, offensive or defensive magics, healing magics and so on. While many of the spells are known to more than one character, they each have one specific special ability to set them apart some more useful than others. Ryu can regain a little of his health, Bow has an attack that has a chance of instantly killing your attacker, Katt has a useless skill of taunting your opponent making her more likely to be attacked than the rest of your party and so on.

You gain control of the rest of these characters as you make your way through the game, meeting various people and completing quests. I found the first quest to be irritating, as you will have to spend some time wandering about being randomly attacked for a while to increase your character’s power and statistics before taking on the first bosses. This is one of my pet peeves of late, as you’re essentially twiddling your thumbs unable to progress the main story because you haven’t learned some critical spell or some such nonsense. Thankfully this is the only time it’s really required, with the sizeable remainder of the game being on a better difficulty curve. You may still have to do it to get any newly acquired members up to snuff though, which is tedious and repetitive, although to be honest it’s a flaw present across nearly all RPG’s, so it’s not going to put off too many fans of the genre.

You travel the world taking on tasks of increasing importance and difficulty in an ultimate quest to find out what the strange force is that has appeared in the forests near your old home village that appears to be sucking up all the energy of the world. For certain of these tasks you’ll be forced to have certain characters in your team. There are a total of 8 playable characters, of which you can select 3 to party up with Ryu. Expanding this choice after a fashion is the soul fusions that can be carried out after finding various shaman characters around the world. Various combinations are possible, giving either mild stat boosts or in the case of particularly successful ones a whopping great increase and a change in ability for the character. A shamanised Nina gains an extra roughly fifty percent magic point boost and the ability to banish monsters should you tire of slaughtering them. Shamanised characters even get different and equally well-drawn graphics.

Many of your quests boil down to the standard RPG ‘find out you need McGuffin[1], talk to someone who has McGuffin[1] and will exchange it for McGuffin[2], fight a bunch of creatures and a boss to collect McGuffin[2], return and get McGuffin[1]’, but several show more imagination, and several quest have you assume the role of just one of your characters to make use of their special abilities, such as a lengthy solo quest at Sten’s hometown to vanquish a demon, uncovering much of his (to us) unknown past. It’s useful to see such stabs at character development, hampered only slightly by some strange translation choices that don’t seem quite right.

The game took me something in the region of 30-35 hours to complete, although admittedly that did include a lot of ultimately pointless levelling-up of characters I ended up not using for any length. Nearly a day and a half of solid gaming. To me, that’s a hell of a lot of time. Strange to think then that this picked up some flak for being too short. Jesus, how long do these pencil-necked geeks want to play games for? I used to consider myself pretty hardcore but even I though that I was spending too long on this game than was strictly healthy. If it was any longer I’d probably have bugged out.

Or stopped playing. But the time I’d reached the final battles I was getting more than a little pissed off with the near continual battles that were being thrown my way every four steps, to the extent of running away rather than standing and fighting because I was bored of them. Some especially cheap tricks used by the game in the final area inexplicably strip your characters of their shaman soul fusions, forcing you to either carry on regardless with a weak party or traipse all the way back through these lengthy, monster filled dungeons to get back to your township and reinstate them. It’s terrifically annoying and plain sloppy game design, eking another hour or half hour out of a game that’s already long enough.

Despite having multiple endings and two strong, challenging boss fights at the end that can have a tendency to disappoint in RPGs, there’s little to no replay valve. If you wanted to you could try and find all of the tenants for your township (more on which later) to see who’s best, but it’s hardly necessary. Still, given the time spent on it I could hardly say I was short-changed in the value for money department, and despite the minor niggles about the first and last hours everything in between is a great amount of fun. The story is perhaps a little generic overall but in places but there’s a fair amount of unexpected innovation, such as being miniaturised and transported inside a Queen’s body to cure her by literally fighting the disease in place of her immune system.

