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.

Dragon Gun - Arcade

It has guns, and dragons. Ronsil would be proud.

It's an interesting idea, but given the fact that Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Magic and a whole other glut of "Dragon" based games came out around this time, it was only a matter of eventuality that someone did this in a board meeting. "How about... a gun game... wait for it... with DRAGONS" which was invariably met with rapturous applause and much cashbags of money heaped upon the little bastards head then with a quick return to reality for the rest us, this I think is how Dragon Gun was born.

You name it, and it'll come running to attack you.

And it's mad. I mean seriously mad in the way that when you stop and think about it, you realise why everything wants to kill you beyond the "Some git is trying to take over Fantasia... I mean the World". Yep this game is heavily rooted in the fantasy world so much so that I'm half expecting Luck Dragons and David Bowie dealing me "this little slice" of a piece of cake inside a Labyrinth.

It's an interesting take on the boss battle, actually being grabbed and attacked.

The plot in Dragon Gun is a simple affair, after all it's an arcade game so there's little point in doing anything convoluted, especially when you can just skip it and get back to shooting dragons. (And a whole host of other things) But for those that like to get their money's worth out of a game: Some Princess in a far away land (ooh) needs help after being attacked, a messenger from the dragons tells her to find two asshats that can fire the Dragon Gun (Name drops are great aren't they) and these people will be legendary enough to stop everything while blowing up most of the countryside with their god-like weaponry.

Do special, get dragon.

So you're either Twatty McJock or Dopey Doris in the quest to save the fantasy land from, some threat. Which, upon reflection, seems to be the BIGGEST case of mass parasites I've ever seen. Practically every enemy you fight has some sort of living critter in their body while they expel at high speed towards you, puking it up, arm-cannon-ing it at you or ass-blasting you with some living (or undead, we're not picky here) monstrosity that will damage your health. Seriously, some nit-shampoo and a worming drugs would solve this problem far quicker than a gun could. But wouldn't be as much fun.

Huge monsters will assault you at every turn.

So you've your character in Dragon Gun, you've a gun with infinite rounds but holding off the trigger charges up for a bigger shot, and a selection of Dragon Bombs that wipe out everything on screen or at least, cause heavy damage to the bosses and sub-bosses, and as an added bonus, if you run out of bombs, you get a weaker recharge blast that still destroys all projectiles and does minor damage to everything as well. You're quite well equipped in this game. But then so are the enemies, with worms, skulls, face-hugger looking things and god knows what else living in their bodies.

"Pull trigger to cap asshat" - a much better game.

Dragon Gun is an on-rails shooter, you don't choose where to go, you just follow the pre-set route and meet the boss at the end if you get that far. Which would be a shame if you didn't as the bosses are a rather colourful and lively bunch that range from Large Dragon, to flying centipede, Large Frog, running centipede with more parasites than one would care to think about, last boss and last boss 2 (back for revenge as per typical unimaginative game approach). While things to move at a quick pace, there's plenty to shoot at but thankfully not everything is capable of hurting you and there's a little mercy invincibility from one damage point to the next.

Look out, it's got a glimpse of plot here!

Graphically creative is an understatement for Dragon Gun, the variety and sheer scope of monsters is incredible. Yes you get your typical types with the dragons, lizards etc, but there's so many more monsters in the game which can be shot and killed in various ways. Heads get blown off only for the monster's JAWS to fly out and try one last bite, chests are shredded and limbs shot away, legs running off with the rest of the monster long since departed. Wyverns dying then returning as skeletal dragons to take more attempts and killing you. There's a high level of originality within the monster department here, it's a shame the backgrounds and scenery for the most part is either too pixelated or clearly a photograph, probably from New Zealand long before hobbits were filmed.

Insects, dragons, demons, dogs, this game has a LOT of things killing you.

Once again with the sounds, the music is overshadowed and drowned out by the explosions and screams of things dying, some monsters have some VERY human sounding screams while other sound effects sound like they're been taken from Alien 3 and Space Gun, I'm guessing someone sold a game engine at one point. Thankfully the music doesn't really add much to the game when you do hear it, so there's little missing when you don't hear what Dragon Gun is trying to pipe out through the speakers.

Even the bosses take quite the stab at the originality approach.

Overall it's a fun game, worth a few quick plays and if you're careful enough you can get quite far on just a credit or two but it's  not likely that you'll want to come back and play it again as there's no real variation in the game to want to see if things are different, however it is still enjoyable and at least with the relative ease of the game, you'll feel like you're getting good value for your cash.

Robocop NES

You've seen the film, now suffer the 8-bit

In one of those moves to capitalise on the popularity and success of the arcade game, the NES version of Robocop was brought in within a year as a "sort of" port to the gaming industry. In what seems to be an acceptable practise, games would be produced on one machine and then other companies that worked on other formats (i.e. Started in Arcade, then would be made for C64, Nes, ZX81 etc) in order to bring the game to other machines in a way that could be played but wasn't quite the same standard as the original arcade game. Sometimes these games were VERY close to the original (Take Bubble Bobble as an example) and in other cases the game was.. well, let us just say that it wasn't very much like the original and in many cases was either a passing similarity or more of an "in name only" kind of concept.

