Night Slashers (Arcade)

It's like killing monsters... Actually it's just killing monsters.

Data East has a history of hit and miss gaming. This one is more of a "skewed off to the side" kind of game. In the same vein as Final Fight, Mutation Nation, Violent Storm and other such brawlers, Night Slashers takes a sort of Van Helsing approach to gaming and pits three characters (The Heavy, All Rounder and Nimble Minx) against a medly of monsters from various franchises and source materials and you get to beat them up in a variety of fashions and ways.

How's it "uncanny" if he knows lots of martial arts?

You've your strong character, a mix of cybernetics and cheesy rock with a dash of California in there. Capable of picking up monsters and leaping around while using combos and attacks others can't. Your all rounder character that looks very synonymous to Van Hellsing while having a balance of combos and moves and then there's the token bonus nimble character that nobody really wants to pick as they can't take a hit as well as the others and has more moves than most people will bother to try and learn to be effective with them before having to select another character as they've just lost their last life... again. Night Slashers knows its cliches and falls into the same trap as almost every other similar game (Undercover Cops... Monster Maulers... Dynamite Cop 2... I'll stop there...)

...maybe

INTROOO!!! Actual fighting is not as fun/easy.

Plot wise for Night Slashers, you get various monsters roaming the world and these 3 people are going to fix it. By killing everyone and not looking for a cure. Zombies are roaming the streets, Doctors have gone mad, Frankenstein's Monster is stalking in the shadows, a pastiche of Dracula causes trouble, someone gets to punch out a helicopter, a Mummy fights using wrestling moves (not bad for an emaciated guy...girl...dead person), all because some demon is returning to this plane of existence and your characters need to kill it. (No spoils but if you've seen certain episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, you know what to expect. Yeah that episode with the possessed book that got scanned into a scanner...)

Give it now! Cut this 'running away' shit and get to the fighting!

Graphically, Night Slashers is certainly riding high in the blood, guts and gore department. Everything you fight and kill dies (un-dies?) in a violent or gruesome fashion while cut-scene images look impressive and reek of 90s comic book stylings which adds to the cheesiness of the game but not in a negative manner. Likewise, getting critical hits on enemies throws up a comic book style effect to illustrate that you just hit harder than you ever hit before and often resulting in an instant kill with standard enemies. The largest problem, graphically speaking, is that the animations of the creatures and the characters becomes less fluid depending upon which movements the characters are forced to go through, usually getting up or moving more dynamically beyond the point of the generic "menacing walk" down the street.

At least he has an idea of what to do

Having said that, the audio in Night Slashers tries its hardest to give the player an experience with the music that ultimately falls flat in places but ambles along amicably enough to set a suitable mood without the emphasis on being too serious while not being overly slapstick (the graphics and Over The Top violence do that already), and while it's impressive to hear digitised speech and sound samples for the combat, it's rather repetitive to hear the characters repeating the same words over and over, ad nauseam, every time they get up or do a special move. The first few times it's ok, after that it simply becomes dull and monotonous.

Obligatory lift level

There's little here to come back to for Night Slashers, after the first time the game is beaten, aside perhaps to see the excessive violence and cheesy horror setting and in all regards, even that isn't enough to determine more credits from pockets. Repetitive gameplay despite the option for more attacks and combos and an awkward control system coupled with monsters and bosses that get stupidly high levels of priority in attacks, bury any chance of a real replay interest with the very undead it has with its own monsters.

Don't care, kicked your arse already.

WWF WrestleFest - Arcade

A golden age for some fans

At one point, before the current rage of WWF with "The Rock" and "Stone Cold Steve Austin" (which is likely showing my age right now but oh well) and after the likes of Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy, there was the pandemic of WWF wrestling featuring The Hulk (young version), Big Boss Man (RIP), Jake the Snake Roberts, Ultimate Warrior (RIP), Mr Perfect (RIP) and Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase, and my word that's a lot of dead people (most of them around the age of mid 40's too...).

Lots of fights, or one big brawl?

So, what do we have then? Well it's a fine mash up of fake acting and overtly fat men jumping around a roped-off arena and pretending to be hurt. Much like the video game then BWAHAHA... Ok I'll stop there. WWF WrestleFest takes the approach of giving up to 4 players a chance to "be" their favourite 90's wrestlers and duke it out mano-e-mano in the ring with the chance to pull off all the trademark moves of their 'heroes' in an attempt to be just like them.

It get chaotic, fast.

WWF WrestleFest does bring to the game a medley of 12 wrestlers and 2 main gameplay options. There's the 2 vs. 2 tag team game that players can progress through (or battle each other) and take on other tag teams until they reach the final against the Legion of Doom (a.k.a The Legion of Spiky Shoulder Pads they NEVER USE IN A MATCH) or they can go the 30minute long, Royal Rumble in which they start in the ring and battle each other until only one person is left standing by either counting other wrestlers out with pins and submissions, or throwing them out of the ring entirely.

It's the tag-team nobody asked for!