One other touch of originality is your very own township. Early into the game you find a hideout that can be used for a free rest and recouperation, and after saving some carpenters in one of the quests they express their gratitude by returning to your crib and building another three houses. Many of the random characters met during your quest will offer to take up residence, providing various services depending on who you pick. Some will be able to teach powerful spells to you, some open up armories so you can gain access to more powerful weapons a little earlier than usual and so on. Others seem to be entirely useless, just wasting perfectly good oxygen.

Graphically it’s fine, if uninspired. It shows its SNES roots very clearly, with limited texturing and flashy effects. Stuff like Golden Sun has shown that there’s no need for things to look quite this bland, but on the positive side some of the character design of the later, larger monsters is very good indeed. Some of the spells have a nice initial wow factor but after seeing them more than a few times you may be thinking that a shorter animation would be nicer, but none of them are lengthy enough to be irritating.

The sound is bland and inoffensive, although more variety would have been appreciated in the world map scenes as it’s possible to grow very bored of the same tune is continually played as you travel. The effects are lacking however, the spells never getting the cracks and booms to match the visuals.

Overall, it’s hardly perfect, and it’s not going to even vaguely appeal to anyone that isn’t a RPG fan already in the way that Zelda or the Golden Sun games have. Similarly if you’ve played through the SNES version there’s little to no reason to buy this apart from the nostalgia factor of playing it again, but this time on the move. For those not deterred by it’s flagrant old-schoolism, there’s enough nice touches to make it worthwhile investing some time in, especially now that the almighty Zelda has finally been released driving the price of this down substantially.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Sega’s Saturn console was, by any possible commercial yardstick, an abject failure. Countless words could be written to describe how this happened and how much of an atrocity it is, but this isn’t the place. Let’s just say that the might of Sony’s marketing machine and Sega’s critical underestimation of the market for newfangled 3D games resulted in the machine’s premature failure. There should be no sour grapes about this, simply put the better console won. It’s currently still in use with games produced for it, giving it an almost unheard of lifespan that only the Gameboy beats.

But quality of hardware is almost irrelevant; it’s the games that ought to count. That’s why many were baffled by the publics seemingly insatiable appetite for average PS fare when there was so many clear ‘triple A’ titles on the Saturn. Sega Rally, Nights, Burning Rangers, Sonic R, Marvel Super Heroes, Virtua Cop, Daytona USA, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Virtua Fighter 2; nothing seemed to spark much enthusiasm outside of the hardcore Sega acolytes, most of whom loved the chunky black box with disturbing ferocity.

It was almost a parting gift from Sega for the dying machine that they bestowed Panzer Dragoon Saga on the world. The two previous games had been on-rails shooters, good-looking, fun to play but never likely to revolutionise the way you thought about gaming. News that the third of Team Andromeda’s dragon based outings was going to be an RPG was met with a few raised eyebrows and doubting remarks. When finally delivered, it was clear just how misplaced those doubts were. They had delivered the best game on the Saturn, and one of the all-time great games that will be remembered fondly by anyone lucky enough to get their hands on the fairly limited release.

It is a time of civil war. The Empire rules with an iron fist. Edge is a young soldier on an Empire ship assigned to work at a mine, with orders to investigate…something. Their captain, who Edge looks on as a father, looks set to announce that they’ve found something. Unfortunately, something has found them. Civilisation is rebuilding itself following a collapse, and the genetically engineered monsters of the previous era still roam the land, killing humans if given the chance. They seem to be getting stronger recently, but even for that it’s an abnormally strong and well-armoured one that interrupts proceedings. They barely manage to drive the monster away, but things take a turn for the worse.

Another imperial ship arrives on the scene, but opens fire on the stationed soldiers. Edge is knocked out for a while, coming to in time to see the other ships leader, Craymen ordering his lackeys to kill the captain. Which they do with aplomb. They also seem to be making off with something from the dig site, which looks suspiciously like a girl sleeping in some sort of chamber. Edge tries to intervene only to be knocked down a chasm, seemingly to his death. Some force field stops him from making a loud splat on the chasms floor, although by this point he’s unconscious again. The poor lad doesn’t have a lot of luck in coming around, as this time faced he’s soon faced by a number of the overgrown crab-like monsters which caused the earlier bother, after a managing to have a brief wander around to pick up a nifty gun.