So instead of getting a near approximation of the arcade game we get this instead... You can likely tell by now which tone I'll be adopted for this review. Well done for recognising a pattern, aren't you clever.

I can only imagine robo is blowing one fat raspberry at this point.

6 levels of platform trawling (you don't jump) where Robocop will walk slowly from one side to another and gradually punch and shoot his way past thugs, mugs and under-world scum, beat off dogs (not like that...) helicopters, large people that are bullet proof (mostly...) an odd assortment of bosses and villains ranging from generic tough guy that can be encountered repeatedly later on, to Miller who held the mayor hostage to ED209 (twice) and so on.

Like the arcade game, there's punching and shooting, though unlike arcade there's the lovely incapacity that is the game deciding "No guns here" and forcing you to punch everything once again. The arcade did this initially and never again, but this game will occasionally FORCE it upon you while fighting pretty much the same enemies you were while having access to the gun. On top of this, you'll have a time limit (which gets VERY tight in the last levels) and a health bar where you tank damage (or not, seriously, at what point did a dog bite through Titanium Alloy armour?). Your weapons range from the pistol to the machine gun to the cobra cannon so it's nice to see that little nod of acknowledgement.

Wow... can we get any more supposedly patriotic? It really doesn't work on non US audiences

There's slightly more focus (ONLY SLIGHTLY) than the arcade game in keeping with the theme of the film. The 2nd level for example is set entirely around the siege with the mayor and your boss being the very guy that Robo punches out of a window (to land on a crash mat that isn't entirely out of shot and used again in the news report, but enough movie mistakes here). Not only do you have to traverse the building and search various rooms, you'll also be able to actually punch through the walls to find secret routes and then take on the boss in a shootout with a hostage and then kill him. It's nice to see that the NES throws in things that the original arcade didn't touch upon.

The third level takes place in the warehouse, akin to the films drug factory. Followed by going to OCP headquarters which is what happens next after interrogating Clarrence Boddicker (yep.. dicker..) followed by the showdown at the steel mill (film again) then back to OCP (like in the film!) If anything that should be praised here is that the game follows the film rather than just using it as ideas for backdrops, it sticks fairly closely to the plot and mimics it in the cut-scenes between levels which is a lot more impressive than the arcade managed to do it.

The problem however is that the arcade focused on gameplay and responsiveness and the NES... didn't.

Possibly the most impressive graphic in the game, and even here it has glitched.

Graphically speaking, this game is ugly. The backgrounds are almost enough to make me puke blood in disgust (especially the first level) but redeems itself by having one of the HUGEST ED-209 bosses I've seen in a game, so big in fact that they boss fight(s) tend to be in dark rooms so the graphics can be focused on rendering him in-game (a shame he's so easy to beat if you have the machinegun).

It can also be hard to work out where the doors are in the game and sometimes the sensitivity and precision required to enter the door can be a nightmare. It's also a little odd in trying to go through a door and having never encountered one before, not realising you can go through the door in the first place. Often a fun thing to witness while you run back and forth trying to find what you're missing until you die of time-out. Yay, use another continue.

You'll learn to love these moments, it's when the music is different

Incidentally, dying = new life = continue = restart the whole level and slowly walk through it again. As you can see, this is a key formula for qualifying for dickmove-university. Especially annoying on level 6 where you start on a backwards moving conveyor belt and goes EVEN MORE SLOWLY for your progress. Aside from this, there's a lot of other inconsistencies where some doors can be walked into on the horizontal plane on which you walk, while other doors are rather more disgusting in that you have to push up to walk through them while they look like these other doors that you can hobble your way through with your oh-so-limited frames of animation.

Controls are an absolute shitbagbastard, of the highest order. Stairs are a nightmare to try and ascend or descend while the actual act of picking up items is still a case of TeaBagging Hit or Miss wherein you need to duck but have to be almost pixel perfect in your positioning just to get a battery or health bar. Later enemies have the lovely ability to hit you no matter where you are and serve JUST to drain your health until you slap it down.

Punch fight. Bullets don't do shit here. Yes it's as dull as this picture looks.

There is far too much dependency upon having perfect timing for the game to be any real fun and it becomes quickly a slog through the hardest and slowest forms of gaming if only because your reaction times need to be super human and your control with the not-so-entirely-accurate-control-system(more hyphens please) has to be above and beyond.

Avoid this. It's a disaster of a game that's ONLY saving grace is that it sticks far more rigidly to the plot of the original film than the first arcade game does.

A boss fight... It's about as many enemies as you'll get on screen at once.

And the music... you'll be begging for a different tune on the levels, it's the same cheese-fest schmaltzy rubbish of the original theme tune. Actually you know what, fuck this. Go watch the original film instead while playing the arcade version.

And avoid the shitty remake film!

...Afterwards, blow my brains out for having to suffer this game.