Controls in WWF WrestleFest are slightly unintuitive to say the least. You've the joystick, a punch button and a kick button. But these are contextual buttons and it all depends upon what the opponent is doing, or how they are poised that will end up with what you actually do. If the opponent is down, punching does attacks, while kicking attempts a pin. But stand near their head and you'll pick them up for more attacks, while also being able to run and launch yourself upon them. Tagging out requires being at the corner with your teammate and pressing punch, but hold a direction too long and you'll find yourself climbing the turnbuckle instead.

Slight variation, there's no rope-rebounding allowed

Despite this, WWF WrestleFest also makes things far more awkward than it needs to by using the idea of "grappling" and having it come across "randomly hitting buttons to struggle against an arbitrarily decided outcome". It seems grapples are decided mainly by the computer determining which outcome it actually wants and tough shit if you're not the one it chooses. On top of THAT, actually determining which moves you'll get as a result is almost as much of a lottery if only because once you've "won" a grapple, the next button press will perform a move, by that point you'll likely be hammering buttons still to try and win the grapple, so the move happens regardless of your attempts.

He looks as old there as he does now, was this game predicting the future?

Aside from the controls being dodgy, WWF WrestleFest has the lovely little time in showing us large sprites, fairly detailed graphics and even get to the point where we see SOME muscled and toned men and many fat men, so at least there's some accurate depictions of the actors, I mean, wrestlers. The audio within WWF WrestleFest has a slightly muffled commentary but it's clear enough to make out what's being said most of the time while the impacts and slams onto the canvas are suitable amplified just like in the shows to add gravitas to the dancing around these men are doing.

Even the Ref gets to dance to SaturdayNight Fever.

WWF WrestleFest, is more famous as being the arcade that few would play while many would realise what it was depicting, a genre of entertainment that had a high in the early 90s before becoming obscure and then returning many years later. But it does the job well of featuring the main names from the time, just a shame it's not very playable and about as much of an act as the 'real' thing is.

Gauntlet 2 - Arcade

Whose face is more horrifying between Warrior and Valkyrie?

Why Gauntlet 2 and not Gauntlet 1? Simple really, read on and I'll tell you. Gauntlet 2 is the successor to the largely popular game Gauntlet. A game based around the lovely lore of Dungeons and Dragons, which involve some Dragons and maybe a Dungeon or two. Everything that Gauntlet has, Gauntlet 2 has more of and better.

Mazes, ghosts and monsters ahoy!

Pick your character by holding the joystick in a specific manner and pressing start. Choose from A warrior (Tough guy but slow shots), Wizard (Wuss but heavy firepower, a glass cannon so to speak), an elf and a Valkyre who are the middle ground between the warrior and wizard, and venture forth into the multiple, multiple levels of Gauntlet 2.

New incidents come with a little instruction.

You start your intrepid journey in Gauntlet 2 with a top-down/birds-eye-view display of the local part of the dungeon and can move in 8 directions while either firing your weapon or casting magic (if you have it). You'll have a health counter that steadily counts down, meaning you'll have to find food or other sustenance to survive (more credits help a lot) and battle lots of different enemies that will be keen to drop your health counter further than it already has.

Sadly, some mazes have invisible walls.

That is the basics of both Gauntlet and Gauntlet 2, however the intricacies are what keeps the game going and what keeps bringing people back to the game itself. Through each level, one can find keys to unlock doors and chests that (may) contain treasure (or death... he's not nice at all), locate food to up the health counter and other special power ups that include Invulnerability (Yet the health drops quickly anyway), reflective shots (which can hit AND hurt you), transportation (You teleport through walls, chests, keys, potions etc), IT (makes the enemies run at JUST you), repulsiveness (enemies run away but still shoot back) and various potions that act like smart bombs in taking out most of the junk on the screen or boost stats like strength, attack, defence and speed. There's a lot to be found and used within the game.

Wouldn't be much of a secret if it didn't have those...

To stop you, Gauntlet 2 throws every cliché in the book at you. Ghosts, trolls, lobbers (little people that throw stuff), demons, sorcerers, dragons (rare but damn they're tough) and DEATH to name but a few problems you'll encounter. You can run into most of these things and cause damage (except ghosts and death, they just damage you and Dragons... Well if you're running INTO one you deserve to be crispified) or shoot them. They in turn will cause damage if they chomp, whack, bite, punch or "death" you on contact or hit you with a ranged shot.

The deeper you go, the harder it gets. Said the Actress to the Bishop.

Interestingly, the game has a curious narrator that likes to comment on almost everything and every new "instance" of something happening will pause the game, explain what it does and then carry on without repeating itself. This goes for being hit by a new enemy, being shot by a new enemy, picking up anything you've never picked up before etc. etc. The narrator will happily talk to you about it including when you do stupid things like shooting the food, even going so far as to tell EVERYONE who did it. The narrator will also happily tell you when someone's "Life force is running out" or the most famously remembered line of somebody "...is about to die" with base notes warning of impending demise.

Eventually though, you just get bored of it all.

That said, unless you're pumping in credits left and right, this game will not let you finish it. Even working in tandem with partners and having a foolproof system, you're going to get butchered one way or another and enemies like Death are designed almost purely just to get credits out of pockets and into the machine. Dragons too if you get too close. Else it's a good fun, smoothly playable game that is worth a visit or two every few years or so.