While you have had some opportunity to get used to the control methods by having Edge wander about the dig site, so far this has largely been a long, prerendered cut scene. It’s a fairly common scheme used by RPG’s nowadays, long intros so you have some idea of the character of the heroes and villains with other cut scenes going over important plot developments. It’s used here in perfect balance with the actual action / fighting / exploration aspects, and you never feel that you’re twiddling your thumbs as the story arc suddenly jumps forward ten steps over the course of another lengthy cut scene, which was a problem I have found with the Final Fantasy series on Sony’s beast.

The scenes themselves are impressive. The Saturn’s FMV capacity was never it’s strongest point, but even it can’t ruin the aesthetics of the work here. Newer games have benefited greatly from technologies relentless march towards a shinier future, their rendering techniques growing to the point of having spin off films. While Saga can’t match that realistic quality, it can match it on stylistics. It carries through to the action scenes too, as the whole thing just feels part of a well thought out and rich world. The locations are convincing too, and this is a hugely important part of caring about the world.

None of which would be worth a toss if the characters weren’t interesting. Edge himself may initially fall into a nicely stereotyped character, out for revenge against Evil No.1 who killed/kidnapped/maimed Friend/Family Member/Pet No.2. What’s important is that over the course of his quest as he tries to catch up with Craymen is that he does develop from this simplistic worldview as he notices how he has the power to right some of the injustices doled out by both sides of this war, to the extent that the initially fiercely Empire loyal Edge ends up having to accept the guidance of Craymen against a greater evil, putting his feelings aside for a better future for this troubled land.

It carries over into the minor characters as well, even those with few lines somehow seem to be complete, well rounded characters rather than bolted on to tell you where to find the Mystical McGuffin No.3. It’s an impressive achievement, one rarely managed by any game. One thing that should perhaps be pointed out is that the voice acting remains entirely in Japanese, due to time and money constraints on the conversion. Saying that this adds character to the game doesn’t exactly sound right, but it’s certainly preferable to a badly dubbed English version that is often foisted upon an unsuspecting public. It certainly fits well with the music, at any rate.

If there’s one thing the Saturn could justifiably say it was leagues ahead of its Sony rival it was the on-board sound. It’s Yamaha chipset is used to astonishing effect, sounding for all the world like a professionally mixed score. To have this generated in real-time by the Saturn is another great feat in a game full of them. The tunes themselves are among the most atmospheric and absorbing soundtracks I’ve heard, which again helps so much in being sucked up into the world of the game.

As alluded to previously, the story starts off as a simple quest for vengeance that takes on layer upon layer of twists and complexity as Edge travels through the world. He has to question exactly why the Empire was so keen on protecting and excavating the dig site, and what exactly are Craymen’s plans? Is he actually less of a threat than the Emperor is to the countries own stability? Why are these monsters suddenly growing in power and numbers? How does the woman carried off by Craymen’s ship fit into the story?

Well, that’s quite an important part of the story. She’s revealed to be named Azel, and you reluctantly have to fight her on several occasions. She also rides a dragon, Atolm. This is a bit of a bugger for Edge as he’s taken a bit of a shine to her, and killing her isn’t a great way to gain her affection. He can’t get through her seemingly blind devotion to Craymen and his cause, and it’s this devotion that helps Edge to start to question the world around him.

The fights themselves follow the random encounter pattern that’ll be familiar to most. Later games like Grandia show that it really isn’t necessary to have enemies just appear out of the ether to challenge you, but this doesn’t seem to have caught on too well. Once in an encounter, it’s not quite the common turn-based affair. You have three action bars that charge over time, and actions require you to use these bars. A shot from Edge’s gun burns one bar, and one of the dragon powerful Berserker spells burn up two.

This adds a welcome element of timing and strategy to the game, as you may want to go for an all out attack hoping for a quick K.O. or perhaps holding a bar in reserve to heal yourself may be more prudent, an so on. There’s the usual array of attack and healing spells, and each enemy has a weak point that you can use to your advantage to pummel them, especially with the Sniper add-on to Edge’s gun. You don’t have to remain stationary either, indeed flying around or behind your opponent is necessary to avoid their attacks and to find their weak spots. Certain critters can only hurt you if you are directly in front of them, say, so flying to their side allows you to safely butcher them.

How quickly the bars fill depend on what type of dragon you are. After reaching a certain experience level your dragon gains the ability to morph and change it’s properties, such as increasing its defence at the expense of speed, hence taking longer for the bars to fill but taking less damage while doing it. The four basic properties are speed, defence, spell power (spiritual) and attack power, and you can pick nearly any position in-between. Again, this gives great flexibility in how you decide to play the game and that can only be a good thing.

The game will probably keep you occupied for a good thirty hours, so it’s good value for money. As RPG’s go, it has more replay value than average as there are a few extras that you may miss on a first play through, like the two final and powerful forms of your dragon’s evolution. The 100% completion rate is difficult to make, but surely you’ll want your name to live forever in myths and legends by achieving it?

Picking flaws in the game seems trivial. Perhaps you could say that the in game graphics look a little dated and spartan compared to today’s efforts, with the ever-present Saturn low-res texture problem. This is a limitation of the system rather than the game though, so it seems churlish to take it to task for this while they still remain some of the best the machine has seen. Many of the spells are impressive, and the design of the main characters the dragons and the large bosses are superb.

There is innovation throughout this game, from boss fights where you actually have to use your head rather than just plug away continually to the design of the world to the dragon’s changing ability to the involving storyline that doesn’t follow the same tired path many others do. I really can’t think of any flaws apart from those that would be levelled at the genre as a whole, and this is (I think) the best example of the genre yet. Excellent and absorbing in every way, it may well be worth the £100+ that this goes for on eBay nowadays.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

It was widely accepted that during the 16-bit console heyday there were two things that could be done with a comic book licence; turn it into a side scrolling beat-em-up or turn it into a side scrolling platform game. While current generation consoles may put these into 3-D, the only other advancement is Capcom’s stuffing of the Marvel characters into their never-ending series of one-on-one fighters. With the GBA becoming a de facto porta-SNES of late, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the movie / comic tie in for DareDevil is a side-scrolling beat-em-up.

What it doesn’t have in originality, it doesn’t make up for anywhere else, I’m afraid. The plot is never a primary concern in these kind of games, and DareDevil does nothing to change that. Matt Murdoch is a lawyer, blinded as a child by a freak accident. His other senses grew to superhuman strength to compensate, giving him a kind of sonar-vision. His aim here, as in the film is to stop the appropriately named yet as far as the comic would be concerned inappropriately coloured Kingpin, the current crime overlord. Along the way double D will have to take out the likes of Bullseye, Elektra and about a billion nameless goons.

DD relies mainly on his chop-sockey-kicky-punchy skills to dispatch of his opponents, with the usual range of jump kicks, spin kicks and punches etc at his disposal. He also has a handy club to fall back on, for when skulls absolutely needs to be cracked, homeboy. And so he runs to the right, beating up all who oppose him, grabbing the usual health and invulnerability powerups, and also DareDevil icons, used to unlock secrets. Eventually you reach a boss, who generally provide more of a challenge than the preceding thugs if only due to the irritatingly cheap attack patterns, requiring more luck than skill to advance. “Frustrating” is a good word to describe this, as is “lazy” and “crappy”.

The only hint of originality is the use of Mr. Devil’s sonar, and even that’s poorly implemented. While this could have been featured more heavily, using it to give you an advantage over your enemies in a great many situations, these possibilities have been sadly passed over by developers Griptonite in favour of a cheap way to find hidden items. Get near a location with an inexplicably invisible powerup and a few lines start popping out of DD’s noggin, ala the way Spidey’s spidersense is shown in the comics. A tap of the shoulder button turns on the sonar-power, the pick-up becomes visible and you can collect it, should you desire. It’s a pointless use of a power that could be used so much more effectively with a little thought.

Griptonite have striven for a more comic book like presentation of the game, rather than the darker visuals of the movie. To this end occasionally opponents will be felled with a ‘Bif!’ or ‘Kerpow!’ logo appearing. This is neither big nor clever, but understandable as the game appears to be aimed more at younger players than the ageing fanboy market.I could go on, but I’d be repeating myself, much like the game. Jings, even Renegade and Double Dragon let you at least move in more than one axis and they’re both around 17 years old now. This kind of cheap, lazy cash in harkens back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and C64 where movie tie-ins were thrown out by the boatload with no originality whatsoever (if memory serves the Speccy version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was programmed in about a week to rush it out for Christmas). While DareDevil isn’t actively unplayable, it certainly isn’t a good enough game to choose over the plethora of other fighters such as Final Fight.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Role playing games never really took off in a huge way in the UK on the Megadrive, Western gamers seeming to prefer the offerings from Square and Enix appearing on the SNES. Things were a little different in Japan, where gamers happily tucked into Sega-based treats such as Phantasy Stars 2, 3 and 4, and the superb Shining series, starting with Shining in the Darkness, then Shining Force 1 and 2 (which appeared in its third incarnation on the Saturn, and looks to continue on with Shining Soul and it’s sequel on the GBA). It was perhaps a strange business decision for a western company to even think about programming a RPG for the western Megadrive market, but that’s exactly what relatively inexperienced programming team Naughty Dog software did. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because the same team went on to produce the Crash Bandicoot series for the Playstation, before sensibly flogging the franchise off before it became totally stale and making Jak and Daxter.

Published by Electronic Arts, who were just starting the process of focusing entirely on sporting franchises and the annual updating thereof, it was initially scheduled for a release on the Amiga as well, where it may have fitted in quite nicely. In the middle of production, EA took the decision to can their Amiga division, and the aforementioned sporting slant ensured that only one print of the game was made. Clearly this limited both the sales of the game and any kind of widespread knowledge of the game. Which is a great pity, as it’s actually very good.

You take the role of Buc, a young sorcerer in training at Sorcerer’s Guild Academy the City of the Mind. Your master sends you on a few errands, firstly to meet the local priest of Nexus, the heavenly father and creator for this particular plane of existence. The priest warns you of the dangers of the dark side, here represented by the evil god Void, who wants to destroy everything because he didn’t receive enough attention as a child, or some other equally well thought out reason. You are a force for good, whether you like it or not. As will be discussed later, this game is very open ended, but it does have some limitations, which persist in game design to this day.

Your next mini-adventure is to retrieve the Guild symbol that has been half-inched by a hermit who lives up a hill just outside the city. During this little trek you’ll notice the game’s weakest feature – the animation, or lack thereof. When the game is sitting still, as the screenshots show, it actually doesn’t look too bad, especially for a Megadrive game. It has a nice isometric viewpoint that allows the world of Usha Bau to be far more realistic than the usual flat 2D maps with little rock and snow motifs to indicate mountainous terrain. However once the character moves through this world map you can’t help but notice that there’s only three frames of animation, those being left foot forward, standing still again, right foot forward.

This means that rather than smoothly scrolling around the map it jumps block by block, with the character taking a second after you lift your finger off the pad to stop moving. This is jerky and disconcerting on initial play. Of course it never stops being jerky, but if you can persevere with it for a little while you will become accustomed to it, and it’s well worth playing on. The music is also a brave attempt at producing a tune from the less than adequate Megadrive hardware, and for the most part it succeeds. There are certainly far worse sounding games on the system.

After chatting with the thieving vagrant it becomes apparent that he’s not going to hand over the symbol without a fight, so feel free to provide one. During battle, you are temporarily transported to another plane of existence, which is an unusual concept, but actually makes sense given the customary spellcasting powers of earthquakes and lava flows and the like, which are available in other games but magically (by their very nature) only effect the unfortunate target of the spell, but the land around them gets away unscathed. The technique in Rings Of Power side steps this, but at the cost of making every battle take place on an identical, and dull plain arena. Only magic can be used in these battles, so getting hold of new and more powerful spells and the experience with which to use them is vital.

Again this approach has its oddities, as you end up with archers casting an arrow and knights casting a knife, which makes little sense. After casting your one available spell, Stun, enough times to dispatch the tea leaf, you collect the symbol and head back to the Academy.

Your master takes you aside and gives you a spiel about being the most promising of his students, before an assembly of your fellow students arrives to hear an important announcement from the master. It seems that one of the legends of the land’s creation, that of Nexus creating everything using a Rod of Power, is in fact true. Also true is Nexus’ later decision to split the rod into 11 rings and scatter them throughout the land, by this point lost in the mist of the past. After a great deal of research, the master has found all the location of these rings and is going to dispatch his students to collect them before Void’s servants can and use it for their nefarious purposes. Before the location’s beans can be spilt, one of you fellow students attacks your unsuspecting master and kills him, his last breath being a spell to disperse the rest of the students, yourself included around the globe.

Your purpose is now clear, collect the rings and hopefully along the way get in some vengeance for your master’s death. While you could attempt this on your own, you will find yourself slaughtered in short order by the various wandering sources of evil, either wild animals, pirates or some other servants of Void. A better plan is to get a squad behind you for backup. And so you do, performing small sub-quests to prove your worth to the various guild masters throughout the world to assemble a team eventually consisting of a Knight, Archer, Enchanter, Conjuror and a Necromancer. This initial stage is the most linear part of the story, but even here there’s a little room for manoeuvre. The order in which the characters join your party is pretty much fixed, but if you want to wander of in search of some of the easier (i.e. less combat oriented) rings then there’s nothing to stop you. It goes without saying that by the end you’ll need a full complement kitted out with appropriately powerful spells to finish it.

Spells are not learned through leveling up in this game, which is unusual. While you still have to achieve a certain level to cast them, the spells themselves must be purchased through the guilds, or the one-stop magic superstore Magic-B-Us. This is effectively just a substitute for buying more powerful weapons and armour, a common enough occurrence in RPGs. Less common is having to continually purchase food and water for your journeys, or else you start to suffer the consequences and eventually die. Cash can be had from the usual killing, and also from trading, with certain places paying a premium for certain good and selling others cheap.

While this adds another string to the game’s bow, it can be hugely annoying when you’re forced to break off your pursuit of the rings to get some money together to feed yourself. To be fair, this is only ever a problem if you tire of wandering around on foot and decide to look at the alternate modes of transport available.

At some point you’re going to have to set sail to other lands, so boats and ships are available. Boats aren’t so good for sailing in deep water, claiming more food and water per movement, but ships can’t sail up most of the rivers. On land, you can get round the map in about half the time if you hire a Dino, which actually uses less food and water than trying to walk over deserts and swamps on foot. Fastest of all is the Dragon, flying over Usha Bau at great speeds at the cost of a ridiculous food and water penalty.

The quests themselves are varied. Many are the typical RPG fare of talk to someone, find out you need McGuffin[1], talk to someone who has McGuffin[1] and will exchange it for McGuffin[2], fight a bunch of creatures and a boss to collect McGuffin[2], return and get McGuffin[1], occasionally with a double cross and additional fight at the end. Standard fare, and nothing to be ashamed of. They’re all well crafted, with some showing a hint of quirky originality (Can’t think of the last time I was required to find a thespians moustache for a spell). Other quests merely involve answering a series of riddles asked by some gatekeepers, which will earn you the Ring of Thought. Most of the quests relate to the Ring they pertain to in some respect other than mere hack and slash quests to get at them, such as the Ring of Mutation having transformed itself into a woman, now living somewhere in a city, requiring it to be tracked down.

This game also has the distinct advantage that should you become stuck in one of the quests, there’s usually opportunities to pursue some of the other Rings until inspiration strikes you again. Most of the quests are well enough thought out that’ll there’s no great logical jumps that need to be made, although the one or two that do require it can make the game hugely frustrating. The quest for the Ring of Will is aptly named, as a section in a maze trying to find and walk over switches that are barely distinguishable from the ground requires enormous willpower to stop you throwing the cartridge out of nearest available window.

Still, patience is a virtue, I’m reliably informed, and it’s required here if you want to see the end. The open-ended nature of picking and choosing the quests is something that is rarely seen even now, and an impressive feat for an inexperienced coding team on the Megadrive. The only downside of this is the story’s narrative pretty much vanishes, reducing to just collecting the party, collecting the rings and then having a final battle to conclude the story. This contrasts with the more tightly focused games such as Phantasy Star 4, where it’s still a good vs. evil tale but there is actually some character progression built into the story as their quest continues, and makes the game that bit more personal, and therefore more likely to be finished.

Rings Of Power supplies a strong challenge and a well crafted game, but may not prove addictive and involving enough for many people to see it through to the end.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

In the current wave of oh-so-nostalgic ‘retrogaming’ that seems in vogue these days I always feel one particular game gets short shrift; Psytron for the ZX Spectrum, a game so complex and innovative that (arguably) it took around a decade for the rest to catch up to it.

On it’s release in June 1984 by a little known company, Beyond, video games on the spectrum were largely limited, primitive affairs. This is not entirely unexpected as the hardware it was running on was largely limited and primitive. Without going into a discourse on the system, the ZX Spectrum 48K this game was designed to run on featured 48K of memory, a Zilog Z80A CPU running at 3.54MHz, and a basic graphics display chip which could only assign two colours to blocks of 8×8 pixels at a time, resulting in some horrifying colour clash when sprites overlapped in each other in these zones. Oh, and a grand total of 8 colours, and a sound chip which could do little more than beep. (Literally. The built in programming language, Sinclair BASIC, used a BEEP command to control it).

This is not to say a vast quantity of enjoyable games did not exist, many such as Jet-Pac, Commando, Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg are still regarded as classics. However in terms of scope and depth, these are fairly limited, ‘arcadey’ games. No such criticism could be leveled at Psytron.The game is set on a planet far far away, named Betula 5. You assume the role of a commander, the Psytron, of the sealed-off base on the planet’s surface, airtight against the hostile atmosphere. The base consists of a number of facilities connected by an inner ring. This is represented through ten separate screens, with your control centre apparently being located in the middle of the facility, the other buildings radiating out.

These facilities include the obviously necessary ones as crew quarters, medical facilities, docking bays and atmosphere processing, as well as some more exotic items such as a freezetime generator (what, you don’t have one? They’re simply all the rage in Kensington.) and a matter disrupter bank. All these have various uses throughout the game, so it’s clearly worthwhile keeping them in good working order.

The presence of a matter disrupter bank hints at the presence of some sort of trouble on Betula 5, and indeed that’s the case. The base will come under attack from an un-named alien foe, possibly as some on-going war, perhaps as a metaphor for the soul’s irreconcilability with the mind, probably as a plot device. Thankfully the aliens aren’t going to immediately start a full on assault, possibly as an overtone to a peace offer, perhaps as some way of gauging the base’s resistance, probably as a plot device. And just as well, because this gives us some time to be gradually introduced to the scope of your powers.

The game spans six levels, all on the same base. In the first level, all you can do is watch as the alien ships grow from specs on the horizon to being all up in your face. Their first plan of attack is to drop saboteurs into the base’s inner ring of connecting walkways. You can easily jump between screens using the number keys, giving quick access throughout the base to find these loathsome rapscallions. These doglike creatures bound along to the nearest airlock and then explode, causing a fair amount of damage while doing so.

Clearly they must be stopped. This is accomplished by sending out a remote drone to intercept, controlled on the small screen in the bottom right corner. This gives us the drone’s point of view, the idea being to get close enough to shoot the explosive little critter, who tends to jink and bob around to add a little spice to the proceedings.

Okay, in terms of your enjoyment it’s unlikely to give Max Payne a run for your money, but unlike Max Payne this game has a lot more to it. Any kind of first person viewpoint was a novelty this early on in the Spectrum’s life, and indeed that of video games, so this was a fairly enjoyable little novelty.

Which is a good thing indeed, because you’ll be playing the level over again five times before moving on to the next one. The rationale for this being to prove your competency before moving on to the next challenge, meaning you must achieve an average score over your last six attempts greater than the target for that level. Once you have, you can progress. This will mean that you’ll have a good grasp of the skills introduced on that level to carry forward, and also extends the amount of time you’ll have to spend on the game to beat it fivefold. Your views on this may vary from being an interesting bit of game design (arguably realistic in that you have to prove yourself to your superiors, or as realistic as space base commanding can get) to being an exceptionally cheap way of blocking your progress. I can’t say it seemed too annoying at the time, however when going back to play it and having lost any saved games I had, being forced to play the same early levels over when wanting to push on was irritating.

The next level allows you to take the fight to the alien pig-dogs in the sky. Standard cross hairs based aim and shoot applies. You must simply destroy the alien ships before they get close enough to drop the saboteurs or the more instantly damaging bombs. The mechanics of this certainly works well enough that this could have been released on it’s own and be hailed as one of the system’s better games, although little more than a Missile Command rehash. In these early levels, the pace is quite leisurely and you should not have too much difficulty in dispatching the occasional ship the aliens send in your general direction. Later, it becomes a manic fight against almost insurmountable odds.

To help in this we are introduced in later levels to the Matter Disrupter, a highly useful facility that will destroy every ship in your range of view. Unfortunately it has a habit of blowing up, a probability of about one in five every time it’s used if memory serves (My manual has unfortunately, gone to rest in a far better place. Kensington, I hear). Should the facility be damaged, this probability rises. Despite its temperamental nature it’s clearly useful. Any damage that is taken to the base, either by bombs, saboteurs or malfunctioning disrupters at this point is automatically taken care of for you.

However, that’s about to change. The next level introduces an almost unheard of, certainly on a Spectrum, element of resource management. It starts off simply enough, again easing you in gently, with only having to assign repair crews to locations that need it. Assigning more people gets the job done faster. Simple enough, but people that are working use more oxygen than those that aren’t so you’ll have to make sure the O2 generator’s in top nick. They also need a certain amount of rest after a shift is finished, so if the crew quarters are damaged they won’t get it and they’ll work slower. They also need food, which is handled automatically at this stage, or they slow down, and eventually die off. They may be injured by bombs or saboteurs, so they’ll have to go to the medical centre, which requires more medical supplies. Oh, and while this is going on the aliens are still attacking, and getting a bit more determined about it. All you have to do for the moment is assign crews and shoot, so you should manage alright.

Next level, all hell breaks loose. Now on top of everything you have to place orders for supplies. These are delivered from a mothership somewhere off the top of the screen, through a transporter beam on the docking bay. If an alien ship flies through this, the beam is broken and the remainder of the supplies lost. This means you’ll have to keep a close eye on this while still protecting the rest of the base. The ship has a limited space, so only a certain amount of goodies can be delivered, meaning you’ll have to choose wisely.

Respite is given by the freezetime generator, which is now introduced and is a valuable ally. It does pretty much what is says on the tin, essentially stopping everything on screen, including your crosshairs, unfortunately. You can, however manage your supply situation and assign repair crews here without having to worry about the nasty aliens as well, which makes things a little easier. It comes at the cost of a huge power expenditure that is only slowly recharged, so you’ll still have to think quickly or suffer the consequences.

The final level has been sent from hell to claim your soul. It’s objective is simply to survive for one hour. And then repeat the feat five times. Good luck. It’s simply a combination of everything you’ve been doing do far but on a more intense scale. It’s difficult to beat this game. It may just be possible to survive it.

For the Spectrum this was an incredibly deep game. The only vaguely action oriented game of comparable scope was the just released Elite, and that was only available on the expensive BBC micro at the time. Psytron has a level of sophistication about it which was rarely matched on the Spectrum, graphics which well disguised the flaws inherent in the machine it was played on and provided a great challenge for even the most skilled of players. I’d say a better action / resource management game could not be found until Westwood’s Dune 2, which didn’t arrive until 1992. Certainly worth a look for any game historian, or anyone not too obsessed with eye candy to appreciate a good game.